jeudi 26 mars 2015

The laughter of the maid of Thrace applied to postmodern capitalism or how intellectual impotence becomes academic discourse

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



[1] Hans Blumemberg, op.cit, p. 23.
[2] Clément Rosset, Le Réel et son double, Paris, Gallimard, 1972.
[3] Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mains sales, Paris, 1948.
[4] Martin Heidegger, Parmenide, (Winter 1942-1943), L IV Gesamtausgabe.