[OPE-L] Praxis Makes Perfect

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<http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=9748>

Praxis Makes Perfect

Book Review by Anindya Bhattacharyya, May 2006

Anindya Bhattacharyya takes a look at some
recently published books that examine the
philosophical implications of the struggle for
radical political change.

In 1845 the young Karl Marx wrote down a series
of short notes to himself summarising the
conclusions of his intense engagement with the
radical philosophies of his day. They were never
intended for publication, but were nevertheless
been preserved for posterity after Marx's death
by his lifelong friend and comrade Frederick
Engels.

Of these notes - the so called Theses on
Feuerbach - the final one is the most famous:
"Philosophers have only interpreted the world in
various ways, the point is to change it." For
Marx, this statement marked an exit from
philosophy and a declaration that philosophy's
interminable problems and contradictions could
only be resolved by a kind of radical conscious
political activity that he would soon call
revolutionary socialism.

Ever since then philosophy and radical politics
have been engaged in a curious relationship of
simultaneous rivalry and dependence. On the one
hand revolutionaries have been deeply suspicious
of philosophy, seeing it as a sophisticated mask
and justification for the existing political
order - ideology, in other words.

But on the other hand, revolutionaries cannot
simply ignore philosophy. Radical political
practice is inseparable from radical political
thought and theory. These theories in turn are
both influenced by philosophy and are obliged to
hold their own in the court of philosophy.

In recent years these complexities have reemerged
into the centre ground of intellectual debate.
The ruling class has attempted to impose
neoliberalism on the world. This, combined with
the new drive to imperialist war has sparked mass
resistance.

This resistance on the ground has been
accompanied and paralleled by a new strain of
radical and explicitly political philosophers
such as Tony Negri, Slavoj Zizek and Alain
Badiou. In various ways all of these thinkers try
to grapple with the abstract aspect of the same
problems that political movements face concretely
- how can radical change come about? How can the
new emerge from the old?

Alex Callinicos's new book, The Resources of
Critique, is a detailed and sustained engagement
with these questions and these emerging radical
philosophers, as well as with more established
leftist and liberal thinkers such as Jürgen
Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu and John Rawls. The
book operates at several levels, acting as a
summary of major current trends in philosophy, a
negative critique of those trends, as well as a
positive intervention into philosophy and
contribution to its ongoing debate.

Ontology matters

The range of authors surveyed in the book is
extremely broad, straddling both the "analytic"
tradition of social and political theory favoured
in British and US academia and the "continental"
tradition of speculative philosophy. Much of the
book builds on and deepens the philosophical
positions developed by Callinicos over the years,
especially over moral questions - how, if at all,
can a radical left political project be
justified? - and problems regarding the nature
and origin of scientific knowledge and realism.

But his direct engagement with explicitly
ontological issues - roughly speaking, the
question of what "being" means at its most
general and abstract level - is a new
development. Callinicos writes, "Ontology
matters. This is the result that has most
surprised me personally... [though] I must
confess some vestigial wariness about the whole
subject."

Why should ontology matter? The reason is that
how we conceptualise being is closely bound up
with how we conceptualise how the new can emerge
from the old. In the most general sense, if
something new can simply be explained by the old,
then it isn't really new in any radical sense of
the term, it was "always already there". Such a
static and conservative understanding of the
world leads ineluctably to a static and
conservative understanding of politics.

But if the new cannot simply be explained by the
old, it must in a sense come out of nowhere.
Radical innovation - an "event" as Badiou calls
it - emerges "from the edge of the void" and
ruptures with the current order of being. Yet
this too is also politically problematic, as
Callinicos notes. It is uncomfortably close to a
miraculous and religious conception of the world,
and seems to licence all sorts of arbitrary
voluntarism and moral relativism.

It follows that radical change, innovations,
events, have to be situated somewhere in the
dialectical relationship between something and
nothing, being and the void. But the structure
and nature of this dialectic is anything but
obvious. In the latter half of the book,
Callinicos lays out his provisional contribution
to this problem, drawing on Marx's understanding
of society, Rawls's theories of justice and the
"critical realist" ontological theories of Roy
Bhaskar.

The publication of The Resources of Critique
coincides with major new works by two of the
philosophers most prominently associated with the
"ontologies of the void" that Callinicos
critically engages with, Zizek and Badiou. In
their different ways, they too seek a
philosophical understanding of how it can be
possible to break with the deadlocks of
globalised neo-liberal capitalism.

Zizek has declared his latest work, The Parallax
View, to be his "magnum opus" and his most
philosophically ambitious work to date. As always
with Zizek, it is a dizzying mixture of highbrow
philosophy and lowbrow cultural analysis, all
peppered with psychoanalytic insights,
idiosyncratic asides and the odd dirty joke. But
underneath this dazzling display of pyrotechnics
is a single philosophical theme hammered home
relentlessly.

This theme is a concept of "parallax", which is
Zizek's latest attempt to traverse the paradoxes
of the old and new outlined above. Roughly
speaking, the idea is that from the perspective
of the old, the new appears impossible and
miraculous. But from the perspective of the new,
the old is radically transfigured and abolished.
The trick - and this is where Zizek's "parallax"
metaphor comes into play - is to grasp both these
positions simultaneously and identify their truth
with their very incompatibility.

All of this sounds very much like the classical
dialectics of early 19th century philosopher
Hegel reinvented for a materialist and
disenchanted age. And indeed Zizek proudly
declares himself to be a partisan of "dialectical
materialism", taking on all the connotations of
this term for a school of philosophical thought
that is often dismissed as hopelessly old
fashioned and fatally compromised by Stalinism.

Whether Zizek succeeds in reinventing dialectical
materialism is open to question. For my money his
approach is a little too overidentified with
Stalinism - one gets the impression that the
primary reason for Zizek choosing this
terminology is to shock the liberal academy. His
contrarian audacity in this regard is always
charming, but it often acts to paper over his own
complicity with the capitalist ideology he so
ruthlessly criticises.

An alternative approach is taken in Badiou's
latest book, Logiques des Mondes, which has just
been published in French and is currently being
translated into English. This work is conceived
as a second volume of Badiou's 1988 masterpiece,
Being and Event, which has just come out in
English translation - the 18 year gap testifying
to both the stupefying parochiality of English
language philosophy and the fact that this
parochiality has finally had its day.

Logiques des Mondes outlines what Badiou
describes as a "materialist dialectic" that plugs
some holes in his previous account of how the new
thinking ("truths" in Badiou's terminology) can
emerge from the sterile and endless circulation
of opinion, dogma and academic knowledge. This
question is treated in detail in Being and Event
through a close reading of mathematical set
theory.

Being and Event is certainly an astonishingly
original and provocative book, though at times
extraordinarily difficult. But as Callinicos
notes in his valuable summary and exposition of
the work in The Resources of Critique, Badiou's
conception of events and truths suffers from a
kind of theoretical ultra-leftism that tends to
dismiss questions of objective reality and
empirical relations entirely.

Logiques des Mondes is in many ways a response to
these criticisms that deploys another aspect of
mathematics - the theory of categories - to offer
an account of relationality, objectivity and
appearance. It also points to a curious shift of
tone in Badiou's work and a break with a certain
political pessimism that marked his previous
work, written at the height of the intellectual
backlash against the radicalism of May 1968.

In the preface to the English language version of
his book Metapolitics, also recently published,
Badiou writes: "The demonstrations in London
against the war in Iraq bore witness to a
confidence far greater than in Paris... This is
what one might call the French paradox:
intellectuals there are capable of great
radicalism, but they are also fickle and highly
dependent on prevailing phenomena... I am happy
that [my work] is appearing in English, for I
have found there to be, in the countries which
speak this language, perhaps less certitude and
audacity, but more tenacity."

The political implications of Zizek and Badiou's
philosophical interventions will no doubt be
worked out over the coming years, and will no
doubt be marked by all sorts of mediations,
corrections and contradictions.

But the fact that this strain of radical thought
is alive and kicking - and tentatively entering
into conversation with the new political
movements against war and neo-liberalism - is
itself a beacon of hope and a signal that cracks
are beginning to widen in the stultifying order
of Blairite "common sense" ideology.

Alex Callinicos, The Resources Of Critique, Polity Press
Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View, MIT Press
Alain Badiou, Being and Event, Continuum;
Logiques des Mondes, Editions du Seuil

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