Common Ground

Jeremy Gilbert

Description

Under neoliberalism the cult of individualism reigns supreme, forced upon us through culture, media and politics, it fatally limits our capacity to escape the current crisis of democratic politics. In Common Ground, Jeremy Gilbert asks us to reimagine the philosophical relationship between individuality, collectivity, affect and agency, proposing a radically non-individualist mode of imagining social life.



The book considers how opponents of neoliberal hegemony, and of the individualist tradition in Western thought, might protect collective creativity and democratic possibility. Examination of the historical roots of individualism's 'Leviathan logic' and fresh readings of theorists such as Hobbes, Lazzarato, Simondon, Lyotard, Laclau and Deleuze and Guattari, force us to confront longstanding assumptions about the nature of the individual and of collectivity. Exploration of this fundamental faultline in contemporary politics is accompanied by analysis of the different ideas and practices of collectivity, from conservative notions of hierarchical and patriarchal communities to the politics of 'horizontality' and 'the commons' which lie at the heart of radical movements today. Through an understanding of the philosophy shaping contemporary relations and disrupting hegemonic values, we can re-imagine the present moment.
Preface

1. Postmodernity and the Crisis of Democracy

2. A War of All Against All: Neoliberal Hegemony and Competitive Individualism

3. Leviathan Logics: Group Psychology from Hobbes to Laclau

4. The State of Community Opened: Multitude and Multiplicity

5. The Non-Fascist Crowd: Individuation and Infinite Relationality

6. Feeling Together: Affect, Identity and the Politics of the Common

7. On the Impossibility of Making Decisions: Affect, Agency and the Democratic Sublime

Conclusions

Notes

Index

Sujets

• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Cultural studies
• Anthropology
• Social
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 08 novembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849649773
• Langue: English

Extrait

Common Ground

First published 2014 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Copyright © Jeremy Gilbert 2014
The right of Jeremy Gilbert to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 2532 3 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 2531 6 Paperback ISBN 978 1 8496 4976 6 PDF eBook ISBN 978 1 8496 4978 0 Kindle eBook ISBN 978 1 8496 4977 3 EPUB eBook
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface



1. Postmodernity and the Crisis of Democracy
2. A War of All Against All: Neoliberal Hegemony and Competitive Individualism
3. Leviathan Logics: Group Psychology from Hobbes to Laclau
4. The State of Community Opened: Multitude and Multiplicity
5. The Non-Fascist Crowd: Individuation and Infinite Relationality
6. Feeling Together: Affect, Identity and the Politics of the Common
7. On the Impossibility of Making Decisions: Affect, Agency and the Democratic Sublime
8. Conclusions

Notes
References
Index
Acknowledgements
Any such work obviously owes debts to more sources than could possibly be enumerated, but it behoves an author to try. Some of the ideas presented here began to gestate, for better or worse, a very long time ago, when I was an undergraduate: particularly under the tutelage of the inspirational Bob Chase and Couze Venn, and were developed as a graduate and post-graduate student with the unfailing encouragement of Rachel Bowlby, Mandy Merck, James Donald, William Outhwaite and Ernesto Laclau. The book itself was a long time coming and could never have been completed without the support of my many friends, colleagues and students at the University of East London, as well as the patience and encouragement of Pluto Press.
Many of the specific ideas and arguments presented here were first floated in public in the pages of the journal Soundings and on the digital commons of open Democracy : the founding and current editors of these two publications have been mentors, inspirations and friends almost throughout my adult life, and I remain unflaggingly grateful for the opportunities which they afford me to think, experiment and learn. Networks of colleagues around the Signs of the Times project, the journal New Formations , the Compass organisation and the Association for Cultural Studies have all contributed immeasurably in helping me to think through the issues in the book, as have long conversations with Mark Fisher and Alan Finlayson. At the same time, without my friends in Lucky Cloud Sound System and Beauty and the Beat, many of the propositions in a work like this – which, at the end of the day, is all about the value of enjoying being together – would feel empty and didactic, rather than difficult but necessary attempts to express and conceptualise the things that we do.
The actual process of finishing a book usually puts a difficult strain on one’s closest family and friends, and this was no different. My partner Jo Littler was supportive and loving as she always is, on all of our adventures, intellectual and otherwise. Our daughters Robin and Isla were very good and very patient while Daddy finished his book, and as excited and delighted as anyone once he had finished. A number of immediate friends and colleagues found themselves with more work to do than they would have had to do otherwise, and never complained: none more so than Tim Lawrence (although Stephen Maddison and Debbie Shaw may have come close). Cedric Lassonde and Cyril Cornet kept the show on the road while I had to duck out of too many nights of shifting speakers and playing records; being able to re-join them was one of the best things about finishing.
Thanks to Sara and Russell for the ginseng candy – it really helped. Thanks to my family for everything and to all the friends I haven’t named.


The book is a present for Isla and Robin.
Preface
What is the most pressing political problem that faces us today?
Of course, to such a banal question, the answer must always be: ‘Which "us" are you talking about?’
In this case, however, there is an answer that could be given no matter who ‘we’ might be: the intensifying ecological crisis, which threatens the viability of mammalian life as we know it. This is surely the first problem facing all humans and many other life forms on this planet.
And yet, this is a strange answer in a way, because doesn’t everybody already know about this issue? Isn’t the scientific and political consensus sufficiently robust for us to be able to say that in fact this is no longer even a political problem at all, being the subject of no substantial disagreement (Rancière 1998)?
Well, no, because the political problem is precisely this: everyone knows about it, and yet nobody seems able to do anything about it. Or, more precisely still: we seem unable to take a decision about what changes to our collective behaviour the situation requires, and to enact them at national or international, or often even at regional and local, levels. This, then, is fundamentally a democratic crisis: a crisis in the capacity for collective decisions to be taken and upheld. As such, it is the symptom of a much deeper crisis of political democracy which has been under way now for 30 to 40 years – almost as long as mass democracy had lasted before the crisis struck. This democratic ‘crisis’ has multiple overlapping causes, but it cannot be understood without grasping the political and cultural effects of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism promotes – and, where it can, enforces – a set of assumptions about human social life which have circulated for centuries, but have probably never been as powerful as they are today. According to these assumptions, the isolated, competitive individual is the basic unit of human experience. They treat all creative agency and potential rationality as properties of individuals rather than of groups, which are in turn understood only as fetters on the freedom and mobility of individuals. They enforce and normalise market relations in every conceivable social sphere, promoting an atomised, fragmented and commodified culture within which it becomes difficult even to imagine belonging to a group on any scale which is actually capable of getting things done.
The consequences for conceptualising and practising democracy are obvious: insofar as democracy necessarily implies the creative and potentially rational agency of groups, it simply cannot be expected to work. This is the unspoken assumption of neoliberal culture which renders most of our political institutions worthless and ineffective today: democracy cannot work, because all collectivities are inherently impotent. Or if they are not, then they should be, because the other informing assumption of individualist culture is this: if collectivities are ever capable of exercising agency, then this is only in the form of a monstrous and homogenising mass, a fascist crowd.
This poses a particular problem for the Left, which has always staked its claims on some kind of belief in the constructive and democratic potential of the collective, but which has struggled to convince large-scale publics of this potential during the decades following the defeat of Soviet communism. Even before that particular defeat, at least since the early 1970s, the traditional vehicles of collective agency – Labour and social-democratic parties, trade unions, leftist governments – had been losing legitimacy in most parts of the world, as they struggled to adapt their industrial-era practices to the complexities of a post-industrial, ‘post-Fordist’ world.
And yet this legitimacy was not only undermined by the emergence of post-Fordism and the rise of neoliberalism. In fact it was arguably the ‘New Lefts’ of the 1960s, and the social movements of the 1970s, which posed the first lethal challenges to the highly conformist, homogenising model of collectivity which informed the political and democratic institutions inherited from the mid twentieth century. This book contends that the anti-democratic project of neoliberalism has been as much as anything a defensive reaction on the part of the corporate elite to the challenges posed by the demands of the New Lefts for autonomy and participatory democracy.
Since that time, a whole range of political, social and cultural experiments – all implicitly opposed to the logic of neoliberalism – have tried to mobilise a different set of implicit assumptions about the nature of collectivity and sociality, asserting that these can in fact be understood as dynamic, productive conditions of possibility for all kinds of creative innovation. These experiments range from the reform of the former Communist parties to the mass experiment in collective intelligence which is the World Wide Web (Lévy 1997, Benkler 2006); from the World Social Forum to the communal councils of Venezuela; from the Green parties to rave culture; from Negri’s theory of the multitude to the pirates of the peer-to-peer world. This book tries to draw out the philosophical and political implications of asserting the claim which informs all such experiments: that human (and even extra-