Reading Leftist Theories №1 – Mouffe, Dean, Berardi, Giroux
As someone educated and influenced by German post-structuralist and the more or less non-political vein of media studies I have been for a long time abstinent from Marxist or Frankfurt-School influenced topics, but the last five years or so (2013–) after the financial crisis of 2008 finally led to some change. Here I collect some rather preliminary thoughts on four leftist theory-books— three I read during this summer and one in early 2017 — I think are crucial also for current media theories.
Jodi Dean — a new horizon for cutting through communicative capitalism
I start more or less chronologically — along my reading — with Jodi Dean’s “The Communist Horizon” from 2012, which I referred to already in a previous post from 2017. Dean addressed the need for a new horizon, a new goal for us (you and me) to aim for and to orient us towards, which she called “communist horizon.” In the book she discusses six aspects of communism as a term: 1. a specific image of the Soviet Union and its collapse. 2. An actual, concrete and existing powerful force. 3. The sovereignty of the people. 4. Commons and commoning. 5. A desire to cut through what she calls communicative capitalism. And 6. The party (see p. 16).
I pick-up the third, forth and fifth aspects since they resonated most with me. With people Deans doesn’t mean “a whole or a unity but people as the rest of us, those of us whose work, lives, and futures are expropriated, monetized, and speculated on for the financial enjoyment of the few (p. 70).” This relates maybe to the way Mouffe understands populism. Both seem to view people, proletariat, etc. not as something homogeneous inhabiting some universe, but living in pluriverses, with pluralistic world-views, but all against the decline of democracy and the rise of inequality.
Communicative capitalism is according to Dean the thing to struggle against. “An idealogical formation wherein capitalism and democracy converge in networked communication technologies (p. 123).” “We build the trap that captures us, a trap which extends beyond global use of mobile phones and participation in social networks to encompass the production of the phones and the hardware necessary to run these networks (p. 124).” In some sort of Freudian move she writes “communicative circuits of contemporary capitalism are loops of drive, impelling us forward and back through excitation and exhaustion (p. 144).” We are trapped in them, like this text here. How can we get out?!
Franco “Bifo” Berardi — more irony and imagination
“Bifo” or Berardi in “Heros. Mass Murder and Suicide” from 2015 uses similar arguments, but with more emphasis of the mental and pathological aspects — describing losses of sensibility for example — of neoliberalism. 1977 is for him a year of watershed marking a shift: “From the age of human evolution the world shifted to the age of de-evolution, or de-civilization (p. 6).”
Berardi’s analysis of policically inspired mass murderers and suicides is linked with a strong criticisms of the rise of neoliberalism and on a more general level the glorification of competition: „Our entire precarious life is submitted to this one imperative: competition. All of our collective energies are enlisted to one goal: to fight against all others in order to survive (p. 26).” The case of Anders Breivik was for me most pertinent. This “neo-conservative killer”, who even wrote a sort of manifesto, was not suffering but acted in the name of ideological and political values (islamophobia). Cut-and-pasted snippets from the www arguing against Marxism, Feminism and Multiculturalism and against the decline of Christian and European values, even quoting Derrida as the hero of the leftist cultural critics, he tried to criticize. The case of this killer is complicated, but certainly depressing as the whole book is, until you read the last chapter called “What Should We Do When Nothing Can Be Done?” Here Berardi argues for more irony. A topos I encounter more and more in different contexts. He concludes with: “Irony is about the independence of mind from knowledge; it is about the excessive nature of the imagination. So, at the very end: don’t believe (me) (p. 226).”
Berardi’s hope and bet on the power of poetics (irony), imagination, fantasy, utopia, art and design is what links him with Mouffe, but also with Dean. Her call for a “operative fantasy (Dean, 248)” such as a communist horizon announcing a “collective desire for collectivity (Dean, 158)” might also be part of those ironical expressions of imagination as Berardi envisions.
Chantal Mouffe — lets radicalize to move out of our post-democratic state
Mouffe — whose works I read only recently, but are at the moment highly convincing — could join here, since she emphasizes the importance of affects, libidinal energies and artistic practices in her monograph “For a Left Populism” published in June 2018. Emphasizing art’s “capacity to make us see things in a different way, to make us perceive new possibilities (p. 77)” she argues for political and discursive practice, which includes not only text and speech, but more.
Her argumentation for more leftist populism starts by stating that the current political situation in Western Europe is in a post-democratic state. What is discussed and processed (or has been — maybe we are already at a different stage) on the political stage doesn’t represent the struggles in our heterogenous worlds, but seems to form a state where there is no agonistics, especially from a leftist point of view. After the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s the Labour Party in the UK or the social democrats in Germany have more or less eradicated the differences between left and right based on their consensus model and the establishment of a center-left and center-right.
Is consensus poison for democracy?
The captive character of neoliberalism to capitalize everything in the name of liberalism led to a sort of dilution, to a state where everybody seems to agree that its ideals and practices (competition, de-regulation, outsourcing, infinite growth) are inevitable things. Mouffe writes, that more immanent critique of the left is needed in order to remember or to address the increasing inequality regarding for example income, oppression and finally self-determination. This needs to get coupled with “democracy” as a common signifier for different fields of struggle. Especially in order to act against the raising right-wing populists, neoconservatives, who want to re-establish authoritarian, or even racist practices of oppression (islamophobia, homophobia, phobia of everything different and altered). This is the way to draw a line between them and us. Because what we have in common is aiming to act against neoliberalism, but they abandon democracy, which is unforgivable.
Anti-Capitalism is not the right way?
Interestingly Mouffe argues that anti-capitalism is not the main concept to fight for, since as an abstract entity it is not connected with the struggles for equality our communities might endure.
“The fundamental mistake of the ‘extreme left’ has always been to ignore this. They do not engage with how people are in reality, but with how they should be according to their theories. As a result, they see their role as making them realise the ‘truth’ about their situation. Instead of designating the adversaries in ways that people can identify, they use abstract categories like ‘capitalism’, thereby failing to mobilize the affective dimension necessary to motivate people to act politically (p. 50).”
Radicalize, but try to respect the rules?
Mouffe uses the term adversary instead of enemy, which is also part of her take on agonistics. An approach she elaborated upon in an earlier book I still need to fully grasp, but it implies, that to radicalize in the name of democracy and to link that to a leftist populism, we still need to respect rules. Rules we agreed upon in the last 150 years, but also rules we need to re-negotiate with them. Similarly, Sarah Schulman, writes, more on a micro-level — but these are the most important! — that conflict needs de-escalation. Mouffe would call this de-escalation the shift from enemy to adversary. Schulman’s argues: When we overstate harm caused by inequality and call it abuse it merely distracts from taking the conflict seriously. Thus, on a macro- or meso-level, an overuse of affect might also be the wrong direction for a leftist populism.
Henry Giroux — critical pedagogy
In order to be able to strengthen leftist populism, we might also need practices of education, which leads me to Henry A. Giroux’s “On Critical Pedagogy” from 2011. It is a collection of essays and includes an interview (p. 169–180), which is quite helpful for sketching out contours for a critical citizen. The critical citizen is someone, who will play crucial roles in forming the many versions of new leftist populisms. Firstly this person, would need a deep-routed understanding of the relational character of planetary dependencies (ecospheres, the circuits of goods and capital). Secondly, she needs to be multi-literate not only in order to deal and work with a lot of different people from different backgrounds and with new technologies of knowledge production, but also for being more “tolerant of and responsible to matters of difference and otherness (p. 170).” This includes tolerance and fairness towards righ-wing populists, respecing them as adversaries not enemies. Still this kind of toleance is not unnecessarily eradicating differences. Thirdly, the ability to critically examine history and the insight that things are contingent and thus changable. Fourthly, and in resonance with Mouffe: “[E]ducators and others will have to reinvigorate democracy by assuming the pedagogical project of prioritizing debate, deliberation, dissent, dialogue, and public spaces (p. 170) [.]” And of course this goes beyond the borders of nation-states.
More-Than-Human Leftist Theory?
When I remember what I posted before following Timothy Morton, which was basically the claim that leftist-thinking is in trouble, because it is anthropocentric, then I suggest say that all four books (Mouffe, Dean, Berardi and Giroux) not only offer links to focus more on techno-ecological aspects such as algorithmic or computational oppressions or techniques of data analysis directly leading to inequalities, but they also — by acknowledging the importance of the bodily, mental and affective dimensions — allow to direct our horizon towards issues linked with our cohabitants and companion species. In fact we lived in oppressive naturecultures since ages (Timothy Morton would argue: Since the rise of Agrilogistics) and our ecologies are more and more capitalized by strange and awful practices such as socalled biodiversity offsetting.
Finally, the four books offer links for media aesthetic practices or actions: Ironical, utopian, affective and critical interventions using all kinds of practice-oriented research activities such as workshops, schools, interventions, exhibitions or the design and realization of new platforms for commoning and more: Things I will try to describe in upcoming posts.
