There is a remark over at jahsonic.com about the Slovenian critic Slavoj Zizek, in Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, attacking what he sees as the "radical chic" Deleuzians (he names, among them, Hardt and Negri's Empire), arguing that such projects turn Deleuze into an ideologist of today's "digital capitalism."
Really? Or is this Zizek's particular take?
Hardt and Negri's text, Empire, is Deluezian in so far as it argues for "a decentred and deterritorialising apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers" (xii). This can be seen as a radicalised version of those current understandings of "globalisation", which refuse the traditional Marxist understandings of U.S. imperialism. Hardt and Negri's vision of a post-modernised global economy holds that no nation-state, even the U.S., can act as a centre for an imperialist project today.
Is this radicalization not an important shift? Does not this account promise to be an innovative analysis of the contemporary global order? With globalisation we are witnessing a ‘new imperialism’, but one that is not a repetitition of an old form of domination eg., the US assuming the place, for example, of nineteenth-century Britain. The new terrain is that the contemporary global condition represents a novel departure from the previous world order.
Why not interpret the process of globalization through a reading of Marx from perspective of Deleuzian and Foucaultian categories of thought? This would give us a notion of a postmodern global Empire: ‘a decentred and deterritorialising apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers’ (xii). This suggestion is that this universal form has emerged from the slow death of modernity, and that we now stand on the precarious edge of a postmodern epoch. So Empire is the form that the spatial and temporal organisation of capital is rapidly assuming.
That account makes sense so far does it?
If we think of this spatial and temporal organisation of capital in the neo-liberal terms of the competitive global market, then this new form of Empire cannot be reduced to state forms and their spatial projection. Nation states are losing their power to shape events: that is very clear from Australia's experience. And the global market can be conceptualized as a network of powers and counterpowers structured in terms of what people in the global financial institutions call an 'architecture’. The structures and logics of power of this order have no clear centre or boundary, even if there is a definite hierarchy (the G7?) with the US at the pinnacle.
Hence we have a new form of power, whose flows of money, ideas and internalised systems of representation, are spread throughout the international system without it being grounded territorial base or state forms of sovereignty.
Is this not a radical reworking of the neo-liberal understanding of the global marketplace? To give it a theoretical twist, the reworking can be interpreted as a categorical analysis in which the categories deployed by classical economics to explain the global market are developed and revised by Hardt and Negri. It is along the lines of what Marx did with classical political economy.
I think that we can put Slavoj Zizek's 'radical chic' to one side.
In this article in The Age Richard Rorty argues that the West is restricting freedom in response to terror. He is right.
He says that we must not acquiesce. He is right about that too.
Hardt and Negri say that the emerging new world order is not appreciated by contemporary theoriests. They spell this out along the following lines.
"Many contemporary theorists are reluctant to recognize the globalization of capitalist production and its world market as a fundamentally new situation and a significant historical shift. The theorists associated with the world-systems perspective, for example, argue that from its inception, capitalism has always functioned as a world economy, and therefore those who clamor about the novelty of its globalization today have only misunderstood its history...proper attention to the....universalizing dimensions of capitalist development should not blind us to the rupture or shift in contemporary capitalist production and global relations of power. We believe that this shift makes perfectly clear and possible today the capitalist project to bring together economic power and political power, to realize, in other words, a properly capitalist order. In constitutional terms, the processes of globalization are no longer merely a fact but also a source of juridical definitions that tends to project a single supranational figure of political power."
"... other theorists are reluctant to recognize a major shift in global power relations because they see that the dominant capitalist nationstates have continued to exercise imperialist domination over the other nations and regions of the globe. From this perspective, the contemporary tendencies toward Empire would represent not a fundamentally new phenomenon but simply a perfecting of imperialism...Without underestimating these real and important lines of continuity, however, we think it is important to note that what used to be conflict or competition among several imperialist powers has in important respects been replaced by the idea of a single power that overdetermines them all, structures them in a unitary way, and treats them under one common notion of right that is decidedly postcolonial and postimperialist. This is really the point of departure for our study of Empire: a new notion of right, or rather, a new inscription of authority and a new design of the production of norms and legal instruments of coercion that guarantee contracts and resolve conflicts."
We ended the last post with a question: What then, is the juridical concept of Empire? In the text under consideration Hardt and Negri say that:
"The theoretical responses to this constitutionalization of a supranational world power, however, have been entirely inadequate. Instead of recognizing what was really new about these supranational processes, the vast majority of juridical theorists merely tried to resurrect anachronistic models to apply to the new problems. To a large extent, in fact, the models that had presided over the birth of the nation-state were simply dusted off and reproposed as interpretive schema for reading the construction of a supranational power. The "domestic analogy" thus became the fundamental methodological tool in the analysis of international and supranational forms of order."
"Two lines of thought have been particularly active during this transition, and as a kind of shorthand we can conceive of them as resurrections of the Hobbesian and the Lockean ideologies that in another era dominated the European conceptions of the sovereign state. "
"The Hobbesian variant focuses primarily on the transfer of the title of sovereignty and conceives the constitution of the supranational sovereign entity as a contractual agreement grounded on the convergence of preexisting state subjects. A new transcendent power, "tertium super partes," primarily concentrated in the hands of the military (the one that rules over life and death, the Hobbesian "God on earth"), is, according to this school, the only means capable of constituting a secure international system and thus of overcoming the anarchy that sovereign states necessarily produce"
And the Lockean? Presumably it would be more constitutionally orientated. Hardt and Negri say:
"By contrast, according to the Lockean variant, the same process is projected in more decentralized, pluralistic terms. In this framework, just when the transfer toward a supranational center is accomplished, networks of local and constitutionally effective counterpowers rise up to contest and/or support the new figure of power. Rather than global security, then, what is proposed here is a global constitutionalism, or really this amounts to a project of overcoming state imperatives by constituting a global civil society."
Back to Empire.
When we move to the first chapter of the text we find Hardt and Negri clearing the ground very quickly. They say:
"The problematic of Empire is determined in the first place by one simple fact: that there is world order. This order is expressed as a juridical formation. Our initial task, then, is to grasp the constitution of the order being formed today."
"We should rule out from the outset, however, two common conceptions of this order that reside on opposing limits of the spectrum: first, the notion that the present order somehow rises up spontaneously out of the interactions of radically heterogeneous global forces, as if this order were a harmonious concert orchestrated by the natural and neutral hidden hand of the world market; and second, the idea that order is dictated by a single power and a single center of rationality transcendent to global forces, guiding the various phases of historical development according to its conscious and all-seeing plan, something like a conspiracy theory of globalization."
That makes a space for us to investigating the constitution of Empire in juridical terms. This is looked at in terms of the:
"... process of the long transition from the sovereign right of nation-states (and the international right that followed from it) to the first postmodern global figures of imperial right. As a first approximation one can think of this as the genealogy of juridical forms that led to, and now leads beyond, the supranational role of the United Nations and its various affiliated institutions.....The U.N. functions as a hinge in the genealogy from international to global juridical structures. On the one hand, the entire U.N. conceptual structure is predicated on the recognition and legitimation of the sovereignty of individual states, and it is thus planted squarely within the old framework of international right defined by pacts and treaties. On the other hand, however, this process of legitimation is effective only insofar as it transfers sovereign right to a real supranational center."
Hardt and Negri interpret Kelsen along neo-Kantian lines:
'Kelsen proposed that the international juridical system be conceived as the supreme source of every national juridical formation and constitution. Kelsen arrived at this proposal through his analyses of the formal dynamics of the particular orderings of states. The limits of the nation-state, he claimed, posed an insurmountable obstacle to the realization of the idea of right. For Kelsen, the partial ordering of the domestic law of nation-states led back necessarily to the universality and objectivity of the international ordering. The latter is not only logical but also ethical, for it would put an end to conflicts between states of unequal power and affirm instead an equality that is the principle of real international community. Behind the formal sequence that Kelsen described, then, there was a real and substantial drive of Enlightenment modernization. Kelsen sought, in Kantian fashion, a notion of right that could become an "organization of humanity and [would] therefore be one with the supreme ethical idea."<4> He wanted to get beyond the logic of power in international relations so that "the particular states could be regarded juridically as entities of equal rank" and thus a "world and universal state" could be formed, organized as a "universal community superior to the particular states, enveloping them all within itself."'
Kelsen is quickly shunted to one side due to the divorce between his formal construction and validity of the system and the material structure that organizes it. Kelsen's remains a fantastic utopia. They locate themselves in:
"... the gap between the formal conception that grounds the validity of the juridical process in a supranational source and the material realization of this conception. The life of the United Nations, from its foundation to the end of the cold war, has been a long history of ideas, compromises, and limited experiences oriented more or less toward the construction of such a supranational ordering. The aporias of this process are obvious, and there is no need for us to describe them in detail here. In the ambiguous experiences of the United Nations, the juridical concept of Empire began to take shape."
This post gives us some insight into Negri's Empire. Shavro over at The Pinocchio Theory says Negri's thinking is grounded in the changes that the world has gone through in the last thirty years or so: changes from industrial capitalism to a "knowledge economy," and from the Cold War to a global marketplace, in which corporations have become more powerful than nation-states. In this new economy, traditional distinctions of place and time, between physical and intellectual labor, and indeed between labor and leisure, have pretty much disappeared. Shavro goes on to say that:
"Basically, Negri argues that capitalist "production" is no longer a specific category or specific portion of society. It is no longer the "base," in comparison to which everything else would be a mere "superstructure." Rather, capitalist production is everything and everywhere -- and quite directly so. It's brain power as well as machinery, leisure time as well as work time, recreation as well as reproduction, inner thoughts as well as outer actions."
Hardt and Negri conclude the Preface of Empire by saying that they "hope to have contributed in this book is a general theoretical framework and a toolbox of concepts for theorizing and acting in and against Empire."
In his what is wrong with left and what can we do about it post Peter Levine says that the US Democrats (social democrats in Australia eg., the ALP), which are:
"... today’s “progressives” are actually conservatives, staving off radical change and defending old institutions as preferable to the market alternatives promoted by Republicans. Bill Clinton is a progressive hero not because of what he built, but because of the proposals he vetoed.Today’s progressives are not only conservative about New Deal institutions. They are eager to conserve natural ecosystems and minority cultures (especially poor, indigenous ones). They are more fiscally conservative than Republicans. They are also more resistant to scientific innovation: witness their response to genetically engineered crops. They have adopted traditional conservative priorities by objecting to federal power in the areas of law enforcement (the USA Patriot Act) and education (No Child Left Behind). And they are the biggest defenders of institutions, such as public broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Humanities, that promote the high culture of the past."
Yet the Hawke/Keating ALP were also the economic revolutionaries as they opened the Australian economy up to the global market, and kicked away a lot of the props of old protectionist Australia int he name of competition policy.
Peter says that the:
"The problem with this kind of conservative “progressivism” is not that it is wrong. Rather, it is politically and rhetorically weak, because it lacks a broad, coherent, forward-looking agenda. School systems, unions, and welfare programs are unworthy of more than half-hearted endorsement, yet no political movement can win by half-heartedly defending the recent past....What the Left needs are new models, new institutional arrangements. The best of these, alas, are still in a nascent, experimental, R&D stage. If that is our problem, then we will get nowhere by playing politics Texas-style. At best, we are now at the beginning of a long, slow process of developing a workable alternative to laissez-faire economics."
Did the Australian social democratic lack a vision of what Australia could become? No. They went beyond defending the past. The Keating ALP had a vision of what Australia could be in a global economy governed by economic flows. It was developed during the early 1990s and was used to fight the 1993 election.
It was what was often referred to as the big picture. This basically married a free market economy to social democracy. Don Watson in Recollections of a Bleeding Heart describes it as a story of progress of an independent Australia
"...towards a modern, competitive, skilled high waged economy replete with jobs that were not a dead-end;...democracy of the broadest kind, the maximisation of rights and liberties, the extension of both individual opportunity and social justice; a post-imperial multicultural Australia [that gave its people] the opportunity to choose those institutions and symbols which reflect their sentiments and reality and not those ogf a bygone era."
In the Preface to Empire Hardt and Negri give a working definition of what they mean by the term. They say:
"We should emphasize that we use "Empire" here not as a metaphor, which would require demonstration of the resemblances between today's world order and the Empires of Rome, China, the Americas, and so forth, but rather as a concept, which calls primarily for a theoretical approach."
"The concept of Empire is characterized fundamentally by a lack of boundaries: Empire's rule has no limits. First and foremost, then, the concept of Empire posits a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality, or really that rules over the entire "civilized" world. No territorial boundaries limit its reign. Second, the concept of Empire presents itself not as a historical regime originating in conquest, but rather as an order that effectively suspends history and thereby fixes the existing state of affairs for eternity. From the perspective of Empire, this is the way things will always be and the way they were always meant to be. In other words, Empire presents its rule not as a transitory moment in the movement of history, but as a regime with no temporal boundaries and in this sense outside of history or at the end of history. Third, the rule of Empire operates on all registers of the social order extending down to the depths of the social world. Empire not only manages a territory and a population but also creates the very world it inhabits. It not only regulates human interactions but also seeks directly to rule over human nature. The object of its rule is social life in its entirety, and thus Empire presents the paradigmatic form of biopower. Finally, although the practice of Empire is continually bathed in blood, the concept of Empire is always dedicated to peace-a perpetual and universal peace outside of history."
If so, then this is a rupture from Aristotle, who held that politics should command the market in order to achieve the good life. It is a radical disrupture.
In my previous post on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire I had casually linked to a post on Peter Levine's blog, which said the democratic left lacked a vision of a better life. Peter is talking specificially about the US, but his remarks also apply to Australia. He says:
"In my view, Democrats and progressives face much deeper problems than Fox News and Karl Rove—problems that also frustrate the Left in Europe; problems that have produced a long, slow decline over two generations. Their crisis is intellectual, not just tactical. It was painfully evident in the primary campaign, when we heard no serious proposals for such change from anyone on the Democratic side.... This void suggests to me that the Left is weak today because of a lack of tough and creative thinking, not because good "progressive" ideas are being suppressed by the mass media."
My concern with revitalising the left is more theoretical; but one based on the actual experience of politics.
That then is the context of my reading Empire:--do Hardt and Negri's develop anything that would help to develop a positive vision for the democratic left, currently endeavourign to conserve our civic culture from the series of attacks by the conservatives?
After saying that the new global form of sovereignty is what they call Empire Hardt and Negri distinquish empire from imperialism. They say:
"By "Empire,"... we understand something altogether different from "imperialism." The boundaries defined by the modern system of nation-states were fundamental to European colonialism and economic expansion: the territorial boundaries of the nation delimited the center of power from which rule was exerted over external foreign territories through a system of channels and barriers that alternately facilitated and obstructed the flows of production and circulation. Imperialism was really an extension of the sovereignty of the European nation-states beyond their own boundaries. Eventually nearly all the world's territories could be parceled out and the entire world map could be coded in European colors: red for British territory, blue for French, green for Portuguese, and so forth. Wherever modern sovereignty took root, it constructed a Leviathan that overarched its social domain and imposed hierarchical territorial boundaries, both to police the purity of its own identity and to exclude all that was other.The passage to Empire emerges from the twilight of modern sovereignty. In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow."
Hardt and Negri then go on to give a Marxist account of the transformation of the modern imperialist geography of the globe. They say that the realization of the world market signal a passage within the capitalist mode of production. Capital seems to be faced with a world defined by new and complex regimes of differentiation and homogenization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization.
Fair enough. We have through that radical transformation in Australia during the last two decades. Hardt and Negri add:
"The construction of the paths and limits of these new global flows has been accompanied by a transformation of the dominant productive processes themselves, with the result that the role of industrial factory labor has been reduced and priority given instead to communicative, cooperative, and affective labor. In the postmodernization of the global economy, the creation of wealth tends ever more toward what we will call biopolitical production, the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another."
So how do we understand it?
This looks to be the full text of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire. I have not read the book, but I have noticed that this upbeat lefty text has been widely reviewed. I presume that it can be read in contrast to the views of the conservative and neo-liberal right—eg., Fukuyama, Nye, Huntington, Luttwak, Friedman, Brzezinski—who have spelt out what I see as the field of US hegemony in geo-politics, economics and mass culture.
So I will work my way through the text here. My reason for this is that since the 1980s there has been a notable gap between ordinary people trying to live in the way they want with the nation state and the systems of political and economic power that defeat them. What is going on here apart from defending the institutions of the welfare state from the revolutionary neo-liberals attempts to privatise them health, education, water, electricity, public broadcasting? My concern here is: "does the democratic left have a positive vision of a nation state and the good society in a global world? Or is it just a defensive stance? Is the Third Way of a Latham-led ALP all there is on the table? Is the Third Way it?
The Preface of Empire opens with the following remarks:
"Empire is materializing before our very eyes. Over the past several decades, as colonial regimes were overthrown and then precipitously after the Soviet barriers to the capitalist world market finally collapsed, we have witnessed an irresistible and irreversible globalization of economic and cultural exchanges. Along with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule-in short, a new form of sovereignty. Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world.Many argue that the globalization of capitalist production and exchange means that economic relations have become more autonomous from political controls, and consequently that political sovereignty has declined. Some celebrate this new era as the liberation of the capitalist economy from the restrictions and distortions that political forces have imposed on it; others lament it as the closing of the institutional channels through which workers and citizens can influence or contest the cold logic of capitalist profit. It is certainly true that, in step with the processes of globalization, the sovereignty of nation- states, while still effective, has progressively declined. The primary factors of production and exchange-money, technology, people, and goods-move with increasing ease across national boundaries; hence the nation-state has less and less power to regulate these flows and impose its authority over the economy. Even the most dominant nation-states should no longer be thought of as supreme and sovereign authorities, either outside or even within their own borders. The decline in sovereignty of nationstates, however, does not mean that sovereignty as such has declined."
And the primacy of the nation state has declined. You only have to think of the jobs moving offshore to realize that. The nation-state---Australia or the US---does not possess the power to prevent these economic flows.
But that does not mean that sovereigny has declined. I'm open to suggestion on what this could mean.
Sovereignty is generally seen as the supreme authority within a territory, and the terrority can be the globe or any part of it. So we can have historical manifestations of sovereignty. The nation state would be one such manifestation. It's power is now being circumscribed by the global market.
Hardt and Negri say that their " basic hypothesis is that sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire."
Okay, I'm open to considering a new form of sovereignty in a global world. One that looks to be along economic lines. What we have is a re-thinking of sovereignty.
About time too. Sovereignty had ben too closely tied to the nation-state for too long.
I just stumbled across this response by Dirk Martin Grube to the Joseph Margolis article considered in the previous post. The Grube article is called, Pragmatism: A bridge between Anglo-American and Contintental Philosophy?, and it interprets Margolis to be saying that:
"Like Rockmore does in his contribution, Margolis takes as the vantage point for his considerations the existence of three distinct sorts of philosophies, viz. Anglo-American analytic philosophy, Anglo-American pragmatism and continental philosophy. His sympathies lie with pragmatism. And the thesis that matters most for our present purposes is that pragmatism is, as he calls it in the written version, ‘…perhaps a connective tissue spanning the great divide between…analytic and continental philosophy’.The reason that it makes a chance of being such a connective tissue is that it is to a good extent capable of avoiding the weaknesses of both analytic and continental philosophy while retaining their respective strengths".
But what does that mean? Grube says Margolis means:
"...that the philosophical contest within the Anglo-American confines is, or, rather, should be decided in favor of pragmatism over analytic philosophy. That being the case, the best insights Anglo-American philosophy has to offer can be used to augment continental philosophy. And stripped of its pretentions to exceed the human in the direction of the necessary and stripped of all privileges, cognitive or otherwise, continental philosophy is not as strongly at odds with Anglo-American philosophy as is usually assumed."
Does Grube buy this account? He thinks otherwise. He wants to
"....insist that it is not analytic philosophy as such that is committed to scientism and naturalizing tendencies but, rather, that this is the case where some analytic philosophers have taken a wrong turn. But analytic philosophy can be pursued without such allegiances, say, be reconstructed in terms of more or less formal, i.e. (in the broad sense of the word) logical concerns—in line with the intentions that lay at its origin. That way of putting the matter allows you to take a more moderate stance towards analytic philosophy and to regard pragmatism as an important improvement on it rather than as its substitute."
What the revisionism suggests is that “analytic” philosophy is a style of doing philosophy, not a philosophical program or a set of substantive views. Analytic philosophers aim for argumentative clarity and precision; draw freely on the tools of logic. And they identify more closely with the sciences and mathematics than with the humanities. In other words, "analytic" philosophy no longer has a substantive research programme. “Analytic” philosophy--as a substantive research program--is dead.
Brian Leiter's popular revisionist account holds that "continental philosophy is distinguished by its style (more literary, less analytical, sometimes just obscure), its concerns (more interested in actual political and cultural issues and, loosely speaking, the human situation and its “meaning”), and some of its substantive commitments (more self-conscious about the relation of philosophy to its historical situation). "
Then Leiter makes a defence of the analytic school after conceding that it is has limitiations by attacking postmodernism through the category of good philosophy and bad philosophy. He says:
"Whatever the limitations of "analytic" philosophy, it is clearly far preferable to what has befallen humanistic fields like English, which have largely collapsed as serious disciplines while becoming the repository for all the world’s bad philosophy, bad social science, and bad history. (Surely English professor “celebrities” like Stanley Fish and Andrew Ross are fine contemporary examples of “the man of letters who really is nothing but ‘represents’ almost everything, playing and ‘substituting’ for the expert, and taking it upon himself in all modesty to get himself paid, honored, and celebrated....”) When compared to the sophomoric nonsense that passes for “philosophizing” in the broader academic culture--often in fields like English, Law, Political Science, and sometimes History--one can only have the highest respect for the intellectual rigor and specialization of analytic philosophers. It is also because analytic philosophy remains very much a specialty that it is possible to rank departments: the standards of success and accomplishment are relatively clear, maintained as they are by a large, dedicated scholarly community."
"...increasingly meaningless label: much of what philosophers do on the European Continent these days is "analytic" philosophy or historical scholarship. A small minority of philosophers in the U.S., it is true, still use the label 'Continental philosophy' to demarcate whatever someone suitably obscure has done in Paris recently, or to signify a commitment to a particular brand of phenomenology that is largely defunct everywhere, including in Europe."
Tricky huh?
What has happened to the awareness of "method” of doing philosophy that is underpined by certain pre-philosophical commitments regarding human nature, ontology, knowledge etc.
Often we hear about the continental analytic divide in academic philosophy. Most of the emphasis is on what divides. Only rarely is the commonality (the bridge over the divide?) between the different schools explored.
This paper, Pragmatism's Advantage, by Joseph Margolis from the The Rapprochement of the Anglo-American and Continental Philosophical Traditions conference is an exception. It explores the commonality.
True, there is lots of misleading guff on Hegel and Geist. But we can put to one side since it is pretty much the standard run of the mill stuff. We can also put to one side Margolis' privileging of pragmatism as the overcoming of opposition between analytic and continental philosophy. It is a standard rhetorical ploy of American pragmatists.
I sideline the Geist account of the differences between the analytic and continental schools because Margolis is able to capture some of the similarities and differences between analytic and continental philosophy: ones that resonate with my own lived experiences.
What Margolis says about the differences is the following:
"Pragmatism is poised...between the extremes of analytic and continental philosophy of the sorts now mentioned. It isolates as a distinct question the question of the right analysis of the human being as such, in the very context in which we arrive at a realist picture of the world ample enough for all intelligent life. Analytic scientism precludes constructivism: hence, precludes the Kantian and post-Kantian resolution of the Cartesian paradox."
"Pragmatism is committed to bringing the account of the human down to scale, without yielding to any premature form of ‘naturalizing’ or to any form of privilege or ontic necessity or unexaminable faculty or, worse, the revelations of Being itself, which are (as Heidegger candidly admits) utterly alien and unbidden! .....That is the basis of its opposition to the extreme proposals of analytic scientism and Husserlian and post-Husserlian phenomenology: the one, in the direction of naturalizing; the other, in the direction of anti-naturalism."
Where Margolis is misleading is when he says that this recoil leads to anti-naturalism. It is misleading because not every continental philosopher recoiled from natural science by running back to God. Marx was a naturalist. Okay, so Marx was an economist not a philosopher. What about Nietzsche and Merleau Ponty then? Hell, you can even give a naturalist interpretation of Hegel's texts---I would. The same with Heidegger.
What we have in continental philosophy is a different kind of naturalism--one that is more concerned with society rather than nature: one that takes its pathway from Hegel's Philosophy of Right and Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals.
Now Margolis does acknowledge this, when he says that pragmatism as a naturalism or realism is:
"...a cousin to any corresponding movement from the continental side that recoils from vestigial privileges in the ‘corrective’ work of figures like Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger.....Once the temptations of new forms of privilege are set aside, we begin to glimpse the prospect of an abundance of continental theories that may claim a history pertinently similar to pragmatism’s history and something of a cognate idiom. There’s the clue to pragmatism’s current ‘advantage.’ I find that prospect more than prefigured in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and, say, the Frankfurt Critical program, both of which have been judged hospitable to themes very close to those favored by pragmatism. But the evidence (often tantalizing and inconclusive) may be drawn as well from figures like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Franois Lyotard, and others loosely collected as post-structuralists."
"Both feature a Heideggerean reading of what it is for a human being ‘to have a world’ or to investigate physical nature scientifically within the terms of a human world. ‘Having a world,’ Olafson maintains, cannot be captured by, or reduced to, the conceptual idiom usually thought adequate, in Anglo-American analytic philosophy, for the descriptive and explanatory work of the natural sciences. ... Here, I would say, we find ourselves in the neighborhood of a fresh beginning bridging the shared strengths of pragmatism and continental philosophy and directed (at least in part) against the egregious scientisms of analytic philosophy. ‘Having a world,’ I would say, is, at least initially, common ground between Husserl, Heidegger, and Dewey—and, for that matter, Hegel."
In this paper Tom Rockmore charts the structure of twentieth century philosophy. It is part of a conference concerned with the Rapprochement of the Anglo-American and Continental Philosophical Traditions
Rockmore starts by stating the obvious:
"If we limit the question for the moment to roughly the last hundred years, we know that towards the beginning of the twentieth century, at a time when other philosophical tendencies were in the ascendant, three important movements emerged independently, movements which for different reasons rapidly came to dominate the debate: American pragmatism, so-called continental philosophy, and Anglo-American analytic philosophy.These three tendencies are very different, independent, and cannot be reduced to each other. Much of the discussion over the ensuing century takes the form of a contest for hegemony between them fought out in the philosophical space."
Rockmore goes back to Kant to anwer this. Again fair enough. because Kant is the philosophical crossroads in modernity.
But he come up with a conservative response when he says that the problem of knowledge is the key. He says:
"With respect to this theme, progress in philosophy concerns progress in formulating an acceptable theory of knowledge. Kant is a turning point since he points out clearly that theories of knowledge based on metaphysical realism must fail since no coherent account can be given of the relation of representations to objects. He shows that the most promising modern alternative, if epistemological scepticism is to be avoided, lies in working out some form of constructivist approach to knowledge on the basis of empirical realism.If this is the criterion, then philosophy in the twentieth century has mainly been making time in different ways. Though some philosophical tendencies have diverged from the problems of knowledge, others have continued to repeat the concerns of the past without learning from the results of the prior discussion. All too often philosophers in the last century have restated interest in forms of metaphysical realism for ontological (Heidegger) or epistemological purposes (Husserl, Davidson, Rorty, Carnap, the early Wittgenstein). It has often failed to draw the lessons of the critical philosophy in trying to build on the results of the debate in carrying forward the most important insights of the modern debate."
The key text here is Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. That really does open new ground, even if it is largely an unread text these days. That text historicized philosophy, lead to the rejection of the God's eye view and introduced movement or becoming.
A Hegel quote. It is dense but it is good.
"The manner of study in ancient times differed from that of the modern age in that the former was the proper and complete formation of the natural consciousness. Putting itself to the test at every point of its existence, and philosophizing about everything it came across, it made itself into a universality that was active through and through. In modern times, however, the individual finds the abstract form ready-made; the effort to grasp and appropriate it is more the direct driving forth of what is within and the truncated generation of the universal than it is the emergence of the latter from the concrete variety of existence.Hence the task nowadays consists not so much in purging the individual of an immediate, sensuous mode of apprehension, and making him into a substance that is an object of thought and that thinks, but rather in just the opposite, in freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity so as to give actuality to the universal, and impart to it spiritual life. But it is far harder to bring fixed thoughts into a fluid state than to do so with sensuous existence."
Hegel is suggesting that the ancient Greeks faced the task of wresting abstract ideas ("universals") from the flux of the sensory. The moderns thinkers are suffocated by the proliferation abstractions--abstract categories, concepts, and numbers.
What then of postmodernity? What do we do in the world of the society of the spectacle and the realm of the internet and cybernetic?
Do we go from the universal to the concrete or particularity?
From the abstract universal to the concrete universal?
This story is of ethical interest.
A pregnant woman walked into the emergency department of Melbourne's Royal Women's Hospital one day in late January, 2000. Leaning heavily on her husband, the 40-year-old was hysterical after learning that her unborn child suffered from the non-fatal abnormality, dwarfism. She begged staff on the ward to help her. She wanted her 32-week-old foetus aborted. She was adamant. If the hospital refused to help, she said she would kill herself. Or travel to Asia, where she believed she would find someone willing to perform the operation.
After the woman was examined and counselled over the next few days, staff, including a psychiatrist, a geneticist and an obstetrician, were convinced that if the pregnancy was not terminated, even at this late stage, the woman would commit suicide. A "foetal reduction" was carried out and the baby, a girl, was stillborn. Although the woman did not see the child, she named her Jessica.
Later-term abortion is performed in major obstetrics hospitals around the country in cases where serious foetal abnormality is present. In Jessica's case, the abnormality was not fatal; instead, the doctors' reasons for terminating were based on their overriding concern that the woman's life was at risk. The doctors raised the option of the woman continuing with the pregnancy and giving the child up for adoption. The couple rejected this. The woman had a history of mental illness and had attempted suicide several times in the past.
Though abortion is illegal in Victoria, 1969 Victorian Supreme Court ruling that permits abortion when there is a serious danger to the pregnant woman's physical and mental health. Yet the law is grey. The Victorian Crimes Act prevents a woman who is over 28 weeks pregnant – the point in gestation where the foetus is deemed "viable" – of "unlawfully" destroying a child that is capable of being born alive. It carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison.
There was an internal hospital inquiry into the case. It found there was some uncertainty in the diagnosis and that the woman's case notes were incomplete. The inquiry noted there was less clinical support for late termination of pregnancy, where there is some doubt about the diagnosis or where the foetal abnormality is less severe. The inquiry concluded the doctors acted in good faith, given the circumstances, and cleared them of any wrongdoing.
A a staff member referred the case to the hospital's adverse events committee. There were deep ethical concerns among some staff at the hospital and hospital management took the unusual step of going public. It suspended the three doctors involved and referred the case to the state coroner. The hospital said at the time it was unclear from the medical records whether a lethal injection had been administered to the baby before the birth was induced.
Two years ago, the state coroner's office ruled it did not have the jurisdiction to investigate the termination because the baby had been born dead, though the acting Victorian government solicitor provided advice to the coroner that his office did have jurisdiction over the case. However, the state coroner, Graeme Johnstone, agreed to release the woman's private medical records to Victorian National Party senator Julian McGauran, an anti-abortion politician, then sealed the file prohibiting anyone else from access.
Using information in the records, McGauran lodged a complaint with the Medical Practitioners Board of Victoria, accusing the doctors involved of malpractice. McGauran says the doctors broke the law by agreeing to terminate such an advanced pregnancy.
Victoria's Health Services Commissioner Beth Wilson is appalled by the coroner's actions, saying the files should never have been released. The Medical Practitioners Board of Victoria was deeply divided over whether to launch an inquiry. It determined it didn't have a legal basis to refuse. The board was forced to seek a search warrant after the Royal Women's Hospital refused to hand over the files, citing patient confidentiality. The hospital opposed the order and it is on that issue that the court will rule at the end of April.
In response to claims that his complaint Medical Practitioners Board of Victoria was politically motivated McGauran says that:
"I am trying to draw a legal distinction between early- and late-term abortion. I know I don't have the public's support on early termination but I don't believe the community wants abortions at 32 weeks and no institution should allow distressed patients on the edge of suicide to dictate medical practice or ethics."
In an earlier post I mentioned the closure of American liberalism as it is expressed in the New York Review of Books. In this post I want to spell out this sense of closure a bit by picking up on a particular American response to the powerful critique of modernity and liberal democracy by both conservatives and marxists. That critique has been explored on this weblog in terms of a critique of an instrumental economic/technological reason.
Take this review of two books by Richard Wolin and Mark Lilla that address what they define as the perennial conflict between philosophy and political power. Both texts address this conflict in terms of the intersection of philosophy and tyranny through a series of philosophical–biographical sketches of some of the most noteworthy European intellectuals of the past century.
In his book Heidegger’s Children (which I haven't read) Richard Wolin argues that Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse embraced and endorsed tyranny (and rejected liberal democracy) because they all ultimately "accepted . . . [the] series of deep–seated prejudices concerning the nature of political modernity" that they acquired largely from Heidegger.
What are these deep-seated prejudices and how are they different from assumptions or traditions I wondered. Judging from the review these deep seated prejudices appear to be the antiliberal "Zeitgeist of the interwar years" in Germany, an antimodern Catholicism, and being "elitist" and "aristocratic". That appears to be that.
This is pretty thin. It reminds me of this experience. it only gets off the grround when Heidegger's philosophy is taken as bad because it leads to, or causes his fascist politics. You can sense Wolin's closure here with both Bataille and Foucault. These are anti-liberal too and they must be repulsed. There is no need to probe too deeply into their insights into the way power works in liberal society; or their attempts to develop an alternative kind of reason to the instrumental reason of modernity. They are contaminated by their association with tyranny.
In contrast, Mark Lilla in his The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics does mention a number of arguments for the intersection of philosophy and tyranny--what Lilla calls The Lure of Syracuse. In the words of the reviewer:
"Lilla considers, and rejects, a number of different theories that have been proposed as explanations over the years. The philosophical choice for tyranny cannot be traced solely to an overabundance of "rationalism," as Isaiah Berlin and the members of the Frankfurt School have claimed. But neither can simple–minded "irrationalism" of the kind emphasized by Jacob Talmon be blamed. And while Raymond Aron was right to point out the dangers of an excess of "commitment" on the part of French intellectuals, such German scholars as Fritz Stern and Jürgen Habermas have been correct to identify the opposite tendency ("disengagement") as the crucial defect in many others. "
"...blissful kind of madness" that love can induce, whether its object is "another human being or . . . an idea . . . [of] eternal truth, justice, beauty, [and] wisdom." When such passions refuse the discipline that "the philosophical life aims to provide," they come to dominate the soul. And when that love is inspired by ideas, the results can be disastrous, especially when the love–struck intellectual attempts to realize his ambitions in politics."
Presumably liberals engage in daily Stoic practices of self-control and moderation. It is not what I saw in Federal Parliament.
I've been a bit inward turned of late because I have so little time to read or surf the web. With a little more time up my sleeve I've come across this article on Schmitt by Alan Wolfe.
I recall reading Wolfe when a postgraduate. So it caught my eye. Wolfe says that Schmitt has become the darling of the left in search of a way to renovate Marxism; a left that still has a soft spot for totalitarianism.
Hmm.
Might it not be the case that the texts of Schmitt offer an insight into how politics works in liberal society?
Wolfe's is a fluff piece but he does make an interesting point. He says that:
"In short, the most important lesson Schmitt teaches is that the differences between liberals and conservatives are not just over the policies they advocate but also over the meaning of politics itself."
You can see the American liberal rejection/closure at work in this paragraph
"To the degree that conservatives bring to this country something like Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction, they stand against not only liberals but America's historic liberal heritage. That may help them in the short run; conservative slash-and-burn rhetoric and no-holds-barred partisanship are so unusual in our moderately consensual political system that they have recently gotten far out of the sheer element of surprise, leaving the news media without a vocabulary for describing their ruthlessness and liberals without a strategy for stopping their designs. But the same extremist approach to politics could also harm them if a traditional American concern with checks and balances and limits on political power comes back into fashion."
I read stuff like this and think---its academic. The New York Review of Books is full of a closed liberalism that rejects--not engages with---anything from the European content that is unpalatable. This bloodless liberalism fails to make not contact with the nitty gritty reality of political life. These liberal academics need to do a tour of duty in Congress. Maybe then they will begin to reflect on the unreason within a liberal polity.
You can see the repudiation in this paragrah:
"Because he showed so little appreciation for the American liberal tradition, Schmitt, supposedly a theorist of power, misunderstood the most powerful political system in the world."
So why not engage with Schmitt rather than play?
Is not the American liberal polity creaking in its joints? Is is not turning its back on the republic in favour of empire? Does it not currently work in the name of the exceptional.
Was not 9/11 but an exceptional situation that calls for the emergence of a potentially all powerful sovereign who rescues the constitutional order from its own technical and formal procedures? Do not the consequences of 9/11 indicate that Americans aspire to a world state because they make universal claims for their way of life? Do they not view liberal democracy as something they are morally bound to export? Are they not pushed by ideology, as well as by the nature of their power, toward a universal friend/enemy distinction?
Answering in the affirmative is what makes sense from the edge of the empire here in Australia.
Could not the unreason of political reason be linked to myth?
If politics is about fear of violent destruction (death) then how does the state hold sway in society. I kept on thinking about that as I walked the long corridors of federal parliament late at night. It was eerie.
I was acutely aware of being a part of a political machine---its Hobbesian imagery I know. That was how I experienced it.
I asked myself: 'How does this conservative government of John Howard rule'? How is it able to stay in power in a liberal democracy.
It was not by the sword since it was a federal liberal democracy. Yet it ruled---retained power---by activating fear of violent death from terrorists whom, it warned, could strike anytime, anywhere. This way of ruling the citizenry was far more obvious with the imperial Bush presidency in the US. They have terror alerts being announced all the time.
The fear of violent death that was so activated has a sublimal undercurrent---the emotion of terror.
How then did it govern?
Through myth. Myth held things together. That is all that I could come up with. Yeah I know its Hobbes again.
The state was a some creaky machinery in the service of ensuring the physical protection of the governed. The fear created was both real (the Bali bombings) and mythic (terrorist cells are everywhere in the body politic).
What then was the myth? Terror? Or Absolute Terror
That was where I got stuck. I then went about doing the job I had been contracted to do.
One of the things that I notice about federal Parliament was how its long corridors are filled with groups of organized lobbyists going about their business. Groups of them are everywhere. And they start early---around 8.30 am. After doing some of the rounds of those they were trying to persuade they would hang about Aussies---the coffee shop in Parliament House--- with mobiles glued to their ears. They are taking a break whilst they waited for the next set of appointments. They were (mostly) men with a purpose who had a glint in their eye and a determined gait.
Most of the lobbyists were trucking off to the minsterial offices. Some (the big energy companies) camped in the foyer of Ministers offices. The ministeral entrance to Parliament swarmed with their comings and goings. Many, from the big end of town, had far more more direct access to the Ministers than did the individual Senators. Is this not a probelm?
So what was their business? What were the lobbyists up to? What were they trying to achieve? What was the significance of all this activity of persuasion and cajoling? (The energy companies cajole rather than persuade.)
For many lobbying is seen to be benign as it is a part of the workings of democracy. It is the process of pluralism and persuasion at work, not the existence of violent factions with a sword in their hand. On this account lobbying is more a briefing rather than political warfare. It is the way political reason worked.
I saw it differently. In the field of health the briefing was the appearance. The reality was armed antagonism. The lobbyist groups (eg., the AMA) were a band of warriors who had declared the right to evaluate self-protection in its own way and to act accordingly. Each had claimed the right to judge the political as a conflict between friend and foe.
This is interpreting the actions and statements of the lobbyists through the eyes of Carl Schmitt. I saw them representing commercial power and so they were a counter force to the liberal state. Though many of the business lobbyists did not possess political power, many of them were were in a position to prevent the state from exercising that power. Thus the energy companies prevented the efforts to give a greater role to renewable energy.
If Parliament is what is left of the original lethal clash between king and commons, and is the continuation of this civil war, then it is a form of warfare that has renounced killing and is carried on by other means. The lobbyists represented the intensification of the internal antagonism in civil society.
For Schmitt the pluralism of democracy means a hollowing out of the power of the state, the fragmenting of political unity, and ongoing destablizing division. Unity can only be maintained when two or more parties recognize common premises of the Constitution. The ethic of the state becomes the ethic of the Constitution, and it is the Constitution that forms the ground of real political unity.
Will this be called into question with the forthcoming industrial relations legislation We saw something of this warfare in the 1990s when Peter Reith was Minister of Employment and Industrial Relations. Remember all that conflict on the wharfs?
Schmitt's Hobbesian account makes sense.
The danger is that in a liberal democracy the Constitution becomes to be seen as the little more than the rules of the game and its ethic degenerates into the convention of fair play. The threat of conflict getting out of hand is part of the politically possible present. It is the threat the political order must continually ward off.
My month to six weeks contract work to do philosophy inside the machinery of federal Parliament is drawing to a close.
My very intense experience over the last month of dealing with the conflicts within the political machinery of the state reaffirmed Carl Schmitt's thesis that the essential political distinction is the one between friend and enemy.
That distinction is fundamental and elemental.
Without it the strife, chaos and passion of politics makes little sense. Politics in Parliament is a case of armed autonomous armed groups (political parties) confronting one another across a shifting political battlefield. It is a kind of ongoing civil war.
Within that battle field fear is the key emotion. The fear of being destroyed by one's enemy.
Outside the media prism the conflict within political life looks like mud slinging. But inside the political institutions the conflict has a different existential quality. In the Concept of the Political Carl Schmitt describes it this way:
"Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme cases of conflict. Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one's own form of existence." (p. 27)
However, the threat of danger is ever present. As Thomas Hobbes indicates the essence of war iconsists not in the actual fighting but the known disposition to do so. Within Schmitt's enemy concept is the ever present possibility of conflict.
This is an interesting paper. It is by Lisa Martin and it is on multilateralism. She says:
"I begin by examining the concept of multilateralism, both in theory and in history. I then turn to an analysis of multilateralism, asking why the United States turned to multilateralism after World War II and evaluating its payoffs. The final section applies the insights developed in the rest of the paper to the future of multilateral organizations. It concludes that the current policy of “ad hoc multilateralism,” or turning to multilateral organizations opportunistically, fundamentally misunderstands the nature and motivation for multilateralism. Such a policy is therefore likely to fail, leaving the United States with a stark choice between expensive unilateralism and needing to rebuild its reputation as a reliable participant in multilateral endeavors."
"Multilateralism is remarkable in that it does not give a privileged position to the hegemon. If generalized operating principles are put into place, the hegemon is subject to the same rules as others. As noted above, multilateral principles were not respected fully. Yet it is striking that this immensely powerful state championed principles and norms that served to bind itself; it created institutions that were premised on the notion that even the United States would play by the rules it asked others to accept."
The rules of multilateralsim implied some notion of moral obligation and duty.