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136 Editorial collective David Cunningham, Howard Feather, Peter Hallward, Esther Leslie, Kevin Magill, Stewart Martin, Mark Neocleous, Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford

Contributors Colin Falconer (colin.falconer@wanadoo. fr) studied social administration at the London School of Economics, in 1968. He moved to France in 1979. He is a member of the editorial board of the independent political and theoretical review Socialisme International. Eyal Weizman is an Israeli architect, writer and curator based in London. He is a professor of architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Director of Goldsmiths Collegeʼs Centre for Research Architecture, and a co-editor of A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture (Verso, 2003). The projects in that book were banned by the Israeli Association of Architects, but later shown in New York, Berlin, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Malmo, Tel Aviv and Ramallah. Harry Harootunian is Professor of History at New York University. His latest book is The Empireʼs New Clothes: Paradigm Lost, and Regained (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004). Paolo Virno lives and works in Rome. He is an editor of the journal Forme di vita and a regular contributor to Multitudes. His books include A Grammar of the Multitude (University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

Copyedited and typeset by illuminati www.illuminatibooks.co.uk Production and layout by Peter Osborne and Stewart Martin Printed by Russell Press, Russell House, Bulwell Lane, Basford, Nottingham NG6 0BT Bookshop distribution UK: Central Books, 99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN Tel: 020 8986 4854 USA: Bernard de Boer, 113 East Centre Street, Nutley, New Jersey 07100 Tel: 201 667 9300; Ubiquity Distributors Inc., 607 Degraw Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217 Tel: 718 875 5491 Cover: Andrew Fisher, Frozen, 2005

Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd. www.radicalphilosophy.com

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philosophy MARCH/APRIL 2006

COMMENTARY Why Did the Banlieues Burn? Colin Falconer ................................................................................................ 2

ARTICLES Walking through Walls: Soldiers as Architects in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict Eyal Weizman ................................................................................................. 8

The Future of Fascism Harry Harootunian ....................................................................................... 23

INTERVIEW Reading Gilbert Simondon: Transindividuality, Technical Activity and Reification Paolo Virno and Jun Fujita Hirose ............................................................. 34

REVIEWS Sara Beardsworth, Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity Tina Chanter and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, eds, Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristevaʼs Polis Cecilia Sjöholm, Kristeva and the Political David Macey................................................................................................. 44 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason John Kraniauskas ........................................................................................ 48 Matthew Beaumont, Utopia Ltd: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870–1900 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions Martin Ryle................................................................................................... 51 Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism Alberto Toscano ........................................................................................... 54 Frederic J. Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany Nickolas Lambrianou .................................................................................. 57 David Pinder, Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism Frances Stracey ........................................................................................... 59 Simon Critchley, Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens Drew Milne ................................................................................................... 61

NEWS In for the Longue Durée: The Graduate Labour Struggle at NYU Leigh Claire La Berge .................................................................................. 63

COMMENTARY

Why did the banlieues burn? Colin Falconer

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he violence on French housing estates in November 2005, which saw thousands of cars burnt, attacks on public buildings, occasional Belfast-style confrontations between police and young rioters and police helicopters overflying residential suburbs, sent shock waves through French society. The scale of the violence and repression was unprecedented. One month after the return to ʻnormalʼ, over 800 young people had been imprisoned, often after the mere pretence of a fair trial. When the revolt began, the entire Establishment was caught by surprise. Yet the crisis did not come out of the blue. Police statistics revealed that since the beginning of the year, on average nearly a hundred cars had been burnt every week. What happened in November was a sudden increase in tension after the death of two boys in an electricity substation in Clichy-sous-Bois, a town in the northern suburbs of Paris dominated by bleak high-rise housing projects. They had been fleeing police after a reported robbery, which turned out never to have happened. When interior minister (and would-be president) Nicolas Sarkozy announced an inquiry into the boysʼ deaths, only to repeat in the next breath the inaccurate version given by the local police, he added fuel to the fire. A few days later, a tear-gas canister exploded near the entrance of a mosque during Friday prayers (significantly, the riot police claim they didnʼt know the mosque was there). No regrets were expressed until long after the damage had been done. The dignified response of the victimsʼ families, community and religious associations and the local mayor contrasted sharply with Sarkozyʼs arrogant behaviour and President Chiracʼs curious silence. The riots were a conscious, if largely unorganized, response not only to years of neglect, but to repeated provocations by Sarkozy and other right-wing demagogues. For months, he has been exhorting the police to step up action against ʻtroublemakersʼ, setting targets for deporting undocumented immigrants and declaring that ʻthe scumʼ would be ʻwashed out of the housing estatesʼ. Community policing has been abandoned in favour of strong-arm tactics, with Sarkozy cynically saying that it is not the role of the police to play football with young people. He has called for rioters to be deported if they are foreign nationals, although many have never lived in their country of origin (in one of the first cases the court refused to do so, saying that the boy in question was ʻperfectly integratedʼ). In the aftermath of the troubles, polls showed a leap in support for the ideas of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his arch-rival, the ʻEuroscepticʼ Philippe de Villiers. Sarkozy himself may be a demagogue, but he is far from being a fool. In a deliberate break with conventional political discourse, he has spoken about the need for a measure of ʻpositive discriminationʼ, rather than vague talk of ʻequality of opportunityʼ. While upping the law-and-order rhetoric, he has been busy promoting conservative Muslim leaders.

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Radical Philosophy 136 (March/April 20 06)

Politics of the suburbs While of little bearing on the violence itself, Islam is at the heart of debate on the banlieues, the deprived areas on the fringes of French cities. Representations of Muslims usually depict either a withdrawal into ʻcommunitarianismʼ and religious conservatism, or a growth in extremism. Suburbs with a large immigrant/Muslim population have in this view become ʻextraterritorialʼ zones outside the Republic. Hence the rhetoric of ʻreconquestʼ often used by politicians and editorialists. The reality is far more complex. Not only do people of all origins bear the brunt of unemployment and poverty, but Muslims do not form a homogeneous ʻcommunityʼ. Sarkozy himself clearly believes in the emergence of a pro-business Muslim middle class, whether represented by the associations controlling the majority of mosques (often linked to the undemocratic, neoliberal regimes in the former French colonies of North Africa), or by the more dynamic, and ambiguous, umbrella organization the Union des Organisations Islamiques de France (UOIF). This organization, which is said to be linked with groups in the Lebanon and Egypt such as the Muslim Brotherhood, issued a fatwa against Muslims taking part in the riots. This attitude was condemned by progressive Muslims close to the global justice movement, such as Tariq Ramadan and the Collectif des Musulmans de France, for playing into the hands of those who blamed Muslims for the troubles. They emphasized the social and political, rather than ethnic or religious, roots of the movement. Another group, Participation et Spiritualité Musulmanes, insists on the need to engage with the wider society, and work with non-Muslims in the interest of peace and social progress.1 The French Left as a whole responded to the November crisis, correctly but inadequately, by attacking the governmentʼs social and economic policy. Unemployment is running at up to 50 per cent among young people in deprived areas. Little wonder that for many of them the ʻinformalʼ economy has become a way of life. Spending on social services has been squeezed. Health charges, utility bills and local rates have all increased. Unemployment benefits are under attack. With 1960sʼ public housing projects deteriorating rapidly, the outer suburbs need a massive injection of resources. While efforts have been made to smarten up sink estates by renovating or demolishing tower blocks, the real social problems faced by their residents have continued to get worse. At the same time, community groups have had their funding cut, school auxiliary workers have been sacked, public transport projects in suburban areas has been axed. However, the November protests were no traditional labour revolt, and the influence of the (mainly ʻwhiteʼ) Left in the housing estates is negligible. Other explanations are needed. Thanks to the riots, there is now a heightened consciousness that, in ʻthe country of the Rights of Manʼ (no less!), non-white citizens face widespread ʻexclusionʼ. In the ʻsensitiveʼ areas, genuine attempts were made by left-wing councillors and mayors to avoid playing off ʻrespectableʼ citizens against residents of the housing estates, or cités. They emphasized that the conflict was not racially motivated, and took initiatives to bring community and faith-based associations together. Residentsʼ groups were set up to protect schools, youth centres and sports facilities from firebombing, while avoiding the trap of forming vigilante groups. In the best cases, steps have been taken to build bridges to disaffected young people. Hundreds of local meetings have been held, many of them very political, to draw the lessons of what happened. However, it remains the case that for a broad section of public opinion the violence is associated with immigration, polygamy and Islam. The most crushing verdict on the events was provided by the governmentʼs intelligence-gathering service. The Renseignements Généraux concluded that, far from being the result of a religious or criminal conspiracy, the popular revolt had in fact been entirely spontaneous, and an indicator of the despair felt by young people ʻof all originsʼ as a result of unemployment, poverty, racism and lack of hope for the future.

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Republican consensus The Leftʼs response has a fundamental political weakness. When the government introduced emergency powers under a 1955 law passed to deal with the Algerian liberation movement, there were few objections from the ʻofficialʼ Socialist opposition. Although most Left-controlled local authorities did not impose curfews, arguing that the car-burnings were by then diminishing, they did not challenge the central thrust of government policy – the need to ʻrestore the authority of the stateʼ. Some Socialists laid the blame on ʻirresponsibleʼ parents. There was sympathy for withdrawing family allowances from parents of ʻguiltyʼ children, cracking down on fake marriages and lowering the age of apprenticeship to fourteen. Within the Socialist Party, there is support for immigration quotas tailored to labour shortages. Sticking to traditional working-class demands such as better social services and an attack on unemployment (goals which social-democratic governments have singularly failed to meet in the past), while touting Franceʼs official ideology of a single and undivided republic in which ʻall citizens are equalʼ, leads to ʻdownplayingʼ minority groupsʼ specific needs. So does simply calling for a united response to policies like privatization and pensions ʻreformʼ. Worse still, when activists from minority groups raise awkward questions, they are often accused of creating divisions in the working class. The reality is one of massive alienation from trade-union and political organizations – and not only among ethnic minority groups. If only ʻtheyʼ would get involved and join trade unions and left-wing parties, activists seem to say, we could all get on with the job of working towards a bright socialist future (or at least helping to elect a Socialist president in 2007). Such attitudes put the onus of integrating on immigrants and the children of immigrants, and fail to provide an adequate response to racism and discrimination. When integration is seen to fail, the victims themselves can be held responsible for not making sufficient efforts or clinging to outdated traditions. Left-wing parties have left an enormous political vacuum by refusing to take up Muslimsʼ legitimate feelings of exclusion and diabolization. Indeed, the Left often seems obsessed with a largely imaginary threat to ʻsecularismʼ or laïcité. Such kneejerk reactions have their roots in republican anti-clericalism; coincidentally, 2005 saw the centenary of the separation of church and state. They also reflect a strong ʻlibertarianʼ (anarchist) trend for which religion as such is an enemy – sometimes the main enemy. Finally, feminists tend to treat Muslims as if they were a reactionary bloc. Confrontations took place earlier in the year, when attempts were made to exclude more open-minded feminists, joined by Muslim girls wearing the headscarf, from commemorations of International Womenʼs Day and the 1975 law legalizing abortion. Two organizations representing the dominant republican, ʻintegrationistʼ (some would say ʻassimilationistʼ) trend are SOS Racisme, originally a broad-based anti-racist group but subsequently hijacked by a section of the Socialist Party, and Ni Putes Ni Soumises (ʻNeither Whores Nor Submissivesʼ), which tends to place the blame for violence against young women on the housing estates exclusively on the subculture of young Arab and black men. Both benefit from an inordinate degree of support in the media. ʻRepublicanismʼ and ʻsecularismʼ fail to take into account the dynamic, multcultural nature of French society, as well as the global context of the neoconsʼ ʻwar of civilizationsʼ. The republican tradition arose at a time when the ʻcivilizing missionʼ of French imperialism was taken for granted. Such an attitude is mirrored by the idea that republican institutions and especially the education system are the key to ʻintegratingʼ minorities, which are naturally expected to give up the supposedly ʻbackwardʼ aspects of their own culture. The orthodoxy on the French Left is that all public expressions of religious and/or ethnic identity are ʻanti-republicanʼ. However, in practice many militants reserve their bile for what they see as an ʻoffensiveʼ by Muslim fundamentalists. The Enlightenment tradition – somewhat chauvinistically viewed as a unique

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French contribution to civilization – is often invoked in an idealistic fashion against religious ʻobscurantismʼ. Voltaire, of course, was involved in a clash with powerful religious institutions that were fully integrated into the semi-feudal Ancien Régime. Any comparison with Islam in France (or, for that matter, the evangelical Christian movements which are flourishing among other non-white minority groups) is totally misplaced. The Left fails to recognize the role played by alienation from the majority culture, and ultimately by the alienation experienced by all exploited (but especially oppressed) groups within capitalist society, in the success of religious beliefs. In relation to Islam, even ʻprogressiveʼ thinkers are often influenced by the idea that Muslims are stuck in a time warp, incapable of understanding or responding to modern conditions. Islam, in this view, is a peculiarly ʻbackward religionʼ. Hence the notion, frequently expressed by left-wingers and feminists, that Muslim women who wear the headscarf – including those who choose to do so – need to be liberated ʻdespite themselvesʼ. There are, fortunately, alternative voices. A number of writers have provided a sensitive and well-informed analysis of the multiple strands of consciousness among French people of ʻArabo-Muslim cultureʼ, as well as a critique of the concept of laïcité.2 Going beyond such elementary intellectual practice, it is important for those engaged in political action to address the real problems faced by discriminated groups. Defending the basic democratic right to religious, political and cultural expression is a necessary part of such a process. Only a minority of radicals (some Greens, Communists and global justice activists, a small section of the Trotskyist Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, some anti-racist and human rights campaigners, individuals with a history of anti-imperialist struggle, intellectuals involved with Le Monde Diplomatique, etc.) have made any practical effort to engage in dialogue and joint work with Muslim or black activists. Some progress has been made through recently created groups such as the Collectif une École Pour Tou(te)s (CEPT), which campaigns for the right of girls wearing the Muslim headscarf to receive a state education, or the Collectif des Féministes Pour lʼÉgalité (CFPE). Unfortunately, they have been effectively ʻblackballedʼ by the mainstream Left. This writer, for one, has discovered an unsuspected authoritarian streak on the Left, directed against members and supporters of a vulnerable section of the population. It is not a pretty sight. In addition, opponents of multiculturalism and progressive ideas are on the offensive. The introduction in 2003 – with little parliamentary opposition – of the law banning religious symbols in schools reflected the ʻrepublican consensusʼ that integration consists essentially of immigrants adapting to established French norms (see David Macey, ʻThe Hijab and the Republic: Headscarves in France, RP 125). It also revealed widespread ignorance and Islamophobia, extending from the Far Right to (depressingly) the majority of feminists (Christine Delphy was a notable exception) and sections of the Far Left. Notoriously, Claude Imbert, editor of the centre-right magazine Le Point,

5

admitted cheerfully in 2003 to being ʻa little Islamophobicʼ. His problem, he said, was with Islam as a religion, not just Islamic extremists. Most recently, the well-known philosopher and broadcaster Alain Finkielkraut gave an interview to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz which the anti-racist organization MRAP described as ʻa text of a rare racist violence, echoing the clichés of the Front National and placing this social insurrection by French people he calls blacks or Arabs on an ethnic and religious planeʼ. He said that ʻanti-racism will be to the twenty-first century what communism was to the twentiethʼ. He is also reported as stating that Franceʼs footballers had been ʻblack, white and Arabʼ in 1998, but were now ʻblack, black and blackʼ and had become a laughing-stock. His statements were applauded by adjutants of Le Pen – and condemned by the Jewish organization lʼUnion Juive Française pour la Paix. (It should be said that Finkielkraut subsequently claimed he had been ʻmisquotedʼ. On the other hand, those who have read the original text in Hebrew claim that the English version printed in Haaretz was in fact watered down by embarrassed Israeli journalists.)

Post-colonial colonialism Such outbursts have fortunately not gone unchallenged. Recent developments have stimulated debate about issues previously considered inappropriate in France, whose ʻrepublicanʼ tradition discourages any legitimation of cultural, linguistic or religious differences. Astonishingly, the question of French colonialism has not only become an issue among intellectuals and militants from minority groups, but has even impinged on the mass media. History has suddenly become political. In February 2005, parliament decreed that schools should teach the ʻpositive roleʼ of French colonialism. At the time, opposition was limited to a petition by academics and teachersʼ associations, who declared they would ignore it. It took the urban violence – most of whose authors had presumably never heard of the law but knew about racism and ʻpost-colonialʼ attitudes from personal experience – to bring it to the attention of the mass media. As a result, the Socialists (some of whom in constituencies with many returned white settlers had supported it in the first place) attempted unsuccessfully to obtain the repeal of the law, mainly in the name of ʻacademic freedomʼ. Chirac and de Villepin, who take their reputation in Arab and African countries seriously, have attempted to distance themselves from the law. But the president has lost touch with his own rank and file, who are out for blood. Even the bicentenary of Napoleonʼs victory at Austerlitz in 1805 became a hot potato, as black militants protested about the non-recognition of the emperorʼs restoration of slavery in 1802 as a ʻcrime against humanityʼ. A popular late-night talk show broadcast a debate about allegations that Napoleon was a racist who gassed rebel slaves. Political and cultural associations in Guadeloupe and Martinique, supported by the veteran politician, poet and philosopher Aimé Césaire, planned to give Sarkozy an appropriate welcome to the region, causing the brash and self-confident hero of the Right abjectly to cancel his planned visit. At the centre of discussion in the media, but also in informal arguments up and down the country (if my factory canteen is anything to go by), is the future of the ʻFrench modelʼ of integration. Journalists have drawn attention to discrimination in employment and housing, as well as to the almost total absence of individuals from ethnic minority backgrounds in parliament, the media and public life in general – outside entertainment and sport. Complacency about the ʻprocess of integrationʼ (thought to be a natural and inevitable result of the ʻrepublican modelʼ) has been undermined. Unfavourable comparisons with the ʻAnglo-Saxon modelʼ have become more common. A television crew returned from a visit to a housing estate in Tottenham with glowing reports (sic). Before the riots, even raising the question of under-representation of minority groups was widely regarded as a concession to British- and US-style ʻcommunitarian politicsʼ. (As I write, I

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am aware that such terms as ʻminority groupsʼ or ʻethnic discriminationʼ are not part of French political vocabulary, and shock many educated readers. ʻBlack Frenchʼ or ʻArab Frenchʼ as a description of an individual or a group would be inconceivable, as would be the teaching of Black, Asian or Muslim Studies in schools. Collecting statistics on ethnic origin or identity is considered a breach of the ʻprinciple of republican equalityʼ. Interestingly, the denomination ʻFrench of North Africaʼ exists, but refers exclusively to returned white settlers – the pieds noirs.) In these circumstances, some activists have concluded that the treatment of minorities in present-day France is part of a continuum running from the slave trade, the colonial period and the massacres in Madagascar and Algeria to the exploitation of immigrants in the postwar boom and present-day discrimination against their children and grandchildren. They refer to such treatment as ʻpost-colonial colonialismʼ. When, at the end of 2004, a group known as the ʻIndigènes de la Républiqueʼ (the name refers to the subhuman status reserved for the indigenous population at the height of the colonial period) was set up, the reaction bordered on the hysterical. They were falsely attacked for promoting separatism and being soft on Muslim intégrisme, and banned from using trade-union premises for meetings. Although an analysis of the text shows that the key concept is ʻequality of rightsʼ, they were accused by the nationalrepublican Left as well as the ʻeconomistʼ Far Left, of raising race or ethnicité as an issue in place of an orthodox class analysis. The statement published by the Indigènes nevertheless attracted thousands of signatures, and a successful march was held on 8 May, the anniversary of the 1945 massacre of pro-independence demonstrators in Algeria as well as of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. A great deal needs to be done to clarify ideas about feminism, secularism, the role of religion and the meaning of words such as ʻoppressionʼ, ʻrepublicanismʼ, ʻcommunityʼ and ʻintegrationʼ in France.3 Riots, it is often said, solve nothing. But when the fires burn, politicians, academics and militants have to respond with all sorts of new thinking.

Notes 1. An excellent source for Muslim opinion is the website Islam En Toute Liberté at Oumma.com. 2. See, for example, Alain Gresh, LʼIslam, la République et le monde, Fayard, Paris, 2004; Xavier Ternisien, La France des mosquées, Albin Michel, Paris, 2002; Saïd Boumama, LʼAffaire du voile, ou La Production dʼun racisme respectable, Geais Bleu, Paris, 2004; Laurent Lévy, Le Spectre du communautarisme, Editions Amsterdam, Paris, 2005. On religion, see the review ContreTemps 12 ʻA quels saints se vouer? Espaces publics et religionsʼ, Textuel, February 2005, containing articles from different perspectives by Gilbert Achcar, Daniel Bensaïd, Chris Harman, Fouad Imarraine, Samy Johsua, Sadri Khiari, Michael Löwy, Josette Trat. 3. See the website Les Mots Sont Importants at www.lmsi.net, coordinated by Pierre Tevanian, author of Le voile médiatique. Un faux débat: ʻLʼaffaire du foulard islamiqueʼ, Raisons dʼAgir, Paris, 2005.

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Walking through walls Soldiers as architects in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict Eyal Weizman

This article is based around several interviews I conducted with both Israeli military personnel and Palestinian activists following the 2002 Israeli incursion into Palestinian areas as part of operation ʻDefensive Shieldʼ.1 Using these interviews I will try, in what follows, to reflect upon an emergent relationship between armed conflicts and the built environment. Contemporary urban operations play themselves out within a constructed, real or imaginary, architecture, and through the destruction, construction, reorganization and subversion of space. As such the urban environment must be understood not simply as the backdrop to conflict, nor as its mere consequence, but as trapped in a complex and dynamic feedbackbased relation with the forces operating within it – be they a diverse local population, soldiers, guerrilla, media or humanitarian agents. Indicative of the emergent relationship between conflict and space are urban warfare tactics that redefine a relation to the physical/architectural element of the wall. Walls, in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, have lost something of their traditional conceptual simplicity and material fixity, so as to be rendered – on different scales and occasions – as flexible entities, responsive to changing political and security environments; as permeable elements, through which both resistance and security forces literally travel; and as transparent media, through which soldiers can now see and through which they can now shoot. The changing nature of walls thus transforms the built environment into a flexible ʻfrontier zoneʼ, temporary, contingent and never complete. The following article aims to expand our empirical and theoretical knowledge of urban operations in order to sharpen potential political and humanrights critiques of such operations both in the context ofthe Israeli–Palestinian conflict and more generally. By examining the militaryʼs own language, and the theoretical basis that they claim as essential for the

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Radical Philosophy 136 (March/April 20 06)

development of new military tactics – a basis often sought in critical and postmodern theory, including the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, Bataille, and the Situationists, among others – this article will try to explore what is at stake in the uses of such theoretical ʻtoolsʼ by military thinkers, especially since they are the very same tools through which forms of oppositional critique have themselves frequently been articulated.

Inverse geometry The first excerpts I want to consider here are from an interview I conducted with the commander of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) paratrooper brigade, Aviv Kokhavi. When, like other career officers in active service, Kokhavi was sent to complete a university degree, he planned to study architecture but ended up studying philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.2 Kokhavi was in charge of the April 2002 IDF operation in the Kasbah (old city) of Nablus, and in the Balata refugee camp alongside it, that formed part of a larger operation known in Israel as ʻDefensive Shieldʼ. He told me about the way in which the IDF conceived of this attack: We decided … to simply look at the space architecturally different… This space that you look at, this room that you look at, is nothing but your interpretation of it. Now, you can stretch the boundaries of your interpretation, but not in an unlimited fashion. After all it must be bound by physics – it contains buildings and alleys. The question is: how do you interpret the alley? Do you interpret the alley as a place, like every architect and every town planner does, to walk through, or do you interpret the alley as a place forbidden to walk through? This depends only on interpretation. We interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to walk through, and the door as a place forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors. This is

because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner, and I do not wish to obey this interpretation and fall into his traps. Not only do I not want to fall into his traps, I want to surprise him! This is the essence of war. I need to win. I need to emerge out of an unexpected place. And this is what we tried to do. This is the reason that we opted for the method of moving through walls … like a worm that eats its way forwards – appearing outside and then disappearing. We were thus moving from the interior of homes to their exterior in a surprising manner and in places we were not expected, arriving from behind and hitting the enemy that awaited us behind a corner… Because it was the first time that this method was performed [on such a scale], during the action itself we were learning how to adjust ourselves to the relevant urban space, and similarly how to adjust the relevant urban space to our needs.… We took this micro-tactical practice [of moving through walls] and turned it into a method, and thanks to this method we were able to interpret the whole space differently!… I ordered my troops: friends! This is not for your consideration! There is no way of moving otherwise! If until now you were used to moving along roads and sidewalks, forget it! From now on we all walk through walls!

Elsewhere Kokhavi referred to this manoeuvre through walls and across the depth of the city as ʻinverse geometryʼ, which he explained as ʻthe reorganization of the urban syntax by a series of microtactical actionsʼ.3 Most literally, the new routes cut through walls – adding up sometimes to 100-metrelong paths – defining inside as outside, and interiors of homes as a thoroughfare. His soldiers used none of the streets, roads, alleys and courtyards that make up the order of the city, and none of the external doors, internal stairwells and windows that make up the order of the building, but moved horizontally through party walls, and vertically through holes blasted through ceilings and floors. As such the three-dimensional movement through walls, ceilings and floors across the solid fabric of the city reinterprets, short-circuits and recomposes architectural and urban syntax. Movement becomes constitutive of space – it cuts across rather than submits to the authority of walls, borders and laws. This tactic was developed to deal with the way Palestinian resistance was fortifying and being organized within Nablus and Balata in the days following the operation. The 100–200 guerrilla fighters in Nablus, including members of all the Palestinian armed organizations, had been barricading all entries to the old city and Balata with concrete-filled oil barrels, trenches and piles of trash and rubble. The streets and alleys were mined along their length with improvised explosives

and gas tanks. The entrances into buildings facing these routes were also booby-trapped, as were the interiors of some prominent or strategically important buildings. Several small independent groups of around fifteen fighters, lightly armed with AK47s, RPGs, and explosives, were organized deep within the camp, each based around another major route or road intersection. Runners were supposed to keep the separate groups informed and supplied throughout the battle. In his preparation for the operation Kokhavi informed his officers: They [the Palestinians] have set the stage for a fighting spectacle in which they expect us, when attacking the enclave, to obey the logic that they have determined … to come in the old-style, mechanized formations in cohesive lines and massed columns, conforming to the geometrical order of street network pattern.4

The orders received by Kokhavi were to arrest or kill ʻterroristsʼ according to pre-drawn lists containing about 300 names, and to intimidate the civilian population so as to prevent them from cooperating with the resistance.5 The operation in Nablus started on 3 April 2002, when Kokhaviʼs troops cut off electrical, telephone and water connections to the entire city, placed snipers and observation posts on the mountains and on the high buildings that surrounded it, and cordoned the city and its surrounding camps off in a perimeter closure.6 Then a large number of small military units entered the camp from all directions simultaneously, moving through walls rather than through the routes where they were expected.7 Kokhaviʼs battle orders to his soldiers were: We will completely isolate the camp, in daylight, creating the impression of a forthcoming systematic siege operation … [then] we will apply a fractal manoeuvre swarming simultaneously from every direction and through various dimensions on the enclave.… Each unit reflects in its mode of action, both the logic and form of the general manoeuvre. … Our movement through the buildings will push [the insurgents] into the streets and alleys, where we will hunt them down.8

According to a survey conducted by the Palestinian scholar Nurhan Abujidi after the battle, more than half the buildings in the old city centre of Nablus had routes forced through them with anything from one to eight openings made in their walls, floors or ceilings – making several haphazard cross routes that could not be accounted for by simple linear progression.9 For anyone who might imagine that moving through walls is a relatively ʻgentleʼ form of warfare, the fol-

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lowing is a description of the sequence of the events. Soldiers assemble behind a wall. Using explosives or a large hammer they break a hole large enough to pass through. Their charge through the wall is sometimes preceded by stun grenades or a few random shots into what is most often an unsuspecting private living room. When the soldiers have passed through the party wall, the members of the invaded family are assembled and locked within one of the rooms, where they are made to remain, sometimes for several days, until the operation ends, often without water, toilet, food or medicine. According to Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights organization Bʼtselem, dozens of Palestinians have died during such operations. If moving through walls is pitched by the military as its ʻhumaneʼ answer to the wanton destruction of traditional urban warfare, and as an ʻelegantʼ alternative to Jenin-style destruction, this is because the damage it causes is often concealed within the interiors of homes. The unexpected penetration of war into the private domain of the home had been seen in Palestine, just as in Iraq, as the most profound form of humiliation and trauma. The following are excerpts from the testimony of a Palestinian woman identified as Aisha, collected by Palestine Monitor staff member Sune Segal in November 2002: Imagine it – youʼre sitting in your living room that you know so well, this is the room where the family watches TV together after the evening meal … And, suddenly, that wall disappears with a deafening roar, the room fills with dust and debris and through the wall pours one soldier after the other, screaming orders. You have no idea if theyʼre after you, if theyʼve come to take over your home, or if your house just lies on their route to somewhere else.

The children are screaming, panicking.… Is it possible to even begin to imagine the horror experienced by a five-year-old child as four, six, eight, twelve soldiers, their faces painted black, submachine guns pointed everywhere, antennas protruding from their backpacks, making them look like giant alien bugs, blast their way through that wall?

Aisha pointed to another wall in her home with a builtin bookcase: ʻAnd this is where they left. They blew up the wall and continued to our neighbourʼs house.ʼ10

Academy Shimon Naveh, a retired brigadier general in the Israeli army, is the director of what the IDF calls its ʻOperational Theory Research Instituteʼ. About sixty years old, his bald head and some measure of physical resemblance have made some refer to him as ʻFoucault on Steroidsʼ. The Institute was set up in 1996 as a theoretical laboratory for the training of senior military staff. Kokhavi was one of its students. One of the Instituteʼs reading lists is composed of much architectural theory (mainly from around 1968), as well as work in urban studies, systems analysis, psychology, cybernetics, and postcolonial and poststructuralist theory. When I interviewed him, Naveh explained: We are like the Jesuit order. We attempt to teach and train soldiers to think … We read Christopher Alexander, can you imagine? John Forester, other architects. We are reading Gregory Bateson, we are reading Clifford Geertz. Not myself – our soldiers, our generals are reflecting upon these kinds of material. We have established a school and we have developed a curriculum that trains operational architects.11

According to Naveh, this institute is unique within the IDF and other militaries. However, it forms a definitive part of what the geographer Stephen Graham has called a ʻshadow worldʼ of military urban research institutes and training centres that have been set up to rethink military operations in urban areas. According to Simon Marvin, this ʻshadow worldʼ is currently responsible for more intense and well-funded urban research programmes than all university programs put together.12 In a lecture he delivered in the context of the exhibi-

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tion Territories–Live in Tel Aviv,13 Naveh showed a slide resembling a ʻsquare of oppositionʼ that plots a collection of logical relationships between certain propositions referring to military and guerrilla action. The different corners contain such headlines as ʻDifference and Repetition – The Dialectics of Structuring and Structureʼ; ʻFormless Rival Entitiesʼ; ʻFractal Maneuverʼ; ʻVelocity vs. Rhythmsʼ; ʻThe Wahhabi War Machineʼ; ʻPost-modern Anarchistsʼ; ʻNomadic Terroristsʼ – phrases which mainly reference the work of Deleuze and Guattari.14 In an interview afterwards I asked Naveh: ʻWhy Deleuze and Guattari?ʼ SN Several of the concepts in A Thousand Plateaus became instrumental for us … allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a way that we could not have otherwise explained. It problematized our own paradigms.… Most important was the distinction they have pointed out between the concepts of ʻsmoothʼ and ʻstriatedʼ space … [that accordingly reflect] the organizational concepts of the ʻwar machineʼ and the ʻstate apparatusʼ.… In the IDF we now often use the term ʻto smoothen out spaceʼ when we want to refer to an operation in a space as if it had no borders. We try to produce the operational space in such a manner that borders do not affect us. Palestinian areas could indeed be thought of as ʻstriatedʼ in the sense that they are enclosed by fences, walls, ditches, roadblocks and so on … We want to confront the ʻstriatedʼ space of

traditional, old-fashioned military practice [the way most IDF units presently operate] with a smoothness that allows for movement through space, across any borders and barriers. Rather than contain and organize our forces according to existing borders, we want to move through them.15 EW Is moving through walls part of it? SN In Nablus the IDF understood urban fighting as a spatial problem.… Travelling through walls is a simple mechanical solution that connects theory and practice. Traversing boundaries is the definition of the condition of ʻsmoothnessʼ.16

This corresponds also to strategic positions developed in the Institute that bear on general political questions. Naveh supported the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, as well as the Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon before it was undertaken in 2000. He is similarly in favour of withdrawal from the West Bank. In fact his political position is in line with what is referred to in Israel as the Zionist Left. His vote alternates between the Labour and Meretz parties. And his position is that the IDF must replace presence in occupied areas for the possibilities to move through it, or produce in it what he calls ʻeffects … military operations such as aerial attacks or commando raids … that affect the enemy psychologically and organizationallyʼ. As such, ʻwhatever line they [the politicians]

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could agree upon – there they should put the fence. This is OK with me … as long as I can cross this fence. What we need is not to be there – but … to act there … Withdrawal is not the “end of the story”.ʼ

Swarm I have long, indeed for years, played with the idea of setting out the sphere of life – bios – graphically on a map. First I envisaged an ordinary map, but now I would incline to a general staffʼs map of a city centre, if such a thing existed. Doubtless it does not, because of the ignorance of future wars. Walter Benjamin17

To understand military movement through Palestinian urban areas, it is necessary to explain the way in which the IDF interprets the by-now-familiar principle of ʻswarmingʼ – a term that has become a buzz word in military theory since the start of the Revolution of Military Affairs. In his interview Kokhavi explains the way he understands the concept: A state military whose enemy is scattered as a network of sporadic gangs … must liberate itself from the old concept of straight lines, linear formations of units, regiments and battalions … and become itself much more diffused and scattered, flexible and swarm-like … In fact it must adjust itself to the stealthy capability of the enemy.… Swarming to my understanding is simultaneous arrival to target from a large number of nodes – if possible from 360 degrees.

In a different place, he mentions that a swarm ʻhas no form, no front, back or flanks, but moves like a cloudʼ, and should be measured by location, velocity and density, rather then power and mass.18 The manoeuvre was in fact adapted from the Artificial Intelligence principle of ʻswarm intelligenceʼ. This principle assumes that problem-solving capacities are found in the interaction and communication of relatively unsophisticated agents (ants, birds, bees, soldiers) without (or with minimal) centralized control. ʻSwarm intelligenceʼ thus refers to the overall, combined intelligence of a system, rather than to the intelligence of its components. It is the system itself that learns through interaction and adaptation to emergent situations.19 According to Shimon Naveh, the swarm exemplifies the principle of ʻnon-linearityʼ. This principle is apparent in spatial, organizational and temporal terms. In spatial terms – in contrast to linear operations (what Naveh calls the ʻsubjection of manoeuvre to Euclidean logicʼ20) that rely on the operational authority of border lines, on a distinction between front, rear and depth, and where military columns progress from outside

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into the city – swarming seeks to conduct its attacks from the inside out and in all directions simultaneously. Lines of movements are not straight but tend to progress in wild zig-zags to disorient the enemy. The traditional manoeuvre paradigm, characterized by the simplified geometry of Euclidean order, is thus transformed into a complex ʻfractalʼ geometry. In organizational terms, instead of fixed linear or vertical chains of command and communications, swarms are coordinated as polycentric networks with a horizontal form of communication, in which each autarkic unit can communicate with the others without going through central command. The physical cohesion of the fighting units is thus replaced with a conceptual one. According to Naveh this ʻform of manoeuvre is based on the break of all hierarchies, with the command practice on the tactical level coordinating discussion. Itʼs a wild discourse with almost no rulesʼ. In it, as Kokhavi mentioned above, the fractal logic is exemplified by that fact that ʻeach unit… reflects in its mode of action both the logic and form of the general manoeuvreʼ. As Naveh puts it: Although so much is invested in intelligence, fighting in the city is still, and ever more so, unexpected and messy. Battles could not be scripted. Command cannot have an overview. Decisions to act must be based on chance, contingency and opportunity, and these must be taken only on the ground and in real time.

The theory is that by lowering the thresholds of decision-making to the immediate tactical level, and by the encouragement of local initiative, different parts of the swarm can provide an answer to unpredictable encounters, to rapidly developing situations and changing events – to the forms of uncertainty called, since Clausewitz, ʻfrictionʼ.21 In temporal terms, traditional military operations are linear in the sense that they seek to follow a determined, consequential sequence of events embodied in the idea of ʻthe planʼ. In traditional military planning the idea of ʻthe planʼ implies that actions are preconditioned to some degree on the successful implementation of previous actions. Battles progress stage by stage. A ʻswarmʼ, by contrast, is supposed to induce simultaneous actions, but these actions are not dependent on each other. The narrative of the battle plan is replaced by the ʻtoolboxʼ approach.22 According to this approach units receive the tools to deal with several given situations and scenarios, but cannot predict the order in which these events would actually occur.

With swarm manoeuvres the military thus seeks to break with its geometrical and even topographical characteristics in favour of topological ones, and reassemble itself as a network that is in effect inspired by guerrilla and terrorist tactics. This act of mimicry is based on the assumption, articulated by the military theorists John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, that ʻit takes a network to combat a networkʼ.23 For Naveh, the concept of the swarm corresponds with military attempts to understand the battle-space as a network – the city as a very complex system of interdependent networks. Furthermore urban battles take place within a field in which two networks – the military as a network and the enemy as a network – overlap spatially. The fight must be understood as a dynamic relational field of forces where soldiers, objects, actions and spaces must be seen in constant and contingent relation with other spaces, objects and actions.… These force relations imply intersection, convergence, cooperation or conflict. This relationality must be seen as the central feature of military spatiality.

This may explain the fascination of the military with spatial models and modes of operation put forth by theorists like Deleuze and Guattari, who themselves drew inspiration from guerrilla organizations and nomadic wars.24 Exemplary in the history of modern urban conflict and guerrilla warfare, the defenders of the Paris Commune, much like those of the Kasbah of Algiers, Hue, Beirut, Jenin and Nablus, navigated the city in small loosely coordinated groups, through openings and connections between homes, basements and court-

yards, and through alternative routes, secret passages and trapdoors. Unable to control the pockets of Red Army resistance scattered through Stalingrad, Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov similarly gave up centralized control of his army. The result was later analysed as a form of ʻemergent behaviourʼ, where the interaction between the independent units created a so-called ʻcomplex adaptive systemʼ, making the total effect of military action larger than the sum of its components.25 ʻManoeuvre Warfareʼ, as developed by several military theorists in the period between the two world wars, and as practised both by the Wehrmacht and by the Allies during the European battles of the Second World War, is based on such principles as increased autonomy and initiative.26 Similarly, walking through walls, the Israeli architect Sharon Rotbard reminds us, has been invented at every urban battle anew, out of local–tactical necessities.27 It was first recorded in Marshal Thomas Bugeaudʼs La Guerre des Rues et des Maisons, in the context of anti-insurgency tactics in the class-based urban battles of industrial-revolution Paris.28 Instead of storming the barricades from the front, Bugeaud recommended entering the barricaded block at a different location and ʻmouse-holingʼ along ʻover ground tunnelsʼ that cut across party walls, then taking the barricade by surprise from the flank. On the other side of the barricades, and ten years later, Louis-August Blanqui wrote this micro-tactical manoeuvre into his Instructions pour une Prise dʼArmes.29 For Blanqui the barricade and the mouse-hole were complementary elements employed for the protection of self-governing urban enclaves. This was achieved by

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a complete inversion of the urban syntax. Elements of movement – paving stones and carriages – turned into elements of stasis (barricades), while the existing elements of stasis – walls – became routes. The fight in the city, and for the city, was equated with its interpretation. However, despite some similarities here, contemporary swarming is dependent not only on the ability to move through walls but on the technological capability of independent units to orientate, navigate and coordinate with other units across the cityʼs depth. During the operation in Balata, 7,000 IDF soldiers were moving through the camp and later through the Kasbah – Kokhavi referred to this as ʻinfestationʼ – hardly setting foot at street level. In order to perform such manoeuvres, each unit had to understand its position in the urban geography, its relative position to other units and ʻenemiesʼ within its operational space, as well as its position in relation to the logic of the manoeuvre as a whole. In an interview I conducted with an Israeli soldier, he described the beginning of the simultaneous battle thus: We never left the buildings, and progressed entirely between homes … It takes a few hours to move through a block of four homes.… We were all – the entire brigade – within the homes of the Palestinians, no one was in the streets.… During the entire battle we hardly ventured out.… Whoever was on the street without cover would get shot.… We had our headquarters and sleeping encampments in carved out spaces within these buildings … It became impossible to draw up battle scenarios or single-track plans to follow through.30

Indeed so far as the military is concerned, urban warfare is the ultimate postmodern war. The belief in a logically structured, single-tracked, and pre-planned approach is lost in the complexity and ambiguity of the urban reality. Civilians turn combatants, and combatants turn civilians again. Identity changes as quickly as gender; characters switched from women to fighting men in the speed it takes an undercover ʻArabizedʼ Israeli soldier or a camouflaged Palestinian fighter to remove a machine gun from under a dress. For a Palestinian fighter caught in the crosshairs of this battle, ʻThe Israelis were everywhere: behind, on the sides, on the right and on the left. How can you fight that way?ʼ31 Since Palestinian guerrilla fighters were sometimes manoeuvring in a similar manner, through pre-planned openings, most fighting took place within the homes themselves. Some buildings became like layer cakes, with Israeli soldiers both above and below a floor where Palestinians were trapped.

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Military theory I asked Naveh in what way critical theory became important for his teaching and training. He responded: We employ critical theory primarily in order to critique the military institution itself – its fixed and heavy conceptual fundaments.… Theory is important for us in order to articulate the gap between the existing paradigm and where we want to go.… Without theory we could not make sense of different events that happen around us and that would otherwise seem disconnected.

At a different point within the interview he returned to the issue of education: We have set up the institute because we believed in education and needed an academy to develop ideas.… At present the institute has a tremendous impact on the military … [It has] become a subversive node within it. By training several high-ranking officers we filled the system [IDF] with subversive agents … that ask questions.… Some of the top brass is not embarrassed to talk about Deleuze or Tschumi.

I asked him: ʻWhy Tschumi?ʼ SN The idea of disjunction [embodied in Tschumiʼs book Architecture and Disjunction] became relevant for us … Tschumi had another approach to epistemology – he wanted to break with single perspective knowledge and centralized thinking. He saw the world through a variety of different social practices, from a constantly shifting point of view … [Tschumi] created a new grammar – he formed the ideas which compose our thinking.32 EW Tschumi…?! Why not study Derrida and deconstruction? SN Our generals are architects … Tschumi conceptualized the relation between action, space and its representation. The Manhattan Transcripts [a project by Tschumi that notated a murder on Central Park, NYC] gave us the tools to draw operational plans in a different manner than drawing simple lines on maps. He provided the useful notations to plan an operation. Derrida may be a little too opaque for our crowd. We share more with architects – we combine theory and practice. We can read but we know as well how to build and destroy and sometimes kill.

Besides the theories cited above, Naveh also mentioned such canonical elements of urban theory as the Situationist practices of dérive – a method of drifting through a city based on what the Situationists called psychogeography – and of détournement – the adaptation of found or squatted buildings for a purpose different to that they were designed to perform. These were

of course conceived by Guy Debord and others in the Situationist International as part of a general strategy that sought to undo the built hierarchy of the capitalist city and break the borders between private and public, inside and outside,33 use and function; replacing private space with a ʻborderlessʼ public surface. References to the writing of Georges Bataille, directly or as cited in the writings of Tschumi, capture the desire for an attack against architecture. Batailleʼs own call to arms was meant to undo the rigidifying rationalism of a postwar order, escape ʻthe architectural straitjacketʼ, and liberate repressed individual desires: ʻ[A]n attack on architecture, whose monumental productions now truly dominate the whole earth, grouping the servile multitudes under their shadow, imposing admiration and wonder, order and constraints, is necessarily, as it were, an attack on man.ʼ34 For the likes of Bataille, Tschumi and the Situationists, the repressive power of the city is subverted by movement through and across it. In the postwar period, when the broadly ʻleftistʼ theoretical ideas I have mentioned here were developed, confidence waned in the capacity of sovereign state structures to protect or further democracy. The ʻmicropoliticsʼ of the time was, in many ways, an attempt to constitute a mental and affective guerrilla fighter at the intimate levels of the body, sexuality, intersubjectivity. The personal was to become subversively political. It was, as such, a strategy of exodus from the formal state apparatus into the private domain, which was later to extend outwards. While these theories were conceived in order to transgress the established built ʻbourgeois orderʼ of the city – with the wall, projected as solid and fixed, embodying this repression in matter and form – here these methods are projected in order to conceive of forms of tactical attack in an ʻenemyʼ city. Education in the humanities, often believed to be the best lasting weapon with which to combat imperialism, has been adopted as imperialismʼs own weapon. It is not my aim in this article to try to correct mistakes and exaggerations made by military thinkers in the use or interpretation of specific theories. It is obvious that Naveh attempts to impress, and enjoys his adopted role as the ʻsubvertorʼ of subversive theories. In conversation he often attempts to make chilling claims. He repeats the fact that his job and the final aim of his theory and practices are to kill: ʻDid you read the book on “intimate killings?” … In order to kill we must arrive right next to the person we want to kill … we do not want to capture ground we want to kill and leave.ʼ Moreover, military use of theory is of course nothing new. The figure of the soldier– philosopher is one of the clichés of Israeli military

history. In the 1960s, when academic education was part of a military career, many high officers, returning from studies in the USA, were, for example, discussing Spinoza, often describing the battle-space, especially the 1967 occupation, through the Spinozian concept of ʻextensionʼ. It is not therefore a question of placing blame, at this point, on theory as such. Rather, what is required is a recognition and understanding of the use of particular strands of left-wing theories where they are deployed in order to project power, not to subvert it. When I asked Naveh himself about the ideological basis of the theories he uses, he answered: We must differentiate between the charm and even some values within Marxist ideology and what can be taken from it for military use. The theories do not only strive at a utopian socio-political ideal that we may like or dislike, but are based upon a methodology that wants to disrupt and subvert the existing political, social, cultural or military order. The disruptive capacity in theory [elsewhere he mentions the term ʻnihilistʼ] is the aspect of theory that we like and use.… This theory is not married to its socialist ideals.

Transparent walls A special emphasis of military operations in an urban terrain is dedicated to developing future technologies and techniques aiming at the ʻun-walling of the wallʼ (to borrow Gordon Matta-Clarkʼs term).35 Besides the physical piercing of walls, new methods have been devised to allow soldiers to see and shoot through walls. An Israeli company by the name of Camero has developed a hand-held cross-wall vision machine that combines thermal imaging with ultra-wideband radar that, in a similar way to medical ultrasound, can produce three-dimensional renderings of biological life in spaces behind solid objects.36 The images depict human bodies as fuzzy heat sources floating (like fetuses) within an abstract clear medium onto which everything solid – walls, furniture, objects – has been melted. Special ammunition capable of piercing through walls, without the bullet-head deflecting much, have been developed to complement the ability of seeing through walls with that of killing through them. As such, cross-wall radar will have a radical effect on the future relation of military practice to architecture at large. Its future developments may have the capacity to render all built environment but life transparent, unveiling the oriental cityscape and making solid architecture effectively evaporate. Instruments of ʻliteral transparenciesʼ are the main components in a military ghost-like fantasy world of no borders, of boundless fluidity in which the city becomes a

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navigable space, an ocean. By seeking to see what is invisible, collapse time and space, and move through space, the military seeks to elevate contemporary technologies and (almost contemporary) theories to the level of metaphysics – literally seeking to move beyond the here and now of physical reality. This relates also to technologies seeking to produce ʻcontrolledʼ destruction. After the international outcry that followed the destruction in the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002, the IDF saw it as necessary to provide further courses to its engineer corps in order to improve their ʻart of destructionʼ, which had seemingly gone out of control. In a military conference held in Tel Aviv, an Israeli engineering officer mentioned to his international audience that, ʻhelped by the study of building construction and structuresʼ, at present ʻthe military can remove one floor in a building without destroying it completely or remove a building that stands in a row of buildings without damaging the othersʼ.37 This testified, if no doubt exaggerated, ability to ʻchirurgicalyʼ remove building parts is the engineerʼs response to the logic of ʻsmart weaponsʼ. In a manner similar to that in which ʻsmart weaponsʼ, such as those used in the context of Israelʼs policy of ʻtargeted assassinationsʼ, have brought a higher level of civilian casualties, simply because the illusion of precision gives the military and political complex the necessary justification to use explosives in civilian environments where they cannot be used without hurting civilians – in Gaza there have been two civilian deaths for every intended killing during the al-Aqsa Intifada38 – the imagined ability of ʻsmart destructionʼ, and attempts to perform ʻsophisticatedʼ swarming, could bring more destruction over the long term than ʻtraditionalʼ strategies did, because these methods and the manipulative and euphoric rhetoric associated with them help decision-makers to authorize their frequent use. It is thus essential to assess critically the language of the military in this regard. Highly euphoric military theoretical and technological ʻtalkʼ seeks to describe war as remote, sterile, easy, quick, intellectual, exciting and almost cost-free (to the military that is). Violence can thus be projected as tolerable, and the public more inclined to support it. As such, by further developing and communicating new war-making technologies, the illusion that a military solution is possible is projected into the public domain. Yet, as countless examples have so far demonstrated, including the operations in Balata and the Kasbah of Nablus, the realities of urban warfare are much messier and bloodier than the way the military would like to portray them.

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So, could we think of the use of Deleuzean theory as a mere form of propaganda? It would be too easy to dismiss it as only that. For, again, like the concept of ʻsmart weaponsʼ, this theory has both a functional and a discursive function in the conflict. In terms of function, how far Deleuzean theory influences military tactics and manoeuvres is a question that arises with regard to any relations between theory and practice, and is thus rather complex. Theory may obviously create new sensibilities and may help to explain and further develop ideas that emerged independently within separate fields of knowledge. In terms of discourse, war, if it is not a total war of annihilation, is always a discourse between enemies. Every military action is meant to communicate something to the enemy, to demonstrate, to threaten, to signal. Talk of swarming, targeted killings, and smart destruction may thus help the military communicate to its enemies that it uses only a part of its full capacities for destruction. In this respect a swarming operation is presented as a warning that ʻnext time we would indeed save ourselves many casualtiesʼ by being brutal without restraint – as was done in Jenin.39 Raids can thus be projected as a ʻlesser evilʼ, a more moderate alternative to the full devastating capacity that the military possesses, and will unleash if the enemy increases the acceptable level of violence or breaches some unwritten rule. In military operational theory it is essential that the military never uses its full destructive capacity and always keeps the ability to increase the level of atrocity. Without this relative ʻrestraintʼ, fear and thus threat are meaningless.

Shifting house walls The IDFʼs destruction of the Jenin camp – more than four hundred buildings in an area of 40,000 square metres40 – could be understood as the creation of a radically new layout to the camp. The end of the battle saw new roads cut, existing ones widened, and an open space cleared out at the centre of the camp. Tanks and other military vehicles could afterwards penetrate deep into the interior of the camp along the new and widened paths. In fact the wanton destruction of the centre of the camp started on 9 April when Palestinian guerrilla fighters managed to kill thirteen IDF soldiers in an ambush in the Hawashin district of the camp by causing an entire alley to collapse upon them, making use themselves of the built fabric as a weapon. The conflicts that emerged between Palestinian residents of the refugee camp and UN representatives after the battle may reflect another aspect of the relationship of design to destruction. The following information is

largely based on a filmed research project that Nadav Harel, Anselm Franke and I undertook during the rebuilding of the camp. Some $27 million donated from the United Arab Emiratesʼ Red Crescent were allocated to allow the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to implement a new master plan in the camp and replace most of the destroyed homes with new ones.41 The public presentation of these plans sparked off a series of conflicts. Briefly described, there were two controversial issues in the reconstruction plans as I understood them. The first concerned the road layout: UNRWA engineers used the IDF destruction path to propose the widening of the campʼs roads. The nine streets that were used as access routes for IDF tanks into the camp, and that were widened by bulldozers, were to be rebuilt according to the new, ʻbroadenedʼ dimension. From their previous span of just over 5 metres they were to be stretched to almost 7 metres across – just wide enough for Israeli tanks to swerve in without smashing into house walls. In some cases the widening took place only on the ground floor. This was achieved by ʻpushingʼ the external front walls of homes almost a metre inwards of their original position in a way that made the upper floors overhang parts of the street.42 Although UNRWAʼs proposal was argued to be an improvement of the campʼs traffic arrangements, the campʼs popular committee,43 where the armed organizations have a crucial influence, protested the fact that the widening of the roads might allow Israeli tanks to drive easily through the camp. One of the committee members publicly protested, insisting that ʻit should be made more, not less difficult for Israeli tanks to enter the campʼ.44 The debate ended with UNRWA exercising its sovereignty over the campʼs affairs and pushing on with construction according to the ʻwideningʼ plan regardless. Berthold Willenbacher, UNRWAʼs project director,45 was quoted in an apologetic afterthought that painted the military aspect of the redesign as a mere negative by-product: ʻWe designed a way for Israelis to get through with tanks and we shouldnʼt have done that because the armed guys have less chance of getting away than

if itʼs narrow alleys. We didnʼt take their aspect into consideration.ʼ46 However, members of the committee told us that they believed that this decision was undertaken consciously by UNRWA in order to protect the new-built ʻassetsʼ. A related dispute regarding the nature and function of walls as visual barriers erupted among the members of the popular committee itself. In some buildings within the camp small courtyards were separated from the street by 2-metre high walls. The courtyards behind the walls are places where women and children

play and cook. These walls were often destroyed by IDF soldiers during the operation in order to expose possible sniper hideouts. The second debate dealt with the height of these walls. Hamas representatives on the popular committee asked that these walls be built just under average eye level so that passers-by could look into the courts and make sure that Islamic codes of modesty were not relaxed. As such, this debate came to be concerned with issues of privacy. Hamasʼ attempt to lower the courtyard walls sought to generate a regime of surveillance that, although different in its intentions from the one mentioned above in the context of Israeli surveillance strategies, could also be understood as an attempt to make the wall transparent. This debate ended with the committee, dominated by the largely secular Fatah, deciding against lowering the walls, and allowing the Nablus-based architect of the campʼs rebuilding, Hidaya Najmi (who has since reconstruction been careful not to enter the camp), to go on with his design of high walls and private courts. The first debate thus demonstrates the way in which the logic of ʻdesign by destructionʼ has been extended into the reconstruction of the camp with an

17

urban layout that increased its permeability. The new layout may allow a future IDF armoured incursion to become less destructive to property. The IDF could enter the camp in the ʻtraditional mannerʼ with heavy vehicles moving through without breaking buildingsʼ parts and without soldiers smashing through party walls. By taking responsibility for the well-being and maintenance of architecture in a situation of hostilities, this design becomes complicit with the military logic of the campʼs destruction, and may precisely fall into one of the more obvious traps of the ʻhumanitarian paradoxʼ, according to which humanitarian help may, under certain conditions, end up helping the oppressor. If the first debate was concerned with issues of permeability, the second was concerned with issues of transparency. Both show the power of walls to imply a different urban and social order. These debates reflect yet another Israeli fantasy: that Palestinian resistance could be subdued by the destruction and reorganization of its physical habitat. The Palestinian city and the refugee camp, as Stephen Graham has demonstrated, are often imagined by Israeli security and political figures as formless conglomerates of material refuse – a kind of malleable ʻsolidʼ through which IDF soldiers may plough or tunnel their way, redesigning space with their movements.47 Resistance, accordingly, could be subdued with the organizational simplification embodied by these acts of ʻdesignʼ; acts whose effect may bring about the ʻmodernizationʼ of the built fabric. Indeed much of the history of urbicide is proceeded by a history of infrastructure and hygienic improvements. The upgrade of infrastructure and living standards may seek to eradicate the conditions that breed discontent, but also, and increasingly so, to create the vulnerabilities that may reduce the motivation of the urban population to support active resistance. It is important to note that, apart from the Kasbah of Nablus, all the places discussed above are refugee camps. In the camps, the question of urbicide is not straightforward. The temporary nature of the refugee camp is its very essence, as it manifests the urgency of the claim for return. A sense of temporariness is often maintained by keeping conditions in camps at a bare minimum. In some camps, sewage still runs unchecked, and trees are not planted lest the camp be perceived as a permanent city. Sometimes building a new house in the camp could be seen as a betrayal of the national cause, and it is primarily the younger generation that reject plans for reconstruction. As a young Palestinian activist in the Daheisha refugee camp mentioned to the filmmaker Eyal Sivan: ʻthey

18

[the UN] were planting and we [Fatah activists] were uprootingʼ. In fact having an address in the camp often means keeping alive an address in the lost land. This could itself explain why there are 12,000 people registered as residents in the Daheisha camp, but only 8,000 actually living there. The ʻupgradingʼ of the Jenin camp, and its consequential integration to the fabric of the city of Jenin, may have the effect of undoing this very status of temporariness. This has, in fact, been a central part of Israeli strategic thinking since the creation of the refugee problem. Indeed, according to documents recently uncovered by Tom Segev, the first proposals for construction in the occupied West Bank, debated by the Israeli government immediately after the 1967 war, were for the building of new cities for Palestinian refugees from Gaza. Relocating the refugees and turning them into city- or village-dwellers was meant to diffuse and undo the physical preconditions of ʻthe refugee problemʼ.48 Ariel Sharon oversaw in 1971, as the military commander of Gaza, and again in 1981, as minister of defence, plans to rehouse Gaza refugees in Israeli-style housing blocks purpose-built beside the camps. In Mohamed Bakriʼs film Jenin Jenin, shot in the immediate aftermath of the April 2002 destruction, interviews with camp residents communicated the impression that the camp was accepted as a city only when the destruction and threat of dispossession arose again. ʻCampicideʼ, if such a word is to exist, should therefore have a meaning different from that of ʻurbicideʼ. It should paradoxically come to describe the constitution of the camp as a city and the concomitant loss of its provisional ʻcampʼ status. It is in this context that we can understand a statement made by one of the members of the Jenin campʼs popular committee, who, after seeing the newly built cream-coloured permanent looking homes, declared: ʻwe have lost the right of returnʼ.49

The Dogville effect laws and unmarked frontiers remain … unwritten laws.… And thus when frontiers are decided the adversary is not simply annihilated; indeed, he is accorded rights even when the victorʼs superiority in power is complete. And there are, in a demonically ambiguous way, ʻequalʼ rights: for both parties to the treaty it is the same line that may not be crossed. Walter Benjamin50

The ʻpolitics of separationʼ enforced by Israel throughout the territories of conflict, of which the wall/ fence system is only a part, operates according to

the principle that for Israeli soldiers, and to a lesser degree for settlers and Israeli citizens, space should be ʻsmoothʼ, ʻliquidʼ and ʻpermeableʼ, but that it must remain definitively ʻstriatedʼ and ʻsolidʼ for Palestinians. Besides the main wall/fence built throughout the West Bank, a variety of temporary border-like apparatuses – material synonyms to the border – have emerged: ʻbarriersʼ, ʻblockadesʼ, ʻclosuresʼ, ʻroadblocksʼ, ʻcheckpointsʼ, ʻsterile areasʼ, ʻspecial security zonesʼ, ʻclosed military areasʼ, ʻkilling zonesʼ. These are transportable, deployable, removable and flexible ʻborder devicesʼ that shrink and expand the territory within which Palestinians can move. The material presence of these boundaries varies. Sometimes they hardly exist at all (as in the case of a closure decree). At other times, they have differentiated degrees of permeability (as in the case of a ʻbreathing closureʼ). Borders are conceptual and declarative before, and sometimes regardless of, being material. In Lars von Triersʼs film Dogville, boundaries between properties, as well as between interior and exterior spaces, were drawn on the stage floor without being materially extruded. Yet these notations still had the authority to dictate the movement of the characters. Here, military orders, the will and means to enforce them, could create a barrier before, and sometimes regardless of, any physical fortifications. On the other hand, the strongest material borders could be meaningless without the legal and military means to enforce them. A barrier that has no legal authority becomes transparent. Although the wall between occupied Gaza and Egypt was the most fortified, it collapsed a day after the IDF completed its redeployment because the regime that maintained it was replaced. It only stood because of the willingness of the Israeli authorities to maintain it by fire and death. Navehʼs precondition for withdrawal – ʻas long as I can cross this fenceʼ – implies a conditional withdrawal that can be annulled at times of emergency. In fact Israelʼs preconditions for any territorial compromise, and the drawing of temporary borderlines from Oslo onwards, all had a clause of exception that guaranteed Israelʼs right, in some emergency security circumstances which it could itself declare, of ʻhot pursuitʼ, by which it could break into Palestiniancontrolled areas, enter neighbourhoods and homes in search of suspects, and take these suspects for interrogation and detention in Israel. This undoubtedly undoes much of the perceived symmetrical nature of walls implied in the Benjamin citation above. As long as this clause allowing for ʻhot pursuitʼ is included in Israeli–Palestinian agreements, Israel still remains

sovereign in Palestinian territories – simply because it can declare the exception that would allow it to move through the wall and then within Palestinian cities.51

Un-reading The words of built space, or at least its substantive, would seem to be rooms, categories which are synthetically or syncategorematically related and articulated by the various spatial verbs and adverbs – corridors, doorways and staircases, for example, modified in turn by adjectives in the form of paint and furnishings, decoration and ornament … Meanwhile, these ʻsentencesʼ … are read by readers whose bodies fill the various shifter-slots and subject-positions. Fredric Jameson52

According to Hannah Arendt, the political realm of the Greek city was guaranteed, quite literally, by two kinds of walls (or wall-like laws): the wall around the city, defining the zones of the political, and the walls between the public areas and the private house, guaranteeing the autonomy of the private space. ʻThe one harboured and enclosed political life as the other sheltered and protected the biological life process of the family.ʼ Without these walls, ʻthere might have been an agglomeration of houses, a town (asty), but not a city, a political community.ʼ53 The differentiation between a city, as a political domain, and a town is based on the conceptual solidity of the elements that safeguard both public and private domains. Their destruction – physical or conceptual – would turn the city back into a non-political domain, the habitat of subjects without rights. In historical siege warfare the breaching of the outer city wall marks the destruction of its sovereignty. Accordingly, the ʻartʼ of siege warfare engaged with the geometries of the perimeter of city walls and with the development of equally complex technologies for breaching them. Contemporary academies of urban operations, as mentioned above, are increasingly concerned with methods of transgressing the limitations embodied by the domestic wall. In that respect we could think about the cityʼs walls as one would think about the city wall – the operative edge of the law and the very condition of democratic urban life. At stake within the juridico-physical interplay that makes a city are thus two interrelated political concepts: sovereignty and democracy. We may understand the former as the ʻwallʼ (or border in the case of a state) assigned to protect the latter, which in turn is dependent on protection of the private sphere, defined not only as the private interior of the home, but, since the Reformation,

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as a freedom of conscience.54 Sovereignty is embodied thus by the idea of the ʻcity wallʼ (or the border), defining and protecting the sovereign boundary of the (city) state, whilst democracy is embodied by the protection of the party wall, separating and defining private spaces. For Arendt, the rise of society is the rise of the oikia or the household: Even Plato, whose political plans foresaw the abolition of private property and the extension of the public sphere to the point of annihilating private life altogether, still speaks with great reverence of Zeus Herkeios, the protector of borderlines, and calls the horoi, the boundaries between one estate and the another, divine, without seeing any contradiction.55

The breaching of the domestic wall as a physical, visual and conceptual border could mark out one of the most radical representations of the ʻstate of exceptionʼ. In it, the obliteration of the limit to privacy has become one of the core tools. In this context we can understand what is at stake in the US Patriot Actʼs expansion of so-called ʻsneak and peekʼ warrants, allowing federal agents to access the private domain covertly and enter the private space of individual suspects.56 The domestic wall is conceptualized as a border, the home as enemy territory, and property intrusion as armed invasion. ʻHomeland Securityʼ (or what could now be dubbed ʻHome Securityʼ) is thus placed outside of democratic control. The military analysts exult at the possibilities offered by Deleuze and Guattari, Tschumi, and so on, because this inner domain – the subversive micro-sovereignty of privacy – now represents a potential extension of their power and sovereignty into places into which it was not previously extended. As such the invasion of the ʻhomeʼ – of intimate space, the space of subjectivity – has become yet another ʻlast frontierʼ. The military practice of walking through walls ties together the physical properties of construction with the syntax of architectural and social order. The technologies developed to allow soldiers to see living organisms through walls, and the ability to walk through them, address not only the materiality of the wall but its very concept. Activities whose operational means is the ʻun-walling of the wallʼ thus destabilize not only the legal and social order, but the democratic order itself. With the wall no longer physically and conceptually solid and legally impenetrable, the functional spatial syntax that it created – the separation between inside and outside, private and public, as well as between retreat and exclusion – collapses.57 The

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palindromic linguistic structure of law/wall binds these two structures in an interdependency that equates built with legal fabric. The very order of the city relies on the fantasy of a wall as stable, solid and fixed. Indeed architectural history tends otherwise to see walls as a constant or basic – architectureʼs irreducible given. The un-walling of the wall invariably becomes the undoing of the law.58 When Kokhavi claims that ʻspace is only an interpretationʼ, and that his movement through and across the built fabric of the city reinterprets architectural elements (walls, windows and doors) and thus the city itself, he uses theoretical language to suggest that one can ʻwinʼ an urban battle, not by the destruction of a city, but by its ʻreorganizationʼ. If the wall is only the word of a ʻwallʼ, un-walling also becomes a form of rewriting – a constant process of undoing fuelled by theory. Could rewriting amount to killing? That is to say, if moving through walls is a method of ʻreinterpreting spaceʼ, and the nature of the city is ʻrelativeʼ to this form of interpretation, could ʻreinterpretationʼ itself constitute a form of murder? If ʻyesʼ, then the ʻinverse geometryʼ that turns the city ʻinside outʼ, with its private and public spaces shuffled, would require a definition of the dangers of urban operations that goes beyond the physical and social destruction they bring – but deals with their ʻconceptual destructionʼ as well.

Notes This article was originally written for the workshop Urbicide, the Killing of Cities? that Stephen Graham, Daniel Monk and David Campbell organized at Durham University in November 2005. I would like to thank them for their invitation and comments. I would also like to thank Brian Holmes and Ryan Bishop for commenting on earlier drafts, and David Cunningham for working so hard on making sense of this one. A version of this is forthcoming as a chapter in The Politics of Verticality (Verso 2006). 1. My recent work centres around the way militaries have started to think about cities. For this reason I have been attending military conferences dealing with cities and urban warfare and interviewing military personal in Israel, the UK and the USA. The interviews cited here were conducted in the context of Archilab, The Naked City, Orleans, 2004, for the contribution of Eyal Weizman, Anselm Franke and Nadav Harel. The questions were composed by Eyal Weizman and filming was undertaken by Nadav Harel and Zohar Kaniel. Interviews conducted in August and September 2004. 2. Chen Kotes-Bar, ʻStarring Himʼ (ʻBekikhuvoʼ), Maʼariv, 22 April 2005. Originally in Hebrew; all translations authorʼs own. 3. Cited in Hannan Greenberg, ʻThe Limited Conflict: This is How You Trick Terroristsʼ, Yediot Aharonot, www. ynet.co.il, 23 March 2004.

4. Cited in Shimon Naveh, ʻBetween the Striated and the Smooth: Urban Enclaves and Fractal Manoeuvresʼ, paper delivered at An Archipelago of Exception, conference at the CCCB in Barcelona, 11 November 2005, organized by Eyal Weizman, Anselm Franke and Thomas Keenan. 5. Amir Oren, ʻThe Big Fire Aheadʼ, Haʼaretz, 25 March 2004. 6. At least eighty Palestinians were killed in Nablus, most of them civilians, between 29 March and 22 April 2002. Four Israeli soldiers were killed. See www.amnesty.org; accessed 12 February 2003. 7. In fact the idea for the manoeuvre is credited to a platoon commander and his sergeant in one of the units, both from kibbutz Givaʼat Haiim. See Naveh, ʻBetween the Striated and the Smoothʼ. 8. Cited in Naveh, ʻBetween the Striated and the Smoothʼ. 9. Nurhan Abujidi, who conducted a survey in Nablus after the battle, found that 19.6 per cent of buildings affected by forced routes had only one opening, 16.5 per cent had two openings, 13.4 per cent had three openings, 4.1 per cent had four openings, 2.1 per cent had five openings, and 1.0 per cent (two buildings) had eight openings. See Nurhan Abujidi, ʻForced to Forget: Cultural Identity and Collective Memory/Urbicide: The Case of the Palestinian Territories, During Israeli Invasions to Nablus Historic Center 2002–2005ʼ, paper presented at Urbicide, the Killing of Cities? workshop at Durham University, November 2005. 10. Sune Segal, ʻWhat Lies Beneath: Excerpts from an Invasionʼ, November 2002, www.palestinemonitor.org/eyewitness/Westbank/what_lies_beneath_by_sune_segal. htm; accessed 9 June 2005. See also Abujidi, ʻForced to Forgetʼ. 11. Shimon Naveh, in discussion after delivering the lecture ʻDicta Clausewitz: Fractal Manoeuvre, A Brief History of Future Warfare in Urban Environmentsʼ, at States of Emergency: The Geography of Human Rights, a debate that formed part of Territories Live, Btzalel Gallery, Tel Aviv, 5 November 2004, organized by Eyal Weizman and Anselm Franke. 12. Simon Marvin, ʻMilitary Urban Research Programmes: Normalising the Remote Control of Citiesʼ, paper delivered at conference Cities as Strategic Sites: Militarisation Anti-globalisation and Warfare, Centre for Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures, Manchester, November 2002; Stephen Graham, ʻFrom Sanctuaries to “Glass Prisons”? Global South Cities, Urban Warfare, and US Military Technoscienceʼ, Antipode (forthcoming). 13. When the exhibition Territories (curated by Anselm Franke and Eyal Weizman) arrived in Tel Aviv it was hosted and paid for by the Bʼtzalel Academy School of Architecture under the directorship of Zvi Efrat. The Israeli Ministry of Education, which indirectly financed this exhibition, sought to ʻbalance it outʼ by including Naveh in our list of speakers. 14. Shimon Naveh, ʻDicta Clausewitzʼ. Compare Navehʼs titles to those used in, among others, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Continuum, New York and London, 2004; and Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Columbia University Press, New York, 1995. 15. See also Shimon Naveh, Asymmetric Conflict: An Operational Reflection on Hegemonic Strategies, Eshed Group for Operational Knowledge, Tel Aviv, 2005, p. 9.

16. Telephone interview, 14 October 2005. 17. Walter Benjamin, ʻA Berlin Chronicleʼ, in One-Way Street and Other Writings, Verso, London and New York, 1979, p. 295. 18. See Greenberg, ʻThe Limited Conflictʼ. 19. See Eric Bonabeau, Marco Dorigo, and Guy Theraulaz, Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999; Sean J.A. Edwards, Swarming on the Battlefield: Past, Present and Future, RAND, Santa Monica CA, 2000; John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, eds, Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy, RAND, Santa Monica CA, 2001. 20. Naveh, ʻBetween the Striated and the Smoothʼ. 21. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Everymanʼs Library, London, 1993, pp. 119–21; Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Zone Books, New York, 1991, pp. 78–9. 22. Michel Foucaultʼs description of theory as a ʻtool-boxʼ was originally developed in conjunction with Deleuze in a 1972 discussion. See Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, ʻIntellectuals and Powerʼ, in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1980, p. 206. 23. See Arquilla and Ronfeldt, eds, Networks and Netwars. See also Shimon Naveh, In Pursuit of Military Excellence: The Evolution of Operational Theory, Frank Cass, Portland CA, 1997. 24. See De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. 25. Col. Eric M. Walters, ʻStalingrad, 1942: With Will, Weapon, and a Watchʼ, in Col. John Antal and Maj. Bradley Gericke, eds, City Fights, Ballantine Books, New York, 2003, p. 59. 26. See B.H. Liddell Hart, Strategy, Plum Books, New York, 1991. 27. Sharon Rotbard, White City, Black City, Babel Press, Tel Aviv, 2005, p. 178. 28. Marshal Thomas Bugeaud, La Guerre des rues et des maisons, J.-P. Rocher, Paris, 1997. The manuscript was written in 1849 in Bugeaudʼs estate in the Dordogne after his failure quickly to suppress the events of 1848. Bugeaud did not manage to find a publisher for his book, but distributed a small edition among his colleagues. In the text Bugeaud suggested widening the Parisian roads and removing corner buildings at strategic crossroads in order to allow for a wider field of vision. These and other suggestions were implemented by Haussmann several years later. See Rotbard, White City, Black City. 29. Auguste Blanqui, Instructions pour une Prise dʼArmes, Société encyclopédique française, Paris, 1972. Available online at www.marxists.org/francais/blanqui/1866/ instructions.htm. 30. Interview with Gil Fishbein, Tel Aviv, 4 September 2002. Fishbein describes the first stages of the battle of Jenin before the bulldozers were called in. 31. Cited in Yagil Henkin, ʻThe Best Way into Baghdadʼ, New York Times, 3 April 2003. 32. Naveh mentioned that he currently works with the Hebrew translation of Bernard Tschumiʼs Architecture and Disjunction. Originally Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1997. 33. ʻGo inside, he ordered in hysterical broken English. Inside! I am already inside! It took me a few seconds to understand that this young soldier was redefining inside to mean anything that is not visible, to him at least. My

21

34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

40.

41. 42.

43.

44.

45. 46.

22

being “outside” within the “inside” was bothering him. Not only is he imposing a curfew on me, he is also redefining what is outside and what is inside within my own private sphere.ʼ Cited in Segal, ʻWhat Lies Beneathʼ. Georges Bataille, ʻArchitectureʼ, in Encyclopaedia Acephalica. Available online at: http://website.lineonenet/~d.a.perkins/pGBARCHI.html. Brian Hatton, ʻThe Problem of Our Wallsʼ, Journal of Architecture 4, Spring 1999, p. 71. Krzysztof Wodiczko, ʻPublic Addressʼ, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, 1991, published in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 11 October 1992–3 January 1993, and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, 22 May–22 August 1993. Zuri Dar and Oded Hermoni, ʻIsraeli Start-Up Develops Technology to See through Wallsʼ, Haʼaretz, 1 July 2004; Amnon Brazilay, ʻThis Time They Do Not to Prepare to the Last Warʼ, Haʼaretz, 17 April 2004. See also Amir Golan, ʻThe Components of the Ability to Fight in Urban Areasʼ, Maʼarachot 384, July 2002, p. 97. See Greenberg, ʻThe Limited Conflictʼ. From September 2000 to the time of its evacuation, 1,719 Palestinians were killed in Gaza – two-thirds of them unarmed and uninvolved in any struggle; 379 of them children. See Amira Has, ʻThe other 99.5 percentʼ, Haʼaretz, 24 August 2005. This resonates with Navehʼs attitude to American military action in Falluja: ʻa disgusting operation, they flattened the entire city… if we would have done just that we would have saved ourselves many casualtiesʼ. Some 1,500 other buildings were damaged and 4,000 people were left homeless. Fifty-two Palestinians were killed, more then half of them civilians. Some, including those who – elderly or disabled – couldnʼt leave on time, were buried alive under the rubble of their homes. See Amnesty International, Shielded from Scrutiny: IDF Violations in Jenin and Nablus, 4 November 2002; and Stephen Graham, ʻConstructing Urbicide by Bulldozer in the Occupied Territoriesʼ, in Cities, War and Terrorism, Blackwell, Oxford, 2004. A further $5 million from Saddam Hussein was divided between the families whose homes were destroyed, and those who lost relatives. Between 10 and 15 per cent of the original ground area of the lots of destroyed buildings were later registered as public ground. In some cases, this area was seized only on the ground floor. UNRWA bought further land on the edge of the camp and relocated some of the households from the destroyed core. The project was dedicated to Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the late president of the UAE. A popular committee is an organizational form based on participatory democracy developed within the occupied villages, refugee camps and cities which emerged during the first intifada. In most places, political parties from the main factions in the PLO, as well as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, appointed representatives. Gideon Levy, ʻTank Lanes Built between New Jenin Homesʼ, Haʼaretz, 10 May 2004. This was engaged in the exhibition Walking through Walls, curated by Eyal Weizman, Anselm Franke and Nadav Harel. The first project director, the British Iain Hook, was killed by IDF soldiers, who later claimed to have mistaken him for an armed Palestinian. ʻWe got blamed for doing it this way but we made the

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

55. 56.

57. 58.

roads wider for cars and ambulances – it would be silly not to. We just wanted to make a normal living area … we see it from a technical aspect, not in terms of war; the Israelis will come in regardless.ʼ See Justin McGuirk, ʻJeninʼ, Icon Magazine 24, June 2005, www. icon-magazine.co.uk/issues/024/jenin_text.htm. See also Levy, ʻTank Lanesʼ. See Graham, ʻConstructing Urbicideʼ. Tom Segev, Israel in 1967, Keter Books, Jerusalem, 2005, p. 566 (in Hebrew). But this is not typical of the position of many other refugees delighted by their new homes. See Levy, ʻTank Lanesʼ. Walter Benjamin, ʻCritique of Violenceʼ, in Reflections, Schocken Books and Random House, New York, 1989, pp. 295–6. In recent months, the practice has been reported in the areas around Ramallah. Prime Minister Netanyahu previously stated: ʻHot pursuit is a sub-issue. Itʼs a specific instance of a generic issue, and the generic issue is the freedom of action of Israel to protect its citizens wherever they are. And against whatever threats emanate from anywhere.ʼ Press conference with Prime Minister Netanyahu on the Hebron Accord, 13 January 1997; available online at mfa.gov.il. Fredric Jameson, ʻIs Space Political?ʼ, in Neil Leach, ed., Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, Routledge, London and New York, 1997, p. 261. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1998, pp. 63–4. Because walls function not only as physical barriers but as devices of information exclusion (of vision and sound), they have provided, since the eighteenth century, according to architectural historian Robin Evans, the physical infrastructure for the construction of privacy and modern subjectivity. See Robin Evans, ʻThe Rights of Retreat and the Rights of Exclusionʼ, in Translation from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, Architectural Association Publications, London, 1997. This is developed in Platoʼs Laws, Book 8, 843; cited in Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 30. The Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees individualsʼ rights against unreasonable search and seizure. It is required that the government gives notice before searching through or seizing an individualʼs belongings. Before the USA Patriot Act was passed in Congress on 24 October 2001, prior notice could be suspended only under a narrow set of circumstances. Section 213 of the Act expanded so-called ʻsneak and peekʼ warrants. Under this section the government can delay notice of a search if it can show ʻreasonable cause to believe that providing immediate notification of the execution of the warrant may have an adverse resultʼ. This means that government agents can enter a dwelling without notice if they have a reasonable suspicion that an announcement would inhibit the investigation of a crime, by, for example, enabling the destruction of evidence. This procedure replaced the old standard of ʻknock and announceʼ by which, when executing a warrant, law enforcement officials must generally announce their presence. www.humanrightsfirst.org/us_law/loss/ loss_ch2.htm. Evans, ʻThe Rights of Retreat and the Rights of Exclusionʼ, p. 38. Hatton, ʻThe Problem of Our Wallsʼ, pp. 66–7.

The future of fascism Harry Harootunian Since the collapse of actually existing socialism and the abrupt ending of the Cold War that had polarized the world along the lines of contending theories of modernization, there has been a steady attempt to recover historical intensities that had been displaced by the reduction of political differences to a dyadic struggle between ʻtotalitarianismʼ and the ʻfree worldʼ. Almost as if the flood gates had been lifted, the suppressed experiences of a prior age have been unleashed into the new time announced by the post-Cold War, reminding the present that the past had not really disappeared so much as been shelved in our midst, a little like a purloined letter we have faced without recognizing it in its place. One of the more important casualties of this silencing and banishment was the fate of fascism, as both a powerful ideological force in the 1930s and a political movement that swept rapidly over whole continents. This is not to suggest that throughout the years of the Cold War the subject was ignored, but its understanding was mediated by its association with the category of totalitarianism. With the ending of the Cold War, fascism was released from its singular association with totalitarianism and the way was reopened to focus on its relationship to capitalist modernization, if not to induce occasional pangs of nostalgia for the 1920s and 1930s. The turn to reassessing the status of fascism has been prompted less by a desire to perform a historiographical finger exercise than the need to find an optic capable of grasping the contemporary situation, in which the familiar signs of fascism have begun to show themselves with greater regularity. The appearance of three books,* within a year or so of each other, demonstrates a desire to ʻwork through a pastʼ in order to avoid both the risk of caricature and the forgetting of objective social conditions that identify the continuing persistence of fascist spectres. Paxton and Wolin both agree with Michael Mannʼs declared aim ʻto take fascism seriouslyʼ, as if to compensate for a weakened memory that more often than not inhibited the effort to work through the traces of this shelved history. These

books seek to show that even though fascism had its epochal moment, its history is not nearly completed in light of the contemporary conjuncture and the turn of events since 9/11. Lurking behind this renewed interest, then, is the fearful conviction that a political catastrophe threatens to repeat itself in a different register and that the past of fascism might yet prefigure our future and take reprisals on it, since it has not yet been sufficiently worked through.

Forgetting fascism Let me begin by recalling Hannah Arendtʼs epochal study, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), issued not long after the inauguration of the Cold War. It initiated the long-standing tendency to reduce fascism and communism to their shared, minimal dimensions by referring to both as expressions of totalizing political forms – different sides of the same coin – committed to state violence on a genocidal scale. Coupling Stalin and Hitler became a favourite reflex of the Cold War, drawing upon the experience of Germany and Italy to dramatize fascismʼs urge to realize total reorganization and Soviet Russia to personify the communist analogue. Both shared a genocidal impulse driven by the necessity of realizing a totalizing political ambition. But what Arendt dropped from her new equation was the role played by vitalism in the 1930s and its relationship to fascism. This is still important because vitalism (excoriated by Georg Lukács in his underappreciated The Destruction of Reason, 1952), signified, in its full fury, the end of civilization and culture altogether, and was joined at the hip with the desire of totalitarianism to perpetuate the loss of freedom in self-estrangement and unreality. In fact, in the 1930s, vitalism and totalitarianism were seen as opposing forces, with the former standing for the preconscious, changeless and ahistorical, while the latter signified post-consciousness and the post-historical. Furthermore, to link socialism, even the Stalinist inflection of a distorted Marxism, to cultural nihilism and a frenzied Spenglerian civilizational dance of death worked

* Michael Mann, Fascists, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004; Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, Norton, Boston MA, 2003; Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2004.

Radical Philosophy 136 (March/April 20 06)

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more to reinforce the ideological alignments of the Cold War than to account for the clash of historical differences before the war. It also overlooked the fact that the Soviet Union had just come out of a genocidal war that had taken the lives of 20 to 30 million of its inhabitants. The alternative Arendt chose was to return to the scene of the prewar conjuncture and rescue a discredited liberal democracy, which had already failed to save capitalism from itself. Her reconfiguration made the Westʼs Cold War struggle with a generic totalitarianism appear as a continuation of a World War II effort to dispose of one local version of authoritarianism before embarking upon another, in an emerging worldhistorical conflict. Hence, in the scholarly literature, this powerful intervention licensed the widespread practice, especially among historians and political scientists, of envisaging fascism as a variant of Marxism, an offshoot or outgrowth, sharing common properties and often similar political, economic and social emblems, ideas and goals. This particular tactic encouraged the incorporation of fascism into Marxism, and both Nazism and Soviet Communism into totalitarianism, in order to sharpen and clarify the polar positions of the Cold War contest. The effect of this twinning was both to remove fascism from contemporary considerations by sweeping it under the carpet of communism and to constrain its future recurrence by confining it to its moment – what Ernst Nolte called the ʻepoch of fascismʼ – thereby signalling that it had moved into the past. Once this specific configuration of fascism had played out its productivity on the historical stage, the process of forgetfulness rapidly set in, since there seemed to be no good reason to fear its return. During the Cold War, social theory, in the form of programmatic development and modernization theory, facilitated the effacement of fascism from the screen of contemporary consciousness by substituting the category of modernity for capitalist accumulation, and, thereby, removing the crucial relationship between capitalist crises and the variety of attempts to resolve them or evade their baneful effects on political society. In this new narrative, capitalismʼs fateful aptitude for producing unevenness was misrecognized as ʻunderdevelopmentʼ and a sign of temporal delay (a colossal case of misidentity) and was suppressed in favour of the promise of convergence and the realization of even development. It was in this context that democracy was identified with market capitalism, as a natural relationship, when before the war they were considered incompatible.

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If fascism was banished from the Cold War present, resulting in a dismissal of its concept as a reliable analytic and descriptive instrument, its unsurprising return after the collapse of the Berlin Wall has reintroduced all of those repressed memories residing in the political and cultural unconscious that acted as placeholders of what officially had been delegated to forgetfulness and imprisoned in a historiography based on the passing of its epoch. Even before the Cold War ended, however, some voices were willing to confront the spectres of fascism as a living reminder of what had once happened in the past and could surely recur in the present. In the 1970s Primo Levi consistently declared that every age could expect the return of fascism in new and different registers – what in The Drowned and the Saved he described as the continuation of the ʻSilent Nazi Diasporaʼ.1 He was persuaded that even if fascism would not always and overtly take the form of violence and coercion associated with its prior historical experience, polluting judicial processes and poisoning educational practices, it could encourage nostalgia for a world in which order supposedly prevailed, in innumerable ways. But he also recognized that such insurmountable nostalgia easily leads back to precisely those devices employed to maintain the illusory fear of disorder, and those disciplines devoted to maintaining order,2 which Deleuze and Guattari, in another instance, associated with ʻmicrofascismʼ. Years before, in 1959, Leviʼs contemporary Theodor Adorno returned to the terrain of fascism to recall for his present that the ʻpast that one would like to evade is still very much aliveʼ. ʻThat fascism lives on,ʼ he asserted, ʻthat the oft invoked working through of the past has to this day been unsuccessful and has degenerated into its own caricature and cold forgetting to the fact that the objective conditions of society that engendered fascism continue to exist.ʼ But Adorno quickly warned that fascism cannot be derived from subjective dispositions. ʻThe economic order, and to a great extent also the economic organization modelled upon it, now as then renders the majority of people dependent upon conditions beyond their control and thus maintains things in a state of political immaturity.ʼ Acutely aware of the failures of liberal democracy during the interwar period and its contemporary pitfalls, recognizing also that democracy and capitalism had been once recognizably incompatible, Adorno was convinced that it had not yet been ʻnaturalized to the point where people truly experience it as their own and see themselves as subjects of a political processʼ. It was simply one among a number of items on a menu offering political choice. People were not identified with democracy; nor

was it a sign of their political maturity. Instead, it was nothing more than an instrument of special interests to which people ʻsubmit to given conditionsʼ that force them to ʻnegate precisely the autonomous subjectivity to which the idea of democracy appealsʼ.3 Adornoʼs untimely reflections on the failure of democracy and the importance of ʻobjectiveʼ conditions to any understanding of fascism echoed the prescient and penetrating observations made a generation earlier by Karl Polanyi, who, as early as 1935, had already pronounced on fascismʼs desire to erect a society founded not on the ʻconscious relationships of personsʼ, but rather the conviction to ʻtransformʼ and structureʼ them in such ways as to extinguish the development towards ʻsocialismʼ.4 What Polanyi had unveiled in this overlooked analysis of fascism made on location, so to speak, was the continental historical experience that democracy inevitably led to socialism and how this outcome necessitated the elimination of the former before its transubstantiation into the latter. Fascist anti-individualism derived from a rationale founded on the belief that capitalism and democracy were incompatible, as was the utopia of unregulated market capitalism that he dissected later in The Great Transformation (1944). Fascism was thus committed not merely to destroying democracy but also to establishing a new social order rid of the possibility of its return. For both Mussolini and Hitler, the principle of democratic equality in politics and the principle of private ownership of the means of production in economic life had created the contemporary crisis and underscored the widespread belief that democracyʼs moment had passed. Polanyi later detected the link yoking liberalism to fascism, inasmuch as fascism saw its task as preventing interference in the price system and diminishing the sum total of goods produced, as promoted by both communism and democracy. ʻFascismʼ, hence, ʻis condoned as the safeguard of liberal economics through the elimination of a democratic political sphere and the subsequent reorganization of economic lifeʼ – market capitalism – on the template of different branches of industry to become the ʻwhole of societyʼ. As a result, fascism appeared everywhere under the banner of solving the crisis of capitalism by calling into question the utility of all forms of political representation (sharing with modernism a comparable distrust of claims to artistic and cultural representation) and demanding, in many instances, a moratorium on all forms of political representation. To this end it promised the installation of an arrangement that would reflect the template of economic life – capitalism – by

superimposing on it the figure of a natural, organic community. In this way, fascism pledged its energies to expunging the social from society and ridding economic life of all the impurities that had created conflict and impaired its full development. But the principal condition of this communitarian condition, which Slavoj Žižek has called ʻGemeinschaft capitalismʼ, required the extinguishing of all traces of subjective autonomy underlying the claims of individualism and its replacement by the ʻrestorationʼ of a natural order that had been lost to history and the ʻnowʼ of the times signalled as the appointed moment of repetition of an everyday lived by the folk. Proto-fascist theorists like Ludwig Klages had called for a decontamination of life, which meant eradicating the ʻBody–Soulʼ of consciousness, ʻMindʼ, as ʻan inimical irruption … a diseaseʼ. The Austrian philosopher Othmar Spann pointed to the self-estranged condition of contemporary society and the objectification of social relationships that Marxists upheld as a ʻspectral worldʼ, where the ʻspectresʼ are real. Spann reasoned that social relationships are not self-estranged because there is no place for the individual and autonomy. Capitalism was not only the truth of social reality, it was eternal – an endless present or permanent temporal fusion of past and future in the now.5 In fact, it was precisely this sensitivity to the demands of the present, the domination of the new, and the vestiges of the past still lingering in material evidence and nostalgia that disclose fascismʼs encounter with time and its political dimension. Too often, proponents of modernity have dramatized the difference between fascist modernity and a modernist version on the basis of the role played by the past in the present. Hence, fascist modernity, rooted in recalling the archaic, was invariably seen as retrograde, uneven and incomplete, compared to some idealized, modernist vision of the modern that had already expelled the past from its precincts. Yet fascist conceptions of temporality were no more rooted in the past, which often was refigured in the present for tactical reasons, than any other conception of modernity that claimed release from the burdens of its past. The politics of time built into modernity concerns the way in which modern societies deal with the question of the past in the present and how they choose to acknowledge or displace its force. The perceived indeterminacy of an empirical present and an absent past that is constantly being summoned and mixing with the new constitutes not so much a resistance to modernity as the principal condition of what it means to become modern. Contemporaneity and the appeal to the timelessness held

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by memory invariably reveal a structure of deferral and desire that repetition seeks to resolve while managing only to stimulate even greater anxiety about the future. With Spann, moreover, even the state was relegated to a recessive position, conforming to medieval organic conceptions, reserving the totality to society as a whole; whereas for Klages, vitalism or the will-to-power and unconscious life, now emptied of the last residues of consciousness, authorized unimaginable destruction. This move opened the way to Carl Schmittʼs conception of a state absorbed in identifying and destroying its enemies – the killing of non-nationals who at the same time were non-natural and the formation of a version of human community based on the principle of a ʻfixed sequence of devouringʼ combined with an absence of consciousness and a capacity to recall the memory of the archaic community. What is important about this prewar interlude and its forms of figuring a ʻnewʼ conception of life is the kinship between fascism and capitalism and the desire of the former to save the latter at all cost, even at risk of totalizing the arrangements of authority to remove self-determination altogether. This episode of fascism reminds us that we are still in the epoch of capitalism, regardless of how advanced, late or post- it is, and that we have not yet exorcised the fascism that remains inscribed in it, like a ghost in the machine. But the machine, as Deleuze and Guattari recognized, is no ʻmetaphorʼ. ʻOnly because the causes continue to existʼ, Adorno cautioned, ʻdoes the captivating spell of the past remain to this day unbroken.ʼ6

Actually existing fascisms Among the three new efforts at ʻworking through the pastʼ under consideration here, only the historian Robert Paxton acknowledges as a possible explanation the primacy of the relationship between capitalism and the formation of a fascist solution. But while he recognizes that the pairing made ʻpracticable bedfellowsʼ (208), he also backtracks as if worried that too much emphasis on this relationship will throw him into the Marxist camp. Like Mann, he places great emphasis on fascismʼs political ambitions and the assault on liberalism, democracy and socialism, which bring him back to the capitalist crisis. Wolin, on the other hand, remains committed to following the history of an idea, in order to explain the intellectual genealogy of fascism from anti-Enlightenment counter-revolutionary thinking through Nietzsche and his followers, especially in France, to its postmodern avatar in our time. His concluding defence of a (neo)liberal credo squarely puts him in a camp championing capitalism, which he

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has already exempted as an explanatory issue in the historical formation of fascisms by the prior decision to bracket objective conditions. The decision to dismiss the relationship between capitalist accumulation and fascism is based on a Cold War conceit that had feared privileging the determination of economic agency. Instead, there was an impulse to emphasize the application of political will and leadership. This conforms to the Cold War attempts of modernization theorists to privilege the role played by political rationality in the formation of new nationstates. But what is overlooked is the way in which the primacy of political will affirms the necessity of removing social and political detriments to the proper functioning of capitalism. Despite the anti-bourgeois clamour of fascists and their exposure of materialism (but not exploitation), capitalism (especially the sacred trinity formula of landed private property, labour and capital-profit) retained its hold within the attempt to reconfigure society behind the promise of eliminating both democracy and a corrosive individualism grounded in interest. Moreover, it is difficult to imagine the appearance of fascism in any environment where capitalism is absent. The historical examples of fascism are invariably connected to the development of capitalist accumulation and productive relations. It is far more plausible to identify the surfacing of some form of a ʻfascist minimumʼ everywhere capitalism had sought to install a beachhead in the interwar period, including the colonies. But Paxton and Mann seek to displace this bonding by redescribing the relationship as one between modernity and fascism – a tactic more in keeping with our own intellectual tastes (and a hegemonic Weberianism) than the historical temporality it shaped. In this narrative, modernity and its fascist moment reflect failed political rationalization. This is the argument made to explain Japanʼs encounter with fascism, not forgetting the examples of corporative states found throughout Eastern Europe. To establish the relationship between capitalist modernization and the occurrence of fascism requires neither endless attempts to tease out the causal connection between big business, especially those which personified capitalism, and specific regimes (the labour of historiography), nor a limiting of the terms of understanding to movements, organizations and parties.7 Yet Paxtonʼs ʻanatomyʼ is founded on just such an approach that seeks to narrativize fascism by plotting its successive stages from inception and movement through the final acquisition of political power. Mann openly declares his intention to provide a ʻsociology of movementsʼ, which manages to substitute classification

for analysis. Nonetheless, by appealing to modernity, rather than capital accumulation, both Paxton and Mann, and to a lesser extent Wolin, inadvertently raise the unstated but banished spectre of capitalism, since the spectacle of modernity, apart from its identification with a representation of Enlightenment rationality, signalled the shift to new productive forces and relationships and the expansion of the world market. Although fascism was on record for having hurled virulent denunciations at bourgeois individualism, decadent culture, monopoly capital and even private property (one need only scan Ezra Poundʼs radio broadcasts from Mussoliniʼs Italy), at the same time as it was declaring war against democracy and its drift towards

socialism, much of this rhetorical sound and fury looped back to attempts to save capitalism from itself. Even in its broad-based assault on the capitalism of its day, fascism selected targets like money and finance rather than exploitation, production and the commodity form. According to Mark Neocleous, this attack on finance, banking and money capital constituted fascismʼs capitulation to capitalist production. More importantly, it represented a confusion of the effects of capitalism with its logic, a response often shared by Marxists during the interwar years.8 The aspect of capitalist modernity that undoubtedly led to both the dismissal of a relationship between capitalism and fascism and the desire to forget the significance of fascism by placing it in a completed history (attested to by the mountain of detailed histories) has been the inattention to capitalʼs logic and the socially structuring role played by the commodity form and relations. It is, I believe, this perception that explains Adornoʼs observation concerning the return of fascism, as well as Deleuze and Guattariʼs appeal

to Oedipalization and colonization of the unconscious as the ultimate sources of fascism (or imperialism), as Foucault implied in his Preface to Anti-Oedipus. Foucault proposed that fascism was the ʻlastʼ ʻmajor enemy, the strategic adversaryʼ: Not only historical fascisms, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini, which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively – but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to have power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.9

In other words, Jean-Luc Nancyʼs ʻour historyʼ. It is the relationship to the commodity form that is missing in most accounts of fascism and that offers a plausible explanation for its capacity to return punctually, as well as its own suppression of history for the mystery of myth and origin (like the nation-form itself) and its predilection for repetition. In the interwar period, some fascists even saw the social objectification of humans, their self-estrangement, as a natural, original condition. While Paxton and Mann show sensitivity to fascismʼs fascination with power as a framework for their comparative perspectives, authorizing their respective programmes to anatomize and classify, their checklist approach recuperates an older strategy that never rises above description. Robert Paxtonʼs purpose in The Anatomy of Fascism is to present fascism ʻin its diversity and complexityʼ. Drawing upon a vast monographic literature, he is more concerned with how it worked rather than with fascist words, in contrast to Mann who empowers thought and ideas with practical action. Specifically, Paxton focuses on the role of conservative allies and accomplices and the machinery of fascist political systems and the ways they structured the social formation. Acknowledging that fascism was invented for an ʻera of mass politicsʼ, inaugurated by accelerated capitalist modernization and urban industrialization, Paxton proposes that fascists were thus less preoccupied with economics than politics, which ʻtrumpedʼ economic considerations, even though the primary aim of war necessitated revising the relationship. The main target of fascism was liberalism, with itsʼ ʻhands

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off governmentʼ policies, distrust of the masses and refusal to employ force. But these ʻgeneralizationsʼ must always be mediated by attention to the diversity of national cases. To this end Paxton turns to constructing a template that promises to embrace what he calls a ʻfascist maximumʼ (as against reduction to ʻessenceʼ), which at the same time aims to provide a comparative perspective. Yet even though this model recruits its properties principally from the German and Italian experiences, its exceptionalism invariably leads to the conclusion that the fascist-like scenes in Japan or Brazil fell short of meeting the five-stage developmental trajectory spelling out the prescribed preconditions. If Paxton is persuaded that it is no longer possible to identify fascism by ʻchecking the colour of shirtsʼ and the demands of nominalism, insisting instead on normative definitions, understanding fascism still depends on checking his list, which, he believes, will permit recognizing the formation of the movement and give an idea of its narrative, both vertically and horizontally. The five stages are: (1) the origins of the movement, (2) ʻrooting in the political system, (3) seizure of power, (4) exercising power, and (5) the uncertainty over choosing strategies of radicalization or standing still. Paxton distances his approach from previous efforts that have quibbled over defining terms, supplying encyclopedic coverage and imagining ideal types. While his dismissals of earlier approaches are laudable, his own perspective is dogged by an ambiguous account of the role played by capitalism and its propensity for generating crises, the failure of liberalism, and the timeliness of the fascist offer to save capitalism from itself. What drives this insurmountable ambivalence is the fear of according privilege to a single determining cause and the ʻinevitabilityʼ of its outcome. If, as he acknowledges, fascism ʻthrived upon the crisis of liberalismʼ (which, after all, was precipitated by capitalism), he moves quickly to reject any theory of crises that might explain the revival of the figure of fascism – such as the one proposed by Polanyi. One need not be a Marxist, he avers, to see the crisis of the liberal state as a reflection of ʻa stressful transition to industrializationʼ. But the spectacle of late development inadvertently calls attention to the status of capitalist accumulation and its propensity for producing crises everywhere in the form of a structurally determined unevenness, rather than merely attesting to the signs of arrest and delay. German fascism was hardly an expression of the consequences of ʻlate developmentʼ. As if he had

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finally recognized the circularity of his logic, Paxton reminds readers that ʻfascism is never an inevitable outcomeʼ. Confident that the authority of historical knowledge will not only lead us to actually existing fascisms, Paxton also discovers in it the optic that will permit us to recognize its future coming. However, without offering some conception of repetition or a principle capable of explaining the revival of fascism, itʼs hard to see the point of elaborate anatomies and classifications. Too often the impulse for such strategies derives from identifying a repetition of empirical content in historical fascism and overstating its general utility. On his part, Paxton recommends understanding the ʻrevival of an updated fascismʼ as the instance of a ʻfunctional equivalentʼ and not as an exact replication. Yet he never makes the argument for either how the ʻfunctional equivalentʼ manages to break away from the ʻideal typologiesʼ he has dismissed or how it conforms to a logic of contingence. While Paxton rejects the possible recurrence of ʻclassical fascismʼ, he leaves open the way for its second coming in the realization of one or two of the earlier stages of his template. But this recognition still relies on the content of a ʻfascist maximumʼ, rather than its form, and its uncanny resemblance to precisely those historical examples whose revival he has discounted with admonitions against ʻinevitabilityʼ. Between Paxtonʼs desire to make room for a return and his overheated fears of historical determinism, it is not at all clear that his conception of a ʻfascist maximumʼ and its devaluation of the complex relationship between culture and politics (which he has overlooked in his eagerness to privilege ʻactionʼ over ideas, ʻhardʼ history over soft) have moved discussion beyond the claims that have held fascism hostage to its epoch. Mannʼs is the more ambitious attempt to compose a comparative tableau of fascisms. His sociology of movements (to be followed by a volume on comparative genocides) revisits the familiar historical cases like Germany, Italy and Spain. But he also adds variants from Eastern Europe, like Romania and Hungary. What is missing from his inventory, as it is from Paxton and most comparative studies seeking to make a case for a shared ʻfascist minimumʼ, are examples recruited from outside Europe – such as Japan, China (under Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT in the 1930s) and Brazil, along with those fascist flirtations found throughout the shadowed periphery of colonies and semi-colonies in those years, regions often subordinated to the industrial core but which nevertheless had already been drawn into the widening circumference of capitalism.

Mann insists on seeing fascism as plural and diverse, experienced by a number of societies that are able to satisfy his checklist. His purpose is not only to identify a set of minimal requirements commonly shared, but to entertain the possibility of fascismʼs repetition in a different register in our present. This impulse is shared by both Paxton and Wolin, and all agree that ethnic cleansing in Bosnia marked the return of the ghostly revenant of fascism. But no such response was forthcoming with the earlier genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda or indeed the Turkish massacres of Armenians, which literally inaugurated the centuryʼs vocation for combining capitalist modernization, ethnic cleansing and the mass murder of whole populations. Nor is there even a hint of acknowledgement of Aimé Césaireʼs prescient 1950 observation that fascist violence in the European wars, what he described as the ʻhighest heap of corpses in historyʼ, originated in the colonies. Mannʼs injunction to ʻtake fascism seriouslyʼ because it might return means only that it might come back again in Europe. For writers of Césaireʼs generation and after, who always took it seriously, fascism was always returning because it had never gone away. It had become a fixture of everyday life. In Mannʼs view the reappearance of fascism in recent times has occurred in Islamic regions, adulterated and mixed with other forms of religious and authoritarian traditions. These are ʻpolitical religionsʼ, or, as he puts it, forms of ʻsacred fascismʼ but reassuringly fall short of his checklist and the pay-off of his ʻpackageʼ (374). Paradoxically, Mannʼs comparative sociological perspective seems cemented in the ʻfascist epochʼ. From this point of view, fascism was prompted by a world historical moment, announcing the emergence of the masses in industrializing urban society, committed to class warfare in those societies wrestling with liberal democratic politics, confronting capitalist global crisis. In short, fascism materialized with capitalist modernity and entered the scene with the offer to resolve the ʻworldly problemʼ in which nation, state and war were seen as agents of progress. But if Mann is willing to attribute to capitalism and its special talent for generating crises the role of agent, this observation commands less attention than the configuration of fascism it occasioned and its appetite for figuring forms of political power. By the same measure, Mann seems bent more on discounting a number of received accounts of fascism, in order to clear the way for the presentation of a classification system. The classification merely revises those interpretations with which he is more congenial. While quick to distance his perspective

from Marxian and idealist accounts (especially Roger Griffinʼs preoccupation with ʻpaleogenetic myths of rebirthʼ), Mann adopts a view proposed by Roger Eatwell that envisages fascism as having constituted a ʻradical Third Wayʼ. This is precisely the description fascists often themselves gave as they struggled to shoehorn their programmes between liberal democracy and socialism; and probably not too distant from the contemporary neoliberal ʻThird Wayʼ advocated by Giddens/Blair. Hence, fascisms were characterized by nationalism, holism (collectivity), radicalism and, of course, the ʻThird Way, or, as the Japanese sociologist and theorist of fascism Takata Yasuma put it in the late 1920s, the ʻthird View of Historyʼ superseding both idealist and materialistic narratives of modern society. In Mannʼs reckoning, Eatwellʼs conception of a ʻThird Wayʼ unveils itself as an ʻalternative vision of modernityʼ that prefigures more recent clamour for modernities that might offer alternatives to a dominant Western modernity by making its case on an irreducible culturalism fixed by geography. Mann seeks to broaden this description by adding to fascism a ʼpursuit of transcendenceʼ and the mission of cleansing the nation-state, of both class and unwanted minorities, through the instrument of paramilitarism. Transcendence authorizes violence in the name of radically revolutionary solutions and clearly takes precedence in Mannʼs classification system. Other categories include nationalism (the desire for rebirth) and statism (manifest in implementing authoritarian corporate structures). The importance of class in this structure is diminished since Mann asserts that people often have multiple social identities exceeding singular affiliation. The problem with Mannʼs discounting of class for transcendent cleansing is that it still invokes the spectre of capitalism and its role in generating social conflict. At the heart of Mannʼs comparative sociology are two unexceptionable observations. The first relates to which states successfully weathered the challenge of crises and which resorted to repressive measures to maintain order and move on to accomplish total integration and mass mobilization. Here, Mann reworks the thesis advanced some years ago by Barrington Moore (Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, 1966) by proposing that fascism did not derive from a crisis of liberalism, since liberal regimes apparently succeeded in avoiding its solutions. Fascism appeared in those societies characterized by dual states, half-liberal and half-authoritarian. In other words, fascism appeared in those societies where capitalist development had

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lagged or been delayed. There is a temporally based argument implicit in Mooreʼs thesis. For Mann, the temporal factor is replaced by an uneven geographical fix that locates fascism in the European periphery of the northwest, in central, east and southern Europe. But it hardly improves Mooreʼs early interpretation (which had the virtue of including Japan and China) to relocate its temporal delay in an identifiable geographical space. The second observation emphasizes that these fascisms favoured an extreme form of nation-ism grounded in the claims of an organic and natural community and a powerful state committed to employing violence as the only ʻtranscendentʼ solution to ending social (class) conflict plaguing modern (capitalist) society. In this view, fascism appears more as a contender in a

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competition among theories of socialization promoting the promise of greater social solidarity and stabilization. It is this socializing function that prompts Mann and others to see fascism as an ʻalternative modernityʼ. Thus, ʻfascism was a product of a sudden, half-baked attempt at liberalization amidst social crises.ʼ Its claim to exercising power was based on a demonstrated propensity for ʻknocking both their heads togetherʼ and then assimilating class and other interest groups in corporatist organizations. If, for Mann, an ideological crisis complaining of cultural malaise and generating the desire to defend ʻmoral absolutesʼ exacerbated the general social crises, Richard Wolin makes this contention over value – morality and ethics – the subject of his assault on the failure of philosophy and its sponsorship of a narrative of ʻunreasonʼ. Wolinʼs account of a genealogy whose trajectory drifted to fascism and postmodernism (a conflation that itself marks the triumph of unreason) inflicts upon the reader once more the familiar gesture of emotional and moral gravitas that has characterized neoliberal thinking, and the self-delegation of responsibility by ʻright thinkingʼ people (ʻanti-totalitariansʼ) who are seriously committed to saving us from the misspent passions of our youth (the curse of the 1960s, again) in order to right the world before it is too late. We know that the burden of this task is weighty because we are told so at every opportunity. For Wolin, the overwhelming desire to show how philosophy joined fascism to postmodernism stems from recognizing the uncanny return of the ghosts of fascism in nation-states (genocide) and an exhausted postmodern reflex whose easy cynicism sanctions it. What has sealed this odd and proleptic kinship is a shared rejection of reason. The argument draws urgency from the ʻtroubling prospect … that an anti-democratic orientation popular during the 1930s was making an eerie comeback – this time under the auspices of the academic leftʼ. Convinced that the postmodernist ʻjuggernautʼ, todayʼs

successor to the fascism of the 1930s, and its premature ʻfarewell to reasonʼ has ended, Wolin happily announces that the so-called ʻrevolution of 1989ʼ was motored by a discourse on human rights which effectively worked to ʻundermine totalitarianismʼ and revalidate the ʻvalues of Western humanistsʼ, reviled by the cultural Left (academics, the real target of Wolinʼs book) as an instrument of American imperialism. In other words, the defence and deliverance of the West (or Mannʼs northwest) came from those geographical regions on the periphery scarred by uneven development and a legacy of authoritarianism. Wolin throws the scourge of identity politics into his cassoulet for additional flavouring. Here, his complaint soars and sours into aimless denunciation because, he claims, the practice of identity politics promoted an antipolitical stance or simple apoliticality (probably true), which, where guarantees securing identity didnʼt exist, led to genocidal orgies (wildly irrelevant). It is a stretch to link an insubstantial academic fashion to genocidal behaviour in Bosnia, Rwanda and Algeria, just as it was cheap opportunism for others before him to have blamed Sartrean philosophy for the Cambodian horror. Even worse, Wolin, like others who have draped themselves in the garb of gravitas, is concerned with ʻformal guarantees of procedural democracyʼ for ʻtolerationʼ and ʻmutual recognitionʼ. But he has nothing to say about the demand of substantive democracy and its insistence on genuine equality; only pious appeals to abstract values enunciating human rights designed to maintain the status quo. The human rights he parades as instances of Western humanism are nothing more than the embodiment of ʻfreedomsʼ insuring the interests of private property owners, corporations, financial capital and, of course, unnecessary consumption; freedoms guaranteed by market and trade and a vocation called ʻthe rule of lawʼ. In this regard, his much admired revolution of 1989 was ʻbefore the letterʼ, so to speak: it was as much driven by the lure and seductions of neoliberalism as by a return to the lost values of Western humanism. Wolinʼs project is to show how Enlightenment reason went astray but need not have made the fateful detour. The culprits in this hijacking are principally French intellectuals of the postwar period (who already gave us Cambodia), even though he begins the story with the counter-Enlightenment and the subsequently epic role played by Friedrich Nietzsche, an international intellectual terrorist, if there ever was one, on Wolinʼs assessment, who prefigured fascism and postmodern political discourse and its devalorization of coalition-building consensus.

Wolinʼs principal narrative theme derives from the historiographical conviction (most recently popularized by Simon Schama) that the French Revolution spilled over into political excess and uncontrolled state violence, war, terror and dictatorship to persuade ʻanti-philosophersʼ to conclude that philosophy itself had undermined the order of things. Antoine de Rivarol (apparently a source for Edmund Burke) is complimented for his ʻclairvoyanceʼ for having seen revolutionary France descend into social catastrophe. Rivarol and the party of anti-philosophers were clear about their contempt and distrust for the masses clamouring for rights, and certain in their belief that ʻwhen people cease to esteem (the monarch), they cease to obey.ʼ Disgust for the political principles of Enlightenment reflected fear for the loss of monarchical sovereignty. The formation of this counter-Enlightenment programme forecast fascismʼs later disavowal of the regime of reason of the nineteenth: science, democracy, socialism and individualism. And the subsequent fascist effort to rid society of Enlightenment rationality (but never technology) supplied an alternative modernity capable of overcoming the nineteenth-century dedication to the rule of reason. Nietzsche was central to expanding this anti-philosophic tradition, with Heidegger running a close second, who supplied the principal philosophic tropes to the French intellectual world after World II, notably Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, with a share of the blame being distributed to Bataille and Blanchot. Wolin is hoping to show that what Germany had lost on the battlefield it regained in the Latin Quarter of Paris, and that the cynicism about reason and democracy propelling anti-Enlightenment thinking and fascism was transmuted into a ʻleftʼ postmodernism. Through intellectual alchemy, the fascism theorized by Nietzsche and Heidegger became a philosophical critique deployed to undermine humanism and democracy. As an archaeologist, Wolin has hit upon the under-appreciated kinship between counter-Enlightenment reaction, rearticulated by fascism, and the ʻpostmodernism credoʼ, with its faith in anti-humanism and anti-democracy. In short, he has discovered fascism with a new face. In a Leo-Straussian bellow, ventriloquized first by Allen Bloom, Wolin wants to warn the ʻLeftʼ against forgetting the ʻimperatives of morality and international lawʼ at its own peril. ʻBy romanticizing the lifestyles and mores of Non-Western peoplesʼ, it is claimed, ʻit [the Left] suspends critical judgment, destroys its own credibility and guarantees political irrelevance.ʼ For whom, Wolin never says.

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Where Wolinʼs vaunted defence of ʻtolerationʼ and ʻmutual self-recognitionʼ fit in this recipe is difficult to say. Romanticizing the ʻnon-Westʼ (note the negativity) becomes the contemporary successor of the romance with fascism. As for the romance with fascism he has promised to elucidate, it has been mercifully liberated from history (and capitalism), from its enabling and entailing conditions, to become the embodiment of a seductive Enlightenment unreason and the forerunner of our own postmodern condition and its contempt for democratic and humanistic values. This melodramatic merger of Right and Left at some vanishing point takes place on an imaginary plane, free from history, and embraces ʻthe liberal ideal of an independent civil society, legally secured agreement against arbitrary governmental encroachmentʼ, Wolin names ʻAmericaʼ. But could this utopia be Bushʼs America? Or does it resemble more the historic fascisms Wolin has so assiduously avoided considering in his ʻintellectual romanceʼ? Wolinʼs ʻcritiqueʼ – one encomium describes it as ʻstraight thinkingʼ – prevents him from recognizing that postmodernism is not the enemy of liberalism but one of its primary intellectual and cultural supports. His blindness is overtaken by a kind of petty-bourgeois ressentiment or ʻstruttingʼ (observed by Marx in his critique of Max Stirner) as we learn that ʻthe postmodernists bask in the freedoms of political liberalism – to whose institutions they are indebted for their brilliant careers – while biting the hand that feeds them.ʼ By trying to evade the question of the role played by capitalism and its propensity for generating periodic crises of accumulation, all three writers have trouble confronting contemporary recurrences of fascism and addressing the subject that prompted their quest. All three rely on grasping the past as the principal condition for recognizing its repetition. Only Paxton comes close to acknowledging the importance of capitalist dysfunctionality in the interwar period, and then backs off. But Paxton does not exclude the possibility of fascism returning after its epoch and not necessarily in the same historical form. Exploring the consequences of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, radical nationalist exclusionary movements in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Wall, violence against immigrants in numerous European states, the decided turn to the right in Italy and Austria, and right-wing agitation in France and the Netherlands, he is convinced that a fascism of the future need not look like the classic model. It is Paxtonʼs belief that new fascisms will constitute inflections of the older example and that understanding the anatomy of historical fascism, especially the various

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stages leading to movement and seizure of power and how it worked, will enable the present to recognize it. Mann constructs a vast system of classification that identifies and describes the role of capitalism manifest in geographic unevenness, only to conclude that fascists were more interested in the exercise of social power. In the end, he is reassured that the aberrant manifestations of fascism today fall short of satisfying his checklist – a move Paxton is reluctant to make even though he places great stock in the utility of historical knowledge. Wolin ignores the question of capitalism altogether, as he does history itself. Instead, he resorts to construing a fantasy narrative that brackets the conditions attending historical fascism in order to demonstrate philosophyʼs complicity with postmodernism as the basis of a case for fascismʼs return.

Fascist futures Without confronting the repetition inscribed in the history of capitalismʼs relationship to liberalism and thus engaging the conditions inviting the solution offered by fascism, any effort to consider the return of fascism in the present or future will inevitably be constrained by appeals to functional analogues corresponding to checklists, classifications and intellectual affiliations. However, if we are willing to examine this relationship as it has been rearticulated in contemporary neoliberalism, it is possible to begin to see both a way out of this historicist impasse and how the return of fascism might work in a new temporal register, without resorting to analogues that attest only to history repeating itself. Despite the rhetoric of democratization that has dominated contemporary neoliberal discourse, the economic and political ʻmanagementʼ of crisis has, in Samir Aminʼs words, ʻreinforced the danger of anti-democratic regressionʼ.10 Amin gave an early warning of what has become the subject of David Harveyʼs recent A Short History of Neoliberalism:11 namely, that liberalism, everywhere, engenders and enhances the risk of fascism. What is at issue here is the aptitude of contemporary neoliberalism to promote and embark upon a programme (since the late 1970s and early 1980s) that has sought to recuperate the excesses of a prior liberalism and remove those safeguards and social goods employed after World War II to diminish the margin of unevenness that had plunged prewar capitalist societies into crisis and war. Instead, neoliberalism has pursued a trajectory designed to dismantle every form of regulation once adopted to curb market interference in those aspects of social and collective life that had been once

considered too important to leave to the caprice of the ʻinvisible handʼ. Moreover, this has been made possible by active complicity of a strong state form, which it has publicly disavowed, even as it has formed a powerful partnership with the political classes. What once had been taken out of the market has thus today been restored to it, to give substance to a fantasy utopia it is supposed to represent. Yet even before Amin and Harvey, Polanyi had already seen, in 1944, in the baneful excesses of marketization the necessity of liberalism to enlist the coercive powers of the state in order to realize its utopian aspiration of an unfettered and self-regulating market as the basis of reorganizing social and economic life, despite its familiar rejection of interference. Polanyi asked contemporaries to understand that even though antifascism had scored a momentous victory, the rejection of liberal utopian fantasies merely set the stage for a new round of economic expansion. What was forgotten was that there can be no escaping the risk of repetition and the regression to fascism ʻwithout breaking categorically with the logic of neoliberal globalizationʼ.12 The failure of economic liberalism in the 1920s, which fascism sought to radicalize, could be attributed to incompleteness, which became the strategy for explaining unevenness. Polanyi, on the other hand, saw in liberalism the operation of some sort of dialectic working to impede Enlightenment reason. In its crudest version this operation reduces to attacking political democracy as the source of interventionism.13 What this shows is the repetition driving liberalism, which, in its new neoliberal avatar, is even more determined to overcome the ʻdefectsʼ of incompleteness by resorting to ever-greater measures to satisfy the appetite of a self-regulating market, which promotes unevenness. What fascists and socialists both foresaw as the excesses of capitalism and the necessity for correction, neoliberalism repeats today in order to realize the completion of its utopian trajectory. Where neoliberalism seeks to improve upon the liberal past is in its utilization of a strong state, even at risk of contradiction. The consequences for substantive democracy are immense: they recall the earlier fascist assault on popular democracy and the political intervention it provoked, ʻhaunting the history of market economyʼ.14 The fascist response to the impasse of liberal capitalism aimed to reform the market economy at the price of undermining democratic institutions. In this regard, liberal opposition to any form of planning opened the way to fascismʼs momentary victory. But the lesson neoliberalism has learnt from this earlier

episode is that the achievement of freedom without some mediating force was an impossibility. The neoliberal recognition of the need to rely on state coercion and intervention when necessary to implement its programme was thus accompanied by a redefinition of freedom itself, as we have learned today: the figuration of a new fiction whose content required alteration once power and compulsion were employed to secure a new freedom of enterprise and private ownership, even as it has insisted on maintaining the older illusion. This is the regime of ʻprocedural democracyʼ whose content was defined three years after Polanyi wrote his great book, in the credo of the Mont Pelerin Society, whose most distinguished signatories were Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman and Karl Popper. Its founding statement expressed anxiety for a decline of belief in private property and the competitive market and worried that ʻwithout the diffused power and initiative associated with these institutions, it is difficult to imagine a society in which freedom may be effectively preservedʼ.15 For Polanyi, the liberal idea of freedom had already ʻdegenerated into a mere advocacy of free enterpriseʼ. It was replaced by ʻa freedom for those whose income, leisure and security need no enhancingʼ.16

Notes 1. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, Vintage, New York, 1989, p. 20. 2. Primo Levi, Lʼassymetrie de la vie, trans. Nathalie Bauer, Robeert Laffont, Paris, 2004, p. 70. 3. Theodor Adorno, ʻThe Meaning of Working through the Pastʼ, in Critical Models, trans. Henry Pickford, Columbia University Press, New York, 1998, pp. 89, 98, 93. 4. Karl Polanyi, ʻThe Essence of Fascismʼ, in J. Lewis, K. Polanyi and D.K. Kitchen eds, Christianity and the Social Revolution, Gollancz, London 1935, pp. 390–91. 5. Ibid., pp. 392, 376, 375. 6. Adorno, ʻThe Meaning of Working through the Pastʼ, p. 103. 7. Mark Neocleous, Fascism, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1997, pp. 4, 43. 8. Ibid, pp. 43–4. 9. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schitzophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley et al., Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, 1983, p. xii. 10. Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization, Zed Books, London, 2000, pp. 102–3. 11. David Harvey, A Short History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005. A review of Harveyʼs book is forthcoming in RP 137. 12. Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization, p. 102. 13. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Beacon Press, Boston MA, 1957, p. 145. 14. Ibid., p. 223. 15. Quoted in Harvey, A Short History of Neoliberalism, p. 21. 16. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 257.

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INTERVIEW

Paolo Virno

Reading Gilbert Simondon Transindividuality, technical activity and reification Jun Fujita Hirose At the end of the 1980s, the thought of Gilbert Simondon – a French philosopher (1924–1989) almost entirely ignored until then – was given a new lease of life on the French philosophical scene. The year of his death, 1989, saw both the republication of Simondonʼs secondary doctoral thesis, The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,1 and the first publication of the second part of his principal thesis, with the title Psychic and Collective Individuation.2 So far as the first part of his principal doctoral thesis is concerned, part of which was published in 1964, it was republished in 1995 as The Individual and Its Physico-Biological Genesis.3 In 1992, the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris organized a large conference on Simondonʼs work, signalling the definitive rediscovery of the richness of his thought. Lectures from this conference were published with the title Gilbert Simondon: A Thought of Individuation and Technology.4 In 1993 the first monograph on Paolo Virno was born in Naples in 1952. From Simondonʼs thought was published, Simondon and 1968 to its dissolution in 1973 he was an activist the Philosophy of Technical Culture by Gilbert in Potere Operaio, a political group founded by 5 Hottois. Then, in 1999, Muriel Combes published some of those members of the workerist journal a work of introduction to his thought, Simondon: Quaderni Rossi who did not join the Communist Individual and Collective, in the prestigious PUF Party of Italy. He was an active participant in il series Philosophies.6 The last work on Simondonʼs movimento of the 1970s but was not linked to any thought to date is a collection of articles edited by specific group. In 1979 Virno was arrested in the Jacques Roux and published in 2002 with the title so-called ʻApril 7th judgementʼ, along with Antonio 7 Gilbert Simondon: A Working Thought. Negri and others. (For more on this period, see ʻDo The current reappraisal of Simondonʼs thought You Remember Revolution?ʼ in Paolo Virno and has, largely, occurred in relation to the continuing Michael Hardt, eds, Radical Thought in Italy, Unistudy in France of the work of Gilles Deleuze. Or at versity of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996.) He least, all the commentators from within this tradiwould remain in ʻpreventative detentionʼ for three tion know, without exception, that Simondon was years accused of being a member of a terrorist a philosopher ʻvery dear to Gilles Deleuzeʼ, as you group that the prosecution referred to simply as ʻOʼ regularly repeat whenever you speak of Simondon in (Organizzazione). All the charges were dropped. your writings. Indeed, in 1966 Deleuze published a Since 1994, Virno has taught at the University of review of The Individual and Its Physico-Biological Urbino, the University of Montreal and the Uni8 Genesis. This article seems to be much more than versity of Calabria. Virno has edited the journals a mere review; it is, rather, a text in which one can Metropoli, Luogo comune, and DeriveApprodi. He find an extremely dense exposition of the concept is currently an editor of Forme di vita. Among his of ʻdifferent/ciationʼ that would – three years later numerous publications are: Convenzione e mate– become the core concept of Difference and Repetirialismo (1986), Mondanità (1994), Il ricordo del tion.9 From 1969, the year Difference and Repetition presente (1999), Quando il verbo si fa carne (2003), 10 and The Logic of Sense were published, Simondon A Grammar of the Multitude (2004) and, most would engage with Deleuzeʼs work, in more or less recently, Motto di spirito e azione innovativa (2005). explicit ways. In part, the rediscovery of Simondonʼs This interview originally appeared in the online thought, like that of the French sociologist Gabriel edition of Multitudes 18, October 2004.

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Radical Philosophy 136 (March/April 20 06)

Tarde (1843–1904), which is considered as dear to Deleuze and Félix Guattari as that of Simondon, appears to follow from the discovery of his influence on Deleuze. Having said that, your own contribution to this reconsideration of Simondonʼs thought, appears linked to the following two complementary aspects: (i) the focus on the – particularly political – importance of Psychic and Collective Individuation, a book of Simondonʼs that has always received scant attention due to his being frequently considered a ʻthinker of technologyʼ; and (ii) your attempt to make your concept of ʻpost-Fordist multitudeʼ more precise by bringing together Simondonʼs Psychic and Collective Individuation with Marxʼs thought. It is true that Muriel Combes, for example, dedicates a good part of her book to the elucidation of the great importance of Psychic and Collective Individuation, but she does this principally so as to document how Simondonʼs notion of ʻtransindividualityʼ foreshadows Deleuzeʼs concept of the ʻfoldʼ. It is also true that Combes highlights the political power of Simondonʼs thought in relation to the contemporary, post-Fordist organization of work and to Marxʼs thought. But she does so primarily through The Mode of Existence of Technological Objects, so that her entire explanation is limited to the context of ʻtechnological objectsʼ. So far as I am aware, you have written on Simondonʼs thought three times: first, in A Grammar of the Multitude;11 then in the Postface to the Italian edition of Psychic and Collective Individuation, taken up again in When the Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature;12 and, finally, in an article with the title ʻThe Angels and the General Intellect: Individuation in Duns Scotus and Gilbert Simondonʼ in the French journal Multitudes.13 It is interesting that in each of these publications you speak of Psychic and Collective Individuation. So, for my first set of questions: how did you first come across Simondonʼs thought and why do you always write about Psychic and Collective Individuation? Paolo Virno The ʻprinciple of individuationʼ has always been a fundamental theme for me. Asking what renders an individual singular has always seemed a decisive question for me because, by posing it, one is forced to suppose that the individual is a point of arrival of a complex process and not an already given starting point. The notion of a ʻprinciple of individuationʼ enables one to think what is unique and unrepeatable (the singularity) in strict relation with what is common and shared by all. In a book I wrote many years ago, Convention and Materialism,14 there was a chapter entitled ʻPrincipium individuationisʼ. This is how I encountered Simondon. How could I let a thinker for whom (physical, psychic and collective) individuation was an idée fixe escape me? I was struck by two theses in particular. First, that a preindividual quota of reality persists in every subject alongside the individualized component. This means that the very idea of ʻsubjectʼ should be understood as a permanent mixture of the Common and the Singular. The second noteworthy thesis of Simondonʼs concerns the collective: the latter neither compresses nor debases the individual; it is the space within which individuation is refined and strengthened. For Simondon, the preindividual quota of reality that every subject contains can be individuated in turn but only in the relation between many individuals, only in the collective, only in socio-political cooperation. In collective practice, the preindividual is transformed into the transindividual. And it is the category of the transindividual that is the category which, at the level of post-Fordist globalization, can designate a public sphere that is no longer linked to the state – that is, a non-representational democracy. These theses are absolutely new. They overturn many rooted philosophical and political superstitions. However, I have not completely overlooked Simondonʼs other writings. I studied his book on technology carefully. In 2003, I dedicated a university seminar to it, which has not yet been published (and perhaps never will be). I believe that Simondonʼs thinking on technology helps to make a clean sweep of a good number of nineteenth-century theories that oscillate between catastrophist and liberatory understandings of technology. Simondon situated technology in relation to humanity and the world in a new way, alongside aesthetic, religious,

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political and other experiences. But I think that perhaps the central point is that technology is transindividual for Simondon. That is, it expresses what does not reach the point of individuation in the mind of the individual. The machine gives an external appearance to what is collective, to what is species-specific in human thought. Unable to find an adequate equivalent in the representations of individualized consciousness, preindividual reality is projected externally as a universally usable complex of signs and objectified logical schema. For Simondon, it would be a capital error to consider technology a simple support for labour. The two terms are asymmetrical and heterogeneous: technology is transindividual and labour is interindividual. That is to say that labour connects individuated individuals, whereas technology gives a voice to what is common or, more precisely, to what is preindividual in subjects. Marx had already shed light on the latent conflict between technology and labour; it is enough to recall the celebrated pages in which he ascribes technology to the ʻgeneral intellectʼ – that is, to thought as a public (or transindividual) resource that has the merit of reducing unqualified waged labour, working for a boss, to a ʻmiserable residueʼ. JFH What I find particularly interesting in your reading of Simondon is precisely this transformation of the question of ʻtechnologyʼ into that of the ʻgeneral intellectʼ (Simondon never spoke of the general intellect). It is true that in the conclusion to his book on technology, The Mode of Existence of Technological Objects, Simondon radically distinguished ʻtechnical activityʼ from ʻlabourʼ15 and that he discovers in labour the ʻprincipal cause of alienationʼ,16 in so far as ʻlabourʼ – or, rather, ʻthe division of labourʼ – puts workers in relation only in so far as they are ʻconstituted individualsʼ and, as a consequence of this ʻinterindividualʼ relation, alienates workers from the ʻconstitution of a … transindividual relationʼ. That is, it alienates workers from any collective individuation starting from the ʻcharge of preindividual realityʼ (apeiron) borne by each worker – or, better still, shared by all workers – that each worker could, not so much as ʻconstituted individualʼ but as ʻsubjectʼ (ʻvaster than the individualʼ) ʻexpress him or herself in the technical objectʼ or, more precisely, in the ʻcontinuous genesis of the technical objectʼ. It is in this sense that Simondon says: ʻto reduce alienation, … labour must become technical activityʼ. Yet it seems to me that, at least in The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Simondon limits himself to the treatment of the question of material production by the ʻmachineʼ or the ʻtechnical objectʼ. So, when he speaks of the ʻcharge of preindividual realityʼ (apeiron, ʻnatureʼ, etc.) that each worker–subject bears within himself, he is dealing exclusively with the ʻknowledge of the technical objectʼ. Consequently, Simondon concludes by saying that ʻthe firm, the set of technical objects and people, must be organized on the basis of its essential function, that is, in accordance with its technical functioning.ʼ Whereas, when you speak of that same ʻcharge of preindividual realityʼ by placing it in relation to the concept of ʻgeneral intellectʼ that you draw from the ʻFragment on Machinesʼ in Marxʼs Grundrisse, you do not limit yourself to the treatment of the knowledge of the machine but extend it to the ʻintellect in generalʼ, which is shared by the entire human Gattungswesen in so far as it is ʻthinking-speakingʼ. That is what enables you, first of all, to treat of the question of immaterial production (immaterial and cognitive labour), which does not depend on any material machine as principal means of production and, moreover, allows you to turn the concept of ʻtransindividualityʼ into a decisive weapon for your ʻanalysis of contemporary forms of lifeʼ. Now then, in A Grammar of the Multitude you point out that Marxʼs formulation of the very concept of ʻgeneral intellectʼ is unsatisfactory, in so far as he ʻconceives the “general intellect” as objectified scientific capability, as a system of machinesʼ – that is, in Simondonʼs terms, as ʻtechnical objectʼ. In this sense, what would you say of the thesis explained in the ʻConclusionʼ of The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects? Is it not precisely this deficit, common to Marxʼs Grundrisse and Simondonʼs book on technology, that leads you to reread Marxʼs Capital (specifically the pages on the concept of ʻlabour-powerʼ as the ʻsum of physical and intellectual aptitudes existing in the bodyʼ) alongside Psychic and Collective Individuation?

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PV Youʼre right. We can only follow Simondon part of the way. At a certain point it is necessary to take leave of him and proceed alone (just as we must depart from many other ʻfriendlyʼ thinkers). We do so with gratitude for his help but without nostalgia or regrets. True, Simondon elucidates the transindividual character of technology and the transindividual character of the collective, but he does not grasp (and how could he?) the point at which these different forms of transindividuality become tightly linked or, rather, are welded together (thereby becoming something different from what they were separately). The point of fusion is contemporary living labour, ʻmass intellectualityʼ and ʻcognitive labourʼ, or whatever we want to call it. Contemporary living labour is both socio-political collective and general intellect. Labour-power has become invention-power; not because labour involves the functioning of the machine but because it develops technology beyond the machine, through the cooperation of living subjects based upon thought, language and imagination. The difficulty for us is to conceive adequately the two aspects of the general intellect. On the one hand, it is the basis of social production located beyond the vile epoch of wage labour. On the other hand, it lies at the basis of political institutions that take leave of the state with its centralized administrative apparatus, its compulsion for obedience, and so on. One can distinguish the technological-transindividual and collective-transindividual from these two standpoints. Although one must add that what we are left with is a third thing, different from the two roots from which it springs. I am sometimes tempted to call this, at once, ʻtechnologicalʼ and ʻpoliticalʼ transindividual communism. But so as not to trouble anyone, I will simply say that it is the common place of human praxis. To get back to Simondon, he is certainly naive when he speaks of politics. On those occasions he appears to operate beneath his means. There are more political ideas in his writings when he doesnʼt focus on politics, such as in the passages on ʻcollective individuationʼ and on technological invention.

Post-Fordist alienation JFH It seems to me that this notion of the ʻgeneral intellectʼ as a ʻtechnology beyond machinesʼ is – at one and the same time – the crucial concept that you draw from Marxʼs and Simondonʼs writings and that goes beyond them, since for them the model of ʻlabourʼ was always ʻmodernʼ in the sense of the term Charlie Chaplin gave it. So, the ʻgeneral intellectʼ, understood in your sense, not only has ʻtwo sidesʼ, technical and political, but also what you frequently call an ʻambivalenceʼ (for example, you speak of it in the interview with the Colectivo Situaciones: ʻLa Condición ambivalenteʼ, which can also be found in the Japanese translation of A Grammar of the Multitude).17 ʻContemporary living labourʼ, based upon the ʻgeneral intellectʼ, is precisely ʻlabourʼ – that is, productive of surplus labour (perhaps one could say that ʻcontemporary living labourʼ, in which a pure ʻinvention-powerʼ can be mobilized, would be more productive than ʻmodernʼ labour). When one speaks of ʻcontemporary living labourʼ, it seems to me that Simondonʼs distinction between ʻtechnologyʼ and ʻlabourʼ cannot be retained, because, in this case, the transindividuality that is dear to ʻtechnologyʼ can be resituated in the heart of ʻlabourʼ itself: transindividual labour (indeed, it is in this precise sense that you note, in ʻThesis 7ʼ of the fourth chapter of A Grammar of the Multitude, the lack of foundation to Jürgen Habermasʼs position, in which ʻlabourʼ is understood to be pure ʻinstrumental actionʼ and is contrasted to ʻcommunicative actionʼ). That said, I would like to return to the question that Simondon poses in the conclusion to The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, namely to that of alienation. If the interindividuality of labour was the ʻfirst cause of alienationʼ in ʻmodernʼ production, and if transindividuality – or, in Habermasʼs terms, ʻcommunicative actionʼ – is ʻput to workʼ in post-Fordist production, what can be said about alienation in the post-Fordist context, not only from the Simondonian standpoint, namely that of the ʻinterindividualityʼ of the division of labour, but also from the Marxist point of view, namely from that of the ʻownership of

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the means of productionʼ? It sees to me that it becomes very difficult – if not impossible – to speak of ʻalienationʼ with respect to post-Fordist production, because in this case the means of production are nothing but the ʻgeneral intellectʼ itself, which is always shared by the workers. Which leads me to my next question: do you believe that posing the question of ʻalienationʼ, from the Marxist and the Simondonian standpoint, remains possible within the post-Fordist context? If yes, how? If not, why? The ʻambivalenceʼ of the ʻgeneral intellectʼ is not limited to its technical aspect; it also concerns its political aspect. Of course, the ʻcollective-transindividualʼ, based upon the ʻgeneral intellectʼ, puts the politicalparliamentary system of the state in crisis, but this could lead both to ʻnon-representational democracyʼ and to the ʻhypertrophic growth of the administrative apparatusesʼ, as you point out in the second chapter of A Grammar of the Multitude. Within the current international conjuncture, specifically with regards to Iraq, the ʻpreeminence of the decree with respect to the lawʼ comes to the fore – not only in relation to the administration of the US state but also to that of Japan, Italy, and so on. In this context, it is very interesting that today people ask themselves if there is legitimacy to such a decree or to such a sovereignty that issues such decrees. This is interesting because it seems to me that in the case of the ʻcollectivetransindividualʼ, which according to Simondon is no longer based upon the ʻcontractʼ that is necessary to all ʻinterindividualʼ relations, it is no longer a form of sovereign legitimacy. And it is this same impossibility of becoming legitimate that, ironically, allows state administrations to make decrees (without legitimating themselves). PV You have raised many interesting and complex questions. Perhaps too many. I am afraid that I shall only be able to reply to some of them. First, you are absolutely correct about the ʻambivalenceʼ with regard to post-Fordist labour. In some ways, this labour has absorbed the transindividuality of technology: the labour of the individual is not added to that of other individuals so as to give place to interindividual cooperation. On the contrary, an individualʼs labour presents itself as a particular manifestation of transindividual cooperation given a priori. Furthermore, post-Fordist labour has absorbed into itself the transindividuality of the collective as well; so much so that many productive operations seem like political actions, in that they demand the presence of others, and must contend with the possible and the unexpected. For all these reasons, it appears that labour expands infinitely, to the point of comprehending that which, in the terms of political economy, is not labour: passions, affects, language games, and so on. This is the reason for the critique of Habermas, of his contraposition of ʻinstrumental actionʼ and ʻcommunicative actionʼ. But one must be careful, for if everything is labour, one could say that nothing is. That is to say, labour loses its specificity. The line of demarcation that separated it from all other experiences becomes cloudy and indistinct. In a way, labour is today truly productive (of surplus value and profit) only if it coincides with the human abilities that previously explicated themselves in non-labour. Here is the ambivalence: everything is labour but it is this very fact that explodes the concept of ʻlabourʼ itself. One should instead speak of transindividual activity by contrasting this term to that of labour – while specifying, of course, that capitalism is strong today precisely because it is able to compress transindividual activity into the straitjacket of labour. The ambivalence and uncertainty of judgement finds its material basis in this compression. The question of alienation requires a more strictly philosophical consideration. I believe that we need to distinguish between ʻreificationʼ and ʻalienationʼ, considering the former good, indeed the only thing that can act as an antidote to ʻalienationʼ. ʻReificationʼ is what I call the process through which preindividual reality becomes an external ʻthingʼ, a res that appears, a manifest phenomenon, a set of public institutions. By ʻalienationʼ I understand the situation in which the preindividual remains an internal component of the subject but one that the subject is unable to command. The preindividual reality that remains implicit, like a presupposition that conditions us but that we are unable to grasp, is alienated. In that sense I would say that post-Fordist ʻalienationʼ consists in the fact that the preindividual,

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although it is the actual basis of social production, does not become res publica, political organism, non-representational democracy. So, far from implying one another, the concepts of alienation and reification are polar opposites. Reification is the only remedy to alienating dispossession. And vice versa: ways of existence, thought and being that are insufficiently reified are alienated. JFH Therefore you redefine ʻreificationʼ (Verdinglichung) as the transformation of preindividual reality into the transindividual res. This extremely radical redefinition of the notion of ʻreificationʼ forms the central theme of your book When the Word Becomes Flesh, to the point that this title signals nothing other than the ʻreificationʼ of which you speak: the becoming-flesh of the word – that is, the becoming-res of preindividual nature that is shared by all subjects. In the chapter ʻIn Praise of Reificationʼ,18 you suggest that one should distinguish ʻreificationʼ not only from ʻalienationʼ but from ʻfetishismʼ as well. You believe that reification can be as much an ʻantidoteʼ to ʻfetishismʼ as to ʻalienationʼ. In order to explain this distinction between ʻreificationʼ and ʻfetishismʼ you introduce another very interesting concept, that of ʻthings of the relationʼ, in contrast to the Marxist one of the ʻrelationship between thingsʼ. You argue that in ʻreificationʼ ʻthe relations between people … are incarnated in the things of the relationʼ, whereas in ʻfetishismʼ, as Marx says in Capital, the relation between people is transformed into ʻa relation between thingsʼ; and this means that ʻreification invests the relation itself, whereas fetishism operates on the correlated termsʼ – that is, on the already constituted individuals. One could also say that ʻreificationʼ is transindividual, whereas ʻfetishismʼ is interindividual. From here you draw two conceptual lineages: on the one hand, transindividuality – technical activity – reification, and, on the other hand, interindividuality – labour – fetishism. Now, I would like to return to the question of ʻ“post-Fordist” alienationʼ. You have just defined this as ʻthe fact that preindividual reality does not become res publicaʼ. If that is so, if post-Fordist capitalism subsumes ʻtransindividual activityʼ into itself – that is, transforms preindividual reality into transindividual res – it seems to me that this means that there cannot be alienation in capitalist post-Fordism to the extent that everything is reified, thereby becoming transindividual res. In that sense, your expression ʻ“post-Fordist” alienationʼ would be a contradiction in terms. That is, there is a contradiction between the noun ʻalienationʼ and the adjective ʻpost-Fordistʼ. But, if there is nothing contradictory in this expression, then you will need to clarify for us the distinction between ʻtransindividualʼ and ʻpublicʼ. How would you define the ʻpublicʼ in relation to the ʻtransindividualʼ? In addition, this question also appears to be linked to your thesis concerning ʻpersonal dependenceʼ as the negative aspect of the experience of the multitude – that is, of the post-Fordist multitude. You view the ʻextreme of “alienation”ʼ precisely in this ʻpersonal dependenceʼ, to the extent that the relationship between men is, here, ʻtransparent because not mediated by thingsʼ. But it seems to me that one could ask oneself: does ʻpersonal dependenceʼ involve a transindividual res even if it is unable to constitute a ʻpublic resʼ? With respect to the question of ʻpersonal dependenceʼ you speak of ʻpublicity without public sphereʼ. I believe that you could reformulate this concept of yours in Simondonʼs terms: as transindividuality without public sphere. What would you say?

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PV To begin with I would like to clarify one thing regarding ʻfetishismʼ or, rather, on the relationship – which needs to be completely rethought – between the concepts of ʻreificationʼ, ʻalienationʼ and ʻfetishismʼ (which although famous are so vague as to be considered almost interchangeable). After this clarification, I shall try to respond to the more substantial points that you raise (although, dear Jun, you do not pose any ʻminorʼ points…): that is, is it legitimate to speak of ʻpost-Fordist alienationʼ. As I was saying, alienation means that an aspect of our life, of our thought, of our praxis assumes a strange form and becomes unavailable to us, exercising instead a dark power over us. Take this philosophical example: self-consciousness, Descartesʼ ʻI thinkʼ allows all forms of representation but cannot itself be represented. It escapes us. All reflection on the self-conscious I, precisely because it is based upon that same I, seems destined to travel back again without ever grasping its object. The image of an I prior to the I, of an I that presupposes itself, that is ungraspable, is alienated. Take now a political example: the preindividual reality that each of us carries with us – all within us that is Homo sapiens, that is our human nature – is alienated if it fails to find external, collective, socio-political expression. Fetishism is an attempt – a false, mistaken one – to respond to the alienation of our inner life, to the isolation of the individual subject. Fetishism means assigning to something – for example, to money – characteristics that belong to the human mind (sociality, capacity for abstraction and communication, etc.). Reification, on the other hand, is the correct and effective way of defeating alienation: in contrast to fetishism, it does not take a given thing, loading it with animistic values, but turns into a thing, res, what falsely presented itself as inner and ungraspable. So, to the alienated, reification opposes an I outside the I: self-consciousness, its formation and structure, are located in certain observable practices, in certain linguistic events, and in particular external facts. Furthermore, reification sets against preindividual alienation the fact that what unifies individual minds, the ʻbetweenʼ when we speak of the ʻrelations between peopleʼ, has its own visible thinghood – that is, becomes a public institution. In conclusion, fetishism and reification are two distinct ways – no, two antithetical ways – of escaping alienation. The real contrast is between these two opposed ways of overcoming the poverty of inner life. We now come to your question on ʻpost-Fordist alienationʼ. You say: given that contemporary capitalism enjoys certain preindividual characteristics of human beings (sociality, linguistic faculty, capacity for cooperation, etc.) and, in doing so, gives it the consistency of a res – that is, of external facts – one would have to say that contemporary capitalism is not alienating but profits economically and politically from alienation. I think that you are partly right and partly wrong. Do you remember that phrase of Marxʼs that goes something like: ʻCapitalist stock companies represent the overcoming of private property on the basis of private property itselfʼ? By this Marx means that capitalism is only able to contend with the development of productive forces that surpass capitalism by way of forming stock companies. I propose that we apply this phrase to our discussion. One could then say: post-Fordism is the overcoming of alienation on the basis of alienation – that is, without being able to leave the latter behind. One must distinguish what is true from what is in use. The transindividual character of the relations of production are true; but the interindividual (and despotic) rules that govern them are in use. However, the common, shared, public character of material resources that are required in contemporary production turn into a proliferation of hierarchies that are as arbitrary as they are meticulous. Or, as you put it, they are converted into personal dependence. The contrast between what is true (transindividuality) and what is in use (alienation and fetishism) can be expressed in the formula you suggested at the end of your question: transindividuality without a public sphere. But transindividuality that does not become reified in a public sphere has too many of the features of preindividuality. Once again, it is true but not in use. It is in the space between these two adjectives that one encounters the open sea of political struggle.

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Post-Fordist multitude JFH In ʻThesis 3ʼ of the fourth chapter of A Grammar of the Multitude, you postulate a necessary distinction between the ʻtrueʼ and the ʻin useʼ. There you argue that, in the contemporary crisis of the society of labour – that is, in the epoch of post-Fordism – ʻLabour time is the unit of measurement in use, but no longer the true one unit of measurement.ʼ This thesis is connected directly to your discussion in ʻThesis 5ʼ of the same chapter: ʻin the post-Fordist era, surplus-value is determined above all by the gap between production time which is not calculated as labor time and labor time in the true sense of the term.ʼ Bearing in mind both these theses, it could be said that if labour time is no longer true, the time of production is. If, on the other hand, the latter is not yet in use, labour time continues to be so. Here we find one of the fields of ʻpolitical struggleʼ of which you have just spoken: how can we put the time of production in use? Or, in other words, how can it be reified into a ʻres publicaʼ? Some people propose to do so by means of a ʻbasic incomeʼ [reddito di cittadinanza] as a public institution that could put to use the time of production as the ʻunit of measureʼ. Others criticize this proposal, arguing that it is nothing but a social-democratic project to the extent that it is a more or less Keynesian institution of wealth redistribution. I donʼt think you speak of it at all, at least not explicitly, but what do you think of this proposal of a ʻbasic incomeʼ in relation to your discussion of ʻreificationʼ? The contemporary gap between the ʻtrueʼ and the ʻin useʼ can also be found in your political alternative between Multitude and State (or People), or, more precisely, multitudinal transindividuality and state (or popular) interindividuality. Simondon believes that the state is interindividual because it is conceived as a group contract between constituted individuals. One could say, multitudinal [multitudinaria] transindividuality is true; whereas the interindividual state is in use. In this sense, what blocks the becoming-res of the ʻbetweenʼ – that is, what is alienating – is not only the interindividuality of wage labour but also that of the state. In the second chapter of A Grammar you note these two complementary aspects of the reifying process: ʻOn the one hand, general intellect can only affirm itself as an autonomous public sphere, thus avoiding the “transfer” of its own potential into the absolute power of Administration, if it cuts the linkage that binds it to the production of commodities and wage labour. On the other hand, the subversion of capitalist relations of production henceforth develops only with the institution of a non-state public sphere, a political community that has as its hinge general intellect.ʼ19 Two questions follow from this observation. First, could you expand upon the relationship between wage labour and the state? Second, could you explain to me concretely what you understand by ʻnon-representational democracyʼ as a ʻnon-state run public sphereʼ? If possible, I would like you to shed some light on the relationship between the parliamentary system and the state administration with respect to the question of the blockage of preindividual ʻreificationʼ. PV I think you sum up perfectly the current area of political struggle: labour-time is no longer the true measure of social wealth but continues to be the measure in use. And whereas production time as a whole (which coincides with life itself: language, affects, etc.) is the true measure, it is not yet in use. Political conflict, the organizational processes, tactics, the forms of struggle (strikes, sabotage, disobedience, etc.): all of this must measure itself, step by step, against the problem of putting in use – making socially recognized – that which is already true. A single political act must be evaluated by this criterion: it is not wrong or right in itself but only in so far as it facilitates or obstructs the construction of a civilization located beyond the epoch of the state and wage labour. It is in this sense that I defend the basic income. The distribution of an income beyond labour is a step necessary to take to underline the fact that, today, one produces when one doesnʼt work. One could say that the basic income is the salary due to transindividual cooperation and that paying transindividual cooperation is a way to make it in use (as well as true). Moreover, I donʼt consider (from the conceptual standpoint, of course) a basic income to be the end; it is

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instead the starting point. To be more explicit: a guaranteed income would, in principle, enable one to be less enslaved, less subject to blackmail, and more active. One must imagine the basic income as a trigger of social invention-power, as the basis for a finally less farcical ʻself-entrepreneurshipʼ. In the 1960s in Italy, Fordist workers in the large factories demanded ʻwage increases uncoupled from productivityʼ. I believe that objective to be the direct precursor to the basic income. In both cases, it is a case of bringing the existence of labourpower to an end. In the 1960s, one pursued this objective by infinitely inflating its cost, so as to make it ʻuneconomicʼ. Today, it is a case of bringing the existence of the labour-power commodity to an end by remunerating it even when it is considered, in interindividual terms, to be inactive. I understand the objections according to which the basic income is a neo-Keynesian blackmail. But I think they are mistaken because, as I said, they are judging an abstract objective, without considering whether or not it favours making what is true, in use. In addition, it seems to be that the objective of a guaranteed income has a positive materialist flavour. Think of the three watchwords of the French Revolution: Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité. Their foundation is Christian-bourgeois: one is ʻequalʼ before God as juridical subjects and in the exchange of commodities; one is ʻfreeʼ because oneʼs position is determined only by the objective economic mechanism (and not by a system of personal dependencies); and one is ʻfraternalʼ inasmuch as one belongs to the same nation. Instead, one has the right to a basic income because one is an experiential body that wants to experience the joys of living in an epoch in which working for a boss has become an unjustifiable and parasitic social cost. Contemporary living labour can become the heir of the entire materialist tradition. You also want to know what I mean by the ʻnon-state-run public sphereʼ (or, and it comes to the same thing, ʻnon-representational democracyʼ). I would like to premiss my remarks by saying that while the post-Fordist multitude continues to appear in the guise of the People, until it is able to invent political forms adequate to its modes of being (of producing, communicating and inhabiting the world), authoritarian political experiments will continue to multiply. Think of Italy. Berlusconi and the New Right recognize that representative democracy is empty, lacks any real bases, and they substitute it with the Business Party.20 In addition, in the absence of a new public sphere centred around the general intellect instead of the ʻsovereignʼ, the multitude itself can give off all sorts of poisons and destructive – even self-destructive – impulses. It can be in favour of war, it can be egotistic, cynical and corrupt. Having said that, I shall say what a non-state-run public sphere could be today. Social forums are certainly a good approximation. Differing capabilities converge in them: communicative, technical and professional capacities. Social forums exhibit a share of transindividual, productive cooperation and endeavour to convert it into political action. Sure, they canʼt do so yet. But they set a good precedent. The nonstate-run public sphere must progressively absorb the knowledges/powers that are, today, concentrated in the state administration – not in the parliaments but in the administrations. To reappropriate these knowledges/powers it will probably be necessary to attempt local experiments. A single city, a single neighbourhood, can take steps towards the invention of new political forms – although they will need to do so in tight contact with productive global forces that they try to concentrate in a single place. If these experiments move ahead sufficiently, they can become reproducible politically. In short, the question is not that of ʻtaking state powerʼ but to dissolve it, by revealing its likeness to a criminal gang: ferocious but marginal. I am aware that my attempt to specify the characteristics of the non-state-run public sphere is inadequate and clumsy. But so it should be. A subversive political theory must reveal an empty place that can be filled by practical action. Any political theory worthy of the name must await the unexpected. Translated by Matteo Mandarini

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Notes 1. Du mode dʼexistence des objets techniques, originally published by Aubier in 1958. 2. The principal thesis was entitled ʻLʼIndividuation à la lumière des notions de forme et dʼinformationʼ (Individuation in the Light of the Concepts of Form and Information). 3. LʼIndividu et sa genèse physico-biologique, Millon, 1995. 4. Gilbert Simondon, Une pensée de lʼindividuation et de la technique, Albin Michel, Paris, 1994. 5. Simondon et la philosophie de la culture technique, Deboeck, 1993. 6. Simondon: Individu et collectivité, PUF, Paris, 1999. 7. Gilbert Simondon, Une pensée opérative, Publications de lʼUniversité de Saint-Etienne. 8. This review can now be found in Gilles Deleuze, LʼIle déserte et autres textes, Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 2002, pp. 120–24. 9. Différence et répétition, PUF, Paris, 1969. 10. Logique du sens, Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1969. 11. Grammatica della moltitudine, Rubbettino, 2001; A Grammar of the Multitude, Semiotex[e], New York, 2004. 12. Lʼindividuazione psichica e collettiva, DeriveApprodi, Rome, 2001; Quando il verbo si fa carne: Linguaggio e natura umana, Bollati Boringhieri, 2003; ʻMoltitudine e principio di individuazioneʼ. 13. ʻLes Anges et le general intellect. LʼIndividuation chez Duns Scot et Gilbert Simondonʼ, Mulititudes 18, Autumn 2004, http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=1572&var_recherche=Virno. 14. Convenzione e materialismo, Theoria, Rome 1986. 15. ʻTechnical activity is distinct from simple labour …, in that technical activity not only involves the use of machines, but also a certain amount of attention to the technical functioning, maintenance, adjustment and improvement of the machine, attention which extends the activity of invention and construction.ʼ 16. This, for Simondon, is secondary to the Marxist question of the ʻownership of the means of productionʼ, which he considers to be only ʻone of the modalities of such alienationʼ, namely ʻeconomic alienationʼ. 17. A translation of this interview can be found at www.generation-online.org/fpvirno2.htm. [Trans.] 18. ʻElogio della reificazioneʼ. 19. Jun Fujita Hirose is actually refering to a passage from ʻVirtuosity and Revolutionʼ, in Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno, eds, Radical Thought in Italy, trans. Ed Emery, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996, p. 196. This was originally published in the journal Luogo commune 4, Spring 1993, and then reprinted in Paolo Virno, Mondanità, Manifestolibri, Rome, 1994. [Trans.] 20. ʻPartito-aziendaʼ or ʻBusiness Partyʼ is the term many on the Italian Left use to refer to Berlusconiʼs political party Forza Italia. That the value of Berlusconiʼs assets has risen hugely over the period of his government is not coincidental. [Trans.]

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REVIEWS

Rebellion, or, analysis Sara Beardsworth, Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity, State University of New York Press, New York, 2004. 309 pp., £44.50 hb., £15.25 pb., 0 7914 6189 0 hb., 0 7914 6190 4 pb. Tina Chanter and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, eds, Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristevaʼs Polis, State University of New York Press, New York, 2005. 217 pp. £40.81 hb., £13.50 pb., 0 7914 6567 5 hb., 0 7914 6568 3 pb. Cecilia Sjöholm, Kristeva and the Political, Routledge, London and New York, 2005. 157 pp., £60.00 hb., £17.95 pb., 0 415 21365 7 hb., 0 415 21366 5 pb. When, in 1973, the Bulgarian-born Julia Kristeva published her vast Revolution in Poetic Language, she had already been a highly significant figure on the Parisian scene for some years. Her earliest work had helped to make Bakhtinʼs dialogism and theory of the carnivalesque familiar to a French audience, whilst the closely related concept of intertextuality made a huge impact by demonstrating that a text is never a closed system but always an element in a fluctuating network of quotations, reference, allusions, and so on. Kristeva was on the board of the avantgarde literary-theoretical review Tel Quel (1960–1983), which, in the 1970s, published material by Derrida, Barthes, Sollers and Foucault and became the focus for some exciting (and often vicious) exchanges between literary-philosophical theorists and the political Left. She is now the author of, at a rough count, some thirty books and the secondary literature on her is constantly expanding. Kristevaʼs influence has been enormous, both in France and elsewhere, and has had an impact on everything from psychoanalysis to literary theory and gender studies, even though her relationship with feminism has always been both fraught and tenuous. As both Beardsworth and Sjöholm both note, not a few feminists (Coward, Butler, Delphy) have over the years bridled at her tendency to equate femininity with ʻnatureʼ, ʻmaternityʼ or, more recently, ʻintimacyʼ, whilst insisting that ʻwomanʼ is ʻthat which cannot be namedʼ. Kristeva has never been an easy figure to come to terms with, not least because she so rarely sets out to persuade: her usual mode of argument is assertion and she does not respond well to criticism. The Kristevan corpus is now so vast that any discussion of it probably has to be selective to some degree, and although Beardsworth and Sjöholm do cover a lot of material and do provide, almost in passing, admirable ʻintroductions to Kristevaʼ, the focus is mainly on the

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Radical Philosophy 136 (March/April 20 06)

work of the 1990s, or, in other words, on the studies of psychoanalysis and revolt. The net is cast slightly more widely by the ten distinguished contributors (all women and all but one working in American universities) to Revolt, Affect, Collectivity, which contains, inter alia, interesting reflections on Kristeva and Arendt from Noëlle McAfee and Peg Birmingham, on abjection from Tina Chanter, and on Kristeva and film theory from Frances L. Restuccia. None of the three books really discusses intertextuality or Bakhtin. Curiously, almost no attention is paid to Kristevaʼs ventures into fiction, and this silence remains unexplained. This is a pity, if only because it leaves unresolved one of the many intriguing paradoxes about Kristeva: as a theorist, she places enormous emphasis on the virtues of avant-gardism, but her work as a novelist could hardly be more traditional in terms of plot, style and genre. Nor is there much sustained discussion of the recent trilogy on the feminine genius (three volumes devoted to Klein, Arendt and Collette respectively), though Beardsworth is somewhat off the mark when she remarks that Kristeva has ʻturned to writing biographyʼ. The trilogy is based largely upon existing biographies (Phyllis Grosskurthʼs, in the case of Klein) and there is little evidence of primary biographical research. The dusty archives inhabited by biographers are clearly not Kristevaʼs natural habitat or spiritual home. Both Beardsworth and Sjöholm provide fine, and overlapping, descriptions of Kristevaʼs immense project. For the latter, it is ʻa systematic displacement of the political from the universal (or public) domain to the singular and intimate space of significationʼ; for the former, Kristeva elaborates a ʻphilosophy of cultureʼ rooted in the psychoanalytic view of subjectivity. It was not always so. Kristevaʼs first work was on linguistics and poetics. Revolution in Poetic Language then introduced characteristic themes which, although they have been modified, are still there. Psychoanalysis

becomes a central concern, though it would be another three years before the author qualified as a psychoanalyst. Lacan was of course the dominant figure in French psychoanalysis but, whilst she takes a lot from him, Kristeva rebels against him by challenging the central category of the symbolic (basically, the realm of language and exchange) and introducing the crucial dimension of the semiotic. The semiotic is described as a pre- or sub-symbolic-linguistic dimension revealed by primitive rhythms and primary processes expressive of an untrammelled desire and pleasure principle. Not ʻmeaningfulʼ in itself, the semiotic is a precondition for language and meaning. Closely associated with the feminine and the archaic maternal, the semiotic is also a source of danger: it is close to the psychotic. According to Kristeva, the semiotic can be tapped into by the practice of avant-garde writers (Mallarmé, Lautréamont), musicians and some painters (Jackson Pollock). Their fracturing and splintering of grammar and syntax reveal something that cannot be contained by the symbolic, but without which the symbolic cannot function. Modern poetics is described, perhaps rather romantically, as an ʻexperimental psychosisʼ. Although the semiotic tends to be equated with the feminine-maternal, Kristevaʼs avant-garde pantheon has always been predominantly male (the Duras discussed in Black Sun is a late addition to the pantheon and something of an exception). It is often argued that Kristevaʼs approach to gender must therefore be flexible (male writers adopting what might be termed a feminine position), but it is hard to escape the conclusion that a crude male–female dichotomy still lurks in the background. This formidable apparatus is brought to bear in order to demonstrate that political transformations must be accompanied by, or perhaps preceded by, a revolution at the level of subjectivity and meaning. The revolution must in other words also be textual. This was the basis for the textual experiments of Sollers and the Tel Quel group. Beardsworth claims that the textual-poetic revolution was analogous with actual revolution, but the analogy does not really hold. The historical period covered by Revolution in Poetic Language stretches roughly from the 1850s to the 1890s: this was a period of literary experimentation but not, after 1871, of mass political subversion. The repression of the Commune had seen to that. As Beardsworth indicates in her introduction, Kristevaʼs early methodology was both strangely flawed and surprisingly traditional: the application of a theory (psychoanalysis) was applied to the problem (the bourgeois world) in the belief that work (texts) would change the problem. This

is a very traditional articulation: psychoanalysis is to art as theory is to practice. And as Sjöholm, following earlier critiques of Sémiotiké (1969), demonstrates, Kristevaʼs arguments can be circular: that which she seeks to explain is presumed to exist by the theory that supposedly explains its emergence. Sjöholm quite rightly notes that there is something very disquieting about Kristevaʼs continued failure to condemn the Chinese Cultural Revolution for the bloodbath that it was, and to accept that it had nothing to do with any textual practice, but Sjöholm, Beardsworth and Brandt (in her interesting contribution to Revolt, Affect, Collectivity) tend, if anything, to be overindulgent towards the Maoism of Kristeva and Tel Quel in the early 1970s. They also take it rather too seriously. As a lot of observers were all too aware at the time, there was always something almost comic about revolutionary manifestos issued by wealthy individuals operating out of a publisherʼs office in the rue Jacob. The revolution and the ensuing revolutionary terror were always going to be textual. There are few criticisms to be made of any of these texts at the level of exposition: the clarity (and the patience) is outstanding. It will be a long time before these accounts of the later Kristeva are bettered. If there is a problem it is surely that the authors and the contributors to Revolt, Affect, Collectivity tend, like their subject, to present Kristevaʼs work as self-generating, self-sustaining and self-contained. A number of basic questions are tacitly ignored and some awkward remarks are overlooked. The most obvious questions are, ʻWhy psychoanalysis?ʼ and ʻWhich psychoanalysis?ʼ Kristeva often seems, especially in her later work, to operate with a pure drive theory, supplemented by her own concept of the semiotic. Very few psychoanalysts do this. The psychoanalytic notion of the ʻarchaicʼ is slippery, especially when articulated with that of ʻdriveʼ. A drive (Trieb, pulsion, but unfortunately rendered as ʻinstinctʼ in standard translations of Freud) refers to a dynamic process in which pressure directs the organism towards an aim (satisfaction and the reduction of tension). The drives are normally conceived in dualistic terms: sexual, self-preservation or, in later formulations, sexual (life) and death drives. Enormous emphasis is placed by Kristeva on the death drive, seen not in Freudian terms as an urge to revert to an organic state of inertia, but in neoKleinian terms as the privileged mode of expression of something archaic, indestructible and immortal. For Klein, this drive originates in the angry frustration of the pre-linguistic infant. For Kristeva, it appears to

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be an innate expression of the semiotic. Given their importance in Freudʼs metapsychology, drives are surprisingly difficult to define or locate. They are said to operate at the frontier between psyche and soma, which is also the realm of Kristevaʼs semiotic. Freud initially described the drives in quasi-metaphorical terms derived from hydraulics and thermodynamics, but later refers to them (in the New Introductory Lectures) as ʻmythical entities, magnificent in their indeterminatenessʼ, which does little to clarify their status. A similar indeterminacy surrounds the notion of the ʻarchaicʼ, usually used by Kleinians to refer to the ʻprimitiveʼ emotions of the infant. At times, Freud uses the term in that sense, but he also uses it to designate mythological or quasi-historic events when he speculates that ontogenesis is a recapitulation of phylogenesis. The classic Freudian example of primitive emotion is the guilty pleasure felt by the brother-sons after their murder of the father in Totem and Taboo. The fluctuating meanings of ʻdriveʼ, ʻarchaicʼ and related notions go some way to explaining Kristevaʼs characteristic exploration of a timescale that is so immense as to be almost cosmic. The exploration of otherness in Strangers to Ourselves involves long excursions into the Greeksʼ treatment of foreigners and into biblical studies. In her examinations of the origins of ʻthe politicalʼ (but not politics), Kristeva turns to mythology and foundation myths in which ʻthe socialʼ is founded upon the violent exclusion of the scapegoat, and from there into theories of the sacred. She goes in search of what René Girard calls ʻthings forgotten since the foundation of the worldʼ. The ambiguities here are legion. Is the murder of the father a myth, a matter for speculation or an underlying historical reality? Is the archaic, devouring mother a childhood fantasy (as it tends to be in Klein) or a real figure from the depths of time? Kristeva sometimes appears to be indulging in a speculative comparative study of mythologies. Her etymological forays into the ʻoriginalʼ or ʻprimalʼ sense of words are, like those of Heidegger and Derrida, equally ambiguous. These are the things that the structuralist revolution, with its emphasis on synchronic systematicity, was against. Revolution in Poetic Language was a call to arms. Over the twenty-three years that divide it from The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, the emphasis shifted towards an analysis of structures of subjectivity, and the analysis of literary works and paintings

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became surprisingly conventional. Although Kristeva introduces major concepts – notably abjection – her approach to textual analysis betrays many of the classic flaws of so much psychoanalytic criticism: the text is there simply to exemplify and confirm the theory. The landscape described by Kristeva from 1996 onwards is more politicized, but it is also quite familiar: we live in a disenchanted world dominated by the society of the spectacle and by industries that churn out a robotic ʻcultureʼ. The avant-gardes have been co-opted or recuperated (shades of Marcuse here) and it is true that the surrealists and the situationists have ended up in the museums and galleries. Revolt, seen as a psychic necessity, appears to have become impossible. This is an age of Nietzschean nihilism. Beardsworth in particular provides a vivid account of post-Nietzschean

nihilism: not so such ʻbelief in nothingʼ as the impossibility of believing in anything after the collapse of all values and authority. In psychoanalytic terms, even Lacanʼs symbolic father proves to be a hollow idol with feet of clay. Kristevaʼs proposed antidote is what she terms ʻrevolt cultureʼ. From the 1980s onwards, Kristeva argues that the pathologies of modernity (including nihilism) are forms of resistance against the dominant discourse. Psychoanalysis is privileged because it is at once a symptom of modernity and the key to its understanding. Once more, the avant-garde (Mallarmé, Artaud, Bataille, Céline, Proust) is invoked as the bringer of revolt but there is no call for textual-political revolution. Revolt is now described as ʻintimateʼ: intimacy is that which is most profound and singular within us, and this alone can provide the basis for a revolt that will promote new forms of intersubjectivity grounded in love. Intimacy will, it is claimed by Kristeva in Intimate Revolt, show the psyche the road to ʻinfinite recreationʼ (une infinie recréation). It is

probably no accident that LʼInfini is the title of the successor to Tel Quel. Revolt culture appears to be grounded in a culture of great literacy and sophistication. It may well be the case that listening to, say, Berg, is still, as Adorno might have argued, a good antidote to commodified music, but those who do not have access to Kristevaʼs ʻrevolt cultureʼ appear to be doomed. In Sense and Non-Sense, it is explicitly stated that, when they have no access to it, the ʻexcluded (so broadly defined as to include unemployed youth, the suburbs, the homeless, the unemployed and foreigners) must content themselves with ʻretrograde ideologiesʼ (and not least religious fundamentalisms) and tend to become casseurs (ʻwreckersʼ, ʻriotersʼ). There is, it would appear, little or no hope for the wretched of the earth. Casseurs is a very loaded word. The loi anti-casseurs adopted in 1970 (and abrogated twelve years later by Mitterrand) introduced, on rather dubious legal grounds, the notion of collective responsibility (and, by implication, punishment) for all acts of violence committed during demonstrations. It was directed primarily against the Maoists of the day. They were supposedly Tel Quelʼs comrades, though the journalʼs brand of Maoism rarely involved anything but verbal violence. Kristeva has indeed come a long way. The thesis that, because it works at the juncture of psyche and soma and on the most basic processes of signification, psychoanalysis provides a basis for revolt becomes rather less credible if one glances at the actual pronouncements of the psychoanalysts who so often voice their opinions in the pages of Le Monde and elsewhere. Few of them have had anything positive or helpful to say about the sexual abuse of children, adoption, same-sex partnerships or violence against women. Many of them fear the ʻfeminizationʼ of society and fret about the creation of a society of siblings in which there will be no parental authority. Few French psychoanalysts, and certainly no Lacanians, display any interest in the neurosciences and many tend to dismiss them on the grounds that they are behaviourist (and, of course, American). Kristeva does not appear to be the happy exception to the rule. Passages in New Maladies of the Soul do indicate that she takes a more tolerant view of drug therapies than many of her colleagues, but she also reverts to the stark choice between ʻspeech and pillsʼ. It is probably not true that the antidepressants we consume in such vast quantities ʻcureʼ clinical depression, but they do allow sufferers to function. Like the Lacan who was nostalgic for the great hysterics of old, Kristeva seems almost disappointed that her

patients do not present with the classic psychoanalytic symptoms. She is of course right. We do not seek out analysts and therapists because we display the symptoms of conversion hysteria. We do so because we have problems with our relationships, with our children and with our work, or simply because we are depressed. The clinical implications of the semiotic or abjection have never been spelled out by Kristeva herself, and they are not spelled out by any of the texts under discussion here. Similar caveats must surely apply at the political level, where the gap between grand theory and what used to be called the concrete analysis of concrete situations yawns even wider. Most of Kristevaʼs work is at the level of ʻthe politicalʼ. This proves to be a realm in which there is no state, no classes and, above all, no economy, but when she does address immediate political issues, some disturbing features emerge. This is no doubt because, like most of those associated with Tel Quel, she has followed the familiar path that leads from verbal Maoism to verbal support for Giscard dʼEstaing and now Chirac, via some positively embarrassing eulogies to de Gaulle. The anti-Gaullist slogans of May ʼ68, which Kristeva chanted along with everyone else, are now described as ʻrabid and patricidalʼ. So far, so banal. Yet some of Kristevaʼs remarks are almost alarming. It is, for instance, quite unclear whether the ʻforeign otherʼ of Strangers to Ourselves is a foreign national or a ʻracialʼ other, but the fact that the first signifiers of his or her difference are ʻeyes, lips, cheekbones and skinsʼ strongly suggest the latter. This is dangerously close to the terminology of the teacher who describes the non-white children in her class as ʻforeignʼ. In her ʻOpen Letter to Harlem Désirʼ of 1990 (Désir was the charismatic frontman for the ʻSOS racismeʼ group; it was a sad surprise to learn that it is not his real name), Kristeva suggests that relations between ʻimmigrantsʼ and ʻhostsʼ should be based upon a reciprocity of recognition, and the notion of a polyphonic nation is indeed attractive. She then goes on to suggest that ʻimmigrant populationsʼ should be asked why they have chosen the ʻFrench community and historical memoryʼ as their host country. Many North African ʻimmigrantsʼ would be perfectly entitled to reply, ʻBecause a government employment agency recruited my father from his village in Algeria, and I have French nationality anyway.ʼ Thousands of black ʻimmigrantsʼ could, like Fanon and Césaire (writing in the 1950s), reply ʻIʼm from Martinique, which is, or so I have been told, an integral part of the French Republic.ʼ This is not an individual failing or damning evidence of commonplace racism, but it does suggest

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that Kristeva cannot escape the confusion that surrounds the entire French debate about citizenship and nationality. All too often, it is forgotten by politicians, journalists and cultural critics alike that in many cases the offensive ʻMuslim woman in a headscarfʼ is, and has from birth been, a French citizen. Very few of the defenders of ʻRepublican valuesʼ point out or even remember that the Third Republic – which, between the 1880s and the final separation of church and state in 1905, made secularism the central national value and constructed a republic that recognizes equal citizens but not women, Jews, ethnic minorities, and subsumes

particularisms under an abstract universalism – was also a regime that assumed the right, or even the duty, to conquer and colonize the ʻinferior racesʼ of northern and sub-Saharan Africa in the name of its self-defined civilizing mission. The school textbooks published by the universal republic abounded in racist stereotypes. French republican discourse is now struggling, and apparently failing, to deal with a problem with the ʻotherʼ that was there from the beginning. Revolt culture does not seem to offer much of a solution. David Macey

Critique of pure politics Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, Verso, London and New York, 2005. xii + 276 pp., £26.00 hb., 1 85984 651 3 hb. On Populist Reason reveals a fundamental fact about Ernesto Laclauʼs research programme to which many, including the editors of the recently published Laclau: A Critical Reader (Routledge, 2004), remain blind: that populism, as both concept and historical experience, constitutes the centre of gravity of his work as a whole. Laclauʼs contributions to the reconfiguration of Gramsciʼs concept of hegemony and his account of radical democracy (co-authored with Chantal Mouffe) are unthinkable without his historical experience of populism in Argentina and his subsequent attempts first to conceptualize it and then to generalize its logic to politics as a whole. Hegemony, or, better, what we might call a performative principle of hegemonization, is the mechanism of this generalization. Populism also underlies Laclauʼs more recent philosophical meditations on ʻuniversalityʼ and his forays into postMarxist critical thought. This is Laclauʼs intellectual project: the translation of ʻpopulismʼ into ʻpoliticsʼ via ʻhegemonyʼ. On Populist Reason is a summary of this project so far. On Populist Reason restages the critical account of populism Laclau first rehearsed almost thirty years ago in Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977) – a stunning work in 1970sʼ Althusserianism. Populism was characterized there as a ʻsynthetic-antagonistic complex with respect to the dominant ideologyʼ. Laclauʼs theoretical language may have shifted, as has his view of the kind of object populism is (no longer a mere ideology, but a discursive practice, confusingly conceived as ʻmaterialʼ because constitutive), but it is clear that what is involved is a theoretical development rather than a complete change in perspective.

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Antagonism remains fundamental. It is ʻthe foundation of an internal frontier separating the “people” from powerʼ, he writes in On Populist Reason. Synthesis, or the production of the ʻpeopleʼ – ʻan equivalential articulation of demandsʼ – is equally so. This is the ʻhegemonyʼ side of populism, which first emerged in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. It is in thinking ʻarticulationʼ that the development in Laclauʼs thought is most visible: from an original critical engagement within Marxism to its rapid abandonment. In Reading Capital Althusser presents the notion of articulation as the theoretical means through which what ʻmakes the whole a wholeʼ may be thought – synchronically and structurally, rather than dialectically. It accounts for the relations established between instances of the social that are defined by their relative autonomy, for which ʻregional theoriesʼ might be devised to determine their specific logics. Laclau attempts such an account of the politico-ideological superstructures in Politics and Ideology, where he asks, ʻwhat does the form of an ideology consist of?ʼ Not in the class-ʻbelongingʼ or literal contents of an ideological discourse, he maintains, but in ʻthe principle of articulation of its constituent interpellationsʼ. Nationalist ideology, or the popular interpellations Laclau analyses in his original accounts of fascism and populism (which are fundamental to any successful socialist movement), cannot be derived from class position or ʻthe economicʼ (that is, as an expression of the contradiction between forces and relations of production). The traces of this early Althusserianism are still visible in On Populist Reason, especially in its stubborn anti-Hegelianism. In its account of populist

hegemonization, for example, it argues for a political dynamics of ʻpartial objectsʼ (or particularities) that refuse dialectical subsumption (universality). Articulation remains fundamental here as a means for thinking totalities, although these are now understood to be purely contingent and always incomplete. It is from Althusserʼs attempts to escape the spectre of economic determinism and to develop the theoretical consequences of the idea of overdetermination for history that Laclauʼs own theoretical and political concerns emerge. These trace the parameters of what will become his later post-Marxism, and they generate problems about the prolongation of conjunctures into histories that are more than diachronic series, that involve change rather than a mere succession of states of affairs. In this respect, Laclauʼs deployment of the idea of articulation furnishes the theoretical content of his formalism. To underline the relative character of the autonomy of superstructural instances (as well as his commitment at the time to a Marxist science of history), in Politics and Ideology Laclau resorted to the idea of a ʻdouble articulationʼ in which the non-class or ʻpopularʼ aspect of a social formationʼs relations of domination is brought into a definite but overdetermined relation with class and the relations of production, without being derived from them. Here, class struggle is carried out on the terrain – and in the ideological medium – of the relations of domination, characterized by a ʻstate–peopleʼ opposition. On the one hand, the idea of a double articulation theoretically secured the presence of ʻeconomicʼ determination in the understanding of politics and ideology, whilst, on the other, reconfiguring the modalities of its effects, This is what disappears in Laclauʼs subsequent analyses in which class becomes just one more element among a multiplicity of elements to be given form through political articulation. Relations of production are subordinated to relations of domination: class contradiction is subordinated to contingently produced political antagonisms. The notion of articulation is thus Janus-faced. It is central to Laclauʼs formalist accounts of populism and fascism, as well as to the related theoretical attempt to overcome economic determination ʻin the last instanceʼ and so endow politico-ideological practices – particularly hegemony – with a substance of their own qua the production of subjects of social transformation. This ideologism was subsequently deployed by many on the Left in the UK to account for a Thatcherism misconceived as an example of ʻauthoritarian populismʼ. In Politics and Ideology, Laclau already suggested that the famous ʻpeculiarity

of the Englishʼ – that is, the power of the landowning aristocracy within British capitalism – reveals the ideological power of the bourgeoisie rather then its economic weakness. Similarly, from this perspective, the rise of fascism is symptomatic not only of a crisis of bourgeois hegemony in the transition to monopoly capitalism, but also of the capacity of the institutions of the working class to generate popular, democratic and national interpellations. The inadequacies of the Communist movementʼs reductionist analysis of fascism, especially in its Third Period, stands in sharp contrast to Laclauʼs own experience of the articulatory power of Peronism in Argentina from the 1940s and 1970s – as described in both Politics and Ideology and On Populist Reason – and the emergence from within it of a powerful left-wing movement. In such cases, articulation (the synthesis or ʻcondensationʼ of interpellations), and not reduction, is the key to understanding the formation of new power blocs. Articulation is what comes to define political practice for Laclau, and it is because of the absence of such considerations that in On Populist Reason he charges Hardt and Negriʼs conceptualization of the ʻmultitudeʼ as paradoxically lacking in politics. It is too religious. By way of a reply, however, Hardt and Negri would insist on ʻexodusʼ, arguing that the articulatory politics of hegemonization championed by Laclau is a sovereign and thus a statist one. Thinking political ʻexceptionʼ against the grain – that is, as normal – has been crucial to Laclauʼs reflections on fascism and Peronism, to his conception of politics, and to the questions he has posed to Marxist orthodoxy. These questions have their origins within the Marxist tradition, specifically in the political Marxism inaugurated by Gramsciʼs reflections on the politico-cultural significance of the Bolshevik Revolution (a revolution ʻagainst Capitalʼ), on the one hand, and the emergence of fascism in Italy (the ʻnational questionʼ), on the other. What these historical processes have in common is the perceived effects of uneven development, one of which is crucial: the historical tasks conventionally attributed to the bourgeoisie in historicist Marxism (for example, nationbuilding and democratization) may be taken over by another class (ʻpermanent revolutionʼ). Once again this exemplifies the non-class belonging of particular ideologies. This experience is the crucible of Gramsciʼs concept of hegemony – as well as related notions such as the differences between ʻwar of positionʼ and ʻwar of manoeuvreʼ – whose anti-reductionist genealogy Laclau and Mouffe traced in Hegemony and Socialist Practice. It is also the historical source of criticisms

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of Laclauʼs appropriation of Gramsci: he privileges the production of political subjectivities over social institutions in his uses of ʻhegemonyʼ. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is the text in which Laclau took his leave of Marxism – into ʻpost-Marxismʼ – through the door opened up by ʻhegemonyʼ. It is the work in which class loses its privileged articulatory power and the work of ideology is materialized as ʻdiscourseʼ (that is, as a materialism of the subject). Finally, it is the place in which Laclau and Mouffe upend economic determination of the social to argue instead for its political – that is, hegemonic – institution. On Populist Reason continues in this vein. It poses important questions in its criticisms of Marxism: for example, concerning its Eurocentric and productivist positing of a privileged subject of emancipation and all that such conceptions exclude. Yet it fails to provide historical answers to these questions, answers that would move beyond the continuous present of a diachronic or serial conjuncturalism grounded, by and large, in linguistic structure: metaphor and metonymy. Like the early essay ʻTowards a Theory of Populismʼ, in Politics and Ideology, On Populist Reason begins with an account of the inadequacies of existing theories. For most of these populism represents a form of political irrationalism or exception, whilst the term itself is generally considered fuzzy and inoperable because its field of reference is so wide as to defy clear definition. But not only is there reason and a logic to populism, according to Laclau (a ʻlogic of equivalenceʼ grounded in antagonism), its very lack of determinate content is crucial to its identity. Laclauʼs approach is both rigorously formalist and performative: as it crystallizes into particular forms, populism is resistant to pregiven conceptual determinations. It is as such that it is understood as exemplary for a non-reductionist thinking of politics in general. Why is ʻpopulismʼ so apparently indeterminate a concept? Laclauʼs answer is: because it describes a process of hegemonization in which particular ʻclaimsʼ (demands which have been rejected by the state and thus reformulated via antagonism) are fused into an oppositional unity across social sectors (ʻtotalized through equivalenceʼ) without losing their particularity. The populist subject is, therefore, not only always already dislocated – and thus also ʻopenʼ, like all subjects for Laclau – it is also defined by multiplicity. But this means that it is always threatened from within by the particularities that are contained within its synthesis. ʻCorporateʼ particularity remains untouched by the universalizing tendency of populist totalization.

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It is the fusion of demands reproduced through antagonism and equivalence that constitutes the performative dimension of populism for Laclau, whilst his formalism is evident in the ʻarticulatedʼ subject (or ʻidentityʼ) that results, rather than in the literal or social contents of the claims. In other words, as long as they are antagonistic to the state (and thus ʻdemocraticʼ, suggests Laclau), producing a potential ʻpopularʼ subject in their fusion, these claims could in principle contain any demand whatsoever, including, of course, fascist ones. Laclau thus brings On Populist Reason to a close by insisting that ʻwe can only begin to understand Fascism if we see it as one of the possibilities inherent to contemporary societies.ʼ This warning is yet another instalment of Laclauʼs polemic with the Communist movementʼs inability adequately to analyse – and thus to confront – both fascism and populist movements such as Peronism. He suggests that it is still in thrall to ʻemotionally charged fetishesʼ which cloud its judgement, such as ʻclass struggleʼ and ʻdetermination in the last instance by the economyʼ. Laclauʼs criticism in On Populist Reason of Žižekʼs Hegelian politics is devastating in this respect: in his dismissal of all ʻ“partial” struggles … Žižek cannot provide any theory of the emancipatory subject.… One is left wondering whether he is anticipating an invasion of beings from another planet.ʼ In an otherwise uncharacteristic moment of enlightened self-fashioning, Laclau at this point evokes an ideal of ʻobstinate rigourʼ in thought, which it is clear he thinks a ʻfaintheartedʼ Left has failed to live up to. The performative dimension of populism is certainly a historically important one: the figure of Eva Perón in Argentina or the fascist aestheticization of the political come immediately to mind. Yet Laclau has very little sense of the importance of cultural form for political movements. Rather, in his view, performance ties populism directly to affect. This is where psychoanalysis enters into Laclauʼs account: no longer in the top-down form of interpellation but now through cathectic investment, binding subjects driven by ʻdemandʼ (political desire) to an ʻobjet petit aʼ (Lacanʼs ʻlittle otherʼ or ʻbit of the Realʼ located, as maternal principle, within the Symbolic Order). This ʻsurface of inscriptionʼ stands in here politically for a kind of reconciliation in common that looks beyond the multiple particularities gathered in equivalence – very much like little utopias (although, following Joan Copjec, Laclau himself refers to the ʻbreast value of the milkʼ) – as well as for a popular identity, ʻthe peopleʼ, that represents and totalizes the equivalential chain of demands as a whole. This is the work of what Laclau calls an

ʻempty signifierʼ (in contrast to ʻfloating signifiersʼ, which emerge when the internal frontiers of social antagonisms shift, producing competing struggles for hegemony). Empty signifiers, Laclau insists, can never be conceptualized, or read off from pregiven political or historical contents, but are embodied and ʻnamedʼ retrospectively. This performative aspect of populism is an attempt to account for its Jacobin enthusiasms and its affective contents, which are the ontological ground of politics for Laclau – the result of a ʻdemocratizingʼ appropriation of Freudʼs various attempts to analyse the constitutive tie between leader and social group. In Laclauʼs populist version, the former is no longer the authoritarian Father but just another brother, one among equals, and, as a model for thinking the hegemony of one equivalential claim among others, it is the means through which populist political identity is produced. In Laclauʼs new analysis, the ʻpopularʼ form is thus full of desire, a desire that defies reason. Yet surely such affect is always already mediated, either by cultural form – in the sense that, for example, Eva Perón makes of the Peronist state a melodramatic media event – or by the rationality that the formulation of particular claims – as rejected demands – requires for their totalization. Similarly, it is never made clear why the subject so produced is a ʻpopularʼ one – that is, a ʻpeopleʼ. Why this ʻnameʼ? Hegemony and Socialist Strategy offered a ʻgenealogyʼ of the idea of hegemony; On Populist Reason is marked by the absence of a history of ʻthe peopleʼ – of the kind

hinted at by Agamben in Homo Sacer in which, over a couple of brief pages, he sketches the historical difference between a ʻsovereign peopleʼ and a people biopolitically conceived. At this psychoanalytic point, Laclauʼs argument begins to wear a bit thin. It relies too heavily on a legitimating critique of economic reductionism. Having proclaimed (contra Žižek) the incompatibility of Hegel and Lacan, Laclau hails a moment of identity in the work of Gramsci and Lacan: The logic of the I and the hegemonic logic are not just similar: they are simply identical. This is why, within the Marxist tradition, the Gramscian moment represents such a crucial epistemological break: while Marxism had traditionally had the dream of access to a systematically closed totality (determination in the last instance by the economy, etc.), the hegemonic approach breaks decisively with that essentialist social logic. The only possible totalizing horizon is given by a partiality (the hegemonic force) which assumes the representation of a mythical totality. In Lacanian terms: an object is elevated to the dignity of the Thing.

The formalist principle of articulation between autonomous domains breaks down here in performance, and an identity is posited between libidinal economy and political formation, in which Gramsciʼs theoretical invention is reduced to Lacanʼs proto-science. The rejection of an oversimplified reductionist ʻdreamʼ provides the cover for a new reductionism of Laclauʼs own making. John Kraniauskas

Nowhere ahead? Matthew Beaumont, Utopia Ltd: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870–1900, Brill, Leiden and Boston, 2005. 214 pp., £39.72 hb., 90 04 14296 7. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, Verso, London, 2005. xvi + 431 pp., £20.00 hb., 1 84467 033 3. ʻSo admirably had the revolution been organised that, by noon, London was entirely in the hands of the social democratic party.ʼ Matthew Beaumont quotes this sentence from Looking Ahead!, an anti-utopian novel of 1892, whose conservative author here conjures up a scene many on the Left have liked to imagine. The utopian idea of a moment of transition, at which a new era will be definitively inaugurated, seems central to the socialist political imaginary. Whether or not socialism took over old utopian (and millenarian) dreams, some have argued that its

advent made them superfluous. Marxʼs disapproval of speculations about post-capitalist society is well known: Beaumont quotes a letter of the 1870s in which Marx disparages German workers for ʻplaying with fancy pictures of the future structure of societyʼ. Fredric Jameson, drawing a Coleridgean distinction, claims that socialismʼs advent ʻdramatically simplifiedʼ the task of cultural imagination in projecting new worlds. Once capitalism was recognized as a systemic whole dominating the historical epoch, ʻits one great alternative – socialism – … also emigrated from the

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world of utopian fantasy to that of practical politicsʼ. The socialist framework of the transformed society was from now on ʻposited in advanceʼ, leaving the projectorʼs fancy with the ʻextraordinarily complexʼ but secondary role of elaborating the shape and tenor of daily life there. Jameson seems to be invoking, behind Coleridgeʼs imagination and fancy, the Marxist distinction between base and superstructure, with the implication that law, politics and culture are subsidiary spheres. Many socialists, however, have regarded the extension of civic and political freedoms and the promotion of cultural self-development as integral to the socialist project. Most would agree that the governments and parties that claimed to practise something like socialism in post-World War II Europe – Communist in the Soviet sphere, social-democratic in the West – never fulfilled the great hopes placed in the socialist idea: an idea invoked here not as historically instantiated ʻpractical politicsʼ, but as a regulative ideal or utopian horizon. How but in envisaging a future world (whether by imagination or by fancy, and in defiance of Marxʼs veto) can we give content and meaning to a notion of true socialism which effectively defines it as being still unrealized? The question remains, however, as to whether the utopian genre, and the assumptions it is based on, are valuable or pernicious in the kinds of vision they encourage. Both books touch on these large questions of utopiaʼs relation to a practical politics of the Left, and suggest they are posed anew by globalization and resistance to it. The ʻnew forms of political agencyʼ that can be expected to arise against the seemingly all-encompassing reach of capital are not yet in place (writes Jameson in his Introduction), and in this hiatus we need utopian thought for its attempts to ʻconceive alternate systemsʼ and because ʻUtopian form is itself a representational meditation on radical differenceʼ. Only a renewal of the fading utopian impulse can preserve us, he later says, from falling into ʻthe helpless position of passive accomplices and impotent hand-wringersʼ. These pro-utopian claims are by no means self-evident; but their directly political address is welcome. The theme certainly invites a more public and engaged kind of argument than specialist cultural-historical research can usually aspire to. However, neither book attempts a systematic discussion of utopianismʼs legacy for contemporary left politics. Beaumontʼs reflections, published in a series entitled ʻHistorical Materialismʼ, are confined to the period indicated by his subtitle. He argues that late Victorian literary utopianism was generated by ʻmani-

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fest historical tensions between dominant and emergent class formsʼ, and characterizes most utopian authors as ʻreform-minded intellectualsʼ whose work, offering an imaginary ʻsolution to the social contradictions they encounter[ed]ʼ, was ʻthe perfect expression of the pettybourgeois reformistʼs political consciousnessʼ. This applies especially to state-socialist utopias, of which Edward Bellamyʼs very successful Looking Backward (1888) is the best known, not least because it prompted William Morrisʼs riposte, News from Nowhere (1891). Beaumont turns then to feminist utopias, taking as the ʻmost compelling and comprehensive exampleʼ of the genre Amazonia, by Elizabeth Corbett (1889). Amazonia is inaugurated following the settlement of Ireland by selected morally and physically superior Englishwomen: Beaumontʼs summary makes clear that this is explicitly conceived as a remedy for Irelandʼs unruly state, which threatened the Empire. This is ʻa eugenicist fantasy as well as a feminist oneʼ, Beaumont notes, built on a ʻdilapidated essentialist conception of racial and sexual identitiesʼ. Jameson points out that the genre often posits, as in Moreʼs original Utopia, an inaugural moment of quasi-colonial settlement. Beaumont might have paused to reflect on the generic licence that allowed Corbett to turn Ireland, on the eve of a decisive phase in its anti-colonial struggle, into Amazonia. Trollopeʼs The Landleaguers (1884) is a conservative work largely motivated by hostility to the Irish agrarian movement, but the disciplines of literary realism would always have secured a novelist like Trollope against imagining Corbettʼs absurd neo-Plantation. Jameson and Beaumont show how utopian writing opens up the historical field to radical reconfiguring (ʻanamorphosisʼ, form made readable by optical transposition, is Beaumontʼs figure for this); but the genre also readily accommodates historical stupidity. It is a frustrating limitation of both books that neither author offers sustained critical discussion of the relations between utopian and futuristic fictions and their realist and modernist antitypes. Jamesonʼs asides about the ʻmodernist readerʼ are no more than provocations, and his claim that both modernism and realism are ʻexhaustedʼ (in the reprinted essay ʻFear and Loathing in Globalizationʼ) is stated rather than argued. Beaumont turns from Amazonia to anti-communist ʻcacotopiaʼ (Greek: kakos, ʻbadʼ). This flourished in England after the Paris Commune of 1870, and Looking Ahead! was one of several novels in which insurrection was imagined to have crossed the Channel. His final chapter is on News from Nowhere, which he distinguishes from other utopias of the period by the

fact that Morris conceives the present historically. The novel is laid open to Benjaminʼs messianic ʻtime of the nowʼ by the character of Guest, the time-travelling protagonist from the late Victorian present. ʻGuest is a ghostʼ, who haunts both the utopian future and ʻold Londonʼ, to which he must eventually return and where his vision, or dream, must inspire everyday political action. This Benjaminian criterion usefully draws a qualitative distinction, and works both formally and politically. Marge Piercyʼs Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), which provides the quotation rounding off Jamesonʼs ʻThe Desire Called Utopiaʼ, also has a structure in which present-day human actions determine whether the utopian future will ever come to pass. It is odd that Jameson devotes far more space to Ursula Le Guin than to Piercy, when the latterʼs work seems more directly and interestingly related to the politics of eco-

logical and feminist activism. Beaumontʼs silence on the conservative ideas of gender entailed by Morrisʼs medieval-ruralist utopianism is odd too. It strengthens oneʼs impression that Beaumont has exempted Morris from full critical-historical contextualization, and is himself nostalgic for the imaginary possibilities of late-Victorian socialist utopianism, even though he acknowledges that the ʻobjective conditionsʼ for social revolution were lacking. Archaeologies of the Future, tied to no particular historical ʻconditionsʼ, ranges very widely over the utopian landscape. It is a snip at £20: you get, what-

ever else, a bibliographical-thematic treasure trove, an anthology of utopian visions, positions and critiques, with Jamesonʼs own voice counterpointed by many others – Ernst Bloch (several of the most thoughtful quotations are from his The Principle of Hope, 1959); Brecht; B.F. Skinner; Le Guin… Part Two includes a short, previously unpublished tribute to Philip K. Dick, plus eleven essays that originally appeared between 1973 and 2003. ʻProgress versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future?ʼ is particularly interesting, and covers ground that Jameson skates over rather too lightly in Part One. (Other essays on utopia by Jameson, not included here, are in The Seeds of Time, 1994, and New Left Review II 25, 2004.) Alongside the reprinted pieces are 235 pages of almost entirely new material. These make up the bookʼs first part, ʻThe Desire Called Utopiaʼ, on which I focus here. Given Jamesonʼs long-standing engagement with utopianism, one approaches this extended essay hoping for a carefully framed definitive argument. What one gets is provoking, in good and bad senses, but in the end exasperatingly digressive. The presentation is not chronological, and there is no clear thematic ordering. As Jameson turns at will to the broadest conceptual and temporal horizons of his topic, the trees of history often disappear in the forest of the longue durée. He throws out too many asides designed more to stimulate than to illuminate. For example, apropos of Skinnerian behaviourism we are told ʻwe may well argue that programming is the very essence of childhood pedagogy and formationʼ; we may well argue, however, that a pedagogy quite distinct from ʻprogrammingʼ is both possible and desirable, and has even been practised, this side of utopia. As one reads, the underlying drift becomes perceptible. It is typified by a passage in Chapter 12 where Jameson posits ʻthe familyʼ as a common topos of Aristotelian political theory, of Jane Austenʼs middleclass novels, and of nineteenth- and twentieth-century utopian fiction. This seems like a provoking conflation of social forms that have little in common. But the essential point is that, despite change, we remain stuck with reproductive arrangements rooted in affective individualism. Jameson quotes Gideʼs Familles, je vous hais (ʻFamilies, I hate youʼ), implying that this is the properly utopian slogan. Some kind of family, alas, persists, but utopia persists in opposing to it some unrealizable alternative: ʻIt is as though Utopian form itself … repeated Gideʼs famous cry … a cry of impotence, rather than the declaration of a war that could be won.ʼ What many would call progress – the greatly more complex kinds of intimacy and

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affiliation that surround growing children today – is here counterposed, as its mere opposite, to unrealized utopian ʻdifferenceʼ. Presumably Jameson intends as a compliment his claim that ʻmodern feminism is only the latest Utopian effort to bypass the bourgeois family in the direction of group marriage or single-gender systemsʼ: feminism (and queer politics, though this is not mentioned) getting credit not for cultural and legal changes that have happened, but for a libidinal revolution that still lies over the horizon. This same utopian option for ʻradical differenceʼ is the connecting thread between disparate statements (or refusals) of value. Noting that it ʻwould not seem particularly necessary, after Nietzsche, to argue [the] regressivenessʼ of ethics, Jameson nonetheless takes the trouble to dismiss them in a short paragraph, reminding us that Freud thought the ʻopposition between heroes and villainsʼ betrayed an ʻinfantile spiritʼ – as if Freud, or anyone, thought that ethical discrimination depended on that kind of fantastic binary. Discussing utopian figures derived from ʻthe life-world of the peasantry, of growth and nature, cultivation and the seasonsʼ, he suggests that these live on in ʻthe industrial or post-industrial era only in the mocking remnant of “birth, copulation and death”ʼ: a rather opaque formulation, awakening a suspicion – half-confirmed by other passing comments – that Jameson thinks we are already in a ʻposthumanʼ world where ʻgrowth and natureʼ should have stopped mattering. Along, perhaps, with ethics and pedagogy. The same commitment to ʻdifferenceʼ, the same reluctance to entangle utopian projection in history and immanence, perhaps determine the two most striking choices Jameson makes in the focus and scope of the argument, his ʻresolute formalismʼ and the extensive readings devoted to works of fantasy and SF. These genres do not have a straightforwardly lineal relation to the utopian tradition founded by More (or by Plato, as some argue) and exemplified in Beaumontʼs texts. In this tradition, as Jameson notes, fantasy of another world combines with reference, perhaps implicit but more or less constant and deliberate, to matters of political contestation in the present. Jameson gives a substantial account of the generic relations between SF and fantasy in Chapter 5; here and there in the reprinted essays (especially in ʻProgress versus Utopiaʼ), he indicates why he regards SF as a privileged genre for telling some kinds of truths about the contemporary. But nowhere does he deal systematically with the generic distance of both SF and fantasy from the politically focalized, immanently directed fictions of the older utopian tradition.

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ʻResolute formalismʼ, or ʻperverse formalismʼ as Jameson also calls it, is found rather strikingly in the several diagrams that decorate the text, Lacanian ʻGreimas squaresʼ, offering to schematize psychosemantic coordinates of the utopian impulse. Formalism operates more strongly in a negative sense: the decision to explore the generative matrix of utopian writing is a decision to downplay its content, the dimension which most obviously refers us back to lived experience. It is hard not to register this as an evasion of politics. Stalinism, neo-imperialism, globalization, ecopolitics, feminism: all figure, but contingently, as they come up in relation to texts and speculations. This would matter less if ʻresolute formalismʼ delivered striking insights. Jameson himself, as much as any critic, has been able to show how narrative form translates dimensions of political (un)consciousness. But in ʻThe Desire Called Utopiaʼ, formal analysis of any sustained kind is a casualty of the compulsively digressive exposition. The dizzy reader may note down one or two stabilizing generalizations: the utopian text is especially adapted to ʻregistering… signals from the past and the future and bricolating them into cultural representationʼ; ʻUtopian space is an imaginary enclave within real social space.ʼ What is claimed here might with equal or greater justice be claimed for good realist and modernist novels. Hardy and Gissing (to return to Beaumontʼs period) remain readable long after almost all their utopian fellow-writers, partly because their fictions of the present day were historically perceptive whereas most futurological speculation turns out to be historical bunk. Those who think we do need to imagine the future, but doubt the value of literary utopias in helping with that task, are unlikely to have their minds changed by either of these books. Martin Ryle

Dossier for the prosecution Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2005. 312 pp., £38.00 hb., £15.50 pb., 0 226 00785 5 hb., 0 226 00786 3 pb. For many months now, British newspaper columns have been saturated with shrill calls for secularism, ominous warnings that a sizeable contingent of the Left, whipped into an anti-imperialist frenzy, is suc-

cumbing to some kind of ʻappeasementʼ vis-à-vis the reactionary religious forces of ʻIslamismʼ (or, in more combative quarters, ʻIslamo-fascismʼ). Foucault and the Iranian Revolution might be construed as ammunition for these ideological quarrels. As its subtitle intimates, it examines Foucaultʼs infamous reports on the revolution (undertaken for the Italian broadsheet Il Corriere della Sera in 1978–79) as an object lesson in how a certain Western intelligentsia could be led to uncritical support for what the authors depict as an archaic (at best) or totalitarian (at worst) theo-political project. The motivation for this archival operation becomes glaringly evident in the conclusion, where Afary and Anderson anchor their plea for ʻstrategic universalismʼ in a dubious analogy between Foucaultʼs ʻseductionʼ and the respective responses of Jean Baudrillard and Noam Chomsky to the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Characteristically, the authors ignore the myriad ways in which these three authors are politically and philosophically incommensurable (recall Baudrillardʼs Forget Foucault and the 1971 Chomsky–Foucault debate), preferring to reduce their interventions to simple effects of a shared anti-Western anti-liberalism. In so doing, like many of their ʻliberalʼ peers, they obfuscate what might be at stake in unravelling the historical and ideological ties that bind capitalism, imperialism and the emergence of religious anti-systemic movements. About a third of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution is taken up by an appendix collecting the totality of Foucaultʼs texts on Iran, together with contemporary polemical replies, related documents and two valuable texts by the Marxist scholar of Islam Maxime Rodinson. This material should be of considerable worth for those interested in the ʻWesternʼ reaction to the Iranian revolution, in Foucaultʼs sole foray into what he baptized ʻthe journalism of ideasʼ and, not least, in examining the links between religion and revolution. There is certainly cause to revisit and reactivate these debates today, for instance as concerns the Leftʼs abiding tribulations over how to address the hijab and the role of women in Islamic political movements and societies. Yet for all of their righteous Habermasian criticism of the Leftʼs relativist, irresponsible drift – which retraces the steps of Mark Lillaʼs fatuous tirade against ʻthe reckless mindʼ – it is difficult not to conclude that Afary and Anderson have succeeded in producing a book which, at the formal level, is nothing if not postmodern. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution is the dossier for a prosecution carried out in a court where all standards of argument, evidence and rhetoric have been strangely scrambled, if not wholly

mislaid. To draw the requisite lessons from Foucaultʼs ʻcaseʼ, Afary and Anderson provide us with, among other things, a compressed (and hackneyed) account of Foucaultʼs theories of power and discipline, an interesting if tangential treatment of Iranian ʻpassion playsʼ (the Taʼziyeh), a meandering chapter – combining anecdote and conjecture – on Foucaultʼs perception of Middle-Eastern homosexuality, a chronology of womenʼs role in the Iranian Revolution, and an account of the debates and recriminations in the France around Foucaultʼs articles. Much of this is interesting, and episodically erudite, but the result is a book neither about Foucault nor about Iran. Whatʼs more, it is certainly not a book about Islamism – a many-sided political phenomenon that is here dealt with in a cavalier and unenlightening manner. The authorsʼ strategy is to try to account for what James Miller has unhelpfully called Foucaultʼs ʻfollyʼ – his enthusiastic reception of the ʻpolitical spiritualityʼ at work in the Iranian Revolution – by embarking on a set of seemingly disconnected lines of inquiry. Thus we are told that Foucaultʼs infatuation with this mass, anti-systemic revolt derived from his obsession with death as an ethical limit, from his misconceptions regarding the practice of homosexuality in the Middle East, from his androcentrism, from his misplaced ardour for all things non-Western, from his interest in non-verbal technologies of the self, and so on. Foucault, in short, is a ʻHeideggerian Orientalistʼ. As epithets go, this is a diverting one, but it rests on a perfunctory understanding of Foucaultʼs philosophical practice and outlook. In brief, Afary and Anderson contend that Foucault was primed for Islamismʼs seduction by his ʻbinary worldviewʼ, goaded by a pathological hostility towards modernity and a romantic valorization of its mad, Oriental or traditionalist ʻotherʼ. A couple of points of criticism will suffice here. First, it is doubtful whether the very opposition between the modern and the pre-modern is in any way receivable in the ambit of Foucaultʼs archaeology of knowledge. Though authors such as Giddens have co-opted some Foucauldian insights about discipline and docility into a mainstream sociology of the modern world, the notion of modernity is, for better and for worse, not operative in Foucaultʼs major works – indeed, these might be seen to suspend its very validity as either a descriptive or a normative category. Second, Afary and Andersonʼs claim that Foucault is captivated by a nostalgia for the pre-rational (a claim that might be seen to impel Derridaʼs instructive polemic with Foucaultʼs The History of Madness) fails even to contemplate the possibility, central to Foucaultʼs methodology, that

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there may exist different regimes of rationality. Viewed through the prism of works such as The Order of Things, Foucaultʼs thought is a potent antidote against the postulate of a unitary ʻWestern reasonʼ that we could either defend or condemn. Is this to say that Foucaultʼs position is beyond criticism? Not at all. If we take this ʻIran dossierʼ not as an appendix to the prosecutionʼs eclectic case, but as an object of investigation in its own right, I think we will gain far greater insights into Foucaultʼs own stance and into our present predicament than Afary and Anderson are capable of providing. Though the question of ʻthe Westʼ does have a certain prominence in Foucaultʼs reports and interviews on Iran (how could it not, given the discourses of Khomenei or Ali Shariati?), the Manichean anti-modernism by means of which Afary and Anderson pigeonhole Foucault and hold him up as a warning to todayʼs Left is far too coarse a notion – albeit one which is instrumental in bolstering the claim for an elective affinity between his ʻpost-structuralismʼ and the phobic Islamism of the Ayatollah. Leaving aside Foucaultʼs occasionally egregious errors of political judgement and his ignorance regarding the politics of Iran and Shiʼism (which led him to discount the possibility that Khomenei might take power despite the latterʼs theorization, ever since 1943, of clerical rule), what theoretical commitments underlie Foucaultʼs ʻKantianʼ enthusiasm for the Iranian Revolution? Far from being explained by the anti-modernist amalgam offered by Afary and Anderson, Foucaultʼs texts are remarkably coherent, if problematic, in their estimation of the singularity of the Iranian Revolution. Instead of castigating Foucault for his undeniable insensitivity to feminist concerns, we would learn more by interrogating Foucaultʼs fascination with the Iranian ʻspiritualization of politicsʼ. Having identified the Shah and the ʻmodernization–corruption–despotism seriesʼ as the object of the uprising, Foucault asked himself whether the very idea of Islamic government was to be regarded as a reconciliation, a contradiction or the threshold of a novelty. His suggestion, in the midst of the unfolding events, was that the supposed absence of a classical political programme driving the mass opposition was matched by the manifestation of a unified political will, ʻthe collective will of a peopleʼ. Strikingly, he spoke of ʻan abstraction in political philosophy encountered for the first time in the fleshʼ. But Foucault appears to conflate this idea of a finally embodied Rousseauianism with the provocative notion that such an appearance of the popular will in a religiously articulated uprising constituted ʻa

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general strike against politicsʼ. In other words, that it demonstrated the desire not to allow for politics as ordinarily understood within the uprising. It is ironic to see someone who, as Afary and Anderson indicate, never looked on the French Revolution with any great sympathy, here formulating the ʻalternativeʼ modernity heralded in the streets of Tehran in the classical terms of revolutionary politics. Rather than anti-modernism per se, then, it was a kind of anti-political politics that ensnared Foucault. The source for this anti-politics is not to be sought in a penchant for irrationalism or Heideggerian Orientalism (or perhaps ʻOccidentalismʼ?), but in Foucaultʼs increasingly prominent anti-Marxism, and his erstwhile alliance with the nouveaux philosophes. The plebeian motif of the masses against the state, of an irreducible revolt against a rationalist, and therefore exterminatory, image of revolution, is a theme that Foucault borrowed from his friend André Glucksmann, and the writings on Iran become unintelligible without keeping this very problematic allegiance in mind. In other words, a far more conjunctural reading is needed to explain Foucaultʼs intervention, as well as his project of a ʻjournalism of ideasʼ (for which he recruited young Turks like Alain Finkielkraut, who has gained some notoriety as of late for his reinvention of a kind of republican racism). It was Marxism, far more than liberalism, which served as the target for Foucaultʼs acerbic comments on the insipid nature of the Occidental ʻexplanationʼ of Iranʼs religious politics. And it was an allergy to Marxism, portrayed as the dead end of European politics, that led Foucault to disavow the class struggles at work in Iran for a fetishistic portrayal of the classless masses and their monolithic protest against all ʻglobal systemsʼ – as well as to resuscitate, via Furet, the Stirnerian thematic of revolt versus revolution. Having said that, it is futile merely to censure Foucaultʼs stance and its anti-Marxist bases, since, as the authors admit, Foucault was more perceptive than most concerning the weakness of the secular Left in Iran, and, besides, orthodox materialist explanations of the revolutionʼs unfolding have tended to obscure what we may call the ʻrelative autonomyʼ of religious-political discourse. Any critique of Foucault on this count cannot allow itself blindly to reiterate the timeless wisdoms of an immaculate Enlightenment, but must face up to the historical weakness of leftist politics and analysis when faced with the ʻspirit of a world without spiritʼ. Such a critique, which the superficiality and opportunism of Afary and Andersonʼs criticisms does not even begin to approximate,

would need first and foremost to achieve some clarity about Foucaultʼs conception of politics. After all, contemporaneously with his reports on the Iranian situation, Foucault was involved in a panoramic inquiry into the historical sources and technical modes of liberal governmentality. This research, which has since spawned a micro-discipline of sorts within sociology, was not, as Afary and Anderson contend, aimed at denouncing the modern state as the pinnacle of oppression, for the nostalgic sake of a pre-institutional utopia of alterity. Foucaultʼs painstaking treatment of the European Polizeistaat, German Ordo-liberalism and the Chicago school is hardly the product of a fanatical anti-statist, revealing instead a thinker of ʻpolitical reasonʼ as the production of situated constellations of discourses of power and technologies of subjectivation. Instead of peddling a satisfying, if vapid, picture of Foucault as a dyed-in-the-wool anti-modernist (and liberally bandying about nigh-on meaningless terms like ʻpostmodernistʼ and ʻpost-structuralistʼ) it would be better to consider what allowed for the perplexing asymmetry between his reactions to Iran and his concurrent work on the modern state. There are two possibilities at work here, both implicated in Foucaultʼs anti-Marxism of the late 1970s. One is that Foucault – without thereby abdicating his work on governmental regimes of truth – regarded Iran as a captivating exception to the European rationalities he was otherwise preoccupied with. The other is that he was attracted to the seemingly incompatible ideas of ʻpolitical reasonʼ and the ʻspiritualization of politicsʼ to the extent that they both sundered the bond between subjectivity and ideology, allowing for an analytics and a politics of singularities and events. It is such a repudiation of a materialist notion of ideology that, in the case of Iran, drove Foucault into a moralization of politics – the foremost menace that, according to Maxime Rodinson, afflicts politics when it colludes with religion. It is also in this anti-Marxist reflex that we can find the causes for Foucaultʼs peculiar reluctance to apply his conceptual grid to an analysis of political Shiʼism. In order to steer clear of classism, ideology or the ʻdead weight of modernizationʼ, and to ʻrespect singularities when they emergeʼ, Foucault, for a short spell, seemed to forsake the impure articulations of power and knowledge. The texts collected in the appendix to this book do provide vital material for anyone interested in the stakes and the styles of intellectual intervention, and for those who do not wish merely to retread the debates on Islam, feminism and emancipation that preoccupied the French intelligentsia in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. They also

permit us to grasp the price to be paid for abdicating on dialectics for the sake of a plebeian and anti-Marxist notion of anti-systemic struggle. But their interest does not lie in the ideological comfort provided by seeing Foucault in the dock for crimes of association with what Rodinson problematically described as ʻa type of archaic fascismʼ. Rather, it is by delving deeper into the disjunctures within Foucaultʼs political thought and by treating Islamism as an object of inquiry rather than either repulsion or fascination that we may learn from this brief, if fraught, intellectual episode. Alberto Toscano

Uses and abuses of concepts for politics Frederic J. Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2005. 256 pp., £30.00 0 300 10829 X hb. The blind spots of the title refer to a visual experiment from Wilhelm Wundtʼs Grundzüge der physiologischen psychologie of 1874. A white circle and smaller white cross are situated on a black background such that when one covers over the right eye and stares at the cross from a certain distance the white circle disappears. Wundtʼs experiment, which reveals the small area of the retina which is not sensitive to external impulses, is employed here to refer to not only the physiological discourses that typographers, artists and philosophers of the Weimar era actively engaged with, but also the way in which the works that have survived this era – Benjaminʼs and Adornoʼs in particular – are in themselves subject to a certain blindness, a blindness as to their extra-philosophical origins. Schwartzʼs thesis is that although the concepts of Critical Theory live on in contemporary thought, the particular debates and terminological sources of many of these ideas remain hidden from view. This is due to the particular academic afterlife of Weimar thought itself, but also – and more problematically – to what Schwartz identifies as some wilful dissemblance on the part of Critical Theory, and Benjamin in particular. Schwartz thus seeks to re-evaluate Critical Theory by tracing key terms and concepts – the expert, mimesis, distraction, fashion – back to their roots in Weimar-era art history, as well as other disciplines such as sociology, architecture and design, and even less discussed pseudosciences of the time such as psychotechnics.

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Whilst influential figures from early-twentiethcentury art history such as Hans Sedlmayr, Wilhelm Pinder and Alois Riegl are no longer as obscure as they have been, their role in determining and shaping the intellectual ground from which Critical Theory emerged remains relatively undiscussed. In this respect, Schwartz, as an art historian, is attempting to remove the ʻblind spotsʼ not only of Critical Theory but of the historiography of art itself, returning to our image of the Weimar era a sense of the often idiosyncratic but genuinely interdisciplinary nature of the intellectual debate of the day. For example, Schwartz analyses the way in which terms such as ʻfashionʼ and ʻstyleʼ became problematic within art history after Wölfflin, and that, as such, they could form the ground for a critical discussion of the new and novelty in the subsequent work of Adorno and Horkheimer. In Schwartzʼs

reading, it is modern art historyʼs attempts to overcome the shortcomings of Kulturgeschichte which reveal the ʻdouble bindʼ of concepts such as style: at once that which promises an escape from the bad historicism of artistic development, and a category which demands a critical reflection on the relationship between the ʻnewʼ in cultural form and the condition of modernity itself. As such, Schwartz argues that only Dialectic of Enlightenment could begin to articulate this tension between modernityʼs view of history and the denigration of its present, an articulation which Schwartz also identifies in Adornoʼs deliberately ʻoxymoronicʼ early essay titles such as ʻTimeless Fashion: On Jazzʼ. Yet it is the discussion of Benjaminʼs work and its sources which dominates the book. In part, this may be because of what Schwartz describes as the ʻcompelling yet ambivalentʼ status of so much of Benjaminʼs writings. Whilst many might read Benjaminʼs use of a

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concept such as the expert (from 1925 on) as a somewhat ironic response to the technologization of culture itself, Schwartz demonstrates how this apparently everyday word is in fact mediated by Benjaminʼs contact with key members of the avant-garde: Sasha Stone and Laslo Maholy-Nagy in particular. These artistsʼ ambitions to create graphic works that critically explore the ʻnew conditions of attention, perception and thoughtʼ found in Weimar modernity – Maholy-Nagyʼs ʻDynamic of the Metropolisʼ setting the tone for Benjaminʼs OneWay Street – meant a redefinition of the artist as an ʻexpertʼ. It is a redefinition which Benjamin parallels with his own exploration of the role of the writer/critic in an age of ʻprompt languageʼ, the particular textual demands of a regimented life: the card index, cross referencing, traffic signals. For both Benjamin and the artist/expert too, the humanʼs very sense of space is transformed, and with it the visual and tactile reception of artworks. Benjaminʼs ʻThe Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibilityʼ stands, then, in the centre of any number of discussions about the political role of perception itself. Jan Tschicholdʼs 1925 elementaire typographie, for example, makes the distinction between aesthetic contemplation as the ʻpsychology of the savoring bourgeoisʼ and that of the ʻactive worker, the proletarianʼ. For Schwartz, this equation between visual instantaneity, distraction and the artist as expert ʻcould be taken over ready madeʼ by Benjamin, and informed his subsequent discussions of the spatiality of city life itself. Yet Schwartz also demonstrates how Benjaminʼs work subsequently feeds back into art-historical debate too. The work of Carl Linfert, for example, took Benjaminʼs theory of baroque allegory to create a theory about the way in which modernity itself transformed vision and the experience of space. An ʻarchitectural visionʼ (Architekturanschauung) emerges between pictorial language and that of the architectural plan, removing the ʻparticular standpointʼ of perspective illusionism. Such ʻobjectifiedʼ vision entails, for Linfert, the removal of viewpoint and thus ʻthe fragmentation of all sense of contextʼ: ʻthe constant in architectural drawing is not the fixed point of view but rather a visual circling around buildingʼ. Such reassembling of fragmented space ʻunder a different lawʼ becomes, in turn, crucial for Benjaminʼs theory of distraction. Whereas Benjaminʼs work on Trauerspiel contrasted baroque fragmentation with the contemporary pathos of dramatic expressionism, it is Linfertʼs realignment of Benjaminʼs categories with the particular visual modes of modernity that enables a two-way dialogue between Benjamin and the Weimar avant-garde.

Yet, despite this, one may also sometimes get the impression that Schwartz is occupying a more familiar academic territory, in which the well-known thinker is revealed to be less of an original and much more indebted to pre-existing ideas than it first appeared. This is a game that could be (and often is) played with any thinker, and particularly one as appropriative and eclectic in their sources as Benjamin. To be fair to Schwartz, this is not all that the book does, and its original work on the broader context of Weimar intellectual life is rewarding enough. However, the central thesis of the book is this idea of a blind spot, implying the neglect or dissemblance of conceptual sources even as their terms live on. Knowing this, however, begs a fundamental question about Benjaminʼs methodology, which Schwartz only rarely pauses to consider: to what effect is the appropriation of such non-philosophical categories put, and why? Benjaminʼs own answer is straightforward: in any act of translation (between languages, between books, disciplines, or the past and the present) such transformations are always tactical, not simply a ʻborrowingʼ but a utilization towards a particular end. The work of art essay makes this most explicit in a sentence which appears at the end of the opening paragraph of the second, 1936 version: In what follows, the concepts which are introduced into the theory of art differ from those now current in that they are completely useless for the purposes of fascism. On the other hand, they are useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.

In other words, these terms are not simply ʻtaken overʼ but strategically transformed, with a political intention that could hardly be more explicitly stated. Unfortunately, any analysis of the political implications of these various acts of appropriation in Benjaminʼs work is passing and brief. Indeed, ʻpoliticsʼ exists here only in the sense of the broad historical backdrop and the unfortunate affiliations of some of the figures under discussion. Simply commenting on the irony of Benjaminʼs use of terms which were previously developed by thinkers who came to align themselves with the very fascism that his work was attempting to resist (Hans Sedlmayr in particular) is not enough. Schwartzʼs aim – to reveal the blind spots of one discourseʼs indebtedness to another – thus risks a misrepresentation of Benjaminʼs task, despite the evident care and originality taken in re-evaluating the Weimar period itself. Nickolas Lambrianou

Now here David Pinder, Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2005. 354 pp., £50.00 hb., £17.99 pb., 0 7486 1487 7 hb., 0 7486 1488 5 pb. Visions of the City proposes a counter-history of past utopian visions of the modern city. Its critical recovery of ʻvitalʼ models of utopian urbanism (rather than pastoral retreats) from late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Western Europe is, however, temporally double-edged: providing a corrective history, as well as hoping to rekindle a ʻphilosophy of the possibleʼ for alternative city designs today. The intention is that to rethink current cities critically ʻagainst the grain of dominant capitalist imaginariesʼ requires a return to the question of utopia, defined here (following Jameson) as what ʻremains of our capacity to imagine change at allʼ. The political positions at stake here are clearly defined: those who desire a revolutionary change in present conditions are utopians; those who hail the demise of utopia are apologists for the sclerotic conditions of the status quo. As part of his alternative, Pinder exposes a ʻnoirʼ archive of modernist forms of utopian urbanism, in particular the ʻgarden city movementʼ of Ebenezer Howard and the planned or ʻconcept citiesʼ associated with Le Corbusier. In both cases, he dismantles the myth of ʻvalue-neutralityʼ surrounding their rhetoric of ʻpurityʼ, and exposes how their dreams of spatial order – and, through this, social harmony – resulted in a restrictive, homogenized and disciplining urban culture. To cut across the grain of these reductive city visions, Pinder poses alternative ʻgeographies of everyday lifeʼ – that do ʻnot repress complexity, diversity, ambiguityʼ – drawn from ʻother contemporaneous currents of utopianismʼ, especially from within the avant-gardes: namely, the surrealists during the 1920s and 1930s, and, for the second half of the book, the Situationist International (SI) during the 1950s and 1960s. These so-called ʻdissident cityʼ utopias are not embraced uncritically, but are in turn exposed as having their fair share of a ʻdark sideʼ. For example, the errant, fluid, dynamic and open formation of Constantʼs situationist city vision, called ʻNew Babylonʼ, is praised for contesting the fixed and closed space of modernist city forms. But it too entails risks. The anarchic and democratizing freeing-up of social restrictions represented by its aleatory space, may also signal a more dystopian endgame: the sense

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of groundlessness and indeterminacy that this open city advocates may ironically mirror the flows and boundlessness of a capitalist space–time – precisely what it intends to diagnose critically and transform. It is by contrasting the positive and negative sides of both modernist (Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier) and avant-garde city utopias (surrealism and the Situationist International) that Pinder reveals the uncertain and vacillating models of utopianism and urbanism that ʻmodernism always containedʼ. It is this forgotten ambivalence that he resuscitates as relevant for critical revisions of the present. For Pinder, all speculations and actions aimed at alternatives to current capitalist space–time are constitutively utopian. A subtle reworking of the temporality of utopia is at stake. It no longer refers to a future space–time, ʻan impossible fantasyʼ closed off in an elsewhere and so cut off from the contemporary world. Utopia becomes (what it always was for Pinder) a speculative form of immanent critique of the present. Utopias emerge from within the conditions of the present as targeted negations of what exists. Although Pinder doesnʼt put it like this, utopia is no longer a ʻnowhereʼ but becomes an immanent ʻnow hereʼ. Of course, utopian thinking always transcends the present in its imagining an elsewhere. Yet, it is the ʻwhenʼ of utopian instantiation that is at stake here. Pinder argues against the deferral of utopia through the use of a plan produced in advance of a future, yet-to-be constructed space, and instead argues for the possibility of utopia in the form of an event; that is, constituted through acts that are carried out immanently, from within and against existing conditions. It is in order to expand this deployment of utopian urbanism that Pinder turns his attention to the ʻunitary urbanismʼ of the Situationist International, with a particular focus on the transformation of the city envisioned by Constant. Despite Pinderʼs insistence on the obscurity of the SI, the account he gives reiterates what has now become the dominant, and highly reductive, reception of the groupʼs practice, via the academic disciplines of architecture and urban planning, as constructors of alternative cities and, through this, provocateurs of new, as yet unnameable, types of provisional subjectivities. Pinder does, however, make productive connections between the SIʼs theory of unitary urbanism and, their one-time friend, Henri Lefebvreʼs theory of the production of space. The SIʼs refunctioning and reterritorializing of post-World War II Paris from below, on behalf of the marginalized – their model of a renovated, anti-capitalist city polis – aspired to overcome alienated social relations.

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Spatiality for the SI and Lefebvre is social, and society is spatially constituted. Therefore a change in one domain acts as the catalyst for a change in the other. What prevents this tactic from deteriorating into some abstract account of deterministic behaviourism is the particularity of the SIʼs dialectical negations of the city. For example, the SIʼs collective actions targeted the atomization and specialization induced by the ʻsociety of the spectacleʼ; they embraced idleness and play in the name of a critique of enforced work or slave labour under the conditions of capital. However, this affirmation of play, as a targeted negation, gets overlooked at times by Pinderʼs seeming embrace of play as such – despite the SIʼs constant warnings that a ʻplay-cityʼ could end up as a Luna Park of escapist entertainment. The SIʼs provisional yet concrete utopian actions were not mindless or nihilistic, but part of a constructive project whereby specific urban détournements were not simply about producing a new type of space, but aimed at inciting new forms of social relations. It is the SIʼs commitment to change ʻnowʼ that provides Pinder with a possible model for a living, as opposed to an idealist and dead, utopianism dedicated to the end of capitalism today. Though it was precisely for this reason that the SI actually refused to use the term ʻutopiaʼ, stating that ʻreality is surpassing utopiaʼ. Of course, reality changes. So, for Pinder, unlike for the SI, ʻutopiaʼ becomes a term that needs to be reanimated. But, also unlike the SI, whose actions were carried out in the name of non-authoritarian socialism, Pinderʼs desire for urban change lacks any specific political affiliation. His call for ʻpartisans of possibilitiesʼ has no basis in actual social constituencies. And for all his speculations on ʻa critical urbanism todayʼ, it is precisely what constitutes our present that remains a mere vision in this book, hinted at in a few broad, gestural descriptions given in the last pages. Here, the possible use value of the SIʼs strategic critiques of their times ʻcouldʼ be seen as influencing a few generically presented activist movements, such as the so-called ʻanti-capitalistsʼ. But how these present-day groupings are differentiated, along contested political, sexual and racial lines, is never clearly outlined. And those dissatisfied with the present may call for change, but not necessarily in terms of a total revolution, as Pinder seems to assume. The cost of the vanishing mediator of the present means that Pinderʼs call for a utopianism today remains locked in the recent past it recovers. This can offer insightful rereadings of the critical potential of past dreams, perhaps a wishful thinking for some sort of Benjaminian shock, where the ʻoldʼ revital-

izes the ʻnowʼ through alternative, because untimely, encounters. Yet, to avoid Pinderʼs own aversion to nostalgia – where future cities of the past compensate for our loss of imaginings of how to get out of here – the relevance of the extension of past strategies into the present needs to be established from a contemporary perspective. To be fair, Pinder does allude (albeit briefly) to recent feminist critiques of many of the utopian cities he has selected – in keeping with the authorʼs acknowledgement of the bookʼs ʻmaledominatedʼ and limited ʻEurocentric focusʼ – and he also acknowledges the gender blindness of many of the SIʼs theories and practices. But this hardly qualifies his support for them. Ultimately, to neglect the difference between the political situations of the 1950s, from which the SIʼs urban visions arose, and today can only delimit the philosophy of the possible we need now. Frances Stracey

Merely meagre, or doggerel redux Simon Critchley, Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, Routledge, London and New York, 2005. xiii + 137 pp., £45.00 hb., £12.99 pb., 0 415 35630 X hb., 0 415 35631 8 pb. Not so long ago the professional Anglo-Saxon philosopher responded to poetry with scorn, deriding its metaphysical pretensions as so much Sturm und Drang. In so far as truth and knowledge were claimed, the status of poetic argument was below philosophical consideration, as vaguely understood as the dignity of manual labour. Simon Critchleyʼs approach is rather to embrace poetry as a grand affair in need of popularization. Belletristic musings remain unfashionable, especially among academic critics who are steeled against literary truth-claims as so much happy-clappy ideology. Critchley, nevertheless argues, as the blurb puts it, ʻthat poetry enlarges lifeʼ and that it ʻcontains deep and important philosophical insightʼ. His enterprise is, then, rather bold and untimely. Readers aware of Critchleyʼs other work might expect a high-level engagement with Heidegger and Derrida, and through them the traditions of thinking in which poetry is fundamental. Heideggerʼs importance is evident in the margins, but Critchley is rather too reticent about the

troubled struggle to salvage a poetics of thinking, or of poetry, out of the Heideggerian legacy. Derrida is strikingly absent from this book. The gamble, then, is that some more direct encounter with the poetry of Wallace Stevens might be possible. Having confessed to his own youthful dabbling in ʻbad Nietzschean free-versifying doggerelʼ – a rather promising recipe for new modes of satire he unfortunately abandoned – Critchley reassures the reader that he himself no longer writes poetry. Indeed, he opines that, ʻIf I have a general cultural complaint it is that, first and most importantly, there are too few readers of poetry and, second but relatedly, too many of those readers are writers of poetry.ʼ It isnʼt evident how these problems are related: whether, for example, the problem is that writers of poetry are misleading guides to the art form who should be encouraged to abstain from their doggerel so as to increase the proportion of readers who arenʼt writers. Critchley presumably does not wish to put a stop to experiments in democratic self-expression, as if, by analogy, there would be more people listening to music if fewer people tried to make music. A clue is provided by the function of poetry as Critchley conceives it: poetry elevates, liberates and ennobles human life.… Poetry enlarges life with a range of observation, a depth of sentiment, a power of expression and an attention to language that simply eclipses any other medium … poetry is life with the ray of imaginationʼs power shot through it.

A total eclipse of the heart, one might infer. Those with a rather different sense of poetry as a horizon of language might be wary of the metaphor of shooting, especially of anyone trying to shoot rays through anything. This ray-gun conception tends to fire over the heads of those who conceive of poetry as an art of language more distinct from life, or who are suspicious of such metaphors of size and power. One form of liberation much argued for by avant-gardes would be to free poetry from its associations with nobility and the religiosity of spiritual goodness. Poetry might need to be destructive, debunking and thoroughly low, developed through processes of deconstruction, if only to socialize poetry out of the clutches of pseudoaffirmative therapeutics. But how might poetry enlarge life, assuming there are some who can be persuaded that they need enlargement? The bookʼs focus is on the epistemological insights offered by Stevens, principally the relation between ʻthought and things or mind and worldʼ. Critchley concedes that it would be fatuous to mine poetry for philosophical puzzles dressed up in ʻpleasing poetic garbʼ.

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He acknowledges poetry as a mode which might be more articulate than philosophical prose. But, despite the caveats, Critchley quickly adopts categories poets and philosophers have taken much trouble to question: ʻWhat I find in Stevens, what I see his verse moving towards, is a meditative voice, a voice that is not shrill, but soft yet tenacious.ʼ Aside from the problem of ʻvoiceʼ, and what this might imply for a metaphysics of presence read into writing, the brooding, meditative calm ʻfoundʼ in Stevens quickly begins to look like the hard-sell for a spiritual retreat into Black Forest gateaux among the Heideggerian woods and clearings. Given the propensity of post-phenomenological poetics to focus on a rather restricted canon of poets – Hölderlin, Rilke, Trakl and Celan, say, rather than Mayakovsky, Brecht, Zukofsky or Frank OʼHara – the focus on Wallace Stevens allows an English-language focus without too quickly becoming mired in romanticism again. Critchley reads Stevens through romanticism, however, suggesting that all poetry has to be written in romanticismʼs failure and be ʻanimated by the belief that poetry should take on to itself the existential burden of religious belief without the guarantee of religious beliefʼ. He is not alone among readers of Stevens who want to domesticate the strange, more Joycean, more modernist materiality of language in Stevensʼs poems. But just as Nietzsche needs to be defended against those such as Heidegger who seem not to find Nietzsche funny, so Stevens needs to be defended against his more prominent admirers. Put bluntly, the modernism of Stevens remains to be understood and recognized. Stevens may be guilty of writing poems that too easily lend themselves to quasi-philosophical musings, but his work also fizzes with modes of levity that shrug off the pretensions of ideas, and are often hilariously offhand with the furniture of desire and perception supplied by romantic poetry. There is, however, the embarrassing question of intentionality, and what Stevens may or may not have thought his poems were meant to mean. As Critchley notes, there is the influence of George Santayana, a thinker who appears about as likely to appear on the twenty-first-century philosophy syllabus as Santana (the one with the electric guitar), though one can imagine a poem by Stevens on the subject of their mutual influence. If, as Critchley suggests, ʻAt its best, modern poetry achieves the experience of a sudden rightness that can be crystallized in a word, a name or a sound, the twanging of a blues guitarʼ; why not Santana? Scholarship has yet to provide a sufficiently nuanced account of the intellectual history of Stevens, not least the pseudo-philosophical prose that Stevens

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wrote. He may have talked up the idea of pure poetry, but his poetry is anything but pure. For Critchley, the necessary philosophical matrix is provided by Kant: ʻI am not saying that Stevens is simply a Kantian, but rather that he begins from Kantian premises read through romantic spectacles. That is, he begins from a perceived failure of Kantianism, from what might be called a dejected transcendental idealism.ʼ I take it that this should be read as a joke. Even if some sense can be made of Stevensʼs poetry read as offering qualified assertions of an anti-realist metaphysic, surely the tone could also be read as one of Nietzschean affirmation rather than anything dejected. As the argument unfolds, this reader wondered whether Critchley should not take up versification again to bring a little more poetry to some of his resonant assertions: ʻMetaphysics in the dark is a kind of music, where rightness means sounding right.ʼ While the dance of meaning in Stevens is often a precarious high-wire act, on the verge of collapsing into a rather well-constructed metrical safety net, Critchley goes right out on a limb without much to help him defy gravity: ʻThings merely are: the palm, the bird, its song, its feathers, the wind moving slowly in the branches. One can say no more.ʼ But of course this one called Critchley can and does say rather more, and says more than can be read without scepticism, disbelief or a strong stomach. There is an oddly tacked-on discussion of Terrence Malick, which is interesting, but which jumps into the medium of film for no obvious reason and ignores the many poets who might be said to have worked on through Stevens. In the conclusion Critchley aligns Stevens with Blanchot and Levinas, but even fragments of Stevensʼs poetry suggest that very different strategies of writing, wit and seriousness are at work in such different œuvres. Part of the fragility of poetry is its vulnerability to appropriation, but there is more to Stevens than the kind of dejected idealism mined here. The principal merit of this short, rather informal and lightweight book is that it reveals, for anyone who doubted it, that the late romantic ideology of poetry is alive and kicking down publisherʼs doors. Despite the best efforts of sundry modernists, avant-gardists and exponents of ideology-critique, it is still possible, apparently, to meditate on the lofty sayings of poetry, especially by implicating them in the parallel lofts of philosophy. Things might not merely be so, however, if Critchley could be persuaded to stop reading poetry and go back to producing Nietzschean doggerel, the badder the better. Drew Milne

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In for the longue durée The graduate labour struggle at NYU

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n 9 November 2005, the majority of New York Universityʼs 1,000 graduate student employees went on strike in order to force NYU to bargain a second contract with our graduate student employees union – the Graduate Student Organizing Committee of the United Auto Workers, GSOC/UAW local 2110. Now in its ninth week (as of 8 January 2006), our strike has paralysed NYU, the largest private university in the United States. Hundreds of undergraduate classes and recitation sections have been cancelled, and many more papers and exams remain ungraded. While there have been a number of graduate student employee strikes at private American universities – including Yale, University of Pennsylvania and Columbia – during the past three years, the strike at NYU holds a unique place in American academic and labour history. Indeed, the future of academic worker unionization at private universities for some time to come may well be decided at NYU within the next few months. In 2000 the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal body that regulates labour practices, ruled that NYU was legally obligated to recognize its graduate student employees as workers who have the right to unionize. And in 2002, NYU became the first and only private university to have a recognized graduate student labour union. (Public universities are regulated by state, not federal, law and many have had unionized graduate students since the 1960s.) The first contract the union won resulted in substantial material gains for NYUʼs graduate students, including guaranteed health insurance, a minimum annual salary with a wage increase on average of 40 per cent over five years, and the security of knowing that we would have stable and protected employment while we completed our graduate studies – all novelties for graduate students at NYU. The successes at NYU inspired graduate students at other private research universities and within a year of our first contract, union drives were under way at Brown, Yale, Columbia, Tufts, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell and Temple. In 2004, however, on appeal from a coalition of private university administrations, the NLRB, now staffed by anti-labour Bush appointees, overturned its earlier decision and made union recognition for graduate student employees at private universities optional. This ruling provided the NYU administration with legal leeway, and, as the end of our contract approached, it appointed a series of farcical committees to review whether to continue to recognize our union. Unsurprisingly, and despite a

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majority of graduate, undergraduate and faculty support, NYU refused to bargain, and since 31 August 2005 we have been working without a contract. NYU President John Sexton has ominously dubbed NYU the ʻEnterprise Universityʼ, and, like many corporate employers, NYU relies heavily on underpaid, part-time labour. In fact, 75 per cent of the teaching at NYU is not done by its professors, but rather by its graduate students and adjunct teachers. The result is a workforce largely without health insurance, without job security, and without access to a living wage. Private research universities like NYU are leading the trend in this model of academic de-professionalization and labour casualization while at the same time reaping revenue from skyrocketing tuition and room and board fees, now $45,000 a year at NYU. Without a union, graduate students become the contingent labour force that sustains this employment model; the more prevalent the model becomes, the fewer tenure-track jobs are created. Graduate students understand first-hand that the need to supplement our incomes with low-paying adjunct gigs undermines our chances of finding a tenuretrack job once weʼve finished our degrees. Weʼre fighting for union representation now with an eye towards maintaining and improving academic labour standards for our professional future. Of course the NYU administration understands this too, which is why they have committed seemingly unlimited resources to destroying our union. Our strike has exposed how much the university relies on graduate student labour, just as our union has demonstrated the benefits that collective bargaining can bring to an academic workplace. It has also given NYU a chance to demonstrate what kind of employer it is. The administration has spent millions of dollars to employ a corporate law firm whose website proclaims that the ʻpreservation of management rights is our goalʼ. Graduate students have been threatened and spied on, had their rights to freedom of speech and association trespassed against, while faculty supportive of the union have been subject to electronic surveillance. On 28 November, an especially punitive policy of retribution was implemented. Unlike most employers who dock pay for the duration of a strike, NYU announced that graduate students who continued to strike past 5 December would be denied their stipends and locked out of teaching positions for the entirety of next semester. Those who go out on strike next semester will be denied their stipends and locked out of teaching positions for the following two semesters. This policy, designed to intimidate all students, had NYUʼs large international student population as its particular target since their visa status prohibits them from working outside the university. Nonetheless, on 5 December, the day that the ultimatum went into effect, the picket line in front of the library was filled with hundreds of striking graduate students chanting ʻYour deadlines mean nothing, our union isnʼt budging.ʼ Meanwhile, NYU has drawn the moral disapprobation of academics worldwide. Thousands have signed an online petition to protest NYUʼs behaviour, and many have written personal letters to President Sexton saying that they will discourage their students from enrolling in NYUʼs graduate programmes. Over a hundred international students signed a letter claiming that because of the hostile treatment they had received, they too would discourage students in their home countries from attending NYU. Now, as NYU begins the process of trying to lock out striking graduate students, many departments have told the administration that they simply will not comply. The next threat? There are rumours that recalcitrant departments may be placed in receivership. As we begin the spring semester, hundreds of graduate students remain on strike for union recognition and a second contract. One student from the history department has worn a placard that documents the sentiment here well: ʻWeʼre in it for the longue durée.ʼ Leigh Claire La Berge Leigh Claire La Berge ([email protected]) is a PhD candidate in American Studies at NYU.

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