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This text was presented in January at the 2010 Telos Conference, "From Lifeworld to Biopolitics: Empire in the Age of Obama."

President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Messianic peace was signified by the person conservatives and liberals labeled "messiah" or "the One."[1] The Nobel committee symbolically demonstrated deliverance by promises of "change" and "hope."[2] One week before the award another part of a media eschaton materialized: publicly contemplating a military coup to thwart the "Obama problem." Appealing to U.S. military leaders in eight, compact bullet points, a well-credentialed journalist wrote: "Military intervention is what Obama's exponentially accelerating agenda for 'fundamental change' toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama's radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible."[3] If right-wing American media, through its core of movement conservatism, announced Obama martyrdom, the Nobel Committee announced resurrection.

Obama's idealistic presidential campaign dramatically moved audiences. Conversely, executive Obama demonstrates a conservative realism.[4] Sam Tanenhaus notes as much describing postwar conservatism as one distinguished by movement "revanchist counter-revolutionaries" and realists.[5] Revanchist's orthodox, recta ratio, "right reason," draws radicalistic authority from foundations of metaphysical and religious thought.[6] Revanchist's hostility toward technocratic institutions both governmental and civic defines contemporary political theory.[7] Obama's governance attempts to stabilize revanchism.[8] His Oslo acceptance speech is indicative of such: part repudiation of messianic symbolization, another, restoration of the Just War doctrine, and to the dismay of some, affirmation of unilateralism. Tanenhaus's polity is a Burkean replenishment of adjustment and accommodation comprised of American's who are both liberal and conservative that "cling to the past" and "push forward into the future."[9] This polity reconciles Burke's "prejudices" (cherished notions and beliefs) with George Santayana's "animal faith" (arational claims to knowledge) by "demands of unanticipated events." Political activity he further defines as a "public expression of . . . drama, the theatre in which the modus vivendi of our civil society is continually enacted—and replenished."[10]

From Burke's vantage revanchism is a dysfunctional excess that over-improves established order as it really existed. In this way revanchism parallels the civil rights movement.[11] History demonstrates that malleable liberal democratic form absorbs revolution into the State. In contemporary politics however, it is difficult to ascertain social movements not captured within media technologies.[12] Giorgio Agamben's divine governance, oikonomia, insists a religious element remains central to devices and apparatuses, such may indicate a revanchist grievance beneath ideological explanation.[13] Apparatuses, for Agamben, are violence machines that capture and standardize natural history, language, and community.[14] Our experience in this division takes place through boundaries of subjectification.[15] The metaphysics of presence may find its simulation in technology, as a one-way transmission of truth. Would such lead one to believe they incarnate the law, that they are, in some way, exceptional?

Centrism, consensus, and Burkean computation, the technology of modern governance, faces a continuing crisis. Revanchist-inspired congressional opposition to every legislative effort Obama initiates is a death knell to the consensus of old. Recent electoral losses by movement republicans have failed to "update the brand," indicating the GOP lack stability as well.[16] Revanchism evades stabilization into a movement or ideology. Claiming ideological independence, the Tea Party movement underscores that claim with calls for a second American Revolution. Conversely, a thick published stream of psychotic depictions by liberal pornographers establish conservative revanchists as demented psychopaths or some authoritarian aberration. While pertinent, this misses the mark.[17] Revanchist political expression demonstrates a crisis of exposition and evasive performance. Had we learned anything from Erich Fromm, crisis will provide an escape from freedom. Do we face, in the advent of the revanchist, a genuine crisis beyond the paranoia politics of the past?[18] One of authoritarian salvation, provided it is not already in the form the device? Do we risk becoming mere bodies breathing history, the true Left Behind, should we fail to understand contemporary polarization humanizes subjects that in turn diminishes counsel and civility?

A subject-object dialectic pronounces itself in revanchism. Walter Benjamin articulates something similar in his dialectical image of storyteller and novelist. The dialectical image examples the concealing and revealing of death. Subjectifications, first demonstrated by the novel, are devoid of counsel once bound in experience necessary for authentic speech. In regards to authoritarianism would such emerge as revanchism's spirited, animal faith? Would this technicized vivendi, hypostatized through the novelistic modality of devices in the hands of contemporary subjects, allow one to "defend society" against its own revolutionary determination? How do we, or should we, prevent our own radicalization as speech continues toward origination in technological order increasingly historical opposed to natural?

Subjective Aspection

Benjamin's storyteller fell into atrophy by way of information; drifting into appearance, by way of the novel.[19] A new beauty was possible in this vanishing yet he remains unclear as to what comes after. Conversely, he criticized information that standardized the storyteller's communicability of experience.[20] A golden web of natural history we departed. Consequently, we entered a multi-colored web, a history of salvation through devices, similar to what Agamben calls a "humanization" of language from living being.[21] Animal faith and cherished prejudice demonstrates revanchism and realism are indicative of such. Thus a general trend between Tanenhaus, Agamben, and Benjamin in the transition from storyteller to novelist is feasible. These divisions fall under two margins: insubstantial being and imperceptible reason.

If subjectivity increases toward a monaural experience truth would be verification privileging transmission over listening. Verification, in Benjamin's critique, is the essence of information which depends on newness to survive.[22] One would experience memory robust with verification giving a messianic aspect to content.[23] Would a beautiful vanishing reveal itself through such verification? Confusion of imperceptible content with insubstantial being can be read through Benjamin's insights of Marcel Proust's mémoire involontaire, integral to Agamben's apparatuses.[24] Erlebnis is attributable to experience with media. Microtargeting represents a manifested broadcast of Erfahrungen, what Benjamin calls a constellation.[25] Activity nominates a humanized historical neighborhood, a being stellation, "the work," within reflecting images. Erlebnis constitutes a bodily aspect recalled from figures of storage, of species and devices. Erlebnis and Erinnerung thus constitute aspects of content formation through novel-devices.

Agamben defines image as a non-substantive accident occurring in subjects.[26] Contemplating image-reflection he defines species as the capture of living being. A Latin translation from the Greek eidos, or form.[27] Species results from "a religious nucleus," a violent fracture[28] removing life from the commons, transitioning Erfahrung and Erlebnis into apparatuses via devices.[29] Agamben elaborates species by "aspect," "vision," and "appearance." Humanization is a process viewed by living, given being remains partially insubstantial.[30] Aspect, in relation to species "cannot be determined according to the category of quantity . . . it is not a form or an image but rather the 'aspect of the image or of a form.'" Image dimensions cannot be measured quantities; rather what he calls "aspects of species, modes of being and 'habits.'" Agamben gives a subjective depth at which we enter content's logic, what I call species by subjective aspection.[31] In his words "it is never a thing . . . only a 'kind of thing'."[32] Aspect's earliest OED definition refers to astrology. One can be in the aspect of a world. Aspection, a kind of thing is not wholly species, rather, an interpretative ratio or framework, an insubstantial and imperceptible confusion. Aspecting structures thus behold species in occultation. Novels are forbearers of such devices: aspect being of specified-worlds.

Aspection of species rubs up to Benjamin's perplexed reader who "sees himself living this written life." In contemporary media we are all novelist living our speciated stories. Yet Benjamin claims "the novelist cannot take a step beyond the limit at which he writes," aspect will not suffice. For Benjamin this limit "invites the reader to a divinatory realization of the meaning of life."[33] If the divinatory meaning of life—the center of the novel device—is the end, would it not indicate a reflective space for an eschatological experience withheld from actualization? Species portends a messianic experience by recovering language in aspect. Aspect is an experience beyond a novelistic soliloquy of imago logic, after the end, thus eschatological. This presents aspect as tenoring sensorial negation through opaque content. Considering the uncanny it is the problem of the subject after deconstruction, after desubjectification, and beyond fraudulent counsel.

In 1916, twenty years prior to The Storyteller, Benjamin wrote to Martin Buber contemplating "the crystal pure elimination of the ineffable in language." Elimination is technology's claim on language through writing. Benjamin's language occurs from a "magical . . .  un-mediated" source.[34] In other words, he questions making apparent an insubstantial, living-being, through writing and "the work." Benjamin mentions a "linguistic magic." Content potentiates magic, Agamben's possibility of "knowing being as such," a crystallized language-window built by living being.[35] In Benjamin's words he questions the "dignity and nature," what cannot be "transmitted through content." At the beginning of The Storyteller, aspection is taken up once more. Benjamin notes a fundamental experience of image, for him, had changed.[36] His storyteller vanishes into "outline," that is, into an aspect of the historical, delineated by growing distance, perceptible in departure.[37] Humanization fills this gap which Agamben advises: "if the interval between recognition is indefinitely prolonged the image becomes internalized as fantasy and love falls into psychology."[38] According to Benjamin what "precludes psychological shading" is the "chaste compactness" of a particular a-historical being. Microtargeting pioneer, Mark J. Penn calls this "the art of trendspotting." Through polls, he insists, the primary goal of microtargeting "is to find groups . . . that have either started to come together or can be brought together by the right appeal that crystallizes their needs."[39] Penn's enthusiastic language-crystallization serves Burkian order, more properly, it is his only revelation. For Agamben, this is the most "implacable apparatus," a transformation of what he calls "the species into a principle of identity and classification."[40] To fully substantiate being is to exist being into absolute species. Language would be mere instrumentality. Aspect evades total crystallization by the State.[41] Samuel Weber describes Benjamin's thoughts on language-medium not as instrumental, but rather, theological-mystical "which, hypothesizes and hypostatizes language as an end in itself." Benjamin's language theory addresses this abyssal end. Weber likens such to Deleuzian virtuality with one major reversal: the virtual would be the reality of the structure rather than, as Deleuze would have it "[the] structure as the reality of the virtual" coinciding, he continues, with Derrida's "structural possibility rather than in view of their actual realization." In this way, language humanization, from Agamben's division hypostatizes into a surface, the tentative ground by which revanchist express messianic aspection.[42]

Thinking Benjamin's Crystal Motif

A mineral vein reflects through Benjamin's text. At the end of The Storyteller, Benjamin analyses Leskov, and tells of one who "descends on the lower scale of created things."[43] Storyteller's have, he notes "ventured in the depths of inanimate nature" beholding (for Leskov's character) a chrysoberyl, the mineral gemstone from "the lowest stratum of created things." This gem is "directly related to the highest [thing]."[44] A crystalline stone allows a view across the entire ladder of experience, of species. Leskov's subject he notes "is granted the ability to see . . . a natural prophecy of petrified, lifeless nature" this prophecy "applies to the historical world in which he himself lives." This artisan craft, a seer's sight which moves through stone establishes a "connection" between "soul, eye and hand," however, according to Benjamin, this praxis we are no longer familiar with.[45] Thus our storyteller without counsel drifts through windows from the house of language into apparatuses of neighborhoods.

Benjamin's death was pushed from living perception. Agamben concurs with one departure: the possibility of the good or happiness one is drawn to in the device.[46] Benjamin's novel, Larry Rickels theorizes, is an inoculation against the dead. Death pushed from perception—concealing negation in structures—is reintroduced through the novel-device and the hospital, which "uncanny-proof our home." These structures administer, in his words, "the Gospel." Experience, meeting a notable limit in the trauma of the Great War, as Benjamin noted, finds its secularized image-logic in the device. A simulation, or opaque death, is reintroduced through species repetition. Trauma divided from, and returned to experience, comes through the asylum-device. PTSD victims, the dubiousness of the RMA, and the disjunction of war time reintegration reported by the informatic media has concealed and revealed asylum-death to the polis. The fantastical success of the PS3 Call of Duty war game series further evidences such phenomena.

Aspect's grammatical definition squares with the uncanny: a relation to passing time, in particular, through repetition. Aspect is thus an unknown-familiar.[47] The crystal motif through Benjamin's contemplation of the dialectical image presents a multifaceted clue.[48] Within this image a new counsel may await.[49] Benjamin notes historical progression moves being toward universality, into stone-being. Memory's standardization eliminates the insubstantial as its primary builder. Revolutionized and radicalized inside the historical we commit, in Benjamin's words, "political action" that "however destructive, reveals itself as messianic."[50] A developing life expresses this messianic grief through asylum-salvation. When Benjamin wrote "[t]he seer's gaze . . . kindled by the rapidly receding past," did he articulate the revanchist's view who "perceives the contours of the future in the fading light of the past as it sinks before him in the night of times"?[51] Would viewing the ladder of species demonstrate the determination and determining experience of aspection?[52] Determination opens an obscured future, which throws light into crystallized language.[53] Benjamin's constellation, a single moment is the multi-colored web mediated by bodies transmitting this stream of immanent past into species. This dialectical image presents aspection recalling and generating historical experience.

Revanchist fidelity to standardization, millennial youths faith to the order of diversity and high exposure to death-simulation, indicate a surpassing of industrialization's claim on being. Benjamin's historians and prophets cooperatively turned their backs to the past and obscured a view of the future yet revanchist emerge from Benjamin's "chamber" as both.[54] This chamber, the novel-device, transmits an infantile politics aspect hints as a new surface for originary language. Benjamin's novel is memory's tomb, what we inevitably submit to, but also arise from. Standardized experience in its end, may safeguard being from being the last stone of the State.

Notes

1. This article features commentary by Huffington Post writer Justin Frank, who criticizes Hilary Clinton for characterizing Obama's rhetoric as "celestial . . . magical thinking." Franks goes on to contemplate Clinton's quote "celestial choirs will be singing," referring to Obama's entrance into the presidency as some sort of divine deliverance. I find it necessary to grasp on to Franks understanding of hope, because, as he states, hope in its most "primitive form" is in fact magical thinking, which, if we consider the decreasing capacity of an informed and reasoning polis, this hope would certainly be magical, and even messianic. As for our thesis, what Bush is for voters so too should Obama signify.

2. "Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people a hope for a better future."

3. "Obama Risks Military 'Intervention'" was hastily taken down from Newsmax.com. It was republished by Mediamatters.org.

4. Obama's political nature "temperamentally conservative" p. 117, see Sam Tanenhaus, The Death of Conservatism (New York: Random House, 2009).

5. Ibid., pp. 20-21.

6. An interesting segment opens in Tanenhaus's first chapter for our analysis of revanchism. "In his pioneering essay "The Convenient State" (1961), the twenty-six-year-old Garry Wills, at the time the most promising young conservative thinker in America, clarified the distinction: "A consensus, as the word's form indicates, is a meeting of several views to a single view. Consensus implies compromise, establishing a minimal ground of agreement on which to base political organization. Orthodoxy goes to the roots of metaphysical and religious awareness and demands a 'right view' on these things, not merely a modus vivendi. (The contemporary word for 'ideology')." Tanenhaus, The Death of Conservatism, pp. 16, 21.

7. Tanenhaus clarifies the differences of revanchist and realist: Burke "had warned against the destabilizing perils of extremist politics of any kind" his conservatism was based "on distrust of all ideologies" (ibid., p. 16).

8. Political reason, for Burke, is "a computing principle, a matter of 'adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing' the emphasis on continual adjustment and recalibration of the existing order" (ibid., p. 17).

9. Ibid., pp. 27, 118 quote.

10. This truth of American politics provides a "place for authentic conservatism that seeks not to destroy, but to conserve" (ibid., p. 118).

11. Tanenhaus acknowledges Willmore Kendall, conservative political thinker who wrote: "adherents of revolutionary movements, right and left...can be described as people 'who will not take NO for an answer'" (ibid., p. 15).

12. Therefore the journalist who searches out where terrorist are "radicalized" pose a rather multifaceted question. National Public Radio, All Things Considered, December 28, 2009, journalist discusses radicalization through an examination of online content in attempt to locate where it takes place.

13. Agamben notes in his theological genealogy of divine economy this is similar to "the oikonomia introduced in God between being and action" (p. 16). "If we consider . . . the theological genealogy of apparatuses . . . (a genealogy that connects them to the Christian paradigm of oikonomia . . . the divine governance of the world) we can then see that modern apparatuses differ from their traditional predecessors in a way that renders any attempt to profane them particularly problematic" (p. 19). See Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? trans. David Kishik and Stephan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2009).

14. "Indeed, every apparatus implies a process of subjectification, without which it cannot function as an apparatus of governance, but is rather reduced to a mere exercise of violence" (ibid., p. 20).

15. Apparatuses "separates the living being from itself and from its immediate relationship with its environment" (ibid. p. 16).

16. A recent special election in New York District 23 went awry for movement revanchist whose national figures drastically altered the race ousting what they viewed as a liberal interloper (centrist republican) for a movement ideologue. The ideologue lost, and a conservative democrat won the republican district. The author of this article attributes the loss to a misunderstanding of local politics by movement leaders. He also comments on two gubernatorial races and how these indicate a national political mood in terms of the new president.

17. Max Blumenthal reports extensively on movement conservatives in his recently published book Republican Gomorrah, which outlines a Frommian scenario of complicated movement figures with shady histories against the back drop of Fromm's famous text Escape from Freedom. While the work demonstrates a systemic party logic movement conservatives captured along with the republican nomenclature, it cannot suffice as an explanation of any new authoritarianism, or defending society via common political subjects. Kevin Phillips properly demonstrates a more sound and systemic explanation of theocracy and republicanism in his text American Theocracy.

18. The title of Richard Hofstadter's mid-1960s article comprehending the angry mind of political behavior, The Paranoid Style of American Politics, seems to hold its weight.

19. Appearance, see: Giorgio Agamben, "Special Being," in Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007) pp. 56-57.

20. Samuel Weber has rehabilitated "communicability" into "impartibility." See Samuel Weber, Benjamin's -abilities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2008). Walter Benjamin noted Karl Kraus's depiction of newspapers create an "atrophy of experience." How such atrophy developed in the last century and the consequences for political activity are poignant for eschatological experiences in media. One could extend atrophy beyond newspapers, of which the news industry itself is in serious decline. See: Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003) p. 316.

21. Benjamin's obscuring storyteller became a novel-device of revelation. See: Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nicolai Leskov," in Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935-1938 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002) section XIV, p.155.

22. Information's value "does not survive the moment in which it was new." Information surrenders to presence "without losing any time." In contrast, the story of natural history is a surplus that "preserves and concentrates its energy over time." Benjamin, "The Storyteller," p. 148 Yet by "revelation" returning to the image in solitude with the device, the eschatological reveals within aspects of reflection. Agamben, "Special Being," p. 57.

23. In the device we write as a novelist would and "take to the extreme that which is incommensurable in the representation of human existence." Benjamin, "The Storyteller," p. 146 Information is something which requires only that it be understandable it itself. Benjamin, "The Storyteller," p. 147.

24. Erfahrung, long-term experience bound in tradition, and Erlebnis, isolated, momentary experience, work through Gedächtnis and Erinnerung. Gedächtnis is primarily recalling unconscious data; Erinnerung a recall of more individualistic memories. Considering transmission and listening, in light of retention and activity, perhaps Benjamin's Erfahrung, and Gedächtnis: experience and memory, provide a clue. Erfahrung "condensed . . . experience over time," is analogous to apparatuses. Erlebnis, momentary, isolated experience; pertinent to reflecting upon images. Erfahrungen, built by Erlebnissen, are respectively, work and activity.

25. See footnote 7 of "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940.

26. Image is "not a substance but an accident . . . found in a mirror, not as in a place, but as in a subject . . . it does not possess a continuous reality." Agamben, "Special Being," pp. 55-56.

27. Agamben's translation of species from his essay "Special Being" in Profanations. Eidos relates to being substantiated in captured images opposed to the insubstantial not captured. "In philosophical terminology species was used to translate the Greek eidos." Agamben, "Special Being," pp. 56-57.

28. Religion removes "things, places, animals, or people from common use" that "transport them to a separate sphere. Every separation contains or conserves in itself a genuine religious nucleus" (Agamben, What is an Apparatus? p. 18). This difference occurs for Agamben via Foucault who "demonstrated how, in a disciplinary society, apparatuses aim to create...docile, yet free, bodies that assume their identity and their 'freedom' as subjects in the very process of desubjectification" (ibid., p. 19).

29. Species is a part of subjectification read with Agamben's definition of apparatus: "a machine that produces subjectifications, and only as such is it also a machine of governance. Capitalism and other modern forms of power seem to generalize and push to the extreme the processes of separation that define religion." Concurringly Benjamin notes the novel's mass proliferation rises with the middle class. One can extend this proliferation to cellular phones and personal computers novel devices. Benjamin, "The Storyteller," Section VI.

30. The term derives from Latin "signifying 'to look,' 'to see,'" it root extends through spectrum (image, ghost). Agamben, "Special Being," pp. 56-57.

31. OED def. of aspection: action of looking at, beholding.

32. Agamben, "Special Being," p. 56.

33. Benjamin, "The Storyteller," p. 155.

34. The crystal pure elimination of the ineffable in language is read with Agamben's Special Being and also presages Benjamin's delineation of the storyteller from living efficacy into appearance. See Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 79-81.

35. See: Giorgio Agamben, "The Idea of Language," in Potentialities, p. 47.

36. Benjamin's "perpetuation of remembrance" I adapt as a n index of species. Remembrance, Eingedenken, is the "muse-derived element of the novel" added to "recollection," Gedächtnis, "the muse-derived element of the story," who share a "unity of their origin in memory" that disappears with the decline of the epic Embedding and consequent concealment of the memory muse is a transmittable structure of being in severance that forces memory into mere appearance. Benjamin, "The Storyteller," p. 154, Benjamin's early writing on form and content in terms of retention and activity are poignant. He describes how content is accumulated by the withdrawal of form. See Walter Benjamin, "The Currently Effective Messianic Elements," in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996), p. 213.

37. Benjamin's "image" of both the moral and external world had "changed." Benjamin, "The Storyteller," p. 143.

38. Agamben, "Special Being," p. 58.

39. See Mark J. Penn and E. Kinney Zalensne, Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes (New York and Boston: Twelve, 2007), p. xvi.

40. Agamben, "Special Being," p. 59.

41. Such was presaged Samuel Weber's insights in a collection of essays titled Targets of Opportunity. Weber notes the OED definition of target shares its meaning with shield.

42. Weber, Benjamin's -abilities, pp. 38-39.

43. Benjamin, "The Storyteller," p. 160.

44. Ibid., p. 161.

45. Ibid., p. 157.

46. Ibid., p. 156, and Agamben, What is an Apparatus? pp. 13, 17.

47. The insubstantial form without "a proper place" could be the potential story that, according to Agamben "occurs in a subject . . . like a habitus or a mode of being . . . like the image in the mirror." Agamben, "Special Being," p. 57.

48. Benjamin's quote: "The dialectical image is an occurrence of ball lightning that runs across the whole horizon of the past. Articulating the past historically means recognizing those elements of the past which come together in the constellation of a single moment. The dialectical image can be defined as the involuntary memory of redeemed humanity." See Walter Benjamin, "Paralimpomena to 'On the Concept of History'," in Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940, "New Theses B" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003), p. 403.

49. Knowledge is the experience of the moment historically, within that moment of the dialectical image; the past becomes part of our involuntary memory (ibid., p. 403).

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid., pp. 405-7.

52. Benjamin's "the project of discovering 'laws' . . . the course of historical events is not the only means—and hardly the most subtle—of assimilating historiography to natural science." The political eschaton is not a historian, whose task, Benjamin notes "is to make the past present." This historian is "guilty of the same fraudulence" of replacing language and its faculty of death into a predetermined field of memory. Ibid., p. 401.

53. "Only when the course of historical events runs through the historian's hands smoothly, like a thread, can one speak of progress." Ibid., p. 403.

54. Ibid., pp. 4012, XVIIa.

On Tuesdays at TELOSscope, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Andrew Walker looks at Peter Uwe Hohendahl's "Critical Theory and the Challenge of Totalitarianism," from Telos 135 (Summer 2006).

Totalitarianism is a curious phenomenon of modern history and is often said to be a very twentieth-century one, at least as far as developed liberal democracies are concerned. The archetype totalitarian states in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy defined their political order against the established liberal democratic systems that existed elsewhere in Europe, and we saw them off. Further backslapping was called for when the Soviet Empire disintegrated and democracy was able to spread throughout Eastern Europe. But, as should be expected with conceptual discussions such as these, it is not as simple as it first appears. Critical Theory in the Frankfurt School tradition began to reach maturity in the context of a totalitarian Europe; the analyses of social structures and processes within modernity are shaped by the Fascist or Soviet state. But the categories of critique developed at this stage of Critical Theory are not anachronistic curiosities. The term "totalitarian" is a tricky one to define and apply. Peter Uwe Hohendahl's article "Critical Theory and the Challenge of Totalitarianism" is both a historical discussion of the development, but also of the wider applicability, of ideas and theories surrounding totalitarianism.

Totalitarianism is not of itself an ideological position but involves total state authority with the goal of continuation of an established order. Herein lies the wider and present applicability of such a study:

it is crucial to understand that the totalitarian state is by all means compatible with a capitalist economy. The concept of a natural economic order (used by liberal theory to establish the notion of a free market) is shared but interpreted differently. For the fascist state, the advanced capitalist mode of production is useful as a way of employing the masses. What has changed, according to Marcuse, is the ideology used for the continuation of the existing economic order.

Later in the article, Hohendahl discusses the direction of the authoritarian state in post-World War II Critical Theory as the conclusion of state managed capitalism. The tendency, in this argument, is toward a rationalized economic sphere that dominates irrational social processes and structures.

The goal of this critical tradition is not to set state-socialism against liberal democracy, nor the reverse, as the model of freedom and human happiness. The goal, Hohendahl claims, "is that of a non-antagonistic democracy." This line of thought is not exclusively drawn from direct analyses of what it is to be totalitarian. The discussion of modernity and post-Enlightenment rationality is inseparable from discourse on the authoritarian state. The idea within early Critical Theory that "[t]he very rationality that enables humans to overcome the fatality of myth also contains the regression to mythic unfreedom" leads to the conclusion that "the methodology of the Enlightenment is already proto-totalitarian." Hohendahl continues: "for Horkheimer and Adorno the expansion of modern mass culture serves as an index for the decline of individual freedom and the potential rise of the all-embracing total state." Such a development undoubtedly subverts the democratic element within modern mass democracies.

It is the critique of the bureaucratization of modern states that allows Critical Theory to analyze them in terms such as "authoritarian" and "totalitarian." According to Hohendahl, it is in the formation of this as a historical-philosophical critique that gives it more weight: it allows the observer to

shift the emphasis from the political enemy, the totalitarian regime, to a more profound danger residing in the formation of the human subject in its alienation from nature. Differently put, the political critique has turned into a philosophical critique for which National Socialism and Stalinism provide the horrifying examples.

If the goal of the non-antagonistic society is to be envisioned at all, a process of society wide critical self-reflection must occur which can focus on qualitative change within social organization. Late capitalism is characterized by a lack of qualitatively focused self-analysis; it is "like a machine on autopilot." In cases where such societies begin to malfunction, states have to resort to more and more overt authoritarian means to maintain order.

Read the full version of Peter Uwe Hohendahl's "Critical Theory and the Challenge of Totalitarianism" at the TELOS Online website. If you are affiliated with an institution that is an online subscriber to Telos, you have free access to our complete online archive. If not, you can purchase 24-hour access to this and other Telos articles at the low rate of $5/article.

The similarities between the five Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) have recently been manifested in their new Berlin embassies—five separate buildings and one common house, distributed around an open courtyard.

In English, the geographically more restricted term "Scandinavian" is often taken to be synonymous with "Nordic," although the former geographical term actually excludes Finland and Iceland. I shall here use the term "Nordic," even while focusing on a section in Telos 148 (Fall 2009) called "From Scandinavia."

Although "Nordic" is not quite a nationality, the concept could favorably be compared to the idea of being "German" before the Prussian-Austrian war of 1859—a time when "German" was also a disputed concept. However, the Nordic debate about what we actually have in common was hardly ever so heated. The last war between our countries occurred as long ago as in 1814. Swedish troops then entered Norway, which Denmark had been forced to give up, after the Danish government had sided for too long with Napoleonic France. Sweden, having lost Finland to Russia in 1809, sacked the old king, adopted a new one from among Napoleon's Marshalls, and marched together with the rest of Europe against France.

Even today, from a Swedish perspective, it would not really be good sport to allow three Danish scholars to define undisputed the current cultural and political situation in the Nordic countries. The Danes here referred to do not present a unified argument, and maybe some of them would disagree by my grouping them together as "Danes." Kasper Støvring writes about cultural policy and focuses Denmark. Frederik Stjernfelt has a more general perspective concerning the debate on religious fundamentalism, yet most of his examples are Danish. Klaus Solberg Søilen's topic is politics and is concerned precisely with "Scandinavia," and to some extent also Finland. Yet, a common point for all three is the recurrent critique of the left. Whereas Støvring is clearly conservative, Stjernfelt poses as a liberal and Solberg Søilen can probably be termed a populist, of the right-wing kind, it would seem: he complains about the salaries of skilled craftsmen (p. 85): "it is very difficult to get hold of a qualified carpenter or electrician."

Solberg Søilen thinks that the Swedish "romanticized" version of the Social Democratic Welfare state has dominated also the other countries. But, according to Solberg Søilen, this vision now merely hides the more brutal facts (p. 73): "party distinctions in Scandinavian politics no longer involve coherent ideas related to political ideologies, but . . . parties instead have become machines to maintain power and keep supporters employed." Solberg Søilen himself appears to have something of an ideological agenda: "the Scandinavian welfare state model has shifted from providing support to the poor to guaranteeing the middle class a certain lifestyle" (ibid). This and similar arguments could have been presented neutrally as merely a series facts, with reference to statistics and source critique. Solberg Søilen instead chooses to support his argument by tendentious language, as revealed not just in the previous quotations. The idea that ideology has disappeared would seem to be falsified by the apparent ease whereby the three Danes adopt separate ideological positions, while simultaneously forming a front toward the left.

The three Danes appearing side by side in Telos seem to want to demonstrate that at least in Danish culture and politics, consensus is lacking, due to an apparently unwelcome influence from three sources: Swedish social democracy, cultural radicalism, and fundamentalist religion. From various perspectives, they all believe that everything will be fine, as soon as Denmark is relieved of these threats, presented as eminently external factors.

Stjernfelt wants to explain that "secularism" is not a fundamentalism, as "the religious person argues." He does not really try to bridge the positions that he from the start defines as ideological opposites. Little room is left for lukewarm common sense, as if we really had to make a choice today: between superstitious fundamentalism and Stjernfelt's version of secularism. Here, while accepting that secularism is hardly a fundamentalism, I am surprised by Stjernfelt's strong conviction that secularism nevertheless must be portrayed as an ideology.

Why does Stjernfelt feel compelled to colonize all aspects of the secular age? Is not secularism more than a recently discovered rational system of arguments? To many, it instead appears to be a long-term cultural shift, involving new ways of belief and rarely being easy to disentangle from previous religious epochs. To some extent, the latter were not merely carried by superstition, but also by efforts to make the world more rational. Støvring's reference (p. 64) to Gadamer and the dynamic effects of past knowledge here seems more pertinent than Stjernfelt's suspicions.

I don't mind that Stjernfelt denies that cultural beliefs could have the same status as individual human rights. But I do not see why the secular welfare state's protection of rights needs to be reinforced by an ideology of secularism, as opposed to just plain secularism. If Stjernfelt insist on supporting such an ideology, perhaps he should call it either "atheism" or "republicanism"? This is what the French believe in, it seems. On the other hand, is it really true that there exists a unified ideology called "culturalism" which, according to Stjernfelt, "constitutes a major political step backward, which threatens to erode 250 years of enlightenment and to open the door to never-ending religious wars" (p. 53)? Scary if it was true, but it seems a bit exaggerated.

Støvring, apparently unaware of Stjernfelt worries, seems more confident in the substance of a specifically Danish culture. Although he admits that the nation still need to be defined and supported by a cultural policy—to counter the negative effects of previous "liberal" and "radical" policies: "How do we define the nation? And what about the practical policies? These questions are not at all easy to answer. But that is not a reason to refrain from giving a try" (p 72).

Among the three Danes, Støvring's confidence fits better with the standard narrative about Scandinavia and the Nordic countries as truly successful countries, in terms of politics, culture, and economy. As recently revealed firstly by Iceland's experience of the financial crisis, economic success is least self-evident. Norway became rich only in the 1970s, when it became profitable to produce North Sea oil. Finland turned wealthy in the 1990s, thanks to Nokia mobile phones. Denmark got rich on agriculture and trade at the end of the nineteenth century, Sweden in the 1930s due to raw materials and heavy industry. According to 2008 OECD statistics, all the Nordic countries are to be found among the top thirteen in terms of GDP per capita, Norway as number two, the other countries ranking 10 to 13 (not entirely reliable as far as Iceland is concerned, but the others have climbed the scale due to financial stability). At least as important, the Nordic countries have top ranks in terms of rule of law, democracy, health, and gender equality.

The potential for calling this experience an international success story was exploited already in 1936, by the American writer Marquis Childs, reportedly a close follower of president Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the seminal book Sweden: The Middle Way, he held up both Sweden and Denmark as models of prosperous cooperation between labor and capital: "Protected from the imperialist rivalries by a wide strip of sea, the political and economic life of the Scandinavian countries achieved a slow, careful growth that was impossible on the mainland. Out of this evolutionary growth came a way of life that is characterized by certain fundamental distinctions—of stability, of order, of sanity—which set it quite apart" (Childs 1936, p. 21).

There are many reasons why this story about a slow cooperative life seemed so attractive also after the tumultuous 1930s. The importance of the story was supported even by its critics, notably by the Danish-Norwegian novelist Aksel Sandemose, who in the 1933 novel "A fugitive crosses his tracks" (Eng. trans. 1936) described or rather invented a series of prohibitive commands called "the law of Jante." This was a mentality that according to Sandemose ruled all small municipalities in Scandinavia, stating that nobody should be different.

That criticism can be supported by studies of communal practices in Danish farming cooperatives receiving their ideology from the famous priest Grundtvig; or by studies of small Swedish industrial communities, ruled paternalistically first by the factory owner but soon also by the strong unions. Of course we can also note tendencies to mind control in Protestantism, where it was deemed important that every subject really believed. The Scripture had to be brought zu Hause, Martin Luther argued. But the effects of the populations in the Nordic countries having to learn to read their own bibles were more far reaching.

Perhaps, by revealing my skepticism vis-à-vis the Danes, I risk appearing to merely support the idea that we live in the best possible of worlds. The homogenizing aspect of culture, politics, and economy in the Nordic countries—the back side of consensus—is clearly worth debating. Yet, I truly believe that if such a debate is presented as an inclusive rather than exclusive move, it will be more fruitful in setting up common goals and a competition among the means. The general situation in the Nordic countries appears to be precisely such a stable position, which allow for debate. Unfortunately, these Danish authors instead demonstrate a serious of tendentious and sometimes cynical efforts to question the integrity of their opponents or rather caricatures of these: the left, social democracy, cultural radicals, and for some strange reason, probably having to do with aspects of the academic debate in Denmark unknown to me, Jacques Derrida.

Acknowledging that Støvring seems to feel more comfort with the strength mobilized through tradition, his effort to build on Danish nationalism does not fit his refusal to recognize the contributions of Danish cultural radicalism in the nineteenth century (e.g., Søren Kierkegaard was a radical, wasn't he?).

It is hardly by chance that three Danes take on these essentially defensive positions. The Danish state and Danish nationality was established longer ago than the other Nordic countries, just after the Viking era. Also modern rule of law, democracy, and welfare was developed early on in Denmark, during the nineteenth century. But Denmark has also been haunted by defeats. Today we should probably not overestimate the impact of losing Norway in 1814 or Schleswig-Holstein in 1864, but more importantly the Second World War in Denmark was an experience that remains difficult to integrate in a progressive national mythology.

If Norway was also occupied in April 1940, the Norwegians put up a fight. Furthermore, they had already mobilized intellectually to get rid of Swedish rule in 1905, a divorce that involved peaceful if somewhat agitated negotiations. Finland suffered two defeats against the Soviet Union, but could look back upon a more successful war of liberation in 1917—or a bloody civil war, if we listen more closely to some of the defeated parties. The Finns remain proud of their ability to defeat the Russians in several battles, even if the war was lost twice, in 1940 and in 1944.

Finally, the Swedes could soften the impression of having betrayed democracy by trading with Hitler's Germany. Successive governments have proudly recalled a series of gestures of international solidarity toward the Finns (Sweden was not neutral but nonbelligerent during the 1939–40 winter war), the Norwegians, the Danes, and the Jews. Later, this ideal of international solidarity has been repeatedly reinforced by Swedish support for the United Nations. A recent overview of war experiences in the Nordic countries can be found in the volume edited by Kerstin von Lingen, Kriegserfahrung und nationale Identität in Europa nach 1945 (Schöning, 2009).

Here, it might sound a bit superficial to claim that Danish scholars remain affected by the lack of war in Denmark during the Second World War, notably because of the ensuing difficulty to mythologize this historical experience for national purposes: efforts based upon heroes of the resistance remain rather bleak. Just like in Germany, Italy, or France, rigid attitudes will presumably soften over time.

Of course a full explanation of what we might call Danish exceptionalism must be based on a comparison of much more than memory politics. How important are the differences in municipal life that we easily discern, even if we only compare the Nordic countries from the hotel rooms of international conferences: the rather flat Danish landscape where even a huge city like Copenhagen seem to blend easily with surrounding small villages; the dramatic mountains of Norway where small communities cling closely to the fjords; the great lakes and forests of Finland and Sweden and their apparent fascination with big industry.

It is tempting to call Denmark more continental, more bourgeois. How strange that such ancient nineteenth-century notions carry any weight at all in our age of globalization.

Shannon Mariotti's article "Damaged Life as Exuberant Vitality in America: Adorno, Alienation, and the Psychic Economy" appears in Telos 149 (Winter 2009): Adorno and America. Nicole Burgoyne follows up with some questions.

Nicole Burgoyne: One of your main concerns with psychoanalysis as it developed in America in the postwar era is that it accepted a commercialized and materialistic view of happiness as an ideal. One can see how this sort of obsession with living life to the fullest is at odds with Freud's early work toward curing suffering individuals and his later theories on the repressive nature of society in general. Do you see this uniquely American form of psychoanalysis, which Adorno characterizes as the loss of the individual experience, as related to his critique of America's culture industry? Why are these phenomena prominent in American culture as opposed to elsewhere?

Shannon Mariotti: In parts of Minima Moralia, Adorno explores the American postwar therapeutic revolution whereby psychoanalysis became professionalized, standardized, normalized, and popularized in mainstream society as a tool increasingly targeted toward helping individuals better adapt to, and take pleasure in, the offerings of conventional society. Psychoanalysis was originally supposed to work against the problem of bourgeois alienation, but in Adorno's view, it became part of the problem, contributing to the loss of the thinking, experiencing, negating, critical self. Yes, American psychoanalysis in the postwar era was infected by the same systematizing, identifying, homogenizing logic of modernity that also pervades what Adorno calls the culture industry. But he does not see these phenomena as uniquely or solely American: they are logics of modernity more generally that coalesced in especially intense ways and gave novel form to the experience of alienation in postwar America.

Burgoyne: You write:

Like other members of the Frankfurt School, Adorno was deeply influenced by psychoanalysis: critical theory sought to apply Freud's analysis of subjective psychology to a Marxian social critique of the repressive and dominating features of modern civilization. . . . [However, m]ainstream psychoanalysis had lost Freud's critical edge, and it problematically ignored Marx. (169-70)

Given that Freud utilized case studies to elaborate broader theories of human psychology and Marx spoke of widespread alienation that plagued a class of people due to their common working conditions, to what extent is it possible to avoid the kind of generalization in psychoanalysis that you criticize? What alternative is there to interpreting a specific case in terms of a general principle, especially given the demands of educating professionals in practicing psychotherapy nationwide?

Mariotti: Adorno's criticisms are not centrally aimed at the tendency to make psychological generalizations about broad categories of people, based on their historical contexts, material conditions, and life experiences. Indeed, he sees this way of thinking as a potentially powerful tool for critique and engages in this practice himself in his own theorization of the experiences of modern alienation. Rather, Adorno seems most concerned about the way postwar psychoanalysis tended to shift the focus away from analyzing the social factors of illness. Instead of studying illness as a critically valuable indicator of social problems, postwar psychoanalysis increasingly objectified illnesses into standard, and normalizing, categories that were seen as unrelated to the individual's life experiences. Adorno is also concerned about the implicit view of subjectivity underlying postwar psychoanalysis: the self came to be imagined as a mechanistic assemblage of moving parts that could sometimes break down and require recalibrating, so the individual can better fit in, adapt, and respond to existing (but unquestioned) social imperatives.

Burgoyne:You narrate two distinct eras in American psychology, the popularization of psychotherapy and the new culture of psychopharmacology. Do you see the rise of latter culture precipitating the decline of the former, or did some intermediary event dull popular enthusiasm for psychotherapy? Might the American zeal for psychotherapy not have been as widespread as Adorno was led to believe, but rather part of his specific cultural experience of America (life in New York City and Los Angeles)?

Mariotti: Historical analyses do uniformly emphasize the revolutionary nature of the changes that took place in American psychology after World War II. Psychoanalysis came to dominate psychology and enjoy the same kind of cultural popularity that Prozac received in the early 1990s: psychoanalysis became the talk of the town, but certainly Adorno's understanding of this phenomena was likely intensified by the particular cities he lived in during these years. I did find striking parallels between these two distinct eras in psychology. The era of Freud, neuroses, and the psychoanalyst's couch, at first glance, seems to have little in common with the contemporary model that goes under the name of biological or scientific materialism and is concerned with the brain, chemical imbalances, and pharmaceuticals. But in fact, many scholars emphasize underlying commonalities and show how dominant aspects of the contemporary era can be traced back to the 1940s. Because of this, I was able to highlight the continued relevance of certain aspects of Adorno's critique of postwar American psychoanalysis.

Burgoyne: Could you expand on what I see as one of the central points of your article, namely, the connection between the postwar American psychology revolution, which generalized psychological problems and created widespread expectations of conformity to the superficial joys offered by mass culture, and the modern goal of feeling "better than well" which you link to biological materialism?

Mariotti: Both eras seem dominated by what Adorno calls "the happiness imperative" and are marked by a problematically uncritical attitude toward the social roots of illness, a tendency to rush past thinking through the cause and context of the illness in a race for the cure, so to speak. Then and now, Americans pursue their own happiness through things that advertise they will help us live our lives to the fullest, that offer us the chance to not just be "normal" but also, in Peter Kramer's now famous phrase, "better than well," and that promise to improve and perfect the self. We tend to have more enthusiasm than skepticism for all things that offer "more," for all things better, longer, faster. This might all seem innocuous, but Adorno draws our attention to the ways these tendencies can have problematic side effects. The happiness imperative can blind us to the ways that certain illnesses might serve as illuminating and critically valuable indicators of social problems, even as a stimulus to change. Further, a single-minded quest after "exuberant vitality" may blind us to the pain and suffering of others around us, whereas letting our gaze linger on the sights we would rather look past could stimulate an ethical response. Finally, there can be negative political consequences to singing what Adorno calls the "gospel of happiness" in ways that displace critical thought.

Burgoyne: You describe Adorno's method of negative dialectics as follows:

By paying attention to the disruptive qualities of particular things, letting the object "speak," and granting "preponderance to the object," the practice of negative dialectics works to break apart the false harmonies built up by the logic of identity and the idealist dialectic. (176)

Could you elaborate on the connection you see between this methodology and the enactment of democratic politics?

Mariotti: Adorno sees critique as essential to democracy, indeed as the essence of democracy: he sees this capacity for questioning what is presented as necessary, natural, and inevitable, as a form of resistance that is central to cultivating the kind of politically mature selves who might "self-govern" in the most meaningful sense of the words that seems promised by the ideal of democracy. For Adorno, there are qualities in the world—which he calls "nonidentical" qualities—that can work to stimulate these critical capacities, to connect us in the praxis of thinking, and that contain a utopian tendency to protest against "what is" and point toward alternative possibilities. But there are also modern forces working to deafen us to the dissonant call of these nonidentical qualities: bending to these powers, we may lose the thinking, experiencing, negating self in the phenomenon that Adorno calls "damaged life." He connects this alienation from the self with our alienation from a more robust understanding of democracy. This is why the counter-action he proposes is so important: when we try to look and listen to the nonidentical, we engage in the critical practice of thinking against the given that Adorno calls "negative dialectics," and we also work in fulfillment of the promise of democracy.

This text was presented in January at the 2010 Telos Conference, "From Lifeworld to Biopolitics: Empire in the Age of Obama."

Historians of the future will no doubt claim that the "neo-liberal era," the era of neo-Smithean celebrations of "market naturalism," was essentially the era of the "intellectual retreat of the political left."[1] Although the story of this retreat is far too complex and contradictory to explore here, clearly one of the main reasons for the intellectual emaciation of "left politics" after the 1970s was the political right's ideological appropriation of much of the left's critical philosophical discourse. Perhaps most significant in this regard was the right's re-articulation of Hegelian historico-political philosophical narratives into a version of nineteenth-century Whig progressivism; where the telos of western culture and society was conceived as nothing less than a new and final stage of capitalism founded on a triad of consumer culture, information technology, and finance. On the left, the loss of faith in orthodox Hegelian accounts of politics—and the loss of faith in orthodox Marxism is of course a case in point here—was to give rise to a new set of philosophical sensibilities, perhaps the most influential of which was the heterodox Hegelianism of so-called post-structuralist modes of social and cultural critique.

However, for many committed to more traditional leftist political goals and aspirations post-structuralist Hegelianism was viewed as "radically insufficient"; to the extent that for them any new radical philosophical disposition must begin with a recognition that Hegelianism is now, in whatever form, little more than a means for a philosophical legitimation of the neo-liberal universe. According to Antonio Negri in particular, Hegelian philosophies of historical becoming now displayed their falsity in their justification of the politics of Thatcher-Reagan as "the end of history." In Negri's radically counter-Hegelian political philosophy, the Hegelian dialectic had now not only "stalled" but, by tarrying too long with the negative, in fact now offered little more than a "miserable transcription of exploitation constantly renewed, of unhappiness constantly imposed."[2] As such, in his view what was needed in the context of a radically new systemic conjuncture was a more stridently ontology-centered form of radical philosophical discourse that strove for a positive affirmation of the revolutionary "truth of the left" and a Machiavellian appreciation of how to build—through "positive affects"—new political movements that could function as both global and globalizing expressions of the left's sacred and hard-won philosophical truths. Thus began a search amongst some of the most politically engaged elements of the left's intelligentsia for a new politics of affirmation, creativity and political reconstruction centered on philosophically grounded notions of passion and desire as the means of self and collective empowerment. Hegelian critique, it seems, had left the left waiting and wanting, and in the end all that it had delivered was, to borrow some recent notable rhetoric, "more of the same." Now the left had to act from an alternative philosophical starting point in order to build viable political "collectivities" in the wake of the Badiouian revolutionary truth events of the twentieth century.

It was out of the crisis of Hegelianism that Spinoza emerged as a central philosophical figure in new left theoretical discourse, to the extent that he now appears in many ways to have replaced Hegel as the "master thinker" in a good deal contemporary critical-theoretical thought. On first impression it may seem odd that the post-60s European left found Spinoza's philosophy so interesting and appealing as his was a philosophy whose naturalism and individualism had led many to associate him with early modern developments in philosophical liberalism.[3] Why, indeed, did the left turn to Spinoza in particular in order to find a new radical philosophical path beyond that mapped out by Hegelian dialectics and the negative labors of the concept? This question is, of course, easy to answer and has in part already been answered. What might be termed "the new Spinozism" was in many ways the result of a growing recognition that is was Spinoza who was the first modern philosopher to attempt to construct a radical materialist ethics and politics based upon the "affective dimensions" of human life. More specifically, we can now see that the left latched on to Spinoza because he was the first radical philosopher of affect who linked questions of radical political action to questions of how to empower bodies. As is well known, for Spinoza "affect" is simply "the affectations of body by which the body's power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained."[4] Radical politics by Spinozist lights is thus in the first instance a politics of bodily empowerment and with Spinoza many on the left saw the possibility for a constructive politics of embodied action and positive affective engagement with other bodies in the name of radical political ideals. According to one recent commentator, Spinoza appealed as new critical-theoretical resource because he offered the left the possibility for a new politics of affirmation, passion and affective positivity grounded in an idea of life conceived as "vitality."[5]

In this paper I will attempt to answer a number of questions related to the emergence of this new philosophical disposition. How should we assess the wider intellectual consequences of this new philosophical "development"? Is it a basis for a much needed reinvention of the philosophical discourse of the left? Or does it, in the end, represent a retrograde re-affirmation of an early modern scientism that displays deep metaphysical affinities with modern liberalism? Clearly these are very large questions and so in what follows I will try to give them some empirical focus by focusing on how "New Spinozist" modes of conceptuality can help us to make sense of a key political moment in the development of the contemporary neo-liberal universe: the birth of Reaganism.[6] I will show that what is most interesting and relevant about New Spinozist modes of theoretical critique is that it allows for a new appreciation of the ideological significance of the political leader in an age of mediated politics. Nowhere is this now more evident that with the rise of Obama—in some ways Reagan's "left-political twin"—whose mediated affects have already made a significant political impact (although, unlike Reagan, they have yet to be "captured" and "solidified" into anything that might be termed an "ideological formation." There is as yet no "Obamism"). However, I will suggest that in the last analysis it seems clear that the New Spinozism is itself radically insufficient and at best only supplements existing modes of theoretical critique and at worst can easily collapse in crude post-theoretical mode of inquiry that displays strong affinities with positivism.

The New Spinozism and the Politics of Affect

Spinoza's central position in the history of European Enlightenment is now well documented.[7] However, in was not the rationalist so much as the "the radical anti-humanist Spinoza" that appealed to the new left. In fact, the New Spinozism can be traced back to the work Althusser, Balibar, and the now largely forgotten political philosopher Pierre Macherey; all of whom famously celebrated Spinoza for his anti-humanist materialism. This tradition has be recently augmented by the ideas of Negri and Delueze, from whom there has emerged an interest in Spinoza as a radical philosopher of affect who allows us to appreciate the philosophical importance of the way in which pre-individual bodily forces augment or diminish the subject's capacity for action; a dimension of human life that many New Spinozists view as the "implicate order" of contemporary neo-liberalism.[8] It is this aspect of his philosophy that has appealed to a new generation of critical thinkers striving to articulate a form of social and political critique beyond the strictures of "bourgeois subjectivity." Here, Spinoza is now widely now viewed as the basis for a new mode of critique of the liberal bourgeois "subject of interest"—with its computational maximisations of personal utility—and his thought typically viewed as a philosophical condition of possibility for the development of a relational conception of the embodied subject that is both materialist and inherently social. In contradistinction to bourgeois subjectivity, Spinoza's subject is seen as active, power-enhancing and ontologically constructive, in that each individual is viewed a striving to empower itself by assembling itself to other subjects and things.[9] In this way Spinoza is seen as having effectively collapsed the old classical political distinction between "ethics" and "politics" by conceiving of embodied affect as "power" and as such he must be conceived as the first philosopher of what has come to be known, after Foucault, as biopower.

The point of the argument presented here, however, is not to provide a synopsis of the main themes and issues covered by the New Spinozism. Here, rather, I want to focus on one particular aspect of the New Spinozism: the foregrounding of the affective and affecting "mediated body of leader" as an ideologizing instrument in the age of mediated politics. For Massumi, one of the most currently influential of the New Spinozists, it is only bodies and their affects that are, in reality, politically significant today after the waning of belief. According to Massumi, a Spinozist appreciation of the affective significance of the mediated event of the embodied leader allows us to understand the nature of political power in contemporary mediated cultures. In his view, after the demise of the old ideologies all that remains for the left is a politics of affective bodily intensities owned and recognized rather than a politics of cognition, reflection or recognition. In his view, left politics today, if it is counter the reactionary affective politics of contemporary media transmission—what might be termed the "biopolitics of the right"—requires a new understanding of the body, affect and their relationship to ideology. According to him "[i]n North America at least, the far right is far more attuned to the imagistic potential of the postmodern body than the established left and has exploited this advantage for at least two decades. Philosophies of affect…may aid in founding counter tactics."[10]

In more traditional critical theoretical accounts of the nature of contemporary mediated politics, electronic media are condemned for reducing politics to an adjunct of the culture industry: specifically to mass entertainment, the culture of celebrity and the advertisement form.[11] Here, it is recognized that the new "electronic aesthetization" of the domain of the political differs from its fascistic ancestor—famously theorized by Benjamin—in that contemporary electronic mediation of politics does not involve a founding of political mythologies as such, but rather only a profound commodification of parties and leaders as effectively the image of a political brand offered to political consumers in the political marketplace. Intimated early on by Schumpeter, the traditional left critique of aestheticized politics involves a critique of its manifest irrationalities and a theoretical exposure of the latent authoritarianism of the, now branded, "secular Charisma" of the political leader: a politics that reduces all serious political questions to managerial questions of trust or appeal (or to questions of lack of trust brought about by mediated scandals of various kinds[12]). In these accounts the alternative to a branded politics of "managerial-technocratic trust" is seen as some kind of direct democracy embedded in an enhanced and cognitively transparent public sphere.. Where the leader as an embodied actor did appear in these critical theoretical accounts, it was as the narcissist who acted out unconscious conflicts on the political stage in the form of political dramas. The archetypal political leader here was Nixon, the "secular charismatic" technocrat debilitated by an underlying malignant narcissism.[13]

Now, although these schemes possess a good deal of explanatory power in relation to a number of post-war US presidencies, they miss the importance of the role of affective dimension of the Reagan-Thatcher moment and, more generally, the significance of mediated leadership in the production of contemporary "ideological effects." The leader's role today is much than that of a "moralizing agent" or "devious Machiavellian" and it clear that the image of the leader and the leader's mediated embodied performances play a centrally significant role in contemporary forms of political mobilization. What the leader says or the policies he/she actually enacts today, in fact, is often politically quite irrelevant in terms of the political attitudes and orientations of the polity: it is the way his/her body, speech and image interact to construct affectively significant, aesthetic, event that is the most important politically. Today, each appearance of the leader becomes an event pregnant with affective expectation and it is these expectations that mobilize political actors (not ideas and arguments per se). The polity expects to feel something from each leader-event and if the affective dimension is lacking then the political dimension itself does not emerge. In Massumi's view, this shows that we must focus on Reagan as the archetypal political figure of the neo-liberal political universe—Nixon, Johnson, and even Carter represent the forms of leadership of political world long gone when politics was still tied up with ideology as traditionally conceived.

As a political leader Reagan does not fit easily into existing theoretical schemes. He was not a pragmatic technocrat neither was he a devious narcissist. In fact "personality" seems entirely irrelevant as a critical category in regard to his presidency. As Massumi points out, nobody was convinced by anything that he ever said, not even his supporters. His presidency was truly revolutionary in that it was entirely staged, affective and non-cognitive. It was the first politics that did not disguise its own status as embodied pretence and its own significance as a politics of feeling. More specifically, according to Masumi Reagan was the first contemporary leader who performed in order to present himself and the politics that he represented as a dramatic bodily affect-event: specifically as a mediated movement that captures our attention by what he terms "the jerk of the power mime": the jerk that transmits affect effectively. Reaganism was thus in reality all about Reagan as embodied affective performance. The mass subscription to the ideology of markets and so on was premised upon a prior capture of Reagan as affect. Ideology is therefore no longer required to articulate itself as such but is rather mimed by men of power with a talent for self-affectation. The acting leader creates the political through a mimed performance, a performance of what Massumi terms "seeming being." As such the leader becomes little more than a site of affect; a bio-mediated phenomenon, whose affectivity spills out, "bleeds," beyond the body of the leader into the body politic as an affective intensity that it then captured by its mediated receivers. In this way the leader enters the bodies of other political subjects and his or her success depends on the ability of the leader to "resonate" with as many other bodies as possible. Of course Reagan's "talent" as actor helped in this regard, but for Massumi his political career can be seen as a result of his failure as an actor. Political leadership and politics more generally becomes the compensation for the lack of success at acting and one of the most significant consequences of this was Reagan's transformation of the political arena into a space where all political questions turned on the affective impact of the leader's body.

Reagan, as we know, presented his entire personality as a new beginning. For Massumi this shows that Reagnism was not a belief-system as such but simply a feeling of incipience; the feeling that something—new—is about always about to happen. Reagan stood for the feeling of possibility. In this way "Reagan-as-affect" soothed the status anxieties of the middle classes in the US production of a confidence boosting sense of open personal horizons and American futurity. Without the "contagion of Reaganic affect" the sense of affective incipience, "glad morning," that neo-liberalism is only now starting to lose would not have been possible.

Conclusion: Creativity vs. Critique

The focus on the leader in New Spinozist modes of social and cultural criticism is both important and timely. The figure of the leader had been lost in much contemporary critical discourses, with their tendency to view the leader as simply either an "effect" of wider social and cultural forces or a tabula rasa onto which the political masses project their unconscious longings. And it seems clear that today we are witnessing the emergence of a form of politics that does place the political leader in a central nodal position in a wider affective network. The inability of any leader to produce an affective sense of political "fellow feeling" in a wider political community of affect typically means political defeat for his party and followers. However, there seem to me to be a number of reasons to be suspicious of New Spinozist claims that their approach amounts to the beginnings of a new theoretical paradigm.[14]

Firstly, as the purpose of traditional forms of theoretical critique has been to expose the ideological nature of individualism and to unmask the primary reality of social relations, the New Spinozist focus on the individual leader can strike in many ways an anti or perhaps better post-theoretical move. Moreover, with its focus on the social and political significance of the empirical facticities of affect, that are typically measured by neurobiological and other bodily-focused means, the New Spinozism, also appears in many ways to be resolutely positivist. Is then the New Spinozism a form of "positivism in fancy dress? Might we have here little more than Humean affective naturalism wrapped up a radical philosophical tinsel paper, an aesthetic positivism whose positivism is disguised by a veneer of Romantic chic?

Even more important perhaps is the New Spinozists rejection of traditional notions of theoretical critique. Formerly, critical theory lived on a strict dialectical diet of "Enlightenment" that was widely conceived as the "negation of the negation" and the inarticulate hope of a utopian political promise. By these lights, the New Spinozism does not speak theoretically for and behalf of those "negated" by contemporary neo-liberalism in any way at all and clearly there is no obvious attempt in New Spinozist theoretical work to take a position outside of the neo-liberal universe of bio-political affect. In general, in the New Spinozism there is a tacit acceptance that we can no longer use theory as a means to theoretically critique the falsity of existing social reality—via an exposure of the suppressed political possibilities and latent emancipatory potentials—because in New Spinozist accounts there is simply no outside and beyond the contemporary social and cultural universe of affect to expose. Everything of political significance is already here: the revolutionary truth has already happened, the task now is the Leninst task of "what is affectively to be done" in order to preserve and evangelize it. Here, theory collapses into a means of facilitating a political movement, thought into Machiavellian strategizing, critique into the creative act of the construction of the movement. Thus the instrumentalization of thought in the New Spinozism is one of its more worrying dimensions, but so is the idea that the creation of the politically new is itself a form of political radicalism. Hegelian differentiation is now conceived as positive creation. The power of capital, which is nothing less than the power of the production of the multitude appropriated for private gain, the power of affective "worlding" itself, must be harnessed in the name of a radical political alternative. But how can we tell whether a "world" is politically progressive or not? What criteria can we deploy here? Might the left end up producing a "world" that is "inhabitable" and in this way repeat old political mistakes?

This takes us to a related concern to do with the politics of Spinozist vitalism itself. For many New Spinozists, an understanding of social and political possibility does not necessarily break affectively bound relations between people and things: critique only works at the level of concept what is needed is an intervention at the level of "life" (as this is the level at which capital now operates). Ontologically, according to the New Spinozists, we must begin with what was formerly viewed as the false—"life," the performative, the virtual and the affective. But does this vitalism lean towards a naturalism that is in many ways "beyond the political" as traditionally conceived, a vitalism that allows us to shrug our shoulders at traditional forms of injustice as simply expressions of "life"? Furthermore, there is also the suspicion that the post-Hegelian left has used Spinozian vitalism to effectively theologize contemporary neo-liberalism: that now becomes a total quasi-omnipotent bio-political environment with no outside. In Massumi's work, the affective dimensions of the leader become the equivalent of Spinoza's God: his/her sacrificial "affective" blood nourishes new political realities and new psychic creations at the level of popular political culture. But the question of why the political philosophy of the left needs this kind of "theological turn" is left unaccounted for. However, can new world really be created by the affects of the multitude? How is this done? What "practice" can we appeal to here as a normative guide? The question of what lies "beyond" the neo-liberal is any many ways the most pressing political philosophical question of all and one never really articulated at the level of theory in New Spinozist discourse. There is simply a faith in the affective powers of multitude to engender what Hardt and Negri termed an "ontological transformation of the subject."[15] The" beyond" of the neo-liberal world, for them, must be an ontological creation of the multitude, and in this way, the New Spinozism strives to take the left out of this world by acts of passion and creativity to rival those of the right.[16] But again, is ontological escapism a valid political response to the current crisis. Does this not immediately strike as a desperate measure?

Overall, it seems clear that the focus on the affective dimensions of human sociality and the foregrounding of the political significance of the political leader in New Spionzist forms of theoretical engagement with the neo-liberal are real intellectual innovations. However, this amounts to little more than supplement to existing modes of theoretical engagement and it is difficult to see how New Spinozist modes of conceptuality can be deployed in order to found a new critical theoretical tradition as some have claimed.

Notes

1. The emaciation of left-leaning political thought in face of the new neo-liberal doxa of rational, competitive, self-equilibrating individualism, and the ensuing "apolitical" situation that is still a noticeable feature of today's political landscape, came as something of a surprise to those weaned on a diet of post-1968 modes of social and political critique; largely because from the early decades of the nineteenth century until the late 1960s, the ideas of the left had presented themselves as the inevitable political futurity of a western modernity that had defined itself in terms of the utopian promise of its political futures. In fact, throughout most of the last century, it had seemed that the left had managed to cement a new, internal, conceptual relation between modernity and a largely Marxian notion of "progressive politics." Thus, in the middle decades of the last century, even conservative political figures claimed that "we're all socialists now." However, after the mid-1970s something rather remarkable happened. It became commonplace to assume that that the progressive ideals of the left not only no longer mattered, but were in point of intellectual fact something of a "philosophical absurdity." Somehow, in the 1970s, all left-political futures became dystopian and immediate political realities, at best, pragmatically significant. As a consequence the left retreated into the conceptual gossamer of "the symbolic order" and, from the 1980s onwards, sniped from the sidelines at a resurgent capitalism that now defined itself through the optics of nineteenth-century liberalism.

2. Antonio Negri, "Spinoza: Five Reasons for his Contemporaneity," in Timothy S. Murphy, ed. Subversive Spinoza (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004), p. 2.

3. Thus according to this popular doxa, Spinoza was very much a modern liberal thinker, albeit one whose liberalism is doused with an unhealthy dose of pantheism.

4. Murphy, Subversive Spinoza, p. 70.

5. Rosi Braidotti, "The Politics of Life as Bios/Zoe," in Anneke Smelik and Nina Lykke, eds., Bit of Life: Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience and Technology (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 2008), p. 182.

6. Brian Massumi, Parables of the Virtual (Durham NC: Duke UP, 2002).

7. Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001).

8. See Patricia Clough, "The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and Bodies," Theory, Culture and Society 25, no. 1 (2008): 1-22. In this way, the individual is conceived as composite of discrete elements that is both affected by and affecting of a larger causal order.

9. See Warren Montag, "Imitating the Affects of the Beast: Interest and Inhumanity in Spinoza" in Differences 20, nos. 2-3 (2009): 54-71. Relatedly, Spinoza philosophically pre-eminence in the context of the contemporary political situation is due to the way he gave centrality to conatus the human striving to empower itself, a striving that for Spinoza was co-extensive with the power of God.

10. Massumi, Parables of the Virtual, p. 42.

11. See Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (London: Methuen, 1985); Andrew Wernick, Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology and Symbolic Expression (London: Sage, 1991).

12. John B. Thompson, Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age (Cambridge: Polity, 2000).

13. Vamik D. Volkan, et al., Richard Nixon: A Psychobiography (New York: Columbia UP, 1997).

14. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000), p. 21.

15. Ibid., p. 384.

16. Here the boundary between the human, the artificial and technological no longer mean anything. Technologies are as much part of space of political action as any human individual or group. This requires a move beyond traditional theory in another way because it demands a rejection of the old humanist idea of technology as the expression of an inhuman instrumental rationality. The problem with orthodox modes of critical theory is that they are still wedded to old "Aristotelian" understandings of technology where technology is simply a means to an end.

Each Tuesday in the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Philip Crone looks at Aryeh Botwinick's "Same/Other versus Friend/Enemy: Levinas contra Schmitt," from Telos 132 (Fall 2005).

Representative Joe Wilson's outburst during President Obama's speech to Congress on healthcare reform in some ways overshadowed the content of the speech itself. Had Wilson shouted out in another, non-American context, such as during the Prime Minister's Question Time in the United Kingdom, he would have received little notice. But with an eye to the protocol and tradition surrounding presidential addresses to Congress in the United States, commentators from both the left and the right lambasted Wilson's actions. Of course, Wilson was not without his supporters who seemed to have little concern for such protocols, or at least seemed to think that the gravity of the situation warranted violating the traditional standards. Still, Wilson's yell stood in stark contrast to the lines offered at the end of Obama's speech in which the President called for "[replacing] acrimony with civility."

Civility and respect for differences of opinion have long been heralded as hallmarks of American liberal democracy. Yet it is a natural question to ask why such characteristics have been given such a high value. Political debate and argument is fundamentally premised on differences of opinion between two or more parties, and if these parties are fully convicted to their beliefs why should they let principles of civility stand in the way of achieving their political goals? In his article "Same/Other versus Friend/Enemy: Levinas contra Schmitt," Aryeh Botwinick examines such issues by considering Carl Schmitt's conception of politics, which is fundamentally grounded on the distinction between "friends" and "enemies." For Schmitt, identifying one's enemies is the key to political societies:

His [Schmitt's] moral/metaphysical/political indictment of liberal society is that it is depoliticized—and therefore weak, apathetic, materialistic, directionless, and disoriented. By contrast, a political society that has clearly identified its enemies and has psychologically—if not yet fully materially—girded itself up to do battle against them has attained properly speaking to the level of the political. For Schmitt, the fault line for differentiating between properly political societies and improperly political societies is the delineation of enemies and the preparation and readiness for war in the first case and the neglect (or un- or under-cultivation) of enemies and the consequent lack of preparation for war in the second case.

Thus, liberal society fails to be political because it fails to identify its enemies, whether internal or external, and to prepare for war against these enemies. Botwinick takes exception to Schmitt's characterization of political society, arguing that "Schmitt correlates politicization with readiness to wage war only because he works with a tacit background premise—namely, inequality." When one accepts inequality as a fundamental characteristic of society, as Schmitt does, it makes sense that an elite group would use war to defeat and subjugate its enemies. Botwinick suggests that once equality is taken as a premise, liberal society too becomes political. Botwinick writes that "the politicized nature of liberal society finds expression in the progressive waves of equalization that have characterized modern societies."

Botwinick proceeds through other deconstructions of Schmitt's arguments and takes to task his readings of Hobbes, implications of the friend/enemy distinction for international relations, and Schmitt's relation to Christianity. Throughout, he reaffirms the possibility of politics in liberal society divorced from the concepts of friend and enemy, and provides analysis indispensible for our current political situation as we decide whether political rivals are enemies or simply fellow travelers in the scheme of liberal society.

Read the full version of Aryeh Botwinick's "Same/Other versus Friend/Enemy: Levinas contra Schmitt" at the TELOS Online website. If you are affiliated with an institution that is an online subscriber to Telos, you have free access to our complete online archive. If not, you can purchase 24-hour access to this and other Telos articles at the low rate of $5/article.

Not to be caught off guard, most serious journals keep obituaries of the notables that will sooner or later succumb to the passing of time. I have prepared the following for Telos, not only on a man but also on his country. I propose to launch it ahead of the events.

From Hope to Fear: The Dilemma of Radical Equality

Ten years after the triumph of the Chinese revolution, in the Americas the island of Cuba underwent an equivalent upheaval. The Cuban revolution provoked an extraordinary interest and enthusiasm at the time throughout the world. In the middle of the Cold War, Cuba acquired a geopolitical significance out of proportion to its size and economic weight—and almost provoked a nuclear exchange between the two superpowers.

The importance of Cuba, however, was of a different kind. The Cuban revolution was seen as the latest of a series of socialist experiments in moving beyond capitalism and toward a new society of radical equality. One could argue that Cuba closed an even longer cycle of revolutions.[1] In fact, the Cuban revolution vowed to "build a new man" and demanded nothing less than the reconception of human nature. The prestige and the lasting legitimacy of the Cuban revolution rested primarily on the equalization of social conditions and on the universal access to health and education—two achievements attained with record speed during the first decade of the revolution.

Those of us who were young in 1960 remember the passionate curiosity that the Cuban experiment provoked. That was in the West, where postwar prosperity had given rise to leftist libertarian hopes among the youth. In the communist East, where socialism had been imposed from above and from outside, and had solidified into an oppressive form of bureaucratic domination, the Cuban revolution seemed also to offer a better hope. The following are recollections from a Romanian student:

Castro's energetic and long speeches while visiting Romania were listened to in people's houses with an admiration and a form of exotic respect that the Romanian dictator Ceausescu never enjoyed. "It's Fidel!"—old people were saying to me in a tone that resembled a mythological invocation. . . . Fidel seemed to have accomplished, in Romanian popular view at the time, something that local communism either failed to achieve or lost as a cause on its way.[2]

From a sociological and comparative point of view however, one must pose two different and perhaps disturbing questions: One, to what extent are those achievements linked to the totalitarian form of the regime that took shape during the initial surge of the revolution? And two, what price did the Cuban society and economy pay for the relentless pursuit of total and egalitarian inclusion? In other words, is there an inner logic that connects the enforcement of social justice with the absence of civic and public rights, with police repression, and with the prohibition to move away? The official complaints in the capitalist West about the violation of human rights fail to fathom a completely different view of what is right and what is wrong, a view of the world that does not recognize as legitimate any act of dissent, abstention, and the embrace of difference—in Albert Hirschman's words, that refuses to consider voice and exit as worthy of respect.

In a forthcoming book on Cuba, Claudia Hilb addresses these two questions.[3] She approaches them historically and chronicles the intimate association between two processes during the first decade of the revolution, namely, the rapid equalization of conditions imposed by the revolutionary regime upon the entire society and the extraordinary concentration of power in the figure of Fidel Castro. According to this author, the one makes no sense without the other. The entire revolutionary project was one of transforming society from the top—in Foucault's terms, from a high point of total visibility, surveillance, and control. According to this analysis, the revolution was panoptical from the beginning. The project rode on a wave of popular enthusiasm and a collective feeling of emancipation from a corrupt and despotic past. It was not therefore the voluntary or unwitting replacement of one despotism for another, but something very different: a radical overhaul of existing inequalities that required total and central control and mass participation.

In Max Weber's typology of the forms of legitimation, the revolution joined together rational (in the sense of systematic and meticulous control) and charismatic domination. This coincidence of the rational and the charismatic is a phase through in which most revolutions pass. In the long run however, rationality trumps the "cult of personality," and true to Weber's prediction, charisma becomes bureaucratically "routinized." The Cuban peculiarity consists in the persistence of charisma and the longevity of Fidel—a process that has provided the regime with long-range stability but ultimate fragility. Aside from these distinctions, what count for the present discussion is the speed, the depth, and the manner of construction of an egalitarian society during the first phase of the revolution.

In a very abridged form, what one discerns in this period is the rapid equalization of society from the bottom up, by favoring the rise of the downtrodden and the excluded, but enforced "without ifs or buts" from the top of political power. In other words, radical equalization and centralization of control were two sides of the same coin, two constitutive elements of the same process.

The first ten years witnessed two agrarian reforms: the first an expropriation, break-up, and redistribution of large holdings to the landless, and the second an imposition of state control over all agricultural production, large and small. The non-agrarian sectors of the economy too were nationalized and passed into the property of the state: foreign subsidiaries, sugar refineries, commerce, utilities, and construction. The state also took control of health and education, and regulated housing. All these measures favored those at the bottom of the social pyramid and progressively alienated those above, first the privileged elite and then the middle class, including small property owners initially favored by redistribution. Each wave of equalization produced a corresponding wave of exile—first the recalcitrant, then the disenchanted. In the worlds of Barrington Moore Jr. in reference to a similar but much more severe process in the early phases of the Soviet revolution, this was a period of "terror and progress"[4]. Popular mobilization went hand in hand with severe repression.

At the top level of leadership a voluntaristic model of forced development prevailed (first embodied in the figure of Ernesto "Che" Guevara and subsequently by Fidel Castro himself), with the stress on altruistic as opposed to material incentives. In the language of the times, it was an attempt to construct socialism (efforts-based compensation) and communism (needs-based compensation) simultaneously. In practical terms, the process eliminated all the economic agents that were not agents of the state.

What was the upshot? At the sociological level, there was a radical leveling of difference and distinction; at the economic level, a phenomenal disorganization of production. The economic dislocation happened in part due to the eviction and exodus of qualified strata, but more significantly due to the inability of the state to manage and to allocate activities without market signals. The former was a serious but temporary effect; the latter a fatal flaw.

The centralization of control in the hands of one person and the repression or marginalization of any other center of decision-making affected not only the "natural" enemies of the revolution, but its original supporters as well. The control and "coordination" of student organizations, of labor unions, and finally of the cultural and artistic producers, has been well documented by analysts throughout the years and is also available in the form of recollections and memoirs. A similar process occurred with the single party of the revolution, which through successive purges became a docile communist machine, subordinated to Fidel. As in other soviet-type regimes, those "in the cockpit" were in constant fear of "falling out of grace."

For the wider society, quieter forms of what Victor Zaslavsky called "organized consensus" gradually replaced the initial enthusiasm of revolutionary mobilization.[5] A vast network of surveillance and thought control was established through the committees for the defense of the revolution, police informants, and the active encouragement of denunciations of acquaintances, relatives and friends. Daily life under such conditions passed from a state of charismatic endorsement to a culture of fear, perhaps best illustrated by the German film The Life of Others, [6] which portrays the social psychology of control in the former DDR—the epitome of Soviet-style societies. The result was the corrosion of civil forms of conviviality, which have been studied in other contexts as well.[7] From an economic point of view, it meant the downgrading of initiative and morale, which reinforced the incompetence of the state and required ever more unpleasant dispositions, like desabastecimiento (stock outs) and rationing.

If on the political level the regime survived through repression, on the macro-economic level it was on the dole of the former Soviet Union. When the latter collapsed Cuba suffered enormous penury until it was partially bailed out by the help of Chavez's oil-rich Venezuela. The early dependence on the USSR tempered the initial voluntarism of the revolution,[8] and the aggressive but clumsy foreign policy of the United States helped to provide a justification for tightening control. But ultimately the model of soviet-type society that was established in Cuba was the product of a deep internal logic.

Forced equality produced economic disincentives and dysfunctions negatively affecting growth and prosperity—among them ersatz full employment, absenteeism, theft of public property, a clandestine market, and a "double morality" of conformity and deviance at the same time. For example, an ordinary Cuban would ritually denounce the exiles in Miami but cash in on remittances by relatives in the United States. Moreover, the regime soon discovered that social inequality has not one source but many—and that the regime was generating its own. For as Charles Tilly has shown, inequality is not a mere gradient susceptible of measurement along one dimension (as for instance with the Gini coefficient), but a series of categorical distinctions based on different means and resources.[9]

The Autumn of the Patriarch

As time goes by and the original leadership faces old age and death, Cuba teeters unprepared for a transition to a world that, although mired in crisis, no longer accepts the mode of life that Cubans have withstood during a heavy fifty years. Excluding inequality, on many other comparative indicators, Cuba today does not fare better than it did in 1959. Comparing it to poorer Caribbean nations will not do—the comparison is with Chile, Uruguay, or Brazil. Today, as then, the relative position is pretty much the same. The conclusion is sobering: Cuba has attained greater social equality at the price of political repression and economic stagnation. It lives in a bubble of silence and denial, as in a museum of a way of life that nobody wants.[10] Over fifty years, the revolution has spent the moral capital reserves it held as a bastion of dignified resistance to the colossus of the North. The question pending for the future is how to accede to a modality of economic growth that does not destroy some social achievements of the past—how to throw away the communist bathwater without ejecting the egalitarian baby as well.[11] That is a tall order indeed.

The world of late capitalism does offer examples of managed transitions from egalitarian socialism to unequal but prosperous capitalism—some more attractive than others.[12] In some intellectual and policy circles there is discussion of the "Vietnamese way" in which the communist power structure itself sponsors an opening of the country to capitalist investment, while protecting not just its own interests but also social solidarity. A superficial overview of social behavior however, raises the question of whether the Cubans—after decades of forced-fed altruism—have not lost their appetite for solidarity as well as the initiative for entrepreneurship that East Asians managed to retain. Travelers from Brazil to Cuba these days report that, although the two populations live in the tropics, Brazilians exude and exalt life, but Cubans seem numb.

If the Cuban leadership decided to undertake "Vietnamese reforms," the situation would look like this. The regime would propose measures that would give greater scope to the private sector, reduce the budget deficit, and boost the output of agricultural and consumer goods in order to raise market supplies and exports. Specifically, the government would seek to make prices more responsive to market forces and to allow farmers and industrial producers to make profits. Barriers to trade would be lowered; the checkpoint inspection system that requires goods in transit to be frequently inspected would be abolished; and regulations on private inflow of money, goods, and tourists from overseas would be relaxed. In the state-controlled industrial sector, overstaffing in state administrative and service organizations would be slated for reduction. Government leaders also would plan to restructure the tax system to boost revenue and improve incentives. Non-traditional exports would increase, while outside investors would regain their faith. As in Vietnam, the economy would then grow at 6 percent or more a year, inequality would increase (an inevitable byproduct of a capitalist surge), but poverty would diminish significantly. With luck and investments from another tropical republic—Brazil—Cuba could mitigate its dependence on foreign fossil fuels and become a net exporter of sugar ethanol. The transition would be for Cuba another large social experiment, this time based no longer on the socialist proposition that sacrifice should be shared equally, but on the capitalist proposition that a rising tide lifts all boats.

In the immediate future, Cuba will navigate treacherous waters—a passage full of danger between the Scylla and Charybdis of two rent-seeking mafias, one inside the country and the other one outside:[13] on the one hand the attempt by exiles to settle accounts, and on the other the pretensions of functionaries of the regime to become the new capitalist masters, Russian style.

More than fifty years ago, a young rebellious student called Fidel Castro led a failed assault on the fortress of Moncada. He was arrested and tried. In his defense, he gave a speech that became famous, "History will absolve me." For the next fifty years history was kind to him because he made it, wrote it, and kept it under firm control. The other History to which he referred in his youthful speech could not possibly absolve him—because it does not exist. What remains of its ghost is a question mark in the sky, under which Fidel and his system wither dismally with age.

Notes

1. Barrington Moore, Jr., in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), discussed the cycle.

2. Emanuel Ionut Crudu, "Exploring the Future of Cuba. Scenarios about the Remains of an Alternative Modernity," Lucca: Institute of Advanced Studies (IMT), 2009.

3. Claudia Hilb, ¡Silencio, Cuba! La izquierda democrática frente al régimen de la Revolución Cubana (Buenos Aires: 2010).

4. Barrington Moore, Jr., Terror and Progress: USSR. Some Sources of Change and Stability in the Soviet Dictatorship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1954).

5. Victor Zaslavsky, The Neo-Stalinist State. Class, Ethnicity and Consensus in Soviet Society (New York: Sharpe, 1982).

6. Das Leben der Anderen, a 2006 drama film by writer and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.

7. Juan E. Corradi et al., eds., Fear at the Edge. State Terror and Resistance (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992).

8. In part, the "Sovietization" of Cuba was a consequence of the spectacular failure of an economically irrational decision by the Líder máximo—the failed "record" sugar harvest of 1970, reminiscent of Mao's "Great Leap Forward."

9. Consider the powerful theoretical argument by Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1999). For the dysfunctional legacies of Cuban socialism, see Edward Gonzalez and Kevin F. McCarthy, Cuba After Castro: Legacies, Challenges, and Impediments (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2004).

10. For an illustration see another German film, Bye Bye Lenin! directed by Wolfgang Becker, 2003.

11. For an interpretation that still values the nature and persistence of a Cuban alternative modernity, see Antonio Carmona Baez, State Resistance to Globalization in Cuba (London: Pluto Press, 2004).

12. A useful contribution to this comparison is B. Smith, "Life of the Party. The Origins of Regime Breakdown and Persistence under Single-Party Rule," World Politics 57, no. 3 (2005): 421–51. See also Mark P. Sullivan, "Cuba After Fidel Castro: Issues for US Policy," CRS Report for Congress, August 2005.

13. See Joel Hellman, "Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Post communist Transitions," World Politics 50 (1998): 203–34. For a comprehensive review of post-Fidel scenarios, I recommend the research report produced under my guidance by the Rumanian doctoral candidate Emanuel Ionut Crudu, "Exploring the Future of Cuba. Scenarios about the Remains of an Alternative Modernity," Lucca: Institute of Advanced Studies (IMT), 2009, op. cit.

This text was presented in January at the 2010 Telos Conference, "From Lifeworld to Biopolitics: Empire in the Age of Obama."

On the 20th of January, 2009, there was euphoria when Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America. Five days earlier, the Lunar New Year arrived, heralding in the Year of the Ox. Perhaps there is no guiding symbol more apt for the year than a castrated bull; a work-horse, domesticated, obedient, and non-independent. After all, in this current climate of an economy in disarray, this seems to be a prudent call—"herd together, buckle down, and move in the same direction."

At first glance, these two events seem to have nothing to do with each other. It might even seem absurd to put the two in relation with each other. But as Georges Bataille has taught us, in order to think, one must never be afraid of thinking the seemingly unthinkable. And here, one does hear echoes of the Ox throughout Barack Obama's inauguration speech, especially in his call to remain "faithful to the ideals of our forebears, and true to our founding documents. So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans."[1] A brutal translation of this would be, "this is what you have to do; so just shut up and follow the leader—follow me." Whilst attempting to address the current economic crisis, Obama suggests that distribution of wealth and commonality are the solutions: "the success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart—not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good." A little later on, he situates this call for collective thinking in history when he says, "recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with the sturdy alliances and enduring convictions."

The Obama formula for success is best captured by his maxim, "what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose . . . " Just how this collective imagination is formed though, is an altogether different tale. It is not surprising that there was no elucidation of this point; it would have been terribly inappropriate, not to mention instant political suicide, to invoke any memory of Stalin and totalitarianism at his welcome party. However, the traces of the call for communality—of persons under a common ideal, goal, idea—were undeniable. The fact that Rick Warren and Aretha Franklin were chosen to lead the opening prayer and sing at the inauguration ceremony respectively, further illustrates this logic: "if a homo-phobic preacher and a has-been singer can find a place in my ceremony, this shows that as long as you follow my philosophy you will have a place behind me."

Nonetheless, the reverse of this statement also holds true: "resistance is futile, you will be assimilated." The aim to close all extra-territorial prisons—Guantanamo Bay being one such example—only shows this: no longer are areas of exception needed. If one is optimistic, this would suggest that everyone will be given a free and fair hearing under the Laws of the United States. However, this could also mean that the United States under Obama is precisely this space of exception; or even more obscenely, that Obama himself is the exception. The fact is, after the swearing in, he is now transfigured into the sovereign, he has now filled the space of exception, a space briefly vacated during the interregnum.

The logic of "all under one idea" is terror

Whereas in a two-sided battle, my opponent thinks that what I think and do is unjust, and I think that what he does and thinks is unjust. Well, his freedom is complete and so is mine. With a hostage, I am applying . . . not even "pressure." It is much more than that. It is the social bond taken as a fact of nature.[3]

What has been taken away is choice: one no longer can do anything but constitute "September 11" as a "terror attack on the United States"; your only other option, alternative, is to refuse this interpretation. This is hardly a space for negotiation—all you can say is "yes" or "no."

Here, one can hear an echo of the Obama rally cry—"yes we can." Most of the focus has been on the emphasis of the affirmation that "we can." However what has been driven aside—rather forcefully at that—is the notion of the "no"; what seems to have been discounted completely is the choice to not do something, even though one can. This suggests that all potentiality has to be translated into actuality; in other words, potentiality is only a phase before actuality—if this particular translation is not made, there might as well have been none to begin with. But as Giorgio Agamben has taught us, potentiality as such always already brings with it the potentiality not-to-be. Hence, the implication of this call is that only results matter—by extension, you are only as good as your productivity, as what you produce; "you as such do not matter, unless you can." Clearly in the Obama world, there would be no place for Bartleby.

When Barack Obama said, "for we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth," he was met with thunderous applause, for this sounds like a reiteration of the American Dream, where regardless of race, language, or religion, anyone has a chance of success. In many ways, he is the very embodiment of this philosophy of meritocracy: the entire Obama campaign was run on the premise that Americans should vote for him not as a black man, but as the most competent candidate, the one that met all the conditions to be the leader. However, this also reiterates the fact that "as long as you fulfill the set criteria, you will be rewarded."

It is precisely this understanding—the knowledge that power rests in forms—that Barack Obama possesses. This is why anyone and everyone can gain recognition under the new regime: no longer is the banal binary of "you are either with us or against us" at play; instead we are now faced with the far more insidious challenge of the "patchwork." On the surface, it would seem that a patchwork is fluid and welcoming to all differences. However, anyone who has done any sewing would know that patchworks run on strict logics: anything that does not fall within the overall scheme is cut out and thrown away. In this "patchwork" world that Obama is invoking, every American—and since he never lets the rest of the world forget that the US "remain[s] the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth"—by extension everyone in the world, is now a unit for exchange; a calculable entity which has to choose between fitting the master-plan or being cut out. You are no longer even given the choice to be "against us," to resist, for if you are assimilated, you no longer even exist. In this sense, one is no longer allowed to be the enemy; the only option that remains is to either play (unconditionally accepting the rules of the game) or leave.

This is of course nothing more than capitalism at its purest: everything is equal, flattened—channeling the spectre of Jean Baudrillard, everything has been "liberated so that it can enter a state of pure circulation, so that it can go into orbit,"[4] in the precise sense that everyone and everything is completely and utterly exchangeable. However, it is not as if this complete exchangeability comes without a price. If everything is equivalent to everything else, this also means that nothing is inherent any longer; there are no longer any secrets, any unknowns. Everything is completely and utterly knowable, calculable, disseminable. And as Baudrillard has warned us time and time again, when

each individual category is subject to contamination, substitution is possible between any sphere and any other: there is total confusion of types. . . . Each category is generalized to the greatest possible extent, so that it eventually loses all specificity and is reabsorbed by all the other categories.[5]

In other words, it can be found everywhere; and by extension, nowhere at exactly the same time. If everything is political, then politics itself is meaningless; if economics is everything, the economy as such ceases to have any meaning. In terms of humans, if we are all exactly the same as the next person, this means that none of us are singular. Perhaps this was already apparent by the increasing importance of "human resource management" over the last few decades: by this logic, humans are nothing more than resources; constantly depreciating, and more importantly, completely replaceable.

Here we find ourselves in an almost Beckettian situation; one where we can no longer go on (after all what is the point), but have to at the same time. Perhaps at this point we have to attempt to find hope in the perfection of the system itself, in the fact that no system can be perfect, in the fact that the absolute perfection of the system is its own failing point. The only way to face this absurd premise (where perfection and imperfection are exactly the same) is to be completely ironic; not in the traditional sense of keeping a distance from it (the distance of analysis) but the very opposite—the absurd position of utterly plunging into the very absurdity itself.

When faced with an utterly indifferent system—governed by a single Idea without any regard for the followers of that Idea—one has no choice but to be even more indifferent.

For this is the nightmare of any disciplinary mechanism: what power would it have over the subject if the subject did not mind being disciplined in the first place? In this sense, not only is resistance to the disciplining expected, it is absolutely required: one can even go so far as to say that resistance is the very crux of the disciplinary mechanism. Without this assumption, the entire disciplinary system would collapse on itself.

When faced with a system that attempts to objectify (to flatten everyone into variations of each other), instead of resisting—insisting on our subjectivity and uniqueness—we must take the plunge and embrace our status as pure object(s). The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is an apt metaphor for this: it spreads, not by combating the defenses of the host, but by doing the exact opposite; HIV attaches itself to its host precisely by using the host's defenses. In this manner, the more the host body attempts to defend itself, the more it attempts to combat the HIV, the more the virus spreads. In this sense, a position of hyper-conformity may potentially short-circuit the entire logic.

Capitalism—and economics as a whole—is hinged on the fact that its subjects attach personal meaning to their consumption. Thus we must abandon the age old strategy of "finding meaning" in our own lives. By plunging ourselves into infinite circulation, by embracing utter and absolute meaninglessness, we will not face up to capitalism, but instead take it on its own terms.

Forget revolutions: they move around in circles and eventually end up in the same place. In the Year of the Ox, we must embrace the fact that we are castrated beings, all lined up and facing the same direction. Perhaps even embracing the ironic advantage of being a slave—remembering always Georges Bataille's teaching that slaves cannot be sacrificed. After all, why must we read "yes we can" as a strong affirmation—it can also be a question, an empty claim, or even better, a plea; soft, weak, whimpering.[6] And perhaps, in this absolute indifference, not just to the system, but to ourselves, we might be able to seduce the totalizing logic of capitalism itself. Thus, we offer it the challenge of our own emptiness, our own absence, in fact, our own deaths. Perhaps it might respond with its own …

Notes

1. The transcript to Obama's inauguration speech is widely available from various sources, including here. All references to the speech will be from this source.

2. Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming (1999), p.70.

3. Ibid. pp. 70-71.

4. Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena (1999), p. 4.

5. Ibid. pp. 8-9.

6. And here I must acknowledge a debt to my dear teacher, Avital Ronell, who brought my attention to a conversation she had with Jacques Derrida, where they opened new registers, possibilities, in the phrase "God Bless America."

Each Tuesday in the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Timothy Stacey looks at Paul Gottfried's "Enforcing 'Human Rights': Rejoinder to Rick Johnstone" and Alain de Benoist's "What is Sovereignty?" both from Telos 116 (Summer 1999).

As Tony Blair remains a prime candidate for the EU presidency, despite (or, knowing Blair, in spite of) the protestations of his former adversaries at home, it is high time to pose the question of sovereignty in relation to the central enforcement of human rights. And this for four reasons: first, as Prime Minister of Britain, Blair showed little or no respect for localism, preferring the efficiency of top-down reforms from education to policing. If he cared little for provincial politics as the nation's leader, what is to say he will care for national politics as the continent's leader? Second, and as a means to achieving this centrism, Blair flouted parliamentary constraints on his leadership. With the EU checks on central control as lackadaisical as they have proved to be in recent years, all it requires is a maverick like Blair to go trampling through the fine red tape that protects national sovereignty. Third, Blair is an unashamed Europhile, in the past proving quite happy to give up his own nation's sovereignty in the name of EU global clout. Fourth and finally, Blair is the champion of liberal interventionism. Whatever the discrepancy between his excuse for invading Iraq and his reason for staying it through, it is no secret that heavier on Blair's conscious is whether Iraq was a ripe case for liberal intervention—not whether he lied to the British people. Before Blair becomes a new-age Charlemagne, it is worth assessing the case of sovereignty with respect to human rights.

In his article "Enforcing 'Human Rights': Rejoinder to Rick Johnstone," Paul Gottfried offers an argument that cuts through every aspect of Blair's naive centrism: there is no consensus on the minutiae of human rights (an argument, one ought to note, that reveals the practical implications of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, in which it is argued there is not and cannot be a calculated consensus concerning moral absolutes). So as we look toward the future of Europe, it is worth considering the possibility that we are enforcing more than the most basic human rights to the detriment of sovereignty:

Eurocrats . . . not only impose socialist welfare state policies on their constituent members, but proclaim "years of anti-racism," together with mandating multicultural programs for once sovereign European countries. What is the cultural threshold beyond which members of the new world "liberal federalism" become subject to invasion and reconstruction? Is the failure to accept Third World immigrants, to extend universal suffrage, or to allow women into the work force sufficient grounds for offence and collective action by the new world order? Exactly what degree of imitation to his own preferred society must the rest of the world exhibit in order not to risk reprisals from those carrying nukes or enjoying military superiority? Reading Johnstone one gets the impression that Thrasymachus had a point about justice coming down to the advantage of the strong. (136)

Are human rights, even in liberal communities, becoming just that which the strong deem them to be? If so we need to reassess what it means to us as liberals to respect a nation's sovereignty. In "What is Sovereignty?" Alain de Benoist does just this:

The democratic sphere of the people's will can be ignored, since it contradicts the juridical and moral norms that are considered to be superior. In the field of international relations, the result was that it became impossible to recognize political equality among different national sovereignties, and to resolve international disputes collectively. This contradiction led, in turn, to the "right of intervention," which also pretends to limit political sovereignty by a legal norm and, ultimately, by "moral" values. For example, Daniel Cohn-Ben-dit and Zaki Laïdi have declared that "ethical sovereignty is a new way to think about sovereignty," and they have defined this new form as "the refusal to allow anyone to claim sovereignty for objectives contrary to basic freedoms and human rights." Such a type of discourse, which is regularly used to justify "humanitarian wars," i.e., military aggression pre-tending to be "just," immediately poses the question of who, besides sovereign states, should concretely limit political sovereignty. By definition, only those who have the means to do so can exercise the "right of intervention." (110)

Sovereignty itself is only granted insofar as it does not contravene human rights as defined by those with the power to intervene. Reading Gottfried's and Benoist's articles, one becomes painfully aware of the contradictions implicit in doctrines of liberal intervention, whether that be intervention at home or abroad. If you want a leader that will finally turn Europe into a unified entity with viable and unequivocal policies on certain issues, go for Blair. This is perhaps the best way to give Europe international clout. But if you want the EU to remain more about the peaceful coexistence of sovereign states, who nonetheless maintain their idiosyncrasies, push for someone else.

Read the full version of Paul Gottfried's "Enforcing 'Human Rights': Rejoinder to Rick Johnstone" and Alain de Benoist's "What is Sovereignty?" at the TELOS Online website. If you are affiliated with an institution that is an online subscriber to Telos, you have free access to our complete online archive. If not, you can purchase 24-hour access to this and other Telos articles at the low rate of $5/article.

Each Tuesday in the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Etel Sverdlov looks at Rick Johnstone's "Ethnic Purges and Neighborly Pacts: Reflections on a Swiss Statue," from Telos 115 (Spring 1999).

Optimism can never be overrated. It is simply too easy, when examining the world with a keen eye, to become lost within daily strife. For this reason, I found Rick Johnstone's article "Ethnic Purges and Neighborly Pacts: Reflections on a Swiss Statue" particularly refreshing. Within his text, he traces the development and achievements of Switzerland, emphasizing the modesty of their political ambitions as one of the causes for their success. What saturates the article, however, more than anything, is a committed positive outlook concerning the Swiss. Johnstone glories in their pacifism and applauds them for their tolerance. When analyzing national policy, most people judge countries by what they have accomplished; Johnstone, on the other hand, steps through the looking glass and rejoices in what the Swiss have not done. And what they have not done is a lot. He points out with satisfaction the lack of war monuments to the fallen of World War I in Swiss villages: they had no desire to die by machine-gun fire in the muddy trenches. He emphasizes their invisibility on the political scene: "People jest that no one knows who is the President of Switzerland. . . . If no one knows who the President of Switzerland is, that is because it does not matter, and if it does not matter, that is not because Switzerland is not a success, but because it is, and because its success comes not from above, but from below." He praises the most useless weapon of war, the Swiss Army Knife—a symbol, with its miniature corkscrew and scissors, of self-reliance and autonomy.

Have we therefore been asking the wrong questions of countries? Perhaps in the quiet progress of Switzerland, it is possible to see a contrast with the grand gestures of other nations. The beginning of democracy for the Swiss began with the Oath of the Reutli, where rather than, for example, locking themselves in a tennis court in order to lessen the power of the monarch as the French did at the outset of the Revolution, the people of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden signed a treaty for mutual assistance. Johnstone describes it as "a kind of pre-Enlightenment democracy, that was not based on abstract concepts about human rights." As trivial as such a difference may seem, the very concreteness of the terms may have offset any danger of ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing, a term usually relegated to dictatorships and the more gruesome parts of history, seems unnervingly common within the story of developed countries. It is not unnecessary to commend the Swiss on avoiding what so many other kingdoms could not. The land of the Magna Carta alternated between prosecuting the Catholics and Protestants, depending on the monarch in power. The country that wrote the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man descended upon enemies of the state without mercy during the Revolutionary period. Even the originators of the Declaration of Independence cannot consider themselves absolved, for the Americans, if nothing else (and there is much else), treated the native settlers of the continent with unbearable cruelty.

Switzerland, therefore, accustomed to acting moderately and lacking desire for nationalistic conquest, used their peaceful tradition not only to side-step internal brutality but to avoid the First World War. The philosophy of 1960s America, "make love not war," was in fact a more extreme version of the Swiss attitude toward conquest. Although they defended themselves fiercely in defensive campaigns, the lack of interest in external recognition and glory separated them from their more idealistic, and perhaps crueler, neighbors. Thus Johnstone asks the question, "Where were Swiss peasants during the Battle of the Somme? They were in the Alps making cheese. . . .  'No, I'm sorry, I can't make it to the trenches, I have to milk my cow, so I guess I'll have to miss all that glory.'"

One can tell that Johnstone derives great pleasure in recounting the actions of the Swiss over the centuries. His laudatory analysis of the Switzerland, although bordering on a panegyric, does raise questions on whether loftier principles may often unite with baser morality. "Ethnic Purges and Neighborly Pacts: Reflections on a Swiss Statue," acts, therefore, as convincing praise for political inaction and a cheerful commendation of the peaceful life.

Read the full version of Rick Johnstone's "Ethnic Purges and Neighborly Pacts: Reflections on a Swiss Statue" at the TELOS Online website. If you are affiliated with an institution that is an online subscriber to Telos, you have free access to our complete online archive. If not, you can purchase 24-hour access to this and other Telos articles at the low rate of $5/article.

This text was presented in January at the 2010 Telos Conference, "From Lifeworld to Biopolitics: Empire in the Age of Obama."

Carl Schmitt has been often accused of uncritically utilizing metaphysical concepts, such as "the will," in his political philosophy. In this talk, I will begin to reconstruct the onto-phenomenological foundations of the Schmittian conception of the political will, arguing that it is not a pre-fabricated or transcendental entity, but a historical instant of what Edmund Husserl called "constitutive subjectivity." The argument entails two crucial theoretical steps. First, I will draw a parallel between Husserl's account of the crisis of European sciences and Schmitt's version of the crisis of the political. In each case, the crisis reveals multiple disconnects between the institutional, bureaucratized reality, on the one hand, and the suppressed lifeworld (political or otherwise) that underpins this reality, on the other. Second, I will explore the Schmittian analogue to the Husserlian subject who inhabits this lifeworld. I hope to demonstrate that, for Schmitt, the will is not a numinous, interiorized entity but power in its lived, historical actuality, in other words, political facticity. To reclaim the political lifeworld in 2010, then, we need to tease out the living political will buried beneath the institutionalized, bureaucratized edifice of contemporary politics.

The formal analogy between Schmitt's political philosophy and Husserl's phenomenology comprises three channels of inquiry concerned with the problem of modernity and with the possibilities of its resolution. First, the oppressive layers of bureaucratized and neutralized institutions, including the law and the state, are an extension of what in his book The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology Husserl terms "sedimentation" (Sedimentierung). Husserlian sedimentation involves a forgetting of the concrete foundations of abstract knowledge in lived human experience, along with the founding impulse itself, thanks to the preponderance of abstractions founded, instituted, or established on that which has been forgotten.[1] We could argue that the experience of the political at the founding level of Lebenswelt, the life-world, has been suppressed by the founded institutionalization of politics that, paradoxically, presupposes and extirpates this lived, embodied, existential basis. For Husserl, the crisis erupts, precisely, when founded abstractions tend toward an excessive separation from their phenomenological foundations and when what we know about the world assumes the character of familiarity or obviousness. On the political side of things, the crisis evidences a divergence between the institutional arrangement, such as the state, and its existential premises—collective decisions on the form of political existence, formations of the community of friends against enemy groupings, etc.—and it is these "groundless," existentially self-legitimating political foundations that fall prey to neutralization. As a consequence, we witness the objectivization of the political in modernity, its divestment of any subjective underpinnings uncritically dismissed as archaic despotism. The objective legal order comes unglued from the subjective orientation, thereby, shuttering the unity of nomos and ushering the age of political nihilism. Now, Obama's election promises revolved, exactly, around the hope of doing away with the objectivization of political life and its corollaries: disenchantment, voter apathy, and nihilism. A year into his presidency, these sentiments are, probably, more intense than they were before. The screws of objectivization have been tightened, precisely, in the name of expanding popular participation in US politics.

A particularly pernicious aspect of institutionalization is extreme formalization, or the persistence of that which had taken root in the political life-world long after the disappearance of its existential raison d'être. The difficulty in dealing with formalization is due to its inevitability and, therefore, the unfeasibility of its wholesale eradication.[2] If there is a "solution" to the problem of modernity, it does not dictate a rejection of abstract thought, which as Adorno and Derrida have taught us, is the pharmakon (remedy and poison) of freedom, nor does it succumb to the anarchist temptation to abolish all formal political structures. The stress Schmitt places on the exception should, likewise, alert us to the fact that it is an exception to the rule, which is not rescinded but, rather, preserved and strengthened thanks to a revalorization of its ultimate telos embedded in the political life-world. In lieu of prescribing an easy way to overcome the problem of modernity, Husserlian reduction and Heideggerian de-formalization impose the exigency of a patient, if not Sisyphean, theoretical and practical work of removing layers of sedimentation that are bound to re-grow, given that their accumulation constitutes the movement of history.

This, then, is the other dimension of the crisis: the survival of an empty organization or legal form betraying—in the double sense of expressing and becoming unfaithful to—the decision that gave rise to it. Schmitt writes, "the issuance of a constitution can exhaust, absorb, or consume [erschöpfen, absorbieren oder konsumieren] the constitution-making power" (CT 125),[3] immediately adding, however, that this exhaustion neither invalidates nor renders irrelevant the political will. Because constitution-making power is vital for political life, its absorption and exhaustion in the constitution only deepens the crisis and demands a new decision on the political form. One sign of the crisis of formalization is the dissolution of a unified constitution into a set of particular laws (CT 69): an early warning that the will, from which the unity of the constitution stemmed, is no longer expressed in its own objectification. The statute stays behind as an empty shell, an abstraction no longer linked to concrete existence, a sediment disengaged from political being. Once again, we may note that Obama's extreme legalism, which Russell Berman and I referred to in our Introduction to the special issue of Telos on "Schmitt and the Event," falls on the side of formalization suffocating the political life-world.

Second, like Husserl, who harnesses philosophy to the task of reactivating the forgotten origins of knowing, learning to see the enigmatic core of the familiar, "accomplishing for oneself that which has originally given rise to what one is now aware of as 'ready-made'"[4], Schmitt is committed to an archaeological reactivation of the "living sources" of politics buried deep beneath the ossified institutional structures. It is crucial to realize that, given Schmitt's polemical and highly situational usage of political concepts, his accentuation of the elemental experience of the political is also contextually and historically ensconced as a reaction to the crisis of modernity threatening with a complete depoliticization, neutralization, and formalization of human existence. Piercing through the layers of ready-made institutional reality, political reduction has in view the same goal as Husserl's phenomenological reduction, namely, reviving politics as a lived experience and as a concrete, de-formalized phenomenon (in a qualified sense that precludes something like the pure self-evidence and the absolute visibility of the political). The advantage of this phenomenological elaboration on Schmitt's project is that it avoids imputing to his methodology a mishmash of heterogeneous "modes of unmasking, historicization, ideational reconstruction and decontestation"[5] and, thus, endorses theoretical coherence without compromising on historical sensitivity.

The third step in this politico-phenomenological process is to ask who or what exactly remains after reduction has bracketed or put aside various abstractions and "obvious" descriptions of the political. Here, too, a reference to Husserl will prove useful. According to Volume I of Ideas, what survives the operations of reduction is that which is purely immanent to consciousness, "intentionality," or directedness of consciousness toward something. As intentional, consciousness is, in each instance, conscious of something (perceiving of the perceived, desiring of the desired, thinking of the thought), in double sense of the genitive; consciousness both bestows meaning on phenomena and is co-produced with whatever it is conscious of. Reduction gives us access to a whole region of being, which, while it is a part of the world, construes this world as meaningful. Transposed from Husserl's phenomenology onto Schmitt's political philosophy, constitutive subjectivity can equip us with a model for understanding the collective and individual subject of the political and the permutations of the irreducible pouvior constituant subtending the constitutional forms emanating from it. While the irreducibility of the subjective element has been often associated with the old metaphysical notion of the will that seems to have percolated into Schmitt's theory, the reductive-phenomenological take on the issue makes recourse to metaphysical explanations less plausible. But what, exactly, allows us to make a case for a post-metaphysical, existential-ontological interpretation of constitutive political subjectivity in Schmitt's political philosophy?

The most conspicuous, and perhaps the most controversial, example of constitutive subjectivity in politics is the sovereign will. A political philosophy that seeks, at any cost, to avoid the trappings of modern positivism is likely to appeal to this notion, despite running the risk of inheriting the old metaphysical quandaries associated with it. Schmitt, nevertheless, is careful enough to skirt the positivist Scylla and the metaphysical Charybdis by resorting to the will—the paradigm case of pure psychic inwardness—so as to ingeniously destroy the master distinction of traditional metaphysics between interiority and exteriority. The "word 'will'," he maintains, "denotes an actually existing power as the origin of a command. The will is existentially present [vorhanden]; its power or authority lies in its being [seine Macht oder Autorität liegt in seinem Sein]" (CT 64). This definition, furnished early on in Constitutional Theory, does not mean that a purely interior, psychic entity, which exists a priori, only subsequently actualizes itself either as Hegel's Geist that passes through world-history, or as Nietzsche's will-to-power. Nor is political will coterminous with the psychic will of the immediate person, even when this person alone is responsible for deciding on the constitutional form of political life. Schmitt's "will" is, merely, power in its very actuality, an always already exteriorized expression of political existence, while power is an appellation for the effectivity of the will, which is not a withdrawn, noumenal cause[6] but an active intervention in a given state of affairs (actually existing power as the command's origin). The political will must have an existential substratum—not to be confused with the modern sense of body politic—wherein it resides not as something "misplaced" but as a matter of fact inseparable from its being: " . . . only something existing in concrete terms can properly be sovereign. A merely valid norm cannot be sovereign" (CT 63). And it is this onto-existential dimension that requires further analysis and elaboration.

Closer to us, the idea of Obama's election campaign was that the new political will was virtual—that it arouse out of new modes of Internet participation in political life. The failure of this model does not necessarily depend on the will's "non-concrete," virtual existence, but on the fact that its power never lay in its own being but was artificially conjured up for the elections. An existentially present political will does not wake up every four years only to be safely put to sleep as soon as the ballots are counted!

With the assertion that the power of the will resides in its being (in seinem Sein), Schmitt brackets, parenthesizes, or reduces a long history of legitimizations that depended either on a direct theologico-metaphysical anchoring of authority (in the divine right of kings, for instance), or on a more circuitous secularization of previous religious concepts (the sacred sovereignty of the people as a modified version of God's supreme authority). If the power of the will is grounded in its being, then it is self-grounded in such a way that its ontic manifestations, known as monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic regimes—as well as the three degenerate forms Aristotle attributes to them in The Politics—fail to account fully for political reality and bespeak their ontological basis in the decision on the form of political existence. Underneath mythological covers, the sovereign will is existentially self-justifying and self-validating, in other words, "the word 'will' denotes the essentially existential character of this ground of validity [wesentlich Existenzielle dieses Geltungsgrundes]. The constitution-making power is political will, more specifically, concrete political being [konkretes politisches Sein]" (CT 125). As in the earlier citation from Constitutional Theory, the will is practically identical to the existential nature of political being, that is, the being of political beings, as opposed to a set of basic laws or state structures. Moreover, it is not something in being, a spiritual "thing" misplaced into political space, to paraphrase Heidegger, much less an identifiable regime with its statutory, institutional accoutrements, or representatives. It is, rather, political being as such. The semantic equivalence of being, will, and power—each term interchangeable with the other two—is indicative of Schmitt's ultimate innovation in political philosophy, his discovery of the field of onto-existential politics.

Despite the binding of the will to concrete, embodied existence, however, constitution-making power is not restricted to its monarchic or autocratic variety given that every "systematic unity and order" arises out of "a preestablished unified will" (CT 65). Having reduced (de-constituted) the liberal-democratic state and the Rechtsstaat constitution to the founding decision on the form of political life, Schmitt not only peers behind various forms of constitution, but also reconstructs ontic political reality on the newly discovered ontological basis. It remains to be explained what Schmitt means by "a preestablished unified will."[7] In citing this entity, does he revert back to metaphysical foundationalism that thrives on explaining concrete reality by means of a priori transcendental causation (the Idea, the thing-in-itself, the will, that orchestrate everything in the world from which they are absent)? Does the insistence on the unity of constitution-making power throw us back onto the old, tried and tested terrain of metaphysics?

The "pre-establishment" of the will does not happen in a transcendental realm outside of history but is, itself, a political fabrication, which, in democracies, necessitates an extreme homogenization of citizenry. The metaphysical concept of the general will obfuscates a very practical question as to "who has control over the means with which the will of the people is to be constructed: military and political force, propaganda, control of public opinion through the press, party organizations, assemblies, public education, and schools" (CPD 29). Leftist political thinkers, including the French philosopher Louis Althusser, refer to these institutions as "Ideological State Apparatuses" responsible for the orderly production of docile subjects in the image of the master Subject of ideology, a secularized figure of God. For our purposes, it is enough to highlight the historico-ideological construction of the will of the people, which is forged through a series of fraudulent identifications. In the process of setting up the collective will severed from the organicty of Gemeinschaft and from a purely political consolidation in the face of an enemy threat, the voting majority, on the one hand, gets identified with the people in general and, hence, also, the will of the "outvoted minority" is absorbed into that of the majority (CDP 25). The will of the parliament, on the other hand, is translated into the will of the homogenized people (LL 24) and, thus, into the metaphysical construct of volonté générale. That is to say: the unity of the will in democracy, be it direct or representative, is not a simple unity distinguishing all metaphysical concepts, but a oneness that overlays and suppresses difference and heterogeneity. Political reduction exposes the sedimented layering of identifications only to point out that at the bottom of the ideological construction we do not detect a forgotten atomic unity of the will but stumble upon the smoldering cinders of a conflict resolved through the imposition of the political will of the victorious party on the vanquished.

Surely, the consensual drive in the formation of a constitution is conceivable but solely under exceptional circumstances: "When a constitution is at issue, a compromise will only be possible when the will to political unity and state consciousness strongly and decisively outweighs all religious and class-based oppositions, so that these religious and social differences are rendered relative" (CT 83). The constitutional compromise is especially pertinent to the formation of federations that come about as a consequence of an agreement, approximating most closely the social contract scheme. Still, the contractual model cannot hope for equality among those who have reached such a compromise, because the assessment and interpretation of the adherence to and the violations of the terms of the contract are still a prerogative of sovereign decision-making: "Who decides whether there is a valid contract, whether the grounds to dispute it are persuasive, whether the right to withdraw is provided, etc.?" (CT 120). Thus formulated, the question of constitutive political subjectivity comes back to haunt that which has been constituted, demanding a constant re-constitution of political forms in every "application" of rules and in each act of overseeing and judging procedural "correctness."

However potent it may be, the criticism of "the will of the people" does not solve the problem of the sovereign will in other political regimes. Another rejoinder to the allegation that, in Schmitt, the will reeks of old metaphysics has to do with the notions of unity and indivisibility of sovereignty in general. The core consideration here is whether the will, as well as the subject of sovereignty, is a ready-made "entity," or whether, in a phenomenological manner, it comes into being with that which is willed. According to Nietzsche's insights in On the Genealogy of Morality and, especially, in The Will to Power, there is really no doer or subject behind the deed. The agent is a later, a posteriori, and, to a large extent, fictitious interpellation into the action.[8] Neither Schmitt, nor Husserl reaches this seemingly scandalous conclusion, yet it is my hypothesis that political will and the sovereign qua sovereign come about as a result of the decision on the exception; that is to say, they do not preexist the moment of the decision but are decided into existence in this very moment. The production of the sovereign and of the will by the decision is a self-production, in that, in the absence of any transcendental supports, the sovereign is decided into existence by herself, by the act of sovereignty, which, from the standpoint of the existing legal-political order, is null and groundless. The unity of the will is the upshot of the unity of action (whether deciding on the exception or giving a particular constitutional form to political being) so that, in each case, the action constitutes the will not as an abstract or undetermined spiritual entity, but as a specific willing to. . . . But since action is temporally finite, the will must also exhibit this quality. Its existential finitude requires a constant re-activation, a re-binding of its ties to what is willed, if the process of sedimentation and the crisis, whereby the willed separates from the willing, is to be managed, if not outright overcome.

Notes

1. Refer to Paragraph 9, "Galileo's Mathematization of Nature," in Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1970), pp. 23-59, and especially Section H, "The Life-World as a Forgotten Fundament of Science," pp. 48-53.

2. If there is a "solution" to the problem of modernity, it does not dictate a rejection of abstract thought, which as Adorno and Derrida have taught us, is the pharmakon (remedy and poison) of freedom, nor does it succumb to the anarchist temptation to abolish all formal political structures. The stress Schmitt places on the exception should, likewise, alert us to the fact that it is an exception to the rule, which is not rescinded but, rather, preserved and strengthened thanks to a revalorization of its telos embedded in the political life-world. In lieu of prescribing an easy way to overcome the problem of modernity, Husserlian reduction and Heideggerian de-formalization impose the exigency of a patient, if not Sisyphean, theoretical and practical work of removing layers of sedimentation that are bound to re-grow, given that their accumulation constitutes the movement of history.

3. Carl Schmitt's works are abbreviated here as follows: CPD: The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. E. Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986); CT: Constitutional Theory, trans. J. Seitzer (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2008); LL: Legality and Legitimacy, trans. J. Seitzer (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004).

4. James Dodd, Crisis and Reflection (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004), p. 134.

5. Jan Müller, "Carl Schmitt's Method: Between Ideology, Demonology, and Myth," Journal of Political Ideologies 4 (1999): 61-85.

6. Schmitt deems Romantic occasionalism to be a negation of "the concept of causa, in other words, the force of a calculable causality, and thus also every binding norm" (PR 17). If this is the case, then the political will in Schmitt, too, is "Romantic" since it finds itself at home in such a negation.

7. Likewise, the "constitution is valid by virtue of the existing political will of that which establishes it. Every type of legal norm, even constitutional law, presupposes that such a will already exists" (CT 76).

8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), esp. "The Will to Power as Knowledge," pp. 262ff.

Each Tuesday in the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Lev Marder looks at Russell Berman's article "From Brecht to Schleiermacher: Religion and Critical Theory," from Telos 115 (Spring 1999).

Enlightenment forced the individual to turn toward the light and become "enlightened." Two centuries after this compelling, compulsive transformation began, where has education guided, or misguided, its followers? In Russell Berman's article "From Brecht to Schleiermacher: Religion and Critical Theory," a tortured figure emerges. When considering the chastised innocent victim in a discussion of religion, one is conditioned to think back to the inquisition by the Church, stoning under Islamic shariah law, etc. Yet can the discussion of religion be dismissed, condemned, outlawed, or silenced on the basis of the most egregious episodes? Is this figure suffering simply because of religion or, rather, because of a certain dogmatism that is in need of critical discussion? These are some of the questions Berman examines in his article.

Refraining from repeating the tired condemnation of religion, Berman instead encourages us to at least re-examine the attacks on religion. The Nazi opposition to the Church, in the not so distant past, for example, does not raise eyebrows, yet the Communist preference for Nazi objectives in this respect over the anti-fascist efforts does. Berman explains that "a pragmatic cooperation with any anti-fascists, religious or not, was undercut by a suspicion of religion on the part of the progressive camp, members of which were evidently not particularly dismayed by the fate of religion in Nazi Germany. Indeed, they were prepared to stand by and take a neutral position, privately applauding the "progressive" result of Nazi policy" (37). Torn between "religion" and Nazism, the critical thinker was abandoned to his or her own devices, allowed to be silenced, and even thrown into the gas chamber.

Berman's range is not limited to looking at religion from Brecht's Marxist assault on religion to Schleiermacher's more critical defense of it. Indeed, he reaches far into the past, examining the historical horizons within which these thinkers are situated. Here, Berman brings to the surface some of deepest roots of what limits and what can possibly unbind the figure:

The key civilizational-historical issue at stake: the transition from emphatically local paganisms to axial world religions, which took place between two and three millennia ago, and, which, especially in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, fundamentally transformed human ways of life and humanity's contemplations of its own limits. To address this transition as the basis for a discussion of religion is crucial. But it is also nearly impossible in the context of the contemporary limits on discussion described above, i.e., the requirement that religion in general, and not these specific religions, be discussed. Yet, it is within these axial religions that the life of humanity is largely played out. Based on universalist revelations, i.e., experiences of the divine reported as pertaining not merely to a tribe, but to the full cosmos, these religions made enormous contributions to the process of overcoming constrictive local limitations. The world of tradition and local idol worship suddenly became obsolete, and in its place a grandly wider horizon opened up, within which more supple versions of local tradition could develop. The particular dynamism of the West derives explicitly from this conflict between local lives and universal aspirations. (43-44)

Situated between universality and the local over two millennia ago, the figure still bears the traces of the complex relation between local and universalistic drives. Even though dogmatic versions of both forms of religion seem to replace one another—pseudo-resolving the tension in favor of one or the other and leaving the figure scarred—there are signs of an alternative possibility within the tension. The tension itself is defined through the convergence of horizons, and perhaps more importantly the possibility of expanding horizons as monotheistic religion once did. How can one redirect attention back to the horizon without trying to erase it? Rather than adhere to the dogmatic forms of religion, Marxism, or the Enlightenment, Berman’s support for critical theory as a possible embracing of the tensions is intriguing. Can critical theory rescue the suffering figure? Can it offer what religion was and is supposed to offer? Is critical theory in danger of becoming “religion”?

Read the full version of Russell Berman's article "From Brecht to Schleiermacher: Religion and Critical Theory" at the TELOS Online website. If you are affiliated with an institution that is an online subscriber to Telos, you have free access to our complete online archive. If not, you can purchase 24-hour access to this and other Telos articles at the low rate of $5/article.

This text was presented in January at the 2010 Telos Conference, "From Lifeworld to Biopolitics: Empire in the Age of Obama."

Scientific naturalism represents one of the "two countervailing trends that mark the intellectual tenor of our age," the other being religious worldviews, to follow here Jürgen Habermas's diagnostic of our present.[1] In a broader intellectual landscape dominated by research programs in neuro- and cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics and so on, contemporary naturalism symbolizes not only the philosophical framework of these leading intellectual enterprises, but more fundamentally a sort of zeitgeist for our epoch.

This is true not only at an epistemological level, characterized today by the efforts of an entire generation of philosophers, particularly analytic and post-analytic, English-speaking philosophers, to "naturalize" knowledge, the mind, consciousness, and whatever else can be objects of "naturalization" but also, and probably more crucially, at the anthropological level. If one can revive here the Foucauldian distinction between "the two great critical traditions" in which modern philosophy has been divided—that is, philosophy as an "analytic of truth" (epistemology), and philosophy as an "ontology of the present" and "an ontology of ourselves"[2]—contemporary naturalism, in spite of its increasing importance as an epistemological issue, appears even more relevant today at the level of an ontology of ourselves, of what we take ourselves to be. It is here that we witness today the growing "penetration of an objective scientific self-understanding of persons into everyday life"[3] and accordingly, as recent studies in the social sciences have focused on, the emergence of new forms of subjectivity and new social figures intensively shaped by the vocabulary of leading sciences such as genetics and neurobiology.[4] It is here, that a naturalistic rhetoric has increasingly occupied the domain of what we once were so proud to consider supremely cultural, historical, and social matters—all the phenomena for which the German Idealists coined the expression Geist. It is again at this anthropological level that we can witness a global redefinition of the profile of our humanness in terms of an increasing weight of biological arguments. This is spectacularly true in a vast range of disciplinary fields, from psychiatry (the current hegemony of the so called "second biological psychiatry," with its focus on the biochemistry of the brain as the crucial site for mental disorders, and its emphasis on a molecular diagnostic style [5], that, along with the advent of psychopharmacology, has resulted in the emergence of that critical biopolitical figure of our present called the "neurochemical self" who maps "desires, moods, and discontents" onto the brain itself and its chemical imbalances [6]), to political theory (with its own "life-sciences boom"  [7], that has caused a renewed plausibility of "biological facts"  [8] for the understanding of politics, from the right to the left of the political spectrum, and increased references to genetics and neuroscience to explain political behaviours), finally to anthropology and the social sciences with various attempts to naturalize and darwinize culture and society, and a general decline of the culturalist, "semiotic" (Marconi) and disembodied picture of human beings that had its heyday in the seventies. All of this constitutes an impressive confirmation of what philosopher Roberto Esposito has pointed out as one of the crucial philosophical event of our epoch, namely that fact that "the idea of humanitas . . . presumed for centuries as what places human beings above the simple common life of other living . . .  increasingly comes to adhere to its own biological material" and is more and more "reduced to its pure vital substance."[9] This flattening "into the purely biological" is symptomatically revealed in the many disciplinary shifts I have before very quickly mentioned in my cartography.

It is in my view the unprecedented intertwinement of the human condition and cutting edge scientific programs, molecular biology and neuroscience firstly, that mainly produces today this absorption of our ontology into its natural layer, life itself at the level of its genes, molecules and neurones. Such a deep reassessment of the symbolic structure of being human does indeed prove extremely traumatic for much of the European, post-Kantian tradition (with its deep-rooted antinaturalism[10]), but this is something we have to leave aside in this paper. This focus on the role of the sciences in provoking the collapse of the symbolic dimension of the human onto its biological layer, and its reduction to "mere living matter" (Esposito) is in my view the crucial heuristic point to address the original features of biopolitics and biopower today, in what it seems not inappropriate to call "a neurobiological era." But this focus on the importance of the life-sciences is exactly what is missed in some of the most influential philosophical analysis of biopolitics today. What a curious paradox! In an age intensely marked by the life-sciences, in which scientific naturalism seems to be the only great narrative originating from the Enlightenment that is still alive and well (and rather, that has filled the void produced by the collapse of other narratives like Marxism); in an age where biological concepts such as the gene and the brain have acquired an unprecedented iconic force, a public dimension, and a metonymic power to signify what is more intimate in ourselves, it remains difficult to understand how philosophers who are critically engaged in the task of addressing biopolitics "as an ontology of the present" can achieve that by completely ignoring the way leading sciences really work today, and concretely set the tone of the biopolitical discourse. Can we really have any in-depth analysis of biopower out of any reference to the epistemological dimension of its prefix, that bios which is continuously remade and reconfigured in the history of life-sciences?

Making a point of principle not to care about science and its history, and therefore not to show any interest in the "historical epistemology" of concepts like "biology" (a lack of which, certainly Michel Foucault could not be blamed) constitutes a real failure in two influential philosophical readings of contemporary biopower: the works of Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. In Agamben for instance, biopolitics and biopower fall more or less directly from the sky of metaphysical events, they have no histories and discontinuities or nuances to show. Their relations to the advent of modernity as the age when life itself has been for the first time addressed as such, that is as an "object of knowledge among others,"—a crucial point in Foucault's The Order of Things [11], is completely missed. Not to mention here that in Agamben's philosophical take-up of the term, biopower is defined solely by its capacity to kill, its deadly aspects, and not by its being a much more intricate and subtle "political economy of life," a way of remaking people, as Foucaldians would say today.

Esposito's work, and particularly his recent important book Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, is historically more accurate than Agamben's in many respects, but his project to read our biopolitical present solely through the lens of the murderous Nazi past (which Esposito considers the culmination of modern biopolitics), and therefore to address contemporary biopower as a projection and a generalization of Nazi biopolitics, or better thanatopolitics, seems utterly misguided[12]. Is really the biology of today neoliberal regimes of governmentality the same as that of the Nazi period, that is a biology of "inevitability," "destiny," "essence," and "degeneration"? Is the biology of today a "biology of 'depth'," like in the Nazi time, that "tried to discover the underlying organic laws that lay behind and determined the functioning of closed living systems," or rather, to say it with Nikolas Rose, a new biological thought-style that operates "in a 'flattened' field of open circuits" and sustain a biopolitical discourse where at stake is less "destiny," and more "risk," "vulnerability," "intervention," and "optimization," with each of these concepts elaborated at a "molecular level"?[13]

An intellectual historian, I guess, would be surprised to notice how anti-Foucauldian is the style of inquiry of philosophers who today aim to expand on Foucault's analysis of biopower. As Rabinow and Rose have put it: "when Foucault introduced the term [of biopolitics] in the last of his College de France lectures of 1975–6, Society must be defended (2002), he is precise about the historical phenomena which he is seeking to grasp. He enumerates them: issues of the birth rate, and the beginnings of policies to intervene upon it; issues of morbidity, not so much epidemics but the illnesses that are routinely prevalent in a particular population and sap its strength, requiring interventions in the name of public hygiene and new measures to coordinate medical care; the problems of old age and accidents to be addressed through insurantial mechanisms; the problem of the race and the impact upon it of geographic, climatic and environmental conditions, notably in the town. The concept of biopower is proposed after ten years of collective and individual research on the genealogy of power over life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."[14]

One might say that in contemporary philosophical theorizations on biopolitics à la Agamben or à la Esposito there is a detrimental split between Foucault as political thinker, the Foucault who saw Modernity as as the epoch of an immediate reflection of "biological existence . . . in political existence"[15], a Foucault who is taken very seriously (as it should be), and Foucault as historian of the sciences, who addressed Modernity as the threshold of a new epistemic spatialization, where life was first conceived as "a regional and autonomous discourse," a latter Foucault who is completely overlooked. (By the way the opposite is true for historians of science, who know well the Foucault of The Order of Things but disconnect him from the political implications of his late elaboration on of biopower).

Is there scope for reconciliation between a historical epistemology of the concept of bios and its political implications? Hopefully there is, a cross-fertilization of the two perspectives is much needed if we want to entirely understand the intricacies of biopower today, whose structure lies exactly at the crossroads of these two dimensions. Let me conclude in this direction by hinting just very preliminarily at one possible way of gathering these two viewpoints. I refer to a possible application of the Agambenian bare life to that specific figure of life that is produced in contemporary scientific endeavour, especially by genetics and neuroscience. My suggestion is to see how productive it would be to address Agamben's idea of the emergence of a bare, cultureless and formless dimension of the living, not as a consequence of its exposure to the sovereign power that manifested itself paradigmatically in the concentration camps or in the figure of the refugee, but because of life's subjection to the objectifying scientific gaze at work today in the scientific labs all over the world. One can paraphrase Agamben by saying that production of bare life is not only the originary activity of sovereignty but, in its own way, also the originary activity of modern technoscience. What else has been the impact on the idea of humanness of molecular biology first and neuroscience afterwards if not the emergence of a bare dimension of life (life itself at the level of its genes, molecules and neurones) that becomes for these disciplines an immediate site of truth about of ourselves? What else comes to light through the remaking of the idea of the living provoked by genetics and neuroscience if not a formless and cultureless dimension of the living no longer contaminated by society, culture, and reason, all intellectual values greatly discredited after the end of great narratives, in favor of natural and scientific ones?[16]

Such a transformation, of bios into zoe, or at least such widespread effort to reshape our form of life putting at its center "the sheer vital dimensions of existence" can, suggests Paul Rabinow, be noticed everywhere: from "the obsession with health, fitness, pre-natal diagnosis, life-sustaining systems, living wills, plastic surgery, evolutionary moralism—altruism—aggression, male bonding, gay genes, female relational capacities, Prozac . . . , cloning, diet, nutrition, etc., etc., etc."[17] All are indicators of this shift in which le vivant increasingly absorbs le vécu, to recall Canguilhem's famous distinction (as Rabinow does). That are no longer coercive State apparatuses with their early twenty century dream to "control the political make-up of populations" and manage the "health of the body politic"[18] but the irresistible intertwinement of the imperatives of "a market economy of health" and cutting edge techno-scientific programs to nourish all of this, should speak of the radical discontinuities of the current state of biopower in a neurobiological era, and the necessity for a renewed, empirically grounded, analysis of its contemporary dimension.

Since I am speaking at a Telos conference let me conclude by saying that this reference to the empirical level and this urgency for political theory to focus on the latest developments coming from the sciences was, after all, the original program of Critical Theory, and in particular Horkheimer's ambition of a social philosophy "enriched and supplemented by empirical work in the same way that natural philosophy was dialectically related to individual scientific disciplines"[19], a point further re-elaborated in his inaugural address "The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research" (1931), where Horkheimer invoked "the idea of a continuous, dialectical penetration . . . of philosophical theory and specialized scientific praxis" and hoped "to organize investigations stimulated by contemporary philosophical problems in which philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians, and psychologists are brought together in permanent collaboration."[20] This is the task that an in-depth analysis of biopower today should require of scholars from different disciplines.[21]

Notes

1. Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), p. 1.

2. Michel Foucault, "Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution", Economy and Society 15 (1986): 88-96, here pp. 95-96.

3. Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, p.1, translation slightly modified.

4. Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2007).

5. Nancy Andreasen, Schizofrenia: from Mind to Molecule (New York: Am. Psychiatric Group, 1994); Eric Kandel & Larry Squire, Memory: From Mind to Molecules (New York: Freeman, 1999); Abraham Rudnick, "The Molecular Turn in Psychiatry: A Philosophical Analysis," The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 27 (2002): 287-96

6. Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, p. 188.

7. Mika La Vaque-Manty, "Nature's New Constraints? Political Theory and the Life Sciences Boom," unpublished (2006) (accessed at www-personal.umich.edu/~mmanty/research/Natures_constraints.pdf, June 2007).

8. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), p. 299.

9. Roberto Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2008).

10. See my "Naturalism as an Ontology of Ourselves," forthcoming in Telos.

11. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970) pp. 274ff.

12. I have further elaborated these points in my review of Esposito's book that is forthcoming in Economy and Society, 2010.

13. All quotations in this paragraph from Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, pp. 15, and 204-205; see on this Meloni 2010, forthcoming.

14. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, "Biopower Today," BioSocieties 1 (2006): 195–217, here p. 199.

15. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 142.

16. It is exactly this political mechanism of substitution of values (from culture and politics to science and nature) that makes contemporary naturalism so attractive today, especially for moral and political philosophers. This is the subject of a project of a book I am currently working on about Naturalism and Modernity.

17. Paul Rabinow, "French Enlightenment: truth and life," Economy and Society 27 (1998):193-201, here p. 200.

18. Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, especially chapter 2.

19. Quoted in Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973) p. 25.

20. Max Horkheimer, "The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research," in Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 9.

21. This transcription of my talk at the Telos conference 2010 draws in part from an article forthcoming in Telos ("Naturalism as an Ontology of Ourselves") and, in some passages, from a second one in press for Economy and Society ("Biopolitics Today"). The colloquial style of the intervention has been conserved in the text. Maurizio Meloni is a Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute for Science and Society, School of Sociology and Social Policy, the Univ. of Nottingham, UK. Email: maurizio.meloni@nottingham.ac.uk.

This text was presented in January at the 2010 Telos Conference, "From Lifeworld to Biopolitics: Empire in the Age of Obama."

1. The Fusion of Geo-Politics and Geo-Economics

Over the past thirty years or so, globalization has supplanted the sovereign national state with the globalized "market-state." In this complex and non-linear process, the sovereign national state, which provides public investment and universal welfare for the citizenry, has been superseded by the "market-state," which instead maximizes client and consumer choice by opening up all levels of the economy to global finance and trade, as Philip Bobbitt has documented in his seminal book The Shield of Achilles.[1] Beyond Bobbitt, I have argued elsewhere that the "market-state" fuses centralized bureaucracy with the extension of market exchange to all areas of public policy and the private sphere. In consequence, the institutions of civil society and the practices of civic culture have been largely absorbed into the "market-state" and subordinated to the logic of formal contract and exchange value.[2]

In spite of numerous differences, the model of the "market-state" captures the essential features of both the more market-driven capitalism of the West (the United States, Europe, and Japan) and the state-orchestrated capitalism of the East or the South (the so-called BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India, and China). Among these features is a growing polarization of society, with widening levels of inequality, increasingly entrenched pockets of poverty, and a gaping disconnect between the ruling "new classes" and a citizenry that is increasingly atomized and alienated. Faced with the administrative and symbolic order of the "market-state," individuals and groups are deserting traditional parties or the ruling regimes and embracing a new populism which fuels anti-establishment protest movements as diverse as the Iranian Green Revolution, the Tea Party movement, or local Chinese revolts against the Communist nomenclature.

Arguably this tendency towards the convergence of state and market power is part of a wider and deeper change in geo-politics and geo-economics. However, it is not the case that geo-economics has simply replaced geo-politics, as Edward Luttwak asserted at the beginning of the 1990s.[3] We have not left behind the modern age of a geo-political logic of inter-state conflict centered on military war and territoriality—as evinced by the Gulf War of 1991, Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, the war opposing Georgia to Russia in August 2008, or ongoing territorial disputes between India and Pakistan, China and India, as well as the "frozen conflicts" in the former Soviet space. Nor have we entered a postmodern age characterized exclusively by geo-economic conflicts: water instead of land, access to world markets instead of the control over territory, trade and finance instead of armies and tanks. Rather, the post-Cold War era marks the fusion of geo-politics and geo-economics, a collusive complicity whose main theater of production is the "spectacle of power"—the rise of a "spectacular politics" and "spectacular societies" (Guy Debord) where power is largely derived from a sinister fusion of wealth and celebrity.[4]

Beyond Debord, one can say with Baudrillard that the mode of simulation underpinning the operation of capitalism reduces democracy to little more than procedural formalism as well as reinforces the demobilization and quiescence of the citizenry.[5] And beyond Baudrillard, one can suggest that the confluence of capitalism and secular liberal democracy reverses the metaphysical priority of actuality vis-à-vis possibility and enshrines the primacy of the virtual over the real. In turn, this is grounded in a subordination of the sacred to the quasi-sacrality of the state and the market. As such, we have already entered a post-democratic phase in which the rise of corporate, cartel capitalism is correlated with the decline of civil society and civic culture as well as the erosion of public, traditional religion and shared customs. Just as the crisis of liberal democracy is welcome because it de-legitimates the underlying secular ideology, so the growth of disaffection and populism further erodes the established democratic institutions that are necessary but insufficient for a politics that combines some degree of formal representation with real civic participation.

The old and tired ideologies of left and right have either collapsed or surrendered to the neo-liberal marriage of bureaucratic centralism and free-market fundamentalism, whose failure is now plain for everyone to see. A genuine transformation of the status quo will require a retrieval and extension of Renaissance and Enlightenment civic humanism that outwitted in advance the false dualism of the dominant, secular ideologies since the French Revolution.[6] Indeed, this tradition was instrumental in the original emergence and development of an autonomous space neither controlled by the state nor dominated by the market—a compact that is the grounded in the clear distinction of powers and embeds both political sovereignty and commercial exchange within the mutualist and reciprocal relations of communities and associations.[7] These (and other) traditions of Christianity are indispensable to a new civil economy that subverts the dominant logic of social and commercial contract with a logic of gift that translates into practices of mutual help and reciprocal giving.

2. On Modern Bio-Politics

Broadly speaking, the fusion of geo-politics and geo-economics is the combined result of a double shift that is synonymous with modernity: first, from market economies to global capitalism; and, second, from dispersed sovereignty with overlapping jurisdictions and participatory hierarchies to a politics of formal representation ruled by the sovereign center.[8] In the long and uneven process of modernization, the formalization of politics has been in league with the financialization of the economy. For both promote a growing abstraction from locality and community and thereby a dissolution of organic human and natural bonds. Beyond (and partly against) Marx, the Marxist economist Fernand Braudel and the Christian Socialist Karl Polanyi have shown in complementary ways how "disembedded" commerce centered on exchange and monetary value—which differentiates modern capitalism from traditional market economies—commodifies not just labor and social relations but also nature and life itself.[9]

Like the capitalist expansion of monetary value to virtually all areas of life, the modern democratic processes of abstract individual rights and formal representation tend to extend the formality of the law and procedural mechanisms to the entire range of social and communal activity. But far from representing a thorough democratization of power in favor of "the many," democratic rule in much of the nineteenth and the twentieth century has been characterized by an increased usurping of sovereignty by the executive branch of government, as Giorgio Agamben has shown.[10] The problem is that this corrupting tendency can flip over into a process of self-corruption, as a democratically elected executive will claim the legitimate authority to exceed its own mandate in the face of circumstances which could not be anticipated by that mandate and which the electorate cannot vote on.

The most recent example that illustrates this point is the national state response to international Islamic terrorism. By launching a "global war on terror," many different democratic systems in the West and elsewhere have declared a "state of exception" and suspended core constitutional provisions like habeas corpus precisely in order to protect the constitution from what they believe to be an existential threat.[11] For this reason alone, Carl Schmitt was right to define the sovereign as "he who decides on the state of exception."[12] But when the executive decrees the "state of exception," the conceptual difference between democracy and authoritarianism enters a zone of "in-distinction" where formal democratic structures remain in place but actual practices violate core values of liberal democracy such as fair trial, a proper measure of free speech, right to defense, and a fair treatment of detainees and the convicted. More fundamentally, the exercise of power in authoritarian democracies lacks proper checks and balances, such that the defense of sovereignty masks a radicalization of Foucault's bio-political power where the value of human life is neither universally equal nor absolutely sacrosanct.

As such, modern sovereign power blends the juridical-constitutional model of state sovereignty with the "biopolitical" conception of power in terms of the application of politics to all aspects of life. Contrary to the Aristotelian idea that politics is coextensive with human life in society, modernity makes political power the foundation of life itself, as exemplified by Hobbes' Leviathan, which "giveth and taketh life". Late modernity, by reinforcing the procedural formalism of representative democracy at the expense of civic culture, undermines the social bonds upon which vibrant, participatory democracies depend. For these (and other) reasons, both capitalism and democracy deny the sacred dimension of the universe and the sanctity of human and natural life, both of which they conjointly subordinate to the quasi-sacrality of the state and the market, as I have already indicated.

This also explains in part why Walter Benjamin's description of capitalism as a "quasi-religion" was so prescient and must now be extended to secular liberal democracy.[13] As such, bio-politics provides the conceptual and practical link between the modern primacy of state centralism and market anarchism over empires and the papacy, on the one hand, and the late modern collusion of global capital with the executive branch of government. Moreover, liberalism and the sort of economic and social liberalization that it advocates helps produce a kind of democracy that is post-democratic, as I argue in the following section.

3. Post-Democratic Market-States

Over the past one hundred years or so, neither democratization nor economic modernization in the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, or elsewhere in the West have moved in linear or cyclical ways. Instead, both exhibit a parabolic shape. Politics becomes increasingly democratized for a period (e.g., extended voting rights, regular elections, alternating governments) and democracy remains formally in place, even after actual democratic practices decline (e.g., falling voting turnout, party membership in freefall, political debate replaced by tightly controlled, PR-driven spectacles, etc.) and power reverts to elites which serve the interests of corporate business at the expense of the wider public. The "new classes" serve the interests of corporate business to the direct detriment of the wider public good, as both Christopher Lasch and Paul Piccone argued over forty years. Coupled with the concentration of power in the hands of the executive (as well as the unelected and unaccountable agencies of the para-constitutional state), we can say with Sheldon Wolin that this marks "the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry," whereby democracy becomes increasingly managed and flips over into something like "inverted totalitarianism."[14]

Likewise, the economy does not follow regular business cycles of growth, stagnation, and contraction which follow a fundamental underlying trend. Rather, the modern history of economics is one of bubble cycles of boom and bust, characterized by "manias, panics and crashes" (Charles Kindleberger). Paradoxically, the rise of finance capital has created a kind of volatility that has pervaded all levels of the economy, including the reliance of local government on global financial instruments such as derivate trading. In turn, this has not simply led to the contagion of systemic risk but also generated a new climate of uncertainty which can never be insured against and which erodes the bonds of trust, cooperation, and professional ethos—as Richard Sennett has shown in his book The Corrosion of Character.

Taken together, the parabolic shape explains in large part why democracies and market economies have seen a growing centralization of power and a progressive concentration of wealth—a constellation that undermines communal bonds and social cohesion. Specifically, a new managerial class in state bureaucracies and elected politics has conspired with a globally expanding "culture industry" against locality, family, and the whole "moral economy" of both guiding virtuous elites and common popular customs.[15] Civic participation in political debate and economic activity has gradually been marginalized in favor of a tightly controlled spectacle of electoral campaigns and endless televised shows. All of which points to a double specularity: just as free-market capitalism is the spectacle of abstract, fetishized, idealized commodities, so liberal representative democracy is the spectacle of the mass representation of general opinion and desires to the alienated and atomized masses. Moreover, the fusion of economics with politics has produced a convergence of the capitalist and the liberal democratic modes of specularity whereby both are now dominated by the identical self-reproduction of the sinister show of wealth and celebrity which is hollowing out the tradition forms of participatory and representative democracy centered on localities and town-halls.[16]

4. Beyond the New Populisms

The modern bio-politics that underpins the fusion of geo-politics and geo-economics as well as the rise of post-democratic market-states is currently fueling a new wave of new populisms. First of all, an establishment populism deployed by (former) leaders such as Tony Blair, Silvio Berlusconi, Nicholas Sarkozy, and to a lesser extent Barack Obama who purport to be the agents of change and progressive renewal against the forces of conservatism in party politics and state bureaucracy. Secondly, an anti-establishment populism fueled by popular anger and grass-roots anxiety about persistent unemployment, bank bonuses on the back of bailouts with taxpayers' money, and increasing central regulation. What is new about these populisms is that they elevate personalities over above political parties and replace a politics of rationality with a politics of affectivity where the emotional intelligence of leaders qualifies them for the highest state office, as Neil Turnbull has argued.[17] Moreover, the political discourse of current leaders eschews parliamentary and civic mediation by appealing directly to the largely passive spectators via the virtual media of social network sites, appearances on chat shows and tightly controlled "town hall" meetings. As such, the professed pragmatism of the ruling classes masks a more fundamental ideological and material commitment to the bio-political subordination of human, social and natural to the power of post-democratic market-states. The spectacle of power which constantly re-enacts the self-representation of mass opinion to the masses reinforces even the establishment populisms upon which it thrives.

A revivified kind of representative democracy alone is perhaps a necessary but certainly not a sufficient resistance against the combined power of state and market or against the new populisms just described. For example, Jürgen Habermas's distinction between procedural and substantive democracy completely ignores the ontological problem of elevating representation over above participation. It also posits the normative primacy of modern, abstract secular values like tolerance or the will of the majority over non-modern virtues embodied in civic practices such as justice governed by notions of the good rather than merely fairness.

Nor does contemporary civil society provide a bulwark against the worst excesses of the secretly collusive centralized bureaucratic state and the unbridled free market. Indeed, both capitalism and liberal democracy view civil society as a part of the social contract and the logic of market exchange which historically consecrated the rise of the (secretly collusive) centralized state and the unbridled market at the expense of empires, the papacy and intermediary institutions such as guilds, cooperatives, traditional support networks, worker self-organization and autonomous local government. As a result, civil society in its current configuration is subject to the legal, administrative and symbolic order of the post-democratic market-state. Like governmental welfare, civil society now plays a merely "compensatory role" and as such it subservient to the dominant logic of abstraction shared by both capitalism and liberal democracy.

At the same time, the ongoing repercussions of the global Great Recession are exacerbated some of the trends just described. So far, political and policy responses to this crisis have failed to change the imbalance of power between global finance and local economies. Unprecedented state action to the tune of $9 trillion in cash injections, lending guarantees, and funding lines (according to IMF estimates)—all aimed at rescue banks and other "systemically important" financial institutions—has not improved lending to cash-strapped businesses or households. Nor has a proper contest of ideas resumed between parties in governments and in opposition. Instead, the left has bailed out global finance without reforming it while the right has printed money while preparing to cut public spending. Both have propped up a system that privatizes gains, nationalizes losses, and socializes systemic risk. Neither has so far launched a genuine redistribution of power and a re-balancing of wealth in favor of citizens, communities, intermediary associations, and small businesses. Credit and property bubbles are once again building, this time predominantly in China and countries with significant sovereign wealth funds—a worrying trends which threatens a second round of default and debt deflation.

What is therefore required is to diffuse sovereignty, pluralize power, and locate the relational nature of humanity and the environment at the heart of a new civil economy. In turn, this necessitates the embedding of markets in the complex web of communal relations and the blending of the universal virtue of justice with particular traditions of mutualism and association. The aim is that individual freedom and social welfare are no longer governed by purely economic-utilitarian calculations but instead by political-ethical goals of human flourishing in line with the organic links of both nature and culture.

Instead of mindless modernization, what is more important is a new kind of settlement whereby both the centralized bureaucratic state and the unfettered global free-market are transformed in order to serve the genuine needs and interests of persons, communities, and the environment. To achieve this, state and market must be re-embedded within a wider network of social relations and governed by virtues and universal principles such as justice, solidarity, fraternity and responsibility. This can only be achieved by combining the principle of solidarity with the principle of subsidiarity, according to which political and economic decision-making should take place at the most appropriate level in order to serve individual and communal well-being, i.e., as close as possible to the local level (including communities and neighborhoods) and if necessary at the regional, national, or global level. In terms of the current configuration, this requires a large-scale political and economic decentralization, coupled with the creation of intermediary structures such as trans-regional and supranational bodies. To be sure, restoring the local requires a certain kind of locally driven paternalism that corrects regressive social practices in accordance with the best traditions of that local culture as well as by introducing external standards of achievement and discipline.

Concretely, what is required is the creation of enterprises that operate on the basis of mutualist principles like cooperatives or employee-owned businesses, e.g., Mondragon in Spain (with over 100,000 employees and an annual turnover of more than US $3bn), Toyota in Japan, the John Lewis Partnership in the UK, or Crédit Mutuel in France. These and other similar businesses pursue not just private profit but also social ends by reinvesting their profit in the company and in the community instead of simply enriching the top management or institutional shareholders. In turn, this necessitates professional associations and other intermediary institutions wherein workers and owners can jointly determine just wages and fair prices. Against the free-market concentration of wealth and state-controlled redistribution of income, a more radical program is to enable labor to receive assets (in the form of stake-holdings) and to hire capital (not vice-versa), while capital itself comes in part from worker- and community-supported credit unions rather than exclusively from shareholder-driven retail banks.

Moreover, profit and technological innovation can no longer be viewed as ends in themselves but as means to secure the stability of businesses, their employees and the communities hosting them. Like the "market-state," money and science must be re-embedded within communal, social relations and enhance rather than destroy mankind's organic ties with nature. Based on new, positive incentives combined with more punitive action and reinstated social taboos, the world economy needs to switch from short-term financial speculation to long-term investment in the real economy, social development and environmental sustainability. Democracy and modernization will provide popular sovereignty and progress only if they eschew further abstraction from localities, communities and families and instead uphold the "good life" and the common good in which all can share.

Notes

1. Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles. War, Peace and the Course of History (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 213-42.

2. Adrian Pabst, "On Market-States and Post-Democracy," in Vladislav Inozemtsev and Parag Khanna, eds., Democracy and Modernization (Moscow: Europe Publications, forthcoming in 2010).

3. Edward N. Luttwak, "From Geopolitics to Geo-Economics," National Interest 20 (1990): 17-24; Edward N. Luttwak, The Endangered American Dream: How to Stop the United States From Being a Third World Country and How to Win the Geo-Economic Struggle for Industrial Supremacy (New York: Basic Books, 1993).

4. Tocqueville and Carlyle were among the first to describe the emergence of "spectacular societies." Their ideas were further developed by Thorstein Veblen in his The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Penguin Books, 1994 [1899]) and crucially in the work of Guy Debord, La Société du Spectacle (Paris: Ed. Buchet-Chastel, 1967) and Le déclin et la chute de l'économie spectaculaire-marchande (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1993).

5. Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, trans. Mark Poster (New York: Telos Press, 1975).

6. Eugenio Garin, L'umenesimo italiano (Bari: G. Laterza, 1958); trans. Italian humanism: philosophy and civic life in the Renaissance, trans. Peter Munz (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965).

7. On the Christian origins of civil society (which can be traced to late Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance and the Scottish Enlightenment), see John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680-1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), esp. pp. 201-405; Luigino Bruni and Stefano Zamagni, Civil Economy: Efficiency, Equity, Public Happiness (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), esp. pp. 13-99.

8. Adrian Pabst, "Modern Sovereignty in Question: Theology, Democracy and Capitalism," Modern Theology, forthcoming.

9. Fernand Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XVe-XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Ed. Armand Colin, 1979); Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation. The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press 2000 [orig. pub. 1944]).

10. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), esp. pp. 1-40.

11. Jean-Claude Paye, La fin de l'Etat de droit: La lutte antiterroriste, de l'état d'exception à la dictature (Paris: La Dispute, 2004), trans. Global War on Liberty (New York: Telos Press, 2007).

12. "Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet", in Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität (Munich/Leipzig: Duncker und Humbolt, 1922), p. 11.

13. Walter Benjamin, "Capitalism as Religion," in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings—Volume 1 (1913-1926) , ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 288-91.

14. Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Pres, 2008), p. x.

15. E.P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th Century," Past & Present, 50: 76-136; E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (London: Merlin Press, 1991).

16. Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004); Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing Out of Western Democracy (London: Verso, 2009).

17. Neil Turnbull, "On Left Spinozism," paper delivered at the TELOS Annual Conference 2010 on January 16, 2010, at New York University.

Each Tuesday in the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Marcus Michelsen looks at Valerie Allen and Ares Axiotis's article "Nietzsche on the Future of Education," from Telos 111 (Spring 1998).

If someone were to ask me the question "What is authoritative?" I might as well say, "I am. What I give my assent to has authority in my life." Though true if one admits that for authority to manifest itself it must be recognized by someone, and for something to become authoritative in my life it requires just such a manifestation to me; still, this turns the question around. If I am pursued by the following question "How do I recognize what I should assent to?" the Enlightenment provides me with the answer: "Reason. Reason has authority in our lives. History itself testifies to the reason that formed it in the decisions of great men and in freedom, the spirit of the people. Moreover, to be enlightened means precisely to be in possession of reason." There are, however, reasons to suppose that such an answer is suspicious, and that the Enlightenment, by glorifying itself, leads us astray. What if, in the belief that authority comes from reason, we have got it wrong?

In their article "Nietzsche on the Future of Education," Valerie Allen and Ares Axiotis examine certain "threats" theorized by Nietzsche "internal to the principle of 'reasonableness' itself." These threats specifically address the university because they concern "that principle upon which the liberal university is based." The threats to reason issue from the reason-authority axis characteristic of three unities of the Enlightenment developed and problematized in the essay: the unity of knowledge, the unity of teaching and research, and the unity of the student/teacher relation. There are two basic problems: (1) allocating authority to reason hampers the emergence of certain legitimate sources of authority; and (2) mixing authority with reason actually derails reason from its essential purpose, which would take place outside the scope of authority and be characterized by "the spontaneity of the en-th[e]ou-siasmos (literally: 'in-divination')."

The authors develop a notion of what Nietzsche's model educational situation would look like, developing their ideas from a lecture series by the early Nietzsche entitled "On the Future of our Educational Institutions." On the one hand, they describe an initiation into a kind of special society: "The Greek concept of education as radically initiatory thus provides the key to understanding Nietzsche's reference to the Burschenshaft, since the process of initiation necessarily implies the existence of some kind of thiasos ('company,' 'confraternity' or 'troupe') to which the initiate makes application and gains admission in order to share the experience of life-change." On the other hand, the authors sketch a space without authority for the purpose of leaning to use reason: "The implication for education is, therefore, quite evident: if thought is to be the ultimate aim of education, then the structure of thinking must itself be embodied in the structure of educational institutions themselves." They suggest what Nietzsche has in mind is a "Schole," which "is not an institution—a 'school' in the modern sense—nor is it a condition or state as the English word implies ('at leisure'). It is a mysterious and an-archic power, which shuts the eyes, the ears, and the mouths to the functional imperative of fitness-for-purpose and sets everyday life out of joint in order that one may see, hear, and speak with the spontaneity of the en-th[e]ou-siasmos."

If the ideals of the university, the three unities mentioned above, constantly undermine themselves because they assign an impossible task to reason, debasing reason through the unending quest to merge reason with authority, the question remains: can we really imagine reason in the absence of authority? Furthermore, must we do so in order to protect the integrity of this intimate aspect of our lives? The authors appear to adopt this position by reanimating Nietzsche's arguments, however one wonders whether the solution that they sketch out is in any practical sense possible.

Read the full version of Valerie Allen and Ares Axiotis's "Nietzsche on the Future of Education" at the TELOS Online website. If you are affiliated with an institution that is an online subscriber to Telos, you have free access to our complete online archive. If not, you can purchase 24-hour access to this and other Telos articles at the low rate of $5/article.

Each Tuesday in the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Timothy Stacey looks at Luciano Pellicani's article "Was Fascism Revolutionary?" from Telos 122 (Winter 2002).

With wave after wave of Islamic extremist attacks across the globe in the last decade, two schools of thought have begun to emerge: the idealist and the realist. The idealist school says that Islam is dangerous; the realist school claims that economic deprivation is the chief cause of terrorism. Both schools are based on the presupposition that liberalism itself has nothing inherently provocative about it. Crucially, both sides ignore that liberalism can of itself be offensive—not because, as some media pundits suggest, its values are hard to swallow, but because it strictly has no values. There is something distinctly inhuman to this aspect of liberalism that is alienating to those that are new to the liberal rationale.

It is in this sense that Luciano Pellicani's article "Was Fascism Revolutionary?" is worth a read. Pellicani explains that fascism was based on a ubiquitous, but only here and there politically recognized, mistrust of liberalism. Fascism was not revolutionary, in the sense of being unprecedented, because it shared its grievance with communism. This offers the modern liberal reader some much needed perspective into the Islamic extremists' plight. Extremist Islam's aversion to liberalism is neither mysterious nor unprecedented. Liberalism's lack of values, widely understood to have fueled communism, also fueled fascism, as exemplified in the latter's animosity towards the bourgeoisie:

Fascism was an epochal phenomenon characterized by the "revolt against bourgeois society, its moral values, its political and social structures, its lifestyle." It emerged as an intellectual and moral resistance to the atomization brought about by the industrial revolution, and ended up in the "exultation of what was conceived as a unit of fundamental solidarity, the nation." In the name of the nation, it launched a revolutionary call to arms. (69)

Equally, Islamic extremists today claim to be offended by the degenerate behavior condoned by liberalism. The Muslim nation can be thought of as Islam per se and globalization can be considered a threat as imminent and divisive to Islam now as industrialization was to Germany and Italy in the 1920s. Islamic terrorists admonish that the inevitability of global liberal hegemony has left them with no option but violence. In this sense, too, they agree with communism and fascism:

In the sense of a rapid military concentration of forces and of energetic action by a firm and compact military organization, and in the sense of a precise system using its own forces, logistic committees, mobilization, etc., as well as the merciless annihilation of the adversary, when this is necessary and dictated by circumstances. (73)

The similarity in justification for violence suggests a similar hopelessness in the face of the liberal leviathan. Simply, all political extremism is anti-liberal. If liberalism has an extremist wing, it is extreme anti-extremism. It is the mistrust of value-laden, and therefore implicitly irrational, ideas. Strictly agnostic in terms of the values underpinning production, liberalism implies free-market capitalism. Therefore all extremism is implicitly anti-capitalist, hence so many extremists are offended by the logical consequences of capitalism: a marketplace whereby the only value is monetary and so anything goes. In liberal societies, when certain groups, necessarily not liberal because not agnostic, claim to be offended by certain products—be they movies, play-toys, or what have you—the impact, direct or indirect, that criminalizing such a product will have on the wider economy plays a major role in deciding the outcome of the dispute. Again the promise of fascism is eerily similar to that of Islamic extremism:

By gaining power with that singular coup d'état that came to be called the "march on Rome," and by installing the one-party dictatorship, fascism proclaimed through Alfredo Rocco that the age of the liberal state, agnostic about the supreme national values, had ended and that the new state would become the "guardian of public morality." Furthermore, "in the name of this high duty," it would intervene "to repress the lies, corruption and all forms of deviation and degeneration of public and private morality." (73)

Liberalism is anti-value, ergo all extremism is anti-anti-value. When we fight in the name of liberalism, we often suggest that we are fighting for freedom to have whatever values we see fit. Ironically, however, as the liberal-capitalist model progresses, this freedom is more and more defined by the right not to have values. Perhaps the emergence and re-emergence of Islamic extremism is the last throe of idiocy before the liberal rationale finally takes over the globe; perhaps it is one instance of a periodical phenomenon that ought to be addressed. Either way, we do well to remember that violence against liberalism is not a new phenomenon and it is not our values that are hated. I have said that all extremism is anti-liberal. But if we can have a sensible debate about the woes of liberal neglect, all anti-liberalism need not be extremist. Pellicani's "Was Fascism Revolutionary?" by showing fascism to be symptomatic of a wider distaste with liberalism, is a step in just this direction.

Read the full version of Luciano Pellicani's article "Was Fascism Revolutionary?" at the TELOS Online website. If you are affiliated with an institution that is an online subscriber to Telos, you have free access to our complete online archive. If not, you can purchase 24-hour access to this and other Telos articles at the low rate of $5/article.

Each Tuesday in the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Timothy Stacey looks at Philip Goodchild's "Truth and Utopia," from Telos 134 (Spring 2006).

In the wake of the global economic meltdown, it is once again time to reassess the parameters of the free market. Politicians would have us believe that this reassessment can stand outside of ideology, offering us a clear choice at the ballot between the can-dos and the has-beens of fiscal responsibility. In his article "Truth and Utopia," Philip Goodchild reveals how this attitude is philosophically misguided, using as it does contingencies of human error as scapegoats for deeper faults of the economy. For Goodchild these faults, alongside those of technology and science, reside in modern optimism, founded on the propositional model of truth, a model that presupposes the positivist Parmenidean maxim truth is true:

On the one hand, the propositional model of truth, embedded in science, finds its proofs in practice through technology. The truth of this model seems to be effectively revealed through mastery of nature: thinking constructs being. On the other hand, the propositional model of truth demonstrates its rectitude through political economy. Economics is the moral discipline founded on an appeal to the evidence, based on the propositional model of truth. In spite of claims to moral neutrality, political economy constitutes itself as a morality that displaces competing moral claims. (73)

Now, because truth is true for all times and peoples, how we arrive at truth is also irrelevant. The standard for truth is the mastery of nature. And the standard for good method is the speed with which a result is produced. This harks back to Heidegger's The Question Concerning Technology, wherein modernism is defined by the attempt to enframe truth and put it to practical use. The global economic crisis is a timely reminder of this practice: A few brilliant MIT mathematicians enframe truth in a few complex formulas believed capable of nullifying risk. Goodchild strikes further into the heart of this problem: modernism's true shortcoming is its divide between thought and being. A mathematic formula, rigid and timeless, can never encapsulate something as spontaneous as the economy, involving as it does the chaotic relation of billions of human beings to each other and to their environment. Taking functionality as the standard of truth is to neglect the temporality of functionality.

Let us therefore propose a different experiment with truth. The Parmenidean hypothesis is utopian: truth is not yet true. The same thing is not yet for thinking and for being. Alongside thinking and being, we do not yet have a third term that unites them, but we do have a faith in their unity, a utopian aspiration. It is time for philosophy to take this credit or piety seriously as a potential mediator for being and thought. We need not pretend to understand how being is mediated to thought. There is an excess in being over thought that may be gradually disclosed in experience. Only as such can we begin to think the new, for thinking and being take time. Let us acknowledge the incompleteness of truth. Truth, if it ever is to come, will only become true in utopia. (75)

"Truth and Utopia" admonishes that if truth is not yet true, then the lessons of the past are more important than the innovations of the present. In economic terms, this means taking the Wall Street crash as a greater truth than the eureka moment of a few mathematicians—even if they did go to MIT. What we do next is inherently political. Whether we reassess our formulae or reassess our understanding of economics, we must begin by reassessing our attitude towards truth.

Read the full version of Philip Goodchild's "Truth and Utopia" at the TELOS Online website. If you are affiliated with an institution that is an online subscriber to Telos, you have free access to our complete online archive. If not, you can purchase 24-hour access to this and other Telos articles at the low rate of $5/article.

"Even the loveliest dream," Adorno notes in Minima Moralia, "bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion." It is as if, in the moment of waking, one were to experience the way in which the dream is "damaged," indeed as if there were already something "damaged" in the dream itself. According to Adorno, the "description of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma in Kafka's Amerika"[1] captures this experience most acutely.

At first glance, Adorno provides a merely literary example, albeit a significant one. In the few lines that comprise his aphorism on dreaming, he also draws an analogy between the knowledge about the dreamer's inevitable disappointment and the recognition of the absurdity of happy music, which he attributes to Schubert. At second glance, however, Adorno's reference to the Nature Theater of Oklahoma hints at a twist. The blemish does not have to elicit disappointment, the feeling that one is "cheated of the best." For elsewhere, in his "Notes on Kafka," which were written at the same time as Minima Moralia, Adorno speaks of a recovery of what is damaged and cites the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, whose ideal is a world made up of "stale goods." The following sentence is to be understood literally: "The resurrection of the dead would have to take place in the auto graveyards."[2]

Adorno discovered his own Nature Theater of Oklahoma in New Jersey, as he observes while recalling his experiences as a scholar in America: "The Princeton Radio Project had its headquarters neither in Princeton nor in New York, but in Newark, New Jersey, and indeed, in a somewhat improvised manner, in a disused brewery. When I traveled there, through the tunnel under the Hudson, I felt a little as if I were in Kafka's Nature Theater in Oklahoma. Indeed, I was attracted by the lack of inhibition in the choice of a locality that would have been hardly imaginable in European practices."[3]

In its lack of inhibition, the improvised corresponds to the shabby, because that which is damaged or worn out no longer fulfills its purpose, as if it were free from the compulsion of ends. And it is on the basis of such a lack of inhibition, of such freedom from purposes, that the improvised and the shabby also correspond to the slow-witted and the childish, the anachronistic. As Adorno says in a letter to his parents, written in Los Angeles and sent to New York in 1942: "Nothing happens, we do not get out, hardly see any people. What matters to us is how many new rosebuds there are, that there is a wonderful big brown dog living diagonally opposite us, that due to the cool weather Baldchen Plymouth (our little car) once again refused to start, that the cat caught a gopher (a sort of prairie rat) and dragged it onto the balcony. Poor daft village children that we are, we are naturally ashamed of all our follies before our cosmopolitan parents."[4]

Adorno is struck by the villa of a friend in Beverly Hills, not only because of the "indescribable view," but also because "despite the Spanish style" it has "something of a German fairytale castle."[5] Does the eclectic not belong to the same sphere as the improvised, the shabby, the anachronistic? In order to improvise uninhibitedly, to put aside the damaged, the exhausted, the worn-down, in order to maintain a secondary existence, in order also to acknowledge that which oscillates between the heterogeneous and the incompatible, one needs space, in both a literal and a figurative sense.

At the end of Kafka's Amerika, the "vastness" of the country expands for Karl Rossmann beyond his train window as he sets out for the Nature Theater of Oklahoma. While Adorno complains about the "shortcoming of the American landscape,"[6] which is "without the mild, soothing, un-angular quality of things that have felt the touch of hands or their immediate implements," he also praises, almost in the same breath, the beauty of this landscape, which finds its expression in "the immensity of the whole country" and is yet perceptible in "even the smallest of its segments."[7] The "proportion of mountains to sea" on the Californian coast reminds him of the Riviera; only this landscape is "much more long-lined and open."[8]

The American Dream, one could conclude, is one of openness, in which being and appearance no longer operate as counter-forces, as illusion and disappointment. Is it a nightmare, or a dream awakened to itself, as it were? Rather than calling for an unequivocal answer, this question alerts us to an ambiguity that pervades the American dream, indeed that generates it, at least in its Adornian guise.

First published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 15, 2008, number 268. Trans. by Jason Kavett

Notes

1. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. Edmund Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), p. 111.

2. Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Sam and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), p. 271.

3. Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 218-19.

4. Theodor W. Adorno, Letters to his Parents 1939-1951, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2006), p. 91 (trans. modified).

5. Ibid., p. 228.

6. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 48.

7. Ibid., p. 49.

8. Adorno, Letters to his Parents, p. 70.

Each Tuesday in the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Andrew Walker looks at Roger Foster's " Dialectic of Enlightenment as Genealogy Critique," from Telos 120 (Summer 2001).

It is often cited as the founding text of Critical Theory in the Frankfurt School tradition. Even Michel Foucault is said to have claimed that he could have saved himself a lot of time had he read Dialectic of Enlightenment years earlier. The book draws together threads from Weber, Freud, Lukács, and Marx in order to show the authors' view of modernity as a world of restricted thought and suppressed alternatives. Rather than bringing forth a new age of human emancipation, the rise of Enlightenment reason has led to new forms of domination, it has become its opposite, it has reverted to myth. The book analyzes the all-pervasiveness of commoditizing social relations, the totalizing presence of cultural production, and the domination of the critical faculties of rational thought. Though its importance is widely recognized, Dialectic of Enlightenment has often been dismissed as being pessimistic to the point of anachronistic. It should continue to be read and re-read, however, as there is still a great deal of insight into the one-dimensionalism of dominant social thought within its pages.

Roger Foster demonstrates the present relevance of this work in his article " Dialectic of Enlightenment as Genealogy Critique," from Telos 120 (Summer 2001). Foster defends Dialectic against a number of criticisms by demonstrating that it does not lose out to its own pessimism. Its does not dismiss Enlightenment rationality as such as domination; rather, it is a historically rooted critique that seeks to "trace the suppression of reason's context transcending force, in order to reveal both its contingency and its entwinement with dominant social interests" (80). It stands as a critique of one aspect Enlightenment rationality, logical positivism, which has become synonymous with rationality itself. Foster continues:

the critique developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment . . . takes the form of a genealogical critique of the positivist Enlightenment because Adorno & Horkheimer see the positivist mentality as the intellectual reflection of the reification pervasive in the social world. (81)

If read in this way, Foster argues, Dialectic of Enlightenment tells a story of the rise to supremacy of only one mode of rationality. The dominance of positivist thinking reduces the space for critical experience and for rational consideration of the social and historic roots of present social structures and systems of knowledge.

Perhaps the most interesting and relevant aspect of Dialectic in Foster's article is the ways it uses genealogical method to show

the present as an object of critical experience, through the presentation of the dominant structure of rational thinking as founded on a repression of alternative possibilities. (82)

The fear of the unknown, which objectifies itself into the idolatry of gods and demons in mythically based thought systems, is expressed in positivist though as a "totalizing world of pure immanence" in which everything is classifiable and quantifiable (86). Anything that lies outside this "rational" construct is therefore a source of fear, in the Freudian sense. The discourse of colonialism, orientalism, and present Western global dominance casts the other as the unknown, the source of fear. The BBC's decision to invite the leader of the extreme right British National Party, Nick Griffin, to appear on its flagship current affairs program Question Time juxtaposes "safe," mainstream politics with its extremist, racist opposite. The unknown, the radical outlier, is portrayed as a source of fear, hatred, and derision. No space is granted to the discussion of a genuine alternative, or to the validity and intellectual coherence within any form of radical politics. The critical experience has been reduced to the choice between the established norm and the fascist, destructive alternative.

What Foster achieves in his article is a valid demonstration of the importance and relevance of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Jürgen Habermas's claims of "performative contradiction" perhaps miss the mark in Foster's assessment. They might be better leveled at later postmodernism, where the tendency toward "crypto-normativism" that Habermas highlights, undermines the intellectual argument. Dialectic of Enlightenment should not be cast aside as a historical curiosity, nor should it be perceived only as a problem that Critical Theory has had to "theorize its way out of." What Foster demonstrates in his article is the intellectual strength and importance of this work; that it should continue to be read, re-read, and learned from.

Read the full version of Roger Foster's " Dialectic of Enlightenment as Genealogy Critique" at the TELOS Online website. If you are affiliated with an institution that is an online subscriber to Telos, you have free access to our complete online archive. If not, you can purchase 24-hour access to this and other Telos articles at the low rate of $5/article.

Each Tuesday in the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Francisco Unger looks at Michael Marder's article "Carl Schmitt's 'Cosmopolitan Restaurant': Culture, Multiculturalism, and Complexio Oppositorum," from Telos 142 (Spring 2008).

Michael Marder's essay on Carl Schmitt's concept of complexio oppositorum, a term elaborated in Schmitt's Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923), takes up this "complex of opposites" as a framework for understanding culture. Marder makes the provocative argument that what is normally a decorative centerpiece in the mantle of depoliticized liberalism, "multiculturalism," can be rescued on Schmittian grounds in order to militate against the somnolence of its former master. When it is understood as the recognition of a charged plurality, or a complex of opposite cultures, multiculturalism satisfies the need for a living politics. Cultures are not paying mere lip service to a common framework of socially entrenched goals, or to the proselytizers of universalism by day (political players by night), but now cultures are seen as vehicles for a people's political particularity. For Marder, novels, films, languages, manners, etc., can become political weapons by which a disempowered group shatters the fiction of an all-inclusive consensus, and intrudes on the atmosphere of sterility that often accompanies liberalism's claim to "universality."

So what can Coltrane, Faulkner, and the Brown Bomber tell us about the prospects for a revitalized multiculturalism? Marder acknowledges two main challenges to the notion of turning to culture for political representation. The first is the reduction of culture to pure entertainment, and the second is what Marder sees as an association of culture with death in the West. But Marder uses a second aspect of Schmitt's complexio oppositorum, its emphasis on the living relationship of particular elements to form, to argue that cultures can represent the identities of politicized groups without succumbing to the general morass. "Form" should not be associated with conceited Western rationalism, or proceduralism from above, light in danger and lacking in spice. Schmitt's "form" is angled against Hegelian synthesis, and the complexio attempts to nourish struggle from below rather than to instantly sublimate the parts into a synthesis that resolves conflict upon demand. While we may all be spectators in the restaurant of debased American culture, Marder's instinct to turn to culture for political inspiration can be understood as an appeal for us to become more serious and discerning readers, archivists, and, yes, consumers of our American culture. In the American melting pot, we should actively seek out everything indigestible. As Marder writes:

A form of forms victimized to the greatest extent in the age of neutralizations and depleted to the point of merging with entertainment, culture holds the highest potential among the other "shipwrecks" of depoliticization (economics, morality, technicity, etc.) to resist this dominant trend and to give a new impetus to the political.

Marder insists that unlike its

liberal counterpart, which cleverly passes totalitarian rigidity for the tolerance of "otherness" and "diversity," the proposed Schmittian multiculturalism does not pre-delineate the terrain for political engagements, nor does it project culturally specific attitudes and beliefs onto the contrived sphere of universality. Akin to the complex, it embraces the sometimes contradictory cultural particularities in a non-totalizable fashion, keeps open the space for political antagonism, functions as a radically pluralistic living form, and non-transcendentally expresses the truth of culture.

Marder asserts that forcing multiculturalism to face up to its own philosophical premises can force it into either living up to the creed or shedding its duplicity. Either way, Marder concludes, this challenge will not be merely semantic, or utopian. By forcing liberalism to reckon with the "enemies" in its midst, Schmittian multiculturalism can instigate the type of authentic controversy out of which any revival of the political must spring.

Read the full version of Michael Marder's article "Carl Schmitt's 'Cosmopolitan Restaurant': Culture, Multiculturalism, and Complexio Oppositorum" at the TELOS Online website. If you are affiliated with an institution that is an online subscriber to Telos, you have free access to our complete online archive. If not, you can purchase 24-hour access to this and other Telos articles at the low rate of $5/article.