Random Variable

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 21^st 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.

A number of interesting posts this week.

Harry Brighouse reports on a new book discussing Basic Income Grants, a central tenet of Green policy. The book discusses BIGs against Stakeholder Grants, not entirely dissimilar to Labour’s baby bond:

I’ve been familiar with both proposals for a long time, and find both very appealing, I haven’t got a stake in the debate really. But I was surprised how much new and interesting stuff was in the book, so I thoroughly recommend it whether you are a newcomer to the debate or an old hand.

Tyler comments on carbon offsets:

…these carbon offsets shift back the demand curve for dirty power but they also shift out the supply curve for power as a whole. (The persnickety might argue the demand curve doesn’t even shift back, but if you have to buy all those offsets you will think twice about your next plane trip.) Competition from wind power forces down the price of the monopolistic dirty power company (electricity?), which means that other people buy more of it. The quantity of dirty power consumed might well go up rather than down.

Colin Farrelly comments on Dworkin’s recent Oxford lecture, in which he weighs in on the role religion should have in politics, a major gripe of mine with the “secular left”:

Dworkin then noted that the most powerful argument for establishing religion are not paternalistic. Rather it is the claim that the majority are entitled to a particular culture. So the important question is- Who gets to shape the culture with which we live? How do we decide to answer this question?
The 2 models give different answers. The culture could be shaped organically… millions of independent decisions about what to buy, what to make, who to talk to, etc. can shape the culture. Or the culture could be shaped through collective political/coercive decisions. Dworkin argued that it has OK to collectively shape the moral culture, but if we hope to take his second principle seriously- the principle of special responsibility- the culture must be shaped organically. And this then leads him to endorse model (2)- the tolerant secular state.

Larval Subjects discusses pedagogy from a Deleuzian standpoint:

A pedagogy of problems, a new dialectics, thus becomes the site of a politics– A site where false problems would be revealed and carefully criticized, and where the focus would consist in the articulation of genuine problems where new individuations might take place…

John Quiggin reports on the McKibbin-Wilcoxen plan for climate change:

It was a good presentation and Warwick made an effective analogy between the McKibbin-Wilcoxen plan for climate change which uses fixed prices in the short run and fixed quantities in the long run, and the bond market, where central banks set short-term interest rates but allow long-term rates to be set by the market.

One thing I hadn’t realised, though, is that the plan doesn’t allow for international trade in emissions permits, even in the long run. McKibbin sees this as an advantage, since there’s less of a reduction in sovereignty, but I see it as a big problem for two reasons. First, there’s an obvious efficiency loss in not allowing countries with low-cost offsets to trade with high-cost countries. Second, the biggest source of credits so far is China, the country that is going to need the most persuading to join an international agreement (contrary to Warwick, I’m confident the US will ratify Kyoto, perhaps extracting some concessions on timing and targets, as soon as Bush goes out, and that Australia will do so then, if not earlier). The possibility of gaining credits, combined with the threat of border taxes on exports from non-ratifying countries will be needed to overcome the obvious free-rider problems.