This evening I found myself reading The Communist Horizon by Jodi Dean. As always, the writing is lively, clear and I find myself agreeing with much that she says. However– and here my remarks will be brief –I find myself disturbed by the defense of “the party”; or rather, to be more precise, the underdetermination of her concept of the party. To be clear, while my sympathies lie in the direction of anarchism, I agree with Dean in holding that some sort of organization is necessary in order to accomplish any political change. In my view– and I realize this will be controversial to some –“communism” and “anarchism” are synonymous. Anarchism denotes a social form that is no longer alienated in the figure of a state, party, or leader, but where people directly rule themselves and organize their social world. Communism means precisely the same thing. However, both communism and anarchism are Real in Dean’s Lacanian sense of the term. As she writes,
I use ‘horizon’ not to recall a forgotten future but to designate a dimension of experience that we can never lose, even if, lost in a fog or focused on our feet, we fail to see it. The horizon is Real in the sense of impossible— we can never reach it –and in the sense of actual (Jacques Lacan’s notion of the Real includes both these senses). The horizon shapes our setting. We can lose our bearings, but the horizon is a necessary dimension of our actuality. (1 – 2)
The claim that anarcho-communism is Real, is the claim that it functions as a sort of “regulative ideal” that is never reached in practice, but that nonetheless regulates practice in the present or actuality. As a regulative ideal, anarcho-communism reminds us that while we might need leaders, parties, bureaucracy, etc., radical egalitarianism and collective self-determination are the ultimate aim of all our practices and we must perpetually subject our own practices and organizations to critique so that they don’t become fetishized or ends in themselves.
In the second chapter, Dean strongly suggests that leeriness of the party is equivalent to an embrace of neoliberal, democratic politics. Here I think Dean confuses issues of content and form. She assumes that if one is critical of party organization, they are rejecting the communist party (a particular content). My concerns with party politics, however, are rather different. They pertain to the form of parties, and in particular, how identifications function, regardless of whether we’re talking about the Nazi party, the democratic party, a particular religious denomination, a particular group such as “speculative realism”, “existentialism”, “object-oriented ontology”, or the communist party. All of these structures share a particular form, even though their contents are quite different. It is the effects and products of these forms that we need to attend to.
read on!
There are two basic problems that arise from identification with these master-signifiers at the level of politics. First, there is the problem of the party or group organized around a master-signifier becoming a university discourse. Lacan’s discourse of the university (left), has nothing in particular to do with universities or academia (though they’re common there), but rather refers to a particular form of social relation that can be instantiated in a number of different domains. We could just as easily call it the “discourse of bureaucracy” or the “discourse of autopoiesis” (as conceived by Luhmann). In the university discourse we have an apparatus of knowledge, law, or techniques (S2), acting on some new novelty or singularity (a), producing a barred or alienated entity ($) as its product. Why is the product of this discourse alienated? Because in being run through the machine of the discourse, the novelty loses all of its singularity and is reduced to yet one more instance of the bureaucratic or epistemological apparatus (S2). The singularity (a) does not change the discourse, rather the discourse subordinates the singularity to its norms, laws, categories, or procedures. Factories are another instance of the university discourse with respect to both the materials they transform into commodities and how they act on workers.
We will note that in the position of truth, we see S1, the master-signifier. The truth of the university discourse is some sort of master-signifier that we identify with: “Lacan”, “Deleuze and Guattari”, “Marx”, “democrat”, “republican”, “American”, “communist”, “anarchist”, etc. It is this master-signifier that we identify with. So here’s the problem. Describing the communist party, Dean writes, “I’m tempted to use terms from complexity theory here: the party is a complex, adaptive system” (20). This is what we always hope, but sadly this is seldom the case. This a formal problem with group structures organized around master-signifiers, not specific to a particular content: they have a tendency to shift from being for the sake of the people they represent, for example, to being solely for their party. In other words, perpetuation of the master-signifier, the point of identification, not what the constellation is supposed to represent becomes an end in itself that ends up alienating that which falls in its sway. Among Heideggerians, for example, Heidegger research becomes an end in itself, whereas the aim should be understanding of being and the world. Among the democratic party, perpetuation of the democratic party becomes an end in itself, rather than representing the interests of the people. The first question we need to ask of any form of organization– and this is why we need anarcho-communism as a regulative ideal –is that of how we can insure that parties, groups, and organizations remain “complex, adaptive systems”, rather than becoming ends in themselves and machines of alienation. How can we organize in a way that remains responsive to the alien and singular? That’s the question.
The second problem with group structures is of greater concern and has darker implications. As I have argued for a number of years now, group identification has the structure of masculine sexuality (the left side of the diagram to the right). I will not rehearse the intricacies of Lacan’s graph of sexuation here (readers who are curious can consult chapter 6 of The Democracy of Objects or my article “The Other Face of God“, .pdf). Group identification is organized around identification with a master signifier (Ex~Phix) or the upper portion of Lacan’s symbolic equations. Lacan argues that both of these structures encounter paradoxes or contradictions, thereby generating particular forms of jouissance or enjoyment. These are depicted on the lower portion of the graph. On the masculine side or the side of group or party identification, we see jouissance organized in terms of ($ –> a) or the barred or alienated subject related to objet a or the remainder or singularity that escapes the symbolic totality dreamed of by the university discourse.
According to Lacan– and I think he’s right –every attempt to form a symbolic totality produces a remainder that can’t be integrated. Symbolic totalities are thus necessarily supplemented by a fantasy symbolized in the matheme ($ <> a) that patches up, as it were, the totality through this supplement. We need to avoid the idea that fantasy is a happy or enjoyable thing. Rather, fantasy is Janus faced. One side of fantasy points to the divided subject being united with that element that it’s lost so as to therefore become complete. This is nicely depicted in Aristophanes’ speech on love in Plato’s Symposium. This is of course impossible because the lack in the structure is a structural fault, not the result of a contingent loss.
Because this fault is structural rather than contingent, the other face of fantasy is far more dark. Unconsciously recognizing that the fault is structural, fantasy thereby provides an explanation of some sort of foreign agent that prevents the totality from being formed: the imposter, the double agent, the invading foreigner, women, etc. The subject then attempts to eradicate this barrier to totality so as to bring totality into existence. Such was Zizek’s conclusion regarding the function of the symbolic figure of the Jew in anti-semitism. Anti-semitism has nothing to do with real Jews, but is instead a fantasy structure designed to explain why the organic and harmonious communities dreamed of by conservative ideologies fail (today the figure of the Jew has been replaced by leftists and Middle Easterners). The point is simple: group identification necessarily leads to internal purges within the group on the grounds that they are the “indivisible remainder” that prevents the group from functioning well and harmoniously, and systematically lead to persecution of some other group as the place-holder of the remainder, the real, or that which cannot be assimilated.
The stronger the identification, the stronger this tragedy asserts itself. Anyone who has spend any time lurking on democratic blogs in the last five years will discern this structure with respect to hardcore Obama-supporters. Anyone who has belonging to a Christian religious group will discern this structure. Anyone who has interacted with hardcore Marxists will have experienced this first-hand. Anyone who has interacted with highly identified conservatives and republicans will have experienced this. These are effects of a particular form, not the content of a particular group-identification. This is why we witness similar horrific forms of purges and persecutions of aliens on both the left and the right. The stronger the group-identification, the stronger the paranoia, and the greater the violence.
We are thus faced with an antinomy:
Thesis: Emancipatory politics and justice necessarily requires organization; which, in its turn, requires identification.
Antithesis: Identification and group organization necessarily leads to injustice through internal purges and the scapegoating of an alien seen as cause of the constitutive incompleteness of the totality.
This antinomy is what I believe needs to be addressed. We cannot avoid the need to identify and organize if we are to produce change. Yet if we are to do this without producing further injustice, we need to produce forms of identification and group organization that do not lead to this alienation and these sad, unjust, passions.
January 17, 2013 at 2:58 am
Reblogged this on Becoming Poor.
January 17, 2013 at 2:59 am
Great article!
I am curious why you think leftists and Middle Easterners have “replaced” the figure of the Jew as the scapegoat of conservative ideology. Isn’t it more unsettling to think that, perhaps, the figure of capitalism, patriarchy, mastery, sovereignty, The Bankers, fundamentalists, or any other number of master signifiers (even “master signifiers” as a master signifier) are scapegoated? In other words, how do we avoid scapegoating while still taking a stand against injustice? If you perceive injustice as perpetuated by conservative ideologies which believe in master signifiers, how can you avoid “master signifiers” becoming a master signifier which is scapegoated by your own ideology?
Hopefully I am clear here. My question is how to avoid scapegoating altogether. Perhaps an anecdote will clear it up. One of my friends once told me, he isn’t intolerant of anyone except people who are intolerant. Well, first of all, psychoanalysis teaches us that we are not aware of our intolerance, thus it is a narcissistic illusion when one thinks that she or he is not intolerant of anyone except intolerant people. But more importantly — isn’t this always-already what the intolerant person says? In other words, the scapegoater always claims to be scapegoated — the victimizer always claims to be victimized. Here is where boundary logic offers a nice neologism, “fictim,” to describe precisely the figure of the fictionalized victim in a given narrative — the one presented as a victim, or “the oppressed,” but who secretly enacts oppression. To paraphrase von Franz, sensitive people are tyrants, making everyone walk on eggshells around them with claims of being offended, outraged, hurt and so on.
Timothy Morton’s concept of Beautiful Soul Syndrome addresses this very idea: that the boycotter or scapegoater always claims to be fighting the evil “out there” in the world, but is actually perpetuating the very evil they decry. As Morton puts it, evil is not in the eye of the beholder, evil _is_ the eye of the beholder that sees evil as something “out there.”
So again, if we identify “those who rely on master signifiers” or whichever other group or ideology as “the problem” how do we avoid perpetuating the very problem we decry?
January 17, 2013 at 3:29 am
Just to mention, I’ve had a very brief discussion with Jodi Dean about the antinomy you conclude with and she’s well aware of it. It is, I think *the* problem for the left. Have you been following the implosion of the SWP in the UK? It’s exemplary.
January 17, 2013 at 3:47 am
I’ve tried to have this discussion with her a few times since 2006 and she’s always dodged it, defending discipline, sacrifice, party, and the need for an avant gard against the people.
January 17, 2013 at 4:16 am
That’s funny, because the minute I said to her “but parties have such a bad history, and virtually all end up counter-revolutionary at some point”, she said, “Yeah, I know.” No dodging, nothing. Sigh. Anyhow, I’m on your side on this, not for Lacanian reasons, all I had to do was read Emma Goldman’s Living My Life, the part about her time in Russia. The Bolshevik reaction to the Kronstadt mutiny was my personal last straw.
January 17, 2013 at 10:21 am
“I am curious why you think leftists and Middle Easterners have “replaced” the figure of the Jew as the scapegoat of conservative ideology. Isn’t it more unsettling to think that, perhaps, the figure of capitalism, patriarchy, mastery, sovereignty, The Bankers, fundamentalists, or any other number of master signifiers (even “master signifiers” as a master signifier) are scapegoated?”
That’s an interesting point. Certainly ‘the bankers’ have become popular figures of hate among the masses (both right and left, to some extent) in the past few years. But we shouldn’t confuse loathing in general with what (I think) Levi is talking about, which is a particular hatred aimed at those who don’t belong, those who are outside and alien to the in-group and who supposedly prevent the in-group from forming a totality — stop it from being ‘one, big, happy family,’ so to speak.
While people hate bankers, along with politicians and used car salesmen and so on, I don’t think these people are thought to be outsiders in quite the same way as Jewish people were and Muslims and leftists now may be. To these people they say ‘oh, bugger off to [insert socialist/Islamist country here] if you love it so much’ (that is if they don’t try to forcibly expel or destroy these people) — because these people are thought to be antithetical to the very fabric of the in-group. While people do hate big business and so on I don’t think there is this sense that it is alien, that it should be expelled, that it doesn’t belong here. They might recognise that bankers, lawyers, politicians and so on are arseholes, but they’re *our* arseholes!
January 17, 2013 at 2:44 pm
Hi Levi — I’m wondering, have you finished the book yet? I discuss the party along the lines of the discourse of the analyst, pushing the idea Zizek suggests in his afterward to Revolution at the Gates. I doubt this will convince you on the party, but it would make the debate clearer since that’s the way I defend it. It matters in that the party is not conceived as a totality (and neither is the people, which I explicitly defend as open as a way to avoid populist accounts of it as a totality). Also, it seems to me that you are attacking fascism, which blames an alien for the incompleteness of a totality, rather than a communist party, which is rooted not in incompleteness but in class struggle.
January 17, 2013 at 3:06 pm
Jodi,
Again, these are formal features of all group structures, not accidents. Thematizing the party in terms of the discourse of the analyst doesn’t address the concrete question of how to minimize this. Similarly, xenophobia is not something restricted to fascism, but is a structural effect of group identification. Girard is good on the points. If you look at the history of the psychoanalytic association and Lacan’s own schools we very clearly perceive these dynamics, so it’s not clear the discourse of the analyst helps here, nor that it can be transferred to the group level.
January 17, 2013 at 3:16 pm
Levi, There’s a lot of interesting material on transference at the group level; I’ve been working through early crowd theory, Freud on group psychology, and Michels on the party. On splits and purges — yes, I don’t think this is a problem. I think this is the way that a group strengthens itself and is not injustice (it’s important to keep in mind that a party is not a state; a party is a voluntary organization). But I think that scapegoating is only one way to understand splits, not the only way.
January 17, 2013 at 6:13 pm
That’s the hope, but again and again whether we’re talking about parties– regardless of political orientation –or religious organizations we see parties failing to function in the way you describe. Every party, of course, claims that it’s merely strengthening itself. The question is one of what checks can be instituted to minimize the fascist tendencies of parties.
January 17, 2013 at 6:21 pm
I would also add that the goal of a party should not be to strengthen the party (a university discourse), but to strengthen the people and that the people and party should never be confused.
January 17, 2013 at 6:31 pm
Hi Levi,
I personally feel similarly to you, and I too have more anarchist leanings. I feel a certain hesitancy to identify as X for precisely these reasons.
My question is about Badiou’s Maoism. As you may or may not be aware, modern Maoist thought (Marxism-Leninism-Maoism) holds as one of defining characteristics both self-critique of self and criticism of others. In this case, it seems fair to say that the Master-Signifier “Maoism” is self-cancelling, especially when you add in conceptions of dialectical materialism and in particular historical materialism.
Going off Jodi’s point, I think it is for this reason in particular why the Party is not to be conceived as a totality. Perhaps one can imagine it as being under erasure. How would you respond to this notion? Re: Badiou, it would be best to think of this in terms of conditions, of course. In the end, are his truth-conditions sufficient to erase the Master-Signifier?
I have my thoughts, but I do await your opinion. Best wishes.
January 17, 2013 at 8:23 pm
To what extent does the party come to be the medium through which a love of failure is practiced ad infinitum. On this point Dean is no better than the anarchists – both romanticizing failure and calling on others to fail better, and better. The real question that the left has consistently been unable to answer is: what would it mean to win? We can’t answer this question and perhaps the fear of this sort of castration leads us to all sorts of stupid revolutionary blueprints and party lines.
January 17, 2013 at 8:49 pm
There are different levels here. First, there is the abstract level of master signifier. Then there is the party-form, which arises because this group inclusion becomes underdetermined by certain contingent factors, so it is structural but mediated. It is wrong to jump from fantasy (something on the level of the inclusion-form) to scapegoating (a concrete symptom.) That is completely counter-psychoanalytical. Group inclusion doesn’t necessarily lead to scapegoating. It is even highly debatable that “group inclusion” is an adequate name, because a number of structures can fall under it, and because “group splitting”, signing apart rather than signing in, has been a conscious theme in the history of the Party in significant moments. Your tools even seem to blur the distinction between excommunicating and splitting. But even where a massive degree of excommunication and scapegoating are at work, something like Stalin’s purges is structurally different to something like the Cultural Revolution, if we are going to discuss the shitty past of “the Party”.
Also, I’m not sure about the way you talk about master-signifiers. If a master-signifier needs to be saved (which is what actually happens, not that it becomes an end) this is because something isn’t working, but not because of the master-signifier. You do see a lot people strenuously fighting to avoid psychosis, and of course “the big other has to be kept innocent”, but this is not an unavoidable effect of the symbolic order. Reproduction is not pathological in itself, and its very artificiality is where politics happens.
For me, the questions of the party, of thinking organisation, are 3: the discourse of the analyst (rather than the discourse of the university), a (rather than S1) and to fully understand the as of yet mysterious relationship between falling out into the void and becoming institution, despite all the debates sparked by Zizek’s Lenin.
January 17, 2013 at 10:33 pm
f,
That’s a nice sentiment, but where have you ever seen a party function as the discourse of the analyst? I think you’re mistaken about the master-signifier. Because no signifier can signify itself, every master-signifier falls up short S1/$.
January 18, 2013 at 6:59 pm
I would love to know if you’ve read Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed”, and if so what you think of how she tries to work through this antinomy?
January 18, 2013 at 7:02 pm
In “Dreamworld and Catastrophe,” Buck-Morss argues that fascism is the political pathology towards which capitalism tilts, whereas Stalinism is the political pathology towards which communism tilts. I wonder if there really is something in that distinction, or if the two are just different manifestations of a single underlying pathology entailed by group identification. In either case, it might make sense for purposes of clarity to use terms like “Stalinism” and “micro-Stalinism” rather than “fascism” and “micro-fascism” when talking about the scapegoating tendencies of communist political formations. This approach might have certain shortcomings when it comes to the issue of Maoism, but it would at least have the advantage of avoiding the confusions and conflations introduced by the lump term “totalitarianism,” which has been pretty seriously critiqued by historians over the past couple of decades.
January 20, 2013 at 2:22 am
I will simply note that with regards to the party and Lacan’s four discourses, Badiou, in Theory of the Subject, identifies it with all four discourses, rather than with one of those proposed here (university, analyst’s, etc.).
January 21, 2013 at 5:12 am
[…] Communist Horizon, which has been getting a good deal of publicity and generating interesting debates on the blogosphere (and in my Facebook feed, for that matter). Dean’s book can be situated […]
January 21, 2013 at 5:24 pm
Hi Levi,
I am right at the point you are, having started the Communist Horizon but not finished it, and liking Dean’s work a lot but disagreeing with her defense of the party.
But I am not satisfied, I don’t think, with *how* you critique the party, as a form that by logical necessity will lead to self-preservation, exploitation, hierarchy, purges, etc. I don’t really like Lacan’s approach, or Ranciere’s, who says more broadly (in OSP, I think) that society itself is necessarily a police order. I get that raising it to the formal level is rhetorically useful because it shows those party apologists who still exist (incredibly, after Stalin, after a generation of thought designed to build a politics without the state) that we are *serious* about this anti-party stuff. But even if it is useful because it functions as a sort of nuclear argument against people who refuse to see the obvious, the dangers of a total argument like logical necessity seem to outweigh the benefits. Such total thinking in absolutes (i.e. there is absolutely no party that could ever exist as a complex adaptive system) is surely one of those things, like the state, that we have to learn to do politics, and political theory, without. Such thinking forecloses the possible; it chokes off life with regulating axioms. I think we have to make a case that is harder to make: in the wake of Stalinism and Maoism, the party is not a road we want to walk, even though it is possible that a party might come to exist that would be function as a complex adaptive system. We have to say that even if such a party is possible, the weight of experience (an experience we have to continually re-narrate, apparently) teaches us overwhelmingly that we should avoid that option like the plague, that if we want to pursue complex adaptive systems, the party is an awful way to do it. The fact that such a sentence is almost self-evident should be enough rhetorical ammunition to shout down the apologists and move forward with something much more sane.
I also like your equation of anarchism and communism, and would just add that we should tie democracy in with that equation as well, in the way the Italians have been doing: the horizon we aim at is a democratic horizon as well as a communist or an anarchist one. That way, we need not cede the power of democracy to the liberal democrats, and see democracy as an obstacle or diversion, the way Dean does. Rather we can recapture it, we can insist democracy is absolutely integral to what we want as communists or anarchists (because it is).
February 6, 2013 at 12:35 am
I know someone who started a company, and they got to a point where they had to say “either we will spend a significant amount of time trying to build a new funding stream, possibly ending our project’s integrity, or this company dies in 3 months time”, this stand was noble, and meant they did good work for three months, he now works in a very dubious company that weakened it’s own principles to survive.
Continuous generation of a system of identification cannot be removed from the equation, but my idea is of a party that constantly turns itself inside out: It constantly looks within itself for the means of it’s own transformation into a more effective and different party with the same agenda, shifting because of it’s overlaps with other parts of the world.
You know how socialist parties always seem to appear with slightly different names? What if that was the actual purpose of a party, to birth a more effective successor that can deal with the current situation?
All the basic principles of it’s identification would be discarded, except for it’s purpose and it’s desire to build it’s successor.
Getting that right is vital, in that they would be expected to constantly build new daughter movements in other situations, focusing on radicalisation towards anarchic justice before commitment to any specific program. Building in new places rather than just constantly redecorating the hall would be vital. A scientific discussion group seeks to enable gardeners for anarchism, and they then seek to transform a newspaper.
Does this end as a chain of sacrificial support, with each part withering away as it does it’s job? Does it end up as an ecosystem of mutual support? Probably mostly the former, and maybe withering too fast, but I like the idea of a group that constantly seeks to move the front on to a different form.
February 2, 2014 at 6:31 pm
[…] This “weaker” anarchist ethos which pertains, in my view, to the notion of identity and identification when it comes to structural organization that is found wanting in communist-structured organizations. I think that Levi Bryant, on this subject in particular, is more or less correct in repeatedly touching upon this problem (see here). […]