REVIEWS Whatever happened to analytical Marxism?

G.A. Cohen, If Youʼre an Egalitarian, How Come Youʼre So Rich?, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2000. xii + 233 pp., £30.95 hb., 0 674 00152 2.

This is a strange and disappointing book. The jokey that Cohen absorbed in the process. The second part and populist title is misleading. In fact the book switches to the analytical philosophy which Cohen contains the Gifford Lectures which Cohen gave in imbibed when he went to college, first to McGill in 1996, but these lack the substance and coherence one Montreal then to Oxford. But autobiography is left expects from such lectures. Indeed, these lectures are behind here; the second part is devoted to a purely a disparate miscellany, some autobiographical some philosophical discussion of Rawlsʼs theory of justice. philosophical, which do not hang together as a whole. There is a tenuous attempt to link these two parts They need to be read ʻsymptomaticallyʼ as the Althus- under the heading of equality. Marxism, claims Cohen, serians used to say, for what they omit as much as for foresees the advent of an equal society as the inevitable what they contain. outcome of the march of history; Rawls sees it as a There is one particularly glaring omission. What- political task; whereas Cohen himself maintains that it ever happened to analytical Marxism? Not so long will come about only if individuals are committed to ago, Cohen was the leading figure of a movement equality in their personal lives and create an egalitar- with that name which promised to bring the self-pro- ian moral ʻethosʼ. However, attention to this theme claimed standards of clarity and rigour of analytical is uneven. The first part barely focuses on it at all. philosophy to Marxism. Following the publication of Rather, it contains an excellent account of ʻtraditionalʼ his Karl Marxʼs Theory of History (1978) – the most Marxism stressing the Hegelian, dialectical theory of important work to emerge from this movement – a history which underlies it – precisely the aspect of group of like-minded thinkers rapidly formed. Apart Marxism rejected by analytical Marxism. from Cohen, prominent members included Jon Elster, Cohen starts from the way in which Marxism, John Roemer and Erik Olin Wright. They were known in Engelsʼs phrase, regards itself as a ʻscientificʼ as as the ʻSeptember groupʼ because they met annually in opposed to a ʻutopianʼ form of socialism. He shows that month, alternatively as the ʻnon-bullshit Marxism how this distinction is based on a Hegelian dialectical groupʼ. All talk of ʻdialecticʼ, together with the other theory of history. For Marxism is first and foremost a mystical trappings of Hegelian metaphysics, was to historical and economic theory which aims to under- be banished. Marxism was going to be ʻrationally stand the workings of the present, capitalist world, reconstructedʼ. rather than to lay down how things ought to be in Soon a stream of books, articles and even a small some ideal future. According to this theory, capitalism secondary literature started to appear. But just as is only a particular and limited stage of historical quickly as it grew that stream seems to have dried up. development. The full working out of the conflicts If this book is anything to go by, even the memory of within it will lead ultimately to its downfall and give it has now been suppressed. Like one of those photo- rise to a new historical stage: socialism. Socialism is graphs of old Bolsheviks from which a purged figure thus born out of the processes of capitalism. Socialist has been airbrushed out, this book has a great gap at political activity should not be regarded as a form the centre where some account of analytical Marxism of social engineering which tries to impose goals ought to be, and, disposed awkwardly around it, are on society from the outside; it functions rather like the components which went towards its formation. a midwife helping with the birth of the new social Even that, however, is enough to make clear what an order. impossible project analytical Marxism set for itself. Cohen calls this the ʻobstetric motifʼ in Marxism The book comprises two quite disparate and – an ugly phrase for what in Marx is a powerful irreconcilable parts. The first begins with an autobio- and poetic metaphor. Cohenʼs use of language is so graphical account of Cohenʼs communist and secular awkward that it is not clear whether this ugliness is Jewish upbringing in Montreal and goes on to give deliberate. In any case, as Cohen well shows, this an account of the ʻtraditionalʼ Marxist philosophy motif is rooted deeply in Hegelʼs philosophy. It is an

Radical Philosophy 104 (November/December 2000) 39 integral part of Hegelʼs dialectical method (though choicesʼ. This is an old accusation, but none the more Cohen is shy of that term), where it is applied to logical valid for that. A considerable discussion of it already processes of thought as well as to social and histori- exists, to which Cohenʼs asides add nothing. For cal developments. It also runs right through Marxʼs example, Sartreʼs 1948 play Les mains sales (recently work. It is present even in the canonical ʻPrefaceʼ to revived in London) is all about this issue. Cohen also A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy charges traditional Marxism with ʻcriminal inatten- of 1859, which Cohen claims to be explicating in Karl tionʼ to ʻthe problems of socialist designʼ, as though Marxʼs Theory of History, where Marx asserts: ʻno it believed that socialism would spring forth fully social order ever perishes before all the productive formed at the appointed hour. Again this is a familiar forces for which there is room in it have developed; but questionable charge, reiterated in the briefest and and new, higher relations of production never appear laziest of terms here. There were many things wrong before the material conditions of their existence have with actually existing socialism but absence of plan- matured in the womb of the old society itselfʼ. ning was not one of them. In these chapters Cohen gives an excellent brief In short, the Hegelian historical approach needs summary of these themes in classical Marxism and to be discussed and assessed, but Cohen does not of their Hegelian origins, making central to Marxism do that. On the other hand, he does provide a well- precisely what its analytical offshoot tried to remove. argued critique of the classical Marxist view that the If this is Marxism, then what hope is there for an proletariat will emerge as the agent of revolutionary analytically ʻreconstructedʼ version? This would not historical change to overthrow capitalism and build be so much a non-bullshit Marxism as a non-Marxist socialism. This is one of the best chapters in the Marxism, a self-defeating project if ever there was one. book, even if it is reprinted from another source. Small wonder that it has not prospered. However, it does not fully address the issues raised One cannot help but feel that Cohen could have by the dialectical theory of history, since the idea of written a very good account of the dialectical themes the revolutionary proletariat is only one aspect of this, in Hegel and Marx had he so wished, but this is not even if a fundamental one in Marxism. For the rest, his purpose here. These themes are described, it seems, however, the theory is simply discarded with barely only to be rejected. It would be misleading to say that a comment. they are criticized; they are simply discarded with only At this point the lecture audience was treated (or the briefest of dismissive asides. should that be ʻsubjectedʼ?) to a session of community Thus the Hegelian view that a new social order singing. The reader is let off with a brief explanatory appears only when the conditions for its emergence paragraph and can move on to the next chapter. This are ripe is described as ʻwonderfully convenientʼ marks a radical break. The second part of the book and ʻincredibly optimisticʼ. These are superficial and is completely different in theme, style and content. inadequate criticisms. The Hegelian doctrine may According to Rawls, Cohen explains, a just society perhaps better be regarded as a tautology: the emer- is governed by two main principles of justice. One of gence of a new order ipso facto demonstrates that the these is the ʻdifference principleʼ, according to which conditions for it were present. Nor is that necessarily an unequal distribution of goods is just only if it is an objection to it. On the contrary, this doctrine can necessary to benefit the least well off members of the be seen as laying out the conceptual framework for society. Rawls uses this principle to justify unequal the Hegelian historical approach rather than specify- incentives. The argument is familiar. The ʻmost tal- ing a substantial theory of historical progress. Or entedʼ members of society will produce more only if perhaps it should be acknowledged that the Hegelian they are given incentives and the extra production can approach is often ambiguous between these two ver- be used to benefit the worst off. sions. In any case, if the Hegelian approach is to Rawlsʼs theory involves a sharp distinction between be taken seriously – and Cohen presumably believes the public and private spheres. For he maintains that that it should be, since he devotes half a book to it principles of justice should be applied only to the – then it requires a good deal more discussion than ʻbasic structureʼ of society – that is, its legal structure. it receives here. Issues of justice do not concern how people behave Similar remarks apply to the other ways in which in their private lives. Cohen questions this. Even on Cohen dismisses the historical approach of Marxism. Rawlsʼs own views, he argues, the principles of justice It is politically damaging, he says, because it leads should apply not only to legislative matters but also socialists to think that they can avoid ʻhard political in private life. A just society requires not only just

40 Radical Philosophy 104 (November/December 2000) rules but also what Cohen calls an ʻethosʼ of justice The fact that Cohen made his name as a Marxist, albeit that governs individual behaviour. of the ʻanalyticalʼ variety, has vanished from view. This point is well enough made, though in rather Indeed, Marxism tout court has now disappeared a laboured fashion. Material which forms the basis from Cohenʼs philosophical repertoire, if this book is for a single already published article is stretched out any guide, for it figures here only as a part of Cohenʼs over a couple of chapters. And the scope of Cohenʼs past, included it seems as an act of filial piety. It would argument is exceedingly limited. He makes no attempt be a pity if this indeed proves to be the trajectory to develop or explore the notion of a moral ʻethosʼ, nor of Cohenʼs thought. No matter how problematic it to consider what social conditions would contribute to was, the project of ʻrationally reconstructingʼ Marxism its growth or inhibit its development. Marx, of course, undoubtedly made a distinctive and original contribu- had much to say about this. He did not regard the tion to contemporary philosophy. On the evidence of absence of an egalitarian ethos as unconnected with this book, there a long way to go before the footnotes the domination of egoistic interests in the law and to Rawls which Cohen is currently writing will result the economy. But Cohen makes no attempt to think in work of similar importance. through what Marxism has to contribute on this issue. Sean Sayers

Bridges over troubled Walter

Lutz Koepnick, Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London, 1999. 312 pp., £34.00 hb., 0 8032 2744 2. Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism, Pluto Press, London and Sterling VA, 2000. xiv + 298 pp., £14.99 pb., 0 7453 1568 2.

Now that we have Benjamin, what do we do with him? the book address what Koepnick sees as the three Do we add him to the roster of intellectual history? stages of Benjaminʼs development of the ʻaesthetici- Use him as a resource for theoretical plundering? zation thesisʼ, based upon readings of The Origin of Discover in him the partial prefiguration of contem- German Tragic Drama, ʻThe Work of Art in the Age porary concerns? Or does his life stand as a model of Mechanical Reproductionʼ and the Arcades Project, of the intellectual? All of these Benjamins have been respectively. Overall, he asks Benjamin to provide done and continue to be done. But rarely has Benjamin him with a means of distinguishing fascism from been approached in a manner which draws upon his modernity per se, arguing that in Benjaminʼs view work; to engage with a moment of the past as an ʻfascism constitutes a historically specific and singu- illumination and critique of the present. Refreshingly, lar regime of political representation and experienceʼ. both these books set out to place Benjamin in a critical Benjamin is cast as arguing that fascism ʻmobilizes relationship to the present, although in different ways technological and economic rationalization against the and with different degrees of success. normative substance of political modernity, against Lutz Koepnickʼs Walter Benjamin and the Aes- post-Enlightenment values of political justice, equality, thetics of Power, at first sight, sets a reading of freedom and democracyʼ. The obvious question arises Benjamin against areas of contemporary theory. The of how far this normative substance was any such thing central aim is to develop a critical model of fascism in twentieth-century Germany before World War II, – particularly Nazism – with which to counter the but, as this passage suggests, it is Koepnickʼs aim to vision of fascism as part of modernity, even as the enlist Benjaminʼs aestheticization thesis for a liberal apotheosis of its metaphysics, suggested by critics such democratic critique of fascism and, just possibly, of as Lacoue-Labarthe, on the one hand, and in a differ- the present. The trouble is that Koepnick is, by and ent manner by the historisists of the Historikerstreit, large, too faithful to Benjamin for this enlistment to on the other. In order to identify the ʻsynchronic and be easy; it ends up as rather more of a press-ganging, diachronic uniqueness of fascist terror and fascist with the struggle still visible. modernismʼ so as to resist its normalization, Koep- A clear example can be found in Chapters 5–7. nick turns to Benjamin. The three main sections of These link Benjaminʼs account of phantasmagoria in

Radical Philosophy 104 (November/December 2000) 41 the Arcades Project with an account of the fascist aes- a somewhat Habermasian account of fascism as a theticization of politics derived from the Mechanical very particular premature conclusion of an unfinished Reproduction essay. This is done in order to argue project of modernity. Koepnick needs to unify the two, that, alongside the political spectacle, Nazism enlisted but does not succeed in this book, instead tending to everyday consumption and private pleasure-seeking; fall back on an equation of Benjaminʼs revolutionary the alienating fragmentation of commodity fetish- demands with individual autonomy, self-determina- ism aiding the homogenization of the political. Here tion and rational exchange. Quite how this sits with the political dimension itself becomes a market item. Adornoʼs judgement that ʻIn all his phases, Benjamin Using this conception, a well-argued critique of a conceived the downfall of the subject and the salvation vulgarized version of aestheticized politics which takes of man as inseparableʼ is unclear. fascism as style is mounted, with the Hayward Gallery Benjaminʼs ʻsolutionsʼ to the aestheticization of ʻArt and Powerʼ exhibition of 1996 as an example. politics and the commodity realm of modernity are But Koepnick cannot accept what he recognizes as given short shrift by Koepnick. On some occasions, the implications of this version of the aestheticization Benjaminʼs arguments are rather dismissively excused, thesis: ʻWhat, one might ask from todayʼs perspective, on the grounds that they were a response to a particular is so singular about this nexus of politics, commodity moment. At other times, Benjaminʼs position is repre- production, and mass consumption in fascism?ʼ A good sented as being disconnected from political action question, but one that for Koepnick has already been and leading to an apocalyptic passivism. This latter answered. Following Detlev Peuckert, he argues that is advanced via a reading of the ninth of the ʻTheses ʻthis barbarism [fascism] was not one normal outcome on the Philosophy of Historyʼ. But such a reading is of modernization per se, but rather the unique result sustainable only if the thesis is taken out of its dia- from a strategic prioritization of technological, social lectical relations to the others. Given those relations, and economic over political, legal and moral moder- it is clear that the Angel of History is not an allegory nity.ʼ Here two incompatible accounts of modernity of the historian. For Koepnick, Benjaminʼs attempt are yoked together; Benjaminʼs analyses of experience to forge a critical power of the image out of modern in modernity are asked to work alongside and support experience in order to combat fascismʼs manipulation

42 Radical Philosophy 104 (November/December 2000) of images and modes of looking fails, as Koepnick introduction in terms of clarity and overview, the book finds ʻthat none of his dialectical thought-images and offers far more than might be anticipated from some- critical interventions could ever suffice to obliterate thing in this genre. Its focus is on technology, or rather this hellish universeʼ. This image of a failed, utopian on Technik, a term which signifies both technology and Benjamin is all too common, as Esther Leslie points technique, thus involving both the means and relations out, in those who wish to discard Benjaminʼs Marxism. of production. Benjaminʼs use of the term Technik, Such seems to be the case here. Certainly Marx is not instead of Technologie, thus includes the organization, Koepnickʼs strong point, as, in one of his very few use and direction of technology. The dual and inter- mentions, Koepnick appears to argue that, for Marx, related senses of Technik are explored in a series of the phantasmagorias of commodity fetishism ʻmerely readings in and across Benjaminʼs writings, forming denote … the results of collective blindnessʼ. This is in what Leslie calls a ʻcoherent projectʼ. Beginning with stark contrast to Leslieʼs clear perception that Marxʼs One Way Street, and moving chronologically onwards, commodity fetishism and Benjaminʼs phantasmagoria Leslie produces accounts which possess subtlety and both have the ʻorigin of their convincing illusioning clarity. The chronology does not mean that work prior … not in subjective errors of perception … but in the to 1923 is left unaddressed. Indeed, the range of phenomenal form of reality presentedʼ – which is to Benjamin material utilized, which includes letters, say, in experience. notes, multiple published and unpublished versions of An indication of the contrast between Koepnickʼs texts, produces a strong sense of the interrelations and and Leslieʼs books can be found in their handling of shifts in Benjaminʼs criticism. For example, Berliner Benjaminʼs essay ʻTheories of German Fascismʼ. Given Chronik, not usually considered in the context of Koepnickʼs acknowledgement that sustained analyses Benjaminʼs theories of Technik, is given a rich and of fascism are not frequent in Benjaminʼs work, one nuanced reading, emphasizing a ʻmulti-storeyed view might think that the essay would merit more atten- of historyʼ in which Berlin is seen through a childʼs tion than the brief mentions it receives. In these, the eyes, rather than simply as a child. The aim is to find a issue of technology and ownership is acknowledged hope in the past for the adult critic, but a past in which but thoroughly subordinated to the aestheticization the misdirection of technology is already manifest. of war. Benjamin is even admonished for having This bookʼs Benjamin is a materialist one, although failed to consider the spiritual missions that fascism never simply so. Part of Leslieʼs concern is to trace a assigned to non-war technologies, as if the autobahns transition from a materialism to a historical material- werenʼt built by Workersʼ Battalions. Leslie, on the ism, and she does not follow the old demarcation lines other hand, points firmly to Benjaminʼs insistence of mysticism/Marxism in Benjaminʼs work. At times, on the frustration of technological possibilities by though, resemblance can be stretched too far; for the relations of production as making war necessary. instance in the links drawn between the ʻTheses on the Moreover, beneath the heroic semblance of those who Philosophy of Historyʼ, the ʻTheses on Feuerbachʼ, and espouse the aestheticization of war lie the features Leninʼs 1917 theses; or in the ʻaffinityʼ of Benjamin of the fascist class warrior. Leslie rightly connects and Trotsky. The problems of the Romantic Benjamin this argument with those made in an earlier form in also do not appear in any detail. It was not just the One Way Street about the ownership and direction of surrealists who had difficulties in bringing together technology under the bourgeoisie. In failing to address the energies of intoxication and the constructive, dis- this link, Koepnickʼs attempt to use Benjamin to hold ciplined direction of revolution, but Benjaminʼs insist- fascism separate from a more general modernity falters ence on the action-generating moment in his later work badly. is not really addressed. Although Leslie is certainly Overall, Koepnickʼs book is frustrating because it right that theology ʻis the moment of outstripping the combines interesting and well-made arguments with givenʼ, the transportation of theological categories into peculiar errors and omissions; thoughtful criticisms sit a historical materialism remained rather more fraught next to under-thought judgements. It seems at times as than she acknowledges. The extensive historical detail if the book is at war against itself, with its conclusions assembled in the book is woven together with Ben- attempting to undo the direction of the arguments. jaminʼs texts in a manner which convincingly exhibits Leslieʼs Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conform- the historical moment in the very fabric of those texts. ism is one of a series of introductions, rather strangely The shifting political situations and cultural politics in billed as being about the key thinkers of the postwar and against which Benjamin locates his tasks emerge era. Although it certainly fulfils the requirements of an as vital for an understanding of the works. In a prop-

Radical Philosophy 104 (November/December 2000) 43 erly Benjaminian fashion, each work is read like a ing [Erkenntnis], to recognition as (as Catalan, as ʻlittle worldʼ, and the world can be found in the work. queer, as a philosopher). Any demand for recognition Rather than producing a ʻBenjamin and his timeʼ style implies that the demander is not fully self-identical. of biography, Leslie finds history in Benjamin. She Recognition both ʻestablishes and confirmsʼ the iden- gives a highly critical account of the tradition and tity of those it acknowledges. It both constitutes and present of Benjamin Studies. This is a context where authenticates the recognized, in a dual process whose the insistence on Benjaminʼs coherent project and divergent aspects can never coincide. The notion of a historical Aktualität is clearly of importance. It has ʻcompleteʼ or successful recognition is a contradiction been suggested that those who want cultural theory in terms: a self-sufficient being – one that fully coin- without philosophy should stop reading Benjamin; cides with itself, or with othersʼ perception of it – is perhaps the same is true for those who want phil- anything but a speaking being. osophy without social and political history. The import The process of recognizing is thus an acknowl- of the work goes much further than the Benjamin edgement of non-identity in Adornoʼs sense. Both branch of academic industry, however. To recover a subject and object of recognition, along with recognition thoroughly historical Benjamin is to find that his work itself, are always a ʻnot-oneʼ, split by a fundamental cannot be wholly subsumed into the conformisms of ʻbetweenʼ. This between is essentially cultural, as the present. Leslieʼs goal is to find hope in the past García Düttmannʼs title suggests, because it stems from and an accusation of the present. our apparently ʻother-than-naturalʼ lack of self-identity Giles Peaker (our distance from the passively in-itself); from the fundamentally relational nature of cultural identities (their derivation from forms of cross-cultural struggle); and from culturally valorized forms of insight and Keep thinking discernment (from the co-implication of ʻcultureʼ and privileged forms of ʻcultivationʼ). In terms reminiscent Alexander García Düttmann, Between Cultures: Ten- of Homi Bhabhaʼs analysis of the interstitial enuncia- sions in the Struggle for Recognition, trans. Kenneth tion of cultural differences – a curious omission from B.Woodgate, Verso, London and New York, 2000. x + 245 pp., £40.00 hb., £13.00 pb., 1 85984 755 2 hb., Between Culturesʼ deliberately slight bibliography 1 85984 273 9 pb. – García Düttmann argues that cultural identities are never self-sufficient or transparently ʻrecognizableʼ, Between Cultures performs a conceptual rescue mis- but always caught up in the reiterated negotiations of sion. Its author sets out to recover a fundamentally recognizing: ʻculture is never simply itselfʼ, ʻculture disruptive concept of recognition from its habitual always means between culturesʼ, and every ʻin-between association with integration, accommodation and withdraws from attempts to objectify itʼ. coordination, while avoiding recourse to a facile This resistance to objectification best defines the affirmation of the merely ʻunrecognizableʼ or purely overarching purpose of this otherwise eclectic book, incommensurable as such. García Düttmann lays claim and aligns it with that complex current of broadly ʻanti- to a genuinely creative process of recognition. This is identitarianʼ (anti-classifying, anti-normalizing, anti- the great virtue of this densely written, smoothly trans- coordinating) philosophical thought variously at work lated and thoroughly challenging book: in a time of in Heidegger, Sartre, Adorno, Foucault and Derrida. a generalized ʻrestorationʼ or reaction, it tackles what The guiding imperative can be summed up in a few we might call the philosophy of resignation (ʻrealisticʼ words: avoid solidification, avoid fixed identities, ʻstay liberalism, bland multiculturalism, chastened pragma- in the gap of an in-between, keep creating new con- tism, consensual discourse ethics…) on its own chosen nections and forging new contextsʼ. Or more simply: ground – the ʻpolitics of recognitionʼ. It achieves this keep thinking! The urgency of the imperative derives while resisting, up to a point, the lures of an ulti- from a difficulty well known to those who have tried, mately meta-philosophical intuition of pure difference in the aftermath of deconstructionʼs methodological or otherness, whether it be called desire, hybridity, the heyday, to theorize the status of ambiguously marginal Real, the irreconcilable, the divine. ʻsubject positionsʼ (a difficulty whose ramifications are On García Düttmannʼs account, recognition [Aner- demonstrated to great effect by García Düttmannʼs kennung] is not simply the passive confirmation of sustained consideration of the once militant slogan an already constituted yet hitherto unacknowledged ʻweʼre queer, weʼre here, so get fuckinʼ used to itʼ, identity. Recognition cannot be reduced to re-cogniz- in a chapter first translated in RP 81). More than

44 Radical Philosophy 104 (November/December 2000) merely one ʻsexual preferenceʼ among others, a queer the abstractions of citizenship in something like the position presents itself here as essentially disruptive. republican sense. For his part, Taylor might well retort How can such a position demand recognition from that what the Québecois with whom he is engaging in that which it disrupts, without simultaneously losing his essay (and who go ʻunacknowledgedʼ in García the basis of its own distinctive character? Is a perma- Düttmannʼs critique) are actually demanding is not nent provocation possible, any more than permanent recognition in García Düttmannʼs sense at all, but revolution or permanent subversion? How to avoid, rather institutional guarantees of cultural preservation. after Auschwitz, after AIDS, the apparently irresistible Habermasʼs own likely rejoinder is no less predictable: forces of reformist accommodation and politically García Düttmannʼs hostility to any ʻsynthesizing idea correct pacification? of an ultimate horizon of interpretationsʼ, his affir- An important part of any answer to these questions mation of the ʻessential openness and multiplicity of depends on an engagement with those thinkers who horizonsʼ, is coherent only if he himself reduces the have sought to reduce the dynamics of recognition notion of ʻultimate horizonʼ to the static object of a re- to ʻthe political instances which unify, normalize, cognition. (Letʼs not forget what a horizon is, after all: and disciplineʼ: Taylor, Habermas and Honneth. These a horizon is not an objective structure of the world or ʻdogmaticʼ thinkers, García Düttmann argues, channel universe, but a limit specific to a particular perception disruption through integrating procedures or coordinate or reflection, however ʻuniversalʼ or abstract.) How is differences within consensual horizons. They ʻturn it possible to conceive of multiplicity without some recognition into a result, a stabilized relationshipʼ or gesture of univocal or unambiguous inclusion –be it ʻreciprocity.ʼ By contrast, ʻthe task of an active politics the multiplication of ever larger ʻbelongingsʼ or sets, as of recognition which does not objectify culture … with Badiou, or the articulation of an ultimate ʻplane consists in bringing about conditions for an existence of immanenceʼ or consistency, as with Deleuze – a or a life capable of exposing the being-not-one of rec- gesture other than pure reiteration, and ʻwithinʼ which ognition as suchʼ – that is, the being of the ʻbetweenʼ, this multiplicity is conceivable as a multiplicity? How a being ʻwithout presuppositionʼ. García Düttmann can unlimited multiplicity be affirmed from across saves his most withering critique for discourse ethics, the confines of effectively independent horizons or dismissed as indifferent to the distinction of truth from effectively incommensurable ʻlanguage gamesʼ? illusion and condemned as a reduplication, in alleg- García Düttmann is certainly aware of the problem; edly ʻpost-metaphysicalʼ and post-monological form, of indeed he foregrounds it. He mirrors his analysis of those metaphysical attributes of clarity, transparency differential ʻreiterationʼ in the performative structure and self-affirmation traditionally associated with the and general organization of his own writing, which is constituent subject. Against the condescending politics as abruptly elliptical as it is consistent, as approximate of ʻrecognition asʼ, García Düttmannʼs recognizing as it is prescriptive, as episodic as it is ʻrepetitiveʼ or aims at ʻrebellion and revoltʼ, seeks out what remains insistent. However, whether this essentially rhetorical blank or illegible, operates in the medium of radical solution stands up, whether there can be a coherent uncertainty, and endures the trauma (the ʻtestimonyʼ) conceptualization of unqualified difference that does of the ʻextremeʼ as such, the ʻextreme limitʼ of its not affirm, immediately and by the same token, its time. radically all-inclusive immanence or ʻuniversalityʼ, It is at this point, no doubt, that the sceptical are questions more Deleuzean readers, at least, may reader will begin to ask a couple of fairly predictable be likely to answer in the negative. questions. Habermasians will mutter the words ʻper- At the same time, it is not clear if the refusal formative contradictionʼ when they relate the reiterated of this reduction is universally progressive. García demand for a ʻrecognition [that] must shatter and Düttmann privileges those individuals who, because transform the systemʼ to García Düttmannʼs stinging they ʻmake no claim to an achieved recognitionʼ, can disdain for any merely liberal or republican concep- respond to prejudice or dismissal by ʻsimply inventing tion of politics. García Düttmann is too accomplished a different war machineʼ. But what sorts of strategic a performer to be concerned on this score. Never- difference are obscured by the adverb ʻsimplyʼ? As theless, it is hard to see what kind of political system Marxist critics of postmodern and postcolonial theory could sustain an endless multiplicity of such demands, have long maintained, an emphasis on contingency and other than one whose own strictly political criteria of ʻradical indeterminacyʼ is uncomfortably close to the recognition are precisely indifferent to all ʻrecogniz- material medium of contemporary domination itself ableʼ differences – that is, one firmly geared toward (financial mobility, economic flexibility, ceaseless com-

Radical Philosophy 104 (November/December 2000) 45 mercial innovation). It may well be that what such nition of a familiar visual pattern, sound or smell (a domination finds most uncomfortable to ʻrecognizeʼ question that might lead him to engage with Proust or is not the assertion of unpredictable difference and Merleau-Ponty, if not cognitive science). On the other cultural indeterminacy so much as the prescription hand, he does not acknowledge the interruption of that of flatly in-different, rigorously inclusive principles: ʻdiscontinuous continuityʼ of deconstructive discourse the axiomatic though situation-specific assertion of promised by strictly axiomatic forms of thought (a universal rights and equalities. question that might lead him to deepen his engagement Finally, for a work so firmly oriented towards the with Agamben or Badiou). Perhaps García Düttmann limit of its performance, it is disappointing that García would be right to reject such interruption: the point Düttmann does not confront two questions at the is that he does not seem to recognize its possibility. opposite thematic limits of this uncompromisingly In what sense is any kind of ʻrecognitionʼ at work in conceptual study. On the one hand, he avoids the the demonstration of mathematical proofs, for instance, limits of physical embodiment and sensual perception or indeed in the prescription of universal rights or – that is, the limits imposed by the non-conceptual equalities as such? mechanics of the senses in, for instance, the recog- Peter Hallward

The fact that it is mine

Ross Poole, Nation and Identity, Routledge, London and New York, 1999. 224 pp., £45.00 hb., £14.99 pb., ISBN 0 415 12622 3 hb., 0 415 12623 pb.

Thoughtful, provocative and unpredictable, Ross Poole behaved so as to deserve our loyalty. Instead, he makes his case for nationalism without relying on adduces a generic tale of individual development. From the well-worn distinction between a bad ethnic and infancy, the self develops in a state of dependence on a good civic version. He stoutly contests the gener- the ʻmoral resourcesʼ of others, and this dependence ally unquestioned role of imagination in Benedict incurs a moral obligation that for Poole is both over- Andersonʼs ʻimagined communitiesʼ formula. And he riding and always already national: criticizes liberalismʼs negative freedom, which holds us back from proper national loyalty, in the name of we begin to acquire our national identity literally on our motherʼs knee. We discover our nation – as we a republican ideal of citizen participation that he later discover ourselves – in the bedtime stories we are admits will no longer work under harried modern told, the songs which put us to sleep, the games we conditions. Salvaging this ideal today, he concedes, play as children.… [M]y nation – like my family would mean settling for a merely ʻmimeticʼ relation – has a particular claim on me, not merely because to the state rather than an active participatory one. it is different from others, nor because it can from Instead of lapsing into nostalgia, Poole wants moral some vantage point be judged to be superior to oth- philosophy to rise and sing to the difficulties of its ers. Its claim lies in the fact that it is mine. historical moment. The analogy between the nation and the family, In this Hegelian mode, Poole stakes his argument neither of them chosen yet both peremptory in their on the verdict of history. Like Hegel, he sometimes demands on us, each possessed by us and therefore leaves us in doubt as to whether the history referred (though the logic here is fuzzy) rightfully possessing to is collective, individual, or both. us, is the core of Pooleʼs argument. It is also a source If we are to accept the judgement of the past 200 of trouble. The analogy suspends discussion of their years of world history – and Hegel could hardly ob- conflicting demands (Antigone does not figure) while ject to the choice of tribunal – then it is not rational identification of the individual with the political also suggesting that nations are as indisputably real as structure but national identity which has provided families. The liberal self is not a person, for Poole, but the moral resources for modern citizenship. the nation most assuredly is a person: nations take the Pooleʼs own appeal to the tribunal of history does not pronoun ʻwhoʼ rather than ʻwhichʼ, and each is warmly move from ʻisʼ to ʻoughtʼ by offering positive exam- welcomed as an individual with ʻits own story to tellʼ. ples of such citizenship, nations that have supposedly However intermittent, this naturalizing rhetoric does

46 Radical Philosophy 104 (November/December 2000) land and the continued mistreatment of Aborigines. When Poole confronts immigrants with what looks like an old-fashioned assimilationism, then, he is in fact mobilizing not national pride but national shame – though Australians can be proud of the uses (like the welfare state) to which they have put their shame. Those better acquainted with the Australian situation will have more to say about the feasibility of achieving a sense of national belonging that would encompass older colonial settlers, Aborigines, and so-called less than justice to the messiness of modern history NESBIANS, or non-English-speaking-background (much of it a history of empires rather than nations) migrants. But in general terms (if one can generalize or of the modern family. ʻWe come to feelʼ, he writes, at all), it remains possible that Hegel was right: that ʻthat our national identity is as natural and inescapable such things as welfare and a sane racial policy stand a as our gender.ʼ If so, many will think, then so much the better chance if the identification demanded of citizens worse for both. But Poole is not having that conversa- is not with their nation but with their state. For all its tion. Using the family to naturalize the nation, he takes sins, the state seems easier to control than national for granted that gender itself is natural, and happily so. emotion, and it offers more direct channels to those For his purposes, there are no queer or feminist critics transnational agencies that, as Poole concedes, will of the family. There are no unhappy, feuding families. be called upon increasingly to deal with so-called Indeed, there is almost no conflict of any kind. What globalization. the nation demands of us is ʻsacrificeʼ, not killing. Having grounded his case for nationalism on history, It guarantees social welfare rather than making war. Poole is both consistent and courageous in declaring Bismarck, who did both, is missing from the index. that history has now turned against nationalism. In a Nationalism to Poole is a matter of positive ties; it is tantalizingly brief conclusion, he attempts accordingly rarely if ever a matter of shared hostility to an ʻalien to come to terms with cosmopolitanism. ʻIf cultural otherʼ either outside or inside the border. The hypoth- diversity is the necessary outcome of globalization, esis that alterity and conflict might be constitutive of then cosmopolitanism is the virtue of this necessity.ʼ nationalism is not even presented for refutation. As He distinguishes between moral cosmopolitanism, a result, Pooleʼs nationalism seems cheery, sanitized, which is acceptable because it doesnʼt rule out ʻspecial inoffensive. preferencesʼ, and legal cosmopolitanism, or the idea of But there is perhaps a good reason why Poole is a world state, which is a bad idea because it opposes less concerned with the identity of the nation in space such preferences. His aspirations accompany a third (which would involve antagonism) than with its iden- form of cosmopolitanism, perhaps not fully emergent, tity in time, which shifts the terms from geopolitics to which would involve learning to live and work amidst psychology. Just as the healthy individual must accept a bewildering diversity of responsibilities and commit- his or her continuity with past actions, a past self, the ments rather than accepting the ʻaustere universalismʼ argument goes, so must we all behave as citizens. We that sees attachments as impediments. My best wishes must acknowledge that we are ʻmorally accountable go with him, and with it. History has not rendered for actions performed by others, especially when these a positive verdict as yet on cosmopolitanism, which may have taken place before we were even bornʼ. In remains weak in presentable institutions and for the the current Australian context, this is an argument moment must rely more on ʻoughtʼ than on ʻisʼ. on behalf of Aboriginal rights. As Poole explains in a crucial chapter, years of large-scale immigra- Bruce Robbins tion have threatened to erode the sense of shared national responsibility for the violent seizure of the

Radical Philosophy 104 (November/December 2000) 47 Which way now?

Kimberly Hutchings, International Political Theory: Rethinking Ethics in a Global Era, Sage, London, 1999. xvi + 208 pp., £15.99 pb., 0 7619 5516 X pb. Molly Cochran, Normative Theory in International Relations: A Pragmatic Approach, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999. xx + 295 pp., £37.50 hb., £13.95 pb., 0 521 63050 9 hb., 0 521 63965 4 pb.

If all theory is normative, as both Kimberly Hutchings distinction. In Cochranʼs words, all these authors and Molly Cochran acknowledge, then what is norm- derive a ʻnon-contingent ethicsʼ (Hutchingsʼs applied ative theory? And what is normative theory in Inter- ethics) from weak, contingent, foundations. national Relations? These are important questions at Hutchings maintains that this problem is not over- the end of a decade of wars and civil wars, massacres come either in international society, or in Marxist, and bombings, interventions and sanctions. And yet, it postmodernist, or feminist approaches; while Cochran is widely asserted that within International Relations further adds poststructuralist and neopragmatist attempts to answer them have reached an impasse. approaches to this list. Marxist approaches, for Both Hutchings and Cochran set out to analyse the instance, although radically different in their onto- reasons for this impasse and accept the challenge to logical assumptions, reproduce these contradictions on suggest a way out. Consequently, we should be able the epistemological and prescriptive levels when they to tell, at the end of these two books, what normative hold that all claims are historically contingent while theory in International Relations can or should be. at the same time maintaining that some are objectively Both authors order the theories with which they true. Both Hutchings and Cochran argue that post- engage in ʻdebatesʼ. Hutchings begins with the debate modernism and poststructuralism, albeit accepting the between Realists – the Realpolitik approach – and impossibility of ontological as well as epistemological Idealists – the liberal approach – and is joined by truth-claims, nevertheless reproduce the traditional Cochran in the analysis of the cosmopolitanism/com- vocabulary, only now in inverted commas. They derive munitarianism debate followed by the discussion of from it a non-contingent ethics which claims universal various critical responses to traditional approaches. validity for the questioning of all boundaries and There is, they argue, a common problem to the seem- claims to sovereignty – thus presenting their own ingly opposed positions which is responsible for the theoretical practice as universally valid and politically impasse. They share, as Hutchings formulates it, an correct ethics. ontological conception of nature and reason as distinct Whilst largely sharing a diagnosis of the impasse in and mutually exclusive realms from which politics and normative international theory, Cochran and Hutchings morality are derived. Realists and Idealists disagree differ radically in their solutions to the problem. For only about the realm – nature or reason – from which Cochran, American pragmatism based on a radical moral principles properly have to be derived. Conse- critique of epistemology as such appears a promis- quently, the dilemma both approaches face is to bring ing candidate to cut through that Gordian knot. She moral principles and politics together, each derived in replaces Rortyʼs emphasis on the private/public divide abstraction from the other. This undertaking is bound with Deweyʼs assumption that individuals fulfil them- to fail in light of the fact that the underlying concepts selves in constant interaction with the community; and are formulated in opposition to each other to begin she replaces Deweyʼs emphasis on methodology with with. In each case normative theory is reduced to the Rortyʼs insistence on language, metaphor, aesthetics shrunken form of applied ethics – moral principles and irony. By thus leaving epistemological debates unsuccessfully imposed on politics. behind and concentrating on ironic redescriptions of Both Hutchings and Cochran argue that this pattern the world and creative inventions of new traditions repeats itself in the cosmopolitan/communitarian and identities – always mindful of their fallibility debate since cosmopolitans depend unreflectively on – Cochran believes that we can overcome the earlier ontological assumptions – about reason, the individual, impasse of normative theory. This pragmatic ethics the state, the world – which cannot in fact be grounded. would liberate feminism, for instance, from wasting Meanwhile communitarians like Michael Walzer use time on the attempt to develop a feminist theory of both arguments based on nature as well as arguments oppression, on endless debates about the proper concept based on reason – without, however, overcoming the of ʻwomanʼ, and the proper way to present womenʼs

48 Radical Philosophy 104 (November/December 2000) experiences. Instead, pragmatic feminists could simply the present by uncovering alternatives which have invent new languages, traditions, identities. been suppressed and which may provide a basis for This solution, however, falls squarely into what critique. Hutchings calls applied ethics – only now without Hence, where Cochran has given up theory, in the the attempt to ground it. While Cochran may be sense of any systematic investigation of the world we quite right in pointing out that ethics needs to be live in, and opted for applied ethics, Hutchings has created, not discovered, it remains unclear how defined the task of a proper normative theory – phenom- socially constructed individuals can create or invent enological adequacy and genealogical honesty – and new and critical traditions without any systematic given up ethics. For although Foucauldian genealogical attempt to understand or explain the system in which honesty may provide some grounds for judgement, these they have become themselves in the first place. grounds are always only immanent. And the validity Hutchingsʼs solution, therefore, attempts to do just bestowed upon a theory through the recognition and that. The impossibility of grounding our ontologi- identification of readers is one of accurate description cal and epistemological assumptions deprives us of or reflection. It does not necessarily produce trans- external categories by which to judge our theories cendence and even less so a certainty that any form and our ethics, but not of the possibility to produce of transcendence will be morally ʻprogressiveʼ. an immanent critique along the lines of a Hegelian What, then, finally, is normative theory? For phenomenology. Normative theory can provide a Cochran it is applied ethics based on imagination systematic investigation of the norms and values and the ʻmanipulation of sentimentsʼ; for Hutchings embodied in political institutions, social practices it is a phenomenological and genealogical analysis and theoretical reflections in a particular historical of ethico-political life. The two books themselves, period. In this sense, normative theory is a practice however, do not provide an imaginative ethics or of self-understanding and the validity of such norma- a phenomenological and genealogical analysis but tive theorizing will be entirely determined by the rather an epistemological critique of the practice of number of people who can recognize themselves in epistemology and an abstract theoretical critique of such a theory. In addition, normative theory needs the practice of abstract theorizing. And for this reason to engage in Foucauldian genealogical investigations we never learn what normative theory in International of our regimes of truth in order to denaturalize Relations is. The answer to that question would, as

Radical Philosophy 104 (November/December 2000) 49 Hutchings clearly states, require an alternative analysis The aim of the book is to assess Bakhtinʼs inter- of the norms and values embedded in the political woven philosophical and historical argument as a con- institutions and social practices constitutive of inter- tribution to the ʻdefinition of the democratic projectʼ. national relations. Without this, we are left to speculate In this enterprise the presence of Habermas looms about the ethico-political system which reproduces large, with Bakhtin being read as a philosopher of ad infinitum the separation of morality and politics, the ʻunfinished project of modernityʼ, working towards theory and practice. a democratic culture from within the sphere of aes- Beate Jahn thetics, which Habermas eschewed. Hirschkop can certainly find good grounds for linking Habermas and Bakhtin: both attempt to develop a neo-Kantian meta- ethics, drawing upon some of the same philosophical As an idealist ancestors, and both seek to defend the Enlightenment project, radicalized according to the development of Ken Hirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for communicative (dialogic) over instrumental (mono- Democracy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999. xx + 332 pp., £45.00 hb., £14.99 pb., 0 19 815961 7 logic) reason. Both Bakhtin and Habermas are shown hb., 0 19 815960 9 pb. to gain from this meeting of agendas. Bakhtin avoids Habermasʼs excessive rationalism through his concen- Bakhtin studies have come a long way in the last tration on aesthetics, drawing upon Hermann Cohenʼs decade. Holistic exposition and application dominated ʻaesthetics of pure feelingʼ and Max Schelerʼs inter- Bakhtinʼs reception in the West up to the beginning subjective phenomenology. Habermas provides insight of the 1990s, but now the inconsistencies and gaps in into one of Bakhtinʼs own blind spots: the institutional the work of the Russian theorist have moved centre analysis retained, in a heavily revised form, from stage. Similarly, the exaggerated claims to Bakhtinʼs Marxism. Thus, where Bakhtin conflates two senses originality have been shown to rest on a lack of aware- of ʻresponsibilityʼ (general answerability for oneʼs ness of Bakhtinʼs own intellectual sources. As a result, deeds and the capacity to act in an ethical fashion), Bakhtin has become an interesting starting point for Habermasʼs institutional critique provides a framework investigations into problems of cultural theory rather for distinguishing between them. than a source of new categories that can be applied There are many advantages to the argument that regardless of their philosophical heritage. In this book, emerges from the meeting of the two thinkers, but Ken Hirschkop builds upon recent advances in Bakhtin the extent to which one can accept the argument as a studies to provide the most informed critical study of whole depends upon whether one is prepared to accept Bakhtinʼs work to date. He draws on the extensive the neo-Kantian principles that Hirschkop seems to research that has been carried out both in Russia and share with his protagonists. This bears particularly in the West, and examines this research and Bakhtinʼs heavily on the notion of democracy that motivates the own work through a far more philosophically astute study. Society is treated solely as an ʻethical realityʼ lens than has been used hitherto. with normative structures granted a questionably large Hirschkop provides a useful window onto the degree of autonomy from the social conditions of Russian-language research for English speakers, care- specific modes of political rule. Hirschkop here partici- fully documenting the different strands and evaluat- pates in the reduction of agency to the interaction of ing past research in the light of recent findings. In juridical persons that is required by the neo-Kantian the process, the myths about Bakhtinʼs biography are philosophy that informs the work of both Bakhtin and documented and exposed, some of the intellectual Habermas. At no stage are the jurisprudential roots sources of his ideas are laid bare, and a much more of Bakhtinʼs ethics – which governs his distinction historically credible and philosophically interesting between monologism and dialogism – subjected to figure emerges. In my opinion, it is the central part scrutiny. Instead, while Bakhtinʼs rejection of legal on Bakhtin ʻmyths and historyʼ that is the strongest formalism is bolstered, the notion that jurisprudence is feature of the book. It is a masterful distillation of the ʻmathematicsʼ of ethics, the dia-logic of the human a very varied and widely scattered collection of mat- sciences, remains unchallenged. Bakhtinʼs suspension erials. The details are well contextualized and their of all questions of causality on human action rests on relevance is made clear, as the author seeks to assess this very feature, as does his reduction of the struc- the relevance of Bakhtin today and to build on his tural capacities for action to forms of intersubjective partial insights. interaction (dialogic relations). Similarly, Bakhtinʼs

50 Radical Philosophy 104 (November/December 2000) effacement of the referential capacity of discourse in style and narrative are shown to rest upon concerns his analysis of relations between discourses, which of a political nature, even if Bakhtin does all he can is based on the same bifurcation of the monological to avoid this conclusion. The ʻapolitical populismʼ natural and dialogical human sciences, also appears to which many more conservative critics have valued in be taken at face value rather than interrogated. Bakhtinʼs work turns out to have been possible only Hirschkop echoes Habermasʼs charge that Marxism by avoiding some of the most important implica- has not developed a theory of democracy (though tions of the problems he addresses, and ultimately by classical Marxists were never indifferent to modes of mystifying crucial features. As an idealist, Bakhtin is political rule) but proceeds to treat democracy exclu- repeatedly led to confuse institutional and formal ques- sively as a form of intersubjectivity. Marxism is charged tions, and he seeks the solutions to political problems with treating democracy as merely a transitional stage in the cultural realm. The result is what Hirschkop on the way to socialism, but the example of Leninʼs perceptively terms Bakhtinʼs almost pathological ten- pronouncements during the Russian Revolution, which dency to rework and recast the same argument in Hirschkop adduces, takes no account of the extreme different forms throughout his career: in the absence conditions in which they were made. The isolation of of an adequate social theory, Bakhtin was compelled forms of intersubjectivity from the social conditions to grope for answers in neighbouring domains. In in which they are embedded restates the inadequately bringing out these features, Hirschkop has made a embodied conception of human agency which both significant contribution to our understanding of an Bakhtin and Habermas share. The neo-Kantian notion important and influential thinker. that the world is not given but is conceived forgets Craig Brandist that whether or not the structures of the natural world are recognized they still impose inescapable limits on human activity, and the biological needs of human beings continue to influence human behaviour causally. Revolt into style These considerations cannot simply be ʻbracketed outʼ. Raoul Vaneigem, A Cavalier History of Surrealism, Democracy inevitably involves questions of the control trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, AK Press, Edinburgh, of the extra-discursive necessities of human life, and 2000. 130 pp., £7.95 pb., 1 873176 94 5. a purely anti-naturalistic approach will inevitably prove to be inadequate in such circumstances. While This is something of an oddity. Commissioned in 1970 Marxism may indeed need to work to develop a more for a planned series of books for high-school students, adequate anthropology, and the ethical dimension of it was written in great haste by an author who admits this is certainly crucial, this needs to grow out of that it was not particularly dear to his heart. The and remain in constant contact with socio-economic projected series was abandoned and the manuscript analysis. The first move of neo-Kantianism is to sever languished in a drawer until, more or less by accident, these features and Hirschkop goes too far along the it was published in 1977. The book appeared under same path. the pseudonym ʻJules-François Dupuisʼ – he being the One other problem is the tendency to view Bakhtin concierge of the building in which Lautréamont died in as a rather more consistent thinker than he actually was. 1870 and a witness to the poetʼs death certificate. The In trying to incorporate elements of Lebensphilosophie author is in fact Raoul Vaneigem, who, at seventy-six (from Simmel, Dilthey, Misch), neo-Hegelianism and and still active, must be one of the last survivors of the Marxism (Lukács, Bukharin), phenomenology (Shpet, Situationist International. Together with Guy Debordʼs Scheler) and Brentanian language theory (Marty, Society of the Spectacle, his Revolution of Everyday Bühler) into a neo-Kantian framework, Bakhtin Life (1967) is the great classic of situationism, the arrived at some awkward and contradictory formula- most conspiratorial of all the left-wing movements tions. These are given less attention than they deserve, of the 1960s. Like the surrealist group led by André even though some of Bakhtinʼs most interesting and Breton, the SI was a tightly knit group of politically instructive theorizing results from them. motivated men (and the odd woman) convinced that Nevertheless, the political subtext of Bakhtinʼs artistic and political revolution went hand in hand. argument does emerge through a meeting with the Like its surrealist forebear, it had all the comradely Habermasian agenda. Bakhtinʼs concentration on the atmosphere of a basket of crabs: it devoured comrades ethical significance of modes of discursive interac- and expelled former comrades. Vaneigem argues here tion and his flawed attempts to integrate questions of that expulsions and the breaking off of relations are

Radical Philosophy 104 (November/December 2000) 51 the only weapons available to an intellectual group. Hindley hangs in the Royal Academy in an exhibition And when the last expulsion has been pronounced, called ʻSensationʼ in collaboration with an advertising presumably the only solution is, as the surrealists agency. Perhaps it all began when Salvador Dalí began speculated in the 1920s, suicide. to decorate shop windows in New York, and was There are many better histories of surrealism than dubbed ʻAvida Dollarsʼ by an outraged Breton. Breton this, the real interest of Vaneigemʼs polemic being the too contributed to the commodification of surrealism. light it sheds on situationismʼs difficult relationship He was a dealer, buying cheap from his surrealist with an ancestor it loathed with a rare affection. There friends and selling dear to rich collectors, and trading are many definitions of surrealism itself. Bretonʼs profitably in African and Oceanic art. Vaneigem omits programmatic slogans spoke of a pure psychic automa- to mention that Breton was not a rich man; even sur- tism that would reveal the workings of the psyche; of realists have to live, authentically or otherwise. Oddly, the abolition or transcendence of all contradictions; of Vaneigem does not fully explore the economics of the a new beauty that would be convulsive, or would not avant-garde: the production of expensive limited edi- exist; and of the ʻbasic surrealist actionʼ of going into tions (to which James Joyce was no stranger), the small the streets with a revolver and opening fire at random runs of illustrated books printed solely for wealthy (no one did so). The movement he led is perhaps best collectors. A cynic might add that there is a healthy viewed as an attempt to condense Marxʼs ʻChange the demand for early situationist ephemera too. worldʼ with Rimbaudʼs ʻChange life.ʼ The twin slogans Vaneigem does not really offer an alternative to are also the inspiration behind situationismʼs ambition surrealismʼs political failure. Counterfactual specu- to disrupt what it calls the spectacle, to break with the lation as to what might have happened if the Spanish alienation in which all that remains of a precapitalist revolution had triumphed over both the Stalinists and unitary society is an ideological organization in which the fascists will not usher in any new age. Jibes the attempts of individuals to act upon the world about Trotsky being the butcher of Kronstadt will are reflected, corrupted and transformed into their offend the faithful of the Socialist Workersʼ Party opposite – into the autonomous life of the non-lived. (which may be no bad thing), but is anyone else still The goal of the radical aesthetic from the Romantics listening? The implicit argument is that situationism onwards has always been to abolish culture as a sepa- still offers an alternative. That the Pompidou Centre rate sphere and to return it to ʻlifeʼ, just as Dada, an could host a retrospective exhibition on the Situ- embodiment of the consciousness of the crumbling of ationist International in 1989 suggests otherwise: it ideology, sought to destroy ideology in the name of too has become caught up in the spectacle. Three authentic life. years later, the same institution mounted a huge and Surrealism was, for its cavalier historian, a failure. successful exhibition devoted to André Breton. Even Unable to sustain the negativity of Dada, those who Debordʼs suicide became a minor media event (see wanted to restore art to life turned direct experience Radical Philosophy 71). Once again, revolt has been into one more art-value on the market. They could turned into mere style. Whilst this schematic history not prevail over the reality of art being pressed into of surrealism offers no real way out, it does raise the service of a spectacular society founded on the the issue of whether avant-gardism can continue, commodity system. This is a society that can turn of whether there is an alternative to the society of todayʼs revolt into tomorrowʼs official culture, in which the spectacle. Is the silence of a Beckett all that rebellion meets the insatiable demand for the new. is left? Changing the world proved to be an impossible task. A Vaneigem is surely quite right to argue that no distinctly uneasy flirtation with the French Communist ʻrevolution in everyday lifeʼ can succeed without a Party left Breton sadly disillusioned, and transformed coherent and global negative critique. But can a late Aragon, once his closest associate, into the apologetic romanticism shored up with references to Marx supply bard of Stalinism. Rimbaud famously remarked that that critique? In the current playground craze for life was ʻelsewhereʼ; so too was the revolution. Pokémon – a so-called card-trading game – there is That surrealism was coopted into the service of no distinction whatsoever between the product and the the society of the spectacle is not in doubt. The advertisement, no possible escape from the strangle- shocking images have become familiar. The famous hold of Nintendoʼs vertical integration of a market photograph of Péret insulting a priest now looks trite. aimed solely at the exploitation of children. How do It was once possible to shock by writing poems about we/they rebel against that? the parricidal Violette Nozière; a bad portrait of Myra David Macey

52 Radical Philosophy 104 (November/December 2000) sense of taste: x is beautiful in so far as it pleases oneʼs Dasein in the dark senses. Echoing Heideggerʼs condemnation of aesthet- Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. ics, Agamben thus broadly defines aesthetics as any Georgia Albert, Stanford University Press, Stanford consideration of art which comprehends it in terms of CA, 1999. 130 pp., £25.00 hb., £8.95 pb., 0 804 73553 the state of feeling aroused by the beautiful. Yet, with 0 hb., 0 804 73554 9 pb. the victory of Erlebnis over Erfahrung, the subject Featuring prominently in Heideggerʼs The Origin of only succeeds in enjoying itself and its vital powers the Work of Art, the idea that there is an intrinsic link and not the work: the work, from which the spectator between aesthetics and nihilism has haunted a number is radically alienated, has stopped working: ʻIt seems of recent thinkers about art. In his fascinating essay … that every time aesthetic judgment attempts to The Man Without Content, Giorgio Agamben explores determine what the beautiful is, it holds in its hands this thesis by looking at how modern aesthetics, or not the beautiful but its shadow, as though its true rather the attitudes and approaches to art it involves, object were not so much what art is but what it is not: has obscured what he calls ʻthe original structure of not art but non-art.ʼ the work of artʼ. Agambenʼs thesis, then, comes down to this: artʼs Much of the book is about reinterpreting the history formal autonomy, its diremptive disconnection from of aesthetic theory since Kant. Locating the birth of any origin outside the scope of a disenchanted modern modern aesthetics roughly in the middle of the seven- subjectivity, has, under the conditions of modernity, teenth century, Agamben argues that the conception of been fatefully conjoined with an almost total loss of art then underwent a drastic reshaping. From having cognitive ability. In order, therefore, to break out of been bound up, as Hegel takes for granted in his the endless and empty movement of self-reflection, Lectures on Aesthetics, with the specific character of and thus regain a sense of artʼs (cognitive) claim on us a societyʼs collective belief system and practices, art (i.e. to transcend the horizon of nihilism within which now started to be viewed in terms of its autonomy, art has been implicated), the condition of aesthetic thus reflecting its bourgeois connoisseursʼ ideal of autonomy has to be superseded. Now, since the early absolute freedom. The author agrees with Hegel that modern diremption of art categorically implied the the autonomization of art implied a massive loss of separation of genius, and thus poiesis, from taste, it ʻspiritual significanceʼ, yet he rejects the view that follows for Agamben that any candidate for a non- this loss should be interpreted as entailing the death autonomy-based conception of art must satisfy the of art. What Hegel realized was rather that from now condition of uniting poiein, in the sense of bringing on art is condemned to exist in a state of perpetual something into being or presence, with the experience self-transcendence. Art, as in much romanticist and of art. modernist theory, becomes the pure potentiality of While accepting Hannah Arendtʼs claim that in negation. the Western tradition the distinction between poiesis, Moreover, artʼs loss of substantial content is reflected praxis and work de facto has been progressively in the schism, characteristic of modern aesthetics, obscured, Agamben thinks the work of art must be between artist and spectator, or genius and taste. On grounded in what he calls the original event of poiesis the one hand, the artist experiences a radical tearing – that is, in an original temporal dimension in which or split between his own free subjectivity and the ʻthe poetic status of man on earth finds its proper ʻimmense repository of materials that [he] can evoke meaningʼ. Both praxis and work, rather than being or reject at willʼ. Drawing on Hegelʼs critique of roman- coextensive with poiesis, are to be seen as philo- ticism, Agamben accordingly (thereby explaining the sophically derived from this foundational conception bookʼs title) defines the modern artist as ʻa self-annihi- of manʼs poetic existence. The key concept in this lating nothingʼ. Having no artistic content presented to regard is rhythm: a more authentic temporal dimen- him as valid, the desperate painter, musician or poet, sion, constitutive both of the world and art, rhythm, as in Balzacʼs portrait of Frenhofer in The Unknown like Heideggerʼs Seyn, has the power of production Masterpiece, finds himself caught up in a logic of into presence. ʻTo look at a work of art … means infinite reflection, and hence in nihilism. On the other to be hurled out into a more original time: it means hand, artʼs achievement of autonomy gives rise to the ecstasy in the epochal opening of rhythm, which gives disinterested spectator – that is, to an engagement with and holds back.ʼ the work purely with a view to aesthetic enjoyment. As it stands, this account is potentially tendentious Aesthetic art calls for a non-cognitive response in the on several fronts. For one thing, Agambenʼs ontology

Radical Philosophy 104 (November/December 2000) 53 of rhythm seems worryingly uninformed by any actu- of Marrakesh, the slums of Calcutta) that we come ally existing works of art. By that I do not simply into contact with the ʻstrong emotionsʼ. What makes mean that he ought to have undertaken an analysis of Dangerous Emotions a dangerous book is that it is some exemplary art-work. The problem is rather that both a poem to a free and non-teleological libido and given his nihilism thesis, no such work can exist: its the projection of that libido on to the wretched places very existence would completely contradict his view of the world. Lingis forces us to consider whether that art has vanished in the night of reflection. Indeed, philosophy really can travel outside of itself without Agambenʼs essay is ambiguous, between claiming that simply projecting its own outside. no works of art (in the ontological sense) are available A precedent for this ʻtravel-philosophyʼ can be to us, and that we have forgotten what a work of art is. found in the ethnology of savages, barbarians and If the latter is the claim, then the burden of his argu- nomads practised by Deleuze and Guattari. In fact, ment, which now starts to look deeply conservative, Dangerous Emotions loses a great deal of its strange- seems to hinge on the transmissibility of the tradi- ness if we consider it as a phenomenological trans- tion. By going, in a Heideggerian spirit, back to the lation of Deleuze and Guattariʼs Thousand Plateaux. presumed ground of art, perhaps it would be possible Not only does Lingis admit to borrowing concepts such to retrieve its meaning. In the final chapter, however, as the despot; it is possible to find other notions like Agamben appeals to Walter Benjaminʼs ʻTheses on the ʻbecoming-animalʼ playing a more concealed role in Philosophy of Historyʼ in order precisely to deny the his book. Even the arrangement of the bookʼs chapters possibility of genuine transmission, thus withdrawing, seems to follow the model of a series of relatively it seems, the condition under which his own argument discrete ʻplateauxʼ. What is different is the thickness could be rendered coherent. Interestingly, the chapter of the phenomenological description, and it could be ends with the proposal that art itself, regardless of its that Lingis actually owes more to the original model historical status, might offer a way of transcending the that Deleuze and Guattari drew on. This was Gregory continuum of linear time. How far this takes us into Batesonʼs description of Balinese emotional life as a theology remains unclear. After all, since works of art cumulative movement of states (or plateaux) of inten- by definition have emancipated themselves from myth, sity. This accumulation of intensity can be seen in the way each chapter of Dangerous Emotions steps up to art alone would apparently not be enough to create the the next in an intensification of the bookʼs argument. conditions for a non-alienated historicality. But what It is actually relatively simple to extract the thesis would be? Wisely, Agamben offers no answer. of this frustrating book from the description that Espen Hammer surrounds it. The emotions are analysed as the result of the living organism assimilating ʻfree and non-tele- ologicalʼ energies from the environment (trade winds, Wretched places volcanoes, ice floes, etc.). As it absorbs these environ- mental energies the organism then produces an excess Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, over what it requires to adjust to the environment, and 2000. 195 pp., £28.50 hb., £10.50 pb., 0 520 21629 6 this excess must be expended. (So far this will be hb., 0 520 22559 7 pb. familiar to readers of Georges Batailleʼs The Accursed Share, and it is strange that this is not listed in the Alphonso Lingis is a singular figure among Ameri- small number of references given by Lingis.) It is this can and British continental philosophers because he excess and its expenditure that is experienced by the belongs to no recognized school and has no obvious subject as ʻitsʼ emotional states. However, because this intellectual master. Instead, he has created his own expenditure is the result of environmental forces the ʻphenomenology of intensityʼ by bringing together the emotions cannot be understood as interior subjective work of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas (both of whom states. Not only do the emotions come from the world he has translated) with that of Deleuze and Guattari. but because these intensities demand expenditure they Dangerous Emotions is the latest example of this also force the subject back into the world, beginning unlikely synthesis and provides a phenomenological the whole process of assimilation again. analysis of the emotions, particularly libidinal emo- From this cycle of absorption and expenditure tions, as states of intensity. It also demonstrates the Lingis tries to create an ʻethicsʼ of expenditure. The insistence of Lingisʼs recent work that philosophy must living organism is constituted through its being open travel to feel the intensive forces at work in the world. to the environment because it must draw its energies His controversial contention is that it is only in the from the world. However, it can draw these energies ʻwretched placesʼ (the favelas of Rio, the bordellos either from the forces that ʻhold walls together and

54 Radical Philosophy 104 (November/December 2000) closedʼ or from the forces that are free and non- a critical exegesis of the three writers in question in teleological. This Nietzschean dualism of reactive and order to advance the critical realist project. active forces is then mapped on to the world, with Smithʼs choice of theorists is in part based on his the reactive forces identified with the ʻgrim androidsʼ attempt to read state theories in terms of their epis- of corporate America and the active forces identified temological and ontological claims and assumptions. with the rebels who live in the wretched places. Lingis Thus Dahl, Hayek and Jessop are understood less even enlists the Hollywood film Point Break as an through the usual and, for Smith, rather restricting example and in doing so further glamorizes its surfer categories of ʻneo-pluralistʼ, ʻneo-liberalʼ and ʻneo- anti-hero Boddhi, who, at the climax of the film, Marxistʼ, and more through the ways in which their suicidally surfs into a storm rather than give himself work is shot through with understated and sometimes up to the FBI. The multiplicity of the libido is actu- unstated philosophical assumptions. It is on this basis, ally crushed by this ʻethicsʼ that claims to celebrate claims Smith, that the relationship between these three multiple intensities. Intensities are forced into the writers can be reassessed, and used as the basis for correct singular response to the singular imperative rethinking state theory: ʻI want to encourage social of the environment that can only be experienced in a scientists working on the state to explore the insights singular wretched place. which can be identified through sensitive and careful While I donʼt doubt the sincerity of Lingisʼs identifi- cross-fertilization.ʼ cation with the wretched of the earth, which is admi- On the one hand, this provides interesting insights rable as philosophy often accommodates itself to the into the work of the three writers in question. Hayek, neo-liberal world order, his philosophical ethics is dan- for example, is placed less in the tradition of neo- gerously close to an inverse moralism. By identifying liberal rational choice theory, and more in the tradition free and non-teleological desires with certain places, of phenomenology as developed by Alfred Schütz. The with certain acts, and even with certain people, those outcome is that Hayekʼs account of the self-generating desires are limited and controlled rather than being order is seen less as part of the intellectual foundation released. Despite his many debts to Bataille, some of the neo-liberal policies of the 1980s and more as the acknowledged and others not, Lingis lacks what Jean- basis of a phenomenologically informed transformative Luc Nancy called Batailleʼs ʻsobrietyʼ. It may be that praxis. to be carried away by the dangerous emotions is not On the other hand, the exploration of such intel- really to respond to them in all their dangerousness. lectual cross-fertilization leads to some rather bizarre Benjamin Noys conclusions, the most obvious of which concerns the relationship between Hayek and Jessop. We are told that ʻJessopʼs account of the relationship between autopoietic and allopoietic qualities of social systems Rethinking what? has strong affinities with Hayekʼs account of the insti- tutional products of catallactic relations.ʼ The affinities Mark J. Smith, Rethinking State Theory, Routledge, in question emerge through a comparison of the realist London and New York, 2000. xiv + 281 pp., £60.00 assumptions in the work of both writers. But this radi- hb., 0 415 20892 0. cally underplays the distinct lack of political affinity. This book does not do many of the things one might However restricting or misleading the usual labels expect of it. It is not a book about ʻthe stateʼ; it does ʻneo-liberalʼ and ʻneo-Marxistʼ might be, they can not offer a theory of the state; and it does not even presumably still be of use – assuming, that is, that cover the range of state theories that have been offered the words ʻliberal and ʻMarxistʼ still have some mean- in the past. It claims to offer a ʻmetatheoryʼ – defined ing. Smithʼs highlighting of the epistemological and as an exploration of the principles and assumptions ontological cross-fertilization of these writers comes behind theories of the state – but this in fact turns out at the rather high price of losing sight of their political to be two things: first, a lengthy examination of the commitments. work of three main theorists, Robert Dahl, Friedrich This book does provide some useful insights into Hayek and Bob Jessop; and second, an attempt to find the work of Dahl, Hayek and Jessop. But it is hard out what, if anything, these writers have to say to to know which is more offputting: its attempt to critical realism. As such its claim to offer a ʻcritical encourage social science yet further down the critical exegesis of state theoryʼ seems a little overstated: it is realist road, or its ridiculous price. Mark Neocleous

Radical Philosophy 104 (November/December 2000) 55