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.

The social symbolic

If, then, what is called “the symbolic” encodes a socially sedimented heterosexual pathos, how ought the relation between the social and the symbolic to be reconfigured? If the symbolic is subject to rearticulation under the pressure of social arrangements, how might that be described, and will such descriptions trouble any effort to draw a clear distinction between the social and the symbolic? Has the social—within postmarxism—become equated with the descriptively given, and how might ideality (possibility, transformability) be reintroduced into feminist accounts of the social? Such a project would refuse the simple conflation of the domain of the social with what is socially given or already constituted, and reformulate a Marxian account of social transformation outside of implausible historical teleologies. To the extent that views of social transformation have relied on such teleological accounts of history, it seems imperative to separate the question of transformation from teleology. Otherwise, the site of political expectation becomes precisely the incommensurability between a symbolic and a social domain, one in which the symbolic now encodes precisely the ideality evacuated, after Marxism, from the domain of the social.
-Judith Butler, "Against Proper Objects"

To the question "Has the social—within postmarxism—become equated with the descriptively given," one can only answer yes, and it is Butler's ingenuity both to locate this problem unashamedly within the postmarxist discourse in which she works (not unlike Derrida) and resist it through a notion of power's psyche (involving insubordination through iterability and/or resistance in interpellation: see The Psychic Life of Power for the most breathtaking formulation of all this). The Lacanian and Foucauldian (and Deleuzian, perhaps) orientations only get so far in actually outlining what the social actually is: it is in their interest to displace it into some homogeneous symbolic arena or into the pure play of the social itself, placing a huge gap where the question of agency is left suspended at best, and the possibility of collective action continually deteriorates. There are two possibilities for getting out of this particular bind: I see one in Butler, and the other in Fredric Jameson (who would not do so "within postmarxism")--although the Gramscians perhaps also remain a possibility and I think they might be reconciled somewhat to Butler's position (Jameson, however, is also sympathetic to Gramsci). Both seem to recognize the same location of the problem, however--it is right here...

Gramsci Presentation

I gave this presentation to a class this week:

I will not be talking directly about hegemony but instead about something else that comes up quite often in the reading we did for this week and (as we will definitely see when we read Black Reconstruction) in the work of Du Bois: the writing of history. What are the demands of historiography for someone thinking about politics and working out Marxist concerns? This is my question. However, in pursuing it I may be constantly traversing a point at which the effort of writing history (as Gramsci in his notes seems to be approaching it) passes over into a concern that might influence his use of the word “l’egemonia.” If any such point exists, and if I ever do move through it, we might question it with respect to what it gives our understanding of Gramsci (and Du Bois) and what areas the mere possibility of its existence is already excluding from the field of my considerations—in other words, whether and how this point might only also be a blind spot.

This indirect approach might best start with a quotation from Gramsci’s notes towards an account of the Italian unification in the mid-19^th century. Here, according to Gramsci, the Northern urban productive force (i.e. totality of labor + totality of means of production, including instruments and waste) had for various reasons to assemble the Southern urban forces around its lead so as to attain what Gramsci calls homogeneity of internal coherence among all urban forces. But, unlike the urban North, these urban Southern forces were not the leading forces in their own part of the nation: they were often led by the rural force in the countryside. Gramsci shows that these conditions were able to produce a “strident contradiction” that, if made explicit, would produce something incurable, something the Northern urban force could not use its particular homogeneity or cohesion to remedy. If we can, let us try and observe for now precisely how Gramsci is staging or setting this contradiction up as the posing of a question—letting the other complex concerns work themselves out afterwards. “The urban forces,” Gramsci says, in this state of affairs,

are socially homogeneous, hence must occupy positions [across Italy] of perfect equality. That was theoretically true, but historically the question posed itself differently: the urban forces of the North were clearly at the head of their national sector, while for the urban forces of the South that was not true, at least not to the same extent. The urban forces of the North had therefore to persuade [dovevano quindi ottenere] those of the South that their [i.e. the South’s] directive function [funzione dirrettiva] should be limited to ensuring the “leadership” [direzione] of North over South in a general relation of city to countryside. In other words, the directive function of the Southern urban forces could not be other than a subordinate moment [un momento subordinato] of the vaster directive function of the North. The most strident contradiction was created by this series of facts [La contraddizione piú stridente nasceva da questo ordine di fatti]. The urban force of the South could not be considered as something on its own [comme qualcosa a sé], independent [indipendente] of that of the north. To pose [porre] the question in such a way would have meant asserting in advance an incurable “national” rift [un insanabile dissidio «nationale»]—a rift so serious that not even a federalist solution would have been able to heal it [avrebbe potuto comporre]… In reality, however, there existed only certain “aspects” [«aspetti»] of such a national question, not “all” the aspects or even the most essential ones. … In practical terms, therefore, the question posed itself in the existence of a strong center of political leadership, with which strong and popular personalities from the South and the islands would necessarily have had to collaborate (SPN 99-100; Q19§26, 2043-44).

Now, as Gramsci composes this history, he does not oppose the “national question,”—that is, the question about the independence of the Southern urban forces from those of the North—he does not oppose this question to history as some historiographer’s construct or external mechanism that would pretend to make sense of history’s “actual” richness: provisionally, we may say that history for him is something that works itself out in structures similar to questions. However, we can also see that it is essential for him to keep marking the fact that history, though it works out itself in structures similar to questions, does not work itself out in the form of theoretical questions or meta-historical reflections. Thus, when he says, “to pose the question in such a way would have meant asserting in advance an incurable ‘national’ rift,” apparently we must see that the history of the productive forces, and not any particular person or historiographer, is the one posing or putting forth the question, and putting it to themselves. Similarly, we must see that it is opposing and avoiding its own questions by dispersing their disruptive potential into aspects, only some of which actually exist, as Gramsci says. The writing of history, then, appears to consist of looking at the conditions in which the productive forces can pose themselves discernible questions, and tracking the ways certain aspects of these questions, in their existence or non-existence, allow this force to avoid or seize the question through them.

 But what do we mean by this? What exactly is being seized and avoided? This can be put another way: why does Gramsci say that, in reality, only some aspects of the question exist? This is because, as we said peremptorily, the question itself (which, we remember, was the question as to the independence of the urban force of the South from the North) comes from beyond the capacity of productive force of the urban North to remedy it: the question’s aspects reside in that space in which the North’s own homogeneity or cohesion is precisely not enough by itself to endure the question’s possibility. This leads us to a deeper understanding of the role of the question at which Gramsci’s historiography looks. The question of the independence of the Southern urban force is there in the history Gramsci is writing because it is not yet possible for the Northern urban force to actually make this Southern force wholly independent “in reality.” If this were possible, if the Northern force were homogenous enough for this independence to occur, the Northern urban force would not be where it is, within a relation to the South and faced with this question as to whether it is or is not in this relation—indeed this is why actually posing the question would “assert in advance” of posing it that there would be a rift, as Gramsci claims. The only option for the urban North, then, is attempting the unification that would risk asserting the question of its independence from the South so as to avoid asking that very question. This means, on the level of the productive forces, working with what it already has—only aspects of the question, as Gramsci says, since the questions are somehow, by the fact of its cohesion or lack of cohesion, the fact that it cannot be asked merely by or with those productive forces.

What is it beyond these productive forces that could constitute the questions that Gramsci’s historiography traces? In answering this, we can see how historiography may become explicitly related to politics and Marxism for Gramsci. Because we know that it cannot come merely from a productive force, let us suggest that for Gramsci this cohesion or non-cohesion of a productive force resides within its relations—more precisely, in the area of these relations which exceed being merely the productive force itself considered qua productive, i.e. economically. If this is so, the historiography of this productive force can transform itself into analyses of relations of force, which, as Gramsci says,

cannot and must not be ends in themselves (unless the intention is merely to write a chapter of past history), but acquire significance only if they serve to justify a particularly practical activity, an initiative of will. They reveal the points of least resistance, at which the force of will can be most fruitfully applied; they suggest immediate tactical operations; they indicate how a campaign of political agitation may best be launched, what language will best be understood by the masses, etc. (GR, 209; Q13§17).

In order to see this transformation, we must look at where Gramsci effects the expansion of the area beyond productive forces as such: that is, in a few pages within the note titled “Analysis of Situations,” when he differentiates various “moments or levels” in the relations of the productive forces. For reasons of time, I cannot look at all of this differentiation now, but I can look at one of them: the “most purely political phase” (GR, 205) of what he calls the moment of the relation of political forces.

This moment is not as tied to the economic constitution of the productive forces as “the relation of social forces.” It indeed contains economic concerns (or concerns that only relate to the productive forces qua productive,) but in one of the three levels Gramsci specifies it is explicitly questions that, beyond these economic or “corporate interests,” arise. If we can, let us notice again merely how the word “question” must appear and function—again letting other concerns (like that of ideology, the party, etc.) be illuminated perhaps by virtue of this notice. “This is the most purely political phase,” Gramsci says,

and marks the decisive passage from the structure to the sphere of the complex superstructures; it is the phase in which previously germinated ideologies become “party,” come into confrontation and conflict, until only one of them, or at least a single combination of them, tends to prevail, to gain the upper hand, to propagate itself over the whole social area [a diffondersi su tutta l’area sociale]—bringing about not only a unison of economic and political aims, but also intellectual and moral unity, posing all the questions around which the struggle rages [ponendo tutte le quistioni intorno a cui ferve la lotta] not on a corporate but on a “universal” plane (GR, 205; Q13§17).

The “question” as it functions here is not just what makes productive forces risk themselves. It is the means by which they risk and secure for themselves that homogeneity and coherence that they have. By expressing or articulating a particular set of historical questions within its political dimension, a productive force can make all other forces struggle politically (and, as Gramsci says, also economically, intellectually, and morally) around it. These questions, then, would be the political development of contradictions in the historical situation of productive forces that were so particularly problematic that they could not be overcome. If historiography articulates how these political questions are constituted, they will indeed be working out not just the past, but also where force can be applied.

Let me just suggest that it would be in the beginning of the notes on “The Modern Prince” that we might find this articulation regarding how these political forces are constituted. There, it is the particular functioning of the myth that will illuminate the constitution of the currently broad definition we are using of “political.” The absolutely crucial question that these notes prompt us to ask, which is indeed that question towards which all of this has tended, would be whether Gramsci in the end was writing history (in the sense of "the past") in the passage above or constructing a myth. Or both--and have we gone any way in specifying what this conjunction or disjunction would be? We might also ask this of Du Bois next week. The fundamental point for me, however, is that Gramsci is trying to delineate a history that would be absolutely incommensurate in its truth with vanguardism as a practice: vanguards could only be untrue, could only be the populous in the grip of a mistake. But this precisely does not mean that vanguardism does not happen. Indeed, it put Gramsci in jail. But the question we need to ask ourselves--if we are to refine our inquiry--is whether myth or history as "the past" would do this. Or, again, both (or none). We could also conclude by showing that the last quote continues, “and thus creating the hegemony of a fundamental social group over a series of subordinate groups” (GR, 205). Hegemony would thus have already crossed our path somewhere—I’ll venture that point occurred when we moved from how the productive force questioned itself to how it used this questioning to express itself.