Some time in the early Nineties, I got into a drunken argument about Althusser with a rather upper class young colleague who taught French literature. My point was that Marxism is an Economic Structural Causal Model whose mathematical expression must involve an impredicative type of category theory. Furthermore, since, for Marxists, the superstructure must be the configuration space of the substructure, it follows that that the 'Transformation problem' is the dual of a 'Transportation problem' . Without loss of generality, the proletarian, or parturition capable, element, arising out of a particular wholly Economic substructure pairing off with a Sociological superstructure, must be canonically circumscribed. Thus Althusser was wrong to strangle his wife. All sociologists must be mathematically liquidated but only by a non-arbitrary or natural transformation of fully faithful functors.
By way of revenge, the young lady sent me a copy of 'The ignorant school master' by Jacques Ranciere which had just been translated into English. It was about some guy who moved to a country whose language he couldn't speak and who then set up as a teacher of subjects he had no knowledge of.
Ranciere's point was that pedagogy as a profession involves the artificial creation of inequality. It involves mystification. Mathematical economists, I knew from my own experience, first set up an absurd axiom system before rigorously deriving meaningless proofs. However, because they use sets which are not well defined and, more importantly, which contain intensional elements along side extensional ones, there is a problem of impredicativity. It may be that some category theoretical approach of sufficient refinement can make progress here. But, if this is the case, there must be a 'witness' that too of a canonical type. A guy who strangles his wife may just be a lunatic- even if she is provably a sociologist. Only an action ensuring the liquidation of all sociologists- assuming there is some 'natural' way of distinguishing members of that set- could qualify as 'verification'.
Ranciere defines politics as an activity the subject of which is equality. This is certainly the claim Indians might make about soteriology or esoteric metaphysics. All have the Buddha nature, or potential for kevalya, or have an equal 'Atman' which is not distinct from Brahma. Moksha- ultimate deliverance- is the attainment of this absolute equality.
Speaking generally, Indian religious sects require some practical actions designed to empower the underprivileged and raise them up to an equal material and cognitive level. But this is the case with all Religions. Could it also be true of a strain of structuralist Marxism which, it may be, flourishes on the wrong side of the Channel? Sadly, what is much more likely is that there, as here, only paranoid stupidity has festered in the Academy.
Consider Ranciere's first thesis from his book Dissensus
Thesis 1. Politics is not the exercise of power. Politics ought to be defined in its own terms as a specific mode of action that is enacted by a specific subject and that has its own proper rationality. It is the political relationship that makes it possible to conceive of the subject of politics, not the other way round.
We use terms like 'Office politics' to refer to intrigue and coalition formation whose aim is to alter outcomes and established hierarchies or expectations regarding obligations and entitlements. But, if nothing significant is affected by such politicking the term has a dismissive or comically pejorative meaning. Sayre's law is famous- 'Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low'. An economist would say that the absence of 'transferable utility' (i.e. the possibility of buying off opposition) is what envenoms zero sum games where for one 'to gain face' another must be humiliated. The workaround is simple- as was proved by 'Legally Blonde II'. Get everybody to sit in a circle and let each take turns saying something nice about the person next to them. Interestingly, Narendra Modi tells kids that this is what used to happen at his old school. Instead of 'exam warriors' jealous of each other's attainments a harmonious 'learning team' was created where the kids helped each other.
In practice, relationships burgeon and go beyond the merely transactional where extra 'positional' or 'esteem based' goods and services are created on a basis of mutuality. But this involves saying nice things which are almost true or which could become true as circumstances improve, rather than telling stupid, paranoid, lies.
Yet, surely, Marxism or any other sort of bien pensant activism can do nothing else? Without the stupid lies, the thing would be as anodyne as the well coiffed young women in Legally Blonde II giving each other compliments. Worse, the Marxist version of the 'snap cup' (into which written compliments are put) involves grievances of a humiliating type. Thus, due to I iz bleck, I'd get strokes for being descended from Gunga Din while myself giving strokes to women who, due to they don't got penises, are bound to get epistemically raped by everybody. By contrast, the girls in Legally Blonde II would go on to collectively 'shatter the glass ceiling' while Modi's class-mates can take pride that one of their own has risen to the highest office in the land. What can Marxism offer save the corpse of Althusser's wife?
Rancider writes of
a fundamental vicious circle that characterizes political philosophy itself. This vicious circle consists in the particular way in which the relation between the political relationship and the political subject gets interpreted;
A particular person may stand in a political relationship with other people. But that relationship does not have a separate relation with anybody or anything save under a wholly arbitrary, not to say crazy, interpretation. You may say 'Y is related to X by virtue of being x's daddy. There is a fatherhood relationship between Y and X'. This may be true or it may be false but it isn't crazy or utterly arbitrary. However if you say 'Y's relationship of fatherhood has just married my neighbor's cat which means X is actually a kitten', people will think you are mad.
There is no 'vicious circle' here. There is simply stupidity or the arbitrary assertion that a relation can itself have a relation. Fatherhood can marry a cat and thus gain feline relations by marriage. Motherhood can drop out of Law School to become an avocado and thus a distant relative of the cinnamon tree.
that is, in the assumption that there is a way of life that is 'specific' to political existence,
a sane assumption. If no way of life is specific to political existence then the Legislature must consider questions such as under what circumstances the next of kin of a kitten is a cinnamon tree.
enabling us to infer the political relationship from the properties of a specific order of being and to construe it in terms of the existence of a figure possessing a specific good or universality, by contrast with the private or domestic world of needs and interests.
But we have to do this for language to function or for thoughts not to degenerate into nonsense.
Politics, in a nutshell, comes to be seen as the accomplishment of the way of life proper to those who are destined to it.
So, politics is like eating and drinking and shitting. But so is everything else it is worth our while to think or talk about. No doubt, in the soteriological realm we may speak of a grander destiny than that of any form of life. But politics is not soteriology. It may aim at equality of some specific sort- e.g. an equal right to vote or stand for election- but it can't aim for something unconnected with lived lives of what are, at least potentially, political subjects.
The very partition that in fact forms the object of politics thus comes to be posited as its foundation.
Nothing wrong with that. A foundation is a partition of a certain sort.
So, conceived as a specific way of life, the specificity of politics is dispensed with from the start.
No. It is insisted on from the very start. The thing is 'extensional'. There is a well-ordering relation.
Politics cannot be defined on the basis of any pre-existing subject.
Yes it can. We can define it as 'the activities associated with the governance of a country or area, especially the debate between parties having power'. Here both the territory and the people involved have been specified in advance.
The 'difference' specific to politics, that which makes it possible to think its subject,
Politics is merely a word. It has no thoughts. It can't suddenly decide to become a Chartered Accountant and to emigrate to Australia.
must be sought in the form of its relation.
Substitute 'topology' for 'politics' and you at once see this is nonsense. Yet everything in any political theory can have a model in set theory.
In the above-mentioned Aristotelian definition of the citizen,
a guy willing to be governed who can also take part in governance
the subject (polites) is given a name
to name a thing isn't to define it. My parents called me 'Vivek'- 'intelligent'- though I am as stupid as shit
defined by a partaking (metexis) both in a form of action (arkhein)
this assumes there is a Platonic form of leadership or that the actions of a leader have a unique property. But such is not the case. The relation is purely nominal. Nothing intrinsic to the action makes it the action of the leader. If the Archon scratches his butt, this may be a sign that everybody should scratch their butt. But, equally, it may be no such thing.
and in the passibility corresponding to this action (arkhesthai).
There is no such passibility. A leader may feel nothing when exercising power. Stoics can be citizens.
If there is something 'proper' to politics,
it is extensional. There is a well defined set of actions which have the property of being 'political'
it consists entirely in this relationship,
No. It consists entirely in the extension of a predicate. A relation is merely a type of predicate. There is nothing 'proper' to a predicate whose extension is not well defined. It is a misconceived or useless or actively mischievous relation.
The plain fact is 'relations' don't have any independent existence. In the Euthydemus, Plato shows that, if you assume otherwise, the fact that your Daddy has a dog proves you must be a puppy. Aristotle has a 'third man argument' against relations themselves having relations and those relations having relations. You get an infinite regress of nonsense.
which is not a relationship between subjects,
thus Fatherhood isn't a relation between kids and their Dad. If your Daddy has a dog, you must be a puppy.
but between two contradictory terms that define a subject.
there is no contradiction in both governing and being governed. A barber may shave others but himself by shaved by others. Russell's paradox only arises under an axiom schema of unrestricted comprehension. But no relation can be comprehended sans restriction. We must start with an axiom of specification and then try to add on axioms of regularity, choice, etc.
Nothing defines the subject of politics for political discourse itself. The thing is a Tarskian primitive.
Politics disappears
when its extension disappears, not
the moment this knot between a subject and a relation
which arises by stipulation or is entirely arbitrary
is undone,
Nonsense takes its place with the result that a kitten's next of kin might be a cinnamon tree. On the other hand Rancider's dick disappears when his fly is undone.
which is exactly what occurs in all the speculative and empiricist fictions that seek the origin of the political relationship in the properties of its subjects and the conditions of their coming together.
Such 'fictions' may be useful enough. Moreover there can be overlapping consensus between such fictional constructions such that some propositions become 'superassertible'- i.e. indefeasible in themselves though only warranted by diverse strands of defeasible reasoning. But, like everything else, superassertibility is only warranted by utility. What Rancider is doing is utterly useless. Perhaps that the point to him and Badiou and so forth. Theirs is the Art for Art's sake of an utterly useless, self lobotomizing, Aesthetics. It is one thing to ask the wrong questions when attempting reasonable reception. It is another to think the wrong questions are themselves the proper response to anything.
The traditional question 'For what reason do human beings gather into political communities?' is always already a response,
To the question 'how can we make things better?' One approach is to say 'consider why we got together in the first place. Wasn't it so as to kill sociologists? That's what we should be doing'. Somebody else say 'No. Sociologists don't matter- though we get that you don't like them coz they keep fucking your wife. The truth is, we got together in the first place so as pool our resources to reduce risk and uncertainty of such and such types. Let us use recent advances in Statistics and I.T to improve outcomes by doing better mechanism design.'
resulting in the disappearance of the object it professes to be explaining or founding - that is, the form of political partaking that then vanishes in the play of elements or atoms of sociability.
Nothing of the sort happens if we give the correct answer to the question of why collective action and social choice first got off the ground.
Rancider, brains filled with Marxian shite, couldn't do any fucking 'political partaking' and thus wrote stupid books for cretins crazier than himself.
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