°Non publica
Well, it seems a small majority of voters in France did not feel sufficiently persuaded and cast a ‘no’ vote against the treaty. I’m going to go out on a limb here and argue that it’s not despite the arguments put by Habermas, Beck and Negri that the referendum failed. It’s because those arguments were put, in the way they were, by the people who put them. It was the (Malcolm Turnbull) kiss of death.
Habermas and various others, such as Gunter Grass, appealed to a high modernism: “Do all you can to prevent France from betraying progress!” Ulrich Beck effused that “Europe may even become a beacon of freedom in a turbulent world.” Negri talked in similar terms of progress and (without quite using that word) enlightenment. So, when you get right down to it, this has little to do with the specific clauses of the treaty just voted on (no one really talked about these as Virilio noted), and everything to do with their desires to be cast in the role of ‘public intellectuals’ and all its glorious corrolaries such as ‘the public sphere’ and so on.
I’ve been leafing through Kant of late, for another essay, and wondering about this passage from the Critique of Pure Reason:
“Without the control of criticism reason is, as it were, in a state of nature, and can only establish its claims and assertions by war. Criticism, on the contrary, deciding all questions according to the fundamental laws of its own institution, secures to us the peace of law and order, and enables us to discuss all differences in the more tranquil manner of a legal process.”
It’s interesting for its argument about the conditions under which Reason becomes, is, force. I suppose one could read this as a Kantian - liberal - explanation of the state of emergency: the absence of critique (the absence of a critical media, or ‘public sphere’ or ‘critical intellectuals’) as the conditions under which democracy becomes inoperative, and so forth. But one could also read this as the working premise of those above who argued for a ‘yes’ vote. With the idea of the EU cast in the role of Critique. The idea of the EU, which is to say, various critical intellectuals in search of a public - feeling left out of the loop, hankering after the apparently non-violent tranquility of legal process and (global) law and order.
Which reminds me: here’s an article condemning Hardt’s and Negri’s Multitude on the basis of being ‘too pomo’ and not sufficiently outlining what a new form of global governance might be like. The reviewer is quite wrong. They aren’t really very ‘pomo’ at all, although it’s anyone’s guess what North Americans imagine that term to mean. And they do outline what model of global governance is preferable. Well, it’s the EU, of course.
The EU, sure, but not with that first attempt at a constitution, which by all accounts would have spelled disaster…no?
Matt [May 30, 2005 @ 3:13 pm]
Hello Matt.
If you mean that this particular constitution would have spelled disaster - I’m not sure I’d use the word ‘disaster’, but I wasn’t suggesting a ‘yes’ vote would have been a good thing. It sure didn’t amount to anything like the ‘progressive Europe’ you would be led to believe by Habermas et al.
Maybe my sarcasm didn’t come over all that well … If not, I was being dismissive, all along the way.
Anyway, I didn’t mean to imply that the EU was a model of global governance, or indeed that it is important to provide models for such. I don’t think the alternative to nationalism is actually globalism. This seems to me a trap.
archive [May 30, 2005 @ 3:30 pm]
They read new global bastion of peace and enlightenment (or counterweight to US hegemony), we read disaster?
That opendemocracy does a lovely line in naive wrong-headedness. “People around the world feel helpless when decisions made at the International Monetary Fund or in the boardrooms of large corporations affect their ability to work or provide for their families. They feel similarly disenfranchised when a single country and a few of its allies decide to intervene militarily absent multilateral authorisation or a compelling rationale. In this way both “anti-globalisation” and anti-war protests are exercises in democracy – an attempt to “have one’s say” at the transnational level.”
That’s scintillating critique, that. There really is a subtler and more compelling linkage btw Iraq and globalisation!
Also this: “It is somewhat ironic that two writers as well read as Hardt & Negri would embellish their book with arcane – even outlandish – references, but neglect highly relevant lines of scholarship like cosmopolitanism, deliberative democracy, reflexive law, Habermasian communication, and the study of global civil society.”
Now I understand what’s wrong with Hardt and Negri. It’s the same problem all over, innit? Not enough Habermas.
az [May 30, 2005 @ 3:40 pm]
Hello ‘archive’,
thanks for your comment. No I would agree that is certainly a trap.
Matt [May 30, 2005 @ 4:01 pm]
hi again A,
I keep remembering things I want to ask you about after posting other comments. Your mention of Kant reminds me - are you interested much in early German idealism or romanticism? I had a course once with Andrew Bowie, a Schelling scholar among other things, who argued that the German romantics anticipate a lot of themes of 20th century philosophy - both continental and analytic - and that in some ways the romantic debates were more useful than some current ones. In particular I’m thinking about issues of closure and nongroundedness, in politics. I remember some phrase to the effect of everything being always already in the middle, which to my mind would imply a philosophy of an open ended series of encounters. I have a fantasy alternate life plan (like the one in which I become a linguistic primatologist and study chimpanzee language acquisition) wherein I write a comparative study of the panentheism/spinoza controversy involving Mendelson (sp?) and contemporary returns to spinoza in althusser, negri, et al. I wonder if perhaps that’s another way (albeit a very obtuse way) to paraphrase some of the questions that have come up re: subjectification as a category useful for getting around political statism and vanguardism (spinoza suggesting a thought of ontology, which is I think also a philosophical anthropology, while the romantics suggesting a foucaultian ‘not why but how’ kind of analytics…).
ramble ramble,
n8
nate [June 8, 2005 @ 4:37 pm]