“Seek ye first for food and clothing, then the kingdom of God will fall to you also”

G.W.F. Hegel, letter to Knebel, 30 August 1807

We watch in horror, as the global explosion of the Sars-CoV-2 virus continues. The spreading medical emergency starkly reveals the real wages of neoliberalism and its extractive austerities. Gutted national healthcare systems that put profit over lives have left millions of people without access to medical care – a de facto death sentence for many. Every day now, we see where that leaves us in a pandemic. The healthcare crisis unfolds within a larger context of crisis: the underlying economic crisis of late capitalism and the planetary ecological crisis of late capitalist modernity. In the Covid19 emergency, the next crisis to arrive, before the medical crisis is over and just as the economic one begins to kick in, is likely to be a crisis in the capitalist food system.

The growing, picking, processing, packing and delivery of our food is vulnerable at many points in the long supply and delivery chains that stock the shelves in our grocery stores. Farmworkers, food processors and delivery workers are asked to work in unprotected conditions that often make social distancing impossible. Pickers on the industrial farms, many of whom are undocumented or precarious migrants, typically travel from squalid work camps to the fields in tightly packed buses. Workers at Amazon, the largest corporation dominating the end-delivery chains, have begun walkout strikes as Covid19 spreads through their warehouse workplaces. It is hard to see how breaks and bottlenecks in the global flows of food will be avoided without cynically sacrificing the workers who feed us. We need to understand and anticipate this, because food is at the center of life and social reproduction. The struggles for food sovereignty that will soon come to the fore will not only help to keep us alive – they highlight values of care, mutuality, gender equality, and climate and environmental justice that can orient the fight against fascism  and the refusal to go back to normal, when all the dead are buried. If the Covid-19 pandemic is pushing us to think an alternative form of social and natural symbiosis, food production is an essential facet of this operation, even more, a nodal point for its utopian and practical dimensions.

For an End to Big Agriculture

The capitalist food production system is ecocidal and genocidal; paradoxically, extinction is its immanent drift. The rupture of Covid19 is at least an opportunity to overthrow a destructive and unsustainable mono-industrial paradigm and replace it, everywhere, with more localized systems of polyculture and agroecology. Founded on the 17^th century slave plantation system and forced on the world from the 1950s on under the obscene misnomer “the green revolution,” the current capitalist food system is dominated by large transnationals that grow cash crops for export on huge monocultural farms and neo-plantations. These “Big Ag” monopolies are fossil fuel dependent, are heavy with pesticides and chemicals, waste precious water (70-90 % of all freshwater used by modern society!), drive bees and other needed pollinators as well as birds and other small predators to collapse and extinction, and discharge toxic runoff that causes red tides and dead zones when it reaches the seas. Moreover, capitalist food production is fully implicated in driving global warming and climate chaos:

Agriculture is also the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions from society, collectively accounting for about 35 % of the carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide we release….The energy used to grow, process and transport food is a concern, but the vast majority of emissions comes from tropical deforestation, methane released from animals and rice paddies, and nitrous oxide from over fertilized soils.

We must add that this food system, which eats its own tail in a classic dialectic of enlightenment, is embedded in imperialist relations. More or less in step with the rise of neoliberalism, the World Bank, IMF and Big Ag capital have forced every country in the world to attack its bases of food sovereignty in small-hold farming and to chain itself to the world commodity markets. The global debt system was the lever to force this new phase of “original accumulation,” with deadly applications of violence to repress local resistance to these new enclosures, especially in the Global South. All this arrives every day, in our kitchens and on our plates! The idiocy of this “consensus” may soon be returning to haunt us, just as the idiocy of destroying public health structures returns in the continuous blare of sirens around New York City’s overwhelmed hospitals. Finally, in what should be the nail in the coffin of capital’s control over our food, Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu, has taught us exactly how the capitalist food system is implicated in the cross species jumps that loosed Sars-Cov-2.

For Agroecology and a Food Sovereignty Popular Front

There are better ways, and the struggles to defend and spread them have been ongoing for many decades – indeed, as our Indigenous comrades tell us, for 500 years! Traditional growing practices preserve hard-won local experience and knowledges and tend to work with, rather than try to dominate, local ecologies. As a result, their decentralized polycultures are far more sustainable, frugal, versatile and resilient – just what we need in our food systems in a time when climates are weirding in response to capital’s flogging of the planet. In Europe and the Global North, organic “foodies” and Slow Food enthusiasts are often perceived as luxury hobbyists of the privileged classes. In fact, these lifestyle trends are distant echoes of the intense grassroots struggles for food sovereignty being waged across Latin America and Africa by the largely Indigenous-led network La Via Campesina, in Brazil by the Marxist-inspired Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), and in India by numerous peasant movements.

La Via Campesina in particular has coined and elaborated the idea of food sovereignty into a program for justice from below. It claims an inalienable right of all peoples to define and realize their own food systems, and to defend those systems from coercive invasions and extractive enclosures by imperialist capital. The international network of small and cooperative farmers, peasants, pastoralists and fisherfolk have also worked out and broadcast a body of practices and values they named agroecology. Similar in some respects to permaculture, agroecology embodies a whole approach to social reproduction based on values of care, mutuality and – let’s not be afraid of the word – kinship with the natural world. Many scientists have understood that agroecology offers more sustainable practices than industrial monoculture, and as a result the UN has to some extent appropriated and advocated for the concept, giving it a top-down, technocratic inflection that La Via Campesina has had to criticize. Agroecology is not just a set of practices that can be monetized for profit or adopted without changing anything else in anthropocentric, patriarchal capitalist class society:

Agroecology is a way of life of our peoples, in harmony with the language of Nature. It is a paradigm shift in the social, political, productive and economic relations in our territories, to transform the way we produce and consume food and to restore a socio-cultural reality devastated by industrial food production. Agroecology generates local knowledge, builds social justice, promotes identity and culture and strengthens the economic viability of rural and urban areas.

The urgent point is this: the knowledge commons for sustainable local alternatives to capitalist food production already exist and are readily accessible and sharable. Certainly, agroecological and permacultural approaches are possible in Greece. We only need to ensure that collective projects in this direction are grounded in solidarity with grassroots struggles for food sovereignty and climate and environmental justice – and in a communist horizon for a just and classless world. This is also to say, that acro-ecology is not a backward-looking idealization of the past, it is a forward-looking practice that can be in tune with the best aspects of the current techno-scientific knowledge and capacities. 

Food Sovereignty, Migrant Rights and Anti-Fascism

In the current crises, the struggle for food sovereignty brings forward the exploitation of migrant farmworkers and links up directly to the current terrain of anti-fascist struggle. As already noted, the workers whose labor power is exploited in the fields, slaughter yards and packing houses of capitalist agriculture are very often undocumented or precarious migrants whose status makes them especially exposed to extreme exploitation and coercive violence. Certainly this is true in Europe and many parts of North America. Their workplaces were always likely to be toxic, but now with Covid19 they are often forced to labor in mortal danger. Adequate protections, including face masks, gloves, sanitation gear and testing is a matter of life and death for the women and men who bring our food to table.

We can and must say more: racist anti-migrant and anti-refugee scapegoating is the common denominator of the hard-right turn in global politics. Indeed, racist nationalism dominates the toxic concoction that is resurgent fascism, and has been widely adopted in the rhetoric and policies of rightist governments around the world. This turn reflects tendencies towards authoritarian statism that, among others, have been long developing and were noted and forecast decades ago by Nicos Poulantzas. And it now unfolds in a situation of multiple systemic crises whose class character was vividly described by Mike Davis as a “planet of slums” and whose political logic Christian Parenti has analyzed incisively as “the politics of the armed lifeboat,” which tends towards full-blown “climate fascism.” Such is the moment we live in. We need to be clear about the links between all of these crises and social struggles, and shape our actions across them.

Toward Dual Power

Food sovereignty is the material and metabolic basis for an organized counter-power to capitalist terror and climate fascism. There have been many helpful discussions of mutual aid and calls for dual power initiated by autonomist comrades in the social emergency of Covid19. And Marxist feminist comrades have called for us to meet the emergency with a “social reproduction revolution.” Now we need to anticipate the coming crisis of the capitalist food system, and begin discussing how we will prepare our reaches for food sovereignty. To consider this a backup plan to help get us by in lean times misses the point. The dominant capitalist classes are certainly preparing to force us back into our places, however far this deadly pandemic goes. Before it exploded, anti-austerity insurrections were already rocking the global system; for the moment the solidarity of social distancing has emptied our streets and arrested the face-to-face and breath-to-breath forms of our politics. This will change, but fallout from Covid19 is still just beginning. The danger of disruptions to the food supply and delivery chains is real, for the reasons indicated above. Even in social distancing, we need to begin the discussions about what we will do, if that happens. Bread riots, a trigger of past revolutions, will come; will there also be pitchforks?

The rupture in normality also brings its opportunities – call it “disaster communism” or whatever you like. Many are aware now, and many more are learning it through the pandemic, that capital’s logic of accumulation is a dead end – literally as well as metaphorically. Degrowth, with a communist-autonomist horizon, is the actual imperative, given the deep structural crisis of planetary meltdown. Degrowth does not mean primitivism nor it is against the development of humanity’s creative forces. It means sustainable symbiosis, thus, a different form of social and environmental justice. Neo-fascism will be the form of desperate violence aiming to block any social transition that threatens capitalist class power. We know this. Either we resign ourselves to go back to our places and work away at our own mutual destruction, or we push this break further, exactly where social reproduction meets anti-fascism and anti-imperialism.

Growing tomatoes, herbs and earthworms on the balcony is no doubt a wonderous thing. But what is called for now is to collectivize the possibilities in all directions. The point is that food sovereignty is the material and metabolic (energy) basis for everything else, as we would quickly realize if we began to go hungry. Agroecology and permaculture are real possibilities in Greece, which need to be explored and built out from below. Some comrades are already actively engaged in this direction. And again: this can’t be a mere withdrawal to rural communes, it has to be a reorientation that feeds the struggles. For now, we should start discussing and sharing knowledge and practices and brainstorming possibilities.

Simple models for collectivizing growing can be organized among friends and small groups and planted wherever there is access to land. Access may be through family plots in villages or, in extremis, by other direct and time-tested means. Growing co-ops can be set up to share the work on a part-time basis, as was done before in many difficult moments of history. Urban gardens will undoubtedly be appearing in unexpected places. The deeper values of agroecology, in their close connection to social struggle and the long resistance to capitalist enclosure, can orient this turn. Whatever happens, we should build out these possibilities as far as we can, because doing so will both support and enact the politics of solidarity and mutuality that we believe in.

VOID NETWORK (Athens-Greece) written by Gene Ray and George Sotiropoulos

*George Sotiropoulos is Doctor of Political Theory and author of A Materialist Theory of Justice: the One, the Many, the Not-Yet.

*Gene Ray is Associate Professor of Critical Theory and author of Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: From Auschwitz to Hiroshima to September 11 and Beyond.

________________________________ 

SEE ALSO

Sustainable Ways of Living: Food Production & Distribution- Mutual Aid

Interviews with comrades in Frankfurt practicing collective food production and alternative ways of distribution based on mutual aid and social awareness, experimenting with ecological, alternative and sustainable ways of living. Research by VOID NETWORK / Tasos Sagris & Sissy Doutsiou https://voidnetwork.gr

READ ALSO

The post Feeding Dual Power: Food Sovereignty, Anti-Fascism and other Pandemic Struggles appeared first on Void Network.

Why is the Far-Right on the Rise?

The scarecrow of “populism” has been frequently placed into a narrative that is also dear to liberal intellectuals and politicians. According to this narrative, the rise of the “populist Right” owes to the putative support it has enjoyed from white workers and more generally from the “native” plebeian elements of European societies. Despite the blessings it delivers, the story goes, the train of development and integration that Europe has been travelling on has left some people behind, exposing them to the propaganda of “ethno-populists”. In a recent article Aaron Winter and Aurelien Mondon have done a great job detailing that this line of explanation is both untenable and class biased. In the last analysis, its essential function is to stigmatize the working classes for political immaturity, as they are consistently being represented to be “carried away” or “duped” by demagogues. Whitewashed, at the same time, are the undemocratic structure of the EU as well as the role of the political, economic and technocratic class in charge. At best, this liberal discourse sustains a lukewarm drive for reform, which is supposed to include the “left-behinds” and, consequently, exorcize the twin ghosts of populism and nationalism.

As a corrective to the idea of a plebeian mass support, Winter and Mondon convincingly argue that the growth of the far right is spurred to a considerable degree by mainstream media. The relation does not necessarily or mainly concern open support, it has more to do with the mainstreaming of the far right agenda: the mass media across Europe are not only giving platform to the nationalist and xenophobic rhetoric of far right parties, at the same time they have been systematically promoting and inflating issues that are conducive to the spread of far right politics, like the “refugee crisis”, “the immigration problem”, “Islamic terrorism”, “criminality” and “anomy”. This, however, must not be taken to mean that the phenomenon (along perhaps the parallel decline of the far left) is little more than a media bubble. For that would downplay the historical, political, social, economic depth of the current crisis, without which neither the far right nor the far left could have emerged out of the political margins. As the recent Euro-elections ratify, a salient aspect of this ongoing crisis concerns political representation, in particular the decline of the two political traditions that have monopolized national government in western Europe after WWII and largely engineered the EU project: the moderate (liberal, conservative, Christian-democratic) Right and the social-democratic Left. While elitism, corruption and a detachment from social reality may have played a role, they do not suffice as explanations for the decline of the parties that belong to these two great political traditions. Instead, it is necessary to take also into account their growing inability to uphold the mediating role between actuality (how things are) and ideality (how things should be), whose tension has nourished modern democracies from their birth.

The Waning Promises of Parliamentarism

Every social formation necessarily represents itself under the light of justice, that is, as a historical form that crystalizes or moves towards the right order of things. In the dynamic context of modern societies, and buttressed by the grievances and instability that phenomena like inequality, systemic exploitation, exclusion, marginalization, and destitution generate, the affective gap between actuality and ideality acquires an endemic, constitutive character. In this context, political parties have taken up the task of promising the best way to bridge this tensional gap, with parliamentary politics serving to promote different programmatic visions of justice through peaceful means and legally regulated procedures. It is in this sense that the mediation of the gap between actuality and ideality is flagged as a key dimension of modern democracy, next to legitimizing governmental power and organizing political competition in a consensual manner that forestalls civil conflict.

In these terms, the social-democratic left and the moderate right have been offering two hegemonic political alternatives, while both respecting the fundamentally sound (or more strongly, just) institutional structure of the modern democratic state. Of course, and here we move closer to their crisis, the ideological and political traits of these political traditions did not remain static. Far from it, they have merged towards the “center” and jointly rode the bandwagon of globalization under the aegis of a seemingly triumphant capitalism. In the context of the “post-democratic consensus” that transpired, political competition increasingly took the form of rivalry over efficiency. The best that the “new” Center-Left and Center-Right could promise was optimal management, i.e. that they are the most capable administrators of a historical process hailed for leading towards a cosmopolitan, prosperous and technologically advanced future. A pertinent way to conceive the European Union is as one of the salient forms of this new international order.

For millions of its inhabitants, though, Europe was not living up to the expectations nor did they enjoy all the fruits of the infamous “European values”. Expectedly, the many-headed crisis that came out in the open since 2008 has intensified the gap between how Europe is and how it should have been according to the evangelists of European integration. From the “peripheries” of Europe, like Portugal, Spain and Greece, to countries that are considered its core, like France and Italy, the ideal of a civilizational unit moving towards political unification and economic prosperity was foundering in the rocks of indebtedness, unemployment, austerity and a deeply uneven concentration of power and wealth within and among the member states. Moreover, since this tension is played immanently on the level of institutional forms, the dominant institutions of European social formations could not remain untouched. One such institutional form is precisely parliamentary politics and its leading parties. In line with the moral panic liberals tend to bring whenever trust towards parliamentarism totters, initially the prevalent reaction from below was not to fall for aspiring Bonapartes but to fight for a “real democracy”. Much more than positing a demand through the formal circuits of the state or prescribing an ideal that is to cure the ills of this world, an international movement flourished that set out to experiment how such a real democracy should be. From Plaza del Sol in Madrid to Syntagma square in Athens, popular assemblies sprung which, along with declaring their opposition to austerity, tried to reanimate the principles of equality and people’s power from empty formalities, which they have been largely reduced to in recent decades, into a lived, practical experience. It is too early to assess the legacy of the cycle of struggles at whose forefront stood the “squares-movement”. Yet, in the short-term, uprisings failed to produce institutions capable to act as organs of a new democratic regime or even to revitalize existing democracies. Likewise, they have failed to block austerity. And as it frequently happens after the regression of a popular surge of struggles, this double failure has opened the way to the far right.

Yet, liberal fears again notwithstanding, parliamentarism has not suffered the same fate as the parties that dominated it. Rather, once the first wave of popular mobilizations in Spain (with the Indignados), Greece (with the Aganaktismenoi) and every other country where anti-austerity movements emerged (e.g. Britain and Bosnia) ran out of steam (and indeed a similar pattern is repeated today with the Yellow Vests movement in France), parliamentary politics has reasserted itself and the rise of the far right is actually one of the mediums of this reassertion. For unlike the fascist movement of the interwar period (a difference that hasty identifications fail to register) the contemporary far right does not directly challenge parliamentarism. Instead, by channelling discontent in the formal conduits of protest-vote and by fostering hopes that their electoral victory will solve all problems, far right parties have served to shield parliamentary democracy from the critical attitude popular movements have shown towards representation and the potential of a more radical democracy that this critical stance carries. This is not to exclude the possibility of a more authoritarian turn, since this is arguably an immanent potential of the far right. But we are not there yet, and the more the threat it poses to democracy is inflated, the more the role of the far right in augmenting the existing undemocratic structure of European states is downplayed.

Neo-Archaic Visions of Past and Future Glory

While the crisis of political representation may be an important factor in the rise of far-right parties, it is not the sole one; the decline of one form does not automatically bring the rise of another, as the poor performance of the radical left testifies. Clearly, far right parties say something that sounds attractive to many of those disillusioned with traditional parties. Schematically, at the center of the far-right’s propaganda (and the same holds true for similar trends outside Europe) is a reassertion of the nation state as the effective solution to the problem of justice, i.e. the problem of giving to a social formation (or even life at large) its proper form. For if this problem at its heart contains the aforementioned tension between actuality and ideality, the far right prescribes a strong, protectionist and ethnically homogeneous nation state as the best form for bridging the gap between how things are now and how they should be.

Political projects do not emerge in a historical void and the apparent success of this key idea has been certainly boosted by real sociopolitical trends. On the one hand, the internationalization of capital has generated industrial wastelands inside Europe as well as facilitated the production of polyethnic societies through flows of immigrant labor. At the same time, the European Union has served to undermine whatever elements of popular sovereignty existed in favor of a centralized, bureaucratic structure of power. In this context, precarity, insecurity, anger, disenfranchisement have variably affected segments of the working and middle classes throughout Europe. Precisely, the far-right steps in to mediate these affects, shape them and channel them towards a conservative (nay reactionary) and nationalist direction. The populist trope of elite/people is fused with a nationalist and racist discourse in order to produce a singular imaginary threat, the “foreigner” (in Brussels, in the ghettos, outside the borders) and a single cause for all that is wrong today, the subversion of the national community. In this way, the far-right promises on the one hand to give back to native workers their dignity and on the other to protect the privileges of the middle classes but also, let’s not forget, the profits of national capitalists. Overall, by mobilizing the power of the familiar, the far-right acts as a vector for the reconstitution of a closed, national body.

Looking Forward, Looking Left

If the specter of masses assembling behind nationalist banners appears to be fleshing out in front of our eyes, a few years ago the prospect of popular mobilizations acting as engine for radical change also seemed to be on the agenda. The radical Left in its turn promised to play a catalyst role by entering a sort of dialectic relation with grassroots movements: joining them in the streets but also channeling them towards the existing state with the hope to democratize it. A trend certainly existed: SYRIZA in Greece, Podemos in Spain, a little later the leftwing turn of Labor in the UK; even in the previous European elections an identifiable presence was registered at the left of social democracy. But, instead of opening new horizons to popular movements, leftist parties practically served to curb them. Thus, if the booming fortunes of the far right are based to a considerable degree in their capacity to mobilize the power of the familiar, the decline of the radical Left has something to do with its failure to harness the energies of the new. For sure, the Left may also have failed to draw from its own tradition and assert effectively familiar forms it has once helped consolidate, above all, welfare and labor rights. But, unlike the far-right, a leftist project cannot base its success on a neo-archaic assertion of old forms. The promise that the Left carries can only be transformative. Even those things that deserve to be defended need to be integrated to a politics that responds to the problem of justice not by evoking an idealized past but by pointing forward towards a different future. Naturally, this is far more difficult, for such a future cannot simply be posited ideally, it needs to be built through the forms that develop today. The combined effect of systemic inequality and exclusion, endemic psychosomatic pathologies, mass population displacement, geopolitical competitions and environmental degradation poses severe challenges and the odds may certainly look adverse if not grim. But when were the odds ever really in favor of leftist projects? To see in the material reality of present injustice and in the multiform resistances against it the seeds of a new justice is a necessary quality for a radical Left worthy of its name.

___________________________

George Sotiropoulos holds a PhD in Political Theory and currently teaches and is a researcher at the International School of Athens. His book, A Materialist Theory of Justice: The One, the Many, the Not-Yet, is available now. He is a member of Void Network

source: https://medium.com

The post Between Past and Future: On the Contrasting Fortunes of the Far-Right and the Far-Left in Europe By George Sotiropoulos / Void Network appeared first on Void Network.

ΜΙΑ ΥΛΙΣΤΙΚΗ ΘΕΩΡΙΑ ΔΙΚΑΙΟΣΥΝΗΣ
Το Ένα- Οι Πολλοί – Αυτό που δεν έχει ακόμα Συμβεί

ΠΑΡΑΣΚΕΥΗ 12 Ιουλίου 2019
ώρα 19:30-21:00

Σύλλογος Ελλήνων Αρχαιολόγων
Ερμού 134-136- Αθήνα

Ομιλία- Παρουσίαση του βιβλίου
A Materialist Theory of Justice: The One, the Many, the Not-Yet (εκδόσεις Rowman & Littlefield International)

Γιώργος Σωτηρόπουλος
(διδ. Πολιτικής Φιλοσοφίας / μέλος της συλλογικότητας Κενό Δίκτυο)

Το να σκεφτούμε τη δικαιοσύνη υλιστικά σημαίνει πρώτα από όλα να ξεπεράσουμε έναν κανονιστικό ιδεαλισμό, που καθιστά την έννοια μία κρίση του λόγου-δικαστή επί του κόσμου και των σωμάτων που τον συνθέτουν. Σημαίνει επίσης να σκεφτούμε τη δικαιοσύνη πέρα από τα όρια του κράτους, όχι μόνο ως πολιτική δομή αλλά μορφή σκέψης, που οριοθετεί και αξιολογεί πάνω στη βάση παγιωμένων ρόλων και ταυτοτήτων. Σημαίνει όμως επίσης να σκεφτούμε τη δικαιοσύνη πέρα από την κατηγορία «Άνθρωπος», αναζητώντας την ανάδυση της στη συναισθητική δομή της ζωικότητας, ίσως και πέρα από αυτήν, μέσα στο γίγνεσθαι του κόσμου. Ακολουθώντας αυτήν την πορεία η θεωρία ανακαλύπτει τη δικαιοσύνη ως έναν εμμενή καθορισμό των διαδικασιών δόμησης και αποδόμησης κοινωνικών μορφών ύπαρξης, οι οποίες και συνθέτουν αυτό που ονομάζουμε ανθρώπινη ιστορία.

οργάνωση:
εκδόσεις ΚΕΝΟΤΗΤΑ
εκδοτικό εγχείρημα της συλλογικότητας ΚΕΝΟ ΔΙΚΤΥΟ
https://voidnetwork.gr

ΔΕΙΤΕ περισσότερες πληροφορίες για το 3ο Θερινό Βιβλιοστάσιο (Πεμ. 11 έως Κυρ. 13/7) την έκθεση βιβλίου και το πλούσιο πρόγραμμα ομιλιών και εκδηλώσεων:
https://www.facebook.com/events/2524543760912430/

Το Θερινό Βιβλιοστάσιο, που φέτος διοργανώνεται για 3η συνεχή χρονιά, προέκυψε από την ιδιαίτερη συνάντηση μικρών εκδοτικών εγχειρημάτων με διαφορετικές αφετηρίες αλλά συνδιαλεγόμενες διαδρομές. Στόχος μας είναι το Θερινό Βιβλιοστάσιο να γίνει και πάλι ένας τόπος συνάντησης με αφορμή τα βιβλία: τα βιβλία που απευθύνονται σε ανήσυχα πνεύματα και φλογερές ψυχές, τα βιβλία που μετουσιώνουν τη μοναχική ανάγνωση σε συλλογική πρακτική, που ασκούν κριτική στο υπάρχον, που φιλοδοξούν να δημιουργούν ρωγμές και ανοίγματα εκεί όπου υψώνονται μόνο τοίχοι.

The post Μια υλιστική θεωρία Δικαιοσύνης – Ομιλία: Γ.Σωτηρόπουλος ΠΑΡ.12/7 στο 3ο Βιβλιοστάσιο appeared first on Void Network.

Η Δικαιοσύνη βρίσκεται στην καρδιά των ταξικών και κοινωνικών αγώνων αλλά και των νέων σχέσεων με τις οποίες πειραματιζόμαστε. Πέρα απο μία κανονιστική έννοια, συνιστά ένα διαρκές αίτημα και μια ενεργή διαδικασία, ροή σε διαρκή ένταση μέσα στην πορεία της χρονικότητας εντός της οποίας εμφανιζόμαστε ως δράστες της. Επικαλούμαστε την Δικαιοσύνη, την αμφισβητούμε, την αποζητούμε, εμφανίζεται στην καθημερινότητα μας ως ένα πλήθος μικρών και μεγάλων πρακτικών προβλημάτων. Και όμως μοιάζει να μας διαφεύγει, ακόμα και στο επίπεδο ενός κοινού ορισμού. Είναι κάθε θετικός ορισμός αδύνατος και αν ναι πως αποφεύγουμε τον αξιολογικό σχετικισμό που εξισώνει θύμα και θύτη, κυρίαρχο και καταπιεσμένο; Ειδικά σήμερα όπου οι κυρίαρχες μορφές δικαίου όλο και λιγότερο μπορούν να οριοθετήσουν τον κόσμο, ένας κριτικός στοχασμός πάνω στην έννοια και στα περιεχόμενα της Δικαιοσύνης, καθίσταται απαραίτητος. Συμβάλλοντας σε αυτήν την κατεύθυνση, ο παρών κύκλος ομιλιών θα επιχειρήσει να χαρτογραφήσει τα πολλαπλά πεδία και τους τρόπους που η δικαιοσύνη πραγματώνεται, αναδεικνύοντας την πολυπλοκότητα και τις απορίες που φέρει η έννοια αλλά συγχρόνως και το ριζοσπαστικό της πλεόνασμα.

Κύκλος Διαλέξεων
ΔΙΚΑΙΟΣΥΝΗ – μέρος 1ον

Ζακ Ντερριντά: Περί ψεύδους

υπό ηθική, πολιτική και δικαιική έννοια

Ομιλητές:

Βαγγέλης Μπιτσώρης– συγγραφέας, μεταφραστής

Γιώργος Σωτηρόπουλος – διδ. Πολιτικής Φιλοσοφίας, Κενό Δίκτυο

Παρουσίαση– συντονισμός:

Γιάννης Ραουζαίος – κριτικός κινηματογράφου– μέλος της συλλογικότητας Κενό Δίκτυο

Πέμπτη 20 Ιουνίου 2019 —ώρα 20.30

Ταράτσα NOSOTROS Ελεύθερος Κοινωνικός Χώρος
Θεμιστοκλέους 66- Εξάρχεια

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The post Κύκλος Διαλέξεων ΔΙΚΑΙΟΣΥΝΗ- μέρος 1ον: ομιλητής: Β. Μπιτσώρης – Πεμ. 20/6/19 NOSOTROS- Κενό Δίκτυο appeared first on Void Network.

• S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’[1]

[includes spoilers]

To the reader who has seen what has been justifiably called a “cultural Behemoth”, Eliot’s phrase may not seem an entirely accurate depiction of the series’ ending. After all, a capital is practically burned to the ground, in the penultimate episode, by what is the equivalent of a modern weapon of mass destruction, a flame throwing dragon; so, there is certainly something of a “bang” involved. Yet, it is noteworthy that the show unravels its plot in such a way that it does not end with an epic battle between Good and Evil, as many would probably expect. Put in the context of the huge stakes that the story has patiently built in previous seasons, the last episode truly has the tonality of a whimper. Considering the extremely noisy finales of many blockbuster films today, this is not necessarily regrettable. At the same time though, it is impossible to ignore a conservative mood driving the less-epic-than-anticipated finale. This is not the conservativism of Eliot though; rather, as Žižek has quickly noted, it is the tepid conservatism of a liberal mindset. To this point however, another needs to be added: that the conservatism of the finale is tampered by a progressive twist, the transition to elective monarchy, which is also liberal at its heart.

To be sure, Game of Thrones (just like George Martin’s books on which it was based) is not “liberal” in any obvious, straightforward manner. In fact, when the whole series is considered, the opposite would seem to be the case: passions have the upper hand over reason, individual autonomy is hard-pressed between familial obligations and status constraints, consensus consistently gives way to violence as the ultimate arbiter of rivalries and conflicts. And yet, the way the fundamental issues of power and justice are resolved – arguably, the twin themes around which the whole narrative revolves and develops – is at its heart liberal. In other words, the way the series’ creators decided to close a story that hardly qualified for a liberal narrative of gradual-but-steady-progress towards a more enlightened state of being, betrayed a fundamentally liberal sensitivity. In delivering, thus, its “liberal-conservative-progressive” conclusion, Game of Thrones gives a good glimpse of the poverty of the liberal imagination, its inability to stay faithful to radical potentials which are immanent to a situation or even appreciate how significant sociopolitical change occurs.

Setting aside for the moment the theme of justice, Game of Thrones, as its title quite clearly suggests, is predominantly a story about power: about the desire to seize it, hold it, escape it, and about the unavoidably corruptive effects of its pursuit. There is in fact something of a Foucauldian wisdom in the way power is shown to circulate throughout Westeros and Essos (the continents where the story unfolds), in the complex relations that the protagonists enter. However, the “King’s head” has most certainly “not been cut off”[2] and power, despite the many centrifugal tendencies, is concentrated symbolically and materially in the Iron Throne, the seat of the monarch who has united the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros into a medieval type of centralized political form. Fantasy apart, this is essentially a feudal world.

In whatever form it comes, premodern, modern and more, “power corrupts”: this is both a philosophical truism and a popular cliché and if Game of Thrones was simply driving this point home it would have hardly made such sensation, no matter how much nudity, sex and gore were thrown in the mix. What rather distinguished the show from the start is the way it unfolds its central thematic line through multiple story arcs and a rich tapestry of realpolitik and intrigue. For these two aspects the series (as before it the books) has been praised, justifiably so. There is one more element though that defines Game of Thrones: there are two story lines, one intruding, the other leaking, which disrupt the story’s central thematic, whilst also affecting its direction. On the one hand, there is the story of the white-walkers coming from beyond the wall (the boundary between civilization and barbarism), who embody a force that exceeds entirely the calculative rationality of power-politics (and, it should be added, of economic reason). This story-arc acts as a dreadful reminder that all of humanity’s works and days are shadowed by a coming oblivion, towards which no argument or negotiation is possible. In this way, the narrative throws a critical light on the illusions of power and human ambition. While the white walkers come from the outside, the second story is an immanent line of flight from within power-politics, something that does not make it less subversive. This is the story-arc of Daenerys Targaryen, her becoming: from a legitimate contender of the Iron Throne to a popular-cum-messianic leader who promises to “break the wheel”, i.e., to abolish the established order of things and its entrenched hierarchies. Thus, if through the march of the white walkers justice is to disappear along with power, here it emerges as a potent force of change, marking the passage from a legal entitlement within an existing structure of right towards a radically different form of being. Overall, we have two lines of deterritorialization upsetting the narrative’s central line of meaning: one is a total deterritorialization accelerating towards the formless immanence of dead matter. The other carries the promise of a reterritorialization towards a better, more just world.

The way that these two lines could converge in the end was one of the great thrills the series offered. There was for sure one common trope: both bespoke and prepared for a violent event that would decide their fortunes. This allowed the idea of a convergence into one great, final battle. But, thrilling as it sounds, that would be impossible, and it is to the merits of the creators that they avoided the temptation. For these two lines of deterritorialization point to radically different directions. Hence, while they could conjunct, they could not be decided on a single event (other than in the sense that the victory of the white walkers would de facto destroy the dreams of a better world, which justifies Daenerys’ decision to join the forces of the Army of the Living.) The real question concerned their temporal arrangement, that is, which story would take precedence, and which would set the stage for the finale. The imperative tone that set its stakes made it seem that it was the white walkers story-arc that would come last; after all, what is more, significant than the battle between life and death? Again, it is to the merit of the series that it chose to follow the other route. For in this way (whether intentionally or not), it avoided the moralistic, apolitical assumption that there is a danger that unites us all. Given how this assumption tends to obscure the real political and social stakes in the looming environmental crisis, this is no trifling matter. Surely, without life there is no problem of justice, but without justice is life tolerable? At any rate, our own predicament is the political and social fortunes of the world, rather than a cosmic clash between Good vs. Evil, hence in its arrangement of events Game of Thrones strikes a contemporary chord.

If the structure of the narrative was compelling the execution suffered. The last season has been rightly criticized for failing the stories, mainly under pressure of time constraints. However, even if it had been told better, the end would remain conservative, or as Žižek has it, “liberal-conservative”. For the target in the last season is the prospect of radical change and the violence it inescapably entails. Daenerys incinerating the people of Kings Landing is entirely forced, and no reference to madness or a subtext patriarchy can redeem it. This plot-twist was necessary however in order for the audience to get emotionally estranged from the character and the revolutionary justice she embodied (or so she claimed). For, especially at a time such as our own, where class discrepancies are astutely felt, the burning of nobles and slave-owners could only be experienced as right. Hence, the burning of laymen needs to be turned into a necessary next step. Not to let the association be missed, this is made clear in Tyrion’s pep talk to Jon Snow, to convince him to assassinate Daenerys.

To be sure, that violence can develop its own dynamic and run rampant; also, that revolutionary justice has a despotic aspect, are valid, historically testified insights. But this is why they deserve nuanced theoretical reflection. At its best, liberalism is an insightful warning on the dangers of undifferentiated power, especially one armed with conviction. But the dialectics of violence, justice and power escape it, and it is not a coincidence that the series’ liberal conclusion typically confuses revolutionary dictatorship with fascism (Daenerys is depicted as a fascist leader in front of her Army). Moreover, this inability of liberal thought is not only because of its conservativism. It is only when liberalism’s progressive dimension is given its due that its poverty becomes properly elucidated.

In resolving for elective monarchy as “the breaking of the wheel”, Game of Thrones reveals how narrow the horizons of the liberal imagination are. There is also an element of naivety, since rational consensus has rarely resolved anything of world-historical consequence. In England for one, the unnamed model of the new regime installed in Westeros, political compromise passed through civil conflict and the defeat of every radical democratic alternative. And the same is true of representative democracy, which is dismissed by the nobles but clearly alluded as an even more desirable form of polity. The real poverty of the liberal imagination is that it cannot even pay proper tribute to its own historical constitution.

Then again, the summary dismissal of the prospect of plebs getting the right to vote and, even more, the frustration of the messianic promise of a savior-Queen point to a radical alternative. Nothing is ever given to the plebs. In good old Marxist terms, their emancipation will come from their own activity. But this is a story Game of Thrones could not have told.

[1] Collected Poems 1909-1962, (Main edition), London: Faber & Faber, 2002.

[2] M. Foucault, “Truth and Power”, Essential Works 1954-1984 vol.3: Power, ed. James, D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al, London: Penguin, 1994, p.122

George Sotiropoulos / Void Network

George Sotiropoulos holds a PhD in Political Theory. He is a member of Void Network. Recently he published the book A Materialist Theory of Justice: The One, the Many, the Not-Yet (published by Rowman and Littlefield International). You can find info about his Greek language book here 

The post No Other World Is Possible: Game of Thrones and the poverty of the liberal imagination- George Sotiropoulos / Void Network appeared first on Void Network.

“We believe we pretend to believe that we share in some pre-understanding. We act as if we have some common sense on what “religion” means in the languages we believe we know how to speak. We believe in the minimum trustworthiness of this word. […] Well nothing is less pre-assured that this factum, and the entire question of religion comes down perhaps in this lack of assurance”.

A similar point can be made about justice. When we talk about justice, we believe that we utter a word that can be translated and understood in different languages. Even more, we can be assured that our utterance will be understood to refer to something whose existence, absence or violation is or should be a matter of great concern. There are cultural and ideological traditions that value freedom over equality, or freedom and equality over authority and hierarchy (or vice versa), and so on. However, it is hard to find social formations and political systems that do not aspire to some form and notion of justice. This can be arguably seen to provide empirical support for John Rawls’ famous thesis in his Theory of Justice that justice is to social systems what truth is to systems of thought, that is, their “primary virtue”.

And yet, to return to Derrida, nothing is less certain than that when the word justice is uttered, we know what is being talked about. As Raymon Geuss has pointed out in Philosophy and Real Politics, “it is striking how unclear this concept is in ordinary language and to what extent conceptions of justice differ from one context to another and in different human societies at different times”. In theoretical terms, this is “the problem of justice”: the existence of a notion that is highly valued across cultures, but whose content and form is open to many contested and conflicting articulations.

Confronted with this quandary, the path usually followed in the relevant theoretical field, the main-stream of theories of justice, is to argue in favor of a specific conception of justice over against other rival ones. This is indeed what Rawls has done: after he posits justice as the primary virtue of social order, he moves on to flesh out its content by identifying justice with fairness. But many other options are available: justice as entitlement, as self-determination, as equal opportunity, as social equality, as meritocracy, to name a few other well-known conceptions. Mindful of the unavoidable element of simplification that generalizations entail, the theoretical discussion on justice can be largely depicted as a continuous debate over the notion that identifies what justice truly is.

In this sense, despite their different and even conflicting assessments, normative definitions operate on the same register: they posit an ideal (justice) which they identify with another ideal (fairness, equality etc.) that effectively defines the form of a just society or more specifically of a just course of action. Thus, theoretical normativism yields a philosophical idealism: an ideality is elevated to a general principle that materiality must adjust in order to acquire its proper or true form. In this way, justice becomes a judgment upon bodies and their affective partiality. In Deleuzian terms, justice “is the judgment of god”.

For all that, the quandary identified earlier does not vanish, it rather intensifies so as to become a true aporia: every normative definition of justice necessarily excludes other available options. And while it aspires to do that on rational, non-partisan grounds, on closer look there is always a political commitment lurking. Justice thus appears to be helplessly enmeshed into the very political antagonisms whose normative framework and proper resolution it theoretically claims to offer.

Now, from the numerous theoretical and philosophical currents existing today, post-structuralism seems to be the least suitable to lift us from this aporia. I most certainly do not claim to offer ‘the post-structuralist theory of justice’. After all, unlike Marxism or even psychoanalysis, there is no single author whose corpus can serve as a unitary point of reference and from which theory may seek support and legitimacy. The difference that poststructuralism has been said to praise defines it also as a current of thought. There are different starting points and theoretical trajectories that speak different languages, even critical to each other. Foucault’s and Derrida’s debate sparked by the History of Madness is well known. Less critically, Deleuze has stated that he admires deconstruction, but it has little to do with his own philosophical project. Yet, the common determination to problematize cherished notions of the western philosophical and political tradition and to think difference in a positive way generates substantial points of encounter. Justice, a true shibboleth of western political philosophy, is one such point.

What I would like to suggest is that the relevant reflections of Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, three of the most famous poststructuralist thinkers, can be fused to a single stream of thought, which allows us to think the problem of justice in a way that overcomes the impasses of normative-cum-idealist political theory, without adopting the objectivist reductionism or functionalism of traditional materialism neither the flat ontology of new materialisms, which tends to disable a differentiated and differentiating theory of justice.

A spectral promise

I begin with Derrida since it is to him that we owe partly the emergence of a new critical discourse over justice, which re-cognizes the link between justice, power and violence yet tries to sustain the notion’s radical valence and political integrity.

Derrida’s own reflection revolve around one key idea: the irreducibility of justice to law. As he put it programmatically in ‘Force of Law’,

I want to insist at once to reserve the possibility of a justice, indeed of a law that not only exceeds or contradicts law, but also, perhaps, has no relation to law, or maintains such a strange relation to it that it may just as well demand law as exclude it.

In its essentials, the argument is not new. Benjamin, with whom Derrida engages extensively, has unequivocally asserted that there is an “infinite chasm between justice and Right”. To make a huge leap back in time, the non-identity and irreducible tension between justice and law is a key theme in attic Tragedy, which let us not forget had a huge formative impact on the intellectual environment where philosophy grew.

Derrida places himself in this critical tradition and gives it a radical inflection. Justice cannot be contained by law because it resists representation, hence, deconstruction. Τhis strong apophatic standpoint claims not to advance passive resignation or normative relativism (as it has often been accused of). Rather, the impossibility to name justice in a definitive manner, and thus to encapsulate it into a normative/legal order of imputation and representation, creates the possibility of thinking and practicing justice in innovative ways. Indeed, since justice may sometimes exclude or be against law, it can on principle be indexed on social struggles that breach legally sanctioned codes of conduct: wildcat strikes, mutinies, riots, revolts. In this way, justice becomes a category that pertains and allows us to think not (only) ordered procedures but disruptive events.

Yet, real events of insurgency – from which the philosophical concept of the event draws nourishment – never enter Derrida’s purview in a systematic manner. How can indeed the positive presence of justice in social struggles and uprisings be marked, when every claim to presence has been on principle displaced? Not accidentally, Derrida takes a critical distance from the great historical alternative to the legalistic conception of justice that liberalism has promoted, the revolutionary justice preached by the socialist (Marxist, anarchist, communist) tradition. Even more, in his critical commentary of Benjamin, Derrida suggests that ideas of an anomic justice delivered by revolutionary violence are germane with the logic of arbitrary, sovereign rule.

As a way of response, it is worth noting that the link between sovereign Power and revolutionary terror is not forged directly in the moment of popular (resentful and redemptive in equal measure) violence but during its statist mediation. In this respect, a more dialectical analysis of the phenomenon of revolutionary Terror is called for. At any rate, the main issue here is that Derrida entertains the possibility of an alternative to prevailing liberal conceptions of justice, epitomized in the rule of law, but never names it, nor does he systematically reflect on the social forms that have historically embodied it. Even his references to the “new international” are distinctly vague and careful not to give a concrete shape to the militancy that they evoke.

Attributing this standpoint to purely theoretical reasons is to decontextualize thought and obscure its historical mediations. Derrida’s reflections on justice can be plausibly seen as “a theory of defeat”, a notion proposed by Ahlrich Meyer in reference to the work of Marx after the defeat of the 1848 revolutions. That is, Derrida’s late work on justice is expressive of a period when the revolutionary hopes that the “red utopias” have nourished were fading away, after their last upsurge in the 1960s and 1970s. Consequently, the “justice beyond the law” that Derrida conjures lacks a concrete anchoring point.

To be sure, like every genuine thought, Derrida’s is an active reflection on his epoch, one that is bent to resist the liberal triumphalism that we have come to associate with Fukuyama’s infamous “end of history”. Derrida’s thought traces in the ruins of past defeat an indelible residue. Struggles arise and fade, political systems come and go, hopes for a world-historical plebeian redemption have been defeated, the neoliberal utopia that replaced them is swept away by a post-apocalyptic mood; but justice remains. It remains as a promise, a point which allows Derrida to critically broach the messianic potency of justice. But it also remains as a specter that effectively subverts every attempt to offer an ontology of justice. Discerning the “hauntology” that displaces every onto-political configuration of justice is Derrida’s lasting legacy, open to a fertile appropriation: there is an excess that is proper to the idea of justice, which unsettles existing forms of Right by evoking the specter and promise of a justice to come

Yet the fact remains that Derrida’s thought is too steeped into the discursive in order to direct the theorization of justice into a theory of material forms. Nor thus do we ever get a robust analysis of how or why justice emerges in the world. Justice for Derrida dwells essentially on the sphere of ideality; as such, his thought must be seen as a radical idealism set to defer the moment when the necessarily violent application of the ideal of justice comes. There is certainly a critical moment built into this gesture. However, it comes at the expense of a systematic accommodation of the collective praxis that originally displaces the identity between justice and law and raises the problem of justice to the level of political and theoretical consciousness. To attain its fully radical sting and thus become adequate to the violent complexity of the real history of justice, Derrida’s notion of a justice beyond the law needs to be fleshed with the materiality of struggling and desiring bodies.

Power/Justice

Here is where Foucault enters. To be sure, even less so than in Derrida, there is nothing that resembles a “theory of justice” in Foucault’s work. On principle however Foucault’s thought is designed to clarify the way that normative concepts like justice operate and assume their meaning within organized systems of power/knowledge. In brief, from a Foucauldian perspective, justice is not an infinite judgment either of God or of Reason on finitude but a “thing of this world”, whose actuality is always entangled with concrete power relations.

Here we clearly have a perspective that critically embeds normative claims to justice in their material context without reducing them to a fixed metaphysical category, be it “Matter” or “Power”. Given that power is not a univocal substance but a relation generating and unfolding in a complex interface of domination, control and resistance, justice should also not be expected to play a univocal function. Indeed, in the distinction that Foucault draws in Society must be Defended between two types of history, a significant differentiation for justice is also touched upon. In both histories, (whose paradigmatic expressions are respectively Roman and Biblical history) justice holds a key place, but unlike the first “official” history, in the second “anti-history” justice is not found in the lawful constitution of the present, which has fulfilled the past and aspires to mold the future into its own image. It is rather present in its current absence, as a memory of struggle and defeat, as resentful anticipation of a coming vindication, and as a raging battle-cry against the powers that be. In this respect, justice is operative both in rituals of power as well as in events of revolt.

From this inference another crucial insight can be drawn: if justice is indeed not only “what is established”, as Pascal had once asserted, then this is primarily because the historical continuum – discursively established by the narratives of linear progress and triumphant Power – is interrupted by uprisings and struggles that pose a practical challenge to every sanctioned partition of the sensible, i.e. to every nomos, even to the one which claims to rule by virtue of its self-sustaining rationality. This insight gives substance to the notion of a justice “beyond law” by embedding justice to the activity of defiant and insurgent bodies. But what is exactly embedded? Is it an idea, a principle, a virtue, a fantasy? Disappointingly, on the one occasion where he attends to this theme in a reflective manner, during his famous debate with Chomsky, Foucault reverts to a rather conventional functionalism. In his own words:

I would like to reply to you in terms of Spinoza and say that the proletariat doesn’t wage war against the ruling class because it considers such a war to be just. The proletariat makes war with the ruling class because, for the first time on history, it wants to take power. And because it will overthrow the power of the ruling class, it considers such a war to be just.

And then in a more generalizing fashion:

it seems to me that the idea of justice in itself is an idea which in effect has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power.

Now, I do not deny that justice plays both functions. What I find spurious is the genealogical reduction that allows for a definitional identity: “justice is a device”.  For such a verdict ignores that power is not the end of which justice serves as a supporting means. This can be seen in the idea of workers-power, which intensifies the link that Foucault makes between proletarian struggles and power to the level of a political principle. Workers-power names sociopolitical forms – from the dictatorship of the proletariat to autonomia operaia (workers autonomy) – that enable the laboring masses to change and improve their lives. In every case, the change is experienced to provide justice with its content, while conversely justice concerns precisely these conditions – from a higher wage to self-administration – that enable a better life for the workers.

Rather therefore than a crude functionalism a more intricate relation is suggested, a fusion of justice and power in processes of biopolitical production. For justice specifically, a non-derivative potency is implied, of justice as a mobilizing force in the struggles of those who in the context of existing dispositifs of power/right are subject to multiple forms of disenfranchisement. Interestingly, in his later article on revolt Foucault hints towards this direction. For if at the heart of the irreducible event of revolt an experience of injustice is involved, does not the latter experience imply a more positive desire for justice?

 Becoming-justice

The real question of course here concerns the exact relation between affective experiences of injustice and the alleged desire for justice. Foucault himself did not pursue this issue. One reason may be that, despite his positive review of Anti-Oedipus, he continued associating desire with lack (at least this is what he confined to Deleuze).

It is not that difficult to comprehend why Foucault insisted on the identification of desire and lack. Don’t we desire what we don’t have? Money, time, bodies, pleasures, power? More substantially, the link suggests itself because both phenomena act as vectors between two points: “desire for…”, and “lack of …”. In both cases, a space is denoted that needs to be covered. For the case of justice specifically, the link is further fortified by the fact that the desire for justice denotes a chasm between an Ought and an Is, which as Hegel has perceptively commented leads people to react against the existing order of things. However, there is a crucial difference: lack designates a void, a constitutive absence; hence it is essentially a category of negativity. Desire, on the other hand, designates a positive magnitude and quality, that is, a movement and an interplay of bodies that always and already fills the space between them. It is this this key idea that Deleuze and Guattari develop by elaborating on the productivity of desire. For to say that desire is a “factory of production” is effectively to conceptualize the way that desire produces the trajectories, connections and assemblages which actualize it.

In terms of a theory of justice this opens an extremely fertile path, signposted by Deleuze and Guattari (although not systematically pursued). The desire for justice is much more than the search of an absent ideal, which will finally give to those who find it what they rightfully deserve. It is a productive trajectory that co-extends to the forms that actualize it: to unions, associations, communes, NGO’s, courts, militias. All these forms are invested by a desire to set things right, that is by a desire for justice. And since there is no “desiring production” which is not at the same time “social production”, the desire for justice ultimately unfolds as a biopolitical process. “We have our being in justice” (Becket).

This perspective yields nothing less than an open and expansive topography of justice: as an immanent determination of social/desiring production the actuality of justice is not reduced to law-making. Rather, as Deleuze and Guattari argue in their Kafka book, justice spreads throughout social being, wherever things are taking place: “in the hallways of the congress, behind the scenes of the meeting, where people confront the real, immanent, problems of desire and power, the real problem of justice”. Moreover, as they continue, since everyone is involved into the problems of desire and power, everyone is also an “auxiliary of justice”. In this respect, as they conclude, “justice is the continuum of desire, with shifting boundaries that are always displaced”.

This perspective gives to justice a rhizomatic and dynamic potency. What all the singular instantiations have in common is that justice in order “to be” must “become”. Actualizing justice is a becoming-justice. The notion is not a metaphor. Far from it, the Deleuzian notion of becoming is important precisely because it grasps that justice does not concern the self-realization of a primary identity, not even a dialectical one of the “in-itself” to “for-itself” type. It concerns the production of difference through a combination of heterogeneous elements. Resisting austerity, revolting against a dictator, establishing a temporary occupation or a permanent commune, fighting for a better wage, initiating a jihad, joining a crusade. In all these cases, a differential passage is involved, becoming something other than what you are supposed to be, creating new connections, entering into new assemblages: becoming other, becoming-many, becoming-justice.

Of course, this process may stabilize so as to form a field of interiority with new allocated roles and identities. This is the moment when justice is captured by the state and the thought peculiar to it, “state-thought”. However, such a capture remains always incomplete, negotiable, fragile. The history of justice in this respect may be legitimately seen as the contentious and intensive interplay between stratification and deterritorialization, the composition of majorities and the formation of minorities, transcendent judgement and immanent critique. From this perspective also, the idea of justice, i.e. the noetic actualization of justice as a conceptual/ideational generality, can be seen to serve a double function: it operates both as an “order-word”, that prescribes to the present its proper form, and a “pass-word”, which evokes an earth and a people that “do not yet exist”.

Interestingly, in this context justice operates as a necessary mediation that prevents the dualities which frame Deleuze’s philosophy to break down into an onto-political dualism. At the same time, the reduction to a crude, reductionist monism is also avoided. Instead, the theorization of justice invites an analysis of different diagrammatic lines: one “hierarchical-stratified”, the other “horizontal-egalitarian”. In Deleuze’s and Guattari’s terms: “another justice, another movement, another space-time” (A Thousand Plateaus).

Two further crucial insight follow: no single normative definition of justice is possible since the becoming of justice involves as its intrinsic moment the decoding and disordering of existing forms. This means that riots, revolt, and other forms of popular insurgency, up to and including revolution, are not symptoms of dysfunction but positive forms of becoming-justice. Finally, insofar justice is (a) becoming it belongs to history but also it constitutes one of its points of excess, since every actualization of justice is shadowed by non-derivative potentials which stand as its virtual alternatives.

Clearly, there is much more that needs to be said to substantiate the theorical perspective proposed. My goal here however was not to offer an exhaustive theory. It was to show how poststructuralist thought offers tools and a space for thinking justice afresh. In this context, I have articulated a series of suggestive points which are meant to ground a key programmatic insight: a theory of justice should be a critical analysis of differential forms ordering, regulating, subverting, transforming, and haunting our world.  Thus, instead of prescribing to the world its one true form, to think justice is to open ourselves to the world’s potential figures. As a French graffito (recently restated during the “gillets jaunes” mobilizations) astutely puts it: “other ends of the world are possible”.

George Sotiropoulos / Void Network

George Sotiropoulos holds a PhD in Political Theory. He is a member of Void Network. Recently he published the book A Materialist Theory of Justice: The One, the Many, the Not-Yet (published by Rowman and Littlefield International)

The post Becoming-Other, Becoming-Many: Poststructuralism and the Problem of Justice – George Sotiropoulos / Void Network appeared first on Void Network.

Becoming-Other, Becoming-Many: Poststructuralism and the Problem of Justice- George Sotiropoulos– political philosopher and member of Void Network participates in the conference POSTSTRUCTURALISM: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE Wed. 6/3/2019 MADRID

This paper argues that poststructuralist thought can help articulate a critical and materialist notion of justice against the normativist and idealist conceptions dominant today. The assumption that justice is a critical concept goes all the way back to Plato, whose interrogation of the notion in the Republic yields a critical analysis of the political forms existing in Greece at the time. On the other hand, in the very same work, Plato has been taken to canonize an idealist conceptualization of justice, as a normative Ideal that prescribes how things Ought to be. This conception remains prevalent today in mainstream theories of justice, which unfold within a more or less liberal frame of reference. Despite the plurality of perspectives and the willingness to critically engage with key premises of liberal thought, justice continues for the most part to be conceived as a judgment that reason passes on material reality. Recognizing the exclusionary implications of this type of normative political theory, a diverse yet identifiable current of thought has emerged that attempts to recover a more critical conception of justice, which does not adopt however the reductionist attitude of traditional Marxist or more broadly materialist critiques. In this context, the legacy of poststructuralism has been ambivalent. On the one hand, the late work of Derrida has arguably been an inaugurating moment of contemporary critical and non-reductionist theories of justice. On the other hand, it is not hard to find instances in the work of other iconic poststructuralist thinkers that suggest a principled dismissal of the notion’s analytical and political merits. Intentionally or inadvertently, poststructuralism’s radical critique of political normativism has been said (and accused) to lead to a subsumption of justice to power. Even Derrida’s attempts to sustain the irreducibility of the former to the latter, ends up in an aporetic position, which refrains from articulating an alternative, positive conception of justice. It is the latter possibility that my paper explores. Starting with a brief discussion of Derrida and Foucault and then focusing on Deleuze and Guattari, it will be argued that poststructuralist thought provides a fertile basis for a concept of justice that foregrounds the latter’s critical potency without however forfeiting its normative and ethical traits. At the same time, this conception will be shown to be consistent to a materialist theory of social reality, yet respectful of the ideational dimension of justice as well as of its excessiveness vis-à-vis historical actuality.

Conference Program

more info: https://poststructuralismconference.wordpress.com/conference-abstracts/

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