The world (and books)

Graeber Debt Jubilee

2011-12-22T02:37:00.000+01:00

The news coverage of the euro crisis is giving me feelings of suffocations. Everywhere panic is stirred up, as if the big catastrophe was a break up of the euro-zone. But the genuine catastrophe is what is happening right now: whole populations sentenced to austerity without a trace of democratic process, and a naked power grap by the few conveniently legitimated by the "crisis".

Earlier this autumn I was reading Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years (Melville House, 2011). Seeing the euro crisis unfold in real time while reading was a tremendous and awesome experience, giving me a weird feeling of experiencing the end of the world with a voice-over.

The book is brilliant. It simply should be read. Like always with Graeber, it is never boring. He's always generous, letting the reader feel smart and come to startling new understandings on almost every page. He writes well, and explains well.

Here it won't be possible to summarize the book. So let me just gesture towards some of the things I liked: first, there are the wonderful first pages about the Garden Party in London, where Graeber gets the innocuous comment: ”Surely, one has to pay one’s debts” - a statement one might say that the entire book tries to problematize. From there the big arguments unfold: the idea that virtual money is the original kind of money (not cash or bullion), the criticism of the myth of barter, the distinction between communism, exchange and hierarchy as the three basic forms of economic morality, and the suggestion that history alternates between epochs of bullion and epochs of credit. Among the titbits are things like the claim that Europeans never "reverted to barter" after the collapse of the Roman Empire, the speculation that patriarchy originated in the horrified reaction against Mesopotamian credit economy, the discussion about the corporation-like Buddhist monasteries in China, or the startling account of the origin of the Bank of England.

Along the way, an anthropology of economic relations is built up which is used to show that barter, taken as the prototype of the "market" by classical economics is in fact only typical of relations between enemies. Members of the same community practically never use barter to exchange things; they share them or give them away, saying "I owe you one". In other words, they live in a credit economy. Historically, barter was used between enemies or strangers, people with whom there was no interest in building long-term relations. Barter was in fact a behavior close to war.

Money existed in so-called "primitive" communities too, but was embedded in human relations, functioning as approximate credit units. Even when existing in material form, it was seldom used in daily transactions, tending to be reserved for special occasions – such as marriages, funerals or alliances – when there was some important rearrangement of relations between people. This kind of money Graeber calls ”social currencies” and the economies in which they are employed ”human economies”. What happens when such economies give way to commercial ones – when obligations turn into debts? The result can be debt peonage, as in Mesopotamia, or slavery, as in ancient Greece or Rome.

An important argument is about the role of the state and especially of military force. Money is credit money, i.e. IOUs or, basically, debt. It functions as money as long as it is redeemable. In principle, an IOU can be issued by anyone (such as the "tally sticks" used in medieval England or the scraps of signed paper that circulated as notes in China), but usually they only become recognized as money through the state. Even when issued by the state, money remains debt. When states first issued coins it was to pay for their armies. But how could states ensure that this money would be redeemable, that there would be markets where the money would be accepted? By demanding the money back in taxes, ensuring that markets would grow up around the armies. The ability to raise taxes in turn rested on the ruler's means of coercion. Armies, then, were crucial to the creation of money and markets. Ultimately, it is state's ability to back its IOUs with military force that underlies its ability to create money.

Graeber broadly divides history into three epochs of credit and two epochs of bullion. The most ancient economies were credit economies. In Sumer and the Mesopotamian empires, a typical pattern emerged whereby conflicts over debt were resolved or mitigated through periodic “Jubilees”. Credit led to debt peonage, which in turn provoked resistance in the form of indebted peasants joining the nomads – like in the Biblical “exodus”. Institutionalizing the “Jubilees” was a way for the empires to avoid losing their populations and to minimize their vulnerability to nomad attacks. This early credit age, however, were succeeded by the gruesome Axial age (the age of the Roman, Maurya and Han empires) when coins dominated. During the Middle Ages credit again became dominant in Europe, India and China. This was followed by the age of modern bullion-based capitalist empires, which lasted until 1971, when the Nixon shock inaugurated a new age dominated by credit. According to Graeber, it matters a great deal what kind of epoch it is. Bullion-dominated epochs have generally been warlike. Coin or cash is tailor-made for hostile relations, when you will never see each other again. Credit, by contrast, is more suited to peace and stability, since it presumes the possibility of reliable long-term relations.

A seemingly paradoxical fact, mentioned several times by Graeber, is that usually in the past, the ages of virtual credit money were accompanied by institutions designed to protect debtors (such as the Jubilee), but the most recent such age is different. Today institutions like the IMF instead function to protect the creditors. Graeber doesn’t really present a solution to this riddle, merely suggesting that the new age of credit is still rather new and that things are still up for grabs. With a little effort, we might still make this an epoch in which debtors rather than creditors will be protected. ”It seems to me that we are long overdue for some kind of Biblical-style Jubilee” (p390).

Here’s my one objection to the book. The fact that we live in a credit-based economy today is indisputable, but that is hardly ground for hope. Credit economies only need to be “humane” to debtors so long as the state or system of coercion is weak. Only then must they must presume some basic trust or faith in the debtor. Today, however, states have developed to such an extent that trust in debtors can be dispensed with. Credit cards are accepted and loans are granted, not because of any trust in the debtors, but because the system will guarantee repayment. Debtors can no longer escape to the desert, but will be tracked down electronically. Even if they can’t pay, banks are too big to fail. What matters is not whether one lives in an epoch of cash or credit, but the strength of the system, its overall growth prospects and its apparatus of coercion.

Just look at Greece, which is caught in a cage. The recipe of slashing growth prospects to reduce debt is about as reasonable as robbing a worker of his tools and then tell him to work until he has repaid his debt. To me it seems this is neither an age of bullion nor credit, at least not if credit is supposed to mean trusting each other, being humane, and caring for the long-term relation. Credit today means trust in coercion. It means: I trust the jailors above all, and if I trust you, it's because I trust your fear.

So we see: the catastrophe is not default or a break-up of the euro zone. The catastrophe is that a system has come into being which we think is so important that we are sacrificing whole populations to ensure its functioning.

But there is one weak spot in the system that keeps this catastrophe going. Unlike mutual trust, trust in coercion is a one-sided trust that is found above all in the creditor. It needs to be complemented by fear on the part of the debtor. We al recognize this fear. Fear of the crisis and of failure, panic at the prospect of default and of a rebuke from the rating agencies. This fear is part of the catastrophe.

Part of the cure must be: don't fear! Humane societies don’t need growth. Humanity and civilization are often real and strongest among failures and losers. Barbary is strongest among those who strive to be on top. If you want proof, just look around the world, or even just at Europe.

Making things public (according to Latour)

2011-12-20T22:58:00.000+01:00

I'm not well read in Bruno Latour, so I write this not to assert any standpoint, but more, really, to clarify my impressions to myself and to test them against any criticism they might invite.

I've just read “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: or Howto Make Things Public”, his introduction to an exhibition catalogue edited by himself and Peter Weibel (Making Things Public: Atmospheres ofDemocracy, Karlsruhe: Center for Art and Media / Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2005). It's an intervention in political philosophy, written as an essay in the good old style - stimulating, well-written, erudite. He criticizes mainstream political philosophy – from Hobbes to Habermas – for neglecting "things" - and pleads instead for an "object-orienteddemocracy”, a Dingpolitik.

He pointsout that the old word ”Thing” originally designated a type of archaic assembly,as in Icelandic Althing (suitablylocated in a desolate site in the middle of a fault line). ”Thus, longbefore deisgnating an object thrown out of the political sphere and standingthere objectively and independently, the Dingor Thing has for many centuries meant the issue that brings people together because it divides them” (p13). The central idea is that what creates a public is not shared values or principles or any basic shared agreement, but the existence of a pressing concern that divides us: "wedon’t assemble because we agree, look alike, feel good, are socially compatibleor wish to fuse together but because we are brought by divisive matters ofconcern into some neutral, isolated place in order to come to some sort ofprovisional makeshift (dis)agreement” (p13).

So disagreement unites. As he points out, demos anddemon share the same root, the Indo-European da-, to divide (p14).

At this point, one might ask if a public or a people are united only by disagreement, or if they also have something else in common. While the overall thrust of Latour's argument is certainly to stress the constitutive role of disagreement, he does add one more factor, which is crucial - the sharing of territory. ”Hence, the people, the demos, are made up of those who sharethe same space and are divided by the same contradictory worries” (p16).

Despite the concession to territory, Latour's conception of the public is thin, building on little but mutual disagreement. Rather than a unitary assembly, such politics would be an assembly of assemblies, by necessity constantly on the verge of dissolving into parts (an "assembly of disassembling"). As he points out, the difference between following the way of the "demon" - multiplying difference and disassembling - and that of the "demos" - multiplying occasions to agree, assemble and share - is thin as a knife (p30). One way to deal with the inconclusive nature of public deliberation is to be modest and acknowledge our insufficient cognitive capacities. ”The cognitive deficiency of participants has been hidden for a long time [...]. We were told that all of us – on entering this dome, this public sphere – had to leave aside in the cloakroom our own attachments, passions and weaknesses” (p20). Hence Latour's slogan: ”Disabled persons of all countries, unite!” (p19f).

A public tolerant of diversity need to avoid the dream of unity and totality which he associates with "the phantasmagorical spheres, globes, common good and general will that the Leviathan was supposed to incarnate” (p24). Instead, he argues, it needs to be "phantom-like" (an expression derived from Lippman's "phantom public"). To illustrate what this might mean, he refers to an artwork, The Phantom, designed by Michel Jaffrennou and Thierry Coduys:

It’s activated by the movements of the visitors throughout the show so that each spectator is simultaneously an actor in the show and the only screen on which the whole spectacle is projected. By moving through the various exhibits, the visitors will trigger various captors that will be used as so many inputs to trigger outputs which will give a vague and uneasy feeling that “something happens” of which the bystanders are responsible but in a way that is not directly traceable. Politics will pass through you as a rather mysterious flow, just like a phantom. (p24)

If we compare to Habermas, a striking trait of Latour's conception of the public is that it has no need for any underlying agreement, no shared language rules and no shared orienation to consensus. Apart from territory, it seems constituted by nothing by disagreement. This is at least formally a similarity to Rancière's conception of the public as a polemical place for the manifestation of disagreement. At the same time, the differences to Rancière are both striking and instructive.

Latour's demos or phantom public
would not be a "body politic"

For instance, behind Latour's stress on disagreement one senses his concern with globalization, the global multitude of voices who no longer comprehend democracy ("Listen to the Japanese tradition... Listen to the Jivaros... Listen to the jihadists", p25). The global is what cannot be united under one roof. "Where would you assemble the global? Certainly not under golden domes and kitsch frescoes where heroic senators and half-naked Republics are crowned by laurels descending from clouds" (p20). Thus he discards the old metaphors for the public, the "spheres" or "domes". Yet, whether we like it or not, today the shared territory that brings people together is the global. Demonstrations against globalization show how a divisive issue brings people together, even if they wish to differ. The globe is where we all co-habitate: "we are all in the same boat" (p27).

To Rancière, by contrast, disagreement has nothing to do with global diversity. It springs from the injustice of the social order. This is why he, unlike Latour, presents the Ding, the cause of disagreement, as something that is visibilized only with the disruptive political act of those who have no part in the established order. Latour, by contrast, tends to present it as a pregiven and shared object of worry. This difference explains their radically different visions of politics. In Rancière the political event that constitutes the public is a rupture of the order. Latour, by contrast, presents dissent as constitutive of a new kind of phantom-like regular politics. Rancière's vantage-point is that of the excluded part, while Labour takes the perspective of the already, at least more or less, included, who only need to admit of their own weaknesses and insufficiences. (Vantage-points are important. To theories too one should pose the question: cui bono?)

Let me move to a theoretically more central point. Does Latour present a tentable, persuasive account of how publics work? To me, he vastly overestimates the role of disagreement. The fact that people assemble or gather together is usually the result of the existence of shared norms. In Iceland, this shared basis was provided by custom; there was implicit agreement about where to go and how to deal with divise issues, where to seek allies, how to present one's cause and what compensations were reasonable to claim for damages. Iceland, then, is not a good example of how the existence of a pressing divisive concern is enough to force people together. Would more contemporary examples - like the climate crisis or the threat of war - be more persuasive? I am not convinced. A climate summit too procedesalong certain formal, agreed upon rules.

To be sure, Latour acknowledges that there are matters of global concern that inspire actions not based on shared rules - as when fundamentalists resort to violence out ofresentment at the injustice of existing forms of representation (p25). But herethe question arises: why does the Ding sometimes bring us together to fight and sometimes to talk? Why do some people talk, rather than resort to violence? Surely, there are many more factorsthan mere disagreement that play in here and make people constitute publics.

A final point of disagreement (!) with Latour concerns the role of norms needed to create egalitarian forms of interaction. In classical conceptions of the public - e.g. in Habermas or Arendt - public are essentially arenas where people are able to interact on the basis of an "egalitarian semblance". In old Iceland, this semblance was vouchsafed by custom and by the fact that it was already a relatively egalitarian society, lacking both king and state, in which the "thingmen" were independent, wealthy peasants. In today’s more stratified societies, people are at least made to appear equal by a systematic bracketing of real inequalities in status, wealth and power. Latour says nothing about how his phantom publics would deal with inequality. To the extent that these too depend on an egalitarian semblance, I would argue that they too need to rely on shared norms for bracketing - and, if so, they cannot be constituted solely by disagreement. There has to be some normative common ground.

Of course, it's quite possible to conceive of publics without egalitarianism. Nancy Fraser, for instance, argues that "subaltern counter-publics" shouldn't opt for maintaining the semblance of equality, which in fact conceals real exclusions and hierarchies, but for a strategy of "unbracketing". Only in the disruptive effect such "unbracketing" has on the mainstream public sphere - effect similar to those of "politics" in Rancière's sense - do real chances appear for the empowerment of excluded groups. Latour's slogan about the disabled persons of the world and his argument that we all ought to be more open with the weaknesses, attachments and passions that we for solong have hidden away as ”private” suggests that he too conceives of the publicas something that ought to dispense with bracketing. Formally, in terms of atypology of publics, he would therefore belong with Fraser and Rancière. Unlikethem, however, he does not conceive of unbracketing as provocative oraggressive. To him, unbracketing is not needed to challenge social injustice, but in order to reveal weaknesses in ourselves. He never touches on the issue ofinjustice, the very reason why Fraser and Rancière focus on unbracketing. Sothe question is, how would a Latour-inspired public deal with injustice? Howwould aggressive forms of unbracketing that challenge the privilege of the included be viewed and managed in such a public? Can such calls be managed by ethics of mutually respecting our disabilities? Or by letting them pass through us as a "rather mysterious flow, just like a phantom”? What appears to me to be left out - or am I misreading him? - is the question of how people not only react to an issue, to a "thing", but take it upon themselves to make it an issue, into a "thing" which the general public can no longer afford to ignore. This act of creating the divisive issue seems to be to be the core of politics.

Greece

2011-11-04T22:49:00.001+01:00

My thoughts go to Greece. No referendum,the politicians say. Only stability, stability, stability. Seldom has it beenso clear what suffering stability means

Nazim Hikmet's beautiful poem from 1930 - quoted atthe beginning of a 2008 proclamation from the uprising in Greece.

If I do not burn
If you do not burn
If we do not burn
How will darkness come to light?
(Nazim Hikmet, “Like Kerem”)

(Thanks to Kaz Sagrada for passing this on)

What is the relation between the public sphere and public space?

2011-11-02T18:54:00.001+01:00

Right now I'm trying to put together a theoretical piece for a presentation next week. It's going to be about the relation between the public sphere and public space.

Here's a brief summary of part of what I'm going to say.

Many have suggested that the relation between the two concepts is insufficiently researched. Here I would like to 1) suggest two reasons why this might be so, 2) propose a rather simple model that might clarify the relation, and 3) briefly discuss some conclusions that might be drawn. In particular, since some theorists seem to be suggesting that the idea of public space is more suited to a radical politics open to the excluded or disadvantaged than that of the public sphere, I will try to evaluate that claim and indicate in what ways it might hold true.

1. Why the confusion?

To begin with, the public sphere is not at all an un-spatial concept. Habermas cannot be accused of neglecting the physical places or mediums in which the public sphere has developed - private homes, for instance, or coffeehouses, salons, assemblies, street, theatres, or newspapers. What is true is that the public sphere is not necessarily linked to any particular place or medium. It is also true that the relation to space has become further blurred by so-called globalization (and the growth of "diasporic public spheres", "transnational public spheres", "global public sphere moments" etc). The indeterminate relation to space is, I suggest, one important reason for the confusion regarding the relation between the concepts of the public sphere and public space.

To at least begin to clarify the confusion, I will argue as follows. Although not necessarily linked to any particular physical space, the public sphere can surely be described as a social space - a particular kind of social space characterized by political deliberation about common affairs. Using a concept of space that is socially rather than physically defined should be fine. As I will show, concepts of public space are in fact also usually socially defined.

A second reason for confusion is that there are two kinds of theories of public space. Both use the term "public space" but they do so in opposite ways.

On the one hand, there are theorists of urban sociability like Erwin Goffman, Georg Simmel, Richard Sennett, Lynn Lofland, or Jane Jacobs. What they have in common is that they all link ”publicness” to concrete urban space. But there is no real link to the public sphere, to politics. What matters is that people are visible to each other, not that they talk or discuss. What they research is how strangers behave when they share a space where they are mutually visible to each other. What sustains "publicness" is the system of norms that regulates this interaction. Goffman's "civil inattention" is a well-known example of this norm-guided behavoir. Jane Jacob's Hudson Street "ballet" is another example. The formal etiquette between strangers which Sennett sees as so crucial to the publicness of the ancient régime is a third.

On the other hand, there are scholars like Jacques Rancière, Don Mitchell or Bruce d'Arcus, whose main interest is in "dissent public space" (this is d'Arcus' term). I've already discussed their idea of public space in a previous blog entry ("Public Space and Public Sphere: Notes on Reading Don Mitchell"). Common to them is that they see publicness as arising through acts that manifest or visibilize dissent. If the theorists of urban sociability see publicness are maintained by an intricate system of norms, the theorists of dissent see it as erupting when the norms are disrupted.

The former group of scholars associate public space with norms of bracketing - or systematically disregarding - differences in status among people. Where all are strangers, there is no high or low. We refrain for inquiring to deeply into the background of the strangers we meet. By doing so, we maintain the semblance that everyone is equal. The second group of scholars, by contrast, associate publicness with un-bracketing, with the "uncivil" taking or occupation of place where injustice is visibilized. Rather than bracketing marginalization, oppression or status differences, they are brought out into the open.

2. Contention and bracketing: a model

A solution requires that we start, not from the dichotomy of "sphere" and "space", but by investigating two dimensions of "publicness" which I believe are more fundamental.

As I argue in "Public Space in Recent Japanese Political Thought and Activism: From the Rivers and Lakes to Miyashita Park" (forthcoming in Japanese Studies 31:3, December 2011), two dimensions are constitutive of the public in classical theorists like Habermas and Arendt: verbal contestation and the bracketing of dependencies and inequalities in wealth and status. Typically, deliberations in the public sphere rest on the presence of both of these two dimensions. Deliberation can be seen as a form of communication in which contestation is moderated by the norms of bracketing, which are necessary in order to create a semblance of equality among the participants. Bracketing is thus ambivalent: it is thanks to bracketing that egalitarian arenas can be created, but it also prevents real inequalities in wealth, status and power from being openly thematized and challenged.

To summarise, the publicis not only a realm of free and open communication or debate, but also an arenain which important parts of social life are systematically bracketed in order tocreate a semblance of equality among participants. This means that the public –against the commonsensical view – must be viewed not only as an arena of debateand communication. It is also constituted by a certain silence, a ‘bracketing’that is needed to prevent it from dissolving back into the ‘real’ world.

Interestingly, challenges to the exclusivity of the mainstream public sphere have come from two directions, one emphasizing more thoroughgoing forms of bracketing (Karatani Kôjin's defence, in Transcritique, of bracketing as crucial to a Kantian public can be seen as one version of this) and another emphasizing more unrestrained forms of contestation (here a good example is Nancy Fraser's subaltern counterpublics and her advocacy of "unbracketing").

An important point here, which I feel it is necessary to stress in order to grasp the function of bracketing more fully, is that there are multiple public with alternative norms of bracketing. Bracketing thus openates also in the subaltern counterpublics. There's a sociological classic, The Hobo (by Nels Anderson), that provides a wonderful insight into the camps (or "jungles") of the homeless people in early 20th century America. Just as the Simmelian salons or Habermasian coffeehouses, these were egalitarian and "democratic" arenas. People exchanged information and told stories over the fire. But they never inquired too deeply into a person's name or previous life. Just as in the salons and coffee houses, they bracketed each other's background.

Let us now try relating the various theories of public space and public sphere to these two dimension.

The "classical" theories of the "public sphere" (or "public realm") are found in the upper right quadrant, i.e. they are theories that stress both bracketing and contention. Grasped from its spatial aspect, we might call it "space for deliberation".

We can also observe that the most influential theories stressing "public space" fall into two distinct groups, which have very little in common.

So we see: the classical theories are not radically divorced from the theories of public space. They share the stress on dimensions such as bracketing or contestation. Hence the first difficulty of separating and counterposing "public sphere" and "public space" in a clearcut fashion.

The second difficulty stems from the fact that theories of public space are not uniform. "Public space" is a catchword for very heterogeneous conceptions. These tend to fall into two camps, which are mutually more opposed to each other than either are to the theories of the "public sphere".

To summarize: the reason that the relation between public sphere and public space is so hard to clarify is that the public sphere arises in the convergence of bracketing and contestation, i.e. that it requires a mixture of both elements. Conceptions of public space arrange themselves in two compartments on either side of this.

3. Some consequences

Theories of public sphere have been criticized for being exclusive, hierarchical, and too restrictive. Some - most explicitly Don Mitchell - seem to propose "public space" as a more radical notion, more open to the excluded. What conclusions can we draw?

Well, public space theory exists in two forms which both "radicalize" certain aspects of the "public sphere". Some point to spaces that provide refuge from "real" social status, others to spaces for contesting and renegotiating the order.

At whichever of these two senses of public space one looks, one finds a political significance geared to those excluded from or disadvantaged in the politics of the public sphere. Are we then entitled to conclude that "public space" is more suited to be the focal point of a radical politics than the "public sphere"? The correct way to put it is surely that public space is not inherently radical in itself, but rather a crucial and irreducible element in all politics. What goes beyond the regular politics of the public sphere is not space in itself, but rather acts that use space to unbracket or visibilize inequalities or to construct arenas based on alternative forms of bracketing.

Strange times

2011-10-03T23:04:00.000+02:00

Reuters has an article about debt cancellation, citing the idea of the jubilee. So now we have established economists and politicians warming up not only to the Tobin tax and alternative currency systems, but the jubilee as well! The motive, of course, is to "jumpstart the economy", or, in other words, to save capitalism. But, still, I think interesting opportunities are opening up here!

On debt cancellation:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/03/us-haircut-idUSTRE79125J20111003

On local exchange networks/alternative currencies:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/world/europe/in-greece-barter-networks-surge.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all%3Fsrc%3Dtp&smid=fb-share

Tobin tax:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/mar/08/european-parliament-backs-tobin-tax

By the way, I'm reading Graeber's Debt right now. Hope to be back with a report later.

Parrhesia: notes on the public sphere, power and death

2011-09-09T01:54:00.003+02:00

Yesterday I reread Foucault's lectures on parrhesia (collected in Fearless Speech, a booklet published by semiotext(e) which is also available here under the name "Discourse and Truth"). Rereading them I was struck by the penetrating light they throw on issues such as free speech, public speech and the public sphere.

Parrhesia means to tell the truth, or literally "to say everything". In particular, it means speaking truth in the face of power, even at the risk of your own life."Someone is said to use parrhesia and merits consideration as aparrhesiastes only if there is a risk or danger for him or her in telling thetruth" (Foucault 2001:15f). Parrhesia usually comes from below and is directed to those above. In Hellenistic times the parrhesiastes, or truth-speaker, was a person who spoke the truth to the sovereign. To be sure, the use of free speech in the agora of Athenian democracy was also referred to as parrhesia, but the imagery informing Foucault's discussion seems Hellenistic rather than Athenian. In any case, the Athenian agora was hardly a space where speeking was without risk. As Arendt states in In The Human Condition, it was a place where "courage and even boldness" was needed for public speech (Arendt 1958:186).

Speaking truth in the face of power – who can help thinking that this sounds so much like Foucault? Especially in its late, Hellenistic version, theparrhesiast is also someone who appears fundamentally alone, left to his own devices in the confines of the sovereign's court and without help from any well-intentioned public sphere prepared to listento reason.

Using parrhesia as a model for public speech may sound outrageous. However, the attitude of speaking truth even when you risk your own life is not totally divorced from our understanding of the public and for public speech. One implication of reading parrhesia as a model of public speech would be that making something public would be tantamount to declaring: "I know that speaking here might get me killed. Therefore, I speak only because I have already put myself in the position of someone who is dead. I am dead to my status and to the norms and obligations that define my place in society and bind me to it. I therefore speak as a person who has left society, as an outsider, or as a ghost". The public, then, arises when we speak from the vantage-point of the dead. Here we can go a step further and define the place or standpoint from which public speech becomes possible. This is a space we could describe as a no-man's-land or liminal space. We could also call it a kind of sacred space, because only in such spaces can the voices of the dead be heard. With Amino we call say that it is characterized by muen since it is a place in which we must behave as if since our relations with the secular world had been severed.

Foucault's parrhesiast par excellence is Socrates. Apart from him, perhaps the court jester is the most famous figure of the parrhesiast in western tradition. In Japan, a similar role was played by children, whose “truths” according to Amino were tolerated since they were considered apart from humanity, sacred or, in a sense, dead. Foucault is quite right in seeing parrhesia as an important line in the genealogy of criticism. In Christianity it is picked up not only in the form of confessions, but also in the idolization of martyrdom. In the self-immolation practices that have become an established protest method all over the world truth is again linked to death or the readiness to die.

Parrhesia? (H. C. Andersen, The Emperor's New Clothes, illustration by A. Rackham)

Just as truth is linked to death, it is also linked to ghosts. In literature, the fear of ghosts often seems to be linked to their ability of speaking the truth. Take the example of the ghosts visiting Richard III in Shakespeare's play: he fears them because they are the only ones who know the truth and can speak it. In the Japanese Nô dramas, the standard pattern revolves around ghosts who tell the truth and by doing so finally become able to achieve liberation. In the film Seppuku (directed by Kobayashi Masaki, 1962) the pattern is basically the same. The first half corresponds to the part of the Nô drama in which the background is recapitulated by the shite (played by Nakadai Tatsuya), who hasn't yet revealed his true nature. Then the crucial unmasking takes place and he transforms himself symbolically into the "ghost" of Motobe who confronts the assembled retainers with the truth, achieving a spectacular and bloody vengeance before finally succumbing to a "second" and final death. The film, by the way, is a masterpiece. The music is wonderful, composed for the biwa (or Japanese lute) by Takemitsu Tôru.

Nakadai Tatsuya in Seppuku (dir. Kobayashi Masaki 1962)

Perhaps it's not so strange that the early medieval "publics" in Japanese history were also places linked to death. The ikki (egalitarian leagues formed for military purposes) were formed by drinking "divine water" symbolizing the cutting of ties to the secular world. The rengakai (poetry gatherings), which were well-known for their egalitarian character, originated in poetry meetings held below blossoming cherry trees (hana no moto renga). Presided over by itinerant priests, these meetings would be attended by commoners as well as warriors or even retired emperors, all hiding or "bracketing" their secular identity behind straw hats or veils. These places, as the historian Matsuoka Shinpei points out, had the quality of muen. Cherry trees were thought to be passage-ways between the living and the dead, or even points of entry to the land of the dead which was thought to be located beneath them. Flower-viewing parties as well as these poetry gatherings in turn went back to the even older tradition of “Yasuraihana”, a celebration involving dancing and playing music that was a call for the flowers to stop falling and at the same time a pacification of dead souls that could bring disease.

To return to public speech, it goes without saying that holding up parrhesia as a model of public speech carries with it the risk of idealization. Foucault points out that, early on in Greek thought, doubts appeared concerning the negative aspects of parrhesia - is everybody entitled to use it, or should it be limited to people of a certain quality or education; and how about the possibility of parrhesiasts being mistaken about the truth (Foucault 2001:72)? Furthermore, parrhesia also poses the problem, from the parrhesiast's own point of view, of its limited efficacy. No matter how much the parrhesiast might hope that "dying" to the material circumstances that tie him or her down to a particular place in society will enable the voice to travel freely and reach the ears of everybody, in real life that voice may well be smothered. Nothing says that people will listen even if the parrhesiast forfeits his or her life. If you want a public, it’s not enough with courage and free speech. There must bepeople who can hear you, and who are willing to listen. And you must be willingto listen to them.

Using Habermas' expression, we could say that there can be no public speech without a public sphere. Still, Foucault does elucidate a fundamental dimension of that publicsphere, namely the operation of bracketing. To participate in the public sphere you need to bracket your everydaydependencies, power-relations and status in real life. This is an aspect stressed by many of the theorists of the public sphere or public realm. Habermas points out how important it was for the formation of the early bourgeois public sphere that discussions could be conducted in the coffeehouses and salons without regard for rank or status. Arendt too stresses that bracketing, or "play-acting" is necessary in public in order to create arenas where all participants can participate as peers of equals. Speaking about the Greek isonomy (equality), she writes:

Isonomy guaranteed... equality, but not because all menwere born or created equal, but, on the contrary, because men were by nature...not equal, and needed an artificial institution, the polis, which... would make them equal. Equality existed only inthis specifically political realm, where men met one another as citizens andnot as private persons. (Arendt 1977:21)

Bracketing is of course only a temporary operation. Once deliberation is over, the game of tolerance will end. What Foucault adds to the discussion of bracketing is again related to death and risk-taking: remember that when you leave the agora, you are back inthe web of dependencies again, and then you might have to run for your life!

For unlike isonomia (the equality of allcitizens in front of the law) and isegoria (the legal right given to everyoneto speak his or her own opinion), parrhesia was not clearly defined ininstitutional terms. There was no law, for example, protecting theparrhesiastes from potential retaliation or punishment for what he or she said.(Foucault 2001:72)

A striking image of the risks awaiting the parrhesiast once he or she has stopped speaking might be found in Zhang Yimou's film Hero (2002). This is a film that revolves around the dialogue between the emperor Shi Huang-di and the would-be assasin in which truth is finally disclosed. This dialogue, which takes place in the dark and totally empty courtroom of the emperor, can be seen as a compressed public sphere à deux in which deliberation drives the narrative forwards towards a gradual revelation of truth. Like all public spheres, it has the semblance of peace. Speech rather than violence becomes the centre of action, a fact epitomized by the assasin's decision not to kill the emperor. As he finally leaves the courtroom and descends the gigantic stairs down to the palace gate, he is outside the sacred circle of speech and ready to be sacrificed. What was bracketed is un-bracketed. The film ends with his death as he is nailed to the closed palace gate by thousands of arrows.

Public sphere (Hero, dir. Zhang Yimou, 2002)

That unbracketing must take place once speech is over has, of course, not been ignored in liberal political thought. Already Kant made the distinction between public speech, where one was free to make public use of one's reason, and activities in mundane life outside the public, where one had to "obey". What was needed to protect the speaker and facilitate the use of public speech was thus, firstly, the establishment of a "civil" public culture in which words would not be met by violence, and, secondly, to find institutional mechanisms for counteracting the unequal distribution of power (through checks and balances, procedures for anonymous voting, and so on). Already Athenian democracy came up with ways to prevent the centralization of power, such as lottery and anonymous voting (ostracism), that protected citizens from the danger of having to expose themselves publicly.

What distinguishes Foucault from liberal political thinking is his reluctance to rely on either on the presumed civility of modern publics or on institutionalized mechanisms for counteracting power. Like the parrhesiast, he clings to the "truth" carried forward by the word, by public criticism, even as he sees through the power relations operating through the public. His stance is therefore characterized by a very curious ambivalence in regard to public speech, which is on the one hand the carrier of explosive "truths", but on the other hand lacks the medium that would be required for these truths to be transmitted properly, namely a well-functioning public sphere. Lacking a medium in which truth can survive in disembodied form, it must take refuge in the body of the person who knows the truth. Parrhesia remains relevant to us today, because - as Foucault points out - that truth insists on being spoken, even at the cost of putting the body at risk. A paradoxical result of truth's embodiment is that the (potentially) dead body also becomes the logical position from which truth must be uttered.

Of course, I am not claiming that Foucault is trying to apply the idea of parrhesia directly to today's situation. What he claims is merely that it forms an important part of the roots of the "critical" tradition in Western philosophy - a tradition to which Foucault can surely be counted:

And I would say that the problematization oftruth which characterizes both the end of Presocratic philosophy and thebeginning of the kind of philosophy which is still ours today, thisproblematization of truth has two sides, two major aspects. One side isconcerned with insuring that the process of reasoning is correct in determiningwhether a statement is true (or concern itself with our ability to gain accessto the truth). And the other side is concerned with the question: what is theimportance for the individual and for the society of telling the truth, ofknowing the truth, of having people who tell the truth, as well as knowing howto recognize them. With that side which is concerned with determining how toinsure that a statement is true we have the roots of the great tradition inWestern philosophy which I would like to call the "analytics oftruth". And on the other side, concerned with the question of theimportance of telling the truth, knowing who is able to tell the truth, andknowing why we should tell the truth, we have the roots of what we could callthe "critical" tradition in the West. And here you will recognize oneof my targets in this seminar, namely, to construct a genealogy of the criticalattitude in the Western philosophy.

In addition, nothing to stop us from trying to recognize parrhesia as a theme of continued centrality even in today's world. The best and most liberating kind of protest often has the quality of parrhesia. We find it in the gays or lesbians who decide to come out in public. We find it in social movements, especially in their early stages when people decide that they must speak up. We find it in writers and intellectuals too, at least in those who are ready to face unemployment and risk their social standing. We find it in Mrs Poyser, when she finally decides she's had enough and, after years of humiliation, erupts in protest and gives her landlord a piece of her mind (see the lovely description in Scott 1990:6ff). The public of such courageous, decent people is also a liminal space, a space in which they have no longer anything on which to rely but themselves.

Walter Benjamin describes how, in moments of revolutionary upheaval, the dead will come to join the struggle. No wonder, once you stop trying to survive, you can speak freely. Your companions are now the dead, the comrades of the past who have returned to join you again to help you build a better future.

References

Arendt,Hannah (1958) The Human Condition,Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.

Arendt,Hannah (1973) On Revolution, London:Faber and faber.

Foucault, Michel (2001) FearlessSpeech, ed. Joseph Pearson, Los Angeles: semiotext(e).

Matsuoka, Shinpei (2004) Utage noshintai – Basara kara Zeami e (The Body of the Banquet: From Basara toZeami), Iwanami shoten.

Scott, James (1990) Dominationand the Arts of Resistance, New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

James Scott and the anarchist history of Zomia

2011-08-21T19:24:00.002+02:00

Reading James Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009), I came across this sentence: “The British in Burma, Leach noted, everywhere preferred autocratic ‘tribal’ regimes… with which they could negotiate; conversely, they had a distaste for anarchic, egalitarian peoples who had no discernible spokesman” (Scott 2009:212).

Why does this strike me as familiar? Ah yes, the anecdote about Kissinger asking for a phone number he could use when he wanted to phone Europe...

Speaking of Scott, this book is, like his other books, really a pleasure to read. It's interesting and has a simple message that sticks in the reader's memory. It will certainly stick in mine for a long time. Many hills and mountainous regions in South-East Asia were first populated by refugees. These mountains functioned as a no-man's-land, as a zone of refuge for people fleeing the state. The so-called primitive "tribes" inhabiting these hills and mountains have often been portrayed - especially by the agricultural "paddy kingdoms" from which they escaped - as barbarians stuck at a primitive stage of social development. As Scott points out, the hill peoples were not backward or "primitive" at all. Rather than being ignorant of civilizaton, they had freely chosen their way of life to escape subjugation. They knew only too well what civilization amounted too: a life of toil and unfreedom, taxes, corvée and conscription, of being treated as little better than a slave.

The book is actually quite well summarized by Scott’s own abstract for a conference paper, so I’ll start by quoting that:

The hill peoples of mainland Southeast Asia have been viewed, until recently, by scholars and valley peoples, a ‘backward population’ that has failed to make the transition to settled, wet-rice cultivation and incorporation into state structures. This paper, instead, treats the hill-dwellers as essentially a maroon, runaway, state-fleeing population which has, over the past two millennia, peopled the hills. Moving away, especially from Han expansion, into this ‘zone of refuge’, hill people are best conceived of as a “state-effect”. Their social structure, agricultural practices, and cultural values make most sense in this light. The concept of “escape agriculture” is introduced to explain how swiddening and foraging are practiced, in large part, because they are resistant to appropriation, unlike irrigated, wet-rice cultivation which is tailor-made for appropriation. The concept of “escape social structure” is introduced to account for practices of dispersion, fission, and acephaly designed to evade capture by slave-raiding and incorporation into state structures. The history of conscription, warfare, epidemics, crop-failure, taxes and corvée in the valley states is examined to show how they may account for patterns of demographic flight from lowland state cores. Much of the distinctiveness of the “hills” as an agro-ecological and cultural zone, I argue, stems from the fact that the hills have been populated by those who have voluntarily fled or have been driven out of the alluvial valleys. (Abstract to the paper “Zomia as a ‘State-Repelling Space’”, to the conference ”’Zomia’ as a Framework for Conceiving Scholarship on Upland Mainland Southeast Asia”, organized and chaired by James C. Scott).

The word "Zomia" used in the conference title refers to the mountainous regions of the Himalayas and lower ranges that run from the Central Highlands of Vietnam through most of Laos, southwest China, northern Thailand, northern Burma, and into Northeastern India. It was originally coined by van Schendel and is derived from “zo” which means “hill” in some dialects along the Burma-India/Bangladesh border (Scott 2009:14).

One reason for my interest in Scott's portrayal of hills and mountains is that it can be linked to ideas I've been interested in myself, such as those of no-man's-land or the common. The people depicted in his book flee to spaces that are still free to use. They are leftover spaces, but also places of refuge and open and equal access to subsistence resources. Scott uses the term “non-state spaces” – “locations where, owing largely to geographical obstacles, the state has particular difficulty in establishing and maintaining its authority” (Scott 2009:13). Such spaces were always the subject of derison from people adopting the point of view of the "civilizations" of the plain. People without a fixed abode or ancestral place were stigmatized as “people of the four corners of the world” in Vietnam (ibid. 102). The Chinese described the Lahu of Yunnan as “people of the mountains, forests and streams” (ibid. 103). The colonial and early postcolonial regimes, like the classical states, considered these areas terra nullius or inutile, in the sense that they did not even repay the costs of administration in terms of grain or revenue (ibid. 340 n16). Not surprisingly, civilizational discourses of all kinds - such as the Chinese distinction of "raw" and "cooked", or the Western idea of civilizational progress - come in for grinding attacks by Scott. Such views, Scott emphasizes, disregard that statelessness can be a deliberate choice.

The open and equal access to subsitence resources was crucial. “Common-property land tenure and an open frontier are… the material conditions that underwrite egalitarianism" (ibid. 279). Foraging and swiddening - which Scott calls the "two major state-repelling subsistence routines" - would have been unthinkable without it. The rice paddy, by contrast, is ideal for the ruler: not only is rice the crop that feeds the greatest population per area unit, but it also ties the peasantry to the place, it imposes a regular, collective rhythm on life, and it can easily be confiscated or burned or destroyed as retaliation. By contrast, in the hills sweet potatoes or cassava could be grown individually, without need of cooperation, according to the needs of the family, almost anytime during the year. It could be grown by swiddening farmers in the hills, out of reach of the eyes of officials, and being below ground, it could not be easily harmed (ibid. 207). The Irish, Scott remarks, chose to cultivate the potato not only because it provided many calories but also because it could not be confiscated or burned (ibid. 196).

To prevent loss of population, the state systematically tries to block escape routes. Echoing an old suggestion made by Owen Lattimore (which is today vigorously supported by scholars such as Christopher Beckwith), Scott argues that the Great Wall was as much for keeping the population inside as to keep barbarians out (ibid. 110). The state also tried to prohibit subsistence activities in the mountains and wetlands or - as in the case of the Legalists - to systematically starve the population into grain or paddy rice farming by separating them from the open commons (ibid 72). As the wars of the Burmese and Siamese kings show, states went to war to capture populations and force them to relocate in the paddy deltas.

In a discussion which it is tempting to link to Hirschman's theory of "exit", Scott discusses the conditions that facilitated escape. Important prerequisites were "a large open frontier" with access to open stateless spaces, mobility, peripheral location, a flexible social structure that could change size and institutions, availability of crops that could be used in the mountains, and knowledge of foraging, hunting, swiddening or pastoral nomadism.

Being surrounded by plentiful "stateless space" and lacking the capability to check people's freedom of movement, it is no wonder that ancient states were desperate to find means to keep or increase their populations. This certainly puts the famous Chinese philosophical texts in perspective. I'm thinking of when Mencius says that if only rulers were benevolent and virtuous, people would flock to them out of their own accord, from all directions, as water flows downwards. Even while reading Mencius, I remember I was vaguely reflecting on the social background of such statements. Clearly, this must have been a period when the population in general was much more "nomadic" and less settled than it would later become, much more ready to move if it didn't please it to stay.

Compared to the time of Mencius, however, the agricultural kingdoms and empires soon grew in size and power, pushing back the frontiers of the "stateless" areas. Scott's book contains much historical material illustrating this process. Chinas' southward expansion, for instance, was accompanied by brutal military campaigns of expulsion and extermination that created wave after wave of refugees of various origin, often lumpted together under the name "Miao". Scott points out that this term was applied indiscriminately to almost any acephalous people on the frontier and hence lacked any specific ethnic identity over time (ibid. 140). Generally, Scott adopts a radical constructivist view of ethnicity in his work, pointing out that ethnicity and tribes are state-effects rather than natural givens. “Ethnicity and ‘tribe’ begin exactly where taxes and sovereignty end” (ibid. 114f).

Many of the hill peoples that populate today Zomia are descendants from refugees escaping civil wars and strife in China, e.g. the Taiping Rebellion (1851-64) or the Panthay Rebellion in Guizhou and Yunnan (1854-73). Many Chinese entering northern Siam in the late nineteenth century were remnants of the Taiping forces. In the 20th century, defeated Kuomintang troops settled in what is today known as the Golden Triangle, where they came to control much of the opium trade together with their hill allies. In 1958, under pressure from Chinese party cadres and soldiers, fully one third of the Wa population crossed the border from the People’s Republic into Burma seeking refuge (ibid. 154).

What is the situation for non-state spaces today? Private property and the modern national state have eradicated them. Sovereignty now reaches all the way to the border of the next state, the hills are increasingly incorporated into the state-space for the extraction of various resources and cultural assimilation is encouraged. Demographic factors are making valley people migrate into the hills, engulfing them and bringing with them their state (ibid. 11f).

Certainly, one might fantasize about new zones where state control is weak. Criminal networks, black economies, moments of chaos, situations when the apparatus of control is overburdened and breaks down, as during the recent urban unrest in Britain… We might even try to imagine ways to increase our subsistence knowhow in order to become less dependent on the regular labor market or our employers. I cannot help recalling here a book I read a year ago, Boku wa ryôshi ni natta (I became a hunter, 2008). It's written by Senmatsu Shin'ya, a former student activist in Kyoto who kept fowl and pigs on the university campus and who is now a hunter, using traditional methods to catch deer and wildboar in the mountains. Although he claims to have dropped out of political activism, in the light of Scott's book his life-style still appears political indeed!

Scott's book is rare in trying to look at history from a non-state perspective, taking the side of the "primitives"", "mountain peoples" or "nomads" who have always been looked down on by the "civilized", settled peoples of the plain, the empires and the paddy-kingdoms. In seeing through the self-conceit of civilization, it belongs with other refreshing books, such as Marshall Sahlin's Stone-age Economics, Pierre Clastre's Society against the State, the books of Amino Yoshihiko or the essays of Bruce Chatwin.

Conflagration in Britain

2011-08-17T23:51:00.008+02:00

When I saw the first reports from the unrest in Tottenham, my first thought was that it followed the classical pattern of urban disorder in Britain and France in recent decates, with an act of police brutality triggering the conflagration. A difference to what happened in France 2005 was that this time no-one tried to describe the unrest as an immigrant riot or race riot. It seemed like a riot by all the young people, regardless of race, who had ended up socially excluded and with no future. Was there hope in this, I wondered - hope that race and religion would be forgotten and common experiences of exclusion would unite people? But another difference, less hope-inspiring, was the sheer scale of the violence in London, and the fact that people trying to stop fires or protect their shops were among the victims. By contrast, the riots in the banlieus had seemed comparatively controlled, rational or even ritualized, the violence being directed against the police or against cars, but not really against any other unrelated people.

As I've written before about the riots in France, the causes of urban unrest are seldom exhaused by economic grivances. Economic marginality is certainly an important background factor. But to say that economic betterment is all the rioters want seems unconvincing. In episodes of unrest, the paramount desires seem to be those of freedom and respect. To pay back against humiliation, to restore "justice" and to revel in new-found freedom almost always seems like more important concerns to rioters than economic deprivation per se.

Some commentators have argued that the brutal cuts and austerity measures of the present Cameron government cannot have caused the riots since they haven't really started to have effect yet. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if the measures were an important factor anyway, not for economical reasons, but as a final insult and proof of the establishment's arrogance and contempt for the lower classes.

That pur joy and revellation in freedom is an important factor in rioting is apparent from the following gleanings from various texts on the riots.

It has become clear to the disenfranchised young people of Britain, who feel that they have no stake in society and nothing to lose, that they can do what they like tonight, and the police are utterly unable to stop them. That is what riots are all about. Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. (Laurie Penny, "Panic on the Streets of London", Open Democracy, 9 August 2011)

At around 5pm, watching the live coverage of the start of the night's violence on Mare Street, it struck me that things were kicking off in broad daylight. The disturbances on Sunday seemed opportunistic, "copycat" - people taking advantage of the overstretched police to launch a relatively minor spree of theft and destruction. On Monday, this "opportunism" had become a strategy. A daylight confrontation meant open defiance of the police, not simply taking advantage of darkness and overstretch. It was as if, all of a sudden, groups across London realised that the police could not be everywhere. [...] It looked as if the rioters were revelling in their mobility, flowing from place to place without pattern but simply because they could. It looked like a kind of sudden freedom. Call it mob rule, call it Hobbesian anarchy; condemn these robberies, the arson, the assaults on passers-by, the destruction of small businesses. All those things were disgusting. But the kids doing them were clearly dizzy with a kind of liberation. (Will Wiles, "Riot Thoughts")

Everyone was on a riot, just goin’ mad like, chuckin’ fings, chuckin’ bottles. . .it was good tho’. . .it was good fun . . . ‘course it is! [...] Yeah. . .it’s the governments fault . . . conservatives whatever, whoever it is, I dunno’. We’re showin’ the police we can do what we want. That’s what it’s all about (interview with riot girls, BBC)

The second quote above continues with a statement on how frightened the author feels about the breakdown of rule of law, since that is a rule he benefits from. The interview with the "riot girls" seems to have been the object of much derison on the net, but aren't what they are doing simply that they are celebrating freedom in all its ugliness and beauty? Against the tendency to idealize freedom and turn it into a harmless slogan, these quotes are, I think, a good a reminder of how explosive this ideal really is. Whenever freedom is realized, it tends to frighten people or scandalize them.

Let me return to the comparison between the unrest in Britain with the 2005 riots in France. Sophie Body-Gendrot has written a lucid analysis about it. She expresses one of the similarities in a laconic sentence: "What is striking is that these youths ask for nothing." This is indeed a striking, important fact. It's true that they don't ask for anything, they act. What's happening is that they take the opportunity of freedom as it offers itself, trying to expand it and keep it alive. They know that no one is ever going to help them with that. They can't ask anyone, since no-one can do it except they themselves.

Pointing out that the desire for freedom, or joy in freedom, can be an important factor behind riots is not to defend them. I too would have felt frightened by looting and arson. As a researcher, however, I think it is undeniable that much rioting is simply impossible to understand without taking this desire - along with the desire for respect - into account. That said, I also admit that I do have a weakness for this desire, that I find comfort in how strong and pervasive it has proven to be (even though I do not approve of all the manners in which it has been realized), and that I do wish that all downtrodden souls will have the opportunity at least once in a lifetime to feel the joy of freedom. It goes without saying that no one else should come to harm and that the freedom must be shared with others.

To return to Body-Gendrot, she also mentions a few differences between the urban unrest of Britain and Frace. Apart from the fact that racial conflict seems to play so little role in the British unrest, she also discusses the different configuration of Paris and London - affluent Paris being like a "medieval fortress" with outbreaks taking place at the margins while the boundaries of London neighbourhoods are more porous - and the differences in public reaction to the riots in Britain and France which reflect differences in political culture. The only thing I wonder about in her discussion is the seeming discrepancy between the early part of her paper that stresses how much rioters usually have in common with other residents in their neighborhoods (whim whom they share the same "reservoir of grievances" regarding police harassment, poor housing and lack of jobs), and the middle part that mentions their "detachment from their communities that allowed actions without remorse".

End of blogging for today. A privilige of writing a blog is that you can indulge in impressions and on-the-spur comments, without having to be systematic or reaching conclusions. Writing a blog can be very dreamlike, but such dreamlikeness is also true of reality itself.

A friend found this Google map linked to by the Guardian. A snapshot of the situation in London on Monday night August 8.

Hangenpatsu, Kimigayo and idyllic talk in Tokyo

2011-08-04T17:11:00.008+02:00

A few days ago, I went to Osaka to take part in the demonstration against nuclear power ("Natsu Datsu-Gen-Patsu sound-demo").

One thing that surprised me was the participation of young people in black robes who looked like Buddhist priests. First I thought: no way they can be real priests. After all, they had fancy-looking straw hats - except of one of them, a muscular sunburned fellow with a Hanshin Tigers towel tied around his head. Some had sneakers instead of the customary zôri sandals. I complimented them for their nice outfit and asked why they had dressed up like that. "It's because we are priests", they answered. It turned out that they belonged to the Ôtani-ha of Jôdo Shinshû (True Pure Land Buddhism).

As the demonstration started, the air was rattled by the hard sound of a bongo drum and the priests picked up their black and white flags (nobori). With the text "We take our refuge in Amitabha Buddha" (Namu Amida Butsu), they nicely and incongruously complemented the "Hasta la victoria siempre" of the Che banner further ahead. Many participants were carrying sunflowers, the new symbol of the anti-nuclear power movement. The priests had placards on their backs with images of the Buddha and texts in the Osaka dialect like "Watashira mo iikagen okoru de" (We're angry too).

"We too are angry" (picture borrowed from the blog Raita M no nikki)

Perhaps it's only one of my own private idiosyncrasies, but in so-called "sound demos" I always enjoy the live music - drums, saxophones, or any instrument really - best and try to walk as close to it as possible. The priests had brought various things from their temples which they used as instruments. One of them made a sharp penetrating sound with a metal bell in the shape of a bowl (o-rin) and another had what looked like a small mokugyo (a wooden instrument in the shape of a fish).

As we approached Namba, near the end of the demonstration, I got my second surprise when the DJ started to play Kimigayo, the controversial national anthem. As far as I could see, nobody protested. Maybe it was only in my imagination, but the entire demonstration seemed to grow quiet, as if in deference. It felt a bit like a sports event. Although I had felt stupid when I asked the priests why they were dressed like priests, I think I felt even more stupid walking along with the demonstration to the solemn tunes of the anthem and wondering why I was participating in this spectacle.

I later found a participant report ("Afugan Iraku Kitachôsen to Nihon") that mentions that the anthem was accompanied by a change of slogans, something which I hadn't noticed from where I was walking. The new slogans included "We are neither right nor left, just ordinary citizens", "Please, participate in the demonstration regardless of whether you are right or left" and "Let us sing Kimigayo in a normal way, without being coerced". As the blog author points out, the intention behind the arrangers is easy to sympathize with. Surely, the entire citizenry are victims when a nuclear accident occurs.

However, if the intention was that everybody should be able to participate regardless of ideological conviction, then why on earth play the Kimigayo at all?

What I think needs to be said clearly is that the idea that a national anthem is "neutral" and stands above politics is a delusion. My intention is not to single out the Kimigayo in particular, despite its controversial status. The same can be said about any anthem. If I had participated in a demonstration in Sweden, and the organizers had suddenly decided to play the Swedish anthem, I for one would certainly have refused to walk along. Playing a national anthem is divisive - just as divisive as playing an overtly "leftist" or "rightist" song - for the reason that nationalism is itself an ideology, propagated for political reasons by political actors in all modern states.

My intention today is not to criticize nationalism - although that is an ideology I detest. What I want to point out is simply that the idea of trying to use nationalist symbols to reach out beyond ideological barriers is unworkable.

Not only does it seem insensitive towards the Korean or Taiwanese participants in the demonstration. Doesn't it also seem like an almost intentional affront against those on the left who have long fought against the ordinances forcing teachers to stand in fron of the Hinomaru-flag and sing the Kimigayo in school? Such an ordinance was in fact passed by the Osaka Prefectural Assembly on June 3, less than two months ago.

Maybe it's time for a brief digression into the history of ideas here. As I said, my intention is not to single out Kimigayo as worse than any other anthem. Looking specifically at the Japanese context, however, it's possible to trace back the idea of Kimigayo's "neutrality" to the distinction between the kokutai (national body) and seitai (political body), with the former standing for the nation organically united under the emperor while the latter stood for the institutions of politics, such as parties, assemblies or govenments (I recommend this piece by John Brownlee for a brief history of the idea of kokutai from the Meiji era onwards). Using this ideology, it became perfectly logical for nationalist zealots in prewar Japan to assassinate prime ministers and other politicians in the name of the emperor, hoping to "dispel the clouds" that had hidden the imperial sun.

The ideology was also expressed in the official prewar doctrine that Shintô was not a religion - a doctrine that sounds like a funny curiosity today but which had real political import, since it meant that citizens and colonized subjects could be forced to participate in emperor worship without violating the freedom of religion guaranteed by the Meiji constitution. Although so-called "State Shintô" was abolished after the war (and Shintô is today officially regarded as religion), I don't think it is farfetched to claim that the ideas behind it still live on in the widespread "common sense" that nationalism is not a political ideology. It is on the basis of this "common sense" that teachers are today forced to resign if they refuse to sing the Kimigayo or stand in front of the Hinomaru flag. An obvious continuity exists behind such events today and the famous incident in 1891 when the Christian Uchimura Kanzô was fired as a teacher after refusing to bow to the portrait of emperor Meiji and the Imperial Rescript on Educaction.

Korean schoolchildren worshipping at a Shinto shrine. Freedom of religion?

The effect of portraying things like anthems or flags as "non-political" or "non-ideological" is to marginalize dissent and rob it of legitimacy. After all, if these act of standing, singing or bowing are essentially non-political acts, how could they possibly go against the political or religious convictions of anybody who's in his right mind? And if they do, surely those oddballs must be somehow so "different" from to rest of us reasonable, mainstream citizens that we don't need to pay much attention to them?

But let me end by shifting subject. The last three days we've spent in Tokyo, and, oh how idyllic it has been. My heart goes out to everyone we've met there. Some day, perhaps, I'll write more about the places we visited - Asakusa, Kanda, the countryside in Saitama, and peaceful Enoaru Café, the best café in Tokyo.

Ikegami Eiko and aesthetic publics in Tokugawa Japan

2011-07-30T08:59:00.009+02:00

I've recently been writing a piece (forthcoming in Japanese Studies) on how the classical conceptions of a public sphere or public realm in Habermas and Arendt have been challenged by conceptions put forth by Amino Yoshihiko and other historians as well as by activists in the homeless movmement in Japan. Against those who claim that nothing corresponding to a "Western" notion of the public exists in Japanese history, these historians and activists argue that vigorous and powerful public realms existed in pre-modern Japan, especially in the medieval era before the establishment of the repressive Tokugawa shogunate. What enables them to put forth this argument is that they reconceptualize the idea of the public. Instead of emphasizing speech and deliberation as Habermas and Arendt, a central feature of their idea of the public is what Amino calls muen (no-relation) - a quality that enables people to suspend the status, identities and ties of the surrounding secular world and to create egalitarian arenas open to marginal groups.

These historians succeed in locating strong domestic "publics" in medieval Japan. Striking examples include the horizontal associations of the ikki leagues, the egalitarianism of renga gatherings, and the suspension of secular identities at places associated with the sacred. But they usually don't try to establish any continuity between them and contemporary publics. Instead they tend to portray the Tokugawa era (1600-1868) as an era in which these domestic roots of the public were repressed and whithered away.

It is therefore interesting to find a work that focuses precisely on the Japanese "aesthetic publics" in the Tokugawa era and how they developed. Ikegami Eiko's work Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (2005) promises to fill in the gap between the medievalists' account of the premodern publics based on muen and the establishment of the modern nation-state Japan after the 1868 Meiji Restoration. The book is also interesting since it makes fruitful use of the pioneering work of Amino and other historians who have followed in his footsteps, such as Matsuoka Shinpei or Katsumata Shizuo, but without sharing their pessimistic outlook on Tokugawa period society.

While admitting that the Tokugawa shogunate was repressive, she argues that Tokugawa society witnessed a "network revolution" that went hand in hand with a popularization of aesthetic knowledge and civility. It thereby created an equivalent to the horizontal civic associations in European societies. In opposition to those who lament the lack of a genuine public sphere in Japan, she argues that the proliferation of aesthetics publics in this era helped form arenas of freedom from state control where people of various background could associate on equal footing, engaging in free communication characterized by liveliness, sensuality and laughter. ”The stereotype of pre-modern Japanese as people as submissive doormats trodden beneath the heels of militaristic despots fails to convey the vitality of Japanese communicative activities in this period – not to mention modern Japanese cultural practices” (Ikegami 2005:12).

There is much to appreciate in Ikegami's book. Focusing on the relation between art and politics, she provides an interesting and engaging history of Japanese art and aesthetics that gives due attention to its social context. On the way she also delivers an original argument about the origins of the contemporary nationalism that takes pride in Japan as a land of refined beauty and politeness. Here I won’t say much about these matters, where I think she does an excellent job. Instead I will focus on what I think is the main theoretical argument of the book, namely her intervention into the debate of whether anything like the the ”public sphere” existed in Japanese history before Westernization. Unfortunately, it is here that I find the book to be weakest.

The main idea, if I understand Ikegami correctly, is that the proliferation of aesthetic publics shouldn't be viewed simply as an indication of a lack of freedom or of people's wish to escape the world of politics. While it is true that Tokugawa authorities didn't tolerate open challenges to their power, she shows that this picture needs to be balanced against the abundance of freedom in the non-political realm. Even though the "official" realm was structured around vertically or hierarchically organized relations, they coexisted with extensive non-political "inofficial" areas in which horizontal associations proliferated. While the "dominant public" - represented by the so-called kôgi of the shogunate - stressed the maintenance of existing hierarchical relations, ”wide enclaves of free discursive spheres” existed outside this public which authorities had neither the capabilities for nor much interest in controlling.

From medieval times to the Tokugawa era

The best way to follow her argument is to start with medieval Japan, when the central government was weak and strong horizontal associations emerged in the realm of art as well as in politics. Relying on the research of historians like Amino or Matsuoka, she illustrates the vigor of these associations with za (seated) arts. For instance, linked verse (renga) gatherings under cherry blossoms (hana no moto renga) were liminal events thought to be linked to the netherworld. In accordance with the principle of muen, people from various social backgrounds - from commoners to retired emperors - could participate in these poetry sessions without regard for status. Secular ties were suspended in the felt proximity to the sacred. An illustration of the radical, wild and unbounded nature of this freedom from vertical orders was the popularity of frenzied dancing, thought to be animated by sacred madness (kuruu). This freedom also took political form, as in the horizontal ikki alliances proliferating in the latter half of the Middle Ages, alliances that were often linked socially to preexisting linked-poetry circles.

"Hanami takagari zu" (Unkoku Tôgan, late 16th century): Dance for quieting the blossoms (yasuraihana)

The structure of the field of publics changed drastically with the strengthening of central power during the Tokugawa shogunate. Vertical relations now came to dominate the official public realm. While artistic pursuits like jôruri, poetry, threatre, music, calligraphy, painting, ikebana, bonsai, tea, or fashion grew in popularity, they differed in many respects from their medieval predecessors, becoming more controlled, secular and less subjected to "the spirit of magic" (ibid 137f). The decisive difference was that art was now forced to remain in the non-political realm. ”The Tokugawa aesthetic publics were able to build on the remnants of the medieval za spirit only by confining themselves to the interior realm of watakushi (the private) and accepting the official boundaries set for them by the state” (ibid 127). Although horizontal associations continued to exist, they were now confined to the realm of the non-political aesthetic publics. Ikki become outlawed and the word takes on a new meaning, starting to signify peasant revolt.

Shijô kawara yûrakuzu (early 17th century)

Another striking difference compared to medieval times was the reliance of Tokugawa aesthetic publics on the market. The widespread enthusiasm for learning the arts was fuelled by commercialization. Performing artists and poets able to make a living as teachers rather than having to rely on feudal patrons. Paid agents were used to mobilize amateur artists and poets. Knowledge about the arts was spread through the commercial press, and poetry contests were held with thousands of people from all over the country sending in contributions. Economic development was also important, along with the spread of literacy, in attracting various teachers and masters to rural areas. Ikegami quotes a report by a critical official in the Kantô area from 1826:

Performing artists of various types go out from Edo to visit different areas in the Kantô and generally wander around. These people include masterless samurai, Confucian scholars, painters and calligraphers, haikai masters, ikebana teachers, and masters of igo or shôgi games. They organize meetings, get permits from the local village officials, and earn good money from wealthy people in the area, and encourage luxurious spending. As a result, the peasants get lazy and neglect farming because of their bad influece. (quoted in Ikegami 2005: 206)

While some aesthetic publics were structured hierarchically, as in those arts that relied on the monopoly of certified "houses" (the iemoto system), horizontal loose networks remained vigorous in arts such as haikai-circles. Ikegami discusses the example of Igarashi Hamomo, a woman poet who travelled around to participate in linked-verse gatherings, relying on the hospitality of local members of haikai networks, locating other women poets and helping them organize women-only groups. Referring to haikai as ”network poetry”, she characterizes it as marked by border-crossing, jokes, subversion, travel.

Aesthetic public: the audience of an early kabuki play including two foreigners (Kabuki zukan, ca 1605)

Although these aesthetic enclave publics differed from their medieval predecessors, Ikegami stills sees them as functioning along the lines of the principle of muen. They were enclaves where "people could temporarily suspend the application of feudal norms" and where connections could be formed between people from various social backgrounds (ibid 4). People engaged simply as poets or artists, having decoupled from preexisting identities in the ”official” order. Being relatively egalitarian, these publics included bohemian samurai, rich merchants, village chiefs, artisans, small shopkeepers, and she even mentions fishermen who read poetry in their boats.

With time, she argues, the shell of the formal identities in the Tokugawa order became even more hollow:

Once the aesthetic publics were accepted as important components of the private life in Tokugawa Japan, they quietly produced individuals who considered their aesthetic enclave identities to be more profoundly rooted to their true selves than were their feudal categorical identities. (ibid. 43)

Here Ikegami seems to suggest that the Tokugawa order with its multiplicity of enclaves led to the construction of apolitical or private man as the true man. She thus supplies the social background to an important fact in the history of ideas recorded by Maruyama Masao, namely that Tokugawa scholars like Ogyû Sorai for the first time in Japanese history started to distinguish between a public realm ruled by the Tokugawa order and a private realm where people were free to engage in self-cultivation.

The ostensibly non-political aesthetic publics were not entirely decoupled from political empowerment. One example discussed by Ikegami is Watanabe Kazan (1793-1841), a painter from a samurai family who recorded in his diary the political discussions he participated in during his travels. Travels like that, she writes, provided occasions for learning about political realities, ”an education in political awareness”. Aesthetic publics, then, clearly had the potential to be transformed into political publics:

The pattern of socialization described in the writings of Kazan challenges the prevailing notion that pre-modern non-Western societies such as Tokugawa Japan did not develop spheres of critical discourse regarding political matters. [...] [L]ate Tokugawa Japan began to produce larger numbers of people with a critical political consciousness. This consciousness in turn was supported by numerous spheres of voluntary socialization that made use of the established logic of aesthetic enclave publics. (ibid. 201).

Such travels also contributed to the establishment of networks between villages, traditionally the most powerful base for popular protest. Regions with a high density of haikai networks also had a high level of grassroots participation in political mobilization around the Meiji Restoration (ibid 207). The spread of kokugaku, yonaoshi movements and the ”freedom and people’s rights” movement all benefitted from the networks of the haikai circles (ibid 213-218). Ikegami suggests that those networks also laid the groundwork to such remarkable local initiatives as the 1881 "Itsukaichi constitution" draft. An even more striking example is the 1884 Chichibu Rebellion (also known as the Konmintô Rebellion or Poor People’s Party Rebellion) which also sprung from local haikai circles. Fascinating material discovered by the historian Moriyama Gunjirô shows how the uprising had been preceded by poetry sessions dedicated to Sakura Sôgorô in Nagaru village.

Apparently, just as the medieval ikki horizontal alliances often had linked-verse sessions before their military actions, peasants in this community had two poetry-making sessions to solidify their dedication to their project of protest. (ibid. 219)

She also suggest that prayers to Sakura would have been understood as prayers to cherry blossoms (sakura), the old symbol of the sphere of muen (ibid 219).

"Eejanaika" dancing on the eve of the Meiji Restoration

The definition of publics

My first critical comment concerns Ikegami's definition of the word "public". She defines publics as ”communicative sites that emerge at the points of connection among social and/or cognitive networks” (Ikegami 2005:7). What I find noteworthy here is that she defines the public in terms of a relation between "networks" - publics are where networks "meet and intersect" (ibid 24), or where ”the actions of switching/connecting and decoupling of networks take place” (ibid 48). Networks are thus central to her definition. Problematically, however, I cannot see that she ever really clarifies what a network is. In her discussion of the concept of network she states simply that they consist not only of concrete interpersonal ties but also cognitive associational maps perceived in the form of narrative stories, and that the term network might be preferable as a substitute to more limited terms like social relations, social structure and values and norms (ibid 46f). This amounts, in my view, to saying that anything in society or culture can be a network. Using a wide concept of network is not bad per se, but an unfortunate consequence is that any social or cultural meeting-point can viewed as a "public" according to her definition, which strikes me as far too wide and imprecise.

This lack of precision is problematical in relation to several issues:

1) It becomes hard to see how she delineates what she calls the "aesthetic publics". Are these publics not themselves better understood as networks of people with shared interests, rather than as spheres where networks "intersect"? Her accounts of these various publics suggest very clearly, I think, that the former option is correct. If she denies this, seeing them as nothing but spheres for the intersection of networks, then where is the substance that might justify labelling them as "aesthetic"? One might of course also try claiming that both options can be correct at the same time, but then the distinction between public and network collapses.

2) A second problem concerns the old problem of the relation between the public and community. It has long been claimed - by people like Arendt, Richard Sennett, Lyn Lofland, Karatani Kôjin and many more - that publics are social spaces where one "meets the stranger", i.e. a person who is not part of one's own community. By contrast, Ikegami appears to be claiming that publics are rather where one meets a person who is not part of one's own network. But what is the additional benefit introduced by replacing the word community by the word network? Presumably, a network is more open and not as tightly structured as a community. But if networks are per definition open, then the entire idea of speaking of connections between separate networks starts to look shaky. If a network has a connection to another, won't they be part of the same network? And if that is so, then how do we locate the sphere where networks "intersect"?

3) A third problem with the definition is that networks can be connected in secret. If that is so, does it really make sense to define that meeting as ”public”?

4) A final problem appears when she writes that ”identity, culture , and meanings as such are ’emergent properties’ arising from the interplay of human subjectivity in actors involved in network relationships at the communicative sites of publics” (Ikegami 2005:5). This is a very strong claim, because it implies that culture, identity etc cannot arise within networks, or in, say, local or bounded communities. Is that really true?

Japanese aesthetic publics and the Western "public sphere"

She repeatedly contrasts her own approach to that of Habermas. However, she does so in a curiously sloppy way, almost as if she hadn’t read him. This is a pity, because the result is that she constructs an artificial wall between the aesthetic publics of Tokugawa Japan and the bourgeois public sphere described by him, and that she fails to see the many similarities between the two conceptions.

Let us look at some of the criticism she directs against Habermas. Firstly, she claims that the public is necessarily plural, while he defines it as ”an integrated and unified realm”. This seems unfair, since Habermas is quite explicit in his book that he is not going to treat all public spheres, only the bourgeois one. Secondly, against the "normative" views of the public in Habermas and Nancy Fraser, she emphasizes that ”the field of multiple publics is always charged with the dynamic of power” (ibid. 58).

The efficacy of the message that flows from communicative actions is also influenced by the way in which that public is positioned in the field of multiple publics. Consequently, the concept of the multiplicity of publics brings us to another important question: If publics are necessarily multiple, what are the interrelations between them? [...] Habermas’ historically informed analysis of the public sphere in the West is in fact a case study of this hegemonic process in which one category of the liberal bouregois public sphere gained normative authority in the West. (ibid. 59)

This is a reasonable statement, but surely it is ludicrous to state that Habermas or Fraser are neglecting power relations between the various publics. Habermas himself would quite willingly agree to the fact that his analysis is a case study how the bourgois public sphere was shaped and reshaped by historical struggles in Europe (see his own comment in The Structural Transformation, 1989:xvii.).

What I find perhaps most regrettable is Ikegami's refusal to engage with the bourgeois "literary publics" (literarische Öffentlichkeiten), which Habermas sees as the seedbeds of the openly political bourgeois public sphere that later developed. Referring to the aesthetic publics of Tokugawa Japan, she writes:

Publics of this nature – popular, decentralized, and intuitive – constitute the diametrical opposite of Habermas’ model of the unitary, bourgeois, and rational public sphere of late eighteenth century Europe. (ibid. 381)

They might have been the opposite of the political bourgeois public sphere, but where they really so different from the literary publics? Just as she neglects the literary publics, she also neglects Reinhart Koselleck's discussion of the role of the masonic lodges in the 18th century – despite the fact that here we have a situation in Europe which is strikingly similar to the situation in Tokugawa Japan. In both cases repression meant that publics could only take the form of enclaves since open political dissent was not tolerated within the dominant public.

The difference might be that the enclaves in Europe - whether in the shape of literary salons or masonic lodges - permitted a budding political discourse, which later entered the wider public and helped spark revolutions. But as Ikegami herself notes, this is only a difference in degree, not in kind. The critical discourses recorded by Kazan during his poetic journey, the spread of kokugaku ideology or the formation of rebellions on the basis of haikai networks testify that the transformation of aesthetic publics into political one was well on its way by the late Tokugawa period. She traces the development of the aesthetic publics in Japan up to a point where they seem about to take the leap and reclaim the revolutionary energies they once possessed in medieval times. Unfortunately, her theoretical framework - which posits a rather sterile opposition between the Japanese and European trajectories - is a hindrance in order to understand the dynamics of that process. Rather than simply contrasting Japanese aesthetic publics to the "Western" or Habermasian political public sphere, it would surely have been interesting and fruitful to look also for similarities, especially through a comparison between the aesthetic publics in Japan and the literary publics in Europe.

The question of power

Ikegami makes an important point when she writes that ”the structure of the institutional field of publics in a society is profoundly influenced by the orgnizational structure of the state” (Ikegami 2005:63). However, I wonder if she goes far enough in clarifying the role of the state.

She makes it perfectly clear that the fact that the Tokugawa state was a repressive state intolerant of political dissent was a crucial factor behind the shape the Tokugawa aesthetic publics assumed. State power was decisive in curtailing the freedom of the earlier medieval publics which had often been very political and oppositional in relation to various powerholders.

However, at the same time she repeatedly emphasizes how the Tokugawa state relied on ”indirect rule”, which in practice meant that it delegated control. This, in combination with the ”Tokugawa network revolution”, which occurred as communicative networks expanded in scale, density and complexity, meant that the state was unable to survey or control the myriad of publics very efficiently.

The resulting picture of the Tokugawa state is not as clear as one could have wished. If the complexity of the networks meant that the state lost control, why were the aesthetic publics so afraid of venturing into the realm of politics? Why was the state able to retain efficient control in the realm of the political public sphere despite its inability to control the proliferating networks? Was there anything that forced the aesthetic publics to be more careful about political speech than enclave publics in Europe, such as the masonic lodges? Although Ikegami's text contains some clues to these questions - spies and the risk for detection, the fear of gruesome punishments, and processes of identity formation that lead to the idea of the non-political human being as the "true" human being - the picture still contains many blanks. Fear of detection and punishment has existed in many societies. Surely, there must have been ways of discussing politics in furtive ways in the networks of the aesthetic publics. How else could rebellions suddenly spring from them? Without clarifying that, the mapping of communication in these publics remains incomplete.

The public as muen or as political deliberation?

As I mentioned in the beginning, I am interested in how the classical formulations of the "public" in Habermas and Arendt are challenged by alternative conceptions of the public in which muen is central. Ikegami's book must surely be seen as a contribution belonging to the latter camp. At the same time, she clearly sees the "aesthetic publics" of the Tokugawa era as operating in a different fashion from the medieval publics analyzed by Amino. She also appears to see important lines of continuity between the Tokugawa publics and present-day Japan - for instance, the preference for tacit modes of communication, the ideology of "Japan" as a country of beauty and politeness, and perhaps also the reluctance to engage in explicit political discourse. Although her book doesn't deal with modern Japan, surely many readers will find it remarkably much like today’s Japan when she writes that in the Tokugawa era "an intensely controlled and hierarchically ordered formal society” coexisted with ”the relaxed and sensual dimension of popular culture” (Ikegami 2005:130).

Does this mean that she views muen as central to the way publics operate in contemporary Japan as well? This question is not so easy to answer. In fact, I believe her book can be read in to quite different ways.

On the one hand, there are certainly many passages that suggest that she sees a long-lived tradition of public life centered on muen as something distinctly Japanese. Such a conception of history appears to lie behind her repeatedly stated contrast betwen the Japanese and European trajectories, with the former being characterized by aesthetic publics operating with sensual and tacit modes of communication and the latter by rational, bourgeois publics of the Habermasian kind.

But on the other hand, her book can also be read as a story of discontinuities. The principle of muen barely managed to survive in the Tokugawa era by being confined to aesthetic "enclave publics", where it was "civilized" and lost its political function. As the Tokugawa order started to crack up and totter, these enclave publics again took on a political role, becoming the birthbed of open rebellion. As I have suggested, this reading foregrounds the similarities to the European patterns - especially to the "literary publics" and their politicization - rather than the differences. Although the principle of muen might still have animated these rebellions, we now see much more of rational political deliberation - for instance in the fervor of the "movement for freedom and people's rights" with their many speeches and pamphlets, the organization of political parties and the drafting of constitutions in villages.

I myself prefer the latter reading, for reasons I've stated above. A consequence of that, however, is that it becomes problematical to suggest any unbroken continuities between the Tokugawa era and today. Japan today is certainly to a great extent apolitical and consumerist - a land of play, shopping, amusement, aesthetics and subcultures. But rather than seeing this as a legacy of Tokugawa society, it is surely better to view it as a product of shifting historical circumstances in which important factors have been the ability of elites to placate social unrest through economic development and the fact that attempts to challenge power - through the "movement for freedom and people's rights" and the plethora of other movements in prewar and postwar Japan - have repeatedly run aground and produced a sense of defeat.

To summerize, I believe Ikegami vacillates between, on the one hand, claiming that Tokugawa aesthetic publics were fundamentally different from the Western political, deliberative publics. On the other hand, her account suggests that they potentially represent something similar to the Western public, since political dissent and opposition actually grew out of the renga and haikai networks, thus following a similar development as the one Habermas traces from the literary to the political publics. This defence, however, tends to erase or weaken her argument that there is something fundamentally different between Japanese and Western notions of the public.

Final words

My criticism is not meant to imply any rejection of the book, which I read with much pleasure. Neither do I think that enclave publics are irrelevant today. They partake of the ambiguity that Adorno and Marcuse detected in the "affirmative character" of art, namely that art both prefigures utopia and sanctifies the status quo. By creating enclaves of substitute freedom, aesthetic publics genuinely help people lead happier lives, sustain their sense of self-worth and fulfillment, and to endure a situation in which they have been made politically powerless.

But does this mean that there is no need for protest or politics, as long as we have enclaves to which we can escape? Near the end Ikegami acknowledges ”certain disquieting features of this proto-modern heritage”, namely the unsolved problem of political discourse. The problem, she states, appears ”when the traditional Japanese non-discursive modes of communication are used outside their proper domains” in which case ”they may serve as a pretext to discourage the linguistic articulation of critical discourse” (Ikegami 2005:381). Rather than reading her simplistically as a defender of the freedom of the aesthetic publics, it makes more sense to read her as saying that they fulfill a legitimate and important role next to the political ones. There are times when we need to save what can be saved and take shelter, but there are also times when we become impatient and desire to venture outside to see the blue sky, and even times when we are forced out of the shelters since they are under attack and about to collapse. Isn't what is happening today, in an increasingly harsh economic climate and increasing concern with surveillance and security, that governments far stronger than the Tokugawa shogunate are destroying the enclaves of the apolitical aesthetes, except for the rich and powerful? How long can the subculture otaku, or the fashion-conscious freeter boys and girls, react to this destruction by gliding away to the next enclave, hoping to find his or her true self there, pretending that protest and the political public don’t matter?

Finally, let me add that there might be something misleading about the opposition between aesthetic and political publics. Nothing says one must abandon art to express oneself politically. There is critical potential in art. But it blossoms only when it leaves the realm of pure art, and allows itself to express whatever it wants to express, including politics.

Ikegami, Eiko (2005) Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Why not a Green Party in Japan?

2011-07-27T02:22:00.001+02:00

It's interesting to compare Paul Hockenos' list of "elements" or factors behind the strong German anti-nuclear movement (in "Germany's Nuclear Endgame: The Lessons", in Open Democracy, 26 July) with the conditions in Japan.

It turns out that there are many similarities (strong grassroot protest, non-violent direct action, "non-ideological" diversity enabling alliances across left-right spectrum).

A major difference is that the Japanese movement never took off from the local level while the German movement developed nation-wide platforms and a Green Party, which in turn was crucial in fostering economic incentives and green legislation.

So the problem is: why won't Japan, with its myriad of obscure ephemeral parties, also set up a Green party? Now would be a good timing.

Strays thoughts

2011-07-26T05:51:00.012+02:00

Travelling is good for thinking in many ways. Routines drop away, you meet people, and things seem to start anew. You think much and feel much. Doing both at the same time is always the best way to think. You get up early with too little sleep. As the hot summer makes you pause, you’re assaulted by memories and strange ideas. Instead of reading in a room you read on a bench, by the riverbank, on a train or in a café. You walk a lot. Your body loves it, feeling free, and your thoughts wander too.

It struck me today, as we were taking my son to kindergarten while he was sitting on my shoulders, that a boddhisattva cannot be a person who helps others out of pity. Theoretically, I know very well that this is nothing new. From a standpoint of non-duality, there is no helper and no helped. A boddhisattva who thought in such terms would be a contradiction in terms.

Perhaps a boddhisattva would rather be a person who, rather than thinking of herself as helping others, keeps searching for the boddhisattva in the other, recognizing the everyone she meets has the potential of being such a boddhisattva and waiting for it to appear – in the kindergarten teachers, the relatives who will visit us tomorrow, the homeless, the high school girls, the person in a suit who is hurrying past us, or anyone else in the throngs of Shijô street?

If such an attitude is fully attainable, I don't know. But I want to help others, it will surely not hurt if I recognize how much I myself am also in need of help. Listening to others as if their words could help you in some important respect – making you see things more clearly or enriching your life or whatever – is usually a good way of making you both feel better. It’s not true that if you want to help others, you must help yourself first. If you want to help others, let them help you, or at least let them know that they have that ability.
There is a quote by Calvino, from Invisible Cities, which I think expresses this attitude, at least in part.

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

To help what is not inferno is not to act out of pity. Rather than simply being good yourself, Calvino seems to be saying, we should help goodness to spread and give it room. The one who helps others out of pity doesn't just risk appearing presumptous, producing resentment and irritating people. Even worse is that he monopolizes goodness, thus stopping its growth and keeping it tiny.

Let me put it like this: whenever you want to help another, do so in a way that helps goodness grow. If you help another, but in such a way that you produce resentment or shame, then goodness will not grow. It will be something you have gained only for yourself, but such a goodness is worth very little.

It may sound strange, but our common view of religious dogmas often sound true only if we invert them. A boddhisattva is a person who helps others by treating them as if they could help her. If we turn to Christianity for a moment, I've always thought that it sounds unconvincing that we should pray to God for forgiveness. How much truer isn't it to say, on the contrary, that it's we who must learn to forgive God?

Karma is not the law that determines the transmigration of souls. How could there be any souls, if there is no atman? No, there is no soul that can preserve its identity even over the course of a life-time. How, then, could there be any identity between life-times? Karma is nothing but the birth of goodness from goodness, or of hatred from hatred. There's no need to involve the idea of the soul. The first five verses of Dhammapada put it well. So, actually, does Richard Gere. Asked what he had learnt from Dalai Lama, he answered: "That anything I do that's motivated by any personal enrichment leads to suffering for me, while anything that enriches the happiness of someone else makes me happy. And it's never failed" (thanx for the quote to E., whose doors and walls have always been a source of wisdom for me).

The dolls of Awashimadô

2011-07-24T19:00:00.011+02:00

On our way to Umekôji Park today, I was intrigued to find a small temple with the sign "Ningyô kuyô" (Memorial service for dolls). Walking inside we found a peaceful, small yard in front of a prayer hall, Awashimadô. What immediately caught our eyes was a big glass cabinet filled with the most marvellous, sad-looking dolls.

Looking left was another cabinett, just as marvellous.

Brilliant like a faded, slightly spooky fairytale court.

This slightly anxious-looking lady was sitting in a cabinet next to the prayer hall.

Beneath the cabinet, Hotei and the other "lucky gods" seem to be discussing the weather.

The only living presence we noticed during our visit at the temple were two cats who manned the reception desk:

Since I'd never seen a temple like this before, I first thought the idea might be to pray for the souls of dead children (as in mizuko kuyô, the memorial service for stillborn or aborted children), but then we discovered an explanation on one of the cabinets.

To thank and pray for the souls of the dolls who have comforted our spirits and taught us to respect and take care of all things around us will also purify your own heart.

Later, I also find the following text on the temple's homepage:

Here at Awashimadô of the Sôtokuji temple, we perform memorial services for dolls. In line with the saying that a soul resides in all things, we have long felt that things too possess heart and life and should be treated with care. Here we transmit our feelings of gratitude and say "Thank you for the time that has been" and pray for the dolls.

This, then, is where people leave their old beloved dolls and say farewell to them. A land of the dead of dolls. Looking at their sad faces, I felt it was like a home for the unwanted elderly.

There are still things I don't understand and which I wish I could find an explanation for. For instance, it seems that at many other temples, the dolls are burned after the memorial service. But the dolls we saw here looked old, even bleached in the sun. Perhaps they are just left at the temple instead of being burned. But if that is so, how long will they be here? Or are the dolls in the cabinet just a select few used for exhibition?

I also wonder if the background of "ningyo kuyô" is fully explained by the texts I saw. Doing a quick search on the Internet, I quickly learned that doll offerengs were often made to temples by women wishing to become pregnant. This was for instance the case with Hokyôji temple, which also performs ningyô kuyô. If that is so, the dolls might once have had a sort of magical function, perhaps similar to the wooden Akuaba dolls I saw in Ghana which depict babies and which childless parents take care of just as if they were real children, in order to become pregnant.

That this might have been the historical reason behind the "ningyô kuyô" is confirmed by a Japan Times article by Setsuko Kamiya:

Historically, for instance, Kiyomizu Kannondo has long been a temple where couples would go and pray to be blessed with a child. When a child did come along, it was then customary for them to take a doll to the temple as the child's substitute to prevent anything bad befalling it. As time went by, some people simply started bringing dolls they wanted to get rid of, and the temple began accepting them daily and eventually started the annual ritual 49 years ago.

This seems to imply that the practice of ningyô kuyô is of rather recent origin. It also appears to be becoming more popular, with more and more dolls being offered each year at big "kuyô" ceremonies at places like Meiji Shrine in Tokyo.

The article also add another interesting piece of information.

All very touching, for sure, but why do so many Japanese feel the need to pray for the dolls before abandoning them -- to say such "Thanks and Goodbye," as signs at Meiji Shrine proclaim? According to Sumie Kobayashi, who heads the reference room of doll manufacturer Yoshitoku Co., the key actually lies in the annual Hinamatsuri Doll Festival. The dolls for this occasion, traditionally representing the wedding of the Imperial couple, are displayed on a platform. They are admired and handled with care and respect. Kobayashi explained that festivals such as this are rooted in ancient purification rites performed as the seasons change, and that long ago the dolls were votive symbols in human form.

Still, this doesn't seem to be the entire explanation either. To be sure, many temples seem to be specializing in hina ningyô memorial services, but that doesn't seem to be the case at Awashimadô where they appear to accept dolls of every conceivable kind, including French dolls, ceramic figures, teddy bears and Hello Kitty.

So what we seem left with is simply the fact that for some reason many people find it hard to part with their old dolls. Or as the article says, referring to two interviewed people:

Both Okamoto and Yamada believed it just wasn't right to simply toss their dolls into a rubbish bin, not least because of the memories that they embody. Each felt that doing so would in some way bring a curse down on them.

This is a feeling which is easy to understand. "The end is important in all things", to quote a famous old book from the 18th century. Rites have always been useful to say goodbye in a proper way. But I still don't have any explanation to why this practice emerged when it did. What did people do with their dolls before the ningyô kuyô began? How do people part with other things they have loved?

A grotesque manifest

2011-07-24T12:07:00.006+02:00

I just had a brief look at the (1,500 page!) ”2083: A European Declaration of Independence”.

No, I didn't read it. I don't have the time or the stomach for this kind of thing. I read parts though, and here's my preliminary summary of what I saw: hatred of multiculturalism, the "cultural Marxist" elite and the "Islamic colonization of Europe". A desire to strike a pessimistic, heroic tone: our only hope against the near-complete victory of "political correctness" are a few courageous resistance fighters. Time is running out. In a few decades we will have a Muslim majority. The 50's was an idyll: today violence and criminality rule the streets.

The introductory pages are followed by a ”book” on the atrocities of Islam and the falsification of history. The next ”book” is about Europe and the EU’s deliberate project to islamicize Europe. He claims that western feminism paved the way for Islam. Apart from cultural Marxism, multiculturalism and feminism, he also resents global capitalism, labour migration, low birthrates, rap and black culture.

An interesting curiosity is his hatred of what he calls the Frankfurt school, which he claims was founded by Lukács. This nebulous school - of which he thinks Gramsci and today's deconstruction also form part - assumes central importance in his thinking as a sinister contemporary "cultural" version of the classical "economic" Marxism but just as intent on erasing Western civilization as the latter. Thinkers like Marcuse, Fromm and Adorno are introduced in Wikipedia-like entries (with pedantic but truncated lists of important works). This entire tradition of thought is summarily reduced to "revolution", resentment against Western civilization and Gulag. Much of the information is superficial, the argument is crude and the entire text is full of repetitions.

There is also an attack on sociology, entitled ”Why the discipline of Sociology must be completely removed from Academia” (If he hadn’t been a madman, I would have felt flattered).

Another curiosity is his appreciation of countries like Japan or South Korea that ”never adopted multi-culturalism” (very flattering to these countries indeed!).

In the second half of the long manuscript I discover what I can only describe as bizarre long passages with descriptions of armour, weaponry and shields, presumably things needed by Knights Templars to repulse Islam from Europe.

The most repulsive thing about what happened in Oslo and Utoya are of course the acts themselves, the deaths and the cruelty. What point is there in paying attention to the ideas expressed by the murderer? What strikes me, however, is how well this guy’s world-view accords with what is propagated by islamophobic or racist parties in Europe - the desire to defend an idealized idyll against outsiders, the hatred of a dominant "political correctness" which is equated with betrayal. These are parties which have recently made spectacular electoral gains in many countries and are now trying to gain a measure of respectability. If one removes the comical theoretical ornaments, the basic ideas are familiar. One can only hope that the horrible deeds in Oslo and Utoya will help make them less respectable again.

A very reasonable protest

2011-07-18T18:33:00.003+02:00

Here we go, on our way to join the protests against police repression in Osaka - a tiny group wandering through the longest shopping mall in Japan, the Tenjinbashi shôtengai.

Here's what the protests were about: In April seven people were arrested on charges of "disrupting official duties" as they were protesting against the fact that homeless people in Japan are not allowed to vote. To vote in Japan you need a certificate of residency (jûminhyô), which in turn requires the possession of an address. In addition to being poor and lacking a place to live, the homeless are thus prevented from exercising basic democratic rights.

The resident's card system is also hugely discriminatory against the homeless for many other reasons: without it it is impossible to get an ID card, a bank account, an insurance or a mobile phone - de facto preventing the homeless from receiving welfare or pensions or applying for a regular job.

Additional info (in Japanese) about the demonstration can be found here.

To deny people basic democratic rights for lack of a certificate of residency is absurd. It is also absurd to maintain a system that exacerbates exclusion. I give all my support to those who campaign for everybody's right to vote as well as to the demand that the arrested be released immediately.

Days in Japan

2011-07-15T20:05:00.005+02:00

I've been in Kyoto now a couple of days, and perhaps I should say something about my experiences here. I simply love it. The summer heat, the warm nights, the people I meet, the way I myself function here.

I've written before about the Kamo river. Today I decided to go to the university on foot along the riverbank rather than taking the train. Wonderful. I realized again how much I like the place. When I felt the gravel and the wooden planks of the bridges under my feet, it felt as if the place itself, or its spirit, was welcoming me. Yes, it was right to come here. Some places are just like old friends, and just as deserving of visits.

As I passed the houses of the homeless under one of the bridges, three of the inhabitants were standing outside, joking with each other and laughing. A picture of happiness.

Recently my days have been taken up by trips to Osaka, by talks, meetings, events and fieldwork. I've been able to listen to amazing stories from people who participated in the last ditch fight to protect the tent village of Nagai Park from eviction - a fight that was fought not with violence but by a theatrical play, performed on a stage while the city staff and the guardsmen demolished the village (see here for some You Tube footage). I spent a peaceful morning at Oshiteriya, and what a privilege it was, next day, to take part in the cooking of tamago-donburi in Ôgimachi Park, despite the many mosquitos. My thanks to the generous chef! Tomorrow I'm off to Osaka again, this time for a demonstration and for an interview.

Nagai Park today

One of my impressions is that "deprivation" is not really the most apt word for describing life in the tent villages. There might be some truth in the statements of people like Ogawa Tetsuo or Nagagiri Kôsuke about the richness of life in these villages. Collective life seems to have survived here much more than in in so called mainstream society. Materially, it can't be denied that life here is characterized by hardship and poverty. But the poverty is perhaps not as extreme as many people think. As long as they are able to maintain their village, they are able to live a life not much worse than anyone else's. Above all they do not give the impression of being helpless or mere objects of charity or pity.

Over the last decade, most of the big tent villages in Osaka have disappeared, many through large scale forced evictions. Homelessness is still rampant, but today many of the homeless are forced to lead an insecure and ambulant life on the streets rather than in the comparative safety of the villages. Many have been pressured to enter shelters and apply for welfare. Among those who receive welfare and manage to secure an apartment, many feel isolated and return to the remaining villages to find company.

Aluminum cans, crushed for recyling

I know so little and they know so much. There might not be much meaning in stating my superficial impressions. Still, I will end with one more. One of the few things in this country that really, really shines is activism, that of homeless people as well as that of freeters. Not pop culture, not chanoyu, not Toyota. Activism, by the way, is not a conduct linked to a particular role, that of "activists". It is the attempt to be alive, to be free and able to act, rather than just being an object or helpless bystander.

Murai Shôsuke on the wakô

2011-07-04T08:11:00.004+02:00

Wajin barbarian, Jurchen barbarian

Part of my pleasant stay here in Hokkaidô I've spend reading Murai Shôsuke's 1993 book Chûsei wajinden (A medieval account of the Wa people). A pleasant read, which taught me much about the wakô (in Chinese wōkòu, in Korean waegu). It's a work which is close to Amino Yoshihiko – one could even describe it as a direct attempt to apply the latter’s ideas of asylum and margins to the study of the wakô.

Wakô is a term which is often translated as "Japanese pirates", but as Murai shows, the wa of Korean sources didn't correspond to "Japanese". Neither is it correct to translate wajin, wafuku or wago as "Japanese people", "Japanese dress" or "Japanese language". Instead Murai argues that national categories are not really relevant in understanding the world in which the wakô lived, suggesting that the wakô are better understood as a transnational mix of "border-straddling people" who were able to establish something close to a shared culture of the entire East China Sea region. Wafuku and wago are best understood as the shared dress and the shared language of people participating in this culture. Ethnically, there was much mixture between populations across the Tsushima Straits. Thus Korean-born people too could be referred to as wajin if they had lived for some time on Tshushima and many sources show that wajin were a familiar and economically important presence to the populations along the southern Korean coast.

This means that he is critical of historian Tanaka Takeo’s provocative claim - based on sources that claim that Korean robber bands and outcaste groups had dressed up in wafuku - that the 14th century wakô were a mixture of Japanese and Koreans or even solely Korean. Murai objects that the sources supporting such a claim are scarce, late and motivated by prejudice against outcasts. Personally, I also find it hard to believe that the many pirates on Tsushima would have refrained from venturing westwards to raid Korea. Besides, there doesn't seem to be any point in a wafuku disguise unless there was a general assumption that wakô were generally wajin.

Much along the lines suggested by Amino, Murai argues that the important dividing line was not between nationalities but between the farming and non-farming populations. A cultural continuum conjoined the sea-going populations of the Tsushima Straits and southern Korea, and opposed them to the settled farming population supported by the Korean state. This also seems to be in line with how Korean officials judged the situation, since they repeatedly petitioned the court to deal with piracy by turning the sea- and mountain peoples into farmers by giving them land and taxing them (Murai 1993:54-58). Here I can't help recalling the arguments of Owen Lattimore and James Scott (see the latter's The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia) about how states in East and Southeast Asia have struggled for much of their history to stop their farming population from escaping and returning to a nomadic life. Were the wakô the nomads of the east, just as the Mongols and Jurchen were the nomads in the west?

The parallel between the wajin and the nomadic populations of Inner Asia is in fact a theme that is stressed repeatedly in the book. Thus the Joseon court regarded the wajin as barbarians on the level of the Jurchen yâmin (野人). Adopting the Chinese idea of a civilizational centre surrounded by ”four barbarian peoples” they saw themselves as surrounded by the yâmin in the north, Japan in the east, the ”three islands” (Tsushima, Iki and Matsura) in the south, and Ryûkyû in the west. Furthermore, the three landing ports granted to the wajin (三浦) in the south corresponded to the five fortifications (五鎮) which had a similar function in regulating trade with the Jurchen along the northern frontier (ibid. 59-62).

The account of life in the three ports (Busan, Ulsan and Jinhae) is interesting. The wajin who traded here came mainly from Tsushima, a barren and overpopulated island which was economically dependent on Korea and to which the three ports was a much needed source of economic wealth and a demographic outlet (ibid 108f). Originally only granted as landing ports, they soon developed into permanent wajin settlements or small towns with temples, amusement facilities and prostitution. Houses were in Japanese style with earth walls and thatched roofs. Despite restrictions on travel, trips to nearby hot springs were popular. The settlements were surrounded by walls guarded day and night to prevent the wajin from mixing with the local population (not so much out of fear of smuggling as because of military secrecy), but reports indicate that it was common for the wajin to cross the walls in secret.

The juridical status of the three ports was ambiguous and Murai portrays them in a fashion which recalls Amino's conception of muen or asylums from secular power. Policing and legal jurisdiction seems to have been abandoned by the Korean officials. Although they could punish local Koreans harshly for dealings with the wajin, they usually left the latter alone. This made the ports into a kind of legal limbo or “air pocket” in which only a vague authority was wielded by the distant Tsushima lord, a state which made the ports a haven for piracy and smuggling. They were also largely freed of taxes. An important factor behind this lenience on the part of the Joseon court appears to have been the fear of a renewed outbreak of wakô attacks and another was the fact that Korean officials and merchants too profited from the trade (ibid. 95-103, 126). Tightening of controls, the imposition of less profitable trade rates and harsher measures against piracy led to the outbreak of a Tsushima-supported revolt in 1510. With its suppression, the permanent settlements came to an end and from then on Busan alone was used as a landing port for the wajin.

The later wakô in the 16th century had a quite different character compared to the early ones. The background was the resumption and rapid growth of trade in the course of the century. An important role in this trade was played by the huge production of silver in Japan, which took off with the introduction of Korean cupellation techniques in the 1530s. Ming China's demand for silver and Japanese demand for Korean cotton - rooted in military needs of the sengoku (warring states) era in Japan - provided the conditions for the second wave of wakô. Now it was no longer the Tsushima-Korea relation that was central. The main role was instead played by pirates based in Western Kyûshû, such as Wang Zhi, who raided across a far larger area than the earlier wakô. While earlier exchanges within the region had largely taken place within the framework of the Chinese-centred interstate system (the "tribute system"), this second wave of wakô was helped by the decline and gradual collapse of this system. With the waning of Ming power the policy of maritime prohibitions (hai-chin) could no longer be maintained, which led to the freeing up and proliferation of unregulated trade, a trade which was frequently accompanied by violence and went hand in hand with the increase in piracy.

Just as he had previously depicted the "three ports" as a form of asylum, Murai again deployes what seems like Amino-inspired language in depicting the freedom of the predominant pirate nests of this later era, places like Hirado on Kyûshû, the Gotô islet chain: “Places like Gotô or Hirado were bases of wakô activity with the character of asylums”. He also describes them as “utopias for pirates” where a “maritime world hostile to the state” could develop (ibid. 210). With the reestablishment of strong state power in China and Japan in the 17th century, new and stricter maritime bans are adopted in China, Korea and Japan and the world in which the wakô had proliferated ends.

The deployment of the idea of asylums (or muen) on the "border-straddling" peoples of the East China sea seems to me like a logical extension of Amino's original conception. It frees the latter of some of the difficulties arising from Amino's tendency to see muen as based in religious notions such as a lingering "primitive" authority of the sacred. Instead, the wakô asylums portrayed by Murai seems to have had sprung mainly from the weakness of the medieval state and the inability of the latter to prevent a plurality of rivalling power centers to arise which were strong enough to challenge or escape its control. It was this weakness which allowed the "border-straddling" peoples and their trade to flourish and to establish a shared culture covering much of the region.

Ludd

2011-06-17T02:58:00.007+02:00

One of my favorite essays on the Luddites is Thomas Pynchon's “Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?” from 1984. Perhaps because it tells me something about Pynchon, something about where his heart is, that makes me like him. Perhaps also because he manages to tie together Ned Ludd with Frankenstein and King Kong ("your classic Luddite saint"). And how I smile at the ending fanfare, the theatrical and oh so beautiful quote by Lord Byron: "And down with all kings but king Ludd!".

Why write about the Luddites? Well, I thought it might be timely, now when so many others - Krugman, for instance - have started sounding almost serious about the risk that highly educated people will have their skills devalued by technology. And, of course, in an age when nuclear power plants are exploding people's trust in technology isn't what it once was.

However, there is something facile, something a little bit too respectable, about the "Ludditism" that rests satisfied with protecting consumer interests in the interest of cleaner energy. Why is it, for instance, that Hannah Arendt's defence of the "Luddite machine smashers" of 1968 in On Violence sounds so utterly harmless? Is it because her portrayal of the student revolt as a desperate Luddite reaction against a technology that has turned apocalyptic contains too many echoes of Heideggerain philosophy? Or is it because metaphors always lack something compared to the real thing, and the students didn't really break any machines? Is it because it sounds so much more noble and commendable to be concerned about technology in general than to smash it because it threatens to make you jobless?

Far more interesting is Eric Hobsbawm's old essay “The Machine Breakers” (from Past & Present, No. 1, 1952). It helps you understand history (read it!), how rational and reasonable the breaking of machines could be, and how far it often was from any hatred of technology per se. Perhaps most crucially, it never pretends that the Luddites were something else but workers.

Whenever we speak of Luddites, I feel that there is a distinction we should at least try to be aware off. Breaking machines as part of the struggle of producers threatened by the capitalists in whose interests the machinery is installed is something else than protesting against the risks that technology will pose to the survival of mankind in general. Going back to Pynchon, we can in fact see that part of the brilliance of his argument probably derives from his skill in moving between these two kinds of Ludditism: the anger of workers and the fear inspired by an uncanny technology that goes berserk.

To the machine-breaking workers, the original Luddites, it's hard to imagine that the machines were uncanny. Probably it was rather the Luddites themselves who appeared uncanny (at least to the capitalists), as the representatives of an avenging force or a return of the repressed. By contrast, when we turn to Frankenstein's monster or Fukushima Daiichi, it is clearly technology itself that has become uncanny and threatens to lay the dreams of order and progress into ruins.

The people Arendt call Luddites are people who fear that avenging ghost and, anxious about the "risks", call for restrictions on technology. But if we agree with Pynchon that King Kong is the typical Luddite saint, then mustn't we also agree that today it is technology itself that has turned Luddite? To Pynchon, ludditism is not necessarily a reaction against against technology at all; it is a reaction against injustice. It is to take sides with the ghosts and make the victors pay. I imagine King Ludd saying: Go ahead and protest against technology, but it's not enough. The real issue is justice. What we're smashing is not just technology, but our oppressors' illusion that they will get away with what they're doing, that we count for nothing, and that they have the right to oppress us.

Nomads and empires

2011-06-16T02:10:00.009+02:00

During the last year I have been reading a few books about China and its various steppe neighbors (Xiongnu, Mongols, Uyghur...). My hope is that these brief jottings about what I thought while reading them will help me put the various perspectives offered on the subject of empires and nomads into some kind of order.

The common association of steppe nomads with mobility and military power - think for instance of Deleuze and Guattari's "nomadic war machine" - seems partly rooted in the actual conduct of warfare. The inability of successive Chinese dynasties to ever defeat the nomads decisively before the Qing Dynasty stemmed from the fact that the nomads could almost withdraw into the interior of the steppe, retreating to a point where the bulky imperial armies could be ambushed or where their supply lines would be stretched too far. The empires' means of controlling the nomads were therefore limited, the best results usually being gained by playing out nomad clans against each other, domesticating part of them by selective rewards such as trade or political support in inter-clan struggles. When nothing else worked, the empire would have to buy peace by tribute, as the Han Dynasty did to the Xiongnu or the Tang Dynasty to the Uyghur, or attempt to wall itself in, as the Ming Dynasty did when it abandoned the steppe and erected the Great Wall.

Thomas Barfield

One influential theory about the relations between China and the steppe nomads is Thomas Barfield's. His 1989 book The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (the main argument of which is recapitulated in a 2001 essay, "The Shadow Empires") argues that the nomadic empires of the Xiongnu, Mongols and Uyghurs were "shadow empires" or secondary formations, rising and falling in tandem with the primary empire, China. Unable to tax their own too mobile and pasturing population, they lived on extracting wealth from China. This idea that nomad societies were "non-autharcic" and hence dependent on trading with or raiding neighboring agricultural peoples is derived from A. M. Khazanov, who made this the central thesis of his 1984 book Nomads and the Outside World. Barfield develops this idea by arguing that the nomads' primary aim was almost never conquest (the Mongol empire was a rare exception), but to gain the resources which they lacked themselves - if not by trade, then by raiding. Regular wars would only break out as the Chinese tried to shut out or drive away the nomads, closing border markets or abrogating treaties. Barfield points out that their dependence on the "primary empire", China, explains why they often intervened to support tottering the Chinese dynasties against domestic turmoil, as the Xiongnu did during the Han and the Uyghurs during the Tang.

Barfield mainly discusses the steppe polities of Mongolia, people familiar with trade and caravans. The fact that they knew how to enrich themselves on the goods they got from the Chinese was one reason why they could thrive on a strong China. The Manchu or the Jurchen further east belonged to another tradition, less concerned with trade and more prepared to prey on China in times of weakness and making several attempts to conquer it, the most succesful one being the Manchu conquest of the 17th century.

An interesting part of Barfield's argument concerns the uselessness and futility of the grand Chinese war campaigns against the nomads, who basically desired trade rather than war and posed no fundamental threat to the empire. The wasteful wars of the martial emperor Wu-di against the Xiongnu were a failure. What finally pacified the latter were not the wars, but allowing them to occupy a position along the border where they could trade.

Emerging from Barfield's book is the image of rather harmless nomads, far from the image of warlike barbarians Chinese historians like to conjure up. This image, true or not, is enough to put the simple opposition of nomads and empires in question. In Barfield's vision, there is hardly any essential conflict between the two. On the contrary, the steppe nomads usually tended to establish symbiotic relationships with the empire, whose real enemy was another kind of formation, another logic, associated with the Manchu and Jurchen further east.

Nicola Di Cosmo

Barfield's account is challenged by Nicola Di Cosmo, whose 2002 work Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History represents a completely different take on the steppe empires. Di Cosmo's ambition is to use archaeology as well as textual sources to escape the "claustrophobic narrowness of the Chinese classical tradition” (Di Cosmo 2002:3). He is also critical of the view that the steppe empires were dependent on or secondary to the Chinese empire or that they could only subsist by trading or raiding the Chinese.

Against the view that nomads raided or attacked because of desire for trade and need of cereals, he points out that nomads to a certain extent grew their own cereals, that they didn’t need much and that they also had access to other sources of wealth through their Central Asian trade network. He rejects the notion that the nomadic economy was dependent on Chinese production and therefore had to trade or raid. It was the Chinese who needed economic exchange with the steppe - to obtain horses and exotic goods - and this, along with the desire to establish contact with allies in Central Asia, explains the Chinese aggressiveness and expansionism in regard to Central Asia (ibid. 155-8, 168-171, 248).

Di Cosmo also argues that until the Ming Dynasty, the Chinese border walls were not so much a defense against increasing nomad aggression, but rather part of Chinese aggression and expansion, serving as a base for exercising hegemony over tribes living along the frontier (ibid. 139, 155f). He also notes the curious fact that the walls - for instance during the Ch'in Dynasty - were not located between the Chinese and nomad populations, but far out in relatively homogenous non-Chinese country, running through "an alien land inhabited by alien groups" (ibid. 152), "right in the middle of large stretches of grassland used for pastoral production" (ibid. 157) - something which he believes may have been linked to the Chinese need to acquire horses for its nascent cavalry.

All in all, this adds up to a firm rejection of the idea that state-formation among the nomads was subordinate to or dependent up the influence of the previously established Chinese empire. We can note, however, that just as little as Barfield does he portray the steppe nomads as inherent aggressors intent on conquering China. The big military campaigns were usually started by the Chinese.

Christopher Beckwith

Di Cosmo's arguments are supported by Christopher Beckwith, who in his 2009 Empires of the Silk Road - a polemical work that sometimes lends itself to what I suspect may be rather too broad generalizations - reiterates the criticism of Barfield's "needy nomad theory". Far from being poor, Beckwith argues, ”rank-and-file nomads were much better off in every way than their counterparts in the peripheral agricultural regions, who were slaves or treated little better than slaves” (Beckwith 2009:xxiii). They were also generally "bigger and healthier than the peripheral agricultural peoples” (ibid. 325). ”Moreover, if life on the steppe was so hard, and the people there were so poor, why should peasants from peripheral states want to defect to them? The reason is that most nomads might have been poor, but most peasants were much poorer” (ibid. 332).

What Beckwith is saying here may sound reminiscent of Marshall Sahlins' well-known argument about "stone age affluence": so-called primitive peoples generally lived a life of relative ease and abundance, while systematic impoverishment makes its appearance with so-called civilized, settled or agricultural life. However, Beckwith clearly parts way with Sahlins in his insistence that nomad empires were far from primitive. They were in fact highly advanced and complex, bringing together not only pastoral nomads, but also agricultural and urban peoples. ”The nomadic peoples and the settled urban peoples were mutually inseparable components of any successful Central Eurasian empire” (ibid. 258). The economic entity into which these peoples were brought together was the so-called "Silk Road", the highly intricate Inner Asian economy itself, which - contrary to popular prejudice - was no mere pipeline connecting east and west. The nomadic states were crucial to this economy, not only because they instituted a pax which provided security for travel, but also because of their demand for products such as silk, metals, and gems: ”what drove the economic engine of the Silk Road was first of all internal Central Eurasian trade, based on internal demand not only for the products of their own peoples but for those of neighboring Central Eurasian states and the peripheral states” (ibid. 321).

Like Barfield and Di Cosmo, Beckwith also attacks the stereotype of nomads as inherently warlike. The Great Wall was not built to protect the Chinese from the barbarians, he argues, but for offensive purposes, to hold territory conquered from neighboring states and prevent loss of population to them (ibid. 27, 330, 333f). In an argument echoing James Scott's in The Art of not Being Governed, he argues that the life of peasants in the "civilized" agricultural empires was in fact such a burden that the rulers were always desperate to prevent the flight of population to the much freer "primitive" societies of the mountains, forests or steppes. ”The only was to avoid losing population, power, and wealth to Central Eurasia was to build walls, limit trading at frontier cities, and attack the steppe peoples as often as necessary” (ibid. 333f).

Arthur Waldron

Another illuminating work that goes even further in dispelling misperceptions about the Great Wall and which is probably bound to serve as an eye-opener to most readers is Arther Waldron's 1990 The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth. The introductory chapters are a funny read about how mistaken the view is of a single “Great Wall” existing ever since Shi Huangdi. For most of China’s history, no wall existed. Before the Ming Dynasty, all walls eroded quickly since they were made of earth. Furthermore, they were constructed in various places according to the needs of the various dynasties. The invading Mongols don’t seem to have encountered any wall. The often discussed riddle why Marco Polo never mentions passing through any "Great Wall" is solved: there probably wasn’t any.

Waldron furthermore criticizes the stereotypical view of an ahistorical Chinese cultural essence somehow expressed in wall-building (as in the idea that the wall was a direct expression of the Chinese worldview, serving as a symbolic boundary between civilized, agricultural China and barbarian peoples of Central Asia). Wall-building was only one strategy among many others used in the course of the various dynasties towards the steppe, including trade, peaceful coexistence and outright conquest. Only the Ming Dynasty - and only from its middle period - seems to have relied primarily on wall building. The middle chapters deal with the question why this was so - the reason was military weakness and the inability to hold the Ordos region - and do a good job in illuminating the various debates that took place at the Ming court.

The final chapters deals with the construction of various myths concerning the Great Wall (as being continuously in existence in the same place since Shi Huangdi, serving as a boundary between civilization and barbary, being visible from the moon etc) and their role in modern nation-building, a subject which Waldron also treats in an amusing essay from 1993, “Representing China: The Great Wall and Cultural Nationalism in the Twentieth Century”. While conceding that components of the myths originated in China, Waldron argues that ”the myth itself first grew to maturity in the Europe of the Enlightenment and was reimported into China in the twentieth century, at a time when that country faced an acute identity crisis” (Waldron 1993:40).

Speaking of the wall, it is hard not to recall Owen Lattimore's argument in "Origins of the Great Wall of China" (originally written in 1937). Although it operates much with the probably untenable idea of the wall serving as a boundary between civilization and barbary, it must have been one of the earliest attempts to debunk som of the common myths of the wall. Pointing out that the various Chinese walls existed not only along the northern frontier but also between several of the Chinese states of the "Warring States" period, he argues that they functioned not only to keep people out but also to keep them in, preventing the home population from dispersing or reverting to a nomad state (Lattimore 1962:7-118).Lattimore's old argument is still suggestive, since it points out that much state-building has involved not only providing protection against nomads, but also a suppression of nomadic lifestyles at home. Even in Lattimore's account, then, it turns out that the boundary between the civilized and the barbarian is fluid.

Peter Perdue

The fact that the nomads too engaged in state-building is a theme that is central to Peter Perdue's 2005 book China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia. Perdue criticizes Barfield for not allowing the nomads any agency of their own and adopts a perspective closer to Di Cosmo's. The book looks at three empires – the Manchu Qing, the Muscovite-Russian and the Mongolian Zunghar – as engaged in "competitive state-building" during the 17th and 18th centuries, a process which ends with the erasure of the Zunghar empire and the major part of its population in the latter half of the 18th century. Before being obliterated, however, the Zunghar had managed to travel quite a bit on the road of state building, creating their own capital, mapping the empire, adopting artillery, and so on.

There is much of interest in Perdue's thick book. It is packed with detail. Among the most horrifying pages are about the genocidal character of the final Qing campaigns against the Zunghars. This genocide - which appears to have been quite deliberate, judging from the prevalence of directives urging "massacre" emanating from emperor Qianlong - led to the disappearance of the Zunghars as a people and left much of present-day Xinjiang empty and ready to be populated by Han Chinese, other Mongols and Turkic peoples moving in from the southern oasis towns (Perdue 2005: 283-286).

Perdue argues that the crucial factor that enabled the Qing, unlike previous dynasties, to conclusively defeat and eliminate the Mongols as a threat was the closure of the steppe through the simultaneous advance of the Russian and Qing empires. This advance, along with the Sino-Russian treaties of Nerchinsk and Kiakhta in the early 18th century, deprived the Mongols of “breathing space” to consolidate their state.

All Qing efforts would have been in vain if the Zunghars had had unlimited space in which to retreat… Thus the Nerchinsk and Kiakhta treaties… made possible the closure of the steppe. The presence of the Russian empire in Siberia rendered Qing-steppe relations radically different from those in any earlier period. (ibid. 523).

Perdue believes that the "closing of this great frontier was more significant in world history than the renowned closing of the North American frontier” (ibid. 10).

He rejects two well-known old hypotheses about the decline of the steppe empires. Firstly, the idea that the nomads were vanquished by the diffusion of gunpowder is rejected, since the Mongols also adopted gunpowder (ibid. 11). Secondly, he also rejects the idea that the region was turned into an economic backwater as the Europeans penetrated the Indian Ocean and trans-Asian trade along the old "Silk road" dwindled.

Even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the old Silk Route trade declined, the Russo-Chinese tea and fur trade remained important. Religious diversity, linguistic pluralism, and cosmopolitanism characterized the oasis cities. More than anything else, it was the conquest of the region by the ‘modern’ empires of China and Russia that relegated it to backwardness in the nineteenth century. (ibid. 10)

An idea that runs through Perdue's book is that of a basic similarity between European and Chinese processes of state-building, economic dynamism and expansionism up until the end of the eighteenth century. Thus he stresses the similarities between the settlement of Xinjiang and European colonization (ibid 335-339, 342ff) and points out that American, Russian and Chinese expansion represented a worldwide and almost simultaneous advance of settler-frontier and the obliteration of nomads (ibid 16).

James Millward

James Millward's 1999 Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759-1864 does not deal with nomads. I mention it here anyway since it does deal with the territory once inhabited by the Zunghars - modern Xinjiang - and how it fared after the Qing conquest.

A major aim of the book is to study the transformation of the Qing empire into the entity known today as ”China”. Being a product of Qing conquests, this entity is of course far bigger than what might be referred to as China proper or the entity that, for instance, a Ming official would have recognized as "China". Today, however, the idea of China possessing natural borders that are coextensive with those of the Qing empire has become firmly rooted. This is reflected in the changed significance of the Jiayuguan, the old border outpost in Gansu which once, to literary Chinese, had signified the end of civilization in the West but which in the late 19th century could be described by journalists as an toll gate absurdly located in the midst of China.

Jiayuguan as reconstructed today

Millward traces this transformation back to the shift in Qing policy that started with the Kokandi invasion of 1830 and the mid-19th century rebellions in Xinjiang. Previous to these events, Qing rulers had conceived of their empire as consisting of discrete parts, united only in the celestial person of the emperor himself. In this conception, China was simply one of the parts, next to the Manchu, the Mongols, and other peoples. Based on this pluralist conception, the Qing government ”rarely placed Han Chinese... in positions of authority of Inner Asians”, instead checking their movements with a road-pass system and prohibiting them from settling permanently in the Muslim south. This, of course, was nothing like the Sinocentric world order posited by John K. Fairbank and other researchers as dominating the Qing conception of the world (Millward 1999:234).

Shaken by the invasion in 1830, however, the dynasty shifted stance and started to accommodate the Han Chinese. While local Chinese in Xinjiang fought off invaders, massacred native Muslims and clamoured for permission to make permanent settlements there, elite scholars like Wei Yuan and Gong Zizhen started to advocate a policy of assimilation, hoping to displace Xinjiang people with massive Han immigration and thus to create a Chinese empire in the Western regions (ibid. 244-250). The result, as Chinese-style administration was implemented the immigration of Han Chinese promoted, was a "Hanization" of the Qing empire:

It is a well-known aspect of China’s modern history that Han Chinese officials, commanding new provincial armies, successfully repressed the Taiping and other rebellions in China proper and thereafter exercised increasing influence on Qing domestic and foreign affairs. There was a less well known but parallel process underway on the peripheries of the Qing empire, however. Han colonization and implementation of Chinese-style administration of frontier regions, from Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Manchuria to Taiwan, became standard dynastic policy as foreign pressures mounted int he latter half of the latter century. (ibid. 250)

The transformation of the Qing empire into "China" was completed after the fall of the Qing dynasty. While the Han activists who had opposed the Qing were inspired by the legacy of the geographically far smaller Ming empire, they were not willing to let go of the Qing conquests. Leaders of the Republic as well as of the People’s Republic thus tried to ”retain – and justify retention of – the Manchu empire while renouncing the Manchus” (ibid 13). The empire was recast as a Chinese nation-state. ”Like any modern nation-state, China has assumed its current sense and shape only after a process of invention, a process Benedict Anderson has memorably called ’stretching the short, tight, skin of the nation over the gigantic body of the empire’” (ibid. 18).

What emerges from the discussions of nomad state building in Barfield, Di Cosmo, Beckwith and Perdue is a multifaced picture of the steppe nomads that does not lend itself very easily into classifications in terms of deterritorialization versus reterritorialization, or "the nomadic war-machine" versus "the apparatus of capture". Despite this each of the books - along with Millward's - in its own fashion opens up for the possibility of critical scrutiny of Chinese empire building

References

Barfield, Thomas J. (1989) The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Barfield, Thomas J. (2001) “The Shadow Empires: Imperial State Formations along the Chinese-Nomad Frontier”, pp 10-41, in Susan E. Alcock et al (eds) Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Beckwith, Christopher I. (2009) Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present, Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Di Cosmo, Nicola (2002) Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Khazanov, A. M. (1984) Nomads and the Outside World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lattimore (1962) Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers 1928-1958, Paris and La Haye: Mouton & Co.

Millward, James A. (1998) Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759-1864, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Perdue, Peter (2005) China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia, Cambridge, Mass. & London, England: Harvard University Press.

Waldron, Arthur (1990) The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Waldron, Arthur (1993) “Representing China: The Great Wall and Cultural Nationalism in the Twentieth Century”, pp 36-60, in Harumi Befu (ed) Cultural Nationalism in East Asia: Representation and Identity, Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California.

Schiller on play and nature

2011-06-11T22:48:00.014+02:00

One always hestitates before writing anything about a classic. Classics always seem to demand at least half a year of research and a proper article. But what's a blog for if not for treating even classics like dime novels?

1955 USSR stamp celebrating Schiller

So here are some frivolous remarks about Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters which I read last autumn because I was interested in theories about play.

In this work, Schiller describes aesthetics as founded on the play-drive. He celebrates play as a mediating factor that cures humankind's "fragmentation of being" by reconciling reason and nature, form and sense, formal drive and sensual drive, and freedom and necessity. The single most famous sentence in this work is probably the one in which Schiller states that "man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays” (p.107).

One of the things I found interesting in this work was Schiller's portrait of nature. This is how he describes human beings in a state of captivity in nature: “self-seeking, and yet without a Self; lawless, yet without Freedom; a slave, yet to no rule. At this stage the world is for him merely Fate, not yet Object” (p.171). In passages that sound like an echo of Hobbes, he describes the world of nature as a world of fright in which man's sole concern is survival. “In vain does nature let her rich variety pass before his senses; he sees in her splendid profusion nothing but his prey” (ibid.). Wisely, Schiller hastens to add: “Man, one may say, was never in such a completely animal condition; but he has, on the other hand, never entirely escaped from it. Even among the rudest of human creatures one finds unmistakable traces of rational freedom, just as among the most cultivated peoples there are moments in plenty which recall that dismal state of nature” (p.173).

Let me now turn to the problematic concluding letter - Nr. 27 - which contains the following passage about how play exists even in nature.

When the lion is not gnawed by hunger and no beast of prey is challenging him to battle, his idle energy creates for itself an object; he fills the echoing desert with his high-spirited roaring, and his exuberant power enjoys itself in purposeless display. The insect swarms with joyous life in the sunbeam; and it is assuredly not the cry of desire which we hear in the melodious warbling of the song-bird... The animal works when deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and it plays when the fullness of its strength is this mainspring, when superabundant life is its own stimulus to activity. (p.207)

This passage can be interpreted in two ways: either in Maslow-like fashion as a statement to the effect that we engage in play or aesthetics when we no longer need to worry about the material necessities of life, or else more narrowly – but to my mind more interestingly – as a kind of definition of what we mean by play. Play is what we do when we do something for pleasure, as a goal in its own right, without any external compulsion or ulterior motive.

I prefer the latter reading, for a variety of reasons. I believe that play is often independent of and even antithetical to material security, and I see little sense in trying to interpret Schiler as a post-materialist avant la lettre (although I admit that the question of how he thinks his ”joyous kingdom of play” will come into being is open. The latter is described near the end of the book as a state in which play and beauty will be universal and create equality. It almost made me start humming about the ”schöner Götterfunken”).

However, even if I opt for the second interpretation, the passage is still problematical. Does it mean that Schiller uses two incompatible definitions of play, on the one had seeing it as a unity of reason and sense which preserves the best of both and makes us fully “human” and on the other seeing it as an activity done for sheer “plenitude of vitality”? The problem is that according to the latter definition, play has no need of reason. As he himself states, animals and even trees can play in that sense. To be sure, on the next page, he tries to steer clear of contradiction by specifying that only the first kind is “aesthetic play” (p.208). But there are still ambiguities left. Note how his examples of “animal play” subvert his earlier bleak portrait of captivity in nature as a relentless struggle for survival. Perhaps nature is not so bad after all?

Finally, let me return to the famous sentence about human beings only being fully human when they play. Interestingly, Schiller defends this proposition by referring to how we think of the gods. The Greeks portrayed their “blessed” gods as freed “from the bonds inseparable from every purpose, every duty, every care", and as making "idleness and indifferency the enviable portion of divinity" (p.109). I sympathize a lot with this portrayal of the gods, not because I believe in any, but because of the implicit - and at Schiller's time probably rather daring - assumption that we should all behave like gods. I also fully agree that there is no other way we can think of gods except as playing. That's how Jahve creates the world and the bodhisattvas save it. Think of what Krishna says in Bhagavad Gita.

There is nothing in this universe, O Arjuna! that I am compelled to do; nor anything for Me to attain; yet I am persistently active.

What is this if not playing?

This sentence, by the way, was of great comfort to me - along with some other sentences by Chuang-tzu, Musil and Benjamin - during a period when I was still young and believed that philosophical truth could be measured by the effect a statement had on your mind by making you understand things that would sound proposterous if you spelled them out literally. The idea of God is precious, because it refutes the stupid prejudice that we only create because of our fear of death. During a conversation I told a friend that one must live as God would have, if he had existed. Because God isn't forced to do anything and has no material worries, yet still he creates.

That, by the way, goes rather well together with the sentence by Musil I was also fond of quoting at the time:

...daß wahrscheinlich auch Gott von seiner Welt am libsten im Conjunctivus potentialis spreche (nic dixerit quispiam – hier könnte einer einwenden...), denn Gott macht die Welt und denkt dabei, es könnte ebensogut anders sein.

Schiller, Friedrich (1967) On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (ed. & tr. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson & L. A. Willoughby), Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Did the public sphere develop out of free space? Notes on Hetherington and Koselleck

2011-05-31T16:47:00.016+02:00

A few notes about Kevin Hetherington's 1997 book The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering and Reinhart Koselleck's old classic Critique and Crisis: The Pathogenesis of the Enlightenment (published in German already in 1959) - two books that both treat the Enlightenment and the emerging public sphere in relation to space.

The central concept of Hetherington's book is that of heterotopia. This is defined as "spaces of alternate ordering". He explains the term by referring to Louis Marin’s concept of utopia. ”Marin’s concern is not with utopia as such, imaginary perfect societies, but with the spatial play that is involved in imagining and trying to create these perfect worlds” (Hetherington 1997:viii). Hetherington’s interest is in this spatial play, or ”utopics”, which takes place in the spaces of modern society, not separated from it or beyond it. Such places are what he calls heterotopias. As examples, he focuses on the Palais Royale, masonic lodges, and early factories.

Shops in the galerie du Palais Royale 1640 (Abraham Bosse)

In particular, his discussion of the Palais Royale is a wonderful example, which vividly conveys the sense of heterotopia with its markets, bazaars, shops, gardens, arcades, bookstores, brothels and coffee-houses. It combined the socially central with the socially marginal; respectability coexisted with the amoral or subversive. Although hardly a model of a new society, it expressed a simultaneously hedonistic and political "utopics" which Hetherington sums up in three words: liberty, equality, and fraternity (ibid 19). It also helps him to criticize Richard Sennett and Jürgen Habermas, and their "public sphere based on the utopia of reason and civility". The public sphere was never just a républic des lettres, as he claims that Habermas depicts it. What one finds in the Palais Royale is ”not only the mobilization of reason... but also the mobilization of emotion and desire, of the more expressive aspects of social life that have to do with personal freedom, from the clandestinely sexual to the overtly political” (ibid. 13). Hetherington seems to be using the idea of heterotopia here to redefine the public sphere in a manner somewhat similar to what Paul Gilroy does with his idea of the "Black Atlantic". Both focus on in-between spaces in order to detect partially hidden public spheres that break with the model of textuality and emphasize bodily or sensual aspects - as in black music with its "saying, screaming, shouting and singing", as Gilroy puts it.

Hetherington argues that heterotopias are not to be romanticized as places of resistance, counter-hegemonic empowerment, transgression or freedom as he claims that Henri Lefebvre, Rob Shields, Mikhail Bakhtin and Victor Turner tend to do (ibid. 21-35). Heterotopias are no perfect societies or orders; they are themselves processes of ”social ordering”. They generate their own codes, rules and relations of power. They only differ from mainstream society by the fact that these ordering processes are felt to be ”other”, different or inconguous in relation to the socialy sanctioned.

Hetherington's concise definition of heterotopia as alternate ordering is convenient and suggestive, but reducing everything to ordering seems unhelpful. Even if each heterotopic instance represents its own ordering, it often makes sense to speak of a higher or lower degree of aggregate order or disorder (=freedom, openness) in a setting or space. Aggregate disorder increases with the number of separate orderings that such a space contains. And that is exactly the situation in a liminoid state or in the carnivalesque marketplace. No order is imposed, or allowed to become dominant, and that is what matters. That is what creates the experience of freedom. Hetherington's three examples are not situated on the same level: factories and lodges are alternative spaces in which a single principle has become dominant and where it is hard to detect any of utopian "play". The Palais Royale, by contrast, appears like a much freer and stimulating place, precisely because it contained such a mixture of orderings. It represented a space with high aggregate disorder. Similarly, moments of what Turner calls communitas are hard to describe as being just as ordered as everyday routine in a factory. Hetherington's criticism of people like Bakhtin or Turner thus seems unfair.

He returns to criticize Habermas again in his discussion of masonic lodges. In his view, Habermas fails to explain how the bourgeois individual is created who steps out into the public realm (ibid. 81f). Hetherington argues that the lodges played a crucial role in this formation. In this, he basically follows Koselleck, to whose work I will now turn.

Camilles Desmoulins at the Palais Royale, urging the masses to storm the Bastille.

Koselleck’s subject is the genesis of the Enlightenment. A bit surprisingly to me, he quite boldly steps forward as a reactionary thinker in this book - clearly enamored of Hobbes and Schmitt, and a great detester of the Enlightenment thinkers, whom he sees as hypocritical forerunners of the massacres and tragedies of the 20th century. Put simply, his thesis is that the seeds of the Enlightenment were planted by the religious and civil wars of the 16th and 17th centuries - wars that broke out because people believed they could follow their “conscience” in public. As the Absolutist state came into being, it restored order by relegating that conscience to the private sphere. That - rather than the later Enlightenment critique of church and superstition - was the decisive step towards secularization in Europe. The absolutist state was conceived as a neutral and rational executor of raison d’état, as operating "without conscience". It thus started to appear immoral in the eyes of the “private” citizens: "now it was the monarch who was guilty from the start, in the measure of the citizen's innocence" (Koselleck 1988:50). Absolutism worked fine as long as the memory of the horrors of the religious wars were still fresh, but, unfortunately, people soon forgot and conscience started to pop up into the public realm again, this time calling itself the Enlightenment. At first, it had to take shelter under ostensibly apolitical pursuits, often in private arenas such as the Masonic lodges, salons or literary societies – places where participants could be “in secret free” (ibid. 75). Koselleck focuses almost all his attention on the lodges, thus conjuring up a rather unflattering portrait of the Enlightenment thinkers as steeped in secrecy and mysticism. Their criticism of Absolutism was the expression of a hypocritical conscience isolated from having to deal with the complexities of the real world, which it arrogantly subjected to its judgements. The criticism was irresponsible and, even worse, totalitarian. In its impatience with unreason, its emergence in public naturally triggered a new wave of “civil war”, this time under the name of Revolution.

Freemason initiation - an alternative ordering?

Koselleck's argument invites criticism. Was the Absolutist state really so neutral? Is it true that reason or conscience is necessarily divisive and therefore must be kept out of politics and the dirty work of ruling left to machiavellian princes? Koselleck seems to think that the onlychoice is between despotism (a Leviathan neutral in regard to religion) and anunrestricted idolization of ”conscience” that leads to civil war (religioussectarianism, revolutionary zealots). Habermas would of course object: there isalso the alternative of a civic culture in which citizens learn to respect eachothers’ good arguments. They participate jointly in ruling the secular state, expressingtheir “conscience” or religious beliefs in public language, but refraining fromsuperimposing them on others (see his “Religion in the Public Sphere”, EuropeanJournal of Philosophy 14:1, 2006).

However, there are also points of interest in Koselleck's argument. One is the idea that absolutism is established not because people believe in it but because they internalize and privatize their beliefs. Here one might compare to Maruyama Masao's argument about the role of Ogyû Sorai's thinking in Tokugawa Japan, a philosophy which is marked by the near absolutism of Tokugawa rule and in which the idea of privacy as a sphere of freedom appears for the first time in Japanese political thinking.

Even more interesting is the account of how the Enlightenment "bourgeois public sphere" was born out of what we today would probably call "free spaces". In Koselleck's account this public sphere itself started out as a kind of underground counter-public in need of secrecy and protection. It survived its fledgling years only by portraying itself as unpolitical. A crucial part of his argument is that even activities that are not overtly political can have an immense political significance. For instance, by eschewing politics in order to focus on moral perfection, Freemasonry paved the way for a moral absolutism that indirectly put existing politics in question, subordinating it to a moral standard alien to it. It thus put a logic in motion that ended up producing the very political protest it started out by turning its back to. This strikes me a being rather similar to the way "free spaces" today can have political significance despite seemingly only providing space for apolitical pursuits. For instance, what orthodox political activist may criticize as "merely cultural" forms of activism aiming at nothing but "having fun" can be a political challenge to mainstream society by fashioning a standard by which the dreariness of the latter can be judged. As Matsumoto Hajime (of the Amateur Riot in Tokyo) says, what matters is not to sacrifice outselves for the revolution, but to actualize a post-revolutionary world here and now, and then attracting others by showing them how fun it is. Sometimes the term "prefigurative policitics" is used for that kind of activism. Certainly, there are problems with that notion (which I will return to some other day), but what strikes me as interesting is that Koselleck has such a clear eye for the potential political import of such politics.“The Masons have nothing to do with politics directly, but they live by a law which – if it prevails – makes an upheaval superfluous” (Koselleck 1988:84). No matter how one evaluates such a politics, one has to admit that it sounds surprisingly similar to what people like Matsumoto Hajime are saying today. Koselleck also helps throw some suggestive light on the problem about whether prefigurative politics might function as a mere safety-valve, as a harmless substitute for protest. His view is clearly that even groups that claim not to be striving for any revolution and merely pursuing alternative lifestyles can be dangerously subversive. At least in his view, prefigurative politics would appear to be a precursor or catalyst of protest, rather than a mere substitute for protest.

And to conclude? Hetherington and Koselleck both discuss how space plays crucial roles in the development of the public sphere. Hetherington, I feel, subsumes a little too much under his concept of heterotopia, making it rather difficult to see how the impulse of resistance and protest might grow out of the spaces he describes, which in his hands tend to become little more than instances of ordering. Koselleck is more helpful in tracing the dynamics whereby the ostensibly apolitical gets political, despite the unfairness and rigidity of his argument and despite his love for Leviathan.

References

Hetherington, Kevin (1997) The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering, London & New York: Routledge.

Koselleck, Reinhart (1988 [1959]) Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

Nobody's dead

2011-05-05T23:29:00.013+02:00

Reading the news of the bin Laden assassination I am somehow reminded of the story of Polyphemus. You remember - the gigantic cyclops who was blinded by Odysseus. In the story, Odysseus gets away from the raging cyclops with the help of his cunning, calling himself "Nobody" so that poor Polyphemus makes a fool out of himself, escaping out the cave by tying himself to the underside of a sheep and finally sailing to safety and new adventures from the rocks that the cyclops in vain tries to hurl at his ship.

Of course, in the story we've been served in the media the ending is different. The cyclops gets his revenge and justice is done.

Do we feel dismayed or happy? Well, I personally don't feel like celebrating in the street. Nor do newspaper headlines saying "Rot in hell" or "Got the bastard" make me very happy. Frankly, I find it revulsive when presidents or secretaries of state find it in order to sound like boasting maffia bosses: "You won't see him walking this earth again", "You cannot wait us out, you cannot defeat us..."

Incidentally, my first thought when I read the news was that Charles Tilly was entirely right in stating, as he does in several of his texts, that there is a close analogy between state government and organized crime.

What fascinates me - oh yes, I admit that I do find these lurid pieces of news fascinating - is not Mr Nobody (as many have already pointed out, he was already a nobody by the time of his death), but Polyphemus.

What then does the Cyclops symbolize, this one-eyed giant with his terrible caves and his sheep farming? Of course the one-eyed fanaticism and crudely simplistic dominance, which has existed in all times and which is just as strong and one-eyed in our own time. Stupidity's language of power, the dictatorship of narrowmindedness. Truly, we have reason to ask how things will fare. We are trapped in the cave of the Cyclops, now as then. Among wolves we play sheep. Confronted by the threat of the Cyclops' groping hands we hide under the ram's stomach, trying to make the despot believe we are his favorite ram. (Harry Martinsson)

Well, I'm not sure this portrayal of the Cyclops as the stupid despot is all there is to this many-sided creature. At the very least, there is one little bit missing, which I think Adorno and Horkheimer help us to see when they stress the fact that to Homer, the Cyclopses were primitive barbarians unacqainted with laws, agriculture and civilization.

Stupidity and lawlessness share a common definition: when Homer calls the Cyclops a "lawless-minded monster", he does not mean simply that the Cyclops does not respect the laws of morality but this his thinking itself is lawless, unsystematic, rhapsodic (Adorno & Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment)

Fortunately, there's a neat way to solve the logical conundrum that the Cyclops seems to connote both repressive state power and lawlessness. We only need to recall Schmitt's formula: sovereign is he who decides on the exception. The essence of sovereign power consists in the very power to abrogate the law or the constitution. The state can protect the lawful order only by virtue of possessing the power to set the law aside and create a temporary lawlessness in the form known as a state of emergency or "state of exception". What is revealing and helpful in Schmitt's formula is that it points out that such lawlessness is not so much an aberration but rather the very essence or core of state power.

This power of course also extends over information, over the "truth". The openly admitted logic of state interest that makes Obama withhold the photo of bin Laden's corpse, would indicate that other inconvenient pieces of information are also likely to be withheld the moment they clash with state interest. No problem if the body is too mutilated to be shown - we'll just mutilate the truth as well so that we don't have to show it.

There's no need, however, to interpret this sovereign power as rational, Machiavellian or calculating. Let us recall the blind rage of American politics in the wake of 9.11, a rage that American politicians never made any attempt to hide. In fact, I believe they took pride in it, perhaps even delighting in how mad and barbaric they had become. Let me echo Adorno & Horkheimer here: calling this politics lawless does not mean simply that it lacked respect for laws but that its thinking was itself lawless, unsystematic, rhapsodic. Isn't there even something almost endearingly stupid in the way the Obama administration has gone about the business of the photo? Telling people that they won't be shown it because it will make them hate you doesn't sound like a very good way to placate them.

The source of my fascination is seeing the face of the stupid Cyclops appear, in naked and undisguised display of his brutal powers. It's not so often it happens. Usually it hides away, pretending not to exist, under its much more civilized, lawful, and agreeably democratic and tolerant surface. Even when the traces of barbarism are a little bit too conspicuous to be hidden away - like Guantanamo or the use of torture - they are usually treated as dirty little facts rather than things to boast about. I am not just talking about the sycophancy of the present US administration here. I have no doubts that all states possess similar monsters in their caves somewhere, ready to jump out at the slightest provocation, wreak their havoc and dance in the streets when the nobodys that dared to disturb them have been crushed to pulp.

As the dancing stops, however, we will be treated to another macabre spectacle: that of Cyclops' face reverting back into the more familiar and civilized faces of whatever "progressive" politicians happen to be in power and addressing their people through their TV cameras. What interests me is not at all the mutilated face of bin Laden, but the uncanny face of the state. No photos of that, please. It's not a pretty picture.

Saving what classes? Saving what dream?

2011-04-21T02:36:00.006+02:00

Better than Scott Walker

This will be a long entry, because I will quote a lot from a text by Franco Barchiesi (thanks to Peter Waterman for recommending this) - his ”Notes on the Wisconsin Insurrection”, published on Edufactory on April 14. The quotes are there as a service to the reader - because I find them impressive. If anyone wants to read my own reflections on them, you'll find them at the end of the entry.

Just two remarks. First: if any reader feels that his or her time is too limited to read all of this, go directly to Barchiesi's text and just read the last paragraph - highly recommended! Secondly, let me state here at once one reason that I found the text so illuminating. It helped me understand better the centrality of slogans about "saving the middle classes" or "saving the American Dream" in the recent demonstrations in the US (See for instance the detailed reports here about "Rally to Save the American Dream", a nationwide manifestation expressing solidarity with the struggle in Madison. “This is more than unions now. This is a fight against the extinction of the middle class,” one protestor is reported to have shouted).

Here's a quote from the beginning of the article, describing the wave of demonstrations in Madison, culminating on March 12 with a 100,000-strong march. The background is of course the rightist Wisconsin state government proposed budget and anti-labor laws which would strip public sector employees of collective bargaining rights.

It was an eruption of iconoclastic irreverence, a joyous mood of insubordination that often contrasted with time-honored imageries of a liberal left – also quite abundant in the Madison demonstrations – sturdily attached to flag-waving and the buzzwords of the “American dream” and the defense of the “middle class"

This passage introduces what I see as the central theme of the text. The protests are placed in a force field, still captive to the "time-honored imageries of a liberal left", but also with a "distinctly new quality about them". Something new and promising is taking form here. "They represented the first instance of a mass, nationally visible mobilization explicitly directed against corporate power and its institutional representatives since the start of the current economic crisis".

In an important next step, Barchiese turns to history to give us some background. It's a long but rewarding quote. In it, he shows that the conservative or "liberal" tendency to back away from open confrontation is rooted in the strong progressive or Leftist legacy of Wisconsin itself. The argument is provocative but important.

The size and radicalism of the Wisconsin demonstrations far surpassed other still significant protests against even more draconian legislation in other Midwestern states, such as Ohio and Indiana. Observers and commentators have explained the particular radicalism of the Wisconsin mobilizations in terms of popular reaction to the authoritarian disruption of local political cultures and moral economies. Many have therefore emphasized labor’s deep roots in the state, the home of a progressive-populist republican strand impersonated at the turn of the past century by senator Robert La Follette and his fulminations at “vast financial power in private hands” and related foes of “the common man – the worker, the farmer.” Historical precedents used by way of explanation are, however, deeply problematic to the extent they assume a static view of political identities that – in a way that surely assuages the celebration of a linear progress so central to the self-image of American left liberalism – reproduce themselves mostly in terms of “tradition” and “heritage”. More useful would be an analysis of the shortcomings, failures, and ambiguities of such political and ideological threads to understand how they are modified and contested by forces, subjectivities, and desires making sense of present social dynamics and power relations.
In the early twentieth century, agrarian populism and a burgeoning white industrial proletariat boosted by Northern European immigrants echoing German and Scandinavian welfarist ideas propelled both a pioneering social and fiscal legislation and – especially in the 1924 elections when the socialist-backed La Follette ran for president beating the Republican and Democratic candidates in the state – working-class politics. Later Wisconsin became a stronghold of public sector unionism, and was the first state to allow, in 1959, collective bargaining for teachers and local government employees. Central to La Follettian progressivism was the collaboration between the state and the public higher education system, namely the University of Wisconsin (UW) centered on its Madison campus. The state government regarded then the university as a “laboratory for democracy” and a site to experiment with corporatist social compacts infused with strong doses of Christian social doctrine and work ethic. The aim was to turn capitalist industrialization into a process of social stability, reining in the disruptions and dislocations of waged employment. That was dubbed the “Wisconsin idea”, to which prominent intellectuals like labor scholar and UW professor John R. Commons added their contribution towards work-based social measures like unemployment compensation. It was a nationally significant experiment with harnessing workers’ power through productivity pacts for the purposes of orderly capitalist development. It was also a project underpinning specific social hierarchies and orderings of citizenship, at the pinnacle of which stood regular white male breadwinners as embodiments of productive virtue and personal responsibility, the necessary counterparts of the governmental welfarist deal and the factors enabling the participation of the “common man” to the affairs of the state. Commons himself, as a key advisor to La Follette, was in fact convinced that recent immigrants and non-white “races” were prone to sloth and laziness, which made them unsuitable for democracy. His ideas propped up a eugenics movement that was in full swing in the US as similar concepts were translated into policies in the very Scandinavian countries where so many of the Wisconsin working class originated.

Especially people in Sweden, with its "consensus culture" and its pride in a "Swedish model" in which basic social justice is combined with labor peace and superior economic performance, should find ample food for thought here.

Bachieri then turns to the present conjuncture:

It is at this point that historical similarities give way to the need of analyzing the innovations of the current phase and its unfolding antagonisms. At odds with capital’s optimism for its ability to reshape the social and natural reality, central to the mythology of the old Gilded Age, the new Gilded Age is rather marked by the desperate quest by the US ruling classes of profit-making alternatives to the continuous decline of the country’s imperial position and the still unresolved accumulation crisis following the 2008 collapse. It is a frantic search that, nonetheless, reveals little vision beyond the most blatant and shortsighted financial grab of livelihoods and resources. Organized labor, the partner of old techniques of social control and progressive-Fordist productivity pacts, is now cast as an “un-American” self-serving special interest, when not a cause of economic decline and social decay. Far from confidently representing itself as the pinnacle of an inclusive, upwardly mobile social order, the white middle class is increasingly lured into resentful images – which movements like the Tea Party consciously abet by fanning popular anxieties over imperial eclipse – of national purity under threat by a host of imaginary assailants, which depictions rife with racial stereotypes of the public sector, its programs, and its beneficiaries ominously fit. The evaporation of organized labor, sponsored by neoliberal administrations and aided by unions assuming the role of enforcers of productive discipline and global competitiveness, has resulted in a working population with a unionization rate of less than 7 percent in the private sector, rising to 12 percent overall due to the organization of public employees. In Wisconsin, about half of the 300,000 government workers are unionized, but they are only 6 percent of those with jobs, two million of which work in casual and precarious positions. The convenient rhetoric of “change” generously deployed by Obama to win the 2008 elections gained a lot of traction in Wisconsin too as the state went Democratic, but was followed by the usual rude awakening once President Obama and his aides quickly and cynically dismantled their left-wing grassroots support. The White House and the Democratic National Committee have actually intervened to discourage party representatives from endorsing the Wisconsin protests, the timing of which interfered with the President’s priority of recruiting bipartisan consent for his “win the future” vision. As an unforgiving approach to global competitiveness seen as a cut-throat race against China and other emerging economy, Obama’s “winning the future” requires the systematic defunding in the present of public entitlement-based programs and the reorientation of state support towards a cognitive capitalism where corporate interests determine the content and objectives of knowledge while critical debate as well as workers’ rights and social contestation are deemed unaffordable luxuries.

Note that the passage portrays two "actors" that are both struggling and in the course of their struggle inflicting injustice on others. First, there is the American elite and their frantic quest to keep up a tolerably profitable level of capital accumulation and preserve their imperial hegemony from slipping over into Chinese hands . Second, there is the resentful white middle class, jealous of its rights and seemingly not giving a thought to the mass of cheap and dispensible workers.

So where, then, does the radicalism come from, that genuinely "new" quality Barchiesi detected in the protests? One source is the university, home of the cognitariat, part of the very stratum of precarious workers customarily neglected by the unions and left out of all agreements with power.

In a state with a 90 percent white population, the numerical success of the protests can also, sadly and paradoxically, be explained with the fact that the institutions could not resort to usual racial scapegoating by presenting the beneficiaries of union rights and collective bargaining as undeserving, dependency-prone, and work-shy blacks and Latinos. As the legacy of Wisconsin progressivism many demonstrators reclaimed also contains distasteful aspects of the state’s settler inheritance, the place of whiteness as a factor underpinning collective solidarity remains a thorny, little debated question in the demonstrations. Yet, even if only 6 percent of Wisconsin’s population is black, the large African-American community in Milwaukee – one hour drive from Madison and a local context of appalling poverty, segregation, and mass incarceration – remained largely distant from the protests. How resonant is, therefore, the Wisconsin insurrection with oppositional practices where blacks, Latinos, and migrants constitute the majority? Similar questions can be raised on the unassailable centrality of “the unions” in activist discourse: how does it speak to the precariously employed? How does it come to term with organized labor’s own history of corporatism, racial exclusions, defense of occupational privilege, and collaboration with neoliberal restructuring? Finally, one should also question how the nostalgic evocation of past welfarism, of which collective bargaining is ostensibly a cornerstone, keeps presenting governmental intervention as the harbinger of progress and social justice, ignoring how, even in the golden age of US social policy, such intervention has operated through the stigmatization of the poor, extremely residual and racially biased safety nets, gender hierarchies, and the unrelenting injunction to find employment as the exalted condition of virtuous social inclusion. In the absence of a critical interrogation of these trajectories, which optimistic claims of an unbroken left progressive legacy tends to paper over, the resignification of social struggles into a language of liberal-democratic freedoms is not only shortsighted as a discourse of alternative, but operates indeed as a key component in the very structure of subjection that the Wisconsin events questioned. Not only did the demonstrations and occupations reclaim rights and protections now under threat; they also practiced a reappropriation of politics as the autonomous expression of common forms of life. Thinking of the reappropriation of the common as a political project means critically engaging this and similar movements as much as the forces and strategies they oppose.

Barchiesi's assessment is thus that there is potential here after all, provided that the Wisconsin insurrection can "contribute to advancing a democracy of the common" not just in slogans but in actual practices. However, his closing words a grim and come close to sounding like a condemnation.

The radicalism of the demonstrations and occupations drew its energy from the fact that those taking part in them articulated not only the concerns of worn-out identities of past struggles (the union-based “middle class” with its productive patriotism) but also the claims arising from the precarious predicament of multitudes with little or no direct experience of the socially stable, protected life such identities nostalgically fantasize. In this perspective, the conflicts that originate from higher education as it embraces corporate imperatives and rationality are decisive elements of innovation in the Wisconsin struggles. Walker’s envisaged separation of UW’s two flagship campuses (Madison and Milwaukee) reflects the “New Badger Partnership” advocated by UW-Madison’s chancellor “Biddy” Martin. The result would be to restructure the most prestigious sites of the waning public system from “state agencies” into semi-private, commercialized “public authorities” or “charter campuses” with broad and autonomous powers in setting tuition, employment conditions, tenure criteria, and relations with outside contractors. It is a major step towards the end of statewide systems of “land grant” public institutions, pioneered in the Midwest and of which the old Fordist-welfarist social compact of the “Wisconsin idea” made a cornerstone in the state’s economy. In their place there would thus be a tiered university system mirroring labor market inequalities and hierarchies: private elite and nominally public campuses aspiring to Ivy League-type status would provide a diverse, well-rounded training, administered by academic superstars, for the children of the ruling classes; the remains of the existing public system would focus on professional degrees for intermediate managerial and technical jobs; finally, a vast layer of depleted colleges and universities would offer vocational and practically-oriented training, through legions of adjuncts and teaching assistants at poverty wages, for the swelling ranks of the precarious cognitariat. [...]The sustained participation of graduate students in the Wisconsin insurrection revealed not so much the appeal of old left – liberal or populist – identities, narratives, and traditions, but a critical awareness of the contradictory place cognitive labor occupies in governmental imagination: praised as the engine of recovery, yet invited to continuous sacrifices and to think of itself as infinitely flexible and malleable; productive of knowledge in the socially cooperative networks of a university system that still calls itself “public”, yet subject to the constant private appropriation of the fruits of this social cooperation; invited to play a crucial role of economic stabilization, yet having its own daily existence constantly destabilized and precarized by market discipline.

*

Let me now, loosely based on the quotes above, put down a few brief reflexions. In these I will try to expand the picture a bit further than Barchiesi. The result will be a sketch, and a rough one at that. Let me call it a kind of rumination on the kind of politics that might be possible today.

Let me return, first, to the observation I made above that both the corporate elite and the white middle class come forward as fighting rather desperate battles. They both appear as what I think could be termed conservative actors, anxious to preserve on the one hand a threatened hegemony and rate of profit, and on the other a threatened status and standard of living. The defensive nature of the both these struggles strikes me as significant for three reasons. Firstly, it confirms the observation - made by Ulrich Beck and others - that today's struggles don't seem to be so much about the distribution of wealth and riches any more, as about the distribution of risks and sacrifices. Secondly, it seems safe to say that the shift towards the latter kind of distribution struggle goes hand in hand with an intensification of the struggle. The Swedish socialdemocratic model as well as the "Wisconsin" idea both demonstrate how easily it is for workers and elites to come to amiable agreements as long as the conflict is mainly about the distribution of wealth. Thirdly, the fact that both elites and middle classes share a certain conservative orientation creates something likea paradox: the fact that both are keen to defend something is what intensifies the conflict, but it is also what creates a possible - and from a Leftist perspective, rather poisonous - common ground for these antagonists, noticeable in slogans such as "saving the American dream", a dream, one could say, about restoring the old harmonious relationship between billionaires and workers in which large parts of the working class started to identify as middle class.

For many reasons, I believe that the standard of living must be lowered in the "old" core economies (Europe, North America, Japan) from now on. One reason is the environment. We will not be able to extract energy and other resources forever. Another is the rise of the "rest" of the world outside the West. We will not be able to buy cheap T-shirts from the global south for ever either. Much of the affluent life enjoyed in the "old" core has depended on a de facto imperialism which will have to end. The third reason has to do with the shift of the global hegemony from the USA to East Asia and how this shift is related to debt. The more the motors of capital accumulation move outside the countries of the old "core", the more the populations within that core will have to depend on debt to maintain standards of living. Demand is kept up through a hypertrophy of the credit economy, foreign loans and other infusions of foreign capital. This happens partly in order to keep up the semblance of profitability (Harvey's "temporal fixes") and partly because governments know that politicies that would lower the standard of living will be unpopular.

However, since competitive "new" core economies and other holders of spare capital only have a limited interest in financing high standards of living in the old "core" - namely so long as it yields desirable returns in some form - there will be pressure among elites in the old core to lower the dependency on foreign capital flows, and cutting debts in order to "restore competetiveness". This pressure is manifested in the hypersensitivity of the market to even moderate levels of indebtment (as in Portugal) and in the popular mantras of governments everywhere about the need to cut back and reduce.

So, there wil be pressure for a lowering of standards of living. It can take three forms:

1) Lowering the standard of living of the poorest, most marginal and politically weakest elements of the population (immigrants, the sick, the homeless, the unemployed, the elderly, children, students...). That would meant disbanding the welfare state and curtailing large chunks of the public sector. This is what we see happening in Sweden now under its present rightist government.

2) Lowering the standard of living of the middle classes (including workers with secure employment). This is hugely unpopular, as the protests in Madison demonstrate. It is an attack on the bulk of population, the mass of voters and the very basis of the productive labor force. It risks alienating and radicalizing the middle class. Only some, I fear, will join the Left. Many will turn to rightexremism, fuelling the racisms and "immigrant hostile" movements so conspicuous in Europe today.

3) Lowering the standard of living of the richest. This is certainly the most reasonable and rational solution, but it will encounter fierce resistance from the most powerful elements in society, who - apart from the economic and political clout - today enjoy ideological hegemony. To maintain growth and restore competitiveness, we need to increase the income gap - that is the argument, which almost nobody dares to gainsay nowadays.

The struggle about the distribution of sacrifices will be a struggle about where among these three options the brunt of the lowering of the standard of life will happen.

The right enjoys ideological hegemony today, mainly since they have been able to go for the first option. As long as they limit their attacks to the weakest and most marginal groups in society, they enjoy the support of mainstream opinion and most of the middle classes. That is more or less the situation in Sweden today. The slogan used by the rightist government - "It should pay to work" - is an attempt to drive a wedge between the employed and the unemployed portions of the working class. In a parody of the American dream it is asserted that anybody is able to get a job, provided that they are willing to work. Meanwhile, the brunt of the sacrifices are heaped on the back of the chroncially sick and the unemployed. Not even a collapse of the ideological hegemony of the right will necessarily favor the Left. In Sweden too there are already "white middle classes" eager to lash out aggressively against the weakest in society and eager to save the Swedish dream.

The Left is certainly in disarray. Social democracy was once able to provide a bridge between the weakest groups and the employed classes in the middle, but that was in the age when the prime political issue concerned the distribution of wealth. How will things be when this issue is overshadowed by the distribution of what many will feel to be sacrifices? Raising taxes for the rich is of course a necessary measure which might represent a viable line of continuity for the social democrats. Raising taxes, however, was more popular when Keynesianism still held sway and provided a theory for those who wanted to argue that a greater public sector role in the economy could actually improve economic performance. This worked fine until economic hegemony started to dissolve in the old "core", a process that Keynesianism was unable to reverse. The onset of hegemonic decline coincided in time with the shift away from struggles about the distribution of wealth towards struggles about the distribution of felt sacrifices. The crisis of social democracy in Sweden and many countries today is closely linked to that of capitalism - or at least of capitalism in the "old" core.

If, in such a harsh climate, a possible ground for solidarity can be discerned, how would it look? Merely reviving Keynesianism won't be sufficient. To begin with, the very idea of competetiveness and growth is suspect. In a world in which the the game of chasing hegemony is the only game in town, the idea of competetiveness will always be used as a blackmail against workers. Sharing the meagre resources that are available is the only realistic form of solidarity, plus struggling against the rich and powerful to make them pay their share of course. In the precarity movement there is an inspiring ambiguity, a desire to strive in two directions at once. On the one hand there is an "anti-poverty" orientation expressed in the demand for material security and joyful angry slogans such as "Hand over the money!". On the other there is a "Viva poverty" orientation, an orientation driven by the realization that true freedom is also a freedom from the obsession with material wealth and careers and that it can very well mean self-chosen poverty. There is on the one side a desire for justice, driven by anger, and on the other a desire for peace, driven by what I feel is a desire for happiness and freedom. It may sound schizophrenic, but as far as I can see this movement's hit the right spot. The only way forward is to move in both directions at once.

"If I work, I think I will be a loser" (from the Kyoto Mayday of dispersal and disobedience, April 2010). An expression of "Viva Poverty"?

Carl Schmitt, Großräume, and the EU

2011-04-10T21:55:00.009+02:00

Last week I finished reading Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth (2003), a book which he worked on during the war and published in 1950. I read it because of my interest in the relation between land-appropriations and the “free” or unregulated no-man’s-lands beyond the community of international law. I found two points of interest in the book: 1) The lawlessness and freedom of the oceans are described as homologous to the "state of exception" which Schmitt famously treated in his Political Theology ("Sovereign is he who decides on the exception"), and 2) his ideas about Großräume or blocs, which anticipate the EU.

His prose is mostly a pleasure to read - it is sharp, clear and to the point. Although it usually stays within the bounds of a controlled magnificence, it sometimes gets out of hand and develops into mythological-sounding bombast To illustrate, let me quote from the foreword:

The traditional Eurocentric order of international law is foundering today, as is the old nomos of the earth. This order arose from a legendary and unforeseen discovery of a new world, from an unrepeatable historical event. Only in fantastic parallels can one imagine a modern recurrence, such as men on their way to the moon discovering a new and hitherto unknown planet that could be exploited freely and utilized effectively to relieve their struggles on earth. The question of the new nomos of the earth will not be answered with such fantasies, any more than it will be with further scientific discoveries. Human thinking must again be directed to the elemental orders of its terrestrial being here and now. (Schmitt 2003:39)

So what is the nomos of the earth? The word, he explains, comes from nemein, a Greek verb meaning both to divide and to pasture. Rather than law in the abstract, he describes it as the spatial, political and juridical order considered to be binding in international affairs (ibid 19f). It is the order of society expressed in its ordering of space, “the immediate form in which the political and social order of a people becomes spatially visible” (ibid 70).

The coming into being of the first nomos of the earth is described in lofty, mythical language as a primordial appropriation and division of land. Schmitt talks of the earth as the root of law and justice, of "firm lines" becoming apparent as the soil is cleared and worked by human hands. Gradually fences come into being, along with other boundaries. With them families, clans, tribes, as well as power and domination become visible (ibid 42). Before proceding, I think we should note that already here at the very start of his argument, he reveals an agricultural bias, a bias for the settled population. He talks of lines, but where are the lines of movement - lines surely as important as those of boundaries and divisions? When he writes that land-appropriation is “the primeval act in founding law” (ibid 45), I wonder why - didn't the hunters and gatherers also have laws? Don't nomads too have their own nomos, but without fences? Non-agricultural people are elided from his mythological creation narrative, elided just as the indigenous populations driven away by European colonizers in the "virgin" lands "discovered" by the latter. The primordial nomos described by Schmitt, I can only conclude, was also the founding act of imperialism.

Nevertheless, Schmitt does focus in on one kind of free, unregulated space next to the settled, appropriated one - the sea. In fact, the discussion of the relation between land and sea in legal thought is one of the gravitational centers in the book. To look at how he views this relation, we can follow his division of history into three epochs, each characterized by its own nomos:

In the oldest times, there was no single global order and the oceans were largely unexplored. Every civilization considered itself the center and the world beyond it as ruled by war, barbarism, and chaos. "Practically, this meant that in the outer world and with good conscience one could conquer and plunder to a certain boundary” (ibid 352). The seas were a realm of freedom, but that also implied freedom for booty: “Here, the pirate could ply his wicked trade with a clear conscience” (ibid 43).

The next nomos of the earth came into being about 500 years ago, with the so-called age of discoveries, and was Eurocentric. This was the epoch of modern international law (Völkerrecht or jus gentium) which rested on belief in European civilization. Non-European space was considered un- or halfcivilized, and as available for European domination or colonization. The new world "did not appear as a new enemy, but as free space, as an area open to European occupation and expansion” (ibid 87).

Treaty of Tordesillas 1494 - example of raya

Now for the first time the entire earth, including the oceans, became ordered in terms of international law. The first "global lines" came into being - first the Spanish-Portugese divisional lines or rayas, and then the French-English friendship lines or "amity lines". While the former were “not global lines separating Christian from non-Christian territories, but were internal divisions between two land-appropriating Christian princes”, the amity lines were based on completely different principles. They delineated the realm where “European public law” held from the rest of the world where it didn’t: “treaties, peace, and friendship applied only to Europe, to the Old World, to the area on this side of the line”. Outside the Old World, the state of nature ruled and the law of the stronger applied (ibid 92).

It is quite apparent that Schmitt is fascinated by these amity lines. Based on them, wars could legally be waged between European powers in the colonies, despite peace being concluded in Europe. The lines also gave free rein to “privateers”, as when Richelieu declared in 1634 that French seafarers were forbidden to attack Spanish and Portuguese ships on this side of the Tropic of Cancer but were free to do so on the other side. Another example of this legal dualism is that English law distinguished between English soil, where common law ruled, and other areas where the king's power was unrestricted. ”The king’s power was considered to be absolute on the sea and in the colonies, while in his own country it was subject to common law and to baronial or parliamentary limits” (ibid 98).

Reading this, many readers will probably recall Schmitt's famous discussion about sovereignty in Political Theology, and it is interesting to see that Schmitt himself sees a connection between the discovered "virgin lands" and the state of exception. ”The English construction of a state of exception, of so-called martial law, obviously is analogous to the idea of a designated zone of free and empty space” (ibid 98). In both cases the sovereign is free to impose his own order unhindered by the consitution or by common law.

Needless to say, in the colonies the brutality of the "state of exception" was not an exception at all, but the rule. Conversely, the state of exception or "martial law" can be understood as the implementation in the sovereign's own country of the unrestricted powers he enjoyed in the colonies. In both instances the power of state sovereignty is revealed in naked and terrifying brutality. In both instances, the reader is offered a perverse confluence of legally unrestricted freedom and total oppression.

Schmitt's account of the legal implications of the amity lines opens up an interesting perspective on imperialism by showing how much it has in common with today's attacks on urban "no-man's-lands" like the parks or riverbeds where the homeless live. In these "free" spaces freedom is also the freedom of mainstream society to insult or drive away the inhabitants. In The New Urban Frontier (1996), Neil Smith underscores these similarities by comparing the language of gentrification to that of "frontier warfare". What Schmitt brings out is how perversely understandable these attacks become in the light of the principles of sovereignty. The uncivility and brutality of authorities and neighborhood kids in dealing with the homeless would appear simply as a sovereign power let loose from the restrictions to which it is subjected on "this" side of the amity lines but which dissolve into thin air as soon as those uncivilized "others" come into its way that are not considered part of the community of civilized, respectable citizens. Some readers might think of Agamben here - suffice it to say that "bare" life is to be found not only in the camps but also in the colonies.

Before proceding, let me clarify that I do not believe that Schmitt's argument in the slightest diminishes the importance of trying to create and enlarge no-man's-lands. Schmitt's equation of total freedom with total oppression holds only for situations in which the lack of legal restrictions is not matched by a corresponding lack of power asymmetries. In such situations freedom will certainly mean the freedom of plunder, war and despotism. Freedom from laws is of no use if power is left unharmed. What his argument shows is therefore not that the struggle for freedom is futile, only that legal freedom is never enough - that we should also strive for the freedom from power asymmetries, from the despot himself.

Now, let me move on to the second topic that interested me - the similarities between the EU and the idea of Großräume promoted by Schmitt in the end of the book.

The old nomos of the earth established in the age of discoveries started to dissolve in the late 19th century. After the first world war Europe was no longer the “sacral center of the earth”. It was already being overshadowed by the United States. With the League of Nations, an empty universalism displaced the old distinctions between civilized, barbaric and savage, which became “juridically insignificant” (ibid 234). The idea of supra-state "just" wars displaced the idea of the idea of war as a sovereign right of nations. But, Schmitt suggests, this normative universalism lacked a secure foundation. The non-European states were regarded as states in name, but never became recognized as partners in the community of international law in the way European states had recognized each other during the old nomos.

A secure foundation for a new nomos is therefore lacking and the system is unstable. Schmitt appears to believe that such a foundation can only be provided in two ways, world hegemony under a single power or a plurality of regional blocs or Großräume. Which way the world will develop will depend to a large degree on the United States. Ever since the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, “the Western Hemisphere had found itself facing an enormous alternative between a plurality of Großräumen and a global claim to world power”. The United States now needs to decide whether "to make the transition to a Großraum and to find its place in a world of other recognized Großräume, or to transform the concept of war... into a global civil war” (ibid 296). Schmitt's preferences are quite clearly with the idea of an equilibrium of several independent Großräume. Such a possibility, he states, would not have custom or tradition on its side, but it would be "rational", provided that "the Großräume are differentiated meaningfully and are homogenous internally” (ibid 355).

The translator, G. L. Ulmen, states in his introduction that Schmitt had alluded to the idea of the Großraum already in 1928, in an article in which he had argued that modern technology had made borders illusory and that the world had ”become smaller” while ”states and state systems had to become larger”. "In this enormous process of transformation", he had written, "perhaps many weaker states will disappear. A few giant complexes will remain”. Germany itself was territorially ”too small” to be a world power and had to find its political future in the future of Europe. These giant complexes, or Großräume, would become the main international agents in the future, rather than states, and they would in turn compete with each other, arranging themselves as friends or enemies ("Introduction”, p19). In 1939, he returned to the idea of the Großraum, arguing that the technical-industrial-economic development necessitated that the segregation into "small-space" (kleinraum) economies of forms of energy, such as electricity or gas, had to be overcome "organizationally” in a ”great-space economy” (Großraumswirtschaft) (ibid 23).

In these ideas, Schmitt appears to be anticipating both ideas which we today associate with "globalization" and the economic reasons behind the establishment of the EU.

I suggest that we acknowledge Schmitt as one of the spiritual forebears of the EU - not because he played any active role in its actual preparation or because he was particularly unique in putting forth ideas about Großräume, but because he did so with characteristic and ruthless clarity. In fact, he was far from unique. The idea was very much in the air in the interwar era. Exactly the same idea surfaces at the same time in Japan, as is well known. Take for instance the radio address from 1940 by Arita Hachirô, the foreign minister who originated the term "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" (Daitôa kyôeiken). In this radio address, Arita explains that the world is being divided into blocs and that it is desirable that the blocs should consist of nations sharing the same culture:

The countries of East Asia and the regions of the South Seas are geographically, historically, racially, and economically very closely related to each other. They are destined to cooperate and minister to one antoher’s needs for their common well-being and prosperity. (”The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”, pp 1006f, in Sources of Japanese Tradition, vol. 2, Columbia University Press, 2005)

Arita emphasizes that the system presupposes a ”stabilizing force in each region” and it is not hard to guess that by that he means Japan. He is only one example among many Japanese intellectuals and politicians around this time where we find similar thoughts.

From the Manifesto for Greater East Asian Cooperation (Daitôa kyôdô sengen), a propaganda booklet for children

In these calls for culturally and economically unified blocs the spiritual roots of the EU are already present. Acknowledging people like Schmitt as pioneers of the idea of the EU - perhaps just as important as the celebrated Coudenhove-Kalergi - will help bring out in all necessary clarity that the EU is not solely about the trauma of war after 1945 or the desire for peace and reconciliation. That the idea of such a union didn't need the catastrophe of war is demonstrated by the fact that it surfaced already before the war. To neglect the role played by people like Schmitt is also to miss or downplay the economic or geopolitical arguments for the union. To put it plainly, it is wrong to see the EU simply as an overcoming of Nazism or the Third Reich, since it also represents a continuity of some of the projects with which they were associated. The EU satisfied a need not only for reconciliation or "fettering Germany", but also a desire for a new and more efficient and stable order after the defunct system of the European ”concert” of nation-states - a desire that also nourished fascists and Nazis like Schmitt.

How easily this desire lets itself be expressed or justified as a hope for peace is illustrated by Schmitt himself. Putting the finishing touches to his book in 1950, he writes:

But today, it is conceivable that the air will envelop the sea and perhaps even the earth, and that men will transform their planet into a combination of produce warehouse and aircraft carrier. Then, new amity lines will be drawn, beyond which atomic and hydrogen bombs will fall. Nevertheless, we cling to the hope that we will find the normative order of the earth, and that the peacemakers will inherit the earth. (Schmitt 2003:49)

Schmitt, Carl (2003) The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, New York: Telos Press.

Nancy Fraser and transnational public spheres

2011-04-09T01:42:00.011+02:00

Nancy Fraser makes an interesting attempt in her paper "Transnationalizing the Public Sphere" to conceive of a "transnational public sphere" in a way that preserves the normative force invested by Habermas in his original concept of the public sphere, which was tied to the nation-state. The paper exists in at least two versions, one from 2005 and one from 2007, with some interesting differences between them. Let me comment briefly on these differences.

Both papers take their point of departure in the same problem. Since Habermas' classical Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere from 1962, “public sphere theory has been implicitly informed by a Westphalian political imaginary: it has tacitly assumed the frame of a bounded political community with its own territorial state” (Fraser 2007:8). Implicitly, the concept of a public sphere has assumed the existence of a national citizenry, a modern state apparatus, a national communication infrastructure, a national language, and so on. So the problem is: “can the concept be reconstructed to suit a post-Westphalian frame?"

Fraser points out that this isn't as easy as it seems. As a normative idea the concept is dependent on two yardsticks: normative legitimacy and political efficacy. Without them, it would lose "its critical force and its political point" (ibid 7f). The problem is how to ensure legitimacy and efficacy under transnational conditions, without relying on the "Westphalian" nation-state infrastructure.

In the 2005 version of her paper, I found her to be surprisingly conservative, basically keeping all the central features of the Westphalian public sphere and hoping for their transnational expansion/extension. The weaknesses of this position seemed to be to be obvious. In claiming that the transnational public sphere depends on some form of super-Westphalian framework in order to have democratic potential, she was in effect condemning it to irrelevancy in practical politics. Denying the possibility of a public sphere before the establishment of transnational institutions, she also seemed to be leaving today's transnational social movements in a limbo, with no room for them to ground their claims to legitimacy.

This position is modified in her 2007 paper. Here the argument is more intricate and the outcome more fruitful. To begin with, she revisits Habermas' classical work in order to assess two lines of criticism directed against it. Firstly, there was the "legitimacy critique" which focused on Habermas' neglect of the "systemic obstacles" that prevented subaltern groups in society - such as workers, women, the poor, or various minorities - from participating on a par with others in public debate. Her own 1991 essay, "Rethinking the Public Sphere", which highlighted the role played by "subaltern counter-publics" in challenging exclusions, is a well-known rendering of this line of criticism. Secondly, there was the "efficacy critique" that argued that Habermas had failed to register the full range of systemic obstacles that prevented communicatively generated popular will from being effectively implemented in state policy.

Both these lines of criticism, however, "took for granted the Westphalian framing of political space” (ibid 12) since they identified the public with the citizenry of a territorial state.

So can the two ideas of normative legitimacy and political efficacy can be detached from the Westphalian premises? She begins with legitimacy. The legitimacy of public opinion, she argues, rests on two conditions: inclusiveness and parity. Discussion should not exclude anyone with a stake in the outcome, and all participants should enjoy equal chances to state their views and place issues on the agenda. In the Westphalian public, however, these two conditions were not always clearly distinguished.

Seen from the perspective of the Westphalian frame, both the inclusiveness condition and the parity condition were yoked together under the ideal of shared citizenship in a bounded community [...]. The effect, however, was to truncate discussions of legitimacy. Although it went unnoticed at the time, the Westphalian frame encouraged debate about the parity condition, while deflecting attention away from the inclusiveness condition. (ibid 20f)

Moving to a post-Westphalian stage could therefore increase the legitimacy of public opinion by stimulating discussion about inclusiveness. But how should the inclusiveness condition be understood in a post-Westphalian age? The answer is already provided by Habermas himself in the form of the "all-affected" principle, which holds that "all potentially affected by political decisions should have the chance to participate on terms of parity in the informal processes of opinion formation to which the decision-takers should be accountable" (ibid 21). This principle should hold true regardless of citizenship.

Henceforth, public opinion is legitimate if and only if it results from a communicative process in which all potentially affected can participate as peers, regardless of political citizenship. Demanding as it is, this new, post-Westphalian understanding of legitimacy constitutes a genuinely critical standard for evaluating existing forms of publicity in the present era. (ibid 22)

Next, she turns to the criterion of political efficacy. Efficacy too rests on two conditions: the "translation condition" according to which public opinion must be translated into binding laws and decisions, and the "capacity condition" according to which the political system must be able to implement these measures. Again, the Westphalian frame truncated discussions of efficacy, fostering interest in the translation condition but obscuring the capacity condition.

It is hard, however, to imagine how an efficacious transnational public should be understood since there is nothing corresponding to a territorial state that migh possess the administrative capacity to implement the demands of a transnational citizenry. “The challenge, accordingly, is twofold: on the one, hand, to create new, transnational public powers; on the other, to make them accountable to new, transnational public spheres. Both those elements are necessary” (ibid 23). As Fraser admits, "the job is not easy". But "only if public sphere theory rises to the occasion can it serve as a critical theory in a post-Westphalian world” (ibid 24).

After having read her 2005 draft, I was agreably surprised by reading this. This is better. In the draft, she appeared to neglect social movements and instead called for institutional renovation in a rather strident voice, arguing that the idea of the public would lack critical force and political point without it. Here she “saves” the idea of the public without making it dependent on prior existence of global institutional structures. Instead, the emphasis is more on the public as a normative force that actually only comes fully into its own in the global age. Concerning both the legitimacy and the efficacy condition, Fraser manages to show that globalization can contribute - at least in part - to liberating the emancipatory potential of the public from its truncated form in the Westphalian age, when aspects of inclusion and capacity were obscured. Both these aspects are now highlighted thanks to the flows of people, the potential of decisions to affect people globally, and the weakening of individual states against the transnational power of capital.

The problem is thus no longer posed as how to reconstruct the Westphalian public on a global scale. While she is obviously still seeing the construction of some form of global institutional framework as an urgent task, she is also suggesting that the public might serve as an important transnational arena even in the absence of such a framework. She is no longer categorically saying that the idea of a transnational public sphere is not viable without transnational institutions (an assertion that would have been very tied to an “empirical” understanding of the public sphere as something really existing). Instead she approaches a position which may be rendered as follows: the idea of a transnational public sphere is viable as a normative guideline or yardstick, even in the absence of transnational institutions, just as the public functioned as a regulative ideal guiding criticism in the Westphalian age.

I do, however, have three reservations:

Firstly, alternative notions of public also exist. There is no shortage of reconceptualizations that emphasize the freedom and universality of “publics” far more open than "Westphalian" one. Take Karatani Kôjin, who even opposes the public to any bounded spaces and sees it as essentially located outside all national communities. Amino Yoshihiko's idea of muen is another example. Relying on such conceptualizations doesn’t mean jettisoning the normative content of the public sphere concept, since they are tied to their own very normative concepts of freedom.

Secondly, although I understand her desire to focus on the normative rather than the emprical components of the concept of the public sphere, I do believe her argument would have profited from paying greater attention to questions of what form the empirical existence of a transnational public sphere might take, or what forms it does take already today in those "global public sphere moments" (Eide and Kunelius) when it is temporarily realized. In her old 1991 article, her model was one of a central or mainstream public sphere (the “liberal bourgeois public sphere”) which was opposed by "subaltern counter-publics". This idea of one single center hardly holds if we are to picture a transnational public sphere. In such a transnational setting, subalterns or excluded groups will need to be able to form their own counter-publics in reaction to whatever public oppresses or excludes them, regardless of how "central" it is. Such a conception would allow for a plurality of “centers” in reaction to which a plurality of counter-publics can form. Interestingly, these alternative publics can today, more easily than before, take transnational form. That means that counter-publics will no longer necessarily be more local than the various “mainstreams” against which they are reacting. Interestingly, in her 1991 paper she raised the concern that the counter-publics might turn into parochial “enclaves”, and emphatically claimed that they always return to the mainstream public and expand it. Today, by contrast, the risk that counter-publics will turn into enclaves is probably smaller. In fact, often it is rather the national “mainstream” public spheres that become “enclaves” – closed, parochial and local. That might also mean that there is no longer the same burning necessity for the counter-publics to “return” to the mainstream. To at least some extent they can bypass it. So what I want to suggest is that the key to how a transnational public sphere might arise would lie not only in how the mainstream national public sphere can be made to expand, but also in how the counter-publics from different nations join together into transnational networks.

Thirdly, I am skeptical to her claim that "efficacy" is really essential for the idea of the public to have critical potential. "Legitimacy" appears to be a far more essential component, and as she notes herself, it is not in principle so difficult to construe legitimacy in transnational terms. In fact, a Habermasian framework would seem to demand it. I would therefore like to downplay the tendency in Fraser to portray the construction of transnational institutions as a task for critical theory. Take what is happening right now in North African and the Middle East - the coming into being of a beautiful and revolutionary transnational public sphere from Morocco to Syria. Surely, it would be ridiculous to claim that the critical potential of this public sphere would be enhanced by erecting some supranational governance framework with the "capacity" to respond to and implement the popular demands. Whatever "efficacy" this public has, it possesses because of the strength of its legitimacy and the weakness of the institutional orders opposing it.

Social movements can certainly contribute to calling global institutions into being by holding politicians accountable and forcing them to act in order to take responsibility for global problems. I disagree, however, that the creation of such institutions per se is a central task for social movements. Their task is not to build those institutions, but to call them into being by their dissent. The pragmatic problem may remain concerning where best to apply pressure – on national levels, on corporations, on supranational organizations etc – but there the guiding principle should simply be one of flexibility: hit the weakest link and act so that you will grow stronger, by gaining allies and supporters. Make the opponent and potential allies see that it is in their interest to work together with you. Here a measure of strategic reason is permitted. Transnational movements need not feel confined to addressing transnational institutions. Just as the old "national" movements would sometimes address local governments or companies and sometimes the national governments, transnational movements should feel free to choose their targets flexibly and pragmatically, according to their present needs - just as they are in fact doing today.

The criticial potential of the idea of the public stems above all from the "legitimacy" condition. "Efficacy" is a secondary quality, and a dangerous one. Building institutional "capacity" will also heighten the capacity of institutions to contain criticism and dissent. To build that capacity is not the task of the dissenters. To believe that the public sphere can only function critically if such capacity exists is a delusion, and arguing that dissent lacks force unless such capacity is first created is about as clever as teaching your opponent judo before you start attacking him. Capacity will come in time, as soon as protests make the established elites realize the need for containment. The public, however, gains its critical force by outrunning capacity. The public lives only as long as it is the seedbed of more demands than can be granted.

Habermas 1960 - still a Westphalian public sphere?

References

Fraser, Nancy (2005) “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere”, March.

Fraser, Nancy (2007) “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World”, Theory Culture & Society 24(4):7-30.

Like a fire? Rosa Luxemburg and primitive accumulation

2011-04-04T20:01:00.019+02:00

These are notes on the renaissance of an idea - that of primitive accumulation.

By right, I should start with Marx, but that will have to wait. After all this is only a blog. Suffice it to say that to Marx, primitive accumulation - the appropriation of wealth derived from non-capitalist modes of production often through means such as fraud, looting, conquest or oppression - played a crucial part in the origin of capitalism. Instead I will simply sketch how the idea develops from Rosa Luxemburg to contemporary thinkers like David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, Giovanni Arrighi, and Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri.

Luxemburg

The first important step in the development of the idea after Marx is taken by Luxemburg. She criticizes Marx for viewing primitive accumulation as merely “incidental” to the functioning of capitalism or as “illustrating merely the genesis of capital” (Luxemburg 1951:364). She thus clearly recognizes that capitalist accumulation proceeds on two tracks: both through the exploitation of wage labour emphasized by Marx and through ongoing processes of primitive accumulation (ibid. 452). For her, capitalism's inability to survive without primitive accumulation is part of her explanation of imperialism. Capitalism needs a non-capitalist environment into which to expand and which functions as a safety-valve that saves it from its overaccumulation crises. But this is also what will prove to be its undoing:

Capitalism is the first mode of economy [...] which tends to engulf the entire globe and to stamp out all other economies, tolerating no rival at its side. Yet at the same time it is also the first mode of economy which is unable to exist by itself, which needs other economic systems as a medium and soil. [...] In its living history it is a contradiction in itself, and its movement of accumulation provides a solution to the conflict and aggravates it at the same time. (ibid 467)

Luxemburg conjures up the image of capitalism spreading like a fire, consuming itself: “thus capitalism prepares its own downfall under ever more violent contortions and convulsions” (ibid 453).

Harvey, Arrighi, Sassen

Contemporary authors like Harvey, Sassen or Arrighi derive much from Luxemburg. Like her, they stress that value is generated both from labour power and from primitive accumulation, and that spatial expansion plays an important role in maintaining capitalism. What they add is a realization that: 1) spatial expansion is a much more subtle process than the image of colonizal conquest suggests, and that 2) the "non-capitalist" environment from which capitalism can draw its profits is more diversified.

Harvey develops the first of these realizations into his idea of the "spatial fix" and the second into the idea of "accumulation by dispossession" - his term for primitive accumulation. Let me start with the spatial fix. Luxemburg identified the spatial expansion with imperialism, implying that capitalism’s possibilities of expansion were very near their end by the time she was writing. The “spatial fix” is something much more flexible, consisting in the geographical expansions and restructurings used as temporary solutions to overaccumulation crises. As Harvey points out, spatial fixes are available even in a world that is more or less fully incorporated in capitalism. Spatial fixes make use of gegraphical unevenness, but uneveness is not simply a product of "underdevelopment". Capitalism produces its own unevenness, often plunging already “developed” regions into destructive devaluations. The idea implied here is that processes of primitive accumulation are turned not only against the remaining few non-capitalist formations but also against parts of capitalism itself.

Since such processes of primitive accumulation are part and parcel of today's capitalist world, Harvey prefers to refer to them by the term "accumulation by dispossession". Under this rubric he includes a wide variety of phenomena which have in common the appropriation of wealth that has been formed outside the production processes of capitalism proper, i.e. not through “the expansion of wage labour” (Harvey 2005:178). It includes things like the privatization or commodification of resources like water, land or public services; intellectual copyright; "biopiracy" (”pillaging the world’s stockpile of genetic resources”); or the use of the credit system to redistribute wealth ("reducing whole populations to debt peonage" by rescue packages or managing crises in order to be able to use bailouts as an excuse for pillaging). Things like using traditional songs for making profit or the medical knowhow of indigenous peoples would be examples of accumulation by dispossession.

Arrighi's and Sassen's analyses of primitive accumulation are inspired by Harvey's and differ only in emphasis. In line with his own theory of accumulation cycles and moving hegemonies, Arrighi (2004) puts particular stress on the tendency for the core of capitalism to move geographically with the search for profitable investment through spatial fixes. Using structural adjustment programmes and the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2008 as examples, Sassen is even more emphatic than Harvey that today's processes of primitive accumulation are not about the incorporation into capitalist relations of pre-capitalist modes of production but ”the destruction of traditional capitalism in order to extract what can be extracted for the further deepening of advanced capitalism” (Sassen 2010:24).

Hardt & Negri

Hardt & Negri refer to Harvey's idea of "accumulation by dispossession" several times in their 2009 book Commonwealth, but give the idea their own peculiar twist. The "non-capitalist" environment on which capitalism feeds is here designated as the "common". The “common” is defined as both the wealth of the material world – air, water, fruits, nature – and as those results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production. The latter make up an “artificial common” consisting in language, images, knowledges, affects, codes, habits, practices, and relations (Hardt & Negri 2009:viii, 139, 171). Their central claim is that capitalism increasingly tends towards a “biopolitical” stage in which it needs to rely on the common for production, i.e. capital can only parasitize on the resources of the common without being able to create them by itself. In particular, they emphasize the urban environment as a resource for free production and creativity that is central to capitalism. The city “is to the multitude what the factory was to the industrial working class” (ibid. 250).

Commonwealth is perhaps the book by Hardt & Negri that I like most. It has, however, its weaknesses. Part of them derive from their neglect of some of the factors in contemporary capitalism that Harvey and the other contemporary authors highlight. In their insistence that the new "non-capitalist" frontier is right here among "us" in the developed world, in the midst of the metropole, they tend to disregard the continuing exploitation of wage labour and the role of spatial fixes in the international division of labor - the fact, to put it bluntly, that next to post-industrial “immaterial labor” there are sweatshops too. This problem is not solved by their insertion of a rather incongruous chapter (chapter 2.1) which is full of praise for anti-colonial struggles and calls for solidarity with the south. This chapter feels too much as an ad hoc reply to certain critics (such as Caffentzis or Dyer-Witheford) and is not theoretically integrated with the rest of the work.

The fire is still raging

To Marx, primitive accumulation was part of the origin of capitalism, but not an organic component of capitalism itself. Luxemburg took the next step, arguing that capitalism needed constant access to non-capitalist areas into which to expand. With the onset of neoliberalism, the idea of primitive accumulation gained prominence again. Authors like Harvey, Arrighi or Sassen argued that the appropriation of "non-capitalist" wealth could also take the form of predatory attacks on wealth formed within capitalist societies themselves. This transformation of the idea reaches an apogee with Hardt & Negri, for whom the "non-capitalist" environment consists of language and other common resources that make creativity possible and on which capitalism is increasingly dependent. The common denominator of the contemporary authors is that they make primitive accumulation a central feature of contemporary capitalism. Capitalism, they suggest, is losing its capacity to regenerate itself through the surplus value generated by the employment of labour-power and has to rely on appropriating wealth created elsewhere.

For some reason, neither Luxemburg nor any of the theorists of primitive accumulation today point out that their observation that capitalism needs a value input not derived from labour power invalidates Marx' labour theory of value (or at least makes it less relevant to understanding contemporary capitalism). This would have been a logical corollary. Importantly, however, they draw the right political conclusions. As Harvey points out, just as today's neoliberal capitalism is relying not only on exploiting wage labour but also on the plunder of non-capitalist formations, resistance to capitalism likewise must have a dual character. The struggle of wage laborers must be complemented by the struggle to defend things owned by the public or possessed by us in common against expropriation.

References

Arrighi, G. (2004) “Spatial and Other ‘Fixes’ of Historical Capitalism”, Journal of World-Systems Research, X:2 (Summer):527-539.

Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2009) Commonwealth, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Harvey, D. (2003) The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Harvey, D. (2006) The Limits to Capital (new edition), London & New York: Verso.

Luxemburg, R. (1951) The Accumulation of Capital (tr. Agnes Schwarzchild), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Sassen, S. (2010) ”A Savage Sorting of Winners and Losers: Contemporary Versions of Primitive Accumulation”, Globalizations 7(1-2)(March-June):23-50.

Mouffe and Schmitt

2011-04-03T17:27:00.013+02:00

Just a brief note here. In my earlier criticism of Chantal Mouffe, I was especially irked by what appeared to me to be a Schmittian note in her insistence on the impossibility of transcending conflict. Like him, she is convinced that there can be no politics without the friend-enemy distinction. Her decisive error is in drawing the conclusion that such a distinction must therefore always be affirmed. Nothing says that the goal of politics must be politics, just as nothing says that the goal of war must be war.

Be that as it may, I recently had a look at The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, edited by Mouffe, to explore her view of Schmitt a bit further. What is immediately apparent is the high regard in which she holds Schmitt. While he is an “adversary”, he is one “of remarkable intellectual quality” whose “views would deprive us of many insights that can be used to rethink liberal democracy with a view to strengthening its institutions” (from her "Introduction", p.1). What she values in Schmitt is that he reminds us of the necessary conflictual dimension in politics, which is tidied over in liberal thinkers like Rawls or Habermas. Her only disagreement with Schmitt is that:

...while he asserts the conflictual nature of the political, he does not permit a differential treatment of this conflictuality. It can manifest itself only in the mode of antagonism… According to Schmitt, there is no possibility of pluralism – that is, legitimate dissent among friends. (p.5)

This sounds disingenious, considering Schmitt's own lament for the decline of the European Völkerrecht, in which war itself was "bracketed", reduced to a contest between legitimate adversaries, i.e. sovereign states and their regular militaries. Schmitt himself is hardly a person who would celebrate the abyss of total conflict or all-out war. What Mouffe does is not so much to introduce the notion of "legitimate dissent" into his thought, as to turn bracketing around, re-applying it to the domestic arena. Where Schmitt talked about international relations, Mouffe talks about political dissent within the state.

The result of this re-application is her own "pluralistic agonism" - a perpetual discursive war contained within the safe framework established by the ethico-political principles of liberal democracy. As she readily admits, this is a very "liberal" and hence circumscribed view of the legitimate manifestations of conflicts. Its necessary corollary is a distinction between legitimate enemies, or "adversaries", who stick to the framework, and the illegitimate enemies who don't.

The adversary is in a certain sense an enemy, but a legitimate enemy with who there exists a common ground. [Adversaries] share a common allegiance to the ethico-political principles of liberal democracy. (p.4)

This is an astounding sentence, following as it does her characterization of Schmitt as - remember? - precisely an "adversary". From the standpoint of her agonistic pluralism, this is a generous designation to say the least, but also one that blurs the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate opponents. Where in his works does she detect an adherence to the principles of liberal democracy? Or is being a Nazi after all not necessarily any impediment to being considered a legitimate opponent?

She also contributes to the volume with an essay, "Carl Schmitt and the Paradox of Liberal Democracy". Here she rejects “humanity” and “abstract universalism” as a basis of democracy. Democracy always dismisses and excludes, because “if the people are to rule, it is necessary to determine who belongs to the people” (p.42). I am dismayed by these formulations, not only because of their crudeness but also because they are so obviously bound to please some of the elements I most loath in today's political scene. I know that she is not a racist or nationalist, but she writes this in 1999, near the end of a decade in which such forces achieved a comeback in European politics. What on earth convinced her that attacking Habermas or Rawls was such an urgent task that statements about the necessity of determining "who belongs to the people" had somehow become excusable?

Mouffe herself seems to realize that upsetting existing determinations of "who belongs to the people" might be at least as necessary as establishing them, and - inconsistently - hastens to add that:

...the articulation with the liberal logic allows us constantly to challenge – through reference to ‘humanity’ and the polemical use of ‘human rights’ – the forms of exclusion that are necessarily inscribed in the political practice of installing those rights and defining ‘the people’. (p.44)

Pulling back from the abyss in this fashion is certainly commendable, but how can she admit of such a "reference" and such “polemical use” if she rejects all universality? And if she does admit of this recourse to universalism, then why the implacable attacks on Habermas and Rawls?

Mouffe, Chantal (ed) (1999) The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, London & New York: Verso.

Arendt on Benjamin

2011-03-29T18:41:00.019+02:00

A small warning - this entry will probably only interest a small number of Walter Benjamin-fans ("Benjamin-otaku"?).

I had a look at Hannah Arendt's introduction to Illuminations - a collection of essays by Benjamin translated into English - for the first time today, and was shocked to find what, in my view, must be one of the worst interpretations of Benjamin I've ever seen. It's quite legitimate to start, as she does, with a criticism of Adorno's misunderstanding of Benjamin's intentions in the essay on Baudelaire. Part of Adorno's well-known criticism is that Benjamin's attempt to relate elements of the superstructure directly to “corresponding elements in the substructure” was crude and "undialectical", too reminiscent of vulgar Marxism, and failed to do justice to Benjamin's own insights. By immersing himself in the "wide-eyed presentation of mere facts" - such as barricades or the duty on wine - his study ended up "at the crossroads of magic and positivism", a "bewitched" spot from which the way the elements were "mediated" disappeared from view (letter from Adorno to Benjamin, 10 November 1938).

Arendt defends Benjamin, saying that, yes, he was truly not a good Marxist (“the most peculiar Marxist ever produced by this movement”). She then proceeds to explain that Benjamin’s thinking was “poetical” and “metaphorical”, and that that was why he delighted in material facts. Such facts were metaphors which served to bring out truth.

He had no trouble understanding the theory of the superstructure as the final doctrine of metaphorical thinking – precisely because without much ado and eschewing all ‘mediations’ he directly related the superstructure to the so-called ‘material’ substructure, which to him meant the totality of sensually experienced data. He evidently was fascinated by the very thing that the others branded as ‘vulgar-Marxist’ or ‘undialectical’ thinking. (p.20)

So she rebuts Adorno by claiming that Benjamin’s way of seeing the relationship between superstructure and substructure was a metaphorical one. “Metaphors", she explains, "are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about”. She then proceeds to compare Benjamin to Heidegger, stressing how "close" they were or how much they had “in common” (p. 50, 53). For instance, they both shared the view that truth resided in language and “understood language as an essentially poetical phenomenon” (p. 54).

She is right in insisting that Adorno misunderstood Benjamin. Benjamin never meant to reduce elemenents of the superstructure to any material basis. Baudelaire's poem to the soul of wine wasn't a reflection in the superstructure of the wine tax in the second empire. However, she goes wrong when she tries to explain how Benjamin uses material phenomena to bring out the truth. Benjamin was not interested in “poetically” diving back into the sensual through metaphors. The entire Trauerspiel-book was an attack on art and the pretensions of art – including poetry – to reveal truth. Poetry is not a relation to Being. What, at heart, she misses is that the relationship between material facts and elements of the superstructure is that of a montage. It is neither that of a causal relationship (as in “vulgar Marxism”) nor a metaphorical one. A montage brings out truth by arranging elements into a constellation through which all the individual elements are turned into ruins, robbed of their mythical appearance of naturalness or self-sufficiency. Its effect is to shock the reader by juxtaposing the heterogeneous. It blows mindfulness to high heavens and does not invite contemplation. The montage is similar to what Benjamin calls allegory in his Trauerspiel-book, and allegory is also among the things that Arendt fails to understand. She contrasts Benjamin’s “metaphorical” thinking to the allegory, trying to portray the latter as alien to Benjamin's essentially metaphorical thought (p.19), and thereby completely misses why Benjamin himself preferred the allegory. She talks about the “spirit of Benjamin’s thought”, but the spirit she presents is Heidegger’s.

Arendt, Hannah (1973) ”Introduction Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940”, pp 7-60, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn), London: Fontana Press.

Libya and the revolution

2011-03-22T11:37:00.012+01:00

The New York Times editorial on Libya today is indicative of the confusion that seems to be felt about this new intervention - or, rather, war - everywhere. There is concern about the lack of a clear goal, the lack of an exit-option and, I think, quite a lot of fear about what new sufferings the war will bring. There is also concern about what will become of the Arab revolution from now on.

It's true that the "allied attacks on Libya were perhaps the only hope of keeping more people from being slaughtered" and it's also true that if Quaddafi would have been "allowed to crush the opposition, it would chill pro-democracy movements across the Arab world". But it is also true, as Abdulhadi Khalaf says, that "this is a golden opportunity to train fighter pilots and secure access to oil. That is the reason why many countries now attack goals in Libya, not that they intend to stop the suffering of the people" (in Swedish here). There will hardly be any intervention in Yemen or Bahrain, close allies to the US.

Isn't there a real danger is that the intervention itself will also "chill pro-democracy movements across the Arab world"? I am not an expert on the Arab world, but I am pretty sure that no protester, absolutely no-one, wants to be seen as the vanguard of a NATO invasion.

The big question now seems to be: Is there a possibility of being for the revolution without being for the intervention?

Regardless of that, the intervening powers must refrain from anything that could hurt civilians. That's the only way to obtain a minimum of legitimacy.

Abu-Lughod "Before European Hegemony"

2011-03-05T23:09:00.002+01:00

In her 1989 book Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250-1350, Janet Abu-Lughod provides an interesting pre-history to the “European” world-system analyzed by Wallerstein . According to her the latter system arose as a kind of transformative take-over of an earlier system that was already in existence although it had been declining since the mid-14th century. This was not a system centred on Europe. It had several cores, but its most important center was in China. Her analysis therefore works as a criticism of Wallerstein’s at least tendential Eurocentrism (but only partly, because she is a bit Eurocentric herself, addressing a European or at least "Western" implied reader, starting the book with Europe, using Europe as a constant point of reference and sometimes curiously overvaluing Europe’s contribution to the system in a way that is inconsistent with her general thrust which is aimed at showing how peripheral Europe was).

Although this early system was not "capitalist" in Wallerstein's sense (he stresses systematic “endless accumulation” in his definition of capitalism rather than the kind of long-distance trade that Abu-Lughod describes), Abu-Lughod makes it clear that this was an important predecessor system of the properly capitalist system that emerged in the 16th century. It was in this early system that the important trade routes were established, as well as much of the productive activity and the institutions necessary for trade.

As for particular geographical areas, I liked the analyses of the Italian city states as well as the analysis of Srivijaya and its relation to China. It was also interesting to see how much emphasis she puts on factors like the Black Death in explaining the decline of the system after the mid-14th century. The decisive factor behind this decline, however, was the disruption or closing of China’s two trade routes to the west - first the landbased route across Asia (the “silk road”) after the collapse of the Mongol empire and later the seabased route when the economy no longer allowed the Ming to send navies into the Indian Ocean. “When both of these lines to the world system were open, China flourished; when they closed, China declined, and, with her, the rest of the world system” (p.258).

According to her, these developments were also of enormous importance in accounting for the rise of the new Eurocentered world system. No technological superiority was needed for the latter. “When, after 1435, the Ming dynasty withdrew a powerful Chinese fleet from the ocean… an enormous vacuum of power was created that, some 70 years later, the Portuguese intruders filled with their own brute fire power” (p. 259). So, Abu-Lughod asks, did the West rise or the East fall? She argues that “the East had already substantially ‘fallen’ before the Portuguese men-of-war appeared in the Indian Ocean. That weakened world was a plum ripe for the taking. No special ‘virtue’ inhered in the conquerors; they took control of the remnants of a preexisting world system, one they then ruthlessly honed to serve their own ends” (p.260).

A noteworthy point here is the prominent use Abu-Lughod makes of the notion of an emptiness or vacuum that can be "filled" as an explanans. This is a way of explaining things that is quite usual in everyday thought, but which hasn't been given much attention in scholarly thought (although Ahrne & Papakostas discusses it at length in one of their books). Braudel appears rather fond of the argument, as when he discusses the success of Mycenae or the Phoenicians, speculating that they were able to "fill a void" in the Mediterrenean. What is perhaps especially intriguing with this kind of explanation is that it suggests a state of very radical unpredictability. A void can be filled by almost anything. A void is a cause that at the same time accentuates contingency. If we accept, for instance, that a "void" reigned in the Indian Ocean in the 15th century then that means that whatever direction history took from then on was underdetermined, i.e. that it could just as well have developed in a completely different direction. If the Portuguese had delayed their expansion fifty years, say, then who can tell who would have filled the void instead, and with what consequences for the world system?

Abu-Lughod, Janet L. (1989) Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250-1350, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The Kangnido map (1402): Korean-made map of the world based on Mongolian sources (not mentioned in the book, but a nice representation of peripheral Europe from the point of view of the more central parts of the world system).

Repression and invention: a warning from Brecht

2011-02-21T03:25:00.000+01:00

Good article by Robert Fisk about the way security forces ape each other: "Three weeks in Egypt show the power of brutality and its limits"

He writes, among other things:

If the people once – just once – lost their fear, and rose up to crush their oppressors, the very system of pain and frightfulness would become its own enemy, its ferocity the very reason for its collapse. This is what happened in Tunis. This is what happened in Egypt.

That's a thing we all want to believe. Still, I'm worried about Libya and I do hope things will work out well there. As for Iran, the situation is wholly different there. I see so much more than mere repetition.

A warning from Brecht:

“The oppressors do not work in the same way in every epoch. They cannot be defined in the same fashion at all times. There are so many means for them to avoid being spotted. They call their military roads motor-ways; their tanks are painted so that they look like MacDuff’s woods. Their agents show blisters on their hands, as if they were workers. No: to turn the hunter into quarry is something that demands invention.” (“Against Georg Lukács”, pp 68-85, in Aesthetics and Politics, London & New York: Verso 2007, p. 82f)

And here's Albert Hirschman, again about the need for invention:

“[C]hange can only happen as a result of surprise, otherwise it could not occur at all, for it would be suppressed by the forces that are in favour of the status quo.” (A Propensity to Self-subversion, Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 136)

The public and its undergrowth

2011-02-19T22:58:00.007+01:00

The public sphere has an "undergrowth". Outside there are not just the caves of intimacy we call the private sphere, but also a maze of passage-ways, alternative arenas, temporary connections, informal openings and informal gates on which the light of the public seldom or never falls.

The undergrowth is a favorite locus of the postmodern political thought that rose to prominence in the wake of the radicalism of "1968". As the pretensions of attempts to change society through open protest - in the full visibility of the public sphere and in the light, so to speak , of the sun of history - became untenable, the undergrowth turned into a place of refuge for those who still advocated resistance. Thomas Pynchon puts this idea very well:

One popular method of resistance was always just to keep moving – seeking, not a place to hide out, secure and fixed, but a state of dynamic ambiguity about where one might be any given moment, along the lines of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (Pynchon 1997, “Introduction to Jim Doge’s Stone Junction”)

In the 70s and 80s, Deleuze & Guattari started to advocate “flight” as a way to undermine the system while a “strategy of disappearance” found proponents among thinkers such as Hakim Bey and Jean Baudrillard. Strikingly, the concept of resistance now revealed itself as wedded to mobility, to flight, to vast smooth spaces, to a room of maneuver far superior to the cramped public sphere. In all these respects, the concept also presented itself as an antipode to the even more cramped private space. Resistance, in any case, was possible. Not by protest perhaps, but by disappearing from public view and finding freedom like cyberpunks in the mazes of Gibson’s cyberspace, like rats in a big house, or like the poor hunted Slothrop, fleeing his persecutors in the Zone. If the system couldn't be altered by the use of "voice" in the public sphere, then it could be altered by "exiting" to the undergrowth. The state, in Paul Virno's words, would crumble "not by a massive blow to its head, but through a mass withdrawal from its base".

When I read articles like the one by Sheller & Urry which I discussed in a recent post, I can't help thinking that it's to this post-68 current - a "tradition" already - that they are linking up. Yes, it's all there - the attempt to redfine mobility as resistance, the mood of feeling fed up with old "static" notions of the public sphere...

The idea of exit as resistance should not be underestimated. It deserves careful scrutiny, at least from two directions. On the one hand it is fairly obvious that it serves an ideological function, legitimizing or rationalizing a withdrawal from political activity under the pretext of offering resistance. But on the other, it can't be denied that exit can be a quite efficient weapen under some circumstances (provided that the opponent is dependent on your participation and you have access to good alternatives - see Hirschman!). Besides, to a person traumatized by defeat, there might not be much more to do in the way of resistance than to withdraw and take shelter in the undergrowth in order to recover his or her strength, to pick up a gun while running, so as to fight another day. Running or taking shelter all the time, however, is hardly pleasant, and to a recovering person, it is crucial to identify the moment when flight can stop and offensive action is again possible.

Let me now turn to a specific problem. How can the "undergrowth" be specified theoretically in relation to the notion of the public sphere?

Towards the end of his life Deleuze sketched the theory of the control society. This theory shows how ambiguous the relation of the "undergrowth" is to the public sphere. For instance, he points out that the fact that communication is the life-nerve of control-societies means that “[t]he key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control” (Deleuze, Negotiations, Columbia University Press 1990:175). This sounds like an advocacy of exit from the public sphere, the latter being viewed as a site of pervasive control and monitoring. However, flight teems with possibilities of counter-forays into public communication in a way which both upsets it and marks a return to the public sphere. Viruses and computer piracy, he suggests, will replace strikes and sabotage: “We’ve got to hijack speech” (ibid). The question we should now ask is: is “hijacking” a form of participation in public communication or something opposed to it?

This ambiguity remains in Hakim Bey and Negri & Hardt. All these thinkers maintain the basic idea of flight into rhizomatic complexity as a preferred form of resistance. What they add to Deleuze is a clearer emphasis on the possibility of collective resistance. The rhizome is turned into a network. Bey pictures it as a "pirate utopia" with its islands, remote hideouts, and mini-communities living outside the law. The suggestive idea of a shady “network” that might take the place of the superseded public sphere builds on the idea of a society of such complexity that no single central power really has the ability to control it any longer. “For the strategic coalescence, complexity is not just an aesthetic but a necessity, a cognitive maquis or zone of resistance, a realm of ambiguity where the uprising must find its economy, its heartlands.” (“10. Volkways”, in Millennium). What is envisioned is the guerrilla tactics of striking and running away, in the manner of a nomadic war-machine. Negri & Hardt similarly pin much on the argument that the networks of the control society are open to the possibility of resistance, because their effectiveness and hence survival to a large extent depends on the freedom of movement allowed within it. “The same design element that ensures survival, decentralization, is also what makes control of the network so difficult” (Hardt & Negri 2000:299).

These three examples - Deleuze, Bey and Hardt & Negri - show that despite an ostentative use of the rhetoric of exit ("flight", "disappearance", "desertion", or "exodus"), none of them are actually advocating any pure one-way exit from the public sphere. In fact, it is even dubious if it can be said that they advocate exit as resistance at all. Resistance comes when one stops in order to use the picked-up gun, when one occupies part of the enemy territory in the form of a T.A.Z or when the diffused multitudes suddenly converge again, fed up with "withdrawing from the base" and intent instead on "dealing a massive blow to the head" as in Seattle. As I've pointed out elsewhere, there is an ambiguity in the rhetoric of exit as resistance which is particularly glaring in the case of Hardt & Negri.

In Empire (2000) the main examples of desertion and exodus are refugees, migrant labour, escaped slaves, and the mass-emigrations that triggered the fall of the Berlin Wall. Resting on a myriad of individual decisions – a “diffusion of singularities” – rather than organized movement, the effect of these desertions is said to be to silently weaken the system of power, undermining it rather than fighting it. [...]. In Multitude (2004) and other recent texts the concept of exodus tends to be broadened into a metaphor of resistance as such, including voice and public confrontation. Simultaneously, the central image illustrating the concept shifts to the mass-demonstrations of the alter-globalization movement in Seattle and Genoa. The result of these changes is that the concept becomes more confrontational – what is needed is not simply to abandon or “undermine” power by depriving it of participation and support but actively to turn against it and topple it, through “a blow to its head” to use Virno’s words. This vacillation indicates a basic unresolved dilemma. The more they stress the undermining effects of the withdrawal of various subaltern groups from imperial control, the thinner the link to organized resistance becomes. Conversely, the more they connect their theory to the present surge in anti-corporate and anti-war activism, the more its empirical content tends to merge with the traditional movement repertoire of voice and public confrontation.

However, here I will try to present a counter-argument to myself. Perhaps the "undergrowth" is essentially contradictory. If that is so, then resting content with merely criticizing this contradiction will risk blinding oneself to the fact that this undergrowth nevertheless exists and fulfills a variety of functions. Seen from the vantage-point of the "public sphere" it will perhaps inescapably appear ambiguous and contradictory, as neither pure "exit" nor pure" participation".

Let us ask, however, if there is any other vantage-point from which these ambiguous forms of resistance would appear natural, self-evident and comprehensible. Might not autonomy be one such viewpoint? Whatever autonomy might mean, it sure doesn't mean that we need to adjust - and all to often "participation" means just that, to adjust oneself to some form of rule. But neither does autonomy mean that we must confine ourselves to non-participation. That too would be heteronomy. To act autonomously means to act in ways that can't be confined to either participation or non-participation. Could we say, perhaps, that the "undergrowth" is a place for autonomy?

Muen and gôko

2011-02-19T22:50:00.007+01:00

The historian Higashijima Makoto’s publications about the historical construction of the public sphere in Japan and the idea of “rivers and lakes” (gôko or kôko, 江湖) provide a good example of recent attempts in Japan to reformulate the idea of the public without relying on the problematic notion of ôyake or kô. I've already mentioned him in an earlier entry. Here I will have a closer look at how he relates his argument to Amino Yoshihiko's concept of muen in his book Kôkyôken no rekishiteki sôzô (The historical construction of the public sphere, Tokyo Daigaku shuppansha 2000).

Higashijima doesn't just reject notions of "public" that are too close to the idea of the "official" or state-related. He also rejects notions that retain too much of the notion of "community” (kyôdôtai), such as when the historian Katsumata Shizuo sees an early Japanese form of "public" opposed to official power in the kugai of autonomous town-communities” (machi-kyôdôtai) or popular federations (ikki). Higashijima objects that such communities might have managed to create a form of "common", but they never created a true "public" since community always entails closure. No matter how opposed these "communities" were to official power, ironically they could never achieve more than a new miniature “official” space reproduced on a smaller scale (Higashijima 2000:240f).

Not even Amino goes free from criticism, although his mistake is "merely" that he conflates the fake public of kugai with the genuine openness of muen .

What we need to question is the identification of kugai with muen. What in the end emerges as the problem in Muen Kugai Raku is the confluence between: a) freedom through the community, and b) freedom from the community. The dilemma that arises from the confluence between a, which is closer to kugai, and b, which is closer to muen, does not yet appear to have been sufficiently brought to consciousness in Muen Kugai Raku… It is clear that it is not the idea of kugai but precisely the idea of muen that must be the point of departure from thinking about the public in the sense of Öffentlichkeit, of being open to all. (ibid. 214f)

Higashijima is also partly critical of arguments that purport to find an affinity between the ideas of Habermas and Amino (e.g. historians like Hanada Tatsurô - for a text in English by Hanada, see his 2006 paper "The Japanese 'Public Sphere': the Kugai" in Theory, Culture & Society 23:2-3). Whatever affinity there in Amino's thought to the Habermasian idea of the "public sphere" (Öffentlichkeit), is found in the idea of muen, not in the idea of kugai.

Sarugaku performer (to the left) together with a dengaku performer. Sarugaku later developed into nô theatre.

While rejecting the idea that kugai as an early Medieval approximation of Habermasian Öffentlichkeit, Higashijima is quite emphatic in his insistence that muen corresponded rather well with this notion. Thus he refers to Tsuda Sôkichi's description of sarugaku performances as open to the general public and as taking place in areans where all onlookers were supposed to be equal, regardless of rank or age, and thus similar to how Habermas describes the literary public sphere of the 17th century in France. In both cases, culture provided places where all participants were “free of status” - which in turn exactly corresponds to the notion of muen, the state of being cut off from relations to the community. Higashijima suggests that the fact (so hard to explain to many who are used to view Amino as a leftist historian) that Amino professed a preference to at least some of views of the liberal-conservative historian Tsuda over those of his own Marxist mentor Ishimoda Shô can be explained by his affinity to Habermas (ibid 2000:246).

Although he doesn't mention it explicitly, it seems rather clear that Higashijima more or less identifies muen with gôko ("rivers and lakes"), the concept he himself focuses on as the most appropriate term (much more suitable than the common translations ôyake or kôkyô) for the "public" in older Japanese history. As I've already mentioned, the word gôko was popular in early Meiji times when it was used much like we would use the expression "public sphere" today . As one goes back in history, however, one sees that the roots of this idea where quite different from those of the "public" in Europe. To be brief, it originated in Zen Buddhism where it was linked to the idea of free "nomadic" wandering of people who had renounced the world. Among monks, it was used as a metaphor of freedom from ties to power and rank, and in popular usage it became used as a derogatory term for "people of no account" such as travelling entertainers (including sarugaku troupes) and paupers lacking a fixed domicile. Higashijima emphasizes the "nomadic" quality of this public by comparing it to what Karatani calls a Verkehrsraum (kôtsû kûkan), a “space for traffic” or for intercourse between strangers outside the confines of the state (ibid 299).

Higashijima's account is indeed interesting and I will try to deal with it at greater length in a text I will present at a symposium in Kyoto later this month where I'm going to discuss how the "public" has been translated into Japanese.

Let me close, however, with a few critical remarks.

Firstly, muen is not a “public” in the Habermasian sense. It is true that muen is radically divorced from community and more linked to nomadic mobility, but the Habermasian public is not. The latter goes well with community as well as with stationary bourgeois citizens.

Secondly, in his conception of the public Higashijima tends to put emphasis on a particular understanding of the “public” as an “area open to all” (bannin ni hirakareta ryôiki). However, openness is not necessarily a central feature of “public” in Western languages. For instance, while most influential accounts of the public - take Habermas, Arendt or Sennett for instance - stress the public as a forum where strangers interact, very few have claimed that a public must really be open to all. Neither Habermas’ “public sphere” nor Arendt’s “public realm” is open in such a radical sense.

It's it fact terribly easy to find differences between the idea of "rivers and lakes" and the Habermasian public. The latter is not as closely linked as either muen or gôko to religious ideas. It is not as associated with marginal places and marginal populations as the latter either. Above all, neither muen nor gôko are very closely linked to the idea of a sphere for deliberation or public debate (this is something which will be a central topic in my talk in Kyoto).

Finally, I also need to address the idea of the "common". I wonder if it's really correct to describe the ikki as necessarily closed. Weren’t they in fact one of the few instances in which locality (village, family or clan) was transcended in medieval Japan? As many historians have pointed out, some spanned entire regions while others – the religious ones – even formed countrywide networks. That said, I agree that it is important to distinguish the “common” from the idea of true openness to all. That is why I myself distinguish the "common" from what I call “no-man’s-land” (a concept I think is rather close to muen and gôko). Unlike Higashijima, however, I would not identify "no-man's-land" or gôko with a Habermasian “public”, since such a “public” is not fully open. What we need to distinguish is, therefore, three different things: common, public, and no-man’s-land.

Mobility and politics: notes on Sheller & Urry

2011-02-03T11:09:00.008+01:00

Automobility

I'd like to make a short note about Mimi Sheller and John Urry's “Mobile Transformations of `Public' and `Private' Life” (Theory, Culture & Society 20:3, 2003). The reason I read this text was that I was interested in how it would treat the relation between public sphere and public space. As some theorists have pointed out, theorizing this relation better than has been done previously would benefit our understanding of both concepts (see for instance Smith & Low 2006:5f).

The authors discuss various meanings of public and private - public and private interest, public and private sphere, public and private life, public and private space, and publicity and privacy - and argue that none of these conceptions is suited to capturing the mobility and fluidity of political action today, the age of automobility and electronic communications. To support their claim that these conceptions are "static" or linked to space they refer to a few examples, such as Habermas' discussion of coffee houses and Arendt's of the agora (p.114). Instead of thinking "in terms of ‘spheres’ or ‘spaces’, concepts that are often static and ‘regional’ in character”, the authors emphasize "the increasing fluidity in terms of where (or when) moments of publicity and privacy occur” (p.108). Along with the rejection of static conceptions, the authors also reject the complaint among thinkers like Habermas or Sennett that the boundaries of public and private are being eroded, “colonized” etc.

We show that cars, information, communications, screens, are all material worlds, hybrids of private and public life. Despite the heroic efforts of 20thcentury normative theorists to rescue the divide, the various distinctions between public and private domains cannot survive. The critical theorists reviewed above each in different ways diagnosed the erosion of boundaries between public and private as the cause of democratic decline; maintaining or restoring the boundary, they imply, is crucial to the continuance of democratic citizenship in the contemporary world. We argue, in contrast, that the hybridization of public and private is even more extensive than previously thought, and is occurring in more complex and fluid ways than any regional model of separate spheres can capture. Any hope for public citizenship and democracy, then, will depend on the capacity to navigate these new material, mobile worlds that are neither public nor private. (p.113)

In order to stress the political potential of mobility, the authors mention examples such as Reclaim the Streets. The “proliferation of anti-capitalist, anti-globalization social movements emerged within the context of new mobilities of bodies, capital, objects, money, information and images. Such fragmented and fluid temporalities of public and private exceed any simple notion of boundary erosion or colonization - if anything it is more like ‘creolization’” (p.121).

A summary of the argument might look like this. The authors attempt to reduce the public sphere to static public space in order to more efficiently criticize it by directing attention to spatial processes that dissolve static space. They then try to suggest a new notion of the public more in tune with these processes.

I have two criticisms.

Firstly, it strikes me as rather curious that the authors claim that all the conceptions of the public mentioned above are static and linked to space. This is a bit surprising, since the "public sphere" is usually thought of precisely as a despatialized concept. Arendt is explicit in pointing out that the public realm is not place-bound. "The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be” (Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958:198).

Habermas, to be sure, talks of coffeehouses as places where the bourgeouis public sphere once took form. It is quite clear, however, that the public sphere cannot be reduced to deliberations going on in public space. It can occur in a lot of places, some of them private - at the breakfast table, for instance. "Every encounter in which actors do not just observe each other but take a second-person attitude, reciprocally attributing communicative freedom to each other, unfolds in a linguistically constituted public sphere" (Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Polity Press 1996:361). In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas explicitly states that only certain publics are placebound (distinguishing between episodic publics that can arise anywhere, occasional publics that arise when people gather together in certain institutionalized contexts such as concerts or political meetings, and abstract publics that are held together by mass media). It seems strange to claim that cars or the Internet per se are enough to upset a public sphere conceptualized in this fashion.

Secondly, I don’t agree that all “static” or “place”-bound concepts of the public must be discarded. Here I agree with Don Mitchell – what is necessary for public visibility is often "static" public space. If homeless people about to be evicted from a park want to make a public issue of their struggle, they usually do better by staying put in the park and refuse to move than go for an Internet campaign. The uprising in Egypt today may have begun with mobile and elusive gatherings springing up in the alleyways and disappearing just as quickly when the police arrived, but as soon as the protesters grew in strength they started gathering at Midan al Tahrir, occupying the square and guarding it by staying there night after night. Not everyone is mobile, and not everyone wants to move. That's the problem with building a politics only on the idea of mobility and ignoring the importance of sometimes being stationary. What is needed is a combination of both. Politics is about friction. Where capital is already hypermobile, isn’t the most effective way to offer resistance often simply to stay put, to hold on to space, to refuse to go along and escape though the lines of flight? To say “no” when welfare is being cut or the homeless evicted? Isn’t the “public” often what flares up, like fire, through the friction created when capital or authorities encounter resistance?

So the authors are clearly at least half wrong: the idea of “navigating” mobility risks becoming a justification of those who want to obliterate public spaces or the public sphere, an ideology neglecting those who are not or do not want to be hypermobile.

But perhaps they are also at least a little bit right. The categories of public and private are problematical. There does exist a realm that is admittedly difficult or perhaps even impossible to theorize in the old terms, something like Deleuze’s nomadic “smooth” space and the new modes of politics that such a space would offer, or the half hidden network “hinterland” that Bey or Negri mention as an indispensible base for revolts. By trying to approach this realm, they sketch a politics for a possible future in which public spaces or static spheres have vanished, but instead everywhere has become a potential point where politics may again flare up on the global “public screen”.

Egypt

2011-02-01T09:03:00.010+01:00

Today’s the day of the ”march of millions”. The military has promised not to use violence. The new cabinet has started to talk about the need for dialogue, but the protesters want Mubarak to go. How analyze this? There are a variety of viewpoints: the diffusion of revolt (from Tunisia and on to Egypt and Yemen), political opportunity, cognitive liberation, emotional transformation, the role of communication technologies, the shape of networks, the question of how Islamist groups will position themselves in regard to the rebellion (they won’t hijack it as in Iran, but how about the fears of the Kopts?), the question of internal differences among protesters, the international politics viewpoint of how all this will shake the US alliance structure and scare Israel, the balance between exit and voice (the emergence in public discourse of things suppressed for decades), the problems raised by the fact that the movement is fuelled not only by disgust at ”30 wasted years” but also by poverty and the issues of food, energy, water and justice (problems that won’t go away just because a regime topples), and, finally, the sheer richness of how the street is transformed and experienced in new ways. There is happiness and anger in the air, it seems, and that emotional magnet is making people get out of their houses and out on the streets. How do we understand that magnet, that great collective bath in which accumulated disgust and cynisim is temporarily cleansed?

Postscript (mid-February): I still haven't got any answers - but I'm very, very happy! For some interesting analyses, please have a look at:

Mohammed Baymeh, "The Egyptian Revolution"

Mark LeVine, "The Shaping of a New World Order"

Andrea Teti, "The Politics of Fearlessness"

Daniel Byman, "Why the Mideast Tumult Caught Scholars by Surprise"

Let me end with a quote from the midst of it all, which I like very much:

“Egyptians right now are not afraid at all,” said Walid Rachid, a student taking refuge from tear gas inside a Giza mosque. “It may take time, but our goal will come, an end to this regime. I want to say to this regime: 30 years is more than enough. Our country is going down and down because of your policies.” (NY Times, 30 January)

Jane Jacobs - some critical remarks

2011-01-30T18:32:00.009+01:00

Last month I read Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Vintage 1992, orig. 1961). A curious book - I like much of it, yet disagreed with something on almost every page. Let me use this entry to clarify to myself exactly what I found so objectionable.

Hudson Street

First something briefly on her general argument. Against "current city planning" with its huge housing projects, suburbs and depopulated lawns, she defends the intricate street "ballet" of Hudson Street - the hustle and bustle of people coming and going, greeting neighbors, drinking pop at the stoop, keeping an eye on the street, looking after children and helping strangers.

Street safety is an important part of this picture. Unlike in small towns or suburbs, safety in the city means keeping safety among strangers. "The bedrock attribute of a succesful city district is that a person must feel personally safe and secure on the street among all these strangers" (Jacobs 1992:30). I like her insistence that public peace is not kept primarily by the police, but by “an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves” (ibid 31f). In other words, "publicness" is seen by her as a source of safety, rather than as a source of danger.

Here's an example of this publicness in action: looking out from her window, she sees a person, possibly a pederast, trying to get a little girl to go with him.

As I watched from our second-floor window, making up my mind how to intervene if it seemed advisable, I saw it was not going to be necessary. From the butcher shop beneath the tenement had emerged the woman who, with her husband, runs the shop; she was standing within earshot of the man, her arms folded and a look of determination on her face.

Soon other people too emerge from the bar and other shops, as well as the fruitman. ”Nobody was going to allow a little girl to be dragged off, even if nobody knew who she was. I am sorry – sorry purely for dramatic purposes – to have to report that the little girl turned out to be the man’s daughter” (ibid.39).

Sounds idyllic. Yet she betrays her clear awareness of the possible unease this account might arouse by a defensive remark: “Safety on the streets by surveillance and mutual policing of one another sounds grim, but in real life it is not grim” (ibid.36). Is the idea of “publicness” as a source of security really opposed to surveillance society? Isn’t there a risk that in both, the problem is that the very concern with security will lead to exclusion?

Here's Mike Davis about L.A., the “fortress city” where the police battle “the criminalized poor”:

Today’s upscale, pseudo-public spaces... are full of invisible signs warning off the underclass ‘Other’. Although architectural critics are usually oblivious to how the built environment contributes to segregation, pariah groups – whether poor Latino families, young Black men, or elderly homeless white females – read the meaning immediately. (Mike Davis, City of Quartz, Verso 1990:226)

The difference compared to how Jacobs’ streets function is not the employment of a certain design of the built environment to discourage pariah groups from entry, nor it the existence of surveillance and exclusion per se. The difference is in the agent of policing, which in Jacobs’ case it is the stratum of residents and everyday users of the street rather than the police or security firm. But in either case marginal elements will probably be able to "read the meaning immediately" and the effect will be similar.

My first criticism of Jacobs would be that she is overly concerned with security. Wherever security becomes a main concern, the stranger will suffer. Wherever there is a sense of community coupled with fear and insecurity, one will find the seeds of a bunker mentality which will harm the very "publicness" Jacobs tries to defend. Don Mitchell is surely right when he asserts that in today's societies we need to put up with a certain amount of insecurity if we want to have a truly public space.

Here's my second criticism: Jacobs lacks sympathy for things marginal. In recent book, Sharon Zukin classes Jacobs will the "gentrifiers" (Naked City, Oxford University Press, 2010:12), which seems like a fair assessment. Her book contains plenty of evidence of her aversion to shady strangers, dark edges and rats. She doesn’t hesitate to categorize a long list of places as "dead places" which often make ”destructive neighbors”: junk yards, used-car lots, vacant lots, parking lots, or buildings that are abandoned or underused (Jacobs 1992:230, 257ff, 263, 334). Problematically, her accounts of "destructive" or "dead" places easily slips into explicit arguments about unwanted people.

The perverts who completely took over Philadelphia’s Washington Square for several decades... did not kill off a vital and appreciated park. They did not drive out respectable users. They moved into an abandoned place and entrenched themselves (ibid 98)

This is a seemingly progressive argument, asserting that it's not the unwanted people who are to blame for the deterioration of the park but the lack of vitality of the district. The unwanted people remain unwanted, however, and getting rid of such people is clearly among the benefits of the kind of vitality she is advocating. To be sure, she states clearly that it is not ”illuminating to tag minority groups, or the poor, or the outcast with responsibility for city danger” (ibid.31) and she laments the discrimination and ostracization of peoples of color (ibid.63, 72). Perhaps it is more fair to say that what she wants to excluded are certain phenomena, such as delinquency or crime, rather than any specific category of people. But such a demarcation is hard to make: if residents are supposed to keep watch over the street, they will go on outward appearance of people and their criteria will inevitably involve prejudice.

A point which emerges clearly from her book, although she never states it explicitly, is that vitality excludes. She talks about neighborhoods or districts being "attractive" to people as a criterion of “success”, but, perversely, a city without what she calls ”dead” spots may be more exclusive and inhospitable to some people than a city in which such spots are allowed to remain. For instance, vacant lots or untidy and neglected parks may be a haven for children, young people or the homeless. Vitality is not a way to make a district more attractive to strangers in general, but to a select category of desirable strangers. Jacobs' portrayal of the life of streets and pavements mixes an air of seeming tolerance for strangers with an allergy to certain kinds of strangers. The explanation for this curious sorting of strangers is not hard to find. It has to do with the viewpoint adopted by Jacobs in her book, which overlaps with the viewpoint of the local shopowner. She shuns all uses and users who scare away customers.

I also have a third criticism, but here I will be brief. Her “successful” city is an inner city, a city centre, with plenty of shops and strangers. How realistic is it to use that as a model for the city as a whole? Not very. The neglect of the world outside the inner city is connected to her strange diagnosis of whatever is unwelcome as symptoms of ”unsuccessful” city design. Although she vaguely mentions larger systemic factors as possible explanations of poverty and slumming, she is clearly not very interested in them. By concentrating solely on factors related to urban design, she makes it sound as if better design could make slums disappear, along with criminals, perverts and other unwelcome marginals.

Let me end with a note on the character of the "public space" that emerges from the pages of Jacobs' bok. A comparison with Don Mitchell, who gives a very different account of public space, will be illuminating. To both, public space is the name of a certain social phenomenon, which is far from stable and which can appear but also disappear depending on the circumstances. In both it is, I believe, tied to a certain subjective experience of space. If the quintessential public space for Mitchell is created by an act that upsets the order and makes the marginal urban outcast visible, to Jacobs it consists in the everyday “ballet” of street and sidewalk life. In Jacobs, public space hinges on a certain "ordering of the sensible" - to use Rancière's term - which shouldn't be upset by the public visualization of the “uncounted part”, of those who are not supposed to be there. Her public requires the exclusion or suppression of the private to a sphere where it won’t disturb anyone or scare away people or make them feel unsafe. A space in which the private can no longer be excluded – a street or park rife with criminality, prostitution or “perversion”, homeless people sleeping in “public” etc – is also one that has “gone bad” and that is no longer public space in the sense in which she uses the word. In Mitchell, by contrast, the public arises precisely when this ordering is challenged and upset through the provocative visibilization in public of things, people or behavior that is usually relegated to the hidden, private sphere.

As mentioned, there are also things I like her book: her attempt to defend some form of urban public life rather than the illusory safety of privacy or small-town community, her defense of the inner city against suburban housing projects and shopping centres located outside town, the fact that she adopts the viewpoint of street-level pedestrian experience rather than that of most urban planning or car-drivers. But the problem is that she thinks Hudson Street can be generalized and that she doesn't like marginals. To criticize her valorization of security and vitality is not to advocate dullness and insecurity, but to attack her partiality. To insist on her kind of vitality means making a city attractive to certain people and unattractive to others. To insist on her kind of security means security to some and insecurity to others. The question would be: is there a way to conceive of a city that is attractive and safe for all?

Denis Wood on "shadowed spaces"

2011-01-20T12:11:00.007+01:00

I’ve found something interesting, a samizdat paper that’s been circulating clandestinely since 1978 and finally been made available on the art project “shadowed spaces” website. It's called "Shadowed Spaces: In Defense of Indefensible Space" and it's written by Denis Wood. Wood is a famous geographer, or psycho-geographer, who has forced us to rethink maps.

Here’s he’s closing in on something other writers have been dealing with using terms like heterotopias, no-man’s-land, dead zone or terrain vague. He stands out, though... How? Partly by his poetic talent. Partly, also, by the fact that he focuses so much on the clandestine, almost “private” nature of these spaces. Someone writes he’s interested in defending our need for privacy in public, but I think that’s an oversimplification. Firstly, privacy is something that can be defended as a right. Wood seems to be aiming at something so transgressive and explosive that not even customary private space would be able to contain it - something that needs to be hidden even from the eyes of those who you normally let into your private space, such as your family or most of your friends. Shadowed spaces, as I understand him, allow for what would be intolerable in public as well as private space. It’s no wonder he originally wrote the paper for a criminology conference. He’s dealing with things, such as illicit sex, that are either criminalized or feel so shameful that they feel like crimes.

Secondly, a defense of shadowed spaces could also be seen as a defense for more publicness rather than less – depending on how you define the public. Publicness doesn’t have to mean public scrutiny or public visibility. It can, for instance, also mean open access, so that if you try to eliminate shadowed spaces, exclude certain categories of people or certain usages of space, then you are actually decreasing publicness. Although it may sound slightly paradoxical, places often become less public the more publicly scrutinized or "problematized" they are. By banning sex on the beach, for instance, we make beaches less public than they would otherwise have been. Likewise, the more mutual surveillance there is in a community, the less hospitable it will probably feel to outsiders.

To conclude, I don’t think you can say that he is defending either public space or private space tout court, because the very categorization of space as public or private is the result of a certain ordering effort, a certain regulation which in itself needs to be “public”, that is, to some extent commonly agreed upon and upheld by common norms. What he is defending is instead the existence of spaces that have escaped this normative regulation, this publicly agreed ordering.

Some quotes:

What were the earliest shadowed spaces? That of the colored half-light underneath the blanket, or that beneath the bed? That of the stuffy darkness in the closet behind the clothes, or that behind the stairs on the way to the basement? What does it matter? All of them were shaded. Which came first? The mutual sharing of pubic anatomies with Carol Lewis in the blinkered light beneath the baldachino of the bushes; or the pants-down hanky-panky with Sonny Schwartz in the leaden demi-jour of the old gray Army blanket? With Denny Ring the making of plans and marshaling of stones to throw at Harry Puerto Rico in the shuttered murk below the porches; or the rending with my brother of all our books in the street-light shattered darkness of our bedroom after the light was out? Who cares about primacy? Each adds detail to a pattern of secret deeds committed in forgiving darkness, shaded from the eyes of parents, janitors, and other keepers of the norms ...

They’re the deeper recesses of abandoned lots cut off from view by screens of kudzu or the ramparts of long forgotten dumps; they’re the jungles of ailanthus that spring up along the embankments of the switching yards beyond the station master’s view; they’re the forest and the grass that flourish in the piece of land devoid of access except through someone’s yard, that are encouraged on the margins of open water that run with sewage during heavy rains, that thrive in the bottoms of unworked quarries; they’re the spaces underneath the bridges, spotted with guano and bereft of greenery or curtained with trees and cool in the summer; they’re the odd corner of the park or the state institution, the part of the federal lands just beyond the hole in the fence, the whole of the dying estate too large to be patrolled by the caretaker’s wife. They’re the places you think about going to let your dog run, the places you stay away from if you know what’s good for you, the places you have to go to to roll a drunk or meet what passes in these days for hobos. And they’re the places you go if you want to find ... discarded underpants.

They are important places, the shadowed spaces, a geographical subconscious without which it’s impossible to even think about non-normative behavior, a spatial underworld twined throughout the environments of other actions. In these places proscription is proscribed, and the relationships between the one and the many and the done and the not done are worked through and out with consequences as unforeseeable as the locations of the places themselves, inevitably tripped over in the doing and the looking and the feeling and the learning that specify the character required. Important places, the shadowed spaces, and complex and tricky. They can’t be made. They can’t be planned. They can’t be staked out and signed and known. They have to be ... left over, they have to ... over-looked, discovered by happenstance, found in need, cajoling even as cajoled. But though they can’t be made, the shadowed spaces can be unmade, wiped out, destroyed, made useless, impotent and truly empty ... and with ease…. Totalitarianism creeps on cat’s feet till it pounces for the kill. Then the shadowed spaces are the only place of refuge.