Theoria

Some from Mark Featherstone’s “The End of History: Utopian Realism and the Politics of Idiocy” (best title on an article so far this year) in the current issue (March 2007, 7(1)) of the Journal of Classical Sociology. Admittedly, it isn’t entirely clear why Featherstone published the article here, but the journal has published solid work, of which this is an example.

His appeal to “equality” seems rather undeveloped to the point that it appears as an unqualified and self-evident good and his Marxism is a little on the vulgar side (at times he’s almost instrumental regarding the relation between a monolithic economy and an equally monolithic state where the President’s hand guides everything that happens in the favor of his own class), but, all the same:

However, the central problem with this view is that it brackets out the consideration of capitalism and the unspoken principles that maintain this economic system, namely exploitation and competition. Given that these principles have become untouchable, it is difficult to see how reform can restructure the social and political system to make relations between people more equal. Reform will always take place within the co-ordinates of a social system which, because it is subordinate to an economic system that produces surplus value from exploitation, can never really produce social, political and economic equality. I believe that this turn towards notions of reformism relative to theories of revolutionary change is more or less responsible for the current lack of imagination in sociology, politics and cultural studies.

In order to work inside this situation, whereby capitalism is out of bounds for critique, Anthony Giddens (1991) has taken extraordinary measures to create a sense of hope for contemporary society. His term ‘utopian realism’ is a strange concept that threatens to short-circuit and implode upon utterance. Utopian realism means that we can pursue utopianism, and strive for an equal society, but retain a realistic view of contemporary social and political conditions. What sense does this make? Surely we must either strive for utopian social conditions, which would make people equal through the abolition of the antagonistic structures of capitalism, or accept the current state of play, which relies on reformism to somehow tame the worst excesses of neo-liberalism, and at the same time put money into the pockets of rich capitalists. I fail to see how it is possible to pursue utopianism inside an economic system which relies on the principles of competition and exploitation to produce surplus value for capitalism.

What, then, is the purpose of Giddens’ notion of utopian realism? Perhaps the sense of his concept resides in its non-sense. Utopian realism makes sense for capitalism because it creates the image of radical social and political change inside an economic system built upon the reproduction of exploitative social relations. Giddens brackets out economy in order to make the reform of capitalism relate to utopian social change. Apart from the reformist’s critique, which would be that social protectionism has become an inconvenience for neo-liberals, such as Bush and Blair, who need to maximize the production of surplus value relative to the cost of social provision, the radical perspective makes it clear that the reform of capitalism would never remove the central problem of our current predicament, regardless of the political intention to make our society a more equal place. This would be the case because the real problem of our current social and political system is the basis of the system itself. Capitalism is the problem. Even if we could convince ourselves of the presence of a governmental commitment to social reform and the redistribution of wealth in global society, the point would remain that capitalism cannot produce equality. Equality is impossible under capitalism. Under these conditions, Giddens’ response is to keep capitalism, but offer the illusion of hope. He wants to create the impression that reform will somehow produce a more just society, even though the truth of globalization is that never before have there been such vast differences between the super-rich and those who have to live in absolute poverty.

Giddens’ notion of utopian realism is a reflection of the wider social and political reception of the end of history thesis. The contradictory nature of the term shows that we have run into a situation that translates the revolution/reformism couple into an economy of lack/excess. It is precisely because there is no possibility of revolutionary change that notions of reformism continue to spiral out of control in order to compensate for the lack of hope that colours our contemporary social and political situation. However, the other side of this mania for change, which has led to the return to the scene of the Kafka-esque nightmare of bureaucratic organization bent on the implementation of reform for its own sake, is the re-emergence of the modern perception of the radical antagonism of social class. The link between these two moments is clear. The mania for change functions to obscure our perception of social antagonism, and the production of excessive reformism increases proportionate to the clarity of our comprehension of class opposition. From this point of view Rumsfeld’s view that ‘it takes too long for anything to happen’ (2003: 24) must be read in relation to the current threat posed by the possible return of essentialist, antagonistic, class politics to the cultural orthodoxy of constructionist, contingent, identity politics. Rumsfeld wants to make things happen faster because he intuits the ordinary crisis of neoliberalism. He wants to make things move faster in order to postpone the collapse of the postmodern ideology of contingent identity, which supports the neo-liberal economic principle of adaptive or, what Bauman (2000) might call, liquid individualism.

However, when Rumsfeld complains that nothing happens fast enough he fails to realize that things cannot continue to move faster. Despite his impatience, the will to speed has its limits. Speed is never infinite. As Paul Virilio has shown in his recent exhibition, The Unknown Quantity (29 November 2002–30 March 2003; Virilio, 2003), high speeds produce crashes, catastrophes, disasters and other accidents. In order to provide some form of social and political contextualization for this claim, Virilio explains that whereas small-scale societies had to cope with small-scale accidents, global society might soon have to cope with a global accident that will affect everybody on the planet, regardless of their geographic location or situation in a variety of social stratification systems. Although this thesis recalls Ulrich Beck’s (1992) notion of the risk society, it might be the case that what Beck understands, and Virilio misses, is the way that systems of socio-economic stratification distribute these bads or accidents to various groups of people in different measure.

In this respect we might follow Beck by saying that the global accident will not be about equality of opportunity, but rather that the distributive nature of this catastrophic event will become representative of the current class structure of global society. In other words, economic meltdown, or ecological catastrophe, will not impact upon everybody in equal measure, because some will be able to insulate themselves from the worst effects of such disastrous events. However, the unintended consequence of the unequal distribution of bads will be to illuminate the necessity of class antagonism to our global society. As such, the illumination of the unknown quantity in Virilio’s thesis, which also happens to be the unknown quantity of Rumsfeld’s theory of knowledge and non-knowledge, will become the essential unintended consequence of the global accident. The philosopher of speed proposes a communist ethic, or speed limit, to save humanity from the ravages of the global accident, whereas the former American Secretary of Defence wants to make the neo-liberal, post-human, speed machine move even faster. The point remains, however, that the recognition of class antagonism will be the necessary by-product of the catastrophic global accident.

The other side of this view would be to say that it is only because neo-liberal economic stratification remains the unknown quantity (unknown known) of Rumsfeld’s position that we will have to cope with the global accident in the first place. In this respect Rumsfeld’s unknown quantity will resurface when the highspeed economy that continues to postpone the return of antagonism hits the wall of the revolutionary moment Kant understood to be a quasi-natural accident, the salto mortale (Kouvelakis, 2003). In light of this claim it is possible to refer to the liberal theory of the emergence of the social contract and the genesis of economy in order to suggest that the history of the collective organization of human life has come full circle. From the state of nature, through social cooperation, and back to the savagery of natural selection, it is clear that capitalism has run its course. The first move in this story was made by Hobbes (1982) to answer the essential sociological question: how is society possible? His response was to explore the possibility of a state of pre-social chaos called the state of nature. For Hobbes, the state of nature would be a place of endless warfare without trust or social cooperation. However, his view was that it was precisely this horrible state of absolute freedom that was necessary for the birth of political power and social organization. In other words, the state of terror would lead men to believe that they would be better off living under political power, rather than fighting it out in the state of nature forever more. The consequence of the social contract was the creation of a form of sovereignty that could guarantee the safety of men in exchange for subservience to the law of the land.

After this initial move, which led to the definition of freedom within the confines of specific rules and regulations, the next move was Locke’s (1988) radicalization of the position of sovereignty. Locke’s view was that Hobbes’ notion of sovereignty was too exclusive. In Hobbes’ view the precise role of the sovereign was to allow men to exchange their fear of everybody for the fear of one man, the Leviathan, who would remain inside the state of nature. Hobbes’ sovereign would remain above the law. He would retain possession of his absolute freedom to punish those who sought to break the law. The rule of Hobbes’ sovereign was not open to debate. The sovereign made the law. He did not follow the law. Locke was critical of this Hobbesian move, which follows the structure of Freud’s (1991) notion of phobia by making the fear of one particular object stand in for the fear of every other object, because he wanted to make the sovereign on Earth subject to the legal regulations of a higher power, God.

Locke’s view was that men possess natural rights to life, liberty and property and that the defence of these rights from governmental interference was essential to the maintenance of freedom in the liberal society. Thus Locke gave men the right to rebellion. While Locke’s thesis can be seen to be the first step in the emancipation of economy from politics, Adam Smith was able to complete the move in his Wealth of Nations (1991). Smith’s move was to turn the economic system into a quasi-natural machine for the reproduction of wealth. The invisible hand became the quasi-divine symbol that could regulate the economy and transform individual greed into social benefit. Despite Marx’s (1990) critique of Smith’s political economy, which sought to dispel the illusion that social benefit could come from self-interest, it is still possible to find traces of the notion of the invisible hand in Giddens’ concept of utopian realism. The essential link between the two concepts is made by the sleight of hand that produces the thesis that valuable social reform is possible inside a social and political system driven by a quasi-natural principle that relies on globalized competition and exploitation to reproduce itself.

Smith’s innovation was, therefore, two-fold. First, he made economy the sovereign principle of liberal society. Economy became the state of nature. Second, he made the state of nature appear redistributive. In this respect competition and exploitation were made to relate to the notion of freedom of choice, profitability and the general improvement of social conditions through economic efficiency, growth and progress. However, even though the Marxist (1990) critique of Smith’s theory was passed over by western capitalism, Keynesian revisionism was able to temper the worst excesses of the economic state of nature for the best part of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, Soviet communism was able to serve the purpose of an ideological counter-weight that could offer an alternative story about equality to the one put forward by those who thought that free market capitalism was the best route to the creation of a just social and political system. However, this Cold War balance of power could not hold. The rise of Reaganism/Thatcherism in the early 1980s, which might be seen to have been a reaction formation to the problems of western capitalism in the 1970s, and the start of the second Cold War saw an increase in antagonistic relations between capital and labour. Finally, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe was representative of the failure of socialist labour to resist the economic Darwinism of Reaganism/Thatcherism.

The story of Reaganism/Thatcherism and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe is bound to the emergence of the theory of economic freedom we call neo-liberalism. Despite the appearance of the Clinton/Blair version of third way capitalism, which attempts to provide neo-liberal economic policy with a friendly face, it is clear that the model of capitalism we live with today has sent us back into the savagery of the state of nature. It requires no stretch of the imagination to see that the current Republican administration with its Bush doctrine, war on terror and paranoid/conspiratorial fear of unknown unknowns is symbolic of our return to the Hobbesian horror story, the state of nature. Given this theory, it is surely not enough to speak in terms of the small steps of reformism. Even Hobbes, who was eventually supportive of the rule of tyranny, understood that the solution to the terror of the state of nature had to be radical enough to make the shift from one form of pre-human life to some kind of human social contract. Diverse thinkers, such as Giddens and Laclau, might think that the call for revolution is idiotic, but if their realism is the best hope we have, then one might prefer to choose the route of Dostoyevsky’s (1998) fool, Myshkin, every time. Thus the politics of idiocy appear the best option to replace the unimaginative proceduralism of reformism because the idea of reflexive stupidity conjures a form of consciousness aware of both its own limitations and the miserable predicament of the human body.