Tag Archives: austere politics

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

Aside
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

Aside
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.

Standard
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.

Standard
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.

Standard
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.

Standard