Theoretical Times

Steve Redhead

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781787430044
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

In Theoretical Times, Steve Redhead describes the post-crash economic, environmental, political and cultural condition we live in today. As the rise of the international right - Donald Trump, Brexit, Marine Le Pen - swarms the globe, a new global battle within the right is developing: the globalists and neo-liberals versus the economic nationalists and protectionists. What then are the prospects for a resurrected theoretical politics of the left?
Theoretical Times considers the work of theorists such as Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio, in this innovative reinvention of theory and the politics of theory. After the global financial crash the world is being hollowed out and we find ourselves in what Žižek calls a desperate state of hopelessness, the "new dark ages". Accelerated culture sees us digitally entertaining ourselves to death but leaves us exhausted and frightened waiting for World War Three. Theoretical Times offers new theoretical resources as a way out of the quicksand.

1

TIME FOR THEORY

We live now increasingly in a precarious (Standing, 2016) world dominated by an upsurge of savage anti-muslim populism (Badiou et al., 2016, 2017a, 2017b; Muller, 2016). This populism is manifestly of the neo-right, best represented by Donald Trump’s administration in the United States (Johnston, 2016; Wead, 2017), Marine Le Pen’s Front National, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) formerly led by Nigel Farage, and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party in Australia, with many other people and parties of the same ilk expanding exponentially across the globe. Advisers to the President inside the White House speak openly of the need for remilitarised policies for a world overwhelmed by ‘Islamo-Fascism’ which is supposedly threatening the West (Muller, 2016). Globally, a new right populist focus on North Korea and Kim Jong-Un, the Cuba and Fidel Castro of the twenty-first century, means the likelihood of calls for nuclear weapons for Japan and South Korea. Post-catastrophe (Redhead, 2011) is always already here, as if the long-awaited apocalypse has already happened and we are waking up to world dystopia the day after the bomb was dropped. The delayed global effects of the global financial crisis which could have put Trump and company in the White House much earlier are always with us — they have never gone away.

What then is the new state of theory, or of theory after theory (Elliott & Attridge, 2011) or theory after ‘post-theory’? (Redhead, 2011). This chapter looks at the worldwide subcultural scene of theory post-global financial crisis, and post-9/11, where theory and theorists have achieved a global audience as never before. Especially, it sketches main elements of the new transcendental materialism (Johnston, 2014) generated out of the work of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek (and Jacques Lacan) as supplemented by the theoretical work of Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. In the case of both Baudrillard and Virilio in my view they have been wrongly considered and promoted within the discourse surrounding postmodernism and postmodernity. Their celebrity stardom has been seen to be a result of the rise of the postmodern condition and their theoretical productivity to be in accord with analysis of postmodern culture and the postmodern economy (Armitage, 2013). In opposition to this line of thought, Theoretical Times interprets their work much more positively, as a necessary if not sufficient embellishment to the transcendental materialism of Badiou and Žižek. As this book shows Baudrillard and Virilio are better placed at the edges of transcendental materialism, providing dangerous supplements to reset aspects of the perspective in the age of the rise of the right and the decline of the left. This new political economy is the theoretical perspective most appropriate to the production of the theoretical work of Badiou and Žižek and having long historical (Cole, 2014) routes in G. W. F. Hegel, German Idealism and Karl Marx. Adrian Johnston (2014), the theorist most associated with the term ‘transcendental materialism’, defines it precisely:

But what exactly is ‘transcendental materialism’? This is a name for a philosophical position indebted to the speculative dialectics of G.W.F. Hegel and the historical materialism of Karl Marx and his followers. However, whereas certain versions of Hegelian-Marxian dialectical materialism tend to emphasise possible unifying syntheses of such apparent splits as that between mind and matter, transcendental materialism treats these splits as real and irreducible (while nevertheless depicting them as internally generated out of a single, sole plane of material being). As both Maoists and the young Alain Badiou would put it, this is the distinction between the Two becoming One (dialectical materialism) and the One becoming Two (transcendental materialism). (Johnston, 2014, p. 13)

Both Žižek and Badiou have made enormous strides in sharpening the edges of transcendental materialism while still allowing their work to range without limits — Badiou to mathematics (2008b), love (2012b), cinema (2013e), theatre (2013f) and poetry (2014a) and Žižek to theology (Žižek & Gunjević, 2012), drama (2016f), refugee crises (2016d) and film (2014a). Especially though in major theoretical works both Žižek (2012b, 2014c, 2016e) and Badiou (2013a, 2013b) have changed the landscape of contemporary philosophy, psychoanalysis and political economy. The involvement of both thinkers in the shifts in relation to historical materialism and dialectical materialism and then eventually transcendental materialism has been profound, initially wrong footing devotees and critics alike. As leading Badiou and Žižek scholars Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda have explained in terms of their acclaimed edited book of essays (Hamza & Ruda, 2016) on Žižek and dialectical materialism:

The concept for this book emerged after the publication of Slavoj Žižek’s Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism. The initial aim was to gather a series of responses to the book in the philosophical journal Crisis and Critique that we both co-edit. We envisaged bringing together scholars who begin from different perspectives to seriously engage with the concept of dialectic in the work of G.W.F. Hegel and Jacques Lacan as presented and systematically developed by Žižek in Absolute Recoil. But when we started putting this together, it became clear that the initial idea had to be expanded beyond the frame of a journal issue and required a properly systematic realisation in the form of a book. (Hamza & Ruda, 2016, p. 1).

The major philosophical book projects of Badiou such as Being and Event (2013b) and Logic of Worlds: Being and Event 2 (2013a) — as well as a future forthcoming Being and Event 3 — and Žižek such as Less Than Nothing (2012b), Absolute Recoil (2014c) and Disparities (2016e) demand a terrain of inquiry beyond academic journals which befits the two theorists’ major status as global intellectuals with only tenuous connections to ordinary university life with its conservative limits. The terrain needed is almost ‘post-academic’, a space which theoretical times opens up and sustains. The speed and prolific nature of both theorists’ work causes all sorts of dilemmas in engaging with it. As Hamza and Ruda note in defending their own book length project:

The present volume therefore became far more ambitious than the initial project. As the title of the book suggests, the volume you are about to read undertakes a critical and systematic investigation into the concept of dialectical materialism developed in the work of Slavoj Žižek. The main focus of this volume lies on his 2012 Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism and his 2014 Absolute Recoil, but the essays gathered here do not limit themselves to these two works. They also address elements and aspects of Žižek’s thought from different books and, often, do so in a more general manner. The latter can also be regarded as being fully legitimate as one can argue that ‘dialectical materialism’ has been exercised and has marked the practice of thought that manifests in Žižek’s oeuvre, beginning with The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel With Lacan although the term itself explicitly appears only from a certain moment on in the unfolding of Žižek’s intellectual enterprise. (Hamza & Ruda, 2016, pp. 1–2)

Journals like Crisis and Critique continue to provide space for the theoretical and political development of transcendental materialism, and social media connects up the dots for millions around the world. In a few short years the maturity of the theory behind transcendental materialism has become more and more evident while cutting into, and across, events and movements in the political present as never before. The connection between theory and the politics of theory has converged.

One of the reasons we can call today’s period theoretical times is the deep maturity of thought of theorists like Badiou and Žižek and their global followers under the rubric of transcendental materialism. The systems of thought built on decades of work, and having deep roots in philosophy, psychoanalysis and political economy from the last several centuries have gained a maturity not seen in earlier periods of celebration of theorists, even in the earlier lives of these theorists themselves. In the case of psychoanalysis and its relation to these theorists it is to Sigmund Freud that Badiou and Žižek scholars look. As Ruda, looking at Badiou’s thought as ‘idealism without idealism’, and his debt to the philosophy and psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, says:

In 1914 Sigmund Freud published a remarkable text. In it he for the first time introduced the concept of the compulsion to repeat, of the transference neurosis, and of working through. (Ruda, 2015, p. 3)

Certainly transcendental materialism demands remembering, repeating and working through. Žižek has written of Lenin’s global significance in these terms 100 years after the revolution of 1917 (2017b). It does also though raise the question of the singularity of the two theorists work in the realm of transcendental materialism. Agon Hamza, in an edited book of essays on Žižek’s philosophical system, and the need to repeat and work through, raises the difficulty of formalisation of Žižek’s system of thought:

A problematic comparison is that with the philosophy of Alain Badiou. To put it in a very simplified manner, in an elementary level, it is not a difficult task to be a follower of Badiou, or a Badiousian in philosophy, due to his very well-structured system. This holds true for being a Badiousian in the exegesis level. However, the case with Žižek is different: not only the formalisation of his philosophy but also being faithful to his thought is a much more complicated philosophical enterprise. Although one shouldn’t dismiss Žižek’s own indifference towards the proper philosophical ‘system’, I want to argue (in a rather bombastic fashion) that the only way for his philosophy to resist both its time and its (what is wrongly described as) interventionist character is to subject his system to a rigorous formalisation. (Hamza, 2015, pp. 3–4)

As producers of systems of philosophical thought, and as global intellectual celebrities, Badiou and Žižek have known each other for a long time and their paths have crossed at many places in their life and work. For Peter Engelmann, introducing their published versions of oral contributions, and concluding discussions, at a convention in 2004 in Austria:

The question that governs this book, whether the philosopher should take part in contemporary events and comment on them, is the question regarding intellectuals in our society, treated in a specifically philosophically specific fashion. It no longer suffices to answer that the philosophers should not only interpret the world, but rather change it […] The answers of the Parisian philosopher Alain Badiou and the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek during their discussion of this theme in Vienna in 2004 turned out to be more modest and more sceptical than one might perhaps expect from philosophers. Instead of taking refuge in an old glory that has long since become historically obsolete, they try instead to recall the specific quality of philosophical thought and derive their answers from that. Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek have known and esteemed one another for long time. Slavoj Žižek was continually proposing Alan Badiou for the Passagen publishing programme. Badiou, for his part, has been helping to translate Žižek’s words into French. Both know what the other will say and how he will argue, at least in broad outlines. (Badiou & Žižek, 2009, pp. viii–x)

Engelmann sees the two philosophers as divergent but, ultimately, best seen together:

They are not in agreement about important philosophical concepts, and notions, as they affirm once again in this discussion. That is the case regarding their concepts of the event and the Real, but also for their understanding of the role of the imaginary or of politics. On the other hand, they agree that philosophical engagement must result out of the specificity of philosophical thought and should also establish its limits in this sense. (Badiou & Žižek, 2009, p. x)

For Badiou and Žižek it is ‘philosophy in the present’ (Badiou & Žižek, 2009) that matters. This book introduces the links and differences between Badiou and Žižek, with Baudrillard and Virilio at their side and their back, as a significant part of what it calls these theoretical times. It reflects on a new global academic and non-academic interest in post-disciplinary theory in the phenomenon of what this book labels theoretical times, explaining succinctly why we are still the contemporaries of May 1968 as Badiou has put it (2014a; Badiou & Milner, 2014; Feltham, 2008). Badiou, reflecting on the strikes and protests of workers and students in Europe in May 1968 40 years on in May 2008, first queries what all the fuss is still about and then provides a justification for seeing us as tied integrally to 1968:

The first answer is decidedly pessimistic. We can now commemorate May ’68 because we are convinced that it is dead. Forty years after the event, there is no life left in it. Or so say some who were the notables of ’68. ‘Forget Mai ’68’, Cohn-Bendit tells us now that he has become an ordinary politician. We are living in a very different world, the situation has changed completely, and we can therefore commemorate the best years of our lives with a clear conscience. Nothing that happened then has any active significance for us. Nostalgia and folklore. There is also a second and even more pessimistic answer. We are commemorating May ’68 because the real outcome and the real hero of ’68 is unfettered liberal capitalism. The libertarian ideas of ’68, the transformation of the way we live, the individualism and the taste for jouissance have become a reality thanks to postmodern capitalism and its garish world of all sorts of consumerism. Ultimately, Sarkozy himself is the product of May ’68 and, to celebrate May '68, as Andre Glucksmann invites us to do, is to celebrate the neo-liberal West that the American army is defending so bravely against the barbarians. I would like to contrast these depressing visions with some more optimistic hypotheses about what we are commemorating. The first is that this interest in ’68, especially on the part of significant numbers of young people is, on the contrary, an anti-Sarkozy reflex. Even as its importance is being denied so strongly, we appear to be looking back at May ’68 because it is a potential source of inspiration, a sort of historical poem that gives us new courage and that allows us really to react now that we are in the depths of despair. And then there is another, and even more optimistic, hypothesis. The commemoration, and even the official, commodified and deformed side of it, may mask the vague idea that a different and societal world is possible, that the great idea of radical change, which for 200 years went by the name of ‘revolution’ and which has haunted the people of this country for 40 years now, is still quietly spreading, despite the official pretence that it has been completely defeated. (Badiou, 2010a, pp. 43–45)

This is essentially Badiou’s ‘communist hypothesis’ for a ‘communist modernity’ which fellow theorists like Žižek also take up much to the acclaim of attendees at events all over the world on the ‘idea of communism’. The splintering of the global left since 1968, and its enormous consequence, remains a question very much on the agenda. Lenin’s question ‘What is to be Done?’ is very much still to the fore, as Žižek recalls, 100 years after the Russian Revolution. But theorists like Badiou and Žižek and their followers are acutely aware of communism’s history and the totalitarian and authoritarian tag which is applied to it as a political philosophy (Žižek, 2017a). They are well aware that communism today means the likes of China with its capitalist economy run by a State Communist Party, although as Bruno Bosteels (2014) claims there are relatively recent ‘actualities’ of communist experiments in Latin America such as Hugo Chavez’s socialist Venezuela as well as post-Batista communism in Castro’s Cuba. The ‘idea of communism’, supplementary to the communist hypothesis, is the idea which Badiou maintains is more about keeping an idea (after capitalism) alive. As Badiou says at the first Idea of Communism conference held in May 2009 shortly after the global financial crisis:

My aim today is to describe a conceptual operation to which, for reasons that I hope will be convincing, I will give the name ‘the idea of communism’. No doubt the trickiest part of this construction is the most general one, the one that involves explaining what an Idea is, not just with respect to political truths (in which case the Idea is that of communism) but with respect to any truth (in which case the Idea is a modern version of what Plato attempted to convey to us under the names of eidos, or idea, or, even more precisely, the Idea of the Good). I will leave a good deal of this generally implicit in order to be as clear as possible regarding the Idea of Communism. (Douzinas & Žižek, 2010, p. 1)

The idea of communism may have become more successful in the twenty-first century than the actuality of communism, but the communist hypothesis remains robust in theory and the theorists in theoretical times.

Where are there maps and routes out of the apocalyptic and dystopian rise of the new new right and the global quicksand it has created? Is Badiou’s communist modernity one of them? Post-catastrophe (Redhead, 2011) rules in a way that has a whole population feeling ‘claustropolitan’, ready to jump off the planet in fear of the dystopic and apocalyptic future painted and predicted by whole swathes of popular culture in our world today. The world feels, for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, as if it is on the brink of terminal disaster — a ‘university of disaster’ as Virilio (2010b) puts it. Living in the present feels like it is an opening scene from Danny Boyle’s 2002 zombie apocalypse film 28 Days Later where ‘the last man’ finds himself surveying a totally empty deserted city as the ‘undead’ Manchester metropolis beckons up the motorway. Stanley Kubrick’s early 1960s film Dr Strangelove: Or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb, featuring Peter Sellers in multi-parts, has, always already, all the hallmarks of today’s Trump administration and its knee-jerk response to complex global geo-politics with nuclear war only an ‘accident’ away. In amongst a daily diet of fake news, very fake news and real leaks in the Trump administration, the search for complex theory and accounts of the politics of theory goes on apace. Fifty-year-old texts, such as Louis Althusser, Jacques Rancière and Étienne Balibar’s Reading Capital (2015) have been the subject of whole international conferences, and overflowing conventions committed to theorising the new, resurrected ‘idea of communism’ as Badiou describes it. As we have seen this contains seeds of an ‘actuality of communism’ in Bosteels’ view (2011, 2014) and a ‘communist horizon’ in Jodi Dean’s vision (2012, 2015). There, too, is a contemporary ‘agony of power’ of ‘the divine left’, where there is a palpable failure to use sovereignty, as envisaged by Baudrillard (2010a, 2014) in his posthumously published work. Only a decade ago writer and blogger Mark Fisher (2009) could publish a book about how it was easier to envisage the end of the world than to envisage the end of capitalism because of what he described as ‘capitalist realism’. Today, after a decade of the post-crash condition experiment for the whole globe, after ten years of the global financial crisis and its effects, one of the foremost global theorists of the political, Wolfgang Streeck (2016), can write confidently about ‘how capitalism will end’ and speak confidently about a ‘failing system’ of capitalism. Badiou and Žižek scholar Frank Ruda (2016) has further shown how a useful contemporary fatalism can be employed against the ball and chain of capitalist realism and a choking neo-liberalism. For Žižek (2017b) the hopelessness of the global situation in the late tens of the twenty-first century is so great that we can barely own up to how bad things are, but that very hopelessness may be the trigger for the ‘courage’ to get ourselves out of the mire.

As I have argued, we live, interestingly, in theoretical times. Previously we lived, theoretically, in interesting times. Study has attached itself to ‘theory’ and ‘theorists’ as never before. It has also inexorably become part of celebrity intellectual culture, a sub-division of the celebrity culture associated with film, music and sports stars. Popular culture has become embroiled with theory and theory has become embroiled with popular culture. Digital theory for a digitised world as we shall see later in this book. A futurism of the moment for a city of the instant as Virilio (2010a) has suggested with the world under rapid, and rabid, globalisation in what he calls its ‘last gallop’ (2011). The celebrity intellectual culture which has developed over the past few years has also produced open access online journals devoted to theorists such as Baudrillard, Badiou and Žižek. The International Journal of Baudrillard Studies began in 2004 with Baudrillard on its editorial board until his death in 2007. The International Journal of Žižek Studies began in 2007 with occasional contributions from Žižek himself and Badiou Studies began in 2012. Ruda has recently noted that Badiou stated that ‘Lacan is our Hegel’ (2015, p. 8) in his book Theory of the Subject (Badiou, 2009b) first published in the early 1980s, so this aspect of twenty-first century celebrity intellectual culture has a relatively long history going back into the last century.

As we have seen, Badiou himself has been seen by Ruda as ‘our Lenin or Marx’ and Žižek has said of his friend Badiou that ‘a figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us’. Chairman Mao has featured strongly in both Baudrillard and Badiou’s trajectory. Since the early 1970s Badiou’s work has been characterised as ‘post-Maoist’: in Bosteels’ words ‘[…] Badiou’s relation to Maoism […] amounts to a form o...