Ecce Homo! Occupy God?

First published on the website Culture Matters, March 27, 2016 (Easter Sunday). Revised. Formerly available at http://culturematters.org.uk/culture-hub/item/2270-ecce-homo-occupy-god.html. Ecce Homo! Occupy God? Marc James Léger 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign slogan and unofficial ad designed by Yikes Forever. In a recent online article written for Roar magazine, the Halifax-based activist and scholar Max Haiven defines the concept of the commons in terms of grassroots democracy, horizontalism, sustainable reciprocity, community-level decision-making and radical autonomy.1 What is at issue in this article is not so much what he says about the need to replace state sovereignty with commons, but the way that individuals and individualism figure in his discussion. Whereas most Marxists would agree on the question of the withering of the state, and on the socialist critique of bourgeois ideology, not all Marxists would agree with the anti-humanist and postmodern presuppositions that are at play the immanentist critique of concepts like autonomy or sovereignty. Haiven’s article is typical of the tendency of social movement activists to dismiss the category of the individual that for previous generations was essential to Freudo-Marxism, but that today, after the influence of discourse theory, has seemingly disappeared, as Michel Foucault once said, like a face in the sand at the edge of the sea. I contrast Haiven’s critique of individualism to the ideas of the Not An Alternative collective, an activist group for whom individualism is also a problem, but where, in contrast, psychoanalytic concepts are adopted and made use of in their Occupy strategies. Brushing up against liberal ideology, Haiven’s text replaces the notion of “the public” and “counterpublics” with that of the commons. He challenges the idea of the individual as an Enlightenment concept that presupposes the public as its counterpart. The principle of egalitarian reciprocity that underwrites the commons involves, he says, “rich reciprocity, inter-reliance and the connections between communal and individual responsibility and autonomy.”2 He takes this beyond the idea of human rights, made in our capitalist world into a notion of the “irreducible and self-contained, contract-making individual,” which he decries as the source of political and economic power – the liberal social contract writ small.3 We must deconstruct this politics of white, male property owners – a “lethal fantasy,” he says, since none of us are self-sufficient monads.4 Instead, we “rely on community, collaboration, cooperation and commons.”5 He writes: “Our powers have been turned against us, to the point where we are at risk of undermining the network ecology of collaborative life that actually sustains us. Ecce Homo! This is what comes of the fetishization of the individual!”6 Woe to all would-be saviours! Further, the individual, according to Haiven, “is a dangerous but intoxicating fiction,” a “political box” that we must deconstruct so that we can build commons.7 Since privacy implies private property regimes, as opposed to creative commons, neither are people or even the objects they make fully free, and so we must wake up from the dream of complete liberation from community, responsibility and accountability. Whatever social structures we have, he says, they should be used to build commons-instruggle: human rights beyond human rights transformed into “rights to the commons” of education, health, material abundance, lifeways, migration, and the freedom to “practice one’s identity and body and mind and sexuality as one chooses.”8 Haiven’s article contrasts interestingly with another text published in Roar magazine: “Occupy the Party: The Sanders Campaign as a Site of Struggle,” written by the New York-based art collective Not An Alternative (NAA), a group comprised of core members Beka Economopoulos, Jason Jones and political theorist Jodi Dean.9 Beka Economopulos was recently depicted on the news show Democracy Now! She was participating in a campaign in which supporters of Democratic Party nominee Bernie Sanders had gathered in Zuccotti Park to telephone voters in the states of Illinois, Florida and Ohio and encourage them to vote for Bernie.10 I myself endorse the Sanders campaign and encourage people to use the hashtags: #hillarysowallstreet, #killarywarhawk and #bernienumnum. It is significant that these activists have chosen to campaign on the site of the first Occupy Wall Street encampment, since Sanders is the only candidate who in some ways addresses the concerns of this grassroots movement. I know Economopoulos and Jones from my brief interactions with NAA at the 2012 Creative Time Summit. The day after the Summit, we also met at a Debt assembly and march, where, as it happens, I met Haiven for the first time. Being familiar with the writings of Jodi Dean, I was not surprised to see Economopoulos on the Democracy Now! episode holding two placards, one of which read #Political Revolution and the other, #Not Me Us. The latter slogan would seem to fit perfectly with Haiven’s sentiments as well as Dean’s, even though there are significant differences between them in terms of the viability of socialist party politics for the left. Dean has written extensively about the need for radical collective action and often criticizes individualism. For example, in The Communist Horizon she writes: Some might object to my use of the second-person plural “we” and “us” – what do you mean “we”? This objection is symptomatic of the fragmentation that has pervaded the Left in Europe, the UK, and North America. Reducing invocations of “we” and “us” to sociological statements requiring a concrete, delineable, empirical referent, it erases the division necessary for politics as if interest and will were only and automatically attributes of a fixed social position. Weskepticism displaces the performative component of the second-person plural as it treats collectivity with suspicion and privileges a fantasy of individual singularity and autonomy. I write “we” hoping to enhance a partisan sense of collectivity. My break with conventions of writing that reinforce individualism by admonishing attempts to think and speak as part of a larger collective subject is deliberate.11 What Dean says about the collective we could and should also be said about the individual, which should not be conflated with the ideology of individualism. One should mention that the ideology of collectivism can be abused as much as the ideology of individualism. What many who are working after postmodernism tend to ignore is the fact that liberal ideology is premised on the relational yet never conflating self-definition of subject and object, individual and collective. There is notion in Marxist dialectics that obliges socialists to choose one over the other, which is simply a reductive ploy of formal logic. Where Haiven sees individualism as a dangerous fiction, Dean sees it as a fantasy. I agree with Dean’s critiques of micropolitical practices of self-cultivation and individual consumer choice. NAA and Dean are savvy activists and a boon to the movement because they are not satisfied with the kind of pettybourgeois moralism that is often found in anarchist circles, which often prefer the devil they know – capitalism – to the communist strategy of taking state power. The Democracy Now! episode not surprisingly showed people who disagree with NAA’s idea that grassroots activists should “occupy the party.” For example, Vlad Teichberg is quoted saying that OWS should remain outside the two-party system. In the way the episode was edited, Economopoulos responds to this with the statement: “I’m thrilled that they’re here [i.e. those who disagree with the Zuccotti Park telephone campaign]. I believe that social movements, Occupy, are about disagreement – right? – yet a fidelity to what binds us together in struggle.” This statement gives a nod to Alain Badiou’s notion of fidelity to an event and the truth procedure that follows from it. In other words, Economopoulos is making an allusion to Badiou’s notion of “the communist hypothesis.”12 In their artwork, NAA often use over-identification strategies, also known as the tactic of subversive affirmation. Examples include the pranks of the Yes Men, who pose as business leaders and infiltrate conferences to deliver in their speeches the kinds of information that corporate executives typically avoid, or the now defunct Colbert Report, a television parody of right-wing news pundits. During Occupy Wall Street, NAA made OWS protest tools that mimic the design of yellow and black police tape. The visually stimulating NAA tape was used extensively by OWS activists in their demonstrations. In the lead up to the one-year anniversary of OWS, the police had cordoned off certain streets near Zuccotti Park. In response, NAA made imitation police control cinder blocks out of polystyrene. These were spray painted with the same colours and fonts used by the NYPD and read: OWS Protecting the People from the Powerful. Cayley Sorochan and I used their instructional video on how to make book bloc shields and created for our Maple Spring marches red book shields of Alain Badiou’s The Rebirth of History and Slavoj Žižek’s The Universal Exception.13 Since we were a book bloc of only two people, we marched with these book shields alongside the demonstration in mimicry of the small police squads that would sometimes march alongside the demonstrations. Cayley and I would certainly agree with the notion of fidelity to the idea of communism. Although we were tired and famished when we attended the Debt rally and march in New York City, we had participated extensively and in various ways in the Maple Spring. The fact that we left to eat in the middle of this march was used by some people to suggest that we are unfaithful bourgeois individualists. This is unfortunately the kind of stupidity that one finds all too often in activist circles and in circumstances where militancy is conflated with the competitive careerism of middle-class academia. I have elsewhere been mocked from the opposite perspective, with fidelity to the event being compared to medieval chivalry. The concept of fidelity is part of Badiou’s contribution to the radical theory of praxis, as defined in his two main books: Being and Event and Logics of Worlds. According to Badiou, it is impossible to understand the idea of fidelity without an idea of subjectivity. Subjectivity and subjectivization are very different words from individual and individualism. Although individualism is by and large an Enlightenment concept and an essential component of bourgeois ideology, one could say that since the Rights of Man is an essential, core aspect of the French Revolution, individual rights are part of the first sequence of what Badiou defines as the communist hypothesis. Marxists, in fact, never eliminated the individual subject from dialectical theories of human praxis. Beyond this, the notion of subjectivity – whether you characterize it as individualist or not – is essential to numerous strands of materialism. We should note here that Marxism contrasts radically in this regard with fascism, which rejects individualism, universalism as well as human rights and champions a sacrificial anti-materialist collectivism. But what about commons? In Capital, Marx described the way that cooperation and solidarity exist within a capitalist mode of production and are mediated by money. Despite the good intentions of utopian leftists, the kinds of communitarian cooperation that are championed by the beautiful souls of the New and now also postmodern left, nevertheless contribute to capitalist social relations. To be fair, so has all hitherto communist experiments. For all of the criticism one might make of possessive individualism, and we should not conflate privacy and individual property with the Marxist critique of private property, it remains not only a communist but a human challenge to go beyond the hegemony of capital as the concrete universal. For Badiou, being, or ontology, is associated with Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic notion of the subject and with mathematical set theory. Being is infinitely multiple and not particularly significant in terms of creating a meaningful event in the worlds of love, science, art or politics. For Žižek, on the other hand, we never occupy a place of truth since humans, as subjects of language, are also never at the level of what Badiou derisively refers to as animality, defined as the level of subjectivity before becoming faithful to an idea through the transformative procedure that follows an event. What is important about NAA is that they appreciate these kinds of issues, In “Occupy the Party,” they address the limitations of the Democratic Party, the electoral system, parliamentary democracy, and the state form. These are essentially meaningless to any radical revolutionary politics that works towards “internationalism, anti-imperialism, anti-racism and worker control of the means of production.”14 And so why vote for Bernie at all? Why not build autonomous political structures outside the two major U.S. parties? One quick answer is that, according to polls and analysts, Bernie is the only Democratic candidate that is critical enough of the oligarchic establishment to win an election victory against the likely Republican candidate, Donald Trump, a demagogue whose ideas many have begun to compare to those of Adolph Hitler. The point that NAA make in the article is that the left has no means at the moment to implement its principles, that “our principles become the barriers to their own realization.”15 And so the more we try to occupy places of power, the greater is the danger of cooptation. As they put it nicely: “The dilemma of left politics is that we appear stuck between beautiful souls and dirty hands.” They write: Politics involves knots of principle, compromise, tactics and opportunity. Their push and pull against one another accounts for much of what many dislike about politics: banal rhetoric, betrayals, splits. Finding a candidate or party with which one fully agrees is impossible. Something is always missing, always off. This is not (only) the fault of the political system. It’s (also) a manifestation of the ways people are internally split, with conflicting, irreconcilable political commitments and desires.16 Nothing therefore is unified and self-identical, not individuals, not institutions, and not movements for social change. The question then, in the battle for hearts and minds, and in political organizing, is whether the level of individual subjectivity is something we should or even can eliminate? Beyond endless deconstruction, should we not focus on what is to be done? For NAA, the political struggle cannot be a matter of numbers, or majority rule, but the insistent push in the streets and squares. They give as examples Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, two movements that have challenged the status quo and changed the parameters of political possibility. The extent to which these movements have actually done this is debatable. They have certainly affected the media representation of critical issues, but they are also conflicted internally, as NAA is right to mention, by very different political philosophies and orientations. Like BLM, NAA proposes that movements for change should not create another mass political party but should occupy the existing parties, with the Sanders campaign extending these struggles within the Democratic Party, forcing a split within the party. “The more we engage, they say, the more damage we can do, at every turn demonstrating the gap between people and practice.”17 One might wonder, if everything is barred, can institutions and individuals be occupied in the same way? The critique of liberal individualism has certainly seen its fair share of occupations in the twentieth century, from the “personalism” of forced collectivization and the gulag, to Maoist dormitories, Khmer Rouge social engineering and Symbionese Liberation Army abductions. If that be the case, one would rather be a member of the winning party than on the wrong side of History. Think for example of The New Babylon (1929), a wonderful Russian silent era film that depicts the events leading to the Paris Commune and its reorganization of the divisions that were already present in capitalist relationships, represented by the contrast between Dmitri Shostakovich’s “La Marseillaise” juxtaposed with the “Can-can” from Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld. But then Socialist Realist films like this get criticized for its reified stock characters. Closer to our postmodern times than Stalinist or Situationist purges, micro-politics skew the problem of dissent and difference within the ranks in favour of the capillary and rhizomatic formations of posthuman subjects. Affinity rather than discipline becomes the watchword of social movement activists and the process of radicalization is accepted, in principle, as multifarious. Fidelity to a truth procedure can be confusing in the context of horizontalist grassroots movements, especially, as Badiou says, when one thinks in terms of equivocal concepts like democracy and in the absence of a strong ideology. Where there is no unified political formation you have what communists refer to as massism, the relatively dis-organized masses pitted against state and corporate power without the guidance of leadership and party programme. Self-directed leadership in these contexts is not always effective and if someone decides to opt out of leaders and programmes altogether, as advocated by the Invisible Committee, the question of collectivism can be very local and insular, regardless of what the unofficial leaders say.18 We have all experienced the kinds of conflict and tensions that can easily divide militants in the absence of an overarching framework. As Naomi Klein said somewhere, it’s easier for people in the movement to give in to callouts and the micro-policing of comrades than it is to focus on changing the power structure. In my view, the significance of the resurgence of the left in the 2000s can be explained as a critique of the limits of postmodernism and a renewal of political economy and macropolitical thinking. Outside of the Sanders and Corbyn campaigns, the Western left has yet to take up the organizational challenge. Psychoanalysis teaches us that the unconscious does not begin and end at the point of consciousness or political identification. As all advertisers know, ideology, propaganda, and spectacle are operative at the level of the psyche, even if the outcomes are never certain or predictable. This is certainly true when Bernie describes himself as a socialist. The American public, politicians and news media often do not seem to know what to do with such statements. They seem more comfortable with the outlandish buffoonery of Trump. Why is this? NAA explains it nicely, “Just as Occupy was never about one group, so the Sanders campaign is not about him. It’s about changing the conditions of political possibility.”19 The Democrats are terrified of being taken over by politics, they argue, and the mobilization of the left gives them reason to be afraid. But how useful is this notion of fear? True, the billionaire class is relatively speaking afraid to lose control of its enormous economic power and so it does everything to prevent social movements from directing change, as was noticed in Greece with the debacle that followed the referendum on the debt crisis. But fear is also an intrinsic part of their game. As Badiou said about Nicolas Sarkozy, “The electoral operation incorporates fear, and the fear of fear, into the state, with the result that a mass subjective element comes to validate the state.”20 Once the state is occupied by fear, Badiou argues, “it can freely create fear.”21 The dialectic is one between fear and terrorism: a state that is legitimized by fear becomes ready to become terroristic. One sees this everywhere in the building of a security state, with surveillance of the enemies created by global imperialism spreading to encompass the control of all leftist organizations, no matter how small they might be. As Badiou puts it: “Control will change into pure and simple state terrorism as soon as circumstances turn at all serious.”22 Today, a “post-traumatic” left tends to avoid ideas like revolution and vanguards. Militants in the capitalist North must therefore convince both the working class and the middle class that change can be pursued against the system and that we should not fear the existing conditions of economic decline since, when fear takes hold, the aspiration to class mobility leads to identification with centrist and conservative politics, which guarantees declining living standards, poverty and misery for the vast majority of people. In this context, psychic resources, the ability to speculate, reflect, and criticize is essential. Individualism, for lack of a better term, is an asset to social movements, against both conformity to the dominant neoliberal order as well as to idealist temptations within our own political thinking. Of course we have to be idealistic, but better to do so as materialists. It might be better, even if more alienating and academic sounding, to use the terms subject formation and social formation than that of individuals and publics. Lacan teaches that psychoanalysis is not recipe for politics. As Žižek puts it, “psychoanalysis does not show an individual the way to accommodate him or herself to the demands of social reality.”23 Having been excommunicated from official psychoanalytic milieux, Lacan made an entire theory of the concept of excommunication, understood in terms of what is unanalyzable and yet shared through the chain of signifiers. One way to think of this is with the Lacanian formula according to which “there is no Dasein (ontology) except in the a-object”; for Lacan, “there is no subject except through a signifier and for another signifier.”24 The scandal of psychoanalysis is that the truth of the subject does not reside in himself or herself and so knowledge remains for all subjects an enigma, something that we avoid through the mechanism of fetishistic disavowal. Our criticism of individualism is a measure of our repudiation of psychoanalysis. This is why critical cultural and political theory can today speak to us about jouissance, knots and split subjectivity, while also proposing that we remain faithful to the idea of communism. From our entry into language our primary narcissism is always already part of a commons of symbolic meanings and social structures, the point is to change them for the better. In Philosophy for Militants, Badiou says that the goal of the twentieth century was to create a new man at any cost, so that humanity could become the new God.25 What we have today, he says, is the inhumanity of technological annihilation and bureaucratic surveillance. How then does humanity overcome the inhumanity in which it is immersed? Franco Berardi asks a similar question about the hypercomplexity of the technolinguistic automatisms that cause us to behave like swarms.26 The bioeconomic totalitarianism of financial abstraction is due to the acceleration of the infosphere, with little prospect, he thinks, of being able to reverse this trend. If the only imaginable process of subjectivization is that of immersion, then we need to think like Bifo of ways to subvert subsumption. For Badiou, this requires the courage to create “new symbolic forms for our collective actions”: truths that are not reducible to law and its transgression but that rather create a generic will.27 My take on individualism is that we should be collective while also being human or humanitarian. This to me is definitional of leftist class struggle. It means ridding ourselves of the idea of positivity in social and subject formations. Notwithstanding the incommensurability of differences, there is more to enjoy in human variance than there is in the pretense of conformity and in pointless strictures of correctness. Think for example of both the hilarity and the pathos in a film like Miloš Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball (1967), where the effort to keep up appearances and respectability clashes with common human foibles. This is not at all to deny the call for solidarity, organization, responsibility and mutuality on the left, but it is to challenge what could be considered the anti-human senselessness of a postmodern social constructionism that is so ridiculously imperious as to argue for the disappearance of the human subject. This erasure is a delusion of all positive systems and so-called materialisms that have not incorporated the complex of critical theories that have defined the left since the age of Enlightenment. Notes 1. Max Haiven, “Reimagining our Collective Powers Against Austerity,” Roar (June 5, 2015), available at https://roarmag.org/essays/max-haiven-common-austerity/. 2. Haiven, “Reimagining our Collective Powers Against Austerity.” 3. Haiven, “Reimagining our Collective Powers Against Austerity.” 4. Haiven, “Reimagining our Collective Powers Against Austerity.” 5. Haiven, “Reimagining our Collective Powers Against Austerity.” 6. Haiven, “Reimagining our Collective Powers Against Austerity.” 7. Haiven, “Reimagining our Collective Powers Against Austerity.” 8. Haiven, “Reimagining our Collective Powers Against Austerity.” 9. Not An Alternative, “Occupy the Party: The Sanders Campaign as a Site of Struggle,” Roar (February 16, 2016), available at https://roarmag.org/essays/occupy-democratic-party-sanders-campaign/. 10. See “Occupy Activists Return to Zuccotti to Phone Bank for Sanders, Sparking Debate over Political Role,” Democracy Now! (March 14, 2016), available at http://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/14/occupy_activists_return_to_zuccotti_to. 11. See Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (London: Verso, 2012); Crowds and Party (London: Verso, 2016). 12. See, for instance, Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, [1988] 2005), Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, [2006] 2009), and The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, [2008] 2010). A simplified synopsis of Being and Event as well as Badiou’s Logic of Worlds is available in Badiou, Philosophy and the Event, trans. Louise Burchill (Cambridge: Polity Press, [2010] 2013). For a more developed discussion of the question of subjectivity in Badiou’s work, see Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, [1982] 2009) and Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 13. For more on the work of Not An Alternative, see http://notanalternative.org. See also Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, [2011] 2012) and Slavoj Žižek, The Universal Exception: Selected Writings, Volume Two, eds. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2006). 14. Not An Alternative, “Occupy the Party.” 15. Not An Alternative, “Occupy the Party.” 16. Not An Alternative, “Occupy the Party.” 17. Not An Alternative, “Occupy the Party.” 18. See Tiqqun, This Is Not a Program (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), [2009] 2011). 19. Not An Alternative, “Occupy the Party.” 20. Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, [2007] 2008), 13. 21. Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy, 13. 22. Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy, 13. 23. Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan (London: Granta Books, 2006), 3. 24. See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIV: The Logic of Phantasy, 1966-1967, trans. Cormac Gallagher, available online at www.lacaninireland.com. 25. Alain Badiou, Philosophy for Militants, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso, [2011] 2012), 43. 26. Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 3. 27. Badiou, Philosophy for Militants, 58, 79. Marc James Léger is independent scholar living in Montreal. He is editor of The Idea of the Avant Garde – And What It Means Today (2014) and author of Brave New Avant Garde (2012), The Neoliberal Undead (2013) and Drive in Cinema: Essays on Film, Theory and Politics (2015).