R a d i c a
a journal of socialist
166
Editorial collective
Claudia Aradau, Matthew Charles,
David Cunningham, Howard Feather,
Peter Hallward, Esther Leslie, Stewart
Martin, Mark Neocleous, Peter Osborne,
Stella Sandford, Chris Wilbert
Contributors
Nichols Mendoza teaches in the School
of Culture and Communication, University
of Melbourne, and is founder of the KJF
Initiative, www.keepjournalismfree.org.
Finn Brunton (http://finnb.net) works on
digital media adaptation, modification and
misuse and issues of publicity, privacy
and anonymity. He will take up a post in the
School of Information at the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor, in the autumn.
Antonia Birnbaum teaches in the
Philosophy Detartment at the University
of Paris 8, Saint-Denis. Her latest book is
Bonjour Justice Walter Benjamin: Le dtour
grec (Payot, 2009).
Mathieu Potte-Bonneville is currently
prsident de lAssemble collgiale at the Matthew Charles........................................................................................... 41
Collge international de philosophie, Paris.
His books include Daprs Foucault (with
Philippe Artires, Les Prairies ordinaires,
2007) and Foucault (Ellipses, 2009).
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 image: Marx Lounge, Liverpool, 2010
Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd.
www.radicalphilosophy.com
Radical Philosophy Ltd
l P h i l o s o p h y
and feminist philosophy
CONTENTS march/april 2011
Commentary
A Tale of Two Worlds: Apocalypse, 4Chan, WikiLeaks and the Silent
Protocol Wars
Nicols Mendoza............................................................................................. 2
Keyspace: WikiLeaks and the Assange Papers
Finn Brunton.................................................................................................... 8
articles
Between Sharing and Antagonism: The Invention of Communism
in the Early Marx
Antonia Birnbaum......................................................................................... 21
Risked Democracy: Foucault, Castoriadis and the Greeks
Mathieu Potte-Bonneville............................................................................. 29
reviews
Hans Radder, ed., The Commodification of Academic Research: Science and the
Modern University
Eeva Berglund ............................................................................................... 39
Martha C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities
Susan Hekman, The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures
Alessandra Tanesini....................................................................................... 44
Dawne McCance, Derrida on Religion: Thinker of Difference
Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the
Opening of Awe
Steven Shakespeare, Derrida and Theology
Sas Mays........................................................................................................ 46
Nick Couldry, Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics after Neoliberalism
Mark Fisher.................................................................................................... 49
Randall Williams, The Divided World: Human Rights and Its Violence
Anne McNevin............................................................................................... 51
Andrew Hoskins and Ben OLoughlin, War and Media: The Emergence of
Diffused War
Joyce Goggin................................................................................................. 53
Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory
ine Kelly....................................................................................................... 54
CAMPAIGNS: AGAINST EDUCATION CUTS
Pow!
Nina Power..................................................................................................... 56
Occupations and Their Limits
Escalate.......................................................................................................... 58
Smells Like Teen Spirit
Emily Clifton ................................................................................................. 60
Obituary
Captain Beefheart, Vorticist Artist (19412010)
Ben Watson ................................................................................................... 62
Commentary

A tale of two worlds

Apocalypse, 4Chan, WikiLeaks and the
silent protocol wars
Nicols Mendoza

T
here is something eerie about the WikiLeaks logo. It works as a sort of graphic
manifesto, an image of dense political content stating a notion of ample con-
sequences. A cosmic sandglass encloses a duplicated globe seen from an angle
that puts Iraqi territory at the centre. Inside this device the upper and darker planet is
exchanged, drip by drip, for a new one. The power of the image lies in the sense of
inexorability it conveys, alluding to earthly absolutes like the flow of time and the force
of gravity. The WikiLeaks symbol can be read as a bullish threat that grants the upper
world no room for hope. The logo narrates a gradual apocalypse, and by articulating
this process of transformation through the image of the leak, WikiLeaks defines itself
as the critical agent in the becoming of a new world.
What has become manifest since late November 2010, with the release of what is
now known as The US Embassy Cables, is that the narrative implicit in the WikiLeaks
logo, that of a world disjunct, not only fits the WikiLeaks saga but describes a greater
struggle of global power, held diffusely by transnational corporations and enforced by
governments around the world. This power is under attack by a relatively new actor that
can be called, for now, the autonomous network.
The conditions that allow the network to challenge the power of governments and
corporations can be traced to the origin of the Internet and the Cold War zeitgeist that
made the network we know possible. It was only because Cold War strategists had to
narrate to themselves the unfolding of what was known as the worst-case scenario
(the moment after a thermonuclear apocalypse was under way) that a computer network
with the characteristics of the Internet was implemented. The idea of the apocalypse
was so extraordinary that it allowed for the radical thinking that resulted in the TCP/IP
computer protocol suite, a resilient network protocol that makes the end user of the
network its primary agent. The design philosophy of the Internet protocols represents
a clean break from the epistemes and continuums that had historically informed the
evolution of Western power, as traced by Foucault and Deleuze from sovereign societies
to disciplinary societies to societies of control.
The main goal of the early Internet was to provide a survivor with a versatile tool
that could make him an empowered agent in an utterly hostile post-apocalyptic world.
The TCP/IP protocol suite structures the network around three exceptional character-
istics: (1) it essentially bypasses the need for central structures, establishing a network
based on the principle of end-to-end (or peer-to-peer) communication; (2) it provides
maximum resilience of communication in a hostile environment through the model of
distribution; and (3) it is neutral to the information being distributed. These characteris-
tics at the protocol level defined the network as, literally, out of control.

2 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 )
 The early Internet was so accidental, it also was free and open in this sense [as
a commons],1 Steve Wozniak says. To produce a commons is indeed an accident
for Empire. Dismissed as a never-meant-for-the-masses autonomous zone, by and for
the military and academia, it was allowed to evolve out of control. But this accident
that happened because of daydreaming an extreme future never stopped happen-
ing. It evolved. At some point it gained an accessible graphic interface, and spilled
all over the globe. By then it was too late to disarm what is now the increasingly
contentious coexistence of two worlds, as the WikiLeaks logo registers. One world
is a pre-apocalyptic capitalistic society of individualism, profit and control; the other
a post-apocalyptic community of self-regulating collaborative survivors. The conflict
arises from an essential paradox: because the web exists, both worlds need it in order to
prevail over the other.
The cyber war announced so spectacularly (in the Debordian sense) in the days fol-
lowing WikiLeaks US Embassy Cables release is not really about the DDoS, denial of
service attacks that barely obstructed access to the MasterCard website for a few hours.
If anything, the ephemerality of the disturbance leaves the sensation that Anonymous,
the group that launched it, is anything but a structural threat. What journalists around
the world have failed to narrate is the tale of a network that increasingly challenges,
bypasses and outcompetes the global corporate-government complex.2 A struggle about
the obsolescence of the very idea of the nation-state, and an almost unanimous coalition
of governments, led by the USA, fighting furiously to regain control by exerting legal,
financial, symbolic and, perhaps most concerning, technical violence on their adversary.
The reasons for this failure of journalism are structural. As Bourdieu noted, journalism
is a weakly autonomous field. In Foucaults terms, its governmentality sets meaningful
structural criticism beyond what is thinkable. The legacy of Julian Assange, founder of
WikiLeaks, is in this sense (so far) to replace the journalistic structures that curated the
critical figure of the whistleblower with the autonomous network, thus redefining not
journalism but what journalism perceives as newsworthy reality.

Rogue episteme
Approaching the history of the Internet through the Cold War
zeitgeist helps us see a sort of Schumpeterian quality in the network.
Essentially a destructive entity that, like the Terminator, comes
from the future (the imagined end of civilization), it is loose in an
arcane environment (the present) that fights back. Perhaps the fact
that Anonymous defines itself using tone and vocabulary that closely
resemble the description of the Terminator in Camerons 1983 film is
not a coincidence but a sign of the epistemic coincidence of two post-
apocalyptic entities.

Your feelings mean nothing to us. We have no culture, we have no laws,

written or otherwise. We do not sleep, we do not eat and we do not
feel remorse. We will tear you apart from outside and in, we have all the
time in the world. (extract from entry on Anonymous in the Encyclopedia
Dramatica)
Listen. Understand. That Terminator is out there. It cant be reasoned with,
it cant be bargained with it doesnt feel pity of remorse or fear and it
absolutely will not stop. Ever. Until you are dead. (James Cameron, director,
The Terminator)

Network-native structures and their resulting communities are

fuelled by hybrid motivations often alien to the material struggles seen
by Marxism to lie behind the motion of history. In his book Hacking
Capitalism Johan Sderberg proposes the notion of play struggle as

3
opposed to class struggle as the force that drives hackers as well as diverse realms of
the network society.

Similar to labour in that it is a productive engagement with the world, play differs in that it
is freely chosen and marked by a high degree of self-determination among the players. At its
heart, the politics of play struggle consist in the distance it places between doing and the
wage relation. Play is a showcase of how labour self-organizes its constituent power outside
the confines of market exchanges.3

Sderberg proposes that play is labour within an exchange system external to the
autocratic determinations of materialism. With the notion of play struggle we can
understand Anonymous and its instant response in the wake of the WikiLeaks attack.
Anonymous emerged spontaneously from 4Chan.org, which has a curious set of fea-
tures: (a) anonymity, (b) lack of memory (as opposed to cloud computing, no record
is kept in its servers but rather in the collective memory sedimented in the minds and
hard drives of its users), (c) emphasis on visual conversation (through the intervention
of images), and (d) a non-censorship policy that is only afraid of the police (as opposed
to the market). Therefore, Play: these characteristics are all instrumental to placing in
4Chan an insurmountable distance between doing and the wage relation. Its unique
policy, its origin, ownership and ethos, and its substantial and highly engaged commu-
nity make 4Chan the Internets most prolific semiotic laboratory.
It is telling that the software used to perform the denial of service attacks on
MasterCard, PayPal and Amazon is a relatively simple program called LOIC, for Low
Orbit Ion Cannon, a fictional weapon in the Command & Conquer series of video
games.4 Play drives Anonymous. It is the glue that ultimately holds it together, and the
threat of state/corporate control triggers its reaction. Serious play is at the core of the
rogue episteme. When play follows only its own logic it necessarily escapes commod-
ification. To play seriously is often counterplay, 5 to set the system itself as the locus of
play (even 4Chan has been victim, because it is funny, of its own DDoS attacks). Remix
of pop culture imagery in 4Chan can be understood as a case of inverted absorption.
Instead of commodification by the mainstream, it is 4Chan which exploits the main-
stream deconstructing its text, inverting and problematizing its original intentions in a
way that exceeds fan culture. 4Chan.org is a primary node in the fundamental clash of
the centre and the indigestible fringe of contemporary digital culture.
Anonymous is one of countless iterations of a vibrant digital fringe, an unprece-
dented source of cultural production situated outside of the regular conducts: those
regulated by governments and exploited by corporations in order to standardize identity
and stimulate consumption. What is unprecedented is not only the method but also the
subject of production. The method and subject are one: the de-localized collaborating
community. Anonymous is an open provocation from the rogue episteme of the col-
laborating community. Not only incomprehensible to the corporate episteme, more
importantly it is repressed, excluded and policed; handbook procedure on how to deal
with cultural production that cannot be absorbed into corporate imagery.
For the average individual, visiting 4Chan, and particularly its main forum called
simply /b/, can be either repulsive or disappointing. Its content is distasteful to
sensibilities constructed by the twentieth centurys mammoths of consumption-driven
mass media, and their resulting version of reality. But we cannot fully understand the
true state of contemporary culture, and the future of cultural production (that scary
euphemism), if we do not understand 4Chan. Yet 4Chan does not feel any need to be
easily understood. Its autonomous project requires a stage of disorientation because
its method is continuously to produce and evolve a language of its own. After all, how
can autonomy be claimed while using the language of the oppressors? How can a new
epistemological commons come to be if not by the crafting of an alternative language?

4
 Early impressionist paintings were abhorred as well: they were thought to be an
insult to the high art of painting because they were being read through the very
categories that were being subverted. The digital fringe assists in solving the problem
of disorientation by establishing a parallel knowledge apparatus, analogous to the one
that currently dictates reality: knowledge regarding this branching episteme of the
anonymous collective is articulated, while still using its own terms in Encyclopedia
Dramatica, at www.encyclopediadramatica.com. These two sites constitute a robust
strategic node in the unwritten project of autonomous Internet aesthetics as a commons,
or, as it is often called, the hivemind, an entity composed of myriad human and non-
human actors that fosters what Ive called above the rogue episteme.
Perhaps 4Chan is not exactly what Sean Cubitt had in mind when interrogating
digital aesthetics, but it is certainly a model that seems to holds its ground against the
insidious blandness of the corporate site:

Digital aesthetics needs both to come up with something far more interesting than corporate
sites, and to act critically to point up their insidious blandness and global ambitions. Sub
version of the dominant is inadequate. In its place, it is essential to imagine a work without
coherence, without completion and without autonomy. Such a work, however, must also be
able to take on the scale of the cyborg culture, a scale beyond the individual, and outside the
realm of the hyperindividuated subject. By the same token, aesthetics must move beyond the
organic unity of the art object and embrace the social process of making.6

Anonymous and 4Chan currently play a strategic and necessary role in the struggle:
the construction of an alternative episteme based on the commons of play rather than
on consumption and commodities. Yet their political impact in the specific case of the
WikiLeaks saga has been blown out of proportion. Mainstream journalism focused
on the ultimately symbolic skirmishes starred by Anonymous, hyping the spectacular
narrative of a cyberwar fought by an otherized and widely misunderstood cultural
movement that cannot really be called hacktivist.
Although the idea of two parallel worlds sets the stage, it is really the over
simplification of a fuzzy, ambiguous and entangled field. Even the idea of the leak itself
establishes a relationship, a flow that connects the two worlds.

5
Beings in a digital nexus
Julian Assange defines himself as a being in nexus: Im an activist, journalist, a software
programmer and expert in cryptography, specializing in systems designed to protect the
defenders of human rights.7 It is a common mistake to think that 4Chans imagery is
contained and endlessly reconfigured exclusively inside the 4Chan node or any of the other
peripheral cultural nodes of which 4Chan is merely the paradigm. The vapours of the
4Chan cauldron float freely through the web, through other media, and often into physical
reality. As meaning flows towards the mainstream through diverse curatorial platforms,
the abnormal is filtrated, sanitized and relegated to the appropriate realms, which are
ultimately defined in function to the semiotic needs of the corporate world. Fully mapping
or theorizing these flows is beyond this article, but two major points should be noted.
First, this process of flow is also transformative: at the same time as some of the
content is discarded (as it is curated) by realms that are less daring, more commercial,
or more family oriented, these very realms find themselves dealing anyway with a new
language which is in a gradual process of adoption, and which subtly transforms them.
Second, a taxonomy of autonomy is necessary to theorize these secondary realms.
While 4Chan is outside of the corporate cultural production, it is at the centre of a
hybrid mediascape that features different degrees of epistemic autonomy. These tax-
onomies encompass the media as a global phenomenon and go all the way to the most
corporate environments of mass media, of which mainstream reporting of Anonymous
is just another example. The flow and the destiny of fringe cultural inventions are
determined by vectors inherent to the media, and these vectors need to be understood
through a taxonomy that looks closely at their structural elements and the role they play
in enabling or constraining autonomy.
Cubitt has noted the ideological construct hiding in the catchphrase cloud comput-
ing, a term that obscures the fact that the cloud is really made of thousands of dense
cargo containers filled with computing equipment that consumes more energy than the
airline industry. Cyberspace, outside the mind of the user, does not exist. Therefore, the
operation is to consider and analyse cyberspace as a semiotic construct. Perhaps the
more meaningful notion here is the plasticity of the semiotic ethos of cyberspace: how
its inhabitants adopt the social norm of each specific virtual space while at the same
time exploring its boundaries. If practices of content creation are substantially different
from 4Chan to Facebook, it is not, as one tends to imagine, because the individuals
are different but because the interface and the overall environment are different, and
impose a determined set of values on its members/users. Individuals accordingly adjust
their digital selves. All the aspects that result in the actual interface, whether evident
or not, that constitute an online collective collaboration (like website origin, ownership,
interface, aesthetic, demographics, moderation, business model, hardware, etc.) play an
equally significant role in determining the ideas that will inhabit its space as well as the
turbulences through which they will evolve.
The notion of an entangled media, where the autonomous and the corporate, the
fringe and the mainstream, the centralized and the distributed seem engaged in a
shapeless mesh of cultural production, ceases to be contradictory by understanding
the simple reality that they are all the cultural objects of the same individuals.
Media channels multiply faster than demographic segments and interest orienta-
tions. The real scenario is that the Anonymous hacktivist is also a nice Facebook
user, has a few favourite television shows, participates frequently on websites like
Slashdot, Digg or Reddit, votes, and so on. All this is done while plastically adjust-
ing his (it is usually a he) very cultural identity according to the context. Existing
in a multidimensional media nexus, he does (we all do) a sort of hyperspatial
jumping to parallel existences, constantly choosing to participate in different com-
munities and different realms.

6
Coup de net
There is no remote corner of the Internet not dependent on protocols, Laura DeNardis
insists.8 What DeNardis stresses is the ultimate preponderance of the technical over the
social protocol. Lessig inaugurated this line of thinking when he famously stated Code
is Law. But protocol runs deeper than software: if code is law then protocol is the
constitution. This is why, as long as attention is diverted towards anything spectacular
(like tactical and superficial DDoS attacks), governments can start the demolition of the
protocols that grant the possibility of autonomy to the network. In reaction to the release
of the US Embassy Cables, the UN called for the creation of a group that would end the
current multi-stakeholder nature of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to give the last
word on Internet control to the governments of the world. The almost illegible resolution
calls for the UN

to convene open and inclusive consultations involving all Member States and all other stake-
holders with a view to assisting the process towards enhanced cooperation in order to enable
Governments on an equal footing to carry out their roles and responsibilities in respect of
international public policy issues pertaining to the Internet but not of the day-to-day techni-
cal and operational matters that do not impact upon those issues.9

I have emphasized the fragments where the meaning hides: to enable Governments to
carry out their roles and responsibilities is of course a nice way to talk about enabling
the surveillance, censorship and control that the current protocols still make porous.
After Hillary Clinton stated that the leaks are an attack on the international com-
munity, the move to gain control of the IGF is unsurprising. It fits the conflict outlined
by the WikiLeaks logo. Even if the motion is defeated, which is currently possible, a
card has been shown. More moves of this nature, on all possible fronts, will follow until
the coup de net is complete. The IGF episode matches Douglas Rushkoffs analysis of
the ongoing net neutrality debate: The moment the net neutrality debate began was the
moment the net neutrality debate was lost. [the Internet] will never truly level the playing
fields of commerce, politics, and culture. And if it looks like that does stand a chance of hap-
pening, the Internet will be adjusted to prevent it.10 Protocols are the defining battlefield in
the struggle between governments and corporations and the autonomous network. The
UNs attempt to take over the IGF is a true act of cyberwar with the strategic warfare
plan of hacking the Internet to finally eradicate its aspirations for autonomy.
The notion of protocol describes not only computer protocols, but also social, cul-
tural and political conventions that inform the behaviour of societies. In an ambivalent
world that is simultaneously exploring new territories of freedom and being subjected to
heightened measures of control, the gradual reclamation of the commons is the crucial
operation. Scholars like Michel Bauwens and David Bollier articulate how the Internet
fosters processes of decommodification that effectively challenge capitalism. Rather
than being the result of a violent class struggle, the end of capitalist hegemony might
be the result of a slow Internet-enabled process of migration, a dripping (to abuse once
more the WikiLeaks logo) towards societies that organize around commons.
What is interesting is that WikiLeaks, after all, is still up. Someone still hosts it
(poetically, a hosting company located in a Cold War era anti-nuclear bunker), and
because someone still hosts it, someone still processes their fund-raising, so that allows
whistleblowers to keep on leaking information, and so forth. WikiLeaks is an example
of how a rogue can still thrive against the will of Empire, supported by an emerging
ecology of more autonomous actors. MasterCard, PayPal and Amazon dont need to be
shut, just bypassed or outcompeted. As the autonomous ecology evolves, it allows for
more complexity. This is where the war stands to be won: in the building of autono-
mous structures of all sorts (structures that bypass and outcompete existing ones) on top
of other new structures until the entire old world is unnecessary.

7
Notes
1. www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/steve-wozniak-to-the-fcc-keep-the-internet-
free/68294/.
2. Except for John Naughton in the Guardian: the first really sustained confrontation between
the established order and the culture of the internet. There have been skirmishes before,
but this is the real thing. See www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/dec/06/
western-democracies-must-live-with-leaks.
3. Johan Sderberg, Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Movement,
Routledge, London, 2007; emphasis added.
4. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOIC.
5. Thomas Apperley, Play and Counterplay from the Situated to the Global, Institute of Network
Cultures, Amsterdam, 2010.
6. Sean Cubitt, Digital Aesthetics, Theory, Culture & Society, SAGE, London, 1998, p. 142.
7. Le Mondes article on Julian Assange as Man of the Year 2010: www.lemonde.fr/documents-wiki
leaks/article/2010/12/24/julian-assange-homme-de-l-annee-pour-le-monde_1456426_1446239.html.
8. Laura DeNardis, Protocol Politics: The Globalization of Internet Governance, MIT Press, Cam-
bridge MA, 2009.
9. See www.isoc.org and www.unpan.org.
10. Douglas Rushkoff, The Next Net, 2011, www.shareable.net/blog/the-next-net.

Keyspace
WikiLeaks and the Assange papers

Finn Brunton

Y
ears ago, Julian Assange considered solutions for an unusual problem, the
kind of thing cryptographers discuss: how can you make sure a message only
becomes readable at a certain time, not before, such that no human frailty or
mechanical error interferes with the schedule? He came up with three answers, which
display his knack for odd lateral thinking, an unremarked gift that turns up throughout
his work. One solution: encrypt the message, and then broadcast the key to the code out
into space, to distant astral bodies, as he puts it, and wait for it to be bounced back.
You can publicize the body, the distance, the coordinates; the satellite dishes of Earth
will be oriented at that hour of that day to pick up the bounce and your message will
be read. Another solution is quite baroque, with space probes passing a key stream
between them, using space as the storage medium, before sending decrypts back to
Earth. The last is by far the most elegant solution, the most difficult to realize, and in
some ways the cruellest. If you can predict the future cost/CPU speed then you can
create a problem which cant be solved with current technology at a reasonable price.
The future isnt predictable enough to do this over the longer term.1 You can embed
the solution in the future, sealed against every human force but the curve of increasing
processing power the present can only build, and speculate.
What Assange and his colleagues have built, what WikiLeaks embodies, is a kind
of photographic negative of this last project: current technology has created a set of
profound opportunities and problems for the existing order waiting for the arrival
of human arrangements capable of making use of them. WikiLeaks is a preliminary

8 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 )
solution, an initial sketch of a world in which the potential within these technologies
has been unlocked. In cryptography, keyspace is the realm of possible solutions for the
keys to an encrypted message. If we can construe the problem, the question, of how we
are to use these machines and algorithms we have built, WikiLeaks is a narrowing of
the keyspace, clarifying some borders, edges and areas of possibility.
It is far from the only solution. WikiLeaks is more a model than it is some irreplace-
able object. There are already diverging approaches. Birgitta Jnsdttir, who was one
of the crucial facilitators of the release of the Collateral Murder video, has expressed
concern with the emphasis on megaleaks: leaking as a high-visibility international
media event, as opposed to the targeted release of information to relevant activist
campaigns and organizations best positioned to make use of it.2 A related critique has
lead to OpenLeaks, run by an ex-WikiLeaker, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, which separates
the submission of documents from their publication, providing secure drop boxes for
anonymous submissions to websites, so any group can have their own channel for
leaking. Country- and region-specific WikiLeaks-inspired organizations are proliferat-
ing: IndoLeaks (for Indonesia), BrusselsLeaks (the EU), Rospil (Russia), ThaiLeaks
(Thailand), BalkanLeaks (the Balkans generally), PinoyLeaks (the Philippines with
the spectacular slogan Those who engage in Monkey Business should beware of the
Monkey-Eating Eagle), PirateLeaks (the Czech Republic), TuniLeaks (Tunisia).
The copying and reinvention of the *Leaks structure (to use an asterisk as program-
mers do with *nix for any flavour of operating system similar to Unix) will be far
more significant than any specific disclosure on the part of WikiLeaks itself though
for now the latter has the benefit of a core team of highly skilled programmers and
administrators, working relationships with major publication outlets and a few trust-
worthy ISPs and governments, an articulate public face, and a number of unexpected
allies, like the roving volunteer band of activists and troublemakers that constitutes
Anonymous. WikiLeaks is a single organization, with a number of visible flaws, and
more undoubtedly apparent to insiders, but encrypted drop boxes and distributed digital
publishing are powerful and established technologies only now beginning to find the
extent of their purpose. (It will be interesting to see if the local/national model in
*Leaks projects so far is supplemented by more domain-specific groups devoted to
leaks concerning banks and the financial industry, universities, pharmaceuticals, or
agribusiness, for example.) WikiLeaks is not the last word but the first, and it demands
analysis as such.
Similarly, Assange is not the sum of the *Leaks project there is deep concern
within the ranks of WikiLeaks about his leadership, and indeed concern about the role
of leaders generally in such an organization but he remains a vital figure for under-
standing the political role and the possibilities embedded in the current technological
infrastructure. In his writings, which include a blog, papers and drafts of papers, a book
for which he did much of the research, and postings to various mailing lists (primarily
concerned with cryptography), we can find a set of ideas to illuminate the present event
of WikiLeaks: the application of computational thinking to politics, a sustained consid-
eration of the relationship between secrecy and publicity, a strategy for automatically
rewarding open organizations relative to closed, and, perhaps most surprisingly, a philo-
sophical engagement with logic and phenomenology that becomes a model for a politics
that compensates technologically for human cognitive deficits. To understand the trajec-
tory of these ideas, we must also understand the culture and the ethics of hackers and
cryptographers in which they were nurtured a culture that prizes elegant solutions to
complex problems, transparency for organizations and privacy for individuals, and the
free circulation of knowledge, all of which we find embedded in WikiLeaks.
This article was written at two speeds: the slow pace of reading and reflection
about that slowness, more in a moment and the velocity of the urgent and exigent

9
problems of the present situation. For the latter, this articles conclusion includes
problems to be resolved and steps for immediate action if we are to sustain the
techno-political future of which WikiLeaks has been the preliminary stroke. For the
former, that slowness, what the moment demands of us here, in the pages of Radical
Philosophy, is not more speculation as to Assanges character or the inner workings of
the organization, nor further reminders of the revelations (or their lack) in the cables,
nor more political oratory. Those things are all being done elsewhere, in volume and at
length, by people and institutions on all sides and duplication of effort is antithetical
to the hacker ethos whose mindset we are seeking to understand. What a philosophical
space is in a unique position to provide is interruption, contemplation and slowness. In
the midst of the global 24-hour pulse of news and analysis, we can pause, to compre-
hend WikiLeaks as a historically and technologically embedded event, a gathering of
many forces that we can draw apart. We have an opportunity to be true to the visible
and the invisible, as Assange has said of his own work on the history of hacking,
examining both present forms and the underlying fields of force that shaped them.3

How long have you got?

The conversation of cryptography, Assanges milieu, often comes back to cosmic scales
of time. Long strings of numbers are always present; sometimes these are hashes or
public keys, but often they are years, the inconceivably long spans it would take to
crack a particular code by crude means. The immediate business of crypto so often
protecting yesterdays secrets or todays mail exists in the shadow of epochs and
kalpas of potential computing time. So it is with insurance.aes256, the 1.4 gigabyte
encrypted file posted to the WikiLeaks page for the Afghan War Diaries in late July
of 2010. Insurance: it is, presumably, meant as a dead mans switch, in the event of
something truly dire happening to the organization or its leader. After a certain number
of days without logging in to a system or responding to an automated ping, the key will
be made available (sent, automatically, to large groups of reporters and sympathizers,
posted to blogs and Twitter, and so on). There are few more
intensely contemporary digital objects than this opaque file:
an unreadable document that is the focus of intense public
scrutiny, the intersection of publicity and secrecy indeed, a
public secret if ever there was one, an informational threat
turned into a distributed protection scheme, made available to
all, first by download and then shared on peer-to-peer networks,
accumulating interpretations, and containing what? Clear-
and-present-danger information, Top Secret rather than merely
classified, a scorched-earth response to damage? Or is it empty,
just noise, a bluff a contemporary version of the apocryphal
telegram, suggestive but content-free (All is discovered; flee
at once) with which Arthur Conan Doyle claimed he could
Kircher, Ars Combinatoria, 1669

send any pillar of society rushing out into the night without
even a change of clothes? Some in the crypto world see it as a
challenge to the National Security Agency to reveal that it has
known how to crack the Advanced Encryption Standard (the
.aes) all along since why would they approve of an encryp-
tion method to which they didnt have a back door?
All of this speculation plays out in the immediate foreground of a timeline that
stretches beyond the end of the universe. The 256 in .aes256 means that decrypting
the file requires a key 256 bits long. To guess this key by trying every possible combi-
nation, a brute-force attack, means searching through a vast keyspace. Every popular
discussion of cryptography involves a few back-of-the-envelope Fermi estimates with

10
the inevitable conclusion: if we turned all the computing power on Earth to the problem
of decrypting insurance.aes256, accounting for the steady increase in processing
capacity every microchip coming out of Intel dropped into another machine to enlist
immediately into the work it would still take longer than the life of the solar system,
the galaxy, the universe, before we would get anywhere. The presence of this cosmic
length is salutary, offering an opportunity to slow down, to read these events in light of
the past, to contemplate.
Nietzsche, no stranger to time-delay
problems, writing as he often did for
readers foreordained, passport-holders
from Hyperborea with new ears for
new music, notes the highest virtue
available to the aristocracy slowness,
the slow glance, to take time, to
become still, to become slow.4 From
this comes philosophys strength to
consider an event like WikiLeaks (we
could speak as well of ieks insistence that we wait in the face of immediate crisis,
that we seize time to think). The brute-force strategy on .aes256-encrypted files invites
us to think of a history before and after our present political and technological forms.
To crack the key by force would open the insurance file long after the continents had
gathered again, the Earth fallen into the atmosphere of the dying sun, and the sun itself
collapsed to an extremely dense and faintly luminous white dwarf. Amidst all the din
of news and politics we can take some small part of the geological calm inherent in a
huge keyspace, and think, slowly and in long perspective, about what is happening now
starting with the utopian imaginary of digital disclosure.
I cant even read my own notes without wondering if Im trying to send myself a
secret message while doing everything possible not to be deciphered by myself, as one
of the cryptanalysts says in Edmundo Paz Soldns Turings Delirium, a novel Assange
cited on his now-defunct blog in 2006. 5 Soldns novel, a political thriller devoted to
the culture of hackers and cryptographers, plays out the struggle between the Black
Chamber, an NSA-like gathering of cryptographers devoted to securing the secrets and
information-gathering capacity of the state (and the transnational corporations with
which it is partnered in the privatization of the countrys utilities), and the loose team
of dissident hackers who release hidden documents and engage in denial-of-service
attacks. (In a beautiful touch which feels thoroughly in keeping with our moment
of Berlusconi, Murdoch, and Roger Ailes of Fox News, the fatuous state-sponsored
news is delivered on television by a Philip K. Dickian virtual avatar, Lana Nova, who
has just been given an upgrade and now has twice the number of her original facial
expressions.6 Any real understanding of the situation in Soldns setting of Ro Fugitivo
belongs to those who can attend to the materials online.) The dissidents, led by a gifted
hacker whose assumed identity, Kandinsky, becomes a flexible name another can
assume to die in his place, are potent examples of the image of the young inventive
programmer snatching secrets from the grip of those in power. But we can go further
back for our icons of the present.
This has been an unauthorized cybernetic announcement, concludes the note on
the package in John Brunners 1971 The Shockwave Rider, a science-fiction novel
whose depiction of data liberation provides an instructive contrast to the existing reality
and theories underlying WikiLeaks. The main character another in the long line of
supremely gifted fictional hackers with restlessly fluid identities has gathered every
instance of suppressed knowledge in his future United States and seamlessly inter-
polated it into everyday life, a one-step transition into an entirely transparent digital

11
society. Financial fraud, featherbedding and an imminent bankruptcy appear in the
companys annual report; an explicit breakdown of item-by-item spending in the back-
tax demand; every health violation on the ingredients list of the can, and known present
carcinogens on the box of cosmetics (and the cost of the out-of-court settlements): This
is a cybernetic datum derived from records not intended for publication, say many of
the notes. The protagonist who has launched this scheme says it simply: As of today,
whatever you want to know, provided its in the data-net, you can now know. In other
words, there are no more secrets.7
The project is a fantasy of rational action based on perfect knowledge a subject at
the heart of Assanges writings. It is also a fantasy of data delivered appropriately, made
into knowledge through automatic processes. The product of the protagonists surveil-
lance worm program isnt some accumulation of raw data, hundreds of gigabytes of
text exports, SQL dumps, KML and CSV files: it arrives, in Brunners fictional vision,
assembled and packaged as it would be by a muckraking journalist and posed in stri-
dent terms of bribery, propaganda, environmental degradation, human-rights abuses, and
so on, neatly attached to the relevant area of public life.8 Ask a question, and the system
delivers you a cogent and polemical answer, outlining clear cases of malfeasance and
atrocity no ambiguous and convoluted financial instruments here, no structures that
are disproportionately beneficial to some, no layers of complicity, but straightforward
crimes with obvious perpetrators. Its the data version of Cockaigne, where cheeses fall
from the sky and fish leap from the sea to the hungry peasants feet. The public reacts
appropriately, inquiring into every corner of diabolical mismanagement, and turning
their outrage to the construction of a new society for the greater good. (This takes the
form of an austere command economy whose logic springs from the detailed economic
data redacted and withheld from the populace. Its a strange amalgam of Allendes
pilot Cybersyn project and the guaranteed minimum income.) Therefore none shall
henceforth gain illicit advantage by reason of the fact that we together know more than
one of us can know, Brunner closes, one of the propositions of this new society of
permanent data transparency. The layers of fantasy present here that the secret data
will be immediately useful, that social ills are the result of distinct and specific crimes
whose perpetrators can be easily dealt with, that a cogent argument can be made to
which the populace will respond with appropriate and focused action are part of the
enormous frustration which drove Assange to action, to a nonfictional project in collec-
tive data disclosure.
This problem of logical speech and rational action runs through much of Assanges
non-cryptographic writing. He has described the goal of WikiLeaks as scientific
journalism read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is
based on9 with the evidence ever-present. He returns again and again in his writings
to problems of argument, evincing the disappointment of the logical reductionist, as
he characterized himself: I once thought that the Truth was a set comprised of all the
things that were true, and the big truth could be obtained by taking all its component
propositions and evaluating them until nothing remained.10 Argument is unavailing
when it displeases the listener, the axiom of transitivity is revoked, and illogic wins
the day. Why do people fail to act in their best interest? How can they condone the
crooked, the venal, the obviously false and the wrong-headed? Assange takes notes
throughout his blog on problems in cognition, psychology and epistemology: learned
idiocy, measurement problems in physics, emotional manipulation by advertising, the
social experience of gifted children, perceptual calibration. How to hack reality? How
to pierce the skin? How to find the spot on the wall where the illusion flickers and rip it
open?11 His anger at wilful misperception is intense:

And before this [desire for truth] to cast blessings on the profits and prophets of truth, on
the liberators and martyrs of truth, on the Voltaires, Galileos, and Principias of truth, on the

12
 Gutenburgs [sic], Marconis and Internets of truth, on those serial killers of delusion, those
brutal, driven and obsessed miners of reality, smashing, smashing, smashing every rotten
edifice until all is ruins and the seeds of the new.12

Minus the Internet, Marconi (a technologically conservative fascist, but let that pass)
and serial killers, this would not be out of place in a socialist pamphlet in the tradition
of Bakunin or, with the sentiment slightly toned down, the work of Marxist phil-
osopher of language and information visualization pioneer, Otto Neurath. It is this deep
disappointment in the failure of logical argument, of evidence, to spur righteous action,
that gives WikiLeaks its two-tier strategy which distinguishes it from the Shockwave
Rider fantasy.

You throttle it
A state is a certain relationship, as Assange quotes Gustav Landauer: an arrangement
of humans towards each other.13 The genius of the WikiLeaks model, in all its various
adoptions and adaptations, lies in the manipulation of this human arrangement from
two sides we can call them exoteric and esoteric. The exoteric model is the obvious
work of a data disclosure project like WikiLeaks: providing the public with knowledge
it would otherwise be denied. This carries a few strategic difficulties. First, the data
must be manipulated into a useful format and provided with an interpretive and presen-
tational layer for those who dont want to pore over a few hundred thousand text files,
or figure out what CSV means. This is the work of journalists, as in Cablegate, and
volunteer programmers and designers, as with diarydig.org (now relocated following
attacks to http://213.251.145.96/search/), and crowds of readers, as in the Reddit collec-
tive search through the 9/11 pager logs (We need to get this to Page 1, to increase the
number of people analyzing and reporting14).
Second, and far graver, is the rationalists complaint, the problem that makes the end of
Brunners novel such a painfully wishful thing to read: you can provide a public with the
information, you can give them scientific journalism, and they still wont do anything.
They will disregard your evidence, ignore the logic of your arguments, or persist, unsur-
prised, in acting as they always have. Perhaps they will, in fact, be reassured and heartened
by their governments willingness to disappear and torture alleged suspects, cook evidence
and cover up wrongdoing, and engage in secret drone strikes in Yemen. This is, to take a
locution from bug reports, a known problem, the internal threat to social action inertia,
willed ignorance, misrepresentation, distraction, the condition of witnessed, but seemingly
unanswerable injustices, to quote one of Assanges essays.15 The possibility of public inac-
tion provokes the second, esoteric element of the WikiLeaks strategy.
Assange has a very different public in mind as the esoteric audience for the
disclosures of WikiLeaks, or any WikiLeaks-like organization: those who already
know the secrets, those who created them. Over the course of two drafts (with dif-
ferent titles) of a document published in the last months of 2006, State and Terrorist
Conspiracies and Conspiracy as Governance, Assange outlined what is arguably the
primary purpose of a leaks-driven project, with scientific journalism being a positive
second-order effect.16 It builds on a mathematical discipline called graph theory and a
conspiratorial view of politics to produce a computational model of the capture of state
power. To be clear, Assange defines conspiracy quite broadly the actions and plans
of a political elite which are kept secret to avoid inducing resistance on the part of a
public: individual and collective will in one draft, the peoples will in another. These
conspiracies constitute the active political form, the primary planning methodology
of authoritarian regimes though an example of two closely balanced and broadly
conspiratorial power groupings, the Republican and Democratic parties of the United
States, suggests, again, that for Assanges purpose an authoritarian conspiracy is a
spacious category.

13
 Given this breadth, and the sheer diversity of
possible conspiracies in scale, means, goals and
contexts, is it possible to generalize and abstract
an anti-conspiratorial strategy? Assange turns to
graph theory, a branch of mathematics devoted to
the analysis of networks. Graph theory began with
the superlative mathematician Leonhard Euler, who
perceived within a party game about the bridges
of Knigsberg (can you cross each bridge once and
return to your starting point?) a number of points
and lines, nodes and paths. It provides a way to
extract abstract diagrams from the messy specifici-
ties of real-world networks. Imagine, Assange asks,
that we can describe a conspiracy in this abstract
fashion: all the participants are nodes, points on
the network, with lines of communication between
them along which information flows. The edges
of the conspiracy are defined by all those from
whom these secrets must be kept. The lines of com-
munication within the conspiracy can be of varying
weight, describing the amount of important information being passed along, and nodes
can be of higher or lower value depending on the weight and number of their connec-
tions to other nodes. This model allows Assange to bracket out the complexities of spe-
cific conspiracies, and produce an evaluative metric of total conspiratorial power the
power of the group to communicate and plan internally, that is, rather than its capacity
to effect change in the world: the ability of the conspiracy to think, act and adapt.17 (If
any curators want to produce a highly relevant retrospective in 2011, Marc Lombardis
Narrative Structure diagrams intricate hand-drawn maps of conspiratorial projects,
in the Assange sense are crying out for a show.)
Assange takes this model further: the conspiracy is a type of device for taking an
input, like reports, cables and intelligence, acting on it, and producing an output. A
conspiracy computes the next action of the conspiracy, in his words, and the total
conspiratorial power is the clock rate of this device, how fast it can advance to the
next step and react to new states of affairs.18 The traditional approach to dealing with
conspiracies has been a patient and particular one: documenting their workings, finding
the most significant nodes, and removing them from the graph that is, imprison-
ing or assassinating people. Ideally, analysing the graph would allow you to target
nodes whose removal might break a conspiracy into two separate and weaker units,
for example, or abruptly isolate many other nodes. Assange wants an abstract and
general strategy suited to his black box inputoutput model. What is the best way to
lower the total conspiratorial power of any conspiracy, whether its a political party, a
group of insider traders, a terrorist cell, a multinational corporation or a small gang of
bureaucrats?
You do this by leveraging the Internets capacity for anonymity of users and distribu-
tion of information. If anyone in the conspiracy leaks, and the information is disclosed
anonymously, everyone in the graph becomes suspect, if not for leaking then for negli-
gent security. You dont need to neutralize key nodes if they stop talking to each other,
or if their conversations are so restricted by the possibility of disclosure that their links
become far less important. You throttle it, which Assange means in the mechanical
sense: the fuel decreases, the speed slows.19 The total conspiratorial power is turned
down towards zero, the state where no one is talking to anyone else. The blood of the
conspiracy as creature may be thickened and slowed until it falls, stupefied; unable to

14
 sufficiently comprehend and control the forces in its environment.20 This is the esoteric
strategy, and its goal is a power split into fragments and so locked in purges, silence,
tactical internal denials and traceable lies that it is halt and lame, chewing on its own
tail. This is a key reason why the WikiLeaks group are not hackers, in the crude but
common sense of people penetrating secure systems to acquire information. To break
into a system and steal a document merely provokes an organization to improve its
security, and releasing the document is no guarantee of a positive social result. It is
vital that the materials are leaks because that will foment suspicion and paranoia among
the conspirators. The ideal application of the Assange model is a kind of panopticon
turned inside out, where the main guard tower is gone because any given prisoner
might be an informer.
Furthermore, such an approach places a differential burden on institutions: in a world
where leaking is a strategy of redress, more secretive (which, for Assange, is synony-
mous with unjust) organizations will be hit much harder than comparatively open
groups. In the blog post, from precisely four years ago today, that links to the PDF of
Conspiracy as Governance, he summarizes his argument for the future:

[I]n a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative
to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many
places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those
who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.21

It is this strategy that distinguishes something like WikiLeaks from yet another specu-
lative icon of network politics the engineer and cypherpunk Timothy Mays 1993
proof-of-concept BlackNet project, to which WikiLeaks has been somewhat mislead-
ingly compared.
BlackNet was an entirely anonymous information marketplace, built on untrace-
able digital cash, for people to transact anything that could be transmitted digitally
(corporate secrets, military secrets, credit data, medical data, banned religious or
other material, pornography, etc.).22 In the long run, the adoption of anonymous,
untraceable transactions would be an engine for Mays specific school of anarchism.
It would be a government-crushing machine the real choice is between a total state
and crypto anarchy, May asserted, at least as far as life informationally and life online
are concerned.23 WikiLeaks, in the long run, is meant as a way of filtering good/open
organizations from bad/secret ones, creating an inhospitable environment in which to
be secret, and thereby improving governance.
Assange is not the nihilistic wrecker-of-civili-
zation fantasized by the American right (who
seem to have at last found the Bond villain their
impoverished understanding of the world has led
them to look for). His work reflects an attitude
of intensely moral empiricism, empowered by a
programmers toolkit for abstraction and break-
ing big problems into smaller ones. The politics
of WikiLeaks is a cybernetic politics, with
Marc Lombardi, Narrative Structure Diagram

built-in, auto-correcting feedback loops that tend

a society towards transparent institutions and
accurate information, because the cost of con-
spiratorial secrecy is pushed disproportionately
high.
Assange concludes the latter of the two con-
spiracy papers, dated 3 December 2006, with
this sentence:

15
 Later we will see how new technology and insights into the psychological motivations of con-
spirators can give us practical methods for preventing or reducing important communication
between authoritarian conspirators, foment strong resistance to authoritarian planning and
create powerful incentives for more humane forms of governance.24

He never got around to concluding the paper or, rather, its conclusion, those practi-
cal methods, is all around us, a demonstration of his anti-conspiratorial strategy. The
domain name for WikiLeaks was registered in October 2006, and the site was publish-
ing documents by that December.
That last goal more humane forms of governance expresses part of the larger
project with which Assange is engaged. It is a project that, strange as this may sound
given his application of abstract computational thinking to politics, is fundamentally
humanist, in a very specific sense. In scientific journalism and strategies for exploiting
paranoia, in his desire for immediate experience and accurate perception (as he con-
trasts, for example, the powerful, communicatable phenominological [sic] descriptions
of nature given by young children against the meaningless answers given by older
children who repeat what theyve been told by teachers25), Assange seeks a technologi-
cally enabled political system that can compensate for human cognitive limits. He wants
an open society not simply because it is less conducive to authoritarian conspiracies, or
because it will encourage social justice, but because the circulation of accurate data will
aid us in living in our almost unmanageably complex society.

Inky fingers
Another thought experiment for cryptographers, another project in human capacities
for Assange: how to make a key operative only under certain psychological or physical
conditions. Is it possible to create a key that, under coercion, locks the interrogator out
of the file, using the limits of the human body and mind as a kind of failsafe? Pain,
altered states, impaired cognition could become parameters for decryption. Assange
sketched some solutions in a posting to a mailing list devoted to OCaml, a program-
ming language with properties useful to his project.26 Along with recognizing faces and
creating meaningful similes (A is to B as, etc.), Assange suggested a maze-walking
exercise: a maze with landmarks that you pass in a certain order and direction to
produce your key. This path would be immune to key-logging techniques (which track
every stroke on a keyboard) and could draw a different maze every time; only you
would know in what order the landmarks must be passed. It might be impossible to
explain under coercion. Perhaps walking the maze in one progression would unlock
something plausibly revealing but relatively innocuous and a different route opens the
text file with all the safehouses, all the names of colleagues. In any case, to produce the
key, the human element needs to be there, at the mouse, conscious and willing.
Like this notional keying system, the event of WikiLeaks is only concerned with
computer security in the most peripheral way. What is actually at issue is the politics
of secrecy, anonymity, and online distribution and collaboration new logics of organi-
zation, as Alexander Galloway has put it. The security of the machines isnt really at
issue; its the humans that are fragile and dangerous. The term from military aerospace
for building technologies that have to involve people, the man-in-the-loop, works
perfectly here. You want to minimize the harm the man, in-the-loop, can do to your
system: so slow, so prone to black out under high G-forces, so inclined to momentary
hesitations, to calls of conscience, to leaks and confessions. A decade before Assange
laid out the theoretical architecture for turning the people inside a conspiracy against
one another, he was collaborating on a project named Marutukku (a Mesopotamian
god, master of the arts of protection), a deniable cryptography package. 27 Deniable, in
this case, meaning that you can provide a passphrase to decrypt some portion of your

16
data without revealing the whole thing, or that theres more to reveal. Marutukku was
also known as Rubberhose, after the old crypto joke about rubber hose cryptanalysis:
decrypting a file by beating the key out of someone who knows it. Marutukku was
designed to provide both cover (you could plant some secrets to satisfy your interroga-
tors the maze-walking key was to be one notional part of Marutukku) and the deeper
deniability of ignorance. You could receive a thumb drive, and a key to some portion of
it, unaware that there are others, thus minimizing the informational damage that even
torture can do, and working around human frailty. WikiLeaks, and what it portends,
is all about working with and managing our points of failure and overload, as human
minds and as social creatures.
Assanges particular design intelligence has always been about taking advantage of
the irreducible humanity within computational processes, from our visual capabilities
(another keying method he proposed involved generating moirs of color whose varia-
tions would be visible to a single individuals unique sense of hue) to our paranoia, our
social arrangements, our difficulties with reductionist logical argument. On Sunday, 30
July 2006, apropos of Finlands transparent taxation system, he wrote an introductory
comment that provides the context not only for WikiLeaks and related projects, but for
our current dispensation, the horizon of the political thought that WikiLeaks represents:
Society has grown beyond our ability to perceive it accurately. Our brains are not adapted to
the environment in which we find outselves [sic]. We cant predict important aspects of our
societal environment. Its not designed to run on our brains. Were maladapted. In our evolu-
tionary history we spent a lot of time tracking the behavior and reputations of small number
of people we saw frequently. If we want some of the social benefits that a small society
brings then we need computational crutches so when A fucks over B any C considering
dealing with A will know. A society that can think in this way is able to route goodness to
people who do good and away from those people who generate hurt. The decision as to what
is good is too complicated to be formulated in regulation and elections are a very coarse ex-
pression of what people think is good. Any paper formulation will put power in the hands of
a political and technocratic elite. Robust routing decisions must be made by individuals and
individuals need tools to manage complexity enough so they can make them effectively in a
modern society.28

We can discern in this that society is a larger version of Assanges conspiratorial

structure: an information-processing system, computing next steps and, ideally, routing
towards the good and away from the bad. What society, understood like this, needs
most is tools to circulate data, and to manage complexity such as an organizational

17
model and a kit of technologies that will, theoretically, edge a society always towards
increasing the flow of accurate information available to all eyes. From 1990 to now,
the night that I write this, the power of a given computer has increased by a factor of
about 8,000. Storage capacity relative to cost has grown still faster.29 The release of
the Pentagon Papers another regular WikiLeaks comparison was an event of extra-
ordinary paperwork. Daniel Ellsbergs task primarily lay in arranging the reproduction,
movement and storage of thousands of pages, using relatively rare photocopy machines,
one page at a time (To speed up, I tried to program my motions30), and workflows
of folders, scissors, glue, suitcases and cardboard boxes. The particular affordances
and constraints of paper are intimately intertwined with the shape of bureaucratic
governance, from Charles-Hippolyte Labussire the clerk whose covert destruction
of documents (using public baths and the Seine) created for the Committee of Public
Safety during the Terror saved much of the Comdie Franaise from execution31 to
the dossiers of the Stasi, the in-trays of the Eichmannian Schreibtischtter, and the
Vietnam War Study folders Ellsberg pulled from the filing cabinets at RAND. To
intervene in the flow of paperwork is still a heavy, toner-streaked, physical matter,
requiring someone with Ellsbergs access over time coupled with a willingness to go to
prison. Even given these characteristics there is no possible way for the most dedicated
renegade diplomat, working with paper, to collect 250,000 confidential cables and make
them available to journalists or the public. Thats a lot of reams of paper, and pallets
of documents, to transact secretly. Digitally, its a thumb drive, a CD, a zipped file
uploaded to a server. It can be forgotten in a taxicab, lost in a messy office. And it can
be circulated with complete anonymity for the leaker. (Bear in mind that PFC Bradley
Manning, the alleged leaker in the Cablegate case, was apprehended based on the
advice and chat transcripts provided by Adrian Lamo, to whom he apparently confessed
much of his activity.) New forms of information storage, distribution and analysis can
enable new political arrangements new apparatuses of surveillance and capture as
well as publication, organization and resistance.
The promise of these new technologies and the new arrangements they could enable
relies on more general action, our action. As Ive suggested at the opening, WikiLeaks
is only the first such object, and one of its most valuable contributions is the provoca-
tion to further work. Id like to close this article with a direct address, at present speed
rather than reflective philosophical slowness a contemporary version of Fouriers
chapter at the close of the Thorie des quatre mouvements, where, having presented
his arguments for the political-ecological transformation to come, he provides hands-on
counsel for those who would be prepared. We could even give it the same title: Advice
to the Civilized Relative to the Coming Social Metamorphosis.
Given WikiLeaks and the boom in *Leaks organizations, given our capacities for
anonymity, data storage and distributed publication, what is to be done? Fouriers advice
included not to sacrifice present good for future good. To this we can add the follow-
ing, which is only a starting point, welcoming further additions and conversation.
If you understand and can deploy the technologies and you should take this very
seriously, as the safety of any potential leaker relies on it you can launch your own
*Leaks project. If you arent in a position to roll them yourself with complete confi-
dence in your security, keep a close eye on OpenLeaks, which, at the time of writing,
has a promising approach to providing secure drop boxes for other organizations. As
with blogs, the most successful leak sites will probably be those with quite specific
subject domains, which can attract journalists and skilled crowds to their analysis
and make sure stories particular to that area are heard. Any project like this is going
to involve experience in the editing and redaction of releases, and painstaking inter-
nal security and ethical reflection Geert Lovink and Patrice Riemenss thesis 11 of
their Twelve theses on WikiLeaks provides a concise overview of these issues. 32

18
 There are numerous projects of infrastructural significance which need contribu-
tions. These are not reactions to WikiLeaks itself but to the very real problems
with authority, control and rule of law online which it provoked into high visibility.
They include: new cloud services (following Amazons deplorable plug-pulling of
the WikiLeaks resources on their servers), of which OpenStack (http://openstack.
org) provides a good starting point; new Domain Name System (DNS) architecture,
so people can type in a human-memorable name (as opposed to a string of digits)
and get the Web site they want regardless of what parties may seek to make the
name unavailable or unreliable there are interesting proposals being mooted for a
peer-to-peer DNS system that would decentralize addressing (see, as a starting point,
http://dot-p2p.org); and on the farther horizon new systems of funding, to ensure the
donation and asset freeze-out directed against WikiLeaks by PayPal and the credit
card companies cannot continue to be a problem.
There are a number of social and legal issues. While well-run *Leaks projects
can provide anonymity and protection to the leakers with methods like encrypted
connections and anonymous proxies, the human need for solidarity, empathy and
companionship, especially on the part of one of who is running serious personal
risks on principle, is profound as the grim case of Manning, currently spending
twenty-three hours a day in solitary in the Marine Corps brig, will attest. Some
method to enable community and alliance without discovery seems warranted. As
does assistance with how to talk to the media in the release of a leak a means to
counteract the inevitable spin, message management and public relations deployed
by institutions to marginalize any potentially damaging information. One grave legal
concern is the protections available to mirror sites. A site like WikiLeaks, coming
under attack, relies on volunteers hosting mirrors on other servers, so people seeking
the sites information can reliably find it elsewhere if the main site is unavailable.
Hosting a mirror is currently a legal grey area, however especially for hosts within
affected countries, like the United States. Will a mirror host face pressure from the
state, their employers, or others, and what is their recourse to pressure?
A massive document-gathering like that of the SIPRnet cables was probably lucky,
and will not be repeated. Systems of logging access and document requests will
make it far more difficult to collect material anonymously. Solutions for undetectably
copying documents are needed.

Notes
Research for this article was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (CNS/NetS
1058333) and the AFSOR-MURI Presidio grant. It would not have been possible without the help and
suggestions of several persons who would prefer to remain anonymous. Thanks to you, my friends.
Hone-o oru! To simplify the process of future researchers, I have followed the different time/date
formats used by the different online resources cited below.
1. Julian Assange, time-delayed release of information, post on the cypherpunks list, 20020323.
http://marc.info/?l=cypherpunks&m=101686313723681&w=2.
2. As interviewed on www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2010/12/06/dec-610--pt-1julian-assange/.
3. Julian Assange, Researchers Introduction, in Suelette Dreyfus and Julian Assange, Underground:
Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier, Mandarin, Port Melbourne, 1997.
Available electronically at www.xs4all.nl/~suelette/underground/.
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Preface, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, ed. Maudemarie
Clark and Brian Leiter, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997, p. 5.
5. Julian Assange, Turings Delirium, post on iq.org, 22 September 2006. Assanges blog was shut
down some time ago; this and all other blog citations from the version archived on the Wayback
Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20071020051936/http://iq.org/.
6. Edmundo Paz Soldn, Turings Delirium, trans. Lisa Carter, Mariner, New York, 2007, p. 207.
7. John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider, Harper & Row, New York, 1975, p. 219.
8. Conversation with those involved makes clear that creating a useful that is, hyperlinked, searchable,
reasonably fast front-end for even a relatively constrained set of materials, like http://diarydig.org
for the Afghan War logs, is not a trivial matter.
9. Julian Assange, Dont shoot messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths, op-ed in The Aus-

19
 tralian, 8 December 2010; available online at www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/wikileaks/
dont-shoot-messenger-for-revealing-uncomfortable-truths/story-fn775xjq-1225967241332.
10. This particular thought actually appears twice, almost unchanged, in the final entry of his blog, as
well as about a year earlier: 29 August 2007 and 12 July 2006.
11. Julian Assange, How can we untie the unknot? post on iq.org, 3 August 2006.
12. Julian Assange, Iirationality [sic] in argument, post on iq.org, 29 August 2007.
13. Assange quotes Landauer at the beginning of the last version of his homepage at iq.org, as preserved
at http://web.archive.org/web/20071020051936/http://iq.org/.
14. See the Reddit thread Conspiracy theories commence: WikiLeaks to release over half a MILLION
text messages from 9/11, submitted 24 November 2009, comment by xyroclast: www.reddit.com/
r/reddit.com/comments/a7xpt/conspiracy_theories_commence_wikileaks_to_release/c0gatuc.
15. Assange, Conspiracy as Governance, p. 1 n1.
16. Both drafts were released as PDFs, originally linked from Assanges blog and now hosted by John
Young at the website Cryptome: http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf.
17. Assange, Conspiracy as Governance, p. 4.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., p. 5.
21. Assange, The non linear effects of leaks on unjust systems of governance, post on iq.org, 31
December 2006.
22. Timothy C. May, Untraceable Digital Cash, Information Markets, and BlackNet, presented at
Computers, Freedom and Privacy 1997; available online at: http://osaka.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/
articles/tcmay.htm.
23. Ibid.
24. Assange, Conspiracy as Governance, pp. 56.
25. Julian Assange, Tale of the Tesla coil, or learned idiocy, post on iq.org, 26 June 2006.
26. Julian Assange, call for ocaml volunteers, post on the Caml mailing list, 20000814; available at:
http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-list/2000/08/6b8b195b3a25876e0789fe3db770db9f.fr.html.
27. A basic overview of Marutukku/Rubberhose is available. See Suelette Dreyfus, The Idiot Savants Guide
to Rubberhose, available at: http://iq.org/~proff/rubberhose.org/current/src/doc/maruguide/t1.html.
28. Julian Assange, Transparency in the cold light of Finland, post on iq.org, 30 July 2006.
29. A few days ago, IBMs Almaden Research Center published demonstrations of the soundness of the
physics underlying a new form of memory, Racetrack which uses the spin of individual electrons
to move data along magnetic nanowires pointing towards eventual production. Racetrack, or any
number of other experimental models of memory, will lead to increases, relative to cost and electri-
cal power, still more dramatic than what weve encountered so far: enormous libraries of data on a
mobile device that can be accidentally put in the wash.
30. Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, Penguin, New York, 2003,
p. 302.
31. Benjamin Kafka, Paperwork, Cabinet 22, Summer 2006; available at www.cabinetmagazine.org/
issues/22/kafka.php.
32. Geert Lovink and Patrice Riemens, Twelve Theses on WikiLeaks, as posted in Eurozine, 2010
1207; available at: www.eurozine.com/articles/20101207lovinkriemens-en.html.

subscribe now

www.radicalphilosophy.com
20
Between sharing
and antagonism
The invention of communism
in the early Marx
Antonia Birnbaum
London calling
Why talk about communism today? A first point *
everybody will be agreed upon: the spectre of com-
munism is not haunting Europe, nor for that matter
any other region of the world. The only place where
communism is a positive name for anything is China,
where it designates the ruling party of one of the most
powerful capitalist nations of the world. In the immedi-
ate conjuncture, there are no real forces or conflicts
that directly call for a reappraisal of communism.
However, certain questions linked to its reappraisal do
appear to be at stake in conflicts that are taking place.
For example, is it not the case that violence of the
oppressed is a strategic political means? Is it not time
to question its permanent disqualification, which goes
hand in hand with the aggravated monopoly of state
violence? This is a question raised by Slavoj iek in
a recent article in Le Monde diplomatique. How can
social conflicts once again become conflicts outside of
the realm of law? This question was raised by Jacques
Rancire a few months ago. Speaking on the radio
about the USA, he argued that conflicts take legal form
so rapidly there that they are immediately deactivated
as politics. We need to situate politics back within
social struggle. I would like to add another question:
how do we deal with the prescribed logic of compro-
mise, of ruse, of deferral, that implicates us in the
very capitalist dismantling and competition we strive
to deflect? In the 2009 university strike in France, the
students of Paris 8 wrote in a leaflet: We dont want
a supposedly reformed future, we want a real present,
now. To that I can only add: me too.
* This is a revised version of a talk given to the Research Seminar of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston
University, London, November 2010.
Such remarks indicate little more than the pos-
sibility of looking at the present through the prism of
some experiences of the 1970s, now that the capitalist
bubbles of the 1980s and 1990s have burst. However,
such reappraisal has to deal both with the economic
and conjunctural aftermath of those bubbles and, more
generally, with the aporia of an extensive, global capi-
talism. This aporia is both trivial everybody remarks
upon it and self-defeating. Let me put it in the most
general terms. The more certain diagnostic moments of
Marxs theory of the contradictions of capital continue
to be operative, the less politically actual they seem to
become. For Marx, the privilege of antagonism hinged
upon the supposedly necessary unfolding of capitalism
towards its violent end. We, on the contrary, are caught
in a strange limbo of contingent temporality. Knowing
that capitalism is neither an inevitable horizon nor
a historical stage that will necessarily end, we are
constantly thrown back on the lack of an alternative
power. Even in the struggles that do take place, there
is an enormous, almost insurmountable difficulty in
subjectively stepping out of the capitalist framework.
So, another symptom: the more frenetically we search
for the place-holders of communist aspirations, the
more these aspirations seem to fall back into formal,
purely potential, even speculative modes.
If we turn to the communist tradition, the idea of
communism immediately evokes two moments: the
moment of class struggle and the moment of a common
human capacity shared by all. They answer two differ-
ent questions. Are we set upon defeating capitalism on
the basis of a movement actualizing its contradictions,
R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 ) 21
preferably in a revolution? (This means that we involve
our lives in the struggle against servitude imposed
by the market; struggle focuses on opposition.) And
are we set upon living that part of our lives which is
irreducible to this servitude, on sharing without delay
what we have in common, here and now, disregarding
the icy waters of selfish calculation? This pertains
to the common, associative moment of communism.
It focuses on sharing.
Generally, the associative moment is linked to the
utopians Saint-Simon, Fourier, Cabet whilst the
antagonistic moment is linked to Marx. Rancire,
for example, takes up this classical divide in his text
Communists without Communism, presented at the
2009 London conference on the idea of communism.
I propose to work on a different assumption. Might
it not be relevant for us today to reinstate the mixed
logic of Marxs inaugural encounter with communism?
Wasnt Marx simultaneously confronted with both the
violence and the sharing inherent to communist aspira-
tions? And might not this simultaneity at least give us
a lame foot to walk on? (The expression comes from
Bataille.) Of course, this inaugural encounter with
communism took place in a hopeful period of struggle,
before the defeats of 1848, whereas our situation seems
devoid of any forceful perspective. Nevertheless, reach-
ing back to this moment may be relevant in so far as it
refers to an unconsolidated period of Marxs thought.
By asking how Marx brings different elements into
play, we may be able to apprehend some possibilities
in our own situation.
My questions, then, are the following. How does
the dominant feature in Marxs communism class
antagonism connect with the associative, fraternal
moment? How does this connection come about within
his texts? In what ways does this connection take
effect, both in the element of struggle and in that of
sharing? I will restrict my inquiry by concentrating
on the brief sequence that encompasses the Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, the articles in
the DeutschFranzsische Jahrbcher and Vorwrts. ates this social being from any historical teleology that
With regard to the coherence of Marxs theory,
the predominant angle is dialectical class contra-
diction. Not only does Marx apprehend it as the
father of all things but he also posits the principled
struggle against capital as its basis of intelligibility.
Hence his concept of critique, in which the analysis
of capitalist conditions is intrinsically linked to their
destruction and transformation. Such is the formula
of praxis. Nevertheless, in his own thinking the dif-
ference between contradiction and sharing does not
simply amount to an opposition. Likewise, there is a
22
gap between destruction and transformation. The dif-
ference is asymmetrical, the gap is to be bridged. In
Marxs early texts, the predominance of the theory of
contradiction is in contact with a different experience,
with a wider, irregular field of praxis. If one looks
closely, it seems that moments of shared enthusiasm
and moments of anger communicate, without their
being a clear determination of their relation. Marx
presents them together: he presents us with the enigma
of their assembly.
Other peoples discoveries
Let us take a short view forward: in the Manifesto of
the Communist Party, written in 1848, Marx conceives
the communist idea in the perspective of class contra-
diction. This idea, along with the party, reveals itself
through the struggle of the working class, as the most
advanced point of thinking in this struggle, which
grasps its meaning and its goal. The contradictions
between the bourgeois class and the proletariat will
lead to a final conflict, a surpassing of capitalist
antagonism and the disappearance of all classes in a
harmonious organization of society. The communist
project points to a final term, an end of all alienation
and all domination, humanity delivered of its contra-
dictions and its divisions, without being able to deter-
mine this finality in its real content. In this intrigue,
the initiative seems mostly to fall on the side of the
bourgeoisie, which, in the opening pages, ceaselessly
produces the upheaval, the destruction, the constant
revolutionizing of all means of production, pushing
the proletariat further and further into the realm of
negation: the proletariat is nothing; it is this nothing
contracted into the fury of negation.
Now let us now take a step back again. In the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, personal
notes written before the popular uprisings of 1848, the
approach to communism is different. Marx qualifies
man as a being whose very existence is immediately a
common existence, or a generic existence. He dissoci-
orders it to a project. What is the social being not
the communist project that aspires to such a project?
How do we ascertain such a being?
For all that he links the communist aspiration to
a generic being, Marx never loses sight of workers
struggles. In his reflections in the Manuscripts, in
the articles of the Jahrbcher, Marx pays attention
to that dimension of social being that reveals itself in
the procedures of struggle, without being part of any
programmatic intention. This communist aspiration
of our lives such is Marxs intuition points to a
quasi-synonymity of individual being and social being.
What is at stake is to grasp the unstable agitation of
this common being, both through the figure of class
struggle and through the figure of a common being.
To grasp this articulation, we will turn to the
peopling of the young Marxs texts, rather than to his
rearrangement of anthropology. Let us put aside the
function of knowledge (it has already been analysed
to death) and focus on the function of speech in this
text. To reach it, the first task is to break with the
chronological dimension. Linear readings (Althusser
notably) have repeatedly stated that the young Marx
does not yet have at his disposal the theoretical ele-
ments he will develop after 1848, mainly surplus value.
These elements are necessary; they alone will allow
him to assess the operations of capitalism, to produce
its critical science. On this view, the Manuscripts are
considered as operating by default, on a humanist
basis borrowed from Feuerbach.
Can the 1844 Manuscripts be thus described as a
simple prelude for a science yet to come, a science in
which the vital activity of humans and the mutilation
of salaried work can at last become coherent in one
and the same contradiction? This way of dealing with
the young Marx ignores Marxs own remark that it
is not enough that thought compels its accomplish-
ment; reality itself must compel thought. Following
this remark, theoretical discontinuity is not a lack
of science; it addresses the reality that jostles theory,
especially the reality of conflicts. The statements,
aspirations, experiences of proletarian struggle are
immediately present in Marxs text; they impel the
cutting edge of his effort.
The first statement of the Manuscripts is a conclu-
sion: Wages are determined by the fierce struggle
between capitalist and worker. The capitalist inevitably
wins.1 Defeat is assumed before the book has even
started, before any arguments can be deployed. Defeat
is the loathsome fate that befalls workers in capital-
ist work production. Defeat is also the cynicism of
the discourse of political economy that justifies such
relations.2
Against this defeat, Marxs unfinished text appears
as a strange Kampfschrift (polemical writing). He
starts the conflict anew, at exactly the point where he
signals defeat. Interspering his remarks between long
quotations from Ricardo and Smith, Marx dwells on
what counters their discourses, breaks up their frame-
work. Inquiries, contacts with workers, writings of
French and German socialists (the League of the Just,
Weitling), Schultz Bodmers analysis of the ideologi-
cal content of national economy, natural and positive
critique of humanity by Feuerbach. The articulation of
a communist trait, of the violent struggles in which the
workers are implicated, of the polemic against national
economy, all this is amenable to the mix of theory with
other peoples discoveries, 3 with the multiple gaps of
perception expressed in the voices of these and others.
Other peoples discoveries: the expression is first
used by Marx in the opening pages, which also refer to
Feuerbach. Unless we want to consider these exterior
discoveries simply as illustrations of a theoretical
construction, it is clear that the counter-position non-
alienated activity and the mutilation of wage-labour is
not merely an error of the young Marx (waiting to
be corrected by the Marx of Capital), but the specific
energy, the springing point, of his remarks. These
encounters and events, the relation between concurring
and heterogeneous elements, are the very impulse of
Marxs undertaking. In his effort to counter national
economy and its fiction of cupidity as the originary
state of humanity, the philosopher proposes to come
back to the fact of national economy taken in all its
complexity: he works simultaneously with the facts and
the refusal of these facts. This complexity produces
a giddiness of causality that the philosopher first
discovers not in the social being conceptualized by
Feuerbach, not in the pages of a book, but in a workers
meeting.
When communist workers gather together, their
immediate aim is instruction, propaganda etc. But
at the same time they acquire a new need the
need for society and what appears as a means has
become an and. This practical development can be
most strikingly observed in the gatherings of French
socialist workers. Company, association, conver-
sation which in turn has society as its goal is enough
for them. The brotherhood of man is not a hollow
phrase, it is a reality, and the nobility of man shines
forth upon us from their work-worn figures.4
On the occasion of the organization of struggle,
the goal ceases to be the end, the means cease being
subordinated to such an end. The goal is transferred
into propaganda, doctrine, association, to the point of
becoming one with them. This strange oneness does
not produce an identity between the workers life and
a life of combat; quite the contrary, it introduces a
double take. A new relation appears between workers
that begins during their struggle against the capitalists.
Thus what Marx calls the brotherhood dimension first
appears in a struggle, but is not identical with struggle.
These workers are not fated either to be nothing or
to fight. Their existence is lodged in an unalienable
excess that coincides neither with their condition of
23
exploitation nor with the imperatives of struggle. In
this excess, they have already emancipated themselves
from servility and hate for the master, two characteris-
tics of the same world. This excess communicates the
transformation of gestures and thoughts that give body
to an emancipated life.
The French workers discover in their political meet-
ings and associations the first gestures of a life irreduc-
ible to the waged conditions of reproduction. Marx
discovers in the humanity of these French workers a
gap between the communication through which they
break with isolation and the struggle they conduct
against capitalist alienation. The communist feature
does not derive from oppression; it indicates what
remains in excess, an indetermination that is out of
reach of negation. If we look at the quotation, this
feature of brotherhood is not, at least not directly, a
feature of combat, of class hate as it will later be
called, nor even of a discipline, but the real anticipa-
tion of a different manner of association, a manner
that already, here and now, outreaches the oppression
of work and competition. But if this is so, how does
class struggle relate to this excess? Is there even any
relation, in the sense of a necessary relation?
Struggle and the excess
Let us recall what Marx underlines: in the logic
opposing workers and capitalists, the starting point is
the negation or, worse, the defeat of the worker, his
intolerable oppression.
But the worker has the misfortune of being a living
capital, and hence a capital with needs, which for-
feits its interest and hence its existence each moment
it is not working. As capital, the value of the worker
rises or falls in accordance with supply and demand,
and even in a physical sense, his [or her] existence,
life was and is treated as a supply of commodity like
any other commodity. 5
The workers own body is private property live
capital that must be sold at all costs to feed it, clothe
it, rest it, in brief to reproduce it. In so far as man is
labour-power, man is opposed to its own humanity,
wears out life to reproduce it. In return, struggle is the
negation of this suffered exploitation.
In the scene of struggle describing the French
workers, humanity is won back through a struggle and
a transformation. These moments intersect without
coinciding. They are distinct, but not separate. Their
heterogeneity is literally packed together in a single
knot. Compelled by a strong case of revolt, Marx
risks thinking out this knot. He does so in regard
to the insurrection of the Silesian weavers in 1844.
24
Unfolding his position in the debates raging around
this event, Marx relays the communist aspiration of the
workers, against those who only see in it an uprising
without conscience. His analysis appears in Vorwrts
under the title Critical Notes on the Article The
King of Prussia and social reform. By a Prussian.
It is a virulent, caustic, wildly audacious reply to the
anonymous article by Arnold Ruge. Marx was furious
about this anonymity, fearing the article might be
attributed to him.
The revolt is restricted, but explosive. The weavers
are in a state of extreme poverty, on the edge of famine.
Whilst their relations of production are still often those
of the workshop, whilst they finance their own looms,
they are already subjected to an extensive capitalist
market. The introduction of machines, the competition
with England, the illegal agreements between bosses to
lower salaries aggravate the situation: working fifteen
to sixteen hours a day, the weavers cannot live. The
revolt starts on 3 June 1844 after the arrest of a weaver
of Peterwaldsau, an arrest requested by the Gebrder
Zwanziger. Faced with contempt they are told to eat
grass when they say they have no means to eat the
weavers destroy their houses, their workshops, their
titles: they attack the bank, so to speak. They hold
bosses prisoner, destroy their workshops. Prussia sends
in the army: resisting in face of the order to fire, the
insurgents meet the army with stones and axes, oblig-
ing them to flee, even though they experience severe
losses. They are repressed in a bloodbath the next day.
In their song Spottlied Blutgericht they propose to
transform all men into poor men.
Hunger revolt, revolt against the machine, against
certain loathsome bosses, for a just salary: such
arguments were trotted out to play down the uprising.
Marx, on the contrary, stresses the communist energy
of the event.
We have seen: a social revolution possesses a total
point of view because even if it is confined to only
one factory district it represents a protest by man
against a dehumanized life, because it proceeds from
the point of view of the particular, real individual,
because the community against whose separation
from himself the individual is reacting, is the true
community of man, human nature. In contrast the
political soul of revolution consists in the tendency
of the classes with no political power to put an end
to their isolation from the state and power.6
In the situation of heightened European agitation,
these remarks are directed against Ruge and his posi-
tion: that the German poor (the revolting weavers)
are only poor Germans, captives of their interests,
provincial, without any relation to politics. For Marx,
on the contrary, the direct attack of capitalist property
that does not seek a mediation with the power of aris-
tocracy attests a strong conscience of communism.
Marxs starting point is his confidence in those who
enter the struggle. What holds his attention, what is
important, is the process of radicalization that unfolds
in the revolt. Hence, however limited an industrial
revolt may be, it contains within itself a universal
soul: and however universal a political revolt may be,
its colossal form conceals a narrow spirit.7 Here Marx
is already working out the untimely dialectics of a
revolution that he locates within several countries. The
German bourgeoisie has not participated in revolution-
ary freedom; it has known nothing of it but restoration
and defeat. The new proletariat knows nothing of an
allegiance to the citoyen; it starts out where the French
and English workers left off, with a social revolution.
Marx stresses that, contrary to the revolutionary oppo-
sition of the French bourgeoisie to aristocracy and
clergy, this workers revolt is no longer determined by
a workers will putting itself in tow of the proprietors,
nor even by a will to appropriate power for their own
class. The weavers protest against exploitation in the
name of their common humanity. This unprecedented
universal feature detaches itself during the revolt.
They start with a refusal of the extreme degradation
of their life conditions, of the dispossession of their
work tools caused by capital. They go on to designate
wage-labour itself as an abomination. All men are
poor. Poverty is not the matter of a community of need,
but of this: nothing can belong to some more than to
others. In this sense, the real human community that
the weavers declare in their revolt ceases being that
of a certain category of workers (weavers of linen, of
cotton) at the same time that it is already without any
link to the perpetuation of their existence as a class
opposed to the class of proprietors. Their militancy
reclaims a principle of any equality whatsoever: they
are placeholders of a for all that is not identical with
any effective group of workers, nor with any particular
propriety of the human.
What Marx deciphers is an agency linked to daz-
zling speed: as soon as the proletariat appears, there
appears also its most extreme interruption, the dis-
solution of the proletarian condition itself: force of
anger dissociation with power excess over the
logic of need. In the brief, explosive sequence of
this struggle, the anger first focused by the enemy,
the demands compelled by the needs of reproduction
alter themselves, projecting themselves towards their
own extremity. The violent energy of class struggle
produces an exteriority beyond class opposition. In
this sequence, the communist feature of sharing does
not present itself as a mater of a structural linkage to
class contradiction. It rather presents itself as a case of
acceleration; an acceleration gathering momentum in
the process of contradiction, but immediately detach-
ing itself from this process.
The particular, real individual and the real worker
are co-originary and co-originally distinct. The excess
carries itself beyond the constraint that gives rise to
it, becomes consistent in a dimension that Marx will
posit as ontological. Heeding the point of intensity of
this struggle, Marx rediscovers this dimension in the
25
proletarian experience. The refusal of the workers to
be robbed of their lives crystallizes a refusal upheld in
the name of the fact that we are all commonly human.
Marx is confronted with an initial generosity, a com-
munist trace of immediacy that relates our very being
to a common existence. This tendency compels him to
put the negative logic of conflict into parentheses, to
set out for a more uncertain region, where the need to
survive or to reproduce life ceases to be the given of
humanity. Of course, this does not mean that needs
are not essential to human life. It means that these
needs are not a material necessity, as opposed to the
superfluous. Their relation is the unstable hinge of
a life for which nothing is reduced to nature. Marx
explores the irreducibly common element of this life,
an element set outside of alienation and the opposition
to alienation. He tries to distinguish between a non-
alienated vital human activity and its division with
itself, its reduction to waged labour-power. Here, then,
Marx borrows from Feuerbach.
An art of contingent contacts
Contrary to struggles that proceed from their oppo-
sition to exploitation, vital praxis precedes out of a
strange antecedence. Not being anything given, it is
subtracted from alienation. It is not a negation of an
oppression, but the affirmation of an untamable part
of our common being. In the Manuscripts of 1844,
Marx does two things. On the one hand, he locates
this common being outside of the dialectics of contra-
diction. On the other hand, community becomes a
question of being only in so far as ontology becomes
unrecognizable to itself, a praxis. This generic exist-
ence is called by Marx an objectified being. Objecti-
fied being is opposed to spiritual being: human being
is a nature, a sensibility in the grasp of the material
reality of the world. It belongs immediately to this
being that it is in relation to others and to nature.
Humans only live by giving expression to this being, by
elaborating it, objectifying it (which is different from
alienating it). Vital human activity is not a means in
view of satisfying needs, it is not ordered by a goal
beyond this expression. Far from being instrumental,
this activity itself is a vital need.
In this activity, or praxis, gestures of immediate
survival are not opposed to what takes form as art
or science, since generic being is nothing other than
being in nature.8 Marx stresses that what opposes the
function of need and that of superfluity is the wage
situation, not the essence of vital activity:
The result is that man (the worker) feels that he is
acting freely only in his animal functions eating,
26
drinking and procreating, or at most in dwelling
and adornment while in his human functions he is
nothing more than an animal. It is true that eating,
drinking and procreating are also genuine human
functions. However, when abstracted from other
aspects of human activity and turned into final and
exclusive ends, they are animal.9
In vital activity, the articulation between animality
and humanity is not founded on an organic necessity,
as a supposedly final point of reality. It pertains to the
exteriority of the relations that make for our bodily
being: The practical creation of an objective world,
the fashioning of inorganic nature, is proof that man is
a conscious species-being, i.e. a being which treats the
species as its own essential being or itself a species-
being.10 Marx stresses the disunity of our life reality:
the whole of nature is the inorganic body of man.11
So far as it is inorganic, human naturality has no
given form that can simply be fixed in its physical
existence. The human body possesses no stable deter-
mination, its reality is intrinsically decentred: human
life expresses itself and gives itself consistency through
conscious transformation of the world and the relation
to others. This means that the being of the world
and of man are not hostile a priori. Their perpetual
adjustment is a sign of their common naturality. Man
being seized by the power of praxis in bodily exist-
ence, vital human activity is an articulation of senses
and thought that all humans partake in. Together, they
partake in the non-evident, unpredictable risk of this
fashioning. Marx stresses the conscious moment in
the fashioning, the objectifying, of our generic being.
If, however, we are to account for the displacement of
ontology through praxis, then there is no longer any
reason per se to privilege this conscious moment.12 The
non-evident aspect of our lives does not only concern
its consciousness, it concerns the relation between its
bodily and its intellectual moments: they connect in
unpredictable ways.
Marx wants to consider our lives outside of aliena-
tion, to express an objectifying that no longer pertains
to an accomplishment of self through negation, but to
a tension between selves, to collective universal being.
The difficulty is to conceive of a fashioning of our lives
that is heterogeneous to the total dominance of one
function by another, that does not reinstate a regular,
necessary form. This is what Bataille attempts when
he invokes the connections of all elements of our lives
through chance and play. Though Marx declines
to explore this difficulty, there are a few intuitions
in his text. Let us quote another passage from the
Manuscripts.
 All his human relations to the world [of the integral
man] seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling,
thinking, contemplating, sensing, wanting, acting,
loving in short, all the organs of his individuality,
like the organs which are directly communal in form,
are in their objective approach or in their approach
to the object the appropriation of that object. This
appropriation of human reality, their approach to
the object, is the confirmation of human reality. It is
human effectiveness and human suffering, for suffer-
ing, humanly conceived, is an enjoyment of the self
for man. Private property has made us so stupid and
one-sided that an object is only ours when we have
it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly
possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc., in short, when
we use it. Therefore all the physical and intellectual
senses have been replaced by the simple estrangement
of all these senses the sense of having.13
Non-alienated vital activity includes both passivity (or
suffering) in the eminent sense outside of consump-
tion and activity in the eminent sense, outside of an
instrumentalizing of nature.
In this list of our vital activities, Marxs text does
not privilege production of nature and self as the
essence of the human. It does not privilege any one
sense or orientation. It deploys a horizontal, combina-
tory logic. What is thus heterogeneous to wage-labour
is also heterogeneous to the negative Hegelian
dialectic of labour. Vital human activity runs through
indetermination, subsistence, superfluity. Rather than
praxis in the limited sense, it is a play of life itself
objectified in a play with the world and others. This
play is also the moment of its distance. For this vital
human activity does not proceed out of antagonism;
nor does it derive from the sphere of work; and we can
see a more obvious affinity of the activity with literary,
artistic, or scientific communities, and the community
of love, than with the activity of proletarian struggle.
Once again, the question of the relation between
this praxis and class struggle compels us, but this time
in the reverse direction, from the generic perspective
itself. Let us be clear: the impetus of praxis can occur
in any of us, through any human act or passivity. It
can occur outside of any scene of struggle. However,
this common generosity can only break with the isola-
tion imposed by wage-labour if it does not in turn
isolate itself from the struggles against oppression.
Its affirmation coincides with the incompleteness by
which it maintains itself open to the contradictions
of the situation it has ripped itself out of. There can
be no completed figure of non-alienated praxis. In
short: if the for nothing of being, its unconstrained,
impertinent groundlessness, can distend its relation
to struggle, it cannot ignore it. Otherwise its freedom
simply becomes a spiritual supplement or a place of
evasion, an oasis in the desert that is incapable of
making a world. This means that, notwithstanding their
affinity, this ontological dimension does not pertain to
the community of love, of literature, art or science, any
more than it does to that of proletarian struggle. The
relation between generosity of being and struggle has
no necessary form: both exist only in the contingent
forms of their vicinity.
Assuredly, class antagonism for Marx proceeds out
of an oppositional, dual logic. In this sense, the we
of the proletariat possesses a trait of oneness, that of
struggle, but without fixing itself in this trait. For what
the proletarians cannot tolerate, what they strive to
emancipate themselves from, is precisely the condition
of wages. Thus there is a connection between non-
alienated praxis and struggle, which operates in various
ways from the closest to the most distant between
class struggle and the dissolution of all classes. The
connection between opposition to capital and a gen-
erosity outside of general equivalence is displayed in
an art of improper, contingent contacts, which borrow
from action, possibility, division and play, without ever
becoming one with any of these registers.
A lame walk
In the prism of the connection of sharing and struggle,
Marxist communism decentres itself from itself. If we
consider the chronology, this decentring is inaugural,
whilst its exclusive centring on antagonism is a later
development. The decentring envelops both the contra-
dictions of struggle and the free agencies of praxis.
An inextricable, highly unstable mix, or, in Batailles
words, a lame walk, experimented within the contin-
gencies of its own improvisations. To become what it
is a manner subtracted from oppression excess must
articulate its vicinity to the negation of this oppression.
To become what it is a destruction of capitalist power
opposition must exceed itself towards the possibilities
of a generic life. To hold on to the untimeliness that
produces the oneness of these two moments: this might
give at least an indication for a political praxis.
Of course Marx put the stress on the contradictory,
dialectical unfolding of struggle, especially after the
workers defeat in 1848. However, nothing obliges us
to do the same, nor for that matter to reduce Marx to
his major expression. After all, for Marx himself, this
figure hinges on the idea of a necessary destruction
of capitalism; its strategies are laid out in regard to a
final cut. After the defeat of real or historical com-
munism, it is no longer relevant to refer to such a cut,
and strategy no longer has a fixed horizon: it has to
27
make the path it walks. Reconsidering the lame walk 4. Ibid., p. 365.
of the mix between antagonism and sharing might be 5. Ibid., p. 335.
6. Karl Marx, Critical Notes on the Article The King of
one way of spelling out strategies in which the intuition Prussia and social reform. By a Prussian, in Karl Marx
of a communist future is always itself a present. Early Writings, p. 419.
7. Ibid.
8. What is translated here as generic being (Gattungs-
Notes wesen) is translated as species-being by Rodney
1. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Livingstone.
1844, in Karl Marx Early Writings, trans. Rodney Liv- 9. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 327.
ingstone and Gregor Benton, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 10. Ibid., pp. 3289.
1974, p. 282. 11. Ibid., p. 328.
2. On this point of defeat and on many others, see the excel- 12. In a very classical metaphysical gesture, Marx distin-
lent book by Anne-James Chaton, LEffac. Capitalisme guishes our fashioning of our lives from that of animals,
et effacement dans les Manuscrits de 44 de Karl Marx, who are without conscience.
ditions Sens & Tonka, Paris, 2005. 13. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 351,
3. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 282. emphasis added.

Centre for Research in

Modern European Philosophy
Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences / Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture

Londons research centre for continental philosophy

research seminars
11 March 18.0020.00 Assembling Untimeliness, Permanently
Swedenborg Hall and Restively: On Gerhard Richter
2021 Bloomsbury Way WC1 Paul Rabinow
Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley

28 March 18.0020.00 What is a Commandment?

Clattern Lecture Theatre Giorgio Agamben
Penrhyn Road Campus Philosophy, University of Paris 8
Kingston University

14 April 18.0020.00 Eleven Theses on Marx and Marxism

Swedenborg Hall tienne Balibar
2021 Bloomsbury Way WC1 Humanities, University of California, Irvine

apply now for MAs starting October 2011

MA Modern European Philosophy An Erasmus Agreement for student exchange

with the Department of Philosophy, University
MA Philosophy and Contemporary Critical Theory of Paris 8, Saint-Denis, covers these three
MA Aesthetics and Art Theory programmes

STAFF ric Alliez, Howard Caygill, Peter Hallward, Catherine Malabou, Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford

PhD studentships

Two studentships for full-time students (UK- and EU-level tuition fees and an annual maintenance grant) to be
taken up October 2011 for a period of three years, subject to annual monitoring. See our website for details.

www.kingston.ac.uk/crmep
Risked democracy
Foucault, Castoriadis and the Greeks
Mathieu Potte-Bonneville
The delay involved in the publication of lectures or
seminars has strange effects: what comes late and
in a different time to its own is research and words
which were caught up more so than the books in
the historical circumstances of their elaboration; and
the text that is finally published, with the reflections
of the author and the remarks of the audience, carries
something of the historical situation that produced
it. This documentary dimension is sharper still when
there appear together works undertaken in the same
period by two thinkers between whom, at the time,
no debate took place, and who appear to have been
totally unaware of each other. An outline appears, in
the background of their preoccupations and intellectual
trajectories, which we could call, following Frdric
Worms, a specific moment in which political history
and the history of thought are mixed.
Thus, in 2008, the traces of two research paths that
were very unlikely to meet were published, and their
conjunction is striking: on the one hand, we have the
series of classes given by Michel Foucault between
1982 and 1983 at the Collge de France, under the title
The Government of Self and Others;1 and, on the other
hand, we have the seminars conducted by Cornelius
Castoriadis between 1983 and 1984 at the cole des
hautes tudes en sciences sociales (EHESS), in the
context of his vast cycle what makes Greece, entitled
The City and Laws.2 The pure coincidence of the
publications brought to the surface what might seem,
over twenty-five years later, also to be a coincidence:
that two French thinkers should, in the same period,
have felt the need to explore, each in his own way,
the Greek corpus and the question of democracy; and
that they should have returned to neighbouring texts
(the tragedy of Ion in Foucault, and of Antigone in
Castoriodis), and to common figures (first of all, and
above all, that of Plato, the proclaimed adversary of
democracy, which the one and the other question, as
we shall see, in a roundabout way).
So, we have a number of coincidences. It is obvi-
ously possible to reconstruct for each philosopher
the different path that brought him to the vicinity of
Athens. In Castoriadis, the reflection gathered in The
Imaginary Institution of Society (1975) is continued
from 1979 in an examination of the link between the
Greek polis and the creation of philosophy as the
opening of a space of thought linked to the experience
of a particular relation, in the human world, between
the imminent organization in the city and the disorder
that continues to underlie it, which it knows it cannot
entirely avert. Foucaults bringing to light of the motif
of governmentality would, from 1978, involve a vast
restrospect, from the period which was most familiar
until then (between the classical age and modernity)
back towards medieval thought, towards the Church
Fathers, and then towards Classical Greece. Nonethe-
less, these different returns only reinforce the suspicion
that there is meaning in the coincidence the impres-
sion, to use a Greek expression, that the latter is as
much blind automaton as it is tukh a concept which
Aristotle used to describe coincidence, inasmuch as it
allows human activity and agrees with it, in politics in
particular, and weaves with them a sensible practice.
The questions could therefore be the following.
What does this concern for Greek democracy, shared
by Foucault and Castoriadis, tell us about the singular
historical moment in which they experienced it, each in
his own way? And what lessons can we learn, in this
moment which is ours, from their respective research?
It would be easy to conclude: return and continuity.
Return, in authors that had somewhat returned from
their radical wanderings in the 1970s, towards the
more traditional examples and problems of politi-
cal philosophy, whose influence on modern writers
Castoriadis ceaselessly insists upon, in order to claim
to follow them (Jean-Jacques Rousseau) or to distin-
guish oneself from them (Benjamin Constant): the
invocation of ancient democracy has indeed played
R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 ) 29
a fundamental role in the fight against monarchy
and for the establishment of citizens rights (CL, p.
31). Continuity, therefore, of a preoccupation with
intellectual sources whose contemporary regimes are
still proclaimed, and with regard to which historical
knowledge has, for twenty-five years now, continu-
ally progressed. (Philipp Raynaud, in his preface to
Castoriadis, insists on the progress of archaeology
regarding the birth of the Greek city, and we could say
as much for the philosophical exploration of concepts
mobilized by Foucault).
Such a diagnosis might be unfaithful to the teach-
ing that the two authors claimed to offer, and that
consisted in insisting not on the continuity of political
philosophy but on the effects of rupture, of disconti-
nuity, which exploration of the Greek sources makes
it possible to uncover, with regard to our present. In
answer to the search, in Foucault, for a historical
ontology of ourselves (which the first lecture of GSO
already mentions), we find, in Castoriadis, the concern
to disengage from retrospective illusions vis--vis the
Greek corpus:
The ancient constitutions serve as screens upon
which are projected the ideological needs of the
present, and thus by the same token a whole col-
lection of important aspects disappear important
not from the point of view of exactness, let us say
philological, but really from the point of view of
significations. (CL, p. 27)
If we follow this lesson, the reading of these texts
changes: we see less a stage on the way to the slow
reinstallation of political philosophy in its timeless
space and canonical references, and more the play
of a double discontinuity or of a double interval.
An interval, first of all, in this strange period at the
beginning of the 1980s, characterized by what Michel
Feher suggests calling an interreign. Prior to that
was the exhaustion of the communist and revolution-
ary lexicon in which the radical experiences of the
1970s were formulated, and towards which Castoriadis
and Foucault always remained sceptical (not only
for doctrinal reasons, but because it seemed to them
that this interpretation was profoundly inadequate for
describing the newness of social movements born of
May 1968). Further down the line, from the second
half of the 1980s, lay the establishment of democracy
as an evident horizon of the new world order, and the
tension [mise en tension] between democratic demand
and the republican model; in other words, the affirma-
tion that democratic societies must protect themselves
from individualistic or communitarian temptations by
becoming vigilant with regard to objective and stable
30
forms of life in common (dignity of the law, abstract
citizenship, nationality).
The texts of which we are speaking are to be found
in the interstice between these two crushing bodies
of reference, in a moment where the experience of
dissidence in the Eastern Bloc made the motif of
democracy emerge as a critical motif posing the
problem of knowing whether and how the democratic
demand can also play a questioning role in the West;
in a moment, therefore, when the affirmation of democ-
racy can no longer be satisfied with the opposition,
imposed by Marxism, between formal democracy
and real democracy, but where at the same time it is
less a question of invoking democracy as a principle
than as a practice, which no principle could replace and
which demands, on the contrary, the questioning of all
principles. As a result, from that very singular moment
of our recent past (an almost invisible moment, since
it is so easily forgotten in the teleological reading of
history), the question comes back to us, challenging the
identity of our very present: what should be done, in
this period in which the signifier democracy has been
compromised in imperial adventures and neoliberal
globalization, but also in which what Jacques Rancire
calls the hatred of democracy could not take the place
of politics? What should be done with democracy?
I will try to support a simple hypothesis: what we
learn from the crossed reading of Foucault and Casto-
riadis is that there is only a risked democracy, where
the verb to risk means at the same time attempt
and threat or hazard. There is no democracy that
is not committed to inventing its own institutions and
procedures, on the basis of a radical uncertainty this
is what we learn from Castoriadis; but there are no
institutions or procedures that can exempt citizens
from an exercise that is always in excess of the rules
that contain it and this is what we learn from
Foucault. Between the one and the other, therefore,
appears the outline of an idea which goes against the
foundational movement by which political philosophy,
regularly, goes from politics as a contingent activity
towards the political which is supposed to give it its
foundation and dignity.
Bifurcations
Let us begin by remarking that Foucault and Castori-
adis seem to borrow, with regard to Greek democracy,
certain profoundly divergent reading strategies. The
central object for Foucault, as we know, is parr-
sia, that attitude seen successively in the courage of
Pericles and the insolence of Plato; an attitude that he
describes at the same time as a manner of speaking
the truth, the taking of risk regarding oneself, the
constitution of a relation to oneself centred around
that very risk, and the attestation of a free act. The
manner in which the examination of parrsia seems
today to integrate naturally into our knowledge of
Foucaults work hides perhaps the signification and
the radical nature of the gesture that consists, in
Foucault, in making that dimension appear, and of thus
destabilizing the established understanding of Greek
democratic mechanisms. One must remember here that
if Foucault used the term archaeology with regard to
his own research, he did so by playing against each
other the two possible etymologies of this word: the
arch of the philosophers (as timeless origin giving
its foundation and its justification to experience) and
the archive of historians, as a material whose historic-
ity, multiplicity and absence of hierarchy profoundly
question the identification of a possible foundation.
Thinking, in Foucault, is therefore to grasp the central
significations of the terms that philosophers claim to
raise to the dignity of an essence, but in order to make
appear in the centre of that centre an invisible dimen-
sion, considered to be secondary, which will allow the
philosophical categories to submerge in a history that
they do not master.
This is precisely what is achieved in the lectures
between 1982 and 1983, on at least two levels. First,
in relation to the idea and word government: the
government, in the vocabulary of contemporary phil-
osophy, as in public space, is a quasi-synonym for
executive power, to the extent that the examination of
the manner of governing seems entirely contained and
explained by the institutional context in which power
is exercised. The displacement operated by Foucault,
by examining the way in which the government of
others implies a government of oneself, consists, on
the contrary, in undoing that subordination, and in
showing that the art of governing (and of governing
oneself) is under-determined by the constitutional
system in which it is exercised. Second, it is inside
this strategy, present since the very first works on
governmentality, that the examination of parrsia finds
its true meaning. It has to do less with completing
the traditional understanding of Greek democracy,
defined by the notions of isonomia and of isegoria,
by means of the adjunction of a third term, than with
de-completing or de-totalizing this understanding
itself. Parrsia, indeed, has a status that is profoundly
heterogeneous with that of the isonomia and of the
isegoria. It is not a determination of similar level. As
Foucault remarks in his commentary on Euripides Ion,
parrsia is, in a way, a discourse spoken from above
[dau-dessus], which comes from a higher source than
the status of the citizen, and which is different from
the pure and simple exercise of power (GSO, p. 104).
Where isonomia and isegoria appear to contain
reflection on democracy in the circle of a double refer-
ence to the law and to rights, parrsia brings into play
the supplemental aspect of an attitude and a practice
which no institutional framework could organize on
its own, and which can, and which can only, vouch
for itself through action in other words, through
history: parrsia, which is of course underpinned
by isgoria, refers to something a bit different, which
is actual political practice (GSO, p. 188). On the
other hand, this attitude does not simply amount to a
knowledge of truth, which it attempts to tell: it is not
measured against the value of the truth of the enuncia-
tion that is supported, but rather the type of relation
to oneself that is established through its formulation.
It is therefore a double displacement: of government
as institution towards government as activity; and of
Greek democracy as ordered system of rights and
duties towards parrsia as attitude towards a truth
whose pre-existence in no way promises that one will
appear to be parresiastic.
It is the play of mirrors of democratic modernity
that is broken: its institutional definition of government,
its juridical-formal conception of democracy, and the
gesture that consists in justifying the latter in the name
of the former, in affirming the sufficiency of modern
institutions in the name of the truth and authenticity
of the Greek model, as though the invocation of this
founding model sufficed to call us democrats. To be
democratic in truth is, on the contrary, according to
Foucault, to displace the examination of the reference
to a true model of political order towards the problem
of the relation to truth, which conditions the exercis-
ing of democracy. It is to suggest that a democracy
is worthy because of the capacity of subjects to take
risks in words. As such, the reflection on parrsia is
not only an archaeology of critique, going back as far
as its Greek models (we could see the appearance
of a third figure of the dramatics of true discourse in
the political domain, which is the figure of, let us say,
critique, GSO, p. 70); it is, just as much, an example
of archaeological critique, regarding any pretension of
democracy to founding itself in a regime whose truth
or authenticity might serve as its model.
In a sense, Castoriadiss approach can in this way
seem a lot more traditional: it brings to the fore the
Greek experience that Foucault leaves deliberately to
the side. If Castoriadis evokes parrsia in passing (the
obligation to say frankly what one thinks regarding
31
public affairs), it is in order to underline immediately
the fact that this outspokenness obviously is not
guaranteed by the law, but is considered self-evident
for everyone (CL, p. 84), to the extent that parrsia is
considered to cover more or less the same semantic
field and the same political function as the isgoria (p.
289n). Above all, parrsia is inscribed on the grounds
of the formal and informal institutions of the city that
the laws contain and that is embodied in the principle
organs of democracy (ecclesia and boul) as well as
in its procedures (for example, ostracism). In response
to this choice of an institutional reading comes the
echo of a long development that Castoriadis devoted
to Clisthenes reform; that is, to the reorganization
of the administrative division making it possible to
divide transversally, through territorial units and social
groups, in a way that tears the egalitarian definition of
citizenship from the hold of geography and of lineage.
The question adopted by Castoriadis is therefore that
of the institution, of the way in which the city is estab-
lished and affirmed collectively like a political com-
munity in action, opposed to the pre-political forms
that constitute the tribe, the family or the village, in
a sort of reactivation of the Aristotelian investigation.
However, this return must not create an illusion:
in Aristotle, the jump from the village to the city
is interpreted and justified by the specific end that
the latter pursues (not living, but living well), an end
that appears retrospectively as the cause tending to
actualize itself through the successive forms of human
community, to the extent that the polis appears less like
an event than an accomplishment. In Castoriadis, the
institution of the city is the extreme opposite of such a
search for essence and the mutation to which he sub-
jects the word institution is related, in its radicality,
32
to the forcing that Foucault impresses on the idea of
government. Where philosophy defines institutions as
collective rules whose stability founds the political
community, by giving a civil translation to the natural
needs of man, it is defined by Castoriadis as the whole
of the representations of systems, together, by which a
society attempts to give itself a figure that is, tries to
overcome in an imaginary way the fact that no single
natural or transcendent reason justifies its existence
or its continuation. This was already the
lesson of The Imaginary Institution of
Society: all of the necessities ordinarily
invoked to explain that a society exists
(whether these necessities are biological,
economic, etc.) are still not enough to
justify the fact that we live together, that
we form a we. Collectivity finds its
source in a contingency and a vertiginous
absence of foundation; hence the fact that
all societies produce an imaginary sup-
plement, guaranteeing social existence
on a superior authority (tradition, divinity
or meaning of history); hence also the
fact that communist society, which sought
to be the pure translation of material
necessity, should have produced a radi-
cally transcendent and proliferating imaginary this is
the lesson learned from totalitarianism. The institution
is therefore not a framework, but (to borrow a phrase
from Foucaults Madness and Civilization) a profile
against the void, which leaves a question open: what
form could a society take when, rather than repressing
its own contingency under an imaginary transcendence,
it assumes its own institution, its own self-creation, in
the manner of a we which would claim to belong
neither to any before, nor to any other, to no being,
nor to any it?
It is in this perspective that the reflection on Ancient
Greece comes into play: it is not a question of elevat-
ing Greek democracy to the level of the foundation
of modern systems. It is, on the contrary, a question
of examining Greek democracy as an example of
a society that confronted the dizziness of its own
absence of foundation, and of asking of a society made
to maintain itself, when it rests precisely on the idea
that the way of life depends on nothing other than the
will of its citizens:
Now, from what does this people of equals in the
eyes of power and of the law pose and utter rights?
The greatness of democracy consists in recognizing
this fundamental philosophical fact: it poses and
utters rights from nothing. nothing: this means
 that the law cannot be deduced from anything else,
that it is not the commentary of the Decalogue nor
a consequence of the theory of Plato on being. By
the constitutive act, the people are self-instituted
as legislator; this act describes the forms in which
the legislating activity must be accomplished to be
valid, forms that are valid for as long as that self-
instituting act lasts. (CL, p. 203).
From this perspective, the reference to the laws pro-
foundly changes meaning; the latter appear less like
the base from which the action and the management
of the collectivity become actually possible, than like
systems aiming to introduce an order inside a contin-
gency which is, knowingly, strictly impassable. This
decentring brings back into question, no less than in
Foucaults work, the idea according to which Greek
democracy could constitute a mode: for this it would
need to have constituted a stable state in the manner
of a thing on which it would be possible to lean:
this is, of course, a more than criticizable view,
strictly metaphysical in the worst sense of the term:
Greek democracy is at no single moment a state
of things but rather an historical process by which
certain communities are self-instituted as com-
munities for free citizens. The process of democracy
is at no time a constitution given once and for
all. (CL, p. 41)
Let me summarize. If, upon a first reading, the
approaches proposed by Castoriadis and Foucault
seem opposed to a legal or extra-legal reading
of ancient democracy, these interpretations seem in
reality instead related and complementary. Related
is the manner in which they discourage any attempt
to take Greek democracy as a model, by gleaning a
radical critique of the idea of model from the interior
examination of this democracy: the parresiast cannot
allow himself truth value for what he says to guarantee
what he says in truth; the democratic process is that
of a community which is instituted in the eclipse of any
model. These readings are also complementary, in the
sense that, according to inverse trajectories (Foucault
descends from institutional frameworks to the ordi-
nary activity of the citizen; Castoriadis comes back
from the system of laws to the absence of any base
upon which they could lean), they discover finally two
symmetrical insufficiencies: in Foucault, the principles
do not suffice to guarantee that one will behave demo-
cratically; in Castoriadis, it is not the insufficiency of
principles that is revealed, but rather the insufficiency
as principle, which democracy is indeed obliged to
count on. From both sides, the origin of democracy is
by itself open upon history.
Convergences
This strange intertwining reverberates through the
strategies of reading that our two authors adopt, when
the concern for defining democracy in another way
brings them to pass through neighbouring references:
let us say, quickly, that in their reading of the obliged
passages of the Greek corpus, Foucault and Cas-
toriadis meet in questionings that have nonetheless
radically different styles. I will refer to two
examples of this convergence.
The first example concerns, of course,
Plato. A history could be written on the
ambiguous space occupied by Plato in the
debate on democracy (from Spinoza to
Badiou or Rancire); an ambiguous space,
first of all, for the adherents to a moder-
ate democratic model. On the one hand,
Plato is in a way the model of models.
He is the one who claimed to found the
political order on the reference to a rational
transcendent and fixed norm (an operation
that Jacques Rancire calls, in Disagree-
ment, archipolitical and that according to
him secretly haunts any attempt to reduce
politics to a pedagogy consisting in bring-
ing citizens to the recognition of the validity of the
political order which is imposed). On the other hand,
Plato is of course a counter-model, in so far as the
rigorous development of his ontological options made
him adopt anti-democratic positions. Hence the fact
that the adherents to an open society against its
enemies (to borrow the phrase from Karl Popper)
should have come to define democracy against Plato,
33
without ceasing, however, to borrow from him the
gesture that consists in refusing the radical historicity
of democracy, in order to found it upon something
other than itself. If we admit, on the contrary, that
Foucault and Castoriadis intended to propose a radi-
cally historical conception of democracy that is, one
that exists only in the immanence of its self-institution
and in the vigilance of its practices we see that the
problem of Plato presents itself to them in a sym-
metrical and inverse way. It is a question, on the one
hand, of skirting what, in Plato, refers to the ontology
of the eidos and of participation, of leaving to the side
the philosopher of models, and, on the other hand, of
detecting in Platos anti-democracy something other
than a simple authoritarian temptation, of which our
democracies should be very wary, as though this
opposition sufficed to justify them and to define them.
This is why, from one text to another, we see the
outlines appear of two versions of what we should
call an anti-anti-Platonism: two roundabout read- constitute the resuming and inversion of the Socratic
ings in which the Platonic reference is reinterpreted,
torn from those mirror games to become not a model
or a counter-model, but a paradoxical illumination of
democratic experience.
This reading is only sketched in the text of Casto-
riadis that is available to us. (The central seminar of
8 June 1983, in which he dealt with this question in
conclusion to his year of classes, has unfortunately been
lost.) The elements available to us make it possible,
however, to guess his reading strategy. First, Castori-
adis returns to the classical reading of the Republic and
the Laws, according to which Plato would have sought
to found the city on a radically transcendent order: it
is just such an absolute that Plato seeks, a measure of
the law, a norm of the norm, an extra-social standard
of society (CL, p. 206). But he adds immediately: the
genius of Plato, obviously an immense genius, was
therefore to find and to make explicit the only other
term of the alternative, the only one which contrasts
with democracy, that is, theocracy or, if we wish,
ideocracy, but it is the same thing (CL, pp. 2067).
Praise for the genius of Plato is only paradoxical
here in appearance: what Castoriadis suggests is that
Plato did not want democracy because he saw in it a
radical experience that ordinary democrats most often
refuse to see. In other words, it is not a question of
defending democracy against Plato, but of defending
democracy according to Plato against those who would
be tempted to confuse it with some model of society
as though there were in the anti-democratic Plato a
more acute and sharper consciousness of the radical
immanence of democracy that is not the case in his
34
moderate adversaries. Second, to this abstract analysis
Castoriadis joins a historical hypothesis: if Plato did
not tolerate democracy it is because it did not tolerate
itself (in the double sense in which it could not stand
itself and became intolerable to him). This thesis refers
in Plato, on the one hand, to the Peloponnesian War, to
which I will return later; on the other hand, it refers to
the condemnation of Socrates, whose questioning rep-
resents a passage to the limit from the free democratic
confrontation of his opinions. The Socratic elenchos is
at the same time brought into question from democracy
(where everyone can freely question everyone) and a
bringing into question of democracy, by demonstration
that strictly no one knows the meaning (CL, p. 212).
Castoriadis concludes: democracy must be able to
assume the risk of this demonstration. And most of
the time it did assume this; it accepted the sophists,
the philosophers, etc. But it did not accept Socrates.
As such, the Platonic search for a callipolis would
hybris, which consisted in exercising ones democratic
right to control and contesting the opinion of others,
but without proposing anything in its place. Thus,
writes Castoriadis, one places oneself outside of the
game of the city, one transgresses one its fundamental
unwritten laws but that is no less the most important
of them all (CL, p. 211) with the law consisting in
bringing back through the exchange the immanent
order of opinions which interweave the existence of
the city. In other words, not only does the negative
conception that Plato makes of democracy outline
what it effectively and radically was (a state without a
model); it is also an inheritor of democracy when the
latter collapses from exercising itself to the full and
from no longer believing in itself.
This motif of inheritance is found precisely in
the place that Foucault assigns to Plato, through his
reading of the history of parrsia. One finds in his
commentary, first of all, another way of tracing the
oblique vis--vis the traditional reading of the Platonic
model. Where Castoriadis reads, in Platos ideocracy,
the underside of a democratic self-creation that the
latter recognized and refused, Foucault insists on
the irreducibility of philosophical practice, as Plato
conceives it, regarding the contents and norms that
it takes as objects, which it endeavours to know and
to apply. The reading of Letter VII, and of Platos
judgment of Dionysius of Syracuse, is strategic here:
it is a question of underlining, against the haste of
Dionysius to raise himself to truth and to transcribe it
in a treatise, that the philosopher assumes an attitude
or an activity, an occupation (Foucault underlines the
word pragmata) which conditions access to the truth,
and whose truth itself cannot exempt the thinker.
In other words, where Dionysius claims to reduce
Platonism to doctrine, Plato reminds us that the truth
is inseparable from ethics. Nietzsche entirely rejected
the Plato of hinter-worlds, but showed his admiration
for the style of Plato. Foucault shows, for his part,
that to attain the transcendence of the hinter-worlds
supposes a stylization of existence which is in no
way given by the latter, an exercise of philosophy of
which nothing, outside of the conduct of the philoso-
pher, guarantees victory. Although these remarks only
indirectly concern democracy (in a mode that I will
indicate in a moment), they seem to come from the
same preoccupation as Castoriadiss. In both cases it is
a matter of reading, in the philosopher who is known
for having entirely submitted the practices to a norm of
truth which overhangs it, the affirmation of an irreduc-
ibility of practice irreducibility perceived and refused
according to Castoriadis, in a political order, and
claimed, according to Foucault, in the philosophical
order. Yet, and this is the second fundamental element
of Foucaults reading, this philosophical order is in no
way foreign to the political horizon: not only will the
test of philosophys reality with regard to politics
not take the form of an imperative discourse in which
men and the city will be given constraining forms to
which they must submit for the city to survive (GSO,
p. 255 we could not better brush aside the vision of
Plato as a defender of models, and of the ideal city), but
this demand of the relation to self is in a sense nothing
other than the democratic demand, in a way enveloped
and folded back in the figure of the philosopher.
Witness to an exemplary transition, of the failure
of democracy and its disintegration in tyranny, Plato
becomes the one in whom truth-saying, a condition
for common speech, becomes the solitary duty of the
adviser and critic of the Prince. It is again a question
of inheritance the life of Socrates plays the role here
not of a crisis which would have encouraged Plato to
radically reject democracy, but of a mediation which
displaces the exercise of parrsia outside of the field
of shared speech:
[the parresiast] is no longer simply, solely or exactly
that citizen among other citizens and a bit in the
forefront of them. He is, you will remember we
saw this with Socrates a citizen, of course, like
the others, who speaks like them, who speaks the
language of everyone, and yet who holds himself, in
a way, aside from them. (GSO, p. 341)
Such a reading has two principal effects. On the
one hand, it has to do with making the freedom of
thought an avatar of the freedom to speak. On the
other hand, it makes the subject of the philosophizer
not an autarchic self, but an implicated subject who
exists only if he risks confrontation with power. Where
Castoriadis treats philosophy and politics in parallel,
the one and the other supposing that chaos and cosmos
coexist in nature and in the human world (CL, p. 8),
Foucault makes the philosophical parrsia a relay of
political parrsia:
The disappearance of democratic structures does not
mean the total disappearance of the question of po-
litical parrsia, but clearly it greatly restricts its field
And as a result, philosophical parrsia, in its
complex relationship with politics, can only assume
greater importance. (GSO, p. 342)
Tragedy
We find these complex relations between the demands
of shared speech and the constitution of the subject in
the second example that I wish to examine: the read-
ings that Foucault and Castoriadis give of tragedy. If
the reading of Plato focused on the very definition of
democracy, tragedy obliges our two authors to confront
the general question of history, its signification and
the manner in which the actions of men are tied up
with the fate that carries away the community. It is
a question which, traditionally, leads philosophers to
increase the value of the dimension of the meaning
(what does tragedy teach us regarding the events of
which men are the actors and the victims?), to the
detriment of the event that tragedy constitutes in itself
(what is a tragedy, as historical and civic practice,
and what does the institution of this practice have
to do with the birth of democracy?). This amounts,
says Castoriadis, to seeking the political dimension
of tragedy in the political positions of poets, which
amounts to transforming tragedies into thesis plays
(CL, p. 139). There is an increased value, we could say,
of the tragic utterance regarding the enunciation and of
the manner in which, on the stage of Ancient Greece,
a new manner of saying and of presenting oneself as
actor of ones speech arose. It is on this very terrain
of the statement that we find Foucault and Castoriadis.
Thus, the long reading of Euripides Ion is an oppor-
tunity for Foucault to deploy an actual genealogy of
citizen speech. If the matter is to understand how Ion
succeeds in achieving the right to speak, the stages of
this conquest appear like so many avatars of the act of
speaking. We find, first of all, the truth-saying of the
oracle, as a speech that is at the same time transcend-
ent and masked Foucaults analyses quite directly
echo, on this point, those of Marcel Dtienne in Les
35
matres de vrit dans la Grce archaque (a reading the different modes of enunciation successively brought
whose importance for Foucault has not been suffi-
ciently underlined, and which can be detected between
the lines of the 1970 The Order of Discourse). The
speech of the oracle constitutes the very model of
speech reserved, where truth is authenticated by its
inaccessibility to those who do not have the necessary
status for speaking it. This transcendence is reversed,
second, in the truth-saying of the humiliated woman.
This time, it is the powerless speech of the weak that
acquires the capacity to turn against the powerful and
to denounce their injustice:
this complaint of injustice hurled against the power-
ful by someone who is weak, is an act of speech,
a type of spoken intervention which is recorded, or
anyway perfectly ritualized in Greek society. (GSO,
p. 133)
We cannot help thinking here of the intervention
written by Foucault, in the same years, at the founda-
tion of an international Committee against piracy, to
help the boat-people: Who then nominated us? No
one. And that is exactly what gives us our right.4
The cry and the imprecation seem to be the condition
of democracy more precisely, the foundation of a
democracy that does not allow, for speech, any other
foundation than itself. It is on this basis that the par-
rsia of Ion can finally appear, and the guarantee that
the god (Apollo) gives him appears finally
less like the restoration of a transcendent
justification than the ratification of a right
which men, first, by themselves, seized: the
cry of humans was needed to extract from
the silent god the discourse which will rightly
establish the power to speak (GSO, p. 152).
As a result, the citizens truth-saying will be
struck by a sort of constitutive ambiguity: it
appears like a statutory privilege, sanctioned
by a divine guarantee which will give it its
power and make it the depository of truth and
of justice. But it appears also like an exercise
which nothing guarantees definitively that
it will be exercised in the right way, and
whose peculiarity is to be shared between its
competing citizens: the use of parrsia presupposed
a series of problems, or rather exposed the person
who resorts to parrsia to risks and dangers (GSO,
p. 156). The structure of parrsia that Foucault brings
to light is that of a position that is always in excess of
the right and status that it can insist upon, and in that
way always likely to be contested. This structure does
nothing other than deploy, in the conflicting space of
the democratic deliberation, the contradiction between
36
to light in the tragedy of Ion.
It is precisely this contradiction, not between the
transcendent laws of fate and the actions of men, but
between the power upon which political speech can
insist and the absence of transcendence which is pecu-
liar to it, that Castoriadis brings to light in the reading
he proposes of Sophocles Antigone. This reading does
not actually dwell on Antigone and on the superior
demands that she claims to assert, but rather on Creon
and on the error that he committed. At the centre of
the interpretation that Castoriadis proposes (and that
he makes the political lesson of the play, CL, p. 145)
is the argument that the son of Creon, Hemon, repeats
in order to try to make his father change his decision:
we must listen to the point of view of the other, and
no one is ever right alone [phronein monos]. Cas-
toriadis underlines the fact that this argument is used
by the one who (precisely because he is his son) cannot
directly contest the authority of his father: a son does
not tell his father that the latter has made a mistake. It
is therefore at the moment when the authority of Creon,
his statutory right to exercise power, is recognized,
and by the one who is not in a position to deny it, that
the condition of intersubjectivity of political speech is
recalled. (Castoriadis comments: even if one is right
in ones reasons, to listen only to the reasons one has is
already to be wrong.) As such, the tragedy constitutes
an element of the democratic institution because the
latter demands that individuals, at the very moment
when they are emancipated from all transcendent
authority, at the moment when they acquire power on
themselves, continue to control themselves against a
background of chaos.
We can see the convergence at work with the
reading of Foucault: not only do the two authors
displace tragedy from its said towards its saying of making them play and of being defined by the way
(adopting, regarding the latter, a point of view that we
could call pragmatic), but they also bring to light
the complementary and contradictory conditions of
speech and of democratic decision. There would be
no democracy if men could not claim a relation to
the true and a capacity to decide to be independent
from all forms of transcendent discourse even if, as
Castoriadis remarks ironically, such a statement of fact
resembles a sort of defence of Creon and of tyranny
(CL, p. 145). But no democratic speech can take its
authority from a foundation which would exempt it
from opening up to the possibility of another speech,
by claiming a sovereign and exclusive right to truth.
On this point, the Foucauldian analysis of parrsia
intersects exactly with what Castoriadis considers to
be Creons error:
[parrsia] is a discourse spoken from above, but
which leaves others the freedom to speak, and
allows freedom to those who have to obey, or leaves
them free at least insofar as they will only obey if
they can be persuaded. (GSO, p. 104)
Democracy risked
To conclude, first of all we can see how Foucault and
Castoriadis both define democracy as an exercise.
If there is no democracy without institutions and
without procedures (Castoriadis), none of these pro-
cedures could exempt citizens from inventing the way
in which the citizens situate themselves in relation to
them (Foucault). In short, democracy is not a regime
that exhaustively defines the fundamental laws and the
statuses that it distributes. Second, this exercise can be
defined as the constitution of speech acts, and of a sub-
jectivity that is susceptible of taking charge of them:
the subject of democracy does not exist before it, but
is defined by the manner in which, in the immanence
of history, it effectively does politics, and in so doing
produces itself. In this regard, we could perhaps say
that Castoriadis and Foucault are not on the same level.
With Castoriadis, the subject of democracy is first
a we, a collective affirmed outside of any superior
reference (we are the instituting body, we are the
source of the institution, CL, p. 200). With Foucault,
the attention is, rather, focused on the democratic self,
on the particular type of individual subjectivity that
democracy brings forth, and that it needs.
But this opposition is relative: from the moment that
the we is freed from all transcendent norms, not only
is the community of equals defined by the participa-
tion it allows of the selves in the democratic debate,
but it could not by itself put forward its unity outside
of the effective confrontation of opinions and of the
possibility for everyone to prolong, modify or contest
the speech of the other. This is what, a contrario,
the example of Socrates shows, where his hubris
consists in mobilizing in order to show the emptiness
of the doxa, the self that democracy needs. Such
a risk would not exist if the we of the community
could maintain itself outside of the exchange between
subjects: its truth, if there is one, is constructed (by
democracy) through its confrontation, opposition, the
dialogue of the doxai; and it could not exist if the idea,
or rather the illusion, of a truth acquired once and for
all became socially effective and dominant (CL, p.
211). Vice-versa, the self which is constructed in the
exercise of parrsia is not an autonomous or monadic
subject: not only does Foucault show how the question
of government of others assumes a government of
self, and how ethics is thus enveloped in the exercising
of politics (this is the frequent interpretation of his
later works); he emphasizes how much the self thus
constituted is worked from the inside by the agonistic
game in which it is involved, a game that at the same
time founds and dismisses its capacity to speak the
truth. The we of Castoriadis and the self of Foucault
do not simply fit snugly one into the other; nor do they
simply contradict each other dialectically. They exist
only in the tension that links them, each time that the
democratic exercise is undertaken.
37
 We are touching upon the last lesson to be gleaned
from the confrontation of our two authors: what I
propose to call the idea of risked democracy. In
Castoriadis, this constitutive risk of democracy comes
directly from the absence of an exterior norm, which
would contain the decisions taken within reasonable
limits, as illustrated in the Peloponnesian War:
that democracy does not contain an assurance
against its own excessiveness is shown in the form
of an effective historical tragedy which will last for
twenty-seven years, in the democratic city par excel-
lence that is Athens. The failure of democracy in
and through the Peloponnesian War seems to show
that the people are not capable of self-limiting, of
posing and of saying rights, of correctly governing
themselves. (CL, pp. 2045)
exerted by a few. But the risk nonetheless exists that
some will use their critical posture in order to raise
themselves above others. There is a risk in allowing
just anyone to speak; but there is just as great a risk
in not letting just anyone speak. And there is a risk
in lacking the necessary courage to speak the truth;
but there is also an opposite risk in using truth to
mask ones absence of courage (which is done, often,
in politics, by those who invoke realism to avoid
having to get involved against injustice). It is not only,
therefore, that democracy is a thing that is as precious
as it is precarious, as Castoriadis emphasizes; Foucault
adds that this precariousness is in itself precious, since
it makes democracy both possible and impossible as
a game of truth.

Translated by Shane Lillis

Castoriadiss phrase, which introduces his reading
of Plato, is ambiguous. It suggests that, if Plato was Notes
wrong to seek the essential norm capable of putting 1. Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others:
an end to this risk, he was right to think that hubris Lectures at the Collge de France, 19821983, trans.
always haunts democracy (no one and nothing can Graham Burchell, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke,
2010, cited in the text as GSO.
secure us against ourselves, CL, p. 205). If we stopped 2. Cornelius Castoriadis, La Cit et les lois, Le Seuil,
there, we could conclude that democracy must watch, Paris, 2008, cited in the text as CL.
above all, over its forms, and be all the more vigilant 3. Michel Foucault, Face aux gouvernments, les droits de
with regard to its institutions if the latter are alone in lhomme [Facing Governments, The Rights of Man],
Libration 967, 30 June 1984, in Dits et crits, Vol. IV,
protecting us against chaos. (This is the reading that a Gallimard, Paris, 1994, p. 707.; trans. at http://ajplyon.
certain number of French authors from the republican files.wordpress.com/2009/06/foucault-facing-govern-
movement glean from Castoriadis. Marcel Gauchet, for ments.pdf.
example, in whom the respect for objective forms of
the Republic must be preserved, above all, because they
preserve us from the dissolution tendentially brought
about by democracy.) This is where the reading of
Foucault goes further. For Foucault does not simply
describe how the democratic procedures are instituted
on the basis of a risk that is always present, or call
upon us to confront this risk lucidly: he shows how
this absence of guarantee, this precariousness, is not
simply a fault in the background of institutions, but an
internal condition of the democratic game, an element
that is indispensable to its functioning.
The play of parrsia is indeed inseparable from a
tension since it articulates three dimensions: (1) true
discourse is necessary to democracy; (2) democracy
threatens true discourse (through the temptation of
demagogy); (3) true discourse threatens democracy
(by recognizing in some an expertise and a knowledge
which gives them an ascendancy over others). Parrsia
cannot therefore regulate the exercise of democracy
by confronting a whole series of disturbances that
are born not from the absence of transcendent norms,
but instead from its own norms. The risk exists that
the people will no longer stand the ascendant critique

38
reviews
Strictly come researching
Hans Radder, ed., The Commodification of Academic Research: Science and the Modern University, University
of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 2010. 350 pp., 44.50 hb., 978 0 82294 396 9.
This thirteen-chapter volume claims to be the first
book-length analysis, from a philosophical point of
view, of the trend towards the commodification of
higher education, combining philosophical analysis
with empirical accounts of the current realities facing
universities and academics. No longer do philosophers
have the luxury of pretending that there might still
be time to discuss threats to cherished values and
practices before the worst happens. Damage beyond
what was imaginable only ten or fifteen years ago
has already occurred. Yet, as academia convulses
with change, people in and around it have also found
resistance remarkably difficult, perhaps because these
changes are usually presented either as non-negotiable
or as responses to the pressures of what alarming
numbers of people blithely talk of as a new knowledge
economy.
Those who write about these problems almost invar-
iably start from personal experience and The Commod-
ification of Academic Research is no exception. In
its introductory chapter, Professor of Philosophy of
Science and Technology at VU University Amsterdam,
Hans Radder, writes that the dominance of economic
thinking has made it possible for university administra-
tions to completely ignore substantive arguments about
what constitutes high-level international research. In
preparation for restructuring the university, arguments
put forward by philosophy faculty in Amsterdam,
detailing why the proposed reorganization could not
be expected to lead to an increase in the quality of the
philosophical research, were simply overruled, as only
supposedly economic criteria had any impact on the
university administration. Radders anecdote sets up
the books theme: that commodification isnt just about
direct market transactions. Elsewhere in the volume,
though, personal anecdote sometimes masquerades as
ethnography or inspires unwarranted claims.
It is good news that philosophers of science and
social and political philosophers, as well as experts
on research ethics, have risen to the significant philo-
sophical, political and moral challenges posed by
what is happening to higher education. Let me start,
however, with some peculiar features of the volume.
First, unlike other critiques of the current fix, the
authors place great emphasis on and maybe have
even greater hopes for Mertonian ideals of gentle-
manly science; a stance that Radder elaborates upon
in a chapter framed as a critique of the sociology of
scientific knowledge (SSK). Perhaps this tendency to
turn its back on much of the recent sociologically
inspired literature on science accounts for a second
oddity in the book, namely how most of its authors
seem to endorse ever more stringent ethical codes and
other forms of regulating research the proliferation
of codes and regulations is rarely celebrated in this
way by critics of the new academic conditions. At
the same time, with intellectual property questions
at the books core, its authors do articulate some
sophisticated critiques of how quality is translated
into quantity, exactly the manoeuvre exploited in audit.
But given its practical concern to find better ways of
regulating academic research, it also seems odd that
the book ignores the ways in which audits are already
promulgated as ways of injecting ethics as transpar-
ency into potentially corrupt practices, and how they
have made most universities into institutions that an
accountant can understand, and so inflicted consider-
able damage in the process.
Despite this, The Commodification of Academic
Research reads as a rather unusual but still valuable
contribution to the wider critical debate. In his intro-
duction Radder notes that the root of our problems lie
in economization, his term for the world-view that
sees and enacts life as a simple calculus of benefits and
losses. But he also reminds us of what any observer
of the real world knows: that lifes patterns are never
a matter or all or nothing. Taking their cue from this,
all of the books contributors offer careful empirical
as well as theoretical analysis. However normative it
may be and much of this book is outspoken about its
ethical preferences philosophy can still revel in all
the straggly bits that economization cannot or will not
acknowledge. (In general, the book shows a refreshing
insistence on grappling with older and slower ques-
tions by using philosophys specialist tools, and by
indulging as it might appear from a social science
R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 ) 39
perspective in a philosophers privilege to meander.)
Carefully spelling out what one hopes is self-evident
for anyone interested in the transformation of academic
research, Radder notes that a critique of commodified
science need not presuppose the existence of, and a
wish to return to, a paradise lost. The other chapters
indicate further that the shift towards commodification
has not been imposed from the outside alone. Things
are hence complicated where the economization of
academia is concerned, and in this book are thankfully
treated as such.
If, then, its authors hardly agree on what the problems
are, let alone what the remedies should be, the volume
does productively limit itself to a fairly precise issue.
It is concerned with the broad dominance of market
thinking throughout the university and in its operating
environment, rather than focusing exclusively on com-
mercialization that is, on practices that draw private
money into the universities. In short, it offers philo-
sophical perspectives on research as intellectual activ-
ity. Its authors take great care to differentiate between
distinct activities and phases of research, bringing to
the debate a precision that can sometimes be lacking in
sociological analyses, not to mention commercialized
science in the medical field. Several authors discuss
the differences between applied science, vocational
teaching and technology transfer; others develop their
analyses by reference to concepts from the philosophy
of science; a few even use the vocabulary of science
and technology policy. Many of the chapters mention
the usual complaints about commercialization in higher
education (huge class sizes, the corrosive effects of
commercially driven recruitment, and so on) but do not
dwell on them. Many of the authors do tell surprisingly
gripping stories. Equally, all the contributors, however
obliquely, also identify new cultural conventions within
research institutions that could be expected to affect
epistemic quality as well as to alter the relationship
between university researchers and society at large.
Scientific research, the volumes chapters suggest in
different ways, has become extremely responsive to its
environment, but what constitutes that environment
the public good, society or the community, or business
is very much up for debate.
Most of the examples in The Commodification of
Academic Research are drawn from the life sciences;
that is, from areas of enquiry whose relevance to
human well-being is not in doubt, and where economic
benefit and public good are easy to confuse. Although
I am familiar with the critiques, and aware of some
of the realities of contemporary laboratory research,
I was still shocked by some of the descriptions of
40 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 )
routine practices offered here: outright manipulation
of research outputs (David B. Resnik), restricting
(by various means) access to significant data (Sigrid
Sterckx, James Robert Brown, Sabina Leonelli), and the
old but nonetheless deplorable corruption of medical
research by the pharmaceuticals industry (Albert W.
Musschenga, Wim J. van der Steen and Vincent K.Y.
Ho). The somewhat bewildering concluding chapter
(Harry Kunneman) concerns psychiatry, making some
hopeful observations about the complexity of human
life and the inadequacy of currently dominant ways
of thinking. As illuminating as these examples are,
however, it is a shame that so little attention is paid
here, except in more abstract terms, to the fate of the
humanities or social sciences. For, as Radders intro-
duction argues, commodification involves everyone
in academia. What Steve Fuller sees as the muta-
tion of academic work into knowledge management
applies across the disciplines, not only in those fields
where patents, licences, royalties and profits operate
(even if the influence of the commercializable sci-
ences is felt more clearly by everyone). Nonetheless,
the books examples are certainly eye-opening as
well as eyebrow-raising. For example, Henk van den
Belts chapter explicitly concludes by observing how
scientists freedom to operate is curtailed under
current conditions, a conclusion drawn in various
ways by many of the other contributions also. Through
discussing the practicalities and the justifications for
intellectual property rights, the book presents the
reader with a a variant of the tragedy of the anti-
commons (as developed in M. Heller and R. Eisen-
bergs Science article Can Patents Deter Innovation?
The Anticommons in Biomedical Research), where
an over-eager application and development of property
rights results in existing resources remaining unused.
Whether because of a patent, or because a scientist
cant speak freely over coffee at a conference for fear
of competitors finding out too much, the capacities of
science are clearly being stifled.
The tragedy, of course, touches us all. Many authors
in The Commodification of Academic Research note
this in passing, and some particularly Mark B.
Brown develop arguments against it using concepts
from ethics and political philosophy. Coming towards
the end of the book, Browns chapter presages, I hope,
a continued and increasingly confident engagement
with these issues that manages to speak to a reader-
ship outside of philosophy. The volume may lack the
catchiness of critiques elsewhere, and it is a shame
so little positive acknowledgement is given to the
systematic and often very inventive and epistemologi-
cally challenging research in science and technology
studies (STS) and the sociology of scientific knowledge
(SSK). But by training its focus so resolutely on the
university itself and on research work, the book never-
theless manages something quite radical: an incipient
self-critique of academic work as such.
In many institutions and not just among the global
elite the academic life is potentially a wonderful life,
at least for a particular kind of person. It is, at its best,
a remarkably comfortable existence, in terms of both
practical arrangements (with the significant caveat that
it does involve routine exhaustion) and how easy it is
to keep a clean conscience, while feeling you are doing
something worthy and important. By the same token,
many academics are highly ambitious and creative
people, and they can be good entrepreneurs and svelte
operators within academias reward systems, whether
based on esteem or money. Not every academic finds
scientometrics an insulting term, and, as the book
indicates, a good many are adept at reaping advantage
through it. For those who are, however, unhappy with
scientometrics, this book at least begins to seek better
grounds for making judgements about what is actu-
ally going on in contemporary universities. Decision-
making by number, by establishing audits if necessary
to render all things measurable and comparable, has
seized the public imagination to the point of hollowing
out politics as well as academia. The early twenty-
first century offers us endless opportunities to judge;
quickly and harshly, if pointlessly. Other peoples
ballroom dancing or parenting skills are as easy to
damn by text message as rail services or medical care
via a feedback form. As such, it really is time that
philosophers sought to engage more openly with the
implications of the current transformation of universi-
ties into human-fuelled economic machines. In contrast
to their close colleagues in the social sciences, phil-
osophers of science appear, however, to have been slow
in taking up the issues that the commodification of
everything throws up, including the commodification
of academic research. New tools and good arguments
are needed to defend other ways of doing things, and,
while it may be a lot to ask, who better to promote
the benefits of clarity of thought and stubborn rigour
than philosophers?
Eeva Berglund
Carry on campus
Martha C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy
Needs the Humanities, Princeton University Press,
Princeton NJ and Oxford, 2010. 178 pp., 15.95 hb.,
978 0 691 14064 3.
The publication of Lord Brownes report on higher
education last October and the British governments
subsequent proposals to implement unprecedented cuts
to teaching funding, alongside the trebling of tuition
fees, threatens to place English institutions in the
unenviable position of being at the forefront of the
ongoing neoliberal experiment with the university,
potentially leapfrogging the USA in the scale and
depth of its ambition to fully privatize higher educa-
tion. As proved by the recent closure of Philosophy at
Middlesex University (as well as a number of other
humanities departments across Europe and the USA),
this transformation has been aggressively pre-empted
by many institutions, mindful of the cuts to public
spending that have been announced in Greece, Italy,
Ireland and California. It has already provoked a range
of theoretical responses from those seeking to defend
the value and importance of the humanities: most sig-
nificantly, if not uniquely, threatened by these changes.
What often unites these responses is the desire for
a recuperation of the public function of the humani-
ties (and philosophy in particular) on the basis of its
civic potential, a desire which establishes the agenda
for debates about the value and necessity of such
disciplines within education. This can be seen in
Britain, for example, in the University of Warwicks
appointment of the first Senior Fellow in the Public
Understanding of Philosophy and in the formation
of The Philosophy Shop, a not-for-profit organization
encouraging and facilitating the teaching of philosophy
in schools; as well as, internationally, in UNESCOs
Intersectoral Strategy on Philosophy from 2005, which
R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 ) 41
promotes the study of philosophy at all levels of
education through activities such as the introduction
of a World Philosophy Day. It is also evident in
Martha Nussbaums polemical tract, Not for Profit:
Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.
Nussbaum situates her intervention in the context
of a world-wide crisis in education, but singles out
British education (even prior to the Browne report) for
exceptional criticism for remodelling its universities
according to the narrowest principles of economic
growth leading to the outright closure of humanities
departments or mergers with more directly vocational
courses and for subjugating academic research to
the demands of impact borrowed from the natural
sciences. For Nussbaum, in contrast, philosophy and
the humanities educate students to be critical of tradi-
tion and authority, endowing them with the rational
autonomy necessary for democratic governance. Her
model of education is one structured not for profit
but for democracy. Problems emerge, however, as she
reveals the extent of the values essential for democracy
and therefore the myopia of her democratic vision.
Although she injects a more strenuous cosmopolitan-
ism into the account, her developmental narrative
largely conforms to a bourgeois pedagogic theory
of late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberalism,
starting out from the psychological assumption of an
essentially narcissistic infant and orientated towards
the political task of producing autonomous, responsible
and tolerant citizens necessary for a stable global
democracy. Drawing predominantly on aspects of the
work of Rousseau, Nussbaum assumes a widely shared
narrative of human childhood in which the struggle
for freedom and equality must first of all be a struggle
within each person, as compassion and respect contend
against fear, greed, and narcissistic aggression. The
function of education is to manage the infantile narcis-
sism that results from our awareness of such helpless-
ness, so that individuals mature into well-rounded
human beings. This favours a liberal social democ-
racy with a strong emphasis on fundamental rights,
protections for political liberty, freedom of speech,
association and religious exercise, and an entitlement to
education and health. Democratic educational institu-
tions should therefore promote the virtues necessary
for good citizenship in such a society: primarily the
capacity for rational autonomy and critical thought,
social cooperation and sympathetic imagination, and
aesthetic, sensual and bodily confidence and integrity.
For Nussbaum, philosophy, the humanities and the arts
are the cornerstone of such an educational project and
as such remain essential for democratic society.
42 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 )
Yet Nussbaums political understanding is rooted in
a classical liberalism whose limitations have already
been exposed in Marxs critique of the secular divi-
sion drawn between political community and civil
society in what he calls the perfect democratic state.
Of her narrative of pedagogic development we might
therefore ask, with Marx: what kind of emancipation
is demanded and what conditions follow from this?
For Nussbaum inequality and exploitation are mis-
conceived as primarily psychological disorders of the
soul, rather than the economic order of the social. She
supposes it is our practical weakness and insecurity
that make us desire and need mastery over others, such
that children who can negotiate well in their environ-
ment have less need for servants to wait on them.
Conversely, she regards collective action as entailing a
de-humanization which results in democratic disorder,
rather than being the product of it. The activity that
takes place in the space between individuals for Nuss-
baum is not work or politics, but play: the ability to
imagine what the experience of another might be like.
Her paradigm is the liberal arts model of US
university education, where students are obliged to
take a range of subjects in the humanities. Nussbaum
identifies the pressure to close humanities departments
in UK institutions with the absence of such a liberal
arts model, but admits it cannot easily be implemented
outside the USA. The difficulty arises because the
state funding of higher education in the USA (already
proportionally more than the UK) is generously sup-
plemented through philanthropic donations and endow-
ments (a revenue stream significantly higher than in the
UK, which has increased during the recession, aided
by tax incentives). Indeed, one wonders whether this
is the essence of the active, humane and democratic
citizenship that Nussbaum seeks to promote: private
individuals giving generously to public projects. At
one point, she gratefully praises the cultivation of
humanistic philanthropy and basically private-endowed
structure of funding in the USA, and acknowledges a
number of institutions which are either supporters or
beneficiaries of such philanthropy.
The association between the humanities and phil-
anthropy etymologically linked via the Latin trans-
lation of those subjects in a Greek education that
generate the love of humanity (philos anthropos)
resurfaces in the neoclassicism of the German Enlight-
enment, and was imported into the United States
during the Gilded Age of post-Civil War industrial-
ism (where philanthropy is evoked as the complement
of patriotism). In the UK, these values and the culture
of philanthropy they endorsed became superseded
by the labour movement and the introduction of the
welfare state, and their continued existence in the
USA is predicated on the relative absence of such a
movement. Margaret Thatchers and David Camerons
more recent recuperation of the Victorian values of
self-reliance, personal responsibility and voluntarism
draw on the same civic virtues as Nussbaum in this
respect. However, Not for Profits insistence that a
liberal arts education is not the vestige of past elitism
or class privilege is contradicted by the realization
that philanthropy and the liberal arts are conjoined in
either a virtuous or a vicious circle in Nussbaums distinction within the humanities that may be deployed
thought, and therefore predicated on the accumulation
of wealth within a capitalist system.
Yet bursaries and subsidies for the poorest students
are only the exceptional fig leaf to the perpetuation
of existing class divisions. Whilst the Browne review
regards philanthropic gifts as an important part of
the future of university funding, this dependence will
exacerbate not dissolve such divisions. There is no
doubt that the Russell Group of elite UK universi-
ties can extract donations from wealthy alumni and
use this to subsidize access for students from poorer
backgrounds. The latter will become a strategic neces-
sity given the levy being proposed for institutions
that charge the highest rate of tuition fees, but will
nonetheless create a financial disincentive for such
universities to widen access for poorer students beyond
agreed minimum targets. Ex-polytechnic institutions,
however, that serve students from mainly urban and
typically socially deprived backgrounds (who cannot
choose their university, dependent as they are on
access to accommodation, childcare and work) cannot
rely on the same philanthropic generosity, yet will
disproportionately shoulder the cost of subsidizing the
education of these poorer students.
Nussbaums defence of the humanities has an
implicit recourse to philanthropy that is not contin-
gent but predicated on an outmoded and reactionary
dependence on privatepublic philanthropy now largely
eliminated from European countries and perhaps
recoverable only with the deepening of the socio-
economic divide. Its recourse to the language of public
good and the democratic, civic virtues of autonomous,
critical thought and playful, imaginative sympathy are
anachronistically redundant for the shifting concerns
of institutions within late capitalist economies beyond
the USA. Bill Readingss excellent 1997 study The
University in Ruins (a work that regains a topical vital-
ity now largely absent from Lyotards notorious essay
on The Postmodern Condition, on which Readings
draws), examines the way the modern university of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was predicated
on the construction of a national identity rooted in
language, history, culture and the arts, necessitat-
ing the ideological reproduction of a bourgeois class
consisting in lawyers, doctors and clergy but also
public intellectuals. As the contemporary university
seeks in turn to reproduce the social relations of the
globalized marketplace of late capitalism, this kind of
public discourse has been rendered largely redundant.
On the one hand, Nussbaums defence of education
for democracy threatens to introduce a qualitative
against contemporary disciplines such as sonic arts
and the study of film, television and culture (Not for
Profit makes no mention of these subjects). On the other
hand, its rhetorical appeal to notions of public good
and democratic citizenship render it increasingly irrel-
evant to the interests of corporations and governments
that appear to be abandoning even the semblance of
democratic responsibility and political accountability.
If there is an element of political realism to Nussbaums
patriotic insistence that it is liberal democracy that
needs the humanities (and this is evident in her corol-
lary argument that business requires the humanities
too, if it is to avoid a corporate culture of yes-people
that inhibits innovation and economic success), it
is nevertheless unclear whether the socio-economic
interests of late capitalism will continue to need or even
desire the democratic legitimacy and active citizenship
she promotes (as opposed to, say, global consumers).
Indeed, it is possible to regard Nussbaums mani-
festo, like UNESCOs comparable proclamations
on the necessity of philosophy for a cosmopolitan
democratic order, as the manifestation of a more
general anxiety over the perceived threat to the liberal-
democratic values of a cosmopolitan capitalism from
the destabilizing influence of so-called religious and
political fanaticism over the last decade. Those who
seek to oppose the neoliberal transformation of higher
education would do well not to retreat to the reac-
tionary humanism of the classical liberal model of
the university, since the arguments in defence of the
humanities proffered by advocates of the liberal arts
anachronistically seek not to overcome but to perpetu-
ate existing inequalities, insolvable by any vision of
humane capitalism. We should not, therefore, seek
apologetically to justify the arts and humanities as
necessary for the goal of transforming immature stu-
dents into mature world citizens, but perhaps, first
and foremost, defend an imperative to education as an
(undialectical) image of unalienated labour.
Matthew Charles
R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 ) 43
Walk this way
Susan Hekman, The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and
Indianapolis, 2010. xi + 148 pp., 45.00 hb., 14.99 pb., 978 0 25335 467 9 hb., 978 0 25322 196 4 pb.
This book is intended to bear witness to what Hekman
claims is a sea change in intellectual thought. The
sea change is primarily a move away from linguistic
or social constructionism and towards a new form of
materialism. The first four chapters of the book are
intended to describe this sea change in, respectively,
the philosophy of science, analytic philosophy, modern
European philosophy and feminist thought. The fifth
and final chapter is intended to extend the approach to
the ontology of the social sciences.
Whilst Hekman clearly succeeds in making the case
that there is, in some quarters, a growing discontent
with constructionism, she only describes in rather
broad strokes, but never fully develops, the alternative
materialist view that she supports. One reason for
this shortcoming, perhaps, is her tendency to present
us with little cameo summaries of the views of those
philosophers and cultural critics who represent such a
sea change. These summaries give a staccato tempo to
the book, which fails to gel into a sustained defence
of a position. Hekman also fails to specify fully the
kind of constructionism that she rejects, leaving it to
the reader to figure out the commitments of the view.
She explicitly claims that both postmodernism and
the strong programme in the sociology of scientific
knowledge exemplify this position, but she does not
say what about these views makes them exemplars of
constructionism. My suspicion is that Hekmans target
is a fuzzy cluster of claims that do not have much in
common. I also suspect that to some extent she relies
on a caricature of the position she rejects one for
which constructionism is the view that there is nothing
outside language, in the sense that there are no entities
or events that have both physical properties and causal
powers to affect human beings. Yet I doubt very much
that anybody has ever consciously held this position.
Rather, constructionism, when it has been coherently
articulated, has taken a rather different form.
In this different form it is best understood as the
view that there are no natural kinds instead, all
manners of typing things and events into kinds make a
reference to human conceptualization. Being a football
or a pound coin are clear examples of socially con-
structed kinds. The supporter of social constructionism
is committed to the view that, for instance, being an
electron, being water or being a tiger are also in some
44 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 )
way socially constituted kinds. As it has often been
remarked, the view is most plausible when applied to
so-called laboratory science, such as particle physics or
genetics, rather than to sciences that are mostly based
on observation, such as some branches of astronomy.
In these areas most if not all of the phenomena under
study only occur under some specific conditions which
involve the use of a variety of apparatuses. In so far as
their mode of production is definitive of what they are,
these phenomena too belong to socially constructed
kinds.
Once constructionism is characterized in this
manner it becomes apparent that Hekman actually
aligns herself to some of its supporters. In the first
chapter of this book she lists both Ian Hacking and
Joseph Rouse as defenders of the view she endorses;
it is instructive that they are both supporters of the
constructionist view I have outlined above. Further,
constructionism, so conceived, is not opposed to agen-
tial realism, at least if the latter is defined as the
view that things and phenomena have causal powers
which make them able, so to speak, to kick back. It
is perfectly possible for a thing a football, a pound
coin to belong to a socially constructed kind and
have causal powers, as when the football hits one in
the face or the pound coin causes the vending machine
to dispense a chocolate bar.
If, then, despite Hekmans claims to the contrary,
social constructionism is not really the opponent of the
philosophers of science she endorses in the first chapter
of this book, what is their real target? They reject a
conception of science as being primarily in the busi-
ness of producing accurate or true representations of
reality. Because of their opposition to representational-
ism, Hekman takes this approach to indicate a move
away from epistemology to ontology. I do not find this
characterization of the shift to be very helpful since
social constructionism is also primarily a theory about
ontology. More helpful is Hekmans characterization
of the same shift as a move towards a conception of
knowledge in terms of practices. So conceived, natural
science is first of all a bundle of practices for interven-
ing upon, manipulating and interacting with reality.
Importantly, at least in the case of Karen Barad, whose
work Hekman discusses in Chapter 4, this reconception
of science as a practice leads to a new formulation of
the ontology of natural science. For Barad the world
is not primarily made up of things and their properties
but of phenomena which are patterns of the world
itself. Hence, we can characterize what is novel in the
view that Hekman endorses not as a shift to ontology
but as a shift to a special kind of ontology: one that
has doings and phenomena as the most fundamental
kinds of what there is.
It is this broad approach to the constitution of the
natural world and to our knowledge of it that is shared
by many of the heroes of this book, who include Bruno
Latour, Andrew Pickering, Joseph Rouse, Nancy Tuana
and Karen Barad. Hekman claims to find similar
developments in both analytical and continen-
tal philosophy. Her exemplary figures here are,
respectively, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michel
Foucault. Contrary to some popular interpreta-
tions, Hekman argues that Wittgenstein is not best
read as a supporter of idealism and that Foucault
does not endorse linguistic constructionism. Both
claims are plausible. It is hard, however, to see
how her treatment of these authors contributes
to the development of the new approach she
endorses. Granted, Wittgenstein thought of lan-
guage in terms of the many practices in which
we use it. Speaking, writing and understanding
are, for him, all complicated forms of doings.
Nevertheless, these considerations alone do not seem to
take Hekman further in the development of an account
of knowledge as something we do, and of doings as
the most fundamental ontological category.
The fourth and fifth chapters are the core of this
book. There Hekman presents the positions of several
feminist thinkers as especially significative of the
new form of materialism she endorses. In her view, it
is feminism that, above all else, is pushing in a new
direction and is the prime mover of the intellectual
sea change The Material of Knowledge is intended to
highlight. Some recent feminist accounts of the body
and of natural phenomena, on the one hand, and of
identity and other social categories, on the other, are
presented as the most fully developed versions of the
new approach Hekman supports. They are character-
ized by an insistence on interactions (as opposed
to linear monocausal explanations) between human
beings and material phenomena, and on the reality of
social categories such as identity.
In these chapters also Hekman hints at two sig-
nificant features of her new materialism. The first
is the idea that reality is able to show itself. This
is what Hekman means by disclosure. The second
idea is not foregrounded by Hekman herself but
is an important theme in some of the authors she
champions. It concerns the pervasiveness of norms.
Whilst Hekman, unfortunately, does not say a great
deal about either idea, it is possible to see how they
combine to give rise to a novel conception of the
cognitive relation between human beings and reality.
The best expression to date of this conception can
be found in Barads work, which is correctly identi-
fied by Hekman as truly groundbreaking. For Barad,
human practices and actions are co-constituted with
what they produce. Natural phenomena, as ways in
which the world is, emerge as a result. In this way
reality discloses itself by means of interventions that
constitute both the doer (which could be human or
not) and what is being intervened in. Further, actions
make the world determinate, that is to say conceptu-
ally articulated. In this way, the natural world itself is
normative because it is constituted when, as a result
of interventions, it comes to matter. It matters both in
the sense that it becomes matter, since objects only
come into existence as being parts of phenomena, and
in the sense of becoming intelligible (conceptually
articulated) because the intervention has constituted
it as a pattern of normative significance.
In so far as Barad takes nature itself to be normative,
she has produced a genuine alternative to the version
of social constructionism which I have described at the
beginning of this review. Her departure from this posi-
tion consists in the idea that nature itself is the locus
of norms; social constructionism, instead, tends to be
committed to the view that only human beings are
capable of creating conceptual articulations. Whilst,
in my view, Hekman does not takes her reader beyond
Barads work, nevertheless this book offers a useful
pointer in the direction of some new and exciting
developments in feminist philosophy of science which
certainly deserve to be explored further.
Alessandra Tanesini
R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 ) 45
What would Jesus deconstruct?
Dawne McCance, Derrida on Religion: Thinker of Difference, Equinox, London and Oakville CT, 2009. xvii
+ 122 pp., 45.00 hb., 14.99 pb., 978 1 84553 275 8 hb., 978 1 84553 276 5 pb.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe, Columbia Univer-
sity Press, New York, 2008. xii + 256 pp., 34.50 hb., 18.50 pb., 978 0 23114 632 6 hb., 978 0 23114 633 3 pb.
Steven Shakespeare, Derrida and Theology, T&T Clark International (Continuum), London and New York, 2009.
xi + 233 pp., 55.00 hb., 14.99 pb., 978 0 56718 664 5 hb., 978 0 56703 240 9 pb.

Perhaps the most prominent figure in the engagement
between deconstruction and Christianity in the United
States, John D. Caputo now approaches in his seminars
at Syracuse the contemporary continental philosophies
of Badiou, Laruelle, Malabou, Marion, Meillasoux,
and others. However, if Caputo has thus sought to
engage a turn towards speculative realism or radical
materialism in recent European philosophy, in order
(following Meillasouxs affirmation of a speculative
grasp of reality in itself figured by the archifossil) to
ask the question of whether diffrance is a principle
of reality or of a correlation with reality, it has
also been in order to return to the relation between
deconstruction and religion itself. The familiarity that
now accompanies any such move as yet another
return to the theological and the suspicion that it
may perhaps have reached a certain point of exhaus-
tion, is already made clear though by the publication
of a number of survey books in Caputos chosen field,
including Steven Shakespeares Derrida and Theology
and Dawne McCances brief Derrida on Religion.
These are both texts that aim for comprehensiveness
in terms of different religious (and to a lesser extent
counter-religious) readings of deconstruction, with an
essentially Christian rather than Judaic or Islamic
focus, and for a delineation of Derridean texts that
have subsisted such thinking. Both are, however, also
defined, to some degree, by a circumspect retraction (at
least, in their own judgement) from straightforwardly
identifying the two discourses: it is Caputo who, gener-
ally speaking, stands as the strongest proponent not
only of an identity between the two, but of the priority
of their equation; as in his claim that deconstruction
is structured like a religion.
That the reality under consideration in such texts
is primarily immaterial is indicated by the ways
in which both McCance and Shakespeare tend to
approach deconstruction through Derridas multiple
nicknames for diffrance (khora, pharmakon, gift,
animality, etc.), which are then treated as more or
less abstract ideas that is, as objects of thought
divested of their material dimensions or as schemas
that might be attached to religious conceptuality. They
thus obviate those aspects of deconstruction attending
precisely to materialities of, for instance, writing,
memory or social institutions. There is therefore very
little in the way of an understanding of the materiality
of language considered in terms of the politics of its
institutional forms as archival mnemotechnics
in either book. In this sense, both Shakespeare and
McCance follow that purportedly deconstructive con-
ception of the religious, outlined in Caputos own On
Religion (2001), as an impossible reality beyond reality.
In the religification of deconstructions impossible,
if Badious Paul is an event of the universal, and
Laruelles Christ is a radical immanentist, Caputos
Jesus is then a deconstructor in that sense given in
his 2007 book entitled What Would Jesus Deconstruct:
The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church.
Yet while postmodernism, in its weakest and most
relativist forms, might be germane to the Church,
things get trickier where post-structuralism and, within
it, deconstruction are concerned.
So, what would Jesus deconstruct? Despite the
possibility of this question for Caputo, and the struc-
tural, philosophical and conceptual complexity of the
copious writings such questions have produced in
attempts to bring together deconstruction and religion,
imagine the brevity of the Agony in the Garden had
Jesus actually been so inclined: its monologue cur-
tailed, God quickly dissolving in the recognition that
the image of the transcendental other out there is just
that a spectral product of that other origin of all
things, diffrance. In fact, deconstruction precisely
militates against the division of the sacred and profane
governed by the classical opposition of the infinites,
developed by Hegel in terms of the absolute infinite
of the theological Idea and the endless series of the
ad infinitum an opposition that is maintained by
theology, metaphysics and (in permutational or struc-
tural form) the majority of contemporary continental
thought. Indeed, deconstruction poses what might be
considered as an axiomatic resistance to such thought:
if, as indicated in Dissemination, infinite diffrance

46 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 )
is finite, then the polar infinites are spectral products
of that more archaic spectral in-differentiation not
transcendental, and neither empirical, but their condi-
tion of im-possibility, and not the reverse. Thus, to take
Caputos question literally, and seriously, would be to
end traditional Christianitys sense of the origin at its
origins, and thus to curtail an entire tradition before
its own historical emergence.
Deconstruction, in this sense, and as a form of post-
structuralism, develops the secular notion of language
in structuralism given, for example, by Montessori
in The Absorbent Mind (1967), where the mystical
value of language emerges from its separation of and
construction of communities. The sense of something
above and beyond the individual and group emerges
from langage, rather than from any transcendental
exteriority. If language, generally speaking, as the
Course in General Linguistics points out, is finally
unmasterable, then prohibitive laws regarding, for
example, fixed gendered roles are, in deconstruction,
to be understood as symptomatic of such meanings
essential instability. Thus, in its legalizing and nor-
malizing function, God is one of the names relating
to (and latterly produced as a counter to) such slip-
page. But this does not mean that the name God
then becomes diffrance, other than in the sense that
all religious thinking is itself deconstructible. That
deconstruction does not obliterate the image of the
absolute is clearly the lure for many of those discourses
attached to it, but, put simply, the deconstructibility
of religious systems of meaning does not entail that
such systems, in their affirmation of the absolute qua
primordial impossible, are themselves deconstructive,
since such primordiality cannot be maintained. In so
far as both McCance and Shakespeare intersect briefly
with the issue of animality, it might thus be worth
mentioning here the moment where the other is, for
Derrida, sunk into the eyes of a cat: the tout-autre is
not transcendentally beyond, and its distance, given
species deconstruction, is not infinite. In terms of such
problematized quotidianism, faith as such must be
seen as a product of those supposedly mediate forms
of exchange communicative, familial, monetary and
so on that are said to be the secondary forms of the
transcendental. In this situation, a passion for the
impossible tout-autre is in fact a form of nostalgia,
and hence, as Specters of Marx would have it, a kind
of endless mourning.
Concomitantly, attempts to connect deconstruction
and religiosity often appear to operate through an
endless efflorescence of detail, interstice or narra-
tive turn as if there was, at some point, some
unspotted secret recess that would open back onto
religion. Yet it hardly matters whether one turns to
R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 ) 47
trace, pharmakon, or autoimmunity as Caputo
has done by privileging the gift in order to unearth
the possibility of a link between deconstruction and
religion that might elsewhere be absent, because, in
problematic conjunction with their difference, such
terms also share a consistent logic; a logic that cannot
but refuse a return to any traditional notion of the
transcendental as origin. (If one did want to find some
macrological meeting point between such exclusive
discourses, it might perhaps be sought in claiming
the co-originarity of difference and things as Mark
C. Taylor does but such would no longer be decon-
struction.) Nor, as it is not a form of relativism, can
deconstruction be invoked in order to bolster postmod-
ernist ideas concerning the proliferation of religions
and gods, in a manner which extends the equation of
religion and consumerism marked in William Jamess
many finite gods a proliferation generated not
essentially by the multiplicity of the social, but by
the supposed ad infinitum of capital. The historical
relationship between capital and certain understand-
ings of religion is no doubt significant for opening up
questions of the terminology that could be employed
in describing religions relation to deconstruction: as
renewal, redefinition or colonization, territorializa-
tion, and so on. But such a relationship operates at
a more general and systemic level: capital, like any
other system, including religious systems of thought,
cannot be other than characterized by the collapse of
the ad infinitum and the absolute (as should be clear
from the spectrality of the commodity elaborated in
Specters of Marx). Furthermore, all systems (which
function as languages, for Derrida, since there is no
outside-text), whether natural or cultural, material
or ideational, or, indeed mathematical, while differ-
ent, are determined by the axiomatics of diffrance.
The relation between capital and the ad infinitum,
as a figure of deferral, is of course key to Badious
rejection of deconstruction, for one, which appears, on
this account, as a discourse of endless procrastination,
sunk into the encyclopaedia of existing knowledges
that perpetuates the indeterminacies of bourgeois
thought, and which contributes to a pathetic situation
in which the existence of God cannot be ascertained.
Such a characterization of deconstruction in terms
of endless deferral is also, for example, a component
of Malabous and Meillasouxs thought, among many
others. In this sense, the pseudo-deconstruction of an
endless religious mourning for an impossible trans-
cendental can only contribute towards the association
of deconstruction not only with endless deferral but
also with an endless miring in a stultified present and
48 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 )
an inertial past. In so far as the current situation is
characterized by some sense of a becoming-after of
the theological turn and, through this, of an after
Derrida and, hence, of a return to philosophy char-
acterized by an affirmation of axiomatics and decision,
this will no doubt serve only to contribute towards
deconstructions institutional and critical demise. Yet
this would be to forget the axiomatic character of
deconstruction in terms of that injunction infinite
diffrance is finite, which might be thought of as a
rule, if it were not also the undermining of sover-
eignty; a given posited violently, if it were not also the
undoing of violence; a law, if this were not also justice.
This crystalline consistency of the axiomatic has been
maligned in some affirmations of deconstruction, as if
it would deny or close off difference; but to ignore such
consistency would be to singularize deconstructions
implacable and nonsynthetic tensions here, then,
between deferral and decision. The complexity of the
axiomatic needs to be thought as (dis)conjunction (a
complexification itself subject to necessary simplifica-
tion) with simplicity.
Attention to the issue of decision clearly structures
Mary-Jane Rubensteins new book Strange Wonder,
where thaumazein (roughly translatable as wonder)
operates as a differential principle for the (non)origin
of thought that both suspends and calls for judge-
ment. Indeed, such attention is indicated in its chapter
structure: Wonder (Socrates), Repetition (Heidegger),
Openness (Levinas), Relation (Nancy) and Decision
(Derrida). In its genuinely detailed, cogent and knowl-
edgeable discussion of such figures, Strange Wonder is
informed by an awareness of the overall structure of
the infinites, but the way in which their problematic
relation is seen to operate in a similar way from the
beginning of the book to its end risks dehistoricization,
just as, in some ways, the earlier chapters conformity
to a deconstructive logic appear presupposed by the
methodology employed. For example: the Socrates
reconstructed here through Theaetetus, as a proponent
of wonder, might have been contrasted to those far
more didactic aspects of the dialogues and the context
of their socio-political formation.
The nature of the axiomatic as such is itself of
course subject to history and difference. Thus axi-
omatics always require for their sense of the decisive
a complex historical armature of explanatory context,
discourse, knowledge (indeed, by inverse ratio: the
more minimal, the more maximal), and thus they
are strictly neither performative nor constative. Like-
wise, permitting a relation between the axiom and the
performative and the decisive, for deconstruction, as
Rubenstein indicates, decision is fractured by oppos-
ing demands: to know everything of a situation and to
act regardless. As Rubenstein glosses in the penulti-
mate sections of the book: every decision must begin
by accumulating as much knowledge as possible,
but justice must not wait. If this describes the
heteronomy of archive and action, reason and deci-
sion, history and the present, it also pushes towards
the instant of decision as madness. Rubensteins
separation from the argument of Derridas The Gift
of Death occurs precisely over this point: Derrida
flattens Kierkegaards Abraham into a subject in this
text by resolving his undecidability, installing him and
God as discrete and sovereign subjects, and convert-
ing faith in the absurd into faith in the economy
of heaven. However, this is, it seems to me, not, as
Rubenstein argues, a denial of thaumazein, but a
refusal of the equation of the incalculable with the
transcendental, and an opening for a reorientation of
wonders locations in the mediate: something like
the archive, say, cannot be, for Derrida, a site of pure
ratiocination it too is differential, and thus also of
the incalculable.
Rubensteins traditionally philosophical attachment
to thought as against mnemotechnics also character-
izes, as indicated, both McCances and Shakespeares
books. In this sense, these texts tend to reinscribe
the privileges of philosophical idealism, which are,
for Derrida, attached historically to phonocentrism.
Derridas practice, however, from the early to the
late work, is always characterized not only by a
deconstruction of thought per se, but by an atten-
tion to various ways in which materiality might be
implicated in such a deconstruction. In contradistinc-
tion to that association of deconstruction with endless
deferral, it might be in that very institutional form
associated with such delay the archive, and its
engagement, broadly thought that its counter might
be sought. If this is, for the Derrida of Archive Fever
and of Echographies, for example, to plunge into the
texts denied by the Book, the archive is not only of
the past, but of the current and, in its diffrance,
concerns not just the archiving of the event, or the
event of this archiving, but potentiates the event of
the future: the possibility of thought, difference and
decision. For, if diffrance differs and defers, it must
differ from deferral. The failure to think this aspect of
diffrance, in this context, is perhaps one of the great
failures not only of deconstructions detractors but of
many of its adherents to date. It is thus still one of its
great possible futures.
Sas Mays
Speak to me
Nick Couldry, Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics
after Neoliberalism, Sage, London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi, 2010. 184 pp., 60.00 hb., 19.99 pb.,
978 1 84860 661 6 hb., 978 1 84860 662 3 pb.
The issue of voice who is allowed to speak and
what weight their account carries is clearly crucial
to politics, and has been brought into sharp focus once
more by the student militancy at the end of 2010. I
write this review in the wake of a furious online debate
triggered by the Labour Partys promise to give a
voice to student protestors.
Nick Couldrys central claim in Why Voice Matters
is that neoliberalism can be defined by its suppression
of voice, which he characterizes as a reflexive form
of agency. The book draws upon a dizzying range of
references, but Couldrys theory of voice is built from
four main sources: Judith Butler, whose Giving An
Account of Oneself is echoed in Couldrys definition
of voice as the process of giving an account of ones
life and its conditions; Paul Ricoeurs theories of nar-
rative; the economist and philosopher Amartya Sens
account of freedom; and political theorist Axel Hon-
neths neo-Hegelian concept of recognition. Couldry
maintains that, under neoliberalism, the market has
trumped all other narratives. Indeed, it has replaced
narrative itself with what is presented as an inexorable
and unanswerable logic: in the UK and the USA neo-
liberalism has been embedded as the new politics,
the way things are, the modern. In these condi-
tions, the idea of neoliberal democracy can only be
oxymoronic, since it aims at the foreclosing of politics
as such. Neoliberal ideologue Richard Posner makes
this explicit, disdaining what he calls jawing in the
agora, and celebrating political apathy because it
signals a broad acceptance of the system that we have.
This kind of bullish confidence might have taken a
serious knock with the financial crises and bail-outs
of 2008, Couldry argues, but neoliberalism is very far
from disappearing. Governments, workplaces and the
media are still controlled by neoliberal thinking, and
as such the philosophical struggle against neoliberal
ideology remains as urgent as ever.
Couldry gives a succinct and persuasive history of
neoliberalism. The worry, though, is that he ends up
opposing neoliberalism with a new form of liberalism:
one in which, instead of being suppressed, voices
are allowed to speak. Yet this approach tends to
underemphasise the ways in which ideology and the
class structure not only stop people from speaking but
R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 ) 49
deny them the conditions for developing an account
of themselves in the first place. The very manner
in which neoliberalism has naturalized its own pro-
gramme means that it disappears as an object of expe-
rience and becomes the frame within which experience
takes place. Couldry refers to the work of Richard
Sennett, but it is not clear that the political value of
a book like The Corrosion of Character consists in
the way that it gives a voice to those whom Sennett
interviews. Instead, the narratives that Sennett records
point to structural conditions of which they might only
be vaguely aware.
Couldry goes out of his way to say that voice
requires a material form which may be individual, col-
lective or distributed (stress in the original), arguing
that voice as a value does not involve individualism.
Despite this and perhaps inevitably given the way
that Couldry constructs voice as a concept the book
is unable to distance itself decisively from such indi-
vidualism. Couldry wants to disassociate himself from
the post-structuralist attack on interiority and agency,
but it could be argued that, if anything, the post-
structuralist assault on interiority didnt go far enough
Thats what makes the business go weve gone into
in the context of a neoliberalism that, as Couldry personality, a family and a community feel.
himself demonstrates, has colonized the private realm
of emotions. Throughout the book, Couldry is forced Couldry draws parallels between these kind of demands
to keep distinguishing his version of voice from and those imposed on participants in the reality-TV
the voices that neoliberal culture continually solicits. gamedoc subgenre that includes shows such as Big
After all, isnt neoliberal corporate culture endlessly Brother. Like workers in neoliberalized institutions,
inviting us to participate, to join the debate, to make gamedoc contestants are subject to an absolute external
ourselves heard? authority; they are forced into paradoxical forms of
The most convincing and compelling section of performance which demand that they reveal their
Why Voice Matters the chapter on media and reality real selves; they must always be positive; and they
television reflects upon neoliberal cultures insistence are simultaneously required both to display team
on participation. Here, Couldry traces the overlaps conformity and to compete against one another.
between performance norms of contemporary work For all the merits of this kind of analysis, Couldry
cultures and those of reality TV. Drawing upon the didnt persuade me that his concept of voice was
research of the journalist Madeleine Bunting, Couldry crucial to the struggle against neoliberalism. That
shows how work increasingly involves the performance is partly because there is always a slightly strained
of a certain kind of emotion. Ann-Marie Stagg, chair quality to his account of voice itself. The synthesis of
of the UK Call Centre Managers Association, told Sen, Honneth, Butler and Ricur never quite achieves
Bunting that service sector employers are increas- a crisp conceptual consistency. Another major problem
ingly demanding that their employees deep act, work is that Couldry uses the word voice in an essentially
on and change their feelings to match the display metaphorical way. Despite the books title being a play
required by the labour process. Or, as the head of on Judith Butlers Bodies That Matter, Couldry pays
Human Resources at supermarket chain Asda more little attention to the materiality of voice: to how voices
demotically put it, actually sound. In the UK, the charismatic power of
both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair the ways
in which they persuaded and irritated people was
We do have the sense that people in the Asda family
live the values its gregarious, off the wall, a bit bound up with accent and voice. Couldrys approach,
wacky, flexible, family-minded, genuinely inter- however, continually collapses voice into narrative. In
ested in people, respect for the individual, informal. line with those orthodoxies in contemporary theory

50 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 )
which Alain Badiou has labelled democratic material-
ism, Couldry nevertheless insists on the importance of
embodiment, with Descartes positioned in his famil-
iar role as the master villain of Western philosophy.
But some theorists of the voice, such as Mladen Dolar
and Michel Chion, have argued that reflecting on the
voice actually entails a form of dualism. (Dolar argues
that, instead of being reducible to the body, the voice
actually functions much like the pineal gland did for
Descartes, as the means by which mind and body are
related to one another.)
Couldry has some worthwhile suggestions about
what a post-neoliberal politics might look like and
how we might get there. He puts the emphasis on
institutional change, but does not underestimate how
difficult and prolonged the struggle to wrest media
and political institutions from neoliberal control would
have to be. As he puts it, Such institutional structures
cannot be changed overnight by will or imagination.
But this should not discourage us from considering
the small acts and new habits from which, even prisoners of conscience. Mandelas disqualification was
within those structures, a different form of political
life can be built.
Mark Fisher
No such thing
Randall Williams, The Divided World: Human Rights
and Its Violence, University of Minnesota Press, Min-
neapolis, 2010. 192 pp., 45.00 hb., 15.00 pb., 978 0
81666 541 9 hb., 978 0 81666 542 6 pb.
It is hard to imagine how even the most ardent sup-
porter of a human rights framework could fail to be
challenged by Randall Williamss erudite portrayal of
the epistemic violence of liberal international human
rights discourse. The Divided World shows how human
rights discourse is embedded in neocolonial relations
that not only privilege interpretations of justice and
injustice that derive from the global North, but also
reinforce racial and class-based inequalities that under-
write the expansion of global capital. In doing so, the
book fluidly connects a range of different examples
from NGO practice to film and literature in order to
capture the varied techniques of liberal ideological
production, and while Williams mounts what is in
many ways a radical critique, he does so with a clarity
that will engage readers both sympathetic and not.
Williams begins by asking whether human rights
can provide the basis for a progressive politics that can
weigh in against the vagaries of global capitalism. His
answer is a resounding no, arguing by contrast that
the postwar institutions of international law, and the
human rights framework they promulgate, are part
and parcel of an imperialist directed reorganization of
relations within and between contemporary state and
social formations: the colonial, the neocolonial, and
the neoimperial. The Divided World thus claims that
we need to be far more critical of the ways in which
human rights frameworks generate and perpetuate
injustice, and that we need new conceptual tools to
map violence on a global scale and evolve strategies to
resist it. The situation calls for what he terms a non-
juridical reckoning that is, extra-legal strategies for
acknowledging, naming and counteracting the complic-
ity of international law and human rights discourse in
grave injustices at the local and global levels.
Williams presents his most compelling case study
in the first chapter, which recounts Nelson Mandelas
disqualification from Amnesty Internationals list of
based on his refusal to disavow the use of violence as
a legitimate tool against the South African apartheid
regime. Amnesty International was determined to
maintain its own credibility by only backing prisoners
of conscience who were unambiguously non-violent.
Williams mounts a convincing argument that the inter-
national NGOs apparent political neutrality was hence
based on the necessity of historical decontextualiza-
tion, and, more specifically, a decontextualization that
obscured the specific experience of colonial oppres-
sion, whereby no platforms for non-violent negotiation
existed. The effect was to depict Mandela (and, by
extension, anti-colonial struggles more broadly) as
open to violence in general, rather than to accept
Mandelas more nuanced explication of the legitimacy
of violence as a last resort. Williams effectively depicts
the discrepancy between international normative orders
that sanction state violence but disallow the taking
up of arms in popular uprisings, regardless of how
just the cause might be. He shows, moreover, how
Amnestys actions instituted the prisoner of con-
science as a subject category built on a normative
order that is deeply tied to the racist and ongoing
legacy of colonialism.
Other chapters carry his argument into a range of
contexts, from the advocacy of a Northern-based Inter-
national Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission
(Chapter 2) to narratives built around liberal inter-
nationalism and colonial subjects in the films Hotel
Rwanda and Cach (Chapter 3), to the extra-legal
reckonings of injustice as depicted in the chronicle of
R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 ) 51
Argentinean commandos who assassinated the Nicara-
guan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle (Chapter 4).
Williams is a fine storyteller and these highly diverse
subjects, in terms of both genre and geography, are
pulled together skilfully to make his overall case
against human rights norms and for alternative ethical
frameworks. No doubt, not everyone will agree with
his reading of the narrative messages in the films and
texts he discusses. His take on Cach, for instance,
in my view understates the effect of the passivity
which he identifies in the colonial subjects depicted
although they may be passive in the way Williams
describes, the passivity also works in an active sense
to maximize the psychological impact on the films
central northern character. Elsewhere in the book,
there is also a tendency to reify decolonization as a
singular social struggle against a somewhat simplistic
reading of Empire or US imperialism. While these are
not the books core focus, such references obscure a far
more geographically complex and disaggregated opera-
tion of global power something that similarly radical
critiques posed by Hardt and Negri or the Autonomy
of Migration scholars, for instance, have identified, if
not always succeeded in portraying.
Williamss book is at its best in critiquing the
false idealism of liberal internationalism, in insisting
that there is in fact no such thing as non-violence,
and radically unsettling adherence to absolute ethical
52 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 )
principles. What is less well developed is his advocacy
of alternatives that draw on the Zapatistas philosophy
of struggle (from below and to the left) or Franz
Fanons defence of violence as a legitimate tool of
anti-colonial resistance (Chapter 5). I couldnt help
wondering whether these alternatives, taken to their
extremes, would ultimately result in arrangements that
avoided injustice, even though it may be injustice of
different kinds, served out to different people. And this
led me to wonder if the imperfection of international
law and human rights norms (and it is indeed a pro-
found imperfection) is enough to warrant its outright
dismissal, thus rejecting the various progressive ends
to which human rights norms can be put, as Williams
himself acknowledges. The argument ultimately left
me unsatisfied as to what is to be done; though this
may be less a criticism of Williams than a reflection
of the ambition of his project and the limitations of a
single volume.
After reading Williamss book it becomes more
difficult to dismiss those who are violent without
asking what reasons they have to take up arms an
important critical task in todays context as ever.
Williams compels his readers to consider whether an
injunction to non-violence can be maintained consist-
ently with the effects of liberal humanism that defends
such an injunction.
Anne McNevin
World of warcraft
Andrew Hoskins and Ben OLoughlin, War and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War, Polity Press, Cambridge,
2010. 300 pp., 55.00 hb., 16.99 pb., 978 0 74563 849 2 hb., 978 0 74563 850 8 pb.
Addressing the tangled multimedia web of reporting
through which most of us experience conflicts such
as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, War and Media:
The Emergence of Diffused War is a timely book that
facilitates our understanding of contemporary media
ecology, along with our role as spectators and consum-
ers within such ubiquitous media. While war coverage
is an increasingly urgent topic in film, television and
new media studies, Hoskins and OLoughlins inter-
disciplinary contribution to this line of inquiry allows
for a mapping of the multifaceted ways in which
reporting is conducted, observed and consumed. The
authors begin with the example of the Crimean War,
now understood as the first media war given its
dissemination through embedded front-line reporting
as well as the photography, works of art and war-
themed attractions that it spawned for curious and
horrified nineteenth-century spectators. What Hoskins
and OLoughlin aim to uncover in their genealogy is
precisely how the waging of warfare is shaped in such
a way as to be always already produced, banishing
any hope of authentic or original experience. sort of catharsis of being moved, and, therefore, a more
If reporting on the Crimean War signalled a major
shift in how war was experienced, in so far as it came
to audiences though a fully fledged apparatus of front-
line observation assisted by artists and photographers,
the current possibility of crowd-sourced reporting has
still more profound consequences. As the book aims
to show, the mediatization of war through active as
well as passive spectatorial practices now gone global
gives rise to more diffuse relations between action and
effect, and creates greater uncertainty for policymak-
ers. The chaotic and subversive flow of information
through an ever-widening spectrum of sources such as
WikiLeaks makes flows impossible to control, while at
the same time rendering information flows and their
affects more radically reflexive. For example, attempts
to prevent the diffusion of jihadist materials online
ultimately has serious ramifications for the structure
and functioning of the Internet as a whole, since any
measures taken will invariably affect actors occupy-
ing any and all positions in the conflict. At the same
time, the random and unexpected movement of people,
things (money, viruses and so on) and images makes
social order entirely contingent rather than given, while
the resulting connections between ostensibly discrete
phenomena set up unpredictable shock waves, and yield
unexpected results.
The diffusion of war through an ever more complex
mesh of everyday sources such as television news,
YouTube, Facebook, podcasts, blogs and video games
also raises questions concerning spectatorship. How
cynical, for example, is the experience of warfare
mediated though game interfaces such as Americas
Army, at once a massively multiplayer online game and
a military recruitment tool? How genuine is televisual
reporting that relies on a presentational stylization of
events, and a self-reflective mechanism that relies on
celebrating stories already covered (remember when
we brought you)? What does it mean to glean
the details of human suffering by always necessarily
observing what the media observe, and what role does
mediation play in the process of compassion fatigue
whereby audience sympathy for any given atrocity
becomes measurable and predictable? Has the spec-
tacle of suffering become a new source of pleasure, a
insipid form of sentimental self-interest and voyeur-
ism? In this case, shouldnt users now bear a vicarious
responsibility as partial collaborators when they click
through to catch glimpses of horror that contribute to a
particular experience of the sublime? And, finally, how
are we to understand the memory of trauma when it
becomes prosthetic, coded or templated on the basis of
previously reported genocide or massacres?
While the authors address questions concerning
media impact and spectatorship, their analysis of
viewer input is equally detailed and troubling. As
systems of mass media become porous that is,
interactive and open to any number of random inputs
volunteered by audience members the question of
credibility becomes paramount. Throughout the book
the authors return to the reporting on Saddam Hus-
seins execution, first in the official Iraqi government
video, and then in the form of mobile phone footage
that was uploaded to websites and sold on videotapes.
While on the one hand the official report sought
to convey a relatively orderly execution, and came
with viewer warnings concerning violence, the mobile
footage offered a more chaotic image of Husseins
R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 ) 53
death, and the cautionary statements that had framed
the official footage were dropped when the mobile
video was picked up on mainstream television. Not
only does this particular example raise questions of
authenticity and credibility while alerting us to the
potential of media to become weaponized within a
larger political-military context, it also begs the ques-
tion of acceptable levels of violence for viewers as they
become both acclimatized to and fatigued by troubling
events such as real-time executions.
Although War and Media covers a good deal of
well-rehearsed territory spectatorship, mediation,
premediation, and so on it also does so in a way that
makes this a particularly useful volume. For example,
while Jenkins, Grusin, Kline, De Peuter Kcklich and
others have been writing for some time now about
intermediality, group sourcing, premediation fan-based
Internet content and the like, War and Media both
narrows and broadens currently available accounts. By
providing a thoroughgoing and meticulous study of one
particular kind of reporting from a number of perspec-
tives, and by incorporating a variety of disciplinary
insights, the book is able to revisit familiar topics while
moving us further into the digital age.
Joyce Goggin
An ordinary
philosopher
Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from
Memory, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 2010.
548pp., 31.50 hb., 978 0 80477 014 9.
What is the story of a life? And where is the place
and what is the form in which to tell it? These are
questions given a careful hearing in Stanley Cavells
recently published autobiography. Renowned as one
of the most influential and prolific of contemporary
American philosophers, Cavell has moved in his medi-
tations from Shakespeares Othello to the late poetry of
Wallace Stevens to the dance routines of Fred Astaire.
In a philosophical career spanning sixty years, this idi-
osyncratic philosophical voice has inspired both cultish
devotion and disciplinary censure. Little Did I Know
is, in part, an accounting for this idiosyncrasy. Given
Cavells career-long obsession with avoidance, with
the disappointingly human tendency always to shrink
from offering accounts of ourselves, blocking ourselves
from exposure, this accounting is doubly significant.
54 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 )
Cavell grew up in Atlanta and Sacramento, Cali-
fornia. The only child of an artistic mother and an
entrepreneurial father, his childhood was marked by
constant movement and upheaval as his fathers busi-
ness ventures consistently failed. Of every place he
moved to with his parents, it seemed to the young
Cavell that we existed with bags packed and stuff
near our hands, poised for departure. Something
of this itinerant upbringing translated to his initial
searches for a profession, an intellectual and artistic
home. Cavell first studied at Juilliard, before giving
up music for philosophy. He enrolled in UCLA as a
special student then progressed to Harvard, where
he found his philosophical calling in the lectures of
the visiting Oxford professor John Langshaw Austin.
The significance of Austin in Cavells philosophical
development cannot be overestimated. It was, Little
Did I Know suggests, an influence of life-changing,
indeed life-giving, proportion. Austins stress on the
philosophical importance of the ordinary, of careful
attention to our words as and when we say them,
registered for Cavell as morally and epistemologically
crucial touchstones for life and learning. The ordinary-
language philosopher attends to words and phrases
in contrast to language that is, as Wittgenstein says,
merely idling; language theoretically spinning its
wheels outside any actual language games that people
engage in with each other, in actual things they do in
the world. As Cavell practises it, in readings of Shake-
speare, Beckett, Emerson, Thoreau, Capra, Astaire
and Austen, ordinary-language criticism attends to
the specific plight of mind and language within which
a human being gives voice to his condition, to the
importance of what we say when. Even Cavells choice
of autobiographical form in Little Did I Know (dating
his depiction of events as diary entries) takes guid-
ance from this philosophical inheritance, faithfully
remembering Austins emphasis on the context of
every utterance.
Returning philosophy to the concerns of ordinary
human persons and showing how it might speak across
disciplinary lines of inquiry are not easy tasks, and it is
characteristic that Cavell should struggle with his own
procedures. Straining to allow even the most incom-
plete idea or figuration its due and careful elaboration,
his philosophy has always held itself open to the fear
of inexpressiveness and the anxiety of exposure. Cavell
is nonetheless aware of the dangers of over-expression,
the pitfalls of obscurity, the many charges (first voiced
by Austin, interestingly, who commented that an early
prose extract of Cavells was a bit purple) of philo-
sophical self-indulgence. Finding a voice of his own
to live with, or to live by, is Cavells own accounting
for the heavy difficulty and sometime resistance of
his prose, which is not simply explained, as Cavell
suspects of Blanchot (or as Cavells own critics might
claim), by the philosophers horror of understanding.
Little Did I Know both acknowledges this self-imposed
difficulty and works to find a way beyond it.
In Little Did I Know, the awkwardness of living (a
fact Cavell associates with the accidentally decisive) is
registered at several moments. Cavell sees human lives
as inherently interrupted, things chronically occurring
at unripe times or in the wrong tempo. He tells the
story of his father, then eighty-three, waking up after
heart surgery and asking about all the commotion in
the hospital room. Its ugly, his father says, to run
around as if an old mans death were an emergency
and not a natural occurrence. Cavell then wonders
whether his father might question his philosopher son
on the responsibility of a doctor, a wife, or any family
member. This is, after all, the concluding paragraph
of a memoir encouraging its reader to expect some
form of reconciliation between father and son. Cavell
had already praised his three children for curing,
or curbing, this vindictiveness, this recurring self-
destructive longing to consign his father to hell. This
father, however, falls back to sleep; this son walks out
to find his mother. There is no rumination on life and
death, no dialectical exchange on duty. Perhaps Cavell
offers this final vignette as a kind of empty punchline,
a commentary on the perpetual lack of sophistication
in everyday events.
The great themes of Cavells career avoidance,
disappointment, exile, fradulence, grace, redemption,
therapy, the ordinary are taken up and taken further
in this, his most recent attempt at autobiography. The
first attempt was occasioned by the foreword to his
1994 A Pitch of Philosophy. Of necessity more pointed
and more concise than Little Did I Know, this earlier
work was but one of many that urged philosophical
writing, in general, to follow lines of the personal and
the intimately revelatory. Indeed, we might say that
Cavells writing has always been for and from the
private imagination. A tone of moral urgency (Cavell
describes the attendant state of mind as one of psychic
emergency) permeates Little Did I Know. There is also
a quiet poetry to the book. Writing of his six-year-
old daughter, and his own sense of inadequacy as a
divorced parent, Cavell pictures father and daughter
together lifting the mild sadness for the wind to take
out of our hands. Reminiscences of his children are
touching and revelatory, perhaps the most instructive
comments, indeed, on the philosophers relationship
with his own parents. What is perhaps most striking
is the enlivening sense that the philosopher has, in his
own words, finally escaped from his works judgement
of him. It would be misleading to suggest that the
judgement of others (though painful to witness) had
ever constrained his philosophical voice. Still, perhaps
Cavell needed the full licence of autobiography in
order to move surely into the poetic register anticipated
by The Senses of Walden (1972). There, as in Little
Did I Know, the importance of accounting for oneself,
of returning ones own actions to the grounds and
tribunals of the everyday, is itself offered to others
as a philosophical gift. Cavells memoir is the private
achievement of a single figure, passing by just this
edge of things in just this broken light; but, most
crucially, in fully meaning what it says, it also enters
a claim to speak for others.
ine Kelly
research-based master programme
critical curatorial cybermedia
applications 2011 2012
a cross-cultural and transdisciplinary
programme which founds its practices on
political thought, postcolonial and gender
theories, the art of networks and internet
culture
a bilingual education (english & french)
developed by an international faculty of visiting
artists, researchers and theoreticians
a program open to artists, art historians, critics,
scholars and activists, and to those with
experience in cultural, artistic and political
domains
application deadline : May 13th, 2011
research-based master programme CCC
http://head.hesge.ch/ccc ccc@hesge.ch
HEAD Genve, Switzerland
www.hesge.ch/head info.head@hesge.ch
R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 ) 55
CAMPAIGNS: AGAINST Education Cuts
Pow!
Nina Power
Before the UK election in May 2010, Conservative
think-tanks such as Policy Exchange were suggesting
that universities should be forced to sink or swim and
that private takeover was a very real possibility for
failing (or even not-so-failing) universities. While the
introduction of top-up tuition fees in 1998 heralded a
shift in the way institutions understood their relation
to both the state and their students, the total market
vision of universities held by the coalition government
crosses a qualitative threshold in the long-standing
drive to impose the ideology of measurability on the
education system, despite the absence of any economic
or social benefit in doing so.
The tripling of tuition fees, the abolition of the
Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) for 1618
year-olds and the removal of state funding for teaching
in the arts, humanities and social sciences have struck
many not only as a searing indictment of the philistin-
ism of a government whose members had themselves
received a free university education, but also as an
inadequate and unsustainable response to the economic
crisis. How is reducing university places, making
levels of debt so high that they become unattrac-
tive and impossible for those not from rich families,
and cutting the funding of various subjects going to
stimulate the economy? What else, exactly, are those
sixteen-year-olds who will lose the EMA, and those
potential university students put off by a lifetime of
debt, going to do instead? The short-termist venality of
government policy, the Liberal Democrat climbdown
over fees, the misjudged rhetoric of austerity Britain,
the new philanthropy, the Big Society and newspeak
claims that we are all in this together have made it
very clear to the British public that it is they who will
have to pay, and pay hard, for a deficit they didnt
create, in the name of a shock doctrine approach to
the economy that they dont want.
It is no surprise, in some ways, that education, with
all its complex forms of constraint and emancipation,
would be at the forefront of this ongoing struggle,
though it is quite clear that the government (and the
police) have so far massively miscalculated the public
56 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 )
response to their policies, assuming, perhaps, that after
decades of ideological warfare, many, even among the
middle classes, would find little to be upset about in
the destruction of the university, with its supposed
distance from the real world and uselessness in an
era characterized overwhelmingly by an obsession with
profit, measurement and financial gain.
In many ways, the attack on universities and the
EMA has been interpreted, correctly, as an attack on
the young, and in particular on marginalized youth.
We have in recent months been treated to the absurd
spectacle of millionaire politicians telling already
impoverished A-level and university students that they
should be fixing the economy by mortgaging their
future for the promise of jobs that are likely never to
exist. Coupled with the institutional racism of a police
force who have for a long time felt at liberty to harass
and intimidate black and Asian youth in particular, the
sense of divide between the rich and poor has become
starker than ever. The battle over education, for so
long understood as one of the main drivers of social
mobility, has taken on a politicized character that had
lain dormant in previous years.
Rage of the Girl Rioters? Yes, please!
The increasingly large and, latterly, ferociously
policed demonstrations of November and December
were accompanied by a series of university, college
and school occupations involving, in total, around
fifty institutions across the country. Although these
events took place in direct response to the attacks on
education, they should be understood in the context of
occupations that took place a year earlier in response
to Israels attacks on Gaza, and to the brief occupation
of Deptford Town Hall by Goldsmiths students on 3
November when the government first announced their
intentions to raise fees and cut funding. Earlier actions
in support of academic staff should also be remem-
bered: last spring, staff went on strike at Kings College
London and students occupied Sussex in protest at
planned lay-offs. The international outcry that greeted
the announcement of the closure of Philosophy at
Middlesex University in May last year, and the sub-
sequent occupations of the main buildings and library
at its Trent Park campus, coupled with management
suspension of staff and students, similarly set the
tone for the autumn occupations. Some have begun
to call it Winter of Discontent 2.0, reflecting, on the
one hand, the return of a more openly Thatcherite
political climate (although it was of course Labour who
commissioned the Browne Report) and, on the other,
the role of new media in disseminating information
and organizing the protests and occupations, the scale
of which prompted many to compare current student
activism to the events of 1968 (plus laptops).
There may be some mileage in comparisons to the
protests of 1968, so long as they can avoid becoming a
nostalgia-fest for those who have long since abandoned
political resistance. But any direct identification fails to
recognize the changed nature and status of the student
as a political and social being: the blurring of the line
between student and worker is far more pronounced
now, precisely because the expansion of higher educa-
tion has created spaces for those whose families do not
previously have experience of attending university. Most
of my students at Roehampton (and Im sure the pattern
is similar in other post-92s) are just as much workers,
parents and carers as they are students, which makes
participation in the protests and occupations perhaps
even more significant. As does the fact that none of the
students who occupied and protested this winter will be
directly affected by the fee increases, frustrating media
attempts to push their usual stereotype of the lazy, self-
interested student. Another set of characters had to be
mobilized: the naive protester simply caught up in the
heat of the events (reinforcing the reactionary division
between the good and the bad protester), the image
of a childrens crusade coupled with a critique of
lecturers who should know better, and so on. It should
be noted that unlike 68, where all the well-known
student leaders were male, the role of women as organ-
izers, protesters and commentators in the recent protests
was central, much to the horror of the Daily Mail in
particular, whose Rage of the Girl Rioters article (25
November) is already notorious.
While National Union of Students and University
and College Union leadership were frequently spine-
less as NUS leader Aaron Porter described himself
during a meeting at the UCL occupation the students
self-organization and rapid outwitting of police tactics
on several occasions should be recognized as part of
a new wave of acephalic mobilizations, which, as pro-
tests build into the new year, cannot get much further
without the support of trade unions, parents and other
workers. This is a point made by Len McCluskey,
general secretary of Unite.
University lecturers, who are being
increasingly told by management to inform
on their politically active students, came
in for some serious criticism from the
media at various points, particularly those
at Goldsmiths who signed a letter defend-
ing the student protests (Full Marks for
the Riot Say Lecturers ran the Evening
Standard headline on 12 November). The
attack on Goldsmiths is not coincidental. It
is seen as the symbolic home of everything
thats wrong with the university accord-
ing to current government policy: arts-
based, in London (there are simply too
many), renowned (but not in the right way) and far
too accessible to students from non-traditional back-
grounds. On a related note, the role of art practice
in recent protests is also interesting, particularly the
re-dtourning of already assimilated art forms the
way the flash mob turned in a matter of months from
an empty social media happening to an advertising
vehicle, to a form of popular protest in the shape of
UK Uncuts tax avoidance campaigns.
There is no doubt that 2011 will see a continued and
increasingly militant anger spreading from students
and the young to public-sector workers and beyond.
Parents of children and young adults are increasingly
and justly antagonized by the punishment meted out
on their kids, and further-education and university
students involved in the protests have received a rapid
education in how not to trust the state, the police or
the media. Some of the most articulate summaries and
slogans of the current situation have come not from the
old revolutionary vanguard, or from the commentariat,
but from the protesters and occupiers themselves and
how could it be otherwise?
R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 ) 57
Occupations and their limits
Escalate
Boundaries are permeable. We reach out beyond the
police containment zone; our attempt to escape is our
attempt to spread the movement into society at large.
On the evening of 9 December, journalists are let out
just before they hold us for two hours on Westminster
Bridge. We are reminded of the futility of tweeting
from our smartphones when all the professional report-
ers have gone home. But, instead of silence, we listen
to our own chants.
In protest our biggest opposition is the boundary.
We reject the boundaries of the lecture theatre, the
separation of students from society, the institutions
of privilege, the binding of subjects to disciplines,
the lines on the timetables that tell us where to be
and when. Boundaries are how we are controlled, and
in occupying we aim to take control of and remove
them. The metaphors abound, and our movement is
attracted to them. It is not by mistake that we engage
in modes of protest that leave themselves open to
poetic interpretation.
Virtual boundaries manifest themselves in the
physical world. Receiving the legal notice of a pos-
session order against an occupation, we find ourselves
presented with deeds and blueprints. The perimeters
of the occupied rooms are outlined in coloured felt-tip.
The documents tell us that the claimant is The Univer-
sity, which means its management. In legal terms, the
management are the owners of the institution: in legal
terms, they control it. Occupiers are depersonalized
by definition, defined as Persons Unknown (including
students). We are expected to recognize ourselves in
that dismissive parenthesis. The symbolism of the
boundaries marked on these documents at that moment
becomes a spectre of physical violence: the threat of
removal by bailiffs.
This mutation from virtual to physical does not
only go in one direction. The police line in front of
Parliament or the Treasury becomes an integral part
of a whole architecture worthy of destruction. The
line becomes a boundary of the spectacle, and then
itself becomes subsumed into the spectacle. We form
our own line and so the process continues back and
forth, between the spectacle of the boundary and the
boundary of the spectacle.
58 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 )
The mass incarceration of protesters in Parliament
Square is counterposed by the fences put up to stop
people getting in. Boundaries become confused. Are
they to pen us in or keep us out? In occupation, we
rebel against a particular boundary, but in doing so we
come to recognize the social functions of boundaries
as such.
The space created within an occupation is based
on mutual reliance, and the boundaries of the zones
become semi-permeable, allowing in the trusted, eject-
ing authority. In a different way, police containment
zones are based on such reliance, in which both
police and protesters fulfil predetermined roles. But
the protest of trust and permeability occurs twice: first
by the police, and then by us. A thousand protesters
break the police line on Whitehall. On the other side
of the barrier, they reform, then come crashing back
into the contained area. The only tactical advantage is
an expression of solidarity.
For while it might seem that the police containment
zone and the occupation are separated fundamentally
by the first being an act of unwanted incarceration and
the latter an actively willed space of liberation this
divide is superficial. The spaces are different, but the
boundaries remain the same. In essence, both rely on a
dynamic of authority and protest. Our practice of disrup-
tion physically manifests the continuing assault of daily
life upon free-thinking and the practice of resistance.
Those students who remained on the outside of the
occupations, and those of us within who constantly
fretted about every decision and movement, share a
state of anxiety. While the first group concerned itself
with the potential repercussions of illegitimacy, ours,
the second group, was petrified that the legitimacy we
had gained would slip away.
Such anxiety feels specific to every individual, but
is communal. It is the binding collective emotion, the
one on which our political movement is uneasily built.
It stems not from an individual situation, but from a
collective subjection to social authority. Alienation,
apathy, depression, fear these have always been
the names of the mental state prior to politicization.
Anxiety is the next phase, the one that propels people
into new spaces of containment.
 The Situationists were already noting in 1967 that
the majority of students were destined to become
low-level functionaries. For them this was a novelty.
For us it is an overwhelming and indisputable fact.
The atomization of the campus, the way in which our
universities increasingly resemble the service industry
these are not accidents or metaphor, but active cor-
relations between the world of work and the institutions
which prepare us for it.
What were once seminars are now merely miscat-
egorized lectures, contact hours have diminished
into minutes, and academics have been incentivized
to prioritize their research over their pastoral obliga-
tions. At the same time costs to students have been
inexorably pushed up. Successive UK governments
have gradually flattened the appetite among students
for intellectual and political opposition. The crisis
has removed for the state the need to immiserate us
in slow motion.
Occupation has indeed re-entered the political
vocabulary. But for us it is also a new political philol-
ogy. The state introduces fees that will dissuade the
poor from accessing university resources. By seizing
and then holding open doors to the fixed capital of
which we are currently being dispossessed, occupation
demonstrates that we intend to make those resources
the possession of all.
Be under no illusions: it scares the management. If
the university managers do not exercise control, they
have no remaining function. They will scratch the itch
of occupation: the courts are on their side, the police
are on their side. They are desperate not so much for
us to leave as for the status of the space to revert to
the calm clockwork order of before.
We begin to realize that we are trapped between a
series of closed doors while we can hear the privileged
few on the other side, pocketing the keys and gluing the
locks. But, as everyone saw on 9 December, trapped
people get angry. Trapped people have to smash their
way out. Anyone who isnt smashing yet doesnt realize
just how trapped they are.
The state argues that fees are fair on the basis
that a university system financed by general taxation
is not. When the state makes this argument, it does not
mention (which is to say, it conceals) that low-income
working people have always paid for HE, and that
doing so has involved paying not just for teaching,
but also for a decades-long programme of invest-
ment in higher-education infrastructure: in research
libraries, lecture theatres, seminar rooms, sports halls,
residences. In the publicly funded Higher Education
Funding Council for Englands 201011 budget, 562 too often those boundaries follow us wherever we go.
million was set aside for Capital Investment. The new
fees will in effect exclude the poor from accessing this
material wealth.
In occupations, the status of that wealth is contested.
The process is quite simple. When we occupy a teach-
ing space, we realize it is possible to participate in the
composition of our syllabus without making a 9,000
per annum personal investment. When we occupy
a research library, we realize we can determine who
is kept out and who comes in. For the middle-class
students who resist fees on principle (and, lets face
it, there are many), occupation is an education in the
material reality of property relations. We learn how the
spaces we occupy are policed under usual conditions:
but we also begin to learn at what cost.
The state is orchestrating a large-scale withdrawal
of social goods. This creates new and urgent pos-
sibilities for class struggle. If occupations have so far
failed to include a larger portion of the student body,
that failure has taught us how much work still needs
to be done if students are to possess a political culture
prepared for such struggle. They have also done some
essential work towards that preparation. The new open
spaces of the occupation offer new modes of under-
standing. Democracy is experienced by many in ways
they had never imagined. Working groups cooperate
for a greater good beyond the meaningless and arbi-
trary production of commodities or predetermined
social goods of the welfare state.
Dumbfounded by the cogs of our societys machin-
ery, we break things to participate: the rules, the
law, windows, property rights, norms, the officially
determined uses of public spaces. Breaking away from
our timetables, from our work/play divides, we come
together not as producers or consumers, but as friends,
in real places, with real tales to tell. The university
became both a target and a home.
We create our own bounded space when we occupy,
delimiting, provisionally, an autonomous space; but we
create our own provisional boundaries only in order
to explode their more permanent and more suffocat-
ing predecessors. Nothing can be locked up at night.
We feel that we own a space in occupation, but in
fact we understand occupation to be a process that
we determine. We dont want just another classroom,
or another police containment zone: rather, we want
people to join us and we want to join them. We risk the
space becoming a fetish, and all too often it does. But
when the occupation ends we continue our process on
the streets and in the classrooms. We continue pointing
to the boundaries we wish to surpass and destroy. All
R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 ) 59
Smells like teen spirit
Emily Clifton
Before I learned about the planned rise in tuition fees
in October 2010, my sole experience of political protest
was as a nine-year-old accompanying my mother on a
thoroughly peaceful anti-Iraq War march in 2003. Im
now sixteen, a student at a South-west London state
secondary school. Following the election last spring,
my friends and I had begun to talk about politics for
the first time. There was a wide range of views. There
was an equally wide range of opinions about the gov-
ernments imminent plans involving tuition fees, only
this time feelings were heightened as the issue was
something that we could directly relate to our futures.
As the students of the future, we are the ones who
will be saddled with massive debts. They will be a
huge deterrent for many of us, as we ponder how
best to continue our education. I dont accept that the
ConDem alliance has any mandate to decide our
futures, to reinstate an elitist education system, and to
reinforce the class system that underlies it, particularly
as the majority of them have benefited from an entirely
free university education.
Inspired by news of planned demonstrations in
London, a friend and I joined the 10 November protest
march from Whitehall to Millbank, the Conserva-
tive Headquarters, in order to unite and fight with
thousands of other justifiably irate students from all
over the UK. The enthusiasm and motivation of the
crowd was phenomenal, with over 50,000 workers and
students spanning all ages, united in their view that
the contents of the Browne Report were unfair and
unnecessary; the energy was particularly exhilarating
and heartening outside Millbank, where the chants and
banners found an immediate and compelling target.
Emboldened by our experience and motivated
through the need to raise awareness among our peers
and create an impact locally, we then decided to organ-
ize our own event in Kingston. We wanted to gain as
much support as possible, particularly in secondary
schools. Like so many similar groups all over the
country, we set up a Facebook event page, giving
information and explaining our motives. We planned
to stage school walkouts, followed by a local march,
to coincide with the National Day of Walkouts to
60 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 )
defend Education (on 24 November), organized by the
Education Activist Network.
Through our Facebook campaign (which included
accept and decline options) we received confirmation
of nearly 600 people intending to participate in the
walkouts. We met with our head teacher to discuss
organization and safety; we wanted to make sure that
staff knew that this was not an action against the
school itself. We were allowed to join the protest with
parental permission; students in some other schools
around the borough had been threatened with expul-
sion or other punishment for attending. Other teachers
in our school had varying opinions about what was
planned. One teacher specified she would be very
disappointed with any student who attended, while
others seemed really excited and impressed by what
we were doing and said they would have loved to come
along themselves.
We contacted the president of the Student Union at
our local university in Kingston, and arranged for our
protest to join up with the university rally planned for 24
November. Through our Facebook campaign, the King-
ston Youth Member of Parliament and Youth Council
also became involved and promised to attend the rally.
On the day, my friends and I were filled with
trepidation and excitement at the prospect of what was
to come. Having been warned of disappointment (we
know that often people promise passionately but then
apathy takes over) we set off for school with bated
breath. When the appointed walkout time arrived,
we were astounded and relieved at the number of
our fellow school students who had obtained letters
of parental permission about 300, far above our
expectations.
We had planned for the walkout from school to
begin at 10.30 a.m. and were apprehensive as armed
with our banners, placards and posters we marched
through central Kingston. Encouragement and approv-
ing looks from supportive onlookers gave us a sense of
hope for our cause. When we arrived at Guildhall, we
were met with a great amount of unanticipated support.
By this stage around a thousand people had gathered
from at least eight different secondary schools around
the borough. Standing in the crowd chanting No ifs,
no buts, no education cuts, we felt an incredible sense
of pride and unity. Hundreds of students marched
through the streets, stopping the traffic and clearing the
pedestrianized areas of shoppers. The atmosphere was
exhilarating and overwhelmingly positive. People had
brought along musical instruments, and the inevitable
police presence felt very good-natured. Onlookers
joined us as we proceeded to the university, where
various speakers had been arranged to address the
march. They voiced the increasingly militant feelings
of the crowd, and the protest gained an additional sense
of clarity and unity.
Watching our protest from inside the Guildhall were
various members of the council, including the leader.
He sent a representative out to us, who invited my
friends and me inside to an impromptu meeting, while
others protested outside. We discussed the councils
stance on the policies (Liberal Democrats, they sup-
ported free university tuition, opposing the coalition
government on this point). We were invited to address a
full council meeting two weeks later. We duly attended
armed with a petition containing 650 signatures. Two
of us argued our case, after which a debate followed.
A motion, to lobby Kingstons two local MPs and
encourage them not to vote for the proposed increase
in tuition fees, was carried by a significant majority.
This was an unexpected achievement, which we saw
as important acknowledgement of our generations very
real sense of fear about our future. We were encour-
aged by the fact that our councillors seem prepared to
engage with us in a democratic process. The council
noted at the meeting that their policy was to lobby
for the abolition of student fees over the next four
years, as they believe a university education should
be free. The leader of the council applauded the fact
that his daughter (a pupil at our school) had attended
the march.
My friend Liane Aviram and I have attended various
university meetings and lectures, including at the LSE
and Kingston University, where we have offered a
teenage perspective on the protests and our feelings
and motivation about them. We attended the 9 Decem-
ber protest and got caught in the police kettle that
afternoon. We were genuinely shocked at the lengths
taken to prevent protesters from walking the streets
of their own towns the vast majority of them peace-
fully. So far as we could tell, almost all of the violence
was begun by the police; it was their provocative and
aggressive tactics that sparked the relatively isolated
clashes that later occurred. We found ourselves shoved
forwards and backwards and pushed about without any
justification. I had never imagined anything like this
before: police bullying sixteen-year-old children in
their school uniforms, just because we were peacefully
protesting. Being caged in for hours was eventually
rather frightening the continual circling of helicopters
overhead leant a sinister atmosphere to the proceedings
and the noise made it difficult to communicate. We
were eventually freed in the
early evening, exhausted by the
experience.
We are determined to carry
on fighting, regardless of the
governments determination to
implement most of Brownes
disastrous recommendations.
And if the protestors who dem-
onstrated all across the country
on 9 December are at all rep-
resentative of wider student
feelings and priorities, then the
coalition government should
remember that we will all be
voters at the next election.
R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 ) 61
Obituary

Captain Beefheart,
Vorticist artist
19412010

A
fter 766 pages documenting in exhausting detail the life and crimes of Donald
Vliet, aka Don Van Vliet aka Captain Beefheart, author and longtime Magic
Band member John French searches for an anecdote that can sum him up:
I remember Don once holding a pair of nail nippers in his hand and saying to me, You are
looking at these right now, but dont ever forget that they are also looking at you. It was a
puzzling statement for a moment, but I grasped that he was saying there are universes within
as well as without, and we are collections of matter moving around in relationship to other
collections of matter.1

This statement is pregnant with suggestion for anyone interested in the subject/object
dialectics of Western philosophy, particular those who might wish to combine a radical
materialism with a dada absurdism sourced from everyday objects. It was not for
nothing that in Phenomenology of the Spirit Hegel said: The Enlightenment upsets
the housekeeping of Spirit in the household of Faith by bringing into that household
the tools and utensils of this world, a world which that Spirit cannot deny as its own,
because its consciousness likewise belongs to it. (486). But how could this extra-
ordinary statement insert itself into the conclusion of a massive biography written by
someone who is now a born-again Christian, and who more than once defines Beefheart
as a demon? Beyond his silence (no release since the short spoken-word CD that accom-
panied the Stand Up To Be Discontinued catalogue of Beefhearts paintings in 1993)
and beyond the grave (multiple sclerosis finally took him in December), Beefhearts
heavy influence warps the thought of even his detractors.
In drumming for Beefheart and piecing together his bandleaders hummed and whis-
tled ideas into something other musicians could interpret, not to mention suffering the
cult aspects of the bands lifestyle, which included paranoid interrogations, victimiza-
tions and even assault, French went through a lot (the reader is spared no detail). The
1960s counterculture went wholesale for LSD, subsequently revealed as an invention
stemming from US government military research labs, and with freaking out and
then cybernetics, it played with other mind-control techniques pioneered by the secret
services. In the mid-1960s, Beefheart led bands which sounded like the Yardbirds or
Them; by the late-1960s, he was dabbling with the modes of experimental social
reconditioning which also gave us EST and Charles Manson. No news there; Beefheart
was a 1960s rock artist. But its hard to think of a biography exhibiting such bipolar
extremes of love and hate, accolade and accusation, as Frenchs Beefheart: Through
the Eyes of Magic. Partly, this is to be explained by its genesis: its a patchwork of
transcribed interview tapes assembled by an author of rudimentary literary skill and
ambition. The book lacks intellectual coherence. But, in a way, thats appropriate.
Like Frank Zappa, who he grew up with and who was a continual point of reference
(and/or thorn of irritation), Beefheart was polemically opposed to the literate, educated
overview. To moralize Beefheart would be to betray him. What hope, then, a reluctant
obituarist? His art. Because it matters.

62 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 )
 Beefhearts art was Vorticist in the manner demanded by Wyndham Lewis in the
pages of Blast, developing the passage in William Blakes Milton where he inveighed
against the banal sense of time instilled by institutional Christianity and exploited by
the future-dreams of capital investment and speculation. Blake proposed wide-eyed
amazement at nature in cosmos, earth and our own bodies as the heaven sought
by his pious contemporaries, something the mature mind achieves and looks back
on, while the unpredictable course of our actual lives on earth becomes the vortex to
concentrate on. Lewis amplified this anti-transcendent materialism into the demand
that artistic creation should be more than a lifestyle indulgence of the privileged, and
actually pack into its physical techtonics the intimation of an existence beyond ideologi-
cal blandishment. Like Blake in his Preface to Milton, and like Captain Beefheart
denouncing the momma-heartbeat lullabies of conventional pop-rock, Lewis excoriated
the hirelings who have corrupted this artistic cause. The Vorticist polemic glowers at
you each time you happen upon a Wyndham Lewis in a provincial art gallery; and each
time you hear a track by Captain Beefheart. This clanking, uningratiating, unintegrated
thing will not serve as decor, or illustration, or ideal, or anything but the assertion of its
own irreducible knottiness. Like a burr left by burdock or goosegrass on a silk chemise,
Vorticist art is annoying and abrasive, but when made the object of attention, its inter-
nal detail and construction make it mind-turning and expansive.
In his review of recent biographies of Syd Barrett (RP 165), Howard Caygill analysed
the tensions of the counterculture by opposing the art-school destructo-purity of John
Latham, Gustav Metzger and Yoko Ono to the
corporate commercialism of the later Pink Floyd.
Fine art counterposed to rock in this way runs the
danger of reproducing nineteenth-century tropes
of class: the self-denying entrepreneur maintaining
his integrity while he waits for greatness at the
end of the rainbow, whilst his thriftless employees
squander all on beer and skittles. Sure, Syd Barrett
the art student faced different ways of making it in
the world, but his dilemma doesnt summarize the
1960s, or how blues and rocknroll reconfigured
class and cultural value. Lets swap Career Advice
for Materialist Esthetix. Blues form the voice of the poet recorded directly on tape or
disc without the medium of print challenged literary values. The avant-garde (Henri
Chopin, say, or Bob Cobbing) responded to this challenge; the mainstream pretended
nothing was happening, only registering surprise that everything they did became tepid
by comparison. The whole history of Black music in America, occluded in an art/rock
opposition (as a glance at the pages of The Wire today will reveal), shows that com-
mercialism can deliver artworks of power unimagined by the Lathams, Metzgers and
Onos: records by Duke Ellington, John Coltrane and James Brown (to name but three).
Vorticist artworks succeed because they do not depend for their power on ideologies
of status or distinction, but actively create the spaces in which they are heard, which is
why they keep popping back up in the wrong social group (Duke Ellington as Easy
Listening; the Pop Group bringing James Brown into the heart of post-punk; John
Coltrane as Patron Saint of Noise rather than Jazz, etc.). Mere sociology cannot map
Vorticist productivity.
The fantastic contribution of Captain Beefheart is that his brand of art rock did
not occlude the demonstrable power and thrust of subaltern musics available in the
commercial sphere. Quite the contrary. It amplified them into a polemic that could then
take on the high ground of poetry, art and philosophy. Any survey of radical 1960s
poetics that doesnt include Trout Mask Replica is a dead letter: this is where the jazz

R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 ) 63
infatuation of Beat shook off its cheerleading role and shaped a music to carry a burden
of blazing Blakean ecology. This is where the verbal intoxication of Gerard Manley
Hopkins and Dylan Thomas exploded into something more than literature: a mode of
life! Captain Beefheart took hold of the interview form and made it burst, refusing
to stoop to the degraded chat of spectacular consumption, and realizing poetry in the
room. Journalists earnest questions were thrown back at them in puns which were
like living performances of Finnegans Wake. As John French makes us acutely aware,
Captain Beefhearts decision to live with no barriers to his unconscious to deny no
association, pun, thought or impulse was incredibly taxing on those in his immediate
vicinity, but it bore fruit in interviews and albums unexampled in rock.
The ideal of the Free Improvisor, in Derek Baileys mind at least, is that of an
avant-garde griot whose every performance constitutes a thoroughgoing interrogation
of the whole point of music. This means that there are practically no tapes of Bailey
that are insignificant, every practice and gig was played at a frighteningly high level of
technique and will. Fluent in words a talker who talked everyone around him silent
with amazement or exhaustion Captain Beefheart had no such fluency with musical
structure. He learned his lessons from the 45 rpm R&B singles which he and the
young Zappa collected. He was familiar with Abstract Expressionism. He conceived the
tune as a finished artwork to be trundled out for audiences as accurately as possible.
Improvisation wasnt the point. His singing and cant-play saxophonism were automatic
gestures prepared for by his musical canvas so theyd sound wonderful; they werent
the listening musical responses of the jazz musician. This is why Revenants Grow
Fins CD box set a collection of unreleased tracks put together by John French is so
unsatisfying, a bunch of weak sketches, though they do prove how artful and deliberate
Beefhearts albums were.
John French has had the difficult task of becoming the curator of Captain Beefhearts
legacy. Whilst aware that Beefheart provided something special, in performance French
makes the mistake of trying to supply it himself, coming on like an imitator (Mallard,
the Magic Band sans Beefheart, did much better by bringing in Sam Galpin, a Las
Vegas lounge singer, on vocals). Frenchs judgements have become much reiterated,
providing received opinion that needs to be challenged by listening to the actual
records again. One of them coloured by his own experiences during recording is
that Spotlight Kid is dry and sterile. No! This is quite simply one of the greatest spook-
rock albums ever made, a convolute of imagery hacked from direct observation spun
in a blue-green vortex of gnomic, minimal funk. Acknowledged as a challenge to rock
musicians everywhere (Mark E. Smith is still trying!), Captain Beefhearts work should
also be acknowledged as a challenge to anyone trying to do more than recirculate
the already-known, to anyone trying to express themselves, in fact. In the passage of
Phenomenology of Spirit quoted above, Hegel goes on to say that the Enlightenments
challenge to religion broaches the issue of absolute freedom. As well as naming Frank
Zappas second album with the Mothers of Invention, the attempt to be absolutely free
was the clarion call of the 1960s revolution. The way Captain Beefheart did it avoid-
ing the airy speculation of the Floyds and Fusioneers in favour of dense compositions
which always negotiate the primal thump of the blues defines freedom in opposition
to escapism, which means shattering the illusion that exploiting other peoples labour
makes you free. Captain Beefhearts work was neither art nor rock, elite nor mass, but
a protest against those who profit from their separation: not a promise, but its livid
example.
Ben Watson

Note
1. Don Vliet quoted in John Drumbo French, Captain Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic, Proper
Music Publishing, London, 2009, pp. 7678.

64 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 6 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2 011 )