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Chapter 1
UNTIMELINESS AND PUNCTUALITY: CRITICAL THEORY IN DARK
TIMES
Criticism is not an "homage" to the truth of the
past or to the truth
of "others"--it is a construction of the intelligibility of our own
time.
--ROLAND BARTHES, "What Is Criticism?"
THIS ESSAY reflects on timeliness and untimeliness in
critical
political theory. It works outside the intellectual circuits through
Twhich both problems are conventionally routed--those offered by Kant,
Hegel, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School--in order to feature aspects
of the relationship between political time and critique overshadowed by
these traditions of thought. Foucault once defined critique as "the art
of not being governed quite so much,"1 and these
reflections
might be taken in the spirit of a refusal to be governed quite so much
by critical theory's traditional intellectual signposts. They accord,
too, with Benjamin's counsel to "wrest tradition away from a conformism
that is about to overpower it," a wresting Benjamin thought could be
enabled through igniting images of the past different from those the
present routinely paints for or as itself.2
We begin with three tales from contemporary political
life, each of which poses a conundrum for the time of critique.
1. The "Geneva Accords," an unofficial framework for a
peace settlement
between Palestinians and Israeli Jews, were signed amid much fanfare by
selected Palestinian and Israeli representatives in December 2003.
Designed to model what "the people" wanted and could agree on (as
opposed to what intransigent official leadership would do) and to
represent a replacement of earlier negotiation processes, including the
Oslo Accords, the Geneva Accords mapped in considerable detail a
contemporary two-state solution to the enduring, bloody conflict in the
Middle East.
Both committed Zionists and Palestinian
militants rejected the Geneva Accords as selling out their interests.
Ariel Sharon condemned the document out of hand, and even Labor Party
Prime Minister Ehud Barak heaped scorn on it. Most Palestinian
organizations also rejected it. In addition, many progressives
committed to a just peace in the Middle East viewed the accords as
representing compromises of Palestinian aspirations and entitlements
too great to swallow: they largely gave up the Palestinian right of
return (leaving the matter for Israel alone to determine), left intact
a number of Jewish settlements (including those around East Jerusalem),
and more generally represented significant Israeli incursions into
Palestinian territory. In addition, for many committed democrats, the
time of the two-state solution, if it had ever existed, had passed, for
practical as well as principled reasons. Such critics argued that the
aspiration for democracy and peace in the Middle East required a
reckoning with the antidemocratic heart of a Zionist state that is also
a colonial one, and insisted on the importance of formulating a
binational state that would harbor Palestinians and Jews on a
one-person, one-vote basis.
Critics in this last group were
themselves harshly condemned by supporters of the Geneva Accords. In
essence the condemnation ran: "You are holding out for utopia while we
are modeling real-world solutions. If you truly care about peace in the
Middle East, then you must support the accords. If you do not support
them, you care more about your abstract ideals than about politics."
2. Once John Kerry emerged as the clear nominee of the
Democratic Party
for the 2004 presidential elections, Ralph Nader threw his hat into the
ring. While delighting Republicans, Nader's move infuriated most
liberals and leftists, including many who had voted for Nader in 2000.
"Anybody but Bush" was the cry of the day, which meant that every voter
had to line up behind the emerging Democratic Party nominee, whatever
one's misgivings about him. Nader was a selfish spoiler, fit for
nothing more than denunciation.
A few small voices, however,
suggested that Nader was doing what he has always done: namely, working
publicly to remind America that obscenely gerrymandered political
districts and two corporately financed political parties do not a
democracy make.3 What was the harm of this reminder when
Nader knows full well that we all--perhaps even Nader himself--would
vote for Kerry in November? And if not during election season, when
else could this point be made as powerfully and vividly? What if
Nader's candidacy were to make Kerry even slightly more accountable to
the citizenry and less beholden to corporate interests? Above all, what
if Nader's candidacy, based largely on a critique of the corrupt and
antidemocratic aspects of the existing electoral and party system,
became a way to infiltrate the media lockout of such critique?
3. In early January 2004, recently elected Mayor Gavin
Newsom of San
Francisco declared that the city would commence granting marriage
licenses to same-sex partners. In the ensuing weeks, as thousands of
lesbian and gay couples descended on San Francisco's City Hall, other
cities in California and in New York, New Jersey, and Oregon jumped on
the bandwagon. Suddenly, gay marriage was the civil rights issue of the
day. The marriages themselves were compared by liberal pundits to the
bus and lunch-counter boycotts of the black civil rights movement. The New
York Times gave
gay marriage a ringing endorsement and, along with scores of other
American newspapers and magazines, carried joyous pictures and stories
of gay couples tying the knot. When, after four weeks, the California
Supreme Court ruled against Newsom's initiative and halted San
Francisco's issuance of marriage licenses to same-sex couples, San
Francisco's gay district, the Castro, exploded. Under the slogan "We
demand the equal right to marry," demonstrators rallied and chanted
through the night.
Meanwhile, those who were dubious about
either the egalitarian or emancipatory aspects of the right to
marry--whether from feminist, queer, left, or anti-statist
perspectives--were largely reduced to silence. So much as mentioning
that marriage has functioned historically to secure women's
subordination and male privilege, to hoard wealth and transmit
property, and to regulate sexuality, ethnicity, race, class, and nation
was tantamount to throwing dirt in the punch bowl. Just as
unmentionable was the fact that as a state- and religiously granted
"status," marriage itself buttresses the intermingled power and
authority of church and state, which together secure and regulate
marriage as the legitimate modality for love, for sex, and for
child rearing. Equally unspeakable was the suggestion that gays and
lesbians promulgating marriage as the ultimate sanctification of love
between two people were biting from the same mythohistorical muffin as
anti-gay conservatives declaring marriage to be timeless and
transcendent in meaning. If this was a civil rights battle, there was
no room to cast doubt or aspersion on the value or the meaning of the
right being fought for. It is therefore hardly surprising that when a
threesome unsuccessfully sought a marriage license from San Francisco
city officials, they were jeered by their fellow queers: "You're
ruining it for all of us," yelled the wedding-besotted crowd as the
triplet of sexual deviants walked away from the courthouse.
Despite the variation in their political significance,
these three
political episodes feature a common conservative and moralizing
rejection of critique as untimely. "It is not the time," declare the
workers in the political trenches to the critics, a retort that invokes
time in the triple sense of (1) the timing relevant to
successful political campaigns, (2) the constrained or dark political
times we feel ourselves to be in, and (3) appropriateness,
mannerliness, or civility--timeliness as temperateness about when, how,
and where one raises certain issues or mentions certain problems.4
The
first sense is concerned with strategy and efficiency in reaching a
defined political end, the second speaks to holding back the dark, and
the third invokes maturity and propriety against infantilism or
indecorousness. Critique is taken to be at best irrelevant, at worst
damaging, to the value represented by each.
The rebuff of
critical theory as untimely provides the core matter of the affirmative
case for it. Critical theory is essential in dark times not for the
sake of sustaining utopian hopes, making flamboyant interventions, or
staging irreverent protests, but rather to contest the very senses of
time invoked to declare critique untimely. If the charge of
untimeliness inevitably also fixes time, then disrupting this fixity is
crucial to keeping the times from closing in on us. It is a way of
reclaiming the present from the conservative hold on it that is borne
by the charge of untimeliness.
To insist on the value of
untimely political critique is not, then, to refuse the problem of time
or timing in politics but rather to contest settled accounts of what
time it is, what the times are, and what political tempo and
temporality we should hew to in political life. Untimeliness deployed
as an effective intellectual and political strategy, far from being a
gesture of indifference to time, is a bid to reset time. Intellectual
and political strategies of successful untimeliness therefore depend on
a close engagement with time in every sense of the word. They are
concerned with timing and tempo. They involve efforts to grasp the
times by thinking against the times. They attempt, as Nietzsche put it,
to "overcome the present" by puncturing the present's "overvaluation of
itself,"5 an overcoming whose aim is to breathe new
possibility into the age. If our times are dark, what could be more
important?
CRITICAL THEORY
To make the argument for critical theory as a hope rather
than a luxury
in dark times, we will need to think first a bit about critique, then
about political time, and then about their relation.
Critique is an old term that derives from the
Greek krisis. As the term flowered in modernity--and indeed,
with Kant, came in part to define modernity--this connection between krisis
and critique has been partly sustained, partly cast off. In
ancient Athens, krisis was
a jurisprudential term identified with the art of making distinctions,
an art considered essential to judging and rectifying an alleged
disorder in or of the democracy.6 (In contrast to
contemporary concerns with distinguishing the two, in its original
usage critique is an explicit project of judgment.)7 Since,
in Athenian democracy, a defendant was also a citizen and Senate
member, and the subset of the Senate constituting the jury also judged
and sentenced the defendant, krisis referred to a scene in
which the object, agent, process, and result of critique were
intermingled. Procedurally, juridical krisis thus
consisted of recognizing an objective crisis and convening subjective
critics who then passed a critical judgment and provided a formula for
restorative action.8 Socratic critique converges with this
practice in its dialectical and dialogical aspect, but breaks with it
as it replaces an adjudicated truth with the search for a philosophical
one. With the latter move, Socratic critique itself becomes a critique
of the originally democratic and holistic form of krisis;
embodied in the Republic and literalized in Socrates' defense
at his trial (see Plato's Apology),
the form, content, aim, and venue of Socratic philosophy is a critique
of Athenian critique and, as such, of Athenian democracy.
The sifting and sorting entailed in Greek krisis focused
on
distinguishing the true from the false, the genuine from the
spurious, the beautiful from the ugly, and the right from the wrong,
distinctions that involved weighing pros and cons of particular
arguments--that is, evaluating and eventually judging evidence,
reasons, or reasoning.9 Krisis thus comes close to
what we would today call deliberation, and its connotations are quite
remote from either negativity or scholasticism.10 Since
this
practice also has a restorative aim in relation to the literal crisis
provoking it, there could be no such thing as "mere critique,"
"indulgent critique," or even "untimely critique." Rather, the project
of critique is to set the times right again by discerning and repairing
a tear in justice through practices that are themselves exemplary of
the justice that has been rent.
Again, this complex origin is
evident in the way the project of philosophical critique takes shape
for Socrates. Socratic critique was born of a monumental crisis,
responding to the catastrophe of the Peloponnesian War, which resulted
not simply in a lost empire but in a profoundly degraded, corrupted,
and disoriented democracy. In this context, Socrates conceived the task
of critique in keeping with the conceptual lines of the original krisis--to
sort,
sift, and set the times to rights--but as he made Athenian
conceptions and practices of justice themselves the object of critique,
he worked to remove from the hands of the demos the process of sorting
and judging entailed in critique. Reconceived by Socrates as a
philosophical activity both deriving from and producing individual
virtue, even critique that involved discerning the nature of political
justice was hived off from the political-juridical domain. This hiving
off is explicitly expressed and defended in the Apology when
Socrates explains his limited participation in Athenian political life
by pointing out the impossibility of pursuing critique (and hence
virtue) there. Thus critique loses its jurisprudential and political
status and comes to be constituted as viable only at a certain remove
from political life. Paradoxically, Socrates depicts critique both as
inherently marginalized and neutered by politics if it refuses
this remove, and yet as politically potent if it can ascertain the
right degree of remove. Socrates responds to the collapse of Athenian
holism, then, by ontologically separating the domains of politics and
critical theory, at which point critical theory becomes (and has been
ever after) a gadfly.
Etymologically, after antiquity, criticism and critique
move apart from crisis,
save for a certain sustained connection in the field of medicine, a
usage that, according to Reinhart Kosseleck, developed in Latin in the
Middle Ages to designate "the crucial stage of a disease in which a
decision had to be made but had not yet been reached."11 Crisis
and criticism as a demand for judgment remain closely intertwined here,
as indicated by the contemporary medical designation critical
condition.
Tellingly, we do not speak of the condition of someone mortally wounded
or dying alone or among laypersons as "critical"; rather, this
terminology is reserved for the dangerously ill within a medical
facility or least in the presence of medical personnel, indicating that
accurate diagnosis and judgments about appropriate interventions
potentially stand between life and death. This meaning lingers in
political crisis as well. When we call a threshold moment in an
international standoff, in negotiations, or in a campaign "critical,"
we signal the need for accurate assessment and effective strategies of
action, all in a context designated as urgent. A critical condition is
thus a particular kind of call: an urgent call for knowledge,
deliberation, judgment, and action to stave off catastrophe.
What is interesting in this contemporary trace of the old
usage is the
sustained linking of the objective and subjective dimensions of
critique, the ways in which a worldly event or phenomenon, whether a
collapsed empire or a diseased body, connects a specific condition with
an immediate need to comprehend by sifting, sorting, or separating its
elements, to judge, and to respond to it. Also noteworthy is the way
that critique is linked to temporal rupture and repair; critique as
political krisis promises to restore continuity by repairing
or
renewing the justice that gives an order the prospect of continuity,
that indeed makes it continuous.
This quality of urgency,
this depiction of critique as nonoptional in the restoration of an
organism's or polity's health, continues through Kant's account of the
imperative of critique in establishing the moral autonomy and hence
freedom of the subject, and through Marx's turn of this imperative to
establishing the conditions for collective human freedom. Attunement to
this lineage provides a counterpoint to contemporary characterizations
of critique as disinterested, distanced, negating, or academic. It also
counters the distinctly modern presumption of critique's dependency on
and involvement with transcendent Truth.12
POLITICAL TIME
This intentionally partial exercise in etymological
memoration suggests
certain ways in which the practice of critical theory inherently
invokes a set of concerns with time. The crisis that incites critique
and that critique engages itself signals a rupture of temporal
continuity, which is at the same time a rupture in a political
imaginary, a rupture in a collective self-understanding dependent on
the continuity of certain practices. Or, as Derrida has taught us to
read a line from Shakespeare, for a polity suffering an internal
crisis, where justice is ruptured "the time is out of joint." Here is
Derrida, riffing on the line from Hamlet: "'The time is out of
joint': time is disarticulated, dislocated, dislodged, time is run
down, on the run and run down, deranged, both out of order and mad.
Time is off its hinges, time is off course, beside itself, disadjusted."13
A
polity in crisis is living out of its time, dissynchronic. In crisis,
"the age is dishonored" consequent to what Derrida terms a rupture in dike's
conjoining power.14 When
a polity is in crisis, the times are unhinged, running off course; time
itself lacks its capacity to contain us and conjoin us.
Critique's relation to crisis thus turns us toward the
problem of
political time, a time that is like no other time and incessantly
morphs in meaning from tempo to temporality to periodicity to world
condition, each sense implicated in every other. As with critique, it
will be useful to juxtapose some formulations of specifically political
time. Machiavelli figured political time as both beyond human
control--the movement of events always has Fortuna's hand in
it--and as that element which every political virtuoso shapes to his
own ends so as to triumph over Fortuna. While Fortuna signifies the
extrahuman movement of political time, Machiavelli also conceived
political time (and political space) as a wholly theatrical production,
to be fashioned and fabricated as a political weapon. For Machiavelli,
the construction of political time was importantly psychological in its
effect, capable of producing different responses--panic, fear,
boldness, lassitude--according to the seeming imminence or remoteness
of a danger or possibility.15
William Connolly,
drawing on Paul Virilio, emphasizes the phenomenon of speed as one of
the most important features of late modernity. For Connolly, we are in
the age of speed, which we had best catch up to if we are to be
effective democrats.16 Sheldon Wolin argues against such a
catching up, indeed argues for a deliberate resistance on the part of
radical democrats to the forced speedup of the political workplace.
Wolin urges this resistance because political time, which he equates
with democratic time, is necessarily slow, slower than anything
else in late modern life: "It requires an element of leisure . . . in
the sense . . . of a leisurely pace. This is owing to the needs of
political action to be preceded by deliberation . . . [P]olitical time
is [also] conditioned by the presence of differences and the attempt to
negotiate them."17 Without the possibility of both
deliberation and negotiation, and of the leisureliness that affords
them, the conditions for democracy are literally eviscerated. This
suggests that the political-as-the-democratic is terribly endangered in
our time. Connolly regards Wolin's conclusion as an understandable but
ultimately unacceptable nostalgia for a different (slower) age. If the
tempo of late modernity is largely given by political economic and
cultural forces, Connolly asks, hadn't we best locate or fashion
democratic practices that can keep, or counter, the beat?18
Fredric Jameson diagnoses postmodernity as a condition in
which "time
consists in an eternal present and, much further away, an inevitable
catastrophe, these two moments showing up distinctly on the registering
apparatus without overlapping or transitional states. It is the next
instant of time that falls out; we are like people only able to
remember their distant pasts, who have lost the whole dimension of the
recent and the most familiar."19 The collapse of a sense of
historical movement in the present betokens the loss of future
possibility. This condition both occasions and allegorizes a collective
paralysis that Jameson anguishes over. A present experienced as eternal
is a present experienced as Total, with no imagined elsewhere. "It is a
situation that endows the waiting with a kind of breathlessness, as we
listen for the missing next tick of the clock, the absent first step of
renewed praxis."20
The conference for which this
essay was originally composed was titled "Critical Theory in Dark
Times." It borrowed the phrase "dark times" from Hannah Arendt, and
Arendt borrowed it from Brecht, and Brecht, I think, from the ancient
Greeks. Such a chain of borrowings figures dark times as recurrent,
thereby suggesting a certain genericism to the problem, just as the
invocation of critical theory draws on a long historical vocation whose
temporally local minions we would be. There have been dark times
before--this is the significance of the plural noun, the reason why we
speak of dark times rather than a dark time or a world cast into
darkness. Indeed, there is something perversely hopeful in the
appellation: dark times are episodic and finite, to be contrasted with
an enduring condition or teleological trajectory. I wonder, though, if
this hopefulness is self-certain, or perhaps instead counterphobic.
If this time of ours feels dark, in what does its
darkness consist? I
do not think we are talking simply about the difficulties of action or
even about despair for the future in the face of unparalleled
constellations of undemocratic power (neocolonial, capitalist,
imperial, religious, terrorist) and of political visions dimmed by a
century of failed alternatives. Rather, the reference would seem to
conjure a child's experience of darkness, one rife with diabolical
forces that can neither be mastered or comprehended, forces that
frighten as they spook and heighten a felt impotence. The darkness
signals not only danger but absence of illumination, and links the two:
the dangers are greater because of the lack of light . . . or a good
part of the danger inheres in the lack of light. We are disoriented,
frightened, and stumbling in the dark.
There are two powers
in our times whose main currency is fear: terrorism and empire. The
principle of terrorism is unpredictable violence; it is the opposite of
systematic, visible, routine, or regularized domination. What renders
terrorist violence as power is its inevitable, anticipated, yet random
arrival, its capacity to disrupt and destroy everyday life any time and
any place. Because terrorism has no regular time or place, we are made
fearful less by actual terrorist events than by the specter of
terrorism, a specter that works through incalculability. This is the
fundamental absurdity of color-coded "terror alerts." Feigning an
ability to measure and predict the moves of a power form that mocks
measurement and prediction, the alerts pretend in a way that convinces
no one that we know what will happen next, that we are in control when
we are not, even as they no doubt increase the fearfulness of those
imagining themselves to be targets.
The principle of fear at
work in contemporary practices of empire is quite different from that
in terrorism and is related to the modern illegitimacy of empire
vis-à-vis principles of democracy and popular sovereignty. This
illegitimacy means that empire today can be justified only through
fear, by declaring a perpetual state of emergency that would allow
conventional democratic principles to be overridden. So modern empire
mobilizes human fear on a mass scale; it is above all parasitic on the
fear incited by the specter of terrorism, but it is also dependent on
the fear related to the porousness of modern nation-states and to the
exposure of vulnerable individuals and deracinated communities to the
vicissitudes of global forces. Empire promises protection from dangers
that it rhetorically magnifies in order to secure itself, a
magnification that intensifies our fear in the dark.
But
while darkness today implies not only fear but also disorientation, the
latter pertains to an arc of powers shaping the present that exceed a
dialectic of empire and terror. We are disoriented by the literal loss
of trajectory following the collapse of historical metanarratives in a
present that appears fraught with injustice and misery and not only
apocalyptic danger. It has become a commonplace to describe our time as
pounded by undemocratic historical forces yet lacking a forward movement.
This
makes the weight of the present very heavy: all mass, no velocity.
Or, in the terms of the late modern speediness invoked earlier: all
speed, no direction. If this heaviness mixed with speediness were
analogized to a mental state, the diagnosis would be profound
depressive anxiety, a disorder for which an astonishing number of
persons today seek treatment. Depressive anxiety is a truly terrible
state: you cannot move because of the bleakness but you cannot rest
because of the anxiety; you can neither seize life nor escape it,
neither live nor die. There may not be a better appellation for our
condition, for the bleakness of a seemingly eternal present with
catastrophe limning its horizon. Permanent daylight, Nietzsche reminds
us, is one with unbroken darkness; the unbearability of both is time
stopped, an endless present.21 Unbroken time is the time of
eternity, death's time. Little surprise, then, that we speak
idiomatically of both time and darkness as "closing in on us." This
quality of closure, this entrapment in an unbearable present, is a
significant part of what makes our times dark today, what makes us
unsure that it is just the times rather than the world that is
darkening--indeed, what makes time and world collapse into one, because
time, for all its speed, appears to have stopped going forward or
taking us anywhere.
CRITICAL THEORY AND POLITICAL TIME
From Walter Benjamin, however, we know that there is
fecundity and not
only bleakness in the arrest of time. Benjamin regarded progressivism
and historicism as the Scylla and Charybdis of critical thinking in
dark times. For the journey through, he reconceived historical
materialism as precisely that which stills time in the present and does
so in order to make the present swerve, to knock it off course. Here is
the sixteenth thesis of "Theses on the Philosophy of History":
A historical materialist cannot do without the
notion of a present
which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come
to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is
writing history. Historicism gives the "eternal" image of the past;
historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The
historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore
called "Once upon a time" in historicism's bordello. He remains in
control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of
history.22
In contrast with a conventional
historical materialism that renders the present in terms of unfolding
laws of history, Benjamin argues for the political and the
philosophical value of conceiving the present as a time in which time
is still(ed). But not only still--rather, it is a present in which time
has come to a stop, thereby implying movement behind it. The
affirmation of this temporal rush behind a still present, an
affirmation that belies the stillness itself, avoids presentism and
ahistoricity in political thinking even as it conceptually breaks the
present out of history. But why does the historical materialist require
this break? What is at stake in extracting this present from what
Benjamin calls the "lifework" of history? Why this trick, and in what
sense can we not do without it?
Benjamin's own answer: "this
notion [of stillness] defines the present in which [the historical
materialist] himself is writing history." Yes, this singular present
impels and shapes the history being written, bringing Benjaminian
historical materialism closer to genealogy as a past of the present, a
past for the present, a history that has an aim with the
present. But there is more at stake here than the self-consciousness of
the theorist, and more too, than an empirical claim about how the
living actually experience the present. Rather, an unmoving present, a
present that is not automatically overcome by time, a present that is
out of time in both senses, is a present that calls to us, calls on us
to respond to it. Both the historical perspective and the political
urgency of the critic are precipitated from this stillness--it contains
the present's call. This is a call we will eventually want to
articulate with the call, considered earlier, issued from a "critical
condition."
The political stakes of the historical
materialist, whom I am provisionally allowing to become one with the
critical theorist, also appear in the next line of the thesis:
"Historicism gives the 'eternal' image of the past; historical
materialism supplies a unique experience with the past." Benjamin does
not make the contrast of historicism with historical materialism turn
simply on a particular method or conceptualization of history, though
he does draw these distinctions (especially in the following thesis).23
Rather, the present is the site of a particular experience
of
history, one in which the present is grasped as historically contoured
but not itself experienced as history because not necessarily
continuous with what has been. This experience of the present allows
the historical materialist to render the present as ripe with
non-utopian possibility--non-utopian because it is historically
situated and constrained, a possibility because it is not historically
foreordained or determined. Historical materialism renders the present
historically yet arrests history for the present, and in that
double gesture of power it becomes critical theory.24
In the final sentences of the thesis, the warring figures
are manliness
and whores: "The historical materialist leaves it to others to be
drained by the whore called 'Once upon a time' in historicism's
bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open
the continuum of history." The trope of the whore who drains, who
through her cheap yet seductive lure undermines man's will and
strength, is no less misogynist because historicism itself is referred
to as a bordello. The other of the whore is the virtuous wife and
sublimated sexual energies, just as the other of the bordello is the
procreative marital bed and sexual repression or regulation. Both
recall the endless rehearsal in Western thought of manly autonomy
undone by ungoverned female sexuality. The whorehouse figured not
simply as moral corruption but as the scene of enervated masculine
energies also figures woman controlled and subordinated (in marriage)
as the precondition of manly public action. The whore that is
historicism drains; the wife that is dialectical materialism leaves man
in control of his powers to make the world.
If we were to
paint this concern with action on a different lexical and literary
landscape, however, we might examine without wincing Benjamin's aim to
retrieve historical materialism both from the fatalistic "empty time"
of the historicist and from the deterministic sigh of another
conception of historical materialism. In insisting on the Nowness of
the present as the impetus for the historical materialist, Benjamin
depicts the historical materialist as rerouting by rethinking the work
of history in the present, stilling time to open time. The possibility
of "blasting open the continuum of history" with this rethinking
literally makes the historical materialist, the critic, into dynamite.
There is a danger at this moment, of course, of
conflating critical
theory with political action, a conflation we will want to avoid.25
But
it is not clear that this is what Benjamin is arguing. Rather, he seems
to be staging the present in terms of a constructed
historical-political consciousness that itself blasts the present out
of the continuum of history. A present figured as fecund rather than as
determined on the one hand or as theologically presided over by empty
time on the other produces what Benjamin famously calls "a
revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past."26 Only
a
chance, but a revolutionary one: this struggle over what the past
could mean in the present is at the same time a struggle for the
future. Benjamin's meditation makes the project of critical theory into
this reconfiguration of time in order to open the present, literally to
let light into dark times.
THE TIME FOR CRITICAL THEORY
The art of engaged critical theory today involves
attending to at least
four related problematics of time, timeliness, and untimeliness: (1)
knowing what time it is, a knowledge that includes (2) reckoning with
the "out of jointness" of dark times, (3) thinking against the age or
being untimely, and (4) shooting at the clocks, stilling or blowing up
time in Benjamin's sense. To interweave these four problematics of time
involves grasping the age historically, a comprehension that, with
Nietzsche and Benjamin, sets it off from itself insofar as it breaks
with the age's own self-conception, and at the same time tears the
present out of a continuum of history. It also involves understanding
untimeliness as the fruit of historical thinking, a genealogical plum
that emerges not from an antihistorical stance but as a historical
consciousness that works against an eternal present on the one hand and
history as a run-on sentence on the other. Untimely critique that seeks
to speak to our time is launched not from outside time, or
indifferently to the times, but rather from historical materialism in
control of its powers and wielded as a power. Thus Nietzsche's call for
an "arrow shot into the age randomly and without guaranteed effect" is
spurned by Sheldon Wolin's and Norman O. Brown's conviction that potent
political critique must know what time it is--in short, must grasp the
age.27 Untimeliness is a technique for blowing up
historical
time, yet is only non-utopian to the extent that it exercises a
profound reading of the times. If historical materialism aims to
fracture a seamless present and to lift that present from seamless
time, untimely critique insists on alternative possibilities and
perspectives in a seemingly closed political and epistemological
universe. It becomes a nonviolent mode of exploding the present.
The navigation of these four problematics of time might
be conceived in terms of an ethic of
timeliness and untimeliness in critical theory, one that involves both
close attunement to the times and aggressive violation of their
self-conception. This is by no means a comprehensive ethics but rather
something like an ethic in Weber's sense--less a set of
guidelines for action than a caution about what may not be discounted
in acting.28 (Weber's
brief for "an ethic of responsibility" in politics has little positive
content; it instead mainly consists of ruling out the disavowals
entailed in other possible ethical stances.) An ethic of untimely
critical theory, then, might consist in the following cautions.
On the one hand, critical theory cannot let itself be
bound by
political exigency; indeed, it has something of an obligation to refuse
such exigency. While there are always decisive choices to be made in
the political realm (whom to vote for, what policies to support or
oppose, what action to take or defer), these very delimitations of
choice are often themselves the material of critical theory. Here we
might remind ourselves that prising apart immediate political
constraints from intellectual ones is one path to being "governed a
little less" in Foucault's sense. Yet allowing thinking its wildness
beyond the immediate in order to reset the possibilities of the
immediate is also how this degov-erning rearticulates critical theory
and politics after disarticulating them; critical theory comes back to
politics offering a different sense of the times and a different sense
of time. It is also important to remember that the "immediate choices"
are just that and often last no longer than a political season
(exemplified by the fact that the political conundrums with which this
essay opened will be dated if not forgotten by the time this book is
published). Nor is the argument convincing that critical theory
threatens the possibility of holding back the political dark. It is
difficult to name a single instance in which critical theory has killed
off a progressive political project. Critical theory is not what makes
progressive political projects fail; at worst it might give them bad
conscience, at best it renews their imaginative reach and vigor.
On the other hand, critical theory concerned with
politics is modestly
bound not only to speak to the times but also to affirm them. In its
historical-mindedness, critical theory is distinct both from normative
moral theory, in its general refusal of historical specificity for its
norms, and from utopian intellectual exercises, which attempt to leap
out of history. But critical theory focused on political life is not
negation, destruction, or nihilism; rather, critical theory aims to
render crisis into knowledge, and to orient us in the darkness.
Critique that does not affirm life, affirm value, and above all affirm
possibilities in the present and the future, while certainly possible,
is not making a bid for political power and hence cannot be understood
as political. This does not mean that critiques must carry a full-blown
political vision, declare "what is to be done," or advance
transcendental or universal norms. But critical theory as political
theory cannot get off the block without affirming contestable and
contingent values, values that are themselves an affirmation of this
world, and this time.
This final point can be put a little
differently by returning to Foucault, with whom this essay begin. In
"What Is Critique?" Foucault argues that historically, "critique is
biblical," by which he means that for much of Western history not
wanting to be governed "so much" or not wanting to be governed "like
that" involved resisting church authority or scriptural prescription,
in short, "refusing, challenging, limiting ecclesiastical rule." But
this resistance, Foucault tells us, "meant returning to the Scriptures,
seeking out what was authentic in them, what was really written in
[them,] . . . questioning what sort of truth the Scriptures told."29
Here
we not only are recalled to the early meaning of critique as a process
of sifting and distinguishing but are invited to understand critique as
a practice of affirming the text it contests. Critique passionately
reengages the text, rereads and reconsiders the text's truth claim. In
so doing, critique reasserts the importance of the text under
consideration (whether a law, nation, principle, practice, or
treatise), its power to organize and contain us, its right to govern
us. This affirmation of the text through an insistent rereading seems
to me the heart of the distinction between critique and its cousins--
rejection, refutation, rebuttal, dismissal. Critique, whether immanent,
transcendent, genealogical, or in yet some other form, is always a
rereading and as such a reaffirmation of that which it engages. It does
not, it cannot, reject or demean its object. Rather, as an act of
reclamation, critique takes over the object for a different project
than that to which it is currently tethered. Critical theory in dark
times thus affirms the times, renders them differently, reclaims them
for something other than the darkness. In this sense, critical theory
in dark times is a singular practice of amor fati.
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Description
File created: 8/7/2007
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Whether
in characterizing Catharine MacKinnon's theory of gender as itself
pornographic or in identifying liberalism as unable to make good on its
promises, Wendy Brown pursues a central question: how does a sense of
woundedness become the basis for a sense of identity? Brown argues that
efforts to outlaw hate speech and pornography powerfully legitimize the
state: such apparently well-intentioned attempts harm victims further
by portraying them as so helpless as to be in continuing need of
governmental protection. "Whether one is dealing with the state, the
Mafia, parents, pimps, police, or husbands," writes Brown, "the heavy
price of institutionalized protection is always a measure of dependence
and agreement to abide by the protector's rules." True democracy, she
insists, requires sharing power, not regulation by it; freedom, not
protection.
Refusing any facile identification with one
political
position or another, Brown applies her argument to a panoply of topics,
from the basis of litigiousness in political life to the appearance on
the academic Left of themes of revenge and a thwarted will to power.
These and other provocations in contemporary political thought and
political life provide an occasion for rethinking the value of several
of the last two centuries' most compelling theoretical critiques of
modern political life, including the positions of Nietzsche, Marx,
Weber, and Foucault.
Review:
"Wendy
Brown undertakes a critical analysis of late modern state power to
reveal how identity politics translated into rights claims ... [This
study] significantly advances our understanding of aspects of politics
where particular identities and universal rights are currently in
conflict."--American Political Science Review
Endorsement:
"A
compelling and original book which provides critical and much needed
insight into the workings of contemporary American politics. There
isn't anyone else doing this kind of work in political theory."--Joan
W. Scott, Institute for Advanced Study
Table of Contents:
|
Preface |
|
|
Acknowledgments |
|
| Ch. 1 |
Introduction: Freedom and the Plastic Cage |
3 |
| Ch. 2 |
Postmodern Exposures, Feminist Hesitations |
30 |
| Ch. 3 |
Wounded Attachments |
52 |
| Ch. 4 |
The Mirror of Pornography |
77 |
| Ch. 5 |
Rights and Losses |
96 |
| Ch. 6 |
Liberalism's Family Values |
135 |
| Ch. 7 |
Finding the Man in the State |
166 |
|
Index |
197 |
|
|
ADDITIONAL ENDORSEMENTS:
"Wendy Brown's Regulating Aversion
is clear, rigorous, and unusually bold in an academic atmosphere that
is now far from sympathetic to its kind of radical critique. Brown has
done a wonderful job of orchestrating her argument, and it has been
articulated with wit. The book is a worthy successor to her best and
most politically astute contributions. This is an important
work."--Paul Gilroy, London School of Economics
"In this
fascinating and provocative book, Brown brings into sharp analytical
focus a perplexing phenomenon: in political discourse since the late
twentieth century, both the objects and content of tolerance have
shifted. The sweep of Brown's analysis is impressive: she deftly weaves
together critiques of contemporary politics with thoughtful
explorations of the history of liberal thought on tolerance."--Melissa
Williams, University of Toronto
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Description
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Animal Spirits:
How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global
Capitalism
George A. Akerlof and
Robert J. Shiller
Book Description
| Reviews
| Table
of Contents
COPYRIGHT
NOTICE: Published by Princeton University Press and copyrighted, ©
2009, by Princeton University Press. All rights reserved. No part of
this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical
means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and
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mount this file on any network servers. Follow links for Class Use and other Permissions.
For more information, send e-mail to permissions@press.princeton.edu
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This
file is also available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format
Introduction
TO UNDERSTAND HOW economies work and how we can
manage them and
prosper, we must pay attention to the thought patterns that animate
people’s ideas and feelings, their animal spirits. We will
never really understand important economic events unless we confront
the fact that their causes are largely mental in nature.
It
is unfortunate that most economists and business writers apparently do
not seem to appreciate this and thus often fall back on the most
tortured and artificial interpretations of economic events. They assume
that variations in individual feelings, impressions, and passions do
not matter in the aggregate and that economic events are driven by
inscrutable technical factors or erratic government action. In fact, as
we shall discover in this book, the origins of these events are quite
familiar and are found in our own everyday thinking. We started work on
this book in the spring of 2003. In the intervening years the world
economy has moved in directions that can be understood only in terms of
animal spirits. It has taken a rollercoaster ride. First there was the
ascent. And then, about a year ago, the fall began. But oddly, unlike a
trip at a normal amusement park, it was not until the economy began to
fall that the passengers realized that they had embarked on a wild
ride. And, abetted by this obliviousness, the management of this
amusement park paid no heed to setting limits on how high the
passengers should go. Nor did it provide for safety equipment to limit
the speed, or the extent, of the subsequent fall.
What had
people been thinking? Why did they not notice until real events—the
collapse of banks, the loss of jobs, mortgage foreclosures— were
already upon us? There is a simple answer. The public, the government,
and most economists had been reassured by an economic theory that said
that we were safe. It was all OK. Nothing dangerous could happen. But
that theory was deficient. It had ignored the importance of ideas in
the conduct of the economy. It had ignored the role of animal
spirits. And it had also ignored the fact that people could be
unaware of having boarded a rollercoaster.
What Have People Been Thinking?
Traditional economics teaches the benefits of free
markets. This belief
has taken hold not just in the bastions of capitalism, such as the
United States and Great Britain, but throughout the world, even in
countries with more established socialist traditions, such as China,
India, and Russia. According to traditional economics, free market
capitalism will be essentially perfect and stable. There is little, if
any, need for government interference. On the contrary, the only risk
of major depression today, or in the future, comes from government
intervention.
This line of reasoning goes back to Adam Smith.
The basis for the idea that the economy is essentially stable lies in a
thought experiment which asks: What do free, perfect markets imply? The
answer: If people rationally pursue their own economic interests in
such markets, they will exhaust all mutually beneficial opportunities
to produce goods and exchange with one another. Such exhaustion of
opportunities for mutually beneficial trade results in full employment.
Workers who are reasonable in their wage demands—those who will accept
a wage that is less than what they add to production—will be employed.
Why? If such a worker were unemployed, a mutually beneficial trade
could be arranged. An employer could hire this worker at the wage she
requires and still have some spare extra output for a larger profit. Of
course some workers will be unemployed. But they will be unable to find
work only because they are engaged in a temporary search for a job or
because they insist on pay that is unreasonably high—greater than what
they add to production. Such unemployment is voluntary.
There
is a sense in which this theory about the economy’s stability is
remarkably successful. For example, it explains why most people who
seek work are employed most of the time—even in the troughs of severe
depressions. It may not explain, for example, why 25% of the U.S. labor
force was unemployed in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression, but
it does explain why, even then, 75% of the workers who sought jobs were
employed. They were engaging in the mutually beneficial production and
trade predicted by Adam Smith.
So, even at its worst, this
theory deserves high marks—at least by the criterion of a schoolboy we
once overheard at a restaurant. He was complaining about the C he had
received on a spelling test—despite the fact that 70% of his answers
were correct. Furthermore the theory does so well even in its worst
prediction in two hundred years. Most of the time—as now, when the U.S.
unemployment rate is still 6.7% (although rising)—it predicts
remarkably accurately.
Consider yet again the Great Depression. Few
people ask why employment was as high as 75% in 1933.
Instead the common question is why 25% of the labor force was unemployed.
To
our mind macroeconomics concerns departures from full employment.
Failure to be at such full employment must then result from a departure
from the classical model of Adam Smith.
We do believe, like most of our colleagues, that
Adam Smith was
basically right regarding why so many people are employed. We are also
willing to believe, with some qualifications, that he was essentially
correct about the economic advantages of capitalism. But we think that
his theory fails to describe why there is so much variation in the
economy. It does not explain why the economy takes rollercoaster rides.
And the takeaway message from Adam Smith—that there is little, or no,
need for government intervention—is also unwarranted.1
Animal Spirits
The thought experiment of Adam Smith correctly
takes into account the
fact that people rationally pursue their economic interests. Of course
they do. But this thought experiment fails to take into account the
extent to which people are also guided by noneconomic motivations. And
it fails to take into account the extent to which they are irrational
or misguided. It ignores the animal spirits.
In
contrast, John Maynard Keynes sought to explain departures from full
employment, and he emphasized the importance of animal spirits. He
stressed their fundamental role in businessmen’s calculations. “Our
basis of knowledge for estimating the yield ten years hence of a
railway, a copper mine, a textile factory, the goodwill of a patent
medicine, an Atlantic liner, a building in the City of London amounts
to little and sometimes to nothing,” he wrote. If people are so
uncertain, how are decisions made? They “can only be taken as
a
result of animal spirits.” They are the result of “a spontaneous urge
to action.” They are not, as rational economic theory would
dictate, “the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits
multiplied by quantitative probabilities.”2
In the original use of the term, in its ancient
and medieval Latin form spiritus animalis, the word animal
means “of the mind” or “animating.” It refers to a
basic mental energy and life force.3 But in modern
economics animal spirits has
acquired a somewhat different meaning; it is now an economic term,
referring to a restless and inconsistent element in the economy. It
refers to our peculiar relationship with ambiguity or uncertainty.
Sometimes we are paralyzed by it. Yet at other times it refreshes and
energizes us, overcoming our fears and indecisions.
Just as
families sometimes cohere and at other times argue, are sometimes happy
and at other times depressed, are sometimes successful and at other
times in disarray, so too do whole economies go through good and bad
times. The social fabric changes. Our level of trust in one another
varies. And our willingness to undertake effort and engage in
self-sacrifice is by no means constant.
The idea that
economic crises, like the current financial and housing crisis, are
mainly caused by changing thought patterns goes against standard
economic thinking. But the current crisis bears witness to the role of
such changes in thinking. It was caused precisely by our changing
confidence, temptations, envy, resentment, and illusions—and especially
by changing stories about the nature of the economy. These intangibles
were the reason why people paid small fortunes for houses in
cornfields; why others financed those purchases; why the Dow Jones
average peaked above 14,000 and a little more than a year later fell
below 7,500; why the U.S. unemployment rate has risen by 2.5 percentage
points in the past twenty-four months, with the end of this rise not
yet in sight; why Bear Stearns, one of the world’s leading investment
banks, was only (and barely) saved by a Federal Reserve bailout, and
why later in the year Lehman Brothers collapsed outright; why a large
fraction of the world’s banks are underfunded; and why, as we write,
some of them are still tottering on the brink, even after a bailout,
and may yet be the next to go. And we know not what is yet to come.
Macroeconomics with and without Animal
Spirits
Of course there is a rich body of macroeconomics
that explains why
there are fluctuations in the economy. Indeed that is what the
macroeconomics textbooks are all about. We will give just two examples.
In the post–World War II period, economists felt that they could
explain deviations from full employment by a single type of animal
spirit: that workers dislike money wage cuts, and that employers are
therefore reluctant to make them.4 This tradition then
morphed into a slightly more sophisticated explanation for why wages
are slow to change. It explains fluctuations in employment arising from
shifts in demand as due to the fact that wages and prices are not all
set simultaneously. This concept in macroeconomics is known as
“staggered contracts.”5 The macro textbooks are full of
many
other departures from the simple thought experiment of Adam Smith, in
which there is always a meeting of minds and contracts are negotiated
between rational people motivated purely by economic interests.6
And that leads us to the philosophical difference
between this book and
standard economics texts. This book is derived from a different view of
how economics should be described. The economics of the textbooks seeks
to minimize as much as possible departures from pure economic
motivation and from rationality. There is a good reason for doing
so—and each of us has spent a good portion of his life writing in this
tradition. The economics of Adam Smith is well understood. Explanations
in terms of small deviations from Smith’s ideal system are thus clear,
because they are posed within a framework that is already very well
understood. But that does not mean that these small deviations
from Smith’s system describe how the economy really works.
Our book marks a break with this tradition. In our
view economic theory
should be derived not from the minimal deviations from the system of
Adam Smith but rather from the deviations that actually do occur and
that can be observed. Insofar as animal spirits exist in the everyday
economy, a description of how the economy really works must consider
those animal spirits. That is the aim of this book.
In
producing such a description, we think that we can explain how the
economy works. This is a subject of permanent interest. But, writing as
we are in the winter of 2008–9, this book also describes how we got
into the current mess—and what we need to do to get out of it.
How the Economy Really Works and the Role
of Animal Spirits
Part One of this book will describe five different
aspects of animal spirits and how they affect economic decisions—confidence,
fairness, corruption and antisocial behavior, money illusion, and stories:
- The cornerstone of our theory is confidence and
the feedback mechanisms between it and the economy that amplify
disturbances.
- The setting of wages and prices depends largely
on concerns about fairness.
- We acknowledge the temptation toward corrupt
and antisocial behavior and their role in the economy.
- Money illusion is another cornerstone of
our theory. The public is confused by inflation or deflation and does
not reason through its effects.
- Finally,
our sense of reality, of who we are and what we are doing, is
intertwined with the story of our lives and of the lives of others. The
aggregate of such stories is a national or international
story, which itself plays an important role in the economy.
Part Two of this book describes how these five
animal spirits affect
economic decisions, demonstrating how they play a crucial role in
answering eight questions:
- Why do economies fall into depression?
- Why do central bankers have power over the
economy, insofar as they do?
- Why are there people who can’t find a job?
- Why is there a tradeoff between inflation and
unemployment in the long run?
- Why is saving for the future so arbitrary?
- Why are financial prices and corporate
investments so volatile?
- Why do real estate markets go through cycles?
- Why does poverty persist for generations among
disadvantaged minorities?
We see that animal spirits provide an easy answer
to each of these
questions. We also see that, correspondingly, none of these questions
can be answered if people are viewed as having only economic
motivations which they pursue rationally—that is, if the economy is
seen as operating according to the invisible hand of Adam Smith.
Each of these eight questions is fundamental. They
would occur to
anyone with a natural curiosity regarding the economy. In providing
natural, satisfactory answers to all of them, our theory of animal
spirits describes how the economy works.
In answering these
questions, in telling how the economy really works, we accomplish what
existing economic theory has not. We provide a theory that explains
fully and naturally how the U.S. economy, and indeed the world economy,
has fallen into the current crisis. And— of perhaps even greater
interest—such a theory then allows us to understand what needs to be
done to extricate ourselves from the crisis. (We present our analysis
and recommendations in the postscript to Chapter 7, the chapter dealing
with the powers of the Federal Reserve.)
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File created: 2/23/2009
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In
politics, utopians do not have a monopoly on imagination. Even the most
conservative defenses of the status quo, Raymond Geuss argues, require
imaginative acts of some kind. In this collection of recent essays,
including his most overtly political writing yet, Geuss explores the
role of imagination in politics, particularly how imaginative
constructs interact with political reality. He uses decisions about the
war in Iraq to explore the peculiar ways in which politicians can be
deluded and citizens can misunderstand their leaders. He also examines
critically what he sees as one of the most serious delusions of western
political thinking--the idea that a human society is always best
conceived as a closed system obeying fixed rules. And, in essays on Don
Quixote,
museums, Celan's poetry, Heidegger's brother Fritz, Richard Rorty, and
bourgeois philosophy, Geuss reflects on how cultural artifacts can lead
us to embrace or reject conventional assumptions about the world. While
paying particular attention to the relative political roles played by
rule-following, utilitarian calculations of interest, and aspirations
to lead a collective life of a certain kind, Geuss discusses a wide
range of related issues, including the distance critics need from their
political systems, the extent to which history can enlighten politics,
and the possibility of utopian thinking in a world in which action
retains its urgency.
Raymond Geuss teaches philosophy at the
University of Cambridge. His most recent books include Philosophy
and Real Politics, Outside Ethics, and Public Goods, Private
Goods (all Princeton).
Endorsements:
"These
terrific essays confirm Raymond Geuss's status as one of the most
thoughtful, honest, careful, original, and politically engaged
philosophers of our time. Displaying Geuss's rich erudition in European
languages, history, literature, art, and music, and his unique capacity
to use philosophy to illuminate current political conundrums, these
essays are attuned both to the most delicate dimensions of human
experience and subjectivity and the cruder phenomena of war, planetary
collapse, party politics, and bourgeois complacency. This is a rich and
wonderful book."--Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley
"These
essays are elegant and erudite, as well as unfailingly insightful and
interesting. A very fine collection."--Daniel Brudney, University of
Chicago
Table of Contents:
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xv
CHAPTER I: Political Judgment in Its Historical Context 1
CHAPTER II: The Politics of Managing Decline 17
CHAPTER III: Moralism and Realpolitik 31
CHAPTER IV: On the Very Idea of a Metaphysics of Right 43
CHAPTER V: The Actual and Another Modernity Order and Imagination in
Don Quixote 61
CHAPTER VI: Culture as Ideal and as Boundary 81
CHAPTER VII: On Museums 96
CHAPTER VIII: Celan's Meridian 117
CHAPTER IX: Heidegger and His Brother 142
CHAPTER X Richard Rorty at Princeton Personal Recollections 151
CHAPTER XI: Melody as Death 164
CHAPTER XII: On Bourgeois Philosophy and the Concept of "Criticism" 167
Bibliography 187
Index 193
Other Princeton books by Raymond Geuss:
Subject Areas:
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