Complicity: Criticism Between Collaboration and Commitment 9781786601032, 1786601036

Citation preview

Complicity

Off the Fence: Morality, Politics and Society The series is published in partnership with the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE), University of Brighton. Series editors: Bob Brecher, Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Brighton Robin Dunford, Senior Lecturer in Globalisation and War, University of Brighton Michael Neu, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, University of Brighton Off the Fence presents short, sharply argued texts in applied moral and ­political philosophy, with an interdisciplinary focus. The series constitutes a source of arguments on the substantive problems that applied philosophers are concerned with: contemporary real-world issues relating to violence, ­human nature, justice, equality and democracy, self and society. The ­series demonstrates applied philosophy to be at once rigorous, relevant and ­accessible—philosophy-in-use. The Right of Necessity: Moral Cosmopolitanism and Global Poverty, Alejandra Mancilla Complicity: Criticism Between Collaboration and Commitment, Thomas Docherty The State and the Self: Identity and Identities, Maren Behrensen (forthcoming) Just Liberal Violence: Sweatshops, Torture, War, Michael Neu (forthcoming)

Complicity Criticism Between Collaboration and Commitment

Thomas Docherty

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2016 by Thomas Docherty All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-7866-0101-8 PB 978-1-7866-0102-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Docherty, Thomas, 1955– author. Title: Complicity : criticism between collaboration and commitment / Thomas Docherty. Description: New York : Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016. | Series: Off the fence: morality, politics, and society | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016020906 (print) | LCCN 2016032476 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786601018 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781786601025 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781786601032 (electronic) Subjects: LCSH: Criticism (Philosophy) | Critical theory. Classification: LCC B809.3 .D63 2016 (print) | LCC B809.3 (ebook) | DDC 801/.95—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020906 ™

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

For Roy Park and for Seamus Deane

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

ix

Chapter 1 Introduction: On Being a Bastard

1

Chapter 2 Diplomacy and Law

9

Chapter 3 Accountancy; or, on Being a Bureaucrat

27

Chapter 4 Skin in the Game

53

Chapter 5 On Democratic Responsibility

77

Chapter 6 ‘Open the Doors!’; or, on Commitment and Reserve

105

Bibliography

133

Index

139

vii

Preface and Acknowledgements

T

his book grew out of a conference, hosted by Bob Brecher, Michael Neu, and colleagues in CAPPE, the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, at the University of Brighton in March/April 2015. The conference was organized by the ‘Understanding Conflict’ research cluster. I am enormously grateful to colleagues in Brighton for the work that they do in these areas, for inviting me to speak at the conference, and for focusing my mind and research onto the topic of complicity. Alongside these professional drivers, I had personal reasons to be interested in modes of institutional complicity, in the ways in which institutions—especially institutions of education and cultural formation—sometimes work by encouraging individuals to become complicit with practices that they might normally eschew. Institutional demands can override the personal, to the point where not only ethical but also professional responsibilities are made to disappear. Beyond that, those institutional demands also sit within social and political configurations; and, consequently, individuals can become complicit with political positions that, personally, they would prefer to resist or reject. This book is an attempt to bring the entire idea of responsibility to bear on what is essentially the institutionalization of corruption in contemporary culture. I have presented earlier versions of some of the material here in a number of institutions in Dublin, Bristol, St. Gallen, Oxford, Royal Holloway London, Wolverhampton, Portsmouth, York, Chelsea College of Arts, and Alberta, Canada. I am grateful to my audiences and colleagues in these institutions for hosting me generously and for helping me to explore the ideas more fully and clearly. In particular, I would like to thank colleagues who, like Bob Brecher in Brighton, honoured me by inviting my participation in conferences or by inviting me to give special guest or public lectures: Annette ix

x    PREFACE AND ACKNOW LEDGEM ENTS

Dolan, Rose Malone, Christopher Bertram, Rowan Tomlinson, Emmanuel Alloa, Dieter Thomä, Roy Sellars, Alan Robinson, Kristin Grogan, Charalambos Dendrinos, Anne Sheppard, Aidan Byrne, Ben Davies, Adam Kelly, Claire Westall, Emilie Morin, Malcolm Quinn, and Carolyn Sale. Several Warwick colleagues have also been very supportive in various ways as I made this book: among them, Michael Gardiner, Dan Katz, Nick Lawrence, Neil Lazarus, Graeme Macdonald, Emma Mason, Paulo de Medeiros, Pablo Mukherjee, Carol Rutter, Stephen Shapiro. I would be nowhere without my current and former PhD students; and here I want especially to thank Dominic Dean, Claudio Murgia, Alice Leonard, James Christie, Christian Smith, Arina Cirstea, Nick Collins, Alireza Fakhrkhonandeh, Jenny Mak, Katja Rebmann, Birgit Breidenbach, Matthew Rumbold, Sourit Bhattacharya, Andy Stones, and Mary Kelly. I would like to thank Michael Schmidt of Carcanet publishers for permission to cite from Edwin Morgan’s ‘Opening the Cage’. The Scottish Parliament owns the copyright for Edwin Morgan’s ‘Open the Doors!’, and I am grateful for permission to quote from this poem. In accordance with the regulations governing such copyright, I acknowledge that this book contains information licensed under the Scottish Parliament Copyright Licence. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers for the series in which this book appears, and also Rowman & Littlefield International for their kind endorsements of the work. None of the above are responsible for any of the shortcomings of this book. These, I can claim entirely for myself. Above all, I owe a debt of gratitude to several colleagues whose example I can only hope to emulate. There have been many; but two, in particular, must be mentioned here and thanked, for without them I probably would not have had an academic career at all. Roy Park helped me to find my feet, as researcher, teacher, and colleague, in more ways than I can list when I moved to Oxford to do my doctoral work. Seamus Deane gave me a platform in University College Dublin that provided the solid foundation of an academic freedom for which I am grateful beyond words. These were two colleagues who trusted me: as leaders and precursors, they felt no need to exercise power over me, but rather knew that I could be trusted to set my own goals and also that, by doing so, I would set them as high as I could. Not for them a punitive culture of targets or of performancemanagement: instead, they preferred to generate a culture of grace, trust, and genuine collegiality, rooted firmly in an earned authority. This, for them, was infinitely better than our more recent cultural and institutional norms, based as they are too often on brazen power of the kind that breeds complicities and

PREFACE AND A C K N O WL E D G E ME N T S     xi

corruptions. They were gracious in their support and remain a model of how to lead others to establish their own grace and authority. I wish I could live up to them better. This book is dedicated to these two extraordinary colleagues: great and dedicated teachers, whose every institutional move has been marked by integrity.

1

Introduction On Being a Bastard

W

hen he considered the world as it stood in 1918, after the Great War, Yeats saw a condition of ‘mere anarchy’. At the centre of a world in which ‘things fall apart’, his sense was that the world was fallen: ‘The ceremony of innocence’, he argued, ‘was drowned’. The consequence was the famous diagnosis of all that has gone wrong at the entry into the modern condition: ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of a passionate intensity’.1 Interestingly, at the close of the Second World War, we find a similar diagnosis. This one is carried out not by a poet but by two historians, Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, who discover in their examination of wartime collaboration that ‘most traitors did not have the courage of any conviction’.2 Conviction, honesty, and legitimacy—and how they can be corrupted or betrayed—are the issues that need to be explored at the core of this introductory chapter. They will there provoke a consideration of the meaning of ‘responsibility’.

: In 1975, Hannah Arendt was awarded Denmark’s Sonning Prize. Every other year, the University of Copenhagen awards the prize to an individual in recognition of her or his contribution to European culture. Arendt used the occasion of her acceptance speech to ponder the very idea of public recognition of the work, thoughts, or value of any individual. The receipt of an honour, such as the Sonning Prize, raises issues of merit and desert. As with many recipients of honours, Arendt takes a specific stand in modesty. To accept an honour is, in some way, also to endorse those who offer the award in the first place. It is to accept and even to assert a shared 1

2    CHAPTER 1

position, to acknowledge at least an overlap of shared interests. Thus, to accept an honour is marked by a contradiction: on one hand, ‘who am I to receive such recognition?’ and at the same time, ‘I am of the same standing as those who are able to decide and dispense honour and recognition’. This is the predicament that Arendt teases out, in some philosophical detail, on the occasion of her acceptance speech. She returns to one of the very well-established themes of the work for which she is being recognized: the relations between the private and public domains. The key figure here to which she turns to help her is the ancient persona. It is this that will allow her to address the fundamentally modest question: ‘who am I to receive this honour?’3 What might ‘public recognition’ entail? That is her question. In ancient theatre, we recognize characters through their masks, which gave them their public face, their ‘personae’. Arendt draws attention to the etymology: the mask or persona was a facial covering that let the sound of the actor’s voice come through (per-sonare, ‘to sound through’, or the act of ‘sounding through’). She then draws attention to the distinction made, in Roman law, between the persona and the homo: the persona is one who ‘possessed civil rights’, whereas homo refers to the person who is ‘nothing but a member of the human species’.4 The persona, in this, is a political figure: one who can adopt a public face and whose voice can be heard in the public sphere, even if the voice is that of a quasi-theatrical figure or role. The homo is the more private figure; the individual who has no political existence and whose fundamental being is characterized by the struggle for survival, for what we will later learn to call (after Agamben) ‘bare life’ (la nuda vita).5 The key element of the distinction here is that the persona enjoys not only the freedom to assume a role, but also the freedom to change it, as the occasion demands. In other words, the persona is not strictly identifiable with the conscience or consciousness that determines her actions. Our social masks— for those of us who have them, and who are not merely struggling for basic survival—‘are not a permanent fixture annexed to our inner-self in the sense in which the voice of conscience, as most people believe, is something the human soul constantly bears within itself’.6 This, in fact, may be a key marker of the distinction between politics and ethics, the latter demanding a more intimate relation between private consciousness and public act. Given this, the adoption of the mask permits a condition in which Arendt can play a role without being fully identified by it, without fully committing her self to it. In that role, then, she gracefully accepts the honour of the Sonning Prize, but also hankers after the moment when she can unmask and step aside, step aside from ‘recognition’, and return to her ‘naked “thisness”’, as she calls it, a condition in which she is ‘identifiable . . . but not definable’. She

I N T R O D U C T I O N     3

resists being seduced, as she puts it, ‘by the great temptation of recognition which, in no matter what form, can only recognize us as such and such, that is, as something which we fundamentally are not’.7 Here, she draws a fine and nuanced distinction between being identifiable and being defined. The neat deconstruction from which that distinction emerges raises a fundamental issue around responsibility. ‘Recognition’—if it implies being ‘defined’ by the prize and its values—endorses the idea that there is a straightforward consonance between the self and her actions (i.e. that there is no distinction between homo and persona), so much so that the actions are somehow determined by, and are also a necessary consequence of, the realization of the self’s own historical being. The action, as it were, necessarily derives from an essential selfhood; and our typical tendency is to call that selfhood our ‘identity’ and also (mistakenly, in Arendt’s account) to ‘define’ ourselves thereby. In this, we have an essential self and voice that determines—predetermines—our action. To what extent, then, are we ‘responsible’ for those actions, if they are thus ‘determined’ as a necessary condition of the self simply being itself or expressing itself ? This is a question that has been asked before; and, appropriately enough in this context, it has been asked in theatre. Edmund, in Shakespeare’s King Lear attacks the fundamental idea that our actions are somehow predetermined by condition, which he calls ‘the excellent foppery of the world’. At its extreme, the logic is found in the total negation of personal responsibility for one’s actions, as in the suggestion that ‘I am innocent. I was only acting upon orders of someone else’. Edmund has no truck with such excuses, such attempts to shift the burden of responsibility onto a prior determinant of our actions. Against this, Edmund asserts a cult of the personal and expresses responsibility for his actions, saying ‘Fut! I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing’. The belief that our actions are determined—be it by the stars as in King Lear, by fate, Ananke or ‘necessity’ as in some classical tragedy, or by a fundamental and essential identity or selfhood—is fundamentally consistent not just with a denial of personal responsibility for actions, but also with a belief in myth. In this character, Shakespeare is asserting a kind of proto-existentialist position; and, for Arendt (who of course knew the philosophy in ways that Shakespeare could not, immersed in mid-twentieth-century existentialist thought, with its attendant concern for authentic being), responsibility requires that we do not remain satisfied with an account that excuses our actions as predetermined by some essential precondition. To suggest that our actions are thus preconditioned would be to say, in cases where our actions are called into question or are seen as reprehensible,

4    CHAPTER 1

that we are merely ‘complicit with’ some rule or law that made us do as we did: we were only obeying orders, and it was the voice of someone else who spoke through our mask. This has serious repercussions for issues of responsibility. Fundamentally, with the figure of the persona and its non-identification with the homo, Arendt raises the question of whether or how I am ever fully responsible for—recognizable in—my actions and their consequences. In modernity, we have usually needed to subscribe to the view that the self is indeed recognizable in her actions—that, indeed, is the meaning of the proverbial ‘actions speak louder than words’. The action, we suggest, is an explicit articulation of some foundational self, the speaking I or subject, whose real defined selfhood is realized through the action, and no longer able to hide its reality behind misleading words. And we apportion praise or blame precisely because of this assumed identity of person and action: indeed, our entire legal system is based upon it. Look closely at the proverb, though: ‘actions speak louder than words’, perhaps; but in this, the actions apparently still speak and therefore operate as words. The proverb tries to eliminate the distinction between words freely spoken (free speech) and action freely undertaken, and it gives primacy to action as a form of speech. However, is there really such a tight correspondence—even what we can call a complicity—between the self and her actions, or between what the self says and her actions? To believe this would be to believe, against Edmund, that our actions are somehow predetermined by the essential character of a self or by a necessity. That is to say, it would be to believe in an ideology of purification, of the ‘pure’ and unadulterated self as a determining instance of actions; and Arendt, for one, certainly knew where that kind of belief would lead us in the twentieth century.8 Edmund, by contrast, is for the bastard, for the ‘impure’, for the messy impurity that allows us to consider that we might be responsible for what we do. The subscription to purity, to a complicity between action and some predetermining condition of our being, is a position that has serious negative consequences. As Sylviane Agacinski has pointed out, a theorization of action that is grounded in an originating and essential identity has two correlates: first, it establishes quasi-essential differences in kind or in species among individuals (as between the male and the female, say, or between races); and secondly, once such distinctions are established, it engenders hierarchies among such distinguished species (such that the male is seen as superior to the female, and so on).9 Once such hierarchies are established, so also is our complicity with certain egregious political positions. The bastard, of course, is illegitimate: her or his legal standing is compromised, and she or he stands outside the law. Edmund’s point, however, is that

I N T R O D U C T I O N     5

it is his actions that are authentic, ‘owned’ by him (as contemporary jargon would put it): proper to him, constitutive of his property and properties. In this character, the bastard stands outside of unearned privilege and beyond the privileges that the law gives to its insiders. In short, he acknowledges that operating in the social and political sphere is a question of the adoption of a persona, a mask that can be changed according to pragmatic and political necessity. He acts, in every sense. To what extent do we base our demands of justice, say, upon a desired ‘authenticity’, which runs counter to its opposite, ‘hypocrisy’? Hypocrisy is usually characterized in terms of the discrepancy between word and deed. The deed is taken to be more authentic because it is something of substance, something that is materially realized in the world. Its reality or realization in the world is what contradicts the word. The word can now be deemed to be false, precisely in the sense that it lacks material realization or representation in the world. It is lacking in material substance: it is therefore a word that remains unrealized in deed and action, or ‘in fact’, as we would say. Authenticity, by contrast, depends upon there being a precise relation between word and deed, a deep necessity that links them as but two aspects of the same fact, such that ‘my word is my bond’, or such that the word is really simply a prefiguring of a reality that is about to be enacted or brought into being. The structure in question would be one where we believe that there is an essential self or identity that necessarily speaks in a particular way and that in turn acts out those words in a manner that is a perfect representation, in action, of those words. The root of this is biblical. In Numbers 30:2, Moses instructs the tribes of Israel that ‘If a man vow a vow unto the Lord, or swear an oath to bind his soul with a bond; he shall not break his word, he shall do according to all that proceedeth out of his mouth’. Theological thinking such as this is very far from the mind of Edmund in Shakespeare. He is asserting his autonomy; and the consequence of that is that he chooses not to fulfil or realize some fundamental theological word of God, word of truth. Likewise, it is far from the mind of Arendt, whose concern is primarily political, organized around issues of political responsibility, guilt, and justice. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion—at least the provisional conclusion—that, as far as Arendt is concerned, we must be as Edmund, ‘bastard’ with respect to the idea of authenticity, if we are to retain the possibility of being political, of being the persona rather than the individual struggling for bare life, for ‘mere’ survival. This is only provisional, however: as we know, especially from her concern with Auschwitz and with the trial of Eichmann, even mere survival has a hugely political dimension. Modernity seems to organize itself around the belief in authenticity: genuine, reliable trustworthiness as a condition of

6    CHAPTER 1

our living and being together. When we spy hypocrisy, we expose it in the interests of purgation and the reestablishment of genuine relation. However, if this position rests on some essential falsehood, then to the extent that we subscribe to it, we are as a society complicit with that fundamental lie. Is it possible, in such circumstances, to avoid such complicity in our critical engagements with culture and politics? Is it the case that we are somehow coerced into collaboration with overweening and unearned or illegitimate authority if we are to be heard and to be effective? And what happens to the idea of a committed criticism, a criticism that is determined to be autonomous and to avoid the taint of any such collaboration? What might these issues around authenticity and responsibility mean for a consideration of guilt, or of a more general complicity with the actions of others? This is where I will begin. NOTES 1. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, in Collected Poems (Macmillan, 1933; repr. 1979), 210–11. We have a contemporary image of how ‘the ceremony of innocence is drowned’ in our own times, in the figure of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee whose drowned body shocked the world in September 2015. 2. Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, Paris: After the Liberation 1944–1949 (revised edn.; Penguin, 2007), 156. 3.  This, of course, is the honourable account of what is at stake in any honours system. In many cases, however, the system is anything but honourable. Not only have there been scandals about ‘cash for honours’ among parliamentary and political parties (especially around 2006–2007 in the United Kingdom), but also ‘honours’ are more or less exchanged among members of various elites. On this, see Seumas Milne, ‘It’s the British establishment that has a problem with democracy’, available at: http:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/23/british-establishment-problem -democracy-jeremy-corbyn. It happens outside of mainstream politics too: one university gives an honorary doctorate, say, to the president of another, with a similar such honour returned after a ‘respectable’ gap in time, perhaps as little as six months—or less. This might be an indicative example of how the elites in various contemporary ‘guilds’ extend and enhance their own individual privileges—and salaries. 4.  Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 12. The distinction here is akin to that she makes between the free individual who, having mastered the basic conditions of human survival, can enter freely into the public sphere and maintain a political life (persona) and the individual who is condemned to struggle for basic survival. 5.  See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer I (Torino: Einaudi, 1995). 6.  Ibid., 13. 7.  Ibid., 14.

I N T R O D U C T I O N     7

8.  Interestingly, the entire discipline and protocols of semiotic analysis fundamentally depend upon the idea that there is a strict identification between what is here termed persona and homo. That is to say, in classical semiotics, and precisely when its mode of analysis is claiming to be at its most ‘political’, the critical moves essentially avoid the political by identifying it too crudely with the ethical. 9.  Sylviane Agacinski, Critique de l’égocentrisme (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 141–42.

2

Diplomacy and Law

I

n between the two terms that I have introduced in my opening introductory comments—complicity and responsibility—we can usefully insert a third: compliance. The question with which to open the exploration of our issue is: when does an act of compliance with something ostensibly neutral or even good make me an accomplice to something that is wrong; and, further, when is it therefore ethically incumbent on me to resist compliance, to become a kind of Bartleby figure, repeating the refrain that ‘I would prefer not to’ in response to any request for engagement with the world?1 That question was an abiding issue for Hannah Arendt, who considered it not just in abstract terms (the terms of a general ‘responsibility and judgment’), but also in pressing and terrifying particularity (as in ‘Auschwitz on Trial’). How does one ascribe guilt to the ‘desk-murderers’, those ‘whose chief instruments were typewriters, telephones, and teletypes’ in the operations of the camps? Eichmann was, for Arendt, a paradigmatic instance of the desk-murderer and, as she points out, in his trial, ‘the court declared that “the degree of responsibility increases as we draw further away from the man who uses the fatal instruments with his own hands”’.2 Legal responsibility here merges with ethical responsibility, tending to confuse the issue of how to judge, how to apportion and distribute guilt and blame, and how, therefore, to comprehend and evaluate the very issue of complicity itself. To what extent can complicity with an action constitute substantive guilt for it? The issue can be considered essentially under three headings: institutional complicities; political complicities; ethical complicities. That arrangement allows us to arrive at a consideration of the relation of complicity to personal responsibility. The route to this—in many ways the real crux of the inquiry of this whole study—involves looking at how ‘rules’ of engagement become 9

10    CHAPTER 2

‘laws’, and how those laws depend, in turn, upon the legitimization of a specific discourse or language-game. Language itself—how we speak, how we write, the freedom of our speech and of an assembly of speakers in a community—plays a key role in understanding the workings of complicity. 1. INSTITUTIONAL COMPLICITIES; OR THE POSITION OF COMPLIANCE-OFFICES The function of ‘institutional complicity’ is to make us do what we’re told, essentially, within our institutions. All institutions work by having a set of internal rules or protocols. As in a game of football, say, there are certain moves within institutions that are permissible, and others that are ruled out of order. So if I lift the ball in my hands, say, and assuming I am not the goalkeeper and standing within my own penalty box, then the game must stop because I have refused to comply with the rules. I will be penalized before the game can be restarted; and, if I repeat the offence against the rules—if I fail to comply—then, eventually, I will be evicted from the terrain, the field of play, or the institution. Likewise, when our educational institutions establish protocols of behaviour and conduct, then we have to comply, or else the game stops temporarily while our breach of protocol is dealt with. We know this, and usually tacitly accept it; and it is this tacit acceptance that we can usually call compliance. Management would regard it as essential to—even as the essence of—the ‘smooth operations’ of the organization or institution. Our everyday life beyond our institutions is also organized through such anthropologically ritualized compliances; and, at one deep level, this is simply the establishment of the bonds of trust and mutual confidence that allow our social order itself to function as it does. We would not usually refer to such trust as an act marked by complicity, unless we are of the view that what our institution or society does, and what it exists for, is essentially nefarious, criminal, and engaged in some kind of fundamental wrongdoing. So, in institutional compliance, we are fundamentally agreeing not just with the ground rules of our institutions, we are also agreeing that they serve some good. This is important: compliance is not neutral; rather, it is an acknowledgement (if tacitly held) that we subscribe to the institution’s aims. It is constitutive of a mutual confidence, of a bond that relates us to the institution, and the institution to a wider good that we wish to serve. The case of football was chosen not innocently, of course. As we know, at least as an apocryphal story, one day in 1823, a young man called William Webb Ellis in Rugby School got fed up with the idea of avoiding hand contact with the ball.3 To him, it seemed abundantly clear that if the point of the game

D I P L O MA C Y A N D L A W     11

was to get the ball between the opposing team’s goalposts, then just using the feet or head was really a nuisance. It hampered the activity. So he changed the rules, and set up a new regime, a new protocol: the game of rugby. In the logic of this story, Webb Ellis attacked the institution: he was a critic; and, in doing as he did—in his failure to comply—he was a kind of small-scale revolutionary. Writ large, of course, this can have serious consequences. What if Webb Ellis had questioned not just the rules of football, but the rules of the institution within which the match took place that day? What if he failed to comply with the school’s fundamental rules? What if he did as he did because he took the view that what the school itself, as an institution, stood for was misguided? If that were the case, what he would have realized is that compliance (with the rules of football) has slipped into complicity (with a social structure of education); and instead of just playing by the rules he has become an accomplice to something with which he disagrees, something he sees as wrong. The rules of the game, he thinks, must change. Given the parallel I have made between the institution and society, I think it might be appropriate to extend this into a consideration of the particular institution: that of the law. In The Rule of Law, Tom Bingham, former Lord Chief Justice and Senior Law Lord of the United Kingdom, quotes Tony Blair from a press conference given on 5 August 2005, in the wake of the London 7/7 bombings: ‘Let no one be in any doubt’, said Blair, ‘the rules of the game are changing’.4 What has followed this, since 2005, is a series of new initiatives in anti­ terrorist legislation. It’s not just a game that is changing here; it is the law itself. This has caused difficulties in many ways (perhaps not least in terms of how it has impacted upon universities, and upon freedom of speech on campus). The question here is not just ‘how have the rules changed?’ but also ‘should we comply?’ In what follows, I want to suggest that it is government itself now that has become complicit with the very terrorist ideology from which it claims to be protecting us. Arthur Chaskalson, who had been a lawyer on the defence team in Nelson Mandela’s Rivonia trial, and who later became the Chief of Justice in postapartheid South Africa between 2001–2005, pointed to the dilemma that the law faces when dealing with terrorism: ‘Terrorism’, he writes, ‘treats people as objects which can be eliminated in pursuit of a cause considered to be of greater importance than the lives of those who are targeted. It seeks to achieve its ends through fear and terror, denying the humanity of its victims. It poses a threat to democracy and needs to be combated. Hence the dilemma’. The dilemma can be glossed quite straightforwardly; but the gloss raises the key question for the law as it tries to deal with the fact of terrorism in a legitimate fashion: ‘Terrorism uses means that the law has rejected; that the law will not

12    CHAPTER 2

and should not use. The question then is: how should law respond to terrorism consistently with its own values? How can this be done without undermining the foundations of a democratic legal system?’5 In recent times, many governments have dealt with this dilemma essentially by making a determined choice to enact laws that may have the undesired effect of undermining democracy. That is to say: the laws brought about arise from an undeclared ‘state of emergency’, and are not brought about by the usual routes of democratic discussion and the seeking of a mandate. The perceived urgency of the demand that we deal with terrorism leads to a legislation forged under conditions of emergency. Emergency legislation brings law into potential conflict with politics: it is as if two games are being played on the same field, and the political game wins over the legal game. However, the legal game then has to comply with, and, indeed, to realize, to endorse, and to enact, the rules of the political game. Consequently, Bingham’s ‘rule of law’ cedes place to rule-as-such, to the rule of governmental politics. In this, the law is determined not by those who will be governed by it; rather, it is determined by those who will execute it—even if the government does not enjoy the confidence of those who are to be thus governed. The result is a conflict and paradox well described by Giorgio Agamben. Agamben writes that ‘if the exceptional measures that characterize the state of emergency are the result of periods of political crisis, and if they for this very reason must be understood through the terrain of politics rather than through the legal or constitutional terrain, they find themselves in the paradoxical position of legal measures that cannot be understood from a legal point of view’. The consequence of this, understood logically, is that ‘the state of emergency presents itself as the legal form of that which can have no legal form’.6 In this state of affairs, we have a complicity problem, and also a legitimacy problem. That which is legal may lack legitimacy, precisely because it has not been agreed or determined by a community; rather, the law is imposed regardless of whether it has achieved consent or whether its constitution is grounded in consensus among those to be governed by it. It is a requirement of our membership of a community that we play by its rules; but here, our compliance with the polity requires that we suspend our usual participation in the determinations of the law, and the structure of our bond—our mutual confidence—is now imbalanced. At this point, we can say that compliance (an agreement to be bound by laws that we have ourselves determined as the rule of law) is verging on complicity. Otherwise put: if we are to remain on the right side of the law, we have to be complicit with whatever it is that the government determines as

D I P L O MA C Y A N D L A W     13

good: but it is government, not the legitimately established law, that rules. We then have a legitimacy that has shrunk to a mere legality, as Jürgen Habermas describes in his Legitimation Crisis.7 Bingham is clear on how the rule of law must operate. It requires that the law is accessible, and easily understood by the citizens whose daily life is governed by it. Citing the European Court of Human Rights, he states that: ‘The law must be adequately accessible: the citizen must be able to have an indication that is adequate in the circumstances of the legal rules applicable to a given case’. That position seems eminently reasonable; and it follows from this that ‘a norm cannot be regarded as a “law” unless it is formulated with sufficient precision to enable the citizen to regulate his conduct: he must be able . . . to foresee, to a degree that is reasonable in the circumstances, the consequences which a given action may entail’.8 The point of all this, for Bingham, is that the rule of law can be a rule— and can therefore demand our compliance—if and only if it operates against arbitrary decision making. That’s to say: there is no rule of law when a government, say, makes it up as it goes along, in order to best suit its own prejudices, desires, or judgements. Yet this is precisely what state-ofemergency legislation permits governments to do. That form of law-making also, necessarily, produces a democratic deficit: it is, of necessity, a law that is imposed from above, without waiting for legitimation through democratic argument—‘governance by discussion’ as J. S. Mill and Amartya Sen call it. For Sen, such a mode of governance is of the essence of democracy as such, for the simple reason that it preserves and does not eradicate the position or argument that is ‘defeated’ through the discussion. This is a democracy that seeks always to keep discussion and decision making alive, as a continual requirement of our social and political life.9 Law-making that bypasses such governance is not just inimical to democracy, but it is also a mode of political legislation therefore that is intrinsically given to corruption, as it becomes law based on patronage. What might it mean to be complicit with the law of the land, under conditions whereby the law of the land is itself such that it might threaten those very bonds of democracy that it is supposed to protect? What do we do when legitimate democratically agreed rules shrink to a mere legalism imposed upon us from above? This is not just a moral question (‘what should I do?’) but also a structural one (‘how can the system of law itself survive its own deconstruction, its own lapse into illegitimacy?’). In less dramatic terms, we would recognize this in the university institution (for the classic example) as the question concerning academic freedom: the freedom that guarantees our ability to critique the rules of the game without fear of falling foul and being sent off. I’ll return to some of these legal issues

14    CHAPTER 2

towards the end of this chapter; but let us first follow this further through the logic of academic freedom, since this will provide a structure for understanding complicity in a specific institutional framework. 2. POLITICAL COMPLICITIES; OR THE LOGIC OF DIPLOMACY Academic freedom is governed by a certain logic of independence. One can avoid being complicit with things that one sees as nefarious by asserting the freedom to dissent, to stand aside from the prevailing view and take a stand elsewhere. The parallel to academic freedom’s guarantees in other walks of life—in institutions or organizations that are more distanced from public engagement—would possibly be whistleblowing legislation. The realization of academic freedom, typically, depends on the voicing of a dissenting position: it is linked to a freedom of speech, though different from that in some fundamentals.10 However, such speech cannot be entirely divorced from rules or laws if it is to be heard. The exercising of free speech, as in academic freedom, is the establishing of a linguistic bond; and, in turn, this is constitutive of the making of a free assembly of speakers. That assembly establishes its identity by establishing its own rules—and here, that is a matter of voices, a word that is cognate with ‘votes’ (as Shakespeare’s Coriolanus knew all too well). Such an assembly, further, is free if and only if it avoids the imbalance between law and politics described by Agamben and outlined in legal terms by Chaskalson. Chaskalson gave us a dilemma: laws designed to protect democratic societies from terror can end up undermining democracy. Paradoxically, they can strengthen and extend the very terror that they are supposed to contest. Agamben gives us the same issue in more philosophical terms: how do we avoid a state of affairs in which the law itself becomes politicized, thereby forgetting its supposed interest in just judgement, and instead serving the sovereign law-giver who acts with impunity? This is not a condition unique to institutions. On the contrary, it permeates the social and political spheres and has now also contaminated the private realm as well. Here is Chaskalson again, this time drawing parallels between the government in 1950s South Africa and the recent Bush administration in the United States, post-9/11: ‘The initial steps taken in South Africa in the 1950s laid the ground for further measures, including the banning of the African National Congress, the Pan African Congress, and over time various other anti-apartheid organizations [98 in all], and the draconian security legislation of the 1960s and later years’. People were brought on-side with this through

D I P L O MA C Y A N D L A W     15

the deployment of linguistic manoeuvring by the political classes: ‘Political rhetoric set the scene for this and for the legislation that followed. The white voters were warned that the state was facing a total onslaught. They were told that the legislation was not directed against law-abiding citizens and would not affect them. The targets were the communists and the terrorists’. When this is done sufficiently, complicity of a sort follows almost logically: ‘The great majority of the white population remained silent and there was little opposition to the measures’; yet the consequences go well beyond what might have been foreseen: ‘Detention without trial was introduced, the police were empowered to hold detainees incommunicado, and to deny them access to their lawyers or their own medical advisors’. This is then extended further: ‘Initially detention was for 90 days, then for 180 days, and then indefinitely. Courts were stripped of their jurisdiction to make habeas corpus orders in respect of detainees. The isolation of the detainees and the ousting of the jurisdiction of the courts led to torture and other abuses’.11 Chaskalson goes on to analyse the linguistic foundation of this, as an issue about who controls the language. He cites Mary Robinson, who ‘has drawn attention to an alternative language that has been developed in the post 9/11 era’ which has led to Orwellian euphemisms (‘coercive interrogation’ for torture; ‘extraordinary rendition’ for kidnapping; and the like). Chaskalson goes on to criticize the UK legislation of 2006 criminalizing ‘the glorification of terrorism and indirect incitement’, and then reveals what is the inevitable logical outcome of this. He writes: ‘If cases arise the courts will no doubt give these words a meaning consistent with the underlying values of the law in this country. But legislation in such vague terms can have a chilling effect on the behaviour of people. It is presumably intended to do so, for governments find it far better for people to silence themselves than to prosecute them’.12 This stifles debate and has what Chaskalson rightly identifies as a ‘corrosive effect on our society’. Can Joyce’s famous recourse, to ‘silence, exile and cunning’, have any purchase on this? One way of dealing with the difficulties here is precisely to suggest that I will avoid all forms of complicity with the existing social or political structures: I won’t just pick up the ball in my hands; rather, I’ll leave the field entirely. Like Bartleby, I’ll simply say ‘I would prefer not to’; or like a latter-day version of Voltaire’s Candide, I shall leave the big picture and will cultivate my garden. On 23 October 2013, the comedian Russell Brand—a contemporary Candide—guest-edited the New Statesman. That evening, Jeremy Paxman interviewed him on BBC’s flagship evening news programme, Newsnight. The single biggest or most discussed ‘bite’ from the interview, as also from the magazine, related to Brand’s statement that, not only had he himself never

16    CHAPTER 2

voted, but that no one else should either. The argument is well known: ‘don’t vote; it only encourages them’; and Brand’s point is that to vote is to be complicit with precisely the system that is damaging and not supporting democracy. Parliamentary democracy is driven by and for the 1 per cent, or so this argument goes. To vote at all is to be complicit with a system that serves the 1 per cent and damns the rest; and, for Brand, the refusal to participate is itself, paradoxically, a mode of participation—but in a different game. He is Webb Ellis, as it were. When pushed to offer the rules of a new game, however, Brand stalled, the ball in his hands; and he rehearsed his assertion of the Bartleby position, the negative liberty of ‘I would prefer not to’. He was clear that he didn’t yet have the rules of a new game, but he quickly added what’s not to be done: ‘Here’s the things it [a new system] shouldn’t do: shouldn’t destroy the planet; shouldn’t create massive economic disparity; shouldn’t ignore the needs of the people’.13 His position—though not his argument—led him to deny any complicity with the system that causes such negative conditions. This is a form of radical independence, especially since it does not yet give a new ‘rule of law’ to which others can sign up. Yet the assertion of such radical independence yields its own paradox. The system that Brand wants to critique depends upon the atomization of the social, and its reduction to a series of transactions between discrete individuals whose only relation with each other is in trade. To stand aside from this is, in effect, to characterize oneself in precisely the terms that you want to critique. It’s the Life of Brian paradox from Monty Python’s 1979 film: ‘You’re all individuals’, shouts Brian to the crowd following him; ‘Yes; we’re all individuals’, replies the crowd in unison, before another voice pipes up, ‘I’m not’. Brand attends to the weakness of the planet as it is being trashed, to the weakness of the poor as they suffer from increased inequality, to the weakness of people who are fundamentally ‘in need’. It is a position that Brand himself describes as being grounded in a version of sentimental love, and that might be thought of as a specific kind of ‘complicity’, the fellow-feeling of compassion. Hannah Arendt, however, would see this very differently. ‘Pity’, she writes, ‘may be the perversion of compassion, but its alternative is solidarity. It is out of pity that men are “attracted toward les hommes faibles”, but it is out of solidarity that they establish deliberately and, as it were, dispassionately a community of interest with the oppressed and exploited’.14 The Brand position, as it were, needs to establish its linguistic community, its free assembly; but the route to that does not lie in the assertion of this kind of radical independence, this refusal to participate. Such a refusal—the refusal to vote—is precisely the refusal to voice oneself, as it were. Although ostensibly very loud, it really indicates a retreat into silence, or worse: into

D I P L O MA C Y A N D L A W     17

talking to oneself, failing to engage enough to persuade others into a community or free assembly with a new language. It does not follow, of course, that the only way to get a voice or to be heard is to compromise one’s position; but it does follow that the forging of a new language is related to the forging of a new assembly of voices—and this, in turn, raises again the issue of the degree to which one is complicit with existing political structures, even as one would change them. The political issue as outlined by Chaskalson and Agamben is that there is now an increasingly unholy alliance and intimacy between politics and law, and, by extension, between government and businesses that rely on the rule of law. Tariq Ali exposes what is at stake in his discussion of ‘the extreme centre’. Our current political arrangements involve politicians who ‘uphold a corporate power’ which they rubber-stamp in government by clique. This clique lives in what Ali calls ‘a half-real, half-fake world of money, statistics and focus groups. Their contact with real people . . . is minimal. . . . They refuse to step down to talk to the people whose worlds they have destroyed’. Further, ‘in power they tend towards paranoia, treating any serious criticism as disloyalty’. The diagnosis is bleak in this ‘symbiosis between power and money’, a symbiosis analysed elsewhere in economic terms by Stiglitz and others.15 For the beneficiaries of this state of affairs, complicity is required; and anything else—including criticism—is seen as disloyalty. Criticism must therefore be erased, and the voice of criticism goes unheard or is left talking to itself. Aristotle had long since analysed the kinds of corruption of political conditions that leads to the perversion of the rule of law. For example, he endorsed the idea of monarchy, but saw how it could easily degenerate into tyranny: the difference is that, for Aristotle, a king considers his people first, while a tyrant is he who acts primarily in his own personal interests. A second example he offers is aristocracy, which can easily descend into timocracy and which is ‘due to the corruption of ministers, who distribute the resources of the state without regard to merit, and keep all or most of the benefits for themselves, and confine public appointments to the same persons, because they pay most regard to wealth’.16 The result is that bad men hold power, he writes. The assertion of radical independence, made in the interests of avoiding complicity with these corruptions, is, paradoxically, what permits the corruption to happen. It does so because it has no strategy of solidarity, no language that can frame a new rule of law. It is language that is at the heart of this: voices are votes, so to speak. Political complicities have traditionally depended on alliances, affiliations, and solidarities. These, increasingly, are grounded in exclusions rather than inclusions. Hugo Young’s biography of Margaret Thatcher drew attention,

18    CHAPTER 2

from its very title, to how the new politics of 1980s neo-liberalism worked. Her key question about anyone who came close to her circle was ‘Is he one of us?’ This reaches its zenith in George W. Bush’s assertion, after 9/11, that ‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us’. In both these cases, there was to be no ground for debate or dialogue: you either signed up or did not, you were either complicit with the project or you were an enemy of the project. This is the new form of class solidarity, and, crucially, it is based entirely on complicities and not on compliance; on legality (or the politicization of the rule of law) and not on legitimacy. There is no longer any room for debate or dialogue or contestation of views. That’s to say, the law-giver (the tyrant, the timocrat) requires total adherence to the law, but to the law that is determined by them and for their interests. These complicities—these political complicities—are now, in effect, based on regimes of language. To exert a material influence (or simply to be recognized as existing), one has to speak the dominant language of the tribe—one has to echo ‘the word’, as it were—the language of ‘one of us’, the language of the ‘war on terror’, the language of ‘business, entrepreneurship, leadership, best practice, targets, benchmarks, excellence, world-leading, content providers, vision statements, strategies’, and all the rest of our contemporary jargon of management and of performance and improvement. As I have argued elsewhere, managerialist fundamentalism now determines what can be said and thought;17 and the logic is that if one’s voice is to be heard—if one’s vote is to count—then one has to be the dummy sitting on the manager-ventriloquist’s knee, the monkey channelling the voice and realizing the will of the boss or organ-grinder. In other words, you can speak—you can even speak out—but you are still silenced, because if the words you utter are to be heard, they must be the words of someone else, the words of the boss. Patronage now becomes the new law. In this state of affairs, the dissenting voice is seen as illegitimate, and therefore is either silenced or is rendered structurally inaudible, precisely because it does not speak the dominant language. This is tantamount to saying that protest is criminalized; and we have seen this exemplified throughout our societies. In the university, it means that the dissenting voice must be disciplined: you can speak, but you’ll lose your job. Critique is thus discarded. The most appropriate riposte to Brand came almost a full year later, on 18 September 2014, in the referendum on Scottish independence. Perhaps the single most important thing about this vote was the turnout: 85 per cent of the eligible electorate voted. As many people noted, this was a vote not just about nationalism—indeed, for many, nationalism was much less important than independence—but this was a form of independence that found a voice. It meant a refusal to comply with what was characterized as the ‘­ Westmonster’

D I P L O MA C Y A N D L A W     19

elite, with their austerity and with their certainties based on tinkering with neoliberal ideas that we are all markets, or enterprises, or business. The point here was that Brand’s desire to change things did come about, though not by his preferred means. This independence vote was about changing the language, opening the language to possibility; and this takes me to the idea of collective responsibility, which is the subject of my final section in this chapter, on ethical complicities. 3. ETHICAL COMPLICITIES; OR, TOWARDS RESPONSIBILITY Complicity, considered now in these linguistic terms, is established through the establishment of a reduced lexicon: the change in the language is actually a reduction of the vocabulary available for discussion and debate. It leads to the assertion that the existing conditions in which we live constitute something called ‘reality’; and it rests on the assumption that the existing dominant language captures and represents that reality perfectly. It follows that any other language—like that of Scottish independence, say—is inherently ‘idealistic’ or, as it is usually said, simply ‘unrealistic’. We are asked to be complicit with TINA, with the coercive language that states baldly that ‘There Is No Alternative’. As Roberto Mangabeira Unger has argued, however, in these terms, ‘being realistic’ essentially means accepting the world as it is. It therefore requires a political endorsement of ‘things as they are’. This is complicity with stasis, so to speak. Such political complicity really means being complicit with an idea that the world is too big to fail, that it can’t be changed by my actions—and thus I become complicit with the refusal to accept responsibility for trying to change a bad situation. It is a position that abnegates responsibility, through quietism, which is the political correlative of silence. One striking political phenomenon in recent times, usually cast as a liberal good, is the historical apology; unable or unwilling to address contemporary problems, we apologize for past bad acts, and distance our present selves and constitutions from them. For example, we apologize for slavery, for the Irish famine, for misogynist crimes, and so on. This is a move beyond Candide or Bartleby; we acknowledge our collective guilt, or our structural complicity, with actions that we, ourselves, did not commit. As Arendt has shown, however, the act of taking such guilt upon ourselves, acknowledging a complicity with a past act that was actually carried out by individuals other than ourselves, is not necessarily a good thing. In postwar

20    CHAPTER 2

Germany, she points out, ‘the cry “We are all guilty” that at first hearing sounded so very noble and tempting has actually only served to exculpate to a considerable degree those who actually were guilty. Where all are guilty, nobody is. Guilt, unlike responsibility, always singles out; it is strictly personal’.18 In fact, she goes further, to claim that ‘in our case of collective guilt feelings [this] would mean that the cry “We are all guilty” is actually a declaration of solidarity with the wrongdoers’.19 The bond that we make with the past in this way is actually a means of avoiding our bonds with the present. The demand for ‘realism’ fundamentally says that the world’s garden is too big for any one of us to deal with its problems; and this translates into a kind of ‘systems theory’ understanding of the world. Thus it is that a banker, say, escapes jail by saying that it was ‘the system’s fault’; and thus it is that corporations and institutions likewise try to escape censure. When wrongdoing is exposed, no individual is ever called to account; but, if we still strive to discover a responsibility, then, quite simply, ‘the system is to blame’, and ‘we will look at our processes’.20 This is also akin to crude versions of Marxism that might contend that an abstract entity called ‘History’ is where we must go for understanding of any individual wrongdoing. Arendt is clear on this, however: unlike ‘responsibility’, guilt is that which singles the individual out from any collective; and this returns us to our court of law. She writes that, ‘in a courtroom there is no system on trial, no history or historical trend, no ism, anti-Semitism for instance, but a person, and if the defendant happens to be a functionary, he stands accused precisely because even a functionary is still a human being, and it is in this capacity that he stands trial’.21 For Arendt, complicity is always political. In my terms here, what this means is that politics is that which erases the possibility of compliance—of community—in an act in which politics supersedes legitimacy. Better put, complicity is what happens when legitimacy shrinks to legality, when the possibility of compliance (collective responsibility) is reduced to our having to be complicit with our superiors in a hierarchical and undemocratic society. In this latter case, we lose not just independence but also our voice. How, then, to engage the world when we live in a state of affairs where ‘every resisting of the evil done in the world necessarily entails some implication in evil’?22 How to avoid complicity with this? Arendt’s answer, fundamentally, is that we should shift the question of collective responsibility to the question of individual guilt: that is, she argues for a rule of law, especially in the face of the bureaucracy of any system. She reverts to the war-crimes Nazi trials to elucidate the point. One of the defences advanced by the criminals was that they were necessarily just a cog in a larger system, where ‘Each cog, that is, each person, must be expendable

D I P L O MA C Y A N D L A W     21

without changing the system, an assumption underlying all bureaucracies’.23 From this, it followed that ‘the question of the personal responsibility of those who run the whole affair is a marginal issue. Here it is indeed true what all the defendants in the postwar trials said to excuse themselves: if I had not done it, somebody else could and would have’.24 Paradoxically, the criminal exculpates himself here by saying that, in committing the murders, he is actually saving someone else from having to do it. This is why, for Arendt, ‘bureaucracy unhappily is the rule of nobody and for this very reason perhaps the least human and most cruel form of rulership’. She goes on, ‘But in the courtroom, these definitions are of no avail’25 because the whole point of the courtroom, of the law, is to individuate, in order to ascribe guilt or innocence. She, too, considers nonparticipation, especially in the light of this paradoxical mode of self-defence for the bureaucratic Nazi criminal. It may be the case, she argues, that individuals elect to be free from politics and to take no part in its workings. This—unknown in the ancient world—is carried to a logical extreme in totalitarianism. The distinction made here is that such nonparticipation might be politically positive under a dictatorship (what if everyone refuses to comply?), but that it is of no use in totalitarian societies. The difference is that in totalitarian societies, the dominant language, as it were, permeates every aspect of life such that no other language, thought, or mode of life is possible. There can be no private realm, no Voltairean garden, into which one might withdraw. For Arendt, ‘Totalitarian society, as distinguished from totalitarian government, is indeed monolithic; all public manifestations, cultural, artistic, or learned, and all organizations, welfare and social services, even sports and entertainment, are “coordinated”’. The system infiltrates everything: ‘There is no office and indeed no job of any public significance, from advertising agencies to the judiciary, from play-acting to sports journalism, from primary and secondary schooling to the universities and learned societies, in which an unequivocal acceptance of the ruling principles is not demanded’.26 Might we say this precisely of our own societies? It is surely the case, as André Gorz and Pierre Lévy have both argued, that the norms of neoliberal capital have subsumed everything in our time. It is difficult to get an audience for any view that contests the idea that everything is a business, that everything is commerce, and that even the very self is an entrepreneurial project: ‘Such, at least, is the neo-liberal vision of the future of work: the abolition of salaried employment, generalized self-entrepreneurship, the subsumption of the whole person and the whole of life by capital, with which everyone identifies entirely’. Now, then, ‘Everything becomes a commodity. Selling oneself extends to all aspects of life. Everything is measured in money’.27

22    CHAPTER 2

If this is the case, then: ‘Whoever participates in public life at all, regardless of party membership in the elite formations of the regime, is implicated in one way or another in the deeds of the regime as a whole’.28 Collaboration—complicity—with such regimes is often described as the lesser of two evils, but ‘Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil’.29 This is why the question of complicity is, in the final analysis, a question of ethics and of personal responsibility. It brings us to my final point in this chapter, which relates to a logic of incrementalism, of incremental small changes in our institutions, our laws, and our politics—in short, in our innermost conditions of living and of selfhood. In this—and many readers of this book will all recognize it from the institutional university context (though the phenomenon is certainly not limited to the university institution, but is rife in any and every ‘managed’ institution)— what happens is that we are faced with a series of small and niggling changes. None of these is in itself very significant, and, certainly, none of them is in itself worth going to the wall over. In the jargon, we should ‘choose our fights’. Yet what happens if we comply with all these small changes? Arendt tells us, and gives us an extremely salutary warning: ‘Acceptance of lesser evils’, she says, ‘is consciously used in conditioning the government officials as well as the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such’.30 We sigh, we get used to it; but over time, we wonder ‘how did we get here from there?’ And here is the salutary example: ‘To give but one among many examples: the extermination of Jews was preceded by a very gradual sequence of antiJewish measures, each of which was accepted with the argument that refusal to cooperate would make things worse—until a stage was reached where nothing worse could possibly have happened’.31 For a more contemporary version of these questions, we could do worse than consult Dave Eggers’s recent novel, The Circle. The Circle of the title is an organization that incrementally begins to control every aspect of an individual’s life. It begins innocently and ‘helpfully’ enough: The Circle develops an algorithm and a web platform called TruYou. This helps coordinate all those pesky passwords that you need to remember for all the websites that you visit and through which, increasingly, your life has to be organized: bank account, workplace identification, different passwords for all the department stores or other sites from whom you buy online, social networking sites, blogging sites, and so on. It is a great success: like Facebook or Google, it starts to assume a massive importance, and people increasingly have to use TruYou if they want to be a functioning part of everyday society. The Circle, however, does not stop there. Incrementally, through the development of other web-based algorithms that allow The Circle to monitor

D I P L O MA C Y A N D L A W     23

the activities of its users (via TruYou), it begins to develop a culture of total transparency. First, it develops micro-cameras that can be placed—again helpfully—to let users see, for example, weather conditions on a beach where they want to surf that afternoon, or to keep an eye on infirm parents while away from home, or to help reduce crime. The camera apparatus for this (SeeChange) quickly proliferates, and we come close to a society of total visual surveillance—a society where, in the words of one of the Wise Men of The Circle, ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN. That upper-case slogan is just one of many that start to operate, Orwellian Nineteen Eighty-Four style, to dominate and to shape the lives of everyone. Increasingly, in order to exist not just as a Circle employee but also as a citizen, everyone must ‘participate’ in the world that is shaped by The Circle. In the end, this becomes a menacing condition as The Circle approaches Completion (when it becomes a fully closed circle, in every sense). At this stage, it develops Demoxie, the new web-based version of democracy. It is a totalitarian nightmare, in which private life has been completely colonized by The Circle, in which ‘all that happens must be known’, where ‘privacy is theft’ since it deprives the world of whatever it is that people are keeping private, where ‘secrets are lies’, and ‘sharing is caring’. The Circle takes to its logical conclusion the power of technology to force entire populations into complicity with mathematically computed algorithms that delimit the possibilities of human relationship while pretending to enhance those very relationships. It gives a dystopian account of a world in which all is shared, and in which everyone must participate all the time. It takes participatory democracy to a point where it becomes life-stifling, in which all communities exist only via a web-interface, and where there can be no actual material engagement of individuals with each other. It is where the culture of authenticity, aligned with technological advance, is taking us, and it makes us complicit—necessarily, and despite our best intentions—with totalitarianism. The Circle is a fiction, but it is one that barely conceals the technological and corporate realities that shape our contemporary predicaments. It is a fiction that reveals the real and historical. 4. IN INTERIM CONCLUSION There can be only one conclusion from this; and it lies in the words ‘responsibility’ and ‘resistance’. Each small change—be it institutional, political, or ethical—must be seen in terms of a larger ideological picture, and its direction of travel needs to be analysed and, where necessary, resisted. We resist by speaking out, but speaking out to our enemies as much as to our friends;

24    CHAPTER 2

and this is otherwise known as argument and persuasion. In some cases, it is called education. Crucially, it has to be done directly, face-to-face, with all the ethical demands that this entails.32 Our primary responsibility, further, is not to the guilt and crimes of the past but rather to the possibilities of the future, and to the inventions, therefore, of new languages. This does not mean that we forget the past; rather, that we see it, too, in terms of that larger ideological picture. In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben follows Arendt closely and writes that: ‘In every age, the gesture of assuming a juridical responsibility when one is innocent has been considered noble; the assumption of political or moral responsibility without the assumption of the corresponding legal consequences, on the other hand, has always characterized the arrogance of the mighty’.33 He gives Mussolini as one such example. Today, he argues ‘the contrite assumption of moral responsibility is invoked at every occasion as an exemption from the responsibilities demanded by law’. That is to say, individuals guilty of criminal behaviour apologize for their ‘errors’, their ‘mistakes’, and their own moral shortcomings. They should be facing the force of law, as individuals in courts, but ‘the tacit assumption of moral guilt attempts to compensate for legal guilt’.34 You and I commit a crime; but, in similar circumstances, our boss says, ‘I did something foolish. I’ve been an idiot’. You and I go to jail; the boss goes onto some TV confessional shows and becomes a celebrity. Ethics is what calls us to an assumption of responsibility; but it also calls to us to establish new modes of assembly, new forms of speech; and, for that, we need, still, a new language. That is probably why poetry matters. Yet our problem remains: what is that new language? We might look to the past to update the present here and quote Marx: ‘The social revolution of the 19th century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future’;35 but what do we do when we are denied the hearing that is required for any act of persuasion? The next two chapters will explore the answer to this predicament. NOTES   1.  See Herman Melville, ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’, in Billy Budd and Other Stories, ed. Harold Beaver (Penguin, 1986).   2.  Hannah Arendt, ‘Auschwitz on Trial’, in Responsibility and Judgment, edited and introduced by Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 241.   3.  For an interesting gloss on the apocryphal story, see the resources at: http:// www.rugbyfootballhistory.com/webb-ellis.html.

D I P L O MA C Y A N D L A W     25

 4. Tom Bingham, The Rule of Law (Penguin, 2011), 136.   5.  Arthur Chaskalson, ‘The Widening Gyre: Counter-Terrorism, Human Rights and the Rule of Law’, Cambridge Law Journal, 67 (2008), 71–72. The title of the article refers to the poem by Yeats with which I opened this book, ‘The Second Coming’, warning of the coming of anarchy: ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’.  6. See Giorgio Agamben, at: http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpagamben schmitt.htm.   7.  See Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (1973; trans. Thomas McCarthy; Heinemann, 1975), where we can see the emergence of what we now think of ‘technocratic’ government: government which is constituted ‘legally’ but whose activity is reduced to ‘management’ instead of ‘representation’, precisely because it makes no call upon legitimacy to underpin its legality.  8. Bingham, Rule of Law, 39.   9.  See, for examples, Devyani Onial, ‘Crux of democracy is governance through discussion, says Amartya’, in The Indian Express, 20 Dec 2006; and Amartya Sen, interview, in Global: the international briefing, Issue 1, Nov 2009. 10.  See the essays collected in Louis Menand, ed., The Future of Academic Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), including especially the essay by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ‘Critical Race Theory and Freedom of Speech’, for some of the niceties and nuances involved in the distinction. See also, more recently, Stanley Fish, Versions of Academic Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), to be read alongside his earlier There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). The arguments are extremely complex and will be explored at length in a forthcoming study that I am preparing on the history of and theoretical questions over academic freedom. 11.  Chaskalson, ‘Widening Gyre’, 74. 12.  Ibid., 75, 76. 13.  The interview is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YR4Cse Y9pk. 14.  Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (1963; repr. Penguin, 2006), 88. 15.  Tariq Ali, The Extreme Centre (Verso, 2015), 3–4. See also Joseph Stiglitz, The Great Divide (New York: Norton, 2015), and The Price of Inequality (New York: Norton, 2012). In 2016, the name of the phenomenon in which politics has ceded place entirely to business is ‘Donald J. Trump’. 16. Aristotle, Ethics (trans. J. A. K. Thomson; Penguin, 2004), 275. 17. See my piece in Times Higher, 04 December 2014, available at: https:// www.timeshighereducation.com/features/thomas-docherty-on-academic-freedom /2017268.article. 18.  Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 147. 19.  Ibid., 148.

26    CHAPTER 2

20.  It is not my intention here to call into question the recently very influential world-systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein. For the best engagement with this kind of work, see Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development (Liverpool University Press, 2015). 21.  Ibid., 30. 22.  Ibid., 152. 23.  Ibid., 29. 24.  Ibid., 29. 25.  Ibid., 31. 26.  Ibid., 33. As we will see later in this chapter and then in more detail later in this study, such a situation can come to us not just by political choice, but also as a consequence of a kind of technological totalitarianism. Dave Eggers has produced a dystopian version of such a society in The Circle, which features later in this chapter, and more substantively in my discussions in chapters 5 and 6 later in this book. 27.  André Gorz, The Immaterial (2003; trans. Chris Turner; Kolkata and Chicago: Seagull Books, 2010), 23, 24; and cf. Armando Ianucci, Observer, 8 March 2015. 28. Arendt, Responsibility, 33. 29.  Ibid., 36. 30.  Ibid., 36–37. 31.  Ibid., 37. 32.  It follows, of course, that the Massive Open Online Course is anathema to education, although it is certainly not anathema to the edu-business that sees education as a cash-cow to be milked for private profit. 33.  Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz (1999; trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen; New York: Zone Books, 2002), 23–24. 34.  Ibid., 24. 35. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1978), 13.

3

Accountancy; or, on Being a Bureaucrat

S

hakespeare was much concerned with bonds, both social and financial. In his plays, the bond related to issues of justice and of proper and responsible judgement. When Cordelia is placed in an impossible position at the opening of King Lear, she adverts to her familial bond. The opening scene is one where her dowry is to be revealed, and she has two suitors in marriage waiting in the wings: Burgundy (the clear preference of Lear himself) and France. Yet she is expected to proclaim love, instead, for her father. She tries astutely and neatly to negotiate this difficult predicament: ‘I love thee’, she tells Lear, ‘according to my bond’. She finds it difficult to speak in this situation, finds it awkward to assert her authority: ‘Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth’, and she concludes ‘I love your majesty / According to my bond: nor more nor less’. In the financial setting, Shakespeare gives the case of Shylock who, when faced with ruin, calls on his legal bond and on Antonio to fulfil the terms of that bond: ‘My bond’, he says ‘I’ll have my bond; speak not against my bond: / I have sworn an oath that I will have my bond’. This becomes his repeated and increasingly desperate refrain in the courtroom. Cordelia gives an account of herself in ethical terms; Shylock gives one in financial terms. Both depend upon bonds and bonding; and both will fall into a logic in which the very idea of society as a ‘binding together’ of individuals becomes a key problem for the modern civic life—and how it measures and judges our mutual responsibilities—that Shakespeare had started to chart in his plays.

27

28    CHAPTER 3

1. RESPONSIBILITY AS GIVING AN ACCOUNT OF OURSELVES We live in deeply irresponsible times. By this, I mean to signal that the very substance of responsibility as such has been vitiated: it barely operates as a valid concept at all. This is not an accident; rather, it is something that has happened by design. Responsibility, as a concept, is grounded in two things: first, morality or ethics; and, second, the realization that we are governed by our ‘responses’ to each other. In a society of responsibility—what we can call an ‘age of responsibility’—we live, first, in a world where we are called to ethical behaviour; and second, that ethical behaviour is determined by the way in which we respond to the call that we hear from the others who make up our world with us (and how they, likewise and simultaneously, respond to us). It is this that is intolerable to those who are ‘responsible for’ the condition of the contemporary world. For those who enjoy power over others, for those who dominate in our societies, for those who are at the winning end of our great inequalities of wealth and opportunity, it is very important that an escape from responsibility as such—an escape from this particular kind of ethical structure—is found. They find it through a kind of linguistic slippage: responsibility is shrunk to the status of ‘accountability’.1 The difference is enormous. Responsibility, as essentially a moral concept, indicates not just that we have material commitments to a real, substantive, and historical world, but also that we are not alone in our engagements with that world. It indicates first and foremost our relation to others, the conditions of our bonds. It is firmly tied to ideas of witnessing, to saying ‘I was there’ or ‘here I take my stand’. It claims us for a substantive, material, and personal engagement with the world, with other people, with an environment, and with history. It writes that history, bearing fully in mind the simple fact that history involves empirical experience and therefore it writes it, so to speak, in the first-person, no matter which person is being written about or described. Responsibility calls to us to ask us where we will take our stand in relation to that history; and indeed, it requires us to witness, to take such a stand, and to defend it as persons. To this extent, responsibility is a concept that calls us, always, to bear witness not just to our own stance, but also to how our stance takes its position and gets its meaning through its relation with others, others whose stance may well differ. In this respect, we can say that responsibility sees the human as identified by what John Macmurray would have called ‘relations’ and ‘actions’. In his Gifford Lectures, given at the University of Glasgow in 1952 and 1954, he summed up this kind of position by writing that ‘All meaningful knowledge is for the sake of action; and all meaningful action for the sake of f­ riendship’.2

ACCOUNTANCY; OR, ON B E I N G A B U R E A U C R A T     29

This, coming some decades before Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, is a philosophical position that makes a claim for action over philosophy, as it were; it prioritizes our relations with each other—friendship—as the very basis of the possibility of establishing an identity. Importantly, that identity is therefore not only social, but also dialectical and shaped by mutual relation, mutual response—responsibility, therefore, in its most fundamental senses. Macmurray develops this further in his Conditions of Freedom, where he argues for a particular understanding of the friendship that is in question here. ‘The ground of friendship’, he argues, can be described as ‘the inevitable need we have to be ourselves’. However, being ourselves is not an isolated or atomistic exercise in self-realization; rather, for Macmurray, the basic condition of becoming ourselves ‘is that we should enter into fellowship’. Here, he is outlining not just an ethics of alterity, but something yet more profound. He suggests that this relation of fellowship is properly defined as love, or ‘the complete affirmation of the other by the self’; and the logic that follows this is essentially a political logic. Macmurray’s claim is that ‘since to be completely oneself is to be completely free, fellowship is the basic condition of freedom’.3 Freedom, in this, is shaped not just by fellowship as such, but also by the fundamental ways in which we relate to each other, to our responses and responsibilities to and for each other. As Arendt knew, responsibility is what calls us to judge. In an uncanny prefiguration of Jean-François Lyotard, who articulates this position in terms of what he called a ‘differend’, Arendt wrote that ‘Particular questions must receive particular answers’. As Lyotard argued, in every situation we must judge, or, as he puts it ‘il faut enchaîner’. The problem, however, comes from ‘the simple fact that there are no general standards to determine our judgments unfailingly, no general rules under which to subsume the particular cases with any degree of certainty’.4 In such circumstances, judgement involves us, personally and profoundly, in the experiencing of responsibility, of being called to respond to a world that demands our involvement, engagement, and resolutions. In these circumstances, the human subject—the I—is realized fully in the first person. However, it is a first person who is not alone in the world, but who is called into being by the world, a world that will be changed by whatever judgement the I might now make. However autonomous we may be, we do not actually generate ourselves as from nothing. This first person, then, is always intrinsically a first person plural: it is an I whose foundation lies in a prior ‘we’. Nevertheless, the I in question here, in responsibility to the world and to others, takes its stance as a first-person singular, even if it chooses to speak on behalf of a community, a we (in Macmurray’s sense, a friendship, a collegiality).

30    CHAPTER 3

Accountability, by contrast, is a much more insipid and neutral affair. It atomizes the social world into discrete individuals, each acting in their own privatized sphere of existence, and it thereby fundamentally threatens the existence of friendship, collegiality, and common assembly—or, in three words, friendship, love, and politics. It suggests that the individual ‘gives an account’, a rendering or record, of the balance sheet of transactions. It tells a story, but, crucially, it tells this story in an impersonal and allegedly ‘objective’ manner, placing the speaker not in a position of subjective responsibility but rather as a mere character in a third-person narrative. An account is an explanation, something that stills our curiosity by, literally, ‘settling’ accounts once and for all. It distances the self from her or his actions and places the actions in a separate order of things, or in an order of being that is removed from direct historical engagement. In accounting such as this, ‘we’ do not exist: everything is cast as ‘he’ or ‘she’ or ‘they’, the third-person-neutral as it is sometimes explicitly called. An example might be the judge who, in passing judgement, ‘explains’ how, in law, the sentence is called for by the crime, as if no judgement at all is actually required on his part. The sentence ‘makes sense’ of the crime by balancing it out and erasing its effects from history, so to speak. Accountability allows us to hide our subjectivity behind some other formal process of bookkeeping. Everything that subjectivity actually implies—like the material experiences of engagement with the world, vulnerability, openness to others and to influence—are all artificially removed from consideration. In this, the I is, in fact, no longer ‘responsible’ at all. The judge, in the case I have just mentioned, is the very embodiment of the kind of ‘irresponsibility’ I alluded to at the opening of this chapter, though he may refer to it as ‘objectivity’ or respect for the abstraction of The Law as such. As the contemporary financial jargon has it, he has no ‘skin in the game’; and he operates in the figure of the judge, in that specific third-person, without himself being responsible for the sentence and his decision, a ‘decision’ that is already given by The Law. It is as if, having heard the crime, the judge in this case consults the rule book, or ledger of accounts, and simply rehearses what he finds there as the appropriate sentence, the sentence that is ‘proper’ to the crime, like its ‘property’. Accountability places our actions beyond our selves and locates them in a ledger of accounts: a rendering of input set against output, in an economy that has a mythic root in theological ideas of eschatological desert and Last Judgement. At the end of a life, in this mode, it is as if we all become accountants: our good actions are set in the balance against our bad, and the weight of the scales indicates whether we are to be saved or damned. The image here of the scales suggests a link, further, between this accounting and justice. It derives from a specific version of how we will sum up a

ACCOUNTANCY; OR, ON B E I N G A B U R E A U C R A T     31

life; but also indicates how we ought to live a life. The problem in all of this is not that we might end up on the wrong side of the scales and be damned; rather, the problem is the very structure itself. The dominance of this image of justice implicates us all in a complicity with a state of affairs in which we eliminate responsibility. We absolve ourselves of responsibility for our actions, precisely when we claim to be most fully captured by justice and by a final judgement on our value. We have replaced responsibility with mere accounting. In his great late poem ‘Open the Doors’, Edwin Morgan stands before the doors of the new Scottish Parliament. These are political doors, not heavenly gates, of course. Yet the underlying logic of his demand is structured in precisely the terms I am seeking here, calling politicians in that new parliament to their responsibilities. ‘What do the people want of the place?’ he asks; and in reply, he writes that ‘They want it to be filled with thinking persons as open and adventurous as its architecture. / A nest of fearties is what they do not want. / A symposium of procrastinators is what they do not want. / A phalanx of forelock-tuggers is what they do not want. / And perhaps above all the droopy mantra of “it wizny me” is what they do not want’.5 It is above all in this last phrase, this disavowal of responsibility in the ‘it wizny me’, that Morgan calls the politicians to responsibility, and most definitely not to mere account. Accountancy is precisely what allows for and even encourages that disavowal, in which those in power and judgement absolve themselves of responsibility for their judgements and actions and powers. This is perhaps especially the case in political matters, but it is the key to a social and institutional structure that allows those who run our institutions to absolve themselves of responsibilities more generally. The phrase says ‘don’t blame me’ for the troubles you might have. It deflects attention elsewhere. It denies complicity in the decision-making process of which the political is a fundamental and intrinsic part. This reduction of responsibility to accountancy, to being accountable, is structurally determinant of the ways in which individuals can be complicit with bad decisions, while absolving themselves of responsibility for them. The key to it is the distancing of the self from history and from material engagement with the world. 2. THE POLITICAL CASE On 15 July 2015, Oskar Gröning, a ninety-four-year-old former Nazi, was sentenced by a court in Lüneburg to four years in prison. Gröning was known

32    CHAPTER 3

as ‘the accountant of Auschwitz’ or ‘the bookkeeper of Auschwitz’. His role in the camp was to take and log all the belongings, especially money, from the arriving Jews, and to keep an accurate record of the money in the account ledgers. After the war ended, Gröning was captured and spent time in forced labour in Britain (although records indicate that the labour in question was not demanding: he sang in choirs). Dan Plesch has found records in the archives indicating that the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC) had him on their files in 1947, where the charge against him is described as ‘common design’. This charge indicates that the UNWCC essentially charged him with being an accomplice to the murders of the Jews in Auschwitz, and, to clarify further, the record notes that this common design means ‘complicity in murder and ill-treatment’.6 Plesch points out that, according to any normal logic, Gröning should have been tried in 1947. However, the international political situation was such that it raised complications, and Gröning escaped justice at that time. He then led a life of relative obscurity until 2004, when he took part in a documentary made by Laurence Rees for the BBC, and in which he acknowledged that ‘I was there’, indicating that he was present in Auschwitz. Following this, the legal authorities in Germany took a renewed interest in his case, and a decade after the documentary was aired, he was tried and found culpable. Gröning’s case is interesting for several reasons. First, he explicitly acknowledged his own ‘moral guilt’, as he called it. He took part voluntarily in the BBC documentary in 2004 (first screened in 2005), and there fully acknowledged his part in what was going on. He took part in the series in order to speak out, he claimed. This was not a Nazi who fled into obscurity and silence forever; rather, he wanted to disprove the accounts given by Holocaust deniers. In stating ‘I was there’, this was Gröning—albeit some half-century after the event—laying his own witness and testament (or testimony) to the murder of the Jews in Auschwitz. However, he made a distinction between what he did and the actual murders. He was what Arendt called a ‘desk-murderer’, and not one who actually threw the Zyklon gas into the chambers, or one who directly murdered the Jewish arrivals. In court, he told the judge—essentially as he had also told Rees—that ‘For me there’s no question that I share moral guilt’. However, he made the distinction between this moral guilt and what he referred to as legal guilt. ‘Whether I am guilty under criminal law, you will have to decide’, he told the court, asking for ‘forgiveness’. When Arendt considered—theoretically and structurally—the case of those who were part of the organizational structure of the camps, she did not focus on any one specific case, but here was a single and identifiable case of one of those she thought of as ‘desk-murderers’. The case will allow us to

ACCOUNTANCY; OR, ON B E I N G A B U R E A U C R A T     33

consider whether the general theoretical issue of guilt, as outlined by Arendt, might hold in this particular instance.7 Gröning was asked in court to describe his role. He explained that his task was to inspect the luggage that the prisoners brought with them to the camps when the individuals arrived on the reception ramps. Specifically, he was to take their money, log it in the accounts, and transfer it to the Nazi government in Berlin. This was not a straightforward task: it involved bookkeeping, since much of the money was in foreign currency, as the people brought to the camps came from different jurisdictions. Indeed, he even referred to himself as an ‘administrator of foreign currencies’.8 The judge, Franz Kompisch, intervened to ask who the money belonged to; and Gröning’s response is clear, but quite chilling. ‘It belonged to the state’, he said, ‘and [it] was to be handed over by the Jews’. Then, as if to gloss the rationale for this: ‘They didn’t need it any more’.9 Gröning was, quite literally, an accountant in these terms. The Nazis had realized, among many other things, that one productive and profitable by-product of their programme was financial: they could make significant sums of money, including international funds, from the killing of the Jews. Gröning’s task was consistent with a straightforward complicity between politics and economics. Putting this more directly, it was an intrusion of money into governance. The resonances of the specific context here—Nazi concentration camps—should not be allowed to divert our eyes from the fundamental structural nature of this troubling relation between politics and economics. The question is not just to what extent we should condemn the Nazis for this criminal behaviour; rather, the more pressing question is whether we have ever managed to escape from the structure of thought and organization of our politics that shaped Gröning. That is to say: why have we never escaped properly from the state of affairs in which responsibility is reduced to accountancy? There was no doubt in the eyes of the court that Gröning was complicit in murder. He was also complicit in another structural situation: the contamination of politics by finance.10 The means for this was the reduction—as in his own eyes—of material realities (the murder of Jews) into something distanced from the self (money; account-keeping). This, though a specific and particular case, helps substantiate the theoretical position laid out by Arendt. It is a kind of test case that proves the validity of her position. Auschwitz was a death camp; and it is one that was run on quasi-industrial lines. It was a kind of factory given over to the production of corpses; and its intrinsic structure of management was consistent with a particular kind of institutionalized ‘modernity’. Zygmunt Bauman has argued, compellingly, that, although the camps were certainly not the necessary or logical

34    CHAPTER 3

product of modernity as such, they were nonetheless organized along lines of efficiency and effectiveness that were at the root of modern industrialized culture. Bauman asks us to consider whether, instead of being a historical aberration, the Holocaust might not instead be simply a laying bare of some fundamental social structures that govern modernity. What if the Holocaust ‘was not an antithesis of modern civilization’? What if its real significance is that it ‘uncovered another face of the same modern society whose other, more familiar face, we so admire’?11 This may sound shocking, and even extremist. But the extreme example of the gas chambers is one that Bauman is prepared to address; and the result is even more shocking, yet necessary if we are to understand the structure of political complicities, political guilt. The chambers—and indeed the whole camps—were managed according to the laws of business efficiency. The SS guards positively encouraged a logic of accountancy within the camps, in their distribution of rewards and punishments. This was useful in the pursuit of efficient management and cost cutting. It is difficult for one guard to oversee a hundred prisoners, say; so why not establish a management scheme and organization that gets them to do the work for you? So, once the prisoners see the accountancy schema—punishment and reward—at work, they learn how to use it to survive. It then becomes absolutely reasonable—rational behaviour—to betray one’s fellow prisoners, if this will figure as a good in your own ledger. As Bauman has it ‘to found their order on fear alone, the SS would have needed more troops, arms and money. Rationality was more effective, easier to obtain, and cheaper. And thus to destroy them, the SS men carefully cultivated the rationality of their victims’.12 3. THE INSTITUTIONAL CASE In our contemporary institutions, infinitely more mundane than the camps, obviously, we find nonetheless the same kind of complicity at work. We rationalize it fully and call it ‘being accountable’ for our work. Accountability becomes a means whereby, often in silence, people in charge of decisions distance themselves from the reality of those decisions; and it is difficult to contest such a distancing precisely because it is ‘rational’. The crude example of this at work is found in the institutional, managerial, and organizational operations of human resources. Most contemporary institutions are governed, explicitly or implicitly, by principles of efficiency: more output for less input. Technology—as in the camps—aids this; but the consequence is that many workers find themselves described as ‘redundant’

ACCOUNTANCY; OR, ON B E I N G A B U R E A U C R A T     35

or superfluous to requirements. They are a resource for which the employer no longer wishes to pay, a ‘minus’ (or, as it is usually called in the bureaucracy of financial administration, a sum ‘opposite to normal’) in the accounts ledger. Ideally, given their status as ‘opposite to normal’, the employer wants to be rid of them; but straightforward sacking looks brutal. Indeed, it might threaten the actual livelihood of the sacked individual: her or his life or regular survival might, in extreme cases, be put in jeopardy. What is needed, then, is ‘management’ and a linguistic legerdemain. ‘Sacking’ sounds harsh; ‘redundancy’ sounds insulting or worse. Instead, management decides on ‘restructuring’ the business in the interests of establishing rationalized normality. This, eminently reasonable from the point of view of a manager and indeed for anyone interested in seeing the business move on, ‘going forward’ into a brighter future, is a means whereby the factual and material realities of stripping an individual of their livelihood can be rationalized away, and thus forgotten. Restructuring allows the manager to think of the machinery of the system of his business as an abstract whole; and the individual thus becomes nothing more than a ‘resource’ or function within a system. Like the typewriter ribbon, however—and even like the human sales assistant at a now mechanized check-out—it is a resource that we no longer need, thanks to contemporary technology. Such restructuring—a recognizable trait in the management ideals for virtually every organization—is, of course, a million miles away from the reality of the camps; but the organizational and managerial structure of thinking is similar. Crucially for present purposes, the prioritization of abstract structure over material reality, and the wilful disregard of the consequences of financial efficiency in the pursuit of profit, is one where there is a clear evasion of responsibility and its replacement with abstract accountancy. The worker may face hardship, but the restructuring manager avoids any complicity in effecting that state of affairs. The managers can ‘give an account’—but an account of themselves, regardless of the consequences of their action. Responsibility disappears. In passing, this is the reality of daily life in many public institutions, such as hospitals, universities, schools, and the like, in jurisdictions that are run by governments who are themselves shaped by that too intimate relation of politics to economics in which Gröning was involved. Corruption follows when economics contaminates political government or institutional governance. We sometimes casually refer to this as mere cronyism. Yet such cronyism, as a form of institutional complicity with the evasion of responsibility, is of much greater significance than we usually allow. Usually, we shrug our shoulders at cronyism such as this. We should not, because to do so is simply to act in complicity with it. It is to be the ‘Muselmann’ in the camp.

36    CHAPTER 3

The ‘Muselmann’, according to Agamben, should be understood in terms of the Arabic word for the Muslim (its literal translation). The Muslim is ‘one who submits unconditionally to the will of God’,13 or, as Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper describe them, ‘those who had tried to obliterate their own individuality in an attempt to make themselves invisible’.14 In relation to the camps, where life itself is at stake, who are we to dare question the individual who complies in this way in order to try simply to survive? We must not, clearly. However, we must equally remember that, although structurally similar, much less is at stake in our contemporary institutions and regular places of employment. There, in those institutions that shape our public life especially (schools, hospitals, universities, lawcourts, and so on), the silence of the Muselmann is a clear act of complicity with unearned authority, or with a naked power in which those in power and leadership positions evade their responsibilities, including their responsibilities for the damage they may do to the livelihoods of employees or societies. There, unlike in the case of the camp internee, we must ask the questions, and we must judge. This entire system relates to a fundamental new trajectory in management and governance of institutions—and also of government of peoples. The key to this is that management abstracts from reality and operates at a level governed by the logic of accounts and accounting itself. Its most obvious political substructure is in the logic of providing ‘value-for-money’ in public service. What this means, in fact, is the production of profit, or of more money in output for less money in input, value is precisely what is eliminated from consideration. The reason for this is that all quality must be reduced to quantity, if it is to be rendered accountable. Responsibility—which operates precisely at the level of value—is here reduced to accountability, which operates, finally, at the level of crude financial profit. This is different, in terminology, from Judith Butler’s use of the same ideas. For her, giving an account of oneself is problematic for the simple reason that the subject—the I—called upon to do the accounting of itself is always already enmeshed in alterity. The subject is given to itself by prior structures and prior relations with others; and it remains, therefore, opaque with respect to itself. This is true and a good foundation for our contemporary consideration of ethics. However, it does not yet reach as far as to see the political consequences of its own position. What is at issue here is whether we can condone a politics that rests in such (false) accounting. 4. FALSE ACCOUNTING False accounting is a serious crime, at least in UK law. It is governed by the Theft Act of 1968. I want here to call into question here a specific instance

ACCOUNTANCY; OR, ON B E I N G A B U R E A U C R A T     37

of accounting that, on the face of it at least, should be called to give an account of itself. I refer to the ‘Time Allocation Survey’ that operates in the UK university sector. This Time Allocation Survey is run by the Joint Costing and Pricing Steering Group, a group commissioned from within the sector to provide transparency about the real costs of teaching and research in UK universities and institutions of higher education. It began its work by establishing a Transparency Review, whose purpose was ‘to establish an approach to demonstrate the full costs of research and other publicly funded activities in higher education’; and the need for this was that we wanted to ‘improve the accountability for the use of public funds’. This, in turn, became a formal ‘Transparency and Accounting Review’, established after the 1998 Comprehensive Spending Review of the then New Labour government.15 Carried out into our annual procedures, it is now formally and fully institutionalized as TRAC, the Transparent Approach to Costing. It has subsets and corollaries: TRAC fEC, or ‘full economic costing’ of research; TRAC(T), or transparent approach to costing for teaching; and TRAC EC-FP7, which is the entire procedure ‘rolled out’ across European Union costings. This may seem eminently reasonable. If people are funding the research carried out in universities through general taxation, then it is appropriate that they know that their money is not being squandered. Transparent accounting is to be the solution; and both the sector’s leadership and government set the parameters for how we should measure this and how we can be assured that the costs that universities and researchers claim for their work is an accurate cost, reflecting the actual or real costs incurred in the work. The principle behind this is that we must demonstrate that we are spending money responsibly. The idea should be that we demonstrate our responsibility to the general tax-paying public; but instead, in the realization of this project, we simply show our accounts at the end of each year, and we limit ourselves to proving that we are decent enough accountants. The very idea that the university, as an institution, may have social responsibilities is lost. The drive to transparency undermines itself: transparency, here, occludes. Crucially, it so revokes and rescinds the very idea of responsibility that, in the end, all we are left with is bland accountability, as my next few paragraphs will show. The effects are extremely deleterious, poisonous to the sector. The project begins as a way of making the costs of research transparently clear. However, if teaching is also funded from general taxation, then it follows that it, too, should provide similar clarity with respect to costs. An academic also, historically, has a certain amount of administrative activity folded into the work that she or he does; and this, too, might be costed and monetized.

38    CHAPTER 3

Thus it is that we find, in the sector, one of its most significant accounting operations in recent decades. Here is how this works. Typically, academic colleagues are required to complete time sheets (the Time Allocation Survey), usually over a three-week period, and in which they must record the amount of time they spend in three activities: research, teaching, and administration. They account for their time, in other words. The log is then sent to the university’s central management for processing. This is where it becomes interesting. According to historical surveys done by the University and College Union (UCU) and its predecessor, the Association of University Teachers, most academics in higher education work an average of roughly 55 hours per week. This should not be all that surprising: most academics take great pleasure in their work, are energized by its intrinsic demands, and eagerly embrace hours in the laboratory or library. As professionals, there is little clear distance between ‘working hours’ and the rest of their daily activities. However, in the Time Allocation Survey, no one is allowed to register the true nature of this work, or, if they do record and register it, the time sheets will be recalibrated by university administrators and accountants. According to the official administration, academics do not work for 55 hours, or anything like it. They work, apparently, for 37.5 hours per week, and for only forty-four weeks of the year. Here is the relevant passage from the official Joint Costing and Pricing Steering Group’s instructions: ‘The project hours of each investigator [i.e. the number of actual hours that each researcher spends on the work] should be converted into hours per annum by dividing by the life of the project. These hours per annum should be divided by 1650—that will give a FTE [Full-time Equivalent] for each investigator’. Why should it be divided by this number, 1650? The answer to that is that 1650 is the total sum of 37.5 (hours per week) multiplied by 44 (weeks per annum). On the FAQ page of the Joint Costing and Pricing Steering Group’s site, one of the questions explicitly draws attention to this oddity. The FAQ question is: ‘Our clinical academics are contracted to work 44 hours a week. Other staff are contracted to work 35 hours a week. Can we use these to calculate the cost per hour?’ This is a reasonable question, if we are seeking true and accurate costs. The answer should be, you might expect, a straightforward and unequivocal ‘Yes, of course’. Here, however, is the answer given: ‘No’. The reason for this unexpected answer immediately follows: ‘1650 hours is considered a fair and reasonable measure of the time spent on average by academics across all institutions and should be the number of working hours p.a. assumed for each full-time member of staff for costing purposes’.16 This rationale is extraordinary. We can take it apart bit by horrible bit: ‘1650 hours is considered a fair and reasonable measure’; well, we might

ACCOUNTANCY; OR, ON B E I N G A B U R E A U C R A T     39

ask, ‘considered so by whom?’ Who arrived at this figure, and on what basis? In any case, whether it is ‘considered’ to be thus fair and reasonable is nothing to the point—the idea is to present a factually true and honest account of costs and prices. The point of the exercise is to get to the actual account of time and money, not what some anonymous person or group ‘considers’ to be ‘fair and reasonable’. Let’s proceed further: 1650 hours is a reasonable measure ‘of the time spent on average by academics across all institutions’. The anonymous individual or group may indeed think this a reasonable ‘average’; but the point of the exercise is not to calculate averages, but to calculate actual costs and to do so transparently. The average is calculated ‘across all institutions’, as if there would be no difference among those institutions, nor among the actual individuals working within them. Finally, the text itself gives away its own falsifying assumptions, when it acknowledges that all of this is to be used as the basis of calculations ‘for costing purposes’, and not for something we might call ‘reality’. At this point, we might ask a serious and troubling question. Is this false accounting? It purports to be true and transparent; but it is clearly not a true and accurate record, since it is based on the accounting convenience of the assumption of a 1650-hours per year total—which is not the reality. The ostensible point of the exercise is to quantify hours and costs precisely, to give an accurate record of reality, not a fiction based upon an assumption of the time spent. In comparison with realities, it may well be as much as 60 per cent out; and this has massive consequences for the funding of all activities in our university institutions. This is of signal importance, given that the reason for the whole exercise is to justify our costs to our paymasters: taxpayers, if this is a public-funded institution. Now, our institutions are required, as a condition of their funding, to produce a summary formal record of their Time Allocation Survey sheets. Academics are pressured, with varying degrees of institutional coercion, to complete the forms and thereby to comply with this problematic system. We might reasonably ask whether they are being required to become complicit in an activity that is open to legal challenge. Are they being systemically corrupted by such complicity? Let us now therefore consider, briefly, a more realistic case. Suppose I work, during the three weeks assigned to me for my completion of my time sheet, something close to a sixty-hour week. (I may be marking fifty assessment essays of some 5,000 words each, with students’ futures depending on the results, and at the same time carrying out my usual teaching hours, preparations, research, speaking, and other engagements, and administration.) So I fill my time sheet out honestly, and record the figures accurately (perhaps

40    CHAPTER 3

i­ncluding the extra hour that I have just spent going through my diary for the weeks and totting up my hours spent on each activity). I record my 60 hours for each of those weeks; but no matter what figures I enter, my institution’s administrative accountants will recalibrate them in order to match the requirements of a 1650-hour year. If we take the more likely figures, based on historical surveys by UCU of actual hours worked, we will get something like fifty-six hours per week across at least forty-six weeks per annum. That comes to 2576 hours, not 1650. This is significantly above the standard calculated by all those TRAC mechanisms. Clearly, any costs worked out on the figures required by the Joint Costing and Pricing Steering Group will be open to the charge that it is an intrinsically falsified account presented to our funding agency, and via them to government and to taxpayers. In any case, the kind of accounting required by marketization and privatization is quite difficult to do, in factual terms. Suppose I listen to opera on my way to work. Is that research? It sounds unlikely, given that I am a professor in literary studies. However, I don’t just listen: I also think about what I’m hearing. A year later, I recall that thought and it intrudes into my research. I’m writing about complicity, and so I’m now thinking about Mozart’s Così fan tutte, for example. Does my ostensibly unimportant listening of a year ago become constitutive of research now? Consider another example. It’s 3 a.m. in the United Kingdom, and I’m asleep at home. In a library in California it is 6 p.m., and a student in that library sits and reads an article of mine that I wrote many years ago, perhaps even before she was born, and it gives her the words she needs to understand something helpful for the essay she is writing. Am I teaching? These are not mere Jesuitical hair-splitting observations. They go right to the core of the question of accountancy and of how it replaces responsibility in the situation of a teaching and researching professional. The quality of pedagogical work—one’s responsibility as teacher and student—is necessarily translated into quantities, for the purposes of ‘value-for-money’ accounting. Once again, the very substance of the professional commitment is erased here, and one is made complicit with a logic of accountancy that evacuates the situation of responsibilities. My words, in the California situation I described above, are disembodied, but accountancy requires a specific kind of embodiment—it requires embodiment in which bodies themselves can be priced, counted, accounted for. That is why TRAC would not regard the situation as one in which I was teaching, nor could it take seriously the fact that the student might be learning. This is not what the institution and contemporary ideology would regard as ‘real’, for it is not verifiable or accountable as a transaction occurring in ‘contact time’.

ACCOUNTANCY; OR, ON B E I N G A B U R E A U C R A T     41

The accounting model is one that assumes a total transparency, not just in financial terms, but also in more profound ways. It suggests that the subject knows always and exactly what it is that she or he does, and that the consequences of their actions are entirely and totally ‘accounted for’ in their intention. If I am asleep, I cannot be ‘intending’ to teach, and therefore am not teaching—even if someone is learning as a consequence of what I have said or written. Likewise, the student cannot be learning unless she or he is ‘in class’, yielding us up to the ludicrous idea that the content of what we do as teachers and learners is collectible in a measured counting-up of ‘contact hours’. The quality of the contact, under the systems of marketization and privatization that go hand-in-glove with accountancy, is all to be subsumed under quantification. What if the student is in class but absent-minded, thinking distractedly about things other than the matter being discussed? None of this matters for TRAC. In accountancy, the very quality of our interpersonal contact is itself reduced to quantification: it is a matter of counting minutes, and then monetizing those minutes, usually to show somewhere a financial profit. In its limitation of education to the business transaction, and in its belief that all such actions are predictable because they are based upon mechanical input/output relations, the entire system is complicit with so-called ‘rational choice’ economics. Such an economic position is not neutral, but is politically inflected; and it favours structural inequality. The point here is not to damn it for this reason; rather, the point is to indicate that the participants in this system have a choice. They can choose to be complicit with corruption; or they can resist. In complying with the requirements of TRAC, are we being required to be complicit in false accounting? This is the serious question that we should ask. False accounting is not just a small misdemeanour: it is a crime, akin to fraud. The legal definition includes charges of concealing or falsifying any account, record, or document that is required for any accounting purpose. To be complicit with this, all one need do is to ‘furnish information’ that is knowingly used in this way and which may mislead those who need to view and receive the accounts in question. I leave this as an open question.17 It is in the interests of the university, financially, to reduce the working week. This has the effect of artificially raising the actual prices of things, which makes it easier to ask for more money. Yet it is not true; the costs are being over-calculated, in some cases, to the tune of around 50–60 per cent. The point is not to argue for a reduction in funding as a result of this. Rather it is to say that we need a mode of thinking about the university sector as marked by responsibilities to the society, not to the accounts.

42    CHAPTER 3

That is, we need to reassert the power of witnessing—I take my stand. In doing so here, I pass on as if I have answered my question at the close of the last section. That is to say, I here assume a responsibility of and for the sector of which I am a part. In doing so—regardless of the precise content of that responsibility, which will differ from individual to individual—we need to refuse complicity with accounting models of the sector. By extension, we need to refuse complicity with the entire trajectory of marketization. Marketization and privatization are structurally determinant of how we will reduce to nothing the responsibility of our institutions. They effectively disempower the institutions and what goes on in them, by translating responsibility into mere accountability, with the resulting fraudulent beliefs. Accountability occludes what is actually going on in material terms. To be complicit with it is to be complicit with a fantasy, and to absolve oneself of responsibility for crimes—as Gröning did and as all desk-murderers do. 5. DESK MURDERERS AND BLOOD MONEY The accounting bureaucrat is he who would pretend to absolve himself of complicity with judgement by committing himself to compliance with rules or laws, systems and procedures. This is a purely formal exercise. It is not just incidental that it is formal and that it lacks any bearings on reality; in fact, it is entirely the structural and managerial point of such bureaucratic accountancy that it has no such contact with reality. It is organized, managerially, as an operational mode whose purpose is to allow management to answer not to other people, but only to itself. Management such as this—accountancy management—is a closed system, a closed circle and every bit as totalitarian as the closed circle that Dave Eggers describes in his fiction, The Circle, where ‘completion’ of the circle is an exercise that imprisons individuals in their complicity with an overarching system that denies the possibility of dissent. This is a ‘responsibility’ that, unlike the responsibilities to actual and material conditions such as we see it in Macmurray, actually works in order to reduce the possibility of human freedoms, to shrink that freedom to nothing: the bottom line of a balance sheet, in which there can be no ‘remainder’, nothing left over. No remnant will be permitted to escape the discipline of ‘being managed’, which means ‘being accounted for’. The repercussions of all of this can be serious. Management such as this is entirely complicit with a disturbing intimacy between money and government, and between finance and governance. That intimacy not only threatens freedom, both abstract and real, it also threatens the fundamental engagements that individuals have with each other as the basis of democratic ­government

ACCOUNTANCY; OR, ON B E I N G A B U R E A U C R A T     43

in politics or of governance in our institutions. We can most readily see this in the sphere of politics and economics. As Stiglitz and others have shown, our ‘democracies’ are now often most properly described not in terms of the one-person one-vote system that is the fundamental characteristic of universal suffrage; rather, the power of corporations and lobbying is such that we now have a system that actually denies universal suffrage, undercutting its principles of engagement and participation, and replacing it with ‘one-dollar one-vote’ instead.18 Similar structures increasingly permeate our institutions, however. As I have argued before, our institutions appear to learn more or less directly their principles of governance from the ways in which the world of politics establishes rules of government.19 In our institutions—especially those in the public sector—it is now money that has become the key driver of ‘performance’ as such; the more money an individual has, the more power and influence, prestige and privilege, she or he enjoys. I shall take our university sector as my key example. First, however, consider regular employment conditions for most workers. It would be unusual for a chef in a restaurant, say, to be asked to finance the provision of her own ingredients as a condition of keeping her job. It would be equally unusual for a carpenter to be told that he had to seek ways of funding his activity by securing access to ownership of a forest. In most cases of employment, it is up to the employer to provide the basic tools, requirements, and ingredients for the job to be done. That is what permits him to cream off the profits, in fact: it is his investment in the business. Now consider the researcher at work in our universities. Research, as we all know, requires ‘kit’: it may be laboratory equipment, it may be books or journals, or it may be raw materials such as chemicals. In some cases, this kit is extremely expensive: the magnet used in MRI research, for example, costs many millions. Research, however, is also a key component of the activity of most academics: we need this stuff to be able to do our job properly. Increasingly, however, sector leaders are telling us that we ourselves need to provide the conditions for this work: we must secure external sources of money to pay for it, or we need to secure ‘grants’ (themselves sometimes not grants at all, but contracts with their attendant obligations) for research funding. At one level, this is uncontroversial: academics have been bidding for work like this, bidding for money to undertake work, for decades. However, a very significant shift is under way in our institutions, whereby the success in securing such funding is now being ‘understood’ by management as a fundamental contractual obligation of employment, even though it is not written into any contract. Colleagues are given financial targets, and are threatened with the sack (or with being ‘restructured’ out of their job) if they fail to bring in the required amount (often an entirely arbitrary sum).

44    CHAPTER 3

As I write, in July 2015, the University of Birmingham faces protests by academic staff who are perturbed at the formal introduction of such targets. In a cunning and utterly disingenuous move, Birmingham management state that, since research is indeed expensive, academics ‘may “be unable to deliver” on their “contractual obligation” to undertake research’ without themselves securing such funding. The colleagues in management absolve themselves of any responsibility for securing the required funding (by, for example, arguing the case for public funding of research, say). Instead, they delegate blame, in advance as it were, to the academic community. This is a delegation of blame for some simple reasons: first, grant application successes are now extremely low, given the huge numbers of individuals chasing small pots of funding; second, the securing of grants is now, explicitly, taken as a measure of performance; and third, it follows from the first two observations that colleagues are being set up for failure in performance. That is to say: we have an accounting structure here whose purpose is to jeopardize the secure conditions of work of academic colleagues. This is what passes for ‘management’—even for ‘best practice’ in management—in our time. It explicitly rewards those with money, pays little heed to what the money is actually for, but ensures that everyone is intrinsically penalized even before they begin their work as researchers. The point is to consolidate managerial power, to ensure ‘crony academicism’, and to tie success firmly to money-as-such. There can be no doubt that some will play the game and succeed. We can call this the monetization of compliance. Structurally, it is not dissimilar to the kinds of ‘reason’ that operated to make the camps ‘efficient’, even if less may seem to be at stake. It is important here to stress two things. Confronted by the protests of the academic body, the vice-principal responsible for the introduction of these targets in Birmingham, Adam Tickell, stated that he was not persuaded that anything in the new policy needed revision; and, further, that ‘this is not a matter for negotiation’.20 In short, compliance is required. Further, as a number of recent cases have shown, the consequences of this kind of policy can be extremely far-reaching, affecting careers, livelihoods, and, arguably, life itself. A number of colleagues in various institutions have faced the imposition of this new monetization of complicity structure of management. Alison Hayman at Bristol University faced dismissal over allegations that she had not secured enough grant income; many academics face the sack in Queen’s Belfast after the application of grant-capture as a criterion in their ‘restructuring’ activities; the University of Warwick attempted systematically to use the same criterion as a means of measuring performance in its School of Life Sciences. In this last case, the then-president of the local UCU branch, D ­ ennis

ACCOUNTANCY; OR, ON B E I N G A B U R E A U C R A T     45

Leech, argued that these targets placed academics in ‘a similar position to market traders in the City, who are judged solely on the amount of money they raise’.21 This comparison laid bare what is at issue here—livelihoods now depend on grant capture, and university employees are to be managed as if they were traders on the floor of the City, there for the shifting around of ever-increasing sums of money, regardless of material realities. Interestingly, in the Warwick example, the sum set for each individual appeared to be entirely arbitrary and was also retrospectively applied. Individuals had to demonstrate that they had secured an average on £75,000 for each of the previous four years, or else they faced the possibility of dismissal. Why £75,000? The only rationale, it seems, is that this figure was arrived at by assuming a global grant income for the school as a whole, then dividing this by the number of individuals in the school, regardless of the actual substantial variability in costs associated with the research of each individual. Finally, some ‘rounding’ of the sum arrived at must have been done. It is unlikely that the calculation came to £75,000 exactly, but, in the tyranny of quantifying number, £75,000 has a nice and aesthetically pleasing ‘rounded’ feel. In short, the sum is made up. Worse than this, the abstract accountancy here is not only proceeding with total disregard for material realities and for individual lives, it also has a damaging effect on overall costs. As David Colquhoun pointed out, there is an incentive here to inflate costs, in order to reach targets. Such targets, he argued, would lead to academics being ‘terrified of being cast out on to the streets at short notice’ and would thus introduce an incentive to ‘massage data’.22 The logic, however, goes even beyond this perversity—it encourages academics to find and carry out not the research that they feel needs to be done, nor the research they want and are well-placed to do. It actually discourages this, and instead encourages academics to seek out the most expensive research possible, not for the sake of the research but to satisfy university accountants and managers. There is also one further extremely troubling case related to this kind of accountancy. Stefan Grimm was a valued senior colleague at Imperial College London. He was an eminent professor of toxicology, with an outstanding international reputation fully warranting his election as a Fellow of the Society of Biology. He led several research teams in a number of groundbreaking projects. Imperial’s management of research, however, is grounded in the same principles of accountancy that essentially ensure that we lose sight of any sense of proper responsibility. On 25 September 2014, Stefan Grimm, having received e-mail correspondence drawing attention to the requirement to boost his grant income, took his own life. The e-mail reminded him that he was under performance review,

46    CHAPTER 3

and that, as part of that review, he was expected to bring in an ‘attributable share’ of some £200,000 and secure funding as principal investigator for a major project within the following twelve months. The e-mail, from Martin Wilkins, who was the head of the section in which Grimm worked, stated: ‘I am of the opinion that you are struggling to fulfil the metrics of a Professorial post at Imperial College which include maintaining established funding in a programme of research with an attributable share of research spend of £200k [per annum] and must now start to give serious consideration as to whether you are performing at the expected level of a Professor at Imperial College’.23 As David Colquhoun points out, Grimm’s position was jeopardized—and we may wonder whether his very life was jeopardized—by the fact that ‘he failed to do sufficiently expensive research’.24 The thing that is most controversial about this case is, in fact, precisely the very limited controversy that it caused. This structure of accountancy is now so ingrained in the sector that Grimm’s death can be passed over without proper and due care. Needless to say, Imperial’s considered response was to state that it would ‘review its procedures’, but certainly not that it would start to accept its responsibilities. Instead, it continues to think these things in terms of business accountabilities, not moral, social, or political responsibility of the university to a wider set of issues. Interviewed on 17 April 2015 on BBC Radio 4’s flagship Today programme, in the ‘Friday business leader’ feature at 6:15 a.m., the incoming president of Imperial, Alice Gast, was invited to talk directly about the case. Instead, she generalized and spoke in abstractions, but at least she conceded that academics and professors are under a great deal of pressure. Astonishingly—and the real astonishment is that this is no longer astonishing at all—she informed her audience that professors are ‘really’ best considered as being like ‘small business owners’, who have a lot on their plates: ‘They have their own teaching to perform, they have their own research and they have their research funding to look after,’ she said.25 Oskar Gröning also had his complex tasks to perform, we should recall, and that involved counting the income. Gast here is close to requiring that we become complicit with a managerial set of norms that involve us in the securing of money as a condition of our employment or security of position. The structure monetizes complicity. Can this properly be thought of as being akin to blood money? For the avoidance of legal doubt: the question is not whether Gast or Wilkins is personally culpable here; rather, the question is whether they are essentially required, by their structural position, to be complicit with a system that is corrupt and debilitating. And if the answer to that is ‘Yes’, then what do they propose to do about it?

ACCOUNTANCY; OR, ON B E I N G A B U R E A U C R A T     47

The situation I have described is certainly akin to what happens in the wider political sphere. There, in the United Kingdom and other jurisdictions that have subscribed to the ideology of austerity, the body itself is now seen as related directly to money. For the moment, I will not discuss in detail here the ways in which disabled people are being systematically deprived of financial support that they used to have through the support structure of general taxation. However, it is worth noting that the principles governing the ways in which disabled people are now treated relate fairly directly to the theme of this chapter. When disabled people are assessed by government-supported agencies, or agencies paid by government, for the purposes of deciding if they are ‘really’ disabled and ‘really’ unfit for work, then an important principle is at work. The principle in question is one whereby the disabled person has to ‘account’ for herself or himself, and where government absolves itself of responsibility to its citizens. The assessment essentially decides the financial worth or value of the disabled person to the State. Payments to help them live their lives are dependent upon the account that the assessor gives of their condition. If we condone this, what else are we condoning, in principle or from the comfort of our desks? In relation to this, we can look briefly—but a little more pointedly—at the idea of bodies or body parts for sale. Janet Radcliffe Richards has taken a dispassionate and reasoned approach to the vexing issue of kidney selling, which remains illegal in most jurisdictions outside of Iran. It is an emotive issue, and one that (as Richards accepts) provokes revulsion in many people. The classic instance of it is the case of the poor individual from a less advanced economy who sells the kidney as a straightforward market transaction. As Richards has it, ‘What is ours to give is normally also ours to sell’.26 She considers the issue in abstract terms, and the key turning point in her mode of argumentation is to claim that she is seeing the case from the point of view of the vendor. The practice looks disreputable and troubling, this case goes, if we assume that the buyer is one of the ‘greedy rich’ who, having taken everything possible from the poor to their own advantage now moves in, finally, on the very body of the poor individual. But this, argues Richards, is to miss the point that, from the vendor’s point of view, and assuming that she or he goes into this action through their free choice, the vendor is actually performing a useful service to someone who is facing death (and who, in this regard, is not in a privileged position, but is actually dependent upon the greater health of the vendor). Further, even if the vendor has limited choices, and the selling of his kidney is the best choice available to him, then we are doing a disservice if we do not allow him to sell legally. Why, therefore, would we ever prohibit such a thing; why would we try to stop a person making the most of his circumstances, especially if he has limited choices?

48    CHAPTER 3

Considered in this way, and abstracted from all the conditions that shape the alleged free choice of the vendor—that is, essentially ignoring the conditions that have given her or him their impoverished circumstances in the first place—the case seems reasonable; we should permit the sale of kidneys. Yet the point is that, in accepting this argument, we are being asked to be complicit with the system that generates the disparity between the vendor and purchaser here in the first place. We are being asked just to accept the way of the world as the way things are.27 Richards points out that transplantation has made it possible for us to think of the body in new and different ways. Once people become aware that their own body part might contribute to the survival of another human being, and that it can function within that other individual’s body, then ‘people started to recognize new opportunities’, as she puts it. ‘Now that organs could be moved between people, in much the same way as other possessions, people would naturally start to think about them in similar ways’.28 In short, assume the logic of marketization, and this all appears perfectly normal and even entirely noncontroversial. However, the point is that we do not need to be complicit with a logic of marketization, especially when it so distances ourselves from the fact of life itself that it turns to the human body and all its constituent elements as a mere ‘human resource’. It might be better to consider our responsibility for and towards a state of affairs in which there is such disparity between the wealthy and the poor that the only or best solution to the predicaments of the poor is to submit and to make the body itself a human resource. A more conventional kind of case relates to surrogate pregnancy. Sylviane Agacinski has considered this in her study of what she calls Corps en miettes, bodies in pieces. She argues against surrogacy because she sees it as a commercialization of the body as such and, above all, of the body of women. For her, it is therefore doubly damnable; it is (perhaps counterintuitively) anti-woman; and it is symptomatic of a culture that has instrumentalised the body and its constituent elements. What would make this kind of case most relevant to my current argument is when it is also mixed with a financial transaction, when someone pays a woman to carry a surrogate pregnancy.29 If we go the route of marketization of the body and its elements like this, then we are getting close to being in complicity with a nefarious situation. Whatever next? Will we start to cut off hair, extract gold teeth, and then sell it all? Well, as Oskar Gröning knows, there is a precedent for that kind of thing. As is often the case, satire is not really the cultural form that comments on contemporary social issues; rather, it often predicts what will become reality in the future. There is an argument that satire is a deeply conservative form, in that it seems to expose hypocrisy but never actually changes anything.

ACCOUNTANCY; OR, ON B E I N G A B U R E A U C R A T     49

Satire, in this logic, actually is complicit with the very hypocrisy that it ostensibly criticizes. It operates as a kind of safety valve, encouraging us to laugh at folly while never actually giving us a reason or a ground from which to change the folly; and in doing this, it endorses precisely the thing it seems to want to change. One example relevant here is Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, a film made in 1983 and consisting largely of sketches rather than a straightforward narrative. A key moment in the film addresses the contemporary clichés regarding social life in the United Kingdom. The scene in question opens with a Yorkshireman walking wearily uphill towards his home, in a street of terraced houses. The scene deliberately echoes a famous television advert, for Hovis bread, made by Ridley Scott in 1973.30 To the background of Dvořák’s New World Symphony, the advert evokes ideas of the nobility of the northern working class, struggling and enduring against adversity in an uphill battle against all odds, but one that is grounded in authentic and essentially human values, especially the values of the domestic family. Monty Python takes this in a different direction. The man walking home somewhat resignedly opens the door of his house onto a scene of domestic chaos, with tens of children all milling about in a cacophony of noise. This is his family. He tells them to be quiet as he has something to say ‘to the whole family’. Even more children are called in. The man announces that ‘The mill’s closed; there’s no more work. We’re destitute’. This is met with sighs. ‘I’ve got no option but to sell you all for scientific experiments’, he goes on. When the children react with more sighs, he says he’s given it all long and careful thought, ‘and it has to be medical experiments for the lot of you’. The satire here has as its components stereotypical ideas of the north, of the working class and—in explaining why there are quite so many children in this family—the Catholic Church’s ban on contraception, based in the Catholic belief that, in the words of the song that follows in the film, ‘every little sperm is sacred’. At the core of the whole, though, is precisely the politics of what we can call bio-finance. The family is poor because of the attitude to the body. At one extreme, this entails respect for the most primary elements of the body in microscopic form—sperm, as the basic fertilizer of life. At the other, it realizes that precisely this attitude to sperm and to the control of procreation leads to mass poverty, in which the only thing that the poor individual eventually has left to sell is not labour, as in Marx, but the body itself—this is the final meaning of the idea that we are ‘human resources’. It is not mere coincidence that it is at this time—the mid-1980s—that what used to be called ‘staff’ or ‘personnel’ were re-titled as ‘human resources’.31 We have come a long way here, and some may judge the implied comparison between the case of kidney selling and the activities in the camps to

50    CHAPTER 3

be a stretch too far, not to mention the overlap that I trace between these and contemporary conditions of managed employment. However, the principle of the argument remains simple, and it calls us to a necessary reinstating of responsibility over accountability. The logic of a contemporary marketization is one whereby human responsibility can be rendered invisible and irrelevant to realities. Those realities are simply those given by the logic of the market and privatization; and they lead to a state of affairs in which there is an unholy alliance between money and blood, money and power. To concede our ‘responsibility to responsibility’ preferring to be content with mere ‘accounting for accountabilities’ is not a neutral or natural act. It is a choice, and the choice is a political one. To the extent that this is a choice, we need not be complicit with it. Indeed, if we are complicit with the logic of total marketization, then it follows that there are serious ethical questions to be asked. Those questions are essentially of the same kind as the questions put to Gröning. But we can resist all this. All we need to do is to revive our sense of responsibility, democracy, and freedom; and then to raise those questions from the dead. Arendt’s deskmurderers may still be among us, but we can resist them and can limit their nefarious effects. We need not comply. Historically, of course, we have at least one case where this whole blood money relation is dramatized—in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. I will look at this, and some similar law cases, in the next chapter. NOTES   1.  It is interesting that, even in a serious and ‘responsible’ consideration of contemporary ethics, in the work of Judith Butler, this same language—Giving an Account of Oneself—can be used. Butler’s key argument, problematizing the identity of a subject of the ethical act when that subject’s identity is in many ways constrained and even ‘given’ prior to its demand for autonomy, misses what is, for me, a yet more fundamental misconstruing of the very idea of responsibility itself in our time. See Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).  2. John Macmurray, The Self as Agent (Faber & Faber, 1957), 14–15.  3. John Macmurray, Conditions of Freedom (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), 59.  4. Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), vii. Kohn here is quoting her from ‘The Crisis Character of Modern Society’, in an essay published originally in Christianity and Crisis (1966), 112–14. In relation to this, we should compare Jean-François Lyotard, Le Différend (Paris: Minuit, 1983), 10.  5. The text of the poem is available here: http://www.scottish.parliament.uk /EducationandCommunityPartnershipsresources/A_Poem_by_Edwin_Morgan.pdf.

ACCOUNTANCY; OR, ON B E I N G A B U R E A U C R A T     51

For readers unfamiliar with Glasgow dialect, ‘it wizny me’ can be ‘translated’ as ‘it was not me’, meaning ‘I wasn’t responsible’.  6. See: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/16/how-nazi-guard-oskar -groning-escaped-justice-in-1947-for-crimes-at-auschwitz?CMP=twt%5Egdnnews. I am grateful to Dan Plesch for directing me to some of the sources here, and especially to his extremely illuminating article, co-written with Shanti Sattler, ‘A New Paradigm of Customary International Criminal Law’, available at: http://www.unwcc.org/wp -content/uploads/2014/11/Plesch-and-Sattler.pdf.   7.  Obviously Arendt did single out one case, Eichmann; but my point here refers to her more general theorization of the issue and not to the specific report regarding Eichmann’s trial.   8.  See the interview at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6D6FGG-dE0.  9. See the report at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe /germany/11551396/Bookkeeper-of-Auschwitz-goes-on-trial-for-murder-of-300000 -Jews.html. 10. This is surely one of our own most pressing and worrying contemporary concerns. The failure of the political class in general—who have eschewed political representation in favour of a simplistic ‘managing the economy’—have so evacuated the political of content and substance that we now face a genuinely negative situation. Lobbying guarantees the ideology whereby ‘one person one vote’ is replaced by ‘one dollar one vote’, as Stiglitz has repeatedly argued. Increasingly, business success is seen as the condition of political success (as in the candidature of Donald Trump for the US presidency in 2016). Internationally, agreements such as TTIP (the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) indicates the readiness with which the political class will permit large corporations and multinationals to subvert national governments, making them subservient to the interests of large-scale and globalized business concerns. See also section 4 of the present chapter. 11. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989), 7. 12.  Ibid., 203. In the light of this, a number of individuals in the camps withdrew as much as possible from the material realities of existence. Giorgio Agamben describes this figure—the ‘Muselmann’—in his Remnants of Auschwitz (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen; New York: Zone Books, 2002). I’ll return to this in more detail below. 13. Agamben, Remnants, 45. 14.  Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, Paris: after the Liberation 1944–1949 (revised edn., Penguin, 2007), 149. 15. See http://www.jcpsg.ac.uk/archive/arch_transpar.htm. 16. See http://www.jcpsg.ac.uk/guidance/faq.htm. 17.  Technically, in law, it is the individual who can commit the crime of ‘false accounting’ and not an institution. This is exactly the point, of course: no individual assumes responsibility for what happens in this system: ‘it wizny me’. 18.  See, for example, Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality (London: Penguin, 2013), 165 and passim. For the UK context, see especially Tamasin Cave and Andy Rowell, A Quiet Word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism and Broken Politics in Britain (Bodley Head, 2014).

52    CHAPTER 3

19.  I argued this in detail in my book, Universities at War (Sage, 2015). 20. See report in Times Higher: https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news /birmingham-academics-course-strike-over-grant-income-demands. 21. See report in Times Higher: https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news /warwick-academics-treated-like-city-traders-with-financial-targets/2017468.article. 22. See report in Times Higher: https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news /warwick-academics-treated-like-city-traders-with-financial-targets/2017468.article. 23. Ibid. 24.  David Colquhoun, ‘DC’s Improbable Science’ blog, available at: http://www .dcscience.net/2014/12/01/publish-and-perish-at-imperial-college-london-the-death -of-stefan-grimm/. 25. See report in Times Higher: https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news /stefan-grimm-death-prompts-questions-for-imperial-president/2019747.article?utm _content=bufferb3b28&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm _campaign=buffer. 26.  Janet Radcliffe Richards, The Ethics of Transplants (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 44. 27.  It is in arguments such as this that the work of Judith Butler is more important, for she would seek to ask questions about the constraints upon the supposedly ‘free choice’ of the vendor in the case. 28.  Ibid., 43. 29.  For the detailed argument, see Sylviane Agacinski, Corps en miettes (Paris: Flammarion, 2013). 30. The advert is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mq59yk PnAE. 31. See: http://www.personneltoday.com/hr/whats-in-a-name-hr-or-personnel-does -it-really-matter/. There are many similar and troubling examples of how selling one’s labour has become transmuted into selling one’s body, including many cases of students reportedly paying off their debts or working their way through college by prostitution or other sexual activities, in the worrying titled ‘sex industry’.

4

Skin in the Game

H

uman skin operates as a kind of boundary, demarcating the limits of our interiority while also permitting our aesthetic and experiential engagement with the materials of the world. As such, it is central to our identity. We can play with that identity—put skin into a game, as it were—by disguise or by art. In this way, skin also becomes the site of an uncertainty or indeterminacy. As Sebastian Faulks puts it in Where My Heart Used to Beat, ‘When you run your hand across another’s skin, is it merely your intention that distinguishes a lover’s heat from a doctor’s care?’.1 In asking this, Faulks brings the erotics of skin into intimacy with health, and also into the intimacy with death—the end of a doctor’s care—when skin has outlasted its purpose, and disintegrates the boundary between an inner-self or consciousness and the corruptions of material history and time. In these circumstances, skin is also often not just the matter of play; it can be a matter of politics. When Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, died from a self-inflicted bullet-wound that fatally pierced her skin, ‘The death certificate, signed by compliant doctors, said the cause of death was appendicitis’. Her death was a part of a political reality that had to be managed, and, under Stalin, ‘Suicide could not be acknowledged. Soviet ritual required collective expressions of grief from different professions’.2 Stalin was, apparently, much affected by her suicide. In this respect, it might be said, as in the words of another contemporary novelist, William Boyd, in his Sweet Caress, that ‘The deaths you witness, hear about, that are close to you—that you may cause or bring about, however inadvertently (I think of my dog, Flim)—are preparing you, covertly, incrementally, for your own eventual departure’.3

53

54    CHAPTER 4

In this chapter, I want to explore what it might mean to have ‘skin in the game’. When skin touches skin, it forms a bond; but the nature of that bond is not determined by the simple fact of interaction. It can form a bond that secures complicity in acts of love, or acts that lead to death. How, then, should we understand the metaphorical slang—putting skin into the game—that is so central to our modern conception of authenticity, of engaging material risk? Can it help us to understand the nature of complicity in financial terms, or in terms where money might have some relation either to the erotic or to the precariousness of a life that is ‘protected’ by our skin? 1. THE SOCIAL BOND In thinking of complicity up to now, we have been concerned with issues of compliance and of coercion. I now want to look at complicity in terms of the fundamental nature of our social contracts themselves. Society might be defined as something that constitutes itself through ‘membership’, through a series of claimed allegiances and affiliations, with ‘insiders’ whose very status as insiders depends upon marginalization of others. Such ‘insiders’ often constitute what we think of, however vaguely and imprecisely, as ‘the Establishment’;4 and they ‘establish’ themselves as insiders precisely by various strategies of exclusion and by the corollary construction of privileges for insiders, the privileges of membership. Do the negative aspects of complicity therefore contaminate the very idea of society-as-such, making it intrinsically a troubling aspect of the very fundamentals of how we might live together? If we think of society as being constructed through a series of social contracts or bonds, is it the case that we are ‘bound’ to complicity itself as an intrinsic structural determinant of all our relationships? One way of exploring this will be through an examination of ‘bonds’— especially bonds of a social nature—and what they signify. The logic of accountancy, as we saw, allows us to distance ourselves from material ­reality. The rendering of accounts is our way of evading personal responsibility— or liability—for actions in which we have been complicit participants. It converts ‘skin in the game’ to a purely metaphorical status in which the real participants in any bond really do not risk anything of themselves. Further, the triumphant rise of accountancy to its present status—as somehow normative of all relationships—is fundamentally detrimental to actual social engagement. Accountancy works by requiring us to play out every aspect of our roles through the symbolic orders of number, mathematics, and—above all—of finance, as if every aspect of living together or bonding was nothing more

S K I N I N T H E G A ME     55

or less than a financial transaction or investment of time, money, and calculations of inputs and outputs of desire. The dominant ideological forms of our times in the advanced economies—the normative idea that markets and privatization are somehow ‘natural’ and therefore incontestable—drives us to a complicity with such accountancy; but what if we were to consider the possibility of a bond in which the participants really did have skin in the game? How might that affect the idea of our contract with ‘society’, or our complicity with its fundamental idea? Shakespeare gave us precisely such a scenario in his Merchant of Venice. In the play, we will find Antonio—the merchant of the title—a trader who quite literally has skin in the game. His agreement with Shylock—their bond—entails that, if he loses, he loses not just money but ‘a pound of flesh’. This is skin in the game in a more literal sense than any of our contemporary capitalists or traders would ever understand. These contemporary traders typically re-describe investment as ‘exposure’, as when they suggest that investors might ‘have exposure to Asia’, say, when they mean that investors should buy or trade Asian stocks and shares. However, this ‘exposure’ does not reveal their actual skin: Antonio, in court, is required to do precisely that. Portia, in her disguise as a lawyer, tells Antonio explicitly, and to Shylock’s temporary delight, that, as a consequence of failure to fulfil the financial terms of his bond, ‘You must prepare your bosom for his knife. . . . Therefore lay bare your bosom’ (Act 4, sc. 1). As a title character, Antonio is rather lacking in distinctiveness. He is a man seemingly struck by a mood not just of melancholy but also even of accidie; he seems to have lost much of the appetite for life itself. He is Hamlet without any of the energy, so to speak: it is often as if he can’t even rouse himself to ask ‘what’s the point?’ or as if he has lost the will to live (more of that later). Against this, however, it is the very fact of the bond with Shylock, entered into in support of his friend Bassanio, that both quickens him into life and, simultaneously, threatens him with death. The bond, then, is a catalyst of sorts; and it forms the structural core of the plot and its various twists and turns. If we think of Antonio explicitly and purely in relation to the plot, he becomes a very interesting figure, for he is exactly like a catalyst in a chemical experiment. He is like the ‘shred of platinum’ described by T. S. Eliot in his ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ essay. Eliot uses the analogy of the catalyst to describe the ‘impersonal’ aspect of the mind of the poet, which he sees as a ‘receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, and images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together’.5 The catalyst, Eliot points out, essentially makes a chemical bond possible and is even necessary for such a

56    CHAPTER 4

bond to occur; but it itself is oddly unaffected by the chemical process. It is, as it were, precisely the cog that turns the ‘plot’ that brings other elements together and into conjunction, while somehow standing outside of the action. Antonio is a character who, on a superficial reading, might be thought to embody precisely such proto-Eliotic impersonality. Yet we can safely say that it is Antonio, more than anyone else in the whole of Shakespeare, who so commits to the materiality of experience that he, quite literally, has ‘skin in the game’. He knows, when he enters into his bond with Shylock, that he risks his own flesh. Other characters may know that they risk life; but nowhere else is there this explicit exposure of skin as such in the game of the play.6 The question that arises is whether Antonio is essentially a party to his own possible demise, and what this allows Shakespeare—and us—to explore is the question of our responsibility for our own survival. Survival is the central theme of this play—‘survival’ in the sense precisely of ‘living on’ or enduring or exceeding the bounds of one’s own biological, and bio-chemical, existence. And one way of describing our social bonds or contracts is to say that they are precisely engaged and entered into with a view to our survival; survival, in some fundamental way, is the very essence of society, the reason for its existence. In establishing social bonds, we establish also common interest—and thus we protect ourselves against the danger or threat of imminent death by sharing in each other’s survival. The sub-plot of the Merchant dramatizes this idea of survival most clearly, through the intervention of a last will and testament. A will is the expression, after death, of a voice that survives or lives on after death and that wills an action, most often associated with money. Portia is a rich woman, made so through inheritance from her dead father. Unsurprisingly, Bassanio (like the various princes who also woo her, and whom she rejects—in at least one case on explicitly racial grounds)7 sees her as a good ‘investment’. However, there is a sense in which Portia’s father lives on through the exigencies laid out in his last will; and, by thus ‘living on’ in the terms of this will, he circumscribes Portia’s own autonomy. The will states that Portia’s suitors must woo her by choosing from three caskets, in one of which the lucky suitor will find her image. Portia, as a dutiful daughter, is constrained to obey the terms of the will. The idea that governs the choosing of the caskets is that the ‘skin’ of the casket does not replicate what is inside. The casket that contains the image of Portia is neither the gold nor the silver caskets; and the suitors who choose these, Morocco and Arragon, are deceived in imagining a superficial relation—a direct correspondence or match—between skin and value, as if the skin itself revealed fully and transparently the intrinsic value of that which it contains. Instead, her image is to be found in the lead casket, the one that is the least showy, and

S K I N I N T H E G A ME     57

the most modest in outward appearance. The motto on this casket, however, is one that essentially requires the suitor to put his own skin in the game: ‘who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath’. The casket scenes, then, essentially enact a play of skins. They work to call into question the idea of authenticity as such, because authenticity is always—and must always be—compromised by politics and by strategy. In short, the self survives as long as it fails to reveal itself: the secret of survival is a form of deception, in which you are not forced to lose your skin, even if you hazard it in order to survive. That is to say: the play shows that you risk a life (or risk dying) in order to survive. In this sense, it is a rather extremist play, suggesting that survival—life itself—is conditioned precisely upon opening oneself to the possibility of death. It is Shakespeare’s most ‘Romantic’ play in this regard. The terms of this play prefigure some modern versions of the anti-hero with whom we have become familiar in Hollywood cinema. That anti-hero is usually someone who stands as an outsider to the Establishment, and sometimes outside the law. One of the interesting aspects of this is the figure who also is bodily marked in some way, or who lays his or her skin on the line. Perhaps the key figure is Al Pacino, an actor who follows in the Hollywood tradition of romantic and sometimes doomed anti-hero parts. Al Pacino, in one of his most celebrated roles in fact, plays Shylock in the 2004 film version of The Merchant of Venice. Pacino made his name not just with Scarface, but perhaps most famously in his role as Michael Corleone in the Godfather films, where Corleone is attractive and seductive in precise proportion to his status exactly as an outsider, as a mobster who is outside the law. The single most important thing about this character is that he finds himself thrust into complicity with the mobster and Mafia gang life that he had initially disdained. The travails experienced in dealing with such complicity and the necessities of compromise that it forces on some of our anti-hero characters is, indeed, one key characteristic of the classical Hollywood anti-hero. Prior to Pacino, we could consider actors such as Marlon Brando, especially in his key role in On the Waterfront. His character there, Terry Malloy, is also a character who has skin in the game, as he is a former boxer. The reason he has given up boxing is, appropriately enough here, financial: he agreed to throw a fight—where he had skin in the game—for money, so that a Mafia-related union leader (Johnny Friendly) wins a bet. In this case, however, the Brandocharacter is establishing a different kind of complicity: he works against the Mafia, and brings the union back to its rightful power. The anti-heroic idea of risking a life to save a life—the fundamental theme of survival or living on, or the theme of ‘the will’ in its widest senses, up to

58    CHAPTER 4

and including the will to live itself—is also at the core of the court scenes in Shakespeare’s play.8 Those scenes play on the nature of the bond in its most fully legalistic senses. For Shylock, the bond is a legal arrangement; and he wants to stand by it. This requires that Antonio should also stand by the bond into which he entered, ostensibly freely. As Shylock realizes that Antonio cannot stand surety for the money given to Bassanio, he repeats obsessively that ‘I’ll have my bond’, rehearsing that statement some four times in ten lines or so in Act 3, scene 3. In court, when he repeats again and again that he must be bound himself by the bond, he states, baldly, that ‘I stand here for law’, and that ‘I crave the law’. The oddity of this play is that this—ostensibly a reasonable position—is turned into a position with which we are discouraged from sympathizing. While normally we would be expected to comply with the lawful, as a condition of being within a society and being affiliated to its norms, The Merchant of Venice makes this a less tenable proposition. Does it follow that we become complicit with somehow wanting to break with the law, indeed to be outside of the law as such? Does it also follow that, in terms of our position with respect to membership of lawful society, we are thereby choosing the path of exile—which, in a play focused on a Jew living in the diaspora, has a particular resonance? Shylock’s predicament lies in the fact that he believes that his bond—his complying with the law—is what will give him not only justice but also some form of advantage. It is law ‘with interest’, as it were, even if in fact the ‘interest’ in question is simply reparation for what he perceives as a series of wrongs done to him, including wrongs done to him as a result of Christian anti-Semitism. Law will allow him to do as he wishes—that is, to take his pound of flesh, regardless of consequences for Antonio. Law is what absolves Shylock himself of any responsibility for shouldering those consequences, or so he thinks; and he can hide his own personal desire for vengeance behind the impersonal formality and neutral propriety of law as such. For him, law is a matter of accountancy, as it were. However, the intervention of Portia, in her interpretation of the words of the bond, circumscribes and delimits Shylock’s action. He becomes more bound than binding, as it were; and he becomes literally caught up within and entangled within the law. He is like a character in Dickens or Kafka; he hopes that law will emancipate and be permissive, when it actually simply and menacingly embraces him to the point of threatening his survival. The play operates by encouraging our sympathy with a position in which he who stands by law becomes trapped by law. In this sense, then, the play does indeed seem to want to make us outlaws, to make us complicit with a reading of the law that calls just treatment or justice itself into doubt.

S K I N I N T H E G A ME     59

Convention has it that the hero of the court scene is Portia, in her disguise as a clever lawyer, deft in her rhetorical manipulations of the text of the law. Her great speech is one in which she calls for the regulatory demands of the law to be tempered by mercy, asking that we do not, in fact, obey the law strictly. Mercy is proposed as something that will transcend the law; or, more precisely put, mercy replaces one system of law with another. ‘The quality of mercy is not strained’, she famously argues, proposing that everyone benefits from it as ‘it blesseth him that gives and him that takes’. This system of law, argues Portia, is one based not just on mercy but also on a kind of gratuitousness: grace itself, or a culture of the gift rather than the bond. It would be a neat structuring of the tensions in this play if we were to see—as the conventional criticism usually in fact does—that there is a structural opposition between the money-grabbing and legalistic Shylock and this speech concerning mercy and grace. Shylock is, in a fairly literal sense, disgraceful: he lacks grace, and will not give. The letter of the bond is what he will observe, regardless of consequences for Antonio. Portia’s ‘mercy’ speech suggests that we should set this kind of literal-mindedness and straightforward bookkeeping or bureaucratic accountancy against mercy or grace. Most readings of the play not only understand this as a foundational opposition that structures its meaning, but also take it that we sympathize with the position of grace as outlined by and characterized in Portia. The real structural opposition governing this play, of course—an opposition probably known more intimately to Shakespeare’s contemporaries who lived it as daily experience, than to our own—is that between Old and New Testament versions of ‘the law’. It is a straightforward opposition between Old and New Testament versions of how we should live and expect justice. The Old has the vengeful God who balances the books: eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life. This Old Law permits of the death sentence, the point in law where one’s skin is radically implicated and where the responsibility for an action is literally inscribed upon the skin of the perpetrator. The New Law, against this, replaces bookkeeping (a bookkeeping whose last entry is the measured weight of flesh itself) with gratuitous behaviour, with behaviour that is more concerned with the quality of mercy and not the quantity of measure. This New Law is proposed here as one that is essentially against a bureaucratic accounting of a life and of ourselves, whereas the Old subscribes to the view that an action that is judged to be against the society can be literally balanced and repaired, restored to a bland neutrality, by the measuring of flesh as it hangs from a rope. We see similar moments at various junctures in Shakespeare, one good example being in Hamlet, when Hamlet tells Polonius to make the visiting troupe of actors welcome. Polonius says ‘My lord, I will use them according

60    CHAPTER 4

to their desert’. Hamlet’s response reveals that there is a conflict between such ‘just desert’ and the generosity and grace of hospitality: ‘God’s body­ kins, man, much better: use every man / after his desert, and who should ‘scape whipping?’ If we go by merit alone, by ‘just measure’ of quantity then, like Shylock, we will ourselves find no favour; rather go the way of quality, and especially the qualities of mercy and hospitality.9 So far, then, so clear: Shakespeare proposes a New Testament or willto-grace, set against an Old Law of vengeance and the revenge of weighted eye-for-eye, of the hanging weight of a body set against responsibility for an action that a society wants to delegitimize. However, what this fails to note is that Portia—and in this she indeed perfectly personifies the play—is herself anything but merciful. Three times Shylock tries to survive, to save his own skin and his own livelihood, when he realizes he has been trapped verbally. But Portia is relentless: ‘[A]s thou urgest justice, be assured / Thou shalt have justice, more than thou desirest’; ‘The Jew shall have all justice; soft! no haste: / He shall have nothing but the penalty’; ‘Thou shalt have nothing but the forfeiture, / To be so taken at thy peril, Jew’; and, finally, ‘Tarry, Jew: / The law hath yet another hold on you’. These are Portia’s lines, hardly an indication of the mercy with which we are encouraged to associate her. Portia, simply, will not let him escape: she keeps him within the cage of the law, in its grip; and she does so in order to wreak revenge upon him. This, in fact, is one of Shakespeare’s most vengeful judges: she ensures that Shylock loses everything and shows him absolutely no mercy whatsoever. Perhaps as ‘a Daniel come to judgement’, she is indeed and precisely an embodiment of the Old Law itself.10 The relevant reference here—the ‘Daniel come to judgement’—is biblical. It comes from the Book of Daniel, in the Old Testament, where Daniel is brought before King Belshazzar, on account of his reputation for having ‘an excellent spirit, and knowledge, and understanding, interpreting of dreams, and shewing of hard sentences.’ The writing that Daniel has to interpret is the famous phrase ‘Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin’, which Daniel interprets fundamentally as a warning to Belshazzar that he has been found wanting. Daniel is telling truth to power. By contrast, Portia is endorsing prejudicial power. Clearly, the simple structural opposition of grace against accountancy, mercy against law, will not hold. Further, the text has worked in such a way as to make the audience entirely complicit in Portia’s actions here—which is why it is so rarely (if ever) remarked upon that we have been made complicit with an act of pure vengeance, pure Old Testamentary revenge of an antiSemitic and racist nature. So now the question must be asked again: where do we stand in relation to the law of the land? Will we be complicit with it when it exacts a death

S K I N I N T H E G A ME     61

penalty, or when it so hounds an individual who (however nasty she or he may be) has fallen foul of the majority view or consensual social arrangements? Will we be complicit with legally sanctioned and permitted prejudice? It is this—rather than the usual simple question of whether the play entertains anti-Semitic thoughts or not (it clearly does so, but that is just the start of a much bigger argument)—that is at the core of this text as a ‘problem’ text for us. The real problem is that literature is here making us complicit with a system of law that the text itself appears to want us to reject. And, at this stage, we are faced with the question of how to judge: that is, the problem that we see in this text is, quite simply, that it demands critique, it demands and requires that we engage a critical faculty in order to find out what to say and do next. As Lyotard has it, the problem for us is how to ‘link with’ this text (that is, to find out ‘what do we now say’ in the face of hearing the text, or seeing the play), and how to do so in a spirit of justice and just judgement or criticism. The text shows the fundamental difficulty involved in the Danielposition, the position that we so often valorise—almost to the point of heroism—as a criticism that ‘speaks truth to power’. Speaking truth to power is, here, not a simple and straightforward matter. This, of course, is literary and fictional. However, if we want some real and material fleshly skin in the game, we can move from this purely fictional episode to other cases that are historical. Consider, for example, the contemporary political question of migration, a question that is shaping a contemporary historical state of affairs in which unparalleled numbers of humans are on the move across various nations, fleeing persecution or poverty: looking for survival. In a brief encounter that went viral on the web, Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, found herself in just such a situation.11 During a visit to a school in Rostock, under a programme called Gut Leben in Deutschland, Mrs. Merkel took a question from a Palestinian girl, identified as Reem. Reem pointed out that she and her family faced the possibility of deportation from Germany. Reem said that she had goals and desires like everyone else of her age, and that her situation seemed so unfair: ‘I have goals in life like everyone else. I want to go to University . . . it’s very unpleasant to see how others can enjoy life, and I can’t myself’. This speech is exactly the same in its intent as Shylock’s famous exhortation and plea when he is taunted in Act 3, scene 1. He points out that he is badly treated by Antonio, ‘and what’s his reason? I am a Jew.’ But he goes on—and this is precisely akin to what Reem, the Palestinian, is also saying (despite the obvious ethnic differences, which are nonetheless worth considering here) in her own context as a Palestinian refugee in Rostock:

62    CHAPTER 4

Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die?

Merkel responds to Reem by taking the formal and legal line. ‘There are thousands of refugees in Palestinian camps. We can’t take them all’; and here, she is, as it were, standing by the impersonally formal and legal position. Yet it is a position that cannot account for the material reality of Reem, a young woman of flesh and blood, sitting before her. In this instance, the skin in the game is visible when Merkel feels the obligation to console Reem directly and physically as she steps over to her to hug her. This is a real and material human, a real body and person: Reem is not an abstract ‘refugee’, merely one example of that equally abstract ‘thousands of refugees’, and Merkel’s speech falters when faced with the realities that go beyond political abstraction. In this situation, then, Merkel’s problem—and ours—is simple but devastating: how do we judge, and what do we do? We are here radically implicated in a judgement; and we have no straightforward grounds on which to arrive at the solution, grounds that will incontrovertibly give legitimation to our judgement. Here, then, follows what may be the most important paragraph in this entire book: This is the condition that we can identify, in its purest form, as criticism itself: the necessity of judging, the requirement that it be a matter where we have skin in the game as a material responsibility to others, and yet we have no stable ground on which to rest our judgement as it hovers precisely between reasoned abstraction and material particularity. This is what we can call criticism as that which exists between two modes of ‘complicity’: the mode of collaboration and the mode of commitment. Merkel’s own way out appears to be through what we can call the ‘Angelo’ solution or strategy, taking this again from Shakespeare. Measure for Measure is another play in which the law and the question of judgement are central preoccupations. The title of this play derives from another of Shakespeare’s biblical sources, in Matthew 7:1 where we read ‘Judge not that ye be not judged / For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again’. As with Portia’s ‘mercy’ speech, this is another appeal to grace and to gratuitous giving the benefit of doubt. Yet the point, for Shakespeare, is that it avoids the necessity

S K I N I N T H E G A ME     63

of criticism, for it explicitly suggests that we can somehow avoid making judgements. This, as the play makes clear, is what we cannot do. There is no escape from the thorny problem. Criticism calls out to us, as it were; and it will not permit us to ignore the call. The classic Angelo strategy—which I suggest Merkel also follows—avoids responsibility, displaces it onto an abstraction: law itself. Merkel/Angelo can thus shelter behind the form of judgement while avoiding the content and reality of it. They have no skin in the game. In the Shakespeare text, Angelo has been placed in the position of judge, to try to restore law and order in a country that has become dissolute under a duke who has been lax. The problem case arises when Angelo’s observance of the law conflicts with his personal desire: that is, when he has some skin in the game. He wants to bed Isabella, whose brother, Claudio, faces the death sentence after being caught out in the criminal misdemeanour of having sex before marriage. Isabella pleads for Claudio; and the plot will turn on the fact that Angelo hovers between observing the law in all its abstract clarity (Claudio must die) and blurring that clarity by the extension of mercy, but mercy that is itself conditional on Isabella consenting to having sexual relations with Angelo himself. The key element, though, is in Angelo’s erasure of himself from the act of judging. In the face of Isabella’s plea, he tells her: Be you content, fair maid; It is the law, not I condemn your brother: Were he my kinsman, brother, or my son, It should be thus with him: he must die tomorrow.

This—this Angelo—is also Angela, Angela Merkel: ‘It is the law, not I’. Clearly, here, I do not intend to single Angela Merkel out for particular or sole criticism; rather, I suggest that this is but one particular example of a much more widespread situation surrounding migration, especially within Europe. The key to understanding the problem relates to our central concern with complicity and the law.12 Merkel and those who stand firm and unbowed in their position of ‘upholding the law no matter what’ essentially require us to be complicit here with a situation in which individuals are threatened with the impossibility of survival. These people—refugees—have skin in the game in the most fundamental way possible.13 It is an inadequate response to their situation to absolve ourselves of the responsibilities of judgement, to say that there is some abstract law to which we will require that they conform. This is to render the individual as an abstraction, as a ‘refugee’ rather than as Reem or as an individual person with skin and with a life at stake.

64    CHAPTER 4

In this context, it is worth noting that the political norms require that we are indeed complicit with a specific financial ideology. Many contemporary migrants—some of them seeking asylum and refuge, some seeking escape from structural poverty and immiseration—are extraordinarily resourceful. They risk their lives in crossing continents, in some cases travelling extraordinary distances on foot and without shelter, in their determination to find a better place to live, to survive. They are poor; and we are encouraged to regard them with suspicion. Other individuals, however, move with remarkable ease, finding that their financial position will grant them speedy access to nations in Europe and privileged positions on arrival. These latter are called ‘entrepreneurs’, and we are encouraged to find them desirable. Clearly, the real entrepreneurs here are the poor: it is they who have shown their mettle, their determination, their grit against all odds, and so on. The language that we use to describe these two groups, however, is designed to make us complicit with the privileges of wealth—a wealth that in many cases is more or less responsible for the immiseration of the poor who seek survival. While the poor seek survival, the wealthy just seek more money. And we are being forced into complicity with money against and over survival. We are Bassanio, willing to risk the life of our friend for our own personal gain. Yet the law itself seems to require that we be complicit with this state of affairs. Propriety, as it were, requires complicity with a system that might lead to the impossibility of survival for other humans. What do we do? The answer to that is complex, obviously, for anyone who realizes that politics is about strategy as much as it is about care for others and respect for the social. Yet it is also equally clear that the answer is not to come up with the bureaucrat’s eternal defence of ‘it wasn’t me’ or ‘I’m just following orders’ or ‘I am observing all the correct procedures and protocol’. 2. MARTIAL BONDS AND THE OFFICE DRONE Some time ago, Paul Virilio established some fundamental grounds on which he outlined and described the structural links combining technology, war, and politics. Fundamentally, he showed that what we think of as civilisation—the growth of cities as political spaces where people work together for common ends and with shared beneficent interests—depends upon the technologies of both speed and conflict. Initially, he argued, human conflicts were deeply intimate: people fought skin to skin, as it were—what remains classed as ‘hand-to-hand combat’, which becomes increasingly rare in the history of warfare (though it persists in various ways, of course, perhaps especially in guerrilla warfare). In that

S K I N I N T H E G A ME     65

s­ituation, one mode of defence and survival is to establish a distance between yourself and your aggressor. You run, at a speed; but, as your aggressor runs after you, you need to try to place impediments in his way to slow him down and increase the distance between you, so you strew obstacles behind you as you run. Gradually, having established some distance, you need to look back and survey the scene to find your aggressor; and now, you have time—you have literally made the time or made a temporal distance between you and your aggressor—to start to build upwards and make an observatory post and ramparts. This, in Virilio’s account, is the start of a city. It builds up, with defences; and it is built literally on speed, in that it is built on the relation between time and distance. Obviously, this is a mythic narrative; but its point is to demonstrate that technologies of speed relate to war, and war to civilisation itself. Cities are built upon a war mentality; and, for our present purposes, cities are built literally to ‘save your skin’, to put a distance between your skin and that of the enemy so that you no longer have direct skin in the war game. Contemporary war owes something to this. However, contemporary war is shaped by two things: (a) a widening of the distance between the combatant and the scene of the kill, as in the use of unstaffed drones in warfare; and (b) a narrowing of the distance between the combatant and the scene of the kill, as in suicide bombings. Our question here relates to whether these two positions are essentially complicit with each other; and, more importantly still, whether our contemporary mode of civilisation—which, through the dominance of bureaucratic ‘accountancy’ over personal responsibility, eschews having skin in the game as much as possible—is itself complicit with war as a mode of life, of civilised living on or survival. War here might be seen not just (as in Clausewitz, famously) as the continuation of politics: it might actually constitute politics. We can begin from a brief consideration of the increased use of unstaffed drones in war. Chris Woods has explored how drones work and, more importantly, how they impact upon the people who operate them. The cliché is that the drone operator is so distanced from the act of killing that she or he sees war simply as some kind of computer game, some video game, in which nothing much is at stake. The cynical view is that, even at such a remove of thousands of miles, the drone operator is complicit (cynically and carelessly complicit) in acts of murder. This is a false and overly limited understanding of what is going on. The detailed analysis demonstrates a high level of psychological stress, even if these soldiers are sitting in an office thousands of miles from the action, working regular shifts like any other office worker and going home

66    CHAPTER 4

a­ fterwards to the safety of suburban life. Perhaps the real question, then, is not so much about the specifics of drone warfare; rather, we should be asking how it is that regular office work has become itself shaped by the regulated protocols that govern warfare. This, as my previous chapter on accountancy shows, is a recurring issue, and one of increasing importance in our contemporary social structures and social bonds. Increasingly, contemporary regular office work distances the worker from the consequences of the work, and certainly removes her or him from having responsibility for those consequences: it removes from consideration the question of whether those consequences will affect people with skin in the game in the material conditions of their life. We need to be stirred by the intrusion of something personal, such as the pain felt and expressed by Reem, to penetrate the shield that contemporary management builds between the work and its outcomes. Reem’s tears are what temporarily break the political norms of the operation of migration policy for Merkel, for example. In the Shakespearean literary example, it is personal and sexual desire that threatens the shield given by the norms of the law of the land. There are plenty of examples, in material history, of how this operates: we usually refer to them as political scandals, in which politicians are found with trousers down, really or metaphorically, exposed in some scandal where their political life has been compromised by sexual desire. The most famous UK case of this—indeed, the model case—is, of course, the 1963 Profumo scandal; but that is simply one characteristic case of something that is extremely widespread.14 In the sphere of ‘office politics’ where the business is drone warfare explicitly—that is, in the military office in the US ‘Distributed Ground System One’, one of the offices from which drone operations are controlled—Chris Woods rehearses an account of one day, as told to him by a mission controller named Janet Atkins. The day in question is one in which she witnesses a death. ‘During a raid’, she is reported as saying, ‘one of the suspects went out the back door and we were told to follow them. All of a sudden we see one of the Blue Forces K9s [dogs] going after them, and the man had a suicide bomb on and blew up with one of the dogs on him’. The incident affected her deeply and emotionally, bringing her to tears while actually still working on the mission. She went on, ‘Part of me was like, the dog was on our side, our team, and I just couldn’t believe it happened. That was the first time that I ever saw one of our own die. And I think, too, just because it was a dog, it’s not like he knew what was happening. I know that it’s their job but it hit me. I was like, “Oh my God that could have been one of our guys!”’15 At one level, of course, the fact that this is a dog—emblem of fidelity and trust—raises the issue of sentimentality. However, we should also recall that this is precisely how Shylock is treated in The Merchant of Venice.

S K I N I N T H E G A ME     67

­ onfronted by the anti-Semitic Antonio, Shylock points out to him that ‘You C call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog, / And spit upon my Jewish gabardine’. Antonio needs money, and in reply Shylock asks ‘What should I say to you? Should I not say / “Hath a dog money? Is it possible / A cur can lend three thousand ducats?”’ (Act 1, sc. 3). Yet the scene described by Janet Atkins is significant for other reasons too. It brings together the remote-controlled drone through which Atkins herself has no direct skin in the game, the suicide bomber whose skin is very clearly thoroughly present, and the dog as a kind of surrogate-human participant (‘that could have been one of our guys’). Crucially, Atkins points to the obvious fact that the dog itself does not fully ‘understand’ the situation: ‘it’s not like he knew what was happening’. The dog is, indeed, in precisely the position of the regular ‘drone’ or office worker, who is not expected to understand the nature of the overall business, but simply to play a functional role; and, in this case, the role is to take the place of human skin. The dog in the case preserves human skin by sacrificing its own—though sacrifice is not the precise word for a situation in which the dog is not a freely engaging participant. Can the same be said of the suicide bomber in the case? He, too, is carrying out a role; but is it one in which he has freely chosen his participation? There is no doubt that, for most suicide bombers, the suicide is indeed construed as an act of sacrifice. However, it is one thing to sacrifice oneself; it is quite another to kill others while doing so, and by doing so making them unwilling participants in your act. This latter is murder; but it is murder in which skin itself is of paramount importance. The skin of the bomber—the texture between his inside and the outside—is the very weapon that will be detonated in the terrorist act. While it implicates her or his victims, it cannot be said to make them complicit with the act. Our question is whether Atkins and the bomber are fundamentally complicit with each other in a situation whereby there is no fundamental distinction between war and civilisation. Both are ‘operatives’—the bomber seeing his work as carrying out the will of the ultimate boss, God; Atkins carrying out her regulated functions—and so the question is whether either of them are acting in a way that re-engages responsibility. One of them—the suicide bomber—very clearly has skin in the game; the other feels as if she has skin in the game, but the skin in question is not her own but that of the dog. This distinction is important. Atkins, remember, although strictly speaking and officially a combatant, operates at a vast distance from the field. If she—via the skin of the dog—is at least indirectly involved in murder, then the question follows very clearly: are all other office workers who sustain the position and office of Atkins also, likewise, complicit in the same act? In short, with reference to this specific

68    CHAPTER 4

case, is US ‘civilisation’—once that civilisation is defined as being ‘in opposition to terror’—complicit with the very structures that sustain terror, but distanced from it simply by dint of technology? That is to say, has the ‘war on terror’ become such that its object is not just the Taliban, Al-Qaida, Islamic State, and so on, but actually civilisation itself? Has Atkins killed her own man, her own literal ‘dogsbody’? Given, further, that many workers know that they operate simply as this kind of dogsbody in their daily work, is it the case that we are all complicit in a series of actions that make us responsible for the attack not just on terrorists but also on civilisation itself? In short: is the ‘war on terror’ itself an act of terror, this time conducted against the dogsbodies that live in and that work to try to sustain civilisation in the first place? 3. COMPLICITY AS THE HIERARCHY OF POWER To answer this—and to conclude this current section of the argument about the nature of our martial bonds—we need to consider more fully the nature of how we enter into our social contracts or bonds. There is a profound difference between complicity and cooperation: the former depends upon hierarchical or vertical power structures and can be enforced by coercion; the latter is horizontal, predicated upon equality and non-coercive freedom. This helps explain why ‘complicity’ is always cast in negative semantic terms (it’s the kind of bad thing whose extreme form is wartime collaboration), whereas ‘cooperation’ is always positively cast (we like it and it is the basis of civilisation). The suicide bomber, of course, claims the ultimate hierarchical authority for his coercive act; most regular office workers and dogsbodies have only the secular boss to look up to. Clearly, these two are worlds apart in material terms; yet, structurally, they are fundamentally organized around the same subscription to hierarchical authority or power. Yet, as I have already argued and as the biblical Daniel shows, it is not the case that ‘speaking truth to power’ will suffice to eradicate the iniquitous hierarchies upon which complicity and its coercive mode of operation breeds. The situation is more complicated than that, in that those who speak truth to power are prone to enter into a repetition of exactly the same structure as the hierarchy that they eschew or critique in the first place. The answer lies elsewhere, perhaps closer to something we can now explore as proper cooperation. Cooperation has its logical culmination in consensus, that establishment of a kind of ‘common sense’ or sensus communis that allows us to establish a system of laws to which we can all freely subscribe and which will give

S K I N I N T H E G A ME     69

us the norms and terms of our social bonds and contracts. Consensus is the basis of consent; and consent is the basis of democratic politics. It follows that we now have a problem if we can show that our complicity with certain political actions that are allegedly in defence of civilisation are not grounded in consensus or consent. If these actions do not operate on the basis of consensus and consent, then it follows that what we call civilisation is actually coercive and undemocratic. (It is very important here to bear in mind the opposition between ‘what we call civilisation’ and ‘civilisation as such’. I am questioning the former.) Our democratic modes and principles of cooperation are thereby being silently perverted into complicities with a system that is grounded in a war upon civilisation itself. In short, if a bond is entered into by someone who is so constrained by circumstance that the bond itself is simply an articulation of power, then cooperation has become complicity. If we are a dogsbody without any real or realistic say in whether or not we have skin in the game, then we are placed in a position of complicity. In the case of the suicide bomber, say, who rests his ‘free’ decision to kill himself upon the will of a transcendent power or god, then the ‘decision’ is not free at all: who could legitimately resist the will of a god? It follows that the suicide terrorist is complicit with a system grounded in coercion and in the eradication of human freedom. However, it also follows that our present modes of resistance to this are likewise implicated in the general eradication of freedom, as the case of the desk-murderers explored above all show. Our cooperation with a soi-disant civilisation has become enforced complicity, when the civilisation in question is shaped by the distancing of our skin from the game, or by the transference of our risks onto the skin and bodies of our general dogsbodies: bureaucratic operatives of an impersonal system. Yet there is, of course, a world of difference and more between the terrorist on one hand, and on the other hand those who would defend living on, survival, against a terror that is death-centred and death-loving. It is this that we can now explore; and the way into it is through what has been called either a ‘conspiracy of good’ or, applied more generally, ‘the banality of good’.16 4. RESISTANCE AND THE CLANDESTINE It would make a neat stance to suggest that the logic of the argument positively valorizes the idea of having skin in the game, of being fully and authentically involved, in a fully material and bodily sense, in the decision making that leads to responsibility. However, things are clearly not that simple; and this is far from what I am arguing here. Indeed, in many cases, having skin in

70    CHAPTER 4

the game is every bit as bad—as complicit with complicity—as being bureaucratically removed. The argument really is for the preservation of skin, for the survival of skin, and for the radical undecidability that I am characterizing as the very name of criticism. The point about such undecidability, of course, is that it can only ever be temporary: in every instance when we are faced with a choice, we do choose. As Lyotard has it, il faut enchaîner, and we ‘link’ with whatever has been given to us by making a decision: even silence is a mode of linking with what we have been given, as Lyotard points out. Yet the further point is that every such decision is now an engagement with the political. A criticism that acknowledges undecidability is a criticism that reawakens the very possibility of politics; and it is a criticism that accepts responsibility. By contrast, a mode of critique that has already decided its political stance and that makes decisions in accord (or in complicity) with that stance is nothing more or less than accountancy, however reputable the political position may in fact be. Consider, in the light of this, acts of resistance. Resistance, in general, might be described as a refusal to conform. This gives a resonance to the position of people in France during the second war, where ‘In the cult of Pétain, to disobey was to betray’.17 In a context such as this, conformity becomes normative and anything resembling the mildest criticism is debarred from the enjoyment of legitimacy: criticism is no longer the expression of a view, but is the betrayal of a consensus. Those who comply become forced into ‘a vicious cycle of docility and prudence’;18 and this is a useful description of the very opposite of criticism. I have stressed before that criticism is the name we give to a certain impasse, one where we must make a decision but where we have no grounds on which to rest assured of the validity of that decision. Criticism is where we attempt to find consensus, not to endorse it, and certainly not to endorse a supposed consensus that is simply the establishment of oligarchical or otherwise undemocratic power; and we attempt to find it by thinking anew and by establishing bonds through that thinking together: cooperation, and cooperation essentially in the matter of research or of inventing a new state of affairs in the material world. In this way, cooperation can be seen as the opposite of collaboration; and also as anathema to complicity. Cooperation, in fact, is not just the essence of criticism; it is also the essence of resistance, by which I mean resistance in many senses: resistance to conformity but also political and historical resistance, résistance. In one description of this, Caroline Moorehead outlines how some résistants in Vichy France worked to help save numerous children in the village of Vénissieux. In August 1942, Jewish people started being rounded up

S K I N I N T H E G A ME     71

to be transported to Vichy. Initially, children were to be exempt from the transportation; but then, driven by purely bureaucratic demands to make up numbers, they were suddenly to be included and sent onto the trains. Moorehead reveals that bureaucratic orders had indicated quotas of Jews to be transported; but, being organized through bureaucracy, there were protocols to be followed. When the protocols got in the way of the target numbers, they were changed. To resist this, numbers of people had to work together to try to thwart the Nazis and the Vichy collaborators, those who would simply conform to the new Nazi rules and laws. They succeeded; but the key point is that critical cooperation now had to become identifiable with a certain illegitimacy, with going underground. As Moorehead has it, ‘All were now conscious that the days of legitimacy, of working in accordance with Vichy rules, were finally over, and that what lay ahead was an increasingly dangerous time of clandestinity’.19 The more general point that we can derive from this is that criticism itself is partly defined precisely by such clandestine modes of underground cooperation; and that it is often regarded precisely as illegitimate. This is its strength: it is a bastard form, and in this it recalls the question of ‘being a bastard’ with which I opened this study as a whole. There is a moment when, to avoid complicity with the banality of evil that passes as ‘normal’ and as the legitimate mode of civilised existence, one has to stand up as and for that which is bastard. The bastard, in this sense, is she or he who has no settled identity, she or he who will not turn to the certainties of religious fundamentalisms or political dogma, working instead in pursuit of more genuine thinking and judging, in pursuit of responsibility. There is, as it were, an intimacy between the bastard and the resister; both are of the underground, both have necessarily wavering identities. This means that both occupy the figure of the persona: both are political precisely by their activities of cooperation and an instability that necessitates clandestine action. 5. THE CASE OF THE SPY, WHOSE VERY NAME IS BOND Complicity involves us in an establishment of bonds. It implies that we bind ourselves to someone or to some project; and, in doing so, that we loosen our bonds with others and even with ourselves. One who is complicit in an action, then, is one who is making a choice and professing an allegiance. To this extent, complicity involves the professions and their professors. It also resembles, structurally, a mode of ‘confession’ with confessors, as in ­Matthew 18:18: ‘Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven:

72    CHAPTER 4

and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven’. Typically, of course, once complicity in a nefarious act is discovered, it is incumbent on those who were complicit with it to make such a confession. Complicity thus involves both professions and confessions: it asks us to take a stand with respect to our bonds. Yet what is this bond that we establish in our complicities? In a chemical bond, atoms bind together to make a compound whose strength is greater, through the simple fact of bonding, than the sum of the atomized elements. It establishes what we can call ‘compound interest’, a binding of interests that leads to a profit or an excess in some way. Bonds such as this, we might say, are like financial bonds, in that their point is to make profit or to produce something that was not there before. Bonds, then, do not just imply the profession of an accord or the confession of an agreement. They go beyond a simple state of affairs in which the partners to the bond are amenable to each other, willing to engage in bondage, as it were, with each other. The structure that the bond makes is not itself entirely neutral, but—as with the fetish of sexualized bondage—at least covertly involves a structure of unequal powers. Many bonds—as in legal cases, for example—signify the production of debts and duties. In this case, a bond ties us down, restricts the future movement of one partner in some way, tying her or him to an agreement made in the present moment in the form of a debt that will need to be paid—often with compound interest. Bonds and interests, in this sense, go together. There is, however, one great bond that has a contemporary significance culturally: the bond known as James, James Bond. Since the days of the Cold War, the Bond novels and films—especially the films—have had enormous commercial success. Why might that be the case? The fictional James Bond was not a desk-murderer: ‘Double-O’ status derives from the ‘licence to kill’; and Bond gains it because he has killed two people in the field. Yet, since these murders are governed by a ‘licence to kill’, they remain within the law; and, indeed, in killing in this way, Bond acts in entire complicity with a law that is thought to transcend the regular laws of the land. The justification for the licence to kill is political: this is state-sanctioned violence. The novels, structured around the logic of espionage, are predicated on the assumption of a lack of bonds, so to speak: they are organized around the fact that people cannot be trusted, because of unstated motivations for their actions. Bond’s task, always, is to unmask those who are complicit with the bad guys (whoever they may be, but usually communists) and to reinstate the values of brisk British empiricism. That is to say, his task is to bind the audience into complicity with the belief that it is always the others who are to blame for whatever is going wrong, the others who are a threat to our native

S K I N I N T H E G A ME     73

interests. Nationalism, nativism, and racism are all of a piece in this: they are complicit with each other. It is almost inevitable—notwithstanding the claims made for civic nationalism—that the nationalist, while not supporting racism, finds herself complicit with it. The Bond franchise, then, is itself a key element in the establishment of what is fundamentally a ‘national bond’, one that gives us the narrative of self-justification and that binds us together in that narrative. That this is a product of the Cold War is itself interesting. The real significance of the Bond character is that he is a nexus for a national character: the British gentleman class, an all-rounder, keen on fair play (and standing up for it against foreign bullies), and a good combination of manliness and companionship. The villains in the novels, especially the early novels, are all themselves stereotypical foreigners. As Jeremy Black has pointed out, there is a geopolitical dimension to this. The novels, set in the Cold War, serve to bolster certain ideas of a British imperial ruling class, and this is set against what are fundamentally racial stereotypes of the foreigners, which, as Black puts it, ‘reflected the role of ethnicity and racialism in his [Fleming’s] politics and a disinclination to look for evil among the British’.20 By approaching it in terms of the idea of bonds and complicities, however, I want here to tease out what is, and should be, at stake for us. The question facing us in this chapter relates to whether we will bind ourselves to law, and whether an allegiance to the laws of the land or to the laws of religion—both seen as transcending historical material actualities—should bind us. When is it permissible to break our complicity with social and political norms in order to prioritize human and material particularity and historical materiality? This, essentially a political issue regarding our bonding together in a state of democracy, is the subject of the next chapter. NOTES  1. Sebastian Faulks, Where My Heart Used to Beat (Hutchinson, 2015), 3.   2.  Peter Finn and Petra Couvée, The Zhivago Affair (Vintage, 2015), 37.  3. William Boyd, Sweet Caress (Bloomsbury, 2015), 437.   4.  The original conception of the ‘Establishment’ was that identified by Henry Fairlie in the mid-1950s, and it included Oxbridge, the upper echelons of national institutions like the BBC, as well as the upper reaches of the civil service and legal institutions. The idea of an Establishment that is based upon exclusions and privileges has been revived in recent times by Owen Jones, in his The Establishment; and How They Get Away with It (Allen Lane, 2014).   5.  T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Selected Essays (3rd edn., 1951; repr. Faber & Faber, 1980), 18.

74    CHAPTER 4

  6.  There are, obviously, other plays in which exposure is important: King Lear on the heath, for example, stripping himself to the condition of a ‘poor, bare, fork’d animal’ like Poor Tom. However, my point here is that the exposure of skin is structural to the plot in The Merchant of Venice in a uniquely explicit way.   7.  When Morocco chooses the wrong casket, Portia says ‘A good riddance. Draw the curtains, go. / Let all of his complexion choose me so’ (Act 2, sc. 7). Rather than see the play purely in terms of anti-Semitism, it might be more appropriate to consider it under a much more generalized racism. For present purposes, the key is that Portia thinks of marriage partners in terms of ‘exclusions’ from her establishment.   8.  As is well-known, Shakespeare, especially in the Sonnets, plays on the various ideas of the will in relation to his own name. I want to suggest here that he is fundamentally tying his name—Will—to the very idea of survival, or to the living on of his voice. It is less a ‘will-to-power’ and more a simple will-to-live. Survival is Shakespeare’s fundamental theme.   9.  For a superb analysis of ‘just desert’ economics, see the work of Avner Offer, especially two papers, ‘A Warrant for Pain: Caveat Emptor vs. the Duty of Care in American Medical System c. 1970–2010’, Real World Economics Review, 61 (Sep 2012), 85–99 ; and ‘Sympathy, Self-Interest and the Invisible Hand from Adam Smith to Market Liberalism’, Economic Thought, vol. 1, 2 (2012), pp. 1–14. 10.  See Daniel, 5:11–17 for the relevant passages in the Bible. 11. The footage is available here, with commentary: http://www.theguardian .com/world/2015/jul/16/angela-merkel-comforts-teenage-palestinian-asylum-seeker -germany. 12. Indeed, in the weeks following her difficult encounter with Reem, Angela Markel distinguished herself as a European leader who demonstrated real and substantial concern for the individuals who sought refuge. In this regard, she has turned out to be the opposite of Viktor Orbán, conservative prime minster of Hungary. Orbán has argued against giving any refuge, stating that the people in need of help are not refugees but all ‘economic migrants’, coming to the EU in search of an economically better life. He forgets, of course, that this is the reason why the whole of Hungary ‘migrated’ into the EU. 13.  It is reported, for example, that some people living in the camps that have been established in Calais in summer of 2015, burn their fingerprints off their fingers in order to avoid being identified on biometrical security data. See Daniel Trilling, ‘Europe Could Solve the Migrant Crisis—If It Wanted’, Guardian, 31 July 2015, p. 31. Further, of course, and in an inverse parallel to this, any non-US citizen wanting to enter the United States, after 9/11, must now be fingerprinted. 14.  There is, of course, a long prehistory of such sexual scandals. The Profumo affair is simply one of the more significant recent examples, bringing together personal sexual infidelities with political betrayals and spying. There is no need for the mix to be quite so potent in all cases, as the example of Parnell and Kitty O’Shea might indicate. Sex and law, desire and its exposure are all that are needed for such scandal to erupt.

S K I N I N T H E G A ME     75

15.  For the full account, see Chris Woods, Sudden Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 169–70. The passage cited is also available at: http://www .theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/24/drone-warfare-life-on-the-new-frontline. 16. See Caroline Moorehead, Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France (Chatto and Windus, 2014), 9, 10; and cf. Tony Judt, with Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (Vintage, 2013), chapter 9. 17. Moorehead, Village of Secrets, 19. 18.  Ibid., 25. 19.  Ibid., 74. 20.  This neat summation of the character is the description advanced in Jeremy Black, The Politics of James Bond (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 19. The character’s name, it should be noted in passing, was taken from another James Bond, an eminent ornithologist; and the character was, as Ben Macintyre has argued in For Your Eyes Only (Bloomsbury, 2009), a bonding or ‘amalgamation’ of the characteristics of several individuals known to Fleming.

5

On Democratic Responsibility

I

n some regimes, complicity is unavoidable, especially if one intends to survive for any length of time. The regimes in which this is most obvious are those that are governed by totalitarian means or under a mode of extreme authoritarianism. The same, of course, can be said for institutions: authoritarian governance breeds a certain culture of complicity with whatever is thought to be the supreme power or office. Those who have studied complicity in terms of political collaboration have been fairly clear on this; and among these, Richard J. Golsan offers a succinct summation of the position. He writes that ‘If political complicity is acute during periods of occupation by a foreign power, it becomes nothing less than a permanent and integral feature of life in totalitarian societies’. This works as if by contagion, such that ‘all individuals are implicated to some extent in the perpetuation as well as the projects and actions of the regime’.1 This is a position well described by Julian Barnes, in his 2016 novella, The Noise of Time, which explores the life of Shostakovich under Stalin. In that world, cowardice becomes not so much a question of morality, but a simple condition of survival. In America, Shostakovich is given a speech to read out; but he reads only the first page before allowing the translator to proceed without him. The speech is not his words in any case. To his horror, he looks at the text and notices that it castigates Stravinsky, whom Shostakovich holds in the highest esteem; but he lets the speech go ahead, sitting there ‘motionless and unreacting’. He burns with shame: ‘He had foolishly imagined that his public indifference to his own speech would indicate a moral neutrality. That was as stupid as it was naïve’.2 The logic, though, is simple: he had no choice in the matter if he wanted the survival of himself and of those close to him, ‘and because there was no choice, equally there was no possibility of avoiding moral corruption’.3 77

78    CHAPTER 5

In totalitarian regimes, or under authoritarian modes of governance, complicity with power reduces us to a bare humanity, a ‘technique for survival’, as Barnes has it: ‘Below a certain point, that was what all men became: techniques for survival’.4 Barnes’s Shostakovich knows that ‘Names would be put in front of him, and he would implicate all of them. No, he would say briefly, which would quickly change to Yes, Yes, Yes and Yes’.5 Survival, in some cases, means a readiness to name names, and in this way to become complicit with the kinds of surveillance culture that plays itself out in totalitarian regimes. As Peter Finn and Petra Couvée show, in their study of the publishing history of Boris Pasternak’s great novel, Dr Zhivago, ‘Feverish denunciations became an integral part of the political culture at all levels of society. Citizens felt compelled to name enemies or be named’.6 Yet it is also played out in some democracies as well: McCarthyism in the United States was perhaps just one of the more extreme political examples in which the naming of names was a key to survival.7 The naming of names, of course, is also what is required in virtually every political act of torture; and it would be naïve to assume that democracies are immune from that. It would be equally naïve to think that this is simply a matter of governmental politics. In fact, the kinds of betrayal documented in his fictional account by Barnes are increasingly an every­day occurrence in our institutional forms of management and governance. That is to say: complicity is a daily fact of life, and not simply a matter for the extremes of totalitarian politics. Similarly, democracy is not limited to politics and, once we introduce the idea of responsibility into democracy, we can see democracy itself—as this chapter will show—as a condition that is increasingly under threat, as a matter of our daily lives together. 1. POLITICAL PURITY We have some clear understandings of complicity in political situations. In times especially of national and international conflict, it is more commonly described in terms of ‘collaboration’. Collaboration, in this political usage, is not regarded positively: rather, it is understood as being underhand, duplicitous (the perversion of diplomacy), and concerned with protecting secrecy for purposes of intrigue (the perversion of confidentiality for personal protection). Those who engage in such collaboration usually also have to deceive themselves in order to make their actions palatable. In what we can think of as this intrinsically ‘extreme’ political form, the seriousness of such ‘collaboration’ often integrates complicity in a profound self-deception. That raises an intrinsically moral issue, related to truth and lying in politics. Political collaboration invites questions regarding the

ON DEM OCR A T I C R E S P O N S I B I L I T Y     79

p­ ropriety or otherwise of lying—in this instance to oneself as well as to ­others—in political situations. In many cases, political collaborators find justification for their actions in the simple demand for survival, a demand that seems to be so basic as to be beyond any ethical matters at all. Such justifications, however, are often ignored in the demand for postcollaborationist purification, for what was called the épuration sauvage in France, for example, at the end of the Second World War. Purification, in this sense, means being purged of all deceptions and standing transparently in what is to be accepted as the truth. It can be accompanied by demands for ritualized sacrifice. In occupied France during the War of 1939–1945, ‘The fact that sleeping with a German might have been the only way for a woman to keep her children from starvation was scarcely considered when the communal fury was unleashed’.8 Symbolic acts of head-shaving would follow, to ensure the sacrificial or ritualistic ‘branding’ of such women. For some who had collaborated in ways other than the physical and bio-political yielding to sex, execution was deemed the appropriate mode of purgation. In this kind of extreme case, collaborationist complicity is seen to have been associated with contamination. It derives from a sense, as in war, that there is an utterly clear division of interests, and equally from a sense that a party to one sectional interest has sullied the purity of the division by importing the enemy into ‘our’ side. There is the further issue within this of how we understand free will: to what extent were collaborators, concerned with survival (including that of others, their children, for example), making a ‘free’ choice? To what extent were they ‘responsible’ for that choice? How pure, indeed, was their will in the first place? This also has consequences for how we think about responsibility itself, and—the subject of this chapter—of the relation between responsibility in the political arena and democracy, as a fundamental form of mutual or shared cooperation in which the purity of a decision about how to live becomes complicated by competing, and even opposing, interests. In his great study of modern democracy, Les Ennemis intimes de la démocratie, Tzvetan Todorov traces this issue back to an ancient quarrel, a religious quarrel at the roots of Christianity, between Pelagius and Augustine. The opposition sets up a useful framework for our present purposes. Pelagius, argues Todorov, asserts the primacy of responsibility: we will be saved or damned in strict accordance with the choices we make about how to live, and issues like divine grace are therefore irrelevant to the question of how we should live. Augustine, by contrast, reinstates the creed of original sin and divine grace, arguing that there are things within us—desires and concupiscence, mainly—that drive us to do things ‘despite’ ourselves, things we do that we know we ought not to do but for which we may hope for forgiveness.

80    CHAPTER 5

The Pelagian would take the view that the collaborator has made a choice, and that she is therefore answerable for that choice; Augustinians take the nuanced view that there may be a rationale for action that is not based upon a reasoned or willed free choice made by the collaborator. Her position is compromised by a prior state of affairs, an origin of and in sin; and she may therefore reasonably request our judgemental grace and understanding. ‘The quality of mercy,’ as Shakespeare’s Portia would have put it, ‘is not strained’, and the woman in this case might reasonably be its object. This, in many ways, is also the very root of our idea of the conflicts and debates that configure cultural ‘modernity’ itself, and also its political correlate in democracy. For whom, on whose behalf, and with what rationale, do we make our actions, enact our choices, and establish our values? Todorov essentially extends his description of the Pelagian controversy into the roots of Enlightenment modernity, seeing it as fundamentally a controversy over the relative claims of autonomy on one hand (crudely, the Pelagian position that translates into the existential assumption of responsibility for the choices that we make in our actions), and what is sometimes seen as the constraining hand of tradition on the other (a position that suggests we are somehow predetermined in our choices, and thus neither entirely responsible for them or autonomous in respect of them—what Sartrean existentialists would describe as ‘bad faith’). This can be pushed to extremes, for the purposes of argumentative clarity. Pelagius, Todorov argues, is essentially an optimist, valuing the great capacities of the human for self-determination. Yet it follows that, if the individual fails, she or he has no one to blame: ‘tout est de sa propre faute [it’s all her or his own fault]’.9 Now, if this individual decides that it is also her or his responsibility to help others to reach their own perfection, then the consequences are extreme: ‘aucun sacrifice exigé . . . ne sera de trop [no sacrifice required will be too much]’. The sacrifice in question is, in such cases, sacrifices of and by others. The name we give to this extreme form of purification in our time is usually terrorism; yet it also has a substrate in the cultures of espionage that shaped recent modernity, through the Cold War, when betrayal shaped some forms of political collaborations. Yet, in their relation to autonomy, these two—terror and espionage—may also be fundamental characteristics of cultural modernity as such. Terrorism and espionage may be the extreme versions of this; yet it is also apparent in more mundane activities, and especially in activities that involve the critic. Teaching itself, for example, is governed by a belief that we have a responsibility to help others by enlightening them in relation to our own wisdom. What, then, is the relation between teaching, criticism, and terror, we might ask?

ON DEM OCR A T I C R E S P O N S I B I L I T Y     81

Reflections such as these offer us an opening for a specific exploration of the relations between complicity in its various forms on one hand, and responsibility or judgement on the other. This is especially so in the political domain; and it is perhaps most pertinent in any consideration of a culture that identifies modernity with democracy, given that democracy is, in its essence, a form of shared responsibility, of ‘collaborative’ or ‘cooperative’ politics. In turn, such questions are shaped by a fundamental concern for moral, political, professional, and personal responsibility, and for responsibility grounded in judgements: how do we judge and how should we judge the activity of a collaborator? Collaboration, in the senses that I have had in mind in the preceding para­ graphs, is an issue of war; and, in war, it is usually the case that one is unmistakably on one side against another. What, then, should we—as cultural critics—make of the observations by Edward Said, in his introduction to The World, the Text, the Critic regarding the issue of committed criticism? He points out that history has shown, with utter clarity, that ‘the dictum “solidarity before criticism” means the end of criticism’. He goes on to make his own stance for a mode of critique that is grounded in constant vigilance, even opposition to all norms: ‘I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the very midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for’.10 Issues of complicity, then, relate fundamentally to issues of responsibility; but they are shaped, to some extent, by ideas of solidarity and commitment, of war allies and enemies, of responsibilities towards others and responsibilities for our own actions; perhaps, above all, they are shaped by ideas of independence, of an independence of thinking, and of action, that can be troubling to the very idea of society itself. A certain ‘radical independence’ may even be seen to be a troubling element within modernity, if we consider modernity to be the triumph of autonomy, a triumph of the human over a potentially hostile natural environment. Here, we can explore three related issues. First, we can consider the idea of purity or purification of political discourse; in other words, we can consider the propriety or otherwise of lying in the political domain, and of wilfully or otherwise ‘going along with’ such lies. Second, we can consider more fully the relation of critical judgements—especially judgements that seek a non-ideological or ‘neutral’ account of states of affairs—to democracy. Finally, we can look at what happens when social bonds are threatened by the cultures of surveillance that dominate our contemporary political situations, by a consideration of the consequences of the culture of espionage that I described above.

82    CHAPTER 5

2. POLITICAL LIES Much of the time, of course, we do not consider these issues in our daily life in the so-called advanced economies of the world. Living in that world, most people tend to go along with prevailing norms of activity, thought, and behaviour. In some jurisdictions, this is called ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. It is a form of living together that we consider to be grounded in a certain balance between the demands of the public sphere and those of private life; and the prevailing ideology—live and let live—allows us to live in unacknowledged complicity with specific ideological commitments that need not (indeed, must not) be exposed and scrutinized if the advanced economy is to survive in its current shape. To that extent, we are indeed ‘complicit’ with a prevailing ideology or set of commitments that we do not subject to examination. But are we therefore also ‘collaborators’? This is a fundamental starting-point for Richard J. Golsan in his study of French Writers and the Politics of Complicity: Crises of Democracy in the 1940s and 1990s. There, Golsan (again following Todorov in this) contends that ‘If political complicity is acute during periods of occupation by a foreign power, it becomes nothing less than a permanent and integral feature of life in totalitarian societies’. In such societies—and Dave Eggers’s The Circle is the most recent dystopian realization of this—‘nothing remains outside “the political”’, from which it follows that ‘all individuals are implicated to some extent in the perpetuation as well as the projects and actions of the regime’. However—and this is the key point for us here—‘the average citizen remains oblivious to this fact because, in totalitarian societies, power never reveals its true source’.11 The issue is raised for us in our everyday life through our ecological predicaments. Naomi Klein, for instance, begins her investigation of climate change and its consequences in This Changes Everything with the story of how Flight 3935, going from Washington to Charleston, is delayed. The reason for the delay is that the summer temperature in Washington, DC, in 2012 was so high that the tarmac melted and the plane’s wheels sank into it. Eventually, after getting the passengers and baggage off and thus making the plane lighter, a very powerful towing truck gets the plane out of the sunken tarmac, and the flight then resumes. Klein notes the ecological irony: ‘the fact that the burning of fossil fuels is so radically changing our climate that it is getting in the way of our capacity to burn fossil fuels . . . did not stop the passengers from reembarking and continuing their journey’. Are those passengers complicit with the assault on the environment? Klein raises the question: ‘I am in no position to judge these passengers. All of us who live high consumer lifestyles, wherever we happen to reside, are, metaphorically, passengers on Flight 3935’.12

ON DEM OCR A T I C R E S P O N S I B I L I T Y     83

In that statement, Klein hints at the core issue in this chapter. To what extent can the individual act in a way that eschews complicity with negative actions, while still managing to exist and count in a world shaped by the fact that those negatives are not seen as negative, but rather viewed as normal and even normative? It is a Kantian question: to what extent does my own action stand in for the actions of humanity as such? Are all my actions ‘complicit’ in one way or another with one side or other of competing and opposing views? On whose behalf do I act, or speak? Behind this lies another fundamental issue. If and when I take my part in a social bond through my contributions to argument—such as, when I speak— what is the position of the subject with respect to truth and lying? This is especially problematic if the speech we make is based upon the judgement not just of what is true for the speaking subject but also of what she or he sees as being good (and even true) for other subjects, that is, when she speaks on behalf of others. Such speaking on behalf of others may be thought of as being consistent with at least one form of democratic participation, whereby one speaks not out of self-interest, but out of the interests of the community as such and as a whole. Can one tell the truth in such a situation? In philosophy, it was Nietzsche who most famously raised the issue in question here. Nietzsche explored truth and lying in a ‘non-moral’ or ‘extramoral’ sense, in 1873. Interestingly, and appropriately enough for our present arguments, he begins by relating the issue of truth and lying to survival. The claim is that deception is fundamental to survival, that ‘[a]s a means for the preserving of the individual [i.e. for survival, in the terms I outlined in the previous chapter here], the intellect unfolds its principal powers in dissimulation, which is the means by which the weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves’.13 This is a theme taken up much later, by Leszek Kołakowski, when he argues that ‘The deliberate transmission of false information is, so to speak, part of the natural order of things. The butterfly says to the bird, “But I’m not really a butterfly at all, I’m just a dead leaf,”’ for example.14 Deception or dissimulation such as this is axiomatic and fundamental as a condition of survival, ‘insofar as the individual wants to maintain himself against other individuals’, as Nietzsche puts it. That is to say: in a situation of conflict or contestation for survival between individuals, lying is normal and even normative. In a kind of Hobbesian ‘state of nature,’ deception is fully operative for survival. However, this does not give carte blanche to lying as such or in all situations. Nietzsche is careful to make a distinction between lying in situations of conflict or competition for survival on one hand, and a different state of affairs in which ‘man wants to exist socially’ and to avoid such conflict, or to

84    CHAPTER 5

circumvent the threat to survival that arises from competitive environments, such as in the struggle for ‘bare life’ that can condition our natural world. Here, the demand for a kind of counter-Hobbesian peace enters; but the result is not that we have unadulterated revelation of truth; rather, we have agreements simply as to what we will accept as truth.15 As Nietzsche now has it, we do not have access to some unmediated truth or some natural state of affairs or nature, in itself, as such; rather ‘that which shall count as “truth” from now on is established’. Perhaps cynically, he argues that we do not really want truth at all, since, as the later T. S. Eliot will put it, ‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality’. Rather, we want peaceful coexistence, which means that we want the consequences of whatever it is that we accept communally as truth to give rise to peace, or to the avoidance of dangerous conflict. Truth, then, becomes a matter of linguistic agreement, conditioned by our willingness to accord with a specific view as if it were the only accurate and true view of things. We can be—in fact we are intrinsically condemned to be—in complicity with truth: truth is, according to this, a fundamental condition of being complicit in lying. This gives rise to the most famous passage from Nietzsche’s essay. First, in an uncanny prefiguration of Saussure’s linguistic proposals regarding signifiers and signifieds, all language for Nietz­ sche operates in a mode of abstraction from particulars. We use the word ‘leaf’ (to borrow his own example) to cover all sorts of different specific material realities, abstracting from the particulars of many diverse actual leaves (Saussure’s ‘referents’) into a single generic term or sign. Those terms and signs operate as metaphors; and it therefore follows that truth itself becomes, famously, ‘[a] movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions’.16 There follows a non-Marxist explanation of ideology. Truth, Nietzsche explains, is ‘the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors’, which is therefore actually, morally, a ‘duty to lie according to a fixed convention’.17 If we are to be social at all, according to this, it follows that we must be complicit with a fundamental act of lying. It further follows that politics and lying are complicit with each other, but complicit with each other in the interests not just of maintaining peace, but also of our common survival.18 At the core of this is an argument more familiar to us from the ­anti-totalitarian thinking of Adorno and Horkheimer. There, too, we find a complex relation to truth. They, too, acknowledged in their Dialectic of

ON DEM OCR A T I C R E S P O N S I B I L I T Y     85

­Enlightenment that what passes for truth is actually circumscribed by a set of protocols regarding what is acceptable and agreeable to a community. That community, identified with a specific view of Enlightenment as modernity, works through the same process of abstraction from material realities as we see in Nietzsche’s description of the operation of language. Where Nietzsche sees metaphor, Adorno and Horkheimer see instead the power of a quasimathematical logic, but one that reduces reality to numbers and to computation. They point out that, in a crude version of Enlightenment, whereby truth is what is ‘revealed’ or clarified by a specific type of reason, ‘whatever does not conform to the rule of computation and utility is suspect’.19 This is what many of us will now recognize as a version of truth that exists only in the form of quantification of abstract qualities: the reduction of reality to operational metrics, or to a number that can be entered into a computation. For a good example of that at work, we can turn again to Dave Eggers. In The Circle, the central character, Mae, has a sexual relation with one of her co-workers, Francis. Their sexual encounter does not last long, a matter of minutes from start to finish, and Mae starts to drop off to sleep. Francis, however, has a ‘fantasy’ to ask: ‘I want you to rate me’; he said. ‘What?’ ‘Just a rating . . .’ ‘Like from 1 to 100?’ ‘Exactly’.20

Mae rates him verbally, saying he’s ‘fine’; but Francis objects, because ‘fine’ doesn’t work for him. She tries ‘perfect’ instead, which works better for him, unsurprisingly. However, he says to her ‘You just proved my point. . . . We just argued about all this, about the words you used and what they meant. We didn’t understand their meaning the same way, and we went around and around about it. But if you had just used a number I would have understood right away’.21 This is the perfect example of what is at stake here. The number—eventually Mae rates him at 100/100—is proposed as a neutral mode of communication: clear, truthful, non-controversial precisely because it is an abstraction. The material reality of their encounter is reduced, narrowed into something that is computational and utilitarian. This is, of course, a paradigmatic example of the entire social structure that The Circle critiques and satirizes: it is our own world, as we know from any business or institutional activity in our times. Truth is ‘measured’, given by our quantified, numerical, and c­omputable

86    CHAPTER 5

r­atings and rankings—as teachers, researchers, saleswomen, producers, ­artists—and this allows for a crude account of what constitutes reality.22 It does two further things. As Adorno and Horkheimer point out, it gives us a bourgeois version of reality, because it allows for comparisons to be made among incommensurables. In doing this, the true account of what constitutes material reality is erased from consideration, replaced instead by the reductive logic of the number itself. Again, we are forced to be complicit with acts of lying, as long as we subscribe to such quantifications of reality. This, indeed, constitutes bourgeois ideology for Adorno and Horkheimer, for, as they put it, ‘Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract qualities’.23 Secondly, it presupposes or requires our complicity with each other as we effectively ‘conspire’ to ignore reality and its material conditions, preferring instead the supposed truth of logical number. This is not, as in Nietzsche or Kołakowski, lying as a means of survival. Rather, it is systemic lying in the interests of circumscribing what it is possible to think or permissible to think. It is the systemic wilful ignorance of material realities, in the interests of a fabricated set of equivalences. That fabrication is also there to pretend that there is already equality where, in fact, there is none. Indeed, ‘bourgeois society’ in this operation will manufacture such a false equality by the processes of numerical abstraction if required. This, in turn, makes us complicit with the very inequalities that are thus hidden from view in our societies, in order the better to protect those in power from serious scrutiny. As in totalitarian societies as described by Todorov, the citizen here is forced into a silent or tacit complicity with power as such, and, more pertinently, with the existing structures of power; and we can do nothing against them. To do something against such structures—that is, to criticize—thus becomes unnatural, against the very structure of nature itself. Meanwhile, of course, actual birds eat actual butterflies. The case of the French resistance to Vichy explored by Caroline Moorehead also offers a further example of what is at stake here. As Moorehead points out, the story of Vénissieux was told and well established before she wrote her own book about the nature of resistance in this small French village. The story was one about the quiet heroism of Pastor André Trocmé, who, ‘between the arrival of the Germans in Paris in May 1940 and the liberation of France in the summer of 1944, helped save some 5,000 hunted communists, Freemasons, resisters, and Jews from deportation to the extermination camps of occupied Poland’.24 If the story was already known, why re-tell it? As Moorehead points out, the facts of the case differed enormously from the existing account. Trocmé was far from alone; and the protection of these potential victims of Nazism

ON DEM OCR A T I C R E S P O N S I B I L I T Y     87

was effected by an entire network of people both within and outside of the village of Vénissieux. The original account appeared in Peace News on 29 May 1953.25 There, it is presented as the story of two pastors, naming Trocmé as the key figure in non-violent resistance to Vichy, ‘a different kind of resistance’, as the report described it.26 The account presented in the paper prioritizes Gandhian non-violence as the key determinant of the success of this mode of resistance; and presents Trocmé the pacifist as the perfect exemplar to those who argue that pacifism would have been useless during the Second World War. The usual argument is not only that the Nazis had to be fought by the usual martial means, but also that resistance as such would also have to deploy similar means if it was to work and if collaboration was to be avoided. The article in Peace News claims a great success for non-violent resistance as a means of successful resistance, even if it was ‘imperfect’, and even if ‘[r]arely during the course of it did those taking part have a feeling of dazzling success’. In particular, moral compromise had to be made: ‘On one point the experience was unsatisfying: it was not possible for non-violent resisters to avoid using false identity papers’.27 A certain falsehood was necessary; and the paper’s summation of the stakes of this remains clear and is clearly stated. The author of the piece, ostensibly taking a cue from Trocmé himself, argues that, ‘To show a true identity paper was the equivalent of a denunciation. It seemed preferable to violate a formal moral rule (absolute truth), in order to apply a living moral rule (the absolute value of the human person)’.28 That exposes fully the issue here, in relation to the question of truth and complicity. Collaboration with Vichy—complicity in responsibility for its accommodation with Nazism—could indeed be resisted by non-violent means; but it involved the non-violent resister in complicity with a particular attitude to truth, notwithstanding the ostensible utter religiosity of Trocmé’s fundamental pacifism. None of this would be at all shocking to Hannah Arendt. She repeats more than once that ‘Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings’.29 For Arendt, lying is consistent with imagining the world differently from how it actually exists in truth; and thus it is a kind of essential prolegomena to political action. All action is a beginning of something new, and it follows that ‘the deliberate denial of factual truth—the ability to lie— and the capacity to change facts—the ability to act—are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source: imagination’.30 Further, this is also a constituent element of freedom, tied firmly to the fact that ‘We are free to change the world and to start something new in it’. Thus far, we might therefore suggest that lying is a kind of necessary element in effecting political action, and that it demonstrates the freedom

88    CHAPTER 5

of our consciousness—our ability to assume autonomous responsibility for the change in the world that we wish to make. Is it then consistent with the democratic principle of cooperative action? Or does democracy require that we call this structure of complicity with lying into question, even to the point where we forcefully repudiate it? 3. POLITICAL TRUTHS ‘Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality’, writes Arendt.31 The reality in question is, once again, the reality of survival: there is a crucial turning point, which is reached ‘when the audience to which the lies are addressed is forced to disregard altogether the distinguishing line between truth and falsehood in order to survive’. At this point—and it is a point that is eventually reached in totalitarian societies—‘[t]he liar, who may get away with any number of single falsehoods, will find it impossible to get away with lying in principle’. Totalitarian rulers have a ‘frightening confidence’ in the power of lies, first because through repetition and through the tacit complicity described above they can start to believe their own lies. This is a common enough phenomenon, and one that is not restricted to societies that are obviously totalitarian: it applies equally in many societies that proclaim themselves to be democratic. One reason for this temporary success of the liar is found in the desire for peaceful cooperative living, a mood or attitude that is especially dominant within democracies. There, as Arendt writes in another essay, this time entitled ‘Truth and Politics’, when lying is necessary for peaceful survival, it can be regarded as being not such a bad thing. Lies, in this situation, can often be ‘used as substitutes for more violent means’ and ‘are apt to be considered relatively harmless tools in the arsenal of political action’.32 In ‘Lying and Politics’, Arendt was addressing the specific instance of the revelations found in the leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. ‘Truth and Politics’ was occasioned by the responses to her own earlier 1963 text, Eichmann in Jerusalem. In ‘Truth and Politics’, Arendt concentrates more fully on the argument that truth will always eventually come out. She notes that the cost might be high for the individual: truth can be itself a matter of survival, especially for the critic or intellectual who wishes to speak it. ‘Throughout history’, writes Arendt, ‘the truth-seekers and truthtellers have been aware of the risks of their business; as long as they did not interfere with the course of the world, they were covered with ridicule, but he who forced his fellowcitizens to take him seriously by trying to set them free from falsehood and illusion was in danger of his life’.33

ON DEM OCR A T I C R E S P O N S I B I L I T Y     89

For Plato, the opposite of truth was opinion, which was equated with illusion; and politics rests upon getting the support of opinion, or the gathering together of like-minded people. The trouble with opinion, of course, is that it is highly variable and often evidence-free or prejudiced; and those who govern their lives by opinion can be merely fickle. Society governed by opinion will be therefore extremely unstable. Thus, for Plato, we need philosophy as the counter to opinion: as the later Roman and early modern Renaissance rhetorical tradition has it, the power of scientia or knowledge is what will triumph over mere opinio. Philosophy, in this view, sets itself the task of finding truth. If we find such truth, then we can also find that ‘principles could be derived [from the philosophical truth] to stabilize human affairs’.34 The vagaries of a world that is rendered unstable by the power of competing opinions are thus to be tamed by the stability of reason, or by a philosophy that uncovers fundamental principles that determine the nature of the good and proper life. One word we have for this conjunction is ‘modernity’. Modernity characterized itself essentially through an idea of how intellectual enlightenment through the operations of reason could allow humans to agree not only on what is true but also on what is good. It offers a framework, grounded in philosophical Optimism, for the operations of a consensually agreed good life. Something crucial now follows, however. Given that politics itself depends upon cooperative debate, philosophy such as this now deprives us of any need for politics at all. Debate regarding different points of view is no longer necessary to get to the truth: philosophy will do that for us. It also follows now that ‘every claim in the sphere of human affairs to an absolute truth, whose validity needs no support from the side of opinion, strikes at the very root of all politics and all governments’.35 This is problematic for democracy. Democracy, we might say, depends at its most basic upon working together. A philosophy that claims access to fundamental truth effaces any such need: the philosopher will be king, and he will simply determine the ‘proper’ means of governance for a society, claiming legitimacy for that organization upon his access to truth. The only way for a citizen to survive in such circumstances is through collaboration: it is as if ‘philosophy’ or ‘truth’ has invaded her domain; and all that she can do is accommodate herself to it. No need for debate, no equality of discursive claims, no argument, and no need even to talk. Just do your job. Optimism, we might say, yields hierarchical structures of social and political organization;36 and, while democracies need not be intrinsically hostile to all hierarchy, it is difficult to reconcile democracy as such with a hierarchy that determines and even circumscribes its fundamental ‘permitted’ or legitimized political structure. There is, of course, another—and more positively inflected—side to collaboration, usually referred to as co-operation. The difference between these

90    CHAPTER 5

two may be found to lie in their different etymologies. Labor refers to the physical activity of work; opus is the product of that work. Collaboration is working together; co-operation is sharing the product or result of that work. In this sense, co-operation might signify something to do with the equitable distribution of resources or products, while collaboration might signify the shared responsibility for input into a task or project. This difference is one that will be important in the pages that follow; and it is a difference that might go some way towards explaining the different semantic value for two similar concepts.37 One way of approaching this issue is in relation to the relative degrees of freedom involved in both positions. Collaboration—especially in its political context of the Second War—may be something either freely entered into or entered into by constraint, as with the woman who sleeps with the Nazi to protect the life of her children, for example. Co-operation, at least at first, seems to be something where there is no such relativity with respect to freedom: this is something that we choose to do, and it involves a political choice with respect to the distribution of goods. 4. COLLABORATION AND THE CRISIS OF FREE SPEECH In the rest of this section, I will probe a specific example of political collaboration, in which the position of the writer—that is, one whose life is caught up entirely in issues of language—is central. This is the case of Robert Brasillach, a famous French collaborator with the Vichy regime, who was executed ‘for intellectual crimes’ in February 1945. This will allow me to turn to the philosophical determination of the relations between collaboration, ­co-operation, and democracy; and, for this, I will rely extensively on the description of ‘republican democracy’ advanced by Philip Pettit. To what extent is writing a matter of life and death? The case of Robert Brasillach invites an exploration of writing itself as an activity that is not only intellectual but also of material substance in its effects; and those effects relate fundamentally to issues of complicity with lies. Robert Brasillach was an extremely well-known writer and journalist at the height of his influence during the years of the Second World War. His writings are unashamedly supportive of fascism, and he edited the fascist journal Je suis partout. Initially, he was a keen supporter of Vichy; but he quickly became critical of the regime, not because it was collaborationist but rather because he thought it was not being Nazi enough. At the end of the war, he was arrested and placed on trial, and after a court case lasting some three weeks, he was found guilty and executed.

ON DEM OCR A T I C R E S P O N S I B I L I T Y     91

The details of the trial have been thoroughly covered by Alice Kaplan in her 2001 study of The Collaborator (to which the following account is almost completely indebted). As Kaplan points out in an interview about the book, what makes Brasillach especially interesting—and this is pertinent to this present chapter—is that ‘he was condemned to death for his words—fighting words’.38 If our ‘truth’ is marked by complicity with words or with linguistic formulations—that is, if truth is simply what we agree to describe as the truth in an act that holds us together in a tacit ignoring of material realities—then the case of a collaborationist writer becomes central to our concerns. Brasillach’s trial opened on 19 January 1945. His defence lawyer was Jacques Isorni, a man who was also sympathetic to Vichy and who would go on to defend Pétain himself. The context of the trial was crucially important for the determination of the result. De Gaulle, in one linguistic performative act, had essentially shaped the context—and his words almost entirely predetermine the only possible outcome of the case. In November 1944, as he prepared to return to France and assume leadership of the nation after the war, de Gaulle proclaimed that ‘the form of the French government was and remains the Republic. The Republic has never ceased to exist’.39 This is more than just a statement: it operated as a performative act, and one that at a linguistic stroke rendered Vichy fundamentally and intrinsically illegal. Isorni’s first line of defence—that Brasillach could not be tried because he was acting in conformity with Vichy state orders—was thus ruled out of court. In other words, Isorni sought refuge for his client in the suggestion that he was operating in conformity with what Vichy had determined as ‘the truth’; and his ‘collaboration’ was nothing more or less than simple conformity with the State. Yet, if the State lacks legality, then, axiomatically, so does conformity with its ‘truth’. In Kaplan’s account, Brasillach was and remained a suave and sophisticated speaker: careful with and of his language, aware of its power to persuade. Famously, he was known to be extraordinarily direct, even rude; but his attitude before the court and before the judge, Maurice Vidal, was entirely different. ‘What a shock for Vidal’, writes Kaplan, ‘to have prepared to interrogate the famously rude Brasillach, and find instead a meticulously kind and gentle respondent’.40 Brasillach’s next line of defence was essentially to claim linguistic affinity not with Vichy but with a long-standing French tradition of anti-Semitism: that is, he was acting in conformity with that ‘truth’, that collaborationist account of what passes for the essence of the French national character and tradition. He stated ‘that his beliefs were French beliefs, his fascism was a French nationalist fascism, his anti-Semitism belonged to a French, not a German, tradition. In that way, he hoped to refocus the debate on his French identity, rather than on the content of his beliefs’.41

92    CHAPTER 5

According to Kaplan, ‘The key to his success lies with his marshalling of one word, “responsibility”. Six times during his interrogation, Brasillach claimed responsibility for his actions’;42 and each time he raised the issue of responsibility, Brasillach attempted to move the discussion from an ideological representation of two opposing sides—collaboration and resistance, one wrong and one right—to a larger, nonideological moral vision where a good man could “take responsibility” on either side, be a hero either of the collaboration or of the resistance, by sticking to his guns. A good man could be either a collaborator or a resister, depending on the strength of his character’.43 In this, we get the foundations of what has become known as the relativist position regarding truth; and, for those who accept that truth is simply a matter of point of view and that it varies depending on who is its subject, the only issue of morality is whether one acts consistently or not with what one takes to be one’s own truth. It is clear—or should be clear, according to the logic of the argument here—that such a position leads not just to a philosophical solipsism, but also to the demise of any serious democracy, in which individuals have to share in responsibility for truth. The climax of Isorni’s defence came with a rhetorical question. Having praised Brasillach as a writer, he faced the jury and asked ‘Do civilized people shoot their poets?’44 Isorni suggested to the jury that they might find that Brasillach’s views were ‘erroneous’, but not that they constituted ‘treason’. This is a classic defence of the civilisation of literature as such against the barbarism of the death penalty. The prosecutor, Marcel Reboul, also praised Brasillach as a literary figure; but then made a crucial distinction between political criticisms that a writer might make in peacetime and those that he makes during war. With that distinction, Reboul claimed it was not permissible to defend Brasillach on the grounds of ‘freedom of opinion’. For Reboul, ‘opinion’ has to cede place in war times to other and more fundamental accounts of reality and truth, accounts determined by the primacy of the survival of the State. And, as de Gaulle had determined, the French State was a republic, had always been so, and had never ceased to exist. There was no ‘Vichy truth’, as it were; and it follows that there is also no ground on which opinions advanced in Vichy can be regarded as opinions freely advanced in terms guaranteeing or supporting the survival of the republic. As Reboul put it, ‘[The Republic] will not put you on trial for your tragic errors . . . [but instead] on trial for your treason’.45 The case determines a number of issues for us. First, it puts paid to any suggestion of a fundamental compatibility between relativistic attitudes to truth and democracy. Second, it nonetheless accepts that what constitutes truth is shaped by survival—in this particular case, the survival of the French state, as much as any personal survival.46 Third, it raises the question of how the

ON DEM OCR A T I C R E S P O N S I B I L I T Y     93

expression of opinion relates to the formation and legitimacy of the State: in other words, it asks us to consider some fundamental issues regarding complicity and democracy. Crucially, this case shows that freedom of speech does not extend to the freedom knowingly to lie; nor does it extend to the freedom to be complicit in the lies that constitute what passes for normative truth within a closed society. To gloss this further: freedom of speech is not consistent with the ‘free’ expression of opinion when that opinion is simply conformity with whatever it is that the established power structures within a society determine as acceptable. Freedom of speech, in short, is marked by the refusal to be complicit with simple conformity to existing norms: it is, by very definition, critical. This calls into doubt the currently prevailing idea that freedom of speech must always operate ‘within the law’. Such a view is one that actually reduces the possibility of our escaping complicity with the conformities that constitute what Nietzsche thought of as the systemic falsehoods that allow our society to operate as it does. In other words, freedom of speech ‘within the law’ predetermines that any such speech will not be permitted to expose the fundamental and ideological constraints within which ‘truth’ is agreed upon in any society. It maintains a hierarchical organization of social and political constitutions in which ‘truth’ is a terrain occupied by a privileged few who can determine what will constitute ‘the law’ in the first place. It follows that such freedom of speech is neither free nor hospitable to democracy. Freedom of speech must be critical of existing states and conditions of truth. Such criticism is also the founding condition, therefore, of democracy. It is grounded in the establishment of a shared new language that seeks to discover the fundamental conditions of the State, conditions that are to be invented in a spirit of free inquiry. This account of democracy depends, it follows further, on a shared dialogue oriented towards making what we can call ‘the public’ or ‘the public thing’, the res publica. 5. CO-OPERATION AND THE CRISIS OF FREE CHOICE In Just Freedom, Philip Pettit advances a specifically republican view of what constitutes freedom as such; and he defines it in terms of freedom from domination. In this account, freedom ‘is more than just being left alone, just benefiting from noninterference’. The ability to avoid being interfered with is, as it were, a necessary but not yet sufficient condition for the establishment of freedom. For freedom to exist, the citizen must also be free from domination. This—freedom from domination—is what obviously complicates the position of the French collaborator who sleeps with the Nazi and thus appears

94    CHAPTER 5

ostensibly to be complicit with whatever it is that is done in the name of Nazism as such: her action is not free, because it is not free from domination. The version of ‘freedom’ on offer here is precisely the same as that which forms the core of William Styron’s novel, Sophie’s Choice, in which Sophie is put in the position of making an impossible choice: choosing which of her two children will be saved, and which sent to the camps. The choice may indeed be hers; but it is not a choice or a decision or an action freely made. We have become aware of how this operates in modern institutions and by modern so-called democratic governments: it operates according to a logic of the ‘delegation of blame’. Governments and institutional managers restrict the choices available, and then point out that the choices being made by their operatives or workers further down the managerial chain are choices for which those lower in the hierarchy are to be held responsible. The government, the managers, absolve themselves from responsibility, while at the same time requiring complicity with the restriction of choice as such. Governments or managements then praise themselves for this ‘democratic’ extension of the franchise and of responsibility. The elites of power that constitute such a managerialist class are indeed interested not just in survival—their own—but also in the protection of their own privileges and the protection of themselves from scrutiny. Pettit points out that, in any actual society, freedom from domination is possible only under specific conditions; and these conditions turn out to be close to a structure in which collaboration is projected into and actually shaped by co-operation. The word for it is democracy. He argues that ‘government inevitably involves interference in the lives of its citizens, whether via legislation, punishment, or taxation’; yet such interference need not be itself structured by the power of domination of one party over others. Such an arrangement ‘need not be inherently inimical to freedom—so long as the people affected by the interference share equally in controlling the form that it takes’.47 In other words, as long as there is co-operation—sharing equally in controlling the output, the opus/opera—there can be freedom, and this can be combined with the labour of making or forming the government. This is one productive way of defining the formation of a democratic mode of government; and, crucially, it gets us round the problem of complicit acquiescence in ideological falsehoods, at least in principle. Democracy itself, one might think, is an ultimate form of complicity: a collective of people acting in concert. David Graeber points out that democracy, of course, ‘is not necessarily defined by majority voting: it is, rather, the process of collective deliberation on the principle of full and equal participation’.48 The issue here, for us, is how to determine the nature of that ‘fullness’ of participation. How fully am I implicated in decisions made in a collective?

ON DEM OCR A T I C R E S P O N S I B I L I T Y     95

In terms of the very limited (bourgeois) democracy of ‘majority voting’, am I to be held responsible for all of the actions of a government for which I have voted? That is the dystopia of The Circle, in which there is never any escape from the political, where there is no right any more to a private life, because privacy is there defined as ‘theft’. Part of the contemporary difficulty that many citizenships face, even and perhaps especially in the so-called advanced economies, is that co-operation is collapsed into collaboration. We begin with what seems a free offering of our voice or vote; and we end up coerced into positions (or into being held responsible for positions) that we would prefer not to occupy. Among the most spectacular form of this, in recent times, has been in the working of the European Union (EU). Two examples will suffice to make the relevant case. On 09 June 2001, voters in Ireland rejected the proposed EU Treaty of Nice. Under the EU rules, a no vote in one member state operated as a veto for the entire proposal, as the EU treaties have to be agreed by state consensus. Most of the then–member states agreed the treaty through their parliaments; Ireland held a referendum of its citizens to govern the national decision. Their vote/ veto was noted; but then ignored, as the Irish were essentially told simply to vote again. In essence, they had voted the wrong option, according to the dominant—and now dominating—powers within the EU. A free vote was no longer free: the Irish were forced to collaborate, not co-operate. Yet more egregious is the more recent case of Greece. The troika of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission requires a series of austerity budgets in Greece, as a condition for co-operating in dealing with a financial crisis caused by private banks who lent money indiscriminately and irresponsibly. The Greek people first of all voted the Syriza party into power, explicitly on an anti-austerity policy; and then rejected, via referendum, the continuing demand by the troika for further austerity. What could have been co-operation—sharing the difficulties caused to the whole of Europe by the nefarious activities of some bankers— turns into a game of power. In this game, money and the financial interests (of an elite, essentially) determine the very content and nature of freedom as such; and the Greeks, having no money, are fully dominated by the EU and by the very bankers who have caused the difficulty. The situation was analysed as early as 2011 by John Lanchester, writing in the London Review of Books.49 This long pre-dates the extreme moment of the crisis, and also pre-dates the election of Syriza into power. At the time, the supporters of Syriza were referred to as the ‘Indignati’, alongside the ­Indignados in Spain (who would in turn become Podémos). These were people influenced by Stéphane Hessel and they took their names from his short book, Indignez-vous! published shortly before he died. Lanchester pointed

96    CHAPTER 5

out that ‘The Greeks know they are being lent money just so they can work very hard for lower wages and higher taxes in order to pay it back at great cost’. This is the ideology now known as austerity. Further, however, there is a thing that the Indignati—and now Syriza, the Greek party of government— also fully understand: ‘the outstanding Greek debt is mainly owned by French and German banks’. Lanchester is clear on what is at issue here. It is the power of money that actually subtends the centre-right and right-wing governments that now dominate the EU; but it is the banks and not the governments that dominate. ‘This’, Lanchester writes, ‘is why the Western European governments are especially keen on the “bailout”: it’s helping to keep their banks solvent. The Indignati do not find that a compelling reason to embrace a decade or so of abject misery. They want the Greek government to default, and the banks to accept losses for loans they shouldn’t have made in the first place’. The essential point here is that the Greek referendum of Sunday, 05 July 2015, in which Greek citizens overwhelmingly rejected the EU’s austerity project, was indirectly an attempt to reassert a democratic will, not constrained by domination and therefore free, over the power of coercion to accept or ‘choose’ a version of ‘reality’ that operates in favour of the banks and financial elites. It was an assertion of co-operation over collaboration (a word whose content in Greece is every bit as powerful as its sense in the French historical and political context). The Greek οχι, ‘No’, was, famously a defiance of Mussolini and a symbol of resistance during the Second World War; and the echo in the referendum was seen by many as deliberate. 6. ESPIONAGE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES This returns us to the issue of the social bond. By approaching our question in terms of the idea of bonds and complicities, however, I want here to tease out what is and should be at stake for us. The fundamental question facing us in this chapter relates to whether we will bind ourselves to law, and whether an allegiance to the laws of the land or to the laws of religion—both seen as transcending historical material actualities—should bind us. When is it permissible to break our complicity with social and political norms in order to prioritize human and material particularity and historical materiality? As I pointed out in the previous chapter, we have a single character-type whose very essence constitutes an examination of that question: the spy. In our cultural understanding of—and interest in—espionage, the bonds that we have to state, law, and the Establishment play upon the consolidation of the national political interest.

ON DEM OCR A T I C R E S P O N S I B I L I T Y     97

As the Bond character says in Casino Royale, he would not be very good at his job if killing troubled his conscience. Yet, since the murders that he commits are governed by a ‘licence to kill’, they remain within the law; and, indeed, in killing in this way, Bond acts in entire complicity with a law that is thought to transcend even the regular and visible or knowable laws of the land.50 What is it that explains the huge commercial success of the Bond novels and films? How can we understand the cultural fascination that the figure and the narratives have, especially in the so-called advanced economies? After all, the novels, structured around the logic of espionage, are predicated on the assumption of a lack of bonds, so to speak: they are organized around the fact that people cannot be trusted because of unstated motivations for their actions. Bond’s task, as I have already argued, is to unmask those who are complicit with the ‘bad politics’ or ‘enemy jurisdictions’ or just simply with ‘evil’ itself, and to reinstate the values of brisk British empiricism.51 That is to say, his task is to bind the audience into complicity with the belief that it is always the others who are to blame for whatever is going wrong, the others who are a threat to our native interests. Now, though, we can see that something else is also at stake here. Identification with the nation state, and compliance with its laws in uncritical fashion, has become the fundamental constitutive driver of a major historical crisis that has shaped the post–Second World War world. That crisis is the on-going and seemingly unstoppable refugee crisis. In December 1950, the United Nations established the position of a UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). UNHCR would deal with what was thought to be the temporary corollary of the 1939–1945 war, the massive displacement of Europeans who had been afflicted by the war. However, history moved on, and the UNHCR has been struggling to keep up ever since. In 1956, by which time it had initially been thought that the necessary work of dealing with the world’s refugees would have been done, the Hungarian uprising was crushed. Throughout the 1960s, attention focused more on the continent of Africa, where struggles related to the ending of colonization had again displaced many thousands of civilians, fleeing war and persecution. As the organization’s own self-description puts it, by this stage, ‘Any expectation that UNHCR would become unnecessary has never resurfaced’. Further, and delineating the ever-expanding problem, ‘Over the following two decades, UNHCR had to help with displacement crises in Asia and Latin America. By the end of the century there were fresh refugee problems in Africa and, turning full circle, new waves of refugees in Europe from the series of wars in the Balkans’.52 However, in recent times—and especially since the falling of the Berlin Wall in 1989—many new walls have been built, border defences

98    CHAPTER 5

s­ trengthened, and the circulation of refugees heavily restricted again. The European states—perhaps especially those governed by right-wing i­ deologies— have closed borders, retrenching into a demand for a kind of ethnic purity that, they say, faces possible ‘contamination’ by foreign individuals. This is laid bare in statements by Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, bringing together a legal and religious set of supposed fundamentals with which ‘we’ must be complicit. On 3 September 2015, Orbán wrote in the German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Deutschung, that ‘Those arriving have been raised in another religion, and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Muslims. This is an important question, because Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity. Is it not worrying in itself that European Christianity is now barely able to keep Europe Christian? There is no alternative, and we have no option but to defend our borders’.53 This is the contemporary realpolitik of complicity. It tries to bind us to a position where ‘there is no alternative’, or where any alternative is immediately ruled as illegitimate because it calls into question the boundaries that surround and circumscribe existing laws, religious affiliation and fundamentals, or even our very identity. Crucially, it calls upon us to keep an ever-watchful eye upon our own citizens, lest they be ‘refugees’ in some kind of disguise, lest they be not somehow legitimate, not echt ‘one of us’. The nation state in our times has come to resemble the kind of police state monitored by internal household spies, as in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Espionage, as it were, has come fully home; and it has been internalized in a culture not just of surveillance (by the State), but also a culture of suspicion (by citizens, of fellow citizens). Such nativist identities are now also the subject of intensive State surveillance; but this is also a surveillance that is increasingly explicitly and even brazenly internalized, as the State encourages us essentially to spy on each other. A simple example will suffice here as a paradigmatic example of what is at issue. In the United Kingdom, advertising on public transport is, as elsewhere, fairly commonplace. Recently, however, that advertising—typically carried on privately owned bus companies—has taken an expressly political turn. As we wait for a bus or drive behind one, we can now read adverts saying ‘Think you know a [Coventry, Newcastle—just insert name of city] benefits cheat? Report them anonymously’, followed by a ‘confidential’ phone number. This is ostensibly an invitation to citizens to report improper conduct. However, it is more than that. It presupposes that ‘benefits cheats’ are a substantial threat to the economy, and indeed that they may be related to the post-2008 financial crisis and the ‘need’ for austerity finances. Further, it establishes as normative—even as a duty—

ON DEM OCR A T I C R E S P O N S I B I L I T Y     99

that we report on each other, whether we have evidence or not. The point is to establish a culture of suspicion and to encourage spying on each other. Clearly, this is an invitation not just to smear those whom ‘we’ may not like, it is also an invitation, amounting now almost to a political instruction, to ensure that ‘we’ are always in complicity with a government. The key issue, though, is that structurally this government no longer acts on behalf of its citizens: it acts simply on behalf of those who share its identity, those who can say that ‘we’ are ‘one of us’. This is anathema to democracy and detrimental to its health. The same is now encouraged institutionally, and by law. The United Kingdom government’s ‘Prevent’ strategy requires that institutions such as universities ‘monitor’ not just the movements but also the speech and even now the moods of students, reporting to the State anything such as any seeming ‘change in behaviour or outlook’.54 Given that teaching itself should, almost axiomatically, help bring about changes in behaviour and outlook, Prevent is substantively a bar on anything that might produce critical thinking: it requires students to behave in officially approved ways, and requires that teachers report any deviation. It is to be effected through our agreed compliance with acts that are fundamentally acts of spying on our neighbours, reporting anything that deviates from State-sanctioned acceptable behaviour. How far is this from a totalitarian mind-set? The unease that many feel about their silent commitment to—their complicity with—the ideologies of the advanced economies in which they live is often dealt with through institutional forms of caring. We can watch suffering elsewhere in the world and can feel empathy with refugees drowning in the Mediterranean or children starving in drought-stricken African countries ravaged by ecological catastrophe. In the face of this, there are two responses. The first is charity—the eradication of a guilty conscience through institutionalized forms of what I might call the ‘outsourcing of care’. Faced with what Luc Boltanski calls la souffrance à distance, we deal with our own discomfort by donating money. The second is to say that the world’s problems are just too big for any individual to consider and engage, and so we retreat into our own smaller, more parochial concerns, doing what we can locally. This latter is the recourse to which Voltaire’s fictional character, Candide, resorts. At the end of that 1759 novella, Candide decides that the only real mode of survival is through a withdrawal into one’s own private sphere, where ‘il faut cultiver son jardin’.55 This is that avoidance of complicity that, at a stroke, engages an ecological and environmental commitment to the world while at the same time reducing that world to the private domain, the private garden.

100    CHAPTER 5

7. INTERIM CONCLUSION What, then, of the critic? To what extent should the critic act in a ‘disinterested’ fashion, as has become the norm for all scientific research in the period of modern science? To what extent should she be driven by her personal—even private—commitments and engagements with the world? As we might phrase it, where is the boundary of the critic’s garden, her nation, and her self? Is it necessary, in order to avoid complicity in what I have called systemic lying—that linguistic conformity with social norms and with the metaphors (or clichés) that pass for truth—that one withdraw from any and all commitment? Should we say, like Habermas, that we are engaged in critical discourse in the non-coercive search for ‘the better argument’, as he has it in his Legitimation Crisis, or should we say, like Melville’s Bartleby, ‘I would prefer not to’, and withdraw? The larger question that this raises concerns the relation between individual and collective responsibility for actions, decisions, or states of affairs in the world. In other words, we might express the real issue here as the issue of the existence or otherwise of community as such. This gives an entire new twist to the idea of identity politics, in that it indicates that a genuine identity politics must be predicated not on the identity of a single individual who subsumes her or his entire being under the image of a particular mythic ‘collective’ identity; rather, it must be based upon community which entails difference, criticism. This is the subject of the next—and concluding—chapter.

NOTES   1.  Richard J. Golsan, French Writers and the Politics of Complicity (Johns Hopkins Baltimore: University Press, 2006), 2.  2. Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time (Jonathan Cape, 2016), 101.  3. Ibid., 110.  4. Ibid., 1.  5. Ibid., 48.   6.  Peter Finn and Petra Couvée, The Zhivago Affair (Vintage, 2015), 43.   7.  See the work of Ellen Schrecker on McCarthyism, especially The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (2nd edition; Palgrave, 2002). McCarthyism is the clear precursor of our contemporary surveillance societies.   8.  Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, Paris: After the Liberation 1944–1949 (revised edition; Penguin, 2007), 77.  9. Tzvetan Todorov, Les ennemis intimes de la démocratie (Robert Laffont, Paris, 2012), 32 [trans. mine].

ON DEM OCR A T I C R E S P O N S I B I L I T Y     101

10.  Edward Said, The World, the Text, the Critic (Faber and Faber, 1984), 28. 11.  Richard J. Golsan, French Writers and the Politics of Complicity, 2. See also Dave Eggers, The Circle (Penguin, 2013). 12.  Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything (Allen Lane, 2014), 2. 13. Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873); repr in Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large, eds., The Nietzsche Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 114–23; passage quoted from 115. 14.  Leszek Kołakowski, Freedom, Fame, Lying and Betrayal: Essays on Everyday Life (trans. Agnieszka Kołakowska; Penguin, 1999), 25. I have discussed this example at some length in my study of Aesthetic Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 111ff. 15.  This, in fact, is a very different source for the kind of pragmatism once advanced by Richard Rorty. Rorty took his inspiration from the thought of William James and of John Dewey, and rested a good deal on the Jamesian proposition that truth is ‘what is good in the way of belief’. However, the Nietzschean position I outline here, while arriving at a broadly similar proposition, nonetheless offers a very different inflection of the question. 16. Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies, 117. 17.  Ibid., 117. 18.  In passing, this might ‘explain’ much of the work of Joseph Conrad, especially in his Heart of Darkness and in his Secret Agent. 19. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (trans. John Cumming; Verso, 1979), 6. 20.  Dave Eggers, The Circle (Penguin, 2013), 380. 21.  Ibid., 381. 22.  The single most egregious example of this is in the multiple worldwide rankings of universities. There has been such a carcinogenically growing plethora of these league-tables, since 1982, that we now have the absurdity of new league-tables whose purpose is to rank the various different league-tables themselves. In the resulting euphoria of number, the realities of what happens in classrooms and laboratories are lost from view, rendered illegible and therefore almost illegitimate. The cancer itself has become the only reality, with the resulting damage to the skin that is in the game. 23.  Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 7. I discuss the cultural implications of this in more detail in my ‘Introduction’ to Thomas Docherty, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (New York: Harvester/Columbia University Press, 1993), 9. 24.  Caroline Moorehead, Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France (Chatto & Windus, 2014), 9. 25.  I am extremely grateful to Claire Poyner of Peace News, who went to great lengths to track down the necessary documents from the archives and who provided me with access to the relevant information here. 26.  Peace News, 29 May 1953, 4. 27.  Ibid., 5. 28.  Ibid., 5. 29. Hannah Arendt, ‘Lying in Politics’, from her Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972), 4.

102    CHAPTER 5

30.  Ibid., 5. 31.  Ibid., 7. 32.  Hannah Arendt, ‘Truth and Politics’, in Between Past and Future, ed. Jerome Kohn (Penguin, 2006 edition), 224. 33.  Arendt, ‘Truth’, 225. 34.  Ibid., 228. 35.  Ibid., 229. 36.  In Leibniz, of course, it rests upon a hierarchy underpinned by an omniscient and omnipotent God. Being prefect by definition, this God must have created the ‘best of all possible worlds’ in which all is always ‘for the best’. Current evil will be seen, sub specie eternitas, as good. I have explored the relation of such Optimism to deconstructive différance in my ‘Introduction’ to Postmodernism (Harvester/Columbia University Press, 1993), 9–10. 37.  I am extremely grateful to my distinguished Latinist colleague, John Gilmore, for his assistance in locating various textual sources determining the extremely nuanced differences between labor and opus. The summary distinction I make here, while broadly supported by the Latin texts, does not quite do justice to the full complexity of the linguistic distinctions. Gilmore points to inconsistencies in the Latin usage that make the distinction less than straightforward. Virgil, Aeneid, VI: 126–29, for example, appears to treat the terms almost as synonymous (private correspondence, 9 July 2015). Broadly, however, the distinction holds. 38.  See ‘An interview with Alice Kaplan’, available at: http://press.uchicago.edu /Misc/Chicago/424146in.html. 39.  This is as cited in Alice Kaplan, The Collaborator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 149. I am thoroughly indebted to this book for the factual account of the trial that I advance here. The interpretation of those facts, however, is my own. 40.  Ibid., 151. 41.  Ibid., 157. 42.  Ibid., 158. 43.  Ibid., 159. 44.  Ibid., 174. 45.  Ibid., 161. The rest of Reboul’s case depended on a series of rhetorical manoeuvres that played upon the jury’s tacit mistrust of Brasillach as a homosexual, establishing a set of metaphorical slippages between political ‘invasion’ of land, and ‘being buggered’: ‘We were buggered, Reboul is saying, and this man liked it’ (Kaplan, 164). 46.  My account here does not attend, for example, to the fact that Brasillach had actually called for the death and murder of résistants, nor does it attend to the more obvious matters relating to Vichy’s complicity in the mass murder of Jews. These, however, are fundamentally shaped by the philosophical positions that I am exploring. 47.  Philip Pettit, Just Freedom (New York: Norton, 2014). 48.  David Graeber, The Democracy Project (Penguin, 2013), 186. 49. See: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n14/john-lanchester/once-greece-goes.

ON DEM OCR A T I C R E S P O N S I B I L I T Y     103

50. This raises interesting issues. As I indicated in my opening chapters, Tom Bingham points out that one of the founding principles of democratic citizenship is that the law is knowable and available to the ordinary citizen. 51.  As a side-issue, it is interesting that towards the end of the series of novels by Ian Fleming, Bond is revealed to be explicitly of Scottish birth. This may, of course, have been partly determined by the fact of the success of the film series, in which Bond was played by Sean Connery, whose Scottish accent was notable. The most recent franchise, in which Daniel Craig plays Bond, makes an explicit return to the Scottish roots of the character when he returns to his family estate in Scotland. Perhaps his great literary predecessor is Richard Hannay, also a Scot, in John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps. There is something to be researched here not just in terms of a Scottish tradition of espionage but also in terms of the idea of the British state as a union or bonding of multiple national constituencies. Erskine Childers may also have a role in that tradition. 52. See: http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49c3646cbc.html. 53.  Report by Ian Traynor in The Guardian, 03 September 2015. For the original version, see: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/fluechtlingskrise/orban-ueber -fluechtlingskrise-das-problem-ist-ein-deutsches-problem-13783525.html. For the original comments regarding ‘Christian’ Europe, see: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik /fluechtlingskrise/viktor-orban-wer-ueberrannt-wird-kann-niemanden-aufnehmen -13782061.html. 54. See: https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/universities-must-assess -risk-of-students-becoming-terrorists-says-home-office/2019067.article. 55. Voltaire, Candide, ed. J. H. Brumfitt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).

6

‘Open the Doors!’; or, on Commitment and Reserve

I

closed my last chapter with a brief reflection on the new walls and borders that are being erected across the geo-political world.1 The most important aspect of this is that the straightforward political issues (related to nationalism and identity) goes hand-in-glove with the fact that such border-closings and exclusions are symptomatic of a profound inability to permit criticism and democracy in our contemporary predicaments. Our dominant modes of thought are constrained by an almost necessary complicity with ‘the way things are’, or as we usually call it, ‘realism’. I have already noted that Hannah Arendt indicates that a subscription to the possibility of change requires the same mode of imagination that we associate with lying, with describing things ‘as they are not’. This is similar to the more recent thought of Roberto Mangabeira Unger, for whom also any demand that we conform to ‘political realism’ is actually a demand that we remain committed to the world as it currently is. The real question for us is how we can speak against the existing state of affairs in the world and also get a hearing, without being axiomatically ruled illegitimate or ‘unrealistic’, without being regarded as illegitimate because nonconformist. What can the critic do to avoid complicity with the systemic lying that we call ‘truth’ within any given society? In this concluding chapter, I want to move away from those border-closures and new walls that are being built everywhere, and instead to begin from a set of radical ‘openings’. The key such opening is a demand—in poetry—for a specific kind of opening of the doors and cages in which we find ourselves. I will start from a brief consideration of two poems, both by Edwin Morgan, and both concerned with opening and with silence.

105

106    CHAPTER 6

1. ON SILENCE AND SAYING NOTHING The first Morgan poem to which I’ll attend, published in The Second Life of 1968, is called ‘Opening the Cage’. The poem plays a series of variations on a line from a John Cage text: ‘I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry’. The poem simply rearranges these fourteen words some fourteen times in fourteen lines: ‘I have to say poetry and is that nothing and am I saying it / I am and I have poetry to say and is that nothing saying it’ and so on.2 Cage is probably most well-known for his 4’33” piece, often described—inadequately and imprecisely—as a ‘silent’ piece of music. The very first score for this piece is now lost; but it was written in conventional musical notation, in which all the bars were marked by rests. The earliest existing ‘score’ for it now is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and it consists of almost entirely blank paper, with Cage’s note that ‘1 page = 7 inches = 56 seconds’. Part of the point of the piece, when played, is to deconstruct the idea of silence or of musical rests: the audience becomes increasingly aware of the music of everyday life, as it were, intruding into and constituting what we usually call silence or rest. I want to suggest that this is akin to a situation in which we regard ‘truth’ as a form of silent complicity with what is; but that within any such silence, there remains a critical noise, a ghostly something that a critical silence or a deconstructive silence can allow to come to voice, can allow to be heard. It is this noise that we seek: it is not officially part of the music, while simultaneously being all that we can hear, however clandestine it may be; and it is thus a new language, and one that exerts a critical pressure upon the official ‘truth’ of our compliant silence. Cage made a number of lectures that amounted to performance pieces, some of them ruminations on silence. In 1949, he gave a ‘lecture on nothing’ at the Artists Club in New York City; and it is in this piece that we find the phrase played upon by Morgan: ‘I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry’. It seems, at first hearing, to imply that poetry says nothing. Cage’s words, developed into poetry by Morgan, are reminiscent of Beckett, who, for many, was the great poet or writer of silence. Beckett, in his Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, which was published also in 1949, at roughly the same time as Cage gave his lecture in New York, famously offers a succinct proposition that can be applied to his own aesthetic determination and presiding theme. He speaks of ‘The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express’.3

‘OPEN THE DOORS! ’ ; OR, ON COM MI T ME N T A N D R E S E R V E     107

This kind of statement is not at all new in fact, however much it may have a new purchase and significance in our contemporary moment. Sir Philip Sidney had said as much in his ‘Apology for Poetry’ in 1595 when he writes that ‘for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth’. Yet, for Sidney, the poet presents the world as it is not: ‘Nature never set forth the earth in such rich tapestry as divers poets have done . . . Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden’.4 Sidney’s argument here, his defence of a writing that presents the world as it is not, is that poetry teaches us how the world can be, and it does so essentially through a kind of false or failed representation of the world as it is. He shows us a world ‘out of joint’, as his contemporary, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, might think it; and poetry sets us the challenge to ‘make it right’, if necessary (as in Hamlet) through a radical act. Sidney makes a series of distinctions among the three different categories of poetry, philosophy, and history. History tells what has happened in a factual fashion; philosophy is concerned with precepts and with what ‘is the case’ (to borrow the phrasing from Wittgenstein).5 Poetry, however, appeals not just to both these things, but does so without any positive straightforward affirmation. It operates by suggestion, by imagination—by offering a world that might be, that can be inferred, or that we can make. Far from it being the case that poetry does not matter because it never affirms anything, it matters precisely because it simulates possibility, and offers what we can call an opening to the possible.

: A brief aside—or ‘essential side issue’—on modern criticism and theory6 Literary criticism, especially in its institutionalized forms in universities and schools, has always been shy of acknowledging the power of poetry. Indeed, it becomes almost a standard truism in some of the dominant forms of ­twentieth-century literary theory that poetry—this bizarre language—somehow avoids any form of linguistic commitments to the world at all. It is as if the critic is shy of acknowledging the kinds of change that the poetry makes possible; the critic will not go through the open door, but instead stands before the door, like the character in Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’, afraid to shake the building, afraid fully to open the cage.7 Twentieth-century literary theory, in fact, is a series of embarrassments at the question concerning the commitment and/or disinterestedness of the critic (and this, essentially, is the subject of this final chapter). At the start of the twentieth century, I. A. Richards argues that poetry makes only what he called ‘pseudo-statements’, statements that look like

108    CHAPTER 6

philosophical or otherwise epistemologically verifiable statements, but statements whose claim upon referentiality was overshadowed by their claim upon the mind of the reader. For Richards, poetry helps us to cheer up through its pseudo-statements. Its task is to engage as fully as possible all the psychological drives in a reader’s mind; but then to resolve all the contradictory drives into a stabilized harmony. Thus, for example, he considers tragedy as the highest form of art because, in tragedy, ‘Pity, the impulse to approach, and Terror, the impulse to retreat, are brought . . . to a reconciliation which they find nowhere else, and with them who knows what other allied groups of equally discordant impulses’.8 This, he argues, brings the whole psyche into active play; but it does so in order to produce ‘that sense of release, of repose in the midst of stress, of balance and composure’. It will not produce action in material history.9 Yeats had worried about commitment, about the power of his poetry, asking in ‘The Man and the Echo’: ‘Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?’ But Auden replied, in his poem ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, that poetry ‘makes nothing happen’, keeping a disinterested view to the fore.10 There is in this a kind of disavowal of the political force of poetry. Such a view finds theoretical formulations in both Russian Formalism and in American New Criticism. Formalism retreats from reference, preferring instead to explore the more metaphysical conditions of literaturnost or ‘literariness’ as it occurs within poetry. Even when it does return us to the materiality of the world—as it does when Viktor Shklovsky argues that the function of art is to make us feel the world afresh or to make us see the world as if for the first time—then it does so in a fashion designed to confirm the existing state of affairs in the world, and simply to enhance our experience of it. American New Criticism famously rejects any priority given to either the author or the reader, preferring instead to focus attention onto the internal logic of the text. Its key critical terms would include—almost exactly reflecting the same structure as Richards—‘irony’ (Wayne C. Booth), ‘ambiguity’ (William Empson), ‘paradox’ (Cleanth Brooks), or ‘tension’ (Allen Tate). By the time of reader-response criticism, we also even replace historically real readers with merely ‘implied’ readers. For many, deconstruction—with its intrinsic valorization of ‘undecidability’—becomes the logical culmination of such a drive towards quietism and accidie. However, at the very moment that deconstruction rises to a prominent position, so too there is an explosion of interest in politically committed positions. Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, and the like theoretical modes all demand action. Yet, as Richard Rorty pointed out, and as Jeffrey J. Williams has more recently reiterated, such action tends to the

‘OPEN THE DOORS! ’ ; OR, ON COM MI T ME N T A N D R E S E R V E     109

symbolic at best. As Rorty puts it, while it is now less acceptable to be racist and sexist in the academy, meanwhile a class-based economics oppresses people of all races and all genders in society. Williams points to colleagues who are all in favour of radical action, in their writings, but who do not actually commit to action in material terms elsewhere.11 Indeed, the ‘containment’ of tensions—and the corollary containment of any proclivity to action in the material world—becomes a cliché of twentiethcentury formalisms, all of which disavow that the poet or writer is speaking in her or his own voice, or that she is persuading anyone to action. This goes all the way from the intentional fallacy in New Criticism, through to the implied author and implied reader in Booth and Iser. More recently, the containment in question is institutional, in that the radical ideas have currency only within some parts of the institution of criticism. Unless and until the institution in which criticism occurs begins itself to address its social and material role, we will not be able to resolve the predicaments that this situation yields. That is to say: the university must rediscover its social role. Here ends the essential side issue.

: The second Morgan poem to consider here is his great poem, written near the end of his life, celebrating and inaugurating the Scottish Parliament on 09 October 2004. It is called ‘Open the Doors!’ Since this celebrates the opening of a parliament, it can hardly celebrate silence, of course: by its very nature, a parliament is the locus of noisy dialogue and debate. The poem opens with the imperative: ‘Open the doors! Light of the day, shine in; light of the mind, shine out!’ It sets up a deliberate Enlightenment dialectic, but also evokes a biblical genesis. Instead, though, of a simple invocation of the theological power of the word (Let there be light; and light there was), it situates that word in terms of a logic of free secular expression, in which thought can be freely spoken, but spoken explicitly ‘in the light of’ the pressures of material worldly realities. It is a politics of dialogue that is set up in this opening, above all a dialogue between the material world ‘as it is’ (the outside) and the world as it can be spoken (parliament in debate, inside) and therefore as it can be. This too is an opening to the possible. The collocation of these texts by Cage and Morgan might let us understand how silence can operate more generally in our institutions, be they the institutions of aesthetics (as with music or poetry) or the institutions of politics (such as those where dialogue and debate might be normative). Hovering here between aesthetic and political institutions is, of course, one particular

110    CHAPTER 6

i­nstitution: the university. The university is a site where the lights of minds can illuminate things and bring them to visibility, but a site also where external and material historical realities must be acknowledged. The door—open or closing—sits between these realms; and the university itself operates precisely as such a door.12 I have stressed the symbolic importance of the door here as an opening to possibility. However, the key question for the critic is whether she will realize a possibility, whether she will be a critic characterized by political commitment or whether she will be characterized instead by a kind of reserve. If our critical authority—that is to say, our ability to be taken seriously as a legitimate social and political voice—depends upon a complicity with the systemic lying that constitutes consensus or the acceptance of ‘realism’ and ‘common sense’, then criticism faces a real predicament. The question is how to express a commitment to the exposure of such complicity while also avoiding falling into complicity simply with another army of Nietzschean metaphors, as it were. This is what we now, finally, need to explore. 2. THE PROBLEM OF COMMITMENT We can start by examining the seeming opposition between commitment and withdrawal or reserve. On the one hand, we have the idea of a literature and criticism of commitment, and this is usually signalled as a commitment to politics, to the materialities of the world. Set against this is the withdrawal from the public sphere, sometimes thought of as a kind of formalist aestheticism, in which the autonomy of the work of art—and of the institutions within which it is considered and criticized (museum, library, gallery, university, and so on)—is regarded as ‘autonomous’. It is the old opposition between a Sartrean idea of commitment on one hand, and what was once called the New Criticism, whose roots may well lie in the figure of Voltaire’s Candide, retreating from the world to cultivate his garden. Adorno considers that opposition in his great 1964 essay on ‘Commitment’. There, one of the many things he does is essentially to effect a kind of fundamental deconstruction of the opposition (although deconstruction is a term that most Adornians would probably eschew). In the essay, which is occasioned as a response to Sartre’s arguments in Qu’est-ce que la littérature, he shows how ‘committed literature’, in committing itself to a recognizable world, essentially undermines itself and its role as art. Art, he writes, is there in order not to return the world to us but to allow us to work out how to resist the ways of the world and the ways in which the world proposes its current order as natural and inevitable. ‘Art’, he writes, ‘is not a matter of pointing

‘OPEN THE DOORS! ’ ; OR, ON COM MI T ME N T A N D R E S E R V E     111

up alternatives but rather of resisting, solely through artistic form, the course of the world, which continues to hold a pistol to the heads of human beings’.13 It is interesting to make the point more fully here by setting this against the thought of an earlier Russian Formalist such as Viktor Shklovsky, for whom ‘Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony’.14 Both Shklovsky and Adorno favour a certain ostranenie, a demand for ‘estrangement’ in and through art. However, the point for Shklovsky is that, through such estrangement, the world will be returned to us in all its sensuousness, and as if we are experiencing it for the first time. For Shklovsky, this is important for it returns the world ‘as it is’ to us, revealing a reality that lies beyond the habits of perception, habits which dull that reality and hide it from normal view or experience. For Adorno, by contrast, the point is to alert us to the fact that the seeming ontological firmness of that world is not immutable. Both are interested in the priorities of form over content; but form, for Shklovsky, ends up by consolidating an existing state of affairs while, for Adorno, form is precisely what demands a different kind of critical commitment, for it alerts us to the necessity that we must commit to the possibility of change in the existing state of affairs. The point for Adorno is that, in a simple or crude commitment to commitment, such as we would have it in Sartre, art and literature essentially become complicit with the forms and structures—the underlying constitution—of the very reality that they would resist or whose solidity and certainties they would contest. The kind of critical resistance that we might seek thus undermines itself, for it remains complicit with an existing order and with the narrowed range of possibility that describes the supposed ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ of things as they are. It is for this reason that we should not simply ditch so-called autonomous art as somehow irrelevant to politics: on the contrary, it is often through the formal experimentation of such art—and the consequential realization that art is not there for us, not there to be understood—that we can resist those underlying conditions and constitutions. Which is also not to say that we should also simply accept and embrace such art at the cost of other kinds of commitment. Art resists understanding: we might say that art is precisely what makes the seemingly comprehensible incomprehensible. ‘Hidden in the notion of a “message”, of art’s manifesto, even if it is politically radical, is a moment of accommodation to the world; the gesture of addressing the listener contains a secret complicity with those being addressed, who can, however, be released from their illusions only if that complicity is rescinded’.15 This ‘accommodation to the world’ is, essentially, precisely the complicity that we now seek to avoid.

112    CHAPTER 6

Adorno is suspicious of anything in art that seems to give consolation in the face of the horror and terror of a reality that is shaped by the very possibility of Auschwitz. ‘The so-called artistic rendering of the naked physical pain of those who were beaten down with rifle butts contains, however distantly, the possibility that pleasure can be squeezed from it’, writes Adorno. ‘The morality that forbids art to forget this for a second slides off into the abyss of its opposite’.16 When meaning is assigned to horror, then pleasure in horror is salvaged, and those who suffered from it thereby suffer a further injustice at the hands of art. Adorno’s argument continues: ‘The aesthetic stylistic principle, and even the chorus’ solemn prayer, make the unthinkable appear to have had some meaning; it becomes transfigured, something of its horror removed. By this alone an injustice is done to the victims’. And finally, in a crescendo, ‘When even genocide becomes cultural property in committed literature, it becomes easier to continue complying with the culture that gave rise to the murder’.17 This argument fully reveals why it is the case that Adorno fears that Auschwitz and National Socialism remain with us: the very possibility of survival, of living on in a meaningful fashion, after Auschwitz, is impossible. This is survivor guilt writ large, in one particular sense. We should also note the precise words that he uses here: ‘it become easier to continue complying with the culture’—this is the complicity that Adorno spots in this essay, and that he wants to contest. Culture is thus in danger of becoming guilty of its own complicities, guilty of playing its part in the continuation of the barbarism that was Auschwitz, guilty of complicity with the fundamentals of the camps and of ‘national socialism’. Adorno is more famous for the aphorism that ‘it is barbaric to continue to write poetry after Auschwitz’, which occurs in this same essay;18 but this—survivor guilt—is what lies behind the statement, I think. It relates to Adorno being haunted, maybe even quite literally, by his own surviving ghost, by the possibility that it could have been him. Making meaning, for Adorno, is a way of assimilating oneself to a world that really has to be resisted; and our usual modes of ‘making meaning’ (via conventional forms of criticism that are predicated upon a demand for ‘understanding’) are therefore complicit with a culture industry that can turn even genocide into entertainment.19 Schindler’s List might be a paradigmatic example.20 There is a precursor figure for this in Melville’s fictional character Bartleby, in ‘Bartleby the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street’. If we are looking for walls, and if we are looking for a story about the relation of writing to both Wall Street and to a principle of ‘realistic’ or perfect copying, this is the tale we need. Bartleby is a scrivener, a man who lives by the very idea and principle of realistic copying in his office on Wall Street. His job

‘OPEN THE DOORS! ’ ; OR, ON COM MI T ME N T A N D R E S E R V E     113

is to copy out, perfectly, legal documents. Yet he resists; he withdraws; he becomes reserved and exercises reserve in his repeated phrase ‘I would prefer not to’. 3. THE PROBLEM OF RESERVE Bartleby is a copyist. His task, as scrivener, is literally to copy out legal documents. He begins earnestly enough, and with seeming great efficiency. However, he refuses to validate his work—or rather, he prefers not to validate his work—through reading it against the original. He yields a copy but one that essentially divorces itself from the origin, or that does not take its origin as its legally binding and authorizing source.21 In this regard, he starts, almost immediately, to step outside the law; but to do so from within the very core of law and legal writing or textuality itself. His writings, then, are what we might call illegal or, better, illegible: unamenable to legislation. He will eventually, of course, die at the hands of the law, in the Tombs, where he behaves in a manner extremely similar to that of Shakespeare’s Antonio, in The Merchant of Venice, as discussed previously. As Melville’s text progresses, Bartleby is increasingly presented as turning to and always facing the wall: this is, after all, also a story of Wall Street. He faces the wall as if facing a mirror; but if so, it is one that refuses to yield the image or representation. It is as if he passes through the wall, in fact; and, increasingly, he is described insistently in terms that make us wonder if he is really there or if he is as insubstantial or transparent as a ghost.22 At the start, we find that there is, in the narrator’s office, a glass wall: a transparent division that does not really divide. Keeping Bartleby on his side of this divide, he also nonetheless procures a ‘high green folding screen, which might isolate Bartleby from my sight, though not remove him from my voice’. This screen, unlike the one dividing these two from the three other scriveners or office workers, allows voices to pass through but not images. These two screens are, as it were, reverse constructions: one allows voice to be heard, the other allows image to be seen. This, essentially, divides the voice from the body. It makes Bartleby into a figure whose entire being is governed by that division. As with Morgan’s ‘Open the Doors’, what we get here is a dialectic between inner and outer; but in this case, as Melville puts it: ‘in a manner, privacy and society were conjoined’; and, we might add, even reconciled.23 The description of the space in which Bartleby sits and works is described as one with little view upon the external world. Given the height and proximity of the neighbouring walls, there is only a small shaft of light that is available

114    CHAPTER 6

outside the window. Bartleby nonetheless spends a good deal of his time facing these walls, as if circling in on himself and withdrawing from everything external to him. All of this is governed by what the narrator calls Bartleby’s key characteristic, ‘austere reserve’. What are we to make of Bartleby, then? What are we to make of austere reserve such as this? In failing to commit to the law, he becomes subject to it, having previously been the subject of it in his copying out of legal bills. Yet he was always, in some sense, superfluous or redundant, never really ‘there’, yet somehow ‘passing through’. In the epilogue, we find that there is a rumour (so not a certainty; but just the shadow of a certainty) that he had been made redundant from the dead-letter office, the office in which communication fails and where letters are held in reserve, before being auctioned or burnt. The text is a kind of purgatorio, a state of in-between-ness, an interlude. For the narrator, there was life before, and life after, Bartleby; but the text itself examines the odd interlude in which Bartleby essentially assumes the very presence of the narrator, displacing him from his office, haunting him (and Wall Street in general). It is like a present that did not happen, in an odd sense, for it has no precedent and no outcome. Is this what we mean to characterize as some kind of critical reserve? Reserve is an important issue for criticism. It is explicitly not the withdrawal of commitment (for we hold it in reserve), yet it is not the commitment of and to commitment either. It might be a withdrawal from commitment. Benoît Peeters, in his biography of Derrida, quotes from a letter that Derrida wrote to Gérard Granel on 4 February 1971. Asked yet again about his relation to Marxism, Derrida wrote: ‘I will never emerge from this silence until I have done the work. . . . Meanwhile, what else should we do but work within the limits of the rigour of which one is capable [. . .] and to act “on the left” every time one can, in the field one perceives or looks over, when the situation is clear enough for this, without having too many illusions about the microscopic effects of any such “action”’.24 For Derrida, often, a bland ‘commitment’ to an established position—such as Marxism—meant simply the refusal to do the work of thinking. He preferred what Catherine Malabou described as a spirit of independence: ‘And it is precisely this independence that I loved in him. Never have I met anyone less fazed by possible reprisals or questions of social respectability. He couldn’t stand institutional obedience getting in the way of thinking, or the norm winning out over the demands of thinking’.25 As with institutional obedience, so too, we might say, with ideological obedience: and one word for such obedience is fundamentalism. ­Fundamentalisms

‘OPEN THE DOORS! ’ ; OR, ON COM MI T ME N T A N D R E S E R V E     115

are, perhaps paradoxically, ‘contaminated’ always by puritanism: that which is purist is itself never pure, but represents a threat in its constant drive towards conformity, and the claims of elites who have access to fundamental truths, whose mysteries are denied to the rest of us. Fundamentalisms respect the solidity of the wall (and financial fundamentalisms respect the solidity of Wall Street); and fundamentalists stand decidedly always on one side of the wall, with which they identify. Any criticism that does this—such as a criticism based upon identity politics—is essentially a criticism marked by complicity with the systemic lying that constitutes conformism. It is anathema to criticism; and it is also anathema to any proper attention to the possibility of criticism making a change in the world, or assuming a critical responsibility for any states of affairs. This is of pressing political and cultural importance, because the academic freedom that encourages the possibility of criticism is under serious threat worldwide. I close this section by focusing attention on this, and doing so in the specific example of the United Kingdom. Although this is specific to the United Kingdom, I also take it as a paradigmatic example of what is happening in other jurisdictions. According to the director of MI5, Andrew Parker, the United Kingdom faces a very serious threat of terrorist atrocity and attack.26 Rightly, the UK government needs to take action to deal with this; and it is establishing a specific argument around counter-terrorism legislation. The legislation will have a serious consequence for the university sector, which is charged with monitoring activity that could be thought to be intrinsically complicit with or sympathetic to terrorism. However, the UK government is deploying a specific ideological framework to shape this. It is also adopting a specific language, in which the kind of criticism that I am trying to endorse in this book may well be classed as, essentially, a form of extremism, and will thus be allied to terrorism. On 13 May 2015, Theresa May, the UK home secretary, argued that the necessary legislation will rest on foundations that ‘promote British values’; and the counter-extremism strategy will target those who are ‘vocally or actively opposed to fundamental British values’.27 That position has since been reiterated and endorsed by UK Prime Minister David Cameron.28 The problem with this is that we—whoever ‘we’ may be—may not agree on whatever it is that constitutes these ‘fundamental British values’. In fact, of course, the UK government is essentially arrogating to itself the right to determine and identify these values; and one reason for the gloriously vague phrase is that the government can then determine these values to suit its own ideological programme. There are no plans for a broad democratic discussion of such values. In this respect, the UK government, with this legislation, is behaving

116    CHAPTER 6

like a puritan fundamentalist: it has privileged access to ‘the truth’ of ‘our’ British values. In fact, however, it is precisely discussion and debate around this and associated questions that would constitute a ‘we’ in the first place. What this means, further, is that the UK government is deciding on what it is that constitutes the ‘truth’ of such values. It is setting up a normative code of conduct to which citizens—and academics and critics—must conform, lest they be found to be in breach of the counter-extremism and counter-terrorism legislation. Worse still, it is not yet revealing the content of that normative code of conduct. (We might say that ‘they’ know what it is, but that ‘we’ don’t. That Kafkaesque position is one I examine in other sections of this chapter.) It follows that any critical intervention runs the risk of jeopardizing the security and safety of its writer and speaker. In this situation, two routes are usually advised for safety and survival: (a) silence, or ‘keeping your head down’; or (b) collaboration. The latter is usually rewarded by promotion within our institutions. Now, the position that I am advocating here—that the point of criticism requires a calling into question of the very foundations of what constitutes material reality—is thereby rendered simply illegitimate and even impossible. If need be, legislation can be put into place to render it silent. This is but one reason why we need to defend academic freedom: it turns out to be the cornerstone of social and political freedoms more widely understood.29 4. THE PROBLEM OF LAW This is actually about a withdrawal from the law, and whether the kind of reserve that I am charting here constitutes a legitimate withdrawal from what has been passed as the law. Bartleby, preferring not to copy the legal documents in his office, is actually saying that he will not represent the law, will not speak it. He stands ‘before the law’, as it were, but refuses to endorse it through repetition, and likewise refuses to silence it through critiquing or destroying the existing documents of law. Reading Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’, Derrida finds there a Freudian intertext. The doorkeeper in the tale is big and hairy. Derrida finds, via Freud, a sexual orientation here, which initially leads us to start to see the door symbolically as a genital space; and the ‘preferring not to enter’ as itself foundationally sexual. It would be therefore a neat summation of the tale to explicate it—repeat it—in such Freudian terms as a tale of displaced sexuality and desire, and thereby to ‘explain’ and have done with it. Yet Derrida writes immediately on leading us in this direction: ‘Let us be patient too . . . don’t go thinking that I am stressing this story to mislead you, or to make you wait

‘OPEN THE DOORS! ’ ; OR, ON COM MI T ME N T A N D R E S E R V E     117

in the anteroom of literature or fiction for a properly philosophic treatment of the law’.30 The point here is patience, ‘preferring not to’, or reserve before the door of the text. Such reserve does two things: it resists that closing of the door that can be brought about by reducing the text to its meaning; and it delays us before the text, slowing down the process of engagement to allow time to think. I want here to suggest that this—reserve as slowing down and the resistance to closure, or meaning—is of the essence of literature. Further, I will argue that this is precisely what makes literature—and, by extension, culture itself—a site of resistance to capitalism. It is here that we find the possibility of our résistance, resistance to complicity with a specific political economy. The literary is intrinsically unlike and intrinsically resistant to capital: indeed, it is the very opposite—the antithesis—of capital. Capital works essentially by speed, and its contemporary technologies make such speed intrinsic to the efficiency gains that capital requires in order to have economic growth. Capital works, in short, by the immediacy of a transaction, by the tendency to reduce and even to eliminate the time taken to complete the process of exchange in the transaction between parties. The high point of this is to be found in the financial sector itself, in the phenomenon known as HFT: high frequency trading. In HFT, transactions are done by computer algorithms much faster than the human brain can compute. You can hold a share for a nanosecond, buying and then re-selling it at such speed that your ownership of it—that is to say, your ‘commitment’ to it—becomes almost purely virtual. Speed, in this, is goal-oriented: it moves us from A to B as fast as possible. One way of thinking of speed is in terms of the operations of metaphor in rhetoric. Jean Ricardou, structuralist literary theorist, once defined metaphor, in quasi-mathematical terms, as the shortest possible distance between two points: a metaphor yokes together lion and king, say, eliminating any idea of the distance between them in space. In this regard, we could say that there is a similarity between how metaphor operates and how a capital transaction operates: the latter brings together two disparate entities (a coat and £200, say) in one intimate transaction, a transaction, further, that proposes an equivalence between the two entities. However, metaphor, although ostensibly doing the same thing here, in fact operates very differently. Indeed, it operates in a fashion that is diametrically opposed to capital in at least one basic sense. In a capital transaction, equivalence is established; and that then closes the story or deal. The coat is now mine, the £200 is yours; and the exchange allows me to say that the coat is fully represented in the £200 and vice versa. Metaphor in literature, by contrast, re-opens the very question that it seems to want to close.

118    CHAPTER 6

In the classic crude example—the king is a lion—the metaphor seems to want to propose an equivalence that will give essential meaning to both king and lion. However—and notwithstanding Ricardou’s mathematical description—the point is that we can say that the king is a lion while simultaneously hearing that the king certainly is not a lion. Metaphor, in short, puts us in the position of Hamlet, rattled and wracked by delay as he ponders the being in not-being and vice versa, whether ‘to be or not to be’. That is to say, metaphor—unlike capital—resists closure, resists meaning; and its point is to make us pause, to give us a delay, to offer us the possibility of reserve. So here is Derrida: ‘Is not what holds us in check before the law, like the man from the country, also what analyses and detains us when confronted with a story: is it not its possibility and its impossibility, its readability and unreadability, its necessity and prohibition, and the questions of relation, of repetition and of history?’31 In short: the literary is precisely the site of a resistance to capital because it resists closing the deal. It keeps the door open while noting that it appears to be closed: it reserves its position and holds us in reserve. It avoids any form of fundamentalism that would destroy the document or the monument; and at the same time, it resists making the document monumental. We can put this directly into terms that operate within the world of the financial institutions. Michael Lewis has exposed some of this—including how HFT operates—in several books. In ‘closing the deal’, as I put it, financial transactions require total agreement; and they operate according to the laws of finance, on which there has to be consensus. Lewis proves that it is this very consensus—this demand for conformity to ‘the truth’ of the City—that caused the 2008 crash.32 Anyone questioning such conformity was simply talking an incomprehensible language. As Lewis puts it in The Big Short, ‘The people at the big firms were being paid to be consensus’;33 and that consensus is essentially an agreement about market-inequality as a structural norm of making deals. He goes on to describe the making of a deal between ‘Danny’ and another partner to the transaction: ‘We both know that unadulterated good things like this trade don’t just happen between little hedge funds and big Wall Street firms. I’ll do it, but only after you explain to me how you are going to fuck me. And the salesman explained how he was going to fuck him. And Danny did the trade’.34 To sum up, we might say simply that the literary is literary precisely and to the extent that it is critical of any fundamentalism; and the same can be extended to a definition of culture. Culture would then be that which calls us to commitment, certainly; but it calls us to commitment to a world that is always about-to-be, and it operates by holding us in reserve like the foreigner from the country standing before the door of the law. Kafka’s man from the

‘OPEN THE DOORS! ’ ; OR, ON COM MI T ME N T A N D R E S E R V E     119

country is, literally, a paysan, a peasant; and the root of that word is to be found in the Latin, ‘pagus’. The critic is she or he who is ‘pagan’ before the intrinsically religious fundamentalism of totalitarian governments—and all governments that claim privileged access to the truth are, by definition, totalitarian. That, after all, is how recognizably totalitarian governments lie: they rewrite the truth of history in their own name and in the configurations of their own values (for example, fundamental British values), and then require their citizens to collaborate and to become complicit in the endorsement of those ‘truths’. 5. THE PROBLEM OF TASTE This, needless to say, is not how we usually consider the operations of criticism. In recent times, we have grown used to discovering a different kind of complicity in cultural criticism. Following Bourdieu, we have come to see that in making distinctions between works of art, we are also fundamentally making social and class distinctions between ourselves as ‘people of taste’ and others as ‘vulgar’. In short, we use culture in order to establish forms of class-complicities, so to speak. This is a significant part of Bourdieu’s argument in his 1974 study of Distinction, the social critique of taste and of how taste operates. Yet, if Bourdieu is correct in this (and he is), then one interesting consequence is that political decisions can be—and usually are—determined by aesthetics and by what we can call ‘complicity with taste’. Taste establishes communities of shared interest. It takes what is essentially a private effect— the visceral or sensory experience and sensation of art or culture—and seeks alignment of that private experience with public validation of some kind: taste essentially asks to be shared, even if shared only to be disagreed about. In this sense, taste is the site of a negotiation between private and public, or between the personal and the political. The question it asks us concerns the precise level of intimacy or even identity that there may be between these two. In what we often term ‘authenticity’, we expect there to be precisely such an identical alignment: there is to be no discrepancy between the private life and the public, as it were. However, what this book has shown is that this does not produce anything particularly desirable, for it requires the private individual to act in complicity with the public ‘truth’. Authenticity, in this sense, becomes systemic lying and complicity with ‘things as they are’. The counter to this negative authenticity, however, is not some crude ‘hypocrisy’. Rather, the counter to it is the act of criticism that respects the potential difference and distance between what Arendt called homo and

120    CHAPTER 6

p­ ersona, ‘bare life’ and ‘political action’. Culture, we might say, is not a state of existing affairs; rather it is what happens when we attempt to find the proper ways of regulating the private with the public: exercising taste. And taste, then, is about a sharing of private experience and the attempt to make a public—and a language—within which that sharing can happen. The making of such a shared language is the making of a cultural event: it returns us to the ancient sense of what poetry is: poiesis, poetry as an activity, and an activity of ‘making’ that is always, of necessity, a voiced sharing. However, what is the nature of this sharing; and what kind of politics lies behind such a community of shared interest? There exists a very useful distinction, originally made in the late nineteenth century in the German of Ferdinand Tönnies, that we can use here, to distinguish between what Tönnies called Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft—which I will loosely translate here as ‘society’ and ‘togetherness’. Broadly, I take the former—Gesellschaft—as something that makes a clear distinction between private and public, and approximates to a condition of liberalism in which ‘the law formally regulates that which is conceived to be public’. This condition is also consistent with an ideology of market fundamentalism, in which ‘self-interested individuals compete for personal material advantage’.35 I take the latter—Gemeinschaft—as something that blurs the distinction between private and public or, as Raymond Wacks describes it, ‘a community of internalized norms and traditions regulated according to status but mediated by love, duty, and a shared understanding and purpose’.36 This allows me to reformulate the distinction. Gesellschaft can be reconsidered as a description of our being together in ‘democratic society’, where ‘democratic society’ is regarded as a kind of finished product, as something firmly established, but as something established precisely as a ‘complicity in systemic lying’, as a society that is governed by that shallow consensus of ‘truth’ known as ‘common sense’. In the UK context, we might call it something like ‘fundamental British values’, established essentially by governmental fiat or diktat, as I described previously. Gemeinschaft, by contrast, is something we can call ‘being together democratically’, in which democracy is not a condition of being, but a condition of becoming: democracy in this is something that happens from time to time, like a momentous event. It is like the quandary we face when we stand before the law or before the door, holding in reserve what we can do, trying to find ways of regulating the claims of the world with the claims of the self—as if standing on both sides of those doors or cages that Morgan calls to openness. Distinction—as a matter of taste in Bourdieu’s sense—while guaranteeing hierarchy in terms of cultural capital, does not yet secure my place or my level in that hierarchy. So I need to see the art on my walls (the realm of

‘OPEN THE DOORS! ’ ; OR, ON COM MI T ME N T A N D R E S E R V E     121

experience) as if it were in the museum (the realm of what passes for truth and value). In doing this, I am stating that I agree with external laws and that I am acting in conformity with them. However, I can’t be seen simply to internalize those laws—for that would entail me having cheap reproductions on my walls, like framed reproductions of the Mona Lisa or Picasso’s Blue Guitar and so on. So I need something that is at once original and risky; but which looks like a safe bet. I need something that operates according to the norms that govern the alleged value of the Mona Lisa or the Blue Guitar. My private sphere is thus contaminated by external laws; and I no longer see the art on my wall, but rather see only the reflection of my self and of my place in a social or cultural hierarchy. This is what we call kitsch. It is also what we call complicity with conformity; and it is the avoidance of the event of culture. It also thereby precludes the event of ‘being together democratically’. Further than this, it is not just kitsch or complicity with conformity. It also is a condition that yields a ‘liberalism’ that is not properly democratic: it is grounded in Gesellschaft, or in external validation, rather than authentic subjective encounter with others. Someone else has my vote, so to speak; or I express myself in and through the voice of an alienated other, the voice that I think prevails in the gallery and museum. It places the work’s price in freemarkets instead of its value in aesthetic judgement and experience at the core of things—and devolves my experience of art onto that of the authority of an elite in a ‘true’ hierarchy. This is the very essence of complicity; and it is therefore utterly uncritical. It denies my subjectivity by subsuming it under that of the museum, an alienated other. It is more than that: in political terms, it is the founding condition of collaboration.37 In this, we have kitsch as political conformity. As Walter Benjamin has it, kitsch is ‘art with a 100 per cent, absolute and instantaneous availability for consumption’.38 We can now add that it is a form that validates political collaboration and complicity with a hierarchical social form that denies the very possibility of any event that we could call democratic. In the end, then, the avoidance of complicity is important for one fundamental reason: complicity is the silent face of a society that not only permits oligarchical rule but that also requires political collaboration in its ­anti-democratic organization. If we subscribe at all to the values of democracy, we will resist complicity with conformity. Central to this is education, which is always marked by forms of persuasion; and such education involves making the private public—otherwise known as ‘freedom of expression’. This is key to democracy, and, indeed, is a determination of the democratic moment or time. Democracy is not a permanent state of affairs or political state of being; rather, democracy, like

122    CHAPTER 6

culture, is something that happens, from time to time, episodically; and it is conditioned by relations of risk, in which the private reveals itself and proposes itself as legitimate in the public sphere, but does so under the condition of risk, not of predictable or recognized guarantee. What I am describing here as ‘being together democratically’—as Gemeinschaft—is a condition in which the establishing of democracy not only takes time but also makes time. Rather than contracting and eliminating the temporal distance in the exchange transaction, it rather prolongs it—as in the working of metaphor. It produces not the certainty of, for example, ‘fundamental British values’, but rather the ongoing debate as to what might constitute value at all. This takes time, delays completion: it prolongs attention and commits us to reserve—and, beyond reserve, to survival or to ‘living on’. 6. CONCLUSIONS I will close with some final considerations of the social bond. I have suggested that there is a specific sense in which criticism is shaped by bonds: we are bound to decide, but we cannot rest that decision on the bonds that tie us to any fundamental certainty, be it the certainty of religion or politics. There are a series of specific instances of this kind of critical impasse in the bonded relation that Shakespeare portrays between fathers and daughters, a kind of intergenerational bond, marked by the issues of gender and autonomy. The social bond is like a social contract: it determines the extent of our commitment to each other in material terms; and, in this, it asks us a fundamental question regarding where our commitments lie. Fundamentally, it asks us to consider the nature of our complicities, and whether we determine our bonds with each other in direct material terms or whether we prefer to think of them in abstract fashion. But what if our commitments are themselves in a state of transition: what if we are genuinely undecided, and therefore at that impasse in thought that I am calling responsible criticism? We considered earlier the working of the social bond in The Merchant of Venice. The easiest way into this further development of our problem would be to think about how the idea of a bond figures in two other Shakespeare plays. In Othello and in King Lear, Shakespeare gives us two young women who are in the process of negotiating and re-negotiating the nature of their familial and sexual bonds. Desdemona acknowledges her bond to her father, Brabantio, speaking explicitly in terms of a debt that she owes him and that must be repaid. However, as Facebook might have it, ‘it’s complicated’; and

‘OPEN THE DOORS! ’ ; OR, ON COM MI T ME N T A N D R E S E R V E     123

it’s complicated because she has married Othello. So she has to rationalize the position, because, as she says, ‘My noble father, / I do perceive here a divided duty’ (stress added). This duty is a debt grounded in a bond: To you I am bound for life and education; My life and education both do learn me How to respect you; you are the lord of duty; I am hitherto your daughter: but here’s my husband, And so much duty as my mother show’d To you, preferring you before her father, So much I challenge that I may profess Due to the Moor, my lord.

Desdemona here essentially rationalizes the state of the debt that she owes; and, in doing so, she asserts her right to engage in a different bond, to transfer allegiance and to become complicit with another—Othello—in undermining the repayment of a debt to the past. She has signed up to Othello. The point of her speech is to say that she wants to attend to her duty to Brabantio, while also acknowledging historical progress. The generations repeat the breaking of familial bonds to make new families. Cordelia is in a yet more delicate position at the opening to King Lear. She is in the awkward position of being asked to pledge love and allegiance to her father when she knows that there are two suitors—Burgundy and France, both interested in marriage to her—in the wings. Hence not only her inability to proclaim undivided love to her father, but also her barbed comment about her married sisters: Why have my sisters husbands, if they say They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed, That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry Half my love with him, half my care and duty: Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters, To love my father all.

In these cases, there is a question of how a woman both acknowledges her bond to her father while yet asserting her bond and duty to herself: it is the condition of the emergence of modernity, understood as the inevitable contestation of tradition against autonomy. Self-determination requires the breaking of one bond, even if in this limited case it means the making of a further bond. Both these cases involve not only the assertion of autonomy by the new generation, the daughters, but also the question—as the rejected fathers see it—of a kind of ‘immigration’, a contamination of the purity of their

124    CHAPTER 6

b­ loodlines by the introduction of alien or foreign elements. This is especially the case in Othello; and it was also the case in The Merchant of Venice, where Shylock’s daughter, Jessica, is also involved in ‘marrying out’. This is important for what follows. As we know, laws are an attempt to regulate behaviour and to hold people together in a series of social bonds. However, the regulation is not, in and of itself, ‘lawful’ in that it cannot itself be enacted in accordance with a preceding law. Law is originary in this sense: it originates itself; and its most profound basis lies in how we call upon it, even logically prior to its existence, in order to construct our social bonds according to it. That is to say: law is brought about by our enactment of it; but the question then is where we stand and whether we all stand equally before a law that is being made and re-made as a condition of our being together. Is the law constitutional, even as it helps establish its own constitutional basis? To this extent at least, law is not only social but also political. There is a peculiar sense in which we cannot know the law, since the law is what we bring into being through the ways in which we negotiate our bonds with each other. Franz Kafka’s short piece ‘Zur Frage der Gesetze’, or ‘On the Problem of Our Laws’, (1931), lays out some of the case. He writes: ‘Our laws are unfortunately not widely known, they are the closely guarded secret of the small group of nobles who govern us’. From the beginning, according to this fabular and fictional account, law divides society, but also establishes class bonds—in this case, the nobility bound together in possession, literal possession, of the law. Further, being in possession of the law like this, the nobility themselves stand ‘outside the law, and that is why the laws seem to have been given exclusively into their hands’. The only way round the paradoxes here would be a revolutionary act through which to effect the overthrow of the nobility; and, even though that would be popular, ‘no one dares to reject the nobility’. Kafka concludes his short piece with the observation that ‘An author once put it this way: the only visible unquestionable law that has been imposed on us is the nobility, and who are we to rob ourselves of the only law we have?’39 That we are unequal before the law is hardly news, of course. Yet this Kafka fable or fragment reveals that what is at stake is, really, a question of living on, a question of survival. Throughout this and the previous chapters, I have been concerned to think of survival as a matter of having skin in the game, as I put it. It may now be appropriate to turn to a fiction, based on real science, that will allow us to explore this a little further, explicitly in terms of survival. In 2005, Kazuo Ishiguro published Never Let Me Go. The novel is essentially a dystopian fiction, but one that is set in an immediately recognizable

‘OPEN THE DOORS! ’ ; OR, ON COM MI T ME N T A N D R E S E R V E     125

locale. Further, it is unlike other types of science-fiction or fantasy-fiction in that the science it calls upon is a science that is already with us: transplantation. I discussed this briefly in considering the work of Janet Radcliffe Richards in a previous chapter of this study; but here we can produce some new issues that will allow for a deeper consideration of complicities. Fundamentally, Never Let Me Go tells the story of three central characters—Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth—who, at the novel’s opening, appear to be entirely ordinary children at a boarding school on the south coast of England. However, the three are clones; and their purpose is to provide a ‘harvest’ for non-cloned humanity, so that the regular non-clones can survive any disease that would normally have killed them. They are ‘human resources’ in this regard. The problems arise in the text when they start to become fully conscious of this purpose; and they want to try to survive their own fateful destiny. They want to ‘defer completion’, as the language of the novel has it. One way of doing this is to fall in love, to establish a sexual and erotic bond—or, at least, this is the rumour that drives them to find ways of deferring their own deterioration. In this regard, then, they are somewhat like the ‘skin jobs’ or replicants in Ridley Scott’s film, Blade Runner. The replicants there—like Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth—are also virtually indistinguishable from the humans; but they have an assigned moment of ‘completion’, as it were, a moment when they are programmed to die. While alive, they live their existence in ways that are romantically intense. As he dies, Roy, the replicant who is leading a rebellion against the humans and against the replicants’ maker, asserts ‘Quite an experience isn’t it, to live in fear? That’s what it means to be a slave. . . . I’ve seen things you people would never believe. Hhhmm: attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time . . . Like tears in rain. . . . Time to die’. This is an intensity of sensibility that remains private, despite being described. It cannot be shared, consisting in ‘things you people would never believe’. This impossibility of sharing is what determines the alien and foreign nature of the replicant; and it is what ensures that the humans on earth regard them as unwelcome. The replicants are, essentially, in precisely the position of unwelcome immigrants: they have returned to Earth and are aliens who must now be eradicated, for they present a threat to the existing conformities and systematic lying that shapes earthly norms. Those are norms that are given by the power of the corporate giants, like the Tyrell Corporation, that now govern how people behave. In the logic of the narrative, political government no longer really exists: government works through the collaboration of the police with the corporations.

126    CHAPTER 6

Quite apart from the usual more dominant theme here, in which the replicants raise the issue (like the clones in Ishiguro) of the relative status of the real and its representation, we have another and perhaps more immediately applicable theme: that of migration, miscegenation (as in Shakespeare), and the question of authority and social control. These replicants are migrants, presented as being individuals who may be able to assimilate and integrate, but who are all the more threatening precisely because of that fact. Unlike the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, they cannot be allowed to fight back against the corporate power that made them. The politics of migration is perhaps the single greatest link between the collaborationist complicities of the mid-twentieth century and our present day conflicts, post-9/11. Both periods have seen massive movements of peoples, seeking refuge from persecution and war. In our time, as I noted briefly earlier, this has caused grave concern to the institution and political identity of something called ‘Europe’. One simple thing to note about refugees is that they have nothing. Often, they have the clothes they stand in and nothing else. They are in need; and they therefore call us to an ethical response. This, however, troubles contemporary conservative ideology. The former UK prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, once stated that the single most important thing about the biblical Good Samaritan was that he was rich, and therefore able to help the suffering poor: ‘Doubtless there will be accusers that we are only interested in more money’, she said. This just is not so. Money is not an end in itself. It enables one to live the kind of life of one’s own choosing. Some will prefer to put a large amount to raising material standards, others will pursue music, the arts, the cultures, others will use their money to help those here and overseas about whose needs they feel strongly and do not let us underestimate the amount of hard earned cash that this nation gives voluntarily to worthy causes. The point is that even the Good Samaritan had to have the money to help, otherwise he too would have had to pass on the other side.40

More recently, Ha-Joon Chang has pondered why it is the case that the advanced economies behave like Bad Samaritans, essentially trying to ensure that those less fortunate do not gain access to the good fortune of the wealthy, lest it become dissipated.41 Contemporary conservatism, subscribing to the ideology of a supposed ‘value for money’, wants to keep its expenditure under surveillance. In our time, thus, we have seen exactly where this kind of politics drives us. It is a situation where politics itself is driven by the bond between government and money.42 Shylock’s thinking is exactly like that of David Cameron, leader of the United Kingdom’s Conservative party. In 2008, before entering government, he spoke against what he called at the time the ‘something for

‘OPEN THE DOORS! ’ ; OR, ON COM MI T ME N T A N D R E S E R V E     127

nothing’ culture that he said described our welfare state. In this, people who received financial support from the State were castigated as ‘benefits cheats’, or as ‘scroungers’ who would parasitically live off the work of others. By 2013, this had been somewhat extended: the target now included ‘migrants’. Whereas in 2008, he was explicit in pointing out that those migrants who came to the United Kingdom to work were welcome, by 2013 he was close to suggesting that migrants were themselves the very scroungers whom we should now cut off from financial support. They were not bound to us, nor we to them. At the same time, however, David Cameron, like many in his government (both Coalition and Conservative majorities) benefit themselves from a something for nothing culture. It is called ‘inheritance’. That is to say, by virtue of the bio-financial fact that their parents were rich, they find themselves financially well endowed. What have they done for that inheritance? They have been born. Importantly, they have been born in a blood lineage that identifies them not as migrants but as native. There is a link being surreptitiously drawn here between birth and desert.43 This was what was so important for those fathers in Shakespeare. A new baby is, as it were, a new arrival in our land; and one who has not arrived here of its own choosing. It is disruptive, nonetheless; it depends on others almost totally to keep it going and allow it to survive. It cannot speak the language, and communicates only by basic cries or sounds. A migrant, likewise, is a new arrival; and if she is a refugee, she arrives not of her own choosing in any straightforward sense. She may well not speak the language; and may be entirely dependent upon others for her survival. How do these two differ? Clearly, it would be simply wrong to equate UK conservatism with a Nazi ideology grounded in racial ethnicity and nativism: these are worlds apart. At the same time, it is important to note a certain complicity, as we might put it, that links them to the same fundamental philosophy of bio-ethnic-finance, a nativism that builds walls and ‘closes the door’. The reason that the replicants in Blade Runner have to die is that after four years, they have started to approximate yet more closely to the human condition: that is, to ‘integrate’ and assimilate. They are in danger of beginning to experience human emotions, to experience human feeling in all its intensity, ‘like pulses on the skin’, as Keats puts it in a letter to J. H. Reynolds on 3 May 1818: ‘axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses’.44 Like children growing up, the replicants are in danger of starting to feel adult emotions; like integrated ‘aliens’, refugees, or migrants, they have started to behave ‘like us’ and to integrate fully. Yet this integration is presented as a threat.

128    CHAPTER 6

The central theme, though, deriving from the original novel by Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, is that we are at war; but we are at war essentially with ourselves, even if we have produced our own ‘enemies’. Dick’s novel, written under the shadow of Vietnam, is fundamentally haunted—like America in that war—by the idea that we are our own worst enemy, that we are essentially killing civilisation in ostensibly fighting for it. A war-civilisation or a civilisation that is shaped by martial force is complicit with the end of civilisation.45 In Blade Runner, further, it is no longer governments that run things, but business; the Tyrell organization that makes the replicants is like some giant multinational or extra-national corporate entity: all-powerful, making and ending life itself. It is a precursor of The Circle. Whether we are replicants or not, we exist as functions or as human resources for such corporations; and it is this that the film—like the Eggers novel later—is asking us to criticize. In short, the issue of migration in our time—as also in the mid-twentieth century—makes civilisation such as we think it, based on unstated violence and fear of the other, as something that makes us complicit with barbarism. This may well be the real meaning of Walter Benjamin’s famous thesis that ‘there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’.46 This intimacy of a certain version of civilisation with barbarism is, in the end, the final complicity that we must seek to avoid. NOTES   1.  Although I focused attention on the fact that walls are being erected to prevent the arrival of refugees into various European countries, I could also have mentioned several other recent phenomena. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was supposed to mark the logical culmination of perestroika, the symbolic ‘opening up’ initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev. However, since then, many other walls have been built, perhaps most significantly the ‘West Bank Barrier’ between Israeli and Palestinian territories. As I write (September 2015), Hungary is building a barbed-wire fence between itself and Serbia; Croatia is building a partial fence on the same border; and other EU states are threatening the fundamental principles of the Schengen Agreement by doing the same, either physically or constitutionally. Some Americans want to elect Donald Trump as president because he promises to build a wall between the United States and Mexico—at the Mexicans’ expense.   2.  See Edwin Morgan, Collected Poems (Carcanet, 1990), 178.  3. Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (John Calder, 1969), 103.   4.  Sir Philip Sidney, ‘An Apology for Poetry’, in Edmund D. Jones, ed., English Critical Essays, XVI–XVIII Centuries (Oxford University Press, 1975), 33; 7.

‘OPEN THE DOORS! ’ ; OR, ON COM MI T ME N T A N D R E S E R V E     129

  5.  See Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Die Welt is alles, was der Fall ist’ in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Routledge, 1992), 30 (Proposition 1).   6.  For the essentials of an ‘essential side issue’, see James Kelman, A Disaffection (Picador, 1989), 23.  7. See Franz Kafka, ‘Vor dem Gesetz’, in Erzählungen, Gesammelte Werke (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1983), 120–21. I will explore this text in a little more detail later.   8.  I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924; repr. Routledge, 1976), 193.   9.  Ibid., 193. In this, Richards follows, extremely closely, the thought of Samuel Coleridge (about whom he wrote a book, of course). Coleridge argued, in Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson (Dent, 1975), 173–74, that the poet, like poetry itself, ‘brings the whole soul of man into activity’, but does so by producing ‘the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities’. 10.  See W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems (1033; repr Macmillan, 1979), 393; and W. H. Auden, Collected Poems (Faber, 1976), 197. 11.  See Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Harvard University Press, 1998), 80–81; and cf. Jeffrey J. Williams, How to Be an Intellectual (Fordham University Press, New York, 2014), 57–60. 12. I have argued extensively elsewhere that the contemporary university is shamefully failing in its secular duty, because it fails to acknowledge its responsibilities to do as Sidney suggests poetry and imagination do: that is, to think and present the world differently from how it is. The contemporary institution has shrunk to become the mere handservant of ‘things as they are’, as if ‘things as they are’ is also how things must be. See two recent books, For the University (Bloomsbury, 2011) and Universities at War (Sage, 2015). 13.  Theodor Adorno, ‘Commitment’, repr. In Adorno, Notes to Literature vol. 2 (trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen; New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 80. 14.  Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’ in Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis., trans. and eds., Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 12. 15.  Adorno, ‘Commitment’, 93. 16.  Ibid., 88. 17.  Ibid., 88. 18.  Ibid., 87. 19.  For a compelling account of the difference between understanding and explanation, see Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen; New York: Zone Books, 2002), 13. 20.  This is not to demean or disparage the activities of the real-life Schindler, nor even to disparage either Thomas Keneally, who wrote the original novel, nor Steven Spielberg, who made the movie. Rather, it is to remind us that as in the case of André Trocmé, discussed in the previous chapter, the reality is never so readily ‘comprehensible’ as its narration implies. 21.  The useful literary comparison here is with Jorge Luis Borges, and especially the story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’, in Borges, Labyrinths (Penguin,

130    CHAPTER 6

1978), 62–71. Menard sets himself the task of writing—not copying—Don Quixote. He succeeds, in that he gets the opening paragraph written; but this is as far as he gets. The point is, of course, that ‘writing’ such as this is precisely the same as ‘reading’; but reading Cervantes in the present day changes substantively the meaning of the text from its ‘original’ conditions of reading (even supposing we could find such an ‘original’ moment). 22.  See Herman Melville, ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’, in Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales, ed. Harold Beaver (Oxford University Press, 1970). As the story continues, Bartleby is described in ghostly terms. He is, progressively, ‘like a very ghost’ (74), ‘always there’ (75), ‘the apparition’ (76), with his ‘cadaverously gentlemanly nonchalance’ (76), his ‘pale form . . . laid out . . . in its shivering winding sheet’ (77–78), giving a ‘mildly cadaverous reply’ (81), ‘this man, or, rather, ghost’ (90), ‘haunting the building’ (93). 23.  Melville, 67. 24.  Benoît Peeters, Derrida (Oxford: Polity Books, 2012), 221. 25.  Ibid., 374. 26.  This statement dates from September 2015, as reported in the national press and media that month. See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in -the-uk/11870917/Six-terror-attacks-foiled-in-year-as-MI5-head-warns-plots-at -three-decade-high.html and http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34276525. 27.  See report by Alan Travis, The Guardian, 13 May 2015. 28.  See report by Alan Travis, The Guardian, 18 September 2015. 29.  I argue this position in more detail, and with specific and pointed reference to the conditions of academic freedom, in my paper ‘On Academic and Other Freedoms’, published in Why Academic Freedom Matters (Civitas papers, 2016 forthcoming). 30.  Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (Routledge, 1992), 196. 31. Derrida, Acts, 196. 32. In passing, it is worth also pointing out that within academic economics, precisely the same conformity to consensus—a neo-liberal consensus—is essentially required for publication in the serious economics journals. The particular force that demands this conformity is the Research Excellence Framework. By identifying specific journals as ‘top-rated’ or (in the jargon) 4*, it becomes impossible for a dissenting economist’s voice to gain legitimacy. 33.  Michael Lewis, The Big Short (Penguin, 2011), 2. 34.  Ibid., 22. 35.  See Raymond Wacks, Privacy (Oxford University Press, 2010), 33. 36.  Ibid., 33. 37.  We can compare, here, Adorno’s observation that ‘Culture is only true when implicitly critical’, in Theodor Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, reprinted in Adorno, Prisms (trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber; MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1983), 22. 38.  Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, Konvolut 3 a, 1. 39. Franz Kafka, ‘On the Problem of Our Laws’ (trans. Michael Hoffmann), London Review of Books 37: 14 (16 July 2015), 23.

‘OPEN THE DOORS! ’ ; OR, ON COM MI T ME N T A N D R E S E R V E     131

40. See: http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/101632. I leave aside the flawed logic of this for the moment. 41.  See Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans (Random House, 2008). 42.  In this regard, it is interesting that the businessman Donald Trump can propose his candidature for the presidency of the United States on two grounds: (a) that he is rich, and that such personal wealth is what the presidency should be based upon; and (b) that he will build a wall between the United States and Mexico. See: http://www .theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/16/donald-trump-announces-run-president. 43. Sometimes, of course, for this class, the nativist link can be forged. Boris Johnson, Conservative mayor of London and eminent ally of Cameron, was born in New York, but is British. Likewise, in 1984, when the conservative newspaper, the Daily Mail, decided that Great Britain needed a long-distance runner for the Olympic Games, it led the campaign to grant British status to Zola Budd, the South African runner whose early career was entirely under the Apartheid regime. 44. John Keats, letter to Reynolds, available at: http://www.gutenberg.org /files/35698/35698-h/35698-h.htm#Page_103. 45. Interestingly, almost the entire trajectory of Hollywood Vietnam movies is an increasingly bare investigation of this fact. See, for example, Gilbert Adair, Hollywood’s Vietnam (Proteus Books, 1981). 46.  Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations ed. Hannah Arendt (trans Harry Zohn; Fontana, 1973), 258.

Bibliography

PRINT SOURCES (Place of publication is London unless otherwise stated.) Adair, Gilbert, Hollywood’s Vietnam (Heinemann, 1989) Adorno, Theodor, Prisms (trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983) Adorno, Theodor, Notes to Literature, vol 2 (trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen; New York: Columbia University Press, 1992) Adorno, Theodor, and Horkheimer, Max, Dialectic of Enlightenment (trans. John Cumming; Verso, 1979) Agacinski, Sylviane, Critique de l’égocentrisme (Paris: Galilée, 1996) Agacinski, Sylviane, Corps en miettes (Paris: Flammarion, 2013) Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer I (Torino: Einaudi, 1995) Agamben, Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitz (1999; trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen; New York: Zone Books, 2002) Ali, Tariq, The Extreme Centre (Verso, 2015) Arendt, Hannah, Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972) Arendt, Hannah, Responsibility and Judgment (ed. Jerome Kohn; New York: Schocken Books, 2003) Arendt, Hannah, Between Past and Future (ed. Jerome Kohn; Penguin, 2006) Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution (1963; repr. Penguin, 2006) Aristotle, Ethics (trans. J. A. K. Thompson; Penguin, 2004) Auden, W. H., Collected Poems (Faber & Faber, 1976) Barnes, Julian, The Noise of Time (Jonathan Cape, 2016) Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernity and the Holocaust (Oxford: Polity Press, 1999) Beckett, Samuel, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (John Calder, 1969) 133

134    BIBLIOGRAP HY

Beevor, Antony, and Cooper, Artemis, Paris: After the Liberation 1944–1949 (revised edn; Penguin, 2007) Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations (ed. Hannah Arendt; trans. Harry Zohn; Fontana, 1973) Bingham, Tom, The Rule of Law (Penguin, 2011) Black, Jeremy, The Politics of James Bond (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005) Borges, Jorge Luis, Labyrinths (Penguin, 1978) Boyd, William, Sweet Caress (Bloomsbury, 2015) Butler, Judith, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005) Cave, Tamasin, and Rowell, Andy, A Quiet Word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism and Broken Politics in Britain (Bodley Head, 2014) Chang, Ha-Joon, Bad Samaritans (New York: Random House, 2008) Chaskalson, Arthur, ‘The Widening Gyre: Counter-Terrorism, Human Rights and the Rule of Law’, Cambridge Law Journal, 67 (2008), 69–91 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Biographia Literaria (ed. George Watson; Dent, 1975) Derrida, Jacques, Acts of Literature (ed. Derek Attridge; Routledge, 1992) Docherty, Thomas, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) Docherty, Thomas, Aesthetic Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006) Docherty, Thomas, For the University: Democracy and the Future of the Institution (Bloomsbury, 2011) Docherty, Thomas, Universities at War (Sage, 2015) Docherty, Thomas, ‘On Academic and Other Freedoms’ in Joanna Williams, ed., Why Academic Freedom Matters (Civitas, forthcoming 2016) Eggers, Dave, The Circle (2013; Penguin, 2014) Eliot, T. S., Selected Essays (3rd edn; 1951; repr. Faber & Faber, 1980) Faulks, Sebastian, Where My Heart Used to Beat (Hutchinson, 2015) Finn, Peter, and Couvée, Petra, The Zhivago Affair (Vintage, 2015) Fish, Stanley, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) Fish, Stanley, Versions of Academic Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015) Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ‘Critical Race Theory and Freedom of Speech’, in Louis Menand, ed., The Future of Academic Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 119–59 Golsan, Richard J., French Writers and the Politics of Complicity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) Gorz, André, The Immaterial (2003; trans. Chris Turner; Kolkata and Chicago: Seagull Books, 2010) Graeber, David, The Democracy Project (Penguin, 2013) Habermas, Jürgen, Legitimation Crisis (1973; trans. Thomas McCarthy; Heinemann, 1975)

B I B L I O G R A P H Y     135

Ianucci, Armando, ‘Politics Was Once about Beliefs and Society. Now It’s a Worship of Money’, Observer 8 March 2015 Jones, Owen, The Establishment; and How They Get Away with It (Allen Lane, 2014) Judt, Tony, and Snyder, Timothy, Thinking the Twentieth Century (Vintage, 2013) Kafka, Franz, Erzählungen, Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1983) Kafka, Franz, ‘On the Problem of Our Laws’ (trans. Michael Hoffmann), London Review of Books, 37: 14 (16 July 2015), 23 Kaplan, Alice, The Collaborator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) Keats, John, Selected Poetry and Letters (ed. Richard Harter Fogle; San Francisco: Rinehart Press, 1969) Kelman, James, A Disaffection (Picador, 1989) Klein, Naomi, This Changes Everything (Allen Lane, 2014) Kołakowski, Leszek, Freedom, Fame, Lying and Betrayal: Essays on Everyday Life (trans. Agnieszka Kołakowska; Penguin, 1999) Lewis, Michael, The Big Short (Penguin, 2011) Lyotard, Jean-François, Le Différend (Paris: Minuit, 1983) Macmurray, John, The Self as Agent (Faber & Faber, 1957) Macmurray, John, Conditions of Freedom (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993) Marx, Karl, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1978) Melville, Herman, ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’, in Billy Budd and Other Stories (ed. Harold Beaver; Penguin, 1986) Menand, Louis, ed., The Future of Academic Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) Moorehead, Caroline, Village of Secrets Defying the Nazis in Vichy France (Chatto & Windus, 2014) Morgan, Edwin, Collected Poems (Carcanet, 1990) Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Nietzsche Reader (eds. Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large; Oxford: Blackwell, 2006) Offer, Avner, ‘A Warrant for Pain: Caveat Emptor vs. the Duty of Care in the American Medical System c. 1970–2010’, Real World Economics Review, 61 (Sep. 2012), 85–99 Offer, Avner, ‘Sympathy, Self-Interest and the Invisible Hand from Adam Smith to Market Liberalism’, Economic Thought, 1:2 (2012), 1–14 Peace News, 29 May 1953 Peeters, Benoît, Derrida (Oxford: Polity Books, 2012) Pettit, Philip, Just Freedom (New York: Norton, 2014) Richard, I. A., Principles of Literary Criticism (1924; repr. Routledge, 1976) Richards, Janet Radcliffe, The Ethics of Transplants (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Rorty, Richard, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)

136    BIBLIOGRAP HY

Said, Edward, The World, the Text, the Critic (Faber & Faber, 1984) Schrecker, Ellen, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (2nd edn; Palgrave, 2002) Shklovsky, Viktor, ‘Art as Technique’ in Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, trans. and eds., Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965) Sidney, Sir Philip, ‘An Apology for Poetry’, in Edmund D. Jones, ed., English Critical Essays XVI–XVIII Centuries (Oxford University Press, 1975) Stiglitz, Joseph, The Price of Inequality (New York: Norton, 2012) Stiglitz, Joseph, The Great Divide (New York: Norton, 2015) Todorov, Tzvetan, Les ennemis intimes de la démocratie (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2012) Travis, Alan, ‘It Wasn’t Just Lib Dems Who Opposed Theresa May’s CounterExtremism Plans’ Guardian, 13 May 2015 Travis, Alan, ‘Counter-Extremism Bill Could Play into Terrorists’ Hands’ Guardian, 18 September 2015 Trilling, Daniel, ‘Europe Could Solve the Migrant Crisis—If It Wanted’, Guardian, 31 July 2015 Voltaire, Candide, ed. J. H. Brumfitt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968) Wacks, Raymond, Privacy (Oxford University Press, 2010) Williams, Jeffrey J., How to Be an Intellectual (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014) Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logiso-Philosophicus (Routledge, 1992) Woods, Chris, Sudden Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015) Yeats, W. B., Collected Poems (Macmillan, 1933; repr. 1979)

WEB SOURCES Agamben, Giorgio: http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpagambenschmitt.htm Boycott, Owen and Connolly, Kate, ‘How Nazi Guard Oskar Gröning Escaped Justice in 1947 for Crimes at Auschwitz: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/ jul/16/how-nazi-guard-oskar-groning-escaped-justice-in-1947-for-crimes-at -auschwitz?CMP=twt%Egdnnews Brand, Russell, interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YR4CseY9pk Colquhoun, David, ‘DC’s Improbable Science’ blog: http://www.dcscience.net/ 2014/12/01/publish-and-perish-at-imperial-college-london-the-death-of-stefan -grimm/ Connolly, Kate, ‘Angela Merkel Comforts Sobbing Refugee but Says Germany Can’t Help Everyone’: Guardian, 16 July 2015: http://www.theguardian.com/ world/2015/jul/16/angela-merkel-comforts-teenage-palestinian-asylum-seeker -germany Dempsey, Karen, ‘What’s in a Name?’ Personnel Today: http://www.personneltoday .com/hr/whats-in-a-name-hr-or-personnel-does-it-really-matter/

B I B L I O G R A P H Y     137

Docherty, Thomas, ‘Thomas Docherty on Academic Freedom’, Times Higher, 04 December 2012: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/thomas-docherty -on-academic-freedom/2017268.article Joint Costing and Pricing Steering Group: http://www.jcpsg.ac.uk/archive/arch _transpar.htm and http://www.jcpsg.ac.uk/guidance/faq.htm Jump, Paul, ‘Birmingham Academics on Course to Strike over Grant Income Demands’, Times Higher, 20 July 2015: https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk /news/birmingham-academics-course-strike-over-grant-income-demands Jump, Paul, ‘Warwick Academics Treated Like City Traders’ Times Higher, 11 December 2014: https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/warwick-academics -treated-like-city-traders-with-financial-targets/2017468.article An Interview with Alice Kaplan: http://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/424146in .html Lanchester, John, ‘Once Greece Goes’: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n14/john-lanchester /once-greece-goes Margaret Thatcher Foundation: Margaret Thatcher, ‘What’s Wrong with Politics?’ Conservative Political Centre Lecture: http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document /101632 Milne, Seumas, ‘It’s the British Establishment That Has a Problem with Democracy’ http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/23/british-establishment -problem-democracy-jeremy-corbyn Morgan, Edwin, ‘Open the Doors!’: http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/Educationand CommunityPartnershipresources/A_Poem_by_Edwin_Morgan.pdf Morgan, John. ‘Universities Must Assess Risks of Students Becoming Terrorists’. Times Higher, 12 March 2015: https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk /news/universities-must-assess-risk-of-students-becoming-terrorists-says-home -office/2019067.article Mulholland, Rory, ‘Oskar Groening, bookkeeper of Auschwitz, Admits “Moral Guilt” in German Court’: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe /germany/11551396/Bookkeeper-of-Auschwitz-goes-on-trial-for-mirder-of-300000 -Jews.html Neate, Rupert, ‘Donald Trump Announces US Presidential Run with Eccentric Speech’, Guardian, 16 June 2015: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015 /jun/16/donald-trump-announces-run-president Orbán, Viktor, Speeches on migrant crisis: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/fluecht lingskrise/orban-ueber-fluechtlingkrise-das-problem-ist-ein-deutsches-problem -13783525.html Orbán, Viktor, on ‘Christian Europe’: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/fluechtling skrise/viktor-irban-wer-ueberrannt-wirk-kann-niemanden-aufnehmen-13782061 .html Parr, Chris, ‘Imperial Professor Stefan Grimm Was Given Grant Income Target’ Times Higher, 3 December 2014: https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news /imperial-college-professor-stefan-grimm-was-given-grant-income-target/2017369 .article

138    BIBLIOGRAP HY

Parr, Chris, ‘Stefan Grimm Death Prompts Questions for Imperial President’, Times Higher, 20 April 2015: https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/stefan -grimm-death-prompts-questions-for-imperial-president/2019747.article?utm _content=bufferb3b28&utm_medium=social&utm_source+twitter.com&utm _campaign=buffer Plesch, Dan, and Sattler, Shanti, ‘A New Paradigm of Customary International Criminal Law’: http://www.unwcc.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Plesch-and-Sattler .pdf Scott, Ridley, ‘Hovis’ bread advert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mq59 ykPnAE UNHCR: http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49c3646cbc.html Whitehead, Tom, ‘MI5 Chief Andrew Parker: Social Media Companies Must Reveal Details of Terror Threats’: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism -in-the-uk/11870917/Six-terror-attacks-foiled-in-year-as-MI5-head-warns-plots -at-three-decade-high.html (for video source, Boyle, Danny: http://www.bbc.co.uk /news/uk-34276525) Woods, Chris, ‘Drone Warfare: Life on the New Frontline’, Guardian, 24 February 2015: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/24/drone-warfare-life-on-the -new-frontline http://www.rugbyfootballhistory.com/webb-ellis.html

FILM Life of Brian. Directed by Terry Jones (HandMade Films, 1979)

Index

academic freedom, 13–14, 93, 115, 121–2. See also free speech; university Adorno, Theodor W., 84–8, 110–12 Agacinski, Sylviane, 4, 48 Agamben, Giorgio, 2, 12, 14, 17, 24, 36 Ali, Tariq, 17 Arendt, Hannah, 1–5, 9, 16, 19–22, 24, 29, 32–3, 50, 87–8, 105, 119–20 Aristotle, 17 Atkins, Janet, 66–8 Auden, W.H., 108 Auschwitz. See camps

Brando, Marlon, 57 Brasillach, Robert, 90–92 Brooks, Cleanth, 108 bureaucracy, 20–21, 35, 42–3, 46, 59, 64, 66–70, 71. See also management Bush, George W., 14–15, 18 Butler, Judith, 36 Cage, John, 106, 109 Cameron, David, 115, 126–7 camps, 5, 9, 20–21, 32–5, 44, 49–50, 94, 112 capital. See finance Chang, Ha-Joon, 126 Chaskalson, Arthur, 11, 14–17 Clausewitz, Carl von, 65 clerical work. See bureaucracy; management collaboration, 1, 20, 31–2, 68, 70–71, 78–82, 86–7, 89–96, 121, 126 Colquhoun, David, 45–6 compliance, 9–13 Cooper, Artemis, 1, 36 Couvée, Petra, 78

Barnes, Julian, 77–8 Bauman, Zygmunt, 33–4 Beckett, Samuel, 106 Beevor, Antony, 1, 36 Benjamin, Walter, 121, 128 Bingham, Tom, 11–13 Black, Jeremy, 73 Blair, Tony, 11 Boltanski, Luc, 99 Bond, James, 72–3, 97 bonds, 5, 10, 12–14, 20, 27, 54–9, 68–73, 83, 96–7, 122–5 Booth, Wayne C., 108–9 Bourdieu, Pierre, 119–20 Boyd, William, 53 Brand, Russell, 15–16, 18–19

De Gaulle, Charles, 91–2 democracy, 11–16, 20, 23, 42–3, 69–70, 73, 77–83, 88–90, 92–4, 96, 99, 105, 115–16, 120–22

139

140    INDEX

Derrida, Jacques, 29, 114, 116–18 desk-murderers. See bureaucracy; management Dick, Philip K., 128 Dickens, Charles, 58 Eggers, Dave, 22–3, 42, 82, 85–6, 128 Eichmann, Adolf, 5, 9 Eliot, T. S., 55–6, 84 Empson, William, 108 ethics, 2, 9, 19–24, 27–9, 36, 79, 126 European Court of Human Rights, 13 Faulks, Sebastian, 53 finance, 27, 30, 33, 35–50, 54–5, 57, 59, 64, 67, 72, 95–6, 99, 115, 117–18, 126–7 Finn, Peter, 78 free speech, 4, 10–11, 14–18, 23–4, 27, 90–93, 109, 121–2. See also academic freedom Freud, Sigmund, 116–17 friendship, 28–30 Gast, Alice, 46 Gilmore, John, 102n37 Golsan, Richard J., 77, 82 Gorz, André, 21–2 Graeber, David, 94 Granel, Gérard, 114 Grimm, Stefan, 45–6 Gröning, Oskar, 31–3, 35, 42, 46, 48, 50 guilt, 9, 20–21, 24, 32–4. See also law Habermas, Jürgen, 13, 100 Hayman, Alison, 44 Hessel, Stéphane, 95 Hobbes, Thomas, 83–4 Horkheimer, Max, 84–6 human resources, 34–6, 49, 125 Iser, Wolfgang, 109 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 124–6 Isorni, Jacques, 91–2

Joint Costing and Pricing Steering Group, 37–40 Joyce, James, 15 Kafka, Franz, 58, 107, 116–19, 124 Kant, Immanuel, 83 Kaplan, Alice, 91–2 Keats, John, 127 Klein, Naomi, 82–3 Kołakowski, Leszek, 83, 86 Kompisch, Franz, 33 Kurdi, Aylan, 6n1 Lanchester, John, 95–6 law, 4–5, 9–17, 20–21, 24, 30, 32, 36–7, 57–63, 68–9, 72–3, 93, 96–9, 113–18, 121, 124. See also guilt Leech, Denis, 44–5 Lévy, Pierre, 21–2 Lewis, Michael, 118 Lyotard, Jean-François, 29, 61, 70 Macmurray, John, 28–9, 42 Malabou, Catherine, 114 management, 10, 18, 22, 25n7, 34–6, 42–5, 66, 78, 94. See also bureaucracy Mandela, Nelson, 11 Marx, Karl, 24, 49, 84 May, Theresa, 115 Melville, Herman, 9, 15, 19, 100, 112–14, 116 Merkel, Angela, 61–3, 66 migration, 61–6, 74n12, 97–9, 123–8 Mill, John Stuart, 13 Milne, Seumas, 6n3 Money. See finance Moorehead, Caroline, 70–71, 86 Morgan, Edwin, 31, 105–6, 109, 113, 120 Mussolini, Benito, 24, 96 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 83–4, 86, 93, 110 office work. See bureaucracy; management

I N D E X     141

Orbán, Viktor, 74n12, 98 Orwell, George, 15, 23, 98 Pacino, Al, 57 Parker, Andrew, 115 Pasternak, Boris, 78 patronage, 18 Paxman, Jeremy, 15–16 Peeters, Benoît, 114 Pétain, Philippe, 91 Pettit, Philip, 90, 93–4 Plato, 89 Plesch, Dan, 32 privacy. See private life; public sphere private life, 2, 14, 21–3, 30, 82, 95, 99–100, 113–14, 119–22, 125 public sphere, 2, 14, 21–2, 36–7, 82, 119–22 Python, Monty, 16, 49 Reboul, Marcel, 92 Reem, 61–3, 66 Rees, Laurence, 32 resistance, 23–4, 50, 70–71, 86–7, 92, 110–13, 117–18 responsibility, 1, 3–4, 6, 9, 19–24, 27–37, 40–42, 46–50, 54, 58, 62, 67–8, 70–71, 77–81, 92, 94 Ricardou, Jean, 117–18 Richards, I. A., 107–8 Richards, Janet Radcliffe, 47–8, 125 Robinson, Mary, 15 Rorty, Richard, 108–9 Said, Edward, 81 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 110–11 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 84 Scott, Ridley, 49, 125–8 Sen, Amartya, 13 Shakespeare, Williams, 3–5, 14, 27, 50, 54–63, 66–7, 80, 107, 113, 118, 122–4, 126–7

Shelley, Mary, 126 Shklovsky, Viktor, 108, 111 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 77–8 Sidney, Philip, 107 Stalin, Josef, 53, 77 Stalin, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, 53 Stiglitz, Joseph, 17, 43 Stravinsky, Igor, 77 Styron, William, 94 Tate, Allen, 108 terror, 11–12, 14–15, 65–9, 80, 115 Thatcher, Margaret, 17–18, 126 Tickell, Adam, 44 Todorov, Tzvetan, 79–80, 82, 86 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 120 Trocmé, André, 86–7 Unger, Roberto Mangabeira, 19, 105 university, 11, 13–14, 18, 22, 37–41, 43–4, 94, 99, 107–10, 115–16, 121–2, 129n12 Vidal, Maurice, 91 Virilio, Paul, 64–5 Voltaire, 15, 21, 99, 110 Wacks, Raymond, 120 war. See collaboration Webb Ellis, William, 10–11, 16 Wilkins, Martin, 46 Williams, Jeffrey J., 108–9 witness, 28, 32, 42 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 107 Woods, Chris, 65–6 Yeats, W.B., 1, 25n5, 108 Young, Hugo, 17–18