BEYOND STATE AND REVOLUTION

88 RIZALINO NOBLE MALABED Φιλοσοφια Volume 14, 1:2014 BEYOND STATE AND REVOLUTION: THE POLITICS OF CONTENTIOUS MULTIPLICITY Rizalino Noble Malabed University of the Philippines Los Baños, Laguna The theory practiced as resistance must come to grips with the state and with revolution. To evade, explain away, or assume the state is fatal. And to think of revolution only as anti-state is as dangerous. After all, the revolution’s aftermath is revealed by history to be just another state. I argue that the danger posed by both state and revolution can be countered by the multiple in society that becomes contentious—or a contentious multiplicity. The multiple and the contentious are practices that pervade society. The state’s objective is to control multiplicity and sublimate contentiousness. The revolutionary strategy is to sublimate multiplicity and direct contentiousness. But multiplicity is dangerous when it is independently contentious. And contentiousness indicates a dialectical process of challenging state power wherein the process itself is privileged over any synthesis. Contentious multiplicity is a practice of freedom. Life is wholly fugitive and temporary, but also wholly palpitating with reality and individuality, sensibility, sufferings, joys, aspirations, needs, and passions… Abstraction being [science’s] very nature, it can well enough conceive the principle of real and living individuals, but it can have no dealing with real and living individuals; it concerns itself with individuals in general.... What I preach then, to a certain extent, is the revolt of life against science, or rather against the government of science.... —Mikhail Bakunin (1970, 58-59) “This is subversion...this is subversion of a very high order. There is multiplicity of tones, characters, courses of structured if divergent flow. We have played the game right, we are real subversives. I am pleased to impart this knowledge to all of you.” —The bandit Buhawi in Yuson (1996,72-73) Malabed (ok) Final.pmd 88 11/24/2013, 7:51 AM BEYOND STATE AND REVOLUTION 89 I argue that multiplicity that is contentious is a danger to both the state and to the revolution that is on the verge of becoming a state or that sees itself as counter-state. Yet the multiple and the contentious are practices that pervade society, which is both the object and resource of states and revolutions. The state’s objective is to control multiplicity and sublimate contentiousness. The revolutionary strategy is to sublimate multiplicity and direct contentiousness. Contentious multiplicity challenges and erodes the effective practices of hegemonic power and, as such, is a weapon against the state. But contentious multiplicity is dangerous through and through and can become the enemy of the revolution that becomes the state. Multiplicity is not diversity, which is a concept and practice already captured and inscribed within the framework of liberal multiculturalism—resource for both state and contemporary capitalism (see Zizek 2006). I interpret multiplicity as the many resources for the practices of individual and community life within and without the state. In fact, most of multiplicity cannot easily be ordered or inscribed in the state’s logic or representations. Multiplicity becomes dangerous in times of revolution, when it is contentious. Meanwhile, contentiousness indicates a dialectical process of challenging state power in which the process itself is privileged over the synthesis. Contentious multiplicity is a practice of freedom. I see two general tendencies in political theory in which the state as practice of hegemonic power is deprecated. First, liberals assert that the state is only an administrative contraption that ensures a procedure of justice that makes possible the private and individual pursuit of the good life. Here, theorists like John Rawls (1993) imagine a stable society of equal and free citizens who live individual lives based on “incompatible religious, philosophical and moral doctrines.” Some liberals also argue for a larger state that provides social welfare in order to assure citizens equal opportunity to pursue their versions of the good life. In any case, the minimal or the social welfare state does away with the ancient democratic distinctions between the public/private and between good/mere (that is, political/economic) life. To Aristotle, for example, the good life is precisely the object of the public realm. Mere life, meanwhile, is properly private (I use mere life in the way Aristotle and Hannah Arendt use the phrase). Aristotle (1958, 5) differentiates mere life—“that stage, still short of full self-sufficiency”—from the good life—“therefore fully self-sufficient.” Mere life is associated with the satisfaction of daily needs, the reproduction of the physical self. Aristotle sees the Greek polis as arising or growing from it—it being necessary for the material reproduction of the city—but not existing because of it. Aristotle admits that there must be some kind of good in the simple act of living, for people are willing to endure great amounts of suffering to cling to life. Thus, mere life must have in it “a sort of healthy happiness and a natural quality of pleasure” (Aristotle 1958, 111). Taking her cue from the politics of ancient Greeks, Arendt (1998) asserts the same with her strict distinction between the private, the realm of the human activities of labouring and working, and the public, where the necessarily political human activity of action takes place. In Arendt (1998, 45, 7) mere life is the human condition for labour. It is human needs and wants in accordance with the natural cycle of nature. It is temporary and is never permanent or long lasting. To Arendt (1998, 96-97, 119), mere life is something to be transcended in the quest for human becoming. Mere life and its means, labour, endanger both work and action because its privileging in contemporary mass society has reduced work to working for life (or making a living) and has all but banished action from the public realm. Instead, Malabed (ok) Final.pmd 89 11/24/2013, 7:51 AM 90 RIZALINO NOBLE MALABED what were traditionally public—the determination and living of the good life—are designated as individual choices that are properly pursued in the private realm. This appears to be the case in most liberal societies. Contra Arendt, however, what I view as perilous for society is neither the invasion of the public by the private nor the limiting of what is properly public to the private but, rather, the conflation of public/private and the designation of this conflation as the proper realm of the state. Second, postmodernists elide the state by interpreting the state practice of power as mostly negative and by locating their critique and resistance on the diffused manifestations of power and power relations in society. Michel Foucault (1984a) for example, dismisses the state as mere codification of the power networks operating in society expressed negatively, that is, expressed as repressions, prohibitions, and proscriptions. Thus, the state practice of power is limited and parasitic on the diffused manifestation of power relations in society. The relevance of this view is its indication of how we are productive of the networks of power present in society and, consequently, complicit in the practice of power by the state. Pro-Foucault, I agree that we are productive of the networks of power diffused in society on which the state is dependent. Indeed, the order of the state rests more and more on the individualising powers of societalstate institutions that commit us to an ever increasing number of authorities that is as extensive as our ever multiplying identities. But this is always coupled with the totalising power of the state that is becoming more dependent on its coercive apparatuses as the recent trend of minimizing states (through measures of austerity in response to crises) have shown, that is, what the trends of governance and austerity illustrate is that the state (as government and state institutions) has become lean and mean. (This is already obvious in the Global South as they lead the way in the implementation of structural adjustments.) Meanwhile, this lean and mean state endeavours to reproduce itself as the only determining order, together with its societally diffused individualising powers, just as before. But Foucault (1978-81) also lectured on state rationality and its implications on state practices of power. One way to reconcile this state-dismissing Foucault with the earlier version that deemed the state important is to understand that what he dismisses are the government and state institutions that are usually referred to by “state.” It is certainly the case that state rationality or governmentality pervades civil society. Also, there is really no longer any distinction between state and civil society in the instances when we mean order when we say “state.” Nevertheless. I argue that the state is more than what Rawls and Foucault assert it to be. The liberal democratic state, for example, does not equate the private and individual determination of the good life to the unlimited practice of possible private lives in society. There is a limit to the pluralism that liberal society can tolerate, even in the supposed confines of the private realm. This limitation is founded on Rawls’s concept of reasonable pluralism. Here, the possibility of consensus is not accidental but rather systematically manufactured by the liberal democratic order. Perhaps an extended discussion of Foucault will clarify this further. In this interpretation, the state is asserted to be more than just an apparatus of procedures or a codification of powers expressed as prohibitions. In this interpretation, the state conflates the distinctions of the public/private and good life/mere life. The private does not invade the public. The public is not delimited into the private. But rather, the state becomes determinant of a conflated public/private space and, as such, of the good and Malabed (ok) Final.pmd 90 11/24/2013, 7:51 AM BEYOND STATE AND REVOLUTION 91 mere life. This assertion is better formulated as: The state is a practice of power that administers the good life as mere life. FOUCAULT ON POWER, STATE, AND REVOLUTION Power is operating continuously everywhere; if politics is about power then we are continuously engaged in it. Stating this may seem unhelpful but it highlights Foucault’s (1984a, 2-65) conception of power as going beyond the limits of the state. These powers are more important than the state itself. The state then is a mere superstructure of prohibitions dependent on the workings of divergent and multiple powers below it. Underscoring the state, it is helpful in describing the powers that permeate society. According to Foucault (1990, 7), to talk about the state is to talk about power in terms of a sovereign and of sovereignty. This means understanding power essentially as repressive. This conception of power mostly confounds and misleads. Applied to sexuality, for example, power as state repression has the insidious effect of bringing “into existence concepts which the fear of ridicule or the bitterness of history prevent most of us from putting side by side: revolution and happiness; or revolution and a different body, one that is newer and more beautiful; or indeed, revolution and pleasure.” Foucault (1984a, 64) asserts that revolution is just “a different type of codification of the same [power] relations” as that codified by the state. While Foucault also implies that there are as many kinds of revolutions as there are possible subversive codifications of diffused power, revolutions only differ with the state in the type or arrangement of the concentrated powers which, to the state, is subversive and illegal. Also, the affirmation of power as repression suggests that sexuality is silenced, thus, allowing us to mistake the mere fact of speaking about it as transgression—a supposed practice of freedom (Foucault 1990, 3-13). In fact, Foucault asserts that since the beginning of the eighteenth century, there was a “discursive explosion,” an “institutional incitement to speak” regarding sex, starting with the Counter-Reformation rules of sacramental confession, which demanded detailed talk about sex in connection to passion and thought. The mind became a battleground for the suppression of passions and the cultivation of self-control and purity. The discovery of population, the revelation that there is such a thing as child sexuality and the study of perverts in the succeeding centuries multiplied the already diverse discourses on sexuality. The type of power brought to bear on the body and on the sex in these discourses, according to Foucault (1990, 17-49), is different. The state is homogenizing, distant, abstracting, excluding, and boundary-setting. The power that Foucault (1990, 47) identifies is multiplying, intimate, specifying, including, and line-ofpenetration setting. Indeed, most power is positive or productive. However, I argue against Foucault that state power operates within the same three axes of positive power that he identifies. First, the state objectifies: individuals and peoples are transformed into population, voters, statistics, and citizens with political affiliations. They become objects of state knowledge. Second, the state normalizes: the state, for example, produces the citizen as law-abiding individual—a standard of normal behaviour on which basis individuals within the state govern themselves. Third, the state produces what Foucault calls Malabed (ok) Final.pmd 91 11/24/2013, 7:51 AM 92 RIZALINO NOBLE MALABED “practices of the self”: nationalism (or patriotism), for example, becomes an ethic by which individuals constitute themselves as citizens, as subjects within the state. Foucault commits here the Marxist error of interpreting the state as mere superstructure and, thus, resistance to it must then be diverted elsewhere to something more fundamental. In Foucault, this leads to a depreciation of the state and a rejection of revolution. To Marxists, this leads to an underestimation of the state either as an opponent of revolution or as what must be taken over in the struggle. This is the fatality inherent in the evasion of the state. I want to clarify that, like Foucault, I do not see revolution as herald to the end of political struggle. But, unlike Foucault, I see in the waging of revolution manifestations or models of the exemplary political struggle. I refer here to the multiplicity that becomes contentious during revolution. I suggest that contentious multiplicity can effectively counter state power and is potentially transformative of the diffused power relations in society on which the state relies. THE STATE IN THREE MOVEMENTS Antonio Gramsci (1971, 12-13, 257-64) ) identifies two interdependent methods in which domination and hegemony are achieved: force and consent. Coercion and consent are practices of the state not only to produce and consolidate its powers but also to order a society that validates its authority. Coercion is directed to elements in society that the state considers undesirable, to individuals or groups that do not “consent either actively or passively,” and as such must be proscribed by law. The object is control or banishment. Consent, meanwhile, is sought by the state (or the dominant social group that controls the state) for what it lays down as law, policy, or course of action. This can be done by political socialization through state institutions and/or by some accommodation of the demands of civil societal resistance. The object of consent is consensus in support for the powers of the state. The dynamics of coercion and consent is productive of civil society: ordered, manageable, and materially productive. The same kind of society that states plan and seek to engineer in James Scott’s (1998) account of the grand projects and schemes of exemplar states in quests to improve the human condition in spite of humans. Thus, state hegemony arises from the practice of power that proscribes and prescribes—a practice of power that produces the normal, obedient individual as citizen and categorizes the deviant and non-consenting into objects of specific state apparatuses. This requires, as earlier asserted, a state that is administrative of the good life as mere life. I claim that this state practice of power is manifest in Thomas Hobbes’s (1991) absolutist state, in Rawl’s political liberalism, and in Giorgio Agamben’s (1995) state of exception. The Hobbesian absolute state is the outcome of the surrender by the multitude of their capacity to will and to judge in exchange for a secure community that allows them to pursue the physical reproduction of life. The state of nature is precisely a state of war, according to Hobbes, because of the multitude wills and judgements that must contend with each other. According to Hobbes (1991, 13-14, 16-19, 38-39, and 45), the trouble with will and judgement are the passions and other human capacities that underpin them. The will, on the one hand, is the enactment of human passions. The problem is that passions encounter other passions in a manner that is always disastrous. Malabed (ok) Final.pmd 92 11/24/2013, 7:51 AM BEYOND STATE AND REVOLUTION 93 Judgement, on the other hand, is derived from sense perception, memory, and imagination that, to Hobbes, are always fallible. Yet, an individual judgement encounters other judgements as if it is the only truth. And Truth is usually intolerant of other truths. In the natural state of a multitude of wills and judgements, clashes between these multiple wills and judgements are inevitable. In the state of nature, where “men live without common Power to keep them all in awe,” one can imagine the calamity of such clashing multitude of wills and judgements. Hobbes (1991, 88) , himself, imagined a “Warre; and such warre, as is of every man, against every man.” Hobbes (1991, 89) paints a catastrophic picture of the state of nature, which is also a state of war: In such a condition, there is no place for Industry… no Culture…no commodious Building…no Instruments of moving and removing…no Knowledge of the face of the Earth… no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short. But Hobbes (1991, 88-89) himself asserts that war does not consist only of continuous battle or fighting but also of the mere disposition to battle or fight. And the time spent in between these actual fighting—peace—is also part of the condition of war. One can accept without contradiction then that the acts of fighting also do not entirely result to killings, and that the articulation of wills and judgements is done in ways other than fighting. Hobbes, for example, asserts that speech is an ability of man even within the state of nature. He also asserts that men can group together for security purposes in cases of bodily weakness. Hobbes, moreover, never denied the existence of the family in the state of nature, or even of groupings based on kinship. As such one can speculate without contradiction, the existence of communities in the natural state. One can then interpret Hobbes’s depiction of the state of nature to mean the absence of a hegemonic or overarching industry, culture, knowledge, art, etc. For do not science, reason, and knowledge arise from passions, from perceptions of the world, from their articulation in speech, from the enactment of passions through will, from the finality of discourse expressed in judgement as Hobbes asserted in the early chapters of the Leviathan? The problem, of course, is that they are a multiplicity in the state of nature. But multiplicity is not an absence. Thus, the reading of Hobbes’s description of the state of nature as an absence of culture, etc., is not entirely correct. Although the state of nature is certainly an absence of one industry, one culture, one knowledge, one art, etc., it is, however, the presence of multiple industries, cultures, knowledges, arts, etc. The problem is that Hobbes interprets this multiplicity as inevitably leading to war. For Hobbes (1991, 120, 148, and 214), man’s reason and the particular passion of man identified as “Feare of Death” impel the human multitude in the state of nature towards peace. A covenant made with each other constitutes the Sovereign for whom, the surrender of the multitude’s capacities, “strengthened him to use as his own, as he should think fit, for the preservation of them all: so that it was not given but left to him, and to him onely; and excepting… as entire, [the] condition of meer Nature, and of warre of every one against his neighbour.” And thus the multitude enters the commonwealth Malabed (ok) Final.pmd 93 11/24/2013, 7:51 AM 94 RIZALINO NOBLE MALABED and become a people. A people determined by the legislations of the Sovereign, who has the sole capacity to do so in the commonwealth, in return for protection, preservation, and security: “[So] that by their owne industrie, and by the fruites of the Earth, they may nourish themselves and live contentedly…,” so that they may enjoy a limited liberty “such as is the Liberty to buy, and sell, and otherwise contract with one another; to choose their own aboad, their own diet, their own trade of life, and institute their children as they themselves think fit; & the like,” so that they may enjoy life. But what kind of life? Mere life? But what of the good life? In the Leviathan, the good life as political life becomes the domain of the Sovereign in relation to other sovereigns. The state practice of politics directed towards the subjects in the commonwealth becomes a politics of managing mere life, its variations seen as the only tolerable versions of the good life. Here, the public/private are conflated into the politics of mere life that the absolute state protects and administers. It is helpful to note at this point Carl Schmitt’s (1996) assertion that the state’s monopoly of the political is dispersed and appropriated by “indirect powers” (groups, parties, and movements) that quarrel amongst themselves in the parliament. This is a different interpretation of the public/private conflation, that is, a result of the appropriation of the rightly state monopolized political by the many organized interests in liberal democratic society. What I argue as conflation here arises from the state’s practice of domestic politics that must deal with the imperatives of mere/biological life. However, as the state/sovereign is also outside of the commonwealth and in the state of nature (with other states), it can do politics that, in Schmitt’s scheme, chooses the enemy and fights it. Also, the state can identify particular members of the commonwealth as enemies and eliminate them. But Schmitt’s point remains valid. My claim can be explained by a discussion of Agamben’s state of exception. Schmitt’s apprehensions, I think, can be explained away by a discussion of Rawls’s political liberalism. The liberal democratic society is a plural and well-ordered society. This claim seems to bring together two distinct, even contradictory, concepts. Arendt (1998, 8 and 220), for example, sees plurality as calamitous. Plurality is a natural human condition in the sense that “nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.” And plurality as the premise of human action gives rise to its calamities—the unpredictability of its outcomes, the irreversibility of its processes, “the haphazardness and moral irresponsibility in a plurality of agents.” Properly speaking, plurality erodes order. Rawls (1993, 50) in Political Liberalism resolves this contradiction through a reasonable plurality of doctrines of the good life advanced by reasonable persons. Reasonable persons are “not moved by the general good as such but desire for its own sake a social world in which they, as free and equal, can cooperate with others on terms all can accept.” Reasonable plurality implies an effective management of society that limits plurality to the reasonable and harmless. Such practice of power is accomplished through the political conception of justice or “justice as fairness.” This political justice, herein asserted to be the practice of power of liberal democratic states, determines and organizes what in society can be considered as public or private. Rawls asserts that political justice is legitimized through citizens’ endorsement but I add the claim that it also produces the citizens that endorse it. Malabed (ok) Final.pmd 94 11/24/2013, 7:51 AM BEYOND STATE AND REVOLUTION 95 The question that Rawls tries to resolve involves stability: how can a society of reasonable pluralism be stable over time? The question, however, already contains its answer—it is stable over time because it admits only the reasonable. This is achieved in two ways: first, by limiting comprehensive doctrines of the good life in the private realm and allowing only their aspects that can constitute the common conception of justice in the public; and second, by proscribing the unreasonable and producing the reasonable in society. Rawls’s (1993, 11, 18, 29-35, 39) conception of the person is important here. The person is defined as “someone who can be a citizen, that is, a normal and fully cooperating member of society.” This political identity of the person as citizen does not change notwithstanding changes in the comprehensive doctrine that s/he subscribes to and advocates. This in turn is necessary as the overlapping consensus constituted from the common denominator among reasonable comprehensive doctrines is endorsed by citizens “as giving the content of their judgements on [political, social, and economic] institutions.” The reasoning becomes circular when one realizes that the citizen, to Rawls, is in turn produced by the political conception of justice. The circularity, however, is resolved when the political conception of justice is interpreted as a practice of state power. Rawls (1993, 71) claims that when publicized, the “political conception of justice assumes a wide role as part of public culture” that educates the citizens about “a way of regarding themselves that otherwise they would most likely never be able to entertain.” To practice the political conception of justice to the full extent is to “realize a social world within which the ideal citizenship can be learned and may elicit an effective desire to be that kind of person.” Thus, the liberal state produces the reasonable citizen that ensures the reasonableness of privately practised comprehensive doctrines of the good life. And what of the unreasonable in society? Rawls accepts the fact that there will be unreasonable doctrines about the good life and suggests that they be contained so that they will not undermine the unity and stability of society. In a footnote, Rawls (1993, 64:fn. 19) asserts: “That there are doctrines that reject one or more democratic freedoms is itself a permanent fact of life, or seems so. This gives us the practical task of containing them—like war and disease—so that they do not overrun political justice.” Schmitt’s doubts about the liberal democratic state are appeased by Rawls’ political liberalism. The political is not captured by indirect powers that see each other as enemies but, rather, as reasonable interests whose more contentious parts or versions are designated as private or proscribed. This is achieved through the making of the normal cooperative citizen and the containment of the unreasonable. Meanwhile, Agamben (1995) extends Foucault’s contention that mere/biological life is modern politics’ definitive object by claiming that it has always been so. This is already asserted above in the discussion on Hobbes. But Agamben, again, goes further —the sovereign’s practice of politics is not only the management of mere life but also decides its existential status. Here, Agamben appropriates Schmitt’s definition (quoted in Agamben 1995, 11) of the sovereign as “he who decides on the state of exception.” The exception refers to what is taken outside, and not simply excluded (Agamben 1995: 18). But the exception validates the rule and the rule allows for the exception. This inclusive exclusion, says Agamben (195, 19), Malabed (ok) Final.pmd 95 11/24/2013, 7:51 AM 96 RIZALINO NOBLE MALABED ...is the fundamental localization, which does not limit itself to distinguishing what is inside from what is outside but instead traces a threshold (the state of exception) between the two, on the basis of which outside and inside, the normal situation and chaos, enter into those complex topological relations that make the validity of the juridical order possible. Agamben (1995. 83) asserts that “[this] sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and a sacred life—that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed—is the life that has been captured in this sphere.” The sovereign determines who or what is taken outside to this threshold, this zone of indistinction, where law is suspended and the power of the sovereign is at its apex. For mere life, to be taken outside is to put its existence into question, to reduce it further into bare life... into the homo sacer. This life is both within and without the legal order; its death is tolerated by law that neither proscribes nor authorizes it (Agamben 1995, 84-85). The sovereign occupies this same threshold of law and non-law. (This is the same assertion made earlier in Hobbes that the Sovereign is inside the commonwealth in relation to subjects and outside it, within the state of nature in relation to other sovereigns, at the same time.) It is this double character of the sovereign that endows it with the capacity to suspend the law for the homo sacer. Yet this condition is not without purpose. Like the imagined other to which in contradistinction the self coheres, the homo sacer serves as the other to which political life is differentiated and cohered. The homo sacer affirms the politics of administering mere life within the conflated public/private realm. Also, the sovereign state creates the appearance that the managed mere life is transcendent of the animal or biological life by designating a life that is lower, whose existence is always in question. But if commonwealth politics is mere administering, the politics of the state of exception is more intimate and authentic— recalling Arendt’s politics as “appearance” (albeit in a sinister guise), and Schmitt’s “identifying and fighting the enemy” (also Hobbes’s state of nature). As such, “from the point of view of sovereignty only bare life is authentically political” (Agamben 1995, 106). Agamben (15, 154-59) identifies refugees, death row convicts, and the inmates of concentration camps as exemplars of the homines sacres. These lives are already of ambivalent legal status and, as such, they serve as human guinea pigs in state sanctioned scientific experiments. In the case of the death row and concentration camp inmates, they are on the threshold of life and death: “Precisely because they were lacking almost all the rights and expectations, that we customarily attribute to human existence, and yet were still biologically alive, they came to be situated in a limit zone between life and death, inside and outside, in which they were no longer anything but bare life” (Agamben 1995: 159). These lives can thus be the objects of scientific and medical experiments without violation of the juridical order but also in affirmation of it. The experiments conducted on these lives become the prototype for state projects that result to obedient, controlled, and healthy citizens. Agamben’s is a bleaker view of the state. The assertion is that the state of exception is always a present threat in society, that in this threat the state’s negative and productive powers merge in a technique over life and death. Such a view puts urgency in the task of resisting the state. But emphasizing the state’s negative power prompts resistance Malabed (ok) Final.pmd 96 11/24/2013, 7:51 AM BEYOND STATE AND REVOLUTION 97 that focuses on limiting or taking over the state’s coercive power. In liberalism, this is because freedom is interpreted as negative liberty. Marxists, meanwhile, consider that the potential for the taking over of the state in favour of the masses justifies its coercive power. The answer to the state is not just limiting state power. Already, many traditional state powers have been diffused into civil society (which participates in turn in the production and reproduction of the state as an order). Neither is revolution that seeks to be another state the answer. REVOLUTION AND ITS “TREASURES” An important point raised in the previous discussion of the state is that it thrives in a conflation of public/private, and its practice of politics is precisely the determination of this realm. The conflation is achieved through the designation of mere life as the object of politics and the designation of the good life as a private pursuit. In Agamben, this is extended by the affirmation of such conflation of mere life with the life of the homo sacer. Another important point raised in the previous section is that the practice of negative and positive state power is directed towards the management, control, or eradication of dangerous and unreasonable multiplicity. Indeed, multiplicity is precisely dangerous and unreasonable when it is contentious. These two points intersect: The designation of mere life as object of politics and the designation of good life as a private matter are undertaken by the state to sublimate the dangers of multiplicity or to eliminate its danger altogether. I suggest that the answer to this state practice of power is partly to be found in revolution. There are, in revolution, models of political struggle that can be used as resources and weapons against state power and order. I refer to moments of the revolution where contentious multiplicity is practised. Revolution itself is not privileged but rather its ability to cohere, at specific moments of its waging, the multiplicity present in society into a contentiousness. Here, it is helpful to recall two relevant assertions in Arendt’s On revolution (1963). First, revolution—as an appropriation of the political by individuals acting together—is an exemplar of political action. Second, there are, in the revolutionary tradition, “treasures” lost or swept aside when the revolution is finally won. Arendt criticizes Marxist and liberal interpretations of the French and American revolutions. Against Marxists, she challenges the claim that the French revolution was driven by the social objective of overcoming poverty and exclusion. Against liberals, she challenges the interpretation that the main objective of the revolutions was the establishment of a limited procedural state that ensures individual liberty. Rather, these revolutions demonstrated the exercise of fundamental political capacities in the quest to establish concrete public spaces of freedom. But this was fleeting. The French and American revolutions eventually failed to guarantee these public spaces of freedom. Arendt (1963, 234-51) insists on a fuller appreciation of these “lost treasures” of alternative polities of participation and action. The idea that the French revolution was driven by the social objective of emancipating the multitude from the squalor and deprivations of poverty has its origins in the American continent, which overturned the European assumption of scarcity with the American experience of plenty. But according to Arendt (1963, 15), this interpretation Malabed (ok) Final.pmd 97 11/24/2013, 7:51 AM 98 RIZALINO NOBLE MALABED comes from a faulty reading of the American experience. The plenitude, or at least the perception that “the laborious in America were poor but not miserable” (Arendt 1963, 63), is a condition that is already enjoyed by the colonies and is prior to the American revolution. Arendt does not deny that the social objective is part of the motivations of the French revolution, to the detriment of the revolutionary spirit. But she claims that emancipation from poverty is not something that can be delivered by a revolution properly conceived as political action. This can also be said for the violent demands for a “happiness” (Arendt 1963, 245), perverted from its originally public character into a private pursuit. What the eighteenth century Americans called “public happiness” can be equated to the French “public freedom,” and the difference of terms indicate that what was a passion in France was an experience in America (Arendt 1963, 115). The eventual changes in American governance, which came to value the private pursuit of happiness (as private welfare) as enabled by laws and norms, do not reflect the revolutionary spirit that motivated the American Revolution. Public happiness is the actual practice of freedom, of being involved and finding pleasure in the conduct of public business (Arendt 1963, 124-25). This is precisely what revolution is all about, according to Arendt. It is liberation from oppression that “aims at least at the constitution of freedom.” It entails “a sense of a new beginning, where violence is used to constitute an altogether different form of government, to bring about the formation of a new body politic” (Arendt 1963, 28). However, there are contradictions in revolution that defeats this revolutionary spirit. To the extent that the most important event in every revolution is the act of foundation, revolutionaries find themselves confronting the contradiction of stability—required in the founding of a new body politic—and the spirit of the new (Arendt 1963, 225). This is manifested in a perplexity that seems unsolvable: “If foundation was the aim and the end of revolution, then the revolutionary spirit was not merely the spirit of beginning something new but of starting something permanent and enduring; lasting institution, embodying this spirit and encouraging it to new achievements, would be self-defeating” (Arendt 1963, 235). Indeed, the histories of the American and French revolutions have shown that this “all pervasive preoccupation with permanence, with ‘a perpetual state’ …secure for…‘posterity’” (Arendt 1963, 232) is tantamount to the revolutionary spirit being delimited as the privilege of revolutionaries who become founders, and has all but eliminated the alternative polities present in revolution. Arendt is referring here to the American townships and town-hall meetings, and the French sections (of the 1st Paris Commune), councils, clubs and societies. These are political spaces for the practice of freedom, “‘the school of the people’ in political matters,” a place to “‘instruct, to enlighten fellow citizens on the true principles of the constitution, and spread the light without which the constitution will not be able to survive’” (Emerson and Robespierre quoted in Arendt 1963, 238, 242). In the American revolution, Arendt claims that the Founding Fathers did not grasp the importance of townships and, as such, failed to incorporate them into the federal constitution. In fact, there was even antagonism to the wider and more inclusive conception of political freedom so that its practice among ordinary people is then transformed and limited to suffrage: “[A]ll power is derived from the people; they possess it only on the days of their elections. After this, it is the property of their rulers” [Constitutional delegate Benjamin Rush quoted by Arendt (1963, 239)]. The effect of Malabed (ok) Final.pmd 98 11/24/2013, 7:51 AM BEYOND STATE AND REVOLUTION 99 this is that the “age-old distinction between ruler and ruled which the Revolution had set out to abolish through the establishment of a republic has asserted itself again; once more the people are not admitted to the public realm, once more the business of government has become the privilege of the few….” (Arendt 1963, 240). Thus the townships that enabled the American revolution (in the sense that the decision to wage the revolution was made in these polities, which then sent representatives to the convention that finalized it) were overtaken and overwhelmed by the foundation of an encompassing but exclusionary federal government. The experiences of the French sections and societies, meanwhile, were quicker and more violent exclusions. Initially praised by revolutionary leaders, such as Robespierre and St.-Just, they became the objects of take over and persecution when these same leaders came into power. The commune sections were transformed into “organs of government and instruments of terror,” noncooperating societies meanwhile were abolished and their members arrested (Arendt 1963, 246-47). What Arendt lauds as the beginnings of political arrangements that make people into “participators of government” became “‘the great popular Society of the whole French people,’ one and indivisible” which “alas, in contrast to the small popular societies of artisans or neighbours, could never be assembled in one place, since no ‘room would hold all’; it could only exist in the form of representation… [as] centralized, indivisible power of the French nation” (Arendt 1963, 243). The small power structures and self-government of the commune sections and societies were threats to the centralized state that the revolution was founding and building. According to Arendt (1963, 249), they were crushed because they were “competitors for public power.” Arendt’s analysis of revolution privileges the public over the private and puts importance on the clear distinction between the two. This is the reason why she sees the American revolution as properly political. Meanwhile, the French revolution was plagued by the social objective, i.e., with its goal of ameliorating the conditions of private life. But the social question in revolution was not only manifest in the French demand to alleviate poverty. I think that the social question was also manifest in the American effort to protect wealth and property. This is seen in the demand “no taxation without representation,” against the limiting of American trade and exorbitant taxation by the English monarchy. This is also seen in the delimitation of the privilege to represent and in the bestowing of suffrage only to men of property. The American revolution did not, in reality, demonstrate a clear distinction between public and private, as Arendt claims. Instead, like the state, the revolution also conflates the public and the private. The real problem for the multiple in society is when the revolution or the state that the revolution founds, decides to be the determinant agency of this conflation. The more obvious and relevant problem is the tendency of revolution to marginalize or eliminate alternative visions of political order and organization from its ranks. This disposition is reminiscent of the state. The victims of this are the “alternatives,” the “others” that at earlier moments were indispensable parts of the revolution. I see two overarching stages in revolutions that explain this. The first stage requires the revolution to be as inclusive as possible. Thus, all alternative visions of social and political order in society are resources to the revolutionary goal of building a broad-based resistance to the state. But not all of these alternatives will constitute the new state. When revolution reorganizes from broad-based resistance to a defined Malabed (ok) Final.pmd 99 11/24/2013, 7:51 AM 100 RIZALINO NOBLE MALABED organization, a counter-state, and then a state, it undergoes a purification that recalls the homogenizing strategies and techniques of the state. These transformations constitute the second stage. These two stages can be argued to roughly correspond to the positive and negative practice of power. The goal of the first stage is to produce revolutionaries— the more of them the better. The second stage proscribes the nonstandard (and deviating) from the true revolutionary (which it also prescribes). These stages are not hard and fast, and not associated rigidly to specific moments in revolution. A revolution may not win. Also, it may face a counter-revolution that is not necessarily sponsored by the state. Thus, the need for revolution to cohere itself in an exclusionary manner is not necessarily driven by its desire to be a state, but may also be motivated by the desire to differentiate itself from what it perceives as rivals. The “treasures” of the revolution consist of the multiplicity that is found in its early stage. This multiplicity is not only limited to the varied conceptions of political order, as Arendt is apt to favour, but also includes the multiple conceptions and practices of social and economic life. What revolution does is to transform this multiplicity into a contentiousness directed at the state. This is the revolutionary moment that I privilege as exemplar for the contemporary political struggle against the state (as both government and order/sovereign and commonwealth). Also, in its direct confrontation with the state, spaces for the practice of life outside both state and revolution become possible. This is because the challenging of the state weakens its powers, opening societal spaces to the multiplicity of alternative orders. CONTENTIOUS MULTIPLICITY AS PRACTICE OF FREEDOM The connection between revolution and freedom raised by Arendt is important and interposes a nuance between the concepts of liberty and freedom. Her assertion is that the revolution itself is an exercise in liberation, the unshackling of the fetters that impede individual liberties. The liberties won back in revolution then become instruments that build and constitute spaces for freedom—“the practice of participating in governance... self-government” (Arendt 1963, 21-28). Freedom is action, and it is political. For Arendt, it is also public. But the advent of the modern state signalled the end of the public/private dichotomy in political practice. In this regard, revolution is no different from the state. Societal practice will also, I think, disclose an interconnection between the supposedly separate realms that trump the artificial bifurcation. What I mean is that the conflated public/private is not inherently bad (or good). It is, however, dangerous. The danger to society, as already asserted, is when the conflation is determined and managed by the state. The counter-danger to the state is when the multiplicity in the conflation—the variations of political, social, and economic life—becomes contentious, challenges the state, and becomes self-determined. I hold to the notion of freedom that is a danger to the state. I extend Arendt’s conception of freedom and argue that it is also practised in the waging of revolution. The contentiousness of the multiplicity in revolution is a practice of freedom. I argue that the contentiousness of the multiple can create spaces in which life can be lived Malabed (ok) Final.pmd 100 11/24/2013, 7:51 AM BEYOND STATE AND REVOLUTION 101 beyond the determination of both the state and the revolution. These spaces multiply within society, and within the revolution itself, as the state becomes weakened by the struggle. These spaces multiply, as there are multiple versions of living life politically, economically, and socially. The theoretical discussions, thus far, have only hinted at the concept of multiplicity without fully clarifying it. Rawls’s reasonable pluralism defines the concept of multiplicity negatively, but multiplicity is not limited to the reasonable. Arendt laments the lost treasures of a revolution. These “others” and “alternatives” eventually were excluded, captured, or repressed because they posed a challenge to the power of the revolution in its second stage, and so they were calamitous. Arendt’s idea of the calamitous plurality partially clarifies what I mean with the term multiplicity. But she limits this to the narrow human activity of action (as it is authentically political) and denies it to work and labour. Genuine Multiplicity, however, includes the many variations of labouring and working. Hobbes’s view of the multitude of wills and judgements that fires up the war of all against all, also, adds to what I mean. Here, Hobbes’s conception is wider than that of Arendt, as willing and judging is applied to all aspects of life, and as he argues that these can be multiple as there is a multiplicity of individuals in the state of nature. The capacities to will and to judge create the unique individual life. But life is not limited to the individual living of it. Life can refer to the lives lived together in a family, a community, in societies. It is at these levels of being among others that the individual life really thrives. This is because wills and judgements are in themselves dependent on other wills and judgements. They thrive on the busy interaction of individuals, groups, communities. Even the one and universal will and judgement of the Sovereign in Hobbes’s commonwealth is parasitic on the wills and judgements that constitute it and that it suppresses. Thus, like Rawls’s liberal democratic state, the Sovereign must make the multiple reasonable. Agamben shows that the state of exception affirms the state power. And the bare life that dwells in this threshold validates it as well. But what the homo sacer does not realize yet is that s/he is political again. Not only because of the Sovereign that recognizes her/him (because s/he appears, in Arendt’s sense) but also because s/he is no longer subject to the law, to the order, or to the social contract. The homo sacer is political because s/he can will and judge once more and s/he can endanger the state through contentiousness—by declaring the state as enemy and fighting it. Multiplicity is all the possible configuration of living life as individuals and as communities. Multiplicity, as such, is also a resource for living the individual and community life. Life is not fixed, not being something but becoming. We can stop and freeze a moment in life’s becoming to think about life so far. In such reflective instances, we realize that life is dependent on other lives, as models, as resources, as other lives from which one’s life can be differentiated and reflected on. Contentious multiplicity is the revolt of life. Oriented towards the state, it is a revolt of life against the state: against the practice of power that limits and proscribes the possibilities of life and prescribes certain kinds of life, which we then accept as our own to the detriment of our free becoming. Contentiousness puts fangs into multiplicity and transforms it into a weapon against the state. Here, I do not limit the term to its meaning in revolution. Contentiousness does not consist in violence alone, but also in other forms of violent or nonviolent resistance practised by people throughout history: teach-ins, boycotts, pickets, strikes, mobilizations, Malabed (ok) Final.pmd 101 11/24/2013, 7:51 AM 102 RIZALINO NOBLE MALABED civil disobedience, sabotage, etc. Contentiousness makes multiplicity into a weapon to combat the state in two ways. First, contentiousness confronts the negative power of the state and wrestles liberties to constitute spaces of freedom that are beyond the powers of the state (or of revolution). I go beyond Arendt and argue that true freedom is practised only in spaces that are beyond the state’s control. Second, contentiousness creates spaces for the living of multiple lives beyond the determination of the state, which in turn erode the state practice of positive power. Earlier, it was asserted that the positive practice of state power multiplies. There is a profound difference here: the state multiplies identities as authorized social roles and in terms of defined categories in which it can box its citizens and, as such, transform them into objects and subjects of specific state apparatuses (for example: prisons, mental institutions, juvenile disciplinary houses, homes, the census office, and health agencies). On the other hand, contentiousness makes possible a multiplicity that expresses the possibilities of life. The practice of contentious multiplicity erodes the positive and negative practices of state power. This is shown by an analysis of state power that reveals practices of limiting or determining multiplicity and making it uncontentious and reasonable. A contentious multiplicity says that the state (as government, institutions, and overarching order) is not needed and that it is willing to fight to prove its point. I also argue that contentious multiplicity possesses transformative capacities that can restructure the diffused practices of power in society. This is because the point of contentious multiplicity itself is to make multiplicity thrive beyond the state. But the transformation of diffused powers does not happen automatically in the fight between contentious multiplicity and the state. Multiplicity and contentiousness must be privileged in an ethos—an attitude towards the world and the living of life among others in the world. This resembles the ethos towards modernity that Foucault (1984b, 32-50) proposes in the essay, “What is enlightenment?” Foucault’s is a philosophical attitude described as a “permanent critique of our historical era.” He characterizes this ethos as a rejection of the blackmail of the Enlightenment (whether one is for the Enlightenment and, thus, reason or is against it), as a permanent critique of the self that avoids the traps of humanism (ultimately an appeal to a conception of human, which is easily given content by varied ideologies), as a critique located at the frontiers wherein limits are discarded in favour of transgression (and as such requiring the methods of archaeology and genealogy), as experimental (by being available to the test of reality, in pursuit of possible changes and the form these take); and, as possessing stakes, homogeneity (of the attitude that everything is changeable), systematicity, and generality. The ethos of contentious multiplicity only makes the amendment that such ethos must be directed against the state primarily, that it must privilege multiplicity and an attitude of contentiousness. CONCLUSION: METAMORPHOSES AND LIFE Contentious multiplicity—as practice of freedom, and as an individual stance or ethos—rests on a hope: that in its practice, individuals and communities will learn to not need an authority of any sort to live life. How life itself should appear in the future is not its concern. In fact, contentious multiplicity affirms that the living of life is a concern best addressed through the particular living of lives. Malabed (ok) Final.pmd 102 11/24/2013, 7:51 AM BEYOND STATE AND REVOLUTION 103 Perhaps, what I mean can be illustrated by the metaphor of metamorphoses in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche (1998, 25-28) speaks of the three metamorphoses of the spirit: first as camel, the beast of burden that bears much and reveres; second as lion, the fierce beast possessing the capability of “creation of freedom for oneself for new creation” and that fights the dragon of “all values of all things.” The lion rejects the dragon as “lord and god” that says “thou shalt” with the roar of its “I will”; and, third as child, who creates new values for itself and who says a sacred “Yes” to the game of creation. Contentious multiplicity is the camel metamorphosed from its burden of being subjects/citizens that bear and revere the knowledge of all things represented by the state. Contentious multiplicity is the lion saying “I will” to reject the “Thou shalt” of the dragon, which is the state. Nietzsche’s metaphor is here applied as metamorphoses of life. But what of the child? The child represents the hope for the lion—that, perhaps, the lion will learn in its continuous willing to stop transforming itself back into a camel that bears and reveres another authority over its life after its victories (or to make itself into a new authority, the new dragon), to let go and become a child. This is also the hope that I hold for contentious multiplicity. Conceivably, this hope may never come to be. But the continuous assertion of “I will” through a contentious multiplicity, at least, makes the practice of freedom a part of life. Contentious multiplicity—as lives being lived and as an ethos—teaches us to not seek authorities, certainties, and permanence in life. It teaches us to “be at home in the maelstrom” (Berman 1988) that is life. REFERENCES Agamben, Giorgio. 1995. Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1963. On Revolution. New York: The Viking Press. Aristotle. 1958. The politics of Aristotle. 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New York: International Publishers. Malabed (ok) Final.pmd 103 11/24/2013, 7:51 AM 104 RIZALINO NOBLE MALABED Hobbes, Thomas. 1991. Leviathan. Edited by Robert Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1985. Thus spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Books. Rawls, John. 1993. Political liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Schmitt, Carl. 1996. The Leviathan in the state theory of Thomas Hobbes. Wesport and London: Greenwood Press. Scott, James. 1998. Seeing like a state. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Yuson, Alfred. 1996. The great Philippine jungle energy café. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press. Zizek, Slavoj. 2006. Multiculturalism, or, the cultural logic of multinational capitalism. In The universal exception. London and New York: Continuum. Submitted: 6 March 2012; revised: 15 October 2013 Malabed (ok) Final.pmd 104 11/24/2013, 7:51 AM