On Putting the Active Back into Activism

Abstract

INTRODUCTION This paper addresses a paradox: how to engage in affirmative politics, which entails the production of social horizons of hope, while at the same time doing critical theory, which means resisting the present. This is one of the issues Deleuze and Guattari discuss at length, notably in What is Philosophy?: (1) the relationship between creativity and critique. It is however a problem that has confronted all activists and critical theorists, namely how to balance the creative potential of critical thought with the necessary dose of negative criticism and oppositional consciousness. Central to this debate is the question of how to resist the present, more specifically the nastiness, violence and vulgarity of the times, while being worthy of our times, so as to engage with the present in a productively oppositional and affirmative manner. I shall return to this in the final section of my essay. There is a conceptual and a contextual side to this problem and I want to start by discussing each one, before addressing my central concern. I. THE CONTEXT The public debate today shows a decline of interest in politics, whereas discourses about ethics, religious norms and values triumph. Some master-narratives circulate, which reiterate familiar themes: one is the inevitability of capitalist market economies as the historically dominant form of human progress. (2) Another is a contemporary brand of biological essentialism, under the cover of 'the selfish gene' (3) and new evolutionary psychology. Another resonant refrain is that God is not dead. Nietzsche's claim rings hollow across the spectrum of contemporary global politics, dominated by the clash of civilizations and widespread Islam phobia. The bio-political concerns that fuel our necro-politics and the perennial warfare of our times also introduce a political economy of negative passions in our social context. Thus the affective economy expresses our actual condition: we now live in a militarised social space, under the pressure of increased enforcement of security and escalating states of emergency. The binary oppositions of the Cold War era have been replaced by the all-pervasive paranoia: the constant threat of the imminent disaster. From the environmental catastrophe to the terrorist attack, accidents are imminent and certain to materialise: it is only a question of time. In this context, mass political activism has been replaced by rituals of public collective mourning. Melancholia has become a dominant mood and a mode of relation. There is, of course, much to be mournful about, given the pathos of our global politics: our social horizon is war-ridden and death-bound. We live in a culture where religious-minded people kill in the name of 'the Right to Life' and wage war for 'Humanitarian' reasons. Depression and burn-out are major features of our societies. Psych-pharmaceutical management of the population results in widespread use of legal and illegal drugs. The narcotic sub-text of our societies is under-studied and mostly denied. Bodily vulnerability is increased by the great epidemics: some new ones, like HIV, Ebola, SARS or the bird flu; others more traditional, like TB and malaria. Health has become more than a public policy issue: it is a human rights and a national defence concern. While new age remedies and life-long coaching of all sorts proliferate, our political sensibility has taken a forensic shift: 'bare life', as Agamben argues, (4) marks the liminal grounds of probable destitution--infinite degrees of dying. At the same time European culture is obsessed with youth and longevity, as testified by the popularity of anti-ageing treatments and plastic surgery. Hal Foster (5) describes our schizoid cultural politics as 'traumatic realism'--an obsession with wounds, pain and suffering. Proliferating medical panopticons produce a global patho-graphy: (6) we go on television talk-shows to scream our pain. …