R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y

a journal of socialist and feminist philosophy

154 CONTENTS march/april 2009

Editorial collective Commentary

Claudia Aradau, Matthew Charles,
David Cunningham, Howard Feather,
Peter Hallward, Esther Leslie,
Stewart Martin, Mark Neocleous,
Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford
The War against Pre-Terrorism: The Tarnac 9 and
The Coming Insurrection
Alberto Toscano............................................................................................... 2

Contributors
Alberto Toscano teaches sociology at articles
Goldsmiths, University of London. He is an
editor of the journal Historical Materialism, Spectres of Anarchy: Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction,
and is currently writing a book on politics and Part Three
fanaticism.
Irving Wohlfarth............................................................................................... 9
Irving Wolhfarth is assembling an essay
collection on Walter Benjamin entitled No
Mans Land and writing a book on Benjamins
Elasticity of Demand: Reflections on The Wire
politics. John Kraniauskas ......................................................................................... 25
John Kraniauskas is Reader in Latin
American Studies at Birkbeck College,
University of London, and an editor of the
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. interview
David Cunningham and Jon Goodbun Propaganda Architecture
teach at the University of Westminster in the Rem Koolhaas and Reinier de Graaf
departments of English & Linguistics and
Architecture, respectively.
interviewed by David Cunningham and Jon Goodbun............................ 35
Antonio Negris book include The Politics of
Subversion (1989; 2005), Insurgencies (1992;
On Rem Koolhaas
trans. 1999), Time for Revolution (2003), Antonio Negri................................................................................................ 48
and, with Michael Hardt, Labour of Dionysus
(1994), Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004).

Copyedited and typeset by illuminati
www.illuminatibooks.co.uk
Layout by Peter Osborne and
David Cunningham
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 TVCC & CCTV facade complete,
Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA).
Images
p. 14: Lindsay Seers, Ventriloquism (2005)
pp. 27, 28, 30, 31: Home Box Office Inc.,
The Wire, Seasons 1 & 3 (2004, 2007)
pp. 53 and 58: Aaron Williamson, Animal Cage
(2006) and Globe Head (2005)
reviews
Martin Hgglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life
Nathan Brown............................................................................................... 51
Axel Honneth, Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory
Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, with Judith Butler,
Raymond Geuss and Jonathan Lear
Nina Power ................................................................................................... 54
Xudong Zhang, Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: China in the Last Decade
of the Twentieth Century
Harriet Evans.................................................................................................. 56
Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics
David Owen.................................................................................................... 59
Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation
Jeremy Gilbert .............................................................................................. 62
news
Rebellion of Greek Youth
Panagiotis Sotiris ......................................................................................... 65

Peace, Legality, Democracy

Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd.
www.radicalphilosophy.com Mihalis Mentinis . ........................................................................................ 67

Radical Philosophy Ltd

Commentary

The war against

pre-terrorism
The Tarnac 9 and The Coming Insurrection

Alberto Toscano

O
n 11 November 2008, twenty youths were arrested in Paris, Rouen and the
village of Tarnac, in the Massif Central district of Corrze. The Tarnac
operation involved helicopters, 150 balaclava-clad anti-terrorist policemen, with
studiously prearranged media coverage. The youths were accused of having participated
in a number of sabotage attacks against high-speed TGV train routes, involving the
obstruction of the trains power cables with horseshoe-shaped iron bars, causing a series
of delays affecting some 160 trains. The suspects who remain in custody were soon
termed the Tarnac Nine, after the village where some of them had purchased a small
farmhouse, reorganized the local grocery store as a cooperative, and taken up a number
of civic activities from the running of a film club to the delivery of food to the elderly.

The case
The minister of the interior, Michle Alliot-Marie, promptly intervened to underline
the presumption of guilt and to classify the whole affair under the rubric of terrorism,
linking it to the supposed rise of an insurrectionist ultra-Left, or anarcho-autonomist
tendency. The nine were interrogated and detained for ninety-six hours. Four were
subsequently released. The official accusation was association of wrongdoers in relation
to a terrorist undertaking, a charge that can carry up to twenty years in jail. On 2
December, three more of the Tarnac Nine were released under judiciary control, leaving
two in jail, at the time of writing (early January 2009): Julien Coupat and Yldune Lvy.
Giorgio Agamben and Luc Boltanski wrote editorials decrying the disproportion and
hysteria of this repressive operation. A petition was circulated by Eric Hazan, publisher
and friend of Coupat, and signed by Badiou, Bensad, Butler, Rancire, iek and
several others.1 In Tarnac (a village proud of its role in the Resistance, and represented
by a communist mayor for four decades) a committee of support was set up, conveying
a virtually unanimous show of solidarity of the villagers with those arrested.
Following the time-honoured reactionary motif of the wayward child of the bour
geoisie drifting into violent idealism, the medias attention has focused on Coupat.
Readers of the press were soon apprised of Coupats studies at the elite ESSEC
business school; of his DEA dissertation on Guy Debord at the EHESS, where he
worked closely with Boltanski; of his involvement in the journal and collective Tiqqun;
and of his alleged authorship of the book Linsurrection qui vient (The Coming
Insurrection), signed by the Comit Invisible.2 In flagrant contradiction to both the
tenor of Linsurrection and what may be surmised about the modus operandi of the
Tarnac commune, he was fingered as the books author and depicted as the charismatic
ringleader behind the commune and its subversive acts.

 Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09)

 As the media feeding frenzy progresses, some of the ideological and investigative
background has surfaced in the press. (The intelligence agency which reports directly to
the Ministry of the Interior, the Direction centrale du renseignement intrieur (DCRI),
the French FBI which replaced the famous Renseignements gneraux (RG) in July
2008, seems rather prone to leaks, managed or otherwise.) It appears that Coupat had
long been an object of observation by the section of that RG tasked with monitoring
the Left. One of their reports even describes him as a critical metaphysician one
of several ironic indications in this whole affair of the passing acquaintance of French
spooks with the world of theory. Increasingly, he is tagged as a leading light in an
ominous and diffuse political agitation, which eschews the domains of organiza-
tion, political representation and regulated conflict for the sake of direct action and
irrecuperable opposition to capitalism.
Unsurprisingly, for a case steeped in the new language of security and the war on
terror, the Tarnac affair has a transatlantic component: the FBI contacted their French
counterparts to signal an allegedly illegal crossing from Canada into the USA by Coupat
and his companion Lvy, and the discovery, in a rucksack left at the border, of a picture
of the recruiting office in Times Square, New York, that would later be the object
of a small bomb attack. The broader context of the operation is the theorem, dear to
Alliot-Marie, of the mounting threat of an anti-capitalist, anti-statist and anti-systemic
radicalization of youth in France and across Europe which cannot be contained in the
usual forms of social conflict. The revealing title of a report on this putative phenomenon
by the DCRI is accordingly: From the anti-CPE conflict to the constitution of a pre-ter-
rorist network: Perspectives on the French and European ultra-left. 3
The 2006 protests against the law on job contracts for the young (Contrat de
premire embauche), following hard upon the autumn 2005 revolts in the marginalized
banlieues, played a defining role in the rise to prominence and eventual victory of
Sarkozy, whose swaggering performance as minister of the interior during the riots
became a kind of trademark. The Sarkozy presidency began under the sign of a deep
anxiety, a reactionary rage for order whose other side was the obsessive scrutinizing of
the future for signs of social turmoil and radical novelty in this instance, one might
very well agree with the Comit Invisible that governing has never been anything but
pushing back by a thousand subterfuges the moment when the crowd will hang you
(83). Given the political peculiarities of France, this fear of the future (and its masses)
took the form of an exorcising of the past as in Sarkozys campaign ultimatum: In
this election, were going to find out if the heritage of May 68 is going to be perpetu-
ated or if it will be liquidated once and for ever. The compulsive reference to the
rebellious past, which is simultaneously imagined as a future as in Sarkozys recent
statement to his cabinet, in view of the possible spread of the Greek syndrome, that
We cant have a May 68 for Christmas provides the current French administration
with its libidinal content, a much needed supplement to the grim vapidity at the level of
its programme.
The very notion of pre-terrorism is deeply symptomatic: it makes patent the link
between the obsessive identification of dangerous individuals and the imagination of
future revolts that call for repressive pre-emption. (There are interesting parallels here
with the 2007 arrest of the German sociologist of gentrification Andrej Holm.) As
Boltanski and Claverie have noted, there is an echo here of the film Minority Report
and its precogs. The context of the world economic crisis and the not-unrelated
upsurge of the 700 euro generation in Greece serve as a backdrop. Indeed, as an anti-
terrorist magistrate recently confessed: There is a temptation during a time of crisis
to consider any illegal manifestation of political expression to be of a terrorist nature.4
Reading the extracts from the secret service reports, the left pessimist might be heart-
ened to see such confidence in the possibility of radical revolt being shown by the state


and its agencies. Alternatively, she might muse that the logic of immunizing oneself
against terrorism by nipping pre-terrorism in the bud with all of its hackneyed refer-
ences to Baader-Meinhof or Action Directe (they too started out by writing pamphlets
and living in communes) is more likely to accelerate and intensify a process of
so-called radicalization, fashioning the state and the legal system into enemies with
whom one cannot negotiate.
Whatever it may say about the prospects for radical politics and its attendant sup-
pression, this affair illustrates the metastasis of a transnational politics of securitiza-
tion, which is now being applied to any form of activity that importunes the established
order from hacking to separatism, from anti-war demonstrations to environmental
activism. The looseness of anti-terrorism legislation recalls Walter Benjamins character
ization of the police in his Critique of Violence: Its power is formless, like its
nowhere-tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence in the life of civilized states. (See
Irving Wolhfarth on Benjamins Critique of Violence and the Red Army Faction, the
second part of his article, in RP 153.) This is a situation enhanced by the development
of what the parents of the accused pointedly refer to as reality police, as one might
speak of reality-TV.
Julien Coupats father Grard turned by his sons ordeal into an eloquent and intran-
sigent advocate for civil liberties, recently put the stakes of the police campaign in stark
terms: They are turning my son into a scapegoat for a generation who have started to
think for themselves about capitalism and its wrongs and to demonstrate against the
government. The government is keeping my son in prison because a man of the left
with the courage to demonstrate is the last thing they want now, with the economic situ-
ation getting worse and worse.5 Like many others, Coupat senior has underscored the
ominous prospect of a form of government so politically illiterate and monolithic in its
reactions that it cannot distinguish sabotage a practice that has always accompanied
social and workers movements from terrorism, a term that is indiscriminately, albeit
deliberately, used to cover everything from mass murder to train delays.

The book
What, then, of the book that considering the meagre pickings for the police at Tarnac
(ladders, train schedules, bolt cutters) seems to be the centrepiece in the states inqui-
sitional arsenal: Linsurrection qui vient? The legal obscenity of basing arrests on a text
one that moreover cannot be personally imputed to any of the accused is obvious.
The right to practise collective anonymity, against the crude biographism of the press,
should also be stressed. It is nevertheless of interest to consider the Tarnac affair in
light of this combative pamphlet half inspired dissection of the misery of everyday
life in contemporary France, half breviary for a diffuse anarcho-communist defection
from capitalist society. It appears that Linsurrection was first brought to the attention
of the powers that be by the criminologist Alain Bauer, who, coming across it on the
shelves of the FNAC in 2007, immediately bought up forty copies and circulated them
to various security experts and agencies. A passage from it has been repeatedly referred
to as incriminating evidence against Coupat:

The technical infrastructure of the metropolis is vulnerable: its flows are not merely for the
transportation of people and commodities; information and energy circulate by way of wire
networks, fibres and channels, which it is possible to attack. To sabotage the social machine
with some consequence today means re-conquering and reinventing the means of interrupting
its networks. How could a TGV line or an electrical network be rendered useless?

A socialist with some sympathies for the emancipatory and egalitarian potential of railway
travel might answer like Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste spokesperson Olivier Besancenot,
commenting on the sabotage, that we want more trains, not fewer, and end the discussion


there. But it is worth considering the diagnosis and prognosis advanced by Linsurrection, if
only to understand the intellectual backdrop to this call to interrupt the flows.
Were one in the business of the RG and the DCRI, one could argue that a host
of themes link Linsurrection to Tiqqun pamphlets such as Thorie du Bloom and
Premiers matriaux pour une thorie de la jeune fille. A narrative of completed
nihilism; a Debordian excoriation of the spectacle (embodied in the young girl, the
commodity made flesh, and carried by the schizophrenic entrepreneur); the vitriolic
polemics against sundry Lefts (Trotskyists, Negrians, ecologists); the view of commu-
nism not as a programme but as an ethical disposition and collective experimentation,
an attempt to recover an emancipatory notion of community; the silent coordination
of a sabotage in the grand style6 and the very idea of an Invisible Committee (or an
Imaginary Party) all of these betoken a certain political continuity. Yet the differ-
ences are also significant. First, stylistically, the works of Tiqqun practised a kind of
second-order situationist dtournement, keeping Debord while losing much of the Marx
and Lukcs that the author of
The Society of the Spectacle
had felicitously plundered,
and throwing into the mix a
generous helping of Agamben
an author who, albeit not
so hard to pastiche, does not
lend himself all that well
to Debordian operations.
Linsurrection is a more
measured and plain-spoken
text, whose politics are rooted
more in anti-urbanist libertar-
ian anarchism than in the
metaphysical auguries carried
by Agambenian figures such
as the young girl or the
Bloom (after Joyce).
Though the agenda of
Linsurrection is still dictated by a situationist-inspired total critique of contemporary
society, the lengthy analyses of the ills of everyday metropolitan life in the age of
flexitime and the new economy are more in keeping with the recent concerns of criti-
cal French sociology than with prophecies about Homo sacer. Just as a Bourdieuian
perspective marks the sections dealing with Frances singular relation to the state and
the school as structures of subjectivation, so the influence of Boltanski and Chiapellos
diagnosis of the dissolution of class solidarity as a foothold for social critique can partly
account for the indifference of Linsurrection to a Marxist discourse of class struggle,
and its delinking of anti-capitalism from class politics.
This is not to say that a certain catastrophism, or, better, active nihilism, does not
pervade this book too, as it did the bulk of Tiqquns production. Linsurrection begins
with the lapidary lines: From every angle, theres no way out from the present. Thats
not the least of its virtues. But as we move through Linsurrection it becomes clear
that, despite the nod to Agamben in the title, his brand of messianic reversibility a
left interpretation of the Hlderlinian adage that where danger is, grows the saving
power also is overtaken by an anarchist blueprint for the secession from metropolitan
capitalism and the reorganization of everyday life in communes that will serve as
bases for a diffuse and horizontal overturning of the reigning system of misery.
This rejoinder to European Nihilism 2.0 is based neither on waiting for eschatological


signs, nor on figures of the reversibility of catastrophe into promise (the young girl,
Bloom), nor indeed on the ultra-modernist idea that accelerating moral and material
decomposition is the key to a transvaluation of the world. We are also not dealing with
a post-workerist exodus immanent to the resources of immaterial labour or cognitive
capitalism. Rather, Linsurrection advocates a comparatively sober practice of defection
and sabotage, which aims to turn the machines of subjection against themselves.
Much of Linsurrections tableau of modern European (more specifically French, and
even more specifically bourgeois Parisian) misery is compelling, especially when it
heeds the situationist injunction that to understand what sociology never understands,
one need only envisage in terms of aggressivity what for sociology is neutral.7 Like the
Debord of In girum, it can even strike notes of dark comedy: Europe is a penniless
continent which secretly shops at Lidl and flies low cost so it can keep on travelling.
At its core lies something like a social-psychological portrait of the micro-managed
and multitasking subject of contemporary work, the function of which is regarded as
fundamentally political: that of biopolitically governing the entirety of social life
and perpetuating a regime of exploitation that is increasingly superfluous. Though
the insight is hardly novel, the Comit Invisible does succeed in pungently capturing
the horror and imbecility of the current proliferation of disciplinary devices such as
personal development, human resources, social capital and other managerial mon-
strosities. Linsurrection encapsulates this under the aegis of what it calls the ethics of
mobilization, the colonization, through work, of the very domain of possibility:
Mobilization is this slight detachment with regard to oneself on the basis of which the
Self [le Moi] can be taken as an object of work, on the basis of which it becomes possible
to sell oneself, and not ones labour-power, to be paid not for what one has done but for
what one is. This is the new norm of socialization.

But what lies beyond this salutary vituperation of the modern ideology of work an ideology
that is all the stronger to the extent that it replaces the heroisms and anxieties of the Sartrean
project with the soft schizophrenia of a thousand projects?
It is here that what one may maliciously term the Epicurean tendency in situation-
ism (present, for instance, in Debords laments for the disappearance of good wine in
Panegyric) gets the better of Linsurrection. Mobilization is linked not only to the
capitalist uses of a parallel-processed self, but to a discourse about the metropolis as
a space of deadening indifference and mortifying abstraction, and to the idea that the
modern city and its masters have perpetrated a kind of assassination of experience:
We have been expropriated from our language by teaching, from our songs by variety
shows, from our flesh by pornography, from our city by the police, from our friends by
the wage system. Despite the aptness of Linsurrections denigration of cities turned
into posthumous museums and the excoriation of the uses of mobility and isolation for
purposes of control not to mention its call for the marginalization and ruination of
Paris, that frightening concretion of power the hankering for revolutionary authentic-
ity is unpersuasive, and ultimately myopic. Just as the short shrift given to the notion
of labour-power leads to a Manichaean opposition between a malevolent economy and
emancipated forms of life, so there is not much attention paid to the transformative
uses of abstraction and alienation. There is more of a hint of Jane Jacobs in the scorn
against indifferent modern housing and the idea that the multiplication of means
of displacement and communication continuously wrenches us away from the here
and now, by the temptation of being everywhere. Whats more, the notion that the
interruption of mobilization will give rise to practical solidarity, as the facade of the
hyper-vulnerable city of flows crumbles, is too romantic to bear scrutiny. Blackouts
and blockages can intimate communism but also be the occasion for even more insidi-
ous forms of violence and hierarchy (Michael Hanekes film Time of the Wolf is an
evocative study in this regard). Likewise, despite the welcome corrective to the idea of


the banlieue uprisings of 2005 as an instance of criminal mob rule, it is doubtful that
actions with no leader, no claim, no organization, but words, gestures, conspiracies
may be taken as a model for organized emancipatory politics.
Though one wishes that the anti-urbanism of the Comit Invisible were more dialec-
tical, some of their reflections on the commune are worthy of consideration. Not only
is renewed debate on the collective experimentation of everyday life to be welcomed,
especially by contrast with nebulous figures of messianic transfiguration; Linsurrection
also raises some important questions for a radical left which conceives of capitalism as
an unacceptably destructive system and views crisis-management as an unappetizing
and doomed vocation. Rather than an ephemeral image of a glorious tomorrow or a
utopian enclave, the commune is envisaged simultaneously as a collective experimenta-
tion of politics and as an instrument for a political action which is not merely instru-
mental but existential, or ethical. Among other things, the emphasis put on the density
of real relations as against the issues of identity and representation that allegedly
bedevil parties, groups, collectives and milieus gives a concrete political meaning to
friendship, over against the obsession, whether prudish or prurient, with the commune
as the site of sexual exchange. Another classic motif, that of self-reliance, is given a
contemporary twist: the commune is presented as a way of gaining and practising the
kind of know-how (medical, agricultural, technical) to allow one to depend no longer
on the metropolis and its forms of security in other words, to ready oneself for real
crisis, as communistic survivalism prepares for capitalist apocalypse.
One cannot gainsay the force and interest of concrete utopias, however minimal or
marginal, nor deny the all too familiar truth once again laid bare by this case that the
modern capitalist nation-state does not suffer alternatives gladly. The young activists and
intellectuals at Tarnac, in this regard echoing if not necessarily following Linsurrection
qui vient, have certainly shown that even very simple experiments with egalitarianism and
emancipation can sow real political relations and solidarities. But, especially at a moment
when the political question of the public is so crucial whether we are speaking of uni-
versities, hospitals, banks, or indeed trains the opposition between the commune and the
metropolis is a false one, as is, to borrow another dichotomy from Linsurrection, the one
between hegemony and horizontality. To appropriate authenticity is not enough. Any truly
transformative politics must surely appropriate distraction, mobility and, indeed, aliena-
tion and indifference too. Trains, like sewerage systems, dams, airports and hospitals, are
not to be repudiated, interrupted or merely abandoned to the whims of the capitalist state.
Perhaps one day, rather than shuttling us from Human Resources conferences to Personal
Development seminars, they may be put to more creative and revolutionary uses, like the
Russian Kino trains of the 1920s.

Notes
1. Giorgio Agamben, Trrorisme ou tragicomdie?, Libration, 18 November 2008, www.liberation.
fr/societe/0101267186terrorisme-ou-tragi-comedie; Elisabeth Claverie and Luc Boltanski, Christ
ou catnaire? Du sacrilge religieux, Mediapart, 13 December 2008, www.mediapart.fr/club/edi-
tion/les-invites-de-mediapart/article/131208/christ-ou-catenaire-du-sacrilege-religieux-au-s; Non
lordre nouveau, Le Monde, 27 November 2008; English version at http://tarnac9.wordpress.
com/2008/11/24/free-the-tarnac9/.
2. Comit Invisible, Linsurrection qui vient, La Fabrique, Paris, 2007; also available at www.
lafabrique.fr/IMG/pdf_Insurrection.pdf; English version at http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/
the-coming-insurrection/.
3. Isabelle Mandraud, Lobsession de lultragauche, Le Monde, 3 December 2008, www.lemonde.
fr/societe/article/2008/12/03/l-obsession-de-l-ultragauche_1126282_3224.html.
4. Quoted in Celestine Bohlen, Use of French Terrorism Law on Railroad Saboteurs Draws Criticism,
Bloomberg News, 4 December 2008.
5. Quoted in Jason Burke, France braced for rebirth of violent left, Observer, 4 January 2009.
6. Tiqqun, Thorie du bloom, La Fabrique, Paris, 2000, p. 134.
7. Critique de lurbanisme, Internationale Situationniste 6, 1961; English version at www.cddc.
vt.edu/sionline/si/critique.html.


 radical philosophy conference
Power to the people?
masses, proletariat, workers, soviets, nation,
community, subalterns, multitudes, commons

London, Saturday 9 May 2009

the general will

multitude and commons
urban collectivities
population & biopolitics

Further details:
matt.charles@blueyonder.co.uk

or visit our website

www.radicalphilosophy.com


Spectres of anarchy
Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction,
Part Three
Irving Wohlfarth
There is an excellent passage in Nadja on the en-
chanting days spent looting Paris under the sign of
Sacco and Vanzetti and Breton adds the assurance
that in those days the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle
[Boulevard of Good Tidings] fulfilled the strategic
promise of revolt that its name had always held.1
The Right to the Use of Force
Benjamins critique of violence cannot be separated
from its religious inspiration. Not merely does it open
up a space of thinking unavailable to the profane
discourse of his time; it also enables him to conceive
of a radical politics that is just and, precisely for this
reason, wants to be nothing but politics.2 Conversely,
and by the same token, this points to a notion of
justice modelled on the Jewish God. Radical profanity
in the spirit of theology: this seeming paradox is, we
saw, the crux of the Theologico-Political Fragment.
In acknowledging the autonomy of the profane order
and thus presumably the legitimacy of modernity
(Blumenberg) it rejects any form of political theo
cracy3 and obviates any attempt to (re)theologize the
profane. Aside from the Protestant ethic analysed by
Weber, there is perhaps no greater immunity to false
idols, including those of the capitalist market, than
the one afforded by an old religion. All the more so
if, as here, it propels a radically profane order of the
profane on its way.
Seen in this light, the modern state would be the
new idol4 that Zarathustra calls it a hybrid between
myth and demythologization. A rough draft for a
review article from the same period, The Right to
the Use of Force (Das Recht zur Gewaltanwendung),
suggests as much. 5 It is irrelevant, Benjamin there
writes, whether the state imposes itself [sich einsetzt]
as the supreme legal institution [Rechtsinstitut] by its
own authority [Machtvollkommenheit] or by an alien
one6 that is, as a secular or a religious theocracy.
In either case, it needs to be dissolved into a politics
that is nothing but politics.
Benjamins draft enumerates four critical options:
(A) to deny both the state and the individual the right
to use force; (B) to recognize unconditionally the right
of both to do so; (C) to grant it to the state alone;
(D) to grant it only to the individual. To sum up an
already summary argument: Benjamin maintains that
(A) termed ethical anarchism by the author under
review is valid for morality (though not for the
reasons usually given), but not for politics; that (B) is
intrinsically contradictory and effectively leads to (C),
which would be defensible only if the state and its laws
coincided with the ethical order; and that, since there
is (contrary to C) a contradiction in principle between
the state and ethical life and (contrary to A) none
in principle between force and the ethical order, (D)
remains the only logical possibility. It is its apparent
material impossibility that prompts the author under
review to reject it out of hand.7 But a word against the
law, the Critique of Violence claims, is not necessar-
ily spoken into the wind.
All power to the individual: this is an at once
terrifying and liberating Entsetzung of the monopoly
on violence so jealously guarded by the modern
state. Not to be subjected to it is presumably not to
be a subject or individual in any accepted sense. Nor
can the right (Recht) to use force in order to dis-
mantle the law (Recht) be a legal one; it is perhaps
no right at all. Benjamin nevertheless continues to
call it that:
An exposition of this standpoint is one of the
tasks of my moral philosophy, and in that regard
the term anarchism may very well be used to
describe a theory that denies a moral right not to
force [Gewalt] as such but merely to every human
institution, community or individuality that assigns
itself a monopoly over it or in any way claims
that right for itself, even if only in general and
in principle, instead of revering it in a particular
case as a gift of divine power, as perfect power
[Machtvollkommenheit].8
Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09) 
Correlatively, the state, in its self-positing sovereignty we live is not the exception but the rule. We must
(Machtvollkommenheit), is implicitly identified here attain to a conception of history that accords with
this insight. Then we will clearly see that it is our
with self-idolatry. In another early sketch, the just
task to bring about a real state of emergency, and
distribution of the power it monopolises is equated this will improve our position in the struggle against
with the abolition of private property.9 fascism. One reason why fascism has a chance is
It is both possible and necessary, Benjamin con- that, in the name of progress, its opponents treat it
cludes, to come to a universally valid decision about as a historical norm. The amazement that the things
we are experiencing are still possible in the twenti-
the right to apply force, because the truth about moral-
eth century is not philosophical. It is not the begin-
ity does not stop at the chimera of moral freedom. A ning of knowledge unless it be the knowledge that
truly subjective decision for or against its use cannot the view of history from which such amazement
be made in the abstract, being conceivable only in arises is untenable.15
the light of the particular goals of ones wishes [des
It is not surprising that the leaders of the RAF should
Wunsches].10 Whatever this might mean in concreto,
have cited this Thesis in their long Declaration at
the general thrust is clear. The telos of a politics that is
the start of the Stammheim trial. Its inversion of the
nothing but politics is, in the words of the Theologico-
relation between rule and exception with respect to
Political Fragment, a striving for happiness on the
the ultima ratio of state power the declaration of the
part of a free humanity one which announces the
state of emergency ultimately denies the legitimacy
quietest approach of the Messianic Kingdom.11 In
of the rule of law. The leaders of the RAF set out in
this sense, the dynamics of the profane order of
turn to subvert the authority of the court with every
the profane12 would be divinely commanded.13 Its
means at their disposal.
political method nihilism is destined to bring
Where thinking suddenly halts in a constellation
down the pillars of profane theocracy, alias bourgeois
saturated with tensions, it gives it a shock, by which
democracy: the state, the rule of law and doubtless also
thinking crystallizes into a monad.16 This sentence
the social contract.
from the Seventeenth Thesis describes Benjamins
Benjamin did not explicitly return to the problems
own strategy of positioning himself in a no-mans-land
explored in this early draft, which belongs to his most
between various fronts. His writings have in turn been
extreme probings of the subject. Several years later,
caught in the crossfire of conflicting interpretations.
however, he claimed to see no reason to be ashamed
The Critique of Violence and the Eighth Thesis are
of or to forswear his early anarchism. Anar-
cases in point. Their reception may conceivably have
chist methods, he went on, were admittedly useless;
been marked by the cautionary example of the RAF;
but communist indeed, all political goals were
such matters are difficult to gauge.
meaningless and non-existent.14 His programme for
Two opposed positions may be schematically con-
a coming politics thus remained a teleology without
trasted here. On the one hand, interpretations of a
final goal: an unconditional break with the millennial
liberal, broadly social-democratic persuasion close to
past, followed, presumably, by whatever the ensuing
that of Habermas find mirror images of Carl Schmitt
union of free men (Marx) would then decide. To the
in the Critique and the Eighth Thesis.17 On the other
last, he considered the winning combination to be a
hand, Giorgio Agambens State of Exception the
properly communist implementation of this anarchist
offshoot of a much larger project18 draws on Michel
project. Like the theological dwarf who may no longer
Foucaults concept of biopolitics and Benjamins
show himself in public, his anarchism disappeared
distinction between a permanent, catastrophic state
from view and entered into a secret pact with historical
of emergency and a real one yet to come. The upshot
materialism. The latter was to be prevented by this
is an analysis of the current world-political situation,
anarcho-crypto-theology from becoming a set of false,
whose ultra-radicalism matches that of the RAF. But
quasi-religious dogmas that would sooner or later be
the politics of pure means that Agamben endorses is
forsworn (e.g. Arons opium of the intellectuals), or a
no longer one of terror or revolutionary violence. He
state religion, or whatever else a Turkish puppet with
finds it rather in complementary Benjaminian figures
a hookah in his mouth might stand for.
of childhood and play.19
The state of emergency The real state of emergency invoked in the Eighth
Let him [the Messiah] come, but let me not see Thesis could not but strike terror at the heart of the
him. (Sanhedrin 98b) powers that be (and that part of us that is wedded to
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the them). A cryptic formula in a letter of April or May
state of emergency [Ausnahmezustand] in which 1940 intimates that this prospect may have alarmed

10
Benjamin too though for very different reasons. The
outbreak of war and the larger constellation which
brought it on have, he writes, induced him to set down
certain reflections later known as the Theses which
he has kept to himself, indeed from himself, for well-
nigh twenty years.20 This return of the (half-) repressed
may be speculatively reconstructed as follows. The
constellation of the Second World War the rise of
Stalinism and fascism, the HitlerStalin Pact, and the
inadequate resistance of progressive forces, notably
the Front Populaire reactualizes a number of intui-
tions first prompted by the First World War and its
aftermath, notably the brief interregnum marked by
the Spartacus movement. Chief among them is the
conviction that the age-old cycle (Umlauf) of violence
can be broken only by violence of a quite different
order. What resurfaces in the Eighth Thesis would thus
be the anarcho-nihilist theology first formulated in the
Critique of Violence. Benjamin would not always have
wanted to admit to himself the enormity of what at
bottom he knew: namely, that it would take nothing
less than the institution of a real state of emergency
the Entsetzung of the law and the state to end
the ongoing state of emergency. This interplay between
knowing and unknowing perhaps has its counterpart
in the First Thesis, where a similar relation obtains
between the oblivious puppet and the canny dwarf.
Agamben proposes a complementary genealogy.
As he presents it, the Eighth Thesis was Benjamins
last move in a game of chess that he had been playing
against Carl Schmitt for almost twenty years.21 It
would thus represent a variation on the First Thesis
the allegory of the chess automaton that can take
on all comers. The unnamed enemy invoked in
the Theses would be, among others, Schmitt himself,
the theoretician of the allegedly permanent, in reality
prehistoric, antagonism between friend and foe.
Ironically enough, the allegedly dangerous relations22
between Benjamin and Schmitt, whom political cen-
trists have been eager to see as twin extremes, would
itself have been such an antagonism.
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that
the state of emergency in which we live is not the
exception but the rule. The key phrase in this sentence
is placed between inverted commas, which signal that
Schmitts concept of the Ausnahmezustand (state of
emergency or, literally, of exception) is being cited
against itself. He is sovereign, so his definition goes,
who decides on the state of exception.23 At the
time the Theses were written, a state of emergency
decreed by the sovereign, Hitler, and championed
by his jurist, Schmitt had been in force for seven
years. For those at the bottom, however, the state of
exception was no exception. (It is true that Nazism
would turn out to be an unprecedented historical
break a Zivilisationsbruch with the civilized past,
but it was also, in an easily misunderstood but easily
verifiable sense, its continuation.) This bitter experi-
ence of the rule refuted the ruling standpoint. It was
the standpoint of the oppressed the one, that is, that
could be ascribed (Lukcs) to them rather than their
actual empirical consciousness and it alone, that had
normative, universalizable force. Normality universal
emancipation had yet to be achieved.
With this move, which recalls the grand theological
reversal (Umschwung) with which the book on the
German play of mourning had closed, 24 Benjamin
places Schmitts sovereign in check and indicates
what it will take to bring a checkmate about. If the
so-called state of exception is the rule, then the true
state of exception will have to be the exception to it.
Hence Benjamins strategic assessment that we cannot
improve our position in the struggle against fascism
without checking the sovereign in all his guises (and
doing so, clearly, with more than the checks and bal-
ances of bourgeois democracy). Otherwise the victory
over fascism will, in the phrase of Sorels cited in the
Critique, be no more than a change of rulers.25 If the
chess game is to be won, the kaleidoscope cannot be
shaken into a new order; it will have to be smashed.
The RAF clearly saw itself as the executor of such
imperatives. Vulgar Communist platitudes, Benjamin
had argued, capture more levels of meaning than bour-
geois profundity ever will.26 No such layers entered the
RAFs thinking. The point was indeed to change the
world, not merely interpret it. But their acts needed in
turn to be interpreted as the acting out of a dilemma
that it was in no ones power to resolve.
1. In 1967 the student movement had gained legitimacy
through its militant protest against the so-called
emergency laws (Notstandsgesetze), which for the
first time since the Second World War paved the
way for the possible declaration of a state of emer-
gency within the framework of the West German
constitution.
2. It was the RAFs declared aim to get the state to
show its true colours by declaring such a state of
emergency. The violence of the judicial system
and security apparatus would then be exposed for
all to see. This is indeed what happened. The state
(over)played its role.
3. But so did the RAF. They imagined that they were
extending the revolution from the Third World
11
 into the heart of the First and heralding the end of
internationalized class relations. A new constellation
had brought on another war. American imperialism
had, they thought, revealed itself to be an extension
of fascism. (Marcuse, we saw, privately entertained
similar thoughts.) The victories of the Vietcong
seemed to mark a historical turning point. On the
basis of this assessment, which was all the more
warped for containing some truth, the RAF wanted
to light the fuse of a real state of emergency
through a campaign of bombings and assassinations.
But in the public mind the one that they actually
provoked reinforced the necessity of the rule of law.
While Benjamins concept of a permanent state of
emergency had not meanwhile lost any of its force
as level-headed a political thinker as Hannah Arendt
came close to endorsing it in her Benjamin essay
of 1968 no one could honestly believe that West
Germany still found itself in a fascist state of emer-
gency. Nothing is ever to be gained by denying the
obvious. Just and radical are synonymous. We do
not live in the same dark times (Arendt). Darkness
is a whole spectrum unto itself.
In his essay on surrealism Benjamin spoke of
winning the forces of intoxication [Rausch] for the
revolution.27 But he also made the following caution-
ary assessment. To place exclusive emphasis on the
intoxicating, anarchic components of the revolutionary
act was to subordinate the methodical, disciplined
preparation for revolution entirely to a praxis that oscil-
lated between exercise and advance celebration [bung
und Vorfeier].28 At its weakest, surrealism would thus
have travestied what was historically needed: a yoking
together of anarchism and historical materialism. The
RAF was an entirely different type of hybrid. It com-
bined wild Marxian theory with the suicidal strategy
of a would-be urban guerrilla without a sea to swim
in. To each his own chimera: revolutionary aspirations
had for Baudelaire been one more way of getting
drunk in a disenchanted world. The RAF drowned
its illusions in killing, surviving and dying.29 This
deadly exercise was another variation of the childish
anarchism that both pacifism and activism represented
in Benjamins eyes. What the RAF lacked was, in
short, his powers of political judgement.
Of these the Eighth Thesis is a highly contested
example. Holding contradictory levels of meaning
together, it makes the complicated claim that the anti-
fascist position can be improved only in an absolute
perspective. Benjamin usually associates the term
improvement with the belief in progress as a histori-
cal norm the very belief that he is here diagnosing as
12
the fatal weakness of the anti-fascist Left. The latters
position therefore needs improvement but clearly
not in any meliorist sense. Appearances to the contrary,
the idea of substituting one emergency for another is
not a politics of all or nothing; it aims for strategic
gains. The RAF transformed this blend of prudence
and daring into a very different kind of nihilism. 30 It
hypostatized some of Benjamins political impulses
just hatred, legitimate violence, positive barbarism
and was oblivious to others. 31
Rainer Rochlitz makes the liberal case against the
Eighth Thesis:
The recourse to an authoritarian politics in
dissociable from Carl Schmitts concept of a state
of emergency is understandable within the terrible
context of the triumph of Nazism in Europe. Contra-
ry to what Benjamins formulation implies, however,
it cannot be generalized beyond that situation. If the
state of emergency is the rule, then the only sane
course of action is the politics of making things
worse [la politique du pire]. In the 1970s, the ethics
of certain terrorist groups grew out of this despair;
they described Western capitalist societies as fascist
regimes, against which they sought to bring about
a real state of emergency. It was in the name of a
false actualization that Benjamins work exerted its
greatest political influence. Whatever the ambigui-
ties of postwar European regimes, their constitu-
tions are those of states of law and do not rest on
naked violence and oppression. We have to be able
to differentiate between fascist regimes and demo-
cratic ones that contain certain class privileges:
Benjamins thinking does not allow us to do so.
The terrorist violence that struck at those regimes
mistook its target. Far from redeeming the suffer-
ing undergone by the victims of past generations, it
merely created new injustices.32
The RAFs actualization of the Eighth Thesis is here
called false. Yet the possibility of such misreading is
located in the Thesis itself. In which case the RAFs
response to it would not be so false after all and
social-democratic and terrorist versions of the Eighth
Thesis not that far apart. The need for new analyses
of new situations was pace Rochlitz intrinsic to
Benjamins method. 33 Correlatively, no text was to be
generalized beyond the conditions of its emergence
(or reduced to them). How to reappraise his own most
exposed and time-bound texts in this light? How
reactualize the Eighth Thesis better?
Faced with our daily global news, Benjamin would
surely have acknowledged the obvious that the first
task is to achieve the state of law. Whether he would
have moderated his mistrust of it is another matter. To
rethink his thinking today with its own imperatives in
mind would mean, first, to give the power [Gewalt] of
facts priority over convictions34 and, second, to let
the agon between the best convictions e.g. Rochlitzs
(all too narrow and innocuous) and Agambens (all
too broad and catastrophist) accounts of the state of
emergency crystallize into other alternatives. Tertium
datur. Justice was not a matter of scales and balance
(Ausgewogenheit) if these meant compromise.
What Benjamin meant by the organization of pes-
simism35 was precisely not a politique du pire36 but
an attempt to avert the worst. The RAF admittedly
made comparable claims. But its version of the Eighth
Thesis only made matters worse. If Benjamins attempt
to improve them through an anarcho-messianic clarifi
cation of the political situation was a wager, it was not
a game of Russian roulette.
The Critique of Violence, the Eighth Thesis, Ben-
jamins game of chess with Schmitt, and the headlong
career of the RAF form an instructive constellation of
extremes:
1. In its reaction to the Schleyer crisis a social-
democratic state decreed the first state of emergency
in the history of the Federal Republic a turn of
events that was accompanied by a modest revival of
interest in Schmitt.37 It lends credence to Agambens
larger thesis that since the end of the First World
War Western democracies have increasingly inte-
grated the possibility of declaring a state of emer-
gency into their judicial arsenal. In which case, the
claim that the state of emergency is in fact the rule
would apply, in a precise judicial sense, far beyond
Benjamins epoch.
2. Why, Kraushaar asks, did the state react to a group
that it refused to recognize as a political association
but only as a marginal band of criminal elements
as if it constituted a threat to its existence?38 Surprise
at this, Benjamin would surely have said, is not
philosophical. According to the Critique of Vio-
lence, the modern state is allergic to any challenge,
however disproportionate, to its authority. An order
that creates a world in its own image (Marx) toler-
ates no violence beside its own. Like the Enlighten-
ment in general, it fears whatever it is unable to
reduce to its own measure.39 This the RAF put to the
test. If its fate confirmed Benjamins diagnosis of the
state, its actions, far from implementing his critique
of violence, helped worsen the latters position.
To repeat: by what pure means that critique can be
implemented today remains the unanswered question.
A Trauerspiel
The conclusion to Benjamins The Paris of the Second
Empire in Baudelaire, written in 1938, reads:
On occasion, Baudelaire also claimed to recognize
the image of the modern hero in the conspirator.
No more tragedies!, he wrote in the Salut public
during the February days. No more history of
ancient Rome! Are we not greater today than
Brutus? Greater than Brutus was, to be sure, less
great. For when Napoleon III came to power,
Baudelaire did not recognize the Caesar in him.
Therein Blanqui was his superior. What they
shared nevertheless went deeper than their differ-
ences: obstinacy and impatience, the force of their
indignation and their hatred, and the powerless-
ness that was their common lot. In a famous line
Baudelaire lightheartedly takes leave of a world
in which action is not the sister of dream. His
was not as forsaken as he thought. Blanquis deeds
were the sister of Baudelaires dreams. The two are
intertwined the entwined hands on a stone under
which Napoleon III had buried the hopes of the
June fighters.40
In an age that had no use for heroes only the role of
hero in the Trauerspiel of modernity was available.41
An earlier passage reconstructs Baudelaires notion of
modern heroism as follows:
The resistance that modernity pits against a mans
natural productive lan is out of all proportion to
his strength. It is understandable that he should
weary and seek refuge in death. Modernity cannot
but stand under the sign of suicide. Suicide sets its
seal under a heroic will that makes no concession
to a hostile environment. It is not renunciation but
heroic passion.42
Anger, impotence, failure, the disproportion between
a heroic will and the existing order these traits form
a constellation in which revolutionary and counter-
revolutionary impulses can veer into one another. To
interrupt the course of the world this was Baudelaires
deepest wish;43 he raged against the crowd with the
impotent anger of one who goes against wind and
rain.44 In his last work, Blanqui pronounces the most
terrible indictment of his own revolutionary efforts.45
Nietzsches eternal return is as intimately at odds with
revolution as it is with religion.
Benjamin and the RAF constitute two further
poles in this persisting Saturnine constellation of
act, dream, will, anger, impotence and suicide. Both
represent a return of the bid to interrupt the eternal
return of the same. But are their hands entwined on
a stone under which their hopes lie buried? There is
little to suggest that Benjamins dream corresponded
to the terroristic daydream,46 let alone the deeds, of
the RAF.
In his late writings Benjamin considers not merely
Baudelaire but also Blanqui from varying angles. Within
13
three decades social democracy had, according to the split between dream, action and knowledge recalled
Twelfth Thesis, managed to erase almost entirely a the post-mediaeval dissociation between knowledge
name whose sound sent tremors [erschtterte] through and belief.
the last century.47 Benjamin detects this effect even in Like the concluding section of the preface to the
Blanquis final capitulation, Lternit par les astres.48 Trauerspiel book, the above-quoted note could have
Two years before, however, in the opening pages of his been entitled Pro domo. It also sheds an oblique light
first published work on Baudelaire, he places Blanqui on the desperado tactics of the RAF. Amalgamating
in a context which raises doubts about the effectiveness
of his methods. He here occupies a hybrid position.
Marx, while acknowledging Blanqui as one of the real
leaders of the proletarian party, portrays the profes-
sional conspirators as alchemists who improvise the
revolution and despise the more theoretical enlighten-
ment of the workers concerning their class interests.
Their firebombs and other engines of destruction seem
all the more miraculous and surprising, he claims,
the less rational their foundation is.49
Elsewhere Benjamin transforms this objection into
a far-reaching insight:

One might well ask whether Blanquis political

activity does not display features which reveal it
as the action of the same man who in old age
wrote LEternit par les astres. H.B. [Heinrich
Blcher] even assumes that the world-view devel-
oped by Blanqui at seventy was conceived at the
age of eighteen, and that this explains the desper-
ate [desparat] character of his political activity
in general. There is, clearly, no precise argument
which could substantiate this assumption. On the
other hand, we should not simply dismiss the
idea that Blanquis persistent lack of interest in
the theoretical foundations of socialism may have
sprung from a deep-seated mistrust of the conclu-
sions that await anyone who immerses himself too
some of the above-mentioned motifs from Benjamins
deeply in the structures of the world and of life.
Baudelaire with others from his Arcades Project, one
Blanqui would not, at the last, have escaped such
immersion.50 might characterize the RAF as follows. They acted like
a man trying to brave wind and rain with a machine-
The hidden link suggested here between Blanquis gun. Unable to accept that the heroic role of the
revolutionary activities and his concluding quasi- revolutionary agitator had been played out, they played
scientific postscript on the eternal revolutions of the it for real and tried to prove its and their existence
stars stands in stark contrast to the unity of theory by force. Their activism was an ago quia absurdum,
and praxis postulated by Marx. A split unity is now a macabre theatre of the absurd. If capitalism was a
located not merely between Baudelaires dream and religion, so was their anti-capitalism. For them, as for
Blanquis action but also in the contradiction within Benjamin, history was (in Stephen Dedaluss phrase) a
the latter between theory and praxis. 51 Not unlike nightmare from which they wanted to awaken; or rather
the sudden, apparently gratuitous acts described in they wanted, by their example, to awaken the others
Baudelaires prose poems which serve to give ennui the historical subject to action; but they too were
the slip and suspend the tyranny of Time, Blan- a dream-collective and their sleep a Marxist variant
quis coups would have been so many attempts to of Goyas sleep of reason engendered monsters;
forestall the demobilizing effect of the recognition in short, they merely contributed to the nightmare.
that revolution was not pace Marx inscribed Neither the rhetoric of their acts nor the phraseology
in the logic of history. It could, if at all, only be of their declaration to the court could bridge the gulf
snatched from its so-called progress. This widening between theory and praxis. What their lurid trajectory

14
did do, however, was to highlight that abyss and with
it the intolerable political blockage of our times.
Certain relational concepts (Relationsbegriffe),
Benjamin writes in 1923, are perhaps best understood
if they do not from the outset refer exclusively to man.
A life or a moment could be unforgettable even if all
men had forgotten it. They would contain a demand
unfulfilled by men and probably also a reference to
a realm in which it is fulfilled: Gods remembrance. 52
The Theses restate this demand as the claim of our
oppressed forebears on our attention. 53 This claim too
the demand for justice, for remembrance in action
would surely persist even if most men had forgotten
it. Benjamins theology is synonymous with this
melancholy experience of human obliviousness. Is it
an accident that the winning combination of the First
Thesis consists of two non-human partners, a puppet
and a dwarf? Where are those to do the job? Is the
human species up to it? If not, who? The sad, failed
history the Trauerspiel of the RAF renews these
questions.
Test of time
We began this essay with various forms of Entsetzen
the RAFs actions, their unclear association with
Benjamin, the dormant anarchy awaiting collective
release and the spectrum of meanings that Benjamin
associates with this word, ranging from the removal
[Entsetzung] of the state to certain minimal devia-
tions from the standard course.54 It is not by violence,
we recall, that the Messiah will change the world,
but merely by adjusting it ever so slightly;55 and the
historical materialist must in turn attend to these most
unobtrusive of changes. 56 The greatest transformation
can thus prove to be the merest shift of position. Power
and powerlessness are as dialectically interlinked as
sobriety and intoxication. 57 Pure violence is the
counterpart of perpetual peace.
All the above-named elements coexist in Benjamins
thinking. It is as if the chess master evoked in the
First Thesis combined every virtue named thereafter,
though doubtless not in any single move: the weak
Messianic force and the virile explosive power; the
paralysed horror of the angel and the avenging hatred
of the oppressed; single-minded resolution and devious
humour; a monastic distance from world events and the
closest attention to detail; violence and non-violence.
All these conflicting, heterogeneous impulses are
needed if historical materialism is to prove a match
for all comers. To object that they can cohere, if at
all, only on paper is to ignore the relation that they
state and, in so doing, perform between word
and deed. Benjamins writings illustrate his theory
of language one in which the word partakes of the
Word. Here at least a certain unity between theory
and praxis obtains.
To return to the sticking point: what is the share of
physical violence in the whole contradictory fund58
of his thinking? This can, he claims, only be decided
from case to case. Let us therefore briefly consider a
particularly relevant one: The Destructive Character
(1931). 59 Like its model, who does not worry about
being misunderstood, this text is exposed on all
sides to idle talk.60 In todays climate, it could even
be suspected of condoning terrorism.
Ripeness for destruction (Zerstrungswrdigkeit)
is what the destructive character tests the world for.
Not always with brute force [Gewalt]; sometimes it is
refined. Unconditional non-violence is not a political
option here; violence is essential as a pure means:
What exists he reduces to rubble, not for the sake of
the rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.
What does this stupendous programme involve? The
dying fall of another sentence gives an ominous hint:
First of all, for a moment at least, empty space the
place where the thing stood or the victim lived.61
Not merely are (inanimate) thing and (living) victim
given equally short shrift here. All superfluous affect,
notably the smokescreen of virtuous indignation, is
likewise removed.62 But can one assent without ques-
tion to this suspension of moral affect? Questions and
objections arise here thick and fast. Is it only a fine
terror (schnes Entsetzen) that the above sentence
inspires? After all that has meanwhile happened, who
can still derive satisfaction from such results? What if
the victims names were Philemon and Baucis? Was
it because an end to mythical violence still did not
appear unimaginably remote to Benjamin that he
could so coolly envisage the sacrifice of human life? If
so, how tenable was such an assessment? How do we
read it in the light of the subsequent Nazi and Stalinist
campaigns of liquidation and purification? Would
not the deadly misuse of such terms soon render them
unusable? Or was it now all the more necessary to reaf-
firm them in the teeth of possible misunderstanding?
Benjamin seems to have adopted the latter strategy.
The closing paragraphs of his Kraus essay, written in
the same year, oppose a purifying, destructive justice
both to the constructive ambiguities of the law and
to the impure rhetoric of the George circle, despite
and because of the latters talk of purity, sacrifice
and a new humanity.63 Here as elsewhere Benjamin
pronounces judgement on what constitutes pure and
impure violence, purity and sacrifice with apodictic
15
certainty and a biblically inspired furore.64 Who does
not share that fury? But who is granted that certainty?
Can such distinctions always be so clearly made? Did
not Benjamin once argue that Communism was not
a matter of the right course, but of a necessarily,
symptomatically and productively false one? Doesnt
the historical Trauerspiel show in terrible detail that
a false order imposes an impure, mixed violence
even on its best enemies and that the circle of mythic
violence could never be broken in entirely pure
fashion?
The destructive character knows only one watch-
word: make room. And only one activity: clearing
away.65 Such evacuation (Entsetzung) causes terror
(Entsetzen). Wittingly or not, it is driven by the need
to clean up a fallen, profaned, overnamed Creation.
The destructive character the (in)human counter-
part of an exterminating angel fulfils Benjamins
anarcho-theological dream of justice in action. Here
too, however, dream is not the sister of action; it is
rather its distant relative. The fulfilment of the dream
is still part of it; the portrait is not its model; his
activity is mimed here by an act of language which
symbolically partakes but by the same token falls
short of it. Nor is it an accident that the actual models
for this portrait were (anti-)cultural figures destroyers
of ornament (Loos), clich (Kraus), catharsis (Brecht),
and so on. Where, then, are this text and the charac-
ter it describes to be situated? Notwithstanding the
symbolic relation of word to Word and the spark Character. It intervenes in the virtual space the no-
between speech and act the separation between the
literary and political spheres remains.
While not therefore a directly political statement,
The Destructive Character nevertheless stands for a
politics that would be nothing but politics. Benjamins
theology of the profane has almost dissolved here
into the profane. But theological elements persist,66
among them an echo of the Jewish ban on graven
images. The destructive character has no image of
the future and can thus pursue a teleology without
end-purpose. He is, in short, the profane executor of
Benjamins Critique of Violence. The question thus
arises once again: under what circumstances can the
most monstrous cases that these texts evoke the
revolutionary killing of the oppressor or the clearing
away of the victim still be envisaged? At least in gave advance insight into the mass psychology of
the West, it has long made little political sense to shoot
replaceable character-masks (Marx).
Let us consider the issue from another angle.
Benjamin will later refer to his psychology of the
destructive character.67 But what this figure repre-
sents is in fact the clearing away of what is usually
16
understood by psychology and character. Just as the
surrealists exchange, to a man, the play of human
features for the dial of an alarm clock,68 he reduces
not merely the world but his own psyche to a bare
minimum. Benjamins commentaries on Brecht like-
wise turn on the dismantling and retooling of person,
name and function.69 Those who stand firmest in the
Communist cause, he comments on Of poor B.B., are
those who started by letting themselves fall.70 Here,
too, the question arises whether such claims have not
meanwhile been refuted by events. Would not Arthur
Koestlers Darkness at Noon show that it was precisely
those who had stood firmest in the revolutionary cause
who were reduced to testifying against themselves in
the name of revolutionary justice?71 But surely the
destructive character is armed against this travesty of
revolutionary self-sacrifice by his insuperable mistrust
of the course of events and his permanent awareness
that of historical man that everything can always
go wrong.72
He thus stands for powers of instant, active, critical
judgement in a rapidly changing environment in
short, for what Benjamin calls presence of mind. A
German Bolshevist revolution, he wrote only a few
months before this text appeared (in November 1931
in the Frankfurter Zeitung), might allow him to write
differently; but he had no illusions about the reception
his writings could expect from a victorious KPD.73
This remark sums up the context of The Destructive
mans-land opened up between East and West by the
fact of Soviet Russia.74 This fact no more convicts
it of complicity with Stalinist purges and terror than
its free-standing status frees it from the context of
guilt (Schuldzusammenhang) in which it, like all texts,
is implicated. A just critique of this text would like-
wise involve presence of mind: rapid historico-critical
judgement of its historico-critical judgement.
The mistrust which Benjamin attributes to
Blanqui of the conclusions awaiting anyone who
immerses himself deeply in the structures of the world
and of life may also, we suggested, have been his
own.75 Instead of seeking to come to terms with, say,
Nietzsches psychology of ressentiment or Freuds
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, which
fascism, he focuses on the mass as the matrix of a
liberation from the entanglements of bourgeois psy-
chology. It is this promise that the destructive char-
acter fulfils. Neither a communist new man nor a
Nietzschean superman but an Unmensch (a monster
qua un-man), this terrible simplificateur has effected
a complete reduction of his own condition, indeed
the extraction of his root [Radizierung].76 To be
radical, Marx had written, is to grasp the root of
the matter. But for man the root is man himself.77
Communism, thus conceived, completes the project
of Enlightenment humanism. If, as the last-quoted
sentence from The Destructive Character suggests,
man in turn now needs to be reduced to his root, this
is because bourgeois humanism has meanwhile got in
the way. Such a quasi-mathematical reduction of the
human of what Nietzsche called the human, all-too-
human naturally raises a host of questions. (How
avoid a return of the repressed? The RAFs attempt
to cut through all political and psychological knots is
a warning example.) But its purpose is clear: to find a
way through the labyrinthine structures of the world
and of life, including bourgeois psychology and moral-
ity. It is, however, a measure of the difficulty of finding
the right man for the job that the one presented here
should not be a man at all but rather an ideal type,
a drawing-board model sketched at a certain distance
from empirical reality.78 He represents one experimen-
tal solution among a contradictory fund of others in
Benjamins work to the problem of how to sidestep or
in his case demolish the quasi-ontological structures
of the world and of life in order to do what needs
to be done. Out of the crooked timber of humanity,
Kant had written, no straight thing was ever made.79
If its knots are nevertheless to be undone, an equally
crooked strategy is needed. Benjamin entrusts it to a
hunchbacked dwarf, whose motto might be: The devil
is old; grow old to understand him.80
We have become poor, he wrote two years later;
but he still saw a political chance in that reduced
condition.81 Our world is characterized by a poverty
of political alternatives. Many will, however, assent to
Habermass objection that the alternative posited by
Benjamin between pure revolutionary violence and a
mythical status quo is, under todays circumstances,
too starkly Manichaean to be viable. But the destruc-
tive character is, precisely, a genius of the viable.
Where others come up against walls and mountains,
there too he sees a way. It is in this refusal of exist-
ing alternatives that his actuality lies. Every moment,
Benjamin claims, has its own peculiar revolutionary
chance.82 The question is: what type of genius would
it take to seize it in post-revolutionary times?
For Hegel world history is its own Court of Judge-
ment (Weltgericht). For Benjamin the historical equiva-
lent to the Last Judgement is the standing judgement
of one historical moment on certain preceding ones83
not, then, on the whole past, but on that past that is
lordre du jour. Such summary justice is untimely
(Nietzsche), involuntary (Proust), partial, passionate
and political (Baudelaire). Its enabling medium is the
critical passage of time, its modality the flash in which
the present and a no less particular past coincide in
an unrepeatable image.84 At every turn of phrase and
events, the historical materialist, the literary critic, the
writer and the translator, as Benjamin conceives them,
exercise such judgement.
And so does the destructive character. What verdict,
then, is our historical moment entitled to pass on his
intervention in his? He is the bearer of a mandate.85
Do we still have one? The only question, Benjamin
writes on his return from Moscow in 1927, is:
Which reality is inwardly converging with the truth?
Which truth is inwardly preparing to converge with
the real? Only he who gives clear answers to these
questions is objective. Not toward his contempo-
raries (thats not what matters) but towards events
(that is decisive).86
Just as all language and works of art ultimately
address themselves, in the early Benjamins scheme of
things, not to an audience but to God, 87 so a political
mandate issues here from the need of the times and
not from public opinion, which might be oblivious to
it. Truth and reality are destined to coincide. Global
capitalism, which knows no truth outside reality, has
reduced this revolutionary ontology to a ghostly, under-
ground existence.88 But even though no viable political
alternative to this one-dimensional religion has so far
emerged, it cannot lay its ghosts for good. If it could,
world history would indeed turn out to be its own Last
Judgement.
The aftermath
Tiny radical minorities make convenient scapegoats.
But all the blame cannot be laid on the RAF. How
Benjamin would have judged this particular extreme
we cannot know. He did, however, speak of the social
order as a chronic context of guilt. The so-called
BaaderMeinhof complex was surely one of its acutest
contemporary symptoms. Extrapolating from one of
Benjamins boldest anthropological speculations, 89 one
could also see the RAF as having acted out buried
desires of the collective political unconscious. Hence
the vestigial aura that surrounds them, nowadays
trivialized on the T-shirt market. That their strategy
would fail was foreseeable. But what alternatives did
false circumstances permit? How, in a state of emer-
gency, reach for the emergency brake?90 How move
in an iron cage? To act where action is blocked: can
this be done without a streak of madness a passage
17
 lacte? Not to act when action is needed: is this not
the reverse pathology of the normal, which serves to
protect us from such madness? Only if this dilemma
were no longer taken in the safe doses with which the
media inure us to it could it begin to be resolved.
Where are those, the young Benjamin quotes
Nietzsche as asking, who are in need [Not]?91 No
one is belatedly being asked to become a sympathizer
with the real existing RAF but rather a foreign their adoptive fathers for a reality principle which
friend92 of the need that drove them before it was
supplanted by the activity of staying alive. What it
drove them to provoked a massive reaffirmation of
the status quo. It was against their cause that they
united the collective. Their desperate gamble proved,
if proof was needed, the impossibility of achieving
justice through terror. This did not, however, yet prove
that it was attainable without violence violence of a
purer kind. Politico-ethical judgement can surely be
exercised only from within this dilemma.
The real and imagined challenge posed by the RAF
bore little relation to the relatively small number of
its victims; the apparatus mobilized against it was
even more disproportionate. It seems likely that the
unmastered German past was at work on both sides;
but such a hypothesis is not easily tested. How deeply
those leaden years have impressed themselves on the
collective memory is equally difficult to assess. The
needs of capitalist production dictate that each present
antiquate what went before, which becomes as stale
as yesterdays newspaper, as pass as a recent fashion
and as unreal as last nights dream.93 So too in the case
of the RAF. The ensuing process of normalization has
closed the episode. By historicizing it, scholarship
too has helped lay it to rest. Without too much outcry,
things again go on this way.94
And yet to continue citing Benjamin the enemy
still does not feel entirely safe from the dead.95 In
the second expos for the Arcades Project Benjamin
observes of nineteenth-century France that the glitter
and splendour with which this commodity-producing
society surrounds itself, along with its illusory sense
of security, are not immune to dangers; the collapse of
the Second Empire and the Commune of Paris remind
it of that.96 The spectre of revolution (Marx) and
the uncanny guest of nihilism (Nietzsche) were the
writing on the wall. The RAF was a latter-day heir to
both. To criminalize their acts, to pathologize their
motives, to demand their repentance, and to leave it
at that, as the prevailing wisdom does, is to want to
exorcise the vast problem that of elementary political
justice which, however criminally and pathologically,
they refused to ignore.
18
But the Left, too, has its ghosts.97 We did 1968,
said Wolinski, so as not to become whom we became.
Putting the past behind one is, however, the very sin
for which the German protest movement originally
denounced its fathers.98 Dr Strangelove, or How I
learned to stop worrying and love the bomb: most
ex-protesters have meanwhile gone with the times,
exchanging the critical theory they once learned from
is, from their former standpoint, the most insidious,
self-effacing ideology of all. They have matured and
expelled their daimon (if they had had one) along with
their demons.99 Once burned, twice shy: how many
former sympathizers with the RAF now keep a low
profile? Others have recanted and joined the other side,
like the ex-Communists of a former period.100 Todays
sobering-up (Ernchterung) knows only Webers
notion of soberness and disenchantment, not those
of Marx or Benjamin, with which it is, precisely, dis
enchanted. In short, the observation made by Adorno
and Horkheimer in 1969 that the disenchantment of
the world has traversed all world-historical convulsions
undeterred101 has been borne out by the aftermath
of the student movement and its terrorist sequel. In
this sense, they may indeed prove to have been mere
episodes.
Benjamins fortunes on the cultural market have
followed suit.102 A long initial vogue103 was borne
by the cultural revolution initiated by the student
movement, whose break-up in the mid-1970s marked
the turning of the tide (the so-called Tendenzwende).
The entry of Benjamins writings into the academic
canon and the cultural feuilletons was accompanied by
a more sophisticated awareness of their complexities,
but also by an increasing disengagement from their
political stakes.104 A project that was intended to smash
the kaleidoscope of so-called cultural history is now
a challenging, provocative part of it. A conference
held in 2006 by an international Benjamin society
could in all impunity call itself a Benjamin festival.
All this parasitic activity around him cannot conceal
the falling of his political stock.
They confirm their defeat, he wrote at a more
threatening moment, by betraying their own cause.105
Todays (ex-)Left has confirmed its defeat by aban-
doning much of the ground it lost meanwhile and
internalizing many of the arguments it used to fight.
The debacle of the RAF may well have contributed
its share to this general retreat. The horizon is one of
non-expectation; and it is against this blocked prospect
that Benjamins writings are read today. There seems
to be tacit agreement on all sides that their interest
can no longer lie in their politics. To excise these from
Benjamins corpus is, however, to abort its afterlife. A
different type of mortification106 is needed.
Benjamins own materialist historiography and liter-
ary criticism point the way. They show how works
become readable, quotable and criticizable only in acts of resistance. Todays states, reaping the harvest
the medium of the historical experience that links them
to, and separates them from, our present. To try to
bring this method to bear on his own texts is to engage
at every turn in a difficult exercise of judgement in
which the court itself may not emerge intact. The task
is to develop combined powers of historical, political
and aesthetic decision which draw their strength from
the always meagre107 present without succumbing In this climate of latent terror, harassed, docile popu-
to the so-called spirit of the times. This is easier said
than done. A tentative beginning was sketched above in
the case of The Destructive Character a text which
posed the question of violence under vastly different
conditions over seventy-five years ago.
Two sets of comments, objections and questions
should at least be mentioned in conclusion:
1. While the RAF emerged out of the specific
conditions of postwar Germany, we now know that it
also stood at the threshold of an unforeseeable renewal
of political terrorism in a new multipolar world. At a
moment when the armed struggle of small ultra-radical
groups had played itself out in the West, the destruction
of the Twin Towers precipitated a new form of asym-
metrical warfare between realigned geopolitical and
ideological forces. The rhetoric of international class
struggle was replaced by that of the clash of civiliza-
tions and by reciprocal neo-religious anathema worlds
apart, and light years behind, Benjamins theology of
the profane. But there is, thanks to globalization, now
no corner of the earth where the demand for justice
is not heard. One of the most tangible responses to it
has been the creation of international courts of law
to which nation-states cede a small portion of their
sovereignty. Has, then, the case for weakening the rule
of law become moot in a world where the first task is
often to strengthen it? Would Benjamin have conceded
that the state often needs to be bolstered before it can
properly wither away? And what place can a particular
in this case, anarcho-messianic version of universal
justice claim in an increasingly multicultural context?
To this latter question two late notes suggest the
makings of an answer: The constructive principle of
universal history allows it to be represented in partial
histories. Universal history in the present-day sense
is never more than a kind of esperanto.108
2. Benjamin wrote of pointing a self-constructed
telescope through a fog of blood.109 Now as then,
impure, mythical violence remains the rule, not
the exception. The fog is partially pierced by isolated
political demonstrations and strikes, some philo-
sophical thinking, historical analysis and investigative
journalism, a few works of art, and countless daily
of the violence that they inflict at home and abroad,
are subject to intermittent disturbance from their inner
margins and the threat of terrorist attack from without.
The threat of mutually assured destruction (MAD)
that hung over the Cold War has yielded to another
worst-case scenario: weapons of mass destruction in
the hands of terrorists with nothing to gain or to lose.
lations indiscriminately abhor violence and blindly
demand security unspecific notions behind which
specific interests take cover. Under such conditions
Benjamins plea for pure violence would seem to have
little or no constituency.
The critique of violence, he argues, cannot afford
to stop short at the law and the state. A lesser
programme will not suffice: the minimum is the
maximum. Only the prospect of a way out of all
previous history the term is Ausgang, as in Kants
What is Enlightenment? would enable a critical,
discriminating and decisive [scheidende und entschei-
dende] angle of vision [Einstellung] on its temporal
data.110 It is on this premiss, conceived not as a regula-
tive but as a realisable idea, that the Theses likewise
rest. If the Angel of History, who sees one unbroken
catastrophe, hardly seems to discriminate between
the temporal data, such discrimination nevertheless
remains the task of the historical materialist, who
looks, as it were, over his shoulder.
One might be tempted to conclude that Benjamins
idea has meanwhile been buried once and for all under
all the temporal data. The idea the Angel sees
it differently. From his angle of vision, it is the earth
that is buried, and the sky obscured, by the mounting
facts.111 Without some such perspective, history would,
from this perspective, merely be what Anglo-Saxon
understatement says it is: one damned thing after
another. Not for nothing, however, does Benjamin
compare the historical materialist to a cameraman
who adjusts the lighting and angle of his shots to the
needs of the moment.112 The wide metaphysical angle
of vision does not suffice on its own. From this we may
perhaps extrapolate the following conclusion. What is
needed today is not a lesser programme what other
objective can there be than the institution of a classless
society without further delay? but its adjustment to
straitened circumstances. If Benjamin never gave up
19
his minimum programme, several late formulations
nevertheless reduced it to its minimum: a dwarf, a
weak Messianic power, the smallest guarantee.113
A reduced model of anarchy is needed one that
could no longer lead anyone into the dead end of
trying, against all better knowledge, to force the way
out, go it alone, and claim, in so doing, to represent the
oppressed. Might this, under the present circumstances,
mean casting our lot with non-violence? Yes, if it is
violent enough. Todays winning combination might
be one in which Benjamins critique of violence joined
forces with those of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther
King and Nelson Mandela.
Who, though, does not feel perplexity114 in the
face of unabated global violence? The best lack all
conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate
intensity.115 But what if the former had made them-
selves at home in the void and the latter were merely
trying to deny it? Something else is clearly needed if
it isnt mere anarchy but, on the contrary, anarchy of
an unprecedented kind that is to be loosed upon the
world.116 The young Benjamin calls it belief, but adds
that everything depends how one believes in ones
belief.117 Two decades later he is still inclined to
assume that the planet is waiting for an end to blood
and horror. Whether we are capable of presenting it
with this three or four hundred millionth birthday gift
is, he goes on, highly questionable. But if we dont, the
planet will finally have us, its heedless well-wishers,
served the Last Judgement.118
The day we do, Judgement too will have withered
away.
The planet, then, is waiting. What, then, are we
waiting for? But what we?
Notes
1. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (henceforth
GS), ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppen
huser, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1972
89, II, 1, pp. 2978; Surrealism, in Walter Benjamin,
Selected Writings (henceforth SW), ed. Michael W. Jen-
nings, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1999,
vol. 2, p. 209.
2. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe (henceforth GB),
ed. Christoph Gdde and Henri Lonitz, Suhrkamp Ver-
lag, Frankfurt am Main, 19952000, III, p. 159, let-
ter to Scholem of 29 May 1926; The Correspondence
of Walter Benjamin 19101940, trans. R. and E.M.
Jacobson, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994,
p.301.
3. Theocracy has no political, only a religious, meaning.
GS, II, 1, p. 203; Theologico-Political Fragment, in
SW, vol. 3, p. 305.
4. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, On the New Idols, Fried
rich Nietzsche, Kritische Gesamtausgabe (henceforth
KG), ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, De
20
Gruyter, Berlin, 1969, VI, 1, pp. 5760.
5. GS, VI, pp. 1048; The Right to Use Force, in SW,
vol. 1, pp. 2314.
6. GS, VI, p. 105; SW, vol. 1, p. 231.
7. GS, VI, pp. 1056; SW, vol. 1, pp. 2312. Non-violence,
Benjamin here claims, has little prospect of political
success. Non-resistance to the point of martyrdom can,
however, be a moral, indeed a sacred action, as when
communities of Galician Jews let themselves be cut
down in their synagogues.
8. GS, VI, pp. 1067; SW, vol. 1, p. 233.
9. Cf. Benjamins early Notes for a Work on the Category
of Justice, Frankfurter Adorno Bltter IV, 1992, pp.
412.
10. GS, VI, pp. 1078; The Right to Use Force, in SW,
vol. 1, pp. 2334.
11. GS, II, 1, pp. 2034; SW, vol. 3, p. 155.
12. Ibid.
13. GS, VI, p. 203; The Right to Use Force, in SW, vol.
1, p. 233.
14. GB, III, p. 160; Correspondence, p. 301.
15. GS, I, 2, p. 697; On the Concept of History, Thesis
VIII, in SW, vol. 4, p. 392.
16. GS, I, 2, pp. 7023; Thesis XVII, in SW, vol. 4, p.
396.
17. Cf. in addition to Habermass essay, Axel Honneths in-
terpretation of the Critique of Violence, in Burkhardt
Lindner, ed., Benjamin-Handbuch, Metzler Verlag,
Stuttgart, 2006; and Rainer Rochlitz, The Disenchant-
ment of Art: The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin, trans.
J.M. Todd, Guilford Press, New York, 1996. From
entirely different perspectives, the aforementioned
texts of Bolz and Derrida place Benjamin, Schmitt,
Heidegger and others in the context of a philosophical
extremism that emerged between the world wars.
18. Cf. on the overall structure of this project Lieven De
Cauter, The Bloody Mystifications of the New World
Order: On Agambens Homo Sacer, in The Capsular
Civilization: On the City in the Age of Fear, NAi Pub-
lishers, Rotterdam, 2004, pp. 15471. It turns on two
extreme theses: the concentration camp as the biopoliti-
cal paradigm of modernity and the state of exception
as that of modern governance.
19. Cf. Vivian Liska, Giorgio Agambens leerer Messian-
ismus, Schlebrgge, Vienna 2008.
20. Walter Benjamin/Gretel Adorno. Briefwechsel 1930
1940, p. 410; also cited in GS, I, 3, p. 1223. It like-
wise takes Zarathustra the longest time to face his
most abysmal thought and heaviest weight. (Also
sprach Zarathustra, III, Der Genesende, KG, VI, 1,
pp. 2667). Nietzsches affirmation and Benjamins
refusal of the eternal return of the same are perhaps
the most intimate of enemies.
21. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. K. Attell,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005, ch. 4.
The earlier moves in this game could be described
as follows. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama
Benjamin offered a subversive variation on Schmitts
definition of the sovereign. The latter had in turn been
a response to the Critique of Violence. The sover-
eign had filled the power vacuum resulting from the
threatened suspension of law and state; deposed by
revolution from below, he was restored by counter-
revolution from above. If Agambens reconstruction
is accurate, then Schmitt, for one, would not have
considered the prospects of Benjamins word against
 the law to be unimaginably remote.
22. Cf. Susanna Heil, Gefhrliche Beziehungen. Walter
Benjamin und Carl Schmitt, Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart,
1996.
23. Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie. Vier Kapitel zur
Lehre von der Souvernitt, Duncker & Humblot, Ber-
lin, 1985, p. 11; Political Theology: Four Chapters on
the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab, MIT
Press, Cambridge MA, 1985, p. 5.
24. GS, I, 1, p. 406; The Origin of German Tragic Drama,
trans. John Osborne, Verso, London, 1998, p. 232.
25. Cf. GS, II, 1, p. 194; Critique of Violence, in SW, vol.
1, p. 246.
26. GB, IV, pp. 1920; Correspondence, pp. 3723.
27. GS, II, 1, p. 308; Surrealism, in SW, vol. 2, p. 215.
28. GS, II, 1, p. 307; SW, vol. 2, pp. 21516.
29. Distant parallels may perhaps be drawn between the
hard revolutionary romanticism of the RAF and the
fin de sicle decadence that Benjamin saw at work in
Jngers cult of war. It complied with the desires of the
bourgeoisie, which longed for the downfall of the West
the way a schoolboy does for an inkblot in the place of
a wrong answer (GS, III, p. 243; Theories of German
Fascism, in SW, vol. 2, p. 316). The difference be-
tween this downfall (Untergang) and the one sought
(according to the Theologico-Political Fragment) by
happiness is roughly that between Thanatos and Eros.
Zarathustras love for those who know not how to live
except by going under (Zarathustras Prologue (4),
KG, VI, I, p. 11) embraces both.
30. Cf. on the differences between nihilisms my articles
Messianischer Nihilismus. Zu Benjamins Theolo-
gisch-politischem Fragment, in Ashraf Noor and Josef
Wohlmuth, eds, Jdische und christliche Sprachfigu-
rationen im 20 Jahrhundert, Schningh, Paderborn,
2002, pp. 141214; Nihilismus kontra Nihilismus.
Walter Benjamins Weltpolitik aus heutiger Sicht, in
Bernd Witte and Mauro Ponzi, eds, Theologie und Poli-
tik. Walter Benjamin und ein Paradigma der Moderne,
Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin, 2005, pp. 10736.
31. To do the job properly [um ganze Arbeit zu leisten],
one must have felt what one wants to destroy (GS,
III, p. 265).
32. Rochlitz, The Disenchantment of Art, p. 235. Rochlitz
also rejects Benjamins version of the proletariat as the
avenging class that social democracy has schooled to
forget its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice (GS, I, 2, p.
700; Thesis XII, in SW, vol. 4, p. 394). Here Benjamin
is, Rochlitz claims, far from Marxs class analysis and
close to Nietzsches identification of socialism with
ressentiment. In fact, however, Benjamins equation
of vengeance with justice is remote from Zarathustras
psychological diagnosis (in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II,
Of the Tarantulas, KG, VI, I, pp. 1247) and close to
Marxs biblical sense of justice and to Nietzsches de-
fence of active virtues against reactive vices. The early
fragment The Meaning of Time in the Moral Universe
makes it clear that vengeance is not to be equated with
retribution: the retributive power of law is contrasted
here with the fury of divine justice a fury which
sweeps through history in a storm of forgiveness (GS,
VI, p. 98; SW, vol. 1, p. 2868). Similarly, Benjamin
alternately admires the hatred of the downtrodden and
a need for fresh air and open space that is stronger
than any hatred (GS, IV, 1, p. 396; The Destructive
Character, in SW, vol. 2, p. 541). An overwhelming
mass of historical and social-psychological material
can undeniably be adduced in support of Rochlitzs
claims. But even if (as Marcuse observed in 1965 of
terms such as culture of the heart and redemption)
Benjamins notions of vengeance and hatred sound
today like echoes from another age, can we forgo them
without becoming Nietzsches last men?
33. Cf. GS, V, 1, p. 593 (N10, 1); The Arcades Project,
trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin, Harvard Univer-
sity Press, Cambridge MA, 2002, p. 474 (N10, 1).
34. GS, IV, 1, p. 85; One-Way Street, in SW, vol. 1, p.
444.
35. GS, II, 1, p. 308; Surrealism, in SW, vol. 2, p. 216.
36. To prove that it was, it would be necessary to show that
Benjamins insistence on separating historical materi-
alism from the forces of progress could only further
weaken the anti-fascist position. His answer to the
centrist argument that both left and right extremisms
played into the hands of fascism by undermining the
democratic structures of the Weimar Republic would
presumably have been that it was, on the contrary, the
liberal centre that caved in.
37. Cf. Wolfgang Kraushaar, Die Schleyer-Entfhrung:
44 Tage ohne Opposition, in Revolte und Reflexion.
Politische Aufstze 19761987, Verlag Neue Kritik,
Frankfurt am Main, 1990, pp. 8492. In the course of
this crisis, the executive established two new bodies
which simply undercut the legal and constitutional
principles which it constantly invoked (p. 90). The
Committee for Internal Affairs oversaw the creation
of a secret police agency no longer subject to pub-
lic, federal or parliamentary processes; and the Crisis
Command robbed parliament of its last possibility of
influence, namely the power of defining what situation
may be designated as a state of emergency a step
not even foreseen in the regulations governing the
declaration of a state of emergency and utterly con-
trary to the constitution (ibid.). This suspension of the
constitution for reasons of state was uncomplainingly
accepted by the media (p. 91). The statesman who took
upon himself the decision to sacrifice Schleyer, Helmut
Schmidt, enjoyed widespread support. The popular ad-
miration of which Benjamins Critique speaks for the
great criminal who defies the law yielded here to that
for an iron chancellor who showed what stuff the state
was made of.
38. Kraushaar, Die Schleyer-Entfhrung, pp. 912.
39. The ideal of the Enlightenment is the system from
which everything and anything follows. In their mas-
tery of nature, the creative God and the ordering mind
are alike. Mans likeness to God lies in his sover-
eignty over existence, in the lordly gaze, in the com-
mand.Whatever might be different is made the same
(Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik
der Aufklrung, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main
1969, pp. 1218; Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philo-
sophical Fragments, trans. E. Jephcott, Stanford Uni-
versity Press, Stanford, 2002, pp. 48). Cf. on the fear
at the core of the Enlightenment (p. 22; p. 11); and on
the fear that haunts the modern state (GS, II, 1, pp. 185,
1923; Critique of Violence, in SW, vol. 2, pp. 240,
245). Witness the Berufsverbot (the disqualification of
politically undesirable individuals from employment in
the civil service, including the teaching profession) and
perhaps also de Gaulles secret visit to Baden-Baden on
29 May 1968.
21
 40. GS, I, 2, p. 604; The Paris of the Second Empire in
Baudelaire, in Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire,
trans. H. Zohn, Verso, London, 1997, p. 101.
41. GS, I, 2, p. 600; Charles Baudelaire, p. 97.
42. GS, I, 2, p. 578. Cf. Baudelaire, De lHroisme de la
Vie Moderne, Salon de 1846, in Charles Baudelaire,
uvres Compltes (henceforth OC), ed. Y.-G. le Dan-
tec, Gallimard, Paris, 1968, pp. 94952.
43. GS, I, 2, p. 667; Central Park, in SW, vol. 4, p. 170.
44. GS, I, 2, p. 652; On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, in
Charles Baudelaire, p. 154. It is of the essence of anger,
Benjamin writes of Baudelaire, to rage against friend
and foe alike (GS, I, 2, p. 642; Charles Baudelaire,
p. 143). Contrast Gods just anger in the Critique of
Violence (GS, II, 1, 196; SW, vol. 1, p. 247).
45. GS, V, 1, p. 75; Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Cen-
tury, Expos of 1939, in The Arcades Project, p. 25.
46. GS, I, 2, 516; Paris of the Second Empire, in
Charles Baudelaire, p. 14. Benjamin is referring
here to the dreams of mid-nineteenth-century French
conspirators.
47. GS, I, 2, p. 700; Thesis XII, On the Concept of His-
tory, in SW, vol. 4, p. 394.
48. Blanqui submits to bourgeois society. But his genu-
flection is of such violence that its throne begins to
totter. GS, V, 1, p. 168 (D5a, 2); The Arcades Project,
p. 111.
49. For them, Marx adds, the only condition of revolu-
tion is the adequate organization of their conspiracy
(cit. GS, I, 2, pp. 51419; Paris of the Second Empire,
in Charles Baudelaire, p. 13).
50. GS, I, 3, 1154 (Ms 1080).
51. Cf. on the shattered components of authentic histori-
cal experience GS, I, 2, p. 643; On Some Motifs in
Baudelaire, in Charles Baudelaire, p. 144.
52. GS, IV, 1, p. 10; The Task of the Translator, in SW,
vol. 1, p. 254.
53. GS, I, 2, p. 694; Thesis II, in SW, vol. 4, p. 390.
54. Cf. on deviations and differentials GS, V, 1, p. 570;
The Arcades Project, p. 456 (N1, 2).
55. GS, II, 2, p. 432; Kafka, in SW, vol. 2, p. 811.
56. GS, I, 2, p. 695; Thesis IV, On the Concept of His-
tory, in SW, vol. 4, p. 390. Zarathustra says something
similar against great events by which, however, he
means revolutionary uprisings: Then it spoke to me
again as a whisper: It is the stillest words that bring
on the storm. Thoughts that come on doves feet guide
the world (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, The Stillest
Hour, KG, VI, 1, 185).
57. Cf. on the dialectic of intoxication GS, II, 1, pp. 299,
307; Surrealism, in SW, vol. 2, pp. 210 and 216. Is
Benjamin, to cite his critique of the surrealists, always
up to this dialectic? Doesnt his language sometimes
seem drunk on theology as if its recourse to the
power and glory of the Word were calculated to com-
pensate for its actual powerlessness on the literary
battle-field? The sober materialist style of his late
work deliberately blunts this lan.
58. GB, IV, 408 (letter to Scholem of 6 May 1934); Cor-
respondence, p. 439.
59. GS, IV, 1, pp. 3968; The Destructive Character, in
SW, vol. 2, pp. 5412.
60. One such misunderstanding should be mentioned here.
The spectacle of the deepest harmony that the world
affords the destructive character as he goes about
making room for a viable world is clearly not to be
22
confused with the fascist and futurist aestheticization
of war and politics that Benjamin denounces four years
later.
61. GS, IV, 1, p. 397; SW, vol. 2, p. 541, my emphasis.
62. For to organize pessimism means nothing other than
to expel moral metaphor from politics. GS, II, 1, p.
309; Surrealism, in SW, vol. 2, p. 217.
63. Cf. GS, II, 1, pp. 3667; Karl Kraus, in SW, vol. 2,
pp. 4567. Derrida argues for an exploration of the
shared thematic of destruction that emerged in the
interwar period, and especially of its German-Jewish
reflections in Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Heidegger
and Others, Force of Law, pp. 656. Benjamin, for
his part, sought to make his writings as unpalatable
as possible to the counter-revolution, at the risk of
making them unpalatable to everyone. GB, IV, p. 25
(letter to Scholem of 17 April 1931); Correspondence,
p. 378.
64. As the cleansing hurricane goes before the storm, so
Gods wrath roars through history in a storm of for-
giveness in order to sweep away everything that should
[mte] be consumed forever by the lightning-flashes
of the divine weather (GS, VI, p. 98; The Meaning of
Time in the Moral Universe, in SW, vol. 1, p. 287).
65. GS, IV, 1, p. 396; The Destructive Character, in SW,
vol. 2, p. 541.
66. The destructive characters insuperable mistrust of the
course of things (ibid., p. 398; SW, vol. 2, p. 542) is the
reverse side of an unspoken, theologically inspired faith
in the revolutionary potential of the real. Cf. by contrast
Zarathustras pagan trust in the heart of the earth
and his accompanying mistrust of the overthrow- and
scum-devils of revolution. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II,
On Great Events, KG, VI, 1, p. 166.
67. GS, I, 3, p. 1244 (notes and materials for On the
Concept of History).
68. GS, II, 1, p. 310; Surrealism, in SW, vol. 2, p. 218.
69. Cf. in particular GS, II, 2, pp. 50610; From the Brecht
Commentary, in SW, vol. 2, pp. 3747; and GS, II, 2,
pp. 52627; What is Epic Theatre? (first version), in
Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna
Bostock, London 1973, p. 9.
70. GS, II, 2, p. 554; Commentary on Poems by Brecht
in SW, vol. 4, p. 231.
71. In the interests of communism: this formula from
Brechts didactic play Die Massnahme (The Measures
Taken) is put in the mouth of the young comrade who
is sacrificed for the cause; Die Massnahme, ed. Reiner
Steinweg, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1972,
pp. 823. It alone does not suffice to substantiate Ruth
Fischers interpretation of the play as an ominous an-
ticipation of the Moscow show trials (41618). But it
is against these that the play has meanwhile to be read.
The issue of revolutionary violence is ventilated here
in connection with the execution of a comrade whose
lack of discipline has endangered the other members
of an underground group: Terrible it is to kill./ Not
only others, we are ready to kill ourselves if neces-
sary./ For this deadly world can only be changed by
force [Gewalt]/ As every living man well knows (pp.
8081). From here it is not far to The Destructive Char-
acter. However problematic certain communist motifs
in Brechts and Benjamins writings may appear in
hindsight, they allow us to measure the narrowing of
the horizon within which the question of violence has
meanwhile come to be considered.
 72. GS, IV, 1, p. 398; The Destructive Character, in SW,
vol. 2, p. 542.
73. GB, IV, 24 (letter to Scholem of 17 April 1931);
Correspondence, p. 377.
74. GS, IV, 1, 317; Moscow, in SW, vol. 2, p. 22.
75. Anyone of his generation, writes Benjamin in 1926,
who grasps the historical moment not as mere phra-
seology but as a struggle cannot renounce the study
and practice of the mechanism through which things
(and conditions) interact with the masses (GB, III, p.
159; Correspondence, p. 300). Was it in order to pre-
serve his model of a potentially critical mass that he
gave little emphasis to the conservative, even counter-
revolutionary, mechanisms at work in that struggle?
To that extent Blanquis willed ignorance would also
have been his own.
76. GS, IV, 1, p. 397; The Destructive Character, in SW,
vol. 2, p. 541. Cf. the transvaluation of the Unmensch
and the barbarian in Experience and Poverty and
Karl Kraus, GS, II, 1, pp. 215, 355, 367; SW, vol. 2,
pp. 732, 4478, 4567.
77. In A Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy
of Right.
78. Among the great creators Descartes, Einstein,
Scheerbart, Klee, Brecht, Loos and the Cubists are
named here there have always been the inexorable
ones who began by clearing a tabula rasa. They wanted
a drawing-table; they were constructors (GS, II, 1,
p. 215; Experience and Poverty, in SW, vol. 2, p.
732). As an abstract of these figures, the destructive
character has in turn, like Klees figures, been con-
structed at the drawing-board (ibid.). This whole text
sketches the precise, unrepeatable context in which the
notion of a destructive character could emerge. But
whereas the barbarian artists, engineers and math-
ematicians evoked here clear away spurious cultural
excess or intellectual obstacles, he allegedly clears
away realities.
79. In his Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan
Intent.
80. Cited by Max Weber in Science as a Vocation, in
Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H.H. Gerth and
C.W. Mills, Oxford University Press, New York 1946,
p. 152.
81. GS, II, 1, p. 219; Experience and Poverty, in SW, vol.
2, p. 735.
82. GS, I, 3, p. 1231; Paralipomena to On the Concept
of History, in SW, vol. 4, p. 402.
83. GS, I, 3, p. 1245; SW, vol. 4, p. 407. The saying from
an apocryphal gospel Where I meet someone, there
will I judge him casts a peculiar light on the Last
Judgement. It recalls Kafkas note: The Last Judge-
ment is a kind of martial law [Standrecht] (ibid.).
Like the state of exception in the Eighth Thesis,
martial law is here cited against itself against the
army, the state, the law. What distinguishes martial
from regular law is the summary of its verdicts. Cf. on
the immediacy of divine justice GS, I, pp. 154, 1989;
Critique of Violence, in SW, vol. 1, pp. 24950.
84. Cf. GS, V, 1, pp. 5767 (N2a, 3); Arcades Project, p.
462.
85. GS, IV, 2, p. 999, notes and materials for The Destruc-
tive Character.
86. GS, IV, 1, p. 317; Moscow, in SW, vol. 2, p. 22.
87. GS, IV, 1, p. 9; The Task of the Translator, in SW,
vol. 1, p. 253. Cf. GS, II, 1, p. 144; On Language, in
SW, vol. 1, p. 65.
88. If the destructive character can tell that things cant
go on this way, this is because at their hidden core
(wirklich, im Innersten, Verborgnen) they dont: they
go from one extreme to the other (GS, IV, 2, p. 1001,
notes and materials for The Destructive Character).
He thus has ontology on his side, but a subversive one,
an ontology of extremes at the opposite extreme from
the above-mentioned quasi-ontological structures of
the world and of life. The latter alias the continuum
of homogeneous empty time (GS, I, 2, p. 701; Thesis
XIII, in SW, vol. 4, p. 395), the reality-principle, and
so on ensure that life does go on this way. The first
ontology, which is perhaps the unconscious of the
second, introduces hairline fractures into it fissures
and asperities in the wall of the real that offer foot-
ing to one who would cross over them (GS, V, 1, pp.
5912; Arcades Project, pp. 4734 (N9, 4 and N9a,
5).
89. Cf. Schnes Entsetzen (Fine Terror), GS, IV, 1, pp.
4345. Partially cited as a motto to Part 1 of the present
essay, this piece is not included in the selection from
Denkbilder (Thought Images) in SW, vol. 2.
90. GS, I, 3, p. 1232; Paralipomena to On the Concept of
History, in SW, vol. 4, p. 402.
91. The full quotation reads: My writings are said to be
so difficult. I would have said that all those understand
me who are in need. But where are those who are in
need? (cit. GB, I, p. 161, letter to Carla Seligson of 4
August 1918; Correspondence, p. 50).
92. Ibid., p. 182, letter to Carla Seligson of 17 November
1913; Correspondence, p. 57.
93. Cf. GS, V, 1, pp. 47, 501; The Arcades Project, pp. 4,
397 (K4, 3).
94. That things go on this way is the catastrophe. GS,
I, 2, p. 683; Central Park, in SW, vol. 4, pp. 1845.
95. Cf. GS, I, 2, pp. 6945; On the Concept of History,
in SW, vol. 4, pp. 39091. Meanwhile a complication
of the fronts has taken place. The enemy remains; but
we are in large measure part of him.
96. GS, V, 2, p. 1256.
97. Cf. on ghosts and justice, Jacques Derrida, Specters of
Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and
the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Routledge,
New York, 1994.
98. Having sold their soul to the bourgeoisie, along with
profession and marriage, Benjamin writes in 1915,
students insist on those few years of bourgeois free-
dom. GS, II, 1, p. 85; The Life of Students, in SW,
vol. 1, p. 45.
99. In their book Die Unfhigkeit zu trauern (The Inability
to Mourn; Piper, Munich, 1967), Alexander and Marga-
rete Mitscherlich venture a parallel between the secret
service technique of turning someone around and
the collective process by which, after the collapse of
the Third Reich, love for the Fhrer was transformed
into its opposite. We lack any corresponding psycho-
historical study of the inner permutations undergone by
succeeding generations. Two initial attempts contradict
one another: Wolfgang Leuschner, Kriegskinder und
68 and Gnter Franzen, Nach Auschwitz. Zur Iden-
tittsproblematik der 68er, Psyche, no. 60, issues 4
and 6 respectively.
100. One of the most influential contemporary ex-
communists, varying The Future of an Illusion and
The God that Failed, has diagnosed his former creed
23
 as a religion without a future. Cf. Franois Furet, Le
Pass dune illusion. Essai sur lide communiste au
vingtime sicle, Robert Laffont/Calmann-Lvy, Paris
1995; The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Commu-
nism in the Twentieth Century, University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, 1999.
101. The development toward total integration has
been interrupted, but not halted; it threatens to realize
itself through wars and dictatorships (Dialektik der
Aufklrung, pp. ixx; Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp.
xixii).
102. I have elsewhere discussed a test case: Warum hat
man das Passagenarbeit nicht gelesen?, in Peter Raut-
mann and Nicolas Schalz, eds, An Walter Benjamins
Passagen-weiterschrieben. Ein Bremer Symposium,
Hochschule fr Knste, Projekt, Bremen, 2006.
103. The counter-culture was also a consumer culture, a
scene whose icons included Benjamin as well as
El Che. Cf. Otto Karl Werckmeister, Linke Ikonen
(Icons of the Left), Munich and Vienna 1997. Ben-
jamins cult-value was boosted by his fate as a Jew-
ish Marxist refugee driven to suicide. The academic
study of his work has partially counteracted this cult
of personality. But it too belongs to a market whose
concerns are well insulated against his.
104. Already in 1973 Habermas observed that the academic
treatment of Benjamin offered at best a corrective, but
no real alternative to the conflict of partisan interpre-
tations (Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or
Rescuing Critique, p. 92).
105. GS, 1, 2, p. 698; On the Concept of History, Thesis
X, in SW, vol. 4, p. 391.
106. Cf. on this concept GS, I, 1, p. 357, and GB, II, p. 393;
Correspondence, p. 224.
107. Cf. GS, 111, p. 259; Against a Masterpiece, in SW,
vol. 2, p. 383.
108. GS, I, 3, pp. 1234, 1238; Paralipomena to On the
Concept of History, in SW, vol. 4, p. 404.
109. GB, V, p. 193, letter to Werner Kraft of 28 October
1935; Correspondence, p. 516.
110. GS, II, I, p. 202; Critique of Violence, in SW, vol. 1,
p. 251. Elsewhere Benjamin puts this in secular terms:
all historiography needs to be tested against the notion
of the classless society (GS, I, 3, p. 1245; Notes and
materials for On the Concept of History).
111. GS, 1, 2, p. 697; Thesis I, in SW, vol. 4, p. 392.
112. GS, I, 3, pp. 11645.
113. Cf. GS, I, 2, p. 693; Thesis I, in SW, vol. 4, p. 389;
GS, I, 2, p. 694; Thesis II in SW, vol. 4, p. 390; GS, I,
3, p. 1243 (Notes and materials for On the Concept
of History).
114. Benjamin traces the decay of counsel to the rise of
capitalism. Cf. GS, II, 2, pp. 442 ff.; The Storyteller,
in SW, vol. 3 pp. 145 ff.
115. Yeats, The Second Coming.
116. Ibid.; stress mine.
117. GB, 1, p. 182, letter to Carla Seligson of 17 November
1913; Correspondence, p. 57.
118. GB, V, p. 193, above-cited letter to Kraft; Correspond-
ence, p. 516. The double meaning of the (Welt)gericht
that we are to be served judgement and/or meal
combines biblical affect with ironic play.
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24
Elasticity of demand
Reflections on The Wire
John Kraniauskas
Cant reason with the pusherman
Finance is all that he understands
Curtis Mayfield, Little Child Runnin Wild
David Simon and Edward Burnss TV series The Wire
(HBO, 200208) opens with a killing and builds from
there, over five seasons and sixty hours of television.
What it narrates is the present life of a neoliberal-
ized postindustrial city, from the perspective of the
bloody corners of West Baltimore, USA.1 The Wire
is a continuation of Simon and Burnss earlier series
The Corner (HBO, 2000), a quasi-anthropological
reconstruction of real lives, directed by Charles S.
Dutton. In fact, in many ways it is a combination and
development of two previous TV series: NBCs cop
show Homicide (based on Simons book Homicide:
A Year on the Killing Streets, 1991) and The Corner
(based on Simon and Burns book The Corner: A Year
in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, 1997).2
Corners are where everyday drugs business is carried
out. They are violently fought over and defended as
what remains of the local economy is bled dry and
addiction extends. They are the places, in other words,
where the stories of the invisible hand of the market
and/or originary capital accumulation are played out.
This is the local, street experience of (illegal) capitalist
globalization. It provides the pathetic script for the
character Bubbles, for example drug addict and
police informant which is literally written into his
body. These are places of labour too, including child
labour: the corner boys. Finally, they are places of
intense state scrutiny and surveillance.
The wire that gives the programme its name is a
bugging or wire-tapping device, fundamental to the
narrative structure of each one of The Wires seasons.
It is the main technological means of secret intel-
ligence gathering, sought and deployed by the police to
listen to, identify and decode the telephone messages
circulating between the drug dealers. In this respect,
The Wire presents itself as a police procedural, centred
on the detective work involved in juridically justifying
and then deploying the bugging technology required.
Unlike the police-procedural pedagogic norm, however,
The Wire critically foregrounds technological under-
development and uneven distribution, educating its
viewers into a culture of everyday police bricolage and
ingenuity, very different from the hyperbolic scientific
know-how of CSI and its many imitators.
The activities of pushing and policing in The Wire
mark out a territory that is divided, crisscrossed and
sutured (constituted in antagonism); in other words,
wired. Crime at one end, joined to the law at the other,
it constitutes a whole way of life.3 In this respect a
work of urban anthropology, The Wire nonetheless
turns its corners so as to accumulate characters, stories
and adventures. It expands and opens out onto the
world, charting encounters, much like the novel in
its chivalric, educational and realist historical modes.
Although here it is a TV camera-eye that travels,
explores and frames the city, emplotting its socio-
cultural environments (in particular, their racialized,
gendered and class divisions), activating, in Franco
Morettis words, their narrative potential; which is
to say, their relations of power, their plots.4 But only
so as to return, repeatedly, to illuminate its point of
departure, the streets, and its principal object of attrac-
tion, the everyday experience and effects of the trade
in drugs and its policing. Like other works of detective
and/or crime fiction, The Wire relays and establishes
the political and cultural contours of the contemporary,
at speed. Indeed, in this sense, it fulfils one of the
prime historical functions of the genre. 5
As The Wire voyages out from the low- and high-
rise housing projects whose corners it films, accu-
mulating and weaving together its stories, it accretes
social content as part of its overall moving picture.
This is conceived primarily in terms of a set of over-
lapping institutions and their hierarchized personnel:
the police (both local and federal), the port authority
and trade-union organization (in Season 2), the city
administration, its juridical apparatus and its shifting
political elites (especially from Season 3 onwards), the
Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09) 25
local educational state apparatus (Season 4), and the
local city newspaper (in Season 5). It is important to
note that these are all places of work. Work is a struc-
turing ideologeme of the series, as it was previously
of The Corner with its dealers and more recently
of Simon and Burnss disappointing subsequent series
about US soldiers in Iraq, Generation Kill (2008), with
its grunts.6 They are also sites of political power-play,
concerned, like The Wires auteurs themselves, with
establishing their own standpoint with respect to the
dramas played out and filmed in the streets. Thus The
Wires own TV camera-consciousness produces itself,
as it were, in counterpoint to the multiplicity of insti-
tutional perspectives it reconstructs, taking the side
of the dominated, that is, of the workers portrayed
in each case. The Wires populist images are, to use
Sartres words, act(s) and not thing(s).7
Season after season, over years of programming,
The Wires looping narrative methodology transforms
and enriches its own story and perspective. There is,
however, a tension here that drives its realist compo-
sitional logic and which its long-running television
format invites that is both formal and analytic. The
Wire attempts to resolve the enigmatic character of
the social that grounds the crime and/or detective
fiction form through an accretive looping logic that
incorporates more and more of the social (through its
institutions), but that thereby simultaneously threatens
to overload and diffuse its televisual focus on what
is most compelling: the dramatization of the political
economy of crime as the key to the understanding of
contemporary neoliberal capitalist society (in Bal-
timore) and its policing. Inverting the procedure of
classic police-procedural film The Naked City (Jules
Dassin, 1947), instead of zooming in on one of 8
million stories, the series zooms out, arguably too
far, attempting to show them all. The paradox of The
Wires accumulative compositional strategy and the
epistemological and aesthetic problem it poses is that
the more of the social it reconstructs, shows and incor-
porates into its narrative so as to explain the present,
the less socially explanatory its vision becomes.8
Crime scenes
It is as if The Wire had been produced in response
to questions initially posed by Walter Benjamin in
his A Small History of Photography (1931) regard-
ing the photographic mediation of the experience of
the modern city. Noting how the journalistic and
quasi-cinematic work of photographers like Atget
was increasingly able to capture fleeting and secret
moments that thus demanded explanation (he refers
26
specifically to the emergence of the use of captions
in this regard), Benjamin asks is not every square
inch of our cities the scene of a crime? Every passer-
by a culprit? And further, is it not the task of the
photographer to reveal guilt and to point out the
guilty in his pictures?9 Three-quarters of a century
(of technology) later this is where the first episode of
The Wire begins, with a crime scene in a Baltimore
city street, one of many.
The opening scene of The Wire is both generi-
cally conventional and narratively surprising. It is also
intensely televisual. A crime has taken place, and The
Wire takes us to it immediately, opening directly onto
a bloodstained street in close-up, bathed in the flashing
red and blue lights of police vehicles, and to the sound
of their sirens images familiar to TV viewers from
reality cop shows and local news programmes. But if
The Wire begins TV-like, it soon becomes cinematic:
the camera scans and tracks, revealing the dead body
of a young man. It then pulls back, encircling and
framing the scene (thereby producing it) in which
the key elements of its juridical and cultural coding
that is, the wired (bloody) territory of the series
diagetic space are crystallized: from a dead black
Afro-American young man, the victim of a ridiculous
and arbitrary crime, we pass on to a Afro-American
witness, who tells its story, and then to a white Irish-
American police officer, who listens and chuckles at
its utter banality.10
The streets of The Wires crime scenes thus consti-
tute a central social space of encounter where, to put
it in Althusserian terms, social power is transformed
and normalized by the state apparatus qua machine,
institutionalized as law, and actualized as force.11 The
police are the main agents of this process, of course,
and homicide detective McNulty, the main star of the
show, is at his post asking questions and making his
presence felt. Most importantly, thanks to the invisible
presence of the camera, audiences magically become
privileged viewers of the crime scene too, positioned
alongside the police at work for the local city state, and
given immediate access to look upon and accompany
the process of crime interpretation. So far, so generi-
cally conventional: The Wire is a traditional work of
detective fiction, adopting a critical (that is, a worker-
ist) police perspective that McNulty embodies.
What is narratively surprising about The Wires first
scene, however, is that the crime that opens the series
has no particular significance for it, except in its gen-
erality, and will be neither reconstructed nor emplotted
into its interlocking narratives. The death of the young
man holds no mystery for the police and will not be
interpreted and tracked. (This
is to be expected in this part
of town; it has been socially
and culturally coded that way.)
It does, however, register an
important, although banal, truth
that is significant for the relation
the series establishes between
narrative form and its own
historical material: the excess
of history over form. The Wire
thus signals, on the one hand, its
own partiality and, on the other,
its consequent status as a work
of narrative totalization which
is always already incomplete.
In this sense, the programme
emerges not only from a realist
desire to accumulate social
content, as noted above, but also from a modernist
acknowledgement of its own narrative limits (imposed
by narrative form) and thus not so much as a representa-
tion as an invention. The first killing functions as just
one of a continuous, repetitive series that composition-
ally divides The Wires overarching narratives off from
the history that determines and contextualizes it. It
stands in for all the victims associated with the com-
mercialization of drugs who precede the stories told
across the five seasons, for all those who will follow
them, as well as for the collateral damage, those victims
who accompany the telling of the stories dramatized
in The Wire, episode after episode.
It is possible to identify other such series too,
although these are built into the narratives that make
up The Wire over time, season after season, imposing,
for their appreciation, a discipline on its viewers that
is specifically televisual: they have to stick with it, for
years (or for countless hours of DVD watching). For
example, there is a series of insider witnesses, many
of them doomed by their contact with the police,
especially with McNulty; and a series of wakes for
members of the force who pass away, which ends with
McNultys own symbolic one, when he leaves the pro-
fession at the conclusion of the final, fifth Season. He
will be replaced. So, if one series of killings opens
The Wire, another of deaths brings it to conclu-
sion. McNultys institutional death, meanwhile, finally
reveals The Wires central articulating narrative: from
the beginning, its first crime scene, it tells the story of
McNultys way out, the death of a policeman. McNulty and his colleagues seek to access by wiring
Like detectives, writes John Ellis in Seeing Things:
Television in the Age of Uncertainty, we are rushed to
the scene of the crime hoping to make sense of what
happened from the physical traces that it has left. Ellis
is not describing The Wire here, or a programme like it,
but deploying the conventional hermeneutic of detective
fiction to account for a general effect of contemporary
televisuality which also, it so happens, describes the
TV experience of tuning in to a programme like The
Wire and being rushed to the scene of [a] crime.12
Elliss description of television form connects with
Benjamins account of photography. As is well known,
the revelatory potential of photographic technology,
in which once hidden historical determinations are
brought into the light of day by the camera demand-
ing explanation, underpins Benjamins notion of the
optical unconscious. In this way, the cameras ability
to capture reality in photographs is associated with a
modern hermeneutic one that Carlo Ginzburg links
to art criticism (the discovery of forgeries), psycho-
analysis (listening out for signs of the unconscious)
and detection (revealing criminal intent) in which
captured scenes may be read as symptoms of some-
thing else (a criminal capitalist economy, for example)
and thus demand close scrutiny and interpretation.13
Such technological developments are deployed and
advanced by the state too, in surveillance operations,
like those portrayed in The Wire.
These involve not only new visual technology, but
devices geared specifically for sound. For it turns out
that there is also a sonic unconscious, made avail-
able for scrutiny today by mobile phones. This is what
and grabbing the messages exchanged between corner
boys and drug dealers. Ellis, meanwhile, is interested
27
in camera work, but more than just with its recording
function: combining aspects of both the cinema and
radio, with television the camera has become a broad-
casting and transmitting device too. In the words of
Rudolf Arnheim, television turns out to be related to
the motor car and the aeroplane as a means of transport
of the mind.14 This is how we are rushed to other crime that is shown and witnessed, but because in a
places, such as West Baltimores corners, or how other
places are tele-transported to viewers, as scenes, as they
relax in living rooms and bedrooms. Television, in other
words, appears to overcome both the distance between
its subjects and objects and their different times, making
them co-present in viewing; and not just mentally, as
Arnheim suggests, but sensually too sounds and
images tugging at the body through
eyes and ears. Ellis refers to the new
social form of looking produced by
contemporary television as witness-
ing, and to television form itself as a
kind of dramatic working through
of the materials thus broadcast in
an era of information overload: they
are managed and formatted into
genres (from the news, to sports
programmes and soaps), dramatized
and put into narrative, serialized and
scheduled.15 Again, Ellis might also
have been describing The Wire and
its first scene, whose last shot is a
close-up of the dead victim, his blank
wide-open eyes staring out from the
TV screen at the tele-transported
viewers; and in the background, the witness and the
detective, working through.
There is another crime scene in the first season of
The Wire that is destined no doubt to become a classic
of its type. In contrast to the first scene, however, this
one, although approaching abstraction in its sparseness,
is full of significance for the articulation and unravel-
ling of its narratives and dramas. It involves McNulty
and his partner Bunk, and a disenchanted middle-level
drugs dealer DAngelo Barksdale (known as D), the a constellation of mutually dependent segments with
nephew of West Baltimore kingpin Avon Barksdale.
The latter is the prime target of McNulty and his
associates police investigation, the object of the wire,
and remains so across three of The Wires five seasons.
Despite all the surveillance, however, information- and
evidence-gathering is difficult, since Barksdale and his
crew are deadly, ruthlessly shoring up any possible
weakness or leakage in their organization. Like so
many subaltern outlaw groups, the Barksdale crew
have internalized and replicated state-like repressive
28
structures that are ferociously hierarchical, and, within
their own terms, strategically meritocratic.
Even before McNulty and Bunk arrive at the murder
scene, viewers know that DAngelo has killed one of
Avons girlfriends (who had threatened to give him
away and talk). We know this not because it is a
previous scene he tells the corner boys he organizes.
As noted above, The Wire is made up of a number
of proliferating narratives, and moves between and
through them transversally. As it jumps from scene
to scene, it travels between different characters, the
social spheres they inhabit and work in (institutions),
as well as their locations (streets, offices). Thus all nar-
ratives are interrupted and crossed by others, looping
back and forth, such that at and through each level
episode, season and series The Wire resembles a
collage or a montage of segments. This is the relation
established between the scene of Ds confession and
the scene in which McNulty and Bunk reconstruct his
crime. However, what happens before, at the level of
narrative emplotment, happens simultaneously at the
level of its story. These scenes, like others, are part of
a shared temporality, but distributed across different
spaces. This means that viewers know D is guilty
before McNulty and Bunk do, but they then in their
decoding of the crime scene work it out and catch
up, such that by its conclusion characters and viewers
become co-present again at the level of knowledge as
well as that of action. But if The Wires polydiegetic
and segmentary character may be described as either
novelistic or cinematic, its televisual character should
not for that reason be ignored.
 Indeed, it has been suggested that the segmentary
quality of the television moving image is definitive
of its form: originally anchored in domesticity, dis-
traction, and the predominance of the glance over
the cinematic gaze. Interrupted viewing (by adverts,
for example) is constitutively inscribed into both the
medium and television form itself, most obviously in
news programmes and soaps. Being an HBO produc-
tion, however, whose broadcasting is advert-free, The
Wire is able both to put such segmentarity to use as a
compositional strategy and simultaneously to subvert
the temporality of its viewing. This is because, for
the most part, its compositional segmentarity works
to extend the action and narrative continuity beyond
the fixed temporality of the episode, undermining the
latters semi-autonomy within the series (as main-
tained even by The Sopranos), slowing down and
spreading the action and stories it portrays beyond
episodic television time (and its scheduling), giving
the impression, at times, that nothing happens. At
this level, The Wire de-dramatizes the serial form from
within. This experience of slowness which contrasts about McNultys and Bunks own addictive relationship
markedly, for example, with the hectic deployment of
segmented scenes in 2416 may be one of the reasons
why The Wire has attracted so few viewers on tele-
vision, although it is a growing success on DVD and
on demand platforms.
This other crime scene may be only a short segment,
but its significance flows through Season 1 and into
Season 2.17 It knots their narratives. This is underlined
by the inclusion of another brief segment within this
constellation of scenes in which Lester McNultys
partner on the wire detail identifies a phone number
he has picked up off the wall at another crime scene
(where the romantic character Omar Little, a kind of
urban cowboy, has stolen one of Avons stashes), which
he identifies as linked to a corner phone used by D
at work.18 Through composition and editing, all of
these discrete segments feed the central narrative: they
become part of the story in which, first, the wiretap is
justified and put to use and, second, D is persuaded
to give up his uncle-boss Avon (and is then murdered
in jail).
The scene is a kitchen in a house that has been
stripped bare and wiped clean. It has become a white
box. And in such a space, the detectives reconstruction
of the crime is almost a work of performance art. Bereft
of forensic technology, they use their bodies, their pens
and a tape measure like bricoleurs to re-imagine the
crime, the trajectory of the bullet, the position of the
shooter (D) as he taps the window (tap, tap, tap, resources (and finally the goodwill of the mayor). It is
as D has already described it) and shoots the young
naked woman as she turns to see who is there. This
is the work of the imagination, and in its eccentric
performance both Conan Doyles Sherlock Holmes and
Poes Dupin are parodically evoked. Most important
for this reconstruction, however, are the photographs of
the barely clothed dead victim that McNulty and Bunk
scrutinize for clues and place about the room so as to
visualize the event for this work of detection is also
the work of fantasy. McNulty and Bunk perform the
scopic drive. Whilst scrutinizing they only enunciate
one word and its derivatives fuck! over and over
again as they realize how the murder was committed,
reaching a climax of discovery fucking A! as they
find the spent bullet in the fridge door and its casing
in the garden outside. It is as if the discovery were a
restaging of the primal (crime) scene.
Fucking and detection intertwine. In a sense, this
is just an extension of the sexualized homosociality
that characterizes the office of the homicide division
of the Baltimore Police Department run by Sgt Lands-
man, its principal promoter. But it also says something
to their work: they do not spend time together drink-
ing so as to forget and obliterate their experiences as
police; on the contrary, they do so to maintain and
extend it, and in fact to obliterate everything else, the
rest of their private, non-police lives.
Adam Smith in Baltimore
The main conflict within the police institution in The
Wire is between its upper bureaucratic echelons with
more or less direct access to the political elites (associ-
ated with city hall) and the working detectives from
the homicide (McNulty) and narcotics (Kima Greggs,
Herc Hauk and Ellis Carter) divisions, joined to form
a special detail in the pursuit, first, of Avon Barksdale
(Seasons 13) and, then, of his successor Marlo Stan-
field (Seasons 35).19 Under the command of Cedric
Daniels, they are joined by a variety of marginalized
officers such as Lester and Prez. The brass imposes
targets and, therefore, arrests. In Lesters version, they
follow the drugs and arrest low-level drug dealers and
addicts. Keeping minor criminals off the streets helps
the mayor. For their part, the detectives who care
(such as McNulty, Lester, Kima and Daniels) want to
build cases against the kingpins inside and outside
the state, and follow the money, exposing economic
and political corruption. In this context, the strug-
gle to justify the wiretap legally becomes a political
one, requiring legal justification and the allocation of
hindered at every turn.
29

However, The Wires principal interest lies in the
way in which the conflicts inside the state apparatus
are mirrored across the wire within the criminal,
drug-dealing community it portrays and its political
economy. This includes not only the influence of the
police on the illegal, subalternized capitalist economy,
but also the ways in which the latter, through bribery,
loans and money-laundering underwrites upper ech-
elons of the local state and economy through the
circulation of its accumulated wealth at which point
it becomes finance capital.20 The intra-crime conflict
presents itself on the ground as a struggle between
fractions for territory and corners (between the East
and West Sides of Baltimore) and takes three main
forms, each of which is associated with a particular
economic logic and specific characters: Proposition
Joe, Avon Barksdale and Marlo Stanfield, and Omar
Little, respectively.
The first form involves an attempt to overcome
the struggle between competitors. In this context, the
character of Proposition Joe (who comes increasingly
to the fore in Seasons 4 and 5) is important since he
represents a tendency towards the formation of a kind
of Baltimore cartel, a co-operative of dealers, which
can manage quality, prices and security. For some,
however, this delegation of business administration
undermines the pursuit of self-interest, self-reliance
and, thereby, control. Avon and Marlo, who represent
a second street-level, competitive form of the drugs
business, are suspicious of Proposition Joes corporate,
conference-room style (he is finally assassinated by
Marlos henchmen towards the end of the series),
preferring instead to impose their own more neoliberal
economy. The third form is a romantic version of the
second, and is represented by Omar, the transgressive
outlaws outlaw (McNultys criminal mirror-image
and sometime ally). Taking advantage of the mis-
30
trust generated between the corporate and competitive
styles, Omar uses guerrilla tactics to trick and rob all
the local kingpins. On the one hand, Omar becomes
a local myth in his own (albeit brief) lifetime; on
the other, he violently debunks the myth of original
accumulation.21
The tension between these regimes of accumulation
is what drives the segmented narratives of The Wire
as they loop across and through each other. The nar-
rative loops connecting the different scenes may thus
also be thought of as narrative cycles: from the cycle
of capital accumulation as it passes through commod-
ity exchange, which takes place on the streets (or in
prison), to the cycles of finance and capital investment,
which take place mainly in offices, restaurants or
luxury yachts. This is why the policing that McNulty
and Lester struggle against represents a racist dis
avowal on the part of the state. The imposition of a
policy based on targets and the pursuit of street crime
(that is, of corner boys and drug addicts), which ignores
the circulation of money capital, involves, in the first
place, the fabrication of the otherness of the criminal
other (a racist production of difference) and, second,
the deployment of the resources to insist on it. The
flow of money, however, tells us that the supposed
other is in fact constitutive of the state in the first
place. This is why drugs money is laundered.22 Lester
and McNulty pursue the money so much so that,
in the end, they almost break the law23 to reveal
its origins and, particularly, its ends. In other words,
they are involved in a radical act. Taking the side of
the working detective within the police institution,
from scene to scene and location to location, The Wire
follows the money too.
Nevertheless, the narrative pursuit of money through
the cycle (or loop) of accumulation from the streets
into finance only goes so far, and this narrative limit
constitutes the generic limit of The Wire as a work of
crime fiction. Crucial, here, is another important char-
acter in the series, Stringer Bell, the key to McNulty
and his colleagues surveillance operation, via D.
He is murdered at the end of Season 3 by Omar and
Brother Mouzone (a hitman from New York) with the
tacit agreement of Avon Barksdale.
Stringer Bell is Avons second in command, the
manager of the business (he counts the money), a
close associate and friend (he advises him to have D
killed) indeed, he is the brains of the outfit (much
like Lester is for the wiretap detail). Avon is a more
charismatic leader with a keen sense for the uses of
violence as a strategy of power and drugs commerce.
Inside the partnership Barksdale and Bell (Stringer
eventually dies under a sign for B&B enterprises)
there coexist in increasing conflict two of the above
logics of accumulation, associated with commodity
exchange, on the one hand, and corporate finance
and investment, on the other. The Wire traces this
conflict, and Stringers attempts to consolidate the
co-operative with a reluctant Avon, following him
right into the offices of Baltimores luxury-apartment
redevelopment projects in which he invests (with the
help of Senator Clay Davis, among others). Until he
is shot, when Avon decides against the world of finance
capital. The Wire follows suit, abandoning the compo-
sitional strategy of looping in and between accumula-
tion cycles linking the office scenes of finance with
commodity exchange on the streets. Instead, it returns
to foreground the battle for corners and corner-boy
allegiances in the streets, where accumulation begins,
and where The Wires story over Season 1 to 3 is
replayed across Seasons 4 and 5 this time between
different crews and kingpins: Proposition Joe and his
nemesis Marlo Stanfield.
The significance of Stringer Bells story as a limit
for both the narrative of The Wire as a whole and its
narration is given in a brief scene again starring
McNulty and Bunk at the beginning of the last
episode of Season 3. It repeats the conflict of accumu-
lation regimes, as a problem of police interpretation.
Stringer has just been killed and the detectives find
an address they did not know about in his wallet.
They go there and are uncharacteristically stunned
into silence by what they (do not) find. They wander
into Stringers open-plan designer apartment, and just
stare, as if it had become stuck in their eyes (it refuses
to open up and become an object for them). This is
Stringer? asks (states) McNulty; Yeh!, replies Bunk.
Their scopic prowess has clearly reached its limits: the
more they scan the apartment, the more unreadable
it becomes. Bunk stands in the middle of the living
room as if there were nothing to be decoded, no clues,
none of those traces on which his and McNultys
subjectivization as detectives depends. McNulty and
Bunk have reached the limits of their considerable
interpretative powers and find no pleasure no crime
in the scene. This is because Stringer has laundered
his lifestyle and wiped his apartment clean, so that it
would seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with
crime that is, the drugs business, the
murder that he administers, the vio-
lence of the exchange of commodities
he coordinates, nor with the culture
associated with it. McNulty goes over
to a bookshelf and looks at the books.
He takes one down and glances at
it and asks: Who the fuck was I
chasing? (as if to the viewers, since
they know more than he) and puts the
book down again. At which point the
frustrated detectives turn and leave.
The scene is never mentioned again,
never returned to and looped into
the narrative. However, just as they
turn away, the camera detaches itself
from their perspective and becomes
momentarily autonomous this is The
Wires TV camera consciousness at work again to
concentrate the viewers gaze momentarily on the title
of the book McNulty has discarded. It is Adam Smiths
The Wealth of Nations.
The detectives dont pick up on Stringers particular
knowledge, even though McNulty had previously fol-
lowed him to a college where he studies Business
Administration, specifically the idea of elasticity of
demand. It is clear in class that Stringers practical
31
knowledge of the market in heroin has given him a
head start on his peers since he already appreciates,
as he tells the teacher, the importance of the creation
of consumer demand, of feeding desire, so as to sell
more and more commodities of a particular type. This
feeding of consumer desire has its correlate in Stringer,
an addict too, since the elasticity of demand also feeds
his own desire: to accumulate.
Giovanni Arrighi teaches at Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity in Baltimore, although it is by no means certain
that Stringer Bell attended his lectures. We might
speculate, however, about what might have been the
result if, like The Wire, rather than looking to China in
his recent study of the contemporary world economy,
Arrighi had turned instead to the wired territory of
the local drugs trade, at Adam Smith in Baltimore,
rather then Adam Smith in China (2007 reviewed in
RP 150) a book probably composed over the same
period as The Wire.
In his discussion of Smiths account of the role of
commodity exchange and competition in capitalist
development, given in the formula CMC in which
commodities are exchanged for money in order to
purchase commodities of greater utility (hardly what
is going on in the territories The Wire maps) he
counterposes to it Marxs general formula of capital,
MCM, in which for capitalist investors the purchase
of commodities is strictly instrumental to an increase
in the monetary value of their assets from M to M.
The formula MCM describes Avon Barksdales
mercantilist street economy of commodity exchange,
its accumulative logic (backed up by extreme violence).
But if Avons activities are MCM, Stringers are
MM. As Arrighi notes, in certain circumstances,
the transformation of money into commodities may
be skipped altogether (as in Marxs abridged formula
of capital, MM). In his previous work, The Long
Twentieth Century (1994), Arrighi fleshed out this
point further: if
[i]n phases of material expansion money capital
sets in motion an increasing mass of commodities
[for example, drugs] in phases of financial expan-
sion an increasing mass of money capital sets itself
free from its commodity form, and accumulation
proceeds through financial deals. Together, the
two epochs or phases constitute a full systemic
cycle of accumulation (MCM).24
Stringers financial deals and abridgement of the
MCM formula to MM threatens either to break
away from the cycle of the commodity exchange of
drugs and set him free leaving his friend and
32
partner Avon behind, or to subordinate them both to
its logic.
One of the most important contributions The Wire
makes to crime fiction is the detail with which it
dramatizes, on the one hand, the procedures and limits
of detection and, on the other, crime as a complex prac-
tice which it conceives formally and compositionally,
through its narrative loops and cycles of accumulation
(which constitutes in turn the TV series polydiegetic,
segmented architecture), not as crime against capital-
ism, but as crime that is thoroughly capitalized (a
neoliberal utopia, in fact). The Wire uses the crime
and detective fiction genre classically, but creatively,
to unpack and unravel Marxs formulae for capital
accumulation. The abridged formula MM provides
the clue to Stringer Bells tendency towards freeing
capital from its commodity basis in drugs (and thus
to his conflict with Avon), as well as for reading the
unreadability of his abstract, apparently contentless
existence in his designer apartment it is, or pretends
to be, pure money. Such unreadability constitutes a
limit for The Wire too; however, a limit beyond which
it cannot go. So it also returns to the streets, to Avon
and Marlo, the corner boys, to MCM.
Repetition and reproduction
The context of the return to the mercantile accumula-
tion of the corners, and to Stringers story, is told in
Season 2, which focuses on the plight of the harbour
workers union, whose members struggle to survive
in a deindustrialized port in the process of being
redeveloped for tourism and luxury homes (part of
Stringers investment portfolio). They still refer to
themselves as stevedores. The union turns a blind
eye (for money) to the illegal importation of goods,
including sex workers, by a Greek mafia-like outfit.
In The Wire deindustrialization feeds and drives the
criminalization of the economic system. Indeed, it is
the dominant form taken by the informal economy. 25
McNulty and the police become involved because a
container-load of sex workers are murdered.
The main story centres on the trade-union leader
Frank Sobotka, his reaction to the murder as he turns
against the Greek, as well as on his unhinged son
Ziggy and his nephew Nick, who, increasingly des-
perate for work and money, also get involved with
the Greek and his gang stealing container trucks
of goods to sell on. Its principal object is to reflect
on the idea of workers who have lost their work, as
industry disappears. It is the dramatic background for
The Wires own workerist sentiments (which pervade
each of its seasons and each of the social institutions
it represents), providing it with its critical standpoint
throughout. In this respect, the harbour like the
corners, the police, the schools and the local newspaper
is also subject to the abridging effects of the MM its freedom which takes the form of time, the time
formula of capital. More specifically, abridgement here
means the loss of industry, for the formula MCM
does not only refer to the buying and selling of retail
goods, but to another cycle of accumulation, that of
industrial capital in which money is invested in
special kinds of commodities (forces of production,
including labour-power) that make other commodities,
which can be sold for a profit. This is what has been
lost, including in the form of its negation: the organiza-
tions of the working class. As Sobotka, Gus Haynes
(the city editor of the Baltimore Sun) and McNulty
complain, proper work in which, as Sobotka says
you make something has disappeared. This loss
of good work is melancholically performed, daily, in
the local bar at the port, where generations of workers
meet to regenerate, and attempt to make good, an
increasingly sentimental and nostalgic sense of com-
munity. (One question is the degree to which such
workerism feeds The Wires sense of radicalism.)
However, all of their activities are financed by crime.
Needless to say, the mysterious Greek connection has
Sobotka killed.
In Prologue to Televison Adorno characteristically
sets out the authoritarian and regressive character of
television as it plugs [t]he gap between private exist-
ence and the culture industry, which had remained as
long as the latter did not dominate all dimensions of the
visible. With its new, digitized and mobilized delivery
platforms, televisuality in a post-television age keeps
on plugging. The Wire, for example, although televisual
at the level of production, is almost re-novelized by its
consumption in DVD format: episode after episode
may be viewed outside the TV schedules, on demand.
Indeed, there is a sense in which it has reflexively
incorporated this aspect into its composition. Despite
his well-known cultural pessimism, Adorno did evoke
future emancipatory possibilities, even for television
(without them, critique would be pointless). He con-
cludes his essay:
In order for television to keep the promise still
resonating within the word [tele-vision], it must
emancipate itself from everything with which it
reckless wish-fulfillment refutes its own prin-
ciple and betrays the idea of Good Fortune for the
smaller fortunes of the department store.26
The dependent and autonomous aspects of each
artwork cannot be thought of as mutually exclusive, nor
be simply read off from their social inscriptions, but
need to be established through critical interpretation.
The Wires dependency on HBOs fortune can be con-
ceived as providing one of the material conditions for
for Simon and Burns to pursue its realist compositional
logic.27
Returning to the corners and their economy, in
Season 4 a school is added to The Wires expanding
world, as are the life and times of a number of potential
corner boys. The business in drugs has been taken over
by Marlo with extreme violence and the dead bodies
of countless competitors hidden in the abandoned
houses of the area (now, in the childrens minds, an
eerie cemetery haunted by ghosts and zombies: typical
of zones of continuous primitive accumulation in
the Americas) by the scary killers Chris and Snoop.
At the level of crime, Season 4 repeats the conflict
between logics of accumulation, but refuses to return to
the unreadable sphere of finance capital. At one level,
Seasons 4 and 5 may thus be experienced as mere
repetition. At another, however, the moving story of
the corner boys, suggests that the addition of another
institution has a strategic intention: systematicity. It
shows the social reproduction of the logic of criminal
accumulation. Its portrayal of the education system
demonstrates the complete failure of hegemony, as a
reproductive power of the state. Overall, the dangers
of naturalistic containment notwithstanding, The Wire
shows the constitutive, systematic and reproductive
power of MCM in both its unabridged and abridged
forms.
Notes
1. There are few temporal markers of exactly when the
action depicted in The Wire takes place, but it seems
to begin some time in 2000 or 2001. This suggests an
intention to understand and film the present, over several
years, more or less as it happens.
2. David Simon, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets,
Holt Paperbacks, New York, 2006; David Simon and
Edward Burns, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an
Inner-City Neighborhood, Broadway Books, New York,
1998.
3. As described by the luckless Gary McCullough in The
Corner: Theres a corner everywhere The corner
dominates I was loyal to the corner it dont care
where you come from its big enough to take us all.
Addictions of all kinds are, of course, fundamental to
such a culture.
4. Franco Moretti, The Novel: History and Theory, New
Left Review 52, JulyAugust, 2008, p. 115.
5. Michael Connollys recent series of thrillers starring his
LAPD detective Hieronymous Bosch, is another exam-
ple of this relaying: from post-Rodney King cultural
sensitivity to Homeland Security.
6. Responding to the question Is this how true warriors
33
 feel?, the resentful Sergeant Brad Iceman Colbert of
Generation Kill is very specific: Dont fool yourself.
We arent being warriors down here. Theyre just using
us as machine operators. Semi-skilled labour. Both
the soldiers in Generation Kill and the cops in The
Wire make do that is, proceed with out-of-date
technology.
7. Jean Paul Sartre, LImagination (1936), PUF, Paris,
1981, p. 162.
8. In contrast, Generation Kill has the inverse problem:
refusing to loop its narrative through other spheres, it
remains fixated on the field of military operations.
9. Walter Benjamin, A Small History of Photography, in
One-Way Street and Other Writings, New Left Books,
London, 1979, p. 256. Benjamin also notes that with such
developments photography turns all lifes relationships
into literature. Before working on TV programmes,
David Simon was a journalist for the Baltimore Sun,
whilst Edward Burns was a police officer and subse-
quently a schoolteacher (like the character Prez in the
series).
10. The dead kid had been given the unfortunate nickname
Snot Boogie. Every Friday he attempted to snatch
and run with the proceeds from a local craps game. He
was regularly caught and beaten up, almost as if in a
ritual. This time, however, he was shot dead. Puzzled,
McNulty asks the young witness, Why did you let him
play? Got to, he answers, its America man!
11. Louis Althusser, Marx in His Limits, in Philosophy of
the Encounter: Late Writings, 19781987, ed. Franois
Matheron and Oliver Corpet, trans. G.M. Goshgarian,
Verso, London and New York, 2006, pp. 95126.
12. John Ellis, Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Un-
certainty, I.B. Tauris, New York and London, 2002,
p.10.
13. See Carlo Ginzburg, Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Hol-
mes: Clues and Scientific Method, History Workshop
Journal 9, 1980, pp. 536. Ginzburg refers to the emer-
gence of a medical semiotics.
14. Quoted in Margaret Morse, An Ontology of Everyday
Distraction: The Freeway, the Mall and Television, in
Patricia Mellencamp, ed., Logics of Television: Essays in
Cultural Criticism, Indiana University Press, Blooming-
ton and Indianapolis, and BFI, London, 1990, p. 193.
15. In Seeing Things, Ellis gives a periodization of tele-
visual eras: a first era of scarcity that lasted until the
late 1970s (characterized by few channels broadcasting
for part of the day only); a second era of availability
that lasted approximately until the end of the 1990s
(characterized by managed choice across a variety of
channels including satellite twenty-four hours a day);
and a contemporary third era of plenty (characterized
by television on demand and interactive platforms).
16. 24s impression of speed is further enhanced by the use
of the split screen. See Michael Allen, Divided Inter-
ests: Split-Screen Aesthetics in 24, in Steven Peacock,
ed., Reading 24: TV Against the Clock, I.B. Tauris, Lon-
don and New York, 2007.
17. For a discussion of the relation between segment and
flow in television, a staple of Television Studies, see
in particular Raymond Williams, Television: Technology
and Cultural Form, Fontana/Collins, London, 1974;
John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video,
Routledge, London and New York, 1992; Richard Dienst,
Still Life in Real Time: Theory after Television, Duke
University Press, Durham NC and London, 1994. For an
34
approach that links the discussion to recent technologi-
cal developments, see William Uricchio, Televisions
Next Generation: Technology/Interface Culture/Flow,
in Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson, eds, Television after
TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, Duke University
Press, Durham NC and London, 2004, pp. 16382. In
Is Television Studies History?, Cinema Journal, vol.
47, no. 3, Spring, 2008, pp. 12737, Charlotte Brunsdon
notes a masculinizing shift in television discourse, away
from feminized melodrama and its inscription into the
living room, to masculinized quality cop shows, like The
Wire and, especially, The Sopranos, and their inscrip-
tion into redesigned living spaces (and TVs) organized
around a variety of new delivery systems.
18. McNulty and Lesters partnership is Kantian: without
Lester, McNultys intuition is blind; without McNulty,
Lesters reason is empty.
19. For example, in Season 2 Major Valchek pressurizes
Commissioner Burrell to reform the detail that pursued
Barksdale in order to investigate Frank Sobotka, the
leader of the stevedores union out of religious jealousy
and thus pave the way for the eventual institutional
rise of Daniels. In this context Danielss own shady past
dealings are hinted at.
20. Such entry into the sphere of the local ruling class is
also mediated by lawyers, particularly Maurice Maury
Levy, who acts for and counsels the crime bosses (Avon
and then Marlo).
21. Omar is a transgressive character in a variety of ways
most annoyingly for the gangsters he robs in terms of
his sexuality (a key theme for many of the back stories
in The Wire).
22. In this sense, the territory of The Wire may be read from
the perspective provided by Homi Bhabhas account
of racism in his The Location of Culture, Routledge,
London and New York, 1994.
23. Much to the annoyance of Bunk and Kima, McNulty
and Lester transform dead bodies into the victims of a
serial killer so as to generate funds to pursue their by-
now private investigation of Stansfield.
24. See Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages
of the Twenty-First Century, Verso, London and New
York, 2007, p. 75; and The Long Twentieth Century:
Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times, Verso,
London and New York, 1994, p. 6.
25. See David Harvey (a critic who has lived in Baltimore
City for most of [his] adult life and also taught at Johns
Hopkins University), The Spaces of Utopia, in Spaces
of Hope, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2000,
pp. 13381: Manufacturing jobs accelerated their move-
ment out (mainly southwards and overseas) during the
first severe post-war recession in 19735 and have not
stopped since Shipbuilding, for example, has all-but
disappeared and the industries that stayed have down-
sized (p. 148). If Season 2 stands out in the series, lo-
cationally, this is because of the territorial significance of
the phases of accumulation foregrounded by Arrighi. As
Harvey makes clear, the predominance of the abridged
formula of finance capital represented by Stringer chang-
es the urban and social geography of Baltimore.
26 Theodor W. Adorno, Prologue to Television, in Critical
Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W.
Pickford, Columbia University Press, New York, 1998,
pp. 4950, p. 57.
27 In its autonomy The Wire also contributes to brand
HBO, a subsidiary of TimeWarner.
interview Rem Koolhaas and Reinier de Graaf

R
em Koolhaas is perhaps the most feted and influential figure in architecture
today, as well as one of the most original contemporary theorists of its changing
relations to urban and socio-economic forms. Co-founder in 1975 of the Office
for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), he is also Professor in Practice of Architecture and
Urban Design at Harvard University.
Starting in the late 1970s OMA established its international reputation through a series of
competition entries, after which it was able to realize a number of built projects, including
the Kunsthal, Rotterdam (1992). In 1994 it completed its most ambitious project up to that
date: the master plan for Euralille in France, a 70-hectare civic and business centre com-
prising the central node for Europes high-speed railway network, described by Koolhaas
himself as the basis for a new form of virtual metropolis spread in an irregular manner
which connects together some 70 million people. Since the turn of the millennium OMAs
practice has dramatically expanded, both in terms of its number of commissions and in
its geographical scope, opening further offices in New York and Beijing. Among its many
celebrated projects have been the IIT Campus Centre in Chicago (2003), the Seattle Public
Library (2004), the Casa da Musica in Porto (2005), and stores for the fashion designer
Prada in New York and Los Angeles. Today, the practice is hectically active in almost all
parts of the globe, with current projects including controversial (and heavily criticized) work
in China most famously, the iconic CCTV Building in Beijing and a host of buildings
and master plans in Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Koolhaas is, however, at least as well known for his writings as for his buildings.
Originally schooled in the 1960s as a screenwriter and journalist, he has become arguably
the most important and widely read architectural writerpractitioner since Le Corbusier.
Following on from formative studies of Soviet Constructivism and the Berlin Wall,
Koolhaass breakthrough text was the 1978 Delirious New York. Subtitled A Retroactive
Manifesto for Manhattan, the book, written while Koolhaas was a visiting scholar at the
Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, proposed a provocative rereading of modern
architecture and urbanism, which set a celebratory account of the surrealistic culture of
congestion to be found in New World Manhattanism against the puritan uptightness and
classicism of Le Corbusiers European Modernism. It was followed in 1995 by the 1,000-
plus-page S,M,L,XL, co-designed with Bruce Mau, which both summarized the work of
OMA up to that point and collected together a number of important shorter texts. These
included pivotal pieces on the Typical Plan (1993), Bigness (1994) and The Generic
City (1994), all of which pursued a strikingly novel, and often slyly ironic, conception
of architecture as that form of cultural production compelled, within twentieth-century
modernity, to relate to the forces of the Groszstadt [metropolis] like a surfer to the waves.
As much concerned with the dislocations of modern capital as conventional architectural
issues of form and space, Koolhaass writings of the 1990s counterposed the metropolis as
an endlessly productive system of fragments to the meanness of architecture as discrete
aesthetic object. At the same time, such texts served to distance Koolhaass intellectual
concerns from the often more abstruse interest in philosophical work, particularly Derrida,
dominant among many of his architect-theorist contemporaries. And while the likes
of Fredric Jameson effectively tried to claim him in the 1980s for some emergent new
postmodernist aesthetic, Koolhaas himself always resisted such identifications. Indeed he
has consistently, and vigorously, promoted his allegiance precisely to the modern, if not
to architectural modernism as a movement as it was completely stripped from its social
programme and to the need to align [with] and find an articulation for what he affirms
as the forces of modernization.

Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09) 35

 In the texts bearing his name since the late 1990s, Koolhaas has tended to take on more
of an editorial or curatorial role. Although collections like Content (2004), printed in garish
magazine form by the German art publisher Taschen, also include key sole-authored texts
most notably the essay Junkspace they are most distinctive for the breadth of intel-
lectual interest exhibited in the writers and texts that they bring together, which escape all
disciplinary categories, as Jameson has put it, and extend from sociologists and geogra-
phers to post-conceptual artists and philosophers of science. This transdisciplinary scope
is apparent, too, in the series of studies that Koolhaas oversaw at Harvard during the late
1990s and early 2000s, under the general title of The Project on the City, which sought
to document the combined effects of the market economy and globalization on the archi-
tectural discipline. These included volumes on the architecture and sociology of shopping,
the unprecedented urbanization of the Pearl River Delta in China, and, most notoriously,
the African metropolis of Lagos, in the organized chaos of
which Koolhaas provocatively found the future of the modern
city: a developed, extreme, paradigmatic case-study of a city
at the forefront of globalizing modernity. Such works continue
to promote Koolhaass often violently expressed opposition
towards what he has called architectures fundamental moral-
ism about the contemporary, as well as his principled scepti-
cism towards the possibility of any directly critical architectural
practice. If this has served to associate him, latterly, with the
politically complacent, and ultimately formalist, arguments of
so-called post-critical thinkers in the North American archi-
tectural academy, in fact at the heart of Koolhaass work has
always been a profound concern with the relationship between
architectural and social form. It is in this sense that he has
written of a desire for architecture to regain its instrumentality
as a vehicle of modernization, and which, in part, no doubt
explains his interest for a number of contemporary thinkers
within the Marxist tradition such as Jameson and Antonio
Negri, whose short 2007 presentation on Koolhaass concep-
tion of the contemporary condition of the metropolis we publish
in English for the first time below.
In 1999, Koolhaas established AMO as a separate research
and design studio, dedicated to the virtual, and running along-
side the conventional architectural practice in Rotterdam. Since
2002 its director has been Reinier de Graaf. As a somewhat
unique think tank, AMO has worked commercially for the likes of Volkswagen, Heineken
and IKEA, as well as Prada. While such work certainly risks complicity with what Okwui
Enwezor describes as the transformation of research into a commodity in the global culture
of multinational consultancy, AMOs most interesting projects have been those which have
seemed best to realize Koolhaass and de Graafs conception of of architectural knowledge
as inherently implying a web of umbilical cords to other disciplines. This is apparent
in, for example, the study of the new forms and economics of global museum design, the
Hollocore project on Europes new urbanity, and the novel text-and-image pieces on global
capitalism and rampant modernization that are the Y$ Regime and ongoing AMO Atlas
Worldwide. To date, the most ambitious of these projects has been The Image of Europe,
a research study, overseen by de Graaf, which resulted in exhibitions, staged in Brussels,
Munich and Vienna, consisting of two enormous panoramic murals documenting the history
of Europes representations and iconography. In such projects, as Koolhaas has mused else-
where, Maybe architecture doesnt have to be stupid after all. Liberated from the obligation
to construct, it can become a way of thinking about anything.
DC

36
Propaganda
architecture
Radical Philosophy Lets begin with the question of why you decided to start AMO.
What was the thinking behind the formation of a separate research unit within the main
architectural practice? What has it allowed you to do that OMA didnt?

Rem Koolhaas The driving force behind both OMA and AMO is curiosity. There has
always been a journalistic dimension that underpins all of my work. Architecture has severe
limitations, and, first of all, AMO simply provided us with a new way of looking at the
world. In this way we try to create context and to extract new insights from it.
The second thing is that we realized that there has always been something very problem-
atic about the architectural profession in terms of the degree to which you are able to define
your own agenda. Fundamentally, as a professional architect, you are submitted constantly
to the wishes of others. Through AMO we have been more able simply to announce interests
on our own and pursue them independently.

Reinier de Graaf The work that AMO is doing with the Hermitage in St Petersburg, for
instance. We pursued a competition for an architectural extension [to the Museum] that we
didnt win, following which the whole extension project was thrown into crisis. So, we then
more or less created a project for ourselves. We found out that there were links between the
Guggenheim and the Hermitage, and used that context in order to propose a different type
of project on the latter for which we completely created our own funding from Dutch and
Russian cultural sources. In effect, we proposed the scope for a curatorial master plan, for
the Hermitage, and then found the funding. So that was 100 per cent the result of our own
initiative both in the brief and in the themes. Its the most radical pursuing of our own
agenda yet, and, in that sense, its quite remarkable that its actually worked.

RP So its a different kind of business model

Koolhaas Partly, I guess, its a different kind of business model, but its mostly a differ-
ent medium for our thinking.

RP How would you define the relationship of this different medium, or mode of address,
to the discipline of architecture itself? Is the point that it still functions as a form of specifi-
cally architectural thinking or knowledge, but one that is intended to be operative within a
much wider social-cultural or transdisciplinary field?

Koolhaas In the beginning I was very sceptical about the ways in which the architectural
profession is conventionally constituted, in the sense that it is based on very old forms
of knowledge. Some of the laws that we work with are nearly 3,000 years old that is,
discussions of proportion, composition, coherence, and so on. A lot of this knowledge didnt
seem particularly relevant any more, in so far as it wasnt able to capture certain new forces
or to respond to certain conditions. Just before we formally started AMO, however, this
problem began to tilt in a different direction, as a result of the fact that, as the economy
started to go crazy, there was a process going on by virtue of which almost the entire
profession seemed to undergo a flattening and loss of memory, identity, and so on.

RP Could one see this as a question, then, of the degree to which architecture as a specific
body of knowledge apparently pre-dates the emergence of capitalist modernity, in some
sense, whereas, arguably, all of the other design disciplines are more or less direct products
of capitalist society and industrialization?

37
Koolhaas Not only this, it has a traditional relationship with the public and a traditional
relationship to the idea of doing good. I have often been intensely sceptical about such
moral pretensions. However, there is a certain tipping point at which what has previously
seemed backward may come to seem forward-looking or progressive in other ways, and so
we have recently become very interested in this. At the same time, we were also struck by
the fact that so many other territories were increasingly using metaphors drawn from archi-
tecture, using our vocabulary to explain other domains.

De Graaf These are words from architecture that are now used in a mainly conceptual
or political and strategic sense, or even as part of military jargon: architect, blueprint,
construct, platform, framework, foundation, model, scaffolding, and so on.

RP So, its a matter of deploying the kinds of knowledge architecture provides us with in
interrogating the more general socio-political uses of these terms?

Koolhaas Yes, in that sense AMO was framed around a simple point: since other disci-
plines use our words, they might as well use our thinking. In this context, the problematic
nature of the language of architecture as a discipline that, in the 1980s, had often seemed
to me only a hindrance now meant that it could actually provide a new space for a form of
thinking which could then be applied productively in other domains.

De Graaf Interestingly, one thing weve also found is that when you work as an architect
and you work in an age thats dominated by specialisms and by the empirically provable,
you end up marginalized, because all the arguments you bring to the table, which may well
be valid in other disciplines, invariably seem to others highly intuitive and unprovable.
Therefore the space you occupy as an architect tends to get smaller and smaller and smaller.
But, to some extent, the sheer fact that architecture is also not a specialism and that, in
fact, it cannot be one means that one can maintain a certain generalist take on things that
often proves crucial in actually getting approval for buildings from higher political levels,
which are themselves populated by people who are, by definition, incredibly dependent on
specialists, but who, nevertheless, can never simply listen to one specialism in order to make
their decisions.
Because architecture has remained a generalist discipline, its important to cultivate its
autonomy in this respect. However, while I think that many thinkers in the [Aldo] Rossi
period were calling, with the use of specifically architectural terminologies, for a literal res-
toration of architecture, we embellish the same terms, to explore their broader metaphorical
possibilities. We want really to destroy the idea of architecture as a kind of hermetic form.

RP From a different perspective, is AMO then also a way, for you, of escaping archi-
tecture, in its limited sense? In the case of the Hermitage project, for example, you seem to
have deliberately resisted the idea of building, to have explicitly advised the museum against
any grand architectural gesture.

De Graaf In this particular case thats true, for very good reasons. If you step back from
your own vested interests in always persuading people to build because thats your busi-
ness objectively an expensive building was the last thing they needed. There are some
cases where adding more actually becomes counterproductive.

Arguing against the odds

RP Perhaps we can go back to try and pin down more clearly the character of the kind
of cross-disciplinary mode of architectural thinking that you described a moment ago? It
strikes me that a lot of your contemporaries Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, Daniel
Libeskind, and others have claimed a fairly direct and cultivated relationship to philo-
sophical modes of thought, and to the work of certain specific philosophers in particular:
Derrida and Deleuze would be among the most obvious. Now, in a way, what youve

38
described as AMOs focus on the uses of architectural language in the broader culture,
and on working through that, might well be associated with some kind of deconstructive
project. Yet youve always seemed to be considerably more wary than many of your
contemporaries about these kinds of identifications. The forms of architectural or urban-
ist thought and writing that youre associated with have generally appeared to be rather
different in character.

Koolhaas Thats true. Nevertheless, I benefited enormously from knowing the work of
these thinkers. And, actually, in some cases I knew them personally. Delirious New York, for
example, is very directly connected to the writings of Roland Barthes, and I doubt I would
have written it had I not met him or read Mythologies. While I was at Cornell, Michel
Foucault was there as well, teaching. At some point I also met Deleuze. I dont think these
influences or relationships necessarily need to be flagged up. But its not an indifference to
these thinkers. As a student, I was soaked in the language of semiotics later on, Deleuze
effectively ended that. This is hardly ever mentioned any more in architectural discourse,
but, to me, it is actually crucial, and, as an absent force, increasingly important.

RP I suppose part of what were getting at here concerns the model of intellectual work
itself. AMO is more or less explicitly organized around a certain idea of doing research.
But this often appears to emphasize more empirical or sociological, rather than strictly
theoretical or philosophical, modes of intellectual practice: the collection and analysis of
data, statistics, and so on. In the past, youve used terms like documentation and descrip-
tion even fieldwork as a way of defining the precise character of this activity.

Koolhaas Well, increasingly Im rather modest about the word research. The obsession
with facts and quantities was generated by the fact that, in the mid-1990s, when I began to
teach at Harvard and to do this kind of work with the students there [in the Project on the
City and in the studies of shopping and the Pearl River Delta], the misfit between what was
then architectural discourse and the real situation was so colossal it seemed that only, as it
were, by an overdose of empirical givens could we hope to begin to dislodge the existing
discourse.

RP So, this was about both a reorienting of theory towards social reality, and a kind of
internal architectural reaction to existing forms of intellectual discourse in the field? You
have often vigorously opposed a certain moralism in architectural discourse the idea that
one shouldnt look at the bad. Is it also a question of insisting, then, upon the importance
of something like what certain social scientists and philosophers used to call a factvalue
distinction?

Koolhaas Partly this is what I meant before when I talked about there being a journal-
istic dimension to the whole thing, which is no doubt based on my previous experience as
a journalist somebody who is supposed to be writing about facts. But we also discovered
that the more we adopted this persona this implacable concern with the factual and the
quantitative the more authority our words appeared to carry. And then, of course, it also
became a form of humour.

De Graaf There is, even among architects who dont do this sort of stuff, a kind of
training in arguing against the odds. When you arrive on the scene and you want to do a
building, nine out of ten times the vast majority of people dont want a building there at all,
and when they do they certainly dont want the building that you want to do. In this sense,
youre faced with a general prejudice against building and against the modern. So, in archi-
tecture there is a long tradition of using facts to your advantage.

Koolhaas Particularly in modernism. All those books of statistics in the 1920s and
1930s, on through to CIAM, which always put things in very serious quasi-apocalyptic
terms can our cities survive? We are very much a last generation informed by that kind

39
of discourse, aware of those positions. In these terms, we would consider maybe 70 per cent
of our output highly ironic.

RP Is that true of the actual architectural projects, as well as the textual and visual work?

Koolhaas Completely. We think that both what we write and what we do architecturally
are, in some way, deeply humorous. This is almost never captured, not by a single critic

De Graaf And the more our exposure increases, the more the irony is easier to miss.

RP Are there any simple examples you can give of this?

Koolhaas Well, the Generic City [published in S,M,L,XL], for example, is almost totally
a parody of a certain kind of architectural writing.

RP Lets talk a little, then, about your relationship to the actual architectural theory of
the 1960s and 1970s. Im thinking of the writings of someone like Manfredo Tafuri. It
has sometimes been suggested that much of your work could be understood as a form of
response to the situation of architecture under advanced capitalism that Tafuri describes,
from a broadly Marxian position, in books like Architecture and Utopia

Koolhaas I have a personal take on this. I was there, as a fly on the wall, when Peter
Eisenman was applying Tafuris ideas, and there was a certain merger of positions [in US
architectural discourse] in a way that really insisted on architectures autonomy, and then
insisted on its critical dimension. Most of what we do at OMA should be understood both as
absolutely undermining this idea of autonomy, and as asserting that architecture, by its very
nature, cannot be critical. You can be critical as an architect, but architecture itself is never
critical in that sense.
I remember there was a series of conferences the ANY conferences where this
relationship with a certain philosophy was consummated. Derrida was very often also
present. And at the last one I was almost literally thrown out because I combined in a single
lecture our work on Prada and Lagos. It was intended as a total denial of autonomy. So, in a
way, we are totally fascinated by many of the same subjects, but our interpretations of these
subjects are radically opposed. The connection is in the interests; the divergence is in the
conclusions. But the connection in interests is, of course, very important.

RP This relates to Eisenmans particular appropriation of Tafuris thought, so as to develop

this theorization of a critical autonomy. Perhaps we could take up a rather different aspect
of this, however. What about the latters emphasis, for example, in the 1970s, on modern
architectures specifically metropolitan condition; that is, on the compulsion for architecture
to open itself up onto the terrain of the metropolis in advanced capitalism? The concept
of the metropolis is a key term in the philosophical and sociological tradition that Tafuri
draws upon: Simmel,
Kracauer, Benjamin,
and so on. And there
would certainly seem
to be an obvious con-
nection here, not only
in Delirious New York
Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)

and in the Generic

City essay, but in
terms of the actual
name of the practice
you decided upon in
the 1970s: the Office
for Metropolitan
Architecture. Whats

40
 the significance of the
Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)

term for you? Is the

key point its distinc-
tion to the form of the
traditional city?

Koolhaas Thats a
beginning. It declares
that all the previous
models for architec-
tures relation to the
city are invalid. And,
of course, it also
announces that this
is an existence on the
other side of nature,
and announces the accepting, and embracing, of that condition. At the time we started the
practice it had a tremendous polemical value, because it was the antithesis of everything
everybody wanted or spoke about. Its significant though that, as opposed to OMA, the M
in AMO is no longer defined. One can think of the word and concept of the metropolis as a
sort of rocket-launcher. But we shed it because it became an inconvenient obligation con-
stantly to have to argue for it.

The idea of Europe

RP Perhaps we could move on to discuss a specific AMO project, The Image of Europe,
which culminated in a series of exhibitions. What was the initial impetus for this?

Koolhaas It started from a very straightforward invitation. In the 2001 Treaty of Nice,
Brussels had been declared the official capital of Europe, and there was a working group
set up jointly by Guy Verhofstadt, the Belgian prime minister, and by Romano Prodi, the
president of the European Commission, to study the consequences of that. So, a number
of intellectuals were invited Umberto Eco was one of them to think about this. Simply
because we were able to illustrate our arguments, and to make a narrative of the arguments,
these slowly but surely became the content of that commission. Because, in the end, it was
we who did the report.

De Graaf That is, the report ended up being their text added to our illustrations, rather
than vice versa.

RP So it was basically an intellectual project on behalf of the European Union?

Koolhaas Yes, the project started with a demand

De Graaf Although I dont think the demand quite foresaw the result! One thing I like
about the Europe project is that one never actually knows whether were working for Europe
or if, in the end, Europe is working for us. Europe is a convenient subject matter for us to
demonstrate the existence of a whole uncharted domain that architecture can reclaim.

RP Does this also entail an engagement with the idea of Europe itself then? tienne
Balibar, for example, has described the EU as one of the most fascinating and mysterious of
philosophical objects today.

De Graaf Actually its interesting the Image of Europe project started as a sort of
philosophical question. Brussels, after forty years of being the temporary residence of
European institutions, became officially the capital of the European Union. So we started
with the question of what are the symbolic implications of this for the city, as the capital not
of a country but of a transpolitical system. If its a capital, how is it different from Berlin,

41
Paris, London, and so on? And we basically stretched this question into one concerning the

Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)

whole domain of Europes representation in general to all of its visual representations, not
just in the city of Brussels, but of the EU itself.

Koolhaas Through this, we then became, of course, very much aware of how inadequate
the communication of the European project had become. Or, of how it had only been possi-
ble to pursue this project by some form of stealth, which perhaps benefited from the fact that
its full scope had never been articulated. But, as a result, the current moment was actually
characterized by the national governments using Europe as a scapegoat. So, we were simply
interested in developing a positive rhetoric for it.

De Graaf Everybody knows the Mall in Washington, or the Forbidden City. Europes
symbolic heart in Brussels is actually a roundabout. This would be another example of the
irony that is often missed in our work: so, for the Image of Europe exhibition in Brussels,
we had a circus tent in the colours of all the European flags as an exhibition space situated
in the symbolic heart of Brusselss European Quarter, which is the Schuman roundabout
[named after one of the found-
ing fathers of the EU].
sterreichische EUPrsidentschaft 2006/HOPI-MEDIA

Koolhaas Totally even

the traffic is part of the irony,
the traffic having to disappear
down a tunnel before it can go
through a monumental arch

RP Is AMOs famous design

of a proposed EU logo in the
form of a barcode another
example of this?

42
De Graaf I think the barcode complies with everything weve said, in that its both
serious and ironic. I remember that when it first came out, as part of the report, it was
one of many images we had designed. But then I got a call from Building Design on a
Friday afternoon saying So, youve designed a new flag. And then BD sold the interview
to the Independent, and, on the Saturday, on the front page, there was the flag, saying
something like: Prodi has seen the flag, likes the flag, approval pending goodbye stars,
hello stripes By Monday, the edition of the Sun had also run an article on it: Call this a
flag? Its a bloody deckchair! And then, on the Tuesday, the Guardian came out and they
launched a competition under the title Can you do better? So the irony created serious
ripples. In 2006 we got to do another round of the Image of Europe exhibitions, and Austria
actually adopted the flag as its official logo of the Austrian presidency [of the EU Council].
I still think its quite an apt summary of what Europe is about: a diversity at a glance,
and a direct, immediate way to convey this diversity. Because clearly what everybodys
afraid of is this blue oil slick that eradicates national identity. And here it is an accumulation
of identities, nevertheless condensed in such a way that its no longer a simple addition but
becomes something new. Of course I also recognize its fundamentally ironic nature

RP But the serious side of all this, presumably, would be that this engagement with the
political idea of Europe is an example of you not simply positioning yourself, so to speak,
at the front end of existing social forces surfing their waves, as youve famously put it
elsewhere but taking a specific position on a certain political issue? Youve just mentioned
a need you felt to create a positive image for Europe.

Koolhaas Certainly Reinier and I became fascinated with the issue, and developed this
positive narrative of the European story

De Graaf We discovered, too, a lot of parallels between what we mentioned earlier

in terms of the kinds of prejudices you have to overcome as a modern architect and the
prejudices faced by the political experiment of Europe. So there is a lot of sympathy! Also,
for us, only once this continent is defined at a European scale and here, of course, all the
internal differences have to be fought out does a certain modernization also become pos-
sible. In terms of immigration, of people coming to Europe, it will, for example, inevitably
be easier for them to become European than to become Irish or German or whatever.

RP Is, then, The Image of Europe a kind of committed work? I mean, is it informed or
motivated by a specific political commitment to some quasi-utopian idea of Europe?

Koolhaas Well I would leave out the quasi And the utopian! [laughs] The idea,
yes working for a political idea, as a propagandist for the political idea.

RP So, thinking of your earlier remarks regarding the impossibility of a critical archi-
tecture, in this sense are you actually happier with the idea of working as a propagandist
than as a critic?

Koolhaas Am I sceptical about being critical but happy about being a propagandist?
[laughs] Thats an interesting question. I think that I have overcome my natural irony, in
certain cases, to be happy with being a propagandist, yes.

De Graaf You could also say that being a propagandist is an ironic way of being a critical
theoretician, which is, I guess, in the end, closest to the truth.

Koolhaas Yes. Have you seen this image [left, a television screengrab of George W. Bush
with the EU barcode logo visible in the foreground]? This was, for us, the real high point
of the project, as a confirmation that we had entered the political sphere. Its real. Its not
PhotoShop.

De Graaf This is Bush unwittingly endorsing our barcode, saying it should be bigger.

43
The politics of modernization

RP You were talking earlier about architects having to be generalists in a way that enables
them to communicate with people at fairly high political levels in governmental institu-
tions. Does this work of OMA/AMO thus reflect, in a contemporary context, what Tafuri
says about the ways in which architectures relationship with planning, specifically urban
planning and, indeed, with the very idea of the plan also confronts it, necessarily, with
planning at the political and economic levels? And, if so, is part of what youre trying to do
a way of seeking to overcome the problems associated with the usual debates around that,
and, instead, to position yourselves at the leading edge of capital, or at least at the leading
edge of actual political decision-making, as some means of intervention?

Koolhaas By not adopting the reflexive position of a critical architecture, we have

certainly never been afraid of engaging directly with fundamentally political operations. For
example, you could see the master plan that we did in Lille [in France], which was part of
the Eurotunnel project, and which aggressively modernized the existing city, as also being a
very political project in this sense, as well as a very European project.

RP Perhaps you could say something more about this idea of modernization? Ive read you
suggesting, in the past, that Europes dominant cultural representations have been essentially
anti-modern in character. And, indeed, one of the things you seem to be most specifically
interested in as regards Europe is an idea of it becoming, in effect, some potential new
space of modernity or motor of modernization, as you call it.

De Graaf The interesting thing about Europe, actually, is that it has to confront
modernity with the full weight of history on its back. So, Europe cant be a radical act of
modernity in the sense of starting from scratch, of a tabula rasa, of forgetting everything.
The challenge of modernity is greatest in the case of Europe, in a way, simply because it
carries with it so much history.

Koolhaas The tabula rasa is not an option, even if you wanted it. So, you have all this
history on your back, and yet youre also modernizing

De Graaf This is [also related to] the contemporary American version of political labour
as opposed to the European one: mission accomplished, in the supposed victory in the Iraq
War five years ago, versus mission never-ending in the EU. All the harshness and anti-
heroicness of European political labour is actually much more an object for admiration

Koolhaas This is another form of opposition At some point, as we continued to be

involved in Europe, we kept hearing the word acquis, which is the French word for that
which is acquired. This is the sum of all the European legislation: the Acquis Communi-
taire. We kept asking to see it, and it didnt exist as a single thing. So then we made it, and,
basically, its a book which is seven metres long, with 90,000 pages.

De Graaf It only exists in segments as documents on the Internet, where somebody at

Agriculture puts up that or that or that. Nobody had ever printed the whole thing and put
it together as one book. And this [legislation] is what nations aspiring to become part of
Europe have to accept.

Koolhaas If you do it, youre European. And, so, this leads to an incredible concept of
syndicated legislation. In order to trade or engage with us you have to adopt sections of this.
So, parts of South America, Africa and, increasingly, the rest of the world, are adopting sec-
tions of it. That for us, now, is a really interesting form of modernization by establishing
common laws, or using law as a platform for encounter. This is a dimension of Europe that
became fascinating for us, and is also a typically European way of doing it a soft power,
exercised not directly but by establishing common entities.

44
 RP So is this political idea of Europe, for which you want to provide a positive rhetoric,
one that has to be partly defined by the ways in which it offers a counterforce to a certain
specifically American politics and image of modernity?

De Graaf Well, it was for a certain phase of the project because of the current events at
the time [the war in Iraq]. But I think, over time, our concept of Europe has become much
more of a stand-alone idea that doesnt need to define itself by contrast to the USA.

RP All this perhaps raises the obvious question of globalization, and the impact of the fact
that the geographical spheres of activity of both OMA and AMO are evidently becoming
increasingly internationalized. Much of your work now is in the Middle East, and youve
talked about a general move eastwards on the part of the practice.

De Graaf At its peak, about 30 per cent of our work was in the Middle East. One of the
things weve come to realize is that we often think of Europe and Asia as separate conti-
nents but actually theyre a single landmass. Once you start shifting eastwards, and working
eastwards, one of the things you notice is this relative seamlessness. So, the unification of
Europe might also be a stage in the unification of a Eurasian landmass.

Koolhaas You realize it in literally

moving that you drive from Dubai to
Saudi Arabia, and realize that if you
kept on driving youd very soon be in
Turkey, and then in Athens. There is a
literal sense of connectedness.

RP Going back to the question of

the modern, and of Europes specific
relation to the modern, how far is your
interest in what is happening in, say,
Dubai or China also defined, then,
by an engagement with the global
dynamics of modernization? A supple-
mentary question to this would be, in
light of what youve just said: to what
degree does this imply that modernity
itself is essentially European in some
way, or, at least, that it has a specifi-
cally European genesis?

Koolhaas Absolutely it is theEn-

lightenment idea that has then been
filtered. The exciting thing is that
other cultures are now copying this,
and more and more taking control of
it.
Ole Scheeren, CCTV, OMA

RP So, its a process of translation

Koolhaas Its a form of relay,

and now you can clearly say that the
originators are no longer in charge.

De Graaf In that sense, this is

globalization. It becomes self-perpetuating, where it almost doesnt matter who is the
originator. It becomes a sort of authorless concept.

45
Koolhaas Not only that. Our position is that, once unleashed, whether you want it or
not, it is what is normal, so you have to inscribe yourself within it rather than try to work
against it or to stop it. Not uncritically, but

De Graaf So as to reveal the ways in which architecture is subject to the forces of

modernization and globalization.

RP OK. But, then, politically and socially, do you register different, better or worse,
forms of modernization?

Koolhaas Of course. The reality is terrible in many cases, really horrendous. We are
always blamed for being insensitive to these forms of suffering.

De Graaf Its always explained as a form of opportunism: that they never say no to
anything, or that theres not a level they wont stoop to.

RP This is the complaint about you working in places like China or Dubai.

De Graaf You are often working with regimes that you wouldnt necessarily pick to be
your governors. But it involves a kind of dialectic, a negotiation with what is there, and
through this you can produce a different kind of knowledge and power.

Design and social form

RP In The Image of Europe, clearly part of the importance of the political idea of Europe
youre interested in communicating, or providing a positive image for, is precisely the
possibility that it might be one that isnt organized around solely economic imperatives. In
other words, that it isnt defined only by an idea of the market. The same is presumably true
of your engagement with globalization, and with the translation of modernity into other
non-European, non-western contexts?

Koolhaas Right.

RP This invites the question, then, of how you understand the relationship between
processes of modernization and the globalization of capitalism as a specific economic and
social form. Does this frame your particular interest in somewhere like China? Im thinking
here of the argument that someone like Giovanni Arrighi makes that socialism may have
lost in China but capitalism hasnt yet won: it has a kind of market economy, of course,
but its an economy that isnt, as yet, necessarily a fully capitalist economy as such.

Koolhaas Well, I think, in retrospect, I would explain our interest in China as coming
from the point of view of feeling that there is a certain fragility, ultimately, about our
capitalist system, and therefore being interested in other versions. You can read the recent
financial crisis, in a way, as being illustrative of exactly what we anticipated. And in certain
ways we really did anticipate it. Maybe the Y$ Regime was our main announcement of
how sceptical we were.

RP This was your analysis of a seemingly inescapable global capitalist regime of the yen,
euro and dollar, in which a logic of the market dictated all values and decisions including
those of architectural production

De Graaf The Y$ Regime was also a very early announcement of the end of Y$
Regime! Which I think has never been properly understood, because it has always been
understood as a quasi-humorous endorsement of something that we were actually very
critical of. I think, basically, good architecture was never comfortable with the period from,
lets say, 1979 to 2008, with the Reagan years and its fallout. You can see the 1990s as a
kind of drunken era, in which the more exuberant the stock exchange, the more exuberant
the architecture.

46
RP What kind of difference do you imagine the current financial crisis might make to the
architectural profession?

Koolhaas Well, I can imagine, if it persists, that architecture may find itself back at some
point like it was, maybe, in the late 1950s: doing a very few earnest things that have a great
significance. [laughs]
Its interesting to talk about Lagos here. I went to Lagos for the first time ten years ago,
and that was in a context of ultimate scepticism about planning, about master-planning, and
even about the most fundamental aspects of architectural organization. It was all about self-
organization and improvisation, and so on. But then when I really looked carefully I saw
that all these myriad improvisations [in Lagos] are only really possible within the context of
an urban infrastructure that had been established in the 1960s and 1970s by very rigorous
architectural visions, by architects often coming from formerly Communist countries. So, we
thought that we were on the other side of this, but we also rediscovered that initial impulse.
There is maybe a hope that this financial crisis brings us closer to that kind of work.
I should say one more thing: without ever having been communist or knowingly Marxist,
it is also very true that, speaking for myself, one influence that certainly led me to archi-
tecture was a confrontation with Soviet Constructivism, and with that moment where you
could really speculate about how society could be reshaped, architecturally. So, thats a
fundamental connection for me. Its an interest in that reshaping of society. And this is why
being in China is so interesting, because you can still see traces of that.

RP Theres an interview from the late 1990s, with the journal Assemblage, which would
seem to relate to this, where you talk of the core of your activity as being the attempt to
reinvent a plausible relationship between the formal and the social. How would you define
this relationship?

De Graaf Im just thinking about Rems comment about Constructivism because that
was an architectural style but it was also the largest imaginable scale of design: where one
sought to design at the scale of society. This is whats fascinating about China, whatever its
faults: that its still an effort to apply design at an unimaginably ambitious scale. Whereas
the maximum scale of design in the West is the scale of the consumer object.

RP So, is the other side of that something like the work with Prada, which one could read
as an attempt to explore specific relationships between certain forms of design and certain
social forms of capitalism, in this case, forms of display or spectacle, and of the consumer
object, and so on? Youve talked [in an interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist] about the Prada
projects in the context of an investigation of what the market economy does to architecture.

Koolhaas Well, with Prada there was already a certain history Miuccia [Prada] was
a communist and a sociologist, with a Ph.D. in political science. So, I think they were
embarrassed by consumerism and by having to operate within it. With Prada, then, there
was an opportunity to see how within that you could create a kind of bubble, maybe not of
its opposite, but, at least, of another world, simply by making it a space for selling or for
being together.
I think maybe you could explain our work in the 1990s as addressing a neglect, or
challenging a prejudice. Shopping was wrong, so we looked at shopping; China was
wrong (and nobody knew about China), so we looked at China. In a way, it was really a
fundamental effort to look dispassionately maybe this is totally the wrong word at the
scale and nature of the beast. This decade is a different decade in that were actually dealing
with it, and feeling less obligation to be objective, and more interested in pursuing a specific
agenda. Thats why we needed AMO, because without AMO there is no agenda.

Interviewed by David Cunningham and Jon Goodbun,

Rotterdam, 30 October 2008

47
On Rem Koolhaas
Antonio Negri
Of the writings collected together in the book Junk-
space, Bigness (1994) is for me the most important.
Rem Koolhaass other essays, The Generic City
(1994) and Junkspace (2001), are partly coherent,
partly paradoxical complements to it. But I agree
with what is argued in Bigness. Indeed I would go
even further and say that Bigness and Delirious New
York (1978) are basic texts for reading and critiquing
architecture today.
Bigness is where architecture becomes both most
and least architectural: most because of the enormity
of the object; least through the loss of autonomy
it becomes an instrument of other forces, it
depends. Bigness is impersonal: the architect is no
longer condemned to stardom.2
Bigness no longer needs the city: it competes with
the city; it represents the city; it pre-empts the city;
or, better still, it is the city. If urbanism generates
potential and architecture exploits it, Bigness enlists
the generosity of urbanism against the meanness of
architecture. Bigness = urbanism vs architecture.3
Here we have overcome the poetry and history of the
city. Between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries,
between Simmel and Weber, Burckhardt and Braudel,
the city had become polis again, the imperial centre.
Now space and time destroy this utopian centrality. The
complexity of the world market reconfigures the shape
of the city: the over half of the world population that
inhabits the urban affirms a real centrality. Bigness, the
dis-measure of the metropolis, is what we find. What,
then is the metropolitan body?
The essay titled The Generic City is complemen-
tary to Bigness and illustrates and deepens its reflec-
tions. Yet I can only partially accept what is argued
in this text. Of the seventeen paragraphs that make
it up, I agree with more than half of the first section,
where new notions of metropolitan identity, the history
of the city, and public space, are de-structured by a
demonstration of the manner in which the metropolis
becomes fractal, anomic, enormous and multinational.
But I agree with less than half of the rest of this text:
the last sections in particular, where the metropolis is
presented as a machine that empties the city of reality,
a sociological field where the horizon is disappearing
and where each moment of stabilization is hypocritical
48 Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09)
and fleeting; the city as empty spaces, panic, insecurity,
screams and rags, infrastructural parasitism, and so
on. The postmodern, a fundamental category in regard
to Koolhaas, which he had already inaugurated in his
retroactive manifesto for Manhattan, Delirious New
York, is here defined as an irreversible category and as
a way of seeing the present. But it is also given as what
is perverse and corrupted, and thus becomes the main
characteristic of his description of metropolitan space.
I disagree with this. But, first, let us look at Junk-
space. Modernization here reaches its highest point,
the apotheosis of modernity with no way out:
Fascism minus dictator. From the sudden dead end
where you were dropped by a monumental, granite
staircase, an escalator takes you to an invisible
destination, facing a provisional vista of plaster,
inspired by forgettable sources. [Y]ou always
inhabit a sandwich In this standoff between the
redundant and the inevitable, a plan would actually
make matters worse, drive you to instant despair.4
Bland, anonymous, repetitive, empty, dispersive,
vacuous, risible, post-existential, and so on. We are
here in a Rabelaisian situation, often full of sarcasm
and intense irony, but with no smile. The metropolis we
inhabit is a huge grotesque theatre with no exit routes,
and effectively hopeless. The architect is tired. The
same urbanism that was meant to defeat architecture
and demystify the architect only survives as the non-
planning of an indefinite and perverse metropolitan
landscape. The architect, demystified, continues to
exist as a worldly and bitter witness, a disenchanted
accuser.
Yet, still something happens here, a spark, an event.
It could just be literature, but the text here displaces
Rem Koolhaass argument. In fact, a paradox becomes
manifest in Junkspace, and it is very real, and this
is the point. The greater the critique of the city and
its fading horizon, the more the metropolis becomes
an endless horizon, the more this junkspace loses the
mathematical and plastic semblances of traditional
architecture and takes on an extraordinary physicality,
shifting its analysis from a surrealism reminiscent of
De Chirico to the dreamy hyper-corporeality of Bacon.
Junkspace is biopolitical.
 Like the Renaissance scientist who has grown up
surrounded by compasses and straight lines, who
wanders around the city to see the butchers dismember
the calf and sell her the meat, and with it an oppor-
tunity to study the anatomy of the body, Koolhaas
similarly criss-crosses the metropolis in search of its
body and anatomy. The first anatomical theatres always
had clandestine escape routes for the foul-smelling
leftovers of the work of anatomy normally a pond
or a path to the river. This is where Rem Koolhaass
analysis takes place in Junkspace, and there it begins
to discover the body of the metropolis.
Junkspace: we inhabit junk. In a discussion of the
metropolis Agamben recently referred to Foucaults
definition of two disciplinary models that defined a
shift from the territorial power of the ancien rgime
to modern biopower: these are the treatment of leprosy
and the control of the plague. The paradigm of leprosy
is one of exclusion: lepers must be moved outside
the city and a neat division between outside and
inside needs to be established. A completely different
paradigm emerges with the plague: those afflicted
by it cannot be excluded and the city is divided into
areas; each area, street and home is then placed under
strict surveillance and control. Everything is recorded.
According to Foucault, says Agamben, modern political
power arises from the convergence and superposition
of these two paradigms. The lepers must be treated
like plague victims and vice versa. As a result, strate-
gies and dispositifs based on binary oppositions such
as healthy/diseased, inclusion/exclusion and normal/
abnormal, which aimed at disciplinary subjectivation
and/or controlling subjects begin to overlap.
If we apply this double paradigm to urban space we
find a first way of understanding the new metropoli-
tan space of the West. This framework entails the
coexistence of simple dispositifs of exclusion and
vision leprosy and a complex articulation of
spaces and their inhabitants the plague in order
to produce a global government of men and things.
Agamben then goes on to discuss the control of urban
space in Genoa July 2001 during the G8; and, we might
add, the government of public space around Rostock
in 2007. 5
What does this all mean? Like the capitalist process
of production in general, junkspace is a space of
disjunctive inclusion. Capital would cease to exist if
it included labour-power and could not be productive
unless it bled its value dry. Nonetheless, it also needs
to separate itself from the labour force and to disjoin
it from its very existence so as to dominate it. In the
productive metropolis, disjunctive exclusion includes
all the population in the metropolis as a productive
space, and then distributes it to mobile flexible and
essentially precarious functions in the creation of value
that is, in the creation of wealth and the extraction
of profit.
Let us subjectify this postmodern condition of
the metropolis. When from a purely analytical, dis-
enchanted and objective phenomenological reflection
we move on to a consideration of the biopolitical,
the emergent picture is extraordinarily complex and
shows that the production of subjectivity is coextensive
with the metropolis. The picture is one of a circula-
tion of commodities, webs of information, continuous
movements, and radical nomadism of labour, and the
ferocious exploitation of these dynamics but also of
constant and inexhaustible excess, of the biopolitical
power of the multitude and of its excess with regard to
the structural controlling ability of dominant institu-
tions. All of the available energies are put to work,
society is put to work: junkspace equals the society
of labour. Within this exploited totality and injunction
to work lies an intransitive freedom that is irreducible
to the control that tries to subdue it. Even though this
freedom can run against itself, and the function of
domination is in some ways absorbed by conscious-
nesses (and this is called fascism), lines of flight still
open up in this ambivalence: suffering is often produc-
tive but never revolutionary; what is revolutionary is
excess, overflow, and power.
This is junkspace seen from outside: a disequilibrium
and rupture multiplied on the indefinite space of the
metropolis. But this is also where the multiplication
of obstacles, borders, lines of fracture and walls can
no longer be regarded as simply blocks dropped down
by power or as swamps that one gets stuck in: they
are interfaces that polarize relations. An interface is a
membrane that alternately pulsates under the rhythm
of two different worlds and two different beats of life.
The interface is a place of entry and exit, conversion
and translation of languages, transformation of what
comes and goes. In the postmodern metropolis there
is always a fracture of throbs and rights, a dcalage
that is both the blockage and the power of productive
forces. Perhaps, in order to understand the junkspace
that lives in the Bigness we need to see the centrality
of the link between forces and relations of production
again, as dissolved in the form of biopolitics.
Can these be reconstructed in a revolutionary form?
I have two brief comments to make to contemporary
urban planners in this regard. Urban reformism always
lies alongside Rem Koolhaass postmodernism. It has
always followed the transformations of the metropolis
49
and recognized them, whilst often mystifying or making
them utopian. This is its greatest effort: hypermodern
reformism still tries to correct the metropolis from
within, ruled by the ideology of transparency (light
materials, linear figures, predominance of glass, and
so on). It is a case of bending the complex substance
of the metropolis onto an axis that is at once plastic
and formalist. Here the industry of architecture reveals
its close relationship to the fashion and film industries.
This project involves all sectors of architectural pro-
duction; it decomposes and recomposes them according
to a logic that, in fact, hides the desire to disarticulate
any possible antagonism of subjects and knowledges,
flooding all the spaces where exploitation and pain
cannot be shown with artificial lights. Rationalism
and functionalism have become soft, but they are still
effective in their mystifying activity.
So postmodern cynicism rightly opposes hyper-
modern reformism: it keeps an eye on Bigness whilst
perversely glancing onto junkspace. Postmodernism
attacks history whilst historicizing; it attacks the Holy
Trinity of rent, profit, wages as an archaeological
stratification, but it knows that it cannot destroy it, and,
in fact, by inheriting it will end up reproducing it. The
postmodern manages to show cruelty in an exemplary
way: that is, the recognition that man the citizen the
worker the nomad anyone is immersed in the world
of commodities, in an exploitative metropolis. Is post-
modernism, then, another declaration of the inability
to withdraw from this situation? Is Bigness ruled by
a sense of impotence? And does the recognition of
junkspace end up coming to the asthmatic conclusion
that it is impossible to act?
All of this lies before us. The sciences of the urban
bow to biopower. That is it. This situation can no
longer last: we need to overthrow it. I am sure that
forms of life never really withdrew from domination
and that, at a superficial glance, they might even seem
to be increasingly subordinated to capitalist command.
From this standpoint, the metropolis is horrible. I am
also sure that there is no longer any hope of grasping
a use-value beyond the circulation of exchange value,
that there is no possibility of digging up a nature, a zoe,
beyond the heavy weight of power on bios. However,
the more the cities and metropolis have become places
of production, the more they cannot but be places of
resistance. Traversing a metropolis today means going
through an immaterial factory. In the Fordist factories,
the hardship of production and the joy of the encounter,
of being together, and of being a class, coexisted just
like solitude and multitude now coexist in the metro-
polis. The metropolis is constant capital in action, a
50
mad expropriation of labour-power; but also the place
where the multitude reappropriates intellectual capital
and the common produced by labour. Therefore, the
metropolis is at once a place of exploitation and a
terrain of exodus. As the hegemony of the factory
worker was built on the communist project, so the
hegemony of immaterial labour and the cognitive
multitude of the metropolis can be built inside and
against the project of production, in the common. From
this realization everything can and must start again.
I really do not know what the architects trapped
in the grip of the crisis of modernity can do. It seems
to me that they need to decide how to interpret the
relation between inclusion and disjuncture, the pro-
ductive relation that extends between metropolis and
multitude. Will it be possible to open up the chance for
encounter and struggles in the metropolis? Certainly
enclosures of resistance and of spaces for utopia are
not desirable. Beyond the hypocritical transparency
of the hypermodern, beyond the illusion that urban
spaces can be gentrified by Tony Blairs creative
classes (here Junkspace really does become a weapon
of demystification and struggle), we need to free new
forms of life and search for new structures of com-
munity that tend towards exodus. I almost laugh when
my closest comrades talk about alternatives in terms of
communes, self-managed gardens and city allotments,
multifunctional squats, cultural and political ateliers,
enterprises of a common Bildung. The cynical realism
of the postmodern has earned my criticism but, starting
from its realism and under no illusion that the city is
entrusted to the exercise of biopower, I ask myself what
it would mean to return the metropolis to biopoliti-
cal production. In the framework of Bigness, not of
craftsmanship, but of the General Intellect, perhaps
we only need to start talking about communism and
democracy again.
Translated by Arianna Bove
Notes
1. Negri is referring here to the Italian collection Junkspace
(Quodlibet, Macerata, 2006), which comprises the three
essays discussed in this piece. Quotations from Koolhaas
in what follows are to the original English editions.
2. Rem Koolhaas, Bigness, or the Problem of Large,
in Rem Koolhaas/OMA and Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL,
Taschen, Cologne, 1997, p. 513.
3. Ibid., p. 515.
4. Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace, in Rem Koolhaas/OMA,
eds, Content, Taschen, Cologne, 2004, pp. 1667.
5. Giorgio Agamben, Metropolis, trans. Arianna Bove,
Generation-Online, November 2006, www.generation-
online.org/p/fpagamben4.htm.
reviews
To live without an idea
Martin Hgglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2008.
255 pp., 55.50 hb., 21.50 pb., 978 0 804 70077 1 hb., 978 0 804 70078 8 pb.
In lieu of either consensus or real antagonism, assess-
ments of deconstruction since the mid-1990s have
tended to encourage a sort of indifferent severance.
Derrida is decried in some circles as a purveyor of
relativist ethics and the return of the religious; he is
celebrated in others for much the same reasons. On
the one hand: after The Gift of Death and Specters
of Marx, the privileging in Derridas discourse of
the wholly Other, of an impossible justice, and of the
messianic exposes a politically complacent utopian-
ism and a philosophically deleterious crypto-theology
characteristic of his entire corpus. On the other: this
turn in Derridas thought reveals an important nor-
mative dimension at the very heart of deconstruction,
which has always been a philosophy of ethico-political
responsibility (one that channels the most laudable
values of religious traditions, some add). Not quite
agreeing to disagree, those who might roughly align
themselves with these views simply ignore one another,
each side convinced that the other has hopelessly
misapprehended the in/significance for contemporary
thought of deconstructions ethico-religious priorities.
Martin Hgglunds powerfully argued book aims to
terminate this non-debate, along with its attendant pos-
tures of perfunctory dismissal and reverential cronyism.
Refuting the notion that there was an ethical or religious
turn in Derridas thinking, Hgglund levels two key
arguments against the positions sketched above: (1) that
a radical atheism informs Derridas writing throughout
his career; and (2) that neither justice nor respect for
the Other constitutes an ethical ideal in Derridas work.
These arguments unfold across Hgglunds detailed
interrogations, on singular points, of Derridas relation
to Kant (autoimmunity of time), Husserl (arche-writing),
Levinas (arche-violence), Augustine (mourning/desire)
and Laclau (autoimmunity of democracy).
The crux of Hgglunds account is his reassertion
of the ontologically univocal character of temporal
finitude in Derridas philosophy. Whereas both Kant
and Husserl view time as a transcendental condition
applicable only to the experience of a finite con-
sciousness, for Derrida, Hgglund argues, the spacing
of time is an ultratranscendental condition from
which nothing can be exempt. Whereas Kant retains
the regulative Idea of an unconditioned sovereign
instance that is absolutely in-itself, for Derrida the
unconditional is the spacing of time that divides every
instance in advance and makes it essentially depend-
ent on what is other than itself. This unconditional
condition yields a basic Derridean formula to which
Hgglund repeatedly returns: what makes X possible
is at the same time what makes it impossible for X
to be in itself. On the basis of this formula, derived
from the ultratranscendental synthesis of time qua
autoimmune trace, Hgglund extracts the following
kernel of deconstructive logic:
if the essence of X is to not be identical to itself,
then the consummation of X cannot even be posited
as an Idea since it would cancel out X. Finitude
is thus not a negative limitation that prevents us
from having access to the fullness of being. On the
contrary, finitude is an unconditional condition that
makes the fullness of being unthinkable as such.
If such an articulation of Derridas post-Heideggerian
ontology is not exactly unfamiliar, what distinguishes
Hgglunds book is the philosophical acumen with
which he delineates its consequences and the rigour
with which he deploys them against the faux amis of
deconstruction.
If we endorse the ultratranscendental status of tem-
poral finitude, then any dualistic separation between
a finite ethical subject or mortal being and the posi-
tive infinity of the Levinasian Other or an immortal
God becomes untenable. Against Robert Bernasconi,
Drucilla Cornell and Simon Critchley, Hgglund shows
that Derridas thinking of alterity is absolutely incom-
patible with any good beyond being, primary peace
or non-violent relation to the other in so far as it is
predicated upon the arche-violence of espacement,
which breaches any interiority and institutes relational-
ity only through an essential corruptibility. Against
the efforts of Hent de Vries, John Caputo and Richard
Kearney to salvage in Derridas texts the promise of an
unscathed God, a divine pax or an Other whose good
is absolute, Hgglund demonstrates that the structural
articulation of Derridas concept of the messianic
without messianism requires an absolute autoim-
munity of time that can leave no instance whatever
Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09) 51
unscathed, even or especially the name of God. In a
more congenial register, Hgglund disputes Ernesto
Laclaus notion that justice or equality or freedom a problem for Hgglund vis--vis the relation of being
can serve as regulative ideas for radical politics, as
the names of a fullness which is constitutively absent.
On the contrary, he argues, the Derridean concepts of
justice and democracy to come cannot entail the
lack of any absent plenitude towards which one should
strive, but rather denote the absolute impossibility of
any such regulative idea given the structural neces-
sity of an unpredictable future in the face of which
hyperpolitical decisions must be made.
Throughout these engagements, Hgglund argues
that Derridas insistence upon openness to the wholly
Other does not and cannot constitute an ethical norm
or prescription. The constitutive autoimmunity of the
trace which exposes any retention of passing time
to the possibility of erasure entails that one must be
open to the other as the what or who of an unpre-
dictable future. But this is simply a description of an
ultratranscendental condition which precisely prevents
the derivation of any stable norm or any reference to
an Other uncontaminated by the arche-violence of the
given time. Derridas notion of infinite responsibility
thus cannot be conflated with that of Levinas, since it
can only answer to a negative infinity of others, and
therefore always entails more or less violent acts of
distinction and exclusion. Infinite responsibility, Hgg
lund stipulates, is but another name for the necessity
of discrimination.
Braiding together Hgglunds critiques of ethico-
theological appropriations of deconstruction, and under
pinning his articulation of Derridas radical atheism,
is the concept of survival. To survive is to live on
as an essentially mortal being constituted by the trace
structure of time. Radical atheism is the uncondi-
tional affirmation of this condition. This affirmation
is radically atheist because it denies not only the
existence of God or immortality but also the desire
for God or immortality as instances that transcend
finitude. The affirmation of survival is unconditional
because it is not a choice or a norm; rather, everyone
is engaged by it without exception. The desire to live
on as a mortal being, Hgglund argues, precedes and
contradicts the desire for immortality from within.
The idea of immortality cannot even hypothetically
appease the fear of death or satisfy the desire to live
on, he states. On the contrary, the state of immortality
would annihilate every form of survival, since it would
annihilate the time of mortal life. Hgglund thus aims
to derive from Derridas thinking of time and mortality
a theory of desire as necessarily atheist.
52 Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09)
The relation of survival to mortality that under-
writes the articulation of this theory, however, poses
to living. Hgglund makes it clear that for Derrida
the autoimmunity of time (espacement, diffrance,
trace) is an absolutely general condition that cannot
be constrained to any delimited region of being.
Thus, to be is to be finite. But Hgglund often writes
as though a condition applicable to every thing could
be adequately described by arguing its application
to every living thing. The spacing of time has ultra
transcendental status, he argues, because it is the
condition for everything all the way up to and includ-
ing the ideal itself, and also because it is the condi-
tion for everything all the way down to the minimal
forms of life. Here the threshold of life would seem
to limit a condition that is supposed to be absolutely
general. Hgglund immediately doubles the confusing
structure of this argument by stating that there is no
limit to the generality of diffrance and the structure
of the trace applies to all the fields of the living. And
again: Derrida spoke of the trace as a mortal germ
that is inseparable from the seed of life. To think the
trace as an ultratranscendental condition is thus to
think a constitutive finitude that is absolutely without
exception. The logic of entailment here (thus) implies
not only that finitude is an absolutely general condi-
tion, but that we can deduce the general condition of
finite being from a statement concerning the relation
of mortality to life.
Clearly Hgglund does not mean to attribute a
vitalist ontology to Derrida. But the undertheorized
relation of finite being to mortal life is more than a
rhetorical problem in his book, because it exposes
a lacuna in his reasoning. Hgglund argues that the
necessary intertwinement of life and death spells out
the autoimmunity of mortality as a general condition
and undercuts the idea of immortality. But if mortal-
ity necessarily entails a relation between life and
death, then non-living matter is not mortal, and the
autoimmunity of mortality (as a modality of finitude)
cannot be a general condition. As Heidegger points out
in his 1929/30 seminar, non-living matter cannot die
and is not dead since it was never alive. Presumably,
then, Hgglund would have to hold that non-living
matter survives it persists in a condition of finitude
without being mortal.
The opening of this asymmetry between survival
and mortality a region of the former (non-living
being) that is not included in the field of the latter
would not challenge the univocal status of temporal
finitude, which applies in all cases. But it does pose a
logical problem for certain of Hgglunds arguments.
Citing Derridas claim that one cannot love a monu-
ment, a work of architecture without the experience
of its finitude and thus that one loves it as mortal,
through its birth and death Hgglund states that
radical atheism proceeds from the argument that
everything that can be desired is mortal in its essence.
Here the elaboration of the central concept of his
project proceeds from the attribution of an essence
predicated upon a relation between life and death
(mortality) to the finitude of everything that can be
desired (including, apparently, non-living matter). At
the core of radical atheism is the following claim:
from the definition of life as essentially mortal, it
follows that immortality is death. To live is to be
mortal, which means that the opposite of being mortal
to be immortal is to be dead. The possibility of his contemporaries in Being and Event.
non-living, non-mortal survival, however, deconstructs
this argument by displacing the binary opposition of
mortality and immortality. It does so by exposing an
ambiguity inherent to the concept of immortality for
which the structure of Hgglunds argument does not
account. The primary denotations of immortal are
(1) not liable or subject to death; and (2) not liable to
perish or decay. This asymmetry is isomorphic with
that of morality to survival. If we construct the concept
immortal according to the first sense, then it would
include non-living beings, which survive (in so far
as they persist in finitude) but are not liable to death.
Since Hgglunds reasoning cannot countenance an
immortal being that survives, we might then take the
term in the second (expanded) sense. But that sense
cannot follow from an opposition to mortality, since
what is subject to the broader sense of temporal fini-
tude denoted by perish and decay can be so without
living or dying. The conceptual excess of survival
over mortality thus ends up deconstructing certain key
articulations of the logic of radical atheism which the
concept of survival inaugurates.
A more general irony of Hgglunds approach is
that his effort to defend the hyperpolitical logic of
Derridas thought ultimately falls back upon a struggle
for lesser violence for its (undecidable) justification.
The unconditional affirmation of survival underlying
that framing of political struggle is uncomfortably
proximate to an affirmation of what Alain Badiou
has sardonically termed democratic materialism,
which affirms, as he puts it in Logiques des mondes,
the constant reassessment of our
mortal being and enjoins us to live
without an Idea. This affirmation and
this injunction are also supposedly
unconditional. Badious work is to the
point here, because anyone who wants
to assess the relation of deconstruc-
tion to varieties of infinite thought
will have to grapple with Hgglunds
account from now on. But what is at
stake in philosophies attempting to
operate after finitude is the perti-
nence to ontology of infinities that are
neither positive nor negative: that
is, which do not require an instance
of the in-itself nor devolve into an
infinitely finite series. This is a pos-
sibility that Hgglunds book does not confront, though
it accounts for why it is J. Derrida whom Badiou cites
on the ontological prerequisite while taking stock of
Until Hgglund is able to demonstrate that Badious
enterprise cannot answer that prerequisite, his impres-
sive recovery of deconstructions unconditional ration-
alism from the predations of its putative allies may not
suffice to convince those more broadly disenchanted
with post-Heideggerian finite thinking to return to
a strenuous engagement with Derrida. Indeed, some
may find that the admirable clarity of Hgglunds
book makes all too glaring how little remains when
Derridas sprawling uvre is pared down to its core.
But that would be no fault of Hgglunds own, and
the reception of his readership is not, in any case, the
standard to which he holds himself. For whether or
not one finds the philosophy that Hgglund expounds
compelling, the rare virtue of his book is that it forces
us to assess that philosophy correctly.
Nathan Brown
Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09) 53
Dissing
Axel Honneth, Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2007. xiii
+ 275 pp., 55.00 hb., 18.99 pb., 978 0 745 62905 6 hb., 978 0 745 62906 3 pb.
Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, with Judith Butler, Raymond Geuss and Jonathan
Lear, ed. Martin Jay, Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 2008. xii + 168 pp., 17.99 pb., 978 0
19 532046 6.
Does Critical Theory need normative foundations?
Prima facie the critique of capitalism in all its myriad
forms might include a critique of the very idea of
norms. After all, those most keen to posit them might
have a vested interest in saying that things are thus,
and so, however the world appears to its inhabitants,
the social order is actually predicated on particular
moral frameworks: anyone who doesnt agree is either
ethically deficient or a political malcontent (or both).
Besides, isnt there something suspiciously ahistorical
about the appeal to norms? Where do they reside,
exactly, and what are you going to do with them once
youve decided what they are? These two Axel Honneth
collections one a series of essays mainly from the
mid-1990s; the other his 2005 Berkeley Tanner lecture,
featuring some rather unimpressed responses from
Butler, Geuss and Lear unintentionally indicate the
serious difficulties of such a project. Indeed, despite
Honneths best efforts, it is not at all clear that the
identification of Critical Theory, understood in the
broadest sense as the attempt to grasp the hegemonic
conceptual forms of capitalist society and to under-
mine the affirmative rationality of capitalism, with the
inquiry into transcendental social norms, could ever be
truly persuasive or ultimately coherent.
At its best, Critical Theory does indeed take the
normative aspirations of Kant and Hegel in particu-
lar as negative templates for a comparison with the
present, but this is not the same as attempting to attach
these norms to existing moral features. Honneth thus
reverses the order of the critique, looking to the world
for evidence of supposed transcendental conditions,
rather than recognizing the failure of such systematic
philosophical projects confronted with the everyday
reality of contemporary capitalist societies. In fact,
Honneth, despite being regarded by some as the leading
inheritor of the Frankfurt School tradition, argues in
an essay entitled The Social Dynamics of Disrespect:
On the Location of Critical Theory Today that the
Frankfurt Schools attempt to critically diagnose
social reality ceased to exist some time ago. What
should come to take its place, according to him, is a
critical theory of society, a kind of normative critique
54 Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09)
which can also inform us about the pre-theoretical
resource (vorwissenschaftliche Instanz) in which its
own critical viewpoint is anchored extratheoretically
as an empirical interest or moral experience. In other
words, there is much in our experience of the world
that can tell us about the pre-cognitive foundations for
why we value what we value. This is both why Honneth
attacks Lukcs for totalizing reification as the key to
understanding capitalism and returns to Heidegger for
a description of care as our fundamental comportment
as beings-in-the-world. Heideggerian care further
morphs into Hegelian recognition under Honneths
schema. Thus he argues in Reification that it is possi-
ble to justify the hypothesis that a recognitional stance
enjoys a genetic and categorical priority over all other
attitudes toward the self and the world. Honneths
rather mercenary use of developmental psychology to
explain how recognition precedes cognition in children
is one of these empirical interests that forms part
of this justification. Butler rightly wonders whether
this isnt a contradiction in Honneths approach: why
should we accept the results of any such research after
the criticism of observational methods that we have
been offered by Honneths extensive critique? Such
scientific detachment is apparently worthwhile if it
justifies Honneths underlying adherence to the clam
that the recognitional stance has priority over all other
attitudes. But this is hardly a convincing argument for
its centrality.
So why does Honneth place so much stress on
recognition? In both collections the concept is read
back into practical and political philosophy so that it
comes to be seen as the hidden Ur-condition for all
contemporary social thought. In the pivotal essay in
the Disrespect collection, Between Aristotle and Kant:
Recognition and Moral Obligation, Honneth links a
Kantian conception of duty to an ethics of care and
certain communitarian models of recognition. In this
way, recognition covers both the duties we owe to our-
selves and those we owe to others. It is ambiguous in
the sense that the number of modes of recognition is
to correspond to the number of forms of moral injuries.
In other words, disrespect is always potentially present
the moment the recognition of another takes place. It
is here that Honneth invokes empirical examples of
disrespect as pre-theoretical resources. Describing
neo-Nazi youth groups as ostensibly dependent on
their own internal recognition, Honneth notes that
the sense of no longer being included within the
network of social recognition is in itself an extremely
ambivalent source of motivation for social protest and
resistance. Recognition has to come from outside to
prevent non-normative potentially violent ways of
dealing with the experience of disrespect and humili-
ation: the neo-Nazis feel disrespected by the state over
the issue of immigration and take out their humili-
ation on a foreign worker. But is it really a lack of
recognition that is the problem here? The rightward
shift of many European states over the past decade
has certainly recognized the way some voters feel
about immigration, but it is far from clear that this
recognition is capable of preventing violence at the
everyday level. The demand for recognition always
seems to presuppose a fixed structure that one can
appeal to Daddy, the state, the International Court
of Human Rights but this is an essentially reactive,
or at best reformist, model of political behaviour. As
Honneth puts it in The Social Dynamics of Respect
essay, we are dealing here with the question of how a
moral culture could be so constituted as to give those
who are victimized, disrespected, and ostracized the
individual strength to articulate their experiences in
the democratic public sphere, rather than living them
out in a counterculture of violence. No longer bash
the fash then, but invite them in to talk about their
feelings.
A further problem here is the incipient moralism
of such a position when it comes to actual political
practice. It is no coincidence that New Labour, for
example, have laid so much stress on a so-called
respect agenda, in which so-called ASBOs (Anti-
Social Behaviour Orders) are dispensed for modes of
disrespectful behaviour (playing loud music, harassing
shoppers, breaking curfews, staring at neighbours). It is
certainly the case that these negative awards become
a badge of pride, thus reinforcing the idea that groups
seek internal recognition if external rewards are slow
in coming, but judging such behaviour in terms of its
failure to meet societal norms obscures any structural
or economic analysis. In those rare moments where
Honneth refers to class, he does so only to talk about
morality: the Critical Theory of society can be kept
open to socially repressed moral conflicts in which
suppressed classes make us aware of the structural
restrictions placed on their claims to just treatment
that is, to as yet unrealized potentialities of his-
torical progress. Social problems, or pathologies as
Honneth rather dubiously calls them, are thus negative
evidence of the norms that should subtend any social
ideal. Evidence of affection between a mother and a
child is just as much of an empirical indication of the
fundamental importance of recognition as the drunk
punching someone outside a nightclub.
In the Reification lecture, Honneth again attempts
to indicate the centrality of recognition to his social
theory. He does so by means of an extended critique
of Lukcs, while endeavouring to retain the term
reification for his own purposes. Lukcss mistake, he
claims, is twofold: to ignore the moral implications of
reification and to take the form of reification particular
to commodity exchange as representative of reifica-
tion in toto. For Honneth, reification is something
more akin to the objectification of sexism and racism,
rather than the thingification of economic and social
relations. Why, then, keep the term at all? Honneths
action-theoretical approach rereads reification as a
kind of forgetting of recognition (the Heideggerian
resonances are not lost on him): to treat someone in
a reified way is to deny that one once knew that the
person was more than their mere usefulness: By
speaking here of mere objects or things, I mean
that in this kind of amnesia, we lose the ability to
understand immediately the behavioural expressions of
other persons as making claims on us as demanding
we act in an appropriate way. People can equally treat
themselves as things in this way, forgetting that they
are not merely commensurate with their capabilities,
or mere material for wage-labour. Aside from stripping
the concept of reification of its explicitly political and
economic content, Honneth fails to recognize several
major changes in the nature of work that problematize
the idea that reification (both his conception and that
of Lukcs) is the central tendency in the nature of
labour. Far from social relations being treated like
things, recent writing on immaterial labour suggests
that it is relationality itself that is exploited both
via the generic capacity to communicate (language,
attention, care) and in the way in which one is sup-
posed to market oneself as someone who is constantly
networking, constantly in contact, ever ready for new
projects. This is precisely the opposite problem to that
of reification, in either its moral or Marxist guises. In
many ways it is much more pernicious how does
one battle against economic oppression if the social
relations are not so much hidden beneath the veneer of
objectivity, but are themselves the very material of our
everyday exploitation? We are not encouraged to treat
Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09) 55
one another like objects (or subjects for that matter),
but rather to see potential connections everywhere.
Objectification, or reification (Honneth explicitly elides
the distinction between the two), is actually somewhat
rare. As Jonathan Lear puts it in his response: often the
problem is not that we are treating persons as persons,
but that we are treating them badly as persons. Butler,
too, makes much of the fundamental ambiguity we
have towards those we care about, against Honneths
optimistic idea that recognition is almost always per-
formed in a positive mode, and stresses the way in
which sadism too in Butlers exquisite formulation
an excitation about being cold can also be a central
kind of recognition.
Honneth ultimately places himself in an awkward
theoretical and political position from the outset;
simultaneously indebted to Marx, Lukcs and Adorno
and interlocutor of current soft moralists such as
Cavell, Nussbaum and Charles Taylor. The result is
a curiously opportunistic use of Marxist terminology
(reification) subtended by post-Kantian metaphysics
and practical philosophy (Fichte and Hegel) and topped
off with a rather uncritical fetish for the theoretical
trappings of human rights discourse esteem, respect
and recognition. In this sense, Honneth is better con-
ceived as a post-Analytic philosopher than anything
else, looking for clues in the pragmatists (Dewey in
particular), appealing to both Kant and Wittgenstein as
equal authorities and worrying about the dehumanizing
effects of Internet dating. (Once two users have found
sufficient overlappings between their respective lists of
characteristics and thereby become an electronically
selected pair, they are then instructed to inform one
another of their feelings for each other through the
high-speed medium of email messages.)
Honneths mixed pool of sources starts to look
like a Deutsche-Americanische Freundschaft for the
twenty-first century. This has all of the advantages
of a properly synthetic approach no philosophical
approach is a priori out of bounds and all the disad-
vantages of a truly synthetic approach all theorizing
is reduced to a kind of weak, generic moralizing that
would be palatable to many, but lacks any critical or
political bite. Honneth explicitly replaces the critique
of political economy with an ameliorative vision of
the social order based on the ambiguous evidence of
normative behaviour. All too often his foundational-
ism takes on a reformist character, and at times even
a kind of finger-wagging, moralistic taint. But this
seems to be the problem in the very idea of trying
to fuse Critical Theory with normative foundational-
ism. As Raymond Geuss puts it in his response to
56 Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09)
Honneth, citing John Dewey, a key reference point
for both thinkers:
John Dewey thought that moral philosophy was
inherently reactionary, an attempt to invent an illu-
sory discourse about imaginary metaphysical entities
so as to defend highly inegalitarian social struc-
tures; ethics was the protection of existing privilege
against novelty and the pressing needs of the many.
Whilst we might not want to go as far as saying that
Honneth defends existing privileges, his over-optimistic
portrayal of recognition, and of the democratic pro-
cedures and institutions that promote it, ultimately
neglects the more structural forms of disrespect that
underlie the reality of social injustice.
Nina Power
The long decade
Xudong Zhang, Postsocialism and Cultural Politics:
China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century,
Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2008. 346 pp.,
70.00 hb., 17.99 pb., 978 0 822 34212 0 hb., 978 0
822 34230 4 pb.
Mainstream academic and media comment on politi-
cal and cultural change in China over the past three
decades converges in a common theme: the failure
of the 1989 protest movement, brutally repressed by
government forces, signalled the end of an era of
increasingly pluralist debates and liberal hopes, usher-
ing in a new phase of market-driven reform and with
it the eclipse of intellectual privilege by a new mantra
of individual competition and consumer power. After
Deng Xiaopings famous tour to the south in 1992,
which gave the go-ahead to an all-out marketization of
the economy, many of those formerly active in political
and intellectual debates transferred their energies to
entrepreneurial endeavours, marking a complicity with
the states engagement with the neoliberal agenda of
global capital. According to this view, with the excep-
tion of the celebrity achievements acclaimed by the
worlds major film and literary competitions, political
and cultural debates in China since the 1990s have
been notable both for their lack of innovative edge, and
for their refusal to engage with ongoing international
discussions about critical alternatives to the teleology
of neoliberalism. No doubt China Studies special-
ists in Western academia bear due responsibility for
this dominant view. Too many have spent too much
time applauding the progressive effects of market
privatization instead of critically analysing the real
tensions in the shifting sands of Chinas economic,
social and political transformation. Effective com-
pliance with the official ideology of modernization
has thus overlooked informed analyses of intellectual
debates in China itself, which, though prevented from
wide dissemination in the Chinese context, have never-
theless occupied the minds of many thinkers and
theorists working in the countrys major academic and
research institutions.
With Postsocialism and Cultural Politics, Xudong
Zhang provides a thick analysis of the cultural and
socio-political debates of the long decade of the
1990s. Set against a broadly chronological account of
developments, from the governments crackdown on
the 1989 protests, Deng Xiaopings market reforms,
the Taiwan missile crisis and the Asian financial crisis,
to the end of Britains colonial rule of Hong Kong
in 1997, his analysis weaves a sense of the historical
framework of intellectual debates together with a theo-
retical commitment to explore beyond the tired binaries
of state and society, communist hardliners and market
reformers, capitalism and socialism, which character-
ize standard analyses of Chinas recent history. In the
process, he puts paid to a view of the 1990s as no more
than a political and intellectual wasteland, and in its
stead identifies a sense of continuing intellectual and
political vitality, even if tightly circumscribed by what
he calls the authoritarian developmentalism of the
state. His focused readings of novels by Zhang Ailing,
Wang Anyi and Mo Yan, as well as his analysis of
films of the Fifth Generation directors, further gives a
sense of how the political and intellectual concerns of
the time can be interpreted through the lens of literary
and cinematic forms.
The concepts of postsocialism and postmodernism
form the theoretical pillars sustaining the discussion
in the books first section. Zhang proposes that the
post of postsocialism and postmodernism highlights
both continuities and discontinuities between current
and past politico-cultural formations in China. Post-
socialism is therefore explained not as a teleologically
driven higher phase of development, but rather as a
conceptual space facilitating analysis of the tensions
and cracks in contemporary China that incorporates
the cultural and political legacy of the Mao era in
penetrating the glossy surface of contemporary con-
sumerism. Postsocialism, he thus argues, prefigures a
new socio-economic and cultural-political subjectiv-
ity that acknowledges the continuing effects of the
cultural and political idiosyncracies of Maoist rule
in shaping the quotidian contours and unconscious
motivations of post-Mao rationalism. Alongside this,
the critical discourse of postmodernism permits an
examination of the dialectic between the increasingly
attenuated appeal of conventional notions of modernity
and modernization, and the evidence of the uneven and
messy socio-economic and political realities of daily
life in market China that defy notions of change as a
progressive advance on what came before. Together,
the two posts invite a release from the dogma of a
triumphant global capitalism driven by a Eurocentric
model of modernity. Postsocialism thus emerges as
both a system and an analytical framework, at a time
when history craves a new critical practice through
the political and cultural configurations it evidences.
Specifically, for Zhang, it points to the ambiguities
of a world combining forces for democratization and
commodification, in which neoliberalisms calls for
the full institutionalization of privatization manifests
itself not so much as a call for freedom, but rather as
an egoistic attempt to carve out an elite realm of bour-
geois privilege premissed on robbing public wealth
and suppressing popular dissent. At the same time,
the concept of postsocialism can encapsulate within its
theoretical parameters the practices of everyday culture
and utopian longings for equality and justice, seen
in the increasing incidence of militancy and protest,
thereby setting out a historical vision, not of Fuku-
yamas end of history, but of a complex reworking of
contemporary forces in a socio-economic and cultural
system that may or may not bring China into collision
with the dominant centres of neoliberal capitalism.
Much of Zhangs attention in this discussion is in
fact directed towards dissecting the political positions
and possibilities identified with the so-called New
Left, a dubious label for a group of intellectuals who,
despite their disavowal of the term, are commonly
bunched together on the grounds of commonalities
in their critiques of Chinas neoliberal agenda. The
New Left combines a critical resistance to capitalist
globalization in China with a conscious association
with Western critical discourse. Prevalently associ-
ated with the figure of Wang Hui, but also with other
academics and theorists such as Cui Zhiyuan, Wang
Shaoguang, Liu Kang and Gan Yang all of whom
studied in and are well known in Western academia
this New Left has brought together diverse discipli-
nary interests to challenge the ideological mainstream
of global capitalism. Though commonly attacked by
liberal academics in China for their supposed nostalgia
for Maos China and their affinity with traditional
socialism, their ongoing contribution is to identify the
governments neoliberalism not as a form of market
Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09) 57
equalizer but as an elitist discourse, the demands of
which for negative withdrawal from the state signifies
not the states actual withdrawal from social life but its
political intervention to protect the fittest in the market
environment. Zhangs position vis--vis the New Left is
not always clear at one point he indulges in a snide
aside, noting that Wang Hui writes as if he has to pass
the test of both the theory-driven academic Left and
a text- and empirical data-obsessed Sinologist in the
United States but his judgement is that neoliberalism
would similarly be rejected by the majority of the
population if there were democratic debate in China.
Chinese nationalism of the 1990s appears in Zhangs
analysis as an allegory of the intellectual and political
dilemma of the decade. He argues that 1990s national-
ism was neither the child of government machinations,
nor the result of the dissolution of the state at a time of
rising economic self-confidence, but rather a response
to a series of international frustrations, conditioned
by the end of the Cold War and a seeming return to
imperialist domination at the moment of Chinas
triumphant entry into the global arena. A popular and
58 Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09)
cultural nationalism, affirmed by economic strength
but also negatively assertive, may thus be understood
as part of the general problematic of politics, culture
and identity in the globalized age. And while the
need to build up a strong national economy has been
used to support mainstream neoliberal positions, a
vision of a political nationalism that similarly sup-
ports the need for a sound national economy may
be oriented to democratic reorganization to reduce
the massive inequities of the state system. Calls for
a political nationalism by the likes of Gan Yang are
thus inevitably associated with the idea of a democratic
reinvention of the Chinese Communist Party. As such,
they are not given a wide press. And, by contrast to the
dominant themes of political nationalism, interrogation
of the national imagination to be found in mass and
popular culture posits an intellectual agenda that refers
more to the messy complexities of postmodernity than
to a commitment to the teleologies of an exuberant
economic nationalism.
The fiction and film discussed in the second and
third sections of this book may be more familiar to
non-Chinese audiences than the polemical
debates analysed in the first section. Most
of the stories discussed here are available in
English translation; the films have long been
acclaimed internationally and have been the
subject of considerable theoretical treatment
by other academics in the field. However,
reading against the familiar grain, Zhang
offers interpretations here that specifically
illuminate the postsocialist theme of the first
half of the book. He criticizes Chinas reap-
propriation of the famous Shanghai writer,
Zhang Ailing, through an analysis of a 1943
short story, which appeared in English as
Sealed Off in 1985. Far from legitimating
a view of progress that corresponds with the
current ideology of Chinas market moderni-
zation, Zhang Ailings narrative highlights
the stasis of the urban experience and the
ennui associated with the metropolis that was
pre-1949 Shanghai. Similarly, Wang Anyis
and Mo Yans works appear as narratives
of fractured engagement with, rather than
simple rejections of, the cultural experience
of Maos China. Mo Yans stylistic moves
between the grotesque, the hilarious, the
seductive and the nauseating in The Repub-
lic of Wine paints a picture of contemporary
China characterized by murkiness and
chaos. Wang Anyis portrayal of Shanghai,
and particularly Shanghai women, in her stories of
the 1990s, remind the reader of the omissions, even
the conscious amnesia, at work in the new language
of the urban and modern that typifies descriptions of
Chinas glossy metropolitan culture. Zhang Yimous
famous film The Story of Qiu Ju appears not as the
coming into being of a new language of legal regula-
tion, but as an illustration of the tensions and conflicts
between the rural and the urban, and the scrambling
of politico-legal codes, as the disadvantaged seek to
claim recognition for unarticulated rights. And, finally,
Zhang offers a new reading of Tian Zhuangzhuangs
The Blue Kite, to suggest that the trauma at the heart
of the film is not so much the melancholy of revolution
and modernity but rather the anxiety that history has
not already begun the unsettled imagination of the
future brought to consciousness at the moment of
encounter between the socialist past and the market
present. tural Politics provides critical evidence of a cultural,
Yet, despite its wealth of analysis, Zhangs nar-
rative suffers from an imbalance between its three
main sections and their very different topical foci.
This may in part be due to the initial character of
the books chapters as journal articles, produced at
different times and for different readerships. In itself,
the lack of a sense of organic completeness to the text
may not matter too much. But the uneven treatment
Zhang gives his themes raises other questions. How
Realistically
Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2008. viii + 116 pp.,
11.95 hb., 978 0 691 13788 9.
Raymond Geuss is perhaps the most stylish polemi-
cist among contemporary political philosophers, and
increasingly one of the most practised in the art. In
this most recent addition to his uvre, he takes aim
once more at contemporary liberal analytic political
philosophy through the representative figures of Robert
Nozick and, Geusss bte noir, the John Rawls of A
Theory of Justice. It is hard not to think that Gerry
Cohens work might not be an even more apposite
target for Geusss ire, but Rawls, of course, has the
advantage of having written the pivotal text for analytic
political philosophy. If the Rawlsian achievement is
undermined exposed as applied ethics then the to the conditions of political agency, and it must
claim to political relevance of vast swathes of the
last forty years of political philosophy fall with it.
are these themes linked to local rather than external
academic debates, if we are to see them as parts of
a critical discursive moment? How do local Chinese
audiences engage with the critical implications of
the works and ideas here addressed? And, notably,
given the widespread evidence of increasing gender
discrimination sustained in the name of economic
efficiency and consumer choice, how does Zhang posi-
tion the theoretical contributions of Chinas feminists
in current critiques of Chinas neoliberal obsessions?
Furthermore, though Zhangs narrative, replete with
complicated discursive flourishes, demonstrates a keen
engagement with current theoretical debates indeed,
few of the great names of critical cultural theory are
missing here it shows much less interest in the work
of his peers similarly engaged with critical reflection
on the politics of culture in China.
Still, why be grudging? Postsocialism and Cul-
political and aesthetic dynamism that, trapped by
local political constraints, demands more and closer
attention in order to chart the internal differences of a
reality that too many claim as proof of the universal-
izing benefits of the neoliberal market. China faces a
future under the thrall of radical uncertainty, and all
too few academics working on China lend their voice
to the debates Zhang pursues here.
Harriet Evans
This may not rank Geusss task alongside Nietzsches
attempt to undermine the peculiar institution of moral-
ity, but it obviously feels like it at times and Geuss,
as a political realist, is perfectly well aware that he
is confronting deeply entrenched academic interests
(the context of his action is hardly conducive to its
success). Still all revolts have to start somewhere, with
a certain militancy.
The basic outlines of the position that Geuss advo-
cates are straightforward: political philosophy must
be realist, it must focus on actions and contexts of
actions, it must be historically reflective with respect
acknowledge the craft-like character of political activ-
ity, that politics is an art, a skill which cannot be
Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09) 59
acquired through learning principles (a point famously
stressed by Michael Oakeshott in his essay Rational-
ism in Politics which Geuss does not mention). What
is the sense of this realism? Although one may try
and situate Geuss in relation to, say, Thucydides,
Machiavelli and Hobbes, and his stance certainly
exhibits relationship to all of these thinkers, the key
feature of Geusss realism is its opposition to wishful
thinking in its various epistemic and normative forms.
Indeed, if one had to summarize Geusss objection to
contemporary analytic political philosophy, it would
consist in the charge that, far from disciplining its
thinking in the ways required to avoid the dangers of
wishful thinking, it opens itself up to the temptation of
wishful thinking, regularly succumbs to this temptation
and perhaps even cultivates an intellectual disposition
towards it. As such it can have no serious role to play
in the enterprise of guiding the exercise of political
judgement that is, of political education.
Ill return to Geusss critique of analytical thought
shortly, but lets consider first how Geuss thinks we
should discipline our thought in order to achieve an
appropriately realistic orientation to our political lives.
Geusss proposal is that we take three issues as loci of
reflection: Lenins question Who, whom?, Nietzsches
stress on the differential structure of human valuation,
and Max Webers focus on legitimacy. The first of these
is spelt out in the view that the question Who does
what to whom for whose benefit? (and hence issues
of agency, power and interest) is always central to
political reflection. Two particular features of Geusss
interpretation of this Leninist slogan are worth noting.
First, Geuss readily allows that perception of Xs
power by Y may itself have sufficient power to affect
what Y takes to be the range of reasonable options
available to him. Second, Geuss notes and approves
Lenins extension of the formula who, whom? to
political philosophy itself: works of political theory are
partisan political acts located in particular contexts of
action and, hence, questions about the actual politi-
cal implications of a theory cannot be excluded as in
principle irrelevant.
The salience of Nietzsches emphasis on human
finitude and the differential structure of human valu-
ation on Geusss view relates to the fact that politics
always involves the relationship of agents with limited
powers and resources engaged in having to choose a
course of action, where doing so necessarily rules out
various other possible options. One might sharpen
this point in terms of Jeremy Waldrons notion of the
circumstances of politics as combining disagreement
about what to do and the need for a common decision,
60 Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09)
where Geusss expansion of this specification consists
in stressing (as Robert Dahl has) the political import
of the ordering or sequencing of decision-making, and
the importance of timing in proposing and undertaking
a policy.
Geuss concludes his three orienting issues by remind-
ing us of Webers rather catholic account of political
legitimacy, and, more generally, of the point that rulers
and ruled alike seek mechanisms of legitimation in
terms of which they can justify or contest political
programmes, policies or actions. Thus, in contrast to
the reductive realism that simply attends to interests,
Geusss realism acknowledges the significance of the
evaluative and normative frameworks in terms of which
we try to make sense of, and (de)legitimate, political
actions a point which connects us back again to the
sense in which the articulation of a political theory is
also a political act.
Reflecting on these questions brings us fairly readily
to an appreciation of that in which Geuss takes the
point of political philosophy to consist, namely the
education of political judgement. This judgement is
rapidly reinforced by Geusss delineation of three tasks
of political theory in this realistic spirit: understanding,
evaluation and orientation. However, Geuss adds to this
list two further tasks that political theory may perform:
conceptual innovation and ideology-critique and it
is worth asking how these stand to realistic politi-
cal philosophy. Geusss major example of conceptual
innovation is Hobbess introduction of the concept of
the state as an impersonal public authority distinct
from both rulers and ruled. Geusss point here is that
in the case of a successful conceptual innovation,
such as he judges Hobbess to have been, we come to
occupy a different political reality in the sense that the
innovation reshapes the space of political reasons that
we inhabit: what counts as political, how we under-
stand our political relations to one another, and so on.
Geuss acknowledges that conceptual innovation is a
complicated process in which descriptive, analytic,
normative and aspirational elements are intricately
intertwined and, hence, that what it means in each
case to say that a particular conceptual proposal did
not work is, thus, a complicated question to which,
probably, only a detailed historically specific answer
can be given. He also acknowledges that once an
innovation is introduced, the fact that it was introduced
to address one problem does not prevent it from taking
on a life of its own and playing a wider range of roles
in political life.
In this context, the significance of Geusss reflections
on ideology-critique (which, in fact, simply summarize
what he has written elsewhere on this topic) is to draw
attention to the point that power can shape attitudes,
beliefs, practices, and so on, in ways that affect our
perception of our interests, and to remind us that
political theories can serve as elements or articulations
of ideology. Not the least of the functions of realistic
political theory is to keep theory honest by exposing
its ideological functions particularly when these are
disguised by the claim of the theory to be non-partisan.
The polemical import of this fairly catholic account of
realism in political theory becomes clear in the second
part of Geusss slim volume in which we learn that
Nozick and Rawls, along with any notion of human
rights, represent failures of realism.
In his previous work History and Illusion in Poli-
tics, Geuss mounted an attack on the concept of human
rights that he essentially summarizes here. The basic
thought is this: human rights talk illegitimately runs
together objective and subjective notions of right;
consequently, in the absence of any global scheme of
enforcing such rights that would allow one to operate
with a coherent subjective notion of human rights,
the concept of human rights is incoherent. It is quite
unclear why we should take this argument seriously
since it is a feature of conceptual innovations that
they often merge elements that previous political or
philosophical positions have held apart. This is true,
for example, of Geusss own favoured example of
Hobbess concept of the state. Geuss may object that
Hobbess achievement consisted in giving a coherent
statement of the idea of the state one which involved
radically revising the concept of freedom and that
no such coherence has yet been given to the notion of
human rights. This seems to me both to philosophi-
cally underestimate recent work on human rights and
to make the mistake of thinking that a conceptual
innovation cannot be politically successful unless and
until we have a coherent theory of it but why should
we think that?
What, then, of Geusss criticisms of Nozick and
Rawls? In both cases, Geuss makes great play of the
historical variability of the terms rights and justice
on which Nozick and Rawls develop their respective
arguments, and in doing so reiterates his claim that
political theory must be historically informed. There
are three points to note about the kind of argument
that Geuss makes here. First, it is unclear what being
historically informed means on Geusss account? If
it is to say that reflective awareness of the historicity
of the terms of argumentation must be built into the
argument, then Nozick and Rawls fail the test, but so
equally does Hobbes. If being historically informed
means that one just is historically informed in an
everyday sense, then Hobbes, Nozick and Rawls all
pass. Second, it will be recalled that Geuss stressed the
point that political theory is partisan political speech
and, indeed, partisan political action, in which case
we might consider, for example, the opening line of
Nozicks Anarchy, State, Utopia Individuals have
rights, and there are things no person or group may
do to them (without violating their rights). as an
effective piece of partisan political rhetoric. To say
that Nozick by presenting rights as the self-evident
basis for thinking about politics, actively distracts
people from asking other, highly relevant questions is
not to say anything of which Nozick is unaware since
he is precisely trying to get people to think of politics
in terms of rights. Geuss objects that Nozick does not
address what Geuss considers to be the right questions
but that is fundamentally a political disagreement.
Third, Geusss reflection on realism stressed the impor-
tance of action to actions and contexts of actions, yet
Geuss entirely ignores the historical context of the
acts that Rawls and Nozick perform in publishing their
respective books. In the case of Rawls, for example, it
is important to recognize that this was directed against
the dominance of utilitarian modes of thought which
are prepared to trade off personal liberties against
public welfare. Rawlss argument that utilitarianism
does not take the distinction between persons seriously
is a philosophical point made for thoroughly political
reasons (one might recall that Rawls had been working
on the project that became this book through the
period of the McCarthy era, the Civil Rights Movement
and the Vietnam War) and Rawls was perfectly well
aware that the political force of his argument hung in
significant measure on the philosophical strength of
his critique of utilitarianism.
The basic problem with the second part of Geusss
book is that, driven by his wish to dismiss the kind of
philosophical work in which Rawls and Nozick engage,
he entirely forgets to do what in the first part of the
book he advises us to do, namely, to attend to political
theories as political acts. This is not, of course, to say
that one cannot raise pertinent questions about the
realism of liberal political philosophy or that Geuss
entirely fails to do so but, overall, Geusss critical
strategy is too flip. If Rawls is engaged in conceptual
innovation as Geuss admits he may be considered to
be, Geuss might have sensibly recalled his own earlier
reflections on the difficulty of assessing both the
success or failure of such innovations and the reasons
for their success or failure.
David Owen
Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09) 61
Having a laugh
Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea
Casson, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2008. 195 pp., 9.95 pb., 978 1 584 35050 7.
GSOH: this now-ubiquitous acronym has its origins in
the personal ad pages of the English-speaking world.
Any voyeuristic glance at the reams of such notices,
or on various heavily subscribed dating websites,
or the social-networking sites which have borrowed
some of their conventions, would make clear just how
fundamental to current conceptions of desirability is
the assumed possession of a good sense of humour.
The sense of humour, we are told, is that which
artificial intelligence encounters as the absolute limit
of its project: it cannot be programmed or modelled
within existing cybernetic paradigms; it cannot be
faked. In a related way, the lack of such a sense in
human beings is registered as symptomatic of one
of the most contemporary of newly visible maladies:
autism. To be a fully realized human subject and not
a failed simulacrum is to possess a sense of humour.
To say of another, s/he has no sense of humour, is
perhaps, less damning today than it might once have
been, precisely because the lack of such a sense is now
regarded as a pitiable disability rather than a mere
character deficiency.
Perhaps surprisingly, for one of the heroes of
Autonomia, it is this phenomenon rather than the
interlocking and intensifying networks of post-post-
Fordist capitalism with which one might assume neo-
autonomists to be currently preoccupied which Paolo
Virnos new book sheds most light on. The largest
section of Multitude: Between Innovation and Nega-
tion is taken up with a consideration of the logic and
special discursive status of jokes, and some observa-
tions on that status which offer powerful insights as
to why a facility for them might be so valuable in our
postmodern context. The joke, for Virno (and in this
he draws heavily on both Wittgenstein and Aristotle),
is the point at which is revealed the contingency of
a norm, the gap between a social rule and its own
inability to found or guarantee itself, or the instability
of the boundary between a general grammatical rule
and a specific, empirical instantiation thereof.
Jokes therefore exhibit the capacity to invent and
reinvent which is constitutive of all human creativ-
ity. Virno makes the conventionally neo-autonomist
assumption that this capacity is somehow more exposed,
closer to the surface of everyday life, and more fun-
damental to prevailing social processes today than
in previous epochs. Hardt and Negri, similarly, posit
62 Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09)
communication as both the central force of twenty-
first-century capitalism and the basis for the potential
power of the multitude. However, Virnos approach to
his themes is, in most respects, very different. This is
not a Deleuzo-Spinozian exercise in radical monism,
but a meditation on the linguistic event which is much
closer in tone and approach to the Derrida of Limited
Inc. or the Lyotard of The Postmodern Condition
and The Differend. Indeed, given Virnos sustained
engagement with Wittgenstein, and with a very similar
range of themes, the lack of any reference at all to
Lyotards Wittgensteinian phase is surprising. At the
same time, there is a good deal of overlap between
Virnos reflections on jokes and Rortys reflections on
the value of irony, but the different context and the
different political orientation of the discussion generate
some interestingly different results.
Crucially, Virnos account of linguistic creativity
as an inherently human trait is explicitly distinguished
from Chomskys superficially similar assertions.
Chomsky derives from his account the assumption
that human nature is basically good (cooperative,
sociable, egalitarian), an assumption which has left
him seemingly incapable of developing any account of
contemporary power relations more sophisticated than
a story of perversely nasty elites lying to an innocently
malleable public. Virno, on the other hand, situates
himself in that tradition including Hobbes, Freud
and Schmitt (none of whom he wants to ally himself
with directly) which sees in political institutions
and the regularities of human behaviour the means
of restricting and containing an inherently destructive
and anti-social set of tendencies; tendencies which are
indissolubly bound up with the inherently linguistic
capacity for negation.
In the books intriguing final section, Virno brings
together this tradition of thought with recent research
into the neurological basis of sociality, suggesting that
while a certain capacity to recognize and mime the
affective states of others may be programmed into
the human brain, it is precisely the linguistic capacity
to negate which means that the linguistic animal is
the species capable of not recognizing his own kind.
The evil that humans do to each other is therefore
an inevitable outcome of that very open-endedness
that is inherent in the creative capacity of language,
an open-endedness that can always lead to a refusal
of that recognition which more fundamental neuro-
corporeal processes might otherwise render instinctive
and unavoidable. The clich that all humour has a
negative or hostile dimension must lend some credence
to this perspective, linking it convincingly to Virnos
discussion of jokes. This is a fascinating argument,
although the apparent affinities and discontinuities
between this position and the entire Lacanian rubric
according to which it is the No of the Father which
institutes the Subjects relation to the Symbolic are,
disappointingly, not alluded to at all.
What is it, then, that restrains this violence, and
makes human sociability possible? One of Virnos
main objectives is to find an answer to this question
which is not Hobbess. For Virno, it must be possible
to refute the claim that it is only in the sovereignty of
the self-founding state that the basis for any possible
society lies. In this although again, he makes no
explicit reference to their work Virno engages a
similar set of issues to those which have concerned
Laclau and Mouffe in recent years. As in Virno, one
of their key themes has been the need for radical
politics to rid itself of all naive faith in the positive,
rational and reasonable nature of human collectivities
and to emphasize the constitutively antagonistic dimen-
sion of socio-linguistic relations. Where his position
differs from theirs is in his rejection, and their implicit
acceptance, of Hobbess logic. Whereas for Laclau and
Mouffe democracy can only institutionalize a void,
an empty space of perpetual contestation, in the place
of the sovereign, for Virno there must be something
other than the arbitrary institution of sovereignty which
makes human social life possible.
In an attempt to name this something, Virno
mobilizes the Pauline concept of katechon early on
in the book and again in the final conclusion. This
term designates a kind of power of ritual which defers
destruction without actually eliminating its danger. It
is mobilized by Virno in the context of his discussion
of the difference between politically instituted rules
and norms and other types of regularity in human
behaviour which might ward off evil according to a
different logic. Katechon, for Virno, is that which
performs a contingent and punctual task: that
of resolving once again the connection between
regularity and rules, between a mode of behaviour
common to all human beings and positive norms.
This kind of connection, upon which the effective
application of rules depends (not to mention the
possibility of changing the rules) must be validated
over and over again.
The resonance between this conception and Derridas
reflections on the iterative and performative citation-
ality of the law and to some extent, all discourse
is only reinforced by Virnos direct engagement
with issues of legal authority and his almost wholly
Derridean characterization of them. As with Derrida
also (to whom, once again, Virno never refers), the
political stakes of the discussion are at times somewhat
oblique, although one very crude extrapolation would
be to observe that katechon might be that very level
of human social life at which it becomes
possible to observe that people get along
together perfectly well without the state
(or any externally imposed systems of nor-
mativity) guiding them to do so. The fact
that David Cameron has made precisely
this observation the basis for his recent
attempts to formulate a new political
philosophy for British Conservatism may
intrigue some readers, but it also bears out
Virnos thesis that something about the
crisis of the modern state makes this fact
of human existence now visible to all. As
such it constitutes the terrain upon which
many political battles must be fought.
The word that does not appear in Virnos lexicon,
although it seems to haunt the entire discussion of
katechon, normativity and invention, is culture. On
the one hand, Virno seems to want to mobilize a
notion of regularity that is explicitly cross-cultural
and hence pre-cultural, identifying universal patterns
to the behaviour of the linguistic animal which are
simply logical consequences of the need to contain the
violence of language, and the dangerous opening to
the world that it involves. On the other hand, katechon
might just be a name for culture-as-such, the condition
of possibility of all subsequent cultural differences, but
also the condition of impossibility of any such differ-
ences being absolute; the condition of possibility of
Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09) 63
both the antagonism which languages power to negate
inevitably generates and the institutions which, before
or beyond any notion of sovereignty, make sociability
possible. Of course, the Derridean problematic of dif-
france, of an infinite relationality which precedes any
firm distinction between affirmation/presentation and
negation, would be somewhat different from Virnos
idea of katechon as restraining the destructive capacity
of humanity, inherent in its use of language; but the
points of contiguity would be interesting to explore.
In so far as Virno makes any strong political claims
in the book, they reside in his classically autonomist
preference for the idea of exodus as a political strat-
egy. Alluding to the third party whom Freud says
must always be present, or at least imagined, for a
joke to be effective (the audience, the public, the world
beyond the dyad), Virno associates this with a political
tendency to move beyond any existing terms of refer-
ence or conflict to find a new mode of being: a new
people and a new Earth, as Deleuze and Guattari might
have said. Again, the affinities with deconstruction are
striking, although here one might mobilize a political
objection to Virnos position either in a deconstructive
register or from a position much closer to Virnos
home. If, as Hardt and Negri famously insist, there is
no outside to Empire, then where might the promised
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64 Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09)
land be found? If politics must be thought, as the later
Guattari insisted, ecologically, with reference to the
full interdependence of life on Earth and the interlock-
ing elements of Integrated World Capitalism, then
how can any strategy of mere escape prove effective?
On a round planet, there is only so far a line of flight
can take you. Virno is far from alone in his fondness
for the idea of exodus, which is referred to directly by
Hardt and Negri and endlessly, if only implicitly, by
Deleuze and Guattari. In all of those cases the problem
remains acute: how to think beyond the limitations of
received modes of thought and Manichaean modes of
politics, without falling as Negri so nearly does into
the trap of millenarianism, valorizing and romanticiz-
ing a position of perpetual defeat.
But there can be little doubt that avoiding this dead
end must always involve an ongoing and undogmatic
attempt to think the most challenging and inescap-
able issues of political philosophy. In a world and a
human species ravaged by neoliberalism, the question
of what does and doesnt make collective life and
innovation possible at all is clearly one such question.
It is a question which Multitude addresses in a most
distinctive and persuasive way, and the questions it
leaves open are not ones that we should ever hope to
finally resolve.
Jeremy Gilbert
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news
Rebellion of Greek youth
The rebellion of Greek youth in December 2008 has
already secured a place in the history of modern social
movements, not because of the extent of the rioting,
but rather because it came as an expression of deeper
social tensions, political ruptures and ideological dis-
placements amidst a growing capitalist crisis. In short,
it looked like a sign of things to come.
Clearly the killing of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigor
opoulos by a police officer acted as a catalyst for the
various forms of social discontent already brewing
in Greek society. First of all, the education system
is in crisis. A highly competitive system of entrance
exams for higher education, requiring huge amounts
of study and expensive tutorial courses, leads only
to a university degree that does not guarantee secure
employment. The dire state of education is exacer-
bated by attempts to implement the so-called Bologna
process reforms, which include various downgradings
of university degrees such as delinking academic
titles and professional qualifications, the introduction
of harsher disciplinary measures and an intensified
pace of study. In addition, there are continued attempts
to legalize private higher education in Greece, despite
an explicit constitutional ban on private universities, a
ban that was reinforced by the struggle of university
students against the proposed amendment of the con-
stitution back in 200607.
The attacks on youth and education cannot be
separated from the economic crisis. With the Greek
economy sliding into recession, households are facing
stagnant wages, job insecurity and rising indebtedness,
compounded by a policy of strict fiscal austerity.
The prospect of massive lay-offs in the near future
aggravates things, as does the Greek governments
commitment to highly unpopular pensions reforms and
privatization of state-run companies.
The long period of state repression from the
defeat of the Left in the Civil War (194649) up to
the period of military rule (196774) gives hostility
towards the police and state a particular inflection and
prevents it from being mere delinquency. Elements of
popular radicalism and militancy, originating in the
post-dictatorship radicalism of the 1970s, persist and
are fuelled by subsequent waves of protest, especially
among students. As a result the occupation of public
buildings, especially universities, and defiant stances
against forces of order gain a broader legitimacy
than perhaps elsewhere. For many years attempts to
discredit and eliminate these enduring collective rep-
resentations in the name of modernization have been
the main preoccupation of the organic intellectuals
of Greek capitalism.
The rebellion managed to gain the support of seg-
ments of the workforce, such as younger workers,
teachers and people in precarious posts of intellectual
labour. However, in other strata of the working class
and the traditional petty bourgeoisie, insecurity has led
to more conservative reflexes.
Interpreting the December rebellion as a mere
expression of rising insecurity, social tensions, growing
inequality and state repression would miss both its
importance and its originality. This particular rebel-
lion tended to unite different segments of youth. It
included both students in higher education and young
people facing social exclusion. It happened in all kinds
of schools and neighbourhoods. No part of Greece was
immune. It included Greeks and immigrants. This can
be equated neither with the French student movement
against the First Employment Contract nor with the
banlieue riots: it was more like a combination of both.
For the first time it was not just the student move-
ment but the whole youth movement that dominated
the social scene, forcing political analysts and com-
mentators to come to terms with a neglected social
subject. The movement accelerated the rearticulation
of a collective identity among Greek youth. This
vaunted struggle, solidarity, hostility towards author-
ity and the traditional political scene, also conveyed
a deeply anti-systemic demand for radical change in
all aspects of social life. As such, the rebellion had
elements of an articulated political discourse and was
not a blind social explosion. One could sense this
not only in tracts by leftist or anarchist groups but
also in the way students expressed their rage against
what they called the policies that kill our dreams.
This political character was similarly evident in the
appeal of slogans such as down with the government
of murderers. Even the most extreme cases of street
violence, such as the mass destruction of banks and
retail stores in the centre of Athens on 8 December,
were directed mainly against symbols of economic
power.
Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09) 65
 Facing a movement of such intensity and extent the
Greek government found itself in an awkward position.
Resorting to further police repression and exceptional
measures, such as forbidding demonstrations, risked
provoking even more violence. Trying to mobilize the
silent majority threatened to turn into an open call for
far-right violence (something that actually happened in
Patras with neo-Nazis posing as angry shopkeepers
alongside the police). Attempting to create a general
consensus around its policies pushed even the neo-
liberal socialists of PASOK to insist on the govern-
ments resignation. Consequently, it tried a combination
of waiting for the Christmas holidays and promising a
harsher police stance in the future, including enforcing
the right of police to enter university campuses in
violation of the university sanctuary.
As a true social explosion, representing a condensa-
tion of all the contradictions of Greek capitalism, and
with youth acting as the weakest link in the chain,
the rebellion was simultaneously the result of deeper
social processes and an unexpected event violently
accelerating the apprehension of the current historical
conjuncture and its potential. This is why it acted as
a litmus test for all the groupings on the Greek Left.
The Communist Party, despite its anti-capitalist and
anti-imperialist rhetoric, exercised the deep-rooted
conservatism of the traditional petty-bourgeois stratum
that forms a large segment of its electorate. It acted as
a party of order, accusing the youths in the streets of
being provocateurs. The Coalition of the Radical Left
(SYRIZA), despite its verbal support of the rebellion, in
many instances succumbed to the pressure to condemn
violence and failed to offer a radical alternative other
than its reference to a democratic solution through
a government of the Left; a proposition that reflects
66 Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09)
both its reformism and its electoralism. The groups
of the anti-capitalist Left were at the forefront of the
demonstrations and took crucial initiatives such as the
effort to bring university students onto the street, the
mobilization of union rank-and-file and the insistence
on holding a mass rally on 10 December, when both
the trade-union bureaucracy and the parties of the
parliamentary Left capitulated to the demands of the
government and cancelled a scheduled rally on the day
of the general strike. But they have also failed so far to
offer a genuine political alternative and did not manage
actually to transform the various forms of activism into
a coherent political mobilization and project. Anarchist
and autonomous groups for the first time opted for
more political forms of activism, instead of classical
Black Bloc tactics, thus broadening their following.
But they also demonstrated the limits to their tribal
forms of organization aversion to mass politics.
It is obvious that social explosions such as the one
experienced by Greece pose a great challenge for the
Left. Given the deepening global economic crisis,
more explosions might be expected elsewhere. The
insistence of capitalist elites on a fuite en avant tactic
of even more flexible labour markets, harsher fiscal
austerity and more privatization can only aggravate
social tensions. The question is how to transform
social discontent into conscious class antagonism,
how to turn the movement into a true social force.
This entails thinking about political representation or
translation. But thinking about politicization either
in terms of a government change or in traditional terms
of revolutionary verbalism misses the point. Nor is
it a question of a simple change of policies, even if
tangible gains, for example in educational policy, are
more than necessary. What is needed is the twenty-
first-century equivalent of a democratic revolution, a
set of political goals and values that would represent
a clear break with actually existing neoliberalism.
That could include: reversing all policies that devalue
living labour; re-establishing the public character of
all collective goods and services (education, health,
social security and environment); re-establishing the
right to mass collective action against all forms of
state repression, discipline, surveillance; refusal to
participate in imperialist campaigns; disobedience in
the face of all forms of economic discipline originating
from international organizations and treaties. Such
demands can open up the way to pose radical social
change as a historical possibility.
Panagiotis Sotiris
Peace, legality,
democracy
The riots and protests that broke out in Athens and
other Greek cities on the night of 6 December were
unprecedented in both character and magnitude.
Despite the states attempt to obscure the political char-
acter of the events, it was clear that the country was
facing not simply a reaction to police brutality and the
death of a young boy, but the revolutionary desire of a
nascent radical political subject. The troublemakers,
commented Prime Minister Karamanlis, proved once
more that their target is social peace, legality and
democracy itself. It was probably the first time he
had stated the truth. For the crowd that took to the
streets targeted precisely these three pillars of Greeces
political reality.
Social peace. The December events did not simply
challenge the mythical social peace, but unleashed a
political antagonism that escaped the established and
cosy relationship between the state, on one hand, and the
institutional workers union (GSEE) and leftist parties,
on the other. As a pamphlet of the ASOEE (Athens
University of Economics and Business) occupation put
it succinctly: the Varkiza peace agreement has been
broken. We are in civil war once again a reference to
the agreement that attempted to end the Greek civil war
in 1945. Despite the exaggerated nature of the claim,
this grasped the flavour of the events. It was the first
time since the insurrection at the Polytechnic School
in 1973 that political antagonism had so disturbed the
social peace, one that has in fact been at the service
of neoliberal development and modernization.
The most recent focus in the effort to consolidate
this social peace was the 2004 Olympic Games, seized
by the Greek ruling class as an opportunity to express
the image of a harmonious and modernized country.
The reality behind the facade, however, has been
the very conditions that rendered the social peace
extremely fragile: an average salary of 500700 for
the majority of the population in their twenties and
thirties (the 700 generation); high unemployment
and a lack of social benefits; an increase in temporary
work combined with a total lack of union rights; an
increasing number of people living below the poverty
line; and the pillaging of households by the banks in
short, a widening and deepening of social inequalities
in a society that thrives on authoritarianism, nepotism
and corruption.
Legality. Greeces political and social scene is made
up of corrupt politicians (four ministers have been
forced to resign due to their involvement in financial
scandals); a scandal-ridden church with monks who
have at their disposal astronomical amounts of money
and engage in business deals with the state; a supine
judiciary; and an elite of senior officials, entrepreneurs
and managers who accumulate wealth through mega-
deals and bribery. The resignation last September of
the marine minister George Boulgarakis revealed an
accumulated fortune of millions of euros, some fifty
buildings across the country and ownership of offshore
companies, all built and managed in a way that guaran-
teed tax advantages and profiteering within the limits
of the law. Defending himself against accusations of
unethical behaviour the minister explained that every-
thing that is legal is also ethical a phrase which
expressed perfectly the notion of legality to which the
ruling class holds.
The crowd that took to the streets of the Greek cities
opposed precisely that notion of legality that allowed
ministers and entrepreneurs to grow rich with absolute
impunity. The revolt, then, was not the criminal action
of a small minority but the ethical-political action of a
nascent political subject that opposes the states legality
and prefigures, albeit embryonically, a different kind
of legality and a different kind of order.
Democracy. In an attempt to criminalize and dis-
guise the appearance of this political subject, and to
save face abroad, the countrys secretary-general of
information called the events a hijacking of democ-
racy and described the rioters as a small, marginal
group of a few hundred extremists. In fact, the small
marginal group consisted of thousands of protest-
ers in Athens and other cities, and was made up of
workers, teachers, artists, students, immigrants and the
Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09) 67
unemployed. The hijacking of democracy was pre-
cisely the unexpected coming-together of the various
elements of this nascent political subject, one which
demanded not merely reforms or the resignation
of the government, as the parties of the institutional
left did, but the abolition of the feeble parliamentary
system and the democracy of cronyism and impotence.
Burn, burn the brothel-parliament, was one of the
main slogans heard in the streets, which was followed
by several unsuccessful attempts to do precisely that.
Although it is true that there was no clear political
agenda (but why should there be?) one needed only to
hear the slogans, listen to the radio broadcasts of the
occupations, or read the pamphlets and manifestos in
order to see that the protesters were united under a
very simple banner: Political, social and economic
equality for all. Referring to the events in Greece,
the French president, obviously alarmed that the riots
could spread to France, argued that in a democracy,
when the people want a change this goes through the
ballot box. In a democracy, it is not the street that
decides. Sarkozy betrayed how unconvincing was the
Greek governments attempt to explain the events as
the result of a small violent minority: he was admitting
that what was at issue in Athens was change itself.
We should therefore see this crowd as an embryonic
radical political subject that is emerging in the space
produced by economic exploitation on one hand and
the selling out of the unionism and the parliamentary
Left on the other. The massive increase in low-paid
part-time labour, coupled with an increase in price
in all basic commodities, has produced a new army
of low-paid workers, very often highly skilled and
university-educated, who live on very little money and
are forced to rely heavily on parental support. This new
middle-class proletariat enjoys no labour rights, lives
in total work insecurity, carries out unpaid overtime
under the threat of job loss, and sees absolutely no
prospects in the future, in the light of planned social
insurance reforms that would guarantee that many
will not even get a pension. With no representation in
the institutional workers union (GSEE), this army of
workers is becoming politicized in a slow movement
towards the formation of independent, autonomous
and anti-hierarchical syndicates and groupings. To this
new proletariat we need to add the already politicized
and autonomously organized workers, the unemployed,
the politicized student body, which last year opposed
and prevented the privatization of education, and a
combative grouping of immigrants.
The magnitude of the events in Athens was the
product of the coming-together of these various sectors
68 Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 20 09)
of the working class with varying degrees of politiciza-
tion and a diversity of political ideas that, nevertheless,
share the same anti-plutocratic values and mistrust of
political parties. The attempt by the political class to
criminalize the events thus aimed at masking not only
the political character of the riots but also the class
composition of the rioters. Everything that showed
the class character of the events was thereby left out
of the picture.
An important characteristic of this nascent political
subject is that it assumes the necessity of some kind of
political violence as a means of class struggle. In the
years after the overthrow of the military dictatorship,
political violence was linked to political killings or
bombings associated with clandestine organizations,
or small anarchist groups engaged in street fights with
police. What was different in the December events was
the fact that thousands of rioters took to the streets.
And, despite the fact that not all protesters engaged in
acts of violence, it was clear that there was a general
acceptance or tolerance of violence, as was seen in the
applauding of the torching of banks and stores.
Given all this, it came as no surprise that the Com-
munist Party (KKE) sided with the extreme right-wing
and nationalist party of LAOS, the ultra-conservative
government of New Democracy and the centre party
of PASOK in condemning the events. The only party
that seemed to grasp the political character of the
events and avoided criminalizing them (though it did
condemn the violence) was the leftist SYRIZA. Yet
SYRIZA failed to recognize the class nature of the
subject, preferring instead to talk of the insurrection
of the youth an ideological category that displaces
the political subject from class to age, and so seriously
misrepresents the events. The media, in turn, performed
another displacement, from the category of youth to
that of students, allowing themselves to engage in
unfocused and hypocritical criticism of politicians
and other grown-ups and to make vague statements
concerning a better future for our children.
Although it is difficult to predict to what extent this
political subject will develop and the direction it will
take, it can nonetheless be argued that the revolt was
an important moment in its constitution. With a differ-
ent approach to political violence, employing a more
flexible language than the rigidly structured discourse
of the institutional Left, and displaying bold political
imagination, the crowd that took to the streets made
clear that the balance of political forces in Greece has
changed.
Mihalis Mentinis