Ontology and Politics Conference, QMUL

Ontology and Politics Conference, June 16th, 2008. Presented by the Politics Department and the Graduate School for Humanities and Social Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London.

The program includes a couple of papers on Foucault and also a Keynote by Simon Critchley.

Sample abstracts:

Johanna Oksala (University of Dundee): “Foucault’s Politicisation of Ontology.”

The paper makes two claims about political ontology. Firstly, I argue for the importance of ontological inquiry in political philosophy. For the theoretical rethinking of politics to amount to an effective response to practical political problems it cannot avoid ontological investigation. My second aim is to argue against any essential definition of ‘the political’. Political ontology should not denote an inquiry into the fixed essence of politics, but a politicised conception of reality. I will problematise the relationship between ontology and politics by putting forward such a conception with the help of Michel Foucault’s critical project. Foucault’s thought formed an important strand in the effort to theorise the social construction of reality that became prominent in the 1960’s and 1970’s. It is my contention that his most original and important contribution to this project was his conception of productive power. The ontological idea behind Foucault’s hybrid notion of power/knowledge is that social practices always incorporate power relations, which become constitutive of forms of the subject as well as domains and objects of knowledge. They are not subjects and objects existing in the world as pregiven constants, but are rather constituted through practices of power. This is a radical, ontological claim about the nature of reality: reality as we know it is the result of social practices, but also of concrete struggles over truth in social space. My argument will proceed in three stages. First, I will defend the importance of ontological inquiry in political philosophy. I will then explicate the politicised conception of reality – the political ontology – that I find in Foucault’s thought. Finally, I will conclude by considering its consequences for our understanding of politics.

Giorgos Fourtounis (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki): “Immanence and Subjection: Foucault, Althusser and the aporia of the subject.”

In this paper I will try to draw some hints from Althusser’s late thinking on aleatory materialism as a means for tackling the alleged impasses of the (post)structuralist theorization of the subject (exemplified in the works of Foucault and Althusser himself) and their political consequences. The close correlation between Foucault’s anti-subjectivist and anti-teleological stances, where the subject is constituted by non-subjective “power/knowledge regimes”, which in their turn are contingent events, essentially unpredictable and non-explicable, entangles him in the aporia of a subject suspended between the constituted and the constituent subject, or between the subject as a result and the subject as a cause. The counterpart of this aporia, which is prolonged rather than attenuated in Foucault’s late work, is the aporia of the Enlightenment (and its advent), which is viewed both as a contingent event “that has made us what we are” and as an attitude or ethos, a task to be accomplished. A similar correlation between anti-subjectivism and anti-finalism is also omnipresent in Althusser’s thought, but here, as I will try to show, the relevant aporias can be tackled better by way of the evocation of Spinozist immanence as a theoretical means of thinking both the structural causality governing the constitution of social formations and the ideological interpellation governing the constitution of subjects. This theoretical strategy was proposed, precisely, as an attempt to resolve an analogous aporia concerning causality, that is, as an escape out of the traditional dilemma between atomist-transitive and holistic-transcendent causality: a structured individuality neither preexists (as a transcendent cause) nor follows (as a transitive result) the elements and procedures of its constitution, but it is their immanent cause, with no existence apart from them. According to Judith Butler, now, both Foucauldian subjection and Althusserian interpellation involve the ontological paradox of a constitutive retroaction and self-referentiality, where the subject necessarily appears as the precondition of its constitution. In the light of this, my suggestion will be that it is precisely such a figure of retroaction, essentially of a Spinozist inspiration, that is constitutively involved in Althusser’s late work, considered as a radical development of his earlier Spinozist structuralism, providing an additional philosophical perspective for the thematization of the aporia of the subject.

Paul Reynolds (Edge Hill): “Ontologies, Politics, Dialectics: The Ordering of Stable and Unstable Moments.”

Behind much political and social theory in the last 50 years has been the question of ontological stability. Post-structuralist influenced critiques have settled upon a critique of – if you like – ’solid state ontologies’, particularly those inherent within universalist, essentialist theories of politics and society such as Marxism or Feminism, and sought to explore the deconstructive, critical and unstable moments that seem to negate ’solid state ontologies’, at its best represented in Derrida and Foucault, and at its worst in the culturally reifications of post-modern discourse. This has produced a dichotomy of – if you like – ’solid state ontologies’ and fluid and ‘unstable ontologies’ in which the entrenchment on either side often depends on philosophical or political convictions, and guerilla war between the trenches atrophies critical debate. Some thinkers work – Laclau, Butler and to an extent Zizek, seem to reflect the agonies (and perhaps agonistic nature) of seeking to straddle these entrenchments and some, to an extent Badiou, and more Critical Realism, might suggest a synergistic alternative to such entrenchment. This paper seeks to build upon these to suggest that an understanding of ontological stability lies not in attachment to one or other moment, but the recognise them as moments in not a dichotomised but a dialectical process, where the ordering of moments produces the balance or scope and limits to particular thinkers accommodations between the two. What is at stake in doing so is not just an arguably more critical openness philosophically, but an approach to politics that recognises the need to effect such dialectical engagements in both strategising and in engaging mobilisation and action in the political frame, and particularly within the anti-capitalism movement at the present conjuncture.

More info here.

New Paper: Foucault, Marxism and the Cuban Revolution: Historical and Contemporary Reflections

New paper by Sam Binkley:

Foucault, Marxism and the Cuban Revolution: Historical and Contemporary Reflections

This article relates central themes of Marxist and Foucauldian thought to the intellectual and political legacy of the Cuban Revolution. Against the backdrop of a reading of Foucault’s relationship to the revolutionary left, it is argued that Marxist theoretical discourse on guerrilla struggle (as articulated by Mao, Guevara and others) provide an intriguing case for bio-political struggle. In the case of the Cuban revolution, an ethics of self-transformation appears in which new ways of living and practicing life are cultivated in opposition to sedimentations of state power. Moreover, in addition to this historical case, a discussion is offered of the reception of Foucault’s work in contemporary Cuba, through an analysis of the published proceedings of a conference on Foucault held at the University of Havana in 1999. Here, Foucault’s thought is appropriated as part of an effort to revitalize Cuban socialism itself. 

In Rethinking Marxism.

Žižek on Critchley

Funnily enough and coming in quite timely, Slavoj Žižek has a piece in the 15 November issue of London Review of Books which discusses resistance and why Critchley’s position is problematic.

He says:

The response of some critics on the postmodern Left to this predicament is to call for a new politics of resistance. Those who still insist on fighting state power, let alone seizing it, are accused of remaining stuck within the ‘old paradigm’: the task today, their critics say, is to resist state power by withdrawing from its terrain and creating new spaces outside its control. This is, of course, the obverse of accepting the triumph of capitalism. The politics of resistance is nothing but the moralising supplement to a Third Way Left.

Simon Critchley’s recent book, Infinitely Demanding, is an almost perfect embodiment of this position.[*] For Critchley, the liberal-democratic state is here to stay. Attempts to abolish the state failed miserably; consequently, the new politics has to be located at a distance from it: anti-war movements, ecological organisations, groups protesting against racist or sexist abuses, and other forms of local self-organisation. It must be a politics of resistance to the state, of bombarding the state with impossible demands, of denouncing the limitations of state mechanisms. The main argument for conducting the politics of resistance at a distance from the state hinges on the ethical dimension of the ‘infinitely demanding’ call for justice: no state can heed this call, since its ultimate goal is the ‘real-political’ one of ensuring its own reproduction (its economic growth, public safety, etc). ‘Of course,’ Critchley writes,

history is habitually written by the people with the guns and sticks and one cannot expect to defeat them with mocking satire and feather dusters. Yet, as the history of ultra-leftist active nihilism eloquently shows, one is lost the moment one picks up the guns and sticks. Anarchic political resistance should not seek to mimic and mirror the archic violent sovereignty it opposes.

So what should, say, the US Democrats do? Stop competing for state power and withdraw to the interstices of the state, leaving state power to the Republicans and start a campaign of anarchic resistance to it? And what would Critchley do if he were facing an adversary like Hitler? Surely in such a case one should ‘mimic and mirror the archic violent sovereignty’ one opposes? Shouldn’t the Left draw a distinction between the circumstances in which one would resort to violence in confronting the state, and those in which all one can and should do is use ‘mocking satire and feather dusters’? The ambiguity of Critchley’s position resides in a strange non sequitur: if the state is here to stay, if it is impossible to abolish it (or capitalism), why retreat from it? Why not act with(in) the state? Why not accept the basic premise of the Third Way? Why limit oneself to a politics which, as Critchley puts it, ‘calls the state into question and calls the established order to account, not in order to do away with the state, desirable though that might well be in some utopian sense, but in order to better it or attenuate its malicious effect’?

And he ends with this claim:

The lesson here is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfil. Since they know that we know it, such an ‘infinitely demanding’ attitude presents no problem for those in power: ‘So wonderful that, with your critical demands, you remind us what kind of world we would all like to live in. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where we have to make do with what is possible.’ The thing to do is, on the contrary, to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same excuse.

Tenured radicals?

Inside Higher Ed.:

The results of the study find a professoriate that may be less liberal than is widely assumed, even if conservatives are correctly assumed to be in a distinct minority. The authors present evidence that there are more faculty members who identify as moderates than as liberals. The authors of the study also found evidence of a significant decline by age group in faculty radicalism, with younger faculty members less likely than their older counterparts to identify as radical or activist. And while the study found that faculty members generally hold what are thought to be liberal positions on social issues, professors are divided on affirmative action in college admissions.

Political Orientation of Faculty Members — 3 Categories

Liberal	44.1%
Moderate	46.1%
Conservative	9.2%