Huang excerpt

 

The equivalence of undead passivity, potentiality qua impotentiality and

messianism in the case of Bartleby has its sonorous echoes in The Open. In the

opening chapter of The Open, for example, Agamben refers to the miniatures in a

Hebrew Bible in the Ambrosian Library in Milan, which for him represent the

righteous on the last day as figures with animal heads. We would be justified in

reading these “representatives of the remnant of Israel, . . . of the righteous who are

still alive at the moment of the Messiah’s coming” (2) as the undead who inhabit the

zone of indistinction between humanity and animality. Such undeadness also stands

out in Agamben’s explication of Heideggerian “profound boredom,” which takes

the animal’s captivation by the environment as a point of departure. What appears

to be an ontological enclosure or “poverty in world” takes on a new ethical light.

That is, the human subject in a state of boredom first feels left in a state of

emptiness in the face of the indifference of all the things around. In the next phase

of its boredom, the subject, while being held in suspense or in a state of oblivion to

concrete space and time, encounters the refusal of the possibilities of Dasein, or the

moment when all its own unrealized possibilities are announced to the subject.

Ultimately, Agamben reads into this profound boredom, which captivates the

subject in a state of indistinction, in what Agamben calls “a potential-not-to, . . . an

impotentiality,” that is, an “originary possibilitization” that makes possibilities

possible without pointing to any concrete possibilities (67).

Now we may see that Agamben’s messianism, be it figured in homo sacer,

Bartleby, or Christ, passes beyond the domain of any specific religion. Profusely

citing Judaism, Christianity, and Shiite Islam in The Time That Remains, Agamben

hollows out the specific religious contents of the messianic so as to preserve the

latter’s potentiality qua impotentiality. With all the above discussions of potentiality

in mind, we will have no difficulty in understanding Agamben’s messianic reading 

of St. Paul’s letters in The Time That Remains. Pauline texts for Agamben aim to

resolve all problems regarding what it means to live in the Messiah, what the

messianic life is and what the structure of messianic time is. Once again, it is the

undead logic of the remnant that persists throughout The Time That Remains. First

of all, messianic time, the contracted “time that remains” (between Christ’s

resurrection and the apocalyptic completion to come), designates neither secular,

chronological time nor eternal time (or the end of time), but a singular interruption

of both. It introduces a remainder into, but exceeds the division between, the two

times. It does not come as a transcendental absolute from outside but as “a time

within time” (67), an Event that transforms the chronological time from within and

makes it out of joint with itself: hence, making “as not” (hōs mē) possible (68). That

is to say, the messianic seizure of time comes neither as a golden age nor as a

completion of totality; it breaks with any such conceptions of time as homogeneous

time, the process of degeneration, cyclical time, and dialectical and directional

progress (Roberts 77-78): simply put, it is both non-teleological and

non-progressive. The messianic converts the “now-time” into a moment, an opening

for our actions (de la Durantaye 302), or “an immanent transcendence” signaling

that “the future is ‘already here,’ insofar as the revolutionary event can break

through at ‘any time’” (Roberts 77; emphasis in original).9 In fact, near the end of

Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben, in a Benjaminian anti-teleological fashion,

                                                      

9 Regarding the exigency of the now-time, we are unlikely to bypass its Benjaminian

undertones, though it is a topic more appropriate to another project than my current one:

In reality, there is not a moment that would not carry with it its revolutionary

chance—provided only that it is defined in a specific way, namely as the chance

for a completely new resolution of a completely new problem. For the

revolutionary thinker, the peculiar revolutionary chance offered by every

historical moment gets its warrant from the political situation. But it is equally

grounded, for this thinker, in the right of entry which the historical moment

enjoys vis-à-vis a quite distinct chamber of the past, one which up to that point

has been closed and locked. (Benjamin 402; emphasis in original)

The messianic, revolutionary intervention in the now-time, for Benjamin, coincides with entering

into the past and redeeming the repressed memories of the past of the oppressed and defeated. On

top of this, the dialectical image unexpectedly “flashes up in a moment of danger” (Benjamin 391)

or occurs in the moment of a standstill like “ball lightning that runs across the whole horizon of

the past” (403). These speculations are perfectly justified by Agamben’s recurrent invocations of

Benjamin in The Time That Remains, particularly regarding the exigency to remain faithful to the

unforgettable (39-42), and his discussion of the gaze that fulfills and puts an end to the past in the

freezing moment of the now-time in Potentialities (153). For both Benjamin and Agamben, in a

word, the undead past has a claim on the weak messianic power at issue. Han-yu Huang 187

already takes this messianic time as a remnant, as a time that remains:

[At the center of historical processes] lies an irreducible disjunction

in which each term, stepping forth in the place of a remnant, can bear

witness. What is truly historical is not what redeems time in the

direction of the future or even the past; it is, rather, what fulfills time

in the excess of a medium. The messianic Kingdom is neither the

future (millennium) nor the past (the golden age): it is, instead, a

remaining time. (159; emphasis in original)

This time as a remnant in excess of, “as not,” itself also pertains to the

ontological change in the subject. For Agamben, Christ’s resurrection, a

revolutionary event as Paul preaches, revokes a Christian citizen’s vocation (or

“calling”) by way of “crucifying” it. This crucified and revoked vocation does not

have any positive content; it has, in the logic of potentiality, vocation as its object.

In a similar vein, the messianic vocation forces the subject to live “as not” (hōs mē)

itself, to call into question every world-condition by way of adhering to it: the

messianic vocation is, then, “the revocation of every vocation” (Agamben, Time 23).

The subject who lives in messianic time is thus ontologically dislocated and

becomes a remnant in excess of itself and out of joint with itself (41, 52-53), out of

joint with any socially constructed identity and reality, with linear time and “the

history of progress.” As testified by his own passage from regal grandeur to

creaturely insignificance, Paul’s messianic vocation invokes a sense of power from

weakness, a “God without sovereignty,”10 who stands in solidarity with the poor

                                                      

10 “God without sovereignty” is an essential part of Caputo’s postmetaphysical, deconstructive

theology that arises in the wake of the 1960s’ “death of God” theology (Robbins, Radical 174-75).

The death of God theology, as voiced by Thomas J. J. Altizer, William Hamilton, and Gabriel

Vahanian, seeks to sever theology from its traditional moral-metaphysical and ontotheological

bearings. As Robbins explains, “This radical death of God theology . . . represents a critical and

prophetic voice in the midst of a culture and faith in crisis, one that was moving away from the

old religious certainties and assurances” (“Introduction” 9). It helped to lay the foundation for

postmodernist critique in general and, by incorporating deconstructive philosophy, gave rise to

postmodern theology (Robbins, Radical 7). Whether this death of God theology and the

subsequent various radical theologies are sufficiently political or authentically radical, as Robbins

wonders, remains a debatable topic beyond the scope of this paper. More relevant to the concerns

of this paper is the fact that Caputo, in his seminal Weakness of God: A Theology of Event, aligns

his theology of event or “theology without theology” with Benjamin’s “weak messianic force” as

well as Derrida’s “religion without religion” (7), which fits Agamben’s persistent efforts to free

religious faith of its positivist contents and, hence, preserve its potentiality and weak messianic

power. Caputo’s theology of event, as an offspring of deconstructive “spectral hermeneutics,” is 

and the outcast (Robbins, Radical 7, 175-76) rather than wielding violent political

power to cast them out. The messianic community and political agency thus formed

are those of neither the majority nor the minority; rather, they are closer to the

Marxian proletariat and Rancière’s “non-parts” (Agamben, Time 57-58), those who

remain uncounted by the sovereign power and who cannot be reduced to any class,

communitarian affiliation or cultural intelligibility. Thus we see the intersection of

the Christian and Marxist revolutionary tradition in Agamben, 11 though his

alignment with either of these is far from self-evident.

On the other hand, this interruption or seizure of time and this messianic

calling suggest a kind of inoperativity (katargeō), one which deactivates the subject

                                                                                                                                    

congenial to Agamben’s theology in the way that it stresses the ghostly look, potentiality, and

irreducible possibility of the event, which constantly presses for expression but resists being

contracted into any finite form, instantiation or order (Death 50-51, 55). The task of a theology

like Caputo’s, according to Robbins, is not to “restore transcendence over against the immanent

logic of secular reason” but to follow the way of the Christ who is “thrust inextricably into this

world” (Radical 175). But Agamben’s congeniality to Caputo’s and other versions of negative

theology stops at his biopolitical views of the realm of the undead, the zone of indistinction

between life and death.

11 For more on this, see Roberts. Roberts’s work offers a comparative reading of Agamben,

Badiou, and Žižek within the dialectical tradition in which, according to him, Christianity and

Marxism easily fit: in spite of their divergence, all three theorists hold on to the universalism of

the break and the messianic destruction of history as progress and eternal recurrence; they are all

concerned about how the past is redeemed and recognized in the present in order to be wakeful to

the future. Roberts’s reading, nevertheless, does not particularly address the undead, which, as

this essay argues, is the necessary ground of the theological, emancipatory project that does not

lose sight of biopolitical conditions. Put in more explicit terms, the undead deactivates, disrupts,

and remains in excess of the process of symbolization and historicization; this first and foremost

must not be foreclosed in our authentic understanding of the radical potentiality of the Christian

and Marxist dialectical tradition. For example, in spite of his “fighting, militant universalism,”

which appears to be diametrically opposed to the Agambenian weak messianism, Žižek draws on

a variety of sources, such as Schelling, Lacan, and quantum physics, to formulate a dialectical

materialism grounded in the logic of “non-all,” the inherent gap, and indivisible remainder: that is,

the logic of the undead. Obviously, Žižek orients the undead to more downright Marxist-inflected

conceptions of reality, identification, subjectivity, and class struggle. As Žižek straightforwardly

puts in “The Spectre of Ideology,” class struggle “designates the very antagonism that prevents

the objective (social) reality from constituting itself as a self-enclosed whole” (74). Such non-all

undeadness pertains to the ontogenetic kernel of the subject: the subject emerges out of but is

never reducible to the material Real. The tendency to immaterialization, spiritualization or

spectralization gaps and undeadens the material Real from within and makes it something in

excess of, out of joint with itself—in other words, it doubles the condition of the subject’s

freedom (Johnston 82-83). Thus I am arguing that any comparative or differential reading of

Agamben, Žižek or any other in alignment with the so-called dialectical tradition can fruitfully

take the undead as their shared ground but, at the same time, as that which resists or remains in

excess of any imposed unity. Han-yu Huang 189 by making it inoperative rather than 

annihilating it (Agamben, Time 43). Agamben’s

task, in other words, is “how to conceive a law beyond law rather than a law

without law” (Crockett 118). He sees in Paul’s use of aphōrismenos (separation or

division) a presupposition of the law or a need to grasp the complex structure of the

law in order to be separated from it, to make it other than itself or, as indicated by

Thanos Zartaloudis when addressing Agamben’s act of profanation, “to eliminate

the negative division of law and make it ‘coincide with social praxis’” (281).12

Here, once again, we should not fail to grasp the logic of the remnant at work. In

Agamben’s own words: “[M]essianic division introduces a remnant into the law’s

overall division of the people, and Jews and non-Jews are constitutively ‘not all’”

(Agamben, Time 50); it is “an operation that divides the divisions of the law

themselves and renders them inoperative, without ever reaching any final ground”

(52). This operation opens up an indestructible, resurrectional realm of radical

universality beyond the normative force of the law, rather than one without the law

as such, and ultimately brings about the “the fulfillment and the complete

consummation of the Law” (Agamben, Homo Sacer 56). As Eleanor Kaufman

explains, “[T]he very act of wanting to overturn the law . . . is symptomatic of an

inability to escape the thought structures of the law and the state” (43). The

messianic political subject thus formed acts in a kind of quietest disinterestedness in

the outcome of actions (Griffiths 190-91), or a kind of undead, Bartlebyan

potentiality to not-be, not-think, and not-write, or a finding of power in weakness, a

departing from the supremacy of will.

If God has always been seen from the traditional Western theological

perspective as potentiality par excellence actualized in His act of creation,

Agamben’s messianism thinks “impotentiality as the limit of potentiality” and aims

not so much at the creation of a new world as at decreation (as the limit of creation):

this, and nothing more, is exactly what Crockett names as the task for today’s

theology (57). However, the non-apocalyptic and constitutively ambiguous

messianism at which Agamben arrives through the undead figures of homo sacer,

the Muselmann, and Bartleby has received a variety of critical responses. This

uneven reception could be attributed to Agamben’s figural thinking. Figures

                                                      

12 Besides, through the remnant as I am discussing here, one may understand the messianic

deactivation or profanation of the law, as Dickinson suggests, in linkage with children’s play. As

an image recurring in Agamben’s works such as State of Exception, Infancy and History, and

Profanations, children play with objects not in the way that adults use them, and then discard

them when they are no longer needed, just as in messianic time when humanity can profane, play

with, and free the law from value, humanity, and sacredness, as well as from its binding with the

violence of sovereign power (Agamben, Profanations 76; Dickinson 84-85). 

embody for him the truth about our bare life in the world of modern biopolitics,

where “we are all virtually homines sacri” (Homo Sacer 115)—for instance,

Agamben has designated the Muselmann as the true witness and his marginalization

and exclusion in the camp as paradigm of modern politics. Many critics, however,

see Agambenian figures as rhetorical devices employed to wake readers up to the

dire biopolitical conditions around them. 13 Other critics, like Leland de la

Durantaye, may caution us against exaggerating the scope of homo sacer and see

this as “a figure from the remote past who brings into focus a disturbing element in

our political present—and points toward a possible future” (211). These critical

responses are mostly enunciated in the name of terminological exactness and

historiographic vigor. However divergent, they either refuse to go to the limit and

see that boundaries or oppositions, including the one between singularity and

universality, no longer hold in the undead Agambenian threshold figures, or they

leave unexplained the concept of messianic political potentiality, agency, and

community.

The point is that Agamben is always aiming at that which remains in excess of

historical specificities, for his theological project takes biopolitics as the ontological

dimension of human existence. Thus for Agamben, if any redemption is possible, it

will arise from that which undeadens us, rather than in any ahistorical, apolitical

utopia. Critics like Patrick O’Connor may take Agamben’s philosophical output as a

repetition of traditional metaphysical constructs of a redeemed life “impervious to

transformation and temporality” (336, 348), a happy life “over which sovereignty

and right no longer have any hold” (Agamben, Homo Sacer 115). However, I

believe we may see the form of life Agamben is speaking of as being never identical

with the human-all-too-human subject, or any essence in the metaphysical sense or

practical goal to be actualized, but rather as a potentiality qua impotentiality in

excess of violent sovereign power and biopolitical domination. The undead from

the Agambenian perspective is life as pure potentiality, on the threshold, out of joint

with itself and thus not as biopolitical life, not as the “immanent reign of

sovereignty” or any sort of “idyllic life.” Such pure potentiality belongs to neither

animality nor human rationality, nor does it imply the Nietzschean overman’s

surmounting of humanity (Dickinson 118-19). It is the kernel of redemption,

freedom, and justice that remains in excess of and in this way de-limits linguistic

representations, logical reasoning, metaphysical and onto-theological

presuppositions, sovereign power, identitarian markers, and all historical,

biopolitical determinations.

                                                      

13 See, for instance, LaCapra, “Approaching.” Han-yu Huang 191

A weak messianic angel like Bartleby points out to us the “limit of limits of

all possible politics” (Beverungen and Dunne 181). From what I see as the

Agambenian perspective, what appears to be a quietist withdrawal and

resistance—resignation or even a form of regression14—in effect radically clears the

ground for the political and is thus a form of that passive aggression which in

Žižek’s view we urgently need today.15 For this is a time when higher Causes have

lost their raison d’etre, politics has collapsed into life itself through so-called

biologico-scientific principles, and life has become an immanent essence subject to

biopolitical administration; this is a time when so many ethical imperatives of the

care of self (body, health, sex, happiness . . .) have turned out to be the other side of

biopolitical domination, when the world is being seen and measured from the

perspective of risk and risk calculus, when liberal democracy engenders a

continuous or even permanent state of emergency and legalizes its right to resort to

the extra-legal (Milbank, “Paul” 129); this is a time when, in sum, everything is a

depoliticizing move that works to prevent the true Event from happening.

                                                      

14 Of course, “regression” in a unique, non-commonsensical sense. Dickinson’s Agamben and

Theology offers an insightful genealogical reading of Agamben’s philosophico-theological work

as a whole through the perspective of regression. Compared with a variety of thinkers and writers

such as Freud, Benjamin, Beckett, who are preoccupied with infancy, trauma, ruins, and so on,

Agamben through the act of regression uncovers the irreducible facticity and singularity of

Dasein, of the prelinguistic or prerepresentational subject, of the whatever-form of life. For

Dickinson, Agamben “is actively seeking to undo the false dichotomies of all representations,

such as that between the particular and the universal, or between historiography and history,

which are reproduced or staged, so to speak, by the conscious/unconscious division itself” (109).

This gesture of regression, in the context of this essay’s arguments, amounts to the messianic

division of divisions, as discussed above, and introduces a remnant into, and hence undoes, the

Western representational, metaphysical, and onto-theological architecture.

15 Armin Beverugen and Stephen Dunne have offered a differential reading of Bartleby via a

variety of contemporary theorists including Hardt and Negri, Deleuze, Žižek, and Agamben. For

Beverugen and Dunne, Agamben’s “whatever Bartleby” is a figure of pure potentiality—a reading

congenial to mine—while Žižek overpoliticizes Bartleby as the paradigmatic figure of

“interpassivity,” that is, a subtraction from contemporary forms of pseudo-resistance (Beverugen

and Dunne 175; Žižek, “Notes” 393). However, the logic of the undead as I formulate it in this

essay also applies to the figure of Neighbor-Thing, as exemplified by Kafka’s Odradek as well as

Melville’s Bartleby, which Žižek brings together with the Agambenian homo sacer and

Muselmann in his works such as “Neighbor and Monsters” and The Parallax View (Chapters 2

and 6). At this point, we may venture to claim that Agamben’s formulation of the Pauline hōs mē

and katargeō, that is, weak messianism as discussed above, resonates forcefully with the purely

structural, formal minimal difference that Žižek reads into Bartleby’s gesture: that is, “what

remains of the supplement to the Law when its place is emptied of all its obscene superego

content” (Parallax View 382). This amounts to, again, the ground-clearing gesture at issue here,

“a new space outside the hegemonic position and its negation” (Žižek, “Notes” 393; emphasis in

original), or the way to undo the vicious circle of the Law and its transgression.

Huang excerpt

 

Agamben says: “The act of creation is God’s descent into an abyss that is

simply his own potentiality and impotentiality, his capacity to and capacity not

to. . . .Only when we succeed in sinking into this Tartarus and experiencing our

own impotentiality do we become capable of creating, truly becoming poets”

(Potentialities 253). Such potentiality qua impotentiality of God the Scribe, that is,

the ability to suspend His own possibility, finds its profane analogue in Bartleby.

Bartleby’s usual formula “I would prefer not to,” a perfect illustration of the undead

Kantian “infinite judgment” as explicated from Žižek’s perspective at the beginning

of this essay, opens up a zone of indistinction between affirmation and negation,

acceptance and refusal, the preferable and non-preferable (254-55); it calls into

question and exceeds the supremacy of the will that destroys the ambiguity of

potentiality and stands as “the perpetual illusion of morality” (254). Bartleby’s

                                                      

7 In Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853), Bartleby is a clerk who does nothing

but make handwritten copies of legal (perhaps metaphorically also “sacred”) documents every day,

until one day he decides to stop copying anything anymore, saying “I would prefer not to.”

8 In the concluding chapter of his Agamben and Theology, Colby Dickinson tackles the

possibility of bridging the missing link between Agamben and “the Spinoza-Deleuzian nexus,”

while here I am more oriented toward Agamben’s messianism in alignment with Marxist-socialist

revolutionary thinking and praxis. Actually, Dickinson does not—and neither do I—posit

Agamben as a thinker of pure immanence. As Dickinson notes, “As with the force of the

messianic which renders the boundary between the transcendent and the immanent completely

obscured, a philosophical movement toward a plane of immanence likewise undoes the

representations of thought founded upon a dichotomous logic of transcendence/immanence”

repeated use of this formula, as a manifestation of irreducible singularity, ultimately

becomes the absolute anaphora “I would prefer not to prefer not to . . .” that spins

on itself and undermines all causal and representational relations; it engenders a

“luminous spiral of the possible” at the threshold between Being and non-Being, the

sensible and the intelligible, word and thing (257, 259). Agamben reads Bartleby, as

in The Coming Community, as a Messianic figure who comes to “save” (or make

possible) the potential to not-be, not-think, and not-write—that is, to save

impotentiality—or who announces the trial of impotent possibility that creates an

ontology beyond Being and non-Being (Potentialities 259, 270). In a word, the

messianic according to Agamben is “constitutively weak,” and it is from such

weakness that the messianic wields its power (Agamben, Time 97).

 Han-yu Huang 

Foucault

Now this discourse, which was basically or structurally kept in the margins by that of the philosophers and jurists, began its career — or perhaps its new career in the West — in very specific conditions be- tween the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries and represented a twofold — aristocratic and popular — challenge to royal power. From this point onward, I think, it proliferated considerably, and its surface of extension extended rapidly and considerably until the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. It would, however, be a mistake to think that the dialectic can function as the great reconversion of this discourse, or that it can finally convert it into philosophy. The dialectic may at first sight seem to be the discourse of the universal and historical movement of contradiction and war, but I think that it does not in fact validate this discourse in philosophical terms. On the contrary, it seems to me that it had the effect of taking it over and displacing it into the old form of philosophico-juridical discourse. Basically, the dialectic codifies struggle, war, and confrontations into a logic, or so- called logic, of contradiction; it turns them into the twofold process of the totalization and revelation of a rationality that is at once final but also basic, and in any case irreversible. The dialectic, finally, ensures the historical constitution of a universal subject, a reconciled truth, and a right in which all particularities have their ordained place. The Hegelian dialectic and all those that came after it must, I think and as I will try to demonstrate to you, be understood as philosophy and right's colonization and authoritarian colonization of a historico-political discourse that was both a statement of fact, a proclamation, and a practice of social warfare. The dialectic colonized a historico-political discourse which, sometimes conspicuously and often in the shadows, sometimes in scholarship and sometimes in blood, had been gaining ground for centuries in Europe. The dialectic is the philosophical order’s, and perhaps the political order’s, way of colonizing this bitter and partisan discourse of basic warfare. There you have the general frame within which I would like to try this year to retrace the history of this discourse. I would now like to tell you how we should study this, and what our starting point should be. First of all, we have to get rid of a number of false paternities that are usually mentioned in connection with this historico-political discourse. As soon as we begin to think about the power/war relationship or about power/ relations of force, two names immediately spring to mind: we think of Machiavelli and we think of Hobbes. I would like to show that they have nothing to do with it, that this historico-political discourse is not, and cannot be, that of the Prince’s politics 13 or, obviously, that of absolute power. It is in fact a discourse that inevitably regards the Prince as an illusion, an instrument, or, at best, an enemy. This is, basically, a discourse that cuts off the king’s head, or which at least does without a sovereign and denounces him. Having eliminated these false paternities, I would then like to show you this discourse’s point of emergence. And it seems to me that we have to try to situate it in the seventeenth century, which has a number of important characteristics. First, this discourse was born twice. On the one hand, we see it emerging roughly in the 1630s, and in the context of the popular or petit bourgeois demands that were being put forward in prerevolutionary and revolutionary England. It is the discourse of the Puritans, the discourse of the Levellers. And then fifty years later, in France at the end of the reign of Louis XIV, you find it on the opposite side, but it is still the discourse of a struggle against the king, a discourse of aristocratic bitterness. And then, and this is the important point, we find even at this early stage, or in other words from the seventeenth century onward, that the idea that war is the uninterrupted frame of history takes a specific form: The war that is going on beneath order and peace, the war that undermines our society and divides it in a binary mode is, basically, a race war. At a very early stage, we find the basic elements that make the war possible, and then ensure its continuation, pursuit, and development: ethnic differences, differences between languages, different degrees of force, vigor, energy, and violence; the differences between savagery and barbarism; the conquest and subjugation of one race by another. The social body is basically articulated around two races. It is this idea that this clash between two races runs through society from top to bottom which we see being formulated as early as the seventeenth century. And it forms the matrix for all the forms beneath which we can find the face and mechanisms of social warfare.

Michel Foucault

Smail

"The best name I can think of for the philosophy that underlies this phenomenon is ‘magical voluntarism’...The way may certainly be hard, possibly (at the expensive end of the therapeutic spectrum) necessitating Odyssean ventures into the Unconscious, but ultimately salvation depends upon personal acts of will.

This was the principal achievement of the founders of modern psychotherapy: to turn the relation of person to world inside out, such that the former becomes the creator of the latter. With many ‘postmodernist’ approaches (e.g. ‘narrative therapy’) magical voluntarism reaches its apotheosis: the world is made of words, and if the story you find yourself in causes you distress, tell yourself another one.

From any rational, scientific standpoint, this kind of view is completely incoherent—indeed it is psychotic. And yet the universe of discourse in which it is put forward is, essentially, a rational, scientific one: the propositions of ‘psychology’ purport to be statements about our own nature and the nature of our world, and in this specific case it is asserted that our world is made of words and can be remade through rearranging words. That such a preposterous notion could be seriously put forward and maintained by people considered to be social scientists is inexplicable unless one introduces into the explanatory framework the notion of interest. In other words, it cannot be that the proposition in question is true; it can only be that it is useful, i.e. that it suits the interests both of those who assert it and those who assent to it. As long as consideration of interest is repressed we are likely to remain utterly mystified about the causes and cures of our psychological ills, trying instead to find our way in a make-believe world while looking for guidance principally to the adepts of magical voluntarism.''

"The trouble is, as soon as therapeutic schools start to formalize and professionalize their procedures they nearly always—advertently or not—enmesh themselves in interiorizing philosophies of one kind or another. There are in fact very few approaches to psychological therapy that don’t in some measure subscribe to individualist, idealist and/or what I call magical voluntarist positions. All such approaches have their foundation in a general cultural assumption that is in fact very hard to shake off—i.e. that fundamentally we are all individuals who just happen to find ourselves in societies. I suspect that it might be more accurate to say that fundamentally we are social creatures who just happen to feel as individuals''.

"Margaret Thatcher was a big influence...In one sense, she was just about the best psychologist that I’ve ever come across, because she knew better than anybody (or the influences she stood for knew better than anybody) what changes people, and how to bring people into line and that’s by affecting their interests and threatening them, inducing them through paying them lots of money and so on. It became very evident after 1979 that the people who came to see me didn’t have much room for manoeuvre, no matter how much will power they applied to the circumstances that they found themselves in, and usually because of some nasty, punitive measure that the Tory government had taken. These people blamed themselves, and they thought: ‘what is it about me…my personal strategies and so on that are not working…why am I so inadequate in these circumstances…?’ and it was perfectly obvious to me that they were not inadequate; it was the circumstances that were the problem''.

David Smail

 

 

 

Chomsky excerpts

"When the doctrines of contemporary “neoliberalism” were crafted in early 19th century England, the message to the population was clear and simple: under capitalism, you have no rights, apart from what your labor will bring in the market. A person without independent wealth “has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is,” Malthus proclaimed in highly influential work. It is a “great evil” and violation of “natural liberty” to mislead the poor into believing that they have further rights, David Ricardo held, outraged at this assault against the principles of economic science, which are as immutable as the principles of gravitation, he held, and against the moral principles on which the science rests, no less exalted. The message is simple. You have a free choice: the labor market, the workhouse prison, death, or go somewhere else — as was possible when vast spaces were opening thanks to the extermination and expulsion of indigenous populations.12

The doctrines are being revived, but under radically different conditions. Ricardo’s “science” was founded on the principle that capital is more or less immobile and labor highly mobile. We are enjoined today to worship the consequences of Ricardo’s science, despite the fact that the assumptions on which they are based have been reversed: capital is highly mobile, and labor virtually immobile — libertarian conservatives lead the way in rejecting Adam Smith’s principle that “free circulation of labor” is a cornerstone of free trade, in keeping with their contempt for markets (except for the weak). Other assumptions of the “science” are so radically false that the whole topic is hard to take seriously: among them, the abstraction from severe market distortions resulting from the centrally-managed transactions of the huge corporate structures that dominate the international economy, and the reliance on the “nanny state” that has been such a decisive factor in economic growth and the specific forms it has taken throughout history, and remains so.

The science originated as a weapon of class warfare, has been adapted for similar ends over the years. It is returning to its origins today as the prospects for rollback improve, narrowing substantially the choices for the growing population who lack rights by doctrinal decision — termed “science” or “natural law.”

The surplus population has to be kept in ignorance, but also controlled. The problem is faced directly in the Third World domains that have long been dominated by the West and therefore reflect the guiding values of the masters most clearly: here favored devices include death squads, “social cleansing,” torture, and other techniques of proven effectiveness. At home, more civilized methods are (still) required. The superfluous population is to be cooped up within urban slums that increasingly resemble concentration camps, or if that fails, sent to prisons, the counterpart in a richer society to the death squads we train and support in our domains. Under Reaganite enthusiasts for state power, the number of prisoners in the U.S. almost tripled, leaving our main competitors, South Africa and Russia, well behind — though Russia has just caught up, now that they are mastering the values of their American tutors.13

The bipartisan crime bill should facilitate the process of controlling the unwanted population, with its vast new expenditures for prisons, sharp increase in the death penalty, and much harsher sentencing procedures. Again, this is an acceptable form of state action, serving the social function of population control and providing yet another Keynesian stimulus to the economy: to the construction industry, lawyers, security personnel, and so on. The public subsidy of the “crime industry” is coming to approach the scale of the Pentagon, though it is less favored: its benefits are not so sharply skewed towards the wealthy.''

"In the 1980s, the U.S. and Britain took the lead in the “triumph of conservatism,” accelerating processes already underway. They therefore lead the developed world in impoverishment and degradation, inequality, homelessness, destruction of family values, hunger, and other values of contemporary “conservatism.” A study by the British charitable organization Action for Children, founded in 1869 with the Queen as patron, concludes that “the gap between rich and poor is as wide today as it was in Victorian times,” and in some ways worse. A million and a half families cannot afford to provide their children with “the diet fed to a similar child living in a Bethnal Green Workhouse in 1876,” a “sad reflection on British society.” Britain has proportionately more children living in poverty than any European country apart from Portugal and Ireland, and the proportion is rising faster than any country in Europe, though the U.S. still holds the lead.

Britain has also not yet matched the achievements of the doctrinal system crafted by our highly class conscious business community, with the assistance of those whom the lively 19th century working class press called “the bought priesthood” of respectable intellectuals. The fact that there is “class conflict” and that the rich and powerful mobilize state power to serve their interests, a truism to Adam Smith, remains within popular consciousness. The 1994 Gallup Political and Economic Index gives interesting information about popular attitudes on these matters (I put aside small numbers, 3%-10%, expressing no opinion). The study reports that over four-fifths of the population think “there is a class struggle in this country” and that “too little” is being done “to level up the classes.” Two-thirds “disagree strongly” with the statement “Britain is a classless society.” Nine out of ten feel that the Government does “too little” for “the working class,” four-fifths that it does “too much” for “the well-to-do,” and over 90% that it does “too little” for “people living on small pensions/income.” Half also think it does “too little” for “the middle classes.” Three-fourths “think of Britain as divided into haves and have-nots,” and a third describe themselves as among “the haves.”

Noam Chomsky (Rollback)