Glossary
| { Autonomy } | { Fictitious Commodity } | { Overaccumulation Crisis } |
| { Creative Destruction } | { Latin American } | { Risk Society } |
| { Culture of Capital } | { Consensus } | { Subjective Cartography } |
| { Dialogicity } | { Military-Economic Bifurcation } | { Unintended Social Order } |
| { Double Movement } | { Neoconservative Morality } | { Zombie Category } |
| { East Asian Network } | { Neoliberal Governmentality } | |
| { Extradisciplinary Investigation } | { Non-State Public Sphere } |
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Autonomy
As a germ, autonomy emerges when explicit and unlimited interrogation
explodes on the scene – an interrogation that has bearing
not on the “facts” but on the social imaginary significations
and their possible grounding. This is a moment of creation, and
it ushers in a new type of society and a new type of individuals.
I am speaking intentionally of germ, for autonomy, social as well
as individual, is a project. The rise of unlimited interrogation
creates a new social-historical eidos: reflectiveness in the full
sense, self-reflectiveness, as well as the individual and the
institutions which embody it. The questions raised are, on the
social level: Are our laws good? Are they just? Which laws ought
we to make? And, on the individual level: Is what I think true?
Can I know if it is true – and if so, how?...
Autonomy comes from autos-nomos: (to give to) oneself one's laws...
Autonomy does not consist in acting according to a law discovered
in an immutable reason and discovered once and for all. It is
the unlimited self-questioning about the law and its foundations
and the capacity, in light of this interrogation, to make, to
do, and to institute (and therefore also, to say). Autonomy is
the reflective capacity of a reason creating itself in an endless
movement, both as individual and social reason...
If the autonomous society is that society which self-institutes
itself explicitly and lucidly, the one that knows that it itself
posits its institutions and its significations, this means that
it knows as well that they have no source other than its own instituting
and signification-giving activity, no extrasocial guarantee. We
thereby encounter once again the radical problem of democracy.
Democracy, when it is true democracy, is the regime that explicitly
renounces all ultimate guarantees and knows no limitations other
than its self-limitation...
This amounts to saying that democracy is the only tragic political
regime – it is the only regime that takes risks, that faces
openly the possibility of its self-destruction.
Cornelius Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy”
and “The Logic of Magmas and the Question of Autonomy,”
both in The Castoriadis Reader (Oxford UP, 1991), pp. 163-63 and
316.
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Creative Destruction
Marx emphasizes how a persistent and generalized fall in the rate
of profit transforms inter-capitalist competition from a positive-sum
game – in which capitals benefit from one another’s
expansion – into a zero-sum (or even a negative-sum) game
– that is, into “cutthroat competition”... The
fall in the rate of profit and the intensification of the competitive
struggle, however, do not end in a stationary state. On the contrary,
they lead to the destruction of the social framework in which
accumulation is embedded and to the creation of a new one. In
Marx’s account, this creative destruction takes three main
forms: an increase in the size of capitals and the reorganization
of business enterprise; the formation of surplus population and
a new international division of labor; and the emergence of new
and larger centers of capital accumulation...
Marx draws a distinction between concentration of capital –
the increase in size of individual capitals arising from accumulation
– and centralization of capital, which transforms “many
small into few large capitals”... The centralization and
reorganization of capital go hand in hand with the formation of
a reserve army of labor and a reorganization of the international
division of labor. The extension and speed-up of technological
and organizational change strengthens the capital-intensive and
labor-saving bias of capitalist development, generating a “relatively
redundant population of laborers”... This surplus population
is then available for new rounds of capitalist development on
an ever increasing scale...
Schumpeter’s analysis of capitalism’s creative destruction
covers only a small part of Marx’s ground but has the advantage
of highlighting key insights... He divides the incessant working
of the process of creative destruction into two phases: the phase
of revolution proper and the phase of absorption of the results
of the revolution: “While these things are being initiated
we have brisk expenditure and predominating ‘prosperity’...
and while they are being completed and their results pour forth
we have the elimination of antiquated elements of the industrial
structure and predominating ‘depression.’” In
Schumpeter’s representation, profit-oriented innovations
(and their impact on competitive pressures) cluster in time. However,
it is just as plausible to hypothesize that they also cluster
in space. We can then substitute “where” for “while”
in the above quotation and read it as a description of a spatial
polarization of zones of predominating “prosperity”
and zones of predominating “depression.”
Schumpeter’s conception of creative destruction has the
further advantage of defining the innovations that underlie the
process very broadly, as “the carrying out of new combinations.”
These include, not just technological and organizational innovations
in industry, but all commercial innovations – such as the
opening up of a new market, a new trading route, a new source
of supply, the marketing of a new product, or the introduction
of a new organization in the procurement and distribution of merchandise
– which succeed in “leading” the economy into
new channels. Shumpeter calls the agents of this leadership “entrepreneurs”
– individuals who may or may not be “capitalists,”
in the sense of having substantial command over means of production
and payment, but who have the capacity to detect and seize the
opportunities for excess profits that can be reaped through a
rerouting of the established flow of economic life.
Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st
Century (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 82-88.
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Culture of Capital
The first culture of capitalism is the one that everyone knows
about. It developed in the secular culture of the Renaissance,
used the visual forms and literary narratives of antiquity as
its raw material, and had naturalistic illusionism as its goal.
If it tended to swing between the poles of neo-classicism and
anecdotal realism, that was also the source of its enduring strength.
It survived not just the transition to industrial capitalism,
but also the convulsive politics of industrialism in nineteenth
and early twentieth-century Europe. This last claim needs some
justification, for this is the point at which the first culture
is often said to have broken down. But the period from 1850 to
1950 conforms, in significant respects, to the pre-existing pattern:
nineteenth-century realism was the last, and perhaps also the
fullest expression of the classical aesthetic of mimesis; the
first half of the twentieth century saw the final flourishing
of the classical style...
The second culture of capitalism is equally familiar, but not
everyone thinks it is a civilization. Before the 1970s it was
called mass culture or kitsch; since then it has been known, misleadingly,
as postmodernism. It can be argued that the continuity between
kitsch and postmodernism is such that they constitute a single
culture; and that this culture replaced not, as the word ‘postmodernism’
implies, modernism, but classicism. The differences between the
first and second cultures of capitalism might be enumerated as
follows: 1) the shift from mimesis to the meme; from the imitation
of the world to the reproduction of the unit of reproduction –
or, to put it another way, from iconocity to indexicality; and,
following from this, 2) the acceptance of stylistic eclecticism
(classical models enjoyed their unique prestige on account of
their supposed naturalism, their occasional use as ornament in
architectural postmodernism was deeply anti-classical), 3) the
reliance on large numbers of consumers to distribute/create the
product, and 4) the erasure of the social rather than the technical
traces of facture.
The preconditions of commodity culture (as I shall call it) were
the expansion of the market and the development of new media.
What poetry and painting were for classical culture, the periodical,
the photograph and their progeny (film, radio, TV, video, other
electronic media) were for the culture of commodities. The sources
of commodity culture were various: sometimes (as with popular
music) drawing almost exclusively on folk traditions; at others
using the classical, sometimes viewed through the prism of modernism.
The so-called postmodern era has been characterized not by any
fundamental change in commodity culture, but by its colonization
of the institutions and media of classicism...
By simultaneously resisting and mediating the two cultures modernism
created a space between them, a distinct zone where their transgressive
intermingling did not instantly compromise their separation. This
liminal space facilitated the long overlap between the two cultures;
it was also the route through which one culture turned into the
other. If the space of modernism is the space between the cultures
of capitalism, and the time of modernism is that of their overlapping,
the trajectory of modernism is that which leads from the first
to the second. We can picture this trajectory as a double fold.
Modernism begins where classicism turns back on itself, and ends
where it turns back into commodity culture.
Malcom Bull, “Between the Cultures of Capital,” New
Left Review 11, 2001, pp. 98-103.
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Dialogicity
The word in the dialogical relation as understood by Bakhtin is
never a neutral word of the language, devoid of intentions, uninhabited
by the voices of others. The speaker first receives the speech
of others (starting from the voice of the mother), with all its
intonations, its emotional affirmations. My own expressiveness
finds every word already inhabited by the expressiveness of the
other. To speak is to enter into a dialogical relation with the
words of others, not initially with the meaning of the words,
but with the expressions, the intonations and the voices. Speaking
means appropriating the speech of the other. Speaking, as Bakhtin
says, is like opening a path through the word itself, which is
a multiplicity full of the voices, the intonations, the desires
of others.
To whom does the word belong? To me, to others, to no one? Can
I be the owner of a common good, like the word, in the same way
as I can be the owner of an object?
“A word (or in general any sign) is interindividual. Everything
that is said, expressed, is located outside the soul of the speaker
and does not belong only to him. The word cannot be assigned to
a single speaker. The author (speaker) has his own inalienable
right to the word, but the listener has his rights, and those
whose voices are heard in the word before the author comes upon
it also have their rights” (Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres
and Other Late Essays, pp. 121-22).
Rimbaud’s formula, Je est un autre, should be understood
as being present first of all in the words that constitute the
tissue of our subjectivity. In my own words resound all the voices
that have appropriated those words throughout history, but also
all the future voices that will take them up again. The other
is not only present in the already uttered word, but is an immanent
and constituent element of every utterance still to come. For
Bakhtin, the other and her words are possible worlds: consequently,
the relation with the words of others is always the event of an
encounter, and not a simple (linguistic) exchange or a (intersubjective)
recognition...
The event created and managed by the TV or the media doesn’t
open up any possibility, but constitutes the departure-point for
an authoritarian production of meaning. It tries to form a subject
of enunciation on which all statements will depend; to construct
a point of origin for the slogans that will constitute a consensual,
majority public. This departure-point or origin of meaning is
“performed” by exploiting and neutralizing the creative
functions which, in film, radio, television and the net, no longer
necessarily involve an author (and his copyrights). These creative
functions are recodified onto the individual subject and his modes
of communication and expression: “At the very moment when
writing and thinking were beginning to abandon the authorial function,
it was taken up again by radio, TV and journalism” (Gilles
Deleuze).
The power of financial centralization and the technological monopoly
imposed on the articulations of expression serve to recreate the
authorial function as a point of departure or origin for marketing,
news, advertising, viewing publics, etc. The control societies
integrate and channel the power to express and constitute multiplicity
by separating it from its own capacity to create and propagate
possibilities. This is the form that capitalist expropriation
takes today.
Maurizio Lazzarato, “Expression versus communication,”
Les révolutions du capitalisme (Paris: Les empêcheurs
de penser en rond, 2004), pp. 159-60, 174-75.
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Double
Movement
For a century the dynamics of modern society was governed by a
double movement: the market expanded continuously but this movement
was met by a countermovement checking the expansion in definite
directions. Vital though such a countermovement was for the protection
of society, in the last analysis it was incompatible with the
self-regulation of the market, and thus with the market system
itself.
That system developed in leaps and bounds; it engulfed space and
time, and by creating bank money it produced a dynamic hitherto
unknown. By the time it reached its maximum extent, around 1914,
every part of the globe, all its inhabitants and yet unborn generations,
physical persons as well as huge fictitious bodies called corporations,
were comprised in it. A new way of life spread over the planet
with a claim to universality unparalleled since the age when Christianity
started out on its career, only this time the movement was on
a purely material level.
Yet simultaneously a countermovement was on foot. This was more
than the usual defensive behavior of society faced with change;
it was a reaction against a dislocation which attacked the fabric
of society, and which would have destroyed the very organization
of production that the market had called into being...
[The double movement] can be personified as the action of two
organizing principles in society, each of them setting itself
specific institutional aims, having the support of definite social
forces and using its own distinctive methods. The one was the
principle of economic liberalism, aiming at the establishment
of a self-regulating market, relying on the support of the trading
classes, and using largely laissez-faire and free trade as its
methods; the other was the principle of social protection aiming
at the conservation of man and nature as well as productive organization,
relying on the varying support of those most immediately affected
by the deleterious action of the market – primarily, but
not exclusively, the working and the landed classes – and
using protective legislation, restrictive association, and other
instruments of intervention as its methods.
The middle [or trading] classes were the bearers of the nascent
market economy; their business interests ran, on the whole, parallel
to the general interest in regard to production and employment...
On the other hand, the trading classes had no organ to sense the
dangers involved in the exploitation of the physical strength
of the worker, the destruction of family life, the devastation
of neighborhoods, the denudation of forests, the pollution of
rivers, the deterioration of craft standards, the disruption of
folkways, and the general degradation of existence including housing
and arts, as well as the innumerable forms of private and public
life that do not affect profits.
By the turn of the nineteenth century – universal suffrage
was now fairly general – the working class was an influential
factor in the state; the trading classes, on the other hand, whose
sway over the legislature was no longer unchallenged, became conscious
of the political power involved in their leadership over industry.
This peculiar localization of influence and power caused no trouble
as long as the market system continued to function without great
stress and strain; but when, for inherent reasons, this was no
longer the case, and when tensions between the social classes
developed, society itself was endangered by the fact that the
contending parties were making government and business, state
and industry, respectively, their strongholds. Two vital functions
of society, the political and the economic, were being used and
abused as weapons in a struggle for sectional interests. It was
out of such a perilous deadlock that in the twentieth century
the fascist crisis sprang.
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon, 1945/2001),
chapter 11, “Man Nature and Productive Organization.”
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East Asian Network
Historically, there existed several maritime regions that stretched
from Northeast Asia to East Asia and then from Southeast Asia
to Oceania... This series of seas... includes the seas of Okhotsk
and Japan, the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea, the South China
Sea, the Java Sea, the Banda Sea, the Arafura Sea just north of
Australia, the Coral Sea and the Tasman Sea between southeast
Australia and New Zealand. Maritime Asia is far larger, at least
as complex, and much more diverse than the Mediterranean. The
landmasses separating the seas are thus separated from one another
and have their own histories. The states, regions, and cities
located along the periphery of each sea zone are close enough
to influence one another but too far apart to be assimilated into
a larger entity. Autonomy in this sense formed a major condition
for the establishment of the looser form of political organization
known as the tributary system.
Takeshi Hamashita, “The Intra-Regional System in East Asia,”
in P. Ketzenstein and T. Shiraishi, eds., Network Power: Japan
and Asia (Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1997), p. 115.
In general, informal cooperation in East Asia has been based on
three yuan (special relationships): ethnic ties, industrial linkages
and geographical proximity. All three types of informal integration
share several features. They are all 1) Market driven. Whatever
the linkages are, it is the economic returns that ultimately lead
to the formation of the informal integration. Other factors only
facilitate the integration. This is different from formal integration,
where many decisions are politics-driven. 2) Privately sponsored.
In all cases of informal integration, the actual integrative activities
have been conducted by private firms. 3) Network based. East Asia
is a region where intergovernmental cooperation has been lacking.
But privately, all kinds of networks have developed among Asians
in different countries. At the macrolevel, there are production
networks and ethnic business networks. At the micro-level, these
two major networks consist of numerous networks formed through
long-term corporate ties, (real or imaginary) kinship, voluntary
organizations, etc. 4) Non-institutional. Integration through
the informal mechanisms does not rely on formal international
organizations. In many cases it is even non-contractual. Therefore
informal integration involves much lower transaction costs than
formal cooperation and is much easier to materialize.
Dajin Peng, "The changing nature of East Asia as an economic
region," Pacific Affairs, Summer 2000.
China is the world’s second largest importer of oil, over
half of which transits through the Straits of Malacca. China also
currently consumes half of the world’s cement, a third of
its steel, a quarter of its copper and a fifth of its aluminum
– much of it traveling through chokepoints in the Straits
of Malacca, Sunda, Lombok and Makassar. These geopolitical concerns,
combined with China’s insatiable appetite for energy and
natural resources, have made it inevitable that China, in its
own way, should pick up where the United States left off. Just
as regional economic forums that include the US, such as the Asia-Pacific
Economic Forum (APEC), are losing steam, ASEAN-plus-3 [the Association
of South-East Asian Nations, plus China, Japan and South Korea]
has picked up momentum, and it is the latter that is calling important
– and effective – economic shots for the region. And
it is not at all unrealistic to anticipate the formation of the
ASEAN-China Free Trade Area (ACFTA) in the near future. China
is also gearing up to create a new security forum within the overall
structure of the Asian Regional Forum (ARF), as an alternative
to the series of bilateral security arrangements that the United
States maintains.
Meredith Jung-En Woo, “The New East Asia,” in New
Left Review 47, 2007.
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Extradisciplinary
Investigation
What is the logic, the need or the desire that pushes more and
more artists to work outside the limits of their own discipline?
Pop art, conceptual art, body art, performance and video each
marked a rupture of the disciplinary frame. But these dramatized
outbursts merely imported themes, media or expressive techniques
back into what Yves Klein had termed the “specialized”
ambiance of the gallery or the museum. Now we are confronted with
a new series of outbursts, under such names as net.art, bio art,
visual geography, space art and database art – to which
one could add an archi-art, or art of architecture, as well as
a machine art that reaches all the way back to 1920s constructivism.
The heterogeneous character of the list suggests its application
to all the domains where theory and practice meet. In the artistic
forms that result, one still finds remains of the old modernist
tropism whereby art designates itself first of all, drawing the
attention back to its own operations of expression, representation,
metaphorization or deconstruction. But there is something more
at stake: a new tropism and a new sort of reflexivity, involving
artists as well as theorists and activists in a passage beyond
the limits traditionally assigned to their practice. The word
tropism conveys the desire or need to turn towards something else,
towards an exterior field or discipline; while the notion of reflexivity
now indicates a critical return to the departure point, an attempt
to transform the initial discipline, to end its isolation, to
open up new possibilities of expression, analysis, cooperation
and commitment. This back-and-forth movement, or rather, this
transformative spiral, is the operative principle of extradisciplinary
investigations.
The extradisciplinary ambition is to carry out rigorous investigations
on terrains as far away from art as finance, biotech, geography,
urbanism, psychiatry, the electromagnetic spectrum, etc., to bring
forth on those terrains the “free play of the faculties”
and the intersubjective experimentation that are characteristic
of modern art, but also to try to identify, inside those same
domains, the spectacular or instrumental uses so often made of
the subversive liberty of aesthetic play. This complex movement,
which never neglects the existence of the different disciplines,
but never lets itself be trapped by them either, can provide a
new departure point for what used to be called institutional critique.
The notion of transversality, developed by the practitioners of
institutional analysis, helps to theorize the assemblages that
link actors and resources from the art circuit to projects and
experiments that don’t exhaust themselves inside it, but
rather, extend elsewhere. These projects are based on a circulation
between disciplines, often involving the real critical reserve
of marginal or counter-cultural positions: social movements, political
associations, squats, autonomous universities.
Brian Holmes, “Extradisciplinary Investigations” (2007),
in Transversal, “Do you remember institutional critique?”
(http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0106/holmes/en).
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Fictitious Commodity
A fictitious commodity is something that has the form of a commodity
(in other words, that can be bought and sold) but is not itself
created in a profit-oriented labor process subject to the typical
competitive pressures of market forces to rationalize its production
and reduce the turnover time of invested capital. There are four
key categories of fictitious commodity: land (or nature), money,
knowledge and labor-power. Each is often treated as a simple factor
of production, obscuring the conditions under which it enters
the market economy, gets transformed therein, and so contributes
to the production of goods and services for sale.
Land comprises all natural endowments (whether located on, beneath
or above the earth’s surface) and their productive capacities
in specific contexts. The current form of such natural endowments
typically reflects the past and present social transformation
of nature as well as natural developments that occur without human
intervention. Virgin land and analogous resources are not produced
as commodities by capitalist enterprises but are appropriated
as gifts of nature and then transformed for profit – often
without due regard to their specific reproduction cycles, overall
renewability, or, in the case of land, water and air, their capacities
to absorb waste and pollution. Money is a unit of account, store
of value, means of payment (for example, taxes, tithes and fines),
and a medium of economic exchange. Regardless of whether it has
a natural form (for example, cowrie shells), a commodity form
(for example, precious metals) or a fiduciary form (for example,
paper notes, electronic money), the monetary system in which such
monies circulate is not (and could not be) a purely economic phenomenon
that is produced and operated solely for profit. For money’s
ability to perform its economic functions depends critically on
extra-economic institutions, sanctions and personal and impersonal
trust. Insofar as money circulates as national money, the state
has a key role in securing a formally rational monetary system;
conversely, its increasing circulation as stateless money poses
serious problems regarding the regulation of monetary relations.
Knowledge is a collectively produced common resource based on
individual, organizational and collective learning over different
time horizons and in varied contexts – non-commercial as
well as commercial. Since knowledge is not inherently scarce (in
orthodox economic terms, it is a non-rival good), it only gains
a commodity form insofar as it is made artificially scarce and
access thereto is made to depend on payment (in the form of royalties,
license fees, etc.). Thus a profound social reorganization is
required to transform knowledge into something that can be sold.
Finally, the ability to work is a generic human capacity. It gains
a commodity form only insofar as workers can be induced or coerced
to enter labor markets as waged labor. Moreover, even when it
has acquired a commodity form, labor-power is reproduced through
non-market as well as market institutions and social relations.
Bob Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State (Cambridge: Polity,
2002), pp. 13-14.
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Latin American Consensus
Over the course of the past seven years, Latin America has seen
the rebirth of nationalist and socialist political movements.
Following Hugo Chávez’s 1998 landslide victory in
Venezuela, one country after another has turned left. Today, roughly
300 million of Latin America’s 520 million citizens live
under governments that either want to reform the Washington Consensus
– a euphemism for the mix of punishing fiscal austerity,
privatization and market liberalization that has produced staggering
levels of poverty and inequality over the past three decades –
or abolish it altogether and create a new, more equitable global
economy... Anchored by Brazil’s enormous market and advanced
agricultural, pharmaceutical, heavy equipment, steel and aeronautical
sectors, the countries of South America have taken a number of
steps to diversify the hemisphere’s economy. They courted
non-US trade and investment, particularly from Asia. Fueled by
a consuming thirst for Latin America’s raw materials –
its oil, ore and soybeans – the Chinese government has negotiated
more than 400 investment and trade deals with Latin America over
the past few years, investing more than $50 billion in the region.
China is both Brazil’s and Argentina’s fourth-largest
trading partner, providing $7 billion for port and railroad modernization
and signing $20 billion worth of commercial agreements. South
American leaders have also sought to deepen regional economic
integration, primarily by expanding the Mercosur – South
America’s most important commercial alliance – and
embarking on an ambitious road-building project. In December [2005]
Lula claimed that Brazil’s trade with the rest of Latin
America grew by nearly 90 percent since the previous year, compared
with a 20 percent increase with the United States... Last December
Venezuela joined Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay as a
full member in Mercosur. At the same meeting where it approved
Venezuela’s petition for admission, Mercosur established
a Parliament modeled on the European Union, agreeing to cooperate
on a range of issues, including multilateral trade agreements
with countries like China.
One sign that economic diversification is gaining force was the
success in 2005 of then Argentine President Néstor Kirchner’s
take-it-or-leave-it offer of 30 cents on every dollar owed on
its $100 billion external debt, to be paid in long-term, low-interest
bonds. In the past, financial markets would have severely punished
such insolence, but with Asian investment pouring in and the economy
rebounding at a steady clip, a majority of lenders had no choice
but to make the deal.
Greg Grandin, “Latin America’s New Consensus,”
www.thenation.com/doc/20060501/grandin.
In 2005, 80% of IMF’s $81 billion loan portfolio was to
Latin America. Today, it’s 1% with nearly all its $17 billion
in outstanding loans to Turkey and Pakistan. The World Bank is
also being rejected. Venezuela had already paid off its IMF and
World Bank debt ahead of schedule when Hugo Chavez symbolically
announced on April 30: “We will no longer have to go to
Washington nor to the IMF nor to the World Bank, not to anyone.”
Ecuador’s Raphael Correa is following suit. He cleared his
country’s IMF debt, suspended World Bank loans, accused
the WB of trying to extort money from him when he was economy
and finance minister in 2005, and last April declared the Bank’s
country representative persona non grata in an extraordinary diplomatic
slap in the face... The Banco del Sur will replace these repressive
institutions with $7 billion in startup capital when it begins
operating in 2008. It will be under “a new financial architecture”
for regional investment with the finance ministers of each member
nation sitting on the bank’s administrative council with
equal authority over its operations as things now stand. Venezuelan
Finance Minister Rodrigo Cabeza stressed “The idea is to
rely on a development agency for us, led by us” to finance
public and private development and regional integration projects.
“There will not be credit subjected to economic policies.
There will not be credit that produces a calamity for our people
and as a result, it will not be a tool of domination” like
the international lending agencies.
Stephen Lendman, “The Bank of the South,” www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=14164.
The ALBA (Alternativa Bolivariana para las Américas) is
a proposed alternative to the U.S.-sponsored Free Trade Area of
the Americas (FTAA), differing from the latter in that it advocates
a socially-oriented trade block rather than one strictly based
on the logic of deregulated profit maximization…. One of
the obstacles to confront is the deep disparity that exists in
development between the countries of the hemisphere, whereby poor
countries such as Haiti or Bolivia are compelled to compete with
the world’s leading economic power. In order to help overcome
trade disadvantages, ALBA pushes for solidarity with the economically
weakest countries, with the aim of achieving a free trade area
in which all of its members benefit.
Teresa Arreaza, “ALBA,” www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/339.
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Military-Economic
Bifurcation
In
the century following the defeat of China in the first Opium War
[1839-42], the eclipse of East Asia turned into what Ken Pomeranz
has called “The Great Divergence.” The political and
economic fortunes of two world regions up until then characterized
by similar living standards diverged sharply, Europe rapidly ascending
to the zenith of its power and East Asia just as rapidly descending
to its nadir... The situation appeared to be changing in the late
1960s and early 1970s, when the mighty US military apparatus failed
to coerce the Vietnamese people into a permanent scission along
the Cold War divide... The economic conjuncture also seemed to
favor the countries that had come to constitute the Third World.
Their natural resources were in great demand, and so were their
abundant and cheap labor supplies. Capital flows from First (and
Second) World countries experienced a major expansion; the rapid
industrialization of Third World countries was undermining the
previous concentration of manufacturing activities in First (and
Second) World countries; and Third World countries had united
across ideological divides to demand a New International Economic
Order...
In the 1980s, a US-driven escalation of competition in world financial
markets had suddenly dried up the supply of funds to the Third
and Second World countries and provoked a major contraction of
world demand for their products. Terms of trade had swung back
in favor of the First World... The Soviet empire disintegrated.
Instead of having the two superpowers to play off each other,
Third World countries now had to compete with the former Second
World countries in gaining access to the markets and resources
of the First World. At the same time, the United States and its
European allies seized the opportunity created by the collapse
of the USSR to claim with some success a global “monopoly”
of the legitimate use of violence... Nonetheless the backlash
had not re-established power relations to their pre-1970 condition.
For the waning of Soviet power had been accompanied by the waxing
of what Bruce Cummings dubbed the “capitalist archipelago”
of East Asia... The collective economic power of the archipelago
as new “workshop” and “cash box” of the
world was forcing the traditional centers of capitalist power
– Western Europe and North America – to restructure
and reorganize their own industries, their own economies, and
their own ways of life. A bifurcation of this kind between military
and economic power, I argued [in the early 1990s], had no precedent
in the annals of capitalist history and could develop in three
quite different directions. The United States and its European
allies might have attempted to use their military superiority
to extract a “protection payment” from the emerging
capitalist centers of East Asia. If the attempt succeeded, the
first truly global empire in world history might have come into
existence. If no such attempt was made, over time East Asia might
have become the center of world-market society... But it was also
possible that the bifurcation would result in endless worldwide
chaos...
Trends and events have changed radically the probability that
each of these outcomes will actually materialize. Worldwide violence
has escalated further and the Bush administration’s embrace
of the Project for a New American Century in response to the events
of September 11, 2001 was, in key respects, an attempt to bring
into existence the first truly global empire in world history.
The abysmal failure of the Project on the Iraqi testing-ground
has not eliminated but nonetheless greatly reduced the chances
that a Western-centered global empire will ever materialize. The
chances of endless worldwide chaos have probably increased. At
the same time, the probability that we will witness the formation
of an East-Asian-centered world-market society has also increased.
The brighter prospects of this outcome are in part due to the
disastrous implications for US world power of the Iraqi adventure.
For the most part, however, they are due to China’s spectacular
economic advance since the early 1990s.
Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st
Century (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 5-8.
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Neoconservative
Morality
One of the keystones of modern economic thought is that it is
impossible to have an a priori knowledge of what constitutes happiness
for other people; that such knowledge is incorporated in an individual’s
“utility schedules”; and this knowledge, in turn,
is revealed by the choices the individual makes in a free market...
What we are witnessing in Western society today [with the American
New Left in the 1960s] are the beginnings of a counterrevolution
against this conception of man and society. It is a shamefaced
counterrevolution, full of bad faith and paltry sophistry, because
it feels compelled to define itself as some kind of progressive
extension of modernity instead of what it so clearly is, a reactionary
revulsion against modernity...
Certainly, one of the key problematic aspects of bourgeois-liberal
society has long been known and announced. This is the fact that
liberal society is of necessity a secular society, one in which
religion is mainly a private affair... Liberal civilization finds
itself having spiritually expropriated the masses of its citizenry,
whose demands for material compensation gradually become as infinite
as the infinity they have lost... For well over a hundred and
fifty years now, social critics have been warning us that bourgeois
society was living off the accumulated moral capital of traditional
religion and traditional moral philosophy, and that once this
capital was depleted, bourgeois society would find its legitimacy
ever more questionable... It is becoming clear that religion,
and a moral philosophy associated with religion, is far more important
politically than the philosophy of liberal individualism admits...
The enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism
as nihilism...
When [the neoliberal economist] Hayek criticizes “scientism,”
he does indeed write very much like a Burkean Whig, with a great
emphasis on the superior wisdom inherent in tradition... But when
he turns to a direct contemplation of present-day society, he
too has to fall back on a faith in the ultimate benefits of “self-realization”...
And what if the “self” that is “realized”
under the conditions of liberal capitalism is a self that despises
liberal capitalism, and uses its liberty to subvert and abolish
a free society?... This is the question we now confront, as our
society relentlessly breeds more and more such selves, whose private
vices in no way provide benefits to a bourgeois order. Perhaps
one can say that the secular, “libertarian” tradition
of capitalism – as distinct from the Protestant-bourgeois
tradition – simply had too limited an imagination when it
came to vice... It could never really believe that self-destructive
nihilism was an authentic and permanent possibility that any society
had to guard against... It could demonstrate that the Marxist
vision was utopian; but it could not demonstrate that the utopian
vision of Fourier – the true ancestor of our New Left –
was wrong.
What medicine does one prescribe for a social order that is sick
because it has lost its soul? Our learned doctors, the social
scientists, look askance at this kind of “imaginary”
illness, which has dramatic physical symptoms but no apparent
physical cause. Some, on what we conventionally call the “right,”
cannot resist the temptation to conclude that the patient is actually
in robust health, and that only his symptoms are sick. Others,
on what we conventionally call the “left,” declare
that the patient is indeed sick unto the death and assert that
it is his symptoms which are the causes of his malady. Such confusion,
of course, is exactly what one would expect when both patient
and doctors are suffering from the same mysterious disease.
Irving Kristol, “Capitalism, Socialism, and Nihilism”
(1973), in Neoconservatism, The Autobiography of an Idea (Chicago:
Elephant Paperbacks, 1995), pp. 92-105.
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Neoliberal Governmentality
In ordinary parlance, neoliberalism refers to the repudiation
of Keynesian welfare state economics and the ascendance of the
Chicago School of political economy – von Hayek, Friedman,
et al. In popular usage, neoliberalism is equated with a radically
free market: maximized competition and free trade achieved through
economic deregulation, elimination of tariffs, and a range of
monetary and social policies favorable to business and indifferent
toward poverty, social deracination, cultural decimation, long
term resource depletion and environmental destruction.... While
these referents capture an important effect of neoliberalism,
they also reduce neoliberalism to a bundle of economic policies
with inadvertent political and social consequences: they eschew
the political rationality that both organizes these policies and
reaches beyond the market... This rationality is emerging as governmentality
– a mode of governance encompassing but not limited to the
state, and one which produces subjects, forms of citizenship and
behavior, and a new organization of the social... One of the more
incisive accounts of neo-liberal political rationality comes from
Michel Foucault’s 1978 and 1979 College de France lectures,
still untranscribed and unpublished. Thanks to German sociologist
Thomas Lemke, we have an excellent summary and interpretation
of Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism.
The political sphere, along with every other dimension of contemporary
existence, is submitted to an economic rationality, or put the
other way around, not only is the human being configured exhaustively
as homo oeconomicus, all dimensions of human life are cast in
terms of a market rationality. While this entails submitting every
action and policy to considerations of profitability, equally
important is the production of all human and institutional action
as rational entrepreneurial action, conducted according to a calculus
of utility, benefit, or satisfaction against a micro-economic
grid of scarcity, supply and demand, and moral value-neutrality.
Neoliberalism does not simply assume that all aspects of social,
cultural and political life can be reduced to such a calculus,
rather it develops institutional practices and rewards for enacting
this vision. That is, through discourse and policy promulgating
its criteria, neoliberalism produces rational actors and imposes
market rationale for decision-making in all spheres...
Liberal democracy cannot be submitted to neoliberal political
governmentality and survive. There is nothing in liberal democracy's
basic institutions or values – from free elections, representative
democracy, and individual liberties equally distributed, to modest
power-sharing or even more substantive political participation
– that inherently meets the test of serving economic competitiveness
or inherently withstands a cost-benefit analysis. And it is liberal
democracy that is going under in the present moment, even as the
flag of American “democracy” is being planted everywhere
it finds or creates soft ground.
Wendy Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,”
Theory & Event 7/1, 2003.
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Non-State Public
Sphere
In “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,”
Marx analyzes intellectual labor and distinguishes two principal
kinds. On the one hand, there is the immaterial activity that
has as its result “commodities which exist separately from
the producer..., e.g. books, paintings and all products of art
as distinct from the artistic achievement of the practising artist.”
On the other hand, Marx defines those activities in which “the
product is not separable from the act of producing” –
in other words, activities that find their fulfillment in themselves,
without being objectivized in a finished work existing outside
and beyond them. The second kind of intellectual labor may be
exemplified by “performing artists,” such as pianists
or dancers, but also includes more generally various kinds of
people whose work involves a virtuoso performance, such as orators,
teachers, doctors, and priests. In short, this second kind of
intellectual labor refers to a wide cross section of human society,
ranging from Glenn Gould to the impeccable butler of the classic
English novel.
The activities in which “the product is not separable from
the act of producing” have a mercurial and ambiguous status
that is not always and not completely grasped by the critique
of political economy. The reason for the difficulty is simple.
Well before becoming swallowed up within capitalist production,
virtuosity was the architrave of ethics and politics. Furthermore,
it was what qualified Action, as distinct from (and in fact opposed
to) Work. Aristotle writes that the aim of production is different
from production itself, whereas the aim of action could not be,
inasmuch as virtuous conduct is an end in itself.
Within post-Fordist organization of production, activity-without-a-finished-work
moves from being a special and problematic case to becoming the
prototype of waged labor in general. When labor carries out tasks
of overseeing and coordination, in other words when it “steps
to the side of the production process instead of being its chief
actor,” its function consists no longer in the carrying
out of a single particular objective, but in the modulation (as
well as the variation and intensification) of social cooperation,
in other words, that ensemble of relations and systemic connections
that as of now are “the great foundation-stone of production
and of wealth.” This modulation takes place through linguistic
services that, far from giving rise to a final product, exhaust
themselves in the communicative interaction that their own “performance”
brings about.
Post-Fordist activity presupposes and, at the same time, unceasingly
re-creates the “public realm” (the space of cooperation,
precisely) that Arendt describes as the indispensable prerequisite
of both the dancer and the politician. The “presence of
others” is both the instrument and the object of labor;
therefore, the processes of production always require a certain
degree of virtuosity, or, to put it another way, they involve
what are really political actions. Mass intellectuality is called
upon to exercise the art of the possible, to deal with the unforeseen,
to profit from opportunities. Now that the slogan of labor that
produces surplus value has become, sarcastically, “politics
first,” politics in the narrow sense of the term becomes
discredited or paralyzed.
The key to political action (or rather the only possibility of
extracting it from its present state of paralysis) consists in
developing the publicness of Intellect outside of Work, and in
opposition to it. The issue here has two distinct profiles, which
are, however, strictly complementary. On the one hand, general
intellect can only affirm itself as an autonomous public sphere,
thus avoiding the “transfer” of its own potential
into the absolute power of Administration, if it cuts the linkage
that binds it to the production of commodities and wage labor.
On the other hand, the subversion of capitalist relations of production
henceforth develops only with the institution of a non-State public
sphere, a political community that has as its hinge general intellect.
The salient characteristics of the post-Fordist experience (servile
virtuosity, the valorization even of the faculty of language,
the necessary relation with the “presence of others,”
and so forth) postulate as a conflictual response nothing less
than a radically new form of democracy.
Paolo Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory
of Exodus,” in Radical Thought in Italy (Minneapolis: U.
of Minnesota Press, 1996); http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/000941.php.
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Overaccumulation
Crisis
Overaccumulation within a given territorial system means a condition
of surpluses of labor (rising unemployment) and surpluses of capital
(registered as a glut of commodities on the market that cannot
be disposed of without a loss, as idle productive capacity and/or
as surpluses of money capital lacking outlets for productive and
profitable investment). Such surpluses can be potentially absorbed
by (a) temporal displacement through investment in long-term capital
projects or social expenditures (such as education and research)
that defer the reentry of capital values into circulation into
the future, (b) spatial displacements through opening up new markets,
new production capacities and new resource, social and labor possibilities
elsewhere, or (c) some combination of (a) and (b).
The general picture which then emerges, is of a networked spatio-temporal
world of financial flows of surplus capital with conglomerations
of political and economic power at key nodal points (New York,
London, Tokyo) seeking either to disburse and absorb the surpluses
down productive paths, more often than not in long-term projects
across a variety of spaces (from Bangladesh to Brazil or China),
or to use speculative power to rid the system of overaccumulation
by the visitation of crises of devaluation upon vulnerable territories.
It is of course the populations of those vulnerable territories
who then must pay the inevitable price, in terms of loss of assets,
loss of jobs, and loss of economic security, to say nothing of
the loss of dignity and hope. Capitalism survives, therefore,
not only through a series of spatio-temporal fixes that absorb
the capital surpluses in productive and constructive ways, but
also through the devaluation and destruction administered as corrective
medicine to what is generally depicted as the fiscal profligacy
of those who borrow. The very idea that those who irresponsibly
lend might also be held responsible is, of course, dismissed out
of hand by ruling elites.
In the current conjuncture, an obvious candidate to absorb surplus
capital is China. Net foreign direct investment rose from $5 billion
in 1991 to around $50 billion in 2002. Since 1998, the Chinese
have sought to absorb their vast labor surpluses (and to curb
the threat of social unrest) by debt-financed investment in huge
mega-projects that dwarf the already huge Three Gorges dam. This
effort is far larger in toto than that which the United States
undertook during the 1950s and 1960s, and has the potential to
absorb surpluses of capital for several years to come. It is,
however, deficit-financed, and that entails huge risks since if
the investments do not return their value to the accumulation
process in due course, then a fiscal crisis of the state will
quickly engulf China with serious consequences for economic development
and social stability. Nevertheless, this proposes to be a remarkable
version of a spatio-temporal fix that has global implications
not only for absorbing overaccumulated capital, but also for shifting
the balance of economic and political power to China as the regional
hegemon and perhaps placing the Asian region, under Chinese leadership,
in a much more competitive position vis-à-vis the United
States.
A second possible outcome, however, is increasingly fierce international
competition as multiple dynamic centers of capital accumulation
compete on the world stage in the face of strong currents of overaccumulation.
Since they cannot all succeed in the long run, either the weakest
succumb and fall into serious crises of localized devaluation
or geopolitical struggles arise between regions. The latter can
get converted via the territorial logic of power into confrontations
between states in the form of trade wars and currency wars, with
the ever-present danger of military confrontations (of the sort
that gave us two world wars in the twentieth century).
David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford UP, 2003/2005), pp.
109, 134-35, 123-24.
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Risk Society
The idea that the dynamism of industrial society undercuts its
own foundations recalls the message of Karl Marx that capitalism
is its own gravedigger, but it means something quite different.
First, it is not the crises, but the victories of capitalism which
produce the new social form. This means, second, that it is not
the class struggle but rather normal modernization and further
modernization which are dissolving the contours of industrial
society... On the one hand, society still makes decisions and
takes action according to the pattern of the old industrial society,
but, on the other, the interest organizations, the judicial system
and politics are clouded over by debates and conflicts that stem
from the dynamism of risk society...
With the advent of risk society, the distributional conflicts
over “goods” (income, jobs, social security), which
constituted the basic conflict of classical industrial society
and led to attempted solutions in the relevant institutions, are
covered over by the distributional conflicts over “bads”...
They erupt over how the risks accompanying goods production (nuclear
and chemical mega-technology, genetic research, the threat to
the environment, over-militarization and the increasing immiseration
outside Western industrial society) can be distributed, prevented,
controlled and legitimized... In the risk society, the recognition
of the unpredictability of the threats provoked by techno-industrial
development necessitates self-reflection on the foundations of
social cohesion and the examination of prevailing conventions
and foundations of “rationality”... In other words,
risk society is by tendency also a self-critical society... Experts
are undercut or deposed by opposing experts. Politicians encounter
the resistance of citizens’ groups, and industrial management
encounters morally and politically motivated organized consumer
boycotts... Uncertainty returns and proliferates everywhere. Non-Marxist
critique of modernization, small and concrete, but large and fundamental
as well, is becoming an everyday phenomenon... Lines of conflict
are coming into being over the what and how of progress, and they
are becoming capable of organization and of building coalitions...
The socially most astonishing and surprising – and perhaps
the least understood – phenomenon of the 1980s was the unexpected
renaissance of a political subjectivity, outside and inside the
institutions. In this sense, it is no exaggeration to say that
citizen-initiative groups have taken power politically. They were
the ones that put the issue of an [ecologically] endangered world
on the agenda, against the resistance of the established parties...
The themes of the future, which are now on everyone’s lips,
have not originated from the farsightedness of the rulers or from
the struggle in parliament – and certainly not from the
cathedrals of power in business, science and the state. They have
been put on the social agenda against the concerted resistance
of its institutionalized ignorance by entangled, moralizing groups
fighting each other over the proper way, split and plagued by
doubts... This applies not only to the West, but also to the East
of Europe. There the citizens’ groups – contrary to
the entire social science intelligentsia – started from
zero and with no organization, in a system of surveilled conformity,
and yet, with no copying machines or telephones, were able to
force the ruling group to retreat and collapse just by assembling
in a square... In society without consensus, devoid of a legitimating
core, it is evident that even a single gust of wind, caused by
the cry for freedom, can bring down the whole house of cards of
power.
Ulrich Beck, “The Reinvention of Politics,” in U.
Beck, A. Giddens, S. Lash, Reflexive Modernization (Standford
U.P., 1994), pp. 1-55.
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Subjective Cartography
The subject is not self-evident; it’s not sufficient to
think in order to be, as Descartes declared, since all sorts of
other ways of existing establish themselves outside consciousness,
and whenever thought deliberately tries to grasp itself it’s
likely to take off like a madly spinning top, without any hold
on the real territories of existence that drift off from each
other in all directions like tectonic plates beneath the surface
of the continents. Rather than the subject, maybe we should speak
of components of subjectivation, each working more or less on
its own. This would necessarily lead us to re-examine the relation
between the individual and subjectivity, and above all, to make
a clear distinction between the two concepts. The vectors of subjectivation
do not necessarily run through the individual, who in reality
appears more in the position of a “terminal” for processes
involving human groups, socioeconomic complexes, informational
machines, etc. Thus, interiority comes into being at the crossroads
of multiple components, each relatively autonomous, and in some
cases, positively discordant with respect to the others.
It remains very difficult to make such arguments heard... It’s
as though a scientific super-ego demanded that psychic entities
be reified, and insisted that they only be approached through
extrinsic coordinates... I find it urgent to rid ourselves of
scientistic references and metaphors in order to forge new paradigms
of ethical-aesthetic inspiration. Besides, haven’t the best
cartographies of the psyche, or if you prefer, the best psychoanalysis,
been carried out by Goethe, Proust, Joyce, Artaud and Beckett,
rather than Freud, Jung and Lacan?... I’ve come to regard
the apprehension of a psychic reality as inseparable from the
articulation of speech that gives it body, both as a fact and
as an expressive process... The precondition for any revival of
analysis – through schizoanalysis, for example – is
that as a general rule, once one takes the trouble to work with
them, both individual and collective articulations of subjectivity
are potentially able to develop and proliferate beyond their ordinary
equilibrium. By their very nature, their analytic cartographies
overflow the existential territories to which they are assigned.
Thus these cartographies should be like painting and literature,
domains where each concrete performance is destined to evolve,
to innovate, to inaugurate prospective openings, without their
authors being able to base themselves on secure theoretical foundations
or the authority of a group, a school, a conservatory or an academy...
Social ecology should work on the reconstruction of human relations
at all the levels of the socius. It should never lose sight of
the fact that capitalist power has delocalized, deterritorialized,
at once extensively, by extending its empire across the entirety
of the social, economic and cultural life of the planet, and intensively,
by infiltrating the most unconscious subjective strata. Thus one
can no longer claim to oppose it solely from the outside, through
trade unions and traditional politics. It’s equally imperative
to confront its effects in the domain of mental ecology in everyday
life: individual, domestic, conjugal, neighborly, creative or
personal ethics. Rather than seeking a dull and infantilizing
consensus, it’s a matter of cultivating dissensus and the
singular production of existence.
Félix Guattari, Les trois écologies (Paris: Galilée,
1989), pp. 22-44.
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Unintended Social
Order
[For Sartre], “the basic type of sociality” is the
collective, the “inert gathering with its structure of seriality,”
which he equates with Hegel’s “atomized crowd.”
His most famous example is the bus queue where, despite having
the appearance of a social group, everyone is isolated from everyone
else and linked only through their alienation, which is what constitutes
them in their mutual isolation... Sartre emphasizes that an inert
gathering like this can be transformed in an instant, “by
the flash of a common praxis,” when it recognizes its common
interest. The origin of this “totalization,” as Sartre
calls it, is “individual freedom conceived as the will of
all.” Individuals fleeing from a common enemy realize that
“it is neither Others, nor a few individuals, who flee:
instead, flight, conceived as a common praxis reacting to a common
threat, becomes flight as an active totality”... Sartre
explicitly equates the process with the communist vision of “the
gradual withering-away of the State”... Translated into
the language of complexity theory, this is an example of a “dissipative
structure” – a form of order that unexpectedly emerges
as disorder increases. Were the equivalent to happen in the entropy
of the state, the resulting dissipative structures would appear
as unintended forms of social order...
Reading analyses of the post-1989 global order in light of the
early twentieth-century literature on the demise of the state
reveals the former to be global variations on the themes of the
latter. The convergence of these theories suggests that the master
narrative of contemporary geopolitics is not, as some imagine,
the move towards global sovereignty or the progress of global
civil society as a step toward it. Rather it is the development
of global society in place of universal coercion: the reabsorption
of a global state by civil society. The obvious contemporary focus
for the process is the decline of American hegemony, still in
its relatively early stages. But it is possible to see this as
the final part of a longer, more complex process, a single transition
of world historical importance: a global decolonization, its constituent
phases so geographically various, and its political ideologies
so distinct as to disguise the underlying continuity. That narrative
is the decline of Western dominance from its peak in the early
twentieth century. It has three distinct phases: the end of European
empires, the fall of the Soviet Union and the waning of American
hegemony. Each empire sought legitimacy in the demise of its predecessor,
emphasizing the differences between them and concealing the extent
to which all were aspects of the same thing – the three-headed
monster of Western imperialism, a global state in all but name...
For the centenarians of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, many
countries in Africa, perhaps India, and certainly Afghanistan,
this will be a very recognizable history. In each case the failure
has been a failure of [imperial] will, the transition often surprisingly
peaceful (though none so gracious as the dissolution of the Soviet
bloc) and the result a diffusion of sovereignty, partly inherited
by successor states, partly dispersed, and partly reconfigured
within new non- or interstate social networks.
The constituent elements in the emerging global civil society
might include civilizations, intergovernmental networks, ngos,
churches, international corporations, academic networks, drug
cartels, al-Qaeda. These are diverse groups, but this analysis
permits a taxonomy more nuanced than most, for it is able to differentiate
those elements of civil society produced by the withering away
of the global state from those produced by the global market,
dissipative structures from products of the arbitrary will...
Rather than being the building blocks of global politics, civilizations
are perhaps the dissipative structures of the entropic global
state... The European Union, often implicitly viewed in terms
of the Hegelian dialectic as a civil society gradually creating
the unity that will allow it to be willed into statehood, may
also prove to be a dissipative structure of the entropy of the
global state, its growing importance an unintended consequence
of the decline of first colonial, then Soviet and now American
power.
If so, its relations with the United States may become increasingly
conflictual. Another corollary of this analysis is that the seemingly
quixotic “war against terror” is in fact just as central
to the contemporary world as its advocates claim. Any “war
against terror” is by definition not a war between states,
but a war of the state against civil society. But this is not
a war against the pre-existing structures of civil society that
underlie the global state. The “long war” is being
fought by the global state against the dissipative structures
generated by its own entropy.
Malcom Bull, “States of Failure” (2006), New Left
Review 46, pp. 16-24.
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Zombie Category
What we are dealing with here is a meta-change, a change in the
coordinates of change. This meta-change is best understood as
a new dynamic that was created when the process of modernization
began to transform its own taken-for-granted foundations. Modernity
then passed an inflection point and began to change into something
qualitatively new... It means all the big questions have to be
rolled out again, and the small ones too. They all have to be
posed anew, negotiated, and answered again – and not through
universalistic arm-chair theory, but through truly transnational
and comparative statistics that we have yet to develop...
My central contention is that sociology developed in the container
of the nation-state. Its categories of perception, its self-understanding,
and its central concepts were all molded to its contours. And
because the concepts thus engendered refuse to die, the sociological
imagination is now inhabited by zombie categories. They haunt
our thinking. They focus our attention on realities that are steadily
disappearing. And they haunt our empirical work, because even
the subtlest empirical work, when framed in zombie categories,
becomes blind empiricism. Zombie categories embody nineteenth-century
horizons of experience, the horizons of the first modernity. And
because these inappropriate horizons, distilled into a priori
and analytic categories, still mold our perceptions, they are
blinding us to the real experience and the ambiguities of the
second modernity...
The achievement of classical sociology was to grasp the internal
dynamics of the industrial market society that was then just coming
into existence. Sociologists distilled its basic principles out
of their own contemporary experience. The concepts they developed
spread out and conquered the intellectual world. They were extremely
fruitful for empirical research and they had huge political effects.
But the irony is that the power of these ideas, and their consequent
success, was all founded on this questionable inference from each
theorist’s society to the society in general. We could call
it the universalist inference. It's false. Yet the perspective
it made possible had an enormous amount of explanatory power...
What we need to do now is to make the change from a universal
perspective to a cosmopolitan perspective. When we infer from
a society, usually our own society, to society in general, the
result is a naive universalism. Globality, by contrast, is what
results when sociologists from all countries of the world, having
interpreted their own societies through the use of the same universal
categories, then meet and confront each other with their different
findings and try to reconcile them. It then becomes immediately
clear that there is no longer a privileged standpoint from which
society can be investigated. In order to deal with this problem,
a global or cosmopolitan society has to introduce a radical change
of view. It has to open itself up to a dialogic imagination and
research... It has to get away from the North Atlantic, and from
the myth that this region shows the rest of the world its future.
It has to move out to embrace the social cosmos.
Ulrich Beck, Johannes Willms, Conversations with Ulrich Beck (Cambridge:
Polity, 2004), pp. 16-19.
*ground
as the contradiction and tragic failure of capitalism right now:
--ground rent, for everything that concerns housing
--ground to the bone, for flexible labor
--ground as the earth itself, overheating and poisoned
--ground zero wherever a bomb goes off and people die