Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 16:50:54 -0700 (PDT)
From: andrew robinson <ldxar1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: RE: More on Fascism (and Flows) (Agamben - Benjamin - Schmitt) (Deleuze& Guattari )


Lowe,
 
I think a lot of what you're saying is spot on, but it's important to be clear on the political differences involved in articulating ideas of contingency.  OK, there are a lot of complexities, but a lot of it comes down to the authoritarianism underlying rightist appropriations, which is a result of "accepting" the "necessity" of asymmetrical social relations and of systematised social control. 
 
"Being "enemies" so to speak of transcendence, transcendental ways of thinking, (social) laws, justice etc. are not to be trapped in something higher than oneself. They are to be decided in the reckoning of the case."
 
There's a reason why the powerful like passive-voice statements - they can cover up the issue of who is doing the "deciding".  In actual social assemblages, this is the core of the whole issue.  And the question of the power-relations between different agents can be altered by the adoption of different mystifications and representations of power; the use of transcendentalist excuses does not simply cover up power but requires that the powerful maintain some kind of "public transcript" (Jim Scott's term) in relation to the oppressed.
 
For Schmitt and a number of his poststructuralist followers, the law, and various relations of social exclusion, remain unconditional necessities.  When the idea of the unconditional necessity of law is combined with the idea of the ungroundedness and arbitrariness of action, the result is, I would contend, tendentially fascist.  If one goes for the critique of transcendentalism but does not go far enough in the critique of law and social asymmetry, the result is philosophical fascism or at least something with authoritarian implications.  For instance, I'm sure George W Bush would love for there to be a situation where there are no taboos against massacring civilians, finding excuses before going to war, rigging elections, etc.  (Of course, it's also irrationalist, because it maintains the necessity of something which cannot be rationally grounded or supported, and also perhaps because the claims of necessity and arbitrariness are in contradiction; but these are less important
 points).
 
People who go picking fights with "transcendentalism", as if this ideational spook is somehow the root of all evil, and are even prepared to drop their guard about fascist and authoritarian ideas to do so, are fighting phantoms instead of social forces.  One should always remember that the real point isn't to criticise "transcendentalism" (or any other belief-system) for its own sake, but to struggle against oppression which occurs in actual social apparatuses.  People who think that the real point is to smash "transcendentalism" are actually falling back into a naive positivism because they think that there is an overarching truth independent of power-relations (i.e. the truth of the statement "transcendentalism is false") which should come before one's political commitments.
 
The most important Deleuzian/Nietzschean/Foucauldian point is NOT that "transcendentalism" is "wrong" but that it is a power-apparatus serving to maintain particular social relations; in which case, the question about any critique of this apparatus is not merely, "is it right?" (in some abstract sense), but how does it alter social relations?  What are the social relations which are instituted if the alternative perspective is adopted instead of "transcendentalism"?  In which case there is a WORLD of difference between Schmitt's views and anything which could even remotely be called a critical perspective - even if some of Schmitt's ideas can be used if they are placed in a new framework.

"Why? Because the masses must believe that the law is decided by contract or concensus or what ever. For no second should we think that law and justice reside within our immediate, "immanent" relations with our situations. "
 
And why must the masses believe this?  Because otherwise they'd have to admit that it's someone else who has all the power.  In other words, if the guy with the gun pointed at your head thinks he can simply make an ungrounded decision to shoot you or not, you're left completely powerless.  So the oppressed try to make counter-claims to weaken this arbitrariness.  So we end up with ideological masquerades which cover up the power of dominant groups by portraying it as consensual etc.  This never makes power consensual etc., but at the same time it puts limits on what the powerful can do (if only because they would provoke unrest otherwise).  Revolutionaries have an interest in breaking down such ideas only if the result is that the masses stop supporting the power which is oppressing them, because they see that on the whole it is arbitrary, not consensual or grounded.  If it just means the bosses, the army etc. see fit to do what they like and tell the civil libertarians and human
 rights activists to f*** off, I'll keep the illusions, thanks.
 
All else equal, the masses are better of with the "public transcript" of liberal rights than without it, because at least the powerful have to be careful not to get caught.  It expresses a power-relation in which the rulers are at least required to keep up an appearance, and where the masses have a residual power to affect the requirements of this appearance; whereas a Schmittian perspective means the bosses can do what they like and admit it, and no-one should complain.  Any emancipatory "anti-humanism" must come from an entirely different angle, using the fact that the powerful act arbitrarily as something which criticises the very possibility of asymmetrical, institutionalised power being legitimate.
 
Telling activists to f*** off is exactly what the critique of transcendentalism means for Schmitt, which is why it's so dangerous to tamper with these kinds of ideas unless you keep a sufficient distance from the politics behind them, and from the aspects of Schmitt's philosophy which form the basis for the politics.  Don't forget, "the point is to change it".

c.f. Deleuze and Guattari on microfascism and the Nazi regime - which according to them is what happens if a line of flight begins but is not able to form a plane of consistency or a rhizomatic arrangement, and which therefore continues into a black hole of pure destructiveness (Vaneigem's "active nihilism").  They say this is even worse than the conformist continuation of a striated order, and repeatedly invoke it as the big danger of movements for social change - something we need to be ever vigilant about.
 
"I see Derrida as well as others who've appropriated the discourse of Schmitt on the left (e.g. Zizek and Mouffe and Negri) as a challenge to the left to abandon their complacent attitudes vis a vis the political and to life in general."
 
This idea of "the political" can be rather dangerous because it is often used as a way of implying that the state is inevitable - since "the political" is "inherently antagonistic" and since its "foreclosure" is the greatest theoretical sin for many of these authors (Negri perhaps aside), and since also it is taken to require the necessity of "decision" and therefore of a deciding agent (the legislator), the influence of this "challenge" is often insidious.  It's like a "challenge" for the left to accept that the right was in fact in the right all along - certainly a "challenging" proposition and one sure to win the approval of those looking above all for provocation and controversy, but hardly any way forward for resistance to the existing system.
 
In the essay "Force of Law", Derrida makes very clear that he sees "law" (the fixed but necessarily inadequate reified structure of institutionalised controls) as necessary and inevitable, so that the process of its being "haunted" by "justice" (the messianic element carrying the excluded others whose claims are silenced within law) can never in fact become revolutionary - a position also clear in Spivak's essay, "Responsibility".   As Esther Leslie makes clear in her book on Benjamin, the politics of this position is straightforward bourgeois reformism.
 
But at least with Derrida the moment of "justice" is still valorised.  For Mouffe, the real problem of the present is anomie resulting from the breakdown of the idea of social integration.  This in turn is due to the lack of a master-signifier and the messy relativism which results from the "foreclosure of the political".  The solution is a "decisive", authoritarian position in which the claims of the state are to extend to a right to impose its will arbitrarily and in which "mere particularities" have no claims against an ordering function given absolute priority.
 
Ditto Zizek: the Act necessarily recomposes social order around a new master-signifier, as the agent who has acted arbitrarily becomes the moment of founding violence of the new order.  Hence the emphasis on authoritarian figures such as Lenin and St Paul.  Lenin in particular is read as someone who knew that the revolution must be betrayed and who to all intents and purposes laid the foundations for Stalinism.
 
In these cases, the critique of "transcendentalism" (or "essentialism") reformulates itself in a Schmittian vein, with the same authoritarian implications.
 
This is certainly not what Agamben is doing in the essay cited previously.  I very much liked this essay, precisely because of the stress on the difference between Benjamin and Schmitt and the fact that, whereas Schmitt retains a "transcendental" commitment to the moment of legislation itself, Benjamin favours a more anarchic politics in which an awareness of contingency opens onto an attack on this moment as such - something Derrida, Spivak, Laclau, Mouffe and Zizek would never condone, nor any of the theorists influenced by "consitutive lack".  (The exegesis of Benjamin is, by the way, controversial, and I've found other authors such as Peter Osborne and Scholem who attribute a Derridean position to Benjamin; but Agamben's argument is also supported by other scholars.  I found Michael Lowy's essay, in his book "Redemption and Utopia", especially convincing regarding Benjamin's views).
 
The moment of legislation does not return with the same force in Nietzsche, except in precisely those passages which link him to fascism; and it does not occur at all in Deleuze and Guattari, Vaneigem, Stirner, Foucault, Hakim Bey, Bonanno, etc., all of whom are very much theorists of contingency, anti-transcendentalist and anti-essentialist (whereas Benjamin would probably call himself a transcendentalist because of the messianic dimension), and who are very much in favour of self-positing by individuals, of singularity, etc.  It occurs in some Marxist authors such as Gramsci, again precisely at the point where their thought takes its most authoritarian turns (e.g. Gramsci on the Modern Prince as legislator, as opposed to the fragmentary view of power which otherwise emerges from his deconstruction of economistic Marxisms).
 
The distinction between the two ways of theorising contingency is absolutely crucial, and in my view even more important than the essentialist/anti-essentialist or transcendentalist/anti-transcendentalist binaries.  This is because, whereas it is possible to be a naive essentialist and still have broadly emancipatory political views (e.g. Chomsky), it is not possible to adopt the Schmittian approach to contingency (complete with the irrational attachment to "law") without resultantly theorising some kind of authoritarian social order.
 
Of course there's also a lot of nonsense goes on in arguments about the "appeal of fascism" and so on (to which Alfredo Bonanno's essay "non-news about fascism and anti-fascism" is perhaps the best antidote), but just because someone's talking nonsense doesn't mean the people they're attacking are right.  The problem with slanders regarding guilt by association ("X reads Schmitt so must be a Nazi" and that kind of thing) is 1) the imprecision of the association involved and 2) the fact that this way of dealing with ideas is itself reactive, opposing fascism as a repressed Other instead of undermining its own reactive structuring.
 
Actually I'm not sure if I'm agreeing or disagreeing with you about a lot of this, because you made a number of divergent points in the last couple of posts and so I'm not sure what is the thread of what you're saying - I offer my apologies in advance if I'm being too harsh towards what you're saying.

Andy

		
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