News on the street is that Hugo Chavez has done it again: the Venezuelan president has made the wild claim, this time, that the United States was behind the earth’s recent attack on Haiti. In English, the source of these claims seems to be the TV channel Russia Today, especially this clip, which has been bandied about the Internet:

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I am going to the Historical Materialism conference at CUNY this weekend. Any of you who are going to be in town, drop me a line.

A dinner with friends and friends’ acquaintances: we are sitting around a table, on chairs or stools or each other’s laps. The food has come and gone, and now we are speaking. “What we do” comes up, and with it the various gripes that come with work. One of the guests, a well-groomed professor, complains that a university where he teaches makes him join a union. “You don’t like unions?” I ask, curious. “No,” he says, “I am an anarchist.” I press him, asking him his opinion on the fact that, statistically, union workers are more likely to have health care and higher wages than non-union workers. “That’s just it, ‘statistically’,” he responds. I remark that I’d go with statistics as long as my health and well-being are concerned; after all, the plague doesn’t kill everyone, just the statistical majority of those who are left untreated. He furrows his brow and asks “Where is this coming from?” Conversation moves elsewhere.

I gave a version of the following paper on Bent Flyvbjerg’s Rationality and Power in a seminar on political judgment this semester. Enjoy, dislike, ignore.

In Rationality and Power, Bent Flyvbjerg takes a close look at the effort Aalborg, a small Danish town, makes to design and implement a comprehensive renewal plan for its downtown. In providing the account of Aalborg, Flyvbjerg wants also to offer an analysis of “how knowledge, rationality, and power work in real life” (3). This emphasis on the “real” will at time put Flyvbjerg at odds with protagonists of the “Enlightenment tradition” (Flyvbjerg makes it a point several times to contrast himself with Habermas, for instance), yet also begs a question to which I will return: given his effort to outline “real” politics, what are we to make of Flyvbjerg’s repetitive remarks about how power defines “reality?”

How do knowledge, rationality, and power work in real life? Flyvbjerg believes their working out demonstrates, as he says in his oft repeated paraphrase of Pascal, “that power has a rationality that rationality does not know. Rationality, on the other hand, does not have a power that power does not know” (234). On the one hand, there is the rationality of power, power’s ability to form a “reality” according to various strategies and tactics and have that reality be upheld on account of its force. On the other hand, there is the power of rationality, the power of reason to discern the nature of things, which Flyvbjerg paints as weak in a fight and only partially capable out of one. This asymmetrical relation between rationality and power could be said to be the center of Flyvbjerg’s understanding of politics; using his understanding to judge the judgment of political actors, we would have to take into account their sensitivity to power-relations, to how the force of arguments gains purchase.

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Congrats to roger, who received 3rd place in the 2009 3QD politics prize. If you haven’t read the winning entry, treat yourself and do so now.

When, after 2004, the notion of a “troop surge” started to become something of a cliché, and the verb surge began to appear in more and more places, I had a shadowy, antagonistic response every time I came across it. But, like an itch that needs scratching but isn’t intense enough to force its way into your consciousness, troop surges remained at the periphery of my attention. And, until this morning, I never investigated if the prickly intuition I had about the phrase — that its unthinking repetition and proliferation in the media masks something more significant than just another shift in news-cycle language — were true. But, since I am somewhat without anything to do today — no announcements to copyedit, no desire to pound out several more pages on Arendt — I went to LexisNexis and looked into the use of “troop surge.”

From 1999 to 2003, a search for the phrase turns up nothing. The first article in the last 10 years to contain both “surge” and “troop,” “Relax, It’s Only a Surge,” occurs on February 05, 2004, in Washington Outlook. In it, the then chief of Central Command, John Abizaid, discusses the novel way that troops will be deployed in conflicts of the future:

“I would prefer [that a commander] should feel free to go to the secretary of Defense and say, ‘Look, we’re going to need a brigade here for probably 60 days for a certain operation.’ I think this concept of [employing] a combination of a base force in the region plus surge forces — to use things as you need them, and for all of the combatant commanders to have less ownership — is pretty important. You [can then] use surge forces to deal with specific military problems.”

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I had to crawl out from the nether regions, bleery-eyed and bedraggled and smelling of shit, as I do, to remark on this image.

That’s almost as good as talking up just war at a peace prize award ceremony — almost.

The next major international summit on climate change will be held in Copenhagen in early December, 2009. The position of the United States in these talks remains ambiguous. The latest climate legislation to move through the U.S. Congress is H.R. 2454, the “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009”. It passed the House in June, mostly along party lines, to the applause of President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It had the support of a wide variety of environmental organizations, including Defenders of Wildlife, Alliance for Climate Protection, the Environmental Defense Fund, the National Wildlife Federation, the Nature Conservancy , the Audubon Society, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, among many others. Needless to say, it also had the blessing of neoliberal environmentalism’s patron saint, Al Gore.

I take the trouble to name these organizations in order to illustrate the mainstream support carbon trading has enjoyed within the environmental movement. To many, it might appear as though the climate bill being passed now that is a long-overdue success after eight years of inaction, institutionalized denial, and the sabotage of climate policy by the Bush administration, its industrial handlers, and their shills in Congress. For consumers who “care about” the environment there is the feeling that something is finally being done. And for some well-positioned professional environmentalists, the sort that might work for carbon trading firms or the many organizations that might do business with them, there will finally be the steady growth in private-sector “green” jobs that everyone has been hoping for. It might look like the United States is finally turning a corner in climate policy.

As it turns out, however, the Kyoto Protocol and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — now seen by many on the bourgeois left as global benchmarks for climate change policy — were themselves hand-crafted by American and European industrial interests to essentially make money from privatizing the atmosphere, permitting themselves to pollute it for free, and creating an entire bureaucracy for quantifying and trading various offset “products”, regardless of their ability to actually limit the emission of greenhouse gases. The IPCC and the Kyoto Protocol are, as we shall see, neoliberal inventions intended primarily to profitably “financialize” global warming, rather than intergovernmental instruments to be used for ending it. In both cases, the United States and some of its European allies essentially absorbed the language of scientists, environmentalists, third-world diplomats, and climate activists, only to regurgitate their efforts as a form of incomprehensible free-market amphigory which might actually be worse than doing nothing about global warming at all. When it comes to climate policy, American private enterprise has been a coprophilic Midas: everything it seems to touch turns to shit.

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The following is my seminar notes on Habermas’ notion of crisis and critique.

“Between Philosophy and Science: Marxism as Critique ” lays out Habermas’ understanding of Marxism “as a philosophy of history that is expressly designed with political intent but is at the same time scientifically falsifiable” (47). To get at what is at stake in this formulation, we need to flesh out critique, crisis, and the philosophy of history.

The concept that Marx employs to describe his project, the “critique” of political economy, is drawn from an intellectual tradition that stretches from the humanists, through the literati, to the theory and practice of 18th-century philosophers. Within this tradition, critique came to mean a sort of individual capacity to discern rightly:

Critique became practically synonymous with reason; it signified good taste and clever judgment. It was the medium for ascertaining what was correct, which laws of nature harmonized with what was just—and it was the energy that drove the activity of reason restlessly forward and around and about until it finally turned against itself. (47)

Critique was, essentially, bound up with what the philosophers of the period thought they were doing: thinking through nature to its rational foundation. Given this intellectual tradition, Habermas believes that it is necessary to explain why Marx felt his project was the “dialectical overcoming of philosophy” (47). To explain Marx’s belief, Habermas offers an argument intended to reveal the necessity of joining critique with crisis.

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The historical basis upon which supposes that there is a connection between social emancipation and social labor has changed so much since the nineteenth century that practically none of the critical social theories of this century continues to place any confidence in the liberating, consciousness building potential of the social labor process. The social change in concrete forms of work has had a similarly destructive effect upon the concept of work. In his concept of work, Marx retained a categorical tension between alienated and unalienated work activity — between integrated organic craft work and atomized, mechanical fragments of activity — while not possessing the conceptual means to describe the mediating process of reflection itself. This tension has gradually been resolved in favor of a one-sided concept which merely reflects the actual relations of social labor. In the course of this complex theoretical development, the concept of work has lost the critical of its meaning, its significance for the potential transcendence of established forms of work in society.  The categories of ‘alienated’ or ‘abstract’ work, with which Marx criticizes the capitalist organization of work activity, have practically disappeared from the theoretical language of Marxist-oriented social philosophy because there seems to be no criterion of appropriately human, that is, unalienated work which is independent of the norms of a particular culture. In the same way, the actual claims and ideas about work held by the subjects who are engaged in social production according to the rules set by a factory leadership trained in scientific management have lost all significance for modern theories of society. They have handed over to the empirical methods of industrial research under the rubric of ‘occupational aspirations’ and no longer play a decisive role in the critical diagnosis of the major conflicts in the contemporary social system. (39-40)

So Honneth writes in his essay “Work and Instrumental Action: On the Normative Basis of Critical Theory.” I think there’s something quite askew in Honneth’s appraisal of “work,” which might be a result of the thinkers he is responding to; at any rate, I want to trace out some of what I think it is.

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