Category Archives: Papers

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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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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Papers

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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Papers

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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Papers

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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Papers

Political Theory and the Crisis of the Political: Post-Althusserian Turns to Politics

Presented at the American Political Science Association, September 2010. Full paper.

For almost 30 years, political theorists on the left have been warning of a crisis of the political. The political, we are told, is being effaced by liberal consensus and neoliberal technocracy. For many of the theorists of the crisis of the political, this crisis necessitates a move from Marxism to post-Marxism, as Marxism was held to have failed to theorize the political, and so to be incapable of understanding the contemporary forces which might resist the crisis. I want to locate some of these theorists more specifically, to show how the theme of the crisis of the political did not arise solely in response to the political situation of the past 30 years, nor in response to the weaknesses of Marxism as such, but rather in response to certain impasses faced by Althusserian Marxism in the 1970s. The purpose of this exercize is partly to effect a mild deflation of the theme of the “crisis of the political,” to move from the idea that we face a post-political epoch to a more naunced characterization of the particular political challenges we face today. This in turn is, I believe, useful in considering what we can learn from the theorists of the crisis of the political in a period defined by a rather different crisis, the economic crisis we have been experiencing for the past three years. Economic crisis surely demands a political response, but it remains to be seen how useful attempts to reinvigorate the political can be in thinking about the demands placed on left-wing politics today.

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Papers

Technology, Nature and Liberation: Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectical Theory of Agency

Originally published in Mandy Merck and Stella Sandford, eds, Further Adventures of the Dialectic of Sex:Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), chapter 7. Full paper.

There is the appearance of something paradoxical in Firestone’s dedication of The Dialectic of Sex to Simone de Beauvoir. Where de Beauvoir argued that “one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one,” relegating biology to the section of The Second Sex on the “myth” of destiny, Firestone opens The Dialectic of Sex by calling the oppression of women “a fundamental biological condition.” Where de Beauvoir is one of the founders of a social constructionist view of gender, Firestone seems to regress to a naïve biological reductionism in which gender follows immediately from the biological fact of sex. As Judith Butler has pointed out, however, this distinction between social constructionist and biological reductionist accounts of sex and gender is not as clear as it seems to be.  I will argue that Firestone is aware of some of this complexity, and so appeals to biology not as a fixed substance to which women’s oppression can be reduced, but rather as one element within a theorization of feminist revolution which would conclude by dissolving the specificity of the biological. The dialectic in The Dialectic of Sex, that is, is based on the mutually constitutive and mutually contradictory relationship between the social construction of gender and the biological facticity of sex.

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Papers

“The Parody of the Motley Cadaver”: Revolution as Life and Death

Presented at Second Nature: Rethinking the Natural Through Politics, Northwestern University, February 2007. Full paper.

If we still, again, face a crisis of Marxism, it is tempting to quote still, again, Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” But are those of us wrestling with this crisis coming to the recognition that the crisis is the rule, or are we in the melancholy position of the angel of history, seeing crisis pile on crisis with no hope of turning our heads towards the future? The necessity of asking this question can be seen in the fact that contemporary responses to a perceived crisis in Marxism center around attempts to conceptualize differently the locations in which we might uncover a cache of revolutionary potential; the turn to Spinoza is, perhaps the clearest indication. I want to investigate this quest for potential in terms of two sets of concepts: on the one hand, creativity, life, and the organic, and on the other, communication, death, and the inorganic. The relation between the concepts in the first group is, I hope, reasonably self-evident, and their connection to the larger question likewise. Hardt and Negri’s discussion of the Multitude in terms of living flesh draws on an organic and vitalist vocabulary, in which the potential of the Multitude results from their expansive fecundity. But Hardt and Negri also call this flesh “an artificial life,” and it is in this artificiality that my second set of three terms are linked. I will, I hope, make the precise connection between the three terms clear later, through a discussion of Benjamin’s own search for revolutionary potential. The point is to show that severing the link between a transformative potential and a vitalist organicism gives us another way to think through this “crisis of Marxism.”

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Papers

Intellectual History as Political Theory: The Relevance of Quentin Skinner

Full paper

Quentin Skinner is often held to have advocated the study of intellectual history in opposition to what has traditionally been practiced as political theory. His criticism (along with other members of the “Cambridge School,” notably Dunn and Pocock) of what he saw as widespread anachronism in the study of political theory when he began his work in the late 1960s emphasizes the importance of history to his work. It would be a mistake, however, to regard Skinner as advocating a discipline of intellectual history separate from political theory, leaving the political theorists perhaps free to continue in their anachronism. On the contrary, Skinner’s interest in historically accurate readings of past texts in political theory is due to a belief that historical accuracy is important for political theory, a rejection of the distinction between an ahistorical political theory and an apolitical intellectual history. But there is perhaps something puzzling about this. One of Skinner’s central claims is that we cannot reasonably interpret historical authors as discussing issues of contemporary relevance, but must instead attempt to understand their work as a response to their own, historically specific, concerns. How, then, could this practice of intellectual history function as a form of political theory which would have any relevance to the present? This is the question I will attempt to answer in this paper. By looking in detail at Skinner’s methodological writings, I will suggest that it is precisely the historical specificity of past works of theory which, by providing us with unfamiliar concepts, makes them useful in reflecting on the conceptual organization of contemporary politics.

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