Radical Philosophy #154

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154 Editorial collective Claudia Aradau, Matthew Charles, David Cunningham, Howard Feather, Peter Hallward, Esther Leslie, Stewart Martin, Mark Neocleous, Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford Contributors Alberto Toscano teaches sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is an editor of the journal Historical Materialism, and is currently writing a book on politics and fanaticism. Irving Wolhfarth is assembling an essay collection on Walter Benjamin entitled No Man’s Land and writing a book on Benjamin’s politics. John Kraniauskas is Reader in Latin American Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, and an editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. David Cunningham and Jon Goodbun teach at the University of Westminster in the departments of English & Linguistics and Architecture, respectively. Antonio Negri’s book include The Politics of Subversion (1989; 2005), Insurgencies (1992; trans. 1999), Time for Revolution (2003), and, with Michael Hardt, Labour of Dionysus (1994), Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004).

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CONTENTS

march/april 2009

Commentary The War against Pre-Terrorism: The Tarnac 9 and The Coming Insurrection Alberto Toscano............................................................................................... 2

articles Spectres of Anarchy: Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part Three Irving Wohlfarth............................................................................................... 9

Elasticity of Demand: Reflections on The Wire John Kraniauskas ......................................................................................... 25

interview Propaganda Architecture Rem Koolhaas and Reinier de Graaf interviewed by David Cunningham and Jon Goodbun............................ 35

On Rem Koolhaas Antonio Negri................................................................................................ 48

reviews

Copyedited and typeset by illuminati www.illuminatibooks.co.uk

Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life Nathan Brown............................................................................................... 51

Printed by Russell Press, Russell House, Bulwell Lane, Basford, Nottingham NG6 0BT

Axel Honneth, Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, with Judith Butler, Raymond Geuss and Jonathan Lear Nina Power ................................................................................................... 54

Layout by Peter Osborne and David Cunningham

Bookshop distribution UK: Central Books, 115 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN Tel: 020 8986 4854 USA: Ubiquity Distributors Inc., 607 Degraw Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217 Tel: 718 875 5491 Cover TVCC & CCTV – facade complete, © Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Images p. 14: Lindsay Seers, Ventriloquism (2005) pp. 27, 28, 30, 31: Home Box Office Inc., The Wire, Seasons 1 & 3 (2004, 2007) pp. 53 and 58: Aaron Williamson, Animal Cage (2006) and Globe Head (2005)

Xudong Zhang, Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century Harriet Evans.................................................................................................. 56 Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics David Owen.................................................................................................... 59 Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation Jeremy Gilbert .............................................................................................. 62

news Rebellion of Greek Youth Panagiotis Sotiris ......................................................................................... 65

Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd. www.radicalphilosophy.com

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Radical Philosophy Ltd

Peace, Legality, Democracy Mihalis Mentinis . ........................................................................................ 67

Commentary

The war against pre-terrorism The Tarnac 9 and The Coming Insurrection Alberto Toscano

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n 11 November 2008, twenty youths were arrested in Paris, Rouen and the village of Tarnac, in the Massif Central district of Corrèze. The Tarnac operation involved helicopters, 150 balaclava-clad anti-terrorist policemen, with studiously prearranged media coverage. The youths were accused of having participated in a number of sabotage attacks against high-speed TGV train routes, involving the obstruction of the trains’ power cables with horseshoe-shaped iron bars, causing a series of delays affecting some 160 trains. The suspects who remain in custody were soon termed the ‘Tarnac Nine’, after the village where some of them had purchased a small farmhouse, reorganized the local grocery store as a cooperative, and taken up a number of civic activities from the running of a film club to the delivery of food to the elderly.

The case The minister of the interior, Michèle Alliot-Marie, promptly intervened to underline the presumption of guilt and to classify the whole affair under the rubric of terrorism, linking it to the supposed rise of an insurrectionist ‘ultra-Left’, or ‘anarcho-autonomist tendency’. The nine were interrogated and detained for ninety-six hours. Four were subsequently released. The official accusation was ‘association of wrongdoers in relation to a terrorist undertaking’, a charge that can carry up to twenty years in jail. On 2 December, three more of the Tarnac Nine were released under judiciary control, leaving two in jail, at the time of writing (early January 2009): Julien Coupat and Yldune Lévy. Giorgio Agamben and Luc Boltanski wrote editorials decrying the disproportion and hysteria of this repressive operation. A petition was circulated by Eric Hazan, publisher and friend of Coupat, and signed by Badiou, Bensaïd, Butler, Rancière, Žižek and several others.1 In Tarnac (a village proud of its role in the Resistance, and represented by a communist mayor for four decades) a committee of support was set up, conveying a virtually unanimous show of solidarity of the villagers with those arrested. Following the time-honoured reactionary motif of the wayward child of the bour­ geoisie drifting into violent idealism, the media’s attention has focused on Coupat. Readers of the press were soon apprised of Coupat’s studies at the elite ESSEC business school; of his DEA dissertation on Guy Debord at the EHESS, where he worked closely with Boltanski; of his involvement in the journal and collective Tiqqun; and of his alleged authorship of the book L’insurrection qui vient (The Coming Insurrection), signed by the ‘Comité Invisible’.2 In flagrant contradiction to both the tenor of L’insurrection and what may be surmised about the modus operandi of the Tarnac commune, he was fingered as the book’s author and depicted as the charismatic ringleader behind the commune and its subversive acts.



Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09)

As the media feeding frenzy progresses, some of the ideological and investigative background has surfaced in the press. (The intelligence agency which reports directly to the Ministry of the Interior, the Direction centrale du renseignement intérieur (DCRI), the ‘French FBI’ which replaced the famous Renseignements géneraux (RG) in July 2008, seems rather prone to leaks, managed or otherwise.) It appears that Coupat had long been an object of observation by the section of that RG tasked with monitoring the Left. One of their reports even describes him as a ‘critical metaphysician’ – one of several ironic indications in this whole affair of the passing acquaintance of French spooks with the world of theory. Increasingly, he is tagged as a leading light in an ominous and diffuse political agitation, which eschews the domains of organization, political representation and regulated conflict for the sake of direct action and irrecuperable opposition to capitalism. Unsurprisingly, for a case steeped in the new language of security and the ‘war on terror’, the Tarnac affair has a transatlantic component: the FBI contacted their French counterparts to signal an allegedly illegal crossing from Canada into the USA by Coupat and his companion Lévy, and the discovery, in a rucksack left at the border, of a picture of the recruiting office in Times Square, New York, that would later be the object of a small bomb attack. The broader context of the operation is the theorem, dear to Alliot-Marie, of the mounting threat of an anti-capitalist, anti-statist and anti-systemic radicalization of youth in France and across Europe which cannot be contained in the usual forms of social conflict. The revealing title of a report on this putative phenomenon by the DCRI is accordingly: ‘From the anti-CPE conflict to the constitution of a pre-terrorist network: Perspectives on the French and European ultra-left’. 3 The 2006 protests against the law on job contracts for the young (Contrat de première embauche), following hard upon the autumn 2005 revolts in the marginalized banlieues, played a defining role in the rise to prominence and eventual victory of Sarkozy, whose swaggering performance as minister of the interior during the riots became a kind of trademark. The Sarkozy presidency began under the sign of a deep anxiety, a reactionary rage for order whose other side was the obsessive scrutinizing of the future for signs of social turmoil and radical novelty – in this instance, one might very well agree with the Comité Invisible that ‘governing has never been anything but pushing back by a thousand subterfuges the moment when the crowd will hang you’ (83). Given the political peculiarities of France, this fear of the future (and its masses) took the form of an exorcising of the past – as in Sarkozy’s campaign ultimatum: ‘In this election, we’re going to find out if the heritage of May ’68 is going to be perpetuated or if it will be liquidated once and for ever.’ The compulsive reference to the rebellious past, which is simultaneously imagined as a future – as in Sarkozy’s recent statement to his cabinet, in view of the possible spread of the ‘Greek syndrome’, that ‘We can’t have a May ’68 for Christmas’ – provides the current French administration with its libidinal content, a much needed supplement to the grim vapidity at the level of its programme. The very notion of ‘pre-terrorism’ is deeply symptomatic: it makes patent the link between the obsessive identification of ‘dangerous individuals’ and the imagination of future revolts that call for repressive pre-emption. (There are interesting parallels here with the 2007 arrest of the German sociologist of gentrification Andrej Holm.) As Boltanski and Claverie have noted, there is an echo here of the film Minority Report and its ‘precogs’. The context of the world economic crisis and the not-unrelated upsurge of the ‘700 euro generation’ in Greece serve as a backdrop. Indeed, as an antiterrorist magistrate recently confessed: ‘There is a temptation during a time of crisis to consider any illegal manifestation of political expression to be of a terrorist nature.’4 Reading the extracts from the secret service reports, the left pessimist might be heartened to see such confidence in the possibility of radical revolt being shown by the state



and its agencies. Alternatively, she might muse that the logic of immunizing oneself against ‘terrorism’ by nipping pre-terrorism in the bud – with all of its hackneyed references to Baader-Meinhof or Action Directe (‘they too started out by writing pamphlets and living in communes…’) – is more likely to accelerate and intensify a process of so-called radicalization, fashioning the state and the legal system into enemies with whom one cannot negotiate. Whatever it may say about the prospects for radical politics and its attendant suppression, this ‘affair’ illustrates the metastasis of a transnational politics of securitization, which is now being applied to any form of activity that importunes the established order – from hacking to separatism, from anti-war demonstrations to environmental activism. The looseness of anti-terrorism legislation recalls Walter Benjamin’s character­ ization of the police in his ‘Critique of Violence’: ‘Its power is formless, like its nowhere-tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence in the life of civilized states.’ (See Irving Wolhfarth on Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ and the Red Army Faction, the second part of his article, in RP 153.) This is a situation enhanced by the development of what the parents of the accused pointedly refer to as ‘reality police’, as one might speak of ‘reality-TV’. Julien Coupat’s father Gérard turned by his son’s ordeal into an eloquent and intransigent advocate for civil liberties, recently put the stakes of the police campaign in stark terms: ‘They are turning my son into a scapegoat for a generation who have started to think for themselves about capitalism and its wrongs and to demonstrate against the government.… The government is keeping my son in prison because a man of the left with the courage to demonstrate is the last thing they want now, with the economic situation getting worse and worse.’5 Like many others, Coupat senior has underscored the ominous prospect of a form of government so politically illiterate and monolithic in its reactions that it cannot distinguish sabotage – a practice that has always accompanied social and workers’ movements – from ‘terrorism’, a term that is indiscriminately, albeit deliberately, used to cover everything from mass murder to train delays.

The book What, then, of the book that – considering the meagre pickings for the police at Tarnac (ladders, train schedules, bolt cutters) – seems to be the centrepiece in the state’s inquisitional arsenal: L’insurrection qui vient? The legal obscenity of basing arrests on a text – one that moreover cannot be personally imputed to any of the accused – is obvious. The right to practise collective anonymity, against the crude biographism of the press, should also be stressed. It is nevertheless of interest to consider the Tarnac affair in light of this combative pamphlet – half inspired dissection of the misery of everyday life in contemporary France, half breviary for a diffuse anarcho-communist defection from capitalist society. It appears that L’insurrection was first brought to the attention of the powers that be by the criminologist Alain Bauer, who, coming across it on the shelves of the FNAC in 2007, immediately bought up forty copies and circulated them to various security experts and agencies. A passage from it has been repeatedly referred to as incriminating evidence against Coupat: The technical infrastructure of the metropolis is vulnerable: its flows are not merely for the transportation of people and commodities; information and energy circulate by way of wire networks, fibres and channels, which it is possible to attack. To sabotage the social machine with some consequence today means re-conquering and reinventing the means of interrupting its networks. How could a TGV line or an electrical network be rendered useless?

A socialist with some sympathies for the emancipatory and egalitarian potential of railway travel might answer like Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste spokesperson Olivier Besancenot, commenting on the sabotage, that ‘we want more trains, not fewer’, and end the discussion



there. But it is worth considering the diagnosis and prognosis advanced by L’insurrection, if only to understand the intellectual backdrop to this call to interrupt the flows. Were one in the business of the RG and the DCRI, one could argue that a host of themes link L’insurrection to Tiqqun pamphlets such as Théorie du Bloom and Premiers matériaux pour une théorie de la jeune fille. A narrative of completed nihilism; a Debordian excoriation of the spectacle (embodied in the ‘young girl’, the commodity made flesh, and carried by the schizophrenic entrepreneur); the vitriolic polemics against sundry Lefts (Trotskyists, Negrians, ecologists…); the view of communism not as a programme but as an ethical disposition and collective experimentation, an attempt to recover an emancipatory notion of community; ‘the silent coordination of a sabotage in the grand style’6 and the very idea of an Invisible Committee (or an Imaginary Party) – all of these betoken a certain political continuity. Yet the differences are also significant. First, stylistically, the works of Tiqqun practised a kind of second-order situationist détournement, keeping Debord while losing much of the Marx and Lukács that the author of The Society of the Spectacle had felicitously plundered, and throwing into the mix a generous helping of Agamben – an author who, albeit not so hard to pastiche, does not lend himself all that well to Debordian operations. L’insurrection is a more measured and plain-spoken text, whose politics are rooted more in anti-urbanist libertarian anarchism than in the metaphysical auguries carried by Agambenian figures such as the ‘young girl’ or the ‘Bloom’ (after Joyce). Though the agenda of L’insurrection is still dictated by a situationist-inspired total critique of contemporary society, the lengthy analyses of the ills of everyday metropolitan life in the age of flexitime and the new economy are more in keeping with the recent concerns of critical French sociology than with prophecies about Homo sacer. Just as a Bourdieuian perspective marks the sections dealing with France’s singular relation to the state and the school as structures of subjectivation, so the influence of Boltanski and Chiapello’s diagnosis of the dissolution of class solidarity as a foothold for social critique can partly account for the indifference of L’insurrection to a Marxist discourse of class struggle, and its delinking of anti-capitalism from class politics. This is not to say that a certain catastrophism, or, better, active nihilism, does not pervade this book too, as it did the bulk of Tiqqun’s production. L’insurrection begins with the lapidary lines: ‘From every angle, there’s no way out from the present. That’s not the least of its virtues.’ But as we move through L’insurrection it becomes clear that, despite the nod to Agamben in the title, his brand of messianic reversibility – a left interpretation of the Hölderlinian adage that ‘where danger is, grows the saving power also’ – is overtaken by an anarchist blueprint for the secession from metropolitan capitalism and the reorganization of everyday life in communes that will serve as bases for a diffuse and ‘horizontal’ overturning of the reigning system of misery. This rejoinder to European Nihilism 2.0 is based neither on waiting for eschatological



signs, nor on figures of the reversibility of catastrophe into promise (the young girl, Bloom), nor indeed on the ultra-modernist idea that accelerating moral and material decomposition is the key to a transvaluation of the world. We are also not dealing with a post-workerist exodus immanent to the resources of immaterial labour or cognitive capitalism. Rather, L’insurrection advocates a comparatively sober practice of defection and sabotage, which aims to turn the machines of subjection against themselves. Much of L’insurrection’s tableau of modern European (more specifically French, and even more specifically bourgeois Parisian) misery is compelling, especially when it heeds the situationist injunction that to ‘understand what sociology never understands, one need only envisage in terms of aggressivity what for sociology is neutral’.7 Like the Debord of In girum, it can even strike notes of dark comedy: ‘Europe is a penniless continent which secretly shops at Lidl and flies low cost so it can keep on travelling.’ At its core lies something like a social-psychological portrait of the micro-managed and multitasking subject of contemporary work, the function of which is regarded as fundamentally political: that of ‘biopolitically’ governing the entirety of social life and perpetuating a regime of exploitation that is increasingly superfluous. Though the insight is hardly novel, the Comité Invisible does succeed in pungently capturing the horror and imbecility of the current proliferation of disciplinary devices such as ‘personal development’, ‘human resources’, ‘social capital’ and other managerial monstrosities. L’insurrection encapsulates this under the aegis of what it calls the ‘ethics of mobilization’, the colonization, through work, of the very domain of possibility: Mobilization is this slight detachment with regard to oneself … on the basis of which the Self [le Moi] can be taken as an object of work, on the basis of which it becomes possible to sell oneself, and not one’s labour-power, to be paid not for what one has done but for what one is. … This is the new norm of socialization.

But what lies beyond this salutary vituperation of the modern ideology of work – an ideology that is all the stronger to the extent that it replaces the heroisms and anxieties of the Sartrean project with the soft schizophrenia of a thousand ‘projects’?

It is here that what one may maliciously term the Epicurean tendency in situationism (present, for instance, in Debord’s laments for the disappearance of good wine in Panegyric) gets the better of L’insurrection. ‘Mobilization’ is linked not only to the capitalist uses of a parallel-processed self, but to a discourse about the metropolis as a space of deadening indifference and mortifying abstraction, and to the idea that the modern city and its masters have perpetrated a kind of assassination of experience: ‘We have been expropriated from our language by teaching, from our songs by variety shows, from our flesh by pornography, from our city by the police, from our friends by the wage system.’ Despite the aptness of L’insurrection’s denigration of cities turned into posthumous museums and the excoriation of the uses of mobility and isolation for purposes of control – not to mention its call for the marginalization and ruination of Paris, that ‘frightening concretion of power’ – the hankering for revolutionary authenticity is unpersuasive, and ultimately myopic. Just as the short shrift given to the notion of labour-power leads to a Manichaean opposition between a malevolent economy and emancipated ‘forms of life’, so there is not much attention paid to the transformative uses of abstraction and alienation. There is more of a hint of Jane Jacobs in the scorn against ‘indifferent’ modern housing and the idea that ‘the multiplication of means of displacement and communication continuously wrenches us away from the here and now, by the temptation of being everywhere’. What’s more, the notion that the interruption of mobilization will give rise to practical solidarity, as the ‘facade’ of the ‘hyper-vulnerable’ city of flows crumbles, is too romantic to bear scrutiny. Blackouts and blockages can intimate communism but also be the occasion for even more insidious forms of violence and hierarchy (Michael Haneke’s film Time of the Wolf is an evocative study in this regard). Likewise, despite the welcome corrective to the idea of



the banlieue uprisings of 2005 as an instance of criminal mob rule, it is doubtful that actions with ‘no leader, no claim, no organization, but words, gestures, conspiracies’ may be taken as a model for organized emancipatory politics. Though one wishes that the anti-urbanism of the Comité Invisible were more dialectical, some of their reflections on the ‘commune’ are worthy of consideration. Not only is renewed debate on the collective experimentation of everyday life to be welcomed, especially by contrast with nebulous figures of messianic transfiguration; L’insurrection also raises some important questions for a radical left which conceives of capitalism as an unacceptably destructive system and views crisis-management as an unappetizing and doomed vocation. Rather than an ephemeral image of a glorious tomorrow or a utopian enclave, the commune is envisaged simultaneously as a collective experimentation of politics and as an instrument for a political action which is not merely instrumental but existential, or ethical. Among other things, the emphasis put on the density of real relations – as against the issues of identity and representation that allegedly bedevil parties, groups, collectives and milieus – gives a concrete political meaning to friendship, over against the obsession, whether prudish or prurient, with the commune as the site of sexual exchange. Another classic motif, that of self-reliance, is given a contemporary twist: the commune is presented as a way of gaining and practising the kind of know-how (medical, agricultural, technical) to allow one to depend no longer on the metropolis and its forms of ‘security’ – in other words, to ready oneself for real crisis, as communistic survivalism prepares for capitalist apocalypse. One cannot gainsay the force and interest of concrete utopias, however minimal or marginal, nor deny the all too familiar truth – once again laid bare by this case – that the modern capitalist nation-state does not suffer alternatives gladly. The young activists and intellectuals at Tarnac, in this regard echoing if not necessarily following L’insurrection qui vient, have certainly shown that even very simple experiments with egalitarianism and emancipation can sow real political relations and solidarities. But, especially at a moment when the political question of the public is so crucial – whether we are speaking of universities, hospitals, banks, or indeed trains – the opposition between the commune and the metropolis is a false one, as is, to borrow another dichotomy from L’insurrection, the one between hegemony and horizontality. To appropriate authenticity is not enough. Any truly transformative politics must surely appropriate distraction, mobility and, indeed, alienation and indifference too. Trains, like sewerage systems, dams, airports and hospitals, are not to be repudiated, interrupted or merely abandoned to the whims of the capitalist state. Perhaps one day, rather than shuttling us from Human Resources conferences to Personal Development seminars, they may be put to more creative and revolutionary uses, like the Russian Kino trains of the 1920s.

Notes

1. Giorgio Agamben, ‘Térrorisme ou tragicomédie?’, Libération, 18 November 2008, www.liberation. fr/societe/0101267186–terrorisme-ou-tragi-comedie; Elisabeth Claverie and Luc Boltanski, ‘Christ ou caténaire? Du sacrilège religieux’, Mediapart, 13 December 2008, www.mediapart.fr/club/edition/les-invites-de-mediapart/article/131208/christ-ou-catenaire-du-sacrilege-religieux-au-s; ‘Non à l’ordre nouveau’, Le Monde, 27 November 2008; English version at http://tarnac9.wordpress. com/2008/11/24/free-the-tarnac9/. 2. Comité Invisible, L’insurrection qui vient, La Fabrique, Paris, 2007; also available at www. lafabrique.fr/IMG/pdf_Insurrection.pdf; English version at http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/ the-coming-insurrection/. 3. Isabelle Mandraud, ‘L’obsession de l’ultragauche’, Le Monde, 3 December 2008, www.lemonde. fr/societe/article/2008/12/03/l-obsession-de-l-ultragauche_1126282_3224.html. 4. Quoted in Celestine Bohlen, ‘Use of French Terrorism Law on Railroad Saboteurs Draws Criticism’, Bloomberg News, 4 December 2008. 5. Quoted in Jason Burke, ‘France braced for “rebirth of violent left”’, Observer, 4 January 2009. 6. Tiqqun, Théorie du bloom, La Fabrique, Paris, 2000, p. 134. 7. ‘Critique de l’urbanisme’, Internationale Situationniste 6, 1961; English version at www.cddc. vt.edu/sionline/si/critique.html.



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Power to the people? … masses, proletariat, workers, soviets, nation, community, subalterns, multitudes, commons …

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Spectres of anarchy Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part Three Irving Wohlfarth There is an excellent passage in Nadja on the ‘enchanting days spent looting Paris under the sign of Sacco and Vanzetti’ and Breton adds the assurance that in those days the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle [Boulevard of Good Tidings] fulfilled the strategic promise of revolt that its name had always held.1

‘The Right to the Use of Force’ Benjamin’s critique of violence cannot be separated from its religious inspiration. Not merely does it open up a space of thinking unavailable to the profane discourse of his time; it also enables him to conceive of a ‘radical politics that is “just” and, precisely for this reason, wants to be nothing but politics’.2 Conversely, and by the same token, this points to a notion of justice modelled on the Jewish God. Radical profanity in the spirit of theology: this seeming paradox is, we saw, the crux of the ‘Theologico-Political Fragment’. In acknowledging the autonomy of the profane order – and thus presumably the ‘legitimacy of modernity’ (Blumenberg) – it rejects any form of political theo­ cracy3 and obviates any attempt to (re)theologize the profane. Aside from the Protestant ethic analysed by Weber, there is perhaps no greater immunity to false idols, including those of the capitalist market, than the one afforded by an old religion. All the more so if, as here, it propels a radically ‘profane order of the profane’ on its way. Seen in this light, the modern state would be the ‘new idol’4 that Zarathustra calls it – a hybrid between myth and demythologization. A rough draft for a review article from the same period, ‘The Right to the Use of Force’ (Das Recht zur Gewaltanwendung), suggests as much. 5 It is irrelevant, Benjamin there writes, ‘whether the state imposes itself [sich einsetzt] as the supreme legal institution [Rechtsinstitut] by its own authority [Machtvollkommenheit] or by an alien one’6 – that is, as a secular or a religious theocracy. In either case, it needs to be dissolved into a politics that is ‘nothing but politics’.

Benjamin’s draft enumerates four critical options: (A) to deny both the state and the individual the right to use force; (B) to recognize unconditionally the right of both to do so; (C) to grant it to the state alone; (D) to grant it only to the individual. To sum up an already summary argument: Benjamin maintains that (A) – termed ‘ethical anarchism’ by the author under review – is valid for morality (though not for the reasons usually given), but not for politics; that (B) is intrinsically contradictory and effectively leads to (C), which would be defensible only if the state and its laws coincided with the ethical order; and that, since there is (contrary to C) a contradiction in principle between the state and ethical life and (contrary to A) none in principle between force and the ethical order, (D) remains the only logical possibility. It is its apparent material impossibility that prompts the author under review to reject it out of hand.7 But a ‘word against the law’, the ‘Critique of Violence’ claims, is not necessarily spoken into the wind. All power to the individual: this is an at once terri­fying and liberating Entsetzung of the monopoly on violence so jealously guarded by the modern state. Not to be subjected to it is presumably not to be a subject or individual in any accepted sense. Nor can the right (Recht) to use force in order to dismantle the law (Recht) be a legal one; it is perhaps no ‘right’ at all. Benjamin nevertheless continues to call it that: An exposition of this standpoint is one of the tasks of my moral philosophy, and in that regard the term ‘anarchism’ may very well be used to describe a theory that denies a moral right not to force [Gewalt] as such but merely to every human institution, community or individuality that assigns itself a monopoly over it or in any way claims that right for itself, even if only in general and in principle, instead of revering it in a particular case as a gift of divine power, as perfect power [Machtvoll­kommenheit].8

Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09)



Correlatively, the state, in its self-positing sovereignty (Machtvollkommenheit), is implicitly identified here with self-idolatry. In another early sketch, the just distribution of the power it monopolises is equated with the abolition of private property.9 It is both possible and necessary, Benjamin concludes, to come to a universally valid decision about the right to apply force, ‘because the truth about morality does not stop at the chimera of moral freedom’. A ‘truly subjective’ decision for or against its use cannot be made in the abstract, being conceivable only in the light of ‘the particular goals of one’s wishes [des Wunsches]’.10 Whatever this might mean in concreto, the general thrust is clear. The telos of a politics that is nothing but politics is, in the words of the ‘TheologicoPolitical Fragment’, a ‘striving for happiness on the part of a free humanity’ – one which announces the ‘quietest approach’ of the Messianic Kingdom.11 In this sense, the ‘dynamics’ of the ‘profane order of the profane’12 would be ‘divinely commanded’.13 Its political ‘method’ – ‘nihilism’ – is destined to bring down the pillars of profane theocracy, alias bourgeois democracy: the state, the rule of law and doubtless also the social contract. Benjamin did not explicitly return to the problems explored in this early draft, which belongs to his most extreme probings of the subject. Several years later, however, he claimed to see no reason to be ‘ashamed of’ or to ‘“forswear”’ his ‘“early” anarchism’. Anarchist methods, he went on, were admittedly useless; but communist – indeed, all political – ‘goals’ were meaningless and non-existent.14 His programme for a coming politics thus remained a ‘teleology without final goal’: an unconditional break with the millennial past, followed, presumably, by whatever the ensuing ‘union of free men’ (Marx) would then decide. To the last, he considered the winning combination to be a properly communist implementation of this anarchist project. Like the theological dwarf who may no longer show himself in public, his anarchism disappeared from view and entered into a secret pact with historical materialism. The latter was to be prevented by this anarcho-crypto-theology from becoming a set of false, quasi-religious dogmas that would sooner or later be forsworn (e.g. Aron’s ‘opium of the intellectuals’), or a state religion, or whatever else a Turkish puppet with a hookah in his mouth might stand for.

The state of emergency Let him [the Messiah] come, but let me not see him. (Sanhedrin 98b)

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ [Ausnahmezustand] in which

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we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that accords with this insight. Then we will clearly see that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against fascism. One reason why fascism has a chance is that, in the name of progress, its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. It is not the beginning of knowledge – unless it be the knowledge that the view of history from which such amazement arises is untenable.15

It is not surprising that the leaders of the RAF should have cited this Thesis in their long ‘Declaration’ at the start of the Stammheim trial. Its inversion of the relation between rule and exception with respect to the ultima ratio of state power – the declaration of the state of emergency – ultimately denies the legitimacy of the rule of law. The leaders of the RAF set out in turn to subvert the authority of the court with every means at their disposal. ‘Where thinking suddenly halts in a constellation saturated with tensions, it gives it a shock, by which thinking crystallizes into a monad.’16 This sentence from the Seventeenth Thesis describes Benjamin’s own strategy of positioning himself in a no-man’s-land between various fronts. His writings have in turn been caught in the crossfire of conflicting interpretations. The ‘Critique of Violence’ and the Eighth Thesis are cases in point. Their reception may conceivably have been marked by the cautionary example of the RAF; such matters are difficult to gauge. Two opposed positions may be schematically contrasted here. On the one hand, interpretations of a liberal, broadly social-democratic persuasion close to that of Habermas find mirror images of Carl Schmitt in the Critique and the Eighth Thesis.17 On the other hand, Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception – the offshoot of a much larger project18 – draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘biopolitics’ and Benjamin’s distinction between a permanent, catastrophic state of emergency and a real one yet to come. The upshot is an analysis of the current world-political situation, whose ultra-radicalism matches that of the RAF. But the politics of ‘pure means’ that Agamben endorses is no longer one of terror or revolutionary violence. He finds it rather in complementary Benjaminian figures of childhood and play.19 The ‘real’ state of emergency invoked in the Eighth Thesis could not but strike terror at the heart of the powers that be (and that part of us that is wedded to them). A cryptic formula in a letter of April or May 1940 intimates that this prospect may have alarmed

Benjamin too – though for very different reasons. The outbreak of war and the larger constellation which brought it on have, he writes, induced him to set down certain reflections – later known as the Theses – which he has kept to himself, indeed from himself, for wellnigh twenty years.20 This return of the (half-) repressed may be speculatively reconstructed as follows. The constellation of the Second World War – the rise of Stalinism and fascism, the Hitler–Stalin Pact, and the inadequate resistance of ‘progressive’ forces, notably the Front Populaire – reactualizes a number of intuitions first prompted by the First World War and its aftermath, notably the brief interregnum marked by the Spartacus movement. Chief among them is the conviction that the age-old cycle (Umlauf) of violence can be broken only by violence of a quite different order. What resurfaces in the Eighth Thesis would thus be the anarcho-nihilist theology first formulated in the ‘Critique of Violence’. Benjamin would not always have wanted to admit to himself the enormity of what at bottom he knew: namely, that it would take nothing less than the institution of a ‘real’ state of emergency – the ‘Entsetzung of the law and the state’ – to end the ongoing state of emergency. This interplay between knowing and unknowing perhaps has its counterpart in the First Thesis, where a similar relation obtains between the oblivious puppet and the canny dwarf. Agamben proposes a complementary genealogy. As he presents it, the Eighth Thesis was Benjamin’s last move in a game of chess that he had been playing against Carl Schmitt for almost twenty years.21 It would thus represent a variation on the First Thesis – the allegory of the chess automaton that can take on ‘all comers’. The unnamed ‘enemy’ invoked in the Theses would be, among others, Schmitt himself, the theoretician of the allegedly permanent, in reality prehistoric, antagonism between ‘friend’ and ‘foe’. Ironically enough, the allegedly ‘dangerous relations’22 between Benjamin and Schmitt, whom political centrists have been eager to see as twin extremes, would itself have been such an antagonism. ‘The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule.’ The key phrase in this sentence is placed between inverted commas, which signal that Schmitt’s concept of the Ausnahmezustand (‘state of emergency’ or, literally, of ‘exception’) is being cited against itself. ‘He is sovereign,’ so his definition goes, ‘who decides on the state of exception.’23 At the time the Theses were written, a state of emergency – decreed by the sovereign, Hitler, and championed by his jurist, Schmitt – had been in force for seven

years. For those at the bottom, however, the state of exception was no exception. (It is true that Nazism would turn out to be an unprecedented historical break – a Zivilisationsbruch – with the civilized past, but it was also, in an easily misunderstood but easily verifiable sense, its continuation.) This bitter experience of the rule refuted the ruling standpoint. It was the standpoint of the oppressed – the one, that is, that could be ‘ascribed’ (Lukács) to them rather than their actual empirical consciousness – and it alone, that had normative, universalizable force. Normality – universal emancipation – had yet to be achieved. With this move, which recalls the grand theological reversal (Umschwung) with which the book on the German ‘play of mourning’ had closed, 24 Benjamin places Schmitt’s sovereign in check and indicates what it will take to bring a checkmate about. If the so-called state of exception is the rule, then the true state of exception will have to be the exception to it. Hence Benjamin’s strategic assessment that we cannot ‘improve our position in the struggle against fascism’ without checking the sovereign in all his guises (and doing so, clearly, with more than the ‘checks and balances’ of bourgeois democracy). Otherwise the victory over fascism will, in the phrase of Sorel’s cited in the ‘Critique’, be no more than a change of rulers.25 If the chess game is to be won, the kaleidoscope cannot be shaken into a new order; it will have to be smashed. The RAF clearly saw itself as the executor of such imperatives. Vulgar Communist platitudes, Benjamin had argued, capture more levels of meaning than bourgeois profundity ever will.26 No such layers entered the RAF’s thinking. The point was indeed to change the world, not merely interpret it. But their acts needed in turn to be interpreted as the acting out of a dilemma that it was in no one’s power to resolve. 1. In 1967 the student movement had gained legitimacy through its militant protest against the so-called ‘emergency laws’ (Notstandsgesetze), which for the first time since the Second World War paved the way for the possible declaration of a state of emergency within the framework of the West German constitution. 2. It was the RAF’s declared aim to get the state to show its true colours by declaring such a state of emergency. The violence of the judicial system and security apparatus would then be exposed for all to see. This is indeed what happened. The state (over)played its role. 3. But so did the RAF. They imagined that they were extending the revolution from the Third World

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into the heart of the First and heralding the end of internationalized class relations. A new constellation had brought on another war. American imperialism had, they thought, revealed itself to be an extension of fascism. (Marcuse, we saw, privately entertained similar thoughts.) The victories of the Vietcong seemed to mark a historical turning point. On the basis of this assessment, which was all the more warped for containing some truth, the RAF wanted to light the fuse of a ‘real state of emergency’ through a campaign of bombings and assassinations. But in the public mind the one that they actually provoked reinforced the necessity of the rule of law. While Benjamin’s concept of a permanent state of emergency had not meanwhile lost any of its force – as level-headed a political thinker as Hannah Arendt came close to endorsing it in her Benjamin essay of 1968 – no one could honestly believe that West Germany still found itself in a fascist ‘state of emergency’. Nothing is ever to be gained by denying the obvious. ‘Just’ and ‘radical’ are synonymous. We do not live in the same ‘dark times’ (Arendt). Darkness is a whole spectrum unto itself. In his essay on surrealism Benjamin spoke of ‘winning the forces of intoxication [Rausch] for the revolution’.27 But he also made the following cautionary assessment. To place exclusive emphasis on the intoxicating, anarchic components of the revolutionary act was ‘to subordinate the methodical, disciplined preparation for revolution entirely to a praxis that oscillated between exercise and advance celebration [Übung und Vorfeier]’.28 At its weakest, surrealism would thus have travestied what was historically needed: a yoking together of anarchism and historical materialism. The RAF was an entirely different type of hybrid. It combined wild Marxian theory with the suicidal strategy of a would-be urban guerrilla without a sea to swim in. ‘To each his own chimera’: revolutionary aspirations had for Baudelaire been one more way of ‘getting drunk’ in a disenchanted world. The RAF drowned its illusions in killing, surviving and dying.29 This deadly exercise was another variation of the ‘childish’ anarchism that both pacifism and activism represented in Benjamin’s eyes. What the RAF lacked was, in short, his powers of political judgement. Of these the Eighth Thesis is a highly contested example. Holding contradictory levels of meaning together, it makes the complicated claim that the antifascist position can be improved only in an absolute perspective. Benjamin usually associates the term ‘improvement’ with the belief in progress as a historical norm – the very belief that he is here diagnosing as

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the fatal weakness of the anti-fascist Left. The latter’s position therefore needs ‘improvement’ – but clearly not in any meliorist sense. Appearances to the contrary, the idea of substituting one emergency for another is not a politics of all or nothing; it aims for strategic gains. The RAF transformed this blend of prudence and daring into a very different kind of nihilism. 30 It hypostatized some of Benjamin’s political impulses – just hatred, legitimate violence, positive barbarism – and was oblivious to others. 31 Rainer Rochlitz makes the liberal case against the Eighth Thesis: The recourse to an authoritarian politics in­ dissociable from Carl Schmitt’s concept of a state of emergency is understandable within the terrible context of the triumph of Nazism in Europe. Contrary to what Benjamin’s formulation implies, however, it cannot be generalized beyond that situation. If the state of emergency is the rule, then the only sane course of action is the politics of making things worse [la politique du pire]. In the 1970s, the ethics of certain terrorist groups grew out of this despair; they described Western capitalist societies as fascist regimes, against which they sought to ‘bring about a real state of emergency’. It was in the name of a false actualization that Benjamin’s work exerted its greatest political influence. Whatever the ambiguities of postwar European regimes, their constitutions are those of states of law and do not rest on naked violence and oppression. We have to be able to differentiate between fascist regimes and democratic ones that contain certain class privileges: Benjamin’s thinking does not allow us to do so. The terrorist violence that struck at those regimes mistook its target. Far from redeeming the suffering undergone by the victims of past generations, it merely created new injustices.32

The RAF’s actualization of the Eighth Thesis is here called ‘false’. Yet the possibility of such misreading is located in the Thesis itself. In which case the RAF’s response to it would not be so false after all – and social-democratic and terrorist versions of the Eighth Thesis not that far apart. The need for new analyses of new situations was – pace Rochlitz – intrinsic to Benjamin’s method. 33 Correlatively, no text was to be generalized beyond the conditions of its emergence (or reduced to them). How to reappraise his own most exposed and time-bound texts in this light? How reactualize the Eighth Thesis better? Faced with our daily global news, Benjamin would surely have acknowledged the obvious – that the first task is to achieve the state of law. Whether he would have moderated his mistrust of it is another matter. To rethink his thinking today with its own imperatives in mind would mean, first, to give the ‘power [Gewalt] of

facts’ priority over ‘convictions’34 and, second, to let the agon between the best convictions – e.g. Rochlitz’s (all too narrow and innocuous) and Agamben’s (all too broad and catastrophist) accounts of the state of emergency – crystallize into other alternatives. Tertium datur. Justice was not a matter of scales and ‘balance’ (Ausgewogenheit) if these meant compromise. What Benjamin meant by the ‘organization of pessimism’35 was precisely not a politique du pire36 but an attempt to avert the worst. The RAF admittedly made comparable claims. But its version of the Eighth Thesis only made matters worse. If Benjamin’s attempt to ‘improve’ them through an anarcho-messianic clarifi­ cation of the political situation was a wager, it was not a game of Russian roulette. The ‘Critique of Violence’, the Eighth Thesis, Benjamin’s game of chess with Schmitt, and the headlong career of the RAF form an instructive constellation of extremes: 1. In its reaction to the Schleyer crisis a socialdemocratic state decreed the first state of emergency in the history of the Federal Republic – a turn of events that was accompanied by a modest revival of interest in Schmitt.37 It lends credence to Agamben’s larger thesis that since the end of the First World War Western democracies have increasingly integrated the possibility of declaring a state of emergency into their judicial arsenal. In which case, the claim that the ‘state of emergency’ is in fact the rule would apply, in a precise judicial sense, far beyond Benjamin’s epoch. 2. Why, Kraushaar asks, did the state react to a group that it refused to recognize as a political association but only as a marginal ‘band of criminal elements’ as if it constituted a threat to its existence?38 Surprise at this, Benjamin would surely have said, is ‘not philosophical’. According to the ‘Critique of Violence’, the modern state is allergic to any challenge, however disproportionate, to its authority. An order that ‘creates a world in its own image’ (Marx) tolerates no violence beside its own. Like the Enlightenment in general, it fears whatever it is unable to reduce to its own measure.39 This the RAF put to the test. If its fate confirmed Benjamin’s diagnosis of the state, its actions, far from implementing his critique of violence, helped worsen the latter’s position. To repeat: by what ‘pure means’ that critique can be implemented today remains the unanswered question.

A Trauerspiel The conclusion to Benjamin’s ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, written in 1938, reads:

On occasion, Baudelaire also claimed to recognize the image of the modern hero in the conspirator. ‘No more tragedies!’, he wrote in the Salut public during the February days. ‘No more history of ancient Rome! Are we not greater today than Brutus?’ Greater than Brutus was, to be sure, less great. For when Napoleon III came to power, Baudelaire did not recognize the Caesar in him. Therein Blanqui was his superior. What they shared nevertheless went deeper than their differences: obstinacy and impatience, the force of their indignation and their hatred, and the powerlessness that was their common lot. In a famous line Baudelaire lightheartedly takes leave of a world ‘in which action is not the sister of dream’. His was not as forsaken as he thought. Blanqui’s deeds were the sister of Baudelaire’s dreams. The two are intertwined – the entwined hands on a stone under which Napoleon III had buried the hopes of the June fighters.40

In an age that had no use for heroes only the role of hero in the Trauerspiel of modernity was available.41 An earlier passage reconstructs Baudelaire’s notion of modern heroism as follows: The resistance that modernity pits against a man’s natural productive élan is out of all proportion to his strength. It is understandable that he should weary and seek refuge in death. Modernity cannot but stand under the sign of suicide. Suicide sets its seal under a heroic will that makes no concession to a hostile environment. It is not renunciation but heroic passion.42

Anger, impotence, failure, the disproportion between a heroic will and the existing order – these traits form a constellation in which revolutionary and counterrevolutionary impulses can veer into one another. ‘To interrupt the course of the world – this was Baudelaire’s deepest wish’;43 he raged against the crowd ‘with the impotent anger of one who goes against wind and rain’.44 In his last work, Blanqui pronounces ‘the most terrible indictment’ of his own revolutionary efforts.45 Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’ is as intimately at odds with revolution as it is with religion. Benjamin and the RAF constitute two further poles in this persisting ‘Saturnine’ constellation of act, dream, will, anger, impotence and suicide. Both represent a return of the bid to interrupt the eternal return of the same. But are their hands entwined on a stone under which their hopes lie buried? There is little to suggest that Benjamin’s dream corresponded to the ‘terroristic daydream’,46 let alone the deeds, of the RAF. In his late writings Benjamin considers not merely Baudelaire but also Blanqui from varying angles. Within

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three decades social democracy had, according to the Twelfth Thesis, managed to ‘erase almost entirely’ a name ‘whose sound sent tremors [erschütterte] through the last century’.47 Benjamin detects this effect even in Blanqui’s final capitulation, L’Éternité par les astres.48 Two years before, however, in the opening pages of his first published work on Baudelaire, he places Blanqui in a context which raises doubts about the effectiveness of his methods. He here occupies a ‘hybrid’ position. Marx, while acknowledging Blanqui as one of the ‘real leaders of the proletarian party’, portrays the professional conspirators as ‘alchemists’ who ‘improvise’ the revolution and ‘despise the more theoretical enlightenment of the workers concerning their class interests’. Their firebombs and other engines of destruction seem all ‘the more miraculous and surprising’, he claims, ‘the less rational their foundation is’.49 Elsewhere Benjamin transforms this objection into a far-reaching insight: One might well ask whether Blanqui’s political activity does not display features which reveal it as the action of the same man who in old age wrote L’Eternité par les astres. H.B. [Heinrich Blücher] even assumes that the world-view developed by Blanqui at seventy was conceived at the age of eighteen, and that this explains the desperate [desparat] character of his political activity in general. There is, clearly, no precise argument which could substantiate this assumption. On the other hand, we should not simply dismiss the idea that Blanqui’s persistent lack of interest in the theoretical foundations of socialism may have sprung from a deep-seated mistrust of the conclusions that await anyone who immerses himself too deeply in the structures of the world and of life. Blanqui would not, at the last, have escaped such immersion.50

The hidden link suggested here between Blanqui’s revolutionary activities and his concluding quasiscientific postscript on the eternal revolutions of the stars stands in stark contrast to the ‘unity of theory and praxis’ postulated by Marx. A split unity is now located not merely between Baudelaire’s dream and Blanqui’s action but also in the contradiction within the latter between theory and praxis. 51 Not unlike the sudden, apparently gratuitous acts described in Baudelaire’s prose poems which serve to give ennui the slip and suspend the tyranny of Time, Blanqui’s coups would have been so many attempts to forestall the demobilizing effect of the recognition that revolution was not – pace Marx – inscribed in the logic of history. It could, if at all, only be snatched from its so-called progress. This widening

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split between dream, action and knowledge recalled the post-mediaeval dissociation between knowledge and belief. Like the concluding section of the preface to the Trauerspiel book, the above-quoted note could have been entitled Pro domo. It also sheds an oblique light on the desperado tactics of the RAF. Amalgamating

some of the above-mentioned motifs from Benjamin’s Baudelaire with others from his Arcades Project, one might characterize the RAF as follows. They acted like a man trying to brave wind and rain with a machinegun. Unable to accept that the heroic role of the revolutionary agitator had been played out, they played it for real and tried to prove its – and their – existence by force. Their activism was an ago quia absurdum, a macabre theatre of the absurd. If capitalism was a religion, so was their anti-capitalism. For them, as for Benjamin, history was (in Stephen Dedalus’s phrase) a nightmare from which they wanted to awaken; or rather they wanted, by their example, to awaken the others – the ‘historical subject’ – to action; but they too were a ‘dream-collective’ and their sleep – a Marxist variant of Goya’s ‘sleep of reason’ – engendered monsters; in short, they merely contributed to the nightmare. Neither the rhetoric of their acts nor the phraseology of their declaration to the court could bridge the gulf between theory and praxis. What their lurid trajectory

did do, however, was to highlight that abyss and with it the intolerable political blockage of our times. Certain ‘relational concepts’ (Relationsbegriffe), Benjamin writes in 1923, are perhaps best understood ‘if they do not from the outset refer exclusively to man’. A life or a moment could be unforgettable even if all men had forgotten it. They would contain ‘a demand unfulfilled by men’ and ‘probably also a reference to a realm in which it is fulfilled: God’s remembrance’. 52 The Theses restate this demand as the claim of our oppressed forebears on our attention. 53 This claim too – the demand for justice, for remembrance in action – would surely persist even if most men had forgotten it. Benjamin’s ‘theology’ is synonymous with this melancholy experience of human obliviousness. Is it an accident that the winning combination of the First Thesis consists of two non-human partners, a puppet and a dwarf? Where are those to do the job? Is the human species up to it? If not, who? The sad, failed history – the Trauerspiel – of the RAF renews these questions.

Test of time We began this essay with various forms of Entsetzen – the RAF’s actions, their unclear association with Benjamin, the dormant anarchy awaiting collective release – and the spectrum of meanings that Benjamin associates with this word, ranging from the ‘removal’ [Entsetzung] of the state to certain minimal ‘deviations’ from the standard course.54 It is ‘not by violence’, we recall, that the Messiah will change the world, but ‘merely by adjusting it ever so slightly’;55 and the historical materialist must in turn attend to these ‘most unobtrusive’ of changes. 56 The greatest transformation can thus prove to be the merest shift of position. Power and powerlessness are as dialectically interlinked as sobriety and intoxication. 57 ‘Pure’ violence is the counter­part of ‘perpetual peace’. All the above-named elements coexist in Benjamin’s thinking. It is as if the ‘chess master’ evoked in the First Thesis combined every virtue named thereafter, though doubtless not in any single move: the ‘weak Messianic force’ and the virile explosive power; the paralysed horror of the angel and the avenging hatred of the oppressed; single-minded resolution and devious humour; a monastic distance from world events and the closest attention to detail; violence and non-violence. All these conflicting, heterogeneous impulses are needed if historical materialism is to prove a ‘match for all comers’. To object that they can cohere, if at all, only on paper is to ignore the relation that they state – and, in so doing, perform – between word

and deed. Benjamin’s writings illustrate his theory of language – one in which the word partakes of the Word. Here at least a certain unity between theory and praxis obtains. To return to the sticking point: what is the share of physical violence in the ‘whole contradictory fund’58 of his thinking? This can, he claims, only be decided from case to case. Let us therefore briefly consider a particularly relevant one: The Destructive Character (1931). 59 Like its model, who does not worry about ‘being misunderstood’, this text is exposed ‘on all sides to idle talk’.60 In today’s climate, it could even be suspected of condoning terrorism. ‘Ripeness for destruction’ (Zerstörungswürdigkeit) is what the destructive character ‘tests’ the world for. ‘Not always with brute force [Gewalt]; sometimes it is refined’. Unconditional non-violence is not a political option here; violence is essential as a ‘pure means’: ‘What exists he reduces to rubble, not for the sake of the rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.’ What does this stupendous programme involve? The dying fall of another sentence gives an ominous hint: ‘First of all, for a moment at least, empty space – the place where the thing stood or the victim lived.’61 Not merely are (inanimate) thing and (living) victim given equally short shrift here. All superfluous affect, notably the smokescreen of virtuous indignation, is likewise removed.62 But can one assent without question to this suspension of moral affect? Questions and objections arise here thick and fast. Is it only a ‘fine’ terror (schönes Entsetzen) that the above sentence inspires? After all that has meanwhile happened, who can still derive satisfaction from such results? What if the victims’ names were Philemon and Baucis? Was it because an end to mythical violence still did not appear ‘unimaginably remote’ to Benjamin that he could so coolly envisage the sacrifice of human life? If so, how tenable was such an assessment? How do we read it in the light of the subsequent Nazi and Stalinist campaigns of ‘liquidation’ and ‘purification’? Would not the deadly misuse of such terms soon render them unusable? Or was it now all the more necessary to reaffirm them – in the teeth of possible misunderstanding? Benjamin seems to have adopted the latter strategy. The closing paragraphs of his Kraus essay, written in the same year, oppose a purifying, destructive justice both to the ‘constructive ambiguities of the law’ and to the impure rhetoric of the George circle, despite and because of the latter’s talk of ‘purity’, ‘sacrifice’ and a ‘new humanity’.63 Here as elsewhere Benjamin pronounces judgement on what constitutes pure and impure violence, purity and sacrifice with apodictic

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certainty and a biblically inspired furore.64 Who does not share that fury? But who is granted that certainty? Can such distinctions always be so clearly made? Did not Benjamin once argue that Communism was not a matter of the ‘right’ course, but of a necessarily, symptomatically and productively false one? Doesn’t the historical Trauerspiel show in terrible detail that a ‘false’ order imposes an impure, mixed violence even on its best enemies and that the circle of mythic violence could never be broken in entirely ‘pure’ fashion? ‘The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away.’65 Such evacuation (Entsetzung) causes terror (Entsetzen). Wittingly or not, it is driven by the need to clean up a fallen, profaned, ‘overnamed’ Creation. The destructive character – the (in)human counterpart of an exterminating angel – fulfils Benjamin’s anarcho-theological dream of justice in action. Here too, however, dream is not the sister of action; it is rather its distant relative. The fulfilment of the dream is still part of it; the portrait is not its model; his activity is mimed here by an act of language which symbolically partakes – but by the same token falls short – of it. Nor is it an accident that the actual models for this portrait were (anti-)cultural figures – destroyers of ornament (Loos), cliché (Kraus), catharsis (Brecht), and so on. Where, then, are this text and the character it describes to be situated? Notwithstanding the ‘symbolic’ relation of word to Word – and the ‘spark’ between speech and act – the separation between the literary and political spheres remains. While not therefore a directly political statement, The Destructive Character nevertheless stands for a politics that would be ‘nothing but politics’. Benjamin’s theology of the profane has almost dissolved here into the profane. But theological elements persist,66 among them an echo of the Jewish ban on graven images. The destructive character has ‘no image’ of the future and can thus pursue a ‘teleology without end-purpose’. He is, in short, the profane executor of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’. The question thus arises once again: under what circumstances can the most ‘monstrous’ cases that these texts evoke – the ‘revolutionary killing of the oppressor’ or the ‘clearing away’ of the ‘victim’ – still be envisaged? At least in the West, it has long made little political sense to shoot replaceable ‘character-masks’ (Marx). Let us consider the issue from another angle. Benjamin will later refer to his ‘psychology’ of the destructive character.67 But what this figure represents is in fact the clearing away of what is usually

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understood by psychology and character. Just as the surrealists ‘exchange, to a man, the play of human features for the dial of an alarm clock’,68 he reduces not merely the world but his own psyche to a bare minimum. Benjamin’s commentaries on Brecht likewise turn on the dismantling and retooling of person, name and function.69 Those who ‘stand firmest’ in the Communist cause, he comments on ‘Of poor B.B.’, ‘are those who started by letting themselves fall’.70 Here, too, the question arises whether such claims have not meanwhile been refuted by events. Would not Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon show that it was precisely those who had stood firmest in the revolutionary cause who were reduced to testifying against themselves in the name of revolutionary justice?71 But surely the destructive character is armed against this travesty of revolutionary self-sacrifice by his ‘insuperable mistrust of the course of events’ and his permanent awareness – that of ‘historical man’ – that ‘everything can always go wrong’.72 He thus stands for powers of instant, active, critical judgement in a rapidly changing environment – in short, for what Benjamin calls ‘presence of mind’. A German Bolshevist revolution, he wrote only a few months before this text appeared (in November 1931 in the Frankfurter Zeitung), might allow him to write differently; but he had no illusions about the reception his writings could expect from a victorious KPD.73 This remark sums up the context of The Destructive Character. It intervenes in the virtual space – the noman’s-land – opened up between East and West by ‘the fact of “Soviet Russia”’.74 This fact no more convicts it of complicity with Stalinist purges and terror than its free-standing status frees it from the ‘context of guilt’ (Schuldzusammenhang) in which it, like all texts, is implicated. A just critique of this text would likewise involve presence of mind: rapid historico-critical judgement of its historico-critical judgement. The mistrust – which Benjamin attributes to Blanqui – of the ‘conclusions awaiting anyone who immerses himself deeply in the structures of the world and of life’ may also, we suggested, have been his own.75 Instead of seeking to come to terms with, say, Nietzsche’s ‘psychology of ressentiment’ or Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, which gave advance insight into the mass psychology of fascism, he focuses on the mass as the matrix of a liberation from the entanglements of bourgeois psychology. It is this promise that the destructive character fulfils. Neither a communist ‘new man’ nor a Nietzschean ‘superman’ but an Unmensch (a ‘monster’ qua ‘un-man’), this terrible simplificateur has effected

a ‘complete reduction of his own condition, indeed the extraction of his root [Radizierung]’.76 ‘To be radical’, Marx had written, ‘is to grasp the root of the matter. But for man the root is man himself.’77 Communism, thus conceived, completes the project of Enlightenment humanism. If, as the last-quoted sentence from The Destructive Character suggests, man in turn now needs to be reduced to his root, this is because bourgeois humanism has meanwhile got in the way. Such a quasi-mathematical reduction of the human – of what Nietzsche called the ‘human, all-toohuman’ – naturally raises a host of questions. (How avoid a return of the repressed? The RAF’s attempt to cut through all political and psychological knots is a warning example.) But its purpose is clear: to find a way through the labyrinthine ‘structures of the world and of life’, including bourgeois psychology and morality. It is, however, a measure of the difficulty of finding the right man for the job that the one presented here should not be a ‘man’ at all but rather an ideal type, a drawing-board model sketched at a certain distance from empirical reality.78 He represents one experimental solution among a ‘contradictory fund’ of others in Benjamin’s work to the problem of how to sidestep – or in his case demolish – the quasi-ontological ‘structures of the world and of life’ in order to do what needs to be done. ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity’, Kant had written, ‘no straight thing was ever made’.79 If its knots are nevertheless to be undone, an equally crooked strategy is needed. Benjamin entrusts it to a hunchbacked dwarf, whose motto might be: ‘The devil is old; grow old to understand him.’80 ‘We have become poor’, he wrote two years later; but he still saw a political chance in that reduced condition.81 Our world is characterized by a poverty of political alternatives. Many will, however, assent to Habermas’s objection that the alternative posited by Benjamin between pure revolutionary violence and a mythical status quo is, under today’s circumstances, too starkly Manichaean to be viable. But the destructive character is, precisely, a genius of the viable. ‘Where others come up against walls and mountains, there too he sees a way.’ It is in this refusal of existing alternatives that his actuality lies. Every moment, Benjamin claims, has its own ‘peculiar revolutionary chance.’82 The question is: what type of genius would it take to seize it in post-revolutionary times? For Hegel world history is its own Court of Judgement (Weltgericht). For Benjamin the historical equivalent to the Last Judgement is the ‘standing judgement’ of one historical moment on ‘certain preceding ones’83 – not, then, on the whole past, but on that past that is

à l’ordre du jour. Such summary justice is ‘untimely’ (Nietzsche), ‘involuntary’ (Proust), ‘partial, passionate and political’ (Baudelaire). Its enabling medium is the critical passage of time, its modality the flash in which the present and a no less particular past coincide in an unrepeatable image.84 At every turn of phrase and events, the historical materialist, the literary critic, the writer and the translator, as Benjamin conceives them, exercise such judgement. And so does the destructive character. What verdict, then, is our historical moment entitled to pass on his intervention in his? He is ‘the bearer of a mandate’.85 Do we still have one? The only question, Benjamin writes on his return from Moscow in 1927, is: Which reality is inwardly converging with the truth? Which truth is inwardly preparing to converge with the real? Only he who gives clear answers to these questions is ‘objective’. Not toward his contemporaries (that’s not what matters) but towards events (that is decisive).86

Just as all language and works of art ultimately address themselves, in the early Benjamin’s scheme of things, not to an audience but to God, 87 so a political mandate issues here from the need of the times and not from public opinion, which might be oblivious to it. ‘Truth’ and ‘reality’ are destined to coincide. Global capitalism, which knows no truth outside reality, has reduced this revolutionary ontology to a ghostly, underground existence.88 But even though no viable political alternative to this one-dimensional religion has so far emerged, it cannot lay its ghosts for good. If it could, world history would indeed turn out to be its own Last Judgement.

The aftermath ‘Tiny radical minorities’ make convenient scapegoats. But all the blame cannot be laid on the RAF. How Benjamin would have judged this particular ‘extreme’ we cannot know. He did, however, speak of the social order as a chronic ‘context of guilt’. The so-called ‘Baader–Meinhof complex’ was surely one of its acutest contemporary symptoms. Extrapolating from one of Benjamin’s boldest anthropological speculations, 89 one could also see the RAF as having acted out buried desires of the collective political unconscious. Hence the vestigial ‘aura’ that surrounds them, nowadays trivialized on the T-shirt market. That their strategy would fail was foreseeable. But what alternatives did ‘false’ circumstances permit? How, in a ‘state of emergency’, ‘reach for the emergency brake’?90 How move in an ‘iron cage’? To act where action is blocked: can this be done without a streak of madness – a passage

17

à l’acte? Not to act when action is needed: is this not the reverse ‘pathology of the normal’, which serves to protect us from such madness? Only if this dilemma were no longer taken in the safe doses with which the media inure us to it could it begin to be resolved. ‘Where are those’, the young Benjamin quotes Nietzsche as asking, ‘who are in need [Not]?’91 No one is belatedly being asked to become a ‘sympathizer’ with the ‘real existing’ RAF – but rather a ‘foreign friend’92 of the need that drove them before it was supplanted by the activity of staying alive. What it drove them to provoked a massive reaffirmation of the status quo. It was against their cause that they united the collective. Their desperate gamble proved, if proof was needed, the impossibility of achieving justice through terror. This did not, however, yet prove that it was attainable without violence – violence of a ‘purer’ kind. Politico-ethical judgement can surely be exercised only from within this dilemma. The real and imagined challenge posed by the RAF bore little relation to the relatively small number of its victims; the apparatus mobilized against it was even more disproportionate. It seems likely that the ‘unmastered’ German past was at work on both sides; but such a hypothesis is not easily tested. How deeply those ‘leaden years’ have impressed themselves on the collective memory is equally difficult to assess. The needs of capitalist production dictate that each present ‘antiquate’ what went before, which becomes as stale as yesterday’s newspaper, as passé as a recent fashion and as unreal as last night’s dream.93 So too in the case of the RAF. The ensuing process of ‘normalization’ has closed the episode. By ‘historicizing’ it, scholarship too has helped lay it to rest. Without too much outcry, things again ‘go on this way’.94 And yet – to continue citing Benjamin – the enemy still does not feel entirely safe from the dead.95 In the second exposé for the Arcades Project Benjamin observes of nineteenth-century France that ‘the glitter and splendour with which this commodity-producing society surrounds itself, along with its illusory sense of security, are not immune to dangers; the collapse of the Second Empire and the Commune of Paris remind it of that’.96 The ‘spectre’ of revolution (Marx) and the ‘uncanny guest’ of nihilism (Nietzsche) were the writing on the wall. The RAF was a latter-day heir to both. To criminalize their acts, to pathologize their motives, to demand their repentance, and to leave it at that, as the prevailing wisdom does, is to want to exorcise the vast problem – that of elementary political justice – which, however criminally and pathologically, they refused to ignore.

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But the Left, too, has its ghosts.97 ‘We did 1968’, said Wolinski, ‘so as not to become whom we became’. Putting the past behind one is, however, the very sin for which the German protest movement originally denounced its fathers.98 Dr Strangelove, or How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb: most ex-protesters have meanwhile gone with the times, exchanging the critical theory they once learned from their adoptive fathers for a reality principle which is, from their former standpoint, the most insidious, self-effacing ideology of all. They have ‘matured’ and expelled their daimon (if they had had one) along with their demons.99 Once burned, twice shy: how many former sympathizers with the RAF now keep a low profile? Others have recanted and joined the other side, like the ex-Communists of a former period.100 Today’s ‘sobering-up’ (Ernüchterung) knows only Weber’s notion of soberness and disenchantment, not those of Marx or Benjamin, with which it is, precisely, dis­ enchanted. In short, the observation made by Adorno and Horkheimer in 1969 that the disenchantment of the world has traversed all world-historical convulsions undeterred101 has been borne out by the aftermath of the student movement and its terrorist sequel. In this sense, they may indeed prove to have been mere episodes. Benjamin’s fortunes on the cultural market have followed suit.102 A long initial vogue103 was borne by the ‘cultural revolution’ initiated by the student movement, whose break-up in the mid-1970s marked the ‘turning of the tide’ (the so-called Tendenzwende). The entry of Benjamin’s writings into the academic canon and the cultural feuilletons was accompanied by a more sophisticated awareness of their complexities, but also by an increasing disengagement from their political stakes.104 A project that was intended to smash the kaleidoscope of so-called cultural history is now a ‘challenging’, ‘provocative’ part of it. A conference held in 2006 by an international Benjamin society could in all impunity call itself a ‘Benjamin festival’. All this parasitic activity around him cannot conceal the falling of his political stock. They ‘confirm their defeat’, he wrote at a more threatening moment, ‘by betraying their own cause’.105 Today’s (ex-)Left has confirmed its defeat by abandoning much of the ground it lost meanwhile and internalizing many of the arguments it used to fight. The debacle of the RAF may well have contributed its share to this general retreat. The horizon is one of non-expectation; and it is against this blocked prospect that Benjamin’s writings are read today. There seems to be tacit agreement on all sides that their interest

can no longer lie in their politics. To excise these from Benjamin’s corpus is, however, to abort its afterlife. A different type of ‘mortification’106 is needed. Benjamin’s own materialist historiography and literary criticism point the way. They show how works become ‘readable’, ‘quotable’ and ‘criticizable’ only in the medium of the historical experience that links them to, and separates them from, our present. To try to bring this method to bear on his own texts is to engage at every turn in a difficult exercise of judgement in which the ‘court’ itself may not emerge intact. The task is to develop combined powers of historical, political and aesthetic decision which draw their strength from the – always ‘meagre’107 – present without succumbing to the so-called spirit of the times. This is easier said than done. A tentative beginning was sketched above in the case of The Destructive Character – a text which posed the question of violence under vastly different conditions over seventy-five years ago. Two sets of comments, objections and questions should at least be mentioned in conclusion: 1. While the RAF emerged out of the specific conditions of postwar Germany, we now know that it also stood at the threshold of an unforeseeable renewal of political terrorism in a new multipolar world. At a moment when the armed struggle of small ultra-radical groups had played itself out in the West, the destruction of the Twin Towers precipitated a new form of asymmetrical warfare between realigned geopolitical and ideological forces. The rhetoric of international class struggle was replaced by that of ‘the clash of civilizations’ and by reciprocal neo-religious anathema worlds apart, and light years behind, Benjamin’s theology of the profane. But there is, thanks to globalization, now no corner of the earth where the demand for justice is not heard. One of the most tangible responses to it has been the creation of international courts of law to which nation-states cede a small portion of their sovereignty. Has, then, the case for weakening the rule of law become moot in a world where the first task is often to strengthen it? Would Benjamin have conceded that the state often needs to be bolstered before it can properly wither away? And what place can a particular – in this case, anarcho-messianic – version of universal justice claim in an increasingly multicultural context? To this latter question two late notes suggest the makings of an answer: ‘The constructive principle of universal history allows it to be represented in partial histories.… Universal history in the present-day sense is never more than a kind of esperanto.’108 2. Benjamin wrote of pointing a self-constructed telescope through a ‘fog of blood’.109 Now as then,

‘impure’, ‘mythical’ violence remains the rule, not the exception. The fog is partially pierced by isolated political demonstrations and strikes, some philosophical thinking, historical analysis and investigative journalism, a few works of art, and countless daily acts of resistance. Today’s states, reaping the harvest of the violence that they inflict at home and abroad, are subject to intermittent disturbance from their inner margins and the threat of terrorist attack from without. The threat of ‘mutually assured destruction’ (MAD) that hung over the Cold War has yielded to another worst-case scenario: weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists with nothing to gain or to lose. In this climate of latent terror, harassed, docile populations indiscriminately abhor ‘violence’ and blindly demand ‘security’ – unspecific notions behind which specific interests take cover. Under such conditions Benjamin’s plea for ‘pure’ violence would seem to have little or no constituency. The critique of violence, he argues, cannot afford to stop short at the law and the state. A ‘lesser programme’ will not suffice: the minimum is the maximum. Only the prospect of a ‘way out’ of all previous history – the term is Ausgang, as in Kant’s ‘What is Enlighten­ment?’ – would enable a ‘critical, discriminating and decisive [scheidende und entscheidende] angle of vision [Einstellung] on its temporal data’.110 It is on this premiss, conceived not as a regulative but as a realisable idea, that the Theses likewise rest. If the Angel of History, who sees one unbroken catastrophe, hardly seems to discriminate between the ‘temporal data’, such discrimination nevertheless remains the task of the ‘historical materialist’, who looks, as it were, over his shoulder. One might be tempted to conclude that Benjamin’s ‘idea’ has meanwhile been buried once and for all under all the ‘temporal data’. The idea – the Angel – sees it differently. From his angle of vision, it is the earth that is buried, and the sky obscured, by the mounting facts.111 Without some such perspective, history would, from this perspective, merely be what Anglo-Saxon understatement says it is: ‘one damned thing after another’. Not for nothing, however, does Benjamin compare the historical materialist to a camera­man who adjusts the lighting and angle of his shots to the needs of the moment.112 The wide metaphysical angle of vision does not suffice on its own. From this we may perhaps extrapolate the following conclusion. What is needed today is not a lesser programme – what other objective can there be than the institution of a classless society without further delay? – but its adjustment to straitened circumstances. If Benjamin never gave up

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his minimum programme, several late formulations nevertheless reduced it to its minimum: a ‘dwarf’, a ‘weak Messianic power’, the ‘smallest guarantee’.113 A reduced model of anarchy is needed – one that could no longer lead anyone into the dead end of trying, against all better knowledge, to force the way out, go it alone, and claim, in so doing, to represent the oppressed. Might this, under the present circumstances, mean casting our lot with non-violence? Yes, if it is violent enough. Today’s winning combination might be one in which Benjamin’s critique of violence joined forces with those of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. Who, though, does not feel perplexity114 in the face of unabated global violence? ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.’115 But what if the former had made themselves at home in the void and the latter were merely trying to deny it? Something else is clearly needed if it isn’t ‘mere anarchy’ but, on the contrary, anarchy of an unprecedented kind that is to be ‘loosed upon the world’.116 The young Benjamin calls it belief, but adds that ‘everything depends how one believes in one’s belief’.117 Two decades later he is still ‘inclined to assume’ that the planet is waiting for an end to blood and horror. Whether we are capable of presenting it with this three or four hundred millionth birthday gift is, he goes on, highly questionable. But if we don’t, the planet will finally ‘have us, its heedless well-wishers, served the Last Judgement’.118 The day we do, Judgement too will have withered away. The planet, then, is waiting. What, then, are we waiting for? But what we?

Notes

1. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (henceforth GS), ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppen­ häuser, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1972– 89, II, 1, pp. 297–8; ‘Surrealism’, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings (henceforth SW), ed. Michael W. Jennings, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1999, vol. 2, p. 209. 2. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe (henceforth GB), ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1995–2000, III, p. 159, letter to Scholem of 29 May 1926; The Correspondence of Walter Benj­amin 1910–1940, trans. R. and E.M. Jacobson, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994, p. 301. 3. Theocracy ‘has no political, only a religious, meaning’. GS, II, 1, p. 203; ‘Theologico-Political Fragment’, in SW, vol. 3, p. 305. 4. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, ‘On the New Idols’, Fried­ rich Nietzsche, Kritische Gesamtausgabe (henceforth KG), ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, De

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Gruyter, Berlin, 1969, VI, 1, pp. 57–60. 5. GS, VI, pp. 104–8; ‘The Right to Use Force’, in SW, vol. 1, pp. 231–4. 6. GS, VI, p. 105; SW, vol. 1, p. 231. 7. GS, VI, pp. 105–6; SW, vol. 1, pp. 231–2. Non-violence, Benjamin here claims, has little prospect of political success. Non-resistance to the point of martyrdom can, however, be a moral, indeed a sacred action, as when communities of Galician Jews let themselves be cut down in their synagogues. 8. GS, VI, pp. 106–7; SW, vol. 1, p. 233. 9. Cf. Benjamin’s early ‘Notes for a Work on the Category of Justice’, Frankfurter Adorno Blätter IV, 1992, pp. 41–2. 10. GS, VI, pp. 107–8; ‘The Right to Use Force’, in SW, vol. 1, pp. 233–4. 11. GS, II, 1, pp. 203–4; SW, vol. 3, p. 155. 12. Ibid. 13. GS, VI, p. 203; ‘The Right to Use Force’, in SW, vol. 1, p. 233. 14. GB, III, p. 160; Correspondence, p. 301. 15. GS, I, 2, p. 697; ‘On the Concept of History’, Thesis VIII, in SW, vol. 4, p. 392. 16. GS, I, 2, pp. 702–3; Thesis XVII, in SW, vol. 4, p. 396. 17. Cf. in addition to Habermas’s essay, Axel Honneth’s interpretation of the ‘Critique of Violence’, in Burk­hardt Lindner, ed., Benjamin-Handbuch, Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart, 2006; and Rainer Rochlitz, The Disenchantment of Art: The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin, trans. J.M. Todd, Guilford Press, New York, 1996. From entirely different perspectives, the aforementioned texts of Bolz and Derrida place Benjamin, Schmitt, Heidegger and others in the context of a ‘philosophical extremism’ that emerged between the world wars. 18. Cf. on the overall structure of this project Lieven De Cauter, ‘The Bloody Mystifications of the New World Order: On Agamben’s Homo Sacer’, in The Capsular Civilization: On the City in the Age of Fear, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2004, pp. 154–71. It turns on two extreme theses: the concentration camp as the biopolitical paradigm of modernity and the ‘state of exception’ as that of modern governance. 19. Cf. Vivian Liska, Giorgio Agambens leerer Messianismus, Schlebrügge, Vienna 2008. 20. Walter Benjamin/Gretel Adorno. Briefwechsel 1930– 1940, p. 410; also cited in GS, I, 3, p. 1223. It likewise takes Zarathustra the longest time to face his ‘most abysmal thought’ and ‘heaviest weight’. (Also sprach Zarathustra, III, ‘Der Genesende’, KG, VI, 1, pp. 266–7). Nietzsche’s affirmation and Benjamin’s refusal of ‘the eternal return of the same’ are perhaps the most intimate of enemies. 21. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. K. Attell, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005, ch. 4. The earlier moves in this game could be described as follows. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama Benjamin offered a subversive variation on Schmitt’s definition of the sovereign. The latter had in turn been a response to the ‘Critique of Violence’. The sovereign had filled the power vacuum resulting from the threatened suspension of law and state; deposed by revolution from below, he was restored by counterrevolution from above. If Agamben’s reconstruction is accurate, then Schmitt, for one, would not have considered the prospects of Benjamin’s ‘word against

the law’ to be ‘unimaginably remote’. 22. Cf. Susanna Heil, Gefährliche Beziehungen. Walter Benjamin und Carl Schmitt, Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart, 1996. 23. Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie. Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin, 1985, p. 11; Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1985, p. 5. 24. GS, I, 1, p. 406; The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, Verso, London, 1998, p. 232. 25. Cf. GS, II, 1, p. 194; ‘Critique of Violence’, in SW, vol. 1, p. 246. 26. GB, IV, pp. 19–20; Correspondence, pp. 372–3. 27. GS, II, 1, p. 308; ‘Surrealism’, in SW, vol. 2, p. 215. 28. GS, II, 1, p. 307; SW, vol. 2, pp. 215–16. 29. Distant parallels may perhaps be drawn between the hard revolutionary romanticism of the RAF and the fin de siècle decadence that Benjamin saw at work in Jünger’s cult of war. It ‘complied with the desires of the bourgeoisie, which longed for the downfall of the West the way a schoolboy does for an inkblot in the place of a wrong answer’ (GS, III, p. 243; ‘Theories of German Fascism’, in SW, vol. 2, p. 316). The difference between this ‘downfall’ (Untergang) and the one sought (according to the ‘Theologico-Political Fragment’) by happiness is roughly that between Thanatos and Eros. Zarathustra’s love for ‘those who know not how to live except by going under’ (‘Zarathustra’s Prologue’ (4), KG, VI, I, p. 11) embraces both. 30. Cf. on the differences between nihilisms my articles ‘Messianischer Nihilismus. Zu Benjamins Theologisch-politischem Fragment’, in Ashraf Noor and Josef Wohlmuth, eds, ‘Jüdische’ und ‘christliche’ Sprachfigurationen im 20 Jahrhundert, Schöningh, Paderborn, 2002, pp. 141–214; ‘Nihilismus kontra Nihilismus. Walter Benjamins Weltpolitik aus heutiger Sicht’, in Bernd Witte and Mauro Ponzi, eds, Theologie und Politik. Walter Benjamin und ein Paradigma der Moderne, Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin, 2005, pp. 107–36. 31. ‘To do the job properly [um ganze Arbeit zu leisten], one must … have felt what one wants to destroy’ (GS, III, p. 265). 32. Rochlitz, The Disenchantment of Art, p. 235. Rochlitz also rejects Benjamin’s version of the proletariat as the ‘avenging’ class that social democracy has schooled to forget its ‘hatred’ and its ‘spirit of sacrifice’ (GS, I, 2, p. 700; Thesis XII, in SW, vol. 4, p. 394). Here Benjamin is, Rochlitz claims, far from Marx’s class analysis and close to Nietzsche’s identification of socialism with ressentiment. In fact, however, Benjamin’s equation of vengeance with justice is remote from Zarathustra’s psychological diagnosis (in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, ‘Of the Tarantulas’, KG, VI, I, pp. 124–7) and close to Marx’s biblical sense of justice and to Nietzsche’s defence of active virtues against reactive vices. The early fragment ‘The Meaning of Time in the Moral Universe’ makes it clear that vengeance is not to be equated with retribution: the ‘retributive power’ of law is contrasted here with the fury of divine justice – a fury which sweeps through history in a ‘storm of forgiveness’ (GS, VI, p. 98; SW, vol. 1, p. 286–8). Similarly, Benjamin alternately admires the ‘hatred’ of the downtrodden and a ‘need for fresh air and open space’ that is ‘stronger than any hatred’ (GS, IV, 1, p. 396; ‘The Destructive Character’, in SW, vol. 2, p. 541). An overwhelming

33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

mass of historical and social-psychological material can undeniably be adduced in support of Rochlitz’s claims. But even if (as Marcuse observed in 1965 of terms such as ‘culture of the heart’ and ‘redemption’) Benjamin’s notions of ‘vengeance’ and ‘hatred’ sound today like echoes from another age, can we forgo them without becoming Nietzsche’s ‘last men’? Cf. GS, V, 1, p. 593 (N10, 1); The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2002, p. 474 (N10, 1). GS, IV, 1, p. 85; ‘One-Way Street’, in SW, vol. 1, p. 444. GS, II, 1, p. 308; ‘Surrealism’, in SW, vol. 2, p. 216. To prove that it was, it would be necessary to show that Benjamin’s insistence on separating historical materialism from the forces of ‘progress’ could only further weaken the anti-fascist position. His answer to the centrist argument that both left and right extremisms played into the hands of fascism by undermining the democratic structures of the Weimar Republic would presumably have been that it was, on the contrary, the liberal centre that caved in. Cf. Wolfgang Kraushaar, ‘Die Schleyer-Entführung: 44 Tage ohne Opposition’, in Revolte und Reflexion. Politische Aufsätze 1976–1987, Verlag Neue Kritik, Frankfurt am Main, 1990, pp. 84–92. In the course of this crisis, the executive established two new bodies which ‘simply undercut the legal and constitutional principles which it constantly invoked’ (p. 90). The Committee for Internal Affairs oversaw the creation of a secret police agency no longer subject to public, federal or parliamentary processes; and the Crisis Command robbed parliament of its ‘last possibility of influence, namely the power of defining what situation may be designated as a “state of emergency”’ – a step ‘not even foreseen in the regulations governing the declaration of a state of emergency’ and ‘utterly contrary to the constitution’ (ibid.). This suspension of the constitution for reasons of state was uncomplainingly accepted by the media (p. 91). The statesman who took upon himself the decision to sacrifice Schleyer, Helmut Schmidt, enjoyed widespread support. The popular admiration of which Benjamin’s Critique speaks for the great criminal who defies the law yielded here to that for an iron chancellor who showed what stuff the state was made of. Kraushaar, ‘Die Schleyer-Entführung’, pp. 91–2. The ideal of the Enlightenment is ‘the system from which everything and anything follows.… In their mastery of nature, the creative God and the ordering mind are alike.… Man’s likeness to God lies in his sovereignty over existence, in the lordly gaze, in the command.…Whatever might be different is made the same’ (Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1969, pp. 12–18; Dialectic of Enlighten­ment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. E. Jephcott, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2002, pp. 4–8). Cf. on the ‘fear’ at the core of the Enlightenment (p. 22; p. 11); and on the fear that haunts the modern state (GS, II, 1, pp. 185, 192–3; ‘Critique of Violence’, in SW, vol. 2, pp. 240, 245). Witness the Berufsverbot (the disqualification of politically undesirable individuals from employment in the civil service, including the teaching profession) and perhaps also de Gaulle’s secret visit to Baden-Baden on 29 May 1968.

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40. GS, I, 2, p. 604; ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, in Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, trans. H. Zohn, Verso, London, 1997, p. 101. 41. GS, I, 2, p. 600; Charles Baudelaire, p. 97. 42. GS, I, 2, p. 578. Cf. Baudelaire, ‘De l’Héroisme de la Vie Moderne’, Salon de 1846, in Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres Complètes (henceforth OC), ed. Y.-G. le Dantec, Gallimard, Paris, 1968, pp. 949–52. 43. GS, I, 2, p. 667; ‘Central Park’, in SW, vol. 4, p. 170. 44. GS, I, 2, p. 652; ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Charles Baudelaire, p. 154. It is of the essence of anger, Benjamin writes of Baudelaire, to rage against friend and foe alike (GS, I, 2, p. 642; Charles Baudelaire, p. 143). Contrast God’s just anger in the ‘Critique of Violence’ (GS, II, 1, 196; SW, vol. 1, p. 247). 45. GS, V, 1, p. 75; ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, Exposé of 1939, in The Arcades Project, p. 25. 46. GS, I, 2, 516; ‘Paris of the Second Empire’, in Charles Baudelaire, p. 14. Benjamin is referring here to the dreams of mid-nineteenth-century French conspirators. 47. GS, I, 2, p. 700; Thesis XII, ‘On the Concept of History’, in SW, vol. 4, p. 394. 48. ‘Blanqui submits to bourgeois society. But his genuflection is of such violence that its throne begins to totter.’ GS, V, 1, p. 168 (D5a, 2); The Arcades Project, p. 111. 49. ‘For them’, Marx adds, ‘the only condition of revolution is the adequate organization of their conspiracy’ (cit. GS, I, 2, pp. 514–19; ‘Paris of the Second Empire’, in Charles Baudelaire, p. 13). 50. GS, I, 3, 1154 (Ms 1080). 51. Cf. on the ‘shattered components of authentic historical experience’ GS, I, 2, p. 643; ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Charles Baudelaire, p. 144. 52. GS, IV, 1, p. 10; ‘The Task of the Translator’, in SW, vol. 1, p. 254. 53. GS, I, 2, p. 694; Thesis II, in SW, vol. 4, p. 390. 54. Cf. on ‘deviations’ and ‘differentials’ GS, V, 1, p. 570; The Arcades Project, p. 456 (N1, 2). 55. GS, II, 2, p. 432; ‘Kafka’, in SW, vol. 2, p. 811. 56. GS, I, 2, p. 695; Thesis IV, ‘On the Concept of History’, in SW, vol. 4, p. 390. Zarathustra says something similar against ‘great events’ – by which, however, he means revolutionary uprisings: ‘Then it spoke to me again as a whisper: ‘It is the stillest words that bring on the storm. Thoughts that come on doves’ feet guide the world’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, ‘The Stillest Hour’, KG, VI, 1, 185). 57. Cf. on the ‘dialectic of intoxication’ GS, II, 1, pp. 299, 307; ‘Surrealism’, in SW, vol. 2, pp. 210 and 216. Is Benjamin, to cite his critique of the surrealists, always ‘up to’ this dialectic? Doesn’t his language sometimes seem ‘drunk’ on theology – as if its recourse to the power and glory of the Word were calculated to compensate for its actual powerlessness on the ‘literary battle-field’? The sober materialist style of his late work deliberately blunts this élan. 58. GB, IV, 408 (letter to Scholem of 6 May 1934); Correspondence, p. 439. 59. GS, IV, 1, pp. 396–8; ‘The Destructive Character’, in SW, vol. 2, pp. 541–2. 60. One such misunderstanding should be mentioned here. The ‘spectacle of the deepest harmony’ that the world affords the ‘destructive character’ as he goes about making room for a viable world is clearly not to be

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61. 62. 63.

64.

65. 66.

67. 68. 69.

70. 71.

confused with the fascist and futurist ‘aestheticization’ of war and politics that Benjamin denounces four years later. GS, IV, 1, p. 397; SW, vol. 2, p. 541, my emphasis. ‘For to organize pessimism means nothing other than to expel moral metaphor from politics.’ GS, II, 1, p. 309; ‘Surrealism’, in SW, vol. 2, p. 217. Cf. GS, II, 1, pp. 366–7; ‘Karl Kraus’, in SW, vol. 2, pp. 456–7. Derrida argues for an exploration of the ‘shared thematic of “destruction” that emerged in the interwar period, and especially of its German-Jewish “reflections” in Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Heidegger and Others’, Force of Law, pp. 65–6. Benjamin, for his part, sought to make his writings as ‘unpalatable’ as possible to the ‘counter-revolution’, at the risk of making them ‘unpalatable to everyone’. GB, IV, p. 25 (letter to Scholem of 17 April 1931); Correspondence, p. 378. ‘As the cleansing hurricane goes before the storm, so God’s wrath roars through history in a storm of forgiveness in order to sweep away everything that should [müßte] be consumed forever by the lightning-flashes of the divine weather’ (GS, VI, p. 98; ‘The Meaning of Time in the Moral Universe’, in SW, vol. 1, p. 287). GS, IV, 1, p. 396; ‘The Destructive Character’, in SW, vol. 2, p. 541. The destructive character’s ‘insuperable mistrust of the course of things’ (ibid., p. 398; SW, vol. 2, p. 542) is the reverse side of an unspoken, theologically inspired faith in the revolutionary potential of the real. Cf. by contrast Zarathustra’s pagan trust in the ‘heart of the earth’ and his accompanying mistrust of the ‘overthrow- and scum-devils’ of revolution. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, ‘On Great Events’, KG, VI, 1, p. 166. GS, I, 3, p. 1244 (notes and materials for ‘On the Concept of History’). GS, II, 1, p. 310; ‘Surrealism’, in SW, vol. 2, p. 218. Cf. in particular GS, II, 2, pp. 506–10; ‘From the Brecht Commentary’, in SW, vol. 2, pp. 374–7; and GS, II, 2, pp. 526–27; ‘What is Epic Theatre?’ (first version), in Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock, London 1973, p. 9. GS, II, 2, p. 554; ‘Commentary on Poems by Brecht’ in SW, vol. 4, p. 231. ‘In the interests of communism’: this formula from Brecht’s didactic play Die Massnahme (‘The Measures Taken’) is put in the mouth of the young comrade who is sacrificed for the cause; Die Massnahme, ed. Reiner Steinweg, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1972, pp. 82–3. It alone does not suffice to substantiate Ruth Fischer’s interpretation of the play as an ominous anticipation of the Moscow show trials (416–18). But it is against these that the play has meanwhile to be read. The issue of revolutionary violence is ventilated here in connection with the execution of a comrade whose lack of discipline has endangered the other members of an underground group: ‘Terrible it is to kill./ Not only others, we are ready to kill ourselves if necessary./ For this deadly world can only be changed by force [Gewalt]/ As every living man well knows’ (pp. 80–81). From here it is not far to The Destructive Character. However problematic certain communist motifs in Brecht’s and Benjamin’s writings may appear in hindsight, they allow us to measure the narrowing of the horizon within which the question of violence has meanwhile come to be considered.

72. GS, IV, 1, p. 398; ‘The Destructive Character’, in SW, vol. 2, p. 542. 73. GB, IV, 24 (letter to Scholem of 17 April 1931); Correspondence, p. 377. 74. GS, IV, 1, 317; ‘Moscow’, in SW, vol. 2, p. 22. 75. Anyone of his generation, writes Benjamin in 1926, who grasps the historical moment ‘not as mere phraseology but as a struggle cannot renounce the study and practice of the mechanism through which things (and conditions) interact with the masses’ (GB, III, p. 159; Correspondence, p. 300). Was it in order to preserve his model of a potentially critical mass that he gave little emphasis to the conservative, even ‘counterrevolutionary’, mechanisms at work in that struggle? To that extent Blanqui’s willed ignorance would also have been his own. 76. GS, IV, 1, p. 397; ‘The Destructive Character’, in SW, vol. 2, p. 541. Cf. the transvaluation of the Unmensch and the ‘barbarian’ in ‘Experience and Poverty’ and ‘Karl Kraus’, GS, II, 1, pp. 215, 355, 367; SW, vol. 2, pp. 732, 447–8, 456–7. 77. In A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. 78. ‘Among the great creators’ – Descartes, Einstein, Scheerbart, Klee, Brecht, Loos and the Cubists are named here – ‘there have always been the inexorable ones who began by clearing a tabula rasa. They wanted a drawing-table; they were constructors’ (GS, II, 1, p. 215; ‘Experience and Poverty’, in SW, vol. 2, p. 732). As an abstract of these figures, the destructive character has in turn, like Klee’s figures, been ‘constructed at the drawing-board’ (ibid.). This whole text sketches the precise, unrepeatable context in which the notion of a destructive character could emerge. But whereas the ‘barbarian’ artists, engineers and mathematicians evoked here clear away spurious cultural excess or intellectual obstacles, he allegedly clears away realities. 79. In his ‘Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent’. 80. Cited by Max Weber in ‘Science as a Vocation’, in Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H.H. Gerth and C.W. Mills, Oxford University Press, New York 1946, p. 152. 81. GS, II, 1, p. 219; ‘Experience and Poverty’, in SW, vol. 2, p. 735. 82. GS, I, 3, p. 1231; ‘Paralipomena to “On the Concept of History”’, in SW, vol. 4, p. 402. 83. GS, I, 3, p. 1245; SW, vol. 4, p. 407. ‘The saying from an apocryphal gospel – “Where I meet someone, there will I judge him” – casts a peculiar light on the Last Judgement. It recalls Kafka’s note: “The Last Judgement is a kind of martial law [Standrecht]”’ (ibid.). Like the ‘state of exception’ in the Eighth Thesis, martial law is here cited against itself – against the army, the state, the law. What distinguishes martial from regular law is the summary of its verdicts. Cf. on the immediacy of divine justice GS, I, pp. 154, 198–9; ‘Critique of Violence’, in SW, vol. 1, pp. 249–50. 84. Cf. GS, V, 1, pp. 576–7 (N2a, 3); Arcades Project, p. 462. 85. GS, IV, 2, p. 999, notes and materials for ‘The Destructive Character’. 86. GS, IV, 1, p. 317; ‘Moscow’, in SW, vol. 2, p. 22. 87. GS, IV, 1, p. 9; ‘The Task of the Translator’, in SW, vol. 1, p. 253. Cf. GS, II, 1, p. 144; ‘On Language’, in

SW, vol. 1, p. 65. 88. If the destructive character can tell that things ‘can’t go on this way’, this is because ‘at their hidden core’ (wirklich, im Innersten, Verborgnen) they don’t: they go ‘from one extreme to the other’ (GS, IV, 2, p. 1001, notes and materials for ‘The Destructive Character’). He thus has ontology on his side, but a subversive one, an ontology of extremes at the opposite extreme from the above-mentioned quasi-ontological ‘structures of the world and of life’. The latter – alias the continuum of ‘homogeneous empty time’ (GS, I, 2, p. 701; Thesis XIII, in SW, vol. 4, p. 395), the ‘reality-principle’, and so on – ensure that life does go on this way. The first ontology, which is perhaps the ‘unconscious’ of the second, introduces hairline fractures into it – ‘fissures’ and ‘asperities’ in the wall of the real that offer ‘footing to one who would cross over them’ (GS, V, 1, pp. 591–2; Arcades Project, pp. 473–4 (N9, 4 and N9a, 5). 89. Cf. Schönes Entsetzen (‘Fine Terror), GS, IV, 1, pp. 434–5. Partially cited as a motto to Part 1 of the present essay, this piece is not included in the selection from Denkbilder (‘Thought Images’) in SW, vol. 2. 90. GS, I, 3, p. 1232; Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History’, in SW, vol. 4, p. 402. 91. The full quotation reads: ‘My writings are said to be so difficult. I would have said that all those understand me who are in need. But where are those who are in need?’ (cit. GB, I, p. 161, letter to Carla Seligson of 4 August 1918; Correspondence, p. 50). 92. Ibid., p. 182, letter to Carla Seligson of 17 November 1913; Correspondence, p. 57. 93. Cf. GS, V, 1, pp. 47, 501; The Arcades Project, pp. 4, 397 (K4, 3). 94. ‘That things “go on this way” is the catastrophe.’ GS, I, 2, p. 683; ‘Central Park’, in SW, vol. 4, pp. 184–5. 95. Cf. GS, I, 2, pp. 694–5; ‘On the Concept of History’, in SW, vol. 4, pp. 390–91. Meanwhile a complication of the fronts has taken place. The enemy remains; but ‘we’ are in large measure part of him. 96. GS, V, 2, p. 1256. 97. Cf. on ghosts and justice, Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Routledge, New York, 1994. 98. ‘Having sold their soul to the bourgeoisie, along with profession and marriage’, Benjamin writes in 1915, ‘students insist on those few years of bourgeois freedom.’ GS, II, 1, p. 85; ‘The Life of Students’, in SW, vol. 1, p. 45. 99. In their book Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern (The Inability to Mourn; Piper, Munich, 1967), Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich venture a parallel between the secret service technique of ‘turning’ someone ‘around’ and the collective process by which, after the collapse of the Third Reich, love for the Führer was transformed into its opposite. We lack any corresponding psychohistorical study of the inner permutations undergone by succeeding generations. Two initial attempts contradict one another: Wolfgang Leuschner, ‘Kriegskinder und 68’ and Günter Franzen, ‘Nach Auschwitz. Zur Identitätsproblematik der 68er’, Psyche, no. 60, issues 4 and 6 respectively. 100. One of the most influential contemporary excommunists, varying The Future of an Illusion and The God that Failed, has diagnosed his former creed

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101.

102.

103.

104.

105.

as a religion without a future. Cf. François Furet, Le Passé d’une illusion. Essai sur l’idée communiste au vingtième siècle, Robert Laffont/Calmann-Lévy, Paris 1995; The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999. ‘The development toward total integration … has been interrupted, but not halted; it threatens to realize itself through wars and dictatorships’ (Dialektik der Aufklärung, pp. ix–x; Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. xi–xii). I have elsewhere discussed a test case: ‘Warum hat man das Passagenarbeit nicht gelesen?’, in Peter Rautmann and Nicolas Schalz, eds, An Walter Benjamins Passagen-weiterschrieben. Ein Bremer Symposium, Hochschule für Künste, Projekt, Bremen, 2006. The counter-culture was also a consumer culture, a ‘scene’ whose ‘icons’ included Benjamin as well as ‘El Che’. Cf. Otto Karl Werckmeister, Linke Ikonen (Icons of the Left), Munich and Vienna 1997. Benjamin’s ‘cult-value’ was boosted by his fate as a Jewish Marxist refugee driven to suicide. The academic study of his work has partially counteracted this cult of personality. But it too belongs to a market whose concerns are well insulated against his. Already in 1973 Habermas observed that the academic treatment of Benjamin offered ‘at best a corrective, but no real alternative’ to the conflict of partisan interpretations (‘Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique’, p. 92). GS, 1, 2, p. 698; ‘On the Concept of History’, Thesis X, in SW, vol. 4, p. 391.

106. Cf. on this concept GS, I, 1, p. 357, and GB, II, p. 393; Correspondence, p. 224. 107. Cf. GS, 111, p. 259; ‘Against a Masterpiece’, in SW, vol. 2, p. 383. 108. GS, I, 3, pp. 1234, 1238; ‘Paralipomena to “On the Concept of History”’, in SW, vol. 4, p. 404. 109. GB, V, p. 193, letter to Werner Kraft of 28 October 1935; Correspondence, p. 516. 110. GS, II, I, p. 202; ‘Critique of Violence’, in SW, vol. 1, p. 251. Elsewhere Benjamin puts this in secular terms: all historiography needs to be tested against the notion of the classless society (GS, I, 3, p. 1245; Notes and materials for ‘On the Concept of History’). 111. GS, 1, 2, p. 697; Thesis I, in SW, vol. 4, p. 392. 112. GS, I, 3, pp. 1164–5. 113. Cf. GS, I, 2, p. 693; Thesis I, in SW, vol. 4, p. 389; GS, I, 2, p. 694; Thesis II in SW, vol. 4, p. 390; GS, I, 3, p. 1243 (Notes and materials for ‘On the Concept of History’). 114. Benjamin traces the decay of ‘counsel’ to the rise of capitalism. Cf. GS, II, 2, pp. 442 ff.; ‘The Storyteller’, in SW, vol. 3 pp. 145 ff. 115. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’. 116. Ibid.; stress mine. 117. GB, 1, p. 182, letter to Carla Seligson of 17 November 1913; Correspondence, p. 57. 118. GB, V, p. 193, above-cited letter to Kraft; Correspondence, p. 516. The double meaning of the (Welt)gericht that we are to be served – ‘judgement’ and/or ‘meal’ – combines biblical affect with ironic play. Translated by Nick Walker and Irving Wohlfarth

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Elasticity of demand Reflections on The Wire John Kraniauskas Can’t reason with the pusherman Finance is all that he understands

Curtis Mayfield, ‘Little Child Runnin’ Wild’

David Simon and Edward Burns’s TV series The Wire (HBO, 2002–08) opens with a killing and builds from there, over five seasons and sixty hours of television. What it narrates is the present life of a neoliberalized postindustrial city, from the perspective of the bloody ‘corners’ of West Baltimore, USA.1 The Wire is a continuation of Simon and Burns’s earlier series The Corner (HBO, 2000), a quasi-anthropological reconstruction of real lives, directed by Charles S. Dutton. In fact, in many ways it is a combination and development of two previous TV series: NBC’s cop show Homicide (based on Simon’s book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, 1991) and The Corner (based on Simon and Burns’ book The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, 1997).2 Corners are where everyday drugs business is carried out. They are violently fought over and defended as what remains of the local economy is bled dry and addiction extends. They are the places, in other words, where the stories of the ‘invisible hand’ of the market and/or ‘originary’ capital accumulation are played out. This is the local, street experience of (illegal) capitalist globalization. It provides the pathetic script for the character Bubbles, for example – drug addict and police informant – which is literally written into his body. These are places of labour too, including child labour: the ‘corner boys’. Finally, they are places of intense state scrutiny and surveillance. The ‘wire’ that gives the programme its name is a bugging or wire-tapping device, fundamental to the narrative structure of each one of The Wire’s seasons. It is the main technological means of secret intelligence gathering, sought and deployed by the police to listen to, identify and decode the telephone messages circulating between the drug dealers. In this respect, The Wire presents itself as a police procedural, centred on the detective work involved in juridically justifying

and then deploying the bugging technology required. Unlike the police-procedural pedagogic norm, however, The Wire critically foregrounds technological underdevelopment and uneven distribution, educating its viewers into a culture of everyday police bricolage and ingenuity, very different from the hyperbolic scientific know-how of CSI and its many imitators. The activities of pushing and policing in The Wire mark out a territory that is divided, crisscrossed and sutured (constituted in antagonism); in other words, wired. Crime at one end, joined to the law at the other, it constitutes ‘a whole way of life’.3 In this respect a work of urban anthropology, The Wire nonetheless turns its corners so as to accumulate characters, stories and ‘adventures’. It expands and opens out onto the world, charting encounters, much like the novel in its chivalric, educational and realist historical modes. Although here it is a TV camera-eye that travels, explores and frames the city, emplotting its sociocultural environments (in particular, their racialized, gendered and class divisions), activating, in Franco Moretti’s words, their ‘narrative potential’; which is to say, their relations of power, their ‘plots’.4 But only so as to return, repeatedly, to illuminate its point of departure, the streets, and its principal object of attraction, the everyday experience and effects of the trade in drugs and its policing. Like other works of detective and/or crime fiction, The Wire relays and establishes the political and cultural contours of the contemporary, at speed. Indeed, in this sense, it fulfils one of the prime historical functions of the genre. 5 As The Wire voyages out from the low- and highrise housing projects whose corners it films, accumulating and weaving together its stories, it accretes social content as part of its overall moving picture. This is conceived primarily in terms of a set of overlapping institutions and their hierarchized personnel: the police (both local and federal), the port authority and trade-union organization (in Season 2), the city administration, its juridical apparatus and its shifting political elites (especially from Season 3 onwards), the

Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09)

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local educational state apparatus (Season 4), and the local city newspaper (in Season 5). It is important to note that these are all places of work. Work is a structuring ideologeme of the series, as it was previously of The Corner – with its dealers – and more recently of Simon and Burns’s disappointing subsequent series about US soldiers in Iraq, Generation Kill (2008), with its ‘grunts’.6 They are also sites of political power-play, concerned, like The Wire’s ‘auteurs’ themselves, with establishing their own standpoint with respect to the dramas played out and filmed in the streets. Thus The Wire’s own TV camera-consciousness produces itself, as it were, in counterpoint to the multiplicity of institutional perspectives it reconstructs, taking the side of the dominated, that is, of the ‘workers’ portrayed in each case. The Wire’s populist images are, to use Sartre’s words, ‘act(s) and not … thing(s)’.7 Season after season, over years of programming, The Wire’s looping narrative methodology transforms and enriches its own story and perspective. There is, however, a tension here that drives its realist compositional logic – and which its long-running television format invites – that is both formal and analytic. The Wire attempts to resolve the enigmatic character of the social that grounds the crime and/or detective fiction form through an accretive looping logic that incorporates more and more of the social (through its institutions), but that thereby simultaneously threatens to overload and diffuse its televisual focus on what is most compelling: the dramatization of the political economy of crime as the key to the understanding of contemporary neoliberal capitalist society (in Baltimore) and its policing. Inverting the procedure of classic police-procedural film The Naked City (Jules Dassin, 1947), instead of zooming in on one of ‘8 million stories’, the series zooms out, arguably too far, attempting to show them all. The paradox of The Wire’s accumulative compositional strategy – and the epistemological and aesthetic problem it poses – is that the more of the social it reconstructs, shows and incorporates into its narrative so as to explain the present, the less socially explanatory its vision becomes.8

Crime scenes It is as if The Wire had been produced in response to questions initially posed by Walter Benjamin in his ‘A Small History of Photography’ (1931) regarding the photographic mediation of the experience of the modern city. Noting how the journalistic – and quasi-cinematic – work of photographers like Atget was increasingly able ‘to capture fleeting and secret moments’ that thus demanded explanation (he refers

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specifically to the emergence of the use of captions in this regard), Benjamin asks ‘is not every square inch of our cities the scene of a crime? Every passerby a culprit?’ And further, ‘is it not the task of the photographer … to reveal guilt and to point out the guilty in his pictures?’9 Three-quarters of a century (of technology) later this is where the first episode of The Wire begins, with a crime scene in a Baltimore city street, one of many. The opening scene of The Wire is both generically conventional and narratively surprising. It is also intensely televisual. A crime has taken place, and The Wire takes us to it immediately, opening directly onto a bloodstained street in close-up, bathed in the flashing red and blue lights of police vehicles, and to the sound of their sirens – images familiar to TV viewers from reality cop shows and local news programmes. But if The Wire begins TV-like, it soon becomes cinematic: the camera scans and tracks, revealing the dead body of a young man. It then pulls back, encircling and framing the scene (thereby producing it) in which the key elements of its juridical and cultural coding – that is, the wired (bloody) territory of the series’ diagetic space – are crystallized: from a dead black Afro-American young man, the victim of a ridiculous and arbitrary crime, we pass on to a Afro-American witness, who tells its story, and then to a white IrishAmerican police officer, who listens and chuckles at its utter banality.10 The streets of The Wire’s crime scenes thus constitute a central social space of encounter where, to put it in Althusserian terms, social power is transformed and normalized by the state apparatus qua machine, institutionalized as law, and actualized as force.11 The police are the main agents of this process, of course, and homicide detective McNulty, the main star of the show, is at his post asking questions and making his presence felt. Most importantly, thanks to the invisible presence of the camera, audiences magically become privileged viewers of the crime scene too, positioned alongside the police at work for the local city state, and given immediate access to look upon and accompany the process of crime interpretation. So far, so generically conventional: The Wire is a traditional work of detective fiction, adopting a critical (that is, a ‘workerist’) police perspective that McNulty embodies. What is narratively surprising about The Wire’s first scene, however, is that the crime that opens the series has no particular significance for it, except in its generality, and will be neither reconstructed nor emplotted into its interlocking narratives. The death of the young man holds no mystery for the police and will not be

interpreted and tracked. (This is to be expected in this part of town; it has been socially and culturally coded that way.) It does, however, register an important, although banal, truth that is significant for the relation the series establishes between narrative form and its own historical material: the excess of history over form. The Wire thus signals, on the one hand, its own partiality and, on the other, its consequent status as a work of narrative totalization which is always already incomplete. In this sense, the programme emerges not only from a realist desire to accumulate social content, as noted above, but also from a modernist acknowledgement of its own narrative limits (imposed by narrative form) and thus not so much as a representation as an invention. The first killing functions as just one of a continuous, repetitive series that compositionally divides The Wire’s overarching narratives off from the history that determines and contextualizes it. It stands in for all the victims associated with the commercialization of drugs who precede the stories told across the five seasons, for all those who will follow them, as well as for the collateral damage, those victims who accompany the telling of the stories dramatized in The Wire, episode after episode. It is possible to identify other such series too, although these are built into the narratives that make up The Wire over time, season after season, imposing, for their appreciation, a discipline on its viewers that is specifically televisual: they have to stick with it, for years (or for countless hours of DVD watching). For example, there is a series of insider witnesses, many of them doomed by their contact with the police, especially with McNulty; and a series of wakes for members of the force who pass away, which ends with McNulty’s own symbolic one, when he leaves the profession at the conclusion of the final, fifth Season. He will be replaced. So, if one series – of killings – opens The Wire, another – of deaths – brings it to conclusion. McNulty’s institutional death, meanwhile, finally reveals The Wire’s central articulating narrative: from the beginning, its first crime scene, it tells the story of McNulty’s way out, the ‘death’ of a policeman. ‘Like detectives’, writes John Ellis in Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty, ‘we are rushed to

the scene of the crime hoping to make sense of what happened from the physical traces that it has left.’ Ellis is not describing The Wire here, or a programme like it, but deploying the conventional hermeneutic of detective fiction to account for a general effect of contemporary televisuality – which also, it so happens, describes the TV experience of tuning in to a programme like The Wire and being ‘rushed to the scene of [a] crime’.12 Ellis’s description of television form connects with Benjamin’s account of photography. As is well known, the revelatory potential of photographic technology, in which once hidden historical determinations are brought into the light of day by the camera demanding explanation, underpins Benjamin’s notion of the ‘optical unconscious’. In this way, the camera’s ability to capture reality in photographs is associated with a modern hermeneutic – one that Carlo Ginzburg links to art criticism (the discovery of forgeries), psychoanalysis (listening out for signs of the unconscious) and detection (revealing criminal intent) – in which captured scenes may be read as ‘symptoms’ of something else (a criminal capitalist economy, for example) and thus demand close scrutiny and interpretation.13 Such technological developments are deployed and advanced by the state too, in surveillance operations, like those portrayed in The Wire. These involve not only new visual technology, but devices geared specifically for sound. For it turns out that there is also a ‘sonic’ unconscious, made available for scrutiny today by mobile phones. This is what McNulty and his colleagues seek to access by ‘wiring’ and grabbing the messages exchanged between corner boys and drug dealers. Ellis, meanwhile, is interested

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in camera work, but more than just with its recording function: combining aspects of both the cinema and radio, with television the camera has become a broadcasting and transmitting device too. In the words of Rudolf Arnheim, ‘television turns out to be related to the motor car and the aeroplane as a means of transport of the mind’.14 This is how ‘we are rushed’ to other places, such as West Baltimore’s corners, or how other places are tele-transported to viewers, as scenes, as they relax in living rooms and bedrooms. Television, in other words, appears to overcome both the distance between its subjects and objects and their different times, making them co-present in viewing; and not just mentally, as Arnheim suggests, but sensually too – sounds and images tugging at the body through eyes and ears. Ellis refers to the new social form of looking produced by contemporary television as ‘witnessing’, and to television form itself as a kind of dramatic ‘working through’ of the materials thus broadcast in an era of information overload: they are managed and formatted into genres (from the news, to sports programmes and soaps), dramatized and put into narrative, serialized and scheduled.15 Again, Ellis might also have been describing The Wire and its first scene, whose last shot is a close-up of the dead victim, his blank wide-open eyes staring out from the TV screen at the tele-transported viewers; and in the background, the witness and the detective, working through. There is another crime scene in the first season of The Wire that is destined no doubt to become a classic of its type. In contrast to the first scene, however, this one, although approaching abstraction in its sparseness, is full of significance for the articulation and unravelling of its narratives and dramas. It involves McNulty and his partner ‘Bunk’, and a disenchanted middle-level drugs dealer D’Angelo Barksdale (known as ‘D’), the nephew of West Baltimore kingpin Avon Barksdale. The latter is the prime target of McNulty and his associates’ police investigation, the object of the wire, and remains so across three of The Wire’s five seasons. Despite all the surveillance, however, information- and evidence-gathering is difficult, since Barksdale and his crew are deadly, ruthlessly shoring up any possible weakness or leakage in their organization. Like so many subaltern outlaw groups, the Barksdale crew have internalized and replicated state-like repressive

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structures that are ferociously hierarchical, and, within their own terms, strategically meritocratic. Even before McNulty and Bunk arrive at the murder scene, viewers know that D’Angelo has killed one of Avon’s girlfriends (who had threatened to give him away and talk). We know this not because it is a crime that is shown and witnessed, but because in a previous scene he tells the corner boys he organizes. As noted above, The Wire is made up of a number of proliferating narratives, and moves between and through them transversally. As it jumps from scene to scene, it travels between different characters, the social spheres they inhabit and work in (institutions), as well as their locations (streets, offices). Thus all nar-

ratives are interrupted and crossed by others, looping back and forth, such that at and through each level – episode, season and series – The Wire resembles a collage or a montage of segments. This is the relation established between the scene of D’s ‘confession’ and the scene in which McNulty and Bunk reconstruct his crime. However, what happens before, at the level of narrative emplotment, happens simultaneously at the level of its story. These scenes, like others, are part of a constellation of mutually dependent segments with a shared temporality, but distributed across different spaces. This means that viewers know ‘D’ is guilty before McNulty and Bunk do, but they then – in their decoding of the crime scene – work it out and catch up, such that by its conclusion characters and viewers become co-present again at the level of knowledge as well as that of action. But if The Wire’s polydiegetic and segmentary character may be described as either novelistic or cinematic, its televisual character should not for that reason be ignored.

Indeed, it has been suggested that the segmentary quality of the television moving image is definitive of its form: originally anchored in domesticity, distraction, and the predominance of the glance over the cinematic gaze. Interrupted viewing (by adverts, for example) is constitutively inscribed into both the medium and television form itself, most obviously in news programmes and soaps. Being an HBO production, however, whose broadcasting is advert-free, The Wire is able both to put such segmentarity to use as a compositional strategy and simultaneously to subvert the temporality of its viewing. This is because, for the most part, its compositional segmentarity works to extend the action and narrative continuity beyond the fixed temporality of the episode, undermining the latter’s semi-autonomy within the series (as maintained even by The Sopranos), slowing down and spreading the action and stories it portrays beyond episodic television time (and its scheduling), giving the impression, at times, that ‘nothing happens’. At this level, The Wire de-dramatizes the serial form from within. This experience of ‘slowness’ – which contrasts markedly, for example, with the hectic deployment of segmented scenes in 2416 – may be one of the reasons why The Wire has attracted so few viewers on television, although it is a growing success on DVD and ‘on demand’ platforms. This other crime scene may be only a short segment, but its significance flows through Season 1 and into Season 2.17 It knots their narratives. This is underlined by the inclusion of another brief segment within this constellation of scenes in which Lester – McNulty’s partner on the wire detail – identifies a phone number he has picked up off the wall at another crime scene (where the romantic character Omar Little, a kind of urban cowboy, has stolen one of Avon’s stashes), which he identifies as linked to a corner phone used by ‘D’ at work.18 Through composition and editing, all of these discrete segments feed the central narrative: they become part of the story in which, first, the wiretap is justified and put to use and, second, ‘D’ is persuaded to give up his uncle-boss Avon (and is then murdered in jail). The scene is a kitchen in a house that has been stripped bare and wiped clean. It has become a white box. And in such a space, the detectives’ reconstruction of the crime is almost a work of performance art. Bereft of forensic technology, they use their bodies, their pens and a tape measure like bricoleurs to re-imagine the crime, the trajectory of the bullet, the position of the shooter (‘D’) as he taps the window (‘tap, tap, tap’, as ‘D’ has already described it) and shoots the young

naked woman as she turns to see who is there. This is the work of the imagination, and in its eccentric performance both Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Poe’s Dupin are parodically evoked. Most important for this reconstruction, however, are the photographs of the barely clothed dead victim that McNulty and Bunk scrutinize for clues and place about the room so as to visualize the event – for this work of detection is also the work of fantasy. McNulty and Bunk perform the scopic drive. Whilst scrutinizing they only enunciate one word and its derivatives – ‘fuck!’ – over and over again as they realize how the murder was committed, reaching a climax of discovery – ‘fucking A!’ – as they find the spent bullet in the fridge door and its casing in the garden outside. It is as if the discovery were a restaging of the primal (crime) scene. ‘Fucking’ and detection intertwine. In a sense, this is just an extension of the sexualized homosociality that characterizes the office of the homicide division of the Baltimore Police Department run by Sgt Landsman, its principal promoter. But it also says something about McNulty’s and Bunk’s own addictive relationship to their work: they do not spend time together drinking so as to forget and obliterate their experiences as police; on the contrary, they do so to maintain and extend it, and in fact to obliterate everything else, the rest of their private, non-police lives.

Adam Smith in Baltimore The main conflict within the police institution in The Wire is between its upper bureaucratic echelons with more or less direct access to the political elites (associated with city hall) and the working detectives from the homicide (McNulty) and narcotics (‘Kima’ Greggs, ‘Herc’ Hauk and Ellis Carter) divisions, joined to form a special detail in the pursuit, first, of Avon Barksdale (Seasons 1–3) and, then, of his ‘successor’ Marlo Stanfield (Seasons 3–5).19 Under the command of Cedric Daniels, they are joined by a variety of marginalized officers such as Lester and Prez. The ‘brass’ imposes targets and, therefore, arrests. In Lester’s version, they ‘follow the drugs’ and arrest low-level drug dealers and addicts. Keeping minor criminals off the streets helps the mayor. For their part, the detectives ‘who care’ (such as McNulty, Lester, Kima and Daniels) want to build cases against the kingpins inside and outside the state, and ‘follow the money’, exposing economic and political corruption. In this context, the struggle to justify the wiretap legally becomes a political one, requiring legal justification and the allocation of resources (and finally the goodwill of the mayor). It is hindered at every turn.

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However, The Wire’s principal interest lies in the way in which the conflicts inside the state apparatus are mirrored – across the wire – within the criminal, drug-dealing community it portrays and its political economy. This includes not only the influence of the police on the illegal, subalternized capitalist economy, but also the ways in which the latter, through bribery, loans and money-laundering underwrites upper echelons of the local state and economy through the circulation of its accumulated wealth – at which point it becomes finance capital.20 The intra-crime conflict presents itself on the ground as a struggle between fractions for territory and corners (between the East and West Sides of Baltimore) and takes three main forms, each of which is associated with a particular economic logic and specific characters: ‘Proposition’ Joe, Avon Barksdale and Marlo Stanfield, and Omar Little, respectively. The first form involves an attempt to overcome the struggle between competitors. In this context, the character of Proposition Joe (who comes increasingly to the fore in Seasons 4 and 5) is important since he represents a tendency towards the formation of a kind of Baltimore cartel, a co-operative of dealers, which can manage quality, prices and security. For some, however, this delegation of business administration undermines the pursuit of self-interest, self-reliance and, thereby, control. Avon and Marlo, who represent a second street-level, ‘competitive’ form of the drugs business, are suspicious of Proposition Joe’s corporate, conference-room style (he is finally assassin­ated by Marlo’s henchmen towards the end of the series), preferring instead to impose their own more neoliberal economy. The third form is a romantic version of the second, and is represented by Omar, the transgressive outlaw’s outlaw (McNulty’s criminal mirror-image and sometime ally). Taking advantage of the mis-

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trust generated between the corporate and competitive styles, Omar uses guerrilla tactics to trick and rob all the local kingpins. On the one hand, Omar becomes a local myth in his own (albeit brief) lifetime; on the other, he violently debunks the myth of original accumulation.21 The tension between these regimes of accumulation is what drives the segmented narratives of The Wire as they loop across and through each other. The narrative loops connecting the different scenes may thus also be thought of as narrative cycles: from the cycle of capital accumulation as it passes through commodity exchange, which takes place on the streets (or in prison), to the cycles of finance and capital investment, which take place mainly in offices, restaurants or luxury yachts. This is why the policing that McNulty and Lester struggle against represents a racist dis­ avowal on the part of the state. The imposition of a policy based on targets and the pursuit of street crime (that is, of corner boys and drug addicts), which ignores the circulation of money capital, involves, in the first place, the fabrication of the otherness of the criminal ‘other’ (a racist production of difference) and, second, the deployment of the resources to insist on it. The flow of money, however, tells us that the supposed ‘other’ is in fact constitutive of the state in the first place. This is why drugs money is ‘laundered’.22 Lester and McNulty pursue the money – so much so that, in the end, they almost break the law23 – to reveal its origins and, particularly, its ends. In other words, they are involved in a radical act. Taking the side of the ‘working’ detective within the police institution, from scene to scene and location to location, The Wire follows the money too. Nevertheless, the narrative pursuit of money through the cycle (or loop) of accumulation from the streets into finance only goes so far, and this narrative limit constitutes the generic limit of The Wire as a work of crime fiction. Crucial, here, is another important character in the series, ‘Stringer’ Bell, the key to McNulty and his colleagues’ surveillance operation, via ‘D’. He is murdered at the end of Season 3 by Omar and Brother Mouzone (a hitman from New York) with the tacit agreement of Avon Barksdale. Stringer Bell is Avon’s second in command, the manager of the business (he counts the money), a close associate and friend (he advises him to have ‘D’ killed) – indeed, he is the ‘brains’ of the outfit (much like Lester is for the wiretap detail). Avon is a more charismatic leader with a keen sense for the uses of violence as a strategy of power and drugs commerce. Inside the partnership Barksdale and Bell (Stringer

eventually dies under a sign for ‘B&B enterprises’) there coexist in increasing conflict two of the above logics of accumulation, associated with commodity exchange, on the one hand, and corporate finance and investment, on the other. The Wire traces this conflict, and Stringer’s attempts to consolidate the ‘co-operative’ with a reluctant Avon, following him right into the offices of Baltimore’s luxury-apartment redevelopment projects in which he invests (with the help of Senator ‘Clay’ Davis, among others). Until he is shot, when Avon decides against the world of finance capital. The Wire follows suit, abandoning the compo-

sitional strategy of looping in and between accumulation cycles linking the office scenes of finance with commodity exchange on the streets. Instead, it returns to foreground the battle for corners and corner-boy allegiances in the streets, where accumulation begins, and where The Wire’s story over Season 1 to 3 is replayed across Seasons 4 and 5 – this time between different crews and kingpins: Proposition Joe and his nemesis Marlo Stanfield. The significance of Stringer Bell’s story as a limit for both the narrative of The Wire as a whole and its narration is given in a brief scene – again starring McNulty and Bunk – at the beginning of the last episode of Season 3. It repeats the conflict of accumulation regimes, as a problem of police interpretation. Stringer has just been killed and the detectives find an address they did not know about in his wallet. They go there and are uncharacteristically stunned into silence by what they (do not) find. They wander into Stringer’s open-plan designer apartment, and just stare, as if it had become stuck in their eyes (it refuses to open up and become an object for them). ‘This is

Stringer?’ asks (states) McNulty; ‘Yeh!’, replies Bunk. Their scopic prowess has clearly reached its limits: the more they scan the apartment, the more unreadable it becomes. Bunk stands in the middle of the living room as if there were nothing to be decoded, no clues, none of those traces on which his and McNulty’s subjectivization as detectives depends. McNulty and Bunk have reached the limits of their considerable interpretative powers and find no pleasure – no crime – in the scene. This is because Stringer has ‘laundered’ his lifestyle and wiped his apartment clean, so that it would seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with crime – that is, the drugs business, the murder that he administers, the violence of the exchange of commodities he coordinates, nor with the ‘culture’ associated with it. McNulty goes over to a bookshelf and looks at the books. He takes one down and glances at it and asks: ‘Who the fuck was I chasing?’ (as if to the viewers, since they know more than he) and puts the book down again. At which point the frustrated detectives turn and leave. The scene is never mentioned again, never returned to and ‘looped’ into the narrative. However, just as they turn away, the camera detaches itself from their perspective and becomes momentarily autonomous – this is The Wire’s TV camera consciousness at work again – to concentrate the viewers’ gaze momentarily on the title of the book McNulty has discarded. It is Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. The detectives don’t pick up on Stringer’s particular knowledge, even though McNulty had previously followed him to a college where he studies Business Administration, specifically the idea of ‘elasticity of demand’. It is clear in class that Stringer’s practical

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knowledge of the market in heroin has given him a head start on his peers since he already appreciates, as he tells the teacher, the importance of the creation of consumer demand, of feeding desire, so as to sell more and more commodities of a particular type. This feeding of consumer desire has its correlate in Stringer, an addict too, since the elasticity of demand also feeds his own desire: to accumulate. Giovanni Arrighi teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, although it is by no means certain that Stringer Bell attended his lectures. We might speculate, however, about what might have been the result if, like The Wire, rather than looking to China in his recent study of the contemporary world economy, Arrighi had turned instead to the ‘wired’ territory of the local drugs trade, at Adam Smith in Baltimore, rather then Adam Smith in China (2007 – reviewed in RP 150) – a book probably composed over the same period as The Wire. In his discussion of Smith’s account of the role of commodity exchange and competition in capitalist development, given in the formula C–M–Ć – in which commodities are exchanged for money in order to purchase commodities of greater utility (hardly what is going on in the territories The Wire maps) – he counterposes to it Marx’s general formula of capital, M–C–Ḿ, in which ‘for capitalist investors the purchase of commodities is strictly instrumental to an increase in the monetary value of their assets from M to M´.’ The formula M–C–Ḿ describes Avon Barksdale’s mercantilist street economy of commodity exchange, its accumulative logic (backed up by extreme violence). But if Avon’s activities are M–C–Ḿ, Stringer’s are M–Ḿ. As Arrighi notes, in certain circumstances, ‘the transformation of money into commodities may be skipped altogether (as in Marx’s abridged formula of capital, M–Ḿ).’ In his previous work, The Long Twentieth Century (1994), Arrighi fleshed out this point further: if [i]n phases of material expansion money capital ‘sets in motion’ an increasing mass of commodities [for example, drugs] in phases of financial expansion an increasing mass of money capital ‘sets itself free’ from its commodity form, and accumulation proceeds through financial deals.… Together, the two epochs or phases constitute a full systemic cycle of accumulation (M–C–Ḿ).24

Stringer’s ‘financial deals’ and ‘abridgement’ of the M–C–Ḿ formula to M–Ḿ threatens either to break away from the cycle of the commodity exchange of drugs – and set him free – leaving his friend and

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partner Avon behind, or to subordinate them both to its logic. One of the most important contributions The Wire makes to crime fiction is the detail with which it dramatizes, on the one hand, the procedures and limits of detection and, on the other, crime as a complex practice which it conceives formally and compositionally, through its narrative loops and cycles of accumulation (which constitutes in turn the TV series’ polydiegetic, segmented architecture), not as crime against capitalism, but as crime that is thoroughly capitalized (a neoliberal utopia, in fact). The Wire uses the crime and detective fiction genre classically, but creatively, to unpack and unravel Marx’s formulae for capital accumulation. The abridged formula M–Ḿ provides the clue to Stringer Bell’s tendency towards ‘freeing’ capital from its commodity basis in drugs (and thus to his conflict with Avon), as well as for reading the unreadability of his abstract, apparently contentless existence in his designer apartment – it is, or pretends to be, pure money. Such unreadability constitutes a limit for The Wire too; however, a limit beyond which it cannot go. So it also returns to the streets, to Avon and Marlo, the corner boys, to M–C–Ḿ.

Repetition and reproduction The context of the return to the mercantile accumulation of the corners, and to Stringer’s story, is told in Season 2, which focuses on the plight of the harbour workers’ union, whose members struggle to survive in a deindustrialized port in the process of being redeveloped for tourism and luxury homes (part of Stringer’s investment portfolio). They still refer to themselves as ‘stevedores’. The union turns a blind eye (for money) to the illegal importation of goods, including sex workers, by a Greek mafia-like outfit. In The Wire deindustrialization feeds and drives the criminalization of the economic system. Indeed, it is the dominant form taken by the informal economy. 25 McNulty and the police become involved because a container-load of sex workers are murdered. The main story centres on the trade-union leader Frank Sobotka, his reaction to the murder as he turns against ‘the Greek’, as well as on his unhinged son Ziggy and his nephew Nick, who, increasingly desperate for work and money, also get involved with ‘the Greek’ and his gang – stealing container trucks of goods to sell on. Its principal object is to reflect on the idea of workers who have lost their work, as industry disappears. It is the dramatic background for The Wire’s own workerist sentiments (which pervade each of its seasons and each of the social institutions

it represents), providing it with its critical standpoint throughout. In this respect, the harbour – like the corners, the police, the schools and the local newspaper – is also subject to the ‘abridging’ effects of the M–Ḿ formula of capital. More specifically, abridgement here means the loss of industry, for the formula M–C–Ḿ does not only refer to the buying and selling of retail goods, but to another cycle of accumulation, that of industrial capital – in which money is invested in special kinds of commodities (forces of production, including labour-power) that make other commodities, which can be sold for a profit. This is what has been lost, including in the form of its negation: the organizations of the working class. As Sobotka, ‘Gus’ Haynes (the city editor of the Baltimore Sun) and McNulty complain, ‘proper’ work – in which, as Sobotka says ‘you make something’ – has disappeared. This loss of good work is melancholically performed, daily, in the local bar at the port, where generations of workers meet to regenerate, and attempt to make good, an increasingly sentimental and nostalgic sense of community. (One question is the degree to which such ‘workerism’ feeds The Wire’s sense of radicalism.) However, all of their activities are financed by crime. Needless to say, the mysterious Greek connection has Sobotka killed. In ‘Prologue to Televison’ Adorno characteristically sets out the authoritarian and regressive character of television as it plugs ‘[t]he gap between private existence and the culture industry, which had remained as long as the latter did not dominate all dimensions of the visible’. With its new, digitized and mobilized delivery platforms, televisuality in a post-television age keeps on plugging. The Wire, for example, although televisual at the level of production, is almost re-novelized by its consumption in DVD format: episode after episode may be viewed outside the TV schedules, on demand. Indeed, there is a sense in which it has reflexively incorporated this aspect into its composition. Despite his well-known cultural pessimism, Adorno did evoke future emancipatory possibilities, even for television (without them, critique would be pointless). He concludes his essay: In order for television to keep the promise still resonating within the word [tele-vision], it must emancipate itself from everything with which it – reckless wish-fulfillment – refutes its own principle and betrays the idea of Good Fortune for the smaller fortunes of the department store.26

The ‘dependent’ and ‘autonomous’ aspects of each artwork cannot be thought of as mutually exclusive, nor be simply read off from their social inscriptions, but

need to be established through critical interpretation. The Wire’s dependency on HBO’s fortune can be conceived as providing one of the material conditions for its freedom – which takes the form of time, the time for Simon and Burns to pursue its realist compositional logic.27 Returning to the corners and their economy, in Season 4 a school is added to The Wire’s expanding world, as are the life and times of a number of potential ‘corner boys’. The business in drugs has been taken over by Marlo with extreme violence – and the dead bodies of countless ‘competitors’ hidden in the abandoned houses of the area (now, in the children’s minds, an eerie cemetery haunted by ghosts and zombies: typical of zones of continuous ‘primitive’ accumulation in the Americas) by the scary killers Chris and Snoop. At the level of crime, Season 4 repeats the conflict between logics of accumulation, but refuses to return to the unreadable sphere of finance capital. At one level, Seasons 4 and 5 may thus be experienced as mere repetition. At another, however, the moving story of the corner boys, suggests that the addition of another institution has a strategic intention: systematicity. It shows the social reproduction of the logic of criminal accumulation. Its portrayal of the education system demonstrates the complete failure of hegemony, as a reproductive power of the state. Overall, the dangers of naturalistic containment notwithstanding, The Wire shows the constitutive, systematic and reproductive power of M–C–Ḿ in both its unabridged and abridged forms.

Notes 1. There are few temporal markers of exactly when the action depicted in The Wire takes place, but it seems to begin some time in 2000 or 2001. This suggests an intention to understand and film the present, over several years, more or less as it happens. 2. David Simon, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, Holt Paperbacks, New York, 2006; David Simon and Edward Burns, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, Broadway Books, New York, 1998. 3. As described by the luckless Gary McCullough in The Corner: ‘There’s a corner everywhere… The corner dominates … I was loyal to the corner … it don’t care where you come from … it’s big enough to take us all.’ Addictions of all kinds are, of course, fundamental to such a culture. 4. Franco Moretti, ‘The Novel: History and Theory’, New Left Review 52, July–August, 2008, p. 115. 5. Michael Connolly’s recent series of thrillers starring his LAPD detective Hieronymous Bosch, is another example of this relaying: from post-Rodney King cultural sensitivity to Homeland Security. 6. Responding to the question ‘Is this how true warriors

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feel?’, the resentful Sergeant Brad ‘Iceman’ Colbert of Generation Kill is very specific: ‘Don’t fool yourself. We aren’t being warriors down here. They’re just using us as machine operators. Semi-skilled labour.’ Both the soldiers in Generation Kill and the cops in The Wire make do – that is, proceed – with out-of-date technology. 7. Jean Paul Sartre, L’Imagination (1936), PUF, Paris, 1981, p. 162. 8. In contrast, Generation Kill has the inverse problem: refusing to ‘loop’ its narrative through other spheres, it remains fixated on the field of military operations. 9. Walter Benjamin, ‘A Small History of Photography’, in One-Way Street and Other Writings, New Left Books, London, 1979, p. 256. Benjamin also notes that with such developments ‘photography turns all life’s relationships into literature’. Before working on TV programmes, David Simon was a journalist for the Baltimore Sun, whilst Edward Burns was a police officer and subsequently a schoolteacher (like the character Prez in the series). 10. The dead kid had been given the unfortunate nickname ‘Snot Boogie’. Every Friday he attempted to ‘snatch and run’ with the proceeds from a local craps game. He was regularly caught and beaten up, almost as if in a ritual. This time, however, he was shot dead. Puzzled, McNulty asks the young witness, ‘Why did you let him play?’ ‘Got to’, he answers, ‘it’s America man!’ 11. Louis Althusser, ‘Marx in His Limits’, in Philosophy of the Encounter: Late Writings, 1978–1987, ed. François Matheron and Oliver Corpet, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, Verso, London and New York, 2006, pp. 95–126. 12. John Ellis, Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty, I.B. Tauris, New York and London, 2002, p. 10. 13. See Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method’, History Workshop Journal 9, 1980, pp. 5–36. Ginzburg refers to the emergence of a ‘medical semiotics’. 14. Quoted in Margaret Morse, ‘An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, the Mall and Television’, in Patricia Mellencamp, ed., Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, and BFI, London, 1990, p. 193. 15. In Seeing Things, Ellis gives a periodization of televisual eras: a first ‘era of scarcity’ that lasted until the late 1970s (characterized by few channels broadcasting for part of the day only); a second ‘era of availability’ that lasted approximately until the end of the 1990s (characterized by ‘managed choice’ across a variety of channels – including satellite – twenty-four hours a day); and a contemporary third ‘era of plenty’ (characterized by ‘television on demand’ and interactive platforms). 16. 24’s impression of speed is further enhanced by the use of the split screen. See Michael Allen, ‘Divided Interests: Split-Screen Aesthetics in 24’, in Steven Peacock, ed., Reading 24: TV Against the Clock, I.B. Tauris, London and New York, 2007. 17. For a discussion of the relation between ‘segment’ and ‘flow’ in television, a staple of Television Studies, see in particular Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, Fontana/Collins, London, 1974; John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video, Routledge, London and New York, 1992; Richard Dienst, Still Life in Real Time: Theory after Television, Duke University Press, Durham NC and London, 1994. For an

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approach that links the discussion to recent technological developments, see William Uricchio, ‘Television’s Next Generation: Technology/Interface Culture/Flow’, in Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson, eds, Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, Duke University Press, Durham NC and London, 2004, pp. 163–82. In ‘Is Television Studies History?’, Cinema Journal, vol. 47, no. 3, Spring, 2008, pp. 127–37, Charlotte Brunsdon notes a masculinizing shift in television discourse, away from feminized melodrama and its inscription into the living room, to masculinized quality cop shows, like The Wire and, especially, The Sopranos, and their inscription into redesigned living spaces (and TVs) organized around a variety of new delivery systems. 18. McNulty and Lester’s partnership is Kantian: without Lester, McNulty’s intuition is ‘blind’; without McNulty, Lester’s reason is ‘empty’. 19. For example, in Season 2 Major Valchek pressurizes Commissioner Burrell to reform the detail that pursued Barksdale in order to investigate Frank Sobotka, the leader of the stevedores’ union – out of religious jealousy – and thus pave the way for the eventual institutional rise of Daniels. In this context Daniels’s own shady past dealings are hinted at. 20. Such entry into the sphere of the local ruling class is also mediated by lawyers, particularly Maurice ‘Maury’ Levy, who acts for and counsels the crime bosses (Avon and then Marlo). 21. Omar is a transgressive character in a variety of ways – most annoyingly for the gangsters he robs in terms of his sexuality (a key theme for many of the back stories in The Wire). 22. In this sense, the territory of The Wire may be read from the perspective provided by Homi Bhabha’s account of racism in his The Location of Culture, Routledge, London and New York, 1994. 23. Much to the annoyance of Bunk and Kima, McNulty and Lester transform dead bodies into the victims of a serial killer so as to generate funds to pursue their bynow ‘private’ investigation of Stansfield. 24. See Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century, Verso, London and New York, 2007, p. 75; and The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times, Verso, London and New York, 1994, p. 6. 25. See David Harvey (a critic who has ‘lived in Baltimore City for most of [his] adult life’ and also taught at Johns Hopkins University), ‘The Spaces of Utopia’, in Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2000, pp. 133–81: ‘Manufacturing jobs accelerated their movement out (mainly southwards and overseas) during the first severe post-war recession in 1973–5 and have not stopped since… Shipbuilding, for example, has all-but disappeared and the industries that stayed have “downsized”’ (p. 148). If Season 2 stands out in the series, locationally, this is because of the territorial significance of the phases of accumulation foregrounded by Arrighi. As Harvey makes clear, the predominance of the abridged formula of finance capital represented by Stringer changes the urban and social geography of Baltimore. 26 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Prologue to Television’, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford, Columbia University Press, New York, 1998, pp. 49–50, p. 57. 27 In its autonomy The Wire also contributes to ‘brand’ HBO, a subsidiary of TimeWarner.

interview Rem Koolhaas and Reinier de Graaf

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em Koolhaas is perhaps the most feted and influential figure in architecture today, as well as one of the most original contemporary theorists of its changing relations to urban and socio-economic forms. Co-founder in 1975 of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), he is also Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at Harvard University. Starting in the late 1970s OMA established its international reputation through a series of competition entries, after which it was able to realize a number of built projects, including the Kunsthal, Rotterdam (1992). In 1994 it completed its most ambitious project up to that date: the master plan for Euralille in France, a 70-hectare civic and business centre comprising the central node for Europe’s high-speed railway network, described by Koolhaas himself as the basis for a new form of ‘virtual metropolis spread in an irregular manner’ which connects together some 70 million people. Since the turn of the millennium OMA’s practice has dramatically expanded, both in terms of its number of commissions and in its geographical scope, opening further offices in New York and Beijing. Among its many celebrated projects have been the IIT Campus Centre in Chicago (2003), the Seattle Public Library (2004), the Casa da Musica in Porto (2005), and stores for the fashion designer Prada in New York and Los Angeles. Today, the practice is hectically active in almost all parts of the globe, with current projects including controversial (and heavily criticized) work in China – most famously, the iconic CCTV Building in Beijing – and a host of buildings and master plans in Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and elsewhere in the Middle East. Koolhaas is, however, at least as well known for his writings as for his buildings. Originally schooled in the 1960s as a screenwriter and journalist, he has become arguably the most important and widely read architectural writer–practitioner since Le Corbusier. Following on from formative studies of Soviet Constructivism and the Berlin Wall, Koolhaas’s breakthrough text was the 1978 Delirious New York. Subtitled A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, the book, written while Koolhaas was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, proposed a provocative rereading of modern architecture and urbanism, which set a celebratory account of the surrealistic ‘culture of congestion’ to be found in New World ‘Manhattanism’ against the puritan uptightness and classicism of Le Corbusier’s European Modernism. It was followed in 1995 by the 1,000plus-page S,M,L,XL, co-designed with Bruce Mau, which both summarized the work of OMA up to that point and collected together a number of important shorter texts. These included pivotal pieces on the ‘Typical Plan’ (1993), ‘Bigness’ (1994) and ‘The Generic City’ (1994), all of which pursued a strikingly novel, and often slyly ironic, conception of architecture as that form of cultural production compelled, within twentieth-century modernity, to relate ‘to the forces of the Groszstadt [metropolis] like a surfer to the waves’. As much concerned with the ‘dislocations of modern capital’ as conventional architectural issues of form and space, Koolhaas’s writings of the 1990s counterposed the metropolis as an endlessly productive ‘system of fragments’ to the ‘meanness of architecture’ as discrete aesthetic object. At the same time, such texts served to distance Koolhaas’s intellectual concerns from the often more abstruse interest in philosophical work, particularly Derrida, dominant among many of his architect-theorist contemporaries. And while the likes of Fredric Jameson effectively tried to claim him in the 1980s for some emergent new postmodernist aesthetic, Koolhaas himself always resisted such identifications. Indeed he has consistently, and vigorously, promoted his allegiance precisely to the modern, if not to architectural modernism as a movement – as it was ‘completely stripped from its social programme’ – and to the need ‘to align [with] and find an articulation’ for what he affirms as the ‘forces of modernization’.

Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09)

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In the texts bearing his name since the late 1990s, Koolhaas has tended to take on more of an editorial or curatorial role. Although collections like Content (2004), printed in garish magazine form by the German art publisher Taschen, also include key sole-authored texts – most notably the essay ‘Junkspace’ – they are most distinctive for the breadth of intellectual interest exhibited in the writers and texts that they bring together, which escape all ‘disciplinary categories’, as Jameson has put it, and extend from sociologists and geographers to post-conceptual artists and philosophers of science. This transdisciplinary scope is apparent, too, in the series of studies that Koolhaas oversaw at Harvard during the late 1990s and early 2000s, under the general title of ‘The Project on the City’, which sought ‘to document the combined effects of the market economy and globalization on the architectural discipline’. These included volumes on the architecture and sociology of shopping, the unprecedented urbanization of the Pearl River Delta in China, and, most notoriously, the African metropolis of Lagos, in the organized chaos of which Koolhaas provocatively found ‘the future of the modern city’: ‘a developed, extreme, paradigmatic case-study of a city at the forefront of globalizing modernity’. Such works continue to promote Koolhaas’s often violently expressed opposition towards what he has called architecture’s ‘fundamental moralism’ about the contemporary, as well as his principled scepticism towards the possibility of any directly critical architectural practice. If this has served to associate him, latterly, with the politically complacent, and ultimately formalist, arguments of so-called ‘post-critical’ thinkers in the North American architectural academy, in fact at the heart of Koolhaas’s work has always been a profound concern with the relationship between architectural and social form. It is in this sense that he has written of a desire for architecture to ‘regain its instrumentality as a vehicle of modernization’, and which, in part, no doubt explains his interest for a number of contemporary thinkers within the Marxist tradition such as Jameson and Antonio Negri, whose short 2007 ‘presentation’ on Koolhaas’s conception of the contemporary condition of the metropolis we publish in English for the first time below. In 1999, Koolhaas established AMO as a separate research and design studio, ‘dedicated to the virtual’, and running alongside the conventional architectural practice in Rotterdam. Since 2002 its director has been Reinier de Graaf. As a somewhat unique think tank, AMO has worked commercially for the likes of Volkswagen, Heineken and IKEA, as well as Prada. While such work certainly risks complicity with what Okwui Enwezor describes as the ‘transformation of research into a commodity in the global culture of multinational consultancy’, AMO’s most interesting projects have been those which have seemed best to realize Koolhaas’s and de Graaf’s conception of of architectural knowledge as inherently implying ‘a web of umbilical cords to other disciplines’. This is apparent in, for example, the study of the new forms and economics of global museum design, the ‘Hollocore’ project on Europe’s new urbanity, and the novel text-and-image pieces on global capitalism and ‘rampant modernization’ that are the ‘Y€$ Regime’ and ongoing ‘AMO Atlas Worldwide’. To date, the most ambitious of these projects has been The Image of Europe, a research study, overseen by de Graaf, which resulted in exhibitions, staged in Brussels, Munich and Vienna, consisting of two enormous panoramic murals documenting the history of Europe’s representations and iconography. In such projects, as Koolhaas has mused elsewhere, ‘Maybe architecture doesn’t have to be stupid after all. Liberated from the obligation to construct, it can become a way of thinking about anything.’ DC

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Propaganda architecture Radical Philosophy  Let’s begin with the question of why you decided to start AMO. What was the thinking behind the formation of a separate ‘research unit’ within the main architectural practice? What has it allowed you to do that OMA didn’t? Rem Koolhaas  The driving force behind both OMA and AMO is curiosity. There has always been a journalistic dimension that underpins all of my work. Architecture has severe limitations, and, first of all, AMO simply provided us with a new way of looking at the world. In this way we try to create context and to extract new insights from it. The second thing is that we realized that there has always been something very problematic about the architectural profession in terms of the degree to which you are able to define your own agenda. Fundamentally, as a professional architect, you are submitted constantly to the wishes of others. Through AMO we have been more able simply to announce interests on our own and pursue them independently. Reinier de Graaf  The work that AMO is doing with the Hermitage in St Petersburg, for instance. We pursued a competition for an architectural extension [to the Museum] that we didn’t win, following which the whole extension project was thrown into crisis. So, we then more or less created a project for ourselves. We found out that there were links between the Guggenheim and the Hermitage, and used that context in order to propose a different type of project on the latter for which we completely created our own funding from Dutch and Russian cultural sources. In effect, we proposed the scope for a curatorial master plan, for the Hermitage, and then found the funding. So that was 100 per cent the result of our own initiative – both in the brief and in the themes. It’s the most radical pursuing of our own agenda yet, and, in that sense, it’s quite remarkable that it’s actually worked. RP  So it’s a different kind of business model… Koolhaas  Partly, I guess, it’s a different kind of business model, but it’s mostly a different medium for our thinking. RP  How would you define the relationship of this different medium, or mode of address, to the discipline of architecture itself? Is the point that it still functions as a form of specifically architectural thinking or knowledge, but one that is intended to be operative within a much wider social-cultural or transdisciplinary field? Koolhaas  In the beginning I was very sceptical about the ways in which the architectural profession is conventionally constituted, in the sense that it is based on very old forms of knowledge. Some of the ‘laws’ that we work with are nearly 3,000 years old – that is, discussions of proportion, composition, coherence, and so on. A lot of this knowledge didn’t seem particularly relevant any more, in so far as it wasn’t able to capture certain new forces or to respond to certain conditions. Just before we formally started AMO, however, this problem began to tilt in a different direction, as a result of the fact that, as the economy started to go crazy, there was a process going on by virtue of which almost the entire profession seemed to undergo a flattening and loss of memory, identity, and so on. RP  Could one see this as a question, then, of the degree to which architecture as a specific body of knowledge apparently pre-dates the emergence of capitalist modernity, in some sense, whereas, arguably, all of the other design disciplines are more or less direct products of capitalist society and industrialization?

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Koolhaas  Not only this, it has a traditional relationship with the public and a traditional relationship to the idea of ‘doing good’. I have often been intensely sceptical about such moral pretensions. However, there is a certain tipping point at which what has previously seemed backward may come to seem forward-looking or progressive in other ways, and so we have recently become very interested in this. At the same time, we were also struck by the fact that so many other territories were increasingly using metaphors drawn from architecture, using our vocabulary to explain other domains. De Graaf  These are words from architecture that are now used in a mainly ‘conceptual’ or political and strategic sense, or even as part of military jargon: architect, blueprint, construct, platform, framework, foundation, model, scaffolding, and so on. RP  So, it’s a matter of deploying the kinds of knowledge architecture provides us with in interrogating the more general socio-political uses of these terms? Koolhaas  Yes, in that sense AMO was framed around a simple point: since other disciplines use our words, they might as well use our thinking. In this context, the problematic nature of the language of architecture as a discipline that, in the 1980s, had often seemed to me only a hindrance now meant that it could actually provide a new space for a form of thinking which could then be applied productively in other domains. De Graaf  Interestingly, one thing we’ve also found is that when you work as an architect and you work in an age that’s dominated by specialisms and by the empirically provable, you end up marginalized, because all the arguments you bring to the table, which may well be valid in other disciplines, invariably seem to others highly intuitive and unprovable. Therefore the space you occupy as an architect tends to get smaller and smaller and smaller. But, to some extent, the sheer fact that architecture is also not a specialism – and that, in fact, it cannot be one – means that one can maintain a certain generalist take on things that often proves crucial in actually getting approval for buildings from higher political levels, which are themselves populated by people who are, by definition, incredibly dependent on specialists, but who, nevertheless, can never simply listen to one specialism in order to make their decisions. Because architecture has remained a generalist discipline, it’s important to cultivate its autonomy in this respect. However, while I think that many thinkers in the [Aldo] Rossi period were calling, with the use of specifically architectural terminologies, for a literal restoration of architecture, we embellish the same terms, to explore their broader metaphorical possibilities. We want really to destroy the idea of architecture as a kind of hermetic form. RP  From a different perspective, is AMO then also a way, for you, of ‘escaping’ architecture, in its limited sense? In the case of the Hermitage project, for example, you seem to have deliberately resisted the idea of building, to have explicitly advised the museum against any grand architectural gesture. De Graaf  In this particular case that’s true, for very good reasons. If you step back from your own vested interests in always persuading people to build – because that’s your business – objectively an expensive building was the last thing they needed. There are some cases where adding more actually becomes counterproductive.

Arguing against the odds RP  Perhaps we can go back to try and pin down more clearly the character of the kind of cross-disciplinary mode of architectural thinking that you described a moment ago? It strikes me that a lot of your contemporaries – Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, Daniel Libeskind, and others – have claimed a fairly direct and cultivated relationship to philosophical modes of thought, and to the work of certain specific philosophers in particular: Derrida and Deleuze would be among the most obvious. Now, in a way, what you’ve

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described as AMO’s focus on the uses of architectural language in the broader culture, and on working through that, might well be associated with some kind of ‘deconstructive’ project. Yet you’ve always seemed to be considerably more wary than many of your contemporaries about these kinds of identifications. The forms of architectural or urbanist thought and writing that you’re associated with have generally appeared to be rather different in character. Koolhaas  That’s true. Nevertheless, I benefited enormously from knowing the work of these thinkers. And, actually, in some cases I knew them personally. Delirious New York, for example, is very directly connected to the writings of Roland Barthes, and I doubt I would have written it had I not met him or read Mythologies. While I was at Cornell, Michel Foucault was there as well, teaching. At some point I also met Deleuze. I don’t think these influences or relationships necessarily need to be flagged up. But it’s not an indifference to these thinkers. As a student, I was soaked in the language of semiotics – later on, Deleuze effectively ended that. This is hardly ever mentioned any more in architectural discourse, but, to me, it is actually crucial, and, as an absent force, increasingly important. RP  I suppose part of what we’re getting at here concerns the model of intellectual work itself. AMO is more or less explicitly organized around a certain idea of doing ‘research’. But this often appears to emphasize more empirical or sociological, rather than strictly theoretical or philosophical, modes of intellectual practice: the collection and analysis of data, statistics, and so on. In the past, you’ve used terms like ‘documentation’ and ‘description’ – even ‘fieldwork’ – as a way of defining the precise character of this activity. Koolhaas  Well, increasingly I’m rather modest about the word ‘research’. The obsession with facts and quantities was generated by the fact that, in the mid-1990s, when I began to teach at Harvard and to do this kind of work with the students there [in the Project on the City and in the studies of shopping and the Pearl River Delta], the misfit between what was then architectural discourse and the real situation was so colossal it seemed that only, as it were, by an overdose of empirical givens could we hope to begin to dislodge the existing discourse. RP  So, this was about both a reorienting of theory towards social reality, and a kind of internal architectural reaction to existing forms of intellectual discourse in the field? You have often vigorously opposed a certain moralism in architectural discourse – the idea that ‘one shouldn’t look at the bad’. Is it also a question of insisting, then, upon the importance of something like what certain social scientists and philosophers used to call a fact–value distinction? Koolhaas  Partly this is what I meant before when I talked about there being a journalistic dimension to the whole thing, which is no doubt based on my previous experience as a journalist – somebody who is supposed to be writing about facts. But we also discovered that the more we adopted this persona – this implacable concern with the factual and the quantitative – the more authority our words appeared to carry. And then, of course, it also became a form of humour. De Graaf  There is, even among architects who don’t do this sort of stuff, a kind of training in arguing against the odds. When you arrive on the scene and you want to do a building, nine out of ten times the vast majority of people don’t want a building there at all, and when they do they certainly don’t want the building that you want to do. In this sense, you’re faced with a general prejudice against building and against the modern. So, in architecture there is a long tradition of using facts to your advantage. Koolhaas  Particularly in modernism. All those books of statistics in the 1920s and 1930s, on through to CIAM, which always put things in very serious quasi-apocalyptic terms – ‘can our cities survive?’ We are very much a last generation informed by that kind

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of discourse, aware of those positions. In these terms, we would consider maybe 70 per cent of our output highly ironic. RP  Is that true of the actual architectural projects, as well as the textual and visual work? Koolhaas  Completely. We think that both what we write and what we do architecturally are, in some way, deeply humorous. This is almost never captured, not by a single critic… De Graaf  And the more our exposure increases, the more the irony is easier to miss. RP  Are there any simple examples you can give of this? Koolhaas  Well, the ‘Generic City’ [published in S,M,L,XL], for example, is almost totally a parody of a certain kind of architectural writing. RP  Let’s talk a little, then, about your relationship to the actual architectural theory of the 1960s and 1970s. I’m thinking of the writings of someone like Manfredo Tafuri. It has sometimes been suggested that much of your work could be understood as a form of response to the situation of architecture under advanced capitalism that Tafuri describes, from a broadly Marxian position, in books like Architecture and Utopia… Koolhaas  I have a personal take on this. I was there, as a fly on the wall, when Peter Eisenman was applying Tafuri’s ideas, and there was a certain merger of positions [in US architectural discourse] in a way that really insisted on architecture’s autonomy, and then insisted on its critical dimension. Most of what we do at OMA should be understood both as absolutely undermining this idea of autonomy, and as asserting that architecture, by its very nature, cannot be critical. You can be critical as an architect, but architecture itself is never critical in that sense. I remember there was a series of conferences – the ANY conferences – where this relationship with a certain philosophy was consummated. Derrida was very often also present. And at the last one I was almost literally thrown out because I combined in a single lecture our work on Prada and Lagos. It was intended as a total denial of autonomy. So, in a way, we are totally fascinated by many of the same subjects, but our interpretations of these subjects are radically opposed. The connection is in the interests; the divergence is in the conclusions. But the connection in interests is, of course, very important.

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© Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)

RP  This relates to Eisenman’s particular appropriation of Tafuri’s thought, so as to develop this theorization of a critical autonomy. Perhaps we could take up a rather different aspect of this, however. What about the latter’s emphasis, for example, in the 1970s, on modern architecture’s specifically metropolitan condition; that is, on the compulsion for architecture to open itself up onto the terrain of the metropolis in advanced capitalism? The concept of the metropolis is a key term in the philosophical and sociological tradition that Tafuri draws upon: Simmel, Kracauer, Benjamin, and so on. And there would certainly seem to be an obvious connection here, not only in Delirious New York and in the ‘Generic City’ essay, but in terms of the actual name of the practice you decided upon in the 1970s: the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. What’s

© Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)

the significance of the term for you? Is the key point its distinction to the form of the traditional city? Koolhaas  That’s a beginning. It declares that all the previous models for architecture’s relation to the city are invalid. And, of course, it also announces that this is an existence on the other side of ‘nature’, and announces the accepting, and embracing, of that condition. At the time we started the practice it had a tremendous polemical value, because it was the antithesis of everything everybody wanted or spoke about. It’s significant though that, as opposed to OMA, the ‘M’ in AMO is no longer defined. One can think of the word and concept of the metropolis as a sort of rocket-launcher. But we shed it because it became an inconvenient obligation constantly to have to argue for it.

The idea of Europe RP  Perhaps we could move on to discuss a specific AMO project, The Image of Europe, which culminated in a series of exhibitions. What was the initial impetus for this? Koolhaas  It started from a very straightforward invitation. In the 2001 Treaty of Nice, Brussels had been declared the official capital of Europe, and there was a working group set up jointly by Guy Verhofstadt, the Belgian prime minister, and by Romano Prodi, the president of the European Commission, to study the consequences of that. So, a number of intellectuals were invited – Umberto Eco was one of them – to think about this. Simply because we were able to illustrate our arguments, and to make a narrative of the arguments, these slowly but surely became the content of that commission. Because, in the end, it was we who did the report. De Graaf  That is, the report ended up being their text added to our illustrations, rather than vice versa. RP  So it was basically an intellectual project on behalf of the European Union? Koolhaas  Yes, the project started with a demand… De Graaf  Although I don’t think the demand quite foresaw the result! One thing I like about the Europe project is that one never actually knows whether we’re working for Europe or if, in the end, Europe is working for us. Europe is a convenient subject matter for us to demonstrate the existence of a whole uncharted domain that architecture can reclaim. RP  Does this also entail an engagement with the idea of Europe itself then? Étienne Balibar, for example, has described the EU as one of the ‘most fascinating and mysterious of philosophical objects’ today. De Graaf  Actually it’s interesting – the Image of Europe project started as a sort of philosophical question. Brussels, after forty years of being the temporary residence of European institutions, became officially the capital of the European Union. So we started with the question of what are the symbolic implications of this for the city, as the capital not of a country but of a transpolitical system. If it’s a capital, how is it different from Berlin,

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Koolhaas  Through this, we then became, of course, very much aware of how inadequate the communication of the European project had become. Or, of how it had only been possible to pursue this project by some form of stealth, which perhaps benefited from the fact that its full scope had never been articulated. But, as a result, the current moment was actually characterized by the national governments using Europe as a scapegoat. So, we were simply interested in developing a positive rhetoric for it.

Koolhaas  Totally – even the traffic is part of the irony, the traffic having to disappear down a tunnel before it can go through a monumental arch… RP  Is AMO’s famous design of a proposed EU logo in the form of a barcode another example of this?

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© Österreichische EU–Präsidentschaft 2006/HOPI-MEDIA

De Graaf  Everybody knows the Mall in Washington, or the Forbidden City. Europe’s symbolic heart in Brussels is actually a roundabout. This would be another example of the irony that is often missed in our work: so, for the Image of Europe exhibition in Brussels, we had a circus tent in the colours of all the European flags as an exhibition space situated in the symbolic heart of Brussels’s ‘European Quarter’, which is the Schuman roundabout [named after one of the founding fathers of the EU].

© Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)

Paris, London, and so on? And we basically stretched this question into one concerning the whole domain of Europe’s representation in general – to all of its visual representations, not just in the city of Brussels, but of the EU itself.

De Graaf  I think the barcode complies with everything we’ve said, in that it’s both serious and ironic. I remember that when it first came out, as part of the report, it was one of many images we had designed. But then I got a call from Building Design on a Friday afternoon saying ‘So, you’ve designed a new flag.’ And then BD sold the interview to the Independent, and, on the Saturday, on the front page, there was the flag, saying something like: ‘Prodi has seen the flag, likes the flag, approval pending – goodbye stars, hello stripes…’ By Monday, the edition of the Sun had also run an article on it: ‘Call this a flag? It’s a bloody deckchair!’ And then, on the Tuesday, the Guardian came out and they launched a competition under the title ‘Can you do better?’ So the irony created serious ripples. In 2006 we got to do another round of the Image of Europe exhibitions, and Austria actually adopted the flag as its official logo of the Austrian presidency [of the EU Council]. I still think it’s quite an apt summary of what Europe is about: a diversity at a glance, and a direct, immediate way to convey this diversity. Because clearly what everybody’s afraid of is this blue oil slick that eradicates national identity. And here it is an accumulation of identities, nevertheless condensed in such a way that it’s no longer a simple addition but becomes something new. Of course I also recognize its fundamentally ironic nature… RP  But the ‘serious’ side of all this, presumably, would be that this engagement with the political idea of Europe is an example of you not simply positioning yourself, so to speak, at the front end of existing social forces – surfing their waves, as you’ve famously put it elsewhere – but taking a specific position on a certain political issue? You’ve just mentioned a need you felt to create a positive image for Europe. Koolhaas  Certainly Reinier and I became fascinated with the issue, and developed this positive narrative of the European story… De Graaf  We discovered, too, a lot of parallels between what we mentioned earlier in terms of the kinds of prejudices you have to overcome as a modern architect and the prejudices faced by the political experiment of Europe. So there is a lot of sympathy! Also, for us, only once this continent is defined at a European scale – and here, of course, all the internal differences have to be fought out – does a certain modernization also become possible. In terms of immigration, of people coming to Europe, it will, for example, inevitably be easier for them to become European than to become Irish or German or whatever. RP  Is, then, The Image of Europe a kind of committed work? I mean, is it informed or motivated by a specific political commitment to some quasi-utopian idea of Europe? Koolhaas  Well … I would leave out the ‘quasi’ … And the ‘utopian’! [laughs] The ‘idea’, yes… working for a political idea, as a propagandist for the political idea. RP  So, thinking of your earlier remarks regarding the impossibility of a critical architecture, in this sense are you actually happier with the idea of working as a propagandist than as a critic? Koolhaas  Am I sceptical about being critical but happy about being a propagandist? [laughs] That’s an interesting question. I think that I have overcome my natural irony, in certain cases, to be happy with being a propagandist, yes. De Graaf  You could also say that being a propagandist is an ironic way of being a critical theoretician, which is, I guess, in the end, closest to the truth. Koolhaas  Yes. Have you seen this image [left, a television screengrab of George W. Bush with the EU barcode logo visible in the foreground]? This was, for us, the real high point of the project, as a confirmation that we had entered the political sphere. It’s real. It’s not PhotoShop. De Graaf  This is Bush unwittingly endorsing our barcode, saying it should be bigger.

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The politics of modernization RP  You were talking earlier about architects having to be generalists in a way that enables them to communicate with people at fairly high political levels in governmental institutions. Does this work of OMA/AMO thus reflect, in a contemporary context, what Tafuri says about the ways in which architecture’s relationship with planning, specifically urban planning – and, indeed, with the very idea of the plan – also confronts it, necessarily, with planning at the political and economic levels? And, if so, is part of what you’re trying to do a way of seeking to overcome the problems associated with the usual debates around that, and, instead, to position yourselves at the leading edge of capital, or at least at the leading edge of actual political decision-making, as some means of intervention? Koolhaas  By not adopting the reflexive position of a ‘critical architecture’, we have certainly never been afraid of engaging directly with fundamentally political operations. For example, you could see the master plan that we did in Lille [in France], which was part of the Eurotunnel project, and which aggressively modernized the existing city, as also being a very political project in this sense, as well as a very European project. RP  Perhaps you could say something more about this idea of modernization? I’ve read you suggesting, in the past, that Europe’s dominant cultural representations have been essentially ‘anti-modern’ in character. And, indeed, one of the things you seem to be most specifically interested in as regards Europe is an idea of it becoming, in effect, some potential new space of modernity or motor of modernization, as you call it. De Graaf  The interesting thing about Europe, actually, is that it has to confront modernity with the full weight of history on its back. So, Europe can’t be a radical act of modernity in the sense of starting from scratch, of a tabula rasa, of forgetting everything. The challenge of modernity is greatest in the case of Europe, in a way, simply because it carries with it so much history. Koolhaas  The tabula rasa is not an option, even if you wanted it. So, you have all this history on your back, and yet you’re also modernizing… De Graaf  This is [also related to] the contemporary American version of political labour as opposed to the European one: ‘mission accomplished’, in the supposed victory in the Iraq War five years ago, versus ‘mission never-ending’ in the EU. All the harshness and antiheroicness of European political labour is actually much more an object for admiration… Koolhaas  This is another form of opposition… At some point, as we continued to be involved in Europe, we kept hearing the word acquis, which is the French word for ‘that which is acquired’. This is the sum of all the European legislation: the Acquis Communitaire. We kept asking to see it, and it didn’t exist as a single thing. So then we made it, and, basically, it’s a book which is seven metres long, with 90,000 pages. De Graaf  It only exists in segments as documents on the Internet, where somebody at Agriculture puts up that or that or that. Nobody had ever printed the whole thing and put it together as one book. And this [legislation] is what nations aspiring to become part of Europe have to accept. Koolhaas  If you do it, you’re European. And, so, this leads to an incredible concept of syndicated legislation. In order to trade or engage with us you have to adopt sections of this. So, parts of South America, Africa and, increasingly, the rest of the world, are adopting sections of it. That for us, now, is a really interesting form of modernization – by establishing common laws, or using law as a platform for encounter. This is a dimension of Europe that became fascinating for us, and is also a typically European way of doing it – a soft power, exercised not directly but by establishing common entities.

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RP  So is this political idea of Europe, for which you want to provide a ‘positive rhetoric’, one that has to be partly defined by the ways in which it offers a counterforce to a certain specifically American politics and image of modernity? De Graaf  Well, it was for a certain phase of the project because of the current events at the time [the war in Iraq]. But I think, over time, our concept of Europe has become much more of a stand-alone idea that doesn’t need to define itself by contrast to the USA. RP  All this perhaps raises the obvious question of globalization, and the impact of the fact that the geographical spheres of activity of both OMA and AMO are evidently becoming increasingly internationalized. Much of your work now is in the Middle East, and you’ve talked about a general move eastwards on the part of the practice. De Graaf  At its peak, about 30 per cent of our work was in the Middle East. One of the things we’ve come to realize is that we often think of Europe and Asia as separate continents but actually they’re a single landmass. Once you start shifting eastwards, and working eastwards, one of the things you notice is this relative seamlessness. So, the unification of Europe might also be a stage in the unification of a Eurasian landmass. Koolhaas  You realize it in literally moving – that you drive from Dubai to Saudi Arabia, and realize that if you kept on driving you’d very soon be in Turkey, and then in Athens. There is a literal sense of connectedness. RP  Going back to the question of the modern, and of Europe’s specific relation to the modern, how far is your interest in what is happening in, say, Dubai or China also defined, then, by an engagement with the global dynamics of modernization? A supplementary question to this would be, in light of what you’ve just said: to what degree does this imply that modernity itself is essentially European in some way, or, at least, that it has a specifically European genesis?

Ole Scheeren, CCTV, © OMA

Koolhaas  Absolutely – it is theEnlightenment idea that has then been filtered. The exciting thing is that other cultures are now copying this, and more and more taking control of it. RP  So, it’s a process of translation… Koolhaas  It’s a form of relay, and now you can clearly say that the originators are no longer in charge. De Graaf  In that sense, this is globalization. It becomes self-perpetuating, where it almost doesn’t matter who is the originator. It becomes a sort of authorless concept.

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Koolhaas  Not only that. Our position is that, once unleashed, whether you want it or not, it is what is ‘normal’, so you have to inscribe yourself within it rather than try to work against it or to stop it. Not uncritically, but… De Graaf  So as to reveal the ways in which architecture is subject to the forces of modernization and globalization. RP  OK. But, then, politically and socially, do you register different, ‘better or worse’, forms of modernization? Koolhaas  Of course. The reality is terrible in many cases, really horrendous. We are always blamed for being insensitive to these forms of suffering. De Graaf  It’s always explained as a form of opportunism: that ‘they never say “no” to anything’, or that ‘there’s not a level they won’t stoop to’. RP  This is the complaint about you working in places like China or Dubai. De Graaf  You are often working with regimes that you wouldn’t necessarily pick to be your governors. But it involves a kind of dialectic, a negotiation with what is there, and through this you can produce a different kind of knowledge and power.

Design and social form RP  In The Image of Europe, clearly part of the importance of the political idea of Europe you’re interested in communicating, or providing a positive image for, is precisely the possibility that it might be one that isn’t organized around solely economic imperatives. In other words, that it isn’t defined only by an idea of the market. The same is presumably true of your engagement with globalization, and with the ‘translation’ of modernity into other non-European, non-western contexts? Koolhaas  Right. RP  This invites the question, then, of how you understand the relationship between processes of modernization and the globalization of capitalism as a specific economic and social form. Does this frame your particular interest in somewhere like China? I’m thinking here of the argument that someone like Giovanni Arrighi makes that ‘socialism may have lost’ in China but ‘capitalism hasn’t yet won’: it has a kind of market economy, of course, but it’s an economy that isn’t, as yet, necessarily a fully capitalist economy as such. Koolhaas  Well, I think, in retrospect, I would explain our interest in China as coming from the point of view of feeling that there is a certain fragility, ultimately, about our capitalist system, and therefore being interested in other versions. You can read the recent financial crisis, in a way, as being illustrative of exactly what we anticipated. And in certain ways we really did anticipate it. Maybe the ‘Y€$ Regime’ was our main announcement of how sceptical we were. RP  This was your analysis of a seemingly inescapable global capitalist regime of the yen, euro and dollar, in which a logic of the market dictated all values and decisions – including those of architectural production… De Graaf  The ‘Y€$ Regime’ was also a very early announcement of the end of ‘Y€$ Regime’! Which I think has never been properly understood, because it has always been understood as a quasi-humorous endorsement of something that we were actually very critical of. I think, basically, good architecture was never comfortable with the period from, let’s say, 1979 to 2008, with the Reagan years and its fallout. You can see the 1990s as a kind of drunken era, in which the more exuberant the stock exchange, the more exuberant the architecture.

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RP  What kind of difference do you imagine the current financial crisis might make to the architectural profession? Koolhaas  Well, I can imagine, if it persists, that architecture may find itself back at some point like it was, maybe, in the late 1950s: doing a very few earnest things that have a great significance. [laughs] It’s interesting to talk about Lagos here. I went to Lagos for the first time ten years ago, and that was in a context of ultimate scepticism about planning, about master-planning, and even about the most fundamental aspects of architectural organization. It was all about selforganization and improvisation, and so on. But then when I really looked carefully I saw that all these myriad improvisations [in Lagos] are only really possible within the context of an urban infrastructure that had been established in the 1960s and 1970s by very rigorous architectural visions, by architects often coming from formerly Communist countries. So, we thought that we were on the other side of this, but we also rediscovered that initial impulse. There is maybe a hope that this financial crisis brings us closer to that kind of work. I should say one more thing: without ever having been communist or knowingly Marxist, it is also very true that, speaking for myself, one influence that certainly led me to architecture was a confrontation with Soviet Constructivism, and with that moment where you could really speculate about how society could be reshaped, architecturally. So, that’s a fundamental connection for me. It’s an interest in that reshaping of society. And this is why being in China is so interesting, because you can still see traces of that. RP  There’s an interview from the late 1990s, with the journal Assemblage, which would seem to relate to this, where you talk of the ‘core’ of your activity as being the attempt ‘to reinvent a plausible relationship between the formal and the social’. How would you define this ‘relationship’? De Graaf  I’m just thinking about Rem’s comment about Constructivism – because that was an architectural style but it was also the largest imaginable scale of design: where one sought to design at the scale of society. This is what’s fascinating about China, whatever its faults: that it’s still an effort to apply design at an unimaginably ambitious scale. Whereas the maximum scale of design in the West is the scale of the consumer object. RP  So, is the other side of that something like the work with Prada, which one could read as an attempt to explore specific relationships between certain forms of design and certain social forms of capitalism, in this case, forms of display or spectacle, and of the consumer object, and so on? You’ve talked [in an interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist] about the Prada projects in the context of ‘an investigation of what the market economy does to architecture’. Koolhaas  Well, with Prada there was already a certain history – Miuccia [Prada] was a communist and a sociologist, with a Ph.D. in political science. So, I think they were embarrassed by consumerism and by having to operate within it. With Prada, then, there was an opportunity to see how within that you could create a kind of bubble, maybe not of its opposite, but, at least, of another world, simply by making it a space for selling or for being together. I think maybe you could explain our work in the 1990s as addressing a neglect, or challenging a prejudice. Shopping was ‘wrong’, so we looked at shopping; China was ‘wrong’ (and nobody knew about China), so we looked at China. In a way, it was really a fundamental effort to look dispassionately – maybe this is totally the wrong word – at the scale and nature of the beast. This decade is a different decade in that we’re actually dealing with it, and feeling less obligation to be objective, and more interested in pursuing a specific agenda. That’s why we needed AMO, because without AMO there is no agenda. Interviewed by David Cunningham and Jon Goodbun, Rotterdam, 30 October 2008

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On Rem Koolhaas Antonio Negri Of the writings collected together in the book Junkspace, ‘Bigness’ (1994) is for me the most important. Rem Koolhaas’s other essays, ‘The Generic City’ (1994) and ‘Junkspace’ (2001), are partly coherent, partly paradoxical complements to it. But I agree with what is argued in ‘Bigness’. Indeed I would go even further and say that ‘Bigness’ and Delirious New York (1978) are basic texts for reading and critiquing architecture today. Bigness is where architecture becomes both most and least architectural: most because of the enormity of the object; least through the loss of autonomy – it becomes an instrument of other forces, it depends. Bigness is impersonal: the architect is no longer condemned to stardom.2 Bigness no longer needs the city: it competes with the city; it represents the city; it pre-empts the city; or, better still, it is the city. If urbanism generates potential and architecture exploits it, Bigness enlists the generosity of urbanism against the meanness of architecture. Bigness = urbanism vs architecture.3

Here we have overcome the poetry and history of the city. Between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, between Simmel and Weber, Burckhardt and Braudel, the city had become polis again, the imperial centre. Now space and time destroy this utopian centrality. The complexity of the world market reconfigures the shape of the city: the ‘over half of the world population’ that inhabits the urban affirms a real centrality. Bigness, the dis-measure of the metropolis, is what we find. What, then is the metropolitan body? The essay titled ‘The Generic City’ is complementary to ‘Bigness’ and illustrates and deepens its reflections. Yet I can only partially accept what is argued in this text. Of the seventeen paragraphs that make it up, I agree with more than half of the first section, where new notions of metropolitan identity, the history of the city, and public space, are de-structured by a demonstration of the manner in which the metropolis becomes fractal, anomic, enormous and multinational. But I agree with less than half of the rest of this text: the last sections in particular, where the metropolis is presented as a machine that empties the city of reality, a sociological field where the horizon is disappearing and where each moment of stabilization is hypocritical

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Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09)

and fleeting; the city as empty spaces, panic, insecurity, screams and rags, infrastructural parasitism, and so on. The postmodern, a fundamental category in regard to Koolhaas, which he had already inaugurated in his retroactive manifesto for Manhattan, Delirious New York, is here defined as an irreversible category and as a way of seeing the present. But it is also given as what is perverse and corrupted, and thus becomes the main characteristic of his description of metropolitan space. I disagree with this. But, first, let us look at ‘Junkspace’. Modernization here reaches its highest point, the apotheosis of modernity with no way out: Fascism minus dictator. From the sudden dead end where you were dropped by a monumental, granite staircase, an escalator takes you to an invisible destination, facing a provisional vista of plaster, inspired by forgettable sources. … [Y]ou always inhabit a sandwich … In this standoff between the redundant and the inevitable, a plan would actually make matters worse, drive you to instant despair.4

Bland, anonymous, repetitive, empty, dispersive, vacuous, risible, ‘post-existential’, and so on. We are here in a Rabelaisian situation, often full of sarcasm and intense irony, but with no smile. The metropolis we inhabit is a huge grotesque theatre with no exit routes, and effectively hopeless. The architect is tired. The same urbanism that was meant to defeat architecture and demystify the architect only survives as the nonplanning of an indefinite and perverse metropolitan landscape. The architect, demystified, continues to exist as a worldly and bitter witness, a disenchanted accuser. Yet, still something happens here, a spark, an event. It could just be ‘literature’, but the text here displaces Rem Koolhaas’s argument. In fact, a paradox becomes manifest in ‘Junkspace’, and it is very real, and this is the point. The greater the critique of the city and its fading horizon, the more the metropolis becomes an endless horizon, the more this junkspace loses the mathematical and plastic semblances of traditional architecture and takes on an extraordinary physicality, shifting its analysis from a surrealism reminiscent of De Chirico to the dreamy hyper-corporeality of Bacon. Junkspace is biopolitical.

Like the Renaissance scientist who has grown up surrounded by compasses and straight lines, who wanders around the city to see the butchers dismember the calf and sell her the meat, and with it an opportunity to study the anatomy of the body, Koolhaas similarly criss-crosses the metropolis in search of its body and anatomy. The first anatomical theatres always had clandestine escape routes for the foul-smelling leftovers of the work of anatomy – normally a pond or a path to the river. This is where Rem Koolhaas’s analysis takes place in ‘Junkspace’, and there it begins to discover the body of the metropolis. Junkspace: we inhabit junk. In a discussion of the metropolis Agamben recently referred to Foucault’s definition of two disciplinary models that defined a shift from the territorial power of the ancien régime to modern biopower: these are the treatment of leprosy and the control of the plague. The paradigm of leprosy is one of exclusion: lepers must be moved outside the city and a neat division between outside and inside needs to be established. A completely different paradigm emerges with the plague: those afflicted by it cannot be excluded and the city is divided into areas; each area, street and home is then placed under strict surveillance and control. Everything is recorded. According to Foucault, says Agamben, modern political power arises from the convergence and superposition of these two paradigms. The lepers must be treated like plague victims and vice versa. As a result, strategies and dispositifs based on binary oppositions such as healthy/diseased, inclusion/exclusion and normal/ abnormal, which aimed at disciplinary subjectivation and/or controlling subjects begin to overlap. If we apply this double paradigm to urban space we find a first way of understanding the new metropolitan space of the West. This framework entails the coexistence of simple dispositifs of exclusion and vision – leprosy – and a complex articulation of spaces and their inhabitants – the plague – in order to produce a global government of men and things.

Agamben then goes on to discuss the control of urban space in Genoa July 2001 during the G8; and, we might add, the government of public space around Rostock in 2007. 5 What does this all mean? Like the capitalist process of production in general, junkspace is a space of disjunctive inclusion. Capital would cease to exist if it included labour-power and could not be productive unless it bled its value dry. Nonetheless, it also needs to separate itself from the labour force and to disjoin it from its very existence so as to dominate it. In the productive metropolis, disjunctive exclusion includes

all the population in the metropolis as a productive space, and then distributes it to mobile flexible and essentially precarious functions in the creation of value – that is, in the creation of wealth and the extraction of profit. Let us subjectify this postmodern condition of the metropolis. When from a purely analytical, disenchanted and objective phenomenological reflection we move on to a consideration of the biopolitical, the emergent picture is extraordinarily complex and shows that the production of subjectivity is coextensive with the metropolis. The picture is one of a circulation of commodities, webs of information, continuous movements, and radical nomadism of labour, and the ferocious exploitation of these dynamics… but also of constant and inexhaustible excess, of the biopolitical power of the multitude and of its excess with regard to the structural controlling ability of dominant institutions. All of the available energies are put to work, society is put to work: junkspace equals the society of labour. Within this exploited totality and injunction to work lies an intransitive freedom that is irreducible to the control that tries to subdue it. Even though this freedom can run against itself, and the function of domination is in some ways absorbed by consciousnesses (and this is called fascism), lines of flight still open up in this ambivalence: suffering is often productive but never revolutionary; what is revolutionary is excess, overflow, and power. This is junkspace seen from outside: a disequi­librium and rupture multiplied on the indefinite space of the metropolis. But this is also where the multiplication of obstacles, borders, lines of fracture and walls can no longer be regarded as simply blocks dropped down by power or as swamps that one gets stuck in: they are interfaces that polarize relations. An interface is a membrane that alternately pulsates under the rhythm of two different worlds and two different beats of life. The interface is a place of entry and exit, conversion and translation of languages, transformation of what comes and goes. In the postmodern metropolis there is always a fracture of throbs and rights, a décalage that is both the blockage and the power of productive forces. Perhaps, in order to understand the junkspace that lives in the Bigness we need to see the centrality of the link between forces and relations of production again, as dissolved in the form of biopolitics. Can these be reconstructed in a revolutionary form? I have two brief comments to make to contemporary urban planners in this regard. Urban reformism always lies alongside Rem Koolhaas’s postmodernism. It has always followed the transformations of the metropolis

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and recognized them, whilst often mystifying or making them utopian. This is its greatest effort: hypermodern reformism still tries to correct the metropolis from within, ruled by the ideology of transparency (light materials, linear figures, predominance of glass, and so on). It is a case of bending the complex substance of the metropolis onto an axis that is at once plastic and formalist. Here the industry of architecture reveals its close relationship to the fashion and film industries. This project involves all sectors of architectural production; it decomposes and recomposes them according to a logic that, in fact, hides the desire to disarticulate any possible antagonism of subjects and knowledges, flooding all the spaces where exploitation and pain cannot be shown with artificial lights. Rationalism and functionalism have become soft, but they are still effective in their mystifying activity. So postmodern cynicism rightly opposes hypermodern reformism: it keeps an eye on Bigness whilst perversely glancing onto junkspace. Postmodernism attacks history whilst historicizing; it attacks the Holy Trinity of ‘rent, profit, wages’ as an archaeological stratification, but it knows that it cannot destroy it, and, in fact, by inheriting it will end up reproducing it. The postmodern manages to show cruelty in an exemplary way: that is, the recognition that man – the citizen – the worker – the nomad – anyone is immersed in the world of commodities, in an exploitative metropolis. Is postmodernism, then, another declaration of the inability to withdraw from this situation? Is ‘Bigness’ ruled by a sense of impotence? And does the recognition of junkspace end up coming to the asthmatic conclusion that it is impossible to act? All of this lies before us. The sciences of the urban bow to biopower. That is it. This situation can no longer last: we need to overthrow it. I am sure that forms of life never really withdrew from domination and that, at a superficial glance, they might even seem to be increasingly subordinated to capitalist command. From this standpoint, the metropolis is horrible. I am also sure that there is no longer any hope of grasping a use-value beyond the circulation of exchange value, that there is no possibility of digging up a nature, a zoe, beyond the heavy weight of power on bios. However, the more the cities and metropolis have become places of production, the more they cannot but be places of resistance. Traversing a metropolis today means going through an immaterial factory. In the Fordist factories, the hardship of production and the joy of the encounter, of being together, and of being a class, coexisted just like solitude and multitude now coexist in the metropolis. The metropolis is constant capital in action, a

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mad expropriation of labour-power; but also the place where the multitude reappropriates intellectual capital and the common produced by labour. Therefore, the metropolis is at once a place of exploitation and a terrain of exodus. As the hegemony of the factory worker was built on the communist project, so the hegemony of immaterial labour and the cognitive multitude of the metropolis can be built inside and against the project of production, in the common. From this realization everything can and must start again. I really do not know what the architects trapped in the grip of the crisis of modernity can do. It seems to me that they need to decide how to interpret the relation between inclusion and disjuncture, the productive relation that extends between metropolis and multitude. Will it be possible to open up the chance for encounter and struggles in the metropolis? Certainly enclosures of resistance and of spaces for utopia are not desirable. Beyond the hypocritical transparency of the hypermodern, beyond the illusion that urban spaces can be gentrified by Tony Blair’s ‘creative classes’ (here Junkspace really does become a weapon of demystification and struggle), we need to free new forms of life and search for new structures of community that tend towards exodus. I almost laugh when my closest comrades talk about alternatives in terms of communes, self-managed gardens and city allotments, multifunctional squats, cultural and political ateliers, enterprises of a common Bildung. The cynical realism of the postmodern has earned my criticism but, starting from its realism and under no illusion that the city is entrusted to the exercise of biopower, I ask myself what it would mean to return the metropolis to biopolitical production. In the framework of Bigness, not of craftsmanship, but of the General Intellect, perhaps we only need to start talking about communism and democracy again. Translated by Arianna Bove

Notes 1. Negri is referring here to the Italian collection Junkspace (Quodlibet, Macerata, 2006), which comprises the three essays discussed in this piece. Quotations from Koolhaas in what follows are to the original English editions. 2. Rem Koolhaas, ‘Bigness, or the Problem of Large’, in Rem Koolhaas/OMA and Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL, Taschen, Cologne, 1997, p. 513. 3. Ibid., p. 515. 4. Rem Koolhaas, ‘Junkspace’, in Rem Koolhaas/OMA, eds, Content, Taschen, Cologne, 2004, pp. 166–7. 5. Giorgio Agamben, ‘Metropolis’, trans. Arianna Bove, Generation-Online, November 2006, www.generationonline.org/p/fpagamben4.htm.

reviews

To live without an idea Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2008. 255 pp., £55.50 hb., £21.50 pb., 978 0 804 70077 1 hb., 978 0 804 70078 8 pb. In lieu of either consensus or real antagonism, assessments of deconstruction since the mid-1990s have tended to encourage a sort of indifferent severance. Derrida is decried in some circles as a purveyor of relativist ‘ethics’ and the return of the religious; he is celebrated in others for much the same reasons. On the one hand: after The Gift of Death and Specters of Marx, the privileging in Derrida’s discourse of the wholly Other, of an impossible justice, and of the messianic exposes a politically complacent utopianism and a philosophically deleterious crypto-theology characteristic of his entire corpus. On the other: this ‘turn’ in Derrida’s thought reveals an important normative dimension at the very heart of deconstruction, which has always been a philosophy of ethico-political responsibility (one that channels the most laudable values of religious traditions, some add). Not quite agreeing to disagree, those who might roughly align themselves with these views simply ignore one another, each side convinced that the other has hopelessly misapprehended the in/significance for contemporary thought of deconstruction’s ethico-religious priorities. Martin Hägglund’s powerfully argued book aims to terminate this non-debate, along with its attendant postures of perfunctory dismissal and reverential cronyism. Refuting the notion that there was an ethical or religious ‘turn’ in Derrida’s thinking, Hägglund levels two key arguments against the positions sketched above: (1) that a radical atheism informs Derrida’s writing throughout his career; and (2) that neither ‘justice’ nor ‘respect for the Other’ constitutes an ethical ideal in Derrida’s work. These arguments unfold across Hägglund’s detailed interrogations, on singular points, of Derrida’s relation to Kant (autoimmunity of time), Husserl (arche-writing), Levinas (arche-violence), Augustine (mourning/desire) and Laclau (autoimmunity of democracy). The crux of Hägglund’s account is his reassertion of the ontologically univocal character of temporal finitude in Derrida’s philosophy. Whereas both Kant and Husserl view time as a transcendental condition applicable only to the experience of a finite consciousness, for Derrida, Hägglund argues, ‘the spacing of time is an “ultratranscendental” condition from which nothing can be exempt.’ Whereas Kant retains

the regulative Idea of an unconditioned sovereign instance that is absolutely in-itself, for Derrida ‘the unconditional is the spacing of time that divides every instance in advance and makes it essentially dependent on what is other than itself.’ This ‘unconditional condition’ yields a basic Derridean formula to which Hägglund repeatedly returns: ‘what makes X possible is at the same time what makes it impossible for X to be in itself.’ On the basis of this formula, derived from the ultratranscendental synthesis of time qua auto­immune trace, Hägglund extracts the following kernel of deconstructive logic: if the essence of X is to not be identical to itself, then the consummation of X cannot even be posited as an Idea since it would cancel out X. Finitude is thus not a negative limitation that prevents us from having access to the fullness of being. On the contrary, finitude is an unconditional condition that makes the fullness of being unthinkable as such.

If such an articulation of Derrida’s post-Heideggerian ontology is not exactly unfamiliar, what distinguishes Hägglund’s book is the philosophical acumen with which he delineates its consequences and the rigour with which he deploys them against the faux amis of deconstruction. If we endorse the ultratranscendental status of temporal finitude, then any dualistic separation between a finite ethical subject or mortal being and the positive infinity of the Levinasian Other or an immortal God becomes untenable. Against Robert Bernasconi, Drucilla Cornell and Simon Critchley, Hägglund shows that Derrida’s thinking of alterity is absolutely incompatible with any ‘good beyond being’, ‘primary peace’ or ‘non-violent relation to the other’ in so far as it is predicated upon the arche-violence of espacement, which breaches any interiority and institutes relationality only through an essential corruptibility. Against the efforts of Hent de Vries, John Caputo and Richard Kearney to salvage in Derrida’s texts the promise of an ‘unscathed’ God, a divine pax or an ‘Other whose good is absolute’, Hägglund demonstrates that the structural articulation of Derrida’s concept of the ‘messianic without messianism’ requires an absolute autoimmunity of time that can leave no instance whatever

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unscathed, even or especially the name of God. In a more congenial register, Hägglund disputes Ernesto Laclau’s notion that ‘justice’ or ‘equality’ or ‘freedom’ can serve as regulative ideas for radical politics, as ‘the names of a fullness which is constitutively absent’. On the contrary, he argues, the Derridean concepts of ‘justice’ and ‘democracy to come’ cannot entail the lack of any absent plenitude towards which one should strive, but rather denote the absolute impossibility of any such regulative idea given the structural necessity of an unpredictable future in the face of which ‘hyperpolitical’ decisions must be made. Throughout these engagements, Hägglund argues that Derrida’s insistence upon openness to the ‘wholly Other’ does not and cannot constitute an ethical norm or prescription. The constitutive autoimmunity of the trace – which exposes any retention of passing time to the possibility of erasure – entails that one must be open to ‘the other’ as the what or who of an unpredictable future. But this is simply a description of an ultratranscendental condition which precisely prevents the derivation of any stable norm or any reference to an Other uncontaminated by the arche-violence of the given time. Derrida’s notion of ‘infinite responsibility’ thus cannot be conflated with that of Levinas, since it can only answer to a negative infinity of others, and therefore always entails more or less violent acts of distinction and exclusion. ‘Infinite responsibility’, Hägg­ lund stipulates, ‘is but another name for the necessity of discrimination.’ Braiding together Hägglund’s critiques of ethicotheological appropriations of deconstruction, and under­ pinning his articulation of Derrida’s radical atheism, is the concept of survival. To survive is to ‘live on’ as an essentially mortal being constituted by the trace structure of time. Radical atheism is the unconditional affirmation of this condition. This affirmation is ‘radically’ atheist because it denies not only the existence of God or immortality but also the desire for God or immortality as instances that transcend finitude. The affirmation of survival is ‘unconditional’ because it is not a choice or a norm; rather, everyone is engaged by it without exception. The desire to live on as a mortal being, Hägglund argues, precedes and contradicts the desire for immortality from within. ‘The idea of immortality cannot even hypothetically appease the fear of death or satisfy the desire to live on’, he states. ‘On the contrary, the state of immortality would annihilate every form of survival, since it would annihilate the time of mortal life.’ Hägglund thus aims to derive from Derrida’s thinking of time and mortality a theory of desire as necessarily atheist.

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The relation of survival to mortality that underwrites the articulation of this theory, however, poses a problem for Hägglund vis-à-vis the relation of being to living. Hägglund makes it clear that for Derrida the autoimmunity of time (espacement, différance, trace) is an ‘absolutely general condition’ that cannot be constrained to any ‘delimited region of being’. Thus, to be is to be finite. But Hägglund often writes as though a condition applicable to every thing could be adequately described by arguing its application to every living thing. The spacing of time has ultra­ transcendental status, he argues, because ‘it is the condition for everything all the way up to and including the ideal itself’, and also because ‘it is the condition for everything all the way down to the minimal forms of life’. Here the threshold of ‘life’ would seem to limit a condition that is supposed to be ‘absolutely general’. Hägglund immediately doubles the confusing structure of this argument by stating that ‘there is no limit to the generality of différance and the structure of the trace applies to all the fields of the living.’ And again: ‘Derrida spoke of the trace as a “mortal germ” that is inseparable from the seed of life. To think the trace as an ultratranscendental condition is thus to think a constitutive finitude that is absolutely without exception.’ The logic of entailment here (‘thus’) implies not only that finitude is an absolutely general condition, but that we can deduce the general condition of finite being from a statement concerning the relation of mortality to life. Clearly Hägglund does not mean to attribute a vitalist ontology to Derrida. But the undertheorized relation of finite being to mortal life is more than a rhetorical problem in his book, because it exposes a lacuna in his reasoning. Hägglund argues that the ‘necessary intertwinement of life and death spells out the autoimmunity of mortality as a general condition and undercuts the idea of immortality’. But if mortality necessarily entails a relation between life and death, then non-living matter is not mortal, and the auto­immunity of mortality (as a modality of finitude) cannot be a general condition. As Heidegger points out in his 1929/30 seminar, non-living matter cannot die and is not dead since it was never alive. Presumably, then, Hägglund would have to hold that non-living matter survives – it persists in a condition of finitude – without being mortal. The opening of this asymmetry between survival and mortality – a ‘region’ of the former (non-living being) that is not included in the field of the latter – would not challenge the univocal status of temporal finitude, which applies in all cases. But it does pose a

logical problem for certain of Hägglund’s arguments. Citing Derrida’s claim that ‘one cannot love a monument, a work of architecture’ without the experience of its finitude – and thus that ‘one loves it as mortal, through its birth and death’ – Hägglund states that ‘radical atheism proceeds from the argument that everything that can be desired is mortal in its essence’. Here the elaboration of the central concept of his project proceeds from the attribution of an essence predicated upon a relation between life and death (mortality) to the finitude of ‘everything that can be desired’ (including, apparently, non-living matter). At the core of radical atheism is the following claim:

‘from the definition of life as essentially mortal, it follows that immortality is death. To live is to be mortal, which means that the opposite of being mortal – to be immortal – is to be dead.’ The possibility of non-living, non-mortal survival, however, deconstructs this argument by displacing the binary opposition of mortality and immortality. It does so by exposing an ambiguity inherent to the concept of immortality for which the structure of Hägglund’s argument does not account. The primary denotations of ‘immortal’ are (1) not liable or subject to death; and (2) not liable to perish or decay. This asymmetry is isomorphic with that of morality to survival. If we construct the concept ‘immortal’ according to the first sense, then it would include non-living beings, which ‘survive’ (in so far as they persist in finitude) but are not liable to death. Since Hägglund’s reasoning cannot countenance an immortal being that survives, we might then take the term in the second (expanded) sense. But that sense cannot follow from an opposition to mortality, since what is subject to the broader sense of temporal finitude denoted by ‘perish and decay’ can be so without

living or dying. The conceptual excess of survival over mortality thus ends up deconstructing certain key articulations of the logic of radical atheism which the concept of survival inaugurates. A more general irony of Hägglund’s approach is that his effort to defend the ‘hyperpolitical’ logic of Derrida’s thought ultimately falls back upon ‘a struggle for “lesser violence”’ for its (undecidable) justification. The unconditional affirmation of survival underlying that framing of political struggle is uncomfortably proximate to an affirmation of what Alain Badiou has sardonically termed ‘democratic materialism’, which affirms, as he puts it in Logiques des mondes, the ‘constant reassessment of our mortal being’ and enjoins us to ‘live without an Idea’. This affirmation and this injunction are also supposedly un­conditional. Badiou’s work is to the point here, because anyone who wants to assess the relation of deconstruction to varieties of ‘infinite thought’ will have to grapple with Hägglund’s account from now on. But what is at stake in philosophies attempting to operate ‘after finitude’ is the pertinence to ontology of infinities that are neither ‘positive’ nor ‘negative’: that is, which do not require an instance of the in-itself nor devolve into an ‘infinitely finite’ series. This is a possibility that Hägglund’s book does not confront, though it accounts for why it is ‘J. Derrida’ whom Badiou cites on ‘the ontological prerequisite’ while taking stock of his contemporaries in Being and Event. Until Hägglund is able to demonstrate that Badiou’s enterprise cannot answer that prerequisite, his impressive recovery of deconstruction’s ‘unconditional rationalism’ from the predations of its putative allies may not suffice to convince those more broadly disenchanted with post-Heideggerian ‘finite thinking’ to return to a strenuous engagement with Derrida. Indeed, some may find that the admirable clarity of Hägglund’s book makes all too glaring how little remains when Derrida’s sprawling œuvre is pared down to its core. But that would be no fault of Hägglund’s own, and the reception of his readership is not, in any case, the standard to which he holds himself. For whether or not one finds the philosophy that Hägglund expounds compelling, the rare virtue of his book is that it forces us to assess that philosophy correctly. Nathan Brown

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Dissing Axel Honneth, Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2007. xiii + 275 pp., £55.00 hb., £18.99 pb., 978 0 745 62905 6 hb., 978 0 745 62906 3 pb. Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, with Judith Butler, Raymond Geuss and Jonathan Lear, ed. Martin Jay, Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 2008. xii + 168 pp., £17.99 pb., 978 0 19 532046 6. Does Critical Theory need normative foundations? Prima facie the critique of capitalism in all its myriad forms might include a critique of the very idea of norms. After all, those most keen to posit them might have a vested interest in saying that things are thus, and so, however the world appears to its inhabitants, the social order is actually predicated on particular moral frameworks: anyone who doesn’t agree is either ethically deficient or a political malcontent (or both). Besides, isn’t there something suspiciously ahistorical about the appeal to norms? Where do they reside, exactly, and what are you going to do with them once you’ve decided what they are? These two Axel Honneth collections – one a series of essays mainly from the mid-1990s; the other his 2005 Berkeley Tanner lecture, featuring some rather unimpressed responses from Butler, Geuss and Lear – unintentionally indicate the serious difficulties of such a project. Indeed, despite Honneth’s best efforts, it is not at all clear that the identification of Critical Theory, understood in the broadest sense as the attempt to grasp the hegemonic conceptual forms of capitalist society and to undermine the affirmative rationality of capitalism, with the inquiry into transcendental social norms, could ever be truly persuasive or ultimately coherent. At its best, Critical Theory does indeed take the normative aspirations of Kant and Hegel in particular as negative templates for a comparison with the present, but this is not the same as attempting to attach these norms to existing moral features. Honneth thus reverses the order of the critique, looking to the world for evidence of supposed transcendental conditions, rather than recognizing the failure of such systematic philosophical projects confronted with the everyday reality of contemporary capitalist societies. In fact, Honneth, despite being regarded by some as the leading inheritor of the Frankfurt School tradition, argues in an essay entitled ‘The Social Dynamics of Dis­respect: On the Location of Critical Theory Today’ that the Frankfurt School’s attempt to ‘critically diagnose social reality … ceased to exist some time ago’. What should come to take its place, according to him, is a ‘critical theory of society’, a kind of normative critique

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‘which can also inform us about the pre-theoretical resource (vorwissenschaftliche Instanz) in which its own critical viewpoint is anchored extratheoretically as an empirical interest or moral experience’. In other words, there is much in our experience of the world that can tell us about the pre-cognitive foundations for why we value what we value. This is both why Honneth attacks Lukács for totalizing reification as the key to understanding capitalism and returns to Heidegger for a description of ‘care’ as our fundamental comportment as beings-in-the-world. Heideggerian ‘care’ further morphs into Hegelian recognition under Honneth’s schema. Thus he argues in Reification that ‘it is possible to justify the hypothesis that a recognitional stance enjoys a genetic and categorical priority over all other attitudes toward the self and the world.’ Honneth’s rather mercenary use of developmental psychology to explain how recognition precedes cognition in children is one of these ‘empirical’ interests that forms part of this justification. Butler rightly wonders whether this isn’t a contradiction in Honneth’s approach: ‘why should we accept the results of any such research after the criticism of observational methods that we have been offered by Honneth’s extensive critique?’ Such scientific detachment is apparently worthwhile if it justifies Honneth’s underlying adherence to the clam that the recognitional stance has priority over all other attitudes. But this is hardly a convincing argument for its centrality. So why does Honneth place so much stress on recognition? In both collections the concept is read back into practical and political philosophy so that it comes to be seen as the hidden Ur-condition for all contemporary social thought. In the pivotal essay in the Disrespect collection, ‘Between Aristotle and Kant: Recognition and Moral Obligation’, Honneth links a Kantian conception of duty to an ethics of care and certain communitarian models of recognition. In this way, recognition covers both the duties we owe to ourselves and those we owe to others. It is ambiguous in the sense that ‘the number of modes of recognition is to correspond to the number of forms of moral injuries’. In other words, disrespect is always potentially present

the moment the recognition of another takes place. It is here that Honneth invokes empirical examples of disrespect as ‘pre-theoretical resources’. Describing neo-Nazi youth groups as ostensibly dependent on their own internal recognition, Honneth notes that ‘the sense of no longer being included within the network of social recognition is in itself an extremely ambivalent source of motivation for social protest and resistance.’ Recognition has to come from outside to prevent non-normative – potentially violent – ways of dealing with the experience of disrespect and humiliation: the neo-Nazis feel disrespected by the state over the issue of immigration and take out their ‘humiliation’ on a foreign worker. But is it really a lack of recognition that is the problem here? The rightward shift of many European states over the past decade has certainly ‘recognized’ the way some voters feel about immigration, but it is far from clear that this recognition is capable of preventing violence at the everyday level. The demand for recognition always seems to presuppose a fixed structure that one can appeal to – Daddy, the state, the International Court of Human Rights – but this is an essentially reactive, or at best reformist, model of political behaviour. As Honneth puts it in ‘The Social Dynamics of Respect’ essay, we are dealing here with the question of how ‘a moral culture could be so constituted as to give those who are victimized, disrespected, and ostracized the individual strength to articulate their experiences in the democratic public sphere, rather than living them out in a counterculture of violence.’ No longer ‘bash the fash’ then, but invite them in to talk about their feelings. A further problem here is the incipient moralism of such a position when it comes to actual political practice. It is no coincidence that New Labour, for example, have laid so much stress on a so-called ‘respect agenda’, in which so-called ASBOs (AntiSocial Behaviour Orders) are dispensed for modes of ‘disrespectful’ behaviour (playing loud music, harassing shoppers, breaking curfews, staring at neighbours). It is certainly the case that these negative awards become a badge of pride, thus reinforcing the idea that groups seek internal recognition if external rewards are slow in coming, but judging such behaviour in terms of its failure to meet societal norms obscures any structural or economic analysis. In those rare moments where Honneth refers to class, he does so only to talk about morality: ‘the Critical Theory of society can be kept open to socially repressed moral conflicts in which suppressed classes make us aware of the structural restrictions placed on their claims to just treatment

– that is, to as yet unrealized potentialities of historical progress.’ Social problems, or ‘pathologies’ as Honneth rather dubiously calls them, are thus negative evidence of the norms that should subtend any social ideal. Evidence of affection between a mother and a child is just as much of an empirical indication of the fundamental importance of recognition as the drunk punching someone outside a nightclub. In the Reification lecture, Honneth again attempts to indicate the centrality of recognition to his social theory. He does so by means of an extended critique of Lukács, while endeavouring to retain the term ‘reification’ for his own purposes. Lukács’s mistake, he claims, is twofold: to ignore the moral implications of reification and to take the form of reification particular to commodity exchange as representative of reification in toto. For Honneth, reification is something more akin to the objectification of sexism and racism, rather than the ‘thingification’ of economic and social relations. Why, then, keep the term at all? Honneth’s ‘action-theoretical’ approach rereads reification as a kind of ‘forgetting’ of recognition (the Heideggerian resonances are not lost on him): to treat someone in a reified way is to deny that one once knew that the person was more than their mere usefulness: ‘By speaking here of mere objects or “things,” I mean that in this kind of amnesia, we lose the ability to understand immediately the behavioural expressions of other persons as making claims on us – as demanding we act in an appropriate way.’ People can equally treat themselves as things in this way, forgetting that they are not merely commensurate with their capabilities, or mere material for wage-labour. Aside from stripping the concept of reification of its explicitly political and economic content, Honneth fails to recognize several major changes in the nature of work that problematize the idea that reification (both his conception and that of Lukács) is the central tendency in the nature of labour. Far from social relations being treated like things, recent writing on immaterial labour suggests that it is relationality itself that is exploited – both via the generic capacity to communicate (language, attention, care) and in the way in which one is supposed to market oneself as someone who is constantly networking, constantly in contact, ever ready for new projects. This is precisely the opposite problem to that of reification, in either its moral or Marxist guises. In many ways it is much more pernicious – how does one battle against economic oppression if the social relations are not so much hidden beneath the veneer of objectivity, but are themselves the very material of our everyday exploitation? We are not encouraged to treat

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one another like objects (or subjects for that matter), but rather to see potential connections everywhere. Objectification, or reification (Honneth explicitly elides the distinction between the two), is actually somewhat rare. As Jonathan Lear puts it in his response: ‘often the problem is not that we are treating persons as persons, but that we are treating them badly as persons.’ Butler, too, makes much of the fundamental ambiguity we have towards those we care about, against Honneth’s optimistic idea that recognition is almost always performed in a positive mode, and stresses the way in which sadism too – in Butler’s exquisite formulation ‘an excitation about being cold’ – can also be a central kind of recognition. Honneth ultimately places himself in an awkward theoretical and political position from the outset; simultaneously indebted to Marx, Lukács and Adorno and interlocutor of current soft moralists such as Cavell, Nussbaum and Charles Taylor. The result is a curiously opportunistic use of Marxist terminology (reification) subtended by post-Kantian metaphysics and practical philosophy (Fichte and Hegel) and topped off with a rather uncritical fetish for the theoretical trappings of human rights discourse – esteem, respect and recognition. In this sense, Honneth is better conceived as a post-Analytic philosopher than anything else, looking for clues in the pragmatists (Dewey in particular), appealing to both Kant and Wittgenstein as equal authorities and worrying about the dehumanizing effects of Internet dating. (‘Once two users have found sufficient overlappings between their respective lists of characteristics and thereby become an electronically selected pair, they are then instructed to inform one another of their feelings for each other through the high-speed medium of email messages.’) Honneth’s mixed pool of sources starts to look like a Deutsche-Americanische Freundschaft for the twenty-first century. This has all of the advantages of a properly synthetic approach – no philosophical approach is a priori out of bounds – and all the disadvantages of a truly synthetic approach – all theorizing is reduced to a kind of weak, generic moralizing that would be palatable to many, but lacks any critical or political bite. Honneth explicitly replaces the critique of political economy with an ameliorative vision of the social order based on the ambiguous evidence of normative behaviour. All too often his foundationalism takes on a reformist character, and at times even a kind of finger-wagging, moralistic taint. But this seems to be the problem in the very idea of trying to fuse Critical Theory with normative foundationalism. As Raymond Geuss puts it in his response to

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Honneth, citing John Dewey, a key reference point for both thinkers: John Dewey … thought that moral philosophy was inherently reactionary, an attempt to invent an illusory discourse about imaginary metaphysical entities so as to defend highly inegalitarian social structures; ethics was the protection of existing privilege against novelty and the pressing needs of the many.

Whilst we might not want to go as far as saying that Honneth defends existing privileges, his over-optimistic portrayal of recognition, and of the democratic procedures and institutions that promote it, ultimately neglects the more structural forms of ‘disrespect’ that underlie the reality of social injustice. Nina Power

The long decade Xudong Zhang, Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2008. 346 pp., £70.00 hb., £17.99 pb., 978 0 822 34212 0 hb., 978 0 822 34230 4 pb. Mainstream academic and media comment on political and cultural change in China over the past three decades converges in a common theme: the failure of the 1989 protest movement, brutally repressed by government forces, signalled the end of an era of increasingly pluralist debates and liberal hopes, ushering in a new phase of market-driven reform and with it the eclipse of intellectual privilege by a new mantra of individual competition and consumer power. After Deng Xiaoping’s famous tour to the south in 1992, which gave the go-ahead to an all-out marketization of the economy, many of those formerly active in political and intellectual debates transferred their energies to entrepreneurial endeavours, marking a complicity with the state’s engagement with the neoliberal agenda of global capital. According to this view, with the exception of the celebrity achievements acclaimed by the world’s major film and literary competitions, political and cultural debates in China since the 1990s have been notable both for their lack of innovative edge, and for their refusal to engage with ongoing international discussions about critical alternatives to the teleology of neoliberalism. No doubt China Studies specialists in Western academia bear due responsibility for this dominant view. Too many have spent too much time applauding the progressive effects of market

privatization instead of critically analysing the real tensions in the shifting sands of China’s economic, social and political transformation. Effective compliance with the official ideology of modernization has thus overlooked informed analyses of intellectual debates in China itself, which, though prevented from wide dissemination in the Chinese context, have nevertheless occupied the minds of many thinkers and theorists working in the country’s major academic and research institutions. With Postsocialism and Cultural Politics, Xudong Zhang provides a ‘thick’ analysis of the cultural and socio-political debates of the ‘long decade’ of the 1990s. Set against a broadly chronological account of developments, from the government’s crackdown on the 1989 protests, Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms, the Taiwan missile crisis and the Asian financial crisis, to the end of Britain’s colonial rule of Hong Kong in 1997, his analysis weaves a sense of the historical framework of intellectual debates together with a theoretical commitment to explore beyond the tired binaries of state and society, communist hardliners and market reformers, capitalism and socialism, which characterize standard analyses of China’s recent history. In the process, he puts paid to a view of the 1990s as no more than a political and intellectual wasteland, and in its stead identifies a sense of continuing intellectual and political vitality, even if tightly circumscribed by what he calls the ‘authoritarian developmentalism’ of the state. His focused readings of novels by Zhang Ailing, Wang Anyi and Mo Yan, as well as his analysis of films of the Fifth Generation directors, further gives a sense of how the political and intellectual concerns of the time can be interpreted through the lens of literary and cinematic forms. The concepts of postsocialism and postmodernism form the theoretical pillars sustaining the discussion in the book’s first section. Zhang proposes that the ‘post’ of postsocialism and postmodernism highlights both continuities and discontinuities between current and past politico-cultural formations in China. Postsocialism is therefore explained not as a teleologically driven ‘higher phase’ of development, but rather as a conceptual space facilitating analysis of the tensions and cracks in contemporary China that incorporates the cultural and political legacy of the Mao era in penetrating the glossy surface of contemporary consumerism. Postsocialism, he thus argues, prefigures a new socio-economic and cultural-political subjectivity that acknowledges the continuing effects of the cultural and political idiosyncracies of Maoist rule in shaping the quotidian contours and unconscious

motivations of post-Mao rationalism. Alongside this, the critical discourse of postmodernism permits an examination of the dialectic between the increasingly attenuated appeal of conventional notions of modernity and modernization, and the evidence of the uneven and ‘messy’ socio-economic and political realities of daily life in market China that defy notions of change as a progressive advance on what came before. Together, the two ‘posts’ invite a release from the dogma of a triumphant global capitalism driven by a Eurocentric model of modernity. Postsocialism thus emerges as both a system and an analytical framework, at a time when history ‘craves’ a new critical practice through the political and cultural configurations it evidences. Specifically, for Zhang, it points to the ambiguities of a world combining forces for democratization and commodification, in which neoliberalism’s calls for the full institutionalization of privatization manifests itself not so much as a call for freedom, but rather as an ‘egoistic attempt to carve out an elite realm of bourgeois privilege premissed on robbing public wealth and suppressing popular dissent’. At the same time, the concept of postsocialism can encapsulate within its theoretical parameters the practices of everyday culture and utopian longings for equality and justice, seen in the increasing incidence of militancy and protest, thereby setting out a historical vision, not of Fukuyama’s end of history, but of a complex reworking of contemporary forces in a socio-economic and cultural system that may or may not bring China into collision with the dominant centres of neoliberal capitalism. Much of Zhang’s attention in this discussion is in fact directed towards dissecting the political positions and possibilities identified with the so-called New Left, a ‘dubious label’ for a group of intellectuals who, despite their disavowal of the term, are commonly bunched together on the grounds of commonalities in their critiques of China’s neoliberal agenda. The New Left combines a critical resistance to capitalist globalization in China with a conscious association with Western critical discourse. Prevalently associated with the figure of Wang Hui, but also with other academics and theorists such as Cui Zhiyuan, Wang Shaoguang, Liu Kang and Gan Yang – all of whom studied in and are well known in Western academia – this New Left has brought together diverse disciplinary interests to challenge the ideological mainstream of global capitalism. Though commonly attacked by liberal academics in China for their supposed nostalgia for Mao’s China and their affinity with traditional socialism, their ongoing contribution is to identify the government’s neoliberalism not as a form of market

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equalizer but as an elitist discourse, the demands of which for ‘negative withdrawal’ from the state signifies not the state’s actual withdrawal from social life but its political intervention to protect the fittest in the market environment. Zhang’s position vis-à-vis the New Left is not always clear – at one point he indulges in a snide aside, noting that Wang Hui writes as if he has to pass the test of both the ‘theory-driven academic Left and a text- and empirical data-obsessed Sinologist in the United States’ – but his judgement is that neoliberalism would similarly be rejected by the majority of the population if there were democratic debate in China. Chinese nationalism of the 1990s appears in Zhang’s analysis as an allegory of the intellectual and political dilemma of the decade. He argues that 1990s’ nationalism was neither the child of government machinations, nor the result of the dissolution of the state at a time of rising economic self-confidence, but rather a response to a series of international frustrations, conditioned by the end of the Cold War and a seeming return to ‘imperialist’ domination at the moment of China’s triumphant entry into the global arena. A popular and

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cultural nationalism, affirmed by economic strength but also negatively assertive, may thus be understood as part of the general problematic of politics, culture and identity in the globalized age. And while the need to build up a strong national economy has been used to support mainstream neoliberal positions, a vision of a political nationalism that similarly supports the need for a sound national economy may be oriented to democratic reorganization to reduce the massive inequities of the state system. Calls for a political nationalism by the likes of Gan Yang are thus inevitably associated with the idea of a democratic reinvention of the Chinese Communist Party. As such, they are not given a wide press. And, by contrast to the dominant themes of political nationalism, interrogation of the national imagination to be found in mass and popular culture posits an intellectual agenda that refers more to the messy complexities of postmodernity than to a commitment to the teleologies of an exuberant economic nationalism. The fiction and film discussed in the second and third sections of this book may be more familiar to non-Chinese audiences than the polemical debates analysed in the first section. Most of the stories discussed here are available in English translation; the films have long been acclaimed internationally and have been the subject of considerable theoretical treatment by other academics in the field. However, reading against the familiar grain, Zhang offers interpretations here that specifically illuminate the postsocialist theme of the first half of the book. He criticizes China’s reappropriation of the famous Shanghai writer, Zhang Ailing, through an analysis of a 1943 short story, which appeared in English as ‘Sealed Off’ in 1985. Far from legitimating a view of progress that corresponds with the current ideology of China’s market modernization, Zhang Ailing’s narrative highlights the stasis of the urban experience and the ennui associated with the metropolis that was pre-1949 Shanghai. Similarly, Wang Anyi’s and Mo Yan’s works appear as narratives of fractured engagement with, rather than simple rejections of, the cultural experience of Mao’s China. Mo Yan’s stylistic moves between the grotesque, the hilarious, the seductive and the nauseating in The Republic of Wine paints a picture of contemporary China characterized by ‘murkiness’ and ‘chaos’. Wang Anyi’s portrayal of Shanghai,

and particularly Shanghai women, in her stories of the 1990s, remind the reader of the omissions, even the conscious amnesia, at work in the new language of the urban and modern that typifies descriptions of China’s glossy metropolitan culture. Zhang Yimou’s famous film The Story of Qiu Ju appears not as the coming into being of a new language of legal regulation, but as an illustration of the tensions and conflicts between the rural and the urban, and the ‘scrambling of politico-legal codes’, as the disadvantaged seek to claim recognition for unarticulated rights. And, finally, Zhang offers a new reading of Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite, to suggest that the trauma at the heart of the film is not so much the ‘melancholy of revolution and modernity’ but rather the ‘anxiety that history has not already begun’ – the ‘unsettled imagination of the future’ – brought to consciousness at the moment of encounter between the socialist past and the market present. Yet, despite its wealth of analysis, Zhang’s narrative suffers from an imbalance between its three main sections and their very different topical foci. This may in part be due to the initial character of the book’s chapters as journal articles, produced at different times and for different readerships. In itself, the lack of a sense of organic completeness to the text may not matter too much. But the uneven treatment Zhang gives his themes raises other questions. How

are these themes linked to local rather than external academic debates, if we are to see them as parts of a critical discursive moment? How do local Chinese audiences engage with the critical implications of the works and ideas here addressed? And, notably, given the widespread evidence of increasing gender discrimination sustained in the name of economic efficiency and consumer choice, how does Zhang position the theoretical contributions of China’s feminists in current critiques of China’s neoliberal obsessions? Furthermore, though Zhang’s narrative, replete with complicated discursive flourishes, demonstrates a keen engagement with current theoretical debates – indeed, few of the great names of critical cultural theory are missing here – it shows much less interest in the work of his peers similarly engaged with critical reflection on the politics of culture in China. Still, why be grudging? Postsocialism and Cultural Politics provides critical evidence of a cultural, political and aesthetic dynamism that, trapped by local political constraints, demands more and closer attention in order to chart the internal differences of a reality that too many claim as proof of the universalizing benefits of the neoliberal market. China faces a future under the thrall of radical uncertainty, and all too few academics working on China lend their voice to the debates Zhang pursues here. Harriet Evans

Realistically Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2008. viii + 116 pp., £11.95 hb., 978 0 691 13788 9. Raymond Geuss is perhaps the most stylish polemicist among contemporary political philosophers, and increasingly one of the most practised in the art. In this most recent addition to his œuvre, he takes aim once more at contemporary liberal ‘analytic’ political philosophy through the representative figures of Robert Nozick and, Geuss’s bête noir, the John Rawls of A Theory of Justice. It is hard not to think that Gerry Cohen’s work might not be an even more apposite target for Geuss’s ire, but Rawls, of course, has the advantage of having written the pivotal text for analytic political philosophy. If the Rawlsian achievement is undermined – exposed as ‘applied ethics’ – then the claim to political relevance of vast swathes of the last forty years of political philosophy fall with it.

This may not rank Geuss’s task alongside Nietzsche’s attempt to undermine the peculiar institution of morality, but it obviously feels like it at times – and Geuss, as a political realist, is perfectly well aware that he is confronting deeply entrenched academic interests (the context of his action is hardly conducive to its success). Still all revolts have to start somewhere, with a certain militancy. The basic outlines of the position that Geuss advocates are straightforward: political philosophy must be realist, it must focus on actions and contexts of actions, it must be historically reflective with respect to the conditions of political agency, and it must acknowledge the craft-like character of political activity, that politics is an art, a skill which cannot be

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acquired through learning principles (a point famously stressed by Michael Oakeshott in his essay ‘Rationalism in Politics’ which Geuss does not mention). What is the sense of this realism? Although one may try and situate Geuss in relation to, say, Thucydides, Machiavelli and Hobbes, and his stance certainly exhibits relationship to all of these thinkers, the key feature of Geuss’s realism is its opposition to wishful thinking in its various epistemic and normative forms. Indeed, if one had to summarize Geuss’s objection to contemporary ‘analytic’ political philosophy, it would consist in the charge that, far from disciplining its thinking in the ways required to avoid the dangers of wishful thinking, it opens itself up to the temptation of wishful thinking, regularly succumbs to this temptation and perhaps even cultivates an intellectual disposition towards it. As such it can have no serious role to play in the enterprise of guiding the exercise of political judgement – that is, of political education. I’ll return to Geuss’s critique of analytical thought shortly, but let’s consider first how Geuss thinks we should discipline our thought in order to achieve an appropriately realistic orientation to our political lives. Geuss’s proposal is that we take three issues as loci of reflection: Lenin’s question ‘Who, whom?’, Nietzsche’s stress on the differential structure of human valuation, and Max Weber’s focus on legitimacy. The first of these is spelt out in the view that the question ‘Who does what to whom for whose benefit?’ (and hence issues of agency, power and interest) is always central to political reflection. Two particular features of Geuss’s interpretation of this Leninist slogan are worth noting. First, Geuss readily allows that perception of X’s power by Y may itself have sufficient power to affect what Y takes to be the range of reasonable options available to him. Second, Geuss notes and approves Lenin’s extension of the formula ‘who, whom?’ to political philosophy itself: works of political theory are partisan political acts located in particular contexts of action and, hence, ‘questions about the actual political implications of a theory cannot be excluded as in principle irrelevant.’ The salience of Nietzsche’s emphasis on human finitude and the differential structure of human valuation on Geuss’s view relates to the fact that politics always involves the relationship of agents with limited powers and resources engaged in having to choose a course of action, where doing so necessarily rules out various other possible options. One might sharpen this point in terms of Jeremy Waldron’s notion of ‘the circumstances of politics’ as combining disagreement about what to do and the need for a common decision,

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where Geuss’s expansion of this specification consists in stressing (as Robert Dahl has) the political import of the ordering or sequencing of decision-making, and the importance of timing in proposing and undertaking a policy. Geuss concludes his three orienting issues by reminding us of Weber’s rather catholic account of political legitimacy, and, more generally, of the point that rulers and ruled alike seek mechanisms of legitimation in terms of which they can justify or contest political programmes, policies or actions. Thus, in contrast to the reductive realism that simply attends to interests, Geuss’s realism acknowledges the significance of the evaluative and normative frameworks in terms of which we try to make sense of, and (de)legitimate, political actions – a point which connects us back again to the sense in which the articulation of a political theory is also a political act. Reflecting on these questions brings us fairly readily to an appreciation of that in which Geuss takes the point of political philosophy to consist, namely the education of political judgement. This judgement is rapidly reinforced by Geuss’s delineation of three tasks of political theory in this realistic spirit: understanding, evaluation and orientation. However, Geuss adds to this list two further tasks that political theory may perform: conceptual innovation and ideology-critique – and it is worth asking how these stand to realistic political philosophy. Geuss’s major example of conceptual innovation is Hobbes’s introduction of the concept of the state as an impersonal public authority distinct from both rulers and ruled. Geuss’s point here is that in the case of a successful conceptual innovation, such as he judges Hobbes’s to have been, we come to occupy a different political reality in the sense that the innovation reshapes the space of political reasons that we inhabit: what counts as political, how we understand our political relations to one another, and so on. Geuss acknowledges that conceptual innovation ‘is a complicated process in which descriptive, analytic, normative and aspirational elements are intricately intertwined’ and, hence, that what it means ‘in each case to say that a particular conceptual proposal did not work is, thus, a complicated question to which, probably, only a detailed historically specific answer can be given.’ He also acknowledges that once an innovation is introduced, the fact that it was introduced to address one problem does not prevent it from taking on a life of its own and playing a wider range of roles in political life. In this context, the significance of Geuss’s reflections on ideology-critique (which, in fact, simply summarize

what he has written elsewhere on this topic) is to draw attention to the point that power can shape attitudes, beliefs, practices, and so on, in ways that affect our perception of our interests, and to remind us that political theories can serve as elements or articulations of ideology. Not the least of the functions of realistic political theory is to keep theory honest by exposing its ideological functions particularly when these are disguised by the claim of the theory to be non-partisan. The polemical import of this fairly catholic account of realism in political theory becomes clear in the second part of Geuss’s slim volume in which we learn that Nozick and Rawls, along with any notion of human rights, represent failures of realism. In his previous work History and Illusion in Politics, Geuss mounted an attack on the concept of human rights that he essentially summarizes here. The basic thought is this: human rights talk illegitimately runs together objective and subjective notions of right; consequently, in the absence of any global scheme of enforcing such rights that would allow one to operate with a coherent subjective notion of human rights, the concept of human rights is incoherent. It is quite unclear why we should take this argument seriously since it is a feature of conceptual innovations that they often merge elements that previous political or philosophical positions have held apart. This is true, for example, of Geuss’s own favoured example of Hobbes’s concept of the state. Geuss may object that Hobbes’s achievement consisted in giving a coherent statement of the idea of the state – one which involved radically revising the concept of freedom – and that no such coherence has yet been given to the notion of human rights. This seems to me both to philosophically underestimate recent work on human rights and to make the mistake of thinking that a conceptual innovation cannot be politically successful unless and until we have a coherent theory of it – but why should we think that? What, then, of Geuss’s criticisms of Nozick and Rawls? In both cases, Geuss makes great play of the historical variability of the terms – ‘rights’ and ‘justice’ – on which Nozick and Rawls develop their respective arguments, and in doing so reiterates his claim that political theory must be historically informed. There are three points to note about the kind of argument that Geuss makes here. First, it is unclear what being ‘historically informed’ means on Geuss’s account? If it is to say that reflective awareness of the historicity of the terms of argumentation must be built into the argument, then Nozick and Rawls fail the test, but so equally does Hobbes. If being historically informed

means that one just is historically informed in an everyday sense, then Hobbes, Nozick and Rawls all pass. Second, it will be recalled that Geuss stressed the point that political theory is partisan political speech and, indeed, partisan political action, in which case we might consider, for example, the opening line of Nozick’s Anarchy, State, Utopia – ‘Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).’ – as an effective piece of partisan political rhetoric. To say that Nozick ‘by presenting “rights” as the self-evident basis for thinking about politics, … actively distracts people from asking other, highly relevant questions’ is not to say anything of which Nozick is unaware since he is precisely trying to get people to think of politics in terms of rights. Geuss objects that Nozick does not address what Geuss considers to be the right questions – but that is fundamentally a political disagreement. Third, Geuss’s reflection on realism stressed the importance of action to actions and contexts of actions, yet Geuss entirely ignores the historical context of the acts that Rawls and Nozick perform in publishing their respective books. In the case of Rawls, for example, it is important to recognize that this was directed against the dominance of utilitarian modes of thought which are prepared to trade off personal liberties against public welfare. Rawls’s argument that utilitarianism does not take the distinction between persons seriously is a philosophical point made for thoroughly political reasons (one might recall that Rawls had been working on the project that became this book through the period of the McCarthy era, the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War) and Rawls was perfectly well aware that the political force of his argument hung in significant measure on the philosophical strength of his critique of utilitarianism. The basic problem with the second part of Geuss’s book is that, driven by his wish to dismiss the kind of philosophical work in which Rawls and Nozick engage, he entirely forgets to do what in the first part of the book he advises us to do, namely, to attend to political theories as political acts. This is not, of course, to say that one cannot raise pertinent questions about the realism of liberal political philosophy or that Geuss entirely fails to do so – but, overall, Geuss’s critical strategy is too flip. If Rawls is engaged in conceptual innovation as Geuss admits he may be considered to be, Geuss might have sensibly recalled his own earlier reflections on the difficulty of assessing both the success or failure of such innovations and the reasons for their success or failure. David Owen

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Having a laugh Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2008. 195 pp., £9.95 pb., 978 1 584 35050 7. GSOH: this now-ubiquitous acronym has its origins in the ‘personal ad’ pages of the English-speaking world. Any voyeuristic glance at the reams of such notices, or on various heavily subscribed ‘dating’ websites, or the social-networking sites which have borrowed some of their conventions, would make clear just how fundamental to current conceptions of desirability is the assumed possession of a ‘good sense of humour’. The sense of humour, we are told, is that which artificial intelligence encounters as the absolute limit of its project: it cannot be programmed or modelled within existing cybernetic paradigms; it cannot be faked. In a related way, the lack of such a sense in human beings is registered as symptomatic of one of the most contemporary of newly visible maladies: autism. To be a fully realized human subject and not a failed simulacrum is to possess a sense of humour. To say of another, ‘s/he has no sense of humour’, is perhaps, less damning today than it might once have been, precisely because the lack of such a sense is now regarded as a pitiable disability rather than a mere character deficiency. Perhaps surprisingly, for one of the heroes of Autonomia, it is this phenomenon – rather than the interlocking and intensifying networks of post-postFordist capitalism with which one might assume neoautonomists to be currently preoccupied – which Paolo Virno’s new book sheds most light on. The largest section of Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation is taken up with a consideration of the logic and special discursive status of jokes, and some observations on that status which offer powerful insights as to why a facility for them might be so valuable in our postmodern context. The joke, for Virno (and in this he draws heavily on both Wittgenstein and Aristotle), is the point at which is revealed the contingency of a norm, the gap between a social rule and its own inability to found or guarantee itself, or the instability of the boundary between a general ‘grammatical’ rule and a specific, ‘empirical’ instantiation thereof. Jokes therefore exhibit the capacity to invent and reinvent which is constitutive of all human creativity. Virno makes the conventionally neo-autonomist assumption that this capacity is somehow more exposed, closer to the surface of everyday life, and more fundamental to prevailing social processes today than in previous epochs. Hardt and Negri, similarly, posit

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‘communication’ as both the central force of twentyfirst-century capitalism and the basis for the potential power of the multitude. However, Virno’s approach to his themes is, in most respects, very different. This is not a Deleuzo-Spinozian exercise in radical monism, but a meditation on the linguistic event which is much closer in tone and approach to the Derrida of Limited Inc. or the Lyotard of The Postmodern Condition and The Differend. Indeed, given Virno’s sustained engagement with Wittgenstein, and with a very similar range of themes, the lack of any reference at all to Lyotard’s Wittgensteinian phase is surprising. At the same time, there is a good deal of overlap between Virno’s reflections on jokes and Rorty’s reflections on the value of irony, but the different context and the different political orientation of the discussion generate some interestingly different results. Crucially, Virno’s account of linguistic creativity as an inherently human trait is explicitly distinguished from Chomsky’s superficially similar assertions. Chomsky derives from his account the assumption that human nature is basically good (cooperative, sociable, egalitarian), an assumption which has left him seemingly incapable of developing any account of contemporary power relations more sophisticated than a story of perversely nasty elites lying to an innocently malleable public. Virno, on the other hand, situates himself in that tradition – including Hobbes, Freud and Schmitt (none of whom he wants to ally himself with directly) – which sees in political institutions and the regularities of human behaviour the means of restricting and containing an inherently destructive and anti-social set of tendencies; tendencies which are indissolubly bound up with the inherently linguistic capacity for negation. In the book’s intriguing final section, Virno brings together this tradition of thought with recent research into the neurological basis of sociality, suggesting that while a certain capacity to recognize and mime the affective states of others may be programmed into the human brain, it is precisely the linguistic capacity to negate which means that ‘the linguistic animal is the species capable of not recognizing his own kind’. The evil that humans do to each other is therefore an inevitable outcome of that very open-endedness that is inherent in the creative capacity of language, an open-endedness that can always lead to a refusal

of that recognition which more fundamental neurocorporeal processes might otherwise render instinctive and unavoidable. The cliché that all humour has a negative or hostile dimension must lend some credence to this perspective, linking it convincingly to Virno’s discussion of jokes. This is a fascinating argument, although the apparent affinities and discontinuities between this position and the entire Lacanian rubric – according to which it is the ‘No’ of the Father which institutes the Subject’s relation to the Symbolic – are, disappointingly, not alluded to at all. What is it, then, that restrains this violence, and makes human sociability possible? One of Virno’s main objectives is to find an answer to this question which is not Hobbes’s. For Virno, it must be possible to refute the claim that it is only in the sovereignty of the self-founding state that the basis for any possible society lies. In this – although again, he makes no explicit reference to their work – Virno engages a similar set of issues to those which have concerned Laclau and Mouffe in recent years. As in Virno, one of their key themes has been the need for radical politics to rid itself of all naive faith in the positive,

rational and reasonable nature of human collectivities and to emphasize the constitutively antagonistic dimension of socio-linguistic relations. Where his position differs from theirs is in his rejection, and their implicit acceptance, of Hobbes’s logic. Whereas for Laclau and Mouffe democracy can only institutionalize a void, an empty space of perpetual contestation, in the place of the sovereign, for Virno there must be something other than the arbitrary institution of sovereignty which makes human social life possible. In an attempt to name this ‘something’, Virno mobilizes the Pauline concept of katechon early on in the book and again in the final conclusion. This term designates a kind of power of ritual which defers destruction without actually eliminating its danger. It

is mobilized by Virno in the context of his discussion of the difference between politically instituted rules and norms and other types of regularity in human behaviour which might ward off evil according to a different logic. Katechon, for Virno, is that which performs a contingent and punctual task: that of resolving once again the connection between regularity and rules, between ‘a mode of behaviour common to all human beings’ and positive norms. This kind of connection, upon which the effective application of rules depends (not to mention the possibility of changing the rules) must be validated over and over again.

The resonance between this conception and Derrida’s reflections on the iterative and performative ‘citationality’ of the law – and to some extent, all discourse – is only reinforced by Virno’s direct engagement with issues of legal authority and his almost wholly Derridean characterization of them. As with Derrida also (to whom, once again, Virno never refers), the political stakes of the discussion are at times somewhat oblique, although one very crude extrapolation would be to observe that katechon might be that very level of human social life at which it becomes possible to observe that people get along together perfectly well without the state (or any externally imposed systems of normativity) guiding them to do so. The fact that David Cameron has made precisely this observation the basis for his recent attempts to formulate a new political philosophy for British Conservatism may intrigue some readers, but it also bears out Virno’s thesis that something about the crisis of the modern state makes this fact of human existence now visible to all. As such it constitutes the terrain upon which many political battles must be fought. The word that does not appear in Virno’s lexicon, although it seems to haunt the entire discussion of katechon, normativity and invention, is ‘culture’. On the one hand, Virno seems to want to mobilize a notion of regularity that is explicitly cross-cultural and hence pre-cultural, identifying universal patterns to the behaviour of ‘the linguistic animal’ which are simply logical consequences of the need to contain the violence of language, and the dangerous opening to the world that it involves. On the other hand, katechon might just be a name for culture-as-such, the condition of possibility of all subsequent cultural differences, but also the condition of impossibility of any such differences being absolute; the condition of possibility of

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both the antagonism which language’s power to negate inevitably generates and the institutions which, before or beyond any notion of sovereignty, make sociability possible. Of course, the Derridean problematic of différance, of an infinite relationality which precedes any firm distinction between affirmation/presentation and negation, would be somewhat different from Virno’s idea of katechon as restraining the destructive capacity of humanity, inherent in its use of language; but the points of contiguity would be interesting to explore. In so far as Virno makes any strong political claims in the book, they reside in his classically autonomist preference for the idea of ‘exodus’ as a political strategy. Alluding to the ‘third party’ whom Freud says must always be present, or at least imagined, for a joke to be effective (the audience, the public, the world beyond the dyad), Virno associates this with a political tendency to move beyond any existing terms of reference or conflict to find a new mode of being: a new people and a new Earth, as Deleuze and Guattari might have said. Again, the affinities with deconstruction are striking, although here one might mobilize a political objection to Virno’s position either in a deconstructive register or from a position much closer to Virno’s home. If, as Hardt and Negri famously insist, there is no outside to Empire, then where might the promised

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land be found? If politics must be thought, as the later Guattari insisted, ecologically, with reference to the full interdependence of life on Earth and the interlocking elements of ‘Integrated World Capitalism’, then how can any strategy of mere escape prove effective? On a round planet, there is only so far a line of flight can take you. Virno is far from alone in his fondness for the idea of exodus, which is referred to directly by Hardt and Negri and endlessly, if only implicitly, by Deleuze and Guattari. In all of those cases the problem remains acute: how to think beyond the limitations of received modes of thought and Manichaean modes of politics, without falling – as Negri so nearly does – into the trap of millenarianism, valorizing and romanticizing a position of perpetual defeat. But there can be little doubt that avoiding this dead end must always involve an ongoing and undogmatic attempt to think the most challenging and inescapable issues of political philosophy. In a world and a human species ravaged by neoliberalism, the question of what does and doesn’t make collective life and innovation possible at all is clearly one such question. It is a question which Multitude addresses in a most distinctive and persuasive way, and the questions it leaves open are not ones that we should ever hope to finally resolve. Jeremy Gilbert

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news

Rebellion of Greek youth The rebellion of Greek youth in December 2008 has already secured a place in the history of modern social movements, not because of the extent of the rioting, but rather because it came as an expression of deeper social tensions, political ruptures and ideological displacements amidst a growing capitalist crisis. In short, it looked like a sign of things to come. Clearly the killing of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigor­ opoulos by a police officer acted as a catalyst for the various forms of social discontent already brewing in Greek society. First of all, the education system is in crisis. A highly competitive system of entrance exams for higher education, requiring huge amounts of study and expensive tutorial courses, leads only to a university degree that does not guarantee secure employment. The dire state of education is exacerbated by attempts to implement the so-called ‘Bologna process’ reforms, which include various downgradings of university degrees – such as delinking academic titles and professional qualifications, the introduction of harsher disciplinary measures and an intensified pace of study. In addition, there are continued attempts to legalize private higher education in Greece, despite an explicit constitutional ban on private universities, a ban that was reinforced by the struggle of university students against the proposed amendment of the constitution back in 2006–07. The attacks on youth and education cannot be separated from the economic crisis. With the Greek economy sliding into recession, households are facing stagnant wages, job insecurity and rising indebtedness, compounded by a policy of strict fiscal austerity. The prospect of massive lay-offs in the near future aggravates things, as does the Greek government’s commitment to highly unpopular pensions reforms and privatization of state-run companies. The long period of state repression – from the defeat of the Left in the Civil War (1946–49) up to the period of military rule (1967–74) – gives hostility towards the police and state a particular inflection and prevents it from being mere ‘delinquency’. Elements of popular radicalism and militancy, originating in the post-dictatorship radicalism of the 1970s, persist and are fuelled by subsequent waves of protest, especially among students. As a result the occupation of public buildings, especially universities, and defiant stances

against forces of order gain a broader legitimacy than perhaps elsewhere. For many years attempts to discredit and eliminate these enduring collective representations in the name of ‘modernization’ have been the main preoccupation of the ‘organic intellectuals’ of Greek capitalism. The rebellion managed to gain the support of segments of the workforce, such as younger workers, teachers and people in precarious posts of intellectual labour. However, in other strata of the working class and the traditional petty bourgeoisie, insecurity has led to more conservative reflexes. Interpreting the December rebellion as a mere expression of rising insecurity, social tensions, growing inequality and state repression would miss both its importance and its originality. This particular rebellion tended to unite different segments of youth. It included both students in higher education and young people facing social exclusion. It happened in all kinds of schools and neighbourhoods. No part of Greece was immune. It included Greeks and immigrants. This can be equated neither with the French student movement against the ‘First Employment Contract’ nor with the banlieue riots: it was more like a combination of both. For the first time it was not just the student movement but the whole youth movement that dominated the social scene, forcing political analysts and commentators to come to terms with a neglected social subject. The movement accelerated the rearticulation of a collective identity among Greek youth. This vaunted struggle, solidarity, hostility towards authority and the traditional political scene, also conveyed a deeply anti-systemic demand for radical change in all aspects of social life. As such, the rebellion had elements of an articulated political discourse and was not a ‘blind’ social explosion. One could sense this not only in tracts by leftist or anarchist groups but also in the way students expressed their rage against what they called the ‘policies that kill our dreams’. This political character was similarly evident in the appeal of slogans such as ‘down with the government of murderers’. Even the most extreme cases of street violence, such as the mass destruction of banks and retail stores in the centre of Athens on 8 December, were directed mainly against symbols of economic power.

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Facing a movement of such intensity and extent the Greek government found itself in an awkward position. Resorting to further police repression and exceptional measures, such as forbidding demonstrations, risked provoking even more violence. Trying to mobilize the ‘silent majority’ threatened to turn into an open call for far-right violence (something that actually happened in Patras with neo-Nazis posing as ‘angry shopkeepers’ alongside the police). Attempting to create a general consensus around its policies pushed even the neoliberal ‘socialists’ of PASOK to insist on the government’s resignation. Consequently, it tried a combination of waiting for the Christmas holidays and promising a harsher police stance in the future, including enforcing the right of police to enter university campuses in violation of the ‘university sanctuary’. As a true social explosion, representing a condensation of all the contradictions of Greek capitalism, and with youth acting as the ‘weakest link in the chain’, the rebellion was simultaneously the result of deeper social processes and an unexpected event violently accelerating the apprehension of the current historical conjuncture and its potential. This is why it acted as a litmus test for all the groupings on the Greek Left. The Communist Party, despite its anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist rhetoric, exercised the deep-rooted conservatism of the traditional petty-bourgeois stratum that forms a large segment of its electorate. It acted as a party of ‘order’, accusing the youths in the streets of being ‘provocateurs’. The Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), despite its verbal support of the rebellion, in many instances succumbed to the pressure to condemn ‘violence’ and failed to offer a radical alternative other than its reference to a ‘democratic solution’ through a government of the Left; a proposition that reflects

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both its reformism and its electoralism. The groups of the anti-capitalist Left were at the forefront of the demonstrations and took crucial initiatives such as the effort to bring university students onto the street, the mobilization of union rank-and-file and the insistence on holding a mass rally on 10 December, when both the trade-union bureaucracy and the parties of the parliamentary Left capitulated to the demands of the government and cancelled a scheduled rally on the day of the general strike. But they have also failed so far to offer a genuine political alternative and did not manage actually to transform the various forms of activism into a coherent political mobilization and project. Anarchist and autonomous groups for the first time opted for more political forms of activism, instead of classical ‘Black Bloc’ tactics, thus broadening their following. But they also demonstrated the limits to their ‘tribal’ forms of organization aversion to mass politics. It is obvious that social explosions such as the one experienced by Greece pose a great challenge for the Left. Given the deepening global economic crisis, more explosions might be expected elsewhere. The insistence of capitalist elites on a fuite en avant tactic of even more flexible labour markets, harsher fiscal austerity and more privatization can only aggravate social tensions. The question is how to transform social discontent into conscious class antagonism, how to turn the movement into a true social force. This entails thinking about political representation or ‘translation’. But thinking about ‘politicization’ either in terms of a government change or in traditional terms of ‘revolutionary’ verbalism misses the point. Nor is it a question of a simple change of policies, even if tangible gains, for example in educational policy, are more than necessary. What is needed is the twenty-

first-century equivalent of a ‘democratic revolution’, a set of political goals and values that would represent a clear break with ‘actually existing neoliberalism’. That could include: reversing all policies that devalue living labour; re-establishing the public character of all collective goods and services (education, health, social security and environment); re-establishing the right to mass collective action against all forms of state repression, discipline, surveillance; refusal to participate in imperialist campaigns; disobedience in the face of all forms of economic discipline originating from international organizations and treaties. Such demands can open up the way to pose radical social change as a historical possibility. Panagiotis Sotiris

Peace, legality, democracy The riots and protests that broke out in Athens and other Greek cities on the night of 6 December were unprecedented in both character and magnitude. Despite the state’s attempt to obscure the political character of the events, it was clear that the country was facing not simply a reaction to police brutality and the death of a young boy, but the revolutionary desire of a nascent radical political subject. ‘The trouble­makers’, commented Prime Minister Karamanlis, ‘proved once more … that their target is social peace, legality and democracy itself.’ It was probably the first time he had stated the truth. For the crowd that took to the streets targeted precisely these three pillars of Greece’s political reality. Social peace. The ‘December events’ did not simply challenge the mythical social peace, but unleashed a political antagonism that escaped the established and cosy relationship between the state, on one hand, and the institutional workers’ union (GSEE) and leftist parties, on the other. As a pamphlet of the ASOEE (Athens University of Economics and Business) occupation put it succinctly: ‘the Varkiza peace agreement has been broken. We are in civil war once again’ – a reference to the agreement that attempted to end the Greek civil war in 1945. Despite the exaggerated nature of the claim, this grasped the flavour of the events. It was the first time since the insurrection at the Polytechnic School in 1973 that political antagonism had so disturbed the social peace, one that has in fact been at the service of neoliberal development and modernization.

The most recent focus in the effort to consolidate this social peace was the 2004 Olympic Games, seized by the Greek ruling class as an opportunity to express the image of a harmonious and modernized country. The reality behind the facade, however, has been the very conditions that rendered the social peace extremely fragile: an average salary of €500–700 for the majority of the population in their twenties and thirties (the €700 generation); high unemployment and a lack of social benefits; an increase in temporary work combined with a total lack of union rights; an increasing number of people living below the poverty line; and the pillaging of households by the banks – in short, a widening and deepening of social inequalities in a society that thrives on authoritarianism, nepotism and corruption. Legality. Greece’s political and social scene is made up of corrupt politicians (four ministers have been forced to resign due to their involvement in financial scandals); a scandal-ridden church with monks who have at their disposal astronomical amounts of money and engage in business deals with the state; a supine judiciary; and an elite of senior officials, entrepreneurs and managers who accumulate wealth through megadeals and bribery. The resignation last September of the marine minister George Boulgarakis revealed an accumulated fortune of millions of euros, some fifty buildings across the country and ownership of offshore companies, all built and managed in a way that guaranteed tax advantages and profiteering within the limits of the law. Defending himself against accusations of unethical behaviour the minister explained that ‘everything that is legal is also ethical’ – a phrase which expressed perfectly the notion of legality to which the ruling class holds. The crowd that took to the streets of the Greek cities opposed precisely that notion of legality that allowed ministers and entrepreneurs to grow rich with absolute impunity. The revolt, then, was not the criminal action of a small minority but the ethical-political action of a nascent political subject that opposes the state’s legality and prefigures, albeit embryonically, a different kind of ‘legality’ and a different kind of ‘order’. Democracy. In an attempt to criminalize and disguise the appearance of this political subject, and to save face abroad, the country’s secretary-general of information called the events a ‘hijacking of democracy’ and described the rioters as ‘a small, marginal group of a few hundred extremists’. In fact, the ‘small marginal group’ consisted of thousands of protesters in Athens and other cities, and was made up of workers, teachers, artists, students, immigrants and the

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un­employed. The ‘hijacking of democracy’ was precisely the unexpected coming-together of the various elements of this nascent political subject, one which demanded not merely ‘reforms’ or the resignation of the government, as the parties of the institutional left did, but the abolition of the feeble parliamentary system and the democracy of cronyism and impotence. ‘Burn, burn the brothel-parliament’, was one of the main slogans heard in the streets, which was followed by several unsuccessful attempts to do precisely that. Although it is true that there was no clear political agenda (but why should there be?) one needed only to hear the slogans, listen to the radio broadcasts of the occupations, or read the pamphlets and manifestos in order to see that the protesters were united under a very simple banner: ‘Political, social and economic equality for all.’ Referring to the events in Greece, the French president, obviously alarmed that the riots could spread to France, argued that ‘in a democracy, when the people want a change this goes through the ballot box. In a democracy, it is not the street that decides.’ Sarkozy betrayed how unconvincing was the Greek government’s attempt to explain the events as the result of a small violent minority: he was admitting that what was at issue in Athens was change itself. We should therefore see this crowd as an embryonic radical political subject that is emerging in the space produced by economic exploitation on one hand and the selling out of the unionism and the parliamentary Left on the other. The massive increase in low-paid part-time labour, coupled with an increase in price in all basic commodities, has produced a new army of low-paid workers, very often highly skilled and university-educated, who live on very little money and are forced to rely heavily on parental support. This new middle-class proletariat enjoys no labour rights, lives in total work insecurity, carries out unpaid overtime under the threat of job loss, and sees absolutely no prospects in the future, in the light of planned social insurance reforms that would guarantee that many will not even get a pension. With no representation in the institutional workers’ union (GSEE), this army of workers is becoming politicized in a slow movement towards the formation of independent, autonomous and anti-hierarchical syndicates and groupings. To this new proletariat we need to add the already politicized and autonomously organized workers, the unemployed, the politicized student body, which last year opposed and prevented the privatization of education, and a combative grouping of immigrants. The magnitude of the events in Athens was the product of the coming-together of these various sectors

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of the working class with varying degrees of politicization and a diversity of political ideas that, nevertheless, share the same anti-plutocratic values and mistrust of political parties. The attempt by the political class to criminalize the events thus aimed at masking not only the political character of the riots but also the class composition of the rioters. Everything that showed the class character of the events was thereby left out of the picture. An important characteristic of this nascent political subject is that it assumes the necessity of some kind of political violence as a means of class struggle. In the years after the overthrow of the military dictatorship, political violence was linked to political killings or bombings associated with clandestine organizations, or small anarchist groups engaged in street fights with police. What was different in the December events was the fact that thousands of rioters took to the streets. And, despite the fact that not all protesters engaged in acts of violence, it was clear that there was a general acceptance or tolerance of violence, as was seen in the applauding of the torching of banks and stores. Given all this, it came as no surprise that the Communist Party (KKE) sided with the extreme right-wing and nationalist party of LAOS, the ultra-conservative government of New Democracy and the centre party of PASOK in condemning the events. The only party that seemed to grasp the political character of the events and avoided criminalizing them (though it did condemn the violence) was the leftist SYRIZA. Yet SYRIZA failed to recognize the class nature of the subject, preferring instead to talk of the ‘insurrection of the youth’ – an ideological category that displaces the political subject from class to age, and so seriously misrepresents the events. The media, in turn, performed another displacement, from the category of ‘youth’ to that of ‘students’, allowing themselves to engage in unfocused and hypocritical criticism of politicians and other ‘grown-ups’ and to make vague statements concerning a better future for ‘our children’. Although it is difficult to predict to what extent this political subject will develop and the direction it will take, it can nonetheless be argued that the revolt was an important moment in its constitution. With a different approach to political violence, employing a more flexible language than the rigidly structured discourse of the institutional Left, and displaying bold political imagination, the crowd that took to the streets made clear that the balance of political forces in Greece has changed. Mihalis Mentinis