Showing papers in "Contemporary Political Theory in 2015"

Politics that matter: Thinking about power and justice with the new materialists

Abstract: Although wide-ranging in their aspects and concerns, ‘new materialist’ approaches in feminist and political theory share a commitment to trouble binaries central to humanist inquiry, for example sensuous/ideal, natural/artificial, subject/object. In distinction from an ‘old materialism’ rooted in Marxian critiques of idealism and continuing that tradition’s humanist bent, the new materialisms underscore a need to reconceptualize matter: nature, in both its animate and inanimate guises, but also the apparatuses, artifacts and other objects that are produced by and productive of human capacities, and indeed of the world itself. In so doing, these approaches compel a rethinking of the boundary between human and nonhuman. At stake is the claim that such reconceptualizations can clarify our ethical imperatives and political possibilities: a recognition that matter is not the passive receptacle or recipient of human agency, which is in turn neither sovereign nor unified, conditions a post-humanist perspective said to promote generosity, responsibility, and/or receptiveness to difference. From the perspective of an earlier materialism, by contrast, where exploitation and oppression happen to ‘species-beings’ rather than being enacted through such biologistic distinctions, political and ethical critique hinges on a human/nonhuman divide. The curious commodity that is labor power, for example, or the conundrums of commodity fetishism and alienated labor, are demystified – and the capitalist system perpetuating them is exposed as dehumanizing – through analyses that traffic heavily in the binaries now being questioned. In that earlier context, subjects appeared as makers of their own history (although of course not ‘just as they please[d]’ (Marx, 1996, p. 32), objectivity was accorded both to social structures and to historical materialist analyses of them, and the power of ‘things’ was more likely to be linked to their reification than to an inhering vibrancy. Pursuing a thorough investigation of the differences between these interpretive paradigms is well beyond the scope of our essay. But we begin by contrasting them in

Behavioral economics as neoliberalism: Producing and governing homo economicus

Abstract: The research program of behavioral economics is gaining increasing influence in academic economics and in interest from policymakers. This article analyzes behavioral economics from the dual perspective of Foucault’s genealogical investigation of neoliberal governmentality and contemporary critical theorizations of neoliberalism. I argue that behavioral economics should be understood as a political economic apparatus of neoliberal governmentality with the objective of using the state to manage and subjectivize individuals – by attempting to correct their deviations from rational, self-interested, utility-maximizing cognition and behavior – such that they more effectively and efficiently conform to market logics and processes. In this analysis, I contend that behavioral economics enacts three components of neoliberal governmentality: positioning the market as a site of truth and veridiction for the individual and the state; regulating what constitutes the objects of political economy and governmental intervention; and producing homo economicus (economic human) and diffusing this mode of economic subjectivity across the social terrain. In doing so, behavioral economics and its rationalities transform and introduce new technologies of power into neoliberal governmentality. I illustrate this argument with an analysis of recent changes to retirement savings policy in the United States, heavily influenced by behavioral economics thinking, that entrench neoliberal formations.

Radicalism restored? Communism and the end of left melancholia

Abstract: Since the onset of the 2008 economic crisis and the resurgence of various forms of transnational radical politics (the Arab Spring, Occupy and so on), several left-wing thinkers have argued that the era of left melancholia is now over. This article examines such claims, paying particular attention to the recent re-engagement with the idea of communism in contemporary critical theory. Foregrounding the recent work of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek and (especially) Jodi Dean, I suggest that the attempt to re-invigorate and revitalise the academic left is welcome, but I question some of the political and theoretical investments that characterise this (re)turn to communism. In particular, I interrogate the new communists’ tendency to contrast a vision of a melancholic and deradicalised left beholden to feminism, anti-racism, single issue politics and identity politics with an alternative vision of an authentically radical left emboldened by the re-emergence of the idea of communism. Such a distinction is not only analytically problematic, but also reflects, and shores up, a range of inequalities and exclusions within academic left theory and practice. These elisions, hierarchies and exclusions, I argue, are testament to much of the academic left’s continued unease about, or even outright resistance to, feminism, anti-racism and queer politics. Overall, my intention is to trace some of the effects and consequences of the new communists’ claim that they offer a newly radicalised left theory and politics: in so doing, I offer a preliminary rethinking of how we narrate the contemporary history of radical left politics.

Two spheres of domination: Republican theory, social norms and the insufficiency of negative freedom

Abstract: Republicans understand freedom as the guaranteed protection against any arbitrary use of coercive power. This freedom is exercised within a political community, and the concept of arbitrariness is defined with reference to the actual ideas of its citizens about what is in their shared interests. According to many current defenders of the republican model, this form of freedom is understood in strictly negative terms representing an absence of domination. I argue that this assumption is misguided. First, it is internally inconsistent. The central republican focal point of arbitrariness is a necessarily socially constructed ideal that only exists as the creation of the citizens themselves. Second, republican freedom operates in two distinct realms or spheres. There is freedom under a law that is required to uphold the collective good as reflected in society’s norms, and there is freedom within that very system of norms. The threats to freedom from within each sphere are different and must be addressed accordingly. The negative approach, however, conflates the two and emphasises only the dangers faced under the law. This exposes citizens – especially those from marginalised social groups – to domination in the second realm from oppressive social norms. Only by clearly recognising the nature of both kinds of threats can a comprehensive republican freedom be formulated.

Seeing collectivity: Structural relation through the lens of Youngian seriality

Abstract: This article is an examination of the puzzle of why there has been so little organizing of the unemployed and the precariously employed in the years since the beginning of the Great Recession in 2008. I argue that this paucity of organization is, in part, the result of the sedimentation of a neoliberal commonsense, or a particularly dominant colloquial interpretation of American individualism, which makes it difficult to perceive structural relation – not only in the case of economic politics, but generally speaking. I propose that using Youngian seriality as a lens can help us see structural relation more lucidly without reducing all structural relation to class relations or making essentialist claims about who we may be as persons or about the objective nature or static organization of structures themselves. This way of seeing provides an opportunity to perceive the multifaceted and intersectional ‘we’s’ that contemporary people perceive themselves to be, while not reducing the individual to an atomistic being outside the context of social, political and economic relations.

What is important in theorizing tolerance today

Abstract: if one wants to grasp tolerance politically, that is, as a problem of power and as organizing relations among citizens, subjects, peoples or states, then it must be understood, inter alia, as being enacted through contingent, historically specific discourses - linguistically organized norms operating as common sense. [...]any political discourse of tolerance - from that developed for handling Protestant sectarianism in seventeenth-century England to that used by the G.W. Bush Administration in the aftermath of 9/11 to distinguish the West from the rest, to that used by the Israeli state for describing (only) its policies toward homosexuals - is embedded within other discourses articulating the qualities and meanings of the religious, cultural, social or political order that the discourse of tolerance purports to pacify. [...]tolerance, correctly understood, is a virtue of the public use of reason.

The morality of border crossing

Abstract: This critical exchange contributes to the ongoing discussion of the themes of economic migration and human rights that we have pursued previously in these pages. It begins with a comment by William Smith on Luis Cabrera’s The Practice of Global Citizenship (Cambridge, 2010), and includes a response from Cabrera.

The social and the political in Luhmann

Abstract: This article examines Luhmann’s contributions to contemporary political theory from a different light than has been made available thus far in Anglo-American political theory. More specifically, I argue that social systems theory makes a provoking and productive intervention in the ongoing debate on competing conceptions of ‘critique’ and normativity. I first compare Luhmann’s approach with that of Foucault’s and show that systems theory powerfully interrogates the sociological validity of the structure of normativity often found in the currently prominent liberal-universalist political theory. Later in the article, however, I identify a central theoretical problem in Luhmann’s brand of systems theory – namely a highly constricted notion of politics. This, I argue, stems from a strong apolitical structure of its overarching concept, the social. I trace this problem by analyzing the peculiar character of Luhmann’s normativism, or what I call ‘reluctant normativism’, and then by putting his central concepts alongside the recent developments in the theories of ‘the political’.

Marx with Kant on exploitation

Abstract: No thinker is more associated with the concept of exploitation than Marx. However, contemporary theorists do not tend to look to Marx for an account of what exploitation in general is, or why it is bad. This article addresses that neglect. It argues that The German Ideology formulates a general conception of exploitation as instrumentalization, whose harm may be construed by appeal to the test of contradiction in conception belonging to Kant’s Formula of the Law of Nature. The Grundrisse links Marx’s value-theoretic account of capitalist labour-exploitation to this general conception of exploitation as self-seeking action that fails the contradiction in conception test. Exploitation can then be rejected on grounds of community, rather than on autonomy-related grounds, as G.A. Cohen and Allen Wood favour. It also suggests a non-contradictory maxim principle of justice that counts against capitalism, while avoiding utopian appeal to equal rights.

Suffering and the making of politics: perspectives from Jaspers and Camus

Abstract: Bonnie Honig has recently criticized the attempt to graft ethical and political principles onto the alleged universality of suffering. She considers this trend inhospitable to vigorous, democratic citizenship, and she pits a ‘lamentational politics’ centered on suffering and mortality against a political, agonistic humanism that focuses on life, action and courage. In this article, I inquire into how political action in concert can (and does) arise out of suffering. I characterize suffering, following Karl Jaspers, as a situation that defines being human. Yet, drawing on Jaspers and Camus, I resist its portrayal as immediately universal and anti-political. First, I transpose suffering from the plane of singular, idiosyncratic experience to that of complex situation. Second, by way of my reading of The Plague, I suggest that suffering can be privileged ground for the reconfiguration of political landscapes through its unmaking of identities in both a literal and metaphoric sense. Suffering ought not to be displaced from debates in political theory. Rather, it should become an agonistic ground of contention. It should be re-politicized.

Blade Runner’s humanism: Cinema and representation

Abstract: Many have pointed to Blade Runner’s humanization of its ‘replicants’ as a compelling statement against exploitation and domination. I argue, however, that the film has another kind of agenda: a Rousseauvian concern about the dangers of representation, about confusing the imitation with the real and confusing the consumption of images with political action. Rather than humanizing the other, Blade Runner’s central concern is to humanize our own social and political relationships, which are in danger of falling into the same trap Rousseau outlined in his Letter to D’Alembert. To do so, we must learn to appreciate the difference between mutual surveillance and mutual regard. To live freely in any regime, we must understand the dangers of representation, even if, in a large state, we must continue to make use of it.

Interactive democracy: The social roots of global justice

Abstract: Interactive Democracy’s central vision is for maximally local, democratic communities, which are linked by transnational institutions, to build up interactive democratic representation and participation in decisions that affect them. To realize this vision, Gould engages with a broad sweep of topics and approaches, including social ontology of human rights and democracy, Habermasian discourse ethics, care ethics, the importance of gender equality, recognition justice, cosmopolitanism, solidarity, emergent technology, humor as cross-cultural understanding and more. Gould reviews and expands many ideas from other books and articles for the purpose, making the text useful both for newcomers and those familiar with her earlier work. A theme running through these diverse topics is the idea of communities – what they are, and what ethical relations between and within them look like. This aspect of the book is not as highlighted as some others, but it is necessary for all stages of Gould’s argument, and her work on it is a valuable contribution to social and political philosophy. Therefore, it is worth focusing on for this review. The book argues that communities are necessary for human agency. Full agency involves ‘not only the capacity for choice, but also a process of the development of capacities and the realization of long-term projects over time, as well as the cultivation of relationships’ (p. 16). Developing capacities and realizing complex, temporally distant projects (and of course developing relationships) make this version of agency pre-suppose interdependency among individuals. These relations form a community character for those agential projects the book describes as ‘common activities’ or ‘joint activities’ (p. 16). As Gould says, ‘In these cases, the activity is oriented to shared ends or goals, and the social group is understood as constituted by individuals in the relations rather than as existing holistically above or beyond them’ (p. 16). These communities of shared projects and goals develop ‘power-with,’ which Gould quotes Amy Allen to define as a capacity of a group ‘to act together for the attainment of a common or shared end or series of ends’ (cited on p. 185). Voluntary formation of these communities is ‘probably a normative desideratum’ (p. 233), but not necessary. People can belong to multiple such communities through choice or accident, and they