Ghost in the Wire

Further:

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/006958.html
http://lecolonelchabert.blogspot.com/2005/12/agency-is-eeeevil.html

Ken, you could certainly post this roundup to LS, methinks..

My seminar paper on the topic: Populists or Proletarians [pdf] Cheers-

I read the paper, though I should point out it ends in mid-sentence on page 12, so I'm thinking the pdf conversion had some issues. Still there's enough of it there to see where you're going with it, unless there's some surprises at the end. I do think there's a few problems, though, and I'd like to inquire about them.

First, why do you presume Marx is fundamentally correct when it comes to his discussion of the operations of the proletariat? It seems to me that in the absence of a certan concession to a "structuralist" Marxism, one that does away with any of Gramsci's insights into the constitution of the classes and the operations of identity within hegemony, that your argument chain would end up collapsing.

Second, I think you're making a mistake that Zizek makes as well, (and I think Laclau could be more explicit about this argument) which is that you think Laclau's description of populism is designed for strategic purposes rather than as a description or a political ontology, i.e., an explanation how it is that politics operate. Laclau's argument isn't just that it's a good idea to talk about populism, but rather that populism is in fact the structural essence of all remotely democratic politics, and so we learn about the political order from analyzing them. Zizek is of course correct that the more radical, and thus more transformative gesture, is one of refusal of the terms of capital en masse, but this is of course why he turns to movies to explain agency and then condemns the Paris rioters for not articulating a broader plan against French capital, because the radical refusal of the terms isn't actually politically viable. Indeed, I think it's possible that this gesture may actually end up being more open to fascist discourses, but I need to think about it more before I assess that possibility more seriously. Anyway, the point is that radical gestures are transformative, but not particularly mobilizing.

Kenneth, thanks for those comments. I checked the file again and it was okay for me - but you're only missing one fluff conclusion sentence anyway.

I don't want to defend just any old Marxism - neither Second International nor Althusser - but I do think Marx has it right philosophically and strategically regarding what is necessary for anticapitalist struggle, so that's why I extract those 4 points. I suppose Zizek "updates" Marx per Gramsci, and am convinced - for now at least - that capitalism really is both the historical and material condition for the possibility of multicultural, manipulable political identites, and so functions somewhere between "determination in the last instance" and mere logical/transcendental condition, i.e. capital generally lets anticapitalist antagonisms appear IFF it can coopt them.

As to your second point, if I sound like I'm only reading Laclau strategically, I don't mean to. In fact, I find Laclau's to be a very persuasive account of political ontology within advanced capitalism, a theory of the process by which excluded entities get themselves formally/really subsumed under capital. And this is what I take to be the outcome of most latter 20th c. struggles (anti-discrimination, feminism, environmentalism...): all these entities were being inadequately tended to by capital, and so they had to fight to get some subsumptive attention. This is not to deny their very significant external benefits, but even those benefits (legal protections for minorities and LGBT persons, for instance) can be reduced, from the perspective of capital, to bringing the wages and social conditions for those people up to optimal subsistence level.

For something which would challenge capitalism itself, I agree that some radical, Leninist or otherwise, probably anti-democratic (in its initial actions) stance is required. Some days, I figure there are plenty of worthwhile 'populist' reforms that can be made within capital itself - capitalism being a near utopia relative to previous social forms, but other days radical transformation seems to much more important than democratic mobilization.

I'm not trying to be polemical here, but you make a move in the above response that always confuses me when I see it, and I think that before I offer a rejoinder, maybe I could get you to expand upon it. You say:

[I] am convinced - for now at least - that capitalism really is both the historical and material condition for the possibility of multicultural, manipulable political identites, and so functions somewhere between "determination in the last instance" and mere logical/transcendental condition, i.e. capital generally lets anticapitalist antagonisms appear IFF it can coopt them.

I have a series of questions about this. First, what would it mean to be an historical and material condition? Does it mean that it's the main condition, the only condition worthy of the name, does it mean it lays the groundwork, or that it determines the results entirely? You get the gist here, I'm sure; I'm just trying to understand what it would mean for capitalism to be an historical and material condition, as opposed to say, a formation (a result of a confluence of events, discourses, logics, technics, etc.), or whatever else. It seems to me that any answer that treats capitalism as a condition in any prior, genetic sense, necessarily has a difficult time explaining particular instantiations of capitalism, say, between Japanese and American versions, or say even between Kerry and Bush in terms of economic policies (I'm thinking fiscal and, eventually, monetary policy differences). I'm opposed to this obviously, but it's just a different read of the ontological formation of society, so I'm not sure if it's useful to articulate that opposition. It might be, but I think I need to understand your thinking better.

Second, and this is where the confusion comes in, you speak of capitalism as a condition, and yet you then treat is as an agent, which seems to imply particular elite formations who control, like gatekeepers and keymasters, the possibility of alternate systems, discourses, or exchanges. In other words, the antagonism is permitted (by whom? how? how is it occluded or voided if not permitted?) if those who control the conditions/discourses/etc let it be articulated as such? Now I obviously disagree with this. Along with Derrida and Laclau, I think antagonisms are constitutive of the social and political, rather than something permitted by a preexisting political formation, but whatever my disagreement, I can't see how capitalism can be both condition and gatekeeper in the absence of some almost magical power, some mystical supernatural power, in which case, I would wonder why that sort of move, that mystification is beneficial?

Sorry for the delay in the response. Between end of the semester grading and exam writing, and the newborn, it's been a bit hurried around these parts.