The Ideology Issue 9781478009498

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Editor

Michael Hardt Editorial Board

The South Atlantic Quarterly was founded in 1901 by John Spencer Bassett.

Rey Chow Roberto M. Dainotto Fredric Jameson Ranjana Khanna Wahneema Lubiano Walter D. Mignolo Kathi Weeks Robyn Wiegman Managing Editor

Stacy Lavin

Correspondence may be sent to the South Atlantic Quarterly, Box 90660, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0660. Special issue proposals are welcome.

Copyright © 2020 by Duke University Press issn 0038-2876

The

South Atlantic Quarterly

SAQ 119:4 • October 2020

The Ideology Issue Andrew Cole, Special Issue Editor

Introduction: The Ideology Issue   667 Andrew Cole Lifting the Veil  671 Mladen Dolar Critical Theory in Times of Crisis   681 Hortense Spillers The Sovereignty of Critique   685 Audra Simpson Identity Politics, Criticism, and Self-criticism   701 Colleen Lye Ideology Critique 2.0   715 Caren Irr Judgment and Social Being: Notes on Teleological Positing   725 C. D. Blanton How Does Critique Become Effective?   735 Warren Montag Surface Critique: Althusser, Foucault, and the Problem of Ricardo   747 Eleanor Kaufman Everybody’s a Critic   761 Hal Foster Extinct Critique  767 Anna Kornbluh

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Boundless Mystification  779 Robert T. Tally Jr. Single? Great? Collective?: On Allegory and Ideology  789 Bruce Robbins Meditations on Last Philosophy   799 Alexander R. Galloway The Dialectic of Space: An Untimely Proposal   811 Andrew Cole The End of Ideology, the Ideology of the End   833 Alenka Zupančič

A G A I N S T the D A Y

The Gilets Jaunes Uprising Francesco Brancaccio, Editor

Introduction: The Space-Time of the Gilets Jaunes  846 Francesco Brancaccio The Hour of Revolt: The Gilets Jaunes and the Question of Emancipation  856 Ludivine Bantigny The Gilets Jaunes: From Declassing to Counter-power   866 Marta Camella Galí, Matteo Polleri, and Federico Puletti The Climate of Roundabouts: The Gilets Jaunes and Environmentalism   877 Élodie Chédikian, Paul Guillibert, and Davide Gallo Lassere

Notes on Contributors   888

Andrew Cole Introduction: The Ideology Issue

Welcome to the ideology issue. Why is ideol-

ogy an issue at all? The better question is why shouldn’t it be? Scholars, artists, architects, journalists, and activists around the world understand that there are consequences to their practices, that our words and works mean something to ourselves—otherwise what’s the point?—and that our efforts to make sense of the world can matter to others, be they your friends, family, coworkers, or the greater public. Our activisms and words, however, can also get us into trouble or cause serious disruptions, locally and nationally. And in the same way there are consequences to what we do, our projects are a consequence of the world in which we live. Otherwise, there’d be no there there, nothing with which to work, nothing to dream about improving, or simply seeing anew because something seemed off, wrong, and therefore worth rectifying. Consequences are the fundamental issue about ideology. Call them causes and effects. For all of its long history of usage since the late eighteenth century, ranging in meaning from the “natural history of ideas” and “delusion” to “values” and “enjoyment,” the term ideology boils down to the problem of causes and effects. What the concept of ideology brings to the older scholastic

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conversations about these two categories—as well as to the even older musings about fate or destiny—is an emphasis on their distinct sociality or, better, the institutional, political, and economic significance of what determines us in our own willful determinations and what limits our efforts to break through and change things. Baby steps, though. To begin with, ideology, as an operative term, reminds us that a portion of what we say has been said before, that a good deal of what we think has been thought already, that some of what we do has been done previously, not only by people in the past long before us but also by people today, right now, both near and far. In other words, it’s relatively easy to acknowledge that we’ve carried on doing things a certain way from the previous generation, that we follow traditions, even if our actions aren’t called that or recognized as such. But the term ideology makes this common insight a lot more challenging because it forces you to face yourself in the present. For the most part we feel free, in the moment, as living, breathing individuals. Yet, the quality of that experience—spontaneous and idiosyncratic—always has a quantitative complement. That is, sure as day, there’s a minimum amount of individuals feeling exactly the same as you and their number eventually adds up to a generality in which you suddenly seem like all of them, all of the rest, whether you know it or not, or like it or not. Ideology is a magic number, a peculiar quality of quantity—a sum greater than the total of parts. In other words, ideology works by not adding up or making sense. That’s why one of the everlasting problems of ideology is that even though people know what’s best for themselves, they—puzzlingly and annoyingly even—do their worst, especially if it means acting against their own self-interest in the long run to screw someone over in the short term. It’s frequently said that ideology is a remainder, an irreducibly irrational element or kernel that eludes explanation or representation, such as behavior like this. That’s true, though this problem of ideology as remainder could be cast in another way. Verily, in terms of explaining the inexplicable, the term ideology is like the last person standing, the one holding the bag left to clarify just how a mob of so many human tendencies—like idiocy, indifference, helplessness, hopelessness, vulnerability, fragility, need, resentment, paranoia, narcissism, prejudice, superstition, religion, error, disinhibition, anger, tribalism, hate, brutality—can coerce truth, knowledge, even science, into giving in; or how the latter three find the former absolutely unshakeable and incorrigible. If there exists a better single term for this phenomenon and problem, then many readers would be glad to hear it.

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Ideology will make an existentialist out of anyone. And that’s one option to pursue, for the word ideology picks out existential problems in a specific way, with students of the term using pairings like “the universal and the particular” or ideas like “inscription,” “interpellation,” and “over-determination” (which pluralizes old-school determination) to explain how ideology wends its way into our heads. However ideology shapes our thoughts, and just where the line lies between original ideas and ideology loaded with everyone else’s, it can be said that ideology has perfected the art of transmuting our individuality, our individual peculiarities, into a collective identity just as, on a higher level of abstraction, it transforms our group identities into social differences. It’s why classism, sexism, and racism—any of the isms, really—are rightly called ideologies, for ideology targets us, weaponizes us, or both. But it excludes no one, which is a social fact almost everyone finds (or should find) hard to accept without feeling that it’s the word itself that does violence to them and thus needs to be expunged from our conversations. Indeed, to reject the critique of ideology because it attends to all that damages and distorts, or because it often makes art less beautiful or literature less lovely—though never less important—is like confusing the critique of racism for racism, as when activists or certain journalists are accused of playing the race card when speaking on the injustices of the carceral state. That we are urged to return to enjoying resplendent forms and let politics slide in our academic work is just another way of snarking, “why can’t you just have some fun for once?!” (This is why the politics of enjoyment is often an unrecognized death drive.) If the problem of ideology compels you to face yourself, the critique of ideology motivates you to face the world, which is always more than a composite of family, neighborhood, school, place of worship, law and law enforcement, history, culture, society, what have you. The total that exceeds these instances—thus giving them space to be distinct from one another— is that sum greater than its parts, that totality called capitalism, which doesn’t bring all of these domains of life into being so much as it leaves not a single one untouched. Does this mean that capitalism is ideology? Not necessarily, though I wouldn’t stop anyone from saying so. The point is that if we are going to speak of ideology, then we have to speak of capitalism. For it’s in capitalism—and in modernity generally—that the problem of ideology begins, where unrelated areas of life that don’t seem overtly political or for that matter economic are nonetheless ideological in the way they talk the talk and walk the walk of capitalism. It’s to say that while ideology

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isn’t capitalism, it is of capitalism. After all, it’s in early capitalism that the word was invented. And it’s in late capitalism that, we’re told, ideology has come to an end, along with the critique of ideology. It’s for the spokespersons of those latter ideas—yes, they’re around—to justify why they express the deepest wish fulfillment of capitalism. Meanwhile, it’s for the authors of this special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly to demonstrate just why the problem of ideology, and especially the critique of ideology and of capitalism, is vital now more than ever, in our pages and our practices.

Mladen Dolar Lifting the Veil

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deology, like being in Aristotle, can be spoken of in ever so many ways. One word, but a Babel of tongues. As with Aristotle, the question arises whether we are dealing with various senses of the same entity that persists through different uses of the word, or whether different senses point to various kinds of entities. With dozens of proposed definitions, one is always on a shifting terrain and doomed to arbitrary entry points. With this risk and caveat in mind let me propose one simple line. One of philosophy’s crucial goals and ambitions, since its inception and throughout its history, was, at the simplest, to do away with delusions. Given the propensity of human mind to fall prey to illusions of all kinds, one should devise stark strategies to counteract it, to undo the illusory enchantment, to lift the veil, to unmask, to see straight. This was the principal task that philosophy set for itself at the outset, and one can simply invoke, say, the sharp divide between mythos/ logos, or the adage “know yourself,” or the various academic conundra concerning the validity of epistemic truth claims and the foundations of moral injunctions. The moment of its beginnings is often described as the Greek Enlightenment in order to draw an analogy with the eighteenth-century The South Atlantic Quarterly 119:4, October 2020 doi 10.1215/00382876-8663566 © 2020 Duke University Press

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Enlightenment, which invented the very name Enlightenment for the process that was supposedly always already there. The historic circumstances may be radically different, but the project was driven by ultimately the same ambition, the later historic moment mirroring the former, and bringing it to completion, to the victory of the Enlightenment—indeed a revolution. Of course, this is a very simplified way of telling this story. Both moments were ridden with endless detours: the shifting complexities of envisaged delusions, misconceptions, fallacies, chimeras vs. the intricacies of rational means, arguments, logical tools, the invention of ever new reasons to tackle them; and the massive differences in historic and social backgrounds. But I am pursuing this purposely naïve narrative for one particular end: if Enlightenment, in the largest sense, saw itself as the undoing of delusions (of “self-incurred immaturity” in Kant’s [1996] famous parlance) and if it eventually triumphed with the advent of modernity, then this is precisely the inaugural moment of ideology. And so ideology essentially pertains to modernity. One can take the French revolution as an easy shorthand for so many of these processes and simply note that the term ideology first appeared in its immediate aftermath.1 It could only be conceived at a historical juncture when the originary Enlightenment ambition of philosophy has run its course and come to a completion, when it won the alleged victory, the watershed beyond which we are supposedly modern. Ideology, as a modern entity, has thus bid farewell to combatting the age old chimeras and superstitions,2 to unveiling the true reality behind them in order to dispel them. The whole problem is that ideological illusions, in this new constellation, are part and parcel of the “real world” that is supposed to stand hidden behind the veil. It’s now the “real world” that produces illusions, sustains them at its core, and keeps them in its bosom. It’s not just a matter of deluded consciousness. Rather, it’s that much of reality, much of the world itself, is questionable. The mask appears to blend with the face it is supposed to mask, and this is what separates ideology from run-of-the mill human propensity for delusions. The world itself, in its hard reality, appears to be structured as ideology. It’s no longer consciousness and its whims that should be debunked, its delusions lifted. Rather, the delusion is ingrained in the very structure of reality itself. The critique of ideology has therefore a much harder task than the classical philosophical endeavors, stretching, well, from Thales to Kant. It demands a double reflection on account of a doubled distortion: the veil that obfuscated reality is shifted and located within this reality itself. This shift was highlighted by Marx in the very first sentences of the Preface to The German Ideology, the manuscript of 1845 that inaugurated the proper concept of ideology, at least in its most important strand:

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Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relations according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The products of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away. Let us revolt against this rule of concepts. Let us teach men, says one, how to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man; says another, how to take up a critical attitude to them; says the third, how to get them out of their heads; and existing reality will collapse. These innocent and child-like fancies are the kernel of the modern Young-Hegelian philosophy. . . . (MECW, 5.23)

The passage involves a nice rhetorical coup de force: what is presented as the critical stance, readily accepted by Enlightenment commonsense, is then exposed as childish fancy. What is so ideological about the German ideologists, belonging to the seemingly radical group of Young-Hegelians (that Marx and Engels were initially also part of )? Paradoxically, their ideological condition is precisely that they don’t have a concept of ideology, so their struggle against chimeras, dogmas, and delusions follows the pattern of the Enlightenment debunking of illusions. Dismantle the illusions, as the thinking goes, and the world will crumble; domination will come to an end. Is the Cat on the Mat? As opposed to this old view, there is a new task of what can properly be called critique (as opposed to debunking), a critique bearing on ideology (as opposed to illusions), thus pursuing and radicalizing the notion of critique proposed by Kant at the height of the Enlightenment. In the long tradition of “critical theory,” stretching back to Marx, whenever one says ideology one utters, in the same breath, the critique of ideology. Ideology immediately calls for critique, not for some neutral and objective description; or if there is to be description, it aims to dismantle its object, not just examine and explain it. Its object is its foe. But as opposed to all kinds of delusions which abound in human history, the deception involved in ideology is structurally necessary and thus inveterate; it stems by necessity from a certain condition of the world and sustains this condition. What is ultimately required is changing the world that necessitates the illusions and inevitably produces them—a world that can only function as long as they are maintained. Falsity pertains to the world, not just to its consciousness. “False consciousness,” said Marx . . . but of a false world. The redoubling of false consciousness vs. reality is shifted

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into the duplicity of reality itself. Hence, the odds are against the prospect of the traditional unveiling ever working, and the Enlightenment idea that people will abandon delusions once they see light easily turns out to be itself a great delusion, maybe the greatest of all, thus itself a peculiar and telling case of ideology, perhaps its sneakiest form. This shift of duplicity into reality affects the standard assumptions about truth and deception. The standard test of truth and falsity of a statement is supposed to accord with “the cat is on the mat” model. All we have to do is to look to determine whether the cat is really on the mat or fooling around in the garden, and if we find it curled on the mat then the statement is true (“if and only if ” etc.). Not so with ideology, which, to be sure, involves falsity, but it doesn’t thereby fall into the realm of lying, intentional deception, and fraud—to be sure, there is no lack of that, and there never has been—but such a notion would imply a naïve reduction of ideology to a thesis about those in power cheating people by their falsehoods. The key dimension of ideology is neither epistemic nor moral, neither psychological nor propagandistic. It is structural. It doesn’t simply consist of false statements about reality which could be exposed by comparison with the true state of affairs. Ideology proper starts when it is not the statements that are false, but rather the reality with which one should compare them. It skews the very yardstick of judgment. It gets hold of subjects at the exact moment they perceive something as objective reality, independent of propositions one may form about it. Ideology is at its strongest when it presents perceived reality as something utterly non-ideological. This is what happens most obviously and ubiquitously, say, with the way that “economy” is taken as the hard objective reality of our time (another way of saying, well, capitalism)—the whole discourse of the market economy as the ultimate hard reality and reference point of our present world. Ideology consists precisely in presenting the advancement of global market economy as the ultimate horizon of what’s thinkable and objectively available to our minds. In this respect left-wing and right-wing politics as a rule differ only in degree: to what extent one should regulate or deregulate this self-propelling force, to what extent it should be attenuated by social concerns, human rights and state intervention, or given freer reign. The difference is that of degree, not of substance (and the left is increasingly looking like the right with a more human face). Economy is perceived as an objective force, inexorable in its progress and global spread, something that can be canalized and restrained, or encouraged and released, but there is a troubling consensus at the bottom. The lie involved in ideology today doesn’t pertain so much to statements about economy (that, too), but to the reality itself that is set up as

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the measure of their truth value. Economy—the central ideological category in its seeming non-ideological appearance—is the proton pseudos of this universe.3 It is the cat itself on the mat, not the ideas we may entertain about it, and anyone who maintains that the cat is not on the mat automatically runs the risk of being ridiculed as blinded by ideology. The major feat of ideology is to present a non-ideological touchstone and to reserve the label ideology to the supposed biased views of those who cannot or will not see the obvious. 4 From Estrangement Effect to Estrangement Defect Still, this scenario doesn’t do away with the call for unveiling, unmasking and debunking, but makes it doubly difficult, requiring a redoubled unveiling, as it were, not just on the part of consciousness but on the side of reality. It is not enough to disclose the reality behind the veil of deception, since this reality itself turns out to be structured as a lure. But the lure still involves a disguise, although a reflected one; it still calls for unmasking and exposure: to lay bare the hidden underside of the ideological façade presented by reality in its seeming self-evidence, to reveal the hidden underpinnings of its officially presented front, the behind-the-scene that ideology tries to keep concealed, to exhibit its symptoms. This kind of critique requires most strenuous effort, but what I am interested in here is actually a strange turn that we are witnessing recently and which seems to present a new stage of ideology: the apparent self-unveiling, the self-unmasking of the official front itself. Not the exposure of what lies behind the ideological lure, but the coming out of this underside itself. Let me take a detour through Brecht who invented an ingenious mechanism of ideology critique, the notorious Verfremdungseffekt, the effect of estrangement. What does this estrangement consist of?5 Imagine a rich fat capitalist coming on stage and without further ado stating bluntly: “I am a capitalist. My only interest is to squeeze workers as much as I can, to make them toil as hard as possible and to pay them as little as possible. I only care about my profits.” One can immediately recognize an archetypal Brechtian situation in which characters blatantly and shamelessly state their business in an unadulterated form, without a mask or disguise, without illusions and deceit. The strangeness, the estrangement effect of this statement, resides in the impossibility of it ever being announced so bluntly and publicly. If it were stated publicly and without disguise it would be inoperative; it couldn’t effectively constitute the social bond on which modern exploitation is based. Ideology, in this older form, consists in the way in which the pursuit of interests must be hidden behind the formal façade of common values, be it in the

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form of universality of human rights, high ethical ideals, the love for humanity, the endeavor for progress and general prosperity, democracy, tolerance, freedom, and so forth. This is the necessary appearance that constitutes ideological reality. The bald-faced statement of interest stages the impossibility of the underside coming to the fore in a plain manner. It imposes the dialectics of interests and their concealment: they can only exist and thrive by being transposed into a different kind of discourse that covers them with the cloak of universal values. The first Brechtian step is to unveil the actual driving force behind the high ideas and pin all ideas to their actual driving forces that sustain the ideological reality. Now the strange thing is that such a proclamation doesn’t sound so strange any more. It is as if the estrangement effect doesn’t really work any longer. Certain ways of blunt talk have actually become conceivable and admissible, acceptable in public speech, so that Brecht’s intended dialectics of brute interests and their concealment don’t quite function. If one needs to give a name to this shift that occurred in the last decades, then, for lack of a better name, one can first point to the ascendancy of neoliberal discourse. One of its achievements was precisely that certain type of blunt statements gradually gained public currency, emblematically starting with “greed is good”—such was the simple and trivial slogan which encapsulated a certain program in the eighties, promoting it to the rank of a commonly acceptable general truth about common good and public interest, the underside of brute interests coming into plain sight. It is as if the cynicism of Brecht’s characters has ceased to look cynical and has lost its force to produce estrangement. The hidden blunt interest has come out and turned into a public hero. There is no more estrangement, and the Verfremdungseffekt of Brecht’s plays today perhaps takes its principal resource in the very lack of Verfremdung. Repression of Repression But this was just a beginning, in view of what was to follow in the present day populist turn; what was perceived as a new kind of outspokenly obscene discourse in the eighties was but a kernel which blossomed into spectacular proportions a quarter of a century later, quite beyond the limits of what was then conceivable. One may take obscenity as a makeshift clue to this new turn. What is obscene? One is tempted to bring its definition in line with Freud’s designation of the uncanny: something comes to the fore that should have remained hidden, one sees something that shouldn’t have been seen.

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This is actually Schelling’s definition of the uncanny of which Freud approves.6 He also points out the vicinity of the uncanny and the comical. The obscene seems to involve both the uncanny and the comical to some extent, although with a twist that is difficult to qualify. Obscenity causes a sort of anxiety, although translated into indignation, and a sort of comical effect (one easily speaks of buffoonery, clownishness), although the laughter gets stuck in the throat.7 And there is another dimension in this strange mix, say, that of shame and shamelessness: shame also involves something coming to light that shouldn’t have been revealed, and there is the reflected shame, the shame one feels at the shamelessness of the exposure of the other. The uncanny, the comical, and the shameful intersect in the obscene, producing a troubling effect that remains enigmatic.8 Outrage, perplexity, disgrace, disbelief, puzzlement, amused horror? What should have been hidden has come to light—but what is it? Is it a truth that comes to the fore with this exposure of the hidden? There would be an ultimate irony in this, in “truth” coming out as obscenity, but this is not what is at stake. To be sure, there was always an obscene side to power, its shameful hidden secrets, its brutal self-interest behind the pretense of ideals, its narcissistic megalomania, its vulgarity now put on brazen display, its petty envy, jealousy, and malice. But if all this comes to the fore, are we finally seeing its truth, uncovered, unveiled, without dissimulation? Is this the hidden truth that ideology tries to cover up with its construction of reality, with its inner veil? Anything but. Quite the contrary, what we see is just another lure, another image, another fake, not some deep truth, but a more insidious metalure, as it were. Obscenity is not the mark of truth. It is the way that the very unveiling starts functioning as a veil; the shadowy double does its apparent coming out and starts acting as the biggest boost of ideology. Philosophy has been haunted by the liar paradox since its inception (Epimenides, the Cretan liar, was actually Thales’s contemporary) and has devoted a lot of reflection to its intricacies and the ways to avoid its clutches. But now it seems that we have to do with a whole new avatar of the liar paradox, a sort of its redoubling (or maybe, again, a meta-liar paradox): most significantly, a person holding the highest office can tell thousands of evident lies without any consequences.9 Everybody knows them to be lies, they are easily verifiable, they can be checked against simple and commonly available facts, no need for convoluted interpretations, no need for sophisticated conceptual means developed by the critique of ideology to debunk the subtle fallacies behind the façade of seeming accuracy and objectivity. The simplest

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“cat is on the mat” test will suffice, without going to the length of examining the falsity of the cat. It is as if the object of analysis would itself present its own devastating critique in the face of the hapless critics of ideology. It’s like ideology unmasking itself, lifting all the veils. The emperor may take off all his clothes, and people may cry “the emperor is naked,” pointing out the obvious, but to no avail.10 Even more, the emperor may proudly cry out: “look, I am naked!” (actually not a bad way to summarize the bulk of Trump’s statements), thus being always in advance of the outraged critics. This situation resembles the structure of the Freudian joke (meta-joke?): why are you so emphatically demonstrating to me that power is obscene when I know full well that power is obscene: you must be lying to me. It looks like ideology, in its reflected form, has done its coming out, thus putting the vigilant and perspicacious critics of ideology out of work. What remains for them to do, if their object reveals itself in full view and displays what should be laboriously excavated? Are we confronted with a truth that was distorted and disguised under the cloak of ideology and its illusions and is now in full view? This is the crux of the matter, the new turn that I am trying to pursue by no doubt too cursory means: the mechanism by which lifting the illusion actually heightens and enhances the illusion; the lifting of the veil turns into the most obdurate veil. The new twist (seen before, but never so directly) is that the best way to hide is to be hidden in full view, in plain sight, in full spotlight, in front of the world audience, daily.11 The utter obfuscation coincides with the coming out of the hidden. Freudianly speaking, this may look like lifting repression, with the most childish and primitive impetuses coming to light, but it’s the very opposite—the repression itself gets repressed. This is maybe the simplest diagnosis qualifying this present moment and the point of my essay: the astounding degree to which the repression itself can get repressed. With the alleged end of history, proclaimed some thirty years ago, we were supposed to start living in post-ideological times. The ideological delusions were gone, historically defeated, so the story went, and we were finally free to espouse reality without ideological bias and deception. This maneuver broke the field wide open for the proper critique of ideology; it looked like its vintage case, with reality being blatantly presented as free of ideology, and hence the textbook example of ideology par excellence. But this troubling development took place, too crude for ideology critique to tackle—namely, that this ideological reality started to overtake the critique by its own exposure, using this exposure as the major asset of its deployment. What is left to the ideology critique to do?

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Notes 1 2 3 4

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Notoriously it was Destutt de Tracy who proposed the term ideology in 1796 as ‘a science of ideas’, to follow all the textbooks. Hegel in his Phenomenology (1807: 329–49) treated the logic of this combat under the general heading “The struggle of the Enlightenment with superstition” Cf. the subtitle of the French original, which invokes “economystification” (Dupuy 2014). This is where Marx’s critique of ideology splits into two interconnected strands: the critique of the forms of consciousness and of “ideas” (the imposition of the ruling ideas by the ruling class etc.); and the ideology embodied in the economy itself and its practice, most conspicuously as commodity fetishism, the zero ideology which is not labeled as such. Hence the primacy of the critique of political economy, which aims at the “economic basis” and not the “ideological superstructure.” The major problem that persists is how the latter informs the former, but I cannot deal with this here. I am here briefly reusing an example from my article “Brecht’s Gesture” (Dolar 2012). “Uncanny is what one calls everything that was meant to remain secret and hidden and has come into the open” (Freud 2003: 132). The best comment on the comical aspect was provided by Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame: “not even the Pythons in their 1960s pomp could match the surreal madcap nature of the presidency. . . . The reality is funnier than anything one can do” (Agence France-Presse. 2018). I must single out the truly excellent book by William Mazzarella, Eric Santner and Aaron Schuster (2020), Sovereignty Inc. One is also tempted to conceive the obscene as etymologically connected to another Freudian topos, to read obscene as beside the main scene, coming from the other scene, from Freud’s notorious anderer Schauplatz, the other stage. But its Latin etymology actually goes back to the proto-Indo-European kweyn, to soil, mud, filth; hence in Latin inauspicious, ominous; repulsive, offensive, abominable; immodest, impure, indecent. Or, all the facts about the blatant abuse of power are in full view, but no impeachment. Etc. It may seem that the signifier “Trump” condenses all this most economically. But the process hasn’t started with Trump, who is rather the product of a shift that was decades in the making. If one considers drastic facts being on full display without this having any consequences, one can recall that nobody was ever held accountable for the biggest economic crisis in Western history, with an unprecedented massive state intervention to bail out the culprits, and nobody was ever held accountable for starting the Iraq war, on the basis of a blatant lie, with catastrophic consequences and no end in sight. To take just the most obvious. This looks like a new avatar of Poe’s purloined letter, only with the addition that it bears the inscription “This is the purloined letter.” Still, nobody finds it, or even better, everybody finds it and reads it, to no avail.

References Dolar, Mladen. 2012. “Brecht’s Gesture.” Theory and Event 15, no. 4. muse.jhu.edu/article /491200. Dupuy, Jean-Pierre. 2014. Economy and the Future: A Crisis of Faith. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 2003. The Uncanny, translated by David McLintock. London: Penguin.

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Hegel, Georg. 1807. Phenomenology. In Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller. 1977: 329–49. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1996. “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” In What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, edited by James Schmidt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mazzarella, William, Eric Santner, and Aaron Schuster. 2020. Sovereignty Inc. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Agence France-Presse. 2018. “Donald Trump is funnier than Monty Python, says Terry Gilliam.” Guardian, March 17. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/mar/17 /donald-trump-is-funnier-than-monty-python-says-terry-gilliam.

Hortense Spillers Critical Theory in Times of Crisis

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t has occurred to me before now, but only by way of example, that critical theory, in its varied iterations, witnesses its most impressive moments of efflorescence in times of crisis. The 1960s, I believe, offer an excellent case-in-point: the collapse of what amounted to an apartheid regime of the post-slavery confederacy in the United States marked the end of my childhood and initiation into the rites of taxpaying citizenship and the responsibilities of suffrage. In fact, the latter, ironically, exposed those years as especially dangerous ones for the exercise of the ballot by Black people. The passage of Civil Rights legislation in 1964, voting rights in 1965, women’s rights and title IX in 1972—all contributed to the erection of the academy, especially in branches of the human sciences, as we know it today. If we extract 1968, 1969, from this spate of years, this is what we see: on both sides of the Atlantic, youth movements in the streets of all over the world created a watershed moment that, in turn, forced the academy to absorb it as its visible other, as what is political motion one moment becomes not even in the next a new curricular object. The Africana program at Brandeis University, for instance, was instaurated by a handful of students, both undergraduate and The South Atlantic Quarterly 119:4, October 2020 doi 10.1215/00382876-8663578 © 2020 Duke University Press

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graduate, who had only a few days before occupied the university’s computer center, Ford Hall, at the time during the winter of 1969. Something rather analogous to the Brandeis movement happened also at Cornell University and the establishment of Africana studies out of the occupation of Willard Straight Hall on the Ithaca campus. These transformative events that sound rather extreme today belonged to their heroic moment of Columbia, Berkeley, Kent State, and Howard, and lest we forget, the spring 1968 assassinations, one very quickly and imminently on the heels of another, of MLK and RFK in the decade of American political murder that included John Kennedy, Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X, among others. I cite and recite this configuration of events here in order to suggest that the now- suspended period of critical innovation that the 1960s set in motion seems to me the twin form of political action that was provoked because enough of society had reached the limit of what it was willing to bear under the old regimes and dispensations of state powers. By the early to middle 1970s, the Black studies movement and the women’s movement had exerted so sufficient pressure on coeval configurations of knowledge that the old names were no longer adequate. We needed new ones. A similar motivational connection is traced by Martin Jay in his study, The Dialectical Imagination, which examines the rise of the Frankfurt School in 1923. According to his reading, members of the Frankfurt School, or what became the Institute of Social Research, were responding to challenges to Marxist theory brought about by the Russian Revolution and its implications for Central European intellectual classes. Poised between the Bolshevik powers, on the one hand, and the failures of Weimar democracy, on the other—in any event, a revolutionary sequence in the contemporary world—the Frankfurt School sought to unify theory and praxis; as Jay (1973: 4) explains: Loosely defined, praxis was used to designate a kind of self-created action, which differed from the externally motivated behavior produced by forces outside [human] control. Although originally seen as the opposite of contemplative theoria, when it was first used in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, praxis in the Marxist usage was seen in dialectical relation to theory. In fact, one of the earmarks of praxis as opposed to mere action was its being informed by theoretical configurations. The goal of revolutionary activity was understood as the unifying of theory and praxis, which would be in direct contrast to the situation prevailing under capitalism.

What we have done in contemporary practice since the post-1960s theoretical efflorescence is to separate “criticism” and “theory” (as the concept of

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“praxis” appears to have shed status altogether) into adjacent precincts of intellectual energies, the former related to the protocols of “close reading” and its earlier iterations in the New Criticism; while the latter, in its proximity to the “afterlife,” I suppose we could say, of “philosophy” is hierarchically supersessional to “criticism.” To have been called—and perhaps it is still true—a “theorist” two decades ago, rather than a “literary critic,” say, was one’s deepest desire, even though I do not recall that anyone ever said what either of them was, but relied instead on knowing the difference when he/ she saw it. One of these is perceived to be more complex than the other; to cover more capacious discursive ground and is thought to be conversant with the epigone of philosophical reflection and its canonical texts and contexts. If we think about it, we can see how “criticism” and “theory” are not only mutually supportive, but interpenetrative in the relay of emphasis and competence that they evoke at varying moments of reading and analysis. It seems to me that critical theory, as Jay argues the post-Weimar intellectuals pursued it, melded the aims of criticism and theory in working out the protocols of a responsive and responsible view of socio-political order. In our work today, we have not only abandoned the powerful engines of criticism, having reified theory as the imagined pure locus of a writerly practice, but we’ve abrogated from any desire, it seems to me, for a vantage point onto a larger sociality that shapes our becoming. These lapses suggest, quite frankly, that the critical theoretical ferment of the 1970s to the beginning of the new millennium boils down to a standard operating procedure that provokes text after text of textual production, but entirely predictable in the moves it makes, the conclusions it draws. This behavior, overseen by administrators, who are bean counters, inscribes the mixed blessings of difference to which universities were opened as a result of the transformative work of the 1960s. On the one hand, the post-1960s humanities academy may be the most democratically representative in the entire history of higher education, while on the other, the new academy in the proliferation of curricular objects seems to have lost sight of their dialectical involvement and relationship. We need wait no longer for a crisis to inspire a renewal. We’re up to the neck in crises. But how will critical theory respond? Reference Jay, Martin. 1973. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Audra Simpson The Sovereignty of Critique

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orn from dissatisfaction and alienation from the disciplines, Native Studies in what is now North America sought to teach people in the 1970s to serve Indigenous communities and defend treaty rights and, in doing so, lands and waters. From its beginning, the field was a critique of knowledge and disciplinary formations that had imagined indigenous peoples as either dying or dead, or subjects of continual capture. The emergent field emphasized both sovereignty (the historical agreements that “tribes” or nations had entered into to protect their lands) and the necessity to engage materials about Native people, evaluating and analyzing not only its truth claims but its constitution—a practice of critique. These two crucial activities in Native and indigenous studies (sovereignty and critique) are in tension with one another. In what follows I offer an account of the theoretical and political impetus for this focus in the field on sovereignty, while giving an account of its formation. I divide the analysis into constituent parts that reveal the tension between commitments to an inherently constraining and delimiting formulation—sovereignty— and to interrogative practices like critique, looking specifically at the ways in which sovereignty and The South Atlantic Quarterly 119:4, October 2020 doi 10.1215/00382876-8663591 © 2020 Duke University Press

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critique co-constitute each other. This tension or relationship has germinated critical strands within the field that address the domination of the settler state as well as the production of knowledge and the formation of the disciplines. As such, Native Studies developed in service to community, with critical commitments to protection of territory and decolonization that extend to institutional and academic commitments and politics.1 “Sovereignty” may now be viewed as a dated political idea premised on an exceptionalism that, some might say, has a specious claim to contemporary imaginings of justice. Its genealogy resides in a Western European, monarchic right to kill—in a desire to secure jurisdiction over territory that appears to no longer matter in the world of today. This is (presumably, perhaps ideally) a world that is punctuated by flows of capital and people, where “belonging” is sorted not by clans, crests, and names but by twitter handles in deterritorialized, de-raced, and blooded spaces beyond the material world. Yet in spite of this admittedly abbreviated account of the “hyper-real” world in which we live, theorists from the Pacific2 have taught us that the radical Indigenous commitments to place- and water-centered lives persist, not as stasis but in a dialectical tension between these core commitments to life, land, and waters. Sovereignty, in this sense, matters. But only critique can help us distinguish between sovereignty as western exceptionalism and dominance, and sovereignty as Indigenous belonging, dignity, and justice. Constituent Parts 1 Let first let me speak more of the title of this piece and its constituent parts. “Sovereignty”—the notion of jurisdiction over territory and people, of a monarchical power to kill, in Schmittian terms to possess such an increase of power and have absolute arbitrariness at one’s disposal, is summarized blithely as a power defined as the one who may make the decision. Why speak of such arbitrary power as virtue or “sovereignty” at all when its power is derived from potential lethality? Why do so when it is both an artifact of Western geopolitical and now biopolitical effort, when it is invested clearly and unambiguously in the deep histories of Western governance that required force, violence, exclusionary practices in the carving of territory? “Carving out territory” is not a project without bodily effects. A certain innocence attaches itself to such language, yet in so doing it galls the record of lives and land lost in the project of “carving.” And “carving” what? Territory, at once material and metaphysical, to which Indigenous peoples globally belong. So why speak of sovereignty when it has been used to justify the seizure of those territories as “just” (in the form of divine power and right) and

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the ongoing life of foreign and sometimes settler and settling governance in Indigenous lands? Why talk about sovereignty in the context of critique? In indigenous studies it is a strange need seemingly at odds with the philosophical systems that animate claims to and for justice, land, water, life, and dignity, yet sovereignty plays the shorthand game of protecting territory from incursion and, one would think, protecting from harm. “Sovereignty” is a political form that held hands with the first instances of global capital, mercantilism, that authorized the travel of foreigners to Indigenous territories and the massive, forcible detachment of people in search of more land, more labor, and more capital. Indigenous lands and bodies were Western sovereignty’s (supposed) terra nullius and tabula rasa—their lands, their bodies and then minds, were to be cleared, like a forest for planting and emplacing others here. Jesuits called their work in “New France,” a “harvest of souls”—for the Lockean logic of property formation informed retrospectively the efforts of missionaries as they worked their minds and souls into something extractable and convertible: spirits as property, land as possession. As such, “sovereignty” is fraught. It is shot through with these hidden and not so hidden experiences of force, displacement, and containment. Yet Indigenous peoples now “govern” presumably, with this political form, or aspire to, or are conscripted via (settler) law to use this language of sovereignty and aspire to control of territory, memberships, and jurisdiction. Simultaneously—and this is my key point throughout—Native and Indigenous studies has made “sovereignty” an intellectual and scholarly focus that also served a political project of justice and service for communities. There is a political and collective sense of self that now must be addressed in the move to sovereignty. The Iroquois Confederacy, Lewis Henry Morgan’s so-called “Romans of the New World”—or as they know themselves “Haudenosaunee” (people of the Longhouse)—have acted as nations and as sovereign, sovereign because they confederated, because they have their own governance system, their own “citizenship” or clan system, their own land— what is left of it. They even tried in the late 1920s to acquire recognition at the League of Nations as a nation-state in order to rid themselves of the burdensome yoke of Canadian settler colonialism. The bid for recognition was not successful, but was crucial for furthering an understanding of North American Indigenous sovereignty globally and thus qualifies what we might think of as “success.” 3 Either way, the appeal for international recognition was argued not with the language of racial redress or rights, but with the language of sovereignty. So this term is more than merely an ancestor to white, western political ordering confined only to Europe but is a language game that historically been played under conditions of imperial settler coloniality.

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The historical record is replete with Indigenous peoples making these arguments that pivot around the claims of sovereignty. 4 They have made them to other Indigenous nations, governments of various forms, to international tribunals regarding the centrality of their own inherent capacity to govern and the need for that capacity to be respected (see Deloria Jr. and Wilkins 1999; Bruyneel 2007; Stark 2016). These arguments and episodes of assertion were felt most recently when what is now the United States linked opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline to a specific violation of Fort Laramie Treaties of 1851 and 18685—treaties that, in defining the boundaries of Sioux protect one of the largest water tables in the world. These are treaties that are law, and as such are laws that have been abrogated. They are arguments predicated upon relationships between people (as co-signatories to agreements). As it stands, these laws now protect the water table and provide critical resistance to the danger posed by the transport of fossil fuels across those territories and to the toxicity to land, water, and people that follows this form of incursion. The Geonpul cultural analyst and theorist Aileen Moreton-Robinson has argued that Indigenous relationships to land—the bundle of relationalities to land, water, and peoples (what is translated in what is now Indigenous Australia as “country”)—is an ontological position that requires sovereignty (see Moreton-Robinson 2008, 2015). The significance of “sovereignty” to protect land and relationships is not limited to territory, but to bodily integrity and safety as well. The Muscogee legal scholar Sarah Deer has argued that Indigenous sovereignty in a legal sense protects Indigenous women from sexual violence because it is the diminishment of tribal sovereignty in the first place that allows for racial impunity and the extreme forms of violence that are inflicted upon Indian women in their territories (Deer 2015). Wherever there is dispossession, wherever there are people who manage to survive such theft in liberal democracies, sovereignty will just as surely appear.6 In Anglo-liberal democracies settler sovereignty is at work as jurisdiction, maintaining and protecting territory, but it tries to conceal its power and its history in a variety of ways. To be sure, this history is managed or contained in the conciliatory language of public apologies (see Simpson 2011),9 which attempt to repair prior wrongs and tend to an injured but restored demos. But more virulently, “sovereignty” animates the directives that issue from presidential mouths on matters of immigration, of the “border” and who shall cross it, and more generally on questions of what kind of exclusions are needed to protect, presumably, territory, place, and populace—who shall pass, who shall not pass, who shall die, who shall (let) live.

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It’s an ongoing ruse, this question of whose state and land this is, because it is premised on other violences that are animated by racial hierarchies and fears. The violences that first took land from Indigenous peoples, violence of war and of law, attend differently to other people of colour, for they, as well, remain vulnerable to force when imagined as out of place; they, as well, are rendered subjects of fear rather than recognized as fellow citizens worthy of protection (Maynard 2017; Camp and Heatherton 2016). They still cannot move too fast, or too erratically to white eyes lest they incite a panic and themselves be murdered, for appearing as bodily matter out of place (see Yamahtta-Taylor 2016; Ransby 2018). This danger to Black lives is as pervasive as it is atmospheric—animated by an antiblackness that is, as Christina Sharpe (2016: 104) argued, “as pervasive as climate.” This atmospheric requires reminders that black bodies be resignified as human—that they matter, that they are subjects of care and love, not danger, violence, and disposability. Likewise, the two-faced Janus of sovereignty, of presumed jurisdiction over territory, shows one face to Indigenous peoples as they hold on to these imperatives of life, but there are similar atmospherics (see Simmons 2017) at work here in which the other face of Janus emerges—that of dispossession and broken treaties (as in 1868). In other words, the same jurisdictional plea for protection animates Indigenous calls for upholding treaties, because the provisions of treaties can protect land and waters from violence. Sovereignty matters in these different ways, is embedded within ideologies of exclusion, fear and violence in the maintenance of a settler state and protection from encroachment and violence when deployed by others. Is sovereignty the right thing, then, for us to think with?7 Sovereignty is more than a problem of the violence to exclude, to maim, to kill in the name of jurisdiction, or a reminder of past agreements. It can be a useful analytic, if not practice. However, this idea requires a repositioning, a reclarification of purpose that can be unsettling because of its very rootedness in place and in history. Indigenous peoples define themselves through relatedness to each other as families, as clans and nations, in relationship to territory. The Oka Crisis (1990), Idle No More (2012), #NoDAPL (2016), and the Unis’tot’en Camp (2010–present) teach again and again that resistance and refusal to dispossession and encroachment are practices of care in addition to pronouncements of trespass and theft.8 This fact renders sovereignty as a form of relationality rather than a violent claim of property, exclusion, and a right to kill. So I think my own point further: what does sovereignty mean to people who are conditioned to think of themselves in responsible relation to land, to history, and to each other in this way?

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Constituent Parts 2 Let me tell the same story differently now. When white people of various forms, various specificities, came here they thought that they “found” (presumably) savage people who were at times seriously jarring to them. Those whom they encountered, who are now defined by this encounter—if we can use such benign language for the longitudinal process of dispossession that this inaugurates—were, in the case of the Haudenosaunee,9 led by women. But even this mode of “leadership” was shared with men. As to be expected, British and Dutch traders and politicos found these gendered arrangements to be unusual. They noted repeatedly that the women had to be dealt with, that they had their own councils, their own positions of significance or influence (“Clan Mothers”); that they were responsible for the transmission of chiefly names or titles, and that they “owned” or cared for land. Settlers thus recognized these Indigenous political orders as classically political, realizing that Indigenous protocols should be observed for diplomatic relations. That there were such political frameworks of considerable richness and variety only increases the sense that there was deep intentionality to the “settling” of so-called New Worlds, because murderous rampages required the breaking of diplomatic relations.10 Settlers, after all, came for souls. They came for land. They came for themselves. And Indigenous peoples were in the way.11 In whatever negotiated, subtle, harsh form that took, they were in the way. And the project of getting us out of the way, off our own land, out of ourselves, away from our families, the project of removing people from land, family, and culture in order to alienate them, is dispossession, which is the ongoing project of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism—the project, analytic, and form of governance—is not the event that it has been imagined as, an event of “Conquest,” a singular “genocide” (in the singular, as if it is finished). Rather, it forms a material and semiotic structure and force to disappear those who cannot be used to the ends of land and capital accumulation. Because sovereignty is inherent, unceded, and situated in a contested territory, it constitutes more than the right to kill. For the Standing Rock Sioux in 2016, sovereignty was invoked as a prayerful duty12: it was the duty to protect their land and water from toxicity. Similarly, the ongoing manifestations at Mauna Kea by Kanaka Maoli and allies sought to block the construction of a thirty-meter telescope. The construction of such a telescope— the largest one in the world—required that the Kanaka Maoli rescind their responsibility to that mountain as a living plane, as a site of ongoing ancestral life. They refused the understanding of the mountain as simply “the

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most scientifically beneficial vantage point to view the stars,” and in doing so, refused to forget, abandon, and revoke their responsibilities and relationship to that territory as anything other than a life form that matters to them. “Sovereignty,” then, moves through these different contexts as a philosophical and governing system that is carried in the languages and experiences of people who had and still have political codes and commitments for life that predate settlement. If this desire to move people out, to take from them, is a force and a simultaneous failure then we might ask why a state like apparatus such as sovereignty persists in argumentation, law, and practice? “Sovereignty” remains as an active antagonist as long as there is a state that is predicated upon dispossession. This active relationship to land, water, and responsibilities returns us to the activity of critique. “Critique” attaches itself to these claims and iterations of sovereignty because, in practice, it is to stand in active relation towards knowledge. As Foucault said, it is to “know knowledge”—to try to get as full a grasp over what is before you and know how it operates, examine its effects, and see what it does. “Knowledge” in a formal disciplinary sense has been an object of concern for Indigenous peoples who use it to govern in every way. Such “critique” has been nothing if not central for the Native Studies project from its inception. Constituent Parts 3 The defining moment for the institutionalization of Native Studies took place at, of all perhaps surprising places, Princeton University at “The First Convocation of Native American Scholars” in March, 1970. It was there, as Crow Creek Sioux Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (1997: 9) recounts, that there was a proclamation for the development of “Native American Studies as an Academic Discipline” whose major thrust would be the defense of land and indigenous rights. She summarized the sentiments of speakers at the convocation: “we cannot defend our languages and cultures if we cannot defend land.” Her decades’ long work not only contributed to the planning and implementation of this vision at places like the University of Arizona, but a steady output of articles and books that hammered at this point, expressing the need for intellectual infrastructures within and beyond universities that would contribute to the well-being of native nations and peoples. These infrastructures were to be based on an approach that was “endogenous” (inward looking) rather than materialist or scientific—what she called “exogenous” (or anthropological, scientific).13

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Her account, and the formulation of the discipline pronounced at Princeton, required working from within tribal or Indigenous worldviews and frameworks and refuting “the exogenous seeking of truth through isolation” (re: “the ivory tower”) (Cook-Lynn 1997: 11). This discipline was to be generated from within indigenous or “tribal” frameworks but also was to be in an active, critical relationship—one predicated upon “refutation” or critique—with the systems of thought that come to know and name and entrap Indigenous peoples and knowledge systems. This was in an especially charged and critical relationship to anthropology, which at that time, imagined indigenous peoples to be cultural remnants and at other moments, as scientific subjects, but not so much as authorizers of their own knowledge histories, futures, and destinies. Vine Deloria Jr. (1970) characterized the inequality of this relationship as parasitic, and the scholarship as producing “conceptual prison[s] into which Indians have been thrown.” The terrain of justice, then, moved between calls for institutional, disciplinary, and curricular transformation and political action on land and water. The aspirations of the Princeton Convocation were put into effect when Awkesasne Mohawk Richard Oakes, a San Francisco State student, took stock of the inadequate Native studies offerings at his university and planned to agitate, with then faculty member, Standing Rock Sioux anthropologist Beatrice Medicine, for curricular offerings that mattered to Native nations. As a result of this planning and action, Native Studies programs began at San Francisco State as well at Trent University in Peterborough Ontario in 1969. Within no time there was also the nineteen-month Indigenous occupation of Alcatraz in 1970,14 which demanded that out-of-use federal lands be returned to Indigenous peoples. Those actions, those arguments for intellectual independence, were preconditioned by the refusal of epistemic domination, what Deloria called a “conceptual prison.”15 Anthropology of that moment—1969, 1970 and 71—responded to these critiques and activisms. Deloria’s parodic and biting critique of anthropology in Custer Died for Your Sins highlighted the inequities of power exacerbated by anthropologists in the field, as well as the ways in which their research was largely useless to Indigenous communities. Other works of the time highlighted the global condition of colonization and imperialism that enabled the field itself; Talal Asad’s Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973) and Dell Hymes’s Reinventing Anthropology (1972) put anthropology into global, imperial circuits of knowledge and practice. Not long after the Princeton Convocation, the formation of Native and Indigenous Studies at San Francisco State, and the occupation of Alcatraz, some of the very same

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scholars attended the American Anthropological Association meetings in 1970 and, prompted by Deloria’s scathing critique along with the concerns of others, successfully pressed for a research code of ethics—a code that the AAA never had before.16 In spite of this dialectic between the field of anthropology and Native American studies—one which may be read as negative but then quite generative and productive—the practice of each field remained strained, to say the least. In Haudenosaunee research, for example, there was a small group of anthropologists that maintained a kind of textual domination over representations of the Iroquois.17 They blocked Haudenosaunee versions of history around NY State curriculum changes in the eighties, prevented the return of wampum belts, and betrayed promises to elders regarding the publication and circulation of images of sacred masks. This small group of anthropologists operated outside of these ethical and transformative discussions within a field that was itself grappling with its colonial legacy and was responding very directly to anti-colonial and in particular Indigenous critiques of its method and practice. What then became of the literature in response to critical projects on the ground? What of the projects that refused historical injustice and ethnographic entrapment as well as the gaze and practices of the containment or disappearance of Indigenous peoples? The answer requires more than a push for representation. As noted above, critiques of the late 1960s mobilized into political actions as well as institution- and curriculum building, bearing in mind all along those commitments to land and sovereignty. At times, Cook-Lynn’s “endogenous” approach operated at the center. These actions would fan out in different ways, and they often aligned with ambitions of language and Freedom Schools as well as clinics in communities and cities.18 The result may be now a wide range of educational options that center Indigenous thought, culture, and politics in the service of communities. Above all, there is a commitment to community but at the same time there is the practice of critique, an implicit “refutation”, to once more borrow Deloria’s language, of conceptual prisons. Recent scholarship has built upon and elaborated the central role of critique in the field. Jodi Byrd’s Transit of Empire argues that the theoretical nesting ground of what is considered critical thought—in classic western theory—has required the figure of the indigenous to be a site through which the claims of theory “transit.” Here critical theory hollows out Indigeneity, rendering it inert in order to build useful explanatory frameworks that nonetheless remove, ignore, and elide Indigeneity, completely transiting through

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it. In that transit there is a near-constant deferral of the actuality of Indigenous frameworks, liveliness, lands, and waters. Byrd establishes this idea through a reading of theorists like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who speak of “Indians without ancestry,” which helpfully challenges European Enlightenment thought but which, more crucially, misses the kinship their own ideas have with Indigenous figures within and beyond their texts (see Byrd 2011). Her study made critical theory her primary object, in social scientific terms, but she also opened up her analysis to the reading of maps, of missionary voyages across the world, and of John Woo’s torture memos on Guantanamo—memos that reach back to the archive of killing Modocs in the 19th Century in order to justify the form of violence inflicted upon rightless, and not yet charged but presumed to be, terrorists. As Byrd shows time and again, the grounds of justification for these European projects are found in Indigeneity, but the latter is deferred; it not only does not speak for itself, but it is a linchpin only for imagining, justifying, and asserting in this case, a form of sovereignty. It is in this deferring, and occluding context that histories also get rewritten for the political desires and needs of the day. The most celebrated book in Canada that both Indians and Canadians embraced in the last decade is Orenda (Boyden 2013),19 a fictionalized and savagizing retelling of the past “encounter” with the especially savage Haudenosaunee. This Avatar-like narrative of life in what was “New France” was written by a now-legendary imposter to the field of literature, a faux-Indigenous author, Joseph Boyden.20 His fictionalized account was an award-winning best seller. Among its many problems, it used the Jesuit Relations, a global chronicle of missionary activity among Indigenous peoples in North America (as well as those-to-be-converted-globally), to create a new past for Canada in the present. This new past was to accord “equal agency to all participants,” the possibility of malevolence or virtue to all protagonists, as a modality of literary if not historical reconciliation. In this “fictionalized” encounter text, there is a complication: we are not told where moral weight lays, who the “bad guy” is—is it the Jesuits? the Huron? Each protagonist appears in a complex form, except it seems, the Haudenosaunee. They (we) are the bad ones. Perhaps, true to Byrd’s analysis, we see a transit in every way, a barreling through Indigenous polities, stories, knowledges, and politics to stop short at a Haudenosaunee monster. Canada may need a monster, or the literary imagination per se needs one. Either way, “Indigenous” disappears in a strange, conciliatory, retrospective sleight of hand: one group is (still) the “bad guy.” Indigenous peoples in this reconciliation text were not actually needed except perhaps for inspirational fodder—an

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absence deemed acceptable because the author was (then, supposedly) Indigenous himself ! So the “transit” was complete, with its own indigenous driver who was not, in fact, Indigenous. Constituent Parts: Coda The arc of critique runs through a field of ideas that are tied to actions. Coloniality, however, shapes so much of this field. And there the specter of the state, of dealing with and perhaps thinking like a state, lurks: it is here, then, that sovereignty intersects the arc of critique. I have offered an account of this term, sovereignty, and its imbrications with the practice of critique, the Foucaultian interrogation of knowledge, which was tied to inequalities and to a refusal of that power over Indigenous life. This refusal created the life form of Native and Indigenous Studies, but perhaps most dialectically this refusal protects the grounds and waters that Natives peoples themselves protect and care for. Notes 1

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This piece was has had a long life in its journey to publication. I am grateful to Jennifer Denetdale and the Indigenous Book Festival (IFAIR) at University of New Mexico (2014) for inviting me to keynote their conference and in doing so, to write new work. Theresa McCarthy is owed big thanks for the invitation to keynote a cornerstone of Haudenosaunee scholarly life, “Storytellers Conference,” at University at Buffalo in New York (2015), as is Carole McGranahan and the graduate students who honored me with the invitation to keynote “The Ethnographic Turn: On Theory, Method and Practice in Anthropology” (2016). These public versions of the work were germinated in deep, conversational reflection for the past ten years. Graduate students in my “Critical Native and Indigenous Studies” seminar have worked through the texts that are found in this piece and I thank them for thinking through this work with me. Sandy Grande was a colleague without peer for offering clarifying edits at the 11th hour. Thanks to Andrew Cole for the invitation to distill this material into article form and his careful edits on the final version. All mistakes are my own. Paradigmatically, Epeli Hau’ofa (1994) “Our Sea of Islands.” See also Vincente Diaz and J. Kehaulani Kaunaui’s (2001) introduction to the special volume “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge.” See Monture (2015) for a thorough account of Deskaheh (Levi General) bid for international recognition on behalf of Haudenosaunee in the 1920s. Deskaheh’s (1923) twenty point appeal to the League of Nations, “The Red Man’s Appeal to Justice.” For an excellent summary see Joanne Barker’s (2006) introduction “For Whom Sovereignty Matters.” Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868). There is an earlier treaty of the same name from 1851. Both demarcate the boundaries of the Great Sioux Nation and describe the terms of non-interference of said territory.

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See, for example, Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015). For a history of dispossession as theft in anarchist thought and critical theory see Nichols (2019). I point as well to Six Nations’ own Rick Monture’s (2015) aforementioned literary history and analysis of Six Nations of the Grand River, We Share Our Matters that demonstrates the life of sovereignty through entangled imperatives of Haudenosaunee notions of ‘the good mind’ and colonial governance. Respectively, these are responses to state incursions into Indigenous territory to: extend a golf course nine more holes through a Mohawk burial ground (Oka Crisis, 1990), remove protections to land and water through revisions to the “Indian Act” (Idle No More, 2012), violate two treaties in order to extend a pipeline that will transport fossil fuels atop the largest water table in the world (#NoDAPL 2016), reoccupation of territory by allies and Wet’suwet’an nationals in opposition to the extension of gas and shale pipelines through Wet’suwet’an territory (ongoing). These are all violations of Indigenous jurisdiction. The most thorough (and necessarily revisionary) account of the historiography of Haudenosaunee women may be found in Hill (2017). See especially Chapter 2, “Kontinonhsyonni-The Women Who Make the House.” See Reséndez (2017) for extensive accounting of the genocidal and enslaving after-effects of these encounters. For an extensive “non-consensual” account of this history see Dunbar Ortiz (2015). See Estes (2019) for a comprehensive and historicized account and analysis of this action, as well Estes and Dhillon (2019) for a range of writings on the action in Standing Rock: Voices From the #NoDAPL Movement. The spiritual dimension of the action is all over LaDonna Braveheart Bull Allard’s (2019) account, which embeds the sacredness of the site with an earlier Whitestone massacre that wiped out 2000 dogs (carrying babies), countless people—her grandmother was a survivor. It happened on the very site where the pipes were to run through the Cannon Ball River. For work on the sacred-ness of Mauna Kea see Caumbal-Salazar (2017), Hobart (2019) and Maile (2019). See “Who Stole Native American Studies?” where Cook-Lynn (1997: 11) summarizes this “endogenous” method: “This approach has been seen as an immediate departure from the anthropological, ethnological approach that has focused from the outside on cultural materialism and ‘the other’ and the so-called scientific method. This departure has been a major part of the struggle toward autonomy as a discipline.” Yazzie and Estes (2006) have an excellent review of Cook-Lynn’s scholarship and significance to Native Studies in “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Essentializing Elizabeth Cook-Lynn.” This was led by the same Richard Oakes that started organizing for a comprehensive Native Studies program at SF State and LaNada Means. See Kent Blansett’s (2018) recent biography of Oakes. See Cook-Lynn’s (1997: 22) assessment of those fields as “disfiguring and deforming Native peoples, communities and nations.” See Biolsi and Larry Zimmerman Jr. (2007) for an account of this Bureau of Indian Affairs funded panel within the AAA in 1970 and the crucial after-effects within the field. Most crucially was the development of the first statement of ethics for the professional member organization of the field. For conceptual framework and history of this representational practice, see Simpson (2014). Theresa McCarthy (2016) and Gail Landsman (2006) characterized the anthropologists of the Iroquois as particular “holdouts” well after all of this change in the field.

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For a Haudenosaunee example, see White (2015). Note: “Orenda” is a Mohawk word that translates to “spiritual power.” The story of his contrived identity was first reported by the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) by Jorge Barrera (2016). It created a storm of further work on the inconsistencies in his narrativization of not only himself but also the work he appropriated from others. See Eric Andrew-Gee (2017) for a more recent account of not only the story that Boyden told about himself but his relationships with communities in the North that he then wrote about under his assumed and shifting identity. In his very critical review of the novel, the Anishnabe scholar Hayden King (2013) identified how Boyden disproportionately attributed violence to the Haudenosaunee, which in turn imputes a certain inevitability and virtue to colonialism.

References Andrew-Gee, Eric. 2017. “The Making of Joseph Boyden.” Globe and Mail, November 12. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/joseph-boyden/article35881215/. Asad, Talal. 1973. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London, UK: Ithaca Press. Barker, Joanne. 2006. “For Whom Sovereignty Matters.” In Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination, 1–32. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Barrera, Jorge. 2016. “Author Joseph Boyden’s Shape-shifting Indigenous Identity.” aptnnews. ca, December 23. https://aptnnews.ca/2016/12/23/author-joseph-boydens-shape-shifting-indigenous-identity. Biolsi, Tom, and Larry Zimmerman Jr. 2007. “Introduction: What’s Changed, What Hasn’t.” In Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria Jr and the Critique of Anthropology, 3–23. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Blansett, Kent. 2018. A Journey to Freedom: Richard Oakes, Alcatraz, and the Red Power Movement. New Haven, Yale University Press. Boyden, Joseph. 2013. The Orenda. Toronto: Penguin Books. Braveheart Bull Allard, LaDonna. 2019. “They Took Our Footprint Out of the Ground.” In Standing Rock: Voices From the #NODAPL Movement, edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon, 43–55. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bruyneel, Kevin. 2007. The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Byrd, Jodi. 2011. Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Camp, Jordan, and Christina Heatherton, eds. 2016. Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter. London: Verso. Caumbal-Salazar, Iokepa. 2017. “A Fictive Kinship: Making ‘Modernity,’ ‘Ancient Hawaiians,’ and the Telescopes on Mauna Kea.” Native American and Indigenous Studies 4, no. 2: 1–30. Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. 1997. “Who Stole Native American Studies?” Wicazo Sa Review 12: 9–28. Deer, Sarah. 2015. The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Deloria Jr., Vine. [1970] 1988. Custer Died for Your Sins; An Indian Manifesto. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Deloria Jr., Vine, and David Wilkins. 1999. Tribes, Treaties & Constitutional Tribulations. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Deskaheh. 1923. “The Red Man’s Appeal to Justice.” https://law.lib.buffalo.edu/pdf/Redmanappeal.pdf 1/13/2020 Diaz, Vincente, and J. Kehaulani Kaunaui. 2001. “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge.” The Contemporary Pacific 13, no. 2: 315–42. Dunbar Ortiz, Roxanne. 2015. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Boston: Beacon. Estes, Nick. 2019. Our History is the Future. New York: Verso. Estes, Nick, and Jaskiran Dhillon, eds. 2019. Standing Rock: Voices From the #NoDAPL Movement. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hau’ofa, Epeli. 1994. “Our Sea of Islands.” The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1: 148–61. Hill, Susan. 2017. “Kontinonhsyonni: The Women Who Make the House.” In The Clay We are Made Of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River, 53–76. Winnipeg, University of Manitoba Press. Hobart, Hi’ilei. 2019. “At Home on the Mountain: Ecological Violence and the Violence of Terra Nullius.” Native American and Indigenous Studies 6, no. 2: 30–50. Hynes, Dell. 1973. Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Pantheon Books King, Hayden. 2013. “Critical Review of ‘The Orenda’: a Timeless, Classic Colonial Alibi.” Muskrat Magazine, September 23. http://muskratmagazine.com/critical-review-of-joseph-boydens-the-orenda-a-timeless-classic-colonial-alibi/. Landsman, Gail. 2006. “Anthropology, Theory, and Research in Iroquois Studies, 1980–1990: Reflections from a Disability Perspective.” Histories of Anthropology Annual 2: 242–63. Maynard, Robin. 2017. Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present. Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood. McCarthy, Theresa. 2016. In Divided Unity: Haudenosaunee Reclamation at Grand River. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Monture, Rick. 2015. We Share our Matters. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2008. “Introduction.” In Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters, 1–15. St. Leonard’s, NSW: Allen and Unwin. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2015. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nichols, Robert. 2019. Theft is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ransby, Barbara. 2018. Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the 21st Century. Berkeley: University of California Pres. Reséndez, Andrés. 2017. The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Simmons, Kristen. 2017. “Settler Atmospherics.” Cultural Anthropology: Fieldsights, November 0. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/settler-atmospherics. Simpson, Audra. 2011. “Settlement’s Secret.” Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 2: 205–17. Simpson, Audra. 2014. “Constructing Kahnawà:ke as an ‘Out-of-the-Way-Place’: Ely S. Parker, Lewis Henry Morgan and the Writing of the Iroquois Confederacy.” In Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stark, Heidi. 2016. “Criminal Empire: The Making of the Savage in a Lawless Land.” Theory and Event 19, no. 6. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/633282.

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Treaty of Fort Laramie, U.S.-Sioux Nation, Apr. 29, 1868. 1868. United States National Archives. https://ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=42&page=transcript. Maile, David Uahikeaikalei’ohu. 2019. “Threats of Violence: Refusing the Thirty Meter Telescope and the Dakota Access Pipeline” In Standing Rock: Voices From the #NODAPL Movement, edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon, 328–43. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. White, Louellen. 2015. Free to Be Mohawk: Indigenous Education at the Akwesasne Freedom School. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Yamahtta-Taylor, Keeanga. 2016. From #blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation: The Movement for Black Lives. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Yazzie, Melanie and Nick Estes. 2016. “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Essentializing Elizabeth Cook-Lynn.” Wicazo Sa Review 31, no. 1: 9–26.

Colleen Lye Identity Politics, Criticism, and Self-Criticism

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ore than forty years ago the Combahee River Collective (CRC), a Black lesbian feminist socialist group in Boston, coined the term “identity politics.” For much of those forty years, it was largely forgotten that identity politics arose as a variety of Marxist politics. Instead, identity politics appeared to us as the ruination of all universal political projects, whether these were to be conducted in the name of the citizen, the proletariat or the human. But both to celebrate identity for its subversion of homogeneity and to lament its corrosion of solidarity is to reduce identity to difference. For Mao, on the contrary, identity had the dual aspects of particularity and totality, and indeed is the very name for the contradictory relationship that unites them. Mao’s dialectical sense of identity, I will argue here, was also the CRC’s. The CRC’s 1977 statement in which this first use of “identity politics” appeared can be read as a document of US Maoism, registering the moment of the latter’s passing from a phase of a strategic politics to an ideological politics. By reading the CRC statement as a translation of Mao’s theory of contradiction to US circumstances, I hope to encourage future investigations of the relationship between the forms of The South Atlantic Quarterly 119:4, October 2020 doi 10.1215/00382876-8663603 © 2020 Duke University Press

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self-inquiry developed by US Third Worldists and the structuralist theory of ideology developed by Althusser and his students.1 These were two lines of global Maoism which sprang from a common interest in the relations of production or social reproduction developed on separate continents in the period of long sixties. Soon, in the 1980s, these would directly confront each other in the US university as an antinomy between (subaltern) “experience” and (French) “theory.” There, the English Department played host to the imagination of literature as a privileged medium for the working out and possible resolution of that antinomy. This was a vision of the English Department as a guerilla base area for the conduct of ideology critique, a Yan’an where sixties social movements sought refuge from the neoliberal counterrevolution in their “long march through the institutions.”2 Whether in 2020 this vision of English has any life left in it or has already died some time ago is a question requiring more exploration that I am capable of here, but also entails a more disciplinarily specific set of stakes that others in the special issue discuss. Here, my aim is simply, and more broadly, to ask us to consider: what would it mean to think of identity politics as a recommendation for how to build a revolutionary mass subject? To that end, what I can offer is a new historicization of the CRC statement. In 1977, when the CRC published its statement, the occasion was how to reenergize what they saw to be the two leading anti-systemic movements of their time, feminism and Black Power. By the mid-1970s these were losing visible momentum as a result of external and internal factors, and also seen to be offering competing theories of social oppression. “Identity politics” was the CRC’s proposal for their unification. In their formulation, the CRC suggested: “This focusing on our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics came directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression” (Taylor 2017: 19). The CRC reasoned that since the oppression experienced by Black women was not of one kind but several—they mention specifically racial, sexual (by which they meant what we would now call gender), heterosexual and class oppression— reflection on personal experience would be a means for generating a future theory of how multiple oppressions “interlock” in the “synthesis” that “create[d] the conditions of our lives” (Taylor 2017: 15). In the Third World revolutionary nationalist context of the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, “Black” was understood to be synonymous with “Third World.”3 As such, Black feminism was the proposed “logical political movement to combat the simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face” (Taylor 2017: 15).

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The lasting uptake of the CRC statement was the thesis that race, gender, sexuality, class (and possibly other) factors are always co-present, with no one factor having a necessary causal priority. Though the CRC proposed turning to Black women’s experience to discern the way multiple systems of oppression were structurally interconnected, its statement came to be received as a standpoint epistemology that could give experiential or sociological credence to philosophical arguments against historical causality in the abstract, whether these types of arguments were partisan to Althusserian overdetermination (or structural causality), Derridean linguistic materiality, or some mixture of both (cf. Mann 2013). The subsequent inf luence of the CRC’s concept of “manifold and simultaneous oppressions” would be guaranteed by its collection in two key anthologies published at the start of the Reagan era: Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua’s This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), and Barbara Smith’s Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983). 4 These collections were crucial to preserving the memory of the sixties for both activist veterans of sixties movements who subsequently went into academia or other forms of intellectual production and cultural work, as well as for the younger generation of university students who saw their own intellectual and activist projects in the 1980s—South African divestment, Central American sanctuary, Rainbow Coalition campaigning, literary canon reforms—as a continuation of the sixties. Initially, the CRC statement attained its widest audience through This Bridge Called My Back, the anthology that helped to institutionalize the woman-of-color as a literary subject within then newly multiculturalizing English departments. Meanwhile, the CRC statement’s placement in Home Girls, a founding collection of Black feminist studies edited by CRC core member Barbara Smith herself, would ensure a smaller but dedicated readership among subsequent cohorts of Black feminists across different disciplines and beyond academia. Within this line of propagation, the CRC’s ideas would eventually come to see their most powerful translation via the work of the Critical Race Studies scholar and legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw. In a 1989 law review article published in University of Chicago Legal Forum, Crenshaw (1989: 149) first used the term intersectional to conceptualize situations wherein more than one kind of discrimination is present. There she wrote: The point is that Black women can experience discrimination in any number of ways and that the contradiction arises from our assumptions that their

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claims of exclusion must be unidirectional. Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in any intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them, Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination.

As Left critics of intersectionality theory have observed, the figuration of social injury as a traffic accident reflects a conceptualization of social violence as a merely contingent event. On this account, intersectionality theory is incapable of yielding a cognitive map of the systemic interrelations between racial and gender discrimination, much less between racism and sexism as social forces from which such discrimination arises.5 Nevertheless, despite—or perhaps because of—its fundamental political modesty, there is currently, as a recent critic has aptly put it, “a scramble for intersectionality” (Alexander-Floyd 2012: 2). In our post-Affirmative Action era, intersectionality has become a handy institutional tool for carrying on the formally-constrained liberal project of diversifying the professions.6 In this particular instance, intersectionality entails an additive notion of multiple disadvantage. It’s a way of pursuing diversity without reliance on racial categories, now legally disallowed; in this manner, intersectionality tactically functions as the replacement for categorical identity-based remediation. Here, the intersectional person becomes the ideal minority subject, to be sought for inclusion because the form of her multiplicity is not qualitatively distinct from that of the majority, just quantitatively. Consisting of simply more unranked differences, her intersectionality can be considered to exist on a continuum with the marks of uniqueness that distinguish the abstract liberal individual. This is the narrow window by which higher education institutions today must maneuver to reconcile a commitment to “diversity” and to “excellence,” assimilating the former to the latter. In this application, intersectionality is compatible with individuality and indeed signifies the very opposite of identity as it was conceived by the CRC and, in fact, Crenshaw.7 Despite this liberal institutional inscription of intersectionality, it’s also a word that is commonly used as a synonym for the CRC’s notion of interlocking oppressions. The Wikipedia page for Barbara Smith describes the CRC as a collective that “emphasized the intersections of racial, gender, heterosexist, and class oppression in the lives of African-American and other

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women of color.”8 CRC core member Demita Frazier, in a recent interview by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2017: 123), says that what the CRC conceptualized was in fact intersectionality before the term was claimed by Crenshaw. Appreciative recoveries of an earlier radical Black feminist tradition—in which are included figures such as Claudia Jones and Frances Beale as influences upon the CRC—often read intersectionality back into that tradition as the best way to describe its core theoretical contribution and internal continuity. One finds the scholarship relying on the word “intersectional” to describe that tradition’s core insight that different oppressions of racism and sexism are always interconnected, whether what is being emphasized is that they are concrete parts of a larger system called capitalism and/or imperialism, or that they reflect in the abstract the nonhierarchizability of differences.9 Whether internationalist or postnationalist, the reliance on “intersectionality” as a way to variously describe the meeting of multiple oppressions reflects the fact that their social relationality is hard to think. Recent years have seen an emerging body of scholarship more open to discussing the fruitfulness (and not just the impasses) of the historical interactions between Marxism and Black liberation movements in the US. This has yielded more textured descriptions of the Marxist milieus within which the Black feminist notion of multiple oppressions was first hatched and developed, from the Old Left to the New.10 The appearance of this scholarship reflects the relaxing of internalized censorship on Marxist topics within the US academy, as well as recognition of the insufficiency of antiessentialism as a condition for Left coalition politics. Still, more work remains to be done to explain how we got from interlocking oppressions to intersectionality, why it is possible on the one hand to think they mean the same thing and on the other hand to think they are different enough so that the solution to the bad hegemony of intersectionality is to revisit the position of the CRC (to be seen in perennial calls by Marxist critics since the 1990s, and most recently Asad Haider (2018)).11 There are important differences within the radical Black feminist tradition worth noting. Jones was a leader within the left flank of the CPUSA in the 1940s and 50s who wrote of the “triple oppression” of US Black women. Beale was a non-Party Third Worldist who wrote of the “double jeopardy” of US Black women in 1969, which she soon expanded into the “triple jeopardy” of US Third World women. Triple Jeopardy was the name of the journal of her organization, the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), which was an expansion of the Black Women’s Alliance (BWA) so as to include Latinx and Asian American members. The CRC openly called itself socialist. For all

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three activist authors—Jones, Beale and the CRC—the goal was the quest for a revolutionary anticapitalist subject to which Black women might belong and, in belonging, transform and advance.12 By contrast, Crenshaw’s argument for intersectionality was published within the context of Critical Legal Studies’ importation of deconstruction into the legal academy. Crenshaw’s stated aim was not the cohering of any vanguard Black female subject, but the demonstration of the impossibility of the representation of one. And yet if Crenshaw chose to speak of discrimination rather than oppression, it was not without awareness of a downsizing of analytic scale from a problem of social theory to a problem of judicial doctrine. Her project was simply of a different type—by no means a revolutionary theory, but not incompatible with the anti-systemic sensibilities of the sort that the CRC openly avowed. Her critique of the law’s constitutive limitations, after all, suggested that civil rights work had always to be accompanied by a socially transformative—not simply reformist—activism. Contra its institutional policy uses today, intersectionality in Crenshaw’s conceptualization clearly argued against a merely additive understanding of discrimination or difference (cf. Harris 1990). To this end, Crenshaw sought to lay out quite systematically the complex, variable outcomes of what it meant to be subject to the intersection of two kinds of discrimination: To bring this back to a nonmetaphorical level, I am suggesting that Black women sometimes experience discrimination in ways that are both similar to and different from those experienced by white women and Black men. Black women can experience discrimination in ways similar to white women’s experiences; sometimes they share very similar experiences with Black men. Yet often they experience double-discrimination—the combined effects of practices which discriminate on the basis of race, and on the basis of sex. And sometimes, they experience discrimination as Black women—not the sum of race and sex discrimination, but as Black women. (1989: 149)

Being subject to two (intersecting, nonparallel) discriminatory practices can produce as many as four kinds of possibilities—x and not y, y and not x, both x and y, not x and not y. And of these four, the latter two possibilities involve unknown territory. In the third option, the combined effect of racial and gender discrimination is more than a simple one plus one, requiring a more complex mathematical or accounting procedure. Worst of all, in the fourth option, to experience discrimination as a Black woman conforms to no legal precedent and thus is unlikely to be legally actionable or representable at all. It’s possible to see Crenshaw’s reframing of the CRC’s quest for a politically conscious subject in terms of the problem of that subject’s representa-

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tion as a sincere answer or follow-up that’s simply reflective of her historical moment. After all, though the CRC posited the belief that capitalism, imperialism and patriarchy were systemically interlocked, it did not itself provide a conceptual or empirical account of how they were—hence its turn to personal experience in hopes that this would in the future yield theory or history. We might thus read intersectionality as marking out the place where manifold oppressions can only be felt or experienced as the violence of contingency because their systemic interrelationship cannot be—had not yet, at the time of Crenshaw’s writing, been—cognized. If Crenshaw’s project sits at some disjuncture from the CRC’s, it is not, I’d argue, in the inconsistency between contingency and systematicity but in Crenshaw’s skepticism as to the emancipatory promise of a politics of subjectivity. That skepticism is a sign, in 1989, of the passing of the sixties (cf. Connery 2009). To that extent, as much as our current moment urges a return to the CRC statement on the premise that it’s been feeling more like the early 70s than ever before, we’re also more likely to share Crenshaw’s critical sensibility than the CRC’s. Reading the statement in 2020, we are most likely struck by the disconnect between the revolutionary ends of the statement and the modesty of its suggested practical means. The statement turns in its penultimate paragraph to the topic of the group’s manner of internal self-conduct: “In the practice of our politics we do not believe that the end always justifies the means. Many reactionary and destructive acts have been done in the name of achieving ‘correct’ political goals. As feminists we do not want to mess over people in the name of politics. We believe in collective process and a nonhierarchical distribution of power within our own group and in our vision of a revolutionary society. We are committed to a continual examination of our politics as they develop through criticism and self-criticism as an essential aspect of our practice.” (Taylor 2017: 27, italics mine)

These lines come almost directly before the statement’s concluding sentence: “As Black feminists and Lesbians we know that we have a very definite revolutionary task to perform and we are ready for the lifetime of work and struggle before us” (Taylor 2017: 27). Though the CRC statement is often called a manifesto, by that generic measure the ending is rhetorically anticlimactic. Rather than feeling roused to action, the reader is more likely to feel uncertain as to what exactly is that “very definite revolutionary task” the group knows to perform, having just been emphatically told about the group’s process rather than platform. The best way to make sense of the CRC’s choice of rhetoric is to see its emphasis on process as itself the platform. The final turn to process comes

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on the heels of an open-ended list of concrete struggles in which the group is involved—support for Third World women’s workplace organizing, picketing on behalf of community healthcare, the fight for rape crisis centers and battered women shelters in Third World and black neighborhoods, the defense of abortion rights and campaigns against forced sterilization. The list is open-ended and concludes with the acknowledgment that the aforementioned activities and issues are merely representative; this is because “the work to be done and the countless issues that this work represents merely reflect the pervasiveness of our oppression” (Taylor 2017: 26). If multiple oppression translates into an infinity of concrete manifestations, then practical work must be accompanied by ongoing theoretical work. The statement thus turns to describe the group’s consciousness-raising activities in the form of workshops held on Black feminism on college campuses, women’s conferences, and high schools. These workshops are partly to address racism in the white women’s movement, but in accord with the statement’s opening sense that the point of identity politics is to apply oneself to the work of ending one’s own oppression and not someone else’s, “eliminating racism in the white women’s movement is by definition work for white women to do” (Taylor 2017: 27). Thus while the CRC will not cease demanding accountability on this issue from white feminists, it makes sense that the statement should end with an emphasis on the group’s work of internal self-reflection; then ensues the paragraph quoted above. Criticism, as it were, must be accompanied by self-criticism. Though Mao is not explicitly named, the CRC’s mention of “criticism and self-criticism as an essential aspect of our practice” would have been recognized by readers at the time as an obvious allusion to him. Nor would such an allusion have been exceptional. In alluding to Mao, CRC would have been using a rhetoric common to 70s US feminism many strands of which, far beyond “hard Maoist” circles, drew inspiration from the Chinese communist revolution that subjective work was a primary precondition of wider social transformation. The historiography of the Second Wave has made note of Chinese communist inspirations for 70s feminism’s practice of consciousness raising and the idea that personal is political (Echols 1989; Lieberman 1991; Van Houten 2015).13 Meanwhile, scholars of Black Power are taking an interest in the Black Panthers’ uses of the Little Red Book and the travels of several US Black revolutionaries to Mao’s China (see Wu 2013; Mullen 2014; Frazier 2015). Strangely, least researched is global Maoism’s uptake by US Third World feminism even though, arguably, it was in this sector of US social movements that Maoist ideas took deepest root and through which it had the widest theoretical impact (cf. Chow 1993: 10–20; Ross 2005).

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In his 1937 essay “On Contradiction” which, along with “On Practice,” was required reading for many US Third World activists, Mao argued for the existence within an historical moment of multiple contradictions, among which were to be distinguished principal and secondary contradictions. Furthermore, contradictions were divided into antagonistic and non-antagonistic types. Antagonistic contradictions were those such as between colonies and imperialism, and could only be resolved by national revolutionary war. Non-antagonistic contradictions, such as those between incorrect and correct thinking among comrades, could be resolved nonviolently, by ideological struggle. A main lesson of his essay was that there were many different types of contradiction, each involving different modes of resolution. The “contradiction within the Chinese Communist Party is resolved by the method of criticism and self-criticism” (Mao 1937: 222). Importantly, Mao’s “On Contradiction” was issued as a theoretical justification for the strategic necessity under pressures of the Sino-Japanese War of making a united front with the bourgeois nationalist party, the Kuomingtang (KMT). In this context, Mao argued that class struggle between the communists and the KMT was secondary to anti-imperialist struggle. Identifying class division as a secondary contradiction in this context meant subordinating it to principal anti-imperialist purpose; moreover, it indicated the prospect of resolvability through nonviolent, ideological means (in the interest of enlarging one’s forces by not liquidating prospective allies). The theoretical subordination of a secondary contradiction to a principal one did not necessarily mean, however, the temporal deferral of its address, but in fact just the opposite. In the time of strategic politics to which Mao Zedong Thought belonged, resolution of the secondary contradiction often had to come first. Sometimes, the demands of adapting Marxism to an agrarian-based society required the stretching of orthodox Marxist models of base and superstructure wherein the principal contradiction was to be found in the superstructure. Thus, Mao ([1937] 1975: 336) wrote, “When the superstructure (politics, culture, etc.) obstructs the development of the economic base, political and cultural changes become principal and decisive. . . . This does not go against materialism; on the contrary it avoids mechanical materialism.” In the long revolution that characterized the Chinese twentieth century, both before and after 1949, the need to construct a revolutionary socialist agent out of many different classes (where workers did not form a majority) meant that revolution was conceived as a protracted and unceasing process, centrally involving the construction and reconstruction of political subjectivity. Criticism and self-criticism in a Maoist sense denoted the friendly (i.e., nonviolent) form of struggle one reserved for comrades and allies. In using

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that phrase, the CRC would have been thinking of their group as something like the Party and coalition-making (between white feminists and Black Power groups) as something like a United Front. And yet a big difference is that, in Mao’s proposal, criticism and self-criticism was a method of moving Party members toward a correct line, whereas as we saw in the CRC passage previously quoted the CRC had turned to it as a method for just the opposite— as a way to avoid the temptation of insisting upon ideological uniformity. The CRC’s bending of criticism and self-criticism toward the purposes of ideological pluralism reflects in part that the statement was written at the tail end of the period when New Communism in the US had been at a high point (roughly 1970–74), and intense sectarianism was splitting the newly formed Marxist-Leninist parties that were looking to China.14 That pluralist impulse is reflected in the insistence on “manifold and simultaneous oppressions” (Taylor 2017: 15) in which is refused the analytic hierarchizing of contradictions that Mao had insisted upon as the definite task of the revolutionary. Just eight years before, Frances Beale’s essay “Double Jeopardy,” which was (again) an important immediate predecessor of the CRC statement, had been clear to lay out that in the double oppression of black women by racism and patriarchy, racism was the principal contradiction and patriarchy the secondary. “Black people are engaged in a life-and-death struggle,” Beale wrote in 1969, “and the main emphasis of Black women must be to combat the capitalist, racist exploitation of Black people. While it is true that male chauvinism has become institutionalized in American society, one must always look for the main enemy” (Beale 1970: 110)15 “If the white [feminist] groups do not realize that they are in fact fighting capitalism and racism, we do not have common bonds . . . [and] then we cannot unite with them around common grievances” (Beale 1970: 120). Closer to the strategic spirit of Mao’s writing, Beale’s commitment to an ordering of contradictions reflects the reality of armed black revolutionary struggle before Cointelpro’s effective repression of the Black Panthers, and the sense of the still vital comparability and continuity of Black nationalism within US and Third World revolutionary nationalisms abroad.16 Beale’s rhetorical echoes of Mao are also more obvious, as in her allusion to Mao’s description of women as holding up half the sky. Beale wrote: If we are talking about building a strong nation, capable of throwing off the yoke of capitalist oppression, then we are talking about the total involvement of every man, woman and child, each with a highly developed political consciousness. We need our whole army out there dealing with the enemy and not half an army. (Beale 1970: 113)

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Thanks to the work of Fredric Jameson, Julian Bourg, Camille Robcis, Fang Yan and others, we’ve come increasingly to understand just how influential Mao’s theory of contradiction was on Althusser’s formulation of the relative autonomy of ideology—and thus French Maoism’s contribution to the postsixties cultural turn (Jameson 1984; Bourg 2004; Robcis 2012; Yan 2018). US Maoism’s contribution, for its part, was to the post-sixties turn toward identity politics as a privileged terrain of subjective inquiry that, as in the United Front context of the Chinese 30s, sought the cultural construction of a new mass revolutionary agent in a situation where existed on the horizon no apparent working-class proletarian vanguard. Reading the CRC statement in light of (their reading of ) Mao, we can see how identity held out the practical prospect of unity, as a way of linking particularity to totality. As Mao wrote: “It is so with all opposites; in given conditions, on the one hand they are opposed to each other, and on the other hand, they are interconnected, interpenetrating, interpermeating and interdependent, and this character is described as identity” (Mao 1937: 338). Furthermore, when we read the CRC statement in light of Mao, we can discern more clearly its Janus-facing historical quality, as a stepping stone or switch point between the New Communism of the early 1970s and the Critical Race Theory of the late 1980s. Traces of the strategic temporality of Beale’s use of contradiction are still present in the CRC statement where “criticism and self-criticism” is offered as the road to revolution. But also present is the presentiment of a process of social change so protracted that the “lifetime of work and struggle” it requires may be historically unnarratable, stranding us at Crenshaw’s violent crossroads where collide “manifold and simultaneous oppressions.” More than ever, the truth value of multiple oppressions’ temporal simultaneity in the realm of experience calls for something more than the reflective realism of intersectionality’s analytical simultaneity—though what that is has not yet been born. Notes This essay benefited from the insights of Andrew Cole, the generosity of Ula Taylor who shared with me her insights into Frances Beale, and the conversation of Cedric Johnson. All errors and shortcomings are of course mine alone. 1 Since the publication of Christopher Connery’s important 2007 essay “The World Sixties,” there’s been an efflorescence of scholarship on “global Maoism” understood as a phenomenon contemporaneous with the Chinese Cultural Revolution and inspired by a “wind from the East” but also distinct from the actual theories of Mao Zedong Thought and its practice in China. Yet much of this work on global Maoism studies various sixties movements’ uptakes of Maoism in national isolation, and tends to emphasize the disconnectedness of US Third Worldism from Third World revolutionary realities. One

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important exception is Fabio Lanza, The End of Concern (2017), a study of the Committee for Concerned Asian Scholars, which might be seen as a site where global Maoism met US Third Worldism to productive ends. The phrase is attributed to 1960s German student activist Rudi Dutschke. For more on Maoism in Germany in the 1960s, see (Slobodian 2018). In her interview by Keeanga-Yamattha Taylor (2017: 44–45), CRC core member Barbara Smith emphasized: “We considered ourselves Third World women. We saw ourselves in solidarity and in struggle with all third world people around the globe.” The statement was first collected in Zillah Eisenstein’s Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (1978), but with the near disappearance of socialist feminism by the start of the 1980s, this venue was not a major means by which 1980s readers would have encountered it. The entire literature on intersectionality is too vast to cover here. But since what concerns me here is the Marxist origins of identity politics, I’ll note in particular some Marxist critiques of intersectionality. See, for example, (Brenner 2000; D’Aguilar 2012; Farris 2015; Shi 2018). In the common parlance of how applicants to UC Berkeley’s graduate programs may be competitive for diversity fellowships, being able to reflect multiple types of disadvantage is referred to as “intersectional.” On Crenshaw’s abhorrence of a “flattened” use of intersectionality through “just multiplying identity categories rather than constituting a structural analysis or a political critique,” (see Alexander-Floyd 2012: 4). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Smith (accessed 1/16/20). See, for example, Cheryl Higashida’s (2011) immensely valuable Black Internationalist Feminism. Angela Davis also uses the term to describe women-of-color feminism as a formation “compelled to address intersectionality and the mutual and complex interactions of race, class, gender, and sexuality” (see Davis 1995: 310). See the essays in (Joseph 2006; Gore, Theoharis, and Woodard 2009); also (McDuffie 2011; Gore 2012). Also, see Taylor’s (2017) introduction to How We Get Free, op. cit. For a minority view of the CRC statement as already reflective of a liberal standpoint epistemology at core no more radical than Crenshaw’s intersectionality, see Cedric Johnson (2019). On how African American feminists in the Second Wave developed a “vanguard center” ideological approach to feminist activism, see Benita Roth (1999). Sarachild (1978) contains quotations from Mao’s “On Practice” and William Hinton’s Fanshen. On the rise and fall of New Communism in the US, see (Elbaum 2002). On Beale’s and her cohort’s evolution toward an increasing concentration on capitalism and imperialism as their main enemies, see (Anderson-Bricker 1999: 60). On Beale’s and the TWWA members’ political education program consisting of Marxism and socialist theory, see (Ward 2006: 137).

References Alexander-Floyd, Nikol. 2012. “Disappearing Acts: Reclaiming Intersectionality in the Social Sciences in a Post-Black Feminist Era.” Feminist Formations 24:1.

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Anderson-Bricker, Kristen. 1999. “Triple Jeopardy: Black Women and the Growth of Feminist Consciousness in SNCC, 1964–1975.” In Still Lifting, Still Climbing, edited by Kimberly Springer. New York: New York University Press. Beale, Frances. 1970. “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.” In The Black Woman: An Anthology, edited by Toni Cade Bambara. New York: Washington Square Press. Bourg, Julian. 2004. “Red Guards of Paris: French Student Maoism of the 1960s.” History of European Ideas 31.4: 472–90. Brenner, Johanna. 2000. Women and the Politics of Class. New York: Monthly Review Press, 293–324. Chow, Rey. 1993. Writing Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Connery, Christopher. 2007. “The World Sixties.” In The Worlding Project, edited by Rob Wilson and Christopher Connery. Santa Cruz: New Pacific Press. Connery, Christopher. 2009. “The End of the Sixties.” Boundary 2, 36:1: 183–210. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, Issue 1, Article 9. D’Aguilar, Delia. 2012. “Tracing the Roots of Intersectionality.” Monthly Review, April 12. mronline.org/2012/04/12/aguilar120412-html. Davis, Angela. 1997. “Angela Davis: Reflections on Race, Class and Gender in the USA.” In Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, edited by Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Echols, Alice. 1989. Daring to the Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967–1975. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Eisenstein, Zillah. 1978. Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. New York: Monthly Review. Elbaum, Max. 2002. Revolution in the Air. New York and London: Verso. Farris, Sara. 2015. “The Intersectional Conundrum and the Nation-State.” Viewpoint Magazine, May 4. www.viewpointmag.com/2015/05/04/the-intersectional-conundrum-and-the -nation-state/. Frazier, Robeson Taj. 2015. The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gore, Dayo. 2012. Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Activists in the Cold War. New York: New York University Press. Gore, Dayo, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard, eds. 2009. Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. New York: New York University Press. Haider, Asad. 2018. Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump. London: Verso. Harris, Angela. 1990. “Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory.” Stanford Law Review 42.3: 581–616. Higashida, Cheryl. 2011. Black Internationalist Feminism. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1984. “Periodizing the 60s.” Social Text 9/10, Spring-Summer: 178–209. Johnson, Cedric. 2019. “Black Political Life and the Blue Lives Matter Presidency.” Jacobin, Feb 17. jacobinmag.com/2019/02/black-lives-matter-power-politics-cedric-johnson. Joseph, Peniel, ed. 2006. The Black Power Movement. Routledge. Lanza, Fabio. 2017. The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Lieberman, Sally Taylor. 1991. “Visions and Lessons: ‘China’ in Feminist Theory-Making, 1966–1977.” Michigan Feminist Studies 6, 91–107. Mann, Susan Archer. 2013. “Third Wave Feminism’s Unhappy Marriage of Poststructuralism and Intersectionality Theory.” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 4:4, Spring, 54–73. Mao, Zedong. (1937) 1975. “On Contradiction.” In Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, Vol. 1. Peking: Foreign Languages Press. McDuffie, Erik. 2011. Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldua, eds. 1981. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. Mullen, Bill. 2014. “By the Book: Quotations from Chairman Mao and the Making of AfroAsian Radicalism, 1966–1975.” In Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History, edited by Alexander Cook, 245–65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robcis, Camille. 2012. “China in Our Heads: Althusser, Maoism and Structuralism.” Social Text 30, no. 1 (110): 51–69. Ross, Andrew. 2005. “Mao Zedong’s Impact on Cultural Politics in the West.” Cultural Politics 1:1: 5–22. Roth, Benita. 1999. “The Making of the Vanguard Center: Black Feminist Emergence in the 1960s and 1970s.” In Still Lifting, Still Climbing, edited by Kimberly Springer, 70–90. New York: New York University Press. Sarachild, Kathi. 1978. “Consciousness-Raising: A Radical Weapon.” In Feminist Revolution. New York: Redstockings. Shi, Chi Chi. 2018. “Defining My Own Oppression: Neoliberalism and the Demands of Victimhood.” Historical Materialism 26:2, 271–95. Slobodian, Quinn. 2018. “The Meanings of Western Maoism in the Global 1960s.” In Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, edited by Chen Jian et al. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Smith, Barbara, ed. 1983. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. Taylor, Keeanga-Yamattha, ed. 2017. “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” In How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Van Houten, Christina. 2015. “Simone de Beauvoir Abroad: Historicizing Maoism and the Women’s Liberation Movement.” Comparative Literature Studies 52:1. Ward, Stephen. 2006. “The Third World Women’s Alliance: Black Feminist Radicalism and Black Power Politics.” In The Black Power Movement, edited by Peniel Joseph. London: Routledge. Wu, Judy. 2013. Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism During the Vietnam Era. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Yan, Fang. 2018. “The Althusser-Mao Problematic and the Reconstruction of Historical Materialism: Maoism, China and Althusser on Ideology.” CLCWeb 20: 3. doi.org/10.7771/1481 -4374.3258.

Caren Irr Ideology Critique 2.0

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deology critique remains the primary social contribution made by intellectuals in the humanities to the project of emancipation and planetary survival. Locating the nodes of ideological confusion or displacement within a text; examining the expressive effects of ideological untruths; assembling the pieces of ideologies in formation; tracing ideological inversions as far back into the conditions that animate them as one can; marking the loss, persistence, and revival of overly coherent ideological explanations: these are all essential skills that humanists practice and teach. These skills enliven our work and contribute to our collective well-being. They are transferable to many sites in social life, and they make the risk of thinking worthwhile. Yet, as I suggest in this essay, to advance the project of emancipation, humanist intellectuals need to participate energetically in struggle on the grounds of theory, rather than sink into the squishy sofa of propaganda labeling, pointing out what’s false or what’s ethically incorrect. Doing so involves renovating the practice of ideology critique itself toward what can be called Ideology Critique 2.0. In the current conjuncture, four tasks for the renovation of ideology critique The South Atlantic Quarterly 119:4, October 2020 doi 10.1215/00382876-8663615 © 2020 Duke University Press

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present themselves, and I describe each in turn. My aim is to advance a project of critique that increases collective well-being. First, critics of ideology must become skilled in differentiating ideology from propaganda. Many academic humanists today replace ideology critique with mere propaganda labeling and ethical condemnation. Propaganda labeling identifies well-known tropes whose social content is already widely disavowed. Confirming the truisms of the present by re-erecting and then toppling once again the statues that have already been felled by a previous generation, propaganda labeling fosters intellectual stagnation and replaces critique with an unearned and ready-made sense of accomplishment. In other words, such work performs reproductive tasks rather than critical ones: it reproduces the norms of the present by repeating and memorializing the actions that created our own circumstances rather than investigating them. This is the project of ideological rigidification rather than the active critical labor of unsettling, opening, and liberating. Propaganda matters and needs to be understood on its own terms. The French philosopher Jacques Ellul, in his 1965 Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, characterizes propaganda as an appeal that allows emotions to override reason; he is particularly interested in appeals that supplement modern anxiety and alienation with collectivizing passions. This psychological warfare envelopes human subjects within an organization oriented toward social actions that satisfy their need for purpose. Understood in this sense, propaganda closely resembles kitsch, since it offers pre-packaged pseudo-political attitudes as a substitute for a strategic response fully engaged with immediate conditions. “Public opinion shaped by propaganda loses all authenticity,” he concludes (113). For Ellul, one corrects for a propagandistic overflow by strengthening public rationality and advancing an ethics of freedom. He argues eloquently against accepting propaganda as a necessary evil (or good). “Such an assumption,” he asserts, is made “only by those who worship facts and power . . . the world of necessity is a world of weakness, a world that denies man. To say that a phenomenon is necessary means, to me, that it denies man. Its necessity is proof of its power, not of its excellence” (xv). What’s denied of our humanity, according to Ellul, is our freedom. Propaganda or any other supposed necessity is for him antihuman because it is anti-emancipatory. Ellul’s entirely plausible account of propaganda describes very well the workings of many popular appeals to prejudice and imagined threats to a group’s well-being—from anti-immigrant hyperbole to conflicts over reproductive rights, the Second Amendment, and many other topics. It is easy to find examples of propaganda as he defines it. This is the case because propa-

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ganda, for Ellul, is not merely a technique for promulgating a political program or ideology around which it organizes itself; in his twentieth century, “propaganda no longer obeys an ideology” (196). The propagandist picks and chooses among ideologies, amplifying or diminishing their elements at will. Modern propaganda has become a self-sufficient and self-replicating machine that regenerates itself everywhere. By contrast, for Ellul ideology is a “degraded and vulgarized” doctrine supported by belief rather than reason (193). This definition suggests that ideologies are not necessarily manifestly public and open to debate; they can and should be understood as the habituated response lying just beyond the horizon of recognition. Ideologies rest in the frame, the posture, and the false necessity. They rely on belief rather than knowledge because they are not readily accessible to the eye. From this perspective, then, any readily familiar trope that we already know how to condemn ethically would necessarily represent propaganda and not ideology. To grasp ideology and expose it to reason, for the purposes of emancipation, we need different tools than those of propaganda labeling. The second task necessary for a renovated ideology critique is the grasping of ideology in light of current conditions. This project pulls us toward the degraded doctrines operative in our own moment, not just those systems readily recognizable because of their diagnosis in another setting. To read ideology we need to make visible and examine the premises for thinking that appear essential, inescapable, and obvious in affective and embodied experience as well as the cognitive. Among the current conditions that influence our understanding of ideology is an abundance of affect. Certainly, affects have histories. They develop in relation to the material conditions of which they are a part, and in so doing they modulate ideologies, lending an affective dimension to ideology itself. When critics of ideology consider affect, they become alert to the limits of rationalisms. Affects encode ideological puzzles, as Lauren Berlant’s (2011) “cruel optimism” or Sianne Ngai’s (2012) “zaniness” remind us—revealing the buried layers of belief that persist in the face of an abundance of information and reason. Yet they also seem to replicate themselves, flow, and cycle at frequencies not entirely accessible to approaches that require the traditional contemplative calm of reason. Becoming more subtly attentive to the work of affect in relation to ideology seems a vital concern for contemporary ideology critique. Similarly, we will want to attend to the ever-diminishing size of the ideologeme. Fredric Jameson’s famous smallest unit of ideology seems to have grown still smaller and quicker with digital communication—leading

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to new patterns of accretion. Ideology critique focused on the dynamics of social media in particular needs to read the effects of a few characters that transform virally within moments. The rapid reappearance of increasingly tiny ideologemes in the confusing word salads not only of political leaders, but also of the multi-user platform itself, demands a kind of frequency tracking device as much as or instead of the testing of belief by reason. In other words, one result of a closer attention to the current logic of ideologemes might be a displacement of interpretation of meanings with an analysis of frequency and patterns. Ideology critics may find themselves disentangling recombinant mutations of ideologemes rather than correcting or condemning falsehoods and errors. By pulling apart the fraying strains of the genetic material of ideology, the critic can demonstrate how these proteins came to be attached to each other. She can also expose the leaps across sites that ideologies make, reckoning with movement, gesture, absorption, repellence, and so on as much as with meaning. From such a perspective, the locus of ideology critique shifts from a preoccupation with subject formation (who I am, who we are) to intersubjective and even interspecies symbioses. In the current condition of climate crisis, the urgency of a critical unraveling of destructive repetitions seems particularly obvious. Some of the writings of sociologist John Levi Martin (2009), inspired by developments in cognitive science, might be particularly useful here, as they attend less to the picture-thinking aspects of ideology and more to the permutational logic of social systems. Another feature of the current conditions necessary to incorporate into ideology critique is the global circuitry of intellectual exchange. After all, much of the dominant narrative of the concept of ideology and its deployment as a mode of critique traces a path from Germany to France and back again. The enormously influential work of Althusser and his circle of students at the École normale supérieure in Paris anchors this story, since they were crucial to reinterpreting Marx’s scattered remarks on ideology and social reproduction, pulling them together into a theory of ideology itself and a practice of ideology critique during the 1960s and 1970s. Althusser’s thinking is typically situated in relation to the French Communist Party’s responses to Stalinism, the Algerian war, Maoism, the Cuban revolution, and (to a lesser extent) the conflict in Indochine/Vietnam; Warren Montag (2013) has written brilliantly on the intellectual impact of these events. It is, however, the interpretation of these events by French intellectuals that the focus on Althusser documents. Althusser’s students are often credited with developing a method that transformed European accounts of “the world”; in

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this vein we can recognize Emmanuel Terray’s (1972) studies of so-called primitive societies, Alain Badiou’s (2005) philosophy of the event, and Étienne Balibar’s (2016) rethinking of citizenship and the state, to name but a few. The history of ideology as a concept includes a few scholars from the European semi-periphery (Slavoj Žižek of Slovenia, Nicos Poulantzas of Greece), but those small forays usually exhaust the geographical range of theories of ideology. Yet intellectual historians know that national contexts have certainly influenced thinking on ideology. As recent debates remind us—American responses to Althusser, for instance—the questions of ideology critique concentrates on interpellation and the subject. Ideology critique becomes the ground for a hermeneutics of suspicion directed at the formation of subjects who reproduce power relations in their psychic lives and supposedly spontaneous relations to themselves and each other. Ideology critique of this sort becomes obsessed with spectacle, consumption, and commodity logic as if these were sole forms of exploitation. A tiring and sometimes tiresome attitude of ruthlessness toward the subject then produces an exhausted critique of critique that threatens to dispose of the entire apparatus at precisely the moment when reactionary ideologies are on the upswing and repression is very much on the table. The American and Anglophone history of ideology critique tends toward a tragic narrative of decline. The main feature that falls out of the dominant American and Eurocentric account is the work on the concept of ideology performed by scholars residing in the so-called global South. Some of these were Althusser’s students as well as other adherents to his general principles of thought; after all, as Bruno Bosteels (2017: 115) reminds us “perhaps in no region in the world did [Althusser] reach a greater status as a potentially revolutionary thinker than in Latin America.” Scholars working the global South who practiced influential versions of ideology critique in a roughly Althusserian vein would certainly include the Beninese critic of ethnophilosophy Paulin Hountondji (1996) and the author of handbooks on Cuban revolutionary tactics, Regis Debray (2017). We could also note Rafael Guillén (a.k.a. Subcomandante Marcos) in Mexico (2002), media scholar Dai Jinhua (2002) in China, the world-systems analyst Samir Amin (1990) in Egypt and Senegal, the proponent of activist theater, Augusto Boal (1990, 1993) in Brazil (discussed further below), and the left-wing proponent of Islamic revolution in Iran, Ali Shariati (1979) in Iran. To understand the contributions to a theory of ideology developed by non-European scholars, we might briefly consider the work of Mexican philosopher Bolivár Echeverría (2017).

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In a posthumous 2017 piece, Echeverría emphasizes the crucial role of ideology, alienation, and subjectivity in contradictions between use-value and value. Like the Frankfurt School thinkers with whom he is in conversation, Echeverría keeps his attention on culture rather than an orthodox structuralism that might prioritize conflicts between the forces and relations of production as the motor of history. But in his 1980s-era Mexico, these themes have different effects than they have had in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Germany of the 1950s. Echeverría describes an alienated human subject that is the observer of its own subsumption by the god/dictator/usurper of capital. The great irony of capitalist culture for Echeverría is that “the human being—which in principle could reactivate the exercise of his sovereignty or political selfreliance—is found, given the violent usurpation of his political capacity, obeying the stipulations of this great subject” (2017: 131). His human subject remains present, self-reliant, and even potentially sovereign to the extent that she witnesses her own domination not so much from within (i.e., in the appeal to her own worst instincts) but from without. Her will has been usurped from outside through an on-going process of colonization, but the testimony to her on-going potential for freedom is her surprise at discovering herself obedient. Here, Echeverría’s continued emphasis on alienation, spectatorship, suspension, and merely grudging obedience opens a window in the otherwise airless room of political dictatorship. In other contexts, Echeverría develops an account of the ideology of the baroque that is also responsive to the conditions of Latin American postcolonial conditions. In both conversations, he undertakes the creative work of building a form of freedom into the foundation of his social vision. Echeverría’s example should remind us how stimulating and creative political theory produced in situations other than those of advanced capitalist democracy can be to contemporary accounts of ideology and critique. Together with an appreciation for the affective intensities and micrologic scale of ideology, attention to the explicit project of liberation built into treatments of ideology in the global South is essential to our conception of ideology and ideology critique. The third major task that Ideology Critique 2.0 needs to tackle concerns the affirmative and constructive aspects of critique. In other words, critique must distinguish itself from mere attitude (for example, an attitude of suspicion), as well as from ethics, politics, and philosophy. Critique is, after all, a theory. It builds concepts, patterns, and systems in order to model and interpret. Because it is a project of building, it is an

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inherently affirmative act employing rational, social, and expressive/creative aspects of human capability. It does not need to be supplemented or replaced by affirmation, because critique is itself already a form of storytelling. It is narrative. It is conversant, dialogic, and necessarily situational. To the extent that critique is invested in a project of emancipation (and I have been asserting that this is a necessary premise of ideology critique), it is utopian and inherently constructive. That being said, we certainly can diversify the practice of critique in order to make its creative aspects more self-evident. On this front, Augusto Boal’s (1993) Theater of the Oppressed might serve as a model—calling as it does on the body, performance, and collective expression on stage. Boal’s projects were part of a Brazilian activist theatrical practice in the 1960s and 1970s, a period of dictatorship. After being arrested and tortured, Boal went into exile, where he wrote up accounts of his method. His is an extra-national nomadic practice arising from a situation of crisis. Inspired by Brecht, among others, Boal developed many games and theatrical forms designed to inspire engagement and political investigation. Many of these games include improvised skits depicting problems of immediate concern to those involved, together with means for transforming those situations. In Boal’s method of “Image Theater,” for example, groups of active participants develop a theatrical “image” and treat it as a mobile, dialectical figure that can be split apart and reconfigured, transforming it on the spot from the “real image” to the “ideal image.” The method in general asks not for visibility alone but for direct interventions into scripts, pulling the audience into the role of the protagonist to alter action on stage and reorganize the relations between the stage and the auditorium. Boal asserts that the effect of this method is a shift from em-pathy (or feeling vicarious emotion inside the seated spectator) to sym-pathy (or a feeling with or alongside that inspires visible movement); his games encourage the transformation of passive spectatorship into energetic “spect-actors.” The “fundamental hypothesis” of Boal’s work is that “if the oppressed him [or her]self (and not an artist surrogate) performs the action, this action performed in a theatrical fiction will allow him [or her] to change things in . . . real life” (1990: 42). The theater of the oppressed is a critique that functions as a rehearsal for social action. This bold hypothesis wagers a great deal on the transformation of the subject’s relation to itself in a theatrical fiction. Boal is interested in creating a technique and a terrain that institutionally assists emancipation from mental slavery, providing a space for willed collective liberation from the stranglehold of interpellation by dominant ideology. He does not expect this

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release from the “cop in the head” to happen spontaneously or in isolation, but rather fictively—in sympathetic imaginative spaces where the oppressed publicly experience themselves as protagonists changing the script. The simultaneity of visceral, affective, active, and verbal experience is thus crucial for Boal’s practice of ideology critique. This is how it creates its terrain. But we also need to stress the informational aspect, which is present in Boal’s work through the figure of the Joker. The Joker has various roles; sometimes the Joker incarnates as a judge or a kind of switch-hitter who interrupts or moves among the roles in a classic scripted play, revealing the masks and objectifying conventions involved in each role. Here the Joker is most familiar, appearing as an expert guide or editor. However, in the improvised theater of the oppressed, the Joker embodies a particular sort of informed gaze. More of a master of ceremonies or a facilitator, the Joker inhabits a theatrical universe parallel to the realist environment of the protagonist. The Joker is a “contemporary and neighbor” to the spectators, offering explanations and exegeses for the action on stage, while also disrupting the aesthetics of the performance, being “magical, omniscient, polymorphous, and ubiquitous” (1993: 175, 182). The Joker prompts reflection in both audience and actors, invites engagement, insists on swerves, and embodies that unstable, unlikely space between fictional and real actions. This, I think, is the sense in which it is most useful to understand the role of the informed gaze of the critic in ideology critique. In other words, the Joker does not provide new information or present herself as a superior scientific site of knowledge. The role can be played by even novice participants. The informed gaze is just an assigned role and a wild card; it is necessary to good game design and political dialogue. The wildness of this approach to information derives from its movement across terrains and its assigned disengagement from naturalizing conventions. When this attention to formation enters a reading rather than a performance, it may involve some withdrawal from the text. Here there is a more elaborate story to be told about the dialectic of presence and absence, questions and answers in symptomatic reading. Alert to effects, the Joker-asreader pulls back to a vantage point from which it is possible to see the Althusserian “absent question” that generates an “answer” in a particular text (Althusser 2016: 32). This retreat soon pivots back toward an audience of potential actors, triggering new formations in which, with which, active sympathy arises. The Joker as critic practices sympathetic reading. No doubt there are limitations to Boal’s “Image Theatre”; in particular, the preoccupation with physical presence that his method requires may rely

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on a notion of organic community that is difficult to support in a decentralized and global sphere of digital communication. Nonetheless, ideology critique might adapt from Boal a quite useful resistance not so much to the metaphor of information but rather to a fixation on the gaze. In other words, it may well be the mobile embodiment of the Theatre of the Oppressed that allows for some of the most creative extensions around the hyper-visual spectacles of ideological surveillance. Moving, shifting places, f lowing through and beyond the Real Image—the ideological image—these are the actions that Boal’s Joker/critic urges us to perform, and for Boal this transformative form of critique can only be done with the full body. Boal’s methods help to shake the “cop out of the head” (again, his phrase) by engaging with others and doing the work of active rearrangement. This version of ideology critique openly advances a project of struggle. It grips and wrestles, stretches and expands the ideological imaginary with its somatic emphases. It activates the hands in the making of something new—including new ideologies. It involves the mouth alongside the eye when it undertakes a risky parrhesia or truth-telling. At its best, ideology critique conceived in this creative fashion galvanizes the entire social body—not just a transcendental eyeball—and in so doing it thrives. Ideology critique is not, after all, a solely cognitive project; at its best, it is a means for living well. Finally, the fourth task facing a renovation of ideology critique today (an Ideology Critique 2.0) is the grounding of critique in the dynamism of matter. Rather than remaining enclosed within the virtual world of images, bits, and bytes, critique undertakes a patterning and interpretation of ideology in order to set it in relation to material conditions. This work is essential to the work of affirmation, because it affirms ideology itself as a creative act through an interpreting of it. Because the material conditions of the present, from the fossil fuels underground to the very atoms of the atmosphere, are organized by capitalism, attending to the dynamism of matter requires ideology critique to always ask in each instance (not just in Althusser’s final one) how and where ideology engages capital. Ideological expression does not float in the sea of capital unaffected by its currents; bits of detritus from times gone by accumulate, swirl, and cohere. They form gyres and plastiglomerates; they circulate as microbeads, animated by waters whose movements also need to be mapped. When ideology critique is most successful, it builds usable knowledge of changing, dynamic material conditions as well as charting the relations of the ideological fragments and wholes to those conditions. It inspires by connecting. It builds by animating. Practicing an active, contemporary

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form of ideology critique—what I have called Ideology Critique 2.0—is a necessary and urgent task for humanities intellectuals as a collective body. The successful undertaking of this task requires on-going investigation into ideology as a concept in contemporary conditions, and it will certainly involve dedicated attention to the affirmative aspects of critique in the context of capitalism. Together, these initiatives advance the project of human freedom and planetary survival. References Althusser, Louis. 2016. Reading Capital, translated by Benjamin Brewster. London: Verso. Amin, Samir. 1990. Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World. London: Zed. Badiou, Alain. 2005. Being and Event. London: Continuum. Balibar, Étienne. 2016. Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology. Translated by Stephen Miller. NY: Fordham University Press. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Boal, Augusto. 1990. “The Cop in the Head: Three Hypotheses.” TDR 34, no. 3: 35–42. Boal, Augusto. 1993. Theatre of the Oppressed. Theater Communications Group. Bosteels, Bruno. 2017. “Reading Capital from the Margins: Notes on the Logic of Uneven Development.” In The Concept in Crisis: Reading Capital Today, edited by Nick Nesbit, 113–65. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dai, Jinhua. 2002. Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua, edited by Jing Wang and Tani E. Barlow. London: Verso. Debray, Regis. 2017. Revolution in the Revolution?: Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America, translated by Bobbie Ortiz. London: Verso. Echeverría, Bolivár. 2017. “Bolivár Echeverría on Gyorgy Markus.” Thesis Eleven 138: 1 (Feb 9): 126–31. Ellul, Jacques. 1965. Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, translated by Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner. New York: Vintage. Guillén, Rafael (Subcomandante Marcos). 2002. Our Word Is Our Weapon. New York: Seven Stories. Hountondji, Paulin. 1996. African Philosophy: Myth and Reality. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Martin, John Levy. 2009. Social Structures. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Montag, Warren. 2013. Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy’s Perpetual War. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ngai, Sianne. 2012. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shariati, Ali. 1979. “Reflections of a Concerned Muslim on the Plight of Oppressed People.” ICIT Digital Library. icit-digital.org/articles/reflections-of-a-concerned-muslim-on-theplight-of-oppressed-people. Terray, Emmanuel. 1972. Marxism and “Primitive” Societies: Two Studies. NY: Monthly Review.

C. D. Blanton Judgment and Social Being: Notes on Teleological Positing

Rebellieren wir gegen diese Herrschaft der Gedanken. —Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,1 Preface to The German Ideology (1976)

C

onsciousness, it would seem, is destined to go awry. The very movement of the Hegelian system attests as much, laboriously struggling to recuperate each wrong turn as another moment of knowing that falls short, not yet absolute. For the young Marx, himself struggling to recuperate Hegel at a moment short of absolute, the problem is still more stark: consciousness is false consciousness. As a present historical fact, as yet untransformed by some future communist correction, consciousness constitutes the evidence of some prior distortion. In the 1844 manuscripts, it presupposes the abstract alienation of social being (and labor) into a transfigured object, against which it “stands in hostile opposition” (Marx 1975: 350). With The German Ideology, opposition has famously given way to inversion, as consciousness renders the world “upside-down as in a camera obscura,” twisted by the Young Hegelians to posit mere “ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process” as sufficient grounds for ever more majestic forms of theology, metaphysics, philosophy as such (Marx and Engels 1976: 36). The South Atlantic Quarterly 119:4, October 2020 doi 10.1215/00382876-8663627 © 2020 Duke University Press

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For the young Marx, the task is straightforward, if not simple: to unmake the distortion, bending consciousness back into the image it misses, substituting a true for a false representation. If ideology names anything, it is this: a quantitative ratio or a qualitative displacement, constitutive of the consciousness it also warps; a false intuition, a structural misapprehension. Critique, then, as correction, but a correction required by consciousness as such. False consciousness, in this sense, is less an error than a redundancy, “ideology” a simple shorthand for a tautological insistence. It is, of course, hardly worth seeking to escape such a version of ideology, or the drama of consciousness it necessarily reproduces. The concept of ideology itself ensures that it cannot be done. But this is just the point. To the degree that ideology remains a problem—the problem—it can only redouble the prior problem of consciousness. Karl Mannheim (1954: 52) insisted as much in distinguishing a partial from a “total conception of ideology,” trained on “the reconstruction of the systematic theoretical basis underlying the single judgments of the individual.” Indeed, for Mannheim (1954: 58), that totalizing conception arises epiphenomenally from “the development of a philosophy of consciousness,” modulated through German idealism more generally. The Frankfurt School’s conscription of Freud and Althusser’s deployment of the Lacanian imaginary underscore the same point. To speak of ideology is simply to repredicate consciousness as the deeper issue. But it is worth returning to Marx to ask whether consciousness is the only problem, the only falsification wrought by labor. Understood within the domain of consciousness, ideology names a structural problem of representation. But not all falsifications are representable, and not all falsifications are matters of consciousness at all. Marx himself would, under one reading, leave the problem behind. With Capital, the mode of falsification wrought by consciousness has changed. No longer the conscious agent of a judgment itself grounded on a “systematic theoretical basis” partially obscured, the subject of what Mannheim terms “knowledge” has been radically reassigned: Commodities themselves cannot go to market and perform exchanges in their own right. We must, therefore, have recourse to their guardians [Hütern], who are the possessors of commodities [Warenbesitzern]. Commodities are things, and therefore lack the power to resist man. . . . In order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another as persons whose will resides in those objects. (Marx 1990: 178)

Or again, a few lines on:

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The guardians [Warenhüter] must therefore recognize each other as owners of private property. This juridical relation, whose form is the contract, whether as part of a developed legal system or not, is a relation between two wills which mirrors the economic relation. The content of this juridical relation (or relation of two wills) is itself determined by the economic relation. Here the persons exist for one another merely as representatives and hence owners, of commodities. (Marx 1990: 178–79)

At a stroke, the Marxian identification of labor-power within a totalizing system of exchange and the consequent analysis of the commodity’s own logic, unfolding behind our backs, force consciousness out of the equation entirely. To the degree that knowledge remains at issue, it belongs to a commodity that—though a “born leveller and cynic,” “always ready to exchange not only soul, but body” (Marx 1990: 179)—has little need of consciousness at all. As Marx insists, the problem raised by the commodity is not consciousness but will. The ambiguous power of the commodity’s guardian, stripped of any meaningful sense of its own derivative function, is constituted nonetheless in a juridical relation of contract and exchange: such guardians “have therefore already acted before thinking. The natural laws of the commodity have manifested themselves in the natural instinct of the owners of commodities” (Marx 1990: 180). Characteristically, Marx displaces one Hegel for another, substituting the theoretical matrix of the Philosophy of Right for that of the Phenomenology of Spirit, labor for consciousness, second nature for nature. But with the disappearance of consciousness as an element of the exchange, the problem of ideology in its familiar sense vanishes as well, even if ideology’s social effect does not. In fact, the account of the commodity, along with the notion of labor-power, requires another logic: some different way of accounting that which we know wrongly. Willing Judgment It has often seemed poor Lukács’ fate to have gotten the questions right, even while getting the answers wrong. Or better, it has seemed his distinction to have gotten the answers wrong in just the way needed to revise the original question, to have rendered in the mode of judgment a misjudgment that amounts to insight in itself. So it is with the whole quixotic plaint against modernism (and its ideology), for example, but so too is it with consciousness. When confronted, in the reification essay, with the problem of ideology, Lukács famously provides a dialectical answer.6 Within the regulative

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limits of bourgeois thought, the falsifications of consciousness are revealed in an inevitable crisis—revolution, world war—with the cataclysmic discovery that Kantian appearance has failed to gauge the actual systemic work of reification. That which seemed nature stands revealed as the second nature of capital, even if uncomprehended. But this eruption into consciousness of a prior unconsciousness belongs, insofar as it remains embedded in bourgeois thought, to the individual alone. For the proletariat, the matter is necessarily different. Commodified as labor-power, the proletarian retains no such individuated consciousness of his own. Reconstructed as subject-object rather than subject, he detaches consciousness from the will that Marx stipulates and joins it to the class instead. However tragic the fact, few would now seek to salvage Lukács’ prophecy. If the unsparing critique of bourgeois reason, skeptical of consciousness’ adequacy, seems more apt than ever, its hopeful reclamation of class-consciousness has turned out otherwise. But as Lukács himself would gradually realize, some portion of that failure derives from the unreflective maintenance of consciousness itself as the governing frame. Again, it is consciousness, or the faith in it, that has gone awry. When Marx invoked a juridically made will-without-consciousness as the commodity’s guardian, he also summoned a different philosophical problem, beyond idealism’s drama of consciousness. At stake is not merely a mimetic capacity, some image of greater or lesser fidelity, but also a matter of judgment itself. Since the Cartesian abandonment of scholastic intellectus in favor of voluntas, judgment (the very possibility of wagering a logical claim, of asserting that x is y) has depended on some faculty of will. For Kant, the difference distinguishes understanding from reason; for Hegel, phenomenology from logic. In this regard, the achievement of Capital lies in its formulation of a judgment, a propositional sentence of universal import that owes nothing at all to the registration of an intermediating consciousness but nonetheless expresses a determinate will: the general formula of capital as such, M-C-M’. The value-determination of the commodity imposes itself extrinsically but remorselessly, as an iron law impervious to consciousness, but with the force of an axiom. Knowledge without Consciousness Marx’s general formula is a logical singularity. Initially descriptive of the universally mediating power of money (C-M-C), it tracks not only the social emergence of the commodity as “the universal equivalent” (Marx 1990: 180)

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capable of representing the value of all other commodities, but also the formal opening of a new subjective space, transcendent in its power but empirical in its content. Ontologically, that is, the formula enfolds a conundrum: a subjectivity capable of a kind of determinate knowledge, but unbothered by consciousness at all, a subjectivity inverted. Having divided knowledge from consciousness, however, the commodity does still more, reshaping the logical form of knowledge itself. M-C-M’ is thus also, in the classical sense, a judgment, a moment of “posited relation” (as Hegel might call it) in which the subject passes into identity with its predicate (Hegel 1999: 663). But this is a judgment of no familiar sort. Although its power to impose the law of a second nature imbues it with the force of reason, such a judgment cannot be said to remain analytic (in Hume’s sense, for example): its very regulation of disequivalences evades mathematical tautology. It is thus more properly synthetic (in Kant’s sense if not Hume’s), but again awkwardly so. After all, the formula’s ground remains resolutely empirical, a posteriori in the Kantian sense, while nonetheless claiming the universalizing power of an a priori. That emergent universalizing power, moreover, simultaneously forecloses the Kantian solace of the merely reflective judgment, with its root in the conceptually unassimilated particularity, by dispelling the particular as such in the moment of use-value’s liquidation by exchange. The determination of value, logically speaking, predicates no particular quality at all. But it determines the universal as an all-conditioning fact. Thought within the terms inherited from a philosophy of consciousness, then, the general formula of capital, M-C-M’, layers notional impasse upon apparent impossibility: the first casualty of the epistemological break turns out to be epistemology itself, if understood as a theory of the philosophical subject’s knowing. But more decisively, Marx’s inversion of the subject divides epistemology itself from the more general question of knowing as such, now altogether loosed from consciousness. Vested in the commodity’s own determining power of judgment rather than its guardian, “knowledge” no longer measures mimetic accuracy, some correlation between concept and object. It belongs instead to the radically inhuman will of the commodity, left to think and posit for itself. The most familiar version of this thought, no doubt, points forward to philosophy (or post-philosophy) in an Althusserian vein, toward a mode of causality dispersed into the effects of structure. But the difficulty inheres already, I want to suggest, in Lukács’ long struggle with the problems of consciousness and ideology, stubbornly maintained and renewed over half a century. The impasse of the reification essay, it has already been suggested,

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lies in its inability to conceive an ontology fit to its purpose. Its need to displace the ideological circumscription of bourgeois thought with a consciousness opened to the second nature of reification as wrought by the commodity requires that the proletariat seize the privilege afforded by a philosophy of consciousness. But the enabling fact of the proletariat’s own reification as a class, its ontological reduction to commodified labor-power, has rendered consciousness supererogatory. To fall back on consciousness is to refuse the sober power of reification—and thus to encounter, in altered form, that hiatus irrationalis that beset bourgeois thought in the first place (Lukács 1971: 116–20). In the scattered pages composed toward an ethics decades later, gathered as The Ontology of Social Being, Lukács (1982) returns to the same crux, but from another angle. Each of the converging elements in this turn of late thought is crucial: ontology, in the sense specified by Marx’s notion of social being, that ground of collective formation regulated by labor’s commodification; ethics, in the sense maintained by post-Cartesian rationalism (operative through both Kant and Hegel), denoting not some degraded practice of moral ordering but the entire sphere of judgment belonging to the will; labor, caught in the very moment of its conceptual transition, through Smith to Marx, into labor-power, from self-alienating activity to commodity of commodities. Binding each to each is the strange logic of what Lukács would label “teleological positing.” Teleological Positing As unwieldy in the phrase as in the concept, teleological positing [teleolische Setzung] returns to the fault-line running through Marx’s reading of Hegel, fixing on the disparity between the “one-sided” philosophy of consciousness developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the intimations elsewhere that the problem of labor has left such a philosophy to the side (Marx 1975: 387). At issue is the originating alienation of labor itself, in the shape of a purposive act, even before its transfiguration as labor-power: the moment of material activity in which some thing is posited as something else (a tree as a ship, a stone as a wall, land as a field). Inasmuch as labor necessarily marks an interference with the givenness of nature, some détournement of that which simply is both in- and for-itself, it configures an odd ontological ground. However incrementally, labor’s purposive act displaces or alters some prior natural and material fact. And while such an adjustment follows an act of consciousness on the laborer’s part, some intention or other explic-

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itly formed, that intention fixes only a form or a provisional design, some imperfectly makeshift idea destined go awry in the totality of the social world. Labor, in this sense, portends its own mode of knowing, begins to know for itself. But it knows incompletely, and while Lukács (1982: 71) firmly ascribes the origin of the laboring subject’s consciousness to this moment of projection, this is, he insists, “not simply a consciousness of something that ontologically remains completely indifferent towards its being known, but rather itself forms, in its presence or absence, correctness or falsity, a component of being.” From the outset, labor gathers consciousness into a logic entirely of its own, projecting the formation of an end that inheres purely as a notional design or purpose within the act. The “being” that labor postulates thus remains strangely counterfactual: no longer ascribable purely to nature, not yet fully integrated as social being, it remains ambiguously premised on the manifestation of an end that might or might not be achieved in a fashion corresponding to an original design. Instead, it simply marks the first incursion of second nature upon nature, suspended somewhere between natural causality and the systematic determination of the finished commodity. But the fact of that original design bears its own decisive significance. To be sure, labor removes the laborer from the object of his work, as the young Marx insisted, initiating the chain of alienating negations that will culminate in social being’s full form. But it also postulates a dialectical turn within dialectics, a mode of knowledge that belongs fully neither to a conscious laboring subject nor to the encompassing power of a determinate natural law. Labor predicates its own judgment, in effect, testing a mode of reason simply by making one thing into another, x into y: it performs its own concrete proposition. “Hegel’s logic, in other words . . . is not a logic in the scholastic sense, not a formal logic, but rather an inseparable union of logic and ontology” (Lukács 1982 I: 20). On one side, Lukács accordingly radicalizes the Hegelian Doppelsatz, sinking the rational into the actual even as a matter of propositional form (see Hegel 1991: 20). But in the process, he simultaneously transforms the place of consciousness more generally. Consciousness, on this account, inheres within labor, but is almost necessarily falsified in the same moment by virtue of labor’s own actualized power of judgment. More radical still, however, is the consequent transformation of rationality as well—no longer a philosophy of consciousness, but a philosophy in spite of it. As early as 1938, Lukács (1976: 345) had begun to sketch a strange fold within the larger system of Hegelian logic, required by its confrontation with history in the problem of labor:

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Hegel’s concrete analysis of the dialectics of human labour annuls the unyielding antithesis of causality and teleology, i.e. it locates conscious human purposes concretely within the overall causal network, without destroying it, going beyond it or appealing to any transcendental principle.

For this Hegel, teleology haunts the entire history of the dialectic, dividing nature against itself by deriving a possibility of purpose that stands against it, crafted within the objectivity of the material world as a kind of form. As early as 1805–6, Hegel’s name for that purposiveness will include labor and reason together, in the figure of a “cunning” that regulates ends well beyond the range of the conscious act. As Lukács (1976: 345) quotes, from Hegel’s early lectures: The broadside of force is assailed by the fine point of cunning. The point d’honneur of cunning in its struggle with force is to seize it on its blind side so that it is directed against itself, to take a firm grip on it, to be active against it, or to turn it as movement back on itself, so that it annuls itself.

Against its received sense, this “teleology” arises not in Aristotelian, scholastic, or enlightenment fashion—as final end or divine design—but as a negation in its own right, culled not from some natural purpose, but rather as the very possibility of purpose asserted against the blind determination of pure causality. It is, of course, not by chance that Lukács first raises this problem of a dialectically mediated causality in the course of disentangling two operative modes of judgment entwined in Hegel’s thought, extracted from German idealism and the British political economists, respectively. What is most remarkable, however, is the fact that, with the appearance of labor, the specter of a judging consciousness—somehow set apart from its own effect—all but vanishes, even as judgment remains. In the process, a new opposition asserts itself, in the shape of a dialectic between causality and a teleological projection that originates in consciousness but invariably escapes it, burrowing instead into an object of labor now possessed of its own formal will, regulated by natural causality, but directed by a different cause posited in the work itself. In this respect, what seems the consciousness manifested by Marx’s commodity—the linen of the coat that “reveals its thoughts in a language with which it alone is familiar” or the “grotesque ideas” of the famous table’s “wooden brain”—merely fulfills an end already posited in labor as such (Marx 1990: 143, 163).In the fully developed scheme of Hegel’s logic, Lukács suggests, the same inversion of natural causality and posited teleol-

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ogy has already transpired. Teleology’s emergence early in The Science of Logic as the reflexive negation of causality—as a “reflection determination” in its own right, comparable to and succeeding upon being and nothing, essence and appearance—thus clears the way for its concluding reassertion (as the resolution of mechanism and chemism) on the way to cognition and the absolute idea (see Lukács 1982: 53–57, 82–84; Hegel 1999: 405–8, 735– 54). But it travels, by way of political economy and Hegelian logic together, into Marx as well, etched into the dialectic of use and exchange, but also consequently figured in the conceptual gap between an act of labor that posits a quality and a labor-power that merely bears value: Labor consists of teleological positings that activate causal series. This simple statement of fact eliminates a millenial [sic] ontological prejudice. Contrary to causality viewed as equivalent to laws which spontaneously govern the transformation of all beings into their general expression, teleology is always a mode of positioning originating in a consciousness. This teleology can activate only causal series moving in definite directions. (Lukács 1969: 139)

At stake here is a cognitive gap both familiar and strange. Famously, Marx’s transformation of labor into labor-power produced a concept already at work but previously uncognized, sufficient to explain the conversion of discrete and particular moments of use into the universality of exchange, a universality itself beyond any direct intuitive perception. In a programmatic inversion of the Kantian order, the purely normative force of understanding would now belong to a commodity-system impervious to intuition at all, even as the inferential work of reason (of will, of ethics, of judgment) stands revealed as a space of misprision, operating within and underneath the only judgment that retains determining force: the value-form itself. The general formula of capital encapsulates a determination of a new sort, a simple predication of value that disposes entirely of qualities. In the middle range, however, where the simple fact of labor postulates a series of qualitative ends that might or might not hold true, a new kind of thinking becomes necessary. Judgment, in this special sense, is but labor’s tentative attempt (and therefore ours) to think teleologically that which the commodity already knows as final cause. But what, then, of consciousness itself, of ideology? Or indeed of a critical theory that seems to remain anchored to the possibility of its correction? Of Ideologiekritik as such? Among the effects glimpsed (but only glimpsed) in this untimely recovery of teleology lies a new power of critical judgment. Beyond a traditional or positivistic theoretical mode, an orthodox

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critical theory has usually fixed on the possibility of a knowledge grounded in reflective judgment, on the cultivation of a purer conscious mode, without fixed claim or end (see Geuss 1981: 60–61). Necessarily, such consciousness presumes self-consciousness, excavating—in the heuristic and merely reflective, never determining, Kantian structures of aesthetic and teleological judgment—oneself in place of the world. Teleological positing insists otherwise, recovering in the problem of a world made by capital a space of determinacy waiting to be cognized, uninterested in consciousness but open to revaluation through labor. That such cognitions will stray from the mark is certain, but even that errancy holds (however dimly) the promise of a labor that requalifies pure exchange, or conjures some better predication: a work of art perhaps, some contrary purpose not found in (second) nature. What is thereby posited is not a better consciousness, but the end consciousness misses, a determining power of critical judgment belonging elsewhere. Note 1

“Let us revolt against this rule of thoughts” (translation modified).

References Geuss, Raymond. 1981. The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1991. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, translated by Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1999. Hegel’s Science of Logic, translated by A. V. Miller. Amherst, New York: Humanity Books. Lukács, Georg. 1969. “The ‘Vienna Paper’: The Ontological Foundations of Human Thinking and Action.” In Lukacs’s Last Autocriticism, edited by Ernest Joós. 1983. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Lukács, Georg. 1971. “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” In History and Class Consciousness, translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Lukács, Georg. 1976. The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics, translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: MIT Press. Lukács, Georg. 1982. The Ontology of Social Being, translated by David Fernbach. London: Merlin Press. Mannheim, Karl. 1954. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, translated by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Marx, Karl. 1975. “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844).” In Early Writings, translated by Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton. New York: Vintage Books. Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1976. The German Ideology. In Collected Works, Volume 5. New York: International Publishers.

Warren Montag How Does Critique Become Effective?

To approach critique today as both a word and a

concept, that is, to approach critique critically, as Marx ironically remarked in the Holy Family, is no easy task. To understand why this is the case, we need only turn to the current conjuncture, in which critique figures as the object of two opposing narratives. According to one, critique is the object of a kind of nostalgia, grounded in turn in the specific historicism that makes nostalgia possible. Here, critique represents a knowledge available only to a collective self-consciousness able to grasp itself simultaneously as self and other that we, globally, have lost, or are on the threshold of losing, in a movement of historical devolution. From the perspective of the other, the gradual disappearance of critique is greeted with relief on the grounds that the extinction of critique, here pathologized as a “suspicious” or even “paranoid” approach to culture, is a necessary step in our progress towards a post-critical culture that paradoxically appears, more or less explicitly, as a return to the innocence of the time before critique, when things were things and words were words (Felski 2011; Latour 2004; Sedgwick 1997). The fact that both tendencies accept without question the assertion of critique’s disappearance, as well as

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the concept of history such an assertion implies, is noteworthy, as is the retrospective posture both assume, looking back either to a time of historical insight (now lost) or a time of innocence (now also lost). That critique today is the site of a conflict between antagonistic tendencies should not be understood as a historical accident, however: conflict is constitutive of critique as it has existed from the time of its emergence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, above all, conflict over the notion of critique itself, that is, critique’s self-critique, which today often takes the very Kantian form of the imposition of limits to determine its proper jurisdiction. Thus, even the attempt to reject critique finds itself compelled to engage in the very activity it seeks to declare illegitimate in order to carry out its project. It appears that, for us now at least, the outside of critique is within it, a fact that does not render that outside any less of an outside; the very history of critique can be understood as the perpetual becoming-other, the movement of Sichanderswerden, as Hegel (1807) called it, immanent in its activity of critique. The fact that any attempt to develop a critical account of both critique and the critique of critique must begin from a position internal to the field critique claims as its own seems to present us with a paradox: if there is no place outside of critique from which to criticize its presuppositions, we are forced to enter a circle that requires us to act on the basis of precisely the assumptions we seek to invalidate and, in a word, criticize, even as we criticize it. The critique of critique would seem to be at risk of being captured by, or assimilated into, critique—if, that is, the critique of critique is not simply critique that does not know, or perhaps no longer knows, itself as such, and therefore an uncritical critique, to use Marx’s expression, incapable of self-criticism. If we hope to be able to criticize both critique and the critique of critique, we must find a way to break free of this vicious circle, or at least enlarge its circumference sufficiently for us to be able occupy (in the political as well as spatial sense of the term) a place within it. To find a way out of critique, at least in its actual form, divided into the opposition described above between critique and the critique of critique, we must reject the attribution to critique of the autonomy that allows it to imagine itself as an Imperium in Imperio, an empire within an empire, but ruled by itself alone, by the laws it has decreed to itself. If the notion of the autonomy of critique is an illusion, however, it is a necessary illusion in the sense that it is both historically determined and an essential part of the operation of critique, that without which its very identity would be called into question. Marx, who delighted in showing the contradictions at work in the most

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coherent of systems, theoretical as well as economic, posed a question that must have seemed terribly unfair or simply irrelevant to the practitioners of critique. The question, articulated in the works of 1843–44, and to a great extent forgotten or simply unheard, was the question critique poses to itself in the act of existing, although silently, only in the practical state, without ever fully acknowledging or confronting it: how does critique become effective? How does it move or change things, how does it “shake things up” (faire bouger les choses), to use Althusser’s (1970: 98) expression? The history of critique is full of answers to this question (I might cite Kant’s critique of Hobbes, Hegel’s critique of Kant, and Marx’s critique of Hegel), insofar as the justification of its existence demands an answer, but the question itself is rarely acknowledged, as if the history of critique were the history of its preemption or deferral. The question Marx posed is related to (but distinct from) the question of the truth of critique, whether rational or moral/ legal, which typically stands in for it. Marx, following Spinoza and appropriating certain elements in Hegel’s thought, asks how the truth of critique or criticism can impose (and not simply affirm) itself as true, that is, how its truth becomes what Machiavelli called la verità effetuale della cosa, truth armed with the power to actualize itself, to become real (1961: 55). To demand of critique that it account for the process by which whatever truth it produces becomes, not simply certain, but effectual, in practice as well as in theory, however, is to risk appearing naïve or simply ignorant of the history of critique. The fact is that those most responsible for developing the project of critique in its modern sense, from Kant to Habermas, have insisted that the truth of critique, and in an indirect sense its power, derives precisely from its independence from practice. Kant’s (2002: 19) phrase, “argue as much as you like but obey” (even those laws contrary to reason), served not only to prevent critique from provoking state intervention, it just as importantly established the position whose justification Habermas and even, at a certain point, Adorno would later make explicit: only an exchange of arguments free from self-interested coercion, whether by the state or “the street” (die Straße), can guarantee not simply the truth of the critique that emerges triumphant from the free and fair competition between arguments, but ensure that such arguments can persuade a citizenry, as well as the reigning sovereign, to adopt the ideas proposed by critique, and then to act on them, on the grounds of reason alone, without the interference of extra-rational forces that leads to division rather than unity (Habermas 1991). Adorno, for example, declared those who carried out the university and factory occupations of 1968 guilty of the error of what he called “practicism,” a

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too rapid and too crude attempt to “translate” critique into practice (1999: 127). But the notion that critique develops in a realm outside of its practical and institutional existence, represents a denial of the reality that the work of critique takes place in specific apparatuses where critique is promulgated by the relatively few individuals authorized to perform such a task. In practice, the oral and written forms of critique adhere to an elaborate set of rituals and constraints that, to all appearances, extend the inequalities and hierarchies of the world outside into the sanctum of the university. Denying the material existence of critique allowed Adorno to argue that political practice is a translation of a theory that necessarily precedes it into material form, and, as is always the case with translation, represents a betrayal of the original (whose problems can be attributed to a bad translation). In fact, Adorno (in stark opposition to Marcuse) feared the becoming-actual of his own critique of capitalism because it could only be realized through precisely the mass struggle going on all around him in the annus mirabilis of 1968, in its unpredictable and sometimes violent forms. The effect of his position was to close off critique from the only means by which it can become effective, that is, as Marx argued, its completion in (and not translation into) the action of masses through which alone critique becomes itself. Before I turn to Marx’s texts, I want to address what I earlier referred to as the necessary circle of any critique of critique. I will do so by looking briefly at Althusser’s discussion of what he called the circle of philosophy, despite the fact that the term “critique” itself rarely appears in Althusser’s work, and more often than not in citations from Marx and Kant rather than in his own voice. This near absence is less the result of a desire to differentiate himself from the tradition of critical theory and ideology critique (in fact he had little familiarity with this tradition until late in his career and, even then, showed little interest in it), than a sense that the concept of critique was the site of combined and uneven theoretical development, and thus a tangle of contradictions that could not simply be taken up as is. He did not, however, reject the concept of critique, but as was the case in his use of “ideology,” although in a far less visible way, often in the margins or “offstage,” as he liked to say, he worked intermittently to rectify it. From very different starting points, and following different paths, Althusser and Marx found their way to the same place, what we might call the materialist critique of critique, that is, not the rejection of critique on materialist grounds, but an exploration of what critique continued for more than a century not to see: its own material existence. In Althusser’s Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, “critique” appears only once, and not in the text itself, but in his 1974

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preface (1990: 171). This is all the more significant in that it is in this work that Althusser defines philosophy as the activity of distinguishing, sorting (trier), and differentiating, as did both Plato (Theaetus 150b) and Aristotle (De Anima III 428a), using the verb κρίνω—the root of the word critique: An entire philosophical tradition since Kant has contrasted “dogmatism” with “criticism.” Philosophical propositions have always had the effect of producing “critical” distinctions: that is, of “sorting out” or separating ideas from each other, and even of forging the appropriate ideas for making their separation and its necessity visible. Theoretically, this effect might be expressed by saying that philosophy “divides” (Plato), “traces lines of demarcation” (Lenin) and produces (in the sense of making manifest or visible) distinctions and differences. The entire history of philosophy demonstrates that philosophers spend their time distinguishing between truth and error, between science and opinion, between the sensible and the intelligible, between reason and the understanding, between spirit and matter, etc. They always do it, but they do not say (or only rarely) that the practice of philosophy consists in this demarcation, in this distinction, in this drawing of a line. We say it (and we will say many other things). By recognizing this, by saying it and thinking it, we separate ourselves from them. Even as we take note of the practice of philosophy, we exercise it, but we do so in order to transform it. (1990: 74–75)

Althusser here offers a double critique of critique as it is currently practiced and perhaps has been since the eighteenth century, as a practice that denies that it is a practice. He confronts the existing forms of critique with the forgetting that unites them: the forgetting of the history congealed in the word itself, and the forgetting of the materiality of its own practice. To acknowledge this materiality is to recognize that critique is never above or outside the world that it subjects to judgment or examination, but thoroughly entangled within it, as if for Althusser, the first object of critique must be the critique itself, its place and function in this entanglement, and its first act, self-criticism.1 Accordingly, he draws a line of demarcation through the notion of self-criticism, dividing it in two. The Hegelian version of self-criticism amounts to a theory of history as a succession of moments whose self-critique both depends on and culminates the telos of absolute knowledge. The other, irreducibly distinct notion of self-criticism is directly related to what Althusser calls the “circle of philosophy”: “All objective knowledge of philosophy is in effect at the same time a position in philosophy, and therefore a Thesis in and on philosophy” (1990: 102). If the lines of demarcation that philosophy draws are within itself, it neither transcends the philosophical realm nor can it justify its

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actions by appeal to a truth outside of its own practice. On the contrary, it must act “without the aid of any superior instance judging and deciding each question,” compelling him to “speak here, paradoxically, of error without truth and of deviation without a norm” (Althusser 1977: 10). But to push Althusser slightly, the drawing of the line of demarcation, and therefore the act of critique, assumes that the opening or gap or void made intelligible by the line of demarcation is already there to be traced, insofar as every philosophy is constituted around the contradictions proper to it. Further, these contradictions mark the eruption of the conflicts often regarded as outside of philosophy, within it, its concepts, metaphors, and propositions, turned to new and opposing uses. As Althusser wrote in the essay “Il piccolo teatro” included in For Marx, “there is no true critique which is not immanent and already real and material before it is conscious” (1969: 143). True critique, as Marx will argue, is the critique already existing in a practical state, that is, immanent in the practices of resistance and struggle. At this point, I want to turn to Marx himself, not the mature Marx of Capital, but the early Marx, who offered an analysis of critique as it was both theorized and practiced in his own time. In keeping with this analysis, it might be argued that Marxism was born, not as the child of Hegel and Feuerbach, but in the Prussian forest at the moment the simple act, allowed to the poor by custom, of removing dead wood from the ground for their use, became a crime, and therefore the moment that the law’s violence turned the practice of a custom into popular resistance, and the force of this resistance fractured criticism, just as sound waves shatter a glass. Critique is assuredly at work in the articles published in Die Rheinische Zeitung in the fall of 1842, but it does not precede and stimulate the resistance of the landless peasantry (Marx 1975a). On the contrary, the increasing refusal of the rural poor to surrender their customary right to the twigs and branches fallen from trees even in the face of increasingly repressive measures, also made visible the aporia of positive law, particularly the contradictions internal to the legal concept of property. Marx had already recognized that it is not critique that reveals the antagonistic class positions concealed by the pseudo-universalism of the law, but rather the specific forms and sites of mass struggle that render class rule as such intelligible and thus available to critique. In addition to the assumption of the primacy of practice over theory (explicitly stated in the Theses on Feuerbach), however, Marx points to another element equally important to his critique of critique: the concept of the masses, what Spinoza understood as the physical power of the multitude, as well as what necessarily accompanies this power, the capacity to produce knowledge.

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This helps explain the specific form that Marx’s critique takes in the Holy Family (written in conjunction with Engels, two years after the articles from the Rheinische Zeitung) (1975c). While Marx ridiculed the self-referentiality of a critique that must constantly prove its criticality, namely, that it is “critically critical criticism,” his primary object is to confront critique with the reality of its practical existence, above all, its relation to “the masses,” as Marx (1975c: 148) argues at length in the section of chapter 7 of the Holy Family, titled Die “unkritische Masse” und die “kritische Kritik” (the “uncritical mass” and “critical critique”). Here, he argues that the true adversary of “critical criticism” and the object of its critique is not the state, as critical critics claim, but the “obdurate or stubborn mass,” die “verstockte Masse,” in the singular, mass as opposed to masses, a fact to which Marx will attach a certain significance (1975c: 148). The critical critics seek by means of their critique to enlighten, if not liberate, the mass, but the latter stubbornly refuse to heed, or perhaps even to hear, the truth that critique hopes will set them free. Accordingly, Marx and Engels’s satire frequently takes the form of an ironic identification of the critical critics with Christ’s apostles. Not only do they see themselves as the saviors of the mass, but, like their predecessors, fear they are sowing seeds on stony soil and casting their pearls before swine, so impervious is the mass to the message that will set them free. Marx’s position does not constitute a rejection of critique or simply a demand that it change its object, as is often deduced from the famous inversion in the “Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Theory of Right”: “the weapon of criticism cannot replace the criticism of weapons [die Waffe der Kritik kann allerdings die Kritik der Waffen nicht ersetzen]” (1975b: 10). “Criticism of weapons” is misleading; Marx refers here to the “criticism” that comes from weapons, the physical force that must accompany (but not replace) critique for it to be effective, because “material force can only be overthrown by material force [die materielle Gewalt muß gestürzt werden durch materielle Gewalt]” (1975b: 10). He clearly rejects the assumption that critique is external to material force and confined to the role of a spiritual or intellectual power. In fact, it is not immediately clear what the phrase “material force” means, although the remainder of Marx’s sentence shows that by material force he is not speaking of weapons in the strict sense, or at least not only of weapons. Rather, at issue here is the materiality of critique, the material forms in which it exists. Critique is effective, according to Marx, not by demystifying the false to reveal the true, or by replacing false ideas with true ones, but when, like Machiavelli’s verità effetuale, it “takes hold of the masses [sobald sie die Massen ergreift]” (1975b: 10).

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It is easy to read Marx’s formulation, especially in light of what follows it, as an anticipation of Lenin’s (famous or infamous) argument in What is to be Done? (1903) that “Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers . . . would have to be brought to them from without” (1961: 422). But Marx is not concerned with consciousness; on the contrary, the question for him is how the masses become, or more precisely constitute themselves, as a material force, given that to overthrow a system of material forces requires more than true ideas and the weapons of criticism. In fact, Marx is very close to Althusser’s proposition cited earlier that “there is no true critique which is not immanent and already real and material before it is conscious.” Material force, as Marx understands it, is theory armed, theory embodied in the most powerful weapon of all, the masses themselves, and the power of their collective action. But if this is correct, how are we to understand the concluding phrase of the passage cited above: “theory becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses [die Theorie wird zur materiellen Gewalt, sobald sie die Massen ergreift]”? The verb translated here as “gripped” is the third person singular present tense of ergreifen, which also means “seize” or “apprehend.” Its use here presents the reader with an amphibology. Marx’s phrase may mean that theory necessarily arrives from outside the masses to seize or grip them and propel them into action. But it might just as well be understood to assert that the theory that seizes or grips the masses arises from within them, in the sense that an individual is seized or gripped by an emotion at the moment it becomes conscious. The latter reading makes visible Marx’s own critique of the actual practice of critique as a secularized evangelism whose mission is to save the mass from its own stubborn and intractable ignorance. A characteristic common to the different currents of critique in his time was the tendency to measure the adequacy and value of criticism by the extent of the distance that separated it from the ideas and actions it imputed to the mass. The critical critics and critically critical critics erred in that they took ideas or beliefs as the cause of actions, both individual and collective, and sought to change the world through a conversion of the soul or change of beliefs as the necessary precondition of the physical action that social transformation requires. According to this model (of which Adorno’s critique of practicism represents a variant), critique develops outside of and prior to the struggles and actions of the masses, in a realm of analysis and argument, in order then to be transmitted to them as a set of rational ideas and beliefs that will determine their action. Marx’s rejection of such a model is very clear: masses form oppositional movements (which always involve discursive as well as corporeal acts)

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that produce theory without dispensation from above or beyond. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Marx argues that for critical critics “in general, the mass is an indeterminate object, and therefore can neither carry out a determinate action nor enter into a determinate relationship. The Mass, as the object of Critical Criticism, has nothing in common with the real masses who, for their part, constitute among themselves massive contradictions” (die Masse, wie sie der Gegenstand der kritischen Kritik ist, hat nichts gemein mit den wirklichen Massen, die wieder sehr massenhafte Gegensätze unter sich bilden) (Marx 1975c). This passage helps clarify the statement cited above: “theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. “ Marx distinguishes between die Masse in the singular and the die Massen in the plural, the former the imaginary object of critical criticism, the latter, the masses whose actual existence takes the form of an irreducible plurality of divergent and massive (massenhafte) contradictions (Gegensätze). But how are we to understand the phrase “die Massen sehr massenhafte Gegensätze unter sich bilden?” On the one hand, it may be translated as “massive contradictions take shape within the masses themselves,” referring to conflicts internal to the masses in their plurality. On the other, however, we might translate it as “the masses among themselves [and we should note that it is unter sich and not zwischen sich] create or construct (bilden) massive contradictions,” or even “forms of opposition,” as suggested by the French translation, La Masse, en tant qu’objet de la Critique critique, n’a rien de commun avec les masses réelles, qui constituent à leur tour entre elles des contradictions fort massives. Marx’s insistence on the plural, masses (die Massen), suggests that their multiplicity is the element in which contradictions and oppositions flourish, and ideas and propositions are tested and refined through both debate and action. Their internal diversity is a source of the power and intelligence of the masses. The disagreements and disputes that arise among them are the necessary effect of their necessarily heterogeneous experience of the often invisible forms of inequality and subjection that both stimulate and constrain revolt. Critique, even when it does not know it, absorbs, distills, and preserves this knowledge. It is this fact that produces the anxiety felt by many of the practitioners of critique: a critique of capitalist society in its actual existence is transmitted to them in different ways by the masses in the course of their struggles. To return it to them in a coherent form is like handing them a weapon with which to transform the world. Following Marx’s path, Trotsky (1932) argued in the History of the Russian Revolution that there can be no revolutionary politics (the convergence of theory and practice), and by extension, no revolution, without “learning from

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the masses” who see politics “from below,” testing and probing the defenses of the established order, forcing it to reveal itself, by their everyday acts of resistance and revolt. The true and truly effective critique is one whose eloquence is not simply discursive, but exists simultaneously in the material force of mass movements and mass struggles. The problem critique must confront is not how to translate its theory into practice, as the Word once became flesh, but how to translate the truths immanent in the practice of insurgent movements into theoretical form. Note 1

Althusser uses the term “self-criticism” in part to appeal to the young Maoists of the post-1968 period, as well as to appear to remain faithful to the Stalinist traditions still strong in the PCF (Parti communiste français). In both cases, self-criticism took on a ritual and disciplinary character (similar to the function of the expanded confession of the Counter-Reformation). But his actual self-criticism is closer to a “balance sheet” (un bilan) of successes and failures, as well as outcomes expected and unexpected, to adjust and calculate future interventions—without the moralizing supplement. More could be said here, needless to say, and we can add “self-criticism” to the list of “what did Althusser mean by . . .” For an exposition of the Maoist phrase “self-criticism” in other contexts, see Colleen Lye’s essay in this volume.

References Adorno, Theodor and Marcuse, Herbert. 1999. “Correspondence on the German Student Movement.” New Left Review 1, no. 233, Jan–Feb: 123–36. Althusser, Louis. 1968. “Sur le rapport de Marx à Hegel.” Hegel et la pensée modern, edited by Jean Hyppolite. Paris: PUF. Althusser, Louis. 1969. “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht.” For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books. Althusser, Louis. 1977. “Introduction: Unfinished History.” In Proletarian Science: The Case of Lyssenko, by Dominique Lecourt, translated by Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books. Althusser, Louis. 1990. Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, translated by Warren Montag. London: Verso. Althusser, Louis, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey, and Jacques Rancière. 2015. Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, translated by Ben Brewster and David Fernbach. London: Verso. Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, translated by Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1807. “Vorrede.” In Phänomenologie des Geistes. Bamberg/Würzburg: Verlag Joseph Anton Goebhardt. Kant, Immanuel. 2002. “An. Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” In Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings, translated by David L. Colclasure. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Latour, Bruno. 2004. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter): 225–48. Lenin, V. I. 1961. “What is to be Done” In Collected Works, Vol. 5. Moscow: Progress Publishers: 422. Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1961. Il Principe. Torino: Einaudi. Marx, Karl. 1975a. “Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly. Third Article. Debates on the Law on the Theft of Wood.” In Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. I, 224–63. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, Karl. 1975b. “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” In Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol: 3. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, Karl and Fredrich Engels. 1975c. “Critical Criticism’s Correspondence.” In The Holy Family. Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol: 4, 142–61. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1997. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is about You.” Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Durham: Duke University Press: 1–37. Trotsky. Leon. 1932. The History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 1. New York: Pathfinder Press: 231.

Eleanor Kaufman Surface Critique: Althusser, Foucault, and the Problem of Ricardo

My formulation of this topic is indebted to a

classroom experience, or perhaps is an elaborate atonement for a throwaway comment I made in a graduate seminar I taught on Althusser and Foucault, with a handful of English graduate students in attendance. When we began our discussion of a selection from Reading Capital, I quipped that this is the ur-text of ideology critique that the surface readers are reacting against, this is the hermeneutics of suspicion, paranoid reading, and so forth that everyone is attacking these days. To this remark, the Comparative Literature students as well as students from several other disciplines asked what I was talking about and readily admitted to having no idea what surface reading was. However, the generally subdued English graduate students burst onto the scene with elaborate explanations of surface reading, distant reading, postcritical reading, descriptive reading, and various new formalisms, basically saying I had collapsed a lot of things into one term that I ought to be more careful about. Rather than following that apt advice, and leaving aside the question of whether English departments are the predominant or perhaps only locale where deep reading and surface reading are actually discussed, much less opposed, I wish instead

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to consider the figures of surface and depth associated with Marxian and particularly Althusserian ideology critique, so as to explore some of the convergent notions of structure in the mid-1960s French intellectual landscape. Against the idea that thinkers such as Althusser practice a form of ideology critique that is equivalent to a style of “deep reading,” at issue is a model of critical analysis that attends to what is readily perceptible on the surface but nevertheless occluded, and occluded in a fashion that occasions diametrically opposed conclusions about the point at which new concepts emerge. While Althusser and Foucault have striking overlap in critical method, what divides them is Ricardo: for Althusser, Ricardo’s difference from Marx represents the break between ideology and science; for Foucault, Ricardo and Marx are entirely of the same moment. Rather than all stakes being profound, or limited to description, for Althusser and Foucault the stakes of critique are precisely on the surface of things. To consider Althusser and ideology is to encounter the dominant essay that for many casual readers serves as a synecdoche for Althusser’s thought as such, namely, the set of notes entitled “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” first published in 1970, and often referred to as “the ISA essay.” This piece was translated and collected in the 1971 English language compilation Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, and includes such oftcited formulations from Marx that ideology is the ideology of the ruling class (1971: 146), and that “ideology is the system of the ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group” (158). It also develops the properly Althusserian (and psychoanalytically inflected) notion of ideology as the “imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (162) and as something that hails and interpellates individuals as subjects (173–75). Read in isolation from the rest of Althusser’s oeuvre, such pronouncements give the impression of a depth model, that a mere surface understanding fails to see the deeper and systemic class structure, and that a more thorough interpretation, a closer reading, unearths the true meaning hidden underneath. In this regard, Althusser might be considered a deep reader par excellence, or even a “paranoid” one in Eve Sedgwick’s (2003) formulation, someone who in Freudian fashion would look for the latent meaning behind the manifest content of a text.1 Before considering this model as it pertains to Althusser’s analysis of ideology, it is important to note that Jacques Lacan’s explanation of the Freudian unconscious eschews the notions of latent and manifest for something more akin to adjacency. Rather than viewing the conscious and the unconscious as residing at either end of the surface/depth or visible/invisible

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spectrum, Lacan (1998) insists in Seminar 11 that such a mode of opposition is Jungian, not Freudian: Freud’s unconscious is not at all the romantic unconscious of imaginative creation. It is not the locus of the divinities of night. . . . [T]he fact that Jung, who provides a link with the terms of the romantic unconscious, should have been repudiated by Freud, is sufficient indication that psycho-analysis is introducing something other. . . . To all these forms of unconscious, ever more or less linked to some obscure will regarded as primordial, to something pre-conscious, what Freud opposes is the revelation that at the level of the unconscious there is something at all points homologous with what occurs at the level of the subject—this thing speaks and functions in a way quite as elaborate as at the level of the conscious, which thus loses what seemed to be its privilege. I am well aware of the resistances that this simple remark can still provoke, though it is evident in everything that Freud wrote. (24)

Unlike Jung’s model of the unconscious, which makes the unconscious into a dark, mythical netherworld entirely at odds with the conscious, Freud’s model, according to Lacan’s claim, is much more subtle and for that more radical. It is easier, and perhaps more believable, for the unconscious to exist in an incomprehensible realm, entirely apart, so that to access it entails a magisterial work of descent and retrieval. But if the unconscious is “structured like a language” (20) and ordered like the conscious, just with a slight difference, the complexity of the structure is harder to perceive and hence more challenging. The challenge is one of the surface, to see what is there in plain view but is not being seen, in the fashion of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” a text that was not incidental to Lacan (given he placed his analysis of it as the entry point to the Écrits [2006]). It is moreover perhaps not incidental that the eleventh seminar, also known as The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis and delivered in the first half of 1964, was hastily relocated to the École normale supérieure, Althusser’s career-long home, after Lacan’s late 1963 “excommunication” from the International Psychoanalytic Association. Althusser was of course much in dialogue with Lacan and Lacanian psychoanalysis at this moment and otherwise, but rather than taking this up as a specific instance of influence, which it may also be, I wish to consider the larger argument that a particular modality of adjacent or surface—as opposed to deep—reading is one that traverses the thought of this period in France, at least through 1966. Indeed, this logic subtends Foucault’s 1963 Birth of the Clinic (Naissance de la Clinique; 1994a) and his Raymond Roussel (2004) from the same

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year, and beyond that the celebrated analysis of Velázquez’s Las Meninas from the 1966 The Order of Things (Les mots et les choses), particularly in the play between visibility and invisibility. Whether it is a question of the retrospective view of the body that becomes available with autopsy and the field of pathological anatomy, or the “key” to Roussel’s oeuvre left at the moment of death, or the visual field of mirrors representing representation that ushers in the Classical era, in all instances we are dealing with a new way of seeing that raises the specter of a still greater invisibility (Roussel’s How I Wrote Certain of My Books [1977], left before his suicide in 1933, only gives the key to “certain” of the books). In short, the bright visibility of things— in the first two cases illuminated by death itself—is not without its share of opacity. In this milieu, even apart from Althusser’s close personal connections to both Lacan and Foucault, it is hardly surprising that this same structure of thought is central to Althusser’s notion of the “epistemological break,” essentially the transition from ideological thought to properly scientific thought, that for Althusser marks the difference between the young Hegelian Marx and the author of Capital (1990), or in what will concern us here, between Ricardo and Marx. The difference between science and ideology is not a matter of retrieving deeply embedded or repressed material and bringing it to the light of day. Rather, and crucially, it is a matter of properly conceptualizing material that is readily present and visible, and all the more challenging for this. Althusser repeatedly emphasizes, in Reading Capital and other writings from the period (especially those collected in For Marx, which appeared in 1965 along with Reading Capital), that a major “scientific” discovery is not inventing something as if pulling it out of a hat, but re-conceptualizing something already there and even recognized by other thinkers in the field. Such, for Althusser, is Marx’s relation to his own younger self, and above all his relation to Smith and especially Ricardo. Although Althusser doesn’t use the terms adjacency or unconscious as such, he portrays Marx’s formulations as effectively overlapping with or adjacent to those of the earlier political economists—with the difference that Marx conceptualizes or makes visible certain of the things that remain effectively unconscious in their work. Althusser readily admits that the British political economists Adam Smith (1723–90) and David Ricardo (1772–1823) had observed the same economic relations and tendencies as Marx, only they were unable to articulate the conceptual framework of surplus-value. Referencing Engels, Althusser frames it in Reading Capital as “the question of Marx’s novelty with respect to

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a reality which is not new in Marx!” (2015: 301). As with the previous examples from Lacan and Foucault, the necessary material is already there and plainly visible, but it is a matter, as Althusser puts it, of “giv[ing] a concept to the fact [Smith and Ricardo] had managed to ‘produce’” (322). Marx “pronounce[d] the words surplus-value where Ricardo had pronounced the word profit—or the words relations of production where Ricardo had pronounced the words distribution of income” (322). Effectively, Ricardo produced something without discovering it, without giving it a concept. Moreover, as in Foucault’s examples, it is not a teleological progression but the retrospective reading, here from the vantage point of Capital, that makes the whole structure visible. This is quite close to what Althusser terms “structural causality” (2005: 344), the idea that a cause is only visible in, or indeed produced by, its effects. Hence a structure is the product of its effects rather than operating foundationally, and so the attempt to uncover a causally agential deep structure isn’t very Althusserian (or for that matter Lacanian).2 What seems critical in all of these cases is that this movement (from unconscious to conscious, from ideology to science) might very well not have happened, or happened differently. Adjacent domains don’t come with a sign that says “no trespassing, keep out,” thereby providing a perverse incentive to read their symptoms. As I hope to show in what follows, Althusser’s notion of “‘symptomatic’ reading” (27) is really very far from the caricature of ideology critique whereby the base is ferreted out from the superstructure in an eminently paranoid and suspicious fashion.3 Even the ISA essay, in its rather less subtle approach to this topic, makes it clear that ideology permeates both depths and surfaces to the point it is not readily detachable from various overdeterminations, such as speech, other entities, and even being. The difficulty of reading for or with ideology can be illustrated by setting Althusser’s assessment of Marx’s novelty alongside Foucault’s assessment of the political economists in his sensation-generating publication that appeared the year after Reading Capital and For Marx. In The Order of Things from 1966 (1994b), Foucault traces the defining characteristics of three successive eras—the Renaissance, the Classical, and the Modern—across three distinct domains—natural science, language and linguistics, and economic theory—arguing that in each era, or episteme, there are discursive boundaries to what can be thought and said. For example, beyond the observation that many people were drawn to study botany in the eighteenth century, Foucault suggests that this was the height of the classical era in which classification and representation dominated. Hence it wasn’t that eighteenthcentury people really liked plants but rather that the easy visibility of plants

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perfectly accommodated the style of classificatory thought that reigned in that epistemic conjuncture (Foucault 1994b: 137). If we were to consider this type of analysis as a form of ideology critique, which Foucault does not do, it would seem to coincide remarkably with the mid-1960s Althusserian model of taking material that is readily available but reading it otherwise. It is not that plants concealed or deflected a deeper desire, such as an escape from rapidly encroaching industrialization (though we do see something of this in Rousseau!), but that they corresponded to the ways of organizing knowledge prevalent in that period. There is nothing hidden or repressed here. 4 The mode of critique instead represents a more refined retrospective reading of large-scale structures at far remove from individual human impulses or desires. As many have noted, the antihumanist structural logic that unites thinkers such as Lacan, Althusser, and Foucault during this period is pervasive and profound. Perhaps unfortunately for his Marxist sympathizers, Foucault did not confine his analyses in The Oder of Things to the natural sciences. In charting the movement of economic thought from the Renaissance preoccupation with resemblance and similitude to the Classical penchant for circulation and exchange to the Modern emphasis on function and production, Foucault delineates important differences between Smith and Ricardo that place them on either side of his Classical/Modern divide: [T]he difference between Smith and Ricardo is this: for the first, labour, because it is analysable into days of subsistence, can be used as a unit common to all other merchandise . . . for the second, the quantity of labour makes it possible to determine the value of a thing, not only because the thing is representable in units of work, but first and foremost because labour as a producing activity is “the source of all value.” Value can no longer be defined, as in the Classical age, on the basis of a total system of equivalences, and of the capacity that commodities have of representing one another. Value has ceased to be a sign, it has become a product. (1994b: 254)

For Foucault, Smith’s version of political economy displays the major attributes of the Classical era: the emphasis on exchange and equivalence, a logic of representation, and a system of signs. By contrast, Ricardo’s emphasis on function, production, labor, and ultimately value places him squarely in the Modern era. Foucault notes that Ricardo’s focus on the immobilizing tendencies of scarcity (of land, of profit) presents the economy through a pessimistic lens. Marx, by contrast, considers the same negative elements but tethers them to History, so that those equipped to recognize History’s alienating power are thereby prepared to change it.

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Whereas Smith and Ricardo (whom Althusser lumps together) belong to different epistemic moments for Foucault, Ricardo and Marx do not, these differences of positive and negative orientation notwithstanding. Thus, Foucault is able to make his infamous pronouncement, which I cite at length: But the alternatives offered by Ricardo’s ‘pessimism’ and Marx’s revolutionary promise are probably of little importance. Such a system of options represents nothing more than the two possible ways of examining the relations of anthropology and History as they are established by economics through the notions of scarcity and labour. . . . At the deepest level [au niveau profound] of Western knowledge, Marxism introduced no real break [coupure]; it found its place without difficulty, as a full, quiet, comfortable and, goodness knows, satisfying form for a time (its own) within an epistemological arrangement that welcomed it gladly (since it was this arrangement that was in fact making room for it) and that it, in return, had no intention of disturbing and, above all, no power to modify, even one jot, since it rested entirely upon it. Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else. (1994b: 261–62, 1966: 273–74)

If Foucault’s method of structural reading has a strong resonance with Althusser’s (and this resonance and its variations arguably could be traced forward and backward to earlier and later periods in their respective oeuvres5), then this passage is a loud alarm signaling that something has gone off the rails, for Althusser’s and Foucault’s positions with respect to Marx could hardly be more contrasting. Leaving aside the vexed question of Foucault’s relation to Marxism, to which a great deal of literature has been devoted,6 I want to focus on the structural place of Ricardo in both of these analyses. In a sense, Ricardo occupies a register adjacent to Marx for both thinkers: for Althusser, the slight difference signals Marx’s revolutionary import; for Foucault, the slight difference affirms Marx’s unexceptional place in a larger cohort of nineteenth-century thinkers, among whom Ricardo stands out as the watershed figure. Whereas Althusser’s Ricardo gets placed next to Smith as alighting on the critical terms of analysis (labor, value, wages) without distilling the concept (surplus-value), Foucault’s Ricardo is of “decisive importance” (1994b: 253) for signaling the transition from Smith’s classicism into the modern era, in which Ricardo is then filed next to Marx insofar as both thinkers highlight the role of the worker and link value to production. Both Althusser and Foucault draw on the model of the epistemological rupture or break (Althusser more explicitly), traceable to the work of the French historians of science Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, but locate it on either side of Ricardo.7

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What, then, do we do with the problem of Ricardo? Do we consider him something of a placeholder, almost a zero value or imaginary line (to use LéviStrauss’s [1963] formulation in “Do Dual Structures Exist?”) that allows a system of structural analysis to operate effectively, whether from the Marxist or Foucauldian position? In this scenario, Ricardo would stand in for a boundary, a line of demarcation, one that enables differences always on the surface to be parsed with clarity and distinction into their particular patterns of visibility and invisibility, blindness and insight. It would hardly even be necessary to read Ricardo closely (though Foucault does)—his very presence and employment of important terms would be enough. The inquiry could be continued somewhat recursively insofar as it also constitutes a key difference between Althusser and Foucault. Do their diametrically opposed readings of Marx constitute more of a break or a periodic similarity (a break in terms of Marx, a similarity of style in the mid-1960s)?8 Such analyses are sure to be unsatisfying for those who hold to a deeper sense of ideology. Even though Ricardo writes a great deal about the plight of the worker, he does not share Marx’s labor theory of value in that he does not fully consider the exploitation inherent in the workings of surplus-value. And this would be the end of the discussion for some, and also a good reason for not reading him. To return to Foucault’s dismissal of Marx, above, it is interesting to note two distinctive turns of phrase. For someone attuned to the play of the visible and the invisible as they work upon surfaces, Foucault introduces a striking appeal to depth when he writes “au niveau profound du savoir occidental le marxisme n’a introduit aucune coupure réelle.” Whether we follow the translator in reading this as “at the deepest level of Western thought” or simply “at a deep level,” Foucault equates depth somewhat oddly with the real break (“coupure”) that Marxism in fact did not introduce. But then we might ask would such a coupure (the word Althusser replaces for Bachelard’s “rupture”) ever be situated at a deep level to begin with, whether in Bachelard, Canguilhem, Althusser, or Foucault? The predominant mode of Althusserian and Foucauldian analysis would regard the break as something visible at the surface rather than the depths, which if anything makes it harder to see. Until we get to Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition in 1968 (1994), almost no philosopher in 1960s France takes depth seriously. Furthermore, Foucault resorts fully to simile in stating that that Marxism in the nineteenth century is not like a fish out of water, but more mundanely like a fish in water, not being able to breathe anywhere else. There is a strange transubstantiation between Marxism and fish, not unlike what we

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see between coats and linen or other mystically communicating commodities in volume 1 of Capital. (Notably, this is the “ideological” part of Capital that Althusser instructs us not to read until we have read the rest several times [Althusser 1971: 81].) We might even recall the happy life of hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, and raising cattle in the evening from The German Ideology (1998; also part of Marx’s ideological youth according to Althusser). This recourse to figures of speech or idealized activities could not be more vividly opposed to Ricardo’s resolutely non-metaphorical language in On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, a tendency also remarkable in Althusser.9 For Ricardo (1962: 26–29), the fish do not talk or swim, rather two (or sometimes three) salmon have exchange equivalence to one deer, and a rise in wages does not alter their relative value. Animals must also be considered with respect to the labor necessary to kill them, as for example when Ricardo (1962: 23) bluntly notes that one beaver would have greater value than two deer if the weapon needed to kill the beaver required greater accuracy and hence greater labor. Ricardo’s animals and commodities do not traffic in metaphor or theological niceties; it is hard to read more deeply into them. Althusser’s clarity to a fault puts him in far greater stylistic alignment with Ricardo, while Foucault’s flourishes of depth and obfuscation range him closer to Marx. Such generalizations would require further textual support, to be sure, but they help illustrate something of a chiasmus of style and affinity between the four terms, Foucault, Althusser, Ricardo, and Marx.10 Ricardo’s style has a strong affinity with Althusser whereas Althusser has a weak affinity for Ricardo; Marx’s style has a strong affinity with Foucault whereas Foucault entertains a weak affinity for Marx. It might be presented thus as a comparison of Althusser and Foucault (Figure 1), where the roles of Marx and Ricardo cross and change places. This superficial structural-stylistic diagram might lead us to an easy psychology of depth, in the form of concluding that opposites attract, or something of the like. But it is precisely the resistance to deep readings of this sort, and their attendant ideologies, that Foucault and Althusser share. While aligning Foucault with either Marxism or neoliberalism has become something of a cottage industry,11 and not one this reader has great sympathy for in either direction, a more productive alignment is a shared critical method.12 It is a method attendant to adjacency rather than depth, to conceptualizing what is already visible but not apprehended as distinct. It is a structural mode of reading that does not readily align with the enterprise called

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Figure 1. Comparison of Althusser and Foucault in terms of Marx and Ricardo’s roles. Source: Created by author.

structuralism, which “ism” was resoundingly renounced by both Althusser and Foucault. Rather, it is a critical method that attends to re-conceptualizing what has been visible but unseen all along, a style of ideology-reading that produces surface critique. Notes 1

2

3

Rita Felski labels Althusser the “quintessential suspicious reader” in The Limits of Critique (2008: 113). What follows is far from the first attempt to challenge such a claim. See especially Rooney 1995 and Young 2017. The last outpost of this thought in the 1960s is probably Gilles Deleuze’s parallel notion of “quasi-causality” in his 1969 The Logic of Sense, a text also focused on the importance of the surface. That the complexities of mid-1960s structural thought were reduced to easy “structuralist” notions of causality, binarism, and synchronicity is in no small part due to later statements by the thinkers in question, who by the early 1970s were quick to renounce any connections with so-called structuralism, or as Althusser puts it in Essays in Self-Criticism, “theoreticism” (1976: 105). See, for example, Best and Marcus, which includes a perplexing equation of Althusser’s contributions to Reading Capital with notions of “absent cause” and Gnosticism (2009: 5).

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Foucault’s comments about botany in particular anticipate his celebrated “repressive hypothesis” that appeared a decade later (1988). See Ryder 2013 and Montag 2005, 2013. Regarding the earlier period, in The Political Unconscious, Jameson lists both Althusser’s Reading Capital and Foucault’s The Order of Things as sharing a joint hostility to questions of “interpretation” and “hermeneutic” (1981: 21). See, for example, Marsden 1999, Negri 2016, Bidet 2016, and Garo 2011. See Bachelard 1984, 2002 and Canguilhem 1968. For different sides on whether to align or oppose Althusser and Foucault, see Kelly 2014, 2018 and Močnik 2014. Friedman (1995: 176) helpfully reevaluates the ideology/science divide with respect to metaphor, noting Althusser’s position “that ideology necessarily inhabits science from within, and scientific discourse cannot dispense with metaphor.” My thanks to Hank Okazaki for pointing out that this acronym arrangement quite aptly spells FARM. For a range of perspectives on Foucault and neoliberalism, see Zamora and Behrent 2016, Sawyer and Steinmetz-Jenkins 2019, Lemm and Vater 2014, Paras 2006, Kennedy and Shapiro 2019, and Lagasnerie 2012. Although this essay takes issue with Felski’s (2015) characterization of Althusser in The Limits of Critique, her earlier argument (2008) for the importance of considering shared critical methods is quite apposite.

References Althusser, Louis. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press. Althusser, Louis. 1976. Essays in Self-Criticism, translated by Grahame Lock. London: NLB. Althusser, Louis. 2005. For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster. New ed. Radical Thinkers. London: Verso. Althusser, Louis. 2015. Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, translated by Ben Brewster and David Fernbach. London: Verso. Bachelard, Gaston. 1984. The New Scientific Spirit, translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Boston: Beacon Press. Bachelard, Gaston. 2002. The Formation of the Scientific Mind: A Contribution to a Psychoanalysis of Objective Knowledge, translated by Mary McAllester Jones. Manchester: Clinamen. Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. 2009. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108, no. 1: 1–21. Bidet, Jacques. 2016. Foucault with Marx, translated by Steven Corcoran. London: Zed Books. Canguilhem, Georges. 1968. Études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences. Paris: Vrin. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. The Logic of Sense, translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press. Felski, Rita. 2008. “From Literary Theory to Critical Method.” Profession: 108–16. Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Foucault, Michel. 1966. Les mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, Michel. 1988. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel. 1994a. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel. 1994b. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel. 2004. Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, translated by Charles Ruas. London; New York: Continuum. Friedman, Geraldine. 1995. “The Spectral Legacy of Althusser: The Symptom and Its Return.” Yale French Studies 88: 165–82. Garo, Isabelle. 2011. Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser and Marx: la politique dans la philosophie. Paris: Demopolis. Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kelly, Mark G. E. 2014. “Foucault against Marxism: Althusser beyond Althusser.” In (Mis) Readings of Marx in Continental Philosophy, edited by Jernej Habjan and Jessica Whyte. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kelly, Mark G. E. 2018. “Problematizing the Problematic.” Angelaki 23, no. 2: 155–69. Kennedy, Liam, and Stephen Shapiro, eds. 2019. Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature. Re-Mapping the Transnational: A Dartmouth Series in American Studies. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1998. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, translated by Alan Sheridan. Seminar 11. New York: Norton. Lacan, Jacques. 2006. Écrits, translated by Bruce Fink. New York: Norton. Lagasnerie, Geoffroy de. 2012. La Dernière leçon de Michel Foucault: sur Le néolibéralisme, la théorie et la politique. Paris: Fayard. Lemm, Vanessa and Miguel Vatter, eds. 2014. The Government of Life: Foucault, Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism. New York: Fordham University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. “Do Dual Structures Exist?” In Structural Anthropology, translated by Claire Jacobson. New York: Basic Books. Marsden, Richard. 1999. The Nature of Capital: Marx after Foucault. Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought 20. London: Routledge. Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1, translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1998. The German Ideology: Including Theses on Feuerbach and Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Močnik, Rastko. 2014. “Ricardo—Marx // Foucault—Althusser.” In (Mis)Readings of Marx in Continental Philosophy, edited by Jernej Habjan and Jessica Whyte. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Montag, Warren. 2005. “‘Foucault and the Problematic of Origins’: Althusser’s Reading of Folie et déraison.” Borderlands e-journal 4, no. 2. Montag, Warren. 2013. “Althusser and Foucault: Apparatuses of Subjection.” In Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy’s Perpetual War. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Negri, Antonio. 2016. Marx and Foucault, translated by Ed Emery. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Paras, Eric. 2006. Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge. New York: Other Press. Ricardo, David. 1962. Works and Correspondence. Edited by Piero Sraffa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society. Rooney, Ellen. 1995. “Better Read Than Dead: Althusser and the Fetish of Ideology.” Yale French Studies 88: 183–200. Roussel, Raymond. 1977. How I Wrote Certain of My Books, translated by Trevor Winkfield. New York: SUN. Ryder, Andrew. 2013. “Foucault and Althusser: Epistemological Differences with Political Effects.” Foucault Studies 16: 134–53. Sawyer, Stephen W. and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, eds. 2019. Foucault, Neoliberalism, and Beyond. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield International. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shapiro, Stephen. 2019. “Foucault, Neoliberalism, Algorithmic Governmentality, and the Loss of Liberal Culture.” In Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature, edited by Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro, 43–72. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press. Young, Robert. 2017. “Rereading the Symptomatic Reading.” In The Concept in Crisis: Reading Capital Today, edited by Nick Nesbitt, 35–48. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zamora, Daniel, and Michael C. Behrent. 2016. Foucault and Neoliberalism. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity.

Hal Foster Everybody’s a Critic

H

ow did critique become a bad object when, only a few decades ago, it seemed to be the cutting edge of cultural practice? It started with objections about the hermeneutics of suspicion: Why did the critic assume that truth was always hidden and that he alone (and it usually was a he) could expose it (see Ricoeur 1970: 34)?1 And why did he suspect the worst anyway? These questions were compounded by others concerning the authority of the critic: How could he presume to judge others morally or to speak for others politically? Who did he think he was? Soon it became almost common to personify critique as mostly malevolent and slightly mad. Rather than “paranoid” readings, Eve Kosofsky Sedg wick (1997) argued, we needed “reparative” ones; rather than “iconoclash,” Bruno Latour (2004) insisted, we needed “concern and care.” This call for a swing from one Kleinian disposition to the other resonated widely. One heard less about the possibilities of critique and more about its limits: critique was seen to block other approaches to culture—above all, appreciative responses that might attract rather than alienate potential readers, students in particular. (Talk about the limits of critique followed closely on concern about “the The South Atlantic Quarterly 119:4, October 2020 doi 10.1215/00382876-8663663 © 2020 Duke University Press

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crisis of the humanities”; it was almost as if critique were partly to blame for the decline in enrollments; see Felski 2015). Yet might reparative criticism be almost a category mistake or at least a partial contradiction in terms? After all, “criticism” derives from the Greek krínein, which means to judge, to decide, to separate. And why turn to critique for repair in any case? Inadvertently that might abet the old humanist habit whereby we look to culture for redemption, a habit that, as Leo Bersani (1990) has argued, diminishes our experience to the extent that it is framed as already damaged or otherwise fallen. In short, the longing for the reparative and the redemptive might warrant a little critical suspicion in its own right. Another familiar charge is that critique operates as its own doxa. “Any student can and does denounce the bourgeois or petit-bourgeois character of such and such a form,” Roland Barthes (1977: 166–67) averred as long ago as 1971. Not only is critical consciousness not transformative per se, Jacques Rancière (2009: 46–47) has added recently, but “the exploited rarely require an explanation of the laws of exploitation.” Here, all at once, critique is deemed to be automatic, ineffective, and beside the point: everybody’s a critic, and it couldn’t matter less. According to this view, critique has become its own brand of cynicism as well as its own kind of doxa. As analyzed by Peter Sloterdijk (1988), “cynical reason” has the structure of fetishistic disavowal; for example: “I know the art museum is governed by plutocratic interests, but nevertheless I believe it is still a part of a public sphere.” And yet, as Paolo Virno (2004) has argued, such cynicism retains its moment of awareness (even as it blocks the transformation of that awareness into action). To stay with the museum, an unexpected benefit of the journalistic caricature of contemporary art as a mere expression of the luxury marketplace is the broad recognition that, for its major collectors, such art is a financial investment and a prestige object, and its gifting to the museum a tax dodge and a publicity boost. This example can be multiplied many times over. Far from irrelevant, critique is robust today, and perhaps more in the public realm than in the academic world: “everybody’s a critic” has taken on a positive valence. In fact, charged by movements from #Metoo to Black Lives Matter, critique has acquired a political salience that it has rarely enjoyed before. In the wake of activist protests against corrupt patrons such as the Sackler family, the Koch brothers, Warren Kanders at the Whitney Museum, and Larry Fink at the Museum of Modern Art, the “art washing” of tainted fortunes can no longer be ignored. (In a nice irony, at the very moment that the museum seems foreclosed as part of a public sphere, it begins to be reclaimed as such (see Massing 2019).) And though the influence of toxic philanthropy in the academic

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world is not much highlighted yet, the historical involvement of many universities in the brutal economics of chattel slavery is now generally known. Also obvious, especially after the white-supremacist march in Charlottesville in August 2017, is the resurgence of Jim Crow intimidation in the South and the inscription of racism in civic space around the United States. As a result, museums, universities, and related institutions have become pressure points for activists, who have exploited the contradictions between the public missions of such entities and the private interests that direct them, or, as one collective has put it, “between the progressive values they claim to embody— public education, civic engagement, aesthetic cultivation . . . —and the structures of power that they actually help to legitimize and reproduce” (MTL Collective and Puar 2018; see also Allais et al. 2018). And this activism is not restricted to marginal groups: shareholder and stakeholder pressure on giant corporations and media conglomerates regarding crucial issues such as immigrant protection, abortion rights, and gun control is widespread.2 Of course, critique also faces enormous obstacles. Apart from all the legal and political fixes that flagrantly favor the superrich and the Right, any control of image flow (aka spectacle) and any counter to information oversight (aka surveillance) remain out of reach for almost all of us. Technological constraints governing what becomes visible are bad enough; new ones governing what stays invisible are worst still. (These are “the limits of critique” that should concern us more than any other.) How to respond to an order in which the vast majority of images and data are produced by machines for other machines, with humans left out of the loop (think of facial-recognition programs alone). This technological setup complicates, if not invalidates, our basic ideas about mimesis: that images and information represent the world, that they are meant to be seen and understood by us, that they mean at all. As the German filmmaker Harun Farocki (2004) demonstrated, images and data have become “operational,” that is, they do not represent the world so much as they activate systems of control within it. For the American artist Trevor Paglen all our talk about the digital transformation of visual representation has distracted us from the momentous change that is the machine readability of unseen images, and all the focus on semiotic ambiguity in cultural interpretation has obscured the central fact of the algorithmic scripting of data. How might critique proceed if its usual protocols no longer have much purchase in such a regime? If power today depends largely on invisible information harvested, searched, surveilled, and acted on by corporations, governments, police departments, insurance companies, and credit agencies, how are we to track it, let alone to

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challenge it? If the fundamental stake of politics is “the distribution of the sensible” (as Rancière has it), how are we to respond to its fading away (see Paglen 2016)? In this dim light the recent insistence on affect in theoretical discourse appears as a belated protest not only against its banalization but also against its ideologization in a world governed by FAANG (aka Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google). “Literacy” is a problematic term—it tends to be exclusionary, and it sets us all up for perpetual testing and retraining—but what might count as the requisite competence in this world? A century ago modernists such as Walter Benjamin and László Moholy-Nagy defined literacy as the ability to decode a photograph. Today, the German artist Hito Steyerl (2020: 145, 14748) argues, it is the capacity to navigate “the networked space” of “the military-industrial-entertainment complex” and to detect how “reality itself is post-produced and scripted.”3 “We need to learn how to see a parallel universe composed of activations, keypoints, eigenfaces, feature transformers, classifiers, training sets, and the like,” Paglen (2016) adds, that is, to see as our embedded programs do—scanning, decoding, and connecting. Hence Steyerl (2020: 56) calls for crash courses in apophenia, or the perception of significant patterns in data, as well as in inceptionism, or the extraction of salient information from internet noise though “deep dreaming.”4 Farocki, Paglen, and Steyerl all focus on the increased control by corporations and governments, through satellite imaging and information mining, of what is given to us as real in the first place—what can be perceived, figured, known, disputed—at all scales, from the individual pixel to the vast agglomerations of big data. In different ways they point to the necessity of a discipline of agnotology, or the analysis of how it is we do not know or, better, how we are prevented from knowing (see Proctor and Schiebinger 2008). Perhaps what we need, then, is not less suspicion but more, yet of a sort that is not satisfied with embittered exposé. Not less iconoclasm but more, yet of a kind that does not exult in its own anarchistic gestures. And not fewer paranoid readings but more, yet in a way that does not devolve into solipsistic conspiracy theory. To paraphrase Philip K. Dick, the true paranoiac is not so much mad as possessed of maddening facts. Notes 1 2 3

Ricoeur used the famous phrase “the hermeneutics of suspicion” only later, in a retrospect on this text. For more on the subject see my “Post-Critical” (Foster 2015). For a brilliant account of the new terms of such activism, see Feher 2018. I discuss Farocki, Paglen, and Steyerl in What Comes After Farce? Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle (Foster 2020).

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Her neologism “inceptionism” riffs on the 2010 Christopher Nolan movie Inception about a corporate dream-thief. Andrew Cole points out to me that, even as Steyerl proposes “apophenia” in the name of critique, it can also serve the interests of post-critique, as it does in the “distant reading” advocated by Franco Moretti.

References Barthes, Roland. 1971. “Change the Object Itself.” In Image-Music-Text, translated by Stephen Heath. 1977. New York: Hill and Wang. Bersani, Leo. 1990. The Culture of Redemption. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Farocki, Harun. 2004. “Phantom Images.” Public 29. Feher, Michel. 2018. Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age. New York: Zone Books. Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foster, Hal. 2015. “Post-Critical.” In Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency. London and New York: Verso. Foster, Hal. 2020. What Comes After Farce? Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle. London and New York: Verso. Latour, Bruno. 2004. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30: 225–48. Massing, Michael. 2019. “How the Superrich Took Over the Museum World.” New York Times, December 14. MTL Collective, and Jasbir K. Puar. 2018. “Land of the Lost: MTL Collective talks with Jasbir K. Puar about Decolonization.” Artforum. https://www.artforum.com/print/201806/mtl -collective-talks-with-jasbir-k-puar-about-decolonization-75523. Paglen, Trevor. 2016. “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You).” New Inquiry, December 8. Proctor, Robert N., and Londa Schiebinger, eds. Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2009. Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Translated by Steven Cochran. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, translated by Denis Savage. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1997. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay is About You.” In Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sloterdijk, Peter. 1988. Critique of Cynical Reason. Translated by Michel Eldred. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Steyerl, Hito. 2017. Duty Free Art. London and New York: Verso. Virno, Paolo. 2004. Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Translated by Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

Anna Kornbluh Extinct Critique

That ideology critique is contentious enough to

warrant this special issue of SAQ owes in large part to Bruno Latour’s 2005 essay, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?,” published in Critical Inquiry, which is a landmark journal of cultural, aesthetic, political, and literary theory across the humanities. In a clarion call, Latour raised alarm about a practice so recurrent in contemporary theory as to be a ritual itself: namely, that behind every fact, every façade—indeed behind nature itself— lies a social construction just waiting to be uncovered by the critic. The unavowed theology of this critical habit, he argued, enabled climate denialism, because plutocrats themselves had come to invoke the constructedness of facts and broad epistemic uncertainty as justification for their lucrative lethal carbonization of the earth’s atmosphere. Out of steam, critique backs fossil fuel. Latour’s concern establishes a connection between critique and practice, academic theory and political reality, one which makes a neat homology (critique exposes social construction; Republicans and corporations find this exposure congenial). But his argument also deliberately occludes the causes of this homology, since he derides the hubris of “explanations resorting automatically to

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power, society, discourse . . . empires, capitalism” (Latour 2004: 229) and endorses in contrast “a renewed empiricism” (231). Where a materialist might say that carbon executives deny climate change because it pays, Latour’s empiricism eschews the alleged transcendence of causality, regarding instead the immanence of horizontal, distributed interaction. Heeding Latour’s call, the ensuant movement of postcritique in political theory, philosophy, and literary and cultural studies has adopted both a horizontalist ethos and empiricist episteme—but strikingly has not preserved this originating concern with climate. Nor, we might note sixteen years later, have ruling ideas changed in response to the postcritical turn. Rather, since we put down critique, climate denialism has become full-throated, full-throttle climate nihilism.1 If critique and the discourse of its exhaustion has something to do with the crisis of ecological degradation, perhaps this something can be grasped less through what critique produces in the world, and more through how the world produces critique, including the critique of critique. Such a reversal corresponds to the original procedure of critique in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The German Ideology, which instantiates materialism as regard for the environments of ideas. Surveying the “ruling ideas” in their present, Marx and Engels observe of their colleagues “It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality” (Marx and Engels 1998: 36). “Reality” they proceed to specify as the material environment that supports the conceptualization and communication of ideas, what they call the “definite social relations” that enable the “existence of living human individuals” (37). These relations involve “first . . . the organization” of individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature” (37). Critique here already importantly configures itself as ecological awareness: an inquiry into the connection of ideas to the social relations capacitating the production of human existence.2 Of course ecology is a vastly complicated interrelation of manifold agencies, but as the Marxist theorist Raymond Williams pointed out long before Latourian horizontality, the networked assemblage, object oriented ontology, and postcritical affects became ruling ideas, “complexity” must not obscure the general “intentions” of capitalism, for only if we grasp those tendencies in their distinction can we imagine and implement genuine alternative modes of production, including now, when it is too late. My title “Extinct Critique” marks this too-lateness and this materialist impulse: not merely metaphorical exhaustion but material extinction now conditions critique. The wholesale destruction of the precious environment

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of the university means there are only last critics standing; the wholesale destruction of Earth means there will soon be few humans at all. How does postcritique register or indeed perform this environment? What are the social relations of production and reproduction that materially determine postcritique? And since critique entails not only “negative” diagnoses but also affirmative projections of emancipation, what is to be affirmed after situating postcritique in relation to extinction? Eve Sedgwick’s formidable lament of paranoid reading decried most of all a lack of surprise attendant upon gotcha historicizing arguments, and pioneers in literary study like Stephen Best, Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Rita Felski eloquently conjure enchantment and immersion as alternatives to critique—but the “no future” of extinction will not be a surprise, and we will not be ironically distant from it. Most academic critics live all too acutely the degradation of their environments, even if the highest theorists have been the most insulated from labor exploitation and industrial restructuring. While the number of students going to college has increased steadily in the thirty-year period since states started dramatically slashing public funding for higher education, the percentage of students majoring in humanities subjects has plummeted. The profound recission of state funding has meant all manner of privatization of the public, administrative bloat and upward wealth transfer, precaritization of labor (75 percent of academic instruction nationwide is fulfilled by instructors other than tenure-stream faculty), and ballooning college costs. In many of the most extreme cases— Alaska, Oklahoma, Montana, North Dakota—defunding correlates to the volatility of the extractive economy, as Sheila Liming (2019) recently commented. Meanwhile the great recession, the jobless recovery, the continued privatization of public resources, and responsibilization of individual families for wellbeing has exerted vise grip pressures on the regard for the function and purpose of the university, with extreme vocationalization supplanting general education and liberal arts curricula. This backdrop of flattening contextualizes the regnant flat ontology in so many theoretical fields. The profession of criticism is being disassembled, the ecosystem for thinking is imperiled by rapidly escalating levels of cognitive-compromising carbon, and meanwhile our thought leaders rhapsodize these declinations as “weak theory” and “amateur criticism.” The trumpeting of amateurism as “a feminist alternative to the disciplinary fashioning of criticism” (Micir and Vadde 2018: 519) by modernity’s cult of expertise has unsavory parallels with the anti-expert, anti-disciplinary deskilling of university labor, as the contingent faculty of Twitter like Jacquelyn Ardam

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quickly pinpointed.3 In fecund retreat from “masterful” “suspicious” “heroic” Marxism (Best and Marcus 2009: 6, 11, 15), “surface reading” and weak theory proffer tender mercies of “the proximate, the provisional, and the probabilistic” (Saint-Amour 2018: 440). An adjacent methodological embrace of the personal sanctifies in the domain of academic literary study the very logic of the wider literary marketplace—personalization, memoir, autofiction, immediacy– and the logic of the even wider economic sphere, of new enclosures. These attenuated personal knowledge frames have deep roots in standpoint epistemology, and their consolidation in the recent past tracks oh so closely with heightened austerity. Jeff Williams (2015) has usefully umbrellaed many postcritical methods as “the new modesty”—scientization and de-interpretation, less speculation and synthesis and more use of statistics, MRIs, or other data, the supplanting of explanation by description. Such minimization of specialized knowledge protocols and a hurry to take up the frameworks of putatively more legitimate disciplines like computer science, quantitative sociology, and laboratory psychology mirrors our industrial diminishment—the structural adjustment of our profession, with its acute decommissioning of cultural and literary interpretation. Seen from this environment, postcritical praxis looks like methodological innovation as alibi for the tenured elite: so there will not be another employed generation of professional critique? We don’t need it anyway. The synergy between modesty, weakness, critique out of steam, and the ruin of the university combusts in the very specific historical situation of the post-great-recession university, but a longer arc of theoretical unbinding also tracks with the great acceleration of fossil fuels. The futurelessness and deteleology of extinction instantiate the anti-instrumental impetus of critical inquiry, from Adorno and The Postmodern Condition, Écriture Féminine, and No Future, to l’avenir of deconstruction, that which evades and disrupts all specification, mastery, or use. Theoretical critique propounds so many variations of pessimism, subtraction, and irony. The literary and aesthetic interpretative customs flowing from these philosophical interventions combine rapturous reverence for the sublime and the singular with meticulous accumulation of particularities in history and context with suspicion of grand narratives and positivized values. We are driven by a code of particularizing and concretizing, of dismantling systems, of destabilizing universals—of taking things apart. Suspicious of concepts, signifiers, and institutions, many theorists have understood their political purview as the struggle against what stands. Dissolution and dismantling are celebrated as the opposite of constituting; the phenomenally popular philosopher Giorgio Agam-

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ben (2016: 263–67) names this value “destituency” (from the Latin de + statuere—to move away from setting things up, deserting, forsaking, abandoning). Constituting is violent containment; destituting is lavish unforming. Our eminent theorists thus proclaim themselves “unbuilders,” equating building with dubious synthesis and the made form. Formlessness as aesthetic value animates anarchy as ethico-political value—but the question of critique in the time of extinction requires that at least we hear how the vitalist mantra “burn it all down” rhymes rather much with the institutional embers on our incinerating planet. Dissolutionism is the intellectual modality of an ongoing destruction of environments, both the felling of the habitable earth and the razing of the university as an ecosphere of flourishing. The retreat from analysis to phenomenological witnessing, affective response, and epistemic modesty enact as methodology the privatizations that have eroded the university and enfeebled collective action, while the wholesale repudiation of the intellectual and political value of Marxist frameworks of causality and totality has clouded the situation, including the labor conditions, in which intellectuals find themselves, since Latourianisms now proffer as political action contemplating the agency of the stone and the sylvan beatification of extinction rites. Making these erosions and becloudings matters of concern, while also turning thought instead to bulwarks and rays, is the properly dialectical answer to the question of critique today, in the midst of the first forced extinction. It is an answer all the more urgent since so many humanistic and literary theoretical and critical responses to ecocide have been taking shape as dispersive panegyrics to hypercomplexity, while the problem of oligarchic obstacles to decarbonization is tragically simple. 4 Postcritical horizontalizations—euphoric affective connections, deliquescent anarchic agencies, and dislocated capitalist causality—correlate with the ruling ideas of our time: climate nihilism and the demolition of the university. Critique does more than make such correlations though; it also offers synthetic, projective, and constructive affirmations. Note the different spatiality of this operation: the full movement of the dialectic, the negation of negation, the advancing of contradiction, sublates horizontality, offering in its place some vectors of the vertical. Dicey as this seems, speculatively pursuing this upward motion for critique can usefully dislocate the ruling horizontalism. Several insurgent figurations of the vertical can guide this speculation. First, Marx theorized freedom as creative building, and propounded many crucial norms for human flourishing throughout his critique of the capitalist

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mode of production. Second, Fredric Jameson, the avatar for Marx in most of these postcritique debates, consistently theorizes utopia, which he argues is most powerfully mediated through architecture and infrastructure, the built form and the idea of constituted space. Third, the discourses around the Green New Deal tacitly theorize an emancipatory verticalism: instrumentally, unambiguously, seizing the state power held by the virulent minority—fossil fuel executives and billionaires—and wielding that power for the majority. Let us go through these three insurgent figurations in a little more detail. Evidently it needs to be said that Marx is a positive dude. Critique is not just interrogation and subtraction and negging; it is also affirmation and composition. Even though he invented the practice of ideology critique, exposing how ideas participate in power relations, and even though his radical revisions of materialism set it up as a tool for revealing how norms and normative values uphold unequal distributions of power and wealth, his work also promotes norms and emancipations. The liberatory movement that Marx and Engels positively call for is predicated on the norm that things would be better if the regime of surplus value did not organize the production of material life itself, if the state served the immiserated and expelled rather than the larded few. At the base of this conviction that a better social formation is possible rests Marx and Engels’s definition of human beings as creative, constructive builders. Rejecting common ways of differentiating human nature from animal nature, Marx and Engels settle on the idea that whereas animals merely subsist, humans produce a mode of production: “Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization” (Marx and Engels 1998: 37). Humans are productive, making their own conditions of existence, and this essential quality of generative laboring is appropriated by the capitalist mode of production: Labor is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man mediates. . . . We understand labor in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labor-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realizes a purpose of his own. (Marx 1990: 283–84)

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The architect encapsulates the human’s constitutive constructive capacity, which differs from the bee’s in its imaginative quality. Percussing this imaginative dimension of labor, Marx (1990: 1044) pairs the figure of architect with that of the poet: “Milton produced Paradise Lost in the same way that a silkworm produces silk, as the activation of his own nature.” Labor yields existence and yields literature; the ontological character of creative constructions founds Marx’s enthusiasm for building. The intense creativity of human existence is violated by the systematic division of labor and the exploitative conditions of labor, whereby workers are denied the freedom to create multiply. Against this violation, Marx proposes the value of alternative collations. He writes, “In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic” (Marx and Engels 1998: 53). The diurnal simultaneity here sublates specialization, division, qualification, particularization, actualizing instead “the general production” and extensive space of “society” essential to creative, constructive existence. Such refusal of division notably rejects the lineations of administered, valorized temporality, favoring the spatial axis of relational sociability. Freedom flourishes in the spatial room of reordered time. The ultimate prescription is for critique itself, this creative and life-sustaining activity, that expresses the constructive drive of homo faber. This enthusiasm for literary creativity and critique as essential to human existence inspires the bold claims of Jameson’s 2016 book An American Utopia. As if in the only possible dignified response to the postcritique enterprise, Jameson published an outrageous, dialectical affirmation—he wrote a utopia!—which has become one of the very most scandalous theory texts of our present. Blending the utopian genre’s disposition toward spatial imagining with his perennial interest in architecture (including a really crucial essay, “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology”), Jameson asks what is to be built up? An American Utopia is a speculative experiment to locate the utopian potential latent in capitalism. In the storied tradition of the utopian genre, An American Utopia holds that a more collectivist society would necessarily require organized provision of goods and services; in the storied tradition of dialectics, Jameson’s utopia casts that organization as already here, now, in actually existing infrastructure of the military. A veritable social welfare paradise offering housing, education, transportation, and medical care

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across a spatial network coordinated by distinct centralized and hierarchical forces, the military surprisingly models a utopian state. From Jameson’s fascinating willingness to regard structured organization as technique rather than constraint, we can educe a new imagining of the political affordances of composition and verticalism—of making arrangements and holding them in formation. Although the politics of building have usually been reduced to the politics of containment or closure, this new imagining makes space to insist on the contrary that the built form and the constituted social can host freedom. Forms can be reformed; theory infatuated with formlessness, flow, and unmaking misses this simple fact. Built sociability— order, organization, institution, law, the state—affords support, benefits, and efficacy beyond the suppression of particularities and reifications that are so often cited in horizontalist rhetoric—and these are the integuments of concerted movements to reimagine collective life in the face of extinction. Indeed, this is how we must read the novelty of the conception of collated sovereignty advanced by the platform for the Green New Deal. Against the tide of denialism, kleptocratic nihilism, and inertia, and against as well the theoretical sacred cows of horizontalist mushrooming interpenetrations, poetic forsaking of instrumentality, and denunciations of anything falling short of the abolition of value—against these political fantasies and these academic theories, current politics offer an alternate theory. Here is a plan, developed by black scholars and indigenous activists and Bolivian leaders, championed by women, that is ready to start somewhere enormous when enormous is not enough. Naomi Klein calls it a “story of civilizational transformation” (Klein 2019: 17) which requires “reinventing the very idea of the collective, the communal, the commons, the civil, and the civic” (Klein 2014: 404) and questioning “what we value more than economic growth and corporate profits” (461). This transformation appeals to historical precedents of multilevel governmental direction of the entire society, including autonomizing the political and regulatory functions of the state from industry by ending campaign contributions, and publicizing/nationalizing fossil fuel companies to ensure their breakup. The basic theory behind these demands is that it is possible to repoliticize the economy, and while this politics often wears a communitarian/pluralist sheen, there can be no mistaking that a big deep state is its condition of possibility. Absolutely heretical to reflexively anti-statist, anti-institutionalist dissolutionists, this de facto state theory is just elementary dialectics: thinking at large scales, centrally coordinating planning, centrally providing infrastructure are affordances of the state form, which organized political power of the people can wield for their own wellbeing. Standing

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Rock and We Are Seneca Lake and Skolstrejk för Klimatet formulate a theory of the state and of the necessity for other dispensations as the affirmative correlate of the critique of carboniferous reason. How can we be out of steam and modest, horizontalist and weak, when there is such an urgency to buttress the firefight, when the environment for our thought is a desperate spur? Dialectical critique is affirmative, so here are my norms. Do critique: assess the environments for thought, and build necessary alternative environments. Commit to strengthening our institutions for critique and reflection and mediacy, precisely now when they’ve been decimated. Do the feminized service labor of making the place where we work work. Behold the university as a site of workplace struggle and as an immediate sphere in which it is possible to be effective, even on the colossal problem of the ecocide: organize to be sure your institution divests from fossil fuels, organize (and bargain fairly with) university laborers like faculty, contingent faculty, graduate students, and support staff, and then organize some more. In your teaching and writing, risk synthesis! Theory must work to build the world up. We must, in the present, make claims about causality, systematicity, and the revaluation of values, so we can make the very specific move to counter rapacious greed with rapid decarbonization. The dispersive poetics of attunement to the material world, romancing precarity, and dissolving binaries entice us to lie down. Critique and its cartography of other spaces enjoins us to stand up. Extinction rebellion leaders are eloquently calling for judgements of the good and the just. The war vet turned extinction pedagogue Roy Scranton dares us “to make meaningful choices in the shadow of our inevitable end” (Scranton 2013). The political theorist Thea Riofrancos (2019) argues, “resignation cloaked in realism is the best way to ensure the least transformative outcome.” Climate strike leader Greta Thunberg has her own building metaphor for struggle, what she calls “cathedral thinking”: “We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling” (Thunberg 2019). This kind of in medias res synthesis, this celebration of the freedom in necessity, this consecration of construction—this too is the lifeway of critique. “Critique” and “crisis,” it is surely a literary cliché to note, have a common etymological origin in the Greek krínein κρίνειν, “to decide.” The extinction crises in theory and practice, in the university and on Earth, force a decision. It is too late, our ossified intellectual habits are dying, as are we—but crisis paralysis, romantic resignation, and arrested critique guarantee the worst. Wild imaginings, big abstractions, and brassy syntheses are less bad. Weak theory is a seductive siren, postcritique a consoling modesty. Go out strong.

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Notes 1 2 3 4

Some arguments in these pages echo theses in my recent books (Kornbluh 2019a, 2019b). For a different version of this argument, see Foster 2000. See the Twitter thread here https://twitter.com/jaxwendy/status/1130937926156738562 ?s=20. For more on this contradiction between complexifying tendencies in theory and simplifying tendencies in analysis, see Malm 2017.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2016. The Use of Bodies. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Althusser, Louis. 2014. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In On the Reproduction of Capitalism. New York: Verso. Ardam, Jacquelyn. (@jaxwendy). 2019. “I’ve been watching the conversations around @MModernity’s “Weak Theory” issue unfold from the sidelines and here is my take: sure is easy to claim weakness when you have tenure or TT job. The Q of weakness looks v different from the land of the contingent.” Twitter, May 21, 4:46 p.m. twitter.com/jaxwendy/status/1130937926156738562?s=20. Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. 2009. “Surface Critique: An Introduction.” Representations 108, no. 1: 1–21. Bloch, Ernst. 1989. “Building in Empty Spaces.” In The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, translated by Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenberg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Colebrook, Claire. 2015. Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press with Michigan Publishing–University of Michigan Library. Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foster, John Bellamy. 2000. Marx’s Ecology. London: Monthly Review Press. Hayot, Eric. 2018. “The Sky Is Falling.” MLA Profession, May. https://profession.mla.org/thesky-is-falling. Klein, Naomi. 2014. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. New York: Simon and Schuster. Klein, Naomi. 2019. On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kornbluh, Anna. 2019a. Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club. London: Bloomsbury. Kornbluh, Anna. 2019b. The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1982. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1985. “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology.” In Architecture, Criticism, and Ideology, edited by Joan Ockman, 51–87. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press. Jameson, Fredric. 2016. An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army. Edited by Slavoj Žižek. New York: Verso. Latour, Bruno. 2004. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2: 225–48.

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Liming, Sheila. 2019. “My University is Dying: And soon yours will be too.” Chronicle Review, September 25. https://www-chronicle-com.proxy.cc.uic.edu/interactives/20190925-my -university-is-dying. Malm, Andreas. 2017. The Progress of this Storm. New York: Verso. Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital, Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. New York: Penguin. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1998. The German Ideology, including Theses on Feuerbach. New York: Prometheus Books. Micir, Melanie and Aarthi Vadde. 2018. “Obliterature: Toward an Amateur Criticism.” Modernism/modernity 25, no. 3: 517–49. Riofrancos, Thea. 2019. “Plan, Mood, Battlefield—Reflections on the Green New Deal.” Viewpoint Magazine, May 16. https://www.viewpointmag.com/2019/05/16/plan-mood-battle field-reflections-on-the-green-new-deal/?fbclid=IwAR1kdch2dIjC1cV0qUslSSoGtdsdA _oYOl4wAtxjwhbMZwmKuXCI5NmPV9Q. Saint-Amour, Paul K. 2018. “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism.” Modernism/modernity 25, no. 3: 437–59. Scranton, Roy. 2013. “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene.” New York Times, November 10. https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/learning-how-to-die-in-the -anthropocene. Sedgwick, Eve. 2003. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.” In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, 123–51. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thunberg, Greta. 2019. “‘You Did Not Act in Time’: Greta Thunberg’s Full Speech to MPs.” Guardian, April 23. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/23/greta -thunberg-full-speech-to-mps-you-did-not-act-in-time. Williams, Jeff. 2015. “The New Modesty in Literary Criticism.” Chronicle Review, January 5. https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-New-Modesty-in-Literary/150993. Williams, Raymond. 1973. “Base and Superstructure.” New Left Review 82, no. 1: 3–16.

Robert T. Tally Jr. Boundless Mystification

In a memorable paragraph from The Political

Unconscious, Fredric Jameson (1981: 60) observes that “Interpretation . . . always presupposes, if not a conception of the unconscious itself, then at least some mechanism of mystification or repression in terms of which it would make sense to seek a latent meaning behind a manifest one.” This rather straightforward acknowledgement alone marks Jameson as being in league with those whom Paul Ricoeur (1970: 30), in his Freud and Philosophy, had dubbed the “masters of suspicion”— that is, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—who purportedly embrace if not also figuratively embody a hermeneutics of suspicion. Jameson (1981: 60–61) goes on to recognize “the objection of the ordinary reader, when confronted with elaborate or ingenious interpretations, that the text means just what it says,” but he adds the following: Unfortunately, no society has ever been quite so mystified in quite so many ways as our own, saturated as it is with messages and information, the very vehicles of mystification (language, as Talleyrand put it, having been given us in order to conceal our thoughts). If everything were

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transparent, then no ideology would be possible, and no domination either: evidently that it not our case. But above and beyond the sheer fact of mystification, we must point to the supplementary problem involved with the study of cultural or literary texts, or in other words, of narratives: for even if discursive language were to be taken literally, there is always, and constitutively, a problem about the “meaning” of narratives as such; and the problem about the assessment and subsequent formulation of the “meaning” of this or that narrative is the hermeneutic question.

For Jameson, the very fact that narratives have meanings requires an interpretive framework or hermeneutic by which one can disclose, construct, or construe that meaning, which cannot simply be “read off” the surface of the text, for even a literal interpretation is still an interpretation. What is more, given the forces of mystification in our society, interpretation is all the more necessary to get some sense of the realities obscured by such forces. In this view, Jameson’s sense of narrative as a socially symbolic act is connected to a project of ideology critique. In recent years, this sort of approach to narrative and to social criticism has come under increasing fire, as advocates of various forms of “postcritical” criticism militate against approaches to literary or cultural studies that involve what they consider to be examples of the hermeneutics of suspicion. Rita Felski’s celebrated broadside, The Limits of Critique (2015), effectively blames Jameson for establishing the culture of critique in contemporary literary studies, as she notes that “[t]he coining of the phrase ‘political unconscious’ was a stroke of genius that launched a thousand research projects; it captures both the overwhelming force and the essential elusiveness of the cause to which works of art are ultimately tethered” (2015: 57). Felski blames Jameson and his followers for being insufficiently “respectful, even reverential, in tone” (57), among other things, and argues for a postcritical form of reading that focuses less on interpretation and more on description, and more specifically, less on demystification, more on affirmation, passion, and inspiration (187). Felski’s opposition to “critique” and call for a postcritical approach to literature joins a long and growing line of polemical proposals by critics who aim to combat the hermeneutics of suspicion in literary studies. Although I would not want to conflate them, as each has its own distinctive characteristics, Felski (2015: 8) declares that she joins “a growing groundswell of voices” contributing to a postcritical “ethos,” and in a footnote she duly names Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s discussion of paranoid versus reparative reading, Toril Moi’s recent embrace of ordinary language philosophy, Stephen Best and

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Sharon Marcus’s call for “surface reading,” as well as Marcus’s later developed term “just reading,” Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, and most importantly Bruno Latour’s insistence that critique has “run out of steam” (Felski 2015: 195–96). In a 2015 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jeffrey J. Williams referred to such approaches as examples of “the new modesty in literary criticism”: “Literary critics have become more subdued, adopting methods with less grand speculation, more empirical study, and more use of statistics or other data. They aim to read, describe, and mine data rather than make ‘interventions’ of world-historical importance” (2015). However, there is nothing modest in the stridency with which these critics oppose what Best and Marcus call “symptomatic reading” and what Felski calls “critique.” Indeed, their hubris in taking on what they imagine to be a dominant, widespread, and well-nigh unassailable culture of critique in academic literary studies is remarkable. As becomes clear to anyone reading carefully, the objection to the hermeneutics of suspicion in literary studies is part of a larger attack on theory, and while various types of antitheory have circulated for as long as theory itself has, this particular movement seems to feature a generational backlash. As Best and Marcus state directly in their “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” “now we do things a bit differently than they did back then” (2009: 2). They make clear to whom the “they” refers as well, since Jameson is specifically named as the representative of that older, and by implication, less valid form of reading (Jameson was born in 1934, and Best and Marcus each in the mid-1960s). Undoubtedly, part of the energy animating the postcritical turn involves this sense of revolutionary, not to say Oedipal, overturning of the old guard by the new. If this is the case, then a historical reading of the phenomenon might reveal the extent to which ideological processes have become all the more powerful, refined, and complex in our era than in the one in which those older, suspicious minds were formed. After all, one of the features that these variously termed postcritical approaches share is a sense that ideological mystification is no longer something to be worried about, which may be a sure sign that ideology is operating in full force. Indeed, the proponents of the postcritical oppose the idea of ideology critique, and this opposition is, in turn, a thinly veiled—or, perhaps, not so thinly veiled—attack on Marxism. In the United States, at least, there was far more “symptomatic reading” coming from non-Marxist perspectives, such as psychoanalytic criticism, as well as feminist criticism and critical race studies, to name a few. And yet, it is certainly no accident that Jameson, widely recognized as America’s leading Marxist literary critic from at least

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the early 1980s on, is the primary target of the postcritical criticisms, and that The Political Unconscious is set up as the fons et origo of contemporary “symptomatic reading.” As Carolyn Lesjak points out in “Reading Dialectically,” the public events at which “surface reading” was introduced prior to publication included a 2006 seminar of the American Comparative Literature Association, “Symptomatic Reading and Its Discontents,” on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Political Unconscious and “The Way We Read Now: Symptomatic Reading and Its Aftermaths” conference in New York in 2008, at which Jameson himself was the keynote speaker; in retrospect, Jameson’s invitation to participate in that event can only be viewed as a meticulously organized trap (see Lesjak 2013: 269 n63). Twentyfive years after apparently laying the foundations for what was now considered the wrong way of reading, Jameson and The Political Unconscious were set up as the enemy of contemporary critical practice, and Jamesonian ideology critique—never mind its dialectical insistence on finding the good alongside the bad in any given text—was held up as that which ails literary studies in the twenty-first century. Bruce Robbins has observed that the rhetorical effect of the phrase “the way we read now” already situates the “surface reading” partisans on the side of what must in advance be understood as right and good, for, like the phrase in Latour’s title (“Has Critique Run Out of Steam?”), “it assumes that which it would seem obliged to establish. And what it assumes, more precisely, is that history has confirmed the author’s argument” (Robbins 2017: 373). Ideology critique, like the Marxist theory and criticism behind it, is utterly passé from this perspective. As if to underscore that very point, Best and Marcus quote Jameson’s line about ideology and domination which I quoted at the beginning of this essay, and then assert—what even then seemed bizarre, and now seems almost mad—that, because images like those of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, or of President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” media event are readily available on the internet or television for all to see, interpretation is no longer necessary, for the political domination and state-sponsored falsehoods are visible on the surface of everything. As if those very images were not used for ideological ends! As if everyone “read” their meaning off their surfaces in exactly the same way! The naivete of such a statement in 2009 was shocking, but surely it is unforgivable in the era of “fake news” and the like. The irony is that this particular variety of antitheory and postcritique should become so pervasive and popular just when it did. For readers like Felski, Best, and Marcus, among others, ideology critique is not only old-fashioned, it seems, but objectionable in its very world-

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view, operating as it does through a hermeneutics of suspicion that seeks ever to uncover hidden—sometimes intentionally hidden—meanings. It is “paranoid,” a term used to better effect by Sedgwick, and applied by Best and Marcus to Jameson, to believe that there are meanings other than the most obviously visible. In the age of Bush and Cheney (and Trump too?), all domination is so obvious that it is a waste of time to interpret it. Or even to oppose it, apparently. In such a world, the surface reader’s conviction that this is all there is to see far too quickly becomes the beat cop’s dismissive “Nothing to see here, folks!” And yet it seems like awfully bad timing to abandon critique. If Jameson in 1981 was thinking of Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle,” of consumer culture, multinational capitalism, and of postmodernity more generally, then how much more suspicious ought we to be in our time of the internet’s world wide web of fake news, sponsored journalistic content, social media scandals, and complex yet stark ideological divides? It is perhaps a sign of how thoroughly the hermeneutics of suspicion has pervaded my spirit that I become instantly skeptical when told that things are “just” so. Much as we may disdain the unnecessarily complicated, the overly simplified seems far more dangerous. Even more than the deliberate attempts to mislead with sponsored content in our news sources, compromised journalistic ethics, and bald-faced lies that now seem to permeate public discourse today, the honest belief, held by many, that there is little beyond the ordinary appearance of things is altogether pernicious. If anything, the boundless mystifications of our era call for more hermeneutics and more suspicion. Appeals to the plain, the simple, and the ordinary cannot help but serve the forces of mystification and hence, the status quo, if only as an unintended consequence. I agree with Phillip Wegner (2020: 9) that “theory represents a call to read more widely and expansively,” in which case these more antitheoretical approaches are not only anti-interpretation, but anti-reading, inasmuch as they seek to limit in advance the possible meanings to be produced. A number of critics have pointed out how the rise of these sort of postcritical approaches has coincided—perhaps not just coincidentally—with the predominance of neoliberalism in the United States and elsewhere, and statements like Best and Marcus’s denying the existence of ideology do sound far more like extensions of the political dogmas of Thatcherism and Reaganism than they do new forms of scholarly engagement. Understandably, the proponents of surface reading, just reading, thin description, postcritique, and so on are wary of being labeled quietist, apolitical, or conservative, but that’s in part because their arguments, on their surface, so clearly

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support either the status quo of the neoliberal state or the status quo ante of some more reactionary formation (such as the call for the return to ethics or aesthetics of one type or another). Felski asserts that “questioning critique is not a shrug of defeat or a hapless capitulation to conservative forces,” but that “it is motivated by a desire to articulate a positive vision for humanistic thought in the face of growing skepticism about its value” (2015: 186). It is perplexing that Felski does not realize that the latter feeds the former, that is, that articulating this positive vision serves as a capitulation to conservative forces, which are after all the forces demanding that the humanities justify themselves in precisely those terms. I can only imagine that Felski has become so besotted with her characterization of the critic as the pompous, arrogant, relentlessly negative avatar of “critiquiness,” “an unmistakable blend of suspicion, self-confidence, and indignation” (187–88), that she feels that simply presenting a more likable stereotype of the English professor to the world will suddenly cause governors, state legislators, and Congress to allocate billions of dollars in funding for the humanities, as if publishing a number of less overtly political readings of this or that nineteenth-century novel in New Literary History will restore tenure-track positions to literature departments across the country (see Tally 2019). (By the way, Felski’s characterization of the critique-focused critic could not be more unlike Jameson himself, one of the most generous and careful readers around, who has always insisted that all texts have value and who finds utopian elements in even the most right-wing authors, such as Balzac or Wyndham Lewis.) Regardless of her intent, Felski’s project and others like it play right into the hands of the conservative political forces that have besieged higher education for the last forty years or more. It may well be that the postcritical turn in literary studies is itself a symptom of the broader neoliberalism in the society as a whole. Crystal Bartolovich has suggested, for example, that “surface-reader appeals to the ‘text itself’ not only mark a pointed withdrawal from politics and theory but also—while humanities departments are contracting—internalize the economic imperative to scale back when we should be asserting the importance of humanistic inquiry to the most pressing problems facing our planet” (2013: 116). Lesjak sounds a similar note when observing “the increasingly conservative mood within literary criticism and its key theoretical gestures,” going on to say that “[t]he overarching message seems to be: scale back, pare down, small aims met are better than grand ones unrealized, reclaim our disciplinary territory and hold on to it” (2013: 37). Moreover, Lesjak sees this as not only a politically questionable strategy, but as one that will certainly

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prove to be a failure in practice: if market demands require us to abandon theory and “return to our roots” in more simple forms of literary reading, then the argument goes, “we can perhaps save our jobs as humanities professors by (cynically) complying with the instrumentalization of knowledge and thought driving the very institutional and university policies that see the humanities as obsolete. . . . All this is done in the name of getting back to basics, while seemingly forgetting that we have been there before and that it is no longer the place it used to be, if it ever was that place” (37). The visions of austerity, modesty, and limited range fit well within an ideological system that imagines markets as operating efficiently, almost without the need for human actors or concerted efforts. It is not a great leap from allowing the texts to speak for themselves to leaving the market free to do its thing. Robbins has identified another aspect of the postcritical approach’s fundamentally neoliberal character. In eschewing politically charged approaches to the study of literature, including critique itself, such postcritical methods mirror the outwardly apolitical character of neoliberalism. As Robbins explains, “neoliberalism depoliticizes: It abandons to the silent authority of the market questions that had earlier been seen as requiring collective decision-making, which is to say matters of politics” (2019). In the specific case of academe, Robbins asserts, “[t]he ‘new modesty’ could never have gotten the attention it has if neoliberalism had not prepared the ground for it by undermining public funding for higher education, thereby ravaging the job market and demoralizing the job market’s youngest victims, even the many today who face their situation and its necessarily more modest expectations with a cheerful, clear-eyed fatalism” (2019). Neoliberal policies thus paved the way for postcritical literary studies, which in turn recapitulates the essential message of neoliberalism by allowing what had otherwise been understood to be political—works of literature and culture themselves, as well as the criticism used to help make sense of the ways those works help make sense of our world—to seem largely devoid of, or set apart from politics. There is yet another respect with which the postcritical forms of literary criticism resembles and finds itself in league with neoliberal practices. As Robbins notes, “Postcritique, were it ever to be widely embraced, seems likely to produce a criticism that is closer to fandom. In lieu of critically examining literature or the culture it is a part of, postcritique encourages a rhetoric of helpful and largely positive advice to the would-be consumer” (2019). Appreciation of the text or author has always been an element of both teaching and research in academic literary studies, of course, but what has traditionally distinguished academic study from the more casual forms to be

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found in fan forums or reading groups is precisely the degree to which academic pedagogy and scholarship remains critical. To abandon critique will not restore university-level literary studies to some prelapsarian idyll about a time before critical theory or poststructuralism invaded English departments, but rather will emphasis the degree to which academic expertise of any kind is no longer necessary for marketing and selling the product. In fact, although Robbins does not go this far, it seems to me that the advocates of surface reading, postcritique, or other such anti-interpretive approaches, perhaps unconsciously, have adopted a position enthusiastically taken by the managerial class of the neoliberal university: namely that students, as well as other readers, are fundamentally customers. As the consumerist ethos of postmodern fandom makes all too clear, the customer might relish limited forms of criticism, and often there’s immense joy to be found in critically picking apart one’s favorites texts, as any visit to a Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter discussion group will prove almost instantly. But for the most part, those sorts of criticisms will function almost like surface readings, inasmuch as they must leave uncriticized the very conditions for the possibility or mode of production of the works under consideration. At the very least, the fandom itself—along with ticket sales, merchandizing, and other branding possibilities—ensures that the ultimate beneficiaries of such “criticism” are the media conglomerates behind them. In Adorno and Horkheimer’s era, what they called “the culture industry” appeared as a monumentally vast mystification machine, but our own era puts the old studio system to shame when it comes to manipulating the tastes and the spending habits of the public, both in the Americas and elsewhere around the world. The entertainment industry now is branded in such a way that fans cheer as much for the corporations as they do for their favorite characters. And, as Gerry Canavan has recently pointed out, there are fewer and fewer players in that sport; of the twenty highest grossing Hollywood films in the past decade, all were sequels or part of a franchise, and eighteen were produced by a single monstrous corporate entity, The Walt Disney Company, which now controls Lucasfilm, Pixar, and Marvel Studios (see Canavan 2019). In a field in which postcritical commentary replaces interpretation and critique, fandom is likely to become more like the normal way to examine cultural artifacts like films or novels, in which case academic literary criticism may suffer the fate of serious cultural journalism in an era of sponsored content and infomercials, which is to say, it will still exist, but it will become much harder to find.

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To return to the Jameson quotation with which I began, critical interpretation and analysis is needed precisely because “no society has ever been quite so mystified in quite so many ways as our own, saturated as it is with messages and information, the very vehicles of mystification,” and this is far truer today than it was in 1981 when The Political Unconscious was published, and the various forms of literary criticism aiming to counter or avoid the hermeneutics of suspicion are both symptoms of and contributors to that pervasive mystification. In his final chapter, Jameson insisted upon what he referred to as “the dialectic of ideology and utopia,” which for him meant that while all texts are necessarily and inescapably ideological (hence, “negative” in the parlance of postcritique), they are also embodiments of a legitimately utopian impulse (hence “positive”) in the form of some kind of class consciousness. In Jameson’s words, “any Marxist analysis of culture . . . can no longer be content with its demystifying vocation to unmask and to demonstrate the ways in which a cultural artifact fulfills a specific ideological mission,” but must also seek “to project its simultaneously Utopian power as the symbolic affirmation of a specific historical and class form of collective unity” (1981: 291). These are not two alternative perspectives, Jameson avers, but rather a unified perspective in which both are always and already present at the same time. Jameson is here talking about the power of Marxist literary criticism, with its profoundly sensitive form of ideology critique, to inform our understanding of narratives and their relationship to our social, political, and historical experience more broadly, but this is also the crux of Marxism itself, which requires the ability to critically interpret the world if there is any hope of changing it. As Jameson (2009: 416) explained in Valences of the Dialectic, A Marxist politics is a Utopian project or program for transforming the world, and replacing a capitalist mode of production with a radically different one. But it is also a conception of historical dynamics in which it is posited that the whole new world is also objectively in emergence all around us, without our necessarily at once perceiving it; so that alongside our conscious praxis and our strategies for producing change, we may also take a more receptive and interpretive stance in which, with the proper instruments and registering apparatus, we may detect the allegorical stirrings of a different state of things, the imperceptible and even immemorial ripenings of the seeds of time, the subliminal and subcutaneous eruptions of whole new forms of life and social relations.

Interpretation, in literary studies more broadly, certainly should not stop at finding “the” single, discrete “Truth” (with-a-capital-T), a Grail unworthy of

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the quest even if it existed. But a robust critical hermeneutic is needed to make sense of the present, situating it in relation to the historical past no longer within our grasp, which in turn is a prerequisite for any meaningful change in our futures, even if what’s at stake is only the institutional future of higher education and not our collective future within a mode of production whose aim is to destroy us and the Earth in short order. At least when it comes to the more modest practice of reading literature, the results would be not only “truer” in that ironic, Nietzschean sense, but also more interesting. And therein lies the ultimate sin of the postcritical approach or the surface reading or whatever: in their boundless mystification they are undoubtedly making our literature, as well as our lives, a good deal less interesting and arguably less safe. References Bartolovich, Crystal. 2013. “Humanities of Scale: Marxism, Surface Reading—and Milton.” PMLA 127, no. 1: 115–21. Best, Stephen and Sharon Marcus. 2009. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108: 1–21. Canavan, Gerry. 2019. “Disney’s Endgame: How the Franchise Came to Rule Cinema.” Frieze, December 6. https://frieze.com/article/disneys-endgame-how-franchise-came-rule -cinema. Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 2009. Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso. Lesjak, Carolyn. 2013. “Reading Dialectically.” Criticism 55, no. 2: 233–77. Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, translated by Denis Savage. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Robbins, Bruce. 2017. “Not So Well Attached.” PMLA 132, no. 2: 371–76. Robbins, Bruce. 2019. “Critical Correctness.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 12. https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Neoliberal-Neutering-of/245874. Tally, Robert T. Jr. 2019. “Critique Unlimited.” In What’s Wrong with Antitheory?, edited by Jeffrey Di Leo, 115–33. London: Bloomsbury. Wegner, Phillip E. 2020. Invoking Hope: Theory and Utopia in Dark Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Williams, Jeffrey J. 2015. “The New Modesty in Literary Criticism.” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 5. http:www.chronicle.com/ article/The-New-Modesty-in-Literary/150993.

Bruce Robbins Single? Great? Collective?: On Allegory and Ideology

My title refers to a once-famous passage in

Fredric Jameson’s 1981 book The Political Unconscious. Jameson (1981: 19) is talking about the essential mystery of the cultural past, which, like Tiresias drinking the blood, is momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long-forgotten message in surroundings utterly alien to it. This mystery can be reenacted only if the human adventure is one; only thus . . . can we glimpse the vital claims upon us of such long-dead issues as the seasonal alternation of the economy of a primitive tribe, the passionate disputes about the nature of the Trinity, the conflicting models of the polis or the universal Empire, or, apparently closer to us in time, the dusty parliamentary and journalistic polemics of the nineteenth-century nation-states. These matters can recover their original urgency for us only if they are retold within the unity of a single great collective story.

Jameson goes on to describe the world’s single great collective story as “the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity” (19). I imagine that formulation will raise hackles, assuming there are any hackles not The South Atlantic Quarterly 119:4, October 2020 doi 10.1215/00382876-8663699 © 2020 Duke University Press

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already raised by the idea of the “human adventure” as “one”—not just a unifying story of emancipation and/or enlightenment, the meta-narratives that Lyotard had just declared over and done with, but any story of humanity taken to be single and collective. The question marks I’ve added are intended less to indicate my own doubts, though I have some, and more to suggest that this idea is also not self-evident to Jameson himself. Single and collective are provocative words, given the general assumption that, as Lisa Lowe (2010: 45) puts it, “differences of nation, language, religion, gender, race, and class” make it absurd to imagine an “individual moving in a linear fashion through a single, stable social totality.” But I will start instead with “great,” which may actually be the most interesting of the three. As the reference to Tiresias in the underworld suggests, The Political Unconscious assumes that the “long-dead issues” of the cultural past are, in fact, dead. Otherwise they would not need to be re-animated. But their deadness is not the result of mere forgetfulness. I take it as a roundabout way of acknowledging, at least as a fear, and perhaps as more than a fear, the possibility that the past is not alive for us politically—that the past as seen from the present is fundamentally amoral. To put this another way, it’s the possibility that the passage of time has an inexorably subversive effect on that taking of sides without which a political view of the human adventure seems less plausible. Taking sides for something and against something is the fundamental gesture of politics. Does this gesture apply to the cultural past? When Lévi-Strauss launches a frontal assault on Sartre in chapter nine of La Pensée sauvage in 1962, his point is the absurdity of thinking, as Sartre does, that history is a play in which, at any given moment, the modern spectator can and must choose a side. Jameson refers to La Pensée sauvage in his new book, Allegory and Ideology, but he does not confront Lévi-Strauss’s critique. Jameson’s writing shows over and over again a dramatic ambivalence as to whether taking sides is politically necessary or, on the contrary, whether the impulse to take sides is an undialectical concession to a childishly unhistorical Kantian moralism. Jameson’s fascination with the so-called “Greimas square,” which is much in evidence in the new book, can perhaps be best explained in this context: starting out with a stark binary of opposites, good and evil being the paradigm, the Greimas square generates further, complicating alternatives, showing that the initial situation can never be reduced to the simplicities of good and evil or any comparable binary. Hence taking sides comes to look like a kind of category mistake. One might imagine, thinking of the sentence about wresting a realm of freedom from a realm of necessity, that the truth of all these lost issues and

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conflicts was in fact a desire on the part of some for greater freedom and a willingness or eagerness on the part of others to deny them that freedom. But Jameson’s “happy ending” story is haunted by another, much darker vision, one in which, despite the incalculable violence and suffering involved, perhaps no good aims were served, so the taking of sides made no sense—a vision where all the efforts and sacrifices were for nothing, or nothing that now makes those sacrifices seem worth making, where what we call “great” is great, like the conquests of Alexander, which seem to have left something like 500,000 people dead, conquests of which we do not approve now and would not or should not have approved then. From this perspective, Jameson seems to share with Perry Anderson a wariness about provoking activism in causes that will later turn out not to have been politically coherent or worth the effort, even if people could successfully be moved to shed blood over them, including their own. To say that what we need is a “single great collective story,” in other words, is perhaps to say that the single collective story would have to be filled with greatness in the darkly amoral, Alexander-the-Great sense of greatness, a sense from which approval is often or mainly missing. That is, it would have to build using chaotic and even nihilistic materials that are determined by another sort of “difference,” materials that most often resist any assimilation to the struggle for freedom, that defy any moral or political identification that would lift them out of the realm of necessity. From the point of view of changing the world, salvaging the greatness of the cultural past might appear quite ancillary. Those familiar with Marxist traditions of criticism will recognize in Jameson’s concern for the cultural past his longstanding fidelity to the Lukácsian line, which has its own peculiar commitment to the past. As opposed to the “make it new” literary activism of a Brecht, Lukács of course puts his faith in history. One might open up some space between Jameson and Lukács by asking whether he too has faith, or by asking whether faith or belief as we understand them are things we can do without. Lukács believed in capital R Revolution, just as Brecht believed in action—believed, presumably, that action was not just a good in itself, but was or could be politically coherent. That too is a belief. On the Lukács/Jameson side, perhaps one should say the belief is that the world has been changed, even if one is not entirely sure that it has been changed in a politically desirable or coherent way. That belief would not need History with a capital H, meaning confidence in Revolution. What it would need is compulsive, repeated inspections of the record of the past in order to verify its always somewhat doubted coherence. You would look to the record of the past in order to decide whether or not history is all actions, some of them

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“great” actions, but actions without coherence—to verify whether history has moved forward, or just moved. The second chapter of Allegory and Ideology, which deals with the history of the emotions, starts with a long, mysterious description of a laboratory, a laboratory that turns into a Plato-like parable not so much about knowledge itself as about knowledge of history: It is a vast and ill-lit basement, intersected by pipes of all sizes, of various materials, in various states of deterioration, without obvious passageways and obstructed by tanks and storage containers of all sizes, each one of which, pipes and tanks alike, sporting dials and glass panels of equal variety whose registers, clocks, meters, thermometric pressure gauges, numerical scales, quadrants, warning lights, and calibrations are in constant surveillance by the innumerable historians in their white coats and checkboards, jostling one another as they jockey for a look or a sneer at their neighbors. (Jameson 2019: 49)

The passage is not finished, but I pause here: if it is “historians” who are watching over all these tanks and storage containers and so on, then the subject would seem to be, again, the “single great collective story,” though presented from a different angle. Here history is inspected from the viewpoint of the present, by looking at those inspectors who are inspecting it. The implication is, I think, that the differences that might threaten to dissolve the great collective story’s singleness may or may not be a fact about history itself; what is on display is differences in how we examine history: the different kinds of measurement, the different materials measured, and the rivalry between the measurers, who look or “sneer” competitively at their neighbors. Perhaps the point is that if we can mock differences of present perspective, we will have less of a problem (or appear to have less of a problem?) with differences that are, so to speak, really there, whatever the perspective on them. The passage continues without a break: No one knows how many kinds of measurements are in play here, nor even the antiquity of some of the devices, each of which registers the variable rates of different indicators, such as water pressure, temperature, instability, consumption, luxury goods, life expectancy, annual film production, salinity, ideology, average weight, average heat, church attendance, guns per family, and the rate of extinction of species. (49)

Putting salinity next to ideology is rather a nice move: you think at first that Jameson is first playing up and then breaking the materialism of the metaphor’s “laboratory” frame (“water pressure,” “temperature,” and so on), and

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then you remember that “salinity” may be an indicator of the imminent “extinction of species,” hence very much on the same plane after all as ideology and guns per family. Climate change, which has given a boost in plausibility to the singleness and collectiveness of our collective story, has also given a boost to the materialism on which the singleness side depends for its major support. In the next paragraph, Jameson comments, in a mode that will be familiar to his readers, that none of these instruments registers History directly, of course; it exists somewhere outside this basement or laboratory, and all the dials seem to record it in one way or another. You could certainly call it an absent cause (or an untotalizable totality) if you think it exists; but no one has ever seen anything but the gauges and their needles, the numbers and their rise and fall, which vary wildly and require separate monitors. Despite this, there persist the occasional joint cooperative efforts along with the most unsubstantiated generalizations and a tacit conviction if not a mutual agreement that there must be something or other out there. (49–50)

Much depends here on how you read Jameson’s tone, itself known to defy even very sensitive instruments. If you think he is simply being sarcastic, you may not register much if any variation from the 1981 passage about the “single great collective story.” On the other hand, those who are racing “frantically back and forth to invent a master statistic that might encompass all these random findings” do not sound like avatars of the single great collective story by which Jameson would happily choose to be represented. In this tongue-in-cheek version of Plato’s Cave, the conclusion that “there must be something or other out there” does not inspire confidence in the sort of achievable unity of past and present that Jameson had seemed to be claiming four decades ago. There are various other places in Allegory and Ideology where Jameson seems to sound a retreat from the “single great collective story.” For example: “In an age in which heterogeneity and difference are the watchwords, unity and unification are suspect operations, as they may well deserve to be; but for that very reason they deserve to be acknowledged as categories in their own right, which also exercise the attraction of a certain security and domestication” (40). This sentence has not one but two vacillations: first, from unity being suspect to unity needing to be acknowledged, and then from unity needing to be acknowledged to unity’s attractiveness, in terms of “security and domestication.” Security and domestication do not sound like left-wing virtues. But maybe they are, dialectically considered. The next

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move is to say that “unification” reifies, turning processes into objects. Speaking at his most dialectical, but also in the name of a certain common sense, Jameson argues that turning processes into objects is not just a good thing (as it is in Hegel), it’s essential. The chapter on the emotions, where he talks about the birth of self-consciousness, is quite Hegelian in this sense: to have or to be a self at all, he argues there, requires seeing oneself as an object, as an Other, in that sense as reified, and being able to scrutinize oneself accordingly. Though he flirts with the nominalist or “X is a construct” idea that the real history of the emotions is the history of their naming, his most reliable commitment is to a Hegelian-Marxist version of constructivism that sees objectification as a historical accomplishment and sees History as something like the sum total of these objectifications, reified activity pushing forward in the midst of prior reifications. In other words, reification is essential to progress, a word that Jameson refuses to disavow. He is willing to sound quite impious, by the standards of the contemporary left, in his defense of progress. He warns, for example, that Benjamin’s now canonical “denunciation of ‘progress’ (whether bourgeois or social democratic) [has] become a crippling limitation on some properly constructivist socialism” (37). Constructivism, whether qualified as “socialist” or not, is the word Jameson seems to have settled on, at least provisionally, to represent this position. It’s a position somewhere between vulgar Marxist materialism, on the one hand, and on the other the various structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers he has managed over the years to assimilate or at least engage with—call it his postmodern side. If the first position asserts confidently that the arc of history bends toward justice, the second translates into common sense as “everything is narrative,” the (unavowable) assumption being that, the end of history being unknowable, there is an infinity of possible narratives and that we are free to choose among them. That can’t be what Jameson thinks. But this version of constructivism—call it “X is a construct”—is close enough to what Jameson thinks (and much closer to what the general reader thinks than “the single great collective story”) to be worth worrying over. Allegory and Ideology is announced as the second volume in the now six-volume project entitled “The Poetics of Social Forms.” The only volume that remains unwritten is the first one, which is supposed to be on narrative. I can see why the volume on narrative would be the one left for last. That’s where Jameson would need to decide once and for all where he stands on “everything is narrative.” But that’s arguably what he’s trying to do, in the present volume, by turning back to the unfashionable subject of ideology. In

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the general disciplinary conversation, narrative is what has replaced ideology. It’s as if, embarrassed by not having a confident handle on the “truth” we feel we would need in order to speak of ideology as “false consciousness,” we have allowed “everything is narrative” to substitute for “everything is ideology,” thereby evading the truth claim. But how can anyone believe that substitution works? You still have to account for why some narratives seem better or worse than others. Are we supposed to think that what substitutes for the authority of truth is the narrative’s size, on the principle that smaller is better? Are big meta-narratives off-limits while smaller narratives are fine, even if the small ones assume or assert the existence of large collectivities, as long as the small narratives are plural? Don’t all narratives, of whatever size, generalize and (to cite Hayden White) moralize? You can see the stakes of Jameson’s longtime dialogue with White when he argues that allegory is a model of dialectics in that it preserves what it allegorizes. “So even a reading of Christian allegory will seek to preserve the substance of the original or literal text” (22). An allegorical reading of a text will not charge that a literal reading is false, but only that it omits the text’s “prophetic dimension,” hence sinking back into what Jameson calls “mere chronicle” (22). For White, as readers of his classic “Value of Narrativity” essay will remember, chronicle is preferable to what we think of as history, since it does not offer the illusion of a resolution to the events recounted. And annals—no resolution, but also no subject around which the events are organized—was even truer to reality than chronicle. In naming the “prophetic dimension” as something that should be restored to history proper, something without which “mere chronicle” is impoverished, Jameson may not be doing his own case any favors. In the reading of White that I will not do more than allude to here, I would take him to represent the “everything is narrative” position at its strongest and would argue that the choice of a historical narrative, which White in Metahistory presents as free choice, a matter of ungrounded and ungroundable existential commitments, is in fact determined, even for White himself— determined by history itself, which is what White seems to assume will always define what is and is not an acceptable narrative for any given society. In this sense, I think White is closer to Jameson than he ever wanted to admit. Jameson reaches for the term “ideology” in the new book in order to suggest that narrative, which for him is ideology, is materially constrained. This means that we are constrained in choosing which narrative we existentially prefer, and it also means that narrative itself is constrained in its form. This constructivism differs from “everything is narrative”: its assumption is

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that narrative, which is a product of human activity, is constrained in the same way that all human activity is constrained. Thus, to call something a narrative is not to celebrate its unique existential or quasi-aesthetic freedom, and to call something ideology is not to denigrate its lack of such freedom. We are back in the realm of Marxist orthodoxy—making history, but not under circumstances of our own choosing. The difference is that Jameson is here presenting our entanglement in ideology or unfreedom with a certain exuberance and even delight, as if what mattered most about unfreedom was the perverse guarantee it offers that we are truly and genuinely connected to the single great collective story. Jameson’s gestures toward a materialist meta-history, which would spell out the zones and vectors of unfreedom, are few and easy to neglect in this book, but his history of the emotions helpfully goes back to just those “conflicting models of the polis and the universal Empire” that he had mentioned in the “single great collective story” passage almost forty years earlier. His point is that the modern system of the emotions is born, along with modern self-consciousness, in the transition from the Greek city-state to a Christianizing Roman Empire. Christianity, universalizing itself within the Empire, is something like a mode of imperial surveillance, demanding that otherness be internalized. As the Greek virtues are paired with vices (anger, for Aristotle, had no binary opposite), the subjects of Empire bend to the imperative of self-scrutiny. In making this case, Jameson claims he is showing “the constitutive relationship between the system of emotions and the social formation itself ” (70). Roman imperialism seems of course an especially alienating context in which to place the history of the emotions. History here does not take the obvious form of a struggle between freedom and necessity. On the other hand, this episode does look like a moment in which Jameson has contrived to get intentions, and even good intentions, into his story. Quietly polemicizing against Nietzsche and Foucault, he has done a make-over of their militantly Greek-positive version of the Greek-to-Christian transition, and has done so precisely to credit early Christianity with good intentions—specifically, with the intention to liberate those it was converting, who were also those the Empire was conquering. For Jameson, the same historical context, the moment when early Christianity was trying to universalize itself, absorbing into itself the beliefs of the Hebrews, the Romans, and other groups within the Roman Empire, serves as the key explanatory context both for the birth of the emotions and for the birth of the patristic fourfold scheme of allegorical interpretation that was laid out in the Political Unconscious. The title of the book, again, is Alle-

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gory and Ideology, and one is naturally curious about why the champion of a “single great collective story” has such insistent recourse to allegory. The answer here is that allegory is a way of dealing, within an empire, with “radical cultural differences as it seeks to reconcile Judaic, Roman, and many other mentalities” (2019: 71). In other words, it is imperial ideology. It is also a means of preserving the past. To look at history and find a great deal of allegory, as this book does, is to find in history, amidst all the destruction, both an impulse to preserve and a large quantity of successful preservation. Preserving is a key thing that allegory does. Preserving differences. Allegory is a tool for retaining difference—the difference of other cultures, but also the difference of the past—but retaining difference without making difference sacred. The charge that Jameson deals with difference by absorbing it into his own larger historical scheme—a charge one hears with some frequency— could also be seen as the assertion that if difference is not treated as sacred, there has necessarily been a violation of it. A hostile critic might of course conclude that Jameson is offering up his own allegorical method as an identification with Empire. But how grave a charge would that be? After all, why should one be surprised, dialectically speaking, either that the capacity to envision world history as a single great collective story has depended on the brutal and expansive power unleashed by imperialism or, on the other hand, that the “greatness” of this vision—a vision now available of course from the center of American Empire—can be manhandled or refunctioned so as to wring from this terrible spectacle as much reason for hope as possible? So: a single great collective story? We can’t say because we don’t know the ending. You don’t need me to tell you that the future is unknowable. But there is no reason to rule out the possibility that a collection of intentional acts, even acts with mostly unintended consequences, may turn out eventually to embody a collective intentionality, especially if they are the acts of a democratically expanding cast of actors. This is not a philosophical question to be decided by theoretical deduction. It is a historical question to be engaged with in time. To the extent that it can be settled, and I don’t know what extent that is, it will have to be settled as much by looking backwards at the cultural past as by acting forwards to clean up the mess we are presently in. References Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 2019. Allegory and Ideology. London: Verso.

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Lowe, Lisa. 2010. “Metaphors of Globalization.” In Interdisciplinarity and Social Justice: Revisioning Academic Accountability, edited by Joe Parker, Ranu Samantrai, and Mary Romero, 37–62. New York: SUNY Press. White, Hayden. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. White, Hayden. 1980. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1: 5–27.

Alexander R. Galloway Meditations on Last Philosophy

What folly to believe that the world is thinkable.

Such is the inaugural dilemma of philosophy. An insurmountable chasm opens between subject and object. To bridge the gap requires a violent intervention. One impossibility breeds another. Ideology sits astride this gap. Or, in a sense, the gap itself is ideology. Because of this, since Althusser at least if not also Marx, ideology has been intimately intertwined with the question of representation. For if subject and object are different (they are), and if they come into some sort of correspondence (they do), then one ought to account for how subjects and objects are represented to each other. “Metaphysics” is one name for the notion that the world is thinkable. And since the inauguration of metaphysics by Plato the question of ideology has long contained a normative aspect. If something is represented, it might be represented poorly. If something acts as a medium, it might perform in better or worse degrees. Ideology is thus inseparable from a normative sense of the human condition, that is, from a notion that consciousness might be clouded or impeded, indeed that consciousness might even be “false.” Or if not false, then at least a candidate for improvement. And the various critical methods—unmasking,

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demystifying, decoding—place great emphasis on the act of interpretation as a way to counteract the inherent mystifications of representation. In a relatively early text on method Fredric Jameson used terms like “censor” and “censorship” (labels he would ultimately discard) to describe how ideology distorts and represses original experience.1 “Content is already concrete, in that it is essentially social and historical experience,” he wrote on the relationship between criticism and the content of a work, and we may say of it what the sculptor said of his stone, that it sufficed to remove all extraneous portions for the statue to appear, already latent in the marble block. Thus, the process of criticism is not so much an interpretation of content as it is a revealing of it, a laying bare, a restoration of the original message, the original experience, beneath the distortions of the censor. (Jameson 1971a: 16)2

Jameson’s metaphor of the sculptor and his stone says much about the ontological schema guiding his work, and indeed guiding much of Marxist ideology critique more generally. The concrete conditions of social life, or what Jameson called “words, thoughts, objects, desires, people, places, activities,” constitute the real level of existence, upon which arise the distortions of the “censor” like so great a weight of stone (Jameson 1971a: 16). Or as Marx put it in 1852 on the heels of Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état, “[t]he tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living” (Marx 1963: 15). Still, if something is censored it can conceivably be uncensored, and ideology critique is not so easy as that, as Jameson would be the first to admit. The reason is that there is no small-scale, localizable truth in a particular film or piece of literature, some specific thing, and no other, spoken by the text once and for all. Uncensorship fails, then, not because the ideology police are too powerful, but because texts are too polysemous. Who on Earth can say what the overzealous shark in Jaws actually means? Indeed, as Jameson showed in a much read essay on allegory in film, the shark can mean any number of things (and capitalism isn’t one of them): from the psychoanalytic to historic anxieties about the Other that menaces American society—whether it be the Communist conspiracy or the Third World—and even to internal fears about the unreality of daily life in America today, and in particular the haunting and unmentionable persistence of the organic—of birth, copulation, and death. (Jameson 1992: 26)

One cannot say, therefore, as Badiou said of Deleuze, that Jameson is “monotonous” in his criticism, like those interminable bores who stifle all lively con-

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versation with preposterous claims that all art and culture are secretly about x, be it sex or God or death or something else entirely (Badiou 2000: 13). In an earlier statement from 1971, Jameson described critique in similar terms: In matters of art . . . it is wrong to want to decide, to want to resolve a difficulty: what is wanted is a kind of mental procedure which suddenly shifts gears, which throws everything in an inextricable tangle one floor higher, and turns the very problem itself (the obscurity of this sentence) into its own solution (the varieties of Obscurity) by widening its frame in such a way that it now takes in its own mental processes as well as the object of those processes. In the earlier, naïve state, we struggle with the object in question: in this heightened and self-conscious one, we observe our own struggles and patiently set about characterizing them. (Jameson 1971a: 9)

This shift in generality from “the obscurity of this sentence” to “the varieties of Obscurity” nicely captures the logic of critique. Critique is a reduction; it’s also a suspension of reduction, accepting instead the many “varieties.” At the same time, expressions like “heightened” or “one floor higher”3 are slightly counter-intuitive, given the way in which Jamesonian critique ultimately anchors all forms of interpretation within the material conditions of existence, that place which, to believe the metaphor, ought to lie “one floor lower.” Recall his description of the dialectical interrelationship between reification and utopia, outlined by Jameson already many years ago: “All contemporary works of art . . . have as their underlying impulse . . . our deepest fantasies about the nature of social life, both as we live it now, and as we feel in our bones it ought rather to be lived” (Jameson 1992: 34). Jameson’s suggestion that utopia is in everything, but so too dystopia, is startling but also invigorating in its capacious. All works of art—all!—contain both reification (“as we live it now”) and utopia (“as we feel it ought”), and thus all works offer hefty helpings of hope and optimism even as they perpetuate the most degrading demoralization. On this point, “Jameson’s work departs from the whole tenor of Western Marxism,” Perry Anderson has observed, “a tradition whose major monuments were in one way or another, secretly or openly, all affected by a deep historical pessimism. [ . . . ] Jameson’s writing is of a different timbre” (Anderson 1998: 75–76). And so, through the magic of dialectics, the negative may be inverted into the positive. 4 What this means is that interpretation can be dumb or it can be smart. Dumb interpretation fixes meaning, turning the text or art work into something simple and singular. Smart interpretation doesn’t so much multiply

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the meanings as turn the meaning into the multiple, as with the aforementioned “varieties” of obscurity. In other words, dumb interpretation takes up the inaugural dilemma of philosophy—the insurmountable chasm between subject and object—and swats the problem away with an uncomplicated equation of terms, this subject with that object. Jameson described this best in his short book on volume one of Marx’s Capital. The first riddle of Capital is the riddle of equivalence, Jameson argued, the riddle of the equation as such, the riddle of how one thing could ever be fairly and accurately substituted for another thing. Capital offered an “immense critique of the equation as such,” Jameson observed, in reference to Marx’s recurrent example in which twenty yards of linen are equivalent to 1 coat, just one of several equations that populate Marx’s text. (Jameson 2011: 22).5 “[H]ow can one object be the equivalent of another one?” (Jameson 2011: 23). How can one phenomenon render a singular interpretation, one and only one? The properly Marxist answer is as blunt as it is romantic: it can’t. Still, we know that it can, or at any rate it does, and hence figuration and form of appearance (Erscheinungsform) are required to “solve” the riddle of interpretation. This shift, from equation to figuration, is fundamental in Marx, and Jameson too, and it forms the basis of the critical project more generally. Figuration is superior to equation might be a fitting mantra. Or, to soften the distinction slightly, figuration could be labeled “weak” equivalence, while equation could be labeled “strong” equivalence. The second type (equation) forms the backbone of the capitalist skeleton, while the first (figuration) is deployed by criticism, frequently via allegory that most resourceful mechanism, as a way to mediate between dissimilar narrative layers or cultural elements. Strong equivalence is the equivalence of natural fact and eternal truth, those things Marxism seeks so avidly to unmask and dismiss. Strong equivalence is an economic discourse in which things are swapped for other things. In this way, strong equivalence acts as a truth discourse, because it uses economic transactions as proof for the naturalness of those very transactions. (The rationale being that if something can be swapped for something else, then the transaction must have tapped into something true.) However, Marxism is not a truth discourse, Jameson argued, but a way of marking and mediating between codes. At one point he even called theory, along with art, a “registering apparatus” for codes, something like the Aufschreibesystem in Friedrich Kittler. (Jameson and Zhang 1998: 371)6 Jameson’s notion of a “registering apparatus” remains enigmatic, however, not simply because it replaces an interpretive process with a technical metaphor, grounding the theoretical enterprise in, say, the clicks of the tele-

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type or the oscillations of the “tympanic principle” (Jonathan Sterne)—not to mention unnecessarily tying it to Kittler’s year 1900—but also because it forestalls the more urgent question of theory, which Jameson frequently describes elsewhere as that of coming to terms with apparatuses and registrations themselves.7 Weak equivalence is attractive precisely for its weakness, or shall we say its patchwork quality, tinkering and recombining terms rather than equating them via a kind of rote determination. For Jameson, Marxist critique is a “translation mechanism” not an equation mechanism. And “Marxism is a far more subtle and supple mode of translating between these languages than most of the other systems,” Jameson has noted, before immediately demurring on the question of truth. If you want to say that this is a privileged thought-mode, then it is because of that, not because you insist on knowing the truth. It is because you mediate between these various theoretical codes far more comprehensibly than anything these codes themselves allow. . . . The notion of mediation between these codes is the crucial one, not the truth-power of one code of philosophy— like Marxism—over the other. Reality takes care of truth; the codes are our business. . . . The things themselves simply are; they exist in the world, they are real phenomena. (Jameson and Zhang 1998: 366, 371)

“Subtle and supple,” then, is figuration as it maps the many complexities of the world “far more comprehensibly” than the equation can provide. Or, again, figuration is superior to equation. But if Jameson is an opponent of small-scale necessity, that Jaws means x and only x, he is an adherent to large-scale necessity, what might be called generic necessity or the necessity of the totality. No mystery here, however, because large-scale necessity is nothing more than the basic foundation of life, what Marxists call the real conditions of existence. Here Jameson’s Marxism takes an unexpected turn, for his is not primarily a political theory but rather an economic one, in that it conceives of things in terms of the economic base, in terms of an act of basing (which is all too often experienced as a form of debasing). “I have always understood Marxism to mean the supersession of politics by economics,” he wrote, acknowledging the determining nature of the material conditions of existence (Jameson 2004: 403– 8). Jameson has even argued, to the confusion and dismay of some, that Marx’s Capital is not a political book or a book about politics (because it’s a book about economics) (see Jameson 2011: 2, 37, 139, 141). This is another way of demonstrating how materialism isn’t simply one critical methodology

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among many, like a hat selected from a rack containing dozens of alternatives. Materialism is the necessity of the conditions themselves. It lacks only a proper name: The Totality of Necessity? The Materialist Exception? The Doctrine of the Untranscendable Horizon?8 All of this provides the fuel for the various forms of actually existing interpretation that populate Jameson’s work, from cognitive mapping, to symptomatology, to allegory, to diagramming. Through all of them the lesson of the stone sculptor remains constant: form reveals the social situation; only through the forms of art and literature may we find the concrete social context in which it is embedded. “One of the things that Lukács taught, and one of the most valuable, I think,” Jameson explained in an interview, is that the form of [a] work of art . . . is a place in which one can observe social conditioning and thus the social situation. And sometimes form is a place where one can observe that concrete social context more adequately than in the flow of daily events and immediate historical happenings. . . . I think what Lukács meant to me is that ideally, one should somehow get to the content through the forms. (Jameson and Zhang 1998: 360, 361)9

This is the ultimate way to understand aesthetics in Jameson, and particularly the relationship between aesthetics and politics: the aesthetic is the precipitate of the political; to arrive at the political one must begin with aesthetic experience. But this all sounds so modernist. Wasn’t Jameson the harbinger of a newly dawning postmodernism? Phillip Wegner has cited cognitive mapping as evidence of Jameson’s intrepid ingress into postmodernist methodology (Wegner 2014: 69). There’s certainly something to this. Yet I see cognitive mapping as more of a formal subsumption of the postmodern, not a real subsumption (this being the typical plight of late-modernity). Despite its obvious spatial quality, cognitive mapping is deeply rooted in an older set of concerns: subjective orientation or intention, ground or landscape, temporality or historicity (or absence thereof ), and of course narrative. In other words, if cognitive mapping were truly a postmodern methodology wouldn’t it rather be more like cognitive nomadism, cognitive schizophrenia, or cognitive drift? This will also force a slight reformulation of Wegner’s otherwise masterful periodization of Jameson, in which “the major statements produced at the end of each of the first three decades of [Jameson’s] career—Marxism and Form (1971), The Political Unconscious (1981), and Postmodernism (1991)— [are] embodiments, respectively, of a realist, modernist, and postmodernist critical aesthetic” (Wegner 2014: 21). I suspect instead that the blueprint laid

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out in The Political Unconscious is not one mode among others but the dominant mode of critique evident in all of Jameson’s work. In other words, if Wegner stresses the historical periodization of Jameson’s career overall, I prefer to stress what, in a phrase borrowed from Sartre, Jameson likes to call the “untranscendable horizon” of history. And, of course, Marxism is uniquely able to integrate these two parallel tendencies, both history and the reduction of history. In other words, Jameson is a modern thinker in general, and something of a modernist in particular, a fact that might also be true about critique overall.10 Jameson’s modernism is no anachronism, however, even today in the twenty-first century, given that modernism describes more a subjective stance than an historical period. To be sure, Jameson railed against the modern in the finale of A Singular Modernity (2002: 215), calling it “a one-dimensional concept (or pseudo-concept) which has nothing of historicity or futurity about it,” and arguing that the modern basically offers nothing for radical politics, which “cannot be theorized or even imagined within the conceptual field governed by the word ‘modern.’” In Jameson’s view, modernity eclipses history and temporality by being bound to an ideology of presentness or contemporariness (an argument that seems to discount the importance of communism and socialism within the various modernisms, as well as the singular example of the cinema). Modernity, as an ideology of presentness, will always disappoint politically. Instead of a return to the modern, “[w]hat we really need is a wholesale displacement of the thematics of modernity by the desire called Utopia. . . . Ontologies of the present demand archaeologies of the future, not forecasts of the past,” a demand ultimately addressed by his book of that name, Archaeologies of the Future (Jameson 2002: 215; see also Jameson 2005). Critique’s reduction to material conditions complicates the putative avant-gardism of the modern. For even if Jameson remains wedded to the modern notion of the break (“the second power,” “a higher level”) the critical reduction stipulates that each and every break deviates, as it were, “in favor of ” the generic totality. In other words, all interpretation is but a subset of genre interpretation—not the other kind, auteur, avant-garde, high modernist, or what have you—no matter what cultural objects are under investigation, from Thomas Mann down to Michael Mann. So, if Jameson is a modernist, he is a low modernist in which the method of criticism, albeit catalyzed by the break, adheres ultimately to the law of genre. All of which puts in stark relief the two competing modes of critique in the modern era. The enlightenment model, for which Kant is the ready

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exemplar, favors a consciousness free to contemplate the conditions of its own existence, as well as anything and everything else. By contrast, the dialectical model of the Nineteenth Century—all those young Hegelians who, mirabile dictu, might blossom one day into full grown Marxists—favors a consciousness bound to its material conditions, indeed reducible if not already reduced to them. In short, it’s Kant versus Marx, or if you like Lodovico Settembrini versus Leo Naphta, which is another way to think the relationship between philosophy and theory, and specifically the withering of the former in the hands of the latter.11 Moments of ambivalence do appear, however, as in Jameson’s rueful reprimand of the fundamental narcissism of the dialectical system, in which the spirit of reason perceives even the most intransigent opposition as nothing but a mirror image of itself, an inversion waiting to be brought back into the fold: We thereby search the whole world, and outer space, and end up only touching ourselves, only seeing our own face persist through multitudinous differences and forms of otherness. Never truly to encounter the non-I, to come face to face with radical otherness . . . such is the dilemma of the Hegelian dialectic. (Jameson 2010: 131)12

Meanwhile critique has moved on. Or the world has moved on from critique. Today neither the Kantian or Marxist modes maintains much influence, surpassed by a raft of post-critical projects, from the “new materialism” of Karen Barad or Bruno Latour, to Deleuzianisms of all shapes and sizes. While Deleuze and Jameson might seem like polar opposites—compare for example their respective views on Hegel—Jameson does cite Deleuze with some regularity, and his commentary on Deleuze is laudatory even as it inverts conventional wisdom (namely, that Deleuze, the great master of multiplicity, is in fact a dualist) (Jameson 1997). Here Jameson follows the general trend in secondary writing on Deleuze: either praise and emulate him (as in mainline Deleuzianism), or warp him into an unrecognizable contrary (as with most forms of anti-Deleuzianism). Either way, there appears to be no critique of Deleuze on his own terms. Hence the great anti-Deleuzian responses to Deleuze reframe him, improbably, as a Platonist (Badiou), a Hegelian (Žižek, Malabou), or a dialectician (Jameson), when we know that no sentence in Deleuze makes sense unless he is properly understood as neither a Platonist, a Hegelian, nor a dialectician! This is not to disparage the discoveries of these authors—indeed it does seem correct, following Jameson, to consider the fundamental dualism between the nomads and

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the state—yet in the end we have still not learned anything new about Deleuze, who remains somehow immune to the critical project altogether. The reason is clear: critique is a metaphysical enterprise; but Deleuze never wrote a word of “metaphysics” in the technical sense, preferring instead the anti-metaphysical tradition of radical immanence. Yet the dialectic is nothing if not ravenous. And even Deleuze is not too anti-Hegelian to have a place in the Jamesonian method. “Thinking politically means turning representation into diagrams,” Jameson wrote, evoking Deleuze’s famous diagrams. Thinking politically means making visible the vectors of force as they oppose and crisscross each other, rewriting reality as a graph of power centers, movements, and velocities. Such diagrams are the last avatar of those visual aids that mesmerized the first structuralisms; they are the latest way to get out of ideas and into a new form of materialization. (Jameson 2004: 406)

To get out of ideas? We can do no better than take heed of the young Marx, he so perturbed by “abstract thinking” and “speculation,” and Marx’s realization that the best response to philosophy is not more philosophy (Marx 1974). Indeed the best response to philosophy, claimed Marx, is to cease doing it. Jameson’s work, like Marx before him, presents a series of meditations on last philosophy, in order to get out of ideas and into a new form of materialization. Notes 1

2

3 4 5

6

See Fredric Jameson (1971a: 9–18). This essay was reprinted, most recently, in Fredric Jameson (2008a: 5–19). In The Political Unconscious Jameson (1981: 20) spoke in terms of “the unmasking of cultural artifacts as socially symbolic acts.” Elsewhere Jameson’s compendious essay “On Jargon,” a delightful weapon deployable against those who seek to denigrate theoretical language, stated in straightforward terms how truth is obscured due to reification (thereby requiring a theoretical language fit to decode such obscurity) (see Jameson 2000: 117). References to “censorship” also appear in Jameson (1971b: 407). A decade later in The Political Unconscious, Jameson described such ideological policing in terms of “strategies of containment” rather than censorship (see Jameson 1981: 52–53). The phrase is repeated in Jameson (1971b: 308) Jameson (1981: 291–92, 296) spoke of a “negative hermeneutic” and a “positive hermeneutic.” For Marx’s equations see, inter alia (Marx 1976: 139). In “Marxist Criticism and Hegel,” Jameson (2016: 430–38) admitted the essential awkwardness of interpretation, what he called “the embarrassing weak link of the move from text to context” (432). Surprising I have yet found only a single reference to Kittler in all of Jameson’s works, although there must be other references waiting to be discovered, the reference being a short citation near the end of his book The Antinomies of Realism (Jameson 2013: 309).

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On the tympanic principle see Sterne (2003: 80 and passim). Yet even here lies the potential for mischaracterization: interpretation does not reduce a text to this or that particular interpretation; but it does demonstrate that grounds have been sought, that the firmament of the text ought to be grounded in something whatsoever. Hence Marxist critique does not so much reduce everything to class as reduce everything to reduction. For more on the concept of ground see Jameson (2016). Or, here, Jameson makes his position on the relationship between aesthetics leads to politics even more clear: “I have always stood for political, social, and historical readings of works of art, but I certainly do not think that you start that way. You start with aesthetics, purely aesthetic problems, and then, at the term of these analyses, you end up in the political” (357). To call Jameson a modern is not to deny the special affinity between theory and postmodernity. As he put it once during a discussion of the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Niklas Luhmann, “theory is itself a form of thinking (and writing) that aims to focus the relationship-in-difference of the various autonomous fields; and in that respect its vocation has a certain kinship with the movement of postmodernity, even though the practice of theory does not commit it to any celebration of the postmodern or to any repudiation of the modern either” (Jameson 2008b: 563-582, 580). In this passage, “fields” is code for Bourdieu, while “difference” code for Luhmann. On this point, Jameson interestingly recounted that Althusser’s aversion to Hegel (an index for Althusser’s more general aversion to philosophy) was at the same time a proxy war against both Stalinism and Maoism: “The story of Althusserianism can be told only schematically here: its initial thrust is two-fold, against the unliquidated Stalinist tradition (strategically designated by the code words ‘Hegel’ and ‘expressive causality’ in Althusser’s own texts), and against the ‘transparency’ of the eastern attempts to reinvent a Marxist humanism on the basis of the theory of alienation in Marx’s early manuscripts” (Jameson 1984: 178–209, 191). “Narcissism seems to me a better way of identifying what may sometimes be felt to be repulsive in the Hegelian system as such. It is not so much the all-encompassing ambition of the Hegelian philosophical project.  .  .  . Nor is idealism the most telling reproach. . . . No, the most serious drawback to the Hegelian system seems to me rather the way in which it conceives of speculative thinking as ‘the consummation of itself’ (namely, of Reason)” (Jameson 2010: 130–31).

References Anderson, Perry. 1998. The Origins of Postmodernity. London: Verso. Badiou, Alain. 2000. Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Translated by Louise Burchill. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1971a. “Metacommentary.” PMLA 86, no. 1. January. Jameson, Fredric. 1971b. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1984. “Periodizing the 60s.” Social Text 9/10, Spring-Summer. Jameson, Fredric. 1992. Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge.

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Jameson, Fredric. 1997. “Marxism and Dualism in Deleuze.” South Atlantic Quarterly 96, no. 3: 393–416. Jameson, Fredric. 2000. The Jameson Reader. Edited by Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks. Oxford: Blackwell. Jameson, Fredric. 2002. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London: Verso. Jameson, Fredric. 2004. “Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory.” Critical Inquiry 30, Winter. Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future. London: Verso. Jameson, Fredric. 2008a. The Ideologies of Theory. London: Verso. Jameson, Fredric. 2008b. “How Not to Historicize Theory.” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 3, Spring. Jameson, Fredric. 2010. The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of Spirit. New York: Verso. Jameson, Fredric. 2011. Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One. New York: Verso. Jameson, Fredric. 2013. The Antinomies of Realism. New York: Verso. Jameson, Fredric. 2016. “Marxist Criticism and Hegel.” PMLA 131, no. 2: 430–38. Jameson, Fredric, and Xudong Zhang. 1998. “Marxism and the Historicity of Theory: An Interview with Fredric Jameson.” New Literary History 29, no. 3: 353–83. Marx, Karl. 1963. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers. Marx, Karl. 1974. Early Writings. Translated by Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton. London: Penguin. Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wegner, Phillip. 2014. Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Andrew Cole The Dialectic of Space: An Untimely Proposal

Ideology is a heap of problems, goodness knows,

largely because we always hear the same old things about it: There is no escape from ideology. Everyone knows we’re acting ideologically and nobody cares (plus it’s fun or hilarious). There is no ideology anymore. Makes you wonder whether there’s an ideology about ideology itself, seeing as these claims are now slogans or chants. At the very least, ideology is very much a manner of speaking. To talk about ideology is to tell of your “place” within it, your “position,” where you stand (left or right), your “standpoint,” your orientation in the “ideological field” or “landscape”—it is to say something about how ideology opens up gaps and “spaces,” the manner in which it has “dimensions,” the way it is “everywhere” and has no “outside,” the way we’re in it and it thus needs “mapping,” and so forth. These are commonplaces in critical writing, so ubiquitous that we hardly notice them, but maybe there’s something to them, in their very consistency, because they express, time and again, spatial concerns. To assert that the problem of ideology is a spatial one is hardly news. Yet to say that ideology is itself space, or that space is ideology, is another matter. For ideology—if I may be permitted the personification—this topic is a touchy one

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it’d rather avoid addressing. Ideology isn’t dumb, after all. It’s learned by now not to spoon feed us ideas, telling us what exactly to say, but it does salt our sentences with just enough spatial metaphors to dimensionalize our point of view and impute profundity to our insight, so that we don’t go farther into the spatial problem, farther into the fundamental questions of matter and materiality that in the history of philosophy almost always attend reflections on space.1 It’s as if ideology wants us to believe that it has space totally covered. Does it? Ideology tells us it has space covered precisely because it doesn’t. This is because ideology dwells differently among the various media of human expression, and this difference is significant. Ideology feels right at home in areas like language, time, consciousness and subjectivity, such that ideology is often said to be exactly these things (or, for some academic reactionaries, never ever these things!). And it’s at these “sites” where we always expect to find it. Ideology, though, feels less welcome in the domains of space and matter. It manages, of course. But it should take no special pleading to assert that ideology does space differently to words, making it easier to identify ideology in language (as ideas, as ideologemes, as conflicts in meaning) rather than in cities, for example, which are accretions of praxes and complexes of material forces beyond words or even conceptualization; it’s axiomatic, for example, that all the great “city novels” are a thousand pages long and yet still come up short in their portrayal of urban space.2 The problem of critiquing ideology, then, is as much about the differences in media as it is about ideology. And because the problem is really about both, we need to think dialectically and first contemplate the contradiction between disparate media, like language and matter, whose interrelation is always in question—that is, always a dynamic and already a dialectic. Our task, in other words, is to test for ideology’s allergies. It is to pit ideology’s best media—like language and time—against its worst, most conceptually fraught media, like matter and space, and see how this helps the critique of ideology and fosters constructive counter-hegemonic practices. It is to acknowledge the fact that language codes meaning differently from matter (which itself means nothing), that time codes experience differently from space, and that ideology tries to convince us otherwise in its penchant to homogenize everything as identical, persuading us that, no, language is materiality or that time is space.3 Ideology, in this effort, has it made, because as critical theorists we often enable it, or even do its work, in that we frequently seem to temporalize space and textualize matter, thus helping ideology cross the gap between time and space, language and matter. I therefore propose an untimely critique that is attentive to the dialectic of space. For if space continually exceeds

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ideology, failing to conform to it, and vice versa, then our critique of ideology could be mindful of this gap and aware of this very difference in temporal and spatial media, even if it seems that the pressures of our present render time and space indistinguishable in everyday perception. Two things stand out, then. First, this dialectic of space would be powerful enough to “break the bricks”4 of ideology with an adamantine model of “material contradiction” that’s quite unlike the easy temporal contradictions often associated with dialectics, as well as most philosophy as such. Our regard for the spatial dialectic, in other words, lays bare the limits of ideology in ways we’ve yet to theorize or for that matter systematize. Second, with its unrelenting, unapologetic spatiality—a dialectic of space can be seen to gum up the temporal processes of ideological reproduction just long enough to open up a space within ideology, and outside it, before time returns, with great haste and acceleration, to move us along as if there’s nothing here to see. Ideology, Contradiction, and the Dialectic Before going any farther, we should try to say what ideology is. What it is is what it does. Whether we define ideology as a “representation” or chalk it up to some feature of the “imaginary,” per Althusser in his famous sweeping sentence,5 whether instead we decide to talk of institutions and disciplines as ideology by another name, like Foucault,6 or whether we call ideology “bad [ruling] ideas”—whatever we say ideology is—we all know what it does. It messes around with contradiction. There are different accounts of what exactly ideology does with contradiction, and—on the flipside—accounts of what contradiction does to ideology. Does ideology cover up social antagonisms we’d rather not discuss (it’s uncivil!), or cannot put into words, or cannot even think? Or does ideology worsen these antagonisms, sharpening them, making things shittier and shittier for more and more people? These questions are raised in the work of Althusser, Macherey, Jameson, and Žižek.7 There’s a shared language among our four friends here: primarily Lacan and Hegel, pro or con—in other words, yes, Hegel. But let’s recognize that this talk of contradictoriness goes back to Marx and Engels, who in the German Ideology write: In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here it is a matter of ascending from earth to heaven. That is to say, not of setting out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh;

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but setting out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process demonstrating the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the brains of men are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology as well as the forms of consciousness corresponding to these, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. (1975–2005: 5.36–37)

This is that notorious passage, roundly descried for reducing our minds, our subjectivity, to goings-on at the material “base.” You won’t find Althusser, Macherey, Jameson, and Žižek talking like this about ideology, saying these exact things, but—then again—aren’t Marx and Engels showing that ideology is itself contradiction—that it is this very splitting into of all of these fields? It’s the nature of ideology to divide and ramify into “Morality, religion, metaphysics,” along with whatever else is meant by “all the rest of ideology,” which includes—as Marx and Engels show deeper into the German Ideology—the natural sciences, political economy, politics, history, philosophy, and (false) “true socialism.” Ideology disperses itself. It reaches into every area of social life and finds advantage in the variety of human inquiry, how, say, experimental science isn’t exactly religion, yet both are, fundamentally, “ideology.” Through such difference making—indeed, by generating points of view in contradiction to one another—ideology expands itself across society into places where people do all and sundry things, conducting science, practicing religion, espousing political economy, and the like. Marx and Engels have received untold grief for writing the aforementioned passage, but there’s a hard kernel of truth to it: the thesis that ideology is simply a reflex and echo of a “material life-process” and “material premises” is to say quite explicitly that ideology isn’t materiality. At best, ideology is materiality with an asterisk. See, we’ve gotten hung up on the vulgar causation described in that passage, worrying about how reductive it seems to construe our thoughts as reflexes, echoes, and phantom presences of the lawful mechanics of the material base. But we’ve paid less attention to the fact that, here at least, ideology is not matter. Nor is it space. Rather, ideology flatters matter and mimics space. It shadows matter, spreading out and spatializing itself as if it were, like matter, synonymous with extension, as if it had volume. Ideology permeates society by “krisis [κρῐ σ́ ῐς],” division and separation, which—as the ancient and medieval philosophers show—is exactly how you think matter in its elemental or atomic configurations (Cole 2020). And that’s the kicker: for if we are constrained to think ideology as if it were

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matter, we’re close to believing that ideology is matter. Advantage ideology, which is always ideology, in the same way that ideas and ideals are but phantoms seeking embodiment, playing the part of materiality as “real presences,” which articles of faith can’t convince us are in fact matter or body. So there’s a problem for us here: as long as we think about ideology in the same way we think about matter, we do ideology a favor (and we commit fetishism). This is a significant issue besetting the critique of ideology, with the unsettling fact that “krisis,” whence “critique” gets its name, is how ideology works by dint of fissiparation. Matters of the Dialectic It’s a problem for the dialectic, too, which is supposed to help us in the critique of ideology. If Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1977: 66) has just one thing to teach us, it’s that you can think the dialectic in all of its poses, all of its incalculable degrees of opposition, all of its intensity and stakes (like life and death). But it also teaches us that dialectics involves embodiment, desire, feelings and emotions, and more generally language itself, “which belongs to consciousness.” Ideology feels right at home in these areas, too. It is always filching the materials of the dialectic itself—language, narrative, desire, subjectivity, and consciousness. So what’s needed, I propose, is a dialectic purposely composed of matters different from ideology. We require a dialectic grounded in a medium unlike the common ones that ideology appropriates when it takes up language, narrative, desire, subjectivity, consciousness and of course time and the condition of “being in time”—which is to say, temporality. This would involve a dialectics that is unrelentingly spatial and unapologetically material, with the expressed intent to devalue time and jam up the temporal processes of ideological reproduction, whose raw materials (language, narrative, desire, subjectivity, consciousness), we appropriate so often that we find ourselves always in the same bind as to what’s what, what’s ideology and what’s critique—a problem that goes all the way back to Marx’s remarks (and complaints) in his famous postface to the second edition of Capital where he says that his dialectical method can “appear” strikingly similar to the object he’s analyzing, capital (Marx 1977: 102). In other words, if the dialectic is going to be different from ideology, and if indeed its kind of contradiction is to be distinct, then we need, in sum, our own raw materials—our own matter—because the current raw materials (language, narrative, desire, subjectivity, consciousness) aren’t material enough. Too many asterisks.

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Now, Barthes (1968) in his Elements of Semiology spoke of ideology, language, and matter in turns, as if each is the other. But with due respect for all he did for the unspoken “language” of clothes, we know this isn’t the case. They are all dissimilar media, which even Althusser (2014: 259) could admit in his work on ideology as he puzzled over what makes hard and durable materiality different from, well, most everything else in culture we’re comfortable calling “material”: “Of course, the material existence of the ideology in an apparatus and its practices does not have the same modality as the material existence of a paving-stone or a rifle.”8 He means to say that, yes, institutions and actions are material, involved as they are in every aspect of our life worlds, acting on our bodies. But they’re not material in the same manner as “a paving-stone or a rifle.” Right? Althusser’s phrase, “a paving-stone or a rifle,” is a bit of a throwaway line, but it’s useful. Althusser implies that the paving stone is as much a weapon as the rifle, likely bearing in mind the events of May 1968 when student protestors in the streets of Paris defended themselves with rocks they toed up out the avenues, hurling them at riot police and using them to build barricades. But he also wants us to think of these two items as a different kind of materiality no less. What if, for example, there were something differently revolutionary in the “paving stone”—not the paving stone as a ballistic missile but the paving stone as a piece of inert material, a stone, once set in place in that street by someone’s hands? What if that kind of materiality, a materiality that comprises our built environment, a materiality that is a piece of our carpentered world, could be just what the dialectic needs to get some material distance from ideology, dwelling as ideology does in the materials it knows and loves best, like language, subjectivity, consciousness, time, and history? Althusser couldn’t quite bring that paving stone to ideology, owing to the fundamental clash of media or matters: stone and the ideological apparatus. I sympathize. Rightly, he couldn’t bring himself to say that the stone is inherently dialectical, for then he’d lapse into vital materialism, which is a common undialectical destination (Cole 2016) for those who’ve blown right past the crucial part about this being a “paving” stone, a stone that is worked. Althusser couldn’t go all vitalist. But he also couldn’t go back to an old school “historical materialism” of the Hegelian cast where all that matters is that the stone is fashioned, that nature is shaped, that matter is formed—materiality is almost always worked on.9 That’s not all that matters, of course, which is why we need a better approach. Sartre looks at the problem of the paving stone through the lens of the “practico-inert.” Marx (1977: 994) names it “dead labor.” We’ll return to

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Marx below where he and Engels anticipate Sartre in proposing a phenomenology of the built environment (in their critique of Hegel and Feuerbach). For now, let’s note that in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, on my reading, Sartre was trying to develop a materially materialist theory of ideology in the way Althusser found difficult to formulate—materialist in the sense pertaining to the durable pieces of our built environment, what’s been laid down before our generation came along to do our bidding—a material, concrete (as in cement) world that precedes our essence. Now, Sartre uses this term, “practico-inert,” to talk about seriality, groups, and collectives. Unquestionably, matter and space play a lead role in the drama of the collective—as my discussion of Fanon below indicates—but my focus here is simply to point out that in offering this new term, Sartre attempted to reboot the Marxist vocabulary about ideology by thinking about the matter of our built environment, as itself a production: concretized labor and human effort called praxis. Our surroundings are layered with these past praxes, these past forms of life. They are not buried. But they are foundational. What’s sedimented into our built environment lingers there as passivities that are activated every time we engage them—in the case of the paving stone: walking, cycling, laying pipe, weaponizing stones into “rocks,” repurposing the paver for the wall of a new building, stacking it with other stones in a garden as an ornament, hauling it off to be ground to gravel, etc. To be sure, these sedimented praxes are often preconscious for us, beneath our notice until they are pointed out (unless we’re moving about with the “attentive concentration of a tourist” ogling at old buildings, as Benjamin says in his most wellknown essay [1969: 240], “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility”10). But it doesn’t take much to notice. Just look up and out onto the context in which we find the paving stone as part of a walkway, which directs our bodies this way rather than that, up the slope, then down. Quite honestly, and apart from the obviously germane topic of architecture as social control (see below), what’s more ideological than the fact that our very motion in the world, through social space, is predetermined by people before us who built up our infrastructures and architectures? The deer path that’s the Lenni Lenape footpath that’s the settler’s wagon track that’s the commuter’s highway. Foundation on foundation, floor upon roof. Sartre took the “practico-inert” in a direction different from ours, mindful as we are not only that space is power but that you can’t believe the hype about the “City of Tomorrow”—the future hope of the modern city that, after Le Corbusier, razes what came before it. For we must reckon with, indeed bear responsibility for, how the “practico-inert” takes shape, and how

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these inertial forces shape us in turn. This is because Le Corbusier’s ([1929] 2013: 244) modernizing slogan that “We must construct for today” already insists on the impossible, the “clearing away from our cities the dead bones that putrefy in them.”11 If that be our aim, we’ll never finish, never stop “clearing,” a word that is also suspiciously central to Heidegger’s conception of built space premised on “clearing away” or Räumen (1973). For “clearing” is an action against and through inertial praxes, just as it is a way to bulldoze through people’s lives, lands, houses, and “homes.” Some made a science of this, in the cases of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and Gustavo Giovannoni, seeking to build over, around, or with, medieval structures in the nineteenth and early twentieth century; or Georges-Eugène Haussmann, whose renovation of Paris’ narrow medieval alleys assured that the military could fire cannons down those new wide boulevards to “clear” them of rioters, as both Marx and Engels observed.12 Some made a policy of clearing, per the malpractices of “urban renewal” in the US, placing highways or (white) student dorms over Black neighborhoods and academic buildings over slave cemeteries.13 That well-known example of postmodern architecture and finance capital in Los Angeles, the Wells Fargo Center, stems from just such a program of “renewal.” The complex itself sits on what was once Bunker Hill, a neighborhood that was subject to a long “revitalization” involving the eviction of thousands of residents, the raising of old Victorian homes once converted into boarding houses for workers, and a total leveling of the hill itself (Klein 1977: 51–58)— all by the impetus of the Housing Act of 1949 and its terms of art: clearance, the “clearance of slums,” to “clear the land” for “building construction on the cleared sites” (Committee on Banking and Currency 1949: 1–2). Räumen: this is what flattens space, and levels land and mountains, into ideology. Globally, there are incalculably other instances like this that can be studied in the work of “forensic architecture” (directed by the architect Eyal Weizman, including collaborations with Eduardo Cadava, Fazal Sheikh, Paulo Tavares, among many others). And in almost every case what’s erased is what persists, materially, in one way or another, in one place or another. Such material presences—at once inert and active—generate something like a gravitational field around them, to which people the world over are drawn, and for which they fight with care, commitment, preservation, and documentation. It’s easy to see quite how ideological these inertial matters are when they move from the preconscious to the conscious to outright awareness of the violences of segregation and colonization that break bodies. Many inertial praxes require survival strategies, survivance everywhere every day. Put that way, the distinction between ISAs and RSAs, as we have in Althusser, seems quaintly

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academic, as both set out, in the end, to put you in your place. To which Franz Fanon in Black Face, White Masks says fuck that. He lays out the problem clearly and with explicit engagement with Sartre. First, he explains that “Sartre has shown that the past, along the lines of an inauthentic mode, catches on and ‘takes’ en masse, and, once solidly structured, then gives form to the individual. It is the past transmuted into a thing of value.” The past is so “solidly structured,” so built and baked into what we already are, as to shape and distort consciousness, to give “form to the individual” living in the present. When Fanon ([1952] 2008: 202, 205) declares that the “density of History determines none of my acts. I am my own foundation,” he is thinking dialectically, spatially, and materially. He is saying that the density of history has a habit determining people’s acts and “assigning” them (in the Sartrean language) foundations. He knows what place does to people. But Fanon also knows what people can do to place. For in Wretched of the Earth ([1963) 2003: 141; see 142, 43; see Sartre 1991: 716–34), he proposes something close to a spatial dialectic to remake those very foundations: during the period of nation building every citizen must continue in his daily purpose to embrace the nation as a whole, to embody the constantly dialectical truth of the nation, and to will here and now the triumph of man in his totality. If the building of a bridge does not enrich the consciousness of those working on it, then don’t build the bridge, and let the citizens continue to swim across the river or use a ferry. The bridge must not be pitchforked or foisted upon the social landscape by a deus ex machina, but, on the contrary, must be the product of the citizens’ brains and muscles. And there is no doubt architects and engineers, foreigners for the most part, will probably be needed, but the local party leaders must see to it that the techniques seep into the desert of the citizen’s brain so that the bridge in its entirety and in every detail can be integrated, redesigned, and reappropriated. The citizen must appropriate the bridge. Then, and only then, is everything possible.

This is poiesis for the people. For Fanon, the building project—and what he calls on the next page, “major public works projects” (142)—goes deep and is fundamentally dialectical in the relays between exteriority and interiority: to “appropriate the bridge” is to think the bridge, be the bridge, live the bridge, and make the bridge. Fanon is deeply aware that to do a meaningful “materialism” is to take it all the way out to the built environment and all the way down (again) to the deepest level of social being, where your ground, your foundation, is what’s made collectively. When he says “every citizen must . . . embody the constantly dialectical truth of the nation,” he means an

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embodiment that materializes into your very being the built environment you help bring into existence and that issues from your interior. For to participate in a collective is not to be a part. It is to be a whole. This is why Fanon’s passage can be read as an open letter to “architects and engineers.” Don’t flatten (your professional) fields into ideology. Don’t clear. Help us build to make ourselves whole, constructing infrastructures and public spaces that issue from our deep sociality. As a critique of ideology, then, the spatial dialectic isn’t limited to phenomenology and perception precisely because it includes practice—praxes past, present, and future. It’s a dialectic activated by those who work it, walking the path, moving the stone, designing and building the bridge. There’s no use in speaking of the past in anything but these material terms, in the same way that talk of the present is pointless without asking just where the built environment, redolent with its inertial praxes, resides in social life and, one step farther, just where and what social life fundamentally “is.” Let there be no talk of philosophical “grounds” without talk of grounds, no “foundations” without foundations, no “structure” without structure, no “edifice” without edifice, no “architecture” without architecture. Eschew hauntologies that dematerialize our world and naturalize the past as just so many traces, specters, and palimpsests (i.e., “texts”). Even if we remain mesmerized by an auratic and immaterial model of the past, we are forced to observe its many spatializations and materializations in plain language, as if our own words and instincts bend toward that “paving stone.” How so? We commonly say the past “lives” in memory. But as the mnemonic techniques from antiquity to the present tell us, such “living memory” has its place, its own building—those “palaces” and avenues of the mind down which you saunter pausing at doorways, entering rooms, browsing shelves, and probing cubbies in the retrieval of stored information. This is why we say an event in the past “took place,” that we say, “I was there.” This is why we say someone “dwells” in the past, wandering through its discrete spaces and seeking shelter against the winds of time and the wine-dark seas of change. One word for this longing, of course, is “nostalgia”—which means “homesickness” or νόστος ἄλγος (nostos algos; return home, sorrow). Even when we’re not constructing actual “sites of memory” (the subject of Pierre Nora’s [1984–86] Les Lieux de Mémoire), we’re doing it in our heads, writing about it, and creating images of times past stacked into place, as when the pile of sand at the bottom of the hourglass means time’s up. Think Benjamin’s “angel of history”: “a pile of debris before him grows skyward” like a monument to calamity, over which a storm brews as winds

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rage from the same direction, “from Paradise” but in name only. The angel of history views things differently: “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet” (1969: 257–58). Though he apprehends neither time nor succession, he still beholds eventfulness, the pile of rubble continuing to grow at his feet. He’s the historical materialist who finds history actively materialized, not emptily temporalized via “historicism” (see 255–56, 262). To him, the past is a cumulative material force in the troubled present, the now (Jetztzeit), while the future is that no-place called utopia to which he is blown backwards, wings akimbo. Part of the problem is recognizing just where we are, and what modes of perception are required to develop a phenomenology of the built space. While Hegel’s dialectic will (below) offer one way to advance such a phenomenology—as a dialectic of space attending to material, rather than linguistic, contradiction—this philosopher himself would occasionally see right through such spaces, making it hard for readers themselves to know just where they are. Take his Phenomenology of Spirit, in particular, the chapter on “sense certainty” which is one of Hegel’s most read pieces of writing. It’s full of objects and packed with exposition—with the lesson being that no matter how much we try to “look carefully,” regardless of how simply we describe what we see, pointing at things to bring them to someone else’s attention, we’ll never find “meaning” in its Sunday best, never discover “certainty” (Hegel 1977: 59). Sense-certainty is an oxymoron, in this respect. But once we finish reading Hegel’s discussion of sense-certainty, the very first chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, we realize we’ve been places. We recollect that over many pages, Hegel introduces a variety of things serially, a house, a tree, a piece of paper, and dilates about them, such that they separate and float apart from one another until they disconnect, spaced out by the prose rather than dimensionalized into an image, figure, or “scene” (Hegel 1977: 61–66). And so it’s left to us to set these items in the storehouse of our memory, look back on the totality of what we’ve read, and see that “sense-certainty” is indeed a “scene,” a built environment, where we behold our protagonist trying to “reach out into space and time” or “enter into it” (Hegel 1977; 61 [see 56]; 58). For one, it’s a place that’s produced, composed of things made, worked on, and cultivated: house, tree, paper.14 The house is built. The tree is planted. The paper is milled, and soon (if not already in Hegel’s time) to be industrially produced. As Hegel writes, focusing on the “house or tree” in turns, you can virtually see him on location, looking around, pointing at the house that’s shaded by the tree, planted there to

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shade the house and provide “landscape” as you look from the lane—all there, as sure as day turns to night and words fail us. As the scene blends into the next chapter on “Perception: Or The Thing and Deception,” Hegel continues the story, such as it is, to speak of “salt”—again, in no random way, because of course he didn’t mine the salt himself. It too is produced, and he finds the salt inside that same house, likely on the table, where sits the very piece of paper he’s been staring at the whole time (Hegel 1977: 60, 66)—that is, when he’s not staring down the salt, as if in imitation of George Segal’s “Man at a Table.” This is not an easy scene for readers to see, and to picture it requires compression that reduces these many pages of dry exposition to one page, even one sentence, of ekphrastic description. However challenging it is to imagine the place here, once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Hegel can often make matters difficult for readers. He could have just said he was on the front walk of a house or in a room, you know, set the scene—even Kant does us this courtesy every once and while, as when he speaks of a cozy warm room in the first critique! Yet what Hegel shows us—on purpose and by accident—is how roundly everyone ignores the built environment, our produced surroundings, during our most intense inspections, glaring at things and piecing them apart in a manner of philosophical demonstration that anticipates Heidegger’s (1967) work on equipmental totalities. The lesson for us, in reading Hegel, is how routinely we, too, see through things, how deeply into words praxis can quickly sink, such that the built environment becomes a matter of word play, language games, texts and “texturology.”15 So I am not confident that the various ways to construe the built environment “as a language” is a help here, as we see in architectural theory from at least the eighteenth century on, starting with aesthetics about the “symbolism” of architecture (of course, Hegel is in this mix) and leading up to contributions by Mukařovsky in the 1930s, Summerson in the 1960s, and Zevi and Jencks in the 1970s, to say nothing of the application of “literary theory” to architectural analysis or even, perhaps, architecture parlante in the US, where, like the chicken in every pot, every building gets a motto. For to move the problem of built space quickly into one of “language” not only takes us away from our experiment with how to think the materiality of the “paving stone,” but it draws us towards ideology, which of course loves language. Tafuri’s (1976: 3, 8, 15, 50, 60–62, 149, 156, 158–60, 169) work in Architecture and Utopia in this respect is a necessary critique of the language of architecture, and the practice of style, as ideology (which involves all manner of contradiction, mind you).

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So we go back to Marx and Engels, returning to the German Ideology. For them, any practice of “sense-certainty” that breezes right by the questions of production as you look around is itself a piece of “German ideology”—let’s just call it “ideology.” Laying into Feuerbach for his incurious gaze upon his surroundings, they write: Even the objects of the simplest “sensuous certainty” are only given him through social development, industry and commercial intercourse. The cherrytree, like almost all fruit-trees, was, as is well known, only a few centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite society in a definite age it has become “sensuous certainty.” (1975–2005: 5.39)

Commerce put the cherry-tree here, but now to Feuerbach’s sight the tree itself is—like Hegel’s tree by the house—naturalized into the environment and abstracted from previous praxes, earlier production processes. This is no way of looking, for—as they continue to say, jokingly—“when things are seen in this way, as they really are and happened, every profound philosophical problem is resolved.” They really hit home this point in a footnote, declaring that “he cannot in the last resort cope with the sensuous world except by looking at it with the ‘eyes,’ i.e., through the ‘spectacles,’ of the philosopher” (Marx and Engels 1975–2005: 5.39). Seen that way, the world just becomes empirical facts before us, and we see right through them, through what makes an obvious “fact” as a “thing done,” which is not so obvious but which opens up the question of production.16 Continuing to rib Feuerbach, Marx and Engels extend this comment on perception, saying that in Manchester Feuerbach sees only factories and machines, where a hundred years ago only spinning-wheels and weaving-rooms were to be seen, or in the Campagna of Rome he finds only pasture lands and swamps, where in the time of Augustus he would have found nothing but the vineyards and villas of Roman capitalists. Feuerbach speaks in particular of the perception of natural science; he mentions secrets which are disclosed only to the eye of the physicist and chemist; but where would natural science be without industry and commerce? (1975–2005: 5.40)

You can note how quickly Marx and Engels revert to time here, “a few centuries ago” (above), “a hundred years ago,” “in the time of,” but that’s okay, because they simply wish to say that without “industry and commerce” there would really be no “natural science.” So goes the story of history. But there’s

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a spatialization here as well in the way a place is all of these times at once as praxes, as human work, human forces of production and the modes of production that activate them, that are recessed into a “landscape” flattened by the picturesque gaze but still available to philosophical reflection. Where there were “rooms” there are “factories and machines,” which came here because there was already a site where there were “rooms.” This is a good place to do business, as it were—perfect for development, attractive to developers! And this how the forces of inertia can, again, be gravitational in a different sense. We are thus called to see synchronically and know space dialectically as the subsistence of difference within identity, as the site where a collection of praxes, past and present, co-exist, as inertial forces activated when we work on them. To see synchronically is to resist the urge to see through things, to walk over things with inattention, to naturalize things in the act of using them. It is not to see things “as they are,” which implies presentism and a refusal to think beyond saying “it is what it is,” “things are as they are.” It is, rather, to unsee. It is to take the negative image of our built environment, such that buildings go from foreground to background, appearing “in the way” of the terrain, unnatural, emerging as excrescences or impediments plopped down from the sky; it’s when the road on which you travel appears as a cut in the terrain, an overlay “foisted upon the social landscape by a deus ex machina,” as Fanon says, rather than a hypnotizing expanse unfolding in front of you from the horizon like an arcade video game.17 It is to see “the surround” from the surround itself, rather than from the “false image” of center, from the fort, from the occupation, from the city, from the home, from the car.18 It’s to see two things at once, in the same space—the thing as individuated but whole unto itself, and the thing as an assembly of parts, produced this way rather than that; likewise, it is to behold the thing as a part in a whole, and the whole as a construction or composition of parts. It is, in sum, to attend to the dialectics of space, of seeing and knowing the built environment, that requires the hardest kind of logical contradiction, violating the old laws of identity that are always solved by time and tarrying, and embracing contradiction that we think is unthinkable and indeed impossible. This is my final proposal . . . The Material Contradiction of the Spatial Dialectic Lefebvre ([1974] 1991), Soja, and Jameson are the three thinkers who’ve made everyone aware of “the dialectic of space” or the “spatial dialectic” in

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the first place. For the sake of advancing their projects, we need Hegel and more Hegel, who can help us attend to the durable material contradictions of our built space—indeed a spatial dialectic that can account for the “paving stone.” Of course, all three thinkers already work closely with Hegel in their formulations of a spatial dialectic, but here I mean a particular emphasis within Hegel himself, at the very founding and foundations of his own dialectic where he recuperates “contradiction” from all the aspersions philosophers up to Kant had thrown its way—in order to say that, yes, “All things are in themselves contradictory” (Hegel 2010: 381). To demonstrate the viability of contradiction in the Science of Logic, Hegel makes a crazy claim that, up until his writing, would seem philosophically downright illogical: External, sensuous motion is itself contradiction’s immediate existence. Something moves, not because now it is here and there at another now, but because in one and the same now it is here and not here; because in this here it is and is not at the same time. One must concede to the dialecticians of old the contradictions which they pointed to in motion; but what follows from them is not that motion is not but that it is rather contradiction as existent. (2010: 382)

To say contradiction is existent is to say, colloquially, that it is real, concrete, and material. And to say that it is real, you need a version of contradiction that is literally hard to imagine, almost too “heavy” to contemplate, in the way mods once meant the word. At issue here is the strange contradiction that “at the same time” a thing is “here and not here.” This sort of contradiction is contrary to anything Aristotle would propose in his Metaphysics, where he asserts the famous principle of non-contradiction: “The most certain of all basic principles that contradictory statements are not at the same time true” (1984: 1.1597; 1011b13–14). In other words, you can’t say “A is B” and “A is not B” with both being true “at the same time”—as Hegel is doing here in saying that A “is here” and A “is not here,” “at the same time.” Hegel is tasking us with a great labor of thought, sloughing off on us this total impossibility, by making time no way to resolve the contradiction—this common idea of waiting around for something to change or go away. Remember, Hegel’s whole aim is to challenge the long held belief that “the contradictory cannot . . . be represented or thought” (2010: 382), and this includes the spatial contradiction of “what is here and not here.” Even an impossibility like this must be thought, however jarring it seems. It must be represented precisely because we lack the means to do so and need a jolt to invent them, if crisis or clearing hasn’t motivated us to do so already.

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As if things weren’t bewildering enough, Hegel presses on from this abstract spatial contradiction to conceptualize an outright material contradiction pertaining to what can be said to be in place. And in the process he undoes yet another of Aristotle’s laws, what we now call the law of identity (or, for fans of Leibniz, the identity of indiscernibles)—as in the Metaphysics, “the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect” (1984: 2.1588; 1005b), or, per the Topics, “if two contraries are equally liable to occur naturally in a thing, and the thing has been defined through the one, clearly it has not been defined; otherwise there will be more than one definition of the same thing” (1984: 1.254; 151a). In his Philosophy of Nature, which is nothing if not a clinic on the capacity of the dialectic to be spatialized and materialized, Hegel writes something very different about how “contraries” can inhere in the “same thing.” He says “that two material parts which formerly persisted as outside each other and which therefore must be conceived as occupying different places, now occupy one and the same place. This is the contradiction, and it exists here in a material form” (Hegel 1970: 134). For our purposes, it matters less what Hegel is talking about (he’s expositing on “elasticity” as the continuity of distinct parts when the whole suffers impact but soon springs back into shape). What matters more is how he talks about it, contra the old principle of non-contradiction in view of the “material form” of contradiction. He’s saying that two things can “occupy one and the same place,” all without cracking a grin that this is an impossibility we’ll just have to accept, never once blinking an eye in confidentially asserting that he’s rewriting Zeno’s famous paradoxes of motion to speak not of “abstract places, but here material places, material parts” (Hegel 1970: 134). To think the material contradiction, in all of its apparent impossibility, in all the ways it distorts time into simultaneity and produces a spatial dynamic, the motions and tensions of place that aren’t reducible to time, is to begin to conceive a spatial dialectic against the grain of commonsense and spontaneous consciousness but especially against the temporal currents of a dialectic that performs not unlike ideology (which was always Adorno’s beef ). It is, quite simply, to spatialize and materialize contradiction. All of the authors I mention in the foregoing sections attempt to think the impossibility of a spatio-material contradiction. More will need to be said elsewhere, as I plan to do, and more dialectical logics will need to be spatialized (or their spatiality emphasized). But for now we can indicate that a spatial dialectic is what we can develop a sense for, not only because Hegel didn’t fully do so but because in the work of our best spatial theorists, our greatest teachers,

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this intransigent material contradiction, which is where one grounds a spatial dialectic, is resolved into time, language, and consciousness. Prima facie, Benjamin’s (2003: 462–63) “dialectics at a standstill” would seem most promising as a spatial dialectic in the way it fixes time until we learn that it’s about “dialectical images” in dialectical time, meaning, “the place where one encounters them is language” (462). We wish to clarify, rather, that language isn’t the only place; there is also “wreckage” and “debris” (per Benjamin above). More on point is, of course, Sartre’s (1991: 320) “anti-dialectic” in the “material field,” which Jameson (1974: 238; 1961: 182, 189; see Sartre 1956: 623) modifies as an “arrested dialectic,” stalled at the “absolute irreducibility . . . of matter.” Here, too, there’s a sense of time standing still, but then we lack spatialization. Both thinkers, in other words, call this dialectic “anti-” or “arrested” precisely because, according to classical logic, there can be no (material) contradiction: here, in other words, the encounter between language and matter produces no dialectic but only absolute difference. (I propose it does.) And so we pass from space back to language and consciousness—a move made by Soja (1989: 2, 223) who, on the one hand, takes inspiration from Borges’s “millions of acts . . . occupied the same point in space” in order to develop a “postmodern geography,” but who, on the other hand, resolves this Borgesian paradox back into “temporal narrative” (222, 223). There’s no criticism here, which would be ungrateful. We’re only talking about—to cite Hegel—what possibilities, or rather new impossibilities, can be “represented or thought” with the spatial dialectic and its hard, material contradictions.19 Jameson, more than anyone, is acutely aware of this problem of even trying to think a spatial dialectic: “One does not undertake to summarize or to present a thought mode that does not yet exist” (2009: 67). Readers may remember Jameson prognosticating decades ago in Postmodernism that we need to overcome our current conceptual limits to grasp postmodern spatiality: “we ourselves, the human subjects who happen into this new [postmodern] space, have not kept pace with that evolution; there has been a mutation in the object unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject” (1991: 38–39). The conceptual problem, in other words, is still with us—we’ve not yet mutated—which is why years later in Valences of the Dialectic Jameson carefully and tentatively follows up his previous claim to describe one feature of the “spatial dialectic.” Not exactly the earlier “arrested” form, this “new spatial dialectic” occasions “the suppression of more traditional temporalities” and the rise of “all kinds of new spatial simultaneities” in finance capital (2009: 69, 66; see 1991: 156– 58; 1992: 10). It involves, above all, “self-consciousness,” which experiences

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“the suppression of time” and a “quasi-spatial enlargement” (2009: 69) alongside “the spatial expansion implicit in the operations of capitalism” (70). While by now you will expect me to observe that Jameson also resolves the spatial dialectic into subjectivity—and that is true—we can see here clearly that time is diminished, suppressed. His work thus lays in place the question we should all be asking: “What is a spatial contradiction . . . ?” (2009: 68). The answer, in part, is that this very spatial contradiction is a material one—recalling that custom in philosophy from antiquity on that the inquiry into space occasions reflections on matter. Hegel will have to be our way to the spatial dialectic. It’s not only that his major dialectical terms bear spatial significance, with—for example— talk of the shapes (Gestalten) of consciousness in “moments” that are at once “elements” (Elemente). Nor is it only that architecture is present everywhere in his work and of course is the foundation of his thinking on aesthetics as well the initial problematic of the Phenomenology of Spirit (above). Those two features would already be enough to think the spatial dialectic with Hegel. Rather, and quite bluntly, Hegel’s spatial dialectic gives meaning to dialectics itself. This is because Hegel, in his logics as well as his Philosophy of Nature, constructs a spatial dialectic with a hard material model of contradiction that makes jolting once more the experience of contradiction itself. We’ve lost the feeling for contradiction, frankly, having passed through so many phases of “theory” that, sans dialectics, make difference a synonym for multiplicity. But we can recognize afresh the critical power of contradiction with the spatial dialectic. For one, ideology is not at home in the “material contradiction” at the center of the spatial dialectic, not quite at full strength in a medium that’s not language or a contradiction that isn’t temporal. Furthermore, it’s as if the spatial dialectic wants to be noticed, demanding our attention, for its version of contradiction presents itself as off, cracked, whacked, cut, cleared, but never erased or canceled, always raised and registered: this is why our inquires into the spatial dialectic have to include spatial politics and histories—in sum, sedimented praxes bearing on the present as inertial forces. If Hegel intended to secure a place for error in his philosophy—“Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself?” (1977: 47)—he certainly found one in the spatial dialectic. With its illogics and impossibilities, the material contradiction of the spatial dialectic takes us aback and sets us back, leaving us scrambling to find ways to commit its paradoxes, energies, and inertial forces to images and words. Good thing that contemporary artists, philosophers, physicists, and novelists, are already on it, registering realities about our material present that are, to put it mildly, untimely.

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Notes 1 2

3 4 5 6

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Lucretius offers the most accessible example of this practice. Everything you want to know about the field of space and literature (or literary geography) can be found in the work of Robert Tally, Jr. Hearty thanks to Julian Rose for his comments on this essay. . . .  to our three-dimensional minds, that is. Here citing the title of René Viénet’s film, “La dialectique peut-elle casser des briques?” “Ideology is a ‘Representation’ of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real Conditions of Existence” (2014: 256). Foucault, in his Birth of the Clinic, among his other books, has some powerful moments of ideological analysis (see [1963] 2003: 44–45). Foucault doesn’t always shrink from the term ideology. Žižek, for example, remarks that “The function of ideological fantasy is to mask . . . inconsistency” (1989: 142). Jameson, in his Political Unconscious, says that “the aesthetic act is itself ideological . . . with the function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradictions” (1981: 62; see 246). Same goes for Jameson’s concept of the “ideologeme,” which involves “the imaginary resolution of the objective contradictions to which it thus constitutes an active response” (1981: 104; see 103). Macherey (1978: 60) puts it a little differently, holding that ideology is “spontaneous” until it touches art; absorbed into various media, ideology breaks apart into contradiction: “the finished literary work . . . reveals the gaps in ideology.” Althusser, whose intellectual DNA is in all of these claims, writes that “it is ultimately the ruling ideology which is realized in the Ideological State Apparatuses, precisely in its contradictions”; “the ideology by which they function is always in fact unified, despite its diversity and its contradictions” (2014: 245; see 219-20). See also Althusser 2005: 89–128 (“Contradiction and Overdetermination: Notes for an Investigation”). Paul de Man makes a similar point about ideology in 1986: 11. And so where did he end up? In “aleatory materialism.” See Althusser 2006. By which example Benjamin reflects on the differences between visual and tactile relations to buildings, with the latter (like Sartre’s practico-inert) receding into the background by way of “habit.” See also his “Pack-Donkey’s Way” in City of Tomorrow, how a city is formed around the donkey paths, avoids the straight line, is difficult to navigate, and supposedly makes no sense. See Marx, “The Financial State of France,” in his comment on “Mr. Hausmann” and the “new boulevards and streets” in Paris (1975–2005: 15.502-03); and Engels who, speaking on the Paris Commune, is reported to have said: “Louis Napoleon had made the streets wide that they might be swept with cannon against the workpeople but now it was in their favor; they would sweep the streets with cannon against the other party” (1975–2005: 22.588). On street clearing, see 1975–2005: 15.454. See Hwy 147 in Durham, NC, built over the leveled Hayti District; and University of Georgia’s Brumby, Creswell, and Russell Halls over demolished Linnentown; as well as its construction of Baldwin Hall over sacred burial ground. Each thing is no ordinary Objekt/object in some abstract epistemology. Each is a “Gegenstand”—a word that brings to mind many synonyms like “Artikel,” “Gebilde” (as well as “Gestalt”), and, last but not least “Ware,” the word for “commodity.”

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This is Michel de Certeau’s phrase from his chapter, “Walking in the City,” in which the skyscrapers of Manhattan are called the “tallest letters in the world” (1984: 91). The question of production, along with construction, is the missing piece here to be discussed in the fuller, forthcoming version of this work. Cf. Heidegger, who takes the positive image of a bridge (in Heidelberg?), which “allows the simple onefold of earth and sky, of divinities and mortals, to enter into a site by arranging the site into spaces. . . . The location admits the fourfold and it installs the fourfold” (1971: 158). I’m expanding here on Fred Moten and Stephano Harney (2013: 17): “the false image is what emerges when a critique of militarised life is predicated on the forgetting of the life that surrounds it. The fort really was surrounded, is besieged by what still surrounds it, the common beyond and beneath—before and before—enclosure.” For Foucault (1986: 23, 25), heterotopic “sites . . . are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another,” but they are “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.”

References Althusser, Louis. 2005. For Marx. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Verso. Althusser, Louis. 2006. Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–87. Edited by François Matheron and Oliver Corpet. Translated by G. M. Goshgarian. London: Verso. Althusser, Louis. 2014. On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Preface by Étienne Balibar. Introduction by Jacques Bidet. Translated by G. M. Goshgarian. New York: Verso. Aristotle. 1984. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1968. Elements of Semiology. Translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill and Wang. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books. Benjamin, Walter. 2003. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cole, Andrew. 2016. “Questionnaire on Materialisms.” October 155: 23–25. Cole, Andrew. 2020. “The Nature of Dialectical Materialism in Hegel and Marx.” In Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism, edited by Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek, 82–101. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Committee on Banking and Currency. 1949. “Summary of Provisions of the National Housing Act of 1949.” Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office. de Man, Paul. 1986. The Resistance to Theory. Foreword by Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fanon, Frantz. (1963) 2003. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. Introductions by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K. Bhabha. New York: Grove Press. Fanon, Frantz. (1952) 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.

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Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. diacritics 16: 22–27. Foucault, Michel. (1963) 2003. The Birth of the Clinic. Translated by A. M. Sheridan. London: Routledge. Hegel, G. W. F. 1970. Philosophy of Nature: Part Two of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830). Translated by A. V. Miller. New York: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 2010. The Science of Logic. Edited and translated by George di Giovanni. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1967. Being and Time. Edited and translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. 7th ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Heidegger, Martin. 1971. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” In Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter, 141–60. New York, NY: Harper and Row. Heidegger, Martin. 1973. “Art and Space.” Translated by Charles H. Seibert. Man and World 6: 3–8. Jameson, Fredric. 1961. Sartre: The Origins of a Style. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1974. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1992. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. London: British Film Institute. Jameson, Fredric. 2009. Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso. Jencks, Charles. (1977) 1991. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 6th ed. New York, NY: Rizzoli. Klein, Norman M. 1997. The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory. New York: Verso. Le Corbusier. (1929) 2013. The City of To-morrow and Its Planning. Translated by Frederick Etchells. Courier Corporation. Lefebvre, Henri. (1974) 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Macherey, Pierre. 1978. A Theory of Literary Production. Translated by Geoffrey Wall. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Marx, Karl. 1977. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1975–2005. The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. 50 vols. New York: International Publishers. Moten, Fred, and Stephano Harney. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. Mukařovsky, Jan. 1977. “On the Problem of Functions in Architecture.” In Structure, Sign, and Function: Selected Essays, 236–50. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Nora, Pierre. 1984–86. Les Lieux de mémoire. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Pocket Books.

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Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1991. Critique of Dialectical Reason. Translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith. Edited by Jonathan Rée. New York: Verso. Soja, Edward W. 1989. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. New York: Verso. Summerson, John. (1963) 1966. The Classical Language of Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tafuri, Manfredo. 1976. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Translated by Barbara Luigia La Penta. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Zevi, Bruno. 1978. The Modern Language of Architecture. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso.

Alenka Zupančič The End of Ideology, the Ideology of the End

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ne of the reoccurring fantasies related to late capitalism is undoubtedly the fantasy of the End. To be sure, the fantasy of the End also appears outside, and prior to capitalist world order, but it could be instructive to look at the way it is structured in this world order, as well as to look at the shifts that occurred in this structuring. One particular shift is especially interesting in this respect, namely the one that took place at the end of 80s/beginning of the 90s, and is emblemized—at the ideological level—by Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man. Perhaps one first needs to point out that this book marks the opposite of what it seems to suggest, namely that we have finally reached the End. What it marks is, quite the contrary, the impossibility to end: namely the impossibility to end capitalism, or the impossibility for capitalism as we know it to come to an end. If capitalist democracy, as the book suggested, constitutes the end of History, this end can last forever, or go on forever; it is not subjected to historical time, but to its own temporality in which there are no intrinsic reasons for it to end. It is an End that can go on endlessly, forever.1 The context in which Fukuyama’s book was written is clear, and closely related to what could The South Atlantic Quarterly 119:4, October 2020 doi 10.1215/00382876-8663735 © 2020 Duke University Press

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be simply described as the disappearance of any real Outside. The end of cold war, that is the end of “really existing socialism” as precisely an actually existing outside of the capitalist order, marking its boundary, now translates into an “open totality” in which the outside (the remaining non-democratic/ non-capitalist regimes) is on its way to the inside: it is “speculatively” already included in the inside; and this inside is all there is (and all there could be). In other words, “the end of history” meant that we have reached a point where we are living in times that cannot end, at least not for any intrinsic reasons or contradictions. This is of course also the moment when the idea, the ideology of the “end of ideologies,” emerged in full swing: the end of ideology meant the triumph of one hegemonic ideology. This ideology consisted mostly in systematically denying any serious social antagonisms intrinsic to the one hegemonic order. This systematic denial also played an important role in how the fantasy of the end has been structured for a long period of time: the end, or any kind of serious transformation, can only come from the great Outside—whereby this outside now basically meant something like the “natural universe” (as opposed to the historical universe), and usually involved a more or less total destruction of the earth. For example: the earth will be hit by an asteroid . . . In relation to this “end of history” it is interesting to observe the following. Lately—in a period most patently defined on the symbolic level by the election of Donald Trump as president (“the impossible happened”)—it looks as if we are witnessing a paradoxical reactivation of history, the end of its end, and we now seem to be moving in an accelerated mode, if only in the direction of catastrophe. This catastrophe has many faces: political (wars, millions of refugees, rise of populism and proto-fascism), moral (cynicism, corruption, as well as the challenge that the new AI and other technologies imply for the very definition of a “human being”), economic and of course ecological, which increasingly appear as related. Something seems to have changed, shifted, also in the structuring of the narrative of the End. Nevertheless, many continue to believe in the end of history thesis and behave, for example, as if Trump were actually an asteroid that hit the U.S. and the world from outer space. Which is precisely the way in which the ideology of the end of ideology continues to live. It continues to live in the form of the refusal to acknowledge the social devastation and contradictions produced by the social order epitomized by this very ideology. For it is this devastation, and these contradictions, that got Trump elected in the first place, and very much from within the “end of history” and the “end of ideology.”

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In what follows I propose to look into two modalities of the relationship between repetition (or repetitive perpetuation, continuation of the same) and ending, and the fantasies that structure this relationship. And I propose to do it in a somewhat humorous, albeit no less serious manner. The aim is to expose a frequent and paradoxical complicity between repetition and ending: the end is not simply something that ends the repetition (or repetitive perpetuation of something), but is essentially presupposed by, or else perpetuated by, the repetition itself. We will look at two modalities of this link between repetition and ending, which each involve their respective subjective and objective economies. The first modality can be put under the following heading: “I Can End It Whenever I Want” We are all familiar with this kind of configuration where the possibility of ending what we are doing is the very condition of its repetition. Be it a romantic relationship (and its recurring scenes or difficulties) or a (bad) habit, “not having the strength/will to end it” strictly correlates to the possibility of ending it, stopping it. Possibility is the crucial term here. It is precisely what allows us not to act (not to end it, in our case). Why bother now? The possibility suffices. A nice comic example of this logic is provided in one of the episodes of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. The episode starts with the famous song, “Every sperm is sacred,” performed by a catholic family with a comically huge number of children. The perspective then shifts to a Protestant couple observing them through the window and commenting on these “bloody Catholics,” as the husband puts it. “But why do they have so many children?” asks the wife. “Because every time they have sexual intercourse, they have to have a baby.” The wife is confused: “But it’s the same with us. We’ve got two children, and we had sexual intercourse twice.” “That’s not the point,” retorts the husband, “we could have had it any time we wanted.” The scene goes on and the husband brags about how their religion allows them to use condoms, even ones that enhance pleasure. “Have you got one?,” asks the wife: “Well, no, but I can go down the road any time I want, and walk into Harris’s, and hold my head up high and say in a loud, steady voice: ‘Henry, I want you to sell me a condom. In fact, today I’ll have a French tickler, for I am a Protestant!” “Well, why don’t you?” The wife is curious . . . Following the same logic, the possibility to end (or to stop) something can be precisely what makes us get involved in it and perpetuate it. And, of course, the fact that the end is structured here as a possibility makes this

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interrogation part of a larger one. In his recent book Abolishing freedom Frank Ruda takes this up in relation to the signifier “freedom”: freedom as possibility, as capacity, exemplified in the ideology of the “freedom of choice”, is the best antidote to actual freedom. Freedom as possibility/capacity has become a signifier of oppression (both social and economic), which Ruda proposes to counteract with “comic fatalism.” He formulates several slogans of such fatalism, some of which directly evoke the idea of the end: they suggest that a way out of this freedom-as-form-of-oppression is to act as if the end has already happened (“Act as if the apocalypse has already happened!” “Act as if you were dead!” “Act as if everything were always already lost!”) (Ruda 2016: xi). So, if you want to end a bad relationship, act as if you have already ended it. Or, here this works even better: if you want to stop smoking, act as if you have already stopped. (And declare, “retroactively,” that the cigarette you smoked half an hour ago was actually your last cigarette.) When accentuating the mode of “possibility” (potentiality) as the main problem in this kind of configuration, we should be careful, however, to add and stress the following: once the mode of possibility enters the game and structures it, we must resist understanding or presenting the stakes simply in terms of possibility versus actuality (or actual action), that is, in terms of the opposition between a mere possibility and its realization. For this opposition is precisely the ideological framework that allows for freedom to function as a mode of oppression. Possibilities are here to be taken, realized, by all means and at any price. The culture (and economy) of endless possibilities is not suffocating simply because there are so many possibilities, but because we are supposed not to miss out on any of them. A person who just sits at home, relishing in the idea of all the possibilities and opportunities capitalism has to offer and doing nothing to realize them, is not the kind of person this system needs. We are expected to keep busy realizing as many possibilities as possible, and in this way never to question the set of given possibilities, the framework which determines and dictates what possibilities are to be realized, and what constitutes something “utterly impossible.” To make this point even more clear we should perhaps add that the Protestant couple from The Meaning of Life are certainly not ideal consumers. What they, and our reaction to them, expose, is precisely the risk of the swift conclusion that only consolidates the “capitalist” logic. Namely the following conclusion: were they to act on these possibilities they have, they would’ve been really free. This is exactly where the ideological trap of this configuration is situated. It is situated in this suggestion that if they are not free, it is because they don’t act on the possibilities and “opportunities” they have. Against this, one must insist that the problem is not that that they don’t act,

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although they could have, but rather that if they were to act, this act wouldn’t change anything in respect to their “freedom” identified with possibility (to do something). It would also change nothing in relation to the given set of possibilities—the set on which they themselves (and their “freedom”) have very little influence. Put differently: what makes the Protestant couple interestingly funny is that they take the logic of freedom as possibility very seriously and quite literally. If we conceive of freedom in terms of possibility/ capacity, then this possibility or capacity has to suffice; it is de facto already freedom, it is freedom as possibility. The “realization” is only an anecdotic addition, which may bring us some pleasure, but adds nothing to the reality of our freedom. This is precisely what the husband comically exposes in the film. But let us return to the starting point of this digression: the example of the Protestant couple from the Meaning of life can be taken as a great illustration of a certain kind of complicity between repetition and ending: they can go on practicing their puritanism because they believe they can end it whenever they want. There is clearly an economy—specifically, a psychological economy, “little arrangements with oneself ”—at work in this complicity. Let’s take another example: smoking and wanting to stop. There is an economy that allows me to go on smoking if there exists a possibility of quitting “anytime I want.” If we fail to recognize the economy at work here, we easily miss the crucial point and move to a much too simple conclusion, along these lines: “Well, you think you can quit any time you want, but in truth this is just an illusion, and you are not strong enough to do it.” This opposition between illusion and truth actually obfuscates the truth, which is that in fact we don’t want to quit (although we are convinced we should), and the possibility of quitting is precisely what directly supports our not quitting. In other words, the problem is not that we want to stop but are not strong enough to do it, but rather that we don’t want to stop, and the apparatus of possibility helps us to be strong enough not to quit. For this is also not as easy as it seems. How many people would start smoking if, for example, the state, instead of putting warnings, threats and disgusting images on cigarette packs, would pass a law stating that if you start smoking, you are not allowed to quit? Ever. Once you start, you commit to it for life. No (other) possibility in view. The structure we are dealing with in this first mode of the relation between repetition and ending could thus be defined as follows: we are infinitely approaching the end as the limit (putting it off as we go along); yet this limit is not simply there at the end, or as “the end of it all,” like it seems to be; it is—in the form of possibility, potentiality—also the very precondition of the movement of repetition; it is what structures this repetition. So, there is clearly an economy at stake here, an economy that mobilizes the possibility

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of ending as the condition of not-ending, of repeating endlessly what is supposed to end. But this is not the only mode of economy involved in the relationship between repetition and ending. The following one is perhaps even more interesting, and its structure is captured by a different kind of declaration, namely: “This Is the Last Time I Do It” In order to exemplify this logic, let me introduce a literary reference: a novel by Italo Svevo, La coscienza di Zeno (Zeno’s Conscience, written in 1923). Svevo (pseudonym of Aron Ettore Schmits) was an Italian writer and businessman living in Trieste, also a close friend of James Joyce (who is in fact responsible for the deserved fame of Svevo’s novel, which passed largely unnoticed when first published). Zeno’s Conscience takes the form of memoirs written as diary entries. As we read in the “Preface” (which is of course already part of the novel) these memoirs were published by their author’s, Zeno’s, psychoanalyst. The memoirs were allegedly sent at some point to the psychoanalyst by Zeno himself, as part of his treatment, and the analyst later published them “in revenge” because Zeno stopped seeing him, ended his analysis with him (Svevo 2003: 3). The memoirs include many different events, but one of the key motives, which is also the reason why Zeno has started his analysis, is his preoccupation with sickness and health, which takes the form of a neurotic obsession with smoking. Zeno is a passionate smoker, yet he is also deeply convinced that smoking makes him sick and weak, that it is killing him and that he must absolutely stop smoking. Yet he doesn’t manage to stop.2 The key words epitomizing his case are not “I can stop whenever I want,” but are best encapsulated by the terms ultima sigaretta, the last cigarette: “This cigarette right here and now is the last cigarette I will smoke.” Zeno tries all kinds of strategies that would help him to stop smoking, strategies accompanied by a simultaneous reflection about them. For example, he remarks that in order to better underline one’s inner resolve, one likes to end smoking together with the end of something else, like the end of the month or the end of the year. We thus attach the end of smoking to the end of something else, something that will inevitably end. This way we redouble the end itself and hope that the inevitable end (say the end of the year) will exert a certain “pull”, bringing along with it the other end, which is not inevitable in the same way but exists only as intention.

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So, here we are dealing with ultima sigaretta, the last cigarette. And of course, nothing tastes as good as the ultima sigaretta. This is how Zeno is thinking about it, even comparing the two modes of the relationship between smoking and quitting that I’m examining here: I believe the taste of a cigarette is more intense when it’s your last. The others, too, have a special taste of their own, but less intense. The last one gains flavor from the feeling of victory over oneself and the hope of an imminent future of strength and health. The others have their importance because, in lighting them, you are proclaiming your freedom, while the future of strength and health remains, only moving off a bit. (Svevo 2003: 12)

The fact that it is the “last cigarette” adds something to its taste, making it the best cigarette ever. You really enjoy it. So the idea (or ideal) would be to think of every cigarette you smoke as of your last one, and enjoy it accordingly. However, and here’s the rub, in order for this to work, you really have to believe it is the last one, that this IS really the end. In other words, you have to be a neurotic (as Zeno, the main character of the novel, most certainly is), and the economy at stake here is not that of little agreements with oneself. You want to stop, you do everything in your power to stop (and Zeno really goes to some extremes here, including having himself kidnapped and locked up in a hospital), but you end up accumulating one last cigarette after another, that is, you end up infinitely repeating the end—and enjoying it against your will. Which is of course a very precise definition of neurotic enjoyment. Strictly speaking, the economy here is an unconscious economy, or, even more exactly, it is the economy of the unconscious. No wonder, then, that Zeno’s conscience is actually a novel “about” psychoanalysis. Differently from the previous configuration, in which the end (as possibility) was inherent to the repetition, what is at stake here is rather that repetition is inherent to the end; there is something about the end itself that drives the repetition, and repetition is essentially repetition of the end. Zeno is very skeptical about both his doctor and his (psycho)analysis—what it can achieve and how. Yet this doctor seems to get at least some things right. One of them is that Zeno’s disease was not the smoking itself (as Zeno thinks), but his obsession with ending it, the conviction that he must stop at all costs. The analyst comes to the conclusion that for Zeno smoking and quitting are actually one and the same passion. So that the real question is not why does he smoke so much, but rather: why does he want to stop, “end it,” so badly? It is here, and not in the smoking itself, that Zeno’s pathology (in all its comic dimension) is to be situated.

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So at some point the doctor tries a new approach. He no longer attempts to directly help Zeno with quitting to smoke, but tells him instead that there is actually no reason for him to stop: These are his words: smoking wasn’t bad for me, and if I were convinced it was harmless, it would really be so. And he went further: now that the relationship with my father had been revealed and subjected to my adult judgment, I could realize I had contracted that vice to compete with my father; and had attributed a poisonous effect to tobacco thanks to my unconscious moral feeling that wanted to punish me for my rivalry with him. That day I left the doctor’s house smoking like a chimney. (Svevo 2003: 412)

So the doctor also offers him a full explanation of why Zeno thinks that smoking is so bad for him (because of a complex relationship with his father), but the key intervention is of course his suggestion that there is no reason for him to stop. The idea that more than smoking itself, it is his obsession with its devastating effects that is actually devastating for him, undermines both kinds of economy involved in the relationship between repetition and ending that we are discussing here. Not only the urgency, the imperative to stop immediately, but also the perspective of the possibility to stop at some later point. Why even bother to stop? What he imposes upon Zeno in this way is the absolute freedom to smoke: Zeno remains there without an end at the horizon, without an end that he could either endlessly repeat or else approach in an infinite movement; an end that would help him to manage his enjoyment, regulate it in one way or another. This now changes the configuration radically and, as expected, affects Zeno badly. He goes on smoking like a chimney for a while, and then concludes: “the freedom to smoke whenever I liked finally depressed me totally. I had a good idea: I went to Dr. Paoli” (Svevo 2003: 414). Dr. Paoli is a “true” doctor, a physician, and Zeno desperately wants him to find some physical cause for his neurotic state, a real disease instead of an “imaginary” one, as he puts it. Yet Dr. Paoli is not of much help. He finds no physical disease that would relieve Zeno. But then—to cut a long story short—Zeno eventually finds a way out of his ordeal: he never returns to his analysis, and hence effectively ends it. Not in any solemn way—rather, he just postpones going back. And after a while, he starts to believe that he is effectively “cured”—not of smoking, nor of wanting to quit, but of feeling bad about it. In other words, he starts to openly enjoy his symptom, enjoy what has previously been his nightmare. In his diary he writes: “I have finally succeeded in return-

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ing to my sweet habits, and started to quit smoking again. I am already much better since I have been able to abolish the freedom that foolish doctor chose to grant me” (Svevo 2003: 418).3 First, we can see here quite literally how “abolishing freedom” can have a most liberating effect, and we have indeed found a very interesting example that we could add to Frank Ruda’s list mentioned above. But we have to add something else and be a bit more precise, following the extremely precise formulation used by Zeno: he has returned to his sweet habit of quitting to smoke, that is to say to his sweet habit of repeating the end. From this perspective, what is going on here is not so much the abolishing of freedom (to smoke), as setting a limit to this absolute freedom; a limit that makes it possible for Zeno not to quit (smoking) but to enjoy it. For it is only through limiting his freedom to smoke by way of continuously quitting, and hence by setting a limit to his enjoyment in this way, that Zeno can effectively enjoy smoking: he can only really enjoy it in the mode of “quitting.” The doctor’s suggestion (“you are free to smoke”) efficiently exposed the limits of the abstract freedom in this case: it exposed the fundamental difficulty masked by the (false, abstract) alternative or “choice” between smoking and not smoking. For this choice is clearly not what was at stake for Zeno: after all, he has been repeating the whole time the very failure of this alternative to capture what was at stake: his enjoyment. At the end, Zeno believes it was not the therapy but the fact that he ended it that finally cured him. In a way, he may be right. But what exactly does his new health consist of ? Does Zeno’s newly discovered capacity to enjoy his symptom really rhyme with something like a true end of (psycho)analysis? Or perhaps even with something like the end of ideology? We kind of get the answer to this question at the very end of Zeno’s memoirs (the last entry), which introduces a suggestion that the fundamental fantasy of Ending that sustains Zeno in his “pathological” repetition remains fully operative: Zeno reflects on life in general and on where it is heading, and he predicts that sickness and the sick will prosper and flourish with the help of “devices” (existing outside our body). By devices he means all kinds of instruments, tools, and other technological inventions of humanity. Devices, he says, are “bought, sold, and stolen, and man becomes increasingly shrewd and weaker.” Weaker how? Because once upon a time when man first invented such devices, they were extensions of his arm and weren’t effective without already having a strong arm to use them. But now, with technological advances, this correlation was lost—it’s enough, for example, just to press a button, anyone can do it, including the weakest among us.

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Zeno reasons that the device itself created sickness, such that we’ve abandoned the law of the survival of the fittest: “The law of the strongest vanished, and we lost healthful selection,” he states. The point here is that Zeno goes on to suggest that it would take “much more than psychoanalysis” to cure this sickness (Svevo 2003: 436). Actually, it would take no less than an unheard-of catastrophe, no less than the end of the world. This is the concluding paragraph of the novel: Perhaps, through an unheard-of catastrophe produced by devices, we will return to health. When poison gases no longer suffice, an ordinary man, in the secrecy of a room in this world, will invent an incomparable explosive, compared to which the explosives currently in existence will be considered harmless toys. And another man, also ordinary, but a bit sicker than others, will steal this explosive and climb down to the center of the earth, to set it on the spot where it can have the maximum effect. There will be an enormous explosion that no one will hear, and the earth, once again a nebula, will wander through the heavens, freed of parasites and sickness. (Svevo 2003: 437)4

Zeno’s obsession with health, sickness, and ending reappears here on a wholly new scale. It takes on planetary, even cosmic dimensions. The sickness is now humanity itself, and it can only be cured by the disappearance of the latter. The disappearance, brought about by humanity itself. Sound familiar? The End of Today It is more interesting how this conclusion perfectly resonates with much of what we could call the “intellectual climate” of our times. The theme of the end, of some kind of apocalypse, of total extinction, or at least of the disappearance of what we call human beings, has an imposing presence. The fact that there are real causes of concern here (if concern it is) in no way contradicts the fantasmatic character of many of these representations of the end. What I mean by this is that the idea of even the most radical, definitive, irreversible End, situated at some point in the future, serves as a framework through which we contemplate (and interpret) our present reality; and it often serves as means of its ideological consolidation. It serves, for example, to give us an idea of just how much is needed to change our present reality, which fills us with increasing discontent. In other words, it provides a spectacular answer to the question: What is it that has to end in order for our present troubles to end? And from there, we can have our pick: we can ether decide that we prefer nothing to change (since change and catastrophe are config-

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ured as one and the same thing), or else we can find consolation in the fact that it will “all be taken care of ” anyway (by this same catastrophe as an inevitable end). And then something new perhaps can begin—this is the “optimistic” twist, the silver lining of the catastrophe scenarios: the potential of emancipation from ourselves. This brings us back to the starting point of this paper, and to a remark by Fredric Jameson subsequently paraphrased by Slavoj Žižek concerning the emergence of different dystopias. Namely that people today can more easily imagine the earth being hit by an asteroid than they can imagine a consequential transformation of the determining (socio-political but also economic) coordinates of our everyday life.5 We can more easily imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The idea (ideology?) implied here is that things will never really change from within the world, and that only a radical catastrophe can save us from ourselves. Which is also why there is a significant ambivalence surrounding the expectations of such an end, and many choose to cheer the prospect of some kind of catastrophe, even the prospect of total extinction. To say that, very often, the prospect of catastrophe is a typical fantasy scenario does not mean that the catastrophe is a fantasy in the sense that it cannot happen. What is fantasmatic about it is the way it frames our present choices and actions, or the absence of them. In spite of very harsh and often haughty criticism of our present way of being, it detects no cracks or true contradictions in this same way of being, nothing that could interrupt it, split it from within, and that one could possibly work with. Very much like Zeno we seem to be delegating the change, the end of our troubles and of all sickness, to another End (which will take care of everything in one go). To be sure, this kind of “orientation in thinking” is to be taken very seriously, for it is a real symptom, symptom of an utter impotence that we experience as social and political subjects to intervene in the course of events and in their structuring. This impotence is quite real, and it is certainly not about us being too “lazy” to actually do something about it, here and now. But the fact that this impotence is real should not let us confuse it with the kind of absolute or structural necessity that could only be dealt with in the form of the end of it all. It is perhaps at this precise point, at the point where, very much like Zeno, we are anticipating a catastrophe which will sweep all our troubles away and “reset” the world, that we should fully apply Ruda’s principle or formula and say: But wait, it has already happened (at least once)! We don’t even need to pretend (or act as if ) it’s already happened. The earth has once been but a nebula, completely free of sickness and of humans and of their problems and devices—and look where this had led to! In other words, is

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this apocalyptic scenario, this perspective of “radical extinction,” not perhaps too optimistic? What if in fact nothing, not even the prospect of total extinction, can guarantee a way out? There is no guarantee that this scenario cannot be repeated or that, indeed, what we are living right now is not already a repetition. So let me conclude with the following suggestion: The world will surely end, but that won’t necessarily be the end of our troubles. Notes This article is a result of work on the research program P6-0014 “Conditions and Problems of Contemporary Philosophy” and the research project J6-9392 “The problem of objectivity and fiction in contemporary philosophy,” which are funded by the Slovenian Research Agency. 1 This is how Fukuyama (1992: xii) explains in his book what he meant by the “end of history” when he first launched “The End of History?” (1989): “This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.” 2 The main character’s name, Zeno, is of course suggestive of Zeno of Elea, the author of many famous paradoxes, several of which (for example Achilles and the Tortoise, The Arrow) involve what could also be described as the “impossibility to every reach an end point” in view of the infinite divisibility of any given distance between two points. 3 This is my translation, since the official English translation has it all wrong at this point. We read: “I have finally succeeded in returning to my sweet habits, and stopped smoking.” What Zeno says is actually something much more interesting, and – I believe – much more to the point for psychoanalytic ears: Sono riuscito finalmente di ritornare alle mie dolci abitudini, e a cessar di fumare (Svevo1985: 424), I have finally succeeded in returning to my sweet habits, and started to quit smoking again. 4 Translation modifed at the phrase, “e s’arrampicherà al centro della” (Svevo 1985: 442). 5 See the film Žižek! (2005), directed by Astra Taylor.

References Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: The Free Press. Ruda, Frank. 2016. Abolishing Freedom. A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Svevo, Italo. 1985. La coscienza di Zeno. Pordenone: Studio Tesi. Svevo, Italo. 2003. Zeno’s Conscience. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Vintage Books. Taylor, Astra, dir. 2005. Žižek! New York: Zeitgeist Films.

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appear in the essays and which categorize the movement as one of “multitudes,” “of the people,” “ecological,” “emancipatory,” etc. Class does not represent a “synthesis” of this multiplicity internal to the real movement but rather a dynamic element, or the vector of its continuous transformation.2 These essays equally have an epistemological position in common. They begin in medias res: the “speaking out” of the Gilets Jaunes was as powerful as it was unexpected, inviting us not only to plunge ourselves in the movement but also to rethink the very meaning of this “plunge.” It’s as true for the researcher as for the militant: no vanguardist position makes sense in a movement expressing itself as a “platform of collective intelligence,”3 which makes militant research into a work of collective learning, the sharing of affects and the composition of forces. Research must therefore locate itself from the outset in this “common” of the movement, to try to release its internal tendencies, lines of convergence and divergence. This is done by experiencing the exchange of words and bodily contact; the rejection of expertise in favor of the rediscovery of experience. The best way to introduce this dossier of texts is to reconstruct the genesis of the movement, characterizing its three phases: digital gestation, spatial explosion, and temporal persistence. These phases correspond to the three fundamental dimensions of the space-time of the Gilets Jaunes. Prequel Films sometimes have the character of prophesy, and cinema can take the place of sociology in the analysis of tendencies. On the September 26, 2018, two months before the uprising of the Gilets Jaunes, Pierre Schoeller presented Un peuple et son roi (the people and its king), a film focused on the first years of the French revolution (1789–93), showing the detachment of Louis XVI from the insurgent people. Ironically, Emmanuel Macron, the president who announced his rise to power with a book entitled Revolution, found himself facing an unprecedented movement which brought back certain watchwords and images of this historical moment: the “end of privileges,” the return to the “social question,” the untimely eruption of these “new sans-culottes” onto the political scene, the chorus of “Revolution! Revolution!” chanted by the Gilets Jaunes on the Champs-Elysées. The story of Macron’s enthronement is that of his detachment ab origine from his “people.” Elected in the first round with only 18 percent of the votes, and in the second with 44 percent, not “by default, but in opposition” to the National Front (Balibar 2018), his project, rather than “reconciling France,” as he solemnly declared during his electoral campaign, gave rise to

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a crisis of legitimacy of the institutions of the Fifth Republic, and in particular its executive. A series of names that traverse the social and political history of the country reappeared in public debate: “Caesarism,” “Jupiterism,” “charismatic power,” “presidential monarchy.” In referring to these statements, we do not, certainly, want to be trapped in the maze of an abstract critique of forms of power. On the contrary, we want to underline how the Gilets Jaunes, “breaking into public space” (Hayat 2019), have shown its material determinations. In other terms, it is a question of grasping the connotations of “class power” that Macron incarnates and represents, and putting these in relation to the generalized feeling at the heart of the Gilets Jaunes: “injustice” and “political dispossession,” two fundamental notes heard throughout French society in the time of the start-up nation. Macron’s modernizing revolution rapidly gave way to a scenario from the Ancien Régime. The beginning of his five-year term was marked by the abolition of the wealth tax (ISF)4, replaced by the real estate wealth only tax (IFI). This inaugural symbol of Macron’s mandate would earn him the title of “President of the rich.” A set of other tax giveaways to the rentier class and to big financial capital defined the implementation of a neoliberal program, alongside the attack on railway worker contracts and the privatization of welfare institutions and commons. In this context, it’s unsurprising that, since the first day of the movement’s explosion, the refusal of the “carbon tax” was linked to the demand for the “restoration of the Wealth tax,” and to the slogan “Macron, resign!” In this triangular relation we find all the potential for the following developments of the movement. In other terms, the refusal of the “carbon tax,” an indirect tax attempting to make the lower classes pay for ecological transition, is immediately linked to the demand that “those with much pay much, those with little pay little.” The request for the resignation of the president is a direct and inevitable consequence of this. Which returns us to the fact that Macron and financial profits are indissociable: simul stabunt, simul cadent—they will stand together or fall together. Thus, far from being an indeterminate “anti-tax revolt,” as mainstream accounts had it, the Gilets Jaunes made the refusal of an unjust and punitive tax one of the starting points of their becoming-class. Digital gestation The starting point of the Gilets Jaunes was the online petition that Priscilla Ludosky, a self-employed woman in the Seine-en-Marne district of the Îlede-France region, launched on May 29, 2018, titled “For a reduction in fuel prices!”5 The petition initially received few signatures, restricted to a rela-

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tively small group: in the country, there was no particular sign of protest against the announcement of the introduction of the carbon tax, the streets being instead invaded by the movements against the reform of railway worker contracts, and against the university selection process. The leap occurred when after the summer, Ludosky managed to get on a local radio station to explain the reasons for her petition. This reached Éric Douet, a private truck driver from the same district as Ludosky, who created the Facebook event “All together, on the 17th November we will block the country!” The moment of digital gestation between October 12 and 16, 2018, was crucial: the petition received hundreds of thousands of signatures and the two principal Facebook groups which made up the virtual agora of the movement were created.6 The element of the commoning of anger in virtual space served as a premise for the desire to meet physically, which happened somewhat later in the occupation of the roundabouts. Besides the three claims we mentioned previously, we must also note that another element was strongly debated: the refusal of the reduction of the speed limit from 90km per hour to 80km per hour on secondary roads. This measure, combined with the carbon tax, was considered a form of punitive discipline for the workers living in “peri-urban” areas.7 The Gilets Jaunes movement thus teaches us something about the concept of “technopolitics.” Indeed, starting from 2001, we entered a properly technopolitical dimension of social movements, in which “the tactical and strategic use of technological apparatuses (including social media) for organisation, communication and collective action” (Toret 2015) overlaps with the appropriation of physical, digital and media space. We can say that technopolitics is present in the Gilets Jaunes movement because they engaged these three levels of space. However, unlike the “movement of the squares,” including Occupy, Tahrir Square, the Spanish “indignados,” and others, the appropriation of physical space by the Gilets Jaunes was double: on the one hand, there were the Saturday demonstrations in the city centers, where technopolitics functioned as a social machine for organization, counter-information and self-narrativizing; on the other hand, in the occupation of the roundabouts, it served the construction of direct democracy. As regards the appropriation of media space, a real bifurcation occurred between social media and the mainstream press. First, because for several months, while official media were concealing police violence, live feeds on Facebook gave counter-reports and provoked a sentiment of collective indignation. Second, because technopolitics contributed to building a leaderless movement (Hardt and Negri 2017) despite the insistence of media on attributing it to charismatic leaders. On certain occasions, social networks

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did remove leaders chosen by the press, in a refusal of the figure of the “spokesperson.” Nevertheless, certain moderators of the Facebook pages became “information relays” for the movement, mostly thanks to their transparent manner of communicating through networks. Even these latter were subjected to critical attention in Facebook groups, which confirms that technopolitical action was fundamental for the strategic choices of the movement, such as, for example, the rejection of representation, and the construction of horizontal practices (Cohen 2019). However, it seems important to point out that technopolitics rests on an ambivalence: on one side, it contributes to the organizational capacity of a movement; on the other side, it is part of digital platforms characterized by the concentration of economic and political power and by the capture of social data for advertising or surveillance purposes (Vercellone et al. 2018). Some analysts have observed that the modification of the Facebook algorithm, which happened some months previously, aiming to promote posts made by “groups” rather than posts by “pages” (Le Pennec 2018), helped the rise of the Gilets Jaunes. At the same time, it is always the power and ownership structures of the platform that have allowed, on certain occasions, temporary censorship of counter-information pages (“Cerveaux non disponibles”) or the pages of unions (“Sud Rail”) which have a certain importance for the movement. In highlighting this ambivalence, we want to show here how digital space not simply served as an interface for the struggle of the Gilets Jaunes (which would be a deterministic approach to technopolitics), but quite on the contrary constituted one of its arenas of struggle. Spatial Explosion Since November 17, 2018, the multitudinous character of the movement has been expressed on different levels. As is shown in the essays collected here, the movement was scattered across in the main peri-urban conglomerations of the country, as well as in certain rural areas. However, we would add that the Gilets Jaunes are not situated in a given location and that the material organization of space is for them an issue of political action. In this sense, one of the salient features of the movement, one of its multiple outcomes, is the production of space (Lefebvre 2000). There are three scalar levels on which this “productive” character was expressed in the first weeks. First, the movement took a decentralized form, “a fractal and polytopic declension” (Gwiazdzinski 2019: 11): it occupied thousands of roundabouts, these “non-places” (Rancière 2019) of traffic reg-

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ulation on roads. The second territorial level is its extension beyond “Metropolitan France.” The “overseas” region of Reunion Island, where the rates of poverty are much higher than in metropolitan France, would precisely be the theater of a popular insurrection, which would last several weeks. Alongside this, groups of Gilets Jaunes appeared in neighboring countries, even if these were not consolidated over time (in Belgium, as well as in Holland and Germany). Finally, the third spatial element concerns the “Acts” taking place on Saturdays, which were organized in the city centers of medium and big cities and which would give rise to riots and other urban forms of revolt. This would create a real political crisis within the government, and especially the executive branch. But what is even more interesting is that these “Acts” would extend over time and would become a sort of “urban custom” of the movement, where meetings between different figures working in the city would characterize moments of struggle. But we should pause for a moment on the question of the roundabouts. Careful observation of the roundabout as “technology of struggle” (Jeanpierre 2019) proves certain readings made at the beginning of the movement wrong, which had received strong media attention, as in the case of the geographer Christophe Guilluy (2018). Guilluy claimed that the Gilets Jaunes were the embodiment of a non-society of “peripheral France,” definitively separated from the social, productive, and cultural fabric of the cities. Guilluy’s project aimed to confine the Gilets Jaunes to a consuming and totalized concept of the “periphery” which would connect them to the “peripheral Great Britain” of Brexit and the “peripheral United States” who voted for Donald Trump. However, following the crisis of the industrial city, the processes of urbanization of the last decades have challenged this distinction between “center” and “periphery,” urban and rural, city and country. As Éric Charmes shows, “the ancient opposition between cities and countryside continues to dominate our representations, even while it no longer corresponds to lived realities. . . . So, the division between the France of the cities and peripheral France is frequently put down to a division between city and country, without the difference being perceived” (Charmes 2019: 101). The “peri-urban” is one of the spaces making up a very spread out metropolitan area, in which “a city radiates out over a vast territory” (Charmes 2019: 101). Indeed, the essays collected here show us that far from being the peripheries versus the cities, the Gilets Jaunes opened a new socio-spatial configuration of struggles within and against the contemporary city, within and against its divisions, its segmentations.8 In this regard, the struggle of the Gilets Jaunes concerns the “common” in a double sense. On the one hand, it is a struggle against the dynamics

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of capitalist accumulation which, today, rest essentially on mechanisms of the extraction of socially-produced value and the dispossession of commons (of the environment, of knowledge, of welfare). But at the same time, in the roundabout, the Gilets Jaunes create the common, which is to say, the assembly of different figures of living labor in the city—salaried, precarious, selfemployed, intermittent, etc. The roundabout is thus a space that connects the Gilets Jaunes to each other and to the multiple territories of the city. Where it was impossible to wage a struggle for the “right to the city”—since the city, in its historical form, never existed—the form of the roundabout challenged the peri-urban residential environment thanks to a hybridization of the urban and the rural in networks of political cooperation. These elements of the roundabout would be soon transferred into other parts of the city. Starting from mid-December 2018, the assemblies of the Gilets Jaunes would form in the main French cities—Toulouse, Bordeaux, Montpellier, Marseille, Nantes, Rennes, etc.—and in the many districts of Paris. To take up an expression of Marx’s (1940: 60) referring to the Paris Commune, the roundabout was, in an unmetaphorical sense, between November 2018 and January 2019, “the political form at last discovered” by the movement. Temporal Persistence A year and three months after their appearance, the Gilets Jaunes continue to surprise. They have proven wrong all those analysts who had decreed the “exhaustion” or the “ebb” of the movement, reappearing always in unexpected ways.9 After December 2018, the government had reacted using three strategies. First, with economic concessions, which were judged insufficient and in some way deceptive by the Gilets Jaunes10 and which in addition were not accompanied by any transformation of the political system, with respect to a movement that demanded, among other things, the creation of a Citizen Initiative Referendum (which is to say a direct legislative power entrusted to citizens). Rather than taking this request into account, Macron organized a “Great National Debate,” with the intention of dividing the Gilets Jaunes, and of integrating a part (the “good” ones, as opposed to the “bad” ones) into the circuits of spectacular presidential politics. This operation failed because the movement refused to take part in the debate, on the one hand pursuing struggles, and on the other hand organizing alternative debates.11 Lastly, the government reacted with violent repression, making the “democratic” and “participatory” rhetoric of the Great Debate an additional feature of power’s dissociation from society.

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After the spatial explosion, the Gilets Jaunes also showed a temporal side: the time of duration and persistence. Beyond the “Acts” and the weekly initiatives of the movement, the “yellow vest trend” now touches other processes of political subjectivation in society. In this sense, the Gilets Jaunes have become “producers of struggle” (Negri 2019) both in terms of the circulation of practices of struggle and of the encounter of new subjects of struggle. In December 2019, they contributed to making the opposition to the pension reform the largest general strike in Europe for decades. Even if the consequences of this strike movement are still uncertain, we can note that there exist two formulae which effectively express the influence of the Gilets Jaunes in this process: first, there was a “yellow-vestization of the strike,” that is, the strikers adopted the Gilet Jaunes repertoire of practices “”including blocking traffic by transport workers—which is echoed in the occupation of the roundabouts—as well as the actions in train stations or malls which took place throughout the country during the strike. The second, the slogan “the strike belongs to the strikers” shows how, in the movement, there was an immanent critique of the traditional forms of union negotiation, such that practices of direct democracy and collective decision-making were reactivated, which were at the heart of the roundabouts and the Gilets Jaunes “Assembly of Assemblies.” Thus, the movement that has been described for over a year as being a movement expressing a segment of class composition on the margins of the processes of production and reproduction of the city, has now become, on the contrary, the catalyst for new struggles for the re-appropriation of a social wage (Negri 2018) and welfare services across hospitals, schools, universities, cultural institutions, etc. How is it that the Gilets Jaunes managed not only to resist but also to persist during all this time? The contributions assembled in this section of SAQ attempt to respond to this question, showing us a protean movement in constant transformation. They do so by developing three fronts of analysis. First, situating the event of the Gilets Jaunes in the discontinuous continuity of the history of struggles for emancipation in France. Then, showing the relation between the social composition of the movement, the political conjuncture and the forms of struggle, organized as a counter-power. Last, showing how the Gilets Jaunes managed to reimagine anti-capitalist struggle, making it indissociable from the ecological question. They provide fundamental elements for reflection and research on the international debate surrounding social movements. —Translated by Christina Aislinn Chalmers

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Notes 1 2

3 4

5 6 7

8 9 10

11

On this “authoritarian polarization,” see Plateforme d’Enquêtes Militantes (2018a). See in this respect the intervention of Michael Hardt (2019) at the University of Paris Diderot on March 4 on the becoming-class of the multitude (the Gilets Jaunes) as a “composition” and “intersection” of an internal multiplicity within the class. This is the way the Gilets Jaunes defined the Assembly of Assemblies, one of the autonomous institutions of the movement. The tax exemption in the wealth tax was justified by Benjamin Griveaux, at that time a government spokesman, as a strategy to obtain the “lacking capital in our businesses,” which is to say, to favor productive investment. As Frédéric Lordon has shown, this measure would not in fact favor any supplementary investment, since the “overwhelming majority of deeds which fill financial portfolios, and which from now on will escape any tax exemption, are actions taking place in secondary markets” (Lordon 2017). See https://www.change.org/p/pour-une-baisse-des-prix-à-la-pompe-essence-diesel. The “France is angry!!!” group, created by Éric Drouet, had 340,000 members, and the “France enraged” group, created by Maxime Nicolle, had 170,000 members. In effect, those living in the Île-de-France were particularly affected by these two measures, since they spend on average seventy-five minutes per day in their vehicles, in contrast to the forty-five minutes for inhabitants of rural areas (Béhar, Dang-vu, and Delpirou 2018). Almost 70 percent of speed cameras were sabotaged in the first weeks of the mobilization. On “accumulation by dispossession” and the role of rental property in processes of urbanization, see Harvey 2011. At the moment of our writing, we are in “Act 68.” A good part of the seventeen billion euros of the budget for the re-evaluation of the minimum wage was used in fact for a “business bonus” abolishing the need to pay social security costs for family allowance funds for employees - a complementary bonus so that the minimum wage would not be calculated considering the pension funds of future retirees. See the site of the platform “True Debate”: https://www.le-vrai-debat.fr.

References Balibar, Étienne. 2018. “Gilets Jaunes. Le sens du face-à-face.” Médiapart, December 13. https:// blogs.mediapart.fr/etienne-balibar/blog/131218/gilets-jaunes-le-sens-du-face-face. Béhar, Daniel, Dang-Vu, Hélène and Delpirou, Aurélien. 2018. “France périphérique. Le succès d’une illusion.” Alternatives Économiques, November 29. alternatives-economiques. fr/france-peripherique-succes-dune-illusion/00087254. Charmes, Éric. 2019. La revanche des villages. Essai sur la France périurbaine. Paris: Seuil. Cohen, Yves. 2019. “Les “gilets jaunes” parmi les mouvements sans leader des années 2010.” AOC. February 21. https://aoc.media/analyse/2019/02/21/gilets-jaunes-parmi-mouvements-leader-annees-2010/. Errejón, Íñigo and Mouffe, Chantal. 2015. Construir pueblo: Hegemonía y radicalización de la democracia. Barcelona: Icaria Editorial. Gwiazdzinski, Luc. 2019. “Le rond-point. Totem, média et place publique.” Multitude 74, no. 1: 7–15.

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Guilluy, Christophe. 2018. No society: La fin de la classe moyenne occidentale. Paris: Hammarion. Hardt, Michael. 2019. “C-M-C’: Classe—Moltitudine—Classe Apine Uno.” Euronomade. March 12. http://www.euronomade.info/?p=11800. Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. 2017. “Assembly.” Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvey, David. 2011. Le capitalisme contre le droit à la ville. Néoliberalisme, urbanisation, résistances. Paris: Editions Amstérdam. Hayat, Samuel. 2018. “Les gilets jaunes et la question démocratique.” Lundimatin. December 29. https://lundi.am/Les-Gilets-jaunes-et-la-question-democratique-Samuel-Hayat. Jeanpierre, Laurent. 2019. In girum: les leçons politiques des ronds-points. Paris: La Découverte. Lefebvre, Henry. 2000. La production de l’espace. Paris: Anthropos. Le Pennec, Tony. 2018. “L’algorithme Facebook, allié des Gilets jaunes.” Arrêt sur images. December 10. https://www.arretsurimages.net/articles/lalgorithme-facebook-allie-des -gilet-jaunes. Lordon, Frédéric. 2017. “Macron, le code du travail et l’ISF. Le service de la classe.” Le Monde diplomatique. October 3. https://blog.mondediplo.net/2017–10–03–Le-service-de-la -classe. Marx, Karl. 1940. The Civil War in France: The Paris Commune. New York: International Publishers. Negri, Antonio. 2018. “Chroniques françaises.” Plateforme d’Enquêtes Militantes. December 14. http://www.platenqmil.com/blog/2018/12/14/chroniques-francaises Negri, Antonio. 2019. “Delle cose di Francia. Lo sciopero del 5 dicembre e i gilets jaunes.” Euronomade, November 27. http://www.euronomade.info/?p=12764. Plateforme d’Enquêtes Militantes. 2018. “Macron ne lâche rien, les gilets jaunes non plus !” http://www.platenqmil.com/blog/2018/12/13/macron-ne-lache-rien-les-gilets-jaunes -non-plus. Plateforme d’Enquêtes Militantes. 2019. “Face à la polarisation autoritaire: renforcer l’autoorganisation, construire le contre-pouvoir.” Plateforme d’Enquêtes Militantes. June 7. http://www.platenqmil.com/blog/2019/06/07/face-a-la-polarisation-autoritaire— renforcer-lauto-organisation-construire-le-contre-pouvoir. Rancière, Jacques. 2019. “Les vertus de l’inexplicable. À propos des Gilets Jaunes.” AOC, January 8. https://aoc.media/opinion/2019/01/08/vertus-de-linexplicable-a-propos-gilets -jaunes/. Toret, Javier, ed. 2015. Tecnopolítica y 15M: La potencia de las multitudes conectadas. Un estudio sobre la gestación y explosión del 15M. Barcelona: Editorial UOC. Vercellone, Carlo (dir.), et al. 2018. Data-driven disruptive commons-based models, DECODE project, European Union’s Horizon 2020, grant agreement no. 732546. https://decode project.eu/publications/data-driven-disruptive-commons-based-models-0.

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political power does not only belong to the professionals in power but that it is communal, and, as such, concerns each and every one of us. “We are all politicians,” reads one of these vests. The political is not reserved for governments; it is res publica, it is shared. In this respect, the uprising of the Gilets Jaunes intends to put an end to the perennial feeling of dispossession that has dominated for so many years, and to the feeling of no longer being represented. The mobilization is a reclaiming of the political process, a powerful re-politicization as well as a “re-localization of the political” (Jeanpierre 2019: 97). The political is effectively displaced into other spaces than those of power. These are spaces of autonomy where we see community building, mutual recognition, revitalization, and engagement in debate and collective decision-making. “Those who do not move do not notice their chains”—in Saint-Avold (Moselle), a Gilet Jaunes’s vest quotes Rosa Luxemburg. It doesn’t matter whether or not this formula is apocryphal. The Gilets Jaunes claim the right to rebellion. In Nîmes on December 22, 2018, Gilets Jaunes carry a banner on which the past is a living present. Here, we see the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen represented, and particularly Article 35, from the 1793 version: “When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people and for each portion of the people the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties” (Anderson [1904] 2001). Events of rebellion often have recourse to history, and this one is no exception. The past is past, of course, but it is useful. It offers, in particular, the affirmation of legitimacy. “It is right to rebel” (Gavi, Sartre, and Vic 1974). “Macron, look at your Rolex, it’s the hour of revolt,” says one vest, striking an ironic tone. And the revolt is revelatory. It makes visible those who are invisible, whose voices are not heard in the media. This form of speech expresses social distress—it renders concrete and discernible situations that are too often reduced to statistics. The uprising exposes other forms of violence than smashed windows. It shows the violence of social contempt and of the gaps that separate the wealthy from the majority of the population: the violence of employment blackmail that leads to the acceptance of the status quo, that makes solidarities and even people’s dignity fly into shards. It speaks out against the violence of suffering, of work, of unemployment, the encouragement of competition, and obedience management. A Space of Class On roundabouts and in the streets, these demonstrations bring people together in a rare way. The members of these gatherings are servers, maintenance technicians, factory workers, teachers, nurses, chefs, students, small merchants

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and artisans, unemployed people, and retired people, among others. Like the 1968 general strike, in which workers in so many professions were mobilized, this movement is marked by a wide socio-professional diversity. An intense set of class relations is played out there (Bantigny and Hayat 2019). In this intergenerational movement, young people have an equal presence to the retired. Among the latter group, “many have experienced difficult living conditions, whether personally or through their children whom they must continue to support financially” (Collectif d’enquête 2019). Women are as present as men. According to a sociological survey, the unemployment rate among the Gilets Jaunes is much higher than the average, around 16 percent as opposed to the national average of 10 percent. Interviews with Gilets Jaunes included in the report attest to this precarity; 25 percent of people interviewed report that they live in a household where the income is lower than 1,200 euros a month, while 50 percent live in households with a monthly income of 2,000 euros and 75 percent have a collective of income of 2,900 euros a month (Collectif d’enquête 2019). The Gilets Jaunes constitute an entire world of workers and employees, including temporary workers, independent contractors, and to a lesser degree, intermediate professionals in diverse sectors, including public services, with many territorial agents involved, and in the private sector, with professional drivers, medical aides, house workers, and clinical officers mobilized (Coutant 2019). The entire country is represented in this movement, from rural districts where the practice of occupying roundabouts has spread widely, to cities of all sizes, to peri-urban areas with local committees and assemblies. This is a popular revolt. “Let’s Make Alliances in Equality” Starting with the third act, on December 1, 2018, a vast convergence took place. Railway workers, antiracist collectives, students, young people from banlieues, trade unions, and people with different political alliances were all there. SUD Rail, the union of railway workers, called upon its members to “take the train of social rage” and the Adama Committee2 insisted upon necessary solidarities, proclaiming: “Those of us who live in working-class neighborhoods work in the most precarious sectors for the lowest salaries.” Their call brings together the populations of banlieues and isolated rural areas: “Many of us must drive for hours to arrive at our workplaces: in factories, in warehouses, in industrial cleaning, and in the security sector. Many of us are also unemployed, with rates of unemployment reaching 40% in some neighborhoods.” And in conclusion: “Let’s make alliances in equality.”

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On December 15, 2018, demonstrators kneeled down on the sidewalk to bear witness to an event that had taken place several days earlier. At Mantes-la-Jolie, dozens of young men, mostly Arab and Black, had been forced to their knees by the police, and required to put their hands on their heads, as if they were hostages. One police officer’s comments were broadcast later: “Here is a class that’s sensible.” The symbol was powerful—it established a link of solidarity between two spaces that are opposed in every way, namely the Champs-Élysées and Val Fourré. The distance imposed by this social gap was suddenly collapsed in the momentum of solidarity. It was as though the Champs-Élysées—this avenue of luxury and privilege—had been transformed into space for the people. However, we must not simply sweep aside the tensions and contradictions that have arisen within the movement. When certain people express residues of racism, sexism, and homophobia, others condemn and fight them relentlessly. At the beginning of the movement, acts of xenophobia were committed, such as betraying migrants to the police, and racist comments were made, particularly anti-Semitic insults. It is an essential issue in this moment and in the movement: in order for it to be emancipatory and remain that way, it is necessary to be vigilant in the face of far-right activists, including those with clear fascist leanings. In a protest in Lyon on December 22, 2018, some of these activists were removed by a group of young antifascists. There is no doubt that the diversity of the movement makes it difficult to categorize politically. On the Champs-Élysées on December 1, 2018, a protestor tagged the line, “Beautiful as an impure insurrection.” It is true that this event is not pure. And the movement of the Gilets Jaunes is not quite as cutting edge as the 1968 movement, which was supported by all leftists, from reformers to revolutionaries, while conservatives feared it, marching on May 30 on the Champs-Élysées. Pascale Fautrier (2019: 179) is correct to distinguish two political poles structuring this movement: a “nebulous sovereign-nationalist” pole on the one hand and a radical leftist pole with libertarian tendencies on the other. Old-World Grievances and Condolences What are the common struggles that unite these groups? First of all, there is a shared struggle against high living costs. Faced with this reality, the price of fuel has become a major issue. The increase of the domestic tax on the consumption of energetic products, the so-called “carbon tax,” is a triggering factor here. But the popular uprisings are not the mechanical result of

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economic difficulties; they are far from being mere “stomach rebellions.” They express an experience of contempt, a feeling of injustice, and, consequently, an aspiration to recognition, respect, and dignity (see Thompson 1971, 1991: 259–351; Honneth 1992; Anderson 1996; Scott 1990). The uprising of the Gilets Jaunes bears witness to this once again. The revolt is not just an expression of refusal. Dossiers of demands, sometimes called “registers of grievances (cahiers de doléances),” are widely written and distributed. These demands articulate goals regarding salaries, pensions, minimum social benefits, and conditions of payment and wealth distribution, such as political projects founded on redefining democracy in its entirety. The “people’s guidelines,” established on the basis of an online survey in which 30,000 people participated (Farbiaz 2019: 84–85), both address minimum wage, raised to 1,300 euros per month, and propose the instatement of a maximum wage, fixed at 15,000 euros here. The document thus establishes the basis for a more equal distribution of wealth. It emphasizes the need for a high employment rate in public services including schools, post offices, hospitals, and transportation, and proposes a large-scale plan for housing construction. A year before the widespread social movement against pension “reform,” this question was already at stake here, with a distribution system behind it (“The pension system must remain united and thus socialized. No partial pensions”), and the amount fixed at a minimum of 1,200 euros. The Gilets Jaunes demanded that the retirement age be set at sixty, and at fifty-five for professions involving “manual labor.” Taxation is just as central to this project as the demand for social justice. Their position on this can be summarized as follows: “the big should pay big and the small should pay small.” It is thus not a revolt against taxation as such but a firm and determined demand for equity. The billions of euros in tax fraud are never out of sight, nor are the “gifts” to capital holders. The Gilets Jaunes call for the reestablishment of the wealth tax, while they expose the “Credit Tax on Employment Competitiveness” as favoring large businesses alone. The platform of dissent demands an end to this and the redistribution of these funds in public services. Indeed, these services are very much at issue. They insist upon an immediate end to the closure of small railways, postal offices, schools, and maternity clinics. They assert that not everything can be commodified and bought. Rather, they insist, common assets must be protected from privatization as well as from the auction market. The platform demands that these national assets, such as ports, airports, and roadblocks not be sold. In these registers of grievances, the Gilets Jaunes also note the increase in gas and electricity rates, demanding that these assets become public again. A major issue

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in this collective project rests on solidarity. The social inequity that results in hundreds of homeless people dying on the street (officially over 600 in 2019) must be eradicated; the platform calls for the rate of homelessness to be reduced to “zero.” They also demand increased benefits for the disabled. It must be illegal to “make money from the elderly.” Rent must likewise be capped, as its vertiginous increase in large cities exacerbates precarious conditions. The platform singularly opposes this: fixed-term contracts are exposed as a machine for the destruction of time and lives. More generally, the politics of austerity are contested head on. The ecological stakes are present as well, and they are consistently tied in to a politics of equality. One vest reads, “no climate justice without social justice,” while a sign expresses this differently: “the blue planet needs yellow to become green again.” The inaugural platform insists upon the need to stimulate the shipment of commodities by rail. Some Gilets Jaunes examine developments that are deadly for the environment, from the plastic invasion of useless gadgets to planned obsolescence. The assemblies insist, for their part, on the fact that it is impossible to make the unchecked and senseless production logic of capitalism “green.” Instead, they claim that an end must be put to it altogether. Here we can see the project of building a new society—one that is more equal and more united. This is why the Gilets Jaunes in Montreuil evoke the “old-world registers of condolences (cahiers de condoléances).” They are rethinking democracy. Fierce debates are held about the Citizen’s Initiative Referendum (Référendum d’initiative citoyenne; RIC). For some, this is a major means to reclaim democracy. Others see it as a trap; indeed, the referendum has Bonapartist origins, and it can be mobilized in the service of an authoritarian government that could exercise a massive propaganda machine and undermine its principles. However, a profound and truthful level of reflection is taking form, with a view to democratizing democracy, revitalizing it, giving it substance and consistency in the places where it is most damaged. This is the goal of the popular assemblies that have been deployed in the movement, along with concrete proposals for unification, from Commercy, Saint-Nazaire, Montreuil and Montpellier with the “assemblies of assemblies,” to the Commune of communes organized in January 2020 at Commercy. These projects share a political wish for direct democracy in the form of communalism. It is a matter of regaining confidence in democratic force and in collective intelligence, which holds great creative and emancipatory capacity. This tendency moves in the direction of a de-specialization of politics, aiming to make the political a common project again, through “self-government by ordinary people” (Baschet 2019: 14).

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Where Is the Violence? A new relation of force has been established. The Gilets Jaunes are divided on this point. Some think that violence and “troublemakers” are a deterrent. Others feel that it is necessary to take this route, as it has been for every revolt in history. The proof of this is before their eyes: state power began to recede following the conflicts on the Champs-Élysées. In a similar manner to the black blocs, the Gilets Jaunes engage in spontaneous violence. In 1968 as well, many people marched in the streets without ever having planned to take part in such violence–and ultimately, they picked up and threw cobblestones. The gesture is also incited by the offensive pressure exercised by law enforcement. Like many things, violence is learned on the job: confronting violence, using it, responding to it. This is what makes an event: its protagonists act without ever having imagined that they would do so two weeks, two days, or even two hours beforehand. From the movement’s beginnings, the media primarily focused on the violence. But where is the violence? In France, two million people live on less than 700 euros a month and slums are reappearing, according to the French Observatory of Inequalities. Meanwhile, the dividends of the CAC 40 reached fifty-seven billion this year. Where is the violence? At Amazon, the workdays are twelve hours long and the weeks are sixty hours long, and they are even longer for underpaid seasonal workers who have been told incessantly to “be pros at the peak of business.” Where is the violence? Suffering at work, the encouragement of competition, and obedience management are just some of the many egregious factors in these work environments. In the SNCF railway company, there are approximately fifty suicides a year. And what of police violence? What order does law enforcement protect? We have seen serious wounds, torn hands, fractured jaws, people who have been blinded, and, tragically, the death of Zineb Redouane on December 2, 2018, in Marseille after the firing of a teargas grenade. In some places, we see an inverted world. Will posterity remember that in 2019 it was the French police, the Republican Security Companies (Compagnies républicaines de sécurité; CRS), who threw cobblestones? This is evidenced by footage taken in Montpellier in early January 2019. Jacques Rancière’s distinction between “police” and “politics” is strikingly relevant here. “Police” is government by brutality, saying “move along, there’s nothing to see here.” “Politics” is the exercise of the people’s shared power. Now, the government seems to operate only by policing.

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The Duty of Resistance On October 17, 2019, one vest read: “We are men and women who have decided together that we will no longer live on our knees. We refuse to be instrumentalized or commodified. Posterity will be our judge.” And on a sign held by a group of Gilets Jaunes on the same day, photographed by Serge D’Ignazio, we read: “Resistance: a word invented to protect men and women from living on their knees.” Indeed, the uprising of the Gilets Jaunes consists in the refusal of resignation, the rejection of passivity. “The end of me, the beginning of us,” reads another vest. The collective expresses itself here, and it is full of generosity and hospitality, as we have seen in the cabins, on the roundabouts, and in the revived “people’s houses.” The powerful reference to 1789 and, more generally, to the French Revolution, bears witness to a desire drawn from the past: that of the abolition of privileges. In September 2019, in Toulouse, a Gilet Jaune wrote the following on her vest: “If you could, you would buy our souls while you’re at it.” No, truly, not everything is for sale, not everything can be engulfed into becoming a commodity—profitable, productive, and competitive. In this respect, the uprising of the Gilets Jaunes is certainly a movement of aspiration to solidarity and dignity, as well as a refusal of docility. “When injustice becomes the law, resistance is a duty,” reads a banner displayed in La Rochelle. “Is it a revolt?” Of course, we cannot yet respond to this question with the retort: “No, it’s a revolution.” But it is at the very least a popular uprising, emerging with the force of the unprecedented and the depth of long-held rage. Like all events that erupt with the novelty of an explosion, no one expected it. And yet, it was foreseen: things couldn’t last any longer, not the way they were. We have seen it for years—the world is dancing on a volcano. We’ve known it for years—more and more people do not feel represented. They see the political world play out from afar, at an absolute distance from their own lives. The movement of the Gilets Jaunes gives an entirely different consistency to politics. It expresses a way in which to reclaim the most crucial aspects of the political: democracy and social justice. In many different places, large cities and suburbs, small towns and working-class neighborhoods, the revolt takes—and of course, it takes people by surprise. For it is distinct from all that was known before. Its manifestations often diverge from the beaten paths; they take off “into the wild.” This revolt occupies spaces, but these spaces are not factories, offices, and shops. Rather, they are tollbooths and roundabouts. The movement takes on power itself, rather than management alone.

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In the last few years, multiple forms of mobilization have prefigured this rage. Some of these movements were large-scale and determined, like the protest against labor laws and the Nuit debout, while others were more dispersed, in universities and businesses, such as the long railway workers’ strike in the spring of 2018. The Gilets Jaunes represent both an extension of these events and a true break from them. This movement insists on the blockage of circulation rather than production, even if some of its currents support a general strike—and even a “jaune-eral” strike. But the continuity is marked by the new determination drawn from the Gilets Jaunes’ inventiveness, during the strike and the mobilizations engaged on December 5, 2019 against pension “reform.” The chants and slogans that have arisen from the movement are taken up again and multiplied. Here, the word “revolution” is spoken. In Paris, the general assembly of Belleville has evoked a “GiletJaunes-style strike” (see AG de Belville 2019). “Every politics of the oppressed is a politics of the event. . . . Conversely, the politics of dominant classes believes that there are no events in history. The real is intangible, immobile, repetitive, without any alternative, without other possibilities” (Plenel 2019: 153). What is an event? It is a surprise, the emergence of the unseen, which, at the same time, is born from perceptible causes. The revolt makes visible a social and political order, simultaneously exposing and contesting it. All uprisings begin with a common consciousness, and they nourish it, elucidate it, allow it to be seen more clearly. People find themselves and one another other in it, they have discussions, they talk about life, about difficulties, about loan payments, about their neighborhoods, about the great effort to keep going—solitude gives way to solidarity. In this manner, time accelerates: we learn quickly, through the movement’s collective dimension. As in all events, we experience the acceleration of time and its powerful politicization. “The time is out of joint.”3 The hour of revolt has sounded. Let the hour of emancipation come . . . —Translated by Sylvia Gorelick Notes 1 2

3

On this subject, see Foucault 1982. The Adama Committee is collective that demands justice and truth for Adama Traoré, who died at the age of twenty-four on July 19, 2016, at the gendarmerie in Persan after being apprehended in Beaumon-sur-Oise. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V. This is the formula that Jacques Derrida (1994) analyzed incessantly in his reading of Marx.

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References AG de Belville. 2019. “Une grève gilet-jaunée.” Plateforme d’enquêtes militantes, December 10. http://www.platenqmil.com/blog/2019/12/10/une-greve-gilet-jaunee. Anderson, Frank Maloy. (1901) 2001. “The Constitutions and Other Select Documents Illustrative of the History of France 1789–1901.” In Liberty, Equality Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution, edited by Jack R. Censer and Lynn Hunt. American Social History Productions. www.columbia.edu/~iw6/docs/dec1793.html. Bantigny, Ludivine, and Hayat, Samuel. 2019. “Les Gilets Jaunes, une histoire de classes?” Mouvements 100, no. 4: 12–23. Baschet, Jérôme. 2019. Une juste colère. Interrompre la destruction du monde. Paris: Éditions Divergences. Collectif d’enquête. 2019. “Enquêter in situ par questionnaire sur une mobilisation. Une étude sur les Gilets Jaunes.” Revue française de science politique 69, no. 5: 869–92. Coutant, Isabelle. 2019. “Les “petits-moyens” prennent la parole.” In Le fond de l’air est jaune. Comprendre une révolte inédite, edited by Joseph Confavreux, 147–50. Paris: Seuil. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge. Farbiaz, Patrick. 2019. Les Gilets Jaunes. Documents et textes. Vulaines sur Seine: Éditions du Croquant. Fautrier, Pascale. 2019. La vie en jaune. Chronique d’un soulèvement populaire. Vauvert: Au Diable Vauvert. Foucault, Michel. 1982. This is Not a Pipe. Translated and edited by James Harkness. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gavi, Philippe, Sartre, Jean-Paul and Vic, Louis. 1974. On a raison de se révolter. Paris: Gallimard. Honneth, Axel. 1996. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Translated by Joel Anderson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jeanpierre, Laurent. 2019. In Girum. Les leçons politiques des ronds-points. Paris: La Découverte. Plenel, Edwy. 2019. La victoire des vaincus. À propos des Gilets Jaunes. Paris: La Découverte. Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Thompson, Edward P. 1971. “The Moral Economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century.” Past and Present 50: 76–136. Thompson, Edward P. 1991. “The Moral Economy Reviewed.” In Customs in Common. London: Merlin Press.

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Like any unexpected social phenomenon, the Gilets Jaunes attracted many interpretations. Notably, within militant and university milieus it became the object of many political hypotheses and different analyses, giving rise to a real “quarrel” (Badiou 2019). In the context of this proliferation of contributions relating to the movement, we can distinguish three interpretative approaches that seem to us paradigmatic. The first approach is deflationist, the second populist, and the third, localist. The first, affirming the movement has no political interest from an anti-capitalist perspective, holds that in a context where neoliberalism falls into the hands of “sovereignist” forces, the Gilet Jaunes and their demands are in fact compatible with this system, and do not constitute a true opposition to it (Badiou 2019). Far from being a force of rupture with the established order, this new figure of social mobilization would be instead its inverse reflection, lacking a solid form of organization and a truly structured political program openly committed to a “communist horizon.” The second approach, while recognizing the political potential of the movement, claims to reduce the social composition and aspirations of the Gilets Jaunes to the layer of a recalcitrant “lower class” (petit peuple) acting against the economic policies of the European Union, tendentially identitarian and nationalist. This social composition would be opposed indeed to the effects of globalisation and in particular to the Maastricht project of European integration; in this sense, the “lower class” of the Gilets Jaunes would be situated in the same political sequence as the people of Brexit and the wave of “populisms” (Onfray 2020). The third approach—the localist interpretation—is built, on the other hand, on a precise analysis of the sociology of the movement, its geography and development during the first months of the mobilization. It insists, rightly, on the radically new character of its forms of organization, on its “post-ideological” nature and on the context of crisis in the “Fordist” social and political structures of organization in which it emerged. Putting the accent on the “experiential” (Lianos 2018) aspect of the politics of the roundabouts, this interpretation aims mainly to emphasize the local and “communal” dimensions of its practices, to the detriment of the overall meaning of its development, in order to oppose the model of the Gilets Jaunes to the series of “alterglobalization” movements of the 2000s (Jeanpierre 2019). All of these interpretations, which are based on sociological observation and suggest specific political horizons, adopt positions of exteriority in relation to the studied phenomenon, either more or less pronounced depending on the case. This is an epistemological perspective that characterizes

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most proper social-scientific research and which guarantees a certain critical distance vis-à-vis the object of research and its transformations. Without questioning the legitimacy of this mode of enquiry, we propose, in the following pages, a different interpretation, based on the immanent “logic” of the movement (Rancière 2019) and forged through our accumulated exchanges in a work of “co-research” (Allavena and Polleri 2019; Gallo Lassere and Monferrand 2019) carried out over the course of more than a year.5 It is, thus, beginning from the lived experience of the assemblies, the demonstrations, and the surrounding conversations that we return to the uprising of the Gilets Jaunes and its evolution between November 2018 and January 2020. Given that their social and spatial composition is inseparable from their practices of struggle and open political perspectives, we advance the thesis that the Gilets Jaunes knew how to subvert the frustration and sad passions of social and geographic “declassing,,” turning it into an economic struggle and reappropriation of the political. The Gilets Jaunes thereby managed to constitute an unprecedented case of “democratic counter-power” within French society. Socio-spatial Composition and Political Conjuncture Accused many times of being a “pre-political” movement and sometimes stigmatized as reactionary and “barbaric” (but also “fascioid,” “putschist,” “racist,” “anti-Semitic” or “homophobic”), the Gilets Jaunes, rather, expressed the politicization of a significant section of the lower classes and of certain strata of the middle classes in the process of proletarianization. These are the social strata affected by the psycho-economic suffering brought about by neoliberalism and by the gradual phasing out of all attempts at social and geographic mobility, two closely linked dimensions in a centralized country like France. In this perspective, an analysis of the movement in terms of social composition must be integrated into research on its spatial composition. The opposition expressed since November 2018 against the increase6 in taxes on fuel (the “carbon tax”) easily translated into the language of protest against the profound changes taking place in French society, however often these passed unnoticed. After the financial crisis of 2008, the incomes of the lower classes of the population have progressively diminished (Bourguignon 2019), so much so that fixed expenses such as housing, electricity, gas, water and school fees have increased much quicker than inflation (Fassin and Defossez 2019). This inverse evolution of income against expenses has also had the consequence that a whole part of the population has found

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itself having a smaller and smaller budget to meet all its needs. This impoverishment is all the more painful because it has affected a part of the population that was not excluded from the circuits of production of wealth. At the same time, the increasing cost of real estate, especially in big cities, has driven a certain number of low-income households to move away from the urban centers, where their place of work is located, to rent or buy housing in areas described as “peri-urban.”7 Neither city, nor country, these places maintain a strong dependence on the urban centers even if they are spatially removed from these. Abandoned by public services, these areas constitute a zone of limbo as much from the socioeconomic point of view as the political. Here, public transport services are insufficient or in the process of being dismantled, while the widespread feeling toward institutional politics is that it counts for nothing as soon electoral campaigns are over. All this explains why in these territories—the most active throughout the mobilization—the carbon tax was not only rejected as an unjust tax (because indirect and not progressive) but was able to be the vector of the politicization of a generalized feeling of exasperation—the feeling of “”being “fed up” (“ras-le-bol”) as often expressed in the first calls to protest—anchored in the material living conditions of increasingly large segments of the population. Watching the movement closely in these first weeks, many inquiries showed an overall consistency in the profiles encountered, not in terms of professional status, but from the point of view of the social position occupied. Salaried or self-employed workers belonging to the “lower classes” or to “intermediary” professions (Coquard 2018), retired, unemployed, part-time or precarious workers, all having experienced a certain economic fragility, the Gilets Jaunes expressed a variegated set of those who are disadvantaged in society and who see themselves being less and less protected in the social transformations imposed by neoliberalism. This is the multitude of those dispossessed of dignified conditions of existence and the possibility of political decisions over their own destiny, thanks to a presidential political system separated from society. It is enough then to add to these structural conditions a few conjunctural factors to understand the reasons that led to the explosion of the movement between October and November 2018. Since his arrival at the Élysée with the presidential elections of 2017, Emmanuel Macron launched a real offensive against French welfare, established procedures of political mediation, and trade union organizations. In this situation, the defeat of the rail workers’ strike during the summer of 2018 against the reform of the rail service strongly marked public debate, especially since it was accompanied by a

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scandal linked directly to the figure of the president. Indeed, a security officer to the president, improperly disguised as a police officer, was recognized on the margins of the May Day demonstration, as he was violently repressing demonstrators. The erasure of all forms of social and political mediation, the dismantling of the institutions of the welfare state, an ambiguous relationship between the officials of the Élysée and the Police Prefecture, and a generalized delegitimization of the figure of the president: these were key elements of the French political situation in the summer of 2018. This conjuncture became heated in the fall, with the increase of fuel taxes justified by an acceleration in the country’s ecological transition. In this context, the “gilet jaune” (yellow vest), détourned from its usual meaning which associates it with a law prescribing visible clothing to prevent road accidents, became the instrument to make visible the generalized accident of a whole part of the population most penalized by the policies promoted by Macron. In expressing at once a means of political subjectivation and a modality of protest, this costume revived, on the one hand, the history of the French revolution, which adopted as its symbol the Phrygian cap of freed slaves and, on the other hand, the popular counter-culture of carnival (Sloterdijk 2018). Its function was in this case to put everyone on equal footing in disrespecting established power and in defiance of a centralist and technocratic government whose resignation was immediately demanded. But the gilet jaune also became a means of communication and a singular surface of inscription; since it constituted the “board” on which to write or draw the multiplicity of pleas, reflections, and demands brought forward by the movement. Reinvention of Class Struggle and the Reappropriation of Politics At the beginning of fall in 2018, the opposition to the supposed “eco-tax” promoted by Macron was immediately very broad. In October, many videos posted on Facebook denouncing its strategy of offloading the costs of ecological transition on the lower part of the population went viral. Meanwhile, a petition launched on the internet got more than a million signatures in a few days.8 By November, hundreds of pages or groups on social media, such as the Facebook group, “France is angry” (La France en Colère), had been created and joined by hundreds of thousands of people. These online communities played a leading role in breaking the isolation and increasing the sense of political illegitimacy over the choices made by the government. Drums started beating on social media, where it was decided to adopt the gilet jaune as a symbol and to begin the occupations of the roundabouts, these elements

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of the peri-urban fabric created to make circulation more fluid, where blockage actions could happen and where permanent meeting and organizing points could easily be created. Since the very first weeks, the protest has played on a double temporality: occupation of the roundabouts with blockage or slowdown of circulation during the week, and demonstrations in the rich areas of the capital on the weekend. The Saturday demonstrations were not announced to the police, but publicized through anonymous accounts on social media. The blockage of production and consumption through the occupation of the nodes of circulation, and the collective irruption in the metropolitan centers thus constituted the two principal axes around which the Gilets Jaunes’ practices of struggle were organized. These two axes make it possible to identify the three main points of attack in the contestation: the questioning of the forms of government of the enlarged reproduction of the socioeconomic system; the demand for a decentralization of state structures; and the critique of politico-geographic hierarchies crossing social space. If the occupation of the roundabouts indeed made it possible to create new spaces of sociability and local assemblies, the Saturday demonstrations—called “Acts” and organized on a weekly basis in the capital or in other cities—targeted the centers of economic, political and symbolic power in the country. This double temporality that characterizes the practices of the movement not only represented its form of expression and its strategy of struggle. It was above all its vector of transformation and consolidation over time, thus channeling the two fundamental claims of the Gilets Jaunes: the reinvention of social conflict in the context of the weakening of the effectiveness of the traditional strike, and the reappropriation of the ultimate meaning of political experience, namely the creation of new forms of living and organizing together, antagonistic and alternative vis-à-vis existing institutions. On the one hand, in fact, we have the multitudinous irruption in the “wealthy neighborhoods” of the big cities, in malls and in logistics distribution districts: a practice aimed both at the destabilization of constituted power (through the assault on institutional buildings) and at disturbing the flows of capitalist valorization made throughout the whole reproductive cycle of the economy (production-circulation-consumption). On the other hand, the occupation of the roundabouts and the formation of hundreds of local assemblies allow the reconstitution of hubs for the socialization of suffering, where it is possible to collect the many different “complaints” (doléances) and discuss the overall conditions into which society has fallen. In other words, these are places where collective speech becomes political decision

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and organization, aimed at putting the mechanisms of reproduction of the dominant socio-political order into crisis, and experimenting with other possible connections. Behind the constant reference of the Gilets Jaunes to the republican motto of “fraternity” among participants in the movement, what stands out is indeed their ability to re-open not only the imaginary of the strike and of social conflict, but also the desire to break with solitude and to return the materiality of existence to its political dimension through the constitution of a new “moral economy” (Hayat 2019). This is because it is the sharing of a certain experience of injustice and readiness to fight which characterize the participants of the movement, much more so than their belonging to a particular professional category. As the analysis of the oral and written productions of the assemblies of the Gilets Jaunes shows, this co-implication of social conflict, instance of democratization and experimentation with autonomy, emerges from the first “Acts,” with the shift from the refusal of the carbon tax to the demand for the “resignation” of the President to the demand for more “buying power” for the poorest social classes. A demand in which the need to be constituted as an autonomous and alternative “counter-power” vis-à-vis dominant powers remains no less important than the need for a reappropriation of the wealth produced in society (Negri 2018; Balibar 2018). The double temporality of the Gilets Jaunes thus expresses the two lines of force traversing a movement that emerges as an “uprising” against constituted power: there will be no reinvention of the class struggle without reappropriation of political experience. And no reappropriation of politics, without the practice of direct democracy and the invention of new common institutions. All Power to the Roundabouts! Toward a Democratic Counter-power? The “democratic question” indeed plays a major role in understanding the Gilets Jaunes movement (Plenel 2019). In a critical or negative sense, the uprising points its finger not only at inequality in the distribution of wealth. More generally, it points toward the relationship social inequality maintains with the structural crisis in the mechanisms of representation and the balance of powers of the presidential system of the Fifth Republic. In a positive or affirmative sense, the Gilets Jaunes expressed a need for the radical reinvention of democracy, as much on the level of big political institutions, as on that of local autonomy and the experience of daily life. Addressing this need took several forms: discussion groups on social media to occupy the roundabouts, from the formation of local assemblies to the refusal of the “Great

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Debate” proposed by Macron in order to exit the crisis, to the construction of the self-managed digital consultation platform, the “True Debate.” This series of heterogeneous attempts share a common denominator: the practice of direct democracy as a political expression of social counter-power. Direct democracy is therefore, first, the common name expressed by the local groups that make up the “body” of a profoundly polycentric movement. In their collective experimenting with organizational forms, the Gilets Jaunes immediately valued horizontal practices of democracy as a terrain of vertical struggle against “Macron and his world.” Second, it is the modus operandi adopted for the construction of the autonomy of the movement (Brancaccio and Camell Galí 2019). The experiment of a democratic counterpower, in fact, must first be understood as a quest for the independence of the movement vis-à-vis the unions, political parties and, more generally, all forms of representation. A course of struggle that later passed through refusal to negotiate with the government and all forms of mediation with the contested “old world,” to finally arrive at the opening of a variety of infrastructures of collective confrontation and deliberation. Spaces such as the “Assembly of Assemblies” (AdA) of the Gilets Jaunes were a vector of subjectivation and a decisive instrument of coordination for groups of people far removed from traditional politics. The AdA gathered together hundreds of local assemblies from all over France at each iteration, with the objective of meeting, discussing and drawing up a common strategy for the movement. This experience is based on the idea that “all power is in the local assemblies”: a principle that embodies, in our perspective, the double meaning that the Gilets Jaunes gave to the practice of autonomy. On the one hand, the development of a movement that is totally independent of already existing organizations; on the other hand, the momentum of self-normativizing expressed in the inventions of common procedures and rules guaranteeing horizontality and the diffusion of power across networks. These two elements constitute the autonomous temporality of the movement since it is also with the AdA that the Gilets Jaunes developed their own “agenda,” and it is there that the movement anchored itself over time as a counter-power. This example of democratic self-organization shows, then, the deep link between the territorialization of the movement and the overall significance of the struggle it waged. Far from being simply social figures from “peripheral” locations, the Gilets Jaunes testified rather to the complexity of the socio-urban structure of contemporary capitalism, and directly attacked the connection between the distribution of socially produced surplus value and the re-writing of the current geography of economic and political power.

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In the construction of spaces such as the AdA, this political struggle, inseparable from a critique of the capitalist system in its totality, showed a considerable striking force that touched the foundations of constituted power. By organizing itself as a multiplicity of local committees, online groups, citizen assemblies and roundabouts, the movement was able to resist the authoritarian reorganization of the state machine. Its power was precisely the opening up of a perspective of autonomy based on democratic principles without renouncing the “larger” level of conflict against Macron and his project of neoliberal reform. More than functioning as organizational formalization and centralization, the AdA presented itself as a flexible infrastructure produced for the purpose of meeting and linking the multiplicity of demands of the Gilets Jaunes, without any claim to internal homogenization or hierarchization. From the Citizen Initiative Referendum (RIC) to the battle against the privatization of airports in Paris, the convergences with ecological and union struggles, and the discussions on an overall strategy for “ending capitalism,” a multiple and proliferating collection of demands was composed and recomposed in the debates of the AdA. This experience of coordination was situated within a radically anti-bureaucratic horizon and sought a political form able to live up to the multitudinous dimension of the social uprising launched in November 2018. A sort of platform for open political cooperation, operating through the constant revision of the mechanisms of discussion and political decision, according to the principle of decentralization and the exchange of responsibilities and skills. In other words, a federation of local assemblies and rebellious singularities, which showed itself capable of giving a new impetus to social, political, and ecological conflicts in France. An experiment that, it seems to us, opens new possibilities for the 2020s in Europe. —Translated by Christina Aislinn Chalmers Notes 1

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“Plein le dos” (https://pleinledos.org/) is an artistic and militant project which aims to collect photos of slogans appearing on the backs of yellow vests, everywhere in France, in order to create a collective popular memory. A selection of these photos is collected in the Collectif Plein le dos 2019. According to the figures given by the French Ministry of Internal Affairs. More than ten thousand were taken into custody by the national police force, more than five thousand people went to trial and around a thousand were sentenced to prison time. Since the beginning of the Gilets Jaunes the documentarian David Dufresne (2019) has monitored and classified the episodes of police violence. The tally is two deaths, 323 head wounds, twenty-five people with lost eyes, four hands torn off. The

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high number of wounded people is due to the use of weapons such as the manual stingball grenade, the F4 teargas grenade, the GLIF4 instant teargas grenade (containing a dose of TNT) which are forbidden elsewhere in Europe. In 2010, the movement opposing the pension reform was beaten, and the reform was voted through. The same result occurred with the movement in spring 2016 against the then titled “Work Bill” (Loi Travail) or the “El Khomri Bill.” At the beginning of the summer, the reform was voted through by Parliament despite street demonstrations around the whole of France and the movement’s growth under the name “Nuit Debout,” which included occupations in the squares of many towns. In March 2018, the movement contesting the reforms to the national railway service would also have no effect. Certain works of co-research are available on the collective site “Plateforme d’Enquêtes Militantes”: http://www.platenqmil.com/apropos. Tax increases of 6.5 cents on diesel and 2.9 cents on gasoline, in addition to the 7.6 and 3.9 cent price increases of these two fuels, respectively, in the course of 2018. These are not defined as zones of “fixed poverty,” which is equally largely present in the urban centers. It is therefore necessary, as various sociologists suggest, to avoid simplistic dichotomies such as center/periphery and city/country (Béhar, Dang-vu and Delpirou 2018). For a deeper examination of the question (Lussault 2019). The petition entitled, “For a reduction in fuel prices,” was launched by Priscilla Ludowski and addressed to the Minister for ecological transition, François de Rugy: https://www .change.org/p/pour-une-baisse-des-prix-%C3%A0-la-pompe-essence-diesel.

References Allavena, Julien, and Matteo Polleri. 2019. “From Co-research to Counter-institution.” South Atlantic Quarterly 118, no. 2: 457–69. Badiou, Alain. 2019. “Leçons du mouvement des Gilets jaunes.” Lignes 59, no. 2: 37–46. Balibar, Étienne. 2018. “Gilets Jaunes. Le sens du face-à-face.” Médiapart, December 13. https:// blogs.mediapart.fr/etienne-balibar/blog/131218/gilets-jaunes-le-sens-du-face-face. Béhar, Daniel, Hélène Dang-Vu, and Aurélien Delpirou. 2018. “France périphérique. Le succès d’une illusion.” Alternatives Economiques, November 29. alternatives-economiques. fr/france-peripherique-succes-dune-illusion/00087254. Bourguignon, François. 2019. “Pour la première fois depuis la guerre, le pouvoir d’achat a décliné sur une longue période.” Le Monde, March 6. lemonde.fr/politique/article/2019 /03/06/pour-la-premiere-fois-depuis-la-guerre-le-pouvoir-d-achat-a-decline-sur-une -longue-periode_5432162_823448.html. Brancaccio, Francesco, and Marta Camell Galí. 2019. “Retour sur Saint-Nazaire: inventer la démocratie directe, s’organiser en contrepouvoirs.” Plateforme d’Enquêtes Militantes, April 25. platenqmil.com/blog/2019/04/25/retour-sur-st-nazaire--inventer-la-democratie -directe-sorganiser-en-contre-pouvoirs. Collectif Plein le dos. 2019. Plein le dos: 365 gilets jaunes, novembre 2018–octobre 2019. Le Masd’Azil: Les éditions du Bout de la ville. Coquard, Benoît. 2018. “Qui sont et que veulent les gilets jaunes?” Contretemps. Revue de critique communiste, November 23. contretemps.eu/sociologie-gilets-jaunes/. Dufresne, David. 2019. “Allô place Beauvau, c’est pour un bilan, une cartographie des violences policières.” Médiapart. January 29. mediapart.fr/studio/panoramique/allo-place -beauvau-cest-pour-un-bilan.

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Fassin, Didier and Defossez, Anne-Claire. 2019. “Les Gilets Jaunes objet politique non identifié.” AOC, March 15. aoc.media/analyse/2019/03/15/gilets-jaunes-objet-politique-non-identifie/. Gallo Lassere, Davide, and Frédéric Monferrand. 2019. “Inquiry: between critique and politics.” South Atlantic Quarterly 118, no. 2: 444–56. Hayat, Samuel. 2019. “Les Gilets Jaunes, l’économie morale et le pouvoir.” Médiapart, February 7. blogs.mediapart.fr/edition/mondes-possibles-cycle-de-rencontres/article /070219/les-gilets-jaunes-l-economie-morale-et-le-pouvoir-samuel-hayat. Jeanpierre, Laurent. 2019. In girum: les leçons politiques des ronds-points. Paris: La Découverte. Lianos, Michalis. 2018. “Une politique expérientielle—Les gilets jaunes en tant que peuple.” Lundimatin, December 19. lundi.am/Une-politique-experientielle-Les-gilets-jaunes-en -tant-que-peuple. Lussault, Michel. 2019. “Des ronds-points et de la condition périurbaine.” AOC, January 10. aoc.media/analyse/2019/01/10/la-condition-periurbaine/. Negri, Antonio. 2018. “Gilets Jaunes: un contropotere ?” Euronomade, December 21. euronomade .info/?p=11461. Onfray, Michel. 2020. Grandeur du petit peuple. Heurs et malheurs des Gilets Jaunes. Paris: Albin Michel. Plenel, Edwy. 2019. La victoire des vaincus. Sur les Gilets Jaunes. Paris: La Découverte. Rancière, Jacques. 2019. “Les vertus de l’inexplicable. À propos des Gilets Jaunes.” AOC, January 8. aoc.media/opinion/2019/01/08/vertus-de-linexplicable-a-propos-gilets-jaunes/. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2018. “Macron n’est pas Louis XVI.” Le Point, December 13. lepoint.fr/politique /gilets-jaunes-peter-sloterdijk-macron-n-est-pas-louis-xvi-13-12-2018-2278959_20.php.

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depriving communities of the conditions of their social reproduction and their territorial sovereignty. This is also the approach of the Lakota in their struggle against the construction of pipelines in the Great Plains of the Dakotas (Estes 2019) and the Achuar in their fight for the preservation of agroforestry systems on the border between Peru and Ecuador (Descola 2008). At another level, it is a procedure that takes place on a large scale in the European “Zones to Defend” (Zones À Défendre; ZAD)—in Notre-Dame-des-Landes near Nantes, at Sivens, and in the Amassada in the Southwest of France, in the Susa Valley in Italy, etc. These territorial communities ensure their existence thanks to sustainable means of subsistence, such as agro-ecological cultures, short circuits, local solidarity networks, and other experiences of sharing and commonality. The Gilets Jaunes have developed a territorial approach that echoes this modality of living and understanding political ecology. Another, more urban ecological tendency has developed in the context of movements for environmental or climate justice. Environmental justice is considered to have emerged in 1982 in Warren County, North Carolina, during the struggle of African-American populations against the installation of a highly toxic waste landfill in a majority black neighborhood (Wells 2018). In this case, environmental justice was intimately linked to the civil rights movement and to the fight against the environmental inequalities that reinforce power disparities along lines of race and class. This is a form of environmentalism that is antiracist and anti-capitalist at its root. Although the movement for climate justice emerged from the movement for environmental justice, it is much more heterogeneous. The climate justice movement includes all organizations fighting against climate change, and it is present throughout the global North. This movement has conserved the concern for linking climate questions to antiracist politics, feminist struggles, and labor demands, but its social composition, which is mostly white, urban, and middle-class, often leads its actors to forms of engagement anchored in juridical battles or lobbying. In France, for example, the “Case of the Century” (“Affaire du siècle”) is a campaign organized by the Foundation for Nature and Humanity (Fondation pour la Nature et l’Homme), Our Shared Responsibility (Notre affaire à tous), Greenpeace France, and Oxfam France, which holds the French state accountable for its inaction on climate change. As we can see, this type of action, like that carried out by international NGOs, exemplifies the movement’s legalistic approach to climate justice. On this point, we must note that the climate justice movement is split at its center between these somewhat moderate associations which engaged in forms of legal battles and more radical organizations, which advocate for civil disobedience (such as Action Non Vio-

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lente Cop. 21, Alternatiba) or means of direct action (such as Extinction Rebellion, Youth for Climate, Friday for Future). The movement of the Gilets Jaunes proposed an original synthesis of territorial struggles and movements for climate justice beginning with the contestation of the carbon tax. Before their first appearance on the Champs-Élysées and on thousands of roundabouts throughout France, the Gilets Jaunes contributed decisively to the politicization of ecology. There were two opposing camps in the French public sphere beginning in October 2018. On one side were the dominant classes and the mainstream media, which, under the pretext of refusing to reduce the ecological question to “a moral injunction based on individual consumption,” wanted to make “the middle and lower classes pay the cost of an illusionary ecological transition,” while denouncing the movement of the Gilets Jaunes as anti-ecological. On the other side were the Gilets Jaunes, who refused “to accept this lie propagated by the state [and] to assume the burden of ‘responsibility’ for the ecological crisis” (Plateforme d’Enquêtes Militantes 2018; F. A. P. de la Pateforme d’Enquêtes Militantes 2018; Des militant·e·s écologistes 2019). With the Gilets Jaunes, it has effectively become impossible to separate the issues of environmental disaster and climate change from questions of social and political justice.1 In this way, the Gilets Jaunes have contributed to “pushing ecology beyond ecology” (Citton 2018). But how did this process of radicalizing and broadening ecological demands take place? Within the space of several weeks, the protest against the increase in gas prices led to a proliferation of demands regarding all spheres of social life. In this sense, we will advance the hypothesis that this dynamic was enabled by the movement’s territorial establishment and the production of counter-knowledge. It therefore seems to us legitimate to claim that the Gilets Jaunes gave rise to a movement for climate and environmental justice that reinvented traditional practices of dissensus2 while deploying unprecedented modalities of territorial organization and creating a new material culture. The Carbon Tax and Eco-Political Subjectivation The Gilets Jaunes’ first target, in the earliest phases of the uprising, was the increase of the “carbon tax.” This tax was instated in 2014 with the alleged purpose of funding the transition to alternative energy sources. This Pigovian tax, which internalizes the social cost of economic activities by integrating negative externalities into the market, had the express goal of reorienting household consumption toward less polluting products and to contribute the revenue to the struggle against climate change. However, far from fulfilling

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these virtuous functions, the carbon tax is in fact a legislative instrument that is both fundamentally unequal and profoundly ideological. And the Gilets Jaunes exposed it as such. On one hand, many analysts have demonstrated the degree to which sensitivity to the fluctuations of fuel prices is directly proportional to standards of living: “while the wealthiest 10% of households take up three times more kilometers than the poorest 10%, when prices are raised, they reduce their consumption much less than poor households” (Combes 2018). The poorest households are unable to buy lower-emission cars or to reduce their car use, given that they often live in neighborhoods located farther from metropolitan centers. They therefore pay more taxes than the rich, while “the most affluent 10% of households emit four times more carbon than the poorest 50%” (Combes 2018). The carbon tax thus serves to exacerbate socio-environmental inequalities. On the other hand, it is presented as a necessary step in funding the ecological transition to other energy sources. But the hobbyhorse of green capitalism has turned out to be a Trojan horse. First of all, the cynical instrumentalization of the tax by Macron’s government has been laid bare in the public sphere, with only one part of the tax revenue being geared toward renewable energy, while over five hundred million euros in revenue have been allocated to the general budget to support its structural deficit. The Gilets Jaunes also denounced the tax law’s regressive character, since it applies to all consumers equally, irrespective of income. Finally, the Gilets Jaunes criticized industrial groups and big businesses, revealing the crucial role of taxation—and thus of the state—in the reproduction of capitalist social relations.3 Yet—and this is a decisive point—what matters most from the perspective of political ecology is the way in which this revelation was constructed and collectively effected. To contest such an iniquitous, unjust, and allegedly ecological measure, the Gilets Jaunes occupied roundabouts, spaces emblematic of the French highway system, connecting commercial zones in peri-urban areas (Depraz 2018). This tactical choice effectively blocks the flow of commodities, making the movement visible to the citizenry and creating new social spaces. It thus demonstrates “the multiplicity of territorial and functional interdependencies within large areas comprising cities, countryside areas, housing developments, struggling and revived rural towns, zones of activity, natural spaces, commercial centers, logistical centers, etc.” (Delpirou 2018). The Gilets Jaunes occupying roundabouts thus constituted a “total spatial reality” and a small commune, emerging as the neuralgic nodes in a complex network of organizational microstructures, interconnected and disseminated throughout the territory of France. This dense mesh was, however,

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lacking any unifying center of reference. Each occupied roundabout was equivalent in value to all the others, such that only their common trait of belonging to this category mattered. Here, there is no Zucotti Park as in New York, or Puerta del Sol as in Madrid, no Parisian Place de la République to define the movement, to give it a brand name. Instead, there is a vast constellation of anonymous roundabouts, identified only by their pragmatic geographic coordinates, which are linked to directions accessible on a day-to-day basis: near X shopping center, next to X warehouse, at the entrance of X highway, etc. (Lussault 2019)

The Gilets Jaunes have diverted the primary function of roundabouts—cold non-places, empty and nameless—transforming them into spaces overflowing with vitality, human warmth, camaraderie, and multiple forms of action (Cassely 2018). It is here, as in the Zones to Defend or in spaces occupied by movements since 2011, that the Gilets Jaunes camped out for weeks, if not months. There, they built people’s houses, constructed cabins, and creating meeting spaces that have fostered links of solidarity, new relationships of mutual aid, and support networks between friends and family, neighbors, or simply people who cross paths every day but are not in the habit of speaking, discussing, or converging around their lived experiences (Lianos 2018, 2019a, 2019b, 2020). Communal projects address the problematics of daily life, completing the “original political task of describing the ‘world’” which has “taken up the inquiry into the productive sphere and enlarged it to encompass the surrounding environment and the forces that weigh on it” (Jeanpierre 2019: 166–67). Drawing up tables of daily life, developing questionnaires, drafting lists of demands, creating registers of grievances: these are the politico-cultural operations that have allowed for the Gilets Jaunes to enact the “work of describing life territories” capable of producing knowledge from below that calls into question the very foundations of “the old regime on climate” (Latour 2019). Territory and Knowledge The French context at the territorial level of municipalities and, especially, at the level of “communities of municipalities” allows us to understand the deep-rooted force of the Gilets Jaunes. The Gilets Jaunes have been most active in the territories where their concerns were ripe for politicization. Effectively, the Gilets Jaunes’ critique of representation, combined with their demands for social and ecological justice, are rooted concretely in daily life and in a relationship to territory that are alienated by the current municipal

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structures. With the advent of new public management and the transformation of the state-form, the last decades have seen organizational apparatuses become increasingly distanced, both physically and politically, from smaller municipalities. Villages and small cities have thus been gathered into “communities of municipalities,” resulting in an immediate dispossession of decision-making processes from city halls and organizations such as local associations. This process has been accompanied by the superficial solicitation of feedback from inhabitants put under the purview of these new administrative entities. Projects of territorial reorganization and of the General Review of Public Policies (RGPP), for example, which are “proposed” to the inhabitants of municipalities, are increasingly parachuted in by external experts who don’t have the slightest knowledge of the areas in question (Bruneau, Mischi, and Renahy 2018). Mayors respond to this paternalistic marginalization and alienation of certain populations with projects that supposedly embody ecological values but in fact constitute pure greenwashing. Inhabitants know very well what is necessary for the improvement of the life of villages and their surroundings, including forests, rivers, and fields. Yet, at the local level, we have long observed the very thing that Macron’s Great Debate revealed at the national level in the spring of 2019. This is, namely, a false participatory democracy in which the contempt and condescension of the ruling classes takes precedence over the true needs of citizens, as well as their very capacity to define those needs and identify the means to fulfill them. 4 Inhabitants rarely participated in municipal workshops, consultations, and surveys, as they were aware that their opinions would be like a drop of water in a bureaucratic ocean. The Gilets Jaunes worked to legitimize public speech in the name of citizens, developing shared perspectives in collaboration with them to address the issues that affect them directly. Paradigmatically, the problem of the increase in gas prices and of the carbon tax went hand in hand with that of the disappearance of public services and public transportation vertically imposed by Macron. From the outset, this brings together ecological and social justice, and political and fiscal justice. For example, the reform of the SNCF (the French railway network) in the spring of 2018 resulted in, among other things, the closure of small train lines and workforce reduction in small railway stations. To compensate for this, bus networks were put into place, which are often fewer and more polluting than trains. This is a specific policy case that the Gilets Jaunes have been denouncing for two years, articulating far-reaching perspectives from the ground up and horizontally. As we have seen, the increase in gas prices directly impacts the daily lives of populations that have no other choice than

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to drive their cars to go to work, to drop off their children at school, to go shopping, to go to the hospital, to get home in the evening, etc. And in this context, “no one is free to choose whether they have a car or not, because the suburban universe is organized around driving.” Consequently, “the alternative to the car must be global,” or, to quote Gorz at greater length: “we must never pose the problem of transportation in isolation but always link it to the problem of the city, the social division of labor and the compartmentalization that it has introduced between different dimensions of life. There is one place to work, another place to ‘live,’ a third place to shop, a fourth to learn, a fifth to be entertained” (Gorz 2008: 44–46). This is how the Gilets Jaunes have thought and acted, criticizing the “green” projects proposed by experts, which never take on the reconfiguration of social spaces and relations in their entirety. Another point, which is less visible but far from being simply anecdotal, and which the Gilets Jaunes have addressed many times, is the question of consumption. Since November 2018, the Gilets Jaunes have engaged in practices that hinder and even block spaces of consumption. These range from ostentatious and luxurious spaces, which the Gilets Jaunes have occupied through demonstrations in wealthy neighborhoods and on the ChampsÉlysées, to spaces of lower quality and mass consumption such as shopping centers, large distribution chains, supermarkets, and Amazon warehouses on the outskirts of roundabouts. Contrary to these opulent, unsanitary, and socially and ecologically degrading forms of consumption, rural Gilets Jaunes have established short and alternative circuits in the countryside, in mountainous areas, and along coastlines.5 This demonstrates the will to build solidarities with sections of the population that are close to the Gilets Jaunes while upholding their right to adequate food. The Gilets Jaunes have worked in collaboration with local farmers and producers to prepare collective “big feasts” on roundabouts and in people’s houses. Over time, these networks have become rooted in certain territories, becoming permanent fixtures beyond the Gilets Jaunes’ organization. They have been extended to support communities for the aid of migrants at the French-Italian border, associations that support the homeless and the poor and, during the demonstrations against pension reform, workers who led a very long and difficult strike against the Macron government. Here, once again, the Gilet Jaune movement gave way to a general politicization of seemingly specific issues: the free distribution of food and the demand for sanitary products no longer have anything to do with an engagement that is simply individual or collective, ethical or humanitarian. Rather, they become points of support in the struggle for justice and dignity, forging links between subjects who would never have met otherwise.

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Final Considerations The inhabitants of small cities and villages for many years have developed knowledge that extends from the primary needs of municipalities to the sustainable management of forests, and through alternative and more sustainable modes of exchange and consumption. With the Gilets Jaunes, the dissimulation and pooling of this knowledge has not only circumvented the bureaucratic practices typical of the public sector but also become openly political and autonomous. All the microstructures put into place by the Gilets Jaunes have effectively avoided the reproduction of the state apparatus’s frames and forms of rationality, leading to organizational processes that pose the question of self-government, even if only negatively. It is within this context that the Gilets Jaunes have traced an unprecedented and powerful path for the reappropriation of politics via their shared experience of territory and the consolidation of autonomous knowledge. The pooling of all practical-theoretical knowledge tied to territories, socio-environmental milieus, and social reproduction more generally allows for social and ecological battles to be carried out at both the local and national levels. It is no coincidence that many people who have participated in ecological struggles since the 1970s, such as the fight against nuclear energy, have joined the Gilet Jaune movement. These militant activists have refused to invest in dominant ecological organizations, which they identify as overly bureaucratic, vertical, tied in with elected officials, and not sufficiently radical, particularly with regard to social issues. An important struggle that has developed between 2018 and 2020 in France thanks to the Gilets Jaunes has been the one against all forms of privatization, often pursued through alliances with citizen- or unionled movements. This includes protests against the privatization of airports (through occupations and petitions, with anchor points where Gilets Jaunes collect signatures), dams (through blockage actions and demonstrations, working together with unions and local ecological associations), and forestry management (via actions for the protection of trees with ecological communities and local citizens, as we have seen in Corrèze, Dordogne, and Limousin). If the Gilets Jaunes can be considered an environmental justice movement, previously nonexistent in France, it must be noted that they have introduced a new radicality to traditional ecological organizations in terms of the modes of action and watchwords that they use. For a long time in France, ecological movements were split into two constituencies that were largely unaware of one another. On one side, territorial movements struggling against unnecessary large-scale projects had long developed strategic and radical goals (such as the suppression of private property in Notre-Dame-

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des-Landes) and quasi-insurrectional combat tactics (on the Sivens Dam, for example). These movements were largely rural. On the other side, a very legalistic climate justice movement, with a principally white and urban social composition, supported programs for energy transition. These moderate programs do not call into question the mode of production responsible for the climate crisis, nor do they critique the state structures that ensure its permanence. The Gilets Jaunes’ creation of a new urban and peri-urban territoriality has led to a profound upheaval of this opposition: climate justice can take place beyond legality, and territorial battles can be fought in the heart of the metropolis. The Gilets Jaunes represent the first movement to have overcome the division between city and country in French ecology. But most importantly, the Gilets Jaunes have introduced a new question to the agenda of ecological priorities: who should pay in the fight against climate change? Should it be the polluters, the most affluent classes and businesses? Or should it be the poorest, those who are often most directly affected by climate change? Who should take on the climate risks of capitalist production? The progression of recent events in France offers us some paths toward an answer to this question, which are compelling if only partial. First of all, on September 21, 2019, during a peaceful climate march, the Gilets Jaunes spoke to demonstrators of their environmental program from a practical perspective. They asserted that the catastrophe would not be fixed by a moral reform of individual practices that weigh on the poorest members of society and those who are the least responsible for the crisis. Rather, they claimed, it will be fought by those who are inventing new ways of living on earth against the capitalist destruction of the world. It is noteworthy that the demonstration in Paris was the only one in the world that was violently suppressed by the police on that day. This was the government’s only possible political response in the face of the demonstration’s scale and the risks it presented in terms of alliances between the Gilets Jaunes and environmentalists (Combes 2019). Several days after the climate march, groups of Gilets Jaunes co-organized the occupation of one of the main shopping centers in Paris, Italie2, along with several environmental groups (Youth for Climate and Extinction Rebellion, among others), effectively blocking the consumption of commodities in these spaces. Then, beginning on December 5, 2019, environmentalists actively participated in blockages, demonstrations, and picket lines against pension reform. They acted both as workers and out of the recognition that point-by-point reform accentuates tendencies toward the financialization of the economy, radicalizing the production logic of capitalist societies, with negative implications in terms of public health, resource extraction, and greenhouse gas emissions (Des militant.e.s écologistes 2019).

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In both of these cases, we can see a “yellow ( jaune) effect” at work, where there is no longer any separation between fiscal issues and political issues, social questions and ecological questions. Here, “climate justice” truly emerges as “the contemporary model of anti-capitalism” (Leonardi 2019). —Translated by Sylvia Gorelick Notes 1 2 3

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One of the movement’s principal slogans synthesizes this point well: “End of the world, end of the month—the same system, the same fight.” On this point, see the other essays in this dossier. On this point, one need only look at Gilets Jaunes’ famous list of forty-two demands that came out in early December 2018 (Jeremiechayet 2018). This document calls for the taxation of the Big Four and other multinational corporations, an end to tax advantages for big businesses (CICE) and for “the use of this money to fund the production of hydrogen cars, which, unlike electric cars, are actually ecological,” a much more progressive income tax (and the reestablishment of the wealth tax), an end to the politics of austerity and the reimbursement of illegitimate debt interest, and an end to the taxation of fuel, maritime fuel, and kerosene. Their final ecological demand is for the development of public transportation, advocating against the closure of small train lines and for the shipment of goods by rail, and demanding a “Large Insulation Plan for housing (to achieve ecological savings for households).” On this point, we would like to recall in passing the clumsy initiation, in September 2019, of an illusory citizen’s convention for the climate composed of 150 randomly selected members: conventioncitoyennepourleclimat.fr/. In Dunkirk, for example, the Gilets Jaunes have gone beyond promoting Local Exchange Systems and Associations for the Preservation of Local Farming and have even founded an Extinction Rebellion chapter in Pas-de-Calais.

References Bruneau, Ivan, Julian Mischi, and Nicolas Renahy. 2018. “Les gilets jaunes en campagne— une ruralité politique.” aoc.media, December 14. aoc.media/analyse/2018/12/13/gilets -jaunes-campagne-ruralite-politique/. Cassely, Jean Laurent, 2018. “Les ‘gilets jaunes’ ou la révolte de la France des ronds-points.” Slate, November 9. slate.fr/story/169626/blocage-17–novembre-gilets-jaunes-revolte-ronds -points-france-peripherique-diesel. Citton, Yves. 2018. “Abécédaire de quelques idées reçues sur les “gilets jaunes.” aoc.media, December 21. aoc.media/analyse/2018/12/21/abecedaire-de-quelques-idees-recues-gilets -jaunes/. Combes, Maxime. 2018. “Gilets jaunes vs Macron: la transition écologique dans l’impasse.” aocmedia.org, November 24. aoc.media/analyse/2018/11/23/gilets-jaunes-vs-macron -transition-ecologique-limpasse/. Combes, Maxime. 2019. “La France, seul pays où le cortège a été violemment réprimé.” Basta!, September 23. bastamag.net/Marche-climat-21-septembre-gilets-jaunes-black-bloc -repression-forces-de-l-ordre-lacrymogenes-droit-de-manifester.

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Delpirou, Aurélien. 2018. “La couleur des gilets jaunes.” La vie des idées, November 23. lavie desidees.fr/La-couleur-des-gilets-jaunes.html. Depraz, Samuel. 2018. La France contrainte des “gilets jaunes.” aocmedia.org, December 13. aoc.media/analyse/2018/12/12/gilets-jaunes-france-contrainte/. Descola, Philippe. 2008. “À qui appartient la nature?” La vie des idées, January 21. laviedesidees .fr/A-qui-appartient-la-nature.html. Des militant·e·s écologistes. 2019. “Green Bloc contre la réforme: les écologistes demandent la retraite du gouvernement.” Plateforme d’Enquêtes Militantes, December 19. platenqmil .com/blog/2019/12/19/green-bloc-contre-la-reform--les-ecologistes-demandent-la -retraite-du-gouvernement. Estes, Nick. 2019. Our History Is the Future. London: Verso. F. A. P. de la Plateforme d’Enquêtes Militantes. 2018. “Force jaune / vert / rouge.” Plateforme d’Enquêtes Militantes, December 26. platenqmil.com/blog/2018/12/26/force-jaune--vert --rouge. Gorz, André. 2008. Ecologica. Galilée: Paris. Guha, Ramachandra. 1989. “Radical Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique.” Environmental Ethics 11, no. 1: 71–83. Guha, Ramachandra, and Juan Martinez-Alier. 1997. Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South. London: Earthscan. Jeanpierre, Laurent. 2019. In Girum. Paris: La découverte. Jeremiechayet. 2018. “Liste des 42 revendications des gilets jaunes.” Mediapart, December 2. blogs.mediapart.fr/jeremiechayet/blog/021218/liste-des-42-revendications-des-gilets -jaunes. Latour, Bruno. 2019. “Du bon usage de la consultation nationale.” aocmedia.org, January 15. aoc.media/analyse/2019/01/14/usage-de-consultation-nationale/. Leonardi, Emanuele. 2019. “La crise écologique doit être payée par les riches.” Plateforme d’Enquêtes Militantes, October 10. platenqmil.com/blog/2019/10/10/la-transition-ecologique -doit-etre-payee-par-les-riches. Lianos, Michalis. 2018. “Une politique expérientielle: les gilets jaunes en tant que ‘peuple’.” Lundímatin, December 19. lundi.am/Une-politique-experientielle-Les-gilets-jaunes -en-tant-que-peuple. Lianos, Michalis. 2019a. “Une politique expérientielle (II): les gilets jaunes en tant que ‘peuple’ pensant.” Lundímatin, February 19. lundi.am/une-politique-experientielle-II-Les-gilets -jaunes-en-tant-que-peuple-pensant. Lianos, Michalis. 2019b. “Une politique expérientielle (III).” Lundímatin, June 26. lundi.am /Une-politique-experientielle-III-Michalis-Lianos. Lianos, Michalis. 2020. “Une politique expérientielle (IV).” Lundímatin, February 9. lundi.am /Une-politique-experientielle-IV-Entretien-avec-Michalis-Lianos. Lussault, Michel, 2019. “Des ronds-points et de la condition périurbaine.” aocmedia.org, January 11. aoc.media/analyse/2019/01/10/la-condition-periurbaine/. Plateforme d’Enquêtes Militantes. 2018. “On a Ridgeline: Notes on the ‘Yellow Vests’ Movement.” Viewpoint Magazine, December 6. viewpointmag.com/2018/12/06/on-a-ridgeline -notes-on-the-yellow-vests-movement/. Wells, Christopher W., ed. 2018. Environmental Justice in Postwar America: A Documentary Reader. Seattle: Washington University Press.

Notes on Contributors Ludivine Bantigny is a historian and lecturer at the University of Rouen. She works on the history of social movements and political commitments. Among her publications are 1968, de grands soirs en petits matins (2018, reprinted 2020), La France à l’heure du monde: de 1981 à nos jours (2013, reprinted 2019), Révolution (2019), L’Œuvre du temps: mémoire, histoire, engagement (2019), and La plus belle avenue du monde: une histoire sociale et politique des Champs-Élysées. C. D. Blanton is associate professor of English and director of the Program in Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Epic Negation: The Dialectical Poetics of Late Modernism. Francesco Brancaccio has a doctorate in theory of the state and comparative political institutions from the Sapienza University of Rome. He is currently a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Social Sciences of the University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis, and his research focuses on urban commons. He is a member of the CEMTI laboratory and the Department of Culture and Communication of the University of Paris 8. He is also part of the Plateforme d’Enquêtes Militantes collective. He edited with Carlo Vercellone SAQ 118, no. 4 (October 2019), titled “The Common.” Marta Camell Galí has a degree in Philosophy from the University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis with a master’s thesis on the social question in the works of Gabriel Tarde and Gilbert Simondon. She is part of the Plateforme d’Enquêtes Militantes collective.  Élodie Chédikian is a doctoral candidate in political theory and Ancient Greek history at the EHESS (CESPRA Lab and the ANHIMA Center). She is working on the concept of stasis/civil war in Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War and in Hobbes and Machiavelli’s works. Andrew Cole is Professor of English at Princeton University, where he directs the Gauss Seminars in Criticism. Among his books are The Birth of Theory (2014) and a forthcoming title on the dialectic of space, as well as a coauthored work on Marx with Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda. Mladen Dolar is Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana. His principal areas of research are psychoanalysis, modern French philosophy, German idealism, and art theory. Having lectured extensively at universities in the US and across Europe, he is the author of over hundred and fifty papers in scholarly journals and col-

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lected volumes. Apart from fourteen books in Slovene his book publications include most notably A Voice and Nothing More (2006, translated into eight languages) and Opera’s Second Death (with Slavoj Žižek, 2001, also translated into several languages). His new book The Riskiest Moment is forthcoming with Duke University Press. He is one of the founders of the “Ljubljana Lacanian School.” Hal Foster is the author of numerous books, including, mostly recently, What Comes After Farce? Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle (2020). Brutal Aesthetics, his 2018 Mellon Lectures, will soon be published by Princeton University Press. He teaches at Princeton, coedits October, and contributes regularly to the London Review of Books and Artforum. Alexander R. Galloway teaches media studies at New York University and is author of several books on digital media and critical theory, including The Interface Effect (2012). A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, Galloway is currently finishing a new manuscript on the deep history of cybernetics. Paul Guillibert has a doctorate in philosophy from Université Paris Nanterre. His dissertation is titled “Land and Capital: Think the Destruction of Nature in Time of Global Disasters.” He is assistant lecturer in philosophy at Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès. Caren Irr is Professor of English at Brandeis University and the author of Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the 21st Century (2013), Pink Pirates: Contemporary American Women Writers and Copyright (2010), and The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the US and Canada (1998). She has also coedited two collections of essays on critical theory, and she is the editor of a collection forthcoming from Minnesota on literary and artistic responses to plastic. Eleanor Kaufman is professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French and Francophone Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of The Delirium of Praise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski (2001); Deleuze, the Dark Precursor: Dialectic, Structure, Being (2012); and At Odds with Badiou (forthcoming). Anna Kornbluh is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (2019), Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club (2019), and Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (2014). Her current research concerns impersonality, objectivity, mediation, and abstraction as residual faculties of the literary in end times. She is the founding facilitator of two scholarly cooperatives: V21 Collective and InterCcECT.

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Davide Gallo Lassere is “chercheur rattaché” at the Laboratory Sophiapol (University of Nanterre) and teaches politics at the University of London in Paris. He is the author of Contre la Loi Travail et son monde (2016). Colleen Lye teaches English and Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. She is currently working on two projects: a book on Asian American literature after 1968, and a coedited companion on Marxist criticism and theory after the sixties. Warren Montag is the Brown Family Professor of Literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles. His most recent books include Althusser and his Contemporaries (2013) and The Other Adam Smith (2014). Matteo Polleri is a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Paris Nanterre (Laboratoire Sophiapol) and Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. His research is focused on the contemporary contamination between Marx’s social philosophy and Foucault’s theory of power. He is part of Plateforme d’Enquêtes Militantes (Paris) and Laboratorio Autogestito Manituana (Turin). Federico Puletti is a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Paris Nanterre (Laboratoire Sophiapol) and University Alma Mater of Bologna. His research focuses on the concept of “Cooperation” in Marx and the analysis of contemporary transformations of work and accumulation processes. He is part of the Plateforme d’enquêtes Militantes collective. Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. His latest book is The Beneficiary (2017). He is working on a book about criticism and politics, and his documentary What Kind of Jew Is Shlomo Sand? (released by Mondoweiss in April 2020) is available at youtube.com/watch?v=sO3fVFXeSWY. Audra Simpson is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. She researches and writes about Indigenous and settler society, politics, and history. She is the author of Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (2014), winner of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association’s Best First Book in Native American and Indigenous Studies Prize, the Laura Romero Prize from the American Studies Association as well as the Sharon Stephens Prize from the American Ethnological Society (2015). She is coeditor of Theorizing Native Studies (2014). She has articles in Postcolonial Studies, Theory and Event, Cultural Anthropology, American Quarterly, Junctures, Law and Contemporary Problems, and Wicazo Sa Review. In 2018, she was the Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto and in 2019 the Nicholson Distinguished Scholar in The Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the

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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She delivered the General Anthropology Division’s Distinguished Lecture at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting in 2019. In 2010 she won Columbia University’s School for General Studies “Excellence in Teaching Award.” She is a Kahnawà:ke Mohawk. Hortense Spillers is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Over the years, she has taught at Wellesley College, Haverford College, Emory, and Cornell Universities, in addition to serving as a guest professor in the Program in Literature at Duke University (2002–3). Among her publications are foundational essays like “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” and “‘All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother’: Psychoanalysis and Race.” Her scholarly writings are collected in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (2003). She has also edited Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text (1991); and coedited, with Marjorie Pryse, Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition (1985). Recipient of many honors, she received a Lifetime Achievement award from the literary journal, Callaloo, in 2016, and was honored with the Nicolás Guillén Lifetime Achievement award by the Caribbean Philosophical Association at its most recent international conference in summer 2017. Robert T. Tally Jr. is the NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at Texas State University. He is the author of numerous books, including Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (2019), Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism (2014), Poe and the Subversion of American Literature (2014), Utopia in the Age of Globalization (2013), and Spatiality (2013). His edited collections include The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space (2017), The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said (2015), Literary Cartographies (2014), Geocritical Explorations (2011). Tally is also the editor of “Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies,” a Palgrave Macmillan book series. Alenka Zupančič is a Slovene philosopher and social theorist. She works as research advisor at the Institute of Philosophy, Scientific Research Center of the Slovene Academy of Sciences. She is also professor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. Notable for her work on the intersection of philosophy and psychoanalysis, she is the author of numerous articles and books, including Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan; The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two; Why Psychoanalysis: Three Interventions; The Odd One In: On Comedy; and, most recently, What is Sex? doi 10.1215/00382876-8663795

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