Kermit Snelson on Fri, 5 Oct 2001 09:02:24 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Violent Agreement |
"Still, we should be wary of interpreting the violent confrontation at Genoa as the clash of incompatible ideologies." This observation, from today's London Review of Books with respect to Hardt and Negri's book "Empire" [1], deserves careful consideration. Any member of a profession based on conflict, whether general, lawyer or activist, has a vested interest in having an opponent. As they teach in economics, "If there's only one lawyer in a small town, she'll be poor. But if the same town has two lawyers, they'll both be rich." A clash it truly is, but not one of ideology. In fact, it's rather a necessity that both sides of the conflict be of the same fraternity. Lawyers fight lawyers, not plumbers. In the sphere of statecraft, in which the tools of conflict are war and terror, this fraternity is that of fascism. And fascism is not a matter of ideology; ideologies are merely fuel for the fire. There can be, and have been, fascisms of both the right and the left. There is currently in circulation even a fascism based on classical liberal humanism. Like "terrorism", "fascism" is a term that describes style, not substance. Real political theory is, and must be, a seamless garment, a constellation, that reflects all the seemingly contradictory aspects and needs of humanity. It is only in aesthetic or professional attachments to any one aspect that true danger arises: the danger of fascism. For those who love freedom and hate war, fascism is the only strategic adversary. Any others, as Foucault says in his preface to Deleuze and Guattari's "Anti-Oedipus," are merely tactical. Walter Benjamin wrote in "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducability": "The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life ... All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war." Aesthetic politics relies on mythmaking. Hobbes's "Leviathan." Georges Sorel's "myth of the general strike." The "Permanent Revolution." The "Decline of the West." The "clash of civilizations." The "end of history." And now "Empire." It is through awe that we are ruled. Or to sanitize a saying of James Joyce, there are only two kinds of true love in the world: our love for our children, and our love of lies. Given the nature of the "Great Game", is it any wonder that our latest enemy has been located in Afghanistan, that strategic prize that has eluded all empire-builders since Alexander the Great? It is the last unconquered summit of professional imperial statecraft. Had the Taliban there not existed, our own Taliban would have had to invent it. And in fact, it did. A lawyer cannot survive without other lawyers. A conflict cannot exist except against a member of the same fraternity. So it should not surprise us that the very people that originally financed, armed and trained militant Islam in Afghanistan are now arguing for world war by deploying tropes indistinguishable from those of the enemy they themselves created: those of theocracy, of a world moral imperium, of exterminating the decadence inherent in America's traditionally liberal ethos. Any more than it should surprise us that Negri's followers are battling in the streets against a doctrine that is nearly indistinguishable from their own, which shares both a political muse (Spinoza) and a publisher (Harvard) with fellow political mythmakers whom they would supposedly detest. Have we already forgotten Georges Sorel, the "Marxist" who begat Mussolini? Link: [1] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n19/bull2319.htm Kermit Snelson # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net