On Political Impasse

Power, Resistance, and New Forms of Selfhood

Antonio Calcagno

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350268494
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Power is classically understood as the playing out of relations between the ruler and the ruled. Political impasse is often viewed as a moment in which no clear-cut delineation of power exists, resulting in an overwhelming sense of frustration or feeling stuck in a no-win situation. The new globalised world has produced a real shift in how power works: not only has power been concentrated in the hands of very few while many millions become more oppressed by radical shortages and growing costs, but we also have a new category of political subjectivity in which many find themselves neither rulers nor radically oppressed. Those who live the neither/nor of contemporary power live the new global impasse. For those of us who are stuck and compelled to wait for dominant power to break, this book uncovers possibilities in thought, imagination, and self-appropriation through oikeiosis, that is, making oneself at home in oneself, and constancy.

1

The New Impasse

Deeper Conditions of the Contemporary Impasse: The Fatigue of Forms of Change and the Rise of a New Form of Political Impasse

Political impasses have always existed. As moments of political power, though, they are usually swept into the post facto historical accounts of the clear determinations of events that follow them. An impasse between two sides in conflict, for example, is usually understood according to the dominant interest of the parties involved and narrated to show some kind of victory or benefit. We see this clearly when we examine the twentieth-century wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan: the moment of impasse is absorbed by the more defining determinations of victory and loss or ruler and ruled. If there is something like a new form of political impasse, we have to account for the inability on the part of a group to bring about significant political change. All political change is historically conditioned. But it is not only the advent of neoliberalism, with all of its contradictions, that is responsible for the current structure that makes manifest yet another moment of impasse. Part of our inability to move beyond the impasse, which political theorist Chantal Mouffe indicates is the result of the failed response of neoliberal economics to deal with the ensuant collapse of 2008 that produced noxious forms of populism,¹ lies in the fact, I claim, that our political imaginary has been deeply conditioned by two once very successful paradigms of change: reform and revolution.

Rosa Luxemburg brilliantly distills the power (and impotence) of these two paradigms of change in her famous work Reform or Revolution?.² She mines the historical development of socialist reformists, as well as their contemporary defense of the possibility of change through the adoption of proposed Liberal (and capitalist) reforms sanctioned by both government and the rule of law, and ultimately rejects this approach as either affirming an unjust and oppressive status quo or being slow and inefficient. Luxemburg favors revolution, and she justifies her case through economic and historical analysis. The question that haunts her concerns timing—when to launch a revolution?—as both historic and economic considerations do not yield an exact answer. She emphasizes the need to pay close attention to the conditions that make revolution possible. Some would argue that, sadly, Luxemburg misjudged her own time, evidenced by her own failure (and brutal death) to bring about revolutionary change in the German Revolution of 1919. What is profoundly interesting about Luxemburg’s thought is the deep awareness of history and the way in which it conditions material reality.

History, or historical consciousness, becomes increasingly rich as it collects and ponders the thoughts and deeds of humans while constantly offering interpretations and insights about them in their present situation. It sheds light on crucial aspects of human activity, especially politics. When we examine the history of political thinking, we certainly find a plethora of ideas that have become stagnant, violent, or noxious, such as the totalitarian philosophies of National Socialism, Fascism, and Soviet Communism. Indeed, most political theory has as its motivating impetus a series of circumstances and a number of political personalities that have failed miserably at achieving any kind of politics aimed at human flourishing: Plato responds to the crisis of the Thirty Tyrants, Thomas Hobbes to the civil wars, and Hannah Arendt to totalitarianism and capitalist consumer societies. Political thinkers offer alternatives and solutions to what they see as the decadence of political rule. We must acknowledge that some of what is offered is plainly impractical or shortsighted, and some is unacceptable on account of its inherent inhumanity—it simply breeds violence and enforces divisive practices.

We can certainly read the history of political thinking as a response to crisis, but even so, such an understanding ascribes to the agents and events involved in any historical situation either the capacity and power to respond or the freedom and willingness to respond to given circumstances. Change, it seems, is always possible in the sense that we can change the balance in the ruler–ruled dynamic.

Plato’s Republic, for example, is a response to what he sees as a decadent and corrupt Athens suffering from the legacy of the Thirty Tyrants. His vision of a new polis is illumined by the Good—the philosopher-king not only sees the forms, but also the Good. Society is ordered according to different classes of people that justly carry out what they are by nature designed to do as rulers, guardians, or workers. Plato unabashedly defends a hierarchy of political power and no one escapes the ruler–ruled relationship that he establishes among the classes. All classes are bound by the demands of justice; the philosopher-king is subject to the truth of the forms and the Good. Some would argue Plato’s republic is tyrannical because the philosopher-king is conceived of as the summit of power with full illumination while other classes are purposefully and maliciously denied certain knowledge, as evidenced by the famous myth of the metals, and Plato’s insistence on the need for what some have called the noble lie: the classes, ultimately, need to work as one if the new polis is to thrive, and this involves the execution of the ruler–ruled relationship.

Medieval thinkers, drawing from Plato and the Neo-Platonists, also see power as the relation between the ruler and the ruled. Whether we speak of Dante’s defense of rule by the one, namely, monarchic rule, or Marsilius of Padova’s firm division between papal power and the power of the Holy Roman Emperor, ultimately, all are subject to God. Medieval political power introduces into Western thinking an absolute, natural order that is intimately connected to the God of monotheism. This God, the one being who is exempt from the dynamic of the ruler and ruled, is subject to no one and subjects all. The exemption becomes important in modernity because of the sovereign state of exception: sovereigns are truly sovereign because they can exempt themselves from the rules of state, a claim reserved only for God.

Machiavelli and Hobbes, two important initiators of modern political thought, claim that sovereign rule can discipline and bring order to a world tragically suffused with the darker shades of human nature. Machiavelli notes that politics is born out of the need to try and control human volatility and fickleness, whereas Hobbes believes humanity to be in a state of constant aggression; homo homini lupus, “we are to each other as wolves,” he tells us. Yet, in each of these modern models of politics, whether the Leviathan of government, the prince, or a reworked Roman model of republican rule—and though some form of sovereignty is asserted by rulers in these models—rule is still understood as a relationship between a ruler and the ruled. Machiavelli and Hobbes painstakingly detail the ways in which rulers are dependent on their subjects, and how they should avoid civil strife and tyrannical models of rule that will inevitably and miserably fail, as did the reign of Agathocles. We know that both philosophers lived in times of protracted civil unrest and sought stability through new models of rule that promised the peace and security vital for human flourishing.

Though many Western governments have modern forms of political rule, for example, the checks and balances in place among different branches of government, and rule by law, I believe we are no longer just modern subjects. Michel Foucault’s analyses of power show us how it can manifest itself in a plethora of ways, and not only in material ones; nonetheless, he views power as structured by relations between a dominant and subjectivating force. Foucault succeeds in showing, through his careful and expansive studies of documents, archives, disciplining practices, especially on the “cellular” or granular levels, that power need not be framed simply as a series of direct, traceable, and immediate actions caused by an agent. He loosens the connection between actor and agent to show how institutions, human beings’ relations, and bodies configure themselves in visible and invisible relations of power. Power is ubiquitous. Although traditional concepts of power root it in an individual such as God, a prince or monarch, government, or the people, Foucault’s understanding brings a unique dimension to the evolution of the concept. Political change, then, need not be centered only around the removal of traditional holders or causal nexuses of power. Often when such leaders and centers of power are eliminated, the problems remain, albeit in different forms. Political change and resistance, Foucault shows us, can come from different directions and result in varying structures: political change is a multilateral possibility.³ Power and change have become more complex phenomena following the intensification and complexification of contemporary global society; older models of change marked by the removal of key actors are no longer sufficient.

Furthermore, the ascendency of a new global financial order, the explosion of technology and communication-information networks, and an unprecedented growth in the human population have created a new political order which lays the groundwork for how we view power and political change. Zygmunt Bauman calls this new reality liquid modernity⁴ or, simply, globalization. He observes that the establishment of a new, looser and less centralized, neoliberal financial capitalist order means that traditional forms of government are subject to market demands in ways and on a scale never witnessed before. Elected governments are mobilized not so much by the desires of their citizens, but by the demands and pressures of global capitalism. People thus become alienated, subject to rule that does not stem from their own local governments, understood as structures of rule. People are subject to rule that does not stem from their own traditionally centralized and territorially bounded governments, but from international and global forces, including competition, trade deficits, IMF and World Bank policies, and massive and complex global supply chains. Noam Chomsky discusses the ascendancy of this new political, global financial rule that operates outside the borders of both national and international sovereignty, thereby giving to it greater flexibility of movement and unchecked freedom to exert the force necessary to achieve its own goals.⁵

Today, with the ascendency of financial capital oligarchies and nationalist regimes, such as Victor Orban’s Hungary, we have a firmly established form of rule that has eclipsed the power of legitimately elected governments to change the course of events within their own states. Christian Marazzi quotes Antonio Negri in his discussion of the foregoing shift:

The sovereign government on national territory, writes Negri, “hasn’t worked for decades: to reestablish an effectiveness it uses a procedure of governance. But this, too, is insufficient—the same local government needs something that goes beyond a territorial state, something that substitutes the exclusive sovereignty that the nation-state otherwise possessed.” The passage from government as the state modality of the regulation of growth to governance as the exercise of technocratic control—partial, punctual and local—is exactly what we have been witnessing in the international crisis of sovereign debt. It isn’t by chance that the financial crisis is, de facto, a banking crisis, an insolvency crisis in which regional banks, from the German Landesbanken to the Spanish Cajas to nation states and American cities, find themselves on the brink of bankruptcy, struggling to reduce their debts. . . . Today, international financial markets are the ones that, with the “simple” differential of bond revenues, technically determine if a citizen of Greece, Illinois or Michigan has the right to retirement funds or if he or she has to resort to public assistance to survive.⁶

Marazzi remarks that the new financial capitalism can move and shape the lives of masses of people in unprecedented ways. He observes:

Analyzing financial capitalism under this productive profile means talking about bio-economy or bio-capitalism, “whose form is characterized by its growing connection to the lives of human beings. Previously, capitalism resorted primarily to the functions of transformation of raw materials carried out by machines and the bodies of workers. Instead, bio-capitalism produces value by extracting it not only from the body functioning as the material instrument of work, but also from the body understood as a whole.” (Vanni Codeluppi, Il biocapitalismo. Verso lo sfruttamento integrale di corpi, cervelli, emozioni (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008))⁷

Christian Lotz adds to the insights of Marazzi by observing that the abstraction caused by a reduced quality of life—so much time and effort is involved in the basic exchange mechanism of money—has led to the impoverishment of the human spirit, and ultimately created a culture of tutelage in which the financially powerful rule over the masses.⁸ Furthermore, as the Italian philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato argues, global financial capitalism has produced a new class distinction between debtors and creditors,⁹ in which the latter oppresses the former. The most recent financial collapse of 2008 has left many countries, including Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Cyprus, and Italy, in dire economic circumstances. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and various national central banks demand austerity measures and countries comply, for they are reliant upon hefty bailouts to prevent the collapse of their internal economies. Citizens are then forced to accede to imposed salvage plans and pay from their own private funds, as they did in Cyprus to support the local banking system. And as Elettra Stimmili argues, the economy of widespread debt and austerity has reinforced age-old logics of sin and justified punishment aimed at controlling and limiting the lives of countless individuals.¹⁰

The varied responses to the 2008 crisis are fascinating, but the majority, in my view, are framed in a reworked late-nineteenth-century paradigm of revolution that has been filtered through the politics of the 1960s. I believe such paradigms have become largely ineffective; they do not bring about any major changes or, at least, the major structural changes they demand. Movements like Idle No More and Occupy Wall Street started off with great support and hope, but dissipated over time, revealing, in the end, a lack of any perduring unifying force that could effectuate real and long-lasting change. The status quo of neoliberal financial capitalism remains.

There are many reasons for such short-lived, ineffective responses, including the changing nature of power, as mentioned above, media representation, the nature of our limited consciousness and attention, material and financial resources, the impact of technology and media, power divisions, human greed, and human desire, but one of the major reasons is overlooked: the very responses we have formulated are heavily dependent on ideological or conceptual forms of change that are gravely fatigued, namely, revolution and Liberal reform (both with their strategies of disobedience, protest, and violence). It would be fair to say that our notions of political change are deeply colored by the historical framework in which we situate change. Let us recall that not all historical political changes are the same: each one is relative to its time and is understood within the conceptual apparatus of its time. For instance, Plato did not wish to speak of change proper, but rather, the truth of conforming to the demands of the eternal—the good, true, and beautiful. As an Athenian Greek, he understood reality to be eternal, and called for a conversion of thought (periagoge) at a time when political thinking was unable to take in the eternal forms and citizens were unable to live according to them. Constant change (i.e., becoming) is, for Plato, a thing to be avoided and, at least in some of his writings, a serious source of disease insofar as it inhibits human flourishing.

Today, the French philosopher Alain Badiou could be said to be one of the leading thinkers of revolution or what he calls the “event.”¹¹ He is the living synthesis of nineteenth-century Marxist-inspired revolutionary politics, Maoist sensibilities, and 1960s’ student-worker politics. Badiou is the true soixcentehuitard. He teaches that genuine politics happens only when there is a radical rupture of a given political order driven by state oppression. The rupture is truly an event when the situation is reordered by the very event that brings it about. A new subjectivity and new sense of time emerge with the decision on the part of the actors involved to bring about revolutionary change. Badiou gives us examples, including the French Revolution, the Russian Revolutions, and May 1968. Needless to say, what qualifies as an event is monumental in scope. The French Revolution, for example, marked the end of the very possibility of divine absolutist monarchical rule; the totalizing reigns of Louis XVI and his predecessor, Louis XIV, would never again be possible.

But the political conceptual framework of revolutionary events has become tired, despite what Badiou argues. Why? People have lost faith in this conceptual apparatus. The revolutionary promise of Marxian-inspired regimes like the former Soviet Union, Cuba, and China led, in reality, to brutal systems as corrupt and abhorrent as the previous imperial and capitalist regimes. The promised economic well-being, which would allow human desire to flourish according to the needs and means of each individual, was not delivered. Hierarchies were enforced, and the collapse of these regimes or their transformations into huge capitalist world powers, as in the case of China, renders impotent revolution as an effective model of change.

In Western Liberal economies, on the contrary, the demands for social change or reform articulated in the 1960s by great civil leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Gloria Steinem, and Harvey Milk produced revolutionary change for African Americans, women, gays, and lesbians. Governments and courts responded by extending rights and protections to vast segments of populations that were previously limited or excluded from participating fully in civil society. In many ways, the spirit of the 1960s still animates the desire for change and equity. Yet, despite these great social and political changes, the framework or paradigm of revolutionary change is no longer effective in Western Liberal democracies. Change is brought about through the traditional mechanisms of the democratic vote, the court system, and the legislative process—all instruments of reform. With greater access to these mechanisms, the need for revolutionary change has quelle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Thesis
• Preface
• 1 The New Impasse
• 2 The Inscription of the Ruler–Ruled Power Relation in Political Thought and the Obscuring of Impasse
• 3 Impasse and the Recovery and Transformation of Selfhood
• Conclusion: On Possible New Forms of Selfhood
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint