new version June 2006

Neil Larsen, University of California, Davis

I.

“The whole is the untrue.”¹ This phrase, one of the signatures of Adorno’s most unmistakable work, Minima Moralia, points to an irony that perhaps not even its author could have discerned. Notwithstanding the truth of its bitter rebuke to the Hegelian dialectic as apology for capitalist modernity, as a philosophical dictum in its own right it would itself have to be judged false, fatal to any aspiration to dialectical thought. To that much, of course, Adorno testifies, both in practice–for neither Minima Moralia nor any other of his works reflect any doubt that critical theory, as part of its own conceptual movement, must strive for the totalization of its object– but also in theory: one need look no further than to Minima Moralia itself than to have this confirmed: “Dialectical thought opposes reification in the…sense that it refuses to affirm individual things in their isolation and separateness: it designates isolation as precisely a product of the universal.”² A refusal to isolate means a commitment to totalize, albeit a non-Hegelian one. The alternative would be to succumb to the reified consciousness of the object in its sheer immediacy. The “whole” may be the “untrue,” but that does not make the part the truth. Both become false, at least from the immediate standpoint of “wrong life” reflected, consciously and without apology, by Minima Moralia.

The less conscious, perhaps inadvertent irony in these words, however, is how true they become in relation to Adorno’s own formal mode of self-presentation-that is, as a reflection on the relationship of his thinking to the language and style in which it is conveyed. With only a few exceptions, this is a language that, outwardly at least, resists its own mediation by any formal standard of systematicity or argumentative blueprint. Any reader of Adorno, from the newcomer to the initiate and academic exegete, experiences this, for example, in the great difficulty one has in summarizing-and also at times in retaining-his arguments. As I can confirm from my own experience in teaching Adorno’s works and assigning my students to produce such summaries, this can seem to be a virtually impossible task. The end result is often little more than a list of citations, almost always a sampling of Adorno’s aphoristic and dialectically tensed sentences. Consider for example-taking Horkheimer’s co-authorship as moot in this regard–the chapter on the Culture Industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment. How is one to outline or condense the logic of its argument as a whole? One can attempt a gloss, or look up one of the reasonably good ones already published, but sooner or later, if the text itself is followed closely, the conclusion seems inevitable that this logic, though everywhere in force, does not so much develop by stages as it reiterates itself continuously and in shifting empirical and polemical contexts. From its opening statement-”Culture today is infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio and magazines form a system.”³ -the “whole” is, in essence, already expounded, and, although someone not immediately persuaded by it might in the end succumb to the sheer thrust-almost a kind of fury-of its will to truth and to its sociological sweep, nothing in Dialectic of Enlightenment that follows can be said to take on the burden of proving it, or any other in the series of emphatic, unrelentingly indicative-mood sentences that follow it and that, in effect, make up the entire text of chapter and work themselves. Here, as, to one degree or another throughout Adorno’s corpus, the “untruth” of the “whole” can only be eluded through constant exertions to wrestle the latter into virtually every lexical predication. That Adorno’s thinking at any given point in its development and formal presentation forms a coherent, exquisitely reflective and mediated whole, supple and adaptive, is in no way contradicted by this. But the movement of thought through language is at the same time an inward, condensing movement of language within itself, a movement toward what is, for the logical organization of Adornian critical prose, a fusion of dialectics and style at the level of such language’s smallest moving part: the sentence or short, aphoristic sequence of sentences. So, for instance, a sentence taken almost at random: “There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh about.” (112) Or another: “What is offered [in photographic images] is not Italy but evidence that it exists.” (119) Or again: “The consumer becomes the ideology of the amusement industry, whose institutions he or she cannot escape.” (128) The last of these sentences, somewhat more theoretically explicit, is probably a better choice than the former for the would-be précis of “The Culture Industry,” but the essay’s claim to truth, and its corresponding power of conviction, seems to weigh equally in each of them. All such sentences or dicta appear to elaborate, in an iterative or serial structure, on a logic that is virtually identical and whole in each of them.

No one, of course, was more aware of this than Adorno himself, and one can find reflections on this form of presentation throughout his writings⁴. But nowhere is the latter more poignantly evoked than in one of the centerpieces of Notes to Literature, “The Essay as Form.”⁵ What Adorno observes there-essayistically-of the essay,-e.g., that it “allows for the consciousness of nonidentity, without expressing it directly”; that it “is radical in its non-radicalism, in refraining from any reduction to principle, in its accentuation of the partial against the total, in its fragmentary character” (9)- not only provides the elements for a general theory of the essay-form but is as good an account as any of what Adorno’s readers should, ideally, experience if form remains true to its intention.

But such reflections on what amounts to Adorno’s fundamental formal principle, the node at which style and theoretical aim merge in what we might refer to schematically here as Adorno’s dialectical minimalism, are not the end of the story. Even if Adorno is right about the cognitive and critical powers of the “methodically unmethodical” (“The Esssay as Form,” 13) -and, as could be argued, his dialectical minimalism has succeeded, probably beyond Adorno’s wildest dreams, in generalizing itself as a kind of (ironically) popular-cultural voice of critical-theoretical authenticity, a voice that no one striving for such authenticity, including the author of these lines, can resist trying to imitate-there remain the questions both of the deeper, historico-genetic origin of such language and of what might be its own ideological limitation, its own possible moment of “untruth.” At the very least we are faced with a theoretical and formal paradox staring back at us from virtually every page of Adorno’s work as a critical theorist: namely, why has the “whole” become the “untrue” for the formal, expressive tendency of a thinking that, in relation to any given object, knows-and ultimately reflects this knowledge in its own content and movement-just the opposite? This is the question I want to discuss, however speculatively, in these pages.

II.

One way to attempt to illuminate this paradox is to consider how Adorno’s dialectical minimalism compares to the inevitable model for all modern, critical-dialectical prose, namely the language of Marx, and above all that of Capital. Even if, philosophically and, in a sense, philologically speaking, the most visible debt of the Adornian dialectic is to Hegel, Adorno’s re-thinking of the form of critical theory in relation to totality and system is unquestionably mediated by Adorno’s own positive theoretical relationship to Marx, however problematic this relationship and however reluctant he seems to have been to address it explicitly. Consider, in this light, one of Marx’s most distinctive and enigmatically dialectical mots from the concluding, fourth section (on the “fetishism of commodities”) of the first chapter of Capital I: “Value, therefore, does not have its description branded on its forehead. It rather transforms every product of labor into a social hieroglyphic.”⁶ This two-sentence sequence contains the dialectical chiasmus or inversion typical of Marx as a dialectical stylist: the objective, reified surface of the capitalist social formation appears as something self-evident, as transparent. The value-form is socially tacit, its own logic apparently already given in universal social practice. But it is just this apparent self-evidence, this objective transparency, which conceals the essence, the fundamental synthetic principle of capitalist society. The value-form is a fetish-form, not because it is mysterious (a “hieroglyphic”) per se, but because it exists in a relationship of mutual determination with an objective social nexus that itself turns its products into fetishes and its own social “bearers” into fetish-worshippers. The truth of the value-form is hidden in its own transparent self-evidence, both practically and theoretically. To decipher value one first must understand how value converts the social totality itself into a cipher.

Adorno, more than most Marxists of his day-and thanks, clearly, to being as much the student of Hegel as was Marx himself-knew how to read Capital, and, down to the sentence level, could reproduce the same dialectical, logico-stylistic movement evident there, often in the same inverted or chiasmic form. Thus the Culture Industry, as theorized in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, does not dominate its consumers by hectoring or lulling them into subservience. It dominates them precisely by making them free to consume its products, that is, by virtue of already having taken on a social objectivity existing “behind the backs” of consumers who, say, even when switching off the television, continue to reproduce the essence of its “message” in their own heads. The Culture Industry, like value, represents the outward, objective form of what the subjects of the dominant, reifying social relation already are qua subjects.

But the position of Marx’s dictum within the whole that is Capital is in no way arbitrary. Marx could not have opened the chapter on the commodity with it because the truth that it condenses, here in a quasi-aphoristic style, about the object of Marx’s critique-the value-form-must already have been shown by means of the rigorously theoretical argument that precedes the concluding, fourth section of the chapter on the commodity. The objective transparency of value in its form of appearance has already been proven by Marx to disclose, within its own immanent terms, its mysterious, fetishized essence. That the value-relation self-evidently exists and just as self-evidently rests on an equation of qualitatively different kinds of labor and use-values serves as the unshakeable premise here from which it follows that value must appear as a paradoxically “social substance” residing in commodities as their seemingly material, thing-like property. And that result, judged by the same standard of self-evidence furnished by the value-relation itself, must be deemed false. The classical political-economic theory of Smith and Ricardo succumbs to the commodity-fetish, convicting itself, ultimately, on its own, immanent terms. The incomparable critical force of Marx’s chiasmic dictum on the value-form and of his mode of presentation generally in Capital rests on this proof, and the remainder of Capital proceeds to extrapolate from it and to build a theoretical system on its rigorous foundation.

Not so the dialectical sentences of “The Culture Industry.” In Adorno’s defense, it must doubtless be acknowledged that his own thinking also, even if only implicitly, strives consistently to follow through on this theoretically rigorous point of departure, or at least to keep its radical truth constantly in view. Moreover, insofar as the objects of Adornian critique are cultural or ideological in form, the standards of proof themselves become considerably more difficult to meet, far more complexly mediated. But that should not, in principle, have prevented Adorno-much less prevent his contemporary readers and students-from attempting to hold critical theory and immanent critique to this same, rigorous standard. The abjuring of systems and “false” wholes, whether in the name of the “individual” or the “non-identical,” may begin to look like little more than theoretical abdications in light of the systematic, logical standard set by Capital. Yet, already in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno appears to require of his readers that they somehow learn to overcome the expectation that the logical articulations and truth-claims of immanent critique could meet such standards of proof. Ironically, given what is on one level its profound philosophical rigor, nothing in Adorno’s thinking is proven-unless, that is, one is willing or able to share Adorno’s evident suspicions that anything not already reified and turned into a piece of “positive” knowledge could be proven, or that proof could count any longer as anything more than the perpetual, emphatic disclosure of the object’s sheer negativity. The movement of what would be the proof for Adorno, if one were (or perhaps when one is) possible, appears to coil itself within the dialectical springs of style and language themselves, in the intuitive hope, if not faith, that the critically-theorized object in its own worldly course will shine through the words themselves when the moment is right. But in the meantime, a possible moment of self-apology has to be acknowledged in Adorno: for surely it is not the essay, as Adorno (self-referentially) describes it in “The Essay as Form,” that constitutes the “critical form par excellence” (18). The form of Capital-a form regarding which one might indeed speculate (to what genre does Capital belong?) but which is certainly not that of the essay-sets this standard, and sets aside and humbles any claims lodged on behalf of a “methodically unmethodical” flux of quasi-Nietzschean aphorisms, however dialectically-charged and true such sentences may be, in their particularity, to their Marxian point of origin.

Marx, it will be useful to recall, reflects on the methodological question of the whole in a widely-read section of the introduction to the Grundrisse subtitled “The Method of Political Economy.”⁷ There he acknowledges the seemingly more obvious method of “beginning with the real and concrete”-in economics, population-and then moving “analytically towards ever more simple concepts (e.g., class, exchange, division of labor) from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until [arriving] at the simplest determinations.” (100) This method he contrasts to the inverse, less spontaneous one of beginning with such simple determinations-with abstract concepts-and ascending from these back to the level of the concrete whole: “Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second the abstract determination leads towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought.” (101) The latter is, according to Marx, “obviously the scientifically correct method.” (ibid.) Although one should stipulate here that, on this plane of generality, the “scientifically correct method” is still that of the classical political-economic systems (Smith and Ricardo primarily) which Marx takes as his own immanent object of critique, it is also clear that, formally, Capital too adheres to this method too by starting with the commodity, or value-form and deriving from it the structured sequence of theoretical categories (e.g., exchange, money, capital, surplus-value, etc.) that lead, theoretically, to the “concrete totality” that is the capitalist mode of production itself. Marx diverges-critically-from classical political economy by insisting on the historical, specifically bourgeois origin of the conceptual abstractions themselves. (Grundrisse, 105) While retaining their abstraction, however, their systematic inter-relation or structure in the methodological context of Capital is itself made possible by a historically evolved whole-a concrete totality-whose own structure and “laws of motion” Capital’s theoretical structure, in a sense, now comes to embody directly, i.e., to which it now becomes immanent. The simple determinations or conceptual abstractions work as abstractions without succumbing, as they do in classical political-economy, to their own reified, naturalized form because they have become, in Capital, historically-grounded moments of a totality that is not abstract. Thus the proof that value, in its social form of appearance, conceals the social whole that generates it is, on one level, a (theoretically) simple matter of showing that this whole is historical, that it has not always been and will, necessarily, become other than what it is. Capital’s “mode of presentation” (its Darstellungsweise in the terms of Marx’s postface to the second edition of Capital I) does not coincide with its “mode of investigation” (Forschungsweise) because only the former can reflect the immanent motion of the historical whole and set forth the theoretical system within which a rigorous proof of this historicity-a proof that does not revert to the reified, tautological form of classical political economy-is possible.⁸

Considered from precisely this vantage point, Adorno’s dialectical minimalism, his idiosyncratically dialectical dissidence in relation to the logic of the system and to rigorous theoretical method, at least on the level of his own Darstellungsweise, betrays neither a reversion to the naïve empiricism governed by the “chaotic concrete” nor a Hegelian-idealist equation of the whole with the concept itself. It bespeaks rather an adherence to the method of Capital in which, paradoxically, what should be the concrete, historical whole has itself undergone a kind of collapse back into abstraction. It is as if the “concrete totality” immanent to and thus mediating the theoretical abstraction and systematicity of Capital had inexplicably lost its historical source of motion and come to a halt. Concepts, in Adorno, retain their dialectical, non-reified form-thus evading their “bad” abstraction in, say, the theoretical poverties of positivism-but seem to resist their own methodological deployment on the level of a theoretical system. This is because the only concrete totality that could possibly ground a “totality in thought” already appears, to Adorno, to have falsified its own historical concept. Method itself, without ceasing to be sensed as necessary, grinds to a stop. There is no mediated, logical way to arrive at a whole that no longer, as in Capital, situates itself in thought as both the premise and the result of theoretical reasoning because this whole now confronts theory as a “bad” abstraction, as a given, as soon as its concept is invoked.

Thus the “whole,’”in this case, turns out to be “untrue” in still another sense-as the historical totality that, harkening back to but simultaneously annulling its methodological basis in Capital, mediates the conceptual abstractions of theory and method, only here with the apparent risk of stripping them of their truth. Mediation seems to turn back on itself, resulting in the paradoxical need for a dialectical immediacy. Faced, that is, with such a monolithically “false” whole it follows that only a dialectic that never for a moment turned its back on it, that denounced it and its absolute positivity incessantly, a dialectic that had bound itself–like Odysseus before the Sirens–to its own immediate surface as form, could hope to survive.

III.

The problem is that even if the thought positing it could somehow manage to preserve its own dialectical consistency and configuration, such a whole would not itself be dialectical and would work just as incessantly to annul the dialectical movement of its own immanent, critical reflection. This is, in effect, the argument advanced by Moishe Postone in Time, Labor and Social Dominationagainst Horkheimer’s “critical pessimism,’ but it would appear to apply with equal force to Adorno⁹. Observing the key influence of Friedrich Pollock’s theory of state capitalism on Horkheimer’s thinking, Postone notes a “theoretical turn taken [by the Frankfurt School] in the 1930s, wherein postliberal capitalism came to be conceived as a completely administered, integrated, one-dimensional society, one that no longer gives rise to any immanent possibility of social emancipation.” (84-85) This is a charge often made by “orthodox” Marxists and “revolutionary” theory generally against Critical Theory, and Adorno in particular-one recalls Lukács’s famous quip about Adorno having taken up residence in the “Grand Hotel Abyss”-but what lends particular force to Postone’s argument is its careful demonstration that Horkheimer’s was not merely a conjunctural but a “necessary pessimism” concerning the “immanent possibility that capitalism could be superseded.”(86) This paradoxically immanent historical necessity, ascribed by Horkheimer not to historical change and internal crisis but to stagnation and paralysis, is clearly a model for the paradoxically “orthodox” but apocalyptic embrace of the dialectical methodology of Capital evident in Adorno’s thinking. Postone likewise attributes such “critical pessimism” not to a deviation (as per Critical Theory’s “revolutionary” detractors) but to an unquestioned, uncritical adherence to “traditional Marxism” and especially to the latter’s identification of the revolutionary, critical standpoint with that of the proletariat, or ‘labor.’ Postone’s general critique of the latter position is too elaborate and far-reaching to summarize here, but its gist is that labor, no less than the commodity or value, is an abstract social form inseparable from capital and hence one whose crisis is subsumed within the crisis of capitalism as a whole. The counter-posing of “labor” to capital as if the former represented a positive, spontaneous, and necessary pathway to social emancipation fails to grasp a theoretical result worked out in Capital: that the abstracting of “labor” from the general form of purposive social activity already conforms to the logic, constitutive of capitalism, that counts as “productive” only activity that produces value. Take away the value-abstraction, however, and the logic of isolating “labor” from social praxis and reproduction falls with it. The concrete labor that produces use-value can, in capitalism, only serve as the vehicle or embodiment of the abstract labor productive of exchange-value – or, simply, of value. Making “labor” the revolutionary subject thus only reproduces the Ricardian standpoint that directly counter-poses the relations of production to those of distribution, reasoning, effectively, as if value, in its subjective, active form could somehow negate itself merely by abolishing its own form as a given, objective result. Thus the danger clearly arises that, in the wake of a conjunctural, political defeat of the proletariat as the representative of “labor,” a “pessimistic” theory might interpret this crisis as merely the eclipse of the subjective factor, leaving the objective side of “labor”-value-and the neo-Ricardian distortion of Capital firmly in place. This is the apocalyptic, “negative” re-affirmation of “traditional Marxism” that Postone attributes to Horkheimer:

We have seen that Horkheimer’s theory of knowledge had been based upon the assumption that social constitution is a function of “labor,” which in capitalism is fragmented and hindered from fully unfolding by the relations of production. He now begins to consider the contradictions of capitalism to have been no more than the motor of a repressive development, which he expresses categorially with his statement that “the self-movement of the concept of the commodity leads to the concept of state capitalism just as for Hegel the certainty of sense data leads to absolute knowledge.” Horkheimer has thus come to the conclusion that a Hegelian dialectic, in which the contradictions of the categories lead to the self-unfolded realization of the Subject as totality (rather than to the abolition of the totality), could only result in the affirmation of the existing order. Yet he does not formulate his position in a way that would go beyond the limits of that order, for example, in terms of Marx’s critique of Hegel and of Ricardo. Instead, Horkheimer reverses his earlier position: “labor” and the totality, which earlier had been the standpoint of critique, now become the grounds of oppression and unfreedom. (113-114)

Adorno was, to be sure, a more subtle thinker than Horkheimer, as apt to question the latter’s increasingly liberal positions on late capitalism as he was to share Horkheimer’s generally pessimistic view of the possibility of social emancipation. But the underlying connection between such pessimism and an ironic adherence to a traditional Marxist privileging of “labor” detected in Horkheimer by Postone has the potential to explain certain basic problems in Adorno’s thought as well. That an inverted, apocalyptical, but still implicitly labor-centered Marxism likewise suffuses and delimits the theoretical content of Dialectic of Enlightenment has, in fact, been argued recently and in detail by the German critical theorist Norbert Trenkle¹⁰. While acknowledging the path-breaking contribution of Horkheimer and Adorno to setting in motion a radical critique of Enlightenment, Trenkle-along with Robert Kurz, Ernst Lohoff and Roswitha Scholz one of the leading representatives of the critical school known as Wertkritik in German-speaking, left-wing circles-finds in the text of Dialectic of Enlightenment itself “the document of a critique always partially recanted out of fear of itself. Its argumentative movement is at least in part one that does not base itself in the dialectic of the thing itself but that is derived in opposition to it.”¹¹ This authentic, but, for Adorno and Horkheimer, displaced “dialectic of the thing itself” Trenkle argues to reside in “a fully determinate social relation, constituted by commodity and value-form.”¹² Although Adorno and Horkheimer clearly grasp and allow for this inner, dialectical connection of Enlightenment to value-form (to that extent showing their unmistakable debt, shared by virtually all Frankfurt School Critical Theory, to Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness) they reduce it in turn to a far more generalized, abstract, and anthropologized “abortive separation from Nature” (“misslungene Ablösung von der Natur”, 47) lying, apparently, at the threshold of primordial societalization. But by the very fact of this “reverse-projection” (“Rückprojektion”, 46) of the value-abstraction-an abstraction from all qualitative content, issuing in what for Kant becomes the pure, ahistorical formalism of Reason itself-back to the origins, so to speak, of “species-being,” Dialectic of Enlightenment reproduces the ideology of bourgeois Enlightenment itself, as the standpoint that (like the classical political-economic systems critiqued in Capital) regards all previous history as merely the incomplete working-out of itself, i.e., of the value-abstraction and its rationalist, philosophical sublimation. What distinguishes the teleology underlying Dialectic of Enlightenment from its bourgeois Enlightenment variant is not, finally, any substantive critical-theoretical break but the former’s “turn to resignation” (“resignative Wendung”):

What is described is no longer the glorious triumphal march of progress but the gloomy tread of fatality. Liberation from domination is never more than a flickering possibility, rendered groundless and no longer, in any case, the end-point of history. As correct and important as the critique of the idea of progress clearly is [in Dialectic of Enlightenment], it remains caught up in this idea itself. Insofar as it merely rejects the optimism of the idea of progress (the supposed necessity of liberation), it reproduces the historico-philosophical construct that forms its basis.¹³

Trenkle traces the same “negative” Enlightenment-teleology, the same tendency to recoil from the full, historical implications of a crisis of capitalist modernity only imperfectly glimpsed, to Adorno’s later works as well, specifically to Negative Dialectics. (See Trenkle, pp. 51-65) Here he criticizes Adorno’s attempt to “rescue” Kantian ethics as well as his ambiguous stance vis as vis the exchange abstraction: an abstraction accurately grasped (following Alfred Sohn-Rethel) as the underlying, social-form basis of “identity thinking” but simultaneously and paradoxically posited in a utopianized, purportedly reciprocal and non-capitalist form, freed from the fetters of surplus-value extraction, as if a kind of Kantian “ethics” of exchange could point beyond its own social and historical determination.

But Trenkle’s fundamental critical insight here-in effect, that Adorno can disclose the crisis of capitalist modernity as a crisis of the modern subject-form (and to that extent initiate a fundamental break with a “traditional Marxist” reduction of critical standpoint to class standpoint) only at the cost of a de-historicizing, abstract-universalization of this crisis itself-could, I think, be developed still further and help to unravel the more troubling aspects of Adorno’s aesthetics. This is the subject for a study of its own, exceeding the immediate limits of this essay. But its argument would run as follows: Adornian aesthetic theory can be considered to rest on a paradoxically dual conception of formal abstraction as a negative principle both qua mimesis (i.e., formal abstraction as the true, negative rendering of the “positive” reifications of late capitalism) and qua emancipation (the modern, abstract work of art as itself the only remaining historical line of flight or negative standpoint from which to oppose or resist said reificaiton). Following Postone, Trenkle and Wertkritik, one might see in this duality yet another working out of the logic of “critical pessimism”: that artistic form is inexorably driven to comprehend the equally inexorable tendency of the value-abstraction to negate, even to the point of self-annihilation, all social content, aesthetic included, follows from the historical specificity of capitalist crisis itself. But that such a mimetic negativity should double as a kind of social transcendental, that the aesthetic should, in some mysterious way, step in to redeem a lost social negativity, removes us once again to a plane of abstraction outside the historical specificity of the crisis of value-form. The abstract work of art suddenly takes up a position with respect to the value-abstraction essentially congruent with that of “labor” in traditional Marxism: as the “subjective” negation of an object that, as part of this same, pseudo-dialectical movement, expels from its own theoretical consciousness any and all principles of immanent negativity or contradiction. That “labor” falls away and the abstract work of art steps in to take its place thereby furnishes the “real abstraction” of value with a kind of historical alibi in the face of its real, and terminal, historical crisis.

IV.

But if, theoretically-that is, on the level of system-Adorno fails to integrate the real, concrete totality and scope of capital’s historical crisis into his thinking, it could, I think, be argued that he anticipates the virtual implications of such a crisis when his thinking takes as its objects the cultural, aesthetic, and ethical particularities of his own historical moment. Might it not be that when Adorno looks back at the “false” whole through its parts-when it is conceptually and formally the parts that mediate the whole-the tendency to historical abstraction in his thinking begins to be reversed? At least, might this not be so when the “parts,” as they almost invariably do, take on the form of immediacy of culture, the ethical and, especially, the aesthetic itself? Such might be a hypothetical conclusion to the above, sketched here only in rough outline.

This is a possibility intriguingly suggested by, among other things, the fact that Adorno’s least explicitly systematic work, the work that most closely adheres to the Benjaminian organizing principle of constellation-Minima Moralia-is also his most richly historicized. The inward, self-condensing movement of Adorno’s thought-form, at its apogee in Minima Moralia but detectable everywhere in his opus, would thus be provisionally explained by the fact that, when experienced through and at the level of its cultural particularities and immediacies, the fully historical truth of late-capitalist crisis, its reality as an absolute internal limit, no longer appears strictly as something that must (but cannot) be proven theoretically. On the level of culture and “wrong life” it is the objective immediacies of crisis that, so to speak, have already taken upon themselves the “burden of proof,” and the task of the critic then limits itself to assessing such truth-claims on their own, immanent terms. Adorno’s “minimalist” and stylized dialectic might then be understood as the form that, because it imitates the accidental, fragmentary form of its objects, permits him to render the historical truth of crisis to which such objects point without needing to have already worked out its theoretical critique-in advance, so to speak, of having formulated its concept. The movement towards totality, towards dialectical mediation and synthesis, a movement that takes place for Adorno within sentences as much or more than it does between them, could be seen, in this sense, as a direct way of giving provisionally conceptual shape to the historical mediation of aesthetic, cultural and ethical immediacies that do not yet, for him, add up to a historical whole. Such sentences might thus be said to constitute an idiom of crisis in lieu but also in anticipation of the rigorously theoretical formulation of what would be the latter’s theoretical concept.

But what then, might explain in turn the anticipatory, idiomatic reflection of a terminal crisis of capital that perhaps only now, in the wake of the demise of Fordism and of the advent of capital’s “third” (microelectronic) industrial revolution, becomes a possible object of theorization? From the critical standpoint worked out by contemporary critical theorists such as Postone and Trenkle-from the standpoint of the historical unity-in-crisis of capital and labor-the answer I propose here points us again to the ironic fact that, in the “minimalist” Adorno, it is, above all, the aesthetic object, not the political or economic (or philosophical) one, through and in relation to which his thinking seems to take on its richest, most concrete historical mediacy. Adorno would thus be understood as equipped, in essence, to think the crisis of capital immanently through the form of the aesthetic even while failing, in the end, to do so in the direct, systematic categories of philosophy and theory tout court. But this, surely, would reflect equally what is, for Adorno, the intuitive understanding of the aesthetic as what is directly negated not merely by the “false” whole of the Culture Industry’ or by bourgeois “Enlightenment” but by the value-abstraction itself. The social logic of the value-relation, of the “real,” fetishized abstraction of the commodity form, is, inexorably, to annihilate all aesthetic content and experience. (The same, perhaps, might be said as well of the negativity of ethical content in relation to the value-abstraction-such at least would appear to be an unspoken but absolute premise of Minima Moralia.) The more explicitly philosophical categories of Adorno’s thinking-such as “negative dialectics”-remain far more ambiguous and historically impoverished in this sense, erecting themselves in a negative relation not to the value-abstraction itself but to categories-such as “Enlightenment” or “identity”-that eventually, because of their own “bad” abstraction, find their way back, as Trenkle has observed, into Adorno’s philosophical standpoint itself. One should be careful to add here that the more explicitly philosophical claims of Adorno’s aesthetic theory, above all the argument that artistic abstraction (e.g., “serious music” in the essay on jazz) somehow exempts itself from the reifying, essentially nihilistic logic of the value-abstraction, suffer the same historical impoverishment. But when engaged by and situated within the mediate space of aesthetic, cultural and ethical objects in their particularity, Adorno guides himself unerringly by the historical truth that these objects themselves also, unconsciously, sense: that the terminal crisis of the society governed by the abstract “labor” and the logic of “self-valorizing value”, and the historical possibility of its negation, are all that now warrants their existence.

Notes

¹ My translation. The German original reads: “Das Ganze ist das Unwahre.” (Frankurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969) p.57. In a foonote to his translation of Minima Moralia (London: NLB, 1974, p.50) E.F.N. Jephcott notes Adorno’s inversion of Hegel’s dictum from The Phenomenology of Mind, “Das Wahre ist das Ganze,” but, curiously, opts for the word “false” rather than “untrue.”

² Minima Moralia, p. 71. These are the opening lines of fragment 45 (“‘How sickly seem all growing things’”), which, together, with 44 (“For Post-Socratics”) and 46 (“On the morality of thinking”) are this work’s most sustained reflection on dialectics. Similar language can be found throughout Adorno’s works, but the following passage from “Why Still Philosophy” (1962)-no less para-logical in its way than the earlier aphorism it qualifies-seems especially pertinent in this regard: Traditional philosophy’s claim to totality, culminating in the thesis that the real is rational, is indistinguishable from apologetics. But this thesis has become absurd. A philosophy that would still set itself up as total, as a system, would become a delusional system. Yet if philosophy renounces the claim to totality and no longer claims to develop out of itself the whole that should be the truth, then it comes into conflict with its entire tradition. (my emphasis; Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 7.))

³ Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) p. 94.

⁴ See, for example, the concluding paragraph of the “Dedication” in Minima Moralia, p. 18.

⁵ Notes to Literature, Vol. One trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) pp. 3-23.

⁶ Trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990) p. 167.

⁷ Trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguing Books, 1993) pp. 100-108.

⁸ See Capital Vol. One, p. 102.

⁹ Time. Labor, and Social Domination: a Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)

¹⁰ See “Gebrochene Negativität: Anmerkungen zu Adornos und Horkheimers Aufklärungskritik,” Krisis: Beitrage zur Kritik der Warengesellschaft #25 (2002) pp. 39-65.

¹¹ My translation. German original: “das Dokument einer Kritik, die sich immer wieder partiell zurücknimmt, weil sie vor sich selbst erschrickt. Ihre argumentative Bewegung ist wenigstens teilweise eine, die nicht in der Dialektik der Sache liegt, sondern sich dieser entgegenstemmt.” (39)

¹² My translation. German original: “eine ganz bestimmte, von Ware und Werte konstituierte gesellschaftliche Verhältnisse.” (47)

¹³ My translation. German original: Nicht mehr der glorreiche Siegesmarsch des Fortschritts wird beschrieben, sondern der düstere Gang des Verhängnisses. Befreiung von Herrschaft ist allenfalls noch eine aufblitzende Möglichkeit, die nicht mehr begründet werden kann, auf jeden Fall aber nicht mehr notwendiger Endpunkt der Geschichte. So richtig und wichtig die Kritik des Fortschrittsdenkens auch ist, sie bleibt doch in ihm befangen. Indem sie bloss seinen Optimismus (die angebliche Notwendigkeit der Befreiung) verwirft, reproduziert sie negative das ihm Zugrunde liegende geschichtsphilosophische Konstrukt…. (46)

Dez. 2004

Neil Larsen

I.

A history without violence would, for us at least, be unrecognizable as history. Yet, paradoxically, violence as phenomenon appears to exist apart from the history in which it is omnipresent. Violence seems, almost unconsciously, to found the historical imagination itself and at the same time to exist apart from it, as a moral or metaphysical absolute. In the final analysis this no doubt has to do with the impossibility of disassociating the idea of violence from that of death as physical annihilation.  Taken to its extreme, violence could end history by destroying virtually all historical agents.  Indeed, it must rank as one of the great historical feats of modernity that is has actualized what was before this merely theoretical possibility and even learned to make us accommodate ourselves to it in our daily lives.  Alongside the abstract repugnance it universally merits in the language of official ‘values,’ violence as means and as sheer adaptation advances at a sure and accelerating pace.  Whatever they may convey on the level of official historical sanctions, the stories and images of catastrophic violence–whether of Auschwitz or Hiroshima, of the Escuela de Mecánica or El Mozote, or for that matter of Columbine High, 9/11, Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib–inform us just as predictably of the adaptive cost that lived history can be relied upon to exact from its subjects: it is this bad, it will continue, and it will get worse. The real likelihood of violent annihilation becomes for many something to be factored into the equations of contemporary life, as one would a marriage or a retirement, while for the rest its specter becomes a permanent part of the domestic landscape.

Thus the forbiddingly difficult task of historicizing violence, political or otherwise–a task now, in the age of preemptive wars and suicide bombings, rendered more difficult and more urgent than ever.  This if nothing else is what so emphatically commends the work of the historian Arno Mayer, which in part occasions this essay and the volume to which it seeks to contribute.  In works such as The Persistence of the Old Regime, Why did the Heavens not Darken? and The Furies, Mayer has effectively withstood the nearly universal tendency that, by allowing the abstract and formal repudiation of violence to become the ideology of a real, daily adaptation to its regimes, absolves modern political history of its inherently violent foundations.  Mayer marshals an impeccably objective historiography to prove, in The Furies, that by reducing the violence unleashed by the revolutions of 1789 and 1917 to a generic phenomenon understood either to vitiate their emancipatory content or to be completely external to them, one simply cannot explain them as events.  Revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence and terror do not, as Mayer shows, cancel each other out, much less validate the Burkean conservativism that abjures them both. Their mutual determination, rather, traces a specific form of historical motion, that of the modern social revolution in its full scope. Up to a point at least, Mayer successfully historicizes violence by methodically refusing to remove violence from the historical context of revolution itself as both an objective social process and as an event in real time about which it is still impossible to think except, however minimally, in a historical spirit. In the end, the guillotine delivers a violent death just like any other instrument, and can dispatch a Robespierre as readily as a Louis XVI, but the history that gave us the guillotine cannot be detached from the history of the political movements and ideologies that initially legitimate its use against some and not others.

That is, violence itself, for Mayer, remains, essentially, an event, inseparable from the larger chain of events that lead into and flow out of it.  Hence the remarkable impact of a work such as Why did the Heavens not Darken?, which ties the decision of the National Socialist regime to implement the Final Solution, whatever its ideological predispositions,  to the political fall-out from events on the battle fields of the Eastern Front, specifically the fall of the siege of Moscow in 1941.  However controversial Mayer’s historical theory of the Holocaust may in fact be, it forces us to reflect on Auschwitz as, on one level at least, a terrible historical contingency.  That the violence of the death camps has more than a contingent quality is in no sense disputed by Mayer here.  But by arguing, indeed seeking to prove to us that this violence was, as event, initially inseparable from the violence of the anti-Soviet war, the flight into the metaphysics of violence, into its combined existential abstraction and rationalization, is prevented.

II.

Are Mayer’s methodically historical account of violence as event, and, more pointedly, his insistence on the often under-estimated historical role of counterrevolutionary violence and terror in shaping the violence and terror of revolution illuminating or especially pertinent to the modern history of Latin America?  In the most general sense, obviously, yes–as they are for history generally.  But in a certain narrower sense, the answer is, ironically, no, if only because political and state violence in Latin America have, especially since 1945, been so notoriously and self-evidently the practice of the Latin American counterrevolution (in league with US imperialism) that the correction is almost superfluous.  While revolutionary violence and terror are obviously not unknown in modern Latin American history, they cannot be compared to the Jacobin and Soviet experiences in the latters’ obessive, ideologically overdetermined interest for historiography, especially Cold War liberal historigraphy. If anything, the postwar Latin American experience of political violence is what stands in a position to illuminate and buttress Mayer’s historical argument even further–an argument that, not unlike Surrealism according to the theory of the “real maravilloso,” would make immediate sense to the Latin American man on the street.

But this in turn points to a more basic question than the above, and one to which a work such as The Furies can no doubt help to supply anwers:  what is the structural relationship of revolution and counterrevolution to the process of capitalist modernization itself in Latin America, as compared to this relationship in Western Europe and even in Imperial and Soviet Russia?  In both of the latter cases, violent revolution is the prelude to far-reaching social and political processes of modernization.  Despite their obvious differences vis a vis each other, and the fact that, in the wake of its effective collapse in 1991, the Soviet model begins to look in certain ways more ‘Latin American,’ 1789 and 1917 really have no precise historical analogues in Latin America. Where is so determinate and strict a succession of such elemental historical processes as political revolution and social and economic modernization to be observed in Latin American history?

In a punctual sense, perhaps the cases of Mexico and Cuba could be cited.  The Mexican Revolution, curiously, more or less shares the chronology of the Soviet experience: from revolutionary inception in the second decade of the 20th century to economic crisis and political implosion or near implosion in the 1980s and 1990s.  Cuba’s revolutionary modernization, uniquely configured by the geopolitics and the chronology of the Cold War, probably parallels more closely than any other Latin America revolution the orthodox sequence of a 1917, in which the direct seizure of power is followed by a sweeping social and economic transformation together with a largely successful monopolization of violence as legitimate force on the part of the revolutionary state.  But with the end of the Cold War, Cuba, even more than Mexico, has had to trade off the political integrity of its revolutionary institutions in exchange for conceding most of the economic and social reforms for which these institutions once stood. Their shared, close proximity to the dominating power to their north–a power that, for all its counterrevolutionary fervor and propensity to violence can, ironically, ill afford significant social upheavals just across its borders–probably explains more about the formal, institutional longevity of these modernizing revolutions –ironically coupled to their effective social reversal—than could any deeper homology with the historical syntax of 1789 or 1917.

As a rule, however, revolutions are more frequent if also more sporadic, short-lived and fragmented events–i.e., much more volatile–in Latin America than in the European and North American theaters of modernity.  This has given rise to a widely broadcast caricature of Latin America as the land of the eternal coup d’etat, complete with the inevitable medal-strewn miles gloriosus and menacing men with guns, and in which the political difference between those against the wall and those manning the firing squad soon evanesces. But behind the caricature lies what is nevertheless an important historical qualification, perhaps so obvious as to be in danger of being set aside: that, because capitalist modernization is itself such a violent and volatile affair in Latin America, the revolutions and counterrevolutions that are its “birth pangs” are likewise so.  Latin American revolutions occupy a place more transverse, so to speak, to the history of economic modernization, a less punctual place than in the case of their epoch-creating models in 1789 and 1917.

The reasons for this are, in a sense, the central problem of modern Latin American political and economic history and long a stock-in-trade of Latin American historians.  But it is, for all that, rare that anyone thinks in a very sustained way about the general, structural relation of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence to modernization and modernity in Latin America, even if, on a local level, one often thinks about little else. (Rare, that is, that one thinks through this relation and still thinks historically rather than veering off into the realms of liberal morality and metaphysics.) In this sense, Mayer’s magisterially comparative account of 1789 and 1917–one in which the crucial factors not only of chronological disparity but also (even more crucially for Latin Americanists) of unequal capitalist development are plainly determinant–can serve as a fundamental point of orientation.

III.

Has, then–to proceed in this analogous mode–the counterrevolution definitively triumphed in Latin America?  Has the old regime survived, in the end, or come back to overturn all efforts to effect revolutionary change? In the plainest sense, yes. With the heavily qualified exceptions of Cuba and Venezuela–and the frankly even more circumscribed and adventitious exceptions of the transient regime changes (ca. 2004) in Brazil or Bolivia–the class elites that dominated Latin American states and societies at the outset of the Cold War retain their dominant position.  But to further sustain this viewpoint, one would have immediately to qualify and relativize its terms.  “Counterrevolution” and “old regime” in precisely what sense?  For Mayer the old regime of landowning aristocrats is associated with a feudal or at best transitionally capitalist mode of production.  It is at the very least a matter of debate as to whether such a class has ever existed in Latin America.  While landed wealth in Latin America remains a crucial political power, its own relationship to the uneven and fraught process of economic and social modernization invites little comparison, it seems to me, to the class positionings of money-wise English baronets, Prussian Junkers or Russian boyars. Rural elites in Latin America are typically not the grudging accommodators and sly survivors of modernizing liberal bourgeoisies but themselves principal agents of modernization and liberalization and less the junior partners of a local than of an absentee, ultramarine ‘foreign’ bourgeoisie whose banks are practically as powerful as states. While the cities in Latin America have been the sites of the ‘middle class’ revolts that have forced retreats and (when in league with rural uprisings) land reforms on the ‘old regime,’ these cities themselves were and remain in many ways the mere extension of traditional class power, the portuary nodes of a network of class relations centered outside both country and city.

All of this of course points to the structural fact of colonial and neo-colonial domination of Latin America and the latter’s determinant role in forcing and, in the wake of the ‘neo-liberal’ Thermidor, reinforcing an export-led, extroverted path of modernization on the region, one in which both rural and industrial products in the form of commodities enter a world market, so to speak, as equals.  In Latin America the countryside does not, by feeding the cities, perform its historic role in the potentiating of ‘primitive accumulation.’ Both countryside and city must be fed by the world market, dominated in its turn by always-already accumulated masses of capital that set the limits to any local process of modernization, and for which the politics of ‘old’ and ‘new’ regimes in, say, Argentina or Honduras are effectively a matter of indifference.

Here, that is to say, Mayer’s painstaking insistence on the violence of modern revolution as the latter’s active constituent but at the same time as irreducibly political and event-driven, apposite as this is to his critical objective as a historian, begins to fail us.  The working premise of The Furies is, like Marx’s in his political writings, that revolutions are the nodal flash points and the semi-conscious instruments of a kind of capitalist (or ‘socialist’) modernization from within. They are thresholds of the modern.  The ‘old regime’ can ‘persist’ because that to which it will eventually give way is moving against it on the same social and national plane. But the revolutions and counterrevolutions of modern Latin America, especially in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods, take place within a framework of modernization that is both a given of colonial and neo-colonial social formation –a modernization in this sense ‘from without’–and, paradoxically, also a constitutive absence.  The modern in Latin America is perpetually unfinished business, a success the breeds its own failure as a very part of its development, not a threshold but the single doorway leading into and out of–what else?–a labyrinth. Because both are arrayed alongside and at the same time against the abstract plane of a protean modernity that is inseparable from the social itself, the friction of ‘old’ and ‘new’ regimes, of revolution and counterrevolution, becomes chronic rather than punctual and generates a violence that seems circular and irrational.

This is, in fact, the violent irrationality latent–and nowadays more and more manifest–in all modes of capitalist modernity, but one that it has, so far, been the function of peripheral zones like Latin America to displace onto themselves and absorb, whether by enduring the unilateral, directly violent batterings of imperialist domination and subjugation or through the medium of social and economic ‘policy.’ (Think, to cite a timely and stark analogy here, of the transition in Iraq from the regime of indirectly murderous UN-approved sanctions to that of direct, overtly and massively violent US invasion and occupation.)  But one may reasonably speculate whether the coming phase in the history of the capitalist modernity once ushered in through the ‘straight gate’ leading from the guillotine to the voting booth and the stock exchange may now have become the roosting place for a rather different species of ‘furies,’ on their way ‘home,’ so to speak, from places like Latin America.  In that sense, it is perhaps the latter’s seemingly irrational form of violence as a political relation of means to end that might prompt us to re-think the history of violence set forth in works like The Furies.

IV.

I want at this point to expound, however briefly, one such re-thinking, likely, for linguistic reasons, to be unfamiliar to most readers in Latin America and the US.  This is the work of a group of radical critical theorists centered around the contemporary German journals Krisis and Exit!, the most prominent of whom is Robert Kurz, author of works such as Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus, a monumental historical study of capitalism from the standpoint of a radically revised, post-Cold War Marxism, and, more recently, Weltordnungskrieg. Kurz’s fundamental thesis, an intensely controversial one to be sure, is that, in the wake of the post-Fordist “third” industrial revolution ushered in by micro-electronics, vastly increased levels of productivity and the corresponding rise in the so-called organic composition of capital are pushing all social formations subordinate to the law of value–that is, all social formations–to the brink of a terminal crisis of reproduction.  Because the continued self-valorization of capital now, at currently attained levels of productivity, requires a vastly diminished quantity of abstract labor power, enormous pools of that labor power become effectively “unexploitable,” permanently superfluous to the needs of self-valorization.  Those familiar with Marx’s classical exposition of the law of the rising organic composition of capital–and the subsequent “law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall”–will be able to fill in the last blank here: absolute declines in the capacity to valorize labor power mean absolute declines in the capacity to extract surplus-value.  Expressed in terms of the commodity and commodity-form: as labor-power more and more ceases to be a saleable commodity, the commodity-form itself loses its content, becoming an increasingly ‘fictional’ social form, actualized only through ever more desperate ‘flights forward’ into financial speculation and the resort to what Kurz and others refer to as outright “economies of plunder,” i.e., throwing onto the market whatever pools of money or directly saleable commodities there are that can be looted for short-term gain or to stave off eventual collapse, whether these are gathered in the savings accounts of pensioners, the fraudulently over-valued portfolios of Enron and Worldcom stockholders, or in the subsoil of Iraq.

According to Kurz, the economies of the Third and former Second World were the first to succumb to this crisis.  The attempt, common to both, at competing successfully on the world market through an accelerated, or “recuperative” (nachholend) modernization has, in this view, effectively failed.  Economies from the former Soviet Union to Argentina simply could not undertake the immense capital investment required to achieve levels of productivity commensurate with those of the US or the EU and Japan and, in some cases (e.g., the former GDR) experience the de-valorization of an entire national-industrial base virtually overnight.  India, China and Brazil may prove to be the only (temporary) exceptions to this rule–but for how long, and at what social cost to their own populations?  Meanwhile, the societies of sub-Saharan Africa, of much of Central and Southeast Asia, and of a significant swath of Latin America virtually fall off the map, becoming little more than immense, stagnant reservoirs of ‘unexploitable’ labor-power crowded into gargantuan, unlivable cities, “monetary subjects without money” forced to compete in the most violent fashion for the crumbs of globalization.  This is reality now for the majority of the planet, a reality recently described in chilling fashion by the urbanist Mike Davis in his chilling essay, “Planet of Slums.”

That such a crisis must and does lead to catastrophic increases in and the constant proliferation of new forms of violence is self-evident.  Perhaps, after all, much the same could be said, mutatis mutandis, of the crises of the old regime that led successively to 1789, 1917 and even, in Mayer’s argument, the ‘second Thirty Years War’ of 1914-1945.  But the structural relation of violence to the total process of social formation and reproduction has surely changed.  The violence of ethnic cleansing, of death squads and para-militarism, of suicide bombings and pre-emptive wars–of, to paraphrase the title of Kurz’s most recent book, ‘world civil war’–has ceased to be punctual and ‘foundational’ and become both chronic and corrosive.  Violence more and more leaks out of politics and the state, calling forth ever more violent state reprisals and policing measures in its turn. In Kurz’s view, violence becomes the ultima ratio not merely of the state, but of strained market relations themselves, of the commodity logic that the modern state was erected to institute and regulate.  Violence now enters the market directly as a kind of apocalyptic form of reproduction, no longer buying in order to sell (Marx’s famously succinct formula for the capital relation) but looting in order to sell.  As it once did in its early youth, capitalism again writes its history in the “annals of blood and fire.”  But this time it is a primitive accumulation in reverse.

Ernst Lohoff, a frequent contributor to Krisis and the author of an important critical study of the civil-cum-international war that produced the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, has recently synthesized this historical re-thinking of violence in rigorously theoretical and systematic terms.  In “Gewaltordnung und Vernichtungslogik” (“Violent Order and the Logic of Annihilation”) Lohoff traces what he terms the “violent core” (Gewaltkern) of the social subject of commodity-society to the historical foundations of modernity itself.  Hobbes’ defense of the absolutist state as the only bulwark against the ‘bellum omnia contra omnes,” re-read by Lohoff in light of the contemporary rise in “post-state” violence, reveals violence itself to be a constitutive ideological element of the civic values of freedom and equality to which it is officially anathema.  “Men are equal,” for Hobbes, “insofar as they all share a mutual capacity to kill one another.”

Hobbes’ construct brings into view the fundamental relationship in which men are displaced by their own unsocial sociality ["ungesellschaftliche Gesellschaft-lichkeit"]. Contract and Right are not the precipitates of human cooperation but rather grow out of a sublimated praxis of violence ['Gewalttätigkeit'], a praxis that is not abandoned in a fully normalized commodity-producing society, but that is presupposed in it.

The state as the generalized, universalized and externalized form of a violence inherent in the social logic of alienated, commodity relations goes on to perfect its social base of market-subjects by claiming the exclusive, ‘sovereign’ right to wage war.  And, by warring against other states and evolving standing armies of conscript citizens

“a certain regimentation of violence ['Gewaltregime'] evolves, without which the modern, monadic subjects of market-competition and work could simply not have arisen.  The fraternity of the national ‘we,’ the self-induction into militarized corps of fellow countrymen, prepares the ground for the market “I”…

When, however, commodity-relations themselves enter into the purportedly terminal crisis described in the paragraphs immediately above, the resulting weakening of the state monopoly on violence, the “leakage” of violence from the political onto the directly social and economic planes, forces the submerged “Gewaltkern” of modern, ‘monetary’ subjectivity back out of its sublimated, political forms and into the open, making society and economy themselves into virtual battlefields.  In “post-state” war, writes Lohoff,

the separation between war as end and warlike means breaks down; the path becomes the goal.  The economics of war [now] function as an economics of plunder, as the form of reproduction peculiar to a business of war, from which the appearance of abstract universality has fallen away.  In ways quite reminiscent of the battles of early modernity, it is now increasingly up to war to supply the means of war.

V.

A Latin Americanist who reads Kurz and Lohoff will, however skeptically, likely experience something like a shock of recognition.  Until much of the rest of the world caught up to it in the 1990s, seemingly disproportionate and irrational outbreaks of violence–from the overthrow of Arbenz in the 1950s to the mass torturings and killings carried out by military dictatorships in Brazil and the Southern Cone in the 1960s and 70s to the counterrevolutionary terror in Central America in the 1980s–made Latin America into the grisly poster-child of wanton, ‘civil’ blood-letting. That the greatest and bloodiest monopolist of violence of all time, the United States, played a decisive role in virtually all of this cruel history must never for a moment be forgotten, but Dulles, Kissinger and Elliot Abrams found ready collaborators among the ranks of the Latin American praetorians and ‘lumpenbourgeoisies.’ Consolidated and, if such a thing is possible, routinized and normalized on the social and economic rack of neo-liberalism, the horrific mass murders of, say, the Argentine ‘Proceso’ or the Reagan-sponsored Nicaraguan ‘contra’ genocide nevertheless continue to pose a terrible, sphinx-like question to survivors and historians alike. Bluntly phrased: were all these deaths in vain?  Here and there a few generals or police captains and other ‘bad apples’ go to jail, but the reforms, radical and modest, for which so many died now seem almost beyond recall, much less imaginable in the present.  Can such catastrophic violence and injustice really have had built into it no redemptive denouement?

Perhaps history will eventually surrender up an answer, but in the meantime one must consider whether this redemption tends still, in fundamentally Enlightenment fashion, to be imagined as the missing final act of the drama of progressive, liberal modernization.  Those who die for ‘liberty, fraternity and equality’ are, so it is said, redeemed by the fact that these ideals become enshrined in the institutions of the state and civil society.  But what of those who die at the hands of these very ideals and institutions themselves, ideals and institutions which, having now outlived themselves and grown violent and nihilistic with the progressive crumbling of their commodity-structured, modernized economic and social underpinning, turn on their subjects because, like unsaleable commodities, the latter paradoxically now stand in the way of the social automaton that liberates and equalizes them only in the abstract?  Indeed, what of those who die at the hands of such ideals and institutions, while still believing in them?  For that matter, what of those who, in wreaking such violence, become the agents of a retro-Hobbesian modernity while imagining themselves to be the champions of tradition and the knights of the old regime?  It is only against the violent backdrops of 1789 and 1917, no doubt, that these historical actors (among whom we must also be included) could recognize themselves.  But in modern Latin America, as, increasingly now, in the rest of the world, the stage may already have been set for something else.

Neil Larsen

University of California, Davis

During the final months of 2001, when I first conceived the idea for this essay, Argentina had become the sudden focus of world attention. The International Monetary Fund, in what seemed at the time an unprecedented move, had refused to continue loaning money to the De la Rúa government, and, in the course of the following weeks, and the effective economic collapse of the country, a quasi-revolutionary situation appeared to prevail. On December 20, 2001 there occurred the now near-legendary uprising of the people of Buenos Aires that succeeded in forcing the resignation of De la Rúa. Though upwards of forty people were killed by police in the course of the uprising, the Argentine armed forces refused De la Rúa’s plea for intervention, thus marking what seemed, indeed, a revolutionary new phase in Argentine political and social history.

I am trained as a Latin-Americanist and had, not long before the ‘revolution’ of December, 2001, spent some weeks in Buenos Aires, so the events of those days–and developments since–were to leave a especially acute impression on me. The leading institutions of finance capital, under pressure from the United States of course, had effectively decided to jettison entirely not only a close ally of the G-8 but a national economy that had not long before been the second largest in Latin America, one whose relatively sizeable and affluent middle class, and once well-organized and relatively highly-paid industrial working class, had long merited Argentina–or, at any rate, Buenos Aires– a kind of honorary ‘first world’ status in the eyes of the world capitalist elites. In effect, the biggest bankers of the world, in keeping with the many other drastic measures introduced by the US hegemon after 9/11 and with their own serious internal financial crisis, had made a calculation: Argentina was no longer worth ‘saving.’ Its ‘country-risk’–a rating scale used by the IMF and the World Bank to inform potential investors of the most and the least secure ‘national’ havens for parking their excess capital– was suddenly on a par with that of sub-Saharan African countries. In August of 2001 there was already to be heard in Buenos Aires the pun which had it that Argentina’s ‘country-risk’–in Spanish, “riesgo país“–had risen so high that that the country itself had become a “riesgo país” – a ‘risk country.’

But what struck me with equal force, at the time, was the sense of the gap that separated these clearly world-historical but conjunctural events from what was then, and largely remains, the tenor of ‘theoretical’ discussions of “globalization” in the academy and in radical-intellectual circles in the US. At the center of these discussions was, of course, the sensation generated by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, a tract celebrated (if also, by then, notorious) for its literally millennial proclamation of a ‘new world order’ that had, so its authors told us, rendered virtually all heretofore existing secular forms of knowledge about the world, and its social, economic and political constitution(s), obsolete. I won’t pause to summarize here what must already be familiar arguments to many readers, except to emphasize the ontological, and almost religious fervor with which Hardt and Negri and their many avid readers proclaimed a kind of Copernican revolution-in-the revolution, a ‘new world order’ at the same time sinister, ubiquitous, strangely fascinating in its ‘shimmering planes of immanence,’ and–sure enough–ripe at any unpredictable moment for the world-revolution vouchsafed in the massing at all points of the center-less and rhizomatic network of Empire’s own twenty-first century grave-diggers: the “multitude.” Old fashioned Marxist notions such as the law of combined and uneven development, according to which breaks in the world system would occur, if and when they did, serially, and at local and conjunctural nodes were, to hear Empire and its celebrants tell it, a thing of the past, since, in this most epical and chiliastic version of ‘globalization’ theory, the janus-faced Empire/multitude global entity had long since spilled over and washed away the uneven and sub-global barriers once erected by such things as sovereign nation-states.

No one, of course, could doubt the implied sympathy of Empire, and the more broadly constituted left-theory/ critique of globalization that it had evidently succeeded in condensing, for the “multitude” that had taken to the streets and struck a momentary but impressive blow against capital in Buenos Aires. But the gap that opened up here, as I saw it, between a metropolitan-based and essentially academic “theory” and a distinctly national-popular instance of spontaneous revolutionary practice seemed to me especially acute, not to say grotesque. Here, I thought, was an ideological and perhaps cultural blind-spot notable in itself and worth some reflection. It is these reflections that follow. The reader, whose indulgence is hereby begged, will note, however, that they do not unfold in a smooth and linear course from ‘theory’ to ‘event’ or vice-versa, but, rather, assume a roughly paratactical format, hovering in range of a number of problems and symptoms peculiar to “globalization theory” in the US, before tracing their way back to Argentina. The wished-for critical and rhetorical trump in which ‘practice,’ in the form of national crisis and popular uprising, shatters the false idols of a smugly self-removed ‘theory’ proves more elusive than expected, leaving one instead with a set of even more pronounced doubts as to what really counts as ‘theory’ in the first place, and, alongside this more skeptical stance, the chronic question for both Argentina and the globe, viz, what is to be done?

I.

When it comes time, if it ever does, to write the intellectual history of the ‘theoretical’ wing of the humanities in our own moment, that history will be punctuated less by its changing paradigms than by the rise and fall of its jargons. Of course, jargons are nothing new, and, in principle, all intellectual histories could be written this way. But what is particular to our moment, what bespeaks its specific form of intellectual poverty, is an apparent change in the relationship of terminology to concepts. This is a relationship whose messiness and general unevenness it has been the historical role of jargons to hide, but a relationship that jargons, acting as a kind of conceptual shorthand, could also keep from collapsing altogether. So, for example, even if one had never read or studied psychoanalytical theory, one’s casual use of terms such as “return of the repressed” or even “Freudian slip,” however pretentious and hollow, might still contain enough of a connection to the theory itself to lead one, eventually, in the direction of its real conceptual content.

But even that precarious link, as concerns much of what we are now given to understand as our ‘work,’ appears to have been severed: with increasingly fewer exceptions, it is no longer concepts that mediate terminologies, but the reverse. Adorno’s strictures against the linguistically certified conceptual frauds of Heideggerianism and the post-war German existentialism it later spawned had already pinpointed this tendency in 1967:

What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content.(1)

To compensate for this ideological ‘loading’ of words at the expense of their conceptual content, the latter necessarily discursive, there is substituted the pseudo-discursive context of the linguistic ‘performance.’ Terms simulate concepts merely by being uttered or prominently displayed, a practice that not long ago seemed almost to approach the level of self-parody in, for example, the case of the term “the body.” Concepts become, at best, what is necessary to produce sentences containing the terms that identify the speaker as rightly (or wrongly) affiliated. I may not be able to explicate it or mediate it conceptually, but if I pronounce or write the term “hybridity” my audience will immediately be given to understand whose ‘theoretical’ authority I invoke and what books are on my bookshelves. And, for many of us, that seems to be ‘argument’ enough.

As the lives of jargons go, the now decade-plus old buzz over ‘globalization’ has a curious, perhaps even a novel feature: in naming what is purportedly a process or an existing or threatening condition that has, in principle, swallowed up everything, the thing that actually does the ‘globalizing’ or swallowing seems necessarily to lack a name. What would we call it? Not “the globe,” surely. “Globality”? “Globalism”? The latter has a nice ring to it, but perhaps only because it can’t rub off an already noticeably ironic nuance as the term that would also refer to the ideology that governs the consciousness of those who replicate, without a moment’s hesitation, the jargon of ‘globalization.’ ‘Globality’ would then make sense as the term denoting the utopian face of this ideology or will-to- jargon. (Adorno, for whom “ideology” itself “has shifted into language,”(2) already considered these as amounting to the same thing.) “Globality” would be that quality or state of mind or society that meant that the world had finally caught up with ‘globalization.’

Note that in the now seemingly more august case of the jargon of ‘postmodernism,’ this strange defect of the nominal did not obtain, since that term could function equally well as noun or adjective, viz, ‘postmodern culture’ or just ‘postmodernity’ or ‘the postmodern.’ Ditto for the ‘postcolonial.’ If culture could be said, in historical terms, to have become ‘postmodern,’ then the ‘postmodern’ could itself migrate from the predicate to the subject position. But a term such as ‘the global’ seems always about to fall back upon a mundane, merely descriptive connotation, lacking the aura of novelty and esoterism without which contemporary intellectual jargons cannot long survive. To say ‘global culture’ or even ‘a global culture’ may describe something real–the exportable form of Hollywood, for example–but, theoretically, it says very little, and perhaps nothing really new at all. For it is with ‘culture’ as it is with any concept: it must name a universal aspect in its object for it to have become a concept in the first place, and hence to refer to its ‘global’ aspect is, beyond its minimally descriptive value, fundamentally pleonastic. Culture must in some way already be a universal for it to be a particular. At best, ‘global culture’ becomes a novelty with, paradoxically, no place to be in relation to something else that it supersedes, since, presumably, there is no place left where it is not.

On the most vulgar plane, the advent of a new jargon merely indicates the exhaustion of an older one. This, to a depressing extent, probably explains the preponderance of individual uses of the term “globalization.” In the sphere of literary criticism, cultural studies and ‘Theory,’ one tends by default to say “globalization” where, more often than not, one once said “postmodernity.” The appetite, if not the need for epochal markers of some sort, for regular re-toolings of a self-consciously and, so to speak, prematurely declared ‘Zeitgeist,’ obeys the banal logic of an intellectual marketplace flooded with surplus and unsaleable goods: the same article on, say, Toni Morrison or teaching Shakespeare becomes a new one by being framed against a ‘new’ cultural dominant. Though they bear no direct responsibility for the phenomenon itself, Fredric Jameson’s widely disseminated theoretical writings, especially his essays on postmodernism, have given an ironically Marxist sanction to this taste for simulated paradigm-shifts. Both ‘postmodernity” and “globalization” (the latter following Jameson and Miyoshi’s widely-read volume, The Cultures of Globalization)(3) are, in their Jamesonian acceptation, “logics” of a late capitalism that, even if most of us understand very little about it in any genuinely critical or theoretical sense, nevertheless satisfies better than other brand-name historicisms our need to be located in an “age” of something. The ‘Jamesonianizing’ of these jargons makes them more respectable because, in principle, they are more readily subject to an eventual ideological-critique-cum-Aufhebung that, even if it never really occurs, allows us to occupy more comfortably our putative form of secularity, acknowledging its sway without having to endorse it as a desirable state of affairs. The fact that, even more markedly than in the case of ‘postmodernity,’ the jargon of ‘globalization’ is launched by the right rather than the left(4) only further underscores the degree to which the propensity to re-’historicize,’ every decade or so, our own cultural ‘moment’ has become an inveterate way of not ‘making history,’ at least not if we can help it. And in that case it really makes no difference where or by whom the epochal terms are set.

II.

Of course, we are omitting the term that, though rarely pronounced in polite circles, would seem to denote what it is that is doing the globalizing: capitalism. But here too the jargon of globalization already begins to collapse back onto itself, losing that minimal referentiality that even jargons must possess in order to reproduce themselves. To say “global capitalism” or “capitalist globalization” threatens to become pleonastic too, but here in an even more insidious way, having to do with the nature of capitalism itself. For capitalism, from its inception, is global, if not immediately in its actual range and extension as a planetary network of economic relations and agents, then in its structural-historical particularity and difference vis a vis other, anterior modes of production. The language of the Manifesto remains insuperable here:

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe.

It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.

To speak of ‘global capitalism’ makes superficially good sense, but it lags conceptually because it suggests that it would make equal sense to speak of a ‘local capitalism,’ whether present or past. Yet we know that there is not presently any such thing, and that, over the course of its history, capitalism could not properly be said to have been ‘local’ with respect to anything that was itself ‘global,’ unless it was simply the uneven patch-work of tributary and tribal societies that capitalism has now fairly long since overthrown and reduced to mere cultural outposts. In referring to the ‘global’–unless by that term we mean, in a purely geographical or geological sense, the planetary–we refer to a social logic, a capacity for a social form to become fully global, or spatially universal in its constitution, a capacity that capitalism itself inaugurates.

III.

As purely a gesture of ‘theoretical’ affiliation, the jargon of “globalization” is no doubt preferable in certain ways to the jargons it has displaced. At least here there is the promise of a real concept, of some possible theoretical or even just secular purchase on something. With the jargon of “postmodernism” one could never quite be sure even of this. The term, of course, could be and was sometimes used to describe any number of genuine and at times interesting cultural phenomena, but the concept itself has always, even in the best of hands (e.g., Jameson’s or David Harvey’s) remained so amorphous and ultimately indistinguishable from others–including that of “modernism” itself–that one wonders whether, if we all stopped saying it (that is, if we haven’t all at this point already stopped saying it) it would make the slightest difference to the content of what we were saying. At any rate, we’ve clearly moved on to affiliate ourselves, as ‘loci of enunciation,’ in other ways.

The current common sense about globalization seems to run something like this: inexorable advances in the spheres of technology and communications, together with the irresistible pull of market forces–especially after the collapse of the last socialist and national-liberationist bastions erected against the latter–have integrated the peoples and nations of the world as never before into a single, planetary network. So, for example, a flyer for a lecture on “Teaching Foreign Languages in the Context of Globalization” posted on the walls of my university office building proposes, with good sense, that the very notion of what a “foreign language” is has changed since the institutionalization of foreign-language instruction in US universities at the end of World War II. Multi-lingualism becomes more and more the norm within certain existing national boundaries, making it uncertain what the term “foreign” could now possibly mean.

But how to get from this sort of modest observation to, say, an “untotalizable totality which intensifies binary relations between its parts,” Jameson’s provisional “definition” of globalization in his preface to The Cultures of Globalization(5)? Without ruling out the possibility that Jameson may have been on to something insightful here, the sense of what kind of thing it is that is being ‘defined’ in the first place remains fundamentally vague and unmediated conceptually. Leaving aside the question of whether “untotalizable” could really mean anything at all in this context, the reference to “totality” seems purely scholastic here, since whatever it was that universally named our “age” or our “culture” before “globalization” was presumably also a “totality.” The very will-to-theorize here, asserted in advance of any sense of what, besides the jargon-driven flight from socio-lexical boredom and exhaustion, the objective occasion for theorization itself might be, reduces talk of “globalization” to the primitive level of a kind of picture-thinking. “Globalization” becomes a way of thinking whatever we were thinking about before, but with the image of a globe–that is, of a planetary, rather than a purely social and relational entity–now hovering above our heads. Like Sherwin-Williams paint, which once advertised itself with a picture of a cosmic-sized can of its product being poured over the planet earth, globalization “covers the earth.” Of course, by all accounts, what really matters about “globalization” are the social effects attributed to it, providential or catastrophic, depending on whom you believe. But underlying all such accounts, from the familiar Green-spirited bumper sticker enjoining us to “think globally” and “act locally” to an add for the American Express Card, the idea is that we are all now planetary beings in our most direct forms of spatial immediacy. Planetary being itself becomes the false universal of ideology, reducing the social logic of universal mediation by capital to its lowest common denominator as a shared space, and thereby making it seem as much a given as having the earth beneath our feet. In one, terrifying sense, this may be true: were the social being of capital and the physical, spatial existence of the planetary ever to fully coincide, that would no doubt entail the effective destruction of the latter as a place for social habitation. Meanwhile, however, the pseudo-critical picture-thinking of “globalization” ironically pushes this prospect to the margins of social and political consciousness. As we go about our business ‘thinking globally’ and ‘acting locally’ it is as if we were looking at ourselves safely from another planet, a now fully extra-terrestrial site for a transcendental Subject that cannot otherwise be both social and global at the same time.

In yet a further irony, it is the dominant, corporate version of this scenario that undertakes to historicize all of this, as, in a mock-Hegelian reprise(6), it equates the reality of globalization with the rational, and vice-versa. Those who, in steadily increasing numbers and with deep ethical conviction, oppose the real irrationalities and depredations of corporate-led globalization seem, however, to succumb to its ‘Hegelian’ logic nevertheless: the ‘rational’ may in fact be irrational, but it is still the real, for what could me more real than the planetary? In actively opposing globalization, one must paradoxically do so from within its planetary realm, i.e., at some impossible, utopian point that the ‘global’ itself has determined as ‘local.’ Again, the resort to the extra-terrestrial as the socially and historically negative: to oppose globalization ‘globally’ would seem to require a non-existent Archimedian point, another globe from which to resist or thrust aside this one. This, in fact, is the fantasy worked out in Deleuzian irrationalist terms in Empire, a tract with a picture of the planet on its cover and whose brave and mystical talk of “the multitude” “planes of immanence,” the “poor as god on earth” and “anthropological exodus” reads less like ‘a Communist Manifesto of the twenty-first century’ than a Communist Manifesto for another planet altogether.

IV.

To explode the US corporate jargon–and ideology–of “globalization” we need look no further than Argentina, whose dramatic economic collapse in 2001 has produced levels of misery, political upheaval and institutional crisis that–while ‘commensurate’ with those in already devastated sections of the globe such as, say, Indonesia or the Philippines, or even parts of sub-Saharan Africa–afflict what was, only a few years ago, a country proclaimed by finance capitalism as a showcase of neo-liberal reform. The chain of events leading to collapse is well-summarized by the economist Joseph Halevi, writing the April, 2002 issue of Monthly Review:

The political crisis of this important South American country formally erupted when, in the first week of December 2001, the IMF decided to withhold a $1.3 billion loan approved for servicing the country’s $142 billion external debt. The IMF claimed that the government, then led by President Fernando De la Rúa of the Radical Party, was not meeting its commitment to further cut its spending. This claim was false. From the fall of 2000, when the Argentine government entered yet a new round of negotiations with the IMF, until the Buenos Aires uprising of last December [2001[, the government ...systematically cut spending. It privatized social security and cut the provinces' funds, forcing many of them to use surrogate (scrip) money to meet their payments. During the summer, the economic minister, Domingo Cavallo-a darling of the IMF who, by the way, was undersecretary of the interior (Federal Police Department) during the bloodthirsty military dictatorship in 1981-set the goal of a zero budget deficit. If the target was not attained, it was not for lack of trying, but because of the galloping social crisis, with unemployment reaching 18 percent and an equal percentage classified as underemployed. Immediately after the withholding of the loan by the IMF, the government embarked on an even tougher round of cuts, which included freezing people's bank accounts and limiting withdrawals to $250 a week. It was at this point that the people of Buenos Aires rose up against the government.(7)

The uprising of December, 2001 was followed by a rapid series of caretaker regimes, the latest of which, that of the Peronist Eduardo Duhalde, is now (March, 2003) preparing for new elections. The freezing of bank accounts that, sealing the fate of De la Rúa, brought the middle class of Buenos Aires into the streets--the so-called "corralito"--has since been partially lifted, leading to the partial resumption, in appearance at least, of 'normal' economic activity, regularly trumpeted by neo-liberal organs such as The Economist as signs that the crisis is easing. After formally defaulting on its debt to the IMF in the early days of the Duhalde government, Argentina has resumed negotiations with that body. But any impending recovery is a figment of neo-liberal imagination. A recent article in the New York Times reports, in figures from as recent as January, 2003, a 12% shrinkage of the Argentine economy since December, 2001, leading to unprecedented levels of misery:

[A]t least 60 percent of the country’s 37 million people now live in poverty, defined as an income of less than $220 a month for a family of four. That is nearly double the number toward the end of 2001. Even more alarming, more than a quarter of the population is classified as “indigent,” or living on less than $100 a month for a family of four.(8)

In traditionally poorer, rural regions of Argentine, such as Tucumán, deaths due to starvation are increasingly frequent, leading to fears–in a country that has historically produced huge quantities of grain and meat for export–of famine. Meanwhile, as a result of successful law-suits lodged against the government by banks and large depositors, demanding that accounts forceably converted from dollars to devalued Argentine pesos in the wake of the December revolution be “re-dollarized,” the public debt of a country already technically in default threatens, according to the Buenos Aires daily Página 12(9), to increase by at least $27 billion, an amount greater than the net worth of the entire national banking system. There are even reports of government negotiations with foreign financiers concerning the possibility of paying off all, or part of the national debt through the “sale” of Patagonia, Argentina’s large, sparsely populated southern province, to oil prospectors and wealthy ‘ecological’ investors eager to buy up its huge tracts of wilderness.(10)

Of course, this picture of an emerging, if not already full-blown social and economic catastrophe is, in a “global” context, nothing new. Argentina now joins the ranks of millions, if not billions of other groupings of human beings, from sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan and Indonesia, to broad swathes of the Balkans and the former Soviet Union–and, indeed, to much of the rest of Latin America–for whom “globalization” has meant almost total disarticulation from the circuits of finance capital and commodity exchange, leaving these same, countless human beings to stagnate in the liminal state that the German economist Robert Kurz characterizes with the term “Ausbeutungsunfähigkeit”–”unexploitability.”(11)

What makes the Argentine experience especially stark, however, vis a vis the policy-sermons and suburban homilies of the official neo-liberal ‘new world order’ is both the statistical and, so to speak, the historical steepness of the fall. In contrast, say, to a brutally impoverished society in Southern Africa only fairly recently emerged from colonial domination and violently and negatively integrated into the capitalist world-market, Argentina has been a modern, independent national entity–with its own long history of economic and political class formation, extensive industrialization and–in sum–national self-integration and near-complete global integration into the modern world-system–for almost as long as the United States. The effective economic annihilation of its once relatively extensive urban middle class after December, 2001 can be, to be sure, compared to similarly brusque and violent class decompositions in provincial cities of the former Soviet Union. But, whereas the latter catastrophes can be blamed, by the official neo-liberal party-line, on the errors and the historical futilities of ‘socialism,’ Argentina’s middle-class catastrophe is the “global” foundling left on the door-steps of Wall Street and Washington. Though, like much of the rest of Latin America and what was once termed the “developing world,” Argentina has never fully overcome the gap separating relatively prosperous and modernized urban enclaves from much poorer and less-industrialized rural hinterlands, this gap was nevertheless probably closer to being closed in a historically peasant-less Argentina than anywhere else in Latin America, with the possible exception of its smaller neighbor, and effective twin, Uruguay. It is a gap now restored to an enormity not seen in Argentina since the earliest days of its history. In Argentina, as in few other places outside metropolitan Europe, Japan and North America, the fate of the city is the fate of the whole country. If, to be sure, one can still point to the relatively unscathed fortunes of (the proportionately smaller) urban middle classes in Brazil, Uruguay or Chile, or to the now more chronic and less dramatic and sudden pauperization of the same class sectors in Caracas or Mexico City, all that really separates the latter from the nightmare of waking up to vanished bank accounts and pensions, hospital closings and the wiping out of professional careers is, in effect, a “Deer Hunter” like game of Russian roulette, in which the IMF and the US Treasury Department hold the pistol to the head of Latin America, and the relative and momentary needs of one group or another of panicked Wall Street investors spin the chamber. As of today, the foreign policy of US finance capitalist elites probably cannot afford to let what has happened in Argentina happen in, say, neighboring Mexico–a much more important US trading partner than Argentina, with a traditionally impoverished rural sector on which to impose the most violent side-effects of austerity programs, and a country for which, from the US standpoint, an Argentine-like political crisis, would pose enormous “security” risks. But, by the same token, if Argentina and its once quasi-cosmopolitan petty bourgeoisie, must, at a certain juncture, be heaved overboard, the clock is set ticking for Santiago, São Paulo and Mexico itself. Globalization gathers up the world into a single network of finance and communication, precisely so as, once the speculative bubbles start bursting in chain-reaction, the more quickly to explode its cosmopolitan and pseudo-planetary, ATM/airport-lounge zones of LCD-illuminated complacency.

V.

But if the crisis in Argentina effectively short-circuits vulgar, neo-liberal “globalization” theory, it belies, no less dramatically, the seemingly more ‘theory’-inflected and critical accounts of globalization typified in tracts such as Empire. The latter, seduced, like the former, by the ideological utopianism of the ‘planetary,’ envisions, in the erosion of older forms of capitalist national sovereignty, the spontaneous emergence of a correspondingly ‘planetary’ form of polity. Nations, conceived, according to the picture-thinking of “globalization,” as so many multi-colored puzzle pieces on a child’s miniature globe, dissolve and melt into the unified color scheme of ‘the world.’ But nations, though necessarily territorial in their historical genesis and in their economic and political structures of reproduction, are not, in this sense, spatial, sub-planetary entities. They are complex historical and social entities, and when globalized finance capital begins, as it has now begun, to burst asunder these ‘sovereign’ structures of reproduction, the resulting, crisis-driven forms of sociality look nothing at all like Hardt and Negri’s fantasies of the “multitude.” They remain ‘national,’ or perhaps, more simply, in some as yet scarcely definable sense, ‘local’–but in ways that, one may speculate, force us to re-think the very social coordinates of the national as they have grown up on the modern historical subsoil of the commodity form and its corresponding forms of ‘real abstraction.’

Consider, in this regard, the following(12). One of the most dramatic features of the Argentine crisis was, and in large part remains, monetary. Even before the climax of December, 2001, the impending financial collapse of the country, both induced, in part, and aggravated by the state’s desperate attempts to adhere to the one-to-one peso/dollar convertibility rule instituted in the early 1990s by the Menem regime, produced what Halevi, in the article cited above, identifies as a deflationary episode. In effect, by continuing to pay its debt, or at least to adjust all aspects of national economic life to the needs of global finance, Argentina saw money itself cease to circulate within those sectors of the economy that, for purposes of the local regime and the IMF, had become superfluous or unsalvageable. This partial collapse of the national currency was and still is partly disguised by the issuance of scrip–i.e., local, emergency currencies–by provincial and even municipal governments so as to be able to ‘pay’ their employees. This was effectively the prelude to the “corralito,” the freezing of private and of some commercial bank accounts after the break-down of negotiations with the IMF, a measure that literally condemned large sectors of the population, not restricted to the rural and urban poor, to live without money.

Of course, money still circulates in Argentina, and still, as the quintessential commodity-form, functions, by default if nothing else, as the abstract social nexus. But the response of poor and middle class Argentines–that is, of everyone but those members of the national capitalist elite who had managed long since to place their holdings into overseas, dollar accounts–was not merely to pour into the streets of Buenos Aires, beating in protest on pots and pans (the so-called ‘cacerolazos’) and demanding the reopening of their bank accounts, but, of necessity, to build emergency forms of social distribution and organization, unmediated, in essence, by the commodity form. These emergency formations–literally hundreds of neighborhood level ‘asambleas’ (assemblies), trading clubs (“clubes de trueque”) and, in the poorest neighborhoods, political-cum-distributive collectives known as ‘pickets’ (“piqueteros”)–are, in themselves, not a new historical phenomenon, and have sprung up whenever severe capitalist crises take deflationary turns. But, for a time at least, extending, arguably, up to the present moment, they become the central arena, the privileged social space, of Argentine national ‘life.’ Incorporating, as part of their culture, a violent, if still spontaneous and volatile rejection of official politics in Argentina (expressed in the popular slogan, “que se vayan todos,” loosely translated, “throw all the bastards out”) these are new forms of sociality that experience themselves as both national and as unmediated, of necessity, by the subject-less abstraction of a ‘national’ currency–indeed, as unmediated by the abstract, non-conscious subject-form of money itself.

The crucial point here is that, due to the specific historical circumstances and configuration of the contemporary Argentine crisis, a more or less fully modernized national formation, epitomized in a large, urban middle class with more than a century of national-cultural tradition, experiences in full, public and collective self-awareness, what the Argentine economist José Nun has characterized as the melting together of economics and politics(13). If, as a result of the advanced crisis of global, finance capital, of the accelerating and fatal separation of speculation and investment from any real, productively-based economy, all capital increasingly becomes “fictional,” then, in Argentina, the nation itself becomes, so to speak, the real of fictional capital.

It would, needless to say, be a folly to romanticize this phenomenon, to see in it a definite harbinger of a global movement beyond capital. Actually existing globalization has, without significant exception, prompted forms of national political and economic crisis in which the rule has been the reversion to “economies of plunder,”(14) violent class re-composition and civil war. Argentina may, in the long run, prove no exception to this rule. But, in ways that most current globalization theory simply does not allow us to perceive, the relative strength of national-cultural forms of association and experience in Argentina–an ironic product of its colonial history and formation–seems to have poised it, at a crucial juncture, to ‘act locally’ outside the fetish-forms of alienated, global modernity.

1 Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will Evanston: Northwestern University Press, p. 8.

2 Jargon of Authenticity, p. xxi

3 Durham: Duke University Press, 1998

4 As David Harvey has noted, the term ‘globalization’ first rose to prominence as part of an advertising campaign for the American Express credit card, and soon thereafter “spread like wildfire in the financial and business press, mainly as a legitimation for the deregulation of financial markets.” See Spaces of Hope (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000) p. 13.

5 Op. Cit., see p. xii. 6 popularized in the early 1990s by Francis Fukuyama’s notorious “The End of History.”

7 See “The Argentine Crisis,” available on the Monthly Review webpage: http://www.monthlyreview.org/index.html

8 Larry Rohter, “Once Secure, Argentines Now Lack Food and Hope,” March 2, 2003.

9 Claudio Scaletta, “El costo de los fallos judiciales redolarizadores puede ser simplemente sideral,” March 10, 2003

10 Antoine Bigo , “Estado en agonía vendería la Patagonia”

Spanish translation, Andrés Meléndez y Domingo García, from Liberation (Paris), March 4, 2003, http://www.liberation.com/page.php?Article=92905

11 See Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus (Frankfurt Am Main: Eichborn Verlag AG, 1999) and Weltordnungskrieg: Das Ende der Souveränität und die Wandlungen des Imperialismus in Zeitalter der Globalisierung (Bad Honnef: Horlemann Verlag, 2003)

12 In what follows, as, parenthetically, throughout this essay, I follow both the account and the analysis of the Argentine crisis made available in Martín Caparrós’ extraordinary collection of interviews and conversations with Argentine intellectuals (and non-intellectuals): Qué País: Informe urgente sobre la Argentina que viene (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2002)

13 See Qué país, p. 26.

14 See Kurz, Weltordnungskrieg.

Neil Larsen nalarsen@ucdavis.edu

With the bloody debacle in Iraq driving the Bush regime to levels of imperial ruthlessness and corruption worthy of the emperor Nero, the combined sense of outrage, despair, and unreality evoked by political life in the US seems to have reached its limit. But now California takes us well past even this point by electing Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor. The political post-mortems –assuming, that is, we aren’t all already dead or have had our bodies snatched by some cyber-pod electro-genetically hatched in Hollywood or Silicon Valley–continue to toll forth, but this much is known: ‘Arnold’ vanquished his nearest competitor by more than a million votes, and the vote to recall standing governor Gray Davis triumphed by a margin of 10.6%. Voter turnout was high. This means that registered Democrats (a sizeable majority in the state), as well as a traditionally pro-Democratic voting block comprised by women and gays and lesbians, as well as Blacks and Latinos, ‘crossed over’ to vote for Schwarzenegger in huge numbers. Even unionized labor, probably the most organized, traditionally Democratic voting bloc in the state, spurned the instructions of its union bosses and offered up 51% of its votes to Republican gubernatiorial candidates Schwarzenegger and McClintock, who made no secret of their anti-union views.

Last minute revelations about Schwarzenegger’s sexual aggressions and Nazi leanings proved entirely ineffectual and, some have speculated, may even have strengthened his appeal(1). Evidently, Schwarzenegger’s ‘groping’ harvested the libidinal ‘choice’ of more voters than could be recruited on the basis of moral outrage. Or, more likely still, id simply vanquished superego from within the psyche of the typical, individual voting ego as s/he approached the peepshow-like sanctuary of the voting booth. It was either, at this point in the psycho-drama, grope with or be groped by a humorless post-modern Quijote/Sancho Panza mutant–pale and cadaverous Davis joined at the electoral spine to Cruz Bustamante’s fake-bracero pudginess: think of them groping ‘your’ wife or daughter!–or go with the candidate who, naked in his armor, kept the fantasy free of the incumbency of the real.

Voting, after all, is itself a kind of groping–the kind one does in the dark, here the blind and irrational darkness, officially non-existent, that stretches between the subjective exercise of bourgeois right and the objective will of the ‘people,’ embodied in the state. Somewhere deep down, we all sense that once we elect them, our ‘representatives’ obey a will that is neither ours nor theirs, nor even, in the last analysis, the will of those with the money who bought them and presented us with them as ‘choices.’ This is the ‘will,’ abstract and subject-less, of the market; ‘election’ as a form of buying and selling; the ‘will’ of money itself–not just those who have it–of the money-form as the “power which brings together impossibilities and forces contradictions to embrace”(2); the ‘will’ of capital in its self-reproducing drive to turn labor power into ever more capital. Thus aware, even if only dimly, neither the practical indeterminacy of rational self-interest nor the abstract, disembodied moral imperatives of gender equality are a match for the fantasy body, so certain and palpable in its violent and ‘groping’ connection with others, and which we need only vote for in order to will into political reality.

And so what if Schwarzenegger admired Hitler, or invited the Nazi turned UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim to his wedding with the Kennedy gene pool? The fascist horrors of more than half a century ago have, at least in the US, become so abstract; have been so repeatedly re-narrativized in ways that make them historically incomprehensible; are already so devalued semantically(3) when equivalent horrors are routinely visited upon countries such as Iraq in the name of democracy and even ‘anti-fascism’ that they too effectively enter mass consciousness as a kind of cultural free radical, able to bond with almost anything within the ether of mass psychology.

As global capital continues to grind itself into a catastrophic and likely terminal crisis, the skill of living, even in a place like California, with almost daily reports of today’s “world civil wars” and serialized, post-Fordist genocides inexorably breaks the ethical reference of the signifiers of absolute evil. Schwarzenegger might just as well have expressed admiration for Darth Vader or Winston Churchill or Wlad the Impaler and the effect on the salto mortale of voting would have been the same. (Stalin, or the prophet Muhammad would have been another story.) The Hitler anecdote only proves that ‘Arnold’ is also a fantasist, a chance for real solidarity and commensurate humanity for voters whose fetishized votes have been so completely drained of political content that only a fantasy election itself can drag most of them to the polls.

The very fact of the recall election itself–only the second that has ever unseated a governor and no doubt the first ever in US history to unseat so powerful an executive–has not been given the formal examination it deserves. Amidst all the talk of how ‘Arnold’ will address the state budget deficit or what his election means to the Bush campaign for 2004, only a few have noted that, in principle, the campaign to recall Schwarzenegger could-and likely will- become official the day he takes office. Anyone who, like the car-alarm millionaire, California congressman and Gray Davis recall bankroller Daryl Issa, has the money to hire enough signature gatherers could stage another fantasy-election before the new term is out. All it required to get on the recall ballot itself was a few thousand dollars and the signatures, more or less, of your extended family or client list. In California, that is, we witness the materialization of the unspeakable paradox that lies at the heart of the idea of representative democracy: the fact that terms of office are not themselves democratic, and that, taken to its logical extremes, only the perpetual, electron-stream-like flow of the popular ‘will’ through the electoral calculus and a ballot on which every voter, every atom of civil society, has the right to appear, can make up for the latent tyranny–the real ‘Terminator’– of actually taking office. This already has provoked the concern of some keepers of the electoral cult, one of whom, an assistant professor of political science at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, was heard recently to remind a National Public Radio interviewer that the Madisonian idea of the Founding Fathers would not have approved the California bacchanale and that, not so long ago, the Senate was chosen by the House of Representatives. Imagine the ‘Madisonian’ hue and cry that would have sounded had moderately left-wing Green Party candidate Peter Camejo won on October 7.

But the ‘Madisonians’ and duly elected war-criminals in Washington have nothing to worry about. Permanent ‘direct democracy,’ under the sway of a global capital whose severe crisis drives it to explode the sovereign will of entire nations, not to mention the suburban druthers of California parents of school children, does not promise to re-integrate politics with grass-roots daily life, as some imagine. It merely perfects, insofar as this is possible, the complete subordination of what is left of bourgeois right to the ‘privatization’ of all things ‘public.’ Not the further development, but the crisis of an over-ripe commodity-form, its degenerating capacity to reproduce itself unless it invades everything, including the ostensibly public, non-commercial sphere of elections, produces the California ‘electoral circus.’

The vote-fetish, that is, converges on the master-fetish itself, that of money, the ‘real abstraction’ that must continuously circulate and make more of itself out of labor power for it to remain money. But, unless they are sold outright, votes, as we all know but cannot quite confess, now buy nothing, exchange for no real equivalent quantum of will or power. The exchange only becomes reciprocal on the mass-cultural plane, the plane of narrative and fantasy. In return for our votes, we get to go to the ‘circus’ for free and watch our overlords, at their own expense, add sensual content and real-life action figures to our private, mental fantasies. (Karl Rove and former California governor Pete Wilson–respectively, the orchestrators of the Bush and Schwarzenegger Gesamtkunstwerken–seem to have grasped at least the practical implications of this economy more accurately than their Democratic counterparts.)

If votes continue, on one level, to translate into money–in the form, say, of pork barrel legislation or the brokering of contracts or state-spending initiatives for local business constituencies–the looming financial ‘market correction’ that threatens both to vaporize bank accounts and all other kinds of ‘paper’ as well as to reveal as fact the rapid fictionalization of huge stocks of capital renders even these exchanges increasingly unreal. The fact that the $87 billion that the Bush regime proposes to spend on Iraqi ‘reconstruction’ would, as has been openly remarked upon in the press, nicely take care of a good portion of the state budget deficits in the US, demonstrates this monetary quandary well enough. 87 billion dollars to fight a (real) war on (fictional) ‘terror’ translates–even as the war makes terror a reality–into an 87 billion dollar increase in the money the US already didn’t have, hence into 87 billion reasons more to sell one’s vote for the price of a having a giant Nazi cyborg watch over your sleep. The form of the recall election itself–the staging of the dialectic whereby ‘direct democracy’ becomes real and at the same time the most perfect manifestation of total social alienation and disempowerment(4) – obeys this crisis-logic perfectly.

1) See recent articles by Mike Davis, James Ridgeway, and Susan Faludi, inter alia.

2) Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin, 1992) p.379.

3) Remember that Saddam Hussein, according to the Nazi’s more legitimate heirs, was ‘worse than Hitler.’

4) The Davis recall/Schwarzenegger victory makes for an oddly poignant context in which to review Hegel’s famous remarks on “Absolute Freedom and Terror” in The Phenomenology of Spirit. “Universal freedom,” writes the ‘Madisonian’ Hegel (thinking of the Jacobin terror in France) “… can produce neither a positive work nor a deed; there is left for it only negative action; it is merely the fury of destruction.” For Hegel, of course, “universal freedom” could pertain only to a society made up of commodity-subjects, even if he put his finger on the latter form’s latent contradictoriness.