Two events for Northwestern’s Paul of Tarsus Interdisciplinary Working Group

Next Monday and Tuesday, the Paul reading group at Northwestern will be hosting two talks, one by me over Agamben’s Highest Poverty and the other by Aidan Tynan over Deleuze’s relationship to Paul. Details “below the fold.”

The U.S. as a party-state

Yesterday on Twitter, I ventured the hypothesis that the U.S. form of government is, most fundamentally, not a constitutional republic, but a variant on the party-state form — the difference being that there are two parties instead of just one. This can be difficult to see, because the predominant analysis of the great party-state forms of the 20th century, namely fascism and communism, has focused on the misleading concept of “totalitarianism.” Interpreting the party-state phenomenon through liberal democratic norms, the “totalitarian” analysis decides that since something like civil society or the private sphere no longer has the desired autonomy, we can only conclude that the state, as the only other available center of power, is over-dominant. This is a profound misreading of the situation, however, as Foucault points out in Birth of Biopolitics. The problem in party-states is not that the formal state structures are too strong, but that they’re too weak to restrain the party-movement that instrumentalizes them. In China, for instance, formal state structures “exist,” but the Communist Party essentially ignores them — indeed, the Party is not even recognized as a legal organization.

In the U.S., the party-state operates by pretending that it’s not a party-state. Constitutional norms and the division of power are given continual lip-service, as when Obama castigates “Congress” rather than the Republicans, and the Founders’ desire to prevent factions is presented as an operative norm of contemporary politics. Nevertheless, the constitutional division of powers is less important to the functioning of the government than the party structure. Indeed, both parties instrumentalize American constitutional quirks whenever the opportunity presents itself. More broadly, both parties seek to cover up their own corruption or incompetence by pointing toward the other party’s illegitimate “partisanship” — and the much-vaunted “bipartisanship” mainly serves as a mechanism to allow them to congratulate themselves for subverting the will of the American people.

More important than the rhetorical and political strategies, however, is the sense that the party duopoly is above the law — both in the sense of instrumentalizing it to maintain its hold on power and in the sense of evading legal sanction.

On the Mad Men backlash

Fair enough: Mad Men has been on for a long time, and there was bound to be a backlash at some point. What’s interesting to me, though, is the form the backlash has taken. Over and over, people are saying: okay, we get it. The symbolism is heavy-handed. Parallel plots are too elaborately coordinated. Everything is becoming too simplistic. A recent manifestation of the backlash in the New Yorker has claimed that Don Draper is less a character than a “thesis statement.”

In other words, the show is being castigated for remaining true to its original vision and for continuing to explore the same themes it’s always focused on. And again, fair enough: people are allowed to get tired of things. Yet it seems to me that there’s always an underlying demand, an unspoken grievance motivating these complaints. “Yes, yes, we get it, we realize that Don Draper is a terrible fraud, a pure surface whose success is an indictment of the system he operates in — so can you please get back to plotlines that allow us to view him as a charismatic character with real depth?” “Yes, yes, we understand, the system is rigged so that do-nothing old white dudes continue to triumph over more talented young people and particularly women — so now that we’ve acknowledged that, can you give us a fantasy portrayal where Peggy is totally put in charage and succeeds brilliantly?” “Okay, God, we hear you, we know that the advertising milieu is so toxic that even an apparently innocent character is ultimately pulled into the self-centered scheming — but why did you have make Megan seem to be more or less a naturally good person at first and deprive us of the fantasy that everyone is always-already a backstabbing social climber?”

As Gerry Canavan said on Twitter yesterday, Mad Men, like other “high quality” shows, succeeds because its audience doesn’t understand it. They tune in for the suave Don Draper, and they resent being deprived of that fantasy — even though the entire work of the show has always, from day one, been to deprive us of that fantasy. They tune in looking for a soap opera filled with sexy people and elaborate sets (and “fan service” such as more screen time for Peggy or the triumphant return of Sal), and they resent that the show has a moral critique of the milieu it’s documenting. If you really “got it,” you’d either stop watching — or start watching the show differently. As it stands, the backlash seems to be driven by the fact that the show’s viewers simply don’t want to “get it.” And the fact of that paradoxical combination of addiction and resistence makes me wonder if Mad Men will turn out to be the most interesting and artistically successful example of the early 2000s “high quality cable drama” genre.

Yet another concept that is better expressed in German

This time around, it’s not a ridiculous compound, but a single word: “Blase.” It’s the word used to refer to a financial “bubble,” but it also has another meaning: “blister.” The advantages of “blister” over “bubble” for describing the financial phenomenon in question are manifold. A financial bubble sounds wholesome and fun, as though financiers are blowing soap bubbles in the park. Eventually they’ll pop, but why dwell on that? If we believed that there was a financial blister underway, by contrast, there’d be much less metaphorical incentive to let nature take its course — once it got to a certain point, it would need to be lanced in order to avoid an uncontrolled bursting that could lead to infection. Further, the metaphor of a blister is more evocative of the origin of the phenomenon, pointing as it does toward an excessive amount of friction, rubbing a part of the financial markets raw and causing it to become inflamed. A financial blister in the housing market, for instance, would not indicate that the housing market was doing especially well, but instead that an unsustainable amount of work is being demanded of it.

Interview in Review 31

I’ve been interviewed in Review 31. It starts out with Awkwardness and Sociopaths, but it then branches out into questions of how I see the more properly academic side of my work fitting together with them. I found the interview helpful for thinking such things through — hopefully you will find it interesting.

The structure of The Kingdom and the Glory

I have spent a lot of time with Agamben’s Kingdom and the Glory, but until this time through, I was always baffled by the structure — the whole thing seemed to jump around quite a bit, and the motivation for the investigation of glory seemed difficult to discern. Why not skip the glory and more fully develop the stuff in the appendix? As far as I can tell, I am not the only person who has had this problem, and so I thought I would share the structure I have gleaned from the very detailed reading I’ve been undertaking over the past few days.

First points:

• This is a book about the debate between Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson — but not on their own terms. Rather, it’s about what they both disavow (economy) and what they both unwittingly share (glory). This is a big source of misunderstanding, because it’s easy to think that Peterson is supposed to be the source of the economic paradigm Agamben is developing (particularly back before Peterson was actually translated into English).
• While the analysis of economy takes up slightly more space, the goal is to get to glory. Angels provide the hinge between the two parts, as the chapter “Angelology and Bureaucracy” seems to establish that there is no redemptive possibility in economy, while there are hints that glory is at least pointing toward something beyond our destructive power structure.

So I’ll just go through the chapters one by one.

Adventures in Trying to Do Research During the Semester

My research project on the devil has been long deferred. It was immediately clear to me after finishing my dissertation that the devil theme was the most interesting aspect and worthy of its own study, and that remained my “official” position on the matter despite the fact that I was doing relatively little in the way of actual work toward that goal. I explain this partly by the vagaries of the job market — in my years as a VAP, I wasn’t sure where I was going to wind up, in the sense that I didn’t know if I’d find a job at all and I also wasn’t sure what department I’d be in. Hence I focused more on my little pop culture project, along with more occasional writings that were mostly dictated by invitations rather than any kind of systematic program. I gave myself time off from thinking about such things while finding my feet at Shimer, and then once I was through my first year, I had already committed my summer (and much of the fall, as it turns out) to my Agamben translations.

But now, dear reader — now I have actually done something.

A brief review of a brief book: Taubes, To Carl Schmitt

Only a Christian would make a deal with the devil. That’s what’s so disturbing about the gesture of selling your soul — it only makes sense if you know what’s at stake, yet it’s precisely because you know what’s at stake that it doesn’t make sense. It seems to me that this is a possible lens through which to view Jacob Taubes’s complex relationship with Carl Schmitt, as expressed in the brief collection To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections, which the introducer of the volume, Mike Grimshaw, has already announced and discussed here on AUFS.

What makes Schmitt a great thinker in Taubes’s eyes is that he really did understand what was at stake in his historical moment. He just chose the wrong side in the decisive conflict that was unfolding. Taubes grapples with this gap between the diagnosis and the course of treatment throughout the fragments collected here, and he never comes to any firm conclusion on Schmitt the man. On Schmitt the thinker, though, he is unequivocal in asserting his brilliance and signal importance — an assertion for which he can draw on the authority of Walter Benjamin. In what for me is one of the most interesting passages in the collection, Taubes makes his point by means of the passage from “On the Concept of History” about the “tradition of the oppressed” and the “real state of exception”:

Schmitt’s fundamental vocabulary is here introduced by Benjamin, made use of, and so transformed into its opposite. Carl Schmitt’s conception of the ‘state of exception’ is dictatorial, dictated from above; in Benjamin it becomes a doctrine in the tradition of the oppressed. ‘Contemporaneity,’ a monstrous abbreviation of a messianic period, defines the experience of history on the part of both Benjamin and Schmitt; both involve a mystic conception of history whose principal teaching relates the sacred order to the profane. But the profane cannot be constructed upon the idea of God’s empire. This is why theocracy did not, for Benjamin, Schmitt, and Bloch, have a political meaning, but solely a religious significance. (17)

Sandwiched in between Benjamin and Bloch! All of them understand that this world is permanent, that no worldly structure can claim God’s allegiance or legitimation, but that they are all ways of heading off the apocalypse. Yet Schmitt can see in the apocalypse nothing but destruction. He sees the horizon of this world, yet cannot see anything of value beyond it — and so throws his weight behind a katechon who turns out to be the Antichrist. Taubes continues in an enigmatic paragraph that follows up on the implicit reference to the “Theological-Political Fragment” that the mention of Bloch evokes:

If I understand anything at all of the mystical historical construction that Benjamin here constructs with one eye on Schmitt’s theses, then this: what is superficially a process of secularization, of desacralization, the dedeification of public life, a process of step-by-step neutralization right up to the “value freedom” of science as an index of a techno-industrial form of life; this process also has an inner face that testifies to the freedom of God’s children (as in the letters of St. Paul), hence an expression of a reformation that is nearing its completion. (17-18)

The alternative that Taubes, with Benjamin, is gesturing toward here remains unclear to me, but the reflections in this slim volume convince me of the value of reading Schmitt against the grain in order to think toward it.

What is called grading? On the ontological structure of academia

The academy is in crisis. Adjunctification, outcome assessment, online learning, for-profit universities — all of these things have been decried as challenging the very foundations of the academic enterprise. Yet no one stops to ask what that foundation is. We have forgotten about the question of the being of academia. We must put ourselves in a position to ask it afresh, so that we can begin to sketch out the ontological structure of academia. (Here I limit myself to institutions of higher education — lower levels present different, though not unrelated, problems.)

Let us start from the assumption that the academic enterprise is a type of professional practice. Academics never achieved the clearly “professional” status of doctors and lawyers — and our ontological investigation may disclose the inner necessity of that failure — but that status remains an indispensable point of reference. Part of being a professional in the modern world is obviously being certified by the state to undertake some kind of activity in an authoritative way. Anyone can give medical or legal advice, but that does not make them a doctor or lawyer. Further, there are some aspects of being a doctor or lawyer that only “work” if the state certification is present. Not just anyone can write a prescription or rightly demand attorney-client privilege.

Broadly speaking, the aspects of professionality that require state certification to be effective are performative speech acts that the state has empowered the professional to undertake. This puts us into a position to ask: What are academics empowered to do?

Bultmann and Blair

In the lastest LRB, there is a collection of snippets from the magazine’s coverage of Margaret Thatcher (“the third most written about person in the ‘LRB’ archive, after Shakespeare and Freud”), including this aperçu from Tony Blair:

What makes things even worse for radical, progressive spirits is that the ultra-right appears to be even more in control of the Conservative Party this year than it has been previously. Mrs Thatcher clearly regards herself as a dea ex machina, sent down from on high to ‘knock Britain into shape.’ She will wield her power over the next few years dictatorially and without compunction. On the other hand, there is a tremendous danger–to which Dr Owen has succumbed–in believing that ‘Thatcherism’ is somehow now invincible, that it has established a new consensus and that all the rest of us can do is debate alternatives within its framework. It is essential to demythologize ‘Thatcherism.’

In retrospect, it’s clear that Blair didn’t go far enough — he needed to overcome the inherent limitations in Bultmann’s project of demythologization and embrace a Bonhoefferian religionless interpretation of “Thatcherism.”