A spurned necklace

It’s the oldest trick in the book. You create the illusion of terror, then

you get credit for stamping it out; you get funds, you get power. And that’s

exactly what’s going on.

Jonathan Franzen, The Twenty-Seventh City

What is it that joins us together? Gifts, obligations. Things like necklaces, like the baubles the Portuguese traded on the Gold Coast for gold, and later, for slaves. Those same gifts they couldn’t understand – why exchange baubles for gold, precious gold, those same gifts that later led them to ask: why risk like and limb for yellow metals, for little yellow baubles?

Gifts always go wrong. They arrive too late, we don’t understand their importance, they are reciprocated in the wrong way: philosophers call it the problem of other minds. This space between gifts is the space where the comic emerges, the comic, and the tragic.

This is the story of one of those spaces.

It starts with being late, and jumping off a mutatu because someone wants to change the meeting place. I was in the centre of town, the long street that led to the Alliance Français extended before me, and I rushed there, ignoring the bustle around me; my mind was anywhere except where I was. Until I get to a throng of people lining the side of the road, centred around a point on the sidewalk that was invisible to me because of the weight of bodies making a small semi-circle against the railings of the private car park. But, as I mentioned, I was oblivious – I pushed through until I found myself in space, wide open empty space in the middle of the crowd.

He was lying on the street, his body stretched out like a line drawing from a crime scene in an American detective series. Surrounded by cartoon quantities of blood, which cascaded down his face, which, in turn, had been distended and changed until, when following the lines of his face, you moved through unexpected contours, and encountered the deep seated unease produced by a face that had a nose that is not where it should be.

My first thought: should I help him? My second, given the huge crowd, I am sure someone is already helping. Car accident, I thought, or maybe a drunkard who fell down. The proximity to the crowd, to all those bodies pushing against me, absolved any responsibility I might have felt: someone must be helping him, from all those people watching, and as a part of the crowd, I am helping him too. What else was the crowd there for, after all, if not to help him?

As I moved on, passing the private car park, I turned, and saw, through the fence, the injured man struggle to get up. My sense of guilt at not stopping was now fully assuaged, he stood up, started moving – he isn’t dead. Then the crowd bayed. A man moved from the centre of the crowd into the empty space, brick in arm, and, from a distance of about 30cm, launched it straight at the man’s face, who promptly fell back onto the ground. The crowd bayed louder, enjoying the discharge, feeling its purpose.

I was stupefied, and everything that should have been obvious came slowly. Anafanya nini? I asked the grinning security guard next to me, what did he do? He is a thief, the guard replied, he was caught trying to steal a wallet from a woman, doesn’t this happen in your country? Inexplicably, I launch into Baccaria; how, here does the punishment fit the crime?

As if punishment has ever had much to do with the crime.

As I wandered around around talking to people, our thief would occasionally get up, to be stoned again. He seemed complicit in the scene – as if to move too much, he would excite the crowd, and the stoning would intensify, but to move too little would invite the crowd’s boredom, and the need to discharge their raison d’être, and possibly his death. Why else would he try to get up? Knowing full well what would happen.

Talking to people, the story they told was not an unexpected one. If they called the police, then he would simply go to the station to be released – unless the robbed woman was rich, the police had no incentive to put people through a massively overworked court and prison system. In any case, he would soon be released – and what type of lesson would that be for other thieves? Here, they say, we are setting them an example. Why don’t they work? Life is hard for us as well, and we continue, we do not steal: they should struggle as we struggle.

My mind was taken back to a conversation that I had with an ascari, a security guard, the night before. I had pointed out the irony of the rich hiring poor people from the slums to work as security guards to protect the rich against, well, poor people from the slums. “Eh, sawa, but thieving is work too.” Only difference, he told me, is that thieves are stupid, they get caught, and that is the only time one calls them a thief. Politicians evidently aren’t – in the run up to the election, the Minister of the Interior has announced a shoot-to-kill policy against criminals.

This policy had resulted in revealing an older connection that we have largely effaced in the west. A couple of months ago, someone evidently had the idea, high up in government, of making an example, setting the public mind at rest. Simon Matheri, a hired gun for other, more well connected politicians thieves, was declared Public Enemy No. 1.

He was a nobody, it was striking that each robbery he was supposed to have been involved in relied on inside connections – to banks, to private houses – that only someone who lived in Karen, the rich gilded enclave, and not Kibera, the largest slum in Africa that is next door, could have.

That, obviously, had little effect on the shambolic PR exercise that followed. Week after week, it was announced Simon Matheri had been shot – only to turn out that the police had in fact shot someone else, who was not Simon Matheri, but only looked like him, and was in fact a security guard, or factory hand, who had been in the wrong place. The effect snowballed – ‘Simon Matheris’ were being lynched all over the place. In the witch-hunts of days gone by, it was the rich who were killed – a commentary on illegitimate power; witches, like the powerful, rely on eating others, extracting their lifeblood. But here was a witch hunt against a man who was poor, by the poor.

The Baiting Crowd, Canetti calls it. The goal is clear, and everyone wants to join in – there is no risk, and every blow, every minor slight accumulated in the day, can be discharged into the hapless victim. “There is, too, another factor which must be remembered. The threat of death hangs over all men and, however disguised it may be, and even if it is sometimes forgotten, it affects them all the time and creates in them a need to deflect death onto others.” Not just death, but poverty, and the ease with which poverty may turn into being a hired gun. In those lynchings, that spread like wildfire around Nairobi, what poverty can make you do was put on a pedestal, and hung up, so that the neck and the poverty became detached from the people. All those frailties and failures we all experience can be pushed onto this one man. Simon Matheri. But he was not enough – there was not enough of this one man to go around. Indeed, he could not be found. So everyone became potential Simon Matheris, and the violence spread: the poor against themselves, in a quest to banish poverty.

One of the interesting things about this is that it involves two crowds. The baiting crowd, and the crowd of the newspaper. People used to travel for hours to see executions – to allow their death to be banished in the death of another, to be equal, for just a moment, with everyone in the crowd, to know that the irreversible law of the state will be carried out. Today, we are disgusted at collective killings – and yet, vicariously, we live them in the safety of our homes, in the newspaper, and now, on television. “One is tempted to say that it is the most despicable and, at the same time, most stable form of a crowd. Since it does not have to assemble, it escapes disintegration; variety is catered for by the daily re-appearance of the newspapers.” These are the newspapers Hegel thought would produce national consciousness – and here in Kenya, we see that close link to the crowd that Canetti talks about. Matheris were being hung everywhere, the obsession of the newspapers turned into the obsession of the crowd, and the more killing there was, the more people drew strength from Simon Matheris, dying for us all over the country.

In the crowd around our thief, they drew strength from each other, from the proximity of the massed bodies; even those who did not throw a stone could feel a part of it, simply by being there.

I felt complicit. Where were the police? Finally, a security guard walked up, and then my relief turned to horror as he walked straight up to him the thief, and then onto him, stamping down repeatedly on his neck. As I looked on (vicariously? aghast?), a man started to roll up a rubber tyre up to the thief.

A necklace. Not that it matters, but my body went cold all over.

Freetown, Sierra Leone, 1998. ECOMOG, the Economic Organisation of West African States Monitoring Group (the longer and more official the acronym, the more horrible the crime, is a good general rule – think of the UNHCR) has retaken Freetown from the AFRC junta. ECOMOG is composed of Nigerian soldiers, supporting the Kabbah government, which, in a bizarre turn of events, have allied itself with Mende tribal militias against the national army, the AFRC, who have allied themselves with the rebels.

The Nigerians search the town for anyone who might be a rebel. Like a good detective, guilt was a matter of tracing in the everyday the hand of the sacred. Rough skin on the fingers (rough skin! In a city of refugee farmers) was indisputable evidence that you were a rebel. Everyone I spoke to in Freetown remembers what the EU-funded Monitoring Group did next. A rubber tyre, rather like the one we see rolling towards our thief, was placed around the ‘rebel’s’ neck, petrol was poured onto it, and it was set on fire – A nice bright necklace.

A have a set of recordings of the stories of the Monitoring Group I don’t listen to.

And here we were again, the tyre coming up to our thief. And as it came, this gift for the thief who had disturbed the order of public property, the rightful reciprocity of rich and poor, as it came, the police arrived.

The man I was standing next to fell around laughing. “They have come too early – look at their faces.” And it was true, the police had evidently made a mistake, they looked angry, put out, as if stood up on a prom date. They were out of place. The man next to me explained that the police had been waiting around the corner, and that normally they come after the crowd disperses and they pick up the body for the morgue. But someone had gave them the wrong information, they had come too early, and now they found themselves having to protect the criminal from the crowd.

“It would have been better that he died. Now he will never forget.” What do you mean? You mean he will come looking for revenge when, if, he gets out of hospital. The man’s grasp of human psychology was superior to mine. “No, he cannot even remember the faces of those who beat him. But he will never forget that he was beaten – it will always be lodged him, and he will never stop trying to get it out of him. Better he died.”

The tyre lay in the middle of the road – the man rolling it had run off when the police came, and it looked, banal – eventually a policeman took it out of the road, as if to banish from its memory the idea it might have been used for anything other than a car. Despite occasionally kicking our thief, the police tugged him away from the crowd and guarded him, AK-47’s at the ready (though I am sure they would have rather run than turn them on the crowd), until the ambulance came. Two hours later, when I returned to the scene, he was still there. Perhaps the ambulance was also choosing its time to come, life’s gift, like that of the necklace, always too late, misunderstood,. Comic.

Continuation

Continuity

Alfred has just woken up. It is perhaps 6am, the rocks broken yesterday for sale on the street lie in a pile at his feet, the small shack from which he sells weed it located just to the left of the picture. He has no customers yet.

(c) Joshua Craze. 2004. Waiting. Freetown, Sierra Leone.

This is an image of war.

We are not used to associating wars with such images: with moments of trade, with faces in the morning.

The civil war in Sierra Leone, in which Alfred was a combatant, is more easily associated with images of astonishing violence.

These images accompany texts that talk of new wars, where once states waged wars, it is claimed, now people do, and these wars cannot be understood on the same terms as wars between states. On the contrary, by considering one of the axioms of Clausewitz’ On War[1], this essay will demonstrate that the uncertain relationship between politics and war we find in Sierra Leone[2], is a relationship already present in the thought of Clausewitz.

Contemporary conflict is not “new” – there are not, despite Mary Kaldor’s[3] insistence, new wars and old wars. Far from being at a disjuncture with wars of state, the logic of war[4] we find in Clausewitz finds its completion in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone is not a “failed state”, nor the civil war a “non-political war”; civil war was the culmination of a political process, as the Sierra Leonean state was the culmination of a process of state formation.

Let us stop holding innocent ideal against distorted realisation.

I. The image of violence.

Violence separates itself out from everyday life – it demands an explanation on its own terms, far away from where we are now. The words that normally pass for an explanation include “barbaric”, and “horrible.” So it is that our war photographers[5] take images of dying troops, maimed victims, cities lit up by tracer fire. In these photographs, the time of war is a time of violence, of frenetic action; it is impossible to think of stillness, of moments of waiting, of moments of everyday life hidden among the explosions.

These images make clear the extent to which 19^th century notions of warfare still grip our imagination: the idea of war as a proper time, fought between two armies, on behalf of two kings, disengaged from the civilian world, finds its 21^st century parallel in these photos of unimaginable violence separated out from the world of waiting to sell weed.

This continuity would be unsurprising if it were not for the fact that the journalism that accompanies these photographs so insistently denies any continuity between contemporary conflict and the wars of the past. Contemporary conflict is indeterminate: at what point, after how many years, do we say that what happens in Somalia is no longer an exceptional war, but the norm? It is based on religion, or tribalism, apparently[6], rather than being aligned with the political wars of the 20^th century. The latter are created by states acting on the basis of rational political goals: today we have irrational civilians, acting erratically, often not at the behest of a state.

The question of continuity is crucial here. The combined effect of such journalism, and such photographs, is to make violence appear as an absolute disjuncture from social life – irrational, barbaric, and, in any event, unthinkable. Yet, at the same time, this discourse makes it continuous with tribal or religious practice: it denies it a status as a war, as politics pursued by other means. This play of disjuncture and continuity ensures a double removal. When we pick up the New York Times or the Guardian, we see violence represented as something irrational – separated out from our lives – and at the same time, continuous with their lives. In any event, it should be clear, it is not our concern.

II. The logic of complementarity

One of the principle reasons that journalists are able to evoke an absolute disjuncture between contemporary conflicts such as Sierra Leone and previous patterns of warfare is the apparent absence of state actors. Sierra Leone saw an indeterminable conflict between proliferating groups of actors that had relationships to, but were not identical with, state actors. It is these state actors that form our understanding of what war is.

In an inheritance from Roman law, throughout the breadth of political theory, from Hobbes to Schmitt, there is still a great emphasis on sovereign states being considered moral persons, and as such, relationships between them should be conducted with comitas (courtesy) and with jus (probity)[7].

On the basis of these relationships of complementarity, a temporality of war is established. Benjamin notes the importance of this relationship in the Critique of Violence:

Yet it is striking that even – or, rather, precisely – in primitive conditions that scarcely know the beginnings of constitutional relations, and even in cases where the victor has established himself in invulnerable possession, a peace ceremony is entirely necessary[8].

At the end of the war: the peace ceremony. What has changed through violence (me acquiring your land by force), is now sanctified by a new law. This law makes the foundational violence of the law separate from the legal situation (to take back the land would be illegal), and yet continuity is assured; the grammar of war accomplished, we pass over into the logic of politics.

Violence, and its state representative, war, have always had this law-making power. What makes war between states as moral people different is that the rhythm of the war has been assured from the start. As much as the end of the war is followed by the peace ceremony, the beginning of war, for the modern state, is preceded by the declaration of war. As Schmitt details in The Nomos of the Earth[9], it is remarkable how utterly condemned the surprise attack is in the 19^th century. As much as war has a law making power then, this power is constrained in the theory of the state by a set of pre-established laws that seek to legally limit the way in which war is carried out.

Following the end of the Second World War, however, the European powers were forced to engage in a seemingly very different type of conflict.

Here.

(c) Robert Capa. Near Namdinh.May 12, 1954.

It is 1954. We are in Indochina. In the background, a French military convoy in the background roars through to Doia Tan. It certainly has a sense of time: places to get to, missions to be accomplished. In the foreground, a man ploughs a field. He also has a sense of time: the time the rice should be planted, fertilised[10]. These two senses of time are absolutely incommensurable[11]: there is no logic of complementarity here. And with it, no clearly defined start nor finish to the war.

The time between the declaration and the peace ceremony is the time of war. For Clausewitz, the time of war is decided by politics, and ended by politics.

The war in Sierra Leone began in silence. There was no declaration before the collection of Burkinabe, Liberian and Sierra Leonean men crossed the Liberian border into Kailhoun province. There was no peace ceremony at the end.

In On War, Clausewitz tries desperately to keep politics separate from war – to make sure that the grammar of war (its demands, its structural necessities) did not overwhelm the logic of politics, and result in an absolute war which ended in complete destruction. The time of war announced by peace treaties and declarations is one way of assuring its divide from the rest of life. But if there are no treaties? And if the treaties, even in Clausewitz, were not effective?

We see precisely this absence of a specific temporality to war in Sierra Leone. Alfred, whose story began this essay, fought during the war, changed sides with abandon, gave up, became a drug dealer, a diamond miner, went back to war, and gave up again: the structures of the war were not separated out from everyday life, they were entrenched within it. There was no time of proper engagement, of two armies agreeing to do battle away from civilians, and thus, in the depiction of the international media, correspondingly no politics.

What this essay will now suggest, however, is that this not simply a question of contemporary conflict – the indetermination which makes separating war from life impossible is not a result of globalisation, or the rise of non-state actors. It is prefigured in the theory of the state of the 19^th century.

III. The indetermination of a relation

War is a question of continuity. But a continuity of what, precisely? The term finds itself firmly established in Clausewitz’s most famous proposition in On War[12]: “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” This proposition actually occurs twice in On War, and in each case it refers to a different object. We must here not forget that On War is an unfinished text, that Clausewitz wanted to rewrite the book according to something that occurred to him only half way through, that throughout the text there is evidence of a constant battle between war and politics, but a battle which shifts its contours, and by the end has come to assume a completely different meaning, and that, finally, and most importantly, this proposition is merely one of what Balibar[13] calls the four axiomatics of the text, and that, for reasons of space, by taking only these one axioms, I am today being unjust to Clausewitz.

In book I, we find the proposition that war is a way to continue politics with other means. The assumption here is that politics is normally carried out by non-violent means[14], and that it is the right of the state to pursue politics through violent means when these normal means are insufficient. It is important to note, for Clausewitz, it is the state that is allowed to act, and the state is a unity between people, nation and army. These means can then be codified in proper relations.

Yet right away, Clausewitz acknowledges, the means of war – violence – and, crucially, the means of these means (patriotism, the institution of the military) change politics; what is initially set out to be a means employed by politics, becomes something which turns back on politics, makes demands of it, effects it in manifold ways. So while initially we have the formulation that the time of war is but a particular time of politics (a time of politics carried out in a particular way), already in book I, Clausewitz finds time doubling back on itself; the time of politics becoming, already, the time of war. For instance, to give a modern example of the time of politics that Clausewitz would not have been comfortable with, in an election, we already find the time of war prefigured in the need to instil a certain sense of patriotism, in the need to plan to give sufficient funds to the military.

Ultimately, the law-making power of violence (the ability to give violence a continuity that retroactively modifies the conditions of its own founding) can be seen in the constant threat that the military can take over; that the time of politics simply becomes an extension of war. History is littered with examples, but in case we think that this is so far from our situation today, the example[15] of Turkey, a modern European nation where the military has launched four coup d’états since 1960[16], should suffice. The very possibility of war, the necessity of preparing for war, reveals here the violent basis of state power, and the way in which what is initially a means to be employed by the state ends up modifying the logic of politics itself, whereby politics becomes the preparation for war.

By the end of On War, the unease about the relationship of war to politics has expressed itself in a more striking formulation of the proposition. In book VIII, the emphasis is placed on the idea that war is “nothing else but the continuation of politics by other means”. Here, war is no longer an option pursued by political actors when non-violent political means are no longer sufficient[17], instead, it is one among many options. This does not resolve the tension outlined for Clausewitz’ first formulation, but merely displaces it.

First of all, it is entirely ambiguous whether this is descriptive or a prescriptive: is the grammar of war merely the continuation of a political logic (always and in all cases), or, is it the case that it functions as a warning: the violent means of war are only legitimate insofar as they follow a political logic, and do not subvert the logic of the political. To place these doubts back inside our argument: it is not resolved whether the time of war is pursued according to the time of politics (when things should be done, in proper time, according to politics) or whether the time of war is always separate from the time of politics (if the decisions of battle never run according to the priorities of politicians) but necessarily be subordinate to it in order to be legitimate – to be accorded legitimacy afterwards, or retroactively.

IV. The time of peace is the time of war

What Clausewitz feared most was what he called absolute war – where the grammar of war triumphed over political concerns and both sides ended up destroying themselves. What he didn’t anticipate, but what his entire work seems a preparatory warning against, was total war. Instead of war continuing on its own path, and overcoming politics in the proper time of war (that initially declared by politics), what we saw during the 20^th century was war becoming the total commitment of politics: war ceased to be the commitment of states when non-violent means no longer worked, it became a commitment of all people, not simply states or armies. The Schmitt who wrote State, Movement, People[18], reverses Clausewitz, and claims politics should be placed in the cause of war. However, he does so only to the extent that war emerges as a possibility to return to an autonomous political sphere.

In several respects, contemporary conflict is structurally similar to the theory of total war: it involves every element of society, the relationship between politics and war is reversed. What is missing is the state, precisely. Yet, if we were to look closely at the war in Sierra Leone, we would find it is the legacy of a particular history of state formation: Chabal and Daloz[19], in particular, have extensively documented the extent to which seemingly failed states are actually the result of conscious choices by elites to put resources into informal networks rather than Weberian bureaucratic structures, largely as a result of the states insertion into an inter-national environment in a marginal position.

The endless war we seemingly see in Africa, and that is not without parallel in the war on terror (like the war in Sierra Leone, this is a war without a proper sense of time, and, correlatively, it is a war without proper subjects), is prefigured by the inability to distinguish between war and politics in Clausewitz’ text.

What is left ambiguous in Clausewitz, is what precisely war is. It is, one notes, primarily defined negatively – as not being political (and correlatively non-violent). Yet given, as Benjamin has shown, the violent character of politics, and of the laws on which it is founded, we cannot be happy with such a definition of war (as the absence of politics, or of violent means employed by politics).

In wars between states, legal theorists tell us, we have different, contradictory conditions. “The possibility of military law rests on exactly the same objective contradiction in the legal situation as does that of strike law – namely, on the fact that legal subjects sanction violence whose ends remain for the sanctioners natural ends, and can therefore come into conflict with their own legal or natural ends.[20]”

It is precisely in this contradiction that war as a time emerges. What happens in war? Troops move from place to place, they receive instructions – what is efficient and rational for them, given the circumstances, may not be efficient or rational for political actors worried about public relations back home. This is one time of war. It is, one should already note: a time already played at, already present, in peacetime: in practices and drills, in the ritualised launching of nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan. Peace here becomes the playing out of the forces that sustain it.

Even in these exercises, other senses of time emerge: the time of waiting, the traders who make their money: in World War Two it was selling cigarettes, in the Green Zone of Baghdad today, it is KFC franchises, for Alfred, in the story that began this essay, it is selling weed.

There is the boredom of the troops; the hours spent waiting in strange places – trenches in a bygone era, today; shells of mosques. War cannot be the elimination of these senses of time: they are always present – it is indeed a framing of them, occurring in an ambiguously legal space which relies on two key elements: first, a beginning and a possible ending – a condition that we have seen does not pertain to Sierra Leone, but equally, cannot be ensured by Clausewitz, for it is a condition that relies on the separation of politics from war, whereas we are here concerned with elucidating war as a zone as such, and not in relation to politics. Second, it relies on a logic of complementarity: two armies fighting each other. It does not matter if there are more than two sides, as long as the logic continues; national armies, in a legally pre-defined space, fighting a war.

We have seen this space collapses in Clausewitz, we have seen this space collapse in Sierra Leone. What is left is not simply war, but the absence of a political sphere outside of private interests. War becomes merely a framing device to justify the suspension of a legal space founded on elements which do not pertain to the contemporary situation.

Bibliography

Balibar, Etienne. On Clausewitz. Public Lecture. Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities, Northwestern University, Evanston, May 8, 2006.

Benjamin, Walter. 1921. Critique of Violence. In Benjamin, Walter. 1996: Selected Writings. Volume One: 1913-1926. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Von Clausewitz, Carl. 1873 [1832]. On War. N Trübner: London.

Chabal, Patrick & Daloz, Jean-Pascal. 1999: Africa works: disorder as a political instrument. Indiana: Indiana University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. 1988. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Continuum Press.

Fanon, Frantz. 2001. The Wreteched of the Earth. Penguin: London.

Kaldor, Mary. 1999. New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era. Cambridge: Polity

Kaplan, Robert. 1994. The Coming Anarchy. The Atlantic Monthly. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/foreign/anarchy.htm. Accessed 6/2/2004.

Manela, Erez. 2008.The Wilsonian Moment: Self-determination and the International Origins of Anti-Colonial Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Salt, Justin. 1999: Turkey’s military ‘democracy’. Current History. Vol. 98, pp.72-78

Schmitt, Carl. 2003 [1974]. The Nomos of the Earth: in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. London: Telos Pres

Schmitt, Carl. 2001 [1933]. State, Movement, People. Washington: Plutarch Press.

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[1] Von Clausewitz, Carl. 1873 [1832]. On War. N Trübner: London. Henceforth OW.

[2] The case of Sierra Leone is taken as exemplary. The results would surely differ if we took Iraq, Lebanon or Somalia. However, despite these cases being heterogeneous, there is sufficient structural similarity – in the constitution of non-state bodies as military actors, for example – to think that the conclusions drawn from reading Clausewitz in Sierra Leone have a wider pertinence. Regardless, given a lack of space, I am unable to draw on a more comparativist perspective.

[3] Kaldor, Mary. 1999. New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era. Cambridge: Polity.

[4] Two notes should be made here. Clausewitz does not, purposefully speak of the logic of war, but a grammar of war. Logic is reserved for politics, which occasionally employs the grammar of war. The failure of Clausewitz’ project would be for war to acquire a logic of its own. The use of the term “logic of war” here implies precisely that. This point will be developed at length in the rest of the paper. Further, as there is a danger in using Sierra Leone to stand in for contemporary conflict, there is an equal danger in asking a reading of one axiom from Clausewitz to stand in for European political theory of war. Neither name is appropriate to the object. This paper employs a reading of Clausewitz to illuminate certain continuities between his concerns with 19^th century warfare between states and civil war in Sierra Leone. If there are broader conclusions to be drawn about the world we live in today is left for the reader to decide.

[5] An excellent example of this type of image (excellent in both its exemplary nature and its photographic quality) is Battlespace, an exhibition of photographs from Iraq and Afghanistan made by the November Eleven collective. It is available at http://www.battlespaceonline.org/. Accessed 17/4/2008.

[6] Such depictions are a journalistic commonplace. Exemplary in this regard is the neo-Malthusian enthusiasm of Kaplan, Robert. 1994. The Coming Anarchy. The Atlantic Monthly. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/foreign/anarchy.htm. Accessed 6/2/2004.

[7] See Schmitt, Carl. 2003 [1974]. The Nomos of the Earth: in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. London: Telos Press. p.143. Henceforth NE.

[8] Walter Benjamin. 1921. Critique of Violence. In Benjamin, Walter. 1996: Selected Writings. Volume One: 1913-1926. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. p.240. Henceforth CV.

[9]NE.

[10] Perhaps, years earlier, in 1919, his time was also that of Ho Chi Minh, who, convinced that now was “their time”, pressed the case for Vietnamese self-determination to Woodrow Wilson, who had arrived in Paris with a plan to make the world “safe for democracy.” Self-determination, for Wilson, always took place in a framework of imperialism, and Minh’s pleas fell on deaf ears. The time announced by the end of colonialism was not that of equal parties (who would then also fight equal wars), but of an unending war, where the logic of politics and the grammar of war could no longer be disentangled. See, Manela, Erez. 2008.The Wilsonian Moment: Self-determination and the International Origins of Anti-Colonial Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[11] In Fanon’s words: “The Zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers. The two zones are opposed. But not in the services of a higher unity.” This absolutely un-dialectical schema would see the impossibility of a proper combat between the two sides. See Fanon, Frantz. 2001. The Wreteched of the Earth. Penguin: London. p.38.

[12] OW:15

[13] Etienne Balibar. On Clausewitz. Public Lecture. Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities, Northwestern University, Evanston, May 8, 2006.

[14] Though this is unremarked on in the scholarship, the extent to which Benjamin relies on a reading of On War in the Critique of Violence becomes clear through the particular way he uses the word means, and his surprisingly identical identification of diplomacy as a non-violent means, in the critique of violence.

[15] The exemplary analysis of the relationship between war and state power is 1227: Treatise on Nomadology:-The War Machine, in Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. 1988. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Continuum Press. pp.351-424.

[16] See, for instance. Salt, Justin. 1999: Turkey’s military ‘democracy’. Current History. Vol. 98, pp.72-78.

[17] In this formulation, one could call war the “after-life of politics”; the politics pursued at the end of politics. Such a name would indicate the dangerous, contradictory character of such a formulation.

[18] Schmitt, Carl. 2001 [1933]. State, Movement, People. Washington: Plutarch press. This Schmitt should be distinguished from the Carl Schmitt of later works, who works through the contradictions of the position he takes here.

[19] Patrick Chabal & Jean-Pascal Daloz. 1999: Africa works: disorder as a political instrument. Indiana: Indiana University Press.

[20] CV:240.

Archive Fever

To read, as if for the first time.

A review of Archive Fever – Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art – International Center of Photography, New York. January 18- May 4 2008.

A few months ago messages went around the internet, saying things like “The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae.”

In comparison to the way we scan web pages or typed print, reading handwritten pages in an archive is a curiously intimate experience. It is not just that often, such as in the colonial records from Mathari mental hospital shown in the photograph below, the English used is archaic, it is also that reading handwriting far removed from you in space and time proves oddly difficult. In the records I was looking at, the scrawled pen of the doctors on the reports of Mau-Mau insurgents became oddly personal. I grew to recognise the way certain f’s curled, began searching for deviations in handwriting, in the sense of the records. It was as if I was reading for the first time, recognising that actually, none of the words made sense, and the struggle for comprehension – of a different time, of a different person – had to begin anew.

The difficulty in understanding the handwriting of a colonial doctor fifty years points to a difficulty with the archive that does not lessen if the archive in question is composed of images, videos, or the printed word. In each case, there is a handwriting; a subjectivity in the archive that cannot be understood simply in terms of the formal rules in which the archive is embedded.

The archive’s resistance to itself is one of the principle focuses of Okwui Enwezor’s latest exhibition. As you descend into the mazy warren of rooms beneath the International Center for Photography, one is immediately confronted by Christian Boltanski’s Lessons of Darkness: Archives: Detective. A series of boxes, each with a picture on the front: the context of the images suggests that these are the mug-shots of criminals – the left over case files of a tired policeman. In fact, we have no way of knowing if these images are fictional: those of the victim of a crime, those of the criminal, or just snapshots of random people, arranged in such a way as to depict them as criminals.

Let us try a brief thought experiment. I construct a fictional person: find a possible name, make sure he or she has a believable history of social services payments, insert a record of these payments into the relevant government records, and ensure our fictional character worked for a conveniently defunct organisation with few other employees. It is perfectly possible to create a ‘real’ archival person in such a fashion: because we construct our character in terms of the rules of the archive, he is not disprovable within the domain of the archive itself. These rules include both the formal rules, such as where a signature should be placed on a document, but equally the informal forms of life present in the archive: we should ensure that our fictional character has a nice median income as taken as an average of the archive, so as not to arouse suspicion.

Now imagine an archive where every single character is fictional.

This is actually the case of every archive. For in our entirely fictional archive, all we could ever do – without correlation from outside the archive – is prove that each record was faulty, contained contradictions to other records, without ever proving the fiction of the entire archive.

Many of the exhibits in Archive Fever play with these notions, exploring the sense in which the archive is a fiction of its own – in a more academic language, that recalls the Foucault of The Order of Things, we would say that the archive is the systematisation of its own enunciability.

The artist here, at least intuitively, works in a similar manner to the historian. As Carlo Ginzburg sets out in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, the historian searches the archive, not for confirmation of what is already known, but for clues; glimpses of the past that rupture our expected sense of history. Such is the case with Andy Warhol’s Race Riot (c.a.1963), a series of silkscreen paintings made from Charles Moore’s photographic essays for Life magazine of the riots in Alabama.

In the original image, the violence is arresting: the intensity of the image focuses on the dog, the bite: the moment of contact. In the silkscreen version, the distinctions leak away; the dog is as white as the background, the immediate violence recedes into an abstract geometry of white and black. Despite himself, Warhol produces an exemplary Marxist artwork, where the moment of violence is reworked in terms of its structural conditions. The violence of the police dog biting the protestor is unsettling, Race Riot suggests, not because of the immediate violence suggested by the archival image, but because this violence is normal, part of a broader political economy of structural and racial violence that endures long after the wound of the bite has faded. The canvas here is absolutely incommensurable with its background

(the photograph, the context in Alabama) – it opens up a space between the photograph and its archival meaning that allows us to look at our history again in a new light.

Race Riot is perhaps the purest example of this sort of artistic practice in Archive Fever, but other artworks function in an analogous fashion, Glenn Ligon’s reworking of Mapplethorpe’s images of black men in the The Black Book opening up a space where we can destabilise the underlying eroticism of the images. Constantly, the artworks test the rules of the archive, opening up new meanings, destabilising others, creating fictions that function as truths: both within the system of the archive, and in those wonderful moments, such as in Race Riot, where they break through the truth of the archive to reveal the structural inequality revealed behind the rules of the archive, that in this case present a moment of violence as singular, rather than embedded within a broader system of racial discrimination.

Individual works are successful in doing this, but as a whole, the exhibition functions as a collection of parts. Too many works, such as Hans-Peter Feldmann’s collection of front pages from around the world on 9/12/2001, are merely surface reflections of the phenomenon they mean to explore. In Feldmann’s case, the collection demonstrates a powerful proof that history has become merely the manifestation of its own spectacle, but allows us no way to puncture this, to move through this in the powerful way Race Riot allows for the events of Alabama.

More important than the failure of individual works however, is that the exhibition offers no serious self-criticism. It is astonishing that an exhibition that deals with the archive – with the arranging and ordering of material – offers no thought on how the art world arranges its own materials. Such a reflection should include on how such work came to be given a (fictional) coherency in the exhibit, how, for instance, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ piece has now moved through three exhibitions (at least) to inhabit the space at the International Center for Photography. On the sign at the beginning of the exhibition, Enwezor claims to be constructing a meta-commentary on the archive. To do so properly would have meant analysing the process of archive construct in the exhibit itself; this would have allowed the works to live together, rather than seeming to be a collection of parts.

Mal d’archive

Thankfully, the archive offers a model for understanding more than simply the rules of its own creation. That is does so is suggested by the title, Archive Fever, a silent homage to Derrida’s book Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (the book is mentioned nowhere in the exhibit, though if you look hard on the website, you can find one mention of Derrida’s name).

While I would not want to criticise Eric Prenowitz valiant translation, the original French title, Mal d’archive, is much more suggestive that the phrase Archive Fever would allow. The mal of the title suggests not simply fever, but illness, and also, something malicious: tu me fais mal. There are at least three mal’s suggested by Derrida’s title.

There is the feeling of finding something unpleasant in the archive – the discovery, for instance, of someone’s hidden Nazi past, or of a letter your lover wrote to his mistress. Mal d’archive – something that burns us if we read it. Exemplary of this sense of the archive is Anri Sala’s video work Intervista (1998). A detective story of Communist Albania, it charts Anri Sala as he struggles to decode a lost video of his mother at a Communist party meeting, the lip reader he employs at the end to give life to her words is the paradigmatic example of the archive’s burning power.

Why do we look, if this is what we will find? The incessant compulsion we have to look through our own records, to desperately search for something that we know will cause us pain, is one if fevers of the archive to which Derrida’s title alludes. It is perhaps closest to Derrida’s own understanding of the archive as not the construction of a system, but its disjuncture with itself; the archive occurring at the breakdown of memory, when we realise the archive for what it is, a fiction constructed according to rules of which we are only dimly aware.

Aware, however, we are, and this dissatisfaction with our own memories conditions our search for their disruption. Ilán Lieberman’s uses of the archive in his work Niño Perdido (Lost Child, 2006–7) is a poignant reflection on this search. His pain-staking drawings of photographs of missing children function as pre-obituaries. Whereas the archival photographs of the children function to present an absence, and in so doing makes this absence only more apparent (the double death of the photograph), his drawings mark a dissatisfaction with the archive, a search for life in those photographs that mark an endless mourning for what is absent. In so doing, they also work as a commentary on the nature of the photograph itself. The photographic moment, as commentators from Barthes to Sontag have remarked, is always dead, lost, and what we have, when we hold the photograph in our hands, is a small testament to this death. By redrawing the photographs of missing children, Lieberman adds a density to the images that denies the finitude of the moment, which asserts, against the mute equivalence of the archive, the hope of redemption.

Looking at his photographs reminded me of Afghan miniatures from the Timurid dynasty in Herat.

Each miniature was supposed to be an exact copy of those that had gone before it; the labour involved was painstaking and exact. So exact, that many miniaturists went blind, and it was only then, when they were thought to be apart from the temptations of innovation and the tricks of vision, that they could paint pure replicas and embody the essential truth of the work. Such refusal of the evident truth of the archive, and insistence on the work of time present in the artwork, is embodied in the quiet determination of Lieberman’s images.

The actual images from Afghanistan in the exhibition are perhaps the worst work on display. Fazal Sheikh’s photographs of Afghan refugees holding small portraits of young men are gestural images that left this reviewer with just one burning question: what strange obsession leads us to collect these images, to parade these private archives in public (at Sheikh has also done with images from Kenya, Somalia, Brazil, Sudan…the list is endless)

This is perhaps the most pressing sense of mal d’archive – not the pain the archive inflicts on us, nor the unsettling search for the disruption of the archive within itself, but the feverish making of the archive. What compels us to keep accumulating images and documents, images of images, documents about documents – to keep arranging and sorting the fragments of our memory?

The work of art distorts – it transforms materials that we think we know, that we classify and understand, and transports them to a singular place. The effacement of aura we see in the photograph does nothing to reduce this fundamental magic. The photograph opens up new horizons on what is shown on its surface just as the painting does for the material forms from which it is constructed. Given this rupturing effect of the artwork, one would expect an exhibition on the archive to attend to the question of our fanatical compulsion to store documents and images, arranging them in patterns: our search to give order to existence.

That the exhibition does not offer us a meditation on this is perhaps not surprising when we remember that it offers no commentary on its own archive – its practice of taking disparate materials and transforming them into yet another Enwezor exhibition. As a counterpoint to our story, I can offer only an image, and the brief poignant story that lies below it. In this story, the compulsive need of the Guatemalan police to preserve the documents that incriminate them stands in testament to the importance of questioning our compulsion to archive, and attests to the opportunity that Archive Fever missed. Mal d’archive, indeed.

The Future Never Arrives

On gesture in the world[1]

To Milwaukee, Racine, Southport, and Chicago. – We hail you by lightning as fair sisters of West. Time has been annihilated. Let no element of discord divide us. May your prosperity as heretofore be onward. What Morse has devised and Speed joined let no man put asunder.[2]

Time has been annihilated. As early as 1848, and the onset of the telegraph, came the claim that from now on, duration and distance will no longer exist. We could tell a history of modernism that charted the course of the world from this moment as one of greater and greater abstraction, as “all that is solid melts into air” (Marx:2002:48)[3]. Such a history would have globalisation as a further intensification of the process of modernism: rather than places, we have equivalences – as capitalism renders cultures exchangeable, different only within a prefigured system of value. Rather than the body and particular expressions, we have capital, circulating freely through fibre-optic cables.

Given this movement towards greater abstraction, Fig. I, a snapshot from a film made just over a hundred years after a telegram is sent announcing the annihilation of time, poses a quandary.

Antonioni’s depiction of modern alienation, L’Eclisse[4], centres on the bustle of the stock market in Rome. Here, at the centre of the capitalist universe, in the place, or the non-place, we expect to find the abstraction of money in its purest form; we find, instead, the gesture. Not simply the body at the heart of capitalism[5]: a particular gesture, singular to a place and a local economy of signification at odds with capital’s abstractive power.

In her ethnography of the stock markets in Chicago and London, Zaloom (2006:51-72) explains the gestural language of the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT). The hand is turned inwards to show a desire to buy, outwards, to sell. One to five is signalled as one might expect, 6-9 by turning the hand sideways. Zero is a closed fist. The figure of the man on the stock market (and it is almost always a man): he is not the globe, nor yet is he globalisation: he is in a world, a particular one, which denotes customs and conventions that have no simple relationship to capitalism – the conventions, for instance, of gestural communication, the customs of Italian, and indeed Roman, personal relations. Furthermore, all these customs and conventions should not be seen as being contrary to capitalism; rather, they emerge through it: only through the market: the gestures, only through state capitalism: the personal relations.

At the centre of capitalism, there is a flurry of arms. How we understand these gestures is the central problematic of this essay.

Figure I: Still from Antonioni, Michaelangelo. L’Eclisse (1962).

I. the world has disappeared

In hypermodernity, Augé claims (1995:75-116), people increasingly come to know the world through signs of things, rather than through things in themselves; through a small town and its signs for shops and tourist attractions, glimpsed from a motorway, rather than through the town itself. The world’s financial markets offer superficial confirmation of such a claim. In March 2004, for instance, out of the 51 million contracts sold at the CBOT, only 3% ended up in the delivery of a material good (Zaloom:97); in such a market signs – in this case, money – have an (almost)[6] entirely autonomous existence from the material goods to which they supposedly refer.

A narrative that sees the increasing prevalence of signs over what might once have been called use-value is common to many accounts of globalisation, Augé included. However, what is frequently occluded is the degree to which these narratives are continuous with what commentators like Georg Simmel believed was happening in modernity. In his celebrated essay, The Metropolis and Mental Life, Simmel (1971[1903]:324-339) sets out the distinction between village life, with its relationships based on emotion, and the rational life of the city:

All emotional relationships between persons rest on their individuality, whereas intellectual relationships deal with persons as with numbers, that is – as with elements which, in themselves, are indifferent, but which are of interest only insofar as they offer something objectively perceivable (ibid:326).

For Simmel, the intensification of stimulus in the city, combined with the presence of strangers, means people increasingly dealt with each other as abstract and equivalent categories.

In Simmel, money provides the means by which people are abstracted from themselves. In Augé, money is replaced by the notion of sign, but the process remains identical. For instance, in supermodernity, Augé (1995:103) holds that individuals can only enter contractual relationships – precisely, relationships determined by numbers. In a discussion of Marx’s analysis of M-C-M (the way in which money is freed of its productive constraints to become capital, and then re-produces itself as itself – rather than as a commodity, for instance – before being reinserted as money), Jameson (1997:251) produces a similar analysis, claiming: “capital itself becomes freefloating. It separates itself from the concrete context of its productive geography.” Financial markets, for Jameson, create a disembodied spectre of value without mooring in a mode of production. This is structurally equivalent to Augé’s analysis: in one, relations based on place are replaced by contracts; in Jameson, capital also separates itself out from geography and becomes a sovereign domain of equivalence.

To put this process in the context of the figure of the gesture of the stock market trader: this gesture is an aberration because it supposes precisely the type of bodily, cultural relation that should have been effaced, or at least circumscribed, by the process of modernity/globalisation, which should not allow for local clusters of meaning to exist at the heart of the deterritorialising machine. In this sense, the gesture of the trader seems like a figure of incomplete modernity; soon the computer and the internet will efface this moment of bodily habitus at the centre of capitalism. Such an argument would parallel that of Jameson (1992) in Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism[7], where he argues that far from constituting a break with modernism, the fragmentary indeterminacy of postmodernism is part of an incomplete modernity.

The disappearance of this remnant seemed at hand in 2005, when the New York Stock Exchange announced a merger with Archipelago, an electronic exchange, and 200 years of pit trading seemed at an end. Ultimately, this final closure seemed to support Jameson’s theory that “globalization is rather a kind of cyberspace in which money-capital has reached its ultimate dematerialisation” (1997:260).

II. The gesture reappears

The claims that a new more rational age is on the horizon, without the restrictions of the social, have of course been made before, just as the claim that the world is now dematerialised echoes the modernist concerns of Georg Simmel. It is instructive in this regard to look at the development of an almost caricatural Foucauldian institution: the CBOT. The building constructed by the CBOT on LaSalle Street in 1930 seems to be inspired by Bentham. In response to growing commerce and Chicago’s position as the capital of America’s, if not the world’s, derivative markets, the CBOT designed a building in which everyone was designed to see everyone else – perfect vision enabling perfect information. Such a structure was intended to prevent personal and social relations forming where certain groups where favoured due to their position in the room (Zaloom:2006:42). When the traders entered the new building, however, there were immediately complaints: they couldn’t hear anything, it was said; noise could not be distinguished from information. Immediately, the traders started to form social groups within this non-social space.

The architects of electronic systems of trading also claimed that it will be faster, more efficient, and more equal – one of the most forceful arguments against pit trading in Chicago (which fundamentally ended in 1998, though sporadic trading continues to this day) was that it allowed for personal networks, which were thought to impede the liquidity of capital. As Chicago moved to an electronic system, the various firms of stock brokers used extensive training to prepare their workers for the change. Here, we must follow Weber (2003), in making a link between ethical and economic orders. One must note: it requires socialisation to require depersonalisation. As Simmel argues prophetically (it is 1903) “what appears here as dissociation is in reality only one of the elementary forms of socialisation” (1971:329).

It is striking the extent to which this scheme seems to follows Foucault’s account (1979) of the development of the prison. We have the development of a discursive formulation that posits the eradication of the personalised social relation and the institution of, precisely, institutional relationships (of the one-counts-for-all type). Then, just as in Foucault’s prison, the implementation of these schemes produces practices which, while emerging out of an abstracting discourse, nevertheless constitute its negation. For instance, in the Chicago pit, traders were of two types: brokers – who mediated between the pit and a bank or investment company – and locals, who played the market on their own account. Each was parasitic on the other. Zaloom (2006:100) shows how in this system a series of relationships developed that were far removed from the logic of profit. Locals would “take a loss to the benefit of the broker and his client, and in doing so, they would strengthen their relationship through reciprocity with the broker.” Furthermore, systems of status would develop that had little to do with capital and everything to do with a complex play of masks and status more reminiscent of medieval theatre: to ascend in the ranks of traders, one must constantly attempt to – physically – move up a series of steps. The first few times a neophyte dealer did this, he would be pushed off and mocked. Only after demonstrating sufficient bravery (and not necessarily profit), and enduring the requisite humiliation could the trader ascend to a higher level.

Which is to say, what the traders were doing was not simply making money. As Apparadurai sets out in The Social Life of Things (1986:3-64), money does not simply abstract, it also re-enters into local worlds of meaning and significance. To see this movement means looking beyond Jameson’s horizon when he claims that specific particularities (e.g. a culture) become capital: “commodity production is now a cultural phenomenon, in which you buy the product fully as much for its image as for its immediate use” (2000:53). While this is undeniable, what is equally true is that capital becomes cultural: becomes appropriated by local worlds. It is important to give this point its proper accent however: it is not simply that the abstract becomes concrete, but that it becomes concrete as an abstraction: capital becomes cultural only as capital; only as a non-place becomes a place even as it negates the idea of place.

III. Numbers of gesture

So far, we have only considered the physical place of the pit itself. What is important to emphasise is that this is not simply the sign of an incomplete modernisation: the phenomenology of the market is equally present in computer trading (Fig. II). This is not because computer trading is as real and situated as pit trading (though it is), but because pit trading (and indeed, social life in general) is as virtual as computer trading: the same play of potential and possibility, sculpted by habit and phenomenological placing, it at play in pit as it is on the computer screen.

Fig II. Image of the OmniTrader computer system.

So it is not just a case of noticing the presence of the physical in interaction with the computer, as Zaloom does (2006:86)[8], it is also the case of noticing that people do not simply buy derivatives in blocks of 10,000: as Mackenzie (2007) notes: “In some supposedly anonymous electronic markets, participants sometimes signal their identities by offering to buy not 10,000,000 shares, but 10,000,467, or bidding at $92,700,059: the ‘467’ or ‘59’ is like a codename.” The personal gestures of the pit are here re-expressed in an electrical market place, as particular configurations of number comes to stand in for individuals, and the sense of a place existing in a non-place is again re-established. Zaloom (2006:173) argues that the computer trader, like the unusual strategies of the pit trader, in “separating off his market self from his social self… refashions himself as a machine for trading.”

However, such an argument would simply leave us with a notion of differential modernities: the same capitalist system absorbed and changed in differing physical localities[9]: gestures would be variations on a theme.

IV. Numbers gesture

Osborne (2001:188) argues that “all non-places are places qua non-places” because even the negation of place is determinate: it is still in what was locale (what could be anywhere) that meaning is construed. This we see borne out by the traders’ behaviour: their division of work and life, the masks people wear, that Zaloom extensively documents, to hide their alienation. What this points to however, is that the distinctions of globalisation are not clear-cut, not place and non-place, or abstraction and emotion, to remember equally Simmel’s modernism. Instead, they are distinctions of structure.

Electronic trading systems, no less than the pit trading, are systems to structure perception and possibility. In the two systems just mentioned, as we have established, personal relations are intended to be abolished, and yet they reappear – in the figure of the gesture in the pit, and in the figure of the numeric gesture in the electronic trading system. But so far, these figures seem contingent: temporary moments of resistance against the narrative set up by the promise of the opening telegraph: time has been annihilated, and the future has arrived.

There is a third image to consider (Fig III.) – that of the figure of the movement of capital itself. As Herz (1998:20) argues, what needs to be put in question is just how the economy took on a life of its own in modern Western society, for a detailed consideration of Gursky’s Chicago Board of Trade II would lead us to the opposite conclusion.

Fig. III: Andreas Gursky. Chicago Board of Trade II.

The normal confusion of the stock market – a flurry of arms and tongues opaque to the outsider – is heightened by Gursky’s use of time: the image spills out waves of movement as time embeds itself into the image. Here computer banks and information screens are as uncertain and overwhelming as the gestures that surround them. Gesture is not apart from the virtual, and nor the virtual from the real[10]: given this continuity, we should not expect the possible to be effaced by capitalism[11] anymore than the possible is effaced by the actual.

That Jameson and Augé have such a strong link to Simmel in this regard is indicative of another, quieter, genealogy: that which links the conception of the individual in Simmel (a pre-given, atemporal entity) to the idea of the subject in Jameson and Augé. I want to suggest instead, in closing, a figure that shows the way a subject – indeed, a subject with particular practices and particular ideas – can emerge within capital itself.

After the move to fully electronic trading on the London International Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE)[12], a strange figure started to be seen. In many electronic displays on derivatives market, one does not see particular offers, but merely aggregate bid/ask levels for the derivative in question (it is thought this absence of information makes it easier for traders to concentrate on the numbers). Sometimes, there is a spike in the bid/ask levels without an appreciable change in the price. This is normally thought to be someone called a “spoofer”: someone who wants to use a large quantity of bids to create the illusion that there is more demand to buy or sell than there actually is: great cache is associated to “taking him out” and returning the market to its “proper level.” However, though Zaloom (2006:226) doesn’t appreciate this, there is no logic necessity that this figure is a single person at all: it may simply be a series of bids that appear together for contingent reasons. Yet this figure is attributed subjectivity and intentionality, and the market acts as if this figure exists. It is within capital itself – as a structuring of flows of perception and memory – that one can find subjectivity, and it is this subjectivity that undermines any oppositions between abstraction and the particular, because it emphasises that movement is prior to any stoppage: any process of subjectivity.

To return to Jameson (1997:265) then, from a different path: “precisely what finance capital brings into being: a play of monetary entities that need neither production (as capital does) nor consumption (as money does), which supremely, like cyberspace, can live on their own internal metabolism, and circulate without reference to an older type of content.” This internal metabolism is correctly observed – but it is that which emerges through capital, only to negate its premises, if not its functioning.

The future never arrives: but the hands function, nonetheless; within times own annihilation, we find duration.

V. Bibliography

Antonioni, Michelangelo. 2004 [1962]. L’Eclisse. Criterion Collection: London.

Apparadurai , Arjun. 1986. Introduction: commodities and the politics of value. In, Arjun Apparadurai (ed). The Social Life of Things: commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. pp.3-64.

Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. Verso: London.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. Bergsonism. Zone Books: New York.

Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish. Vintage: London

Hertz, Ellen. 1998. The Trading Crowd: An Ethnography of the Shanghai Stock Market. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Jameson, Fredric. 2003. The End of Temporality. Critical Inquiry. Vol. 29. Summer. pp.695-718.

Jameson, Fredric. 2000. Globalization and Political Strategy. New Left Review. Vol. 4. July/August. pp. 49-68.

Jameson, Fredric. 1997. Culture and Financial Capital. Critical Inquiry. Vol. 24. No.1. pp.246-265.

Jameson, F. 1992. Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso: London.

Janszen, Eric. 2008. The next bubble: Priming the markets for tomorrow’s big crash. Harpers. February 2008. pp.39-45.

MacKenzie, Donald. 2007. Zero is a Clenched Fist. Review of Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London by Caitlin Zaloom. London Review of Books. 1 November 2007. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n21/mack01_.html. Accessed 2/2/2008 (subscription required).

Marx, Karl. 2002. The Communist Manifesto. Penguin: London.

Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press: Durham & London.

Osborne, Peter. 2001. Non-places and the spaces of art. The Journal of Architecture. Vol.6. Summer. pp.183-194.

Simmel, Georg. 1971 [1903]. The Metropolis and Mental Life. In: Simmel, Georg. 1971. On Individuality and Social Forms. ed. Donald N. Levine. University of Chicago Press: Chicago. pp. 324-339.

Weber, Max 2003. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Dover Publications: London.

Zaloom, Caitlin. 2006. Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London. University of Chicago Press: Chicago & London.

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[1] ‘World’ is used here very deliberately, to signify the space of possibility in which one moves. Husserl’s Lebenswelt would be the more technical equivalent. One does not live in globalisation: one lives in a world which is affected by it, which has its structures changed because of it, and only affects these changes through worlds. This movement, as this essay will demonstrate, is largely effaced in most contemporary accounts of globalisation, which see it as a grid-like system of subject positions in which individuals struggle. Such accounts fail to explain the way relationship between individual and society largely because they bracket off the mediating term: movement. This essay will foreground this mediation, and consider any positions (subjective or objective), as derivate of it. In Massumi’s concise formulation: “positionality is an emergent quality of movement.” Brian Massumi. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press: Durham & London. p.8.

[2] Text of the first telegraph sent from Detroit to Chicago in 1848, the same year in which the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) was founded. From: A.T.Andreas. 1884. History of Chicago: From the earliest period to the present time, p.263. Quoted in Caitlin Zaloom. 2006. Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London. University of Chicago Press: Chicago & London. p.21. Italics not in the original.

[3] This line is always used to show Marx’s conviction that capitalism deterritorialises people. However, rarely is the full sentence quoted: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.” For Marx, it is through the deterritorialisation of capitalism that man is forced to face the truth of his existence without religious support.

[4] See Fig. I, overleaf. From Michelangelo Antonioni. 2004 [1962]. L’Eclisse. Criterion Collection: London.

[5] Such a body could equally be the body circumscribed by the sign and reproduced in an economy of exchange (witness advertising).

[6] What is left of the type of relationship of reference that Marx saw in use-money relationships before they were deterritorialised by capital in now principally a question of faith: we believed that – foolishly – there was a necessary relationship between the US mortgage market and the derivative packages being traded. This remnant of faith is astutely analysed in a recent article by Eric Janszen (2008:39-45).

[7] However, we should also be aware of Jameson’s (2003:695-718) more recent argument in The End of Temporality. Here, he argues that the increasing transparency of the world-system (e.g. the immanence of financial information) had led to a corresponding dialectical emphasis on representational images. This argument will be taken up in the conclusion.

[8] Zaloom analyses the phenomenon of “fat-fingering”: when one clicks with the right finger rather than the left, selling or buying directly into a bid the trader intended to join.

[9] In terms of the stock market, this argument is made for Shanghai by Herz (1998). She argues that the Shanghai stock market has to be understood in terms of the tension between its insertion as a minor player into a world system dominated by European stock markets, and a continuing distinction between tributary and small capitalist modes of production in Chinese history.

[10] Unfortunately I do not have the space to develop this point fully. See: Gilles Deleuze. 1990. Bergsonism. Zone Books: New York.

[11] Which is ultimately the argument of Jameson and Augé in this regard: specific constellations of possibility are effaced by the deterritorialising effect of capital.

[12] LIFFE was then taken over by Euronext in 2002, prior to its April 2007 merger with the New York Stock Exchange.

Subject without Object

Subject without object: the party in the thought of Alain Badiou

The party is the active purification of politics.

Alain Badiou. April 1975.[1]

We know today that all emancipatory politics must put an end to the model of the party.

Alain Badiou. February 2002.[2]

In the silence you don’t know, you must go on severing, I can’t go on, I’ll go on severing.

Beckett, Unnameable.[3]

If “the 19^th century’s Hegelian idea was to rely on the movement of history ‘to surrender to the life of the object’, the 20^th century’s idea is to confront history, to master it politically.”[4] Such is one of the central theses of Badiou’s summation of the last hundred years, The Century. He sketches out a whole series of methods by which such mastery was attempted; the party constituted the principle means by which an emancipatory politics could bring a political subjectivity into alignment with objective historical processes. The party, in the Marxist tradition of the 20^th century, was the mediating force between an objective situation (capitalism), and the creation of a political subjectivity. In order for such a subjectivity to exist, it needed to purify itself of every reference to the objective historical stratum[5]; in the language of the later Badiou, to subtract itself from the presentation of the situation.

In 1975, at the end of the Cultural Revolution in China, such a movement was still thinkable in terms of the party. By 2002, Badiou is actively involved in Organisation Politique, a political project that explicitly refuses the party model, and the space of the political project that runs along the axis revolution/state is firmly closed.

In the text from which the first quote is taken, the party is the engine of the political. In the second, the party has vanished from the proper horizon of politics. It is no accident that we should use the word “vanished.”

In Théorie du Sujet[6], the clinamen, what Badiou also calls the “vanishing term”, and which is a precursor to the notion of the event in Being and Event[7], takes place only to immediately vanish. While the clinamen can never be encountered in thought as such, through an adherence to the traces of the vanishing term, the clinamen can be the basis for a subject. One can find precisely such a tracing of the vanished party in the political thought of Badiou’s later works.

For instance, for the Badiou of Being and Event there is no Two that exists prior to the taking of a political position[8]: it is through the particular statement that division emerges, and this division is not between two antagonistic enemies, as Schmitt[9] might understand politics. Rather, it is between the adherents to the statement and the situation as such. Unlike classic Marxist discourse, where the subject adheres to a pre-existent objective stratum (e.g. the way the proletariat are attached to the working class), the subject here “is not a substance.”[10] From out of the situation, a two is created, the political subject and the situation that resists, and through this procedure, there is a one, a singular political subjectivity. This is to say, there is not an antagonism between two equal parties but between a subject which is adhering to an event that has no relation to the situation, and the situation itself.

In a structurally similar fashion, in Maoism we can witness a process of thought which allows for the emergence of the bourgeoisie within the dictatorship of the proletariat itself[11]. That is to say, if Lenin[12] finds in the basis opposition between proletariat and bourgeoisie the fundamental motor of history, in Maoist thought, class conflict is not totally determined by pre-existing objective relations (i.e. the economic interests of the working class and the bourgeoisie) but can emerge as a two in any given situation. In the Maoist conception of the party, one can find a trace of what is to emerge in Badiou’s later work.

In the first quote from Badiou, the party is the mode of politics, in the second, the party has vanished.

Here, the question is not one of affirming, in Badiou’s later thought, a simple continuity with his Maoist period, as Bruno Bosteels seems tempted to do[13]. However, nor is it the case that one can unproblematically assert a complete break between Badiou’s latest work and his Maoist period, as is Hallward’s tendency[14]. Instead, it is question of understanding the specific lines of continuity between the two positions, and equally, the disjunctures between them. Ultimately, the challenge must be to think these disjunctures, not from outside the situation of Badiou’s thought, not, for instance, from the position of an inevitable development following the collapse of the USSR, but from within the thought of the party in the philosophy of Alain Badiou itself.

This essay will trace the notion of the party itself, as it is presented in the work of Alain Badiou. Due note will be taken, when possible, of the differences between the approach of De l’idéologie[15] and Théorie de la contradiction[16], two early texts by Badiou, and his later work. However, the emphasis will be on tracing the development of the notion of the party during the 20^th century, as it is presented by Badiou, and on accounting for the continuity between the problematic posed by the party and the political thought Badiou presents in his later work, principally The Century, Abrégé de Métapolitique[17], and Being and Event.

The thesis advanced is as follows. Communism, in all its various forms, poses the party as a solution to two problems: that of duration – which is to say, how does one keep people together – and that of mediating objective situations and political subjectivity. In the course of the 20^th century, the failure of the party to achieve generic Communism is largely to be understood in terms of its insistent attempt to relate politically subjectivity to the existing situation. This insistence on relation leads, as we shall show, to an unending destructive movement that is unable to secure the movement from the state to communism. It is precisely this relation that Badiou’s political thought attempts to undo, and in so doing, suggests a way that one can achieve a generic communism from within an existing situation. It is not a question then, of marking out the thought of Badiou from the thought of the party, but understanding how Badiou’s thought emerges from the disjunctures present in the party. In Beckett’s words: “In the silence you don’t know, you must go on severing, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”; from the ruin of the party, in the space of what Badiou calls the second restoration[18], we again find the Two.

I. The party is purification

The new can only come about as the seizure of ruin. Novelty will only take place in the element of a fully accomplished destruction[19].

The party as an object of Marxist discourse emerges out of the events of the Paris Commune[20]. Here, a heterogeneous set of forces were roundly crushed by the state. In Marxist thought there are two clear positions regarding the lesson to be drawn from these events. The first, set forward by Marx in The Civil War in France[21], argues that the commune clarifies the immediate political objectives of the (working) class with regard to the state – the task is to break the dominance of the state, without coming to occupy the same position. However, this analysis, while correct, does not set out how the working class is to break the dominance of the state; in Badiou’s view, it rests at a level which reads the subjective and objective as part of the same movement: objective considerations of the actually existing working class (they way they are inserted in a system of domination, for instance) are not distinguished from the subjective movement whereby the working class realises itself as proletariat: as a force which overcomes the system of class distinctions upon which the state is based.

The necessity for such a position is first theorised by Lenin, and his understanding of the Paris Commune constitutes the second clear position regarding the lesson to be drawn from these events. Lenin’s position, at its simplest level, argues that without a form of organisation that can condense the forces we see at play in the Paris Commune, there can be no duration to any political movement. The party, for Lenin, is thus posed principally as a question of time: Lenin “proposed a solution to the problem. What type of organization does the proletariat need to really and enduringly break the enemy state machine?”[22]

The problem that Lenin answers is that of duration: how to give a figure of the I/We relationship (where I am understood as a collective, rather than as part of a body where I submit to a sovereign) that could be given duration. Lenin answers, in a simple sense, the question of time: how we can stay together for a long time, and correspondingly, how can the subjective political body enter history.

For the party is not simply a form that gives organisation to the proletariat, rather, in giving organisation to the proletariat, several fundamental structures change. If, initially, the working class is part of an objective situation: a class which has a place in an economic system, then it is the party, by giving a status to the working class over and above their naming in the situation, that allows the working class to emerge as proletariat – as a subjective force in history that is outside of the objective situation; outside in a precise way, because the proletariat is not created simply through enunciation: it is not the case that one could equally create any political subject from the objective situation. The proletariat is the one class that can form itself as a revolutionary subject precisely as a result of an objective dispossession (they are not counted in the situation) and a subjective divestment; the universal truth that they proclaim is precisely that which is outside of any class relation: the end of class relations.

Here we must be clear the extent to which Badiou’s position[23] deviates from Leninist orthodoxy. For Lenin, the party functions as the element which will bring into line the subject (the proletariat) and the object (the inevitable course of history). In the present of Lenin’s writing (pre-October 1917), the proletariat are not conscious of their place in history. Thought is divorced from action. The party offers the mediation which will allow thought and action, life and history, to become unified. As Hallward succinctly puts it: “the party is that agent, produced by history, by which history overcomes itself as history, that is, by which history becomes political logic.”[24]

For Badiou, in contrast, the party as political body emerges when thought subtracts itself from the objective situation. Now it does this in a particular way – one of the great advances Badiou makes as a philosopher is to rigorously think through how the Ideal emerges from within the given situation – but it does not at any point assure a meeting between a given situation and thought. The unity desired by Lenin is not given in Badiou’s philosophy.

Despite this difference, many aspects of Badiou’s reading of the development of the party, at least in its destructive moment, correlate to Lenin’s presentation. For Badiou, the working class, as it becomes the political subject known as the proletariat, subtracts itself from all relations defining social place. This movement also occurs in Lenin, where the proletariat is positioned as the inevitable overcoming of the contradictions of the class system. The initial moment here then, is a destructive one – the party destroys the previous social contradictions from which it emerged. This is the destruction that Badiou speaks of in the quote that opened this section: the new can only come about as the seizure of ruin.[25] This destruction, in Lenin, is assured by the teleological progression of Marxism, whereby the contradictions in capitalism are exposed by the creation of the party. In Badiou’s later work, it is instead the event that is read through the situation, exposing its void; here the moment is entirely situational, and does not rely, as noted above, on a unity of thought and action, subjective political subject and objective conditions.

Badiou is fully aware of the importance given by Lenin and Mao, among others, to the correlation of political subjectivity and objective conditions. Indeed, in The Century, he makes this contradictory relationship the central motif of the last hundred years. In his reading of Mandelstam’s poem entitled The Age[26], he claims[27] “there is an incompatibility of sorts between the ontology of life (in my view homogenous with the ontology of history) and the theory of voluntaristic discontinuity…this incompatibility constitutes the acting subjectivity of the beast-century.” In Badiou’s work, this incompatibility finds its expression in all the great truth procedures of the age. This search for purification of the objective situation, and the desire for an unmediated experience of the real, is nowhere more problematic than in the case of politics.

If we were to expand Badiou’s reading of this motif, then the work of Georg Lukacs[28], unmentioned in The Century, is perhaps exemplary of these contradictions. For Lukacs, the separation of subject and object corresponds to the structure of commodity relations in Marx, where the product is divorced from the social relations that created it. To understand the unity of subject and object one must remain faithful to the proletariat as the motor of history. However, the objective stratum of the working class would frequently act and think in ways that were in variance to Lukacs’ expectations of their behaviour given their historical position. To explain how Marxism should act with the proletariat (to unify subject and object, history and politics) though these actions may seem to go against the interest of the class as they themselves express it, Lukacs introduces a divide between the empirical consciousness of the working class, and their imputed consciousness (how they would behave if they were only aware of themselves as political subjects), with the party positioned as the third mediating term that carries one over to the other. Here, the party takes on the explicit form of praxis, as Lukacs states[29]: “the pre-eminently practical nature of the Communist party presupposes its possession of a correct theory for otherwise the consequences of a false theory would soon destroy it.”

One can see in this statement the contradictions that would later come to destroy the revolutionary potential of the party. Because the party is thought of as theory in practice, and this theory is thought to be congruent with the objective conditions present in the world (history as dialectical unfolding), its actions can be justified as theory, just as its theory will always be found in its practice. This constant attempt to tie political subjectivity to objective conditions leads to significant problems, as we shall see below.

In its first movement, the party destroys the objective conditions that give rise to it. In so doing, it can find no justification within the situation – for the demands of the party are specifically excluded from the presentation of the situation. Thus revolution, for Badiou, authorises itself on the basis of nothing; the creation of a political subjectivity can find no authority other than in fidelity to itself, and at the moment of fidelity this is always the case, even if one believes that later the party will come to be understood as ensuring the passage between subjective and objective.

There is a then a second movement to the party that we should not ignore. The destructive self-authorisation of the first movement should then also lead to the destruction of the party itself, as the party in turn, at least in Marxist theory, is only the mediating agent between capitalism and communism. Thus, within the party, the dialectical movement that created it must then destroy itself; failure to do so would lead to the creation of the party as institution. In the end, for Badiou, it must be able to be said: “Nothing took place but the revolution.”[30] This second movement is more problematic. For if the destruction of the objective conditions of capitalism carries with it, in Marxist thought, a historical logic, this logic cannot be invoked after the end of history and the triumph of the proletariat. For Badiou’s later work, such a movement is provided by the subject, a position already anticipated by the voluntarism present in TDC: “every subject is a forced exception, which comes in a second moment.”[31] However, when the party has succeeded in achieving the dictatorship of the proletariat, and is itself the objective situation, how then is one to divide the party?

II. Purification as the party

A party becomes stronger by purging itself.

Stalin.[32]

Communism was the idea of a collective mastery of truths. But what then happened, everywhere, was that a master rose up, since the truth was no longer separated from the mastery.

Alain Badiou. Abrégé de métapolitique.[33]

Because, as Sainte-Juste demands: “What do they want who want neither Virtue nor Terror?” His response is well known: they want corruption, another name for the failure of the subject.

Alain Badiou.[34]

In The Century, Badiou’s account of Communism is conflicted – both bittersweet and fiercely proud. It is also, remarkably for one who lived its battles so intensely, without the reactionary thoughtlessness that characterises so many of the accounts of the demise of the Communist project. We should not be deceived by the second quote that starts this section; Badiou by no means offers an account of Communism that sees its failure in the inevitable movement from utopian project to institutional framework. As we shall develop in the next section, Badiou sees a way to be faithful to Communism that does not lead to the Terror (or the show trials). In exploring the 20^th century, he principally sees the problem of Communism in its relation to the real, and the guarantees that the party as an institution attempted to place on this relation. It is this relation to the real that for Badiou cannot be a relation at all.

The problem of Communism is not its truth – neither the fraternity of political struggle, nor the equality that is its goal, and that, for Badiou, is the presumption of all political struggles[35]. Truth, for Badiou, is a production of freedom[36] from all relations. This is, if we recall the last section, the function of the party with regard to the proletariat: to ensure its freedom from the existing situation and its constitution as a political subjectivity with duration. As Badiou states[37] in the Petit Manuel d’inésthétique: “the idea of the link (lien), or of the relation (rapport) is fallacious. A truth is unlinked (déliée) and it is towards this local point where a link is undone that a truth procedure operates.” For the subjects of a truth procedure, in this case the members of the Communist Party, we can say that access to the truth is equivalent to what Hegel what consider the practice of freedom. The subject cannot be bound to the party by objective conditions –precisely what the party is set up to overcome – but can only be so by the strength of its own adherence. “The eventual nomination has always already taken place… and this already is our only guarantee. The rest is a matter of faith.”[38]

In being bound only to itself, the fidelity to a truth procedure which is called the party resembles nothing so much as Hegel’s account of absolute freedom in The Phenomenology of Spirit[39]. It is worth briefly considering this incredible text, for it precisely parallels Badiou’s analysis of the Stalin’s show trials, with one distinctive difference, which we shall explore later.

This undivided Substance of absolute freedom ascends the throne of the world without any power being able to resist it…What made the notion into an existent object was its diremption into separate subsistent spheres, but when the object becomes a Notion, there is no longer anything in it with a continuing existence…It comes into existence in such a way that each individual consciousness raises itself out of its allotted sphere, no longer finds its essence and its work in this particular sphere, but grasps itself as the Notion of will, grasps all spheres as the essence of this will, and therefore can only realise itself in a work which is the work of the whole…In this absolute freedom, therefore, all social groups or classes…are abolished; the individual consciousness that belonged to any such sphere, and willed and fulfilled itself in it, has put aside its limitation; its purpose is the general purpose, its language universal law, its work the universal work.[40]

For Hegel, the French Revolution presented the subjective figure of absolute freedom. This figure is not defined by its interest in particular spheres in society (the bourgeoisie, for instance, and their class interest), but precisely and only in itself. It “grasps all spheres as the essence of this will.” In a time of revolution, the question arises: how does one know that the individual is indeed taking his place in absolute freedom: that his work is the universal work, his purpose the general purpose? This problem arises because absolute freedom, relating only to itself, is not bound to any particular conception of the good: it is self-authorising. The society of absolute freedom must be created by all of its members. In the quote given above, it is evident that such a society must be both the creation of decisions of the will, and that the decisions of the One are taken by the All. Such requirements run precisely contrary to the requirements of an institution[41], much as, in Badiou, a truth procedure is incommensurable to any re-presentation.

In Hegel’s account[42], this lack of authorisation means that nothing can ensure absolute freedom in the French Revolution – the Virtue referred to by Badiou in the quote that began this section. Because nothing can authorise this name other than itself, everyone, and everything, is suspected of being merely the semblance of virtue. This is to say, paradoxically, that at the height of the revolution, what one sees everywhere is corruption. Thus, the essence of absolute freedom comes to be: the fight against corruption in the name of an ideal that cannot be verified. In an attempt to assure absolute freedom, this means that everyone is a suspect. In the absence of a criterion by which virtue can be judged, it is precisely in the overzealous identification with virtue that one finds corruption. In an attempt to re-establish the link between the world and absolute freedom, the situation must be constantly purged, and purged precisely of those who seem to embody the general will the most. Hegel finishes his section on the terror by remarking that the logic of purification at play here can only end in nothing, in death. This is the meaning of the peculiar conjunction used by Sainte-Juste that Badiou quotes in the quotation that begins this section: ““What do they want who want neither Virtue nor Terror?” His response is well known: they want corruption, another name for the failure of the subject.”

Virtue and Terror. The necessary conjunction of the two elements in any pure politics (as Badiou understands it) finds echo nearly a century later in Merleau-Ponty’s grim defence of Stalin’s show trials, Humanism and Terror[43]. It is precisely in the show trials that Badiou locates his re-reading of Hegel’s account of the Terror of the French Revolution. This account begins with a restaging of the name Virtue. Virtue, in Badiou’s account[44], becomes one of the many categories of revolutionary politics, along with “‘conviction’, loyalty’, ‘class position’, and ‘obeying the Party’.”[45] All of these categories become ways of accessing the real, and, just as in Hegel’s account of virtue, the non-relational character of the real means that nothing can confirm that the real is what it is – every element of the real is “tainted by the suspicion that the supposedly real point of the category is actually nothing but semblance.”[46]

To understand what is implied by this semblance, it is worthwhile briefly considering the concept of ideology in Marxism. In the work of Lukacs, for instance, ideology is a discourse in which the real effects of social relations are effaced in favour of a representation of society that justifies existing class relations as normal or natural (as opposed to transitory historical phenomenon). Nevertheless, ideology, while organising a discourse which is separated from the society, expresses that very society. It is in the chinks and contradictions of discourse that Adorno and the Frankfurt school later find a way to connect ideology to the functioning of society[47]; it is in the semblance that the real is to be found, as the gap between semblance and real effects.

This conception of ideology shifts from Marx’s interpretation, where[48] ideology hides the objective distribution of society. In this reading, the semblance unproblematically hides the real, and one can reveal the real through critique. In Brecht, by contrast, the violence of the real emerges when the gap between effect and presentation is demonstrated. The power of the real here cannot be directly re-presented, but can only be experienced in the form of a mask, or an ideology.

The real of revolution, be is loyalty or virtue, cannot be re-presented, and cannot be institutionalised. It can be experienced only as precisely the gap between its presentation and its effects. The party, as an institution-to-be, constantly struggles against the impossibility of re-presentation. This movement underlies the constant destructive energy of the Party in the 20^th century: from the Stalinist show trials to the Cultural Revolution, and, to return to the last century, to the French Revolution. However, here one must note a crucial difference between Hegel’s argument in the Phenomenology of Spirit and that of Badiou[49]. For Hegel, the problem with absolute freedom occurs in its lack of relation to anything; that nothing guarantees the movement of the dialectic outside its absolute category. Salvation here would be a relation to the state. For Badiou, in contrast, the problem occurs because there is not a sufficient lack of relation; the revolution constantly tries to assure, like Marx’s notion of ideology, a notion of the real that resides in the objective, rather than in the gap between the real effects and their presentation. In The Century, Badiou tries to distinguish between two conceptions of the passion for the real in the 20^th century. The first, which he finds primarily in art, conceives of the real as a subtraction. In reference to Malevich’s White on White, Badiou writes: “Why is this something other than destruction? Because, instead of treating the real as identity [e.g. the proletariat], it is treated right away as a gap. The question of the real/semblance relation will not be resolved by a purification that would isolate the real, but by understanding that the gap itself is real.”[50]

It is not immediately evident what this formulation of subtraction means for politics. The first thing that is evident is that any structure or institution that attempts to correlate the real to an objective presentation immediately slips back into destruction; attempting to ensure the purification of the party and the correlation of the absolute with the particular. This destruction is un-ending: “Purification is a process doomed to incompletion, a figure of the bad infinite.”[51] The next section will explore what happens the last moment of the sequence of the Party – the Cultural Revolution, where the incommensurable logics of party and state are most forcefully expressed. Then, through an exploration of the political thought of the Organisation Politique, we shall explore the possibilities of a politics based on the idea of subtraction we find in Malevich’s White on White.

III. Destroying destruction

In any case, the Cultural Revolution undeniably signals the closure of an entire sequence, whose central ‘object’ is the party, and whose main political concept is that of the proletariat.

Alain Badiou, The Century.[52]

From 1965 to 1976, China experienced a chaotic period, a period at once incredibly violent and astonishingly productive of new forms of organisation, no matter how short lived. It is this period that now goes by the name of the Cultural Revolution[53]. The new forms of organisation we see emerge during this period were of great interest to the radical thinkers of Europe. By 1965 it was evident that the USSR had made of the dictatorship of the proletariat a state form, and, to paraphrase Badiou’s formulation, if Communism was the idea of a collective mastery of truths, what then happened, everywhere, was that a master rose up, since the truth was no longer separated from the mastery.[54] The Cultural Revolution was, retrospectively, the last attempt to see if from within the party, a truly generic communism could emerge, that did not end up returning to the state form. It was an attempt to answer anew what Badiou, in an earlier work, calls the primary political question: “The only real political question becomes, what is the organic link between the masses in revolt – the decisive historical actor – and the party, constituted as political subject.”[55] In De l’idéologie and Théorie de la contradiction, the party remains the crucial enjeux (stake) for any true politics. This conviction underlies the theoretical positions he takes during the period – for the Badiou of DI and TDC, destruction, based in the party model, rather than subtraction, remains the principle operation of his thought.

As the quote that begins this section indicates, concretely, the project fails: the impossibility of the party form subtracting itself from the state is demonstrated by the Cultural Revolution. This failure begins the sequence of Badiou’s thought that attempts to subtract the political subject from all objective conditions. What this section will show, however, is that Badiou’s later thought does not break with the experiments undertaken by Maoism, rather, the thought of a politics without party begins in Maoism, and subtracts from it what cannot be accounted for within Maoism itself: namely, the irreducible, minimal difference between what takes place and the place in which it occurs; between the subject of politics and the situation of history – it is this that is occluded by the thought of the party, and this that Badiou attempts to resolve in the Organisation Politique.

In Badiou’s depiction of the Cultural Revolution, there is one central stake: does the one divide into two, or does the two become one? These two positions are called the leftist and rightist positions, and, as Bruno Bosteels[56] sets out in his essay on Badiou’s Maoism, these positions become the basis for the early critique Badiou makes of Deleuze. Put simply, “the two becomes one” refers to the following thesis: following the institution of the Chinese Communist Party in the state apparatus, the time of division is over, and a process of synthesis must prevail; what is necessary for the Party is a process of unity, and with it the construction of a state, and the end of mass politics. Such a position was taken by, among others, Deng Xiaoping.

For the leftist position, this position is a conservative one. They claim – Lin Biao and Mao[57], paradigmatically – that the class war has not yet been victorious, and that by calling for One, rather than for division, what the rightist position is calling for is the restoration of the old One, under the cover of synthesis.

At the two extremities of Marxism, you will find the following theses: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness (Marx, Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy).

“Marxism implies manifold principles, but, in the final analysis, they can all be reduced to a single sentence: “It is right to revolt against the reactionaries.” (Mao, ubiquitous quotation during the Cultural Revolution).[58]

The rightist position justifies itself by saying that social being determines consciousness: that the arrival of the party means the end of class. For Mao, in contrast, social being never entirely determines consciousness. For instance, the working class are not automatically the proletariat; nothing about their social being necessarily determines their consciousness as a political subject[59]. Equally, this means that the arrival of the party as social form does not end, for instance, bourgeois consciousness. This is the meaning of the ubiquitous quotation Badiou refers to above: the political here takes absolute precedent. It is a matter of assuming a political position – here that of generic communism – and ringing it throughout the situation (the presentation of a situation that is made to appear as a One), even if that means finding, within the party, a two (and thus, correlatively, a real One – the political subject – and the situation that does not account for it, even if that situation is the Chinese Communist party itself). “Maoism affirms that, even under socialism, what happens at the level of the state is subordinate to what happens in the class struggle.”[60]

So as to properly differentiate between Badiou’s later politics[61] and the thought of Mao, it is here important to emphasise that these divisions were to take place within the party itself. It was not the case that the logic of the party led Mao to abandon the concept of it (as is the case for Badiou). Instead, the internal division – the logic of purification we worked through earlier with reference to Hegel – can only take place within the domain of the party-state. This constitutes the great contradiction of Mao: he is the rebel in power who asserts, simultaneously, the right to rebel, and the unity of the Chinese Communist Party.

This contradiction finds itself registered in three central domains of Maoist thought: in the thought of revolution, in the thought of the state, and in the thought of the economy. We could sum up Maoist thought here in the following way.

Revolution: It is right to rebel against the reactionaries, as the famous slogan goes. There is a constant production of the Two from any One – the constant purification of a political subject which reveals the generic truth that needs to be subtracted from a situation. This occurs at a disjuncture from the objective situation. In saying this, Mao anticipates the absolute singularity of political process (singular processes inside singular situations) that is the characteristic of the Organisation Politique. In both cases, “the two is the process through which the one comes to be” – class does not exist outside of the determination of a political subject.

State: In its nature, the state is a machine destined to oppress hostile forces. Even if within the state there do not exists any forces before they are oppressed, this does not change the oppressive nature of the state regarding exterior hostile forces. When we speak of the form of the state, this does not mean anything other than an army, prisons, arrests, capital punishment, and so on. It is here that imperialism exists, and thus how can the form of the state be different with the coming of Communism?[62] Mao here appears to be brutally frank about the dictatorship of the proletariat. The state is constituted by its oppressive form – its need to violently present a situation. Even if there are no contradictions within the state (for instance, if there is no class struggle within China because there is a Communist state), this does not change the fundamental structure of the state.

This brutal assessment is continued by Badiou in Organisation Politique: in the apparatus of the state, in its insistence to transform a political subject into a mastery of a situation, the false One of the state will only be re-produced. In Badiou, this thought comes with a twist. Because the state – and re-presenting the state of a situation – is abandoned as a task, the state no longer performs the task of structuring opposition to it. The political task is now one of formulating statements in specific situations, which will never follows the logic of the state, but are no longer structured in necessary opposition to them: “It is rather a matter of requiring something from the state, of formulating with respect to the state a certain number of prescriptions or statements…we have to work more through prescriptions against the state than in any radical exteriority to the state.”[63]

Economy: In his notes on Stalin, Mao argues that Stalin depoliticises the will through economism: “All this touches on the superstructure, which is to say, on ideology. Stalin [in contrast] speaks solely of the economy: in any case, there is no politics [in Stalin’s thought].”[64] Through his tying of the political subject of the party to the objective economic situation in the country, Stalin, Mao argues, effaces the political subject. Here we must note the disjunctural element of Mao’s thought. This is summed up, in slightly exaggerated form, by Zizek in his essay on Mao:

The paradox here is properly dialectical, perhaps in the ultimate application of Mao’s teaching on contradictions: its very underdevelopment (and thus “un-ripeness” for the revolution) makes a country “ripe” for the revolution. Since, however, such “unripe” economic conditions do not allow the construction of properly post-capitalist socialism, the necessary correlate is the assertion of the “primacy of politics over economy”: the victorious revolutionary subject doesn’t act as an instrument of economic necessity, liberating its potentials whose further development is thwarted by capitalist contradictions; it is rather a voluntarist agent which acts AGAINST “spontaneous” economic necessity, enforcing its vision on reality through revolutionary terror.[65]

Now Zizek here distorts Mao somewhat – Mao would never claim to enforce Maoism on reality through revolutionary terror. However, the central point is correct: Maoism starts from the political subject, which operates at a disjuncture from the economic (objective) situation. This movement precisely prefigures the emphasis in Badiou, that: “there can be no economic battle against the economy.”[66]

In these three central elements of Maoist thought, and, in the insistence on the irreducible difference between the subjective political subject and the objective situation, we find the inheritance of Maoism in Badiou’s thought. Fundamentally, however, what changes is a word: the word subtraction replaces destruction. In Badiou’s thought, it is no longer the case of destroying conditions to access the real, but in understanding the minimal difference that allows the real to be understood as the very gap between subject and object, world and politics. It is this difference, and its ambiguous implications for politics, we shall explore in our final section.

IV. Immortality without death

Politics, when it exists, grounds its own principle regarding the real, and is thus in need of nothing, save itself.

Alain Badiou[67].

In the final section of this essay, we will sketch out what this minimal difference means for politics. Briefly, our question will be: given the disjuncture between subject and world, how can one hope to make a difference to the world? Hallward[68] alleges that Badiou seems to be endorsing a version of Hegel’s unhappy consciousness, “the stoical affirmation of a worthy ideal or subjective principle, but as divorced from any substantial relation to the material organization of the situation.”[69] Ultimately this is a problem of the way in which Politics is subtracted from History. Contrary to Hallward’s critique, it will be shown that the disjunctural relationship between subject and situation is specific to the situation, though one could not have predicted the subject that emerges from an event from the situation, much as one cannot predict the event from a situation. That said, the subject “is a generic part of the situation insofar as it is an immutable excrescence whose entire being resides in regrouping presented terms.”[70]

In Badiou, subjective thought is only thought from within the subjective itself: there is no objective mediation with the situation, there is no question of judgement (as in Kant), and there is no interpretation (as in the Frankfurt school) – truth and knowledge here are disjunctural terms. In many senses, it is a question of chance, and faith in chance, as Badiou says: “Chance, from which any truth is woven, is the matter of the subject.”[71] This essay does not give me space to develop Badiou’s ontology, nor its equivalence with mathematics. Nevertherless, it is important to note, “that the sequence of (truth) might have some sort of constituent relation with the substantial individuality of what is being investigated is precisely what set-theoretic truth proscribes in advance.”[72]

However, here we must distinguish between a constituent, or necessary relation, and having no relation at all. There are two critiques that must be refuted here if Badiou’s emphasis on singular truth procedures is to have any political validity. It remains to be shown that in asserting political subjectivity has no relation to established categories, Badiou manages to escape the problem of the French Revolution and absolute freedom. Second, while keeping no relation to the objective world, it is important for us to demonstrate that the political subject nevertheless emerged in the world, and will act there, though it is not bound by its distribution of the situation.

In the work that Organisation Politique does on immigration (which is not, we should emphasis, bound to an event, and does not follow the process of subjectification developed in B&E) there is a particular figure who is counted for nothing: the figure of the worker. In their work, to be counted for nothing means to be counted as capital, and not to be counted politically as a figure within the political field. So there is a specific figure whom is not counted, and this figure, to a degree, is open to be understood through investigation, and then, after an analysis of the situation, through a thinking through of the concrete measures that can be made in a situation.

Now it is entirely true that this is not, as I mentioned, the process by which a political subject emerges after an event, but it does mean that, on the basis of analysis of particular occlusions, questions can be asked, and actions formulated, on the basis of the thought of subtraction. Equally, in the case of the creation of a political subject, the subject is able to have such an influence on the situation[73] precisely because it is that subject that has precisely revealed the void of the situation. It is because the subject is only faithful to itself, and the precise sequence it initiates, that it does not fall in the Hegelian problem of absolute freedom, which is inaugurated when the subjective figure of absolute freedom attempts to find guarantee for its work in the situation as such. However, because it emerges within the situation, the precise sequence the political subject initiates is not simply an unhappy consciousness: it is only thinkable in the world, in terms of the material organisation of the world which in which its occurrence was specifically impossible.

Badiou, in the figure of the political subject, is wary of the dangers of the Paris Commune, that heterogeneous anarchy without duration; questions of fidelity and duration are of paramount importance in his work. Equally, the long exposure to Communism, both as state project and as generic ideal (which emerges from the real), has tempered his reading of the party. If for Badiou, the passion for the real, with which he characterises the 20^th century, was ultimately a passion for the generic, which is experienced as the real, then this passion led to a corresponding passion for formalisation, which characterises all the great truth procedures of the 20^th century.

The Party is the name of the formalisation of Politics. It is also the name, today, of the closure of formalisation within the party, for its formalisation was not in terms of itself – it was not singular – but placed in terms of the situation. This attempted correlation to the objective, as this essay has demonstrated, was the great blockage to the Communist project in the last century. Badiou, in removing formalisation from relation to objective conditions, has offered us a reawakening of the project for the 21^st. The real here emerges precisely in the gap: between the figure of the party and its objective representation. Like the Clinamen in Théorie du sujet, the party has vanished. Like the Clinamen, the subjective ideal of which it was the figure keeps on working. In the silence you don’t know, you must go on severing, I can’t go on, I’ll go on severing.

V. Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor. 2001. The Culture Industry. Routledge: London.

Anonymous. 2005. The dialectical Mode. With Regard to Mao Zedong and Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War. Positions 13:3. pp.664-668. Originally published in May 1992, in the third issue of La Distance Politique, the newsletter of the Organisation Politique.

Badiou, Alain. 2007a. Being and Event. London: Continuum Press.

Badiou, Alain. 2007b. A Musical Variant of the Metaphysics of the Subject. Parrhesia. No.2. pp.29-36.Translation of “Scholie: Une variante musicale de la métaphysique du sujet.” From Badiou, Alain. 2006. Logiques des Mondes. Paris: Seuil. pp.89-99.

Badiou, Alain. 2006. Logiques des Mondes. Paris: Seuil.

Badiou, Alain. 2005a. Further selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution. Positions 13:3. pp. 649-668.

Badiou, Alain. 2005b. Selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution. Positions 13:3. pp.635-648.

Badiou, Alain. 2005c. The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution? Positions 13:3. pp.481-514. Originally a presentation by Alain Badiou in February 2002, at the Maison des Ecrivains in Paris.

Badiou, Alain. 2005d. The Century. London: Verso.

Badiou, Alain. 2001. Ethics: an essay on the understanding of evil. London: Verso.

Badiou, Alain. 1998a. Abrégé de Métapolitique. Paris: Seuil.

Badiou, Alain. 1998b. Petit Manuel d’inésthétique. Paris: Seuil.

Badiou, Alain. 1976. De l’idéologie. Paris: François Maspero.Yenan “syntheses”.

Badiou, Alain. 1975. Théorie de la contradiction. Paris: François Maspero.Yenan “syntheses”.

Beckett, Samuel. 1973. Unnameable. From Trilogy: “Molloy”, “Malone Dies”, “Unnameable”. Calder books: London.

Bosteels, Bruno. 2005. Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics. Positions 13:3. pp.575-634.

Group for the Foundation of the Union of France Marxist-Leninist (UCFML). 2005. Maoism: A stage of Marxism. Positions. 13:3. pp. 515-520.

Hallward, Peter. 2003. Badiou: a subject to truth. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press.

Hegel, Georg. 1992. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hegel, Georg. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lenin, Vladimir Illich. 2006. Revolution at the Gates: A Selections of Writings from February to October 1917. Verso: London.

Lukacs, Georg.1971. History and Class Consciousness. Merlin: London.

Lukacs, Georg. 1970. Lenin: A Study of the Unity of His Thought. New Left Books: London.

Mao Tse-Tung. 1977. Five Essays on Philosophy. Peking: Foreign Language Press.

Mao Tse-Tung. 1972. The Little Red book: Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. Peking: Foreign Language Press.

Marx, Karl. 1987. The German Ideology: Introduction to a critique of Political Economy. Lawrence & Wishart: London.

Marx, Karl. 1974. The Civil War in France. Progress Publishers: London.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1969. Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem. Beacon Press: London.

Schmitt, Carl. 1963. On the Concept of the Political. Telos Press: New York.

Taylor, Charles. 1997. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Zizek, Slavoj. 2007. Badiou: Notes from an ongoing debate. http://www.lacan.com/zizou.htm. Accessed 3.1.2008.

Zizek, Slavoj. 2005. Mao Zedong: the Marxist Lord of Misrule. http://www.lacan.com/zizmaozedong.htm. Accessed 11.12.2007.

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[1] This quotation is from the section of Théorie du Sujet entitled “From subjective to objective”, dated April 15, 1975. It was reprinted in positions 13:3: 641. Badiou, Alain. 2005b. Selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution. positions 13:3. pp.635-648.

[2] This quotation is originally from the text of a lecture on the Cultural Revolution that Alain Badiou gave at the Maison des Ecrivains in Paris. It was reprinted in the same issue of positions as the quote above. Badiou, Alain. 2005c. The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution? Positions 13:3. pp.481-514.

[3] Beckett, Samuel. 1973. Unnameable. From Trilogy: “Molloy”, “Malone Dies”, “Unnameable”. Calder books: London. p.326.

[4] Badiou, Alain. 2005d. The Century. London: Verso. p.15. Henceforth TC.

[5] That is to say, for instance, that the constellation of forces that bears the name ‘proletariat’ must be absolutely incommensurable with the demands of the capitalist economic system.

[6] The author is here reliant on the summary of Théorie du Sujet presented in Hallward, Peter. 2003. Badiou: a subject to truth. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 33-35. Henceforth BS.

[7] Badiou, Alain. 2007a. Being and Event. London: Continuum Press. Henceforth B&E.

[8] “The names used by a subject – who supports the configuration of a generic truth – do not, in general, have a referent in the situation.”The names of the subject, in general, do not refer to pre-existing categories of the situation, unlike in classical Marxism, where the name for the subject proletariat correlates absolutely to an objective stratum: the working class. B&E:398.

[9] “The pinnacle of great politics is the moment in which the enemy comes into view in concrete clarity as the enemy.” Schmitt, Carl. 1963. On the Concept of the Political. Telos Press: New York. p.4.

[10] B&E:391.

[11] See, for instance, the account of contradiction in Tse-Tung, Mao. 1977. On the correct handling of contradictions among the people. In. Tse-Tung, Mao. 1977. Five Essays in Philosophy. Peking: Foreign Language Press. pp. 79-96. Henceforth FE.

[12] Lenin, Vladimir Illich. Revolution at the Gates: A Selections of Writings from February to October 1917. Verso: London.

[13] “Badiou was and still is a Maoist, even though no longer the same Maoist he once was.” Bosteels, Bruno. 2005. Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics. Positions 13:3. p.576.

[14] Take for instance the following statement by Hallward: “It is as if Badiou’s recent work positively embraces a version of what Hegel dubbed the unhappy consciousness- the stoical affirmation of a worthy ideal or subjective principle, but as divorced from any substantial relation to the material organization of the situation. It seems that the Maoists’ mistake was not their emphasis on the generic, or even their understanding of what was required to make it a historical reality, but simply their determination to apply this understanding to the world.” BS:242.

[15] Badiou, Alain. 1976. De l’idéologie. Paris: François Maspero.Yenan “syntheses”. Henceforth DI.

[16] Badiou, Alain. 1975. Théorie de la contradiction. Paris: François Maspero.Yenan “syntheses”. Henceforth TDC.

[17] Badiou, Alain. 1998a. Abrégé de Métapolitique. Paris: Seuil. Henceforth AM.

[18] The second restoration, for Badiou, refers to the period after the end of the party as a possible project for politics – after the Cultural Revolution – and the emphasis on the absence of any notion of a universal good. See TC:45-60, and the first half of Badiou, Alain. 2001. Ethics: an essay on the understanding of evil. London: Verso. Henceforth E.

[19] TC:45.

[20] Here I largely follow the reading set out by Badiou in DI: 45-90, 122-3.

[21] Marx, Karl. 1974. The Civil War in France. Progress Publishers: London.

[22] Badiou:2005b:643.

[23] As it is presented, with remarkable continuity, in both DI and TC, works which span a thirty year period.

[24] BS:43.

[25] TC:45. One must note the precise wording of the text: the ruin of the old does not ensure the passage to the new; the new will be at an absolute disjuncture to the previous objective situation. Nevertheless, the new will be destructive of the situation, and it is only on the basis of this destruction that the new can come about. Badiou develops his analysis of the conditions of the party via a reading (TC:39-47) of a text by Brecht, The Proletariat wasn’t born in a white vest. What is crucial to understand in this reading is that it is resolutely undialectical; nothing of the new can be seen as given by the objective situation that will be overcome; it is not in the present that one finds the seed of the future. To give this thought its properly anti-Hegelian spin: the rose is not here. (See the famous preface in Hegel, Georg. 1992. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Henceforth EPR.

[26] TC:11-25

[27] Ibid:16.

[28] See Lukacs, Georg. 1970. Lenin: A Study of the Unity of His Thought. New Left Books: London. Henceforth LS, and Lukacs, Georg.1971. History and Class Consciousness. Merlin: London. Henceforth HC.

[29] HC:327-8.

[30] Badiou, Alain. 2005a. Further selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution. Positions 13:3. p.643.

[31] TDC:64.

[32] Quoted TC:53.

[33] AM:35.

[34] Badiou, Alain. 2007b. A Musical Variant of the Metaphysics of the Subject. Parrhesia. No.2. p.35.

[35] TC:102.

[36] Badiou does not use the word freedom; he instead uses subtraction, or unlinking (déliée). Freedom is chosen here to set up the explicit comparison with Hegel that will follow, though in making such a comparison, it will be made clear the important differences that underlie this choice of vocabulary.

[37] Badiou, Alain. 1998b. Petit Manuel d’inésthétique. Paris: Seuil. p.56. Henceforth PM. The italics in the quote are my own, and are meant, yet again, to draw attention to the profoundly materialist conception of truth that Badiou has.

[38] Quoted in BS: 285. From (1991) L’Etre, l’événement et la militance [interview with Nicole-Edith Thévenin]. Futur antérieur 8. p.21.

[39] Hegel, Georg. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sections 585-595. pp.357-363. Henceforth PoS.

[40] PoS:357. Italics in the original.

[41] As Charles Taylor succinctly says: “The dream of absolute freedom cannot tolerate any structures and differentiation in society whereby people would have different functions in relation to the state…But, argues Hegel, this means no working state can be created…[for] this is the negation of absolute freedom; for according to this each man would will everything that the state did, would thus create by his will the totality of political and social conditions in which he lived; and this is incompatible with the kind of differentiating structure which gives man his place and function.” Here we see most explicitly the divide between knowledge and truth that is the cornerstone of Badiou’s work, anticipated in Hegel’s dialectic. See Taylor, Charles. 1997. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp.185-6.

[42] One should here also see EPR: Part Three: Ethical Life. pp. 187-199. Given the lack of space, my account is necessarily compressed, and distorts Hegel to bring out the points of resemblance to Badiou. This is to say, I simply assert Hegel’s argument, rather than unfolding the complex dialectical proof he gives in PoS.

[43] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1969. Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem. Beacon Press: London.

[44] TC:51-57.

[45] Ibid:52-53.

[46] Ibid:53.

[47] See, for instance, the way Adorno takes the categories of freedom and improvisation in music to be reflective of the commodity structure. Adorno. 2001. The Culture Industry. Routledge: London. pp.29-61.

[48] Marx, Karl. 1987. The German Ideology: Introduction to a critique of Political Economy. Lawrence & Wishart: London. pp.4-48.

[49] This difference is under lied by a much more theoretical argument I do not have time to develop here. Briefly, Badiou’s accusation in Being and Event is that Hegel cannot understand how a bad infinite (simple repetition) can be qualitatively transformed without understanding the disjunctural element of the change. This has ramifications for our argument here, because it is precisely in their differing conceptions of the nature of relation that Badiou and Hegel differ in respect to revolutionary, or absolutist politics. See B&E:161-169.

[50] TC:56.

[51] Ibid.

[52] TC:61.

[53] My primary sources for the account I give of the Cultural Revolution are Badiou, Alain. 2005c and Badiou, Alain. 2006. Logiques des Mondes. Paris: Seuil. pp. 29-36. Henceforth LM.

[54] AM:35.

[55] DI:128.

[56] Bosteels:2005:575-600.

[57] FE:60-71.

[58] Badiou:2005a:649.

[59] This is evidently very similar to Badiou’s position in both his earlier and later works: while an event emerges in a situation – it is resolutely materialist and not transcendental – is cannot be related to the situation: indeed, its impossibility of being accounted for by the presentation of the situation is what qualifies it as an event in the first place.

[60] Group for the Foundation of the Union of France Marxist-Leninist (UCFML). 2005. Maoism: A stage of Marxism. Positions. 13:3. pp. 517

[61] Thought the extent to which Badiou pays homage to Mao is clear. “I can say “our”, I was part of it, and in a certain sense, to quote Rimbaud, “I am there, I am still there.”” Badiou:2005c:481.

[62] Mao, quoted LM:34.

[63] E:98.

[64] Mao, quoted LM:31.

[65] Zizek, Slavoj. 2005. Mao Zedong: the Marxist Lord of Misrule. http://www.lacan.com/zizmaozedong.htm. Accessed 11.12.2007.

[66] E:105.

[67] TC:64.

[68] BS:242

[69] Ibid.

[70] B&E:396.

[71] Ibid:394.

[72] BS:287.

[73] In Zizek’s memorable formulation: what first appeared impossible now appears necessary. Zizek, Slavoj. 2007. Badiou: Notes from an ongoing debate. http://www.lacan.com/zizou.htm. Accessed 3.1.2008.

Controlling Unity

Essay written for Arablife.org.

And the Pilgrimage to the Temple (the hajj) is an obligation to God for those who are able to journey there.

Quran. Sura 3: 90-91.

Last month the Governor of the Mecca region, Prince Khalid Al-Faisal bin Abdulaziz, congratulated[i] all involved for the smoothing running of this year’s hajj. Thankfully, there was no repetition of last year’s tragedy, when 364 people were killed in a huge crush at the stoning ceremony, in part because of an extension to the Jamarat bridge that alleviated the flow of people. However, the invitation of Ahmedinejad to perform hajj – a hand extended by King Abdullah – reminds one that such a central event in Islam is never free of controversy.

Every day begins facing Mecca. It is the birthplace of Muhammad, where he first heard God’s call, and where he first proclaimed his message. It is the centre of the world; even if, for most Muslims, it is a centre out there; something to which one orientates oneself. The centrality of the hajj to Islam can scarcely be overemphasised: it is one of the five basic duties incumbent upon every Muslim.

When we remember that Mohammed believed the message he received was not a new message, but a return to the one true faith already given to Abraham, we see that within Islam there is already a return, a recursiveness. The hajj is a return journey to that home – to the foundations of the religion; to the centre, even if, for most Muslims, it is a centre out there.

Such a return brings with it a corresponding emphasis on the unity of the ummah over all; this is, after all, a place non-Muslims cannot go: it is a sphere that should be purely religious.

Such a display of unity is not an easy thing to bring about: gathered together are almost two million people from a host of different cultures, many of whom do not speak the same language. The cultural estrangement brought about by the pilgrimage can be difficult for many: one is among fellow believers, and yet one discovers, here, at the centre of Islam, that one does not even share a similar language, and that, for each, what constitutes belief varies significantly.

Delaney[ii], in her work on the Turkish experience of the hajj, notes the bewilderment with which the Turkish pilgrims greeted this mix of culture and belief. Indeed, one can note that what should be an experience of great unity can also be one of great self-doubt, as beliefs and practices one believed to be an essential part of Islam are revealed as local concerns not shared by one’s fellow pilgrims from across the globe.

Such divisions are not so much overcome in Mecca as they are organised: during their stay in Saudi Arabia, pilgrims live in tent cities organised according to nation-state. Such an arrangement, necessary in an age where the numbers of pilgrims have exploded, reflects the domination of the state in the organisation of the hajj.

Ninety years ago, when there were only an estimated 300 to 350,000 attending the hajj – with only 150,000 hailing from outside the kingdom[iii] - people arrived at Mecca on foot, or on camel, after long journeys that could include extended stays for work along the way. But such a route was already being closed down by the end of the nineteenth century: with the firming of national and state boundaries in the area, territories were delineated, and pilgrims’ movements were controlled no less than migrant workers and the flows of goods.

Fast forward nearly a hundred years, and it is illegal to go to Mecca by land. It is the plane that is now the key. Saudia (the national Saudi airline) carried 893,702 Hajjis on 1,754 flights from 70 international destinations. At Jeddah, they are awaited by two special Hajj airport terminals, the largest such structures in the world.

Even before entering these terminals however, the budding hajji, searching for unity under Islam, will have been marked and classified by the nation-state. For a start, not everyone can go. Quota systems have been imposed to lessen the considerable administrative strain on the Saudi government. And even then, to be registered requires being organised according to one’s classification of residence and place of origin – just as later in Saudi Arabia one lives in areas arranged by nationality.

One should not be too nostalgic for an era of free travel however. The sheer scale of the modern hajj, itself a reflection of changes in technology and travel, require it. According to the official Saudi figures, a total of 2,454,235 pilgrims from 181 nations performed last year’s hajj, 1,707,814 from outside the kingdom[iv]. To provide housing, food, water, sanitation and transport for all these people is a considerable challenge.

One of the many problems that the Saudi government faces is public health. In 1956, the Saudi Ministry of Health assumed responsibility for health and sanitation during the hajj, and now has extensive sanitation and health facilities across all the sites of the pilgrimage. In doing so, they are unwittingly following in colonial footsteps.

Modern public health services were instituted at the hajj in the nineteenth century due to fears in Europe over the spread of cholera: it was alleged that Asian hajjis brought the cholera to Mecca, and it returned to Europe with North African pilgrims. Europe then pressures the Ottoman sultanate to establish an international organisation to oversee public health at the hajj.

The politics of unity

There are other colonial echoes in the contemporary organisation of the hajj. In the late nineteenth century, the hajj was perceived as a serious political threat by the colonial authorities; people were brought together from all over the Muslim world, and could exchange dangerous ideas about nationalism or Muslim politics. In order to avoid such contact, the Dutch government, anxious about the Netherlands East Indies (today’s Indonesia) established a vice-consulate in Mecca[v].

Today the Saudi government is perhaps less concerned with the spreading of anti-colonial ideas, but controlling not just the people, but also the religious discourse surrounding the hajj, remains crucial. As the central symbolic event of Islam, political dissent at the hajj sends out wider reverberations than a corresponding action at any other time.

In his fascinating account of the Hajj, Abdellah Hammoudi[vi] sets out some of the political and symbolic clashes that occur over the smallest actions at the pilgrimage. At each stop for prayer he details disputes: over where the women should stand, which text should be recited, and over who should lead the prayer; at such a central time, each act takes on a decisive importance, and, given the mixture of people and types of Islam involved, the clashes and debates should not be surprising.

Neither should the Saudi government’s reaction: which is to rigidly attempt to control, not just the people, but the ideas disseminated on the pilgrimage.

They have vested reasons to do so. The official title of the Saudi king is “the Guardian of the Two Holy Places” and much of their legitimacy is derived from their claim to look after these sites, the holiest in Islam. Indeed, the justification for the conquering of the Hijaz was to save Islam from those who would engage in shirk (deviation), and to restore a properly pure Islam. As Okruhlik[vii], among others, has noted, the religious authority of the king, in the absence of a properly nationalist project of forming citizens, has been one of the few means of keeping together Saudi Arabia’s fragile social contract.

When Ibn Saud conquered the Hijaz, and the Holy Places within it, in the 1920’s, controlling and organising the hajj became one of his most important tasks. Initially, controversies over religious interpretation (and correspondingly, who had the political power to enforce their interpretation) marred the hajj. In Mecca the cupola over the house of Khadija, wife of the Prophet Muhammad, was destroyed, and the Nadji who came with Ibn Saud condemned the veneration of sites associated with saints and earlier Islamic leaders[viii].

The Al-Saud was also careful to ensure that not only was there religious interpretation to be followed, but that no political dissent was to occur. In 1928[ix], an Indian Sunni pilgrim denounced the Wahhabis as infidels, and was promptly sent to jail. This incident inspired a tightening of the laws governing religious preaching at Mecca.

Such tension has continued up to the present day. During Nasserism and Arab nationalism, people sought to use the attention given to the hajj as a platform for political protest. The Saudis response was predictable, and, to a degree, understandable: the hajj is a time for religion and unity, not division and political dissent.

However, such a claim should be treated with suspicion. For the Saudi claim, that the hajj is not political, is the basis for a very political claim: that the Al-Saud family are the legitimate guardians of the two sites. Such a logic means, essentially, that when one questions the right of the Al-Saud family, and the degree to which they accord to their own religious justification, one is told that this is religious, and when one tries to enter politics into religion, then one is told this is no place for politics. Such a slippery exclusion is permanently in tension during the hajj.

Perhaps the paradigmatic example of this is the storming of the Mecca mosque by Juhayman al-Utaybi in 1979, recently the subject of an excellent article by Thomas Hegghammer and Stéphane Lacroix[x]. Part of al-Utaybi’s justification for the event was the criticism of the Saudi leaders, whose behaviour contradicted the word of God, and equally their claim to be living in accordance with it. Turning the claims of the Saudi leadership to represent Islam in Saudi Arabia, and using them to show the Al-Saud as corrupt, has been a theme of Islamist criticism in Saudi Arabia up until the present. By preventing political criticism through religious justifications, the Saudi regime invariably create an opposition that creates a political movement through religion; through events like the hajj.

The Al-Saud, in any event, have no qualms in using the hajj for political purposes, provided they control the politics. Witness the very public invitation extended to Ahmedinejad this year by King Abdullah, a step in a political program that saw the two leaders meet earlier last year to discuss Iraq and Lebanon.

Furthermore, one could also note the political implications of the raids that took place during the hajj. Al-Arabiya television reported that an unnamed security official claimed that the “al-Qaeda” militants aimed to make attacks during the hajj[xi]. Given the instant condemnation with which such attacks would be greeted around the Muslim world, it seems highly unlikely any Islamist militants would consider such a plan. Instead, it seems more probably the Saudi government used the excuse of the hajj to round up suspects, and create a feeling of public anger towards the Islamist opposition by suggesting that they would make an attack during hajj. We are Muslims, such a statement claims: they are outside.

To ensure the sanctity of the religious sphere is always difficult. Politics, everyday life, cultural differences – all of them threaten to intrude on an event that should be the moment of Islam at its purest for every hajji. The Al-Saud claim they want to ensure this purity. In reality, the unity they want to ensure, first and foremost, is the unity of the Al-Saud. This means, inevitably, using religion for political ends. It means controlling unity.

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[i] http://www.kuna.net.kw/Home/Story.aspx?Language=en&DSNO=1053484

[ii] Carol Delaney. (1990) The “hajj”: Sacred and Secular. American Ethnologist, Vol. 17, No. 3. 513-530.

[iii] http://www.saudi-us-relations.org/articles/2007/ioi/071216-long-hajj.html

[iv] http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5ipfqgTGHS1baQESLyxKdWcN6g9Dw

[v] Michael Gilsenan. (2006). And you, what are you doing here? London Review of Books. 19/10/2006.

[vi] Abdellah Hammoudi. (2004) Une saison à la Mecque. Récit de pèlerinage. Paris: Seuil. A short extract is also published by OpenDemocracy: http://www.opendemocracy.net/arts-Literature/mecca_2889.jsp

[vii] Okruhlik, G. 2005: The Irony of Islah (Reform). The Washington Quarterly. 28:4. pp. 153-170.

[viii] For more information on these issues, see my earlier article: Joshua Craze, On Wahhabism. SaudiDebate. 24/1/2007. http://www.saudidebate.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=568&Itemid=134

[ix] See William Ochsenwald (2007) Islam and Loyalty in the Saudi Hijaz, 1926-1939. Die Welt des Islams. 47(1).

[x] Thomas Hegghammer and Stéphane Lacroix. (2007) Rejectionist Islam in Saudi Arabia: The story of Juhayman al-Utaybi revisited. International Journal of Middle East Studies. 39: 103-122.

[xi] http://www.reuters.com/article/newsMaps/idUSL214957720071221

Capital’s War

Essay previously published with Arablife.org.

4/01/2007.

With the dismantlement of the Soviet Union the security environment confronting China deteriorated daily, Western hegemonic states daily tightened the ring of encirclement around China. Its causes do not lie in ideological differences, but in the fact that current conventional sources of raw materials no longer support the rise of an Eastern Great Power with consumption levels equal to that of the West.

Zhang Wenmu (2004)[i]

A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East.

Zbigniew Brezinski. (1997) The Grand Chessboard. American primacy and It’s Geostrategic Imperatives[ii].

Later this month George Bush, stumbling into the last year of his presidency, with his allies deserting him in droves, will make a grand tour of the Middle East. Along the way, he will make his first visit to a country that has remained steadfastly loyal to the American government, muted criticisms of American actions in Iraq and Israeli actions in Lebanon aside: Saudi Arabia.

And while the kingdom has announced it will ask George Bush to “pressure Israel to halt settlements in east al-Quds”[iii], the Americans may want to talk to King Hussain about some more frequent visitors to Riyadh: the Chinese government.

For while George Bush prefers to keep his allies at arm’s length, the Chinese have been busy consolidating ties with Saudi Arabia.

It is not all one way traffic. Saudi Defence Minister Prince Sultan and Ali al-Naimi, the Saudi Oil Minister, have both made frequent visits to China – the latter making six trips in the past two years alone.

The Chinese presence in Saudi Arabia then, is not entirely unappreciated. Understandably so: China is the 4^th largest economy in the world in terms of GDP, and presents a growing market for Saudi oil that is especially welcome at a time when the relationship between Saudi Arabia and America has become strained. China, on the other hand, sees in Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves a possible source for its ever growing energy demands. Given that both countries oil industries are run by state companies, we can see this shift as one reflecting official policy.

A 1999 agreement between the two countries formalised the arrangement. It was agreed that Saudi Arabia will open its domestic oil and gas markets to China[iv], and in return China agreed to open its downstream sector (refining petroleum products for the end market) to Saudi firms[v]. The pay off for China has been rapid: the annual rate of Saudi imports from China has risen by 600% in aggregate terms[vi] over the past decade, and the Saudi’s are upgrading the famously inefficient Chinese oil refineries, which might finally allow them to process the low quality heavy oil the Gulf produces.

China’s realism?

But while people are taking note of the new relationship between Saudi Arabia and China, there is less certainty about what precisely the Chinese want. Approaches that try to explain Chinese foreign policy tend to be solidly realist. Indeed, there is an interesting split between the thousands of anguished articles which analyse what it might mean to have an “ethical foreign policy”, or try to trace the route of a “realistic Wilsonianism” (Fukuyama’s latest formulation[vii]), and the absence of any consideration of Chinese foreign policy outside of a narrow framework that sees China interested simply in fulfilling its energy requirements. The idea that China’s foreign policy might have a history does not seem to be considered by the op-ed writers of the Global North. Put simply, while people still talk about Wilson, Lin Biao is swept under the carpet of history: part of the history of communism we no longer want to connect to China.

Despite their ahistorical approach, the way the realists interpret China’s foreign policy is not entirely without merit. The argument was summed up in a recent article by Perry Anderson, a man we could never accuse of being ahistorical, in the New Left Review[viii].

Far the largest, by any measure, must be the emergence of China as the new workshop of the world: not just the rapid expansion of one outsize national economy, but a structural alteration of the world market, with a global impact closer to Victorian England than the more parochial settings of Gilded Age—perhaps even Post-War—America. Three consequences of China’s high-speed growth have followed. Domestically, it has created, amid dramatically increasing inequality, a substantial middle class attached to the status quo, and a more widespread ideological conviction, extending well beyond the middle class, of the benefits of private enterprise. Internationally, it has locked the PRC [People’s Republic of China] into a close embrace with the United States, through a level of economic interdependence surpassing that of Japan. Globally, it has in the past four years helped sustain—or unleash—world growth rates not seen since the sixties.

In this depiction, China becomes the rising capitalist dragon. Its rapid economic expansion creates unprecedented demand for raw materials, and it is largely this demand – notably, in the case of Saudi Arabia, for oil and gas – that has led to a foreign policy that seeks to assure a stable supply of materials. The need for a stable supply and the inter-linking of the Chinese economy, globally and in particular with America, has engendered a foreign policy that is careful not to upset the balance of power in the Middle East, something that China has been emphatically insisting it does not do through its arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Iran.

This vision of capitalist China would see America as the hand-maiden, waiting to give the running of the ship to China. And quarrels in such an arrangement (say, over Taiwan) would be seen as small disruptions on the periphery of capitalist development.

There are a lot of reasons to be suspicious of such a view, in particular, because it underplays the differences between Chinese visions of the world order and America’s, and because it neglects to try and understand Chinese policy through the prism of its history.

However, it must be conceded that this explanation seems to superficially fit the facts.

In 1993, China became a net importer of oil, and the Communist Party’s long-held policy of self-sufficiency had to be abandoned.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest producer of crude oil, has been wooed ever since. This relationship first came to light in 1998, when China sold 36 CSS-2 missiles and nine launchers to Saudi Arabia. Since the 1999 agreement alluded to above, there has been a steady strengthening of times, with both countries co-operating on downstream projects in China[ix], and more projects in the pipeline. China has also been involved in Saudi Arabia: in 2004, Sinopec won a contract for a natural gas project in the north-western block of the Rub al-Khali gas fields, an area that has not been open to foreign firms for the last twenty five years.

Such developments seem to fit the type of realist model sketched out at the beginning of this section. Rather than being concerned about human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia, or attempting to stir up revolution, China has been noticeably silent about Saudi Arabia’s domestic policy, a situation echoed in China’s relationship with, among others, Sudan and Angola, both countries that are hardly models of Western behaviour, and both are countries that, conveniently enough, have oil reserves not yet dominated by the Global North. As the quote from Zhang Wenmu that started this essay makes clear, finding sources of oil and gas out of the reach of America is a priority of Chinese energy policy.

The formula seems simple. A country with burgeoning energy needs seeks countries with oil and gas supplies; in exchange for supplies we offer hard currency, arms sales, and the absence of any critique of your domestic policy. It is a nice ad, and seems to fit what a western political scientist would define as realism: a pragmatic foreign policy without any idealistic goals, such as bringing democracy to the Middle East.

Yet, while the facts may seem to fit the explanation, we must remember Baudrillard’s comment, that “My principal objection to reality is, moreover, its character of unconditional surrender to any hypothesis that one can make about it”[x]

Which is to say, while Chinese actions may seem to fit into the explanations given by American analysts, we should be wary at accepting that these explanations really reflect the strategy of the Chinese government: to understand this, we would have to place these developments against the history of Chinese foreign policy.

Encircling the encirclers

The quote from Zbigniew Brezinski that begins this essay indicates the degree of fear that the Americans have about one country getting the upper hand in the region that used to be called the great chess board, and the correlative control that country would exert over the Middle East. America has always taking corresponding steps to ensure that Central Asia does not come to be dominated by one country; initially this applied to the Soviet Union, and thus the American support for the Afghanistan mujahedeen (ably assisted by the Saudis) from 1979.

However what looks like self-protection to the Americans can seem like, to paraphrase Wang Zenmu, the gradually tightening encirclement of China by Western hegemonic states. This relates to much older memories: China’s experience in the 19^th century was of gradual encroachment by expanding colonial powers on its western and eastern borders. This fear of encroachment has continued in the People’s Republic of China. When America embarked on its policy of containment (the Korean War, support for a separate Taiwan), China, inspired by the United Front strategies developed in the Marxist thought of the 1930’s, tried to develop buffer zones around itself.

We would be too quick to dismiss these ideas as part of ancient history. There is still a concerted effort to limit Chinese domination of the pacific, and America’s development of military bases in Central Asia after 9/11 cannot be understood solely in terms of terrorism, without reference to limiting Chinese ambitions in the region. Furthermore, in several areas of current Chinese policy in the Middle East, we can see echoes of United Front strategies, and even Lin Biao’s concept of the People’s war. Some Chinese writing[xi] has ascribed an absolutely central role to Iran in the battle against US hegemony, and current Chinese support for Iran can be seen as a means of ensuring China maintains a link to Eurasia and the Middle East against any possible encirclement.

Encirclement was a common term in the PRC until recently. But while it has now vanished from diplomatic language and official documents, the Chinese policy towards Saudi Arabia testifies to the fact that many aspects of the thinking remain intact. In particular, the Chinese tributary system, which privileged coalitions based on non-interference, can be seen in the lack of criticism China makes of strategically important countries with which it has relations.

The nature of the deals China makes with Saudi Arabia also provide a clue to the type of foreign policy the PRC want to adopt. In Saudi Arabia, like in many of the countries China has recently strengthened relations with, the deals are exclusive, with China paying over the odds, so as to ensure they are not held hostage – either by the international oil market or by a competitors. In a similar fashion, while the arms deals China has concluded with Saudi Arabia can be seen as a way of offsetting balance of payments deficits created by large-scale oil deals, it is also true to say that this deepening of dependence and obligation on China resembles a style of foreign policy that has larger historical echoes.

Containing younger brother

Despite these echoes of a Communist past, America has no real reason[xii] to be worried about the relationship between Saudi Arabia and China. Given the problems the Saudis face, China is not a credible alternative to America. Furthermore, both Saudi Arabia and China are US allies, in their different ways. China’s economic inter-dependence with America, and that fact that they require a stable oil price in a volatile region, means it is unlikely they will rock the boat. Speaking of boats, it is ironic that the shipping lines upon which oil travels from Saudi Arabia to China are guarded by American vessels, and given the commitments of the Chinese navy around Taiwan, this is unlikely to change anytime soon. Finally, while China is building up its commitments in the Middle East, most of China’s emphasis is on the places the West fears to tread: Angola, Sudan and Russia[xiii].

Equally, despite recent friction with the United States, Saudi Arabia is in no position to disturb their relationship. That said, despite the continued dependency on the United States, Saudi Arabia has been expanding its economic connections throughout South Asia. It is not just benefiting from oil revenues and arms either. The Saudi economy now supplies the Chinese textile industry with petrochemical products, and the Chinese economy is an increasingly popular place for Saudis to invest and recycle the enormous liquidity produced by the current record-high oil levels, especially since America has become a less attractive country to invest in.

Saudi Arabia is now reliant on both countries, despite the benefits it is reaping, for ultimately, as a recent report by a Chinese scholar states, Saudi Arabia “cannot stop pumping oil without shattering its fragile social contract with its own population.”[xiv]

Between two worlds

Given such inter-dependence within a globalised economy, the realist perspective on Chinese policy towards Saudi Arabia would largely seem to be justified: the diversification of Saudi’s oil policy poses America no real threats in the short term. However, just because this is correct, this does not imply that by ignoring the history of Chinese foreign policy, they are not misunderstanding the subjective intentions of the Chinese government. That said, reading an unproblematic continuity between the isolationism of the Cultural Revolution and the opening up of foreign policy that began under Deng Xiaoping is untenable. In reality, neither of these perspectives are satisfying, what we need to do instead is to understand the way the objective conditions of China’s energy needs are seen through the prism of Chinese history, and why the currently apparent capitalist Chinese state emerged out of, and could only have emerged out of, its communist past.

On this point, in conclusion, it is worth recalling a remark made in a different context by the Hungarian philosopher, George Lukàcs[xv]:

The pre-eminently practical nature of the Communist Party, the fact that it is a fighting force presupposes its possession of a correct theory, for otherwise the consequences of a false theory would soon destroy it.

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[i] Zhang Wenmu is a professor at the Centre for Strategic Studies in Beijing and a prolific writer on Chinese foreign affairs. This quote is taken from Radtke K. W. (2007) China and the Greater Middle East: Globalization No Longer Equals Westernization. Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 6: 389-416.

[ii] Some choice quotes from this book are available at: http://www.comw.org/pda/fulltext/9709brzezinski.html

[iii] http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=37411&sectionid=3510203

[iv] Excluding upstream oil exploration and production.

[v] I have analysed this agreement in more detail in an earlier article. See The end of the affair? Saudidebate.com http://www.saudidebate.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=187&Itemid=134

[vi] Leverett, F. And Bader, J. (2005-6) Managing China-United States Energy Competition in the Middle East. The Washington Quarterly. (29(1): 187-201.

[vii] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/magazine/neo.html?ex=1141362000&en=a6ab5b762c549c55&ei=5070

[viii] Perry Anderson. (2007) JOTTINGS ON THE CONJUNCTURE. New Left Review 48, November-December 2007. http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2695

[ix] South China Morning Post, October 5 2004.

[x] Jean Baudrillard (1993) Paroxysm: The Perfect Crime. Paris: Association Française d'Action Artistique.

[xi] See Radtke (2007:394) for a review.

[xii] Perhaps the only caveat we should add here is that the Sino-Saudi collaboration could pave the way for OPEC to accept payments for oil in a variety of different currencies, rather than relying exclusively on the dollar – a move which would have serious implications for the dollar’s status as the world vehicular currency.

[xiii] Andé Mommen. (2007) China’s Hunger for Oil: The Russian Connection. Journal of Developing Societies. 23:435.

[xiv] http://www.wsichina.org/%5Ccurr03.html

[xv] George Lukàcs. (1971) History and Class Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 327.

About Lewis

A review of Al-Rasheed, Madawi. (2007) Contesting the Saudi State: Islamic Voices from a New Generation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. First published here, at SaudiDebate.

Being an anthropologist of Saudi Arabia does not make for an easy life. Rigid state control of research in the Kingdom means Al-Rasheed has (p.12)(n.1) “not come across an impartial sociological or anthropological study of religion and religious practice… conducted by a Saudi researcher.” And while being outside Saudi Arabia allows you the liberty of working critically, it prevents you doing the type of intensive ethnographic fieldwork that is the mainstay of anthropology elsewhere in the world.

To make matters worse, the world is not exactly receptive to the type of nuanced analysis for which good anthropology has become known. When it comes to Saudi Arabia, many writers seem content to trot out a few clichés about Wahhabism and to dig no further into the facts of the matter. That Al-Rasheed has overcome these problems to produce a finely nuanced account of the ways in which the Saudi state is contested at the start of the 21st century is a triumph.

It is important to emphasise the fact Al-Rasheed is an anthropologist because an anthropological approach seems to avoid some of the central problems hampering much of the writing about the Kingdom. If the reader is anything like me, he or she will by now have read hundreds of articles which endeavour to calmly delineate those age-old categories: Wahhabi, Salafi, Sahwi, Liberal and Jihadi. Reading these articles, nothing seems simpler than the way people happily adhere to the roles they have been given. The problems start when you read another article, which has an entirely different set of categories, and find out that actually, according to article (b), those calm categories of article (a) aren’t actually the way we need to see Saudi Arabia, and that the author of article (b) has the definitive set of categories.

There is a problem when an article contains more categories than there are people mentioned in the article to fill them.

Madawi Al-Rasheed does not full into the trap of classification. Contesting the Saudi State is full of people, many of whom have moved between categories, most of whom do not fit neatly into any of them. Al-Rasheed is well aware that categories are only useful in so far as they allow us to understand the richness and complexity of the human relations beneath them. She is also aware that these people may not agree with the categories they have been placed in(n.2) . Most importantly, the books starting point is that even if people call themselves a certain name, or put themselves in a certain category, that self-ascription might be contested by others.

Which is to say, giving names to things is not a prologue to understanding a situation; understanding the contested nature of the names involved in a situation is, in an important sense, the situation itself. In Saudi Arabia at the dawn of the 21st century, understanding the arguments that revolve around names like Salafi is to understand much of the current situation.

Such an approach means not taking names to refer to absolute objects, but understanding that underneath names are discourses that legitimate themselves, and that these discourses are in turn used to respond to very local concerns, which often have only limited relevance to the explicit intentions of the discourse. Al-Rasheed uses such an approach to look to see how underneath different interpretations of what it means to be Salafi there are discourses which encourage and legitimate different types of action on a local level. For instance, (p.137) “even if Jihadism… is a function of global terror networks and transnational religious and political flows, it grows in a specific local context with its own cultural codes and experiences.”

Her method of analysis is vital in Saudi Arabia not just because political science is content to rest at the level of names, but because so much of the politics of contestation in Saudi Arabia is about naming; the official ‘ulama call the Jihadi’s Kharijites, the Jihadis return the compliment – and unless one understands the background underneath all this catcalling, these names float in a vacuum.

Most of the book is taken up in working out what it might mean to be a number of names: Muslim, Saudi Arabian and Salafi being the most prominent. One of the great successes of the book is the way it, in looking at these names, manages to talk about faith. As Al-Rasheed argues (p.210), in social science faith has too often been either an ideological supplement to what is essentially a materialist motivation, or it has stood apart as an irrational motivation for action. Contesting the Saudi State instead traces a very delicate path through the ways religion has interacted with politics; how many Jihadis are not in search of some sort of nihilistic redemption, but are rational actors (ibid) “guided by divine power, empowered by faith in a world where such empowerment is dismissed as emotional, irrational, misguided and even destructive.”

The danger with writing such a book – stood away from your field of research and working from discourse, especially when you want to take faith claims seriously – is that discourse becomes the horizon of your work. It is to Al-Rasheed’s credit that, as far as possible, she does not allow this to happen. Very early on in the book, she makes the point that despite the claims of the official ‘ulama, the government operates according to personal political gains rather than religion.

Indeed, much of the dissent Al-Rasheed writes about in the book emerges precisely from this gap between words and things. It emerges due to the distance between the words of a regime that praised jihad in Afghanistan and the fact it allowed American troops into the country during the first gulf war. Al-Rasheed eloquently describes this contestation of a regime that (p.1) “insisted in complete submission to political authority while preaching total submission to God.”

The book traces the development of the official Wahhabi religio-political discourse, and its implications on contemporary political life. While Al-Rasheed is admirably sceptical of the official claims, proving their verity, or otherwise, is not the focus of the book. For instance, the Wahhabi myth (p.23) “claims that Muslims in Arabia were and are blasphemous, and their salvation is entirely dependent on the message of Muhammad ibn Abd Al-Wahhab.” Now clearly, the fact there was tomb worship does not mean that everyone was a tomb worshipper. But this sort of exercise is not what Al-Rasheed is driving at; she wants to understand how this claim functions to legitimate the Al-Saud regime, and the effect it will have on how those who want to challenge the Kingdom create their opposition.

This review does not allow me the space to go into her claims in detail, suffice to say that even when her book deals with relatively worn ground, the perspective she takes allows new insights. For instances, much of the academic debate on the emergence of the Sahwa centres on whether it was an internal development to Saudi Arabia, or whether it was an imported phenomenon that arrived with the Muslim Brotherhood in the 60’s. Al-Rasheed, characteristically, turns the debate on its head. While she disagrees (p.73) with Kepel (n.3) , who claims that the Sahwa enters the Kingdom with the Muslim Brotherhood, and even suggests the reverse – that the Muslim Brotherhood were influenced by ideas from inside the Kingdom – she suggests this is not the point. What is more important is to see how these ideas (foreign, ‘internal’), are understood on the ground, and made relevant to local concerns in the Kingdom.

Nowhere is this better achieved than in her portrait of Lewis Atiyat Allah, “one of the most popular Jihadi Islamist internet writers” (p.175). Under a nom de plume, he writes sophisticated critiques of the Kingdom, and responds articulately to criticisms. His support of al-Qa’ida is not simply based on the sentiment of “kick the infidel from the Arabian Peninsula”, but is a carefully phrased argument which examines the duty of jihad, and the task of making Islam a hegemonic religion. Reading Al-Rasheed’s presentation of his ideas, you may not agree with him – I hope you don’t – but you cannot walk away claiming his argument is anything other than considered. Her presentation of his work moves from global to local (Saudi Arabian) concerns, not simply showing how the local is now part of the global, and visa versa, but how both local and global share similar dynamics. At each stage of the argument, Al-Rasheed shows the relationship between Lewis’ ideas and the official Wahhabi discourse. It is a rich portrait, that should be required reading for anyone interested in the Peninsula.

This portrait also points to the necessary limit of the study. Inevitably, given the repression within Saudi Arabia, Al-Rasheed’s fieldwork has been a virtual one. In one sense, this is the same movement that has occurred within Saudi Arabia: due to internal repression, critics of the regime have in large part also moved to the internet. However, her treatment creates a slight imbalance in the book. For while we get a sense of the gap between the official discourse and the way the Saudi state functions, the majority of the book – which deals with the ways this discourse is contested – rests on the level of a discursive analysis. Which is to say that the ethnography of jihad has yet to be written, but one cannot fault Al-Rasheed for this. As a nuanced picture of the contradictions of Wahhabi religio-political discourse, and the actors contesting it, Contesting the Saudi State succeeds admirably, and deserves the widest possible readership.

Notes

n.1: All page references to Contesting the Saudi State: Islamic Voices from a New Generation will be indicated by a number inside brackets. Other books will be referred to in the normal way. Notes are denoted by the letter (n)
n.2: Have you ever met anyone who describes themselves as a Wahhabi?
n.3: Kepel, G. (2004) The War for Muslim Minds. pp. 170-196. Cambridge: Belknap Press.

Lines in the Sand

An article shortly to be published with SaudiDebate.

Title: Lines in the sand

Text:

It is difficult to draw lines in the desert. The wind tends to quickly cover them up with sand, and the surface is as before. The problem is exacerbated if one has to draw lines around a nation bordered by seven other countries. If that wasn’t difficult enough, it is especially hard to draw such lines when you have three competing ideas of where the line should be. Nation states like clear lines between organised sovereignties, separating out the vivid blocks of colour on our maps. Such an understanding is not shared by nomadic peoples, whose concept of territorial ownership can often be durational and change with the seasons. Nor is such an understanding shared by Islamic movements that see only one border: that between Islam and the non-believers.

Suffice to say, Saudi Arabia has always had a problem with lines.

This problem is further complicated by the fact that the Saudi Arabian state relied on both Islamic movements and nomads to achieve power. The territorial expansion of the House of Saud in the 30’s would not have been possible without their alliance with the Ikhwanⁱ, a religious and military brotherhood derived from Bedouin tribes. Their notions of movement and expansion did not sit well with the centralising tendencies of Ibn Saud’s nascent state. After a significant deterioration in the relationship, leading to a rebellion in 1929-30, Ibn Saud crushed the movement.

The battle with between the Ikhwan and Ibn Saud was not simply a question of a difference between badw (nomad), and hadr (settled) populations; it was also about two different varieties of Wahhabism. On the one hand, Ibn Saud wanted to consolidate the state he had already established, on the other, the Ikhwan, who cared little for the static boundaries established by the British, and wanted to continue the expansion of Wahhabism.

While the Ikhwan were defeated in the 1930’s, the tension continues between a centralizing state with pragmatic concerns about survival and a religious ideology that, while acting as the justification for the state, implicitly rejects the centralisation of the House of Saud. Many of those who captured the grand mosque in Mecca were descendants of the defeated Ikhwan.

But it is not just the Ikhwan’s descendants who are unsatisfied with the borders Saudi Arabia has drawn up around itself. The Saudi government had encouraged the fighters who had gone to Afghanistan in the 1980’s to fight against the Soviet occupation. On their return, it was these fighters, along with a new generation of religious clergy, that decried the presence of American troops on Saudi soil during the first Gulf war. Again, at stake was a question of boundaries. For al sahwa al islamiyya (the Islamic awakening), the idea of having infidel forces present so close to the holy sites of Mecca and Medina was against Islamic law:differing perceptions of religious and national borders clashed. These tensions was exacerbated by the perceived lack of political will on the past of the Saudi state to intervene in situations, such as Palestine, where members of the umma were under attack.

These tensions continue to build.

Walking the line…

Today, Saudi Arabia is again worried about Saudi militants returning from foreign wars to sow dissent back home. Except this time, the foreign war is rather closer to home. In fact, it is just next door. Most worryingly, as Okruhlik notesⁱⁱ: “The jihadis engaged in the war in Iraq are returning to Saudi Arabia much younger and perhaps more independent than the mujahideen who returned from Afghanistan in the 1980s.”

Saudi Arabia’s border with Iraq is 900km long, undemarcated and undefended. Before the American invasion, the chief concern for the Kingdom was the smuggling of alcohol and weapons. Now, peopleⁱⁱⁱ have to be added to the list. The Saudi government has reacted forcefully. According^iv to a recent report by the Saudi defence analyst Nawaf Obaid, Saudi Arabia has spent $1.8 billion securing its border with Iraq since 2004.

They have every reason to be worried. The Shi’a resurgence in Iraq means the Kingdom is becoming worried about the possibility of a generalised Shi’a awakening across the region. Despite recent reforms instituted in Saudi Arabia, the Shi’a population are still very much second class citizens, and the Kingdom doesn’t want them catching the revolutionary wind. In theory, that would leave Saudi Arabia backing the Sunni factions in Iraq – if it wasn’t for the fact that many of the Sunni factions have links, or at least shared sentiments, with the jihadis currently active in Saudi Arabia.

For the moment then, the border is staying firmly shut. Thousands^v of Iraqi’s are fleeing: at least 100,000 to Egypt, 730,000 to Jordan and 660,000 to Syria, with more arriving each month. Very few are getting to Saudi Arabia. And if the message wasn’t being understood before, the Kingdom hope that the wall^vi they are building, which will cover the entire length of Saudi Arabia’s border with Iraq, will give the message loud and clear. Given past experience, bets are off on Saudi Arabia managing to keep many people out.

…Or crossing it?

If they did fail to build the wall, it wouldn’t be the first time. In 2003, the Kingdom embarked on an ambitious project to build a fence along the border with Yemen. The Saudi government claimed the fence was being constructed to stop smuggling.

They have a point. In December 2003^vii, more than 4,000 people and large quantities of weapons and drugs were seized in the south of the country. The Yemeni side of the border is dominated by tribes that are less than totally obedient to the government, and this makes enforcement of border restrictions difficult. In December 2001 the government attempted to capture Abu Ali al-Harithi, a former body guard of Osama bin Laden, who was believed to be in Ma’rib. The tribal forces responded, and the Yemeni government troops were forced back with heavy losses. To make matters worse, between March 2002 and February 2003, thirty six Saudi border guards were killed in the frontier town of Jizan.

There is not only an unmanageable border with Yemen, but thousands of weapons to be smuggled over it. Decades of civil war mean that there is now^viii an estimated three weapons per head of the population in Yemen. These weapons have been finding their way into the hands of jihadis in Saudi Arabia – two AK-47 assault rifles used in an attack on the U.S consulate have been traced to Yemen’s Defence Ministry.

Despite all these reasons for alarm, the wall was eventually abandoned following fierce disagreements with the tribes living on the Yemeni side of the border. The origin of these arguments is complex.

The Saudi-Yemeni border was first officially fixed by the Ti’fa^ix agreement of 1934, following a war between the two countries. Under the terms^x of Ti’fa agreement, Saudi Arabia agreed to give back some of the gains it had made during the war, while consolidating its hold on Jizan and Najran provinces^xi. The agreement was supposed to last for twenty years, but at the appointed time was neither renegotiated nor renewed. Instead, years of warfare in Yemen followed. It was finally unified in 1990, a policy which Saudi Arabia completely disagreed with, hoping to keep the two countries separated.

However, the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Yemen deteriorated through the early 90’s, as Riyadh supported a number of factions that destabilised the country. The lowest ebb in the relationship was reached in 1994, when oil was found at Ma’rib, which was claimed on Saudi maps, and there were clashes between Saudi and Yemeni troops. Relations then improved in the late 90’s, leading to the Jeddah^xii agreement of 2000, which definitively fixed the borders between the two countries.

It is strongly believed that the Jeddah agreement was already agreed in 1997, and the delay between agreement and implementation was due to it being used as a political tool to gain leverage on other issues, such as the restoration of suspended financial aid from Saudi Arabia to Yemen. Despite no agreements being reached about such issues, the final agreement closely follows the Ti’fa agreement.

Saudi Arabia wanted to build their wall roughly along the agreed boundary – albeit 20km into Yemen’s territory (as the limit of the neutral territory). The tribes living along the border were infuriated. Not only would this mean being deprived of a much needed revenue from smuggling, it clashes with the very different notion of territory held by the tribes living in the north of Yemen.

The Jeddah agreement tacitly acknowledges these differing conceptions of territory. One of the provisions reads:

“Shepherds in both countries will have the right to pasturage and water up to twenty kilometres beyond the border “according to prevailing tribal traditions”. However either side may set restrictions on the number of vehicles crossing the border with shepherds, the firearms shepherds may carry, and the like.”

It is commonly thought that nomadic tribes have no real conception of territory. This is, of course, false. However, their conceptions tend to differ from the absolute lines imposed by ideas of international sovereignty. As J.C. Wilkinson^xiii notes for nearby Oman, rather than thinking in terms of ‘mine’, nomads in the region tend to think in terms of ‘right.’ Pastoral people are reliant on water supplies that are not constant – but change with the seasons. Thus, the notion of ownership tends to be more complicated than the absolute lines of a nation-state; they are, instead, predicated on ideas of duration and co-operative exchange.

Now a line in the desert doesn’t disturb these arrangements, but a large wall certainly does. And sure enough, people were not pleased. The Sh’ite Wayliah tribe objected^xiv to the positioning of the border, claiming to have 240 year old papers that proved the tribes ownership of the land. Such papers may have had some validity – as it was only in 1934 that the areas now bordering Yemen were incorporated into Saudi Arabia, and the Ta’if treaty has only dubious international legitimacy. Be that as it may, Saudi Arabia didn’t listen to their claim and tried to pacify them by giving five hundred of them Saudi citizenship.

The Wayliah were unimpressed, rioting on a series of occasions^xv, and claiming^xvi, in 2004, that there were 3,000 fighters ready to give up their lives to stop the construction of the wall. The Kingdom responded by trying to claim it was not a wall of separation, but after extensive discussions^xvii with the Yemeni government, eventually backed down from the project.

In a fascinating account^xviii, J.C. Wilkinson notes that after the withdrawal of the British from the region, many border disputes were resolved by returning to older notions of territory. Today, two global movements increasingly prevent such accommodations being reached. Terrorism transforms empty stretches of desert into possible weaknesses. Oil transforms those same areas into liquid gold. The way the nation-state reacts to these two phenomenon has little respect for the older, more flexible nodal notions of territory.

Old Rivalries

If the relationship with Iraq and Yemen exemplifies Saudi Arabia’s concern about terrorism, then the border dispute with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) exemplifies the concern with having absolute territorial rights over oil.

The question of the borders between the two countries was re-opened by President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, who took power in the UAE in November 2005, during a formal visit to Riyadh^xix. The argument over the territory was publically reopened in 2006, following the publication of a UAE textbook showing a map^xx of the Emirates extending westward as far as Qatar, across Saudi Arabian territory^xxi.

The origins of this rivalry extend back before the existence of the Saudi Arabian state. At the time, the al-Sauds and the al-Nahyns (now the rulers of Abu Dhabi, the leading emirate) were dynastic families. The al-Nahyns were prepares to accept the dominance of the al-Sauds, but not Wahhabi Islam. The key bone of contention between them was the Buraimi oasis. Control of the oasis meant control of vital water for crops and herding in a desert region. Fifty years ago, the oasis was taken by Saudi Arabia. International arbitration between the two sides ensued. As the arbitration failed, Abu Dhabi retook the well with British support.

The situation changed in 1974, as the United Arab Emirates pressed for international recognition. Saudi Arabia only agreed to recognise the nascent state if Abu Dhabi relinquished a 25km stretch of land linking it to Qatar, and the Shaybah oil fields, now in the south of Saudi Arabia, where oil had just been found. In return, Saudi Arabia promised to relinquish its claim on the Buraima oasis^xxii, and recognise the UAE. An agreement was signed on August 12 in 1974.

Today, the Shaybah oil fields produced 550,000 barrels of light crude oil a day, and revenues from the field are in excess of $10 million per year^xxiii. Abu Dhabi now claims that the whole agreement was carried out under political duress, and want to renegotiate the Riyadh treaty. The treaty itself is of doubtful legality under international law, as it has never been published, nor was it ratified by the UAE Federal National Council. The UAE hope that with new kings in place in both countries, a change in the political climate could occur.

Border Crossings

Any border is overlaid with a series of meanings. The line in the sand is at the same time a national boundary, the route to a watering hole, the oil riches concealed underneath, and the route of a successful conquering army. In the pastiche state^xxiv, the national boundary has to manage the tension between all these different meanings.

But borders are not simply physical. If the nation state’s borders denote the physical territory over which it has the right to exercise sovereignty, there are a second set of borders, which denote which types of people will be treated as subjects of that sovereignty, and in what way. Saudi Arabia’s state religion has created, in part, a form of Islam that is in necessary contradiction with its physical borders. As the jihadi’s expand and push out to other countries, supported by the same ideology that supports the Saudi state, the physical borders of the country feel themselves come under threat. Jihadi’s trapped within one border by another. Saudi Arabia trapped between borders, between conflicting responsibilities. You can bet that the lines of sand will be redrawn yet.

ihttp://www.naqshbandi.org/ottomans/wahhabi/ikhwan.htm

iiOkruhlik, G. 2005: The Irony of Islah (Reform). The Washington Quarterly. 28:4. pp. 153-170. p.158.

iiihttp://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http://www.ndu.edu/inss/Repository/Outside_Publications/McMillan/200601XX_INSS_McMillan_OPub_USIP.pdf

ivhttp://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0420/p07s02-wome.html?s=hns

vhttp://www.sptimes.com/2007/01/22/Worldandnation/Why_so_few_Iraqis_fle.shtml

vihttp://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-2126835,00.html

viihttp://yementimes.com/article.shtml?i=698&p=front&a=2

viiihttp://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/26d878228bfc4a0c34deb476519cfef4.htm

ixhttp://www.al-bab.com/yemen/pol/int1.htm

xhttp://www.yementimes.com/00/iss26/front.htm

xiBoth of these provinces are still felt to be ‘Yemeni’ by a large proportion of the population in Yemen.

xiihttp://www.al-bab.com/yemen/pol/int5.htm

xiiiWilkinson. J. C. 1983: Traditional Concepts of Territory in South East Arabia. The Geographical Journal. Vol. 149. No. 3, pp. 301-315.

xivhttp://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Pageia&ID=IA16204

xvhttp://www.islamonline.net/iol-arabic/dowalia/alhadath2000-oug-29/alhadath7.asp.

xvihttp://www.yementimes.com/article.shtml?i=711&p=front&a=1

xviihttp://www.theestimate.com/backissues/063000/dossier.html

xviiiWilkinson. J. C. 1991: Arabia’s frontiers: the story of Britain’s boundary drawing in the desert. London: Tauris.

xixhttp://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_23-2-2005_pg4_8

xxhttp://www.uaeinteract.com/uaeint_misc/pdf_2006/English_2006/eyb3.pdf

xxiThe UAE ministry of information and culture show another map (http://www.uaeinteract.com/) which reflects the status quo.

xxiiThough many Saudi maps still show the oasis as within its territory: http://www.mofa.gov.sa/Detail.asp?InSectionID=51&InNewsItemID=1750

xxiiihttp://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=2431

xxivhttp://www.saudidebate.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=43&Itemid=119

What is Wahhabism?

A long article I first published with SaudiDebate here.

Title: What is Wahhabism?

Text:

Certain figures take hold of the public imagination; they become scapegoats for all society’s ills. In the England of the 1990’s, single mothers fulfilled this function. Street violence? That will be the lack of a father figure for today’s youth. The NHS unable to cope? Blame it on all those pregnancies. Today, the single mother of international relations is Wahhabi Islam.

Wahhabism is that “hate-filled, extremist fringe of the [Muslim] religion that is the official Saudi creed¹.” In the eyes of the media, it is chiefly responsible for all global terrorism – from the Balkans to Indonesia.

Though, as for any good scapegoat², the ills for which Wahhabi Islam is held responsible vary, its representations in the international press have a number of common points. Wahhabi’s are backwards and archaic; uneducated with no interest in history³; insistent that fellow peoples of the book (Jews and Christians) are nothing more than “sorcerers and devil worshippers, fit for annihilation – a venomous dictum that Saudi mosques spew out to this day⁴“; sponsors of terrorism (or the terrorists themselves).

In sum, they are the “most retrograde expression of Islam⁵.”

Whether or not single mothers were actually responsible for the variety of ills for which they were held responsible is a moot point; such figures are so attractive precisely because whole constellations of different problems can be placed onto them. Knowing as little as possible about your enemy is a great advantage is carrying out such caricatures. Unsurprisingly then, despite all that is written condemning Wahhabi Islam, relatively little is known about its history.

What’s in a name

Wahhabism takes its name from Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, founder of an 18C reformist movement. One of the central aims of Wahhabism was to remove the heretical innovations that had crept into the religion since the time of Prophet Muhammad; the worship of saint’s tombs and sacred stones, for the Wahhabis, was idolatry that had no place in a purified Islam. Given this emphasis, it should come as no surprise that the name Wahhabi is an anathema to Wahhabis. For a movement based on eradicating the association of divine characteristics with humans (shirk), calling yourself after a man would not be the best start⁶.

Instead, Wahhabi’s tend to call themselves ahl al-tawhid, drawing attention to the central importance of monotheism to the movement, or Salafi⁷, followers of the prophetic model as understood by the companions of Muhammad. Following such a model means placing an emphasis on following the examples laid down in the Sunna, and the rejection of the use of reason in the understanding of jurisprudence (fiqh). The importance of reason, in contrast, tends to characterise the modernist schools of Islamic thought. Wahhabi Islam should also be distinguished from traditionalists, who emphasize strictly following the work of early scholars (taqlid). Salafi’s refuse any intermediaries between themselves and the Qu’ran and Sunna.

All this is lost on Wahhabism’s detractors, for whom al-Wahhab is much like Bin Laden, an unlearned rabble-rouser. Unbeknownst to most western commentators, they are joining a long line of critics who have denounced Wahhabism without knowing much about it. The alliance between Wahhabism and the house of Saud in the 18C threatened many of the local Muslim rulers, who were worried that the austere brand of Islam promoted by al-Wahhab would undermine both their authority and the rich flow of revenue they gained from controlling the Hajj. During the period the house of Saud conquered what is now Saudi Arabia, alarmist stories spread that the Wahhabis were like The Kharawarij (of whom more later): fanatical extremists at the margins of Islam.

Two centuries later, little has changed, and there is still a great deal of uncertainty over what exactly al-Wahhab stood for. This is not entirely surprising, as it is exceedingly difficult to get access to his work. Thus we should be especially grateful that DeLong-Bas has recently published an extensive analysis of the writings of al-Wahhab⁸, after the Saudi government gave her access to the archives of his writings in Riyadh. Her work sets out a vision of the thought of al-Wahhab quite at odds with the views of his detractors, and they have reviled her for doing so⁹.

Far from being a unlettered rabble-rouser, al-Wahhab was part of a vibrant and international network of scholars¹⁰. He began by writing in the classical tradition, before moving to more personal commentaries. In these writings, he reaches many positions also arrived at by modernist scholars (who allow for the role of reason), though he does so by different means.

What comes through DeLong-Bas’ analysis of his writing most strongly is both al-Wahhab’s commitment to purifying Islam, and his equally strong repudiation of the type of violent acts normally associated with Wahhabi Islam. For al-Wahhab, one should be punished for wearing a talisman, but it is the talisman that should be destroyed, not the person. His mission was to purify the religion, not to destroy the unbelievers.

DeLong-Bas’ presentation of the gap between al-Wahhab and his image is most forceful when considering the question of jihad. Holy war (jihad), has meant a lot of things over the centuries. Classically, jihad is the justification for war – a description of the relation between the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds. To many modernists, jihad came to mean something personal: an individual commitment to Islam that could be equally carried out with the pen or the tongue. For al-Wahhab, jihad is the war itself, and this war could only be defensive.

In the Kitab al-Jihad, he uses the famous sword verse (Qur’an 9:5)¹¹ not to justify pro-active jihad, which is what jihadis have often used it to do, but to emphasize that during conflict women and children should not be killed. Far from believing, as some have claimed¹², that all unbelievers should be put to the sword, he states the relationships that should be cultivated with unbelievers (in order of preference) are: conversion, a treaty relationship where the infidels pay poll tax to the Islamic state, and last, their slaughter. Now while none of these three options may seem particularly appealing to the unbelieving neighbour of a Wahhabi group, he is here close to modernism – the fact of unbelief is an insufficient cause to go to war.

Waging the defensive war

While DeLong-Bas’ analysis of these issues is masterful, it is also overly defensive. By the end of the text one wonders how it is possible such a peaceful man could have inspired a movement that managed to create a nation-state from a patchwork of tribal allegiances¹³. She is so committed to defending al-Wahhab against the often ridiculous allegations made against him that she is occasionally disingenuous. For instance, in her defence of al-Wahhab’s view of jihad, DeLong-Bas is to some extent fighting a straw man. As far as this author is aware, there is no tradition of fiqh that advocates going to war with a group because they are unbelievers. Even Al Qaeda justify most of their actions on the basis that ‘crusaders’ are attacking Muslims. Now while one can certainly question their grasp of the relevant political facts, it remains to be seen, if we accept their contextual political analysis as correct, they would have sufficient legal basis to go to war in al-Wahhab’s understanding of jihad.

Which is to say that DeLong-Bas’ defensiveness about her subject effaces the connections that do exist between the contemporary Wahhabi state, jihadi movements, and al-Wahhab’s teachings. She accompanies this move by shifting the blame for contemporary political developments onto Ibn Tamiyya. Every element of contemporary Wahhabism she finds distasteful is laid on his doorstep. And while her analysis of Ibn Taymiyya is excellent, is begs the question of the connections between the two thinkers.

If DeLong-Bas’ enterprise was merely academic – an exploration of the thought of an Islamic thinker in the 18C – then her failure to explore the links between al-Wahhab and later ‘Wahhabi’ movements could be justified as falling outside the scope of her investigation. It is to her credit that she attempts to do much more than this, and tries to explain contemporary developments in Wahhabi thought. Unfortunately, her defensiveness leaves an important question unanswered. What is the relation between the thought of al-Wahhab, the contemporary Saudi state, and Salafi jihadi thought?

In the eye of the beholder

Whatever distortions may have been introduced since the writings of al-Wahhab, al madhab al wahhabi is the sect and jurisprudence (fiqh) of the Saudi Arabian state¹⁴, and the link between Wahhabism and the house of Saud continues to be one of the its principle ideological justifications.

According to the ahl al-tawhid, God is the sole creator and sovereign of the universe, and only God can be worshipped. Such an idea is shared by all Muslims, however, and al-tawhid means something more extensive to the Wahhabis. Since the Qu’ran and the Sunna should govern every part of life, if it is to be in accordance with Islamic law, every act has the possibility of being an act of worship. What this establishes is a strong, and, as we shall see, ambiguous, relationship between belief and action. In such a framework, deviant behaviours are an indication of submission to something other than God’s law.

This ambiguous relationship is indicated by Sulayman, the grandson of al-Wahhab and a noted scholar. He was one of the figures involved in the first uprising of the Wahhabi’s, which was put down viciously by the Ottomans¹⁵. When he is asked if one can consort with the idolater, he replies¹⁶: “Even if he claims that he disliked it in his heart, there is no excuse because it is the outward appearance that counts, and, as he has displayed unbelief, he is an unbeliever.” Elsewhere Sulayman seems very reasonable; he allows Muslims to go to the unbeliever’s lands, provided they can practice his religion, and he emphasises that “there is no necessary relation between calling someone a hypocrite openly and him being a hypocrite inwardly.” However, in this quote about unbelief, he displays one of the central tensions in Wahhabi thought: given that every act can be an act of worship, and that we must remove the use of rationality and logic from the law, how can we properly discern if someone believes in Allah?

Put in a more simple way: what is the relationship between belief, faith and action?

The problematic status of such a question can be seen from the path taken by the students of Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani, the well know Salafi hadith scholar who founded the al-Jamaa al-Salafiyya movement in Saudi Arabia in the 1970’s. While avowedly apolitical, it was a splinter group from the movement that stormed the Grand Mosque in the 70’s. al-Albani ended up living in Jordan, while his students took some very different paths. Ali Hasan al-Galabu, for instance, became a prominent scholar of non-violence, while Abu Qatadah became the mufti for the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria. In a fascinating essay, Wiktorowicz¹⁷ claims what this indicates is that there is no substantial theological disagreement between what he calls the purists (those who refrain from political involvement), and the jihadis: their differences lie in their understanding of the political context for action.

Are catapults weapons of mass destruction?

The first signs of open unrest from Islamic scholars outside of the Saudi state structure occurred when al-Hawali and other scholars spoke out against the fatwa allowing American troops inside Saudi Arabia in 1991. One cannot forget the historical parallel here with the accusations of misrule that preceded the initial al-Saud conquest of the holy places.

But while this may have been the first explicit sign of dissent, the roots of the problem were laid a long time before. In the 60’s, the Muslim Brotherhood were forced to flee Nasser’s Egypt, and were welcomed with open arms in Saudi Arabia. While the brotherhood did not acquire a significant following in the country, their political awareness affected a whole generation of religious scholars, as people like Mohammad Qutb (brother of the more famous Sayyid Qutb) taught a generation of preachers, including al-Hawali.

Their anger with the religious establishment, Wiktorowicz argues, is not a matter of theology, but is due to the Saudi preachers reluctance to play a political role and intervene in world affairs.

A contemporary example of such a debate is about whether one can justify the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In order to support their use, jihadi’s turn¹⁸ to a hadith about the siege of Taif. During this siege, Muhammad sanctioned the use of a catapult to attack the city walls, though one could not discriminate between civilians and enemy fighters on the other side. He justified this on the grounds that the enemy fighters were responsible for civilians deaths because they choose to mix among them. Here, the questions are principally one’s of political context: there is no further information the hadith can give you about determining the relevance of the catapult to the nuclear bomb.

Now such a debate may seem miles away from the sober positions adopted by al-Wahhab. However, at heart of the debate is the same set of concerns: the refusal to allow reason to play a role in questions of jurisprudence and the ensuing ambiguity about political interpretation.

Takfir

This debate is played out most intensely in the arguments about Takfir (declaring someone an apostate). Historically, one end of the debate has been represented by The Khawarij. In the seventh century, after the death of Uthman, the third caliph, Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad defeated most of his rivals. Mu’awiya ibn abu Sufyan, a close relative of Uthman, accused Ali of hiding his killers. Eventually, Ali conceded to place the matter before an arbitration. Some of his followers were appalled by his decision and turned against him, feeling only God has the right to judge such matters. They became known at The Kharawarij, declared Ali an apostate, killing him in 660.

Whereas mainstream Islam separate out questions of belief and faith, and their relationship to action, according to Wiktorowicz, The Khawarij conflate them: performing sinful actions for them did not simply mean a lack of faith: from such sinful actions could also be intuited a lack a belief. This extreme understandings of Takfir has marginalised The Khawarij in the Muslim world.

Now Salafi’s reject these principles and agree one cannot base a judgement of Takfir on bad behaviour. Bad behaviour could be simply a result of lack of faith, rather than a lack of belief. There are three categories that could excuse people who are acting badly. People could be acting in an ignorant fashion, they could be coerced, or they could simply be acting out of greed. If any of these conditions are met, then one cannot be declared an apostate. These conditions are equally supported by Al Qaeda¹⁹. Following an attack in Riyadh in which Muslims were killed, some argued one of the victims was an advocate of obscenity. Al Qaeda²⁰ responded by saying²¹: “the debauchery and sins mentioned in connection with that victim does not justify his killing.”

However, how these categories are applied is extremely ambiguous. How does one gain access to the someone’s psychology in a fashion that allows one to know whether someone acts out of greed or not? al-Albani, the Saudi religious leader, has a limited definition, claiming that one cannot know what is in the heart of a sinner unless he himself gives an explicit renouncement of the faith. Al-Hawali responded by criticising him as separating thought and action (irja). Many jihadis then claim that if a ruler persists in legislating sinful acts, despite warnings from scholars, then there is sufficient evidence to conclude he is an unbeliever; and thus to kill him. How, here, one judges what duration of time and types of action qualify as “persists” seems, again entirely open to political interpretation. In these debates, we see the same tensions that also characterise the writing of al-Wahhab.

The limits of discourse

Despite general theological agreement, there are vast difference of political interpretation over such matters as whether America is waging a war against Muslims (justifying a defensive war), or whether the house of Saud are still truly believers. Wiktorowicz uses this division to argue that what we need is to improve the political awareness of the purist scholars (those connected to the house of Saud, in this case). “A purist scholar with a Ph.D in the Islamic sciences as well as advanced education in international relations would be well situated to deconstruct and rebut Al Qaeda’s worldview (though there is obviously the danger that purists might arrive at similar conclusions about politics).²²“

One must note the implicit conservatism in his argument: that what we – as the United States – wants is the Saudi Arabian government. This thesis, which runs through his essay, can be seen in his characterisation of the Saudi state religious apparatus as purist and “non-political.” This characterisation allows him to set up the purists as the force for good in Wahhabism. But though their politics might not be explicit, that is often a luxury afforded to those who have the power of the state behind them. Wiktorowicz argument essentially comes down to a support for the Saudi religious establishment and the state that supports it (and is supported by it).

This dichotomisation means Wiktorowicz fails to see the links between purist and jihadi – how the contradictions in the power base of the purists has produced the jihadi movement as its necessary correlate^23. This is one of the reasons trying to support a purist worldview is doomed to fail.

One can also note here if Wiktorowicz is correct, and the main way of overcoming jihadi thought is through fighting the interpretation of context – then surely the best way to do so is to change American military policy so the context itself changes. This is not a conclusion he would endorse, nor is it one that is entirely correct.

Indeed, the absurdity of such postulations point to the limit of the method employed in both this article and the main texts (DeLong-Bas and Wiktorowicz) under discussion. Discursive restrictions on action are important: to act without an explicit base for action that one’s supporters consider reasonable would mean losing legitimacy. But it is incorrect to deal simply with these discursive arguments outside of the social, political and economic worlds in which they are produced.

Context is not produced in a vacuum, but from a particular perspective. Likewise, discourse may justify action or condemn it, but it should not be seen as identical with the action itself. Winning the unobtainable battle of discourse would not make Bin Laden put down arms, nor would his support suddenly dry up. To solve the latter problem would require attending to the unemployment and alienation in Saudi Arabia that proves such fertile ground for the Wahhabi ideology. A study of Wahhabi Islam that had a strong degree of explanatory power would have to explain the interconnections between the social organisation in Saudi Arabia, the economic and political situation of the jihadis, and the way these elements interact with discourse.

Such a study is yet to be written.

1Alexiev, A. 2003: Among the Wahhabis. Commentary. May 2003; 115, 5. p.70.

2See, among others: Girard, R. 2005: Violence and the Sacred. London: Continuum.

3The claim that al-Wahhab’s Islam is literalist is one of the most common errors made by commentators. For instance: El Fadl. K. A. 2001: Islam and the Theology of Power. Middle East Report. No. 221, pp. 28-31.

4Alexiev. p.30.

5Schwartz, S. 2004: The two faces of Islam: the house of Saud from Tradition to Terror. New York: Random House.

6Wahhabism tends to be a name used only by the movements detractors, and normally in order to impute a foreign influence in another country. It is thus an irony that it is Wahhabism’s emphasis on the deculturation of Islam, stripping it from impute local practices, that make it such an ideal agent of globalised Islam. See, Roy. O. 2004: Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah. London: Hurst Publishing.

7Though Salafism refers to a much wider range of positions than is normally associated with Wahhabi Islam. Furthermore, Salafism should not be confused with the salafiyya, the Islamic modernists influenced by people like Rashid Rida.

8Delong-Bas, N. 2004: Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad. London: Oxford University Press.

9http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,245384,00.html

10See Voll, J. 1975: Muhammad Hayya al-Sindi and Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab: An Analysis of an Intellectual Group in Eighteenth-Century Madina. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Vol. 38, No. 1. pp. 32-39.

11“Then, when the sacred months are over, kill the idolaters wherever you find them, take them [as captives], besiege them, and lie in wait for them at every point of observation. If they repent afterwards, perform the prayer and pay the alms, then release them. God is truly All-Forgiving, Merciful.”

12Alexiev, A. 2003: Among the Wahhabis. Commentary. May 2003; 115, 5.

13There are of course a whole series of reasons aside from Wahhabism that led the house of Saud to be successful. Some of the most interesting theories are to be found in Kostiner, J. 1993: The Making of Saudi Arabia 1916-1936: From Chieftancy to Monarchical State. Oxford: OUP.

14See, among others. p. 166. Okruhlik, G. 2005: The Irony of Islah (Reform). The Washington Quarterly. 28:4. pp. 153-170.

15Sirriych. E. 1989: Wahhabis, Unbelievers, and the Problems of Exclusivism. Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies), Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 123-132.

16ibid. p.130. My italics.

17For much of the following analysis the author is relying on the account given in Wiktorowicz, Q. 2006: Anatomy of the Salafi Movement. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. 29: 207-239.

18Nasser ibn Hamed. http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=subjects&Area=jihad&ID=SR2504. Quoted, Wiktorowicz. p. 215-216.

19This points marks a distinction between Al Qaeda and Qutb, whose ideas allowed the condemnation of entire continents.

20Given Al Qaeda’s evident flouting of these conditions, in could be asked if such discursive structures have any real import. Yet despite the theological justifications being severely strained by Al Qaeda actions, they are nonetheless a constraint on the types of action jihadi groups will consider. Equally, a reticence about judging Takfir from external actions is part of the reason the Saudi religious establishment has refrained from declaring Bin Laden an apostate, a decision that would have large reverberations.

21“The Operation of 11 Rabi al-Awwal: The East Riyadh Operation and Our War with the

United States and its Agents,” FBIS translated text, 1 August 2003. Available at (http://www.whywar.

com/files/qaeda_east_riyadh_operation.txt). Quoted, Wiktorowicz, p. 230.

22ibid. p.234

23For instance, the way a combination of ideological austerity with the decadence of the ruling class has systematically eroded both bases of power, and produced a movement that criticises one on the basis of the other.