File spoon-archives/postanarchism.archive/postanarchism_2004/postanarchism.0403, message 24


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

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