Specters of revolt

Specters of Revolt

On the Intellect of Insurrection
and Philosophy from Below

Richard Gilman-Opalsky

Published by Repeater Books

An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd

19–21 Cecil Court

London

WC2N 4EZ

UK

www.repeaterbooks.com

A Repeater Books paperback original 2016

1

Copyright © Richard Gilman-Opalsky 2016

Richard Gilman-Opalsky asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

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ISBN: 978-1-910924-36-5

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-910924-37-2

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For Robyn, for the love and companionship.

For Roscoe, for the laughter and imagination.

For Ramsey, for the sweetness and joy.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

It’s Always Antebellum

CHAPTER 1

Becoming-Ghost

CHAPTER 2

Beyond Struggle

CHAPTER 3

Unjamming the Insurrectionary Imagination

CHAPTER 4

The Eternal Recurrence of Revolt

CHAPTER 5

A Graveyard for Orthodoxies

CHAPTER 6

The Ferguson Revolt Did Not Take Place

CHAPTER 7

Reason and Revolt: Philosophy from Below

INTRODUCTION

It’s Always Antebellum

The word “antebellum” presents an interesting idea. The word’s particular historical reference is to the period in the southern US before the American Civil War, but its general etymology refers to the time before war. Technically, “ante” means before and “bellum” means war. Human history reveals every time as a time before war. It is even antebellum during wartime — the present war is never the last war. The war to end all wars has never happened. Whenever there has not been war, or when one is taking place, a future war remains somewhere on the horizon. Thus, times of peace cannot be called “postbellum,” because there is no “after war,” only “before war.” The postbellum may function as a utopian touchstone, a thing that has its uses. Whereas, antebellum captures the sense of a present situation about to be changed by some imminent conflict. For those who dream of a peaceful world, this represents a cynical view, or perhaps, just a view held true so far.

But shifting from war to other modes of conflict and other forms of fighting, this same notion turns optimistic and hopeful. Some formulation like the following captures the point well: If we are not now rising up for something better, we will be. This book is not about war, but revolt.

Happily, there are other ways of contesting reality and relations of power than with the militaries of governments. This book explores and develops the premise that human hope, revolutionary imaginations, creativity, and critique — for however long they’re in abeyance — are always eventually liberated and activated in moments of revolt. Of course, this premise will have to be borne out, and basic terms like “revolt,” “revolution,” and “critique” need much defining.

But entertaining the premise, for the introductory time being, we might think of every moment in between revolt as a time before revolt. Perhaps, instead of “antebellum,” we may speak of “anterivolta.” Like war, revolt against the existing state of affairs also keeps on occurring, yet more than war, revolt embodies and reflects the transformative aspirations of everyday people. Whereas wars waged by states embody and reflect the interests of power and capital, which usually coincide. Inasmuch as revolt comes back, in new forms, in different places, with different stakes and demands, periods of relative passivity, times of quiet, are haunted by the specter of revolt, just as peacetime is haunted by the specter of war.

The title of this book, Specters of Revolt, intends an allusion to two major thinkers separated by a century: First, the title alludes to Karl Marx, who happily announced in The Communist Manifesto, that “A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Communism.”¹ Marx understood that the present was haunted by its future abolition. Second, this book intends to recall one of the greatest works of Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, published early into the post-Cold War period.² Derrida’s study of the enduring relevance of Marx emerged in the wake of the ideological model of opposition between capitalism and socialism which spanned the short 20th century. The short 20th century was defined by Eric Hobsbawm as the period between 1914 and 1991.³ In the 21st century that began in the 1990s, a new hegemony emerged around the conclusion that Marx was now irrelevant, proven wrong, and responsible (even if indirectly) for some of the worst catastrophes the world had known. Against the ascendant post-Cold War opinion, Derrida insists that Marxism

is still necessary but provided it be transformed and adapted to new conditions and to a new thinking of the ideological, provided it be made to analyze the new articulation of techno-economic casualties and of religious ghosts, the dependent condition of the juridical at the service of socio-economic powers or States that are themselves never totally independent with regard to capital [but there is no longer, there never was just capital, nor capitalism in the singular, but capitalisms plural — whether state or private, real or symbolic, always linked to spectral forces — or rather capitalizations whose antagonisms are irreducible].

This transformation and this opening up of Marxism are in con formity with what we were calling a moment ago the spirit of Marxism.⁴

Derrida is here insisting that Marxism was not killed in the Cold War, but rather, it is awaiting its next iteration, against previous orthodoxies and forms and for an analysis of the changing present. He acknowledges that the ongoing re-articulation of Marx’s critical analysis of capital is a defining part of Marxism itself, which began shortly after Marx’s death with all forms of rethinking the critique of capital and power in ways beyond both the imagination and the life and times of Marx himself.

Derrida observed:

Capitalist societies can always heave a sigh of relief and say to themselves: communism is finished since the collapse of the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century and not only is it finished, but it did not take place, it was only a ghost. They do no more than disavow the undeniable itself: a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come-back.⁵

Considered in terms of a communist logos (as opposed to a “communist government”), we might say that if there is anything sensible in the idea of communism, in its opposition to capitalist society, then the communist logos cannot be killed by collapsed regimes. Inasmuch as Marxism continues to express and address real disaffections about real deficits in present society and everyday life, capitalist societies will never be rid of it, no matter how much they might like to deny its existence, to proclaim its death.

Derrida’s overarching argument is that, while the 20th century seemed to vindicate Marx’s claim from the 19th century that the world was haunted by the ghost of communism, the 21st would yet continue to be haunted by Marx in spectral forms to be determined, to be reconsidered. Bringing the two together, I claim that both communism and Marx do haunt — and will continue to haunt — the 21st century in particular ways that this book will take up directly in its course. However, the ghosts are neither clearly communist nor Marxist all (or even most) of the time. I suggest a broader framework regarding specters of revolt, which give rise to communist and Marxist hauntings, but also, which haunt the world with other ideas about autonomy, everyday life, anxiety, experience, knowledge, and possibility, in ways that often include but are quite clearly not limited to Marxian and communist discourses, no matter how transformed.

In the fall of 1998, I was a student of Derrida’s in his seminar at The New School for Social Research, “Justice, Perjury, and Forgiveness.” Despite the ambitious title, Derrida’s singular focus that semester was forgiveness. He was particularly interested in the notion that to be pardoned or forgiven is only actually meaningful in the face of the unpardonable, the unforgivable. To forgive someone for a minor mistake, or to say “pardon me” when accidentally bumping into a stranger on the street, is perhaps a nicety, a well-meaning mannerism or gesture, but where forgiveness is really needed — where it actually changes human relations — is where (and when) it is given to the unforgivable. In this way, the power of forgiveness depends upon the unforgivable.

Since then, I have maintained a correlated interest in the acceptance of the unacceptable, in the toleration of the intolerable, pairings that indicate a deeper problem; deeper in the sense that humans regularly accept the unacceptable (unlike forgiving the unforgivable). People regularly accept theoretically changeable facts of the world that are, even by their own accounts, totally unacceptable. Adjustments and acquiescence to unhappiness and dissatisfaction are common expectations of a practical life of “doing what one has to do,” and yet, it remains a basic ethical instinct to say that we should not accept a life that does us and others real measurable harm — at home, at work, in school, in society. And yet we regularly do. We do, that is, until there is a revolt against the unacceptable, against the intolerable.

In this way, revolt seems to me a peculiar force of (or, perhaps, toward) justice that emerges in the crisis of the system of the repressed-irrepressible, of the accepted-unacceptable. Derrida’s seminar on forgiveness, much like his famous essay on justice and the law, explored how these things (forgiveness, justice, the law) depend upon their opposites, how forgiveness requires the unforgivable, and how what is just and legal (in French, “droit”) requires what is unjust and illegal.⁶ We may look upon revolt as a disruption, often vilified as “violent,” that actually comes from the violence of its absence. Powerful interruptions of normal life are typically felt to be and caricatured as “violent” when the interruptions have real and immediate effects at home, at work, in school, or in society. However, the real hope and power of revolt is that it may expose how the cooperative reproduction of the “normal” state of affairs actually conceals a range of unacceptable realities.

Whereas Derrida’s Specters of Marx embodies and reflects a particular historicity of Marxist philosophy in the wake of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Union, Specters of Revolt aims to think through how systems of oppression are always haunted by revolt, how revolt is the oppositional (and historical and liberatory) theory and practice of transformative aspirations. Thus, while it is true that the worldly impetus for the present work comes from the eventuality of recent revolt and the context of capitalist crisis, it is also true that we can theorize specters of revolt in altogether different contexts.

Consider one distant example: During the gladiatorial times of the Roman Empire, an assorted subset of “criminals” and slaves were held captive and trained as gladiators.⁷ Gladiators were trained for violent confrontation with other gladiators as a form of popular entertainment tinged with the moral endorsement of public opinion — an opinion taking cover behind the concepts of “punishment” and “justice.” Although some volunteered, most gladiators came from the despised regions in proximity to Rome, those deemed “barbaric” and “uncivilized” enough for the wanton killing of the “sport” — the enslaved, many of them prisoners taken by Romans during conflict with surrounding regions. Their training took place in the ludus, a gladiatorial school, often also the site of their captivity and servitude. The gladiators were “schooled” in severe prison conditions, regarded as subhuman, and forced to fight to the death.

One of Marx’s favorite heroes, Spartacus, emerged in such a “school,” in a ludus of the lanista Batiatus, in Capua in southern Italy.⁸ Spartacus, the famous Thracian agent of slave revolt in 73 BCE, broke out of his confinement with less than one hundred slaves, making a revolt that led to the uprisings known as the Third Servile War (73-71 BCE). Marx, unsurprisingly, found in this an example of the oppressed “ancient proletariat” rising up against a proto-capitalist oligarchy.⁹ Despite great limitations and much disagreement in our knowledge of Spartacus and the surrounding history, it is difficult to see the events otherwise. Undoubtedly, the conditions of enslavement gave incentive to the revolt of the slaves.

One could say, then, that this iconic slave revolt was the materialization of a real possibility that must have haunted every ludus. The ludus and the coliseum were equipped with cages, guards, and tunnels, as well as multiple forms of abuse, discipline, and punishment for the maintenance of order and the dissuasion of insurrectionary impulses. It is difficult to imagine the containment and cultivation of such violence, and its deployment for the pleasures of its masters, without the ongoing necessity for a repressive system to guard against the outbreak of revolt.

This suggests a certain hauntology: We do not say that the ancient and abandoned Ludus Magnus, for example, the largest arena and gladiatorial school in Rome, is haunted because of the violence that once occurred there. Rather, we understand that the whole system was haunted by the specter of its possible overthrow, before any revolt occurred, within the energies of the repressed and captive humanity. Such a thesis can be stated in either humanist terms, regarding the dignity of the oppressed, or in strictly materialist terms, regarding the conditions of life. However one puts it, specters of revolt are not new. Revolt is a transformative possibility both structurally and existentially bound to all social, political, and economic systems maintained against the interests of the people they confine. This generality applies broadly throughout human history, and remains widely applicable today in schools, militaries, prisons, impoverished communities, despotic and oligarchic regimes, heavily policed neighborhoods, miserable workplaces, etc. All such locations are haunted by specters of revolt, where the “Spartacus” we wait for is less a person than an upheaval — “Spartacus” as a disruption of the system that can be identified as a feature of the system itself.¹⁰ Simply, the basic theorization of Specters of Revolt may well have long predated recent uprisings and capitalist crises, though it is the latter uprisings and crises that motivate this work.

In the years since 2008, certain closures have been reopened by revolt. After the uprising of the Mexican Zapatistas in 1994 opened and set a stage for new forms of revolt against the recently liberated and expanded logic of capital, there were some large but short-lived continuations of Zapatismo in Seattle in 1999 and in Genoa in 2001, as well as in numerous other locations. But then, the closure of capital seemed to stitch things up again, resuming and restoring its hold. Yet in 2008, at the culmination of diverse global crises in economic, social, and political life, Greek revolts tore open the sutures, and since then, we have seen various realizations of the haunting hopes of people in the so-called Arab Spring, in Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Syria, Brazil, and in Occupy Wall Street, among other places, many of which we consider in greater detail throughout this book.

How does the “Spartacus” haunt and threaten the present? An anecdote: In January 2012, I learned about the re-occupation of Zuccotti Park just as I was boarding a plane from Springfield, IL to New York City to present research at the TELOS conference at NYU and do a book talk at Bluestockings Bookstore. I had not been in New York since the Occupy Wall Street activities began in September 2011, and national news of activists taking over the park again in January opened up the possibility for me to participate in and observe the next iteration of occupations in Zuccotti Park. While I was able to participate in and observe some impressive Occupy activity in Springfield, I knew the first thing I’d do upon arrival in NYC was go check out the happenings at Zuccotti. It was freezing cold on the evening of my arrival, but after stowing my bags in my aunt and uncle’s apartment, I made my way down to the park, only to find it empty, save for about sixty or so NYPD cops. There was a lone man with a sign standing at an outside corner of the park, but aside from him, Zuccotti was only occupied by the police.

I figured I would ask the nearest cop about what had happened, telling him that I’d heard the park had been occupied again. He said, “Yes, they were here yesterday, but it got too cold, so they left.” I asked him, “Since they’re all gone now, why are there so many cops in the park?” He simply replied, “Because they come back.” There was a sense, in that moment, in which the absence of the occupiers and the presence of the police disclosed the hopeful expression of a ghost-like power. The park was clearly haunted by the recently departed spirit of the occupation, and its future possibility. The cops had orders to stay in an empty park, but only because the park had not been fully emptied of its contentious potentiality. After a while, of course, the cops too did leave. But the park remains a transformed and haunted site, a location that can never be stripped of its historic role as the place for a surprising expression of disaffection aimed at capital in the financial nerve center of Manhattan. The park, now even empty, suggests the other side of capital: the opposition to the values, purposes, and effects of Wall Street. Discourses of failure do not change the basic facts of this residual expectation, aspiration, and unfinished business of Occupy. On my visit, power saw fit to go on guard even in the absence of something to guard against. Capital’s spaces and bases must be guarded as they are the physical locations of capitalist activity (much capitalist activity has no such physical location), representations of systems, and even demarcations of time, haunted by what they do.

Part of what enables us to speak of specters of revolt is the recognition of unfinished business from previous revolt. Thus, in Baltimore, MD in 2015 we saw a particular iteration of some of the same disaffections that were expressed in Ferguson, MO in 2014, where we found a certain rekindling of some of what was expressed in New Orleans, LA in 2005, which contained some of what was found in Los Angeles in 1992, which contained some of what was found in Watts, Los Angeles in 1965, leaving out, of course, so many critical incidents and coordinates before and in between. Inasmuch as “in between” also always designates a “time before the next one,” we can speak of the antebellum status of revolt. Specters of revolt haunt in between, that is, both before and after, realizations of revolt. To show this well, clear and certain connections between individual coordinates of upheaval must be made more concrete and far less speculative, and that is partly what this book aims to accomplish.

But there is yet another, and perhaps more important aim of the present book, which one could say was summed up best over four decades ago in a conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, published under the title, “Intellectuals and Power.” ¹¹ In the conversation, Foucault says the following in reference to the French uprisings of May 1968:

In the most recent upheaval, the intellectual discovered that the masses no longer need him to gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far better than he and they are certainly capable of expressing themselves. But there exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this discourse and this knowledge, a power not only found in the manifest authority of censorship, but one that profoundly and subtly penetrates an entire societal network… In this sense theory does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice.¹²

Foucault’s comments here mark my point of departure. The present book seeks to advance an understanding of the intellect of revolt, not to provide an analysis of revolt. While some analysis of recent global uprisings is inevitably presented in fleeting, tentative passages, I mainly pursue an understanding of what kind of analysis revolt itself offers. I consider the question, also taken up by Deleuze and Guattari, of What is Philosophy?¹³ In so doing, I try to isolate the most basic features of what might be called “good” philosophy, and then to assess how revolt does it better than professional philosophers ever have done or could do. This thesis, captured well by Foucault, which regards uprising as thinking, upheaval as speaking, is the overarching interest and guiding concern of the present work.

But because revolt is always a destabilizing activity, and because it is animated and energized also by human disaffections, there is often real fear associated with the possibility that it may lead to an even worse reality than the one it opposes. Immanuel Kant was attentive to this possibility in his famous essay on enlightenment, where he recommended public criticism (what he called “the public use of reason”) within the limits of a general obedience (what he called “the private use of reason”), so as to ensure that social and political progress would not undermine the stability and functionality of the basic reality.¹⁴ Indeed, one has to take seriously the possibility that revolt may not only fail to improve the situation, but even make the situation worse. Although, in considering that possibility, it is important to assess whether it was in fact the revolt that made things worse, or if political forces of counterinsurgency are mainly to blame. Often, when a revolt goes badly, the repressive apparatus intervenes with its defensive and normalizing violence, and that violence, allied with the ideas of punishment and “justice,” makes things worse. Yet, the normalizing and punitive violence of “law and order” is typically given a peculiar kind of absolution, as if the only violence on the scene belongs to the upheaval, as if the condemnable violence is the sole property of insurrection. Nonetheless, to insist that revolt always improves the situation would be a kind of romanticization, an ideological distortion.

At the same time, nothing is simple or easy in the historical transformation of the world, nor ever has been. Every major advance, including many that we now look upon as obvious and legal, such as the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, suffrage and women’s rights, the rights of gays and lesbians, had their moments of illegal, courageous, and frightening revolt. Whether we are talking about dangerous slave revolts against the odds of great power, the direct action of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst and their comrades who fought with the police, or the Stonewall uprisings against police terrorism in 1969, the risks of repression and political setbacks, and even of death, are serious concerns. Human history does not unfold in one tidy, linear direction. So, how could we know if women and gays will be rounded up and killed, how should we measure the outcomes and aspirations of the Paris Commune or Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and how could we know if the resistance of Palestinians will result in their total extermination? Hope and fear can mingle in an eternal dance of speculation.

In any case, whether or not it could be worse is the wrong question. It could always be worse and it could always be better. I am not here suggesting we ignore real risks and the possibility of political failure in revolt. Rather, I argue that we must look centrally at the critical and philosophical content of revolt. While, on the one hand, we cannot romanticize revolt, pretending it’s always a full victory, on the other hand, we cannot overlook its philosophical content out of a fear of immediate practical consequences.

For example, in the case of slave uprisings, we see clearly in hindsight that the thinking of the revolt is the better position, and we should keep in mind that present uprisings may well be looked upon with a similar clarity from future perspectives. Yet, to be governed by predictions about future perspectives and possible failure is also highly uncertain, and the politics of fear has long taken sides with the defense of the existing order. Transformative hope sides with the upheaval, however uncertain and rightfully worried that hope may be. This, it seems to me, is all the more reason to engage with the critical and philosophical content of revolt and to oppose the politics of fear that dissuades everything other than the maintenance and reproduction of what already is.

The research for this book began in 2010, when I started working on the first of what would become a series of articles on the relationships between revolt, insurrection, communism, philosophy, and capitalist crisis. These articles were not originally conceived of as a series, but ended up constituting a somewhat cohesive constellation of inquiry that spanned the time and events of the years from 2010 to 2016. What you find in this book, however, is a substantial development and synthesis of discrete researches that were previously published in various journals and magazines, some of which are difficult to find, or have miniscule readerships. The present book begins thinking in the light of uprisings from 2008 to the present, and aims to speak to and anticipate (not to predict) further iterations and occasions of revolt to come. Specters of Revolt is not a collection of previously published essays. I have radically reworked and expanded each piece into complete book chapters, which move them from the vague haunting of each other to a direct linking up, building upon, and theoretical synthesis. In short, this book weaves together years of research on revolt into a new cohesive whole.

The first chapter outlines a hauntology of revolt. We ask: What makes a place, a city, a building, haunted? What is the social and political history that leaves a place haunted, and what is it exactly that does the haunting? Can we speak of ghosts in a materialist language? What do such ghosts tell us, what do they do? To address these questions, we consider the kind of haunting Marx alluded to when, in the opening lines of The Communist Manifesto, he invoked that “specter of communism”: Something that is not quite present, but looms over the existing state of affairs as a danger to it. Can we think, in a similar way, about the specter of revolt? To assist the inquiry, and to show why it matters, I draw on Félix Guattari’s theory of becoming to articulate a politics of becoming-ghost. In this opening chapter, we consider how revolt, as any good ghost would do, threatens to interrupt the constituted present, bringing to light fatal injustices and indignations that have been obscured, dormant, or buried.

In the second chapter, we reconsider the old notion of the virtue of struggle. Struggle has been valorized by radical movements for 200 years, as the name for the dialectical activity driving transformative politics. Struggle and revolution have been associated to the extent that the former is typically understood as both prerequisite to and content of the latter. No transformation without struggle. But should we valorize struggle? I argue for unpacking the other virtues of revolt. Revolt embodies and reflects other virtues of a human life that are more inviting than the hackneyed call for those who are already miserable to struggle and struggle some more. The possibility for activities others than those called “struggle” is at the same time the possibility for making a more desirable mode of action, or many more desirable modes. The old idea of class struggle runs contrary to an autonomist praxis, according to which we might develop new and joyful forms of contestation. Also in this way, specters of revolt are not always defined by catastrophe, as in the ghosts left by death, for they may also be defined by happiness, longing, and revolutionary hope. A politics that valorizes struggle is something no one wants to do; people struggle because they must. Struggle is an apt description of the default position of so much daily life. Therefore, we explore more ecstatic and less insufferable dimensions, impetuses, and purposes of revolt.

Having considered what a specter of revolt is and how revolt relates to happiness and desire, we move on in Chapter 3 to critically consider a prominent form of postmodern politics called “culture jamming.” Culture jamming is clearly not any classical form of political struggle or collective action, and yet it follows a playful, fun, and autonomous revolutionary hope. It appears as a concrete example of revolt by other means, but what exactly does it do? We ask this because, in many ways, culture jamming intends to rethink revolt in light of 20th-century disaffections with conventional notions of revolution. That is, culture jamming is an attempt to rethink revolt so that it doesn’t need to wait for the old class mobilizations that rarely ever come. However, I argue that culture jamming has detourned détournement in the wrong direction, converting a potentially radical situationist praxis into a liberal fantasy that borrows more from capitalist advertising than from Guy Debord. At the same time, we want to learn from culture jamming. What does it tell us about the position of radical critique in the existing society? What does it tell us about communication, media, visual terrains, and revolt by other means than mass action? We discuss and redefine culture jamming so that it may include seemingly spontaneous uprising and collective action, and not only depend upon a tiny cast of atomized celebrity artists engaged in the production of “subversive” marketing spectacles.

Now with a basic theoretical framework for understanding revolt — what it is and how it works — we can consider its actualization in the world.¹⁵ In Chapter 4, we consider the promise of what appears to be the eternal recurrence of revolt in the world. The ends of revolt, its eventual ending and lasting effects, do not grasp the meaning and the power of revolt. I argue for shifted attention to the beginning and to the inevitable recurrence of revolt (instead of ending and effects), as the unit of study. This shifts our focus from the political accomplishments of revolt to its critical content. Whenever revolt is not happening, it will. This is how it haunts, this is how it happens. When revolt goes away, it does not go away for good. It goes away, but always comes back. When it ends, if the world is left much as it was before, the revolt is called a failure. But should we accept this discourse of failure? In The Communist Hypothesis, Alain Badiou challenges the discourse of failure that has become a convention when reflecting on the so-called communist projects of the 20th century.¹⁶ They were not simply failures, he insists, but experiments that we learned a lot from, and that also included distinct successes. While Badiou is correct to attack the ideological emphasis on communist failure, we are interested in the success/failure discourse as it pertains to recent uprisings, which have been more micropolitical and rhizomatic, and less decisively communist. In relation, specifically, to common criticisms of Occupy and the “Arab Spring,” which accused them of a certain aimlessness, I argue that collective refutation of the basic principles of the existing world is always a triumph. We should consider how specific forms of revolt each and always break through the considerable ideological defenses of the existing world, and how they are realizations of very clear disaffections and aspirations.