Three Views of Duplicity

Alan Ayckbourn on corruption:

‘The human mind, left to its own devices, can usually justify any code of behaviour it chooses to suit circumstances. Beware!’
(Ayckbourn: programme note to A Small Family Business)

Gordon Brown on the behaviour of Damian McBride, a man he personally employed, whilst Chancellor and as Prime Minister, for more than ten years:

‘I have said all along that when I saw this first I was very angry indeed. I think the most important thing we do is reassure people everything is being done to clean up politics in our country.’
(Gordon Brown: statement in Glasgow 16 April 2009)

Barack Obama’s Nuremberg defence of those who carried out torture in Guantánamo:

‘This administration has made it clear from day one that it will not condone torture … those who carried out their duties … in good faith … will not be subject to prosecution.’
(Barack Obama: statement accompanying release of CIA memos 16 April 2009)

Imaginary Insurrections II

In an earlier post I fiddled with the idea that Gordon Brown had incorporated insurrection, an imaginary insurrection, into the supposedly endless progress of the State.

In Il fattore A (from Gli autonomi vol I) in which he discusses why Italy was so uniquely and profoundly affected by ’68 – ’77 Lanfranco Caminiti sketches this distinction.

On the one hand there is the US model, a sort of ‘wild capitalism, of primitive accumulation, of the frontier, of mercenaries, where the turbines sweep everything away without regard, and where one can only resist by reforming a little here, a little there, and that at a very high price.’

And on the other there is the ‘Soviet’ version, in which inherent contradictions are gathered together at the highest level of generalisation, as ‘the plan’, thus completing ‘an insurrectional leap without actually creating any insurrection, rather making itself the engine of development: worker democracy produces electrification.’

What Gordon Brown, who likes to save the bathwater from discarded babies, retains (at least rhetorically) is some notion of the State Capitalism of the former Soviet Union.

Anyway here is Badiou at the recent Birkbeck conference reasserting how refusal, which is against the State and its ‘progress’ also comes from within:

‘We must create a political framework, something which is disassociated from the State, which is not ruling by the State itself’ [...] we cannot live today outside capitalism. It’s a nonsense, There is no place outside capitalism. So is it possible to create something like a political space by [...] an analysis of contemporary capitalism? I think this [...] is a necessity, but we cannot [...] create political places outside or at a distance from the State.’

Privatising Despair

 In Imaginary Insurrections I tried to show how Gordon Brown co-opted the idea of insurrection into the rhetoric of New Labour during his Washington speech, how he tamed it: first by putting it into the past (the insurrectionary thought which preceded what’s since been achieved); then by making the crowd, the opposition, the insurrectionary multitude part of the ruling, undemocratic elite which is what New Labour actually is (22% of the voting population as of 2005; though now it is probably worse).

In Ms Harman’s Tame Kangaroo I tried to highlight a closely related trick, to show how Ms Harman pointedly conflated the coercive violence of the lynch mob with conventional models of legality to produce what she called ‘the Court of Public Opinion’ in a piece of rhetoric which showed up disturbingly (as the assault on Civil Liberties also does) New Labour’s quasi fascist inclinations.

Not that there is anything very new in this technique: New Labour has employed it from the beginning. Before his translation to Cardinal Blair of Baghdad, for example, Bishop Tony used quite regularly to jump the barrier between, say, the providers of a central service (for which he was broadly responsible) and those who found themselves victims of its delivery, co-opting their complaints.

And now, in New Labour’s plans, announced by Alan Johnson and James Purnell, that the unemployed should all be offered counselling, preferably CBT, the managerial version of the ‘talking cures’, we have the latest policy counterpart of that same principle.

In 1936, 200 people marched from Jarrow to Westminster to protest against unemployment; not an insurrection, to be sure, though it was something.

In 1981 Norman Tebbit mischievously rewrote that episode to attack the riots then taking place in Handsworth and in Brixton.  A good example of the jam tomorrow version of reality upon which capitalism relies:

‘I grew up in the ’30s with an unemployed father. He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking until he found it.’

Unsurprisingly, what New Labour now propose, at a cost of £13m in freshly invented money, is no more helpful than Mr Tebbit’s plucky memorial and very much more despairing even as rhetoric: not merely the diversion of political anger into sturdiness and self help along the lines of Samuel Smiles but actually the full privatisation of social discontent through its elimination from the social and collective (ie political) sphere and its extrusion into the private, the personal and the ‘mental’.

Should there be mass unemployment and consequential anger and despair, in other words, and this seems by no means unlikely, then the fault will lie not with the depredations wrought by neoliberalism, of which New Labour is a part. Rather it will have come about through individual failures to perceive exactly how half full the glass is. And should there be a solution in New Labour’s terms then this will come about not through the emergence of some new social subject already present in potential, through the ballot box or across the barricades, but simply through getting used to how things are.

Which is a gloss on political impotence, of course: the dissipation of political energy and  endeavour and how they come about through Bourdieu’s social suffering into the ’symptoms’ of ‘disturbed’ individuals.

Ms Harman’s Tame Kangaroo

Bacon’s ‘Revenge is a kind of wild justice’ (Essays IV) introduces several propositions:

‘[T]he more man’s nature runs to [revenge], the more ought law to weed it out: for as for the first wrong, it doth but offend the law, but the revenge of that wrong putteth the law out of office.’

Towards the end of the essay he draws a further distinction:

‘Public revenges are for the most part fortunate [...] But in private revenges it is not so…’

Because ‘justice’ in its untamed state is private, plural, interpersonal and damaging to the Law as an institution, private revenge is inimical to the latter in a more systemic way than, say, the breaking of some individual prohibition. So revenge is like dry rot, ground elder or a virus. As part of any civilising project it needs to be done away with or, at the very least, controlled even as the tarmac is being laid down over the chaos.

Hobbes similarly insists on keeping separate the plurality of the multitude in its natural state, on the one hand, and, on the other, the unity of the people civilly instantiated in (not just represented by) whatever ‘public’ institutions are in place:

‘[M]en distinguish not enough between a People and a Multitude. The People is somewhat that is one, having one will, and to whom one action may be attributed; none of these can properly be said of a Multitude. [...] In a Democracy, and Aristocracy, the Citizens are the Multitude, but the Court is the People. And in a Monarchy, the Subjects are the Multitude, and (however it seem a Paradox) the King is the People.’

(De Cive, XII 8)

And here by contrast is the ‘little and narrow mind’ of the ineffably stupid Ms Harman, New Labour’s deputy leader, as revealed to Andrew Marr, acceding to the exceedingly ‘weak pleasure’ of threatening poor Mr Goodwin’s pension with a lynch mob:

‘The Prime Minister has said [Mr Goodwin's pension] is not acceptable and therefore it will not be accepted. It might be enforceable in a Court of Law but it is not enforceable in the Court of Public Opinion and that’s where the Government steps in.’

What’s underway here, as with Brown’s imaginary insurrection, is an attempt to tame the wild, to turn it into a colony. Her comments mimic a parental turn of phrase: ‘No, because I said no.’ However, whereas parental authority is quite clear (as far as stroppy toddlers are concerned the parent makes the Law) Ms Harman’s version moves about, shifting and evading responsibility, blame and anything else that might be awkward at some point.

First the Prime Minister is reported as having said something in a very performative sense, as though he were a Ruler making Law. But he’s not. Or at least not by himself. So it’s actually just an opinion. Therefore the authority (such as it is) is not legal or even deontic but doxastic.

Next Ms Harman denatures the Law, splitting legal accountability into ‘a Court of Law’ and ‘the Court of Public Opinion’. But the latter doesn’t exist and the former is already, in Hobbes’ sense, the People. In which case to go beyond that bold embodiment into something new involving what Ms Harman calls the ‘public’ but by which she really means the mob is to invite insurrection or what Hobbes calls ‘sedition’, ie the overthrow of civil governance by ‘the multitude’. Whilst to suggest as well, as she does, a connection between such a court and government is to invoke either a People’s Court such as might follow a popular revolution or, disturbingly, the Volksgerichtshof of Adolf Hitler.

But of course Ms Harman steers well clear of all that. Her Court will have no claws, not even theoretical teeth, despite what she implies. So Mr Goodwin’s right to take his booty will indeed be ‘not enforceable’ before her kangaroo court, which is hardly much of a threat. And he will take it anyway. People won’t much like that but they’ll live, and HMG will share their pain. They may fail to take to the streets. However, that will be no victory for any sound good sense. Rather it will be the memory of an almost fascist urge to victimise and punish, albeit not followed through. At least on this occasion.

Here to close is Mandeville’s Grumbling Hide in which the lawlessness of the multitude is incorporated into the polity itself as though it were the grit within the pearl within the oyster:

Virtue, who from Politicks

Had learn’d a thousand Cunning Tricks,

Was, by their happy Influence,

Made Friends with Vice: And ever since

The Worst of all the Multitude

Did Something for the common Good.

Presumably in his prelapsarian pomp, which is why he was given his knighthood in the first place, Mr Goodwin was just such a piece of grit. Or at least he was thus regarded. By a venal and dangerous government which at that stage believed in what it now disowns.