Author Archives: tim

Research notes

I attended the annual conference of the American Political Science Association in San Francisco last week. I presented a paper about how contemporary international development literature conceptualizes politics, and what that means for radical political theory. More importantly, I saw a lot of really interesting papers.

Perhaps my favourite panel was one on Iris Marion Young. The occasion of the panel was the 25th anniversary of the publication of Justice and the Politics of Difference, but most of the speakers considered Young’s career more widely. This was particularly true of Michaele Ferguson’s paper, which showed how Young’s later work on the different modalities of difference developed out of her early engagement with socialist feminism, and particularly her criticisms of “dual-systems theories.” Linda Zerilli’s paper also addressed the whole breadth of Young’s career, in this case Young’s relationship to critical theory. Zerilli distinguished between the earlier tradition of critical theory which was in some general sense gained its orientation from action, and post-Habermasian critical theory which is much more concerned with the epistemological justification of critique. Zerilli connected Young primarily with the first tradition, but, if I understood her correctly, suggested that Young had perhaps given up more ground than she needed to to the epistemological approach.

Zerilli also spoke on an excellent panel on Wittgenstein, arguing against interpretations of Wittgenstein that equate a form of life with a conceptual scheme. A conceptual scheme is a kind of linguistic normativity, restricting what can and can’t be said, but Zerilli argued, drawing on Cavell, that Wittgenstein rejects this kind of normativity. This panel also included a paper by Andrius Galisanka arguing for the importance of Wittgenstein’s rejection of the fact-value distinction to the revival of normative political theory in the 50s. Galisanka particularly emphasized that Wittgenstein was a direct influence on Rawls, with the implication that this should affect how we read Rawls and, perhaps, the whole post-Rawlsian tradition in political philosophy.

Changing directions slightly, there was a panel with the excellent title “Machiavelli Out of Context,” organised around the theme of reading Machiavelli either in terms of modern questions, or in relation to theoretical traditions other than his own. Robyn Marasco’s paper was an example of the latter approach, using anthropological and theoretical discussions of play to explore how Machiavelli construes politics in terms of play. Marasco construes play widely, including games of chance, performance or role play, and flirtation. I’m really excited by the expansion of our understanding of politics this allows, away from a narrow idea of strategic rationality, towards an idea of politics as an expenditure of passion. I also enjoyed Yves Winter’s paper on cruelty in Machiavelli, emphasizing that Machiavelli is part of a tradition in which cruelty is defined by its attack on the dignitas, that is, the status, of the powerful.

Notes from APSA 2015

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Papers

Sovereignty and other neoliberal fantasies

Presented at the American Political Science Association, September 2015. Full paper.

There is a common belief in political theory that we need to pay more attention to the political. Against what is held to be a domination of economic power and technocratic thinking in contemporary capitalism, political theorists call for us to give a greater role for distinctly political concepts such as agonism, the will, or popular sovereignty. The conditions undermining the political, and hence requiring that political theory restore the political, are often identified by the name neoliberalism, where neoliberalism is understood as an ideology or political rationality in which economic logic takes the place of older political logics. The defence of the political would thus be a way of resisting neoliberalism.

In this paper, I want to consider a turn to the political in another discipline. In international development scholarship and practice in the past ten years there has been a movement, variously called “political economy analysis,” “thinking and working politically,” or the “new politics agenda,” which has been successful in persuading the international development community to think about development as a political process. This is perhaps surprising from the point of view of political theory, inasmuch as the agencies involved in international development – western states or large NGOs – are just the sorts of institutions political theorists suspect of putting forward a technocratic, depoliticized, neoliberal agenda. What explains this apparent paradox, I will argue, is that in the new politics agenda in development studies, “politics” is understood in a particular and quite novel way, in which central concepts of politics are reinterpreted according to a neoliberal logic.

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Papers

Willful Feelings: On the Affects of Political Will

Presented at the Western Political Science Association, 2015. Full paper.

The centrality of sovereignty to political theory can make it difficult to isolate and analyze its role within political theory, so in this paper I will take a slightly oblique approach. I will consider one particular experiential aspect of sovereignty, namely, the feelings associated with exercising sovereignty or control, or what it feels like to exercise the will. I draw on the phenomenological or affective approach to the will in Sara Ahmed’s Willful Subjects to dislodge some of the assumptions political theorists make about the cluster of concepts around sovereignty and the will. This critical investigation of the contingency of the role played by the will in political theory sets the stage for a further demonstration of how thinking about affects can be helpful to political theory, looking at Sianne Ngai’s and Lauren Berlant’s investigation of affects associated with limited agency can suggest a different way of thinking about politics from approaches which center the will and sovereign agency.

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Research notes

Sara Ahmed’s Willful Subjects is  an interesting deconstruction of the will, in the sense that it shows how dominant understandings of the will disavow themselves, thereby creating the disparaged category of the willful. Ahmed does this by making two key separations of the will from things we usually thing of it as attached to. First, Ahmed detaches will from the subject. The will is “an experience a subject has of itself as bringing something about” (24), but that doesn’t mean that the will is simply something the subject has, in which the subject would necessarily know what their will was. Rather, Ahmed points out how will can be experienced as an internal obstacle, quoting Augustine of “having more than one will,” an internal war of will against will (28). If we attempt to identify ourselves with one of these warring internal wills, we attempt to exert our will on our will. So the experience of willing, that is, the experience of identifying ourselves with a will, “introduces a command structure: to will is to order oneself to will” (28).

This leads Ahmed to discuss how the will is separated from action:

If willing is to command to will, then willing by virtue of the command is not or not yet to carry out what is willed…. Willing is thus what a subject does – or must do – when a command has not been obeyed. (29)

We usually think of will as directed towards action, but Ahmed points out that within the concept there is this moment of suspension, that will occurs precisely when, and because, action is not quite certain. Hence, as Ahmed shows in the rest of the book, the ongoing project of delimiting the right sort of will, creating a unified and productive will whether that is training the will of the child or disciplining those outside the “general will” of the community (that is, the political role of the sovereign and unified general will is predetermined by understandings of the individual will). This opens up some quite radical possibilities for thinking about alternatives to, or reconfigurations of, the politics of the will.

Deconstructing will

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Research notes

As part of easing myself into working on my new project on the politics of affect and affective labour, I’ve been looking over Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings. That project is currently going under the title “Wilful Feelings,” so I’m particularly interested in Ngai’s focus on using affects to analyse situations of “suspended agency,” which I think I can use as one way in to the question of the relationship between feeling and will. The political contexts Ngai is talking about seem like ones where political theory’s usual privileging of will or agency is going to require some complication (Berlant’s term “lateral agency” is also something I’m thinking about here). Particularly, as Ngai points out, thinking about suspended agency is a useful contrast to the optimistic or recuperative understanding of affect that you tend to get from post-autonomist theorists of affective labour, where affect is quickly subsumed under a more general immaterial labour, which is then also quickly taken to be implicitly communist. Not that there aren’t political possibilities in affective labour, but I think figuring them out requires more attention to the specifics and the ambivalences of affective labour (like, who, in terms of gender, race, and geography, is performing affective labour).

Related to this question about affects and agency is Ngai’s interest in how affect disrupts the distinction between subject and object. She, quite rightly I think, complicates the tendency in affect theory to try and sharply distinguish emotion (supposedly tightly bound both to the subject and to language) from affect (supposedly pre-linguistic and pre- or inter-subjective). Ngai argues for a dialectic between the two terms, and indeed it seems to me that that is the particular theoretical value of affect. Ngai begins the book with a discussion of “tone”, a concept for analysing feelings which are neither objectively observed nor (simply) subjectively experienced. Tone is an aesthetic concept in the sense that it applies to the sensations associated with works of art, which also depend on a dialectic between subjective and objective: the beauty of a painting is neither a purely objective feature of the painting, nor reducible to the subjective pleasure we may experience in looking at the painting. In Austere Politics I argue that this kind of aesthetic mediation is characteristic of more than just art, so I’m interested in thinking about how Ngai’s analysis of tone can deepen my own thinking about political mediations.

Ugly feelings and wilful feelings

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Research notes

I’ve been working on the last chapter of Austere Politics, in which I try and think about some possibilities for a politics that wouldn’t be disconnected from the material complexities of “non-political” life. I’ve been thinking about the Occupy encampments as possible inspirations, so I’ve been reading Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience, by W.J.T. Mitchell, Bernard Harcourt, Michael Taussig. Taussig’s engaged anthropology of the Zuccotti park is beautifully written and very useful on the importance of the physicality of the OWS camp to its politics. I particularly like his description of the physicality of the human mic:

We hear together. We repeat together. And in that repetition we first hear, then speak, thereby tasting the words in our mouths like cherries, with time to let the ideas settle. The idea part of the spoken word gets its chance to resonate in different dimensions of thought and of feeling…. There is joy in spoofing the too-serious ones, left-wing or right-wing, who assume they are the ones who know and have come here to tell us what’s what.

This resonates with Harcourt’s description of OWS as “political disobedience,” which, unlike civil disobedience, questions the form of the civitas, our current constituted political organisation. This is obviously an approach I’m very receptive to, because it is similar to my own rejection of “austere politics.” Harcourt goes on to connect this rejection of our current narrow definitions of the political with Occupy’s rejection of demands, because, he argues, in rejecting demands, Occupy

has deliberately resisted what I would call the privileging of choice. Choice—especially rational and calculated choice—is a hallmark of these late modern times. In the West there is a premium on deliberate decision making, on reason, on intentionality, on sovereignty. To make a free, knowing, deliberate, and intelligent choice is the very epitome and the project of modernity, the project of Enlightenment…. The sovereign choosing self is at the heart of the liberal conception of Western society.

This is a useful thing for me to be reading as I come to the end of Austere Politics, because it points towards what I intend to be my next project, a critique of the rationalist politics of sovereignty and the will in the light of contemporary understandings of affective labour.

It was because of this new project on affects and the will that I picked up a copy of Jameson’s The Antinomies of Realism in Verso’s recent sale. Jameson’s overarching framework for analysing the realist novel centres on the way in which affects become autonomous in bourgeois society. Unlike a description of emotions which treats them as comprehensible parts of a characters narrative arc, affects, as Jameson describes them, are more free-floating, attaching to a kind of ahistorical abstract universal individual. This probably isn’t directly relevant to my project, but I find its good to read around a topic, particularly when you’re just putting it together. In any case, it’s a fascinating book (and Jameson’s magesterial tone is always fun to read), although Jameson’s approach to affects does have some similarity to Ahmed’s theory of the objectification of affects, and I’m a bit disappointed that he doesn’t cite or engage with her work.

Affects in Zuccotti park and in 19th century realist literature

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Papers

Anti-austerity Politics: Marxism, Materialism, and the Scope of the Political

Presented at the Association for Political Theory, October 2014. Full paper.

For many post-Marxists, the political is a vitally important category and it is established, and must be defended, by maintaining the specificity of the political, by preventing its colonization by other categories. The authors I have in mind here include Alain Badiou, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Jacques Rancière, as well as more recent work by Jodi Dean and Peter Hallward. In very general terms, all these authors share a concern with something encroaching on the political, whether that is a theoretical encroachment of Marxist economic determinism, or a practical encroachment of neoliberal marketisation. In either case, these authors assert the separateness of the political as a way of ensuring a space for human agency against the realm of necessity.

The problem is that this insistence on the separateness of the political leads to a narrow and abstract understanding of politics, which cuts politics of from the world in which it is supposed to act. Instead of all the complex considerations we encounter when we engage in political activity, these approaches reduce politics to some formal criteria, such as ‘contestation’ or ‘the incompleteness of the social’. It is because of this reductionism that I refer to approaches to the political which concentrate on its separateness as ‘austere’. In this paper, I attempt to find what we might call an ‘anti-austerity’ conception of politics. A turn to the sensuous or phenomenological, I argue, helps us to understand the richness of politics, that is to say, the multiple varying factors that come together to form the space in which we can take political action.

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Mass Culture and Political Form in C. L. R. James’s American Civilization

Presented at Historical Materialism, London, November 2013. Full paper.

This paper begins from a question: why study pop culture? Or, rather, why study popular culture as someone committed to revolutionary politics or Marxism more specifically? And here I don’t mean studying popular culture in order to engage in politics in a way which would subordinate the study of pop culture as means to political ends. We see this kind of reductive pop culture critique fairly frequently, in which the condemnation of some cultural artefact as ideologically mystifying, or the praise of it as expressing a radical point of view, are taken as occasions for organizing, rallying around, or against, that work. There’s nothing wrong with this, I suppose (although when, as is often the case, the mobilization involved is purely virtual, this kind of activity can combine a self- congratulatory self-understanding as bravely political with little if any political effect). However, this political deployment of popular culture makes for bad criticism because it is (sometimes, and this is admirable, avowedly) uninterested in the particular features of the work under discussion: the interest is in how the work can be deployed as a slogan, not how it functions as a cultural work. What this misses is the aesthetic dimension: how the formal features of the work strike the sensorium of the audience, and what various and ramified effects they produce in doing so Another way of phrasing my question, then, might be: what can a Marxist political project gain from paying attention to the aesthetics of popular culture? And, relatedly, what kind of aesthetic analysis will be valuable from a Marxist perspective?

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Queer Futurity and Utopian Socialism in the First International

Presented at the Western Political Science Association, March 2013. Full paper.

In this paper I examine Marx’s attitude to the temporality of politics through a recent debate in queer theory on the politics of futurity. Edelman’s polemic No Future rejects futurity and politics with it because, Edelman argues, they are both bound up with a heteronormative logic of ‘reproductive futurism’, which sacrifices the present in the name of a future imagined in the form of a child. In response, Muñoz seeks to reclaim the possibilities of utopian imagination through an idea of ‘queer futurity’, which scrambles the linear, developmental, temporality of reproductive futurism. Through a reading of Marx’s debates with his contemporaries in the First International, and his discussion of the Paris Commune in The Civil War in France, I argue that Marx, like Edelman (and indeed like Muñoz), rejects a future which merely reproduces the present, but, like Muñoz, Marx does not on this ground entirely reject thinking about and imaginatively orienting ourselves towards the future. I conclude by sketching the utopian moments within Marx’s later work that become visible in the light of Muñoz’s analysis.

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The Spectral Proletariat: The Politics of Hauntology in The Communist Manifesto

Originally published in Global Discourse: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Affairs and Applied Contemporary Thought 2, no. 2 (2011). Full paper.

“Everything begins by the apparition of a specter,” Derrida writes, describing both the Communist Manifesto and Hamlet. But while in Hamlet the arrival of the ghost sets in motion a train of events in which the ghost does not participate, the Communist Manifesto, I will argue, begins and ends with the apparition of a specter. The specter of communism reveals a more general way in which the proletariat, as Marx construes it in the Manifesto, it itself spectral. The metaphysics, or rather anti-metaphysics, of specters and haunting that Derrida develops in Specters of Marx helps to explain the conception of politics which Marx develops in the Manifesto. The Communist Manifesto has tended to be interpreted either as a determinist work, based on a historical ontology in which the future is determined by what exists in the present, or as a voluntarist work, based on a subjectivist ontology in which the future is brought about by the free actions of independent agents. I argue that, while these two approaches can both be seen in the Manifesto, Marx is, in accordance with the Derridean idea of hauntology, not concerned with what exists, but with what does not exist, and in particular with what does not exist yet. Reading the Manifesto in light of Derrida’s discussion of spectrality provides reasons to reject views which criticize Marx’s supposed essentialist understanding of class (I discuss, in particular, Laclau’s attempt to provide a post-Marxist alternative to Marx’s supposed determinism). That the proletariat is not fixed but is, rather, spectral, allows us to understand the particular futurity Marx associates with the class, and the politics he derives from this.

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