Bad theory

Almost forty years now of theory widely practiced in the US--and we only have a general sense of what theory is. It's a notorious problem that is actually its own solution: theory is one of the only fields where knowledge doesn't know what it has to be. So perhaps we shouldn't ever have to lock down what it is. Neverthless, it has assumed certain shapes. These too should not be avoided or combated in the name of preserving continual micro-self-differentiation etc., etc. Rather, bad elements (that is, bad procedures, bad ways of writing into which we slip--bad theorizing rather than bad theoretical positions or theories) should be identified, isolated, and clipped off or left alone to wither. Here then is what might constitute the "bad theory" (and it should be clear that by "bad" I mean something like "defunct" or "spoiled") that we might just hesitate before putting into service yet again, in another empty denunciation of... what have you:

Theory gone bad is theory that tries to assure the unqualified prolongation of theory. Theory should be finite--more than that, it should continually, with each use, project the point at which it might not be of use. Thus even if you want to say theory is immanent to thought itself, and therefore finite in that respect (when thought dies out theory will die out too), it would still be avoiding the issue: the issue is that the production of something different than theory cannot just be problematized from the outside.

Ethical theory is theory gone bad. There is too much talk of ethics and responsibility now, and this produces a lot of bad theory. This is because the use of ethical terms is the quickest way to build a bridge between politics and theory, or rather the politicization that takes place as theory (as I've outlined before) and the realm of society in all its diffuseness. Perhaps it is an attempt to thicken the overquick linkages to the political realm which early theory indeed made. But there's no reason this has to take the form of ethics--except possibly because this allows theory to sound more relevant, to issue more injunctions. At it's limit, this involves the dissolution of everything political about theory into philosophy, which has always been too comfortable with staying out of politics as it is: why ethics and responsibiliy are semi-proper philosophical subjects is because politics often comes to interrupt and situate philosophical speculation, embarrassing it. Theory that strives to be philosophical (or pseudo-philosophical) shouldn't go down the same road. In this respect I agree even with the extreme assertion of Zizek that, within the period under consideration (1933 and a little after), Heidegger's politicization of his philosophy is more valuable than his outlines of the structures of proper philosophizing (in his courses especially) that borders on an ethics--which is what in general I take away from his recent consideration of Heidegger's joining the Nazis (in In Defense of Lost Causes). That doesn't at all make what Heidegger did right--as Zizek would crudely hold, himself couching things in an overblown ethical language which supposes that the value of this could have been disclosed to him personally and guided his action at the same time as that action could represent a value attributed after the fact, which we perceive as the imposition of politics on the situation (this language--increasingly Badiouian--confuses things almost completely, as I've said before regarding Zizek on this fraught issue). But to attribute such value means (however crudely or confusedly) to recognize that politics imposes itself continually and is actively contained and bracketed by philosophies as well as other forms of knowledge. Theory normally attempts to trace what is thereby left out--but with an ethical turn (which was foreshadowed in the "deconstructivism" practiced at Yale by de Man, where people preached to no end about responsibility in reading), it loses its vocation and becomes increasingly irrelevant. At the same time, and insofar as this irrelevance suffuses theory, "the political" comes up more and more, leading us to the next form of bad theory:

Reifying concepts in order to protect them from reification. Such, at least, is the strategy I see behind such ugly invocations of "the political" or "the social." This form of parody only lends itself to a high seriousness that undoes the reason for adopting the parodic gesture in the first place.

Similarly, bad theory trades in commonplaces. These include the use of phrases like "identity politics," which are most of the time just codes for a reactive movement against queer or feminist impacts upon the humanities. But "western metaphysics" is also a commonplace. Eventually, this trade in commonplaces (a dissolution of the commons?) results in a prohibition on experience itself, as each of these are traded in for something supposedly known (and never described in detail)--or turned back into their reified pseudo-philosophical counterpart by the move we just mentioned.

This is related to the bad-theoretical overuse of alterity as a concept. The dynamics in which alterity engages us are ultimately reductive and need to be reopened back up into the contexts (experiential) from which they emerge. Even if the concept is used to precisely fight reduction, to insist on irreducibility, it has become an uncreative way to reorganize a wide array of phenomena along too-familiar lines.

This is also the way that bad theory ends up relying too much on "language," and makes it into a homogenous field through which everything has to pass. Language isn't that important to good theory. Or, rather, when it becomes a crutch, it isn't language.

Next, bad theory quickly displaces social dynamics too quickly into theoretical terms. An example would be the oft cited "subordination of feminism by Marxism." What and who are we actually talking about here? It is here where Foucault's "discourse" comes in to save the day: when in doubt, say discourse does it. Theories of ideology, in comparison, have infinitely more subtlety--and that's saying something. In Foucault himself, the notion is structured (in the Archaeology of Knowledge) to get him out of precisely the dilemma this question (what? who?) produces, as it is posed to him by people who rightly were wondering just how he was able to coordinate so much information concerning the rise of the human sciences. While it's right to insist that the stratifications of discourse, as well as its effectivity (and by means of such insistence, discourse thereby becomes a richer concept in Judith Butler and Edward Said), this might not be enough to rescue the concept from its reduction to an empty field producing too many of those effects. Discourse has to be used more carefully, with more structuralist concepts brought in to thicken the mix.

Bad theory thinks of itself as avant-garde. It has an easy relationship to its own history that sadly ends up mirroring the simplistic histories of ideas which it was supposed to displace. In general, it proceeds as an arrogant new humanism by thinking of itself as a progressive adventure.

Bad theory thinks it only includes by opening itself to multiplicities. While the focus on alterity is reductive, it'd be wrong to see multiplicity as an alternative, or something that does the job better--even if one conceives of it "rightly" (that is, itself fraught with difference or composed only of differences and dimensions, as in Deleuze rather than in Laclau and Mouffe). Multiplicity might not always be the right thing to which a situation must be opened up or in terms of which it should be conceived. Something like totalization can be mobilized against universality and even unity and oneness, as in Sartre or Adorno.

This touches on another aspect of bad theory: it's unwillingness to use more than one or two theories. Bad theory is usually only one or two theories, which gets stuck to or followed to the letter. It's not yet dogma, because it has so much functionality and can in general also be illuminating. But it seeks to eliminate other theories or foreclose their imposition--which occurs often, and as an annoying conceptual muddle--precisely by extending the one position (and flattening or restricting itself so they can be assimilated without reducing them--which would require changing the current stance). Good theory is polyglot and patchwork: it knows when to shut up in one system and shift to another (in other words, it shouldn't proceed by increasing the number of prohibitions upon itself--something nearly all bad theory does--and then get angry at those who misunderstand the minimalist language). Just because the concept itself--here multiplicity--is actually structured (rigorously) in order not to foreclose something, doesn't mean everyone should see how it doesn't exclude something. Everyone shouldn't have to get on your page (or be immanent to whatever) to be on the same page. Moreover, theory should actually open itself up to other things at the edge of theory, which theory isn't--thus I insisted at the beginning on the finitude of theory, which now is rethought spatially--indeed like literary theory and literary analysis. This leads into my last characterization:

Bad theory thinks it itself is politics: while theory represents the politicization (if only by oblique suggestion) of various other fields and their materials and procedures, it has to be interrupted by something from outside itself--or, as theory, has to go someplace other than the lecture hall--in order to actually become something like activism. Along these lines, one shouldn't think that because one's theory says it does not separate a particular conception and politics (like in theoretical Spinozism), introducing the concept into an arena is not political, nor does it link the politicization that might (and only might) thereby occur to actual politics. It's not that there is a gap which we can never bridge--it is simply that politicization and politics itself requires this lack of certainty as to whether it is, in any instance, traversed, as I think Judith Butler (for one) outlines quite well.

One night in Miami...

We are normally given some twenty or twenty-five minutes of the film, to get us interested in it; then four minutes of commercials, then about fifteen more minutes of the film; some commercials again; and so on to steadily decreasing lengths of the film, with commercials between them, or them between the commercials, since by this time it is assumed that we are interested and will watch the film to the end. Yet even this had not prepared me for the characteristic American sequence. One night in Miami, still dazed from a week on an Atlantic liner, I began watching a film and at first had some difficulty in adjusting to a much greater frequency of commercial "breaks." Yet this was a minor problem compared to what eventually happened. Two other films, which were due to be shown on the same channel on other nights, began to be inserted as trailers. A crime in San Francisco (the subject of the original film) began to operate in an extraordinary counterpoint not only with the deoderant and cereal commercials but with a romance in Paris and the eruption of a prehistoric monster who laid waste New York. [...] I can still not be sure what I took from that whole flow. I believe I registered some incidents as happening in the wrong film, and some characters in the commercials as involved in the film episodes, in what came to seem -- for all the occasional and bizarre disparities -- a single irresponsible flow of images and feelings.
-Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, 91-2

What is interesting here is the tendency of the Marxist move, which we see I think most concretely in Williams (that is, it is registered most thoroughly in experience, not theory, or rather in the collapse of the thought-work distinction--a factwhich Adorno talks about), though it's present in Marx to a huge degree already (mostly as blistering theoretical irony--something I feel many readers don't fully understand). This is to rely not on clearer insight into the phenomenon in question, but to a fleeting glimpse captured while in an irrational state, which does not disclose that the totality is irrational, but transforms what, in any other state, you would call rational into an irrational moment (which presupposes an irrational totality indeed, but also determination, in the Hegelian sense). I think this has to be distinguished somewhat from (though no doubt it is related to) a hermeneutics of suspicion. I should give, in conclusion, Williams' general theory of "flow" or rather (since it is determined, through institutions) "planned flow," which tries to make sense of this experience:

What is being offered is not, in older terms, a programme of discrete units with particular insertions, but a planned flow, in which the true series is not the published sequence of programme items but this sequence transformed by the inclusion of another kind of sequence, to that these sequences together compose the real flow, the real "broadcasting." Increasingly, in both commercial and public-service television, a further sequence was added: trailers of programmes to be shown at some later time or on some later day.
-Television, 91

On detraction

Addison's greatest work, I think, was Spectator 253, which was printed on December 20th, 1711. This consideration of Pope's Essay on Criticism becomes a reflection on criticism itself and especially its negative qualities. Addison is quick to reproach Pope for being vicious before being just in his remarks on Dennis, Blackmore, and Milbourne, but this reproach takes place only within a subtle redirection of our attention onto the more valuable parts of Pope's endeavor. Pope was wrong to get bitter and characterize this (in the Epistle to Arbuthnot) as damning by faint praise. This presupposes that what Addison does, which I wouldn't hesitate to call critical and negative, is actually something positive. What we have is a deflection of certain effects of criticism that align the critical act to dispraise and envy, and which can be mistaken for the motivation of criticism itself. What Addison does is assert these effects only really appear in a criticism that is not stridently neutral (to use his word for it), or continually open to the negative (to use Adorno's word). In this essay, he does this by taking on praise itself, as it were, and showing that praise has its origin, not in some flat opposition to criticism and envy, but also in neutrality and negativity. This involves a subtle performance which demands to be considered beyond its face value but neither as pure rhetoric: while in the Epistle Pope considers it to be the latter, indeed at first (in a letter written to Addison just after the piece was published) also misreads it as the former (he thanks Addison for his "candour and frankness in acquainting me with the error I have been guilty of in speaking too freely of my brother moderns"). Can this shuffling between one and another positivity be said to be typical of someone who would hypostatize the critical act, and see it as the mere viewpoint upon various proper or improper objects of criticism? That is, not as a redirection of our relation to those object by mobilizing the viewpoint itself, and showing it cannot remain so fixed? I'll leave that open. Here is the whole essay:

Indignor quicquam reprehendi, non quia crasse
Compositum, illepideve putetur, sed quia nuper.
-Horace

There is nothing which more denotes a great Mind, than the Abhorrence of Envy and Detraction. This Passion reigns more among bad Poets, than among any other Set of Men.

As there are none more ambitious of Fame, than those who are conversant in Poetry, it is very natural for such as have not succeeded in it to depreciate the Works of those who have. For since they cannot raise themselves to the Reputation of their Fellow-Writers, they must endeavour to sink it to their own Pitch, if they would still keep themselves upon a Level with them.

The greatest Wits that ever were produced in one Age, lived together in so good an Understanding, and celebrated one another with so much Generosity, that each of them receives an additional Lustre from his Contemporaries, and is more famous for having lived with Men of so extraordinary a Genius, than if he had himself been the sole Wonder of the Age. I need not tell my Reader, that I here point at the Reign of Augustus, and I believe he will be of my Opinion, that neither Virgil nor Horace would have gained so great a Reputation in the World, had they not been the Friends and Admirers of each other. Indeed all the great Writers of that Age, for whom singly we have so great an Esteem, stand up together as Vouchers for one another's Reputation. But at the same time that Virgil was celebrated by Gallus, Propertius, Horace, Varius, Tucca and Ovid, we know that Bavius and Maevius were his declared Foes and Calumniators.

In our own Country a Man seldom sets up for a Poet, without attacking the Reputation of all his Brothers in the Art. The Ignorance of the Moderns, the Scribblers of the Age, the Decay of Poetry, are the Topicks of Detraction, with which he makes his Entrance into the World: But how much more noble is the Fame that is built on Candour and Ingenuity, according to those beautiful Lines of Sir John Denham, in his Poem on Fletcher's Works!

But whither am I strayed? I need not raise
Trophies to thee from other Mens Dispraise:
Nor is thy Fame on lesser Ruins built,
Nor needs thy juster Title the foul Guilt
Of Eastern Kings, who, to secure their Reign,
Must have their Brothers, Sons, and Kindred slain.

I am sorry to find that an Author, who is very justly esteemed among the best Judges, has admitted some Stroaks of this Nature into a very fine Poem; I mean The Art of Criticism, which was publish'd some Months since, and is a Master-piece in its kind. The Observations follow one another like those in Horace's Art of Poetry, without that methodical Regularity which would have been requisite in a Prose Author. They are some of them uncommon, but such as the Reader must assent to, when he sees them explained with that Elegance and Perspicuity in which they are delivered. As for those which are the most known, and the most received, they are placed in so beautiful a Light, and illustrated with such apt Allusions, that they have in them all the Graces of Novelty, and make the Reader, who was before acquainted with them, still more convinced of their Truth and Solidity. And here give me leave to mention what Monsieur Boileau has so very well enlarged upon in the Preface to his Works, that Wit and fine Writing doth not consist so much in advancing Things that are new, as in giving Things that are known an agreeable Turn. It is impossible for us, who live in the latter Ages of the World, to make Observations in Criticism, Morality, or in any Art or Science, which have not been touched upon by others. We have little else left us, but to represent the common Sense of Mankind in more strong, more beautiful, or more uncommon Lights. If a Reader examines Horace's Art of Poetry, he will find but very few Precepts in it, which he may not meet with in Aristotle, and which were not commonly known by all the Poets of the Augustan Age. His Way of expressing and applying them, not his Invention of them, is what we are chiefly to admire.

For this Reason I think there is nothing in the World so tiresome as the Works of those Criticks who write in a positive Dogmatick Way, without either Language, Genius, or Imagination. If the Reader would see how the best of the Latin Criticks writ, he may find their Manner very beautifully described in the Characters of Horace, Petronius, Quintilian, and Longinus, as they are drawn in the Essay of which I am now speaking.

Since I have mentioned Longinus, who in his Reflections has given us the same kind of Sublime, which he observes in the several passages that occasioned them; I cannot but take notice, that our English Author has after the same manner exemplified several of his Precepts in the very Precepts themselves. I shall produce two or three Instances of this Kind. Speaking of the insipid Smoothness which some Readers are so much in Love with, he has the following Verses.

These Equal Syllables alone require,
Tho' oft the Ear the open Vowels tire,
While Expletives their feeble Aid do join,
And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line.

The gaping of the Vowels in the second Line, the Expletive do in the third, and the ten Monosyllables in the fourth, give such a Beauty to this Passage, as would have been very much admired in an Ancient Poet. The Reader may observe the following Lines in the same View. A needless Alexandrine ends the Song,

That like a wounded Snake, drags its slow Length along.

And afterwards,

'Tis not enough no Harshness gives Offence,
The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense.
Soft is the Strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth Stream in smoother Numbers flows;
But when loud Surges lash the sounding Shore,
The hoarse rough Verse shou'd like the Torrent roar.
When Ajax strives some Rock's vast Weight to throw,
The Line too labours, and the Words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the Plain,
Flies o'er th' unbending Corn, and skims along the Main.

The beautiful Distich upon Ajax in the foregoing Lines, puts me in mind of a Description in Homer's Odyssey, which none of the Criticks have taken notice of. It is where Sisyphus is represented lifting his Stone up the Hill, which is no sooner carried to the top of it, but it immediately tumbles to the Bottom. This double Motion of the Stone is admirably described in the Numbers of these Verses; As in the four first it is heaved up by several Spondees intermixed with proper Breathing places, and at last trundles down in a continual Line of Dactyls.

Kai mên Sisuphon eiseidon krater' alge' echonta
Laan bastazonta pelôrion amphoterêisin.
Ê toi ho men skêriptomenos chersin te posin te
Laan anô ôtheske poti lophon: all' hote melloi
Akron huperbaleein, tot' apostrepsaske krataiis:
Autis epeita pedonde kulindeto laas anaidês.

It would be endless to quote Verses out of Virgil which have this particular Kind of Beauty in the Numbers; but I may take an Occasion in a future Paper to shew several of them which have escaped the Observation of others.

I cannot conclude this Paper without taking notice that we have three Poems in our Tongue, which are of the same Nature, and each of them a Master-Piece in its Kind; the Essay on Translated Verse, the Essay on the Art of Poetry, and the Essay upon Criticism.

Not negative enough

If the whole is the bane, the negative, then the negation of the particularities which have their epitome in that whole remains negative. Its positive would be solely the determinate negation, critique, not a circumventing result, which the affirmation could happily hold in its hand. [...] What is positive in itself is fetishized from the vernacular, in which human beings praise what they positively would be, finally to the bloodthirsty phrase of the positive forces. By contrast what is to be taken seriously about the unwavering negation is that it does not lend itself to the sanctioning of the existent. The negation of the negation does not make this revocable, but proves that it was not negative enough; otherwise dialectics remains indeed what in Hegel it was integrated into, however at the price of its depotentialization, indifferent in the end towards what is posited at the beginning. What is negated is negative, until it has passed away. [...] That the negation of the negation would be a positivity, can only be argued by those to whom positivity, as a universal conceptuality, is already presupposed at the outset. It rakes in the spoils of the primacy of logic over the metalogical, of the idealistic deception of philosophy in its abstract form, justification in itself.
-T.W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics 161-3

Specters of communism

(Thanks to comments from Grant, I revised a lot of this post--see his comments below for some good insights. It is basically an attempt to extend certain frustrations of Fredric Jameson in his essay "How Not to Historicize Theory" to the way the events of the last few weeks were covered in the news. Postscript: the general thrust of this article aligns vigorously with Jiri Pehe's August 24th article on the Prague Spring which everyone should read: there Pehe says "I suspect that our lasting reluctance to discuss the period [of the Prague Spring] openly is, more than anything else, a sign that the trauma of communism is still very much alive today, despite the last 19 years that democracy has had to take root.")
Bill Keller said the following in the Times a couple days ago:

Writing in The Financial Times last week, Chrystia Freeland recalled Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?,” which trumpeted the definitive triumph of liberal democracy. The great nightmare tyrannies of last century — the Evil Empire, Red China — had been left behind by those inseparable twins, freedom and prosperity. Civilization had chosen, and it chose us.
So much for that thesis. Surveying the Russian military rout of neighboring Georgia and the spectacle of China’s Olympics, Ms. Freeland, editor of The Financial Times’s American edition and a journalist who started her career covering Russia and Ukraine, proclaimed that a new Age of Authoritarianism was upon us.
If it is not yet an age, it is at least a season: Springtime for autocrats, and not just the minor-league monsters of Zimbabwe and the like, but the giant regimes that seemed so surely bound for the ash heap in 1989.

This seems completely backwards in so many ways (even in referring by proxy to Fukuyama, who himself has backed away from that thesis for a long time now), but it comes down to the following for me: if we in America think this summer in particular heralds the return of giant post-Communist powers, as Keller says, it is only because here in America we never quite found a way to deal with their passing away.
Now, indeed, Keller himself seems to argue this when he says,

It turns out that if 1989 was an end — the end of the Wall, the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire, if not in fact the end of history — it was also a beginning.

And yet, he doesn't because he puts it in all the wrong terms: precisely the terms of return that I am speaking about. And this misses everything important.
In fact the verbal slip here is indicative: somehow Keller relegates "the beginning" of the end of the Soviets to the category of "end," discounting it as "a beginning," a beginning that was greater than that of an end. In other words, we have the beginning of the end, and then we have the end as a beginning, as a beginning that exceeds any beginning of the end of the Soviet empire. The beginning of the end of the Soviet empire is not really a beginning, even though Keller must still call it only a beginning.
And what does this real beginning, the beginning that exceeds any mere beginning of the end, bring about or begin? In short, resentment. The end of Communism was the beginning of the very indirect, passive aggressive resentment of the West instead of the Cold War's more direct and clear combat with it. And this is the real problem with Keller's analysis, what makes him miss the point entirely: he characterizes Russia as a country that has suffered a particular pseudo-psychological defeat that has been seeting under the surface all these years to resurge in a sort of nationalist aggression like we see now in Georgia. This is why, as he says, 1989 was a real "beginning"--and why saying this is something different than saying that in our "victory" over Communism we have not learned how to cope with its passing (my personal thesis).
Why is this so mistaken? Because it presupposes a sort of psychodynamic or communal-consciousness model of the operation of the state and its people that was probably only valid for thinking about the actions of Nazi Germany--if it is even valid there. Thus, he says the fall of the wall and the disbanding of the USSR did the following:

It gave birth to a bitter resentment in the humiliated soul of Russia, and no one nursed the grudge so fiercely as Vladimir V. Putin. He watched the empire he had spied for disbanded. He endured the belittling lectures of a rich and self-righteous West. He watched the United States charm away his neighbors, invade his allies in Iraq, and, in his view, play God with the political map of Europe.

Very nice, but this is also the way we talked about Bosnia, which, as we will see, is mistaken for the same reason: it moves quickly between an idea of nationalism or community and the idea of totalitarian psychological frenzy, without making clear what allows for the jump across between the two. Furthermore, it seems only to apply to the states of Eastern Europe and anything resembling a Communist or post-Communist society. It is as if, in the words of Sinclair Lewis, it couldn't happen here. In short, one could call it the logic of the losers. But doesn't this betray the fact that it is merely a way of bolstering the idea that we were and still are (despite all signs to the contrary) the winners? Something seething under the surface, the inner core of a repressed Communism: this is what, for Keller, motivates the action and the nationalism going on in Russia now. Similarly, China is seen--though Keller only moves towards this somewhat--quite similarly, since it has supposedly given up its real hardcore Communist core and embraced capitalism.
And as I began to indicate, what the idea of the return of Communism qua failed-resentful-post-Communism does is, however, more important than whether any of this actually really corresponds to the reality of the situation. This idea covers up the extremely pressing issue of dealing with the "minor-league monsters" which Keller dismisses here but are very much a problem of globalization in the wake of the fall of Communism--indeed despite what Paul Krugman maintains. These monsters aren't just hiccups in the process of globalization and--here is the flipside--neither are they the the fallout of the collapse of any major government that would challenge that of the West.
As I suggested earlier, one would need to see how we dealt with the Bosnian War (and Rwanda, and, now Darfur--though I'll confine myself to Bosnia) as the template for precisely how this work of covering up the real problem proceeds. What was so horrible about Bosnia was the similarity to a large scale nationalism working on such a small scale, and yet so effectively: this obviously came to a head in the unbelievable work of ethnic cleansing. (I should note that a great movie on Heidegger, The Ister, makes certain connections between Serbian nationalism and Nazism that are very well thought out and well depicted.) Indeed, we still can't really seem to cope with this sort of nationalism that we find now with Serbians, particularly in their reaction to the arrest of someone so unbelievably evil as Radovan Karadzic. What produces it? We must work here at the level of more minute and precise forces than those Keller seems to naively posit are at work. In other words, we must not be taken in, as Keller is, and so many are, by the size of the nations and the movements involved (the hugeness of China, in particular). At this huge level, the forces needed to unify a movement just fall into all the old categories of propaganda that now seem so extremely irrelevant: is it really the case that Serbs hate other ethnicities because people tell them? Adorno already in his time gives extremely good reasons why this is a bad way of putting the problem (cf. "Education after Auschwitz").
Now, our ignorance in the face of these problems is precisely not what is addressed by the policy we took in Bosnia. That is, this is not because there is no way to address this level of the micro-forces, it is just that our models of action, which stem from the policy of aid and international peacekeeping which were honed in Bosnia, and which devolved into full out war, precisely avoid them. What is needed is a new way of dealing with the spread of globalization and the destabilization that post-Communist or post-authoritarian regimes introduce into it as this spread occurs. Aid has the tendency, it seems to me, to merely compensate for this destabilization and restabilize, but it allows what is problematic--which is precisely not solely economic, nor cultural, but political through and through--to fester anyway. That is, the problem is a political problem, located at the foundation of the political union that constitutes these post-Communist states, and in some cases, can be ethnic. But it is a problem not of seeing these ethnic interests a s things that are psychological--rather one must think them as the thing that unifies the notion of political action. And again not in the sense of propoganda: rather we are dealing with the idea that politics is founded on a notion of a living body of a certain type, and a sort of filiation or purity between its members: in this sense it is very much ethnic, though not in a cultural way. This takes me into further territory, which is too complicated and confusing for me now. I'll wrap this up.
One thing is clear from all this, Communism still remains a specter--one cannot simply, as we have been doing, forget about it by trying to shift certain aspects of it (those that allowed these politico-ethnic regions to somewhat unify under Communism, if they did unify) into areas like culture, separate from the economy or from the operation of the political sphere in these countries as such. The key is to see that Communism does not return into our thinking as a big massive, homogenous albeit weakened force, like we often depict China and how Keller tries to get us to think about Russia (it is homogeneously resentful): we are realizing that our framework for dealing with these problems remains very locally (or rather, ethnic-politically) determined by Communism and Marxism in general as a model. This is chiefly Fredric Jameson's insight, and it is to his credit that he continually insists that this is still actually the greatest unifying discourse of our time.