The Care Dossier I
Articles
Index
1-2 Editorial
3-17 The Limits of Mutual Aid and the
Promise of Liberation within Radical
Politics of Care
Rhiannon Lindgren
18-28 Careful Cracks: Resistant Practices of
Care and Affect-ability
Ludovica D’Alessandro
29-42 Affective Architecture: Encountering
Care in Built Environments
Linda Kopitz
43-60 Verloren normaliteit? Van het
verlangen naar autoriteit naar
een beauvoiraanse ethiek der
dubbelzinnigheid
Maren Wehrle
61-75 Staging Uncivility, Or, The Performative
Politics of Radical Decolonial
Iconoclasm
Matthias Pauwels
76-92 The Politics of Vulnerability and Care:
An Interview with Estelle Ferrarese
Estelle Ferrarese, Liesbeth Schoonheim
& Tivadar Vervoort
93-107 Thinking Transindividuality along
the Spinoza-Marx Encounter
A Conversation
Bram Wiggers and Jason Read
108-124 Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto
Federica Gregoratto, Heikki Ikäheimo,
Emmanuel Renault, Arvi Särkelä and
Italo Testa
Editorial
Interview
Manifesto
The Care Dossier I
125-129 The Uncaring Feedback Loop of the
Care-Industrial Complex, and Why
Things Go On Like This
Patricia de Vries
130-133 Art’s Work in Mnemonic Care
Sue Shon
134-139 A Thousand Agambens to Replace the
One We Have
Tim Christiaens
140-103 Critiquing Immunity, Critiquing
Security
Paul Gorby
144-152 Propaganda, Politics, Philosophy:
A Critical Review Essay on Jason
Stanley’s How Propaganda Works
(2015) and How Fascism Works (2018)
Maarten van Tunen
Reviews
Cover drawing by Youngjin Park
Graphic design by Yuri Sato & Youngjin Park
1
Editorial
This issue includes the rst instalment of a two-part Care Dossier central to Krisis
publications this year. The contributions to the Dossier testify to the various forms
that “care” can take. It was our aim to take seriously Joan Tronto’s (1993) exhortation
that we need to extend care beyond the narrow dyad of interpersonal relationships of
dependency. Many of the contributions to this issue engage with the extensive body
of literature that has emerged from lived experiences of political and social struggles,
primarily from feminists (of colour), which put friendship, love, and coalition-building
centre stage. Others extend the concept of care beyond human beings, to include
non-human entities, as well as our built environment and processes caused by extractive
capitalism. Such an approach allows recasting practices of providing and withholding
care as material, economic, and political and thus to highlight its intertwining with
structural conditions of racism, neo-colonialism, patriarchy, and their particular neo-
liberal inections. While “Care” is central to the articles collected in the Dossier, it also
reverberates within the other contributions to this issue.
Rhiannon Lindgren’s article “The Limits of Mutual Aid and the Promise of
Liberation within Radical Politics of Care” explores the political ambivalences of
mutual aid in times of COVID-19 through an in-depth historical comparison of the
Black Panther Party with the Wages for Housework campaign. The question of if and
how care provides a site of resistance is further examined by Ludovica d’Alessandro
in “Careful Cracks: Resistant Practices of Care and Aect-Ability”, which articulates
a Deleuzian notion of vulnerability that underscores the importance of concrete and
diverse bodies. In “Aective Architecture: Encountering Care in Built Environments”
Linda Kopitz shows how the deployment of care in contemporary architectural design
is entangled with neoliberalism, while also pointing to the political potential of built
environments and their imaginary innovation. The themes of the articles that explicitly
deal with issues of care resonate with the two articles that are adjacent to direct discus-
sions about care. In her article “Verloren normaliteit? Van het verlangen naar autoriteit
naar een Beauvoiraanse ethiek der dubbelzinnigheid,” Maren Wehrle interrogates the
desire for authority by developing Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of ambiguity into a
novel account of normalcy. Finally, Matthias Pauwels’ article “Staging Uncivility, Or,
The Performative Politics of Radical Decolonial Iconoclasm” engages with the Black
Lives Matter movement in Belgium and, more broadly, the performativity of protests
that take aim at colonial monuments.
This issue also includes two interviews. In her conversation with Tivadar
Vervoort and Liesbeth Schoonheim, Estelle Ferrarese elaborates on her recent work
on care, vulnerability, and the importance of a social-constructivist, as opposed to an
ontological, approach to these concepts. Bram Wiggers interviews Jason Read on tran-
sindividuality and the promises of cross-reading Marx and Spinoza. The importance
that Krisis pays to the diversity of genres of social critique is also evinced in the publi-
cation of “Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto.” The authors, Federica Gregoratto, Heikki
Ikäheimo, Emmanuel Renault, Arvi Särkelä and Italo Testa, see this programmatic text
both as a critical intervention in Critical Theory and as an open invitation to further
2
think collectively. It is in this vein that Krisis explicitly welcomes contributions engag-
ing with the manifesto.
This issue ends with ve book review essays. Patricia de Vries situates Emma
Dowling’s The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It? (2021) in femi-
nist-Marxist debates; and Sue Shon reects on Mihaela Mihai’s Political Memory and the
Aesthetics of Care (2022) and the promises that “mnemonic care” holds for providing
new narratives whjich question ocial, memorialized histories. Tim Christiaens reviews
Adam Kotsko’s Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory (2020), warning us against a teleological
reading of the oeuvre of the theorist of biopolitics. Mark Neocleous’ publication on The
Politics of Immunity: Security and the Policing of Bodies, which maps the cross-disciplinary
productivity of the concept of immunity, is critically discussed by Paul Gorby. The book
review section concludes with an essay by Maarten van Tunen that engages with Jason
Stanley’s How Propaganda Works (2015) and How Fascism Works (2018).
Finally, the concept of “care” serves as a reminder of the - often invisible – labour
that goes into the making a journal such as Krisis, and our dependency as editors on
reviewers, authors, and other contributors. This reliance raises important issues regard-
ing the structural conditions of neoliberal academia which are not unique to Krisis. It
is also, however, a source of intellectual pleasure; and in the spirit of open access Krisis
will start releasing a podcast series this Fall that aims to convey this pleasure beyond the
connes of the written word.
The Limits of Mutual Aid and the Promise of Liberation
within Radical Politics of Care
Rhiannon Lindgren
Social Reproduction Theory, Politics of Care,
Feminist Historical Materialism, Black Panther Party,
Wages for Housework
Keywords
Krisis 42 (1): 3-17.
Abstract
The present COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated conditions for continued survival,
and community-based mutual aid networks have appeared seemingly organically to
address such conditions. I argue these networks often fail to recognize capitalism’s
mediation of caring labor, namely, the processes of survival and reproduction which are
consistently undermined and demanded by capital’s accumulation. Instead, I propose
a politics of care built on insights from the Black Panther Party’s and the Wages for
Housework campaign’s respective responses to a lack of reproductive resources, which
emphasize the position of survival struggles as a primary site of anti-capitalist political
agitation and mobilization.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.42.1.37884
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 License International License (CC
BY 4.0). © 2022 The author(s).
Licence
https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.42.1.37884
3
The Limits of Mutual Aid and the Promise of Liberation
within Radical Politics of Care
Rhiannon Lindgren
Ⅰ. COVID-19andtheCategoryofCare:AnIntroduction
In 2020, the so-called “Crisis of Care” came to a deadly breaking point with the spread
of the novel COVID-19 upper respiratory virus, which at the time of writing has
claimed 4.3 million lives globally out of over 203 million conrmed cases (Fraser 2017,
21: Worldometer 2021). In the continuing struggle against COVID-19, the question of
care has once again come to the fore of political discussions, arguments, and disagree-
ments about the distribution of resources worldwide. The workers of the world found
their basic reproductive necessities, such as food, PPE, hygiene products, and shelter,
once again in false scarcity due to capitalism’s mismanagement of a crisis. To combat the
lack of universal and accessible social services in the United States and many parts of the
world, regular people were called to action and worked to establish networks of mutual
aid on social media and collaborative virtual platforms such as Facebook, Instagram,
Twitter, and Slack. These networks came together to provide the very reproductive
resources in scarcity, like masks, groceries, money for utility bills, etc. through commu-
nity fundraising and donations.
This is neither the rst nor the last time in history that one’s very survival has
become a process of political contestation. Consequently, it is no longer tenable to con-
tinue to ignore the centrality of care within the larger project of political economy and
its resulting strategies of political mobilization. While I acknowledge the tremendous
impacts of mutual aid on local communities during the COVID-19 pandemic, this
paper seeks to produce a structural assessment regarding the viability of these newly
formed networks to contain within them the possibility of a direct, coordinated attack
on capital. To do this, I turn to two dierent historical political movements, which
also responded to a lack of reproductive resources and used basic processes of survival
as primary sites of political agitation and mobilization. In surveying the activities of
the Black Panther Party and the Wages for Housework campaign in the 1960s and
‘70s, I elucidate histories of survival struggles in order to recontextualize their insights
about the possibility of mutual aid as a primary tactic for anti-racist, anti-imperialist,
anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and feminist political organizing. Ultimately, while sur-
vival is a struggle worth politicizing, it would seem that there is not always a guarantee
that struggles to survive yield a revolutionary political consciousness. After a brief
examination of the continuities and discrepancies between the Black Panther Party
(BPP) and the Wages for Housework (WfH) movements,1 I conclude that only when
combined with sustained and multifaceted political education, which intentionally
seeks to produce a shared analysis of the current state of our world, does struggling to
survive create a shared horizon of revolutionary praxis. Consequently, mutual aid as it
appeared during the COVID-19 pandemic is critiqued for its inability to continuously
produce such a shared political analysis grounded in a capacious and complex account
of class as determined by race, gender, and geographical location. Ultimately, I argue
that to create a radical politic of care incapable of being co-opted into further securing
4
the conditions for capital’s domination, community care needs to be rooted in political
education with a multidimensional class analysis in order to transform survival into
opposition.
Ⅱ. CaringLaborandAmbiguity:ATheoreticalNote
Sites of life-making can become integral to collective projects of survival under con-
ditions of dehumanization, extraordinary violence, and psychological warfare. Black
feminists from within the U.S. context have pointed toward the home and familial
relationships as an incredibly powerful site of resistance through which Black people
are able to reproduce their own lives in the face of insurmountable odds (Davis 1981;
hooks 1990; Threadcraft 2016). In these and many other Black feminist works, the rela-
tionship among practices of care, survival, and resistance become articulated as nascent
political projects. Yet, the family unit itself is often a primary site of the reproduction
of compulsory heterosexuality and hierarchical gender roles which are deeply reliant
on gendered divisions of labor, and can itself be a site of acute violence. Consequently,
securing survival through the family unit is ambiguous in terms of the scope and the
objective of its resistance. The ambiguity of this survival as resistance both within and
outside the family unit and its relationship to political praxis is the primary inquiry I
make in this paper.
In order to better articulate the framework through which I investigate these
terms within the histories of the BPP and the WfH movements, it is essential to
connect the ambiguity of survival as resistance to the wider processes of life-making
and life-maintenance which could be loosely called social reproduction. The work it
takes to create human life, and to protect and nurture that life, whether it be your
own life or that of a loved one, is an unending and often thankless “job.” Questions
regarding the structural relationship between capitalism and human reproduction have
been prominent at dierent points throughout the histories of socialist and feminist
critique (Ferguson 2020, 41). According to Sue Ferguson (2020) in Women and Work:
Feminism, Labour, and Social Reproduction, it was intervention of Lise Vogel’s Marxism
and the Oppression of Women in 1983 which proposed a more robust notion of social
reproduction as not solely dependent on the universalization of the housewife gure
(111). Current Social Reproduction feminists often take up Vogel’s underappreciated
work in order to reformulate processes of social reproduction as sites of anti-capitalist,
anti-racist, and feminist struggle (Bhattacharya 2017).
Tithi Bhattcharya states that Marxism makes a claim that workers who
produce the commodities are the “beating heart” of the capitalist system, but Social
Reproduction feminists want to ask, “who produces the worker?” (Pluto Press 2017).
I might suggest taking Bhattacharya’s question further, by claiming a need to evaluate
the processes which produce the working class as a whole. Given practical limitations,
I cannot unpack the intricacies of who does or does not belong to the working class;
however, it is worth emphasizing at the outset that for Social Reproduction feminists
generally, and for my project of articulating a politics of care in particular, class is one
part of the matrix of our social order mediated by capital for its continued accumu-
lation. Part of the value of structurally linking the realm of reproduction to that of
5
production is that it produces an analysis of capitalist logic which no longer reduces all
forms of oppression to its “base” economic form. As Nancy Fraser has articulated in her
exchange with Michael Dawson on expropriation, we can think of capitalism as “…
not an economy but a social system of domination”(Fraser 2016, 165). Even though Marx
himself underemphasized this reality by focusing primarily on wage-labor exploitation,
both Fraser and Dawson argue that the notion of expropriation is particularly essential
to understanding capitalism’s deep entanglement with racial and gender oppression.
While I cannot elaborate the powerful and productive nuances and debates
within the strands of feminist theory Ferguson calls Social Reproduction feminism, it is
essential to note two primary contributions which underlie this paper: 1) Reproductive
labor, and consequently the survival which it procures, is ambiguous because global
capitalism thrives on, and in fact requires, human capacity to labor. When we reproduce
ourselves, and by that I mean when we survive even in order to resist, we are also
providing capital the means for its continued accumulation. 2) This understanding of
class analysis and political economy is inherently multidimensional in order to account
for the ways wider social orders impact, and are impacted by, the social and economic
order of global capitalism. There are internal debates about the theoretical value of
the approach labeled “intersectionality” (McNally 2017; Ferguson 2016), but when
evaluating the histories of the BPP and WfH political perspectives, we can think of class
as fundamentally constituted by processes of racialization and patriarchal norms about
gender and sexuality. The impact of race on the project of survival was a central concern
for the BPP organizing eorts toward which we now turn.
Ⅲ. TheBlackPantherParty:Survival,Revolution,andRevolt
In her insightful retelling of the history of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, Robyn
Spencer’s (2016) The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther
Party in Oakland oers an organizational analysis of the BPP’s development. Spencer’s
extensive archival research supports a close reading of the Party’s survival programs and
how they were key to the overall Party platform, which guided the political objec-
tives and activities of the BPP. Well-known historian and former Party member, Paul
Alkebulan (2007), argues the Party’s founding members, Huey P. Newton and Bobby
Seale, “were searching for answers to America’s seemingly intractable racial problems”
(4). Unlike the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and popular Civil Rights
leaders, Seale and Newton were uninterested in nonviolent or non-confrontational
solutions. In 1966, the Black Panther Party was ocially born with the express aim
of ending political brutality and the creation of a ten-point program which sought to
ameliorate the conditions in which Black communities were suering (Alkebulan 2007,
5). After a couple years of armed demonstrations emphasizing the necessity of Black
self-defense, armed police patrols, and a few violent interactions with the police which
left some Party members killed by cops, Newton was arrested in 1967. The national
campaign to “Free Huey” followed, mobilizing hundreds of new members, with BPP
branches popping up all over the U.S. (Spencer 2016, 56-60). Thereafter, the Party faced
a slew of obstacles challenging the ecacy of their organizational practices and tactics.
Spencer presents the tumultuous period of brutal state repression at the hands
6
of the FBI’s counterintelligence program COINTELPRO through an emphasis on
its eects for the women Party members (2016, 89). She notes that as radical Black
leaders and members were arrested or targeted with unprecedented and intrusive sur-
veillance techniques, women became the foundation of the Party. An informal survey
conducted by Bobby Seale stated that in 1969 women made up two-thirds of the Party
at the time (Cleaver 2001, 125). When Newton’s conviction for killing an Oakland
police ocer was overturned in 1970, he was released on bail and circulated an open
letter formally commenting on the necessity of support for both the Women’s and Gay
Liberation Movements (Spencer 2016, 96). Given the nancial pressures of consistently
rotating bail funds needed to get their comrades out of prison, Spencer notes that
many Panthers lived collectively and divisions of labor around housework were often
contested andcontradicted Newton’s claim of formal gender equality (105). She care-
fully concludes that, “[i]nternal debates around sexuality, gender politics, and leadership
simmered under the surface because many [Party members] viewed them as deferrable
at a time of political instability” (105). Alternatively, the internal debates which took
center stage within the Party revolved around leadership, militarism, and Party loyalty.
In the period of restructuring between 1971 and 1974, the Party’s survival pro-
grams became an “organizational priority” around which the Panthers rebuilt themselves
in the wake of continued state repression (Spencer 2016, 116). While the Free Breakfast
for Children Program has received a lot of mainstream attention, one of the most
successful and longest running BPP survival programs was the Oakland Community
Learning Center (OCLC) which began in 1971. Spencer claims that having such a
solid program grounded in the community actually opened the doors for new survival
programs to emerge when specic needs were identied. Quoting a taped interview
with Ericka Huggins, Huggins recalls, “a number of new programs have developed just
by having the school here…” and then goes on to link the Seniors against a Fearful
Environment program with the creation of a welfare referral system. This demonstrates
the wholistic and intergenerational organizing that was able to happen because of the
Center (119). The OCLC was completely tuition free until 1977 after a failed campaign
to elect Bobby Seale as Mayor and Elaine Brown on City Council left the Party in
nancial decits, and participants were asked to pay up to $35 a month (Spencer 2016,
186). Internal Party reports from this time indicate that the level of “political work,”
such as door-to-door organizing and follow-up with participants in the survival pro-
grams, was signicantly decreased. The Oakland BPP chapter found it dicult to do
“any of the other activities that are done to hold the previously established networks
and to build new face to face relationships with people on the precinct level” (156).
To highlight some of the radical political theory which might have undergirded
or resulted from engagement with Party’s politics, I now turn to the work of two inu-
ential political prisoners associated with the BPP and the struggle for Black liberation:
Assata Shakur and George Jackson. It is clear that big names in the BPP leadership such
as Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Elaine Brown, and David Hillard deeply determined
the principles and frameworks under which the Party operated. In highlighting a per-
spective from below, that of rank-and-le members and former members, I seek to
highlight “imprisoned intellectuals” who represent the eects of a critical engagement
7
with the BPP’s revolutionary framework (James 2003, xiv). Firstly, in reviewing George
Jackson and his understanding of the development of political consciousness, struggles
to survive are sutured to a revolutionary project and politic. Secondly, Assata Shakur’s
autobiography reveals some notable limitations of the BPP around political education
from the perspective of a Black revolutionary woman who decided to leave the Party
to pursue a dierent path toward Black liberation.
George Jackson’s (1972) Blood in My Eye, is a collection of essays and letters
written during his incarceration and nished mere days before his murder in August of
1971. It oers a searing critique of the fascistic “Amerikan”2 state while simultaneously
producing a wealth of concrete suggestions regarding political, organizational tactics
and frameworks through which Black people can ght against the State (ix). Jackson’s
reections on the dialectical movement between survival, or meeting “on the ground
needs”, and a revolutionary political education, highlight some of the aspects of political
organizing that the BPP struggled with in the latter part of the Party’s existence. His
writings identify the need for “dual power,” which seeks to create a sustainable alter-
native for community control within Black communities (113). Before creating the
autonomous infrastructure necessary for community control, it is important to create
a more livable life for working class Black communities. For Jackson, the conditions of
revolutionary consciousness are crucially proceeded by the condition of a full stomach,
free medical care, and a safe place for children and adults to rest their heads. He quotes
Newton on the survival programs in a “Letter to a Comrade*”, stating that, “the sur-
vival programs satisfy the deep needs of the community but they are not solutions to
our problems. That is why we call them survival programs, meaning survival pending
revolution” (Jackson 1972, 70). Jackson goes onto claim that the survival programs
“ll a very real vacuum” already existing within Black communities where people are
living in appalling conditions without having basic bodily needs met, such as food and
shelter (70). He argues that this will demonstrate to working class Black people what
it means to organize around their needs, calling this the introduction of the “people’s
government” (71-72). For Jackson at the time of his writing, the BPP was the strongest
political apparatus which existed outside of the liberal façade of electoral politics.
Jackson (1972) contends that the subsequent step to meeting the needs of the
people is having the vanguard lead the people in the construction of its own auton-
omous people’s government – a vanguard Jackson explicitly states will be the Black
Panther Party (74). Jackson writes that:
Consciousness grows in spirals. Growth implies feeding and being fed. We feed
consciousness by feeding people, addressing ourselves to their needs, the basic
and social needs, working, organizing toward a united national left. After the
people have created something that they are willing to defend, a wealth of new ideals
and an autonomous subsistence infrastructure, then they are ready to be brought
into “open” conict with the ruling class and its supports (84).
The key of Jackson’s call to “feed” our consciousness is not only to nourish the phys-
ical body, but to then put that nourished body to work. Work in this context cannot
mean wage labor for the capitalist, but instead refers to the creation of the autonomous
8
infrastructure which seeks rstly to meet unmet needs, and secondly to build a political
consciousness within Black communities through creating alternatives together (76-
77). Although Jackson does not clearly enumerate what the people’s government will
look like, or under which guiding principles it will operate, he juxtaposes it against
the process of withdrawal. He argues that after the revolution has “failed,” retreat is
not a practical way to rebuild resistance. Instead, Jackson uplifts Newton’s concept of
the Black commune, which he sees as one way the revolutionary class could construct
“a political, social, and economic infrastructure, capable of lling the vacuum that has
been left by the establishment ruling class…” (122). Clearly, the people’s government is
intended to meet unmet needs “on at least a subsistence level,” but it also involves cre-
ating conditions for autonomy from within the contradictory position of what Jackson
calls the “Black Colony” (122).
When the bulk of the money made through the Party became directed toward
electoral campaigns and the security for high-ranking ocials, the survival programs
lost the emphasis of building face-to-face relationships with the people. The clinics still
oered free medical and dental services, but there was no follow-up or invitation for
further Party involvement after the services were procured (Spencer 2016, 159). While
stomachs might have been fed and illnesses abated, the construction of autonomous
community structures waned. This is particularly evident when the main Party activities
were voters’ registration drives during the 1977 Brown/Seale election campaign. Is elec-
toral politics an infrastructure of Black autonomy that people will be, as Jackson notes,
willing to defend? The BPP’s relationship to the people in Black communities is not static
throughout its history. On my reading, the ultimate downfall of the BPP came largely
in part from the highly successful counterrevolutionary campaign of COINTELPRO
that separated the BPP from the people it sought to serve out of security concerns.
Additionally, the focus on political projects of legitimacy, such as electoral politics, threat-
ened to institutionalize and de-fang a revolutionary force whose original intension was
to jeopardize the stability of the Amerikan empire. This tension appears in Assata Shakur’s
autobiography ASSATA. In it, she recalls a riveting personal history of her involvement
with the Black Liberation Movement which led to her capture and imprisonment by the
state for seven years before escaping to Cuba (Davis 2003, 64). Her favorite time in the
BPP was spent working with the Free Breakfast Program as she described the work to
be an “absolute delight” (Shakur 1987, 219). Alternatively, Shakur found the education
requirements for building the internal Party consciousness to be incomplete.
Although the major reasons for Shakur’s departure from the Party were due to
internal conicts between Newton and other longtime members, she found the political
education program to be inadequate to its task. She describes the political education (or
PE) program as having three levels: one for community members, one for ocial BPP
members of a cadre, and one for the highest level of leadership in the Party (Shakur
1987, 232). Interestingly enough, the community classes which focused on the Party’s
ten-point program and “general objectives and philosophies of the BPP” were the most
engaging (221). Her experience with the cadre PE classes was noticeably worse. She
recalls that, “[m]ost of the time whoever was giving the class discussed what we were
studying and explained it, but without giving the underlying issues or putting it in any
9
historical context” (221). Shakur bemoans the fact that even though they could recite
quotes from Mao’s Little Red Book, many cadre members still thought the US Civil War
was fought to free the slaves. She notes that, “to a lot of Panthers, however, struggle
consisted of only two aspects: picking up the gun and serving the people” (221). To be
clear, Shakur was not principally opposed to the use of armed force in revolutionary
struggle, which is attested by her connection to the Black Liberation Army, but that for
her the picking up of the gun is part of a history of Black peoples struggling within the
U.S. and around the world to liberate themselves and their people. Contextualizing that
history and one’s place within it is of the upmost importance.
Without centering the construction of multifaceted political analyses, dier-
ent BPP chapters sometimes found diculty sustaining the growth of the political
consciousness of the wider Black community in which they were embedded. Despite
having known several members with keen political insight, Shakur observes that there
was not an organized attempt to spread that consciousness throughout the Party in
general. Additionally, those best at organizing were often the busiest and had little time
to teach their prowess to comrades. Shakur hypothesizes this deciency was bred simul-
taneously from exponential Party growth in a short period of time, combined with
the brutal state repression which was a feature of the BPP’s existence “almost from its
inception” (Shakur 1987, 222). Understandably, it would be dicult for the vanguard
elements, as Jackson suggests, to feed a political consciousness to the people that the
Party has not suciently fed to its members. There is, again, an unfortunate separation
between the important work of meeting unmet needs, and the growth of a wide and
complex shared political analysis necessary to unite a group of people constantly under
attack from capital and its agents of safeguard within the State.
The activities of the Black Panther Party impacted a whole generation of young
people, especially young Black people, in their struggle for Black liberation. The history of
the BPP demonstrates an unwavering commitment to its community and the transforma-
tion of their daily experiences. To politicize the very survival of marginalized populations,
which capital seeks to simultaneously exploit and destroy, makes the maintenance of such
lives – the caring labors that one’s community performs to ensure their existence in a
world determined to obliterate them – a revolutionary act. And yet, bare survival, with
only a daily reproduction of our bodily and human needs, is not enough to levy a strong
opposition to the capitalist, and perhaps following Jackson’s analysis, fascist Amerikan
state. When survival is politicized, there are important and sometimes unspoken gendered
divisions of labor which become exacerbated, and the BPP encountered diculty appro-
priately integrating an account of such divisions into their political activities. In order to
unpack the political consequences of these sexual and gendered divisions of labor, I turn
toward the international Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s which sought to
politicize “women’s work” as an integral part of a feminist class politic.
Ⅳ. WagesAgainstHousework:“WeCan’tAffordtoWorkforLove”
In the 2017 volume, The New York Wages for Housework Committee: History, Theory, and
Documents, Silvia Federici and co-editor Arlene Austin, reprint key documents, posters,
and internal memos from the New York Wages for Housework Committee based on
10
Federici’s personal archive. The book is thus an incomplete history with many pieces of
documentation missing (Federici 2017, 11). Even with this lacuna, the archival material
which details the demands and political framework of the Committee combined with
Federici’s retrospective commentaries oer a unique glimpse into a highly marginalized
and vilied movement within the larger Women’s Liberation Movement during the
1960s & ‘70s. After outlining both its theoretical foundation and the resulting tactics,
I consider more specically the appearance and activities of the autonomous Black
Women for Wages for Housework group. This group’s activities, as well as Selma James’s
work, the leader in the WfH London chapter, emphasizes the dierential impact of
race, class, and sex on women’s work. Not only did WfH politicize the monotonous
and daily reproductive labor of millions of women, but they saw refusal of this labor as a
key to any winning strategy toward an anti-capitalist and feminist revolutionary project.
The international movement for Wages for Housework began in 1972 in
Padova, Italy at a not-so-serendipitous meeting of four women all hailing from dierent
countries. This meeting was partially due to the recent publication and circulation of an
essay “Women and the Subversion of the Community”, as well as the lived experiences
of frustration with developing radical and feminist alternatives to more “traditional
communist parties” (Federici 2017, 18). Foundational documents such as the 1972
“Statement of the International Feminist Collective” and the 1974 “Theses on Wages
for Housework”, detail arguments about the marginalization of the wageless worker.
Such arguments were in eorts against the inclination of other socialist feminists
who argue that women formed a “sex class” of their own outside of socioeconomic
status. Instead, WfH feminists claimed that what divides unwaged workers from waged
workers is “power, not class” (Federici 2017, 31). Instead of abandoning class analysis,
the WfH feminists openly called for a redenition of “class” itself since the traditional
Marxian denition seemed to elide not only wageless women workers, but those col-
onized peoples in the capitalist periphery. The WfH collective writes, “[c]lass struggle
and feminism for us are one and the same thing, feminism expressing the rebellion
of that section of the class without whom the class struggle cannot be generalised,
broadened, and deepened” (30). Accordingly, a class struggle which chooses to forgo
agitating around the struggles of women, actually undermines itself since the struggle
cannot be universalized nor expanded without radicalizing and incorporating women’s
paid and unpaid labor.
In their landmark 1972 essay “Women and the Subversion of the Community,”
Dalla Costa and James (2019) articulate housework, or the unwaged caring labor
unevenly foisted upon women, as the hidden basis through which the exploitation of
the wage is secured.3 The primary method of this obfuscation includes rendering the
work being done by women in the household a “personal service outside of capital,”
(Dalla Costa and James 2019, 23) or, as much of the WfH pamphlets and posters allege,
“a labor of love” (Federici 2017, 43). The authors detail the ways in which women
are bereaved of what small pleasures may be aorded under the capitalist mode of
organization: their sexuality is co-opted to ensure the reproduction of labor power
broadly; they are isolated in their homes and share no space with other houseworkers
with whom they may at least commiserate; their children are being indoctrinated and
11
subjugated by the educational system; and any bargaining power that the waged worker
may gain from technological innovations is lost on the housewife as her work, even
with a dishwasher, never seems to be complete (Dalla Costa and James 2019, 20-26).
By arguing that the unwaged work of the housewife – and the authors emphasize that
the working-class housewife is the gure under investigation at present (18) – actually
secures the “freedom” of the waged worker, Dalla Costa and James are able to impor-
tantly argue that the exploitation of women is conditioned not merely by individual
men, i.e. their husbands, but the entire capitalist class as a whole.
Additionally, the authors challenge Marxian political economy even further by
claiming that the unwaged work which secures the freedom of the waged worker is in
fact productive, which is to say, it creates surplus value.4 The authors argue that given
the historical institutionalization of familial relations under developing capitalism, it is
clear that the only person “liberated” from reproductive work within the unit of the
hetero-nuclear family is the man. This is not because he does not need to be clothed,
fed, washed, and emotionally engaged, but because he is not structurally coerced to
perform such labor on himself or anyone else. Instead, Dalla Costa and James (2019)
state that unwaged housework is not a superstructural phenomenon, meaning histor-
ically contingent and malleable to capital’s accumulation, but in fact represents a key
dependency within the base structure of capitalistic exploitation (30). If we fail to grasp
the family unit as an elemental unit for the creation of surplus value, “then we will be
moving in a limping [sic] revolution – one that will always perpetuate and aggravate a
basic contradiction in the class struggle, and a contradiction that is functional to capitalist devel-
opment” (Dalla Costa and James 2019, 20). Instead of agitating this division against the
ruling class, the male-dominated left exacerbates this unequal internal division of labor
as non-essential and secondary to wage-labor exploitation, which actually prevents class
struggle from broader realization.
Given this account of the labor women perform and the explicit theorization of
class as a majorly inuential but not completely reductive aspect of woman’s oppression,
WfH’s political framework was perhaps rather unique at the time of their organizing.
Even though they were a small group, they faced immense backlash from both within
and outside of the feminist movement. Both the “white male left” and the liberal fem-
inist movement saw the demand for wages as deterrent to the kind of “equality” they
sought, i.e. equal opportunity employment and exploitation (Lopez 2012, 8). However,
naming wages as the primary goal of the movement was certainly limiting. Instead of
creating a process in which women struggle against the conditions of their care work,
the understanding of their struggle became entangled with ideological valuations of
time and money. Such capitalist ideology is central to the false narrative that wage-labor
occurs on the “free” market as an exchange between “equals.” It was unclear to those
outside of the movement that WfH sought to abolish the conditions under which such
work is performed, as opposed to (the ultimately futile task of) making women’s work
valuable under the rubric of capitalism.
Aiming to unmask the material distinctions from the ideological functions
behind so-called “cultural” dierences, Selma James (2012) contends that the inner-
class divisions are conditioned by capitalist organization, which is to say that the internal
12
dynamics of homophobia, racism, and sexism within the working class fundamentally
benet capital’s continued accumulation (95). As stated in “Women and the Subversion
of the Community,” there is a structural and not contingent relationship between such
systems of domination and capital’s social organization. For James (2012), the “White
left” claims that cultural dierences, or identarian distinctions, should be worked out
separately from class struggle, as if trying to think them through a class analytic creates
confusion (95-96). But in fact, those very “cultural” dierences which make material
impacts in our daily lives are actually how a class is dis-unied, disorganized, but also
reproduced. The very process of reproduction demanded by capital relies upon sexism,
homophobia, and racism and then in turn reies those logics of oppression. James argues
that “[t]hese power relations within the working class weaken us in the power struggle
between the classes. They are the particularized forms of indirect rule, one section of
the class colonizing another and through capital imposing its will on us all” (James 2012,
96-97). From this view, the cultural dierences which beget actual material dierences
in living conditions, divisions of labor, length and viability of life become recognized
not as a struggle of one “culture” over another, but as a struggle of all exploited and
dominated members of the “world proletariat” against the ruling classes (Federici 2020,
111). In this process, James and her comrades internationally hoped that taking class
struggle out of the factory into the home would not make class struggle obsolete, but
widen and multiply it.
In 1975, a group of Black women led by Margaret Prescod and Wilmette Brown
created an autonomous group within the WfH global campaign entitled Black Women
for Wages for Housework (BWfWfH). They were inspired both by the WfH political
position and the immense government budget cuts to crucial social services in New York
City during 1975. Excerpts of their literature are reprinted in Federici’s collection and
a (1980) Falling Wall Press pamphlet entitled Black Women: Bringing it All Home which
reprints a speech Margaret Prescod gave during a 1977 WfH meeting. These sources
show the particularity of Black women’s reproductive struggles against the State and its
determinant qualities of racism, surveillance, and sexual violence. In the inaugural issue
of their journal, Sare, BWfWfH defends the rights of French sex workers on strike by
rallying against their vilication for “demanding money for the work that all women
are expected to do for free” (Federici 2017, 122). Unsurprisingly, this is not only a
nuanced and pro-worker account of sex workers at a time when mainstream feminism
was having so-called “Porn Wars” (Salucci, 2021), but also a link to the disproportionate
exploitation of Black women’s sexual labor during chattel slavery. The BWfWfH group
become integral in identifying the ways in which Black and white women’s sexual and
domestic labor have historically been unequal, and the group emphasized the important
racial dimensions to the struggle for Welfare Rights during the 1970s.
In a 1997 speech, Prescod highlights the gure of the mammy during chattel
slavery and the double function of her labor to both secure the reproduction of the
master and his white family, while also using this position of proximity to pilfer the
masters’ resources and struggle against the very reproductive work being imposed. Using
examples of the mammy “taking wages” from her master in the form of food, clothing,
or books to help educate herself and other slaves, Prescod (1980) contends that “we can
13
see that within the housework of the Black woman in the time of slavery two things
were going on: the utilization of that woman to reproduce the master and his family, and
at the same time that woman making a struggle against that work, to destroy that work”
(16). The service of so-called sexual favors is also central to Prescod’s analysis of all the
dierent sites at which the mammy’s reproductive labor is exploited, even “[…] labor is
exploited, even after the formal abolition […]” after the formal abolition of slavery in
the West Indies (16). She then powerfully argues that the reproductive labor which was
forced upon the mammy was used as the basis for an incredible accumulation of wealth
in the U.S., concluding that Black women in particular are owed a renumeration for
the generations of their unfree and coerced labor, both agricultural and reproductive.
Ⅴ. Congruencies,Discontinues,andaRadicalRe-readingofMutualAid
The double function of the Black woman’s labor during chattel slavery denotes an
important structural element to reproductive or care labor in general. The ambiguity
of reproductive labor, that is its both generative and restrictive features, can make it a
site of both resistance and domination. If one is interested in mobilizing reproductive
labor within a larger emancipatory politics to create care work as a site of anti-capi-
talist struggle, how can we tell when survival is oppositional to capital and when it is
compliant? This question orients the nal section of this paper, which seeks to integrate
the insights oered from the WfH and BPP histories of struggle toward an analysis of
the proliferation of mutual aid projects during COVID-19. Both of these movements
oered a clear evaluation that the wider social conditions under racialized and patriarchal
capitalism were the causes of their suering while simultaneously politicizing everyday
eorts to survive. During COVID-19, eorts to survive became increasingly dicult
and as a response practices of mutual aid emerged, including food and clothing drives,
grocery deliveries, community fundraising for bills or rent on the internet using Venmo,
CashApp, or GoFundMe, and many other online platforms. It would be impractical to
attempt to survey all these practices in detail. Instead, I focus on the seemingly organic
and non-governmental organizations which were created largely from online commu-
nities such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Through referral to a brief study done
on thirty-two mutual aid organizers who used these methods in the United Kingdom
during the height of the COVID-19 governmental lockdown orders, and Dean Spade’s
book (2020), Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (And the Next), I consider
the value of mutual aid as an organizing strategy for a radical politics of care.
Dean Spade is an organizer, academic, and lawyer whose lifework has been
dedicated to building a movement for “queer and trans liberation based in racial and
economic justice” (Spade, 2021). As a committed abolitionist and anarchist, he has
been deeply involved in anti-racist prison activism which includes collaboration with
Critical Resistance, an organization working to facilitate political organizing inside
and outside the prison walls. Spade is committed to anti-capitalist and anti-colonial
organizing as a foundational aspect of community members meeting unmet needs.
While the book builds upon previously published work, it specically caters to the
increased development of such networks in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Spade
argues that mutual aid both meets unmet needs while mobilizing people to ght back
14
against the social and political conditions which create and perpetuate such dangerous
living environments. Spade (2020) claims that, “[g]etting support at a place that sees the
systems, not the people suering in them, as the problem can help people move from
shame to anger and deance. Mutual aid exposes the failures of the current system and
shows an alternative” (13). He is clear that the target of the mutual aid organizer is not
the individual in need, but instead the systems of domination which maintain untenable
living and working conditions (12). Spade argues that community members engaged
in mutual aid are able to reject the liberal charity model through which individuals are
evaluated as worthy or unworthy of assistance (47-38).
The emphasis on the institutions which create and sustain unsafe living and
working conditions for a large portion of the world’s population makes mutual aid an
integral part of revolutionary resistance for Spade. Moving people out of the shroud of
shame caused by increased precarity also means moving them from a feeling of isolation
to a feeling of mutual recognition or collectivity. Even though Spade sees mutual aid
as one tactic among many that we can use to combat these systems of exploitation
and domination, he nds it to be a particularly useful tactic because it “brings people
into coordinated actions right now” (42). Some textual examples of strong mutual aid
programs include Mutual Aid Disaster Relief which sought to provide mutual aid to
Puerto Rico after 2018 Hurricane Maria and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project which
provides free legal advice to trans and gender nonconforming people (Spade 2020, 18).
The urgency and practicality of getting the resources to people immediately helps to
combat “the false separation of politics and injustice from ordinary life” (27).
In the article (2021) “More Than a COVID-19 Response: Sustaining Mutual Aid
Groups During and Beyond the Pandemic” in Frontiers in Psychology, Maria Fernandes-
Jesus et al. interviewed thirty-two organizers about their experiences creating mutual
aid projects during the pandemic. These interviews took place over several months with
interviewees from England, Wales, Scotland, and North Ireland. Overall, the authors
found the following themes most common among the interviewees: a sense of com-
munity-building through meeting localized needs over time, building trust through
connections to individual and collective organizations, and collective coping strategies
which lead to feelings of hope and ecacy (Fernandes-Jesus, et al 2021, 6). Noting
that creating trust between the mutual aid group and the community was essential, the
authors report that generally there were no criteria of eligibility needed in order to
request aid. The authors dene this as operating in what Spade calls the “solidarity and
not charity” model (8). Even though the participants reported a high hourly commit-
ment – one participant stating to have organized seven days a week for six weeks straight
– they also reported a sense of shared identity and supported other organizers with
coping strategies (9). There were both positive and negative reviews from participants
about working with local governmental institutions. Though the authors highlight the
anarchist roots of mutual aid through reference to Spade and Peter Kropotkin, there was
no mention of shared political perspective or analyses from the interviews.
It is clear that some of the community projects which Spade calls mutual aid,
most notability the Free Breakfast for Children program by the BPP, did actively reject
the larger social conditions which produced abject poverty in Black neighborhoods.
15
Simultaneously, the BPP identied the United States government and its logic of white
supremacy as the perpetrators of violence and harm instead of the suering popula-
tions. However, in this brief review of COVID-19 mutual aid eorts in the U.K., it is
less clear to me that organizers used a shared political analysis as that from which to base
and perpetuate their projects of mutual aid. Even if some interviewees in “More than
COVID-19” had radical political views, it was not enough to become highlighted in
the results, nor did it seem that such views brought people to organizing. Most inter-
viewees noted a general feeling of wanting to help those in need (11). The global crisis
of COVID-19 demonstrated quite starkly the “disposability” of certain populations
in the eyes of the economy and various nation-states, yet this was not explicitly stated
by organizers as a motivating factor for their eorts. Some limitations that the authors
identify include that “it was particularly dicult to reach politicized groups and groups
working in deprived and marginalized areas” (Fernandes-Jesus, et al 2021, 14). While I
would concede that mutual aid does bring people into action right now, it does not in
all instances produce a shared political analysis which could orient participants toward
future endeavors.
Why is shared political analysis so important? In the study referenced above,
good-hearted people came together and found community in each other during di-
cult and isolating times. This, in and of itself, is an individually replenishing and helpful
survival strategy; however, without a shared political analysis which understands the
intersectional dynamics that produce and exacerbate such crises in the rst place, then
mere survival will end up supporting capital instead of opposing it. Survival cannot be
an individualized moment of moral achievement. I argue that past historical movements
which politicized human survival and caring labor, such as the BPP and the WfH cam-
paign, demonstrate this clearly since both movements framed survival as a collective and
oppositional eort. Consequently, the very task of surviving became itself a political act. It
is imperative to learn from the anti-capitalist struggles of the past in order to forge a way
toward a liberatory future. In uplifting survival without a robust feminist and anti-racist
class politic, one produces a politic of care that, ultimately, does the work the State
refuses to do: namely, reproduce and attend the unmet bodily and psychological needs
of the laboring classes. This work is done not in the name of revolution, but through the
framework of individual good will. I nd that mutual aid could have the potential that
Spade identies in his work, but without a thorough analysis of each mutual aid group’s
political grounding it may actually work more for the State than against it.
In closing, I suggest that a radical politic of community care able to oppose the
avoidable death and harm from COVID-19 must be joined with attempts to create
autonomous infrastructure which not only secures survival, but builds political con-
sciousness through radical care work. This can look like passing out groceries after
de-escalation trainings; free rst-aid training with a brief lesson about global anti-capi-
talist struggle; free or barter-based childcare collectives in your neighborhood; refusal to
do unpaid emotional labor for your boss. These individual practices need to be processed
collectively and might oer more potential for developing political consciousness than
redistributing scant resources. COVID-19 mutual aid can become transactional when a
one-time donation puts little emphasis on the very conditions which produce suering,
16
yet still aords the donator a sense of moral righteousness. It is not enough to care for
each other out of internal moral obligations. In order to combat the gendered, sexual,
and racial divisions of care labor, the very conditions of such work must be rejected.
Militancy and confrontation to capital cannot only happen in the streets through public
demonstration. It is no longer acceptable to refuse to include caring labor as a part
of revolutionary politics. Protest and care work can and should be two parts of the
same process which seek to confront capital directly and refuse to do its bidding. In
re-amplifying the need for a radical politics of care over and against current mutual aid
eorts to combat the disproportionate eect of COVID-19 on the world’s workers,
paid and unpaid, I revisit histories of anti-racist and feminist struggle to learn the most
vital lessons about how to radically reshape our survival and ensure the future of our
liberation struggles.
Notes
1 From this point forward, the Black Panther
Party will be referred to as BPP or the Party, while
the Wages for Housework campaign will be signified
by the WfH acronym.
2 In this section in particular, I pay homage to
the radical spirit of both Jackson and Assata by the
purposeful misspelling of America to “Amerika”
which can be found in both texts being reviewed
here. This a rhetorical strategy aimed at illuminating
the full breadth of the brutal and bloody history
of white supremacy propagated by the U.S. state
and its human safeguards. As noted in my reading
of Assata, truly powerful political consciousness
demands a persistent historical contextualization and
this misspelling is my attempt to meet her demand
within my own analysis.
3 There seems to be some recent dispute over the
original authors of this prolific essay, as both James
and Dalla Costa had written about in their recent
collected volumes. Given that I cannot parse which
thinker has the most correct account of events, I
have cited both of them as the authors in part to
credit them both equally. There is generous use of
the first-personal plural perspective, as the pronoun
“we” is peppered throughout the essay; by citing
both authors, I hope to lend legitimacy to both
women as central forces within the international
WfH campaign, regardless of any subsequent
political disputes.
4 This hotly debated topic within the disparate
theoretical accounts which could be called social
reproduction feminisms is not a clear cut issue;
however, I tend to disagree with the claim that all
unwaged reproductive labor directly produces surplus
value. And yet, it can be especially difficult to tease
out this question with the growing commodification
of reproductive activities and the increased tendency
for upper class women in the global north to
outsource their housework to lower class women in
the capitalist periphery. Additionally, people such as
a Tithi Bhattacharya argue for an abundant notion of
the social reproduction which includes such public
institutions as education and healthcare. In such an
account, certain groups of waged workers would also
be contributing to the overall reproduction of the
working and capitalist classes, and as well as to the
production of surplus value for capital because their
work is waged. Therefore, it is not quite correct to
say reproductive labor never yields surplus value,
but the question demands detailed contextualization
given exactly what kind of reproductive labor is
under investigation and the various forms that labor
make take.
References
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Rhiannon Lindgren is a PhD Candidate in the
Department of Philosophy at the University of
Oregon. She teaches in the Philosophy and Women’s,
Gender, and Sexuality Studies departments. Her
research primarily focuses on feminist political
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liberation.
Biography
Careful Cracks: Resistant Practices of Care and Affect-ability
Ludovica D’Alessandro
Care, Resistance, Affect
Keywords
Krisis 42 (1): 18-28.
Abstract
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, several institutional policies and discourses,
speaking in tandem with a “health” and “nancial crisis”, have highlighted what seem
to be the consequences of an aporetic disentanglement of capitalist relations of pro-
duction and reproduction. Indeed, partial halts to economic production in the wake
of COVID-19 have become equivalent – through symbolic and material actualisations
of vulnerability and care – to a suspension of people’s capacity to sustain themselves.
This dynamic has thus overshadowed alternatives to the capitalist tie of economic pro-
duction with social reproduction. Resisting this landscape, local solidarity groups have
emerged globally to counter the attening of reproduction for the perpetuation of the
socio-economic status quo by creating networks of mutual aid and support. Learning
from these movements, I propose aect-ability as a philosophically productive term and
tool to conceptualise resistant practices of care, toward underscoring the inherent rela-
tionality and vulnerability of bodies as well as its unequal and inequitable eects, while
rethinking the notion of care itself from these ontological, political, and ethical premises.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.42.1.37886
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 License International License (CC
BY 4.0). © 2022 The author(s).
Licence
18
Careful Cracks: Resistant Practices of Care and Affect-ability
Ludovica D’Alessandro
Introduction
Situated in Milan, Northern Italy, during the rst year of the COVID-19 pandemic, I
continuously witnessed institutional policies and discourses that arose from the seeming
consequences of an aporetic disentanglement of capitalist relations of production and
reproduction. Instead of critically considering the contentious and problematic nature
of these institutional sites, the main governance techniques during the pandemic have
rearmed a “There Is No Alternative” logic. Contrary to this backdrop of narratives
and policy landscapes, practices of solidarity “from below”, such as food and medicine
distribution, community childcare, mental health support, and others, have proliferated
nationally and globally. In this way, vulnerability and its unequal distribution have come
to orient and maintain relations of resistance.
Thinking through these events, I propose aect-ability as a philosophically
productive term and tool to conceptualise resistant practices of care. In this article, I
dene and develop an account of aect-ability that is based on every body’s ability to
aect and be aected. By underscoring the ontological relationality and exposure of
bodies, this concept invokes ethical and political accountability for those who become
aected and how they become aected. Through articulating bodies as always-already
aected and aecting, care work can reproduce or resist current social processes of
normalisation, while exposing the connections among ontological, ethical, and political
dimensions of care practices.
The “Two Crisis” of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, questions of care, social reproduction, and
health have come to the forefront of political debate and organisation. Exposing the
lacks, inequalities, and discontinuities in the infrastructures which sustain life, the
pandemic has reinforced activist demands against cuts and privatisation of healthcare
services, exclusion of care workers from basic labour rights, and shortages in medi-
cine and vaccine distribution across global divides, among other terrains of struggles.
Moreover, protests in several countries highlighted that the pandemic has not only
aected populations in terms of its immediate eects on health, but it has crucially
severed pre-existing structures of inequality and marginalisation.
The conditions which “make life possible” have been under attack more intensely,
not only by the risks immediately related to one’s health and care necessities, but also
by what has been described as a nancial crisis taking place at the same time as the health
crisis. Indeed, companies ceasing production temporarily or going bankrupt, uncertainty
in the nancial market, and shrinkages in the demand of goods have catalysed extremely
high rates of job loss, home eviction and debt, thus exacerbating the more “direct” eects
of the pandemic. If the nexus between these two crises – one productive and the other
reproductive – is hence taken as a given in most hegemonic policies and discourses, I
seek to destabilise this causal necessity by asking: why is the possibility to reproduce life
thwarted in the moment economic production shrinks, slows down, or stops?
19
In Europe and in the United States, the current pandemic-induced nancial
crisis has already resulted in signicantly higher falls in Gross Domestic Products (GDP)
than those recorded from the nancial crisis of 2007-2008. Considering narratives
around the latter in its connection to another crisis - the so-called “refugee crisis” in
Greece -Anna Carastathis, Aila Spathopoulou, and Myrto Tsilimpounidi observe:
What needs further unpacking, then, is the interdependency between the dom-
inant understanding of crisis and the implied return to normativity. In most
debates about the current crisis, questions about the future are limited to asking
when things will return to ‘normal’. In other words, the massive social and polit-
ical shock of the crisis and the destruction of the material conditions it imposes
create nostalgia for what existed ‘before’, an uncritical acceptance of the condi-
tions before the crisis (Carastathis, Spathopoulou, and Tsilimpounidi 2018, 31).
Such mobilisations of the notion of crisis thus go hand-in-hand with a naturalisation of
the status quo. Translated to today’s landscape, I argue that speaking of “nancial crisis” as
a direct and necessary consequence of the “health crisis” caused by the pandemic may,
in fact, hinder the unravelling of the capitalist ties between production and reproduc-
tion, which dangerously naturalises the ideology that decreases in economic growth are
necessarily equivalent to interruptions in life sustainability.
Capitalist Reproduction and Counter-social Reproduction
The entanglement of capitalist relations of production and reproduction has been put
under profound critical scrutiny by Marxist feminist thinkers attempting to elaborate
a unitary analysis of the capitalist system which has converged into social reproduction
theory (Bezanson and Luxton 2006; Vogel 2013; Bhattacharya 2017). Social reproduc-
tion theory aims to sever the ties between “labor dispensed to produce commodi-
ties and labor dispensed to produce people” as parts of the same “systemic totality”
(Bhattacharya 2017, 2). Thus, this analytical apparatus may help explain how capitalist
construction of such a monolithic system – seemingly without exogeneity: as the
infamous Thatcherian slogan goes, “There Is No Alternative” – parallels the strategic
exclusion and dierential inclusion (Mezzadra and Nielsen 2013) of forms of labour
traditionally outside wage mediation and/or undertaken in extremely precarious con-
ditions on which the system is actually built, with care and reproductive work being
among the most paradigmatic examples.
The marginalisation of reproduction as “unproductive” has often been accom-
panied, in capitalist societies as well as most of their economic analyses, by a process
of feminisation and naturalisation of forms of labour relegated to the domestic sphere.
The privatisation of social reproduction is discussed by Isabell Lorey (2015) in relation
to contingent historical actualisations of precarity and autonomy. Through European
modernity, the male white bourgeois subject is indeed armed as an autonomous
being able to act “rationally” in the public sphere, as free as he is master of his own
capacities to produce and possess (Lorey 2015, 29-30). As further analysed by Denise
Ferreira da Silva (2007, 52-3), this process paradoxically proves the postulate, as in John
Locke’s liberal notion of the body politic, that a white male subject is autonomous from
20
any external determination even in – and precisely by – its subjection to political rules.
Against this backdrop, the kind of risk protection liberal governmentality oers for the
white male citizen is fundamentally based
on the one hand, on the unpaid labour of women in the reproduction area of
the private sphere; on the other hand, on the precarity of all those excluded from
the nation-state compromise between capital and labour - whether as abnormal,
foreign or poor - as well as those living under extreme conditions of exploitation
in the colonies (Lorey 2015, 36).
Therefore, liberal articulations of autonomy are heavily premised on violently unequal
regimes of precarity enabled by the naturalisation of free reproductive labour, as well
as through systems of colonial exploitation and racialisation. How is it then possible to
practice and account for autonomous forms of reproduction and care which – even
temporarily – interrupt and/or resist the ties among capitalist, patriarchal and colonial
regimes of production and exploitation?
The reproduction of relations that are resistant to the capitalist status quo
has been dened by Helen Hester as “counter-social reproduction – that is, as social
reproduction against the reproduction of the social as it stands” (2018, 64). Counter-social
reproduction exceeds and resists the reproduction of labour-power; it is rather tied to
shaping communities and infrastructures of care for marginalised lives and bodies. As
argued by Silvia Federici on a similar distinction between the two dimensions of repro-
duction (2008), establishing what could, following Hester, be described as a form of
“counter-care” is fundamental for the sustenance of social movements themselves. For
instance, in thinking about the tradition of working-class mutual aid, Federici claims
that, by radically re-composing care as a terrain of struggle, movements have been
building, in parallel, collective forms of reproduction crucial to their own perpetuation
(2008, 8). Reclaiming this “counter” dimension of reproduction, then, is itself an act of
resistance – exploding capitalist monolithic logic by an autonomous socialisation of one
of its pillars – and of care for resistance, essentially sustaining struggling communities.
Returning to the notion of crisis, counter-social reproduction may well
constitute a crisis by means of its inherent interruption of capitalist gears, creating a
crack which then opens space for another meaning of the word “crisis”: an open-
ended moment of armative redenition and social action. As framed by Carastathis,
Spathopoulou, and Tsilimpounidi:
The question becomes how we can move from the state of emergency (crisis,
precarity, displacement) to a state of transition (critique, resistance, occupation),
and then to one of emergence (solidarity networks, dierent social formations,
alternative economies) (Carastathis, Spathopoulou, and Tsilimpounidi 2018, 33).
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, several moments of “emergence” have indeed
occurred: solidarity networks unfolding from below, such as those in Northern Italy
which proliferated concretely in food and medicine distribution, mental health hotline,
legal support, and itinerant theatre performances, among others. These solidarity
groups took action in support of the psycho-physical health of communities, as well
21
as in response to the socio-economic eects of the pandemic, thereby caring for the
consequences of what, under capitalism, is an entangled health and nancial crisis.
These moments of emergence broke the causal necessity between the two precisely
by reclaiming reproduction as a terrain of struggle and by creating caring and careful
relations that exceed economic growth. Through these networks, I witnessed processes
of political organisation that attempt to build communities that move from and away
from unequal regimes of precarity and marginalisation. Learning from them, I now turn
to unpack the ontological, political, and ethical premises on which forms of care as
counter-reproduction can be built.
From the Power to Be Affected to Affect-ability
Aect-ability is a philosophically productive term and tool to rethink the concept of
care in its resistant dimensions. By aect-ability I mean every body’s ability to aect
and be aected, which gestures towards a theory of bodies as inherently vulnerable,
exposed and in-relation, both aected and aecting in non-neutral elds of power
across unequal and inequitable regimes.
Let me rst discuss the ontological aspects of this concept. A starting point for
my conceptualisation of aect-ability is Gilles Deleuze’s expression “power to be aected”
[my italics], presented in the philosopher’s reworking of Michel Foucault’s theory of
power (1988, 71). Moving from a Spinozian conception of aects, Deleuze argues that
any exercise of power manifests itself as an aect (1988, 71). Against this backdrop, a
power relation is a relation between forces, where forces are dened precisely by their
power to aect and be aected: for instance, if to incite and to produce constitute active
aects, then to be incited, or to be induced to produce, constitutes reactive aects (1988,
71). Reactive aects are, for Deleuze, not simply passive – the ipside of active aects
– but rather relational, as there is an irreducible element which resides in the encounter
between forces consisting in the “force aected […] capacity for resistance” (1988, 71).
In this Deleuzian account, the possibility of resistance then constitutes a third power of
force – next to its power to aect and be aected – which stems from the encounter
between active and reactive aects in relation to “a transformative outside” from which
new sets of force relations can emerge (1988, 86).
Therefore, if the capacity to be aected, accordingly to Baruch Spinoza, made
every body a possible vessel for increases and decreases of power, this capacity, in the
Deleuzian reading, fundamentally turns into a form of power itself. Moreover, if forces
are dened by their power to aect and be aected, force itself is inherently subject to
exposure, and this exposure – or ontological susceptibility – establishes the relational
potential of resistance: encounters of active and reactive aects can either result in the
molecular constitution of a resistant outside, or be xed within a particular set of reac-
tive forces. For this reason, I consider this conceptualisation signicant for theorising
how care and reproduction can resist or reproduce specic processes of normalisation.
Looking more closely at the relationship between resistance and the capacity to
aect or be aected, we can see that it performs two main and signicant gestures: this
relationship problematises the active/passive binarism, while arming resistance as “primary”.
Considering the rst point in Deleuze’s description of the “power to be aected”,
22
the possibility of resistance is catalysed precisely by the relationality immanent to
any aective encounter, in which active and passive poles are not predetermined or
distinguished, but only temporarily produced within specic phenomena. As further
explained by Vinciane Despret (2013, 38), relating forces with aects invites renewed
articulation of agency. In this context, there is no unidirectional movement or linear
causality, but – as in Deleuze’s understanding of aects as relational – agents are activated
precisely by being acted upon, aecting by letting themselves be aected and confer-
ring to others the power to aect us. The second crucial aspect of Deleuze’s account of
power that arms aect-ability is that resistance “comes rst” and can be regarded as
“primary” in regard to power relations (Deleuze 1988, 89). Here, resistance functions as
the inexhaustible and creative potentiality that continuously composes new diagrams of
power by being in relation with the outside from which mutation and change emerge
(1988, 90). These considerations articulate a reading of resistance as a state of becoming:
always-already in-relation but never completely exhausted or reducible to a particular
set of power relations. Thus, resistance cannot be accounted for solely in terms of sub-
version or contraposition to a norm, but becomes the possibility for new congurations
which exceed existing power stratications and destabilise previous categorisations.
This understanding of resistance starts precisely from what is “exogenous” to capitalist
relations, thereby avoiding the production of merely reactive discourse and practices
which remain conned to pervasive and monolithic capitalist logic.
The power to be aected, then, allows for resistance to be theorised as a phe-
nomenon where spheres of activity and passivity collapse, where aecting and being
aected cannot be disjointed or distinguished as separate temporal moments, and
where an ontological relationality and indeterminacy undergird and enable encounter.
However, I would also like to conrm being aected and aecting as an ability – indeed,
as aect-ability – instead of exclusively a power, in order to emphasise the ambivalent,
normative, and opaque embodied dimensions of this capacity. Afterall, the power to
aect and be aected is always-already situated in contexts which are not neutral,
empty, or transparent. Presenting a similar critique in Biopolitics of Feeling, Kyla Schuller
contends that any theory of aect which does not “interrogate how representations
of aective capacity function as a key vector of racialization” remains within the same
“biopolitical imaginary” that has rst produced those hierarchies (2018, 15). To account
for the production of these hierarchies, Schuller extensively explicates how the notion
of “impressibility” – the capacity of internal responsiveness to external stimuli – has
spawned, in nineteenth-century racial thought, an “animacy hierarchy,” assigning to
racialised bodies “the impaired state of throwing o aects but being incapable of being
aected by impressions themselves” (2018, 13). In contrast to this “unimpressibility”,
the European subject was represented as having the capacity to absorb external stimuli
that functioned for his own development and process of self-reection.
The hierarchical dimension produced through this kind of relational ontology
is also highlighted in Ferreira da Silva’s theory on the constitution of self-determination
for the white male subject, in which the transparency of the European subject is strictly
tied to the “writing of the others of Europe in aectability” (2007, 134). This condition
is dened by Ferreira da Silva as that “of being subjected to both natural (in the scientic
23
and lay sense) conditions and to others’ power” (2007, XV). As Schuller’s reections
on Ferreira da Silva’s theory highlight, these two seemingly contradictory accounts
of racialisation could actually describe two temporally adjacent aspects of the same
process: what Ferreira da Silva calls “aectability” becomes, in fact, the precondition
for Schuller’s description of “unimpressibility” as the “lack” of “the self-constituting
capacity of autopoesis” which in nineteenth-century racial thought marked the racial-
ised person as “easily moved and yet unable to retain the eects of those movements”
(2018, 218, n.9). In line with this argument, Schuller also writes that “[a]ective capacity
depends on its denitional opposite, debility, for theoretical solidity” (2018,13); hence,
aect-ability relies on a normative outside to sustain and produce its internal eects.
For all these reasons, I argue that aect-ability has an inherently indeterminate
ontological character which is nevertheless tied to its actualisation in specic bio/
geopolitical elds; this necessitates an account of its constitutive exclusions, such as
the gure of debility mentioned by Schuller. The notion of “debility” has been greatly
discussed by theorist Jasbir K. Puar in The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability
(2017), where the term was attentively analysed “as a needed disruption (but also expose
it as a collaborator) of the category of disability and as a triangulation of the ability/
disability binary” (2017, XV) by foregrounding a biopolitical consideration on mass and
long-term debilitation of racialised bodies. In “Prognosis time: Towards a geopolitics of
aect, debility and capacity” (2009), Puar also denes debility as the opposite of aec-
tive capacity, where the latter is always in “steady tension,” since bodies’ encounters with
“social, cultural, and capitalist infrastructures” often render aective capacity simulta-
neously “exploitative and exploited” (2009, 162). As aect-able bodies move – or don’t
move – within infrastructures which can capacitate as well as debilitate them, the same
reliance on aective capacity as a mode of resistance must be problematised, also in view
of what counts as a “political act” and/or “political space” in the rst place, as well as
how to establish an ethical account of aective hierarchies. Accordingly, I now turn to
the political and ethical implications of the notion of aect-ability in the thinking and
rethinking of care practices.
From Affect-ability to Resistant Practices of Care
By highlighting how “compulsory able-bodiedness” may generate exceptional-
ism-driven accounts of political subversion and resistance (Puar 2009, 165), Puar seems
to question, in a similar spirit as Johanna Hedva, Hannah Arendt’s understanding of the
political as “any action that is performed in public” (Hedva 2016, 2). As Hedva con-
tends, “if being present in public is what is required to be political, then whole swathes
of the population can be deemed a-political – simply because they are not physically
able to get their bodies into the street” (2016, 2). According to Hedva, it is precisely this
normative logic which erases the dierential in/accessibility of public spaces, especially
for those bodies made sick by “regimes of oppression – particularly our current regime
of neoliberal, white-supremacist, imperial-capitalist, cis-hetero-patriarchy” and thus
carry “the historical trauma of this” (Hedva 2016, 7). Therefore, the indeterminacy
inherent to “aect-ability” aims at reecting the ambivalence of embodiment in rela-
tion to power, where aective capacity and debility are always already co-present and
24
unequally modulated, and where the problematisation of agency, as identied by Hedva
for instance, can and should be accompanied by an account of the normative aspects
and eects of aect as ability. Furthermore, the recentring of aective experience allows
for a theorisation of politics as constituted by and through ordinary bodily enactments,
resisting and reproducing specic relations of power by virtue of their aect-ability.
This line of thought is indeed parallel to, and positioned within, a feminist tradition
which aims to destabilise the political by bringing forth daily experienced forms of
vulnerability – allegedly “private” “corpo-aective” (Górska 2016) events – as “not only
already political but as transforming our understandings of what counts as political”
(Cvetkovich 2012, 110). Drawing from feminist theory and activism, I would argue
that this troubling of what counts as a “political act” and “political space” enables a
critique of power which ties together its ontological, ethical, and political dimensions
via an analysis of how quotidian bodies come to aect and be aected by dierent sets
of forces. What kinds of relations are resisted and/or reproduced when we move from
an understanding of bodies as aect-able: that is, as inherently vulnerable but unequally
exposed to the workings of power?
Looking again at practices of care and mutual solidarity, they can be considered
forms of politics which do not reproduce but resist the status quo while, at the same time,
enabling for life in the present. Indeed, if liberal and neoliberal articulations of auton-
omy and dependency have catalysed the othering of reproduction through unequal
regimes of precarity and exploitation, counter-social reproduction radically refuses the
association of politics with the capacity to act independently in the public sphere. In
fact, the exclusion and debilitation of marginalised and oppressed bodies are resisted
through the creation of new political communities through solidarity. Thus, resistance
in this sense involves the simultaneous material and discursive interruption of capitalist
modes of reproduction and the reproduction of resistance itself. For this precise reason,
recentring an ontological dimension of vulnerability and relationality – enabled by
the conceptualisation of bodies as aect-able – troubles hegemonic understandings of
embodiment and performance of the political.
In Precarious Life, Judith Butler describes vulnerability as a condition which
socially constitutes our bodies as sites of exposure, publicity, and interdependency
(Butler 2004, 20). However, this condition is reected and actualised in unequal regimes
of security and protection (Butler 2004, 32). Therefore, thinking of bodies as inherently
vulnerable or, as I am suggesting, “aect-able”, cannot shy away from ethical consid-
erations of the unequal eects of vulnerability and exposure. Isabell Lorey similarly
discusses how the articulation of autonomy in European societies has brought about
the warding-o and othering of existential vulnerability, thus prioritising the security
of some bodies over and against others (2015). The radical implication generated here
and premised on every body’s interconnectedness calls for a formulation of ethics that
starts at the juncture between ontological vulnerability and its dierential aects in
capitalist regimes of precarity. As Lorey stated in a talk with Lauren Berlant, Judith
Butler, Bojana Cvejic´ , Isabell Lorey, Jasbir K. Puar, and Ana Vujanovic´ , “the ambivalence
between the relational dierence and the possibilities of what is in common in dier-
ence can be a starting point for political arguments” (2012, 172). In fact, the unequal
25
socio-economic regimes of capitalist societies create the very conditions in which
reproduction and production are hard to disentangle: exploited and oppressed bodies
are also less secure against the risks imposed by a possible “health crisis”. LevFem
Collective & Transnational Social Strike Platform, in their recent publication about
the struggles around social reproduction taking place during COVID-19 pandemic,
remarked that “women, migrants, workers, LGBTQI+” are the “people whose labor is
deemed essential, but whose lives are considered disposable” (2021, 10).
Counter-practices of care therefore require a fundamental response-ability, a
term coined by Donna Haraway (2008; 2016) to introduce a relational practice of
accountability for how and whose lives come to matter in an ecology that centres
creativity and the making of new relations in an aective encounter; in other words,
response-ability is the ability to respond to being aected. Haraway’s concept dis-
tances “ability” from its unreexive usage as a normative signier of successful capac-
ity and recast “the ability to respond is always-already embedded in incapacity – in
indierence and in-ability to engage”, as argued by Magdalena Górska (2016, 265).
This problematisation of the term “ability”, as I proposed from the start of this article,
is indeed inherent to the concept of aect-ability itself, since its aim is to account
for unequal geographies of aective capacity while fostering an ethical response to
them. Understood this way, the ability to respond accompanies aect-ability as an
ethical practice of learning to be aected, attending to our ontological relationality
and otherness, as well as accounting for hierarchical displacements and dierential
aections, ultimately creating careful cracks where resistant encounters can thrive.
Conclusion
Autonomous rearticulations of care, such as those enacted by social movements during
the pandemic, propose an actualisation of “autonomy” resistant to racial and patriarchal
imaginaries of freedom through external prescription and individual self-formation.
Reecting and respecting the ability of every body to aect and be aected, these
forms of care aim to make connections which enable dierent and response-able forms
of living. In the words of Isabelle Stengers, counter-social reproduction should be pre-
mised on “turning interdependency […] into an active constraint, a constraint that
activates feeling, thinking, and imagining” (2017, 398).
For these reasons, the many experiences of mutual aid and solidarity from
below practiced during the pandemic continue to foster relations, relationships, and
relationalities beyond those mandated and expected eects of crises that have been
taken for granted. Against this reactionary and conservative logic, these movements
rose from the margins in order to denaturalise the status quo which created and
enforced the very infrastructures that continue to privilege some bodies over others,
thus reproducing hierarchies of vulnerability. Counter-social reproduction therefore
holds tremendous radical potential in reshaping community through organisation and
socialisation outside capitalist circuits: solidarity groups, such as those born in Italy
and globally during the current pandemic, as well as those created long before this
pandemic to practice mutual care and sustainment within marginalised communities,
expose how an ordinary, accessible, and existential politics of care is inextricably
26
related to resisting hierarchical ontological and ethical categories. By proposing the
lens of aect-ability, I aim to explore how one way to think, imagine, and dream of a
responsive and response-able ontology, politics, and ethics of care can.
The political relevance of care has been of wide and profound discussion in
dierent scholarly elds and social movements, all of which have variously highlighted
the ambivalent natures, logics, motifs, and radical potentials of care (e.g., Fisher and
Tronto 1990; Precarias a la deriva 2006; Mol 2008; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). My hope
throughout this article is to oer another tool to add to the kit which can be used
through collective thought and praxis around care. Aect-ability, as I have proposed
it here, hints at an ontological dimension of resistance which is inextricably linked
to an ethical response to the unequal political eects of vulnerability in community.
This precondition for, and process of understanding, care can be resistant to capital-
ist paradigms of social reproduction aimed at reproducing inequalities and systems
of dominance. Because the non-dualistic nature of reality prevents a rigid distinction
between these two paradigms of social reproduction and power relations, we can but
accept and embrace the thick complexity of embodied experiences and practices. The
indeterminacy inherent to the notion of aect-ability itself is thus well-suited to keep
these various dimensions and tensions together and alive, which in turn foreground
what an ethics and politics of care could look like under these ontological premises.
As aect-able bodies organise, cracks within the present status quo emerge,
exposing the resistant and careful politics of daily life.
1 Focusing on the effects of the COVID-19
pandemic in Italy, these have encompassed dramatic
increases in the levels of “absolute poverty” (at
record high considering the last fifteen years),
unemployment (only in the month of December
2020 occupation has fallen by more than 100,000
units, the 98% of which were job positions held
by women), and homelessness (the ending of
the moratorium of evictions imposed during
the first sixteen months of the pandemic will
result in around 10,000 evictions only in the
metropolitan area of Milan). See ISTAT, 2021, “Le
Statistiche dell’ISTAT Sulla Povertà. Anno 2020,”
June 16, https://www.istat.it/it/files/2021/06/
REPORT_POVERTA_2020.pdf (last accessed:
28/08/2021); ISTAT, 2021, “Dicembre 2020.
Occupati e disoccupati. Dati provvisori,” February
1, https://www.istat.it/it/files/2021/02/
Occupati-e-disoccupati_dicembre_2020.pdf (last
accessed: 28/08/2021); Ministero dell’Interno,
2020, “Procedure di rilascio di immobili ad uso
abitativo (INT 00004),” September 14, last modified:
23/08/2021, http://ucs.interno.gov.it/ucs/
contenuti/Procedure_di_rilascio_di_immobili_ad_
uso_abitativo_int_00004-7734141.htm (last accessed:
31/08/2021), with reference to the data of 2020.
2See, for instance, CONSOB, “La crisi da
COVID-19: dalla crisi sanitaria alla crisi economica”
[author’s translation: “COVID-19 crisis: from health
crisis to financial crisis”], at https://www.consob.it/
web/investor-education/crisi-sanitaria-economica
(last accessed: 26/08/2021). Notably, if the above-
mentioned consequences of the financial crisis
are considered as necessary consequences of the
pandemic, nonetheless, parallel discourses highlight
how this financial crisis is different, for example,
from the one of 2007-2008 as it is of “exogenous”
origin to the financial market (see, for instance,
Giuseppe Capuano [head of the Italian Ministry
of Economic Development], 2020, “Coronavirus,
crisi economiche a confronto” [author’s translation:
“Coronavirus: financial crises in comparison”],
March 8, https://www.startmag.it/economia/
crisi-economiche-a-confronto/ [last accessed:
26/08/2021]). Hence, it could be argued the relation
of capitalist economic system with its “outside” is
differentially produced and posited when it comes to
determining the origins and effects of the “crises”.
3This theory is partly premised on the work
of feminists from the International Wages Against
Housework Committees in the ‘70s, highlighting
reproduction as a gender-specific site of both
oppression and exploitation with the function to
reproduce capitalist social and labour regimes (Dalla
Costa and James 1975; Federici 2012).
Notes
27
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Hedva, Johanna. 2016. “Sick Woman Theory.” Mask
Magazine. (Adapted from the lecture, “My Body
Is a Prison of Pain so I Want to Leave It Like a
Mystic But I Also Love It & Want It to Matter
Politically,” delivered at Human Resources,
sponsored by the Women’s Center for Creative
Work, in Los Angeles, on October 7, 2015).
Hester, Helen. 2018. Xenofeminism. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
LevFem. 2021. Essential Struggles: Pandemic Fronts.
Sofia: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.
4Contemporary actualisations of social
reproduction in the Global North have foreseen
partial reshufflings of Fordist models of
heteronormative domesticity. However, shifts in
socio-economic paradigms are also to be understood
in continuity with the perpetuation of structures
of dominance and oppression (Lorey 2015, 68-69).
Indeed, fragmentary and class-specific changes in the
“bread-winner” model are nonetheless accompanied
by a reinforcing of colonial lines of power in the
definition of regimes of precarity in the labour of
care (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez 2014). In fact, migration
regulations foster the production of internal/
external borders in a labour market greatly “supplied
by cheap migrant labour” from care and domestic
workers who are mostly excluded from “any social
benefits, unemployment and health insurance”
(Gutiérrez-Rodríguez 2014, 195). Thus, social
reproduction is still greatly articulated alongside
those lines of power which are structural to the
constitution of the capitalist system.
5For more comprehensive accounts of
experiences of solidarity across different countries
during the pandemic see also Sitrin and Colective
Sembrar (2020), and the abovementioned LevFem
(2021).
References
28
Lorey, Isabell. 2015. State of Insecurity: Government
of the Precarious. Translated by Aileen Derieg.
London: Verso Futures.
Mezzadra Sandro and Neilson Brett. 2013. Border as
Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Mol, Annemarie. 2008. The Logic of Care Health
and the Problem of Patient Choice. London:
Routledge.
Precarias a la deriva. 2006. “A Very Careful Strike:
Four Hypotheses.” The Commoner, no. 11
(Spring 2006): 33-45.
Puar, Jasbir K. 2009. “Prognosis Time: Towards a
Geopolitics of Affect, Debility and Capacity.”
Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist
Theory 19 (2): 161-172.
Puar, Jasbir K. 2012. “Precarity Talk: A Virtual
Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler,
Bojana Cvejić, Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and
Ana Vujanović.” Edited by Jasbir Puar. TDR/
The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (Winter 2012):
163-77.
Puar, Jasbir K. 2017. The Right to Maim: Debility,
Capacity, Disability. Durham and London: Duke
University Press.
Puig de la Bellacasa, María 2017. Matters of Care:
Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Schuller, Kyla. 2018. The Biopolitics of Feeling. Race,
Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century.
Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Sitrin, Martina and Colectiva Sembrar. 2020.
Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid during the
Covid-19 Crisis. Edited by Marina Sitrin and
Colectiva Sembrar. London: Pluto Press.
Stengers, Isabelle. 2017. “Autonomy and the
Intrusion of Gaia.” The South Atlantic Quarterly
116, no.2 (April): 381-400.
Vogel, Lise. 2013. Marxism and the Oppression of
Women: Toward a Unitary Theory. Leiden: Brill.
Biography
Ludovica D’Alessandro is a PhD student at the
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her philosophical
and artistic research focuses on the biopolitics of
vulnerability, affective relationalities, and critical
care practices. Her current project is specifically
concerned with afflictions in bowel movements as
related to trauma, psychosomatics, and sexuality.
Her e-mail address is ludovica.dalessandro@student.
akbild.ac.at.
Affective Architecture: Encountering Care in Built Environments
Linda Kopitz
Architecture, Affective Architecture, Care, Built
Environments, Affect, Imagination
Keywords
Krisis 42 (1): 29-42.
Abstract
Between urban sprawl and a return to the rural, between technological advancements
and historical preservation, built environments become a productive sphere to explore
imaginations of a shared future on a changing planet. At the same time, contemporary
architectural writing increasingly appears to extend further than considerations of envi-
ronmental care – particularly in relation to spaces and places frequently criticized for
their “uncaring” neoliberal politics. This article will argue that architecture is increas-
ingly infused and saturated with aective connotations of care. Approaching global
examples critically allows for a further exploration of the interdependency between
spaces, places, and communities that care. In this understanding, care becomes, quite
literally, structural.
DOI
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 License International License (CC
BY 4.0). © 2022 The author(s).
Licence
https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.42.1.37891
https://doi.org/
29
Affective Architecture: Encountering Care in Built Environments
Linda Kopitz
Introduction
Between urban sprawl and a return to the rural (cf. Taylor 2023), between technologi-
cal advancements and historical preservation, built environments become a productive
sphere to explore imaginations of a shared future on a changing planet. At the same
time, contemporary architectural design increasingly appears to extend further than
considerations of environmental care, particularly in relation to spaces and places fre-
quently criticized for their “uncaring” neoliberal politics. The starting point for this
article was precisely a space like this: a photograph1 of a room with the oor and
walls covered in blue fabric, empty except for three white lounge chairs in the shape
and (presumed) softness of a pillowy cloud, and two white oor lamps, standing del-
icately on wooden legs. Eliciting ideas of sleepiness and calmness and serenity, the
room appears to keep the bustle of the outside world out with long, white, owing
curtains. Somewhat surprisingly, this room is one of the oces of a German tech
start-up specializing in safety and security systems – superimposing the exploitative
aspects of a 24/7 start-up-culture with the connotations of serenity of the bedroom as
the presumably most private room within the home.2 Blurring the boundaries between
relaxation and eciency, mindfulness and productivity under a larger schema of caring
values, this layering of connotations is neither accidental nor – as I will argue here –
unique. If “space and its making are political” (Gámez and Rogers 2008, 22, emphasis
in original), a deeper engagement with the architectural process, from the initial idea
to the built structure, is paramount to understanding the social, political, and cultural
connotations of space-making.
As both concept and practice, “care” is as interdisciplinary as it is intangible – tra-
versing practical concerns in healthcare to philosophical approaches and political discus-
sions, from caring for the (human) bodies directly around us to caring about more abstract
concepts like the environment or the world at large. Tracing care in architecture allows
us to think dierently about not just what care means but also where care can be located.
Here, I am following an understanding of care as both an imaginary and a practice – or, as
the members of the Care Collective phrase it: “Care is our individual and common ability
to provide the political, social, material, and emotional conditions that allow the vast
majority of people and living creatures on this planet to thrive – along with the planet
itself” (2020, 6). In the absence of one universal denition of care, approaching care as a
constantly shifting and changing imaginary, an “ability”, allows for an engagement with
possibility and, for the purposes of this article, with architecture as a site of becoming.
If “architecture can creatively and critically invest in the potentiality of spaces
yet to come” (Frichot and Loo 2013, 3), paying attention to the concept of care in the
process of designing and building also has the potential to ultimately create more caring
spaces. Drawing on award-winning examples ranging from the workspace re-imagined
as “hub and home” to governmental buildings (re-designed to “radiate transparency”),
I argue in this article that architectural design is increasingly infused and saturated with
aective connotations of care by: 1) blurring the boundaries between corporate and
30
the private; 2) emphasizing nature and natural materials in built environments; and 3)
highlighting the embodied experience of spaces.3 At the same time, the potential of
architectural writing to both ground the intangibility of care on the one hand, and
strategically employ care as a rhetoric – a ‘care-washing’– of neoliberal processes on
the other, highlights the ambivalences in these processes. As Frichot and Loo suggest:
“Architecture invests in words, or all the things that can be said and written about a
built (or unbuilt and speculative) form, as much as it engages in its seemingly central
task, which is to design, form and construct indisputably material edices, spaces and
objects” (2013, 4). To arm this understanding of architecture as embedded in practices
of not just place-making but simultaneous meaning-making, I draw on examples from
across the globe, consciously blending the boundaries between dierent projects to
trace how the notion of care, intermingling with other values like openness, dialogue,
and transparency, has been employed in the framing of a Taiwanese meatpacking factory
as much as the Swiss headquarters of a luxury brand, in a judicial building in Singapore
just as in a German start-up company.
By intentionally establishing connections between not only dierent types of
buildings and dierent architectural approaches but also dierent geographical regions
and dierent requirements, I aim to emphasize the underlying notion of care that has
become prevalent in architectural practices over recent years. What might at rst glance
come across as a random selection of examples actually follows an algorithmic logic that
doubles as the methodological process for this article: the diverse projects and contexts
cited here are all categorized under “Commercial & Oces” (which quite strikingly
also includes institutional buildings) on the curated architecture platform Architecture
Daily4, thus collectively reveal the prevalence of care as valorisation in both corporate
and public architecture. Approaching these examples from a critical media studies per-
spective – taking into account the visuals, as well as how they are described and embed-
ded into the website – teases out conceptions and contradictions in the architectural
inscription of care. Activating Hays’s understanding of architecture as a “specic kind of
imagination – an intimate blend of sensing, imaging, and conceptualizing” (2010, 357),
the methodological approach to these examples is similarly an exploration of the play
between thinking about and sensing through built environments. The repetitive format
of these marketing materials – following the same (or at least highly similar) structure
and bound by the expectations and aordances of the same website – foregrounds the
connections between these seemingly accidental examples.
It is important to note that, while the examples discussed here might qualify as
responses to Gámez and Rogers’s “call for an architecture of change” (2008), they neither
necessarily or intentionally, nor actively or convincingly, oer alternative approaches
to contemporary questions. While acknowledging that “architecture as product and
process is always embedded in social dynamics” (2010, xi), Till similarly points out that
the engagement of (most) architects with these dynamics remains somewhat lacking.
Authorship also plays a relevant role in this context: as marketing materials, these texts
and images are carefully selected, curated and structured to tell a specic story about
the concept-becoming-concrete. The disclaimer “text description provided by the
architects”, prominently positioned at the top of each page, further underlines this
31
conscious interpretation of design by the architects who quite literally construct these
meanings. Prompted through the restrictive and recurring, established and expected
format of Architecture Daily to put the “unspoken” conditions of architectural design
into actual words, the complex positions of practitioners that are “clearly complicated
by [architecture’s] dual role as art and industry” (Jobst 2013, 73, emphasis in original)
become tangible. Tronto famously argues that “using care as a critical concept will
require a fundamental reorientation of the disciplines of architecture and urban plan-
ning” (2019, 26). How, then, can we move from an “Architecture of Change” to an
“Architecture of Care” – and more specically one encompassing the political, social,
material, and emotional conditions of care as mentioned above? Tronto’s answer to this
question is the call for an architecture willing and able to share the “responsibilities of
caring for our world” (2019, 28). In this article, I elaborate on this answer by suggesting
that shifting the emphasis from caring for to caring through and caring in can expand the
direction and scope of care as both a concept and a practice.
Despite the architectural projects discussed here being framed in Architecture
Daily through their outstanding excellence, there is an undeniable similarity in these
(re)designs: there is an undercurrent of genericness that resembles what Koolhaas
(1998) has described as the “generic city”, albeit on a smaller scale. Yet, it is precisely
the common prevalence of an explicit and implicit discourse of care that makes these
examples a productive starting point to demonstrate how architecture not only shapes
the conditions of a space spatially, but also our understanding of that space guratively.
Moving from the physical setting – and the absence of physical boundaries therein –
of a caring space in the rst section “Hub/Home”, via the caring materiality of natural
building materials in the second section “Material/Intangible”, to the negotiation of
embodied caring connections in the third section “Emptiness/Encounter”, this article aims
to challenge our understanding of the capacity of buildings.
1. Hub/Home: Traversing Boundaries between the Corporate and the Private
While situating the animating concern for their book “The Room of One’s Own”,
Aureli and Tattara argue that “the separation between house and workspace is in decline
as production unfolds everywhere” (2016). At the same time, it should be noted that
this unfolding of production everywhere is not a unidirectional move: while we mostly
talk about the blurring of clear boundaries between work/life as it comes to work
entering the private sphere, the opposite also appears to be true. With the aectively
charged imaginary of the “home” – in the sense of the private, but also the safe and the
serene – infusing the workplace in the examples discussed here, the unique aordances of
the “home” simultaneously become embedded in the neoliberal logic of productivity. If
“architecture, as both process and form, can be understood as the result of a multiplicity of
desires – for shelter, security, privacy and boundary control; for status, identity and repu-
tation; for prot, authority and political power; for change or stability; for order or chaos”
(Dovey 2013, 134) – the negotiation of these desires in the design of corporate buildings
becomes particularly interesting. Positioning the neoliberal workplace as a caring space
through the aective connotations of the home, as I argue in this section, underlines an
understanding of architectural writing as embedded in processes of meaning-making.
32
With a “spatial organization where limits between workspaces and common
areas are diused”, the oces of the informatics company iGarpe-GPISoft in San
Javier, Spain5 are exemplary of this understanding. Structurally, the building organizes
both open spaces, partially separated seating areas and closed oce – with “closed”
meaning separated by wood-framed glass here – around an open atrium to establish
“direct relationships between the team”. A collaborative, balanced work life becomes
not an attitude or approach achieved through and embedded in corporate culture,
but rather an architectural challenge to be achieved with open oor plans rather than
through managerial decisions. Going even further, the common areas of the Spanish
informatics oce are specically “conceptually considered as domestic spaces”, envel-
oping moments of relaxation within structures of productivity, private conversations
within the corporate context. The new building of the T-HAM PABP meat processing
factory, located in Southern Taiwan,6 the largest one in the country, similarly states an
intention to “upgrade the working environment of their factory workers and their
daily working experience” as one of the main animating concerns in the architectural
process – albeit in fourth place, preceded by priorities to increase productivity, expand
production capacities, and maintain corporate standards. In what might be one of the
least-caring industries imaginable – both in environmental impact and labor conditions
– the reconceptualization of the factory to be “neither a shed, nor a fridge-like box”
highlights an attention to the well-being of employees inside as much as to the (public)
perception from the outside. The light-lled spaces for social interaction in the front
of the building in addition to access to the rooftop has not only “made the factory
workers’ daily experience much more pleasant”.
Here, again, the link between design and desire becomes imminent. As
Ballantyne argues, “most buildings most of the time are commissioned with the expec-
tation that one’s current needs will be better accommodated than they were before
the move into the new building” (2013, 194). While there certainly is an expanding
dialogue between design as a practice and as a form of resistance to social, political,
and environmental issues,7 the emphasis on care as governing principle and guiding
value becomes undermined by a near constant linking between “better motivation and
improved product quality” here. In neoliberal logic, “happy” workers will be willing to
stay longer in these enhanced working environments – both in terms of working hours
as in professional career duration – and channel the architecturally augmented “moti-
vation” into their labor. Following Tronto’s suggestion that “even if caring needs are
recognized, they are often in conict with each other” (2019, 30), the negotiation of the
dimensions and hierarchies of care through architectural writing become particularly
interesting. If “neoliberalism is uncaring by design” (The Care Collective 2020, 10), it
is interesting to see how design itself attempts to re-inscribe caring values into clearly
neoliberalist processes. Notably, this also extends from a spatial organization to other,
seemingly purely aesthetic choices.
Writing about Luis Barragán’s emotional approach to architecture, Van den
Bergh points out an “architectural mise en scène of space and light, material and color,
of smell and sound, movement and time” (2006, 1). Strategically using the same strate-
gies that are also used in more private contexts – warm lighting to create an atmosphere
33
of calmness, for instance – blurs the lines between the private and the corporate even
further. Using their own architectural and design practice as a case study in humanistic
architecture, Richard Mazuch and Rona Stephen conclude that “visual monotony can
contribute to physiological and emotional stress” (2005, 50). Interestingly, the color
palettes in the examples here consciously break this visual monotony, eectively shifting
the attention from a potentially monotonous work to a visually stimulating environ-
ment. These aesthetic choices, meant to “regulate privacy and assure comfort” (as in the
iGarpe-GPISoft oces) and raise “the morale and pride in the workforce” (as in the
T-HAM PABP factory) are also strategic choices embedded in existing power dynam-
ics. While undoubtedly adding another layer to the problematic absence of recognition
of domestic work, the blurring between these spheres within both the home and the
workplace also blends the ideologies connected to these spaces under a neoliberal
umbrella. If the “domestic space as a space of retreat and intimacy unburdened by
working relationships” (Dogma 2016) is (re)situated in the sphere of productivity, the
separation between work/life becomes even more challenging than already assumed.
This emphasis on care could also be understood as a dual defense against critical con-
cerns raised about “social exclusivity in the design and production of the built environ-
ment” (Jenkins 2010, 19) on the one hand, and about exploitative work practices on the
other. This ambivalence further points to a necessary carefulness when reading care in
built environments, highlighting the importance of the context and contextualization
of these examples.
If socio-cultural concerns – from politics and economics to desire – indeed con-
stitute architecture’s “perennial sites of negotiation” (Grosz 2001, xvi), an exploration of
the implicit and explicit emphasis placed on care within presumably “uncaring” spheres
becomes paramount for a more nuanced understanding of the complex relationship
between the built environment and the bodies moving in and through it. Clearly, the
shift of the connotations of “home” from the private to the private sector is cause for
concern. At the same time, there is a recursive element within the discourses presented
here: these examples partially reverberate the modernist architectural conviction that
fundamental social and political change can be implemented (solely) by design. The con-
tradiction that Gámez and Rogers see “between the goal of social change and those of
market capitalism and institutionalized power” (2008, 20) could arguably be transferred
from modernist architecture to the present, from urban architecture to corporate archi-
tecture. With a quite optimistic tone, Bell suggests that for communities and individuals,
the process of designing the built environment has the potential to “solve their struggles
by reshaping their existence” (2008, 14). This approach to understanding architecture as
a proactive strategy in tackling social, cultural, political, and environmental issues reso-
nates with a framing of architectural choices as “creating a kind work environment”8 or
embodying “autonomy, freedom, solidarity”.9 Traversing the boundaries between the
corporate and the private, then, also traverses the complicated line separating a re-imag-
ination of the workplace from a mere “care-washing”. Caught between the promise
of care and the premise of capitalism, contemporary architectural writing appears to
perform a bridging between these contradictory demands by inscribing values into
structures – and, quite notably, the materials used to build them.
34
2. Material/Intangible: Tracing Care in Built Environments
Existing research on the connection between architecture and wellbeing frequently
focuses on the architectural and interior design of (mental) health facilities.10
Consequently, the role of architecture in these spaces is reduced to a supporting one for
clinical practitioners in a top-down hierarchy that re-inscribes existing power discrep-
ancies between patients and healthcare professionals. Instead, this article consciously
stays away from both private residences and healthcare facilities to trace the aective
potential of care in buildings where care is not conventionally a primary consideration.
Conceptualized as “the feel and emotional resonance of place” (Du 2013, 217), this
approach also connects and intersects with Birdsall et al.’s exploration of how “values” are
mediated and experienced through the senses in urban, public spaces (2021). Speaking
about the shifting paradigms in architecture from the 1980s to now, Hayes argues for
an “ontology of the atmospheric—of the only vaguely dened, articulated, and indeed
perceptible, which is nevertheless everywhere present in its eects” (2010, 358). The
“atmospheric”, then, closely relates to the ideas of aective dimensions of care as an
architectural value proposed here. This section proposes that materiality plays a decisive
role in conjuring these caring, atmospheric spaces – particularly through the emphasis
on natural building materials.
A case in point: the Swatch and Omega Campus in Biel, Switzerland,11 encom-
passing the headquarters, factory, and museum of the renowned watch manufacturer,
is one of the largest hybrid mass timber structures worldwide. The choice of timber as
the main building material is contextualized by the architects as simultaneously caring
for the environment – as the material “holds much promise for the future” – and for
the well-being of employees – as “wood environments are known to contribute to
greater occupant happiness”. Underneath this reasoning, however, there appears to be
yet another logic: while the use of wood is framed as a vehicle for care on the one
hand, they are framed as an incentive for productivity on the other. What architect Luis
Barragán poignantly referred to as “emotional architecture” (see Bergh 2006) strives for
deeper sensory resonance, which could also be understood as a step away from a more
technology-driven approach to both the design process and its results. Interestingly,
technology also moves into the background in most of the descriptions – almost as if
highlighting smart technologies and smart materials is diametrically opposed to the
emphasis on the natural, the pure, the caring. The previously mentioned Taiwanese
meat processing factory, for instance, is covered in textured tiles made from clay mim-
icking “the fertile agricultural lands of this southern county” – a typical Taiwanese
cladding material evoking a sense of heritage and continuation of tradition, a sense of
the “known” in an accelerated, globalized industry. Not coincidentally, the natural mate-
rial also helps to maintain the building’s internal temperature, which is of the highest
importance to ensure an adherence to the strict quality standards of producing export-
able meat products. This dual function of natural materials in providing comfort while
at the same time enhancing productivity can also be traced in other examples. Instead of
an intangible and immaterial atmosphere, then, the focus is squarely placed on organic
material as embodiment of care. Common to these examples is their introduction of
natural elements, both in building materials and interior design, while at the same time
35
opposing the growth and uncontrollability of nature with clearly designated “natural”
areas. In doing so, the design draws on the calming eects of nature experiences (as for
instance Franco et al. 2017 have discussed), while at the same time entrapping these
experiences within the spatially planned structure of the built environment.
Transferring ideas about the rural idyll to the urban sphere, the integration of
plants within these corporate architectures resembles what Boer has called “scripted
environments” (2018). A similar aesthetic – a ground oor quite literally grounding
plants, which extend into a vertically open oor plan – can be found across the exam-
ples categorized in Architecture Daily, from the oces of the Spanish electronic and
informatics company discussed earlier to the administrative spheres of the Chinese
Guangming Public Service Platform. Harting et al.’s terminology of “urban nature”
“admits the presence of nature even in those human environments that some consider
the antithesis of the natural” (2014, 208). In what is – somewhat optimistically – called
a “garden” in these architectural instances, the plants are not potted but still spatially
distanced from the rest of the space: placed in strategically located cutouts of the oor
paneling, centering the looming and lush palm trees as the middle point of an open
atrium or dividing paths with a succulent-laden barrier, this “natural” presence within
the “urban” remains nonetheless somewhat separate. Franco et al. (2017) emphasize
the multi-sensory aspect of nature experiences, which in turn links the well-being of
nature with the importance of not just vision, but all senses. If “perhaps touch is not
just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind” (McLuhan 1994,
108), the haptic could be assumed to play an integral role in creating the experience
of (the benets of) nature within the built environment. In the examples discussed
here, the integration of natural materials as well as organic bodies nevertheless remains
restricted to the visual: out of (physical) reach, the natural needs to be “felt” rather than
“touched”, it appears. Through the shifting and changing charge of both materials and
spaces created with and by these materials, the “feel” of nature can interestingly also be
found outside of notably green and/or natural buildings.
With its imposing walls of curved aluminum panels and glass, the Guangming
Public Service Platform,12 a dual oce and administration building in Shenzhen, China,
does not immediately evoke connotations of nature and the natural from the outside.
Nonetheless, framed quite poetically as resembling a “vessel oating on the mountain”,
the perforated material not only lets fresh air into atrium spaces, but also creates intricate,
ower-like patterns from the inside. DeLanda proposes thinking about form and struc-
ture not as something imposed from the outside, but rather “as something that comes
from within the materials, a form that we tease out of those materials as we allow them
to have their say in the structure we create” (2004, 21). Despite the material hardness
of both glass and aluminum plates in this example, the built structure teases a softness
out of them, allowing the building to become a owing, breathing counterpoint to the
stillness of the skyscrapers around it. This understanding requires an openness to both
the aordance of the materials in themselves and their connectivity or, in the words of
Hale, “connecting, not cutting o; cultivating and following the ows of force rather
than imposing upon space the sentence of a closed or even ‘nished’ object for static
contemplation or inhabitation” (2013, 127).
36
This is precisely what I mean by tracing care in built environments: with an
emphasis on natural materials, particularly wood and stone, and owing forms, partic-
ularly circles and waves, the examples discussed here insist on care as something that
leaves traces, which in turn accumulate to aectively charge the spaces created with and
through these materials. In “The Cultural Politics of Emotion”, Ahmed begins with the
suggestion that “bodies take the shape of the very contact they have with objects and
others” (2004, 1). Following this understanding, charging the built environment with
“care” has the potential to envelop the bodies within these spheres and spaces with(in)
care. This also underlines how the caring connotations of the home, as discussed in the
previous section, can become entangled with the aective materiality of nature through
the (re)imagination of conventionally non-caring spaces. As an intangible, almost infec-
tious, force, care appears to move from the building materials to the built structure,
infusing the open space between these materials and structures as well as aecting the
bodies moving around and within them. Shifting our attention from what is there to
what is not there – the human body – the following section further complicates an
understanding of care as simultaneously grounded yet intangible.
3. Emptiness/Encounters: On the Absence of the Body
“Architecture and urbanism are always concerned with the future” (2019, 12), Fitz and
Krasny write in the introduction to Critical Care. Fundamental in (literally) building
the future, architecture is at the same time also concerned with the imagination of
more livable futures – for our environments, but also our own bodies, our own selves.
Whereas the discursive negotiation of natural building materials and their relation to
both sustainable and aective experience, as discussed above, is more concerned with
the former, the positioning and movement of the human body within such charged
spaces should not be overlooked. Between a striking emptiness and the promise of
more meaningful encounters, this section explores how the absence of the body adds a
further political dimension to the architectural imagination of caring spaces. Replacing
the clear lines of the “cubicle oce” or the “assembly line”, the design of the examples
discussed in this article quite literally opens up new conceptions of how public and
private infrastructures “work”. At the same time, the emphasis on transparency and
visibility could also be understood as a perversion of the panopticon as a “socio-spatial
diagram of one-way visibility wherein practices and subjectivities are produced to meet
the anonymous gaze of authority” (Dovey 2013,137), particularly in the corporate/
public settings discussed here. Rather than an unidirectional visibility, the control
through an invisible authority becomes dispersed to everyone in the room as well as to
the room itself – again juxtaposing previously discussed senses of privacy and serenity.
Framed in clear contrast to historical perceptions of the juridical complex and
its architectural embodiment, the Singapore State Courts,13 which comprise district
and magistrate courts in fty-three vertically stacked courtrooms and fty-four hearing
chambers, extend this idea of openness: the design eschews a reecting facade in favor
of a series of open terraces, naturally completed with lush planted gardens, and “the
court tower as a result appears light, open, and welcoming”. Yet, precisely by perform-
ing an architectural openness, these spaces remain highly structured and streamlined,
37
especially with regards to the implicit potential for interaction. The spatial division
of the Singapore State Courts into two separate towers – the one in the front accom-
modating the courtrooms and the one in the back the juridical oces – is specically
designed to “not only bring light deep into the building but help keep the circulation of
the judges, persons-in-custody, and the public separate”. Following the understanding
that “architecture is always and everywhere implicated in practices of power” (Dovey
2013, 133), the structural inscription of dierent spheres underneath a layer of welcom-
ing openness keeps the existing practices of power in place.
The Huis van Albrandswaard,14 the oce building of the Dutch municipality
of Albrandswaard, similarly plays with the idea of interaction through spatial connec-
tivity: “The cafeteria for the civil servants is merged with the sports cafeteria of the
connecting gym. This encourages more interaction between council members and
citizens”. However, this architectural choice ultimately does not encourage dialogue,
but rather a sense of mirroring by portraying civil servants as “just like us” while not
actually providing meaningful access to mutual civic exchange. Interestingly, the munic-
ipal building is one of the rare examples of a featured project depicting people within
the photographs, and yet only underlines this point: the only (human) body featured in
the selection of thirteen photographs is a municipality employee. Framed and half con-
cealed by the walls of a towering wooden cubicle, the employee, already small within
the vast openness of the room itself, is looking down at a laptop screen opposite an
empty chair, evoking connotations of an inaccessible, impersonal bureaucratic apparatus
more than an interactive sphere. Although open spaces can be a potential critique on
the crowdedness and business of modern life – recalling “silence as an architectural form
all its own” (Hays 1984, 22) – the silence in this image rather detaches the building
from the life both inside and outside its walls. Assuming that creating caring spaces for
communities is only possible through discourse, the absence of an engagement with the
existing dynamics, particularly within governmental buildings, is striking.
Writing on the urban as increasingly post-political sphere, Boer argues that
“inhabitants are treated as consumers rather than citizens, who also need to work
increasingly eciently, which fuels the demand for smooth, friction-free urban spaces”
(2018). This notion of a friction-free sphere can also be applied to the examples dis-
cussed here: in the absence of interaction, of encounters, of engagement, the productive
and potentially disruptive possibility of friction is also undermined in favor of a smooth,
continuous progression of existing processes. Provocatively, one might even ask whether
this quietness might allude to the “ideal” of a society that does not disagree with exist-
ing power structures and dynamics. Expanding on Dovey’s proposition of understand-
ing buildings as an “assemblage of socio-spatial ows and intersections” (2013, 131),
the architectural choices discussed here can be read as conscious attempts to direct
these ows and shape these intersections towards continuation rather than interaction,
towards docility rather than possibility. While there are certainly aesthetic reasons for
purely architecturally focused photography, the tension between the visuals of empty
spaces and the discourses of a public sphere for encounter and interaction is palpable.
In this context, it is relevant to place these architectural photographs at a spe-
cic phase of the architectural process. Instead of “render ghosts” (Bridle 2014), virtual
38
inhabitants of rendered and (yet) unbuilt spaces, the examples discussed here leave us
with just the architecture, just the building, just the physical specications of an unoc-
cupied space. As Palacios puts it: “Render ghosts will not survive and will disappear
without leaving traces. An empty space is waiting for us to occupy it. We will take their
place” (2013). The architectural photographs discussed here, then, appear to capture the
in-between of virtual renderings – lled with rendered ghosts – and the actual “life” in
and of these buildings. In this sense, these projects have moved beyond the imaginary
space between existence and non-existence, assuring us that these spaces do not need to
be lled with the eerie humanity of render ghosts to manifest their potential as a caring
space. In the absence of either virtualized or real interactions, the emphasis on care as
an intangible yet ever-present aective force within these spaces becomes particularly
remarkable. Detached from the speed of construction and capitalism, these architectural
photos present a specic moment in time in which the aesthetic represents the utopian
ideal of the architects writing these designs. Expanding on Ahmed’s exploration of “how
emotions circulate between bodies, examining how they ‘stick’ as well as move” (2004,
4), we might understand buildings as a type of body as well – a material and ideological
body, holding the potential to (quite directly) inuence the positioning, the stillness, and
the movement of other bodies. If emotions can “stick” to this architectural body as well,
then grounding the intangible idea of care in specic materials and design elements
through a language of transparency and dialogue can infuse the space as a whole with
its aective force even in the absence of (human) bodies. Just like the presence of render
ghosts in virtual renderings, their absence in the photography of completed buildings,
the very emptiness of these built structures, holds potential – a potential to re-imagine
social, urban, political spheres in a dierent way.
4. Conclusion
In the afterword to their overview of architectural theory, Hays and Sykes propose a
similarly atmospheric thinking about architectural thought and practice as involving
not just (techno)logical decision-making, but aective dimensions as well: “Writing the
new architecture means writing with the body as much as the mind, apprehending the
atmospheric and the ecological as feeling and aect as well as thought – folding and
refolding the situation, thickening and articulating it into narrative structures, squeezing
it to yield its social precipitate” (2010, 359). “Writing” architecture, here, should be
understood as the writing both of and about the design, as in the examples raised in
this article. The blurring of boundaries between the corporate and the private – work
and life – through both aesthetics and argumentation is exemplary of this duality. On
the one hand, the idea of a private sphere distanced from the expectations and pres-
sure of work is enveloped within the corporate setting through spatial (for instance
the integration of secluded-yet-visible areas) and material choices (with a particular
emphasis on softness). Focused on materiality, the architectural writing of the sensory
resonance of care – in wood and in plants, through organic materials and owing
structures – opens our minds to how an abstract concept such as care can be grounded.
On the other hand, the aective potential of these choices appears not to be self-evi-
dent, as the architectural descriptions still need to explicitly point out the atmospheric
39
experience of a kind, caring sphere. Although not explicitly referenced by Sykes and
Hays, the link to the Deleuzian fold situates this dual process of “writing architecture”
as a multi-sensorial dialogue between the building and the body. Similarly, Grosz urges
us – again at the intersection between architecture and philosophy – to “explore the
possibilities of becoming, the virtualities latent in building, the capacity of buildings to
link with and make other series deect and transform while being transformed in the
process” (2001, 73). This attention to possibility also draws a connection between the
blurred boundaries of caring space discussed in the rst section “Hub/Home”, the caring
materiality of natural materials as both sustainable and aective choices in the second
section “Material/Intangible”, and the negotiation of embodied caring connections in the
third section “Emptiness/Encounter” of this article.
Expanding the directionality of care from a caring for to a caring through mate-
riality, the idea of embedding caring in built environments becomes a possibility here,
thus transforming our understanding of the capacity of buildings. At the same time,
the immediate linking between dimensions of care and themes of productivity and
performance, eciency and docility, complicates this potential for an “architecture of
change” (Gámez and Rogers 2008, 22). As “valuation can be seen as both produc-
tion and performance of values” (Birdsall et al. 2021, 351), exploring how the idea of
“care” is employed in the framing of architectural design projects also broadens exist-
ing discussions of urban (re)development. If “value assessments are often articulated
through performative means”, as Birdsall et al. (2021, 351) propose, the performance
of care becomes at the same time value-driven and value-driving. In this regard, both
the framing of architecture and the architecture itself can be understood as modes of
expression to ascertain care as a value embedded in the architectural process and its
result. Ballantyne states – almost matter-of-factly – that “it is inevitable that there are
interactions between buildings and people. It is the point of building” (2013, 183). Yet,
the interaction between corporate buildings and the people moving in and through
them remains somewhat vague or absent in architectural writing, therefore reinserting
“the point of building” towards neoliberal logics in what could be seen as a corporate
“carewashing” (The Care Collective 2020) of sorts.
As “segmented assemblages resonate with other assemblages at similar and dif-
ferent scales” (Dovey 2013, 135), the examples discussed here should nonetheless be
understood as situated within their respective urban environments and their practices
of power. Following an understanding of the city itself as “a (collective) body-prosthesis
or boundary that enframes, protects, and houses while at the same time taking its own
forms and functions from the (imaginary) bodies it constitutes” (Grosz 2001, 49), the
interrelation of the body, the building, and the city in a complex entanglement of
aordances and limitations becomes even more notable. Frichot and Loo suggest that
“architecture has renewed its investment in social concerns and a politics of space,
becoming increasingly open to new and vibrant material understandings of a fragile
world that is intricately and globally interconnected” (2013, 5). However, it remains to
be seen whether this “renewed investment” becomes more than lip service instigated
by the aforementioned dicult positioning of architecture between art and industry,
between calls for community practices and commercial interests. At the same time, the
40
potential of architecture as both theory and practice to create a more caring, more
transparent, more connected world in and through the built environment should not
be underestimated. Approaching existing and emerging architectural projects critically
allows for further exploration of the interdependency between spaces, places, and
“communities that care” (The Care Collective 2020, 50). In this understanding, care
becomes, quite literally, structural.
Notes
ArchDaily. “Expansion of the Headquarters of
the CSN / BGLA + NEUF Consortium.”
2019. ArchDaily. March 3, 2019. https://
www.archdaily.com/912327/expansion-of-
the-headquarters-of-the-csn-bgla-plus-neuf-
consortium.
ArchDaily. “IGarpe-GPISoft Offices / Martin
Lejarraga.” 2019. ArchDaily. February 26, 2019.
https://www.archdaily.com/910454/igarpe-
gpisoft-offices-martin-lejarraga-architecture-
office.
ArchDaily. “‘Living Together Is Only Possible
If There Is Always the Possibility to Be
Alone.’ – Dogma Studio’s Hard-Line Look at
Architectural Solitude | Features | Archinect.”
Accessed August 16, 2021. https://archinect.
com/features/article/149959097/living-
together-is-only-possible-if-there-is-always-
the-possibility-to-be-alone-dogma-studio-s-
hard-line-look-at-architectural-solitude.
ArchDaily. “Singapore State Courts / Serie
Architects + Multiply Architects.” 2022.
ArchDaily. August 31, 2022. https://www.
archdaily.com/964357/singapore-state-courts-
serie-architects-plus-multiply-architects.
ArchDaily. “Swatch and Omega Campus / Shigeru
Ban Architects.” 2019. ArchDaily. October 10,
2019. https://www.archdaily.com/926166/
swatch-and-omega-campus-shigeru-ban-
architects.
ArchDaily. “T-HAM PABP Factory / WZWX
Architecture Group.” 2019. ArchDaily. July 22,
2019. https://www.archdaily.com/921310/t-
ham-pabp-factory-wzwx-architecture-group.
Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press.
Bell, Bryan. 2008. “Preface: Expanding Design Toward
Greater Relevance.” In Expanding Architecture:
Design as Activism, edited by Bryan Bell and Katie
Wakeford, 14–25. New York: Metropolis Books.
1 More images of the office (re)design – created
by CSMM for Bosch Security and Safety Things
GmbH – are available here: https://www.cs-mm.
com/en/projects/bosch-sast
2 Less optimistically, one might also draw a
connection between this fabric-covered room and
the inescapability of a padded cell.
3 As an important disclaimer: I do not mean to
suggest that architecture has not ”cared” in the past,
but rather aim to highlight the crucial distinction
between caring as an architectural practice (by
architects) and the inscription of caring values into
built environments (through architectural writing).
4 See https://www.archdaily.com/search/
projects/categories/commercial-and-offices?ad_
medium=filters
5 See https://www.archdaily.com/910454/
igarpe-gpisoft-offices-martin-lejarraga-architecture-
office
6 See https://www.archdaily.com/921310/t-
ham-pabp-factory-wzwx-architecture-group
7 For a further discussion of this, see for instance
Bell (2008) and Fitz et al. (2019).
8 …as the combination of materials, textures
and interior aims to achieve in the iGarpe-GPISoft
offices.
9 … as the reinterpretation of the brutalist
architecture of the Confédération des Syndicats
Nationaux in Toronto, Canada, promises. See
https://www.archdaily.com/912327/expansion-
of-the-headquarters-of-the-csn-bgla-plus-neuf-
consortium
10 See for instance Connellan et al. (2013).
11 See https://www.archdaily.com/926166/
swatch-and-omega-campus-shigeru-ban-architects
12 See https://www.archdaily.com/956371/
guangming-public-service-platform-zhubo-design
13 See https://www.archdaily.com/964357/
singapore-state-courts-serie-architects-plus-
multiply-architects
14 See https://www.archdaily.com/965978/
huis-van-albrandswaard-gortemaker-algra-feenstra
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Biography
Verloren normaliteit? Van het verlangen naar autoriteit
naar een beauvoiraanse ethiek der dubbelzinnigheid
Maren Wehrle
Autoriteit, Gender, Normaliteit, Simone de
Beauvoir, Relationele autonomie, Ambiguïteit
Keywords
Krisis 42 (1): 43-60.
Abstract
Autoriteit lijkt niet langer belangrijk als men complexe moderne democratische samen-
levingen wil analyseren. Tegelijkertijd kan men een toenemend verlangen naar autoriteit
in het sociale en politieke leven waarnemen, een verlangen naar oriëntatie en sturing.
Dit artikel onderzoekt hoe autoriteit en gender met elkaar verweven zijn en hoe dit
tot uiting komt in de huidige crisis van de normaliteit. De paper laat zien waarom een
terugkeer naar een premoderne autoriteit deze crisis niet kan oplossen. Om een nieuwe
normaliteit te co-creëren moet men de dubbelzinnigheid van het bestaan accepteren en
beseen dat vrijheid altijd relationeel is (zie Simone de Beauvoir).
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.42.1.37212
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 License International License (CC
BY 4.0). © 2022 The author(s).
Licence
Lost Normality? From the desire for authority
towards a Beauvoirian ethics of ambiguity
Maren Wehrle
Krisis 42 (1): 43-60.
Abstract
The authority of a souverain no longer seems important if one wants to analyse
complex modern democratic societies. At the same time, one can observe an increasing
desire for authority in social and political life, a longing for orientation and guidance.
This paper wants to investigate how authority and gender are intertwined, and how
this is expressed in the current crisis of normality. The paper shows why a return to
authority cannot solve this crisis. In order to co-create a new normality, one needs to
accept the ambiguity of existence and the relational character of freedom (see Simone
de Beauvoir).
Authority, Gender, Normality, Simone de Beauvoir,
Relational autonomy, Ambiguity
KeywordsDOI
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 License International License (CC
BY 4.0). © 2022 The author(s).
Licence
https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.42.1.37212
43
Verloren normaliteit? Van het verlangen naar autoriteit
naar een beauvoiraanse ethiek der dubbelzinnigheid
Maren Wehrle
1. Introductie: Autoriteit en (gender)normaliteit
Vandaag de dag speelt het begrip autoriteit nauwelijks nog een rol in wetenschappelijk
onderzoek, of het nu gaat om historisch, sociologisch, psychologisch of lososch
onderzoek. Autoriteit als persoonsgebonden vorm van macht lijkt niet meer van belang
als men complexe, d.w.z. genetwerkte, geglobaliseerde, geïnstitutionaliseerde en gevir-
tualiseerde, moderne democratische samenlevingen wil analyseren. Tegelijkertijd, of
juist daardoor, kan men echter een toenemend verlangen naar autoriteit waarnemen
in het sociale en politieke leven, of in ieder geval een verlangen naar oriëntatie, advies,
begeleiding en leiderschap.
In geglobaliseerde en competitieve samenlevingen zijn tastbare soevereinen
verdwenen: in plaats daarvan zijn we allemaal entrepreneur van onszelf en onze eigen
soeverein. Dit lijkt echter tot een paradox te leiden: hoewel aan de ene kant alles kan
worden toegeschreven aan de onzichtbare hand van de markt, vallen we tegelijk terug
op de eigen handen, op onze eigen verantwoordelijkheid. Hierdoor neemt de behoefte
aan advies en kennis toe, die ons kunnen helpen bij de vereiste zelfoptimalisatie en
-regulering. Maar wie heeft het nodige overzicht en het privilege, de nanciële mid-
delen en tijd, om op basis van alle feiten en kennis tot een wel overdachte keuze, een
onderbouwd oordeel of besluit te komen?
In deze context van eigen verantwoordelijkheid groeit het verlangen naar
leiderschap of een autoriteit die verantwoordelijk kan worden gehouden voor de
economische en politieke processen die men deels als willekeurig en ondoorzichtig
ervaart. Naar een autoriteit die orde en normaliteit herstelt; naar een autoriteit die te
vertrouwen is, die zegt wat er gezegd moet worden en doet wat er gedaan moet worden.
Als reactie op een complexe en gedierentieerde realiteit zien we daarom aan de ene
kant een groeiende behoefte aan kennis en advies van deskundigen, om de toenemende
massa aan gegevens en feiten kwalitatief te kunnen afwegen. Aan de andere kant is er
een toenemende scepsis ten aanzien van de neutraliteit en objectiviteit van deze feiten
en? een gebrek aan vertrouwen in de experts die deze feiten genereren en interpreteren.
Het gaat hier niet zo zeer om de betreende feiten en dingen zelf, maar om de persoon
die deze kennis of expertise representeert. Mensen zijn op zoek naar een eenduidige
boodschap belichaamd door een betrouwbare autoriteit, die zij kunnen volgen.
Dat deze comeback van autoriteit gepaard gaat met traditionele genderrslacht-
sollen is iets wat we zowel in educatieve of levensgidsen (zie bijv. Jordan Peterson’s
12 Rules), als in maatschappelijke debatten over veiligheid tegenkomen (Bueb 2006).
Het staat ook centraal in de programma’s van (meestal maar niet uitsluitend) nieuwe
conservatieve en rechtse partijen en stromingen. De comeback van autoriteit gaat vaak
gepaard met oproepen tot discipline, stabiliteit, hardheid, nationaliteit, traditionele
waarden en traditionele genderrollen. Dit is bepaald niet nieuw, maar herkenbaar.
De opkomst van verlangens naar autoriteit en een strikte binaire geslachtsorde
kunnen we beter begrijpen aan de hand van het werk van Simone de Beauvoir. In haar
44
Pleidooi voor een moraal der dubbelzinnigheid (orig. 1947) laat ze zien hoe het ontkennen
van de ambiguïteit van het menselijke bestaan – als passief én actief, geest en lichaam,
subject en object, vrij en gedetermineerd – bijdraagt aan de ontwikkeling van het
kwaad. Maar pas in de toepassing van deze existentiële ethiek op een concreet geval van
onderdrukking, de situatie van vrouwen in de 1940er jaren in Frankrijk in De Tweede
Sekse (orig. 1949), wordt duidelijk, hoe het ene – het verlangen naar een sterke, onster-
felijke, onfeilbare autoriteit – met het andere – het verlangen naar een strikt binaire
geslachtsorde – samenhangt. Beauvoirs denitie van de ambiguïteit van het menselijke
bestaan is daarbij zelf dubbel. Aan de ene kant, is ambiguïteit een ontologisch kenmerk
dat alle (mogelijke) mensen gemeen hebben. Aan de andere kant is de realisering of
ervaring van deze existentiële ambiguïteit altijd concreet en historisch gesitueerd. Haar
analyse is dus ook een analyse van de problemen en uitdagingen van de moderne tijd,
waarin deze ambiguïteit bijzonder duidelijk wordt (Keltner 2006, 201).
Haar inzichten en existentiële ethiek, zo wil ik in deze bijdrage laten zien, zijn
nog steeds, of weer, belangrijk en behulpzaam om de situatie van hedendaagse Westerse
maatschappijen te begrijpen. Niet enkel dictatoriale regimes maar ook liberaal-kapital-
istische machts- en regeringsvormen worden gekenmerkt door een ontkenning of een
negatie van de ambiguïteit van het menselijke bestaan. In liberale westerse maatsch-
appijen heerst evenzeer een ideaalbeeld van ‘de mens’ als rationeel, jong, innovatief,
ondernemend, vrij in zijn keuzes, krachtdadig en autonoom, terwijl kwetsbaarheid,
veroudering, en alle soorten van passiviteit en afhankelijkheid als afwijking of zwakte
worden begrepen. Een maatschappij die een beeld van de rationele, sterke en autonome
mens als norm hanteert, kan gemakkelijk het bestuur en de sociale verantwoordelijkheid
die daarmee gepaard gaan, uitbesteden aan haar burgers. Maar in tijden van globale crisis
en versnelling van technologische, maatschappelijke, economische ontwikkeling breekt
de onderliggende ambiguïteit bij elke gelegenheid door – in de woorden van Beauvoir
“de waarheid van leven en dood, van mijn eenzaamheid en mijn gebondenheid aan de
wereld, van mijn vrijheid en mijn slavernij, van de nietigheid en de unieke betekenis
van ieder mens afzonderlijk en van alle mensen tezamen” (Beauvoir 2018, 10–11). Dit
kan een existentiële angst veroorzaken in de vorm van een verlangen naar een oude
normaliteit, die een interne terugslag (backlash) van de liberale waarden teweeg zou
kunnen brengen.
Deze ‘terugslag’ komt vandaag de dag tot uiting, zo durf ik te stellen, in het ver-
langen van sommigen naar de terugkeer van een soeverein of leider. Het verlangen naar
orde en gezag is vaak een nostalgische roep om een ‘sterke man’, een Poetin, Erdogan,
Bolsonaro of Trump, die in tijden van crisis leiderschap belooft. Het verlangen naar zo›n
‘premoderne autoriteit’ is moeilijk te verzoenen met democratische liberale ideeën, en
hun vertegenwoordigers, zoals Trump, Bolsonaro, Poetin of Erdogan, staan daar dan ook
uitdrukkelijk tegenover. Zij positioneren zich tegenover feiten, empirisme of statis-
tieken en afstandelijke intellectuelen. Elk individu en iedere groepering wil gezien en
gehoord worden: een gezagsdrager, die de macht op een directe manier belichaamt en
zo de verantwoordelijkheid voor de staat en zijn burgers in zijn persoon bundelt, kan
als mogelijk antwoord op deze behoefte worden gezien. De eigen verantwoordelijkheid
en ieders risico kunnen zo worden overgedragen aan een soeverein en opgaan in een
45
hoger doel, wat het individuele leven binnen alle mogelijkheden en onzekerheden een
duidelijke zin geeft.1 De roep om een sterke leider gaat meestal gepaard met het ver-
langen naar duidelijke regels, oriëntatie en vermindering van complexiteit, wat wordt
nagestreefd door terug te keren naar vertrouwde tradities en oude gewoontes. De vage
angst voor een onbeheersbare wereld komt tot uiting in een verzet tegen de ontbinding
van traditionele gezins- en nationale structuren. Dit verzet heeft de verdediging van
de eigen – als bedreigd waargenomen – identiteit als doel en gaat vaak gepaard met
de afkeuring van de aanspraak op diversiteit en de gelijkheid van minderheden. Het
nieuwe verlangen naar autoriteit is, luidt daarom mijn hypothese, dus verbonden met
de zorg voor een verloren normaliteit die wordt of werd gekenmerkt door onder meer
een duidelijke genderorde.
In wat volgt zal ik eerst ingaan op de gendercodering van gezag, de onderbe-
wuste bestendigheid ervan en het daaruit voortvloeiende autoriteitsdilemma van de
vrouw. Vervolgens zal ik samen met Sara Ahmed de heropleving van oude, voornamelijk
mannelijke autoriteiten in vermeende crisistijden onderzoeken. Ten slotte presenteer
ik Simone de Beauvoirs ethiek der dubbelzinnigheid als een mogelijk nieuw perspec-
tief op het verlangen naar autoriteit en normaliteit. Haar aanpak, ben ik van mening,
maakt duidelijk waarom zowel een terugkeer naar de oude genderorde en premod-
erne vormen van gezag alsook het liberaal-kapitalistische mensbeeld geen passende
antwoorden kunnen bieden op de uitdagingen van een complexe en steeds meer ver-
bonden wereld. Beide samenlevingsmodellen houden onvoldoende rekening met de
ambiguïteit van het menselijk bestaan. Zij kunnen dus geen positief beeld schetsen van
de menselijke vrijheid waarin deze wordt verzoend met kwetsbaarheid, socialiteit en
onderlinge afhankelijkheid en verantwoordelijkheid.
2. Autoriteit, geslacht en de crisis van de normaliteit
In het hiernavolgende beargumenteer ik dat ‘premoderne autoriteit’, d.w.z. een
autoriteit die gebonden is aan een persoon en dus ook aan het geslacht, terugkeert in
een geïdealiseerde of gepopulariseerde vorm, 1) omdat macht en autoriteit niet langer
tastbaar en dus minder aanvechtbaar zijn en dit resulteert in een toenemend besef van
de kwetsbaarheid van de menselijke existentie en de complexiteit van de wereld, en 2)
omdat de traditionele autoriteiten een herstel van de orde en de normaliteit beloven,
wat zich vooral manifesteert in een ondubbelzinnige, d.w.z. binaire geslachtsorde.
Autoriteit en geslacht zijn in dit opzicht op twee manieren met elkaar ver-
strengeld. Ten eerste heeft autoriteit zelf genderconnotaties: ze is gebaseerd op zowel
traditionele ideale mannelijke kenmerken als op concrete voorbeelden [van mannelijke
autoriteit] uit het verleden. Ten tweede omdat een binaire geslachtsorde rechtstreeks
verband houdt met dit premoderne concept van autoriteit. Een binaire geslachtsorde
dient net als het premoderne gezagsconcept om orde en stabiliteit te waarborgen. Beide
stellen vanaf het begin identiteiten, taken en verantwoordelijkheden vast die de keuze
en de verantwoordelijkheid van twee groepen afbakenen en beperken.
2.1. Mannelijke autoriteiten
De Latijnse termen auctoritas en auctor verwijzen met een impliciete vanzelfsprekendheid
46
naar mannen: naar oprichters van een imperium, auteurs en scheppers van grote lo-
sosche en literaire werken, uitvinders en ontdekkers. Hetzelfde geldt voor de patrias
als hoofd van familie en staat, en voor de economische leiders van nu: Autoriteit is in
deze westerse context altijd al, op enkele uitzonderingen na, historisch, traditioneel
en functioneel geassocieerd geweest met specieke mannen of zelfs gelijkgesteld met
‘mannelijkheid’ op zich.
Vrouwen komen helemaal niet voor in deze geschiedenis en in de wetenschap-
pelijke literatuur over autoriteit, of alleen als een speciaal geval. Al in zijn oorsprong
en betekenis verwijst de term autoriteit naar attributen die een mannelijke connotatie
hebben in traditionele, religieuze en symbolische termen, zoals activiteit, productiviteit,
kracht, hardheid, mannelijkheid of rationaliteit. Dit staat in contrast met het passieve,
het gevormde, het zachtaardige, het milde, de natuur en de irrationaliteit – attributen
die aan het vrouwelijke worden toegeschreven (Beauvoir 2000; Lloyd 1993).
In de moderniteit is de traditionele vorm van gezag, gelegitimeerd door reli-
gieuze traditie of erfelijkheid, steeds meer vervangen door andere vormen van gezag
die formeel of functioneel bepaald en rationeel gelegitimeerd zijn, d.w.z. door passende
kennis, deskundigheid of prestatie. Ondanks of juist vanwege ontwikkelingen als juri-
dische gelijkheid en de toenemende educatieve voorsprong van vrouwen2, en door het
verlies van betekenis van traditionele vormen van gezag, is het hierboven genoemde
‚nieuwe‘ verlangen naar autoriteit vooral gericht op oude, van oudsher mannelijke
vormen van autoriteit.
Traditionele vormen van gezag zijn, in vergelijking met moderne vormen,
sterker gebonden aan de persoon in kwestie, en minder aan diens prestaties of bewezen
kennis. Dit komt overeen met wat Max Weber een charismatische vorm van autoriteit
noemt, die steunt op bijzondere karaktertrekken en een bepaalde uitstraling die vol-
gelingen in de ban houden. Traditionele autoriteitsbeelden zijn enerzijds gekoppeld
aan concrete mannelijke rolmodellen uit de geschiedenis, de media of de eigen (her-
innerde) ervaring, en anderzijds gekoppeld aan een bepaald autoritair charisma. Het is
echter niet zo dat mannen van nature autoriteit hebben en dat vrouwen dit charisma
niet of slechts in bijzondere gevallen hebben, zoals nog vaak op een pseudoweten-
schappelijke manier wordt beweerd. Dit vermeende charisma is geen puur individueel,
biologisch, ahistorisch of magisch talent, maar bestaat eerder uit het verwerven van
kennis, houdingen en gedrag dat relevant is op een bepaald moment, een zogenoemd
cultureel kapitaal, dat iemand in een bepaalde tijd invloed en erkenning geeft.3 Een
dergelijke charismatische autoriteit van het oude type vertegenwoordigt niet langer
een onafhankelijke vorm van heerschappij, maar is nog steeds relevant in relatie tot
andere vormen van autoriteit. Autoriteiten zijn namelijk nooit volledig en permanent
gelegitimeerd door formele of functionele criteria, positie of ambt, maar altijd afhan-
kelijk van de erkenning van de betreende persoon. Uiteindelijk is het niet voldoende
om alleen maar autoriteit te hebben in de vorm van een ambt; autoriteit moet ook
worden ingevuld en voortdurend worden bijgewerkt door de persoon om als zodanig
te worden erkend en dus bevestigd. Autoriteit is dus niet alleen formeel of functioneel
gelegitimeerd, maar afhankelijk van de erkenning, interpretatie en legitimatie ervan
door anderen – en dus inherent relationeel.4
47
Dit geldt des te meer omdat de ociële autoriteit (als ambtsdrager) een
noodzakelijkerwijs asymmetrische sociale of politieke relatie veronderstelt waarin
één lid meer autoriteit, verantwoordelijkheid en macht heeft, en asymmetrie hierin
vaak zelfs gewild en nodig is (cf. Sennett 1980). Dus hoe meer traditioneel manneli-
jke verwachtingen en autoriteitsconcepten (nog steeds of opnieuw) eectief zijn, hoe
meer deze ook de evaluatie van formele en functionele autoriteiten zullen bepalen
en beïnvloeden. In dit opzicht hebben de traditionele noties van autoriteit een lange
houdbaarheid; ze hebben lange tijd generatieve tradities en media en dus ook de eigen
(vroegere) ervaring bepaald. Hoewel de realiteit en de machtsverhoudingen blijvend
zijn veranderd, werken de oude, door gender getinte associaties vaak onderbewust door.
Algemene en dagelijkse evaluaties van autoriteit worden dus meestal impliciet
gekleurd door traditionele normatieve schema’s die verder teruggaan in de tijd. Deze
normatieve schema’s zijn verder meestal gekoppeld aan ideeën van mannelijkheid of
rolmodellen van concrete mannen die deze normen representeren. Hoe minder gen-
derneutraal de autoriteitsposities binnen de respectieve instellingen zijn (d.w.z. expliciet
‘mannelijk’), des te meer ze een traditioneel autoritair charisma, houding of persoon-
lijkheid eisen (Lovell 2003, 3; Gutho 2013, 188 e.v.). Op dezelfde manier krijgen
instellingen met een ‘mannelijk’ karakter als geheel meestal nog steeds méér autoriteit
en dus méér waarde toegekend dan zogenaamd ‘vrouwelijke’ gebieden als (vooral basis-)
onderwijs en zorg, zoals te zien is in de media-aanwezigheid en de bezoldiging van
deze gebieden.5
2.2. Het autoriteitsdilemma van vrouwen
Vormen en functies van autoriteit zijn zowel in algemene als in ociële zin veranderd,
met name wat betreft de vroegere genderspecieke taakverdeling van arbeid en macht.
Tegelijkertijd lijkt het traditionele autoriteitstype, de persoon of instelling die autoriteit
uitstraalt of bezit, deze verandering op sommige gebieden subliminaal te hebben over-
leefd. Ook vandaag de dag gebeurt het nog dat bij het beschrijven, beoordelen en
bekritiseren van vrouwen als gezaghebbende personen, de focus in eerste instantie niet
ligt op hun functie, kennis of prestaties maar op hun uiterlijk of privébelangen, d.w.z.
(gebrek aan) aantrekkelijkheid, zogenaamd vrouwelijk gedrag of zelfs hun relatiestatus.
Hier zijn tal van voorbeelden van, van verslaggeving over topsporters tot vrouwelijke
politici en ceo’s. Deze (ongewenste) nadruk op allesbehalve hun professionele vermo-
gens zou kunnen verklaren waarom vrouwen ondervertegenwoordigd zijn in zelfs de
moderne vormen van autoriteit. We hebben het hier wellicht te maken met vormen
van autoriteit die eigenlijk als rationeel gelegitimeerd gelden, die formele regels en
een objectieve standaard volgen (‘ociële autoriteit’) en worden gekarakteriseerd
door hun functionaliteit (gezag qua deskundigheid, kennis en ervaring), maar waarin
onderbewuste, oude ideeën over gender en autoriteit doorwerken. Deze traditionele
nadruk op uiterlijk en privézaken kan mogelijk ook verklaren waarom vrouwen, zelfs
wanneer zij deze functies uitoefenen, relatief minder autoriteit wordt toegekend – en
waarom gebieden die gekenmerkt worden door een ‘vrouwelijke’ vorm van autoriteit
(Großmaß 2017) niet als echte autoriteit worden aangewezen en erkend.6
Verborgen onder de oppervlakte van gelijkheid, vrijheid en moderniteit ligt
48
het oude autoriteitsdilemma van vrouwen, dat Simone de Beauvoir beschreef in De
tweede sekse.7 Het is de afbakening van ‘het vrouwelijke’, dat ‘mannelijkheid’ en de
bijbehorende traditionele vormen van autoriteit denieert. Als vrouwen (of mannen)
zich ‘vrouwelijk’ tonen in de klassieke zin, wordt dit geïnterpreteerd als onbeduidend
en dubieus. Maar als ze zich te mannelijk tonen, wordt hun vrouw-zijn ontkend, of
worden ze gezien als een (slechte) mannenkopie die losbandig en niet soeverein is.8
Terwijl bij mannen van middelbare leeftijd in autoriteitsfuncties, zoals bijvoorbeeld
rechters, een mannelijke socialisatie lonend is omdat deze nog steeds samenvalt met hun
professionele rol en de daarmee verbonden autoriteit, moeten vrouwen van dezelfde
leeftijd zich expliciet verhouden tot het omgaan met hun genderrol (Tomsich and Guy
2014, 473; Stievers 2002).
In traditioneel mannelijk-autoritaire beroepen kunnen vrouwen autoriteit dus
(nog) niet vanzelfsprekend of automatisch uitoefenen zoals mannen dat meestal doen.
Dit heeft echter niet alleen negatieve gevolgen: afstand nemen van de professionele rol
en, daarmee samenhangend, reecteren op de eigen genderrol en de ervaren discrep-
antie tussen beide rollen, kan ook een motivatie zijn om deze expliciet aan te pakken
en te veranderen.
2.3. De (vermeende) crisis van de (gender)normaliteit
Met name in tijden van crisis heeft men de neiging beslissingen en acties volgens
oude gendernormen te beoordelen.9 Zo wordt Angela Merkels ‘vrouwelijke zwakte’
en ‘empathie’ verantwoordelijk gemaakt voor haar vermeende fouten in het vluchtelin-
genbeleid. Het is dus haar gebrek aan hardheid die de natie verzwakt: door de natie niet
te verdedigen tegen de veronderstelde invasie van vluchtelingen brengt ze de integriteit
en identiteit van de natie in gevaar. De oude vrouwelijke en mannelijke connotaties zijn
duidelijk zichtbaar in de corresponderende retoriek van andere politici en media. Is een
vrouw ongeschikt om de natie te beschermen tegen penetratie door indringers? Zelfs
als deze retoriek niet noodzakelijkerwijs van toepassing is of toegepast wordt op een
concrete vrouw of man – bijvoorbeeld, Theresa May heeft wél een tijd de mannelijke
autoriteit vertegenwoordigd, die met ‘hardheid’ de Brexit doorzette – zijn de zinnen
die gebruikt worden om de vluchtelings- en economische crises te beschrijven nog
steeds duidelijk gegenderd (zwak vs. sterk, passief vs. actief, binnen vs. buiten, penetratie,
invasie, overstroming van een kwetsbaar landelijk lichaam).
In dit soort politieke discoursen wordt een emotionele reactie (angst en
boosheid) opgewekt, waarbij letterlijk een crisis wordt opgeroepen en daarmee de
noodzaak van een autoritaire reactie, zoals Sara Ahmed laat zien in haar boek The
Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004). Ahmed noemt als voorbeeld de uitroep van het Britse
Nationale Front: “Britain is Dying: How long are you just going to watch?” (Ahmed
2004, 12). Het persoonlijk en emotioneel aanspreken van een ‘jij’ leidt tot een solidar-
iteit en creëert zo een ‘wij’ wat wordt aangevallen en nu moet worden verdedigd door
een sterke vertegenwoordiger.
De lange levensduur van premoderne autoritaire structuren en de heropleving
ervan hangt dus nauw samen met de genderassociaties en de emoties die ze opwekken.
Volgens Ahmed is deze koppeling met emoties de enige manier om te verklaren waarom
49
we deze structuren en normen niet alleen absorberen en belichamen door socialisatie,
maar er ook actief in investeren om onze sociale identiteit te kunnen behouden. Een
dergelijke investering, die meestal niet bewust of expliciet plaatsvindt, toont zich als
de natie een voorwerp van liefde wordt: een formeel teken van burgerschap wordt
zo geassocieerd met de mogelijkheid van verlies, letsel of zelfs de dood. Zulke verha-
len (narratieven) binden burgers op twee manieren aan ‘hun’ natie: enerzijds door de
gemeenschappelijke afwijzing van een buitenstaander of haat jegens anderen en vreem-
den, en anderzijds door de daaruit voortvloeiende verbondenheid met de eigen groep
en een interne solidariteit. Volgens Ahmed is dit wat normaliteit en stabiliteit oplevert
en tegelijkertijd de crisis van deze normaliteit postuleert, waarin de betreende burgers
om deze natie rouwen (als verleden of verloren):
The emotion of hate works to animate the ordinary subject, to bring that
fantasy to life, precisely by constituting the ordinary as in crisis, and the ordi-
nary person as the real victim. The ordinary becomes that which is already under
threat by the imagined others whose proximity becomes a crime against person
as well as place (Ahmed 2004, 43).
Wat Ahmed hier duidelijk maakt is dat normaliteit wordt neergezet als een statische en
zuivere, pure toestand, die altijd in gevaar is en moet worden beschermd en behouden.
Hier wordt een illusie van normaliteit, eenduidigheid en essentie op het niveau van een
natie gecreëerd, die de interne ambiguïteit en dynamiek van geograe en migratie in
haar ontwikkeling en de daarmee gepaarde constante culturele en sociale verandering
negeert. De natie is in deze zin eeuwig, of beter: valt bijna buiten de tijd – het is een
vaste plek met een eenduidige denitie van wie erbij hoort en wie niet. Tegelijkertijd
is ze daarmee ook constant in gevaar, en hier wordt de dimensie van gender bijzonder
duidelijk. Van zowel binnen- als buitenaf wordt de natie bedreigd, en beide gevaren
hebben een genderdimensie.
Normaliteit moet niet alleen extern worden verdedigd, ook de interne famili-
estructuur moet stabiel blijven. Sociale of privénormaliteit is direct verbonden met de
nationale normaliteit; het gezin als de “kern van de natie”10 wordt gewaarborgd door
de binaire geslachtsorde en de daarmee samenhangende klassieke rol- en arbeidsver-
deling. Deze genderorde belooft een duidelijke verdeling en identiteit. Het denieert
wat mannelijke of vrouwelijke kenmerken en taken zijn en structureert daarmee de
werkelijkheid. Volgens de klassieke genderorde zijn vrouwen van nature zachtaardig,
zorgzaam en emotioneel en zijn ze dus verantwoordelijk voor de privésfeer, de zorg en
verzorging van de kinderen, het huis of het vaderland, of voor zorgende activiteiten in
de bredere zin van het woord, zoals zorg, diensten of onderwijs. Mannen daarentegen
zijn idealiter assertief, sterk, dominant en rationeel en zijn daarom geschikt voor pub-
lieke activiteiten, hard of risicovol werk of managementposities.
Deze genderorde spiegelt zich ook in de cultureel gevormde emotionele reac-
ties op zogenaamde ‘indringers’, die de normaliteit en zuiverheid van de natie zouden
bedreigen. De natie wordt hier als vrouw/vrouwelijk gedacht als iets wat men moet
beschermen, waar men kan ‘indringen’ en wat men kan veroveren en penetreren. Een
dergelijke orde met haar illusie van eenduidigheid en eeuwigheid wordt dus van buiten
50
maar ook van binnenuit bedreigd door diverse, dat wil zeggen, andere en nieuwe
familie- en relatiemodellen. Met name in tijden van crisis valt men dus graag terug
op één oude en vertrouwde geslachtsorde, dit geldt zowel voor conservatieve alsook
voor uitgesproken liberaal of progressief georiënteerde personen: in tegenstelling tot de
publiekelijk verkondigde liberale overtuigingen, hebben ook hier traditionele taakver-
delingen en impliciete overtuigingen in vorm van gewoontes in de dagelijkse praktijk
vaak de overhand.11
3. Autoriteit en orde vs. ambiguïteit en vrijheid
Beauvoir beargumenteert in haar Tweede sekse dat zogenaamd vrouwelijke taken en
de vrouwelijke levenssfeer vooral door immanentie, en mannelijke taken en projecten
door transcendentie gekenmerkt zijn. Immanentie wordt daarbij geassocieerd met
zorgende, decorerende of behoudende taken in het privédomein, het thuis, terwijl
transcendente taken doelen op de actieve toekomstige vorming van de publieke, sociale
en politieke wereld. Deze strikte taak-, rol-, ruimte- en tijdsverdeling voorkomt dus in
zekere dat mensen de ambiguïteit van hun existentie onder ogen zien: door deze orde
hoeven mannen zich niet overmatig bezig te houden met hun sterfelijkheid, materi-
aliteit en kwetsbaarheid, en vrouwen kunnen noch de volledige verantwoordelijkheid
nemen voor hun eigen situatie en daden, noch voor politieke en maatschappelijke
ontwikkelingen.
Beauvoir verbindt hier het idee van de ambiguïteit van elke existentie met het
concept van vrijheid en verantwoordelijkheid. In een patriarchale maar ook in een
liberaal-kapitalistische maatschappij kan volgens haar een dergelijke vrijheid niet vol-
doende verwerkelijkt worden. Vrijheid (en daarmee ook verantwoordelijkheid) is iets
wat volgens haar a) op onze concrete situering stoelt (zowel biologisch, materieel, econ-
omisch alsook cultureel, discursief), b) kwetsbaarheid, sterfelijkheid en afhankelijkheid
van de wereld/anderen insluit, en c) altijd al intersubjectief, dat wil zeggen, relationeel
is. Vrijheid is bij Beauvoir dus altijd ook een acceptatie van fundamentele ambiguïteit
en intersubjectiviteit, dat is, wederzijdse menselijke betrokkenheid en afhankelijkheid.
3.1. Ambiguïteit en Situering
Beauvoirs begrip van ambiguïteit wordt meestal in verband gebracht met de ontologie
van Sartre en Heidegger (cf. Gothlin 2006; Keltner 2006). Hier illustreert ambiguïteit de
temporele spanning tussen feitelijkheid en transcendentie, tussen dat wat we nu zijn, en
dat wat we op het punt staan te worden. In die zin wordt het menselijk bestaan opgevat
als een project of wording, eerder dan als een vooraf bepaalde substantie of essentie:
in het bestaan projecteert men zich voortdurend in de richting van een toekomst, en
verenigt daarbij verleden en heden in het doen. In Sartres interpretatie leidt dit tot de
beroemde existentiële imperatief dat de existentie altijd voor de essentie komt. Het
menselijk wezen wordt dus juist gekenmerkt door een ‘gebrek aan zijn’, daarom zijn
we gedwongen om onszelf zijn en dus zin te geven, dat wil zeggen, moeten wij zelf ons
essentie bepalen door middel van onze projecten.
Beauvoirs beroemde zin ‘als vrouw word je niet geboren, maar vrouw word je’,
moet dan ook tegen deze achtergrond worden gelezen. Er bestaat geen essentie van de
51
vrouw, enkel concreet gesitueerde existerende ‘vrouwen’, wier herhaalde praktijken en
projecten het zijn en de zin van ‘vrouw/vrouwelijk’ bepalen. Echter, in tegenstelling
tot Sartre, legt Beauvoir hier de focus niet zozeer op de vrije keuze van projecten,
maar beklemtoont ze het belang van de gesitueerdheid van elke existentie. Hier sluit
ze aan bij het concept van situatie en situering zoals door Merleau-Ponty ontwikkeld
in de Fenomenologie van de waarneming (cf. McWeeny 2017; Wilkerson 2017). Situering
betekent daarbij zowel dat je concreet gesitueerd bent, dat wil zeggen, in een situatie
wordt geboren en door deze situatie bepaald wordt, alsook dat je in-situatie bent, dat je
je deze situatie actief moet toe-eigenen of eigen moet maken.
Beauvoirs aandacht voor het ‘worden’ is dus geen typisch voorbeeld van het
existentialisme van Sartre, dat het ‘worden’ ziet in het licht van absolute vrijheid, of
van de verwezenlijking van een vrij gekozen en individueel project. Haar nadruk ligt
veeleer op de invloed van concrete situaties die een dergelijke ‘ontologische vrijheid’
ofwel beperken ofwel mogelijk maken. Beauvoir sluit zich aan bij Merleau-Ponty door
te stellen dat elke vrijheid noodzakelijkerwijs een gesitueerde vrijheid moet zijn, dat
wil zeggen, beperkt maar ook gemotiveerd door de historische, materiële en sociale
situatie waarin men zich bevindt. Beauvoir maakt dit idee van gesitueerde vrijheid
echter concreet door het toe te passen op de beschrijving van bestaande historische
subjecten (in De tweede sekse: vrouwen) en hun situatie. Daarmee neemt zij het inzicht
van gesitueerdheid serieuzer dan Merleau-Ponty zelf wanneer zij zich kritisch afvraagt
of belichaamd zijn en concreet gesitueerd zijn voor alle bestaande mensen hetzelfde
betekent. Wat als een situatie vooral gekenmerkt wordt door overheersing, onderdruk-
king of beperking? Wat als ervaringen uit het verleden en materiële omstandigheden
niet motiverend of faciliterend werken, maar beperkend of zelfs gewelddadig?
Beauvoir wijst daarmee op het feit dat, hoewel alle bestaande mensen een
algemeen gevoel van ambiguïteit en kwetsbaarheid delen, ambiguïteit niet hetzelfde
betekent voor de bevoorrechten als voor de onderdrukten (vgl. Card 2006, 15). De
les die we van Beauvoir kunnen leren is dat concrete situaties onze vrijheid van han-
delen kunnen beperken, en wel op verschillende manieren. Zo zijn de grenzen voor
sommigen veel strenger dan voor anderen. Dit geldt bijvoorbeeld voor vrouwen in
een patriarchale samenleving, voor onderdrukte minderheden, en voor mensen op een
bepaalde leeftijd in tegenstelling tot mensen in de ‘bloei van hun leven’ (zoals Beauvoir
benadrukt in De ouderdom). In deze gevallen zijn de vrijheid en de mogelijkheden
om te handelen en te kiezen niet absoluut, maar relatief ten opzichte van de concrete
situatie. Daarbij speelt ook gewoonte een centrale rol. Beauvoir en Merleau-Ponty
vatten gewoonte daarbij niet op als een loutere automatische of mechanische herhaling,
maar als een performativiteit, waardoor mensen hun omgeving letterlijk bewonen en
integreren via herhaalde handelingen. In dergelijke processen worden iemands lichaam
en karakter ontwikkeld en verwerft men praktische betekenissen en vaardigheden. Hier
houdt situering op een externe conditie te zijn, maar wordt letterlijk belichaamd. Dit is
waar Beauvoir op wijst in De Tweede Sekse, wanneer zij beschrijft hoe het karakter van
vrouwen wordt gevormd door hun situatie en repetitieve en ‚immanente‘ dagelijkse
taken. In dit proces van verwerving is men zowel passief als actief, gevormd en vormend.
Dit maakt situering enerzijds tot een permanente, anonieme en bepalende kracht, maar
52
impliceert anderzijds mogelijkheden tot verandering en de verwezenlijking van een
concrete gesitueerde vrijheid.
Vrouwen worden daarom ook niet louter passief of van buitenaf tot vrouw
gemaakt (in tegenstelling tot wat de vaak gebruikte Nederlandse vertaling suggereert).
Daarom kiest Beauvoir voor de formulering ‘se faire object’, wanneer zij de wording
van vrouwen in een patriarchale samenleving beschrijft (cf. McWeeny 2017, 218).
Vrouwen worden door hun situatie gedwongen en in het object-zijn geduwd, maar
aan de andere kant moeten ze ook meedoen om zichzelf tot object voor anderen te
maken. De situatie kadert of bepaalt dus de manier waarop de toegewezen seksen hun
subject- of objectrol moeten realiseren. Terwijl vrouwen zichzelf dus tot object maken,
wordt mannen gesuggereerd zichzelf tot subject te maken (se faire subject) door andere
mensen in bezit te nemen en hun eigen kwetsbaarheid en afhankelijkheid te ontkennen
(zie McWeeny 2017, 219: “by extending his subjectivity to the bodies of others and
denying his vulnerability, relational, and passive aspects”)
3.2. Ambiguïteit en vrijheid
Beauvoir beschrijft de situatie van vrouwen in een patriarchale samenleving als één van
onderdrukking. Tegelijkertijd legt ze uit waarom de vorming van vrijheid en verant-
woordelijkheid voor zowel vrouwen áls mannen niet mogelijk is binnen een dergelijke
asymmetrische genderorde. Met een dergelijke orde, stelt Beauvoir, moet de dubbelz-
innigheid van ons bestaan – d.w.z. het feit dat we subject en object, transcendentie en
immanentie, activiteit en passiviteit, cultuur en natuur verenigen – worden opgelost
door één van de twee polen toe te kennen aan een van de twee gexeerde geslachten
(Vintges 2017, 75). Voor Beauvoir is het patriarchaat dus een maatschappelijke organ-
isatie, waarin de existentiële ambiguïteit, die verwijst naar het hele menselijke bestaan,
wordt verraden door te trachten deze te overwinnen en te zuiveren door middel van
een binaire en dualistische opvatting. Alleen door de passieve, materiële, kwetsbare,
sterfelijke en objectieve kant van het bestaan uit te besteden aan vrouwen, kunnen
mannen op hun beurt de illusie overeind houden dat zij volledig actieve, universele,
rationele, machtige en bijna onsterfelijke subjecten zijn. Voor Beauvoir is dit een daad
van kwade trouw, waarbij beide, mannen en vrouwen, falen in het concreet realiseren
van hun ontologische vrijheid en dus in het nemen van verantwoordelijkheid daarvoor.
Vrouwen handelen te kwader trouw wanneer zij hun relatieve, zij het beperkte, handel-
ingsmogelijkheden niet benutten, maar in plaats daarvan een situatie bevestigen waarin
zij van verantwoordelijkheid worden ontzien. Mannen worden van kwade trouw bes-
chuldigd, wanneer zij het andere geslacht gebruiken om hun eigen ambiguïteit voor
zichzelf te verbergen (Vintges 2006, 145). Om hun ontologische vrijheid te kunnen
verwezenlijken en een authentieke relatie met elkaar aan te gaan, moeten vrouwen dus
de positie van de ander verwerpen en hun subjectrol op zich nemen, terwijl mannen
hun contingente lichamelijke bestaan moeten aanvaarden. (Vintges 2006, 145). Beauvoir
spreekt hier geen normatief oordeel uit, alsof het altijd slecht is om object voor een
ander te zijn of kwetsbaar (en actief, rationeel of sterk zijn altijd goed). Het is ook geen
pleidooi van een omwisseling van deze toeschrijvingen, maar voor een herkenning van
de dubbelzinnigheid (ambiguïteit) van onze existentie
53
Je existentiële ambiguïteit ontkennen betekent voor Beauvoir dus je vrijheid
en verantwoordelijkheid ontkennen. Dit geldt zowel voor elk individu als voor de
maatschappij in haar geheel. Dit benadrukt Beauvoir in haar boek over ouderdom
(1947), waar zij laat zien, dat dezelfde categorisering en discriminatie waar vrouwen
mee te maken hebben, geldt voor oude mensen, die in de moderne westerse kapitalis-
tische samenlevingen ook als ‘ander’ worden gedenieerd. Een maatschappelijk systeem
dat het ideaal van een jonge, rationele, sterke, krachtige en goed presterende man als
norm probeert te stellen, terwijl alle anderen als afwijkend worden gedenieerd, is
dus volgens Beauvoir een maatschappij die een verwerkelijking van de ‘ontologische
vrijheid’ voor iedereen concreet onmogelijk maakt. Beauvoirs argument kan dus ook
worden toegepast op de Westerse (neo)liberaal-kapitalistische logica, die zich richt op
prestaties, optimalisatie en vooruitgang en die een ideaaltypisch rationeel, vrij en e-
ciënt subject postuleert. Het enige verschil met het conservatieve patriarchaat is dat
de ongewenste aspecten van het bestaan hier niet langer worden toegeschreven aan de
vrouwelijke helft van de mensheid, maar in het algemeen aan de verliezers van de con-
currentie. Kwetsbaarheid daarentegen wordt niet langer gedenieerd en gelegitimeerd
door het geslacht alleen, maar representeert nu het persoonlijke falen van elk individu.
3.3. Op weg naar een ethiek der dubbelzinnigheid
Volgens Beauvoir (zoals bij Sartre) is elke menselijke existentie per denitie vrij. Maar
in welke mate deze potentiële vrijheid kan worden verwerkelijkt is afhankelijk van de
concrete situering van de existentie, alsook van de wil en daden van het individu. Men
moet zichzelf concreet vrij-willen, en deze concrete wil kenmerkt volgens Beauvoir
de overgang van een algemeen potentieel voor vrijheid (ontologische vrijheid) naar
een ethisch gerealiseerde (concrete en gesitueerde) vrijheid (Beauvoir 2018, 30–36; cf.
Wilkerson 2017, 225; cf. Petterson 2015).
Drie dingen zijn dus cruciaal voor Beauvoir’s opvatting over een ethiek
die gebaseerd is op ambiguïteit en vrijheid. Ten eerste zijn vrijheid willen en ethisch
handelen, één en hetzelfde. Om vrijheid ethisch te realiseren, moet mens hun eigen
(en andermans) ambiguïteit omarmen. Ten tweede, wij zijn niet ondanks, maar juist
dankzij onze ambiguïteit in staat onze vrijheid concreet te verwezenlijken. Hoewel elk
menselijk bestaan zowel vrij als gesitueerd is (ontologische voorwaarden), kan ieder
kiezen (binnen diens concrete mogelijkheden) hoe die de situatie beleeft en of die
diens vrijheid naar behoren wil opnemen (of liever verwerpen of ontkennen).12 Ten
derde betekent dit, dat als wij ethisch onze vrijheid willen verwezenlijken, wij de ontol-
ogische vrijheid van anderen moeten erkennen, en praktisch (ethisch) ondersteunen.
Vrijheid kan dus nooit alléén worden gerealiseerd, maar slechts in samen-
hang met anderen. Elke actie is verweven met en afhankelijk van de acties of reacties
van anderen; elke persoon moet rekening houden met, en antwoorden aan, anderen.
Projecten en acties zijn gebaseerd op bestaande (infra-)structuren, ideeën en acties, d.w.z.
omstandigheden die er al zijn, net zozeer als op materiële en spirituele omstandigheden
die we aan anderen te danken hebben. Beauvoir laat geen ruimte voor twijfel: vrijheid
is geen egoïsme, geen onafhankelijkheid, niet ‘ik kan doen wat ik wil’. Integendeel, een
dergelijke houding zou zelfs gevaarlijk zijn, want om dergelijke privileges te verkrijgen,
54
moet men zich ofwel onderwerpen aan een invloedrijke autoriteit (die deze privileges
mogelijk maakt en waarborgt), ofwel zelf een dergelijke autoriteit worden, waarmee
de ambiguïteit van het bestaan weer ontkend zou worden. Hoe dan ook, zelfs in een
ogenschijnlijke ‘vogelvrije’ houding komt een diepe afhankelijkheid van anderen aan
het licht, die onze vrijheid überhaupt mogelijk maakt (Beauvoir 2018, 63 e.v.).
Dit betekent a) dat ons gesitueerd bestaan altijd verbonden is met anderen, en
er dus altijd al een onderlinge responsiviteit bestaat, en b) dat dit loutere potentieel
concreet gerealiseerd moet worden als ethische vrijheid, dat wil zeggen, een vrijheid
die opzettelijk de vrijheid van anderen respecteert en ondersteunt. Vrijheid vereist
dus concreet wederzijdse erkenning: geen enkele existentie kan zich volgens Beauvoir
volwaardig ontplooien “wanneer zij zich tot zichzelf beperkt en niet appelleert aan de
existentie van anderen” (Beauvoir 2018, 74). Te kwader trouw leven verwijst dus niet
alleen naar individuen die hun eigen vrijheid ontkennen, maar ook naar hen die de
vrijheid van anderen ontkennen. Dat we anderen nodig hebben om onze betekenissen
en projecten te erkennen, te ondersteunen of voort te zetten, is het stukje van de puzzel
dat Sartre heeft gemist: “Willen dat er zijn is betekent immers ook willen dat er mensen
bestaan door wie en voor wie de wereld is begiftigd met menselijke betekenissen. Men
kan de wereld slechts ontdekken op basis van een door de andere mensen ontdekte
wereld” (Beauvoir 2018, 77–78). Om een dergelijke erkenning, legitimatie en gen-
erativiteit te kunnen verlenen, moeten die anderen zelf vrij zijn: “Ieder mens heeft de
vrijheid van anderen nodig en in zekere zin wil hij deze ook altijd, zelfs al is hij een
tiran. Het probleem is alleen dat de mens dikwijls de consequenties van dit willen niet
te goeder trouw aanvaardt. Toch is het alleen de vrijheid van de ander die verhindert dat
elk van ons verstart in de absurditeit van de feitelijkheid” (Beauvoir 2018, 78). Daarom
is het niet voldoende, zoals Barbara S. Andrew beklemtoont: “[T]o make meaning in
front of slavish devotees, for their recognition is not valuable because it is not free”
(Andrew 2006, 36).
Om de wereld op een zinvolle manier te kunnen ontsluiten, hebben we dus
anderen nodig. Beauvoir is de eerste existentialistische losoof die dit schijnbaar een-
voudige punt expliciet maakt. Met een zijschop naar Hegel en Sartre benadrukt zij dat
de ander niet alleen de wereld van mij afneemt en mijn vrijheid beperkt, maar ook
deze wereld (inclusief mijzelf als deel van deze wereld) aan mij geeft. Het aanvankelijke
gevoel van haat is dus naïef, “de afgunst raakt onmiddellijk met zichzelf in conict”, want
“als ik werkelijk alles was, zou er niets naast mij bestaan; de wereld zou leeg zijn, er zou
niets zijn om te bezitten en ook ik zelf zou niets zijn (Beauvoir 2018, 77). Het feit dat
wij ons in een historische wereld bevinden en dat wij deze wereld vanuit ons beperkte
perspectief slechts gedeeltelijk kunnen onthullen, betekent dat andere subjecten nodig
zijn om de wereld met en voor ons te onthullen. Bovendien heeft het hele begrip
‘project’ een noodzakelijke intersubjectieve dimensie: “Elk project wordt bepaald door
zijn wisselwerking met andere projecten” (78). Dus om onszelf te kunnen realiseren
door ons in onze projecten te overstijgen, moeten we een beroep doen op anderen: om
deze projecten als zinvol te erkennen, om eraan deel te nemen, ze te steunen of ze over
te nemen, voorbij ons eindige bestaan. Vrijheid is dus altijd verbonden met de vrijheid
van anderen: “[Z]ichzelf vrij willen betekent echter ook alle anderen vrij te willen” (79).
55
Dit betekent niet dat ik de vrijheid van de ander wil uit eigenbelang. Beauvoir
wil veeleer benadrukken dat elke individuele vrijheid existentieel verbonden is met de
vrijheid van alle anderen. Door mijn vrijheid te willen, moet ik dus tegelijkertijd de
vrijheid van anderen willen: Als de andere subjecten niet vrij (of volwaardig subject)
zouden zijn, zou dat betekenen dat mijn wereld (die zich openbaart door en met
anderen) en mijn projecten (erkend door, overlappend met, afhankelijk van anderen)
leeg of waardeloos zouden zijn. Alleen een vrij wezen kan mij mijn wereld, dat wil
zeggen de betekenis, erkenning en vrijheid schenken waarvan ik afhankelijk ben. De
wereld heeft alleen waarde en betekenis voor mij, en kan dus enkel als normaal worden
ervaren, als het ook een wereld is voor anderen; en vrijheid is enkel betekenisvol als er
anderen zijn om deze vrijheid te erkennen (cf. Card 2006, 25).
Zo’n realisatie van relationele vrijheid gebeurt echter niet zonder conict.
Beauvoir lost de spanning tussen mij en de ander niet op, maar benadrukt beide: dat
we als individueel bestaan ontologisch gescheiden zijn, verschillende verlangens, pro-
jecten of situatie hebben, en dat we op velerlei manieren met de ander verbonden zijn.
Concreet betekent dit dat ik niet tegelijkertijd de vrijheid van allen kan willen. Ik moet
beslissen welke vrijheid ik op een bepaald moment wil steunen, en dat kan ten koste
gaan van of zelfs in strijd zijn met de vrijheid van andere subjecten. Hier raken ethische
beslissingen verstrengeld met geschiedenis en politiek: men moet met een historische
beschouwing en politieke argumenten komen, waarom een bepaalde groep subjecten
op dit moment de steun van de vrijheid meer nodig heeft dan anderen of zelfs ten koste
van anderen. Een dergelijke beslissing moet dus noodzakelijkerwijs betrekking hebben
op en een weerspiegeling zijn van de concrete historische, sociale, economische en
politieke situatie van subjecten en kan niet worden genomen op grond van universele
beginselen of een categorisch imperatief. In tegenstelling tot een liberale sociale loso-
e die enkel stoelt op individuele vrijheid en rationele keuzes, neemt deze relationele
ethiek de concrete situering van mensen (als mogelijk makend en beperkend) serieus;
en in tegenstelling tot het communitarisme, houdt ze niet enkel rekening met een
abstract begrip van gemeenschap, maar met concrete intersubjectieve interacties, relaties
en verhoudingen, en mogelijke spanningen en conicten.
4. Conclusie: Naar een nieuwe normaliteit
Wanneer we nadenken over autoriteit en het verlangen naar normaliteit, is de aanpak
van Beauvoir nuttig, omdat deze de nadruk legt op de concrete sociale en historische
situatie van individuen en de beperkingen die daarmee gepaard gaan. Verder pleit ze
voor structurele en politieke veranderingen die individuen (in haar geval vrouwen) in
staat stellen om hun situatie te overstijgen en zichzelf te bepalen. Tegelijkertijd maakt ze
duidelijk dat vrijheid en afhankelijkheid, activiteit en passiviteit, dominantie en kwets-
baarheid altijd bij elkaar horen en dat we rekening moeten houden met interpersoon-
lijke, sociale en politiek-institutionele aspecten, waar voortdurend over moet worden
onderhandeld. Vrijheid kan dus nooit – ook niet vanuit een geprivilegieerde situatie –
alleen de vrijheid van het individu zijn, maar is gegrondvest op de vrijheid van anderen
en moet met of in confrontatie met hen worden gerealiseerd. Een dergelijk collectief
geleefde “relationele vrijheid of autonomie”13 is niet mogelijk in premoderne vormen
56
van autoriteit en heerschappij of binnen vaste asymmetrische genderorden, noch in
een radicaal liberaal-kapitalistische regeringsvorm: beide houden geen rekening met de
verschillende (sociale, culturele, economische) situaties van individuen en ontkennen
de kwetsbaarheid en afhankelijkheid van de mens. Aan de ene kant ontkennen ze de
kwetsbaarheid van de autoriteiten of (met Beauvoir) van de mannen in het betreende
systeem; aan de andere kant negeren ze de kwetsbaarheid van ieder individu, zoals
blijkt uit het kapitalistische basisprincipe van optimalisatie waarbij iedereen als enige
verantwoordelijk is voor het succes of het falen van zijn of haar leven.
Het vasthouden aan of het heropbouwen van traditionele genderorden en het
daarmee gepaard gaande verlangen naar premoderne autoriteit belooft stabiliteit, veil-
igheid en duidelijkheid in snelle en genetwerkte tijden. Tegelijkertijd wordt duidelijk
dat het vasthouden aan dergelijke ordes een echte ontmoeting en vrije samenwerking
tussen mensen verhindert. Alleen als we elkaar respecteren als echte anderen, in onze
eigenheid en kwetsbaarheid, onze gelijkwaardigheid maar ook in het verschil, kunnen
we zoiets als een “relationele autonomie” (Petterson 2017, 169 e.v.) tot stand brengen.
Dit is niet alleen relevant op het interpersoonlijke niveau van de directe interactie, maar
ook op sociaal-politiek, d.w.z. structureel of institutioneel niveau. Zowel de poging van
neoliberale regeringen om elk individu als een volledig autonoom subject te postuleren,
als de tegenaanval om de controle en de interpretatieve soevereiniteit over te dragen aan
een sterke soeverein, zijn een ontkenning van de dubbelzinnigheid van het menselijk
bestaan.14 Beide alternatieven bevorderen manieren van leven waarbij mensen hun
dubbelzinnigheid niet onder ogen zien en hun intersubjectieve verantwoordelijkheid
niet accepteren.
Hoe begrijpelijk het verlangen ook is naar een premoderne autoriteit, die de
macht (weer) tastbaar maakt in de vorm van een persoon (die zijn mannetje staat)
– het leidt niet tot de gehoopte erkenning van de eigen situatie, persoon of groep,
noch tot een gezamenlijk ontworpen en gedeelde normaliteit. Normaliteit of orde zijn
geen toestanden die eenvoudigweg kunnen worden bewaard of vastgelegd, hoezeer ze
ook emotioneel gepresenteerd worden. Herkenning is altijd afhankelijk van wederzi-
jds respect voor de vrijheid van de ander; normaliteit komt pas tot stand als mensen
deze normaliteit samen creëren, dat wil zeggen als ze dezelfde normen en waarden
erkennen, leven, bekritiseren en ook voortdurend aanpassen en veranderen in al hun
ambiguïteit. Normaliteit (en ook vrijheid) zijn dus net zo kwetsbaar en dynamisch als
menselijke identiteiten. Het antwoord op de onbestemde angst en bezorgdheid over
de complexiteit, diversiteit en globaliteit kan daarom niet een terugkeer zijn naar de
premoderne autoriteiten en de daarmee gepaard gaande, vooraf bepaalde geslachts-,
gezins- en nationale orden. Juist in deze complexiteit en globaliteit wordt duidelijk dat
autonomie en kwetsbaarheid, vrijheid en intersubjectiviteit wederzijds afhankelijk zijn.
Er kan geen sprake zijn van een tegenstelling tussen het subject en het andere, tussen
de autonomie van het individu en de zorgen van de gemeenschap: de twee ‘polen’ zijn
noodzakelijkerwijs met elkaar verbonden.
Met Beauvoir kunnen we hier een ander begrip van normaliteit vinden,
tegenover het begrip van normaliteit dat door pre-moderne autoriteit wordt gebezigd.
Niet een begrip van normaliteit dat enkel is gericht op het behouden van het oude,
57
maar een normaliteit die gericht is op de toekomst, waar mensen enkel samen – met
en soms tegen elkaar – aan een duurzame en voor iedere leefbare vorm van normaliteit
kunnen bouwen. Normaliteit die niet is gebaseerd op genderverschil en ontkenning
van ambiguïteit, maar juist een begrip van normaliteit waarin de wereld alleen als
normaal kan worden ervaren wanneer die wereld er ook is voor anderen.
Menselijke vrijheid wordt altijd gesitueerd en geconditioneerd door anderen,
het wordt alleen met en door hen gerealiseerd. Noch de idee van een radicaal liberalisme
dat de illusie van absolute vrijheid aanhangt en de verantwoordelijkheid alleen aan het
individu overdraagt, noch het verlangen naar een pre-moderne autoriteit of orde dat de
vrijheid en de verantwoordelijkheid van het individu ontkent, is in staat deze menseli-
jke ambiguïteit onder ogen te zien. Beauvoir maakt duidelijk dat autonomie altijd al
relationeel is geweest, het is als het ware een tijdelijke lening die altijd te danken is aan
anderen (ouders, verzorgers) en soms ook ten koste gaat van anderen (onderdrukking).
Als kind, in ziekte en ouderdom hebben we nog niet of niet meer onze autonomie.
Hier wordt relationaliteit als afhankelijkheid dan ook pijnlijk duidelijk. Dat dit relatio-
nele aspect überhaupt publiek zo succesvol kon worden genegeerd, tenminste door de
machtige en daarbij vaak mannelijke helft van de mensheid, berust er juist op dat alle
zorgende functies zich stilletjes buiten het toneel afspelen. Enkel door middel van deze
taakverdeling, het outsourcen van existentiële feiten zoals lichamelijke kwetsbaarheid
en sterfelijkheid, door middel van traditionele gender- en andere machtsrelaties, kan aan
de illusie van een absolute autonomie en autoriteit worden vastgehouden. Maar net als
autonomie is ook autoriteit een tijdelijke lening die berust op de steun, het werk en het
vertrouwen van anderen. In dit verband moet autoriteit dan ook in het meervoud worden
gezien, d.w.z. als een tijdelijke asymmetrische leiderspositie, een overgedragen verant-
woordelijkheid voor een project of een gebied, die iedereen met de juiste kennis en
ervaring op zich moet kunnen nemen. Autoriteit is noodzakelijk, maar slechts voor een
beperkte tijd of op duidelijk afgeperkte gebieden en functies. De taak van autoriteiten
is om anderen voor te bereiden op het gebruik van hun vrijheid; om hen met specieke
ervaring, kennis of competentie doelgericht te helpen hun vrijheid zo zelfbepaald en
tegelijkertijd zo verantwoord mogelijk uit te oefenen: “Want een vrijheid wil zichzelf
slechts waarachtig wanneer zij zichzelf wil als onbeperkte beweging via de vrijheid van
anderen” (Beauvoir 2018, 98).
1 Van Oenen (2018) beschrijft dit fenomeen als
als interactieve metaalmoeheid.
2 Dit geldt alleen voor de westerse wereld,
waartoe ik mij in het kader van dit artikel zal
beperken. Natuurlijk wordt de toekenning van
autoriteit ook sterk beïnvloed door factoren als
sociale klasse en culturele achtergrond, waar ik
hieronder niet verder op in kan gaan.
3 Terwijl Webers ‘natuurlijke’ charisma een
buitengewone heerschappij rechtvaardigt, keert
Bourdieu de oorzaak-gevolgrelatie om: charisma,
dat alledaagse symbolische kansen op macht
mogelijk maakt, wordt alleen gegenereerd door
geaccumuleerd cultureel kapitaal (Kraemer 2002:
185).
4 Volgens Sennett is het een poging om de
voorwaarden van de macht te interpreteren, om ze
betekenis te geven door een beeld te schetsen van
kracht en superioriteit (Sennett 1980).
Notes
58
5 Domeinen waar meer vrouwen werken zijn
nog steeds gedevalueerd in termen van status en
beloning, zie Walby (2011: 114 e.v.); wereldwijd
kunnen we nu spreken van een feminisering, d.w.z.
precarisering van het werk, waarbij privégebieden
zoals de thuiszorg worden gekapitaliseerd en
uitbesteed (Oksala 2016: 123).
6 Bijv. bij vergelijkbare prestaties, bijvoorbeeld
wanneer vrouwelijke rechters of professoren lager
ingeschaald of slechter beoordeeld worden dan hun
mannelijke collega‘s; zie Tomsich & Guy (2014),
Sprague & Massoni (2005).
7 Zo ging in het verleden het traditionele
mannelijk-worden heel natuurlijk en vanzelfsprekend
gepaard met autonomie, activiteit en het streven
naar autoriteit, terwijl de overname en belichaming
van autoriteit bij vrouwen, “het feit dat ze een
autonome activiteit bezit”, in tegenspraak was
met hun vrouwelijkheid (Beauvoir 2000: 834). De
beschrijvingen van Beauvoir beperken zich tot
een bepaalde klasse of intellectueel milieu, en het
proces om vrouw te worden en het gebruik van
verworven vrouwelijkheid verschilt qua sociale
klasse en achtergrond. Skeggs beschrijft bijvoorbeeld
de ‘investering’ van vrouwen uit de arbeidersklasse
in hun specifieke vrouwelijkheid, die meestal hun
enige mogelijkheid is om zich te bevrijden van hun
marginale sociale status; zie Skeggs (1997); Hennessy
(1992).
8 Vrouwen in een gezaghebbende functie worden
niet vanzelfsprekend als autoriteit geaccepteerd,
betoogde Beauvoir: het ontbreekt haar aan de “ronde
goedmoedigheid” die zo aantrekkelijk is bij de
dokter die “zeker van zichzelf is” (Beauvoir 2000:
852). Een soortgelijke dynamiek was duidelijk te
zien in de vorige Amerikaanse verkiezingscampagne:
Hillary Clinton‘s vrouw-zijn of vrouwelijkheid
was een centraal thema, bijvoorbeeld als een
verheven of bedrogen vrouw of met oog op haar
vermeende zwakte: “She ’doesn’t have the stamina”
(Trump); aan de andere kant werd ze beschreven
als een ondoorzichtige, emotioneel koude
meesteres van Amerikas militaire en economische
macht. De retoriek van Trump refereert aan oude
verhandelingen over mannelijkheid, waarin een
antisemitisch idee van de vrouwelijke, onthechte,
verwijfde en corrupte intellectueel tegenover de
eerlijke en sterke man van het volk staat.
9 De coronacrisis lijkt hier op het eerste gezicht
een uitzondering te zijn. Op het tweede gezicht
wordt echter duidelijk dat ook hier een indeling
in typisch vrouwelijke (zorgzaam, voorzichtig,
angstig) en mannelijke (dapper, avontuurlijk)
karaktereigenschappen plaats vindt.
10 Aldus de verwoording van het programma
voor de Bundestagsverkiezing van de AfD 2013 in
Duitsland, zie Kemper (2014).
11 Zie bvb. deze statistiek van de The New
York Times waaruit blijkt dat jongere mannen
niet meer huishoudelijke taken op zich nemen
dan oudere generaties: https://www-nytimes-
com.eur.idm.oclc.org/interactive/2021/uri/
embeddedinteractive/0e9e8cec-1815-5b22-91d3-
541b6b1332c8
12 In het Pleidooi voor een moraal der
dubbelzinnigheid beschrijft Beauvoir in dit verband
verschillende psychologische ‘typen’ van bestaan die
op verschillende manieren aan de verwezenlijking
van hun vrijheid ontkomen. Hun gemeenschappelijk
kenmerk is hun onverschilligheid ten opzichte
van hun bestaan. Zij willen zich aan hun vrijheid
onttrekken, bijvoorbeeld door te proberen alle
waarden van het bestaan te verwerpen (nihilist), hun
vrijheid en verantwoordelijkheid over te dragen aan
een groep, hogere zaak of ideologie (ernstig mens)
of door hun ambiguïteit en dus de vrijheid van
anderen te ontkennen (avonturier).
13 In deze context betekent dit een autonomie
die van begin af mogelijk gemaakt is door en met
anderen. Binnen de feministische filosofie is er
een debat in hoeverre dit compatibel is met een
individualistisch of liberale notie van autonomie,
zie Mackenzie & Stoljar (2000); Westlund (2009);
Rössler (2002).
14 Relationele autonomie en de wederzijdse
erkenning van gelijkheid en verschil kunnen
ook tot uitdrukking komen in collectieve acties
en demonstraties, zoals in het voorbeeld van
een collectieve vergadering van ‚lichamen‘ dat
Judith Butler in haar performatieve theorie van
bijeenkomst (performative theory of assembly) beschrijft.
Gezamenlijk vestigen de respectievelijke individuen
de aandacht op zichzelf en hun zorgen door hun
onzekerheid en kwetsbaarheid op een fysiek actieve
manier te gebruiken als demonstratiemiddel, om zo
een zichtbaarheid te creëren voor hun bestaan, het
belang van hun behoeften (Butler 2015).
Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Allen, Amy. 2008. The Politics of Ourselves. Power, and
Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Beauvoir, Simone De. 2000. De tweede sekse. Utrecht:
Bijleveld.
Beauvoir, Simone De. 2018. Pleidooi voor een moraal
der dubbelzinnigheid. Utrecht: Bijleveld.
Butler, Judith. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative
Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Bueb, Bernhard. 2006. Lob der Disziplin. Eine
Streitschrift. München: List Verlag.
Foucault, Michel. 1994. Discipline, toezicht en straf.
Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij.
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Phenomenology and Philosophy of History
in Le Deuxième sexe.” In The Existential
Phenomenology of Simone Beauvoir, edited by
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to Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Claudia Card,
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Historical Specificity, Agency and the
Performative Self.” Theory, Culture & Society 20
(1): 1–17.
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Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on
Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self. New York:
Oxford University Press.
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Ponty.” In A Companion to Simone Beauvoir,
edited by Laura Henghold and Nancy Bauer,
211–224. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.
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60
Dr. Maren Wehrle is Assistant Professor aan de
Erasmus School of Philosophy (ESphil), Erasmus
Universiteit Rotterdam. Ze is gespecialiseerd
in fenomenologie, filosofische antropologie,
cognitiewetenschappen en feministische filosofie.
Zij heeft gepubliceerd over onderwerpen als
belichaming, gender, gewoonte en de normaliteit en
normativiteit van ervaring.
Biography
Staging Uncivility, Or, The Performative Politics of
Radical Decolonial Iconoclasm
Matthias Pauwels
Decolonisation, Iconoclasm, Colonialist Heritage
Performative Politics, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Rancière
Keywords
Krisis 42 (1):61-75.
Abstract
This article reects on the deployment of crude and destructive modes of iconoclasm
in contemporary decolonial and anti-racist struggles, as exemplied by the campaign
against Belgium’s colonialist patrimony in June 2020. Through a consideration of sym-
pathetic and internal critiques of such modes, I postulate a tensional interplay, within
the said struggles, between two opposing approaches focused on the performance of
civility and uncivility respectively. While the rst is grounded in Rancière’s theory of
emancipatory politics, arguments by Benjamin, Žižek, Jameson and especially Fanon are
deployed to elucidate the rationale, modus operandi and ecacy of the more contro-
versial second approach.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.42.1.37173
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 License International License (CC
BY 4.0). © 2022 The author(s).
Licence
61
Staging Uncivility, Or, The Performative Politics of
Radical Decolonial Iconoclasm
Matthias Pauwels
Travelling Activism from #BlackLivesMatter to #LeopoldMustFall1
One of the remarkable aspects of globalisation is that activist movements and campaigns
travel globally from one locale to another, generating transnational ructions overnight
– a phenomenon that one might denote with the term travelling activism, as a variation
on Edward Said’s “travelling theory” (1983, 226-47). The anti-racist protests in the US
in the wake of the death-by-police-brutality of George Floyd at the end of May 2020
are a case in point. Under the banner of Black Lives Matter, these protests spread
almost instantly over the globe, intersecting with unresolved issues of anti-black racism
and colonialism in many places. This conrms a characteristic feature of contemporary
social struggles noted by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, namely, the way in which
they tend to “leap vertically and touch immediately on the global level” (2001, 54-5).
In Belgium, the 2020 Black Lives Matter campaign once again turned the
country’s troubled colonial past and the related, residual racist attitudes and practices
into burning issues, instigating a radical challenge to the blatant silence and inaction
on these matters. In addition to anti-racist Black Lives Matter rallies, which occasion-
ally escalated into rioting and looting, there was a widespread iconoclastic assault on
the country’s colonialist public patrimony, especially that glorifying King Leopold II.2
Statues, plaques and street names commemorating Belgium’s highly problematic second
king were spray-painted with crass slogans, paint-bombed, smeared with cement, hit
with sledgehammers and toppled.3 The symbolic revenge thus inicted had been a long
time coming and clearly provided a much-needed release of the pent-up anger and
frustration among several generations of Belgo-Congolese.
This was not the rst time that Belgium’s colonialist heritage was contested.4 In
2004, an anonymous collective chopped o the hand of a bronze statue of a Congolese
child in the city of Ostend.5 Part of a larger conguration of sculptures centred around
an equestrian statue of Leopold II, the statue depicts one of a group of Congolese
slaves which, as the inscription states, “express their gratitude to Leopold II [described
as their “ingenious protector”] for having freed them from enslavement by the Arabs”.
The collective lambasted the monument’s blatant hypocrisy as Leopold II’s henchmen
treated the Congolese as slaves on his rubber plantations, meting out cruel punishments
to ensure productivity, such as chopping o hands and arms. By mutilating the statue,
the collective’s professed aim was to make the sculpture more historically accurate.6
In 2008, activist-philosopher Théophile de Giraud had mounted an equestrian statue
of Leopold II on Brussels’ Throne Square, defacing it with red paint – symbolising
the bloodshed during Leopold II’s reign – and staging a lynching. The same statue
was daubed with red paint in 2013 and 2015.7 In 2017, photographs of abuses during
Belgian colonialism were pasted on a statue of Leopold II in Mons, and in January 2018
the Citizen’s Association for a Decolonial Public Space removed a bust of Leopold II in
Duden Park in Forest.8
Although the recent Black Lives Matter protests were the immediate incentive
62
of the surge in decolonial contestations of Belgium’s patrimony, their inspiration and
roots can thus be traced back further in time. However, the worldwide outrage over the
umpteenth instance of racially driven police brutality in the US no doubt contributed
to the unprecedented urgency, scope, and intensity of the contestations. It might also
partly explain why, this time around, the campaign of decolonial iconoclasm was quite
ecacious, resulting in some short-term victories, its impact magnied, no doubt, by
global moral and political pressures as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement. On
a national level, politicians voted in favour of establishing a parliamentary committee
on Belgium’s colonial past. It also led the current king Philippe to ocially express his
personal regrets for Belgium’s colonial misdeeds, although stopping short of issuing
an apology, which would have been more consequential in terms of reparations to the
Congolese people. More generally, media debates ensued on the persistence of racism
– blatant and covert – in Belgian society with regard to job opportunities, housing,
education, or stop-and-search practices by the police.9 All this came about in a matter
of weeks.
On a local level, iconoclastic acts against colonialist monuments often led to
their removal – even if mostly to prevent further damage – which can be seen as
a victory for decolonial activists. However, if the dominant way in which the local
authorities in question proposed to remedy the contested nature of colonialist monu-
ments in the long term is anything to go by, it remains to be seen if this feat will not
prove to be merely temporary. Such proposals displayed an insucient awareness of
the oensiveness of the monuments as well as the gravity of their contestation, with
authorities mostly emphasising the need for providing more factual information and
a proper contextualisation, for instance by adding a critical commentary. Surely such
a minimalist approach is inadequate as textual accompaniments cannot possibly undo
the visual impact of colonialist statues in the public space. Such discursive additions are
likely to have the same dubious status as the proverbial ne print in a contract, and will
do little to trouble the white Belgians public enjoyment of their colonialist past. As such,
it merely enables them to continue to have their colonialist cake and eat it.
To Hell with Your Documents of Barbarism!
While shocking to the average white Belgian, the crude and destructive means of
contestation were not unanimously approved of even among those sympathetic to the
decolonial cause, and became a matter of debate. A commonly held position in this
regard was well expressed by a previous Brussels mayor in response to the aforemen-
tioned theft of a bust of Leopold II in 2018. Although understanding the motivations
behind the action, the previous mayor regretted the resort to what he described as
“Taliban behaviour”, as well as a “rather primal vandalism […] under the cover of
humanism” (Belga 2018).10 An extremist, intolerant, and barbaric type of behaviour is
thus attributed to radical decolonial iconoclasts, blemishing and delegitimising a justi-
ed cause.
On a rst approach, the choice for crude, “barbaric” methods of contesta-
tion can in fact be found to be highly pertinent. One can take heed here of Walter
Benjamin’s verdict, in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (2007, 253-64) on
63
the status of a nation’s “cultural treasures” or “documents of civilisation”, as part of his
historical-materialist reections on culture. Benjamin (2007, 256) regards such treasures
as the “spoils” of a nation’s past conquests that are “carried along” in the “triumphal
procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate.” Of
their origins, Benjamin (ibid.) says that they cannot be contemplated “without horror”,
leading him to famously claim that “There is no document of civilization which is not
at the same time a document of barbarism”, or again, that no such document is “free
of barbarism”.
In Belgium’s post-colonial context, Benjamin’s statements concerning the
intimate connections between civilisation and barbarism – although not specically
related to colonialism – gain extra force and signicance. It is dicult not to regard
the cultural heritage memorialising and glorifying a nation’s colonial past as anything
but highly problematic documents of barbarism, as the spoils and sublimated insignia
of colonisation built on the suering and toil of generations of Congolese people.
To be sure, the barbaric roots of colonialist monuments are carefully obfuscated by a
mystifying, euphemistic discourse that shamelessly lauds the colonising nation for its
civilising eorts abroad.
A Benjaminian demystication of colonialist monuments as documents of
barbarism allows one to counter criticisms of the rudimentary methods of radical deco-
lonial iconoclasts. The latter can be seen to merely reciprocate and match the barbaric
nature of Belgium’s colonialist endeavour, conform to a tit-for-tat logic. It should be
clear that if anyone comported themselves as brutes and savages it was the colonisers
themselves, and not the contemporary decolonial iconoclasts, as some contend.
Moreover, Benjamin’s claims of a relation of complicity between today’s rulers
and their predecessors – or, as he puts it, “those who conquered before them” (ibid.)
– oer a rm rejoinder to criticisms of the recent spate of decolonial activism as being
mere symbolic politics or yesteryear’s struggles. It was not uncommon, for instance,
to hear white Belgians dryly remark that they do not understand all this fuss about
colonialist monuments, downplaying the latter’s contentiousness by regarding them as
relics of a long gone past. It was emphasised that it has “after all” been sixty years since
Congo’s independence and over 110 years since the end of Leopold II’s reign over
Congo. It should be clear, however, that Leopold II’s colonialist venture gave Belgium
a vital head start in securing a strategic spot in the then emerging global world order,
enabling it – up to this very day – to punch above its weight as a tiny country of eleven-
and-a-half million people. It has made Belgium deeply complicit in the founding of a
state of “global apartheid”, as Patrick Bond (2004) calls it, established through Western
countries’ colonialist and imperialist drives which resulted in the massive disparities in
wealth, opportunities, and rights between those in the West and the Global South that
persist to this day.
More specically in relation to on-going contestations of colonialist patrimony,
the “spoils” of Leopold II’s colonial enterprise allowed the Belgian capital of Brussels
to position itself as a thriving, modern, Paris-style metropole by adorning its public
spaces in imperialistic splendour with grand boulevards, triumphal arches, and monu-
mental statues. This urban-architectural capital no doubt played an important role in
64
later establishing Brussels as the seat of powerful transnational institutions such as the
EU or NATO.
The spate of iconoclasm against Belgium’s “documents of barbarism” is thus
more than a narrow, belated manifestation of symbolic politics. It is a contestation of
much broader economic and political processes of oppression and exploitation of the
“wretched of the earth”, to use Frantz Fanon’s famous expression (1963), that have
been unrelentingly wreaking havoc for many centuries all over the world. Rather than
inoperative time capsules of merely antiquarian interest, colonialist monuments are
emblematic of problematical geopolitical processes, and of the accompanying mindset
of those that enforced or beneted from them. As Joëlle Sambi Nzeba of the Belgian
#BlackLivesMatter movement declared, “These monuments are present not just in
public space, but also in people’s mentalities” (Thamm 2020).
“We Are Better Than This”
Behind the aforementioned objections against resorting to basic and violent means of
cultural contestation, one can identify the fundamental structure of what might be called
the sympathetic critique of radical decolonial iconoclasm, whereby the latter is regarded
as “understandable yet deplorable”. It concerns a type of critique that understands or
supports the decolonial or anti-racist cause, yet takes issue with the means deployed to
further it, which are condoned at best, but more often condemned. This sympathetic
critique will be found to underlie other key objections to the recent campaign of
decolonial iconoclasm in Belgium, which will be discussed in what follows.
From a cultural-political perspective, discussions and disagreements regarding
dierent forms of cultural contestation and their legitimacy, ecacy, strategic value,
appropriateness, or performativity, are of key importance. In this article I critically assess
some paradigmatic instances of the aforementioned sympathetic critique. In doing so, I
oer possible interpretations and defences of radical decolonial iconoclasm which act
as a counterweight to such critiques, and thereby enable a more nuanced and balanced
appreciation.
Most interestingly, objections against the deployment of extreme, destructive
means of cultural contestation were also raised from within the decolonial and anti-racist
movements themselves. In a remarkable action, members of the Belgian Youth Against
Racism (BYAR) removed the red paint poured by decolonial activists on a bust of king
Baudouin, the last Belgian king to have ruled over Congo before its independence.11
They thus dramatised their call to fellow activists to stop defacing and damaging mon-
uments. BYAR spokesperson Aimé Schrauwen motivated the action as follows: “It is
important for us to demonstrate that minorities in the country are better than this, and
that we merely ask for equal rights […] like all Belgians, which includes an accurate
narration of history.12
Here, one thus has a grouping of decolonial, anti-racist activists attempting to
undo the presumed reputational damage done to minority groups and, the Belgian-
Congolese population in particular by iconoclastic acts of fellow activists. Although not
explicitly stated by BYAR, one could take such acts to conrm prevailing racist stereo-
types concerning people of colour among white Belgians, such as being hot-headed,
65
overtly sensitive, demanding preferential treatment, or reacting in a violent and illegal
way. In contrast, the disciplined, painstaking manner in which BYAR members removed
the sticky paint from the statue, as well as the placid, collected tone in which the above
statement was delivered, was well-chosen to disprove such biases. It seemed geared
towards demonstrating that decolonial and anti-racist activists – and black communities
and other ethnic minorities in Belgium – are entirely reasonable human beings who
pose only modest demands such as being treated like anyone else.
Similar pleas were made, at the time, within the Black Lives Matter movements
in the US. In response to the oftentimes violent protests involving looting and arson,
prominent gures advocated the adoption of non-violent, serene, and dignied modes
of protest. To be sure, incidents of vandalism, damage, or destruction of property and
plunder were covered disproportionally in the mainstream US media, thereby manip-
ulating the public into thinking that such modes of protest were all-pervasive, which
was not the case.
Formulated more generally, the question can be asked, however, of whether
decolonial contestation through crude acts of iconoclasm does not run the risk of
hardening stubborn racist-colonialist biases. If so, such acts, despite their short-term
gains, might engender signicant adverse side-eects, including scaring o sections of
the population which, although having been largely incognisant of, or indierent to,
colonialist issues up until now, might have come to sympathise with the decolonial cause.
Such a potential backlash can be detected in an extreme form in the predictable
protest against recent decolonial activism by the far right, as happened in London, for
instance, around the same time as the events in Belgium. A protest march was organised
in response to contestations of colonial-era monuments in the UK in which, most spec-
tacularly, a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol was toppled, vandalised,
and thrown into a dock.13 Right-wing groups subsequently saw it as their patriotic
duty to defend the mementos of their nation’s past imperialist-colonialist glory against
attacks by the proverbial barbarians at the gate. Such a right-wing counteroensive
is deeply contradictory and hilarious for sure, as the honour of British civilisation is
defended by a raucous rabble of hooligans – not exactly Britain’s nest – who seem
over-eager to start a riot and engage the police in a st ght. As such, decolonial con-
testations might seem to have degenerated into a clash of “uncivilisations” – to modify
Samuel Huntington’s infamous phrase – with decolonial “vandals” at one extreme, far-
right skinheads at another.
Sublimate Your Black Rage
Another type of sympathetic criticism of radical decolonial iconoclasm can be detected
in a commentary piece by Marc Reynebeau (2020) in which the necessity of “destroy-
ing” statues of Leopold II is queried, while suggesting it to be more “interesting” to
“chop o his hand”. Somewhat similar to the aforementioned action in Ostend, this
would deliver a witty, poetic kind of decolonial justice on Leopold II, inicting on him
– post-mortem and symbolically – the same horrid punishment of dismemberment
that was notoriously imposed by his henchmen to punish “unproductive” Congolese
workers, enforce docility, and create a reign of terror.
66
Other than in the BYAR’s case, the issue here is not so much the acceptability
of iconoclasm as a mode of decolonial activism, but rather its plain, indiscriminate, and
overzealous deployment. Or again, one objects to iconoclasm as simply geared towards
damaging or removing the targeted objects, which is dismissed as uninteresting and dull.
In this second kind of sympathetic critique one can detect a call to activists to practice
iconoclasm in a more precise, rened, and creative way, in line with, say, the Situationist
art practices of the 1960s with their trademark misappropriation and repurposing of
existing objects so as to subvert their original meaning and function. In the case of
Reynebeau’s suggestion, the removal of a hand on a Leopold II statue would suce to
radically change its status and function from a device for glorifying colonialism into its
countermonument.
The fact, moreover, that such minimalist subversions do not themselves eect
or prompt the removal of the monuments – as often happens in extreme cases of
iconoclasm – could be levelled as a key argument in its favour. If colonialist statues are
removed, so is the evidence of past colonialist misdeeds, allowing their perpetrators to
get o lightly, being spared the deserved public humiliation that would be their fate
if they were kept in their place in slightly mutilated form. In the latter instance, they
would serve as a constant, inconvenient testimony to Belgium’s scandalous colonial past
and the continuation of racist and neocolonial attitudes in the present. Or again, they
would act as permanent reminders to white Belgians of the sins of their forefathers,
and the dubious historical roots of their privilege, both within Belgium and globally.
For those at the receiving end, the subverted colonialist monuments could function as
a proverbial moral shot in the arm, as a source of support in their daily struggle against
colonialism and racism, or as levers for decolonising Belgian minds and society.
Pleas for more rened modes of decolonial iconoclasm can also be interpreted
as an enjoinment towards activists to sublimate their outrage in the psychoanalytical
sense of expressing one’s immediate, gut feelings in more elevated, thoughtful, and
imaginative ways. Apart from making decolonial iconoclasm more socially acceptable,
such a sublimated mode might also be taken to elicit more delicate, rich, and enduring
forms of decolonial enjoyment, as opposed to the instant emotional relief and adrenaline
rush of simple acts of disguration or destruction. Over and above considerations of
strategy or ecacy, specic cultural preferences and prejudices can be seen to underlie
such pleas. Restrained, cerebral, and artistic iconoclastic gestures – and the concomitant
subtle delight – are implicitly posited as superior and preferable, both strategically and
aesthetically, to the supposedly base, spontaneous, and philistine actions and pleasures of
“vandal-activists” toppling or sledgehammering away at a colonialist statue.
An implicit hierarchisation of activist modes of contestation is thus upheld based
on assumptions regarding taste that are neither self-evident nor innocent in a postco-
lonial context. One of the basic operations of colonialism can be described through
Jacques Rancière’s (1999, 2004) key concept of the “distribution of the sensible”.14
This concept refers to the dierentiation and classication of groups of human beings
based on the assumption of their dierent sensible capacities. The latter can range from
those considered to be most developed, rened, and rational, to those regarded as less
so, even entailing, in some instances, the denial of specically human forms of sensibility
67
to certain groups. For Rancière, the latter fate befell the slaves or so-called barbarians
in ancient societies, but one can just as well think of the status of the enslaved and col-
onised non-European people since the so-called Age of Discovery. A base, animal type
of sensibility was attributed to these populations, being thought to be receptive mainly
to physical pain and sensual pleasure. Such distinctions, hierarchies, and exclusions on
the level of sensible and aesthetic capacities have played a key role in legitimating the
colonial project, particularly its pretence at being a civilising mission.
The sympathetic critique of the crudity of decolonial methods of contestation,
and the implicit plea for more rened ones, can be seen to inadvertently endorse the
same colonialist “division of the sensible”. It thereby risks appearing as a misguided,
patronising attempt to aesthetically educate and uplift decolonial activists. The clever
or “culturally correct” forms of decolonial iconoclasm that are often proposed as an
alternative to its straightforward applications might, in any case, be a tall order for those
whose lives are negatively impacted by systemic racism and neocolonialism. Its propo-
nents seem to wrongly gauge the current mood of acute outrage in the wake of blatant
incidents of racist violence in the US, making the suggestions somewhat of a mismatch.
Staging Civility…
Considering the aforementioned internal and sympathetic critiques, the question poses
itself of how decolonial contestation through blunt iconoclastic acts is to be assessed.
That is to say, in other than the somewhat condescending terms of an “understandable
yet deplorable” t of “primal” rage on the part of decolonial activists who supposedly
lose their self-composure and dignity, discarding all strategic considerations or concerns
about public perception. Or again, how can radical decolonial iconoclasm be under-
stood more positively, as a legitimate and ecacious strategy in its own right, rather
than merely something to be condoned? Apart from the earlier defence in Benjaminian
terms, what other defences could be levelled? And furthermore, if extreme forms of
decolonial iconoclasm can thus be defended, how should one understand and mediate
the disagreement between decolonial “vandal-activists” and their internal and sympa-
thetic critics concerning the most appropriate means of contestation?
In order to address these questions, I cast this disagreement in terms of a tensional
interplay between two opposing approaches to decolonial and anti-racist struggles, each
with its own rationale, modus operandi, and ecacy. I do not contend here that activists
consciously adopt these approaches. Rather, they are hypothetical-theoretical construc-
tions and interpretative devices that, if nothing else, may serve some purpose in focusing,
furthering, or boosting the debate on the means and ends of decolonial activism.
First, I interpret the sympathetic and internal critiques discussed earlier in terms
of a more general approach towards oppositional, emancipatory politics as theoretically
articulated in Rancière’s political work (1999, 2007). In relation to a particular distri-
bution of the sensible, and the hierarchies and inequalities posited and perpetuated by
it, Rancière argues that oppressed groups contest this distribution by demonstrating
what it denies, namely, their equal intelligence, sensibility, or morality. Such demonstra-
tions of equality by the oppressed are identied as central to emancipatory struggles.
Rancière oers paradigmatic instances of such demonstrations in dierent contexts and
68
with regard to dierent problematics – e.g. class, sex, race, citizenship – and dierent,
oppressed subjects such as the Greek demos, the Roman slaves or plebs, workers and
women in nineteenth-century France, as well as “people of colour” (1992, 59). What
is found to be a similar, central component in the struggle of these diverse groups
against their exclusion or marginalisation is how they disprove the ruling assumptions
concerning their inferior human status by acting and presenting themselves as their
oppressors’ equals. Since this happens in a context in which such equality is rmly
denied, unthinkable even, such “disprovals” have a highly performative character in
Rancière’s theory, in the sense of acting out the equality that is demanded. Hence,
Peter Hallward’s (2006) formulaic characterisation of Rancière’s emancipatory politics
in terms of the “staging [of] equality”.
BYAR’s concerted eort to demonstrate that the Belgo-Congolese and other
minority groups in Belgium are “better” than the crude iconoclastic attacks on monu-
ments or the looting of shops, can be understood in such Rancièrean terms of proving
the civility and dignity of the said groups and, by extension, their equal humanity in
a racist, neocolonialist context. The action seems designed to signal that despite being
discriminated against, minorities are not therefore vindictive and keen to strike back
by violating the majority group’s patrimony, or by intimidating them through violent
protest. On the contrary, minorities communicate that despite enduring racial discrim-
ination, they do not pose exorbitant demands, but only reasonable ones, such as being
treated equally, and neither do they expect any exceptional treatment, such as being
exempted from laws against the destruction of public property. Recommendations of
more rened methods of decolonial contestation, such as Reynebeau’s, can also be
seen to conform to a Rancièrean politics of equality-civility-dignity. In the face of the
outrageous persistence of racism and colonialism, activists are encouraged to contain
their spontaneous emotive responses of anger and vengeance, and express the latter in
more restrained, clever ways, thereby demonstrating a high degree of culturedness and
self-composure.
Key to this politics of civility is thus the refusal to lower oneself to the racists
level and get embroiled into the logic of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”, for
instance by retaliating and answering racist violence with commensurate anti-racist
violence. Or, as argued earlier with Benjamin, by reciprocating the monumentalised
barbarism of Belgium’s colonialist run with a live barbarism. In contrast, by keeping
one’s composure and conducting oneself as a reasonable, civil being in the face of
blatant racism, black activists demonstrate that they are all but the inferior human, or
even animal-like beings that racist ideologies make them out to be, displaying an almost
super-human capacity of self-restraint.
Fact that the BYAR’s action is directed, to an important degree, to fellow
activists – thereby seemingly taking the moral high ground over their “unruly” or
“short-fused” colleagues by literally “cleaning up their mess” – illustrates a further,
key aspect of Rancière’s theory of emancipatory politics emphasised by Todd May
(2009: 113-4). Namely, that demonstrations by the oppressed of their equality or civility
are not only geared towards the oppressor – in this context, the racial adversary or
ex-colonisers – but also function, importantly, as “self-demonstration[s]” (May 2009:
69
114). Appropriating and excelling in modes of sensibility of which an oppressed group
is considered to be incapable, is thus also seen to serve as “a proof given to oneself”
(Rancière 2007, 48) or to one’s own grouping.
… Or Uncivility?
The sympathetic and internal critiques of the recent decolonial protests in Belgium
can thus be seen to be undergirded by a Rancière-style performative politics of civil-
ity. Within such a conceptual framework, the rudimentary iconoclasm and resort to
looting must appear as self-defeating in terms of ghting racism because of reinforcing
persistent racist biases of the white majority, instead of disproving the underlying racial
“division of the sensible”.
However, the decolonial and anti-racist protests in can be seen to be driven
precisely by a sense of disillusion with such a politics of equality and civility, by frustra-
tion at not being treated equally despite all one’s distinctions and accomplishments. At
Black Lives Matter rallies, a commonly voiced complaint was that the Belgo-Congolese
have to perform twice as well as their white counterparts in order to prove their equal
worth, whether academically or professionally. Black activists deplored the unwarranted
burden that is thereby placed on them. Understandably, the resulting frustration, stress,
and fatigue can bring Belgo-Congolese to the extreme point of altogether abandoning
eorts to try and prove the seemingly unprovable – i.e. one’s equal humanity – even
if momentarily. In demonstrative acts of destructive iconoclasm or looting by activists,
one can see such a suspension of the politics of civility played out and staged. The
underlying rationale seems to be that if white-Belgian society keeps on treating its
black citizens as inferior human beings despite all proof to the contrary, then they will
stop behaving at their best and do away with all civilities.
Inversely to the anti-racist or, decolonial politics of civility, and premised on
a more realistic sense of how black people are consistently treated as inferior human
beings no matter how many times they have proven to be the racist’s equal if not supe-
rior, one can thus postulate another, strand of such politics, characterised by the staging
of uncivility. The latter can be seen to be driven by the sobering insight that racism is,
ultimately, not a matter of proof or logic, but of power and irrational biases, and that
racists are neither genuinely interested nor susceptible to proof of black people’s equal
humanity. Based on this, one no longer bothers to oer such proof and stops playing
the racists or colonisers “civilisation game”, which is denounced as a fraud and a ruse.
For one thing, the colonisers’ or racists’ civilisation is clearly structurally tainted by
barbarism in line with Benjamin’s aforementioned claims. For another, the civilisation
game can be found to be stacked in favour of the racists or (ex-)colonisers, with any
success achieved by black people being devalued and undercut by the fact of race.
The latter was commonly argued by Black Lives Matter activists in the US in
the wake of Floyd’s murder. Namely, that it does not matter whether a black person
is, say, highly educated or economically or professionally successful, the mere fact of
being black trumps all possible achievements and distinctions. It makes him/her/they as
vulnerable as any other, less accomplished black person to being treated as a second-rate
citizen by the police, for instance. In a racist society, race thus functions as the great
70
leveller, reducing every black person to the lowest common denominator of the racists
anti-black stereotypes. Again, the anger and despair with this enduring injustice – i.e.
the fact that one’s race functions as the bottom-line in determining one’s humanity and
achievements – can easily be seen to cause anti-racist activists to switch from a politics
based on staging one’s civility, to one geared towards the staging of uncivility.
Postulating a performative politics of uncivility as a counterpoint to a
Rancièrean politics of equality-civility, and interpreting demonstrative acts of crude
decolonial iconoclasm on the basis of such a politics, might allow one to gauge the
possible, underlying rationale and logic of the resort to such acts and other forms of
violent protest.15 Moreover, it might, allow for a more proper and positive assessment
of radical decolonial iconoclasm, that goes beyond evaluations in terms of a deplorable
lapse of self-composure on the part of activists, causing them to smash things up in total
disregard of strategic considerations or a possible public backlash and, as such, some-
thing to be avoided or minimised. Instead, such acts become intelligible and reasonable
as components of an activist approach with its own ecacy and rightful place and time
in decolonial, anti-racist struggles.
The Paradoxical Efcacy of Performing Uncivility
How now should the ecacy of performances of uncivility in furthering anti-racist,
decolonial struggles be assessed, especially in light of the aforementioned concerns
about conrming deep-seated biases and, the related, counterproductive eects, with
the ends being undermined by the means? Against such instrumentalist objections, one
could level Fredric Jameson’s argument concerning the kind of “pure”, or “excessive”
violence that Slavoj Žižek (2006, 380-81), in reference to Fanon’s thoughts on the close
connection between decolonisation and violence, has armed as “unavoidable” in “rev-
olutionary” situations, and to be valued as a “liberating end in itself ” beyond, utilitarian
or strategic calculations.16 In specifying the value of such violence, Jameson contends
that even if “it has no intrinsic value, it is a sign of the authenticity of the revolutionary
process, of the fact that this process is actually disturbing the existing relations” (Žižek
2006, 381). In other words, the demonstrative suspension of, or irreverence toward,
strategic, means-end considerations in violent acts of protest is here taken to be the
“message” and a key, intrinsic part of decolonial struggles. One thus encounters a par-
adoxical mode of ecacy attributed to the very discarding of any thinking in terms of
ecacy. Or again it concerns, a form of protest whose strategic and performative value
lies in the wilful suspension of all strategic thinking.
In a similar vein, the brutal assault on Belgium’s colonialist patrimony sends out
a clear signal that nothing less than a nal reckoning with colonialism and racism will be
accepted this time around, with no more delays or half-measures. It does so in a way that
more restrained, creative forms of cultural contestation – such as the one proposed by
Reynebeau for instance – do not. Against the internal and sympathetic critics, it can thus
be objected that one cannot have the decolonial ends without the violent or destructive
means and the possible reputational fall-out. It can further be understood how demon-
strative acts of uncivility function to an important degree as self-demonstrations, – apart
from provoking the racial adversary – in line with the earlier point concerning the
71
staging of civility. Such acts – say, decolonial activists smashing up a colonial statue –
can similarly be regarded as a way to communicate to fellow activists and community
members that one resolutely rejects the racial adversaries civilisation game.
More specic to the context of decolonial struggle, another explanation for
the ecacy of the staging of uncivility could be deduced from Fanon’s essay “On
National Culture” (1961, 197-224) written during the rst wave of African peoples’
liberation struggles from the 1950s onward. Remarkably, this ecacy is attributed here
to the conrmation of racist stereotypes, which makes for an equally, if not more para-
doxical logic of, ecacy compared to the Žižekian-Jamesonian account. At one point,
Fanon (2004: 158) reects on a phase that, based on his observations, many colonised
intellectuals and artists go through in their quest for an eective way to contribute to
their people’s struggle for liberation. This comes after an initial period in which many
colonised artists and intellectuals assimilated the colonisers culture – one might say, in
an attempt to demonstrate their equality and civility, and conform to the rst mode of
decolonial politics distinguished earlier. In a second phase, an about-turn is seen to take
place in which the colonial culture is rejected and colonised intellectuals rediscover and
assert their own, native culture. Fanon notes, however, that this does not always concern
the native culture’s highest civilisational achievements. In their initial focus on the latter,
colonised intellectuals would still experience a sense of alienation from the common
people whose everyday struggles to survive under conditions of colonialism made them
far less splendid and heroic in comparison, if not downright miserable. In a nal attempt
to become one with the people, some colonised intellectuals are said to give up all
idealised notions of their people and adopt their far less glorious, often “wretched” ways
of life. Of this attempt, Fanon (ibid.) says that it “sometimes means […] wanting to be
a ‘nigger,’ not an exceptional ‘nigger,’ but a real ‘nigger,’ a ‘dirty nigger,’ the sort dened
by the white man.” Fanon’s word choices might be shocking, yet he here merely quotes
the colonisers’ racist terminology.
Within the rst round of decolonial struggles, one thus encounters a strategy
in which colonised artists and intellectuals, in their desire to unite with their impover-
ished people, adopt some of the latter’s manners and values which, as they undoubtedly
know, conrm the colonisers’ racist-colonialist stereotypes. My main interest here is
how Fanon describes the subversive eects of such this peculiar self-positioning on
the colonisers and the colonial enterprise as a whole. Although not intended as such,
Fanon observes that the adoption of the perceived, uncivilised, “barbaric” ways of the
native culture by the educated, cultured elite among the colonised has a damaging
psychological impact on the colonisers. The latter are said to experience this as a scandal
and an aront, signalling their failure at “civilising” the colonised – or at least, its most
“evolved” artistic-intellectual echelons – and at convincing them of the superiority
of, Western European, culture. As Fanon (ibid.) puts it, “Once the colonists, who had
relished their victory over these assimilated intellectuals, realise that these men thought
saved have begun to merge with the ‘nigger scum,’ the entire system loses its bearings.”
He further says that it is experienced as a “setback for the colonial enterprise”, as a
demonstration of the “pointlessness and superciality of the work accomplished” and as
a “radical condemnation of the method of the [colonial] regime” (ibid.).
72
Fanon also observes how this demoralising eect on the coloniser in turn has
an invigorating eect on the colonised. The more the colonisers are dismayed and
dispirited by what to them cannot but appear as an inexplicable regression to an infe-
rior, primitive way of life, the more the colonised are said to be “strengthened” in their
“determination” to ght colonialism (ibid.). As Fanon phrases it, “the uproar it causes
justies his [the colonised intellectual’s] abdication [of the colonisers civilisation] and
encourages him to persevere” (ibid.).
The Psychopolitics of Chopping Off One’s White Wings
Considering these subversive and morale-boosting eects, and apart from the original
motivation of becoming one with the common people among the colonised, one could
see how the adoption of their “uncivilised” ways and, thereby, the self-conrmation of
the colonisers’ racist-colonialist stereotypes, might acquire a performative dimension
and provocative purpose. It might become a way for the colonised to demonstrate
to the colonisers how far they are willing to go in rejecting the latter’s culture and
civilisation, namely to the extreme point of knowingly degrading themselves in the
colonisers’ eyes. If Fanon (2004, 158) describes this move in terms of colonised intellec-
tuals becoming “unrecognizable [for the colonisers], and […] cut[ting] o those wings
that before they had allowed to grow”, there is a clear suggestion of such a provocative
eect and intent. The demonstrative “clipping” of one’s white “wings” or tearing o
of one’s “white mask” by the colonised and, inversely, the adoption of a way of life
and type of behaviour that one knows will only conrm the colonisers worst racist
stereotypes, thus comes to function as a strategy to shock the colonisers and provoke
the above-mentioned feelings of despair and disillusion.
From this remarkable passage of a canonical text in the decolonial corpus, the
paradoxical ecacy of the staging of uncivility in decolonial and anti-racist struggles
can be deduced. To be sure, there are key historical and contextual dierences to take
into account in transposing Fanon’s observations and insights from the rst wave of
struggles by colonised peoples for national liberation after the Second World War, to
twenty-rst century postcolonial Belgium. Still, the resort to crude iconoclasm and
violence by members of a long-standing minority in Belgian society, which I have
interpreted in terms of the staging of uncivility, can be seen to exert similar psychopo-
litical eects on the ex/neo-colonialist nation. It is ideally suited to inict a narcissistic
injury on the (neo)colonialist-racist adversary. Colonialist heritage is clearly designed
to self-congratulate the colonising nation for its so-called civilising mission, which is
often unapologetically and shamelessly stated in inscriptions.17 The brutal assaults on
these monuments visualise in spectacular fashion the blunt, ex post facto rejection of
the colonising nation’s claim to superiority by its supposed beneciaries or “converts”,
exposing this claim as a farce. This forces the post/ex-colonialist nation to reckon not
only with its failure to “win over” the “hearts and minds” of descendants of its previous
colony’s population, but also with the illegitimate nature of its colonial endeavour to
begin with – what Fanon called the “method” of colonialism. This refers to the claim
that, one cannot “civilise” people in an uncivilised, oppressive, and oensive manner, by
treating them as structurally inferior or as eternal novices to the colonial culture.
73
Bold acts of decolonial iconoclasm thus oer a rm rejoinder to the often
heard sentiment among some white Belgians, especially those that have lived or worked
in the colony, that Belgium’s colonial legacy is not entirely negative and that valuable
things were also achieved. By basically giving (post)colonial Belgian society the mid-
dle-nger and saying ‘To hell with your culture’, radical decolonial iconoclasts send
out the unmistakable message that nothing good can ever come of any project that is
enforced through violent, illegitimate means, partially good intentions notwithstanding.
Several arguments can thus be advanced in defence of straightforward, destruc-
tive iconoclasm – understood more generally in terms of the staging of uncivility – as a
legitimate and ecacious form of decolonial contestation. It engenders specic eects
that are key to the decolonisation cause balancing out potentially unfavourable side-ef-
fects in terms of public imaging. Over and above the obvious aim of inicting damage
to monuments or removing them, such acts full other strategic functions and evoke
less straightforward meanings, some of which were specied in this article. In addition
to Jameson’s point that they signal the decolonial movements’ authentic or radical char-
acter, they stage the rejection of a post/ex-colonising nation’s alleged civilising eorts
by its former “beneciaries” and their descendants as indicated by Fanon. Rather than
discarding crude iconoclasm as counterproductive or detrimental to the decolonial or
anti-racist cause by conrming stubborn stereotypes, as some maintain, its necessary
functions and paradoxical ecacy must be acknowledged.
How then, in closing, should one assess the disagreements and reservations with
regard to the deployment of extreme iconoclasm or other forms of violent protest,
as voiced by sympathetic critics and fellow decolonial activists alike? Or again, how
should the relation between what I have called the performative politics of civility and
uncivility be conceived? Despite their opposing rationales and modi operandi, the two
approaches are not necessarily incompatible and they may complement each other in
important ways. On the one hand, continuous frustration, exhaustion even, with the
politics of civility may result in the suspension of civilities, which might pressurise the
racial adversary into conceding to black people’s claim to equal humanity. On the other
hand, the staging of uncivility may only be sustainable for a limited period of time as
the reduction to the racial adversary’s stereotypes might come to be experienced as
self-depreciatory. In order to counterbalance this, recourse might be taken, in turn, to
the politics of civility. A recurrent chronological sequence and oscillation between the
politics of civility and uncivility could thus be postulated, with a proper function and
moment for each. Moreover, despite my somewhat dialectical presentation, the two
types of decolonial, anti-racist politics might, in reality, function as the extreme poles of
a spectrum of activist means and strategies with dierent degrees of both types.
However, the relation between both politics always seems to be an uneasy
and perhaps unacknowledged one, evidenced by the aforementioned internal debates
regarding crude acts of decolonial iconoclasm, or regarding the resort to looting and
arson in the US context. From the perspective of the politics of civility, such actions
and behaviour must always appear self-defeating and self-denigrating, its “perpetra-
tors” undergoing an unfortunate process of desublimation, blindly giving in to their
most base impulses for violation and retaliation, and, as such, “letting the racists win”.
74
Inversely, from the perspective of the politics of uncivility, performances of civility will
no doubt come o as hopelessly naïve, harmless, and upright. And yet, despite their ten-
sional, agonistic relation, the two approaches might not be able to do entirely without
one another. Each could be seen to need the other to compensate for the inherent
limitations of its own logic of resistance, which makes it neither possible nor desirable
to choose one over the other, lest one reduces the ecacy of the struggle against racism
and (neo)colonialism as a whole.
1 The hashtag #LeopoldMustFall was first used
in 2016 by student-activists at London’s Queen
Mary University fighting for the removal of a plaque
commemorating Leopold II (QM Pan-African
Society 2018).
2 One occasion of looting occurred in Brussels’
Louise district on June 7, 2020.
3 For a classic exposé on the horrid acts
committed in the Congo Free State during its reign
by King Leopold II, see Adam Hochschild (1998).
4 For a comprehensive overview and in-depth
treatment of the problematics of colonialist
monuments in public space in Belgium, as well as
different and changing attitudes and approaches
towards these, see Stanard 2019.
5 The Flemish-Dutch name of the collective is
De stoeten Ostendenaere, which can be translated
as the “naughty or brave resident of Ostend”. The
sculptural ensemble is called the “Ruiterstandbeeld
Leopold II”.
6 The collective also made the return of the
bronze hand conditional on adding a panel to the
monument offering accurate historical information
concerning the horrendous practices in Congo,
including historical pictures of mutilated Congolese
people.
7 In the second instance, this was part of protests
against planned celebrations of Leopold II’s urbanist
legacy centred on the equestrian statue on the
Throne Square.
8 The original French name of the collective
is Association citoyenne pour un espace public
décolonial.
9 Excellent studies on the challenges faced
by Belgo-Congolese and other minorities are
Mazzocchetti 2012 and Demart 2013.
10 The ascription of vandalism to acts of
decolonial iconoclasm is consistent with a key
distinction made in the scholarship on iconoclasm.
As Dario Gamboni summarises it, “Whereas the use
of ‘iconoclasm’ and ‘iconoclast’ is compatible with
neutrality and even […] with approval, ‘vandalism’
and ‘vandal’ are always stigmatizing [sic], and imply
blindness, ignorance, stupidity, baseness or lack of
taste” (1997, 18). The key criterion for using the
term iconoclasm instead of vandalism, further, is the
“reckoned presence […] of a motive” (Gamboni
1997, 18) that can be religious or, in case of
decolonial activism, political in nature. Since the
article’s aim is to interrogate critiques of decolonial
iconoclasm in terms of vandalism, I mainly use the
term “radical decolonial iconoclasm” to denote
the straightforward, crude and destructive forms of
decolonial iconoclasm under discussion. In the few
cases where I refer to such forms in the problematic
terms of decolonial vandalism, I use scare quotes.
11 The statue in question is located in the public
park in front of the Cathedral of St. Michael and
St. Gudula in the centre of Brussels. The action of
BYAR took place on June 12, 2020.
12 On the 7 pm news bulletin on the Flemish
public broadcaster VRT on June 12, 2020. Own
translation.
13 The protests against the statue took place on
June 7, 2020, the right-wing protests on June 13, 2020.
14 “Le partage du sensible” in the original French.
15 Although acts of destructive iconoclasm
and extreme forms of protest such as looting or
arson within anti-racist protests can be seen as
instantiations of the same performative politics of
uncivility, there are also significant differences that
complicate their assessment. One such difference
is that in the former case public property, while
in the latter case it often concerns private or
commercial property is targeted, thereby inflicting
damages on parties that are not directly party to
the conflict. Also, in the case of iconoclasm against
colonialist heritage, the choice of the targets as well
as the motivations are rather clear (i.e. decolonial
contestation). In contrast, in the case of looting for
instance, the targets are mostly contingent and other
motives play a role such as discontent over structural
socio-economic deprivation, if also, most likely, a
certain degree of opportunism.
16 Jameson conveyed this point in a private
conversation with Žižek, as indicated in an earlier
version of this passage (2004, 118).
17 Think, for example, of the inscription
underneath a bust of Leopold II in Auderghem,
which reads “A tribute to those who brought
civilisation to the Congo” (my translation from the
French).
Notes
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Belga. 2018. “Un collectif anti-colonial
déboulonne une statue de Léopold II à
Forest: Le bourgmestre de Forest dénonce un
comportement de taliban.” Le Soir, January
11, 2018. https://www.lesoir.be/133432/
article/2018-01-11/un-collectif-anti-colonial-
deboulonne-une-statue-de-leopold-ii-forest.
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Reflections. New York: Schocken Books.
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South Africa Meets the World Bank, IMF and
International Finance. London: Zed Books.
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Belgium and Postcolonial Perspectives.” African
Diaspora 6, no. 1: 1-20.
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François Maspero.
Fanon, Frantz. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. New
York: Grove Press.
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Iconoclasm and Vandalism Since the French
Revolution. London: Reaktion Books.
Hallward, Peter. 2006. “Staging Equality: On
Rancière’s Theatrocracy.” New Left Review 37:
109-129.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2001. Empire.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hochschild, Adam. 1998. King Leopold’s Ghost: A
Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial
Africa. Boston: Pan Macmillan.
May, Todd. 2009. “Rancière in South Carolina.” In
Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics, edited
by Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts, 105-119.
Durham: Duke University Press.
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et théorie du complot. Représentations
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dans des quartiers précaires deBruxelles.”
Brussels studies 63. http://journals.openedition.
org/brussels/1119.
QM Pan-African Society. 2018.
“#LEOPOLDMUSTFALL: Queen Mary
Unversity of London.” In Rhodes Must Fall: The
Struggle to Decolonise the Racist Heart of Empire,
edited by Brian Kwoba, Roseanne Chantiluke,
and Athinangamso Nkopo, 227-246. London:
Zed Books.
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Subjectivization.” October 61: 58-64.
Rancière, Jacques. 1999. Disagreement: Politics
and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
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London: Verso.
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hoeft niet. Zijn hand afzagen kan wel
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References
Matthias Pauwels is a post-doctoral researcher at
North-West University’s School of Philosophy.
His doctoral thesis critically investigated Jacques
Rancière’s work on aesthetics and politics (2015).
His current research focuses on socially engaged art
practices, popular protest movements, and radical
decolonial politics in contemporary South Africa.
Some of the results have been published in the
academic journals Cultural Politics, the Journal of the
British Society for Phenomenology, De Arte, and Theoria,
as well as the volume African Somaesthetics: Cultures,
Feminisms, Politics (Brill, 2020). Pauwels’ earlier
publications in cultural-political theory include
the monograph Too Active to Act: Cultural Activism
after the End of History (Valiz, 2010) and the volume
Cultural Activism Today: The Art of Over-Identification
(Episode, 2007).
Biography
Abstract
In this interview, Estelle Ferrarese elaborates on her account of vulnerability and care
to highlight its political and social, as opposed to its ethical, dimensions. Drawing
on, amongst others, Adorno, Tronto, Castell, and Laugier, she argues that vulnerability
and care should not be understood ontologically, as an antropological exposure of the
body, but rather socially, as the normative expectations and material conditions under
which care work takes place. Situating her approach in anglophone and francophone
discussions on vulnerability and precarity, she discusses her approach to normative
expectations and how it informs her account of vulnerability of living at the mercy of
someone else’s agency, as well as the politicization of vulnerability. She also discusses the
political implications of her account of vulnerability and care with regard to a range of
contemporary issues, such as the Men’s Right Movement, the posthuman turn and the
Antropocene, and mutual aid and the neoliberalization of the welfare state.
Care, Vulnurability, Welfare State, Care Ethics,
Mutual Aid, Critical Theory
Keywords
DOI
The Politics of Vulnerability and Care:
An Interview with Estelle Ferrarese
Estelle Ferrarese, Liesbeth Schoonheim & Tivadar Vervoort
Krisis 42 (1): 76-92.
https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.42.1.38697
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 License International License (CC
BY 4.0). © 2022 The author(s).
Licence
76
The Politics of Vulnerability and Care:
An Interview with Estelle Ferrarese
Estelle Ferrarese, Liesbeth Schoonheim & Tivadar Vervoort
Liesbeth Schoonheim & Tivadar Vervoort: In your work (2016a; 2016b), you sketch
various genealogies of the concept of vulnerability. You refer to the American strand
of Butler’s notion of grievable lives, which of course builds on a Levinasian notion of
ethics, but interestingly you also refer to a French strand that starts from the sociological
analysis by Robert Castel. Precarity, in this latter approach, indicates a process (rather
than a social position) that is shared by the precariously employed and unemployed,
that is, by the poor and the middle class. How would you position yourself in this
genealogy? And in addition to that, keeping in mind the topic of this special issue, could
you elaborate on your understanding of how vulnerability relates to care?
Estelle Ferrarese: At some point, maybe about seven-eight years ago, the very idea of
vulnerability was all over, and a lot of people were trying to deal with this concept. So,
I wanted to gure out where it came from and why it was so important at that time to
think in terms of vulnerability. More specically, I tried to identify the dierent lines of
thought that had produced this focus. My aim was both theoretical and political.
In addition to the lines you mentioned, there is a very old, Christian account of
vulnerability, to which I did not want to be bound. The history of vulnerability within
this tradition is actually very rich. But it also explains why there is so much reluctance
when it comes to vulnerability: although this concept has been met with success, it is
also met with some kind of allergy, especially from people from the left. My assumption
was that it was mostly because of this Christian past that the concept of vulnerability
was considered to be totally apolitical. With the gure of a merciful God who becomes
man, inasmuch as he assumes a vulnerable esh sensitive to suering, it casts vulnerability
as an anthropological feature. I wanted to address this issue. My aim was to identify and
to build on lines of thought where vulnerability was always-already political, where the
term does not only refer to a shared ontological precariousness, but to the exposure to
threats that are socially determined. This social determination encompasses our bodies,
that is, even when we talk about bodily vulnerability, there is something which is social.
And this socially determined vulnerability is not limited to a gradual dierence between
bodies, where some of us are much more exposed due to, for instance, disability or
race-based violence. The historical and social texture of vulnerability is not limited to
an ordering of bodies – some are more exposed than others because of a collective and
institutional past and present. This texture characterizes each singular body. We should
not understand our bodies as immutable, and instead our biology is completely histor-
ical and socially determined, technologized, and so on. This, more thoroughly social,
account can be found in Adorno. In other words, I was looking for these approaches
that conceptualized vulnerability in terms that were free from traces of ontology.
And I found some interesting possibilities. None of them completely satised
me. This is why I try to borrow from dierent threads. One of them, of course, was
Butler’s, especially because they were at the time trying to conceive of a politics of
77
vulnerability that would arise from bodies (Butler 2013 [1997]; 2016 [2009]). But I was
not convinced by what they proposed. Another possibility was care ethics. And as it
happens, I started to engage a lot with representatives of this tradition in France in the
mid-2010s. For some reason, there was a renewal of the idea of care in France, which
took place almost twenty or fteen years after all the developments in the States around
Joan Tronto and others (Tronto 1993; Held 2006).
This was a group of several feminist thinkers around Sandra Laugier, who came,
strangely enough, from an analytical background, primarily Wittgensteinean schol-
arship. They tried to think through, Laugier especially, what care means in terms of
ordinary life (Laugier 2020; Paperman and Laugier 2020 [2006]; Molinier, Laugier, and
Paperman 2009). And they started to invite me a lot to their workshops because I was
using this idea of vulnerability. In my discussions with them, I was assessing what I could
accept from care ethics and what I would need to abandon. So that was the second,
big trend with which I engaged. There are elements of care ethics that I found really
valuable, especially in Tronto. But I had a big diculty with her, and with care ethics
more broadly, namely that the issue of capitalism was completely out of sight. While
capitalism was not really considered, they were, of course, talking and thinking of care
as some kind of work. And hence this work did not seem to be determined by capitalist
imperatives, it seemed there was no inherent relationship between the distribution and
performance of care on the one hand, and the meaning of the market and of production
on the other hand. For me, coming from the Frankfurt School, it was of course not
possible to think about work as something that could be thought independently from
the capitalist form of life.
And then nally, there is Castel, whom you mentioned and who is a sociologist.
As opposed to many of the other theorists that I mentioned before, and who are often
in between philosophy and the social sciences, or were completely in philosophy, he
was a sociologist who was recognized for his empirical work. In the period I am men-
tioning, around 2015, he had already passed away, but some ten to fteen years earlier
he had used this idea of vulnerability in regard to the question of poverty. That was his
prime focus, and he was arguing that vulnerability should not be thought of as a state
but as something that was to be grasped as a certain temporality, as related to time.
Vulnerability evolves and is the result of past events and must be envisioned in relation
to the future. I found that really interesting. The other thing I found intriguing was the
unusual way he was dealing with the idea of risks. When he was talking about groups
that are vulnerable to poverty, he was describing risks. He showed that if you have
previously been exposed to poverty, you have more chances to become poor again or
even become poorer. He would also think of risk in questions, such as, do you still have a
strong network of relationships, acquaintances, and family or not? In other words, he was
trying to list those dierent risks, suggesting that if you’re losing one asset after the other,
then you would become even more vulnerable. What I found most fascinating, however,
was that his purpose was not to assess vulnerabilities by calculating risks, which is part
of the mathematical way of thinking typical for sociology. His aim was not so much to
add one item to another to anticipate a kind of logical development of someone’s life;
what he was actually trying to think with this idea of vulnerability was some sort of
78
an existential condition: when you are vulnerable it actually encompasses your way of
dealing with the world. It transforms your psyche. It is really a total experience. I learned
from Castel that when we talk about risk, we should avoid thinking of that as something
that aects you from the outside and makes you the prey of dierent sociological logics.
It’s also something that becomes you, and as you become more vulnerable, you embrace
your own vulnerability, even if it’s against your own will, of course.
This is, in short, the constellation within which I developed my account of
vulnerability.
LS&TV: Could you elaborate on your notion of the body as fully socially determined,
which is also central to your current research. If we understand you correctly, the issue
is not just a social constructivist point, such as Judith Butler’s, where the body is situated
beyond discourse and yet not accessible except through discourse. New Materialists
have criticized this position quite extensively, and brought to our attention specic
practices of care as transformation of the body. Some, such as William Connolly, have
suggested that an experimental, playful practice of self-care might alter our aective and
bodily reactions, which are initially sedimentations of power relationships (Connolly
1997). Would such a notion of care of the self as transformative, corporeal practice have
a place in your social-constructivist account?
EF: My point is that the body is not only determined, but it’s really constructed. I want
to avoid a dualism where a body is perceived as pure biology, that it encounters dierent
social items, where this encounter involves some kind of violence, and modies an
until-then natural core. My point is that actually our bodies are always-already historical
and socially framed, shaped, and formed because biology has a history – rst of all, a
species history but secondly also a personal history. Everything is interwoven from the
beginning. For instance, we have bigger bodies then 500 years ago. Most, if not all,
of our bodies are technically or medically modied right now: most of us have had
surgeries, many of us take hormones on a daily basis, etc. To speak about history of the
bodies does not amount to endorsing an evolutionary perspective, it is not a question
of envisaging a slow mechanical capitalization of an optimum, on the contrary, it is of
how practices and techniques modied the bodies, in ways which can be contradictory.
And it does not do any good to try to think of vulnerability as something that would be
related to a kind of weakness of the body with a big “B”, a body that would be without
protection, and where threats that are so-called external would activate or disactivate
exposure dierently according to the class or the gender you belong to.
So that’s my point. But you might be right that there is a way we can exper-
iment with our bodies. The history of individual bodies is also a history of self-care
in the Foucauldian sense. The late Foucault talks about self-care as what you owe to
yourself and which is related to the body, as the ancient Greeks used to think (Foucault
1986; 2012). So of course, you can modify your own body through some forms of care.
LS&TV: Could we go back to your genealogy and more specically the position of
Butler and Castell? Your combination of these two authors brings to mind Isabell Lorey’s
79
work on precarity. Lorey describes precarization as the neoliberal government of risks,
so drawing on a Foucaultian analysis of neoliberalism, but she also builds on Butler’s
account of precariousness as well as Castel’s sociological analysis of precarity and risk.
But whereas in your work there seems to be a tension between Butler’s work on
precariousness and Castel’s work of precarity, in Lorey’s work these themes are brought
together. More specically, Lorey seems to dier from you in that she claims to follow
Butler in understanding precariousness as “the term for a socio-ontological dimension
of lives and bodies” rather than “an anthropological constant,” or again, “a transhistorical
state of being human, but rather a condition inherent to both human and non-human
being […] it is always relational and therefore shared with other precarious lives” (Lorey
2007, 11-12). So the question that emerges is that, if we understand precariousness
not as an anthropological constant but as a relational account of vulnerability, could
such a relational account prevent the abstraction of vulnerability into a trans-historical
anthropology? How, and if, can a relational understanding of vulnerability prevent vul-
nerability becoming an anthropological constant in your account?
EF: That’s a good question. What I would like to highlight is that I, for sure, support
shifting the idea of vulnerability from a form of ontology to a relational form. However,
I am also a bit wary about focusing too much on this idea of relations because the
idea of relations brings to the fore the face-to-face model and it makes vulnerability a
matter of intersubjectivity: what can happen when someone is in the hands of someone
else. Instead, what I try to think is really the fact that this scene of intersubjectivity is
shaped by a lot of things, but mostly by normative expectations that make us vulnerable
to some set of threats. In other words, it is precisely because there exists some set of
normative expectation regarding what should be done on this scene that you are made
actually vulnerable. Vulnerability necessarily appears at the same time as a horizon of
obligations (fullled or not). Maybe this is a totally constructivist way of thinking, but
I would say that we cannot use that idea of vulnerability to think about the kind of
exposure that one might have experienced in other times. I think that is not the right
way to think about vulnerability. It does not acknowledge the fact that vulnerability is
instituted. Vulnerability materialises at the level of interactions and social interactions
but is instituted by normative expectations which are not mental phenomena but are
situated between subjects, and must even be conceived as institutions. And this is some-
thing that the focus on the relational does not allow us to think.
LS&TV: Like your work on care and vulnerability, Butler has taken up elements from
Adorno’s reections on morality in their reections on vulnerability. In their Adorno-
lectures (Butler 2005, 103), they interpret Adorno’s account of humankind as pertaining
to “a double movement, one in which we assert moral norms at the same time as we
question the authority by which we make that assertion.” Still, Butler utilizes notions
such as relationality, precariousness, and grievability that seem to dene essential char-
acteristics of humankind. You have criticized Butler’s work for this tendency, as well
as for lacking an account of how the performativity of precariousness would imply
an emancipatory politics. Elsewhere, (2016, 152), you suggest that the denial of the
80
political importance of vulnerability in the literature (which you dene, very broadly,
from Foucauldians to other post-foundational thinkers such as Rancière and Badiou),
unfolds along four themes, of which its “possible anthropological character” is one. You
write that “the rearmation of the ontological, anthropological, or constitutive status
of vulnerability raises problems that are categorical as much as political, that is, are of
political pertinence: how could an ineradicable, universal phenomenon pertaining to
human nature become the object of a critique, or be the wellspring of emancipation?
How does the idea of a fundamental human vulnerability enable us to account for
socially produced or congured forms of vulnerability?” (ibid, 153). Could you elab-
orate on your account of vulnerability (and care) with relation to the anthropological
assumptions, and its consequences for a politics of vulnerability? This massive question
could perhaps be split into two: rstly, how does your account of care and vulnerability
relate to these kinds of anthropological assumptions, and what is your critique of these
assumptions?; and secondly, what does this mean for a politics of vulnerability?
My denition of vulnerability is a living at the mercy of someone else’s agency.
I use this denition rst because I think this idea of “mercy” is very important: it stresses
the fact that something actually might happen or might not happen, but either way you
are still vulnerable. It also encompasses the idea of a power, of a huge power, which is
placed upon you, which does not depend on you, while I insist that it doesn’t mean that
you don’t have your own agency.
It just means that on your own you do not have the eciency or the ecacy
to protect yourself from the risk of these threats. All the same, you can have very strong
agency in other parts of your life.
Now, as I said before, this idea of living at the mercy has to be understood as
something which is determined by normative expectations. And this is where maybe I
should mention someone who is also important to my work, and that is Castoriadis, from
whom I borrow some ideas, even though he is not at all a theorist of vulnerability. He
actually helped me to think about the strength and the density of normative expectations
again, which are not only shared beliefs, but something much more important. He has
this strong idea of institutions as something that is both instituted and instituting. This
is exactly what I have in mind when I talk about normative expectations as institutions.
They are instituted in that we receive them and they are in front of us. But at the same
time, they are instituting, as they institute the scene of interaction. And they institute the
subject, they make us subjects that appear on the intersubjective scene. I mean, we are
made of normative expectations and they create us as a subject.
Once you think about vulnerability in these terms, then politics becomes a
matter of making normative expectations explicit, making them reexive, making them
the object of debates, of perhaps also conicts and struggles in a society.
From this observation, you can go both ways. You can say that there are a lot
of exposures that should count as vulnerabilities, that should be taken care of by the
state, for instance. But you could also see that actually there are some vulnerabilities that
should stay under the radar and that should not be addressed because it is okay if they
stay in the private sphere. I think I mentioned that during our discussion in Leuven,1
when I was talking about love. Love is typically a form of vulnerability, where we are
81
exposed to the other’s lack of love for us. This vulnerability is terrible to the point of
being a threat to life, as some people commit suicide because they were abandoned by
their partners. But at the same time, as a society, we don’t want laws ruling the end of a
feeling or a relationship, and we don’t want the state to take care of this. So, if one thinks
about vulnerability as instituted by normative expectations, a politics of vulnerability is
about making them explicit, reexive, and being the objects of debate. I don’t necessar-
ily mean the polite and rational, Habermasian, debates, but really making them explicit
and then seeing what happens in terms of justications, critiques, claims, etc. It is about
making disagreement possible and visible.
And this may bring us to another point, since once you do that, or rather in
the process of doing that, new political subjects might appear. Subjects who transform
themselves by the very fact that they are putting forward some claims about the reality,
the scope of their exposure and the kind of collective organization it requires. There
is no politics without the birth of new political subjects. Here too, when a person or a
group excavates and challenges an existing normative expectation, we witness a polit-
ical transformation which is at the same time self-transformation. I do believe political
subjects can emerge from a condition of vulnerability, as opposed to what many authors
assume whom I mentioned at the beginning of my talk, such as Rancire or Badiou
(Rancière 2006). For Badiou vulnerability enables the substitution of politics for ethics
and blocks the path to all emancipatory politics (Badiou, 2001). I would say no, quite
the opposite, and stress that being vulnerable is also the possibility to make explicit our
own normative expectation, or the kind of normative expectations in which we are
entangled. Our political agency can be deployed against, on the basis of a vulnerability,
as emancipation can be a task engendered by the trial of vulnerability.
And if I could add a last part to my reection: there is also a threat inherent to
the place of vulnerability in politics; it sometimes seems that the use of the idea of vul-
nerability would per se suce to receive some kind of satisfaction for our claims. I mean
that vulnerability is such a strong focus in politics and philosophy that the argument
“I’m vulnerable” sometimes seems to be enough to prove or to justify some kind of
claim. For instance, there is a new masculinism that has now arrived in France, coming
from North America. I don’t know if you have that in Germany, too, but you probably
do. It is evidenced by the struggles of fathers who did not obtain the custody of their
kids. Which vocabulary do you think they use? That of vulnerability: they described
themselves as vulnerable fathers who are actually at the mercy of unjust states. And it’s
interesting that they actually use the idea of vulnerability to describe an exposure to
very old, patriarchal patterns that would not take into account their love for the kids.
That is why vulnerability not only has a political relevance, but must have
one: politics is a matter of disagreement, including strong disagreement. I think that
what politics allows is precisely an encounter – which can even be dicult – between
dierent discourses, and this encounter actually, and hopefully, might be necessary to
judge and assess all the claims.
That focus on disagreement produces another set of questions, because this
raises the whole issue of who is heard by whom in politics on the political scene. And
it is tragic for some people who cannot provide the proof of what they are exposed to.
82
It’s very complicated. But I want to stress that we need this movement of explication
and conict when we talk about vulnerability, because of this threat that vulnerability
becomes an argument per se. This is why we need politics.
LS&TV: The manner in which you describe how the language of vulnerability almost
directly invites a language of reparative justice, and how these can be co-opted by the
right, such as the Men’s Rights movement, is very instructive. Could you return, however,
to your discussion of love? Just to clarify, your position sounds almost Arendtian, in that
romantic love entails its own forms of vulnerability, and that it should be kept out of
politics and out of the control of the state (Arendt 2013, 242; 2003, 207–8). This is a
position, of course, that has been subject to feminist critiques of love, where there is
a long history of contesting, interrogating, and ghting the normative expectations of
romantic love. Love, we might argue, is always-already under the purview of the state,
insofar as they take shape in specic institutions – typically, marriage – that are sanc-
tioned by the state. Or, in a more Bourdieuian sense, we could say that love relationships
often take place between people with a similar social capital, which has been converted
in one way or another by the state. We might say that the assertion that love is to be
kept outside of politics and, perhaps more narrowly, outside of the state, runs counter
to the feminist critique of love that has brought about massive changes in civil and
criminal law with regard to the institutions in which ‘love’ takes place, but also to the
observation that love is always-already political.
Thank you for raising this question, which is indeed very important. When I
was talking about love, I was precisely thinking about the fact that discussing it and the
kind of collective organization it legitimates is political. The claim that the state should
not address all vulnerabilities arising from love is a political one. I was not saying it is
not political at all. Quite the contrary. I was saying let’s make this the topic of discussion.
And probably – that was my anticipation – most of us would say no, we don’t want the
prohibition of divorce on the grounds of the pain one can experience in a break-up.
But again, that would be the result of a discussion, which means that actually divorce,
marriage, partnership, etc., is political. We saw that in a dierent way in the last ten
years all over Europe with the same-sex marriages struggles. So, you and I agree about
love. I like very much Adorno’s notes on love, which you can nd in Minima Moralia
(§11, 21, 104, 107, 109, 122) precisely because he understands it not as the tumult of
an interiority, but as having from the start a content and social eects. He suggests
that love is pressing in the direction of something which is outside of the capitalist
form of life because it is completely external to any idea of commensurability, and it
coincides with some form of truly caring for someone etc. But at the same time, it
is something totally bourgeois. It is this hilarious aphorism in Minima Moralia where
he is discussing divorce. The truth of love is exposed in the pathetic divorce by
intellectuals and the way they end up struggling in a very petty way about, you know,
furniture and taxes.
So the political texture of love can be observed from dierent aspects, in addition
to feminist theories that have articulated a critique of love. We could think, for instance,
about the fact that the chances of loving and being loved are unequally distributed.
83
Patrick Pharo, a French sociologist, showed in the 1980s how it was complicated for
farmers to nd love because women didn’t want to live this very harsh life anymore – I
mean, the life outside on the elds, the absence of vacation, etc. In this sense too, love is
thoroughly social and political in the sense that the fact of failing in love is not only a
matter of contingency and bad luck, but can be the result of social determinations. We
should not reduce love to this pure feeling coming from nowhere that would save us
against greediness and violence and hate.
LS&TV: Your recent work centers around the tradition of Frankfurt School Critical
Theory on the one hand, and questions around the ethics of care and vulnerability
within the feminist tradition on the other. Taken at face value, the two traditions do
not seem to have much in common: recently, it has often been pointed out that the
writings of the rst generation of the Frankfurt School tend to neglect gendered forms
of social domination. Or even worse, as far as gender and sexuality are discussed, the
recourse of authors like Adorno to Freudian clichés can even be said to reproduce
rather than problematize gendered social norms. In The Fragility of Concern for Others
you develop a fascinating counterweight to these divergences by pointing out that both
Adorno’s “minimal” morality and contemporary theories of care ethics nd a common
ground in taking issue with the coldness and suering that is caused by subsumption
of the particular under the general. What implications do these resonances have for
emancipatory politics in general, and the tradition of critical theory more specically?
EF: These two theoretical constellations do have a few things in common. First, they
apprehend the body as the level or the reality at which morality should be thought
and envisioned. There is this strong idea of the body, of a materialist morality that you
have in Adorno, and especially in Negative Dialectics, when he says that what is left, after
Auschwitz, is only the kind of disgust that the body can experience confronting the
possibility of harming someone else. So, in Adorno, you have this corporeal moment
that would be the last resource in order to avoid evil. On the other hand, care ethics
is all about bodies that actually perform work for other bodies. Moral life is made of
the weary bodies of caregivers; the insistent or resistant bodies; the failing, heavy, or
repulsive bodies of care receivers; the sexualized bodies of both receivers and givers, etc.
Morality is to be understood in its materiality, and taking care of others has to do with
something which is very corporeal, even more so than in Adorno.
Secondly, and Adorno might even go further at the theoretical level on this
point, both traditions think about morality as something that is impure, which I nd
very enlightening. Morality and making moral choices is not a matter of a mental
experiment that you should and could have by abstracting yourself from the context in
order to determine what is just and what is unjust. Both Adorno and care ethics made
a great deal of criticizing Kant’s model of the categorical imperative and recasting the
idea of moral judgment, in its content and form, so that it is not measured by references
to general principles.
But more importantly, a judgment or a moral act is not invalidated because it is
born in a concrete situation, hindered, or determined, precisely because there is no such
84
a thing as an abstract moral judgement. For Adorno all the incarnations of morality, i.e.
all moral philosophies, but also all forms of moral life, are historical, and bear the mark
of a social group. So you can have forms of morality that are determined by a history of
violence. Freedom is not the condition of possibility of the moral gesture. Therefore, the
fact that certain moral gestures are born in and from a general organization – generated
by a reifying totality – of work and aects, is not enough to invalidate them.
And this is the case in the history of care. The point we can make with Adorno,
which is not totally explicit in the ethics of care, is the fact that the way you take care of
vulnerable others is something which was born in a history of domination of women
by men, but also, nowadays, the domination of women, and sometimes men, coming
from the Global South by men and women coming from the Global North. So you
have this completely unequal, unfair distribution of work and of an aect, which is
both the result and the tool of a system of domination. But that does not mean that the
normative content of care is wrong. I like that idea very much. In Negative Dialectics he
says that asking the question of the origin of something is a question of a master, that
“the category of origin is ‘a category of dominion’. It conrms that a man ranks rst
because he was there rst” (1990, 155). As a master, you are in the position to ask proofs
of a purity that suits your interests; the reference to origin reinforces the position of one
with a past that is neither shameful nor humble.
So care ethics and critical theory have some orientations in common, but I
also think that one can be used in order to highlight a lot of things that are completely
dismissed by the other. For instance, Adorno is not a feminist, and the moments when
he is most masculinist are precisely the moments when he tries to be a feminist. We nd
such clichés about women in Minima Moralia; also, he is talking about general coldness
as a characteristic of our capitalist form of life. He does not see that this coldness is also
intertwined with, and articulated by, forms of care that are produced by capitalism. Nor
does he see that the care produced by capitalism is gendered, so the logic of gender
remains completely out of sight in his analysis. This perspective can come from the
background of care ethics.
In the other way, as I mentioned at the beginning, care ethics does not really
think about capitalism. In this tradition, work is work, and is not examined as a labor
shaped by a particular economy. It thus misses the many ways in which the gender
order and the capitalist form of life are intertwined. So I think that you can build some
bridges, some of them might be complicated, but I think it is useful to do so.
LS&TV: They are both in dire need of each other.
EF: Absolutely. That’s a very good way to put it. Yes.
LS&TV: Your reading of Tronto in The Fragility of Concern for Others stresses the
gendered distribution of care as an aect (disposition) and activity, with occasional refer-
ences to other dimensions of oppression – an emphasis which is legitimately considered
the aim of your argument. What I found most striking in Tronto – and what makes her a
profoundly political or social theorist – is that she shows how the “morality” of care that
85
Gilligan essentialized in gendered terms, can actually be found among other groups that
have been coerced or expected to take up care work, for instance Black men. Drawing
on Black feminism, we could perhaps develop this insight in order to problematize the
link between disposition and activity, which is at the heart of the convergence between
Adorno and care ethics as being concerned with coldness and suering. I am thinking
in particular of the gure of the Black domestic as the “outsider within”, whose care
work and close attention to the white psyche enables them and their communities
with information crucial to Black survival (Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks). Could you
elaborate on the possible implications of this critique for your analysis?
EF: I was very much inuenced by bell hooks, even though I do not use her work at all
in the book on Adorno. And I totally agree that the unequal distribution of care work
relies on an unequal distribution of aects. Capitalism, including in its (post-)colonial
logic and in its gendered dimension, produces the subjectivations it needs. It is not only
that you are supposed to perform the gesture, you are also expected to feel, to experience
the moral feeling allegedly behind this gesture.
Someone with whom I discussed a lot in France is Caroline Ibos, a sociologist
who worked on nannies that bourgeois Parisian women hire to take care of their kids.
Her eld work shows the disappointment of these bourgeois women when they realize
that their nanny was actually only driven by money, for instance because the nanny
left and went back to West-Africa without further notice (in France many nannies
come from there). They feel betrayed, thinking “how is it possible that she left without
considering the wellbeing of my kids?” Despite the fact that the paid work hours have
been completed, there is a feeling that the contract has not been fullled. So I agree
that there is this pressure on aects which might also be the last stage of domination.
At the same time, I would also argue in a dierent direction. One could also
say exactly the opposite, that actually that it is easier for some groups to be good, to be
generous. This is something that Adorno talks about in Minima Moralia. When you are
rich, it is so easy to be benevolent and refrain from some forms of violence, pettiness,
and meanness because your form of life is so smooth that actually you are in the posi-
tion that allows you to be kind: “Wealth insulates from overt injustice” (Adorno 2005,
186). So, you have this kind of aect that is possible with no eort precisely because you
are protected from many kinds of resentment, powerlessness, etc., etc. Maybe we can
make things even more complex by saying that, sometimes, experiencing certain moral
feelings is the result of a privilege. Tronto sees only one part of the picture because she
only talks about the indierence of the privileged. For her, the only result of privilege is
indierence. But privilege can also produce some kind of concern, of decency, because
you can aord it. There is no price to be paid.
LS&TV: One of the new ways in which Tronto is taken up is through posthuman
approaches such as by Puig de la Bellacasa (2017). She explicitly builds on Tronto’s
suggestion that care “is not restricted to human interaction with others. We include the
possibility that caring occurs for objects and for the environment, as well as for others”
(Tronto 1993, 103). Care, in Puig de la Bellacasa’s reading, is no longer restricted to an
86
activity carried out by humans and towards humans but operates within and between
sympoetic systems. While this account runs the risk of making the concept of care
counterintuitively large, it has the great benet of extending care to some of the most
pressing contemporary problems – those connected to extractive capitalism such as the
depletion of natural resources and mass extinction. Could you elaborate if and how
your notion of vulnerability facilitates such a posthuman turn?
EF: Issues of care were and should be thought in ways that are related to non-humans
such as animals, ecological systems, etc. It is striking that most thinkers who use the idea
of care, concern, etc. always address it in a way of the question of non-human entities
that are entitled to our care; such as Tronto, of course, but it is at the core of a lot of
thinking, and again Adorno is an example of that.
I have been a vegetarian for twenty-ve years, so I am totally sympathetic with
what is going on in the younger generations and with this strong movement in the
direction of taking care of what is nonhuman.
Now I developed my account of vulnerability without explicitly dealing with
non-human exposures. They would t with what I propose in as much as I am talking
about vulnerability as something that cannot be disconnected from a set of normative
expectations, and about politics as having to do with making those normative expec-
tations explicit and rephrasing them. When it comes to the environment or animals
we also have normative expectations. But then I am well aware that the usual issue
arises: that we are confronted with entities with which we are in a relation of radical
asymmetry, meaning that we can discuss our normative expectations, but they cannot.
I am not sure whether you can solve the issue with ethics of care either. There
is an inherent violence in the act of care, because caring for someone is also dening
what she or he needs. If there is no way to counterbalance what you believe through
some kind of explicit claim that would be made by who actually benets from your
care activity, the violent moment of care will always be there. This is inescapable when
it comes to environment or animals.
Although he comes from a very dierent background, I remember that
Habermas tried to think what we would all owe to animals in Moral Consciousness
and Communicative Action. He was not convincing at all because he argued that we
owe some kind of consideration to animals because they are quasi-human beings that
are capable of intersubjectivity and even of a quasi-language. So he tries to give them
some kind of rights or entitlements to care because they are similar to us. But I think
this is the totally wrong way of putting it. There must be a moment where you think
about this entitlement in a way which is completely disconnected to what makes them
possibly similar to us. At least theorists of care are not trying to avoid or disguise the
problem of asymmetry.
Now how can you really engage in an activity of care without these radical
movements of violent authority? I don’t know. I really don’t know. In France Bruno
Latour advocates a parliament of things. But this parliament of things only works if
there are some spokespersons, and politically speaking we know what spokespersons
usually have made of the claims of the ones they are supposed to defend.
87
LS&TV: We indeed could deploy a similar move as Habermas does, starting from the
observation that there is this specic form of inter-species intersubjectivity in attend-
ing to needs. That step can be made quite easily, to say that there are some forms of
normative expectations between so-called higher developed animals. But what Puig
de la Bellacasa does is more radical. She takes Tronto’s denition fairly literally, under-
standing any activity, including the activities of worms and of fungi, as care. So, she not
only addresses the care of humans towards nature but also the care that is exerted by
nonhuman nature. It is really interesting in its radicality, as it questions the conjunction
of aect and activity and opens up the concept of care. Still, we end up with the same
problem that you highlighted with reference to Latour: it is not so clear anymore what
the concept means and entails politically.
EF: In some reections on capitalism, in particular in Jason Moore’s work, something
similar is done in terms of work instead of care: we are invited to think about and
measure the work which is performed by forests, inasmuch as that they clean the air,
that they make our environment breathable. Or the work which is performed by bees
insofar as they reproduce owers and things like that. So there is the idea that what
should be named “work” is not limited to what humans can perform. But that does
not encompass the question of aect that you just mentioned. I don’t think you can
claim that bees have some kind of aect, at least when they take pollen from one ower
and bring it to another. Even if something like an aect is involved, it is probably not
directed towards human beings.
In order to act as a spokesperson, we might need to make a kind of mental and
theoretical adjustment to translate what is done by non-human entities into categories
that are human. Talking about care and work when it comes to some kind of non-human
activities might help us in order to think about what we owe non-humans. But that
does not solve the political problem of the very existence of a spokesperson, because in
the end the only ones who speak – who discuss normative expectations – are us.
LS&TV: In conclusion, could we talk a bit more about how you situate care as a collec-
tive, political praxis within the context of the privatization of the welfare state? Emma
Dowling, in The Care Crisis (Dowling 2022), shows very astutely for the British context
how the neoliberal de- and underfunding of public services leads to crises, where care
work is increasingly relegated down the “care chain”, such that underpaid and unpaid
care work is done by those who are marginalized based on residency and citizenship
status, ethnicity, race, and gender. Dowling is quite critical of what she calls “care xes”,
under which she also subsumes mutual aid projects, suggesting that public refunding is
the only desirable solution. Yet there is a longstanding critique of the kind of normal-
ization and coercion exerted by the welfare state, which we nd in feminist analyses as
well as anarchist-Marxist approaches. In fact, if we look at the discussion of mutual aid
by someone like Dean Spade (Spade 2020b; 2020a), mutual aid is a political praxis that
generates knowledge of social relations and transforms them from the bottom up. In fact,
it might illustrate quite well your understanding of politics as having its own movement
and immanent eect, as an “activity of transformation of relations to others and to the
88
social world, and insofar as the subject of praxis is constantly transformed through the
experience in which she is engaged, an experience that she forges but that also forges
her” (Ferrarese 2018, 39). Could you position yourself vis-a-vis this discussion?
EF: I come from a French background where the welfare state was and still is quite
strong compared to other countries. We tend to think that the State has a burden when
it comes to taking charge and taking care of some kind of vulnerabilities, disasters,
social threats. And I too regard the State as assuming a primary responsibility to prevent
or compensate for the harms individuals might suer. To put it like Castel, beyond the
intersubjective forms of care that render possible the exercise of an autonomy, every
individual depends upon a “‘social property’ made of sucient rights, resources and
protections” (Castel 1991) and which should be oered by the State. Mutual aid can
be, to be sure, very ecient. But their responsibility for the care of vulnerabilities is a
responsibility by default, which raises if and when the State is decient. I agree that
experiments of mutual aid can be the place of some kind of personal transformation,
some way of reorganizing communities and of giving voice to silenced groups. But they
might completely jeopardize the whole idea of the welfare state, for two reasons, one
is purely political, the other one is moral and cultural. First, forms of self-organization
that seek to build their own care system can be counterproductive because they suggest
that people can take care of socially produced injustices and social pathologies by them-
selves. By substituting themselves to it, they make State intervention unnecessary.
Second, there is also a slippery slope vis-à-vis what we owe each other within
a political community. When we self-organize, do we still have collective discussions
about who should take care of what?
Let me take the counter-example of nursing homes that actually are not real
nursing homes, but places where elderly people organize care between each other. I think
this is problematic. In a way it is really nice that people take care of each other, but on the
other hand, it means that taking care of the elderly is an issue for other elderly. So in a
way, they unburden the rest of us of a kind of work and concern that we should also carry.
LS&TV: There seems to be a tension between mutual aid projects that substitute for
the state on the one hand, and quite the opposite, namely practices of mutual aid that
do not replace the welfare state, but are a place where new forms of community and
political consciousness emerge which could formulate demands towards the welfare
state. With recourse to Rahel Jaeggi’s work, Daniel Loick has called such projects the
politics of forms of life (Loick 2017; 2018, Jaeggi 2018). Take, for instance, the care
work done within the gay community when the state did not help those suering from
HIV/AIDS. To what extent can forms of care become a political project demanding the
transformation of existing institutions? Or to what extent are practices of mutual aid on
the contrary depoliticizing these very institutions and no longer demanding anything
anymore? Perhaps geographical dierences matter a lot. When we look at the US, UK,
or even the Netherlands, the neoliberalization of the state is in such a stage that it has
reached its apex and not much welfare state is left. Hence, the danger of mutual aid
depoliticizing existing institutions seems minimal as the state already retreated from the
89
realm of care to such an extent that mutual aid projects oer more of a hopeful per-
spective for reestablishing something of a welfare state from the bottom up. In France,
where there is still something of a welfare state, the opposite might be true. Still, I had
to think of Édouard Louis’ Qui a tué mon père (2018) which tells the story of Louis’ dad
who cannot work while the state already took away so many of his social benets and
forced him to apply for jobs he is physically incapable of doing. I wonder, whether even
in France, we can still defend the existing welfare state. Should we instead aim for new
projects of social transformation that start out from everyday practices of care? What
should be our political wager?
EF: In France too, there is a neoliberalization of the state, and a lot of things that
were obvious before are not anymore. I too think, and deplore the fact, that not only
Macron, but before him the governments of the past thirty years, including the socialist
governments, have dismantled a lot of systems of protections, have considerably impov-
erished hospitals, schools, universities. Now, compared to other countries, we still have
maternity leave and relatively correct nursing homes (although very recently there was
a scandal about some of them). We still have non-conditional minimum help benets.
They are very low but do still exist. Universities are still almost free.
But most importantly, the pandemics have changed a few things in the sense that we
saw a strong return of the State, both in the good and in the bad way. The way the State
did take care of vulnerabilities shifted, and I think we cannot have the same unilateral
“neoliberal” reading of the political evolution that we had two years ago. In France, the
state suddenly had money for so many things; whereas before it was impossible to get
any kind of help and the budget was so constrained, in the last two years, anything was
possible. Macron had this strange motto where he said “no matter what it will cost”. And
a signicant part of the population got its normal salary while not being able to work for
months and months, thanks to State funds. We were not in the situation of many neo-
liberal countries where millions of people just lost their jobs from one day to the next.
There is a lot of discussion about where that money was before, but the point
here is that there is a strong return of the State. That is not to say that now we are back
to a full welfare state (strangely, in the midst of the pandemic, the number of hospital
beds continued to decrease), but that focusing on the withdrawal of the State from some
spheres of society is to leave out new trends that are just as damaging from the point of
view of the care of vulnerable people as from the point of view of gender.
As everyone has noticed, the return of the State could not do much about
the gendered distribution of work - quite the opposite. Everyone was forced to stay at
home, and everyone (or at least a signicant part of the population) was paid, but in the
end, care was performed in a very traditional way by women who were burdened with
helping the kids with school, cooking, etc.
I would say that there is a strange kind of dialectics here. The return of a quite
strong welfare state did not prevent, and in a way triggered, some kind of a neo-tra-
ditional distribution of care activities. And it did so not because of a certain neo-pa-
ternalism which would have conditioned state aid on certain practices but because it
made the household exclusively an economic unit. Women were in a way both forced
90
and abandoned in their households. As soon as they were no longer in public spaces
in the broad sense, such as companies, associations, etc., they lost the protections they
used to enjoy thanks to the laws, norms, and public policies that framed their activity in
the economic and political spheres, and even in the street. They had strong protection
by the State in economic terms, and at the same time, large aspects of their lives were
just left to agreements that would happen in households. But those agreements were
not agreements, they were just reenactments of very old and oppressive forms of life.
Hence, they were both super-protected and totally underprotected. Here again, you can
see the limits of any kind of state organization of care as a collective activity as long as
normative expectations are not politicized.
LS&TV: This brings us back to the politization of love, maybe not of romantic love
but of parental love, which is another taboo that we still have to look at. We might
have to distinguish between mutual aid projects that are some kind of neoliberal
communitarianism set up by privileged social groups, and those forms of mutual aid
which are galvanizing political consciousness. The typical example is the Black Panther
Party which started a breakfast for children program that the FBI considered the most
dangerous political action in the US. Still, it is often cited as the reason why there is a
breakfast program in the US today. So, the very aim of taking up this need was not the
collective change of ideas of what needs should be met, or what vulnerability is, but
basically an eort to undermine the possibility of political consciousness. Might we say
that the vulnerability of kids at the mercy of the Black Panther Party is preferable to
the vulnerability towards a state-run program with its own risks, such as breaking up
collective consciousness, or the paternalism which Tronto also highlights?
I totally believe that those kinds of non-mixed meetings, practices, and caregiv-
ing organizations have the potential to give rise to new claims, and to allow members
of these groups to rethink and reformulate their own identities, to dene what a threat
is for them, etc. – this is what Nancy Fraser called subaltern counterpublics.
But then comes the second moment of your question, because at some point
you need to assess between vulnerabilities. You mentioned kids, who might indeed
be vulnerable to the way a group performs a certain form of care. How do you assess
vulnerabilities? Well, I think there are no criteria. There is not one and only way to have
a discussion about that. I don’t think that there are ultimate principles that should be
found out in order to say: if we go past this threshold, then it is not taking care of some
vulnerability anymore, but pure violence or paternalism. It is always a matter, again, of
normative expectations and normative expectations cannot be discussed only inside a
group, notably because even the normative expectations of the group are shaped by
something which is broader than the group, because the group was socialized within
a larger political community; but also because claims must go through the trial of
disagreement.
In short, I would say that when it comes to politicization, the moment of closure
of the group upon mutual aid can only be thought of as a temporary step. It cannot be
regarded as an emancipatory horizon. It is the tool, not the end.
91
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References
1 Estelle Ferrarese gave a talk at the Institute of
Philosophy, KU Leuven on November 18, 2021.
Notes
92
Estelle Ferrarese is a full-professor of moral and
political philosophy at Picardie-Jules-Verne
University (France). She is a Senior Member
of the Institut Universitaire de France. She has
been a Visiting Professor at the New School for
Social Research in New York, an Alexander von
Humboldt-Foundation fellow at the Humboldt
Universität in Berlin, and a research fellow at the
Marc Bloch Franco-German Center of Social
Science Research, in Berlin. Her books include:
Vulnerability and Critical Theory (Brill 2018), The
Politics of Vulnerability (ed., Routledge 2017), La
Fragilité du souci des autres. Adorno et le care (Editions
de l’ENS 2018 (engl. transl. The Fragility of Concern
for others. Adorno and the Ethics of Care, Edinburgh
University Press 2020), Ethique et politique de l’espace
public. Habermas et la discussion (Vrin 2015).
Liesbeth Schoonheim is a post-doctoral researcher
at the research unit Theory of Politics at Humboldt
University Berlin. She is an editor of Krisis.
Tivadar Vervoort is an FWO PhD Fellow in social
philosophy at KU Leuven. He is an editor of Krisis
and de Nederlandse Boekengids.
Biographies
Thinking Transindividuality along the Spinoza-Marx
Encounter: A Conversation
Bram Wiggers and Jason Read
Critique, Marx, Spinoza, Transindividuality
Keywords
Krisis 42 (1):93-107.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.42.1.38348
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 License International License (CC
BY 4.0). © 2022 The author(s).
Licence
Abstract
Ever since the publication of Read’s The Politics of Transindividuality (2015), the academic
interest in transindividuality has steadily mounted. In this conversation, Bram Wiggers
and Jason Read discuss the current state of aairs around the concept of transindividu-
ality. The conversation begins with a denition of transindividuality and discusses what
sets the term apart from other philosophies of social individuation. Having dened the
concept of transindividuality, the conversation then engages with the question of how
transindividuality can be adopted as a means of social-political critique. First, Bram
and Jason discuss how transindividuality is evoked but not explicitly mentioned in the
social-political critiques of Spinoza and Marx. Secondly, the conversation takes up the
social-political critiques of Paolo Virno and Bernard Stiegler who make explicit use
of transindividuality. Central to the later parts of the conversation is the complicated
interrelation between the political and economic domains of individuation, as well as
the tendency of collective modes of representation to be eaced and obscured by (neo-
liberal) individualism and the post-Fordist conditions of labor. Overall, the conversation
highlights the relevance of transindividuality for social-political philosophical critique.
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Thinking Transindividuality along the Spinoza-Marx
Encounter: A Conversation
Bram Wiggers and Jason Read
Introduction
Gilbert Simondon’s concepts are “extremely important; their wealth and originality
are striking, when they’re not outright inspiring” (Deleuze 2004, 89). These are the
words of Gilles Deleuze, who, being no stranger to grand gestures, gives us a sense of
the relevance of Simondon’s philosophy. Of all the conceptual innovations Simondon
makes throughout his Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information1 (IL), it
is perhaps the concept of transindividuality that stands out the most. In the context of
his philosophy of individuation, the term transindividuality is meant to designate the
way in which any individual individuation always implies an amplication of its process
in terms of the individuation of the collective. Transindividuality, therefore, literally
comes to designate the mutually constitutive process of what Simondon aptly calls psy-
cho-social individuation. Outside the context of Simondon’s theory of individuation,
the concept of transindividuality has been invoked to overcome the duality between
the individual atomistic subject and the collective that, at least in political philosophy,
has resulted in the impasse between the individualist, contractarian school of thought,
and the holist schools of thought. In terms of critical philosophy, Simondon’s concept
has been appropriated by thinkers such as Étienne Balibar, Bernard Stiegler and Paolo
Virno as a tool to critically rethink Marx’s analysis of political economy.
In the following conversation – recorded via Zoom on January 6, 2022 – I
reect on these diverse philosophical topics surrounding the notion of transindivid-
uality with Dr. Jason Read, professor of philosophy at the University of Southern
Maine and author of The Politics of Transindividuality. Published in 2015, the latter work
provides, as Balibar states on the cover of the book, a “comprehensive discussion of
sources and creative contributions to a renewed Marxist interpretation.” What makes
the work a remarkable read is that it does not merely proceed from Simondon’s original
formulation of transindividuality and its invocations in the work of Stiegler and Virno,
but also returns to philosophers such as Spinoza, Marx, and Hegel, who for obvious
reasons never mentioned the term transindividuality, but who did work around the
issue of individuation as well as the relation between the individual and the collective.
The result is a book that not only situates the current literature on transindividuality in
a systematic manner but also critically engages with the concept of transindividuality by
putting the various invocations of transindividuality in conversation with one another.
What Read aims to indicate by putting these various readings of transindividuality
together is that “the question of collectivity, of transindividuality, is not only simultane-
ously ontological, political and economic, encompassing the dierent senses in which
things, or people, can be said to be individuated, but it is so in a manner that cannot be
neatly, or hierarchically, organized” (2016, 19). Transindividuality as such indicates that
individuation is a complex spectacle crossing various domains.
The extensive and thorough nature of Read’s work has made the book some-
what of a focal point for any serious engagement with the concept of transindividuality.
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For instance, Balibar, whose 1993 lecture Spinoza: From Individuality to Transindividuality
held in Rijnsburg (possibly) initiated the transindividual reading of Spinoza, refers to
Read in his recently published Spinoza the Transindividual (2020). In the domain of
feminist theory, Read’s work has been used by Chiari Bottici in her recent publica-
tion Anarchafeminism (2021) in which she expands upon the transindividual inter-
pretations of Spinoza provided by Read and Balibar to think through the question
“what is a woman?” in pluralist terms. John Robert’s Capitalism and the Limits of Desire
(2021), on the other hand, explicitly adopts Read’s Spinozist-Marxist approach to
the problem of how capitalism produces (individuates) joyfully submitted subjects.
The recent academic interest in transindividuality, however, is not merely conned to
critical theorists working roughly in the Spinozist-Marxist domain. With the recent
translation of Gilbert Simondon’s Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information
(2020) by Taylor Adkins the interest in Simondon’s theory of individuation, in general,
is on the rise.
Considering these developments, a critical reexamination of The Politics of
Transindividuality is warranted. In our conversation, we discuss the critical potential of
transindividuality, the specic transindividual philosophical practices of Spinoza and
Marx, the status of work in today’s (neoliberal) capitalist society, and the complicated
relation between the political and economic. Overall, our conversation once more
highlights the signicance of transindividuality as a philosophical tool to critically (re)
think political economy.
Bram Wiggers: The concept of transindividuality, especially in the non-French speak-
ing world, is relatively new. Simondon’s magnum opus, Individuation in Light of Notion of
Form and Information, was only recently translated into English (2020). Whenever I try to
explicate the notion of transindividuality to people who are unfamiliar with the term,
they attempt to connect it to other notions of (social)individuation such as Fanon’s
sociogenesis or Butler’s performativity. Indeed, both deal with problems of social indi-
viduation in which there seems to be a sort of two-way movement from the individual
toward the collective and the reverse. If we accept that these theories describe a similar
idea of transindividuation as Simondon does, then the concept of transindividuality is
perhaps not that much of a rupture in the way we think about individuation. What do
you think about that?
Jason Read: I think that transindividuality is a name for something that other people
have tried to think under dierent names; I mean the Fanon reference of sociogenesis
is certainly one. Whenever the concept is invoked – and as you mentioned it does have
a strange history outside of the Francophone world or at least in the Anglo American
world where some of the rst translated references show up in things like Marcuse’s
work, but where it really started to show up is in the work of people like Étienne
Balibar, Paolo Virno and Bernard Stiegler, etc. − it is often used as a way to avoid a kind
of dead-end way of thinking the relation between the individual and the collective
in terms of a zero-sum game. Right, the more individuated you are the more you are
separated from collective practices and processes, whereas if you are more integrated
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into collective practices you are less of an individual. Transindividuality suggests the
mutual constitution of the two [individual and collective].
But the escape from this kind of binary of the individual and the collective,
like other binaries that we are caught up in – e.g. mind-body, etc. − is often easier said
than done. It takes more than just invoking it, it takes a sort of really working through.
Often, theories of social relations that attempt to escape the binary end up invoking
an intersubjective way of thinking. Intersubjectivity is a relation between constituted
subjects that relate to each other through their own individual tastes, desires, aects,
etc. Transindividuality, on the other hand, is a relationship between the constitutive
elements of individuation, which means that things can be individuated based on a
shared transindividual basis but that they can individuate in dierent ways with respect
to that. For example, a pervasive feeling of economic instability or anxiety could be a
transindividual condition that can be individuated in dierent ways; it can be individu-
ated in a right-wing version, a left-wing version, you can stress the nation, one’s sense of
belonging or you could see it in terms of the worker and globalization. So you see that
the same constitutive element can become the basis for dierent individuations. This is
dierent from intersubjectivity which suggests that there’s ultimately a relationship of
recognition between already constituted subjects underlying individuation.
BW: Connected to the binary of individual and collective, one of the charges I often
get when attempting to explicate the notion of transindividuality is that it appears to
be just another theory of compatibilism. We can see how this idea is able to emerge.
As you pointed out, there seems to be on the one hand a sort of individuation on the
part of the individual that would suggest a form of autonomy, but on the other hand,
the individual individuation is equally guided, perhaps even determined, by collective
constitutive elements. How would you respond to this charge against transindividuality?
JR: Really, I think that along the lines you mentioned, transindividuality is a dierent
way of engaging with determinism. This comes up quite strongly in Étienne Balibar’s
pamphlet on transindividuality,2 in which Balibar stresses that the underlying ontology
and physics of transindividuality in the Spinozist sense is one that tries to break from
a causality understood in linear terms. Rather, we have to think in terms of multiple
intersecting causes. This comes out in a dierent way in Simondon, who is constantly
trying to unpack the various levels and layers of individuation from the physical to the
natural,3 to the psychic, and so on, in order to understand how each level of individua-
tion sets the conditions, in terms of a problematic, for further stages of individuation. As
human beings, for instance, shaped by thousands of years of evolution, the incorporation
of new habits and desires into our existence continuously sets the problems for further
progressive individuations. The tricky thing then is, and this comes up in some of the
other Spinoza scholars, especially in that of Chantal Jaquet (2014), that even deviations
from ascribed cultural values and norms have to be understood as being determined by
the complexity of the collective values and norms from which they deviate.
The Simondonian term for this is metastability. Metastability is a term used to
describe the fact that determination (by our economy or culture, etc.) is never linear,
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but rather that the determination of processes of individuation is made up of multiple
intersecting factors and relations that are each individuated in dierent ways. So on
an ontological level, transindividuality is the attempt to think of a kind of complexity
through determination, or rather a determination that is less linear and more about
multiple overlapping levels of determination.
BW: Recently, I encountered an article on the notion of the problem in Simondon and
Deleuze by Daniela Voss (2020) in which she explicates this complex, transindividual
determination by means of the concept of chrono-topology, which describes the idea
that the (psychic) individual is a topological structure with a history. This, I believe, is an
elegant way to describe Simondon’s idea that individuation is the constant reassessment
of problems into new solutions – i.e., new (topological) structures. In your book The
Politics of Transindividuality, you reect on this complex determination by arguing that
each individuation is both produced and producing, constituted and constitutive – i.e.,
each individual is a solution to a problem but also poses new problems. Transindividuality
allows us to think about how the individual is the result of these complex relations of
determination and determining.
Moving on to my next question. I think it is striking that the philosophy of indi-
viduation of Simondon, which as you point out is mostly an ontological examination of
the constitutive elements of various beings, is taken up by thinkers such as Stiegler, Virno,
Balibar, and yourself in terms of a critical theory that engages with political economy.
Certainly, Simondon does on occasion refer to Spinoza or Marx, but the passage toward
a critical theory is not apparent. How do you think this passage was initiated?
JR: I think it connects to two things that I have already briey mentioned. One is, as
you mentioned, that I think that there is a tendency with all new concepts or approaches
to maybe overstress the dierence with everything that has come before. Simondon
denitely does that. The interesting thing about Balibar’s approach is that he stresses
that once we have this concept, we can see the way in which other philosophers were
thinking towards transindividuality without articulating it. As such, we could investigate
to what extent there is an unnamed transindividual dimension in, for instance, Spinoza
and Marx. On the other hand, and this is the second point, I think that the individual
can be understood as both a problem and a solution to problems. In a similar sense, I
think that a philosophical concept is both a problem and a solution to a problem. The
question of how to connect the ontology of transindividuality to socio-political and
economic individuation is a problem that Simondon’s thought poses but does not resolve.
As a result, you see thinkers such as Balibar, Virno, and Stiegler who, from very dierent
philosophical backgrounds, invoke the concept of transindividuality by each formulating
very dierent responses to the same problem. For them, the problem is to investigate to
what extent the concept lends itself, or poses a problem for how we think about politics
and economics today.
BW: Can we then understand your The Politics of Transindividuality as an attempt to
provide a more systematic overview of the various transindividual thoughts?
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JR: Yes, in some sense to try to think through the various intersections of these dierent
invocations of transindividuality and to see how they connect as well as what their lim-
itations are. However, I denitely do not consider transindividuality a school of thought
in the strong sense, but more a study of a set of interconnected problems and questions.
BW: Let us then turn to the transindividual interpretations of Spinoza and Marx. The
way I see it is that when you read transindividuality back into the philosophies of
Spinoza and Marx, transindividuality almost seems to become a method rather than a
theory of individuation as it had been for Simondon. In a dierent paper on Spinoza
and Marx you call their respective philosophical practices of transindividuality as pro-
ceeding on the basis of a preemptive strike. Both Spinoza and Marx take the idea of the
free, autonomous individual to be the spontaneous philosophy of man4 and critically
dissect that spontaneous idea by way of transindividuality (Read, 2021). The preemptive
strike, therefore, initiates almost something like a genealogy, investigating the conditions
under which individuals come to understand themselves (perhaps falsely) as free, auton-
omous individuals.
JR: Yes, in the sense that I think that it is not enough to simply say that the transin-
dividual is correct and people who think in terms of already constituted individuals
[intersubjectivity] are wrong and juxtapose the true to the false. It rather consists in
trying to show how individuals come to understand themselves in a particular manner
due to the underlying conditions of individuation. This is eectively the project of the
German Ideology. Marx does not merely aim to indicate why the idealist account of
history as a history of dierent competing and contesting ideas criticizing each other is
wrong, he wants to show how the material conditions have led people to misrecognize,
in a sort of camera obscura inverted world, and think ideas drive history rather than
material conditions. In a related but dierent sense – Marx is more socio-historical and
Spinoza more anthropological – Spinoza wants to understand why we, as individuals,
see ourselves as a Kingdom within a Kingdom, why we believe that we are the cause of
our desires and why we do not see the relations that constitute our aects and desires.
The shared critical dimension of Spinoza’s and Marx’s transindividuality thus consists in
the fact that both attempt to indicate how the perspective of the isolated, autonomous
individual is generated from the very transindividual social relations that exist but that
are in some sense eaced by the individualist conceptions that they give rise to.
The idea of preemptive strike emerged from the fact that one of the things that
I nd very interesting is that both Marx’s Capital and Spinoza’s Ethics contain possibly
the two most famous short texts; the “Commodity Fetishism” chapter in Capital and the
“Appendix to Part One” of the Ethics. These are incredibly important critical texts that
have been turned to again and again for theories of ideology, fetishism, reication, and
so on. But the other interesting thing about both texts, and this is where the preemptive
comes up, is that both Spinoza and Marx are basically saying to their reader: “I know
you do not agree with me because I know that you are still thinking in terms of ”,
whether it be in the case of Spinoza the idea of an individual as freely determining a
98
Kingdom within a Kingdom, or in the case of Marx where it is the idea that commod-
ities inherently possess value. And so both Spinoza and Marx need to write these very
polemical and ahead-of-themselves texts, for neither Spinoza nor Marx at that point
of the texts have worked out either their anthropology or the historical conceptions
necessary for their theories. It is their shared materialism through which they recognize
that our ways of thinking are shaped by our ways of living and that because our ways of
living are such that they in some ways compel us to recognize ourselves as individuals,
that has to be dealt with critically before they can even go on to write the rest of what
it is they are going to write.
BW: One of the ways in which Spinoza and Marx, however, dier is that Marx
is very much bound to a Hegelian teleological understanding of history. Marx at
times appears to be saying that as soon as the material conditions that prevent us
from seeing our true transindividual condition change, we would acquire, in the
form of communism, a recognition of our true transindividual self. Spinoza does
not have this teleological move toward recognition. Balibar argues, for instance,
that Spinoza develops what he refers to as the double constitution of the state,
which is always marked by a certain polarity between reason and imagination.
We can extend this idea of a double constitution to the singular individual.
The constant polarity between reason and the imagination, which is so per-
vasive in our everyday life, blocks any recognition of our true transindividual
condition. Connecting Spinoza to Marx, as you do throughout The Politics of
Transindividuality, would therefore be necessary to overcome a teleological reading
of Marx’s transindividuality.
JR: Yes, I think you are correct, and in some sense Marx struggled with that teleological
element. On the one hand, Marx was optimistic about the revolutionary movements
happening in Europe at the time, which at times seemed to have made him think that
these illusions would simply dissipate, allowing us to see through them and recognize
our real collective existence. On the other hand, Marx often argues in the opposite
direction, and the commodity fetishism chapter in Capital is part of this category, stating
that there is no outside of commodity fetishism. In the Grundrisse, for instance, Marx
seems to think that the capitalist society is organized in such a way that we come to see
ourselves as autonomous individuals because the things that we rely on to make our
autonomous existence possible – e.g., the labor of others − are eaced for we simply
see the commodities and not the labor of individuals that produces them. Before we
began, we were talking about how things are going with COVID and I think one of
the things that COVID has done with the ensuing supply chain issues is that people are
beginning to realize that for them to get the products they want on the shelves, they are
dependent upon other people to make that happen. Marx’s point is precisely this, that
capitalist relations of exchange guided by the principle of “Freedom, Equality, Property
and Bentham,”5 this sort of spontaneous philosophy that emerges from capitalist society,
is one in which we do not see our relations with others but only see the products that
are produced through those relations.
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This is also why in the book I tried to make a passage from Marx to Simondon
to say that the relations of capitalism should be understood as an alienation from the
pre-individual and as an exploitation of the transindividual. We are alienated from the
pre-individual when we are incapable of grasping the very constitutive elements of our
own aects, desires, etc. In relation to capitalism, for instance, we do not recognize how
much of our aects and desires are produced for us to desire more products, which is
Stiegler’s point. The transindividual is exploited in that we are collective not merely
because the things that we consume are produced by others, but also in that our labor
usually depends upon the existence of others, present or not present, to have any kind of
impact or be meaningful at all. But that aspect of production is exploited and, I would
also argue with Marx, in some sense eaced at the same time.
BW: I think that Balibar, in the nal chapter of Spinoza the Transindividual (2020) in
which he turns to the transindividual nature of the philosophy of Marx, has a very
interesting approach to Marx’s understanding of the transindividual relations of capital-
ism that reect some of the things we have just discussed. Balibar suggests that Marx is
not so much interested in showing how individuals are alienated from social relations
due to the capitalist mode of production, but rather that Marx traces how alienation
itself can exist as constitutive relations. In this sense, commodity fetishism is an alienated
form of relation that is constitutive of a particular way of living and acting in the world.
In your article on the Preemptive Strikes (2021), you describe a similar idea. For Spinoza,
the prejudice which states that we are conscious of our appetites but ignorant of the
causes of things causes a superstitious belief in God, which in its turn becomes the
cause of our collective and individual lives by way of dictating certain norms, habits,
and beliefs that are in line with our initially mistaken, superstitious understanding of
the world. Marx almost describes a reverse process in which the fetishized relations of
capitalism become the cause of a particular self-understanding, namely the idea of the
individual laborer as a commodity, which reenters the world of social relations, namely
those of consumption and production, as a thing to be bought and sold reifying the
appearance of commodity fetishism.
The Spinoza-Marx encounter seems very promising in the way that both,
from dierent philosophical positions, describe the way in which alienated relations
can themselves be constitutive of a particular transindividual reality. Nonetheless, it
seems to me that Spinoza and Marx do not share a similar understanding of alienation.
Marx seems to suggest that alienation implies the total loss of self into something else.
Spinoza, who refers to conatus as the very essence of man, on the contrary, does not
talk of alienation in terms of a total loss of self, but rather in terms of a variation in the
capacity to act, in terms of variations in the degree of power.
JR: Right, you know there is a lot of debate within the community who are interested
in the Spinoza-Marx intersection as to whether alienation is one of those concepts that
survives the Spinoza-Marx encounter. One of the reasons is that in terms of Spinoza’s
ontology in which everything is dened by its striving to preserve itself, the idea of a
loss of self does not really make any sense. Then there is another, almost reverse way
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of looking at it, which is the approach taken by Frédéric Lordon. Lordon argues that
if alienation is understood as a loss of autonomy then alienation is itself universal and
even constitutive because there is no true autonomy, no kingdom within a kingdom,
given that we are ultimately always aected by our relations with others. There is also
the perspective taken by Franck Fischbach (2015) who states that read together, Spinoza
and Marx suggest that alienation is not, as is often conventionally understood, a loss of
subjectivity to an object, but rather the reversal of that, a loss of objectivity into pure
subjectivity. Fischbach’s point is that Marx’s interest in alienation originates primarily
in the (capitalist) transformations of human beings who lived in a particular commu-
nity, interacted with that community, and reproduced themselves in and through social
relations toward a capitalist subject who is dened rst and foremost as a possessor of
labor power and nothing else. As a capitalist worker, you have no way of reproducing
your existence other than selling your labor power. Fischbach connects this to the
Spinozist idea that the more we see ourselves as a Kingdom within a Kingdom, the
more we come to see ourselves as subjects disconnected from the world. For many
philosophers, this in fact might be considered the basis of autonomy, but Spinoza sees it
as the basis of our subjection. In order to become more active and powerful, it is not a
matter of arming our pure subjectivity, but rather recognizing that our subjectivity is
conditioned by our relations with others, the natural world, and so on. In this sense, it
is pure subjectivity that is in fact alienation.
Similar to Marx, Bernard Stiegler argues that contemporary capitalism is
transforming people from individuals with certain cultural habits and norms into pure
consumer power. For Stiegler, just like Marx’s laborer who is reduced to pure labor
power, the abstract consumer is alienated from social relations and ‘know-how’ that
are the conditions for autonomous individuation. The fundamental dierence between
contemporary capitalist production/consumption from that which came before can be
illustrated by means of an example. Take something relatively simple like learning a song
or a (video)game. Before the capitalist era of production and consumption, learning a
song was also a condition for being able to produce it. There is a certain passivity and
activity, internalization and externalization involved in which the consumer is also a
producer – i.e., the individual is sort of two sides of the same relation. However, with
the capitalist era of consumption and production, especially with the creation of mass
media and so on, we get the transformation where the subject becomes passive and
subjective capacities are reduced to pure combined power, that is, pure buying power
and pure desires. Just as the reduction of the subject to pure labor power is a form of
alienation from the subject’s capacities through the isolation and separation from the
conditions which produce them, so too the creation of a subject as pure buying power
is also an alienation in the realm of non-working life.
BW: It seems to me that a sort of interesting contradiction emerges between the
accounts of Marx and Stiegler and it is one that I think we can also nd in Simondon.
On the one hand, both Spinoza and Marx seem to suggest − which I think is a move
that we see recurring in the modern philosophies of nature of, for instance, Haraway
and Latour − that by placing the subject back into social relations, fostering a moment
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of recognition with the reality of one’s social and interconnected existence, alienation
can be overcome and the subject regains autonomy. On the other hand, and this is I
think the sort of position that Stiegler and Virno take, there might be a moment where
the tremendous amount of relations, aects, and forces at play in modern capitalism
overload the subject and turn it into a passive receiver. I think it is this sense of overde-
termination that you referred to previously as being alienated from the pre-individual.
The power of the relations of capitalism to make one desire certain things and not others
results in an alienation from the pre-individual capacity to individuate in a dierent
(non-economic) manner and one thus becomes subject to the forces of capitalism. How
is it that transindividuality as a concept allows for these rather diverse critical positions?
JR: I think that around the concept of transindividuality there are dierent ways of
understanding its critical potential. One of the ways would be simply to assert that −
and I do not want to attribute this to Simondon but he is often read in this way − we
are always-already transindividual, it is there in every possible relation, so that there is
not really anything to say critically or normatively about dierent social relations. Then
there is the opposite extreme of that, which is Stiegler’s idea, who is very adamant in
pointing out that we do not live in an atomistic society because we do not have the
necessary transindividual conditions to individuate ourselves. In the modern capitalist
consumer society, Stiegler argues, it is impossible to say ‘I’ or ‘We’. It is impossible
to say ‘I’ because the very things that make up one’s identity are manufactured and
marketed, and it is very dicult to say ‘We’ because there is not really a shared basis for
collectivity. One of my go-to examples to clarify this point is driving on the freeway.
Driving on the freeway is neither an individuated experience because it is so generic
as everyone is doing the same thing, nor is it a collective experience in the sense that
the other cars exist as obstacles to you. So on the freeway, there is no ‘We’ or ‘I’ and I
think that that is how Stiegler sees much of contemporary society. The perspective that
I take is neither the one that argues that everything is always-already transindividual nor
the sort of disindividuation that Stiegler is describing, but to rather think about this
rather paradoxical [Simondonian] idea that we are transindividuated in our own isola-
tion and separation.6
BW: This connects nicely to my next question. One of the things you criticize Stiegler
for is the way in which Stiegler’s understanding of individuation, or rather disindividu-
ation as you just mentioned, of the individual subject is entirely limited to the domain
of consumption and production. It thereby seems to be implicated in a reading of Marx
that argues that the material base entirely determines the superstructure. Individuation,
for Stiegler, is economic individuation and this form of individuation suppresses other
forms of individuation, such as the political. By use of Balibar’s reading of Spinoza’s
double constitution of the state you try to stress that the individual is not only individ-
uated in the economic sphere but also in the political domain, or perhaps even between
these two domains. You put forward the idea of a short circuit between the economic
and the political to clarify the fact that economic relations require political forms of
representation in order to be meaningful, and that political forms of individuation are
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informed by, and inform, economic forms of individuation. Could you expand on the
relation between the economic and political as transindividuation?
JR: Yes, it is something that I have not been thinking about for a while, so I appreciate
that you bring it up. One of the things that Balibar does is to focus on proposition
IVp37 of the Ethics, where Spinoza argues that there are two dierent ways in which
we come into collective life. On the one hand, there is the aect-based way where I
want other people to like what I want so that my desires are, so to say, recognized.7
This is a fundamentally unstable way of constituting a collective because I do not really
want you to desire what I desire, because then we are in competition over the same
thing, but I also do not want you to not desire what I desire because I do not want to
be the only person who desires it. The aective constitution of the collective is thus
marked by constant, ambivalent social relations of attraction and repulsion. The other
side of collective life is grounded in Spinoza’s idea that “nothing is more useful to man
than man” (Spinoza 1996, IVp18schol), which informs the rational idea that our lives
are better when we live collectively. What Balibar stresses is that both the rational and
the aective constitution of the collective are always happening, in the sense that they
happen alongside each other in a mutually constitutive manner.
Coming back to your question. At times I think that Balibar wants to suggest
that, for instance, the nation is the site of imaginary [aective] identication which
is part of the reason why national identities are so xed. You see this best reected in
Balibar’s interest in immigration. Part of the issue with immigration is this weird sense
in which domestic inhabitants are getting frustrated by immigrants because they do
not love the national object of love in the same way that ‘locals’ love it, the immigrants
are perhaps loving it wrong, so that there is always this conict within the national
identity. Contrary to the nation as the site of imaginary identication, Balibar would
then argue that the economy is the domain of utility, of “nothing is more useful to a
man than man”. But then Balibar, as a Marxist, is confronted with the fact that we learn
from Marx that the economy is the domain of exploitation, which Spinoza as a less
sophisticated economic thinker, simply does not recognize.
I would therefore argue, which reects the idea of a short circuit that you men-
tioned, that rather than think that the nation is the domain of imaginary identication
and the economy of rational utility, both the nation and the economy have their imag-
inary and rational components. Balibar develops a similar idea with the gure of the
citizen. The citizen is a gure of a kind of equality and collective belonging framed in
terms of the nation, so that the citizen is the domain of rational utility and the nation
of imaginary identication. But added to that I would also argue that just as there is a
rational basis for our economic relations, there is also an imaginary identication in the
economy. You see this imaginary identication reected for instance in the idea of the
worker, who in politics is constantly split and divided between real worker and not-real
worker. Especially in contemporary ideology, the capitalist or CEO bizarrely present
themselves as the real worker, because they are responsible for innovations and creating
prots, whereas the ‘ordinary’ worker is reduced to the status of not-real worker. So in
that sense, we should extend upon Balibar’s imaginary/rational division between the
103
nation and the economy in order to think, in a Spinozist manner, of the relation between
the imagination and reason as the basis for all social relations, political and economic.
BW: Stressing, as you do, the relation between the economy and the political via the
idea of a short circuit seems to me to open up the possibility for political resistance
against economic exploitation. This would then oset an overly materialist reading of
Marx that argues that only a denitive change in the relations of production would
be able to overcome exploitation, eectively foreclosing the possibility of any political
resistance. I think such an intervention in Marx, stressing the interrelation between base
and superstructure, is very helpful. But if we then look at the cultural analysis of Stiegler,
but especially keep in our minds the thesis of Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos
(2015) which argues that neoliberalism is succeeding in its mission to replace homo
politicus with homo economicus, can we then still speak of political individuation that
could resist the forces of the economy? In other words, is the short circuit not cut short?
JR: Yes, coming back to what we just talked about. Just as Balibar sees political individ-
uation as split between the imaginary identication of the nation, with a certain shared
culture, language, and customs, etc., and the rational identication of the citizen, who is
a person with certain rights and duties attached to them, I would also argue that on the
ip side, the gure of homo economicus is also split between two modes of economic
life. There is, on the one hand, the homo economicus side in which we see ourselves in
terms of competition, individual investments, and where we strive to maximize utility.
But, on the other hand, there is also a collective, perhaps imaginative, dimension in any
and all work process. This is something that Marx stressed, namely that the capitalist does
not just exploit individual labor power, it exploits the fact that once you get multiple
people together their shared labor is always greater than the sum of their parts. He
refers to this combined labor power as Gattungsvermögen, or species-capacity. Marx is
not necessarily very concerned with where this species-capacity comes from, but rather
with the fact that there is something that happens when you bring people together that
exceeds the simple sum of all isolated workers working independently.
We can connect this to neoliberalism, which I think attempts to eace and
obscure the collective basis of labor itself and see it as a purely individual activity. Which
obviously is not correct, for it seems to me that most people when they start a new
job have this moment where co-workers will pull you aside saying; ‘look I know this
is what they are telling you to do, but we gured out this way of doing things which is
faster, it is going to be easier this way and you are not going to wear yourself out’. Such
informal knowledge sharing between co-workers is not at all a relation of competition,
because if we truly had been homo economicus the person who gured out a faster,
easier way to do something would hoard it and keep it to themselves. Yet, this collective
aspect of labor is exactly what neoliberalism is trying to eace. So Wendy Brown is right
to say that homo economicus is an attempt to obscure kinds of political belonging. But
homo economicus also has to be understood as an attempt to obscure certain aspects of
economic relations. So what is at stake in neoliberalism is not just an attempt to eace
the political byways of the economic, but to have eaced the economic understood
104
as the use of the powers of cooperation by really imposing the market side of the
economy on labor relations.
BW: The neoliberal attempt to isolate the individual worker by means of eacing and
obscuring the collective side of labor processes has in recent times obviously been aided
not merely by the globalization of labor processes and nancialization, but also by the
growing virtuality of work. When working online from the comfort of one’s own home
becomes the norm it becomes increasingly hard to recognize the collective processes of
labor in which one is involved.
JR: Yes, I think that is true. Marx really understood well that the subject of capital is split.
When subjects are in the sphere of exchange, where they are out in the world buying
things, subjects see themselves as an individual with their own individual tastes, desires,
and needs. But when workers then clock in at work they recognize that there are others
who are doing the same thing and so on. In other words, they see a dierent mode of
individuation with a dierent social existence. Contemporary working conditions have
tended to more and more obscure the collective nature of work, in the sense that, as you
point out in for instance the COVID pandemic, people are isolated, sitting in front of
their screens not seeing the extent to which their labor is dependent upon the labor of
others. Marx already saw this tension between two dierent domains of individuation
in capitalism, namely the individuation of the consumer market and the individuation
of the working place. I think that, especially in today’s capitalist relations, we see that
the tension between these two dierent domains of individuation has lent itself towards
one domain becoming predominant – that of the consumer market – whereas the
other – the working place − is more or less obscured.
Although, as we were talking about before, there is a sense in which, due to
Covid, we are forced to recognize our dependency on others. That obscured collective
individuation then suddenly comes to light and you get something like the great resig-
nation in the US, where people leave their jobs because they are getting to see the extent
to which they have been rendered disposable and interchangeable, but also because they
see the collective nature of work. Sharing stories such as a restaurant having to close
because all the workers just walked out one day, makes it more likely that someone else
in another place might resist in this way. So in a sense, the isolation and invisibility of
work have to some degree, paradoxically, given way to increased visibility and awareness
throughout the Covid pandemic.
BW: The nal question that I would like to turn to concerns the notion of colinear-
ization advanced by Frédéric Lordon (2014). The way I understand Lordon is that he
attempts to adapt Marx’s analysis of capital to the modern, neoliberal capitalist model by
confronting Marx with Spinoza’s anthropology. Marx’s notion of labor exploitation, at
least in much of the Western world that outsourced its production chains to African and
Asian countries, seems no longer to adequately describe the relation between laborer
and capitalist. A lot of workers really enjoy their work and nd fulllment in it. Lordon,
therefore, argues that the notion of exploitation has made way for passionate servitude.
105
Individual laborers’ desires are colinearized to that of the capitalist so that the laborer
nds joy in being put to work for the desires of the capitalist. Could you expand on this
notion of colinearization as a distinctively modern aspect of capitalism? And also, how
does the concept of colinearization relate to your notion of the short circuit as relation
between the economic and political, as once more there seems to be a threat of the
economic overtaking the political when all desires are capitalist desires?
JR: Yes, the notion of colinearization is certainly interesting. Lordon describes colinear-
ization as the moment where the gap between the striving (conatus) of individuals and
the striving of the capitalist enterprise is reduced to a minimum. Lordon then maps out
this history of colinearization, where the rst way that capital got people to do what it
wanted them to do was simply through the absence of alternatives, in the sense that you
either worked or starved. The second way is the sort of Fordist compromise in which
the pains of your labor were being oset by the ability to consume things. Then the
third way, which is the neoliberal way, is the sense in which you should realize yourself
in your labor. This is exemplied by the slogan “if you love what you do, you never have
to work a day in your life”.
What I think is odd is that Lordon does not seem to think of the economic
and political domain as two separate organizations of aects and striving, for him they
are kind of intertwined. However, Lordon does oer an interesting perspective on the
relation between the economy and politics by appropriating a Spinozist idea concern-
ing the aective nature of causation. Spinoza argues that we get more angry or happy
when someone does something that harms us or benets us which we understand as
freely undertaken, rather than if we understand them to be compelled by necessity.
For Spinoza, this idea is part of the way in which we can overcome the power of the
aects that dominate our lives. If I understand, for instance, that part of the reason why
someone I know is not as friendly and warm to me as I would like them to be is caused
by the fact that their parents are even colder, I am more likely to see the necessary
causes that determined that person to be that way and therefore less likely to be upset
about it. What Lordon does with that distinction is that the economy always presents
itself under the modality of necessity, in the sense that, when economic decisions are
made they are being made in terms of market statistics, the demands of competition,
innovation, etc., and no one is really truly responsible. Politics, on the contrary, is often
presented as freely determined. And this is why politicians are more prone to create
anger for us and economic gures hardly do so.
I think that this aective distinction between politics and economics is very
suggestive and interesting. Although I would add to that, perhaps through Marx, that
the economy, like the domain of politics, is a human institution so that we have to talk
about the perception of necessity and freedom rather than their actuality. But nonetheless,
I do think that this idea allows us to explain why people are more prone to get angry
at things that are perceived to have been freely chosen versus things that are perceived
to have been necessary. We can come back to a COVID-related example. For instance,
in the US you have this sort of reasoning that, even given the rise of new variants and
the increasing caseloads, the economy cannot withstand another lockdown, so that
106
we have to open up the economy. But the interesting thing of course is that − and
this goes back to the idea that our sense of necessity and contingency are themselves
shaped by social forces − recent evidence has shown that president Biden and others
are completely convinced that if they were to impose new lockdown measures they
would basically ruin themselves because these measures would be incredibly unpopular.
What is weird about this is that, on the one hand, what is seen to be necessary, namely
that the economy has to open, is itself contingent and that what is seen as contingent,
namely the imposition of new lockdown measures, is to some extent itself necessary. So
here we are talking about the perception of necessity or contingency that determines,
in a sense, the likelihood of people getting angry and prone to resistance. I think this
aective distinction is certainly an interesting way to think about the division between
politics and economics.
BW: I saw that you are publishing a book on Marx in the near future, what can we
expect from that?
JR: Yes, well the book is really a sort of collection of essays that I have written over
the past 20 years or so. There are some essays on Marx, some on Deleuze, Althusser and
others. But I also have a book coming out from Verso on work called The Double Shift:
Marx and Spinoza on the Ideology and Politics of Work which is my most comprehensive
attempt to synthesize a Marx-Spinoza critical perspective. That is going to be coming
out probably around late 2022 or early 2023.
Notes
1 Originally published posthumously in French
as L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme
et d’information in 2005 as a collection of the two
previously, separately published L’individu et sa genèse
physico-biologique (1964) and L’individuation psychique
et collective (1989).
2 Read refers to Balibar’s lecture Spinoza: From
Individuality to Transindividuality held in Rijnsburg
for the Spinoza Society in 1993. This lecture was
originally published for a small circle in 1997 but
has now been reprinted in Balibar’s Spinoza the
Transindividual (2020).
3 Simondon has various terms to describe the
individuation of simple, living organisms. He most
often refers to living, vital, or natural individuation.
4 The spontaneous philosophy refers almost
to a sort of common sense of individuals. It is not
necessarily a worked-out idea or ideology, but results
from the lived experiences of individuals.
5 This famous quote figures in Capital: Volume 1,
Part II “The Transformation of Money into Capital”,
chapter 6 “The Buying and Selling of Labour Power”.
6 In his account of psycho-social individuation,
Simondon argues that, because the individual cannot
possibly individuate the pre-individual entirely within
itself, it must amplify its individuation externally
in collective modes of representation. The passage
toward collective individuation is however not an
intersubjective phenomenon, but, and this is Read’s
point, something that the individual recognizes in
its failed endeavor to individuate the pre-individual
within itself – this attempt results in the state of
anxiety (angoisse) (2020, 282–85).
7 Spinoza refers to this affect whereby I want
others to want what I want as ambition (1996,
IIIp29schol).
107
Balibar, Étienne. 2020. Spinoza the Transindividual.
Translated by Mark, G.E. Kelly. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Bottici, Chiara. 2021. Anarchafeminism. London, New
York: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos:
Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York:
Zone Books.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. “On Gilbert Simondon.”
In Desert Island and Other Texts 1953-1974,
edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Mike
Taomina, 86-90. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Fischbach, Franck. 2005. La production des hommes:
Marx avec Spinoza. Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France.
Jaquet, Chantal. 2014. Les transclasses ou la non-
reproduction. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France.
Lordon, Frédéric. 2014. Willing Slaves of Capital:
Spinoza and Marx on Desire. Translated by
Gabriel Ash. London: Verso Books.
Read, Jason. 2015. The Politics of Transindividuality.
Leiden: Brill.
Read, Jason. 2021. “Preemptive Strikes (of a
Philosophical Variety): Marx and Spinoza.”
Crisis & Critique 8 (1): 289–305.
Roberts, John. 2021. Capitalism and the Limits
of Desire. London, New York: Bloomsbury
Publishing.
Simondon, Gilbert. 2020. Individuation in Light of
Notions of Form and Information. Translated by
Taylor Adkins. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Spinoza, Benedictus. 1996. Ethics. Translated by
Edwin Curley. London: Penguin Books.
Voss, Daniela. 2020. “The Problem of Method:
Deleuze and Simondon.” Deleuze and
Guattari Studies, 14 (1): 87-108. https://doi.
org/10.3366/dlgs.2020.0392
References
Bram Wiggers is a recent graduate of the Research
Master Philosophy at the UvA. His areas of interest
include social and political philosophy, the history
of philosophy, and critical theory. In his Master’s
thesis, titled Individuation in Light of Notions of
Power and Control: An Interdisciplinary Transindividual
Approach to post-Fordist Individuation, Bram adopts the
conceptual vocabulary of transindividuality to assess
the conditions of individuation under post-Fordist
capitalism using an interdisciplinary approach that
aims to connect the economics of post-Fordism to
the philosophy of transindividuality. Currently, Bram
is working to rewrite chapters of his MA thesis into
publishable articles.
Jason Read completed his Ph.D. at the State
University of New York at Binghamton in
2001, with a dissertation titledThe Production of
Subjectivity: Marx and Contemporary Continental
Thought. His most recently published book, The
Politics of Transindividuality (2015), engages with the
thought of transindividuality and develops its use
for social-political critique. His areas of scholarship
include social and political philosophy, 19thand
20thcentury continental philosophy, critical theory,
philosophy of history, and Spinoza studies. Currently,
Jason is working on two book publications, The
Double Shift: Marx and Spinoza on the Ideology and
Politics of Work (New York: Verso, 2023) and The
Production of Subjectivity: Marx and Philosophy (Leiden:
Brill 2022/Chicago: Haymarket, 2023).
Biographies
Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto
Federica Gregoratto, Heikki Ikäheimo, Emmanuel Renault,
Arvi Särkelä and Italo Testa
The Critical Naturalism Manifesto is a common platform put forward as a basis for
broad discussions around the problems faced by critical theory today. We are living in
a time, e.g. a pandemic time, when present-day challenges exert immense pressure on
social critique. This means that models of social critique should not be discussed from
the point of view of their normative justication or political eects alone, but also with
reference to their ability to tackle contemporary problematic issues (like the dismantle-
ment of the welfare state, the environmental catastrophe, and the sanitary crisis). With
this manifesto, we invite varying practices of philosophical, artistic and scientic social
critique to take seriously the enormous challenges our societies face with regard to
inner and outer nature.
Abstract:
Nature, Society, Critique, Crisis, Future
Keywords
https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.42.1.38637
DOI
Licence
Krisis 42 (1):108-124.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 License International License (CC
BY 4.0). © 2022 The author(s).
108
Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto
Federica Gregoratto, Heikki Ikäheimo, Emmanuel Renault,
Arvi Särkelä and Italo Testa
Preamble
This manifesto is an invitation. It invites varying practices of philosophical, artistic, and
scientic social critique to take seriously the enormous challenges our societies face
with regard to inner and outer nature. It has three parts. The rst part consists of the
eleven theses of Critical Naturalism. The second part is conceptual. It identies the
historical crises and catastrophes that Critical Naturalism seeks to respond to, dispels
the prejudices against naturalism in contemporary critical thought, sketches out the
notions of nature and naturalism, and anchors Critical Naturalism in the history of
Critical Theory. We understand this history, initially, as that of the Frankfurt School,
which must then be expanded and enriched by other approaches to social critique. The
last part consists of fragments for models and projects of Critical Naturalism. They are
exemplary sketches of the varying ways to practice naturalist social critique. The hope
is that the list will be extended by those who want to join us.
Section One: The Theses
Nature, whose concept and reality once seemed overcome, returns by force of its
own repression as a signature of our present historical situation.
Nature spilling over, populations spilling over, hospitals spilling over, climate anxiety
spilling over: The symptoms of the repression become unbearable. Yet, catastrophes
do not mean social transformation. They can be perpetuated by administration.
2020 might continue.
Concepts and theories of nature are not innocent. They participate in bringing
the disasters forth and contribute to perpetuating them. A rational response to the
current catastrophes must include attempts to grasp both these new realities of life
and the dead ways of thinking that sustain them. Such has been Critical Theory’s
claim. Critical Naturalism carries it into our times.
The so-called naturalistic fallacy is hardly a greater peril than global warming,
metabolic rift, and zoonotic spillover. On the contrary, a social philosophy which
abstracts from nature is a mirror image of the lethal practical illusion of indepen-
dence from nature.
Independence from nature and domination of nature are two sides of the same
coin. There is no emancipation without liberation within nature.
Most Critical Theory has hitherto only denaturalized the social in various ways,
the point is also to renaturalize it. Relations of domination in society are embodied
materially, biologically, technologically, habitually, and institutionally, and so is the
resistance to them.
Normativist critical theory has reconstructed the norms of social critique, naturalist
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
109
critical theory pushes forward. It reconstructs social life, especially the relation of
societies to their natural environments and constituents, and it understands itself as
part and parcel of social transformation.
Natural (inter)subjective determinations – drives, impulses, aects – can operate as
critical forces of liberation. Even if always socialized, they are not innitely mal-
leable and they can work against encrusted social norms and structures. Critical
Naturalism cares as much for our natural determinations as for our dispositions to
redirect them.
Nature has contingent and plural histories. It is geared to mutability and variation.
Critical Naturalism acknowledges nature as ordered and disordered, in between
stability and precariousness. It has a transient character.
Traditional naturalism’s illusion of the One Nature of the One Science mirrors
the destructive tendency of capitalist societies to reduce nature to resource, and
it ignores the irreducible plurality of both science and our everyday and aesthetic
experiences of nature. It also impoverishes the ethnographic and cultural variety
of experiences of nature. This plurality is a resource for naturalistic social critique.
Critical Naturalism harbors the utopian drive of reimagining the relationship
between nature and society. It calls for articulation of, and experimentation with,
human social forms of life that can be sustained and freely armed by their individ-
ual members.
Section Two: The Need for Critical Naturalism
Historical diagnoses and theoretical obstacles
We are living in a time when the challenges of the present exert immense pressure on
social critique. Notably, this means that models of social critique should not be discussed
from the point of view of their normative justication or political eects alone, but also
with reference to their ability to tackle contemporary challenges. The dismantlement
of the welfare state, the environmental catastrophe, and the healthcare crisis are three
of the most pressing issues of our time, and each of them can be addressed separately
by specic critical models, but as long as they are addressed separately, the reactions to
them are doomed to suer from political one-sidedness.
A rst historical diagnosis, concerning the neoliberal attacks against the welfare
state, can be articulated within the framework of a theory of social freedom. As Axel
Honneth has argued in Freedom’s Right (Honneth 2015) a welfare state is required to
institutionalize the conditions of social freedom. As such, the project of a critical theory
of social freedom is clearly relevant. However, this approach is exclusively society-cen-
tered, and thus not able to capture what is at stake in the current environmental disaster
and care crisis. Moreover, it draws, at least in Honneth’s case, on a Durkheimian con-
ception of the social as a sui generis reality, a conception that makes it almost impossible
to interconnect the social conditions of freedom with the society-nature relationship.
A second way of articulating the critique of the dismantlement of the welfare
state is presented by social reproduction theory (SRT), as seen for instance in Nancy
8.
9.
10.
11.
110
Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi’s Capitalism (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018) and in the Feminism for the 99
% Manifesto (Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser 2019). In a Polanyian way, Neoliberalism
is here depicted as an attack on the conditions of social life, that is, not only on the welfare
state as a condition for social freedom, but on the very conditions of the reproduction
of social life. This is important since this attack is indeed experienced everywhere on
our planet, and not only in countries where welfare institutions have regulated social
reproduction. Indeed, social life cannot reproduce itself without reproducing its relations
to natural environments, and without biological reproduction in the sense of procre-
ation of humans by humans. Insofar as the SRT approach considers society-environ-
ment relations, it does support ecosocialist and ecofeminist projects. The problem with
this approach, however, is that the concept of “reproduction” is dened through the
contrast between “productive” and “reproductive” work, and between “societal” and
“social reproduction” (where “societal” refers to the reproduction of the capitalist system
as a whole, and “social” to the activities, attitudes, emotions, and relationships directly
involved in maintaining life; see Brenner and Laslett 1991). What is required today is the
overcoming of both these dualistic and schematic distinctions. We must reconstruct the
reciprocal impact of productive and reproductive work in novel ways. Furthermore, we
must investigate the deep and intimate relationship not only between societal and social
dynamics, but also, systematically, between such dynamics and their natural environments
(focusing also on how these environments condition societal and social dimensions).
The second historical diagnosis concerns the environmental crisis. Here, the tradi-
tion of critical theory can attempt an endemic articulation by drawing upon the Marxist
notion of “metabolic rift”. This concept suggests that the interactions between human
societies and their natural environments are analogous with the metabolic processes of
animal bodies. According to this approach, the reciprocal transfers between societies
and their environments are depicted as metabolic processes that can break down. The
result is the destruction of the social forms of life that depend on it. Here, the main issue
touches upon the environmental conditions of social life. When societies overuse the
resources of their natural environments, or when they eject too much waste into the
environment, these can no longer reproduce or reintegrate the waste. On this diagnosis,
it is important to consider how the processes of societal reproduction are organized: the
dynamics of neoliberal capitalism, as well as the types of consumption associated with
contemporary social inequalities, are the main culprits (see Foster 2020; 2021).
However, the problems, in our era of extreme inequalities, exceed those to do
with the metabolic exchanges with natural environments. This becomes painfully clear
with the third historical diagnosis, that of “the era of pandemics”. Indeed, the fact that new
viruses emerge ever more frequently and that they are becoming ever more dangerous
is linked with the contemporary overexploitation of natural environments, as stated by
metabolic rift theories (see Malm 2020); yet it is not reducible to that. The temporality
of the diagnosis cast in terms of an “era of pandemics” is namely dierent from that
cast in terms of an “environmental crisis”: whereas global warming is catastrophic for
its medium-term impact on sea level, meteorological disasters, biodiversity, and mass
migration, the healthcare crisis creates a state of emergency here and now. The content
of this diagnosis is also dierent from the previous one since it sheds a dierent light
111
on society-nature relations: the pandemic makes it painfully evident that despite social-
ization human individuals remain natural organisms, belonging to the same realm as all
other species. Humans are just as vulnerable to “zoonotic spillover” as other species are.
Moreover, the healthcare crisis is intimately linked with the destruction of the welfare
state. Dismantling the public health system is a very bad idea in general, but it is even
worse under pandemic circumstances, where it leads to outright global emergencies. It
is striking how poorly equipped critical theory is for articulating this third diagnosis.
Critical theory has rarely been concerned with issues of health in its critical models,
and when it has, this has been only in terms of mental health. Even when elaborating
on the idea of ‘social pathology’, pathologies in the literal medical meaning of the term
have rarely been given serious consideration.
Most of the proponents of the above-mentioned critical models agree that
from a political point of view, the conjunction of these three diagnoses calls for some
kind of socialism with an ecological focus as a remedy to the neoliberal destruction
of the welfare state, to metabolic rifts, and to the healthcare consequences of environ-
mental overexploitation. The contemporary crises deepen not only class inequalities
and domination, but also gender and racial inequalities, as well as inequalities between
rich countries with comparatively ecient healthcare sectors, vaccination capacities, and
highly destructive environmental impact on the one hand, and poor countries more
vulnerable to crises they are not responsible for on the other. The demand is for a
socialism with a feminist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist focus as well. These political
desiderata can of course be articulated in dierent strategic and programmatic ways.
Their justication depends on political arguments as well as on sociological and eco-
logical facts rather than philosophical reection. Nevertheless, philosophical reection
can also play a role, and one of the useful tasks in this respect is to draw together
the ontological, anthropological, and social-theoretical implications of the three above
mentioned diagnoses in a consistent way that can be informative of, and experimented
in, political practice. Critical Naturalism is the label we use to denote this kind of
philosophical reection.
The challenges of our times call for the Critical Naturalist approach. Importantly,
they also put in serious doubt a number of accepted assumptions in various strands of
contemporary critical social science and philosophy. Let us mention some of the most
obvious ones:
Abstract social constructivism. According to abstract social constructivism, health should
be analyzed as a social construct. One should avoid referring to it from a critical point
of view, as that would mean falling into the traps of biopower. By contrast, Critical
Naturalism addresses health as well as the body as both social constructs and something
irreducible to social construction. When biological organisms are transformed into
social and cultural agents able to express and address organic problems by means of
social norms, these problems do not thereby cease to be biological problems. Critical
Naturalism rejects the symmetrical pitfalls of a social constructivism that reduces society
to social construction and abstracts from its relatedness to nature on the one hand, and
a biological reductionism on the other.
112
Technologicalism. Some forms of social critique based on abstract constructivist accounts
end up conating criticism with the search for technological solutions. For sure, repur-
posing technologies for emancipative ends is a valuable strategy for progressive politics.
Techno-utopian agendas such as the Accelerationist Manifesto (Williams and Srnicek
2013) have rightly diagnosed the sense of the future having been erased from political
imagination in the last decades. However, by not considering the dialectics between
society and nature, such positions eventually endorse a form of articialism in con-
ceiving the role of technology that is both ontologically incoherent and ecologically
dangerous. The future is already here, and it is accelerating in a direction that dreams
of collective self-mastery through technological acceleration will not account for. The
abstract, disembodied character of rationalist social engineering implemented by neo-
liberalism is precisely part of the problem.
Articialism. Abstract constructivist models of social emancipation, also shared by post-
humanists and accelerationist feminists such as the Xenofeminist Manifesto (Cuboniks
2018), conceive of social emancipation as a matter of incrementally bootstrapping
ourselves into articial existence. As such, they are essentially anti-naturalist, believing
that we can simply leave nature behind. This is unsustainable already with regard to
the ontology of artifacts, which in order to be enacted in the world must be materi-
ally embodied, situated in the environment, and adapted to our bodily habits. Social
criticism has rightly denounced the ideological nature of commonsense essentialist
naturalism, which deems unnatural anyone who does not conform to posited biological
or theological norms, and thinks of nature as invariant. However, this does not do
away with naturalness. The Xenofeminist slogan “if nature is unjust, change nature”
should not be taken ad absurdum. Critical Naturalism understands naturalness precisely
as something open to change and to plural orders of transformation, or even as what
allows change! However, this does not mean that nature can change indenitely, that it
can be manipulated without limits.
Flat ontologism. It is tempting to combat the modern denial of the natural conditions of
social and human life by rejecting the society-nature distinction altogether. According
to Bruno Latour, the very idea of society depends on such denial. But rejecting the
social-natural divide should not lead to a rejection of the social-natural distinction and to
relinquishing the very concepts of nature and society1. Such conation of nature and
society ends up missing the critical potential of their relative non-identity. Here again,
Critical Naturalism is an attempt to avoid symmetrical pitfalls: society is neither a reality
sui generis, essentially detached from nature, nor merely a set of specic networks with
other natural entities.
Conation of naturalism with ideology. A powerful source of worries concerning naturalism
within contemporary critical social science and philosophy stems from the fact that “nat-
uralism” is conated with an ideological formation that seeks to justify social inequality
and domination by an appeal to nature. The suspicion is that any reference to nature
in a context where social critique is at stake runs the risk of involving such ideological
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justication. One good example is the famous distinction between “sex” and “gender”,
understood as a distinction between biological (sex) and social (gender) denitions of
human beings. Initially, this distinction had the critical function of distinguishing social
norms, which vary historically and geographically, from the biological descriptions of
sexual dierence. What was at stake was the struggle against the ideological justica-
tion of these norms by presenting them as derived from natural dierences. In other
words, this distinction was initially a critique of ideological naturalism. Judith Butler
then famously contended that the biological distinction between the sexes actually
also amounts to a normative construction, and thus to ideological naturalism (Butler
1990). However, as feminist biologists teach us (e.g. Fausto-Sterling 2012), studying the
nature of our sexual bodies leads us to discover a rich range of possibilities, which goes
well beyond the simple gender dualism (cis-male vs. cis-female). Similarly, studying
the nature of our sexual desires points us to a rich range of possibilities that goes well
beyond the heteronormative regimes. Trans, transitioning, non-binary, third gendered,
queer, etc. bodies can be seen both as natural variations and as social, human, interac-
tional projects or, as in a Deweyan sense, experimentations. The same goes for gay, lesbian,
queer, non-monogamous, polyamorous, kinky, anarchist or otherwise non-conventional
forms of sexual, intimate, erotic encounters and relationships.
We are not convinced by arguments for dropping all references to nature in
social sciences or social and political philosophy as these would allegedly amount to
ideological naturalism. These arguments render any form of naturalism incompatible
with the very project of a critical theory of society. On the contrary, there are good
reasons to believe that such reference plays a pivotal and inalienable role in contemporary
critical theories. Even when gestures and practices of denaturalization are still needed,
an understanding of the nature of our bodies can have a role in debunking prejudices,
challenging widespread assumptions, and thus contributing to changing norms and
structures of oppression. For instance, comparing racialized groups from a biological
point of view can be a powerful weapon for dismantling any justication for oppression,
discrimination, or even dierentiations based on socially constructed notions of “race”.
On this point – that race does not exist biologically – every social constructionist
appears to be a critical naturalist too! Regarding disability and aging, embodied and
extended cognition – a broadly naturalist approach, sometimes also critical (see e.g.
Gallagher 2020) – can show how institutions, norms, and thus domination are incorpo-
rated in bodily habits and skills and create embodied exclusions and inclusions.
Critical Naturalism, as we can see, is critically sensitive to the dierent issues
at stake in domination based on gender, race, and disability. It doesn’t come with a
pre-packaged solution for all of them. It suggests approaching these areas without the
nature-culture and mind-body dualisms that have long blocked critical inquiry.
Nature and Naturalism
If the very notion of Critical Naturalism sounds paradoxical to many, this is not only
because of the above-mentioned assumptions and prejudices in critical social science
and philosophy. Another reason is a set of conceptual worries about “nature” and
“naturalism”.
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Some of the worries about “nature” relate to the fact that it is thought to be
legitimate, for social sciences and philosophy, to focus on what makes contemporary
societies irreducible to their natural conditions and components. Society should be
thought of independently of nature, so the thinking goes. The validity of this claim
depends on a particular way of dening “nature”, “society” and “irreducibility”.
In ordinary language, the meaning of the term “nature” is often linked to
the need to distinguish things: nature-convention (rules and norms), nature-culture,
nature-history, nature-artifacts, and nature-nurture. It makes sense to consider all
these distinctions intersecting and together comprising the nature-society distinction.
Whereas such distinctions work ne in most situated language games, they should
not be hypostatized, that is, posited as xed metaphysical divides. For one thing, there
is culture and social life in non-human nature too. And conversely, in some language
games it makes sense to describe “human societies” as part of “nature”.
The distinction between nature and human society can be understood in two
dierent ways: thinking of nature and society either as two separated realities, or as
various aspects of the same reality. Thinking of them as two separate realities is not
feasible since it would then hardly be conceivable that human societies have natural
elements and conditions. Such a conception also suggests that the nature-society dis-
tinction is analogous to another distinction involved in the ordinary uses of the word
“nature”: the natural-supernatural distinction. Critical Naturalism rejects this outdated
metaphysical dualism, i.e., all views that make a categorical distinction between natural
and supernatural realms of existence.
Critical Naturalism also opposes dening and analyzing societies merely in
terms of their allegedly distinctive characteristics (rules, norms, culture, artifacts, nurture),
without considering their relations with the naturalness from which they might be dis-
tinguished. In other words, Critical Naturalism does not reject all distinctions between
nature and convention, nature and history, nature and culture, nature and artifacts, or
nature and nurture. Rather it strives to bridge the gap between the distinguished terms
and use them critically, conscious of their role in our natural and cultural forms of life.
In this respect, what matters is not so much the question as to whether or not, or to
what respect and degree, human societies are natural, but rather a twofold fact: rstly,
there is a continuity between human forms of life and non-human forms of life, as well
as between forms of life and non-living natural phenomena; secondly, these continuities
are present within human forms of social life.
“Continuity”, in this sense, is a concept coined by John Dewey, a natural-
ist philosopher whose signicance for critical theory is now widely acknowledged.
Continuity means refusal of both reductionism and dualism. In fact, Critical Naturalism
recognizes a plurality of forms of continuity: genetic continuity, relational continuity,
and dynamic continuity. Genetic continuity is a point made by evolutionary theory.
Living beings have come about through a series of transformations of inanimate beings,
and human forms of life are a product of a series of transformations of non-human
forms of life.
Relational continuity is a socio-ontological claim: social entities cannot be
abstracted from their natural environments, and their relations to these environments
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are not only external but also internal. For instance, human labor activities do not only
mediate between societies and their natural environments, but also structure social life,
shaping both the natural environments and the inner nature of the workers.
Most crucial for critical theory is the third continuity, namely dynamic con-
tinuity. According to this idea, continuity also includes constraints on convention,
culture, nature, artifacts, and nurture. In present times, it should be all too obvious that
healthcare crises would not occur were our biological naturalness not an inescapable
constraint on us, or that ecological crises would not occur were our natural environ-
ments limitlessly malleable. It should not be provocative to point out that artifacts are
produced in conformity with mechanical and chemical laws, and that social individ-
uals whose behavior is mediated by conventions and cultural symbols remain animals
subjected to death and disease. And yet it is taken to be controversial to claim that the
human body is not a tabula rasa where culture leaves its print, or that drives, and psychic
defenses are deeply rooted in the history of our species and still produce structuring
eects in contemporary culture. Evolutionary naturalism, as well as Freud’s drive theory,
inicted wounds to human narcissism by highlighting that humans remain animals.
Aligned with technological optimism, social and cultural conservatism, and traditional
dualistic thinking, human narcissism has proved to be strong enough to patch over these
wounds. Critical Naturalism does not provide rst aid for blows to fantasies of human
omnipotence. It cares for vulnerable, embodied, interdependent humans in natural and
social environments over the long term.
Further worries about “nature” have to do with its widespread association
with the ideas of eternal laws of physical phenomena, invariable forms of the living
species, reied genus concepts, and unchanging structures of human nature. Thinking
of societies in their relation to their natural conditions and constituents would then be
incompatible with any project of radical social transformation. But as contemporary
physical cosmology shows, the universe is a result of processes. Biology tells us that
organic species should not be understood as unchanging structures, but as changing
patterns of adaptation to, and adjustment of, changing environments. Contemporary
philosophy of science can therefore support a processual naturalism, in which nature is
seen as composed of interacting processes generating innovations rather than of phe-
nomena subjected to universal and unchanging regularities (see Dupré 2015; 2018).
Critical Naturalism draws lessons from these accounts. It rejects the static conception
of nature that identies nature with a set of unchanging laws and species, and takes
nature to involve both stability and precariousness, to be a mixture of necessity and
contingency, ever in the making.
Naturalism and critical theory
Critical Naturalism aims to be critical in the sense of the traditions of critical social
theory. If one understands critical theory in the broadest sense, these traditions can be
specied by a focus on what is going wrong in our societies, and by attempts to par-
ticipate in shaping social practices. They contrast, rstly, with a traditional conception
of theory where the focus is on the “rst principles” of knowledge, the denition of
the most fundamental traits of reality, or the rationality of the real and an attempt to
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discern what is irrational in a specic historical situation. They contrast also with a
conception of theory that has its aim in itself, truth being an end in itself, and replaces
this with a conception of theory as a tool for making the world less wrong. Within the
Frankfurt School tradition, this conception of critical theory was famously articulated
in Horkheimer’s article “Critical Theory and Traditional Theory”, as well as by Marcuse,
Adorno, and others. But the conception can be traced back even further to Hegel
and Marx, who both historicized philosophical theorizing and emphasized a close and
reective connection between theory and practice. These two moves also played a deci-
sive role for Dewey who claimed that “philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a
device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated
by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men”. Such a conception of critical
theory is also illustrated nowadays, outside contemporary contributions rooted in the
Frankfurt School tradition, in various branches of critical thought, be they inspired by
Foucault (for instance in discussions about biopolitics), by pragmatism (for instance in
discussions on racial integration and epistemic injustices; see Anderson 2013; Medina
2013), or by Marx (such as in the metabolic rift theories), or be they feminist theories,
theories elaborated in critical race studies, critical disability studies, or critical environ-
mental studies.
In the history of critical theory the type of critical naturalism we are advocating
has often played a crucial, even if nowadays neglected, role. Since Hegel is one of the
starting points of the traditions of critical theory – both Marx and Dewey having
started their intellectual lives as Hegelians, and the Frankfurt School trying to synthesize
Hegel, Marx and Freud – it is reasonable to start these brief historical remarks with him.
Contemporary critical theories inspired by Hegel2 generally read him as an anti-natu-
ralist philosopher. They typically emphasize his deconstructions of the theory-practice,
individual-society, and moral-politics dualisms, without taking seriously the fact that he
also criticized the nature-spirit dualism. Hegel presented this latter criticism from an
anthropological as well as a socio-ontological point of view.
From the anthropological point of view, Hegel criticized the mind-body
dualism and emphasized that humans have both a “rst” and a “second nature”: their
internal nature is transformed by the process of socialization in the social world which
is organized by social norms that are a result of a historical process. A similar anthro-
pology played a decisive role for Dewey, for whom human nature is characterized by
a set of plastic impulses, resulting from natural selection and environmental pressure,
as well as by habits or second nature, which direct these impulses. Important for the
critical naturalist orientation here is the idea that even though impulses are always
socially channeled, contradictions can occur between the impulses and the social norms
which condition habit formation, and such contradictions can critically contribute to
undermining the norms. One nds a similar critical naturalist anthropology in the early
Frankfurt School reception of Freud’s drive theory. Though the drives are plastic and
socially channeled, they are also repressed, and their repression can retroact in various
ways on social life, both by contributing to pathological developments (for instance by
generating the “authoritarian personalities” analyzed by Adorno) as well as by dening
emancipatory potentials (for instance in Marcuse).
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From a socio-ontological point of view, Hegel already contended that society
should not be analyzed as a normative realm disconnected from external nature and
the internal nature of individuals. What denes the sociality of human life is a transfor-
mation of the rst nature of human organisms into a second nature, which also makes
individual and collective freedom compatible. Furthermore, for a society to reproduce
itself, it must satisfy the needs of its members via a transformation of external nature
operated by a system of division of labor (a “system of needs” in Hegel’s terminology).
This latter ideal is taken up by Marx who denes work as the “metabolism between man
and nature”, or “between society and nature”, with reference to the possibility of “met-
abolic rifts”. Similar ideas are expressed by Dewey, who denes the economic process as
a human transformation of the biological process of mutual adaptation and adjustment
of organism and environment. In various ways, the relations between societies and their
natural environments are also crucial in the rst generation of the Frankfurt School.
The reference to these relations is loaded with both negative and utopian dimensions.
For instance, in the young Adorno’s text “The idea of Natural-History”, the notion
of second nature has an ontological connotation, expressing the transient and plural
character of naturality: “nature” acquires historical contingency. Acknowledging this
character makes it possible to give expression to those aspects of fragmentariness and
appearance that are proper to the second-natural being of human social life and that
are simultaneously concealed and amplied by reication. For Adorno, the key concept
for a critical social philosophy that makes this task its own proves to be that of “second
nature”: it allows us to think of a social concept of nature and a natural concept of history.
Here, second nature brings to light that reciprocal reference of nature and history, that
contamination between the two poles of the eccentric trajectory of human life which
thwarts any attempt both to hold them fast in isolation and to reduce one to the other.
The history of critical theory is a source of inspiration for Critical Naturalism
in many other respects as well. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno
highlighted that domination of nature results in domination in society. However, they
did not consider that the domination of nature could result in the kind of natural
feedback eects we are currently experiencing in the form of environmental disasters
and public health crises. Alfred Schmidt put emphasis on Marx’s theory of the soci-
ety-nature relation, and on the concept of “metabolism between society and nature”
(Schmidt 2013). Schmidt also demanded that Feuerbach’s sensuous naturalism be taken
seriously by critical theory (Schmidt 1977). A similar point was made by Honneth
and Joas (1989) by now four decades ago, before they elaborated their less naturalistic
mature programs.
Critical naturalist motives have not played a major role in the recent devel-
opments of critical theory. Critical Naturalism is a learning process. It aims to bring
these motives back to the fore, in a form adjusted to the challenges of our time.
Notably, it must overcome the Eurocentric bias of critical theory and outline diverse,
non-reied, multiple, complex ideas and practices of nature and naturalness. Critical
Naturalists must practice self-criticism and avoid the traps of colonizing and imperialist
dynamics. Critical theorists have already made some resources available for a richer
and more inclusive approach to nature: in particular, Adorno’s notion of “mimesis”, his
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critique of identity thinking, and his essayistic and micrological methods (indebted to
Walter Benjamin), as well as Dewey’s idea of pluralistic, multi-layered and changeable
natures, and his fallibilist method of inquiry, are promising starts in this respect. Critical
Naturalism’s concepts remain to be hybridized, aected, integrated, revised.
Section Three: Fragments
Critical Naturalism is not a theory. Like the nature it refers to, and the forms of life
it critically engages with, it appears in plural forms. This last section of the Manifesto
exemplies directions of Critical Naturalism by sketching out some of its models and
intents in fragmentary form. The list of fragments is open-ended and contains an implicit
invitation to grow in number and depth and extend all the way into the fragmentary
experience of everyday life.
The task of critical theory
“What is the most central task for critical theory today?” – “Who are we to say?
Philosophers always come late. They don’t write manifestos. It will be up to the readers
of tomorrow to say what was our most important task today.” Bad question, right
answer. Yet the current catastrophic relationship between nature and culture has ren-
dered the right answer impossible and the bad question necessary. As things stand today,
the old answer has become ominous. It might well be that there will be no readers
of philosophy tomorrow. To contribute to preventing that from happening, to help
achieve natural and cultural conditions, which allow for humanity to survive and to
care for its forms of life is, if not the most central, then certainly an imperative task for
critical theory today.
Nature, culture and care
Culture means care, it derives from the Latin colere. Adorno once remarked that this
colere originally meant the activity of the peasant, the agricola, that is, a certain way of
relating to nature, the care for nature. The fact that we set dierent relations to nature, that
we have dierent forms of life, dierent ways of caring for nature within and without
us, means a chance for us, by mutual criticism, to come to terms with ourselves, to grow by
reconciling ourselves with something dierent than ourselves. Culture means care of
nature. Critique means care of the relationship between culture and nature. Critique
must not be thought of as a judgment, but as a coming to terms with oneself and each
other as natural and cultural beings. Critique promises a non-violent mode of cultural
transformation, the possibility of transforming our lives with care.
It is written in the face of our current form of life that it is failing in this regard.
We nd ourselves in a new historical constellation of nature/culture: a contradiction
between the continuation of our capitalist form of life and the survival of humanity
as we know it. And we nd ourselves completely unable to react collectively to this
enormous challenge ahead of us. The fact that global warming has reached a point of
no return means that the ecological disaster that we are facing is not merely a crisis. It
is a permanent catastrophe, a mutation of our relationship with the environment, of our
culture. We simply have no choice but to permanently alter our relationship with nature.
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How should students and teachers of philosophy react? There are two options:
we can either ignore the fact that global warming has reached the point of no return,
that is, try to suppress the fact that our culture will change, try to, as it were, “engineer”
ourselves into a new form of life, or we can go about this change reectively, react to
the disaster creatively, go through our mutation with care.
One such attempt at a creative reaction has been to create a completely new
vocabulary for nature/culture. Critical Naturalists agree that we need a radically new
beginning. However, a radically new beginning does not mean suppressing the past.
Such reactions end with implausible and abstract vocabularies that cannot be continued
in ordinary language and guide everyday life. They will be either powerless or violent
in the face of prevailing habits and customs. Therefore, Critical Naturalists believe that
suppressing the past isn’t radical at all, it is supercial. Instead, Critical Naturalism pro-
ceeds negatively, by a critique of what is given, the prevailing forms of life. Reacting
with care means being sensitive to the needs and powers our form of life has developed,
it involves redigesting our history from the perspective of the contemporary disasters.
No culture can be created from scratch. New forms of life are assembled from old forms
of life. We can only react creatively from pre-existing habits by cultivating those habits
further and redirecting them from the point of view of the disaster and the objective
possibilities at hand.
Niche constructors
As a particular animal species, humans are distinguished by the fact that work is the
mediator of their adaptation to their natural environment. Work can fulll this mediating
function only with a division of labor which involves a stock of technical knowledge
and norms of cooperation – even in cases where division of labor is structured by
social domination. This also means that, from an evolutionary point of view, work plays
both productive and reproductive roles: it is both a productive activity of transforming
materials into consumption goods that can satisfy our vital needs and make our human
forms of life ecologically sustainable, and it is the reproductive activity of educating to
social norms and technical knowledge, as well as providing the services required by the
cooperative structure of society that has made human forms of life possible.
Productive work consists of uses of natural environments in order to satisfy a
set of biological needs, but it also produces transformations in natural environments,
turning them into partly articial ones, which then generate new needs and new uses of
natural environments. Representations, including representations of nature, are crucial
for orienting productive work and therefore crucial for the quality of the human
eect on human environments too. All of this means that, more than any other animal,
humans are niche constructors. Nowadays, the implications of this anthropological fact
are denoted by the term “anthropocene”, even if the problem with the anthropocene
is not the specicity of human niche construction, but the forms it has taken since the
emergence of capitalism.
Work can either sustain, as in foraging societies, or destroy these environments,
as under capitalism. The challenge is to transform destructive work into sustaining work
without returning to foraging. What is required for tackling this challenge is not only
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a critical theory of capitalism – the existing economic system of production for prot
rather than for use, and instrumentalization of social cooperation to benet the rich at
the expense of the poor. Additionally, there is a need for a critical theory of our uses
of the natural and articial environments, a reactualized theory of “use value”, as well
as for a critical theory of the norms of cooperation, a theory that would question the
allocation of wages and prestige, something which is currently far from being based on
the ecological and social value of the professions. What is demanded is also a critical
theory of work that undermines the hegemonic denition of work as a consumption
of raw materials, including one’s body, rather than as a fruitful use of these material
and bodily instrumentalities. In fact, this hegemonic denition provides an ideological
justication both for the exploitation of nature and for the exploitation of workers.
Reconstruction and experimentation
When intellectuals no longer have the opportunity to be organic intellectuals of a
massive social movement, yet they still want to be sincere, the task remaining for them
is chiey critical. Hence, the philosophical industry in critical theory is today mass pro-
ducing norms and models of social critique, and a great many empirical inquiries from
a critical sociological point of view. Although their value should not be underestimated,
for naturalist critical theory the various normative, epistemological, and empirical con-
tributions to social critique are not enough. What matters is also the reconstruction of
the criticized state of aairs. Our relations to our natural and articial environments,
our drives, our habits of conduct and thought, our systems of institutions, all have to
be reconstructed. Working towards these goals requires elaborating new critical models
which take into account the ecological, technological, and economic constraints at play
in our relations to our natural and articial environments, as well as the anthropological
constraints dened by our psyche and the inertia of our habits, and the sociological
constraints bearing on the practice of social transformation. What is required is devel-
oping models of social critique that are also models of social experimentation, models
that are intimately linked with knowledge of these constraints and with practical imag-
ination of solutions.
Beyond ideological naturalism and ideological antinaturalism
Theorists and theories have a tendency to overshoot. The exaggeration has a tendency
to become habitual and unreective over time and with academic socialization. Critical
theory is especially prone to this process of ossication as it comforts itself by the assurance
of being “critical” by default: what begins as critique turns easily into dogma. The critique
of “naturalism”, “essentialism”, “naturalistic fallacy” and so on has become an automatic
reex to an extent that it is an obstacle for addressing global warming, metabolic rift,
zoonotic spillover, and the myriads of ways in which culture is essentially related to
nature. Whereas the evils of social thought implicated in, or explicitly preaching, ideolog-
ical forms of naturalism are well-known and forever something to be vigilant about, the
current situation forces a clear-headed assessment of social thought which abstracts from
nature, thereby forming a mirror image and contributing to the lethal practical illusion of
independence from nature. All of the original worries concerning naturalism need to be
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revisited without prejudice, so as to achieve a perspective which is neither ideologically
naturalist, nor ideologically anti-naturalist, but that of Critical Naturalism.
Freedom and life
Freedom is an inescapable ideal for critical and emancipatory thought and action, but
the dominant models of freedom are at best inadequate for grasping the constitutive
connectedness of humanity with nature, and at worst complicit with the current crisis
or ongoing catastrophe. The concept of freedom as autonomy or self-determination is
in this regard no less problematic than the simpler concept of negative freedom: it easily
lends itself to the hubristic fantasy of independence from nature. Such independence can
never be actually given, and practical attempts to bring it about can only take the form
of increasingly drastic attempts to dominate nature, to keep its irreducibly independent
dynamics and indierence to human concerns at bay and out of mind. The psychoan-
alytic lesson about the folly of attempts to force internal nature into submission apply
even more so in the relation with external nature. So does its lesson about freedom:
the abstract concept of freedom as independence or abstraction from what necessarily
determines us is self-subversive and destructive when applied in practice. The only real,
concrete form of freedom with regard to what we are constitutively related to and thus
determined by is reconciliation that acknowledges its otherness but overcomes the
hostility in the relationship. It is this unity of dierence and unity, or being with oneself
in otherness—to use the famous Hegelian formula—that characterizes the ideal of a
free relation of a human individual with her body, as well as of a human community
with external nature. As processes of life never cease, freedom in this sense is never given
once and for all, but is always a task to dene the specications of, and to aspire to. If
we fail in this task, we will die out. As Hegel reminds us: the ends of freedom cannot be
separate from the ends of life.
Affects and critique
The emotional and aective dimensions of our habits, institutions, norms, and practices
are of crucial importance, both for philosophy and for life. Living, social, human and
nonhuman beings are shaped and driven by non-cognitive, non- or pre-intentional,
non-linguistic, non- or pre-rational aects. Beings try to articulate aects in specic
emotions (fear, hope, joy, anger, love, hate, guilt, shame, enthusiasm, etc.). Aective and
emotional aspects of individual and collective selves, of their bonds and associations, of
their interactions with the environments, are not only a fact – they can also contribute
to imaginative, critical, and transformative practice. Critical Naturalism, contrary to most
positions in the contemporary landscape of critical theory and social philosophy, tries to
understand the imaginative, critical, and transformative dynamics of aects and emotions.
Aective experiences are vague, incomprehensible, uncontrollable, inchoate,
confusing, at least in many phases of experience. As such, they can signal a non-
alignment between our present and future selves, between given orders (patterns of
action, meanings, values, norms) and what these orders could be and become, how
habits are disrupted and must be readjusted. But they can also be destructive, harboring
anti-social forces. Emotions, for their part, are conscious signs of breaks and disruptions
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– they express awareness of how things should not be, or how they could be dierent.
We are sensual beings in the sense of the young Marx and of Dewey: our task
is to explore the critical and transformative powers of the aects and emotions that all
our senses generate in non-alienated and non-reied transactions with other human
and nonhuman beings, with organic and nonorganic environments.
Natural vulnerability
Aects and emotions reveal the specic and contextual ways in which human (and
nonhuman) beings are vulnerable, the extent to which vulnerability is concretely
and contextually shared. They indicate possible venues for acknowledging, taking up
and organizing socio-natural bonds so that vulnerability can become a possibility for
alternative, radical social and political experiments. Aects and emotions reveal how
dierent beings are vulnerable in dierent ways – also on the basis of socio-natural
determinations like sexuality, gender, race, disability, etc. – and indicate ways in which
such dierences can come to produce, increase, and share knowledge and mutual care,
instead of perpetrating and strengthening mechanisms of domination, oppression, and
exploitation. The recognition of vulnerability is not giving in to politics of precarious-
ness, tendencies to produce ‘victims’ and reify the discriminated, misrecognized, and
invisible: on the contrary, the recognition of vulnerability supports the critique of these
policies and tendencies.
Cherishing the opaque, uncommendable, impulsive, and thus vulnerable sides of
our lives calls into question current neoliberal imperatives of self-optimization, “enforced
happiness”, positive thinking in the face of catastrophes, practices of mindfulness as indi-
vidual(ized) strategies against systemic and structural problems. We cannot eectively
manipulate and control ourselves (our internal nature) in order to obtain the desired
goals, we are not merely the object of constant creation and invention. But aects and
emotions are not just limits; they also entail positive contents from which we can learn.
In this sense, Critical Naturalism can be the metaphysical spring- (or surf)board for new
ethical projects (some ideas: ethics of passivity, ethics of ambiguity, ethics of ignorance).
Third natures
The contrasting use of the notions of nature and society, rst and second nature, does
not refer to metaphysically given, separate, domains of objects, but rather articulates an
expressive vocabulary for developing social analysis. Nature and society, rst and second
nature, are dialectically intertwined place-holder concepts, to be lled pragmatically
in relation to dierent contexts, concepts which disclose certain congurations of
experience and action. In this sense their distinction is a dispositive, which needs to be
deployed anew in relation to the contexts we need to map, operate within, and critically
transform. Hence, the distinction between rst and second nature is contextual and
positional and has not only descriptive, but also critical and dialectical power. It deploys
the perspective from which, from time to time, we can critically re-describe processes of
associated life. But the breaking down of given social categories, by the application and
determinate negation of the notions of rst and second nature, is also future oriented,
and has a utopian moment, aimed at a trans-categorial, armative re-description of our
123
forms of life and of their emerging, dynamic, yet undecided orders of possibilities. One
could say that third nature is what Critical Naturalism, with the place-holder notions
of rst and second nature, aims at. The re-congurative task of Critical Naturalism is
confronted today, in the face of the ecological catastrophe and the entropic transfor-
mations of contemporary landscapes, with the problem of anticipating the future while
grasping a third way between primordial nature and reied second nature, wild nature
and humans’ enslaved nature: the problem of re-imagining natures, through cultural and
technological means, and conversely, of reinventing third natures as plural, contingent,
hybrid orders. In his essay on The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter
Benjamin raised the question of how we can free ourselves from the historical cage of
a given second nature as it has been shaped through a relation – labelled as “rst tech-
nology” – to naturalness as to an external material to be dominated. Whereas second
nature, as it is historically given, is a distorted mirror of human beings’ domination over
rst nature, the utopian moment of Critical Naturalism envisages a third possibility,
whose anticipated gure could let us catch a glimpse of a dierent relation, which goes
beyond both the mere naturalization of human beings, and the humanization of nature.
Benjamin named “second technology” a dierent project of our relation to natural-
ness, whose objective correlative, in the horizon of the future, could be aesthetically
anticipated through the gure of third natures. Their traces can be detected in those
interstitial, undecided territories Gilles Clement names “third landscapes”, which are
left over, unattended by human beings and their historical constructions, and appear as
undetermined fragments, ciphers of the planetary garden.
Anderson, Elisabeth. 2013. The Imperative of Integration.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Arruzza, Cinzia, Bhattacharya, Tithi, and Nancy
Fraser. 2019. Feminism for the 99%. A Manifesto.
London: Verso.
Brenner, Johanna and Barbara Laslett. 2019. “Gender,
Social Reproduction, and Women’s Self-
Organization: Considering the US Welfare
State.” Gender & Society 5 (3): 311–33.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. Feminism and
the Subversion of Identity. London/New York:
Routledge.
Cuboniks, Laboria. 2018. The Xenofeminist Manifesto.
A Politics for Alienation. London: Verso. Available
also online: https://laboriacuboniks.net/
manifesto/xenofeminism-a-politics-for-
alienation/
Dupré, John. 2015. The Disorder of Things. Metaphysical
Foundations of the Disunity of Science. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Dupré, John. 2018. Everything Flows. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Fausto-Sterling, Anna. 2012. Sex/Gender: Biology in a
Social World. London/New York: Routledge.
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Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly
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Foster, John Bellamy. 2021. The Return of Nature.
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Conversation in Critical Theory. New York: Wiley.
Gallagher, Shaun. 2020. Action and Interaction.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
References
Notes
1 As happens in Bruno Latour, in Jason Moore’s
(2015) monist world ecology, and in Timothy
Morton’s (2009) ecology without nature.
2 Such as by Judith Butler, Axel Honneth, or
Slavoj Zizek.
124
Honneth, Axel. 2015. Freedom’s Right: The Social
Foundations of Democratic Life (2011).
Cambridge: Columbia University Press.
Honneth, Axel, and Hans Joas. 1989. Social Action
and Human Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Malm, Andreas. 2020. Corona, Climate, Chronic
Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First
Century. London: Verso.
Medina, José. 2013. The Epistemology of Resistance:
Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice,
and the Social Imagination. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Moore, Jason. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life.
London: Verso 2015.
Morton, Timothy. 2009. Ecology Without Nature:
Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Schmidt, Alfred. 2013. The Concept of Nature in Marx
(1962). London: Verso.
Schmidt, Alfred. 1977. Emanzipatorische Sinnlichkeit.
Ludwig Feuerbachs anthropologischer Materialismus.
Berlin: Ullstein.
Williams, Alex, and Nick Srnicek. 2013. “Accelerate
Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics.”
Critical Legal Thinking, May 14, 2013. https://
criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/
accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-
politics/
Federica Gregoratto is habilitated lecturer
(Privatdozentin) in social and political philosophy
at the University of St Gallen. She has published in
English, German, French and Italian on a variety of
topics in social and political philosophy, such as the
philosophy of love and sex, critical theory (including
the monograph on Habermas: Il doppio volto
della comunicazione, Mimesis, 2013), pragmatism,
recognition and power theories, debt-guilt debates,
gender and intersectionalist studies. She is now
working on a book about erotic love as a social
space of power, freedom and transformation.
Heikki Hikaheimo is Senior Lecturer at the
University of New South Wales, Sydney. His research
areas include Hegel, German idealism, theories of
recognition, intersubjectivity, subjectivity, personhood,
the human life-form, critical social philosophy. He
published the monograph Anerkennung (De Gruyter
2014), the edited collections Recognition and
Social Ontology (Brill 2011) and Recognition and
Ambivalence (Columbia University Press 2021),
as well as Handbuch (Springer 2021). His next
monograph Recognition and the Human Life-form is
forthcoming by Routledge in 2022.
Emmanuel Renault is professor of philosophy
at University of Paris-Nanterre. His research
interests include Hegel, Marx, The Frankfurt School,
Pragmatism, philosophy of nature, the theory
of recognition and of work. His books in English
include: The Experience of Injustice (Columbia
University Press, 2019), Marx and Critical Theory
(Brill, 2018), Social Suffering: Sociology, Psychology,
Politics (2017) and The Return of Work in Critical
Theory: Self, Society, Politics (Columbia, 2018, with
C. Dejours, J.-P. Deranty and N. Smith).
Arvi Särkelä is Lecturer at the University of Lucerne
and Postdoctoral Researcher at ETH Zürich. His
research interest include Spinoza, Hegel, Emerson,
Nietzsche, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Adorno, social
philosophy, philosophy of culture and methodology
of the history of philosophy. He has published the
monograph Immanente Kritik und soziales Leben
(Klostermann 2018), co-edited (with Axel Honneth)
the German Edition of Dewey’s Lectures in China
(Sozialphilosophie, Suhrkamp 2019) and co-edited
(with Martin Hartmann) the volume Naturalism and
Social Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield 2022).
Italo Testa is Associate Professor at the University
of Parma. His research interests include German
Classical Philosophy, Critical Theory, Pragmatism,
Embodied Cognition, Social Ontology, theoris of
recognition, habit, and second nature. Among his
books: La natura del riconoscimento (Mimesis,
2010), and the edited collections I that is We, and We
that is I (Brill, 2016), Habits. Pragmatist Approaches
from Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Social
Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Biographies
The Uncaring Feedback Loop of the Care-Industrial Complex,
and Why Things Go On Like This
Patricia de Vries
Emma Dowling. 2021. The Care Crisis:What Caused
It and How Can We End It. London/New York: Verso
Books.
Review of
Care Work, Care Crisis, Austerity, Financialisation,
Marxist Feminism, Reproductive Labour, Care Fixes,
Privatisation, Neoliberalism, Inequality, Social
Reproduction
Keywords
https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.42.1.38789
DOI
Krisis 42 (1):125-129.
Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 License International License (CC
BY 4.0). © 2022 The author(s).
125
The Uncaring Feedback Loop of the Care-Industrial Complex,
and Why Things Go On Like This
Patricia de Vries
In The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It (2021), Emma Dowling –
Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Change at the University of Vienna – has
written a compassionate and lucid sociological account of the impact of decades of
government entrenchment, austerity, nancialisation, and marketisation on social and
health care infrastructures.
The Care Crisis focuses on the ongoing care crisis in Britain. Dowling argues that
the systematic underfunding of health and social care is long-standing and entrenched.
The retrenchment of the state’s material responsibility for social welfare resulted from
a state-driven social, political, and economic restructuring process that has generated
market relations in the care sector through social engineering. Dowling traces this “neo-
liberal reconguration of care” to the 1970s, when the British government opened the
door to the outsourcing of public services to corporations (Dowling 2021, 12). This
allowed the private sector to prot from social and health care services resulting in the
nancialisation and commodication of social and health care (10). Moreover, Dowling
invokes Margaret Thatcher’s infamous assertion, that “there is no such thing as society,” (9)
to argue that the “neoliberal reconguration” also framed “care as a private or personal
responsibility” — rather than a social and collectively funded responsibility (9).
The current care crisis is described by Dowling as a growing “gap” between care
needs and the recourses made available to meet them (6). More and more people are
unable to get the help they need, and those who provide care to others are “unable to do
so satisfactorily and under dignied conditions” (6). She delineates how under-resourced,
understaed, and undervalued care infrastructures have brought about a shortage of care
facilities, long waiting lists, fragmented community services, and major care decits.
The Care Crisis delineates the underlying rationale and impact of this growing
care gap. Each chapter starts with a short vignette, based on her eldwork, that gives
a glimpse into the oppressive conditions of care work provisions and the rationing of
care needs. Addressing paid care work, unpaid care work, and state-provision issues that
all play an interrelated part in the care gap, Dowling describes the consequences of a
care-industrial complex that operates on a reductive denition of care and imposes a mar-
ket-centred industry model to increase productivity and cost and time-eciency — in
short: protability — on fundamentally social, aective, relational, and time-consuming
labour. Prot is the end goal, whereas care is costly and often does not yield prot.
Adopting a Marxist feminist approach, and using demographics, statistics, and
interviews with people on both the frontlines and, to a lesser extent, the receiving end
of care in Britain, The Care Crisis argues that the underfunding of care is a by-product of
the undervaluing of social reproduction. Reproductive labour is all the usually unpaid
labour associated with women and the domestic sphere which makes productive labour
possible — think of giving birth and raising children, but also keeping a household
running or providing informal care to friends, neighbours, and relatives. For Dowling,
care work is an essential aspect of the labour of reproducing society (37). Care is an
126
inherently “relational and aective” (45) form of work, comprising “all the supporting
activities that take place to make, remake, maintain, contain and repair the world we live
in and the physical, emotional, and intellectual capacities required to do so” (21). This
means that care is “central to the reproduction of society and thus one of its bedrocks,
part of a fundamental infrastructure that holds society together. Without care, life could
not be sustained” (21). Even though the spheres of production and reproduction “are
co-constitutive,” they are not considered equal (36). Reproductive work is still widely
considered non-work or unskilled work “warranting that it either not be paid at all or
paid very little” (36).
Referring to Marxist feminists like Silvia Federici, Dowling further explains
that care is fundamental to the historical organisation and development of the capitalist
system. Marxist feminists showed that creating surplus value in capitalist economies
happens on the backs of unpaid reproductive labour, which is predominantly carried
out by women in society.
As the 1970s feminist movement Wages for Housework argued, the home and
the community are sites of unpaid reproductive labour; hence, the home and the com-
munity are sites of wealth production and labour exploitation (33), and a key source
of capital accumulation (200). There is nothing natural about these conditions. Rather
they “are politically and economically — and hence historically — conditioned, with
all of the gendered, radicalised and classed implications of power relations” (38). Which
is to say, what constitutes acceptable care standards is a “profoundly, social, cultural and
political matter” (26).
The framework and analysis Dowling presents help to explain and critique the
conditions in which care work continues to be “one of the most undervalued and invis-
ibilised activities of all, while those who perform them are some of the most neglected
and unsupported people in our societies” (26). This should not surprise anyone living
in a capitalist, racialised, and patriarchal culture, given that women do most care work
and many of those women are migrants — this goes hand in hand with the devaluation
of care work. But it also helps us to understand that the care crisis she observes is a crisis
“for those in most need of care” (53).
As we all know, “in an unequal world, no crisis aects everyone equally. To
speak of a crisis is thus to ask the question, a crisis for whom?” (6). Dowling refers to
demographics and statistics to point to the larger systemic issues of the devaluation of
care work expressed in the uneven eect it has had on “lone women pensioners,” single
mothers, “Black and Minority Ethnic women,” refugees, children with disabilities, adults
with disabilities or complex mental health issues, jobseekers, the homeless, and those
dependent on benet payments (52).
To speak of a crisis is also to ask: who is picking up the tab for the neoliberal
restructuring of the care sector? Unsurprisingly, the disproportionate burden of care work
is placed upon women and migrant workers, both paid and unpaid. “Everywhere in the
world, without exception, women do signicantly more unpaid care work than men”
(24). “Women carry out 60 per cent more unpaid domestic and care work than men”
(77). Women make up the majority of paid care workers, too: care work “makes up 19.3
per cent of global female employment, and 6.6. per cent of global male employment” (25).
127
Part of the neoliberal doctrine of care is what Dowling calls “care xes,” which
“resolve nothing denitively but merely displace the crisis elsewhere” (15). In dierent
chapters, she discusses these “xes,” such as assistive technologies, gig work, outsourcing
and ooading of care, the mobilisation of and dependency on unpaid volunteer net-
works of community care, informal networks, and free labour of love from friends and
family, Social Impact Bonds (SIB), self-quantication, and the industry around self-care.
To pick just one from this list, more and more often, white and middle-class
people ooad care work onto others – think of nannies, babysitters, domestic workers,
and house cleaners. They are “often female, lower-class and quite probably with a
migration background” (74). Their conditions leave much to be desired: often below
minimum wage, informal, without social security, unemployment and sickness benets,
or pension savings. In this process of ooading care work, “chain reactions” emerge in
which women (and some men) from low-wage countries take on the care work of mid-
dle-class families at the expense of their care work, further entrenching social inequalities
(74). The resulting chain reactions change nothing in the unequal distribution of repro-
ductive labour, but merely replace one group of women and some men from the Global
North with another group of women and some men from the Global South.
The outsourcing and ooading of care are part of the so-called “management”
of the crisis in adult social care (105), which relies on the work of migrant women,
often employed by outsourcing companies that compensate below minimum wage. In
the chapter ‘A Perfect Storm,’ Dowling describes the perverse conditions of adult social
care provision, a “toxic mix” of “unequal distribution of societal responsibility; the lack
of value attributed to the work of caring; austerity and underfunding; and the failures
of privatisation and the consequences of marketisation and nancialisation” (105). This
is epitomised by care providers’ treatment of women and migrant care workers, the
elderly and vulnerable, and by the consequences of the uncritical use of monitoring and
assistance technology for the sake of protability. The very populations that “bear the
destructive consequences of nancialised capitalism” are being “recast as a cost to society
and a risk, to be managed using calculative instruments aimed at nancial returns” (165).
Why does care continue to be undervalued in this way? Dowling argues that
legitimacy and justication are partly achieved “through a denial of the structural
reasons people need welfare in the rst place” (70), and partly a result of what she
calls a “displacement eect” (162). Dowling borrows this concept from Stuart Hall,
who coined it in the 1970s in the context of the criminalisation of young black men.
The displacement eect recasts symptoms of the structural crisis as causes, leaving the
systemic problems of the crisis unaddressed (162).
According to Dowling, the causes of the care crisis are “growing poverty and
inequality” (92), underfunding and the “privatising of gains and socialising of risks” (163).
Yet social care recipients suer from the social stigma that blames and shames them for
their care needs, while political, economic, and social inequalities disappear from view.
Depleted public funding, privatisation, and the logic of business models ensnare social
and health care infrastructures at their roots (139). Care becomes commodied, and
access to it is more and more dependent on what people can aord, leaving the most
vulnerable to their own (limited) devices, and deepening care decits and inequalities.
128
This creates an uncaring feedback loop.
How can we break out of this self-reinforcing loop? Chief among the possible
remedies for the care crisis Dowling explores in the nal chapters of her book is the
need for “transforming the social, economic and political structures that create social
disadvantage” (156). This necessary “transformation of the structural conditions for
care” will only happen if care has “a dierent status” and is organised “as a social and
material practice — at the level of institutions and the everyday” (193). This requires
“allocating more time, money and social capacities” and “elevating its undervalued
political and ethical status” (195). More concretely, she proposes to “denancialise care,”
to democratise it, and liberate it from free trade agreements (196). Care work, she
argues, should be “better paid, with better working conditions, better training, more
resources and improved technological support that enables better caring” (197). It also
needs to “be met with public investment in infrastructures such as childcare, education,
healthcare, eldercare, and community service” (199) and by the redistribution of care
delivery through creating collectively owned forms of care provision. The care crisis,
Dowling contends, demands a “struggle for a better future” (8). This struggle requires
reclaiming “the means to care from the prerogatives of protability” (206).
Dowling’s call is urgent in an ongoing global pandemic and a mammoth task for
capitalist systems that care about prot above anything else. I don’t think many people
on the left would disagree with Dowling’s astute analysis. But can her suggestions for
repair and reform succeed in getting a foot in the door?
Under capitalism, valuation is expressed in money and prot, but does this
mean that money is part of the solution for reversing the underlying political deci-
sions, measures, and infrastructures that have led to this worrying care crisis? Dowling’s
proposals raise the question: can one reform an infrastructure that was parasitic from the
get-go and never worked to begin with? Phrased dierently: what are the implications
if indeed care and capitalism are fundamentally at odds with each other? How can we
extricate care from the credo that time is money?
More pragmatically: How could we incentivise – or reverse engineer – states,
corporate investors, and care providers to take the material and social responsibility
to help reduce poverty and social and health inequality, without exploiting (migrant)
women? The World Health Organisation estimates a projected shortfall of 18
millionhealthworkersby 2030, mostly in low- and lower-middle-income countries,
but every country will be aected. In The Netherlands, new projections predict a
shortage of 135,000 care workers by 2030, particularly in hospitals and nursing homes.
It is easy to predict who will be aected the most. What changes are needed to make
women and migrant workers less vulnerable to parasites — what factors aect the
host-parasite relationship? How do we elevate its status and the conditions of care
work? To throw the cat among the pigeons: what about a men’s quota regulation in paid
care work: enforced, inalienable quotas to mitigate gender, class, and ethnic disparities
and accelerate the achievement of balanced participation in paid care work? We need
to start somewhere.
129
Patricia de Vries works as research professor at the
Gerrit Rietveld Academy. She has published in Big
Data & Society, Rhizomes, nY, De Reactor, Press & Fold,
Amsterdam Book Review, and has written on art and
philosophy for the art gallery MU in Eindhoven,
Centraal Museum in Utrecht, Maxxi Museum
in Rome, and the digital art center Chronus in
Shanghai.
Biography
https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.42.1.38698
DOI
Art’s Work in Mnemonic Care
Sue Shon
Mihai, Mihaela. 2022. Political Memory and the
Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Review of
Krisis 42 (1): 130-133.
Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 License International License (CC
BY 4.0). © 2022 The author(s).
Political Memory, Systemic Violence, Aesthetics,
Care, Care Ethics
Keywords
130
The Krisis two-part special issue on care arrives in a phase of the COVID-19 pandemic
in which the Global North forges a “return to normal,” that is, to pre-pandemic social
and political orders which were already in crisis, and also to revamped processes of
neoliberal globalization playing out in nationalist spaces. Borders closed (except to
capital); governments prioritized national economy over workers in healthcare, fac-
tories, warehouses, and other frontlines; global north nations hoarded vaccines and
healthcare resources; anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, anti-Asian, anti-migrant, xenophobic
and ableist violence reinvented itself within, and traveled across, borders; militarized,
right-wing, and imperial nationalisms resurged around the world, with the February
24, 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine becoming the latest most visible manifestation.
As the pandemic laid bare devastating structural violence, perhaps the imperative
to “return to normal” could be understood as the writing of a globalized memory that
obscures the more than six million dead to COVID-19 worldwide. Political Memory and the
Aesthetics of Care by Mihaela Mihai, published in January 2022, invites a reading against the
backdrop of these reproductions and restructurings. While the book does not explicitly
discuss our current context, it gestures to ways of understanding the struggle over how we
remember the forms of violence of the past two years and how we tell stories about them.
Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care reckons with the un/accountability of
systemic violence in the formation of ocial public memory. Perhaps the most powerful
forms of remembering include the nation narrative, constituted by simplistic understand-
ings of action that authorize the nation form as an outcome of revolution and decol-
onization or as a transition to justice. As Mihai emphasizes, national refoundation and
institutional memory-making projects—unable to narrate the constitutive violence of the
nation form—cast history in terms of victim/perpetrator gures and erase the widespread
complicity with violence that exceeds the logics of agency and a victim-perpetrator dyad.
This erasure not only renders invisible the work and the economies of systemic political
violence, but also places state violence and complicity with it outside of ocial memory,
absolving accountability for the very violence that made the nation’s formation and a
national temporality possible.
This erasure is complementary to an exceptionalized and canonized political
vision expressed in terms of heroic resister gures. In eect, the complexity of political
violence is narrated as simple antagonisms among victims, perpetrators, and resisters,
where the resisters represent a unied, puried political vision. The ocial and public
privileging of “resistance” singularizes political possibility and erases interlocuters, activ-
ities, and visions that demonstrate political plurality, collectivity, and unassimilability.
Fixed in place by the ocial account, the “absolute hero colonizes political memory,”
closing the community’s “hermeneutical space” which ultimately reproduces “the very
practices and relationships—economic, political, and cultural—that led to violence in
the rst place” (7). Mihai argues that the ocial disavowal of complicity and ocial
exclusion of alternative or competing memories constitute a “double erasure” that the
book seeks to expose.
Art’s Work in Mnemonic Care
Sue Shon
131
The rst chapter, “Tracing the Double Erasure,” denes the concept and traces
the moves of the double erasure. This chapter exposes the temporality of systemic vio-
lence that plays out in the remembering and telling of history. In underscoring the
continuities and genealogies of violence, Mihai exposes how the ocial public imag-
ining of a clean break from the preceding order marks the start of a distinct national
timespace and a new history. This temporal, historical, and juridical reimagining of vio-
lence as outside of the “new” order consequently occludes the structural and relational
nature of violence. It also avails individualistic, moralistic, and punitive frameworks for
responding to systemic violence. These limited frameworks arm the historical casting
of characters of victim, perpetrator, and hero.
The rest of the chapter puts complicity and resistance into context and argues
complicity and resistance must be understood as relation. With careful attention to
Pierre Bourdieu’s accounts of socialization, Mihai’s “alternative social-ontological
sketch” maps the relational powers of habitus (generated in social/ized positionality,
including gender, race, sexuality), individual inter/actions sourced by practical sense
emergent in and by unconscious, internalized social ordering (including statist struc-
tures of social ordering), and doxa or societal common sense which normativize what
counts as truth, “including ocial truths about its history and its agents” (33). Mihai
stresses that individuals’ positions in the making of history are constrained to ocial
temporal frameworks, as:
position is not xed but changes over time, reecting changes in both the
context and the agents themselves. Individuals’ sense of time, their capacity to
build on the past to imagine a future and to invest emotionally in that future are
interrelated aspects of their socially embedded experience, which have reper-
cussions on how they navigate the muddy waters of systemic wrongdoing, in
more complicit or more resistant ways. This highlights the need to think about
the temporality of action—that is, the ways in which the past and the future are
brought together in the habitus (34).
Mihai therefore breaks down a completely dierent understanding of action: action
must be understood beyond terms of individual agency. Action is situated in ideolog-
ical, racialized, gendered, classed habitus and in doxastic power of nationalist memory
production, circulation, and reproduction in ways that validate existing orders of race,
gender, and class. Therefore, a focus on systemic political involvement and complicity
with violence would reveal “ssures in the national doxa and recuperate the heretic,
counterhegemonic common sense that have historically challenged it” (38).
Chapter two, “The Aesthetics of Care,” theorizes artwork as a response to,
and a strategy of, a political memory that works against doxastic power and hege-
monic sense-making. Mihai’s methods for exposing the ssures in the national doxa
and recuperating unassimilable sense and sensing reckons with what I interpret as the
archives of ocial memory. Lisa Lowe has argued that the organization of institutional
archives—archives that mediate what Mihai poses as ocial memory—works to resolve
the contradictions and uncertainties of state capacity. For Lowe and others, the archive
is conceptualized as the terrain and the framework that politicizes and spatializes
132
erasure, silence, absence. Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care constructs and oers a
counter-archive of works by artists, activists, historians, and social scientists that hesitate,
interrupt, and thus politicize anew temporality, sense, and memory. Mihai’s archival
selections include artworks that speak to the double erasure, de-heroify nationalist ver-
sions of history, and create hermeneutical space in response to violence, for the sake of
community.
In this eort, Mihai builds on Alia Al-Saji’s concept of aective hesitation to
theorize the capacity for revising memory in hegemonic common sense. Mihai fore-
grounds how this imaginative capacity can be accessed by the work of art; “artworks
can play a transformative role to the extent that they trigger aective but also cogni-
tive, emotional, and moral hesitations” (52). Hesitation can interrupt and politicize the
individual’s practical sense and habits of perceiving, remembering, and imagining as
the subject faces “epistemic friction,” a process Mihai elaborates from the work of José
Medina. Epistemic friction can develop in the hesitation opened up by the artwork,
and friction enables the imagination to “prosthetically include previously disconsonant
instances—of victimhood, complicity, or resistance, within our repertoire of herme-
neutical resources, which we actualize practically in time” (53). Accordingly, the work of
art for Mihai is in the operations of prosthesis and also in “seductive sabotage” or the
pleasure that is part of the art experience—which might sabotage habits and habitus.
Mihai argues that her archive of artworks—lms and novels produced in the
wake, and in reection, of systemic violence—complicate the complicity/resistance
dyad, reframe heroic action beyond the terms that serve national doxa, carve out tempo-
ralities, experiences, vulnerabilities, and rationales that remain unaccounted for in nation
narratives, and oer alternative visions of the past. This archive might be understood as
a counter-archive to nationalized public memory. Mihai’s knowledge production and
reection might be understood as practice in community. In constructing this archive,
Mihai works as “curator” in the original sense of the word: care-taker.
The rest of the book takes care, curates, and, in eect, archives lms and novels
that “pluralize a community’s space of meaning” (57). Mihai oers a care ethics that
always-already integrates interdependency and relationality, which opposes liberal philo-
sophical models that privilege the subject in accounts of sociality. Care ethics necessitate
the framing of violence through relationality. In relationality, the memorialization of
resistance (and complicity) no longer makes sense. Caring therefore is relational practice
and practice in relationship: “we begin to care in the act of caring” (59). As practice, caring
works against instituted and systemic suering, oppression, exclusion, and assimilation.
Thus care ethics oppose “socialized misremembering,” which accepts ocial memory,
and the nation narratives that regulate common sense, and instead oers hermeneutical
space in which seeing, thinking, and feeling otherwise become possible.
The nal three chapters of the book tackle three global sites reckoning with the
temporality of ocial memory’s double erasures: France, Romania, and South Africa.
Mihai takes care to expose the double erasures, summarizes the memorialized ocial
story, and presents an archive that counters the story to restore what has been erased
across the three sites. She looks to ction and lm by Louis Malle, Jacques Laurent,
Patrick Modiano, Brigitte Friang, Marguerite Duras, and Alain Resnais in post-war
133
France; Norman Manea, Dan Pit
a, Herta Müller, Calin Peter Netzer, and Corneliu
Porumboiu in Romania following nearly a quarter century of Nicolae Ceaus
escu’s
dictatorship; and Zoë Wicomb, Achmat Dangor, Tatamkhulu Afrika, John Kani, Ivan
Vladislavic, and Ralph Ziman in post-apartheid settler colonial South Africa. As Mihai
provides views over nationalist memory in France, Romania and South Africa, the
analyses in each and across these sites and chapters also provide tools for deconstructing
doxa and for curating and creating archives of heretic political visions at other sites of
systemic political violence around the globe.
Mihai’s theory of the double erasure and its functionality can be used to analyze
a variety of contexts around the globe. This is her most impactful contribution to the
elds of political theory, philosophy, history, and historiography. Therefore I am curious
how the book situates the temporality of the double erasure in relation to classic and
recent theories of nation time and historical narrativity. Mihai qualies her care and
contributions within the scope of political theorization of systemic violence; her aes-
thetic investigations demonstrate the capacities of artistic care as located in refusenik
artistic production (i.e. the artwork-object). Yet there are some missed opportunities
to engage with intellectual comrades in Asian American Studies, Black Studies, queer
and trans theory, and abolitionist feminist theory who reimagine the care of reading,
hearing, and seeing erasures, silences, and absences in the archives by politicizing the
“where” and the “how” meaningfulness gets located in the work of art.
Most importantly, Mihai’s book shows us how to understand action dierently.
In the present moment, as we struggle against the writing of political memory within
enclosed perceptual experiences and hermeneutics, we might draw from Mihai’s the-
orization of mnemonic care. This would require careful attention to coalition-based
politics of care that emerged in the internationalist George Floyd uprisings of 2020,
especially agents, actions, solidarities, and successes that escape existing languages,
including that of national frames; ephemeral, intangible ground-level mutual aid eorts
that confront state abandonment of Black, Indigenous, migrant, woman, queer, trans,
and poor and working-class populations; and abolitionist critiques including art and
aesthetic practices against the normalization of systemic state-sponsored violence in
carceral society.
Lowe, Lisa. 2015.The Intimacies of Four Continents.
Durham and London: Duke University Press. Dr. Sue Shon is Assistant Professor of Critical and
Cultural Studies at Emily Carr University of Art and
Design. She researches and teaches critical race and
ethnic studies and comparative diasporic literatures
and visual cultures. She is working on a book project,
Racial Sense and the Making of Aesthetic Modernity,
which tells the story of how race acquired a visual
feel due to constraints in the language of modern
human perception.
BiographyReferences
Adam Kotsko. 2020. Agamben’s Philosophical
Trajectory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.42.1.37938
Agamben, Kotsko, Potentiality, Museification, Homo
Sacer, COVID-19
DOI
Keywords
A Thousand Agambens to Replace the One We Have
Tim Christiaens
Review of
Krisis 42 (1): 134-139.
Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 License International License (CC
BY 4.0). © 2022 The author(s).
134
Whoever has read a Giorgio Agamben chapter or essay has probably wondered about
one of his peculiar stylistic habits: he often writes disconnected paragraphs on widely
diverging topics. On a single page, he mixes a philological remark about Aristotle, criti-
cisms of Hobbes, and Benjaminian musings about divine violence. Nonetheless, readers
are always struck by the intuition that these disparate paragraphs evoke a unied argu-
ment. They never doubt that these statements have a single clear message, however dis-
connected their topics. Agamben freely associates across the history of Western thought,
yet every statement forms a microcosm bearing the signature of the entire chapter.
Readers themselves are consequently tasked with reconstructing the underlying idea
that animates these diverse remarks. They take on the role of psychoanalysts decoding
the sentences as symptoms of an implicit apparatus pulling the strings from behind a
curtain of words. This temptation to decipher an arché-text behind Agamben’s explicit
discourse has convinced many interpreters to look for a single philosophical problematic
not only in Agamben’s essays or chapters, but also in his overall philosophical oeuvre.
Leland De La Durantaye, for instance, argues that Agamben’s philosophical trajectory is
one singular sustained meditation on potentiality (De La Durantaye 2009). He argues
that Agamben journeys through metaphysics, political philosophy, and linguistics to
ultimately come to terms with what it means for a human subject to have the potential
to do something and to have that potential taken away from them when they are
reduced to the status of bare life. Sergei Prozorov, on the other hand, reads Agamben’s
itinerary as a persistent attempt to escape sovereign politics (Prozorov 2014). In this
reading, even books on arcane topics in animal biology or theology serve to reect
upon the political opportunities to escape the power of the State. Agamben himself
has encouraged such readings by often presenting his oeuvre as if it were motivated by
a single purpose. In the epilogue of The Use of Bodies, for instance, he writes that he
wanted to “call into question the place and the very originary structure of politics, in
order to bring to light the arcanum imperii”(Agamben 2015, 263). After all, one does not
write a multiple-book project spanning 20 years and 9 books if one does not believe to
be engaged in a single philosophical inquiry.
Such readings have become troublesome during the last few years due to the
Corona Pandemic. Agamben has become notorious for his criticisms of governmental
policies like lockdowns, vaccination requirements, and social distancing.1 There are
clear similarities between Agamben’s opposition to these policies and his critique of
modern biopolitics in books like Homo Sacer, so one cannot simply dismiss Agamben’s
controversial political interventions as somehow unrelated to his overall philosophy.
There is no way of distinguishing clearly between Agamben the philosopher and
Agamben the person in this debate. It is thus tempting to re-read Agamben’s entire
oeuvre as a preguration of his political missteps today. If Agamben’s critique of modern
biopolitics leads to wrongheaded opinions today was Agamben’s approach then not
absurd all along? The pandemic subsequently becomes the new arché-text for the inter-
pretation of Agamben’s philosophical development (cf. Bratton 2021). The downside of
A Thousand Agambens to Replace the One We Have
Tim Christiaens
135
this approach is that other, more interesting potential readings of Agamben’s oeuvre are
marginalized in favour of one master narrative.
Adam Kotsko’s Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory, however, takes aim at this
monolithic interpretive strategy. He even chooses not to mention the Coronavirus
Pandemic to avoid such kind of distractions. The aforementioned reading strategy
ignores the multifarious shifts and turns in Agamben’s philosophical career and even
in the “Homo Sacer”-project itself. Agamben frequently changed his mind about the
ordering of the books in the overall project, often rephrased earlier arguments to t
newer concerns, and he even added chapters to Stasis and The Use of Bodies at the
very end, when the project was published separately in an omnibus edition. These are
not signs of a man who, with the publication of Homo Sacer in 1995, knew exactly
how the project would end in 2014. Nor is it very likely that Agamben would have
already developed his entire philosophy from the start of his career, as some claim. Many
concepts vanish or are rearticulated over the course of a career that spans more than 50
years. Whoever reads about Aristotle’s distinction between potentiality and act in The
Man without Content, Agamben’s rst book, will not recognize the “ocial” Agambenian
interpretation from almost 30 years later. Concepts central to his thought at some point,
like “Voice”, “whatever being”, or “testimony”, simply disappear in later books.
Kotsko chooses a dierent approach to writing an overview of Agamben’s
oeuvre. His concern does not rest on the discernment of a single philosophical
apparatus animating all of Agamben’s individual writings. Other interpreters tend to
reduce Agamben’s books to steps in a uniform argument about a single problematic,
like potentiality, anti-sovereign politics, or pandemic biopolitics. But, if this were truly
possible, then why would Agamben ever have written more than one book? If all his
texts amount to the same argument anyway, it seems that Agamben could have spared
himself the trouble of publishing almost 40 books. Kotsko, on the contrary, has read all
books in chronological order and simply reports his ndings without striving toward
a unied message. Aided by personal conversations with Agamben, he carefully tracks
the multiple thought processes, the promising hypotheses, and creative conclusions, but
also the mistakes, hesitations, and inconsistencies across Agamben’s texts to highlight
the discontinuities. Kotsko’s meticulous reading dismantles all hope of nding a single
arché-text in Agamben. He rather divides Agamben’s philosophical trajectory roughly
into four periods, though he emphasizes that there is never any hard break akin to a
Heideggerian Kehre. Old thoughts or assumptions never truly disappear, but become
rearticulated into new contexts. Likewise, concepts that seem to be new are often
already signaled in earlier texts without being fully elaborated upon.
In the rst phase, between the 1960s and ‘80s, Agamben is an almost aggressively
apolitical thinker interested in art and linguistics. If one would stop reading before the
‘90s, there would be no way of guessing that Agamben would become one of the most
famous political theorists today. He was entirely enveloped in philosophy of art and
the establishment of a so-called “general science of the human” built on a critique of
structuralist linguistics. According to Agamben, the structuralist denition of language
as a system of signs ignored that language actualizes itself only through human beings
actually speaking that language. This created, for Agamben, a productive rift in language
136
itself between the xities of its signifying system and its incarnation in human speech.
Agamben believed, in that stage of his career, that (political) philosophy had ignored
this rift and that poetry was a superior medium for reecting on humanity’s linguistic
condition. Only in the 1990s did Agamben enter a second stage of his philosophical
itinerary with a turn to the political. Though he previously had held the politics of his
time in dire contempt, his friendships with Guy Debord and Jean-Luc Nancy, together
with his worries about the emergence of refugee camps in Italy after the Yugoslav Civil
War, convinced him to start studying politics. He fears that the state of exception is
the ultimate truth of modern biopolitical government: once the State apparatus and
the survival of the population is put under pressure, governments tend to suspend
democratic participation and the Rule of Law. Ultimately, the State itself and its violent
response to social disruption paradoxically becomes the main threat to people’s survival.
Here, Agamben embarks on the “Homo Sacer”-project that would dene the rest of his
career. This is also the period where Agamben reaches the peak of his fame with books
like Homo Sacer, State of Exception, and The Time that Remains.
In a third phase, at the end of the 2000s, Agamben turns increasingly to the
history of Christian theology. He becomes convinced that an adequate critique of
Western modernity must reckon with the latter’s roots in medieval Christianity. In books
like The Kingdom and the Glory, Opus Dei, and The Highest Poverty, Agamben stresses the
ways Christianity has given rise to modern capitalist government. This strategy allows
Agamben not only to critique of (neo)liberal economics as secularized theology, but
also to incorporate Foucault’s newly published governmentality lectures and to nally
articulate the link between his own critique of modernity and that of Debord, which
was explicitly promised in the introduction to Homo Sacer. He argues that Debord’s
pessimistic analysis of the modern public sphere as a big capitalist spectacle was pre-
gured in the way the medieval Church supported its popular legitimacy through
strict rituals and grandiose iconography. Just like the Church kept up the illusion of
an authoritative God through rituals that cunningly suggested God’s glory without
ever having to prove it, the State and capitalism sustain their legitimacy through the
illusion of public debate and ceremonial displays of power. This is also the period that
Agamben starts reecting more thoroughly on his philosophical method, mainly in The
Signature of All Things. Homo Sacer had given rise to multiple misunderstandings about
the way Agamben formulated his political philosophy, so Agamben felt he needed to
clarify the contours of his basic methodological concepts like “paradigm”, “signature”,
and “archaeology”. In phase four, which spans from when Agamben started working
on The Use of Bodies to today, he has increasingly looked back on his philosophical life
with more autobiographical writings, like his autoritratto, and books that discuss the
fundamentals of his oeuvre or return to his earliest interests, like What is Philosophy?
or Adventure. Now that the “Homo Sacer”-project is nished, Agamben has taken the
opportunity to reect on his philosophical career and to delve into some side-projects
that he failed to incorporate in earlier volumes. Though Kotsko does not mention
them, Agamben’s Corona essays can also be understood as a late side-project where
Agamben tries to come to terms with his own legacy. And one can rightly be skeptical
about whether this Agamben succeeds at living up to his former self (Esposito 2020).
137
Kotsko discourages the reader to decipher a single master narrative hidden in
all of Agamben’s works. The entire oeuvre is rather a multitude of attempts to engage
with manifold, dierent topics. Agamben has tried to balance his own personal creative
insights with adequately responding to the challenges of his days, and both have shifted
over the years. However, that does not mean all of Agamben’s works are simply stand-
alone pieces with no internal consistency. Agamben frequently recapitulates and reartic-
ulates old ideas to put them to work in new contexts. He is, above all, interested in the
so-called “Entwicklungsfähigkeit” of philosophical concepts. He takes concepts from
their original contexts and puts them together to generate developmental capacities
that were not present in the original context. By, for instance, confronting Foucault’s
analysis of biopolitics with Carl Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty in Homo Sacer, Agamben
managed to produce reections that were only vaguely present in both of these authors’
own texts. The aim has always been to experiment with the inherent productivity of
concepts, which means Agamben has never been the master of his own discourse, but
has rather been following where the concepts’ developmental capacities led him.
Kotsko calls for a similar approach to Agamben’s own concepts: “I aim […]
to prepare the ground for a thousand Agambens to bloom – in their own enigmatic,
idiosyncratic, and fascinating ways” (Kotsko 2020, 13). In reading Agamben’s oeuvre –
or any philosophical text for that matter – the audience actively reconstructs the text’s
developmental capacities. This constitutes a creative encounter that cannot be simply
replicated for everyone in exactly the same way. Each reader must uniquely gauge the
potential of the text. Every singular encounter with Agamben’s writings can give rise
to a new Agamben that is not necessarily compatible to all other readings. This implies,
for instance, that Agamben’s particular response to the Corona Pandemic is not neces-
sarily the only “Agambenian” response imaginable. Other readings of his work can be
provided with other outcomes. To mention just one example, one could use his concept
of “bare life” not to criticize lockdowns, but rather to criticize the precarization of
essential workers. While many middle-class families have been working from home in
relative comfort, working-class individuals have had to expose themselves to the risk
of infection to keep themselves nancially aoat (cf. Butler & Yance 2020, De Cauwer
& Christiaens 2021). To use a Foucaultian metaphor, Kotsko repurposes Agamben’s
philosophy as a conceptual toolbox with which the philosophers of the future can
build new theoretical edices. Kotsko himself suggests to redirect Agambenian thought
to issues of race, gender, or environmentalism, but one can readily imagine even more
Entwicklungsfähigkeiten for Agamben, like digital ethics, neo-fascist populism, or nan-
cialization. As the Corona Pandemic has demonstrated, a single Agamben can be deeply
awed, but a 1000 Agambens might be up to the task of prying open the arcana imperii
of contemporary politics.
There is, however, one serious risk in Kotsko’s strategy that his book leaves
untouched. Though I agree with his proposal to repurpose Agamben’s oeuvre as a
polyvalent toolbox, I doubt whether Kotsko has adequately identied his intellectual
opponent. It might be true that, in the past, many Agamben scholars have organized
his thought under a single header. The same trend can be found in the earliest intro-
ductions to Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, or Michel Foucault. Many
138
secondary literatures on “new” thinkers go through a phase of scholars presenting the
philosophers’ thought as a uniform project. Once this overview has been established,
however, critics emphasize the uniqueness of particular books or discontinuities in a
philosopher’s development. Especially when archives open up and collected works are
being published, scholars leave the general narrative behind to focus on the particulars.
With Agamben as well, the last few years have predominantly seen publications on
particular themes in Agamben’s overall oeuvre rather than general overviews. Though
such attention to detail delivers fascinating new insights, there is also a looming danger
of reducing the writings of these thinkers to stand-alone museum pieces that commu-
nicate nothing but their mere useless presence. Like a Greek vase in a museum only
presented in order to be admired and catalogued but never used, philosophical concepts
can suer from sclerotic museication as well. Instead of putting philosophers like
Wittgenstein or Foucault to use as conceptual toolboxes, scholars subsequently argue
over whether the word “game” has the same meaning in two dierent aphorisms of
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations or they merely list the 14 dierent meanings
of the word “norm” in Foucault’s lectures from January 1974 to February 1975. These
concepts are withdrawn from the sphere of general use and put on a pedestal to be
admired, described, and categorized. Such detailed philological scrutiny is essential to
proper philosophical research, but if the underlying concepts lose their connection to
the world they describe, the whole endeavour becomes pointless. Agamben himself
is no stranger to the minutiae of philology, but he has also been the victim of a pro-
fessorial class that endlessly complains about his creative readings not being “true” to
authors’ original intentions. Agamben’s interpretations of impotentiality in Aristotle,
boredom in Heidegger, or bare life in Benjamin might not have been entirely up to
date with contemporary philological research, but they have withheld these philoso-
phers from becoming useless museum pieces in an entirely self-referential hall of the
Western Canon. Philosophical Investigations, Discipline and Punish, or Homo Sacer have
been written to reect on the human condition, not to be archived in a sterile history
of the philosophy curriculum. By defending the chronological reading of Agamben
with a focus on the discontinuities, Kotsko might encourage the blossoming of a 1000
Agambens reecting on issues of race, gender, or the environment, but he might likewise
be playing in the hands of the museum curators who want to keep the 1000 Agambens
safe behind protective glass. The emphasis on discontinuity should thus be coupled
on an equally vocal emphasis on use over curation. Though Kotsko himself explicitly
makes this connection, it is up to future Agamben scholarship to keep this project alive.
1 See Agamben (2021). Some of the initial
responses are collected in Castrillón & Marchevsky
(2021).
Notes
139
Agamben, Giorgio. 2015.The Use of Bodies. Translated
by Adam Kotsko. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Agamben, Giorgio. 2021.Where Are We Now?
The Epidemic as Politics.London: Rowman &
Littlefield.
Bratton, Benjamin. 2021. “Agamben WTF, or how
Philosophy Failed the Pandemic.”Verso Blog,
21 July, 2021.https://www.versobooks.com/
blogs/5125-agamben-wtf-or-how-philosophy-
failed-the-pandemic.
Butler, Judith & George Yancy. 2020. “Interview:
Mourning Is a Political Act Amid the Pandemic
and Its Disparities.”Bioethical Inquiry17:
483–487.
Castrillón, Fernando & Thomas Marchevsky. 2021.
Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy.
London: Routledge.
De Cauwer,Stijn & Tim Christiaens. 2021. “The
Multitude Divided: Biopolitical Production
during the Coronavirus Pandemic.” InPandemic
and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Yahya
Madra et al,118-127.Brighton: ReMarx Books.
De La Durantaye, Leland. 2009.Giorgio Agamben:
A Critical Introduction.Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Esposito, Roberto. 2020. “The Biopolitics of
Immunity in Times of COVID-19: Interview
with Roberto Esposito: Interview Conducted by
Tim Christiaens & Stijn De Cauwer.”Antipode
Online, 16 July, 2021.https://antipodeonline.
org/2020/06/16/interview-with-roberto-
esposito/.
Kotsko, Adam. 2021.Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Prozorov, Sergei. 2014.Agamben and Politics: A
Critical Introduction.Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
References
Biography
Tim Christiaens is assistant professor of philosophy
of culture and economic ethics at Tilburg University.
He has written his PhD on the history of
governmentality in Michel Foucault and Giorgio
Agamben and he is currently working on the
impact of platform capitalism on work and workers'
autonomy.
Mark Neocleous (2022) The Politics of Immunity:
Security and the Policing of Bodies. London and New
York: Verso Books, 358 pp.
https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.42.1.38701
Biopolitics, Security, Systems Theory
DOI
Keywords
Critiquing Immunity, Critiquing Security
Paul Gorby
Krisis 42 (1): 140-143.
Review of
Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 License International License (CC
BY 4.0). © 2022 The author(s).
140
Critiquing Immunity, Critiquing Security
Paul Gorby
Mark Neocleous’ The Politics of Immunity: Security and the Policing of Bodies is a book
about the body and the body politic, about how the discourses, the metaphors, and the
ctions of one tend to inuence the other, and how our political obsession with immu-
nity gives rise to autoimmune disorders at the societal level. If, as immunologist Frank
Macfarlane Burnet claimed, immunology is more a question of philosophy than biology,
then Neocleous demonstrates that it is very much a question of political philosophy.
To call this work interdisciplinary is a noticeable understatement, since it covers,
alongside political and philosophical debates, literature in biology, immunology, psycho-
analysis, thermodynamics, and international law. The broad spectrum of research that
Neocleous draws upon for his arguments should put to bed any concerns that this book
is a ‘cash-in’ on the COVID-19 pandemic. Far from being simply another attempt to
rapidly produce something which can appeal to a broad audience interested in the pol-
itics of the pandemic, this book is clearly the outcome of a long-term research agenda.
While the COVID-19 pandemic is mentioned only occasionally in The Politics
of Immunity, its critique of the dual notions of immunity and security, which Neocleous
identies as being at the heart of modern politics, is deeply relevant for how we ought
to think about pandemic and post-pandemic politics. As this book demonstrates time
and again, the scientic search for immunity has signicant political consequences, and
the politics of security inuences the science of immunity. “Descriptions of viruses
now read like they have been penned by security intellectuals while descriptions of
terrorism read like they have been penned by virologists.” (17). It is no coincidence,
Neocleous writes, that the UK organisation for collecting and analysing COVID infec-
tion data – the Joint Biosecurity Centre – is modelled on the Joint Terrorism Analysis
Centre, sharing senior sta and adapting the same “levels of threat” model used to assess
terrorism. Given the contemporary relevance of the politics of immunity and security,
this book will appeal to a broad audience as well as academics working on the issues
and themes Neocleous delves into.
The rst chapter confronts various scientic theories of the cell, which turn
out to have deeply political implications. The chapter begins with a discussion of the
militarised language of much biological and immunological research, which treats the
body and its immunity as a site of never-ending war. While there has been signicant
pushback against this discourse of cellular immunity as warfare, Neocleous points out
that “even those seeking to imagine immunity without recourse to the trope of mili-
tarized violence fall back on other tropes of violent powers of elimination” (52). Many
biological thinkers critical of the discourse of war turn instead to a discourse of polic-
ing, reective of a “liberal position which is happy to critique war and its tropes but
less comfortable with a critique of security” (42). The imagery of police–cells engaging in
“immunological surveillance” (46) in the search for “illegal aliens” (48) within the body
remains prominent within scientic discourse and popular understandings of the body.
This conception of cellular war and cellular policing is important because it
naturalises the prevailing ideas of war power and police power, making them seem
141
inherent to human beings as biological entities. For much early work on immunology,
the cell was the elementary part of the body, which meant it was used to explain human
biology and in turn the human as such. The common understanding of the cell as
an individual and independent entity within the “society” of the body both reected
and helped to cement “bourgeois ideals of self-contained and self-regulating units”
(66) within political society. The cell was also a security concept, as we can see from
its non–biological meaning: an enclosed room within a prison. “The cell was being
consolidated as a political site of enclosure and connement, training and discipline, at
the very moment of its discovery and rise in the realm of physiology” (74).
The second chapter follows on from this by discussing the idea of an immune
Self, an idea which once again blurs the line between scientic and political theory. The
idea of a clear and detectable distinction between Self and non-Self is a key assump-
tion in immunology, one which Neocleous criticises as “imprecise, nebulous, and […]
atheoretical” (87). Despite signicant criticisms of the idea from within immunological
research, it “retains its place at the heart of the immunological imagination” (92) at least
in part because it conrms our political and philosophical prejudices, reinforcing “a
fantasy of agency and will” (ibid.). Moving from early modern philosophers up to the
Cold War, Neocleous provides a fascinating and engaging genealogy of the interaction
between immunological and securitised discourses of the Self.
Chapter two also considers the political and philosophical implications of auto-
immune disorders within the immunity-security paradigm. “Because immunity was
imagined as security, the idea that the system could actually harm the very thing it was
expected to secure was essentially unimaginable” (112). The political assumptions of
immunology, as well as the immunological/security assumptions of politics, signicantly
hindered scientic research into autoimmune disease, while also stunting the philosoph-
ical and political interpretations of immunity, as seen in the writings of Esposito and
Derrida. Beyond the political and philosophical discussions of autoimmune disorder,
Neocleous captures the signicant emotional toll of these illnesses, demonstrating the
sense of dread that comes when your immune system turns against you. “In a literal
sense, you do not know who you are” (121).
This discussion is followed by three chapters on the politics of systems from
three dierent perspectives: the emergence of systems theory, notions of order and
entropy within bodies (both human bodies and the body politic), and nervous systems
and nervous states. Each of these is, in turn, linked to immunity and securitised politics.
The idea of an immune “system” feels so natural to us today that to say that it was
“invented” (145) around 1967 feels disconcerting. Nevertheless, there are signicant
political implications behind the idea of a “system”, a concept which now “seems to
ow naturally and seems able to attach itself to everything” (148).
Systems theory has its roots in research on biological organisms in the 1920s
and 1930s, subsequently being picked up by the RAND corporation in the 1940s with
the express purpose of developing a science of war. “The extent to which modern state-
craft and the political administration of capitalist modernity operates through modes of
quantication, information, codication and standardization can be seen operating here,
in the origin of systems theory” (152). Neocleous moves through the numerous areas
142
of study that systems theory came to inuence, including urban planning, economics,
political science, and psychology, among others. He notes its importance for thinkers
such as Friedrich Hayek and, most notably, Niklas Luhmann. Ultimately, he writes,
the lesson of systems theory “is that we cannot and should not seek to control things.
Control is an attribute of the System” (189).
Chapter four considers the central ction of systems theory: self–regulation.
Neocleous considers Enlightenment liberalism and bourgeois political economy
through the lens of “systems” thinking and the idea of self-regulation. These modes of
thought, he argues, “encourage us to imagine society as constituted through a system
of natural liberty operating as a vast, orderly, and living system in which economic
behaviour and vital need go hand in hand” (226). Chaos, from this perspective, entails
the dissolution of ordered structure. This leads to a uniquely accessible discussion of the
political and philosophical implications of entropy and thermodynamics. “The laws of
thermodynamics and the concept of entropy point to the disorder in any system and
the fact that all systems […] come to an end” (236). Thus, entropy has been a point of
fear for many political thinkers, who have sought the political equivalent of Maxwell’s
Demon, an entity capable of violating the law of entropy and thus “able to govern the
system” (248).
The idea of a political and philosophical fear of entropy and chaos leads us
naturally into a discussion of nerves, nervousness, and the nervous system as it relates to
immunity and its politics. Once again, systems theory serves as the centre of Neocleous’
critique, specically its anti-Freudian attempt to reduce the idea of nerves to a singular
meaning. For systems theory, nerves are simply means of processing and communicating
information; the idea of nervousness in the common sense is completely absent. Systems
theory ignores the emotional, subjective, and psychological connotations of nerves such
that it makes no sense to say that a system feels nervous.
Neocleous provides a strong counterargument to systems theory here, addressing
the social and political implications of nervousness, nervous breakdowns, and burnout.
He provides an invaluable political reading of the memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber,
restoring the work’s original intention as a critique of medical incarceration. The
chapter wraps up with a discussion of the idea of a state having a nervous breakdown.
Moving beyond the journalistic trope – which only ever casts the Western state on the
verge of breakdown, but never quite there yet – Neocleous argues that in the excessively
nervous state the “security system responds […] by searching for enemies, by nding
enemies and by fabricating new enemies” (300). Through this process, he argues, the
state, whether Fascist or liberal democratic, can turn self–defence into self–destruction,
falling victim to a societal autoimmune disorder.
Finally, the sixth chapter considers immunity as a legal ction propping up
sovereign power, with a particular eye towards the notion of non-combatant immunity
in warfare. Here Neocleous engages in a fascinating reconstruction of the genealogy
of immunity’s political meaning, moving from its origins in Roman law as a term of
privilege, through its seldom discussed medieval developments as implying defence and
protection, and on to the emergence of the idea of non-combatant immunity in the
eighteenth century. Taking up literature in international law and norms surrounding war,
143
Neocleous demonstrates that the ideal of non-combatant immunity is in fact a ction,
developed at a period in which “no one in their right mind could ever believe that
states would adhere to it” (327). Indeed, rather than protecting civilians, the conclusion
we are drawn to is that the securitised notion of immunity is primarily concerned with
protecting the state’s right to exercise violence.
Overall, this book is a remarkable piece of scholarship which contributes to
a broad spectrum of literature within and beyond contemporary political thought.
However, a noticeable absence from its wide-ranging discussions are the subjects of
race and colonialism. While these topics do come up on occasion – as when quarantine
is described as having been “a means of managing indigenous peoples” (61) or when
colonial wars’ status as police operations is deconstructed – they are seldom dwelt upon
for long. The points that are raised in relation to race and colonialism are fascinating and
would improve the book were they more thoroughly developed, so the brevity with
which they are discussed is very disappointing.
Despite this limitation, however, The Politics of Immunity will still be of interest
to scholars concerned with colonial and neo-colonial violence due to the signicant
conceptual apparatus it employs. Philosophers and political theorists working in a
wide range of research areas will no doubt nd signicant value in this work, as will
more empirically oriented scholars working on political violence and security studies.
Ultimately, perhaps the greatest value of this work is that it becomes impossible to
unreexively use certain words and terms which have become completely standard in
academic vocabulary. Cell, Self, system, nerve, order, security, and, of course, immunity;
the politics underlying these words become clear to the reader such that one cannot
read or write them without taking into account the assumptions and implications
which Neocleous so astutely highlights in this outstanding work.
Paul Gorby is a PhD candidate in the School of
International Relations at the University of St.
Andrews. His thesis develops a critical theory of
the dual concepts of police power and vagrancy and
applies it to key topics in contemporary political
thought, including governmentality, human rights,
migration, and constituent power. His work draws
on Continental political philosophy, Marxist theory,
and the Black radical tradition.
Biography
Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda Works (2015) and
How Fascism Works (2018)
https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.42.1.37980
DOI
Keywords
Krisis 42 (1): 144-152.
Review of
Propaganda, Politics, Philosophy: A Critical Review Essay on Jason
Stanley’s How Propaganda Works (2015) and How Fascism Works (2018)
Maarten van Tunen
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 License International License (CC
BY 4.0). © 2022 The author(s).
Licence
Jason Stanley, Propaganda, Liberalism and Democracy,
Ideal vs. Non-ideal Theory
144
Propaganda, Politics, Philosophy: A Critical Review Essay on Jason
Stanley’s How Propaganda Works (2015) and How Fascism Works (2018)
Maarten van Tunen
Ever since Plato and the Sophists argued about the relations between reason and rheto-
ric, the topic of political propaganda has been at the heart of the Western philosophical
tradition. Today, given the recent profusion of “misinformation” and “fake news”, the
topic is anything but diminished in importance. In his 2015 book How Propaganda
Works, Jason Stanley pursues a primarily philosophical investigation of the phenomenon
of propaganda in which he integrates a wide range of work from the elds of political
philosophy, analytical epistemology, philosophy of language, and the social sciences.
The book oers a thought-provoking analysis of how the phenomenon of propaganda
interacts with ideology, inequality, and democracy. However, while Stanley succeeds
in oering a timely analysis of some of the pressing dangers that contemporary liberal
democracies face, his book is less original and deeply ambiguous in its conceptual
taxonomy of propaganda.
Despite the relevance of the study of propaganda today, it has received little
attention in recent philosophical debates. In the rst chapter of his book, Stanley
explains this shallow academic state of the art by appealing to a distinction that has
become popular in recent moral and political philosophical discourse: the distinction
between “ideal” and “non-ideal” theory. The reason for the lack of scholarly philosoph-
ical interest in propaganda Stanley locates in the presently ourishing “conception of
normative political philosophy” of which the purpose is to describe “the normatively
ideal components of an ideal liberal democratic state” (2015, 28). As Stanley notes,
there is no propaganda in such an ideal state, where speech behaviour is presumed
to be cooperative. It is a consequence of the constraint to ideal theory in mainstream
moral and political philosophy – undoubtedly under the inuence of John Rawls’s
resurrection of the eld in the 1970s in an explicitly ideal theory fashion – that the
topic of political propaganda has disappeared from sight.
Stanley aims to oer a welcome antidote to this tendency: his purpose is to think
through what it entails to argue for the central social democratic ideals of freedom and
equality in our actually ill-ordered and structurally exploitative (hence “non-ideal”)
societies. As he rightly recognizes, “political philosophy without social theory involves
extreme idealization in the construction of its models” (2015, 31). As such, in Stanley’s
study of propaganda, it is the explicit aim to descend from the realm of ideal theory to
the real-world social and political facts of human speech that is so often propagandistic,
manipulative, deceitful, oppressive, or violent. In order to do so, he draws on the work
of analytical feminism, which he says “has laid the theoretical basis” (2015, xvi) for the
book, and critical race theory, to which he says he likewise owes “an enormous debt”
(2015, xix). Stanley’s aim to pursue a non-ideal theory makes of the book a praisewor-
thy initiative and – at least in its aspirations – a valuable intervention in contemporary
analytical political philosophy, which indeed largely continues to engage in ideal theory.
Despite this hopeful stage-setting, however, Stanley nonetheless seems to revert
to the practice of an ideal way of doing political philosophy in his ensuing analysis.
145
That is, he does think it is possible “to frame the problem of propaganda in terms of
the transition problem” (2015, 29) – the problem within ideal political liberalism of “how
to move from an actually awed state guided incompletely by liberal democratic ideals
to an ideal liberal democratic state” (2015, 29). This problem, however, only looms for
ideal theorists and cannot be understood in inferential terms – this is one of the central
claims of Charles Mills in his inuential 2005 essay in which he criticizes ideal theory
(Mills 2005). So, while Stanley cites approvingly from Mills’s inuential castigation
of ideal theory, he fails to do justice to that very paper when it comes to the issue
of the interrelationship between the two approaches. After all, Mills argues that the
relationship between ideal and non-ideal theory is not inferential (and thus not to be
understood in terms of the transition problem). Instead, the revisionist enterprise of
non-ideal political philosophy – the project that substantively rethinks what it means
to argue for equal rights and freedoms in our structurally oppressive and exploitative
historical and political contexts – cannot be satised within the domain of ideal theory
as an extension of it (Mills 2005, 177).
This fallacy brings to the surface a deep tension in Stanley’s overall project. On
the one hand, it is his explicit aim to drive his energies towards non-ideal circumstances
in which practices of propaganda, manipulation, exclusion, and oppression are pervasive.
Yet, on the other hand, in his recourse to ultimately Kantian norms – distilled through
Rawls and Habermas – of liberalism and communication to account for the question of
why and how propaganda threatens our (nominal) liberal democracies, he turns out to
be much more conservative. Stanley subscribes to the traditional philosophical distinc-
tion between “objective claims of reason [and] biased and self-serving opinion” (2015,
xvi), and he adheres to the “truth-conditional, cognitivist picture” of language in his
conceptualization of propaganda (2015, 126). He holds that this picture gives us an
elegant account not only of what happens when communication succeeds, but also of
what happens when it fails, such as in the case of propagandistic speech. This is what
draws Stanley to the Rawlsian appeal to “reasonableness” as a norm that governs “public
reason” as a way to account for propaganda in liberal democracies (see chapter 3) and to
the Habermasian ideals of deliberative democratic deliberation to explain how perverted
language can be used as a propagandistic mechanism (see chapter 4).
It is, of course, true that Rawls rejected philosophical foundationalism in pursu-
ing a liberalism that is “political not metaphysical” and that Habermas put social theory
centre stage in the project of political philosophy. Nevertheless, these sources manifest
the ambiguity that runs through Stanley’s analysis: Rawls and Habermas are clearly ideal
theorists. It is well-known that Rawls’s central question in A Theory of Justice is “what
a perfectly just society would be like” (Rawls 1999, 8), and, analogously, Habermas’s
deliberative conception of democracy is built on the idea of unobstructed rational debate
between well-informed citizens. This debate takes place in what Habermas has called
the “ideal speech situation” in which only “the unforced force of the better argument”
(Habermas 2001, 94–95) will prevail. The critique of non-ideal theorists levelled against
these constrictions in the study of justice and democratic legitimacy is that they idealize
actual real-world human political and linguistic behaviour, thereby being counterpro-
ductive when it comes to their shared hopes, as politically engaged theorists, to achieve
146
concrete social justice and actual democratic debate. By forging his account of pro-
paganda on the ideal principles of liberalism and social democracy that undergird the
philosophies of Rawls and Habermas, Stanley makes himself vulnerable to the critique
of non-ideal theory with which he at least putatively sympathizes. He rst applauds
the critical principles of non-ideal philosophy, but then regresses to the old-fashioned
theoretical apparatus of ideal theory in his analysis of propaganda. Hence my main
critique is internal: he fails to practice what he preaches.
This ambiguous theoretical-methodological background has repercussions in
Stanley’s central analysis of propaganda. Today, this word has a clear pejorative conno-
tation. It may seem as if this moral connotation is exhibited in Stanley’s introductory
chapter, where he connects it to “manipulation” and “political rhetoric” (2015, 4), as
opposed to reasoned argumentation. Likewise, it seems to be in this fashion that he
writes that propaganda poses an “obstacle to the realization of liberal democratic ideals”
(2015, 19) and that he closes the book by stating his hope that his book will “play some
positive role” (2015, 294) in preventing propagandistic subversion of democratic ideals.
If one studies Stanley’s conceptual typology of propaganda carefully, however, one nds
that it does not allow solely for a negative connotation. He characterizes the practice of
political propaganda in general terms as “the employment of a political ideal against itself”
(2015, xiii). But this denition does not say anything about the desirability of the ideal
involved. Stanley thus construes a conception of propaganda that is morally neutral,
thereby opening up the space for occurrences of good as well as bad propaganda, and as
he later conrms: “my characterization [of propaganda] is perfectly general” (2015, 41).
Suppose one must think of an instance of political propaganda that accords
with Stanley’s denition. In that case, one will probably come up with something like
an invocation of liberal and democratic ideals that are meant to disguise a practice that
is, in reality, illiberal and undemocratic: one which appeals to freedom in the service
of a goal that tends to undermine freedom covertly, for example. (Stanley gives the
example of an appeal to “scientic experts” in order to wrongly suggest that climate
science is awash in uncertainty; (2015, 60)). This is what Stanley demarcates as “the
most basic problem for democracy raided by propaganda”; that is, “the possibility that
the vocabulary of liberal democracy is used to mask an undemocratic reality” (2015,
11). But since Stanley’s characterization of propaganda is in itself perfectly general, it
allows for propagandistic practices that are corrosive not only of presumably attractive
ideals (such as freedom or equality) but also of presumably unattractive ideals (such as
obedience or domination).
Stanley surely is aware of this point, and to illustrate it, he narrates how W.E.B.
Du Bois calls on propaganda “to win the respect, empathy, and understanding of
whites” (2015, 38). Propaganda is understood here as an emotional mechanism that
bypasses reason (“rational deliberation” [p. 12], “the rational will” [p. 48], or “auton-
omous decision” [p. 49]). Additionally, he reproduces an interesting interpretation of
John Coltrane’s jazz version of the famous Christmas song “My Favorite Things” from
the lm The Sound of Music, which is described as an “iconic cinematic celebration
of whiteness” (2015, 64). Stanley writes that “Coltrane takes the song and gives it a
powerful subversive twist, presenting a white aesthetic ideal in a fashion that subverts
147
it to reveal Black experience and Black identity” (2015, 65). According to his own
denition, as he acknowledges, this is an instance of propaganda; Coltrane employs the
aesthetic ideal of whiteness against itself. As Stanley later writes about this example: “in
some sense, this is misleading” (2015, 114) and therefore propagandistic. This shows
how propaganda can be used for bad as well as for good purposes. To change people’s
minds, irrespective of whether they hold morally approbative or disapprobative ideals
in high esteem, sometimes some form of manipulation will be helpful. In Stanley’s
words, “It is hard to see how direct challenges to the ideals will be eective” (2015, 66)
and he argues, a fortiori, that in our non-ideal circumstances propagandistic rhetorical
strategies are even a prerequisite for achieving the liberal democratic ideals of freedom
and equality for all (2015, 115).
Stanley’s conceptualization of propaganda contrasts with what he sees as the
“classical sense” of propaganda, dened as “manipulation of the rational will to close o
debate” (2015, 48). By denition, this moral understanding of propaganda goes paired
with the idea that propagandistic speech violates the Kantian norms of discourse,
which consist of the assessment of reasons as the ultimate justifying source of knowl-
edge. But paradoxically, as I indicated, this is the model of normativity (or at least the
Habermasian version of it) which Stanley himself employs throughout his defence of
liberal and deliberative democratic communication. Stanley slides into murky waters
here. If there is good and bad propaganda, there is no a priori way to decide which
propagandistic practices we should condemn as morally bad and which should we praise
as morally good. Nevertheless, Stanley does try to distinguish between democratically
unacceptable propaganda (what he calls “demagoguery”) and democratically acceptable,
or even democracy-enhancing, propaganda (what he calls “civic rhetoric”) (2015, 82).
In his typology, propaganda undermines democracy if its purpose is to support what
he calls “awed ideologies” (2015, 5) and “awed ideological belief” (2015, 179). This,
in turn, suggests that he believes that not all ideologies or ideological beliefs are awed,
and indeed, he holds that, like “propaganda,” the notion of “ideology” is also morally
impartial. He thereby aims to delineate a revisionist concept of ideology which can be
both true and false. Contrary to how the concept of ideology came to be understood
in the Marxian “critical theory” tradition as perforce epistemically decient, Stanley
thus forges a revisionist conception of ideology as a set of beliefs, values, and norms
that can be both true and false. However, this only changes the question of how to
distinguish between good and bad propaganda into how we may decide what makes
certain ideologies and ideological beliefs awed.
Since Stanley characterizes ideological belief (both true and false) by “its resis-
tance to rational revision” (2015, 187), the criterion of correctness for an ideology is not
just the extent to which it resists bypassing deliberative ideals. Rather, Stanley seems to
believe that this criterion lies in the extent to which ideological belief either enhances
or erodes susceptibility to rational argumentation. As he pictures it: while pernicious
demagogic speech employs awed ideologies “to cut o rational deliberation and dis-
cussion” (2015, 47), civic rhetoric “can repair awed ideologies, potentially restoring
the possibility of self-knowledge and democratic deliberation” (2015, 5). The idea is that
whereas demagoguery decreases our susceptibility to the deliberative democratic norms
148
of discourse that consist of giving and asking for reasons, civic rhetoric increases this sus-
ceptibility. (As we have seen in the Coltrane-case, in our non-ideal circumstances, the
circumvention of rationality is even a necessity for the advancement of liberalism and
social democracy: “There is a structural problem in certain imperfectly realized liberal
democracies that necessitates civic rhetoric” (2015, 115)). The synthetic dependency of
the correctness of an ideological belief on our resulting susceptibility to reasons suggests
that Stanley believes that the knowledge about this correctness, if ever, comes only a
posteriori. But this renders his analysis self-contradicting, for the latter belief radically
contravenes the Kantian framework (in which Rawls and Habermas postulate their
theories) in which ideological belief and propagandistic speech are a priori violations of
the rational will. Stanley’s analysis begs the question here: he aims to defend the ideals
of liberalism and democracy by warning of the threat posed by harmful propaganda
(demagogic speech), which in turn is being warned about by appealing to the ideals of
liberalism and democracy.
It is my contention that at the heart of Stanley’s conceptual taxonomy there
is a fork in the road that he neglects. Either propaganda and ideology are understood
as non-moral phenomena, making them qua philosophical phenomena impossible to
pin down without circular reasoning – then, there is no fruitful way in which we can
distinguish between propaganda and ideology on the one hand and the use of reason on
the other. Or, the alternative route, adopting an understanding of propaganda and ideol-
ogy as pejorative terms for morally bad phenomena, which are so, then, on the Kantian
philosophical basis that renders propagandistic speech a moral violation because it is a
tool that by denition bypasses rationality. Stanley ambiguously shifts between these
alternatives: he does at least claim to employ the terms “propaganda” and “ideology”
as morally impartial, while simultaneously, paradoxically, in his delineation of what
distinguishes bad propaganda and awed ideological belief from good propaganda and
correct ideological belief, he relies on the principles of reasonableness and democratic
deliberation that preclude moral neutrality of these very phenomena. (It is interesting
to see, if only briey, what happens when we do justice to the supposed neutrality of
propaganda that Stanley initially purports to conceptualize. Then, the concept’s utility
disappears, for there would be no criterion to dierentiate between propaganda and the
use of reason. Perhaps the conceptual void of the novelty of his denition of propaganda
makes Stanley withdraw from it in his actual analysis).
For my present purposes it does not matter much that I believe the radical
contingency of our theorizing practices renders a strict philosophical dichotomy
between propaganda and rationality not very useful. (This is what initially made me
enthusiastic about Stanley’s revisionist denition of propaganda). It is beyond the scope
of this review to investigate the details of this revisionist belief, and where it leaves
us is in combatting moral cynicism, political irresponsibility, harmful ideologies, and
pernicious propaganda. As I said, my main critique addresses the internal inconsistency
in Stanley’s analysis. As it turns out, he does want to maintain a metaphysical distinction
between propaganda and the use of reason. He asserts that his book is “about the nature
of propaganda and propaganda generally, that is, about the metaphysics of propaganda”
(2015, 76). He seems to believe this is what the ultimate rationale of his book requires:
149
to map how propaganda works and, more particularly, how demagogic speech is pres-
ently threatening our (nominal) modern liberal democracies. Obviously, this is not an
original project; the old Greeks were already concerned about the endangerment of
political stability by the exploitation of people’s emotions. (This undergirds Plato’s con-
demnation of a democratic form of government). Stanley is well aware of this, and as he
admits: “[t]he argument of this book is not new” (2015, 192). Apart from situating the
discussion in the context of the present century by using interesting recent empirical
data and fascinating novel insights from the social sciences, Stanley contributes nothing
substantial to the more than two-thousand-year-old philosophical conversation on the
relations between reason and rhetoric.
Given the rarity of much-needed analysis of morally and politically signicant
real-world phenomena in recent academic discourse, the aspirations of Stanley’s project
are praiseworthy. Yet I am sceptical about how he pursues his analysis – that is, about
whether it is possible to do justice to the phenomena of propaganda and ideology as in
themselves morally neutral while at the same time cherishing the hope for construing a
“metaphysics of propaganda” that helps to prevent the occurrence of these phenomena
as subverting liberal and democratic ideals. It seems to me that we do not need Stanley’s
taxonomy of propaganda in order to be able to observe that societies with “awed social
structures give rise to awed ideological belief” (2015, 179). This observation leads to
the bold but important and pressing – yet again not really original – political argument
that Stanley forges: that liberal democracy is so in name only if political equality is not
supported by a fairer distribution of wealth. Based on a rich body of recent subject
matter, especially from social psychology, Stanley persuasively argues that substantial
material inequality leads to epistemic barriers to acquiring knowledge and to false
legitimation narratives by the wealthy elite, thereby clearing the ground for eective
democracy-undermining propaganda.
This overt political argument also informs Stanley’s later work, in particular his
2018 book How Fascism Works. Most importantly, what he shows there is how fascist
politics is not dependent on an institutionalized self-identifying fascism. It thus decou-
ples a specic form of government from governing practices; “fascist politics does not
necessarily lead to an explicitly fascist state” (2018, xiv). In this way Stanley is able to
argue how fascist tactics are increasingly being employed by leaders in many Western
countries that self-identify as democracies, in particular in the recent history of the
United States. Besides propaganda, the fascist tactics Stanley distinguishes include the
appeal to a mythic past, anti-intellectualism, unreality, hierarchy, victimhood, law and
order, sexual anxiety, and a dismantling of public welfare and unity. What binds these
tactics, Stanley insists, is the idea of a politics of “us” versus “them”, or a politics of fear.
Beginning where he left o in How Propaganda Works, his book on fascism is more
social and political than philosophical, for it is written as an explicit warning against
fascism, that is, “in the hope of providing citizens with the critical tools to recognize the
dierence between legitimate tactics in liberal democratic politics on the one hand, and
invidious tactics of fascist politics on the other” (2018, xvii).
Stanley’s work is engaging, persuasive, and beautifully written. Still, let me
address two critical points about Stanley’s political analysis, before commenting on its
150
broader relationship to his previous work. First, given Stanley’s explicit contemporary
political orientation, it unfortunately lacks a treatment of the recent information tech-
nology revolution. Stanley discusses the fascist tactic of spreading conspiracy theories
and “fake news,” but he neglects to reect on the vital inuence of the inltration of
big tech and social media which have transformed our social and political lives since
the onset of the present century. It is hard to see how one can understand the political
world today – in particular its (proto-)fascist tendencies – without seriously engaging
with the enormous role played in it by big tech and social media platforms. (By contrast,
in the same genre, David Runciman’s How Democracy Ends (Runciman 2019) contains a
much more in-depth engagement with the information technology revolution).
Secondly, it remains unclear to what extent the fascist tactics Stanley investigates
strictly limit themselves to the realm of illiberal and anti-democratic politics. Consider,
for instance, Stanley’s comments on the fascist use of a mythic past as a weapon for
political gain, which he opposes to a liberal democratic treatment of history as “faithful
to the norm of truth” (2018, 19). Is this not somewhat naïve? Stanley’s preferred non-
ideal perspective would surely lead one to accept that there is at least a grain of truth in
the (in)famous slogan “history is written by the victors.” (It is worth noting here that
Charles Mills’s critique of ideal theory entails, crucially, that the common narrative of
formal liberalism, and gender and racial equality, in fact contains a covert manifestation
of illiberalism, and gender and racial injustices, by silencing the histories of patriarchal
and colonial oppression in its theoretical apparatus). There is, of course, a dierence
between a biased portrayal of history – perhaps even unintentional and unconscious –
and a historical ction that is fully politicized. Nevertheless, Stanley could have done a
better job in making clear when a society’s dealings with its history turns from liberal to
illiberal. The same goes for his understanding of academic expertise as a force of liberal
democracy. The question arises, when does the defence of intellectualism turn into an
elitist and undemocratic faith in technocracy?
Yet again, we ought to commend Stanley’s generally practical orientation and his
engagement with the vicissitudes of our non-ideal, real-world politics. Moreover, Stanley
avoids running into explicit diculties precisely because he keeps a safe distance from
providing theoretical underpinnings of his ideal of liberal democratic legitimacy – there
is no mention of Rawls and Habermas in the book. Nevertheless, it is clear Stanley’s casti-
gation of fascism assumes an ideal theory framework. Take, for instance, Stanley’s descrip-
tion of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as “a powerful iteration and
expansion of liberal democratic understanding of personhood to include literally the
entire world community” (2015, xviii). The problems of ideal theory arise immediately.
Let me try to illustrate this by drawing attention to a historical episode about a for-
mative moment in the history preceding this Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
After the First World War the victorious countries came together during the Paris Peace
Conference (1919-1920) to set the peace terms for the defeated powers. Famously, out
of the conference came the League of Nations. Although often considered to be a key
moment of moral progress in the West, the creation of the League cannot be separated
from what happened to the “racial equality clause” that the Japanese delegation proposed
to include in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The clause reads as follows:
151
The equality of nations being a basic principle of the League of Nations, the
High Contracting Parties agree to accord as soon as possible to all alien nation-
als of states, members of the League, equal and just treatment in every respect
making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account of their race or
nationality. (Cited in Shimazu 1998, 20)
Because of the power play of the major so-called “Anglo-Saxon” powers – the American,
British, Australian, and South-African delegations – the clause was rejected. This is
telling: a clause that demands acceptance of one of the most elementary cornerstones of
the ideals of a liberal democracy – racial equality – was rejected by the countries that are
usually seen as those in the forefront of fostering liberal democratic politics. This raises
a lot of questions, but what is most pressing now is to recognize how the standard story
of moral progress of twentieth-century Western liberal democracy is deeply, and one
may say ideologically, biased. As Mills forcefully argues throughout his work, in order
to come to terms with how these racist practices have shaped our ideas of freedom,
equality, and democracy, the rst step is treating the contentious histories of these ideas
no longer as incidental aberrations in the process of realizing liberal democratic justice,
but as structural features of our very often illiberal and undemocratic and therefore
unjust status quo. This is also what the episode from the Paris Peace Conference makes
clear: the question of what it means to be free and equal in our so-called “liberal dem-
ocratic” but de facto illiberal and undemocratic world must take priority in construing
our anti-racism and our anti-fascism. Although Stanley intends to commit himself to
this emancipatory aim in his critical analyses of real-world propagandistic and fascist
practices, it is unclear what his picture of “liberal democratic personhood” in fact means.
Precisely this obscurity makes his analysis suspect of covertly relying on a standard ideal
picture of liberal democratic justice as the polar opposite of blatant fascism.
Another instance which reveals Stanley’s tacitly ideal understanding of liberal
democracy becomes manifest when we take a closer look at his seemingly uncontrover-
sial claim that “[i]n a healthy liberal democracy, language is a tool for information” (2018,
54). What use is there in insisting on the assertive function of language, given the actual
widespread perversion of this function through deceitful or manipulative speech behav-
iour? Instead, the question we should ask is not how language functions in a healthy (or
ideal) liberal democracy, as Stanley does, but what language does in our unhealthy and
non-ideal social and political lifeworld. Within non-ideal theory, the study of language
must not be (tacitly) constrained by assuming a counterfactual Habermasian ideal speech
situation, but instead it must focus on language as it in reality works, which is often to
distract, mislead, manipulate, and exclude. The general question for non-ideal theory
thus becomes: how do we foster freedom and equality for all given our widely ill-ordered
social, political, and linguistic behaviour? (We may point to an interesting, though so far
largely neglected, analogy here: within ideal theory, the neglect of the dimension of power
in relying on an ideal understanding of communicative behaviour mirrors the neglect
of the dimension of power in relying on an ideal understanding of political behaviour).
Returning to Stanley’s project, we may conclude that the critique inherent
in the framework of non-ideal theory makes clear that, in order to deliver what he
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promises as an advocate of non-ideal philosophy, it is simply not enough to merely reiterate
an ideal picture of the nominal liberal democratic understanding of personhood in
contradistinction to the inegalitarian fascist understanding of personhood (see, e.g., also
(2018, 97)). Until the non-ideal project of asking what it means to be free and equal
in our often illiberal and undemocratic circumstances takes centre stage, Stanley’s tools,
which are meant to help us distinguish valid tactics in liberal democratic politics from
fascist politics, will do only a part of the job at best.
Let me end by underlining that in our contemporary context of widespread
cynicism in public and political debates, Stanley’s warning against how certain forms
of exploitation of ideals imperil our liberal and democratic institutions is welcome.
However, as we have seen, the urge to provide philosophical foundations for this
warning – in the tradition of Kant’s views of the norms of successful communication
as rational communication, thereby posing a categorical prohibition on the practice of
propaganda – commits him to an understanding of propaganda as inherently democ-
racy-undermining. This is directly opposed to his revisionist concept of propaganda
by which he himself tries to replace what he saw as this classical sense of propaganda.
Despite this ambiguity which runs through Stanley’s recent work, his aim to advance a
political philosophy that is socially informed merits praise. Though he remains faithful
to much of the traditional analytical philosophical principles in his metaphysical cod-
ication of propaganda and his general defence of liberal democracy against fascism,
his largely careful analysis of how invidious political practices erode our liberal and
democratic institutions is an impressive accomplishment. Therefore, notwithstanding
the conceptual problems embedded in the notion of “propaganda” that Stanley fails to
solve, anyone who wants to better understand our increasingly corrupt world of public
and political discourse would do well to read Stanley’s recent work.
References
Habermas, Jürgen. 2001. On the Pragmatics of Social
Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of
Communicative Action. Translated by Barbara
Fultner. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press.
Mills, Charles W. 2005. “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology.”
Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 20:
165–84.
Rawls, John. 1999. A Theory of Justice. Rev. ed.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press.
Runciman, David. 2019. How Democracy Ends.
London: Profile Books.
Shimazu, Naoko. 1998. Japan, Race, and Equality:
The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919. London:
Routledge.
Stanley, Jason. 2015. How Propaganda Works.
Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.
———. 2018. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us
and Them. London: Random House.
Maarten van Tunen holds MA degrees in the History
of Political Thought and Intellectual History and
in Philosophy. His research interests are in ethics,
political philosophy and the history of philosophy.
He is currently working at the University of
Amsterdam, where he is affiliated with the research
group Philosophy and Public Affairs.
Biography
