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150 Editorial collective David Cunningham, Howard Feather, Peter Hallward, Esther Leslie, Stewart Martin, Kaye Mitchell, Mark Neocleous, Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford Contributors Ronald Suresh Roberts is a Cape Townbased West Indian writer whose recent books include No Cold Kitchen: A Biography of Nadine Gordimer (2005) and Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki (2007). Derek Gregory is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver, and author of The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Blackwell, 2004). His next book is War Cultures (Routledge, forthcoming). Stella Sandford is Principal Lecturer in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University, London. Her next book, Plato and the Philosophy of Sex, will be published by Polity Press. Jeff Wall is an artist and writer. Peter Osborne is Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University. His books include Conceptual Art (Phaidon, 2002).
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CONTENTS
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philosophy July/august 2008
EDITORIAL One Hundred and Fifty, Not Out................................................................. 2
commentary Beware Electocrats: Naomi Klein on South Africa Ronald Suresh Roberts................................................................................... 3
articles ‘The Rush to the Intimate’: Counterinsurgency and the Cultural Turn Derek Gregory.................................................................................................. 8
‘All Human Beings are Pregnant’: The Bisexual Imaginary in Plato’s Symposium Stella Sandford.............................................................................................. 24
Interview Art after Photography, after Conceptual Art Jeff Wall interviewed by Peter Osborne...................................................... 36
reviews Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century John Kraniauskas.......................................................................................... 52 Copyedited and typeset by illuminati www.illuminatibooks.co.uk Layout by Peter Osborne Printed by Russell Press, Russell House, Bulwell Lane, Basford, Nottingham NG6 0BT Bookshop distribution UK: Central Books, 115 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN Tel: 020 8986 4854 USA: Ubiquity Distributors Inc., 607 Degraw Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217 Tel: 718 875 5491 Cover Pif le Chien, Red Bauble, 2008. The images on pp. 29, 57, 62 are of works in the Boijamns van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, by Paul McCarthy, Maurizio Catalan and Lawrence Weiner, respectively.
Andy Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History Andrew McGettigan...................................................................................... 55 Amber Jacobs, On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis and the Law of the Mother Alison Stone.................................................................................................. 58 Claudia Aradau, Rethinking Trafficking in Women: Politics Out of Security Guillermina Seri............................................................................................. 61 Christopher Goto-Jones, ed., Re-politicising the Kyoto School as Philosophy Fabian Säfer................................................................................................... 64
news Academic Freedom, the Israeli Left and the Occupation Within David Cunningham........................................................................................ 67
Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd. www.radicalphilosophy.com
conference report The Substance of Thought, Cornell University, 10–12 April 2008
©
Radical Philosophy Ltd
Nathan Brown............................................................................................... 71
Editorial
One hundred and fifty, not out
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nniversaries can be anxious times, as the past piles high – and not only in the form of wreckage. As the revisitings of May ’68 running up to its fortieth birthday last month showed, the recent past retains its currency as a weapon in the present, constantly in danger of being turned back upon itself. (How many more suicides of the 1960s will we have to witness before the Right is done with its corpse?) Anniversaries of journals have their own pecularities. Here, in particular, it is a matter of measuring a distance from the past, as much as finding its thread. It is the future that counts in defining the present, since it is the only tense in which it is possible to act. If the ‘radical’ in our title is to extend beyond its commodified form, it will be by renewing a qualitative sense of the new. The dialectics of this process are, however, more devilish than some may care to know. Radical Philosophy has its origin in the intellectual and political energies of the 1960s, overflowing into the 1970s (the first issue appeared in 1972). It was refashioned by the movement politics of the 1980s – feminism and ecology in particular – and the debates over the fate of the communist tradition. It reflected upon the booms of ‘postmodernism’ and ‘continental philosophy’ in the 1990s. And in the early years of this century it has broadened its horizons geopolitically, expanded its contributions to cultural and art theory, and tracked European philosophy as it once again declares itself ‘French’. Each wave an accumulation, an archive; and each through the prism of the aspiration to a more vibrant, and more critical, philosophical culture of the Left. One hundred and fifty issues is a cause for celebration for a selfpublished – and still largely self-produced – journal, adrift in the intellectual desert of a crushingly corporate publishing world. In this issue, we begin a new series of interviews with artists and cultural figures whose work has intersected with the history of the Left, focusing on critical and theoretical aspects of their practices. When the RP interviews from the early 1990s were collected into a book (A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals, edited by Peter Osborne, Routledge, 1996), the cover carried the image of The Thinker (1986) by the Canadian artist Jeff Wall. We are therefore especially pleased to be able to kick off the current series with an interview with Wall, whose photographic practice and writings have been at the forefront of critical debates in the artworld for thirty years – nearly as long, in fact, as the history of Radical Philosophy itself. The second in the series, in which David Cunningham interviews the Dutch architect and urban theorist Rem Koolhaas, will appear in the autumn. Peter Osborne
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commentary
Beware electocrats Naomi Klein on South Africa Ronald Suresh Roberts
W
ith the Karl Marx epigraph at the front of his Orientalism (‘They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented’) Edward Said meant to caution not only against callow imperialists but also against benignly orientalist protectors who trample upon native political agency in the most wellmeaning ways. Everyone knows how neocon invaders like Woodrow Wilson or Henry Kissinger tried to teach the natives to elect good men. We seem to have more trouble realizing what’s at stake when liberal imperialists like Michael Ignatieff or Samantha Power protest against what Power sinuously calls ‘electocracy’. Electocracy is Power’s term for what she derides as a widespread and regrettable ‘reification of elections’. In the same week that she bailed out of the Barack Obama campaign over her relatively harmless description of Hillary Clinton as a ‘monster’, Samantha Power made a far more outrageous and predictably little-noticed defence of Wilson-style inter ventionism and selective respect for democratic outcomes abroad. Just because Hamas was an elected government doesn’t mean that the United States has to talk to it, she told the New Statesman. ‘You know, there is a long tradition in the US of, um, promoting elections up to the point that you get an outcome you don’t like. Look at Latin America in the Cold War.’1 Power uncritically cited the example of Salvador Allende, the elected president of Chile in 1970 who was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup on 11 September 1973. ‘We were trying to figure out if we could promote that election, but we certainly didn’t love the outcome. We played a role in assassinating an elected leader.’ The difference that may divide people like Power from people like Kissinger, regarding this outcome, may boil down to little more than the rhetorical formulation of regret. On the surface, Power’s chilling political ‘realism’ might seem far removed from what Naomi Klein offers in her new and warmly received book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Klein’s coverage of the Chilean coup and its aftermath is extensive and full of outrage, with good reason. Klein’s critique of the 1973 coup is a cornerstone of her thesis, powerfully argued in parts, that autocratic violence and plutocratic economics often ride in tandem. When Klein emphasizes how electorates in Russia, Poland and elsewhere rose up to slap down ‘shock therapy’ economics, it is easy to believe that Klein would want to see electorates in the driver’s seats of national destinies everywhere. She might seem to embrace that ‘electocracy’ at which Samantha Power scoffs. But upon an attentive reading Klein, no less than Power, seems happy with native electorates only so long as their collective decisions match her preferences. This is a particular weakness of her chapter on South Africa. In her discussion of non-African countries, Klein confronts the articulated logic of decision-makers. But when she turns her attention to post-apartheid South Africa Klein is content to recycle the impressions of a small and like-minded clique of analysts such
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as fellow Canadian activist Patrick Bond, described as someone ‘who worked as an economic advisor in Mandela’s office during the first years of ANC rule’. Bond is best known as an anti-government fundraising maestro within global ‘social movements’ circles. His Centre for Civil Society has at times accepted money from USAID and the Ford Foundation and has had links at board level with Ford, Kellogg and other such foundations.2 Klein decries neocon ‘transitionologists’ as a ‘hypermobile class’ that intellectually dominates ‘inherently inward-looking’ native governments, softening them up for neoliberal restructuring. Yet she and some of her informants participate in the same condescension and hypermobility. To avoid duplicating the imperialism they supposedly resist, the ‘social movements’ elite may need to become a little more ‘electocratic’ than at present. Ignoring the implications of her own excellent discussion of how the Ford Foundation channelled the economic interests of the Ford Motor Company in what was an obvious conflict of interest (‘Ford on Ford’, pp. 121–8), Klein uncritically recycles the Mbekibashing views of William Mervyn Gumede, a self-described Oppenheimer Scholar at St Anthony’s College, Oxford, and a former employee of the London Economist’s Intelligence Unit. The Oppenheimer dynasty, founders of Anglo-American and owners of diamond-dealing De Beers, is to South African politics and economics as was Ford to American economic and politics, except more so: their plutocratic dominance of the South African economy far exceeds Ford’s influence within corporate and academic America. Before she published The Shock Doctrine, Klein had described Gumede’s assault upon Mbeki, Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC (2005), as ‘a definitive account of how one of the greatest liberation struggles of our time failed millions of people in whose name it fought’.3 On page 184 of her book, Klein enthuses over global citizenry’s ‘hard-won democratic powers to become the authors of their national destinies’. But not all these new authors, it seems, have written equally compelling political texts. In South Africa ‘the black majority were misled’, John Pilger had argued of the 1994 election in an essay that anticipates Klein’s argument, titled ‘Apartheid Did Not Die’.4 But by the time Pilger published this essay in 2006 (based on a 1998 documentary), the electorate had given an even larger percentage of its vote to the ANC in 1999 (66 per cent) and then a larger still share in 2004 (70 per cent). If Pilger was correct, South Africa’s black voters were not merely misled, but chronically misleadable. Pilger doesn’t explain why that might be. Ah, the boundless stupidity of those millions. Klein’s Shock Doctrine purports to remove the mystery: electorates, including black South Africans, were shocked into a kind of collective coma, so that what looked outwardly like freedom was really a new imprisonment. Back in 1807, the liberal Lord Gloucester founded the African Institution, with a charter to advance ‘the civilization and improvement of Africa’ aimed ‘to prepare and fortify the minds of the ignorant natives of Africa against the fraudulent and mischievous efforts of eager and adventurous traffic’.5 Apparently the natives still need such help, with people such as Klein and Pilger looking to supply it. In an open letter of 1 August 2003, Mbeki addressed this fashionably radical contempt for the newly enfranchised: We must free ourselves of the ‘friends’ who populate our ranks, originating from the world of the rich, who come to us, perhaps dressed in jeans and T-shirts, as advisers and consultants, while we end up as the voice that gives popular legitimacy to decisions we neither made, nor intended to make, which our ‘friends’ made for us, taking advantage of an admission that perhaps we are not sufficiently educated.
Matters of fact The suggestion that millions of newly enfranchised blacks have been so quickly and so easily reduced to a quasi-comatose passivity is a proposition that must be expressed
with great delicacy, to say the least. Klein excels in this. Her favoured strategy is to find a black native informant who mentions the unmentionable, rendering it printable. Klein slips between starkly different ‘shock’ notions as her text proceeds: the literal electroshocks of the torture chamber; the metaphorical ‘shock therapy’ of neoliberal economic theory; the military metaphor of ‘shock and awe’ in Iraq, all somehow subsumed within a loosely defined ‘shock doctrine’. When Klein describes Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, the ‘shock’ epidemic turns from fatuous to farce: ‘Mandela, for his part, was suffering from such an epic case of culture shock that he mistook a camera microphone for “some new-fangled weapon developed while I was in prison”.’ Klein suggests that electorates can become lobotomized by trauma. This is most explicit when she quotes the slain Argentine activist Rudolfo Walsh: Before he was gunned down on the streets of Buenos Aires, Walsh estimated that it would take twenty to thirty years until the effects of the terror receded and Argentines regained their footing, courage and confidence, ready once again to fight for economic and social equality. It was in 2001, twenty-four years later, that Argentina erupted in protest against IMF prescribed austerity measures and then proceeded to force out five presidents in only three weeks. I was living in Buenos Aires in that period, and people kept exclaiming, ‘The dictatorship has just ended!’ At the time I didn’t understand the meaning behind the jubilation, since the dictatorship had been over for seventeen years. Now I think I do: the state of shock had finally worn off, just as Walsh predicted. In the years since, that wide-awake shock resistance has spread to many other former shock labs. (447)
In the South African context the question is: Why has the ANC’s vote risen in each election since 1994? Answer: the electorate is falling more and more deeply asleep. And yet when it comes to plain factual matters Klein herself is frequently caught napping. At page 203 of her chapter on ‘South Africa’s constricted freedom’ Klein lists the apparent nets that descended upon the unwary natives and their political leadership. For instance she cites the Constitution’s property clause, which explicitly contemplates and allows for land reform, as though it absolutely bars land reform.6 Likewise, an ANC government that successfully litigated against intellectual property rights that had stymied cheap generic antiretrovirals gets faulted by Klein for upholding the very constraints they successfully fought down!7 Again, she emphasizes the interest bill on pre-democracy loans as though debt repudiation would have enhanced the democratic government’s cash flows for social spending, without addressing the cash crunch that debt repudiation would entail as retaliating banks shut down credit lines. She suggests that the World Bank succeeded in ‘making private-sector partnerships the service norm’. As strategy and policy adviser to the ANC minister who piloted the 1998 water law reforms, I personally insisted upon precisely the opposite bias, which is why section 19 of the 1997 Water Services Act establishes an explicit onus against public–private partnerships, of which there have been next to none.8 Moreover, section 3 of the 1998 Water Act effectively nationalizes water resources. Klein convinces herself that ‘currency controls’ needed to be imposed in 1994. Actually these were already thick on the ground, a result of the apartheid regime’s earlier battles with capital flight. Klein repeatedly mentions an $850 million IMF deal ‘signed, conveniently enough, right before the elections’ of 1994; this deal then supposedly constrained the incoming government. But she neglects to mention that the IMF has been begging the ANC, with zero success in fifteen years, to take its money. She even believes the minimum wage was not raised. It was. Repeatedly. Additionally, Klein implies that the ANC implemented a massive privatization plan. This is a major theme in Shock Doctrine; privatization is to political economy what sensory deprivation is to clinical psychology. In fact the ANC successfully resisted massive international pressure on privatization, and Mbeki took the steps that were required to allow such resistance to prevail. The ANC has privatized nothing strategic
other than the telephone company. While Patrick Bond at least quotes Mbeki’s many and varied assaults upon the Washington Consensus before caricaturing them as lip service (as in his book Talking Left, Walking Right), Klein proceeds as though Mbeki’s vigorous and long-standing critiques, such as his speech at the ILO Conference in June 2003,9 simply do not exist. When Klein turns her attention to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which investigated the apartheid past, she suggests that the ANC played a role in limiting its political effects. She suggests that the ANC wanted a narrow torture-focused process that neglected apartheid’s systemic aspects. Again I was a direct participant in the formative debates surrounding the Truth Commission, and at the time I co-authored a book with Professor Kader Asmal, the human rights lawyer and ANC minister who had first floated the idea in a 1992 lecture.10 We explicitly advocated a systematic focus and rejected precisely the narrow torture-based approach that Klein criticizes. We emphasized the role of business, which Klein claims the ANC tried to play down. Nelson Mandela wrote the book’s preface; his successor, Thabo Mbeki, spoke at the book’s launch. Rather than the ANC it was the Truth Commissioners themselves who dropped the ball on this, not least because of the influence of their deputy chair, Alex Boraine, a public relations executive during the apartheid years within the Oppenheimer-run mining conglomerate, Anglo-American. After completing his TRC work Boraine left for New York to set up ‘Justice in Transition’ programmes at New York University and Columbia University, massively funded by the Ford Foundation.
Permanent transition The plain truth is that Klein’s account of South Africa is clogged with propaganda. This is all the more poignant because of her undoubtedly progressive intentions. Many of the guiding assumptions of Shock Doctrine do not fit the South African situation, but rather than revise her theory Klein prefers to misrepresent the ‘case’. In fact the last thing sought by the colonial status quo in South Africa is ‘shock’ of any kind. Instead, for obvious reasons, they seek a kind of continuity that was vividly described by one Anglo-American official in the 1980s as ‘permanent transition’. He meant the continuation of state powerlessness: the powerlessness of the apartheid state, buffeted by sanctions and pariah status before 1994 ought to give way to a new powerlessness of the democratic state, which must be weakened by factionalism and delegitimized (not least by reckless internal talk of ‘betrayal’) so that private and international interests can continue to dominate the field as the only entities capable of collective action. This is why the choice of Klein’s chief source in this chapter, William Gumede, is so profoundly problematic. Klein thoroughly buys Gumede’s anti-Mbeki line. In January 2005 the Economist had the following peculiar sentence (italicized below) in a hostile profile of Mbeki, based on Gumede’s book: Mr Mbeki and a team of friends [sic] – Trevor Manual as finance minister, Tito Mboweni at the central bank – pushed through a set of tough economic reforms known as GEAR (the Growth, Employment and Redistribution Plan) to cut the deficit, lower inflation, cut tariffs and bureaucracy and privatize some state firms. These reforms left opponents reeling. Those who wanted to see a state-dominated economy were barged aside.
But since when has the Economist taken up cudgels on behalf of labour unions that were allegedly ‘barged aside’ by market measures? Klein’s book itself demonstrates what everybody knows: the Economist traditionally proselytizes in favour of the sort of economic reforms embraced by Augusto Pinochet and other neoliberal ‘modernisers’. What, then, is going on? As Noam Chomsky has repeatedly said: it is not the selfstyled left-ness or right-ness of governments that offends imperialism, but the extent of a government’s capacity for coherent collective action or nationalist self-assertion. ‘Left’ regimes that sufficiently toe the line are tolerated, as was the China of the 1990s; ‘right’
regimes that show too much independence quickly become anathema. The same regime can cross from initial client to subsequent pariah status, as in the cases of Saddam Hussein and Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega; alternatively, the fire-breathing devil of the Reagan years, Daniel Ortega, can retake Nicaragua if he cleans up his act. One hears far more vituperation over Mbeki’s Zimbabwe and AIDS policies than one does refutation of his logic.11 On AIDS policy, in particular, Mbeki has steadfastly resisted the Big Pharma disaster capitalist logic, peddled by Jeffrey Sachs himself, who advocates a medical form of shock therapy in the form of massive drug-buying binges – a strategy criticized by William Easterley in The White Man’s Burden. And yet, despite her generally unremitting criticisms of Sachs, Klein gives Mbeki no credit here, scared away as she is by the propaganda that has caricatured his position as an ill-defined ‘AIDS denialism’. The rise of factionalism inside the ANC is not now and never was about the country’s location on a policy spectrum between right-wing ‘shock doctors’ and left-wing progressives. Since the defenestration of Mbeki at the ANC conference last December, the new leadership has reiterated the old economic policy commitments. On 22 April 2008 Bobby Godsell, a recently retired executive within the AngloAmerican stable, and Mbeki’s most vociferous ‘left’ critic, Zwelinzima Vavi, general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, co-authored an article in Johannesburg’s Business Day. This unlikely duo voiced thoughts much more closely resembling Klein’s ‘disaster capitalism’ than anything Klein cites in her book. After returning from a trip to London they wrote: We met a financial advisory company specialising in energy and infrastructure which, frankly, saw our situation [of rolling electricity blackouts] as an opportunity rather than a problem. We were a little surprised to be told by them, and by the MD of the investment management arm of one of the world’s largest investment banks, that our problems in this respect are little different from the power challenges of many other rapidly developing countries.
Klein would do well to answer a question posed by the 22-year-old Durban-based environmental activist Khadija Sharife: ‘But whose fault is it that the media acts as a thin veneer for Empire’s interest? Theirs or ours?’ Klein herself is, of course, a powerful part of the global media, with her well-meaning and yet stubbornly Orientalist representations of African politics, complete with a ‘culture-shocked’ Mandela and a chronically paralysed native electorate, falsely unconscious of its authentic best interests.
Notes 1. Samantha Power, New Statesman, 6 March 2008: www.newstatesman.com/200803060030. 2. Stephen Gowans, ‘Talking Left, Funded Right’, Panafricanews, 8 April 2007, http://panafricannews. blogspot.com/2007/04/talking-left-funded-right-more-views-on.html. 3. Ginny Hooker, ‘Take a Leaf Out of Their Books’, Guardian, 25 November 2006. 4. John Pilger, Freedom Next Time, Bantam, London, 2006, p. 218. 5. African Institution, quoted by Rachel Holmes, The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman, Bloomsbury, London, 2007, p. 79. 6. See Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, section 25, which contemplates expropriation, requires those calculating the compensation payable to have regard to ‘the history of the acquisition and use of the property’ and also ‘the nation’s commitment to land reform, and to reforms to bring about equitable access to all South Africa’s natural resources’. 7. The government passed a 1997 law permitting generic imports. The drug industry launched its challenge within months and the government finally won the case in 2001. See ‘South Africa versus Big Pharma’, www.nature.com/nm/journal/v7/n4/full/nm0401_390c.html. 8. Full text of the Act available at: www.wrc.org.za/downloads/legislature/WSA108–97.pdf. 9. Thabo Mbeki, Speech at ILO Conference, 11 June 2003, www.polity.org.za/article.php?a_ id=37111. 10. Kader Asmal, Louise Asmal and Ronald Suresh Roberts, Reconciliation through Truth: A Reckoning of Apartheid’s Criminal Governance, 2nd edn, James Currey, London, 1997, passim. 11. See my book, written with Mbeki’s cooperation, Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki, STE, Johannesburg, 2007.
‘The rush to the intimate’ Counterinsurgency and the cultural turn Derek Gregory
In the years following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the New Yorker published a series of critical reports by its investigative journalists, notably Seymour Hersh and Jane Meyer, on the conduct of the ‘war on terror’ and the invasion and occupation of Iraq. But during 2006 the magazine began to outline an alternative scenario. Staff writer George Packer was a veteran of four tours in Iraq and the author of an acclaimed book on the war whose title, The Assassins’ Gate, provides a brilliant metaphor for the occupation. The gate is the main entrance to the Green Zone in Baghdad, but its Arabic name is Bab al-Qasr, Palace Gate. ‘Assassins’ Gate’, Packer explained, is an American invention, ‘a misnomer for a mirage’. ‘Iraqis complained about the way the US military renamed their highways and buildings and redrew their district lines’, he continued. ‘It reminded them that something alien and powerful had been imposed on them without their consent, and that this thing did not fit easily with the lives they’d always known.’ Travelling back and forth between the Green Zone and the Red Zone that was the rest of Iraq, Packer became ‘almost dizzy at the transition, two separate realities existing on opposite sides of concrete and wire’. In a tortured landscape that was ‘neither at war nor at peace’ firepower was ‘less important than learning to read the signs’, but an aggressive series of counterinsurgency sweeps revealed only that ‘the Americans were moving half-blind in an alien landscape, missing their quarry and leaving behind frightened women and boys with memories.’1 Packer’s disillusionment with the war (which he originally supported) made him receptive to a new, culturally informed strategy of what he called, after Sun Tzu’s Art of War, ‘knowing the enemy’. In January 2006 he visited Tel Afar in northern Iraq, where he found troops implementing an improvised counter insurgency strategy that emphasized the cultural dimensions of warfare. ‘You can’t come in and start
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talking’, their commanding officer told him, ‘You have to really listen to people.’ The next month Packer attended a workshop at Fort Leavenworth on the draft of a new Army Field Manual on Counterinsurgency where he heard much the same. After interviewing several of its authors, Packer argued that social science could redefine the ‘war on terror’ as a global counter insurgency and direct attention away from the diffuse, shape-shifting spectre of pervasive Terror – which the Bush administration had found so rhetorically convenient – towards an engagement with the norms and forms of specific adversaries with their own ‘structure, meaning, agency’. Such a strategy would require ‘deep knowledge of diverse enemies and civilian populations’, but Packer concluded that these ‘revolutionary’ ideas had ‘yet to penetrate the fortress that is the Bush White House’.2 That same month, however, the final version of the Field Manual was released (FM 3-24), which showed that these ideas had breached at least the outer wall of the Pentagon. The civilian was placed at the centre of counterinsurgency (COIN); the first priority was no longer force protection, with troops sequestered in Forward Operating Bases, but protecting the civilian population. To that end, the Manual insisted on the importance of ‘cultural knowledge’, and in a single paragraph outlined a hermeneutics of counterinsurgency: American ideas of what is ‘normal’ or ‘rational’ are not universal. To the contrary, members of other societies often have different notions of rationality, appropriate behavior, level of religious devotion, and norms concerning gender. Thus, what may appear abnormal or strange to an external observer may appear as self-evidently normal to a group member.
For this reason, it was necessary ‘to avoid imposing’ American ideas of the normal and the rational on other people. This was an extraordinary injunction, given the conduct of American foreign policy, the pursuit
of accumulation by dispossession, and the violence of military occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq. But, not surprisingly, the Manual drew a different lesson. In most COIN operations, it warned, ‘insurgents hold a distinctive advantage in their level of local knowledge. They speak the language, move easily within the society, and are more likely to understand the population’s interests.’ Cultural knowledge was therefore essential to combat insurgents and to redress the basic concerns of the population. That twin focus should not be overlooked. A key objective was to generate actionable intelligence about insurgency to inform lethal targeting, so that cultural knowledge was not only a substitute for killing but also a prerequisite for its refinement. The presentation of the new doctrine also, however, focused public attention on non-kinetic operations and non-lethal targeting, and re-presented counterinsurgency as a form of ‘armed social work’ (‘attempts to redress basic social and political problems while being shot at’) whose legal and ethical entailments were front and centre. The Manual reaffirmed the obligations imposed by the Geneva Conventions and rejected the cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners. It also drew attention to the counterproductive potential of overwhelming force. ‘Sometimes the more force is used, the less effective it is.’ Humiliating, injuring or killing civilians and destroying their property is a gift to insurgents, the Manual cautioned, whereas ‘using force precisely and discriminately strengthens the rule of law that needs to be established.’3 The revised doctrine drew on the experience of highly educated commanders in the field – ‘a small band of warrior intellectuals’ – and described counterinsurgency as ‘the graduate level of war’. The Manual also made much of its incorporation of the work of anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists, and the involvement of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard. These intellectual credentials were intended to signal a departure from previous proto cols: as The Economist had it, ‘After smart weapons, smart soldiers.’4 Given American public culture, such an appeal to the humanities and social sciences was audacious, and some critics feared its seductive power. Tom Hayden warned, for example, that ‘the Pentagon occupation of the academic mind may last much longer than its occupation of Iraq, and may require an intellectual insurgency in response.’5 By December 2007 he had his wish. Many anthropologists were up in arms at the Pentagon’s attempt to enlist them in its Human Terrain Systems (HTS) project, which was part of a wider plan to incorporate knowledge of adversary culture into military operations. The Executive
Board of the American Anthropological Association expressed grave concern at the HTS project, and the Network of Concerned Anthropologists pledged ‘not to undertake research or other activities in support of counterinsurgency work in Iraq or in related theatres in the “war on terror”’.6 While these scholars were right to expose the historical roots of ‘mercenary anthropology’ and to sound the alarm at its ethical implications, arguments about the selective appropriation of anthropology and the proper citation of sources (in the Manual) and informed consent and ‘enabling the kill-chain’ (in relation to the HTS) have been drowned out by a chorus of commentaries on the effectiveness of the new doctrine: thus, ‘Army social scientists calm Afghanistan, make enemies at home.’7 Indeed, Kahl claims that counterinsurgency has become ‘part of the zeitgeist’, and media reports trumpet the success of the ‘surge’ in Baghdad, which they attribute in large measure to the new, culturally sensitive strategy pursued under the command of General David Petraeus.8 The importance of these developments thus extends far beyond their ethical implications for anthropology itself. They also have political implications for war that need to be subjected to the closest public scrutiny. It is in order to bring these into view that I want to plot the contours of this ‘cultural turn’ in more detail.9
Late modern war and the city as visual field Towards the end of the twentieth century, American military theorists argued that most wars of the near future would be fought in the cities of the global South, and focused on urban warfare and the ‘urbanization of insurgency’.10 In this optic, the city was visualized as both target and terrain, hollowed out and emptied of human life. Air operations reduced enemy cities to strings of coordinates and constellations of pixels on visual displays, and ground operations reduced cities to three-dimensional object-spaces of buildings and physical networks. The Revolution in Military Affairs promised total mastery of battle-space: a hi-tech combination of omniscient surveillance and ‘bombing at the speed of thought’. This martial God-trick commingles what Harris calls ‘the mundane and the monstrously violent’. He shows how the USA developed a three-day targeting cycle for the first Gulf War, a cascading series of translations from images through data to targets and back again, whose mediations worked to obscure the violence on the ground in Kuwait and Iraq from those organizing it at the US command-and-control centre in
Saudi Arabia.11 This optical detachment is reinforced by the syntax of deliberative targeting, which implies the careful isolation of an object – the reduction of battle-space to an array of points – whereas in fact targets are given a logistical value by virtue of their calibrated position within the infrastructural networks that are the fibres of modern society. The complex geometries of these networks displace the punctiform coordinates of ‘precision’ weapons, ‘smart’ bombs and ‘surgical’ strikes so that their effects surge far beyond any immediate or localized destruction. Thus air strikes on Iraqi power stations in 2003 were designed to disrupt not only the supply of electricity but also the pumping of water and the treatment of sewage, which depended on the grid. By then the targeting cycle had accelerated to a matter of hours. The kill-chain is compressed still further by adaptive targeting, which depends on the identification of targets of opportunity by ground forces who call in close air support.12 At the same time, the distance between target and command centre has increased, a process that reaches its temporary limit in the deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in Iraq. Take-offs and landings of Predator drones, armed with heat-seeking cameras and Hellfire missiles, are controlled by American pilots at Balad Air Force Base north of Baghdad, but the missions are flown by pilots at Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Field in Nevada, some 7,000 miles away. ‘Inside that trailer is Iraq,’ one journalist was told, ‘inside the other, Afghanistan.’ It is hard to overstate the degree of optical detachment implied by such casual reduction.13 But it is symptomatic, for, as these examples imply, contemporary targeting depends on an electronic disjuncture between the eye and the target, ‘our space’ and ‘their space’. The techno-cultural form of this disjuncture makes the experience of war (for those in ‘our space’) less corporeal than calculative because it produces the space of the enemy as an abstract space on a display screen composed of coordinates and pixels and emptied of all bodies.14
The city as terrain Ground operations initially transposed the visual logics of targeting to render the city as a threedimensional object-space. The Handbook for Joint Urban Operations, prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in September 2002, treated the city as a space of envelopes, hard structures and networks whose solid geometry confounded surveillance, reconnaissance and manoeuvres. The same emphasis reappeared in pre-deployment training. Since November 2003 thousands of soldiers have trained for convoy duty by
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driving through a virtual Baghdad, and from February 2005 an enhanced three-dimensional database of the city has been used by the Combat Studies Institute to conduct virtual staff rides to study the ‘Thunder Runs’ made by armoured brigades during the invasion. The simulations render buildings, bridges and streets with extraordinary fidelity: yet the inhabitants are nowhere to be seen. ‘The important thing for us is the terrain’, explains the officer in charge.15 The latest US Army Field Manual on Urban Operations (FM 3-06), released in October 2006, thus opens by emphasizing the sheer complexity of the ‘multidimensional urban battlefield’ and diagrams the city as ‘an extraordinary blend of horizontal, vertical, interior, exterior and subterranean forms’.16 These visualizations are closely connected to the city-as-target. In fact, they are often part of the same process, and assume the same highly sophisticated, technically mediated form as detailed images from satellites, aircraft and drones are relayed to display screens in command centres and combat zones. According to one observer, staring at the brightly lit screens of the Command Post of the Future (CPOF) outside Fallujah was ‘like seeing Iraq from another planet’.17 Mundane models are part of the same discourse of ‘object-ness’. In November 2004, before the second US assault on Fallujah, Marines constructed a large model of the city at their Forward Operating Base, in which roads were represented by gravel, structures under 40 foot by poker chips, and structures over 40 foot by Lego bricks. Army officers made their own model using bricks to represent buildings and spent shells to represent mosques.18 These reductions of the city to physical morphology have three powerful effects. First, they render the city as an uninhabited space, shot through with violence yet without a body in sight. This repeats the colonial gesture of terra nullius in which the city becomes a vacant space awaiting its possession; its emptiness works to convey a right to be there on those who represent it thus. Second, they are performative. As John Pickles shows, ‘mapping, even as it claims to be representing the world, produces it’.19 Before the final assault on Fallujah, one captain instructed his platoon commanders: ‘The first time you get shot at from a building, it’s rubble. No questions asked.’ But in an important sense the city was rubble before the attack began; the violence wrought by the US military in Fallujah cannot be separated from the violence of its visualizations of it.20 Third, these representations have legitimating force; they circulate through public spheres to prepare audiences for war and desensitize
them to its outcomes. The reduction of the city to a visual field is naturalized through the media barrage of satellite images and bomb-sight views (city-as-target) and through representations that hollow out the city on the ground. In a striking graphic from the Los Angeles Times tanks rumble down a street, soldiers scramble across roofs and hug walls: but there is no other sign of life. Similarly, videogames based on the war register only the spectral figures of terrorists and insurgents. Kuma\War combines faux news reports, satellite imagery and mission briefings with first-person shooter games, and in Fallujah: Operation al-Fajr the city is empty of civilians but ‘swarming with Sunni insurgents’. Yet Fallujah was neither empty nor the exclusive preserve of insurgents; the US military threw a cordon round the city and refused to allow men and teenage boys to leave before the attack. I have made so much of Fallujah because many military commentators regard the US assault as ‘a model of how to take down a medium-sized city’. Air strikes had pulverized the city before the ground offensive, but the decisive innovation was the use of persistent intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance from air and space platforms. This ‘God’s eye view’ made it possible to pre-assign targets, and during the attack UAVs provided visual feeds to command centres and combat troops. These airborne sensors ‘opened up a full-motion video perspective on the street battle’ so that, as one ground controller put it, ‘We knew their alleyways better than they did.’21 But other military commentators viewed this as a problem rather than a solution. Pentagon orthodoxy may have regarded the enemy ‘as less important than his labyrinth’, as Mike Davis notes, but some field commanders insisted that knowing the skeletal geometry of a city was no substitute for understanding its human geography. Such abstracted renderings of the city have been sharply criticized from outside the military, but Ricks claims that with its new cultural awareness ‘the Army is turning the war over to its dissidents’: it is this critique from inside the machine that now needs interrogation.22
Genealogies of the cultural turn Soon after President Bush’s announcement of the end of major combat operations in May 2003, it became clear that the war in Iraq was going badly. There were many reasons for this, not the least of which was the complacent conviction that occupation would be mistaken for liberation and the consequent inability to comprehend the basis of insurgency. The cultural turn was a response to these failings.
The US military relied on thousands of young men and women who had been abruptly transferred from small-town America to a cultural landscape for which they literally had no terms. They were given two expedients. One was a fold-out Iraq Visual Language Survival Guide, which included a list of Arabic instructions (‘Hands up’, ‘Do not move’, ‘Lie on stomach’) and point-at-the-picture cartoons showing ambushes, booby traps, vehicle stops and strip searches. The other was an Iraq Culture Smart Card whose twenty panels provided a basic Arabic vocabulary, a bullet-point summary of Islam, and terse tabulations of Iraq’s cultural and ethnic groups, cultural customs and cultural history. This may have been more effective – it’s hard to imagine it being less – but it had limitations of its own that derived as much from how culture was conceived as from how it had to be abbreviated. The panel on ‘Cultural Groups’ in the 2006 version, for example, was concerned exclusively with ethnosectarian divisions: ‘Arabs view Kurds as separatists [and] look down upon the Turkoman’; ‘Sunnis blame Shia for undermining the mythical unity of Islam’; ‘Shia blame Sunnis for marginalizing the Shia majority’; and ‘Kurds are openly hostile towards Iraqi Arabs [and] are distrustful of the Turkoman’. Culture was a forcefield of hostilities with no space for mutuality or transculturation. Commanders were at a loss too, confronting an adversary ‘that was not exactly the enemy we wargamed against’, as one general famously complained. The Pentagon was so invested in high technology and network-centric warfare against the conventional forces of nation-states that it was radically unprepared for the resurgence and reinvention of asymmetric warfare in so-called ‘new wars’ waged by transnational, nonstate and non-hierarchical adversaries in the margins and breaches of former empires.23 In short, the military was in a high state of readiness for precisely the wrong enemy. It had not revised its doctrine on counterinsurgency for twenty years and in an attempt to shore up the situation an interim Field Manual on Counterinsurgency was hastily released in October 2004; but it remained rigidly ‘tactical-technical’.24 That same month retired Major-General Robert Scales repeated arguments he had made before the House Armed Services Committee in an influential essay on culture-centric warfare, in which he called for cultural awareness to be given a higher priority than the technical fix of ‘smart bombs, unmanned aircraft and expansive bandwidth’. Commanders in Iraq had found themselves ‘immersed in an alien culture’, he said, ‘an army of strangers in the midst of strangers’, and forced
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to improvise.25 Many officers turned to email to share their experiences, and the interim Manual was soon eclipsed by developments in the field. By December 2005 a COIN Academy was established in Baghdad, emphasizing the importance of the civilian population and the cultural, and twelve months later the capstone was put in place with the publication of the revised counterinsurgency doctrine. This spare chronology does not provide a con ceptual trace of the cultural turn, and I need to make a series of deeper cuts into its construction. In what follows, I concentrate on just four of its architects, but the cultural turn cannot be reduced to the forceful projection of individual wills. It is a heterogeneous assemblage of discourses and objects, practices and powers distributed across different but networked sites: a military dispositif, if you prefer. As such, it is a contradictory machine. For war, occupation and counterinsurgency are not coherent projects; they are fissured by competing demands and conflicting decisions, and they are worked out in different ways in different places. So it is with the cultural turn.
From cultural morphology to the cultural sciences The groundwork had been partly prepared in a paper on ‘Military Operations and the Middle Eastern City’ by Lieutenant-Colonel Louis DiMarco.26 The lead writer of Field Manual 3-06 on Urban Operations, by the fall of 2003 DiMarco was involved in planning the invasion of Iraq. This was widely expected to centre on urban warfare, but DiMarco realized the gulf between the generalities of FM 3-06 and the situational exigencies of Iraq’s cities. His new analysis did not provide geospecific studies of Baghdad, Fallujah, Karbala or Najaf, however, but a geotypical survey (whose examples included, disconcertingly, Cairo and Istanbul) in which the object shifted between the Middle Eastern city, the Islamic city and the Arab city. These are all problematic constructs, but the nuances of contemporary cultural theory or cultural geography were beside the immediate point. DiMarco’s concern was kinetic operations and his language resolutely one of ‘attackers’ and ‘defenders’. The need to move beyond the abstract geometries of FM 3-06 convinced him that an analysis of built form and topography would be insufficient. What he had in mind was a revolutionary emphasis on cultural morphology. ‘The idea of analyzing urban populations and culture was not recognized,’ he told me, ‘much less accepted.’ Yet his remained a morphological approach, modelled on Stefano Bianca’s Urban Form in the Arab World, and
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its sense of the spatialities of culture captured in urban models, plans and diagrams was neither fluid nor transactional. Consistent with the essentialist diagnostics of Orientalism, little attention was paid to the modern Arab city, which was seen as axiomatically normal and so non-threatening. The focus was on the ‘traditional’ city, which was viewed as the epicentre of radical Islam. As such it was invested with cultural meanings that required translation but, following the morphological imperative, these were inscribed in physical places and structures: the sacred geometry of the mosque and its network of community services; the market and its webs of trade; the neighbourhood and the architectural codes through which privacy is maintained; and the home as a place which ‘no person [should] enter uninvited’. However, these affordances turned out to be preliminaries to their tactical reversal. Throughout the text ordinary meanings were retrieved, interpreted and then subjected to a détournement in which military meanings took absolute priority: mosques isolated from the community by shaping operations, neighbourhoods controlled through checkpoints. These were textbook recommendations, however, and in practice such reversals threatened to capsize the American mission. By the summer of 2004, MajorGeneral Peter Chiarelli, commanding the 1st Cavalry Division in Baghdad, was convinced that the doctrinal progression from combat to ‘stability operations’ was mistaken. Attempting to see military actions ‘through the eyes of the population’, he concluded that a purely kinetic approach to insurgency risked alienating local people not only through its spiralling circles of violence but also through its indifference to their predicament. ‘The cultural reality is that no matter what the outcome of a combat operation, for every insurgent put down, the potential exists to grow many more if cultural mitigation is not practised.’ The image of ‘growing’ an insurgency derives from an organic model of what he called ‘full-spectrum operations’. ‘We went after the insurgents,’ Chiarelli explained, ‘while at the same time – really simultaneously – we maximized non-lethal effects’ that targeted the provision of basic services, local government and economic regeneration. DiMarco had sutured poverty to political radicalism in similar terms. ‘Insurgents use the grievances of the urban poor to garner recruits, support and sanctuary,’ he warned, so ‘commanders must become engaged in these neighbourhoods because it is here that discontent turns into radical action. Poor neighbourhoods become the breeding ground for terrorists and insurgents.’27 But Chiarelli’s Baghdad was not the ‘traditional’ city of classical Orientalism. Before deploying to Iraq,
he and his officers consulted city administrators in Austin, Texas, and while he said he ‘knew we weren’t going to create Austin in Baghdad’, he also knew they would be confronting a modern city whose infrastructure had been degraded by years of air strikes, sanctions and war. Chiarelli recognized the significance of cultural knowledge, and laid his model of modern urban infrastructure over ‘a fully functional model of the norms of the Arab people [and] the current status of Baghdad services and government’. It is not clear
what the first of these entailed, but the second was more straightforward. A major focus was Sadr City, which had been designed by Constantinos Doxiadis, funded in part by the Ford Foundation, as part of the 1958 master plan for Baghdad. It was no Orientalist labyrinth but a modernist, hyper-rationalist grid that had become a vast, sprawling slum. Chiarelli used a prototype of the Command Post of the Future to implement a spatial monitoring system – an ‘event-ful’ visualization of a city in motion rather than a static morphology – that revealed that [Mahdi Army] cell congregations, red zones and anti-coalition, anti-government religious rhetoric originated from those areas of Baghdad characterized by low electrical distribution, sewage running raw through the streets, little or no potable water distribution, and no solid waste pickup. Concurrently, unemployment rates rocketed in these extremely impoverished areas and health care was almost nonexistent.
In short, ‘areas where local infrastructure was in a shambles became prime recruiting areas for insurgent forces’ and, in turn, danger zones for US troops. This is not as reductive as it sounds. The Mahdi Army
‘target[ed] disenfranchised neighbourhoods’, providing both services and shadow government, and Chiarelli’s response was to target the same districts and to focus on producing visible improvements in people’s daily lives.28 But the logic was one-sided: poverty, ignorance and manipulation by malcontents provoked insurgency, and military occupation could not see itself as a legitimate cause for resistance and rebellion. Chiarelli’s approach was to treat counterinsurgency as ‘armed social work’. The phrase is David Kilcullen’s, an ex-Australian Army officer who was seconded to the US State Department as Chief Strategist in the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism; he was a key contributor to FM 3-24 and, until July 2007, served as Senior Counterinsurgency Adviser to General Petraeus. ‘Your role is to provide protection, identify needs, facilitate civil affairs,’ Kilcullen wrote in a memorandum for company commanders, ‘and use improvements in social conditions as leverage to build networks and mobilize the population.’29 Insurgent violence was part of ‘an integrated politico-military strategy’ that could only be met by an integrated politico-military counterstrategy. Precisely because counterinsurgency was population-centric, it required cultural awareness and what Kilcullen called ‘conflict ethnography’; otherwise it would be impossible to understand the connections between the insurgency and the population at large. ‘Culture imbues otherwise random or apparently senseless acts with meaning and subjective rationality’, he argued, so that it was actively unhelpful to locate insurgents outside the space of Reason. He also argued that the spaces through which contemporary insurgencies are conducted are compound and plural, a reticulation of the local, the regional and the transnational. The fluid, multi-scalar geography prompted Kilcullen to conceptualize insurgencies as dissipative structures and self-synchronizing swarms, and he turned to the language of complex systems theory to characterize their emergent properties. But he also used a more familiar model to describe the transnational structure of al-Qaeda as ‘an intricate, ramified web of dependency’, bound together by networks of friendship and marriage, mutual obligation and financial transaction. Seen thus, he claimed, al-Qaeda is ‘a variant on a traditional Middle Eastern patronage network’ that
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functions ‘more like a tribal group [than] a military organization’.30 This characterization has had extraordinary influence, and what was originally an analogical model of ‘the global jihad’ has seeped into general models of insurgency and assumed a starkly concrete form. Although the urbanization of insurgency is one of the cardinal distinctions between classical and contemporary insurgency – ‘the cover is in the cities’, Kilcullen wrote, and so are the targets – his commentaries on counterinsurgency in Iraq have consistently privileged tribalism. When critics complained that FM 3-24 paid insufficient attention to religion, for example, Kilcullen’s response was dismissive: ‘When all involved are Muslim, kinship trumps religion’; the ‘key identity drivers’ are tribal. During the summer of 2007 he reported widespread Sunni resistance to al-Qaeda in the province of Anbar, and explained its tribal origin and operation. He then propounded ‘the Baghdad variant’. Although he conceded that the capital ‘is not tribal as such’, Kilcullen argued that there are such close connections between city and countryside that ‘clan connections, kinship links and the alliances they foster still play a key underlying role.’31 I have no doubt that they do; but while some military authors have written about ‘tribal cities’ as a category apart from the ‘hierarchical cities’ that ‘we Americans know’ – which is not, I think, Kilcullen’s intention – it is misleading to treat Baghdad in such one-dimensional terms. Indeed, in what is probably the most thoughtful discussion of ‘tribal engagement’ from the US military, Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Eisenstadt cautioned that ‘it would be a mistake to overemphasize the role of the tribes or to regard the tribe as the central organizing principle of Iraqi society today.’32 Perhaps this simply indicates Kilcullen’s distance from anthropology, but a close connection between counterinsurgency and the cultural sciences raises its own red flags. In a combative series of essays Montgomery McFate, a cultural anthropologist and a former AAAS Defense Fellow at the Office of Naval Research, called on anthropology to set aside its ‘selfflagellation’ – its colonial guilt and its postmodernism – and reclaim its historical role ‘to consolidate imperial power at the margins of empire’. In her view, ‘cultural knowledge and warfare are inextricably bound’, and
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counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq demanded nothing less than ‘an immediate transformation in the military conceptual paradigm’ infused by the discipline ‘invented to support warfighting in the tribal zone’: anthropology. It is not difficult to see why so many scholars were riled, but McFate was adamant that ‘cultural intelligence’ was not a scholastic exercise. It was important strategically, but it also made a crucial difference operationally and tactically, so that the thrust had to be on the production, dissemination and utilization of ‘adversary cultural knowledge’ on the front lines. In November 2004 McFate organized a conference on Adversary Cultural Knowledge
and National Security, sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). ‘The more unconventional the adversary’, she told the delegates, ‘the more we need to understand their society and underlying cultural dynamics.’33 Over the next eighteen months, McFate’s ideas were transformed into the Human Terrain System, for which she is currently Senior Social Science Adviser. The HTS aims to provide field commanders with a ‘comprehensive cultural information research system’ – filling the ‘cultural knowledge void’ – through a visual display of ‘the economic, ethnic and tribal landscapes, just like the Command Post of the Future maps the physical terrain’.34 All of these contributions rely on visualizations of one sort or another. But Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, one of the lead contributors to FM 3-24, was more interested in what the visual displays could not show: ‘The police captain playing both sides, the sheikh skimming money from a construction project’, Nagl asks, ‘What colour are they?’35 The examples are
telling; the cultural turn is never far from a hermeneutics of suspicion. But Nagl’s question also speaks to the presumptive intimacy of cultural intelligence. In one sense, the reliance on visual displays to capture adversary culture combines optical detachment with the intrusive intimacy of the biometric systems used by the US military to anatomize the Iraqi population. But the cultural turn also implies another sort of intimacy that extends beyond the compilation of databases to claim familiarity, understanding and even empathy. A primer for US forces deploying to the Middle East emphasizes that cultural awareness involves more than ‘intelligence from three-letter agencies and satellite photographs’; Scales’s vision of culture-centric warfare required an ‘intimate knowledge’ of adversary culture; and Kilcullen defined conflict ethnography as a ‘close reading’ of local cultures.36 While this ‘rush to the intimate’, as Stoler calls it, is conditional, forcefully imposed, and unlikely to be interested in thick description, it is clear that ‘the ethnographic has become strategic military terrain’.37 Just like military knowledge of any other terrain, it has to be taught. ‘The military spends millions to create urban combat sites designed to train soldiers how to kill an enemy in cities’, Scales told Congress. ‘But perhaps equally useful might [be] urban sites optimized to teach soldiers how to coexist in a simulated Middle Eastern city.’38
Rescripting Iraq US troops prepare for deployment by rotating through Combat Training Centres. The arc of these theatres of war runs from the United States through Germany to Jordan and Kuwait, but the main Mission Rehearsal Exercises are conducted at the Joint Readiness Training Centre at Fork Polk, Louisiana; the National Training Centre at Fort Irwin, California; and the US Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Training Centre at Twenty nine Palms, California. Each includes prefabricated settlements to train troops in urban operations. In contrast to DiMarco’s concern with cultural morph ology, there is little attempt at similitude. The same physical structures serve for Afghanistan and Iraq, as though the two are interchangeable, and the buildings are rudimentary approximations. One journalist described ‘Wadi al Sahara’ at Twentynine Palms as ‘an impressionist painting’. From the surrounding hills it could be mistaken for part of Basra or Fallujah, but ‘a walk through its dusty streets shows it to be only a vast collection of shipping containers’.39 This too has performative consequences. Shipping containers are an improvement on poker chips and Lego bricks, but reducing living spaces to metal boxes and studio flats
conveys a silent message about the sort of people who live in them. The focus at all the training centres is on interactive realism, and the cultural turn has transformed the terms of engagement. In the early stages of the ‘war on terror’, the emphasis was on air strikes and ambushes, and on state-of-the-art special effects that drew on the visual and pyrotechnic skills of Hollywood and themepark designers. Exercises still include kinetic operations, though these now focus on combating IEDs and suicide bombings, but the main objective is no longer scoring kills but ‘gaining the trust of the locals’. More than 1,000 Civilian Role Players are now on call at Fort Polk alone, including 250 Arabic speakers, many of them recruited from the Iraqi diaspora, who play community leaders, police chiefs, clerics, shopkeepers, aid workers and journalists. New scenarios require troops to understand the meaning of cultural transactions and to conduct negotiations with local people. Careful tallies are kept of promises made and fulfilled by US commanders, and the immediate consequences of civilian casualties are dramatized in depth. Mock newscasts by teams representing CNN and Al Jazeera remind troops that their actions can have far-reaching consequences. ‘It is no longer close in and destroy the enemy’, one Marine officer explained: ‘We have to build relationships with Iraqis in the street.’40 These Mission Rehearsal Exercises have become increasingly expensive and they pose formidable logistical problems. Yet, for all their size and complexity, they cannot convey the scale of operations in a city like Baghdad; and, precisely because they are conceived on the grand scale, it is difficult to inculcate the face-toface sensibility on which the cultural turn relies. For these reasons, the military has become increasingly invested in computer simulations and videogames.
Remodelling Iraq Although videogames are also used to train for kinetic operations, there has been a major effort to devise ‘first-person thinker’ games that model non-kinetic operations. In parallel with the introduction of Civilian Role Players to Mission Rehearsal Exercises, the Pentagon’s cyber-cities have been peopled too. The first attempts to model civilians treated them as aggregations. Computer-generated crowd federates animated the city as a series of physical trajectories and collective behaviours (‘flocking’, ‘path following’), but this was a danse macabre that conveyed little sense of the city as a space of meaning, value and transaction. MetaVR has introduced highly realistic 3D crowd animations into its Virtual Reality Scene Generator,
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but these are typically part of the scene and provide few opportunities for interaction. More significant are those simulations that attempt to incorporate the transactional intimacy of the cultural turn by using Civilian Role Players in Massively MultiPlayer Online Games or by using Artificial Intelligence to model cultural interactions. Forterra Systems produced the first closed virtual world for the US military in 2004 to simulate checkpoint operations in 1 square kilometre of a geotypical Baghdad. Avatars represent American troops, insurgents, Iraqi police and Iraqi civilians, all played by role-players who log on from remote stations, including Arabic-speaking Civilian Role Players from Fort Irwin. Interactions are unscripted, and players communicate through speech, text, facial expressions and gestures. A principal investigator explained: ‘They will learn, if a woman comes up to a checkpoint and she has a baby and a bag, here’s how you handle it.’ Forterra has also developed an enhanced suite of scenarios as part of its Asymmetric Warfare–Virtual Training Technology. These require troops to negotiate with a community leader to improve the delivery of food and medical supplies, and ‘to establish rapport with shoppers in a Baghdad market, only to confront angry civilians as well as insurgents who chose to launch an attack with an IED and small arms.’ Media coverage consistently emphasizes the non-kinetic priorities of the training: ‘AW–VTT is more about social interactions than firefights’, for example, or ‘Forterra creates sandboxes where people learn to interact.’41 The University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies has spearheaded the application of Artificial Intelligence to replicate military–civilian interactions. These simulations mimic the closeness and intimacy that is the fulcrum of the cultural turn in three ways. First, they are highly immersive: ICT claims to transport (even to ‘teleport’) participants ‘experientially’ to its virtual worlds. When ICT first released Every Soldier a Sensor Simulation (ES3), for example, it was a web-delivered patrol-training game in which the player navigates a three-dimensional neighbourhood modelled on Sadr City, and has to read the signs and react appropriately to people, including civilians, security personnel, NGOs and insurgents. The objective is to develop situational awareness and to collect actionable intelligence measured by an Information Operations score. Soon after its release, however, ES3 was integrated with a platform that uses a helmet-mounted display with a motion tracker system ‘to provide a high performance, immersive environment that enables soldiers to move naturally
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in a 360-degree environment with spatial 3D audio and the ability to interact with their environment in a manner that is much closer to reality than a desktop system.’42 The immersive possibilities have been taken still further with experiments in ‘mixed’ reality. ICT’s FlatWorld integrates digital flats – large rear-projection screens that use digital graphics to produce the interior of a building, a view to the outside, or an exterior – with physical objects like tables, doors and windows, and immersive audio, lighting and smell. Players can walk or run through these simulated rooms, buildings and streets, without any helmet-mounted display, and move ‘seamlessly’ between physical and virtual worlds. It is also possible to project ICT’s 3D Virtual Humans onto the flats and have them engage players in dialogue. These simulations mount a renewed assault on optical detachment; as Leopard argues, FlatWorld and its Virtual Humans (who even seem to breathe) actively interpellate players, entreating them to respond in particular, engaged ways to the situations in which they are immersed.43 Second, these virtual worlds are often local, even domestic. Military operations are staged in the places of everyday life, not in an abstracted battle-space but in homes, neighbourhoods and clinics, and they require close, personal interaction with individuals, ‘face work’ that involves learning to read gestures and expressions. Tactical Iraqi, for example, was developed at USC’s Information Sciences Institute to provide troops with the language skills and cultural knowledge necessary to accomplish specific tasks. The player is a US Army sergeant who must find a community leader who can help locate a source of bricks so that his platoon can rebuild a girls’ school damaged in a firefight with fedayeen. The player interacts with adults and children and, if successful, navigates his way from public to private space.44 In an ICT simulation, the player is a US Army captain who must negotiate with two full-body avatars, a Spanish doctor who works for a medical relief organization and an Iraqi village elder, to persuade them to move a clinic to a safer location.45 Third, Tactical Iraqi’s Social Puppets and ICT’s Virtual Humans invoke the inter-personal by making trust central to cross-cultural interaction. In Tactical Iraqi, as Losh puts it, ‘trust is both the precondition of play and the currency of the game’. If the sergeant succeeds in gaining the trust of the local people, measured by a ‘trust-meter’, they will cooperate and give him the answers he needs to advance in the game. A crucial part of doing so is observing the social formularies and protocols that establish the sergeant’s knowledge of
and respect for Iraqi culture.46 In ICT’s clinic scenario, trust is a function of shared goals, believable claims and, again, ritual politeness. In a model dialogue, the clash between combat operations and the work of the NGO is made clear from the beginning. The doctor tells the captain: ‘This conflict is madness, it is killing people!’ When the captain suggests ‘it will be a problem to stay here’, the doctor replies: ‘You are the problem, your bombs are killing these people.’ As the dialogue develops, non-verbal behaviour changes to mirror the progress of negotiations. As in the Mission Rehearsal Exercises, promises made must be ones that can reasonably be kept: ‘The doctor is unlikely to be swayed by an offer of aid if he does not believe the captain can and will fulfil his commitments.’47
The cultural (re)turn These developments represent significant departures from reductions of the city to target and terrain, and the cultural turn has been advertised as a ‘counterrevolution’ in military affairs. But there are three continuities with its predecessors. First, the cultural turn is consistent with the neoliberal armature of late modern war in opening up new opportunities for private contractors. Revising pre-deployment training has involved extensive outsourcing. Cubic Applications Inc., for example, has been the contractor for support
services for Mission Rehearsal Exercises at Fort Polk since October 2001, involving 1,500 full- and parttime employees for instrumentation, special effects and role players. Its contract, valued at $375 million, expired in 2007 and was renewed for the next ten years for $468 million. Another company, Strategic Operations, provides support services at Twentynine
Palms, and has trained over 55,000 Marines at its own facility in San Diego.48 Similarly, the Pentagon has preferred to leverage commercial videogames and to collaborate with engineering and software companies, videogames companies and the academy. The ICT was established in 1999 to develop advanced military simulations with a multi-year, $45 million US Army contract, which was renewed in 2004 for another five years for $100 million. In 2003 DARPA funded the development of Tactical Iraqi at the Information Sciences Institute, and in 2005 the project was spun off into a new private-sector company. Forterra also had its origins in DARPA sponsorship, in a panel to investigate Massively Multiplayer Online games in 2003, and it too was spun off from its parent in 2005. In 2007 Forterra recruited the Chief Technology Officer of the US Army Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation to head its new National Security Division. These examples could be multiplied many times over, and the connections within the military–industry media–entertainment complex have become ever more intricate: but it is clear that the martialization of culture marches in lockstep with its commodification.49 The cultural turn is also consistent with the Oriental ism that has underwritten the ‘war on terror’ since its inception. In its classical form, Orientalism constructs the Orient as a space of the exotic and the bizarre, the monstrous and the pathological – what Said called ‘a living tableau of queerness’ – and then summons it as a space to be disciplined through the forceful imposition of the order that it is presumed to lack: ‘framed by the classroom, the criminal court, the prison, the illustrated manual’. American interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq are paradigmatic cases of a martial Orientalism; in fact, Davis describes the Pentagon’s vision of urban warfare as ‘the highest stage of Orientalism’.50 Although the cultural turn is supposed to soften these dispositions – part of its purpose is to displace the monstrous if not the pathological – it remains an inherently disciplinary programme (and is, in my view, part of a more general bio-political project).51 The Orientalist cast of the cultural turn is strengthened by its constant citation of T.E. Lawrence. The title of Nagl’s book on counterinsurgency Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, is taken from Lawrence’s Seven
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Pillars of Wisdom, and I doubt that it is a coincidence vividly conveyed in Virtual Reality. Here is the project that the Human Terrain System is based on ‘seven director of FlatWorld explaining its versatility: pillars’. Its lead authors describe Lawrence’s writings ‘In the morning you could be training in Baghdad, as ‘standard reading for those searching for answers and in the afternoon you could be in Korea,’ she to the current insurgencies’, and the pre-deployment says. Or on Mars. One moment, the windows of FlatWorld look over a simulacrum of the Iraqi primer dutifully reprints Lawrence’s ‘27 Articles’. desert; when [she] dials in stereoscopic images from Kilcullen’s seminal memorandum was entitled ‘28 Pathfinder, the flood plain of Ares Vallis extends Articles’, and his admiration for, even identification to the red horizon. … Suddenly a translucent 3-D with, Lawrence could not be plainer. No army will ever rendering of a robot walks into the room, pauses have ‘more than a small number of individuals’ with in front of me, and walks back out. When a more a gift for ‘cultural leverage’, he declared, mavericks sophisticated version of this 3-D projection is fortified with artificial intelligence and bathed in … ‘in the mould of Lawrence’.52 Lawrence is a totemic virtual lighting, the mechanical invader will become figure, a powerful representation of a close encounter a Fedayeen soldier.54 with an other who remains obdurately Other. But his talismanic invocation also repeats the classical The emphasis on cultural difference – the attempt Orientalist gesture of rendering ‘the Orient’ timeless: to hold the Other at a distance while claiming to cross calling on Lawrence to make sense of modern Iraq the interpretative divide – produces a diagram in which is little different from expecting Mark Twain to be a violence has its origins in ‘their’ space, which the reliable guide to twenty-first-century America. And cultural turn endlessly partitions through its obsessive yet the cultural turn places America outside history too, because there is Close air support/precision strikes little recognition of the part that its 2004 2005 2006 2007 previous interventions in the Middle Afghanistan Total sorties 6,495 7,421 10,519 12,775 East play in provoking opposition Major munitions dropped 86 176 1,770 2,926 and resistance. In Tactical Iraqi, Total sorties 14,292 16,924 15,676 17,893 Losh emphasizes that the avatars are Iraq Major munitions dropped 285 404 229 1,119 ‘incapable of speech acts that are not scripted by the US military’ and cannot ask awkward questions about US foreign policy preoccupation with ethno-sectarian division, while or military operations. Similarly, the model dialogues the impulse to understand is confined to ‘our’ space, in ICT’s clinic scenario acknowledge American vio- which is constructed as open, unitary and generous: the lence in the present (‘Your bombs are killing these source of a hermeneutic invitation that can never be people’) but not the long shadows cast over cultural reciprocated. ‘That a twenty-first century colonization memory by American violence in the past.53 Those can be reduced to a matter of cross-cultural commuantecedents, which spiral through the constitution of nication’, Vivienne Jabri argues, ‘is itself testimony to the colonial present, are obliquely present in a second the de-politicization of war, invasion and resistance to citational figure haunting the intellectual landscape of occupation.’55 This effect depends on the production of contemporary counterinsurgency. For Galula’s Counter a public and is, of course, profoundly political. insurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice was based on his experience as a French officer during the ‘paci- Therapeutic discourse and the production of a public fication’ of Algeria. Finally, the cultural turn continues the exorbitation The cultural turn has been remarkably public. Countof cultural difference that is at the heart of the ‘war less articles have described the new Mission Rehearsal on terror’. There is little room for an Arab modern in Exercises, videogames and simulations; clips are availmany of its versions – hence the ‘traditional city’ and able on the websites of news media, companies like ‘tribal society’ – because Muslims or Arabs opposed MetaVR and Forterra, and YouTube. When FM 3-24 to US foreign policy and its military adventurism are was posted on the web it was downloaded two million supposed to be outside and opposed to the modern. times in the first two months, and the paperback edition The cultural turn acknowledges that there are cultural published by Chicago University Press became an practices and values to be understood, but locates Amazon bestseller. Some of its lead authors made a them in a completely separate space. Perhaps not round of television appearances: Nagl on John Stewart, surprisingly, the sense of alien estrangement is most Kilcullen and then McFate on Charlie Rose. This
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publicness is, in part, a response to the mediatization of late modern war, and armies of democratic states should explain themselves to the public to whom they are accountable. But this carefully staged space of constructed visibility is also always a space of constructed invisibility. And what has been made to disappear, strangely, is the conduct of the war. The cultural turn has not replaced enframings of the city as target and terrain, but it has deflected attention from the continuation of kinetic operations. The Air Force has been highly critical of the relegation of air power in the new counterinsurgency doctrine. The commander of the USAF Doctrine Center complained that FM 3-24 reflected ‘a very two-dimensional view’ of war and involved ‘too much hand wringing over the potential for collateral damage’.56 While the opportunities for cultural nuance are limited at 60,000 feet and a range of 7,000 miles, the objection is misleading. For the cultural turn is designed to yield actionable intelligence – hence the Human Terrain System and Every Soldier a Sensor Simulation – and Petraeus himself acknowledges that late modern war is a hybrid that includes air strikes. In fact, the air war has intensified since the end of major combat operations, and although this has been under-reported in the mainstream media, air strikes increased significantly between 2006 and 2007 in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Even the spare summary shown in the accompanying table is a considerable understatement, because ‘major munitions dropped’ exclude 20/30 mm cannon and rockets. The 30 mm family of ammunition was developed for Apache helicopter air-to-ground missions, and the close air support A-10 Thunderbolt fighter was designed around the Avenger gun system, which fires an alternating mix of 30 mm high explosive and armour-piercing incendiary rounds with a highdensity penetrator of depleted uranium. These are not rubber bullets.57 Indeed, Kilcullen concedes that ‘there is always a lot of killing, one way or another’ in counterinsurgency, and on the most conservative estimate – body counts are a battlespace of their own – non-combatant deaths caused directly by US military action in Afghanistan and Iraq increased by 70 per cent between 2006 and 2007.58 FM 3-24 ‘doesn’t say that the best weapons don’t shoot’, Petraeus reminded a bemused reporter, ‘it says sometimes the best weapons don’t shoot’. And, as he went on to insist, ‘sometimes the best weapons do shoot.’59 Evidently more often than one might think. The cultural turn also deflects attention from the role of military occupation in provoking violence. The new doctrine consistently refers to the military acting
in support of the ‘Host Nation’ (HN), as though war, occupation and counterinsurgency were events in some deadly Olympic Games. The circumstances in which the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq hardly correspond to Derrida’s unconditional hospitality and yet, far from acknowledging the conditional sovereignty of these states, the doctrine advertises itself as intrinsically therapeutic. Counterinsurgency’s image as ‘armed social work’ is driven home – literally so – by simulated missions like rebuilding a girls’ school or moving a medical clinic. FM 3-24 describes the three stages of counterinsurgency in medicalized terms that are congruent with the biopolitical project of which it is a part: • ‘Stop the bleeding’: ‘similar to emergency first aid for the patient. The goal is to protect the population, break the insurgents’ initiative and set the conditions for further engagement.’ • ‘Inpatient care – recovery’: ‘Efforts aimed at assisting the patient through long-term recovery or restoration of health – which in this case means achieving stability … through providing security, expanding effective governance, providing essential services and achieving incremental success in meeting public expectations.’ • ‘Outpatient care – movement to self-sufficiency’: ‘expansion of stability operations across contexts regions, ideally using HN forces.’60 But the cultural turn is therapeutic in an altogether different sense, through the weight its public presentation has placed on doctrine and training. The US Army defines military doctrine as ‘a common language and a common understanding of how Army forces conduct operations’, and public discussion of FM 3-24 has directed attention to the normative construction of military operations in ways that have foreclosed questions about their practice. This has been compounded by media coverage of the new Mission Rehearsal Exercises, videogames and simulations in which the distinction between the virtual and the real has been consistently blurred. Report after report begins with a vivid description of military operations that is interrupted by variations on the same cut-line: ‘Only this isn’t Iraq; it’s Fort Polk/Fort Irwin/Virtual Iraq.’ The implication is that the hyperrealism of the simulation mimics the conduct of the war: we are in another FlatWorld, moving seamlessly from the virtual to the real, and encouraged to mistake the one for the other. The joint focus on doctrine and training, the normative and the virtual, is an invitation to step through the back of the wardrobe into a martial Narnia where the
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American military consistently follows the rules and intervenes for the greater good. Whatever the practical efficacy – or otherwise61 – of the new measures, there can be little doubt that the rhetoric that underwrites their public presentation is therapeutic for the American public. It sends the strong message that the military has learned from Abu Ghraib and the running battles over the treatment and torture of prisoners. It enables the public to participate in what Losh calls ‘the “rhetoric of walking” in these virtual Iraqs’ in order to witness putative solutions ‘to persistent and perhaps intransigent problems in the theatre of battle.’62 And, as the back cover of the Chicago edition of FM 3-24 notes, it represents ‘an attempt by our military to redefine itself’. The American military is not only redefined but also repositioned as an innocent and virtuous bystander. Sarah Sewall from the Carr Centre, who was instrumental in the review of the draft of FM 3-24, indicts the Iraqi government (among whose failings she lists sectarianism, fecklessness and corruption) and the Bush administration (about which one might say the same), while absolving the culturally aware and ethically driven US military. ‘While the administration gambles away civil liberties at home and abandons human rights abroad’, she declares, ‘the US military has recommitted itself to protecting the rights of foreign citizens of all nationalities and faiths.’63 The long-term solution to insurgency must be political rather than military, as the new doctrine emphasizes, but the cultural turn places so much emphasis on cultural difference and division that the multidimensional violence in Iraq is reduced to an ethno-sectarian conflict from which the United States is causally absent. Many commentators have concluded that the American military’s new reserves of cultural tact and ethical sensitivity mean that the responsibility for continuing violence lies with the Iraqis alone, a logic measured by the distance from Newsweek’s cover of 15 October 2001 – ‘Why they hate us’ – to Time’s cover of 5 March 2007: ‘Why they hate each other’. The locus of the problem remains the same (‘them’), but Time removes ‘us’ (US?) from the frame altogether. This is thoroughly fraudulent. The very presence of American troops and private military contractors is a provocation to violence, although the focus on ethno-sectarian killings distracts attention from deaths directly attributable to American military and paramilitary action, and the American political and military apparatus has been directly implicated in a process of sectarian involution. In a typically colonialist gesture, the Bush administration reactivated and institutionalized sectarian divisions in the political
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constitution of its ‘new Iraq’, and American military commanders have cut deals with local militias to buy a precarious peace that entrenches those divisions. The diminution in ethno-sectarian violence that started in the closing months of 2007 is inseparable from the ethnic cleansing that preceded it and that is memorialized with visceral clarity in the blast-walled fiefdoms of Baghdad.64 There are additional reasons for the diminution in ethno-sectarian violence, including a fragile ceasefire with the Mahdi Army, but, for all its newfound cultural awareness, the military is markedly reluctant to acknowledge the impact of the violent recomposition of Baghdad on its body counts.65 Instead, the public version of events focuses on the new counterinsurgency policy, ‘a belated emergency triage’, according to reporter Jon Lee Anderson, which artfully reinforces the therapeutic effects of the cultural turn.66
Late modern war and the colonial present In one of his less delphic observations as Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld is supposed to have said that ‘death tends to encourage a depressing view of war’. So it does, which is why representations of war as waged by America and its allies have become aestheticized and sanitized. This is a general diagnostic of modernity, where death is no longer seen as part of life, as in other cultural and social formations, but is sequestered in screened and medicalized spaces. This reaches its apotheosis in contemporary war, where an enterprise expressly devoted to killing magically proceeds without death. The cultural turn is another modality of the re-enchantment of war.67 It reintroduces corporeality to war – cyber-cities are re-peopled, Virtual Humans made to breathe – even as it snuffs out mortality. If the ‘virtual citizen-soldier’ is produced within the grid of the military–industry media–entertainment complex, as Stahl suggests, the enlistment of the ‘arts’ academy through the cultural turn provides this spectral figure with a dress uniform decked out in the colours of the humanities and humanitarianism. Just as the global North justifies its interventions in the global South by appealing to ‘military humanism’, so the cultural turn legitimates its conduct of these new wars.68 This should surprise nobody. It is thirty years since Said’s critique of Orientalism drew attention to the close connections between culture and power and, as Eyal Weizman has reminded us, ‘cases of colonial powers seeking to justify themselves with the rhetoric of improvement, civility and reform are almost the constant of colonial history’.69 Those claims
were self-serving, to be sure, and behind its genteel facade colonialism routinely resorted to exemplary violence as an assertion of sovereign power. So, too, the cultural turn not only recentres counterinsurgency on the population at large; it also refines the kill-chain. It does more than this, however, and is more than an alibi. Refusing the reduction of enemy space to empty space, rejecting the dehumanization of adversaries, rehabilitating the concept of the civilian: these are all crucial ways to limit the horrors of war. But it is a measure of how far we have fallen that they count as major advances. Stahl’s virtual citizen-soldier is a hybrid that blurs the distinction between ‘the political role of the citizen and the apolitical role of the soldier’ – the one asking questions, the other following orders – to foreclose the space of public deliberation. Stahl argues that its production is part of the depoliticization of the public sphere, or, more accurately, ‘a reprogramming of the citizen subject’ in accordance with the logics of late modern war. This is a compelling thesis but, as Stahl knows very well, ‘reprogramming’ is mercifully not axiomatic and can be interrupted, even subverted, by asking awkward questions.70 The cultural turn is not confined to cyberspace, but the public projection of its hybrid humanism is directed at the same dismal vanishing point of politics. In a depressing little hurrah for the martialization of culture, Jager demands that scholars choose between ‘doing nothing’ (and ‘leaving the fighting to the military’) and censuring those who ‘do something’. But this is a false choice that evades the critical responsibility to question what that ‘something’ is and what that ‘something’ does.71 Even on Jager’s own diminished terms, a partisan appropriation of the cultural sciences that refuses the reflexivity of the return gaze, treats culture as inert and ignores the relations of power involved in all cultural forms and practices is unlikely to provide much insight into the conduct of war. Neither, more importantly, will it be of any help in the search for peace. President Bush may not know the difference between the two – ‘When we talk about war’, he once pronounced, ‘we’re really taking about peace’72 – but for this very reason cultural awareness cannot be confined to the academy or the military. It needs to spiral through the public sphere and inform public debate and public policy. For only then can those awkward questions can be asked of our masters of war. As Stoler suggests, ‘While government sights are set on “the enemy”, ours might be set on them and how this rush to the intimate structures new sites of imperial governance.’73 I hope this essay might be read as a modest contribution to that protect.
Notes 1. George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, Faber & Faber, London, 2007. 2. George Packer, ‘The Lessons of Tel Afar’, New Yorker, 10 April 2006; ‘Knowing the Enemy’, New Yorker, 18 December 2006. 3. US Army Field Manual 3–24: Counterinsurgency (December 2006) § 1–80, 1–125, 1–149, 3–38, 5–103, 7–22, 7–42, A-45, D-14. 4. Thomas Ricks, ‘Officers with PhDs Advising War Effort’, Washington Post, 5 February 2007; ‘After Smart Weapons, Smart Soldiers’, Economist, 25 October 2007. 5. Tom Hayden, ‘Harvard’s Humanitarian Hawks’, The Nation, 14 July 2007. 6. See http://concerned.anthropologists.googlepages.com. 7. Noah Shachtman, ‘Army Social Scientists Calm Afghan istan, Make Enemies at Home’, Danger Room, 29 November 2007, http://blog.wired.com/defense. This is not to discount the anthropological critique: see David Price, ‘Pilfered Scholarship Devastates General Petraeus’s Counterinsurgency Manual’, Counterpunch, 30 October 2007; David Price, ‘Enabling the Kill-chain’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 30 November 2007; Roberto Gonzalez, ‘Towards Mercenary Anthropology? US Counterinsurgency Field Manual 3–24 and the MilitaryAnthropology Complex’, Anthropology Today, vol. 23, no. 3, 2007. 8. Colin Kahl, ‘COIN of the Realm’, Foreign Affairs, November/December 2007. 9. Cf. Patrick Porter, ‘Good Anthropology, Bad History: The Cultural Turn in Studying War’, Parameters, vol. 37, no. 2, 2007, pp. 45–58. 10. Jennifer Taw and Bruce Hoffman, The Urbanization of Insurgency: The Potential Challenge to US Army Operations, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica CA, 1994; Stephen Graham, ‘War and the City’, New Left Review 44, 2007, pp. 121–32; 121. Cf. Ashley Dawson, ‘Combat in Hell’, Social Text, vol. 25, no. 2, 2007, pp. 169–80, who notes that Pentagon representations of the ‘urbanization of warfare’ as a ‘calculated strategic ploy’ by insurgents and others ignore the political, economic and cultural formations that propel urbanization in the global South. So they do; but the more recent ‘cultural turn’ does incorporate those structural templates – though its analysis of them remains instrumental – and this makes a critique all the more urgent. 11. Nick Cullaher, ‘Bombing at the Speed of Thought: Intelligence in the Coming Age of Cyberwar’, Intelligence and National Security 18, 2003, pp. 141–54; Chad Harris, ‘The Omniscient Eye: Satellite Imagery, “Battlespace Awareness” and the Structures of the Imperial Gaze’, Surveillance and Society 4, 2006, p. 114. 12. Adam Herbert, ‘Compressing the Kill Chain’, Air Force Magazine 86, 2003; Samuel Weber, Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking, Fordham University Press, New York, 2005. 13. Robert Kaplan, ‘Hunting the Taliban in Las Vegas’, Atlantic Monthly, September 2006. 14. Rey Chow, ‘The Age of the World Target: Atomic Bombs, Alterity, Area Studies’, in The Age of the World Target: Self-referentiality in War, Theory and Comparative Work, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2006, pp. 25–43; Derek Gregory, ‘“In Another Time Zone, the Bombs Fall Unsafely”: Targets, Civilians and Late Modern War’, Arab World Geographer, vol. 9, no. 2, 2006, pp. 88–111.
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15. Paul McLeary, ‘Digital Recon’, Defense Technology International, December 2007, p. 20. 16. US Army Field Manual 3–06: Urban Operations (October 2006), Figure 2-2. 17. Noah Shachtman, ‘How Technology Almost Lost the War’, Wired, vol. 15, no. 12, 2007; Caroline Croser, ‘Networking Security in the Space of the City: Eventful Battlespaces and the Contingency of the Encounter’, Theory and Event, vol. 10, no. 2, 2007. 18. Fadel al-Badrani, ‘US Bombards Fallujah Bastion’, The Age, 7 November 2004; Ann Barnard, ‘Inside Fallujah’s War’, Boston Globe, 28 November 2004. 19. John Pickles, A History of Spaces, Routledge, London, 2004, p. 93. 20. Barnard, ‘Inside Fallujah’s War’. 21. Rebecca Grant, ‘The Fallujah Model’, Air Force Magazine, February 2005, pp. 48–53; ‘Operation Dawn: Al Fajr; Brief Comments on Air Power in Urban Warfare’, Talking Proud, 28 April 2005, www.talkingproud.us/ Military042805D.html. 22. Ricks, ‘Officers with PhDs’. 23. Herfried Münkler, The New Wars, Polity, Cambridge, 2005; Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, 2nd edn, Polity, Cambridge, 2006. 24. James Corum, ‘Rethinking US Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine’, Contemporary Security Policy 28, 2007, pp. 128–9; Beatrice Heuser, ‘The Cultural Revolution in Counter-insurgency’, Journal of Strategic Studies 30, 2007, p. 156. 25. Statement of Major General Robert Scales before the House Armed Services Committee, 15 July 2004; MG Robert Scales, ‘Culture-centric Warfare’, Proceedings of the Naval Institute, October 2004. 26. LTC Louis DiMarco, ‘Traditions, Changes and Challenges: Military Operations and the Middle Eastern City’, Global War on Terrorism Occasional Paper 1, 2004, Combat Studies Institute, US Army Combined Arms Center. 27. Ibid., pp. 53, 60. 28. MG Peter Chiarelli and Major Patrick Michaelis, ‘Winning the Peace: The Requirement for Full-spectrum Operations’, Military Review, July–August 2005, pp. 4–17; Patrecia Hollis, ‘The Ist Cav in Baghdad: Counter insurgency EBO in Dense Urban Terrain’, Field Artillery, September–October 2005, pp. 3–8; Croser, ‘Networking Security’. 29. David Kilcullen, ‘Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-level Counterinsurgency’, Military Review, May–June 2006, pp. 103–8. This was first circulated as an email, and republished in modified form as Appendix A to FM 3-24. 30. David Kilcullen, ‘Countering Global Insurgency’, Journal of Strategic Studies 28, 2005, pp. 597–617; ‘Counter insurgency Redux’, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy 48, 2006, pp. 111–30; ‘Counterinsurgency in Iraq: Theory and Practice, 2007’, Seminar at the US Marine Corps Base, Quantico VA, September 2007, www.smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/10/coin-seminar-summaryreport. 31. David Kilcullen, ‘Religion and Insurgency’ and ‘Anatomy of a Tribal Revolt’, www.smallwarsjournal.com/ blog, 12 May 2007 and 29 August 2007. 32. Ralph Peters, ‘The Human Terrain of Urban Operations’, Parameters 30, 2000, pp. 4–12; David Allen, ‘The Trembling Balance: Peacekeeping in the Tribal City’, Defence
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Studies 3, 2003, pp. 83–101; LTC Michael Eisenstadt, ‘Tribal Engagement: Lessons Learned’, Military Review, September–October 2007, pp. 16–31. 33. Montgomery McFate, ‘Anthropology and Counter insurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relationship’, Military Review, March–April 2005, pp. 24–38; ‘The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture’, Joint Force Quarterly 38, 2005, pp. 42–8; Montgomery McFate and Andrea Jackson, ‘An Organizational Solution for DOD’s Cultural Knowledge Needs’, Military Review, July–August 2005, pp. 18–21. 34. Jacob Kipp, Lester Grau, Karl Prinslow and Don Smith, ‘The Human Terrain System: A CORDS for the 21st Century’, Military Review, September–October 2006, pp. 8–15; Shachtman, ‘Technology’. The CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support) programme was developed during the Vietnam War ‘to gather human and cultural intelligence and to develop economic and social programs’. It was coupled to the Phoenix Program that gathered data to target tens of thousands of people for ‘neutralization’: Roberto Gonzalez, ‘Human Terrain: Past, Present and Future Applications’, Anthropology Today 24, 2008, pp. 21–6. 35. Shachtman, ‘Technology’. 36. LTC William Wunderle, Through the Lens of Cultural Awareness: A Primer for US Armed Forces Deploying to Arab and Middle Eastern Countries, Combat Studies Institute Press, Fort Leavenworth KS, 2007, p. 3; Scales, ‘Statement’, p. 8; Kilcullen, ‘Religion and Insurgency’. 37. Ann Laura Stoler with David Bond, ‘Refractions off Empire: Untimely Comparisons in Harsh Times’, Radical History Review 95, 2006, p. 98. 38. Scales, ‘Statement’, p. 8. 39. Jesse Hamilton, ‘Battle-hardened in California’, Hartford Courant, 12 March 2006. 40. Dexter Filkins and John Burns, ‘Mock Iraqi Villages in Mojave Prepare Troops for Battle’, New York Times, 1 May 2006; Wells Tower, ‘Letter from Talatha: Under the God Gun’, Harper’s Magazine, January 2006; Vince Beiser, ‘Baghdad, USA’, Wired, vol. 14, no. 6, June 2006; Guy Rez, ‘Simulated City Preps Marines for Reality of Iraq’, National Public Radio, 13 April 2007. 41. Michelle Mayo, Michael Singer and Laura Kusumoto, ‘Massively MultiPlayer (MMP) Environments for Asymmetric Warfare’, Journal of Defense Modelling and Simulation 3, 2006, pp. 155–66; Ann Laurent, ‘Virtually There’, Government Executive.com, 17 October 2007; Michael Peck, ‘Gaming Hearts and Minds’, Defense Technology International, November 2007, p. 14. 42. Dan Ray, ‘Using Game Technology for ES2 Simulation Training’, Simulation Operations Quarterly, Winter 2005; Robert Ackerman, ‘Army Teaches Soldiers New Intelligence Gathering Role’, Signal, April 2005; Michael Peck, ‘Army Game Strives to Turn Soldiers into Sensors’, National Defense Magazine, July 2005; Quantum3D press release, 3 October 2005. 43. http://ict.usc.edu/projects/flatworld; Dan Leopard, ‘Micro-ethnographies of the Screen: FlatyWorld’, FlowTV: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture 3, December 2005, http://flowtv.org. 44. www.tacticallanguage.com. 45. Patrick Kenny, Arno Hartholt, Jonathan Gratch, William Swartout, David Traum, Stacy Marsella and Diane
Piepol, ‘Building Interactive Virtual Humans for Training Environments’, Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference, Orlando FL, 2007; Patrick Kenny, Arno Hartholt, Jonathan Gratch, David Traum, Stacy Marsella and Bill Swartout, ‘The More the Merrier: Multi-party Negotiation with Virtual Humans’, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference, Vancouver 2007, http://ict.usc. edu/projects/integrated_virtual_humans/C40. 46. Elizabeth Losh, ‘In Country with Tactical Iraqi: Trust, Identity and Language Learning in a Military Video Game’, Digital Experience: Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference, Copenhagen, 2005, pp. 69–78. 47. Mark Core, David Traum, H. Chad Lane, William Swartout, Jonathan Gratch, Michael van Lent and Stacy Marsella, ‘Teaching Negotiation Skills through Practice and Reflection with Virtual Humans’, Simulation 82, 2006, pp. 688, 691. 48. See Gidget Fuentes, ‘War’s Reality Show’, Training and Simulation Journal, 27 August 2007. There is a vast shadow army of 180,000 private military contractors in Iraq too, and some of them are making a cultural turn (of sorts). Blackwater offers a Language School ‘intended to arm the student with the language and cultural knowledge essential to survival in the Middle East’. Its forty-hour, five-day course is ‘a survival course in the target language’ (either Iraqi Arabic or Pashto/Dari). The language of ‘targets’ and ‘survival’ is indicative. Day 1 includes ‘Important expressions; Greetings; Numbers’, but by Day 4 the priorities have become clear: ‘Parts of the body; the Hospital and Doctor’s Clinic; Field Emergencies’; and by Day 5: ‘Weapons and munitions; Instructions for Handling Weapons’; see www.black waterusa.com/training/bwl.asp. 49. Timothy Lenoir, ‘All but War is Simulation: The Military–Entertainment Complex’, Configurations 8, 2000, pp. 289–35. 50. Edward Said, Orientalism, Penguin, London, 1978; Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso, London and New York, 2006, p. 205. 51. Cf. Elizabeth Dauphinee and Cristinas Masters, eds, The Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror: Living, Dying, Surviving, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2007; Julian Reid, The Biopolitics of the War on Terror, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2007. 52. John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005 (Lawrence wrote that making ‘war upon rebellion was messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife’); Kipp, ‘Human Terrain System’; Wunderle, Through the Lens of Cultural Awareness, Appendix B p. 115; T.E. Lawrence, ‘The 27 Articles of T.E. Lawrence’, Arab Bulletin 60, 20 August 1917; KiIlcullen, ‘Twenty-Eight Articles’; Kilcullen, ‘Countering Global Insurgency’, p. 614. 53. Losh, ‘In Country with Tactical Iraqi’, p. 3. 54. Steve Silberman, ‘The War Room’, Wired, vol. 12, no. 9, September 2004. 55. Vivienne Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics, Palgrave, London, 2007, p. 140. 56. John Tirpak, ‘The New Counterinsurgency: Airpower to the Rear’, Air Force Magazine 90, 2007; Charles Dunlap, ‘We Have a COIN Shortage’, US Naval Institute, Proceedings Magazine 133, May 2007.
57. The table is from Anthony Cordesman, ‘US Airpower in Iraq and Afghanistan’, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC, 13 December 2007, at http://tech.military.com/equipment/view/88746/an-gau8-30mm-cannon.html. 58. David Kilcullen, ‘Three Pillars of Counterinsurgency’, Remarks at US Government Counterinsurgency Conference, Washington DC, 28 September 2006; Neta Crawford, Robert Lifton, Judith Herman, Catherine Lutz and Howard Zinn, ‘The Real “Surge” of 2007: Non-combatant Death in Iraq and Afghanistan’, Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, 22 January 2008. 59. Shachtman, ‘Technology’. 60. FM 3-24, paras 5.3–5.6. 61. For a preliminary assessment, see Colin Kahl, ‘In the Crossfire or the Crosshairs? Norms, Civilian Casualties and US Conduct in Iraq’, International Security 32, 2007, pp. 7–46. 62. Elizabeth Losh, ‘The Palace of Memory: Virtual Tourism and Tours of Duty in Tactical Iraqi and Virtual Iraq’, Proceedings of the Joint International Conference on Cyber-Games and Interactive Entertainment, Perth, Australia, 2006, p. 83; ‘Making Things Public: Democracy and Government-funded Video-games and Virtual Reality Simulations’, Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery SIGGRAPH Symposium on Videogames, Boston MA, 2006, pp. 123–32. 63. Sarah Sewall, ‘He Wrote the Book, Can He Follow It?’, Washington Post, 25 February 2007; ‘Crafting a New Counterinsurgency Doctrine’, Foreign Service Journal, September 2007, pp. 33–40. 64. See my ‘The Biopolitics of Baghdad’, forthcoming. 65. When Petraeus reported to Congress in September 2007, he presented a series of maps in which plots of ethnosectarian violence were superimposed over a base-map of ethnic segregation in Baghdad. The base-map remained unchanged throughout the sequence and yet, just days earlier, the equivalent maps used in the Report of the Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq showed Baghdad turning into an overwhelmingly Shi’ite city. See Ilan Goldenberg, ‘Putting Your Best Foot Forward’, www.democracyarsenal.org, 13 September 2007. 66. Jon Lee Anderson, ‘Inside the Surge’, New Yorker, 19 November 2007. 67. James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military– Industrial–Media–Entertainment Network, Westview Press, Boulder CO, 2001; Christopher Coker, The Future of War: The Re-enchantment of War in the Twenty-First Century, Blackwell, Oxford, 2004. 68. Roger Stahl, ‘Have You Played the War on Terror?’ Critical Studies in Media Communication 23, 2006, p. 125; Costas Douzinas, ‘Humanity, Military Humanism and the New Moral Order’, Economy and Society 32, 2003, pp. 159–83. 69. Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, Verso, London and New York, 2007, p. 152. 70. Stahl, ‘War on Terror’, pp. 125–6. 71. Sheila Miyoshi Jager, ‘On the Uses of Cultural Knowledge’, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, November 2007, pp. 17–18. 72. Remarks by the president at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Washington DC, 18 June 2002. 73. Stoler, ‘Refractions’, p. 98.
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‘All human beings are pregnant’ The bisexual imaginary in Plato’s Symposium Stella Sandford
‘All human beings, Socrates, are pregnant both in body and in soul, and when we come to be of the right age, we naturally desire to give birth.’ Symposium, 206c1–2
In recent years the question of the status of sex – that is, sex difference – has become one of the most insistent in feminist philosophy. Does ‘sex’ name a binary difference discoverable in nature, or is this duality carved out from more complex anatomical and other variations? Is it possible to distinguish between the ‘physical’ (anatomical, physio-chemical and genetic) aspects of ‘sex’ and its social inscription? Does sexed identity follow on from biological sex? Or does the social expectation of sexual difference and its concomitant normative demands (for reproductive heterosexuality, most significantly) influence and to some extent determine the category of ‘biological’ sex difference itself? These and other questions about sex and sexed identity have crystallized on the basis of theoretical work in a variety of disciplines and need to be addressed on a multi-disciplinary front, acknowledging the distinctive transdisciplinary character of the concept of sex. What follows is intended as a philosophical contribution to this communal project, via a reading of the metaphors of pregnancy and birth in Plato’s Symposium. The context is the broader claim that these metaphors, and other passages, figures or concepts in Plato’s dialogues, catch our attention because of the distance between them and modern presumptions concerning the nature and function of ‘sex’, leading us to question the latter. This illustrates one of the ways in which the history of philosophy furnishes us with texts through which we may think – and rethink – our contemporary concerns. This does not mean that such texts give us answers or provide us in any straightforward way
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with ideas that can be transposed into or put to work for contemporary agendas. What it means must be determined in each instance. In relation to the questions of sex and sexed identity, Plato’s Symposium catches our attention in a particularly dramatic way. Metaphors of pregnancy and birth are not uncommon in philosophy, or elsewhere. But the centrality of the metaphors of pregnancy and birth in Socrates’ speech to Plato’s Symposium, their extension and the egregious transpositions of sex they involve are an outstanding feature of the dialogue, whatever one’s opinion as to their ultimate philosophical consequence for Plato’s philosophy, here or elsewhere. Their effects are compounded, and their interpretation made complex, by the fact that they come from the mouth of a woman who identifies herself as a ‘spirit-like man’ (daimonios anêr) (203a4) and who is – here at least – the product of a man’s imagination. Another, overlapping set of metaphors – of sexual excitation, erection, frustration and ejaculation – complicates matters further. The prominence of the metaphors of pregnancy and birth in Plato’s Symposium has meant that traditions of commentary which were not otherwise inclined to discuss issues of sex and gender have been forced to confront them, in however small a way. These metaphors also became the focus of some feminist work on Plato in the 1980s and 1990s. That feminist work is implicitly critical of the mainstream literature to the extent that that literature reproduces the same problematic assumptions identified in Plato himself by his feminist readers. In this article, after setting out the detail of Plato’s metaphors and their interpretation in the mainstream literature, I argue that the feminist readings, despite their criticisms, share some of the presumptions of
their predecessors: specifically, the presumption of a certain conception of sex that determines and limits the possibilities for interpretation. Instead, without this presumption, I suggest a reading of the metaphors in terms of a ‘sexual imaginary’ that claims our interest beyond the interpretation of Plato’s philosophy to the extent that it speaks to contemporary formulations of the question or problem of the relation between ‘sex’ and sexed identity.
Eros: reproduction and immortality The metaphors of pregnancy and birth in the Symposium are central to – indeed to a great extent constitutive of – one of the seven speeches on Eros that constitute the manifest content of the dialogue, the speech offered by Socrates. It is therefore necessary to examine this speech in some detail. The context of the speech and the fictional narrative of Plato’s Symposium are well known. Apollodorus recounts, second-hand, how a group of friends, including Socrates, meet at Agathon’s house to celebrate the latter’s victory in a theatrical contest. The friends agree to entertain each other by composing speeches in praise of the god of love, Eros.1 In brief, the young Phaedrus praises Eros, one of the oldest of the gods, for his benign influence on human beings, for inciting them to the acquisition of virtue and the attainment of happiness. Pausanias distinguishes between the Eros who belongs to Common or Vulgar Aphrodite, born of both male and female, with that belonging to the motherless, male-born Heavenly Aphrodite (181c2–6), praising the latter for enabling the education into excellence and wisdom of the young men loved by their noble, older lovers. The doctor Erixymachus proposes an account of Eros as a governing physio-cosmic principle or lord in relation to which the role of practitioners of all kinds (for example physician, agriculturalist, cook, musician) is that of a kind of matchmaker, bringing elements together into harmonious balance. The speech of the comic poet Aristophanes offers an account of the origin of love, with the famous story of the original three kinds of human beings, each split into two by an angry Zeus and thereafter striving to find and unite with their matching half. Agathon himself then composes an encomium to Eros, according to him (contra Phaedrus) the youngest, the happiest, the most beautiful and best of the gods, responsible for all the good things that happen to gods and men.2 Socrates’ own speech critically transforms various elements from each of the other speeches, but crucially shifts the discourse on Eros decisively away from praise of the god as lovable to eros as the act of loving.3
Socrates begins by interrogating Agathon, getting him to agree that love is always love of something, and something which he lacks – in which case Eros is not himself beautiful and good but love of the beautiful and the good, things which Eros himself does not possess but, precisely, desires. Socrates then changes tack, introducing the account of Eros given to him, many years before, by ‘a woman of Mantinea’, Diotima, describing how she first revealed Socrates’ ignorance on the matter of love (just as Socrates had just revealed Agathon’s) and repeating, so the fiction has it, her mystical, metaphysical teaching. Diotima’s interrogation of Socrates retraces the moves in Socrates’ earlier questioning of Agathon, pushing him towards the central question of what love is and what it does, arriving at the claim that love is love of permanent possession of the good (206a11) and the final question about its operation: What is it to love? What is love’s work? (206b1–3) ‘I’ll tell you’, says Diotima: ‘It’s giving birth in the beautiful, in relation both to body and to soul.’ (tokos en kalô kai kata to sôma kai kata tên psuchên. 206b7–8) Diotima explains this as follows: ‘All human beings [pantes anthrôpoi], Socrates, are pregnant [kuousin] both in body and in soul, and when we come to be of the right age, we naturally desire to give birth [tiktein]. We cannot do it in what is ugly but we can in what is beautiful. The intercourse of man and woman is a kind of giving birth [andros kai gunaikos sunousia tokos estin]. This matter of giving birth is something divine: living creatures, despite their mortality, contain this immortal aspect of pregnancy and procreation [ê kuêsis kai ê gennêsis]. It is impossible for this to be completed [genesthai] in what is unfitting; and what is unfitting for everything divine is what is ugly, while the beautiful is fitting. Thus beauty is both Fate and Eileithyia for coming-into-being [tê genesei]. For these reasons, if ever what is pregnant [to kuoun] approaches something beautiful, it becomes gracious, melts with joy, and gives birth and procreates [tiktei te kai genna]; but when it approaches what is ugly, it contracts, frowning with pain, turns away, curls up, and fails to procreate [ou genna], retaining what it has conceived [to kuêma], and suffering because of it. This is why what is pregnant [tô kuounti] and already full to bursting [spargônti] feels the great excitement it does in proximity to the beautiful, because of the fact that the beautiful person frees it from great pain [ôdinos]. For Socrates’, she said, ‘love is not, as you think, of the beautiful.’ ‘Well, then, what is it of?’ ‘Of procreation and giving birth [tês gennêseôs kai tou tokou] in the beautiful.’ ‘All right’, I replied.
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‘I can assure you it is,’ she said, ‘Why, then, is it of procreation [tês gennêseôs]? Because procreation [ê gennêsis] is something everlasting and immortal, as far as anything can be for what is mortal; and it is immortality, together with the good, that must necessarily be desired, according to what has been agreed before – if indeed love is of permanent possession of the good. Well, from this argument it necessarily follows that love is of immortality as well.’ (206c1–207a4)
Desire for immortality is at the bottom of love: ‘mortal nature seeks so far as it can [kata to dunaton] to exist for ever and to be immortal. And it can achieve it [dunatai] only in this way, through the process of coming-into-being [tê genesei]’4 (207d1–3). Through reproduction mortal nature – both animal and human – leaves behind something new in the place of the old, a process which Diotima identifies at work in the constant physical renewal of bodies and also, perhaps surprisingly, in the renewal of the soul: ‘its traits, habits, opinions, desires, pleasures, fears – none of these things is ever the same in any individual, but some are coming into existence, others passing away’ (207e4–6). This is thus not the transformation of the mortal into the immortal, but the perpetual becoming-immortal of the mortal, which is not the being-immortal of the immortal. ‘In this way everything mortal is preserved, not by always being absolutely the same, as the divine is, but by virtue of the fact that what is departing and decaying with age leaves behind in us something else new, of the same sort that it was. It is by this means, Socrates’, she said, ‘that the mortal partakes of immortality, both body and everything else; and what is immortal partakes of it in a different way.’ (208a7–b4)
This stretches the metaphor of ‘procreation’ (tê genesei) a long way, although this is the micro-detail of Diotima’s explanation for animals’ fervent desire to procreate and to nurture their offspring. The love and pursuit of immortality is the rational explanation for what would otherwise appear to be irrational behaviour, in both animals and humans. For the love of immortality, the weakest animals ‘are prepared to join battle with the strongest on their offspring’s behalf and even die for them, torturing themselves with hunger so as to rear them’ (207b4–6). Similarly, the seemingly irrational desire for honour, for the sake of which human beings are ‘ready to run all risks, even more than they are for their children’ (208c6–d1), is the rational attempt to acquire a name for one’s self, ‘“laying up immortal glory for all time to come”’ (208 c5–6).
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This moves the discussion into an explanation of what Diotima means when she says that all people are pregnant in both body and soul. Those men ‘who are pregnant [oi egkumones] in their bodies turn their attention more towards women, and their love is directed in this way, securing immortality, a memory of themselves, and happiness, as they think, for themselves for all time to come through having children [paidogonias];5 whereas those who are pregnant in their souls – for in fact’, she said, ‘there are those who are pregnant in their souls still more than in their bodies, with things that it is fitting for the soul to conceive [kuêsai] and to bring to birth [tekein]. What then are these things that are fitting? Wisdom and the rest of virtue; of which all the poets are, of course, procreators [gennêtores], along with all those craftsmen who are said to be inventive. But by far the greatest and most beautiful kind of wisdom is the setting in order of the affairs of cities and households, which is called “moderation” and “justice”. When someone is pregnant [egkumôn] with these things in his soul, from youth on, by divine gift, and with the coming of the right age, desires to give birth and procreate, then I imagine he too goes round looking for the beautiful object in which he might procreate … For I imagine it’s by contact with what is beautiful, and associating with it, that he brings to birth and procreates the things with which he was for so long pregnant [ekuei tiktei kai genna].’ (208e1–209c3)
These spiritual offspring are ‘of a more beautiful and immortal kind’, which everyone would prefer, according to Diotima, to human children (209c6–d2). They are the sort of children procreated by Homer and Hesiod, and by the lawgivers Lycurgus in Sparta and Solon in Athens (209d2, d6–7). The passion of the poets for poetry and of the lawgivers for the law is erotics – that is, the procreation and giving birth in the beautiful for the sake of immortality. They are immortalized through these offspring in a way that no one is through their human children (209e3–4). However, love’s work ascends beyond even this. In relation to a hierarchy of beautiful things, the spiritually pregnant give birth through, and to, philosophy. The love for a single beautiful body enables the procreation of beautiful words [logous kalous]. Love of beautiful bodies in general and then beauty of souls enables the birthing of ‘the sorts of words … that will make young men into better men’ (210c2–3). Love of ‘beauty as it exists in kinds of activity and in laws’, then of ‘the beauty that belongs to kinds of knowledge’ and ‘the great sea of beauty’ thus disclosed enables the lover to ‘bring to birth many beautiful, even magnificent, words and thoughts in a love of wisdom [philosophia]’ (210c4–d6). Finally, with the love of beauty in itself,
‘pure, clean, unmixed, and not contaminated with things like human flesh, and colour, and much other mortal nonsense’ (211e1–4) the lover succeeds ‘in bringing to birth, not phantoms of virtue, because he is not grasping a phantom, but true virtue, because he is grasping the truth; and … when he has given birth to and nurtured true virtue, it belongs to him to be loved by the gods, and to him, if to any human being, to be immortal’ (212a3–7).
Male pregnancy and the sexual division of images In the mid- to late twentieth-century anglophone literature on the Symposium the meaning and function of the metaphor of ‘spiritual pregnancy’, as it is often called, have become a discrete topic. Two main issues are of most concern: the basic structure of the metaphors of pregnancy and birth, including the distribution of roles, literal and metaphorical, between male and female; and the contribution of these metaphors to the metaphysical argument of Diotima’s speech. Attempts to sort out the basic structure of the metaphors and explain how they work are often motivated by a perceived need to account for the oddity of the idea of male pregnancy, an oddity both for Plato’s contemporaries and his modern readers. And it is specifically pregnancy, and not conception or birth, which is at issue here, for linguistic reasons. The verb translated, mostly, as ‘to give birth’ is tiktein, which also means ‘to beget’. In Liddell and Scott’s Greek–English lexicon the first definition is ‘bring into the world, engender; of the father, beget, of the mother, bring forth’. Thus in the first introduction of the theme in the Symposium – the definition of love as ‘giving birth [tokos] in the beautiful, in relation both to body and to soul’ (206b7–8) – it is not clear that there is any metaphor of birth, since there is no transfer of vocabulary associated exclusively with the female to the male. It could equally be translated as ‘begetting’ or ‘procreating’ in the beautiful.6 In the next lines, however, the elaboration of this gnomic pronouncement claims that ‘All human beings [pantes anthrôpoi] … are pregnant [kuousin] both in body and in soul, and when we come to be of the right age, we naturally desire to give birth [tiktein]’ (206 c1–2). The verb kuein, ‘bear in the womb, be pregnant with’ is a verb usually only used of the female,7 and hence seems to be used metaphorically here. In its proximity to kuein, a metaphorical use of tiktein is also suggested, prompting – although not necessitating – its translation as ‘giving birth’. In itself, a metaphor of male pregnancy, qua metaphor, need not necessarily be odd. However, in the
Symposium the repeated use of the verb kuein with tiktein, the increasingly explicit shift from ‘all human beings’ to ‘men’ and the insistence on the extension of the metaphor, carrying it through to its end, produce an alienating effect, where one might have expected, instead, the attempt to produce a certain comfort with it. Indeed, its dogged pursuit throughout Diotima’s speech has a strangely literalizing effect, to the extent that it becomes less and less discreet. Its repetition, the casual use of the verb in various ways, its insertion into the discourse as if it were something unremarkable, means that stylistically, it is used as if it were meant literally. The manner of its use is the manner of the literal use of a word. In 1964 J.S. Morrison offered an explanation for Plato’s use of kuein in relation to the male: ‘his rather peculiar notion of what happens in human generation’.8 In the Timaeus Plato seems to suggest that the generative ‘seed’ that originates in the brain or ‘marrow’ of the male produces a ‘desire for emission … and so produce[s] the love of procreation’ (91b4–5). This desire for emission, felt at the ‘place of venting’, has its counterpart in the female, in the womb’s desire to bear children (paidopoiias). When they are brought together ‘like plucking the fruit from a tree, they sow the seed into the ploughed field of her womb, living things too small to be visible and still without form. And when they have again given them distinct form, they nourish these living things so that they can mature inside the womb. Afterward, they bring them to birth, introducing them into the light of day’ (91c9–d5).9 Morrison interprets this to mean that the male and female sexual organs ‘have a similar function as receptacle and in due course outlet for this seed’, such that it makes sense to describe ejaculation, as well as actual parturition, as ‘birth’. Indeed, both ‘are births, and both are accompanied (though in varying degree) by pangs. kuein in male and female is strictly parallel, it is the condition of readiness to bear a child; kuêsai is the act of producing whether in male or female.’10 This leaves us, Morrison admits, with a problem of translation. Although it is ‘strictly correct’ to translate kuein as ‘to be pregnant’ this is bound to seem ridiculous and confusing, he says, unless we bear the proposed biological rationale in mind.11 Dover reaches the same conclusion, suggesting ‘fertile’ as a ‘less paradoxical translation’, so ‘all human beings are fertile both in body and soul’.12 For Morrison and Dover, then, there is no metaphor of pregnancy in the Symposium, in the sense that a word referring to the female is applied to the male, only a metaphorical extension of a physical process in the male to a spiritual process, also
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in the male, based on a highly unusual – indeed unique – use of the verb kuein. In fact, Morrison’s article implies that any metaphorical transference from female to male would be so grotesque as to need explaining away, as he does with his biological explanation. Although E.E. Pender broadly agrees with Morrison’s biological explanation for what she calls the ‘male type’ pregnancy (which ‘is simply a metaphor for ejaculation’), she argues that spiritual birth also requires a ‘female type’ pregnancy for the male.13 If male type pregnancy is the ejaculation of spiritual seed, the female type is the giving birth to the child – the ‘many beautiful, even magnificent words and thoughts’ (210d4–5) – which the lovers will join together in nurturing, ‘with the result that such people enjoy a much greater partnership with each other than the one people have in their children and a firmer affection between them, insofar as their sharing is in children of a more beautiful and immortal kind’ (209c6–7). Granted, Pender says, that this female type pregnancy is obscured – that ‘the whole of the “female” experience of pregnancy and giving birth to a child has been suppressed’, that ‘all reference to the female role is avoided’14 – it is a necessary part of the logical progression of the metaphor. For Pender, then, despite the extended metaphor of pregnancy, metaphorical female pregnancy is absent from the Symposium, although it must be assumed. This is a position that rests, like Morrison’s and Dover’s, on the literal interpretation of kuein in relation to the male. For all three commentators, the imagery of pregnancy in the Symposium is not, therefore, primarily – for Morrison and Dover, not at all – ‘female’. If, contra Morrison, other commentators have insisted, in a numbers of ways, on the ‘femaleness’ of the images of pregnancy and birth, this has tended to be in the interest of an explanation of the function of the metaphor, or a broader interpretation of its meaning, rather than an analysis of its precise form. For Paul Plass, for example, arguing on the basis of the usual use of kuein and the fact that Plato does not use the verb in the Timaeus passage cited by Morrison, ‘pregnancy’ is a ‘genuine transferred epithet’ in the Symposium, and is to be understood both as a result of the structure of pederasty (where the younger man plays the ‘feminine’ role) and as a strategy to naturalize pederasty through the transferral on to it of the vocabulary of procreative heterosexuality. Speculating – wildly, it must be said, and on the basis of an implicit endorsement of some dubious and apparently homophobic anthropology from the 1940s and 1950s – on the existence of an ancient Greek
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homosexual argot, Plass in fact takes the metaphors for granted. How else, he suggests, would homosexuals represent themselves, except in heterosexual terms? Thus although Plass refers to the ‘confusion’ and the ‘pervasive blurring’ of sexual roles in pederasty, his understanding of the metaphors is based on a clear distinction between what can be said to be feminine and what masculine, according to which homosexual ‘blurring’ is really the consequence of its being a poor copy of heterosexuality.15 In a very different vein, a number of Plato’s other readers have insisted on the femaleness of the images of pregnancy and birth from a critical, feminist perspective. On this view, the claim for the male form of pregnancy in Morrison et al., reiterates, rather than explains or interprets, the fundamental discursive gesture or ideological process in the use of the metaphors of pregnancy and birth in the Symposium. The strongest statement of this position is Adriana Cavarero’s. According to Cavarero, Western metaphysics – and in particular, here, Platonic metaphysics – is founded on a disavowal of the mother, to the extent that the enduring existential-ontological obsession with which it deals concerns ‘the fact that we must leave life through death, rather than the fact that we enter it though birth’16 – hence the centrality, for Plato, of the desire for immortality. Western philosophy and the patriarchal social and symbolic order that depends on it exclude women, or the ‘female’ element’, ‘female experience’,17 through the disavowal of the fundamental fact of birth – natality – or, more specifically, the fundamental fact that we are of woman born. This is because of both the unendurable (for the male) fact of the dependency of the male on the female and the ‘blame’ attached to birth – the index of sexual reproduction – for mortality.18 The ‘matricide’ at the inauguration of Western philosophy is incessantly re-enacted in its history, according to Cavarero, in implicit and explicit fantasies of male self-birth. Socrates’ speech in the Symposium is a particularly egregious example of this. Far from valorizing ‘the female’ or proposing it as a model, as some feminist commentators have claimed,19 the metaphors of pregnancy and birth in the Symposium, according to Cavarero, perform a symbolic matricide all the more daring and pernicious in its appropriation of female vocabulary.20 The matricide is reinforced through the mimetic strategy of the character of Diotima such that, in Cavarero’s view, the female is made to denounce itself: It is difficult to say that this discourse involves the simple deployment of a metaphor, because the metaphor ends up disempowering and negating the
female experience – of motherhood as power – of which it is itself a metaphor … The result is an act of expropriation carried out through a woman’s voice, namely the voice of someone against whom the expropriation is committed.21
We can thus see why, unlike Morrison et al., Cavarero takes it for granted that the themes of pregnancy and birth refer ultimately to the properly female, but this taking-for-granted precludes any further analysis of the metaphors.
In an essay that discusses all of these claims and positions, Angela Hobbs takes on Cavarero, in particular, in proposing an alternative interpretation of the pregnancy image. Hobbs argues, contra Morrison et al., that the use of ‘kuousin’ at 206c1 – ‘all human beings, Socrates, are pregnant [kuousin] both in body and in soul’ – means that we are dealing with an image of a specifically female bodily function. The Timaeus passage on which Morrison bases his own position only shows, according to Hobbs, that male arousal and orgasm can be thought of as analogous to pregnancy and birth. Given this, is the femaleness of the image
a contingent or integral part of Plato’s overall philosophical position and purpose in this dialogue?22 Hobbs’s answer is that the use of the female imagery is both consistent with Plato’s metaphysics and useful to his pedagogic purpose in the Symposium. The images, according to Hobbs, reveal something to us about Plato’s ‘attitude to gender’, an attitude based on the metaphysical principle of the reality of the incorporeal, intelligible realm which is ‘the ultimate context in which Plato’s use of female imagery should be viewed’.23 That is, gender or sex (Hobbs does not distinguish between the two) is irrelevant in the transcendent realm of the Forms to which we should aspire, but the use of these images has the virtue of suggesting ‘to the more reflective and informed reader that it really is ultimately of little consequence whether the philosopher is male or female. Nor is it ultimately of much consequence whether a male or female philosopher is described in terms traditionally associated with the opposite gender.’ At the same time, the use of the images acknowledges the importance of gender in the corporeal world of becoming such that they are ‘an apt resource for rhetorical and pedagogic purposes’.24 In response to Cavarero’s claims Hobbs then concludes: The enjoyment of playing with, transgressing and utilizing concepts of gender is possible precisely because, finally, they are of no lasting importance. The Symposium is not so much a rejection of the female as gaily cavalier in its attitude towards the embodied. I submit, therefore, that Plato is chiefly concerned not with ‘appropriating the feminine’ but with liberating men and women alike from inessential bodily and cultural constraints.25
Although Hobbs succeeds in proposing an interpre tation of the female imagery that renders its use consistent with Plato’s broader philosophical commitments and educative goals, she misses the point of the feminist criticisms completely. For, granted that ‘the incorporeal, eternal realm of being manifest in the Forms’ is the metaphysical context for the Symposium,26 it does not follow that it should be the
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ultimate context of interpretation for those who do not subscribe to this metaphysics. Indeed, the feminist criticisms are partly criticisms of this metaphysics, and of the view, precisely, that gender is irrelevant. For mortal readers such as Cavarero the reality of the corporeal world of becoming – the only world there is – is the ultimate context of interpretation, and in this world, as Hobbs herself writes, the significance of gender cannot be denied. Hobbs interprets the Symposium in terms of what we might be able to say about Plato’s conscious intentions and consequently thinks that Cavarero is concerned with the question of ‘whether Plato is morally justified in describing male practices and institutions through the use of a female bodily function’.27 For Cavarero, however, it is not a question of Plato’s intentions. At issue is what the text ‘performs’, what it reveals about itself despite itself and about the socio-cultural and ideological function of philosophy and its meaning for the contemporary reader. Hobbs has nothing to say about any of this and thus does not, in fact, respond to Plato’s feminist critics, as she claims.
The carnival of ‘sex’ Despite differences and disagreements, there is a common presupposition across this range of interpretation: a distinction between what is proper to the male or masculine and what is proper to the female or the feminine. In each of these interpretations, sex difference is the transcendental or a priori ground for the explanation, defence or criticism of Plato or his other interpreters. Further, the common presumption of sex difference grounds the general form and aim of interpretations of Socrates’ speech through an implicit articulation of its necessity, in two respects: (i) it is the non-metaphorical origin of the metaphorical terms; understood (ii) as a biological necessity which is not itself amenable to interpretation or open to question. The aim of interpre tation is then to convert the meaning of the metaphor into a literal register, reassigning the elements to their proper place or apportioning what belongs to the female and what to the male. From this perspective the structural and other shortcomings of the metaphors are soon revealed. Extended metaphors always run the risk of becoming artificially stretched beyond their point of best functioning, and, as traditionally interpreted, this happens very quickly in Diotima’s speech. In pursuing the metaphors their elements become more and more contrived and the structural equivalences – such as they are – quickly break down. However, the presumption of sex difference as literal ground means that these interpretations do not
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do justice to the literary and conceptual specificity and complexity of the metaphors. This specificity lies, precisely, in their disregard for any logical correlation with the sequence of physiological processes in human reproduction and their disregard for propriety of reference in relation to the male and the female. This disregard is not their failing; it is their content and quite possibly their purpose.28 To the extent that this is acknowledged by, for example, Hobbs, Plass and Cavarero, it is explained by its pedagogic or apologetic function in the dialogue. For Hobbs it is indicative of Plato’s disdain for the reality of all things corporeal, his ‘playfulness’ with gender a consequence of a metaphysics that locates reality elsewhere than the corporeal world and according to which gender is of no significance. For Plass its function is the naturalization of pederasty. But these acknowledgements of the ‘confusion of sexual roles’29 are based on a presumption of the clarity of the distinctions between male and female, masculine and feminine, as the literal basis for the images. The ground of sex difference is presumed as the raw material for the images, in such a way that the images could have nothing to say about sex difference (or nothing that would concern us, anyway, for, as Hobbs says, they say nothing about mortal humanity beyond conceding the sociological importance of sex difference in the unreal world of becoming). But what if the constitutive confusions are interpreted as being about sex difference, rather than grounded on the presumption of it? What, in the text itself, suggests that such an interpretation is warranted? A fresh look at the images of pregnancy and birth suggests that their distinctiveness is precisely in their problematization of the presumption of sex difference as transcendental or a priori ground, in the sense that they open up this ground itself for investigation. This means that the various metaphors should not be treated as an illustrative or explanatory conduit to the ‘real’ philosophical content of the dialogue (to the recognizably Platonic metaphysics of the being/appearance distinction, for example, or the extracted theory of Forms), but as themselves having philosophical content. Returning to an analysis of the metaphors of pregnancy and birth, we can identify certain aspects of their forms and presentation as the basis for such an interpretation. First, pregnancy is posited as a universal state for all human beings, male and female. One begins by being pregnant, and the work of love is to bring the pregnancy to fruition, to bring to birth. The process of conception, of impregnating or becoming
pregnant, is not part of the metaphorical constellation in the Symposium, except in so far as the Greek verb – kuein – implies, simultaneously, to have conceived (to kuêma is ‘that which has been conceived’, an embryo or foetus; ê kuêsis is conception).30 Second, there are two kinds of pregnancy – physical (of the body) and spiritual (of the soul). The first introduction of the metaphor – ‘All human beings, Socrates, are pregnant both in body and in soul’ (kuousin … ô Sôkrates, pantes anthrôpoi kai kata to soma kai kata tên psuchên) – suggests that, universally, all are pregnant in both respects. Later, however, in the explanation of this claim, Diotima separates those who are pregnant in their body (oi … egkumones … kata to sômata ontes) from those who are pregnant in their soul (oi de kata tên psuchên), or at least those who are more pregnant in their soul than in their body (oi en tais psuchais kuousin eti mallov ê en tois sômasin). This complicates the metaphor. It means not that there is a metaphorical, spiritual kind of pregnancy, derived from the literal model of physical pregnancy, but that the physical pregnancy at issue here is also metaphorical. As ‘those who are pregnant in their bodies’ turn out to be men, directing their attention towards women to procreate human children, it seems that actual physical pregnancy is the model for a metaphorical physical and spiritual pregnancy for the male. But the furthest extension of the metaphor of procreation, including the renewal of each physical organism, its soul and its knowledge (207d–208b), as well as the first mention of the metaphor, suggests that there is a metaphorical physical pregnancy for women too. Diotima’s pedagogic role in relation to Socrates means that there is at least one example of a woman’s spiritual procreation; Alcestis is another (208d3). Third, of the two kinds of pregnancy, the spiritual is, unsurprisingly, the higher form. Although the extension of the metaphor of procreation implies that even animals partake of immortality through their offspring, from 208c an at first subtle shift decisively downgrades physical procreation, even suggesting that the immortality it achieves is dubious (those who are pregnant in body procreate physically to secure ‘immortality, a memory of themselves, and happiness, as they think’ [ôs oiontai]).31 Although animals are said to be prepared to die for the sake of their children, to secure their immortality that way, in the human example the mythical king Codrus of Athens dies for the sake of his children only because he thereby secures a spiritual procreation, the immortal memory of his own courage, immortal virtue and
glorious reputation (208d4–e2). Everyone, according to Diotima, would thus prefer spiritual to human children, for no person ever achieved cultic status through the latter (209d1–2, e3–4). In the final revelation Diotima claims that it is only in the contemplation of beauty in itself, in the Form of beauty, and the procreation of true virtue through philosophical discourse, that one may become beloved of the gods and immortal, to the extent that any mortal can. This being so, the climax of Socrates’ speech achieves a kind of reversal in the form of the metaphor such that it moves from the spiritual to the physical, which is of course consistent with Plato’s metaphysics. (Indeed, the metaphysics requires this reversal.) If what is real and true is the virtue brought to birth in beauty in itself, this – the apex of spiritual procreation – is the model for the achievement of immortality which physical procreation resembles only metaphorically. This perhaps explains Diotima’s otherwise odd claim that ‘[t]he intercourse of man and woman is in fact a kind of giving birth’ (ê gar andros kai gunaikos sunousia tokos estin) (206c5–6). Finally, we should note that Diotima’s speech actually presents the extended discussion of pregnancy and birth as if it were a literal – or at least more literal – explanation of the definition of Eros as ‘giving birth in the beautiful, in relation to both body and soul’. As Socrates cannot understand what this means, Diotima offers to tell him saphesteron – more clearly, more plainly: ‘All human beings, Socrates, are pregnant both in body and in soul.’ For Morrison and others, as we have seen, this, and the idea that ejaculation is a giving birth, are to be interpreted quite literally. But unless this also means that the seed or seeds in human ejaculate and the beautiful words and thoughts brought to birth by the advanced loving couple are similarly, quite literally, ‘children’, even Morrison et al. would have to concede that there is at least an entwining of the literal with the metaphorical in Diotima’s speech. Taken together, these four points mean that the metaphors do not work by simply moving from an uncontentious literal ground to a metaphorical image, from the female (literal pregnancy) to the male (metaphorical pregnancy), or from the physical to the spiritual, but by shifting around between and within the distinctions literal/metaphorical, male/female, physical/spiritual in different ways, simultaneously. Furthermore, the imagery of ‘male’ excitation and ejaculation is not a separate or even merely overlapping element in Diotima’s speech; it is fully integrated into the explanation of the claim that all human beings are pregnant
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in body and soul, which is itself the beginning of the explanation for the definition of love as ‘giving birth in the beautiful’. No doubt this purposeful confusion is partly explained by the fact that, at the simplest level, it is love between men, the education of boys into men and the spiritual life of men more generally that seem to concern Plato, given the identification of erotic maturity with ‘the correct kind of boy-loving [orthôs paiderastein]’ (211b6). The text does not allow for the separation of one set of metaphors from the other, such that the imagery of ‘male’ sexual excitation and ejaculation could be interpreted as an accommodation to sexual normality, making the imagery of male pregnancy more palatable. The claim that the pregnant ‘desire’ to give birth and procreate already suggests the mutual implication of the two sets of metaphors. With this desire the pregnant man ‘goes round looking for the beautiful object in which he might procreate’, a formulation that highlights that pregnancy precedes the sexual encounter. On approaching the beautiful he melts with joy, is full to bursting (spargônti, both to be ripe – ready for birth – and swollen with passion) and is freed from the great pain (ôdinos, specifically labour or birthing pain). Ugliness, on the other hand, makes him contract, curl up, painfully retaining what he would like to release. As Dover points out, ‘the vivid physical terms in which reaction to beauty and ugliness is expressed
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… describe equally the reactions of the male and of the female genitals to sexual stimulation or revulsion.’ Indeed, Dover writes, ‘melting’ and ‘relaxing’ is ‘more appropriate to the female’, but with this he misses his own point. Plato’s carnival of images pays little heed to received wisdom concerning the sequence of events in human sexual behaviour and human procreation. If pregnancy precedes intercourse then detumescence (‘melting’, ‘relaxing’) may as well precede ejaculation. Further, it is only our lack of intimacy with, and lack of tolerance for, the discourses of the experience of pregnancy and birth that motivate the presumption that their association with ‘desire’ and ‘orgasm’ in Diotima’s speech must be metaphorical references to the male – as if pregnancy could not actually be a swelling with desire, and as if birth could not actually be orgasmic. In fact, this presumption is made against the explicit result of the entwining of the two sets of metaphors: an eroticization of pregnancy and birth, however they are understood.
The bisexual imaginary Concentrating interpretative effort on these complexities as constitutive of the philosophical content of the metaphors, rather than trying to separate them out into their simpler (notably, male and female) parts, leads to a reading of these famous passages from the Symposium as the articulation of what might be called a ‘sexual
imaginary’ of considerable interest. I take my concept of the imaginary here from Luce Irigaray’s descriptive and speculative metaphysics, rather than Michèle Le Dœuff’s more specific concept of the ‘philosophical imaginary’.32 Irigaray’s concept of the imaginary is the critical transformation and philosophical deployment of Lacan’s specifically psychoanalytical term. In his earlier work, Lacan developed an account of the imaginary identifications that constitute the form of the ego. In the best known of Lacan’s essays from this period,33 he discusses the ‘mirror stage’ – the early months in the life of the human infant in which he or she first demonstrates the capacity to recognize his or her own image and explore, in play, the relation between the image and the infant’s own body, or between the infant’s body and its environment. Sunk in its ‘motor incapacity and nurseling dependence’ the infant, according to Lacan, jubilantly assumes an image of its own unity and coherence, an anticipation of ‘the maturation of his power’. However, the recognition at the base of this assumption is a misrecognition, both because it is precisely in something other than itself (the image) that it recognizes itself, and because the image possesses a unity which the infant does not yet have (the recognition is an anticipation of the experience of unity, but not yet that experience). The important point, according to Lacan, is that this form [of misrecognition] situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination [as subject], in a fictional direction … The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation – and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of a spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic – and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development.34
Lacan’s account of the imaginary structure of the ego condenses various aspects of Freud’s account of the genesis and development of the ego, in particular the description of the origin of the ego as a reaction of the organism, through the perceptual and motor systems, to the external environment (‘The ego is first and foremost a body ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface’),35 and the role of identification and incorporation in the ongoing development of the content, as it were, of the ego. With the shift to the emphasis on the constitution of the subject in the symbolic order in Lacan’s later work the imaginary is reworked or reinterpreted in relation to the priority of the latter – indeed imaginary
identification is seen as, in part, an attempt to compensate for the constitutive splitting of the subject, an imaginary relation to the real of the body that exceeds the symbolic order. According to Lacan, ‘psychoanalysis involves the real of the body and the imaginary of its mental schema.’36 In Irigaray’s use of the concept of the imaginary the relation between these two is redescribed in terms of imaginary morphology, or more particularly ‘ideal morphology’:37 the quasi-phantasmatic ‘mental schema’ of the body. This imaginary differs from Lacan’s in at least three important respects. First, it is generalized at the cultural-historical level, such that it is able to be characterized as either masculine or feminine, meaning that the imaginary is always a ‘sexual imaginary’. Second, following on from this, the sexual imaginary determines the form of the symbolic with regard to sexual difference, or is the basis of the symbolization of sexual difference. Taken together, this means, third, that the sexual positioning of the subject in the symbolic is tied up with the sexual imaginary in a more general way than it is for Lacan, for whom the specific role of the imaginary phallus is determining (for Irigaray this emphasis is evidence of the masculine imaginary already at work). Her description of the order of Western metaphysics contends that the imaginary morphology of the male body is a reductive, perhaps metonymic, phallomorphic schema. This imaginary morphology is equated with the metaphysical principle of identity, of the One, of the static or stable – the metaphysical principle which, as foundational for the symbolic order, relegates the female to the not-one, the invisible, the non-individuated, castrated, and so on. The speculative element of Irigaray’s metaphysics concerns the possibility of a ‘female imaginary’, an ideal morphology of the female: Perhaps it is time to return to this repressed ‘female imaginary’? So woman does not have a sex organ? She has at least two of them, but they are not identifiable as ones. Indeed, she has many more. Her sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is plural. Is this the way culture is seeking to characterize itself now? Is this the way texts write themselves/are written now?38
For Irigaray the ‘sexual imaginary’ is always either male or female, because, terminological emphasis on morphology, rather than anatomy, notwithstanding, the sexed duality of human being is the fundamental postulate of her philosophy. In her reading of Dio tima’s speech in the Symposium, a ‘philosophy in the feminine’ (to use Margaret Whitford’s phrase) emerges with the figure of the intermediary. In the first part of
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Diotima’s speech at least, according to Irigaray, the intermediary is the third term that permits a relation between opposites in which neither is dominant and in which the terms are not sublated, particularly the relation of ‘the immortal in the living mortal’.39 For Irigaray, however, there is no third term between ‘male and ‘female’, here in the Symposium or anywhere else. However, if we apply the basic structure of Irigaray’s concept of the sexual imaginary to Plato’s text, without her presupposition of a necessary duality of sex, Socrates’ speech in the Symposium suggests the possibility of a sexual imaginary that is neither male nor female, indeed one that is primarily characterized by its refusal of this distinction. This is a bisexual imaginary, in the sense that it is both male and female, the exhibition of an ideal morphology constructed from elements of anatomy regardless of sex. A sexual imaginary in the sense proposed here must be a phenomenon at once cultural-historical and individual. We are thus not faced with the necessity of determining whether Plato’s (or Socrates’ or Diotima’s) sexual imaginary is the, or an, ancient Greek sexual imaginary or an individual affair. Rather, we are faced with the task of identifying elements in the relation between the two. I have argued elsewhere against the presumption that the modern concept of sex, generally understood as biological sex difference, is straightforwardly present in ancient texts, more particularly in Plato.40 An analysis of the function of the concept of genos in the discussion on the education of female rulers in the Republic suggests that its usual translation as ‘sex’ is not only crude, but also obfuscates the argument of this part of the Republic. Briefly, based on the fact that there is no distinct word for ‘sex’ in classical Greek (this is far from the primary meaning of genos), and on a detailed analysis of the appearance of the concept of genos in various of Plato’s dialogues, I contend that these texts suggest a view in which the being of men and women is not determined, in the last instance, by what we call ‘sex’, but by a unified multiplicity of behavioural and other characteristics, including their being-male or being-female, the totality of which bears the ontological weight. This, then, would be the cultural-historical condition of possibility for the bisexual imaginary of Diotima’s speech, which is, to be sure, still highly specific in its explicit presentation and to that extent speculative. Its significance lies, I propose, in what it suggests to us about the imaginary (which is not to say unreal) nature of our sexed identifications as male or female. It suggests, as Irigaray claims, that sexed subjectivity, the
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assumption of a position in the social symbolic order through sexuation, owes more to the cultural-historical form of the imaginary than Lacan concedes. However, this does not mean that the, precisely imaginary, identifications that constitute the sexual imaginary are either necessarily male or necessarily female, as Irigaray seems to think. This leaves us with a claim about the nature of our sexed identifications which realizes, theoretically, different radical aspects of both Lacan’s and Irigaray’s theories of sexual difference. It affirms Lacan’s claim that the sexual subject positions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are distinct from the biological categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’.41 It also affirms the closer relation between the sexual imaginary and the sexual symbolic articulated by Irigaray, but without her restriction of the sexual imaginary to either a singularly male or a singularly female form – that is, without the determining presumption of a certain conception of sex difference as exclusive binary. Indeed, the idea of the bisexual imaginary problematizes this conception of sex difference in contesting its naturalized right to ground the discursive field of sex in advance. Only when this form of sex is not determined, a priori, as an extra-philosophical presumption, may it become, itself, a philosophical problem.
Notes 1. Classical Greek forms a verb with eros (eraô) and participle forms (erôn or ho erôn) that have no transliterated English equivalents. Many translators therefore choose to render all terms with variants of the English ‘love’, which does have verbal (to love) and participle (lover, beloved) forms. In this article I use ‘eros’ when possible; ‘love’ when not. 2. Plato, Symposium, trans. Christopher Rowe, Aris & Phillips, Warminster, 1998, 197b7–8. All references to Stephanus numbers refer to this translation, unless otherwise stated. 3. Socrates’ is not the final speech. Alcibiades bursts into the symposium after Socrates has spoken and offers a panegyric to Socrates, his beloved erstwhile lover. Alcibiades’ speech is crucial to the interpretation of the dialogue as a whole, the central meaning of which probably does not reside in the content of Diotima’s teaching. But this article is not concerned with the interpretation of the dialogue as a whole. 4. Or, ‘procreation’ (Symposium, trans. Walter Hamilton, Penguin, London, 1951); ‘reproduction’ (Symposium, trans. Christopher Gill, Penguin, London, 1999). 5. Or ‘begetting of children’, ‘making fruitful’. See H.G. Liddell and R. Scott, A Greek/English Lexicon, revised by H.S. Jones, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996. 6. As Hamilton translates: ‘The function [of love] is that of procreation in what is beautiful, and such a procreation can be either physical or spiritual.’ 7. In fact Liddell and Scott identify a causal sense of a form
of the verb, kuô, ‘of the male, impregnate’, but only in the aorist tense, which is not that used by Plato here. (Kuein is the infinitive form, but ancient Greek verbs are often discussed (and are listed in lexicons) using the first person present (here, kueô) as this better indicates how it will decline.) 8. J.S. Morrison, ‘Four Notes on Plato’s Symposium’, Classical Quarterly vol. 14, no. 1, 1964, p. 54. 9. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Donald J. Zeyl, Hackett, Indianapolis and Cambridge, 2000. 10. Morrison, ‘Four Notes’, pp. 54–5. In the accompanying commentary to his translation of the Symposium Rowe adds (p. 183) that this explains the claim that ‘[t]he intercourse of man and woman is in fact a kind of giving birth [ê gar andros kai gunaikos sunousia tokos estin]’ (206c5–6): ‘Diotima appears to mean that intercourse literally is giving birth.’ 11. Morrison, ‘Four Notes’, p. 55. 12. Plato, Symposium, ed. Kenneth Dover, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980, pp. 147, 151. See also Michael C. Stokes, Plato’s Socratic Conversations: Drama and Dialectic in Three Dialogues, Athlone, London, 1986, pp. 161–3. 13. E.E. Pender, ‘Spiritual Pregnancy in Plato’s Symposium’, Classical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 1, 1992, p. 79. 14. Ibid. 15. Paul C. Plass, ‘Plato’s “Pregnant” Lover’, Symbolae Oslenses, vol. LIII, 1978, pp. 48, 50, 51. ‘[T]he use of heterosexual terminology may arise directly from the situation itself, since in homosexual relationships one partner frequently assumes a feminine role … The distinctive vocabulary which they [homosexuals in ancient Greece] would develop would naturally consist in large measure of words ordinarily used of heterosexual relationships transferred to pederasty’ (pp. 49–50). The essays by Morrison, Pender, and Plass, and the relevant sections of Dover and Stokes, discussed above, are almost always cited as canonical in references to the topic of male or spiritual pregnancy in the literature on the Symposium. 16. Adriana Cavarero, In Spite of Plato, trans. Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio and Aine O’Healy, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 105–6. 17. Ibid., p. 92. 18. On the latter, see ibid., p. 127 n4. See also Page DuBois, ‘The Appropriation of Reproduction’, in Nancy Tuana, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Plato, Pennsylvania State University Press, Pennsylvania, 1994. 19. Notably, Arlene W. Saxonhouse, ‘Eros and the Female in Greek Political Thought: An Interpretation of Plato’s Symposium’, Political Theory, vol. 12, no. 1, February 1984, especially pp. 21–2. See also, for a more qualified version of the claim, Wendy Brown, ‘“Supposing Truth Were a Woman”: Plato’s Subversion of Masculine Discourse’, Political Theory vol. 16, no. 4, November 1988, reprinted in Tuana, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Plato. 20. Cavarero, In Spite of Plato, p. 94. 21. Ibid., p. 101. 22. Angela Hobbs, ‘Female Imagery in Plato’, in James Lesher, Debra Nails and Frisbee Sheffield, eds, Plato’s Symposium: Issues in Interpretation and Reception, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2006, pp. 261–4. 23. Ibid., p. 271. 24. Ibid., pp. 269, 257.
25. Ibid., p. 271. 26. Ibid.. 27. Ibid., p. 255. 28. Thus it makes no sense to look for a ‘logical progression’ in the image, as Pender attempts (‘Spiritual Pregnancy in Plato’s Symposium’, p. 86), or to try and separate out a ‘male type’ from a ‘female type’ of pregnancy. 29. Plass, ‘Plato’s Pregnant Lover’, p. 50. 30. Compare 203c2, where, in the story of the birth of Eros, poverty ekuêse ton Erôta, ‘became pregnant with Eros’ (Rowe), ‘conceived Love’ (Hamilton), ‘conceived’ (Dover). In his ‘Socratic Midwifery, Platonic Inspiration’ (Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 24, 1977) F.M. Burnyeat notes the ‘strange reversal’ in the Symposium, according to which pregnancy precedes intercourse (p. 8), and also the absence of any account, metaphorical or otherwise, of the process of conception (pp. 12–13). 31. 208e5, emphasis added. 32. See Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1985; Michèle Le Dœuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. Colin Gordon, Continuum, London, 2002. 33. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, Tavistock/Routledge, London, 1977. Hereafter referred to as ‘The Mirror Stage’. 34. Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage, pp. 2–4. 35. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’, trans. James Strachey, in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, vol. 11, Pelican Freud Library, Penguin, London, 1984, p. 364. 36. Lacan, ‘Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious’, in Écrits, p. 302. On Lacan’s concept of the imaginary and its relation to the symbolic, see Philippe Van Haute, Against Adaption: Lacan’s ‘Subversion’ of the Subject, trans. Paul Crowe and Miranda Vankerk, Other Press, New York, 2002, pp. 81–100. 37. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1985, p. 320. See also Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, Routledge, London, 1991, p. 58. 38. Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, p. 28. 39. Luce Irigaray, ‘Sorcerer Love: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium, Diotima’s Speech’, trans. Eleanor H. Kuykendall, in Tuana, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Plato. Irigaray refers to Diotima’s story of the birth of Eros. Eros inherits contradictory characteristics from his father Resource (Poros) and mother Poverty (Penia), giving him an intermediate nature – neither rich nor poor, but somewhere between the two, neither wise nor ignorant, neither mortal nor immortal (203b1–e5), and an intermediary between gods and mortals. 40. Stella Sandford, ‘Thinking Sex Politically: Rethinking “Sex” in Plato’s Republic’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 104, no. 4, Fall 2005. 41. Despite this, Lacan continues to employ the concept of sex ‘illegitimately’ in his psychoanalytical theory, failing to account for the relation between ‘sex difference’ and ‘sexual difference’. See Stella Sandford, ‘The Origins and Ends of “Sex”’, in Christian Kerslake and Ray Brassier, eds, Origins and Ends of the Mind, Leuven University Press, Leuven, 2007.
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Interview
Jeff Wall
Art after photography, after conceptual art
Jeff Wall It’s changed. In the early 1970s, when I wasn’t able to make any work – and that includes the time I was here in London – I was very open to what was being written and talked about – in art, culture, politics – that ensemble of related discourses. Because I was frustrated and unable to have any sort of studio practice, or any kind of practice whatsoever, studio or post-studio, I was probably even more susceptible or receptive to critical theory than I might have been if I’d had a viable métier, because a métier tends to absorb influences and manages them. But I was probably fortunate about that, because I was freer to get involved in the critical theory and philosophy that was just beginning to become available in English at that moment. I was always a studious kid, so getting involved with all that didn’t pose any serious challenge. I was able to enjoy it, and still do. I’d like to think that it doesn’t have any direct relation to my pictures because it would be better if it didn’t. But, in 1976, when I Jeff Wall is a Canadian artist and writer, born in finally got back to a studio for the first time Vancouver in 1946, who has been at the forefront of in six or seven years, I was pretty absorbed in the use of large colour transparencies as a medium for that kind of thinking, and it sort of shaped me contemporary art since the early 1980s. His early work as an artist, and as a person. And that came from the late 1960s was conceptual in character. Textout in my early pictures, like The Destroyed based, it nonetheless began to include photography, in Room. Those first five or six pictures were Landscape Manual (1969), a 64-page typewritten book, really ‘London pictures’, in the sense that they annotated and corrected by hand, that simulates the were manifesting a lot of what I’d absorbed form of a cheap technical manual, in which black-andand gone through while I lived in London white photographs taken through a car windscreen are without being able to make anything. Then, after a few years, I began to be dissatisfied accompanied by a detailed theoretical and narrative with that, and wanted to go in a different commentary. Following a break from making art in the direction… early 1970s, while studying at the Courtauld Institute PO What was the character of that dissatisfaction? JW In my work from 1978 to around 1987, I tried to weave together three threads: studio pictures like The Destroyed Room and Picture for Women, my early landscapes, which were my first moves to continue with ‘straight photography’, and what I later began to think of as ‘cinematographic’ and ‘neo-realist’ pictures. All of those contain, more or less, energies that came from the frustration of
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in London, Wall subsequently returned to art practice as a photographer. He has since become one of the most internationally successful art photographers of his generation. However, his importance is not restricted to his photographic practice. It also derives from a body of critical writing that has made a major contribution to the rethinking of the history of contemporary art, and to the relationship between photography and conceptual art in particular. His most important writings to date are collected in Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2007.
Radical Philosophy 150 (July/August 20 08)
Jeff Wall, The Destroyed Room, 1978, Transparency in lightbox, 159 x 234 cm
Peter Osborne Let’s start with a question about theory. Do you consider theory to play a formative role in your art practice as well as your critical writing? And, if so, what is the difference between the two cases?
the previous six or seven years. By the time I was finishing some of the later ones, like The Storyteller, in 1986, I began to let that thing unravel, let it evolve. I began to hesitate. I tried to become a different person through my work, and to have a different relationship with it. I like to think that what you might call the theoretical elements of those works weren’t really ‘elements’, they were just part of my personality at that point in time, and if the pictures have any fascination for anyone that might be the reason. Only a certain kind of person would be interested in Delacroix the way I was interested in Delacroix; it’s not just a series of ideas that fit together. When I look back at those pictures I have mixed feelings about them, but I feel they have a certain integrity, because they seem to resemble the individual I was at the time. PO From the outside, it looks as if there has been a change in the relationship between the theoretical aspects of your critical writing and your work. In your earlier writings, from the first half of the 1980s up to, say, about five years ago, you establish a historical narrative within which your own work becomes intelligible. More recently, however, I have a sense that your theoretical writings have taken on more of a role of advocacy in relation to the critical debates about your work. There is a more direct critical advocacy for the work, rather than just establishing its conditions of intelligibility – although there is an unavoidable element of advocacy about that too, of course. JW I don’t feel that I have written anything with the aim of making some kind of case for the validity of my work. But, at the same time, because I am an artist whose work is part of the field about which I have written, it’s almost inescapable that my critical perspectives will have emerged from a kind of thinking that I cannot entirely separate from my pictures. A work of art always puts forward a claim as to its own validity, even if it is never articulated verbally or in writing. But it’s there nevertheless. If you do some writing about matters close enough to the domain of your own work, you will have to be involved at some level in putting forward at least aspects of the claims you’d make for your work. Because if the
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claims you are discussing have validity, and if your work – you hope – shares in that validity in some way, the claims you are making are also ones that would, in another context, and to some degree anyway, be made for your work. I have never been sufficiently interested in writing and theory to steadfastly find a way to divorce my writing from my life as an artist. So I have to accept that people will find that sort of advocacy in what I’ve written, and maybe not like that, or feel that it compromises my arguments. My only defence against that is to rely on the quality of the arguments or analyses I’ve made. If they can be convincing despite my own interest in their legitimacy, then there could be some value in them aside from the support they give to my own position. PO And it doesn’t feed back into your practice? It’s really just an epiphenomenal relation? JW I would like it to have an epiphenomenal relation to my pictures, because I feel that my pictures are guided and motivated by my feelings and my life as a whole, not primarily by thoughts about art and its dialectics. But my thoughts about art are very deeply felt and experienced, so I just don’t know how to define the relation. I know that I am also guided by a self-critical sense, which plays a powerful role at each important moment in making something, and that that sense has developed by thinking things through as intensely and clearly as I can. It’s a lived relation, in any case. And I think I’m like other artists in that I have some strong feelings about what is good and not so good art or writing about art, or talk about art.
Kammerspiel PO Nonetheless, some of the sharpest elements of some recent critical debates seem to be delayed effects of your early writings. The obvious example here is the 1981 draft version of your long essay Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel, in which you criticized Benjamin Buchloh. That appears to have provoked a cold October revenge – in Rosalind Krauss’s attack on your work – over twenty years later, in which you become an artistic representative of the spectacle, in the Situationist sense. JW Yes, it seems that wasn’t too popular. When I wrote the draft, it was only a draft. I was trying to write the essay and that was a kind of preliminary approach, one I abandoned. The essay took a different direction and the critical reading of Buchloh’s analysis didn’t go anywhere. PO It didn’t go anywhere in relation to Dan Graham, but it did acquire an independent status as a statement about a certain way of looking at the art of the 1960s and 1970s. JW Yes. I didn’t intend to publish it, but did so at Dan’s suggestion, when the essay was published in a French translation in 1988. But, in any case, I don’t think it was a bad bit of criticism. It was pretty respectful, pretty serious. If you engage another person’s position and give them the respect of thinking about what they’ve said, reading carefully, there’s got to be something positive in that. In the 1960s and 1970s criticism was simply what one did. Artists talked and they argued and they didn’t agree and that was natural. It was how I grew up. Even the mythos of the 1950s, with people sitting in bars and arguing, getting up and walking out on each other (and then of course showing up again the next evening, ready to continue) – I always thought that was natural. Among artists it sort of still is. One calls into question someone else’s work and that’s part of the process of judgement, and it can become pretty critical. The fact that it set off some kind of reaction is fine. PO To what extent was the final, 1982 version of Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel conceived as an alternative history of conceptual art, with Graham as its emblematic figure? JW That is hard to answer. I can’t say I know how it was conceived or why I wrote it. I had no strategy, I just got involved in the thing the way I would get involved in making a
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picture. I wrote it as I went along. I remember being more excited by the analysis of glass architecture in terms of vampirism than I was in the critical version of conceptual art. I am not certain that I was even presenting an alternative version of conceptual art in the sense of making proposals for other possibilities; I was critiquing it, having taken leave of many of its presuppositions already some years before. I didn’t see Dan Graham as an emblematic figure of conceptual art, but as an artist whose work had qualities and aspects that were obscured by assuming it was conceptual art, or was essentially conceptual art. I saw subterranean elements glimmering in it and they seemed more significant. In the process of examining those, I had to show how the orthodox presuppositions of conceptual art repressed those elements. Or – since everyone knew that conceptual art set out to suppress those elements – I had to examine the results of that suppression on the way we, I, experienced and understood a work of art. And that examination was critical of the presuppo sitions. So I ended up criticizing something, and for some people, who had managed to take up the ‘critical position’ at that time, that was a bit of a surprise. PO Looking back, it appears as the first in a genre that has run riot in the last ten years: revisionist historiography of the art of the 1960s and early 1970s. I suspect that the broader critical ramifications of your essay only really became intelligible once that genre was established. JW At the beginning of the 1980s, there was no historiography to revise. PO But there was the self-presentation of an influential small group, which stood in for the absence of historiography. JW Yes, there was probably already a sort of orthodoxy, and it became more conventionalized as the people who were the advocates became professors or got more prominent as artists. But at the time, my view was just as much a contemporary view as any other view. It might have been contentious, but it was still current commentary, not a revisionist look back. PO One of the main issues here (and this bears directly on the debates about the con ceptual components – or not – of your own work) is the extent to which the revisionist historiography of conceptual art still bases its understanding of the term on the selfunderstanding of the small group of conceptual artists who hegemonized it in the late 1960s – providing new empirical material and better historical contextualization – and the extent to which it aspires to change our concept of conceptual art, taking it away from those purely linguistic, philosophically reductive definitions and distributing it more widely, both historically (by expanding its periodization back to the beginning of the 1960s) and with regard to the practices with respect to which it is critically significant. In my own Conceptual Art book, I took the latter track. One way of reading your Kammerspiel essay, historically, is as the start of that process. Placing Dan Graham’s work at the centre of conceptual practice meant that conceptual art just had to be understood in another way. JW It might be right to broaden the definition, especially if you are trying to do some kind of history, but still, I think you have to take into account the fact that hardcore linguistic conceptual art – the work that made the really interesting claims – was successful, as an artistic proposal, in the same way that the readymade was successful. It changed the environment in which all claims are made and one has to acknowledge that achievement. So I am not that interested in the broadened version of conceptual art. My argument – if it is an argument – is with the radical version. PO Your own view seems to have shifted quite decisively since the Kammerspiel essay, in a way that appears, ironically, to reinstate the basic opposition off which Kosuth himself thrived: the opposition of concept and aesthetic. Whereas the Kammerspiel essay offered a novel contextual and relational reading of conceptual art – reorienting its critical
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Jeff Wall, Stereo, 1980, Transparency in lightbox, 213 x 213 cm, two panels
significance towards urbanism and an architectural problematic, in a way that deepened and made far more complex the question of form – more recently, you seem to have given up on that particular expanding field, and returned to métier, which can be understood as a return to a certain (non-conceptual) ‘aesthetic’. This seems to be exemplified in your decision to request that the ‘text/sign’ half of your piece Stereo (1980) no longer be shown; that the piece be reduced to a single panel. In its original form, Stereo was always something of an anomaly in your œuvre. I always liked its anomalous character. This decision seems to have an emblematic significance for your current rethinking of your practice. If one was looking for an emblem of a Friedian turn in the self-conception of your practice, this would be it. JW I’m going to resist that way of looking at it because it assumes that the claims made by radical conceptual art are unproblematically valid and that therefore any diversion from that validity must be some kind of ‘return’. As if we’ve been to the frontier, didn’t like it there, and fled back to a more comfortable interior. I think there are fundamental weaknesses in the concept/aesthetic duality, and so therefore the critique of other art made in the name of that duality is not the unimpeachable frame of reference it has been so often taken to be. I like your interpretation about the sign panel of Stereo; it is so much more interesting than the reality. The sign side was always too bright. I never figured out a way to make it less bright. I always disliked the imbalance, so I asked the owners of the picture to remove it. But it’s not removed in the sense of ‘absolutely and forever’. PO Ok, but if that’s the reason then presumably you might show the sign side separately?
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JW I might! It still exists. PO Sticking with the Kammerspiel essay for a moment longer, at a general thematic level, you make a strong critical-historical claim about the relationship between a ‘good’ conceptualism and architecture. Basically, you claim that the urban is the social content of a critical conceptualism; that the urban is the means by which conceptualism keeps ‘the dream of a modernism with social content’ alive. It’s hard not to see some resonance of this in your photographic practice. The dream of a modernism with social content seems to cross the theory–practice divide. JW I might have thought there was a connection at the time, because of my dialogue with Dan, who is so interested in architecture. But I discovered years later, to my surprise, that I wasn’t interested in architecture at all! When you talk to Dan you talk about what Dan is interested in, that’s how it goes. So I don’t know whether the claim holds up, other than as a way of thinking about Dan’s work. PO Well, I think one can make critical claims about textualization, for example, on the basis of an urban anthropology of non-place. There is a distinctiveness to certain kinds of urban space, in which anonymity and the lack of conventions and practices associated with place mean that social relations are mediated primarily by signs, texts, instructions etc. You can find a lot of the genres of early conceptual work, in its pre-Fluxus stage there – like the instruction piece – in their original social form. There is a kind of unconscious recovery of a quite specific form of social communication that is tied to a certain kind of social space. That leads to the question: what is the place of photography in this type of social space?
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JW Your idea that the prevalence of instructional and technical language in conceptual art derives from that specific aspect of urban life seems right. But once you involve photography, things open up. The absence of signs in a place is as conducive to photography as is the presence. Photography might have been born in the city, but it does not need to stay there. It’s a medium and a practice which doesn’t need to make a decisive distinction in this regard.
Scale PO I didn’t mean at the level of photographic content, I meant at the level of the relationship between photographic representation in general and the experience of urban space. People often make the point, with reference to your work of the late 1980s and early 1990s, that as the lightboxes get larger they seem to be registering a need for contemporary art to adopt the same visual scale as billboard advertisements, in order to occupy social space. Some people defend you on that ground, because of the engagement, while others criticize you, saying your art has become part of the spectacle. But the underlying analysis is pretty much the same. JW I have never wanted my work to occupy ‘social space’; ‘social space’ seems to mean places where one does not usually find works of art. That is an important tradition, but I don’t feel part of it. I am more or less content to see my pictures in the places where we usually find pictures – museums or related places, or some private rooms. The scale wasn’t determined by some engagement with billboards, but by other things, more internal to what I see as the important traditions and manners of picture-making, whether in photography or other media. PO I was thinking more structurally about the relation to scale. Is it not the case that a certain scale might be required in order to articulate a certain form of experience? JW I don’t think that can be generalized because each subject – and the experience of that subject in a picture, or as a picture – will suggest a solution to its scale, along with all the other essentials. PO Is it not still to do with publicity – even in the history of painting? JW Objectively maybe, yes; as some kind of argument or analysis, but not for me. I never wanted effects that were drawn from publicity to become folded back critically into what I was doing. For me, it had more to do with my critical reaction to my own acceptance of conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s. At a certain point, I had a startlingly critical reaction to my own previous engagements. That helped me to recover a relationship with what was then so-called non-avant-garde art – with Matisse, Pollock, Manet … but also Wols and Atget, and the other artists I admire and have always admired. At that moment, I felt I had recognized something essential about the depictive arts, something that could not be the subject of the kind of critiques made of it during the previous few decades. The scale of my pictures was one of the ways for me to find a palpable artistic mode in which my rethinking of reductionism could be expressed, even though that was not my main aim. For a while, it was important to de-reduce things in order to counter the reductionism of post-Duchampian conceptual art (the reduction to language). Scale was a charged issue because it was one of the essential criteria of pictorial form. PO Was there a point at which your reaction against reductionism ended and your practice moved on without it? When was that, the end of the 1980s? JW It’s hard to say exactly. Maybe I haven’t reached that point yet. PO Nonetheless, throughout the period we have been talking about, from the late 1980s until the mid-1990s, your reaction can still be narrated as a transformed continuation of an avant-garde project, in terms of a modernism with social content. Pictures like Vampires’ Picnic (1991) and Dead Troops Talk (1992) seem to present themselves quite explicitly as
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historical allegories – as the capitalist and communist versions of contemporary history, respectively. But your engagement with that kind of historical narrative seems to cease by the mid-1990s. Did you lose interest? JW I think of Dead Troops Talk and Vampires’ Picnic as comic pictures, and so as comic allegories, but yes, allegorical in the sense you define. I also wanted to take the literary aspect as far as I possibly could – the notion of emphasizing or disclosing the literary interior of the subject, and its treatment. The sense of blatant artifice was able to create all sorts of tensions, which had fascinated me ever since the cinema of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the work of Fassbinder, Straub-Huillet, Godard and some others – as a counterpoint to neo-realism and documentary photography. And I was interested in Benjamin’s notion of allegory – The Origin of German Tragic Drama. It made me think about falsity or artifice, about the potential of arrestedness and of the process of masking, all those things. Those two pictures were part of the outcome of that experiment. But once I’d done them, I felt that I’d reached the end of a path, and that I should go somewhere else. I was also beginning to be dissatisfied with that emphasis on the arrestedness of motion, something that seemed to be necessary on that allegorical path. I had done pictures like The Goat (1989), a couple of years before, which is very statuesque and rather mannered in that direction and I began to feel I was going too far. It may also have had to do with the fact that, after ten or twelve years of feeling I needed to establish something by means of a picture, I now began to feel that I not only had established it but I had started wasting my time establishing it. Let’s assume that Dead Troops Talk is a successful picture; still, the feeling of its success wasn’t very positive. I felt I should make a move, do something else. And when you start feeling that way, the something else is probably already there. At that point, the something else was to re emphasize neorealism. I’d already done pictures like Mimic (1982) and Doorpusher (1984) – street pictures that were drawn from direct experiences.
Medium in contemporary art PO I would like to ask you about the category of photography and its relation to ‘art’. In your essay on photography and conceptual art in the catalogue for Reconsidering the Object of Art, you say something like: photo-conceptualism was the condition of possibility of photography becoming Art, with a capital A. Implicit in that formulation is the idea that it is photography as a medium that becomes Art. However, there is another standard narrative about the work of the 1960s, of which you give your own version in your recent essay in Afterall magazine, in which Art with a capital A develops against the concept of medium. In your recent version, these two narratives do not compete but describe parallel developments. There are two streams: a continuation of what you call the canonical forms, and an opening up to art in general. What strikes me as peculiar about this is how critically self-sufficient you consider the two streams to be. You develop an interesting concept of second appearance, so that the non-canonical stream – the generic art stream – is a space in which non-art can have a second appearance as art. But what you don’t do – which I was expecting you to do – is that you don’t allow canonical art into the realm of second appearance. But surely the canonical arts themselves only remain ‘art’ by virtue of their own second appearance. Yet you don’t let the two streams occupy the same art space. JW First, I must object. The ‘canonical forms’ cannot make a ‘second appearance’ in art because their appearance as such defines them as art. The canonical forms are always about a ‘first appearance’, not a second. Even when an existing work reappears in a newer work, the way Walker Evans’s photographs reappeared in, or as, Sherrie Levine’s photographs, Levine’s photograph makes an originary appearance. It is just another photograph that happens to be of an older photograph. That is not the same as, say, a performed event making an appearance in the context of the canonical forms. The canonical forms do not
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need to make any claims for being art, since what we call ‘art’ has been defined by them from the beginning. So, if contemporary art has bifurcated into two streams, the canonical forms stream and the ‘event-structured’ stream, medium can only matter in the canonical stream where art is recognized as it always has been, by its evident physical characteristics – it’s a painting, a sculpture, a photograph. It can’t matter in the other stream where, by definition, that art is obliged to prove that art can be anything the artist can imagine it being regardless of what it is made of – ‘art in general’, as you say. It does seem that the two streams are self-sufficient or at least it doesn’t look like there is a way to cut a channel between them. Going radically against the notion of medium and métier makes it difficult at the same time to devote yourself to either, and devotion to both is the fundamental characteristic of the canonical forms. That doesn’t mean, though, that individual artists can’t cross between streams; quite a few do. They are experiencing the bifurcation very directly; maybe one of them will find the channel. PO One consequence is that you continue to use the category of art photography, which feels quite archaic. To what extent is this an institutional phenomenon? I notice the MOMA book of your writings and interviews comes out of their Department of Photography. Are you are comfortable with the institutional construction of photography as a medium-specific modernist category, as a living form? Hasn’t medium been if not destroyed then at least problematized, as an ontological category, giving it a different status within the same field as the non-canonical arts? JW I don’t think ‘art photography’ is an institutional phenomenon. Photography is one of the canonical forms because it’s a depictive art and so akin to painting, drawing, sculpture. There is no means within our notion of art for there not to be an ‘art photography’. Therefore it really is a living art form, and is practised as such by those with the desire for it. Medium has been made problematic, but only outside the canonical forms. The canonical forms simply do not have a way to escape medium, or a need to do so.
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PO But is that a strategic stance within a predominantly transmedia field or is it an attempt to insulate a practice from such a field? JW Art is probably now dominantly transmedia. But I am not sure whether that fact, or that dominance, is that significant as far as the canonical forms are concerned. They are differentiated, if not insulated, by nature, as we’ve been talking about. I don’t think my argument attempts to insulate the canonical forms, or art photography, from the dominant element, but just to recognize that there is a fundamental differentiation that is inherent in the arts as such and that remains important and meaningful even if it is not dominant. PO What would the test of that claim be? JW The test is always in the quality of the art, at least within the canonical forms. PO Is there really nothing more to be said? There may not be criteria, but are there not fields of relevance, kinds of things such art would have to do? JW Nothing could be relevant in the absence of artistic quality. It’s the quality that discloses everything else. PO That’s a very Greenbergian claim. The problem for Greenberg was that once he got into the position of having to examine those claims – once history had turned against him, so to speak – his thought more or less fell apart. Once he tried discursively to redeem his concept of quality, by moving to the level of philosophical aesthetics, in the late seminars, there is very little there…
Jeff Wall, The Vampires’ Picnic, 1991, ransparency in lightbox, 229 x 335 cm
JW I don’t think he did so badly. I like a lot of his later writing and seminars on aesthetics, like Homemade Aesthetics. He boiled it down to ‘art deals only in results’ – meaning if the work convinces you aesthetically, then any other claims it makes or are found in it can be taken seriously, or must be taken seriously. PO But even Greenberg’s own concept of purification (which is, of course, the historical model for reduction) comes in two forms. In the first form, purification condenses certain kinds of social experience, but later on a kind of physicalism takes over (laying the ground for both minimalism – the continuity – and conceptualism – the reaction), allied to a more Kantian concept of aesthetic experience. The question of whether aesthetic experience conveys significant social experience, or what the significant social experience it conveys is, tends to drop away. In the end, there is an aesthetic reductionism. JW That might be true of Greenberg, but it’s not what interests me about him. I think that, at least for some substantial part of his career, he was saying something related to what Adorno argued – that if a work is artistically successful it will condense significant social experience in some way. His reductionism, if you want to call it that, could have been a response to the tendency always to look for social significance in art first off, without caring for the aesthetic formation and mediation, which is what makes that significance possible. PO But can you redeem the claim for aesthetic success here without giving an account of the significant social experience? JW Not if you really want to talk seriously about art, to analyse it, but it has to emerge from your real experience of the work, your aesthetic experience, which is inseparable from your judgement of the work’s quality. It is in that experience, that experience of the work and the experience of your judgement of the work, that you will recognize the revelation, or disclosure, of that significant social experience, or social material, to use Adorno’s term. PO But unless it’s elaborated, isn’t the claim for the quality of the work in danger of becoming a mere mantra? Don’t ontological questions about the historical state of the work need to be spelled out a bit, in relation to medium and autonomy? In the later period,
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Greenberg himself certainly appeared to believe in a kind of immediacy, especially in relation to painting and sculpture, which seems to obliterate any Adornian claim about the immanence of social mediations. JW As I said, I feel there is an affinity between the two. I interpret Greenberg to be saying, ‘Only under these circumstances will whatever kind of condensed social material make itself available to experience and reflection on experience.’ I believe he meant that without the conviction of quality the social elements could never become significant, because people would never truly experience them. Only in aesthetic experience do they occur to you, only then do you even really notice them. Only then will there be a connection to the viewer’s life and vital interests. PO Is a Greenbergian viewer the ideal viewer of your work? JW Well, in so far as we can think of this ‘ideal viewer’ as definable, it is someone who is capable of and open to having aesthetic experience and making judgements, even if that person cannot account for the process intellectually; someone who has a sense of how the pleasure they receive from their experience of art will affect them in the time they are not enjoying art. But that is all unstructured, and can’t be codified, and so can’t be predicted or planned for. PO It is a decisive retreat from the notion of comprehending a work that is tied to the question of its experience in a way that involves some reflective relation to the system of mediations that it is. JW But comprehending art is a moment of enjoying it. PO And what are the conditions of enjoyment? JW The conditions are that there should be some good art somewhere in view and that a person has enough freedom to be able to come and see that work of art. So we need art of quality and some minimum of personal freedom, even surreptitious personal freedom. PO The disagreement is in unpacking the phrase ‘the quality of the art’. JW Of course, but the disagreement is part of the process of establishing the reputation of the art, and it is a mark of that freedom. PO This looks like a fundamentally ahistorical notion, though. What of the idea that works are in large part intelligible by virtue of their relations to other works? JW I don’t see it as ahistorical. The process of judgement takes place within a specific social context and moment, each time. It is marked by that context but is not aimed at simply expressing or reproducing the context. It’s aimed at the encounter with the art, which is itself not just the reproduction of the ‘art context’ in the form of an individual art work. And judgement is always the comparison of a work with other works. PO It is hard to think of the modern other than in terms of some Valéryian relation of negation to previous works. There does seem to be an element of aggression in modern works towards past works: new works ‘kill’ old works. JW That is the orthodox avant-garde attitude to the relation one has to one’s predecessors. I begin more from admiration of my predecessors and an attempt to do as well as they did. There is a rivalry there, but the rivalry doesn’t involve the destruction of the old works or their reputation, it’s more a quest to equal or even surpass the level of achievement, but at a new moment, which can never be like the moment in which the quality of the older art was achieved. So the new art of the new moment can’t repeat anything of the art of the old moment except its quality.
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PO Even so, in a broader sense, don’t new works change the conditions of experience of older works? JW Yes, precisely. But then something else Greenberg claimed is relevant, namely that, as time passes, works of high quality tend to resemble each other even if they are not at all contemporaneous, and they resemble each other more than they resemble works of less quality done contemporaneously to them. The formation of a canon emerges from the recognition of this resemblance. New works can change the way we experience older works only if the new works resemble the older ones in quality.
Fried’s phenomenological reduction PO Let me ask you something about Michael Fried. There seems to be an irony in your increasing appreciation of Fried’s writings. The irony being that one of the main criticisms of your work accuses it of theatricality, which is the very thing Fried himself was most famously against, in his critique of minimalism. JW It’s not an increasing appreciation; I was always interested in Fried. I read all his published work of the 1960s as soon as it appeared, more or less, and was very much involved with it, especially ‘Art and Objecthood’. I recognized the line he was trying to draw between literalism and illusionism. It meant a lot to me, even though I turned my back on it for a while, when I followed the move towards literalism and conceptual art. And when he made that surprising turn towards Manet and the pictorial art of the previous two centuries, that meant a lot to me as well. Those moves became guidelines that helped me deal with my own situation. His turn towards the art of Courbet and Manet and the others was a dissenting view of the evolution of the avant-garde; it dissented from many of what quickly became the orthodoxies of the 1970s. So there was a serious influence from Fried when I realized what I wanted to do with photography around the middle of the 1970s. To find an irony in this is a bit off. Fried was not talking about whether there are socalled ‘theatrical’ effects within a picture, he was talking about the staging of an object in a space. ‘Literalist’ art is content with confronting a person with an object in a real space and insisting on the superior realism of that encounter, as opposed to the illusionism of so-called ‘previous art’. In pictorial art, there is no such staging. So it is of secondary importance whether the construction of the image displays ‘theatrical’ or ‘anti-theatrical’ characteristics. Both are always present within any picture in the process of being made. A picture is never experienced fundamentally as an object, it is experienced by means of the illusion it creates, what Fried called ‘opticality’. PO Is it not relevant at the level of the light box as an object in the gallery space? JW No, I don’t think the light box has much to do with it. PO The critical contention is that it can happen in relation to light boxes. JW Can it? PO The issue is: what is the light box/picture relation? You are using the term ‘picture’ in such a way as to require an illusionistic reduction to surface. But is there not a tension or a struggle between the light boxes as objects and their picture-producing function? JW It’s very secondary, because the object–person form of theatricality that Fried was objecting to doesn’t exist in pictures. PO For Fried that’s true, but it sidesteps the point… JW No, because it’s true it doesn’t sidestep the point!
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Jeff Wall, Rear View, Open Air Theatre, 2005, Transparency in lightbox, 226 x 293 cm
PO Well, it avoids the whole question of the relation of the light box to the readymade, for example, and thereby the question of the ontological status of the work. The whole point of Fried’s phenomenological reduction of pictures to opticality was to remove the thing-like-status of the carrier – to abstract from ontology and reduce the term ‘object’ to a purely phenomenological sense. JW I don’t see it as a reduction, more as a relation. Everyone who looks at a picture sees that it is some sort of object hanging there. It is futile to attempt to eliminate that perception from the experience of the picture. The aspect of pictorial art that is so rich is that while you are of course looking at an object you are simultaneously experiencing the illusion of seeing other things. And with pictorial art (and this includes abstract art) it is the other things that you are seeing, and the traces of the making of that illusion, that are artistically decisive. The provision of the object upon which the illusion is created is fundamental, but not decisive, as such. An emphasis on the being-there of the object underlying, or supporting the illusion, is a completely valid way of making a pictorial work; it tends towards the reduction of the illusionistic treatment of the surface, finally, to the monochrome. The monochrome is a limit-condition of opticality, not a rejection of it. But pictorial art exists within those limits. It acknowledges but overcomes the primordial fact that it is an object. That is how it is experienced. PO Isn’t the problem for you an unintended consequence of a decision about luminosity, the decision to go for a light box rather than a C-print, for example? It allows you a certain optical quality, but some other – unwanted – things come with that decision. JW Definitely an unintended consequence! These light boxes have a greater object quality than a conventional framed opaque photograph. I will not go into the circumstances that led me to begin working with this form rather than with opaque photos, but there were a number of contingencies involved. The upshot of it is that the picture does announce itself as an object more emphatically than do other techniques. I realize that, and I realize that people are going to concentrate therefore on the object quality more than they would otherwise. But,
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for me, all that happens is that the tension between perceiving an object and experiencing a picture is more pronounced, and so maybe more interesting, at least to some people. PO But there are also structural cultural connections, eliminable only by fairly selfconscious individual acts of phenomenological reduction – between light boxes and televisions, for example – which make the light box a carrier of certain kinds of social experience, or relate it to certain types of social experience. Surely these are an inherent part of its contemporaneity. Yet you want to eliminate them by a reduction to pictorial status. JW I don’t think I want to eliminate them. I agree that those resonances with other media and so on are part of the experience and part of the significance. I only want to emphasize that all of those aspects become meaningful only by means of the experience of the picture and the judgement of the picture. If I appropriated, say, some existing media imagery and re-presented it as a light box, then that would be using the light box strictly as a sign of its social function. And that would be a sort of ‘readymade’ way of relating to the medium, and to its relations with other media, like television. But I am not doing that, I am making a picture for the same kinds of reasons other artists make them. So the medium is identified, almost ontologically, with the criteria of pictorial art, not the other way around. PO This leads us to the question of autonomy – the meaning of autonomy and its conditions. From the standpoint of your Friedianism, autonomy appears largely to be about the work’s capacity to impose a pictorial aspect and to insulate itself from external relations. This is a version of the conventional modernist view of autonomy as self-referentiality. But there’s a competing Adornian version whereby because of the socially affirmative character of autonomy itself, ‘true’ autonomy requires autonomy from autonomy: that is to say, an anti- or non-art element. Here, a critical autonomy always functions via anti- or non-art elements. Your recent sketch of the field of contemporary production reads as if you are associating autonomy and quality exclusively with the canonical forms, and that while the other side of the field is doing something different, which might be considered valuable, it isn’t to be understood in those terms. Alternatively, on the modified Adornian version of autonomy, which I accept, the non-art element is constitutive of autonomy. It suggests autonomy on the other side of the field, despite the fact that there are not canonical forms. JW That’s an interesting way of looking at it. There’s no argument about autonomous art always having a relation with a non-art element, it always does. But I don’t agree that autonomy is about insulating the work from external relations. In that lecture, ‘Depiction, Object, Event’, I emphasized that point. Artistic autonomy is a social relationship, a way in which art relates to what is not art. I think my view has affinities with the Adorno version. But, as I said, so does Greenberg, and so does Fried. In that essay I claimed that the canonical arts simply are not structured so as to set aside the criteria of artistic quality, but that the non-canonical forms exist and thrive precisely by setting those criteria aside. But both are forms of autonomous art, even those that imitate heteronomous forms. PO It seems to be a consequence of what Adorno called the nominalism of late modern art (in a decisively non-de Duvean sense of nominalism). There is an increasing burden placed on the critical part of the individual work, in mediating its relations with the concept of art (as a result of the decline of medium at an ontological level, on this side of your divide). Now, if judgements of significance are individual, in the sense that it is the individuality of the great works that associates them with each other, then surely quality will be spread across the two fields. Individuality is easier in a nominalistic field, but significant individuality is harder; whereas in the canonical forms, precisely because they are rule-governed fields, individuality itself is harder.
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JW Yes, if the judgement is of the individual work – and it always is – then you can’t rule out the non-canonical forms achieving the kind of artistic quality normally identified with the canonical forms. I am not arguing against that; I am saying that, if that happens, it will happen somehow through the process of suspension of criteria, which seems contradictory. But therefore we ought to expect it to happen, and it is probably happening. I’m sure there are a number of non-canonical works that could be pointed to as examples.
The Warhol effect PO What are your views about currently commercially successful contemporary art? JW What we used to call ‘high art’ has become too involved in its own ‘not-being-high’. What has fascinated people since Warhol is to look at a simplified image like, say, a golf ball painted by Roy Lichtenstein, and be thrilled by the shock that many of the qualities that were once present in a work of serious or high art have vanished and yet the thing is still being experienced as a work of high art. This is the Warhol effect, and it is related to reductionism – what Judd called ‘the look of non-art’. It was at one time a challenge to conventional taste. But now that is conventional taste. Takeshi Murakami uses the term ‘superflat’, which means, I assume, ‘radically without depth’. Warhol’s effect was a dialectical depth created by the absence of depth. It was the same with the readymade: an absence of qualities experienced as the presence of those absent qualities. But now we are reaching the point where the presence of the absence is taken for granted, since no one expects to be in the presence of the qualities themselves. Artists now routinely produce the absence of qualities in a conventional way. And in the art world, the things that most blatantly display the absence of qualities are most highly valued. That’s the post-Pop look. But the line between an undialectical absence and a residual dialectical absence of qualities is becoming blurred. We are probably now at the point where that dialectical absence of qualities has evolved to the point where art works have a ‘positive’ absence of qualities; they really do lack almost everything that art needed to have. We are searching for that dialectical lack and we keep finding it, maybe in smaller and smaller percentages, but it’s getting to the point where we are not certain we need that little percentage any more. Jeff Koons has emphatically said that he wants his viewers to feel good about their cultural background, no matter what that cultural background might be. In saying that he is, I think, trying to say that if you should prefer the authentic absence of qualities (rather than the dialectical absence of qualities), because of your cultural background, then that is OK. The knife-edge of this dialectic fascinates people, even if they can’t quite articulate it. PO It’s a game played with commodification. The latest move – if you think of Damien Hirst’s diamond Skull – seems to be to play with production costs, at the same level as the top of the art market’s inflated prices: to make art that costs more than £1 million to make… JW It’s another way of trying to withdraw quality and create that residual avant-garde shock. It’s still reductionism. The addition of any number of diamonds cannot turn the negative of reductionism into a positive, in this sense. PO Is there a reactive quality to your own work, in this context? JW The situation is defined by what we could call a mannerist version of reductionism, in which further and even unexpected reductions are being effected. So we may be quite far from the point of no-art, even though we don’t quite know where that is. At one point we thought that no-art was a conceptual reduction to discourse, which was both true and untrue. Then we thought no-art was the total, complete mimesis of the commodity as an artwork. That’s happened or is well on the way to happening, so that’s not quite it. Now some people are trying to push past that, to enter into the production of commodities on a totally com-
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mercial basis, conforming to public taste in a way in which one should apparently never do; to spend money on a level that only commercial films and the extravagant end of the fashion industry do; to take away every gesture that at one time distinguished high art from commercial art and entertainment. PO In London, this is a practice associated with the White Cube Gallery. JW Touché. Fortunately, the new approaches have not completely replaced the older ones, and there is still some appreciation for the kind of art that we normatively call ‘high art’. It could easily be that the new types of art will be the dominant forms for a long time, but I don’t think they will invalidate the older forms and attitudes. This is obvious just in terms of the art market, where the canonical forms, mainly painting, are extremely highly valued.
Reproducibility and singularity PO In the case of photography, because of its reproducibility, there is also the question of editions. A lot of contemporary art photographers make their living as artists via a strategic relationship to editions – five, ten or even more. What are your views about multiples, as a problem imposed by the medium? Have you ever done multiple editions? JW The conventional view, which comes from the 1920s and is reproduced in all the critical attitudes of avant-garde thinking about photography, was that photographic prints are inherently reproducible and that is one of the essential things about them, one of the things that distinguishes photography from all previous art forms. However, in so far as we just think about it as a medium, the process or act of photography is complete when one print is made from a negative. Why would one make a second print? Is there any photographic reason to make a second print from any given negative? Reproduction of a photograph is a social matter that has nothing to do with its artistic identity in a strict sense. Therefore, the editions of photographs are a secondary consideration. For some time, I made only one print of each picture because this is how I saw it. But I began to have so many practical problems I had to make some pragmatic adjustments, and I’ve been making editions of between two and eight prints since the beginning of the 1990s. PO Reproducibility is related to another issue, which is conceptually distinct: serialism. One of the main forms of art photography at the moment is a form of serialism verging on the accumulation work. People like Tillmans present us with a vast profusion of photographs… JW In the past, photographers laboured under a major disadvantage that derived from their obligation to conform to some form of journalistic model. That tended to identify them with a certain subject, a certain opportunity or encounter – Walker Evans and the sharecroppers of Hale County. That seems to have bound him to an epoch or at least to a certain situation in a thematic way and you can find the same thing with many others. In contrast, painters have never been bound that way. The painter has a sovereign relation to the subject. I have always wanted that sovereignty, that freedom from the subject of the picture. And, for me, that has to do with the singular picture as opposed to the series. With a series, you seem to be committed to the presentation of a theme or a situation, and that the presentation of that theme is your goal and your accomplishment. After that presentation has been completed, you will need to attach yourself to, or discover, another such theme or situation. I am trying to make good pictures, in the sense of the autonomous picture, one by one, and trying to do so over or under – however you want to put it – any subject that occurs to me. The singularity of the picture emphasizes that and protects me from what I see as a limit of my autonomy. As soon as you devote yourself to a subject, you have another purpose. For me, it is important not to have another purpose. London, 25 November 2007
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reviews
Future present Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century, Verso, London and New York, 2007. xiii + 418 pp., £25.00 hb., 978 1 84467 104 5. The concept of development in history has been mainly understood in two ways. In the historicist philosophical tradition, it refers to the concrete spatio-temporal shapes world history takes over its course, as it moves from one world or civilization to another, in the form of successive stages that suggest ‘perfectibility’, ‘gradation’ and ‘maturation’ – in other words, measure. In its classical Hegelian version, this course and its measure are present-centred. The story told by Hegel in The Philosophy of History of the rational unfolding and realization of spirit as freedom (enshrined in the state as law) narrates such developments out of the past, beginning in ‘despotic’ China and – following the ‘cunning of reason’ – on into the northern European post-Reformation present where the wealth of spirit’s historical determinations are deposited. ‘Development’ thus has both objective and subjective sides and is related to the culturalist idea of formation or Bildung. In this conception, however, many are either left behind, or even untouched, by reason and so are not historical subjects. Indeed such exclusions – most of the ‘worlds’ of Africa and America – are constitutive of the ‘spirit’ that informs Hegel’s world history. For Hegel, there is famously no future that is substantively different from his own present. Politics, in other words, has become administration. Marx, however, not only philosophically inverted and socially relocated Hegel’s historicist version (he traced a history of modes of production rather than of empires or states), he also politically retemporalized it by giving history’s course a new development in the shape of a different future present – communism – with a capitalist past. One central reason why such a future is a ‘development’ is that it is to emerge from the capitalist present through the negating agency of the proletariat qua subject of freedom. Marx’s materialist history thus both interrupts Hegel’s panlogism and reconfigures it. This ambiguity, as it was later institutionalized in social-democratic and Stalinist practice, was to become both Benjamin’s and Althusser’s complaint, for which they provided very different solutions. The second, more common way in which historical development has been understood has passed through
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Radical Philosophy 150 (July/August 20 08)
the first tradition, but endows the idea of development with a curtailed evolutionary and technocratic meaning, rather than a revolutionary one. In this sense, it belongs to a powerful paradigm of developmental thinking that has pervaded the natural, psychological and social sciences. Conceived primarily in terms of economic growth, labour productivity and capital accumulation (and hence technological improvement too), this usage of the term ‘development’ has its roots in classical political economy – particularly in the work of Adam Smith – and its critique. Since the end of the Second World War, however, it has been redeployed as the biopolitical complement of modernization theory so as to inform, first, the foreign policy of the USA and then, more generally, the social and economic policy of the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other such transnational institutions. In the context of the Cold War and rising revolutionary forms of decolonization in the 1960s and 1970s, ‘development’ was a means to bring ‘undeveloped’ or ‘backward’ nations and regions – specifically, the ‘poor’ of the so-called Third World – up to date; that is, up to the present as actualized in the metropolitan nations, through health and educational programmes, as well as land reform and an education into market mechanisms – all linked to counter-insurgency and, more recently, security issues. For its part, the international Communist movement at the time insisted on evolutionary ‘stagism’, and the need for further capitalist development in such areas so as to overcome feudal remnants, unify postcolonial nation-states and create the necessary conditions for future socialist transformation. Giovanni Arrighi’s work comes out of the radical traditions that have critically engaged with the above conceptions and the political practices and strategies they have entailed. His most recent book, Adam Smith in Beijing, follows, and completes, his previous volume The Long Twentieth Century (1994). Together they constitute a stunning work of world history with theoretical and political intent whose intellectual roots lie in a mix of radical historiographical traditions: the dependency and world systems approaches of André Gunder Frank
and Immanuel Wallerstein, on the one hand, and, as the subtitle of Arrighi’s latest work suggests, Perry Anderson’s truncated history of modes of production (and, most importantly, the transitions between them), on the other. Gunder Frank, to whom the book is dedicated, is particularly important in this regard. His anti-developmentalist notion of ‘the development of underdevelopment’, in which accumulation in the metropolises is reproduced through disaccumulation in the peripheries, provides the theoretical background to Arrighi’s (as well as David Harvey’s) conceptualization of the territorial aspects of circulation (as schematized in Marx’s formula M–C–M´) and the international division of labour. Fernand Braudel’s mercantile and politicized conception of capitalism – ‘capitalism only triumphs … when it is the state’ – arguably provides the key articulating point for the totalizing ambitions they all share. In other words, together Arrighi’s two books provide a history – mainly an economic history – of the global present. If The Long Twentieth Century reconfigured a developmental history of capitalism from the Italian city-states, via Dutch mercantilism and British industry and empire up until the waning of US world dominance, Adam Smith in Beijing opens up this account onto a possible new world order which is de- and then re-centred on East Asia, and China in particular. From this perspective, Bush’s ongoing world war becomes something like a last stand. Two questions seem to motivate the work in this regard. First, to what extent are contemporary developments in China subordinated to capitalist logics? And, second, if not completely, what political alternatives might a world economically dominated by China offer a reconfigured ‘commonwealth of civilizations truly respectful of cultural differences’? Arrighi’s answers, hardly strident, are: ‘not totally’, and ‘some’. Adam Smith in Beijing thus presents itself in a number of guises: as a work of criticism, theory and history – and the figure of Adam Smith is central to them all. As a work of criticism it engages with, among others, the pioneering work of Robert Brenner on the emergence of capitalism in Europe, as well as his more recent reflections on Chinese economic history and the crises of contemporary capitalism (‘global turbulence’). In this early work on the origins of capitalism, Brenner had engaged with both Gunder Frank and Wallerstein and referred to it, negatively, as a form of ‘neo-Smithian Marxism’. The reasons were mainly methodological. According to Brenner, Gunder Frank’s and Wallerstein’s accounts of capitalist development were not sufficiently grounded in Marxist concepts: they privileged mercantile or commercial
forms of capital and the social division of labour (that is, an enforced geographical distribution of product specialization and production processes that reproduced underdevelopment – what Harvey might now refer to as an imperial ‘spatial fix’) over and above property relations and the process of exploitation. The effect of insufficient orthodoxy in this regard was to de-emphasize violent dispossession and the ‘bloody’ creation of ‘free labour’, and thus also to downplay the role of class struggle in the historical emergence of capitalism. The disagreement is essentially over the role of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ determinations in the emergence of capitalism, both of which play a part in Marx’s account of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ – originally, of course, presented as a critique of Smith’s version of an ‘original accumulation’ of capital (hence the ‘so-called’). Whilst Gunder Frank, for example, may be read as foregrounding the ‘external’, ‘capital’ side of the encounter – in which commerce and the accumulation of merchant capital are stressed – Brenner may be read as foregrounding the ‘internal’ side, the violent dispossession of the direct producers, agrarian class struggle and the emergence of a ‘free’ labour force for capital – which can then ‘seize hold’ of the moment of production (the ground of Marx’s theory of exploitation). If colonialism constitutes the horizon of Gunder Frank’s world history, industrial capitalism does so for Brenner. Read from a sub alternist perspective, Arrighi’s book suggests that the problem with Brenner’s account is that the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and, within the latter, its industrial form, constitutes a kind of Hegelian ‘measure’ which narrates other experiences of capital and non-industrialized forms of labour (for example, plantation slavery) out of the emancipatory historical narrative. In other words, Brenner reconstitutes the version of history on which the idea of more capitalist development in the peripheries was based, and against which Gunder Frank’s account of the ‘development of underdevelopment’ – however problematic – was originally written. Brenner thus reifies one version of the encounter between capital and labour to make it – against the grain of Marx’s increasing caution in his old age with regard to generalizing the British industrial experience – a necessary one. Arrighi writes: the contention that capitalist development pre supposes the separation of agricultural producers from the means of producing their subsistence – which Brenner derives from Marx – has some validity as a description of the conditions that facilitated the development of capitalism in Britain. At the
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global level, however, such separation appears to be more a consequence of capitalism’s creative destruction… than one of its preconditions. In any event, it was definitely not a precondition of capitalist development in other European countries … or the United States, where the agricultural foundations of the greatest technical and organizational advances in capitalist history were laid by the destruction of the native population, the forcible transplant of enslaved African peoples, and the resettlement of European surplus population.
In this regard, Adam Smith in Beijing may be read as a response to Brenner’s challenge: attempting to historically blend and extend both sides of Marx’s account of ‘so-called’ primitive accumulation (‘external’ and ‘internal’), whilst also both affirming and elaborating a neo-Smithian version of Marxism (or is it vice versa – a neo-Marxian version of Smith?). Adam Smith in Beijing is thus also a work of theory which focuses on the relative autonomy of mercantile capital, on the use of international credit to open up new markets (with a little military assistance), and processes of financialization that through successive crises spatially reconfigure the world economy around new ‘hegemons’. In this sense, one might say that it reads Marx’s incomplete Capital Volume 3 against and through Capital Volume 1 to provide an account of capitalist accumulation, systemic ‘creative destruction’ (Schumpeter’s notion) and spatio-temporal development: profit-orientated innovations… cluster in time, generating swings in the economy as a whole from long phases of predominating ‘prosperity’ to long phases of predominating ‘depression’ … [which] also cluster in space… a spatial polarization of zones of predominating ‘prosperity’ [the North] and zones of predominating ‘depression’ [the South].
Fundamental to this aspect of Adam Smith in Beijing is Arrighi’s insistence on a historical synergy ‘of industrialism, capitalism and militarism’ – characterized by an intertwining of the development of forces of production and ‘forces of protection’ – which today, however, is in the process of unravelling with the tendential recentring of the world economy around China. As a work of comparative history, therefore, Adam Smith in Beijing sets out a critical account of the waning of US world dominance and the re-emergence of China (in the context of the bifurcation of military power and economic hegemony), the divergence between the Euro-American course of industrial development and the East Asian course of ‘industrious’ development, China’s renaissance out of a distinct path of non-capitalist market development and the eventual
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hybridization of ‘industrious’ and industrial revolutions. In this sense, historical determination feeds Arrighi’s theoretical reflection and conceptual determination his history. Ironically, moreover, development in world history – if we follow Hegel’s version of its course – cunningly returns to its ‘despotic’ beginnings, in which, in his words, the state ‘is everything’, but now in such a way as to demand a complete reconsideration of its Eurocentric moorings. Speaking about the effects of industry and commerce on ‘the East and West Indies’ in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith looks forward to a possible cosmopolitan future in which ‘the inhabitants of all the different quarters of the world may arrive at that equality of courage and force which, by inspiring mutual fear, can alone overawe the injustice of independent nations into some sort of respect for the rights of one another’. In the context of US decline, writes Arrighi, the contemporary ‘success of Chinese economic development … [has] made the realization of Smith’s vision … more likely than it ever was’. It is Smith that brings Arrighi to China – in the footsteps of the late Gunder Frank’s Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (1998), Kenneth Pommeranz’s groundbreaking The Great Divergence: Europe, China and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000) (including Brenner’s critical response to it), and the work of Faoru Sugihara on the East Asian ‘Industrious Revolution’ – as well as to the related ideas of a ‘noncapitalist market’, on the one hand, and ‘industrious’ development, on the other. According to Arrighi, there is a ‘new awareness’ of the ‘fundamental world-historical difference between processes of market formation and processes of capitalist development’. In other words, not all development and not all markets are capitalist. These differences are crucial. Already in Smith’s time it was widely recognized that markets were in fact far more extensive and socially embedded in China – especially in the Yangzi Delta – than in Europe. Two important questions emerge at this point: (1) what was the cause of the divergence between British and Chinese economic development given the strength of markets in both areas, and (2) given the divergence, what explains the contemporary renaissance of East Asian economies, especially China’s? With regard to the first question, debates are still ongoing but focus on a series of interrelated variables that might explain the rise of competition and the logic of profit maximization – land-population ratios, privileged access to colonies for ‘surplus’ populations and the export of commodities, the availability of natural resources such as coal,
military power, property in land and the ‘freeing’ of labour power – that produce the Industrial Revolution in the UK. These are the issues that Gunder Frank, Pommerantz and Brenner focus on. The second question, however, is just as important because it provides an account of non-capitalist and non-industrial forms of development, referred to as the Industrious Revolution, a form of development geared to the maintenance and reproduction of immense populations like those of East Asia. Here there is, to paraphrase Gunder Frank, a labour surplus and capital shortage, rather than vice versa. In contrast to high capital intensity and an intense profit-driven technical division of labour, the Industrious Revolution is characterized by high labour intensity and non-specialization. According to Arrighi, it is the postwar hybridizations of the industrious and the industrial, first in Japan, then in the economies of Southeast Asia, and subsequently China that explain the recentring of the world economy in the region today: industrialization plus industriousness, technology and labour intensity. The implications of the recentring Arrighi maps are crucial since, in his view, although socialism may have ‘already lost out in China, capitalism… has not
won’. Leaning on Brenner at this point, he writes that ‘as long as the principle of equal access to land continues to be recognized and implemented, it is not too late for social action in contemporary China to steer evolution in a non-capitalist direction.’ Even in the few months since the publication of Adam Smith in Beijing, however, the prospect for both a possible non-capitalist China and a non-belligerent Chinese hegemony in a recentred world economy looks increasingly bleak. As Arrighi suggests, inter-state relations might become more respectful of differences, but given the state-backed, forced mass uprooting of populations in China from the countryside and their migration to the growing cities – more primitive accumulation? – it is not clear what the future holds for the increasingly informalized working classes across the globe (for which, see Mike Davis’s recent Planet of Slums). The form taken by capital accumulation in China, and its dissemination and socialization through the world’s financial institutions, only further instantiates the indifference of capital – its cunning – with regard to the particular forms in which ‘free’ labour is instituted. John Kraniauskas
Intimately against the body Andy Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, Continuum, London and New York, 2007. x + 246 pp., £60.00 hb., £16.99 pb., 978 0 826 48518 2 hb., 978 0 826 48519 9 pb. Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History, Continuum, London and New York, 2007. x + 221 pp., £32.50 hb., £12.99 pb., 978 0 826 41726 8 hb., 978 0 826 41727 5 pb. To write cogently about music today is to be confronted with a proliferation of material not restricted to traditional modes of propagation and distribution: less and less can one rely on mediating institutions to bring to ear what is worth hearing. Decisions of scope – what to discuss and why – assume fundamental proportions when faced with the welter of work to which writing strains to be adequate. The two books reviewed here, both issued by Continuum, take different routes in managing this problem. Paul Hegarty’s Noise/Music restricts itself to a para tactic genealogy of twentieth-century music in order to analyse the disruptive presence of Noise and its significance. Aesthetics and Music by Andy Hamilton focuses instead on thematic problems in the analytic philosophy of music, a subject that has in recent years shed its minority status following concerted work by, among others, Stephen Davies and Roger Scruton. As
a self-described ‘Analytic’ himself, Hamilton’s account is noteworthy both for his sympathy to Adorno and his connection to contemporary jazz through his writing in The Wire and as the author of a book on Lee Konitz and improvisation. To this extent, he is able to extend the frame of reference beyond the classical music of the nineteenth century and produces a complement to Noise/Music despite the latter’s concern with rock, punk, Industrial and Japanese Noise music. The value of Aesthetics and Music lies in its producing the groundwork needed to present modern jazz as music worthy of Analytic philosophical treatment. Even to shore up such a discussion involves developing a ‘humanistic’ conception of music against the main theories based on classical music. This Hamilton achieves through the three key theoretical chapters on the concept of music, the experience of sound and improvisation.
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Hamilton sets himself the task of deflating the current debates around music by insisting on its ‘salient feature’ as a ‘human activity grounded in the body and bodily movement and interfused with human life’ wherein its minimal form is rhythm and its material tones. Trying to define what music is may seem less pressing than determining what is worth attending to, but Hamilton is keen to stress music only as art with a small ‘a’: ‘practice, skill or craft whose ends are aesthetic’. In this articulation lies its opposition to the high-end encomiums for classical music. The resulting tension between the preservation of common-sense, everyday experience of music and the necessary philosophical examination dominates the book. The concept of the aesthetic is drawn from Kant but only with reference to disinterest. That the lack of social purpose alone does not distinguish art from other hobbies like trainspotting is not considered, and that crucial Kantian issues such as reflection and the sensus communis are also absent means that there is no distinction between a religious sensibility and something specifically artistic. The repeated adoption of a distinction between feeling and cognition tastes of folk psychology and dovetails with the Analytic fault of divvying philosophers into preset positions so that Hegel is labelled a ‘cognitivist’. When addressing the question of how musical sound is experienced, it evinces a more nuanced understanding than someone like Scruton, who resolutely defends an ‘acousmatic’ theory of musical experience, which states that sound is experienced purely as sound in idealiter abstracted from information about world and origin. Hamilton at least argues that there is a ‘twofoldness’ to musical experience: we hear the sounds as well as the actions that go into the making of sounds. There is an essential reference to production where expertise can indeed hear and identify individual performers, not simply the tone of a particular instrument. It is, then, one of the reflexive themes open to composition to surprise and defy what the concert attendee expects on seeing the performers. The excitement of not knowing where the sound comes from – ‘what the hell made that’ – is an integral part of contemporary avant-garde practice shared with good ‘sound art’. Although his simple insistence on rhythm and tone broadens what can be debated, Hamilton distinguishes music from sound art. Within the book, the latter category functions to prevent certain liminal cases from acting as counter-examples to his definitions (e.g. rhythmless ambient and drone pieces are sound art not music). In Hamilton’s emphasis on the event of performance, a valuation of the ‘aesthetics’ of human spontaneity in
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its liveliness and potential error is promoted: ‘We do not attend musical events simply for the auditory realism or perfection unattainable through recordings; rather, we want to see as well as hear the creation of musical sounds.’ The value of imperfection is contrasted to a classical valuation of the ‘perfect’, ‘authentic’ realization of the composed score: ‘imperfectionists are right to reject Schoenberg’s idea of performers as anonymous interpreters of a sacrosanct text.’ From this perspective, Hamilton dismisses ‘eye music’ and electro-acoustic tones, since their purity and construction are distanced from what comes out of instruments ‘held intimately against the body’. That is, these tones are not musical on Hamilton’s account; though one might argue that what is most interesting about the twentieth century is the transformation of sound production such that what counts as music expands – this is Hegarty’s theme. As an aside, Hamilton’s ‘disappointment’ at discovering that an ‘enjoyable piece by Cage is aleatory’ is not universal and is precisely the kind of instinct that critical analysis interrogates. Hamilton is concerned to argue that something happens in the event of live music which exceeds philosophical notions of music based on the composed score. This is the crux of the matter for inducting jazz improvisation into what is worth discussing philosophically. But, as with writers such as Lydia Goehr in her The Quest for Voice, the impact of studio recording technology here is underappreciated. It displaces received notions of performance and composition. Live music need not be the privileged listening experience for certain kinds of music and this is deserving of theoretical attention. Glenn Gould’s opposition to ‘the limitations that performance imposes upon the imagination’ is not reducible to Hamilton’s gloss: ‘eliminating contingent conditions of live performance’. That is, studio work and home listening can advance creative interpretation and improve analytic judgement. Hamilton’s concluding paragraph and question – ‘why is [jazz] music so potent, despite evidently being less contrived than the great works of the canon of Western art music?’ – cannot be answered through reference to ‘improvised feeling’ and ‘live energy’. It can only be elicited through attending to the complex historical dynamic of professional gigging musicians, band leaders and studio sessions. Notions of spontaneity and improvisation within jazz cannot be understood without detailed attention to the division of labour within groups from the 1940s to 1970s. Two examples must operate as placeholders here. First, one could consider the career of Charles Mingus. The challenge of adding further complexity to improvisation (particu-
larly counterpoint) was instigated by Mingus’s feeling that jazz had to match the ‘contrivance’ of composed classical music – the development of different compositional practices (extended over live spots) investigates what depth and complexity are possible in this setting. Second, Hamilton cites Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue as an example of ‘pre-performance structuring’ lying on a continuum from improvised to composed. But neglected in his argument is the fact that Kind of Blue was the product of improvisation within a recording session; without the need to entertain an audience, the use of ‘takes’ liberates creativity here. An extra dimension is offered by Hegarty. Noise/ Music considers the levelling instinct of punk to promote amateur, ‘inept’ practice, and hence gives concrete form to Hamilton’s abstract ‘aesthetics of imperfection’. Its authenticity is not some abstract human capacity, but a conjunctural opposition to society. These are not advanced musicians putting themselves under the strain of improvised response but valorized incompetents: ‘He or she will make choices and create combinations that are “wrong”, and this is what has led to the belief in the creativity that comes from a lack of preconceptions and a willingness to try out anything, even if badly.’ With respect to studio practice, one could call to mind the untrained creativity of the first Nurse with Wound productions. This dialectic of (conceptual)
creativity and the repressive demands of manual skill repeats across art brut and free jazz improvisation (see Mingus’s comments about the ‘fresh’ sound of Ornette Coleman despite his doubts about the latter’s ability to play a C scale in tune). The flip side here is that new technique develops in the use and abuse of both traditional instruments and new equipment: the electric guitar promised a purity of sound that was overridden by the new possibilities of distortion and feedback. The recent ‘glitch aesthetic’ is associated with a new set of sounds with which to compose: the transformative possibilities of this noise bed can perhaps best be seen in the Schneider TM vs kpt.michi.gan cover of ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’. These ‘instruments’ are not held ‘intimately against the body’ and mediate human expression through machinery. One suspects that this might bar them from consideration as music for Hamilton. Refreshingly, in Noise/Music, Hegarty appreciates that one factor introduced by Noise is the disturbance generated against the humanist culture of music appreciation. Noise is not simply restricted to a sonic phenomenon (such as dissonance, or Hamilton’s ‘unpitched sounds’), but is cultural and threatening: the ‘spread, dissemination and dispersal of non-message’. It is not thereby external to the history of music, but is involved in a complex dialectic – though one which Hegarty presents through Bataille, rather than Hegel – since Noise cannot be incorporated into musical history without thereby ceasing to be noise and dissipating. ‘Surely whatever way noise is defined … it cannot accept utilitarianism, being a means to an end. If noise is disruption, though, that can be critique, and if actualized as highly fragmented music, almost lurching between its disjointments, then noise has not been banished.’ The chapters accrete, covering both a history of noisiness – from Musique concrète, through amplified rock and roll, to prog, punk, industrial and its offshoots – and conflicting issues of volume, violence, amateurishness and the incorporation of nonmusical sound into the end product. Though Hegarty discusses free jazz improvisation, this is a markedly different philosophy of music – one that is sceptical of any utopianism of unmediated natural human functions or relation to nature. ‘The interaction of generic instrumentation … semi-standard improvisational practices and rhythms on the one hand with the failing of these on
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the other, is how noise occurs here, as opposed to being in the messiness itself, or the abandon.’ Noise’s contestation of social construction and convention is illustrated to good effect in the recuperation (?) of Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans as a noisy, excessive product, threatening the ‘mastery’ of listeners in its exceeding of easy expectations. Moreover, this history of noise and noisiness leads to an engagement with the advent of certain ‘bastard genres’ forged in contemporary Japanese music. There is a chapter on Japan and one specifically on Merzbow – so often the representative here and still rightly so given the extensive output and variety of Masami Akita. These chapters are the culmination of the book, though there are further chapters on sampling and the potential Gesamtkunstwerk of sound art which contain some good insights, such as distinguishing a sound art that would be music not able to function in concert settings from something like acoustic ecology or the walks of Hildegard Westerkamp. Hegarty’s concluding chapter on the phenomenology of listening is gnomic in its brevity, appearing to consider and discard various ‘utopian’ ethics of listening drawn from John Cage, Pauline Oliveros et al. which are dangerously bien pensant in their emphasis on small ‘b’ buddhism and self-improvement. An expanded version of this chapter would be welcome given its suggestive account of Noise’s place in the failure of listening and hearing. This would contrast productively with something more Nietzschean: the strong listener able to bear all this transgression and volume. The positive result of this dynamic is to recognize that the very question of what counts as music emerges in new form: the growth of technology and the noisiness that results unsettles the dominance of traditional Western instrumentation. The provocative potential of Musique concrète, which does not reside in Pierre Schaeffer’s acousmatic dream of a natural musicality, is realized in contemporary sampling and digital production, which means that interesting sounds can be produced and manipulated without the need for traditional skill, training and its concomitant disciplining of the ear. In contrast to Hegarty, it is perhaps only retrospectively that we can see Musique concrète as anything other than the academic tinkering criticized by Adorno – redeemed only when the discoveries are generalized across culture through technological development (and broadcast outside academia in the case of BBC Radiophonic Workshop). Despite Hamilton’s chapter on Adorno, it is only in Hegarty that the place of music in recent social history is addressed. He draws out the importance of music as
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revolt in the accompanying practices that transform the apparatus of production and reception. Electrification brings loudness and aggression – the bath of noise and a shocking, revolutionary weapon in Hendrix. The social noise of punk and its small-scale record labels and the distinct, alternative lifestyles of outfits such as Crass and Psychic TV are also a critique of society and its organization. There is some repetition of this in the British rave scene in the 1980s and 1990s but any discussion of techno is unfortunately absent from Noise/Music – as is the real Cinderella here: metal. Such political issues (including actionism and transgression) are obviously outside of an ‘aesthetic’ approach which will inevitably concentrate on the receptive feeling of the listener rather than a broader social understanding of music as a cultural form and force. Here one might conclude with a somewhat troubling fragment from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Though these comments relate to the ‘political significance of film’, much of the excitement and significance of contemporary music, and Noise above all, is touched upon here. At no point in time, no matter how utopian, will anyone win the masses over to a higher art; they can be won over only to one that is nearer to them. And the difficulty consists precisely in finding a form for that art such that, with the best conscience in the world, one could hold that it is a higher art. This will never happen with most of what is propagated by the avant-garde of the bourgeoisie. … The masses positively require from the work of art … something that is warming. Here the flame most readily kindled is hatred.
Andrew McGettigan
Kill her! Amber Jacobs, On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis and the Law of the Mother, Columbia University Press, New York, 2007. xi + 219 pp., £26.50 hb., 978 0 231 14154 3. The notion of matricide is central to the claims of psychoanalytic ‘French feminism’. Kristeva has written that ‘matricide is our vital necessity’ (Black Sun); while Irigaray states that ‘the whole of [Western] society … function[s] on the basis of matricide’ (‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’), a matricide that, Irigaray believes, is narrated in Ancient Greek myths and tragedies, above all the Oresteia of Aeschylus, and which is more ‘archaic’ than the murder of the
primal father that Freud in Totem and Taboo took to found civilization. Yet Kristeva and Irigaray fail to define exactly what they mean by matricide. In this groundbreaking book, Jacobs set out to correct this by developing a theory of matricide. In doing so, Jacobs builds particularly on Irigaray’s critique of the phallocentric symbolic order and its harmful effects on mother–daughter relations. Jacobs defines the symbolic order as an order of meaning organized around a hierarchical dualism. She rejects Lacan’s view that the organizing dualism, around which subjectivity must always be structured, must be that of having or not having the phallus. Instead, Jacobs suggests that there could be a ‘heterogeneous’ symbolic, comprising a network of different ‘structuring functions’, including a maternal structuring function or ‘maternal law’ (under which the central dualism is between being able to give birth and not being able to give birth). Under such a law, girls could differentiate themselves from their mothers on a generational basis (distinguishing between the mother who can give birth now, and the girl who will be able to give birth in the future), but girls need not separate themselves radically from their mothers, as they would see themselves as (potential, future) mothers like their mothers. The girl could distinguish herself from, and remain related to, her mother. In the current absence of any such maternal law, where women are symbolized as castrated, the girl becomes forced to turn away from her mother in bitter disappointment at her castrated status (as Freud described). The girl turns to the father, severing her ties to her mother and repressing her feelings for her. The girl cannot acknowledge that this severance has occurred – to do so would be to admit the prior attachment – so she cannot mourn the loss of her mother, but can only incorporate into her body her unacknowledged maternal attachment. Thus the daughter oscillates, pathologically, between feeling engulfed, possessed by her mother and feeling cut off from her. Under a maternal law, on the other hand, she need not sever her ties to her mother and could acknowledge her feelings for her. So far, Jacobs is on broadly Irigarayan territory. Without a ‘maternal law’, no mother–daughter differentiation-in-relation is possible, and instead the girl must radically break with – that is, for Irigaray, commit matricide against – her mother. But where Jacobs speaks of a ‘maternal law’ (drawing on Juliet Mitchell’s Mad Men and Medusas), Irigaray speaks of a basic cultural denial of the ‘woman–mother’. Western culture sees woman only as the ‘other’, the inferior correlate, of man; as part of this, the mother is seen
merely as the container for the man’s child. Consequently, the girl learns to see her mother as an inferior being, lacking all that has value, and turns away from her. So does the boy – but whereas he thereby enters into the cultural heritage of his forefathers, the girl is left homeless, ‘derelict’. For Irigaray, all this is the effect of Western culture, which, although deep-rooted, is changeable; Lacan’s insistence that the symbolic order must be phallocentric falsely universalizes what is historically contingent. In this Irigarayan framework, matricide is bad, whether matricide means the boy- or girl-child’s severance from the mother or the underlying cause of this severance, namely the culture’s non-recognition of the woman–mother – what Jacobs calls ‘the mother’s non-status under the current patriarchal organization’. As Jacobs says, then, in Irigaray’s view we should not kill the mother. Jacobs says that she departs from this Irigarayan view. Apparently unlike Irigaray, Jacobs repeatedly suggests that matricide could function positively: ‘matricide is to create a generative loss that can function to transmit social bonds’. Something is to be lost, some phantasy relinquished, in a way that would enable girls and women to situate themselves in relation to their mothers, to their cultural foremothers, and to other women. How this relinquishing constitutes an act of matricide we learn from the reinterpretation of the Oresteia that forms the centre of Jacobs’s book. To recapitulate the basic storyline: Agamemnon, leading the Greek army against Troy, finds his fleet becalmed and must sacrifice his daughter, Iphigeneia, to overcome this; in retaliation for this murder, his wife Clytemnestra kills him when he returns; in retaliation for that, her son Orestes (aided by her daughter Electra) kills her; the Furies hound Orestes for his crime; he comes before an Athenian jury but Athena casts the deciding vote for his acquittal, allegedly because she has no mother, having sprung direct from the head of her father Zeus. Ostensibly, then, the Oresteia is about Orestes’ matricidal deed. But Jacobs argues that another hidden matricide underlies the Oresteian story: the murder by Zeus of Athena’s mother, the Titan goddess Metis. Having impregnated Metis, Zeus swallowed her whole to prevent her bearing a child who might supplant him; he therefore went on to ‘birth’ Athena, who, evidently, is not really motherless after all. But the murder of her mother is unacknowledged within the Oresteian narrative, screened from view by the ‘manifest content’ of that narrative, its preoccupation with the murders of Clytemnestra and Iphigeneia (which, Jacobs argues, re-present the original murder of Metis in distorted, concealed form).
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So the hidden premiss of the Oresteia is Zeus’ incorporation of Metis, a crime that, according to Jacobs, expresses a ‘parthenogenetic’ phantasy on Zeus’ part, defined (following Juliet Mitchell) as a phantasy of being able to give birth without the mother, by taking her place as birth-giver. The Oresteia hides its premises because, Jacobs argues, acknowledging that Zeus’ crime has taken place would entail acknowledging the law that Zeus broke in committing this crime. Jacobs reconstructs the nature of that law from the nature of the crime: since the crime is (the enacted phantasy of) parthenogenesis, the law must be against parthenogenesis; since the crime is against the mother, that law must be transmitted by the mother. This law is the maternal law of which Jacobs spoke earlier: the law that adult women can give birth but men cannot. This law prohibits both girls (who must accept that they cannot give birth yet) and boys/men from indulging their parthenogenetic phantasies. Zeus’ trick, though, is that by devouring Metis he conceals the evidence that Metis existed – or that he committed any crime – or that there ever was, or could be, a maternal law. What is the status of this mythical murder of Metis? Jacobs reads the Oresteian myth as a constellation of male phantasies, so, since this mythical murder is (despite being hidden) the nucleus of the Oresteian myth, the basic male phantasy expressed therein concerns parthenogenesis. The Oresteia thus reveals that there is something like a ‘foundational phantasy’– the parthenogenetic phantasy. (‘Foundational phantasy’ is Teresa Brennan’s term, from her History After Lacan, 1993.) By concealing that it is criminal for men to enact this phantasy, the Oresteia illustrates how the Western symbolic order consecrates this phantasy as normal and rational for men. Jacobs finds another example of this consecration in the speech of ‘defence intellectuals’, rife with imagery of men ‘giving birth’ to bombs. Now, based on her reconstruction of the nature of Zeus’ crime, Jacobs defines matricide as follows: ‘parthenogenesis (the phantasy) + incorporation of the mother (the mechanism by which the phantasy is sustained = matricide severed from its underlying law/prohibition’. Notably, Jacobs refers to the maternal law which Metis transmits as the law of matricide: ‘matricide severed from its underlying law’; or ‘Matri cide [has been] denied its function of asserting the prohibition against the parthenogenetic phantasy’. Thus, Jacobs has defined matricide as the crime of swallowing and erasing the law of matricide, which is also the maternal law. But why call this maternal law the law of matricide when it is this very law that
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the crime of matricide annuls? (And, after all, this maternal law does not state ‘you must repudiate your mother to enter the symbolic order’; this maternal law is an alternative to that kind of phallocentric matricidal law.) I see two reasons why Jacobs might nevertheless want to call the maternal law the law of matricide. First, this law is ‘of’ matricide in that its content is concealed within the mythic act of matricide by Zeus. Second, this law is ‘of’ matricide in that it is a law prescribing that one kill off one’s phantasy of taking the mother’s place, of becoming-mother by an act of jealous incorporation. In this specific sense, the maternal law prescribes matricide. (Jacobs says: ‘Matricide … is a structure whose underlying cultural law functions to force the child/father to give up the … phantasy of taking the mother’s place.’) This also explains Jacobs’s idea that there could be a good kind of matricide involving a generative loss: relinquishing the parthenogenetic phantasy (i.e. committing ‘matricide’) is a loss that is generative in that it enables both boys and girls to situate themselves generationally and in their sexual specificity. This ‘law of matricide’, though, is very different to the existing matricidal law which prescribes radical severance from one’s mother because she has nothing of value. Moreover, Jacobs’s maternal law is a law against the assimilation of the mother that Jacobs herself has described (in Zeus’s case at least) as matricidal. On balance, then, I think it would be less confusing to call the law in question a maternal but not a matricidal law, and to avoid positioning the relinquishing of the parthenogenetic phantasy as matricidal. This would bring Jacobs closer to Irigaray. With Irigaray, Jacobs maintains that there is a matricide (or a phantasy of matricide) at the root of Western culture, a matricide legible in the Oresteia (but, pace Irigaray, legible in the hidden myth of Metis, not the manifest myth of Clytemnestra). However, whereas Irigaray says that she opposes killing the mother, Jacobs says that she is against incorporating the mother. Jacobs avoids joining with Irigaray to denounce matricide because Jacobs has defined the maternal law as the law of matricide. But if we abandon that definition and say that matricide consists in the violation of the maternal law, then Jacobs, like Irigaray, is against matricide. This similarity between Jacobs and Irigaray increases when we consider that for Irigaray the matricide basic to western culture – namely this culture’s non-recognition of any ‘woman–mother’ – works by assimilating women to men, construing them merely as men’s other and as the vessels for men’s chil-
dren. Arguably, then, Irigaray too considers the basic matricide to involve an unchecked phantasy of male parthenogenesis – of men being the true progenitors and women merely incubators – so that in opposing matricide Irigaray, like Jacobs, is opposing this incorporative phantasy. My final questions concern Jacobs’s idea that there could be a heterogeneous symbolic. Since the phallic function is predicated on the reduction of woman to an inferior version of man, and so on the daughter’s turning away from the mother, how could this function coexist with any maternal function? Moreover, the maternal law that Jacobs describes appears to specify that all subjects must situate themselves in relation to the mother (as a future mother or a non-mother) to become a subject at all – the maternal law applies to sons and fathers as much as to daughters. To come into force, it seems, the maternal law would have to oust the phallic law, not merely coexist with it within a network of functions. Under the maternal law, all subjects would have to identify themselves in relation to the mother, in the boy’s/man’s case negatively – as never being able to give birth. This seems merely to invert the structural sexism of Lacan’s emphasis on the phallus, giving us matriarchy in place of patriarchy. It
may well be partly to avoid this problem that Jacobs proposes a heterogeneity of structuring functions. But I am unsure how the maternal law could possibly be just one of several structuring functions rather than a universal law. Jacobs, then, has defended the possibility of a maternal law as an alternative to our current social arrangement which is matricidal in that it sanctions male assimilation and erasure of the mother. Yet the possible maternal law, for Jacobs, is itself a ‘law of matricide’ – it strikes down phantasies of assimilating the mother, of being-mother in her place. Jacobs, then, is against what actually exists, matricide as assimilation, but she supports (a possible alternative) matricide that is anti-assimilation. I have suggested, though, that this use of ‘matricide’ in diametrically opposed senses is potentially confusing and that Jacobs would be better understood simply as promoting a maternal law against matricide. Hopefully these criticisms themselves show how engaging I have found this book. It is admirably bold and original, naming a problem that lies at the centre of the encounter between feminism and psychoanalysis, but which has not before been adequately thematized. The book should be an important reference point for all those interested in this encounter. Alison Stone
Unmaking security Claudia Aradau, Rethinking Trafficking in Women: Politics out of Security, Palgrave Macmillan, London and New York, 2008. xv + 225 pp., £50.00 hb., 0 230 57331 2. Of the 2.5 million people caught in the nets of human trafficking, many are women, generally young, who find themselves forced into prostitution. The displaced, the refugee, the illegal immigrant, the criminal, the terrorist are by now conventional figures in stories of state, police and military intervention. A direct object of security governance, they are rarely thought of as citizens but, Claudia Aradau argues here, are instead treated as ‘the abject’, or as characters in increasingly hybrid dramas such as ‘organized immigration crime’. Trafficked women are a figure that – in Aradau’s word – has been ‘vectored’ in terms of human rights, migration, prostitution and organized crime. Stressing that there is no ‘security’ outside of the ways in which it is represented, Aradau offers a complex, multi faceted account of how security policies, practices and discourses touch the bodies of women defined as
trafficked. ‘Trafficked women’ serves as a mirror to scrutinize the ways in which security takes over new figures, domesticates and disempowers the people, colonizes the political, and interlocks individuals and groups in its web. Security can have no benign or democratic effects, the author contends: neither for trafficked women themselves, nor for those from whom they need protection. This leads Aradau to seek practical and theoretical clues for a politics that unravels security, in the selfidentification of women as (sex) workers, and in the category of work more generally. Originally for a theoretical work on security, the category of work is used here to illuminate the struggles of trafficked women. Security, as we know, lies at the heart of Leviathan. Security defines types of subject – here, ‘positive addressees’, ‘abjects’ and ‘excessive subjects’, the first
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of which it ‘protects’ from the other two. Security practices, Aradau argues, protect only some at the price of excluding others. Security depoliticizes subjects, it abjects and it targets. Subjects get classified according to their worth, while the abject (like the foe defined by Carl Schmitt) is radically excluded from the political, confronting elimination, expulsion or discipline. In a third category of ‘excessive or excrescent subjects’ are those who practise politics and freedom uncompromisingly. While securitization depoliticizes and disempowers, turning humans into abjects, work is seen to offer an alternative scenario, which restores the horizon of politics, citizenship and justice. Rethinking Trafficking in Women opens with media reports of women rescued from trafficker networks in the UK. Placed between ‘illegal migration, organized crime and prostitution’, these women appear as victims in need of protection and assistance. When a rescued woman resists performing as the victim she is expected to be, conceptual instability and confusion arise, as well as moral panics and media campaigns to distinguish ‘true’, ‘genuine victims of trafficking’ from prostitutes, illegal immigrants or smugglers. Addressing specific problems, the other chapters nonetheless read as layers of responses to the same question. How do trafficked women become a security matter? The second chapter revisits current theoretical understandings of security. In contrast to views that were dominant until the end of the Cold War, which represented security as a response to objective threats, security more recently began to be conceived as a construction conjugating images and practices in search of ‘an imaginary future certainty’. Security’s promise of order and ‘ontological and epistemological certainty’ necessarily involves the exclusion of individuals, groups and spaces perceived as dangerous, abject or in need
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of ‘elimination or neutralization’. Trafficked women do not escape this logic. Because of their proximity to illegal migrants, prostitutes and the ‘illegal migrant (sex) worker’, they activate the imaginary of security, and are easily captured in the nets of security and turned from victims into threats. This leads Aradau to introduce the central question of the book: how are we to dismantle practices, identities and spaces of ‘abjectification’? Following on from this question, the third chapter assesses three strategies, ‘desecuritization, emancipation and ethics’, which, drawing on a humanitarian approach, seek to advance new understandings of security inspired by democratic politics and ethical concerns. In all three cases, however, the author shows that these promises are not met. Despite objecting to the treatment of issues and groups as matters of security, desecuritization in fact revitalizes the securitizing mechanisms that it rejects. Emancipation, the second strategy, questions security’s narrow reach and calls for its democratizing to include everybody, especially ‘those who are continuously being made insecure’. Yet such democratic claims also get engulfed by the rationale of security, always in need of dangerous beings, which necessarily limits inclusiveness, ranks individuals’ and groups’ victimhood and vulnerability, and makes them compete for protection. The third strategy, ethics, seeks to redefine the relations between the self and the others of security by acknowledging ‘difference and heterogeneity’, fraternity and hospitality rather than fear. Yet, as these principles remain abstract, with no link to any ‘concrete situation’, the ethical argument becomes neutralized, ‘hijacked and rearticulated within existing relations of power’. In all three cases – desecuritization, emancipation and ethics – the representation of trafficked women as legiti-
mate recipients of help invokes their non-dangerous character, thereby reinforcing hegemonic notions of order. Moreover, with danger insidiously reintroduced in the guise of risk, the humanitarian perspective ends by restoring trafficked women their initial status of ‘dangerous others’. Despite their good intentions, then, strategies based on humanitarian premisses leave dominant representations of danger untouched. The possibility of a non-dangerous abject vanishes, trafficked women are turned into a target of security interventions, and the horizon of security remains as robust as before. Is it possible to narrate women’s resistance in such a way as to ‘reshape the configuration of security practices’? With this in mind, Chapter 4 examines governmental practices of power, knowledge and subjectivity invoking trafficked women which highlight only the elements of their stories that justify specific forms of securitization (e.g. along the lines of health, migration, sexual abuse). Through a panoply of preventive interventions, state and non-state security professionals and ‘amateurs’ from NGOs, churches and grassroots organizations frame ‘security as a governmental dispositive’ dealing with trafficking, where only victimhood and defencelessness seem acceptable. Women can only receive help if they accept the role of innocent victims, willing to be returned to their countries. Any other position is treated as immoral, pathological and criminal. Women’s own voices are captured by this dispositif, especially by the politics of ‘risk minimization and containment’ developed by anti-trafficking NGOs. A woman’s refusal to play security/risk games is pathologized or criminalized, and her rejection of a particular label – for example, illegal immigrant, prostitute – just activates other aspects of the dispositif. Based on legal, human rights and psychological expert knowledge, these institutions turn women at risk into risky, dangerous beings. One position seems especially disturbing to the humanitarian security dispositif: women’s choice of staying irregularly as sex workers in a country where they were brought by force (the preference of most of those identified by Aradau) appears as unacceptable to both security institutions and the humanitarian network of NGOs. Such a choice turns women from security’s abjects into excessive subjects. The insurrectional potential of the illegal migrant sex worker comes to the fore. By ‘making claims against inequality and unfreedom and exposing what is wrong with society as such’, the author argues, women’s self-identification as sex workers challenges the very dispositif of security. It is at this point in the book that work reveals
a radical potential, explored by Aradau in the next chapter, which assesses the possibilities offered by an ethics of equality to give trafficked women a way out of security. Convinced that no ethical claim has practical consequences unless referred to concrete circumstances, Aradau turns to Alain Badiou for a way of thinking about political possibilities which disrupt the order of things. Listening to the women left out by institutions, those excessive subjects who identify themselves as ‘migrant sex workers’, she judges their claims of ‘prostitution as work’ strategically to inform political actions that interrupt both trafficking and its pervasive securitization. Collective organizations of prostitutes, by claiming that ‘all prostitutes (be they foreign or not, illegal or not) are workers’, bring political demands for rights and citizenship to the forefront, in a way that the figure of the victim cannot. They enable a critique of the politics that makes migration illegal and construct it as a state threat. This way, invoking the category of work debunks the security scenario. While states aim to normalize the right to work along national/legal lines, work offers a universal and at the same time material and concrete potential to resist, as ‘it cannot be closed and remains subject to contestation’, the author observes. Chapter 6 assesses practical and theoretical conditions for a politics to take trafficked women out of security and create ‘political subjects out of bare life’. Political and legal struggles led by trafficked women reveal a common appeal to work, equality and liberty. Aradau also refers to successful cases of women being given legal residency and the right to work after invoking their condition as sex workers, such as the Jany case, which in her view suggests that work is a key to what Hannah Arendt called the ‘right to have rights’. The search, in sum, is for a politics that, based on universality and equality made concrete, disrupts the dominant exclusionary politics of security. Chapter 7 assesses the freedom offered to trafficked women. Freedom is absent from discourses and practices involving them, Aradau notices, other than as ‘a limited and managed practice’ or a ‘governmentalized freedom’. The only liberty made available to trafficked women by institutions is the liberty of Leviathan; this is the possibility of regulated movement in the interstices left by security, based on the acceptance of inequality. It is only in conjunction with equality that liberty can put security into question. Aradau sees Étienne Balibar’s insights on civility, ‘equaliberty’ and forms of citizenship attached to human beings
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rather than to states as probably the most productive way out of a form of political life based on someone else’s abjection. Aradau’s book thus delivers what it promises, a comprehensive set of practical and theoretical elements to strategize a way out of security. Even if it would have been nice to hear more women’s voices, the author never loses sight of her excessive subjects, while offering the reader a thorough assessment of current theoretical positions vis-à-vis security. Aradau’s politics out of security arises from a conception of the political as a ‘constant revolutionalizing from the standpoint of those who are rendered as foes or abjects’, shared by, among others, Badiou and Rancière. For politics to take us out of security more than momentarily, however, we would have to confront the political side of the security apparatus examined by Aradau, which Agamben has named the biopolitical machine. In this respect, a politics out of security carries also the project of a politics out of politics. Otherwise, even the universal appeal of work can be threshed by security’s dis positifs, tearing apart individuals according to gender, nationality, legal status, dangerousness, appearance or sexual orientation. That this is done through security is clear from this book. How it is also done through politics is a problem we still need to unfold. Guillermina Seri
Provincializing philosophy Christopher Goto-Jones, ed., Re-politicising the Kyoto School as Philosophy, Routledge, London and New York, 2008. 224 pp., £70.00 hb., 978 0 415 37237 4. The articles collected in this volume all deal, implicitly or explicitly, with a very traditional philosophical topic, namely that of the relation of the particular to the universal. But their focus is on the ethical, political and metaphysical implications of this relation as it was elaborated by the members of the so-called Kyoto School of philosophy. In particular, Matteo Cestari, Yumiko Iida, Bret W. Davis and Kevin M. Doak deal chiefly with the dialectical unity of individual and the nation as it was conceived by Japanese philosophers Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime and Nishitani Keiji. Christian Uhl and Graham Parkes (from almost opposed perspectives) pay attention to the
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members’ understanding of the Japanese nation and its assumed ‘world-historical mission’ in the 1940s. Harry Harootunian refers to Tosaka Jun’s critique of the universalizing character of Japanese fascism that he opposed to the particularity of the individual’s experience of the everyday. This volume is also thoughtfully framed by two methodological chapters by Christopher Goto-Jones and Naoki Sakai, who deal with previous approaches towards the Kyoto School, particularly by scholars of Japanese Studies and the Cambridge School of the history of political thought, and how they particularized the Kyoto School as an essentially ‘Japanese’ version of philosophy. Davis’s, Iida’s and Cestari’s articles successfully show how the philosophical debate between Nishida, Tanabe and Nishitani on the relationship of the individual and the universal – transposing the relationship of the ethnic nation and society – was gradually overdetermined by ultra-nationalist propaganda from the end of the 1930s and in particular from 1941, the year of the outbreak of the Pacific War. Whereas in Nishida’s earlier texts the nation appears only as something metaphysical or ethical (‘an ideal … where each individual and the society as a whole is spontaneously motivated to realize the good’), he eventually, influenced by Tanabe’s criticism, historicized the nation in the 1930s and 1940s by understanding it as a ‘historical body’ in an eternal present, where it was the imperial household that guaranteed the ‘mutual negation’ of individuality and universality, and thereby unification. Tanabe, building on his criticism of Nishida’s merely metaphysical concept of the ethical nation, developed a socio-political notion of the ‘specific’ or ‘species’, which he considered an ‘archetype of nation as a historical being that is grounded upon common ethno-cultural heritage … as an intermediary category between universal mankind and the individual’. Nishi tani, for his part, analysed the relationship of the particular and the universal from the perspective of the world-historical political role of the Japanese state. As Bret W. Davis emphasizes, despite being considered by postwar historians of philosophy as one of the most notorious supporters of Japanese fascism, Nishitani’s politicized philosophy was in fact ambivalent towards contemporary Asianist ideologies. Notwithstanding that his wartime viewpoint embodied cultural nationalist elements (culminating in the assumption of a ‘special world-historical role’ for Japan in Asia), Nishitani remained critical of a purely expansionist Japanese imperialism on the Asian continent and laboured to give current phrases such as ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’ a ‘non-imperialist and non-totalitarian interpretation’.
The relationship between Japan and its Asian neighbours was, similarly to Nishida’s and Tanabe’s notion of the dialectical relationship between the nation and the individual, understood by Nishitani as one of a mutual negation of the particular and the universal or total – it was, according to his own words, ‘an ethics which is neither simply that of isolated individuals nor that of totalism, but one which, in a certain sense, sublates both’. In this respect, Parkes in his article even goes so far as to read a positively connoted internationalism into this ambivalence within the wartime thought of the members of the Kyoto School, sometimes even in apologetic prose. He justifies this on the basis that from the beginning of the formation of the Kyoto School, its members not only knew the classics of Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist philosophy but were also familiar with Western thought, which made them, according to Parkes, ‘internationalist by comparison with their counterparts in the West’, who did not take ‘the trouble to learn an East-Asian language’. To me, it appears extremely questionable whether, for instance, a German philosopher who has command of other European languages or is able to read Latin or Greek should be described as less internationalist, in Parkes’s understanding of the term, than a Japanese scholar who is able to read German. Here, Parkes borders on the kind of particularization of Japanese philosophy that is harshly criticized by Naoki Sakai in his concluding remarks to this volume. To Marxist philosopher Tosaka Jun, an idealistic understanding of the Co-Prosperity Sphere was nothing else but a ethnocentric Japanese spiritualism disguising itself as collective Asianism. Harry Harootunian, in his account of the thought of Tosaka, describes how this representative of the so-called ‘left wing’ of the Kyoto School grasped the binary of the total and the particular in a totally different fashion. According to Harootunian, ‘In an era when other voices were stridently appealing to the largeness [or universalism] of Japan’s “world historical mission”, Tosaka’s designation of the everyday … underscored the importance of temporality and the time of the present.’ This emphasis on ‘the now’ (ima) versus the attempt to historicize and totalize the nation by the other members of the Kyoto School was based on Tosaka’s philosophy of the everyday, which conceived of the present as the ‘kernel of history’ since ‘it was here (and now) that history was lived’. Tosaka, particularly in his critical journalistic writing, showed how fascism in general (and its local inflection, Nipponism, in particular) had suppressed this original meaning of the everyday (and its actualization as politics of everyday) in accordance
with the global expansion of capitalism through the commodification of customs. In his conclusion, Naoki Sakai does not tire of emphasizing that, despite often being interpreted as a uniquely Japanese philosophy by Western scholars, the members of the Kyoto School, or, more precisely, the students and scholars at the philosophy department of Kyoto Imperial University, practised ‘Western’ philosophy and committed themselves, thus, to a ‘form of intellectual inquiry that sought to be universal’. He is right to conclude, hence, that ‘as far as the internal formation of its disciplinarity is concerned, the dichotomy of the West and the Rest or Asia is utterly irrelevant to the comprehension, apprehension or critical evaluation of Japanese philosophy in general and of Kyoto School philosophy in particular.’ For Sakai, to deal with the ‘Kyoto School qua philosophy’, as Goto-Jones puts it in his introduction, it is important to overcome the paradoxical relation of the universal and the particular, which, as we have seen, the members of the Kyoto School themselves struggled with as well. In fact, according to Sakai, it was precisely the orientalist dichotomization of the East versus the West in the study of Japanese philosophy that drew attention away from the fact that the Kyoto School actually further particularized the already particular universalism of ‘Western philosophy’ in its ‘production of the legitimacy of Japanese colonial rule in Asia in universalistic philosophical terms’ – that is, imperial nationalism. While it was, according to Sakai, due to a disciplinary unpreparedness on the part of Japan specialists who lacked knowledge of the central issues of modern philosophy, Goto-Jones claims that, from the 1960s, it was due to the influence of the Cambridge School of the history of political thought (especially Quentin Skinner) – emphasizing the historical context of political ideas – that unwillingly contributed to the exclusion of non-Western philosophies from the ‘highways’ of the history of ideas, by rendering extra-European pasts irrelevant. Other than Parkes’s rather platitudinous account of the Kyoto School’s internationalism, Goto-Jones is convincing in his argument that it is the anti-Western stance of the wartime thought of the Kyoto School – interpreting the sense of crisis in European philosophy as a symptom of the fact that Europe was no longer at the centre – that is valuable for the history of political ideas, since it offers criticism of philosophy’s Eurocentrism, which persists into the present. However, despite the ambitiousness of GotoJones’s methodological contemplations, the question
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still remains as to whether it is really sufficient to decentralize or ‘provincialize’ (as historian Dipesh Chakrabarty once put it) European political thought by means of the introduction of non-male, non-white and non-Western perspectives into the existing disciplinary framework of the history of philosophy. Isn’t it even more important to ask what has to be done to arrive at a coherent methodology of a transnational, transdisciplinary or transtextual approach to intellectual history, which would overcome the ‘adversarialism’ (Goto-Jones) between particularizations and universalizations of non-Western formations of philosophy? In his contribution, Naoki Sakai makes important methodological remarks in this respect. According to Sakai it is necessary to conduct a ‘comparative study of universalism’, namely ‘an inquiry into how and why universal values are proposed for the sake of legitimacy in historically specific social formations’ by means of exploring and explaining how, in our case, the members of the Kyoto School employed and conceptualized core political categories in their particular historical context. In my opinion, three approaches might be useful for a transnational approach to the history of thought. Besides the approach proposed by Sakai to consider the appropriation of Western thought in Japan, not as a passive reception from a hegemonic ‘West’, but as an active and highly selective process embedded in a particular socio-historical moment, it is also of great importance to study the social and intellectual reciprocities between the proponents involved in this process to understand the ‘philosophical dialogue that
existed between philosophers “West and East”’ – even if this dialogue, for instance, merely consisted of an exoticizing instrumentalization, such as in the case of Heidegger’s imagined dialogue with a Japanese. In addition, one further step in the direction of a transnational approach, besides the study of these reciprocities, must lie in the study of coeval or structural epistemological and cognitive parallels within the thought of different intellectual formations. In this regard, Harry Harootunian, not only in his contribution to this volume but also in his masterful Overcome by Modernity (2000), and Kevin M. Doak set a good example of this perspective. Doak’s article adds valuable information for understanding the Kyoto School’s concern with the question of the relationship between the state and the individual or the question of cultural ethnicity in the context of the contemporary discourse of the so-called Japanese Romantic School and the perspective of ‘conservative’ legal scholar Tanaka Kotarō. Harootunian emphasizes that the competition between conflicting regimes of time perceived by Tosaka was also articulated by contemporary thinkers in Europe, especially Ernst Bloch, who described this modern experience as the ‘simultaneity of the non-contemporaneous’. Besides some minor flaws (such as the lack of an article-length introduction to the topic or a comprehensive glossary; the fact that some of the key concepts aren’t translated in a coherent fashion; and the descriptive nature of some of the articles), this volume must be considered an important step in the direction of a transnational approach towards intellectual history. Fabian Säfer
M A R X A N D P H I L O S OP H Y S O C I E T Y
10.30 am–6.00 pm, Saturday 25 October 2008
London Knowledge Lab, 23–29 Emerald Street, London wc1
Joe Mc Carney M emorial Con f erence Speakers
Kai Neilsen, ‘Emancipatory Social Science: McCarney and Levine’ David MacGregor, ‘The Problem of Evil’ John Clegg, ‘A Brief History of False Consciousness’ Andrew Chitty, ‘Can There Be an Ethical Critique of Capitalism?’ Chris Arthur, ‘The Concept of Critique’ There is no charge, but space is limited, so please register in advance: email
[email protected] Joe McCarney (1941–2007) helped found the Marx and Philosophy Society. To commemorate the anniversary of his tragic death this conference will take up themes present in his work. Copies of his books can be found at www.josephmccarney.com.
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news
Walking into walls Academic freedom, the Israeli Left and the occupation within
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n March 2006, Radical Philosophy published a piece by the Israeli architect and writer Eyal Weizman, now director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Entitled ‘Walking through Walls: Soldiers as Architects in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict’ (RP 136, March/April 2006, pp. 8–22), Weizman’s article was a systematic account of the new forms of theory and practice at work in recent Israeli Defence Force (IDF) urban operations; operations which have transformed the built environment of the occupied territories ‘into a flexible “frontier zone”, temporary, contingent and never complete’. Surveying current thinking around urbanized conflict Weizman records Israeli army strategists’ appropriation of a range of ‘broadly “leftist” theoretical ideas’ – including those of the Situationists, Bernard Tschumi, and Deleuze and Guattari – so as to elaborate the ‘conceptual’ bases of these new military tactics. In such ways, he sought to demonstrate, are forms of radical philosophy being ‘deployed in order to project power, not to subvert it’. Weizman’s article subsequently became one of the chapters in his book Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, published by Verso in early 2007. In the same year it was scheduled to appear, in a revised form translated into Hebrew, in a special issue of the Israeli journal Theory and Criticism devoted to the occupation. Edited by Yehouda Shenhav, a well-known left-wing academic and activist (and one of the founders of the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition), and originally founded by the radical philosopher and long-term critic of the occupation Adi Ophir, Theory and Criticism has become something of a focus for contemporary leftist thought in Israel – and, as such, a popular and frequent object of attack by the Israeli Right (as demonstrated by its coverage in the Israeli Academia Monitor and on the notoriously rabid Front Page website). Institutionally, it is published, and economically supported, by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, which, while it is largely staffed by scholars best described as ‘liberal’ in the context of Israeli politics, has itself been renowned, since the ‘Oslo years’, as a particular home for a small number of important ‘anti-’ or ‘post-’ Zionist intellectuals. Given this history, the sequence of events leading to the withdrawal of Weizman’s piece from issue 31 of the journal is thus especially worth recounting. For although its context is very much an ‘academic’ one, it raises a number of issues that invite reflection both about the situation of the Left and about the possibility of critical thought, and of intellectual opposition, in Israel today. As Shenhav puts it in his editorial preface to the special issue that has now appeared – a preface which is, it should be said, both a model of clarity and a powerful self-reflexive interrogation of the journal’s own role in the ‘crisis’ that now confronts it – the ultimate non-inclusion of Weizman’s article follows a specific ‘chain of events that generated a complex situation’ for both the author and Theory and Criticism.1 Its roots lie in the character of Weizman’s original article itself. For one of the most remarkable aspects of ‘Walking through Walls’ was the material directly obtained through interviews with senior figures within the IDF itself, specifically with retired Brigadier General Dr Shimon Naveh – director of the IDF’s so-called Operational Theory Research Institute – and with the commander of the Israeli paratrooper brigade Aviv Kohavi, a former student of philosophy at
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the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the man in charge of the April 2002 IDF operation in Nablus and the Balata refugee camp; an operation exemplary of the new modes of urban warfare that Weizman sought to analyse. As such, however, the article could not, and did not, shy away from assigning a considerable measure of responsibility to these named individuals for, in Shenhav’s careful words, ‘the great harm that the use of these new military methods allegedly inflicted on the civilian population’. Weizman’s article was anything but a reduction of the structural political dimensions of what is happening in the occupied territories – a complex and multifaceted form of spatial control and systematic production of social, economic and political inequality – to the personal actions of particular individuals. But it was undoubtedly by virtue of its specific ‘personal’ focus on Kohavi and Naveh that the ‘complex situation’ to which Shenhav refers arose. The ‘crisis’ that Weizman’s article provoked, and the difficult issues concerning the nature of contemporary ‘academic freedom’ that it has exposed, effectively began when the new director of the Van Leer Institute, and thus de facto chairman of Theory and Criticism’s editorial board, the philosopher Gabriel Motzkin, took up his post in September 2007. At this point Weizman’s article had already been ‘blind’ refereed by two academic reviewers, and both amended and accepted for publication in the journal. Having, however, read the papers scheduled for publication in the occupation special issue, Motzkin made an extraordinary and unprecedented decision. With whatever fears in mind, and with the view that the journal’s board was obligated ‘to allow the main object of the criticism, Brig. Gen. Kohavi, the right of rebuttal’, Motzkin came to the remarkable conclusion that Weizman’s article should, prior to its publication, be passed on for comment to a spokesperson in the Israeli military itself – something that was then done without either Weizman’s knowledge or consent.2 What came back was neither a response from the spokesperson nor are from Kohavi himself, but a letter from the latter’s private attorney threatening legal action against the journal and its editor. Placed in an evidently difficult position, and with advice from the Van Leer Institute’s own lawyer that the journal might be at risk in any libel suit, Shenhav was thus faced with two options: either to push for publication of the article in its existing form, and thereby risk a date in court, or to ask Weizman to revise the article in light of legal consultation. Weizman himself was confident that he could back up all the claims made in the original article and was thus keen to pursue the first course, taking the view that forcing Kohavi to testify in court – if, as may well have been unlikely, he actually resolved to take it that far – would also provide an opportunity to question him about actions in Gaza and elsewhere that Kohavi and the military would rather did not come to light. For obvious (not least economic) reasons, Motzkin and the Van Leer Institute did not take this view.
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Seeking to respond to the crisis at the journal now unfolding, the editorial board met in late 2007 and agreed that in future no article would be sent for response prior to publication – a decision that, in Shenhav’s words, ‘retrospectively recognizes the mistake inherent in the recourse to prepublication response’ – but, as proposed by Motzkin, also resolved that, in ‘exceptional’ cases, articles might instead be ‘submitted to an additional internal review, in order to ensure that factual allegations would be supported by adequate documentation’. This is now the journal’s policy. Yet it is one that raises many questions , and not only for Theory and Criticism. For, as Shenhav acknowledges in his editorial, the ‘decision to be very cautious with regard to articles containing personal references may … contain an unfortunate ideological–political bias’, in so far as it must necessarily confront the question of what exactly counts as ‘adequate documentation’ in a situation of occupation where rule is ‘decentralized and incomplete’. As much to the point, in singling out, as ‘exceptional’, precisely those articles that ‘include personal allegations’, Theory and Criticism now risks, as well as retroactively rationalizing the original wrong done to Weizman, implicitly encouraging a kind of depersonalization of what may go on in the name of the occupation regime itself. Tellingly, the original letter from Kohavi’s lawyer indicates ‘that not mentioning my client in the article will certainly not detract from the ideas in it’. As Shenhav himself notes: ‘In effect, this attorney is proposing that the “personal” be removed from political discussion’, reducing the latter to an entirely abstract realm of ‘ideas’. It is far from clear that Theory and Criticism’s present position does not threaten to assist in such a process. Given the important role that it has played in providing a much needed forum for critical and non-Zionist left-wing thought in Israel, this is a matter that should clearly be of concern far beyond the relative confines of a national academic politics. As Weizman himself notes, one of the most important outcomes of the conflicts and exchanges around this case has been the realization of the need to bring out the ‘personal’ in the context of any theoretical/political struggle, including the necessity of developing new writing habits and different academic/ publication technologies to encourage and defend this type of work. The problem is that, so far, critiques of ‘Israel’, ‘Zionism’, ‘the occupation’, and so on, like the legal struggle against the ‘state’ in the high court of justice, have produced little effect, because [as depersonalized] they were easily ignored.3
Although there is general agreement among the involved parties that the proposed changes suggested to Weizman’s article would, in the end, have been relatively ‘minor’ in academic terms, ultimately he felt obliged to withdraw his piece, as did another contributor, Neve Gordon, a politics lecturer at Ben-Gurion University best known for his own 2006 libel action against Haifa University economist Steven Plaut for articles accusing him of anti-Semitism and support for Holocaust deniers. As Shenhav observes, ‘it seems that both Eyal Weizman and Neve Gordon have fundamental differences [with the editorial board] concerning both the act of documentation and the reciprocal relations between Theory and Criticism and its political and legal environment.’ Beyond the ethics of Motzkin’s initial action – which are, one would think, self-evidently questionable – such differences go to the heart of the difficulties surrounding the clash between what Judith Butler has described as ‘different versions of academic freedom’ in Israel today (Radical Philosophy 135, January/ February 2006). Both Weizman and Gordon justifiably take the view that the position arrived at by Theory and Criticism in its relations to the occupation regime now surreptitiously compromises academic freedom, in a way that both threatens the journal’s own editorial autonomy and transparency, and institutionalizes a form of self-censorship which contains, in Shenhav own words, ‘an inherent potential to curtail [the] ability to criticise the occupation’. As much to the point, it is hard not to conclude that, as with the so-called US Academic Bill of Rights, promoted by American conservatives who have sought to rectify a supposedly left-wing and specifically anti-Zionist bias in the US university classroom, there is, at the heart of all this, a deeply problematic conception of political ‘balance’ at work,
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which needs itself to be subject to critical scrutiny by the intellectual Left. (As Weizman points out, the military – hardly short of platforms for its views – is not in the habit of inviting ‘responses’ to its own publications.) After all, the curtailing of critical opposition and accountability rarely appears as such in modern ‘democratic’ societies, but precisely in the name of ‘balance’ and ‘fairness’ and of an equivalence of ‘views’. What, then, do these ‘chain of events’ and the ‘complex situation’ they have generated tell us about the possible nature of an academic freedom and of critical thought in Israeli today, as well as about the nature of the occupation regime more generally? It should be noted that Yehouda Shenhav has himself long been a radical critic of the complacency of much of what he calls the liberal ‘New Israeli Left’ that emerged in the wake of 1967. In doing so he has consistently challenged, with considerable courage, the very discourse of the ‘occupation’ dominant within that Left, pointing to the ways in which, as he put it in a May 2006 article for the journal News from Within, it has served to falsely ‘separate the “here” from the “there” … the “external” (outside the 1967 borders) from the “internal” (within the 1967 borders)’: The fetishism of the Green Line has a dialectical dynamics. It purifies the occupation, reorganizes and elevates it to channels that deny the intensity and injustices of the Israeli occupation machinery. This fetishism allows the artificial separation between the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’; it creates a moral indifference and hides the fact that the Israeli colonial occupation is found everywhere, not only over the Green Line. 4
In this way, the occupation regime is ‘woven into the internal fabric of society in Israel, at all levels, and is created within it’. Such an argument is reiterated in the first part of the editorial preface to the special issue on the occupation that eventually appeared. As Shenhav puts it there: ‘the paradigm of occupation was and still is anchored in the internal mechanisms of nearly all versions of Zionism … it is turned not only outward but also inward, within the state, where there is no military violence but rather another kind of violence, exerted administratively or by law.’ Shenhav’s own work is worth mentioning here, because there is a more than minor irony, as he is clearly aware – the section of his editorial introduction on Weizman’s and Gordon’s withdrawal is entitled ‘The Occupation within Us’ – in the fact that he should find himself embroiled in a sequence of events that so markedly confirm his central thesis. As he writes: ‘Like Israel within the Green Line, like all Israeli citizens who pay taxes that feed the occupation, [Theory and Criticism] does not exist outside that regime. It exists within the occupation’s matrices of power and the military logic that shapes those matrices.’ Whatever one’s position on the now stalled proposals in the UK for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, the capacity of the Israeli Left to confront critically the ‘occupation within’ from within is clearly crucial to any ongoing resistance to the occupation regime more generally. Both the Van Leer Institute and Theory and Criticism have been central to this. If nothing else, their current ‘crisis’ emphasizes the immense difficulties and complexities of such resistance within the social and legal reality in which they find themselves today. David Cunningham
Notes 1. Yehouda Shenhav, ‘Why Not “The Occupation”’, Theory and Criticism 31, Winter 2007, pp. 322–32; p. 325. Although dated Winter 2007, the issue did not actually appear until April 2008. 2. The narrative of events is somewhat complicated at this point by the fact that, first, it’s not entirely clear that Kohavi is, in actuality, singled out for exceptional criticism in the article, and, second, by the fact that Kohavi’s sister is herself a fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute itself. 3. Eyal Weizman, email to author, 2 May 2008. 4. See Yehouda Shenhav, ‘The Occupation Doesn’t Stop at the Checkpoint’, News from Within, vol. 22, no. 5, May 2006, www.alternativenews.org/aic-publications/news-from-within/news-from-withinvol-xxii-no.5–may-2006–20060606.html#Shenhav.
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conference report
Critical pivot The Substance of Thought, Cornell University, NY, 10–12 April 2008 The stated goal of The Substance of Thought was to assess and intervene in the present theoretical conjuncture by zeroing in on the conflict between post-Kantian ‘critical’ philosophy and the speculative bent of recent philosophies displaying an allegiance to ‘pre-critical’ or ‘classical’ metaphysics. In making this distinction the conference organizers (members of the Cornell University Theory Reading Group) referred to Badiou’s judgement (in his Deleuze: The Clamor of Being) that ‘any philosophy may be qualified as classical that does not submit to the critical injunctions of Kant’ but rather considers ‘the Kantian indictment of metaphysics as null and void’. Citing Negri and Althusser along with Deleuze and Badiou as avatars of a return to the precritical vocation of metaphysics, while listing Adorno, Benjamin, Heidegger, and Derrida among ‘those who continue to take up various trajectories of Kant’s critical legacy’, the conference called for ‘work that takes a stand on the conflict between the two camps’ and for ‘interrogations of the nature of critique, the fate of aesthetics, the privilege accorded to immanence or transcendence, and the status of materialism’. This description of the current situation is apt to raise any number of objections. It effectively positions Badiou (taken here as spokesperson for the pre-critical) as a privileged arbiter of contemporary philosophical orientations, while simultaneously setting up the fate of the Kantian legacy, one way or the other, as the decisive question for contemporary thought. But this chiasmatic framing of the ‘camps’ under investigation turned out to be productive in so far as it encouraged an approach towards each from the perspective of the other, rather than the stubborn entrenchment on opposing sides of those defending either position. Though participants were encouraged to take a stand on the conflict at issue, the real strength of the conference was a collaborative atmosphere in which it was neither pre-critical dogmatism nor the dogmatic defence of critique itself that prevailed, but rather a range of efforts to think through the conditioning of contemporary philosophy by the problems of transcendental idealism and to explore new perspectives upon the latter that might be gleaned from recent efforts to dislodge its indictment of metaphysics.
Three distinct approaches emerged over the course of the weekend. 1. Granting the ongoing pertinence of ‘classical metaphysics’ (if not exactly the ‘nullity’ of critique) and thus exploring the contemporary status of pre-, post- and non-critical philosophies. Returning to Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s two parallelisms, Dustin McWherter attempted to map ‘the regional immanence of thought’ and the asymmetrically mutual inclusion of thought and existence onto the relation between transcendental subjectivity and its empirical instantiation in Kantianism. Floyd Wright addressed the status of the infinite in philosophies of substance via Jean-Luc Marion’s reading of Descartes, positing the infinite as a ‘compulsion’ of thought rather than the function of a limit. Ioannis Trissokas cast the constitutive problematic for the genesis of Hegelian idealism as Pyrrhonian scepticism rather than Kantian critique. Aaron Hodges teased out the conjunction of axiomatics and materialism by exploring ‘the decision to be a materialist’ in Badiou. My own paper attempted to outline a rationalist empiricism, or ‘empiricism of the encounter’, by linking Badiou’s theory of the subject with Hume’s problem of induction via Quentin Meillas soux’s thinking of absolute contingency. 2. Defending the pertinence of transcendental idealism to contemporary metaphysics, in most cases by arguing against the reduction of the former to ‘critical philosophy’. Michael Olson read Kant as a metaphysician of the object, prescribing an effort to extricate the problem of the object and its transcendental genesis from Kant’s subjective solution (contextualizing the efforts of Schelling and Deleuze in this regard). Karin de Boer explored the development of ‘immanent critique’ in Kant and Hegel, arguing that the capacity to reflect critically upon ‘the very idea of philosophy’ within a philosophical system (rather than refuting another philosophical system) remained a crucial vocation of thought with ineradicable ties to the Kantian project. Raoni Padui attempted to defend Kant against Meillassoux’s critique of ‘correlationism’ by insisting that Kant sought to establish the productive autonomy of science and philosophy, not the dependency of the former upon the latter.
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3. Pursuing alternative lineages and models of filiation. Pointing to Badiou’s relative silence on German aesthetics, Rob Lehman explored links between Badiou’s inaesthetics and Baumgarten’s science of the sensible. John Hicks investigated the problematic distinction between poetry and prose in Badiou, Gasché, LacoueLabarthe, Benjamin and Plato, interrogating the role of philosophy in determining the modern concept of the ‘prosaic’. Nina Power excavated ‘The Subterranean Current of Contemporary Feuerbachianism’, positioning Feuerbach’s philosophical anthropology as a link between Badiou (the generic), Virno (the general intellect) and Rancière (rationalist egalitarianism). Two papers from a panel on ‘The Althusserian Legacy’ deserve particular attention. In ‘The Politics of Metaphysics’, Alexi Kukuljevic argued that Althusser’s concept of theoretical praxis offers a non-Kantian model of ‘critical philosophy’, in so far as drawing a line of demarcation in the philosophical field affirms a certain critical dogmatism – a declarative instance in the absence of a criterion – as requisite for the production (rather than knowledge) of truth. Knox Peden’s contribution, ‘What is an Epistemological Problem?’, read the mutual hostility between Althusser and his erstwhile teacher Jean-Toussaint Desanti as symptomatic of a larger conflict in twentieth-century French intellectual history between a ‘Cartesian’ phenomenology (via Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) and a ‘Spinozist’ rationalism (via Cavaillès). Peden offered a case study of the complexity with which Spinozist and phenomenological trajectories intersect in postwar French thought, and the manner in which ‘dogmatic’ and ‘critical’ tendencies are inextricably woven into their mutual implication. The pertinence of Althusserian epistemology was also evident in Alberto Toscano’s keynote lecture, ‘Raving with Reason: Fanaticism, Iconoclasm and Critique’. Linking the question of ‘dogmatism’ with ‘fanaticism’ via Kant’s assertion of a direct link between the former and ‘enthusiasm’, Toscano characterized Badiou and Deleuze as ‘iconoclasts of the multiple’, in so far as they pursue the disobjectification of philosophy. From there, he proceeded to investigate two loci at which to address the contemporary politics of ‘the substance of thought’: the conditioning of philosophy by its institutional context and by capital. Contrasting Kant’s pastoral politics of the institution in Conflict of the Faculties with Althusser’s partisan philosophy, Toscano explored the institutional stakes of moving from a Kantian model of critique to contemporary modes of distinction and demarcation. He then approached the conditioning of thought by capital
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through the concept of ‘real abstraction’ elaborated by Althusser and Alfred Sohn-Rethel. If we take the real abstraction called philosophy to be conditioned by (perhaps predicated upon) the real abstraction that is capital, then – Toscano argued – philosophy loses its critical self-legislation to capital qua substance of thought. The question then is not Kant’s ‘What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?’ but ‘What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Capital?’ The second keynote lecture, by Simon Critchley, was a disappointing conclusion to the weekend. Critchley neglected to confront the conference theme, choosing instead to continue a feud with Slavoj Žižek that many no doubt feel has already grown stale. Hence his sensationalist title, ‘Violent Thoughts about Slavoj Žižek’. The lecture itself was less dramatic, arguing that ethics involves us in a ‘tricky, delicate dialectic between violence and non-violence’, a ‘dialectic’ instantiated by invocations of ‘non-violent violence’ (Butler), ‘war against war’ (Levinas), ‘law against law (Benjamin), and ‘the power of powerlessness’. One has only to follow through on Critchley’s uninterrogated conflation of violence with ‘killing’ throughout his remarks to demonstrate the vacuity of these formulations. Does the delicate dialectic of ethics hinge upon our capacity to practise killing without killing? I would hazard a guess that Critchley’s platitudinous appeal to ‘the maximization of powerlessness’ won few converts to the banner of ‘principled anarchism’. But one insubstantial keynote address was not enough to compromise the success of The Substance of Thought. In the context of an American academy wherein little or no communication occurs between ‘analytic’ philosophy departments and the ‘theoretical’ concerns of English, French, German and Comparative Literature programmes, this was a rare and encouraging instance in which it was precisely thought that sufficed to enable serious debates between representatives of philosophy and literature departments, without the sinking feeling that we were, after all, just playing incommensurable language games. If the confrontation of ‘Critical and Pre-Critical’ philosophies is a fashionable topic, the merit of an event like this was to ensure that current terms such as ‘correlationism’ and ‘Speculative Realism’ do not become merely fashionable. Taking a hard look at the critical pivot around which ‘the return to philosophy’ turns – or from which it has come unhinged – The Substance of Thought offered ample reason to hope that the poles of credulity and dismissal attending the American reception of deconstruction will not be repeated. Nathan Brown
