Radical Philosophy Issue: 111

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111 Editorial collective Caroline Bassett, Andrew Chitty, Diana Coole, Howard Feather, Esther Leslie, Kevin Magill, Stewart Martin, Mark Neocleous, Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford, Alessandra Tanesini Contributors Susan Buck-Morss teaches critical theory and visual culture in the Department of Government, Cornell University, NY. Her latest book is Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (MIT Press, 2000). Martin Shaw teaches international relations at the University of Sussex and edits www.theglobalsite.ac.uk/justpeace. Andrew Chitty teaches philosophy at the University of Sussex. Mike Marqusee is a writer based in London. His most recent book is Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties (Verso, 1999). Cecilia Sjöholm teaches philosophy and literature at South Stockholm University College. Her book The Antigone Complex and the Invention of Feminine Desire is forthcoming. Peter Dews has just completed a semester as Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Center for the Humanities, Grinnell College, Iowa. His most recent book is The Limits of Disenchantment (Verso, 1995).

Layout by Petra Pryke Tel: 020 7243 1464 Copyedited and typeset by Illuminati Tel: 01981 241164 Production by Stella Sandford, Peter Osborne and Stewart Martin Printed by Russell Press, Russell House, Bulwell Lane, Basford, Nottingham NG6 0BT Bookshop distribution UK: Central Books, 99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN Tel: 020 8986 4854 USA: Bernard de Boer, 113 East Centre Street, Nutley, New Jersey 07100 Tel: 201 667 9300; Ubiquity Distributors Inc., 607 Degraw Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217 Tel: 718 875 5491

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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002

COMMENTARY A Global Public Sphere? Susan Buck-Morss..........................................................................................2

Ten Challenges for ‘Anti-war’ Politics Martin Shaw ................................................................................................. 11

Moralism, Terrorism and War – Reply to Shaw Andrew Chitty...............................................................................................16

Emerging Fronts of the Global Anti-war Movement Mike Marqusee .............................................................................................20

ARTICLES Family Values: Butler, Lacan and the Rise of Antigone Cecilia Sjöholm .............................................................................................24

Uncategorical Imperatives: Adorno, Badiou and the Ethical Turn Peter Dews ....................................................................................................33

REVIEWS  Slavoj Z iek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Four Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion Kit Barton ......................................................................................................38

Andrew Barry, Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society Caroline Bassett ...........................................................................................41 Bob Carter, Realism and Racism: Concepts of Race in Sociological Research Phillip Cole ....................................................................................................43 Phillip Cole, Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory and Immigration Bob Carter .....................................................................................................45 Karl Ameriks, Kant and the Fate of Autonomy Eckart Förster, Kantʼs Final Synthesis Brigitte Sassen, ed., Kantʼs Early Critics Christian Kerslake .........................................................................................47 John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connection Fergus Daly ...................................................................................................49

CONFERENCE REPORT Deleuze and Neo-aesthetics, Tate Modern Jon Beasley-Murray ......................................................................................51

OBITUARY John Fauvel, 1947–2001

Cover: Microphone, 2001 Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd. www.radicalphilosophy.com

Noel Parker ....................................................................................................54

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Institutional Critique-by-Numbers

Radical Philosophy Ltd

LETTER Dominic Willsdon..........................................................................................55

COMMENTARY

A global public sphere? Susan Buck-Morss When the multitude ceases to fear, it becomes fearful. Benedict Spinoza

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eptember 11 has ruptured irrevocably the context in which we as intellectuals speak. The acts of terror on that day were no invasion from the outside by a barbaric evil ʻotherʼ but, rather, produced fully within a coeval and common world. We are witnessing the mutation of a new global body politic, and if we are to have any potency as part of its thinking organ, it will be in discourses that refuse to separate academic life from political life, and that inform not just national opinion but a global public debate. To think and write for a global public sphere is not an easy task. I do not have great confidence that this talk* will succeed. I have no political choice but to try, nonetheless, as the commitment to a diverse, multi-centred human society is what my work, and what much of our work, has been about for the past several decades, in universities that are now becoming decisively, and quite hopefully, global communities of scholars. The global public sphere in a broader sense, however, is not yet a ʻcommunityʼ, or even a coherently navigable discursive terrain. To address it is thus a performative act. It aims to bring about that which it presumes. The notion of the ʻglobalʼ itself circulates globally today, describing and generating discourses of social change. Many, including myself, have questioned its newness, pointing to the five hundred years of European expansion that produced a world economy and world political domination. But the global terrain that is emerging out of September 11 and its aftermath is, arguably, of a different order. Historical rupture is a jagged process. There has not been a clean break with the past; there never is. The end of the Cold War, the restructuring of transnational capital, the electronic media revolution – these markers of transition have been with us for decades. We have charted their development with concepts like post-modern, post-colonial, post-socialist, post-Marxist. But September 11 brings the realization that in using these terms our ʻglobal communityʼ has not gone far enough. The hegemonic signifiers of Western capitalism, Enlightenment modernity and national sovereignty were kept in place. Radical criticism attacked their Eurocentricity without denying it. It appears now that events have outrun us, captured in a videotaped image of destructive fury that left us speechless. What disappeared on September 11 was the apparent invulnerability, not only of US territory, but of US and, indeed, Western hegemony. A new, global struggle for hegemony has begun. But let us not be content just to describe this process, as if the only actors who counted were military men, terrorists and counter-terrorist forces. In fact, their use of force indicates their lack of hegemony, not its guarantee. It is, ultimately, the global public that will determine hegemonic power * This is the text of a talk to the Radical Philosophy Conference, Look No Hands! Political Forms of Global Modernity, Birkbeck College, London, 27 October 2001.

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– a public newly forming, for whom the old economic and political narratives – even critical ones – are inadequate interpretive tools. The staging of violence as a global spectacle separates September 11 from previous acts of terror. The dialectic of power, its inherent vulnerability, was itself the message. This distinguishes it decisively from radical social movements that aim to accomplish specific social and political goals. The Chiapas resistance movement, which was violent but minimally so, used global channels in order to garner wide support from a public inside and outside of Mexico, in order to bring pressure to bear on the Mexican state to change specific policies. It was and continues to be a radical, cosmopolitan articulation that translates indigenous cultural experience into hegemonic discourses of criticism as the precondition for the intelligibility of its demands. The goal has been to communicate within the existing codes of oppositional struggle. A poet, Commandante Marcos, speaks in its name in inclusive, human terms against diverse manifestations of oppression; solidarity for this local struggle is imagined in global terms. In contrast, the destruction of September 11 was a mute act. The attackers perished without making demands. They left no note behind, only the moving, deadly image, which the cameras of those who were attacked themselves supplied, as they did the fuel-loaded, civilian planes that mutated suddenly into self-annihilating weapons. This mute act was played and replayed before a global audience – a message, sent by satellite to the multitude – a diversity of peoples who, witnessing the same cinematic time-image, the same movement-image, exploded into enemy camps. Or did they? Let us not move too quickly to the polarized world in which we, weeks later, find ourselves. Was not the immediate response far more unanimous, and at the same time more complicated? Did the new global public sphere not overwhelmingly express sadness and solidarity with the victims? Were not the first responses from US citizens precisely to oppose counterattacks that would only increase human suffering? Is not the adequate word for the global reception rather ʻimplosionʼ, as a global terrain means by definition that there is no outside, at the same time that there is, tragically, no cohesion among the multitude who inhabit it. All the forces of global society, however radically incompatible, are immanent within this overdetermined, indivisible terrain.1 Communicative acts demand a code, we are told. But only one? The force of these images was that they entered simultaneously multiple fields of communication within the global public sphere, with highly varied meanings, from terror to triumph. It was not only, or even primarily, to Americans that the act was addressed. Indeed, to Americans the aim was less to communicate than to explode understanding, a weapon of sabotage with devastating effects because, like an email virus, to receive the communication had the consequence of destroying the code. For Americans to open ourselves to this message as meaningful necessitated conscious acceptance of realities – 5 per cent of the Iraqi population destroyed by US attacks and the ongoing embargo; persistent US opportunism in its Middle East foreign policy; double standards of political, economic and human rights; support to Israel despite its colonialist oppression of Palestine – realities that have been in front of our eyes and ears for decades, but that the code of American self-understanding with its master signifier of innocence had effectively blocked out as meaningless. The repeated question after September 11, ʻWhy do they hate us?ʼ did not want an answer. More than a rhetorical question, it was a ritual act: to insist on its unanswerability was a magical attempt to ward off this lethal attack against an American ʻinnocenceʼ that never did exist. September 11 ripped a hole in the American psyche. But it was possible, even in the desolation, to see an opening to a different collective sense of self, the hope of leaving the counterfeit innocence of America behind. New York City is on American soil, but it belongs to the world, not (only) as a node in a network of global cities, but as a place to work and live. An extreme diversity of national, ethnic and religious communities calls

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it home. Imperfect, conflicted, a place of struggle, New York is a really existing, global public sphere in the most concrete and, currently, most optimistic sense. And when the rescue effort immediately began, these urban dwellers acted first together without thinking separate agendas, performing heroically in the name of the diverse multitude of New Yorkers. They give me courage to write.

Complex meaning, double vision On September 11 the stabilizing structures of the global society that for better or worse keep the global order going proved themselves vulnerable in the highest degree. The attack exposed the fact that global capitalism is inadequately imagined as deterritorialized. Just as ʻthe stateʼ would reveal itself during the anthrax incident to consist of postal workers walking their delivery routes, so ʻcapitalʼ showed itself after September 11 as working people facing job lay-offs without a union for support. The World Trade Center towers were a symbol; but they were also a human and material reality, and the photographically mediated experience of the attack was of both the symbol and the real, antagonistically superimposed. ʻPhotography is a theological technologyʼ, Peter Osborne tells us, because it is indexical, a trace marking the intelligibility of the material world.2 This trace is the surplus that escapes even multiple meanings of the intentional message, in this case sent by the terrorists. It is ʻtheologicalʼ precisely not in the fundamentalist sense. The latter appeals to the text, whether Bible or Qurʼan, to interpret the world as fateful intention. To do so is to exclude photographyʼs material trace, the meaning of which surpasses the predetermination of the word. The traumatic intensity of the images of destruction existed precisely here: as cinematic as they appeared, they were intentionlessly actual, irrefutably material and real. And the reality muddied the symbolic message. If we are to read the act symbolically as an attack on global capital, then how do we square this with the fact that it was the secretaries, janitors, food servers, clerical workers, security guards, and firemen who were killed? If it was an attack on ʻAmericaʼ, then why were there so many other citizen nationals and so many different ethnic names among the victims? If this was the hub of the global economy, then why was it small business people and laid-off workers who suffered? If New York was symbolic of Western cultural decadence and sexual libertinism, then why were so many ordinary friends, families and children left behind? To see a photograph as purely symbolic, rather than as a trace of the real, is a reductive visual practice – shall we call it visual fundamentalism? Of course, this practice precisely describes the American reception of photographs of the Gulf War a decade ago: ʻsmartʼ bombs that exploded human vehicles, houses and bridges like computergame targets; retreating Iraqi troops massacred as they fled; Iraqi women sobbing in grief for family members lost in the brutal US bomb raid on Amiriya bunker in Baghdad. On September 11, these images surged back into memory, and with them a ghost-like presence, the home-grown, mid-Western terrorist, the Gulf War veteran, the ʻperfect soldierʼ who, with reference to the US-caused death of Iraqi children, spoke with bitter irony of the Oklahoma City children he killed as ʻcollateral damageʼ, and who when interrogated by police answered according to US military instructions for captured prisoners of war.3 No one in the US dares to mention this ghost, Timothy McVeigh, who was executed less than a year ago. But surely the nihilism of his act paralleled that of September 11, as does its unpardonable violence. To relate them is to acknowledge a global world as opposed to national difference. At the moment, this blurring of boundaries is too threatening to be allowed. When hegemony is under siege, it does not tolerate complexity of meaning. But complexity is just what the diverse multitude in a global public sphere demands. Striking is the speed with which every image taken of the New York City disaster was reduced

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within a week to one image, the American flag, and under it one caption, ʻthe nation under attackʼ. With brutal simplification, President George W. Bush declared: ʻYou are with us or against us.ʼ Hundreds of thousands demonstrating for peace around the globe were simply ignored. Millions of critics of US foreign policy at home and abroad were placed under suspicion. George Bush, well advised after his alarming, initial slip of calling for a ʻcrusadeʼ against ʻcowardsʼ, spoke eloquently of the need to make a clear distinction between two Islams: one, a great and honourable religion that has been a humanizing force over the centuries and is practised in multiple ways by more than a billion people; the other, a subterfuge for criminal acts of terror. Bush has said it: a small group of men (and the actors on both sides in this disaster have been overwhelmingly men) must not be allowed to ʻhijackʼ the multitude. And who are we, if not this multitude, forced by both sides to acquiesce to the killing of innocent civilians? But to express a cosmopolitan consciousness at this moment is seen as a threat to exclusionary loyalties. We are made to feel afraid. Terror produces terror, as observers have long noted. Bin Laden and his supporters indeed pose a threat, but that threat doubles when it is countered in kind. A ʻfundamental paradoxʼ of the paranoid style in American politics, wrote Richard Hofstadter in 1952, the era of the Cold War, ʻis the imitation of the enemyʼ.4 Now, as on that occasion, the acts of enemies reflect each other. The engagements of war cannot exist without this mirroring, which ensures an overlapping of the military terrain. In this terrain, we, the hijacked multitude, the vast majority, are subjected to the common paranoid vision of violence and counter-violence, and prohibited from engaging each other in a common public sphere. The ʻweʼ who are Americans, under attack by the terrorists, are given an ultimatum by our protectors to mute our dissent, rely unquestioningly on our all-too-human leaders, and trust their secretly arrived-at determination of our interest. To other nations the United States gives leeway according to the pragmatics of diplomatic policy, but one mandate for all is non-negotiable: to be against terrorism means to accept the legitimacy of the US to deploy its military power globally to fight terrorists as it alone, secretly, defines them. For Muslims, it is not their right to practise their religion that is at stake. Rather, it is their right to challenge collectively, in Islamʼs name, the terrorist actions of states: Israeli state terror against the Palestinians or US state terror against Iraqi civilians. But even secular criticism now appears contentious. Samuel Huntington, no radical, has observed that in the Islamic world ʻimages of the West as arrogant, materialistic, repressive, brutal, and decadent are held not only by fundamentalist imams but also by those whom many in the West would consider their natural allies and supporters.ʼ5 It now becomes dangerous for them to say so.

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Can I continue to use the term United States here? US policy? US violence? Since September 11, now more than ever, we must maintain a double vision if we are to see clearly. There are two United States of America, and any political analysis – whether from the Left or the Right – that aims at accuracy rather than myth-making must make that distinction. The one United States, of which I am a voting citizen, is institutionally a democratic republic. It is committed by its constitution to a balance of powers – between local and federal elected officials on the one hand, and among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches on the other. (This balance has been in jeopardy from the moment of George W. Bushʼs election.) It is a nation founded on principles of freedom: not the shallow freedoms of mass-culture mediocrity and consumer choice, but the deeply human – I will say it – universal political freedoms of belief, speech, assembly, due process, and equality before the law; equality that has evolved over two hundred years of citizen struggle to mean blindness to sexual and class difference, sexual preference, racial heritage and ethnic origin, with the goal of affirming and protecting difference in all the individual and collective human senses. I am fiercely loyal to the United States of American that espouses these ideals – ideals in no way the exclusive product of our history, but struggled for widely within the global public sphere. I will give my life to defend both them and the multiplicity and diverse human beings that as fellow citizens and honoured guests inhabit my beautiful land – and I will defend them particularly against attempts to drape the persecution of difference with the American flag. But there is another United States over which I have no control, because it is by definition not a democracy, not a republic. I am referring to the national security state that is called into existence with the sovereign pronouncement of a ʻstate of emergencyʼ and that generates a wild zone of power, barbaric and violent, operating without democratic oversight, in order to combat an ʻenemyʼ that threatens the existence not merely and not mainly of its citizens, but of its sovereignty. The paradox is that this undemocratic state claims absolute power over the citizens of a free and democratic nation. My own coming to age politically was the consequence of another September 11 in 1973, when the US government committed criminal acts, including murder, in support of the military coup in Chile of General Pinochet that prevented the coming to power of Salvador Allende, the legally elected, Marxist president of Chile. (To think these two September 11 events simultaneously – to think Kissinger and Pinochet together as criminals against humanity, to think the US School of the Americas together with the al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan as terrorist training grounds – is precisely what a global public must be capable of doing.) Under the logic of the national security state that has existed formally in the United States since at least 1947, the ʻnational interestʼ was conflated with that of the ʻfree worldʼ; freedom-loving regimes were by definition pro-American; freedom-fighters were any indigenous groups, no matter how anti-democratic, who with US backing attempted to destroy leftist social movements throughout the world. A strong, secular Left existed in every Middle Eastern nation in the 1970s. It supported the Palestinian struggle, in Edward Saidʼs words, as ʻa liberation ideal, not a provincial movement for municipal self-rule under foreign tutelage. We saw it as an integral unit within the liberation movements of the Third World – secular, democratic, revolutionary.ʼ6 This secular Arab Left pressed for social and economic justice in terms antithetical to US military and economic interests, and it was in this atmosphere that the US national security state nurtured figures like Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein (who in 1988, with the knowledge of the Western powers, killed 5,000 people in a poison-gas attack on Halabja),7 and the leaders of the Taliban, all of whom would learn well the lessons of the wild zone of power.

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Global capital, global immanence The US national security state is a war machine. It must have an enemy for its powers to appear legitimate; its biggest threat is that the enemy disappears.8 But given a war, even a Cold War, and now given an ill-defined yet total ʻwar on terrorismʼ, the declared ʻstate of emergencyʼ is justification for suspending the rights and freedoms of citizens. It justifies arresting and holding individuals without due process. It justifies killing and bombing without oversight or accountability. It justifies secrecy, censorship and a monopoly over the accumulation and dissemination of information. All of these state practices are totalitarian, of course. In 1927, Stalin took advantage of an almost hysterical fear in the Soviet Union that the Western powers would invade, declaring: ʻWe have internal enemies. We have external enemies. This, comrades, must not be forgotten for a single moment.ʼ9 The perception of a total threat legitimated the implementation of total, extralegal power both domestically and abroad. The word ʻterrorʼ is used to describe the execution or imprisonment in the USSR of thousands of purged party members in the 1930s, and we are accustomed to equating this terror with Stalinʼs name, as if one evil individual were responsible, rather than the logic intrinsic to the whole idea of ʻterrorʼ. But Stalin justified his actions because the citizenry felt threatened, a state of mind that is fertile ground for abuses of power. According to one participant, ʻIn the thirties we felt we were at war, at war with the entire world, and we believed that in war you should act like there is a war on.ʼ10 The consequence was that popular support existed for Stalinʼs regime, precisely because he was not squeamish about rooting out the evil source. Today the language, the thinking, begins to sound unpleasantly familiar. As I have argued elsewhere, the unlimited, unmonitored wild zone of power is a potential of every state that claims sovereign power, and with it a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence.11 Two consequences follow. The first is that no matter how democratic the constitution of a state regime, as a sovereign state it is always more than a democracy, and consequently a good deal less. The second is that human rights, human freedom and human justice cannot be exclusive possessions of one nation or one civilization. They must be global rights, or they will not be rights at all. The problem is not that the West imposes its democratic values on the rest of the world, but that it does so selectively. It is intolerable that rights be applied with a double standard; it is inexcusable to justify this flagrant opportunism of US or any state policy in terms of respect for cultural diversity. Huntington describes US duplicity: ʻDemocracy is promoted but not if it brings Islamic fundamentalists to power; nonproliferation is preached for Iran and Iraq but not for Israel; free trade is the elixir of economic growth but not for [US] agriculture; human rights are an issue with China but not with Saudi Arabia; aggression against oil-owning Kuwaitis is massively repulsed but not against non-oil-owning Bosnians.ʼ12 We can now add to this list: the killing of innocent civilians in New York City is a terrorist act, but Afghani innocents killed and starving are merely unfortunate; the Talibanʼs violation of womenʼs rights makes them deserving of destruction, while the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan are not even being mentioned as a necessary component of an anti-Taliban regime. As participants in a global public, we cannot allow ourselves, cynically, to accept such double standards. Humanity is the subject of the global public sphere, not the United States. No individual nation, no partial alliance, can wage war in humanityʼs name. We, the diverse multitude of humanity, must insist on this as non-negotiable – that on this point, ʻyou are with us or against usʼ. The United States was left dangling as the sole superpower after the fall of the Soviet Union, an absurdity, arguably, once the enemy was gone, but – it is what having hegemony means – that did not end its superpower status. If indeed the emperor had no clothes, no one in the empire was letting on. The United States still had smart bombs

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and nuclear stockpiles, Wall Street and Hollywood, and that seemed, for all intents and purposes, to matter. Until now, the US has been able, openly, to shift from the moral high ground to raw self-interest and still prevail. Until now. We in the vestige democracy that still calls itself proudly the United States of America have the opportunity, now, to free ourselves from decades of being held hostage by the US national security state that has sullied our reputation and stolen our name. We must ask ourselves: How will we citizens, both civilians and soldiers, benefit from this ʻunlimitedʼ war on terror, when its continuation is precisely what places our lives and our futures in danger? If the American way of life is going to have to change, let it be for the better. Let us not die for a system that exploits the globeʼs resources disproportionately, and disproportionately reaps its wealth; that treats others with superpower arrogance and uses economic bribes to cripple the potency of the newly emerging, global body politic. If the war is brought to the homeland, let us be the ones who wage it – not with terrorist violence whereby the ends justify the means, but with divine violence as Walter Benjamin, a Jew and a Marxist, conceived it: collective political action that is lethal not to human beings, but to the mythic power that reigns over them. George W. Bush insists that this is not the Cold War but a new war; that the goal is not to defend the free world but, rather, freedom itself (ʻenduring freedomʼ, as vaguely defined as the war). Yet the military action that George W. Bush calls the ʻfirst war of the twenty-first centuryʼ looks remarkably similar to US military actions in the past. World wars, the particular insanity of the twentieth century, were struggles for territory. Sovereignty was a geopolitical concept. The enemy was situated within a spatial terrain. In this context, ʻdefending the free worldʼ meant, physically, pushing the enemy out, setting up lines of defence, deportation of sympathizers, pursuits into enemy territory, geographic embargoes – in short, spatial attack and isolation. The overthrow –ʻdestabilizationʼ – of nation-state regimes from within was a clandestine action, best done by indigenous forces, so as not to challenge the terms of legitimation of the sovereign-state system in which wars took place. In global war, conflict cannot be discretely spatialized, a fact that has enormous implications in terms of the imaginary landscape. Because the ʻenemyʼ does not inhabit a clear territorial space, there is nothing geopolitical to attack. The fact that the United States is now nonetheless attacking the geopolitical territory of Afghanistan is indicative of its self-contradictory situation. Its superpower strength is still defined in traditional military terms. But the new global immanence means that there is no outside, a fact that the terrorists operating on September 11 exploited with brilliant brutality. In

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contrast, the United States is manifesting distinctly dinosaur-like symptoms by compulsively repeating its old tactics of massive military response. Global immanence has changed the role of the media as well. In world wars, news reporting was directed to distinct audiences. Radio and movie newsreels reported the war as ʻpropagandaʼ, editing and interpreting events to rally the home front and demoralize the enemy. But when a global audience makes it impossible to separate home and enemy populations, when the vast majority of human beings who are tuned in can be defined as neither ʻusʼ nor ʻthemʼ, when audiences do not sit in spatially isolated bleachers, there is no way of controlling the propaganda effect. The media, rather than reporting the war, is inextricably entangled within it. It is a deterritorialized weapon among diverse populations, which it can both harm and protect. Again, symptomatic of the vulnerability of the United States in these changed conditions is that when global media cannot help but expose as false the stark opposition of good and evil that the government proclaims, its response is to muzzle the media. Under conditions of global immanence, this policy backfires. When Al-Jazeera television reaches 35 million viewers, including a growing American domestic audience, the good/evil narrative is challenged and complicated. The dilemma, of course, is that an open media is just what legitimates US violence in the global defence of freedom, so that policy rationale is continuously in danger of undermining itself. Are we witnessing a US national security state bid to transform itself from an obsolete superpower into a global sovereign power? Such sovereignty would challenge the nation-state system by claiming the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence, launching ʻpolice actionsʼ against ʻcriminalsʼ throughout the globe.13 What, crucially, would be its relation to global capital? In the twentieth century, given the traditional American formula of economic presence and political absence (as opposed to the European formula of direct political imperialism), the Cold War was vital for the legitimacy of US foreign interventions that protected transnational business under the hegemonic banner of protecting the ʻfree worldʼ from communism, capitalismʼs binary other. In the new situation of global immanence, this strategy no longer makes sense: Bin Laden is as imbricated in global capitalism as is Bush. At the same time, the hope that some felicitously reconstituted, ʻpost-modernʼ sovereignty will come about as a new paradigm of power, as suggested by Hardt and Negri in Empire, now seems overly optimistic.14 Would a US-based global sovereignty be capable of becoming the violent arm of global capital? Surely, in the present ʻstate of emergencyʼ, the fledgling protest movements against global capital are already feeling the heavy hand of the new security and surveillance. But there is a contradiction that may hinder a US bid for global power, at least in the short run. Global capital cannot exist without the freedom of movement that a global war against terrorism necessarily circumscribes. What does seem likely, and not undesirable, is that global capital will begin to separate itself from the protective shield that American dominance has provided. Not undesirable, because the equation of global capital with Americanization has obfuscated the political situation. Global capitalism needs to be analysed with the same double vision (if for different reasons) that we have applied to the US state regime. On the one hand, it is the very foundation of the whole possibility of a global public sphere. On the other, it continues to be an indefensible system of brutal exploitation of human labour and natureʼs labour.15 The true nightmare is that, under the terror produced by a total and unlimited war on terror, a US-led alliance of powers (rather than a potentially more democratic and egalitarian United Nations) will develop in a way that protects the global mobility of capital and its interests, but not that of the multitude and the interests of its public sphere.

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Global sovereignty that would attempt to monopolize violence in global capitalʼs defence is a case of reactionary cosmopolitanism, because it lacks a radical sense of social justice. Al-Qaeda and the exclusivity of its fundamentalist struggle is a case of reactionary radicalism, because it lacks a cosmopolitan sense of the public sphere. But when radicalism and cosmopolitanism converge in a global public sphere, when the multitude ceases to be hijacked by either side, when Western hegemony is provincialized within a larger humanity, then terror and counter-terror will have lost its hold. Whether that happens will depend on us.

Notes 1. For these two important notions, the newness of the global defined by its immanence, and the diversity of global society understood as a ʻmultitudeʼ, I am in dialogue with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negriʼs, Empire (Harvard University Press, London, 2000). While we both make use of Spinozaʼs writing for the concept of immanence, my appropriation of Spinozaʼs ʻmultitudeʼ to designate a diverse and decentred global public is not identical to the meaning given the ʻmultitudeʼ by Hardt and Negri. 2. Peter Osborne, Philosophy in Cultural Theory, Routledge, London, 2000, p. 35. 3. Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass, Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables, and Faces of Terrorism, Routledge, London, 1996, p. 138. 4. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1965, p. 32. 5. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1996, p. 214. 6. Edward Said, Peace and its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process, preface by Christopher Hitchens, Vintage Books, New York, 1996, p. 79. 7. Akbar S. Ahmed, Postmodernism and Islam: Predicament and Promise, Routledge, London, 1992, p. 135. 8. I make this argument in Chapter 1 of my book, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, MIT Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2000. 9. Cited in ibid., p. 7. 10. Cited in ibid. 11. Ibid., Chapter 1. 12. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, p. 184. Huntington, the realist, concludes with a non-argued platitude: ʻDouble standards in practice are the unavoidable price of universal standards of principle.ʼ He gives up on the idea of a global public sphere from the start. 13. US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day OʼConnor has observed that the whole question of criminal rights becomes murky in this situation (New York Times, 29 September 2001). It is not democratic to the globe to have the global sovereign elected by the US people; it is not democratic to the US people to have its elected president be a global sovereign. 14. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 139. Hardt and Negri do not face squarely the problem of the legitimate use of violence, which is central to the question of sovereignty. 15. See Teresa Brennan, Exhausting Modernity: Grounds for a New Economy, Routledge, London, 2000.

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MA Modern European Philosophy

Ten challenges for ‘anti-war’ politics Martin Shaw

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t is said that generals always fight yesterdayʼs war, but this is even truer of antiwar movements. Although the ʻwar against terrorismʼ is billed as a ʻnew kind of warʼ, the anti-war rhetoric has seemed even more familiar than the military practice. In this piece I bring my experience of thinking about peace politics to bear on the largely inherited attitudes implicit in anti-war responses to the crisis since 11 September 2001. I write as someone who publicly opposed the military thrust of the ʻwar on terrorismʼ from George Bushʼs first pronouncements. But I proceed by making ten challenges to common lines of anti-war argumentation, and propose alternative foundations for a coherent critique of the war.

1. Do we pay more than lip service to the criminality of the initial aggression? Anti-war activists invariably preface their critiques with ʻof course we condemn the terror attacksʼ – just as in the Gulf War we said ʻof course we condemn the invasion of Kuwaitʼ, and over Yugoslavia, ʻof course we condemn ethnic cleansingʼ. And yet this is a particularly insidious form of argument. It almost invariably means that the speaker does not take seriously the act of aggression which has provoked Western military action. While recognizing a tactical need to acknowledge its illegitimacy, the speaker hopes to move on quickly to the Westʼs own ʻcrimesʼ without really addressing the nature of the initial aggression. In the case of ʻ911ʼ (as some Americans call it) the failure begins with an inability to name the attacks. Of course, this is not a failing only of anti-war opinion; we do not have an agreed terminology for these events. President Bush was quick to call them an ʻact of warʼ: correct so far as it went, but manifestly an incomplete naming. It was an act of murderous propaganda – which is the meaning of terrorism. Innocent travellers and workers were burnt alive, crushed, suffocated, or forced to jump to their deaths. It was an immoral and illegal act of war, illegitimate according to all the standards accepted by worldwide humanity and agreed by its political representatives. Killing was directed overwhelmingly against innocent civilians for no other reason than that they were presumed to be Americans. In terms of law and of literature it would be accurately named a genocidal massacre. And like many acts of war and most genocidal massacres, what presented as targeted violence was experienced as indiscriminate slaughter, killing Britons and Indians, Jews and Muslims, everyone and anyone in the path of its assault. Any response to this massacre that is close to being adequate has to address its absolutely outrageous and horrific character. Those who are quick to condemn Americaʼs response have not been slow to use terms like ʻgenocideʼ to refer to the deaths of Afghans from starvation, the likelihood of which has been only indirectly increased by US action. But they have often been slow to find similar language to describe the terror attacks themselves, which manifestly invite it.

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2. Do we avoid misplaced comparisons that pre-empt moral response? Anti-war critics often minimize the significance of aggression through misleading analogies designed to move the argument onto anti-Western territory. The significance of the terror massacre has been denied by false comparisons with the crimes of America itself. Thus Noam Chomskyʼs initial reaction was to compare this event – in which thousands of people had clearly died – with President Clintonʼs bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan in 1998. Even if this had been a relevant comparison, we can ask whether an immediate comparative framing of any kind was appropriate. The massacre called out for an active moral response – Chomskyʼs first reaction was to pre-empt one. However, the dubiousness of the enterprise was emphasized by the inappropriateness of the comparison. As Christopher Hitchens pointed out, the Sudan analogy was singularly unconvincing. The criminality of Clintonʼs attack was one of carelessness – misidentification of the target – motivated by political calculation. (It was also a response, however misguided, to the massacres of Africans and Americans in the 1998 embassy bombings, victims who do not figure in Chomskyʼs argument.) As Hitchens pointed out, the Islamist terrorists not only intended, in destroying the huge World Trade Centre, to kill thousands of civilians; they may even have expected to murder a hundred thousand (ʻa Dresden for the Talibanʼ) had the towers fallen lengthways across Manhattan. Chomsky made his comparison despite the fact that no one was actually killed in the Sudan attack (although a night watchman was horrifically burned). Chomskyʼs case rested on unseen and unintended ʻcollateral damageʼ, the thousands of deaths that he believed must have been caused in the Sudan through the absence of drugs. This is indeed the most serious aspect of Clintonʼs Sudan fiasco, and no one would deny that it greatly compounds its morally objectionable character. But if Chomsky wanted to enter indirectly caused deaths into a calculus of slaughter, he should obviously have considered the probable indirect casualties of 911 – not least from deepened poverty throughout the Third World from the economic crisis that the massacre has provoked. In short, Chomsky should have compared like with like. The point is not so much the deficiency of his comparisons as what they tell us about his response and its motives.

3. Can we resist temptations towards fallacious contextualization? These comparisons are examples of a wider problem: the use of contextualization to distract attention from the need for a morally and politically adequate response to the terrorist massacre. It will not do to say that the United States had itself committed, condoned or failed to prevent similar crimes against others. Not only do such claims, however true, provide not a scrap of justification or excuse for what was done; by themselves they also fail to provide a sufficient guide to our actions in the aftermath. However, not only anti-war activists, but sceptical press and even academic commentary, have frequently substituted political and economic analysis of the Middle East and Central Asia for a response to the massacre. Partly this is a matter of political habit – we all know how American policy has sustained Israeli occupation in the West Bank, and so on. And this certainly helps explain why many Arabs and Muslims hate America and sympathize with Bin Laden. So while relevant to the framework for a wider political response, it is pernicious when used to explain away the massacre and to minimize the justification for a response to it. This mode of argument is pervasive, and motivated by good intentions (towards Palestinians, for example). Its inappropriateness perhaps needs particular emphasis.

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4. Have we taken seriously the USA’s own moral and legal rights? These kinds of false responses are often linked to an overhasty dismissal of the USAʼs moral and legal rights to make a military response to the massacre. It was, as I have said, an act of aggression, whose seriousness was compounded by the targeting of civilians. Clearly there is a prima facie case for Americaʼs right to respond militarily, not merely as retaliation but in self-defence against the clear danger of further attacks. Initially there was a strong argument that the USA did not know who was responsible, and the ʻWild West justiceʼ of possible attacks on Iraq as well as Afghanistan seemed seriously illegitimate. However, this argument seems no longer valid, in the light not only of the USAʼs evidence, but of Bin Ladenʼs own propaganda efforts, coming forward to claim the political credit if not – in the light of a possible trial, we must presume – the direct command responsibility. Nor is there any doubt about the Talibanʼs generally close links with Bin Laden. So, in this context, Americaʼs right to attack al-Qaeda and the Taliban is not in serious doubt. No wonder that the veteran radical international scholar Richard Falk has pronounced in favour of a possible ʻjust warʼ, the first American war he has supported; or, of course, that almost unnoticed the US has obtained United Nations backing. Of course, the right to make war does not make war right. But it does no favours to an anti-war cause to deny the elements of traditional international legitimacy in Americaʼs response. Anti-war activists have been quick to cry foul when America has failed to observe the formalities of international legitimation – when over Kosovo, for example, NATO was able to gain Security Council backing only retrospectively. They are under an obligation of consistency, if nothing else, to take seriously Americaʼs international rights in this situation.

5. Have we developed the idea of justice as an alternative to military action? The problem with anti-war politics is precisely that it is mostly against the war rather than for justice. Coalitions have been built around the lowest common denominator of opposition to US action rather than around an adequate alternative response to the core issue of this crisis, the terrorist massacre. This is a fundamentally moral and political failing of many current anti-war movements. However, it is also one that has profound consequences, since it gives governments the easy response that criticism of the war does not address the 911 outrage, and allows them to present American action as the only possible response. The only morally and politically effective answer to the USAʼs war in Afghanistan is that there was a choice. The massacre was an act of war, but it was also a crime. It could have been treated as a criminal act. As Sir Michael Howard, the doyen of British military historians, has argued, ʻMany people would have preferred a police operation conducted under the auspices of the UN on behalf of the international community as a whole, against a criminal conspiracy, whose members should be hunted down and brought before an international court. Terrorists can be successfully destroyed only if public opinion supports the authorities in regarding them as criminals rather than heroes.ʼ Even radicals like Falk question whether such a response would have been sufficient, and certainly it was asking for a leap of imagination and politics that was highly improbable in George W. Bush. But imagine the effect if he had embraced an international tribunal as the way to frame morally the criminality of Bin Laden and the other perpetrators. This would have been a powerful and enduring symbol of the global commitment to defeat terror. With Americaʼs drive behind it, it is not too much to think that Bin Laden, like Slobodan Milos evi´c, could eventually have been brought to justice. Unlike the bombing of Afghanistan, this course would have had unquestionable

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global legitimacy. It would have required less cosying up to authoritarian rulers in Moscow, Beijing and Islamabad. And it would have been much more difficult to whip up anti-Western feeling on the streets from Gaza to Jakarta. In America, all but the ʻhard Leftʼ opponents of the war have tended towards a ʻjustice not revengeʼ response. In Britain, however, at a greater distance from the impact of the terror massacre, all too many of the activists have opted for the old modes of anti-Americanism and anti-war.

6. Have we avoided complicity in denigrating international justice? Indeed, the hard Leftʼs response has not only avoided calling for international justice as the alternative to war; it has also undermined this case by denigrating the available models of international law enforcement. In this way it has entered an unholy alliance with the most determined opponents of international justice, on the American Right. Under their pressure, Clinton ganged up with China to water down the ICC treaty, and only signed up to it in his final days. It is no secret that Bush would like to renege on even that commitment. For Republicans, the idea that an international court could try Americans – and, it seems, the killers of Americans – is anathema. Many on the American Right have called for ʻwar not lawʼ. However, the tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, established by the UN in the 1990s, have been a remarkable example of international justice at work, and a triumph for European-driven ideas of law over might. They have impartially indicted, and increasingly convicted, high-ranking officials responsible for crimes against humanity. The conviction of Serbian general Krstic, co-responsible for the genocidal massacre at Srebrenica in 1995, and the indictment of former President Milos evi´c for this and other crimes, are highly relevant precedents for the treatment of the 911 terrorists. Nevertheless, a significant section of the international Left has spent the last two years in systematic denigration of the Yugoslav tribunal as a tool of Western power. Focusing on the tribunalʼs decision, following a report by an investigative committee, not to prosecute NATO for its bombing of Serbia, the ʻhard Leftʼ has set aside the careful work that has created by far the strongest model yet of international criminal justice. In the context of the terrorist massacres, this ʻLeftʼ lines up squarely with the American Right to block the only serious alternative to war as a response to 911. ʻPilgerstanʼ turns out to be not so far removed from Bushʼs ʻWild Westʼ.

7. Anti-American or anti-war? Not only, however, is too much anti-war activism also anti-justice; it is also doubtful if it is seriously anti-war. There are, of course, two main senses in which it is possible to be anti-war. We can oppose this particular war. This is essentially what anti-war politics means in the current situation. As I have pointed out, coalitions are being built on the lowest common denominator, mirror images of Bushʼs own lowest common denominator anti-terrorist coalition, with its collection of unsavoury regimes. Pacifists are in unholy alliance with anti-Americans, opposing this war exactly as they have previous American wars, making little distinction between them (although there are actually quite important differences between this war and, for example, Kosovo). But most anti-Americans are not pacifists. They would support other kinds of war, maybe even the other side in the current war, and some of them even advocate war at home (hence the childish slogan ʻno war but class warʼ on some recent banners). This is not just an abstract point. If Americaʼs cause is morally and legally justified, then the only serious ground of objection is not to its general ends, but to the means that it is using. Two kinds of argument are possible. First, it can be argued that the means will be inefficient and counterproductive. Because al-Qaeda is a transnational terrorist network, it canʼt be defeated by military action in Afghanistan; because the

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Taliban will carry on guerrilla resistance, America faces a long and difficult war with uncertain success; and because the war will radicalize Muslims outside Afghanistan, the terrorist threat will be increased. These sorts of consequential arguments are important and one doesnʼt have to be a pacifist to make them. However, deeper moral objections, essentially pacifistic if not pacifist, can be made to the methods of the war. It is important to make these correctly: it doesnʼt help to exaggerate the wrongfulness of what is being done in Afghanistan. Bush is not fighting an old-style total war with weapons of mass destruction, but the new type of relatively high-precision, relatively low-casualty, media-conscious campaign that has been practised in the Gulf and Kosovo. So long as America takes care to ʻminimizeʼ civilian deaths, it could remain within the limits prescribed by just war thinking (as Falk points out). That word relatively covers, of course, a multitude of sins. Whether or not the war is ʻjustʼ or legal, there is something disgusting about military planners in their Pentagon offices coldly, even if accidentally, incinerating a whole village in eastern Afghanistan. This is especially so when, effectively, such accidents are programmed into the most careful use of even the smartest weapons – and when risk to US military personnel is almost programmed out, at least so long as a war remains one of bombing. Systematic transfer of the risks of war to civilians, however limited these risks are by historical standards, is profoundly questionable. These sorts of objections are compounded by the known dangers of gravely exacerbating the food crisis of millions of poor Afghan people, and of forcing even more into overcrowded, prison-like refugee camps in which the weak will often not survive.

8. Are we engaging actively with the consequential issues of the war? Chomsky and Pilger are right that this sort of ʻcollateral damageʼ can be as serious, when spread across many more lives, as the direct physical harm caused by bombs. However, it is doubtful that much anti-war politics really considers seriously the plight of the poor and hungry in Afghanistan. ʻStop the Warʼ could mean the victory of the Taliban and the return of the conditions that already produced mass hunger long before Bush intervened. Stopping the war, without other measures, would make us feel better, but would it actually help the Afghan people? A serious politics will recognize the reality of the war and the unlikelihood that the USA is going to give up in response to anti-war protests. As well as criticizing the resort to war, and the bombing, it will raise ʻreformistʼ demands for bombing pauses and serious humanitarian relief efforts, if necessary that US and UK troops protect and assist humanitarian provision. While core anti-war politics, on all past evidence, will remain a minority pursuit, television news, press and relief organizations could well build momentum behind such demands. The big precedent is the Kurdish relief operation of 1991, the pressures for which I described in Civil Society and Media in Global Crises (Pinter, 1996). As well as ʻhumanitarianʼ demands about the economic misery of the Afghan people, we should be watching the changing political situation, in order to prevent the excesses of Northern Alliance forces, and to support those who press for a stable, secular government which respects human rights.

9. Are we taking responsibility for our own past positions? One of the peculiarities of anti-war politics is that while very knowledgeable about the history of US intervention, it is often silent on its own history, from which it often learns little. Many of those who oppose the American war in Afghanistan also opposed the wars in Kosovo and the Gulf. As we have seen, they do not always remember to be consistent (for example in upholding international norms) from one war to the next. More seriously, however, they donʼt appear to have learnt from the mistakes of previous anti-war campaigns. The campaign against the Gulf War particularly comes

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to mind. Then, too, much of the European centre-Left and Left opposed the war. They focused most of their efforts on preventing any extension of the military campaign or any broadening of war aims. When President Bush called a halt with the liberation of Kuwait, the anti-war movement breathed a sigh of relief. On the ground in Iraq, however, this was the very moment when people rose up against Saddam Hussein. American troops were so close that they could hear the Iraqi Republican Guard massacring the Shiite rebels in the city of Basra. But they did not intervene to save them. This was not only a failure of George Bush. Back home in Britain and in the USA, hardly any anti-war protestors raised their voices to demand that the West protect these courageous people on the sharp end of a murderous army. Prominent anti-war writers like Pilger, with regular media outlets, didnʼt write about the Shias, and only wrote about the Kurds when it was too late. The rebelsʼ defeat sealed the stalemate in Iraq that has impoverished that society and poisoned world politics to this day, but anti-war activists had done little to prevent it. Like the Iraqis, the Afghan people deserve more than to become our latest propaganda tool against America.

10. Towards a new politics of peace? The politics of international justice, human rights and humanitarian protection provides a powerful alternative to the politics of bombing and the cycle of violence. As in the dissolution of the Cold War, the goals of human rights and pacific politics combine. However, these politics can be advanced only by abandoning the simpler reflexes of traditional anti-war politics, and engaging with the real politics both of the war zones and of international institutions. Faced with a bad and unnecessary war, it is not enough to be AGAINST the war. We must also be FOR the victims, all of them. And that means justice as well as peace. Will we learn this time?

Moralism, terrorism and war – reply to Shaw Andrew Chitty

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here are two fundamental problems with Martin Shawʼs commentary. First, he presumes the legitimacy of the world status quo, and then sees the attacks of 11 September as an ʻinitial aggressionʼ, an irruption into this status quo from out of the blue. Yet in fact the attacks are a continuation and escalation of a war for the colonial subjugation of the Middle East that has been fought more or less continuously since World War II between the USA and its proxy state Israel on the one hand, and their locally based opponents on the other. Suez, the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War, the Iranian revolution, the Iran–Iraq War, the Gulf War of 1991, the bombing of Iraq which has continued ever since, and the two Palestinian intifadas are all episodes in this continuing war, a war which has cost probably over a million Middle Easterners their lives in the last fifty years. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union the ascendancy of the USA in this war has become ever greater, to the point at which virtually every regime in the area is now its client, while the socialist and communist movements in those countries have been defeated and marginalized.

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However, the result has not been the disappearance of opposition to US domination. Instead, the organized leadership of this opposition has increasingly been taken up by the network of Islamic revivalist (or ʻfundamentalistʼ as Westerners call them) groups that now crisscross the region: groups that construe the war as an assault on the Muslim Ummah and that combine their demand for the removal of the USA and its client rulers from the Muslim world with an aspiration to restore this Ummah as a self-determining political entity governed in accord with the precepts of Islam. With the effective throttling of democratic routes to power in their own states, exemplified most blatantly by the annulment of the Algerian elections when they were won by an Islamic revivalist party in 1992, these groups have turned increasingly to terrorism as a means of waging a ʻwar of pan-Islamic independenceʼ directly on the USA: through attacks on US military installations in the Arabian Peninsula (the heartland of the Ummah), through the bombing of its embassies in East Africa, and now through the attacks of 11 September on the American mainland. Not only does Shaw make no attempt to understand the political and historical origins of these last attacks; he positively castigates those who have attempted to provide such understandings, saying that this prevents us from taking the attacks ʻseriouslyʼ. In fact it is the only way to take them seriously, that is, to appreciate their full significance – a task that still remains largely unaccomplished three months after the attacks not because people have spent too much time on such understandings but because they have still spent too little. For Shaw, however, to take the attacks seriously means something else: to condemn them in moral language which is adequate to their enormity. The second problem with Shawʼs approach is the moralism that saturates it, a moralism which goes hand in hand with his dismissal of historical context, for the more we know about the historical antecedents of any act, the less easy it is to be satisfied with passing a moral judgement on it, and moralism demands such judgements everywhere. For Shaw every act must first of all be named and judged in the language of morality and right: the attacks of 11 September (a ʻgenocidal massacreʼ), the launching of a war on Afghanistan (America had a right to do so, though doing so may not have been right), the method of bombing to prosecute the war (ʻquestionableʼ, which is to say morally questionable), and even the actions of the anti-war movement (which show a ʻmoral failingʼ). In this perspective even historical contextualization is reduced to a matter of asking whether or not past morally bad acts by the USA (its support for the occupation of the West Bank, its bombing of a pharmaceuticals factory in the Sudan) mitigate the moral badness of the 11 September attacks. It is this moralizing perspective that he calls on the anti-war movement retrospectively to adopt: those who oppose the war, he says, should have responded to the attacks of 11 September with the same strength of moral revulsion as shown by all the other figures in the public sphere. They should then have tried to channel that moral revulsion by calling for a ʻmorally framedʼ response to the attacks, specifically an international police action against the al-Qaeda network leading to prosecutions before an international court. Shawʼs moralism places him in the company of the vast majority of media opinionmakers in this country, for whom immediate moral judgement always takes precedence over historical explanation. Yet the uses of moralism should warn us of its dangers. The language of extreme moral condemnation is the standard precursor to violence – for which, after all, it serves as the justification – and this connection has never been more glaringly obvious than in the period after 11 September. The month-long Western chorus of public moral outrage that followed that date became part and parcel of the preparation for war, the drumbeat that roused the domestic population to readiness for violence. It served to make the attack on Afghanistan, when it came, seem not merely justified but inevitable. Tony Blair expressed the connection between moralism

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and violence in an almost pristine form, exceeding every other world leader except Bush in both the strength of his moral condemnation of the attacks and his enthusiasm for a war on Afghanistan to avenge them. Meanwhile, it is clear that the American foreign policy establishment that took the decisions to launch this war does not allow its thinking to be hampered by moral categories at all; one only has to look at the websites of ʻgeopolitical intelligenceʼ thinktanks like Strategic Forecasting that form the milieu of this establishment to be sure of that. At the time of writing, just after the collapse of Taliban control over Afghanistan, the question is being raised whether the USA will now move to attack Iraq with the aim of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Whichever way the decision goes, we can be sure that it will not ultimately be based on the strength of evidence, if any, linking the Iraqi government to the attacks of 11 September. The only questions will be: What are the chances of success? Can a successor regime be installed that will be pliable to the USA? What are the risks to the stability of other US client regimes in the Middle East? Can Russia and the EU be squared? If the decision is to launch military action then the necessary moral fervour to justify it will be whipped up, if not on the grounds of support for terrorism then over its possible possession of nuclear or biological weapons. In the sphere of international relations, public moral discourse in the West is little more than a means of selling decisions that have already been arrived at by other means to the domestic population in a language they can understand.

Against ‘for or against’ In the light of this complete instrumentalization of the discourse of morality, the anti-war movement has been quite right to be wary of adding its voice to an already deafening public roar of moral condemnation of 11 September (the volume of which is quite out of proportion to the numbers killed on that day, if we take as a standard the corresponding levels of public condemnation of, say, the Rwandan genocide, the Russian butchery in Chechnya, or the ongoing slaughter of Turkish Kurds). The anti-war movement has largely left the condemnation to others, and concentrated on opposing the war that has been justified by it. Yet by contrast Shaw wants to go even further than Bush and Blair in ratcheting up the level of moral condemnation, by using the term ʻgenocidalʼ to describe the attacks. Let us leave aside the inappropriateness of this particular term (the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon were attacked as the greatest symbols of US economic and military power, not for the number of American people in them). The issue here is, what purpose is served by cranking up the pitch of moral execration still higher in a context where such execration has become simply a means to justify war? Perhaps Shaw thinks that the anti-war movement could have ridden this tiger and steered it in the direction of gaining popular support for his preferred means of dealing with al-Qaeda. But suppose this had happened. The anti-war movement would simply have become the mirror image of the moralizing pro-war columnists of the national press: moral cheerleaders for a policy which has being advanced, within the circles of power, simply for its efficacy in consolidating Western power and security and without any reference to its moral qualities. Shaw cites Michael Howard as a source for this alternative policy, but Howard is no more weighed down by moral considerations than the Pentagon or the US State Department. In fact his model is the British Armyʼs campaign against Malayan guerrillas in the 1950s – a campaign virtually unreported by the media – that was one of the morally dirtiest episodes in the history of the Empire, but that successfully annihilated opposition to British rule in Malaya. As for the system of international justice Shaw recommends, so far it is noticeable that its chief victims have been those who have posed an obstacle to the USA, or at best those for whom it has no use. The chances that the members of the Russian, Turkish, Indonesian, Salvadorian,

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Chilean, Israeli and (most of all) American governments responsible for the massacres of the last fifty years will ever face trial before its courts are effectively zero. It is a system that has functioned overwhelmingly as another tool of US power. It is at this point that the real nature of Shawʼs challenge to the anti-war movement becomes clear. Stripped of its moral rhetoric, it is the same challenge already thrown down by Bush: are you for us or against us? If you are for us, then prove it by the strength and authenticity of your condemnation of 11 September, and couple your rejection of war with a call for alternative ways of ʻhunting downʼ (as if they were animals) the terrorists who organized it. If you fail to do this, then by your silence you are colluding with those perpetrators themselves: you are against us. The fact that this challenge originates ultimately from Bush does not make it any the less serious; quite the contrary. It is a challenge that goes to the heart of the central division in the anti-war movement, between those who above all want to take sides against the USA (and its British lieutenant and Israeli proxy) in the war of the Middle East, whatever de facto alliances this may involve; and those who above all want to see an end to violence and oppression, as much that of al-Qaeda and the Taliban as that of the USA and its clients. Both impulses, the ʻanti-imperialistʼ (to say ʻanti-Americanʼ is to make a hopeless conflation between a governing class and the population it controls) and the ʻemancipationistʼ, are legitimate ones. But in situations like the war on Afghanistan they pull in opposite directions: one towards a positive defence of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, as the current representatives of Middle Eastern resistance to imperialist power, in their war against the USA and its proxies; the other towards a simultaneous rejection of both sides in this war. Shawʼs proposal forces all opponents of the war to situate themselves one side or the other of this divide by the way they respond to it, for while anti-imperialists must reject it outright, emancipationists can only argue with its detail. That an anti-war movement that (rightly) aimed from the start to be as broad-based as possible should contain such contradictions is hardly a surprise. Sooner or later, though, if it is to develop into anything more than an ad hoc coalition of people who oppose the war for quite different reasons, then it must address them and think them through. The way to do this is not by a fruitless counterposition of moral judgements. It is by a patient collective effort to understand the basic roots of the war. It will come as no surprise, given the attempt made above to sketch those roots, if I predict that such an effort will inevitably lead in an anti-imperialist direction.

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Emergent fronts of the global anti-war movement Mike Marqusee

I

t has been widely observed that the US-led global alliance against terrorism is a motley assemblage, bound together by expedience rather than principle. Some would say the same about the global anti-war alliance now being constructed to oppose it. Diversity is certainly the hallmark of this emergent movement, but it is both bound together and in some instances profoundly divided over principles. Since the US attack on Afghanistan commenced on 7 October, there have been large-scale protests in most major European cities, notably 50,000 in Berlin and 50,000 on 13 October in London. None of these, however, achieved the resonance, intensity or publicity of the anti-American protests organized by Islamists in Indonesia, Palestine, Kashmir and Pakistan. The US–British bombardment of Afghanistan has been a gift for jihadi elements, but their mortal enemies, the secular Left, have been far from silent. In Lahore in the last week of September, five hundred women took to the streets chanting ʻNo to terrorism, no to war! No to Taliban, no to Bush!ʼ We didnʼt see this image on our television screens; probably because it would undermine the current simplistic equations. ʻWe in Pakistan have been the victims of this terrorism for the last fifteen years and will continue to be in the near futureʼ, writes an NGO activist and veteran of the campaign against Ziaʼs military dictatorship. ʻHowever, I do not think that this war is the solution. There is genuinely a strong voice in Pakistan on peace. Although we are caught between the devil and the deep sea, as any public debate, if not conducted seriously, brackets you immediately with the pro-Taliban forces. But it does not mean that one should not speak. We condemn the terrorism of the Taliban, the US and its allies, especially Britain.ʼ

South Asia Nowhere outside the USA and Afghanistan has the impact of 11 September proved more dramatic than in Pakistan. In what seemed the blink of an eye, the alliance between the military and right-wing Islamist organizations – an alliance initially fostered by the US government, and which over the past two decades has poisoned every aspect of public life in Pakistan – was snapped. Musharrafʼs military dictatorship chose the carrot over the stick, and the Pakistani elite seem convinced that the embrace of the USA will strengthen their hand, politically and economically. The jihadi in Pakistan have long enjoyed the advantage of street muscle, and they have sought to deploy it in the anti-US demonstrations. Some elements used these protests as cover for attacks on secular NGOs and aid agencies, with police and military units looking on, impassive. Asked if he recognized any ethical difference between these attacks and the US bombing of Red Cross shelters in Afghanistan, Irfan Mufti, an activist in the Citizensʼ Peace Committee, which has brought together trade unions, human rights campaigners, womenʼs organizations and NGOs, answered flatly, ʻNoʼ. In doing so, Mufti speaks for what a number of commentators consider to be Pakistanʼs silent majority: the millions deeply suspicious of both the Talibanʼs version of Islamic rule and the US military action. On 6 November, five thousand attended a rally against both

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war and fundamentalism in Rawalpindi. According to the daily newspaper Dawn (7 November), placards read ʻWar is not an answer to violenceʼ, ʻJustice, not revengeʼ, ʻWe condemn bigotry and revenge in all aspectsʼ. In a statement, the participants said ʻthe US-led military response to the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington has plunged the world into a cycle of violence with no definite end in sight.ʼ Similar secular peace demonstrations emphasizing opposition to US military action, support for human rights and an internal solution for Afghanistan have now been held in all the major cities, including Quetta, which for some days after 7 October witnessed street battles between jihadi-mobilized youth and military units. The crisis has penetrated into distant southern Punjab, to a church in the semi-desert city of Bahawalpur, where sixteen were gunned down. No one doubts these murders were the work of one of the sectarian jihadi groups that, before Ziaʼs time and the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, were unknown in this Sufi-influenced region. Now, like Bush and Blair, they carry their clash of civilizations into civilian life, including places of worship. And it is left to the secular peace activists to remind the world that the poverty-stricken Christian community in Pakistan is the subject not only of jihadi terror but also of state persecution, forced to vote in a separate electorate, and hounded under blasphemy laws. Across the border in India, their counterparts will add that under the right-wing Hindu nationalist BJP-led government, violent attacks on Christians and other minorities have proliferated. In the USA and Britain, the fact that a Hindu fundamentalism – as authoritarian and menacing as any of its counterparts in other religions – actually commands state power in the second most populous nation on earth is rarely acknowledged. But in India its hand has been felt ever more heavily since 11 September. The BJP and the Indian elite in general have been among the most ardent champions of the US-led war on terrorism. But, frustratingly for them, they have not yet received the payback they believe they are due, because the USA needs Pakistan more at the moment. In the meanwhile, the BJP and its allies are using the crisis to pursue their strategic offensive against Islamic terrorism at home and abroad, and to boost their drive to Hinduize (and militarize) Indian society. The government has banned radical Islamic student groups and arrested their leaders. It is now trying to push through a new Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance, giving police even more arbitrary powers to harass and detain anyone deemed supportive of terrorism. Since the nuclear tests of 1998 – now, like the Pakistani blasts, given a belated seal of approval by the USA – a diverse citizensʼ movement against nuclear weapons has been taking shape in India. Along with the traditional Left parties, that movement is now mobilizing against the US–British military action, holding vigils, meetings and marches across the country. For the Left and the peace movement in India, opposing the war is an unavoidable part of a long-term struggle against communalism and aggressive nationalism. The writer Praful Bidwai describes it as ʻa rainbow coalition that encompasses artists and scholars, students and researchers, writers and trade unionists, school teachers and theatre people, human rights activists and feministsʼ. Bidwai stresses that, in addition to objecting to the injustice of the US-led military action, the Indian activists have other related concerns. ʻFirst, the connection between the Afghanistan war and the war “within” being waged by the Hindutva forces to communalize societyʼ. Bidwai cites the recent incursion by Hindu extremists into the demolished mosque in Ayodhya and their desecration of the Taj Mahal, as well as the intensification of the war in Kashmir, as ʻall part of this dangerous agenda, related to the BJPʼs cynical electoral calculus.ʼ Second, Bidwai argues that ʻ11 September exposed the colossal stupidity of relying upon massive military force alone for security. South Asiaʼs unique nuclear hostility makes it the worldʼs most dangerous region. India and Pakistan, locked in a half-century-long HotʼnʼCold war, have plenty of these horror weapons, but few safeguards against their accidental or unauthorized use.ʼ

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The USA Such awesome global realities rarely intrude on public discussion in the USA, where the terrain poses daunting challenges for anti-war activists. Since 7 October there have been actions for peace in at least fifty towns and cities: not only New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Boston, but also Salt Lake City, Sioux Falls and Albuquerque. There have been teach-ins at college campuses across the country. Opinion polls have begun to register a small swing away from military action. Nonetheless, the atmosphere remains hostile. This should surprise no one. The experience of 11 September was without precedent for people in the USA. Something like an act of war was committed against thousands of civilians in the continental USA, a landmass that had previously seemed immune to attack. To add to the frustration and confusion, this act of war did not quite conform to any of the scenarios conventionally associated with war, not least in the absence of a discernible national enemy. What is worse, thanks to a corporate-sponsored media and political elite, the US people have been denied the tools necessary to make sense of what has happened to them: objective information about the role their country plays in the world and a democratic arena in which dissident voices can be heard. Nonetheless, even among those Americans familiar with their governmentʼs long-standing hypocrisy on terrorism, large numbers have looked to military retaliation to secure ʻjusticeʼ for the victims of 11 September. Christopher Hitchensʼs polemics against his former allies have been short on logic and riddled with a fundamentalist zeal for extirpating evil, but there is no doubt that he speaks for many on the US liberal-Left. The facile acceptance of both Afghan civilian casualties and US imperial prerogatives by erstwhile radicals has bewildered (and infuriated) anti-war activists, though some see it as part of a larger pattern. Between the end of the powerful anti-apartheid and Nicaragua solidarity movements of the 1980s and the emergence of a new generation of radicals in Seattle, foreign policy interests were confined to minute minorities. In particular, criticism of US policies in the Middle East – Palestine and Iraq, above all – remained marginalized. This is not just about the influence of the Israel lobby. If its cause were not in accord with the strategic interests of the US corporate elite, it would have counted for much less. The responses to the ʻwar against terrorismʼ testify not only to the legitimation of Islamophobia, but more importantly to the pervasive influence of American exceptionalism. Sometimes this takes the form of an insistence on the unique and sacrosanct achievement of US democracy, for all its flaws, and the rights and responsibilities presumed to go with this achievement. In other quarters it assumes the guise of a tactical argument: nothing must be said or done that excludes progressives from what appears to be the national consensus that ʻsomething must be doneʼ. Most depressingly, it also takes the form of a flagrant double standard towards human life outside the countryʼs borders. Despite the disdain of liberal pundits and the indifference of the mass media, US anti-war activists have sustained initiatives in most locales, though unity and co-ordination have proved elusive. Across Europe, the anti-globalization movement has flowed swiftly into the anti-war movement. In the USA, there is greater hesitation. In addition, following 11 September, US labour unions – key components of the anti-globalization campaign since Seattle – have backed off from any protest that might remotely be construed as anti-American. For the most part, US union leaders are making a point of standing shoulder to shoulder with the US government. Undeterred, a small group of union activists – including health workers, teachers, taxi drivers, legal aid attorneys and public servants – have formed New York City Labour Against the War. Describing themselves as the trade unions of ʻGround Zero New Yorkʼ, several hundred New York trade unionists have signed a statement declaring ʻIt is wrong to punish any nation or people for the crimes of individuals – peace requires global social and economic

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justice.ʼ They also emphasize opposition to racism, attacks on civil liberties and resistance to the job cuts and austerity measures being imposed by employers. Similar labour groups have been formed in Washington and San Francisco. Between 11 September and 1 November more than half a million jobs were lost in the USA. At the same time, Bush and Congress handed some $200 billion – five times the annual operating budget of New York City – to the rich and the giant corporations. The grip of jingoism is powerful among the US working class, but so is scepticism about the US government. There is a creeping suspicion that working people are being asked to pay a disproportionate price for the war, and among black Americans opposition to the military attacks runs at twice the average rate. The longer the war drags on, the harder it will be for the media to maintain the illusion that it has anything to do with securing justice for the victims of 11 September. And as that realization grows, so will the momentum of the US anti-war movement. A number of political arguments cut across the national boundaries of all the anti-war movements. Even within the secular Left, there are serious differences regarding international law and the role of the UN, the nature of Islamic or other forms of fundamentalism, and the degree of acceptance, if any, of US global prerogatives. These differences – and the fact that they are shared intentionally – are not necessarily bad news for a movement seeking to respond to a multi-faceted global crisis.

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Family values Butler, Lacan and the rise of Antigone Cecilia Sjöholm

One may wonder, with George Steiner, what would have happened if psychoanalysis had chosen Antigone, rather than Oedipus, as its model.1 One immediate answer might be: perhaps it would have been more interested in feminine desire. And perhaps its idea of the family would have been rather different. Antigone, as is well known, is the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, the latter Oedipusʼ own mother too, a fact which will determine Antigoneʼs fate in Sophoclesʼ tragedy.2 Her brother lying dead outside the gates of the city of Thebes, Antigone decides to oppose the laws of King Creon, and to bury Polyneces in the name of divine laws. The real conflict of the play is not, however, between the characters of Antigone and Creon, but between the divine, unwritten laws that she evokes and the human laws of Creon. It is not by chance, then, that the figure of Antigone has become central to various discussions in feminism, political theory and ethics which are critical of psychoanalysis, or at least of the Oedipal paradigm. Antigone is more political and more topical than Oedipus. She has been made into a metaphor for, among other things, individuation, ethical action, uncompromising desire, and feminist revolt. And now, in Judith Butlerʼs latest book, Antigone has become a symbol for the collapse of heteronormativity, of the idea that desire and sexuality are necessarily determined by two sexes that are opposed to or complement each other. The hegemony of this idea today governs family politics in most countries, turning all claims to family bonds outside of the heterosexual norm into a kind of deviation. In Antigoneʼs Claim,* a long essay based mainly on her Wellek Library Lectures of 1998, Butler presents

a reading of Sophoclesʼ Antigone that stresses the confusion surrounding not only the question of kinship or origin (for Antigoneʼs father is her own brother) but also the question of sexual identity (for Antigone acts, it seems, more like a man than a woman). Butlerʼs aim is to appropriate the figure of Antigone as a kind of challenge to Western family politics. We are confused, Butler argues, by Antigoneʼs origin and by her gender, but in this confusion Antigone reveals the arbitrariness of the ways in which origins and kinship are determined. The question of kinship, that is, is not simply one of blood, but of recognition; the family, therefore, cannot simply be considered as something given, isolated from the political sphere. Most importantly, Antigoneʼs appeal, according to Butler, is in her challenge to a specifically conservative family politics. Since the origins of kinship are shown to be arbitrary, the question of what constitutes a family becomes negotiable. The family cannot be detached from the state and situated in a pre-political separate sphere. If politics begins with the question of kinship, everything that has to do with the family is bound up with the state and vice versa. Antigoneʼs claim to represent divine law – or the laws of the family, the bonds of love, the customs of heritage and so on – shows that these laws and bonds are as arbitrary as those formalized by the state. Moreover, they cannot be detached from it. Readings of Antigone, such as that of Hegel, that insist on the separation of family and state, have effectively perverted the message of the play.3 Hegel makes Antigone into a representative of the ʻnaturalʼ sphere, of love, family bonds and blood ties, as opposed to the universal order of the state. Butler suggests, however, that we

* Judith Butler, Antigoneʼs Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, Columbia University Press, New York, 2000. x + 103 pp., £14.50 hb., 0 231 11894 5.

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disassociate the question of origin from the question of bonds, that we find new ways of thinking about bonds that are not necessarily formed through blood, or that we recognize bonds that have not been created in traditional ways. The attempt to treat Antigone as a political figure challenging traditional views on origins and kinship has a concrete motivation in a contemporary debate. One of todayʼs most pressing sociopolitical issues concerns homosexual parenting and the right to adopt. Although there is little explicit discussion of the issue in Butlerʼs book, much of her argument seems to revolve around it, Antigoneʼs ʻclaimʼ functioning as the locus of a challenge to certain psychoanalytic presuppositions about the necessary (that is ʻnormalʼ) structure of the family. It is, however, not certain that homosexual adoption of children would seriously threaten the norms implicit in psychoanalytic thinking if same-sex parents are still couples. If we presume that parents should always be two, the shadow of a heteronormative system is still at work. A psychoanalyst could easily argue that such a couple could represent a symbolic structure which does not necessarily assume that there must be a mother and a father, or even that a maternal function and a paternal function be present in the symbolic sense. As long as there are two of them, each parent would still desire someone other than the child. This is what the incest taboo is about, and what is crucial for the childʼs psychosexual upbringing from an analytic point of view. The idea of homosexual parenting in couples does not on its own challenge heteronormativity. But the question of kinship has become complicated in numerous other ways too. There are very many single parents – homosexual and heterosexual – whom society seems to regard as deficient in various ways, asking: should single people have the right to adopt, or knowingly give birth to children on their own, without a partner of either sex? While in most cases, there is a biological father somewhere, in some the father is not only missing, but altogether anonymous or even dead at the time of conception. What kind of symbolic deficit – if there is one – follows in cases where the mother has simply gone to the sperm bank? In other cases, where there are more than two parents, is there a symbolic excess? What if gay men and lesbians decide to have children together as a foursome? There are many new family formations such as this where children live with ʻplasticʼ parents – a Swedish expression denoting the partner of oneʼs biological parent. What

function is he or she assuming? To face these issues squarely we certainly need to rethink the concept of family; the question is, how?

The Antigone complex The question of the formation of the concept of the family is inseparable, historically, from its determination in terms of the norms of sexual identification, paternal authority and so on. In adding her voice to a chorus critical of the Oedipal paradigm in psychoanalysis, Butler strengthens the impression that Oedipusʼs theoretical rule may well be on its way to being replaced by a kind of Antigone complex. This is evident not only in some feminist discourses, where Antigone has long been a pivotal symbol, but also in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Antigone, Lacan writes, reveals ʻthe line of sight that defines desireʼ.4 Of course Lacan, being a Freudian, does not intend with this claim to replace the Oedipal paradigm, but he is certainly displacing the stakes of psychoanalysis, shifting from a concern with pathology to a concern with ethics. Lacanʼs reading of Antigone (1959–60) has attracted an increasing amount of interest in recent years, and Butlerʼs own text is in part a response to it. But Butler sees Antigone as a figure who challenges what she considers to be the heteronormative presumptions of thinkers such as Hegel and Lacan, presumptions which politicize the conception of the family in their contribution to a reactionary ideology. Butlerʼs criticisms, however, apply only to the Oedipal paradigm in psychoanalysis. Here I also want to consider the ways in which Antigone might function as a more potent figure than Oedipus from the perspective of psychoanalysis itself, contesting aspects of Butlerʼs critique and suggesting an alternative psychoanalytic rendering of Antigoneʼs challenge to the politics of the family. Freudʼs Oedipal paradigm, as elaborated in various texts on feminine sexuality – for example, ʻThe Dissolution of the Oedipus Complexʼ (1924) and ʻFemale Sexualityʼ (1931) – is concerned with the father, the mother, the daughter and the son. Presented in structural terms as the origin of desire, the Oedipus complex makes male desire coherent with a patriarchal logic of prohibition and metonymic displacement. The law of prohibition is paternal; the prohibited object maternal. The Oedipus complex is usually summarized as the boyʼs renunciation of the incestuous object – the mother – under the threat of castration. But the function of the law is not only to prohibit the maternal body; it also constructs

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another object upon its prohibition and absence. It serves a twofold function: it creates an empty space where the maternal object used to be, an empty space which could be called the condition of possibility of desire, and it makes access to another object possible. While the maternal body is prohibited, desire is displaced onto another woman. The implicit presumption of structuralism thus subtends the Freudian argument – objects of desire can be exchanged and possessed. Freudʼs Oedipus can therefore continue to live in the illusion that the lost maternal object can be continuously replaced by other women. For women, however, the case is different. There is no immediate coherence between the prohibiting law and the object of desire, and therefore no way to construct a simple metonymic chain of displacements from the maternal body. Freud himself, as well as many female psychoanalysts in the Freudian tradition from Melanie Klein to Julia Kristeva, points out that the Oedipal paradigm is one in which it is a far easier task for the boy than for the girl to undergo the actual process of separation, because of the girlʼs identification with the maternal body. Melancholy, a kind of ʻwhite perversionʼ as Kristeva puts it, will restrain and bind her, leaving her riveted to silence and self-hatred.5 Rather than expressing a non-Oedipally structured form of subjectivity, feminine desire is considered as an Oedipal failure. This could perhaps be seen as something positive: when Oedipus is avoided, the severity of the superego is undermined. Feminine enjoyment – narcissistic, melancholic, hysteric, masochistic or frivolous – may even seem to point to serious gaps in the very foundation of the so-called Oedipal structure. But Freud resists the idea that a failed or weakened Oedipus complex might be welcome. Feminine desire is considered anarchic, but not in a productive sense. It is a disturbance and a threat to cultural values and ethical norms, but not in a way that would alleviate the destructive tendencies of the superego which feeds off these norms. Feminine desire is simply a resistance to the structures on which society builds. It is, according to Freud, effectively detrimental to culture, a ʻretarding and restrainingʼ influence.6

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Simone de Beauvoir, formulating a critique of Freud in The Second Sex, claims that psychoanalysis is identical with patriarchy altogether. The problem with Freud, de Beauvoir complains, is that he takes the founding prohibition against incest for granted. She sees Freud as a kind of structuralist. What Lévi-Strauss calls ʻour elementary structure of kinshipʼ is based on a certain pattern of exchange of goods and possessions, all dictated by one fundamental law: the prohibition against incest, which forces men to search for wives outside the family.7 From this perspective, exogamy produces a certain codification of desire. This structure is easy to relate to the Oedipal paradigm, where the law of the father is the foundation of the incest taboo. But paternal authority, de Beauvoir insists, is not a structural necessity; it is a social construction.8 In mixing up these two perspectives, psychoanalysis fails to explain the relation between sexual difference and desire, merely reinforcing a certain view of it which becomes particularly problematic when the question of feminine desire is raised. It is impossible to presume both that patriarchy lives off woman as object and then to define her desire from this fact. Feminine desire falls outside of the Oedipal economy altogether. And even from a male viewpoint, de Beauvoir argues, the Oedipal model is inadequate. Desire must be more than a simple consequence of the incest-taboo; it has to do with the power of projection and the capacity for transcendence. The prohibition against incest makes

man want to possess ʻthat which he is not, he seeks union with what appears to be Other than himselfʼ.9 Desire is not a structural necessity; it is a project. Lacan takes up the challenge from de Beauvoir: there is not much point in simply explaining desire from an existing social structure. Lacan, however, does not break with the idea of a founding structure, but remodels it as a ʻsymbolic orderʼ which can, in principle, be detached from social life. The symbolic order is the order of signifiers, which does not mean that it can simply be equated with language. The human order, says Lacan in the 1950s, ʻis characterised by the fact that the symbolic function intervenes at every moment and at every stage of its existenceʼ.10 The symbolic order is autonomous in relation to the experience of human beings: it is, as Lacan himself puts it, that which is most elevated in man but at the same time not in man at all.11 This somewhat enigmatic formula means that the symbolic order can be formulated in a number of ways, for example as the law against incest, as the ten commandments, as linguistic rules and so on; but in its most abstract form the symbolic order is simply the castrating cut which makes the subject split and finite in relation to something which he cannot subsume. This is what matters in the law against incest. At first sight, Lacan seems to give the incest taboo the same crucial place as Freud, which means that he also seems to give the same prominence to the system of exchange of women. In patriarchy woman is ʻwhat is indicated by the elementary structures of kinship, i.e., nothing more than a correlative of the functions of social exchange, the support of a certain number of goods and of symbols of powerʼ.12 But what really matters about the structure of kinship is that it is a system of signifiers – it transforms human beings into signs.13 What matters in that transformation is not so much the value of the sign, or the role of the subject in the social sphere as mother, father, daughter, and so on, but the fact that the sign cuts and splits the subject. That cut or split is particularly important in Lacanʼs analysis of sexual difference and desire. Even if we may identify with signifiers in a social sphere (as man or woman for instance), it does not mean that our sexuality is determined in an unproblematic way. The subject is always ex-static in relation to the signifier, never completely at one with it. There is no authentic form of subjectivity, either for women or for men. The moment we become signs for each other is a moment of what Lacan calls foreclosure. The subject never inhabits its sign but is somehow always outside of it, foreign to him- or herself. The aspect of foreign-

ness belongs to the domain which Lacan calls the real. Sometimes the real is translated as the foreignness of the body, as corporeality, flesh and drives. But it does have a more defined significance: the real is that part of the subject which is foreclosed through some kind of founding law. Nowhere does that foreclosure present itself more powerfully than in the relation between the sexes. The inscription of sexual difference will never result in a ʻsafeʼ sexual identity. It leaves a kernel resisting a positive definition. And, what is more important, there is no signifier for the sexual relation as such, only a cut between two asymmetrical positions. Thus Lacan challenges the traditional Oedipal theory of the castration complex, leaving the social function behind and making of it a wholly symbolic process. The lack in the symbolic order represents a traumatic tearing out in the world where the process of sexuation presents us with a void: ʻWhere there is no sexual relation, we find a “traumatism”.ʼ14 There will, then, always be a component of the real in sexual identification. In short, one is never simply a man or a woman; some part of oneʼs sexual identity will always fall outside of the possibility of signification. There is no moment where the mark of sexual difference could possibly affirm itself absolutely, or where the qualities of femininity and masculinity could crystallize. Sexual differentiation means failure; or, there is no ultimate goal to be achieved. This fact opens up an abyss in the symbolic order, which in fact reveals its true nature: it cannot simply be described as an order from which all things will follow, because the symbolic is never fully intelligible. Even if it carves out the structures of desire, the very cause of that desire is embedded in the real. With Lacan, then, a significant shift from the structuralist viewpoint is effected. The implicit presumption of structuralism, that objects of desire can indeed be exchanged and possessed, is undermined. Desire does not primarily have an object or an aim, but a cause. Woman is not figured as a ʻfailedʼ man, but rather as a subject closer to the revelation of this fact. Since a woman is more nakedly deprived of possessions than men (and a man may well think of the phallus as a kind of possession), the elusive quality of that cause is laid bare. The male subject is more prone to cover the discrepancies of desire with the creation of objects, possessions, goals and aims. This has little to do with individual, male subjects. It has to do with the gaps in the symbolic order itself. The traditional description of the Oedipus complex is not a good way of describing desire in terms of

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its having a cause rather than an object. Perhaps this is what Lacan means in his Ethics seminar when he says that Antigone (rather than Oedipus) uncovers the line of sight that defines desire. Desire is no longer depicted as a striving towards the possession of an object, but as a movement of return towards an elusive origin. Antigoneʼs desire may be interpreted in various ways: directed towards the brother, the mother of the common womb, death, the dead body of the brother, and so on. None of these, however, presents itself as an object that would be sustained by a recognizable symbolic order, and the actual cause of Antigoneʼs desire remains foreclosed. Thus, if Antigone is to provide us with some kind of alternative to Oedipus (and this is my interpretation of Lacan) we could perhaps say that the Antigone complex is a figure for desire in a symbolic order which fails to provide the fictional objects that would sustain it. Antigone, unlike Oedipus, struggles in a kind of void. If the object appears in the Oedipal structure, it disappears in the Antigonean structure. She is closer to the eclipse and the fading away of desire. But the reason for her complicated relation to the object is not pathological – whether she is melancholic or hysterical is not the issue here. Desire can never really be reduced to the expectations of a social sphere, or to the adaption to certain norms; it can always only originate in a kind of failure of, or gap in, the symbolic.

Who’s who? In Antigoneʼs Claim, Butler pursues this shift from Oedipus to Antigone. But rather than making Antigone into a figure of desire, a figure of femininity, a figure of maternal heritage, and so on, she makes her into a figure for whom the question of gender and origin are called into question altogether. Antigone figures ʻthe limits of intelligibility exposed at the limits of kinshipʼ.15 She acts upon a heritage which is not simply there, but is part of a system which can be questioned and reconstrued. Moreover, sexual identity is not simply the result of identification with a mother or a father. It is a consequence of the way in which such an identification complies with a normative system, which is reiterated and reinforced through social practices, such as psychoanalysis. Antigone appears as an alternative to Oedipus because of her refusal to perform a ʻheterosexual closureʼ to the play. This does not mean that Antigone becomes a queer heroine, but she becomes a heroine with no easily recognizable gender. If one can speak of an Antigone complex in Butlerʼs theory, it is situated at the point at which the Oedipal law (in Freudʼs terms,

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not Sophoclesʼ) is no longer intelligible, for her father is her brother, and their maternal origin the same.16 Unable to make sense of her origin, placed precisely at the limits of cultural intelligibility, Antigone also becomes the victim of the vicissitudes of cultural norms and rules. The Antigone complex in a Butlerian version, then, does not make Antigone into a model of culture, like Oedipus, but precisely the opposite: the limit of culture itself. Both Lacan and Hegel, Butler argues, make the mistake of assuming that Antigone is ʻpreculturalʼ, rather than an effect of culture. Hegel does not allow Antigone to be self-conscious or part of an ethical order because she belongs to a sphere which is in opposition to the state. ʻGeneralizingʼ her as womankind, he neutralizes Antigoneʼs subversiveness, because women are not given access to the mechanisms that would make their appeals recognizable by the state. His idea of woman as a perversion or irony of the ethical order is, in turn, for Butler, not really subversive, because it merely enforces their exclusion from the state.17 Butlerʼs critique of Lacan is offered on similar grounds, conceiving Lacanʼs symbolic order as one which constitutes its own zone of exclusion, the real. Butler, herself, however, consequently rejects the idea that there could be anything significant beyond the norms and rules that shape our world. Or rather, she rejects the idea that the symbolic system of norms has an outside such as the real.18 Antigoneʼs claim ʻdoes not take place outside the symbolic or, indeed, outside the public sphere, but within its terms and as an unanticipated appropriation and perversion of its own mandateʼ.19 Lacan, according to Butler, sees Antigone as pushing towards the limit of the symbolic because he fails to see that his own conception of the symbolic mirrors his conception of the real, where what is inside and what is outside play less of a role than the determination of the limit of the symbolic itself. Butlerʼs own reading of Antigone focuses on the performative act of claiming other laws, calling into question the limits of intelligibility. The power of laws, according to Butler, stems not so much from principles as from language itself. Whereas for Lacan the word or signifier is structured around an empty space – the space of the real – for Butler it has a normative and performative power: there is no domain outside of language that could be considered as pre-linguistic or as something like the real. When Antigone claims that she follows divine laws, then, the extraordinary power of these words lies not so much in their content, as in the way they point to a crisis of intelligibility. Antigone does not go outside of the symbolic so much as show its limits, for within the (Oedipally structured)

symbolic we can make sense of neither Antigoneʼs heritage nor her sex. Butler also wants to insist, against Lacan, that no transcendental Law can be detached and formalized outside of a social order: norms do not unilaterally act upon the psyche; rather they become condensed as the figure of the law to which the psyche returns. The psychic relation to social norms can, under certain conditions, posit those norms as intractable, punitive, and eternal.… In other words, the very description of the symbolic as intractable law takes place within a fantasy of

law as insurpassable authority. In my view, Lacan at once analyzes and symptomizes this fantasy.20

For Butler, Lacanʼs notion of the symbolic is just the notion of the normative, but in such a way that it remains hidden. On Butlerʼs reading of Lacan, nothing can exist outside of the symbolic order of language or outside of culture, and anything that challenges its limits suffers a real or symbolic death; such is Antigoneʼs fate. Accepting, accordingly, that all language is normative, the problematic separation between the social and the symbolic sphere collapses and the erstwhile hidden normative injunctions in theories such as psychoanalysis are exposed and thus, hopefully, overcome. From Butlerʼs point of view, the hidden normative injunctions of psychoanalysis naively continue to uphold the family politics of conservative forces. In this process, the otherwise emancipatory claims of psychoanalysis are thwarted. On this point her critique

echoes de Beauvoir: the problem with psychoanalysis is that it takes the incest taboo and paternal power for granted, and confuses the existing social sphere with structural necessities. Lacanians, of course, would claim that the symbolic function can be separated from social content. The law of the father, which for many Lacanians is a kind of fundamental structuring factor in intimate relations, does not necessarily have to be represented by a real father; it could equally be a brother, another woman, perhaps even a job. The main point is that there must be another object of desire other than the child for the mother if the child is not to be caught in a fantasmatic relation in which it simply becomes the object of desire for another, rather than a desiring subject. For Butler, however, the claim that something else could fill the symbolic function of the father is not as progressive as it might seem, since the father function is nevertheless enforced as the final authority. The idea of the symbolic itself, she says, is nothing but a ʻsedimentationʼ of social practices.21 The status of the father is nothing but an idealization: the law is the father and the father is the law.22 Lacanʼs ʻformalʼ concept of the family is still stuck, therefore, in the same system, according to which a subjectʼs identity and desire are con-structed around a maternal/paternal axis. Psychoanalysis upholds a cultural heritage of heteronormativity23 and psycho- analysis becomes reactionary because it is blind to its normative grounds. To become productive it would have to rethink its fundamental conceptual framework. This is true not least of the conception of sexual difference, which for Lacanians structures the desire of the subject unconditionally although it may do so in fantasmatic and unexpected ways. The extraordinary importance of sexual difference is particularly poignant when it comes to parents. Butler argues that there is a direct link between the psychoanalytic theory of sexual difference and, for instance, the French resistance against homosexual couplesʼ right to adopt. In psychoanalysis, Butler argues, mothers and fathers are made into the foundation of culture and into the two necessary poles, man and woman, which inform the childʼs psy-

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chosexual development and cultural upbringing. The consequence of this injunction is repressive.24 This argument may seem to be rather extreme: after all, not all French are Lacanians, and not all Lacanians are against the rights of homosexuals to adopt. But Butlerʼs challenge is important, as another example – this time from the Netherlands – well shows. A proposed law, according to which children would be able to choose either their motherʼs or fatherʼs surname as their own, was disputed by many, among them Lacanian psychoanalysts, who argued that the symbolic father, the paternal signifier, somehow ought to be present in a name. Even though some argued that both father and mother should be present in the name, the lack of the paternal signifier altogether was seen as a threat. Thus the Lacanian opposition to the law seems to confirm the ground and force of Butlerʼs critique: the idea that mothers and fathers are formal functions is not just a theory of structure; it has normative social implications and psychoanalysis remains conservative or even reactionary.

Family politics, family ethics But is Butler right? Is psychoanalysis working against emancipation, or is it still possible to use psychoanalysis for emancipatory projects? The question is in fact as old as psychoanalysis itself. From the beginning psychoanalysis has been allied to both feminism and the Left for long periods in the twentieth century. It has, however, been a complicated relationship, and new storms were whipped up with the arrival of queer theory. Are psychoanalysis and its allegedly progressive sympathizers simply ignorant, then, of the fact that it fits perfectly with a conservative and reactionary ideology? Or is it possible to build a progressive family politics on psychoanalytic grounds? The crucial concerns are the concepts of norms and the normative. For Butler, normativity seems to imply the existence of certain codes and rules. A conception of kinship such as that of Lévi-Strauss would thus be normative because it implies a certain ʻpositiveʼ law of what counts as kinship. Lacanʼs notion of the symbolic order, however, need not necessarily be considered as an authoritative system in the same way. Perhaps it is more fruitful to conceive the symbolic as, instead, radically empty. The function of the symbolic in its most minimalist version is to stand for a prohibition tout court. The function of this prohibition is not to force the subject into submission but, rather, to constitute an appeal against submission under authoritative systems. It is thus possible that

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the symbolic function be detached from a normative content. The symbolic, that is, may be conceived as a mark of finitude located at the intersection between language and subject, between the universal and the singular, cutting not only the limits of the subject but the limits of a social and linguistic community as well. In this way, the symbolic does not proscribe norms, but limits the scope of any normative system.25 Psychoanalysis, accordingly, does not know what femininity and masculinity are. If it tells us that there must be sexual difference, then this is not necessarily the claim that there must be men and women, mothers and father, daughters and sons of two well-defined sexes. What it does, rather, is to cut out an aspect of the subject which is incapable of simply complying with the demands of any normative order: ʻbe a womanʼ, ʻbe a manʼ, and so on. The symbolic is not a normative order of values and rules. It takes into account that there is a gap between a normative order of values and codes, of practices and habits that we need to incorporate in our daily lives, and the function of desire. There is no ʻhealingʼ symbol that would overcome this gap. But this fact, on the other hand, protects us from the invasion, eradication and submission under any kind of invisible symbolic authority that could be positivized as femininity, the father, the law, and so on. The subject originates in a necessary impossibility, both an obstacle against fullness and a shield against dissolution. It is the structure of this necessary impossibility which Antigone unravels, and in doing so, points to something which in its most minimalist version could simply be translated as the laws of finitude. Antigone, I would suggest, does not merely bring us to the unintelligible limits of culture. In bringing us exactly to that point which is foreclosed, as death, incest, jouissance and so forth, she does not merely close the play. She opens up another space, the space of alterity, that may indifferently be called the space of the real, the space of ethics, of death, of natality, and so on, because what matters is not so much the actual nature of this space, but that it compels us, draws us, and calls for an understanding. Rather than being simply an outside or margin to culture, the real functions as a limit or an impossibility in the structure of a subject. The real cannot be integrated into a symbolic structure, but it functions as its ʻotherʼ side. It refers to some kind of foreign body or alterity beyond the scope of the subject or agent, which may be another person, may be nature, sexuality, death… When Antigone evokes divine laws, she calls for the city to protect certain customs concerning precisely these areas. But

although these customs may be protected by the law, they cannot be formalized altogether. The limits of love and desire, the negotiation of death and sexuality, touch on a space which is ethical, not political. Rather than enforcing certain practices and habits, the symbolic sets up restrictions and limits which make these negotiations possible. Subjectivity needs to be structured around some kind of impossibility or limit. This impossibility would correspond to its status as finite and as vulnerable. But it would also fill the function of defining us as desiring beings as such. The alternative might well be submission, invasion and fatalism: the giving up of oneʼs subjectivity under the submission to an invisible authority. Psychoanalysis works with the notion of a symbolic function which is separate from the state precisely because it can never be completely ʻpositivizedʼ and transposed into a system of norms and rules. I would argue, from a Lacanian but also from a more general point of view, for the need for a theory which posits a radical break between the structure of subjectivity or agency and a normative order of values. As I see it, Lacan stresses just this point when he makes of Antigone a figure whose desire is determined where the symbolic order fails and fades. This does not mean, of course, that psychoanalysis would be dealing with a ʻsubversiveʼ aspect of ourselves that would be completely untouched by culture, discourse, social contexts, and so on. What it means, rather, is that social and cultural norms do not simply form subjects, but are dependent also on the investments of those subjects. A cultural order is not to be understood merely on the basis of its values, but on the desires invested in those values. These desires are structured around a founding impossibility, pointing to a limit one cannot breach. It could be something with normative implications attached to the founding prohibition, like the incest taboo or the Ten Commandments. But it could also be something completely different: death, the finite perspective of the principle of natality, or sexuation. There is, in fact, much to be gained in assuming the existence of a domain which is neither normative, nor collapsed into the social order. If we adhere strictly to the idea that everything that governs human behaviour can be referred to a normative order in some way, the question of what lies ʻbeyondʼ it becomes uninteresting. It means that there would be no remainder, nothing left outside, no body, no flesh, no real to take into account. But, most importantly, there seems to be no space left for the ethical in Butlerʼs argument. There is no radical break in her notion of normativity, whether

that break be situated between the political and ethical, normative and ethical, or social and ethical. This means that there is no space that would disrupt or challenge the current norms of family politics, and thereby call for its change: a space where phenomena such as desire, love, or the play with new identities find their nourishment. Although Butler does accept that a part of the subject must always be foreclosed, she does not accept that any part of the subject would still not be submitted to the normative order (this is also made clear in Butlerʼs insistence on the unconscious and self-defeating character of Antigoneʼs actions).26 Lacan attaches the symbolic to the real as its other side precisely in order to separate a normative order, which can be formalized, legalized and so on, from another domain: the domain of the ethical. For Lacan (and Hegel) Antigoneʼs demands and desires are separated from the order of the state because she defends a domain that cannot easily be transposed into political discourse, the domain in which arise questions of love, desire, anxiety, death, and so on. The postulation of a domain which is not easily universalizable, interior to the state but never wholly possible to transpose into the discourse which handles matters of the state, appears conservative if it is understood as the claim that ethical values should be founded on the ʻapoliticalʼ phenomena of love, desire and family bonds. But the claim that normativity and ethics could be separated from one another could also be made progressively political. Ernesto Laclau, for example, develops a category of ethics that is important for the functioning of hegemony. The ethical is not the normative; rather, the tension between the domain of the ethical, which is a promise of fullness, and the ʻoughtʼ of the normative, makes the renegotiation of the normative order possible: There is an ethical investment in particular normative orders, but no normative order which is, in and for itself, ethical.… Hegemony is, in this sense, the name for this unstable relation between the ethical and the normative, our way of addressing this infinite process of investments which draws its dignity from its very failure.27

Translating this into the specific question of what is to count and be recognized as a family, the ethical promise of which Laclau writes could perhaps be called love; the normative what is recognized as love. There is, today, an ever-widening discrepancy between love and what is recognized as love, recognized as a family, both in the social sphere and at a political level.

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Butlerʼs project is focused on the need to politicize the family; as I see it, however, a distinction between ethics and politics is necessary for the realization of the emancipatory aim of her project. This does not mean that the question of the family is apolitical. It means only that what Hegel called the ʻnaturalʼ domain – or the domain of desire, love and care – cannot be politically determined or controlled. Indeed, the real problem has perhaps been the overly eager politicization of that domain. Under the banner of family values – not least in Britain and North America – politicians have made more or less intrusive attempts to ʻnormalizeʼ the family. Since ʻfamily valuesʼ and heteronormativity amount to pretty much the same thing, it is of course impossible – and undesirable – to leave the question of the family out of the political sphere altogether. Perhaps the problem is that the family has been made too political, rather than not political enough? Perhaps the best politics could do would be to protect this sphere from discriminating laws, rather than to try and regulate the structure of the family on its own terms. In which case the psychoanalytic demarcation between the normative idea of what is to count as a family and an ethical sphere which withdraws from such norms may well have some use for a progressive family politics, after all.

Notes 1. George Steiner, Antigones, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984, p. 18. 2. See Sophoclesʼ Antigone, ed. Mark Griffith, Oxford University Press, New York, 1999. 3. Butler, Antigoneʼs Claim, p. 6. 4. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Potter, Routledge, London, 1992, p. 247. 5. According to Freud, the maternal object is both given up and retained, thus creating a fundamental ambivalence. See, for example, ʻFemale Sexualityʼ, where Freud has recourse to a pre-Oedipal domain, where the maternal love dominates, in order to explain the ambivalent relation to the mother as the key to the problems of feminine sexual identity (Standard Edition, XXI, Hogarth Press, London, 1953–73, p. 230). On Julia Kristeva and the melancholy of women, see the analysis of Marguerite Duras in Black Sun, Columbia University Press, New York, 1989. 6. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud argues that cultural norms and values enforce the superego, which is in fact is a major destructive factor in Western cultural pathology. On this theory women are not necessarily more pathological than men, but they do not identify with the normative system in the same way (Standard Edition, XXI, p. 130). 7. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. J.H. Bell and J.R. von Sturmer, Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1969, chs 3 and 4. 8. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parsh-

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ley, Vintage Books, New York, 1989, p. 41. 9. Ibid., p. 74. 10. Lacan, The Ego in Freudʼs Theory and in the Techniques of Psychoanalysis, II, trans. S. Tomaselli, Norton, New York, 1988, p. 29. 11. Ibid., p. 116. 12. Ibid., p. 146. 13. Ibid., p. 75. 14. ʻLà où il nʼy a pas de rapport sexuel, ça fait “troumatisme”ʼ, Les Non Dupes Errent, 19 February 1974. From a Lacanian perspective, this tearing out or lack represents the negativity or void which for Heidegger would relate being to beings, the other sex always carries the negative mark which presents to oneʼs own finite status: ʻCe qui est de lʼêtre, dʼun être qui se poserait comme absolu, nʼest jamais que la fracture, la cassure, lʼinterruption de la formule être sexué en tant que lʼêtre sexué est intéressé dans la jouissanceʼ (ibid.). 15. Butler, Antigoneʼs Claim, p. 23. 16. To this extent, Butlerʼs reading of Antigone reiterates her critique of psychoanalysis in Gender Trouble (Routledge, London, 1990), where the structural relation which psychoanalysis assumes to exist between sex, sexual identity and desire is taken apart. See, for example, pp. 6–7. 17. Butler, Antigoneʼs Claim, p. 35. 18. Butlerʼs criticism of Lacanʼs notion of the Real is emphasized throughout her dialogues with Ernesto Laclau  and Slavoj Z iek. Since the Real is always a limit point determined by the symbolic, she argues, it is not useful in the determination of the incompleteness and complexity of the subject, which for Butler can never be covered by Lacanʼs notion of the symbolic. See Judith Butler,  Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Z iek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, Verso, London, 2000, pp. 29–30. 19. Butler, Antigoneʼs Claim, p. 54. 20. Ibid., p. 30. 21. Ibid., p. 19. This is also why Butler is critical of feminist psychoanalysts who argue for the idea that psychoanalysis only sketches positions of desire, and do not argue for fixed sexual identities. 22. Again, Butlerʼs critique here echoes de Beauvoirʼs claim that paternal power is nothing but a social construction, and that psychoanalysis lets everything depend on that construction in a misguided way (Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 41, Butler, Antigoneʼs Claim, p. 21). 23. Butler, Antigoneʼs Claim, p. 71.  24. Butler, Laclau, Z iek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, p. 146.  25. Z iekʼs interest in the Real stems from the fact that it makes up an internal limit to the symbolic system itself, and he has emphazized sexual difference as the epitome of the Lacanian Real for this reason. The interpretation of sexual difference is also open to hegemonic strug gles (see Butler, Laclau, Z iek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, pp. 110–21). 26. The function of foreclosure is considered to be a function of arbitrary social probitions, and not, therefore, of what Lévi-Strauss would call founding cultural prohibi tons (Butler, Laclau, Z iek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, p. 149).  27. Butler, Laclau, Z iek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, p. 81.

Uncategorical imperatives Adorno, Badiou and the ethical turn Peter Dews

The last decade or so has seen a surprising transposition in the dominant tonalities of literary and cultural discourse. Questions of conscience and obligation, of recognition and respect, of justice and the law, which not so long ago would have been dismissed as the residue of an outdated humanism, have returned to occupy, if not centre stage, then something pretty close to it. The so-called ʻethical turnʼ in deconstruction, the popularity of Emmanuel Levinasʼs thought, the surge of interest among Lacanian theorists in such matters as ʻradical evilʼ, Pauline agapé, and Kierkegaardian faith, are only the most obvious manifestations of this trend. But compared with earlier shifts of theoretical emphasis, there is something odd about this turn to ethical issues. If one recalls the takeoff of postmodern theory, back in the late 1970s, there was an unmistakable sense of exhilaration in the air. The decentring of subjectivity, the unleashing of the forces of textuality, corporeality and desire, the jettisoning of the criticʼs role as guardian of values, were experienced as a liberation. Fashionable thinkers were thrilled to lose themselves amidst proliferating rhizomes, to ride the roller coaster of the will-to-power. They eagerly nodded assent when Foucault declared that ʻexperience … has the task of “tearing” the subject from itself in such a way that it is no longer the subject as such, or that it is completely “other” than itself so that it may arrive at its annihilation, its dissociation.ʼ1 The mood of the moment was ʻjouissance now, pay laterʼ. By contrast, there is often something rather reluctant, even shamefaced, about the recent ʻturn to ethicsʼ. In the introduction to a recent American essay collection with that title2, the editors try to make the best of it: Ethics is back in literary studies, as it is in philosophy and political theory, and indeed the very critiques of universal man and the autonomous human subject that had initially produced resistance to

ethics have now generated a crossover among these various disciplines that sees and does ethics ʻotherwiseʼ. The decentering of the subject has brought about a recentering of the ethical.

But the disparate contents of the volume, from John Guillory on the ethics of reading, via Beatrice Hanssen on Fanon and the ʻOtherʼ, to Doris Sommer on ʻattitudeʼ, belie this optimistic account of the transition. Many of the essays betray a distinct unease or confusion about the scope and validity of ethical discourse, even while registering an obscure sense of its necessity. As Judith Butler frankly admits, at the start of her Nietzschean response to Levinas: I do not have much to say about why there is a return to ethics, if there is one, in recent years, except to say that I have for the most part resisted this return, and that what I have to offer is something like a map of this resistance and its partial overcoming.

Chantal Mouffe states her misgivings even more bluntly, as she complains about ʻthe triumph of a sort of moralizing liberalism that is increasingly filling the void left by the collapse of any project of real political transformationʼ. Itʼs clear that all the new talk of responsibility and justice is far from following smoothly from a poststructuralist-inspired contextualism, from the critique of the ʻideal, autonomous and sovereign subjectʼ. Itʼs not so easy to do ethics ʻotherwiseʼ. This is not to say, of course, that the earlier aversion to moral discourse was unjustified. But its motivation was far from clear – especially, one might argue, to those who most strongly expressed it. Readers looking for a more philosophically reflective account of the grounds for scepticism about moral discourse could do worse than open Problems of Moral Philosophy, the transcript of a lecture course which Adorno gave at Frankfurt University in 1963.* Like Adornoʼs other lecture courses, which will eventually make up sixteen volumes of the Nachgelassene

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Schriften, Problems of Moral Philosophy is dotted with personal remarks and humorous asides. We sense an aspect of the man less prominent in his published writings. In the concluding lecture of the series Adorno recalls: ʻWhen the founders of the Humanist Union invited me to become a member, I replied that “I might possibly be willing to join if your club had been called an inhuman union, but I would not join one that calls itself “humanist”.ʼ The proximity of Adornoʼs sentiment to the ʻantihumanismʼ of the French thought of recent decades is intriguing. But, at the same time, the difference in self-understanding canʼt be ignored. From Foucaultʼs notorious proclamation of the ʻdeath of manʼ to Lyotardʼs late essay collection, The Inhuman, French antihumanism was driven, ostensibly at least, by a sense of the theoretical unviability of traditional models of the reflective and responsible subject. In Adornoʼs case, the motivation is different: namely, a moral concern that the rhetoric of humanism now ʻreifies and falsifiesʼ the very issues it was originally meant to address. For Adorno, this does not mean, of course, that an antihumanist stance would solve the difficulty.

The obsolescence of morality Problems of Moral Philosophy is essentially an exploration of this dilemma through a sustained discussion of Kantʼs ethical thought. Kant features throughout these lectures as exemplary, though not as a model to be emulated. Rather, he is the thinker who pursued the theory of morality with the unflinching determination required to bring its antinomies to light. Readers of Negative Dialectics, for which this lecture course, like others from the early 1960s, is a kind of preparatory study, will be able to guess the thrust of Adornoʼs account. Kantʼs sense that there is an ʻaspect of our destiny as human beings which goes beyond mere existenceʼ vies with his proto-positivist tendency to prune back the aspirations of philosophical enquiry for the sake of avoiding contradiction. His emphasis on rational autonomy is undermined by the ultimate reduction of moral obligation to a brute, unquestionable fact. Kantʼs philosophy, Adorno concludes, ʻstarts off by postulating freedom and extracts an immense pathos from it, but in the process of developing its meaning, this freedom dwindles to the point of extinction and his philosophy ends up by dispensing with freedom entirelyʼ.

Of course, for Adorno, these paradoxes are not contingent features of Kantʼs thinking, but arise from the very probity with which he responds to his historical context. And this context is fundamentally defined by the obsolescence of morality as such. ʻIt is only where our universe is limitedʼ, Adorno argues that something like Kantʼs celebrated freedom can survive. In the immeasurably expanded world of experience and the infinitely numerous ramifications of the processes of socialization that this world of experience imposes on us, the possibility of freedom has sunk to such a minimal level that we can or must ask ourselves very seriously whether any scope is left for our moral categories.

To put this another way, the very notion of morality presupposes an – at least relatively – independent sphere of personal interaction, where ethical problems can be addressed through the initiative of individuals, and where the consequences of our behaviour towards others can be more or less reliably anticipated. But in the administered world we can no longer assume the existence of such a sphere. Reading Problems of Moral Philosophy one is struck again by the extent to which Adornoʼs stress on the opaque, unmappable complexity of social and economic processes anticipates central themes of postmodernism and, more recently, of globalization theory. The kernel of truth in such characterizations seems apt to explain the unease of the recent ʻturn to ethicsʼ. Doubtless, this turn has been honourably motivated – by a need somehow to come to terms with the moral catastrophes of the twentieth century, by a desire to find a language in which to address a global situation of pervasive violence, inequality and suffering. We cannot help but be haunted by a sense of living in a morally unjustifiable world. Indeed, on some accounts, the mere standard of living of the Western democracies may be a violation of the categorical imperative. But we also feel our individual powerlessness and the overwhelming of our reflective capacity to determine specific moral norms. In this situation, the appeal of an ethics such as that of Levinas, which appears to bypass the dilemmas of moral reflection through a phenomenology of irrecusable obligation, is understandable. But, of course, as soon as Levinas, almost as an afterthought, moves beyond the imperatives of the ʻface-to-faceʼ relation, and acknowledges the issue of justice, of the existence of the ʻOther of the Otherʼ, then all the old problems return.

* Theodor W. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, ed. Thomas Schröder, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2000. 224 pp., £ 45.00 hb., £15.99 pb., 0 7456 1941 X hb., 0 7456 2865 6 pb.

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In this context, one turns eagerly to Alain Badiouʼs recently published book, Ethics: A Essay on the Understanding of Evil.* For Badiouʼs thought, though much concerned with ethical issues, still nurtures the anti-humanist impulses of the 1960s. Born in Morocco in 1937, and educated at the École Normale Supérieure, Badiou was at first a follower of Sartre, but later became part of the intellectual circle around the mandarin journal Cahiers pour lʼanalyse, whose theoretical lodestars were Lacan and Althusser. Like a number of his contemporaries, Badiou sought to sustain the impetus of May ʼ68 through the idiosyncratic Maoism of the Union des jeunesses communistes de France (marxistes-léninistes), a group in which he played a leading role, until it finally disbanded in the late 1970s. He also taught for many years at the ʻexperimentalʼ university outpost of Paris VIII, where Deleuze and Lyotard were once on the faculty. But in 1999 – in a very French transfiguration – he became head of the philosophy department at the École Normale Supérieure.

High fidelity Badiou opens his Ethics by vigorously defending the honour of Foucault and Althusser, and venting his deep hostility to the general resurgence of ethical discourse, in France and elsewhere. The first part of the book contains a polemical onslaught on the contemporary discourse of human rights, as well as an attack on Levinasʼs phenomenology, which is often regarded as an alternative to it. But the aim of the book is not simply demolition. In the second part of his little treatise, Badiou proposes an alternative ethics, what he calls an ʻethics of truthsʼ. And he concludes by elaborating a definition of evil which, he claims, differs radically from the pious denunciations of humanistic discourse. Let us look first at Badiouʼs positive conception of ethics. To behave ethically, for Badiou, is to remain faithful to a moment of revelation or insight, and to pursue whatever line of thought and action is required to sustain this fidelity. Such disclosures of truth can occur, on his account, in four fundamental domains: politics, science, art and love. They do not transform and dynamize a pre-existent knowing and acting subject. Rather, it is the irruption of an always ʻsingularʼ truth through the tissue of everyday ʻopinionʼ which first brings a subject – individual or collective

– into being. Hence, for Badiou, there is no universal human subject. There are a plurality of subjects, called on to sustain the particular starbursts of truth through which they are constituted, to cleave faithfully to them against the insistent tug of the merely animal side of human existence. Badiou goes on to outline three figures of evil. First, evil can consist in the terror produced by commitment to a simulacrum of truth. This occurs when the supposed breakthrough of truth is related to the ʻclosed particularity of an abstract setʼ rather than to the indeterminate – and hence potentially universal – ʻvoidʼ which it reveals at the heart of a specific situation. Thus the National Socialist ʻrevolutionʼ arose from and was addressed to the German Volk; it did not raise a claim to universal significance by negating the particularity of the situation from which it emerged. Second, evil can consist in the betrayal of a truth, a lack of the nerve and commitment required to pursue its implications to the limit. Finally, evil occurs in the form of disaster when the power of a truth is absolutized – in other words, when there is a failure to acknowledge that the situation in which a truth has emerged cannot be rendered transparent, that a truth-process can never fully name and appropriate its own contingent context. Viewed from this perspective, what is wrong with the contemporary resurgence of ethical discourse? Formally speaking, the attack which takes up the first half of Ethics can be seen to derive from Badiouʼs account of the singularity of truths. More concretely, Badiou expatiates vehemently on his conviction that the contemporary discourses of human rights, multiculturalism, and respect for the alterity of the other, are merely the ideology with which the white, affluent West seeks to assure its own good conscience, whilst continuing to ravage and exploit the rest of the world. Badiou is at his strongest in pointing to the inconsistencies of a facile multiculturalism, the pluralism of the food court and the shopping mall, which wilts in the face of any genuine expression of cultural hostility to liberal values. He also rightly points out that Levinasʼs thought is abused when enlisted to support the ʻcontemporary catechism of goodwill with regard to “other cultures”ʼ, since at its core lies a religious experience of transcendent alterity which cuts across all social and cultural difference. What is more puzzling is Badiouʼs wholesale condemnation of ethics as a ʻpious discourseʼ, and indeed the posture of

* Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward, Verso, London and New York, 2001. 217 pp., £18.00 hb., 1 85984 297 6.

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militant atheism (ʻThere is no Godʼ) which he adopts when pronouncing his verdicts. I suggested earlier that, for Badiou, fidelity to a truth event requires the capacity to go against oneʼs natural, animal propensities. But this was to understate the extremity of the contrast which he draws. On the one hand we have the ʻvaried and rapacious flux of lifeʼ, on the other manʼs capacity to become what Badiou quaintly calls ʻan Immortalʼ, through participation in the irruption of a truth. Or, as he puts it: The ʻsome-oneʼ thus caught up in what attests that he belongs to the truth-process as one of its foundation-points is simultaneously himself, nothing other than himself, a multiple singularity recognizable among all others, and in excess of himself, because the uncertain course of fidelity passes through him, transfixes his singular body and inscribes him, from within time, in an instant of eternity.

Now, itʼs hard to see in what sense this perspective could be described as ʻa-religiousʼ. Indeed, apart from the fact that the subject is interpellated into being by the irruption of a singular truth rather than by the ethical encounter with the Other, the structure of Badiouʼs thought is remarkably similar to that of Levinas. Both set up an exaggerated contrast between the conatus of the human being as a natural being, and the irruption of an event which breaks the cycle of self-preservation, constituting the subject of a process which, as Badiou says, ʻhas nothing to do with the “interests” of the animalʼ and ʻhas eternity for its destinyʼ. Furthermore, Badiou berates the ʻideology of human rightsʼ not for its idealistic conception of the person, but for its complacent commitment to human happiness, and a ʻnegative and victimary definition of manʼ which ʻequates man with a simple mortal animalʼ. In short, it seems the problem with conventional ethics is that it forgets about manʼs immortal soul. This is a contestable diagnosis. Badiou claims that the discourse of human rights splits the supposedly ʻuniversal Subject of rightsʼ between ʻthe haggard animal exposed on our television screensʼ, on the one hand, and the ʻsordid self-satisfactionʼ of ʻthe goodManʼ, the ʻwhite-Manʼ, on the other. But while his polemic may capture a certain offensive Western mindset, what facilitates such arrogance is not, as Badiou suggests, the fact that human rights discourse reduces man to the ʻsimple reality of his living beingʼ. On the contrary, what Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says about human beings is that they are ʻendowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhoodʼ. True, the Declaration goes on to mention various social rights (though not to the extent that most left-

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wingers would wish). But the philosophical nub of the Declaration, which everything else subserves, is the notion of human ʻdignity and the free development of … personalityʼ (Article 22). So Badiou is wrong to affirm that ʻthe ideological framework of “ethics” … equates man with a simple mortal animal.ʼ No mere mortal animal is endowed with reason, conscience or personality. Whatʼs more, itʼs hard to see much difference between the conception of humanity implicit in the UN Declaration and Badiouʼs assertion – which he takes to be a counter-claim – that ʻMan thinks, … Man is a tissue of truthsʼ, and that it is this which allows him to participate in ʻthe Intemporalʼ. Both conceptions are clearly secularized offshoots of the Judeo-Christian tradition – and none the worse for that. Indeed, if anything, Badiouʼs unabashed rhetoric of ʻeternityʼ, ʻimmortalityʼ and ʻfidelityʼ displays its religious origins more openly (ʻfidelityʼ was, after all, a key category in the thought of Gabriel Marcel). One of the surprising things about Ethics, then, is how Badiou can be so blind to this, priding himself on the contrast between the debased piety of ʻhumanitarian prattleʼ and his own militant atheism. But this is not the only thing Badiou overlooks. For his onslaught on the discourse of human rights is curiously one-sided. No one doubts the murderous hypocrisy with which the Western powers, led by the USA, have invoked the language of human rights in recent years. But ʻhuman rightsʼ have also been a rallying call for many activists around the globe. In the form of the Helsinki Accords, they were a major focus for the East European opposition in the years leading up to 1989. They were equally important tactically for Latin Americaʼs struggle against the dictatorships, and continue to provide a vital political point of leverage for many indigenous populations, not to mention the Tibetans, the Burmese, the Palestinians… The United States opposes the idea of an International Court of Human Rights, aware that members of its own armed forces would be among the first to be arraigned before it. But if Badiou neglects the ambivalent potential of human rights discourse, he is equally out of touch with the ambiguities of his own position. The twentieth century has made us all too familiar with the posture displayed in Ethics: contempt for the banality and complacency of a society devoted to commerce and material well-being, a heroic contrast between everyday communication, dismissed as the circulation of a mindless mulch of ʻopinionʼ, and the irruption of politically galvanizing truths. Badiou recognizes the affinities with his political counter-pole, but, as

we have seen, tries to defuse them by suggesting that fascism ties its ʻsimulacrumʼ of truth to a specified group: ʻEvery invocation of blood and soil, of race, of custom, of community, works directly against truths; and it is this very collection [ensemble] which is named as the enemy in the ethic of truths.ʼ But if, as Badiou repeatedly stresses, truths are singular, why should their embedding in a community be a problem? Indeed, since there is no general truth of ethics, but only an ethics of truths, why should we worry about the ʻwar and massacreʼ which fidelity to some truths may require? On this issue Badiou equivocates. Sometimes he talks about ʻthe situated advent of a singular truthʼ, and sometimes about the ʻsingular penetrationʼ of truths through the fabric of opinion. In the second case, of course, it is entirely possible for a truth, whose context of emergence is necessarily unique, to embody that ʻabstract universality and eternity of truthsʼ which Badiou invokes elsewhere. Along with this metaphysical prevarication goes a moral one. The target of Badiouʼs polemic, as we have seen, is the ʻuniversal Subjectʼ of human rights. But when he comes to specify what would be wrong with the use of violence to propagate a (simulacrum of) truth, Badiouʼs response is that, However hostile to a truth he might be, in the ethic of truths every ʻsome-oneʼ is always represented as capable of becoming the Immortal that he is. So we may fight against the judgements and opinions he exchanges with others for the purpose of corrupting every fidelity, but not against his person – which, under the circumstances, is insignificant and to which, in any case, every truth is ultimately addressed.

But if every truth is addressed universally to human beings as ʻpersonsʼ, whose moral and physical integrity must be respected, then this is surely the ethical bottom line. We can shrug our shoulders when Badiou claims that ʻThere is not, in fact, one single Subject, but as many subjects as there are truths, and as many subjective types as there are procedures of truths.ʼ The fact is that Badiou wants Kantian intransigence, without paying the price of a formal universalism. He longs for a truth which would be ʻthe material course traced, within the situation, by the evental supplementationʼ, and yet which would be accessible to everyone. In his book on St Paul, published a few years after Ethics, Badiou writes, ʻThe process of a truth is only universal to the extent that an immediate subjec-

tive recognition of its singularity supports it, as its point in the real.ʼ3 But while immediate recognition of a transformative truth such as that of the risen Christ may spread for a variety reasons, other contingent factors will eventually block that expansion. A truth can only claim genuine universality if it is mediated by the human capacity to talk and reason. But Badiou dismisses ʻcommunicative socialityʼ for the exaltation of being ʻdirectly seized by fidelityʼ. The situation which Adorno diagnosed nearly forty years ago may help explain, but does not excuse, the inconsistencies of Badiouʼs conception of ethics. Indeed, the vulnerable, precarious status of ethical discourse, overshadowed by what Adorno terms ʻthe overpowering machinery of external realityʼ, would seem to call for the very opposite of Badiouʼs braggadocio. At one point in his final lecture, Adorno remarks: If you were to press me to follow the example of the Ancients and make a list of cardinal virtues, I would probably respond cryptically by saying that I could think of nothing except for modesty.

Modesty, however, is not Badiouʼs strong suit. Commissioned in an introductory series for schools, Ethics belongs to a genre of philosophical pamphleteering which, for good or ill, has no counterpart in the English-speaking world. Itʼs the product of an intellectual culture which prizes sweeping assertiveness, rhetorical daring, and the ability to present oneʼs take on the world in sonorous metaphysical garb, but which pays scant regard to the skill of foreseeing objections. In short, it could scarcely have been penned anywhere today except within the confines of the boulevard périphérique. This defiant provinciality gives Badiouʼs thought an unmistakable pathos, even grandeur. Ethics is guaranteed to make many older readers feel quite nostalgic. But, sadly perhaps, the world has changed – and we should be wary of the current drive to package Badiou as the latest maître à penser, the new apostle to the Anglophone gentiles.

Notes 1. Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombatori, Semiotext(e), New York, 1991, p. 31. 2. Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds, The Turn to Ethics, Routledge, New York and London, 2000. 3. Alain Badiou, Saint-Paul. La fondation de lʼuniversalisme, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1997, p. 23.

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REVIEWS

Uncle Joe  Slavoj Z iek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Four Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion, Verso, London and New York, 2000. 160 pp., £16.00 hb., 1 85984 792 7.

A well-known Slovenian philosopher and a British Army officer walk into a bar. One says to the other, ʻYou are just a product of complacent leftist ideology, afraid to turn words into real action.ʼ The other replies, ʻThatʼs not true. Havenʼt you seen my latest publication? Iʼve put Joseph Stalin, a real man of  action, on the cover.ʼ Slavoj Z iek then has to admit that he hasnʼt actually seen the latest edition of The British Army Review.  Slavoj Z iek and the British Army seem to share a common cause: a desire to re-evaluate a figure who regularly contends for the title of the twentieth centuryʼs greatest despot: Joseph Stalin. Implausible as it might seem, an army whose primary military objective for forty years of cold war was the containment of a regime held to be the antithesis of Western democratic freedom suddenly in the Winter 1999– 2000 issue of The British Army Review awarded Stalin the title of ʻMan of the Centuryʼ in view of his both ʻmonstrous and magnificent achievementsʼ. Surely Stalin was the ʻenemyʼ within British military logic for so long that it must be too soon for them to be considering the ʻmagnificentʼ aspects of his impact on history – but apparently not. So when Slovenian  philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Z iek titles his new book (which also features Stalin on the cover) with the question, ʻDid Somebody Say Totalitarianism?ʼ, and one is forced to reply ʻYes, I think the British Army didʼ, then one has clearly entered the terrain of inverted ideological messages, repression  and paradoxical logic that Z iek has dedicated himself to explaining. As it turns out, a revaluation of Stalin is not the  least of the controversial moves that Z iek makes in his most recent book. With a chapter entitled ʻHitler as Ironist?ʼ and including a self-improvement test to determine whether the reader is irrefutably a racist, it is apparent that outrageousness has been carefully incorporated into the bookʼs design. This performative  and motivational effect is precisely what Z iek aims for in what is his most clearly delivered remedial

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plan for the contemporary Left. Whereas before there have been relatively obscure Lacanian directives to traverse the fantasy of political ideology or to embrace the hidden relevance of German idealism for modern thought, here he offers a far more practical guide to locating oneself within the current discourses of Marxism, psychoanalysis, ʻthird wayʼ theory and cultural studies. Moreover, he explains how the received view of totalitarianism operates so often as a shibboleth that it restricts the aims and objectives of these movements. In a familiar term from his other work, the book is intended to provide a ʻdetonating forceʼ that will allow theory, and especially a thoroughgoing Marxist materialism, to free itself from the various culs-de-sac of deconstruction. It aims at preventing more conservative ideologies, including the middle-of-the-road ʻthird wayʼ, from labelling and dismissing the radical Left as unnecessary obscurantism. The enormous variety of cinematic, musical, liter ary and pop references that have always been Z iekʼs trademarks are here in abundance. The relative restraint of his more philosophical books, such as The Ticklish Subject (1999) is abandoned, while the increasing concern with religion found in The Fragile Absolute (2000) is continued. People who were troubled by a perceived Christian fundamentalism in the latter book  will find more reason for worry in Z iekʼs claims about Christianityʼs unique tragic dimension, which is lacking in both Judaism and Buddhism. Again, this can  be attributed to a calculated outrageousness on Z iekʼs part. He deliberately provokes the distinction between Christianity and other world religions to see who will come to the defence of the offended doctrines. It is his suspicion that it will not be the ʻtrue believerʼ who will be outraged by his claims but rather the postmodern leftist academic whose overriding demand for tolerance and contextualization precludes precisely this kind of decisive statement. He provokes what he perceives to be a complacent leftist discourse in order to determine if there is an underlying agenda of disavowed principles. While the deconstructionists

claim that all concepts can be contextualized, it is interesting to see which ones still provide offence. If all concepts are metaphors, why is totalitarianism such an exceptionally effective irritant?  This is where Stalin comes in. It is Z iekʼs contention that the limitations of radical leftist discourse can be seen in the way in which its own paradoxical nature, divided by a need to provide criticism and yet also admit to the contingency of that criticism, is neatly wrapped up and set aside by using totalitarianism as a stopgap. The postmodern Leftist can only survive if he or she is able to limit the basic demand for tangible social and economic change by instead worrying about the danger of slipping into totalitarianism, a system  where tangible change was the central goal. Z iek finds that totalitarianism is too conveniently accepted as the system that went too far. Since everybody knows that totalitarianism is inherently wrong (except for the British Army, apparently), the questions that totalitarianism poses are not questions for us; nor, according  to Z iek (in reference to Hegelʼs observation that ʻthe secrets of the Ancient Egyptians were also secrets for themselvesʼ), are the questions of totalitarianism treated by modern theorists as questions for totalitarians themselves. There is a basic assumption that the centralized authorities within these governments knew exactly what they were doing and were in complete control  at all times. Z iek doubts that this is entirely true. Indeed, it is at the moments when totalitarianism is most unstable, during the purges of the 1930s for example, that the regime reveals its potential. The moment of revolution occurred in the Soviet Union during the purges when Stalin himself did not know what was going to happen – that is, when the fate of the regime was a secret even to the leader. It was at this moment that the social and economic forces were able to act freely beyond any possible control by the government, impossible to incorporate into any Five-Year Plan. This radical ambiguity, the impossibility of anticipating the future, allows for dialectical materialism at its purest. In Lacanian terms, it allows for the repositioning of the point de capiton, the ground of the symbolic order, and thereby opens up new, previously inconceivable,  discursive territory. Z iek is quite willing to admit that the purges had appalling consequences, but

he is not willing to accept that this tragedy can be accounted for by the supposed radical evil of Stalin or the nomenklatura. This is not meant to be a defence of Stalinʼs regime but rather the initiation of a new discussion into the social factors and ideology at work in actually existing communist governments. Indeed, not even the Khmer Rouge can be dismissed on this view (and the book contains an interesting discussion of the state-managed sexual practices of that regime). Simply put, any communist government should be worthy of examination for emancipatory potential. One consequence of this revaluation is that it disputes the standard Western valorization of the dissident within the totalitarian  system. To this end, Z iek makes several controversial claims about a number of dissident figures: Nikolai Bukharin was still acting as a proper Bolshevik in offering to shoot himself despite knowing that the charges laid against him in his 1937 show trial were entirely false; the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, once blacklisted and forcibly distanced from the official ideology, assumes the ineffectual ʻcloset dissidentʼ status that actually helps preserve the regime; even Václav Havelʼs status as an emblem for post-communist democracy is questioned, echoing right-of-centre Czech politician Václav Klausʼs suggestion that Havelʼs humanistic vision relies on the continuance of communist, not democratic, ideals. These figures are not to be considered victims of an inherently evil form of government but, rather, as the integral parts of a system that was actively trying to reconcile socialist ideals with historical circumstances. The treatment of National Socialism is more circum spect, but here Z iekʼs main target is the Holocaust industry rather than the regime itself. Again, it is a case of totalitarianism being used as a stopgap, this

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time, in order to avoid a critical confrontation with the social and economic factors that contributed to  the Shoah. Z iek points to the failure of films such as Schindlerʼs List and Life is Beautiful to confront the figure of the dehumanized ʻMuslimʼ, who cannot be portrayed as either tragic or comic. He is suspicious of any attempt to represent the extreme nature of the Nazi concentration camps, arguing that any portrayal is ultimately abusive of the Muslim. While this criticism attacks obvious targets such as Hollywood, it is also meant to include any attempt within academia to elevate the Holocaust into a diabolical evil, approachable only through respectful silence. This moral approach to a political situation, treating the Nazi regime as a manifestation of metaphysical evil and not the political consequence of various social and economic factors, surreptitiously reinforces its own unacknowledged political objective: the continued separation of Judaism from Western culture. This separation, justified on the basis of the Holocaustʼs supposed singularity, is actually the same one at work in anti-Semitic conspiracy theory and ironically may also exempt Israel from certain human rights decrees. Only by confronting its empirical origins and not accepting the received view of the inherent evil of totalitarianism can a continued examination of the Holocaust stay productive.  There is a clear sense that Z iek wants something new to be introduced to leftist thought. He is tired of the protracted debates that stop short of questioning the actual circumstances that led to the rise of totalitarian regimes – circumstances which, acting as a classical Marxist, he believes lie in class struggle and the recognition of labour. The rest of the book diagnoses the various ways that Western liberals masquerading as radical Leftists continue their own self-deception. There is the embrace of melancholy over mourning that can be found in the work of Judith Butler, and the forced separation of ethics from politics found in a post-secularism influenced by Levinas. In each  instance, Z iek finds that it is the concrete political act that is precluded by the constant need to contextualize and maintain ambivalence. It is not that these theorists are misguided in their intent but that they are contained within a discourse that lost its radical potential years ago. A basic Hegelian dialectical structure raises  itself in Z iekʼs work; the development of radical leftist discourse has reached its point of stagnation. What may have been genuinely radical and subversive in the past is now fully incorporated into the dominant liberal system and a ʻdetonating forceʼ is needed in order to enter a new terrain. If contemporary academic discourse genuinely wants to consider what may lie

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 beyond a globalized, capitalist economy (and Z iek is not entirely convinced that deep down they really do), they will need to search for this kind of force in the place they are currently unwilling to go – totalitarian discourse. After such a great motivational speech, it would  be good if Z iek was actually able to provide the Five-year Plan that will steer academia out of the doldrums, but unfortunately this is precisely what his book does not provide. There is very little indication of where in totalitarian discourse the secret detonator  lies. The closest Z iek gets is the recounting of a Soviet propaganda film where a traitorous spy is promised ʻa severe, but justʼ sentence from a Bolshevik court and, instead of summary execution or the Gulag, receives access to universal education and health programmes.  According to Z iek, the court ʻredefines the meaning of “severe justice” itself in terms of excessive forgiveness and generosityʼ, achieving a genuinely radical goal of opening up new discursive territory. This is what the Leftist should try to emulate, but no more guidance  is given. Z iek has admitted elsewhere that he has yet ʻto pull the rabbit out of the hatʼ, and this remains a rabbitless hat of a book. Without more information about where to look for this emancipatory material, it is difficult to avoid  seeing it in places that Z iek would not approve. For example, it is not clear whether a typical affirmativeaction programme in a Western democracy reduces symbolic differences between political antagonists to that ʻunderlying all-pervasive Samenessʼ which  Z iek denounces, or whether it actually addresses the concrete social and economic needs of an underprivileged class, altering their circumstances on a materialist level, of which he would approve. The symbolic and the material do not seem to be as easily  separable as Z iek would suggest. While he is correct in claiming that the Left has become increasingly concerned with politics at the symbolic level, the division between this symbolic concern and more traditional projects of social and economic change is not definite enough to warrant choosing one at the expense of the other. On the other hand, perhaps postponing a definitive plan is not such a critical fault so long as he delivers a message about the current limitations of leftist discourse and its inability to confront totalitarianism. As an exhortation to overcome this shibboleth in contemporary postmodern academia, the book is a complete success. The British Army cannot be allowed to have all the fun.

Kit Barton

Euro-things Andrew Barry, Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society, Athlone/Continuum, London, 2001. 305 pp., £50.00 hb., £16.99 pb., 0 485 00439 9 hb., 0 485 00634 0 pb. The promise of modern Europe is bound up with technology ʻas threatʼ and ʻas potentialʼ. Europe is an information society, not because information has produced a radical break with the past but because societies operate as if it has. Contemporary society takes technical change to be the model for political action. This is the starting point for Andrew Barryʼs account of Europe as a political machine, an account which demands recognition of the ʻcritical part played by technology in the modern political enterpriseʼ. Barryʼs central assertion is that science and technology should not be viewed as external to political processes, political institutions or political subjects. In Political Machines he sets out to demonstrate that the relationship between these categories is more intimate and more complex than much political science would suggest; and if the focus here is on Europe, Barry is clear that his argument should have a wider applicability. The theoretical underpinnings of this work are to be found in the sociology of science and technology. Indeed, Barryʼs work is to be understood as an attempt to translate critical thinking in this arena into the broader sphere of political science. For Barry the insights of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) are valuable. He also draws on work developed by actor network theorists such as Latour, Callon and Law, using their insights and general approach to address what he perceives as the blindness of much political science to the specificity and force of technology. For those working within SKK it has become a commonplace that ʻlaboratory knowledgeʼ cannot be accounted for solely in terms of the play of social and economic interests. Rather, such knowledge needs to be studied in its particularity. On the one hand, this tends to involve the adoption of particular research methodologies, such as ethnography. On the other, it involves a thoroughgoing attempt to give symmetrical attention to humans and non-human elements involved in the production of objects, knowledges and scientific ʻtruthsʼ. Actor network theory (ANT) is founded on a fierce adherence to this principle of symmetry. Artefacts of all kinds – software architectures, hardware, software, or documentation, for instance – may all be enrolled alongside humans as actants within hybrid networks

which, in constituting a knowledge, or an object, also constitute a social reality. For some ANT theorists, networks produce their own contexts. They cannot be understood in relation to overarching social contexts (ideology, social relations) although they may be investigated in relation to other networks. Latour understands that the ʻParliament of Thingsʼ that emerges as a consequence of such an approach amounts to an assault on a particular kind of sociology. Andrew Barry might be understood to be taking up Latourian cudgels against a particular kind of political science. Certainly, a central movement of Political Machines is the attempt to translate ANTʼs conception of the social/technical relation and the methodological approach it prioritizes from its current niche in science studies, and from its concentration on laboratory matters, into mainstream political thinking. In Political Machines this ANT-like respect for the role of the technological artefact (the non-human in the network) is used to complement a more or less Foucauldian conception of government as a dispersed series of practices and political technologies. As Barry sees it, what is at issue is not ʻthe question of the state, but … a set of practices and technologies of governing which operate across distinctions between state and marketʼ. Two senses of technology – technology as artefact (as an information network with a particular architecture for instance) and technology as technique – are thus brought into relation. This redoubled sense of technology allows him to argue that the assemblages or networks he discerns operating throughout the variously formed spaces he investigates are producing Europe as a socio-technical machine and (simultaneously) as a political institution. Political Machines itself is formed by these assemblages and networks since they become the focus for a series of case studies loosely based on European government (making up the first half of the book) and European citizenship (the second). Each study opens a different window on Europe, which is thereby viewed at a series of strikingly different scales, paces, locations and modalities. To explore the governing technologies of Europe, Barry draws on Appaduraiʼs sense of differentiated spheres of action (the technoscape, mediascape, ethno-

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scape) which might operate to fracture or complicate territorial boundaries. Technoscapes, for instance, may not map onto existing media- or ethnoscapes. Barryʼs focus is on the overlapping technological zones that mark out Europe. These zones are produced where particular forms of technical standardization have been achieved, for instance, or where intellectual property laws have been agreed upon. Zones are thus viewed as ʻspaces of circulation within which technologies take more or less standardised formsʼ. Barry argues that such zones have become the object of developing forms of transnational regulation. In other words, they have become the objects of, and the means for the effecting of, various forms of European integration and harmonization. In the second half of Political Machines, Barry turns his attentions to the European citizen, here regarded as constituted in part through her active involvement in new forms of cultural consumption, and in new forms of information and knowledge gathering. The model of the interactive museum is explored here as a general model for informed and active citizenship, and interactivity itself is taken as a model for conforming the subject which is based not on discipline (as in Foucaultʼs model) but on permission. Rather less convincingly, Barry attempts to understand the road protests at Newbury bypass through an analysis of the ʻobjects, technologies and practicesʼ which produced the event itself. The connection between the two sets of case studies is to be found in technology. In the case of the citizen (as user) and in the case of the regulatory initiative (for instance, an intellectual property regime), order is given through the redoubled sense of technology outlined above. That is, as Barry himself puts it, ʻpolitics does not circulate just through the flow of ideologies or rationalities of government, but through diagrams, instruments and practicesʼ. Viewed in this way, a certain idea of ʻEuropeʼ dissolves. In its place a new Europe emerges, reconstituted as a complex socio-technical entity. This new Europe assumes peculiar characteristics, takes on new modalities, and becomes more clearly composed of many layers, not all of them coterminous. Its boundaries therefore seem less clearly defined, and indeed seem to be defined in process rather than being fixed. This new Europe is at once a more or less harmonized legal zone, a ʻplaceʼ demarcated in various ways (by the signposts marking a European air pollution project in Southeast London, for example). Finally, Europe is defined by the activities of its citizenry, its use

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practices, its consumption practices, even its protest practices. How convincing is all this? If Barry simply set out to attack the increasingly-difficult-to-sustain argument that technology is external to the political, he has certainly succeeded. Barryʼs actants are always assembled with beautiful precision, his networks are marshalled precisely, and each case study reveals a web of complex and intimate relationships operating between scientific or technological actors and networks and political institutions, structures and bodies. Barryʼs work, however, is more than a collection of case studies about socio-technical imbroglios. It is an attempt to understand how modern Europe, thus reconceived, might be at once a technical institution and a political one. And it is here that the problems arise. First, it seems important to note that in making his case for Europe as a techno-social machine, Barry is arguing that there are possibilities for political intervention and political action. He recognizes that a sense of political possibility is threatened when the information society thesis is taken on board; when the belief that a societyʼs horizons are bounded by the technical not the political becomes a general belief, a model for action. The case for understanding Europe as an active and extensive operation rather than as a centralized bureaucracy, often characterized by its inactivity, is well made, and becomes a part of his attempt to offer new grounds for (ground level or micro) political action. On the other hand, this account produces a peculiarly depoliticized sense of what Europe is, and does, not at the level of integration/harmonization initiatives, nor at the level of the local protest or the actions of the citizen-consumer, but as an actor on a wider stage. The central blindness of the book concerns the other reality of Europe – its wider political and economic reality and its place within a global order. While Barryʼs account explores the socio-technical constitution of the grounds of Europe (real and virtual), it refuses to reach beyond these grounds, to ask how Europe as thus constituted figures in the wider world. Here Barryʼs adherence to ANT is very clear, and might be said to take on its limitations as well as its strengths. Actor network theory defies context; the network itself produces the social world as network effect. ANT is hostile to the concept of a horizon within which networks might be formed or made, a horizon within which actants might be operating – which might take them beyond their network ʻscriptʼ. ANT has been criticized for producing a celebratory account of technology where whatever is achieved is

presumed to be right. Barry arguably comes rather too close to this in his essentially romantic account of the construction of Europe. Indeed, it might be the beautiful complexity of the kinds of networks Barry constructs, their self-sufficiency, that allows him not only to suggest that Europe has done more than many of its detractors would allow, but to say that it has done better. In conclusion, the Europe Barry delivers us up to is something that is no more than a socio-technical effect of the actions of actants within the networks that constitute it. Seen this way it can be celebrated, even loved. In these times, it may be clear that such love is rather dangerous. Caroline Bassett

Pure illusion Bob Carter, Realism and Racism: Concepts of Race in Sociological Research, Routledge, New York and London, 2000. 185 pp., £55.00 hb. £16.99 pb., 0 415 23372 0 hb., 0 415 23373 9 pb. This book has two aims. The first is to provide a coherent account of sociological scientific realism (SSR) which defends the idea of social science as a source of privileged knowledge about social reality against the postmodern and poststructuralist critiques of grand narrative. The challenge here is to provide an account of SSR which rests on a genuine analytic dualism between agency and structure, the two indispensable ingredients of any social scientific realism. This has to avoid any conflation of the two while providing a coherent picture of the relationship between them – how each has the power to act upon and transform the other. The second aim is to show that the concept of race has no role to play in sociological theory, and that sociological accounts that do use the concept as an explanatory tool are misleading and misguided. In order to succeed here Carter has to explain why the concept of race is sociologically useless, and, just as important, how sociology can provide helpful explanations of racism and other race-based social phenomena without employing the concept of race to do so. These two projects are connected, because it is through the second that Carter hopes to convince us of the first. In the end the book is a defence of the idea of social science as a privileged source of knowledge, and this defence is provided by taking the topic of race and showing that the only way to provide a coherent

account of it is within the framework of SSR. This is because SSR takes the radical step of removing the concept of race from the theoretical realm and confining it to lay discourse. Accounts that let the concept run free through their theoretical languages are taken to be fraught with confusion. The claim that SSR provides the best explanation of race-based social phenomena by rejecting the concept of race is, on the face of it, deeply paradoxical; but I do think Carter succeeds, in the end, in resolving that paradox. Even if one is not going to buy his version of SSR, one is at least left extremely cautious about the theoretical utility of a concept of race. Carterʼs version of SSR has three essential features. The first of these is the analytical dualism between agency and structure. Carterʼs favoured form of explanation is the morphogenetic model provided by Margaret Archer. This recognizes that the causal interaction between structure and agency takes place in different time frames and the only form of sociological explanation that can illuminate it is therefore narrative. Social change takes place in morphogenetic cycles. First (T1) we describe the social structural context that is in place and that is going to condition, but not determine, the actions of individuals and groups in this context. Next (T2), we describe those actions as they take place in and against that context. Finally (T3) we redescribe those social structural conditions to see how the actions have affected them – they may have been altered (morphogenesis) or not (morphostasis). The cycle of causation between structure and agency then continues. The second essential element of SSR is ontological depth. There are different levels of social reality with their own causal structures and properties. Sociological explanation has to be suited to the relevant level or domain. Following Derek Layder, Carter outlines four domains. The first two are part of agency: psychobiography (dealing with individual development of the self) and situated activity (face-to-face interaction between two or more persons). The second two are to do with structure: social settings (the locations within social structure that frame social interaction) and contextual resources (the material and cultural resources available to social actors in those contexts). Race ideas can be active in any of these domains: as a way of expressing oneʼs psychic need for identification; as a resource in situational interaction; as a formal system of discrimination, such as immigration and nationality law; or as part of a societyʼs general cultural capital. The third essential element of SSR is the distinction between lay and scientific discourse. Most sociological

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terms have ʻdual citizenshipʼ within lay and sociological discourse, and so lead a double life. This makes social scientific theory a much more problematic enterprise than physical scientific theory, but it is not an intractable problem so long as sociologists are alert to this double life of their theoretical terms. Commonsense notions of class, for example, are partial, limited, and sometimes misleading as accounts of the social world. Sociologists operate with a theoretical notion of class, which is fit for the purpose. The means it has a logical place within a body of theory, and receives support from other terms within that body of theory. The problem with the concept of race is that it has no referent in social reality – there is no such thing as race. Therefore we need ʻmore active border controls between social scientific and lay discourses with regard to raceʼ. However, sociologists have been reluctant to take this step. One reason is the view that notions of race have a common-sense vitality and therefore exert an influence over social actors. If belief in races is real and motivates people, then the belief has real consequences; and so race is, in that sense, real. This will not do, says Carter, because it reduces social reality to actorsʼ beliefs about it. ʻThis restricts social science to providing a (circular and largely otiose) description of the social world as seen by its members.ʼ Sociology has to be in a position to question critically the adequacy of actorsʼ descriptions of their social world, and SSR enables it to do this. Another objection derives from the postmodern questioning of the validity of the distinction between lay and sociological. If all concepts are social constructs, why should we privilege theoretical terms just because they are constructed by social ʻscientistsʼ? In the accounts that arise from this postmodern critique, race retains a role as a discourse or symbolic form, or as a source of privileged knowledge. But ʻthis absence of an object is a recipe for incoherence and as is commonly the case with such recipes the end product is often half-bakedʼ. These problems are associated with a ʻwider uncertainty amongst sociologists about the status, meaning and viability of social scienceʼ. Carter argues here that we must not confuse the insistence that sociology is a science with scientism. Scientism is the positivist view that science produces objective facts through neutral observation which enables us to formulate general laws. SSR is theorydriven, and precisely because it is theory-driven it acknowledges that there can be no neutral observation of social reality. The concepts that make up the theoretical framework can only be the social constructs of

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social scientists, but they are precisely constructed as elements of a theoretical system aimed at giving an account of social reality, and this means they are different to the concepts of lay discourse, even where they have a double life. This is because the social reality they have to capture is not limited to the everyday experiences of social actors and their descriptions of those experiences. Social reality, as we have seen, is multi-layered and in principle unobservable, consisting of structures that have causal powers – generative mechanisms. The social scientist must create theoretical models of those generative mechanisms, and then search for empirical evidence that they are in causal play in specific contexts. Having excluded the concept of race from social scientific discourse, how can Carter make the paradoxical claim that SSR provides the best theoretical framework for understanding those phenomena? It performs this task by getting us to set aside any notion of a theoretical concept of race that can perform an explanatory function, and rather focus on the role of race ideas in lay discourse. Although SSR rests on an analytical dualism between agency and structure, in this version the structural element itself has two parts: social structures, which seem to have most to do with

the meaning and distribution of material resources; and the cultural system, the ʻpropositional registerʼ of a society. The cultural system is the body of beliefs and ideas which people draw upon in pursuing projects and interests. Race ideas exist in the cultural system, as ʻideas, or imaginings, that draw upon a concept of raceʼ. The concept of race underlying race ideas is one of distinct biological groupings of peoples with visible physical and cultural differences. This concept has no empirical consistency and therefore cannot ʻcross the borderʼ into scientific discourse, but remains alive and well in lay discourse. Sociological analysis will explain how agents come to have certain ideas about race in particular contexts, and the ways in which they use those ideas. But none of this is to employ the concept of race at the level of sociological analysis, because at that level the concept is unemployable. Race ideas have a reality as the objects of social scientific enquiry, but not as conceptual tools in such an enquiry. Some hard-nosed social scientific conclusions follow from this. For example, someone cannot be an unconscious racist, any more than they can be an unconscious Marxist or Christian. Racism involves a specific set of false ideas about humanity, and the racist is a person who holds those ideas. Also, racism has to be distinguished from other exclusionary tactics such as nationalism or xenophobia, as these are based on different sets of ideas in the cultural system. They can, of course, become connected, and very often are. A third conclusion is that not everybody is ethnically located. Given that ethnicity is socially constructed, then it can only be a sociological concept under conditions which lead agents to interpret the world and themselves in ethnic terms. Not all agents live under such conditions, and therefore for them there can be no ethnic identity in play. It is not that they have failed to perceive that they have an ethnic identity (that would be to reify ethnicity) – it is simply not an idea or an imagining that has a role to play in their social context. ʻRather than “uncovering” hidden ethnicities, sociologists should be asking why notions of ethnicity figure prominently in the subjective careers of some but not others.ʼ In the end, Carter resolves the paradox he has set himself in a convincing way, but questions remain. Most importantly, of course, one has to be convinced that social scientific realism is a viable project, and this is Carterʼs most pressing concern. However, there is another puzzle. Carter poses only one border, between lay discourse and social scientific discourse, but of

course the border is between lay discourse and theoretical discourse in general, unless one assumes that social scientific discourse is the only relevant body of theory. Once we allow that there are other bodies of theory in play, the border country becomes far more complex, with many different boundaries of varying permeability. Indeed, the relationship may be such that the whole notion of a boundary makes no sense here. While the concepts of race and ethnicity may be justifiably banned from entering within the territory of social scientific discourse, it is not clear that they cannot pass into other theoretical zones. The implication of Carterʼs argument is that they should not, because they fail to describe any reality. But it may be that the purpose of such theories is not to describe reality, and that the realist manifesto should not be extended beyond its own theoretical boundaries. Phillip Cole

Back in the 80s Phillip Cole, Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory and Immigration, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2000. 256 pp., £45.00 hb., £16.95 pb., 0 7486 1218 1 hb., 0 7486 1219 X pb. Many years ago, as a member of the Anti-Nazi League, I would regularly talk to meetings of trade unionists, students and political activists about immigration controls and their impact on the growth of right-wing and racist politics in the UK. Discussion at these meetings invariably turned on the issue of immigration controls and their putative necessity, and on whether it was possible to devise a ʻrationalʼ immigration policy. Speakers usually meant by this whether there was some principle of exclusion whose ethical basis could reasonably be grounded in, or made consistent with, social-democratic or liberal notions of fairness and social justice. Speaking at these meetings in the late 1970s, I found that about half of the audience would answer ʻnoʼ to this question, insisting that immigration controls of any sort were rationally and politically indefensible. By the mid-1980s, however, I encountered scarcely anyone prepared to challenge restrictions on international freedom of movement. The issue of national borders seemed to have become rationally and ethically unproblematic; they were there, there was little that could be done about them, and opposition to the restriction of movement between them constituted the

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wildest form of utopianism. Of course, the restrictionist policies of successive Labour and Conservative governments since the 1960s contributed significantly to this shift, but what struck me about many of the arguments for immigration controls was the disturbing assumption that the boundaries of the political community – broadly those to whom one might be considered to have a moral obligation and to whom one would extend political rights – coincide with the boundaries of the nation-state. It is precisely this assumption that Phillip Coleʼs timely and cogent book gets to grips with. Coleʼs starting point is the key question of whether the exclusive membership practices of modern states can be morally justified within the terms of liberal political philosophy. The difficulty that Cole identifies here is that liberal political philosophy has at its core a belief in the moral equality of persons: any moral principle has to be capable of being accepted as rationally and ethically legitimate by any moral agent. However, liberal notions of citizenship, grounded in the reality of nation-states, directly undermine this belief in two directions, first by making a distinction between members and outsiders by drawing a boundary around the community, and second by making a distinction between citizens and subjects by drawing a boundary within the community. Problems of rights and obligations, of the distribution of freedom and welfare, are tackled within already bounded political communities; the question of how membership of these boundaries is to be fixed is set aside. It can only be set aside comfortably, though, if this is done in ways that are compatible with the central principles of liberal political theory. And this is the rub: how is it possible to distinguish between insiders and outsiders in a manner consonant with the principles of equal respect and concern for humanity as such – and not just that part of it that gets to be defined as ʻour responsibilityʼ? The bulk of Coleʼs book explores the various answers that liberal theorists have proposed to this question. Perhaps the most significant of these answers has concentrated on a definition of political community that sees it as constituted by common meanings. The work of Michael Walzer is central to this body of work, and Cole develops a powerful critique of it. Walzerʼs thesis runs along the following lines. Successful political communities need a conception of themselves, a self-conception that needs to be protected through immigration and naturalization controls. Since only members of the community are in a position to identify the limits of the shared understanding underlying their self-conception, it is only they who can decide on the

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membership rules – that is, on who is eligible to belong to the community. This is a popular view within the human and social sciences (and not only there), and Cole argues strongly (and rightly) that it simply sets aside the principle of humanity by appealing to a kind of moral relativism. If all moral principles arise from communities, there cannot be a moral principle of humanity because, as Cole points out, from Walzerʼs point of view humanity does not constitute anything recognizable as a community. Furthermore, this moral relativism seriously limits the scope and nature of any normative judgements we may want to make about the criteria of membership (for example, ʻAryans onlyʼ) that a particular community decides are appropriate or may want to adopt. There is a further difficulty: why should we suppose that an individualʼs identification with a particular nation-state outweighs for them other forms of identification? Cole puts forward a similar argument in his discussion of the ʻcultural nationalismʼ of writers such as Yael Tamir and David Miller. Having established the value of culture as the context of social life which provides individuals with meaningful needs, aspirations and purposes, such writers then assume that the nation (as opposed, say, to other more local groupings) provides the most valuable and significant cultural context. One dangerous implication of this assumption, as Cole notes, is that we ought to identify with co-nationals. There are other implications, too, and it would have been useful if Cole had extended his critique a little at this point. In particular, I think that much of his argument against taking culture and values as constitutive of national communities could be profitably applied to the discussion of ethnicity, where it seems to me that analogous claims are often advanced to justify the description of populations as belonging to this or that ʻethnic groupʼ. Cole concludes his survey of liberal theoristsʼ efforts to square the circle of defending membership controls with the central moral commitments of liberal philosophy by insisting simply that it cannot be done. Any such strategy, he points out, ʻinvolves an incoherence between internal and external principles, and the result is that in both theory and practice liberal theorists and states apply non-liberal if not illiberal principles to outsiders.ʼ Part of the problem for liberal theory for Cole is its ahistorical approach to the formation of nation states and in particular its neglect of the role played by European colonialism in shaping the world. This neglect is the chief reason why

it finds it difficult to theorize actually existing borders. It is also the means by which liberal theory maintains its appearance of universality: the moral and political goods it distributes are due to everybody, but in liberal theory ʻeverybodyʼ refers only to those included within the boundaries of the liberal polity. Cole suggests that the adoption of a postcolonial perspective might help in formulating how the boundaries of political communities should be drawn in a more global order, and, although this is left undeveloped, he is unequivocal about the implications for liberal theory: the only consistently liberal solution to membership control is complete freedom of international movement, and ʻif liberal egalitarians cannot bring themselves to accept this conclusion, then they have to ask themselves what they mean by liberal egalitarianismʼ. Cole has written a clear and boldly argued text; one whose audience should be wider than that suggested on the back cover – students of sociology, racism and ethnicity will also find much that is relevant to their disciplines. Now, if only Iʼd had a copy back in the 1980s… Bob Carter

The fates of Kantianism Karl Ameriks, Kant and the Fate of Autonomy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000. xiii + 351 pp., £35.00 hb., £12.95 pb., 0 521 78101 9 hb., 0 521 78614 2 pb. Eckart Förster, Kantʼs Final Synthesis, Harvard University Press, London and Cambridge MA, 2000. xx + 207 pp., £23.50 hb., 0 674 00166 4. Brigitte Sassen, ed., Kantʼs Early Critics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000. ix + 331 pp., £35.00 hb., 0 521 78167 1. The horizon of meaning of Kantʼs work has been in flux since its origin, partly as a result of the instability of Kantʼs own self-understanding, as each of these books testifies in different ways. Sassenʼs collection of very early responses to Kantʼs theoretical work shows how ʻuntimelyʼ that work was in its own time, and if in the ensuing period the central difficulties of Kantʼs claims have at least been identified and narrowed down, the framework for receiving them seems to shift regularly.

At the moment, there appears to be a broad consensus that the weight of Kantʼs theoretical project rests on the transcendental deduction of the categories, with claims around transcendental apperception bearing ultimate responsibility, while transcendental idealism is subordinated to these issues. Two opposing camps have coalesced within this framework, exhibiting differences that seem ever more irreconcilable, thus perhaps foreshadowing a new shift. On the one hand, a ʻnormativistʼ approach insists on the irreducible spontaneity of apperception, and makes stronger or weaker claims about how this undergirds the capacity to conform to epistemic norms. On the other hand, a ʻfunctionalistʼ approach wants to dissolve apperception into the sum of the cognitive, synthetic functions that are alleged to make it up. Ameriksʼ and Försterʼs books are signs of new and important directions out of this impasse, in that both stress the limitations of theoretical claims about apperception, and both insist on the irreducibility of some kind of metaphysics in Kantianism. Ameriksʼ Kant and the Fate of Autonomy in particular is an extraordinary work, composed of reworked material dating back fifteen years. It will surely have a major impact on work on Kant and post-Kantianism, if not for its general thesis, then most definitely for the sophistication of its argumentation (his account of apperception is perhaps the most sophisticated around). Its title is somewhat misleading, as it is as much about theoretical as about moral philosophy. It concerns the validity of the powerful tradition of critique and development of Kantʼs philosophy that began with Reinhold, and continued directly into Fichte and Hegel. (Schelling is absent, perhaps because of the epistemological bias of the book.) Fichteans and Hegelians will be put on the defensive, as Ameriks wholeheartedly reverses a recent trend towards making Fichte and Hegel ʻacceptableʼ by showing them to be reasonable Kantians deep down, if only you just get to know them. The book begins with a deceptive appeal to the intrinsic ʻmodestyʼ of Kantʼs system. Kant, Ameriks claims, was not concerned with defeating scepticism (being apparently persuaded of the futility of that task), but rather with providing coherent justification for our ability to make empirical judgements (what should be taken as a ʻfactʼ). This justification proceeds by unearthing the conditions for judgement itself (e.g. apperception) and for our spatiotemporal representations. If we wish to provide a coherent structure for these conditions, we are led towards a metaphysical thesis – transcendental idealism – which explains that

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whilst our knowledge is restricted to appearances, this does not rule out a domain of non-spatiotemporal things in themselves, which may be represented by thought, but not known. Ameriks insists that the intelligibility of moral claims about freedom must presuppose a full theoretical ground-clearing of this kind. The post-Kantians, he argues, overlook the subtlety of this approach, going on to produce ever more radical claims about moral and theoretical autonomy, derived ʻdirectlyʼ from the ʻevidenceʼ of self-consciousness. One of the key results of Ameriksʼ analysis is criticism of the use of the concept of representation by Reinhold and his successors. Ameriks convincingly argues that Reinhold infects Fichte and Hegel with a mistaken impression of Kantʼs project that has wide ramifications for their own projects, and will ultimately undermine their absolutist schemes. Reinholdʼs original sin is to claim that all representations must be accompanied by the activity of the ʻI thinkʼ, when Kant only talked about judgements. As a result of this radical, explicitly anti-sceptical claim, Reinhold then

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believes he can move directly to what Ameriks calls a ʻshort argument to idealismʼ: that, as all representations are conditioned by the subject, things in themselves cannot be represented at all. Ameriks goes on to show how Fichte extrapolates further that the notion of things in themselves is not even coherent. The path to absolute idealism is now cleared. There is a genealogical aspect to Ameriksʼ project, as his wider historiographical purpose is to show the contingency of this wrong turning after Kant, in order to disrupt the sense of destination that attends the history of post-Kantianism. But his philosophical aim is squarely to recover the integrity of the Kantian project by putting right the error. First, he shows that Kant does allow unconscious representations. Second, he shows that Kantʼs central claim that ʻthe I think must be able to accompany all my representationsʼ does not refer to all possible representations, but only to representations that are already taken as mine. The apperception thesis in Kant does not refer to all representations, but only to empirical judgements (or ʻexperienceʼ in its technical sense); it simply cannot support the claims made for it by the post-Kantians. Third, the only argument to idealism in Kant is a ʻlongʼ one, not straight from ʻrepresentationʼ itself, but from the fact that we are limited by specific kinds of representations – spatiotemporal ones. Hence Kantʼs idealism concerns the Transcendental Aesthetic, not the Analytic. In conclusion, Ameriks argues that the ʻimperialistʼ turn that begins with Reinhold, to ground all science and philosophy on a radical principle of unity, is quite distinct from Kantʼs route to autonomy. Rather, for Kant, moral autonomy is assured precisely by keeping open the possibility of a metaphysical, immaterial realm of things in themselves distinct from appearances, and on the basis of that possibility, appealing to strictly moral arguments as the ratio cognoscendi of autonomy. Instead of being guaranteed by one radical principle, freedom can only be secured by the very split between theoretical and moral claims. However, one canʼt help being drawn to the uneasy coexistence of Ameriksʼ two polemical claims: on the one hand, for a ʻmodestʼ, ʻcommon senseʼ reading of Kant, and on the other, for the irre-

ducibility of metaphysical arguments in Kant. His soothing claims to common sense can sometimes appear like attempts to avert the readerʼs eyes from the metaphysical elephant that is, if not in the room, then at least in the hallway. Ameriksʼ first book, Kantʼs Theory of Mind, was proudly unfashionable in its metaphysical concerns, and indeed Ameriks has quite recently described himself elsewhere as having a Leibnizian (i.e. not commonsensical) interpretation of Kantʼs claims about the self. Why not just admit that, if one is going to try to provide ʻcommon senseʼ with a justification for itself, opening up the space for metaphysics may not be the way to do it, because metaphysics has to be about more than reassurance of common sense? Nevertheless, I would suggest that this vacillation only adds to the thought-provoking power of Ameriksʼ book, in that it puts in question all the more profoundly the future of Kantianism. It is useful at this point to turn to Försterʼs Kantʼs Final Synthesis, which provides a superb and lucid reconstruction of Kantʼs Opus posthumum. Anyone who knows Kant cannot but be astonished at some of the moves made in Kantʼs final work, with its talk

of organisms as ʻself-moving machinesʼ, its denials that intuition is purely receptive, its insistence on the primacy of Ideas of reason, and its attempt at a ʻsystem of transcendental idealismʼ to rival Schellingʼs. I cannot do justice here to Försterʼs vital work in making sense of these moves, but it is interesting to compare his treatment of Kantʼs final thoughts about apperception in the Opus posthumum with the conclusions drawn by Ameriks (who never refers to this work). Förster shows how Kant starts to speak of apperception as the act by which ʻthe subject makes itself into an objectʼ, and that this requires the determinability of the subject in a spatiotemporal field, one that is no longer defined merely formally, but as completely filled with moving forces. Kant ends his life arguing that the subject must ʻposit itselfʼ ʻas a thing and a personʼ, and he reintroduces the old pre-critical trinity of self–world–God as the ultimate axis of this self-positing. Again, like Ameriks, Förster shows how at crucial points the weight of Kantʼs core claims is displaced onto the outer limits of his system, onto a fragile metaphysical horizon. Christian Kerslake

Free and windy chaos John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connection, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2000. 167 pp., £23.95 hb., £10.50 pb., 0 262 18205 X hb., 0 262 68120 X pb. What does it mean to make art in the twenty-first century? This is the problem John Rajchman sets himself in his latest book, as he ploughs through the thirty or so titles of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in search of answers. Rajchman, a leading art theorist and longtime collaborator with journals such as Artforum, October and the Architecture magazine ANY, has circled around the question of artistic creativity from one book to the next. His previous effort, Constructions (reviewed in RP 96), concentrated on problems of architecture and design in an attempt to create a zone of proximity between philosophy, the arts and urbanism. In this way Rajchman hoped to formulate new problems in the field and sketch their socio-political implications. Having left us with a battery of concepts with which to negotiate the city and its temporalities, he clearly felt that he had taken his part-time experimentation with Deleuzeʼs philosophy as far as it could go: a head-on confrontation was needed and this could only take the form of a book-length study. The product should be of interest to artists and phil-

osophers alike: practitioners because the emphasis is on the creative act in every artistic domain; theorists because it puts every one of their treasured presuppositions into question. In a sense, Deleuze, the most rigorous of recent French philosophers, was also the most anti-theoretical, to the extent that he consistently sought out alternatives to theories that impose themselves in grid-like form on whatever contingent fodder comes their way, in one long search for new ways of conceiving unity and the relations between part and whole. Rajchmanʼs is an experimentation with, rather than an application of, Deleuzeʼs thought. One of Deleuzeʼs main aims was to discourage faithful followers whilst encouraging novel uses of the multitude of concepts he invented, especially in non-philosophical domains. The list of artists, filmmakers and writers who have sought to inflect Deleuzeʼs thought in new directions is endless; not to put it into practice, since theory was already a kind of practice for Deleuze, but to discover a common, immanent compositional plane.

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The first thing that interests Rajchman is how to invent ʻnew expressive materialsʼ and new aesthetic possibilities, signs and images that will allow us to resist the global tele-information culture. Deleuzeʼs is a transcendental philosophy, but only in his own idiosyncratic sense, describing the forces that condition and give rise to what we see and know. And art has a privileged position in relation to this transcendental unconscious. ʻArtworks arenʼt there to save us or perfect us but to complicate things, to create more complex nervous systems no longer subservient to the debilitating effects of cliches, to show and release new possibilities of lifeʼ. This quotation could serve as a summary of Rajchmanʼs book. Rajchman thinks we need a new conception of the brain if we are to stave off the totalitarian effects of cognitivism, propagating as it does the lightning-fast stimulus-response brain as demonstrated by American culture. We need to think of the brain as ʻan uncertain systemʼ. What is required is a probabilistic, lived brain operating through irrational breaks and connections, rather than the programmed brain dear to cognitivists. We must focus our attention on what it is that can occur between stimulation and response, action and reaction, and what can occur is thought and creativity. The Deleuzean brain weaves rhizomatic links prior to cognition, finding under individualized persons the impersonal power of singularities. The political aspect of this follows from Deleuzeʼs view of society as defined by its lines of flight, its leakages. In Rajchmanʼs gloss, ʻthere is no determination of ourselves that does not at the same time create zones of indetermination – indetermination with respect to our individualizations as persons, sexes or genders, classes or strata, even as members of the human speciesʼ. The question becomes one of how minorities may come to bring about new lines of flight and ʻinsert becomings in the official history of majoritiesʼ. Deleuze died as he was writing a book on Marx: one eye on developments in neuro-science, the other fixed firmly on the different creative processes involved in art and philosophy. What is distinctive about Rajchmanʼs work, previously on Foucault and now on Deleuze, is its preoccupation with the ethical implications of philosophy. The Deleuze Connection contains an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, allowing its readers to experiment with modes of existence and styles of thought. And in the best Deleuzean manner it demonstrates that ʻa non-philosophical understanding of philosophy is at work in and through the artsʼ. Perhaps what is most fruitful in the interplay between these two practices

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are the zones of indistinction to which works such as those of Warhol and Duchamp gave rise. What Deleuze wanted, Rajchman makes clear, was for art to assist philosophical thought to leave behind its dogmatic presuppositions and become attuned to the singular (a philosophy of the event); to guide artists through the slit in the (metaphorical) umbrella that shelters people, to ʻtear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rentʼ, as What is Philosophy? so infectiously put it. In the new global megalopolis time is uniquely dispersive and bifurcatory, a far cry from temporalities of old, yoked as they were to cyclical nature or divine law. Along with this new indeterminability of time goes an intensive spatiality, which has left behind the idea of extension and its ʻwell-constituted objects-withproperties and the kinds of distance and relations they supposeʼ. Rajchman extracts from Deleuze the concept of the amorphous unformed space, demanding a new body capable of novel types of relation: ʻWe move in space in ways that cannot be mapped by any extension – we fill it out according to informal designs that donʼt completely organise it – the space and our movement through it become inseparable.ʼ Art can enable us to negotiate inventively the new spatio-temporalities being imposed on us. It can extract sensations from our habituated bodies and their common-sense memories, perceptions and feelings. It can make us see and feel in ever novel ways. ʻThe neuro-aesthetic problem of sensation is: either to create new connections, new linkages or vital transmitters in the brain, or fall back into a deficiency of the cerebellum.ʼ Our most pressing problem today is that we no longer believe in the world. As Deleuze has argued, post-war cinema had provided us with new reasons to believe in the world and its possibilities: Italian neo-realism, for instance, inaugurating a new regime of signs and images and creating characters who could no longer react to the conditions around them but who could see the intolerable. Now tele-informational culture has succeeded in robbing us of the world once more and this has been met by cultural and political thinkers with a wrong-headed retreat into transcendent and consensualist philosophies of communication. But it isnʼt more communication that will save us, says Rajchman, since we only communicate cliché and doxa, but a new belief in the worldʼs possibilities. We need to force sensation beyond every transcendent value, to experiment with what we may yet become in the electronic brain-city. Fergus Daly

CONFERENCE REPORT

Rearguard action Immanent Choreographies: Deleuze and Neo-aesthetics,Tate Modern, 21–22 September 2001

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his conference, organized by Tate Modern and Staffordshire University, brought together an impressive array of speakers from the UK (Alexander García Düttmann and Peter Hallward), Europe (Robert Fleck and Pascale Criton), the USA (Dorothea Olkowski and John Rajchman), and Australia (Ian Buchanan), including artists and curators (such as Christina Caprioli and Andres Kurg) as well as academics. Collectively, these speakers (and others, whose presentations will be the focus of this report) were gathered ʻto explore the power of Deleuzean neo-aesthetics, and also its limitsʼ. Yet in the course of the event, few speakers had much to say about aesthetics, and fewer still seemed prepared to outline what might be meant by a Deleuzean ʻneo-aestheticsʼ. Though overall there were many good and substantial presentations, generally the few that did attempt to relate Deleuzeʼs philosophy explicitly to aesthetic theory or practice were the least satisfying. While this failure to meet the conference aim may not damn altogether the project of elaborating a Deleuzean (neo-)aesthetics, it does show that such a project is still in the rearguard of Deleuzeanism. Though one of Deleuzeʼs overriding philosophical aims was the attempt to go beyond dualisms of all kinds, the aesthetic criticism that imagines itself following Deleuzeʼs footsteps is too often blighted by a proliferation of often remarkably Manichaean dichotomies. These dichotomies (rhizome/arborescence, nomadism/State, and so on) are too easily applied rather mechanically to aesthetic material to produce a new set of judgements of taste serving to justify what are in the end fairly traditional (avant-gardist) conceptions of art. By contrast, within political philosophy, more sophisticated analyses have warned of the dangers of rhizomatic formations and the both suicidal and homicidal potential of the nomad. These dangers, and indeed the dangers of dichotomies themselves, are only all the more apparent in the aftermath of the events of 11 September (and this conference very much took place in the shadow of those fallen twin towers). Perhaps it is simply more difficult to actualize such concerns within aesthetic thought or practice, or at least to do so without again reducing aesthetics to politics. On the other hand, one member of the audience proposed that the conference gather in special session to discuss the impact of events in the United States, with the aim of formulating a message of support to be sent to the artistic community of New York. (I am not sure whether or not this session eventually took place – at the time set aside for its realization, along with the majority of the other conference participants, I was outside the auditorium, taking advantage of the wine reception laid on by the Tate.) But the gesture, while understandable, appeared to establish a debate whose outcome was already known, and a reduction of politics to solidarity with aesthetes. Of the presentations whose focus was on the aesthetic, David Rodowickʼs was among the most interesting, though even this focus was ultimately displaced, in that Rodowickʼs concern was with the philosophical work that film might accomplish.

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Taking examples from Godard, Chantal Akerman and Agnès Varda, the paper aimed both to clarify the concept of ʻconceptual personaeʼ introduced by Deleuze and Félix Guattariʼs What is Philosophy? and to argue that film, too, could express conceptual personae as much as it also presents us with ʻaesthetic figuresʼ and ʻpsychosocial typesʼ. Thus Rodowick argued that in the play between diegetic and nondiegetic forms of presentation and narration, film could establish two differential series of ʻvirtual intercessorsʼ and so express the desire to construct new forms of existence, and the concepts appropriate to new planes of becoming. The force of film lies not in its representational qualities, but in the way in which it can establish a disjunction between two sources of enunciation, and so point to the unthinkable that lies beyond representation. A Deleuzean aesthetics, then, might revolve around efforts to indicate the limits of representation, on the one hand, and to produce new forms of experience, on the other. As Astrid Söderberg Widding also pointed out, film theory has been particularly obsessed with the question of representation (no doubt because of filmʼs apparent fidelity to the real) and with the spectatorʼs (psychic) identification with either the camera or the characters portrayed. Ideas of continuity, seamlessness and recognition have been imposed upon a medium whose technical characteristics (such as montage and added sound) are discontinuous and disjunctive. But in what sense can film (or any other art) serve not only as a critique of representation but also as a medium in which something new is constituted or created? A Deleuzean aesthetics might rescue the idea of creativity from either intentionalism or finalism, both of which reduce what is created to that creationʼs conditions of possibility. This question of the emergence of the new was a thread that linked many of the papers. It is a question that takes on different aspects depending upon the field within which it is asked: in aesthetics, it invokes creativity; in philosophy, conceptualization; in politics, constitution. Everywhere, however, it must also be a question of organization; specifically, what is at issue (if creation is not to be reduced to determination) is self-organization. In this vein, Manuel De Landa applied concepts taken from complexity theory and examples taken from architecture and computer-aided architectural design to consider the conditions necessary to generate viable self-evolving and self-sustaining structures. These conditions are, he argued, a population of diverse forms (and so community has to precede individuality), intensive modulations (and so folding takes priority over metric extension or division), and topological multiplicity (for which spatial resemblance is replaced by a wealth of possible actualizations). Essentially, then, De Landa recasts Deleuzeanism as a form of nonlinear science, and chooses nonlinearity over linearity at every opportunity. He articulates this project with verve and clarity. His presentation was a breathtaking combination of simplicity and ambition: if these three relatively simple conditions explain self-evolving structures, then they also explain all structure, in that what is taken to be formed identity is simply a partial (and so misrecognized) image of a process that is nothing but the continuous self-organizing flow of matter. Yet to equate mountain ranges, as the product of flows of magma, with thunderstorms, as flows of wind and moisture, is also to pass over the question of (metric, or

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linear) scale, however topologically similar they may be. Changes in extension (a linear property), such as doubling all the physical dimensions of a building or bridge, can have catastrophic effects upon the structure as a whole, as the pressure on the loadbearing elements may increase exponentially and the whole edifice collapse. Surely the same is also true elsewhere: doubling the size of a political grouping also has reciprocal intensive effects, for instance, and the self-organization of a political cell must differ from the self-organization of the multitude. So either all properties are in fact nonlinear, or the relation between extension and intensity in the production of the new is more complicated than De Landa suggests; in either case, the dualism on which his presentation rested seems problematic. More fundamentally, is the opposition between creativity and identity also not a misleading dualism? Alain Badiou and Iain Mackenzie both underlined the importance of creativity for Deleuzeʼs political thought. For Badiou, what he called the Nietzschean maxim of creation is fundamental to Deleuzeʼs politics. This maxim could be parsed in terms of three ethical maxims: that we must elude control (and so seek a new negation); that we must precipitate events (and so a new affirmation); and restore a belief in the world (and so a new subjectivity). Though this is not a politics per se (as politics, Badiou argued, is always historical, whereas the maxim of creation sought a liberation from history), it is a politics of art, science, and philosophy, each of which is called upon to be creative, producing respectively affects, functions and concepts, in order to create a ʻnew thingʼ. Mackenzie, in what was perhaps the conferenceʼs most challenging and rigorous paper, enumerated the necessary features of such autonomous creativity, which he identified as a post-Kantian ʻpure critiqueʼ. Pure critique must have no constraints, and must do away with any founding categories of the sociopolitical (because they, too, must be subject to critique). Whereas partial critique shares its terrain with what it criticizes (and so allows that terrain to escape critique), and whereas the terrain of total critique is defined (and so constrained) by its negation of what it criticizes, pure critique is the fully immanent art of constructing altogether new conceptions of the sociopolitical. Pure critique constructs its own terrain. It does away with this social to construct a new socius. In discussion, both Badiou and Mackenzie acknowledged that this absolute autonomy might be impossible and even undesirable. Far, then, from De Landaʼs discovery of self-organization at every corner and every turn, this panel emphasized the constraints that foil the desire for autonomy. Moreover, in so far as there is no linear continuum between constraint and autonomy (in that the greatest reterritorialization is always found on the line of greatest deterritorialization), there could be no comfort in ʻalmostʼ achieving creation, in structures that were ʻalmostʼ self-organizing. Rosi Braidotti instead suggested the potentially productive notion of ʻsustainabilityʼ (and so ʻsustainableʼ becomings), which has the virtue of not being defined by the notion of a lack, or failure. Perhaps this is the direction in which we should be going, to consider how to maintain created structures and collectivities. The question of the feasibility or sustainability of Deleuzean creativity is, perhaps, also the question of revolution for our times. The problem is the way in which the power to which Deleuzeanism points is always so close to the limits to that power of which Deleuze warns. And though ʻImmanent Choreographiesʼ provided no answers to this problem of the entanglement of power with its limits, of self-organization with control, it posed it in the starkest of terms. Jon Beasley-Murray

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OBITUARY

John Fauvel, 1947–2001

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adical Philosophy is still too young to have published many obituaries of members of its Editorial Collective. But, at fifty-three, John Fauvel, who died suddenly on 12 May, was too young to die. I knew him first and foremost as a friend, who between 1982 and 1990 was also on the Collective. He was a man whose calm, quiet understanding could always surprise me, be it about Fermatʼs Last Theorem, nineteenth-century travellersʼ diaries, current philosophy of language, or simply the human nature of those around us. This gargantuan knowledge was founded on an unconstrained accumulation of books and papers – when Johnʼs house was filled with them, he simply added a second floor. Brought up and educated in Scotland, where his father was a headmaster, John pursued his education and his career in the south after he went to study mathematics at university, first at Essex and then at Warwick, finishing with an M.Phil. Close friendships there gave him a lifelong base at Leamington, which is where he died. But in 1977, he moved to a lectureship at the Open University Faculty of Mathematics, and established himself in Milton Keynes. John, being John, could see the virtues in that easily slighted city. John was a man known more to the friends, colleagues and students he gathered over the years – he and I soon became friends through working together – than to the wider world. After his time with RP, he was for the last decade a key figure in the British Society for the History of Mathematics, first as its president and then as the editor of its Newsletter. He was a supportive and patient editor of that newsletter and of five books. He had an ambition, which can be seen in his work for the Open University, to bring together studentsʼ own development of mathematical understanding with the study of the historical development of mathematical concepts. For Radical Philosophy, he simply shouldered part of the work (dealing with subscriptions, refereeing, channelling articles), and contributed his mild-mannered, witty insight in print when he had something to say. So let him speak for himself now from the pages of the magazine. On Isaac Newton: ʻThe retiring Cambridge scholar, prised from his solitary study to serve a grateful nation in an amiable sinecure [as Warden of the Mint], became an avenging fury.ʼ On sexist language: ʻI am more interestedʼ, he wrote in 1983, ʻin lending support to those trying to create a non-sexist verbal climate than in safeguarding “our” linguistic heritageʼ – and then he added laconically, ʻLanguage has always been pretty absurd anyway.ʼ But he could chide us too: ʻfeminists have enough problems dealing with men without having to suffer the wit and wisdom of an almost entirely male collective.ʼ ʻLending supportʼ: that was very typical of John. Noel Parker

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LETTER

Institutional critique-by-numbers A reply to Esther Leslie

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hat would count as an effective ʻinstitutional critiqueʼ of Tate Modern? If it is, as one says, a new kind of art museum, we need to ask what new strategies it uses to organize knowledge and experience, and what forces shape those strategies. So far these questions have not been properly addressed. Esther Leslieʼs ʻTate Modern: A Year of Sweet Successʼ (RP 109) is cheery, knockabout stuff, but it shows how institutional critique can miss the point. The two main moves are the obligatory critique of commercialism and criticism of the way in which history is represented. Leslie points to the on-line shopping, the proposed e-business link up, the re-branding as ʻTateʼ, and so on. Actually, it is less a critique than a slur: Tate is found to be a bit vulgar, a bit trade, rather petty bourgeois. This is supported by the hackneyed likening of Tate Modern to a theme park, on the basis that there are crowds and a shop. The critique of the way in which history is represented involves criticism of the kind of information provided by captions (not enough about economic conditions of production), and some odd allegations about a kind of insidious belittling of modern British art. Leslieʼs main observation is that Tate Modern ʻremakes the space of cultural encounterʼ, staging a ʻmore casualized relationship between viewer and artworksʼ. She thinks that this is due to the insubstantial nature of both the gallery and the art it shows, and that this lack of substance is an effect of an alliance between commercialization and aestheticism (rendered here as ʻdecontextualized formalismʼ). The gallery ʻshowcases but does not think through the implications of much avant-garde practice of the last eighty yearsʼ; namely, ʻthe challenges of Dadaesque anti-art and the post-war movements of Fluxus and mail art, conceptualism and Land Artʼ. The primary implication of these practices is, I suppose, that substantial art is that which incorporates a double critique of commodification and aesthetics. Leslie thinks that Tate Modern fails to ʻthink throughʼ the lesson of this practice because all the works, even the anti-art ones, are contained in the (now commercialized) space of (aesthetic) art. For a while now, this kind of critique has had its own artist-hero: Hans Haacke. He reappears in Leslieʼs piece. If only his influence had been allowed to fill the gallery, she feels, then some substantial work might have been done. The exemplary hero is a very particular Haacke. He is not the Hans Haacke who angrily but beautifully jack-hammered the marble floor of the German Pavilion at the 1993 Venice Biennale, remaking, so it seemed, Friedrichʼs intensely, affectingly, political The Sea of Ice (1823–24). No, Leslieʼs Haacke is Haacke-the-lecturer who ʻexposed the links between [the corporate world and the gallery system] in terms of sponsorship, patronage, ownership, with art as the kid-glove, civilizing face of businessʼ – for instance, in tracing the provenance of paintings by Manet and Seurat. Following this example, the Tate Modern captions might have revealed the acts of patronage that are the basis of the Tate collection. We should know who donated what in lieu of tax and which business, with what dealings, financed the whole place and everything in it. Instead, Leslie writes, we have ʻdecontextualized formalism … todayʼs paint-by-numbers of art appreciationʼ.

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Leslieʼs recourse to Haacke-the-lecturer reveals the limitations of her perspective. The problem with her institutional critique (aside from the economic determinism) is the mutually justifying link between an insensate genre of art theory and an antiaesthetic art practice. This fails because the critique never touches its object: the art institution as such. The practice of Haacke-the-lecturer does not embody institutional critique as art but only as critique. Nowadays, Haacke-the-lecturer only exists to assure the anti-aesthetic critic that she has an anchor in art practice; that is, a practical reflection of her own critique which justifies that critique as being substantially about art. But really it just is her critique. Some kind of aesthetics is needed. The Dadaist tradition is an art, not an anti-art, tradition. We make judgements that are, in some sense, aesthetic about the work of Duchamp, Buren and Broodthaers, for example, and also Haackeʼs Germania. The path to institutional critique must take a different route. If the economic base is your thing, start from the fact that The Tate Gallery (which is, I notice, rather than the brand name ʻTateʼ, the organization named on my pay-slips) is the largest recipient of public arts funding in this country. More importantly, perhaps, it operates primarily as a state institution and not as a commercial one. You can then ask what performance criteria the state sets for the spending of public money, and so discover a powerful tendency towards making the provision of culture more democratic. The next thing is to question the policy-makersʼ power-free conception of democratic culture as a frictionless space of shared values and equal exchanges among a community of friends. After that, look for the ways in which such principles are manifest in the museumʼs programme; and here find that precisely in order to reconcile itself with state prescriptions, the Tate Gallery conceives art projects that, as strategies, owe everything to the tradition of institutional critique. It is among these projects, and not the displays of aesthetic objects in the galleries, that we find the most insubstantial elements in the Tate programme: the plural histories of Century City, community relations projects like Mark Dionʼs Tate Thames Dig, and Anna Bestʼs Wedding Party, the Mongrel website, and the Critical Interventions series. If Tate Modern is a new kind of space, its newness is a consequence of a certain state-led democratization. It seems to me that one of cultural criticismʼs main tasks must be to imagine more fully democratic alternatives, to the particular, highly attenuated type of democratization that is taking place. This will involve rethinking the old emphasis on the commodification of culture, and recognizing how orthodox institutional critique is implicated in some of the institutionʼs most impoverished processes. It will also involve working out the place of aesthetic experience, or more generally of reflective judgement, in any alternative, democratic cultural policy. Dominic Willsdon Curator of Public Events, Tate Modern

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