Specters of Revolt: On the Intellect of Insurrection and Philosophy from Below

INTRODUCTION

It’s Always Antebellum

The word "antebellum presents an interesting idea. The word’s particular historical reference is to the period in the southern US before the American Civil War, but its general etymology refers to the time before war. Technically, ante means before and bellum" means war. Human history reveals every time as a time before war. It is even antebellum during wartime — the present war is never the last war. The war to end all wars has never happened. Whenever there has not been war, or when one is taking place, a future war remains somewhere on the horizon. Thus, times of peace cannot be called "postbellum, because there is no after war, only before war." The postbellum may function as a utopian touchstone, a thing that has its uses. Whereas, antebellum captures the sense of a present situation about to be changed by some imminent conflict. For those who dream of a peaceful world, this represents a cynical view, or perhaps, just a view held true so far.

But shifting from war to other modes of conflict and other forms of fighting, this same notion turns optimistic and hopeful. Some formulation like the following captures the point well: If we are not now rising up for something better, we will be. This book is not about war, but revolt.

Happily, there are other ways of contesting reality and relations of power than with the militaries of governments. This book explores and develops the premise that human hope, revolutionary imaginations, creativity, and critique — for however long they’re in abeyance — are always eventually liberated and activated in moments of revolt. Of course, this premise will have to be borne out, and basic terms like revolt, revolution, and critique need much defining.

But entertaining the premise, for the introductory time being, we might think of every moment in between revolt as a time before revolt. Perhaps, instead of "antebellum, we may speak of anterivolta." Like war, revolt against the existing state of affairs also keeps on occurring, yet more than war, revolt embodies and reflects the transformative aspirations of everyday people. Whereas wars waged by states embody and reflect the interests of power and capital, which usually coincide. Inasmuch as revolt comes back, in new forms, in different places, with different stakes and demands, periods of relative passivity, times of quiet, are haunted by the specter of revolt, just as peacetime is haunted by the specter of war.

The title of this book, Specters of Revolt, intends an allusion to two major thinkers separated by a century: First, the title alludes to Karl Marx, who happily announced in The Communist Manifesto, that A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Communism.¹ Marx understood that the present was haunted by its future abolition. Second, this book intends to recall one of the greatest works of Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, published early into the post-Cold War period.² Derrida’s study of the enduring relevance of Marx emerged in the wake of the ideological model of opposition between capitalism and socialism which spanned the short 20th century. The short 20th century was defined by Eric Hobsbawm as the period between 1914 and 1991.³ In the 21st century that began in the 1990s, a new hegemony emerged around the conclusion that Marx was now irrelevant, proven wrong, and responsible (even if indirectly) for some of the worst catastrophes the world had known. Against the ascendant post-Cold War opinion, Derrida insists that Marxism

is still necessary but provided it be transformed and adapted to new conditions and to a new thinking of the ideological, provided it be made to analyze the new articulation of techno-economic casualties and of religious ghosts, the dependent condition of the juridical at the service of socio-economic powers or States that are themselves never totally independent with regard to capital [but there is no longer, there never was just capital, nor capitalism in the singular, but capitalisms plural — whether state or private, real or symbolic, always linked to spectral forces — or rather capitalizations whose antagonisms are irreducible].

This transformation and this opening up of Marxism are in con formity with what we were calling a moment ago the spirit of Marxism.⁴

Derrida is here insisting that Marxism was not killed in the Cold War, but rather, it is awaiting its next iteration, against previous orthodoxies and forms and for an analysis of the changing present. He acknowledges that the ongoing re-articulation of Marx’s critical analysis of capital is a defining part of Marxism itself, which began shortly after Marx’s death with all forms of rethinking the critique of capital and power in ways beyond both the imagination and the life and times of Marx himself.

Derrida observed:

Capitalist societies can always heave a sigh of relief and say to themselves: communism is finished since the collapse of the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century and not only is it finished, but it did not take place, it was only a ghost. They do no more than disavow the undeniable itself: a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come-back.⁵

Considered in terms of a communist logos (as opposed to a communist government), we might say that if there is anything sensible in the idea of communism, in its opposition to capitalist society, then the communist logos cannot be killed by collapsed regimes. Inasmuch as Marxism continues to express and address real disaffections about real deficits in present society and everyday life, capitalist societies will never be rid of it, no matter how much they might like to deny its existence, to proclaim its death.

Derrida’s overarching argument is that, while the 20th century seemed to vindicate Marx’s claim from the 19th century that the world was haunted by the ghost of communism, the 21st would yet continue to be haunted by Marx in spectral forms to be determined, to be reconsidered. Bringing the two together, I claim that both communism and Marx do haunt — and will continue to haunt — the 21st century in particular ways that this book will take up directly in its course. However, the ghosts are neither clearly communist nor Marxist all (or even most) of the time. I suggest a broader framework regarding specters of revolt, which give rise to communist and Marxist hauntings, but also, which haunt the world with other ideas about autonomy, everyday life, anxiety, experience, knowledge, and possibility, in ways that often include but are quite clearly not limited to Marxian and communist discourses, no matter how transformed.

In the fall of 1998, I was a student of Derrida’s in his seminar at The New School for Social Research, Justice, Perjury, and Forgiveness. Despite the ambitious title, Derrida’s singular focus that semester was forgiveness. He was particularly interested in the notion that to be pardoned or forgiven is only actually meaningful in the face of the unpardonable, the unforgivable. To forgive someone for a minor mistake, or to say pardon me when accidentally bumping into a stranger on the street, is perhaps a nicety, a well-meaning mannerism or gesture, but where forgiveness is really needed — where it actually changes human relations — is where (and when) it is given to the unforgivable. In this way, the power of forgiveness depends upon the unforgivable.

Since then, I have maintained a correlated interest in the acceptance of the unacceptable, in the toleration of the intolerable, pairings that indicate a deeper problem; deeper in the sense that humans regularly accept the unacceptable (unlike forgiving the unforgivable). People regularly accept theoretically changeable facts of the world that are, even by their own accounts, totally unacceptable. Adjustments and acquiescence to unhappiness and dissatisfaction are common expectations of a practical life of doing what one has to do, and yet, it remains a basic ethical instinct to say that we should not accept a life that does us and others real measurable harm — at home, at work, in school, in society. And yet we regularly do. We do, that is, until there is a revolt against the unacceptable, against the intolerable.

In this way, revolt seems to me a peculiar force of (or, perhaps, toward) justice that emerges in the crisis of the system of the repressed-irrepressible, of the accepted-unacceptable. Derrida’s seminar on forgiveness, much like his famous essay on justice and the law, explored how these things (forgiveness, justice, the law) depend upon their opposites, how forgiveness requires the unforgivable, and how what is just and legal (in French, "droit") requires what is unjust and illegal.⁶ We may look upon revolt as a disruption, often vilified as violent, that actually comes from the violence of its absence. Powerful interruptions of normal life are typically felt to be and caricatured as violent when the interruptions have real and immediate effects at home, at work, in school, or in society. However, the real hope and power of revolt is that it may expose how the cooperative reproduction of the normal state of affairs actually conceals a range of unacceptable realities.

Whereas Derrida’s Specters of Marx embodies and reflects a particular historicity of Marxist philosophy in the wake of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Union, Specters of Revolt aims to think through how systems of oppression are always haunted by revolt, how revolt is the oppositional (and historical and liberatory) theory and practice of transformative aspirations. Thus, while it is true that the worldly impetus for the present work comes from the eventuality of recent revolt and the context of capitalist crisis, it is also true that we can theorize specters of revolt in altogether different contexts.

Consider one distant example: During the gladiatorial times of the Roman Empire, an assorted subset of criminals and slaves were held captive and trained as gladiators.⁷ Gladiators were trained for violent confrontation with other gladiators as a form of popular entertainment tinged with the moral endorsement of public opinion — an opinion taking cover behind the concepts of punishment and justice. Although some volunteered, most gladiators came from the despised regions in proximity to Rome, those deemed barbaric and uncivilized enough for the wanton killing of the sport — the enslaved, many of them prisoners taken by Romans during conflict with surrounding regions. Their training took place in the ludus, a gladiatorial school, often also the site of their captivity and servitude. The gladiators were schooled in severe prison conditions, regarded as subhuman, and forced to fight to the death.

One of Marx’s favorite heroes, Spartacus, emerged in such a school, in a ludus of the lanista Batiatus, in Capua in southern Italy.⁸ Spartacus, the famous Thracian agent of slave revolt in 73 BCE, broke out of his confinement with less than one hundred slaves, making a revolt that led to the uprisings known as the Third Servile War (73-71 BCE). Marx, unsurprisingly, found in this an example of the oppressed ancient proletariat rising up against a proto-capitalist oligarchy.⁹ Despite great limitations and much disagreement in our knowledge of Spartacus and the surrounding history, it is difficult to see the events otherwise. Undoubtedly, the conditions of enslavement gave incentive to the revolt of the slaves.

One could say, then, that this iconic slave revolt was the materialization of a real possibility that must have haunted every ludus. The ludus and the coliseum were equipped with cages, guards, and tunnels, as well as multiple forms of abuse, discipline, and punishment for the maintenance of order and the dissuasion of insurrectionary impulses. It is difficult to imagine the containment and cultivation of such violence, and its deployment for the pleasures of its masters, without the ongoing necessity for a repressive system to guard against the outbreak of revolt.

This suggests a certain hauntology: We do not say that the ancient and abandoned Ludus Magnus, for example, the largest arena and gladiatorial school in Rome, is haunted because of the violence that once occurred there. Rather, we understand that the whole system was haunted by the specter of its possible overthrow, before any revolt occurred, within the energies of the repressed and captive humanity. Such a thesis can be stated in either humanist terms, regarding the dignity of the oppressed, or in strictly materialist terms, regarding the conditions of life. However one puts it, specters of revolt are not new. Revolt is a transformative possibility both structurally and existentially bound to all social, political, and economic systems maintained against the interests of the people they confine. This generality applies broadly throughout human history, and remains widely applicable today in schools, militaries, prisons, impoverished communities, despotic and oligarchic regimes, heavily policed neighborhoods, miserable workplaces, etc. All such locations are haunted by specters of revolt, where the Spartacus we wait for is less a person than an upheaval — Spartacus as a disruption of the system that can be identified as a feature of the system itself.¹⁰ Simply, the basic theorization of Specters of Revolt may well have long predated recent uprisings and capitalist crises, though it is the latter uprisings and crises that motivate this work.

In the years since 2008, certain closures have been reopened by revolt. After the uprising of the Mexican Zapatistas in 1994 opened and set a stage for new forms of revolt against the recently liberated and expanded logic of capital, there were some large but short-lived continuations of Zapatismo in Seattle in 1999 and in Genoa in 2001, as well as in numerous other locations. But then, the closure of capital seemed to stitch things up again, resuming and restoring its hold. Yet in 2008, at the culmination of diverse global crises in economic, social, and political life, Greek revolts tore open the sutures, and since then, we have seen various realizations of the haunting hopes of people in the so-called Arab Spring, in Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Syria, Brazil, and in Occupy Wall Street, among other places, many of which we consider in greater detail throughout this book.

How does the Spartacus haunt and threaten the present? An anecdote: In January 2012, I learned about the re-occupation of Zuccotti Park just as I was boarding a plane from Springfield, IL to New York City to present research at the TELOS conference at NYU and do a book talk at Bluestockings Bookstore. I had not been in New York since the Occupy Wall Street activities began in September 2011, and national news of activists taking over the park again in January opened up the possibility for me to participate in and observe the next iteration of occupations in Zuccotti Park. While I was able to participate in and observe some impressive Occupy activity in Springfield, I knew the first thing I’d do upon arrival in NYC was go check out the happenings at Zuccotti. It was freezing cold on the evening of my arrival, but after stowing my bags in my aunt and uncle’s apartment, I made my way down to the park, only to find it empty, save for about sixty or so NYPD cops. There was a lone man with a sign standing at an outside corner of the park, but aside from him, Zuccotti was only occupied by the police.

I figured I would ask the nearest cop about what had happened, telling him that I’d heard the park had been occupied again. He said, Yes, they were here yesterday, but it got too cold, so they left. I asked him, Since they’re all gone now, why are there so many cops in the park? He simply replied, Because they come back. There was a sense, in that moment, in which the absence of the occupiers and the presence of the police disclosed the hopeful expression of a ghost-like power. The park was clearly haunted by the recently departed spirit of the occupation, and its future possibility. The cops had orders to stay in an empty park, but only because the park had not been fully emptied of its contentious potentiality. After a while, of course, the cops too did leave. But the park remains a transformed and haunted site, a location that can never be stripped of its historic role as the place for a surprising expression of disaffection aimed at capital in the financial nerve center of Manhattan. The park, now even empty, suggests the other side of capital: the opposition to the values, purposes, and effects of Wall Street. Discourses of failure do not change the basic facts of this residual expectation, aspiration, and unfinished business of Occupy. On my visit, power saw fit to go on guard even in the absence of something to guard against. Capital’s spaces and bases must be guarded as they are the physical locations of capitalist activity (much capitalist activity has no such physical location), representations of systems, and even demarcations of time, haunted by what they do.

Part of what enables us to speak of specters of revolt is the recognition of unfinished business from previous revolt. Thus, in Baltimore, MD in 2015 we saw a particular iteration of some of the same disaffections that were expressed in Ferguson, MO in 2014, where we found a certain rekindling of some of what was expressed in New Orleans, LA in 2005, which contained some of what was found in Los Angeles in 1992, which contained some of what was found in Watts, Los Angeles in 1965, leaving out, of course, so many critical incidents and coordinates before and in between. Inasmuch as in between also always designates a time before the next one, we can speak of the antebellum status of revolt. Specters of revolt haunt in between, that is, both before and after, realizations of revolt. To show this well, clear and certain connections between individual coordinates of upheaval must be made more concrete and far less speculative, and that is partly what this book aims to accomplish.

But there is yet another, and perhaps more important aim of the present book, which one could say was summed up best over four decades ago in a conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, published under the title, Intellectuals and Power. ¹¹ In the conversation, Foucault says the following in reference to the French uprisings of May 1968:

In the most recent upheaval, the intellectual discovered that the masses no longer need him to gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far better than he and they are certainly capable of expressing themselves. But there exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this discourse and this knowledge, a power not only found in the manifest authority of censorship, but one that profoundly and subtly penetrates an entire societal network… In this sense theory does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice.¹²

Foucault’s comments here mark my point of departure. The present book seeks to advance an understanding of the intellect of revolt, not to provide an analysis of revolt. While some analysis of recent global uprisings is inevitably presented in fleeting, tentative passages, I mainly pursue an understanding of what kind of analysis revolt itself offers. I consider the question, also taken up by Deleuze and Guattari, of What is Philosophy?¹³ In so doing, I try to isolate the most basic features of what might be called good philosophy, and then to assess how revolt does it better than professional philosophers ever have done or could do. This thesis, captured well by Foucault, which regards uprising as thinking, upheaval as speaking, is the overarching interest and guiding concern of the present work.

But because revolt is always a destabilizing activity, and because it is animated and energized also by human disaffections, there is often real fear associated with the possibility that it may lead to an even worse reality than the one it opposes. Immanuel Kant was attentive to this possibility in his famous essay on enlightenment, where he recommended public criticism (what he called the public use of reason) within the limits of a general obedience (what he called the private use of reason), so as to ensure that social and political progress would not undermine the stability and functionality of the basic reality.¹⁴ Indeed, one has to take seriously the possibility that revolt may not only fail to improve the situation, but even make the situation worse. Although, in considering that possibility, it is important to assess whether it was in fact the revolt that made things worse, or if political forces of counterinsurgency are mainly to blame. Often, when a revolt goes badly, the repressive apparatus intervenes with its defensive and normalizing violence, and that violence, allied with the ideas of punishment and justice, makes things worse. Yet, the normalizing and punitive violence of law and order is typically given a peculiar kind of absolution, as if the only violence on the scene belongs to the upheaval, as if the condemnable violence is the sole property of insurrection. Nonetheless, to insist that revolt always improves the situation would be a kind of romanticization, an ideological distortion.

At the same time, nothing is simple or easy in the historical transformation of the world, nor ever has been. Every major advance, including many that we now look upon as obvious and legal, such as the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, suffrage and women’s rights, the rights of gays and lesbians, had their moments of illegal, courageous, and frightening revolt. Whether we are talking about dangerous slave revolts against the odds of great power, the direct action of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst and their comrades who fought with the police, or the Stonewall uprisings against police terrorism in 1969, the risks of repression and political setbacks, and even of death, are serious concerns. Human history does not unfold in one tidy, linear direction. So, how could we know if women and gays will be rounded up and killed, how should we measure the outcomes and aspirations of the Paris Commune or Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and how could we know if the resistance of Palestinians will result in their total extermination? Hope and fear can mingle in an eternal dance of speculation.

In any case, whether or not it could be worse is the wrong question. It could always be worse and it could always be better. I am not here suggesting we ignore real risks and the possibility of political failure in revolt. Rather, I argue that we must look centrally at the critical and philosophical content of revolt. While, on the one hand, we cannot romanticize revolt, pretending it’s always a full victory, on the other hand, we cannot overlook its philosophical content out of a fear of immediate practical consequences.

For example, in the case of slave uprisings, we see clearly in hindsight that the thinking of the revolt is the better position, and we should keep in mind that present uprisings may well be looked upon with a similar clarity from future perspectives. Yet, to be governed by predictions about future perspectives and possible failure is also highly uncertain, and the politics of fear has long taken sides with the defense of the existing order. Transformative hope sides with the upheaval, however uncertain and rightfully worried that hope may be. This, it seems to me, is all the more reason to engage with the critical and philosophical content of revolt and to oppose the politics of fear that dissuades everything other than the maintenance and reproduction of what already is.

The research for this book began in 2010, when I started working on the first of what would become a series of articles on the relationships between revolt, insurrection, communism, philosophy, and capitalist crisis. These articles were not originally conceived of as a series, but ended up constituting a somewhat cohesive constellation of inquiry that spanned the time and events of the years from 2010 to 2016. What you find in this book, however, is a substantial development and synthesis of discrete researches that were previously published in various journals and magazines, some of which are difficult to find, or have miniscule readerships. The present book begins thinking in the light of uprisings from 2008 to the present, and aims to speak to and anticipate (not to predict) further