Critique and revolution

In what I won't hesitate to say is the single best essay I've read on Derrida, "Marx's Purloined Letter," Fredric Jameson says (I paraphrase) that Derrida committed himself early on to the idea that systemic change was the only change there could be, and yet that this change could itself not be brought about by any existing system. This makes his work resolutely political in a strange, irresolute way: it seems more about preserving the possibility for change than bringing about change itself, as if on the one hand he wanted to freeze in time that ("magic" I think Badiou recently called it) moment between 1960 and 1968, after the post-war philosophies and before the post-68 micropolitics, and on the other, constantly found new ways to unfreeze this possibility in surprisingly relevant ways even into the 21st century. His project is then extremely consistent because it focuses itself on a type of change that has that sort of afterlife within (or before?) its life. This also makes the sort of change it protects extremely (and, for many, frustratingly) hard to realize.

Zizek recently (in In Defense of Lost Causes) characterized current postmodernist discourse as the result of a crisis of Leninism. To me, he's beating a dead horse, more than surprising us with something we should have already known. At most, that is, he's bringing this crisis home to the most ignorant, those who have the most secret sympathies with postmodernism despite allegedly breaking with it long ago, and haven't realized this was true twenty years ago. Sometimes that's necessary of course. But it seems old to me because Derrida seems to see this from the get-go. Thus there is not only explicit resistance to the Leninism of his interviewers in Positions, but also a resistance to giving them any very stable alternative. The alternative is, indeed, that of "overturning and displacement," which he calls a strategy. What I'd like to suggest is that this move here, as well as that of founding an impossible science of grammatology (among other things) are indeed part of an effort to rethink revolution in a way that both resists the classical Leninist position, as well as the more populist-leaning plans one will find after '68, though Derrida has, I think, more sympathy with them. What people often called his resistance to Marxism was indeed a resistance to vanguardism--and, I'd say, to the way vanguardism can creep into postmodern attempts to bypass it.

Spivak said once that Derrida wanted to write a book on Gramsci, but assembling the fragments was so demanding he never got around to it. I have a feeling that the book would indeed be about socialist strategy, but wouldn't quite resemble Laclau and Mouffe's writings. Gramsci indeed offers the alternative to revolution, but not so much by abandoning class, as they say. Acting as if purifying Marxism of class will be a major factor in overcoming the Leninist vanguardism--which Laclau and Mouffe don't entirely do, but which ends up being the postmodern position in general, often using their theses as justification--really only just keeps vanguardism rumbling underground. It is only dispersed into micropolitics of various sorts, pockets of local resistance which we can only add up, or agglomerate. And this only preserves the idea that in the end it is revolution that is the goal.

What Derrida does politically, from the beginning, is challenge any notion that revolution can occur through such local struggle. At the same time, he affirms that what we can see, what we can adequately deal with, will always be local struggle--or will manifest itself only in those terms. So this cuts off the additive connection, and makes us think always about that particular "short-circuit" (to use a Zizekian word) between the local and the totality (and the other way around--how total struggle strikes to form local contradictions). This doesn't exclude reform as a possibility (to pick up the old opposition). Rather, because his position makes reform something less subordinate to revolution, something different than the failed revolution or total change, his position encourages it. The point, though, is that we lose any notion of direction, of leading, and of the agglomeration of small groups of whatever sort that would ultimately end in an overturning of the present order.

Thus there is an intimate connection between revolution and globalization in Derrida: the revolution of the circle does not exclude, but rather encourages, the notion that if we expand our horizons (rigorously excluding what falls from above or rises from below, the Zufall), if we expand our world, we will all, ultimately, be connected and lead together through some great change. In this way, thinking globally and acting locally becomes indistinguishable, at a certain point, from thinking locally and acting globally. Both these propositions pass into each other, but what we find out is that at this moment, each has lost its meaning--as one can see in various aspects of the "go green" "movement" which Zizek (I think rightly) finds disgusting, along with the other perverse attempts act as if multinational capitalism can be fought through consumption itself (though one shouldn't entirely condemn reform--that follows from what I said above concerning separating it from revolution). Somewhere the system, the totality, has been missed. And this is why Derrida wants us to think revolution differently, in terms of something like strategy which opens onto total effects which it cannot anticipate on a horizon (what he calls the invention of the other).

Now, this also means intense reading of the local--that is, activities that are usually involved in something like critique. Derrida wishes to get beyond critique (thus deconstruction continually opposes itself to criticism), but he isn't against reading (as should be obvious). This, perhaps, hasn't actually been stressed enough: too quickly he was seen as precisely a critic (see Foucault's famous remarks on him at the end of History of Madness, which accuse him of justifying something like infinite explication in old philosophy classrooms--which are weirdly affirmed in the U.S. as what "saves the text" by Paul de Man), that somehow was against the normal way of reading. Everything about this view must be reversed. Meanwhile, one can wonder (with Zizek and many others) whether, at this point, it is actually at the other end of the spectrum that we should be working: thinking, that is, on the level of totalities. The only thing that Derrida did in this area is something Zizek thinks is particularly postmodern: he thought that the experience of thinking a totality had to be something like Benjaminian weak messianism. Perhaps this is indeed postmodern (approaching something like worship of a God without being). But if you tie it back into the thinking of revolution, and the rethinking of vanguardism, we see its origins, at least, are different. Zizek would rightly say that we don't need anything weak right now. But what I'd stress is that Derrida gives us a weakness that is, when perceived against this background, something more productive than what Zizek and various Lacanians have their sights set on (that postmodern religion and religiosity--which I agree can be interesting, but is a weird and suspicious turn for things to take). And what this means is that he offers us a way where elements of the local, which take over the interpretive aspects of the critical, can be retained to fight something like the crisis of Leninism--which indeed ends up in that precise fatalist sort of religiosity (our local struggles can't do anything, our thinking of the global can only be weak, so we just have to keep doing what we're doing, which is emptily criticizing both the local and the whole system at once). For too quickly the call to think new total systems sees itself as opposed to not only criticism, but the activities involved in criticism--like reading and interpretation. What I'd argue is that this can end up being just another form of criticism, now empty of all of its content. Derrida gives us a notion that we can pull away from criticism by modifying its elements, precisely by making the total system bear upon them. If we have now discovered this also means thinking the totality has a relationship to these elements (partially because, with Derrida, we have blinded ourselves to the inner dynamics of institutions, the possibilities of reform within them that are not ultimately directed towards revolution, and focused continually on their forms of founding violence--the other side of the naive recognition that they are, indeed, organized organizations), and perhaps a more important role than this strategic activity, this is perfect--we're not then really claiming that we're giving up all that reading that is involved in making visible, and rendering strategic, the local changes (in other words that the changes will have, for us, local effects). Don't get me wrong: it's not that interpretation and reading are something really great in themselves. But I just want to make clear that there is a danger in renouncing them. This would be to continually convey, in writing and through reading, that giving up writing and reading means we're going to immediately start thinking the totality. And this, I'd claim, might only be the other side of a certain postmodernism (which, people don't seem to remember, specifically militated against interpretation--i.e. Foucault and his historicists), and it tends to creep into certain discourses now that suspiciously lay all the blame on critique, on hermeneutics of suspicion.