Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2004 22:30:04 -0800 (PST) From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com> Subject: [postanarchism] De Kock: "The Unknown Horizons of Communism and Community" The unknown horizons of communism and community Petrus De Kock Is it at all possible and/or necessary to embark on a (re)thinking of socialism? This may sound like a cynical question, but the fact is that the philosophical, social, political and economic context within which we think socialism today in the year zero marks the word socialism as the ultimate impossibility. But maybe it is exactly this impossibility that makes it all the more urgent, all the more pressing to think what the barriers to a thinking of socialism is. And in order to think these barriers I propose to devote this essay to a few social and philosophical phenomena that may not necessarily lighten the burdens – or lift the barriers, but which may assist a possible re-thinking of socialism. It is necessary at the outset to underline a few ideas and concepts, of which community is the first. It is clear that in the history of socialism, Marxism, and communism a certain thinking of community provides the backdrop against which a varied political and revolutionary tapestry is projected. Community is evoked around every corner, in action and reflection, philosophy and theory. One could say that community is given a double task – it firstly acts as the name of the now, wherein the breakages, schisms, exploitation and excesses of a given society/community finds expression. In the second instance community acts as a receptacle of hope, where it is projected and thought in various ways – filled with the expressions of a revolutionary project to accomplish the establishment of a future where the breakages, schisms, exploitation and excesses of the now would come to an end in the ideal community or condition of communism. The problem that one stumbles across immediately is that community is taken for granted, the mere mention of the word would suffice as explanation. This means that in socialism (as in so much of our political and philosophical discourse) there is a concept we know as community, but not a conception of community where we investigate what it means if we talk the talk of community. But, as we shall see, community is much more problematic, and the problematics inherent in the treatment of community infiltrates our understanding of socialism as well. This means that in order to think what socialism could conjure up, here and now, we’d have to trace a few trajectories along which community could be (re)thought. And then, along with the task of thinking community and socialism another concept appears: utopia. I propose that we proceed from here in some tentative steps and fragments, along which the network of a (re)thinking of socialism could be explored. i The scene or horizon of this essay is set by the following question: Can utopia still be the driving force of our thinking? With this I do not propose a return to accounts of differences between scientific socialism and earlier utopians – or to a large reconstruction of the corpse of utopia but rather to (re)locate the word or concept utopia here, in the year zero and to ask some questions about the contours of this foreign mindscape. ii I want to pick out two of my own phrases in the previous fragment: utopia as driving force of our thinking, and, utopia as a foreign mindscape. In utopia as driving force of our thinking I need to specify a few elements. In the first instance this is addressed to us communists. I use this term deliberately, on the one hand for the sheer daring of it, on the other because it marks political pronouncements with the energy of possibility as well as the fatigue of all revolutionary practices and thinking. For, is it not true that for socialism to be re-thought the word/concept communist needs to be rehabilitated in all its different facets? Implying that we need to move over the ground of what is meant by community, commonality, and a shared social conscience (or consciousness) again. The second phrase, utopia as a foreign mindscape – if considered in the light of the previous, becomes a problematic element. Does the word or label communist not conjure up the frequencies, the energies and hopes of a transformed humanity? What does it mean to use the word communist if it is not tied to the umbilical cord of a hope, a dream, a mindscape of what is to be? It is exactly the latter idea that marks socialism and communism as crisis, the thinking of a crisis. Communism today, does not and cannot express a utopia and a future, and what needs to be investigated are the reasons for the collapse of the possibility for thinking utopia. Utopia is that which strung socialism, and Marxism, and communism along as the carrot towards the land beyond time. What philosophical and social shifts took place in the 20th century that led to the evaporation of utopia which was by nature anyway vaporous, porous and at the same time so solidly material and hence political. What conditions, and what powers dissolved it as a solidly material condition of thinking the beyond of the now, in short – how and when and why did a materialist conception of the future unbundle or decompose? iii The consideration of community I am embarking on here will for the largest part of it revolve around a reflection on Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking of community, especially his considerations of it in his book: The inoperative community. Van Den Abbeele (1991:ix) opens Community at loose ends by considering what the peculiar evocative force of the notion of community is. He states: "What is its apparently irresistible attraction and ability to mobilize the energies of the most diverse groups, all of which are first and foremost constituted by their very interpolation as communities?" He continues by wondering whether there is not an element of demagoguery or mystification at work in the seductive appeal to community that would merit critical scrutiny before we subscribe to its ideological prestige. It could be noted that the appeal to community, and the evocation of ideals of community by groups ranging from left to right on the political spectrum points to the vacuousness or emptiness of the concept community. The question this brings to the fore would be, is there an essence of community? Community would in this sense be an unquestioned value, and what needs to be done is to ask what it could possibly mean to talk community, and more specifically what it would mean if we consider socialism and the ways socialism could express a sense of community in the 21st century. Nancy (1991:1) opens his book with the following passage: "The gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world, the one that possibly involves all other testimonies to which this epoch must answer (by virtue of some unknown decree or necessity, for we bear witness also to the exhaustion of thinking through History), is the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community." The task I set myself here is not one of providing extensive proof for these kinds of statements, like the one above where Nancy announces that this epoch bears witness to the dissolution, dislocation, and conflagration of community. In a cursory fashion I would like to state that the 20th century is probably a time/epoch where the historical singularities of senses of community gives way to the disembodiment of older and more traditional senses of community. Evidence of this is to be found in the ballooning of urban centra, the evaporation of the ability of a variety of communities to locate themselves according to geographical and specified coordinates of identity, heritage and language, and differential senses of community or commonality arising in the electronic fields of mass communication, media, and global economic powers. The transitions in larger social, political and economic structures in the 20th century which heralds shifts in the workings (and constructions) of community, is also silently accompanied by transitions of the self or the subject (or at least a certain understanding of it which I propose is essential to take into consideration here). In this sense a very direct link could be established between the image of the self/subject, and the image of community. What is meant by this is that if the subject is seen and/or lived as a self-generating entity, or as the locus of an autonomous self, correlating images of community would take shape. Community would then denote the essence, or referential totality of those who come together in the common space of a community. A severe philosophical question arises once one begin to ask, what sense(s) of the subject is present now, and also whether as we enter the 21st century the etymology of community in the form of com + munis (as Van Den Abbeele 1991:xi explores the etymology) in the sense of being bound, obligated, or indebted together could be maintained. The two sets of issues on the table at this point are therefore – what we talk of when we talk about the subject, and related to that how notions of community is informed by visions of subjectivity. What does it mean to evoke a spirit of being bound, obligated, and indebted together in a social and economic domain which seems to bind these notions into a project aimed exactly at its dissolution along the contours of a consumerist, mediated, image driven political economy. What needs to be remembered is that a socialist or communist image of the com + munis only functioned within a circumscribed terrain which marked the territory of the society by zones of exclusion. These zones were traced as working class/proletariat versus capitalist/bourgeoisie/owner of the means of production. These zones inscribed within themselves – and on the bodies of those in that political economic zone, a very solid subjectivist/subject driven understanding of the world. The liberatory potential of the class struggle would within that understanding of society (as composed of these exclusionary zones) only come to fruition through the collective revolutionary potential of a class as singular political agent and subject. A question that should be posed here is: can socialism lay claim to an analysis of the current conditions of world capitalism which can still maintain a vision of emancipation expressed as the exclusive ‘right’ of a singular class? In response to such a question I would say no, it can’t. The loci of social struggle has shifted and expanded radically in the course of the 20th century. Witness for example the struggles expressed in feminism, sexuality(s), indigenous peoples (who’s struggles are multifaceted – eg. Against MNC’s and for the maintenance of heritage and identity), environmental struggles, ethnic minorities, religious struggles, etc. It is not as if these issues were not present say in the social atmosphere in which forms of socialism and communism developed and matured in the 19th and early 20th century. I would rather assert that lots of them arose later, and/or were in earlier manifestations of socialism displaced by the subjectivist orthodoxy of the bipolar class struggle. This then makes the ‘orthodox’ notion of class struggle as the positioning of one exploited class, versus one ‘owner/capitalist’ class suspect. What this would then call for is a more transversalist or multiple practice of thinking socialism, which would inherently ask for a further thinking of the understanding of the subject and community under conditions of varied loci of social and political economic struggle. iv The struggle that socialism is facing, is exactly the struggle of extracting itself from, or, extracting from within its own logic the vestiges of revolutionary models built upon the fatigued foundation of a bipolar class struggle. This does not mean that revolution as such should be discarded, but rather that we should think ‘revolution’ differently. This implies a different thinking of the self/subject, community, revolutionary goals and/or objectives, power relations, and ultimately what it means to put the word ‘communist/m’ back into political language. Dare I add something else that needs to be ‘restrategized’ concerning socialism which would be a certain eschatology, or near religious or metaphysical investment in the processes and procedures of revolution as truth. We will return to the latter point in due course. But maybe we have not yet dealt with the relationship between a certain understanding of the subject and community extensively enough. What is at stake in discourse concerning the subject is much more than an academic or philosophical interest, what one can see is really the terrain along which the contestation of a certain political understanding of the self, power, and political agency plays itself out. To make my position clear at this point would be difficult. Partly because I do believe that the poststructuralist take on subjectivity, as expressed by for example Nancy, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari illustrates or points out something of the fracturedness, and polymorphous shape of subjectivity. What this means is that the selfhood of the self cannot be determined by that self alone, hence the self is not reducible to the patterns and platitudes of its own representations. Politically speaking this holds one serious implication. In socialist thought politics is understood as the confrontation between classes, expressing nothing else but a politics of subjectivity where the diagram of the enclosed subject is shifted onto the/a class as node of representational activity. Politics would in that kind of context then become something reducible, where power is reduced to one locality (e.g. the state and capitalist class), and where all subjective revolutionary energy should be channeled. A politics of subject-driven identity of for example the working class is created, holding in its representations of the present and the future the danger of inscribing in its project a paranoia that was what would make of the communist utopia an authoritarian nightmare. A comment that I should add here by way of qualification is that given the time, and political philosophical space in which socialism developed its models of revolutionary and subjective praxis could not have been different. Given the philosophical investment of Hegelianism, and the modes of production present at the time coupled with the ways in which societies did in fact resemble the contours of two contesting classes, it is only likely and understandable that the revolutionary project of emancipation would take the shape it did. But then the question would be, so what exactly changed in what is called the political philosophical atmosphere in the 20th century, which heralds the end of the road for such a form of socialist discourse? I propose that in trying to delimit this – I need to posit the way the subject and community is seen here, and to point to some phenomena and how that contributed to the transition towards the sense or understanding of the subject proposed here. It would in the first instance be necessary in broad terms to outline the view of the subject, or more pointedly the political subject we have to work with here. As already pointed out, socialism holds forth an implicit view of the subject as something singular, and at the same moment this view is transplanted to the political domain by way of its analysis of political economy. Felix Guattari (1995:1) puts forward a view of the subject that could be the basis for a process of the expansion of the ‘revolutionary’ horizons of socialism. According to him subjectivity is something plural and polyphonic (this could in some way be likened/compared to the view of matter as expressed by Gilles Deleuze in his study of Leibniz) as well as something that is produced. We ought not to be caught by the word production, for Guattari subjectivity is produced as a result of the confluence of diverse semiotic registers that combine to engender subjectivity. With this in mind the production of a class identity and revolutionary subjectivity in socialist thought is confined to interpretations and/or readings of material conditions of production – feeding on its part into an understanding of the subject and political subject as something confined to a specified place and role in society. What Marx managed to do was to point to the existence of social and political division, exploitation, and opposition. In an effort to address these social ills the political and philosophical strategies employed had to be pinned on a singular axis of class struggle acting as a magnetic field into which the subject, hopes & dreams for the future, views of the state, revolution etc. had to be drawn. But this view of subjectivity and agency, in keeping with its time, is to a large extent out of step with the expanded horizons and multiple axes of possible revolutionary identifications pervading societies today (ecology, sexuality, security, peace, etc.). In order to account for the expanded social horizons of political contestation and struggle it is necessary to expand what is understood as the subject. At this point Guattari (1995:4) would ask whether: "…we should keep the semiotic productions of the mass media, informatics, telematics and robotics separate from psychological subjectivity?" His answer to this is no. Guattari goes on to argue that just as social machines can be grouped under the title of ‘Collective Equipment’, technological machines of information and communication operate at the heart of human subjectivity. Guattari’s view is quite radical, in the sense that it does not only do away with the affective horizon of machines as ‘abstract’ external quantities to the human. But it institutes/implements technological machines as an integral quality of the human and its processes of identification, socialization and subjectivation (in some sense this is in keeping with the general ‘rules’ layed out by Marx). In this context Guattari (1995:4) states that: "Recognition of these machinic dimensions of subjectivation leads us to insist, in our attempt at redefinition, on the heterogeneity of the components leading to the production of subjectivity." This process of the production of subjectivity can therefore on its part not lead to a singular product, a/the subject, or an identity. The same would then go for political analyses, our interpretations and attempts at understanding social dynamics cannot drift towards the magnetic pole of a singular revolutionary practice. As with the polyphonic nature of the subject, the political subject will also be something open. Guattari’s view of the production of subjectivity and technological machines could be explained in another way as well. One could say that in the forward surge of humanity, the outcomes of technical progress can be measured in the containment and ‘eventual’ penetration, slippage and bursting of the autonomous shell created for it by Descartes and his followers. In the phantasmagoria of progress the unity of the subject was announced as/in a time where progress was seen as the result of human agency, and ingenuity. But in the 20th century the human agent slowly became the object of the collective violence of machines. The first moment of this was the First World War, where classically minded and trained officials of warfare (the Generals, the Noblemen, and the gallant soldier) found themselves embroiled in the first war of the automobile – where the metal teeth of armoured vehicles, and the clenched fists of cannonballs left only the mangled remains of human agency (where the human drives itself forward by creating machines) in the form of dismembered, limbless and limp bodies strewn on the battlefields of ‘tomorrow’. Thus the crises of the subject arises, pining on its part its loss of control of the human and non-human world, pining for the loss of its unity. How can the human, the individual or the subject be whole when so much of its territory (physical and psychic) has been encroached upon by the other category of life: the machine? For an excellent analysis of this phenomenon I suggest a reading of Paul Virilio’s Speed and Politics. The image of the subject and politics appearing at this point is one that holds forth the opportunity and possibility for a transversality of approach necessary in socialism today. This would mean that multiplicity in its various social and psychic manifestations has to be affirmed rather than relegated to the sidelines if it does not fit the image/singular identity of a proletarian class politics. This would open the horizons of socialist thought to the possibilities of thinking the differend, and beyond that a rhizomatic image of thought and power. Power would in this view of the subject not be something located in singular spheres like the state or a dominant class – it would rather be something that is in itself a transversal phenomenon appearing and disappearing on the horizons of the social beyond the grasp of single/singular axes (for a much fuller account of this see Todd May’s fine book on Poststructuralist anarchism). v But what then about community? Let’s look at the following statement by Nancy (1991:10) concerning a sense of the loss of community. This statement should be read within the context of a realization that the search for an egalitarian society, and the community or communal in socialism takes place against the background of a mourning of the loss of community. Here Nancy remarks: "But it is here that we should become suspicious of the retrospective consciousness of the lost community and its identity (whether this consciousness conceives of itself as effectively retrospective or whether, disregarding the realities of the past, it constructs images of the past for the sake of an ideal or a prospective vision)." This is not only true of socialism or communism, but according to Nancy of the West, where the mourning of the loss of an archaic community finds expression exactly in the infinite ‘political’ value placed in notions of community. But let’s look at the rest of his statement in detail: "We should be suspicious of this consciousness first of all because it seems to have accompanied the Western world from its very beginnings: at every moment in its history, the Occident has given itself over to the nostalgia for a more archaic community that has disappeared, and to deploring a loss of familiarity, fraternity and conviviality. Our history begins with the departure of Ulysses and with the onset of rivalry, dissension, and conspiracy in his place. Around Penelope, who reweaves the fabric of intimacy without ever managing to complete it, pretenders set up the warring and political scene of society – pure exteriority. But the true consciousness of the loss of community is Christian: the community desired or pined for by Rousseau, Schlegel, Hegel, the Bak-ouine, Marx, Wagner, or Mallarmé is understood as communion, and communion takes place, in its principle as in its ends, at the heart of the mystical body of Christ." What this would mean for the onset of a re-thinking of socialism and communism is to realize that this act of thinking socialism has to grapple with whether socialism can still follow the course of a search for the lost mystical community. Is this not in any case the (mystical) source of the utopia socialism proposed? And would the evaporation of not only socialism but also the dream of an-other community imbued by the being in common of communism (in short utopia) in the 20th century not tell us something about a threshold that our thinking crossed, moving beyond the myth of a lost community into the plateauic implosion of the eternal now of late capitalism? If it is true that Marx is also to be included in the list of those pining for a lost community, then socialism-Marxism marks one of the most extreme limits of the political expression of this pining in the 20th century. The question facing socialism then is whether it can maintain a search for a lost and mythical community (and communion) – or whether it can usher in a different thinking – a thinking that is not based on the emptiness or lack of something lost which can in all probability not be regained. But according to Nancy it is not a matter of regaining community and communion. For him society was not built on the ruins of community. He states (11): "It emerged from the disappearance or the conservation of something – tribes or empires – perhaps just as unrelated to what we call ‘community’ as to what we call ‘society.’ So that community, far from being what society has crushed or lost, is what happens to us – question, waiting, event, imperative – in the wake of society. Nothing, therefore, has been lost, and for this reason nothing is lost. We alone are lost, we upon whom the ‘social bond’ (relations, communication), our own invention, now descends heavily like the net of an economic, technical, political and cultural snare. Entangled in its meshes, we have wrung for ourselves the phantasms of the lost community." It is not possible to overestimate, or overemphasize the importance of what Nancy has to offer here. His pronouncement is radically political in the sense that it projects the search for a lost community as nothing else but the result of society’s ensnarement in economic structures, technologies, political programs and cultural practices all of its own making. There will as a result of this be no possibility of stepping ‘back to the future’ – of creating a future through which ‘humanity’ can jump back into the mirror of an ancient history of community. This is violent, it is the expression of physical and psychic violence the hu-man unleashes over its own head, on nature, in the political-philosophical sphere of a belief that the human (and community) is an end in itself. The violence Nancy points to is of an order that shows how the hu-man succumbs, twists, and contorts itself in its endless drive to expand the limits of what it is to be human. And all that is left in the whirlpool is an empty yearning for something lost (community), which was never there. Hence the magnificent chasms, holes or abysses of modern, postmodern and hypermodern life. (for the rest go to http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~pa34/petrus_dekock.htm ) ===="Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the mania Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and one way." - Friedrich Hölderlin, 1799 __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Search - Find what you’re looking for faster http://search.yahoo.com
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