Sitting with the political (binaries 1-2)
A few years ago, I became so frustrated with imprecise, contradictory, vague uses of the word political that I proposed retiring the word entirely, a moratorium on its use, or at least a cooling-off period of a few years.
For some odd reason, the Royal Academy of American English doesn't seem to have received my memo.
In fact, I have reluctantly started using the word again myself. I want to write a piece on whether and how Barack Obama embodies or could bring about a "political shift" in the US. But to write about that I need to be able to talk about what a "political shift" would even constitute, and the ambiguity at the core of that phrase is the word "political" itself. So consider this entry a toolbox.
Why is this question a contemporary one? There are two relevant contexts: the national-popular and the cadre-organizational. (I suppose in Gramscian terms we could call the latter "the Modern Prince," which of course opens up the very rich connections with Machiavelli, but not being confined to a prison to write this it would be a little obscurantist to insist on some of Gramsci's more coded formulations.) In the US national-popular, we might say paraphrasing in a weaker way the old formulation that an old political order is dying but a new one cannot yet be born.
In my socialist group, there has been a rather dead-ended (but conceptually interesting for these purposes) discussion of what is and isn't "political." Basically this came out of a push to focus more attention on our own organization in terms of internal culture and mode of organizing ourselves from a group of comrades who were mainly "Gulf War generation of radicalization" and younger and to some extent grounding their arguments in feminist thinking. Sometimes comrades who disagreed with this (who tended to be older, though not across the board, and who tended to ground their arguments in Trotskyism) would critique these priorities by saying, essentially, "that's not political." On its face, this claim was mystifying and frustrating to the younger/feminist comrades, who would say, of course the things we're talking about are political; they're no less political than the kinds of discussions you want to have, though they may be political in a different way. I've ended up using phrases like "macropolitics and micropolitics" or "politics about the world and politics of organization" to navigate these crossed-purpose communications.
But here I'd like to unpack the polarities of "the political" a little further. Among certain people with a fairly strong link to the Old Left, saying that someone is "political" is to shroud them with a mystical aura, at least so much as atheists can muster. What does it mean?
1) "To be political" for the Old Left: "to have a smart, comprehensive analysis of the world, the nation-state, and the social movements (from which the tasks of cadre flow)." (Note: this gloss suggests that the relationship of theory and praxis for the Old Left had more to do with positivism than with dialectics, but this is a discussion for another time.) But even this conception (if I've pegged it correctly) has several elements wrapped up within it: A) comprehensiveness: to be political is to understand the particular in the context of the universal, the global and historical; B) analytical quality: to be political is to have an understanding that uncovers the political content and conflicts at the heart of world and national events; C) intellectual leadership: to be political is to exercise a quality of leadership, to be the head or put oneself at the head at least momentarily - from which it follows that "being political" is not a property which applies in any way to a follower or to an "un-politicized" person who has no relationship with a cadre group.
C) is a conception that has become deeply damaging for the Left, despite its grounding in some inescapable questions. Particularly, it is inescapable that intellectuals (in a broad sense) and analytical work are indispensable for leadership in an organization, although following insights around other kinds of indispensable work - particularly what is often "women's work," such as administration, cooking, caring, organizing the nuts and bolts - we should not privilege intellectual-analytical work as the most important form of leadership. Nevertheless, American anti-intellectualism notwithstanding it is certainly indispensable, and the smartest anti-intellectuals are almost always intellectual leaders themselves who cleverly bolster their hegemony by setting certain kinds of challenges outside the pale. This part of the matter deserves a more careful treatment: in the US, anti-intellectualism is a persistent strand of the highest form of intellectual leadership, in fact, it is dubious whether leadership in the US is possible without it. The anti-Machiavelian and deceptive aspects of US anti-intellectualism therefore must be critiqued, but the critique must be immanent; anti-intellectualism is not a mere log in the road we can jump over or push aside.
One could view all of Gramsci's later work as an attempt to rework this question in a way which is unthinkable without Lenin but which is also distinctly a next step beyond Lenin. In any case, the main reason it creates problems for the US Left is not even the anti-intellectualism problem - which the Left shares with other political stripes - but the fact that the Left has not been part of national political discourse really since perhaps the Communist Party in the 40s or even (given the strange, submerged form of the CP) the Socialists and IWW in the early 1900s. Of course the US Left had a certain presence within the 60s counterculture, which in turn had a resonance in national political culture - but this was an influence once-removed and in many directions refracted. The Left thought you couldn't bring socialism directly to the masses and really never had a vehicle through which to try in any kind of immanent way; thus the sad truth of the fact that the Left was influential within social movements in the 60s and 70s, but in the broader culture it seems to have come off as weird, extremist, and out of touch.
The reality is that for the Left, following on the logic of C), smart leftists can only have conversations which are properly speaking "political" with each other, and in general we don't know how to have political conversations with "unpoliticized" people, which is most of the population. It is as though the Left operates from a Matrix-like theory of false consciousness: unless they take the red pill, we really have nothing to say to them, they don't have an understanding we can engage with. It is no wonder, operating under this theory, that the Left finds itself isolated, dwindling, self-referential, and almost non-existent - waiting to be obliterated along with Zion in order to start over with a new Moses and a new cadre. The Gramsci / Friere / bell hooks / early Stuart Hall notion of politics would be useful for dispelling or at least fundamentally re-orienting this idea: everyone has a politics; everyone has a consciousness in which some ideas have been critically interrogated and re-organized and some haven't; the job of an intellectual in the broad sense is to help people take an inventory of their own consciousnesses and begin the dialogic process of re-ordering, or "conscientization," coming to critical consciousness. The thing that doesn't exactly translate about the Gramsci / Friere model is that in Gramsci's Party or in Friere's literacy classes, one has a significant power imbalance to work with, of intellectual-teacher to recruit-student. Even though the point of the model is to horizontalize these relationships somewhat, compared to traditional education or the Leninist or Fabian Party, the imbalance is never completely undone. Engaging in political conversations with people who will initially think we're crazy, instead of looking to us as authorities, requires a great deal of patience and a slightly different model.
Binary 1: So the first clear duality emerges: "being political" as employing a commandist or "banking" model of intellectual leadership vs. conscientization or just "having political conversations" as an alternative to this.
A) and B) of what I've described as the Old Left conception of "being political" above - the impulse to comprehensiveness and analysis - is worth hanging onto, albeit in a more self-conscious form. I will call this "the political-analytical" or, alternatively, "the macro-political." It is also subject to a duality, which I suspect owes its origin in part to feminist consciousness-raising - i.e. the realization that "the personal is political," that politics happen not only in traditionally male-dominated spaces of the workplace and the government or public meeting space, but also that politics happen in people's homes, personal lives, struggles to articulate themselves in groups of friends and family, etc. I suspect that it is also in part a residual function of the hermeneutics of suspicion, that is, the presumption that and the search for actions, taken in the name of the impartial public good, which bely political stresses and strains.
This approach may have other origins as well, and in any case it lends itself to a sensibility which ends up having very little to do with feminism or Marxism or Freud or Nietzsche as particular content-models of "finding the political." For example, I remember an undergrad professor of mine, a New Yorker, who disliked Seinfeld. He said, I paraphrase: "They're mean, and they're not even political about it. This reflects badly on New Yorkers. We may be gruff and sometimes mean, but those qualities in my experience with New Yorkers often run in tandem with a critical political sensibility which seems to be completely lacking in Seinfeld." I suppose that he meant not just the characters' lack of political conscience and / or consciousness, but also the tedious, banal, intensely sub-parochial, individual nature of their concerns, such that the characters themselves are not so much unpoliticized or depoliticized as existing in a depoliticized universe. To express my professor's sensibility here in the positive sense I would say that it constitutes a premise that everything is political or perhaps more exactly, everything is shot through with politics.
In activist circles this sensibility can sometimes, along with other factors, translate into an emphasis on politics-at-hand or politics-in-the-room. Binary 2: We could thus contrast the political-analytical with "the political-experiential," and the macro-political with "the immediate political." ("The micro-political" seems to stir negative connotations of "navel-gazing" and refusal to look at the bigger picture, so I'll avoid it.)
Agh. I'm tired. Need to go do something else for a while, maybe get out while there's still light. This is long enough for an entry anyway. Coming soon: Schmitt, Aristotle and communitarianism, early Stuart Hall, politics and ethics, maybe something on American pragmatism. Arendt? Sigh.
For some odd reason, the Royal Academy of American English doesn't seem to have received my memo.
In fact, I have reluctantly started using the word again myself. I want to write a piece on whether and how Barack Obama embodies or could bring about a "political shift" in the US. But to write about that I need to be able to talk about what a "political shift" would even constitute, and the ambiguity at the core of that phrase is the word "political" itself. So consider this entry a toolbox.
Why is this question a contemporary one? There are two relevant contexts: the national-popular and the cadre-organizational. (I suppose in Gramscian terms we could call the latter "the Modern Prince," which of course opens up the very rich connections with Machiavelli, but not being confined to a prison to write this it would be a little obscurantist to insist on some of Gramsci's more coded formulations.) In the US national-popular, we might say paraphrasing in a weaker way the old formulation that an old political order is dying but a new one cannot yet be born.
In my socialist group, there has been a rather dead-ended (but conceptually interesting for these purposes) discussion of what is and isn't "political." Basically this came out of a push to focus more attention on our own organization in terms of internal culture and mode of organizing ourselves from a group of comrades who were mainly "Gulf War generation of radicalization" and younger and to some extent grounding their arguments in feminist thinking. Sometimes comrades who disagreed with this (who tended to be older, though not across the board, and who tended to ground their arguments in Trotskyism) would critique these priorities by saying, essentially, "that's not political." On its face, this claim was mystifying and frustrating to the younger/feminist comrades, who would say, of course the things we're talking about are political; they're no less political than the kinds of discussions you want to have, though they may be political in a different way. I've ended up using phrases like "macropolitics and micropolitics" or "politics about the world and politics of organization" to navigate these crossed-purpose communications.
But here I'd like to unpack the polarities of "the political" a little further. Among certain people with a fairly strong link to the Old Left, saying that someone is "political" is to shroud them with a mystical aura, at least so much as atheists can muster. What does it mean?
1) "To be political" for the Old Left: "to have a smart, comprehensive analysis of the world, the nation-state, and the social movements (from which the tasks of cadre flow)." (Note: this gloss suggests that the relationship of theory and praxis for the Old Left had more to do with positivism than with dialectics, but this is a discussion for another time.) But even this conception (if I've pegged it correctly) has several elements wrapped up within it: A) comprehensiveness: to be political is to understand the particular in the context of the universal, the global and historical; B) analytical quality: to be political is to have an understanding that uncovers the political content and conflicts at the heart of world and national events; C) intellectual leadership: to be political is to exercise a quality of leadership, to be the head or put oneself at the head at least momentarily - from which it follows that "being political" is not a property which applies in any way to a follower or to an "un-politicized" person who has no relationship with a cadre group.
C) is a conception that has become deeply damaging for the Left, despite its grounding in some inescapable questions. Particularly, it is inescapable that intellectuals (in a broad sense) and analytical work are indispensable for leadership in an organization, although following insights around other kinds of indispensable work - particularly what is often "women's work," such as administration, cooking, caring, organizing the nuts and bolts - we should not privilege intellectual-analytical work as the most important form of leadership. Nevertheless, American anti-intellectualism notwithstanding it is certainly indispensable, and the smartest anti-intellectuals are almost always intellectual leaders themselves who cleverly bolster their hegemony by setting certain kinds of challenges outside the pale. This part of the matter deserves a more careful treatment: in the US, anti-intellectualism is a persistent strand of the highest form of intellectual leadership, in fact, it is dubious whether leadership in the US is possible without it. The anti-Machiavelian and deceptive aspects of US anti-intellectualism therefore must be critiqued, but the critique must be immanent; anti-intellectualism is not a mere log in the road we can jump over or push aside.
One could view all of Gramsci's later work as an attempt to rework this question in a way which is unthinkable without Lenin but which is also distinctly a next step beyond Lenin. In any case, the main reason it creates problems for the US Left is not even the anti-intellectualism problem - which the Left shares with other political stripes - but the fact that the Left has not been part of national political discourse really since perhaps the Communist Party in the 40s or even (given the strange, submerged form of the CP) the Socialists and IWW in the early 1900s. Of course the US Left had a certain presence within the 60s counterculture, which in turn had a resonance in national political culture - but this was an influence once-removed and in many directions refracted. The Left thought you couldn't bring socialism directly to the masses and really never had a vehicle through which to try in any kind of immanent way; thus the sad truth of the fact that the Left was influential within social movements in the 60s and 70s, but in the broader culture it seems to have come off as weird, extremist, and out of touch.
The reality is that for the Left, following on the logic of C), smart leftists can only have conversations which are properly speaking "political" with each other, and in general we don't know how to have political conversations with "unpoliticized" people, which is most of the population. It is as though the Left operates from a Matrix-like theory of false consciousness: unless they take the red pill, we really have nothing to say to them, they don't have an understanding we can engage with. It is no wonder, operating under this theory, that the Left finds itself isolated, dwindling, self-referential, and almost non-existent - waiting to be obliterated along with Zion in order to start over with a new Moses and a new cadre. The Gramsci / Friere / bell hooks / early Stuart Hall notion of politics would be useful for dispelling or at least fundamentally re-orienting this idea: everyone has a politics; everyone has a consciousness in which some ideas have been critically interrogated and re-organized and some haven't; the job of an intellectual in the broad sense is to help people take an inventory of their own consciousnesses and begin the dialogic process of re-ordering, or "conscientization," coming to critical consciousness. The thing that doesn't exactly translate about the Gramsci / Friere model is that in Gramsci's Party or in Friere's literacy classes, one has a significant power imbalance to work with, of intellectual-teacher to recruit-student. Even though the point of the model is to horizontalize these relationships somewhat, compared to traditional education or the Leninist or Fabian Party, the imbalance is never completely undone. Engaging in political conversations with people who will initially think we're crazy, instead of looking to us as authorities, requires a great deal of patience and a slightly different model.
Binary 1: So the first clear duality emerges: "being political" as employing a commandist or "banking" model of intellectual leadership vs. conscientization or just "having political conversations" as an alternative to this.
A) and B) of what I've described as the Old Left conception of "being political" above - the impulse to comprehensiveness and analysis - is worth hanging onto, albeit in a more self-conscious form. I will call this "the political-analytical" or, alternatively, "the macro-political." It is also subject to a duality, which I suspect owes its origin in part to feminist consciousness-raising - i.e. the realization that "the personal is political," that politics happen not only in traditionally male-dominated spaces of the workplace and the government or public meeting space, but also that politics happen in people's homes, personal lives, struggles to articulate themselves in groups of friends and family, etc. I suspect that it is also in part a residual function of the hermeneutics of suspicion, that is, the presumption that and the search for actions, taken in the name of the impartial public good, which bely political stresses and strains.
This approach may have other origins as well, and in any case it lends itself to a sensibility which ends up having very little to do with feminism or Marxism or Freud or Nietzsche as particular content-models of "finding the political." For example, I remember an undergrad professor of mine, a New Yorker, who disliked Seinfeld. He said, I paraphrase: "They're mean, and they're not even political about it. This reflects badly on New Yorkers. We may be gruff and sometimes mean, but those qualities in my experience with New Yorkers often run in tandem with a critical political sensibility which seems to be completely lacking in Seinfeld." I suppose that he meant not just the characters' lack of political conscience and / or consciousness, but also the tedious, banal, intensely sub-parochial, individual nature of their concerns, such that the characters themselves are not so much unpoliticized or depoliticized as existing in a depoliticized universe. To express my professor's sensibility here in the positive sense I would say that it constitutes a premise that everything is political or perhaps more exactly, everything is shot through with politics.
In activist circles this sensibility can sometimes, along with other factors, translate into an emphasis on politics-at-hand or politics-in-the-room. Binary 2: We could thus contrast the political-analytical with "the political-experiential," and the macro-political with "the immediate political." ("The micro-political" seems to stir negative connotations of "navel-gazing" and refusal to look at the bigger picture, so I'll avoid it.)
Agh. I'm tired. Need to go do something else for a while, maybe get out while there's still light. This is long enough for an entry anyway. Coming soon: Schmitt, Aristotle and communitarianism, early Stuart Hall, politics and ethics, maybe something on American pragmatism. Arendt? Sigh.