Archive for the ‘hardt’ tag
Hardt and Critchley at the ICA
There’s something disparaging about paying £10 to see two people discuss radical politics whilst Tina Brown launches “The Diana Chronicles” to champagne in the room below. Such was the case last Wednesday when Michael Hardt (Empire) and Simon Critchley (On Humour) discuss their latest ideas in radical theory.
Critchley opened with an introduction to his new book, Infinitely Demanding (review to come), which posits the new radical anarchist politics against what he sees as passive nihilism (liberal democracy) and active nihilism (Al-Qaeda and friends). He argues that all philosophical projects arise from an ethical demand that must be unfulfillable. We’ll come back to that later.
Hardt introduced the new Verso release of Jefferson’s letters and talked about his support of the Paris Commune. Hardt agreed with Jefferson on the need for violent revolution every few decades to reinvigorate democracy.
I think the whole talk was lost on the audience if the Q&A afterwards was anything to go by. Someone wheeled out, as if by ritual, the “whole of society is violence” factoid. I’m sure sitting in the Nash Room on a hot summer’s evening is quite a violent experience. However, going the other way, when someone raised the issue Amartya Sen’s concept of capabilities I don’t think it get the full attention it deserved.
After the discussion, and the inane questions, I managed to get a few moments with Critchley.
I was impressed by the fact that Critchley had used a term of his own devising, the dividual in his new book. If only because it’s referred to in Stand Alone Complex. So, I had to ask him where it came from. Alas, SAC uses dividual in the anthropological sense, so there’s no correlation.
I recounted my experiences with radical politics, and how, if anything, they seemed like regressives of the worst kind. How, so many of them, individually retreat into the passive nihilism of European Buddhism, and actively identify with it. In addition, especially the new-age anarcho-primitivism pitched by these groups is practically ecological genocide if ever enacted. This is not a “surely this will result in a gulag” complaint that Žižek claims we must avoid – this is empirical fact. In my little rant, I also spoke of how anarcho-primitivism is based on orientalist narratives based on Western notions of nature and society. In my opinion, this has implications on the kind of global co-ordination efforts that Critchley emphasises would be needed to destabilise capitalism. I did not find his answer particularly satisfying. That today, we live in a time where the anarchists operate on a sixties modus-operandi theoretically, but their practice is something new that he is attempting to put some theoretical weight behind. Sociologically, this is exactly Ulrich Beck’s zombie institutions thesis in action. The anarchists theoretical mode is a zombie – it is totally devoid of meaning in the 21st Century. Individuals involved in the movements then accept the frame of passive nihilism. However, their practice becomes moulded by the conditions of globalisation – a forced cosmopolitanism. Critchley should be admired for taking on the project to cosmopolitanise anarchism today, and I’ll be looking closely in his books for what it has to say on the matter of late modernity.
