Ruisánchez

It's been too long since I last posted... I hope to tend to this blog a little more in the new year.

In the meantime, this is simply to point to another review of Posthegemony, by José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra in the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (46.3 [October 2012]: 577-78).

Ruisánchez's strikes me as a fair assessment. He concludes:

En parte gracias a Posthegemony resulta inaplazable pensar las implicaciones entre estudios culturales y populismo, así como la alianza entre la teoría de la sociedad civil y el status quo neoliberal. Pero no creo que mediante un abandono total de sus aportaciones anteriores. Acaso allí se muestra la ansiedad del primer libro. El uso de la tríada afecto/hábito/multitud está lejos de llenar el espacio que se genera con la demolición de la alianza hegemonía/teoría de la sociedad civil/estudios culturales; hay que saber usar las ruinas. Su abandono total es el producto más obvio del capitalismo académico, acaso más temible y aliado de la hegemonía neoliberal que otras prácticas que se critican en el libro. Si finalmente es difícil discernir entre multitud e imperio o entre buena y mala multitud (257), ¿qué las vuelve un horizonte deseable para la teoría y la práctica actuales?

Brennan

[This is a response to Timothy Brennan's keynote presentation, "The Problem of Unevenness: Peripheral Aesthetics and Imperial Form," presented at the "Negative Cosmopolitanisms: Abjection, Power, and Biopolitics" conference, Edmonton, Alberta, October 2012.]

“Peripheral Modernism. A Response to Tim Brennan”

Tim Brennan provides us with a provocative, forthright, and challenging presentation. Indeed, though one hesitates to call it “ironic,” given the rather critical things that Brennan himself has to say about irony (which he claims “is based on the subject setting itself up as supreme”), it is notable that a paper that opens by excoriating a “combat mode” of theory is itself strikingly combative. Brennan takes shots at entire swathes of the contemporary Humanities: at the “graduate students and young professors” who mistake theory for combat, but also at those who prefer a “radical indecisionism” that is either complementary to or indistinguishable from (or perhaps merely “athwart”) the pseudo-radicalism of their colleagues. He goes on to argue that “a kind of neo-Socratic position [...] is everywhere around us today in the academy,” a stance that is in fact not a stance but is rather designed only to “establish [the speaker’s] superiority over the supposedly rough, impetuous, and naïve adherents to actual positions.”

Everywhere Brennan sees what he terms “louche” theorizing: “an intentionally cloudy, squint-eyed perspective [...] secretive writing, words intended for initiates and hidden from the vulgar public.” No names are provided, but apparently Cornell’s School of Criticism and Theory is a hotbed for this stuff: a mere “simulacrum of revolution”; “a romance with death”; Humanists who are “against humans”; “conservatives of modernist literary cast.” It’s worth unpacking this last very condensed series of epithets: it’s not enough to say that they (we?) are (secretly, unbeknownst even to ourselves) conservatives; we are also unoriginally “cast” from a single mold whose deformity can be traced back to the pernicious influence of both modernism and literature. By contrast, then, Brennan offers us idiosyncrasy and originality (“it has not generally been recognized [...] it has gone completely unremarked”) that is saved from quirkiness or the pernicious conformity of mere novelty by its steadfast refusal of both modernism and the literary “double-entendre.” Brennan calls on distinguished forbears--the Marxist intellectuals of the interwar period, above all--in order to break free from the “irony” that, he alleges, “inhibit[s] our ability to make sense of the imperialist common sense of the present.” He proposes instead an anti-imperialist common sense that has no truck with the “effeteness of literary modernism.” In brief, I don’t think that an “anti-imperialist” common sense is much improvement on an imperialist one; and I’m suspicious of all homilies, and suggest that you should be, too. But back to Brennan’s project: naturally enough, cosmopolitanism is out (being merely the “literary ethos” appropriate to “the imperial aspects of globalization”). Again, however, it is surely ironic that he marshals in support of this anti-cosmopolitan, anti-literary, anti-elitism a “who’s who” of third-world literary intellectuals, practically all of whom are male, middle-class, and ethnically privileged, from Chinua Achebe to César Vallejo, Alejo Carpentier to Mo Yan.

Read more... (pdf file)

Medea

As Rodgers and Hammerstein might have put it: How do you solve a problem like Medea? But of course if Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music turns out to be not such a problem at all, in that her carefree ways make her a bad novice nun but a terrific governess and mother, in Euripides's Medea the title character is the very image of a "bad mother" and in significant ways the problem that she represents is never fully resolved to anyone's satisfaction.

But what is Medea's problem? Is it that she is an outsider in Corinth, to which she has fled with her husband Jason and their small children, unable to fit in or be accepted? Is it indeed that she is a non-Greek, a barbarian, who has to be expelled for the sake of social order and collective harmony? Is it that she is a woman, whom Jason feels he can drop in favour of a rather more advantageous match with the Corinthian King's daughter? Or is it that she is not enough of a woman, that she doesn't know that her role should be submissive and accepting in the face of Jason's pragmatic actions to maintain his fame and his legacy? Is she too emotional, too hysterical and so allows herself to be carried away by her anger and desire for vengeance, enough so as to commit the terrible act of murdering the King, the princess, and worst of all her two young offspring? Is she a monster? Is she crazy?

Or is her problem, by contrast, that she is too rational, too clever even for her own good? That far from turning away from or refusing the conventions of Greek democracy, she takes them to their limit, to the point at which the social contract is itself shown to be insane, unnatural, and monstrous?

In essence, Medea's complaint is that Jason has broken his contract with her. She insisted he make a promise to "love / and honor" her because, aware of the fickleness of familial and affective ties (having herself betrayed her father and killed her brother), she "thought only great oaths would keep / him bound" to her (163-66). Medea believes in such contracts, and believes that the Greeks do, too. Hence she also presses the Athenian King, Aegeus, to "restate [his] promise" that he will give her shelter in his city "as an oath. Only then will I feel secure. [. . .] An oath / Will keep your promises safe against / [her enemies'] powerful inducements to give me up" (725-26; 729-31). And indeed, despite what she has done, at the end Aegeus does provide her sanctuary in Athens. An oath is a solemn thing; the Corinthian Chorus agrees that, with Jason's (literal) disavowal of his bond to Medea "the spell of trust is broken" (444). The danger is that as a result everyone sees that trust is "merely" a spell, a form of words with no power over reality. If Jason's betrayal goes unpunished, then the putative basis of social order, the entire framework of civic incantations and declarations, may come to seem null and void.

Medea, in short, kills her children (and so ruins Jason and destroys his lineage) in order to uphold the social contract. Her claim is that our actions should not be guided either by passing whims or short-term pragmatism. The spell of trust must be maintained by insisting on the harshest of consequences for those who break it. And if Medea is an outsider, this only proves that those who most insist that society keeps its promises are those who have only the promise to depend on. Medea can't make any claims otherwise on affect, habit, or the connections that she could count on if she had grown up in the Greek polis, rubbing shoulders with neighbours and citizens.

But by insisting on the point, Medea inadvertently reveals that the contract is not fundamentally the basis of Greek sociability at all. The Corinthians are aghast: they admit that Medea is consistently in the right, that she has indeed made her case and invoked all the logic and reason that is on her side. Her clever use of argument bears out her threat that her "words / will pin [Jason] to the mat" (592-93). Yet the Chorus protests that her "justice [is] too harsh / for Jason's heartless crimes" (973-74). They plead for mercy, for the suspension of the law rather than Medea's single-minded determination to see the proper consequences follow Jason's precipitating actions.

To put this another way: the Chorus argues for the logic of exception, for the sovereign decision that comes not from following the law but from suspending it. They also thereby reveal the dirty little secret of Greek democracy (and perhaps democracy tout court): that in the end its promises are always at least potentially worthless; that the struggle for hegemony, for consensus, is but a distraction; and that those in power will always ignore the rules if it suits them. In the end, this is the problem of Medea.

Angeles

I also rather like this review, which is a pretty astute synthesis and translation of the book's main concerns. It ends:

La importancia de una propuesta co- mo Posthegemony ha sido reconocida, por ejemplo, en el hecho de haber alcanzado la única mención de honor que otorga el Katherine Sin- ger Kovacs Prize del MLA para las publicaciones del 2010. Pero sobre todo porque, en las múltiples cues- tiones que despierta, deja abierta la puerta para caminos que aún que- dan por transitar.

Francisco Angeles, Reseña. Revista de Crítica literaria latinoamericana 75 (2012): 510-514.

virtual

A blast from the past. Here I am speaking at Virtual Futures, Warwick, 1995:

Virtual Futures 1995 - Jon Beasley-Murray from Virtual Futures on Vimeo.

But you know what: some of this made its way eventually into the book, Posthegemony.

LASA

Alberto Moreiras has written a very nice article on the recent LASA Congress. It mainly comprises a series of reflections on the function played by the Congress itself and the trajectory of Latin American cultural studies over the past decade (a true "Latinamericanism since 9/11"). It then ends with some reflections on the discussions in San Francisco, via a rather promising account of posthegemony:

La posthegemonía es una modalidad de práctica teórica en la que caben innumerables tipos de análisis y tomas de postura, pues no es ni normativa ni prescriptiva: es sólo, y por lo pronto, el lugar de un posible encuentro capaz de generar pensamiento nuevo.

[. . .]

El término incluye de antemano su posibilidad crítica y resulta tan apropiado para pensar problemáticas estatales, es decir, en el registro del estado mismo y de la política de estado, como intra- o extraestatales (microfísicas comunitarias, regionales, ciudadanas o rurales, o bien macrofísicas de la globalización y su impacto), de marea rosada o neoliberales, populistas o no. Y en la medida no menor es que su productividad crítica está lejos de reducirse al pensamiento de lo político: constituiría también una herramienta fundamental para pensar la cultura, y con ella todas las modalidades de presentación de lo visible (estéticas, poéticas) al margen de postulados meramente identitarios. Tiene la capacidad de intervenir en cuanto crítica del conocimiento porque es antes que nada crítica de la ideología, y tiene la capacidad de proponer rearticulaciones políticas e intelectuales de todo tipo.

Alberto Moreiras, "¿Puedo madrugarme a un narco? Posiciones críticas en la Asociación de Estudios Latinoamericanos". FronteraD (June 27, 2012).

Prospero

“Prospero’s Book: On John Beverley's Latinamericanism After 9/11”

Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails.
-- The Tempest, Act 5, Epilogue

John Beverley presents himself as the grand old man of Latin American cultural studies. And not without reason. He was there at the outset in the early 1990s, and has figured in almost all of the significant discussions and debates--about testimonio, subalternity, representation, the politics of location--that have marked the field’s trajectory since. He has been equally instrumental in building the infrastructure of the field. At Pittsburgh, he helped organize the various conferences that brought together significant players associated with cultural studies in Latin America. And he has directed the dissertations of numerous graduate students who have gone on to become important voices themselves. Throughout, Beverley has often shown remarkable generosity of spirit: though his own intellectual and political positions have been clear and often trenchant, he has seldom found the need to impose them on others. He has always welcomed dialogue and disagreement. If there are no “Beverleyites,” that is to his credit: he has never forced anyone into his own mold. But as time passes, he increasingly feels that he is part of a generation that is the last of its kind: the last that can remember the heady days of armed struggle and revolutionary enthusiasm; the last, he suggests, with a personal link to a politics that was truly a matter of life and death. As such, Beverley is perhaps understandably concerned for the future of the field once that link is finally broken. Even among his peers, too many have given up the fight, have turned instead to reactionary neoconservatism; meanwhile, the young are too easily tempted by ultraleftism or other “infantile” disorders. In Latinamericanism After 9/11, then, we can imagine him as a “venerable old teacher,” who with “a firm voice--a masterful voice capable of seizing an idea and implanting it deep within the listener’s mind”--sits us down to listen to him.

Read more... (on academia.edu)

Hatfield

A rather good review of Posthegemony from Charles Hatfield, one of the few so far that has (I think) got what I was trying to do in the book.

The review mostly consists of a smart summary, followed by a pertinent criticism: In continuing to stress the "primacy of the subject" Hatfield asks whether the book then "duplicates, albeit in a radical and ethereal form, the crucial logic of Latin Americanist identitarianism." I'd answer "maybe," especially in that I think it is worth defining a Latin American multitude.

It then ends with some very flattering words:

Posthegemony is a book of major theoretical importance and profound political and disciplinary implications. It ranks high within the crowded field of recent work on the relationship between culture and politics in Latin America. Beasley-Murray’s book will be a main point of departure for our most important debates for many years to come.

Charles Hatfield, Review. MLN 127.2 (March 2012): 404-406. (Or here, as a .pdf file.)

MLA

The video the MLA made for the Seattle Convention, featuring Posthegemony...

cardigan

This afternoon to the Presentation House Gallery in North Vancouver, which as I have mentioned before is one of my favourite galleries in the Lower Mainland, with a great little bookstore specializing in photography.

But right now the gallery is between exhibitions, so we had to content ourselves with the North Vancouver museum downstairs. The woman there commented that she hadn't expected anyone to come in today, what with the snow and all. She turned the lights on specially for us.


The permanent exhibit is small but interesting, charting North Vancouver's history from its establishment as a logging camp called Moodyville in the 1880s, though to its industrial heyday as port and home to shipyards in the mid twentieth-century, and now its post-industrial stress on tourism as gateway to Grouse Mountain and Mount Seymour ski resorts, as well as the rather tacky Capilano Suspension Bridge which bills itself as "Vancouver's top attraction."

The museum always has a temporary exhibit, too, which is often very thoughtfully put together and curated. Right now the show is "Made in B.C.: Home-grown Design," a survey of British Columbia's products from (predictably) the staples of timber and shipping to graphic design, architecture, transport vehicles, school yearbooks, stamps, and goodness knows what else. Still, it's rather obvious that in fact British Columbia has never been a place in which very much got produced: its economy has been based on the extraction or cultivation of raw materials (strangely, though, I saw no mention of the current top export, BC Bud) or on the movement of goods.

Now, if anything, the province's major product is the image of Vancouver itself, built up and burnished through international extravaganzas such as Expo 86 and the 2010 Winter Olympics. No wonder Vancouverites were so embarrassed when a bit of street disorder seemed to sully the city's supposedly good name. We worry about our city's sparkling image the same way residents of Detroit care about the car industry or Venezuelans keep half an eye on the price of oil.

For better or worse, Vancouverites have always aspired to be good citizens, or to seem so at least. One of the most striking objects in the "Made in B.C." exhibition, and just about the first thing you see as you enter the room, is a cardigan knitted by a (male) worker employed by the Pacific Great Eastern Railway sometime at the turn of the twentieth century. As part of the design he had stitched the names of the various towns at which the railway stopped. It's not quite a tattoo, but it's close: a gesture of bearing witness to his employer's achievements on his own body. This may look like hegemony, but of course to call it that only begs the unanswerable question: "What was he thinking?"

prize!

As I arrived at work this morning, someone I didn't know shouted my name from across the street, and then came running over. He wanted to give me a bottle of Prosecco, for my talk last month on "From Access to Interactivity" at "Access 2011." Many thanks to the librarians. Fine people!

And then this afternoon, the folk from the Modern Language Association were in touch. I've won a prize! Well sort of: an honorable mention. For "an outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures."

Here's what they say:

A study that moves elegantly and daringly from political theory to cultural analysis, Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America puts Latin America on the map as a complex region in which hegemony, habit, and affect are constantly being contested and renegotiated in response to the vitality of the multitude. Jon Beasley-Murray does this through a series of engaging discussions of contemporary theorists who dialogue directly with Latin American test cases highlighting the relation between Peronist populism, hegemony theory, and the limits of civil society. With clarity, intellectual rigor, and conceptual sophistication, Beasley-Murray seeks to challenge the dominant critical paradigms of the cultural-studies-oriented humanities and social sciences.

I think I may be drinking that Prosecco tonight.

critiques

A few more reviews of Posthegemony have now appeared. I will respond to some of the points they raise, but in the meantime, here are the responses the book has received to date:

• José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra, Reseña. Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 46.3 (October 2012): 577-78.
• Francisco Angeles, Reseña. Revista de Crítica literaria latinoamericana 75 (2012): 510-514.
• Charles Hatfield, Review. MLN 127.2 (March 2012): 404-406.
• Philip Derbyshire, "Romanticism of the Multitude". Radical Philosophy 169 (September/October 2011): 51-53. (Also here (pdf file))
• Oscar Cabezas, "Review: Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America". Política Común 3 (2012).
• Silvio Waisbord, Review. International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 7.1 (May 2011): 101-104.
• Donald Kingsbury, "Something Always Escapes! Beasley-Murray’s Posthegemony". Theory & Event 14.3 (2011).
• Gastón Gordillo, "Affective Hegemonies".

hegemonies

[The other week there was a small book launch for Posthegemony here at UBC. My colleagues and friends Brianne Orr-Alvarez, Oscar Cabezas, and Gastón Gordillo all presented critical reviews of the book. Here, by kind permission, is Gastón's...]

Jon Beasley-Murray’s Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America is a groundbreaking proposition to abandon the concept of hegemony that may allow us, paradoxically, to re-politicize and reinvent our understanding of hegemonic formations.

Some clues about this theoretical direction are in the book’s title, an intriguing one given that this is a work firmly committed to philosophies of affirmation. Posthegemony, after all, is a phrasing defined by negativity. “Post-things” are things that negate what precede them. And, indeed, Beasley-Murray frames his book as a negation of hegemony. He critically dissects the concept of hegemony and shows how its alleged rationalism, its transcendent connotations, and its emphasis on ideology and representation cannot account for immanence, affect, and habits in the production of politics. And he suggests that we abandon the concept altogether. We live, after all (always have), in post-hegemonic times. And this negation of hegemony is followed by an affirmation: a call for a political understanding of affect, habit, and the multitude.

Yet hegemony is still in the title. Affect, habit, multitude are nowhere to be seen. Preceded by the “post,” what is negated is present, as if in trying to move beyond it Beasley-Murray is still drawn to hegemony. This distancing and incorporation pervades in fact the entire manuscript. Posthegemony is haunted by the ghost of hegemony and, in particular, the ghost of Antonio Gramsci, which is a powerful absence in the book, engaged in only one paragraph yet always there in a phantom form.

Read more... (pdf file)

reader

The Saturday photo, part XV: In Southern California, a younger reader comes to grips with the intricacies of posthegemony:


(Many thanks to Erin Graff Zivin for the image, which she swears is totally unposed.)

review

[The other day there was a small book launch for Posthegemony here at UBC. My colleagues and friends Brianne Orr-Alvarez, Oscar Cabezas, and Gastón Gordillo all presented critical reviews of the book. Here, by kind permission, is Oscar's...]

This book is an attempt to re-think the concept of politics beyond cultural studies and political theories on civil society. In his approach to various Latin American cultural and political phenomena, Jon Beasley-Murray re-opens a debate on key concepts of politics —hegemony, civil society and the State, among others— in order to criticize any conceptualization in which the State excludes the Negrian concept of multitude. Through neo-Spinozan notions derived from Antonio Negri, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault, and the Bourdieusian concept of habits, Beasley-Murray proposes to undermine not only Laclau and Mouffe’s Post-Marxist concept of hegemony, but also the understanding of ideology as the master concept of the Marxist tradition. Thus, posthegemony is not simply a transitional concept that overcomes the concept of hegemony, but also an alternative mode of thinking political theory and Latin American studies. Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America engages with the richest debates in political theory and simultaneously with the most paradigmatic events in Latin American history.

The wonderfully written five chapters of this book develop the notion of posthegemony in the following manner. In the prologue “October 10, 1492,” Beasley-Murray analyses the legitimating mechanisms of colonization by the Spaniards in the 15th Century (the so-called Requerimiento). The author argues that the Requerimiento has nothing to do with the construction of hegemony but with a violent act of coercion. This preliminary remark leads to the first chapter, “Argentina 1972: Cultural Studies and Populism,” which contains a discussion of National-Populism in Argentina (1972). The author denounces the love-pact between people and the nation in its exclusion of the multitude. This chapter is not only a critique of national populism but also a critique of Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxist concept of hegemony. What the author denounces is the imbrication between the concept of hegemony and neo-populism. The second chapter, “Ayacucho 1982: Civil Society Theory and Neoliberalism,” offers a description of Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato’s theory of civil society and shows its failure in the study of one of the bloodiest Maoist guerrilla movements that took place in Peru (Sendero Luminoso). By the same token, it also shows the structural violence inherent to neo-liberalism in the Southern Cone. In the third chapter, “Escalón 1989: Deleuze and Affect,” one of the book’s best, Beasley-Murray describes the offensive of the FMLN in El Salvador as a paradox between political violence and “lines of flight.” He also develops the Deleuzian theory of affects as an attempt to de-territorialize the capture of the revolutionary movement into the state-apparatus. In the fourth chapter, “Chile 1992: Bourdieu and Habit,” the author extends the theory of affects in Deleuze through Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “habit”. The chapter offers an analytical understanding of the correlations between power and bodies through the history of the traumatic Chilean transition from Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship to a neoliberal democracy. In the concluding chapter of the book, “Conclusion: Negri and Multitude,” Beasley-Murray describes Negri’s concept of multitude as an opening to rethinking politics in Latin America. This chapter could be read side by side with the Epilogue, “April 13, 2002,” where the author shows how the constituent power of the multitude breaks the “fiction” of hegemony in the paradigmatic conflict of the so-called Caracazo in Venezuela.

Read more... (pdf file)

Althusser

[Some notes on Althusser, taken from Posthegemony.]

The everyday, routine, and almost invisible politics of habit contrasts with the often spectacular display that characterizes politics as it is more usually understood. The politics of habit is not the clash of ideologies within a theater of representation. It is a politics that is immanent and corporeal, that works directly through the body. Yet habit is primary; it is not an effect or a consequence of political processes that take place elsewhere. Rather, other forms of politics depend upon the dispositions and attitudes that habit inculcates. If we were to think of habit as ideology (and I agree with Bourdieu that we would be better off calling it something else), it would be closer to Louis Althusser’s “ideology in general” than to ideology as the “system of ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group.” Ideology in general precedes and underwrites specific ideologies, in that it constitutes the subjects who then conform to or recognize a system of representations. For Althusser, ideology in general consists in the mechanism of interpellation whereby Ideological State Apparatuses such as the school or the family call subjects into being, subjects whose condition of existence is that they recognize the power of some other, transcendent Subject (capitalized by Althusser) that is reciprocally produced in the same operation. Hence, although interpellation is material, in that it takes place in institutions and through practice (in his illustration, the subject comes into being by turning to face a police officer who hails him or her, and who comes to incarnate the Subject), what it produces is ideal. Physical gestures and attitudes such as kneeling at mass or standing at school assembly construct a doubled subjectivity, in which many subjects turn to face the one, transcendent Subject that appears to be mediated though ideas and representations. But the display, the theatrical (or cinematic) separation of Subject from subjects, is a product of the process that it subsequently appears to have produced. It is an effect that is taken to be cause; a quasi cause that arises through habit.

The habits that structure ideology in general constitute the state and its institutions, and also establish a relation to those institutions that appears to be ideological. The subjects that emerge through interpellation act as though they were following their consciences, as though ideas governed actions. Hegemony theory discloses that these ideas are not free, that they are orchestrated elsewhere. But it still stresses belief and consent. This does not go far enough: it does not recognize that belief arises from habit. Althusser cites the dictum of seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal: “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.” A Catholic will go to mass, a school pupil sing in assembly, a citizen enter the voting booth, and it can appear as though these practices were an effect of free will or, alternatively, of willing if deluded consent to a hege- monic project. Althusser insists, by contrast, that interpellation is a practice, and therefore already corporeal: always already acted out or performed, a subject’s ideas are “material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject.” The ideal is at best contingent: its con- tent irrelevant, it is effect rather than cause. Belief in the power of ideology is itself ideological; ideology is at best a quasi cause in that everything happens (only) as though ideology were in fact determinant. Hence “the ideology of ideology” is the conviction that ideology matters, that our actions follow on from the ideas that we hold or even from the ideas that hold us and so from the ruses of some hegemonic project. And when this ideology of ideology wanes, when it becomes apparent that subjects “know very well what they are doing” but are still doing it, we have entered posthegemonic times. (pp. 181-82)

[. . .]

Social reproduction is never truly flawless. It is always somewhat hit and miss. Philosopher Judith Butler’s theorization of performativity as the embodied enactment of identity roles stresses the ways in which such roles can be “queered”: bent out of shape if not fully avoided. She takes issue with Althusser’s notion of inter- pellation, insisting on the possibilities of failed interpellation (only glimpsed in Althusser’s brief reference to “bad subjects”) to show that the voice of power, the state’s “hailing,” and the order of bod- ies are not fully synchronized. The body always falls short of or exceeds the voice. Hence she argues that “useful as it is, Althusser’s scheme . . . attribut[es] a creative power to the voice that recalls and reconsolidates the figure of the divine voice in its ability to bring about what it names.” Although Althusser’s essay is a critique of the fetishism that imagines that the state alone authorizes subjectivity, Butler suggests that he remains within precisely this paradigm. For Althusser, not only is “ideology in general” necessary and eternal; so therefore is the state that acts as the essential lynchpin of the double circuit of ideology, command, and habit. Butler points, on the one hand, to interpellation’s citational quality: the fact that the state endlessly has to return to previous instances of interpellation so as to legitimate its attempts to constitute subjects reveals that it can never fully establish its claim to originality; the fact that it continually has to repeat itself shows that it is forever incomplete. On the other hand, Butler is also concerned with what remains unvoiced and unspoken. Censorship, for instance, “produces discursive regimes through the production of the unspeakable,” and more generally the gap between what may and may not be spoken determines “the conditions of intelligibility” of any regime of power. “This normative exercise of power,” she argues, “is rarely acknowledged as an operation of power at all. Indeed, we may classify it among the most implicit forms of power. . . . That power continues to act in illegible ways is one source of its relative invulnerability.” Here, then, Butler turns to Bourdieu, theorist of “a bodily understanding, or habitus” that does not depend upon the voice or upon speech. For habit describes what exceeds interpellation, whether that be the state’s biopower or an insurgent biopolitics. (pp. 214-15)

negativity

Jason read has written a very interesting commentary on Benjamin Noys's book The Persistence of the Negative. It makes me all the more eager to read it--if only it weren't so damn expensive--even though (or perhaps especially because) my tendency, like Read's, is towards what we might call the philosophy of affirmation.

But in Read's words, Noys "is not interested in positing an ontology of negativity against the ontologies of affirmation. Negativity is a practice, not a principle, a destruction of existing positivities." And here I sense I agree with Noys. I'm likewise far from convinced by (say) Negri's unremitting championing of the multitude. As I point out in Posthegemony, we still need to be able to distinguish between good multitudes and bad, and to be able to discern when the multitude turns bad.

Or to put this another way: a philosophy of affirmation does not for all that have to be unrelentingly affirmative. Not everything is to be affirmed.

I agree also that the problem with Latour (and, I would add, Delanda) is that they present something of a mirror image of Negrian affirmation, in which it is rather contemporary capitalist relations (instead of the coming Communist utopia) which is relentlessly affirmed. Where Negri claims that "What ought to be, is," Latour and Delanda simply affirm that "What is, is what ought to be." Either way, critique is discarded.

And I am happy to agree in principle with the notion of negativity as "an insistence on localizing thought and practices, resisting both an ontology of affirmation and an ontology of finitude." Again, in large part, this is what I aim to show with the Latin American case studies in Posthegemony.

risk

Guy de Maupassant's "The Little Cask" ("Le Petit Fût") is a short, cautionary narrative of unequal exchange at the border between two economic systems.

In brief, an innkeeper has his eye on his neighbor's farm. But the owner, an old woman who has spent her entire life there, stubbornly refuses to sell: "I was born here, and here I mean to die," as she puts it. But the two eventually come to an agreement, that the innkeeper will pay the old woman an annuity of fifty crowns a month (which she, on the advice of a lawyer, has bargained up from a mere thirty) and he will inherit the property on her death. With the transaction agreed, life continues as before, and the innkeeper notes despairingly that as the years pass the old woman remains as hale and hearty as ever. He then invites her over to dinner and discovers her weak spot: a preference for fine brandy. So in an outpouring of generosity he arranges for her to receive a constant supply of the fine liquor. Soon enough, she begins to decline, people start talking, and she dies a reviled drunk. When her neighbor comes by to take possession of her farm, in accordance with their agreement, he intones the tale's sad moral: " It was very stupid of her; if she had not taken to drink she might very well have lived for ten years longer."

The joke is the disconnect between the moral and the tale itself, even if the conclusion that the innkeeper draws is literally true. For what is stupid is the old woman's trust in her neighbor's generosity, not realizing the economic motives that underlie it.

But in some ways the joke is also on the innkeeper, though he doesn't notice it and indeed presumably wouldn't even mind. For if, as I say, the crux here is the clash between a relationship to land and property based on habit and affect on the one hand, and the introduction of rational calculation of profit, loss, and risk on the other, we see how the dispassionate logic of capital in fact has to be supplemented by an appeal to the senses. The innkeeper's despair arises from the apparent failure of his actuarial calculations: he is forced to intervene by calling on the rather more traditional gestures of hospitality, neighborliness, conviviality, and the gift economy. It just so happens that his gift is (almost literally) a poisoned chalice.

So the hypocrisy of the final judgment rebounds on the innkeeper (again, however little he might ultimately care about the fact). It is as though everything could indeed be explained by the old woman's unwise choices, her failure to make a rational account of her situation and to act prudently to ensure her continued health and so continued enjoyment of the property and annuity alike. But in fact the story tells us that in origin it is the innkeeper's risk assessment that fails, and that his reputation as a "very knowing customer" or "smart business man" depends on his acceptance of other modes of dealing that are not, in the end, entirely businesslike.

Thus ideology: everything can happen as though the tale's moral were correct, because of course it can't be denied. (The old woman may indeed have lived much longer had she not taken to drink!) One is reminded of the many justifications for the recent bank bail-outs, each of which is on its own terms incontrovertible. But this occludes the continued effectivity of another economy, which apparently rational accounts of profit, risk, and loss can never fully escape.

game

I seem to have helped inspire some kind of science fiction role-playing game. I'm not sure I understand it.

posthegemony

The University of Minnesota Press asked me to write a brief entry that would be a sort of "introduction to Posthegemony" and that would ideally touch on current events. This should soon appear on the Press's blog, too.

How do we explain the success of the "Tea Party" movement within the US Republican party?

Its supporters claim that it is very simple: the American people, they argue, are fed up with unwanted government intrusion in their lives and the slide to socialism (or something like it) under the presidency of Barack Obama. The "Tea Party Patriots", for instance, address the "Citizens of our Nation" who "were disgusted that your government ignored your will so egregiously."

Or in the words of of the founder of "Regular Folks United: The Bully Pulpit for Regular Folks" (whose contributors include the now iconic "Joe the Plumber"), he started the website

after many years of feeling like real people were getting lost in the shuffle of political battles. Republican talking points. Democrat talking points. What about Regular Folk talking points? I was tired of elitists (yes, they are on both sides of the aisle) pretending they were doing things to help “regular folks” while they were really, most often, trampling on regular folks’ freedoms and taking their money for some bloated inefficient government program.

In short, we see an almost classic case of populist insurgency: ordinary people rising up against the distortions and manipulations of "politics as usual."

But there is nothing particularly simple about even classical populism. And as liberals are surely by now tired of pointing out, there is no shortage of distortion or manipulation on the part of the Tea Partiers: it is almost bewildering to realize, for example, how many still believe that Obama is a Moslem born outside of the United States. When there is such disagreement over the basic premises of the discussion, there seems little opportunity to have the kinds of debate usually associated with political discourse.

More significantly, many of those who are funding the movement are far from ordinary in any sense of the term. Jane Mayer in the New Yorker recently wrote a long piece about the reclusive billionaire Koch brothers who have piled millions into the cause. With friends like these, it is no wonder that the "regular folks" of the Tea Party find themselves campaigning to continue the Bush-era tax cuts on the very wealthy (those who earn above $250,000 a year). In other words, we also have a classic case of people fighting fervently for their own exploitation as though it were their liberation.

The theory of hegemony is designed to untangle such complications. It was the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci who first elaborated the notion that capitalism's survival relies on the fact that people willingly give their consent to political movements that work against their best interests. Social domination depends, he argued, upon consent as much, if not more, than upon brute force or coercion.

In the mid to late 1970s, Gramsci was rediscovered and hegemony theory was further refined by the Argentine Ernesto Laclau before it was taken up with great enthusiasm by British Cultural Studies. Soon "hegemony" became cultural studies' core concept. It is not surprising, moreover, that the concept came into vogue during another moment at which populism seemed to rule the day: with Peronism in Argentina, and then Thatcher and Reagan in the UK and the USA.

Laclau's motivation was to distinguish between a progressive populism of the left from a populism of the right. For surely the left could not give up on the self-declared "ordinary" people that were the focus of cultural studies' own iconoclastic anti-elitism. (Recall that for Raymond Williams, the founding principle of the discipline is that "culture is ordinary.") And yet ultimately hegemony theory fails in this task: most recently, with On Populist Reason, Laclau simply abandons the project by identifying populism with politics as a whole.

My argument in Posthegemony is that hegemony theory mirrors populism and is therefore unable fully to understand (let alone oppose) it. In parallel, I also show that civil society discourse has a similar relationship to the neoliberalism that it claims to critique. We therefore need some other way to think about politics, if these two foremost instances of progressive social theory are incapable of grasping the two major political movements of the past thirty years.

I call this new way to think about politics "posthegemony."

Posthegemony turns from the Gramscian dichotomy between coercion and consent, to look instead at the subterranean influences of affect, habit, and the multitude that underlie all so-called hegemonic projects.

It should be obvious enough that the Tea Party has more to do with affect, that is with the order of bodies, and with habit, that is with their repetition and resonance, than with any attempt to win the consent of "hearts and minds." And it should be equally clear that the notion of a "people" (of "regular folks" or the "Citizens of the Nation") is a construction that enables interested parties (the Kochs or others) to appropriate the power of a multitude that would otherwise threaten them as much as it unsettles any representative of constituted power.

Posthegemony, then, is a novel form of political analysis (which draws on the work of theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Bourdieu, Antonio Negri, as well as Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben). But it also perhaps points towards a new political project, whose aim would be to liberate the multitude from its own subjection to the popular.