Dada s Last Dada and the Communism to Come

Transcription

1 REVIEW ESSAY Nic Veroli Dada s Last Dada and the Communism to Come Review Essay of Badiou, Alain Second Manifeste pour la Philosophie. Paris: Éditions Fayard. Badiou, Alain L hypthese Communiste. Fécamp, France: Nouvelles Éditions Lignes. 434 Condrescu, Andrei The Posthuman Dada Guide: Lenin and Tzara Play Chess. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Negri, Antonio The Porcelain Workshop: For a New Grammar of Politics. New York: Semiotexte. Therborn, Göran From Marxism to Post-Marxism? London: Verso. We are faced today with an unprecedented historico-institutional constellation. Marxism has reached its termination as a political-theoretical sequence and capitalo-parliamentary democracy has become nearly hegemonic while social inequality is once again reaching the heights of ignominy, thereby undermining the democratic legitimacy of the neoliberal state. Even more daunting is the increasingly collapsed border between the neoliberal state and its totalitarian doppelganger. On one hand, then, there is a crisis of historical proportions of whatever can still be called The Left. On the other, there is a meltdown of whatever might have at one point been called liberal democracy. How can a democracy be constructed that guarantees social equality so as to make substantive its promise of political equality? Only a strong answer to this question can be the basis of a renewed critical political praxis, and perhaps, even, of any political praxis. That such an answer has not yet been invented cannot be an argument against the investigation that the question prescribes. Indeed, the ecological crisis, which seems only to worsen as global inequalities become more widespread, makes the construction of such an answer the more urgent.

2 If to think about politics today means to think within the horizon posed by this question, then Andrei Codrescu s The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tazra and Lenin Play Chess is a monument to failure. Codrescu s explicit intention is to defend the relevance of Dadaism, what he views as the 20th-century s most radical artistic avant-garde at the dawn of the posthuman age. What can an artistic movement invented in the cafés of war-torn Europe in the late teens of the 20th century teach 21st-century cyborgs, with their cell phones, ipods and virtual bodies? This is a guide for instructing posthumans in living a Dada life (1). It is an interesting, though paradoxical proposition since Dadaism was defined at its inception by a rejection of European civilization in the wake of absurd massacres of the First World War. Dada is thus first and foremost a critical gesture. The first Dadas lived in cities that contained the means for a thorough critique of the world (3). The question that seems to be hinted at here is thus: What might a radical critical aesthetics look like in the early 21st century? What might the history of Dadaism have to contribute to such an aesthetics? In what way might it be deemed Dadaist? But the book itself turns out to be a simple apology for advertising and an argument for the further integration of art into the corporate economy. Thus, to the question of the relationship between the social and the political in the 21st century, Codrescu s answer is simply: more of the same. Since artists are for him entrepreneurs of the imagination (62), just as U.S. capitalists, the only thing that makes sense is an alliance a merger even between the historical avant-garde and the corporate executive. Never mind that this corporate structure is responsible for the fleecing of 90 per cent of the world s population, or that it is leaving tens of millions jobless and homeless in its quest for profits or invents ever-more efficient and affordable means of mass social control (from student debt to psycho-pharmaceuticals to internet filters and telephone network databases ). Codrescu is blind to all of this, absorbed as he is by the drama of the Cold War. Just as with U.S. neoconservatives, there is only one political gesture he understands: that which distinguishes between friend and enemy. But whereas the neocons have moved on from Communism to Islamo-fascism over the last few decades, Codrescu has only one dada: Lenin. It thus turns out that the actual question around which the book is organized is: Who won the game? After the collapse of Soviet-style communism in 1991, it looked as though Dada had. But if it had, why do the non-soviet posthumans of late capitalism feel such despair? Could it be that late-capitalism posthumans have arrived at the Leninist future without communism? And if they have, is the game still going on, and does Dada still have work to do? (12) 435 Codrescu answers these questions with a resounding yes indeed! As surprising as that might seem, the current tendency of capitalism to reduce everyone to a robot is in fact the fault of Lenin. And thus, the only solution is more Dadaist irreverence, like the kind that Codrescu distributes on a regular basis as a commentator on

3 National Public Radio. Luckily for him, he is just shocking enough to titillate the delicate sensibilities of NPR s white middle-class liberal audience, without ever stepping over the line into what would be offensive. But since when has the avantgarde been inoffensive (i.e., acceptable to the status quo)? Codrescu accomplishes the amazing interpretative feat of making what was the most virulent aesthetic critique of so-called civilization in the 20th century into one of its greatest pillars in the 21st century. The only real question there is about Codrescu s book is why Princeton University Press, a reputable publishing house, which regularly releases works of impeccable scholarship and remarkable insight, would back it. To this question, I have no answer. 436 There are some thinkers, however, who are trying to confront the pressing questions of our nascent century seriously and constructively. In recent publications, Göran Therborn, Antonio Negri and Alain Badiou stake out their own positions in a dialogue about the reconstruction of radical emancipatory, equalitarian politics. A former Althusserian Marxist, Therborn today represents the pole of social democracy on the defensive worldwide. For him to be on The Left means to be strongly committed to some version of the welfare state accompanied by a parliamentary political system. This view is the official program of most centreleft parties around the world, such as the NDP in Canada, the Democratic Party in the U.S. and the Socialist Party in France. The fundamental proposition of such a position is that so long as the state apparatus is properly managed in order to insure the more or less equitable redistribution of wealth, justice has been achieved in the form of economic equality. It is noteworthy that while Therborn s discussion in From Marxism to Postmarxism? is premised on this view, he never articulates it clearly, wedded as he is to an understanding of social scientific objectivity that precludes any critical consideration of his own perspective. This view also remains hegemonic on the left, despite the spectacular collapse, from the end of the 1980s onward, of the political forces that had sustained the project. Therborn notes this collapse and gives two basic explanations for it: On one hand there has been the global reduction of the historical subject of Marxist politics, the industrial proletariat, which declined from 19 to 17 per cent [between 1965 and 1990], and among the industrial countries from 37 to 26 per cent (18). On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, Therborn laments the failure of social democratic governments to properly manage worldwide inflationary tendencies and rising unemployment during the 1970s, which provided the opportunity for the return of classical economic liberalism under the name of neoliberalism (114). Nowhere does Therborn reflect on this failure seriously probably because of the positivistic prejudice I noted above and one suspects that the sheer admission of it is difficult for him, as it seems practically tantamount to giving up on the project of human emancipation. But this is precisely where a critical and explicit consideration of what it might mean to be on The Left would help get around that implicit but paralyzing sense of doom.

4 There are reasons for social democracy s historic failure and for its contemporary failure of nerves, and they cannot be reduced to monetarist causes like inflation. The political project of social democracy failed for three basic reasons. It failed first because capital reneged on the historical compromise of the post-1945 world once it became clear that the Cold War was just play-acting (Wallerstein 1995). Secondly, it became clear to the technocratic elite during the 1970s that the high levels of redistribution of wealth necessitated by welfare state policies hindered capital accumulation and investment levels, which ultimately led to the curbing of social spending (Harvey 1991, 2007). Thirdly, and perhaps most crucially, social democracy failed because the project itself was contested from below by those to whom the wealth was being redistributed. For committed intellectuals and activists like Therborn, the project of social democracy is a prison whose bars are made of memories. Social democratic politicians may still win elections once in a while but they no longer can achieve much of what they promise, and in any case, no longer promise much of anything. Therborn s book, while it provides a broad and generous survey of various quantifiably identifiable Left movements and theoretical traditions across the world, fails to answer its own question: what happens after social democracy? Since the publication in 1985 of two short books in French, Alain Badiou s Peuton penser la politique? (1985) and Félix Guattari and Toni Negri s Communists Like Us (1990), some intellectuals have begun asking themselves how to rethink the relationship between Marxism and communism. Does the collapse of Marxist politics mean that communist desires are now invalid? What happens to the moral commitment to universal equality after the decline of its main theoretico-political embodiment in the 20th century? For more than twenty years, both Badiou and Negri in Europe, along with some North American intellectuals, have been trying to construct theoretical frameworks that can address these questions squarely. 1 Today, these efforts are yielding both theoretical and practical fruits. 437 There are two prongs to this project. First, there is the historical effort to understand what happened to Marxism and how to relate to it now. This question is particularly tricky because Marxism is, among other things, a very compelling philosophy of history. Even if one rejects any philosophy of history, breaking with it means developing an alternative conception of history and of one s relationship to the past. For Badiou the termination of a political sequence does not necessarily mean its implicit condemnation since he refuses the Hegelian assumption that history is a totality that progresses from particularity to absolute universality. In other words, Badiou agrees with Heidegger and Foucault that there is no such thing as progress, though he refuses both the ethnic substantialism of the former and the nominalism of the latter. Instead Badiou argues that universal truths permeate the historical flux at certain moments in time or in Events. The political sequence that gave birth to Marxism, began, according to Badiou, with the French Revolution and exhausted itself in the global upsurge of For

5 Badiou, though the sequence has come to an end, the communist hypothesis has not. His most recent works, a collection entitled L hypothèse communiste and a short book, Second Manifeste pour la Philosophie, are an attempt at interpreting the meaning of the failure (l échec) of the modern political sequence, and part of his effort to give a metaphysical justification for a politics based on a positive idea of justice. Both books represent a systematic attempt at resurrecting a living communist project. But, while the first is an outstanding work of historicophilosophical interpretation, and the second an overview of an impressive metaphysical construction, there is something deeply absent from them both: a concrete, material reality that grounds the philosophical speculation. There is no doubt that Badiou is a compelling analyst of the history of social movements and revolutions, who is capable of looking at them from the perspective of these events explicit commitment to communism while remaining deeply critical of their shortcomings, but this cannot hide a deficit in his understanding of the present and of emerging political forces. 438 The contemporary content of the communist hypothesis remains utterly obscure for Badiou. Aside, paradoxically, from its abstract Marxist-Leninist formulation as the withering away of the state, private property and social classes, Badiou can only say that communism must practise a politics at-a-distance-from-thestate (2009b: 202), what some of us have been calling a politics without the state (George and Mudede 2002). This shortcoming is, it seems to me, the result of the metaphysical grounding of politics which Badiou operates in Being and Event (2005), and more recently in the Second Manifeste pour la Philosophie. This grounding is entirely retrospective: The Event, in fact, has always already happened, and the only question is one of fidelity to its truths. The very structure of the thought seems to preclude a substantive reference to the present. Even more problematic is the fact that Badiou s categories are so general that they either seem to undermine the communist project or to let it slip through. The second problem is exemplified by Badiou s treatment of truth bodies in the Second Manifeste. A truth body is essentially an entity composed of those who adhere to the trace left behind by an Event, for our purposes those who believe in the idea of communism. It is different from other bodies, not only because its claims are universal (this is its truth ), but also in that from its parts (i.e., those whose actions compose it) are subtracted the usual material interests of bodies. Those who are its parts are so even if it requires them to abandon their biological needs or economic interest (2009c: 30-31). But if communism is not in the actual material interest of generic humanity as Marx argued it was, then communism can only be an empty chimera, even if it is the truth. Antonio Negri s work is, in a way, the negative image of Badiou s work. Where Badiou is single-mindedly retrospective, Negri theorizes the consistency of the present (through notions such as Imperial sovereignty, the postmodern caesura and biopower ) and the historically emergent categories of a new communism

6 ( biopolitics and the common ). Where Badiou seems to abandon himself to an astounding voluntarism, Negri develops an analysis of new forms of communist subjectivity ( constituent power, exodus, multitude and immaterial labor ). Negri s newest book, The Porcelain Workshop, is subtitled For a New Grammar of Politics. In it he attempts to link all of these concepts which are essentially the product of the last thirty years of his reflection (and of his collaboration with Michael Hardt) into one systematic whole. Negri takes up the problem of the rupture between the classical sequence of revolutionary politics and the present moment, but he thinks it from the standpoint of three related transitions in the warp and woof of the present. First, from the perspective of political economy, he conceives of the development of the welfare state as the reaction of capital to the insurgency of labour from 1917 to Second, from the perspective of the political theory of sovereignty, Negri argues that the political power of the state is transformed, in this very development, from a transcendent power in the 19th and early 20th centuries to an immanent network that controls society s activities in depth, delineating the transition from classical liberal sovereignty to biopolitical sovereignty. 2 Thirdly, from a geopolitical perspective, Negri argues the transition from modernity to postmodernity can be thought under the syntagma of globalization as the crisis of national sovereignty. This crisis is manifest in the increasing insignificance of national boundaries in economic and social processes, and by the irreducibility of differences in the global populations (i.e., the multitude ) that are becoming an object of control by global financial and political organizations (19-23). 439 From here Negri continues the work of developing the concept of a common. The notion of common, that which is shared by all from air and water to language and information is the basis for thinking through the development of an alternative to both the private property that characterizes capitalist states and the public property of socialism. Neither privatization nor nationalization, argues Negri, is a real political or economic solution to any of the problems ecological or social facing the global multitude today. Only the extension of the common, that is to say the maximal pushing back of the frontiers of both state and market can deal with these challenges (61-76). Negri s position provides the theoretical and programmatic basis for that famed third way that is neither capitalism nor socialism (Negri and Scelsi 2008), so frequently promised over the last twenty years, and which has only resulted in Clintonism and Blairism so far. That the influence of his thought has already been acknowledged by some political leaders is one thing (Chavez and Harnecker 2005). But the fact that it can actually power a legislative and activist agenda worldwide, one that does not require its own party is entirely different and, so far as I can tell, something genuinely unique in recent leftist theoretical work.

7 But while Negri s thought is compelling in all the ways that Badiou s seems limited, it is precisely where Badiou is at his best in his thinking about time and history that Negri is at his weakest. For instance, there is no substantive rethinking in Negri of the Hegelian legacy of Marxism or of the theory of a world-historical subject. That Negri now calls this subject the multitude instead of proletariat, invoking the ideas of Deleuze and Spinoza (Negri & Scelsi 2008; Negri 2000, 2004) is not terribly compelling since this multitude still seems to function just as if it were a Hegelian Collective subject. If it did not, then why would its strivings so strikingly resemble those of Hegel s World Spirit? This sort of metaphysical fudging essentially pointing to a subject, but without the support of a theory of subjectivation is easy to forget when one is in the throws of political action or involved in the minutiae of strategic analysis, but it comes back to haunt Negri s position with a vengeance when the historical situation changes. It then becomes clear, as happened after Western state apparatuses whipped up a storm of fear in their populations in the Fall of 2001, in such a situation the cavalier attitude toward metaphysics and the theory of the subject of Negri were no longer adequate to the situation, and that is precisely when Badiou s project gained in momentum and popularity. 440 What the 20th century teaches us, if anything, is that social equality by itself, without political equality, leads to dictatorship and the rule of bureaucratic elites, what went under the name of State Socialism in the Soviet block prior to its dissolution in the 1980s. But what the twenty years since have made clear is that political equality without social equality leads just as surely to dictatorship and to the indefinite extension of the state of exception. While they diverge in significant ways, the ideas of both Negri and Badiou are complementary and need to be somehow reconciled in order to produce a philosophico-political framework that is both morally suasive and politically efficacious. Only on such a basis will we be poised to answer the question of the 21st century, namely that of the articulation of social and political equality. Notes 1. Notably, this review was unable to discuss the work of the American intellectuals who have been travelling this path, but the main ones should at least be mentioned: Hakim Bey, Murray Bookchin, John Zerzan. It is interesting to note that whereas the Europeans identify themselves as communists, the Americans overwhelmingly prefer to talk about anarchism, even if many of them come out of the same tradition (Marxism) and set of problems. 2. On the classical liberal state, see Balakrishnan (2000: ) and on the transition to biopolitical sovereignty, see Foucault (1990: ). References Badiou, Alain Peut-on penser la politique? Paris: Editions Seuil Being and Event. Trs. Oliver Feltham. New York: Continuum.

8 . 2009b. L hypthese Communiste. Fécamp, France: Nouvelles Editions Lignes c. Second Manifeste pour la Philosophie. Paris: Éditions Fayard. Balakrishnan, Gopal The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt. New York: Verso. Chavez, Hugo and Martha Harnecker Understanding the Venezuelan Revolution. Trs. Chesa Boudin. New York: Monthly Review Press. Foucault, Michel The History of Sexuality, v.1. New York: Vintage. George, Diana and Charles Mudede, eds Politics without the State. Seattle: Seattle Research Institute. Guattari, Félix and Toni Negri Communists Like Us. Trans. Michael Ryan. New York: Semiotext. Harvey, David The Postmodern Condition. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Negri, Antonio and Raf Valvola Scelsi Goodbye Mr. Socialism. New York: Seven Stories Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel After Liberalism. New York: New Press. 441