The laughter of the maid of Thrace applied to
postmodern capitalism or how intellectual impotence becomes academic discourse
« Virtue is not precisely knowledge, even
if uncertainty is enough to act and to live »
in Hans Blumenberg, Das Lachen der Thrakerin, eine Urgeschichte der Theorie, 1987,
Suhrkamp Verlag.
Observing
my own intellectual life for more than half a century, observing the life of my
academic friends and colleagues, I conclude with sadness that we certainly read
much, we certainly understand less, we certainly wrote many articles and some
books, but we were powerless to engage in actions to commit any changes who
steered the policy of our different countries, engaging them towards a possible
path which would open emancipation of man out of necessity. This initial remark
reminds of and refers to a very old problem, as old as the birth of philosophy
which think how it works a relationship between theory and practice, be it a critical
theory.
According to
my observations and readings, I have not seen any real change in the historic
course of peoples under the guise of books, but when they are confronted with very
serious, better said, tragic events, in spite of the use of rhetorical theory
to justify a posteriori such a practical fight.
Major historical
changes are usually the outcome of plagues, wars or revolutions, or both
simultaneously: even if a war situation may at a times have been pacified by a compromise,
nevertheless we are still at war.
If I take naively
examples picked up from some major changes since the late eighteenth century,
what do I see?
1) The
beginning of the French Revolution was possible among the Parisian masses
because of many famines during the three previous years. The same for the 1792
declaration of war, "the country in danger," this choice due to
domestic political considerations, the imprisonment of the King and the
formation of the First coalition between Prussia, Russia and Austria against French
republic.
2) I’ll take
again a very famous example. Do you really believe that the October Revolution
in Russia is due to the awareness of the various masses in St. Petersburg after
they read Lenin, Marx and Plekhanov? This genuine reversal of power and socio-economic
referents are due primarily to hunger in the cities of St. Petersburg and
Moscow (cf. Marc Ferro), plus not only the war unbearableness supported by the
peasants who had made enormous sacrifices on the south-west front to beat the
Austro-Hungarian armies for example, but in the end, the succession of defeats which
seemed to deprive of any legitimation the sacred aura of the Tsar ...and last
but not least, the result of what Pierre Pascal called the fight for a
sacrificial Christianity (the Russian popular Christianity against injustice,
cf. Moshe Lewin).
3) Finally,
do you believe that the election of Hitler as Chancellor of the Weimar Republic
is due to the fact that a majority of Germans impoverished after the 1929
crisis had read Mein Kampf or due to the
social and economic situation of Germany that were on the verge of collapse, with
an unbearable sentiment of humiliation created by the conditions of the Treaty
of Versailles. It was due to the collapse after the war of the first Welfare
State among Western countries?
All these
banal quotations to remind you and myself that most of the humanities,
political philosophy, political sociology, political sciences more generally
remain on a theoretical Urgrund, the
atemporality of philosophical objects which is their transcendent quality. But « the
only criterion [to distinguish] between theory and « realism », the
most precise as such, is the difference between a finite or infinite conception
of time… »[1] The unrealism of political philosophy (and of all
the specialities which come from it) is precisely the idea that concepts are
not dying… for that only reason the work of Heidegger on the relations between Sein und Zeit is the beginning of an essential
deconstruction of what Clément Rosset named the philosophical illusion[2], the metaphysical, the
truth behind phenomena. Because when we deal with human political actions, appearance
is essence and reciprocally.
As Hegel
had sagaciously observed, philosophy or if you prefer critical analysis rises
at dusk when Athena's owl takes flight. This means that the interpretation always
comes after the action (except among primitive peoples when they seek to
discern among natural events premonitory signs which offer or not an
opportunity to engage the group in an action).
In politics
action is always a result of the application of various notions of power and
sovereignty (in the senss used by Carl Schmitt). So to understand in any political
circumstances the actions of historical actors we must understand what is the concrete reality all about ;
that is to say, what are the power relations at a certain point. Thus, the real
action with its effects is the only reality and not the one of pure intellectual
analysis built in university and academic seminars. But political action, even
if it refers to an ethical-political theory, is never possible, because the
political game is acting violently, and violence is, whatever the
justifications, a decision to make people suffer and die a violent death.
On the
other side, it is said that political action is the art of compromise, but the
compromise also means a possible war in the future: external or internal rebellions
around concepts such as race, religion, class, ideology of happiness, a war driven
toward the total "extermination of the enemy which is considered as a « negative challenge to humanity ».
But regardless of the type of war, the political actor is not a theoretician in
his short-terms goals, but someone looking to achieve them by all the means he
is able to manage. I do not know any policy that does not use all means
possible to achieve its ends, even criminal means (you can check that now in
Iraq, Syria, or Gaza).
So much so
that, the thought that dominate political actors is what could be named
appropriate time, kairos of Gorgias, virtú of Machiavelli. Political actors have
always dirty hands (cf. Sartre's play[3]). If I dare, this was
discovered naively by Plato going to Syracuse to establish an ideal government
according to his criteria with the dictator Dion. The Thracian servant had to
laugh a "Homeric" laughter. Academics (professors or research
fellows) in their office can calmly build ideal societies on the basis of a perfect
ethical ideal, contradictions cannot come from the logic of their argumentation
(which is always perfect), but from their factuality, because facts are not
perfect, they don’t fit within the logical structure of the system of concepts.
Facts are human facts, and--as you well know—nobody’s perfect. Moreover, the
Project for Perpetual Peace of Kant is probably the most unrealistic or surrealistic
work of Kant.
Policy analysis
and Policy interpretation as efficient praxis can only start from a thought
that does not include an ideal, but a kind of medium term, certainly not a compromise
without consistency, but the way to find a balance between opposing forces. Because
power is always the foundation or essence, the Urgrund, among all human societies, even among primitive societies
(e.g., the role of the Melanesian Big Man)
and very, very rare are the exceptions among the most primitive peoples. This
feature might be called the ontological level of social-political man, the zoon politikon, and it must be taken
into account in defining political action, or arta politica, like the art of what it is possible ... because as
soon as a political action is driven by an absolute goal whatsoever, religion,
race, class as the ultimate thought till the end of the world, then there is a total
negation of the Other: the one true religion of the only God or the Trinitarian
God, The Reich for a Thousand Years, the unsurpassable scientific horizon of
Soviet Communism. If ideals would be less glorious, perhaps societies would be more
liveable…
Limits of political action in postmodernity
Hegel once
predicted the advent and the fulfilment of the Weltgeist. Indeed this spirit of the world has been accomplished as
a general practice, but not in the sense of Hegel, but in the one Marx gave it in
his phenomenology of the economy--the spirit of the world is capital’s form in all
societies. In that one could say that the theoretical work of Marx, his
economic theoretical work (his phenomenology of the economy if one prefers) has
found confirmation in the practice of the last century or so. But none of his
political works, because none of the political regimes that claimed they were Marxist
has been truly Marxist, it was much more what an anthropologist could define as
a syncretism between archaic social forces and traditions, forms of socialization
engendered by capitalism and modern nationalism. According to Pierre Pascal and Berdyaev, the Russian
Revolution was more guided by the revolutionary piety of popular Christianity
than by any proletarian consciousness; the Chinese Revolution was mainly something
between a popular revolt and Chinese imperial nationalism, something between the
Boxer Rebellion and a peasant uprising; the Vietnamese revolution is
largely motivated by a long tradition of national independence fight against
all countries in its neighbourhood, because Vietnamese nationalism is rooted both
in the political culture of the elites and in that of the people, more specifically
in the North, etc. The Cuban Revolution, the Angolan movement, the Sandinistas,
Bolivarian socialism (Chavez version) are more or less national revolutions
with social justice expectations. Marxist
references came after the victory...
In their popular
foundations, all these movements are manifold reactions against the effects of colonial
or neo-colonial capitalism, and therefore they are scattered throughout the
world as capitalism is distributed worldwide. So the only historical subject
and seemingly unsurpassable ontological horizon is that of capitalism.
It is
precisely because the ontological horizon of capitalism is unsurpassable that we
are in front of a huge and unheard disaster. The desert grows, wrote both
Nietzsche and later Hannah Arendt. The desert is not only ecological but more essentially
is a spiritual desert, the lack of an ethic of responsibility among a majority
of politicians and among the intellectuals who are serving them. The total failure
of all political attempts to promote the Good and the Enlightenment is the
simplest and the best proof of that desertification. Today Byzantine debates on
climate changes and the hypocritical tears about the necessary decay of productivity
is a simulacrum as it is proposed by the journal MAUSS (Alain Caillé and Serge Latouche). Please try to talk of the decay
of production among the hungry people of the world; or try to produce a real
action and not a simple academic chat or gossip to change military budgets that
provide thousands of jobs in a world where unemployment is the way in which
capitalism manages the social fear of unemployment, and you will get many revolts...
Workers’ solidarity is an illusion already pointed out by Marx in some papers
published in the New York Daily Tribune.
In general
the essence or the ontological ground of revolt belongs to that against which
it rises. This essential remark was formulated by Heidegger in his book on
Parmenides. More precisely, he said: « any opposition which takes the form
of an anti is thought in the same direction as that against which it rises. »[4]
This is an insoluble
aporia, the trap of the disaster I am
speaking about, the aporia of all the revolutions which took place in the
modern world (not the number of deaths, because history, as Bernanos says, is a
large cemetery under the Moon!), it only reinforces the fulfilment of the
essence of capitalism, or if you prefer its Seiendes (the Wesen
of its singular position as to be-in-the-world-as-such). For the exponential
development characteristic of the second modernity (the industrial one), it can’t
be accomplished by itself, it needed and still needs inventive (sciences) and
productive (capital) energies. Now, our hypermodern society,
« postindustrial » and « posthistorical », where industrialisation
is totally submitted to financial power, the production of goods is actually
fulfilling and accomplishing itself in its own totality something that could be
called the Spirit of the global Techno-capital. As Adorno pointed out long ago,
even Culture is an important part of capitalist business and capitalist
propaganda (visual arts and movies)… Even in socialist countries it was already
pointed out. I found a very good example. Ceaușescu told director Lucian Pintilie in the 70’: if you want to make experimental
films which are not for the people, don’t ask the country for people’s money (i.e.,
state money), you must find money by yourself, and pay with your own financial
means. It was the same goal of an unspoken capitalistic goal with the urbanisation
of the Black Sea shore or the one of Lake Balaton when socialist countries
organised mass tourism not only for their citizens but for foreign tourists and
their hard currencies. All that business was a capitalist deal and all that
accomplishes the capital-form of the World,
which is the only real World.
This
aporetic fate of revolts or revolutions in the stage of modernity that tries to
improve the condition of those exploited put in front of us something like our own
contradictions. During the first modernity peoples were like children, naive
and full of great expectations and of an enthusiasm to fight (even till death)
for a better future. Now it’s over. Two World Wars which look like Weltbürgerkriege, the Gulag, Auschwitz, the
Amerindian Holocaust, the Indian genocide by starvation, colonial wars, Napalm
and especially the ‘Yellow Rain’ in Vietnam, the long, endless Palestinian-Israeli
war with Gaza’s total destruction, poor uranium ammunitions in the Middle East,
etc.. And, last but not least, the orchestrated
economic crisis and the rise of unemployment, have driven many European people
to a kind of fatalism : ‘No Future’ or better said, there is no future except
the same cult of the fetishism of commodities, everywhere in the world in the
new churches—shopping malls and supermarkets….
Naive or
corrupt intellectuals denounce as stupid and idiotic those citizens of Eastern
countries who regret the Communist era in spite of all its dysfunctions. But
one must be stupid not to see how the 1989 changes have impoverished masses of
citizens who are the misfits of transition. These people are the majority, the
99%.
On the
other hand neoliberalism agents have not stopped proclaiming that we must put
an end to the welfare state because it prevents the « harmonious
development of the general economy » due to the invisible hand of the
market! After more than thirty-five years of neoliberal practices we have been
able to see what are the socio-economic results in the EU, how economic decisions
based on austerity are those which created more poor citizens than ever since
the end of the Second World War. Certainly one can deeply regret the passivity
of people who have lost historical memory and for whom to challenge the future
is now meaningless, but we can blame intellectuals, those from the East who
have legitimized (by all means) the deployment of these destructive economic policies
for the working class, and those from the West who with the consent of trade unions
have accepted year after year to see the main victories of more than a century
of social struggles slowly abandoned.
In front we
have that landscape: the big postcomunist disaster (for the East and the West).
What is to be done? An old question, for sure.
No Conclusion
Some years
ago I wrote : what we have to do is contemplate the disaster. Because if
we don’t want to be polluted by the absence of morality of all real policy, because
if we want to remain with our hands clean, we shall remain in the sphere of
criticism.
We have no
control over the succession of events. We have to accept that and only leave
behind us a few traces of our times, trying to think and master our times if at
all possible, what I deeply doubt. Maybe someone among us, someone much more imaginative
than me will be able to give a sketch of the future (though we know it is
faceless).
During the
last years in Romania I read and listened to the young generation of academic Marxists
who propose to wait for the coming of objective conditions to engage ourselves
in militant actions. But the objective conditions of alienation and fierce
exploitation of people are still present for a long time, very present. What is
not present are the subjective conditions. Many people dream of consumption
event if they are starving. That is the new postmodern subjectivity which has
castrated people and when they are moving against the capitalist power it is the
horizon of consumption which drives their actions. So we understand with a more
practical example what Heidegger told us in more abstract formulations. After a
long life time of militant enthusiasm for a possible mutation of the times, now,
not very distant from the end of my life I say: there is no future. The Human
species is doomed. It is surprising, even for me, an agnostic, to retrieve the
words of the Bible, but I have no expectation of any Redemption, any Mercy, any
Divine Grace.
But what in
Plato’s analysis was valid for the astronomer (Thales, according to the Theaetetus), and what proved to be true
for the natural sciences, is not so for what belongs to the government of men, in
other words for arta politica. This
was and still is the triumph of the maid of Thrace who had referred to the
earthly reality as the place where the true gods have to be found, among them certainly
Ἄρης, the god of war. And
as you know, the war is still and always politics and policy.
In
retrospect, all our political theories invented in cabinets (I think for
exemple to Spinoza and his Tractatus
theologico-politicus), in an academic ivory tower, during
our scholarly seminars, our debates sometimes subsidized by our political enemies
(e.g. the National Endowment for Democracy, the Soros Foundation, the
Adenauer-Stiftung, the Ebert-Stiftung, and many others) shall appear in the
light of a splendid logical sun, but reality tells us that nihilism is both the
Urgrund and the surface of our daily life as a No Future which surely generates the
uncontrollable laughter of the maid of Thrace… We, critical intellectuals, we have
surely our hands clean, but if we look very cautiously around us and at what is
happening in real political life we have to admit that we have no hands at all.
Claude Karnoouh
24 March 2015
