boredom is always counter-revolutionary

By contrast, one of the things I’ve enjoyed in the aftermath of O-Day has been the conspicuous silence of the bleakly hopeless, post-Deleuzean polit-blogs. In part, I guess, this comes down to the fact that Zizek, in move strangely lacking in his trademark contrariness (last time he welcomed Bush), had already declared for Obama -  and Badiou seems to have kept pretty quiet (I can’t find anything, and his pronouncements usually find their way into the  Kpunk-Belt) – so there’s nothing to gloss upon, and anyway – where would the default pessimism fit in?

Following the double revelation that, firstly, this blog is considered somehow within the ideological orbit of the ‘post-Deleuzean polit-blogs’ of the ‘Kpunk-Belt’ and that, secondly, I therefore have some sort of responsibility to comment on current events whilst remaining ‘bleakly hopeless’, I feel that I should say something on Obama. I am reluctant to attempt to comment on his candidacy and forthcoming presidency in any sort of empirical way – because facts, certainties and absolutes aren’t really the currency of election campaigns – so I am here emphasizing that I am concerned with the moment of his election, the symbolic value of a centrist Black president superseding the catastrophic Bush regime. Geometer magazine, I’ve taken the bait. But don’t expect any sort of comprehensive or holistic analysis, instead I just want to comment on the confluence of two agonistic strands of Leftist critique in the wake of current world events.

I’m referring to a disjuncture within present Leftist concerns between reacting to the Obama moment as a symbolic event, trying to gauge just how far symbolism will take you, and reacting to the current economic crisis, especially in casting it as a moment of mobilisational potential (as, I feel, was the dominant discourse at the recent Historical Materialism conference, and has characterised the quietly inquisitive red-scaremongering of recent news coverage). In short, the disjuncture is between relating the suspicion that a good symbolic moment may prove anticlimactic, with the proposal that a bad economic moment may prove crucial. This is a confluence that reveals a division of intellectual labour within Marxist theory, between the humanists and the social scientists (I use both these terms very broadly). The problem is one of coherence between different registers of response: the humanistic reaction necessary to formulate a meaning from Obama’s election, alongside an analysis of the economic situation that requires a specific vocabulary and specialised knowledge of financialised capital. Just as people like me, coming from the humanities and concerned with cultural mechanisms, are given an important and, at last, positive symbolic moment, we realise we need to learn a whole new language of critique to keep up with current events.

This interpretation is judged mainly, and perhaps unfairly, on the plenary session of the conference last week. David McNally and Robert Brenner, in particular, addressed the processes that have led to the current economic situation, speaking of the crisis of financialisation and fictitious capital, profit rates and the uncertainty of measurement, and the long-term causes and effects of what we are currently seeing, which is not a momentary phenomenon. Whilst they involved themselves heavily with financial mechanisms and economic indicators, little was said regarding the humanistic or hegemonic contributing factors and costs, resulting, as one person said during the discussion, in the scenario that only specialists can commentate and comprehend the situation in its intricacies. There is the danger that the rest of us non-economists will become alienated from the forms and language of this critique, impatient to return to a critical terrain we are more familiar with.

Of course, something similar could be said about the Obama situation, yet relating to that type of politics seems easier and more familiar. A politics of impression, feeling and affect. At their most superficial, American electoral politics are a politics detached from specialised knowledge, appealing to what are imagined to be inherent value judgements and a more emotive register. Obama offers himself as the man of hope and change, but not policy. In this way, despite the wealth of critical tools developed through the history of Marxist and critical theory, there are few firm conclusions that can yet be reached about what Obama means. Yes, he’s better than the previous incumbent; no, in empirical terms he may not provide the major overhaul which seems necessary for sustainable improvement within and without America.

Judith Butler’s essay demonstrates the tentative speculation that characterises the humanist approach. She recognises the progressive potential of the moment, but remains pessimistic: ‘The election of Obama means that the terrain for debate and struggle has shifted, and it is a better terrain, to be sure. But it is not the end of struggle, and we would be very unwise to regard it that way, even provisionally.’ Dylan Rodriguez refuses even the multiculturalist advancement of Obama’s victory, warning instead of the decoy tactic of a spectacularised society that is nothing more than a refurbishment of the White House and nothing less than the sustenance of ‘white supremacist’ social forms. Yet neither of these readings addresses the political economy of the election, neither tries to bring together two of the biggest global concerns of the moment. Particularly contradictory is Butler’s recognition that Obama may have been voted for by non-Democrats – even racists – for economic reasons; yet she fails to identify the economy as an index of Obama’s future success, which otherwise includes Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. Despite being one of the conditions of Obama’s election, the abstractions of the financial market (with their very real effects) remain something that both Butler and Rodriguez, and a host of other (cultural) commentators, are content to shy away from.

The issue is perhaps one of abstraction. The abstractions of a humanist politics, whilst recognised, are given materiality and relevance in their more direct appeal to sense and feeling, whilst the abstractions of financial capital are always at one remove from the human subject. As a result, an auratic understanding of politics is favoured, tending to prefer symptoms over causes. The real political challenge of the moment is to inextricably relate the specialised and alienating forms of financial mechanisms to the same affective register produced by Obama’s election, to allow a humanistic critique of the economy in all its intricacies and convolutions, all its human costs.

So in contradiction to the voices crying out that Marx had predicted all along the inevitability of this type of crisis, it seems that the scenario has preceded the critique. Should the financial crisis be approached with historical specificity and according to its own laws, or should be it be treated as symptomatic of the self-destructive nature of capitalism? The latter seems reductive and historically inaccurate, whilst the former, more applicable for short-term reformist measures perhaps, would necessitate a re-education, so to speak, of a generation of non-economist or humanist Marxists for fluency in the language of finance. The history of Marxist critique is of new language being generated as new problems, new adaptions within capitalism, are recognised. However, this would invariably miss the present moment and it would remain that the crisis precedes the critique.

How’s that for ‘default pessimism’?