THE COMMUNIST DECISION

     In the last entry of this blog I had promised an elaboration of what I am calling a critical theory of the imagination, that is to say a theory of how to evaluate the proliferation of images that constitutes humanity’s contemporary historical condition, given the fact that they can neither be dismissed as ‘spectacle’ nor differentiated on the basis of their truth or falsity. This is what I intend to begin doing here by looking at Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of the work of Friedrick Nietzsche in his 1962 book, Nietzsche and Philosophy. I begin with this book because I see at its core an amazingly powerful theory of the relation between power and imagination, one that is not systematized in it, but which I mean to make quite explicit here. And as the title of this entry indicates my commentary eventually takes me directly to the question of the communist decision, that is to say the decision to become a communist.
     Let us therefore begin directly with the question that concerns us: what is the relationship between image and force in Nietzsche according to Deleuze’s interpretation? At first sight it looks as thought the image were what Deleuze calls a fiction or a projection of reactive forces, the purpose of which is to separate active forces from their power:

Forces are not separable from the differential element from which their quality derives. But reactive forces give an inverted image of that element: the difference between forces becomes the opposition of reactive forces to active ones. It would then suffice for the reactive forces to have the occasion to develop or to project that image for the relation of forces and the values which correspond to this relation to become itself inverted. But this occasion the reactive forces find it at the same time that they find a way to escape from activity. Ceasing to be acted, the reactive forces project the reactive image. It is this reactive projection that Nietzsche calls a fiction: fiction of a super-sensible world that is opposed to this world, fiction of a God in contradiction with life. (p. 143)

A few reminders are in order here. When Deleuze says in the first sentence of this passage that a force cannot be separated from the differential element that qualifies it he is referring to one of the foundational points of his interpretation of Nietzsche. A force exists always in relation to another force. That relation—immanent to the concept of force—is always one of domination or subordination. This is the “differential element” inherent to any manifestation of force to which Deleuze is referring: “Every force is… involved in an essential relation with another force.” (p. 7) There is thus no such thing as “naked force” (and, therefore, since all life is force, no such thing as “naked life”). Furthermore, in every relation of force the differential element is not, or at least not primarily, a quantitative relation: the issue is not so much that there is more of one force on one side of the equation and less of the other force on the other side. Rather the difference seems always to be between active and reactive forces. The question then is whether the differential element that brings the two kinds of force together is a will to “power” or a “will to nothingness.” In other words, are the forces at hand in the service of “affirmation” or in the service of negation (pp. 60-61)?     But how is it even possible for a will to nothingness to ever gain the upper hand over a will to power, since the will to nothingness actively desires nothing but its own disappearance whereas the will to power cannot but affirm life itself? Another way to pose this question, one which brings us back to the vocabulary of force is to point out that by definition the active forces are the ones that dominate, while the reactive forces are subordinate since to react is always to obey (p. 45). And yet, who can deny that reactive forces seem to be in charge everywhere we look? Every philosophical “freedom” is an inevitable path to servitude: obedience to the philosopher king in Plato, to God in Augustine, to reason in Kant, to the State in Hegel. Today, even more so, if that is possible, to obey is the order of the day: all of the values put forward by popular culture as worthy of being embraced—“flexibility,” the pursuit of wealth, satisfaction—are values of obedience (pp. 67, 135). This is perhaps the central problem that Deleuze’s book wrestles with: how is it possible for that which is essentially obedient to trump that which essentially commands?
     And this is where, it seems, the concept of ‘image’ finally comes into the picture. The reactive forces cannot win over the active forces since they are subordinate to the latter; they cannot overpower the active forces since they are, once again by definition, inferior to them. What they can do is give “an inverted image” of the “differential element” that articulates the two—i.e. of the will to power itself. What does this mean? Deleuze writes that the only way for the reactive forces to triumph is for them to “separate” the active ones:

…he [Nietzsche] will show that in each case reactive forces do not triumph by composing a superior force, but by ‘separating’ the active force. And in each case this separation rests on a fiction, a mystification or a falsification. It is the will to nothingness that develops the negative, inverted image, it is this will to nothingness that subtracts. But in this operation of subtraction there is always something imaginary that the negative use of numbers testifies to. (p. 65)

     The reactive forces project an inverted image of the differential element (between active and reactive forces) and thereby transform the will to power into will to nothingness. But what is it that is separated in the active force? What is subtracted from it? And finally, what exactly is that powerful image, that fiction which is powerful enough to transform the will to power into a will to nothing?
According to Deleuze, under some circumstances reactive forces are capable of separating an active force from what it can do. Deleuze gives a particularly compelling example of this phenomenon in his discussion of the Nietzschean concept of ressentiment. Ressenetiment according to Deleuze’s Nietzsche is the first emotion of the slave (the figure representing reactive forces in Nietzsche’s thought, not to be confused with the actual historical instances of the institution of slavery), a defensive reflex of the “bleating lamb,” who declares in a stunning syllogism: “Birds of prey are mean…I am, however, the contrary of a bird of prey. Therefore I am good.”(p. 140) Ressentiment is the primary emotion of reaction because it is structured as a reaction; it gains its momentum from saying “no”. It assigns blame to others, not so much because they are not like it, but because it is not like them. It assigns them guilt for what they are, and it praises itself for what it is not.
     How does ressentiment achieve this feat? By projecting “an abstract and neutralized image of force: such a force, separated from its effects will be guilty if it acts and meritorious, on the contrary, if it does not.”(p. 141) This, of course, is the old myth of free will. The Nietzschean critique of it, which Deleuze carefully reconstitutes, should be fairly straightforward to gather: since every force is always already qualified—as active or reactive (p. 49)—it can never be separated from its consequences: the active force acts, just as the bird of prey preys, while the reactive force reacts, in the same exact way the bleating lamb flees. The lamb’s complaint in the syllogism above is thus absurd since it, in essence, accuses the bird of prey of being what it is.
     Let us come back for a moment, however, on the concept of image that is being presented here: the image that is projected by the reactive forces is that of the “differential element,” the will that organizes the relations between different kinds of force in a given object (or individual, or ensemble). Somehow reactive forces are capable of projecting an inverted image of the will to power onto it in such a way as to transform it into its opposite, the will to nothingness. But how does an image transform anything? How, in other words, do images act? And finally, are images fundamentally reactive, or are there some active images?
     Perhaps taking a step back for a moment will enable us to go forward. The imaginary projection of reactive forces does not transform anything in general, but a very particular kind of thing: a will. Discovering how Deleuze understands the concept of will may help move the investigation forward. He does discuss the question in a rather dense passage that will require some unpacking: “To interpret is to determine the force that gives its meaning to a thing. To evaluate is to determine the will to power that gives the thing its value… The will to power as genealogical element is that from which derives the signification of meaning and the value of values.” (p. 61) Whereas interpretation is what enables us to say whether it is the active or the passive forces that dominate in a given thing, the “will to power”—which here seems to refer to the will in general rather than to one of the elements in the opposition between will-to-power and will-to-nothingness Deleuze draws elsewhere—is what determines the value of values. As such it must always take a stand by either affirming action—what Nietzsche sometimes calls “life”, or creation, or falsehood—or by negating it in favor of something outside it—a supra-sensible world beyond life, ‘better than’ life, or Truth understood as a sort of objective representational exactitude.
     As evaluation the will is a purely subjective gesture, a decision without any objective ground. For it to claim such an objective ground as a justification for the stand it takes is for it to already reveal itself as will-to-nothingness. The will to power properly so-called, then, is both intangible and without any shadow or trace that would connect its existence to the objective world of truth and of things-in-themselves. To place a mirror in front of it, to present it with an image of itself would be immediately to destroy it. And the more ‘accurate’ or ‘truthful’ that image might be the more certain and complete would be its destruction since the image would implicitly impose upon it the values of the opposite type of evaluation. Nietzsche’s concept of image here could profitably be likened to Descartes’ notion of representation. It is precisely the truth content of the representation of the will to power that inescapably inverts its evaluative stand, just as the mirror image inverts the object it reflects (the right being reflected as the left and vice versa). By claiming its epistemological superiority the image of the will to power projected by reactive forces reveals its own slavishness, its idolatrous worship of “Truth” as a supreme value, a value which is in fact nothing but the secularized translation of God. This worship of truth is a denial of life’s supreme attempt to “‘lead astray, to dupe, to dissimulate, to dazzle, to blind.’” (p. 109, originally quoted from The Gay Science) As such it stands in an otherworldly opposition to the world.
     This resolution of the problem of the relation between force and image is only partial, however. For if reactive forces can project a viciously annihilating image onto the will to power, the latter also has an image up its sleeve. The “power of the false,” or art is not to be underestimated: “[A]rt is the highest power of the false, it magnifies ‘the world as error,’ it sanctifies the lie, it makes of the will to mislead into a superior ideal.”(p.117) The political significance of art is that it always disrupts the status quo; it ruptures the normative continuity of the given. Truth, on the other hand, is always on the side of the establishment: “The fact is that the established order and the values of the day always find in it [truth] their most committed supporter.”(p.119) The order of representation always corresponds to the social and political order. To break the former is the task of the work of art. To break the latter is the role of a certain image of philosophical critique. Deleuze writes:

The image of the philosopher is obscured by all its necessary disguises, but also by all the treasons that make of him (sic) the philosopher of religion, the philosopher of the state, the collector of existing values, the functionary of history. The authentic image of the philosopher does not survive the one who knew how to incarnate it for a time, in his time. It must be recaptured, reanimated; it must find a new field of activity in the next epoch. If the critical task of philosophy is not actively recaptured in each epoch, philosophy dies, and with it the image of the philosopher, the image of the free man (sic). (p. 122)

The philosopher is not a figure of eternity, but on the contrary, a figure of his or her times. There are no ‘perennial’ philosophical questions for Deleuze, but only the questions or problems that are singular to a particular epoch, and which it is the role of the philosopher to take up. So historically defined is the role of the philosopher that there can only be an “authentic image” of philosophy, which changes from one epoch to another, no philosophy as such. In other words, philosophy must reinvent itself from scratch from one epoch to the next. Philosophy as will-to-power, or philosophy from the perspective of an affirmative will that elevates active forces to their rightful place must be invented anew in every new historical situation. The specific invention of philosophy is a philosophical critique of the status quo: “To denounce all the fictions without which reactive forces would lose. To denounce in mystification this mixture of baseness and stupidity, which forms just as much the astounding complicity of victims and authors. To make of thought finally something aggressive, active, affirmative. To make free men (sic), that is to say men (sic) who do not confuse the ends of culture with the profit of the State, morality, religion.”(p. 121) These can be the only aims of an authentic philosophical critique: to overthrow reactionary forces and the slavish passions behind which they hide, to bring into question the institutional pillars of this order. Philosophical critique must not be understood in its modern, ultimately Kantian sense, as an operation aiming at reinforcing the limits of ‘all possible thought’, but quite to the contrary, it must be reinterpreted as an attempt to break down the limits of existing thought in order to invent something else:

Instead of a knowledge that is opposed to life, a thought which would affirm life. Life would be the active force of thought, but thought would be the affirmative power of life. Both would work in the same direction, would drive each other and would break limits, one step for one, one step for the other, in an effort of extraordinary creation. To think would signify: to discover, to invent new possibilities of life. (p.115)

The kind of philosophical critique Deleuze has in mind here (or at least Deleuze’s Nietzsche) is affirmative rather than negative: it opens up possibilities for being, rather than closing down possibilities for thinking. The image of philosophy ruptures the status quo by inventing a new way of being, a kind of life that cannot be grasped by existing structures and norms.
     Coming back for a moment to the original question that inaugurated this discussion of Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzscsche, we can say that there are two concepts of image, and therefore two conceptions of imagination, in Deleuze’s understanding of Nietzsche: on the one hand there is the reactive imagination—we might call it the imagined imagination. This is the kind of imagination described by cultural theorists like Edward Said, Enrique Dussel, or Stuart Hall: the imagination understood as an undynamic repository or archive of stereotypical images that present themselves both as scientific representations of the other and as normative models for how others and ourselves should behave. But while these thinkers tend to grope for an epistemologically or structurally grounded critique of the imagined imagination, the Deleuzo-Nietzschean conception opens the path to a genealogical and directly ethical critique: the problem of the imagined imagination is not that it fails to meet scientific, metaphysical, or theological criteria of truth, but that it appeals to them in the first place. The imagined imagination is driven by passive affects, by an awful ressentiment, an overwhelming will-to-nothingness. Whether one turns to the imaginary of Conquest analyzed by Hall in his brilliant essay “The West and the Rest” or to the 19th century colonial imaginary critiqued by Said in his classic Orientalism this insane nihilism is clear, and the ambivalence of the imaginary representations it produced is but proof of its resentful affect: the Noble Savage can only be completed by the Cannibal as the two sides of European representations of native Americans because both aspects reflect the slavishness of the European conquistadors, on the one hand in the form of envy for the freedom of the savage, and on other in the form of fear of his or her power (what greater power could one attribute to another than the capacity of eating one’s own flesh?). If Native Americans had to be murdered by Europeans in an orgiastic holocaust, it is not because the latter were more advanced—technologically or otherwise—than the former, but because they were imagined as other or less than human by their conquerors (whether they were so or not is irrelevant here, of course).
     On the other hand the imagination in what Nietzsche might call a “healthy soul” functions as the virtual invention of new forms of life, and even more fundamentally new forms of evaluation. But more than being novel in the sense of unusual or even unprecedented, the creations of the active or imagining imagination are structured on the basis of different affects and disclose an unprecedented “power of being affected” (p. 69). If ressentiment and bad conscience are the emotional pillars of the imagined imagination, joy and desire are those of the active imagination. And while the former two obey the syllogism of the “bleating lamb” according to Deleuze (you are bad, therefore I am good), the latter follow a rather different logic, one in accordance with the force field that characterizes the will-to-power, one that asserts first and foremost its own goodness. The imagining imagination produces first and foremost the image of the good or the good under the form of image. Its syllogism is “I am good; but you are mediocre.” The active imagination valorizes this life rather than a life outside of life. It is thus a utopian imagination, and this dimension of it has been explored in great depth by Ernst Bloch. But the utopian imagination should not be taken as dictating the “right” way to live, the path to truth. It is but literature, after all, and makes no such claims. The only souls who can find art enslaving are already slaves! Rather, it is utopian in the sense of proposing or inventing images as fantasies without referent, non-representational images, so to speak, works of art that articulate freedom as a permanent alternative to the status quo.
     I will end this entry with a series of conclusions that follow directly on the lines of thought I’ve developed above. On the side of the imagining or utopian imagination there stands the power of decision. The only decision that can be made is the decision to be free, the decision to become a master--and even an absolute master, in the sense of one who does not need a slave in order to be what he or she is. Slavery, on the contrary, always appears as a necessity, as the only thing one can do, in fact precisely not as a ‘doing’ but as obedience to forces outside oneself. If there is one law to which all are called forth to obey in the contemporary world, it is the law of the market, the law of profit and greed. Institutionally, this law manifests itself as parliamentary liberalism in some places, theocracy in others, or secular dictatorship in yet others. In all of those different settings, the principle of obedience remains the same. What, then, can the philosopher do in the contemporary world? Or perhaps, I should rephrase my question: what else can the philosopher do today than make a communist decision, that is to say, to make the decision of being a communist? Today, the power of philosophical critique can only be that of opening up the possibility of an alternative to the liberal parliamentary status quo. To be free today means to dream, to imagine worlds in which the ‘impossible’ named by the forces of serfdom is the norm: social equality, direct participation and expression in the political process by all. The universality of capitalist inequality and subordination requisition the communist idea and give it its universal significance as the properly philosophical critique of the status quo.
     Today, only communists can be properly called philosophers. The name adequate for those who claim to be philosophers but are not communists is very old indeed. It is: sophist.

COMMUNISM & THE CRITICAL THEORY OF THE IMAGE

I was in a printing house in Hell, and saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.

–Wm Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

An image is an idea that has become intersubjectively accessible. As soon as it escapes the solitude of interiority—in phonetic or graphic form, either as a printed or as digital object—the formal status of the intellectual object loses all relevance. Deep in the recesses of his mind, the lone subject can believe he distinguishes between a sense-perception emanating from the “outside world” on the one hand and a logical inference of universal validity on the other—let’s say the existence of the ego as Descartes has it. But as soon as the philosopher ceases to meditate on universal truth and begins to write that truth down, in a room lit by the flames of the chimney or by a few candles; as soon as his silk dressing gown begins to rustle in harmony with the sound of his quill scratching away ink marks on the still virgin sheet of paper laying flat on his mythic table, this seemingly all-important distinction evaporates into thin air. All that is left is an image. Knowledge, art, information—all of these can be understood as images. Undoubtedly these images are coded differently to signal their realm of relevance, and this will in turn influence their treatment by communicational networks and their reception by audiences or publics, but in terms of their substantial existence they are homogeneous.
There are two fundamental characteristics of the image that bear noting for the purposes of this discussion:
1. First the image is always a repetition; it always reproduces something else. As such, the image is not only multiple, i.e. never reducible to a one, but it always tends, more or less successfully toward the universal. The logic of the image is summed up in one verb: to copy. From this standpoint it is easy to see why transformations in recording technologies and in technologies of communication are always salient to philosophical anthropology. The more intensive and extensive the range of these technologies becomes the more humans become capable of acting, but also, paradoxically, of being acted.
2. Simultaneously, however, the image is always deviation, variation, difference. As Borges demonstrates in ''Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,'' the perfect image abolishes the identity of its original by repeating it perfectly. But while the image swallows up the concept of identity in the very moment of its faithfulness, it is, empirically speaking, far more heresy than fidelity. In the very moment of its difference the image is invention. From this it follows that the imagination is not so much a faculty of the mind as modern philosophers have tended to argue, but the power of life itself insofar as life is an astounding multiplication of the power of matter. In its essence life is the ability to act, which is to say to differ from itself. Bergson used to say that from the standpoint of reason action is always a mistake. Indeed: if action is anything it is an interruption of the norm, an adaptation in the language of evolutionary theory. The very rational plan I make in my mind in order to achieve a given goal is itself, at its root, imagination, the invention of an alternative to my existential status quo. Thus, even the appearance of distinction between imagination and reason we began with above resolves itself ultimately into the power of the image. As Spinoza observes in his Ethics (P. II, prop. XL, n. 2) the imagination is the foundation of all the different kinds of human knowledge.

The image as repetition. The image as invention. These two analytically distinguishable characteristics of the image are not antagonistic. If they were the image would always be splitting into two different entities in the phenomenal world itself: image-repetition and image-invention. Propaganda and art could never mix, so heterogeneous to each other would they be. On the contrary, the fact that they and so many other supposedly opposed categories merge into each other under most empirical conditions is as strong an argument as any for thinking that, at the ontological level, they cohere. To believe that repetition and variation are mutually exclusive or even in some kind of logical tension vis-à-vis each other, it is required believe some version of the (very Platonic) principle that being is identity (sameness) whereas difference is nothing. Only on the basis of such a claim would repetition and invention appear to be incompatible. If, on the other hand, one were to start from the assumption that being is the differences that articulate all the beings there are—i.e. that the ontologically salient differences are the ones separating (and articulating) all beings to each other, and not the one that separates being from non-being—then the very essence of what is must be comprehended as a repetition of infinitesimal differences. The two characteristics of the image would then be squarely placed at the heart of the Real, and the image itself understood as the categorial foundation of ontology. Adjudicating between these two different understandings of metaphysics is not my aim here. Suffice it to say that I assume the second view to be the case. If I am right in doing so then not only is the concept of image absolutely vital to a critical theory of social and political reality, but a critical theory of the image will substantially be a critical theory of reality as such.

One of the recurring problems this blog will have to confront I suspect is the question of the universal repetition: what, exactly, distinguishes a dynamic, active universal repetition from a static or passive one? By ‘universal repetition’ I mean a repetition that, in its diversity, tends toward growth in an open-ended way, like, for instance, the idea (or image—same thing) of communism. What is it that distinguishes such a repetition from, say, a racist ideology, or from the Christian doctrine? One cannot simply say that the first is true while the other two are false—at least not on the basis of formal criteria like the logical soundness of the one since such criteria are posterior to the imaginary nature of all three (as I observed in point #2, above). Of course, one can say that while one universal proceeds from an imagining imagination the other two are results of an imagined imagination such a formulation would need to be worked out (and I will try to do so in a future entry) in such a way that the image itself could not simply be split down the middle.
Not to engage that question, however, leads to a kind of flat materialism in which nothing matters, in which all ideas are equal in their worthlessness, a kind of nihilistic axiomatics. In a way this is the problem with an otherwise brilliant article by Regis Debray published a few years ago in the New Left Review. Debray is one of the few authors I’ve found who explores the question of the materiality of the communist specter in the 19th century. In the article, “Socialism: A Life-cycle,” Debray argues that there have been three great eras in the universal history of ideas: first, the logosphere, the age of the manuscript, extending from the invention of writing to the end of the manuscript ushered in by the invention of the printing press in the mid-15th century. Predictably, the second era for Debray, is the one dominated by print technologies, which he argues runs from Guttenberg to 1968. Why 1968? Debray says that this is the moment that televisual forms of communication become dominant. He calls this third moment in his chronology the videosphere. It’s worth noting that he does not gives not any evidence for this last date. Nonetheless, Debray spends the remainder of the article arguing on the basis of this chronology that the passage to the videosphere marks the end of socialism, which as a mode of politics relied on the media and institutions characteristic of the graphosphere: the book, the newspaper, the intellectual, the party.
No doubt a historian of the book would have a lot of problems with Debray’s chronology, both in terms of exact dates and of general scheme, and it’s true that his breakdown of world history into three epochs is rather old-fashioned. But this is not what interests me so much, and though I think he probably doesn’t quite have it right, it does seem to me that some sort of periodization of the history of communications in very general terms is probably not a bad idea. If there is truth to the claims I make at the beginning of this post about the importance of the dissemination of images for human subjectivity, then any understanding of history is going to require some understanding of the way systems of communications have altered the possibilities of sociality and of politics. Nor am I terribly concerned in this context by Debray’s rather curmudgeonly evaluation of the political potentials of the videosphere (basically, there are none: all the great revolutionaries were readers of books and newspapers and we now live in a world debased by tv images…). Though this text was published in NLR two years ago, it was originally delivered as a public lecture in the early 90s, and published in 1991 in his Cours de médiologie generale. So if it makes no mention of the internet or even the zine, the alternative newspaper, etc… it’s understandable. Not only was this the moment just before the beginning of the internet explosion, but anyone familiar with the cultural and political desert that was France in the 80s and during the first half of the 90s is bound to feel some sympathy for the limitations of Debray’s analysis in these respects: he wrote in what might be called a historical blindspot, a moment and a place in which neither the future nor the present (broadly understood) are accessible to an individual.
That said, there are several problems which are not so easily overlooked in Debray’s analysis. For one thing he appears to push a hard-line technological determinism in his account of the demise of socialism: socialism functioned politically in an age of parties; parties could work only in a world in which newspapers were the primary “conveyor belts” of ideas and shapers of publics; now that newspapers have lost their dominance, the party is in decline, and socialism is therefore rapidly becoming a ghost. In essence Debray is pushing a really simplified version of Debord’s theses: we have left the age of critical literary intellectuals and are now entering the age of the spectacle. His pessimism is predetermined by the broadness of his categories of analysis. Debray is practicing critique as a form of nostalgia. There are many grounds on the basis of which one should be skeptical of this approach, but one particularly interests me here: revolutionary, broadly socialist forces came in many shapes and forms aside from the party during the hundred and twenty years from 1848 to 1968 that span the period that Debray identifies as the golden age of socialism. Certainly he makes a good argument for why the party form of socialism became the dominant one: the way in which publics could be formed in the graphosphere seems to have farvored those whose unity could be guaranteed by a system of expression that privileged a one-way communication between literati and masses. But Debray himself, too quick for his own good, identifies the roots of socialism’s straying toward totalitarianism in the very critical literary intellectuals which the graphological mode of communications favored:

A germ of Stalinism lay in the frankness of encyclopaedism, stupidity inside intelligence. A fatal distinction prevailed between the leader and the led. Intellectual authority became the grounds for political domination. Knowledge became nationalized, because doctrines, like temples or countries, need frontiers, and armed clerics to guard them. The most philistine despot found himself wreathed in the laurels of knowledge. Academism, museomania and the general smell of mothballs impregnating Soviet societies became endemic when the ‘tradition’-form was held up as the norm of the future: the archive’s posthumous revenge on invention. (p. 15)

No doubt all this is written in a seductively smooth dialectical style, but it somehow seems to miss the obvious point that if a “germ of Stalinism” in the old socialist party model was bound to flourish into a petrified statism that was the antithesis of socialist hope, then there is not much to be nostalgic for. In addition the presence of other forms of thinking about socialist politics and organization that were evident in the various utopian groups of the mid and late 19th century and in the anarchist, anarcho-communist, anarcho-syndicalist, and council communist movements of the early 20th century which had quite lively public spheres of their own suggests that the insistence on a one-to-one correspondence between mode of communication and form of public sphere may be far too rigid a thesis to account for the diversity of historical forms of socialist politics that were possible in the age of the newspaper.
All this leads me to a second, and in a way opposite problem in Debray’s theorization: on the one hand, he postulates the all-importance of a specific system of mediatization in the production of a proletarian public sphere. But on the other, he says next to nothing about the values produced by this system of transmission, or indeed about the relation between value-production and socialism. Socialism thus appears precisely like an empty historical form among others, one random product of the history of human communications. I suppose this only underlines the real unsatisfactoriness of the historicist remainder in Debray’s though: he is counting on a Hegelian-type universal history to produce socialism as its end, but what he provides of such a narrative certainly does no such thing. So it turns out that while his mediological chronology of universal history should be all-important to it, it signifies nothing. Clearly, if one is serious about the importance of mechanisms of transmission of images in the social and political formation of subjectivity, then such a theory of the communication of images must have an axiomatic dimension that is explicit—it must be a critical theory of the image. That such a theory should be intimately connected to the history of communism (in the sense in which I understand the word in this blog) goes without saying. That Debray cannot provide it is just as clear.
Nonetheless, in spite of these problems, Debray hits, perhaps inadvertently, on an insight that seems quite important to me, namely that the graphosphere produced certain kinds of political identifications—socialist, communist, anarchist, fascist, etc…--which no longer make a great deal of sense. It’s not so much that people no longer identify themselves politically nowadays—I am certainly not endorsing the end of ideology or the end of politics theses. But it’s hard not to notice that these days people tend no longer to make sense of themselves according to these sorts of political identifications. If you think of, say, the anarchist movement a hundred years ago and compare it to what it looks like now, it is a rather different beast—at least in terms of newspaper audiences, unions, propaganda organizations, outright political or revolutionary organizations or even utopian communes. It’s not so much that its membership is significantly weakened (one can always argue that questions of numbers are the result of momentary conjuncture more than anything else). More to the point, however, anarchism today is riven by a variety of very new political identifications: there are eco-anarchists, vegan anarchists, anarcha-feminists—even, rather amazingly, anarcho-capitalists, who all happily mix the anarchist critique of hierarchy with a series of concerns that from the standpoint of a classical anarchists perspective would have appeared as highly particularistic. My point is certainly not to poopoo these new developments in the name of tradition—far be it from me! But I find the transformation itself significant, and suggestive of the possibility that publics today are generated quite differently than they were in the heyday of the graphosphere.
This transformation also affects socialism, as Debray notes in his own way, but it is also true of nearly every other form of classical political identification (something which, at least in “Socialism: A Life-cycle”, he fails to point out). That doesn’t mean that politics is disappearing but that people tend to identify themselves politically in different ways: where yesterday there were nationalists and internationalists, fascists and communists, Christian democrats and monarchists, today there are environmentalists and animal liberation activists, feminists and gender activists, black nationalists and human rights activists, or again social justice activists and community activists, etc... People still speak about liberals and conservatives, but it is in terms that are becoming so broad as to be meaningless. Conservative these days can mean anything from Christian theocrat to market libertarian, when as for liberal, the range of meanings of that label may be even broader. What’s even more confusing is that in some important respects liberalism and conservatism are identical, at least in the US: there are no significant differences of principles between liberals and conservatives on economic issues for instance. In fact, in terms of the definition of classical liberalism (viz: a defense of the unfettered market), there is no outside to liberalism; while it is true that the conservative justification for this classical liberal position (namely, that it is the only game in town) is more convincing—if not more compelling—today than the liberal justification (that free markets lead to social progress).

While the phenomenon of the changing form of political subjectivity undoubtedly has many complex causes (the end of the Cold War, the increasing integration of party apparatuses into the state—all over the world, not only in the US—the decay of parliamentary democracy, changing forms of sovereignty on the global level, the corporatization of the public sphere, etc…) it seems hard to deny that one of them is the changing shape of publics. But to make sense of that in a more penetrating way than Debray can one has to be willing to return to the kinds of philosophical and metaphysical questions with which I opened this entry. Debray’s flat materialism will simply not cut it: it only enables him to see that something has happened, but not having any kind of conceptual framework to grasp it with, he ends up interpreting that transformation as the end: the end of socialism, the end of revolution, the end of change. Perhaps this is how the shadow of Hegel still falls across his thought: in a world in which the Hegelian dialectic is coming to an end, the Hegelian believes that the world comes to an end. But the world is still here, life is still differing, the desire for justice, equality, freedom still strong. The question is not ‘what happened to socialism?’ but ‘what name has that which manifested itself as socialism before taken up now?’

A NEW SPECTER?

When Marx and Engels announced in 1848, at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto, that “A specter is haunting old Europe” they were referring to a growing movement of workers who were linked to each other by increasingly militant demands for social equality and political freedom through labor and political organizations, various publishing outlets, as well as informal networks of activists, writers, and intellectuals made possible by the standardization of postal communications and increasing penetration and accessibility of railway transportation. 

            Much ink has been shed over the past few decades on the question of what the status of this concept of ‘specter’ might be in Marxist theory.  Not much, so far as I know, has been said about the specter itself.  I actually don’t want to cast disparagement on the former, and I will certainly use them in my own reflection.  But it does seem to me like the interrogation of the specter of communism needs to be radicalized in a much more materially concrete direction!  In other words, few have been those who have tried to theorize the specter in its own right rather than in relation to the paradoxes and parrallogisms of Marxist theory.  The premise of this web log will be that such an effort is mandated by the current historical conjuncture.

            In fact, the question that will thematically unite the entries I will post in this space could be formulated as follow: Has a new specter been haunting global capitalism since 1989?  For if the ghost Marx and Engels had invoked in 1848 was finally materialized in 1917 by the October revolution, it died from a serious case of sclerotic overmaterialization in the countries of the former Soviet block.  Everywhere else it took hold (China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc…) it is simply dissolving into the ether of the capitalist market.

            But beginning in the mid-80s of the last century, and perhaps with roots in the New Left of the mid-60s, something else has been brewing, a new specter that is beginning to haunt the global order.  In some places like Venezuela it has attempted to take institutional form—so far inconclusively—while in others it is still gathering intellectual and political momentum.  In France the eco-sabotage of activists linked to Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee have put the forces of order on notice.  In Great Britain some of the student protesters against tuition hikes and university privatization explicitly linked their struggles to the work of some of the leading intellectuals in that movement, while in the United States the resurgence of communist-oriented anarchism over the last several decades seems to me to be a sign of the same yearning. 

            What is the relationship of this neo-communist specter to the feminist and queer movements?  What significance does it have for Africa, the Middle East, and Asia?  In other words can it become globally significant?  What are its distinctive theoretical forms and its social and material roots?  How can it or should it constitute itself subjectively?  What forms can its agency(ies) take? These are some of the questions I hope to think about in this web log.  Some of them I have some idea about, while for others I am still at a loss and will try to formulate hypotheses on the basis of current events.  For all of them I hoping that vigorous debate by readers in response to the entries I post here will enlarge the richness and depth of both questions and possible answers.

            At this stage I am planning on posting an entry every other week or so.  The entries should be about 1000-2000 words long, and, while there will be detours by way of current actuality (political and social events, but also analyses of recently published books and articles), they will be largely focused on developing the concept of a “neo-communism” and responding to some proposals that have been made about how to conceive it.