CONTENTS

172
Radical Philosophy Ltd
R A D I C A L P H I L O S O P H Y
a j o u r n a l o f s o c i a l i s t a n d f e m i n i s t p h i l o s o p h y
Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd.
www.radicalphilosophy.com
MARCH/APRIL 2012
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Editorial collective
Claudia Aradau, Matthew Charles,
David Cunningham, Howard Feather,
Peter Hallward, Esther Leslie, Stewart
Martin, Mark Neocleous, Peter Osborne,
Stella Sandford, Chris Wilbert
Contributors
Gordon Lafer is associate professor at the
University of Oregons Labor Education
and Research Center, and author of The Job
Training Charade (2002) and Neither Free
nor Fair (2007). In 200910 he served as
Senior Policy Advisor for the US House of
Representatives Committee on Education and
Labor.
tienne Balibar is Emeritus Professor of
Moral and Political Philosophy, University of
Paris X, Nanterre, and Distinguished Professor
of Humanities, University of California, Irvine.
His latest book is Citoyen Sujet (PUF, 2011).
Matthew Charles currently teaches in the
Centre for Research in Modern European
Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University
London, and in the English Department at the
University of Westminister.
Noam Chomsky is Emeritus Professor in the
Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
at MIT and author of over a hundred books,
including, recently, Hopes and Prospects; New
World of Indigenous Resistance; and Making
the Future: The Unipolar Imperial Moment (all
2010).
Peter Hallward teaches in the CRMEP,
Kingston University London. He is currently
writing The Will of the People for Verso.
COMMENTARY
Class Warfare in the USA: Anti-Unionism and the
Legislative Agenda of the 1%
Gordon Lafer ................................................................................................... 2
ARTICLES
Lenin and Gandhi: A Missed Encounter?
tienne Balibar ............................................................................................... 9
Faust on Film: Walter Benjamin and the Cinematic Ontology
of Goethes Faust 2
Matthew Charles .......................................................................................... 18
INTERVIEW
Freedom and Power
Noam Chomsky interviewed by Peter Hallward ....................................... 30
REVIEWS
Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One
John Kraniauskas ......................................................................................... 48
Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds, The Affect Theory Reader
Todd Cronan .................................................................................................. 51
Michael Bailey and Des Freedman, eds, The Assault on Universities:
A Manifesto for Resistance
Matthew Charles .......................................................................................... 53
University for Strategic Optimism, Undressing the Academy, or
The Student Handjob
Daniel Nemenyi ............................................................................................ 56
Deborah Cook, Adorno on Nature
Kate Soper .................................................................................................... 57
Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel, The Death of Philosophy: Reference and Self-Reference
in Contemporary Thought
Wesley Phillips .............................................................................................. 59
Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos
David Winters ................................................................................................ 61
Sean Sayers, Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes
Jan Kandiyali ................................................................................................ 63
OBITUARIES
Switch Off All Apparatuses: Friedrich Adolf Kittler, 19432011
Gill Partington ............................................................................................... 66
Politics and Subjectivity, Head-to-Head: Len Rozitchner, 19242011
Bruno Bosteels .............................................................................................. 70
2 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
COMMENTARY
Class warfare
in the USA
Anti-unionism and the legislative
agenda of the 1%
Gordon Lafer
T
he past year has brought an unprecedented series of attacks on public employee
unions in state legislatures across the United States. The most dramatic such
assault came in Wisconsin, where newly elected governor Scott Walker pushed
through legislation that effectively eliminated the right to collective bargaining for his
states 175,000 public employees.
1
Yet while Wisconsin became the crucible through
which much of the population viewed these issues, it was part of a much broader
legislative pattern. In 2011, bills restricting the collective bargaining rights of public
employees were introduced in twenty-eight of the ffty states, and adopted in twelve.
Ohio, for instance, prohibited employees from bargaining over anything but wages, and
from striking. New Jersey eliminated public employees right to negotiate over health
insurance. Idaho abolished tenure for schoolteachers. Michigan established unelected
emergency managers with the power to nullify union contracts in cities facing budget
defcits. Furthermore, while media attention focused on the struggles of public-sector
unions, the year also brought a host of initiatives aimed at restricting the rights of
private employees both union and non-union as well as cutbacks in social and
economic protections for the poor and working class.
In what follows, I will describe the broad agenda that frames the attacks on govern-
ment unions and will try to explain why these initiatives came at this particular histori-
cal moment, before describing the actors and interests that have been most central in
advancing this agenda.
Fiscal crisis as opportunity
In Wisconsin and elsewhere, attacks on public employee unions were justifed as a nec-
essary response to the fscal crises facing state governments. Commentators regularly
suggested that budget defcits were the fault of unions that used their political clout to
pad government payrolls and extract exorbitant benefts from hard-working taxpayers.
Wisconsins Governor Walker explained that the union-busting law was needed because
our people are weighed down paying for a larger and larger government and we can
no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who
foot the bills are the have-nots.
2

But this characterization does not ft the facts of economic reality. Public employees
generally make slightly less than their private-sector counterparts.
3
And both the
number of public employees per capita and the proportion of state budgets devoted to
employee compensation have been fat for the past decade.
4
3
The budget shortfalls of 2011 were actually the product of sudden economic crisis.
In 2007, state budgets were in balance, with several states reporting surpluses.
5
Three
years later, the states faced a combined shortfall of almost $200 billion, by far the
largest on record.
6
What changed in that short time span was no increase in state spend-
ing, but a dramatic fall-off in revenues caused by the collapse of the housing market
and the onset of the Great Recession.
7

Budget defcits struck nearly every state in the country, regardless of employees
union status. Statistical analysis shows no correlation whatsoever between the presence
of public employee unions and the size of state budget defcits.
8
Indeed, the state of
Texas which prohibits collective bargaining for nearly all public employees faced a
massive shortfall of $18 billion, or 20 per cent of state expenditures.
9
If unions didnt
cause the defcits, its also true that eliminating unions is not a realistic strategy for
addressing fscal problems. Employee concessions in certain circumstances may be a
legitimate part of closing budget gaps, but this has nothing to do with the abolition of
bargaining rights. This was made painfully clear when Wisconsins unions agreed to
100 per cent of Governor Walkers economic proposals including signifcant reduc-
tions in benefts only to have Walker declare that no deal was acceptable as long as
workers retained the legal right to bargain. Under questioning by members of Congress,
Walker conceded that many of the most anti-union provisions in his legislation
wouldnt save [the state] anything.
10
So, too, the governor of Ohio which adopted a
law similar to Wisconsins only to see it overturned by a subsequent voter referendum
conceded that his law does not affect our budget.
11

Eliminating collective bargaining rights was not a fscal strategy; it was a political
power play.
Permanently downsizing the state
The fscal crisis facing state governments has been nearly universally invoked as
requiring steep cuts in public services and the sell-off of public assets. But upon close
examination, legislators seem to have been driven less by urgency to close budget gaps
than by the opportunity to advance long-held goals of shrinking the state and under-
mining the political and economic leverage of working people.
These political priorities were frst made evident in the choice of many conservative
governors to extend new tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy even as they forced
drastic cuts in public services. Wisconsin itself, for instance, was one of the few states
not facing a budget crisis going into 2011. The states nonpartisan legislative research
service reported that the government was in line to enjoy a budget surplus; the budget
went into the red only after the governor, as one of his frst acts in offce, enacted
new business tax cuts.
12
Likewise, the state of Ohio repealed its inheritance tax, and
Michigan cut corporate taxes by 80 per cent, all while slashing essential services.
If elected offcials were simply concerned with closing budget gaps, they had many
alternative methods for achieving this end. For instance, the defcits in all ffty states
could have be erased entirely through two simple policy changes: undoing the Bush tax
cuts for the top 2 per cent of income earners, and taxing capital gains at the same rate
as ordinary income. Yet none of the Republican governors advocated this road to fscal
balance. Instead, state after state enacted steep cuts in employee compensation and
safety-net programmes for those suffering through the Great Recession. All told, nearly
600,000 state and local government jobs have been eliminated in the past three years.
13

Funding for schools, child care, public transportation, and care for the elderly infrm
have all suffered dramatic cuts.
Similarly, recent legislation will also make life harder for those unlucky enough to
be without a job. Florida, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri and Wisconsin, among others,
all reduced unemployment insurance benefts. In Indiana, employer contributions to the
4
states unemployment insurance fund were cut by more than 25 per cent, with workers
benefts reduced by a similar amount. Wisconsin now requires unemployed workers to
go a full week with no benefts whatsoever before they are eligible for state support,
and several states promoted new eligibility requirements for recipients, including
increased pressures to take any job offered, no matter how low the wage, rather than
continue searching for a position in ones feld or closer to ones previous wage rate.
It is telling that these cuts were not generally presented as unwanted but temporarily
necessary acts. Cuts were not structured as temporary measures that expire when the
economy rebounds and state coffers are replenished. On the contrary, many states
enacted new structural impediments to increasing revenues even after the economy
recovers requiring supermajorities to raise tax rates, or prohibiting the budget from
ever increasing faster than the rate of infation that aim at locking in the newly
shrunken size of government as the new high-water mark of public-sector activity. In
all these states, then, the agenda for the public sector is not merely to get rid of unions
and cut employees pay; it is to shrink permanently the capacity of the state to provide
essential services or to regulate corporate practices.
Beyond public employees
While policy debates have been largely framed around the need for fscal austerity,
the year also saw widespread attacks on the legal rights and economic standards of
private- sector workers. Eighteen states introduced so-called right to work laws, aimed
at undermining private-sector unions. This Orwellian named policy does not guarantee
anyone a job. Rather, it makes it illegal for a union to require that employees who
beneft from a collective contract contribute their fair share of the costs of administer-
ing that contract. By weakening unions ability to sustain themselves fnancially, such
laws aim to weaken the bargaining power of organized workers, and ultimately to drive
private-sector unions out of existence.
So, too, a dozen states introduced bills restricting the ability of both public- and
private-sector unions to participate in the political process, by requiring unions to
obtain annual written authorization from each member in order to spend dues money
on politics. Since both federal and state law already allow anyone covered by a union
contract to withhold dues from political uses, such laws provide no new rights to
employees, but consume considerable union resources in the bureaucratic activity of
collecting annual notifcations, and aim to muzzle the political voice of organized
workers.
14
Similarly, thirteen states introduced bills banning public employees from
having union dues deducted through the state payroll system even for employees who
voluntarily choose to pay dues. Since there is virtually no cost to states for electronic
payroll deductions, the sole purpose of such legislation is to cripple unions fnancially
and limit the ability of organized labour to participate in electoral politics.
The assault on wage standards extends to non-union as well as unionized employees.
Most states uphold prevailing wage laws, for instance, which ensure that publicly
funded construction doesnt serve to undercut local wage standards. Such laws beneft
union and non-union employees alike, but have long been opposed by non-union
contractors who believe they could make higher profts with lower wage standards. This
year they saw their chance to advance this agenda. Legislation weakening or eliminat-
ing prevailing wage standards was introduced in fourteen states and passed in fve,
severely eroding construction pay scales.
Similarly, minimum wage and overtime laws were scaled back in multiple states,
undermining the most important wage protections available to non-union workers.
Both Maine and Wisconsin adopted laws relaxing child labour protections. Meanwhile,
budget cuts weakened the ability of states to police even those regulations that remain
on the books. In Missouri, for instance, the governors budget eliminated all funding
5
for labour investigators charged with policing minimum wage, child labour and similar
violations. This package of lower wage standards, less enforcement and reduced bene-
fts for those out of work combines to render employees more dependent than ever,
with fewer options but to accept whatever job they may be offered, on whatever terms
employers choose to provide.
A coordinated assault on labour standards
One of the most striking aspects of the past year is not only the extent to which these
legislative initiatives appeared simultaneously in so many states, but also the extent to
which such a disparate array of proposals were promoted as components of a coherent
policy agenda. Michigan, for example, not only restricted public employees union rights
and reduced corporate taxes, but also cut unemployment benefts, prohibited the regula-
tion of repetitive-motion injuries at work, instituted a new tax on pensions, privatized
school support services, and may well abolish its prevailing wage law. The commitment
to this range of proposals is not based on the specifc needs of the local economy.
Pension reform did not arise organically in states with particularly large unfunded
liabilities; nor was school privatization the particular domain of states with under-
performing schools. These laws were not home-crafted responses to local problems; they
were part of a long-standing agenda driven primarily by national business organizations.
The attacks on workers have been promoted by a coalition of anti-union ideologues,
Republican Party operatives, and corporate lobbies. Republican strategists have long
identifed labour unions and government employees as key pillars of the Democratic
Party unions contributing funds and public
employees providing the army of volunteers
knocking on doors in support of big-government
Democrats. Its no mistake that the hardest-
fought anti-union campaigns have taken place in
states that are also political battlegrounds for the
presidential election. If Republicans can cut off
union funds and volunteers in key swing states,
this may alter control of the federal govern-
ment.
15
Partly for this reason, when the 2010
elections swept Republicans into power in these
states, a host of anti-union initiatives that had
long lingered on policy wish-lists suddenly became top legislative priorities.
But behind the network of Republican operatives, the most important forces spurring
this agenda forward are a cluster of extremely wealthy individuals and corporations,
including traditional corporate lobbies such as the Chamber of Commerce and the
National Association of Manufacturers, along with newer and more ideologically
extreme organizations such as the Club for Growth and the Koch-backed Americans for
Prosperity. Recent trends have conspired to endow this coalition with unprecedented polit-
ical leverage. As the US economy has grown dramatically more unequal over the past few
decades, it has produced a critical mass of extremely wealthy conservative businesspeople.
At the same time, elections for public offce have become dramatically more expensive,
leaving politicians ever more dependent on those with the resources to fund campaigns.
Finally, the Supreme Courts 2010 Citizens United decision opened the door to unlimited
corporate spending on political campaigns. In this way, dramatically unequal distribution
of wealth has been translated into equally outsized political infuence for those at the top.
The 2010 elections were the frst ever conducted under the new rules, and they saw record
levels of spending by business political action funds.
16
The series of anti-union attacks
launched in 2011, in large part, refect the success of that strategy.
At the centre of this coalition is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC),
6
a national network that brings state legislators together with the countrys largest
corporations including Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, ExxonMobil and leading tobacco and
pharmaceuticals frms to promote business-friendly legislation. Thanks to an expos
by a disgruntled member, the inner workings of the organization have recently been
brought to light (see www.alecexposed.org). ALECs 2,000 member legislators include
a large number of Senate presidents and House speakers. Legislators are invited to
swanky conferences where committees composed of equal numbers of public and private
offcials develop model legislation. ALECs staff convert these into legislative language
and produce supportive policy reports. Thus state legislators with little time, staff or
expertise are able to introduce fully formed legislation. Ultimately, the exchange that
ALEC facilitates is between corporate donors and state legislators: the corporations pay
ALEC staffs expenses, contribute to legislators campaigns and fund the think-tanks that
promote legislation; in return, legislators carry the corporate agenda into their state houses.
Over the past decade, ALECs leading corporate backers have contributed more than $370
million to state elections and over one hundred laws a year are adopted based on ALECs
model bills.
17
In many cases, ALEC pursues initiatives that directly beneft the bottom line of its
corporate patrons. For instance, ALEC gets money from energy companies and lobbies
against environmental controls; it gets money from drug companies and advocates
prohibiting cities from importing discounted drugs from Canada; it gets money from
technology companies and works to stop cities from providing free broadband Internet
to their residents. But ALEC also promotes a broader economic and deregulatory
agenda that is not directly tied to the proftability of specifc donors. Virtually all of the
initiatives described here refect model statutes promoted by ALEC; these are not aimed
at immediately enhancing donors revenues, but at fundamentally reshaping the balance
of power between workers and employers.
Unions: rst on the chopping block
Long-term economic decline in the USA has produced widespread economic anxiety.
The broad popular sympathy for both the Tea Party and the Occupy movement points to
the volatility of this sentiment, and its capacity to manifest itself in either progressive or
reactionary directions. Those at the top of the economy work hard to channel this com-
bustible mix of fear and resentment in directions that are benign for the elite. In this
context, public employees are an easy and obvious target. Yet while both Republican
and corporate operatives have focused on anti-union legislation, its clear that the ulti-
mate goal of these organizations is an economic transformation that extends far beyond
the labour movement. Unions are the primary target largely because their elimination
will make the rest of the corporate agenda much simpler to achieve.
For the corporate lobbies, the attack on unions has multiple appeals. On average in
the United States, an employee with a union makes about 15 per cent higher wages,
and has a 2025 per cent better chance of getting health insurance and pension
through their job, than a similarly skilled non-union employee in the same industry.
18

Naturally, corporate lobbies would like to eliminate unions in order to pay less and
proft more. No doubt many frms also simply resent having to negotiate with their
employees, regardless of what such a process may ultimately cost. In addition to these
personal motives, the corporate lobbies correctly identify labour unions as the single
most important obstacle to a broad agenda of neoliberalism. The labour movement is
much shrunken, but its 14 million members remain by far the largest and most potent
force in progressive politics. When the US Chamber of Commerce pursues its goals for
health care, child care, paid sick leave, unemployment insurance, international trade,
capital gains and inheritance taxes and school funding, the labour movement is its most
powerful opponent on every score. If the business lobbies could abolish unions, theyd
have a free hand to design the countrys economic policy more or less at will.
7
Why now, and what next?
Why was 2011 the year that brought such a ferocious assault on labour standards? At
the most macro-level, the legislative battles of the past year must be viewed in the
context of the long-term economic decline experienced by working- and middle-class
Americans. For the past thirty-fve years, wages for non-professional employees have
been on a steady, if gradual, decline, while the number of hours one needs to work in
order to make ends meet has increased signifcantly. At the same time, the elements of
a secure life health insurance, a pension, a reasonable chance at owning a home or
putting a child through college have become unattainable for a growing swathe of the
country. We are witnessing the frst generation of Americans that expects to do worse
than their parents. If the country continues in the broad policy directions of neoliberal
trade, privatization, de-unionization and deregulation, there is no possibility but that
living standards for most Americans will continue to decline, as the country is slowly
but inexorably competed down to the level of less wealthy trading partners. This broad
reality provides the fundamental background framing contemporary politics. For the
economic elite, the primary political challenge is how to manage the politics of decline
that is, how to advance an ever-more-radical neoliberal agenda without provoking a
popular backlash.
In part, conservative business elites have encouraged a revolution of falling expecta-
tions. When people come to feel lucky just to have a job with health insurance (and
then just a job even without health insurance, so long as they can pay the rent); when 25
or 35 kids in a class comes to seem fortunate because others are in classes of 50; when
retaining fully funded Social Security and Medicare even without a pension from ones
job seems lucky all these shifts serve to lower peoples expectations of the economy
and their demands of employers. In this sense, the draconian cuts in public services
may serve a long-term political strategy, quite apart from their material impact on
taxes or government regulations. Most of the time, expectations decline gradually. But
occasionally there are crises that legitimate a sudden redefnition of what is reasonable
to expect from government or employers.
This was certainly the case in the years following the September 2001 attack on
the World Trade Center, when dramatic tax cuts for the wealthy, budget cuts for the
poor, and roll-backs of union wage standards were all presented as a necessary part of
patriotic belt-tightening in a time of war. The fscal crises of 2011 offered another such
moment, when the normally gradual degradation of the state could suddenly be sped
up in a frenzy of dismantling public services; when the public could come to accept a
quantum step downwards in its expectations.
Whether this strategy succeeds remains an open question. The Wisconsin legislation
sparked the largest sustained labour mobilization in many years, and Governor Walker
will likely face a recall election later this year. Several of the governors who spear-
headed the most aggressive anti-union initiatives have watched their popularity ratings
plummet, and voters in Ohio resoundingly rejected the anti-union statute enacted by
their legislature. Nevertheless, conservative politicians retain the backing of extremely
powerful supporters who appear willing to spend almost unlimited sums to ensure their
allies remain in offce. In the 2010 federal elections, labour unions were outspent 13 : 1
by corporations, and this imbalance is certain to increase under the new regime of
unlimited corporate spending.
The great unknown in this drama is how the vast majority of anxious, insecure, non-
union American workers will make sense of these issues. To this end, it is critical to
understand clearly the past years legislative battles for what they were: the leading edge
of an ambitious agenda that extends far beyond anti-unionism and that, if successful,
will transform the nation to the detriment of almost everyone.
8
Notes
1. While not technically outlawing unions, the bill is likely to lead to the same end. Public employee
unions are prohibited from negotiating about anything other than wages; wage increases for local
government employees are limited to the rate of infation and must be approved by referendum of
local voters; unions can no longer require those who beneft from contracts to pay their fair share
of the costs of administering them, and even those who volunteer to pay union dues cannot have
those dues deducted through the state payroll system; all unions are presumptively decertifed every
year, and must win support in an annual employee referendum in order to remain in existence; and
participation in any type of job action is grounds for immediate dismissal. The bill also completely
strips unionization right from faculty and graduate student employees in the state university system.
Roger Bybee, After Proposing Draconian Anti-Union Laws, Wisconsin Governor Walker Invokes
National Guard, In These Times, 15 February 2011. Number of employees affected is from Losses
to the Working Families of Wisconsin, Wisconsin State AFLCIO, August 2011.
2. Text of Governor Walkers Budget Address, State of Wisconsin, 1 March 2011, http://walker.wi.gov/
journal_media_detail.asp?locid=177&prid+5668; Steven Greenhouse, Strained States Turning to
Laws to Curb Labor Unions, New York Times, 4 January 2011, p. A1, www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/
business/04labor.html?pagewanted=all.
3. John Schmitt, The Wage Penalty for State and Local Government Employees, Center for Eco-
nomic and Policy Research, May 2010, www.cepr.net/documents/publications/wage-penalty-2010-
05.pdf; Jeffrey Keefe, Are Wisconsin Public Employees Over-Compensated, Economic Policy
Institute Briefng Paper 290, 10 February 2011, www.epi.org/publication/are_wisconsin_public
_employees_over-compensated.
4. Sylvia Allegretto, Ken Jacobs and Laurel Lucia, The Wrong Target: Public Sector Unions and State
Budget Defcits, University of California at Berkeley, Institute for Research on Labor and Employ-
ment, October 2011; David Madland and Nick Bunker, State Budget Defcits Are Not an Employee
Compensation Problem, Center for American Progress, Washington DC, 10 March 2011.
5. Elizabeth McNichol, Iris Lav and Ife Okwuje, States Still Playing Catch-Up in New Budgets,
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Washington DC, 2 August 2006, www.cbpp.org/fles/8-2-
06sfp.pdf.
6. Elizabeth McNichol, Phil Oliff, and Nicholas Johnson, States Continue to Feel Recessions Impact,
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Washington DC, 17 June 2011, www.cbpp.org/fles/9-8-08sfp.
pdf.
7. Ibid.
8. Allegretto et al., The Wrong Target.
9. Erica Williams, Michael Leachman and Nicholas Johnson, State Budget Cuts in the New Fiscal
Year Are Unnecessarily Harmful, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 28 July 2011. Police and
frefghters have the right to collective bargaining in Texas if the city or town they are employed by
has voted by referendum to grant such rights.
10. Quoted in Zaid Jilani, Scott Walker Admits Union-Busting Provision Doesnt Save Any
Money for the State of Wisconsin, Think Progress, 14 April 2011, http://thinkprogress.org/
politics/2011/04/14/158690/walker-admits-union-money.
11. Joe Vardon, Kasich Moves on from Loss on Issue 2, Columbus Dispatch, 16 November 2011. www.
dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2011/11/16/kasich-moves-on-from-loss-on-issue-2.html.
12. Wisconsins nonpartisan fscal bureau issued a memo to legislators in January 2011 stating that the
government had been on track to end the year with a surplus of $121 million. Governor Walkers
claim that the state faced a defcit was primarily due to his enactment, shortly after assuming offce,
of $140 million in tax breaks. Brian Beutler, Wisconsin Gov. Walker Ginned Up Budget Shortfall
to Undercut Workers Rights, Talking Point Memo, 17 February 2011.
13. Williams et al., State Budget Cuts in the New Fiscal Year Are Unnecessarily Harmful.
14. In 2011, such legislation was introduced in a dozen states and adopted in two, Alabama and
Arizona.
15. The Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader, for instance, explained that one of the key goals of the
Walker bill was to defund unions in order to ensure that President Obama is going to have a
much more diffcult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin. Sen. Scott Fitzgerald,
quoted in Lee Fang, WI Senate GOP Leaders Admits On-Air That His Goal is to Defund Labor
Unions, Hurt Obamas Reelection Chances, Think Progress, 9 March 2011, http://thinkprogress.org/
politics/2011/03/09/149655/scott-ftzgerald-obama.
16. National Institute for Money in State Politics, Independent Spending in the States, January 2012,
http://www.followthemoney.org/database/independentspending.phtml.
17. Legislating Under the Infuence: Money, Power, and the American Legislative Exchange Council,
Common Cause, 2011, www.commoncause.org.
18. John Schmitt, The Unions of the States, Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington DC,
2010.
9
Lenin and Gandhi
A missed encounter?
tienne Balibar
The theme I shall address today has all the trappings
of an academic exercise.
*
Still, I would like to attempt
to show how it intersects with several major historical,
epistemological and ultimately political questions. As
a basis for the discussion, I will posit that Lenin and
Gandhi are the two greatest fgures among revolu-
tionary theoristpractitioners of the frst half of the
twentieth century, and that their similarities and con-
trasts constitute a privileged means of approach to the
question of knowing what being revolutionary meant
precisely, or, if you prefer, what it meant to transform
society, to transform the historical world, in the last
century. This parallel is thus also a privileged means of
approach to characterizing the concept of the political
that we have inherited, and about which we ask in
what senses it has already been and still needs to be
transformed. Naturally, such an opening formulation
I was going to say, such an axiom involves all sorts
of presuppositions that are not self-evident. Certain
of them will reappear and will be discussed along the
way; others will require further justifcation. Allow me
briefy to address several of them.
1
Each of the words I employ here is as applicable to
Lenin as to Gandhi, yet a bifurcation immediately
opens up. It would nevertheless be too simple to
believe that a tableau with two points of entry has
been constituted, in which a series of antitheses would
exactly correspond: for example, violent and non-
violent revolution; socialist and national or nationalist
revolution; a revolution based on a scientifc ideology,
a theory of social relations, and a revolution based on
a religious ideology, or a religiously inspired ethic, and
so on. We see right away that these antitheses cannot
be deduced from one another; rather, they sketch a sort
of typology of modern revolutionary phenomena that
helps us analyse their diversity, which is found here
concentrated in fgures whose power is great enough
to have crystallized a debate that still reaches us today.
This stems from the considerable consequences of
the actions of these individuals, or the historical pro-
cesses for which they were the protagonists nothing
less than the two great anti-systemic movements of
the twentieth century (to speak like Wallerstein), of
which the split, the intersection, and the more or less
complete fusion or on the contrary the divergence,
will have been the most important thing about the
century that Hobsbawm called the age of extremes.
This stems as well from the extreme ambivalence about
the effects of these movements, and the paradoxes
with which they were objectively riddled. We have not
fnished seeking to understand the reasons for them.
And so the Bolshevik Revolution, inspired by an
internationalist ideology and based on the conviction
that capitalism is a global system whose transformation
whatever its initial modalities cannot but concern
the entire social formation, resulted in socialism in
one country, or more precisely in the attempt to con-
struct a model of organization of the production and
normalization of society on a state-wide scale, then
that of a bloc of states. This means that in a radical
sense Stalin is indeed the truth of Lenin, even if one
allows, as I do, that revolutionary practices from one
to the other were inverted into their contrary. Once
again, history advanced by the bad side. But it is also
true, or at least arguable, that this model, in its reality
and the idealized representation that the masses and
political leaders of the world made of it, contributed to
the establishment of relations of forces and spaces of
political action without which capitalist and imperial-
ist logic would have reigned supreme. We can clearly
* This is a revised version of a lecture originally written for the Congrs Marx International IV, Guerre impriale, guerre sociale, Universit
de Paris X Nanterre, Plenary Session, Saturday 2 October 2004. It was published in French in tienne Balibar, Violence et Civilit, Editions
Galile, Paris, 2010. It is translated here along with a new Afterword.
10
see the contrast with today. Until its exhaustion, this
model kept the tension between social reproduction
and transformation alive, including the ceaseless search
for variants or alternatives to Leninism within the
Marxist tradition, in such a way as to rectify what
appeared as its counter-revolutionary degeneration.
For its part, the national revolution inspired and
to a certain extent directed by Gandhi no doubt led
to one of the greatest processes of decolonization in
history, perhaps the greatest, even constituting one of
its models (not the only one, obviously). But, as we
know, it also produced a result that contradicted the
perspectives sketched by its source of inspiration on
some essential points.
1
Similarly, there was, accord-
ing to the famous formula of Moshe Lewin, Lenins
last struggle against the statist drift and policing
of the Soviet revolution, just as there was Gandhis
last struggle, in which he met his death, against the
partition of India and the institution of independence
on ethno-religious bases.
2
The revolutionary method
that made a decisive contribution to the creation of the
conditions of independence is known in the West by
the name of non-violence or non-violent resistance.
But it turned out to be incapable of maintaining the
content announced in the manifesto Hind Swaraj of
1908,
3
and nationalist politics toppled into its con-
trary, a communitarian violence that today, ffty years
later, threatens to subvert the states and societies
of the Indian subcontinent. But it is also true that,
like communism, the Gandhian model of
politics with its innumerable variations of
place, conditions, objectives, and discourse
as well has acquired a universalist scope,
as a form for the organization of mass move-
ments that aims at the restoration or conquest
of fundamental rights and a confrontation
between the dominated and the power of
the dominant. This does not apply solely to
those struggles for national independence
and autonomy by minority peoples, but also
and everywhere, as we know, for the move-
ments for civil rights and racial equality.
Pacifsm draws on multiple sources and does not as
such constitute the essence of non-violence, but it is
obviously part of this heritage.
The confrontation between the fgures of Lenin and
Gandhi is not new. On the contrary, it has not ceased
to spring forth as a kind of test of the truth of relations
between politics and contemporary history, since the
end of the First World War. Its important role is par-
ticularly obvious in India, during and after the struggle
for independence, where its detailed explication gave
rise to all sorts of variants, including, one might note,
interesting attempts to interpret Gandhian strategy in
terms of a war of position. Moreover, these attempts
support several surprising moments in Gramsci, where
he establishes a link with what he believes to have been
Lenins ultimate intention as to the displacement of
the centre of gravity of revolutionary struggles. These
would form the common point between Gandhism and
the major movements of religious reform.
4
In Europe,
and in especially in France, as Claude Markovits
has rightly recalled in his excellent monograph, the
confrontation was not only the doing of Tolstoy and
Romain Rollands disciples; it was also sketched out at
the end of the war by communists like Henri Barbusse
who sought to make an inventory of all the forces
converging in the anti-imperialist struggle.
5
New life is breathed into this confrontation today
from the profusion of social and cultural movements,
as much because of the context of globalization as from
their theoretical and strategic incertitude. It results as
well from the fact that, compared to the conditions of
the twentieth century, the politics of the twenty-frst
century, in which the idea of revolution circulates in
a spectral way, is characterized by the effacement
or the complete redistribution of the frontiers that
structure the political domain [lespace politique]:
politico-cultural frontiers between West and East,
economic and geopolitical frontiers between a central
dominant world and a dominated peripheral world,
institutional frontiers between a statist public sphere
and a social private sphere, pertinent as much to the
localization of powers as to the crystallization of
collective consciousness. Above all, what determines
this renewed actuality, or at any rate suggests it, is the
fact that politics fnds itself submerged in a lasting,
if not irreversible, way in a milieu or economy of
generalized violence and a circulation of its forms that
appears to be structural. This violence bears the traits
of a preventative counter-revolution, of the repression
11
and if need be perversion of social movements, which
poses particularly diffcult problems for the very idea
of mass politics and, quite simply, democratic politics.
In these conditions, it is not surprising to see debates
resurface here and there in which Lenin and Gandhi
fgure as references, signs of strategic alternatives with
which the present must be confronted, while taking
stock of the faded image of revolutionary politics.
6
It is also true that these debates sometimes have a ten-
dency to simplify excessively the terms of comparison.
They do this, on the one hand, by referring all models
of political action to abstract, quasi-metaphysical enti-
ties, such as violence and non-violence, and, on the
other hand, by coming closer and closer in the grip of
the shock produced by certain recent devel-
opments of the international conjuncture to
a double series of reductions. They reduce
diverse forms of social violence which are
extremely heterogeneous even if they have
a tendency to overdetermine and multiply
one another to the unique fgure of war;
and they reduce war itself to the function of
the auto-destructive and catastrophic ulti-
mate stage of capitals domination over the
productive forces of society, which would
turn them into their contrary and thus mark
(once again) the imminent achievement of its
historical trajectory.
7
In my view, these are questions
that need to be posed and discussed, but which risk
serving as an obstacle to the necessity of compiling
more partial inventories.
2
Before focusing on what seems to constitute, retrospec-
tively, the neuralgic point of confrontation between
our two models, I would like to recall what justifes
bringing them together under the same name of revo-
lutionary movements. It results from two traits that
we can well see, after the fact, as inheritances of the
nineteenth century and notably of the revolutions for
national independence and social emancipation in the
Western world. They were perfected by the dramatic
history of the twentieth century, to the point of crys-
tallizing what, from different sides, political theory
perceived as the irreducible gap between the concept of
the political and its statist formalization, in particular
in the mode of a juridical and constitutional defnition.
The frst trait is constituted by the place of mass
movements, passing by active and passive phases
reciprocally, but maintaining itself for the longue
dure, intervening on the public stage in an autono-
mous, majoritarian way, thereby escaping the control
and discipline of institutions. This trait is common to
Leninism (which on this point takes the inherited tradi-
tion of the workers movement and social democracy
to an extreme) and Gandhism (which on this point
is innovative in the history of anticolonial struggles,
in India and beyond).
8
It involves a large variety of
formulas associating spontaneity and organization,
which depend both on cultural traditions and on the
conditions of existence of the masses in the societ-
ies under consideration, the ideological motives for
mobilization, strategic objectives, and the nature of
the established power that it confronts. It in no way
excludes representation. On the contrary, in many
respects it renders it possible or re-establishes it there
where the existing political regime conferred a restric-
tive or fctive defnition upon it. But in all cases it
appears irreducible to it, showing in this way that
the essence of democracy is not representation, or
that representation only constitutes a partial aspect of
democracy.
This leads us directly to the second trait common to
Leninism and Gandhism, which is their antinomianism,
taking the term in the traditional etymological sense: a
conficting relation, at root contradictory, with legality
and thus with the power of the state whose norm of
right [droit] constitutes both the source of legitimacy
and the instrument of control over individuals or social
groups. This may concern the dictatorship of the
proletariat as the reversal of the dictatorship of the
bourgeoisie, about which Lenin could write recalling
the most classical defnitions of sovereignty that its
essence resides in the fact of placing, for a social class,
its demands for social transformation above the law.
Or it may concern civil disobedience, the concept of
which, coming from Thoreau and, more distantly, the
right of resistance, was systematized by Gandhi in
such a way as to cover a whole, graduated set of tactics
of struggle aiming to lead the state to the point where it
openly enters into contradiction with its constitutional
12
principles, in order to compel their reform. But in both
cases legality is transgressed which does not mean
that it is ignored. Rather, it would be brought into the
interior of the feld of relations of forces it purports
to transcend.
Here we can use and this is not simply a tribute
to whats fashionable the theoretical grid Negri bor-
rowed from the constitutional tradition coming from the
French and American Revolutions: constituted power
is led back to constitutive power, to the insurrectional
element of democracy.
9
It is true that this occurs at
scales and according to modalities and objectives that
are profoundly different, that can even appear antitheti-
cal. A good portion of current debates on social move-
ments and their capacity for the subversion of civil
society comes back precisely to these differences, but
this must not stop us from staking out the analogy in
principle. This is what implicates a certain concept of
the political (Begriff des politischen), strictly depen-
dent on the confrontation between the workers move-
ment and the set of democratic movements, and a kind
of authoritarian state that is fundamentally repressive,
and from which the expression of social conficts is
radically excluded.
10
Other historians have remarked (as
did Gandhi himself, when he touched upon its limits)
that the strategy of non-violent civil disobedience
is made possible by the fact that the mass movement
fnds itself faced with a state of right (a rule of law)
11

that is not a simple fction, in which particularly strong
traditions of the guarantee of individual liberties exist.
This is the case notably in the Anglo-American con-
stitutional tradition, within certain limits.
12
The same
observation has been made with regard to the effects of
the movement of black Americans for civil rights under
the leadership of Martin Luther King, at least if one
rejects the idea that it was a matter pure and simple of
the manipulation of the American federal state against
certain local powers.
We therefore have modalities of transgression of
legality that are radically different, and about which
we cannot determine a priori which are the most
effective from the point of view of the conquest of
democracy, to speak like Marx in the Manifesto, but
which each time seem strictly dependent upon the
historical form of the state, or the formalization of
the power of domination, which they measure. I use
this Weberian term domination deliberately, but to
elaborate a conception of the forms of domination like
the one Max Weber formulates in terms of the chance
of obtaining obedience, and thus also the modalities
for the production of disobedience, would take us too
far from our discussion here.
13
3
Before I turn to my two fnal points, let me frst address
what I hypothetically called the central or neuralgic
problem for each of these two revolutionary models
such as we perceive them today.
If one attempts to judge the relation between the
Leninist theorization of revolution (which has itself
evolved over time), the political strategy put to work
by the Bolshevik Party under his direction (collec-
tive direction, but one over which he determined
the orientations nearly to the end), and the historical
circumstances (which amount to a genuine epochal
mutation), one can say very classically that the dif-
fculties concentrate around three moments that are
progressively incorporated within one another. The
frst is tied to the conception of the power of the state
as the dictatorship of a class autonomized in relation
to society, being a matter of conquering its apparatuses
so as to transform them, which implies a conception of
the class party as the eminent subject of the revolu-
tion, or the privileged instrument of the movement
from social to political struggle. The second is tied to
the conjuncture in which one might say Lenin gains a
foothold in history by converting a desperate situation
into an occasion for rupture with the system of domi-
nation: this is the moment of the war of 1914, during
which he formulated the slogan of the transformation
of the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war,
which the Russian military defeat and the uprising of
revolting soldiers councils and their fusion with the
social movement of workers and peasants allowed him
to put into practice. Finally, the third is tied to the
vicissitudes of the dictatorship of the proletariat itself,
in conditions of civil war and foreign intervention,
lasting up to the failed attempt at reforming the Soviet
system with the New Economic Policy.
Indeed, each of these moments assigns a central
place to the question of organized revolutionary vio-
lence, or more exactly to the dialectic of two aspects of
what German designates with a single word Gewalt
and which we split into power [pouvoir] and vio-
lence, the institutional and anti-institutional aspects of
violence. But in light of todays conditions and needs,
it is the second of these moments (the war/revolution
relation) that seems to me to command our attention
frst and foremost. This is what Lenin, and the whole
socialist movement contemporary with him, opposed
to the exercise of a radically destructive domination,
or, if one prefers, to forms of extreme state violence
(a point that many historiographies have a tendency to
underestimate). From the impossible, it is necessary to
remake the possible
13
We know that the slogan transformation of the
imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war is the
privileged target of critiques of totalitarianism, which
then fnd in this matrix of terrorism proper to the
Russian Revolution the possibility, at least, of a circula-
tion between Revolution and Counter-Revolution (to be
clear: European communism and fascism) of practices
for the massive elimination of opposing policies and
therefore of the annihilation of democracy (which will
end by opening onto the destruction of the revolution-
ary proletariat itself), whose reality it is impossible to
deny today.
14
But this reading based on the terrorizing
power of words (civil war) does not suffciently mark
out the neuralgic point of intersection for the greatest
force, the greatest capacity for liberation, and the
greatest danger of perversion, or indeed the greatest
mistrust, implicated in Leninism. We must lend as
much attention to the frst part of this phrase as to the
second: Lenin is in fact the only one (and let us note
that on this point the Gandhian revolutionary strategy
is, admittedly, radically inoperative) to pose the ques-
tion of the transformation of a situation of extreme
violence and the annihilation of the democratic forms
of civil society into the means of collective action, of
an initiative of the organized masses. In other words,
he is the only one not to inscribe violence in the
register of inevitability [ fatalit] and to seek, from
the experience itself, the paths of action towards the
causes and centres of the decision for extreme violence.
No idea of revolution, or of democratic revolution,
can avoid this question and, as in Lenins case, it
is likely that it will also be confronted in the least
favourable situations. But there is no doubt here that
Lenin fnds himself enclosed in a conception of the
transformation of the relations of power with no exit,
and this in two respects: enclosed in the national
space, in the besieged fortress, as a result of the failure
of the revolutionary movements in the other warring
countries, which prevented the internationalization of
the civil war; and enclosed in the ideological space
of a certain Marxism, perhaps of Marxism tout court,
which cannot but vary to infnity the paradox of the
non-state state, of seeking out the impossible wither-
ing of the state via forms of its reinforcement
15
If we return now to Gandhi, we can try to perceive
the major lines of a contradiction or of a symmetrical
double bind. We know that what has been translated in
Western languages as non-violence covers in reality
two distinct notions forged by Gandhi: satyagraha
for the frst, and, for the second, taken and adapted
from the ascetic Hindu tradition (Jainism), ahimsa.
Many of the discussions on the relation between the
ethical, or ethico-religious, and the political elements
in Gandhism, which different interpreters, including in
India, read in diametrically opposed fashion either
as the primacy of a politics adorned in religious con-
science, or as a spiritual movement coming to perturb
the normal course of the political and leading it back
on the other side of modern institutional forms turn
around the signifcation of these two terms, and the
possibility of dissociating and reconstructing them
otherwise for moving from one cultural context to
another, from the East to the West.
16
However, if we do
not attend to the set of questions to which they refer,
we cannot, it seems, make a complete representation
of the dialectic for which the Gandhian conception
of politics is also the basis [sige], nor understand in
what sense it introduces a moral element into it that
arises from conscience but also in large part exceeds
its domain.
17
Satyagraha, more or less literally translated as
force of truth, is the term Gandhi substitutes for
passive resistance, from his frst experiences of orga-
nizing struggles for the civil rights of Indians in South
Africa. He then makes this term serve at once as the
name of each campaign of civil disobedience and as
the generic concept for a form of prolonged struggle,
legal and illegal, destined to replace the revolts and
terrorist acts with the prolonged mobilization of the
mass of the people against colonial domination.
Ahimsa, a traditional term of ascesis, extended by
Gandhi from the individual sphere to that of inter-
personal relations, is very diffcult to translate into
the language of Western spirituality, even if Gandhi
believed he saw affnities with the Christian love of
ones neighbour. It designates above all the concen-
tration of energy that allows one to renounce the
hatred for ones enemy, or the inhibition of counter-
violence. If one does not make this religious element
operative at the heart of the political, one cannot really
14
tie together the contrary movements that form the
dialectic spoken of above, with its very concretely
practical and socially determined aspects, in particular
the famous succession of phases of aggressive non-
violence. Here the mass movement frontally opposes
domination by illegal practices and phases of con-
structive non-violence, which are essentially phases
of democratization internal to the movement, which
Gandhi in particular worked to have recognized as
an essential aspect of the struggle for independence
and a condition of its victory, what Jacques Rancire
would call the part with no part that is, the
equality of principle (with nuances that I leave to
the side) of pariahs or untouchables, ethnic minori-
ties and women.
18
But neither can one understand
the revolution in the revolution constituted by the
idea systematically developed by Gandhi profoundly
foreign to the Marxist, and thus Leninist, tradition,
despite all that it was able to think concerning hege-
mony, democratic alliances, the contradictions at the
heart of the people, and so on according to which
the nature of the means used in the confrontation of
social forces reacts on the very identity of these forces
and consequently on the ends of the movement, or on
the results that it produces in its deeds, whatever its
intentions or ideological aims.
19
This opens directly
on to Gandhis famous dialogism:
20
the idea that all
political struggle must involve a moment of opening
to the adversary that conditions the transformation
of his point of view, and on to the practices of auto-
limitation of mass action (very diffcult, as we know,
to put to work, because generally incomprehensible
or unacceptable to those who believe the moment of
the fnal struggle has come), illustrated notably by
the interruptions of the satyagraha when it suddenly
reversed from non-violence into communitarian or
terrorist violence.
Here I will risk a hypothesis on the aporia internal
to the Gandhian model (aporia does not mean absur-
dity, or ineffcacity). It is symmetrical with the Leninist
aporia because it also bears on organization, or more
profoundly on the nature, the mode of constitution, of
the transindividual collective link that makes possible
the emergence of a political subject, and particularly
of a revolutionary subject. This link that one calls
religious is more precisely charismatic, hung upon
the person of the leader as an object of common love
and a subject endowed with a quasi-maternal love that
would beneft all the participants of the struggle, and
that helps them endure the sacrifces that it involves.
This is what one calls roughly saintliness or holi-
ness [prophtisme]. We know that in crucial moments
when political divergences amount to antagonism (as
with Ambedkar on the political representation of the
untouchables), where the state refuses to give in, where
intra-communitarian conficts explode into massacre,
Gandhi was only able to arrive at the autolimitation
of the violence by threatening his own disappearance,
the public fast until death, the ultimately but also
profoundly ambivalent expression of spiritual force.
21

This lasts until the fnal combat in which this method
fails, or provokes a political murder in return, by a kind
of passive violence. The moral, subjective link that
makes up the force of the masses and its capacity for
resistance then appears profoundly ambivalent, based
on an intensely sexualized relation, in which love and
death deliver themselves over, on an other scene, to a
struggle that determines, at least in part, all conditions
being equal, the objective possibilities for infuencing
the domination and structural violence of society in a
transformative that is, historic way.
Are we still in the era of the masses and mass
movements, at least in the sense in which the great
revolutionary movements of the twentieth century
staged them with contradictory results? I cannot
answer this question, not only because I dont have
time, but because I dont know anything about it (Im
not speaking here of wishes, projects or programmes).
What is certain, however, is that it seems that the
idea of political action must remain closely linked to
that of the constitution of a collective actor, in condi-
tions which are themselves not typically the object of
programming or a deduction, even if they are by all
evidence profoundly determined by class conditions
and cultural models. However, these conditions, tied
to the urgency of certain conjunctures, in particular
to extreme conjunctures which make the intolerable
rise to the scale of whole societies, perhaps to the
scale of the world, and which relaunch the demand
for revolutionary transformations only ever give
us a possibility. Some collective actors, or collective
practices, in the traditional sense of a philosophy of
action that not only transforms a certain material, but
forms as well the agents themselves, requires forms
of organization, and they require affective investments,
or processes of subjective identifcation. In showing
but after the fact the depth of the contradictions
concealed within each of these two apparently simple
terms, the histories symbolized by the names Lenin
and Gandhi help us not to lose sight of this complexity
of the political, in which history projects us without
asking our opinion.
Translated by Knox Peden
15
Afterword
The current essay was intended as a sequel to my entry
on force/violence (Gewalt) in the great Historisch-
Kritisches Wrterbuch des Marxismus (in progress),
published under the editorship of Wolfgang-Fritz
Haug.
22
I had ended that very long entry, somewhat
cryptically, by suggesting that for the dialectics of
structural (capitalist) violence and revolutionary (eman-
cipatory) violence, or counter-violence, to become again
an object of theoretical and strategic investigation in
the current conjuncture, some debates that have been
evaded or closed too rapidly ought to be reopened.
I gave as a prime example the confrontation of the
Leninist politics of the dictatorship of the proletariat
and the politics of non-violence and civil disobedi-
ence theorized and practised by Gandhi in India,
which I labelled the other great form of revolutionary
practice in the twentieth century. And I concluded:
This fctional history never took place. But it could
take place in peoples minds in the twenty-frst century,
as they face the development of a global economy of
violence and the concomitant crisis of representation
and sovereignty. It has the advantage of drawing our
attention, not only to the necessity of civilizing the
state, but also to the necessity of civilizing the revolu-
tion. The essay above on Lenins and Gandhis missed
encounter (which, incidentally, was also prompted by
the development of a debate in the post-communist
Italian Left around the possibility of keeping a revo-
lutionary perspective in the face of triumphant global
neoliberalism, while breaking with the strategies and
organizational models of the Kominternian era)
23
rep-
resented my personal contribution to this opening.
I certainly see it as a sketch rather than a conclusive
argument, if only because my acquaintance with the
Gandhian legacy and trajectory is recent, partial and
indirect. And although, like many Marxists of my gen-
eration and affliation, I have spent much time reading,
refecting upon and discussing Lenin, this does mean
that I claim a fnal understanding of his historical
role. On the other hand, I can testify to the crushing
effects that an introduction of Gandhian questions
qua political questions into the Marxist and Leninist
problematic can produce, provided the confrontation
does not remain external that is, offering only an
abstract choice between opposite ethical values. (The
reverse introduction has been rather more frequent,
especially in India, for historically understandable
reasons.) I can also confrm that, if carried on as
more than an academic exercise (in the spirit of the
Plutarchian parallels), against the background of the
contemporary crisis of capitalist globalization (which
is also a crisis of its alternatives), this confrontation
is bound to remain relatively inconclusive. All the
better, in a sense: this shows that we fnd ourselves in a
genuinely interrogative moment: what the philosophers
classically call an aporia. Not only do I not deny this
aspect of my essay, which was acutely pinpointed by
some readers,
24
but I see it as an advantage, provided
the aporia does not remain immobile, or is enriched
with the introduction of third protagonists. Luxem-
burg, Mao, Gramsci, Fanon and Mandela are obvious
candidates, to remain in the twentieth century. In its
dynamic sense, the aporia is simply the name of a tem-
poral nexus that does not rule out the bifurcations of
the present, because it does not accept that we should
simply let the dead bury the dead.
To return to the philosophical-political stakes of the
discussion, I would say that eight years later! I am
even more interested in submitting three issues that
were subjacent in my essay.
The frst is concerned with the blurring of the
OrientalOccidental divide, which certainly played a
signifcant role in keeping the LeninGandhi confron-
tation as a unilateral fgure unless it was replaced
by a repetition of an intra-European confrontation,
featuring the Marxist and the Tolstoyan traditions on
both sides, in spite of some interesting intuitions in
Gramsci. This is not only a question of geographies
and cultures, but also of returning to the classical con-
siderations on the respective importance of state and
civil society in European and Asian societies. It now
appears not only that their respective importance might
have been assessed in the wrong way, when describing
the constraints imposed by bourgeois hegemonic
structures on popular movements of transformation,
but also that they have never constituted a simple
dichotomy at any moment of modern history, and even
less so now, of course. The world system was always
already a system of ideological and political com-
munication, and not only a capitalist global economy.
The second issue is concerned with the disentangle-
ment of the categories revolution and violence. Of
course, at an abstract level, it might seem suffcient
to interpret the idea of revolution in the sense of
transformation (an idea that is already anathema to
many a political theorist today), and then (to avoid
the reformist or evolutionary predicate) to add such
qualifcations as radical or structural But this
would remain verbal. The problem is not to keep
the revolution and drop the violence, because this is
practically never a choice; it is to understand the retro-
active effects of this or that modality of confrontation
with violence on the revolution itself. In philosophical
16
terms, it is the question of which violence is active
and which is not (or is only reactive). In Spinozistic
terms, which violence (on the side of the oppressed, but
also dialectically the oppressors) leads to an increased
capacity to act, and which to a decreasing capacity
(hence to passivity or subalternity)? It is with this
question in mind (not a simple pacifsm) that I alluded
to the twin necessities of civilizing the state and
civilizing the revolution.
This leads me to a third issue: that of collective
subjectivity. Towards the end of my essay, I strike a
somewhat disenchanted note on the indiscernibility of
the masses and mass movements in contemporary
politics. I will not propose here a facile inversion
of this formula, invoking recent events such as the
indignados of Spain or the regime changes in the Arab
world after massive popular mobilizations, as evidence
of the return of history. I prefer to reiterate the latent
question, which is a question about the morphology of
the collective subject who can be active, in the strong
sense, in history, making a difference in the structures
of power, and sustaining that difference over a period
suffcient to produce a transformation. Less than ever
such questions will be asked outside of the symmetries
and dissymmetries of violence and non-violence. But
there is little chance that they can become resolved in
the old terms of confronting the states monopoly of
organized violence in order to address the more struc-
tural violence of the economy. The economy is more
violent than ever, and the state is not disarmed, but it
is disseminated and privatized in a way that renders
the ideological protocols of mass politics highly
indeterminate. We would not be surprised if we were
increasingly surprised by the emerging morphologies.
A serious discussion of the past in all its dimensions
is a condition for that.
Irvine, CA, 28 January 2012
Notes
1. Several commentators defend this point of view, albeit
often from opposed premisses. See Partha Chatterjee,
Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Deriva-
tive Discourse, University of Minnesota Press, Minne-
apolis, 1986, ch. 4, The Moment of Manoeuvre: Gandhi
and the Critique of Civil Society; and David Hardi-
man, Gandhi in His Time and Ours: The Global Leg-
acy of History Ideas, Columbia University Press, New
York, 2003. See also Robert Young, India II: Gandhis
Counter-Modernity, Postcolonialism: An Historical
Introduction, Blackwell, Oxford, 2001, pp. 317ff. The
debate today has moved to the question of the relation
between Gandhis legacy and that of the cosmopolitan
secularism of his successors (Nehru), after the critical
intervention of Ashis Nandy, which attributes Gandhis
insistence on tolerance to the religious character of his
thought and action (see Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind:
Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Princ-
eton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2001, pp. 298301).
2. Moshe Lewin, Le dernier combat de Lnine, ditions de
Minuit, Paris, 1967; translated as Lenins Last Struggle,
trans. A.M. Sheridan-Smith, Random House, New York,
1968.
3. Initially published in Gujarati and English in 1908/9,
Gandhis manifesto for independence, Indian Home
Rule, or Hind Swaraj has been republished numerous
times with variations and the prefaces of collaborators.
Many of its themes (including the defnition of satya-
graha as civil disobedience and passive resistance)
can be found in articles, a selection of which has ap-
peared in French: La jeune Inde, with an introduction
by Romain Rolland, Librarie Stock, Paris, 1924, and in
Gandhis Autobiographie, ou mes expriences de vrit,
ed. Pierre Meile, PUF, Paris, 1950.
4. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Edizione
critica dellIstituto Gramsci a cura di Valentino Ger-
ratana, Einaudi, 1975, Vol. I, pp. 1223; Vol. II, p. 748;
Vol. III, p. 1775. Gramsci oscillates between two read-
ings of Gandhi: one which makes non-violence a stra-
tegic moment in the scenario of the war of positions
(a reformulation enlarged by Gramsci of the Leninist
concept of the political), and another which makes it a
passive revolution of a religious type, under the infu-
ence of Tolstoyism, by allowing in the same stroke for
the actualization and retrospective interpretation of the
political sense of the major popular movements of reli-
gious reform since primitive Christianity in the Roman
Empire.
5. See Claude Markovits, Gandhi, Presses de Sciences Po,
Paris, 2000, p. 42.
6. This is what took place in Palestine in the years after
Oslo. We can see a refection of this in the book of inter-
views by Moustapha Barghouti, Rester sur la montagne,
ditions la Fabrique, Paris, 2005. In a wholly different
context, the discussion has relevance as well in relation
to the strategy invented for Chiapas by the Zapatista
movement (see Yvon Le Bot, Le Rve Zapatiste, di-
tions du Seuil, Paris, 1997).
7. Here I simplify perhaps excessively the thesis of
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Multitude: War
and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Penguin, London,
2004.
8. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of
the Word, 19141991, Vintage, New York, 1996, pp.
199222.
9. In Le pouvoir constituent (trans. tienne Balibar and
Franois Matheron, PUF, Paris, 1997), Negri discusses
Lenin at length, but never mentions Gandhi.
10. The Gramscian thesis opposing the different conditions
of the communist revolution in Eastern and Western
Europe via the inverse proportions of the development
of the state and civil society from one side to the other
is not fundamentally different. It can even be considered
as the reformulation, in HegelianMarxist language, of
this liberal view. See Quaderni del carcere, Vol. II, pp.
865ff.
11. In English in the original (Trans.).
12. This thesis has been defended, with pertinent nuances,
by George Orwell in his article Refections on Gandhi:
Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is im-
17
possible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to
bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your
intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi
in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he
accomplishing? The Russian masses could only practice
civil disobedience if the same idea happened to occur
to all of them simultaneously, and even then, to judge
by the history of the Ukraine famine, it would make
no difference. Partisan Review, January 1949; repub-
lished in The Collected Essays: Journalism and Letters
of George Orwell, Penguin, London, 194550, Vol. 4.
But David Hardiman is right to insist on the fact that
the favourable conditions necessary to the success of
emancipation movements constitute a problem as much
for the violent (or armed) movements as for the non-
violent movements, which is to say, coming back to the
dilemma for the Third World between the 1960s and
the 1980s, the Guevara or the Martin Luther King
model (Gandhi in His Time and Ours, pp. 255ff.). Partha
Chatterjees position in The Politics of the Governed:
Refections on Popular Politics in Most of the World
(Leonard Hastings Schoff Lectures, Columbia Univer-
sity Press, New York, 2006) is substantially the same.
13. In 57 of ch. 1 (Soziologische Grundbegriffe) of the
frst part of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and
Society), Weber defnes the legitimacy (Geltung) of
a social order as the chance that the constitutive dis-
positions of this order are effectively followed (and in
particular that the laws are obeyed). This entirely prag-
matic defnition (arising from a sociological theory of
action and not a normative theory of right) opens onto
the study of the modalities of confict and its regulation.
Today this makes us think of Spinoza on one side, and
Foucault on the other.
14. Such was the fundamental thesis of the protagonists
of the German Historikerstreit (Historians Controver-
sy), in particular Ernst Nolte, taken up in France with
certain nuances by Franois Furet (see E. Nolte, Der
europische Brgerkrieg 19171945: Nationalsozialis-
mus und Bolschewismus, Mit einem Brief von Franois
Furet, Herbig, Munich, 1997 (1987); Franois Furet, The
Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the
Twentieth Century, trans. Deborah Furet, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999), but contested by Claude
Lefort, Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas
of Democracy, trans. Julian Bourg, Columbia University
Press, New York, 2007.
15. As we know, this formula is at the heart of the brochure
prepared by Lenin between the two revolutions (Feb-
ruary and October 1917) and destined to become the
breviary of MarxismLeninism: Ltat et la revolution
(Lnin, uvres compltes, Paris and Moscow, 1962,
Vol. 25, pp. 429ff, 453ff).
16. Young, Postcolonialism, pp. 317ff.
17. For contemporary defnitions close to the source, see
Krishnala Shridharani, War without Violence: A Study
of Gandhis Method and its Accomplishments (1939),
with a new introduction by Gene Sharp and an epilogue
by Charles Walker, Garland Publishing, London, 1972,
which insists in particular (p. 283) on the mobilization
of the capacity for suffering and the force that it con-
fers against the causes of suffering. Also see Suzanne
Lassier, Gandhi et la non-violence, ditions du Seuil,
Paris, 1970; Bhiku Parekh, Gandhi: A Very Short In-
troduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997.
18. Lassier, Gandhi et la non-violence, pp. 100ff. Claude
Markovits (Gandhi, pp. 199ff) describes the acuity and
the limits of the confict with the leader of the movement
of untouchables (dalits), Bhimarao Ramji Ambedkar,
and insists on the double failure of Gandhi to get this
cause recognized by the Hindu nationalists or his strat-
egy by the dalits themselves.
19. Joan V. Bondurant, infuenced by Hannah Arendt in
her interpretation of Gandhi, insists particularly on the
difference between Marxism and what it presents as a
dialectic of the resolution of conficts (but not of com-
promise). See her Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian
Philosophy of Confict, University of California Press,
Berkeley, 1971.
20. This is essentially Hardimans idea (Gandhi in His
Time).
21. This is the problem of the mechanism of identifcation
derived from the fgure traditional in Hinduism of
the renouncer (see Markovits, Gandhi, pp. 545). But
Partha Chatterjees interpretation (The Politics of the
Governed, pp. 1112) is more political: she privileges
the fgure of the mediator, by insisting on his capac-
ity to establish an equivalence between distinct popular
movements in a given conjuncture (in terms that are
ultimately close to what Ernesto Laclau calls populism.
See Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, Verso, Lon-
don, 2005.
22. tienne Balibar, Gewalt, in Wolfgang-Fritz Haug, ed.,
Historisch-Kritisches Wrterbuch des Marxismus, Vol.
5: GegenffentlichkeitHegemonialapparat, Hamburg,
2001, pp. 12701308; in English as Refections on
Gewalt, Historical Materialism, vol. 17, no. 1, 2009,
pp. 99125. See also the rejoinder by Luca Basso, The
Ambivalence of Gewalt in Marx and Engels: On Bali-
bars Interpretation, Historical Materialism, vol. 17, no.
2, 2009, pp. 21536.
23. See the volume La politica della non-violenza. Per una
nuova identit della sinistra alternativa, Introduction
by Alessandro Curzi and Rina Gagliardi, Edizioni Lib-
erazione, Rome, 2004.
24. See Nick Hewlett, Badiou, Balibar, Rancire: Re-
thinking Emancipation, Continuum, London and New
York, 2010, especially pp. 1368.
Images
The drawings in this article are from James Heslip, Drawings
from within the Prison Walls. Heslip, a student at Kingston
University, was sentenced to 12 months in prison in October
2011 for his participation in the demonstration in London
against the rise in university tuition fees.
18 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
Faust on film
Walter Benjamin and the cinematic ontology
of Goethes Faust 2
Matthew Charles
Isnt it an affront to Goethe to make a flm of Faust,
and isnt there a world of difference between the
poem Faust and the flm Faust? Yes, certainly.
But, again, isnt there a whole world of difference
between a bad flm of Faust and a good one?
Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project (N1a, 4)
Whilst the importance of Goethes thought in the early
work of Walter Benjamin has been acknowledged,
less attention has been paid to the Goethean refer-
ences that resurface in his fnal essays, specifcally the
Faustian motifs of the last theses On the Concept of
History. Drawing on the cinematic afterlife of Goethes
Faust, this article utilizes Benjamins own pragmatic
conception of history to argue that its importance for
Benjamin resides in the articulation of a cinematic
ontology that comes increasingly to underpin his own
mature philosophy.
Literary-historical pragmatism
The emergence of the modern academic discipline
of literary studies in the eighteenth century did not
arise out of the older theological and philosophical
tradition of history and for this reason it lacks an
adequate conception of history.
1
This omission ren-
dered it amenable to the integration of the positivist
approach of the natural sciences, especially under the
infuence of neo-Kantianism in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. As a result of this integration,
a dual epistemology tended to emerge, promoting a
regulative metaphysics of historical progress (produced
through the values of Kants transcendental idealism
and coded, via the Enlightenment, into contemporary
conceptions of modernity) which is tied to an empirical
realist attention to the correctness of past histori-
cal facts whose meaning is construed as something
constituted and completed.
Benjamins philosophically informed theory of
literary criticism is directed against both aspects of
this inadequate conception of history. As an alter-
native, he proposes that it begin from a dignifed,
serious and ambitious conception of history (pragmatic
history, in short), guided by the kind of pedagogi-
cal task envisaged by the historian Georg Gottfried
Gervinus.
2
Gervinus condemned the usual, spiritless
Faktensammler, who merely puts things together like
a chronicler, on the quasi-Nietzschean grounds that
all the forces of mankind concentrate on action and
the active life is the focus of all history.
3
Accord-
ing to what Gervinus called his literary-historical
pragmatism, the task of the true historian is to guide
and instruct, through the construction of historical
examples that compel to action.
Benjamin adopts, whilst critically reworking, Gervi-
nuss pragmatic description of the historian as a prophet
in relation to Schlegels dictum that the historian must
be a backward-looking prophet: What is at stake is
not to portray literary works in the context of their
age, but to represent the age that perceives them our
age in the age during which they arose.
4
This cor-
responds to the Copernican turn in historical percep-
tion theorized in the notes for Benjamins unfnished
Arcades Project, which displaces the value assigned to
the what has been of the past as the fxed and stable
point of perception (analogous to Copernicuss dis-
placement of the Earth as the fxed and stable point for
astronomical perception). For in historical perception
according to the pragmatic defnition of perception
(Wahrnehmung) proffered in a fragment from 1917
the useful (the good) is true [Wahr].
5

Yet, in accordance with Benjamins critique of
bourgeois socio-economic order, the useful cannot
be reduced to the political demands of the immediate
present. Gervinuss understanding of active life must
therefore be coupled to a semiotic consideration of the
production of signifcance, since action by itself is not
signifcant. As Peter Osborne has argued in the context
of the American semiotician Charles Saunders Peirces
metaphysical pragmatism, Benjamins conception of
19
historical representation is conjoined with a commit-
ment to a speculative metaphysical realism, one that
continues to insist on the possibility of signifcance
(beyond mere function) by referring to the standpoint
of history as a totalized whole.
6
This is not the temporal
end of history, however, but an eternity immanent to
and constitutive of each moment. A specifc historical
relationship between the past and present (and thus the
present and the future) results from this position, one
that is related to the visualization of that which has
been obscured by the existing order of knowledge. In
this sense Benjamins version represents a radical and
critical expansion of the confated temporal horizon of
existing pragmatism, concerning itself with the past
in order to redeem for a different future that which is
threatened with oblivion in the present. This radically
expands and complicates the pragmatic conception
of use, since its subject is no longer an empirical
individual or particular society, but historical.
This criticism is exemplifed in Benjamins essay
on Goethes novel The Elective Affnities, whose peda-
gogical function is defned as grasping the meaning of
Goethes life for the most specifc and profound tasks
of modern life, as symbols of specifc yet also future
life and suffering.
7
An indication of what this might
mean is provided in the entry on Goethe for the Great
Soviet Encyclopaedia, in which Benjamin claims the
poet was the cultural representative of the ascent of
the German bourgeoisie whilst also being its great-
est critic: he founded a great literature among the
bourgeoisie, but he did so with face averted and his
whole work abounds in reservations about them.
8

If these reservations were realized in the attempt to
reclaim Goethe as the spiritual leader of a nationalistic
and elitist secret Germany by Friedrich Gundolf and
others in Stefan Georges literary circle, Benjamins
Deutsche Menschen a pseudonymously published
collection of letters taken from the age of German
Classicism subversively insists on revealing the
lineaments of a different secret Germany, one whose
fundamental humanism had been shrouded by raucous
and brutal forces that have prevented it from playing an
effective role in public life.
9
Goethe therefore gave the
contents that fulflled him the form which has enabled
them to resist their dissolution at the hands of the
bourgeoisie a resistance made possible because they
remained without effect and not because they could be
deformed or trivialized.
10
This description emphasizes
Benjamins insistence on the literary afterlife of works,
encapsulated in his formulation of artistic greatness
as that which remains historical without a causal effect
in history.
11

Consequently, Goethes mature literary works
beginning with The Elective Affnities (1809),
but continuing in From My Life: Truth and Poetry
(181130) and the WestEasterly Divan (1819), and
culminating in the second part of Faust (1832) are
testament to the aged Goethes attempt to expunge all
traces of aestheticism and sentimentalism from his
writing.
12
Whilst Benjamins essay on The Elective
Affnities opens an account of this period of Goethes
life, there is no comparable critique of its culmination
in Faust 2. In what follows, I want to demonstrate the
importance that Goethes thought holds for Benjamins
philosophy and in particular emphasize the Faustian
motifs of his fnal theses On the Concept of History,
before commenting on the greatness of Faust 2 in
accordance with the pragmatic conception of history
introduced above.
Faustian motifs in On the Concept
of History
The infuence of Goethes epistemology can be traced
across Benjamins writings, notably in the afterword
to his early essay on Early German Romanticism,
the prologue to the Origin of German Mourning-
Plays, and in the notes for the unfnished Arcades
Project.
13
The last sought to grasp the ascent and
decline of the Paris arcades as a primal history of
modernity itself, according to a Goethean conception
of the arcades concrete historical forms as primal
phenomena (Urphnomen) which render perceptible
their immanent economic forces.
14
Benjamin claims
that he transposes Goethes concept of truth from
the domain of nature to that of history, in line with a
materialist version of the theory of original phenom-
enon (Ursprungsphnomen) delineated in his own
prologue to the Origin of German Mourning-Plays.
The prologue insists that the concept of Ursprung
must be distinguished from any neo-Kantian formula-
tion as the logical ground of experience, on the basis
of a historico-phenomenal notion of the Ideal, such
that Ideas are the Faustian Mothers and truth is
visualized in the circling dance of represented Ideas
[vergegenwrtigt im Reigen der dargestellen Ideen].
15

As Philip Brewster and Carl Howard Buchner have
pointed out, this image of the Mothers entails the
Symbolist assertion of the expressive function of
language as representation and its constituent idea
of construction: in the words of the Symbolist Paul
Valry language does not walk to a goal, it only
dances.
16

This Faustian imagery resurfaces in Benjamins fnal
essays, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire and the theses
20
On the Concept of History. The former rejects Prousts
and Bergsons claim to actualize a true experience of
the past via the mmoire involontaire or the dure of
pure memory.
17
In accordance with his emphasis on
the aesthetic construction of truth, Benjamin claims
that it is not in the contemplative ease of Bergsons
dure that the true signifcance of modern experience
becomes apparent, but in what he identifes as the poet
Paul Valrys struggle to represent such an experience.
Where Bergson and Proust seek to actualize the past in
the present, Bergson sees within reach what Valrys
better, Goethean understanding visualizes as the here
in which the inadequate becomes perceptible (das
hier in dem das Unzulngliche Ereignis wird).
18

Benjamins reference is to the refrain of the Chorus
Mysticus at the conclusion of Goethes Faust 2, but the
mention of Valry in this 1939 essay suggests a famili-
arity with the French poets intention to begin work on
a third version of the play, published as Mon Faust in
1941.
19
Kurt Weinberg has suggested that the resistance
of Valrys protagonist to the temptations of the second
Fay (Memory) in Mon Faust refects a rejection of
Prousts and Bergsons promised experience of the past
as one of mere semblance, arguing that this Faust is
imbued with his authors wisdom that to live is to lack
something at every moment.
20
Benjamins deployment
of the Chorus Mysticus against Proustian and Bergso-
nian actualization suggests a similar understanding of
the conclusion of Goethes Faust 2. At the conclusion
of the play, Fausts incessant striving is subverted
into an experience of fulflment, itself saturated with
impossibility and incompletion: a completion only
possible in Fausts death (as Istvn Mszros notes,
Fausts mistaken enthusiasm for the noise of his own
gravediggers is an ironic wish fulflment: the actual
realization of the great Faustian dream).
21
Valrys
return to these themes at the end of the 1930s may
account for the resurfacing of these Faustian motifs in
Benjamins last essay, On the Concept of History.
Fausts original deal with Mephistopheles If I
should ever say to any moment [Augenblicke]: / But
stay! you are so beautiful [Verweile doch! Du bist so
schn] / then you may lay your fetters on me, / then
I will gladly die! is premissed on the possibility of
a moment blissful enough to satiate worldly striving.
22

In what has been described as a melancholy version
of the Faustian But Stay! in thesis IX of Benjamins
On the Concept of History, it is the Angel of History
who would like to stay [verweilen], but not because
the moment is so beautiful but because he is transfxed
by the unfolding catastrophe.
23
Furthermore, what pre-
vents the angel from lingering before the catastrophe
is not an inner striving but an external force, one
that drives (treibt) him away. This force is what we
mistakenly call progress, but what is really a storm
that is blowing from Paradise.
One way to read this paradisiacal storm is as an
allegory of the messianically destructive potential of
Benjamins concept of Now-Time (Jetztzeit).
24
Thesis
IX represents the snapshot or freeze-frame of an
ephemeral moment, in which history is being blown
apart. It is only the angels momentary struggle that
reveals the force of now-time to us, who are caught in
the process of destruction, but because of this recogni-
tion a new conception of history becomes apparent.
Fausts pact with the devil was that if Mephistopheles
showed him a moment so beautiful his striving would
cease and he would choose to stay, then he would
perish: the clock may stop, its hands fall still, / And
time for me is fnished! For Benjamin, in contrast,
history is so catastrophic that the angel would willingly
stay and perish, but he is being driven ever onwards by
what we regard as progress. Our pact with the angel,
then, would be to save history itself, by stopping the
clocks and bringing time to a standstill. Indeed, thesis
X goes on to present the theses themselves as medita-
tions designed to strengthen our resolve to turn away
from the strivings of the world (der Welt und ihrem
Treiben): to liberate the political Worldling/Worldchild
[Weltkind] from our spurious faith in progress.
25

The term Weltkind frst appears in Goethes autobio-
graphical poem Dinner at Coblenz, as a description
of the poet grounded between the Spirit and the Fire
of the religious and the Enlightenment prophets (mit
Geist- und Feuerschritten, / Prophete rechts, Prophete
links / das Weltkind in der Mitten), and similarly
returns in the Classical Walpurgis Night of Faust to
denounce those pious hypocrites who consort with the
devil at the witchs altar.
26
In Benjamins allusion, it
functions partly to denounce the shared progressivism
of both capitalist and vulgar Marxist conceptions of
history. According to the pragmatic conception of
history that replaces it, the historian (including the
literary historian) must turn away from the politics of
the present and make a leap into the past similar to
that of the revolutionary, in order to liberate the forces
unleashed by the suffering and oppression of previous
generations.
27
This leap should take place not in the
current political arena where the ruling class gives the
commands, but in the open sky ( freien Himmel) of
history, in which what has been, by dint of a secret
index (heimlichen Index) that refers to redemption,
strives [strebt] to turn towards that sun which is
rising.
28
21
In his discussion of Weltkind in the book Fire
Alarm, Michael Lwy quickly excavates Benjamins
somewhat odd expression from its Goethean context
and associates it with Benjamins own French trans-
lation, les enfants du sicle, which he glosses as
Benjamins own generation.
29
But in identifying the
subject of the theses with a specifc epoch, he fails
to make the connection between this historical Welt-
kind and Benjamins revolutionary method in The
Arcades Project. For every epoch has a side turned
towards dreams, the childs side, Benjamin insists, and
here the economic conditions of life fnd collective
expression.
30
If it falls to the child to recognize the
new and to assimilate these images for humanity by
bringing them into symbolic space, then this collective,
revolutionary task falls to the historical Worldchild.
31

Benjamins translation, which presumably borrows
from Mussets autobiographical La confession dun
enfant du sicle (1836), juxtaposes the experiences of
his own generation as the children of twentieth-century
Berlin (summarized in the title of his autobiography,
A Berlin Childhood around 1900) with the genera-
tion of bohemians and the utopian socialists born at
the beginning of the nineteenth century in Paris and
explored in the Arcades Project. This collectivizes his
metaphysical concept of youth from his early political
writings on the Youth Movement: the pedagogic aspect
of Benjamins experiment in The Arcades Project
is To educate the image-making medium within us,
symbolizing the newness of the nineteenth century
by visualizing the Paris Arcades from the (massively
foreshortened) perspective of the twentieth century.
32
Benjamins obscure example of such a secret index
in history Dont the women we court have sisters
they no longer recognize? requires similar clarifca-
tion. If we take seriously his claim, made in the essay
Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian, that the
beginnings of any consideration of history worthy of
being called dialectical reside in a characteristically
veiled comment made by Goethe (Everything that has
had a great effect can really no longer be judged), we
can recognize this as a reference to what Benjamin
calls the aporetic element of semblance operating
in the beautiful in relation to history.
33
Insofar as
art aims at the beautiful and, on however a modest
scale, reproduces it, Benjamin argues, it retrieves
it (as Faust does Helen) out of the depths of time,
and it is this conjuration which makes our delight in
the beautiful unquenchable.
34
Benjamin compares its
effects to the image of the primeval world veiled
by the tears of nostalgia and illustrates this with a
line from Goethes 1776 poem, Why Do You Give Us
Penetrating Glances: Ah, you were in times now past
my sister or my wife. Goethes poem speculates that
the bond that exists between two lovers in the present
expresses some original, past relationship. The theses
On the Concept of History generalizes this notion,
in accordance with Benjamins reformulation of the
concept of Ursprung, into one of a secret agreement
between past generations and the present one in rela-
tion to a messianic redemption of history.
35
Here the eternity which enfolds the narrative of
Goethes drama (the Prologue in Heaven, the heavenly
ascension of Margaret at the end of Faust (Lost!
Saved!), and the deus ex machina which concludes
Faust 2) provides the transcendental frame for that
other (messianic) catastrophe which constantly threat-
ens to engulf history. If each moment is found to
bear the imprint of this incompleteness, each might
therefore hold this redemptive hope: To grasp the
eternity of historical events is really to appreciate the
eternity of their transience.
36
Although Michael Lwy
acknowledges the Goethean motifs of Benjamins text,
his description of the theses as essentially a wager,
in the Pascalian sense, on the possibility of a strug-
gle for emancipation should in this context be
reconceived not as a Pascalian wager but rather as a
Faustian pact.
37

Conjuration and phantasmagoria
Whilst the importance of Goethes Faust 2 for Benja-
mins thought is made evident by the references and
allusions scattered across his work, the rest of this
article concentrates on what might be said to constitute
the greatness of the work from the perspective of
a Benjaminian literary-historical pragmatism. This
would, frst and foremost, have to be distinguished
from any approach to the work that sought to grasp its
eternal signifcance. Indeed, just as Benjamins essay
on The Elective Affnities develops its own humanist
critique of the work against the backdrop of a mythical
interpretation that feeds into the cultic conception of
the artist as the spiritual voice of the people prevalent
in Gundolf, so his critical remarks on the archetypal
aesthetic theory of C.G. Jung suggest the mythological
reading of Faust 2 against which any critical reading
must frst differentiate itself.
In the 1931 essay On the Relation of Analytical
Psychology to Poetry, Jung is concerned with how an
unfashionable poet is rediscovered when something
new is found within the work which was always
present but was hidden in a symbol, and only a
renewal of the spirit of the time permits us to read its
meaning.
38
For Jung, the great artist unconsciously
22
activates an archetypal image from the collective un-
conscious, elaborating and shaping this primordial
language into the language of the present by conjur-
ing up the forms in which the age is most lacking. In
this way, the artist compensates for the inadequacy and
one-sidedness of the present.
39

The heros descent to the Mothers in Act II of Goe-
thes Faust 2 provides something akin to the archetypal
scene of Jungs modern analytical psychology, in
contrast to what he regarded as the exclusively repres-
sive (and essentially neurotic) model of the psyche
contained in Freuds classical Oedipus myth. The
unconscious creativity of psychic introversion repre-
sents that other drive (Goethe), missed by Freud,
which signifes spiritual life.
40
Fausts descent to the
Mothers (as an archetypal symbol of spiritual rebirth)
and his retrieval of the magical tripod result in the
creative conjuration of the spirits of Helen and Paris,
symbolizing the need for a nostalgic retrieval of the
mythical the Eternal Feminine to compensate for
the one-sidedness of modernitys materialism, mascu-
linity and restless novelty.
Benjamins practice of literary-historical pragma-
tism must be differentiated from Jungs account on
the basis of its concern with the temporality of the
works afterlife, directed towards not that which is
mythological about the present (the eternal truth of the
psycho-spiritual conjuration of Helen) but that which
is anachronistically modern about Goethes drama,
and brought into dialectical conjunction with our own
present. A starting point for such a conception of the
work might be sought in Goethes correspondence.
Writing to Wilhelm von Humboldt after the comple-
tion of the third Act in 1826, Goethe emphasizes its
peculiar formal structure, citing this as the most
remarkable thing about a play he already considers as
strange and problematic a piece I have ever written.
Whilst the classical Aristotelian unities of place and
action are most punctiliously observed in the usual
way, the unity of time is subverted by being both
radically elongated and subjected to a discontinuous
rhythmic structure: it embraces 3,000 years, from the
collapse of Troy to the capture of Missolonghi.
41

Goethes confession to such formal peculiarity
refects what Benjamin, with reference to Konrat
Zieglers 1919 study of Faust 2, calls the plays fragile
and arbitrary composition, which particularly in the
Helena Acts deviates from the unity of Goethes
overall plan.
42
We should regard this formal deviation
not as the effect of the authors psychological ambiva-
lence, but as the mark of a historical intrusion of our
present into the structure of the artwork, rendering
its classical form (specifcally here the Aristotelian
unities of action, place and time) unsustainable. This
peculiarity becomes increasingly evident in relation to
the afterlife of the work as it approaches our present
day.
Goethe describes the peculiar and intrusive tempo-
rality of Act 3 as one in which times passes as in a
phantasmagoria (in one draft, Goethe subtitles the act
a Classico-Romantic Phantasmagoria).
43
Whilst by the
mid-nineteenth century, the term phantasmagoria had
come to signify the dreamlike and illusory in general,
and the supernatural in particular, Goethes use of the
term places on emphasis on the fundamental disunity
of time in relation to the unities of place and action,
one that characterizes the rapid transition of scenes in
the gothic phantasmagoria spectacles made famous in
Paris by tienne-Gaspard Robertson around the turn
of the nineteenth century.
44

Such phantasmagorical performances were enacted
in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Europe,
relying upon a sophisticated deployment of the older
magic lantern device, which projected the images
from painted slides (although later using advances in
photographic technology to project the performance
of real, hidden actors) onto a secretly deployed gauze
screen or literal smokescreen. The spectral effect was
enhanced through technological and theatrical means
(such as twin projection, the shortening and enlargement
23
of the image through the movement of the projector,
the suggestion of movement through rapid juxtaposition
of images, and the use of music and sound effects,
stage setting, planted stooges, and atmospheric sug-
gestion). The optical effects achieved by Robertsons
phantasmagoria are recounted in a scientifc article
of 1804, in a journal also discussed by Goethe in his
Theory of Colours.
45

Goethes awareness of these shows and their means
of technological production is also demonstrated in a
later discussion of the staging of Faust:
in a darkened theatre an illuminated head is pro-
jected from the rear upon a screen stretched across
the background, frst as a small image, then gradu-
ally increasing in size, so that it seems to be coming
closer and closer. This artistic illusion was appar-
ently conjured with a kind of Lanterna Magica.
Could you please fnd out, as soon as possible, who
constructs such an apparatus, how could WE obtain
it, and what preparations must be made for it?
46

Goethes drawings suggest that the vision of Helen
of Troy should also be patterned on optical illusions,
with two-way mirrors and changing lighting bringing
her image suddenly into focus in the glass.
47
Goethe
was not only familiar with Robertsons phantasmagoria
when he came to write the second part of Faust, but,
according to Albrecht Schne, the whole dumb-show
of Paris and Helen represents an illusionist spectacle
devised by Mephistopheles with the help of a magic
lantern that projects images onto a screen or smoke (or
incense).
48
Mephistopheles directs this performance
from the prompters box, with the phantoms projected
onto the smoke-like haze which engulfs the stage
within the stage.
49

The problem that Jung therefore overlooks in his
appropriation of Fausts descent to the Mothers and
the creative act of conjuration that follows is how the
image of Helen is not produced directly and magically
through the profundity of psychological symbolization,
but is mediated via the technological reproduction
and projection of the magic lantern and the other
technical apparatus of the phantasmagoria show. Jung
thus repeats Fausts own misrecognition, for whereas
as the spectators of the court express an ironic disap-
pointment with these conjured phantoms (He might be
a bit less stiff, Although I see her clearly, Ill point
out that there may be some doubt if shes authentic),
Mephistopheles is continually forced to interject when
Faust takes them for something real (Control yourself,
and dont forget your part, Dont interfere in what
the phantoms doing).
50
Although the magic produced
by the tripod Faust retrieves from the Mothers has
been variously associated with necromantic ritual,
artistic genius and female procreation, its theatrical
necessity should be related instead to the need for the
literal technological projection of the phantasmagorical
performance that follows.
51
Goethes letters both reveal
and conceal the meaning of this scene: not long before
his death, he refers to Faust 2 as these jests which are
meant to be serious.
52
A comparable concern with visual technology has
been detected across Goethes writings, refecting a
conjunction of historical interests in the optical: in
movement and aesthetics, in chemical and physical
processes, in the chromatic, and in the technological
apparatus of the theatre. Eric Hadley Denton has noted
how Goethes life-long interest in bringing prints,
reliefs, and mythological depictions to literary life is
closely related to his later interest in living tableaux.
53

The former is exemplifed by Goethes interest in
viewing statues such as the Laocon by fickering
torchlight, in order to emphasize the temporality of
their implicit movement. In this way, Goethe wants
to cinematize sculpture, Peter Wollen claims, and
his theory of the fugitive moment possesses an
accelerated temporality that intensifes the effect of
fugitive fickering, to anticipate a time when images
would actually move.
54

24
Similarly, although others have discussed the infu-
ence of Goethes Theory of Colour on the novel The
Elective Affnities, along with the explicit fascination
with chemical and physical processes, what has received
less attention is how these interests combine in the
work as a fascination with the imagistic, in what might
be understood as the conceptual literary realization of
the achievements of photographic and cinematographic
technology.
55
Goethes mature interest in the produc-
tion of tableaux vivants expresses a central aesthetic
element of both photography and, to some extent,
cinematography: the uncanny aspect of this capturing
and fxing of time, to be discussed shortly.
56
This
uncanny aspect, which Goethe describes as resulting
from presenting reality as image (die Wirklichkeit als
Bild), refects the novels own unsettling preoccupation
with visualization, including the introduction of a
camera obscura to trace pictures of the landscape by
the visiting English gentleman. Hadley has also noted
the inclusion of optical technology in Goethes Festi-
val in Plundersweilern, a presence, he argues, which
permits us to recognize retrospectively the reformula-
tion of eighteenth-century media as the pre-history
of cinema organized around the social institution of
the marketplace.
57

It is important to note, however, that the phantom
conjured in Act I is, as John Williams makes clear,
not remotely the Helen of Act IIIs Classico-Romantic
Phantasmagoria, singled out in Goethes letter. Here,
the phantom of Helen has become physically embod-
ied and capable of moving and interacting authenti-
cally with the other characters. Williams argues that
this difference is the result of Fausts experience,
vicariously and at frst hand, [of] the whole primi-
tive pre-classical spectrum of archaic Greek religious
myth, the pre-history of Helen herself, as it were.
58
In
other words, it is the phantasmagoric temporality of
Act III singled out by Goethe which differentiates the
ontological status of Helen here.
59
The second Helen
is granted embodiment through the performance of
her prehistory, the staged return to her Hellenic past,
her fight into the future of Fausts baroque past,
and their classico-romantic synthesis as Goethes
modern future. This prehistory occurs internal to the
momentary present that accompanies Fausts collapse
at the end of the conjuration scene, splitting open and
expanding the continuity between the end of Act I and
the beginning of Act IV. In contrast to the hierarchi-
cal levels of meta-theatricality established in the frst
phantasmagoria scene, here the dreamlike semblance
is immanent and inhabited, its phantasmagoric history
is lived.
Visualization
I want to elucidate the signifcance of this phantasma-
gorical temporality, frst in relation to what Benjamin
elsewhere calls the literary technique of visualization
(Vergegenwrtigung), and then by returning to the
specifc visual ontology of photo- and cinematographic
technology. In his notes for the theses On the Concept
of History, Benjamin offers a dialectic of visualiza-
tion when he ridicules the historicist notion that the
historians task is to make the past present (das
Vergangne zu vergegenwrtigen), but goes on to
insist that someone who pokes about in the past as if
rummaging in a storeroom of examples and analogies
still has no inkling of how much in a given moment
depends on its being made present (ihre Vergegenwr-
tigung).
60
Jungs aesthetic account of making present
amounts to a retrieval of the mythological conjuration
of the eternal past performed by Faust. Nonetheless,
Benjamins concept of history in its own way concerns
itself with the task of rendering the truth of history
perceptible.
In a series of reviews of the novels of the French
writer Julien Green, Benjamin distinguishes Greens
literary technique of visualization from the realism of
naturalism, by referring to its magical side as well
as its temporal aspect.
61
By imagining people and
the conditions of their existence in a way that they
would never have appeared to a contemporary, Green
represents a second present which immortalizes
what exists, a literary effect partly achieved through
Greens stylized use of the simple past tense (pass
simple).
62
But this conjuration remains distanced from
that of dreams by retaining a temporal reference to the
here and now as the seal of authenticity that clings
to every vision.
63

As a result of this double aspect, Greens characters
and the conditions of their existence appear to stand
in the twofold darkness of what has only just hap-
pened and the unthinkably remote past.
64
The effect,
in novels such as Mont-Cinre and Adrienne Mesurat,
is that of a primal history of the recent past: what
Benjamin calls a glimpse of pale and feeting clear-
ings in history that occur only as the result of catas-
trophe.
65
What becomes apparent from Benjamins
discussion is the extent to which this reworking of the
past necessarily implies a reworking of the present. It
is, however, the present that becomes spectral, ghostly
or de-substantialized as a result of this diachronic
conjunction, and the past that, in contrast, endures as
substantial, earthly and chthonic.
One way of understanding the effects of this visual-
ization is in relation to the specifc ontology of the
25
cinematographic image. The chemical and optical
process through which light from the object is imprinted
on light-sensitive surfaces lends the photographic image
the specifc ontological form of participation in the
being of its referent, a relationship that Peter Osborne
and others have elaborated with reference to the philo-
sophical pragmatist C.S. Peirces semiotic category of
the indexical sign.
66
Peirces index is a sign produced by
the thing it represents (such as the marks of a fngerprint
or the shadow cast by a sundial): an ontological relation-
ship determined by the moment of exposure necessary
for the photographic image.
67
For Osborne, this consti-
tutes the magical or theological aspect inherent to the
ontology of the photographic image.
68
According to Roland Barthes, the indexicality of the
photograph effects a certain melancholic intimation of
the temporal, elaborated by Ann Banfeld in relation
to linguistic tense:
Barthess effort is to fnd the linguistic form capable
of recapturing a present in the past, a form that it
turns out spoken language does not offer. This now
in the past can be captured by combining a past
tense with a present time deitic: the photographs
moment was now.
69

Banfelds comments permit the connection between
Greens literary visualization and the ontology of
the photographic to become clearer. Benjamin attrib-
utes a comparable effect to Greens construction of a
second present: the simple past tense immortalizes
that which is represented in a remote past, whilst the
deitic reference to the here and now saturates the
present with an ephemeral sense of its own passing
away. In the Arcades Project, it is this recognition of
a past moments ephemerality, its passing away in the
present, that constitutes what Benjamin defnes as the
now of legibility pertaining to the historical index
of the dialectical image.
70
The critical construction
of dialectical images is compared to the technique of
montage in flm, as a cut whose signifcance lies in the
sudden juxtaposition of the past and the present. This
stands in contrast to the minuscule and incremental
changes between frames that are required when flm
seeks to reproduce real movement naturalistically. The
indexical ontology of the photographic image is thus
conjoined with a criticaltemporal attention to the
cinematic image in Benjamins mature epistemology.
This attentiveness to the magical and temporal
aspect of the photographic image should be under-
stood as the culmination of Benjamins theological
theory of signifcation, which incorporates his notion
of perception. For Benjamin, all signifcation must be
predicated on the ontological presence of that which
he designates as the name: the linguistic essence of
the signifed which participates in the medium of its
signifcation, and which therefore signifes the signify-
ing capacity of the signifed itself. The condition of
possibility of signs being able to function as signifers
of things is that things must possess an original semi-
otic (or linguistic) being. According to Benjamins
theology of language, this linguistic being is the divine
Word, the material of all creation. Hence, Benjamins
mature interest in photography and the imagistic in
general is the culmination of his early language theory:
all human words, and indeed all signifcation, are
dependent on their indexical and imagistic foundation.
Returning words to images represents the theological
redemption of their pure aesthetic expression in the
divine Word and their liberation from the intentionality
of human concepts. Naming consequently designates
the paradigmatic philosophical activity of Benjamins
literary-historical theory of criticism, as most clearly
expounded in the Origin of German Mourning-Plays,
which names the baroque mourning-play (Trauerspiel)
by differentiating it from classical tragedy.
In his early critique of Goethes concept of primal
phenomena in his essay on Early German Romanti-
cism, Benjamin insists that Goethes concept of primal
phenomena (Urphnomen) a particular phenomenon
that encapsulates the truth of the whole must be
distanced from the scientifc intuition of nature and
brought into the domain of art. This should be done
in such a way that the primal phenomena are under-
stood as residing in that sphere of art where art is
not creation but nature.
71
According to Benjamin, this
suggests the paradoxical resolution that Goethes
true, intuitable, Urphnomenal nature would become
visible after the fashion of a likeness, not in the nature
of the world but only in art, whereas in the nature of
the world it would indeed be present but hidden (that
is, overshadowed by what appears).
What is this non-creational sphere of art in which
a mimetic function (likeness) permits true nature
to become visualized or experienced? As Benjamin
makes increasingly clear in his later work, it is a
kind of scientifc art brought about by the ontologi-
cal possibilities of technological reproduction. Hence,
in a review of Karl Blossfeldts 1928 book Primal
Forms [Urformen] of Art: Photographic Plant-Images,
Benjamin describes these photographs of magnifed
plant organs as visions in which a geyser of new
image-worlds hisses up at points in our existence
where we would least have thought them imaginable.
72

Through the technological development of photography,
the inner image-imperatives (Bildnotwendigkeiten) of
26
nature are capable of being revealed, representing a
truly new objectivity, one frst anticipated by the
fraternal great spirits sun-soaked eyes, like those
of Goethe and Herder.
The link between these primal image-worlds and
Goethes scientifc-aesthetic theory of primal phe-
nomena is reiterated in Benjamins Short History of
Photography the following year. Discussing August
Sanderss collection of social photography, The Face of
Our Times, Benjamin describes Sanderss work as com-
parative photography, a reference to Goethes descrip-
tion of his own morphological method as a comparative
anatomy.
73
This technological visualization puts into
practice (as a second nature) the construction of primal
phenomena that underwrites the tender empiricism of
Goethes scientifc writing on biology, optics and colour,
but which Goethe refuses in his confused confation of
the empirical nature given to our sensual experiences
and truth immanent within it.
In his science, Goethes refusal to utilize optical
instruments in favour of an unmediated intuition of
nature leads him into a classical pantheism associated
with the daemonic. Benjamin opposes this move,
but suggests that the formal peculiarity of Goethes
later literary works expresses a struggle against this
mythological conception of spiritual nature. Nonethe-
less, the point of Benjamins claim about non-creative
(i.e. technologically mimetic) art concerns its capacity
to express not empirical nature but the historical
truth of nature. The photographic or cinematographic
reproduction does not leave its subject unchanged: the
past content it faithfully represents takes on a new
aspect in this process, its photographic form entails
it is experienced as the oldest something primal
whilst it simultaneously saturates the present of
the viewer with a melancholic recognition of its own
passing and mortality.
What is at stake for a Benjaminian understanding of
the artistic struggle waged in Goethes mature works
culminating in the phantasmagoric temporality of
the Helena scene is related to this cinematic ontol-
ogy. The implications of this claim can be understood
through a consideration of the cinematic afterlife of
the Faust legend. In his excellent discussion of F.W.
Murnaus flm version of Faust, Matt Erlin argues
that Mephistos magic highlights his function as the
flms cinematic principle and that Fausts transaction
with the devil therefore appears as a self-referential
commentary on the way in which the flm attempts
to transform the Faust legend into cinematic material
and thereby infuse it with new life.
74
Thus Murnaus
deviations from the high culture of Goethes literary
version can be read as his own Faustian pact with the
cinematic devil in order to reach out to the masses:
where in Goethes text Fausts desire for his youth is a
given, in Murnaus flm this desire is elicited through
an elaborate visual seduction, which like the seduc-
tive power of cinema threatens to restore vitality at
the expense of all social concern.
For Erlin, the lengthy interlude that follows this
transformation in Murnaus flm (in which Faust travels
to Italy and, with the help of Mephisto, seduces the
Duchess of Parma) signals Fausts [and Murnaus]
separation from his literary origins, both as protagonist
and as embodiment of a textual tradition.
75
This shift
from the textual (high culture) to the cinematic (mass
entertainment) is signifed by Fausts conversion as an
enthusiastic apostle of the visual, encapsulated by his
seduction of the Duchess (using a glowing white orb)
and the cinematic framing of the fnal scene as a
flm within a flm, under Mephistos directorial inter-
vention. Although Erlin suggests this contrast between
the textual and the visual is dialectically superseded
in Murnaus concluding focus on Goethes Gretchen
story such that the self-refexive cinematic tricks
are now psychologized directly into the narrative of
the flm this presumption of a positive negation
of a negation (the restoration of a cinematic neo-
classicism) depends on a false dichotomy established
on the basis of Murnaus visual/mass-entertainment
negation of Goethes textual/high-cultural tradition.
76

This false negation occludes not merely the visual
but the cinematic dimension of Goethes production.
Although the October 1926 premire of Murnaus flm
version of Faust was a major cultural event, the French
director Georges Mlis had produced four short flms
of the Faust legend in the space of seven years in the
earliest days of flm-making (Faust and Marguerite
(1897 and 1904), Damnation of Faust (1898), Faust
in Hell (1903)), and Paul Wegeners Der Student Von
Prag (1913) was one of the frst feature-length flms
of cinema.
77
Early flm-makers frequent engagement
with the Faust legend should be read not as the attempt
to reintegrate the textual tradition in response to the
artistic devaluation of flm, but as the recognition that,
especially in Faust 2, Goethe had already cinematized
the textual tradition.
The phantasmagoria show of Act I masters the sit-
uation by playfully ironizing this possibility, utilizing
the baroque device of framing the play within a play in
order to stage its own continuation, its own immortal-
ity. Far from suspending the present or calling the
reality of the position of the viewer into question,
the hierarchical layering of this Romantic-refective
27
structure has the effect of reaffrming the present
reality of the detached viewer. Here, the Emperors
impossible demands for entertainment are met within
the theatre by incorporating the emerging possibility of
cinematic spectacle, as a possible theatre. In contrast,
the phantasmagoria of Act III is literally unstageable.
Here the cinematic is rendered immanent within the
play, resulting in an impossible work. As a piece of
theatre, Faust 2 performs its own decline in relation
to the advent of the cinematic spectacle. If the union
of Helenas classicism and Fausts baroque in this
phantasmagoric reality produces, as Kurt Weinberg
says, his phantasmagoric son Euphorion, this should
be grasped not as Goethe misunderstood it as
Byronic romanticism (the outer limits of Romantic
dmsure), but as cinematic modernism.
78

With the decline of what Benjamin identifes as
the auratic (that uniqueness and presence of the here
in the now of the present), classical theatre confronts
its own passing away, but simultaneously Euphorions
fight enacts the birth of cinema as a shift into the
light and magic of conjured semblance itself. The
effect within Goethes drama differs from the framed
hierarchies of (Romantic) ironic refection: its frame-
lessness enfolds the refractive intrusion of historical
time into the space of the present. The experiential
effect is registered in a kind of catastrophic clearing,
which retrospectively projects the present into the past
as its fate, whilst desubstantializing the present as one
surreal possibility. Our history is the history of the
cinematic; this insight occurs to us at the moment of
the decline of cinemas existing narrative form, with
the advent of the digital image and the new vistas
demanded by digital, HD and 3D.
79
In this context,
Goethes phantasmagoric visualization may be con-
sidered the primal history of cinema itself. The play
dramatizes its own temporality in a phantasmagoric
procession of images conjured as a carnival of the
allegorical, and prophesizes and dramatizes its own
demise as a performance whose technical demands
anticipate its true realization only in flm. Its moment
was now.
Notes
1. Walter Benjamin, Literary History and the Study of
Literature, Selected Writings, 4 vols, ed. Michael W.
Jennings, Gary Smith and Howard Eiland, Belknap,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London,
19992003 (hereafter referred to as SW), Volume 2, p.
459.
2. Benjamin, Comments on Gundolfs Goethe, SW1,
p. 98.
3. G.G. Gervinus, cited in Gordon A. Craig, Georg Gott-
fried Gervinus: The Historian as Activist, Pacifc His-
torical Review, vol. 41, no. 1, February 1972, pp. 114.
4. Benjamin, Comments on Gundolfs Goethe, SW1, p.
98; Benjamin, Literary History and the Study of Lit-
erature, SW2, p. 464.
5. Benjamin, Perception is Reading, SW1, p. 92.
6. Peter Osborne, Sign and Image, in Philosophy in Cul-
tural Theory, Routledge, London and New York, 2000,
pp. 2053.
7. Benjamin, Comments on Gundolfs Goethe, SW1,
p. 99.
8. Benjamin, Goethe, SW2, pp. 1827.
9. Benjamin, German Letters, SW2, p. 467.
10. Benjamin, Goethe, SW2, pp. 187.
11. Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Moscow Diary, ed. Gary
Smith, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and
London, 1986, p. 39.
12. Benjamin, Faust im Musterkoffer, Gesammelte
Schriften, Vol. 3, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann
Schweppenhuser, Surhkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1977
(hereafter referred to as GS), p. 341.
13. For a more detailed discussion of Goethes philosophical
infuence on Benjamin, see Matthew Charles, Specula-
tive Experience and History: Walter Benjamins Goe-
thean Kantianism, PhD thesis, Middlesex University,
2009, http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/3449/.
14. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland
and Kevin McLaughlin, Belknap, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1999, p. 4 [N2a].
15. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans.
John Osborne, Verso, London, 1998, pp. 35, 29 (trans.
altered).
16. Philip Brewster and Carl Howard Buchner, Language
and Critique: Jrgen Habermas on Walter Benjamin,
New German Critique 17, Spring 1979, p. 25; see also
Charles Rosen, The Origins of Walter Benjamin, New
York Review of Books, 18 November 1977, pp. 3140.
17. Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, SW4, p. 353
n63, p. 314.
18. Ibid., p. 353 n63 (trans. altered). Fausts soul is, at
the fnal moment of Goethes play, rescued from the
clutches of Mephistopheles, as the Chorus Mysticus
of angels sing: All that is ephemeral [Vergangliche]
/ Is only a parable [Gleichnis]; / The inadequate [Un-
zulangliche] / Here becomes an Event [Hier wirds
Ereignis]) (J.W. von Goethe, Faust 2, ll. 121047, p.
47 (page references are to the Norton Critical Edition
of Faust, trans. Walter Arndt, Norton, New York and
London, 2001; translations are amended, based on the
translations of Arndt and of Stuart Atkins in Goethe:
Collected Works, Vol. 2, Princeton University Press,
Princeton NJ, 1994.
19. Benjamin was in (at least indirect) contact with Valry
whilst living in Paris during the 1930s (see Letters to
Werner Kraft (30 January

1936) and to Adrienne Mon-
nier (29 April 1939 and 21 September 1939), in The
Correspondence of Walter Benjamin: 19101940, Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1994, pp.
520, 605, 614). The notes from Valrys Cahiers suggests
he frst conceived of the idea for Mon Faust during the
mid-1920s, and in 1932 gave an address in honour of
Goethe to the Sorbonne on the occasion of the cente-
nary of the poets death. But it seems he did not begin
major work on the project until 1940 (a frst edition was
published in 1941 and expanded in a posthumous 1945
edition). Benjamins reference to the poets Goethean
understanding in the 1939 essay on Baudelaire therefore
28
suggests the possibility that work on Mon Faust may
have begun in 1939.
20. Kurt Weinberg, The Figure of Faust in Valry and
Goethe: An Exegesis of Mon Faust, Princeton Univer-
sity Press, Princeton NJ, 1976, pp. 21213.
21. Istvn Mszros, Marxs Theory of Alienation, Merlin
Press, London, 1970, p. 298.
22. Goethe, Faust, ll. 16991702, p. 46.
23. Michael Lwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamins
On the Concept of History, trans. Chris Turner, Verso,
London and New York, 2005, p. 69. The resemblance
to Fausts pact is further emphasized if we compare
the Angelus Novus of the theses with the Talmudic an-
gels referred to in Benjamins 1922 announcement for
a journal entitled Angelus Novus, who are created in
order to perish and vanish into the void, once they have
sung their hymn in the presence of God (Benjamin,
Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus, SW1, p.
296). The open mouth of Klees Angelus Novus suggests
that the Angel of History is about to break into a song
of lament before perishing. The storm that blows from
Paradise therefore drowns out the angels lament, but
also prevents the ephemeral angels vanishing just long
enough for him to become perceptible.
24. See my discussion of the theses On the Concept of
History in relation to Benjamins early fragment on
The Meaning of Time in the Moral Universe in the
coda to Chapter 3 of my Speculative Experience and
History.
25. Benjamin, On the Concept of History, SW4, p. 393.
26. See Faust, ll. 43274339, p. 123.
27. Benjamin, Paralipomena to On the Concept of His-
tory, SW4, p. 404.
28. Benjamin, On the Concept of History, SW4, pp. 395,
390.
29. Lwy, Fire Alarm, p. 69.
30. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, K1, 1, emphasis added;
K2, 5.
31. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, K1a, 3. The dream
symbolism of the collective consciousness must there-
fore be distinguished from Jungs archetypes precisely
in relation to this experience of the new (see Matthew
Charles, On the Conservatism of Post-Jungian Criti-
cism: Competing Concepts of the Symbol in Freud,
Jung, and Walter Benjamin, International Journal of
Jungian Studies, forthcoming).
32. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, N1, 8, quoting Rudolf
Borcharck.
33. Benjamin, Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,
SW3, p. 262.
34. Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, SW4,
p. 338.
35. Benjamin, On the Concept of History, SW4, p. 390.
36. Benjamin, Paralipomena to On the Concept of His-
tory, SW4, p. 407.
37. Lwy, Fire Alarm, p. 26.
38. C.G. Jung, On the Relation of Analytical Psychology
to Poetry, Collected Works, Vol. 15, ed. Herbert Read,
Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler, Routledge & Kegan
Paul, London and Henley, 1981, p. 77.
39. Ibid., p. 82.
40. Jung, Transformation and Symbols of the Libido, Col-
lected Works, Vol. 5, ed. Herbert Read, Michael Ford-
ham, Gerhard Adler, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London,
1952, pp. 355, 357.
41. Goethe, quoted in Siegfried Unseld, Goethe and His
Publishers, trans. Kenneth J. Northcott, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1996, p. 324.
42. Benjamin, Faust im Musterkoffer, GS3, p. 341.
43. Goethe, Second Sketch for the Announcement of the
Helena (1826), in Faust, p. 523. To be sure, it is of
the essence of the time structure that it is not clearly
differentiated, but that there is an intentional blending
of times, a montage, a superimposing of two or more
times in an iridescent shimmer of phantasmagoric ef-
fect (Harold Jantz, The Form of Faust: The Work of
Art and Its Intrinsic Structures, Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, Baltimore and London, 1978, p. 153).
44. It is this illusionary sense Marx ironically intends to
evoke with his claim that all the political conditions
of revolutionary France have vanished like a phantas-
magoria before the spell of a man whom even his en-
emies do not make out to be a sorcerer (Karl Marx, The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, International
Publishers, New York, 1963, p. 20). Marx exemplifes
this vanishing act with a maxim from Goethes Faust:
All that exists deserves to perish.
45. Neil Flax, Goethes Faust II and the Experimental The-
atre of His Time, Comparative Literature, vol. 31, no.
2, Spring 1979, p. 157.
46. Goethe, Werke, vol. 31, pp. 1634, trans. in Frederick
Burwick, Romantic Drama: From Optics to Illusion, in
Literature and Society: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart
Peterfreund, Northeastern University Press, Boston MA,
1990, p. 185.
47. Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Meta-
phors, and Media in the Twenty-First Century, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 2006, p. 154.
48. Schne emphasizes these technical aspects in his Frank-
furter Ausgabe 1994 edition of Faust, a theme taken up
in Neil Flaxs discussion. Flax, Goethes Faust II and
the Experimental Theatre of His Time, pp. 15466. See
also Stuart Atkins, Goethes Faust: A Literary Analysis,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1958, pp.
1334; John R. Williams, The Problem of the Mothers,
A Companion to Goethes Faust: Parts I and II, ed. Paul
Bishop, Camden House, Rochester NY and Woodbridge,
2006, p. 132.
49. Goethe, Faust 2, l. 6546, p. 186; see Flax, Goethes
Faust II and the Experimental Theatre of his Time.
50. Goethe, Faust 2, ll. 6458546, pp. 1846.
51. Ursula Reidel-Schrewe argues that the key and the tri-
pod are presented as ritual objects complementing each
other and symbolizing the ultimate power of genius.
Ursula Reidel-Schrewe, Key and Tripod in Mikhail
Bulgakovs Master and Margarita, Neophilologus, vol.
79, no. 2, April, 1995, p. 273. John Aloysius McCarthy
rejects this classical association and focuses on their
sexual imagery: Given the clearly phallic symbolism
of the key that naturally seeks out the right place, the
argument for viewing the burning tripod as the aroused
female genitals is more compelling. The triangular form
of the tripod supporting the faming bowl is reminiscent
of the triangular shape of the gateway to the female
reproductive organs. John Aloysius McCarthy, Re-
mapping Reality: Chaos and Creativity in Science and
Literature, Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2006,
p. 210.
52. Goethe, Letter to Sulpiz Boissere (dated 24 November
1831). Goethe echoes this phrase in a letter to Wilhelm
von Humboldt (dated 17 March 1832, in Faust, p. 549),
which speaks again of these very serious jests; quoted
29
in Weinberg, The Figure of Faust in Valry and Goethe,
p. 188 n22.
53. Eric Hadley Denton, The Technological Eye: Theater
Lightning and Gukkasten in Michaelis and Goethe, in
The Enlightened Eye: Goethe and Visual Culture, ed.
Evelyn K. Moore and Patricia Anne Simpson, Rodopi,
Amsterdam and New York, 2007, pp. 23964, p. 254.
54. Peter Wollen, Time, Image and Terror, in Carolyn Bai-
ley Gill, ed., Time and the Image, Manchester University
Press, Manchester, 2000, p. 157.
55. In her discussion of Goethe, colour and technology
in Hollywood Flatlands, Esther Leslie points out how
Edwin Land, the co-founder of the Polaroid Corpora-
tion, developed an astonishing new theory of colour
whose procedures he said were drawn from Goethes
theory of colour. Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands:
Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant-Garde,
Verso, London and New York, 2004, p. 252.
56. Goethe, Elective Affnities, trans. R.J. Hollingdale,
Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1971, pp. 191202.
In Elective Affnities, the architect constructs a tablea
vivant by imposing the forms of painterly composition
directly onto real life by using people and objects as his
material. It was at this moment that the picture [das
Bild] appeared to have been held and fxed [ festgehahl-
ten und erstarrt], Goethe writes of one of these staged
constructions, and the effect of this fxing on the par-
ticipants (Physically bedazzled [geblendet], spiritually
astonished [berrascht]) mirrors the effect upon the
spectators (the disturbing factor being a sort of anxi-
ety produced by the presence of real fgures instead of
painted ones).
57. Denton, The Technological Eye, p. 247.
58. John Williams, The Problem of the Mothers, in Paul
Bishop, ed., A Companion to Goethes Faust: Parts I
and II, Camden House, 2001, Rochester NY and Wood-
bridge, p. 141.
59. Anthony Phelan argues that the return of some element
of antiquity from the past and its reinstatement in the
present gives new meaning to the term representa-
tion, which is now a restoration to presence, but one
that simultaneously destabilizes the personal identity of
its central fgure by insisting on her allusive character
(Anthony Phelan, The Classical and the Medieval in
Faust II, in Bishop, A Companion to Goethes Faust
Parts I and II, p. 162).
60. Benjamin, Paralipomena to On the Concept of His-
tory, SW4, p. 405.
61. Benjamin, Julien Green, SW2, p. 333.
62. See Annie Brudo, Rve et fantastique chez Julien Green,
Presses universitaires de France, Paris, 1995, p. 237.
63. Benjamin, Julien Green, SW2, p. 333.
64. Ibid.
65. Walter Benjamin, The Fireside Saga, SW2, pp. 1512.
66. See, for example, Osborne, Sign and Image; Laura
Mulvey, The Index and the Uncanny, in Gill, ed., Time
and the Image, pp. 14043.
67. Mulvey, The Index and the Uncanny, p. 141.
68. Osborne, Sign and Image, pp. 345.
69. Ann Banfeld, LImparfait de lobjectif: The Imperfect
of the Object Glass, Camera Obscura 24, Fall 1991, p.
75, quoted in Laura Mulvey, The Index and the Un-
canny, pp. 1423.
70. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, N3, 1.
71. Benjamin, The Concept of Criticism in Early German
Romanticism, SW1, pp. 18081; emphasis added.
72. Benjamin, News about Flowers, SW2, pp. 1567.
73. So it was quite in order for an observer like Dblin to
have hit on precisely the scientifc aspects of this work,
commenting: Just as there is comparative anatomy
so this photographer is doing comparative photogra-
phy (Benjamin, Little History of Photography, SW2,
p. 520)
74. Matt Erlin, Tradition as Intellectual Montage: F.W.
Murnaus Faust (1926), in Noah William Isenberg, ed.,
Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to the Classic
Films of the Era, Columbia University Press, New York
and Chichester, p. 163.
75. Ibid., pp. 1656.
76. Ibid., pp. 16670.
77. Ibid., p. 156. The pioneering flm-maker George Mlis,
who describes his frst flms as a genre ferique et fan-
tasmagorique (Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination:
Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution,
University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Ange-
les, 1993, pp. 2534) stands as the fantastical antithesis
to the realist tendency in early cinema. Mlis, perhaps
more than anyone, grasped the phantasmagorical themes
in Goethes version of the legend.
78. Weinberg, The Figure of Faust in Valry and Goethe, p.
160. David Cunningham has criticized recent theorizing
of the ontology of the photographic image in relation to
the avant-garde and in particular to Benjamins concept
of the dialectical image for being overdetermined by the
pictorial tradition of visual studies. Against this, Cun-
ningham emphasizes an inherent transdisciplinarity by
tracing the importance of post-romantic theories of the
literary and poetic image for Benjamin and the avant-
garde (see David Cunningham, Photography and the Lit-
erary Conditions of Surrealism, in David Cunningham,
Andrew Fisher and Sas Mays, eds, Photography and
Literature in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge Scholars
Press, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2005). In this respect, Cun-
ningham would argue that Goethe had already textual-
ized the cinematic tradition in advance, a view that is
perhaps broadly consistent with Franco Morettis reading
of Faust 2 as inaugurating the literary genre of the mod-
ern epic (see Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World-
System from Goethe to Garca Mrquez, trans. Quintin
Hoare, Verso, London and New York, 1996). Yet, I would
argue, this transdisciplinary character is precisely what
is at stake in visualizing Goethes nineteenth-century
poem through the twentieth-century visual category of
the cinematic, rather than through the lineage of ro-
mantic theories of the poetic image or the modern epic
(which therefore reasserts the continuity of historicism).
To claim that Goethe anticipates or textualizes the cin-
ematic tradition is to conjure Goethe into Benjamins
present, in the sense I have criticized in relation to Jung
(whose interpretation of Joyces Ulysses is instructive in
this respect; see Jung, Ulysses: A Monologue, CW15).
In addition, Goethes theory and, specifcally, his prac-
tice of the image have to be strongly distinguished from
romanticism, functioning as they do as a corrective to
the messianic structure of Early German Romanticism
in Benjamins thought.
79. The triumph of Russian director Alexander Sokurovs
2011 reworking of Faust at the 68th Venice International
Film Festival perhaps represents a moment of cinematic
refection on its own tradition, precisely at the point in
which digital production and reproduction threaten it
with obliteration.
30 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
INTERVIEW Noam Chomsky
Freedom and power
Peter Hallward Id like to start by asking you about some of your basic philosophical
principles, starting with your understanding of human freedom and creativity. In the modern
European tradition Im most familiar with, freedom is a dominant philosophical theme from
Descartes through Rousseau to Kant. With Kant we have an affrmation of absolute freedom
from all external causation, but it remains a relatively abstract affair, a matter of pure
practical reason. This sets a post-Kantian agenda: from Hegel and Marx through to the
Frankfurt School and their existentialist contemporaries, the question becomes one of trying
to think freedom or rather the process of emancipation in a way that has more concrete
socio-historical determination or actuality. Through to the 1930s, at least, for many of the
thinkers in this tradition the role of mediating agent was played, one way or another, by the
proletariat conceived as a tendentially universal class.
I know youve approached these issues from a different perspective, but like a lot of your
readers Im curious to know more about how you see these two aspects of your work: the
libertarian aspect, oriented by an uncompromising affrmation of freedom, and the social/
historical aspect, oriented by an equally uncompromising critique of capitalism, imperial-
ism, propaganda and forms of domination more generally.
On the face of it, many of your long-standing priorities and principles the accounts
of freedom you fnd in Descartes, von Humboldt and some of the classical liberals, your
critique of behaviourism, your allegiance to aspects of the anarchist and libertarian social-
ist traditions, and so on seem to form an internally coherent group, one thats consistent
across the whole sweep of your work. Is that how you yourself see it? Did your main ideas
fall gradually into place over time, or were there quite specifc debates or encounters that
served to crystallize things?
Noam Chomsky Well, I was interested in anarchist ideas right back through my child-
hood, but I only learned about the deeper Romantic and rationalist tradition in the 1960s,
after Id pretty much settled most of my own ideas on the topic. Id always been interested
in the anarchist tradition itself, Id investigated it, Id thought it had been somewhat mis-
interpreted, but I cant say that what lay behind the anarchist tradition in many ways was
a direct infuence it was more like a discovery of historical origins for ideas Id already
been defending for some time.
The critique of behaviourism began very early, as soon as I found out about it. I was
a graduate student at Harvard in the early 1950s, and radical behaviourism was orthodox
and ubiquitous. There were a couple of us, graduate students, who just didnt believe any of
it. We were very critical of behaviourism, particularly with respect to the way it was used
in the study of language, of course, but also in psychology and the social sciences, and in
American philosophy more generally.
PH Partly as a critique of social engineering?
NC That too, but it was mainly a critique of its scientifc pretensions. It was worthless
as an explanation of language acquisition, for instance, and it missed some of the more
important work that was happening in biology at the time. So we looked at materials that
not many people were reading in those years European work in ethology, comparative
31
psychology, people like Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, who offered a very dif-
ferent way of understanding behaviour and the cognitive systems at work in behaviour.
Later I wrote criticisms of the social and political implications of behaviourism, and right
around that time, say around 1960, I was beginning to learn about the earlier tradition in the
philosophy of language and mind, the tradition that includes Descartes and von Humboldt.
It was almost totally ignored here: when I started working on it I couldnt even get hold of
the basic documents in the United States; I had to go to the British Museum to fnd things
like translations of the Port Royal grammar, and I found that standard translations, like of
Leibniz, say, were sometimes very inaccurate.
PH One of the more striking things about your approach, at least for a non-specialist
like me, is how you embraced Descartess affrmation of a spiritual or thinking substance
(entirely distinct from extended or bodily substance and thus free from the sort of mechani-
cal causality that seemed to govern the bodily domain) not just as a metaphysical principle
but as a fertile scientifc hypothesis.
NC It was a very reasonable scientifc move. Descartes postulated a second substance,
a res cogitans, and the reasons for his postulating it still remain cogent.
1
This was later
ridiculed by modern philosophers you know, the ghost in the machine, the ghost that
needs to be exorcised in order to resolve the mindbody problem. But I think thats a mis-
understanding. The mindbody problem, Cartesian dual-substance theory, did collapse, with
Newton because the body collapsed. Newton showed, to his own dismay, that we have no
clear concept of body or matter, that physics is obliged to recognize apparently mysterious
immaterial forces of attraction and repulsion, action at a distance, and so on. The common-
sense notion of body collapsed, along with the theory of mechanical causality that underlay
much of the early modern scientifc world-view.
The body was exorcised, but nothing ever happened to the ghost, the mind. What
actually happened, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is that there was con-
siderable exploration of whats called, in the history of philosophy, Lockes suggestion
namely, that just as matter has properties we cannot comprehend, theres no reason to
doubt that God might have super-added to matter the capacity for thought, just as he added
its incomprehensible capacities for attraction and repulsion. The theological framework is
of course dispensable, and in Lockes own private correspondence its sometimes not even
there. Leaving that aside, it led to a theory of thinking matter, whereby thought is just a
property of certain kinds of organized matter much as attraction and repulsion are. Its in
Hume, its developed particularly by Joseph Priestley, the chemistphilosopher, and it goes
on right into the nineteenth century.
2
It should have incorporated Descartess observations
about thought, language, perception and so on, but it didnt; it eventually ran out of steam
and was then forgotten.
Today, this older picture, this conception of thinking matter, is being revived as if it were
new. So if you read biologists concerned with neuroscience, for instance Francis Crick, you
fnd the astonishing idea that our mental capacities, consciousness in particular, are proper-
ties of the brain. Well, that was a standard view in the eighteenth century. What else could
they be? Since theres no matter in the sense of the old mechanical philosophy, of pushes
and pulls and so on, youre left with the fact that there are organic systems that have the
capacity for thought. We can do our best to try to fgure out how they do it. Descartes had
some good arguments and they remain good arguments.
PH What about Spinozas alternative to Descartess approach, which would cast a long
shadow over later European rationalisms? Spinoza conceives of thought as an attribute of
a single all-embracing substance or nature, one that is parallel to but entirely distinct from
extension or matter. As far as youre concerned, does such a point of departure effectively
block in advance the more productive way of approaching the problem, one framed in terms
of a thinking matter?
32
NC Putting aside consideration of Spinozas subtle ideas, after Newtons demolition of
the prevailing concept of matter (body, physical, etc.) we cannot really discuss something
entirely distinct from extension or matter until we are given some coherent account of the
nature of matter. And there is none, apart from the best theory that scientists can come up
with at particular stages of the development of science. It seems to me that we cannot go
beyond some notion of thinking matter, where matter is understood to be a loose cover
term for the best guess as to what there is; maybe even bits of information responding to
our queries to nature, as the eminent physicist John Wheeler suggested. For thought, we can
narrow the quest, on the internalist assumption (often rejected in contemporary philosophy)
that thinking is a property of the individual (mostly the brain).
Biology
PH If now we recognize a capacity for thought and in particular for free or creative
thought as a capacity of an organic system, why then, in principle, should this capacity be
any more resistant to analysis than any other capacity of such a system? In the past youve
emphasized the creative urge of human nature (in your debate with Foucault), our instinct
for freedom (after Bakunin), while insisting that our ability to act and speak creatively
that is, in ways that are appropriate but not externally caused remains essentially mysteri-
ous. Youve suggested its a total mystery, and its a mystery why its a mystery.
3

NC Thats right.
PH The old problem of free will, then, would seem to be inaccessible to scientifc investi-
gation. Youve said its probable that our science-forming capacities simply do not extend to
any domain involving the exercise of will,
4
and speculated that the answer to the riddle
of free will lies in the domain of potential science that the human mind can never master
because of the limitations of its genetic structure.
5

On the face of it, this seems to imply that we can have some understanding of the struc-
turing mechanism (the genetic or biological dimension of things) but not of the capacity it
structures. But if freedom can be understood in terms of a nature, instinct or organism, why
in principle should it remain mysterious? Why couldnt some sort of evolutionary approach
account for it?
NC I looked at some of these questions in a recent article on the mysteries of nature.
6
It
starts off with a quote from Hume, from his History of England a book which not a lot
of philosophers read. Hume has a chapter on Newton, of course, our greatest and rarest
genius, and so on, and he says that one of Newtons great achievements was to lift the veil
from some of the mysteries of nature, while showing that there are mysteries that we will
never comprehend those arent his exact words, but thats the basic idea.
7
His point was,
to rephrase in current terms, that our minds are essentially biological organisms, and like
other organisms they have a certain scope, certain limits, and some questions may simply be
beyond our cognitive limits.
We can reformulate this idea today, knowing a lot more about the biology, but it strikes
me as a very sensible thesis, in part almost a tautology. You look say at rats; you try to train
them to run a prime number maze; well, they cant do it, they dont have those concepts.
You can train them to do a lot of things, but not to make sense of mathematical ideas they
dont have. And if were organic creatures, then were in the same sort of position: we have
cognitive capacities, they have a certain scope, and almost by logical necessity they have
certain limits. We dont know what those limits are, but we can think of science as the
area of intersection between whatever the world is and our cognitive capacities. Theres no
reason to assume that theyre identical. Hume may well be right. And, if you think about it,
Newtons discovery, the idea that there could be occult forces of attraction and repulsion,
remains a mystery to this day. Newton himself never accepted it; he regarded postulation
33
of such forces as an absurdity that no sensible person with any scientifc training could
accept, and he spent much of the rest of his life trying to disprove it. More recently weve
abandoned consideration of the problem, and today we essentially take the existence of such
forces for granted, without asking for an explanation in the terms the founders of modern
science would have demanded.
To put it differently, the goals of scientifc inquiry have been lowered. For the great
fgures who led the modern scientifc revolution, the goal was to understand the world,
which meant to give an account of the world that would render it intelligible to common-
sense understanding as a complex machine, which could in principle be constructed by
a master artisan, like the intricate clocks and other devices that stimulated the scientifc
imagination much as computers do today. As Newtons discoveries were absorbed into
scientifc common sense, the goals of science were implicitly lowered: to intelligibility of
theories about the world, while the world itself remains beyond our intuitive grasp. That is
an important shift in intellectual history, often not suffciently appreciated, I think.
PH In the case of human freedom per se, however, do the problems associated with knowl-
edge of mind-independent realities apply in the same way? Isnt there a refexive dimension
to self-awareness that gives it a sort of practical autonomy, at least, one that helps defend it
against the sort of sceptical questions Hume liked to ask? Already in Descartes, isnt access
to thinking substance proofed against sceptical doubt by the practice of thinking itself, by
the cogito?
NC Few believe that now, and its not
even clear that Descartes himself believed
it. Thats in the Meditations, mainly. Today
this is what philosophers tend to read, but
the Meditations were apologia; Descartes
wrote to his friend Marin Mersenne that
the purpose of the Meditations is to try
to convince the Jesuits that his physics,
which is what he really cared about, is not
heretical. Remember he was very worried
by the fate of Galileo. In fact, he was
supposed to have written a volume on the
mind (which he may have destroyed), in
which he was supposed to have developed
the foundations for his theory. In any case, by the middle of the seventeenth century, Gas-
sendi, Mersenne and others made it clearly understood that the idea of foundationalism was
fnished, indefensible.
PH A version of Descartess cogito remains important in Kant, however, and for many
of the post-Kantians (from Fichte through to Husserl and Sartre). Kants transcendental
approach is one way of taking the apparent limits of our cognitive capacities seriously, in
fact as absolutely binding constraints but without compromising the practical autonomy of
reason. Given the way our minds work, Kant argues, there are theoretical constraints on how
we can understand objects of possible experience (for instance the fact that they must appear
in time and space, must appear as subject to causality, and so on), but these constraints dont
apply to what we can think and do in the domain of practice that is, in the exercise of our
own freedom. I think Kant would argue that its a transcendental condition of the exercise
of freedom that it be fully self-determining; that is, that it remain free from any further
determination, whether this be biological, social, conventional, and so on. Theoretical
ignorance of what freedom is might be a virtual condition, then, of its practical exercise.
Later you fnd similar arguments in Sartre and Fanon, and in a certain way in people like
Lacan, Badiou and iek. I assume youre not sympathetic to this sort of approach, which in
34
a sense affrms the absolute mystery of freedom but severs the link between freedom and
biology?
NC Youre right, Im not sympathetic, in particular to the contemporary version of such
ideas (to the extent that I even understand them). I tend to see the issues more as a biologi-
cal problem. From a strictly phenomenological point of view, freedom of the will is about
as obvious to us as anything is. As human beings were absolutely confdent that we have
freedom of will. That could be an illusion, we can investigate this; if its not an illusion then
we can look for an explanation, though it doesnt follow that we have the cognitive capaci-
ties required to fnd it. But I dont think theres a contradiction in supposing that we might
be able to fnd it or, for that matter, to discover that the question is beyond the bounded
(though infnite) scope of our cognitive capacities, or even why that might be so.
Lets put it a different way. Suppose we want to ask whether dogs have free will. We
dont know if they do or dont, and if they do we dont yet have any understanding of it. But
theres no conceptual barrier of the Kantian kind to discovering it: maybe we can; maybe we
cant.
PH There does seem to be a conceptual difference, though, between the dogs under-
standing of its own will, so to speak, and the biological account we might eventually be
able to propose in order to explain it. Presumably the dog isnt in a position to understand
any of its instincts, to reconstruct (in however incomplete a fashion) the process of its
biological evolution, and so on. And if we have a capacity to understand some of the biologi-
cal processes at issue here, why in principle shouldnt they be adequate, sooner or later, to
explain this freedom too?
NC There is no impossibility in principle that is, abstracting from our biological
capacities. But given these capacities, there is a question of fact. Currently and maybe
forever we dont understand these matters. We dont understand them for dogs, let alone
for ourselves. We dont understand them for insects.
PH What about an explanation that would try to locate some sort of adaptive advantage
or ftness, however indirect its emergence? Theres an advantage in having multi-purpose
hands that can use different sorts of tools, for instance; why not a similar sort of explanation
for self-determining minds?
NC You can tell any story you want, but thats far from understanding the issue. The adap-
tive stories are what serious biologists call just-so stories. Maybe it was this way, maybe
another way thats baby-talk Darwinism. Incidentally, even if we had an adaptive explana-
tion it would tell us nothing about the basic cognitive and neurological processes involved
in it. We can say they evolved because theyre useful. But what are they? That remains
mysterious. Again, even for insects, many questions like this are at the very least not yet
understood; whether they can be understood remains uncertain.
8
PH In principle, then, do you think theres any chance that our understanding of freedom
might one day change in something like the way our understanding of infnity began to
change, in the late nineteenth century? As far back as Aristotle, the notion of the infnite was
routinely held to defne the limit of all human cognition, one inaccessible to any conceptual
distinction, the source of all sorts of apparent absurdities (parts as large as the wholes they
belong to, and so on). Infnity was supposed to be an idea we could never get our heads
round, the divine or transcendent attribute par excellence. But then Georg Cantor and others
showed how we might number different orders of infnity, and in the process laid the foun-
dations for a whole new way of thinking about number in general; the mathematical conse-
quences of the new theory of sets would redefne many things about the feld as a whole.
NC You could say the same about the Pythagorean theorem; at frst it was such a mystery,
so offensive to reason that it was kept secret. Yes, sure, right through history there are cases
35
where what seems utterly outlandish was later absorbed into scientifc common sense. But
that doesnt imply that it will always happen, and it doesnt imply that, in particular, we
can gain some new insight into the way things really are in the sense of the early modern
scientifc revolution, later abandoned.
I think the most dramatic case is in fact Newtons physics. What was considered outra-
geous then is considered scientifc common sense today but its not that we understand it
any better; we still dont have an intuitive understanding of it. The classical modern scien-
tists, Galileo through Newton, they were looking for a conception of the world that we could
comprehend not just the theory, but also its object. That was the point of the mechanical
philosophy. We can understand gears and levers and things pushing each other, and so on,
but we cant comprehend what Newton and his contemporaries regarded as mystical forces.
We may accept them, we may develop a theoretical approach for dealing with them, but that
doesnt mean that they become intelligible. And in fact they dont. Theyre just as inexplica-
ble to us as they were to Newton. We have just modifed our conception of intelligibility, so
that we now say that theyre intelligible, but they arent, by their standards, though theories
about them and about matters even more remote from common-sense understanding may
be intelligible.
PH I wonder if your criteria for what counts as a viable explanation are a little exorbitant,
or anachronistic: why should the sort of intuitive understanding that might have been
appropriate to the (illusory) mechanical philosophy serve as a sort of model for intelligi-
bility in general? Didnt the scientifc revolution of the seventeenth century also serve to
distance understanding of the physical world from empirical observation or intuition, and
to restore mathematics as the paradigm for intelligibility? In this very general sense, didnt
it mark a sort of post-medieval revenge of Plato over Aristotle? This seems to apply to
Descartes algebraicization of geometry as much as to Galileo or Newtons methodological
contributions to physics.
NC It is important to make a distinction between intelligibility of the world and intelligi-
bility of theories about the world. The former was the goal of the mechanical philosophy,
the reigning conceptual framework from Galileo through Newton and beyond, considered so
obvious that Newton regarded his own discoveries as an absurdity that no serious scientist
could accept. To repeat, as these discoveries were absorbed into scientifc common sense,
the goals of science were lowered, to intelligibility of theories. And the conceptions of the
great scientists who created the modern scientifc revolution are indeed now dismissed as
exorbitant but there is nothing anachronistic about the inquiry into what happened and
why, or how the goals of understanding and explanation have changed and the signifcance
of this crucial development of intellectual history.
PH What if we approach the question of freedom through the category of causality, which
is again central to the rationalist conception of things? Both Spinoza and Kant assume the
natural world is governed by suffcient reason that is, by the uninterrupted play of causa-
tion which is why there is no freedom of will in Spinoza, and only an extra-natural
freedom of will in Kant. But if we understand freedom in your terms as an instinct or
as an aspect of nature that is, as something that has come to exist as a spatio-temporal
capacity, itself located within the feld of spatio-temporal causation shouldnt it be possible
in principle to track the evolutionary sequence of steps that led it to become the capacity of
a particular sort of organism?
NC If by in principle you mean in abstraction from whatever our cognitive capacities
are, and from the limitations of evidence (e.g. the lack of tape recordings from tens of
thousands of years ago), then in principle the evolutionary history could be reconstructed.
But in reality the questions have to be posed differently: we dont know the evolutionary
history, and may not be able to fnd out, as Lewontin discussed. There are people like the
philosopher Colin McGinn who have tried to develop the distinction Im drawing between
36
problems and mysteries that is, between questions, which we can at least pose, whose
answers we can at least imagine, on the one hand, and, on the other, mysteries, in relation to
which we cant even pose serious questions; we may recognize certain kinds of phenomena,
but understanding them appears to be beyond our cognitive grasp. If we are organic crea-
tures, then such a distinction must exist: it follows from our being biological organisms, like
the rats in the prime number maze. In principle we might even fnd out what these limits
are. Its not unintelligible to suppose that we can investigate our own cognitive capacities
and determine what their limits are.
We can only speculate at the moment, but its possible that problems like freedom of the
will are mysteries in Humes sense, beyond what our cognitive capacities can explain. Of
course, there is a question as to whether such freedom even exists, but thats a rather curious
question. William James pointed out, and I think its an interesting observation, that the
people who argue that freedom of the will doesnt exist are themselves acting extremely
irrationally. Why give us what they take to be reasons? They believe it and are giving these
reasons because its determined; we dont believe it because its determined. So whats to
discuss?
Theres also a lot of pseudo-scientifc argumentation brought in, to try to explain the
problem away. For example a couple of years ago there was an interesting discovery,
showing that if a person is going to carry out some action, say pick up this pen from a table,
theres activity in the motor cortex of the brain before youre aware of making the decision.
9

This was brought up as an argument against freedom of the will. But it doesnt tell you
anything, except that decisions are made unconsciously, who knows how.
PH But isnt one of the cardinal features of free will, at least in the conventional sense,
that its a matter of voluntary and thus conscious action?
NC Its a standard assumption that mental
acts must somehow be accessible to conscious-
ness (in principle). Some philosophers have
held that that is a criterion of the mental
(notably John Searle, following W.V. Quine). But
why take the assumption to be correct (even if
it can be formulated coherently, which I doubt,
for reasons Ive discussed) particularly when
there is so much evidence that it is false, for
example our best understanding of the mental
acts that enter into what you and I are now
doing? If we abandon the doctrine which
is just dogma, in my opinion then it could turn out that there is a distinction between
voluntary and conscious. And if that is correct, this experimental work might be evidence
for that distinction.
PH One last question along these lines, before moving on. In the past youve said, in
passing, that Im not sure that I want free will to be understood.
10
Is your scepticism about
adaptive explanations to the evolution of our instinct for freedom purely a response to the
unpersuasive science involved, or do you also have normative reasons for rejecting them
perhaps the same sort of reasons at work in your critique of applied behaviourism?
NC To say that the speculations are unpersuasive is I think an understatement. Further-
more, it is important to distinguish evolutionary accounts from adaptive accounts. Its well
understood in modern biology that these are quite different notions. I wouldnt quite say that
the reasons for the feelings expressed in the statement you quote are normative. Its rather
that I think that our appreciation of the richness and excitement inspired by human actions
would be seriously diminished if it were understood an eventuality that seems to me
remote, despite sophisticated and intriguing work on the topic.
37
Psychoanalysis
PH So, if now we admit that, given our current understanding of the biology and psy-
chology, freedom remains an essentially mysterious fact, what then about the domains
that border this mystery? Theres been a great deal of work on this sort of problem in the
so-called human sciences, over the past century. Psychoanalysis has tried to investigate
the boundaries between voluntary and involuntary action, and has explored the ways that
peoples formative experiences structure certain aspects of their unconscious life, shaping
the more or less repressed desires or drives that account for at least some of their subse-
quent behaviour. Sociologists have considered the ways that class tends to structure cultural
habits or refexes. Marxists have looked at the ways a given mode of production generates
ideological patterns that serve to justify or naturalize the class relations required to sustain
it. Someone like your old debating partner Michel Foucault helped to excavate some of
the institutional, social and cognitive processes that consolidate norms of behaviour, the
biopolitical mechanisms that regulate ways of living and reinforce patterns of obedience
to the established order of things, ways of governing and being governed. Do you think
that this sort of investigation has gone any way towards shedding light on the mysteries of
freedom and voluntary action?
NC Its interesting work but it leaves questions of freedom untouched.
PH Completely untouched?
NC It shows the infuences on our use of freedom. Lets assume for the moment that we
have freedom of will. These studies demonstrate conditions on how we may choose to exer-
cise it, but not on its existence in nature. Independently of your class background, cultural
infuences, and so on, you can still make choices that confict with them. And many people
do, for example dissidents, or revolutionaries, or just independent people.
PH This formulation seems to double the category of freedom: we have freedom, and we
are also more or less free to choose to use it. What sorts of constraints do you recognize on
this freedom to use freedom? In the capitalist world we live in, how much real independence
do individual workers, for instance, have in relation to those who might employ and exploit
them? In this and many similar cases, doesnt the freedom or independence in question only
become actual (to use the Hegelian term) when we are able to organize and act collec-
tively? I take that to be one of the main points that Rousseau and then Marx and Lenin were
trying to make.
Is there a danger, if you separate freedom, on the one hand, from the infuences on
our use of freedom, on the other, that you might (in line with Kantian precedent) confne
freedom per se to a sort of indeterminate, purely moral domain? At least that was the
argument that split the feld of French philosophy in the early 1960s, between those who
like Sartre wanted to retain the primacy of free individual choice in relation to all structur-
ing infuences, and those (e.g. Lvi-Strauss, Althusser, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva and many
others) who began to emphasize at deeper and deeper levels the role of such infuences,
economic, unconscious, ideological, epistemological, linguistic
NC Those two positions are not inconsistent. You can perfectly well recognize, and I
certainly do, that there are all kinds of infuences that shape, frame and limit the range of
choices that we can even consider, let alone make. But that doesnt bear on the question
of whether we have the capacity to make choices, or whether it is all determined. And
if we have the capacity, what is it, and how do we exercise it? Those questions remain
untouched. I dont think its quite accurate to say that this stance doubles the category
of freedom. If freedom of choice exists, then we have the freedom to choose. To adopt
Descartess example, we have the freedom to put our hands in the fre and some actually
do (metaphorically).
38
PH They may be compatible in principle, but if you look at what happened in the feld of
recent French philosophy in particular (which came to have a good deal of infuence in the
domain of contemporary human sciences and cultural studies more generally) in the 1960s
there was instead a clear shift from one position to another: theres a move from an empha-
sis on freedom and the anguish of responsibility for choices independent of all structuring
constraint, to an emphasis on structuring factors that seem to proceed independently of all
freedom and choice, such that the subject of choice is itself reduced to the status of a mere
effect or support of structuring causality.
11
NC The people who advocate that sort of position dont believe it for a moment. They
themselves say well, I can escape it. In fact I dont see any reason to take either of these
positions seriously. If you formulate them properly they can be quite consistent. There can
be constraints on what you can consider, let alone do, but that doesnt mean you have no
choice in fact you even have the choice of breaking the constraints.
The same sort of situation applies in the arts; the problem goes way back in the history
of aesthetics. If you read people like Schlegel, say (and people like Coleridge in England
who borrowed from Schlegel), they point out that artistic creativity depends on a system of
rules, within which the artist freely creates. You cant have creativity without a system of
rules you operate within. However, you can challenge the rules. That can also be a creative
act.
Politics
PH In the political domain, to challenge the rules means to wage a revolutionary strug-
gle, and it seems like some situations have developed quite effective ways of defending
themselves against the prospect of revolution. A good deal of your own work over the last
thirty-plus years ever since the crisis of democracy challenged the rules in the late 1960s
and early 1970s has documented in compelling detail the long and far-reaching neoliberal
campaign to contain this crisis: the assault on unions and the decline of the once-thriving
labour press, the consolidation of corporate power, the subversion of genuine popular
participation in political decisions, and so on. Already in the late 1990s your diagnosis was
rather stark, comparing the situation to the period of the Black Death in Europes fourteenth
century, the trauma of a thoroughly atomized and disoriented peasant society.
12
Presumably
its more diffcult, in such circumstances, to act collectively in ways that might challenge a
set of political or economic rules.
NC If Ive given that impression then its misleading, because I think thats only half the
story. In other respects were a lot more free now than in earlier periods. If someone like
me condemns government policy, in a country like the United States, Im quite confdent
that Im not going to be taken to jail, tortured and killed. There was a time when that wasnt
true, and it wasnt that long ago. Eugene Debs, for instance, was thrown into jail because he
questioned the nobility of Wilsons war. And he wasnt a member of an oppressed minority;
he was a mainstream fgure, a major labour leader, a candidate for the presidency, and so on.
He was just tossed into jail. Thats extremely unlikely to happen today.
PH I agree thats true for prominent fgures in the United States though less true of
course for critics of US policy living in a few other places, where your chances of getting
killed or tossed into jail still seem pretty high. But if there is less overt repression of main-
stream criticism in the US today, is that because there is less real need for it?
NC Thats what a lot of people say, but I dont think so. I think its impossible to silence
criticism because the country has become a lot more civilized. There are a lot of things we
almost take for granted now which were almost inconceivable thirty or forty years ago. It
wasnt that long ago, after all, that England essentially murdered Alan Turing, one of the
great mathematicians of the twentieth century and a British war hero. They murdered him
39
because he was a homosexual of course they didnt say thats what they did, but thats in
effect what happened when he was driven to suicide by forced medical treatment for his
ailment. In the United States there were anti-sodomy laws until just a few years ago. The
idea of gay rights used to be almost inconceivable, or even womens rights. Elementary
rights were more or less marginalized until pretty recently, but now we can almost take
them for granted.
PH These are major and hard-won developments. But they dont confict with class
interests.
NC True, the ruling classes are able to accommodate civil and human rights, pretty easily.
In fact if you look at the opinions of CEOs, you fnd that their social attitudes tend to be
fairly liberal. These things dont affect their position. When you start to touch on questions
relating to authority and the concentration of power in the system you run into more chal-
lenging barriers. But still, the freedoms that exist elsewhere give you the opportunity to
work against those barriers.
PH Opportunity, yes, and in some ways a kind of facility; youre right, of course, to
remind people of the differences between political activism in a place like the USA and in
places like Colombia or Pakistan. But the barriers themselves have also evolved in ways
that make them harder to change, not least because for many people they no longer appear
as barriers at all; many of the undergraduate students Ive worked with over the last ffteen
years or so have seemed to accept them as a sort of second nature. In an interview on the
BBC in the mid 1970s, I think its from 1976, you anticipated that the tendency towards the
concentration of power in capitalism will lead to constant revulsion and, yes, theres been
plenty of revulsion, thats for sure, but also a lot of confusion and resignation.
Over these same years, many academic critics of these old barriers, critics who retain a
more or less distant sympathy to the revolutionary tradition (for instance critics infuenced
by Adorno and the Frankfurt School), have become more and more pessimistic about the
prospects of changing the rules, as you say, especially as the legacy of the 1960s began to
fade. They argue that capitalisms hegemony has become so overwhelming and commod-
ifcation so far-reaching that resistance has been reduced to an impotent demonstration of
moral indignation. They point, as you have also done, to the impact of globalization and
fnancialization, the eclipse of left-leaning political parties, the corporate hold on the media,
the perversion and subsequent collapse of socialism in Russia and China, the dilution of a
distinctive working-class consciousness and culture in the more affuent countries, integra-
tion of an increasing proportion of the population into the networks of private property
(through debt, home ownership, pension schemes), and so on. And they tend to conclude that
the very notion of revolution has become anachronistic. Whats your view about this?
NC Power systems dont respond to challenges by saying fne, Ill disappear. They react
by fnding new ways to sustain themselves. To take a classic case, about a century ago, in
the two freest societies in the world, the USA and UK, dominant elites recognized that too
much freedom had been won for them to control the population by force, so it would be
necessary to turn to controlling attitudes and beliefs to fabricate wants and manufacture
consent (respectively, Thorstein Veblen, who condemned the practice; Walter Lippmann,
who lauded it). One outcome was the rise of the public relations industry, dedicated to these
ends. And there were others. These developments were reactions to victories of resistance to
systems of power. They changed the terrain while the range of opportunities extended. The
same is true, I think, of the strong counterattack on the liberating tendencies of the 1960s,
pretty much across the mainstream spectrum, from the Powell memorandum on the right to
the crisis of democracy at the liberal internationalist end. As for whether one chooses to
be optimistic or pessimistic about the prospects for moving on towards greater freedom and
justice, thats a personal matter, of little signifcance that I can see. We should act the same
way, essentially, whatever our expectations of success.
40
PH Perhaps this is another point where the relation between action and actuality deserves
more consideration, but I agree that for decades now people living in the more privileged
parts of the world have been too quick to accept strategic or pragmatic limits on our
range of action. Weve been too quick to internalize the historical logic of the dominant
class, the idea that theres no alternative, and to flter our own sense of possibility through
this presumption of impossibility.
This fltering has taken place in all sorts of ways, through many kinds of institution and
organization: even some of the groups that played a progressive role twenty-fve or thirty
years ago, for instance some of the human rights groups and NGOs you often referred to in
your campaign work on Latin America in the 1980s, now seem to fulfl a more ambiguous
function. More or less by their own admission, USAID and the National Endowment for
Democracy have taken on some of the functions that used to be associated with the CIA, and
they wield considerable infuence in the development sector. Many veterans of the popular
mobilizations in places like Haiti, India or Thailand, for instance (Im thinking of people like
Patrick Elie, Arundhati Roy, Giles Ji Ungpakorn), point to the way that human rights groups
and NGOs have come to serve as defenders if not apologists of the status quo.
13
NC To some extent no doubt, though it was always the case with USAID and NED, and to
a much more limited extent genuine human rights groups. But for the latter, Im not con-
vinced that the changes have been generally in the direction that you describe. Ive worked
pretty closely with many of them for a long time. Take Israel, which is of course a touchy
subject in the USA. I was pretty close to the US leadership of Amnesty International, for
instance, and through the 1980s, at least, they wouldnt touch it; nows theres very little
hesitation. Human Rights Watch was also very careful on this issue, and today its calling
for the US government to withhold funding from Israel to the extent that its involved in any
way with settlements or discrimination within Israel. The press doesnt report that, but its
signifcant, and I think its an indication of how theyre becoming more free and more open,
as they refect changes in the society.
PH Affuent societies are more free and open in some ways, but on the other hand youd
have to go back a long way, at least in Britain, to fnd a period when political discussion was
so narrowly focused. In many ways, the ThatcherBlairCameron sequence represents the
consolidation of a sort of single-party system; expression of any serious political alternative
is confned to the margins. Meanwhile security has become a genuine obsession, and one
way or another the political criminalization of the poor seems to break new barriers year
on year, while the ongoing privatization of so much of the public sphere makes it that much
more diffcult to formulate a concerted response. Higher education, for instance, is being
transformed at dizzying speed into a mere extension of the corporate sector, with little
determined resistance, so far, outside of fairly small groups of committed activists. Every-
where you fnd the market and in particular fnancial markets exercising something close
to tyrannical infuence.
NC To the extent that thats true, theres no point lamenting it. Its more reason for dedi-
cated efforts to combat it, which is by no means impossible. Im sure we agree about that.
PH What about recent developments in the media? Do new mainstream providers like Al
Jazeera or Telesur offer a real alternative to the corporate media? How far does the rapid
growth of blogs, new social media, that sort of thing, challenge the older concentration of
power?
NC They do, though its a mixed story. With regard to the mainstream media, I have
a much more nuanced view than many others I know. I think there are many respects in
which the media are more free and open now than they were thirty or forty years ago.
PH Adherence to the propaganda model you presented (with Edward Herman) in Manu-
facturing Consent (1988) has become less binding in recent years?
41
NC Well, the propaganda model is still there, with few changes, as far as I can see. We
discussed some of these in the second edition, in 2002. However, we didnt really go into
how effective the system was. We said: here are the factors that we think help to shape
media content and so forth, but a separate question is: how effective are they? And there
have been a lot of changes. For one thing, a lot of people in the media, reporters, editors and
so on, came through the experience of the 1960s. It changed them, and the society changed.
The media are now somewhat different. I think its a mixed story.
Its absolutely true that as people have won more freedom, dominant groups have sought
other ways to constrain that freedom. Sometimes this is perfectly overt, as in the case a
century ago that I mentioned when British conservatives and their counterparts in the USA
recognized that enough freedom had been won that you just cant control people by force
any more. The rise of parliamentary labour parties, the growth of trade unions, the acquisi-
tion of civil rights, and so on, all this marked the crossing of a sort of threshold. So they
turned instead to propaganda. It was very explicit: we cant control people by force, so well
need to control their attitudes and beliefs.
PH Yes, I think you could track this back a little earlier, in its modern form at least back
to the anti-Jacobin panic of the 1790s. In Britain, by the middle of the nineteenth century,
after the frst Reform Act, as the danger posed by Chartism began to fade, you fnd people
like Walter Bagehot and J.S. Mill pondering how best to shape the populations political
opinions, how to preserve mass deference and passivity without open recourse to violent
coercion. As youve shown, in the age of Bernays and Goebbels, manipulation of the public
mind quickly became a huge industry, one that has grown steadily ever since.
How do you see the status of public opinion in such a context? You often refer to polls of
American popular opinion, especially when they confrm how popular attitudes tend to be
well to the left of mainstream commentary and the dominant political parties that is, more
or less in line with your own principles.
NC I also often refer to public opinion when its radically opposed to my principles.
For example, fundamentalist religious beliefs, very signifcant in the USA, where half the
population frmly believe the world was created a few thousand years ago, one-third believe
in the literal truth of the Bible, and so on. In general, though, its a very interesting point. To
give you just one example, a fairly extensive and serious poll came out recently, from CBS,
a fairly detailed analysis of peoples attitudes on current political and economic issues, the
fnancial crisis, that sort of thing. And it turns out, as in the past, no matter how right-wing
you get say, the Tea Party most people have more or less social-democratic attitudes. So
the Tea Party segment of the population support more spending on health, education, and so
on. On the other hand, if you ask other questions, take say proposals for a balanced budget
amendment to the constitution, which would be monstrously ridiculous, well I think around
75 per cent of people support it; I think thats a result of effective propaganda, of making
people believe somehow that balancing the budget economically suicidal, but a high prior-
ity for fnancial institutions is extremely important. So people think that we need to cut
down on our spending, but they also think we should increase spending on social services
and so on; you get attitudes that are internally contradictory, but more liberal than many
people suppose.
PH OK, but do most people in the USA currently support the sort of measures youve
defended as necessary for the building of a more just and more egalitarian society the
abolition of corporate private tyrannies, the end of class distinctions, collective ownership
of the means of production, an equal sharing out of unrewarding work, and so on? Given
the context in which these sorts of things are usually discussed, the overwhelming mass of
ideological pressure thats brought to bear on them, is there any reason to expect more than
minority support for such measures, for the time being?
42
In general, when it comes to political struggle, what is the decisive point of reference for
you: majority popular support, or the validity of a general principle? In many if not most of
the campaigns youve been involved in, the initial mobilization involved only a small minor-
ity of people, a group of activists. What role should the reference to public opinion play in
this sort of situation? In the case of the long campaign to end the US assault on Vietnam,
for instance, you began as a tiny minority, even if it was one that could present itself as the
leading edge of tendency that might become more inclusive, in fact all-inclusive.
NC Not just a tiny minority but an embattled and oppressed one; we couldnt have a public
demonstration in Boston against the war without it being broken up.
PH Exactly. How, then, do you see the general position of what you might call a prin-
cipled vanguard whether its John Brown or Noam Chomsky in relation to majority
opinion? How do you see the relation between a principle of justice and the position of
public opinion, which may or may not be aligned with such a principle?
NC I dont quite see the problem. We should uphold principles of justice whatever public
opinion may be, and we should try to infuence public opinion when we feel that it supports
injustice. That raises an interesting question, which I dont think has been well studied,
though theres some evidence we can draw on. Take say 1975, when everyone or almost
everyone agreed that the war in Vietnam was wrong. Its a little crude, but you can divide
reactions between those of intellectual elites and those of the general public. Its easy to
study elite opinion, because its written down. Among the elites, just about the most critical
view you could fnd, on the liberal edge of the spectrum (people like Anthony Lewis at the
New York Times), was that the war began with blundering efforts to do good (almost a
tautology, since if we do something it must be good), but by 1969 it had become a disaster,
since we couldnt bring democracy to Vietnam at a cost acceptable to ourselves. That was
the outside limit of liberal critique and you could have heard similar views, presumably,
among members of the German general staff after Stalingrad.
On the other hand, there were a few studies of popular opinion at the time. Around 70
per cent of people said that the war wasnt a mistake, it was fundamentally and morally
wrong. But those sorts of questions never get pursued. The pollsters dont ask, What do
you mean it was morally wrong? Do you mean we shouldnt be invading another country?
Those sorts of questions are unimaginable to those who run the polls, so we dont actually
know. The numbers, though, remain pretty steady for several years, and suggest a pretty
substantial split between the moral principles of the population and the ideological dogmas
of elites.
PH Youd have heard different views among Marxist intellectuals, of course, but I recog-
nize that in the USA, by the mid-1970s they didnt have the sort of public profle you have
in mind.
Do you think theres anything left in a version of Marxs old idea of the proletariat as
the universal class, or rather as the tendentially universal class the class whose enforced
role in capitalist relations of production gives it a unique social and political position, one
that might come to represent the interests of humanity as a whole (and whose political
supremacy might then be justifed, in the short term, by more or less despotic if not dictato-
rial measures)?
NC Not just Marxist intellectuals, by any means. On the proletariat, Im not sure thats
properly called the Marxist view. Marx himself, in his later years, was deeply interested
in the statistical and political work of the Narodniks, on peasant Russia, and apparently
believed there was a lot of revolutionary potential in the Russian peasantry. This was largely
suppressed by the urban intellectuals, by the Social Democrats and the Bolsheviks, who
didnt like that idea; in fact it wasnt even revealed until years later. I think theres some-
thing to Marxs mature position as to the revolutionary potential in the general population.
43
And I dont think its that far below the surface. I think it can be brought out: its not the
classical proletariat; were living in a different sort of society.
PH I agree that in the 1870s, after some hesitation, Marx expressed some sympathy with
the populist position, given the distinctive features of Russias economy, and he was careful
to avoid prescribing a kind of super-historical narrative that might apply in one and the
same way to very different places.
14
In the 1890s, and after, Lenin himself also had some
sympathy with the Narodniks, rather more than some of his polemical texts might suggest.
15

But do you think that Lenins basic position about the underlying tendencies of capitalist
development (sketched for the frst time in his 1899 Development of Capitalism in Russia)
was contrary to the general thrust of Marxs own assessment of the logic at work in the
consolidation and expansion of capitalism? Is it inconsistent with the general positions Marx
himself took in the Communist Manifesto, in the volumes of Capital and his other economic
writings? The late Russian letters aside, Marx has a lot to say about the proletariat as a
revolutionary class, but overall he seems sceptical about the revolutionary potential of the
peasantry as a class (notably in France), and after 1848 he doesnt refer much to broader
categories like the people or the general population.
16
NC I dont quite accept that picture of the later Marx, or of Lenin, but no doubt in some
respects Lenin developed views that Marx had expressed.
PH Compared with Smith, Humboldt and some of the classical liberals, you dont often
refer to Marx. Is this because you think that he doesnt add much to Smiths own critique
of the stupefying and degrading effects of the division of labour, or to broader critiques
of wage slavery that you can fnd all through the working-class press of the nineteenth
century? Doesnt Marxs critique of classical political economy, his clarifcation of whats
at stake in the extraction of surplus value, in the mechanics of commodifcation, and so on,
add something distinctive and important to anti-capitalist struggle?
NC No doubt. I sometimes refer to his critique, but not much, because, rightly or wrongly,
I dont think it helps much with regard to the topics Im studying. Nor incidentally does
Smiths critique, which I brought up in a different connection: the serious misrepresentation
of Smith in much of the standard literature, and the ways in which his actual views contrast
with capitalist doctrine. On the nineteenth-century working-class press in the USA, I think
the attitudes and beliefs of factory girls from the farms, artisans from the urban poor, and
others like them (with little if any familiarity with Marx) are very interesting for different
reasons: for insight into the ways in which the instinct for freedom manifests itself under
conditions of oppression and regimentation, with a good deal of signifcance for today.
PH One of the lessons that cultural critics infuenced by Marx often emphasize is the
command to always historicize! (Fredric Jameson). Do you think that a Marxist insist-
ence on the historicity of particular modes of exploitation and domination obscures a more
basic simplicity and consistency of power relations, the sort of age-old Godfather model
of politics whereby (as youve often reminded your audiences) the strong do as they wish
while the poor suffer as they must?
NC Maybe Im simple-minded, but it seems to me obvious that we should always be sensi-
tive to specifc historical conditions while at the same time seeking to identify pervasive
themes that show up in one or another way under varying circumstances.
Communism
PH Youve always been very critical of Lenin, who still remains, I think, a symptomatic
point of reference for some broader political questions. Of course I understand why you con-
sistently condemned Soviet Russia as a betrayal of communism needless to say, many old
44
Bolsheviks, not least Trotsky and his supporters, would agree with some of your criticisms.
But Im struck by the force of your hostility to Lenin in particular. In various places youve
described him as rightwing deviation of the socialist movement, as one of the greatest
enemies of socialism, and so on.
17
I dont mean to go back over the historical sequence for
its own sake here, but I think there are some general points of principle at issue that are
worth evoking.
It seems to me you underestimate the degree to which the Bolsheviks, in the run-up to
October 1917, and precisely on account of the relative consistency and clarity of their politi-
cal principles, came to lead a genuine mobilization of Russias urban working classes. Even
relatively middle-of-the-road historians (for instance Sheila Fitzpatrick) have long argued
against Cold War-era assumptions that the October Revolution was a mere coup or putsch,
led by a conspiratorial party with little or ephemeral popular support. More detailed contex-
tual reconstruction of his early work has gone a long way towards undermining the image
of Lenin as a ruthless top-down political opportunist, injecting party-sanctioned political
consciousness into a passive working class.
18
And I wonder if you then underestimate some of the practical problems facing the
Bolsheviks after October, which were daunting by any standard: economic and military
catastrophe, the immediate and vigorous opposition on all fronts of the propertied classes,
non-cooperation or betrayal of the offcer corps and much of the government, soon followed
by a full-blown and exceptionally ruthless civil war combined with international assault
Like many of his contemporaries, and with good reason, Lenin remained mindful through-
out this period of the disastrous fate of the Paris Commune; in some ways the butchery of
1871 set an agenda for much of the twentieth century. If not through the sort of measures
that Lenin and Trotsky came to advocate in 1918, how in practice could any government
based on Soviet power have survived?
This isnt to justify the subsequent perversion of the emancipatory movement, the
subsequent move away from the Soviet and towards the single-party system. But it seems
important, if were to assess fairly the historical legacy and its contemporary signifcance,
to appreciate the scale of the challenge; given what they were up against its no accident
that the frst successful revolutions against slavery (in Haiti) and capitalism (in Russia) both
involved a good deal of forceful political and military power. An anarchist like Victor Serge,
for instance, who would later become one of Stalinisms sharpest critics, quickly came to
justify many of the strict measures the Bolsheviks took during the civil war, soon after he
arrived in Russia in 1919
19
I wonder if you have some sympathy with that sort of assess-
ment of the situation?
Rosa Luxemburg, whom you cite as a critic of and alternative to Lenin, actually took a
quite nuanced position once the historical die was cast. Like Trotsky and Martov back in
190304, she was certainly worried, again with good reason, about the concentration of
power in the Russian party, but she also argued that in a certain sense the future belongs to
Bolshevism, and she applauded many aspects of the Bolshevik achievement of 1917.
20
NC Ive never tried to give a detailed analysis of Lenins doctrines and actions, they are
not a topic that interests me very much, frankly, but I think the few comments Ive made
about it are accurate. In particular, Ive stressed exactly what you say about the pre-October
period. During those months, Lenin veered towards the libertarian Left, in April Theses and
State and Revolution. I think there is some justice in the critique by scholarship that this
was the opportunism of a skilled politician. On taking power, he pretty quickly reverted to
previous stands, and moved to undermine the popular achievements of the post-February
period, including factory councils and soviets, while of course blocking the Constituent
Assembly because it would be out of his control. In general, he moved (with Trotskys
assistance) to create a labour army under the command of the central leadership which was
supposed to drive this backward peasant society to industrialization, a prerequisite for the
development of socialism in his version of Marxism. Undoubtedly the Western intervention
45
and civil war were factors in this evolution, but I think the record shows that it was under
way for more fundamental reasons. In this regard I think the infantile ultraleftists he
castigated were basically right. As for Luxemburg, I read her account as more sharply
critical than your summary and we have to bear in mind that she was in prison, with only
limited knowledge of what was happening, expressing hopes and solidarity but with serious
reservations: and that in the brief period afterwards, before her assassination, she called for
paths quite different from those that Lenin and Trotsky were pursuing. This barely skims
the surface, but I think its accurate as far as it goes.
PH A last question, again generalizing from this historical sequence, about the nature of
revolutionary change. Elsewhere youve mentioned, alongside Luxemburg, Trotskys early
and prescient critique of the Bolsheviks authoritarian infection. The most heated polemic
dates from 1904, in his Our Political Tasks, where he worries, with remarkable and often-
cited foresight, that overcentralization might encourage the party to impose itself in the
place of the proletariat, and then lead to the Party organization substituting itself for
the Party, the Central Committee substituting itself for the Party organization, and fnally
the dictator substituting himself for the Central Committee.
21
Trotsky himself would have
plenty of opportunity to ponder this substitutionist sequence, soon enough.
But I wonder how you yourself might respond to a contemporary version of the question
Trotsky went on to raise, immediately after the 1905 revolution in Russia, regarding the
Bolsheviks anticipation of a fairly gradual movement
from a liberal-bourgeois phase to a socialist-proletarian
phase in the revolutionary sequence (i.e. a relatively slow
shift from the minimal to the maximal programmes
of social democracy). In practice it could never work like
this, Trotsky argued in Results and Prospects (1906).
Imagine that a progressive coalition government were
to come to power in Russia, he wrote, one that included
a leading proletarian component. And imagine that this
government then begins to impose some moderate liberal
reforms for example, an eight-hour limit to the working
day. This would provoke an immediate backlash from the
factory owners and their supporters in the army and in
established circles of power more generally. There would
be mass lockouts followed by mass strikes, and very
quickly the government would need to make a choice: to
back down or to persevere. And if it decided to persevere,
then in order to prevail it would be obliged to follow an
uninterrupted transition to socialist revolution that is,
to accept the logic of class war, to overcome capitalist
resistance, appropriate the factories, deal with the army,
and so on.
22
Wouldnt a version of this question face anyone who had even a partial chance of imple-
menting the sort of measures youve long advocated, regarding the abolition of corporations,
appropriation of factories by workers, and so on?
NC What Trotsky imagined might have happened, or other developments, could have
taken place. The questions we face primarily have to do with what is happening, taking
account no doubt of possible eventualities but not responding prematurely to some worst-
case scenario. I doubt that Trotsky would have disagreed. As for now, I dont think were
far from such concerns. In fact I think that in the last couple of years it could have hap-
pened. When Obama essentially nationalized a good part of industry, say General Motors,
the government basically took it over. The Obama administration followed the predictable
46
policies, namely, restoration of the old system, including off-shoring production, laying off
workers, closing down factories, and various other things. But with enough consciousness
and organization, there could have been an alternative. Workers in GM plants in Michigan
and Indiana could have said no, were not going to close down our factory, were going to
take it over and were going to produce things the country needs, like say high-speed rail.
Well you can imagine the reaction among the banks, the media, and so on. But again, with
enough organization and general consciousness, it could have succeeded. I dont think its
that remote, and I think that people understand it. In fact you come very close to that with
sit-down strikes; a sit-down strike is just a step before saying toss out the bosses, well run
it ourselves.
PH But thats just it: arent the conditions for such consciousness and organization today
relatively discouraging, overall, compared to the late 1970s or early 1980s, when organized
labour sustained the frst of a long series of damaging defeats? Even a quasi-revolutionary
mobilization like May 68 in France was actually contained quite quickly. Whats left of
the union movement has been fghting a mostly defensive rearguard action for as long as I
can remember. In the USA, even the SEIU, which had some real organizing momentum a
few years back, seems to have lost much of its militant edge, and in California has turned
against some of its own most progressive locals. However you measure it, labour militancy
seems to have declined in recent years. Perhaps things are beginning to change this year, in
2011, with the protests that have spread across North Africa and Europes capital cities, and
in some of the public sector protests in the USA. But do you think its realistic to anticipate
more radical challenges to the established political and economic order in the foreseeable
future, especially in the absence of a militant and well-organized mass party?
NC We dont know; these things spring up when you dont expect them. And, to repeat,
I dont think ones subjective feelings of optimism or pessimism matter much. We have
essentially the same choices whatever these highly uncertain judgements may be.
PH You dont think it would need some sort of democratic centralist organization to help
coordinate things, to use the old-fashioned expression? If, say, factory occupations made
real headway in a country like the USA, how would they survive the backlash this would
provoke?
NC Im not predicting it, Im just saying its not inconceivable. For example, during this
recent period, Ive noticed, when I talk with working-class audiences, that people perhaps
hadnt thought of factory takeovers, but it didnt seem to strike them as an exotic idea. Why
shouldnt we?, they often ask. And there were even some attempts, here and there.
MIT, 10 August 2011
Notes
1. Chomsky expands on this point in a recent article on The Mysteries of Nature (2009): Though
much more optimistic than Galileo about the prospects for mechanical explanation, Descartes too
recognized the limits of our cognitive reach [and] speculated that the workings of res cogitans may
lie beyond human understanding. He thought that we may not have intelligence enough to under-
stand the workings of mind, in particular, the normal use of language, with its creative aspects
However, Descartes continued, even if the explanation of normal use of language and other forms
of free and coherent choice of action lies beyond our cognitive grasp, that is no reason to ques-
tion the authenticity of our experience. Quite generally, free will is the noblest thing we have,
Descartes held: there is nothing we comprehend more evidently and more perfectly and it would
be absurd to doubt something that we comprehend intimately, and experience within ourselves.
Noam Chomsky, The Mysteries of Nature: How Deeply Hidden?, Journal of Philosophy, vol. 106,
no. 4, 2009, p. 175.
47
2. Cf. ibid., pp. 16970.
3. Noam Chomsky, Linguistics and Philosophy, University of New Hampshire at Durham, 12 April
1995; cf. Chomsky, Things No Amount of Learning Can Teach: Noam Chomsky interviewed by John
Gliedman, Omni, vol. 6, no. 11, November 1983, www.chomsky.info/interviews/198311-.htm.
4. Noam Chomsky, Refections on Language, Pantheon, New York, 1975, p. 25.
5. Chomsky, Things No Amount of Learning Can Teach.
6. Chomsky, The Mysteries of Nature, pp. 167200.
7. The quotation reads: In Humes judgment, Newtons greatest achievement was that while he seemed
to draw the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he shewed at the same time the imperfections
of the mechanical philosophy; and thereby restored [Natures] ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in
which they ever did and ever will remain (cited in Chomsky, The Mysteries of Nature, p. 167).
8. As things stand, Chomsky writes, the evolution of [human] cognitive capacities remains mostly
obscure. On this topic, evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin has argued forcefully that we can
learn very little, because evidence is inaccessible, at least in any terms understood by contemporary
science. Chomsky, The Mysteries of Nature, pp. 199200; cf. Lewontin, The Evolution of Cogni-
tion: Questions We Will Never Answer, in Don Scarborough and Saul Sternberg, eds, Methods,
Models and Conceptual Issues: An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Vol. 4, MIT Press, Cambridge
MA, 1998.
9. Cf. Benjamin Libet, Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge MA, 2004.
10. Chomsky, Things No Amount of Learning Can Teach.
11. See, for instance, Louis Althussers classic formulation, from 1965: The structure of the relations of
production determines the places and functions occupied and adopted by the agents of production,
who are never anything more than the occupants of these places, insofar as they are the supports
(Trger) of these functions. The true subjects (in the sense of constitutive subjects of the process)
are therefore not these occupants or functionaries, are not, despite all appearances, the obvious-
nesses of the given of nave anthropology, concrete individuals, real men but the defnition
and distribution of these places and functions. Louis Althusser and tienne Balibar, Reading
Capital, trans. Ben Brewster, New Left Books, London: 1970, pp. 180; cf. pp. 2523.
12. Noam Chomsky, Class War, audiobook, Epitaph, 1998 [1995]), section 15.
13. Arundhati Roy notes, for instance, that the expansion of charitably funded NGOs in India coincided
with the opening of Indias markets to neo-liberalism, with the downsizing of the Indian state, with
the dramatic reductions in public spending and with the still more dramatic blunting of political
resistance. The real contribution of NGOs is that they defuse political anger and dole out as aid or
benevolence what people ought to have by right. They alter the public psyche. They turn people into
dependent victims ; the greater the devastation caused by neo-liberalism, the greater the outbreak
of NGOs. Arundhati Roy, Public Power in the Age of Empire, Socialist Worker, 14 October 2004,
www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=2910; cf. Peter Hallward, Damming the Flood:
Haiti and the Politics of Containment, Verso, London, 2010, ch. 4.
14. See, for instance, Karl Marx, letter to the editor of the Otecestvenniye Zapisky, November 1877,
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm. Even here, however, Marx argues that if
Russia is tending to become a capitalist nation after the example of the Western European countries
and during the last years she has been taking a lot of trouble in this direction she will not succeed
without having frst transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once
taken to the bosom of the capitalist regime, she will experience its pitiless laws like other profane
peoples.
15. Cf. Christopher Read, Lenin: A Revolutionary Life, Routledge, London, 2005, pp. 21, 57 and passim;
Lars T. Lih, Lenin, Reaktion Books, London, 2011, pp. 3740, 445.
16. For an overview, see Hal Draper, Karl Marxs Theory of Revolution, Vol. 2: The Politics of Social
Classes, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1978.
17. Chomsky on Lenin, Trotsky, Socialism & the Soviet Union, Q&A session 1989, www.youtube.
com/watch?v=yQsceZ9skQI; Chomsky, Anarchism, Marxism & Hope for the Future, Red & Black
2, March 2001, http://struggle.ws/pdfs/rbr2.pdf.
18. Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context, Brill, Leiden, 2006.
19. Victor Serge, Revolution in Danger: Writings from Russia 19191921, Redwords, London, 1997.
20. In the present period, Rosa Luxemburg concludes, the decisive question is not this or that second-
ary question of tactics, but of the capacity for action of the proletariat, the strength to act, the will
to power of socialism as such. In this, Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were the frst, those who
went ahead as an example to the proletariat of the world; they are still the only ones up to now who
can cry with Hutten: I have dared! Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution [1918], www.marx-
ists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/russian-revolution/ch08.htm.
21. Leon Trotsky, Our Political Tasks (1904), pt. 2, www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1904/tasks/ch03.
htm.
22. Cf. Leon Trotsky, Results and Prospects (1906), ch. 6, www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/
rp06.htm).
48 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
REVIEWS
Inside the factory, and out
Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One, Verso, London and New York, 2011. 158
pp., 14.99 hb., 978 1 84467 454 1.
Fredric Jamesons latest book, published hot on the
heels of a monograph on Hegels Phenomenology (The
Hegel Variations, 2010) and a large collection of essays
on the dialectic (Valences of the Dialectic, 2009), is a
reading of the frst volume of Marxs Capital. Together,
they constitute what appears to be a late push into
European philosophy by one of our most important
Marxist literary and cultural critics, in the form of a
defence of Hegel, Marx and their respective dialec-
tics against alternative, analytical, historicist and
structural Marxist traditions, which variously sideline
the notions of negativity and contradiction. For
Jameson, to attempt to construct a model of capital-
ism, its reality and its refection in thought, and to
reconstruct Marxs dialectical representation of it, is
to coordinate incompatible modes of thought without
reducing them to one-dimensionality. Because this
is also a fairly good description of Jamesons own
style, what we are presented with in his latest work
is a kind of double mimesis: Jamesons contemporary
performance of Marxs previous representation.
In Representing Capital, Jameson thus insists that
Marxs work is a heterogeneous and multiple text
(similar to the Phenomenology), made up of a semi-
autonomous Part One, centred on the commodity and
money forms and the market; the historical Part Eight,
given over to the multiple histories of the emergence
of capital, and particularly of the commodity labour
power; and fnally, and most signifcantly according to
Jameson, Capital-proper, the core of the book made up
of Parts Two to Seven and centred on the experience
of capital accumulation, the factory and the industrial
machine. Jamesons book thus also tracks and refects
the fgurative dramas of Capitals composition at a
micro-analytic level, stylistic symptoms, he suggests,
of the diffculties confronted by Marx in representing
capital. In this sense, following in the footsteps of both
Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Kluge, Jameson pro-
ductively foregrounds Capital as a kind of modernist
montage, a specifc proto-narrative form which can
be imagined as a series of interlinked problems or
paradoxes (elsewhere he calls these riddles), which,
ostensibly solved, give rise to new and unexpected
ones of greater scope. Again, rather like capital itself
on Marxs account, it produces its own barriers to
accumulation (riddles), which it then proceeds to
surmount (solve).
Jameson insists that Marxs Capital should not be
considered a political work. It is not a book about
politics. This, he suggests, dialectically constitutes
its contemporary political signifcance: the absence
of a political dimension from Marxism, specifcally
from Marxs Capital, is one of its great and original
strengths. Moreover, he makes the scandalous asser-
tion (his own words) that it is not even a book about
labour, but rather a book about unemployment. Even
more scandalously, perhaps, he excludes Parts One
and Eight of Volume One from what he presents as
Capital proper.
Drawing on the work of Karl Korsch, among others,
Jameson repeatedly underlines the opposition and
tension within Marxs text between two alternat[ing]
languages or codes, those of class struggle on the
one hand, and of capital accumulation (or the law
of value) on the other, rightly pointing out that in
Capital the former is only intermittently visible. So,
for example, in his account of Marxs chapter on the
length of the working day, Jameson shows how initially
politics seems to come to the fore: Suddenly, it is not
the clunking of machines in the subterranean realms
of production we hear but rather the noisy shouting
of parliamentary voices and their interminable debates
about the shortening of working hours. This is the
effect of collective workers resistance to the vampiric
demands of capital. Indeed, he goes on to suggest that
as well as a refutation to our claim that Capital was
not a political book, Marxs volume already exten-
sive might have ended here with a powerful call for
legislation. It does not, however, and this account of
class struggle and the conditions of labour in Capital
is immediately and dialectically reinscribed into
Marxs ongoing account of capital accumulation;
that is, into Marxs analysis of the relations between
variable and constant capital, of absolute and relative
surplus value all of which Jameson expounds and
to the industrial processes through which, despite the
struggles over the working day (indeed, as a result of
them), capitalist exploitation paradoxically expands
49 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
and increases through the development of new tech-
nologies. From this point of view and here Jameson
could be emplotting for his own purposes the work
of Mario Tronti on the logics of workers refusal and
its subsequent generalization by Hardt and Negri into
a philosophy of history the workers themselves
paradoxically become subjects of capital. Agency (and
politics) is thus subsumed by Marxs focus on the
systemic character of the dynamics of capital in which,
writes Jameson, system is characterized as a unity
of opposites, and it is the open system of capitalism
which proves to be closed. It is at such moments
of theoretical tension and dialectical productivity in
which Marx is attempting to bring different theoretical
discourses together agency and systematicity that
produce what Jameson refers to as Marxs fgurations,
a productive symptom here of his dialectic at work
attempting to unify opposites in his representation of
capital:
Thus, by a chiasmus that has become dialectical,
everything bad about the qualifcation of the closed
has been transferred to the open Capitalism is thus
what is sometimes called an infernal machine, a per-
petuum mobile or unnatural miracle, whose strengths
turn out to be what is most intolerable about it.
It is in such moments of his analysis that Jamesons
experience and expertise as a literary and a cultural
critic come to the fore, despite his attempts to distance
his text from literary interpretation. For what emerges
in his reading, among other things, might be more
forthrightly described as an attempt following here
perhaps in the footsteps of Hayden Whites deployment
of the idea of emplotment in historiography to
discover and consider the necessarily fgurative (even
literary) content of all dialectical thought, in detail.
This means, for example, moving beyond Marxs use of
literary quotation and characterization including his
use of allegory and gothic to examine how certain
key words which are not quite concepts, but not now
pure literary fgurations either work across different
discourses, becoming quasi-conceptual fgurations
(in other words, transdisciplinary sites of conceptual
production). In this respect, Jameson dedicates his
extraordinarily condensed chapter on Capital in its
Time to the signifcance of Marxs use of the verb to
extinguish, to great effect, so as to give an account of
the layering of time(s) in (and of) capital: From this
verb comes past and future alike, along with a view
of the present as production whose originality lies in
its negativity rather than in any positive or affrma-
tive content. Thus, in the fre of present production
past labour is repeatedly resurrected as means and
as value and immediately extinguished in use in the
capitalist labour process of accumulation. The secret of
Marxs previous refections on the idea of production
as consumption is contained in his use of this word,
in Jamesons view, as is the alienated character of
workers experience of real subsumption to (constant)
capital (in the form of machinery). Finally, it returns
us to the retreat of the political in Capital, producing
a real sense of having once been historical capitalism
now becomes eternal, a continuous present. For, in
extinguishing its past capital also appears to extinguish
any other possible future. This constitutes one of the
limits of Volume One, according to Jameson (suggest-
ing, as might the title of his book, that he could write
others on Volumes Two and Three), except, that is, for
what Jameson calls its heroic and comic climaxes.
The heroic climax is especially signifcant, for it
insists on an idea that is almost anathema to the con-
temporary Left: that socialism is to be more modern
and more productive than capitalism. Jameson is refer-
ring to the moment when, in Part Eight, Marx writes
of the tendencies towards the monopoly of capital
of centralization of the means of production and the
socialization of labour become fetters and the knell
of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators
are expropriated. To recover that futurism and that
excitement, writes Jameson, is surely the fundamen-
tal task of any left discursive strategy today. The
comic climax is merely an image, an idyllic image
of freedom from capitalist relations of production,
captured by Marx in his story of a Mr Peel who takes
both money capital and working people with him to
50 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
Australia. Once there, however, he was abandoned:
Unhappy Mr Peel, writes Marx, who provided for
everything except the export of English relations of
production Others exported slavery. This, perhaps,
constitutes Jamesons critique of exodus.
However, one of the problems of occupying the
in-between theoretical space described above, coupled
with the relative shortness of the book, is that Jameson
tends at times to riff, producing short bursts of thought
that remain undeveloped. This has its creative moments.
One may be found in the chapter on Part Eight of
Capital that is concerned with so-called primitive
accumulation (and that contains the above-mentioned
climaxes to Capital). Jamesons chapter is called
History as Coda, suggesting that Marxs Part Eight
is a kind of appendage. It is, no doubt, the baggiest
part, evoking the multiplicity of historical causes,
processes and explanations of the emergence of capital
(even becoming, subsequent to his reading of Deleuze
and Guattaris own version, the favourite of the late
Althusser). There is a really productive moment in
Jamesons account: a kind of dialectical reversal of the
temporal order of the text that folds the historical pro-
cesses Marx associates with the separation of the direct
producers from their means of production, and the
coercive legislation that enforced the creation of labour
power as a commodity, back into Marxs account of
manufacture in Chapter 14 (Part Four). The looping
effect produces continuity in apparent discontinuity.
Jameson thus shows how Marxs fgure of separation
is deployed to illustrate how capitalists need not only
to displace feudal lords and their control of labour,
but also to seize the space of production [here, the
factory system] for themselves and to reorganize it.
The battle here is against the working traditions and
regulations of the guilds and is one of the conditions
for the subsequent rise of machinofacture. Dialecti-
cal history, suggests Jameson, is thus written in the
discontinuous mode of successive negations, subtrac-
tions, separations and omissions which allow us
to read the absent continuity between them. It is, in
other words, a montage.
Certain ideas remain underdeveloped. None more
so than Jamesons self-proclaimedly scandalous asser-
tion that Capital is a book about unemployment. This
is important because it is a key argument for his asser-
tion of the contemporary political relevance of Capital,
despite the texts own systematic and anti-political
dynamic the point being to insist on the necessity
today of both an appreciation and a critique of the
logics of exploitation (including the power and hold of
the commodifcation of labour and the wage form) and
accumulation. Jamesons assertion recurs intermittently
throughout the book, mainly in his account of what
he perceives to be Capital-proper; that is, when Marx
leaves the realm of circulation and exchange (at the
end of Part One) and enters the subterranean realm of
the factory where exploitation and accumulation take
place (which he leaves again for Part Eight). Here, he
fnds the capitalist identity of productivity and misery
that is, the absolute general law of accumulation.
According to Jameson, this is the centrepiece of
Marxs analysis, from where the system as a totality
becomes visible. From this perspective, Marxs classic
accounts of the real (machinic) subsumption of labour
to capital, on the one hand, and the accompanying
logics of pauperization and the creation of a more or
less permanent reserve army of labour, on the other,
become one. This is the moment at which, in the
contemporary context of globalization and resistance
to it, Jameson expands the (political) constituency of
the exploited and thus of capital accumulation to
include the unemployed. The objection here to an
argument I am nonetheless sympathetic with is
that such an expansion and inclusion surely demands
an account of the forms taken by exploitation (and
expropriation more generally) today and the ways
in which these (for example, the wage form) have
become articulated, or even subordinated, to other
forms of capital accumulation: for example, the very
well-known abbreviated fnancial and credit forms
of MM, or the more violent ones of accumulation
through dispossession. It is to this that various kinds
of anarchist resistance, from which Jameson wants
critically to distance himself, in fact respond.
These are the contemporary forms of exploitation
that might be derived from what Jameson believes to
be the extraneous inclusions, within Capital, of Parts
One and Eight. As is well known, Part One centres
on the analysis of the commodity and money forms,
passing through the exchange of equivalents and the
theory of value. It poses a problem or riddle that
the other parts of Marxs work resolve: how does the
exchange of equivalents generate more? The answer
is to be found in the character of labour-power as
a commodity: its use value to capital is to generate
more that is, surplus value. Jameson believes that
Marxs account, which he presents as a critique of
the mathematical form of the equation, is merely an
extension of his earlier A Contribution to the Cri-
tique of Political Economy of 1859. And it is, as the
subtitle of Capital A Critique of Political Economy
makes clear. The crucial difference, however, is
that by the time of the latter Marx had developed
51 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
a theory of surplus value centred on the specifcity
of the commodity labour-power. In the earlier book,
abstract labour is socially de-differentiated labour,
the product of the division of labour, or a kind of
labour in general. In Capital, however, labour-power
is transformed into a commodity and exchanged: this
is what makes it abstract. This is what transforms the
theory of value, set out in Capital. In other words, in
Part One of Capital the commodity has always already
been to the factory.
John Kraniauskas
Radically private
and pretty uncoded
Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds, The
Affect Theory Reader, Duke University Press, Durham
NC, 2010. 416 pp., 67.00 hb., 16.99 pb., 978 0 82234
758 3 hb., 978 0 82234 776 7 pb.
Affect theory emerged out of a set of dissatisfactions
with dominant modes of analysis in the humanities.
Beginning in the mid-1990s there was increasing con-
sensus that the tools and principles of poststructuralism
were unable to accommodate or even recognize central
facts about human experience: those that did not rise
(or fall) to the level of signifcation. The privilege
granted to language in poststructuralism fltered out
precognitive modes of awareness that were felt to be
more basic, even more real than the ideated forms
of linguistic apprehension. Affects constitute a level
of experience [that] cannot be translated into words
without doing violence, Anna Gibbs writes in the new
Affect Theory Reader. Or, as Patricia Clough suggests
in her account of The Affective Turn, citing Rei
Terada, poststructuralism was truly glacial in the
pronouncement of the death of the subject and there-
fore had little to do with affect and emotion. Cloughs
concern, of course, is not with a return to the subject,
far from it, but rather to show how affect theory does
death of the author better than semiotics. Affect
and emotion, Clough writes, point to the subjects
discontinuity with itself, a discontinuity of the subjects
conscious experience with the non-intentionality of
emotion and affect. Affect theory does discontinuity
with a difference. According to Clough, the challenge
of affect theory, against every other form of inquiry,
is to show how bodily matter bears information.
This bodily information overruns the information
contained in any linguistic system. Affect organizes
itself, which means every other form of organization
including perception, cognition, signifcation, meaning,
language, representation, self and other are not only
entirely separable from affects but secondary to them.
You cant get from one to the other: language, no
matter how intensely one deconstructs it, will never
open onto affect. Affects are of a different ontological
order from linguistic representation, so that even the
most advanced modes of poststructural analysis end up
privileging language and the subjectivity it generates.
The Affect Theory Reader shows how affect can
be deployed in a range of frameworks, including the
neurological, psychological, social, cultural, philo-
sophical and political, and that there is room for debate
among these various felds above all between the
Deleuze-inspired writings of Brian Massumi and his
followers and those of the more scientifcally minded
followers of Eve Sedgwick, whose work was formulated
in dialogue with affect psychologist Silvan Tomkins
but there is much more room for agreement among
the various camps. (For a brilliant critique of the basic
assumptions, and evidence, behind both Massumis and
Tomkinss claims about affect, see Ruth Leyss recent
essay, The Affective Turn: A Critique, in Critical
Inquiry). And the agreement hinges on a core claim.
There is, Massumi declares, duplicity of form: every
form or image is received by an agent spontaneously
and simultaneously in two orders of reality, one local
and learned or intentional, the other nonlocal and
self-organizing. In other words, humans apprehend
the world along two separate but not equal tracks:
intention and affect, meaning and sense, perception
and experience coexist but do not merge or commingle
(the latter term in these binaries is always construed
outside consciousness). According to Clough, affects
are defned in terms of their autonomy from conscious
perception and language. So, despite persistent warn-
ings throughout the Reader that affect and cognition
are never fully separable, that there is no boundary
yet between the body and the correlated sign, body
and sign are nonetheless functioning, and analysable,
on ontologically separate planes, as a matter of paral-
lel processing. The difference in kind between affect
and meaning, experience and representation, sense
and signifcance, is a categorical assumption of affect
theory and one worth interrogating.
Part of the affect theory project is to go back pre-
cisely to those poststructuralist masters at least some
of them, Lacan and Derrida, for instance, are conspicu-
ously absent but more often it is to seek an alternate
genealogy in the deeper past. Marx in the Economic
52 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
and Philosophic Manuscripts, Freuds Project for a
Scientifc Psychology, C.S. Peirces pragmatism, Berg-
sons Matter and Memory, William Jamess radical
empiricism, Walter Benjamins writings on mimesis,
Heideggers Being and Time, George Orwells The
Road to Wigan Pier, Primo Levis memoirs, Henri
Lefebvres and Raymond Williamss sociology I am
citing both the usual suspects and some new arrivals
are redescribed as theories and theorists of affect.
In their introduction to the Reader, Melissa Gregg
and Gregory J. Seigworth cite Roland Barthess late
lectures, The Neutral, as evidence of an affective turn
within the stale semiotic paradigm. Barthes calls for
attention to the shimmer of an affective minimum
(the title of the introduction is An Inventory of Shim-
mers). Affective states, Barthes writes, outplay the
paradigm of dialectics by referring to something
unprecedented, something that slips through the net
of dialectical analysis.
The fact that affects, whatever they are, are new
is a point raised by every author of the volume.
Sara Ahmed characterizes a basic element of affec-
tivity as being more and less open to new things;
Lauren Berlant writes of a new atmosphere of new
objects; Ben Highmore suggests that affects constitute
new sensual worlds; Ben Anderson describes how
affectivity offers a promise of a new way to attend
to the social or cultural in perpetual and unruly
movement; affects open unsuspected possibilities for
new ways of thinking, being, and acting, they are for
Gibbs envisionings beyond the already known; for
Clough affects are unexpected, new, contributing to
the forging of a new body; while Steve D. Brown
and Ian Tucker see affects as affording a new space
of liberty in the ineffable. The word new appears no
fewer than 110 times in the fourteen essays.
The relentless pursuit of newness emerges from
the most cited source in the Reader, the collaborative
writings of Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari. Brown
and Tucker cite Deleuze and Guattaris defnition of
philosophy as an imperative always to extract an
event from things and beings, to set up the new event
from things and beings, always to give them a new
event. Lone Bertelsen and Andrew Murphie take
their cue from Deleuze and Guattari in their philo-
sophical reading of a political incident. In An Ethics
of Everyday Infntities and Powers: Flix Guattari on
Affect and the Refrain Bertelsen and Murphie con-
sider the Tampa affair of August 2001, in which the
Howard administration refused permission for a Nor-
wegian freighter, the MV Tampa, carrying 438 rescued
Afghans from a distressed fshing vessel foating in
international waters, to enter Australian territory. A
central fact of this event, for Bertelsen and Murphie,
one that far surpassed the [o]pinions and arguments
around it in importance, was that the boat was painted
red. They write:
It becomes the mark, the possibility of a new event
(a new virtual potential for things to happen differ-
ently), of a new set of physical territories and of
a new set of existential territories (these include
new modes of living, new laws, new sign systems,
new emotions and feelings, new powers to affect and
be affected). In sum, a new feld of expression arises.
(The word new appears eight more times two para-
graphs later.) Bertelsen and Murphie support Guattaris
claim that affect is all there is, which suggests,
they write, an aesthetic approach to politics. Its
an object of aesthetic experience the red paint on
the side of the boat that both initiates the event
and that transcends the arguments made about it.
The arguments about whether one should help the
refugees or not, for instance are always already an
effort to capture and control affect. At the bottom of
every interpretation, understanding, analysis, meaning,
was red. The event meant many things but frst it
was an uneasy and persistent redness sitting on the
horizon. Affects, that is, are not only ontologically
parallel with cognition, they are prior to it. Cognition
not only logically follows affect (although it is not
connected with it), but that cognition doesnt affect
affect. All thought is an afterthought. Gibbs simply
calls this the dependence of cognition on affect and
the senses. Perhaps the most revealing foundationalist
claim emerges when Bertelsen and Murphie provide a
brief footnote declaring, We are not, of course, saying
this [red] image was solely responsible for the events
surrounding the Tampa. Indeed. While affect sub-
tends cognitively mediated representation, as Gibbs
puts it, she similarly warns that affect does not ever
entirely replace or supersede it!
Even the sceptics of the affective reduction reiterate
its terms. Lawrence Grossberg, for instance, wants
to reject the aesthetic politics proposed by Bertelsen
and Murphie (which he believes originate with Mas-
sumis work), citing the idea that you fash these
lights [of terror alerts] at people and there is some
kind of bodily response. Massumis example in the
Reader is a fre alarm rather than a fashing light.
Fire alarms, Massumi writes, citing Peirce, act on the
nerves of the person yet they assert nothing. Gross-
bergs retort to Massumis view of bodily response
to lights and sounds is succinct: Well there isnt
[any bodily response]! Grossberg further warns that
53 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
affect is quickly becoming a formula for everything
that is non-representational or non-semantic. And
yet Grossberg goes on to describe affect as excess,
something not captured by notions of signifcation
and representation, something that escapes theories of
representation, of meaning, of ideology. And again, if
something has effects that are non-representational
then we can just describe it as affect. (Its unclear
what kind of work the scare quotes are doing here.)
As it turns out, Grossbergs real objection is not to the
notion of affect at all; rather, he believes we should be
specifying modalities and apparatuses of affect and
discerning the difference between the ontological and
the empirical within affective experience. Accord-
ing to Grossberg, Massumi and co. are too quick to
confate the empirical (psychology and culture) with
the ontological (the physical body). Whats at stake in
this call for more articulations and the refusal of any
reduction? And how does this square with his declara-
tion that in the end, it all comes back to affect?
Grossbergs critique of the Lefts elitist and van-
guardist politics, for instance, involves a critique of
the Lefts prioritizing of economics over (popular)
culture. Rather than talking about the changing status,
presence, representation, forms, effectivities of the
economy, rather than trying to diagnose what is new
about capitalism, according to Grossberg we should be
seeing that culture is a condition of possibility of
the economic. What this looks like is explicitly stated
in Seigworths introductory discussion of Lefebvre.
Rather than examine institutions, Seigworth writes
(he is citing Greil Marcus on Lefebvre), we should
examine affective moments of love, poetry hate,
desire because in them lie entirely new demands
on the social order. Fighting to change the current
economic system, Seigworth and Grossberg contend,
is simply to use its own already defned assumptions,
a denial of virtual realities the multiplicities and
contradictions beyond or within capitalism. Once
you recognize that culture (love, poetry, rock music,
desire), and not economics, is the real problem, then
your theory is ft for the unemployed and the CEO
alike.
Guattaris aesthetic approach to politics is further
literalized in Berlants study of Cruel Optimism.
Berlants analysis focuses on the moment in the Eco-
nomic and Philosophical Manuscripts in which Marx
describes the abolition of private property as signal-
ling the emancipation of all human senses. No longer
seeing objects as fetishes and nature as a matter of use,
the senses, Marx says, become theoreticians. Berlant
draws on this passage in Marx to understand the
poet John Ashberys untitled send-up of the American
Dream. According to Berlant, our senses are not yet
theoreticians because they are bound up by the rule,
the map, the inherited fantasy, and the hum of worker
bees who fertilize materially the life we are moving
through. The problem, for Berlant, is the suburban
fantasy of the endless weekend, the consumers
happy circulation in familiarity, and the privilege of
being bored with life. (Greggs essay similarly takes
up the regressive politics of the cubicle.) As a reading
of Ashbery this might be right, but as an account of
Marx it isnt. For Marx, of course, the problem is the
privilege of private property, not the privilege of being
bored. One could safely eradicate boredom, without
it bearing on the problem of capital. The anxious
worker, after all, lacks (and perhaps looks forward
to) the privilege of being bored. And affects, despite
their sensorium-shaking transformation of the bour-
geois senses, begin to look a lot like the fetishized
private property Marx scrutinized. Affects are, Berlant
insists, radically private, and pretty uncoded, and, like
the fetishized commodity, they make their dazzling
appearance with the labour behind them obscured.
These private experiences are in fact beyond analysis
an affect, after all, is just a fact.
Todd Cronan
Of course... however
Michael Bailey and Des Freedman, eds, The Assault
on Universities: A Manifesto for Resistance, Pluto
Press, London, 2011. 200 pp., 14.99 pb., 978 0 74533
191 1.
The conceptual poles that orient the collection of
essays edited by Des Freedman and Michael Bailey in
The Assault on Universities are, on the one hand, an
insistence on higher education as a public good, with
public benefts and to be supported as a public service,
and, on the other, a governmental policy partially
initiated prior to the current coalition government, but
now pursued with an unprecedented speed, aggression
and intensity set on the thoroughgoing privatiza-
tion of that sector. These poles are schematized in
Freedmans introduction as the reformers towards
privatization versus a campaign of resistance that
seeks to defend what is most progressive about the
existing public education system.
That many of the essays in this book are marked by
the ferocity of the transformations we are experiencing
54 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
is a testament to the speed and collaborative effort
(involving students, researchers and academic staff)
in accordance with which these essays were written
and edited. Almost a third of the contributors work at
Goldsmiths, whose staff and students both played an
integral role in the student demonstrations at the end
of last year and courageously defended the protesters
where other unions dared not against the widespread
media-led fenesteria in the wake of the attack on
Millbank Tower.
The Assault on Universities is thus a timely work
in several senses. Across its pages, the governments
justifcations for the necessity of teaching cuts and fee
hikes and its recourse to the logic of market competi-
tion are mercilessly dissected. Freedman rejects the
rhetoric of austerity as counterproductive to economic
recovery, and contextualizes the wider attack on public
services in terms of the growing intrusion of the
private sector in these services over the last decade,
underpinned as Nick Couldry points out by Milton
Friedmans seemingly anachronistic ideology of market
liberalism. As John K. Walton notes, this infects the
public sector with the representatives and values of
corporate capitalism: the McKinseyist business model
(things that cannot be measured have no value) of a
new and often semi- or non-academic managerial class.
This transformation is also usefully contextualized in
relation to a growing dependence on the exploitation
of a workforce of precariously employed teaching
staff or graduate students (highlighted in detail in
Marc Bousquets How the University Works: Higher
Education and Low-Wage Nation), to the history of
the student movement, and to international changes in
higher education in insightful essays by Natalie Fenton,
John Rees and Marion von Osten.
The voices raised here are also historically suspended,
poised between an enthusiasm for the student movement
that took to the streets in November 2010, disappoint-
ment over the Commons passing of the motion to raise
the tuition fee limit that December, and a hopeful uncer-
tainty over the direction and resilience the resistance
would take over the course of 2011 and beyond. Refer-
ences to the closure of Philosophy at Middlesex in the
summer of 2010 and the frst wave of UK Uncut protests
that winter could now be easily replaced with appeals to
Free Hetherington (which after seven months in occu-
pation won a signifcant victory for its demands on the
management of the University of Glasgow), civil unrest
and rioting last summer, the internationally-inspired
Occupy LSX movement that pitched camp in the shadow
of St Pauls in October, and to the mass mobilization of
the trade unions on 30 November.
This foregrounded timeliness is imposed not merely
by the temporal conditions under which the work was
published, but also by the conceptual terms of regres-
sive reform and progressive resistance that to a large
extent set the agenda of its debate. The collections
subtitle, A Manifesto for Resistance, expresses this
apparently jarring mix of temporalities: a performance
of futural intent towards making something manifest,
directed here towards preserving and retaining a past
institution, the public university.
Of course universities are not, and never have been,
pristine sites of autonomous and intellectual labour,
notes Des Freedman in the introduction.
However, like many other publicly funded institu-
tions which do not always live up to expectations
(the BBC and NHS spring to mind), a strong defence
of the principle of public provision carries with it
the possibility not only of holding the line but also
of invigorating and democratizing these institutions.
Examples of this backward/forward looking Of
course However defence of the public abound across
these essays. This may be strategically useful even
necessary but it may simultaneously be indicative of
what, in an essay on Achievements and Limitations of
the UK Student Movement, Ashok Kumar, the LSEs
2010/11 student union education offcer, singles out as
the failure of the movement to draft an alternative
to the existing system. I dont mean to suggest weve
simply neglected to draft such an alternative, but that
the diffculty of even attempting to do so is symp-
tomatic of a general political impasse, within which
education (as the perennial site for problems of political
transition) becomes overinvested as the sphere in which
these problems are re-transposed, reduplicated and
intensifed. There is something miraculous in thinking
that education as one of the privileged reproducers
of class inequalities in itself harbours the germ of a
resilient and assertive future citizenship, inhabited by
intellectual truth-tellers as a cornerstone for the reali-
zation of an educated democracy, and the resources
required for the reconstitution of the public good for
a cosmopolitan global governance. The admission for
entering into such a defence of higher education must
be a frank, historical appraisal of the extent to which
UK universities have competed against each other
within a system of academic selection or even been
capable of producing engaged, public intellectuals.
Although a range of viewpoints is represented in
these essays, a reluctance to offer an explicit defence
of the university outside the existing, largely liberal-
democratic formulations of higher education must be
confronted, as both indicative of a deliberate, attractive
55 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
and by no means ineffective political strategy, and a
framing and fxing of the debate at the level of ideol-
ogy critique and the crisis of a democratic political
culture that might itself be problematic. The real risk of
desiring to build a counterculture defending the ideals
of classical liberalism on the model of Wendy Browns
counter-rationality, or Amartya Sens Freedom and
Rationality, or Axel Honneths concept of recogni-
tion even if constructed on the basis of the kind
of knowing counter-ideology proposed by Ronald
Barnett (Beyond All Reason: Living with Ideology in
the University, 2003) is that of precluding precisely
the broader kinds of inclusivity and relevance that the
authors insist be built.
This fxing of the focus of debate is refected in the
list of demands made upon government and university
management at the conclusion of the book, which quite
reasonably focuses on increases to public expenditure
on higher education, including nationally agreed terms
and conditions for staff negotiated by trade unions and
a commitment to the Living Wage even for outsourced
services, to be offset against increases in corporation
tax and the highest levels of personal taxation, and by
fxed salary scales for VCs and senior staff. These are
the kind of non-reformist reforms (Andr Gorz) that
Alberto Toscano points out are nonetheless derided
as impossible, and more diffcult to achieve than the
feeting experiences of democracy afforded by the
organization of protests and occupations. It is right that
they form the starting point for a resistance around
which the broadest coalition can be organized. But they
should not preclude bolder, deeper, more unsettling
questions about the very concept of public education.
In an occasionally sneering review of The Assault
on Universities in Spiked magazine, Tim Black argues
that to cling to the idea of the university as lever of
social-economic mobility is now indefensible, given
the rise of inequality that has accompanied the mas-
sifcation of higher education. In its place there now
exists, he insists, the profound question as to what
the purpose of the university ought to be. Blacks
answer clings to an even older idea of academic
autonomy and Newmanesque in-utility, singling out
for praise Waltons essay on The Idea of the Uni-
versity because it returns to a secularized version of
the older, nineteenth-century notions of the intrinsic
worth of knowledge and culture (embodied in J.H.
Newmans The Idea of the University and Matthew
Arnolds Culture and Anarchy). But on what basis is
it possible to discard so easily Newmans commitment
to the transmission of Catholic truth, once regarded
as central to universal learning, whilst insisting on
the impossibility today of a university without phil-
osophers? In the liberal-democratic defence of the
Idea of the University, are those disciplines deemed
essential is disciplinarity itself to be immured from
historical transformation?
This touches on the larger theme of the massifca-
tion of the university and raises the question of the
economic, social and technological transformation of
education, especially in the last two decades. Neil
Faulkner argues that the expansion of the universities
in the 1950s and 1960s created mass higher education
for the frst time, whose central contradiction (between
intellectual holism and social inclusivity) produced a
crisis that was dramatically revealed by the student
revolt of NovemberDecember 2010. From even a
cursory historical materialist perspective, however,
the central issue would still have to be confronted:
to speak more generally of a resistance on behalf of
the public university would suggest the possibility of
a non-contradictory harmonizing of these concepts,
rather than any kind of dialectical transformation
of the terms involved. A similar contradiction runs
through the heart of Nietzsches transitional essay
On the Future of our Educational Institutions, and
in the name of producing a higher culture premissed
on the independence of the university, he is happy to
discard the massifcation of higher education and its
corrosive association with the state as mere philistin-
ism. It is at the same crossroads that Blacks defence
of the university fnds itself unwittingly conjoined to
that of the coalition government as a counter-revolution
56 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
against the modern demand for accessibility and par-
ticipation in the name of preserving the integrity of
an older vision of academic autonomy (which will, we
must imagine, be preserved in its current form by the
coalition government, if only for the privileged elite).
The best of the essays in this collection remain
alive to this contradiction and to the inversion of
the perspective of resistance it suggests. Its spectre
haunts Toscanos contribution (which in many ways
stands in sympathy with, but also as a critical response
to, Kumars demands), which asks at the outset, Is it
possible to democratize the university?, and does not
shrink from the diffculties involved: And when auton-
omy, maturity and critical reasoning are components of
the ideology of an institution (today we could perhaps
add creativity, innovation, and even radicalism), it
is not surprising that some of its inhabitants over-
identify with them. In doing so, Toscano inverts the
timeliness of a Manifesto for Resistance. Of course,
he might have written, a transitional programme for
a democratic university would certainly need to table
collective measures against the kinds of managerial
power that acts as a crucial transmission belt for the
implementation of government policies on education.
However, he would add, issues of democratic content
(what is to be done?) must take precedence over the
fetishizing of democratic forms as solutions in their
own right (how should we proceed?).
These questions come to bear on the function
and possibility of the public university. If cuts to the
public sector and the services they support are merely
ideological (the result of choices about taxation versus
welfare), it is assumed there is no underlying contradic-
tion between the social-democratic ideal of the mass,
public universities of the future and the systematic
functioning of late capitalism. If, as Nick Stevenson
argues, the third way emphasis upon democracy and
civil society sought to mask the extent to which the
class structure and capitalism were inhospitable to
these ideals, we must therefore go further than Nick
Couldrys insistence that neoliberal democracy is a
paradoxical oxymoron and confront the possibility that
a fundamental contradiction exists between capitalism
(and not merely its neoliberal version) and a mass,
modern and public higher education system. It may be
untimely to formulate the experiment ahead in such
starkly Brechtian terms, but if the concept of higher
education can no longer be applied to the thing trans-
formed into a commodity, we may have to eliminate
this concept with due caution but without fear, lest we
liquidate the function of the very thing as well.
Matthew Charles
Undressing
the student
University for Strategic Optimism, Undressing the
Academy, or The Student Handjob, Minor Composi-
tions, London and New York, 2011, 5.00 pb. 72 pp.,
20448589. Also available free online at http://student-
handjob.wordpress.com.
The haste with which Parliament drove through its
education reforms last winter left scant time for the
student movement to react with much critical refec-
tion on the system it was defending. The prevailing
institutional setup, it was rightly held, was worth
defending as such, being wholly preferable to that into
which the government would to fashion it. In the lull
that has followed the failure to prevent the changes,
the University for Strategic Optimism (UfSO) poses a
vital and overdue question: Just what is the university
that we are fghting for anyway? And what perhaps
could it be?
Their response is a dirty snapshot of UK higher
education, compiled in the form of a mock student
handbook that attempts to piece together university life
in its present and imminent state. In Undressing the
Academy, or The Student Handjob, many of the usual
student-handbook topics housing, mental health,
internships, racism, and so on are critically treated
(or given a belligerent mauling) and developed into
strategies of resistance or escape.
Undressing the Academy is noticeably infuenced
by the Situationist International (SI) and their para-
digmatic (anti-)student handbook On the Poverty of
Student Life. Following the SI, for whom academic
was a term of abuse, a cretin whom the student
must go on listening [to] respectfully, UfSO refer
to the way in which the classroom engenders the
shitting [of] the desk a reproduction of the fxed
studentteacher power relationship which demands
that students passively smile and nod appropriately as
the wise teacher defnes knowledge. Real knowledge
begins, they write, when the mastery of the student
by the teacher is broken. Henri Lefebvres concept of
lived space, at the core of the SIs experiments in
psychogeography, appears in Undressing the Academy
with a call to explore space, preferably on foot (Guy
Debord called this a drive), and to inhabit both the
university and the city according to liberated passions
by turning them into a playground. Though something
of a clichd strategy half a century on, it is important
to remember how the recent student movement did
57 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
indeed turn Westminster into a playground, of sorts,
during its most powerful manifestations: in utilizing
sacrosanct monuments as swings, hurling produce at
future monarchs and parading through government
headquarters. The question stands, though, why such
manifestations ultimately failed.
University students are the target audience of
Undressing the Academy, being, for UfSO, the agents
of the universitys revolutionary potential. Yet the
repeated declaration that students and their tutors
stand in political antagonism towards one another is
surely a poisoned inheritance from the Situationists.
Todays marketization of the university system is
indeed intensifying the commodifcation of student
education into a consumable student experience. But it
is also turning the role of the academic into a fulfller
of student-consumer demands, not to mention a relent-
less fabricator of research papers aimed at attracting
diminishing Research Council funding. In short, by
postulating that without the student, the university
is nothing, UfSO deny the shared position of stu-
dents and academics in the university structure: both
being among its necessary intellectual labourers (along
with library staff, admin, etc.), both ever-increasingly
compelled towards the consumption or production of
market-defned knowledge. Perhaps, in order better to
assess the relations of power involved in the university,
the reifed student/teacher categories should be trans-
cended. Otherwise, calls for change that derive solely
from the side of the student per se, no matter how
radically phrased, risk amounting to mere consumer
demands. (You want tutors who recognize you as an
equal? Coming right up!)
The strategies of resistance or escape (it remains
unclear which is preferred) that Undressing the
Academy proposes are often more prescriptive than
may have been intended, falling into problem-solution
paradigms which, for a panacea, most often simply
propound immediate, collective action. Conceding to
the complexity of the situation might have some-
times been preferable. Also, at points Undressing the
Academy betrays a certain class prejudice (the depic-
tion of technical universities as academic ghettos,
for example) and it neglects any sustained analysis of
gender issues. But as an admittedly partially drawn
attempt to think the imminent condition of the uni-
versity politically, UfSOs provocative aggregation of
such a broad range of issues, its creative attempts to
think their transformation, not to mention its initial
problematization of the university structure itself, are
certainly welcome.
Daniel Nemenyi
Amour propre. Not
Deborah Cook, Adorno on Nature, Acumen, Durham,
2011. 198 pp., 55.00 hb., 18.99 pb., 978 1 84465 255
6 hb., 978 1 84465 262 4 pb.
Anyone offering to expound Adornos concept of
nature has assumed a fraught and diffcult task. This
is in part because his own commentary is so dialecti-
cally pleated, and in part because it is not clear, despite
the coherence and lucidity of his specifc discussions
of naturehumanity relations, that the overall picture
he offers is entirely convincing and self-consistent. In
this scrupulous and densely argued text, Deborah Cook
provides a lucid, thoughtful and scholarly guide to the
detail of Adornos argument. Her account is also well
versed in the secondary commentary on it and offers
a number of important qualifcations and correctives
to it. For those wanting a full and accurate guide to
Adornos position, this is certainly a text to go to. But
for those and I include myself here who are already
committed fans of Adorno, but troubled by the more
aporetic aspects of his argument on nature, this is not,
perhaps, as challenging a discussion as one might have
wanted. Certainly key points of tension are noted, but
there is a reluctance, it seems, to accord them a central
place or allow them to unsettle the expository fow.
Cook rightly presents Adorno as stressing the histo-
ricity of nature and its continuous cultural mediation,
while also insisting on its ultimate exteriority to con-
ceptualization, and the priority of matter (or what the
concept of matter stands for) to thought. And in this
context she pursues the points of comparison and con-
trast with Hegel and, perhaps most interestingly, with
Kant (whose recourse to the noumenal is of course
rejected by Adorno, but whom Cook persuasively
presents nonetheless as a non-identity thinker avant
la lettre). On the other hand, we are not offered much
insight into how we are to understand the qualities of
this non-noumenal yet immediate nature: a nature
which is both the abiding stuff of cultural mediation
and at the same time never accessible other than in its
historic mediations. What, if any, relationship does it
have to the object of the natural sciences? Is it, indeed,
as is suggested, a nature that could exist or fourish
independently of us and what exactly would that
mean? And if we are using concepts to understand
natural things, what concept of the natural has been
presupposed in their selection as natural? Even if,
as Cook says, Adornos materialism refutes the idea
of an unspoiled basic stratum because it stresses the
constant interaction between nature and history, this
58 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
is a claim that only makes sense in the light of some
fundamental conceptual discrimination between the
two. It is true that Adorno aims to de-humanise nature
and de-naturalise humanity as much as the reverse, yet
this formulation of his project still presupposes some
way of distinguishing the opposing categories.
In respect of human nature and environmental
interactions, there is also surely an ongoing tension
in Adornos position between the emphasis on the
always mediated quality of needs (and even instincts)
and the discourse on their repression. Are we products
of repressed need and instinct (a libertarian position
that directs us to a view of emancipation as the
lifting of repression), or is Adorno to be more aligned
with Foucault in rejecting any redemptive return to
some supposedly more
natural less alienated
mode of being? Both
positions fnd some
register in Adornos
writing, and both
are cogently argued
for in themselves at
various points but
there is no disputing
the ongoing tension
between them and
the doubt it casts on
how we are to under-
stand the possibility of
human freedom, or of
what Adorno refers to
as the true society or the right condition. Again,
Cook is quite justifed in pointing to the centrality of
the theme of instrumental rationality and the irresist-
ible urge to subjugate nature. But if both humans and
nature are formed through mutual interaction, then
the subjugation is not only of our inner nature but
of an already humanized environment, and the very
notion of subjugation as if of some pristine and alien
otherness rather than of what is already our own work,
begins to seem problematic.
In discussing Adornos argument concerning needs
and instincts, and Freuds infuence on his thinking
of these, Cook constantly returns to the theme of the
struggle for survival and its dominance in Adornos
account. The instinct for self-preservation is indeed at
the heart of Adornos explanation of where we (or at
least we in the West?) have gone wrong. But given
the excesses of consumer culture today, their role in
the creation of scarcities in less fortunate areas of the
globe, and the very high material standard of living
now enjoyed by many in the more developed societies,
it seems a little odd for Cook simply to reproduce,
without any critical qualifcation, the opinion of Nega-
tive Dialectics that autonomy will be achieved only
when society has been transformed in such a way
that we are liberated from the lifelong struggle to
satisfy our needs. What really needs to be brought
into the picture here, one feels, is the role of amour
propre rather than amour de soi and the devastating
environmental and social consequences of its contin-
ued consumerist form of gratifcation. And there are,
indeed, many conceptual pointers in Adornos work,
notably his discussions of narcissism, of hedonism,
the manipulations of the culture industry and critique
of commodity fetishism, that would seem to invite us
to read him as a critic
of hyper-consumption
rather than one whose
main concern is still
(as in Marxs vision)
with the freedom
that can only be won
through the struggle
against scarcity.
The political
rationale for any close
engagement with
Adornos views on
nature at the present
time lies in its rel-
evance to contempo-
rary eco-criticism and
ecological concerns. Cook refects this in the attention
she pays in her fnal chapter to Adorno and Radical
Ecology, where she provides a comparative engage-
ment with the arguments of Arne Naess, Murray Book-
chin and Carolyn Merchant. As a counter to Naesss
vague recommendations for sustainable consumption
she defends Adornos more realistic assessment of
the obstacles in the way of a more rational ordering
of society. But she also helpfully contrasts Adornos
dialectical openness on the future to Bookchins tele-
ological frame of thinking, and in that context offers
a needed defence of him against the charge of pes-
simism. Merchant for her part is presented as at odds
with Adorno because of her positive take on animism
(which Adorno himself viewed as no less hostile to
nature than enlightenment), and her anthropomor-
phic endowment of nature with voice. And all three
thinkers are criticized for their leanings towards an
identifcation with nature that overlooks the distinctive
role of human consciousness, and for their advocacy
59 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
of a unity in nature at the expense of the diversity
emphasized by Adorno himself. These criticisms are
telling and to the point, and it is good to have so
robust a defence of a dialectical understanding as a
counter to indiscriminate holistic approaches to the
understanding of nature and human relations with it.
Ones only regret is that this engagement has not been
extended to the more recent forms of posthumanist and
new materialist thinking that now wield such infuence
in contemporary environmental philosophy.
Kate Soper
Zombie philosophy
Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel, The Death of Philosophy: Ref-
erence and Self-Reference in Contemporary Thought,
trans. Richard A. Lynch, Columbia University Press,
New York and Chichester, 2011. 331 pp., 52.00 hb.,
978 0 23114 778 1.
Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel compares her eccentric
historicalphilosophical perspective to the anamorphic
skull of Holbein the Youngers The Ambassadors. This
self-professed eccentricity is not unwarranted given the
sheer breadth of material contained in The Death of
Philosophy at a time when we are more accustomed
to essays by or about the latest master-thinker. Around
a quarter of the book alone is given over to notes
and the bibliography symptomatic of its attempt to
respond productively to an acute problem through an
understanding of the history of that problem. Such
an approach is preferable to the historically blind
invocations of the next -ism. Yet the nature of the
historical approach itself inseparable as it is from
the dominant style of philosophical studies in France
is not without its problems, in spite of the fact that
the work was partly motivated against the attempt in
France and elsewhere to snuff out living philosophy in
the history of ideas.
In Part I (of III) the author sets out her problematic
by drawing together prominent philosophical positions
across both analytic and Continental trends so as to
expose the performative contradiction of the implicit
or explicit claims to philosophys expiration. These
conjunctions are intended to be surprising: for instance,
post-analytic relativism (Rorty) and positivist scientism
(Quine), or ordinary language philosophy (Austin,
Searle and Cavell) and phenomenology (Levinas). In
various ways, each position proclaims the death of
philosophy either because philosophy cannot found
knowledge, or because it must be subsumed under,
on the one hand, a master natural science (biology,
physics or neuroscience), or, on the other, literature.
But they come to these conclusions only to rely unwit-
tingly upon philosophical aporias of their own, ones
that share forms of naturalism (so pre-eminent today).
Being philosophical positions of their own (scepticism
and scientism), the aporias performatively refute that
which they declare: there is an incongruence of the
saying and the said. On the basis of these results,
Thomas-Fogiel fnds that contemporary philosophy
suffers from a lack of self-refection, or self-reference,
since it remains unaware of these internal contradic-
tions. Reference has, since the rise of neo-Kantianism,
been considered largely in relation to the putative or
real object, not the philosopher (the self). Hence, in
Part II, The Death of Philosophy proceeds to identify
an overlooked model of refection, to be brought to
bear upon the refexive defcit of the present anti-
philosophical consensus. This model is not to be found
in neo-Kantianism but rather in post-Kantianism.
Fascinating aporias within contemporary phil-
osophy are thus identifed by Thomas-Fogiel. But what
of her professed Fichtean remedy to the aporias? At
this point, a myriad of problems and questions arise.
What would it mean to apply Fichtean self-refection
to a subsequent development in the history of phil-
osophy to Habermas (The Antispeculative View),
for instance? Presumably, Habermas would see the
error of his later turn to naturalism and retire for
good. But would this hypothetical remorse on the part
of Habermas et al. leave us any the wiser? The worry
remains that we are simply encouraged to return to
an unreconstructed Fichte one that, in spite of his
undoubted superiority to Habermas in the pantheon
of Teutonic master-thinkers, fell towards the wayside
for some good reasons (of which Habermas himself
was aware) and apply his concepts externally to a
contemporary philosophy that is already internally
incoherent. The Death of Philosophy does not follow
up these limits to Fichtean refection, save for a brief
discussion of transcendental arguments it does not
refect, to paraphrase Friedrich Schlegel, upon the
concept of refection itself. This is surely due to the
partial account of German idealism as a whole, though
Thomas-Fogiel is by no means alone in this partiality.
At the crucial moment of transition to Part II
the author introduces the idiom of German idealism
in terms of Holbeins eccentric viewpoint. Within
contemporary thought, Fichte and Hegel are deemed
unfashionably metaphysical. This is precisely where
we shall fnd an alternative to the death of philosophy
60 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
thesis a strangely compelling logic. Thomas-Fogiel
remains attentive to the sense by which these fgures
revolutionized philosophy by considering conscious-
ness (Bewusstsein), knowing (Wissen) and science
(Wissenschaft) as constitutively intertwined. The
author prefers to think about this intertwining in the
terms of the congruence between the saying and the
said, so as to correct the concepts of reference and
refection in the language philosophies of Part I, and
to counter the performative contradiction. There is
no transcendent standpoint of refection (or refected),
and each claim to the death of Wissenschaft accord-
ingly results in self-denial. Thomas-Fogiel is on strong
ground here: the German idealist model offers a radical
alternative to the familiar paradigm of representational
philosophy. After all, the merely phenomenalist repre-
sentation of Reinhold provided one motivation behind
Fichtes turn from the fact of consciousness to the
act of consciousness. Hence, The Death of Philosophy
forcefully argues that it is a pre-Fichtean, pre-critical
concept of refection that holds sway today, both in
form and in content.
The problem is, however, that as with the post-
analytic reception of Fichte Thomas-Fogiel does
not follow through the implications of Fichtes insight
via Hegel, but rather remains stuck in the no-mans-
land of the epistemological act of consciousness. The
unresolved stance on Hegel can be sensed when she
attempts to pre-empt some methodological criticisms:
have I covertly advocated a return to Fichte and
probably Hegel? Some differentiation within German
idealism is required here, not least because Hegel
was spurred into philosophy against Fichtes practical
philosophy (in the Critical Journal). It is the earlier
Hegel who knows the signifcance of Fichtean refec-
tion, since substance is now explicitly brought into
play with subject. Philosophy as Wissenschaft ceases
to be contemplative. Unfortunately, Fichte remained
lost in the infnity of the task (refection as a mirror of
mirrors), leaving the fnite world untouched. Similarly,
it is not clear how any language philosophy, reformed
or not, can live up to Hegels sense of determination,
or of mediation. There is no acknowledgement of
this issue in The Death of Philosophy, nor of the
historical materialism that was, theoretically at least,
made possible by Hegels intersubjective breakthrough
(contra scepticism). With the negation of the negation,
Wissenschaft becomes a matter of history. And all of
this remains an important omission, because the fate
of refection in and after German idealism suggests
that the revolutionary project of Wissenschaft remains
incomplete or fawed, in the sense that history itself
remains incomplete or fawed. The idealist concept
of refection deployed by Thomas-Fogiel is eminently
rational, certainly not methodological or pragmatic,
in a manner that is challenged, but not necessarily
falsifed, by historical suffering. Without this histori-
cal dilemma, Thomas-Fogiels self-refection remains
meta-historical and hence naturalist the last thing
she wanted.
Added to this, there is no analysis of the various
manners of philosophys dying in The Death of Phil-
osophy notably, the Aufhebung of Hegel and Marx
that cancels and preserves. Something of philosophy
its speculative claim to the whole is preserved in its
death (end and supersession are actually confated
on p. 70, though this may be an issue of translation).
There remains a more general denigration of death,
even, since death is tacitly assumed to be a matter of
regret, a matter of melancholy and never mourning
hence the invocation of life and, tellingly, infnity at the
end: the model [of refection] allows us to overcome
the ostensible death of philosophy in order to return to
an affrmation of its always renewed life. Presumably,
the task of thinking of Heidegger another culprit
in The Death that which must follow the end of
philosophy, is no matter of regret to the thinker (who
actually says Aufhebung in the Spiegel interview). The
study would have benefted from other terminological
defnitions: is the author discussing the death of
philosophy, or do not the diverse philosophical posi-
tions rather represent deaths of philosophy, plural,
given that Levinas and Quine mean very different
things by philosophy in the frst place? The affnities
regarding self-contradiction are more or less clear, but
what exactly, in each case, is the philosophy that is
professed to have died? Again, some outline of what
is at stake metaphysics, grounding science, the whole
is too often peripheral to the discussion, leaving
the suspicion, once again, that what is to be resur-
rected is long dead, resulting in a zombie philosophy.
Similarly, although Thomas-Fogiel touches upon this,
the relationships between modern science and Wissen-
schaft in the time of Fichte before the explosion
61 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
of the modern sciences would beneft from further
discussion, as would the place of the humanities. It
is too easy to project a plural and organic notion of
Wissenschaft onto the current system of specializations
(philosophy as queen of which sciences, and how?).
A couple of points must be made regarding mode of
presentation. The authors combative style is nothing
if not refreshing. But this sometimes slips into an
overbearing scholarliness partly a result, no doubt,
of the imperative to contest liberal-minded relativism,
partly due to intellectual-cultural differences: Before
judging that I have accomplished my entire task, she
surmises towards the end of the book (this may equally
be a consequence of reading Fichte, who penned such
memorable titles as An Attempt to Force the Reader
to Understand). As to structure, while the transition
from Parts I to II is successful, the turn to Part III, to
the source of the refexive defcit, seems to be going
over old ground, since this forms the prehistory of the
problem itself.
Wesley Phillips
Davos
Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cas-
sirer, Davos, Harvard University Press, Cambridge
MA, 2010. 426 pp., 29.95 hb., 978 0 67404 713 6.
Philosophy, it could be said, constructs itself in
retro spect; thought acquires meaning by means of
its memories. Indeed, writes Peter Gordon, perhaps
what all philosophies have in common is that each
comes to understand itself by telling itself stories
about where it has been. From the trial of Socrates
to Wittgensteins poker-wielding quarrel with Popper,
such stories form the fabric of philosophical memory,
a kind of cultural-cognitive process whereby concepts
are coded with historical content. In the so-called
Continental tradition, few remembered moments have
come to seem more meaningful than the 1929 Davos
dispute between Heidegger and Cassirer. At the time,
the two men ranked among Europes most eminent
intellectuals. The theme of the meeting that brought
them together was the ambitious question, What is
the Human Being? Accordingly, their encounter was
seen as broadly symbolic of everything from the then
nascent crisis within neo-Kantianism to a confict
between, in Karl Mannheims sense, culturally irrecon-
cilable generations. In the eighty years between then
and now, the Davos exchange has played its part in
some of the grandest narratives of modern intellectual
history not least Michael Friedmans infuential
account of a parting of the ways; a supposed separa-
tion of analytic from Continental philosophical styles.
For all this, though, what if such retroactive readings
have misrepresented the events real import? After all,
in philosophical as in other forms of memory, the asso-
ciative (not to mention emotive) act of remembering all
too often colours a memorys content. In this way, by
extension, its easy to see how entire disciplines could
end up overdetermined by their own self-descriptions.
Whats more, a measure of interpretive violence is done
when a debate like Davos is made to serve as a sign of
broader political signifcance. A case in point would
be Bourdieus take on it in his The Political Ontology
of Martin Heidegger. Here the conceptual core of the
encounter is crudely hollowed out in order to portray
philosophy as an allegory of social power. Surely, to
analyse Heideggers (or Cassirers) arguments by way
of such a sociology is already to instrumentalize them?
Instead, reasons Gordon, the best bet for both phil-
osophy and politics would be to divest the fetishized
memory of Davos of any such allegorical function.
With Davos, what was once a dialogue has long since
ossifed into a fxational fable. Hence, what history
requires is a refexive, disenchanted reading, in which
all second-order stories (be they sweepingly socio-
political or insularly professional) are briefy bracketed
out, at least to begin with. Space is then cleared for a
more careful contextualization, where meaning may be
gradually reconstructed from the ground up.
For Gordon, what in fact grounded the Davos debate
was a conceptual confict between two normative
images of humanity. Hence, while Heideggers argu-
ments were animated by an image of humanitys
thrownness (Geworfenheit) for which Dasein was
inescapably fnite, situated inside its existential horizon
Cassirer, by contrast, clung to a neo-Kantian notion
of mental spontaneity, of mans expressive ability to
structure his feld of experience, pressing beyond the
condition of being there towards a truly objective
symbolic order. All this could look like a simplifca-
tion, of course, in so far as it boils down to a binary
gloss Enlightenment humanism versus existentialist
fatalism; metaphysical angst against anthropological
agency but it serves Gordon well as a way of
concretizing the exchanges conceptual framework.
With the stage thus set, what happened next (and what
Davos perhaps demonstrates par excellence) was a
process that Gordon calls ramifcation. If we recall
that to operationalize a concept is to set limits to its
extension, to watch it ramify is, Gordon says, to see it
branch out into the wider world, amassing a freight of
62 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
associations which magnify [its] rhetorical force and
cultural-historical signifcance. This is the slow slip-
page from normative image to narrative; the process
of diffusion by which Davos became a mythical point
of reference.
Gordons ramifed concepts appear roughly similar
to what Niilo Kauppi has called power-ideas (see
Edward Barings review of Kauppis Radicalism in
French Culture in RP 170). One common thrust of
both of these theories is that the more associative links
an idea can consolidate for itself, the more leverage it
will have in the intellectual feld as a whole, mobilizing
its clusters of connotations so as to achieve a meta-
preferential priority over competing concepts. In the
HeideggerCassirer confict, this comparison is borne
out by the ways in which both philosophers tried to
ramify negatively each others habits of mind. Cassirer
implicitly classed Heidegger as an outdated metaphysi-
cian, while Heidegger inscribed Cassirer into his
own larger and more ramifed cultural-metaphysical
narrative: that of the Seinsvergessenheit, philosophys
forgetting of Being. Thus, each subjected the others
stance to adverse ramifcation through historical
re description. Gordon seems to claim that such moves
are not philosophically valid, but this begs the question
of why historicity should not (indeed, how it cannot)
be at stake in argumentation. In any case, a degree of
philosophical one-upmanship, as he puts it, clearly
does appear to have taken place. Throughout the
debate, both speakers statements were rhetorically
underwritten by arguments for priority, consisting not
only of conficting narrativizations (that is, each placed
himself at a more advanced stage in philosophical
history) but also of vying meta philosophies. In that
of Cassirer, the transcendental method must serve as
the general point of departure for all philosophical
problems, whereas for Heidegger, of course, that privi-
leged part was played by fundamental ontology. In this
sense, then, each opponent positioned his own ideas as
conditions of intelligibility for those of his interlocutor.
Gordons close attention to the rhetorical impli-
cature of the Davos debate is deeply illuminating.
Unlike other analyses, it pinpoints the problem of
the participants failure to fnd a common language
in which to formalize their disagreement. That is, in
symbolic struggles like the one described above, every
layer of fguration further obstructs the constructive
conduct of dialogue. If, as Gerald Graff has argued,
making intellectual culture coherent requires
foregrounding points of controversy, then one could
say of Davos that the rapid ramifcation of the conver-
sations content was precisely what prevented a fully
adequate foregrounding. Instead, and especially in the
decades that followed, the disagreement was displaced
onto the indeterminate domain of ideological effects
and cultural consequences (as in later indictments of
the elective affnities between Heideggers Existenz-
philosophie and his Nazism). What was lost in trans-
lation during this interpretive shift from conceptual
truth to pragmatic effcacy was any way of distilling
a soluble philosophical confict from the attendant set
of insoluble symbolic ones the unwieldy idea of an
epochal clash between Cassirers cosmopolitanism and
Heideggers irrational nationalism, for example.
Clearly, the methodology displayed in Continental
Divide creates some complex entailments. At one
point, Gordon explains that the book has been guided
by a drive to sustain the distinction between phil-
osophy and history. He then goes on to refect that
one might say it is a desideratum for philosophy that
its arguments should be resolved by philosophical
means only and without reference to the nonphilo-
sophical world. On this view, philosophy would seem
to demand a kind of askesis, the principled attempt
to hold thought apart from all that is mundane.
As a formula for doing philosophy, the value of this
ascetic ideal seems far from self-evident; a more honest
desideratum might ask for quite the opposite. Anyway,
as Gordon goes on to point out, the principle may
well be unrealizable, as every philosophical concept
begins to ramify the instant it is conceived. Thus,
the kind of distillation described above cant quite
be accomplished, since there is no moment of pure
thought that does not immediately take on a further
meaning. But perhaps we could posit that the pursuit
of such a pristine moment does remain a latent aim of
Gordons, at least at the level of method, existing in a
slightly unstable tension with his detailed reading of
Davoss long arc of ramifcation. Whether or not that
criticism carries weight, what Continental Divide suc-
cessfully demonstrates is that the essence of Davos was
irreducibly philosophical. And even if that essence isnt
historically isolable, Gordon frmly establishes that it
cant be explained away as an epiphenomenon of some
deeper, prior political cause. Nor can any disputes
outcome be decided on the evidence of subsequent
allegorizations. In its level-headed argument against
these misleading myths and memories, Continental
Divide clears the ground for new and more thought-
ful ways of rendering philosophys richly entangled
relationship with its history.
David Winters
63 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
H & M
Sean Sayers, Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2011. 216
pp., 50.00 hb., 978 0 23027 654 3.
What is the most fruitful approach to Marxs social
and political philosophy? In response to this question,
the two dominant branches of Marxist philosophy
have paid surprisingly little attention to Hegel. Ana-
lytical Marxists, such as G.A. Cohen and Jon Elster,
have reconstructed Marxs writings free from their
Hegelian roots; whilst Althusserians have argued for
a sharp break between the juvenile writings of the
young Marx, still in thrall to Hegels philosophy, and
the true Marx of Capital, who ultimately rejected
Hegelian philosophy tout court. Sean Sayers rejects
both of these approaches. His new book, a collection
of stand-alone essays, is an argument for the deep-lying
Hegelianism of Marxs thought, and a spirited defence
of that outlook.
Sayerss topic is alienation a term Marx uses
extensively in his early writings but which he drops
in his later work due, in part, to its Hegelian associa-
tions. The book defends the argument that the idea
of alienation continues to be of importance to Marxs
later outlook, even when the term itself is no longer
used. The frst group of chapters offer an interpretation
and defence of Marxs philosophical anthropology: that
is, his view of man as a creative being, for whom work
is a deeply meaningful activity. Chapters 4 and 5 take
a broader view of the idea of alienation, and consider
how it relates to the other key normative foundations
in the Marxian framework: community and freedom.
Chapter 6 considers exactly what type of criticism
alienation entails, while the fnal chapters deal with
various aspects of Marxs vision of a post-capitalist
society a vision that is potent, but also strikingly
unspecifed and opaque.
After an introductory chapter on the idea of aliena-
tion, Sayers tackles Marxs concept of labour. His start-
ing point is Marxs opaque claim that the importance
of Hegels Phenomenology lies in the fact that it
grasps the nature of labour. Following the interpreta-
tion proffered by Alexandre Kojve and popularized
by Jean-Paul Sartre it is usually thought that Marx
is referring here to the master/slave dialectic, in which
the slave develops himself through his labour and
ultimately achieves a higher stage of human existence
than his master. Sayers challenges this interpretation.
There is, he suggests, no reason to think that the
master/slave dialectic had any special signifcance
for Marx. Instead, he argues that the key to a clearer
understanding of Marxs indebtedness to Hegel can be
found in the latters Lectures on Aesthetics, in which
Hegel develops several themes that are essential to, but
underdeveloped in, Marxs philosophy. These include
the idea of work as the fundamental activity of the
human species; the idea of work as a transformative
process where the natural world is stripped of its
foreign character; and the idea of work as an educative
activity, where the worker develops his needs, powers
and sense of self through his labour. Sayers makes a
good case for flling out this underdeveloped aspect
of Marxs philosophy with Hegels more developed
writings. The exegesis of this diffcult aspect of Marxs
thought is admirably clear, and the focus on the Aes-
thetics is novel and illuminating.
Chapter 3 continues in a similar way, though this
time the focus is on defending Marx specifcally,
from the view that his concept of labour presupposes a
particular paradigm of nineteenth-century labour. This
argument is made both by writers like Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri, who argue that Marx works with
a conception of labour specifc to nineteenth-century
industrialism that does not make sense of work in a
post-industrial economy, and by Jrgen Habermas and
William Adams, who argue that Marxs concept of
non-alienated labour relies on a Romantic model of
craft/artistic production. Sayers rejects both arguments.
On his view, Marxs concept of labour, broadly under-
stood as a form-giving activity, can usefully be applied
to a variety of different types of work, including those
found in a post-industrial economy. This argument is
convincing. However, I was less convinced that there
was not some tension in Marxs account of labour in
a post-capitalist society. True, Marx is fercely critical
of the craft ideal and optimistic of the possibilities that
industrialism creates. But in those rare passages where
Marx does talk of non-alienated labour the model he
continues to draw on is that of artistic production.
So, in the Grundrisse, for example, Marx speaks of
the composition of music as being really free labour
that can be a vehicle for truly attractive work, the
individuals self-realization. There is a tension here
that Sayerss interpretation smooths over.
The fourth chapter considers Marxs depiction of
alienated community in light of the communitarian
64 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
critique of liberalism of the 1980s. Broadly speak-
ing, communitarians make two different, potentially
contradictory arguments against liberalism. The frst
argument, associated with Alasdair MacIntyre, states
that liberal philosophy theorizes the modern social
world as it really is, as a world lacking in communal
belonging and togetherness. The second argument,
made by Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer, states that
liberal philosophy misrepresents the true nature of the
modern social world, as it fails to recognize the way in
which we remain encumbered with strong communal
ties and attachments. Sayers argues that both accounts
are one-sided, and that for Marx, as for Hegel, people
in the modern social world are in fact both detached
from society and embedded in it: detached because
they conceive of themselves as persons, separate
from their social roles, and with interests that are
independent from their community; and embedded
because they are deeply interdependent, connected to
and reliant on one another in all sorts of ways in the
modern economy. Where Hegel celebrated this modern
development, seeing it as reconciliation of individuality
and sociality, Marx thought this reconciliation was a
chimera. The real forms of individuality and sociality,
and their reconciliation, lie beyond the modern social
world in a communist society of the future.
Though Marx himself developed a communitarian
critique of liberalism, there has been very little work
on how his ideas relate to the modern strand of com-
munitarian thought with more attention being given
to Aristotle and Hegel than Marx and Sayers does
a good job in situating his ideas in this contempo-
rary discussion. Nevertheless, in putting forward the
superiority of Marxs views over those contemporary
communitarians, Sayers is unduly uncharitable in the
exegesis of the views he is criticizing. He argues that
there is a dimension of social criticism in Marxs
theory which is entirely absent from the communitar-
ian critique of liberalism. This is unfair. MacIntyre
has criticized capitalism for the way that it tends to
corrupt social practices, while Walzers robust account
of social justice contains a penetrating critique of the
marketization of public goods. Both develop critiques
of capitalism that draw heavily on Marxs social criti-
cism a point that Sayerss interpretation overlooks.
Many commentators Cohen, R.N. Berki and John
Plamenatz among them have argued that Marx
changed his views on self-realization in work. In the
early writings, it is said, Marx argues that though work
is currently alienated, it need not be so; work can
provide an immense source of meaning and enjoyment
to the worker. In his later writings, however, when
he developed a broader understanding of economics,
Marx appears less optimistic. Socially necessary work
that is, work done to sustain basic human needs
now seems to be viewed as inescapably alienating.
According to Sayers, however, this infuential account
rests on a misconception of Marxs views. For Marx,
freedom is not an all or nothing affair; rather, there
are a number of different aspects of freedom, some
basic and one-sided, others more complex. On this
view, there is freedom in necessary work it is
not inescapably alienating as Cohen et al. maintain
but it is not the fullest form of freedom, for that
can only be achieved in work that is free from the
exigencies of need altogether. This distinction makes
good sense of Marxs writings. However, it does not
fully resolve the conundrum of Marxs views on self-
realization, as Sayers himself acknowledges. For two
divergent strands of thought can still be distinguished:
the frst states that there will always be a distinction
between the realm of necessity and the realm of
freedom, where the highest form of freedom will be
enjoyed outside of necessary production, in leisure; the
second states that the distinction between the realms
of freedom and necessity will eventually wither away,
so that people will realize themselves producing for
others, in work itself. It is an interesting question
though one that Sayers does not attempt to answer as
to which one of these accounts of self-realization is the
more plausible option.
That Marx uses the term alienation to criticize
the modern social world is well known. But what
type of criticism does this involve? For many com-
mentators it expresses unremitting criticism of the
capitalist economy for the way in which it estranges
human beings from their nature, their species-being.
On Sayerss view, however, alienation is not a purely
negative or critical concept, based on a timeless,
universal standard of human nature; rather, it is a
dialectical concept that expresses positive aspects.
Alienation is a necessary and progressive stage in
human history, and though it is a stage of great
disharmony not one to rest in as Hegel puts it it
ultimately creates the conditions for its own super-
session. For the Marxist account of history, capitalism
is the key period of alienation that, despite being a
period of great turmoil and fragmentation, is also
one of unprecedented progress progress that creates
possibilities that a socialist society will build on and
develop in a non-alienated way.
Marx and Alienations fnal three chapters deal with
some of the most important aspects of Marxs vision
of a future communist society, including the future
65 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
of property and the overcoming of the division of
labour. Once more, Sayers argues that Marxs thought
develops out of a Hegelian way of thinking about these
issues a way of thinking that does not view these
features of the modern world in purely utilitarian or
economic terms, but takes a much wider, at times
even spiritual, view of their signifcance. This is illu-
minating. However, it is disappointing that very little
attention is given to the brute differences that separate
Hegel and Marx on these issues. For whilst Hegel sees
private property and the division of labour as essential
for the development and realization of individuality
and freedom, Marx viewed them as being inimical
to it, and argued that they must be overcome. Indeed,
in showing how Marx and Hegel shared the same
philosophical outlook, the book as a whole fails to
show how these thinkers came to adopt such strikingly
different positions on the concrete points of social
and political theory. Nevertheless, Sayers provides a
powerful argument for the deep-lying Hegelianism of
Marxs thought, sheds new light on some well-trodden
areas, and writes in an accessible style that much
Marx scholarship still lacks. What he proves, above
all else, is that whilst a great deal has been written on
the HegelMarx relationship, this way of approaching
Marxs philosophical ideas remains the most fertile
feld of inquiry for Marx scholarship today.
Jan Kandiyali
applications 2012 2013
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theories, the art of networks and internet
culture
a bilingual education (english & french)
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application deadline : 11 May 2012

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research-based master programme
critical curatorial cybermedia
66 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
OBITUARY
Switch off all
apparatuses
Friedrich Adolf Kittler, 19432011
I
t is a mark of how far Kittlers reputation had spread in the English-speaking world
that he had acquired his own cutely alliterative epithet: the Derrida of the digital
age. It was probably an inevitable moniker for a fgure who brought his own brand
of poststructuralist thinking to bear on media technologies, but it is misleading for
those coming to his work for the frst time. Certainly, Kittlers work would not have
been possible other than from the vantage point of the digital age. However, he actu-
ally devoted comparatively little of his writing to the technological transformations
of the present moment. The distinctiveness and importance of his work came from
its engagement with the past, and its construction of an ambitious and compelling
archaeology of media technologies. In this sense, his guiding light was not Derrida
at all, but Michel Foucault. The most important of all the poststructuralist thinkers,
Foucault was such a towering infuence that Kittler seems to have indulged in a little
hero-worship.
1
Anticipation of Foucaults latest writings would set the young Friedrichs
pulse racing quite as much as getting his hands on a new LP by his beloved Pink Floyd,
and he noted with regret in later years that a sudden attack of nerves meant he fuffed
his best opportunity to meet the great man.
Friedrich Adolf Kittler was born in 1943 in Rochlitz, Saxony, soon to become part
of the newly divided East Germany. At ffteen, he emigrated with his family to pursue
higher education in the West, and it was at the University of Freiburg that Kittler spent
his formative intellectual years and early career, from 1963 to 1986, frst as a student of
Germanistik, Romance Philology and Philosophy and then later as a lecturer. Freiburg,
on Germanys western border, was particularly receptive to the new wave of French
thinking, but the poststructuralism absorbed by Kittler and his cohort had acquired a
distinctly Teutonic infection as it crossed the Rhine. In the charged atmosphere of post-
war Germany, Derridada and Lacancan were contentious fgures whose ideas carried a
whiff of a discredited tradition of irrationalism, and worse. In Paris, Heideggers legacy
informed the radicalism of 1968, but in Freiburg, still haunting the corridors in his
dotage, he was a troubling reminder of German philosophys association with National
Socialism. Adopting neo-Heideggerian poststructuralist ideas in such a fraught environ-
ment suited Kittlers contrarian tendencies, however. While the would-be Marxist
revolutionaries of Freiburg were sitting in and dropping out, Kittler, having spent his
childhood under East German communism, preferred to stay in his room with only
Foucault and the Floyd for company.
Kittlers other formative theoretical infuences reached him from across the Atlantic.
From Marshall McLuhan he derived a concept of culture in which media technologies
were central and determining factors. Fed through Kittlers Foucauldian post-human
sensibilities, however, such ideas became altogether more radical and far-reaching.
67 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
For McLuhan, media are extensions of man, but Kittler was intent on dispelling such
anthropocentric delusions. Technology is no mere prosthesis of the human, but rather
its effacement. All that remains of people is what media can store and communicate,
he declared.
2
McLuhans seminal text, Understanding Media, provided a landmark
but also a departure point for Kittler. Any such understanding is impossible, since
it is media technologies themselves that shape the very conditions of knowledge
and thought. Kittlers work instead sets itself the more oblique task of description,
detailing the historical emergence of technologies, their structures and systems. In
what David Wellbery calls this post-hermeneutic mode of theorizing, the traditional
vocabulary of criticism is replaced by the bracing new lexicon of information science,
a terminology of channels, inputs and outputs, signals and noise borrowed from Claude
Shannon.
3
Once again, these theoretical imports acquired a distinctive German tinge.
In North America, the media theory of McLuhan and Shannon surfed a postwar wave
of technological optimism and progress, but in Germany the same period inevitably
prompted more troubling refections about machines and their capabilities. World War II
casts a long shadow over Kittlers work. Growing up, he would holiday in Peenemnde
on the Baltic coast, a landscape still bearing the traces of V2 rocket production. The
wreckage and effects the Nazi war machine were everywhere and yet cloaked in
silence. It is unsurprising that war lurks continually in the background of Kittlers
work. It is not human agency but military confict that drives technological innovation.
Early flm cameras owe their design to the development of the machine gun, but such
civilian applications are merely incidental misuses of military hardware. In place of a
decentred human subject so-called man it seems that the engine of change in his
media histories is war.
Geoffrey Winthrop Young describes Kittlers trajectory as a widening spiral,
revisiting the same themes from a more expansive perspective, but his career can
be broken down more conveniently into three stages.
4
In its early period, until the
mid-1980s, Kittlers career bears the strongest traces of his disciplinary background
in literature. His Habilitation thesis became his frst major work, Discourse Networks
1800/1900. Published in 1985 and appearing in English fve years later, it began with
the central fgure of the German canon, Goethe. But this was Goethe with a difference.
The post-hermeneutic approach to German Romantic
poetry focused not on interpretation and meaning, but on
information processing. Literature was part of system of
connections linking humans, technologies, bureaucracy
and writing. The German title, Aufschreibsysteme, a term
lifted from the memoirs of the schizophrenic Daniel
Paul Schreber and translated as Discourse Networks,
designated for Kittler the technologies and institutions
that allow a given culture to select, store and produce
relevant data.
5
And in the discourse network of 1800,
literature holds a special place. In the absence of other
media capable of serial storage and transmission, the
written word has a monopoly. Consequently, for readers
in this pre-technological era, text was more than mere
text. Writing could lay claim to a particular kind of
magic, conjuring up the sound and even images that no
technology could yet store.
A century later, however, the Discourse Network of
1900 looks radically different. Kittlers media history
proceeds in the kind of abrupt jumps and lurches that
testify to Foucaults infuence. But where Foucauldian
68 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
discourse analysis stops at the edges of the written archive, Kittler sees the need to
extend this method of cultural inquiry into other media: All discourse is information,
but not all information is discourse.
6
At the close of the nineteenth century, with the
advent of the typewriter and the invention of technologies able to store sound and
moving pictures, media developed specialized functions. This splitting of data streams
transformed literatures place in culture. Writing now becomes technologized, but, just
as importantly, as one media channel among others, its monopoly is lost. The printed
page, newly demoted, emerges anew as a two-dimensional, inscribed surface, generat-
ing meaning through the pure differentiation of typewritten symbols rather than the
transcendent voice of poetry. No longer the
ultimate expression of Romantic inwardness
or spirit, writing becomes visible simply as a
series of mechanical marks on a material page.
The new Edisonian technological dispensation
produces a new kind of literature focused on
the materiality and opacity of signs. In the
words of Stphane Mallarm, one does not
make poetry with ideas, but with words.
7

The middle stage of Kittlers career contin-
ued this broadening of focus. Literature was no
longer his concern so much as technological
media in general. This period produced
the work for which he is best known in the
Anglo-American world, Gramophone, Film,
Typewriter. It appeared in German in 1986, acting as a kind of sequel to his work
on the media turf wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which,
occupying distinct registers and roles, audio, visual and written media have no option
but to cultivate their own specifcity. Writing, post-1900, writes about itself, about what
it can do and other technologies cannot. Cinema, likewise, cultivates its own language,
utilizing illusions and devices, conjuring doppelgngers and manipulating the fow of
time through camera tricks. Kittlers most audacious move, however, is to map these
information channels onto Lacans tripartite structure of psychic registers. Briefy put,
Lacans symbolic order, with its logic of structure and differentiation, is linked to
the typewritten technology of the written word. Film, meanwhile, corresponds to the
Lacanian imaginary realm, so-called because it centres on a misrecognition of the
selfs wholeness, a necessary delusion sustaining the fantasy of a unifed, coherent
subject. And if the self is something of a psychic illusion, it is conjured into being
through the same trickery as flm, which creates wholeness and continuity from the
celluloid reels succession of disjointed still images. The third part of Lacans triad,
the real, Kittler maps onto early sound recording technology, which stored not only
words but also the raw, unfltered noise that cannot be incorporated into any symbolic
system. The circuitry of the human and that of the machine are one and the same, in
other words: we are not sovereign subjects but merely a function of media.
Such juxtapositions of the technological and the psychological illustrate Kittlers
tendency for speculative, if densely argued, feats of theoretical bravura that thrilled
some readers but left others distinctly unconvinced. And in the third and fnal stage
of his intellectual career, covering roughly the last decade or so, he produced some
of his most baffing work. At the time of his death, only two volumes of a planned
tetralogy, Musik und Mathematik, had appeared in German, but it was in this phase
that Kittler fnally turned his attention to a putative Discourse Network 2000, arguing
that previously divergent information channels had now been united in the universal
language of the digital. Distinctions between visual, audio and written data may still
69 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
exist for the purposes of human operatives, but this is only a superfcial concession
to the limitations of our senses and understanding. In reality, technology no longer
speaks our language. Humanity, always incidental to the communications network, is
now out of the loop, as ever more powerful computers trade data with one another.
Such meditations on the present moment were accompanied by yet another bold leap,
but this time back to Ancient Greece. If digital code represented a universal language
able to store and transmit all data, then it also meant that culture had come full circle.
Hellenic notation systems, and the technology of the lyre, had similarly united music,
mathematical numbers and alphabetical language. The widening spiral of Kittlers
career had expanded just about as far as it was possible to go, and perhaps further. Any
project taking in two thousand years of history was open to accusations of hubris, but
there were also criticisms that Kittler had turned his back on the radical implications
of his early work in favour of the comforts of cultural nostalgia. Having distanced
himself increasingly from his poststructuralist starting point, it seemed that in place of
discontinuities and deferral, he embraced notions of plenitude, occidental grand narra-
tives, and a rather questionable vision of Greek cultural purity.
Kittlers career culminated at the Humboldt University in Berlin, where he moved
in 1993, having left Freiburg for a relatively brief six-year stint as Professor of Modern
German Literature in Bochum. Having begun as a student of literature and philology,
he ended as Chair of Media Aesthetics and History, a journey which is indicative of
Kittlers own shifting focus, but also of the rise to prominence of what has come to be
labelled German media theory. If his early arguments had to be routed through the
disciplinary channel of literature, his position in Humboldts cultural studies department
allowed him to range unapologetically across Hendrix, Homer and Heidegger. And in
the transdiscplinary atmosphere that he himself had helped to bring about, Kittler
taught computer programming as well as the humanities, a skill that he insisted was
imperative for students of culture. In these late years at the Humbolt, he even found
himself something of an inspirational fgure. Kittler became cool; the new name to
drop. As the eccentric, white-haired guru of Mediawissenschaft, he was surrounded by
a coterie of artists and young intellectuals. Ironically, for someone who revelled in his
outsider status, he became the centre of a group. Members of this Kittlerjugend, accom-
panying him to conferences and augmenting his papers with outlandishly costumed
performance pieces, provided an element of the perverse and the provocative, which he
enjoyed.
Someone for whom the human and the technological were inextricably linked, Kittler
was kept alive in the end by life-support machines until his fnal command: Alle
Apparate ausschalten. Switch off all apparatuses.
Gill Partington
Notes
1. Matthew Griffn and Suzanne Hermann, Technologies of Writing: Interview with Friedrich A.
Kittler, New Literary History 27, 1996, p. 734.
2. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 1999,
p. xl.
3. Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1880/1900, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 1990,
p. vii.
4. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Kittler and the Media, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2011, p. 4.
5. Kittler, Discourse Networks, p. 369.
6. Friedrich Kittler, A Discourse on Discourse, Stanford Literary Review, vol. 3, no. 1, 1986, p. 157.
7. Kittler, Discourse Networks, p. 184.
70 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
OBITUARY
Politics and subjectivity,
head-to-head
Len Rozitchner, 19242011
W
hen Len Rozitchner passed away on 4 September 2011 after months in the
hospital where he had been battling the complications of a cancer operation,
his long-time friend and the current director of the National Library of
Argentina, Horacio Gonzlez, referred to him as the philosopher the country has had
for the past sixty years. A man of untiring energy and vitalism, he had formed many
generations of younger scholars, intellectuals and activists. And yet, a strange half-
silence surrounded his own writings during much of his lifetime. When I would ask
older friends of mine about their familiarity with the work and thought of this prolifc
philosopher, many of them would recall for me how they learned their Freud from
the old Len, whether at the university or in clandestine seminars during the military
dictatorship, which forced Rozitchner into exile in Venezuela; but, until recently, there
was almost no published discussion of his many books at least a dozen of which have
been published, including two smaller collections of essays and interviews in the last
year.
Len himself did not seem too bothered by this academic silencing of his work. Nor
did he seek out recognition abroad by appealing to the latest fashions of theory from
across the Atlantic. He studied at the Sorbonne with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose
Adventures of the Dialectic and Humanism and Terror he translated into Spanish, and
he wrote a thesis on Max Scheler, later published as Persona y comunidad (Person and
Community) in 1961, but he was scornful of the structuralism of Louis Althusser and
Jacques Lacan. To their theoretical antihumanism and linguistic idealism, he preferred
his own form of sensual, embodied and historical Freudo-Marxism, summed up in the
crucial book Freud y los lmites del individualismo burgus (Freud and the Limits of
Bourgeois Individualism), 1972, based on a detailed reading of Freuds social works
Civilization and Its Discontents and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.
The core of his proposal, which has remained remarkably some would prefer to say
stubbornly consistent over the years, combines a thorough investigation into the roots
of power and subjection in terror, on the one hand, with a wilful retrieval of the collec-
tive potential for rebellion and subjectivation, on the other.
As early as in 1965, in a pivotal text titled La izquierda sin sujeto (The Left
Without a Subject), he argued that, unless it grasped the subject as the locus of politi-
cal transformation, left-wing militancy would be bound to repeat the political failures
and terrorizing excesses that mark its history throughout much of the twentieth century.
Earlier, in Moral burguesa y revolucin (Bourgeois Morality and Revolution), 1963,
he had begun to unravel the logic of bourgeois individualism by offering a discourse
analysis avant la lettre of the hearings of the contras captured by Castros troops after
the Cuban victory against the US-supported invasion in April 1962 at Playa Girn in
71 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
the Bay of Pigs. Many readers and moviegoers will actually be familiar with this last
book and thus with the core of Rozitchners lifelong work, albeit without knowing it.
Sergio, the main character in Toms Gutirrez Aleas masterful flm Memorias del
subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment), 1968, reads long passages from Moral
burguesa y revolucin in didactic voice-overs that accompany documentary footage
from the hearings of the contras, under the subtitle La verdad del grupo est en el
asesino (The truth of the group lies in the assassin).
About the contras, Rozitchner writes in Moral burguesa y revolucin:
Among them, there is no ethical sense, only a personal morality; there is not a single one
who can take charge of his action and extend its meaning so as to reencounter in it the sig-
nifcation of the acts taken on collectively, by including the full materiality in which they are
grounded.
It is no exaggeration to say that the alternative to this pseudodialectic constitutes
the core of Lens lifelong investigations: a search for a historical dialectic in which
subjects collectively take on the full materiality and signifcation of their actions.
Rozitchner thus worked for over ffty years in the domain where questions of
politics and subjectivity come head to head, particularly in the historical contexts
of left-wing populism and guerrilla struggles, right-wing authoritarianism, military
dictator ship, and the transition to democracy. All of his writings contribute to the
unrelenting effort to uncover the hidden recesses in which power is capable of thriv-
ing on the terrorizing fear of, and simultaneous seduction by, the fgure of authority.
However, this is not merely an analytical attempt to locate the origins of power in
the structure of the superego, for instance; rather, such an analysis also marks the onset
of an alternative democratic politics that would be able in a completely different way
to elaborate these profoundly affective and bodily materials with which subjectivity is
constituted. The aim, then, is dialectically to think terror and death, not just as uni-
versal structures beyond history, nor only as moralizing
fgures of evil located outside and at a safe remove
from ones self, but rather as historical appearances and
as subject formations that go to the core of ones very
own being.
Beginning in the 1980s, Rozitchners books gradually
move further back in time, so that the overall chronol-
ogy of his publications follows an order that strangely
inverts the chronology of the historical content that is
their subject matter: from the two-volume investigation
into the theory and politics of Peronism, Pern: Entre la
sangre y el tiempo. Lo inconsciente y la poltica (Pern:
Between Blood and Time. Politics and the Unconscious), 1985, to a long book on Saint
Augustines Confessions, titled La Cosa y la Cruz: Cristianismo y Capitalismo (The
Thing and the Cross: Christianity and Capitalism), 1997. We thus gradually gain access
to a historical longue dure somewhat along the lines of Michel Foucaults sweeping
return from modernity to Ancient Greece, which likewise passes by way of Augustines
Confessions, in his unfnished History of Sexuality.
Read today, many of these writings seem prescient. Rozitchners obsessive inquiries
into the roots of terror, which originally referred to the military dictatorships in South
America, since then have become timely and uncanny investigations into the terror-
izing logic behind the war on terror itself. No great leap of the imagination is required
to move from the books written from exile in Venezuela in the late 1970s and early
1980s, when Argentina was under military rule, to the recent collection titled El terror
y la gracia (Terror and Grace), 2003, which includes Rozitchners comments on the
72 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 2 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 1 2 )
aftermath of the 11 September attacks and on the war in Iraq. But a similar temporal
loop already overdetermines some of the earlier books. Thus, while the investigation
into Peronism was actually initiated well before the military coup of 1976 in Argentina,
its underlying logic regarding the continued presence of war at the heart of politics
as such, presented in a daring juxtaposition of Freud, Marx and Clausewitz, already
anticipates not only the regime of terror under the military junta, but also the illusions
that undergirded the later transition to democracy in Argentina. It is almost as if by a
perverse counterfnality, the more we step back in time to dig up the prior origins of the
power of subjection, the more history catches up with us from behind by turning the
distant past into an ominous premonition of the present.
Finally, it is also worth noting how Rozitchner seems to have devoted most of his
work to critiquing others, be they friendly opponents, useful adversaries, or full-blown
enemies. This is already the case in Moral burguesa y revolucin, if not earlier in
Rozitchners doctoral thesis on Scheler, whose reluctant materialism is shown to be
unable to counter the moralizing idealism of his theory of affects. But the trend to write
as it were from within enemy territory becomes more pronounced in response to what
Rozitchner perceives to be the ill-constructed compound of left-wing Peronism, and it
clearly reaches a pinnacle with the painstaking analysis of Augustines Confessions.
Why would an incredulous Jew want to write, Rozitchner himself asks, about the
Confessions of a Christian saint? Among the various answers, the most audacious one
certainly outdaring Max Webers hypothesis about the ideological affnity between
capitalism and Protestantism holds that capitalism simply would not have been
possible without Christianity: Triumphant capitalism, the quantitative and infnite
accumulation of wealth in the abstract monetary form, would not have been possible
without the human model of religious infnity promoted by Christianity, without the
imaginary and symbolical reorganization operated in subjectivity by the new religion
of the Roman Empire. Augustine is the model of these profound transformations in the
psychic economy. His Confessions, Rozitchner proposes, can be read as a users manual
for subjection and servitude. The complete devalorization of the fesh, of pleasure, and
of the social in general, together with the newly constituted subjects submission to the
rule of law and imperial order, constitute the lasting religious premisses of the political
sphere.
Given his interest in the subjective, bodily and affective roots of thought, I would
be remiss not to talk about Lens personal intensity and generosity. When he came
to Cornell University to participate in a conference on Marx and Marxisms in Latin
America, he was at the age of eighty-three easily the most outspoken and energized
interlocutor. This was the only time that we met in person, but something immediately
clicked between us and we kept exchanging long letters by email in the fnal years of
his life. His last message came just days before he was to undergo surgery, in February
2011. He was still full of optimism and vitality, confdent that he was going to defeat
the disease. Sadly, he would never leave the hospital. Lens last words to me were
meant as a temporary pause, a promise to be continued. Si sigo no llego, he wrote,
referring to his desire to catch up with his wife and young twin daughters, who had
gone on a day trip to the Delta del Tigre: If I continue, I wont get there. But you did
get there, Len, and now you are also here, always, though you will be missed.
Bruno Bosteels
Lon Rozitchner, Exile, War, Democracy: An Exemplary Sequence, appeared in RP 152,
November/December 2008, pp. 4050.