Moderne onzekerheid

Recensie van: Isabell Lorey (2016) Het regeren van pecairen, vertaald door Marten de Vries. Amsterdam: Octavo, 144 pp.

Precariteit heeft gedurende de laatste jaren groeiende aandacht gekregen, zowel in sociologische en politiek-filosofische kringen als daarbuiten. Discussies over toenemende onzekerheid in woon- en werkomstandigheden spitsen zich meestal toe op een verontwaardiging die berust op de kloof tussen de welvaart van de moderne samenleving en de beangstigende onzekerheid over de toegang tot basale levensbehoeften die deze samenleving diende te bewerkstelligen. Deze onzekerheid is zichtbaar in velerlei vormen, zoals de steeds onmogelijkere situatie van mensen met een laag inkomen op de grootstedelijke woningmarkt, maar bijvoorbeeld ook in de afschaffing van de studiefinanciering. Deze ontwikkelingen passen in de geleidelijke afbraak van het sociale vangnet ten gevolge van jarenlang neoliberaal beleid. In beide gevallen worden er essentiële mogelijkheden ontzegd aan bepaalde groepen, waardoor deze groepen in een steeds sterkere staat van onzekerheid verkeren – onzekerheid over woonplaatsen en baankansen. Het zou verassend moeten zijn dat kwesties omtrent zulke basisbehoeften, na alle industrialisatie en verhoogde welvaart, opnieuw zo’n prangend probleem zijn, niet alleen in Nederland maar binnen de gehele Europese Unie en de Verenigde Staten. Toch heeft deze onrust tot dusver niet geleid tot een protestbeweging die een fundamenteel effect heeft gehad en blijken neoliberale partijen standvastig herkozen te worden.

Het is precies deze schijnbare tegenstrijdigheid, een vreemde dynamiek die eigen is aan de neoliberale samenleving, die Isabel Lorey in Het regeren van precairen (2016) probeert te verklaren. Zij vraagt zich af hoe een cultuur van angst en onzekerheid zo heersend heeft kunnen worden, waarom mensen zich toch bangelijk schikken naar het systeem dat deze onzekerheid produceert, en waarom er ten slotte zo weinig verzet is tegen precaire levensnormen. Lorey stelt dat kennis van precariteit een noodzakelijkheid is om de samenleving te kunnen begrijpen en om enige mogelijkheid voor verbetering te kunnen creëren.

I

Volgens Lorey is er eigenlijk geen sprake van één vorm van precariteit, maar is er nood aan een drietal concepten die tezamen het probleem uiteenzetten: precair-zijn, precariteit en precarisering. Hoewel dit onderscheid in eerste instantie wellicht tot verwarring kan leiden, stelt het Lorey in staat om allerlei verschillende vormen van precariteit te bespreken zonder reductionistisch te zijn. Allereerst richt zij zich op het precair-zijn, waarbij zij Judith Butler volgt in de wijze waarop zij deze term gekenschetst heeft. Butler stelt dat het leven inherent existentieel precair is en dat de mens noodzakelijk afhankelijk is van anderen voor bescherming om in leven te blijven (Butler 2009, 22-23). Deze bescherming kan echter nooit volledig zijn; precair-zijn is een onoverwinbare eigenschap van het leven waartegen men zich altijd slechts gedeeltelijk kan beschermen (Lorey 2016, 33). Lorey vat de mens dus op als een wezen dat altijd fysiek kwetsbaar is en dat berust op de zorg van anderen. Deze opvatting draagt al een nadruk op zorgethiek in zich, een thema dat later in het boek terug zal keren.

Precariteit ontstaat wanneer de bescherming tegen precair-zijn onderwerp wordt van politieke regulatie. Doordat verschillende groepen op verschillende wijzen en in verschillende maten bescherming wordt gegeven, ontstaat er een hiërarchie van precariteit, met een onderlaag van (vrijwel) geheel onbeschermde mensen en een opeenstapelende reeks groepen die in gedifferentieerde mate beschermd zijn. Zulke politieke regulatie bestaat voornamelijk uit het toekennen van rechten die een sociaal vangnet geven aan burgers, zoals het recht op een uitkering of op een sociale huurwoning. Bepaalde groepen verkeren in een hogere mate van precariteit doordat zij deze soort wettelijke bescherming niet ontvangen. De wettelijke status van personen bepaalt dus de mate van zekerheid die hen wordt gegeven. Dit contrast is duidelijk zichtbaar in het verschil tussen de rechten die bezitters van een paspoort uit een land dat deelneemt aan het Schengen-verdrag ontvangen, die door hun paspoort van sociale zekerheid gegarandeerd zijn in al deze landen, en migranten zonder verblijfsvergunning.

Precariteit staat in nauw verband met de term biopolitiek. Deze term, ontwikkeld door Michel Foucault, beschrijft de wijze waarop staten hun politieke macht gebruiken om populaties en lichamen te controleren, te reguleren en te beïnvloeden. Foucault herkende hierin een nieuwe vorm van de toepassing van staatsmacht. Praktijken als het gecentraliseerd wettelijk vastleggen van zorgbeleid toonden voor hem aan dat de staat zich tegenwoordig voornamelijk bezighoudt met het organiseren van het leven zelf. Lorey herkent in de ontwikkeling van precariteit een soortgelijke dynamiek. Volgens haar is het voornaamste onderwerp van regulatie onzekerheid geworden. Maar deze regulatiepraktijken komen niet slechts voort uit de staat, wat ook voor Foucault een essentiële wending is. Burgers voeren zelf deze praktijken uit en zijn zo zelfcontrolerend. Deze controlemechanieken zijn hierdoor productieve onderdelen van de manier waarop mensen hun eigen leven vormgeven, een zogenoemde gouvernementaliteit. Dit betekent dat de manier waarop precariteit gereguleerd wordt ook voortkomt uit de relatie die mensen tot zichzelf hebben. Wanneer iemand beslist om zich bij te scholen, een nulurencontract aanvaardt, of onbetaald werk doet omdat het goed zal staan op diens cv, is dit een individualistische manier om met precariteit om te gaan. De manier waarop het individu zich verhoudt tot precariteit noemt Lorey precarisering, de term die de voornaamste focus van het boek blijkt.

II

Om te begrijpen hoe precariteit geworteld is in de liberale samenleving, analyseert Lorey de manier waarop er in de liberale traditie naar de samenkomst van precariteit en het functioneren van de staat is gekeken. De stroming van het sociaalcontractdenken begrijpt de staat als een rationele overeenkomst tussen een groep mensen die collectief beter af is door het bestaan van een staat. Lorey bespreekt twee pijlers van deze liberale traditie: Hobbes en Rousseau.

Volgens Hobbes koos de mens rationeel een staat te stichten om daarmee uit een natuurstaat van anarchie en zelfredzaamheid te stappen. Lorey stelt vast dat dit hobbesiaanse gedachtegoed de staatsmacht fundeert op een diepe angst voor de ander, die feitelijk voortkomt uit de angst voor het eigen precair-zijn en het besef dat de ander dezelfde angst voelt. Er kleeft dus een tweeledigheid aan deze angst; de angst voor de dreiging van buitenaf, maar ook de angst voor de onvermijdelijke gevaren van het mens-zijn zelf. Elke poging tot het neutraliseren van dit gevaar zal noodzakelijk falen. Deze angst vormt vervolgens de garantie en legitimering voor het oprichten van het staatsbestel, dat als taak heeft om burgers te beschermen van de natuurstaat. Lorey stelt dat deze denkwijze een permanente dreiging vereist en dat deze dreiging tevens de balans verstoort. Van oudsher betaalde de burger voor veiligheid met gehoorzaamheid, maar onder het neoliberale systeem muteerde deze dynamiek en wordt er door middel van onzekerheid in plaats van bescherming gereguleerd. De staat blijft continu op zoek naar de minimaal noodzakelijke afscherming tegen deze onzekerheid om de gangbare machtsrelaties in stand te kunnen houden.

Lorey vervolgt haar analyse met Rousseau, die zij in foucaultiaanse termen interpreteert. Zij stelt dat de opvatting van Rousseau een subjectiveringswijze creëert waarbij de burger zowel soeverein als subject is. Vanuit dit geïndividualiseerde en atomistische mensbeeld ontstaat er onder het neoliberalisme een gouvernementaliteit waarin mensen over het eigen lichaam als productiekracht regeren en hierdoor hun eigen precair-zijn beïnvloeden. Tevens wordt het individu regeerbaarder, aangezien de mogelijkheid ontstaat om subjectiveringswijzen te veranderen door de omstandigheden te reguleren waarin het subject ontstaat.

III

De term precariteit is niet nieuw. Het concept is gemunt in de jaren ’80 door Franse sociologen die opmerkten dat er een verschuiving plaatsvond van vast gesalarieerde arbeid naar tijdelijke contracten, instabiel werk en stages, terwijl er tevens enorme werkloosheid heerste (Castel 2016, 163). Een van deze sociologen, Robert Castel, zag deze nieuwe precariteit als een terugkeer naar een tijd waarin loonarbeid een instabiele arbeidsvorm was waardoor mensen onderworpen waren aan de grillen van de markt. De kracht van de verzorgingsstaat was dat het een minimum aan sociale afscherming bood die de autonomie van de arbeider waarborgde. Vaste contracten creëerden een sociaal compromis dat arbeiders stabiliteit en zekerheid kon garanderen en bedrijven economische voordelen bood. Maar de afbraak van de verzorgingsstaat heeft een terugkeer naar de oorspronkelijke instabiliteit veroorzaakt. Wat Castel herkende was dat onzekerheid niet langer een tijdelijke conditie was, een onzekere periode die je moest doormaken voordat je een permanent contract ontving, maar tot een permanent onderdeel van het leven was gemaakt. Een belangrijk verschil tussen Castels tijd en de periode voor het instellen van dit sociale stelsel was dat een veel significanter deel van de samenleving bedreigd werd door sociale kwetsbaarheid. Hoewel de situatie in het vroege kapitalisme oneindig ellendig en gevaarlijk was, vormde de groep van stedelijke arbeiders in Frankrijk een kleinere portie van de samenleving dan in de jaren ’80 (INSEE, 2018). In de moderne geïndustrialiseerde samenleving diende deze situatie zich aan bij vrijwel alle burgers. Castel beeldt deze opstelling van de samenleving uit als een stabiel centrum van afgeschermde burgers, een periferie van ontkoppelde burgers, en een groeiende groep van precaire burgers. Dit precariaat vormt een bedreiging voor de stabiliteit van het centrum en dus voor de stabiliteit van de samenleving als geheel. Deze groep kan, echter, middels de verzorgingsstaat geneutraliseerd worden en zodoende opgenomen worden in het centrum (Lorey 2016, 57). Toch bestaat er altijd een groep ontkoppelde burgers over voor wie dit proces van integratie onmogelijk is, waardoor die groep een permanente dreiging blijft vormen voor de bestaande machtsverhoudingen.

Lorey benadrukt dat Castel precariteit bekijkt als een metaforisch virus dat zich verspreidt over de samenleving en haar van binnenuit ondermijnt. Het idee dat de integratie van een groep precairen zou leiden tot stabiliteit, noemt Lorey een immuniseringslogica. Het is niet noodzakelijk om het geheel aan precaire burgers te beschermen, maar louter een groep van dusdanig formaat dat stabiliteit mogelijk blijft. De terugkeer van een uitgebreid sociaal vangnet is voor Castel essentieel en afdoende. Deze opvatting is te bekritiseren omdat het alleen sociale veiligheid opeist voor een grote groep, maar het bestaan van een precaire groep als zodanig niet als een probleem opvat. Voor Castel is het echte probleem dat de samenleving kan ontbinden bij een te grote groep aan precairen, en niet dat de samenleving een groep mensen niet genoeg ondersteuning biedt om uit deze staat van onzekerheid te stappen. Zijn visie vormt dus een verdediging van de bestaande maatschappijstructuur en legitimeert het gebruik van veiligheidstechnieken om het niet-integreerbare deel en diens voortdurende bedreiging van de samenleving in toom te houden. Hoewel Lorey voortbouwt op het werk van Castel benadrukt zij ook dit fundamentele probleem van Castels opvatting. Volgens haar is zijn visie doordrenkt van een hobbesiaans beschermingsidee waardoor hij precariteit als onderdeel van de liberale samenleving ziet. Voor Castel blijft er steeds een voortdurende dreiging, een niet-integreerbare ander die verzekert dat gehoorzaamheid het beste volgbare pad is (Lorey 2016, 58).

Daarnaast benadrukt Lorey dat er veel feministische kritiek op Castel is geleverd. Systemen van veiligstelling waren ingericht rondom heteroseksuele mannen die aan het hoofd staan van een familie. Terwijl de man zekerheid verkrijgt door arbeid te verrichten, ontvangt de vrouw veiligheid door een familie te vormen. Voor vrouwen ontstaat sociale zekerheid pas door vrijheid op te geven. Dat maakt de vrouw afhankelijk van de man voor bescherming tegen existentieel precair-zijn (Lorey 2016, 65-66).

Lorey meent tot slot dat Castels visie ontoereikend is om te verklaren waarom de middenklasse tegenwoordig ook in toenemende mate geprecariseerd is, zonder dat deze infectie van het centrum een uiteenval van het systeem veroorzaakt, zoals Castel het zich voorstelde. Volgens Lorey valt de groep geprecariseerde burgers niet meer te onderscheiden van het stabiele centrum (ibid, 77). Er is dus iets anders gaande dan wat Castel beschrijft. Mensen leren tegenwoordig leven met precariteit: risico wordt geprivatiseerd en genormaliseerd.

Lorey heeft ook een andere goede reden om de theorie van Castel te verwerpen. Castel vreesde dat het niet mogelijk is om een verenigd front te vormen tegen precariteit, zoals dat wel gebeurde bij eerdere problemen binnen het kapitalisme. Precariteit is zo alomvattend en divers, en de instabiele banen die precairen hebben geven geen mogelijkheid voor het vormen van een vakbond, waardoor er, aldus Castel, geen duidelijke ingang lijkt te bestaan voor protest. Door zich tegen de theorie van Castel te keren wekt Lorey de suggestie dat Het regeren van precairen gelezen kan worden als een poging om aan te tonen dat zulke mogelijkheden wel bestaan. Maar het boek werd oorspronkelijk gepubliceerd in 2012 en er lijken in de tussentijd geen nieuwe, grootse protesten tegen precariteit zoals EuroMayDay te zijn ontstaan. Dit suggereert dat de mogelijkheden voor protest toch zo beperkt zijn als Castel het voorspelde. Tegelijkertijd sluimert precariteit onder het oppervlak van allerlei politieke ontwikkelingen. Donald Trump probeerde bijvoorbeeld de sympathie te winnen van groepen Amerikanen die in onzekere industrieën zoals de kolenmijnen werken, door een anti-globaliseringsdenken uit te dragen met als doel om baanzekerheid te creëren binnen de Verenigde Staten. Ook bij de Tweede Kamerverkiezingen in Nederland leek precariteit een rol te spelen. Partijen over het gehele politieke spectrum, van de PVV tot aan GroenLinks, probeerden stemmen te winnen van kiezers die zich achtergelaten voelden door ‘Den Haag’. De strategie van dit soort partijen lijkt te bestaan uit het erkennen van deze onzekerheid en het garanderen van allerlei vormen van bescherming. Het idee van Lorey dat de liberale samenleving omgaat met precariteit door zich te beroepen op bescherming komt hierin naar voren.

Lorey suggereert dat het gebrek aan protest tegen precariteit niet zozeer voortkomt uit de huidige arbeidsvormen van mensen die onzeker leven, maar dat mensen geleerd hebben op een individuele wijze om te gaan met precariteit. Volgens haar bestaat de privatisering van risico uit gouvernementele technieken van zelfregering die mensen ontwikkelen om te kunnen concurreren op de arbeidsmarkt. Verschillen tussen vaardigheden, lichamen, en handelingen worden economisch gewaardeerd zodat mensen zich aan kunnen passen om zichzelf veilig te stellen (ibid, 87). Zodoende is sociale onzekerheid gemuteerd tot een fenomeen waar mensen op een individuele wijze in plaats van op een politieke wijze mee proberen om te gaan. Mensen worden geregeerd door onzekerheid en blijven regeerbaar doordat zij alleen naar individuele oplossingen op zoek gaan. Hierdoor kan zelfs het centrum niet langer veiliggesteld worden en wordt er slechts het minimum aan bescherming gegeven zodat de samenleving niet uiteenvalt (Lorey 2016, 81-82). Precariteit wordt gemaximaliseerd, bescherming wordt geminimaliseerd.

IV

Lorey vraagt zich af waarom arbeidsvormen eigen aan het huidige, postfordistische tijdperk in deze mate leiden tot precarisering. In dit kader bespreekt zij Paolo Virno’s A Grammar of The Multitude waarin hij betoogt dat postfordistische productiewijzen berusten op de cognitieve en communicatieve vaardigheden van het individu. Een essentieel aspect van dit soort arbeid is dat het performatief-virtuoos is. Dit soort arbeid werkt op basis van een vervaging van de scheiding tussen privé en publiek: openbaarheid is dusdanig aan het veranderen dat relaties tot het zelf en relaties tot onze arbeid in elkaar overlopen (ibid, 89).

Dit idee van performatieve arbeid ontleent Virno aan Hannah Arendt. Zij beweerde dat dit soort arbeid wordt gekenmerkt door dat het niet als doel heeft om objecten te produceren maar om een zogenaamde affectieve voordracht te leveren. Moderne arbeid omvat de gevoelens van de arbeider, maar is ook altijd gericht op een publiek. Voor Arendt vormt politiek zelf ook arbeid van deze soort, en vormt het dus een uitvoerende kunst die verandering probeert te bewerkstelligen middels een uitvoering van politiek handelen. Doordat politiek een performatieve aard heeft, is zij alleen mogelijk als handelende personen in een openbare ruimte bevinden waarin zijn aanschouwd kunnen worden (Ibid, 93). Alleen onder deze omstandigheden kan het individu vrijheid verkrijgen, door de blootstelling aan het openbare, door uit de privésfeer te stappen en zich over te leveren aan het onvoorziene. Vrijheid gaat hierdoor altijd gepaard met vormen van onzekerheid. Als arbeid tegenwoordig ook een performatief karakter heeft, betekent dit dus dat zij essentieel vervlochten is met precariteit. Als arbeid daarnaast communicatief wordt, vereist dit van een persoon dat diens denken en affecten zich vervlechten met diens arbeid. Als gevolg hiervan vindt zelfverwezenlijking openbaar plaats, door middel van arbeid (ibid, 101). Hierdoor wordt het gehele zelf onderdeel van het kapitalistische productieproces en precariseert zelfs het sociale leven.

Natuurlijk dekt deze beschrijving van postfordistische arbeid maar een deel van de moderne vormen van arbeid, voornamelijk de werkvormen die de middenklasse tegenwoordig aanneemt. Toch zijn er allerlei werkvormen die uitermate precair zijn maar geen performativiteit vereisen, of waarbij performativiteit en affectieve voordracht maar zijdelings betrokken zijn. Een deel van dit soort banen was van oudsher al precair, maar als Lorey bepleit dat er geen harde lijn te trekken valt tussen verschillende soorten precairen, tussen een zogenaamd centrum en een periferie, onderstreept zij hiermee zijdelings toch een verschil. Postfordistische arbeid zou namelijk op een eigen manier precair zijn, een manier die daadwerkelijk verschilt van andere soorten precariteit.

Het idee dat arbeid tegenwoordig ook de gehele persoon van de arbeider zelf opeist zou kunnen verklaren waarom er zo weinig verzet is ontstaan in de laatste jaren. Maar door te stellen dat het inherent is aan postfordistische arbeid om met precariteit om te gaan, maakt deze verklaring precariteit intern aan de huidige soort arbeid, in plaats van extern eraan, bepaald door omstandigheden als baanzekerheid, contractduur, enzovoorts. In een bepaalde zin wordt precariteit door deze verklaring een minder politiek probleem, aangezien het minder het product is van politieke keuzes. Dat lijkt een probleem voor verzet tegen precariteit.

Lorey bepleit dat het huidige ideaal van vrijheid een van soevereiniteit en autonomie is. Om dit te bereiken maken mensen gebruik van zelfregeringstechnieken die ten dienste staan van hun economische bruikbaarheid. Het performatief-virtuoze subject zal telkens blijven streven naar veiligstelling om zich vrij te voelen, maar zal de relatie tussen precariteit en veiligstelling niet ondervragen (ibid, 104). Dit subject is alleen maar gericht op het bereiken van succes en de veiligheid die ermee gepaard gaat. Toch beweert Lorey dat de performatieve aard van huidige productiewijzen potentieel politiek kan worden doordat deze reeds een omgang met precariteit vereist. Een probleem voor deze analyse is dat, als politiek een omgang met precariteit behelst, dit niet betekent dat precariteit ook een omgang met politiek behelst. Lorey betoogt dat moderne arbeid al dichtbij politiek handelen ligt, maar zij maakt niet duidelijk op welke manier de stap tussen de twee gemaakt kan worden. Alleen het feit dat beide soorten handelingen een omgang met onzekerheid bevatten, is niet genoeg om aan te tonen dat de kloof tussen de twee makkelijk overbrugbaar is. Op het punt waar Lorey van het probleem probeert te vertrekken om tot een analyse van de mogelijkheid tot verzet te komen, beginnen er onduidelijkheden in haar boek voor te komen.

Lorey bespreekt in dit kader de activiteiten van verschillende bewegingen die zich hebben bekommerd met de notie van precariteit. Het voorbeeld dat het meest uitgelicht wordt en het meest relevant blijkt, is precarias a la deriva, een Madrileense beweging van vrouwen die zich verzet tegen de bestaande logica van zekerstelling en precariteit. Zij richten zich op de herwaardering van zorg, om zodoende zorgarbeid een centrale plek te geven in politiek-economische discussies, maar ook om onze relatie tot anderen te benadrukken (ibid, 114). De precarias stellen meerdere activistische tactieken voor, zoals een zorgstaking of dérives – wandelende ontmoetingen met andere precairen. Hiervoor worden ruimtes die afgebakend zijn voor onder andere werk, transport, winkelen en wonen doorlopen en gebruikt als anti-individualiserende ontmoetingsplaatsen. Het initiatief had de intentie om door middel van een onderzoeksproject het activistische project te informeren en vorm te geven. Het resultaat van dit onderzoek was om binnen het activisme nadruk te leggen op precarisering boven precariteit en op het nastreven van een versterkte publieke sfeer waarin zorg centraal staat. Hiermee werd ook op de zorg voor het zelf gedoeld, zonder dat dat verbeterde productiviteit of gouvernementeel zelfregeren als doel heeft. De precarias hadden voor ogen deze acties op te volgen met grotere initiatieven, zoals het organiseren van algemene stakingen bij precaire werkplekken en campagnes om onzichtbaar werk – zoals sekswerk en huiselijk werk – meer onder de aandacht te brengen (Precarias a la deriva 2004). Met het bespreken van de precarias probeert Lorey met een hoopvolle noot te eindigen door te tonen welke mogelijkheden er zijn voor verzet tegen de huidige stand van zaken. Het project van de precarias is echter nooit uitgevoerd en vanaf 2005 lijkt de groep uiteen te zijn gevallen. De activistische modellen die Lorey bespreekt zijn dan ook vooral kritieken die precariteit bespreken, maar zij geven geen beeld van hoe nu verder te gaan.

In principe zou Lorey niet zo’n suggestie hoeven geven, maar toch wijdt zij de laatste sectie van haar boek aan een bespreking van precies deze mogelijkheid tot verandering. Lorey bepleit dat die mogelijkheid immanent is aan de huidige machtsstructuren: zij herkent mogelijkheden in de affectieve arbeidsvorm van het postfordistische tijdperk, waarvan zij stelt dat die ook altijd tot het ontstaan van nieuwe sociale relaties leidt die buiten de logica van het neoliberalisme vallen. Hierin schuilt dus een mogelijkheid voor mensen om te breken met de huidige precarisering en om daartegen in verzet te komen. Lorey beschrijft echter niet wat zulke nieuwe sociale relaties of verzetsstrategieën zouden kunnen zijn. Het wordt dan ook niet duidelijk waarom Lorey gelooft dat de huidige machtsstructuren van binnenuit geneigd zijn tot verandering. Als precariteit daadwerkelijk zo diepgeworteld zit in de liberale traditie als Lorey probeert aan te tonen, is het de vraag of en waarom het er immanent aan zou zijn om precies hiermee te breken. De abstracties waarmee Lorey de mogelijkheid voor verandering duidt zorgen ervoor dat het toch voelt alsof het boek onduidelijk eindigt.

Het regeren van precairen biedt dus vooral een duidelijk conceptueel kader bij een heersende problematiek. Het onderscheid dat Lorey maakt tussen drie dimensies van precariteit verheldert op welke wijzen mensen tegenwoordig met precariteit omgaan. Het idee dat precariteit vandaag voornamelijk op een interne wijze gereguleerd wordt en hiermee uit het publieke, politieke domein wordt getrokken, vormt een overtuigende verklaring voor het gebrek aan openbaar verzet. Op het moment dat Lorey probeert aan te tonen dat er nog steeds mogelijkheden voor zulk verzet bestaan, blijft het echter vaag waar deze mogelijkheden uit bestaan. Duidelijke richtlijnen weet het boek niet te bieden, maar Lorey geeft wel een sterk pleidooi tegen een diepgeworteld huidig probleem en wijst daarmee de richting aan voor een mogelijke tegenreactie.

An Activist Scholar’s Approach to Theorizing No Borders

Review of: Natasha King (2016) No Borders: The Politics of Immigration Control and Resistance. London: Zed Books, 196 pp.

In the past few years, the word “crisis” has attached itself to migration. There is a migration or refugee “crisis” going on, and it is somehow understood as a “crisis” for Europe and all the other receiving countries that must deal with this problem. But what about the “crisis” that migrants, those struggling to stay alive, are facing? During the last couple of years, the ‘jungle’ of Calais has been bulldozed, the EU has made an agreement with Turkey to send Syrian asylum seekers who reach Greece illegally to Turkey, and the United States government has been detaining the children of families that illegally cross the border into the US in what can be described as cages. Sanctuary towns across the United States are telling undocumented students to proceed with caution before enrolling in community colleges, as they may leave a paper trail that will enable the immigration authorities to find them. The “crisis” continues to shift geographies, and has gone from being highly visible to scattered here and there. It is against this backdrop that Natasha King’s No Borders emerges as a timely and necessary contribution to the way we think about migration, borders and resistance.

This book, arising from her PhD thesis, is motivated by King’s “desire to create scholarship that’s directly relevant to existing struggles against the border now, and a research method that embedded me in those struggles and that used my experiences of activism as a subject of study” (King 2016, 9). This approach highlights the urgency of the work while establishing an innovative approach to research. King develops much of her theoretical foundation by drawing upon the works of Étienne Balibar, Nicholas DeGenova and Alessandro Mezzadra. By drawing from what could be characterized as radical migration and border literature, she effectively establishes her stance as someone who understands the border as productive, in the sense that the border produces violent notions of “illegality” and constructs a particular reality that is by no means natural. King’s focus is resistance to the border, and she understands illegal border crossing, as well as acts such as hunger strikes that occur in detention centers, as a “refusal” of the border. She emphasizes that one of the central issues or dilemmas which guides her research and the book is: “how to refuse the state while also engaging with it” (King 2016, 5). For King, “this book is not really about migration at all, but about a certain way of being that’s other to the system” (King 2016, 7). In this stance, she opens space for tying migrant activism with anarchist theorizing.

King opens the book by introducing us to the realities faced by people migrating to Europe; those escaping war, famine, and other forms of violent oppression continue to face extremely adverse conditions, where they are sometimes held indeterminately in detention centers, or die during the course of their journeys. She then proceeds to explain migrant activism as grounded in the idea that migration can be a social movement composed of “people who move as active participants in the construction of reality, not simply as people reacting to economic or social factors” (King 2016, 29). Examples of such activist movements include the Sans Papiers movement in France, No One is Illegal in Canada, or We Are Here in the Netherlands. By engaging in acts such as protests on the streets, sit-ins, or seeking legal advice, the groups act as citizens although they do not have the requisite legal status. Migrant activism thus presents challenges to how we understand the relationship between citizen, state, and resistance.

Making her standpoint clear as an activist scholar, King establishes this project as political in nature. It also sheds light on the possibility of a type of academic work that is often underrepresented in academic research on migration. In the end, it is King’s first-hand experience, her interviews and nuanced understanding of life and modes of resistance in Calais and Athens, that is the strength of this book. Her honest assessment of the shortcomings of openly protesting in Athens and Calais, or of the schisms that form within movements, for example, is refreshing and significant. In Athens, the struggle to keep the assemblies composed of anarchist and migrant activist alliances was difficult. She states “Collectives were poorly represented, turnout poor and decision-making slow” (94). These insights form an important part of King’s research methodology.

This research methodology appears to be distinct from ethnographic research because it does not rely upon a standpoint of a distant observer who seeks to understand certain cultural or political practices. Her involvement as a participant in the cause that she is describing, and making a case for, might lead one to call this type of work action research. One could indeed call it action research because of how King uses the “data” she collects (experiences of migrant activists and others) in order to try to help the cause. But unlike action research, she does not emphasize solving the problem per se. King appears to be more interested in elaborating on the multiple dimensions of the problem without proposing a clear solution. In a way, the solution seems quite clear: do away with the borders. At the same time, the alternative to a global system without national borders is not fully elaborated. Thus, her research occupies a middle ground between action research and critical theorizing.

Having established both the context and the methodology, King argues that for her, “a no borders politics is an anarchist politics” (18), a politics that seeks escape from the state. She sees the freedom of movement, black power and gender liberation all as struggles for autonomy. Her autonomy of migration approach is one that is rooted in Post-Marxist theories as expressed in the Autonomia tradition. This tradition has its roots in the anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian movements which emerged during the 1970s in Italy. Amid revolts in factories and at universities in Italy, a particular strain of Marxism known as operaismo or workerism was developed by the left-wing intellectuals of the time. Autonomia was both radical as a movement and as a theory. Building from this theoretical and social movement lineage, King conceptualizes autonomy of migration as “a way of looking at mobility that takes seriously the agency of people who move” (29). Autonomy of migration focuses on the ways that people organize and strategize while on the move, and how these methods become acts of resistance.

At the same time, she acknowledges that practices of living outside the state go back much farther, drawing on anthropological work by David Graeber. Indeed, in certain parts of the book, she draws from Graeber’s anthropological works to confirm that many of these theories and practices, many of the constructs that she is referring to, are not Eurocentric and “are as old as humanity” (150). While it is a great step to acknowledge that anarchism does not necessarily have Eurocentric roots, it would have been more effective to actually provide examples, or maybe use someone other than Graeber as the authority.

From the beginning to the end of the book King makes it clear that if there is one theoretical framework that she finds useful for understanding and advancing the No Borders mission, it is the anarchist view. She explains that No Borders can be understood as “collaboration between people with broadly anarchist views and people who practice autonomy by moving without permission” (72). King’s placement of the anarchist movements as natural allies to the No Borders movement is logical because she is drawing on what she actually observed. In both the Athens and Calais contexts it was often self-proclaimed anarchist groups that came to the aid of migrant activists. The Calais Migrant Solidarity group, for example, included citizens who were choosing to live in the jungles in order to participate in the “mobile commons” (109).

Theoretically, however, King’s placement of the anarchist movements as natural allies to the No Borders movement can feel a bit forced, as becomes clear from some of the dilemmas presented in the chapters on Calais and Athens. It is clear from the accounts that King provides of migrant solidarity groups that alliances between migrants and anarchist groups tend to be problematic due to power differences, and divergences in ultimate aims. When describing the solidarities between anti-fascist groups and migrant activist groups in Athens, King explains how, at times, the anti-fascist groups have come to the conclusion that the migrant struggle is simply not the same as the anti-fascist struggle. For anarchists who completely reject the state, the “legal and rights-based dimensions” of the migrant struggle are too complex for them to get involved in. King writes “for many within the movement, this lack of a coherent or consistent ‘stance’ on or engagement with migration issues has amounted to a failure to stand alongside migrants in their struggles for their rights” (66). Even if anarchists and migrants both value autonomy, is that really enough to tie migrant resistance to an anarchist lens? While King at one point describes the jungle as a “beautiful place” (109) where the idea of the mobile commons was able to really exist despite the atrocious conditions, it is clear that the main aim of the migrants is to get out of there. As she explains, “No Borders politics doesn’t articulate a ‘we’ very easily” (149) and this lack of “we” makes it difficult to conceptualize the anarchist-driven movements with migrant activists who are often seeking the refuge and rights that come with being granted entry into a state.

King aims to develop an anarchism that is beyond Eurocentrism, but it is not clear that she is able to do that in this book. Her theoretical foundations are European. She is relying on Marxism and the Italian Autonomia, and perhaps if she drew from non-European work it would make sense to try to see anarchism as transcending Eurocentricity. There are traditions outside the European context that interpret anarchism and Marxism through a post-colonial lens that could be helpful here. For example, the works of Frantz Fanon, Amical Cabral and Wole Soyinka, or even the anarcho-pacifism often attributed to Gandhi or Buddhist philosophy, could be instructive to look into. However, in the book, the very non-European experiences of migrants are conjoined with anarchism, as it is understood in European philosophy.

King explains that what underlies the “crisis” she witnessed in Calais and Athens is a much larger problem with the “system.” She makes it clear that the state is a central part of that system, and is bound to the oppressive forces of capitalism and post-colonial racism. In fact, it is neoliberal capitalism, the various private and public institutions that make up the border regime, along with a particular logic that determines the way we think about the border and migration, that keep the “system” going. Although King does not provide us with a succinct, clear definition of the “system” she is challenging, her analysis of the various logics and institutions that make up the system does compel one to ask, why is the state so necessary? Why are we unable to think beyond the state? King argues that it is precisely our inability to think beyond the state, to think beyond capitalism, that helps to sustain this “system.”

Throughout the book, King makes a point of acknowledging the intersectionality of her approach. She describes how in Greece “race and migration are deeply intertwined, such that any person of color in the country is also an immigrant, both in the minds of citizens and in legal terms” (87). Throughout the book she also highlights the gendered complexities within migrant activist groups. These are important insights that are strengthened by the fact that King witnessed these dynamics and problems firsthand. One cannot expect to move forward in theorizing the border, migration, or the activism surrounding it, without taking these intersections into account. This is surely one of King’s strengths.

All in all, this book serves an important purpose for those of us who want to understand how migration challenges the system. It presents us with a survey of those who write about migration and the border, and goes further by providing first-hand knowledge of how migrant activism occurs and develops in the oppressive conditions of Athens and Calais. It challenges the reader to think about how we understand resistance and solidarity. We want to help, but as we see, it is not as straightforward as living alongside migrants in the jungle. It is a great foundational text for anyone interested in thinking about the border in a way that moves beyond convention. King insists that the “crisis” is not really over or resolved; she reminds us that it is something that has existed and continues to exist because it is rooted in something much greater than the border itself.

Perspectives That Matter

Review of: Ryan Muldoon (2016) Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World: Beyond Tolerance. New York: Routledge, 142 pp.

In Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World: Beyond Tolerance, Ryan Muldoon offers a liberal and non-ideal alternative to public reason. Public reason is a standard by which moral and political rules, laws, and institutions can be assessed. It requires moral and political rules to be acceptable or accepted, justifiable or justified, to all those persons on whom such rules would be imposed. In its different versions the idea of public reason relies upon implicit or idealizing assumptions that disagreement is not that deep. But our societies are increasingly more diverse than philosophers of public reason tend to think, and we need theories that can deal with this diversity. This is Ryan Muldoon’s initial observation.

Scepticism of the ways that public reason, especially in its Rawlsian vestiges, addresses the increasing diversity of contemporary liberal democratic regimes is not new. Both liberal thinkers and scholars, such as Chantal Mouffe and Iris Marion Young, with a more critical, if not radical, attitude towards public reason, have challenged some of the aspects defining the idea of a political conception of justice valid for all reasonable citizens who recognize the need for fair terms of cooperation, and who advance their interpretation of such terms according to the shared fund of values that inform a democratic society.

We can find, with different expressions and motivations, a recurring motif of reproach for Rawls’s version of public reason. Namely, for the sake of normative cogency, people have argued Rawls idealizes the boundaries of the relevant political community, and, simultaneously, conceives what fills these boundaries and the ways moral agents convey their disagreement on moral issues, such as which religions are to be tolerated, cultural exemptions, and who has the right to vote.

In the first chapters of this book, by stressing the observation that public reason’s diversity problem is ultimately “an account of how diverse individuals actually share the same political conception” (and why this is the case), Muldoon echoes these criticisms, while still remaining explicitly within a liberal paradigm (Introduction and chapter 1). In deliberation of the public-reason kind, he says, moral agents express their similarities, not their differences.

Even if not original, Muldoon’s critical argument is persuasive. Like the authors of a series of other influential books in contemporary normative political theory (i.e. Landemore 2017), he borrows insights from Scott Page’s demonstration that groups of diverse problem solvers can out-perform groups of high-ability problem solvers (Page 2008). Diversity (i.e. many persons who approach the same problem with different backgrounds; persons who have different skills and cooperate to solve a problem; persons who hold different moral or religious doctrines and approach a collectively relevant issue), in other words, is epistemically beneficial. So far, this theorem has gained credit in epistemic arguments for democratic legitimacy. One of Muldoon’s merits is that he brings these ideas to the debate on social contract theory and diversity.

Since modern liberal democratic societies are more diverse than standard social contract theory tends to think, the main claim of the book is that “if diversity is taken seriously, much of social contract theory is subject to revision” (115). Most of the book, then, is devoted to such a revision.

As I understand Muldoon’s position, he is making two related claims. The first is epistemic, if not fallibilistic. It is a rejection of the kind of unwarranted moral generalization that, in his view, is typical of public-reason liberalism. Muldoon argues that we tend to give moral agents too much epistemic credit. In present circumstances, moral agents do not have adequate information to make totally reliable moral judgments. Simultaneously, he warns us against false universalisms. Muldoon thinks there is no epistemic grounding for a uniquely correct set of regulative ideals. Individuals, he says, reason in different ways and do not have the same access to information. It is therefore difficult to identify a priori standards, such as deontological moral imperatives with a universal scope, which can be compelling for all those subject to them.

The second claim is normative. Diversity, Muldoon says, is not only an empirical fact but something we should celebrate and encourage as a normative commitment. Moreover, just as there is no single best life-plan for all citizens, Muldoon argues we have no reason to believe there is a single best social contract for all societies. Any attempt to contain moral disagreement within a priori moral predicates, which regulate society once and for all, would affect the potential benefits stemming from the opportunity of living in a diverse community. For this reason, the ambition of social contract theory for a diverse world should be to motivate each society to rethink which social contracts are appropriate and to discover new ones.

In this vein, Muldoon (chapter 2) rehabilitates Mill’s idea that we learn about the good through “experiments in living” (1977, 261). Conceptions of the good must be tested, Mill argued, by the experience we have in living with them (Anderson 1991, 4). Along these lines, by maintaining that people are not completely identical in every respect, a social contract theory for a diverse world needs to generate rules for particular societies “to come to discover principles of justice that are best suited to their particular circumstances” (118). This is Muldoon’s substantial revision of standard social contract theory. Specifically, his argument does not produce a unique social contract whose suitability is motivated through a mechanism of justification. Rather, Muldoon offers a procedure for discovery where there is no particular endpoint to the process. This procedure, he thinks, is the way to develop social contracts that are responsive to the particular needs and wants of affected individuals without compromising social stability.

Muldoon constructs his argument around the concept of perspective. “Each political theory,” he writes, “is a representation of a particular perspective” (63). Perspectives, he continues, categorize “the world in terms of the values that the theory holds dear” (63). As such, perspectives shape preferences over potential political outcomes, and they also “determine what we see as the outcome” (63). This second attribute is crucial in the book. Perspectives, he says, are “the filters that we use to view the world” (48), mental schemata that provide a general ontology within which choices and evaluations are made. Muldoon’s idea is that an evaluative belief supported by different perspectives is stronger and that by combining perspectives, it is possible to find the most robust moral beliefs (chapter 3).

Given such a variety of perspectives, Muldoon provides a model to determine moral principles wecan take for granted at the beginning of the political process (chapter 4). Central to this part of the book is the move from deliberation to bargaining. Muldoon argues that unlike deliberation – which, in his view, begins with an a priori political conception of justice – during bargaining among parties with a similar set of constraints, each party has to be convinced on his or her own terms. In this situation, moral agents with different perspectives engage with one another in a way that does not privilege any given framework. Actually, as he goes on to say, by balancing the benefits and burdens of a rights distribution, each party may have its own perspective-dependent reason for endorsing the contract despite disagreement at a more substantive level. The goal, therefore, is exactly that of individuating the set of evaluative beliefs that have the greatest number of independent lines of argumentation across different perspectives. This set of evaluative beliefs would be the starting point for the definition and re-definition of social contracts.

If such a model is to sustain an experimental approach to social contracting in a diverse society, it remains to be demonstrated that social experimentation, and changes to the initial cross-perspectivally robust social contract, does not produce an unstable social environment. In the absence of strong cultural bonds, Muldoon argues, material ties can provide strong-enough reasons to keep people together. Diversity, in other words, is also economically beneficial. Muldoon devotes chapter 5 to demonstrating this claim. One assumption (however debatable as it could be) – that the economy is productive and not a zero-sum game – supports the argument for stability. Here he combines the trial-and-error method with Ricardo’s idea of comparative advantage (2004): countries and people should specialise in what they do best.

First, Muldoon argues that diversity leads to more specialisation and greater returns in trade. And since in complex economies we need to have many kinds of tasks performed and diverse problem-solving abilities, trade among diverse specialists increases social production and reduces labour-market competition. If each individual can only be made better off as production (intended as the process of combining inputs to make something for consumption) is made more diverse (diversity in production has no negative consequences), individuals have reason to want more diversity in production. Second, Muldoon claims that without cultural connections, diverse societies are stable insofar as they provide members with benefits greater than those they can find in some other social arrangement. By distributing the gains of uniting in a society to make sure parties are made better off than they would otherwise have been, parties have reasons for remaining in the society. Eventually, all parties, he says, have reasons to participate in a social contract that celebrates and encourages diversity.

One of the explicit ambitions of the book is to bring the notion of perspective to political theory. To do so, Muldoon recalls Amartya Sen’s observation that all major conceptions of justice have some notion of equality (Sen 2009). In other words, they see equality from different points of view. From this, Muldoon argues that “each political theory is a representation of a particular perspective” (63). This is fascinating, but Muldoon stops his philosophical analysis of perspectives all too early. From time to time, the reader has the impression that perspectives have the same, or nearly the same, meaning as other popular expressions in political theory, such as viewpoints, views, points of view, and the like. Sometimes the notion of perspectives does not seem to add much to the canonical vocabulary of epistemic arguments for diversity. Some passages of the book would have benefitted from an investigation into the philosophical foundations of perspectivism. For instance, I am curious to know why different, and perhaps contrasting, perspectives of the same moral object can coexist. Why are different perspectives on the origin of species entitled to be heard? Or why are religious extremists entitled to have a say about syllabuses in schools and academic institutions? Moreover, it seems important to know whether all perspectives can coexist or just a subset of all possible perspectives. If the latter, what defines the threshold of inclusion vs. exclusion? These are normative questions that have received some attention in modern philosophy, from phenomenological thought all the way down to contemporary philosophy of science (i.e. Conant 2005 2006; Giere 2006; Merleau-Ponty 2013). Without opening a dialogue with these traditions, the risk is that Muldoon’s argument will engage with only some of the epistemic arguments for diversity in political theory.

Muldoon offers an original bargaining model which, all things considered, depends less than he seems to think on the notion of perspective. Muldoon assumes each agent is able to engage in the bargaining on her own terms. And he thinks that if the agent is losing more than she gains, then she will withdraw from the agreement. These assumptions make things a little too easy. First, for the most marginalized agents, assuming a bargaining position may necessitate that they comprehensively re-articulate their views. Or, at least, it requires they be recognized as negotiators. Moreover, I am not sure it is so easy to exit revisable but still binding social contracts. In this regard, feminist contributions to the debate on multiculturalism have shown how difficult it is to exit formal and informal contracts. For instance, Ayelet Shacar suggests that, in the case of private religious arbitration, some vulnerable members of minority groups may find it particularly difficult to initiate judicial review over intra-group violations of human rights (2008, 598). Or, in many other cases, vulnerable members would have to pay a heavy social price for defecting otherwise-default, but informal, rules.

The model, I think, would have benefitted from more critical sensitivity towards existing power structures. Muldoon devotes a large part of chapter 5 to defining equality in terms of relative bargaining power. He rightly points out that an agent’s bargaining power is contextual and somehow relative to the other sides of the negotiation. However, a number of other aspects determine the most favourable price in a negotiation, such as looks, asymmetry, reputation as a good negotiator, liability, patience, power to make proposals, and sex. Without factoring these aspects into the design of the model, the risk is to provide a too idealized non-ideal social contract theory.

Muldoon relies heavily on economic theory and on examples to show that his account has a good grasp of the reality of social relations. This makes his book very readable and clear. Sometimes, however, I have the impression that relying on too many examples cuts the complexity of philosophical reflection short.

Notwithstanding my criticisms, I do not mean to deny the importance of the argument internal to the model. Muldoon brings fresh air to liberal debates on diversity and social contract theory. He does so with clarity and analytic rigour.

Field Philosophy and the Societal Value of Basic Research

Review of Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle (2016) Socrates tenured: The institutions of 21st-century philosophy. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 167 pp.

As expressed in its mission statement, Krisis: journal for contemporary philosophy has always sought to combine high academic standards with critical engagement with public issues. It “stands in a European philosophical tradition that takes its public task seriously” and intends to play an “active role in a range of public debates, in the Netherlands and elsewhere”. Socrates tenured similarly argues for a broad conception of “post-disciplinary philosophy”, consisting of three types of philosophical practice (122-126).1

The first is disciplinary philosophy. Its institutional home is the “department of philosophy” and its primary audience consists of fellow disciplinary philosophers. This type of philosophy is specialist, difficult, and therefore not accessible for non-philosophers. Second, there are the philosopher-bureaucrats: academically trained philosophers who have left academia for a job in all kinds of public or private organizations. We may think of ethicists who work in the ethics committee of a hospital, logicians who participate in the research of a computer company, or philosophers turned journalists who investigate controversial sociocultural issues.2 The focus of the book is on the third category: field philosophy, a notion modeled on the features of field sciences and their differences with laboratory sciences (119-120). Institutionally, field philosophers can be found both in philosophy departments and in all kinds of other sites of the university. They differ from disciplinary philosophy in that they aim not only at an academic audience but also (and substantially) at non-academic audiences.

The goal of field philosophy is to “help excavate, articulate, discuss, and assess the philosophical dimensions of real-world policy problems” and its approach is to “pursue case-based research at the meso-level that begins with problems as defined and contested by the stakeholders involved” (124). Note the “begins” and “assess”, which imply that field philosophy preserves its own independence; it is not a form of empirical or experimental philosophy. In particular, Frodeman and Briggle strongly emphasize that field philosophers should literally “enter a local field” and concretely interact with the relevant publics. Furthermore, they should explicitly reflect on the impact, or lack of it, of these interactions, and feed these reflections back into their academic context. As an example of a field-philosophical project they review the participation of one of the authors (Adam Briggle) in environmental debate and action concerning a plan for a more renewable electricity production in the town of Denton, Texas (89-92). On the one hand, this participation in actual local debate and action distinguishes field philosophers from social-critical philosophers who exclusively focus on academic discourse. On the other hand, field philosophy is still defined as a type of academic philosophy, which constitutes a difference with what, in the Netherlands, is called publieksfilosofie (“philosophy for the public”).

The stated reason for writing this book is the claimed dominance of disciplinary philosophy and the corresponding marginality of field philosophy in academia. A considerable part of the book is devoted to a development and defence of this point. In three substantial chapters the authors provide detailed discussion and assessment of the institutional history and the recent literature in applied philosophy, environmental philosophy and bioethics. The first two are shown to be largely captured in disciplinary philosophical practices. In contrast, bioethics has made significant contributions to field philosophy, even if it faces several remaining problems that need to be tackled (101-107).

Thus, there seems to be a significant agreement between Frodeman and Briggle’s view of philosophy and the mission of Krisis as stated at the beginning of this review. Similarly, I myself am in broad sympathy with the analyses and assessments of this book. Still, I would like to add a few points of comment, some constructive, some critical.

The book is strongly US-centered. This is quite clear in the institutional histories of applied and environmental philosophy and bioethics. For instance, at one point (97) the account of the latter seems to move on to the situation in the UK, but after only one sentence the authors return to the US. To be clear, the problem is not a focus on the US as such. The point is that the book does not show much awareness of its almost exclusively American approach.

A central subject of the book concerns the politics of academic inquiry: how should academic disciplines, in particular philosophy, relate to each other and to society? In this respect, the criticism of the current institutionalization and professionalization of philosophy, its insularity in a separate department and its fragmented discourse of specialists, has a point. In the Netherlands, some have broached similar criticisms and argued for a return to the “Central Interfaculty” as the appropriate institutional haven for philosophy.3 However, professionalization is only one of the crucial changes that universities have undergone in the past decades. In addition, there have been far-reaching processes of hierarchization, bureaucratization and commodification (Radder 2016, chaps. 5-8). Strengthening and concretely institutionalizing field philosophy would also require halting and reversing these processes. Although the authors occasionally refer to the neoliberal university, this issue deserves to be addressed much more systematically.4 Furthermore, my hypothesis for a broader, worldwide study would be that outside the US the position of non-disciplinary philosophy may not be as marginal as claimed by the authors. For instance, field philosophy may also be practiced under the heading of Science & Technology Studies (see Felt et al. 2017), an area of research hardly addressed in the book.

Frodeman and Briggle see field philosophy as a form of mode-2 inquiry, that is, research that is context-driven, problem-focused and transdisciplinary (23-25). Their general conception of philosophy does include classical disciplinary (that is, mode-1) philosophy. Yet, philosophy as a whole should be transformed by adding field philosophy as a major, mode-2 part of it. Field philosophy includes normative judgment: it not only concerns what is but also what should be (47). But its endorsement of the mode-1/mode-2 discourse leads one to ask: how critical is field philosophy? At what kind of assessments does it aim? After all, mode-2 discourse has often been severely criticized for its advocacy of a neoliberal science policy. See, for example, this comment by Mieke Boon and Tarja Knuuttila:

As universities have sought to renew their financial base through contract research, educational services, consulting, and the commercialization of research results the mode-2 ideology legitimizes the status quo by offering a rosy vision of the organizational and other changes that are taking place (Boon and Knuuttila 2011, 76-77).

Although this criticism does not necessarily apply to all mode-2 research, it does entail a strong warning against naively joining the mode-2 rhetoric. I suppose, for example, that Frodeman and Briggle do not simply agree with the views and practices of the “entrepreneurs and technologists of Silicon Valley and other hubs of innovation [who] function today as de facto philosophers” (122). But how they would assess these practices (through “critical thinking” aimed at “serving a common good”, 124) remains rather vague. In this respect, the social-critical mode-3 approach proposed by Harry Kunneman is much more explicit about its own normative stance (Kunneman 2010). The same applies to René Gabriëls’ critical analysis and assessment of the Dutch debates on nuclear energy and poverty (Gabriëls 2001).

Above, I stated that the criticism of the dominance of disciplinary philosophy “has a point”. Yet this claim should be qualified by acknowledging the nature and societal value of basic research. First, we should note that basic research is not the same as disciplinary research. In fact, much basic academic research is interdisciplinary. Examples from philosophy abound, especially if we broaden our perspective by including philosophers from outside of the US. We may think of the many interdisciplinary studies building on the work of Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault or Jürgen Habermas; or of integrated history and philosophy of science and empirically-informed ethics. Thus, even if there certainly is a strong tradition of disciplinary philosophy, there is also a significant movement of interdisciplinary philosophers.

My second qualification is more critical. Again, it concerns basic science. Frodeman and Briggle require that academic inquiry should aim for more or less direct societal impact. From the perspective of their “philosophy of impact” (137-149), they strongly criticize the idea of basic research (in particular in the humanities, including philosophy) as motivated by individual curiosity and as possessing an intrinsic value. It is, however, not at all necessary to interpret basic research in terms of individual curiosity, as the authors do. Furthermore, we can, and should, go beyond the idea of intrinsic value and defend the societal value of basic research.5 Since societies have to cope not just with current complex problems but also with hard to anticipate future complexities, they need knowledge resources that are optimally multi-purpose and open-ended. As many examples from the history of science show, basic scientific knowledge offers the best epistemic possibilities for coping with future complexity and uncertainty. This appraisal of basic science is not meant as an endorsement of the scientistic doctrine that science, and only science, is the royal road to solving all our problems. What it says is that, in as far as science is useful for the purpose of anticipating future complexity and uncertainty it is basic science rather than the much more specific application-oriented disciplines. This applies just as well to the humanities and hence to philosophy. Therefore, a comprehensive, critical philosophy should not be limited to the specific problems of particular target groups but also acknowledge the interests of those future generations that will be affected by our current policies. Furthermore, in contrast to what is suggested by critics of the so-called linear model of the relation between science and technology, including Frodeman and Briggle (137-139), we do not need to interpret basic research as a sufficient, or even as a strictly necessary, condition of technological invention and economic or social innovation. A good enough reason (which is not at all “mysterious”: 139) for promoting basic research from a societal perspective is that, frequently enough, the results of this kind of research constitute a significant and indispensable component of processes of invention and innovation (see also Carrier 2011). Due to the dominance of neoliberal politics, in many countries basic research is under pressure and sometimes even marginalized. The above arguments imply that this type of research, with its characteristic long-term perspective, deserves our support: the societal value of academic inquiry, including philosophy, should not be limited to its short-term, local impact.

Finally, should Socrates be, posthumously, tenured? Although Frodeman and Briggle briefly address some critical interpretations of Socrates (15-16), they still see him as a worthy representative of field philosophy, who certainly deserves tenure. I disagree. As I.F. Stone (1989) has convincingly demonstrated, the philosophy and politics of Socrates was strongly essentialist, elitist and anti-democratic. For this reason, he is not the icon of field philosophy that Frodeman and Briggle claim him to be.

Freedom or Private Government?

Review of Elizabeth Anderson (2017) Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about it). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 196 pp.

Elizabeth Anderson’s Private Government is an important and timely contribution to contemporary political theory, especially for anyone thinking about freedom in the workplace or about reforming or replacing existing economic institutions. It combines historical inquiry into the egalitarian origins of free-market capitalist theory with a critical examination of the structure of the contemporary capitalist workplace as a form of “private government” (see below) – a subject that deserves much more theoretical attention than it tends to receive.

The book has three main parts. First, in two essays Anderson tells the story of how free-market ideology started with coherent and compelling commitments to freedom, equality, and free trade, to becoming a defence of deeply unfree and unequal capitalist social relations, after which she argues that modern workplace relations are best thought of as a form of private government. More precisely, she argues that workplace relations are properly political relations; that bosses govern their workers much like ministers and monarchs; and that they do so as dictators, lacking any meaningful accountability to those they govern. Anderson’s two brilliant essays are followed by four critical commentaries by Ann Hughes, David Bromwich, Niko Kolodny, and Tyler Cowen, to which Anderson responds.

In the early free-market thinkers that Anderson discusses – including Adam Smith and Thomas Paine – a commitment to free trade and emerging capitalist society was wedded to broader egalitarian commitments and aspirations, which capitalist social relations were (perhaps not entirely implausibly at the time) taken to promote. However, as the results of capitalism became clearer – especially, she argues, with the industrial revolution and the rise of more intensely collective workplaces and strict managerial control thereover – free-market ideology became increasingly disconnected from the lived realities of capitalism. If anything, free-market theory was re-deployed to support anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic authoritarianism in the name of freedom.

Although the authoritarian and deeply undemocratic nature of workplace relations is clear, “[s]ince the decline of the labor movement, […] we don’t have effective ways to talk about this fact” (Anderson 2017, xx). Anderson’s project is intended, therefore, as a project of ideology critique and conceptual innovation, or at least advocacy.

We are told that our choice is between free markets and state control, when most adults live their working lives under a third thing entirely: private government. (Anderson 2017, 6).

According to Anderson, thinking about the politics of workplaces today requires reviving the concept of private government (Anderson 2017, 40), which she defines as follows:

You are subject to private government wherever (1) you are subordinate to authorities who can order you around and sanction you for not complying over some domain of your life, and (2) the authorities treat it as none of your business, across a wide range of cases, what orders it issues or why it sanctions you. Government is private with respect to a subject if it can issue orders, backed by sanctions, to that subject in some domain of that subject’s life, and that subject has no say in how that government operates and no standing to demand that their interests be taken into account, other than perhaps in narrowly defined circumstances, in the decisions that government makes. (Anderson 2017, 44-5).

This defines “private government” as something inherently anti-democratic and gives good cause to reject it for anyone committed to ideas of freedom requiring non-domination or many relational conceptions of equality (which Anderson has explored extensively elsewhere).

Anderson is careful to point out that a government’s privacy is defined relative to those subject to it. This means that whether something is a “private government” focuses not only on whether an institution is kept separate from the state, but on whether “the governed are kept out of decision-making as well” (Anderson 2017, 45). With this concept, she hopes, we can begin to re-assess the structure of workplace relations from an egalitarian point-of-view.

An interesting question in this regard is the extent to which Anderson’s analysis applies to workplaces with more stringent workplace regulations than the United States. In countries with stronger workplace protections and systems of co-determination – such as the Netherlands or Germany – it’s not clear whether she would think that bosses treat it as none of your business which orders it issues or why it sanctions you. (In fact, Anderson is positive towards German-style co-determination.) This does not mean, however, that bosses do not wield a great deal of arbitrary power in these workplaces, and that as a result there are justified concerns about how free and equal (much less democratic) they can justly be said to be. It would therefore also have been interesting to see a more detailed discussion about the extent to which co-determination can render workplaces free and/or equal in an ambitious sense, whether they are able to guarantee workers much effective power over, and voice within, their workplaces, and, if they do, how stable they tend to be over time given how this encroaches (or would encroach) upon the power of bosses.

In general, the book is (as one would expect) exceedingly well-argued and compellingly written. It tackles a very important and under-theorised set of issues, and it does so excellently. However, I do have some quibbles about the terminology that is sometimes employed, such as “communist” being used to label workplace relations in the contemporary United States (which I find misleading) (Anderson 2017, 38), and the Hobbesian state of nature being described as “a state of anarchist communism” (which is wrong) (Anderson 2017, 46), but these are minor points which are not central to the argument.1

In the final few pages of the second essay, Anderson considers four general strategies for dealing with private government in the workplace: (1) exit; (2) the rule of law; (3) substantial constitutional rights; and (4) voice (Anderson 2017, 65-71). Although she supports both workers’ effective rights of exit and protection under the rule of law, her main focus is on (3) and (4). Here she argues for, on the one hand, introducing a workers’ bill of rights to protect them from discrimination and harassment and to protect their rights to privacy when not off-duty, and, on the other hand, introducing a German-inspired system of co-determination, though she stops short of recommending any single model solution (Anderson 2017, 70).

Of the book’s illuminating critical commentaries, followed by Anderson’s response, Ann Hughes’ argument that the Levellers are not best read to be as pro-free-market as Anderson seems to suggest, and Niko Kolodny’s pinpointing of a tension in Anderson’s critique of workplace relations with respect to democracy, are of particular interest.

Kolodny points out that on the one hand much of Anderson’s argument – her emphasis on economic relations being relations of government, her critique of domination and unequal social relations in the workplace, etc. – invites comparison between economic and state institutions. This would seem to call for the standard response given by many republican and liberal thinkers (including Anderson herself) when considering state institutions: democracy. On the other hand, however, Anderson clearly wants to reject democratising workplaces. Ideas for doing this are somewhat briefly dismissed as being inefficient, but the empirical evidence, I think, deserves greater discussion. Anyone concerned with changing capitalist workplace relations needs to seriously consider the efficiency gains or losses involved in democratising workplaces (and more from an empirical view than that of neoclassical theory), the definitions of efficiency used in those assessments, and the trade-offs between efficiency on the one hand, and the value of more free and equal social relations on the other. Given the limitations of the book’s size and format, any discussion of these matters is bound to be a bit too short to be completely satisfying. It is, sadly, impossible to do everything in-depth in a single book, especially one which needs room for commentaries and a response. Going forward, however, these questions are vital.

The history of social democracy teaches us something important here. Neither strong workplace regulations, co-determination, or the strongest union power ever seen has been sufficient to create free and non-dominating relations in the capitalist workplace. Should we give up on the former and look to replace the latter with a more democratic alternative?

The Aesthetics of Ideology

Review of: Aesthetic Marx (2011) edited by Samir Gandesha & Johan F. Hartle. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 283 pp.

In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, challenges to neoliberalism, and cultural-political tensions over race and gender politics, Marx’s thought – seemingly consigned to the dustbin of history after 1989-91 – is once again attracting attention. Samir Gandesha and Johan Hartle’s Aesthetic Marx makes a distinctive contribution to this revaluation, highlighting the relevance of Marx – as theorist, writer, and icon – for contemporary critical strands of artistic production and cultural-political engagement. The idea for this volume is inspiring but the resulting texts are more mixed, reflecting conflicting tendencies in contemporary scholarship as much as Marx’s ambiguous cultural legacy today.

The editors note the pervasive role of the aesthetic – understood to encompass “aesthetic strategies of distinction and the modulations of affects” (xi) – within contemporary capitalism, which has long embraced the “society of the spectacle” diagnosed by Guy Debord. This suggests that it is time to return to the question of Marx and the aesthetic: “How is the aesthetic, the senses and their objects, conceived of in the classical writings of Marx? How does Marx, himself, who always insisted that he was no “Marxist,” figure in contemporary aesthetic strategies and practices?” (xi). These questions guide the essays collected in this volume. Their sprawling Introduction undertakes a number of contextualising tasks: they underline what they call the post-Nietzschean/postmodernist context that marks the contemporary reception of Marx, the role of Marx in post-Kantian aesthetic theory, and the aesthetic and literary character of Marx’s language. They also emphasise the pervasive influence of Marx on key twentieth-century critiques of aesthetic ideology, from Marcuse’s 1936 essay “The Affirmative Character of Culture” (Marcuse, 1968), Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984), Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (1983), to Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990). To this are added sections on the aesthetic turn in political theory, reflections on the “Machiavellian Marx,” accounts of materialist histories of subjectivity (from Lukács and Benjamin to Negt and Kluge), concluding with some commentary on the figure of Marx in contemporary art over the past 150 years (since the publication of Das Kapital) right up to the 2015 Biennale. This overwhelming array of topics and connections is held together by three main claims: the under-recognised role of the aesthetic within Marx’s political thought, the significance of style in Marx’s texts, and the uptake of Marx by critical theorists as well as artists. To this end, the editors divide the book into three parts, the first focusing on aesthetic issues in Marx’s texts, the second on their literary aspects, and the third canvassing a sample of contemporary artists explicitly using Marx, both as textual source and visual icon.

Gandesha’s opening chapter offers a fine-grained account, mapping out three logics of the aesthetic in Marx’s texts. The challenge, he claims, is to avoid three reductionist attempts to link Marx with post-Marxist aesthetics and politics. The first is to apply Marxist categories to aesthetic discourse, the second is to cherry-pick Marx’s comments on art and submit them to interpretation and analysis, and the third, following Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Rancière, is to argue that all radical attempts to theorize the political are dependent on figures of the aesthetic (3). The latter move results in the claim that the “aesthetic-political” comes to refer to “all aesthetic dynamics that cross (and confound) the hegemonic orders of reason and the established channels of perception” (3). All three strategies, Gandesha contends, underplay “the aesthetic potentials of Marx’s work itself,” which displays three identifiable logics of the aesthetic (4). The first, to be found in Marx’s early critiques of Hegel, concerns sensuous perception; the early Marx “develops a “transformative critique” of Hegel’s understanding of the labour of the concept and develops a sensuous-practical concept of labour” that would inform his later work (4). The second logic concerns the transformation of the senses as the work of history itself. It appears in The Communist Manifesto, which shows how the transformation in capitalism, in particular the objective forces of production, will “transform the conditions of all aspects of life,” presumably including art. This radical transformation of society and culture – “all that is solid melts into air” – was supposed to lead to the radical transformation of the senses that would enable the proletariat to “perceive the “real conditions” of social life” with a social vision of co-operation and equality. This transformation of the senses would thereby lay the groundwork for the “genuine realization of the totality of human power, of species-being (Gattungswesen) in communism” (4). Whatever one makes of this claim philosophically, it gives way to the third logic of the aesthetic, found in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, where Marx modifies the linear, teleological conception of the history of productive forces culminating in communist revolution, proposing the idea of history as the repetition of previous forms of representation that inhibit such a production (4). Instead of a dictatorship of the proletariat we find the “farcical triumph of Louis Bonaparte” “under the aegis of the party of order” (4). For Gandesha, the role of the aesthetic, in this third logic, is to serve as a hermeneutic model “through which the compulsion to repetition could be broken” (4) – an aesthetically oriented, decidedly “modernist” (or Deleuzian) attempt to free the future from the past via differential repetition as the creation of the new (17-19).

A couple of authors take an historical comparative approach to Marx. Henry Pickford examines the Aristotelian underpinnings of key concepts in Marx such as poesis and praxis, the concept of aesthesis (the basis of aesthetics), and the distinction between change/movement (kinesis) and activity (energeia). Although the classical Aristotelian model of production appears under the guise of labour in modern political thought (Arendt and Habermas), Aristotle’s second model of production (as energeia but also poesis), involving activities that have their goal or telos outside of themselves, appears in Marx’s work in the account of labour as an expression of our human species-being. Moreover, Aristotle’s conception of phronesis (practical wisdom) as involving practical perception, along with social aesthetic production, has fruitful potential, Pickford argues, for “a Marxist-inspired practical aesthetics” (23).

Johan F. Hartle compares Marx and Freud, focusing on the concept of free association, which does different service for each thinker (the egalitarian community of producers versus the technique of the “talking cure”). Hartle suggests a convergence between Marx and Freud concerning “a specific method that echoes a specific dimension of aesthetic rationality” (85) – a subversive use of reason that disrupts established orders of representation (87-88). Sami Khatib considers, in a textually focused manner, the “aesthetics of real abstraction,” that is, the sensuous representational/metaphysical aspects of the abstract dimension of value at the heart of commodity “fetishism”. He explores the parallel between linguistic value and economic value, and the underlying exploitation concealed by the dialectical abstractions of value, as well as the “theological,” symbolic, and allegorical mystifications to which it gives rise within capitalism. Readers perplexed by what this densely deconstructive analysis of value has to do with aesthetics are reminded that it does not refer to its philosophical senses but rather to an analysis of the logic of real abstraction operating in commodity exchange.

In Part II, authors turn to the literary, rhetorical, and aesthetic aspects (in the narrower sense) of Marx’s texts. Anna-Katharina Gisbertz discusses the influence of Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s writings on Marx’s early interest in aesthetics and critical engagement with German idealism. She points out the explicit study of Vischer’s texts evident in Marx’s notebooks, especially Vischer’s account of “the active role of the subject in the appearance of the beautiful” and the role of imagination against abstraction and “mechanical materialism,” along with “the role of myth and its relation to poetry old and new” (97-98). Vischer’s account of comedy and sublimity – mediating the Hegelian understanding of these concepts—also played a role in the young Marx’s transition from poetry to philosophy to politics. The young Marx was clearly influenced by Vischer’s account of aesthetic wholes, and although the later Marx eschewed this early aestheticism, the ideas of tragedy and comedy continued to shape his thinking with regard to history and politics, later turning to the “idea of farce as an unredeemed aesthetic form” (105). From tragedy to comedy to farce as a “grotesque repetition,” for Marx history becomes an “inverted world” that needs to be revolutionised “to fight the “sublime” Prussian power” (105).

Hayden White’s “Marx: The Philosophical Defense of History in the Metonymical Mode,” from his 1973 book Metahistory, is presented in abridged form. It is included for its account of the “problem” presented by culture and art, from a dialectical materialist perspective on history. Art seemed to be accorded a “loose determinism” in order to account for its transhistorical value, which remained a “mystery” that “not even the theory of “commodity fetishism” could clear up” (111). The work of art could be thought of as “a simulacrum of the commodity” that literally presents itself as a product of human labour rather than a token of the wealth of its owner (112). Art is a commodity that resists the “expropriative relation of its market existence”; it is a manifestation of free labour, while artists could be regarded as “an avatar of the free worker in an ideal future society” (112). White acknowledges, moreover, that his treatment of Marx in Metahistory is susceptible to the charge of “Formalism,” the view that Science (whether of history or economics) was a matter of form as much as of content, but defends his approach as aiming to show “how Marx’s historiographical writing might be better understood as a work of art rather than as the kind of science he himself had hoped to create for a better understanding of history” (112). Without going into the details of White’s formidable analysis, it is clear that aesthetics plays a central role in his account of Marx’s approach to the historical field in “Metonymical mode”. It is also relevant for his thesis that Marx’s thought has recourse to a set of “tropological structures” – above all the strategies of Metonymy (for the severed condition of humankind in its current social state) and Synecdoche (for the glimpse of unity evident at the end of history) – as a means of developing “a comprehensive image of the historical world” (115). Metaphor, Metonymy, Synecdoche, and Irony offer not only means of conceptualising meaning, according to White, but also “the categories by which such self-conceptualizations are to be comprehended as stages in this history of any aspect of the Superstructure” (146). This tropological system of categories provided a basis for Marx’s categorization of different classes of events “and the stages through which they pass in their evolution from an inaugural to a terminal condition” (146) – from repeated tragic conflict to the comic resolution of the process at the end of history.

Terrell Carver argues that Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte offers a novel account of how “aesthetic practices are crucial to political action” (151). Taking “the aesthetic” in a broad sense, Carver focuses on Marx’s use of imagery in his texts, coupling this with “an imputed visual imagery common to the period” (152). He takes Marx’s journalistic pieces as performative political interventions that have a strongly aesthetic character; The Eighteenth Brumaire thereby becomes a key work of political activism, especially given the rhetorical effects of Marx’s colourful language, his “extravagant imagery, withering scorn, and scathing satire” (155). Marx’s famous (Hegelian) apercus – concerning repetition in history, first as tragedy, then as farce, and about history as freely made by “men,” but not in circumstances of their own choosing – are taken as emblematic of the performative political aesthetic in this text, one geared to arouse the emotions through striking imagery and to activate our political imaginations for a revolutionary repetition of the past.

Inspired by Althusser’s analysis of Machiavelli’s The Prince, Daniel Hartley analyses Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man as a text on aesthetics that also serves as political allegory. He uses it to read the young Marx’s texts in order to reveal an implicit aesthetic logic within “Marx’s developing theory of revolution and the state” (165). Reading these texts together reveals an aesthetic element to Marx and a political slant in Schiller: “a radical Schiller and a young Schillerian radical” (177). Here, as in a number of other essays, the aesthetic serves as a catalyst to explore the productive intersections between Marx and a variety of other thinkers.

In Section III, the authors turn to the relationship between Marx and art, focusing on how (political) artists have taken up Marx in different ways. Boris Groys reflects on how Marx (and Engels) anticipate the shift from individual artwork to the collective installation work, particularly those “that are designed as a means to reflect on the contexts of art production and functioning” (187). Commenting on Suprematism (Malevich), Groys points to the manner in which such works, precisely because of their “context-free” presumptions, prompt a Marxist reflection on “the dependence of art on its social, economical, and political context” (188). Russian artists El Lissitzky and Ilya Kabakov used Malevich’s Black Square as the starting point of their artistic practice, rendering visible the implied background or “infectious context” of the work (190). Indeed, contemporary installation art similarly occludes the “violence” of the social and political orders that underpin their self-presentation of autonomy and artistic independence. Russian Constructivism embraced the destruction of the individualist work in favour of a politically engaged art serving the purposes of revolutionary society. El Lissitzky, for example, drew a parallel between “the sovereign, creative freedom at the core of the Soviet experiment and the creative freedom of the artist as author of an installation that reflected this freedom” (192). Kabakov, by contrast, critically reflected the reification of this artistic freedom “after it was officially and institutionally installed by the Soviet Power and took a certain definite form” (192). Groys’s fascinating discussion of these artists’ work shows how aesthetic experimentation can be coupled with political expression, especially when installation art engages critically with its social contexts of production and circulation.

The final three chapters canvass contemporary art that activates either the spirit of Marx’s ideas or deploy his image for artistic and political purposes. Robin Greeley considers Conceptual art in Mexico after 1968, a time when the legacy and import of Marx’s philosophy and its relationship to aesthetics and to political action were central concerns. The aesthetic activist use of Marx, commemorating his death as an occasion for political engagement (205), led to “experiments in direct democracy” taking the form of collective art actions occurring in the street rather than the gallery (211-212). Such art interventions showed the political potentiality of Marx’s thought in a volatile social context.

Sven Lütticken turns to film, exploring contemporary cinema art projects that can be viewed from the Jamesonian perspective of “cognitive mapping”. These films both map contemporary social reality under conditions of economic destabilisation, and foreground their status as cultural commodities that are both produced and distributed within globalised networks. Sekula and Burch’s The Forgotten Space (2010) examines “ocean transport and the labor conditions it entails,” reflecting on the notion of “abstraction” both in social-economic and aesthetic terms (232). Alexander Kluge’s News from Ideological Antiquity (2008) offers a more streamlined version of “filming Capital,” one that seems “almost over-adapted to the productive logic of the present” (233). Revisiting Eisenstein’s aborted plan to for a film version of Das Kapital, Kluge presents a “seemingly endless series of segments “which consist of conversations between Kluge and various cultural practitioners as well as mock historical figures. He abandons any Eisensteinian dialectical montage in favour of a televisual “flow” of abruptly juxtaposed talking heads, offering an “open-ended dialectic of intermingling discourses that regularly collapse into virtuoso sophistry” (233). Other essay films explore different ways to “film Capital,” from lecture-performance presentations of the idea of “mass-art production” (Hito Steyerl) to Ehrmann and Farocki’s Labour in a Single Shot (2015). The latter offers a controversial assemblage of footage covering workshops with the underprivileged across the globe, which Lütticken criticises as problematic because of the unacknowledged debts of Ehrmann and Farocki’s “networked” approach to collective authorship (245). John F. Hartle’s concluding chapter focuses on representations of Marx in contemporary art, showcasing an array of artistic uses of Marx’s image – from posters, photographs, drawings, sculptures, installations, and videos – in political art aiming at mobilising activists, energising critique, and tapping the latent radical energies of Marx’s iconic image.

Aesthetic Marx offers a fascinating array of texts dealing with Marx and aesthetics, aesthetic elements in Marx’s texts, and the artistic uses of Marx (and his image). The contributors remain mostly focused, however, on the academic reception of Marx or bringing Marxist thought to bear on contemporary artistic problems. Despite the virtues of these approaches, there could have been more exploration of how Marxist ideas have been adapted across a range of contemporary aesthetic and political theories (critical theoretical analyses of the new “attention economy” (Bueno, 2017), for example, or the commodification of affect, attention, and experience as an intrinsic feature of contemporary “cognitive” capitalism (Beller, 2006)). Although Marx the thinker, writer, or icon retains the potential to energise aesthetics and politics, it is the Protean plasticity of Marxist critique that allows it to be critically and creatively adapted within our post-Marxist capitalist world.

Black Transparency in the Era of Post-Truth

Review of Metahaven (2015) Black Transparency: The Right to Know in the Age of Mass Surveillance. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 205 pp.

In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries announced ‘post-truth’ as the word of the year after it had witnessed a spike in its usage in the context of a politically charged year. Metahaven’s Black Transparency: The Right to Know in the Age of Mass Surveillance (Sternberg Press, 2015) could be read as an elegy for this award-winning word, which allegedly describes our current predicament. Over the last decade, Metahaven, an Amsterdam-based research and design studio staffed by Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden and founded in 2007, has become an international brand, generating its own genre in design with a particular mix of politics with avant-garde aesthetics and graphic design. This has led to multiple international exhibitions, presentations and publications of essays and books. Black Transparency part zine, part literature review, part essay – probes how transparency as a principle intersects with spin, political activism, design, architecture and internet (pop) culture. In the book, the authors reflect on the implications of “the geopolitical architecture of “planetary-scale computation,”” a concept taken from Benjamin Bratton with which Metahaven refers to the “overlaying of the world with digital networks” (3). The internet in this centralized structure, has become a geopolitical disruptive weapon (90). Metahaven grieves the loss of the early internet, and expresses hope for a “relocalized internet governed by its citizens” (112).

The politics at play in Black Transparency are a mixture of positions. A nostalgic approach to the internet, combined with a high premium on transparency. Add a dash of libertarian paranoia towards the establishment, sautéed with a ‘fix the internet’ attitude of the hacker culture. Parts of the book read like an ambivalent, and at times stammering, farewell letter to a lost love. The jilted party is the transparency movement, more specifically, the whistleblowing platform WikiLeaks: “[w]hat once was an “intelligence agency of the people” gradually became transparency’s shipwreck” (48). Metahaven has been championing WikiLeaks since 2010, in part through a visual investigation of the politics and aesthetics of transparency. In 2011, they designed WikiLeaks merchandise: buttons, band-inspired T-shirts with file names leaked by WikiLeaks, and translucent silk scarves with ‘WikiLeaks’ printed on them. The profits were donated to WikiLeaks. Black Transparency includes images of the merchandise, as well as info-graphics mapping out the ascent of WikiLeaks onto the geopolitical stage, and the celebrity-cult that surrounded it at the height of its fame in 2013.

At the core of Black Transparency lies the authors’ critique of the modern state: nominally democratic governments conceal their fundamental reliance on secrecy. Secrecy is spelled out as “an informational privilege enjoyed by those in power” (2). The state’s informational privilege has increased thanks to “preemptive electronic surveillance of potentially every global subject, […] expanding the state’s monopoly on violence into precognitive policing of all thought and action” (3). The state’s spying capabilities are aided by our fondness of everything “smart,” and our yearning to be seen. The modern surveillance state signifies a structural change in the governance of democratic societies, Metahaven contends (3). It “recedes into neo-feudal rule by tech-overlords and extra-legal sovereigns” (57). The horseman of this neo-feudalism is the public-private nexus, a “Holy Alliance that binds old-style arcana imperii to the latest cloud technology” (57).

Against this backdrop of “unprecedented online surveillance by governments” black transparency is a “frontal attack” on the autonomy of a state “that wants more control” (2,3). What makes black transparency ‘black’ is the method of disclosure; how information becomes available is “of decisive importance to its political impact” (1). “[D]emocratic change” can be effected when the disclosure of information is uninvited, unexpected, and seemingly spontaneous. The “involuntary transparency” of black transparency sides with the unpredictable and anonymous disclosures of organizations like WikiLeaks, and whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning (xiii). It is designed to reveal “truths that are hidden under the cloak of state secrecy” (38). Black transparency reveals its secrets with the aim of embarrassing and destabilizing the security complex of the state (6), and does so “in defense of the public” (4). Black transparency reveals three things at once: the secret itself, the frantic panic of its keepers once the secret is released, and, thirdly, the spin around its disclosure (62). The ‘black’ in black transparency further means “more or less, “in darkness” as opposed to “in the light,”” (4), with which they mean to remain hidden, unidentified, and opaque. All antidotes to global surveillance go under shades of black, Metahaven argues (3). The examples given are: the Blackphone, Dark Wallet, cryptography, the Dark Web, and #BlackLivesMatter. In an age of mass surveillance, an allegiance to (encrypted) anonymity is seen as an act of resistance: anonymity for the powerless, transparency for the powerful. In the opening pages of Black Transparency Metahaven argues that “there is no transparency without enlightenment,” and “under transparency the state loses the informational privilege [secrets] that allows it to maintain itself” (xiv). However, already in the introduction of the book they foreshadow black transparency’s demise: “Symbolically, black transparency meets its end in Russia […] where nothing is true and everything is possible” (6).

Black Transparency has been a few years in the making – two of the six chapters have been published on e-flux in 2012. The book as a whole reflects how transformative those years have been for Metahaven. The first chapters sing of a love of WikiLeaks, echo the – by now – worn-out slogans of the transparency movement, and the old Enlightenment meme that truth shall prevail. The last three chapters argue that we have become captives of cloud computation, surveilled by centralized corporations, and that spin and propaganda appears to be more powerful than truth. But before we get there, we need to read through a fairly long tribute to the transparency movement. In the chapter titled “There is no Organization, There is Only You”, Metahaven contends that “Information is Power” (27). “Knowledge is Power” (24). “Transparency is Absolute Power” (24). If we are to believe Metahaven, transparency is designed to “confront liberal democracy with its hypocrisy” (31) and uncover the world’s injustices and conspiracies (26). It lays bare the “secret machinations of the powerful” (56). Transparency, they claim, holds power accountable through “action driven by understanding” (37). Informing the public, as a means to “undercut the government” can cause “far-reaching forms of democratic change,” Metahaven suggests (2). These parts of the book may leave the reader desiring for a more tightly edited plea to this modernist Enlightenment value.

As a counterpoint, there is a wealth of critical literature both on WikiLeaks and on the transparency movement that could have been engaged with. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, for instance, questions the naïve assumption that knowledge in the form of exposure will motivate people into action. “It’s strange that a hermeneutics of suspicion would appear so trusting about the effects of exposure,” she writes (Sedgwick 2003, 138f). “[A]s though to make something visible as a problem were, if not a mere hop, skip, and jump away from getting it solved, at least self-evidently a step in that direction” (139). Mark Fenster makes a similar point. He critiques the cybernetic assumptions of the transparency movement in which “the state is defined by its “streams of information”” (Fenster 2015, 153). Disclosure is here understood as “the transmission of information from state to public, and assumes that transmission will banish public ignorance, magically transform public discourse, and allow the true public to appear and triumph” (152). In an article in New Republic, Lawrence Lessig is concerned with the ideological signature of transparency. People’s responses to information are inseparable from their interests and desires, he asserts. “What we believe will be confirmed, again and again” (Lessig 2009). Information is mediated, as Richard Grusin argues, and “mediation is itself immediate”, “life itself is a form of mediation” (Grusin 2015, 132). In Publicity’s Secret (2002) Jodi Dean claims that transparency and secrecy form a false dualism. She critiques the reduction of politics into revealing what is concealed – considering that great miscarriages of justice happen in plain sight, in the realm of the hypervisible. Clare Birchall complicates the intractable relation between transparency and secrecy. “[T]ransparency can have the same effects as secrecy, and secrecy can flourish in “transparent” realms” (7). Furthermore, Geert Lovink and Patrice Riemens argue in “Twelve Theses on WikiLeaks” that the black box strategy of transparency activists, aiming to be opaque in order to force transparency upon others, amounts to “little more than Mad magazine’s Spy vs. Spy cartoons” (Lovink and Riemens 2010). The first chapters of Black Transparency might have felt less dated if it had addressed how Metahaven’s notion of ‘black transparency’ is situated in a wider body of knowledge.

Power and knowledge do not form an automatic nexus that can be triggered by more information. The cybernetic notion that with the right information systems will adapt and change is unfortunately flawed. We often become caught up in rationalizations that only confirm what we think we know; we see what we believe. Bringing more information to the surface does not necessarily produce truth, let alone instigate structural transformation. Can political life be reduced to information? Is it knowable, or, for that matter, inherently teleological? According to transparency advocates, with the right information you can make purposeful adjustments, even systemic changes, to our political realities. Disclosures decrease the ability of a regime to hold on to power. This, too, expresses a fear of contingency and losing control. Equally problematic is the quasi-missionary propensity to bring to light the dark secrets of government, inform the uninformed masses in order to make the world a better place. This conjures spirits of truth-bearing institutions imposed on societies. Instead of challenging their own will to know, or the kind of subjectivity transparency produces, Metahaven swaps one absolute for another, and, as this part of the book stands, comes close to propagating the very kind of practices they aim to discredit.

The plot thickens in the final chapter of the book “When Pixels Become Territories”, in which black transparency finds its end. The chapter reflects on the image economy surrounding the 2014 war between Ukraine and Russia. Metahaven argues that the conflict was for an important part fought “on internet server farms” (155). The war was characterized by “alternative explanations,” (162) “energized, recreated, and post-produced through social media, image manipulation, fiction writing and role playing” (155). During the conflict, Russian workers at the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) were paid to post thousands of pro-Russian comments on Western media articles about the war. In the summer of 2014, The Guardian reported of 40K comments a day on its Russian and Ukraine related articles. Some of the other unlikely foot soldiers in this proxy cyber-war were a Moscow-based design studio, a Vietnamese amateur illustrator, a WikiLeaks retweet of a conspiracy theory, some leaked documents, a nationalist anime YouTube music video chock-full of political spin, in addition to coverage on the are by a labyrinth of state-owned Russian media outlets. In this dazzling, premediated, networked mess, it is impossible to make sense of truth, Metahaven decries. Their inspirator, WikiLeaks, is “allied with a power that should be its target,” they lament (164). “Planetary-scale computation […] is transforming geopolitics in ways we are yet to understand,” Metahaven claims (155). “‘[T]he world in general never appeared as opaque as now,” they insist (6). Empowered by networks of planetary-scale computation, “[f]antasy and reality, fiction and fact, are made equivalent” (164). Such a post-truth condition, in which “nothing is true,” is “immune to black transparency’s most fundamental critique of the state” (164). Black transparency has become “part of an order where fantasy and reality coexist” and cannot provide a way out of this conundrum (167).

What we are left with is propaganda, Metahaven maintains. And indeed, meme-wars, fake-news, alternative facts, ransomware, and conspiracy theories about foreign hackers proliferated during the 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum, and further accelerated during the 2016 US election. Our lives today are dependent on computational systems that are deeply connected, interconnected, embedded and integrated. The under-examined yet palpable capabilities and fragility of these networked systems have caused some to feel more vulnerable. Has the Enlightenment model of politics come to its logical end? Has the post-truth society outpaced the information age? Have the central mediators of authority of the twentieth century run aground?

Metahaven sets out a zealous set of stipulations and questions. Confronted with their own assumptions of certainty, stability and truth, Metahaven seems anxious to see whistleblowers and transparency activists end up in a knife-fight with ‘alternative facts’ and fake news ready to be believed and widely shared on media platforms by their ideological cohorts. If spin and memes are more decisive than factual content, how can we make sense of truth? And who has the power of interpretation?, Metahaven asks in their cri de coeur.

 

Perhaps we need to ask a different question. For many “minorities” – a tremendous misnomer, as minorities form a majority – the basic institutions of authority of the twentieth century failed to provide a common ground to begin with. They know what it means to be exposed to reactionary power politics – and for that matter to racism, classism, and sexism. For decades, feminists, postcolonial, queer and gender theorists, poets, and artists alike have been challenging the presumed universal subject of Enlightenment. For decades they have been deconstructing the power structures inherent to knowledge production. For decades they have questioned the androcentric, ethnocentric and ideological assumptions of what constitutes Truth in the first place. ““The modern liberal subject”: by now it seems, or ought to seem, anything but an obvious choice as the unique terminus ad quem” (Sedgwick 2003, 139). Instead of linearly opposing the power structures of Truth, instead of swapping one Truth for another (mine is better than yours), these thinkers have pointed to the historical contingency of all ‘facts’, and continue to defend complexity, arguing for the need of new ontologies and epistemologies, and radically inclusive narratives. What is more, as Audre Lorde, who pulled no punches, argues in Sister Outsider (1984): “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde 1984, 112). It may temporarily beat the master at his own game, but it will “never bring about genuine change” (112). And if this makes you feel uncomfortable, you are too attached to the master’s house, Lorde maintains (112).

Black Transparency ends with an anecdote on Pussy Riot’s anti-Putin ‘Punk Prayer’ performance in a Moscow cathedral in 2012. Metahaven considers the Russian feminist punk band the logical successor of black transparency. Pussy Riot’s interventions “trigger responses that are themselves disclosures,” Metahaven contends (168). To what end?, we may ask. Post-truth is not remedied by disclosures, by generating more proof as alternatives to the alternative facts, nor by fighting propaganda with propaganda, truths with counter-truths. Reality is irreducible to ‘facts.’ Are we willing and able to step out of the power structures that produce post-truth, even if this means a loss of power? Are we willing to compromise (our) Truth? Compromise does not mean one cannot have (and fight for) strong convictions. Compromise means increasing your ability to relate, and this entails taking into account your obligation to and interconnection with other people and things, known and unknown.

Any counter-strategy that could attend to networked propaganda, the optimization of bias, trolls, meme-wars, echo chambers, and other machinations of power, would first have to make peace with the uncertain, the unfounded – without actual examples, without field guides, pointing to uncharted territory beyond rules. Perhaps we should ask: how to shift the focus, not to bring in the promise of greater transparency or Truth, but to recognize blackness as an inherent condition of truth? How to position ourselves as open to other ways of seeing and knowing? To do the work of dismantling the master’s house means first admitting the loss of mastery.

The Parameters of Platform Capitalism

Review of Nick Srnicek (2016). Platform Capitalism. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 120 pp.

When reflecting on the impact of digital technologies on capitalism, what exactly are we referring to when we use the term ‘capitalism’? Is it an economic system wedded to a particular mode of production – one rooted in private property, market competition, and the profit motive? Is it a juridico-moral constellation whose normative framework grounds and protects the competitive pursuit of property and profit? Or rather, is it in essence a political theory whose logic of “possessive individualism” (Macpherson 1962) is internalized by subjects operating on the assumption that the market will allow them to flourish in freedom? Such questions regarding the identity and scope of capitalism may seem to express a merely theoretical concern, yet they do in fact shape the kinds of research that can be conducted, insofar as they delineate what (institutional) actors and processes can be included as legitimate objects of study. Although many critics would likely agree that capitalism is a dynamic and heterogeneous assemblage which incorporates all three aspects suggested above, the adjudication of their respective pertinence – and thus the extent to which each receives scrutiny – will undoubtedly be informed by disciplinary interests. Moreover, it is capitalism’s very heterogeneity and dynamism that complicates any attempt to grasp it as a monolithic whole, so as scholars we necessarily opt for particular approaches that foreclose others.

One therefore cannot fault Nick Srnicek for providing an unapologetically economistic reading of the most recent transformations in capitalism’s longue durée, which have been propelled by the rising ubiquity of digital platforms ranging from Google, Facebook, and Amazon to Uber, Airbnb, and Deliveroo. In Platform Capitalism, Srnicek offers his readers a sharp, concise, and historically sensitive account of what is and isn’t new about companies that mobilize platforms both as a technological architecture and a business model for gaining a competitive advantage and to create novel forms of value. In doing so, he usefully counters much of the hype that has inevitably accumulated around the platform concept, yet – as I will argue below – his focus on platform companies as primarily economic actors also obscures a number of ways in which these companies, and platform capitalism more generally, are transforming societies on a global scale. Srnicek justifies his narrow approach in the book’s introduction, by distinguishing it from existing studies on the digital economy which, despite their numerous contributions, have neglected “economic issues around ownership and profitability” or have detached such issues from their history (Srnicek 2). In response, Platform Capitalism “aims to supplement these other perspectives by giving an economic history of capitalism and digital technology, while recognizing the diversity of economic forms and the competitive tensions inherent in the contemporary economy” (2-3). The three chapters that comprise Srnicek’s slender volume realize this aim by subsequently looking at the past, present, and future of platform capitalism. Ultimately, according to Srnicek, this conceptual approach “is important for how we think strategically and develop political tactics to transform society” (7), although his analysis unfortunately stops short of developing such tactics in any detail. After considering the arguments put forward in each chapter, I will suggest that this omission can be partly attributed to the book’s lack of engagement with what exceeds the parameters of its business-centric assessment.

Past

Chapter 1, “The Long Downturn”, sets out to “historicize emerging technologies as an outcome of deeper capitalist tendencies” (7) by attending to three relatively recent events that presumably express such tendencies: the response to the economic downturn of the 1970s; the expansion and subsequent implosion of the dot-com bubble around the turn of the twenty-first century; and the aftermath of the 2007-8 financial crisis. I write “presumably” here not so much to question Srnicek’s account as to highlight the point that it matters what story is being told about capitalism, for it determines how we apprehend and evaluate the agents driving its change. For Srnicek, capitalism is essentially marked by “generalized market dependency” that ensures a “systemic imperative to reduce production costs in relation to prices” for goods and services, which requires the constant optimization of labor processes and productivity through technological innovation (11). This narrative concerning capitalism’s core tendencies, which focuses on competition between firms while largely limiting the role of national governments to the creation of monetary policies that stimulate investments in private assets, will turn out to inform his later assessment of platform capitalism – for better and for worse.

What I appreciated about Srnicek’s analysis in this chapter is his effort to show how capitalism as a mode of production crucially depends on both technological and financial support in its ceaseless quest for capital accumulation. The three moments he takes as exemplary expressions of capitalism’s will to power/profitability are connected by the fact that each represents a next phase in the ongoing restructuring of the modern corporation into an agile business entity, whose contemporary expression is the platform company. Such a business entity concentrates on high value-adding activities while divesting itself from “downstream” employment liabilities through technology-enabled outsourcing and subcontracting practices that remotely manage its fissured supply chains, (ostensibly reconfigured into so-called “value ecosystems” in today’s platform economy).

Moreover, this restructuring has been shaped by the increased role of financial markets and instruments, which in turn have been bolstered by deregulation and loose monetary policies. As Srnicek rightfully points out with respect to the spectacular growth of venture and equity capital investment in tech companies during the 1990s, these policies did not only lay the groundwork for the digital economy but also precipitated the 2001 stock market crash as well as the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Yet he also ignores some important processes and actors, which produces some critical blind spots in his account.

For instance, he does not pay attention to how financialization has affected business practices and objectives, especially in relation to human resource management. Although he mentions the importance of shareholder value in corporate decision-making, there is no discussion of how the proliferation of share repurchasing, or the increased role of financial service provision which shifts corporations’ core business from producing goods/services to rent-seeking, have had deleterious consequences for labor (Lazonick 2010; Thompson 2016). Furthermore, while Srnicek notes that unions during the 1980s “faced an all-out assault and were eventually broken” (17-18), he does not explain how this assault was the result of concerted government efforts. As Peck and Theodore (2012, 746) have noted, in the US these efforts “crystallized in the Reagan administration’s economic program, which not only authorized wide ranging welfare retrenchments, while taking the fight to organized labor in the form of antiunion stances and policies, but also articulated a normatively positive discourse of labor market ‘flexibility,’ while (directly and indirectly) sanctioning the expansion of contingent labor practices.” In other words, national governments do more than create favorable monetary policy; they are active (activist) agents in capitalism’s evolution, shaping the conditions for capital accumulation and labor organization. This is not just a matter of companies taking advantage of deregulation and doing what they must to cut costs and meet their bottom line, as Srnicek’s story implies. This is about neoliberal governance as a dynamic mode of intensive regulatory experimentation that reconfigures relations between business, finance, and labor while also reimagining the role of the state. Interestingly, Srnicek does not once refer to neoliberalism in this book, which may signal his distaste for the term or his reluctance to consider capitalism as a mutating political project – now increasingly concerned with governing by debt (Lazzarato 2015) – rather than solely a mode of production.

Present

Chapter 1 ends with a portrayal of “the present conjuncture” as defined by fiscal austerity, corporate tax evasion and cash glut triggering risky investments, and growing job and income insecurity (Srnicek, 34-35). This sets the scene for chapter 2, “Platform Capitalism”, in which Srnicek focuses his narrative on the rise of platforms as the new technology for extracting, processing, and analyzing data, which have become a central source of profit generation and competitive advantage in the digital economy. If this seems like a bit of a leap that’s because it is, as the chapter offers no discussion of how each of the last three recessions (1990-91, 2000-02, and 2007-09) was followed not only by a “jobless recovery” (Peck and Theodore 2006), but also by a new stage in the development of networked information and communication technologies: the World Wide Web, the so-called “Web 2.0”, and pervasive mobile internet connectivity. Each stage featured experiments with new forms of capitalist value-creation and extraction in the face of waning economic growth, yet what ultimately ties these experiments together is their quest to orchestrate increasingly frictionless markets by optimizing the distribution of information (or its proxy: data) as well as the management and prediction of human behavior (through data analytics). Each stage, then, can be understood as a particular yet cumulative articulation of behavioral economics with cybernetic reason. Srnicek does not address this development, however, and while he mentions the massive investments in internet infrastructure during the 1990s boom, I particularly missed an appraisal of Tim O’Reilly’s (2005) influential “Web as Platform” idea, which both envisioned and reflected a reconfiguration of the web into a programmable, data-driven, and “social” architecture. Despite this oversight, Srnicek offers a useful description of platforms as a new kind of firm that owns and manages a computational infrastructure which intermediates between different user-groups and governs their interaction possibilities, while “displaying monopoly tendencies driven by network effects” (48; see also Bratton 2016: 41-51). The rest of the chapter is dedicated to an overview of the emerging platform landscape, presenting and evaluating five platform types: advertising, cloud, industrial, product, and lean platforms.

Space constraints prevent me from attending to each in detail, so instead I will only address his argument concerning the latter type. His main criticism of lean platforms such as Uber, Airbnb, and other “sharing economy” start-ups is that their business model is unsustainable and they do not add anything new to the digital economy. Whereas other platform types have amassed significant assets in the form of hardware and other fixed capital (think of Google’s server farms), allowing them to gain a competitive advantage and become profitable, lean platforms operate according to what Srnicek calls a “hyper-outsourced model” that renders them dependent on third parties – most notably cloud platforms like Amazon for computing and storage capacity, and users for household assets (Airbnb) as well as labor power (Uber) (76). While this assessment is proving to be increasingly accurate, as lean platforms are tentatively starting to invest in physical assets, I think it also neglects a novelty that is quite important. Peer-to-peer markets do not seem to concern Srnicek much, but they should, because beyond their potential to dominate various industries, lean platforms are fundamentally transforming how people consume and produce goods/services. By allowing them to instantly access and monetize any potential asset, they diffuse market logics and entrepreneurial rationalities – i.e. the spirit of neoliberal capitalism – into new territories. Likewise, these platforms are altering working conditions and labor market norms across the board. While Srnicek is correct to argue that today’s gig economy is “effectively an acceleration of the long-term tendency towards more precarious employment, particularly after 2008” (79), this does not mean that platform-mediated labor just entails more of the same. For example, temporary-staffing companies such as Randstad are now experimenting with digital platforms to expand and diversify their operations as global labor market intermediaries, increasingly moving toward a data-intensive and zero-liability “workforce-as-a-service” model (Van Doorn 2017). Even though many lean platforms will undoubtedly be forced to fold in an ultra-competitive field with decreasing VC investment, the more successful ones will consolidate and converge just like other types of platforms, meanwhile stimulating profound changes in how people work (think algorithmic management) and generate an income.

Future

This brings me to the book’s final chapter, “Great Platform Wars”, in which Srnicek lays out what he views as platform capitalism’s primary tendencies and challenges in the (near) future. Here his narrow approach to capitalism as essentially revolving around inter-firm – or “intracapitalist” (95) – competition is most pronounced, which results in some perceptive yet ultimately rather limited observations about the shape of what is to come. The tendencies he discusses, which are understood to be driven by platform companies’ innate proclivity to monopolize, include the expansion of data extraction and analytics into all spheres of live, the need to safeguard one’s strategic position within value ecosystems, the progressive enclosure of these ecosystems into “silos”, and the convergence of companies toward similar markets. Subsequently, the identified challenges mainly deal with the obstacles different types of platforms are facing as they attempt to achieve profitability in various industries, despite their competitive advantages. What I found most thought-provoking in this part of the book were Srnicek’s brief speculations on new business models which focus on rent-seeking in a “post-advertising environment” where platforms are facilitating a shift from consumer ownership to access. A possible corollary of this shift could be “a massive expansion of micro-payments, as the IoT (Internet of Things) enables every good to be turned into a service that charges by the use: cars, computers, doors, refrigerators, toilets” (124). Whereas most analyses of the platform economy tend to assume the insatiability of the data-driven advertising industry, thereby assuming the durability of the “free” social media model and the partnership between platform companies, advertisers, and data-brokers which sponsors this model, such a constellation cannot be expected to survive indefinitely. And when (not if) the data bubble finally bursts, powerful platform companies like Google and Facebook will need to radically alter their monetization strategies – a necessity that is not lost on these companies, both of which continue to diversify their portfolio.

So is the era of “everything-as-a-service” upon us? Is this hyper-extractive and ultra-contingent model the future of capitalism? How will this impact our lives as well as our livelihoods, and what can we do to resist or deter this future – if we’d be so inclined? In the last few pages Srnicek considers some alternatives, ranging from stricter regulation and platform cooperatives – which he quickly dismisses – to creating collectively-owned platforms whose services are offered as public utilities. But these suggestions are little more than afterthoughts and, besides the question of how platform coops are different from “platforms owned and controlled by the people” (128), it is entirely unclear how one would go about mobilizing “the state’s vast resources” to build “postcapitalist platforms” whose control over collected data would nevertheless remain “independent of the surveillance state apparatus” (ibid.). Moreover, this assumes a clear distinction between the imperatives of public institutions, such as (supra)national governments, and private (platform) companies, which has become increasingly untenable since the rise of neoliberal statecraft. One example is the European Union’s Digital Single Market strategy, which has embraced the “collaborative economy” as a site for economic growth and aims to facilitate platform-based market innovations across Europe. Platform capitalism is more than a new version of a legacy system based on competition and profitability; it is also an updated political rationality. Platform companies know this very well and are fully invested in shaping its outcomes, having moved from regulatory arbitrage – i.e. taking advantage of legal loopholes – toward regulatory capture and policy entrepreneurship on multiple levels of government.

On a local level, meanwhile, we see the proliferation of self-proclaimed “Sharing Cities” experimenting with public-private partnerships in order to supplement and improve public services via private platforms. Such initiatives can be seen as a response to the growing pressure on municipalities to take on more responsibilities while faced with waning resources, where platforms for peer-to-peer services like meal-sharing are filling gaps in public provisioning while also stimulating local entrepreneurship and social cohesion. This brings me to my final remark with respect to Srnicek’s argument: beyond a mode of production capitalism is also, crucially, a mode of social reproduction. This means that to understand the future of neoliberal capitalism mediated by platforms we will also have to examine how these technologies reconfigure what Nancy Fraser (2014) has called “Marx’s hidden abode”: the deeply gendered, classed, and racialized organization of care and maintenance work that has remained invisible in most economic analyses, due to its largely informal nature, while it sustains labor power and capital accumulation. This would necessitate an expansion of Platform Capitalism’s parameters, acknowledging the ways in which platforms, as new institutional forms, are pervading our everyday lives while reshaping relations – and further blurring lines – between the market, the state, and civil society. I believe that such a strategic move would allow us to develop more capacious political tactics than have thus far been offered.

Fantasies of Neoliberalism: From the Clerical to the Entrepreneurial Subject

Review of Ulrich Bröckling (2015) The Entrepreneurial Self: Fabricating a New Type of Subject. London: Sage Publications, 256 pp.

The newly translated habilitation thesis of Ulrich Bröckling, The Entrepreneurial Self, forms an impressive and commendable overview of the forces of subjectification shaping entrepreneurial subjects of the neoliberal capitalist era into entrepreneurial selves. The subject, in this Foucauldian study, is no longer a transhistorical figure, but is itself constituted through power relations and modes of governing, moulding and taking advantage of it. Studying this subject, then, comes down to an examination of these creative fields of force. Analysing these fields of force, the study of the entrepreneurial self also tells a story about the nature of neoliberal capitalism. Neoliberalism seeks to universalise the principles of competition found in capitalist markets throughout society. It recognises, however, that such markets do not suddenly appear and run all by themselves. They need competitive subjects to complement them: entrepreneurial selves.

Bröckling’s rich monograph is an exercise in the research field called ‘studies of governmentality’, following in the footsteps of figures such as Michel Foucault and Nikolas Rose. Governmentality – or the “conduct of conduct” – points to programmes and techniques that aim at changing, steering and guiding the behaviour of human beings. Governmentality does not mean fully controlling or determining the conduct of the subject, but structuring its field of possible action (Bröckling 2016, 8-9). It is this structuring that forms the object of Bröckling’s investigation. The resulting ‘genealogy of subjectification’ presented in this book is thus less a comprehensive description of what an entrepreneurial subject looks like, but, rather, an account of what forms of knowledge, methods, techniques and practices are mobilised to actively shape this subject (Bröckling 2016, xiii and 3).

One of the defining characteristics of the Foucauldian ‘studies of governmentality’ is their extension of the notion of government, which now becomes ‘governmentality’, beyond the locus of the state. For Foucault, power cannot be located in a clearly demarcated entity, exercising it in a top-down fashion. Rather, power is dispersed through lowly and contingent relations of force. In looking for the specific knowledge and social techniques constitutive of the entrepreneurial self, then, Bröckling does not simply analyse an authoritative philosophical treatise or the exercise of power by a centralised source. Instead, he traces a ‘convergence of lines’ from heterogeneous contexts and lowly cultural sources. In this way, Bröckling structures the book in three sections. First, he addresses the methodology of the Studies of Governmentality and begins to gather some evidence for the thesis that the neoliberal subject is hailed as an entrepreneurial self. Then, there are two parts: Bröckling first draws up the picture, or rather ‘rationality’, of the entrepreneurial self as it emanates from various theoretical sources. Then Bröckling focusses his attention on four “strategies and programmes” drawn from concrete practices, namely creativity, empowerment, quality and projects.

Bröckling starts the book by delineating some of the contours of the entrepreneurial self from self-help books, training manuals and management programs, which are examples of ‘social technologies’ aiming “to organize life around the entrepreneurial model of behaviour” (Bröckling 2016, 21). Concretely, Bröckling points to what the German sociologists Voß and Pongratz describe as the ‘entreployee’: a new type of labour in post-Fordist production. The entreployee is a labour force entrepreneur who is required to increase self-organisation, self-rationalisation and self-monitoring as well as to autonomously economise their personhood. This sociological notion coincides with demands made on neoliberal subjects in management literature, such as Tom Peters’ and Robert H. Waterman’s bestseller (1982) In Search of Excellence and Gifford Pinchot’s (1985) Intrapreneuring. Much like the entreployee, the ‘intrapreneur’ (contraction of intra-corporate entrepreneur) is a figure that is not just described as but also praised for its readiness to take risks and its drive for innovation. Impressively, Bröckling situates categories like ‘entreployee’ and ‘intrapreneur’ in a far broader context of magazine articles, bestseller self-help books, Thatcherite ‘enterprise culture’, management literature, and the advent of the ‘new economy’ of post-Fordism.

Beyond the sphere of management and organisation, Bröckling also observes in the self-help literature an ethical injunction to view one’s whole life as an enterprise, i.e. as “Me Inc”. In this case, the self is not merely hailed as an entrepreneur only at work, but always and everywhere. In the second part of the book, Bröckling goes into four widespread notions which have materialised in organisational culture, namely creativity, empowerment, quality management and the project. These are interesting topics, and Bröckling treats them in great detail and clarity. However, he fails to mention why he has specifically picked out these four rather than others, such as disruption or network. After all, these are also important buzzwords and expressions of the Californian Ideology in the management-scene of the information age. As a result of this, his treatments of these topics feel more arbitrary and less convincing than the more conceptually oriented chapters of the first part.

These early chapters, on the rationality of the entrepreneurial self, aim to show that these contemporary convergences upon some sort of entrepreneurial image of the subject are not coincidental. Rather, Bröckling demonstrates convincingly that the normative ideal of an entrepreneurial self forms part of the rationality of a family of economic theories grouped together under the label of neoliberalism. He does this by presenting the reader with an impressively clear and concise tour through a variety of theoretical currents in economics, notably ordoliberalism, human capital theory, and Von Hayek’s neoliberalism (later on, Bröckling also turns to contract theory and transaction economics). What these neoliberal theories or theorists all share, so argues Bröckling, are three fundamental convictions. First, neoliberalism argues for market mobilisation. That is, the market is viewed as the most efficient and just mechanism for resource allocation; the market mechanism should thus be universalised by instituting it in various social sectors. Secondly, neoliberalism deviates from classical liberalism in that it views not exchangeability but competition as the essence and main virtue of capitalist markets. Thirdly and finally, neoliberals maintain that neither markets nor competition come about naturally, but must be actively instituted and sustained. Combining these three theses, we may say the political mission of neoliberalism consists in creating and managing the social conditions in which markets and competition are able to come about. In this way, the crux of Bröckling’s argument becomes clear: “If the thrust of neoliberal government is toward generalising competition, modelling society as a whole on the market, then it will ineluctably come to mould subjectivity on the figure of the entrepreneur” (Bröckling 2016, 60).

Bröckling’s observation on the constellation of forces that mould the entrepreneurial subject, then, implies a wider claim on the basic structure of contemporary, neoliberal capitalism. It makes clear that the neoliberal dream of market universalisation does not merely mean the wish to institute markets in all the various spheres of society, for example through the privatisation of the public sector. It also means neoliberalism wishes to universalise the market from the public sphere of work to the private sphere of leisure. For the subject is not just an entrepreneur when he/she is sitting at his/her desk at the office, he/she is an entrepreneur of his/her entire life, “Me Inc”. Seen in this way, universalising the market through the governing technique of subjectification becomes a particularly effective way of inserting ‘human capital’ into the economic system. This technique of subjectification is itself a major component of neoliberalism.

The product of this technique of subjectification, the entrepreneurial self, is an essential element of neoliberal governmentality; it belongs to the ‘social conditions’ which must be instituted in order for neoliberal capitalism to function effectively. Accordingly, Bröckling calls the idea of the entrepreneurial self a ‘real fiction’, the kind of story which supplies “systems with the agents they need in order to operate” (Bröckling 2016, 11). As such, Bröckling’s image of the entrepreneurial self tells us nothing about actually existing subjects, but, rather, more about the forces of subjectification as we find them in actually existing neoliberalism.

It might, in this respect, seem strange that a book entitled The Entrepreneurial Self does not primarily deal with a self at all, but rather with its genealogical production. Bröckling self-consciously refrains from claiming anything about the effectiveness of the power structures which govern the subject, i.e. from claiming that subjects in fact have become entrepreneurial selves. This means, first, that he does not claim that subjects in today’s world behave like entrepreneurial subjects and, second, that he does not attempt to say that subjects experience the lifeworld as governed by the call to act like an entrepreneur. One can laud Bröckling’s self-restraint here, but one may also wonder whether he does not make it too easy for himself by ignoring the question of to what extent the notion of an entrepreneurial self resonates with the intuitions of those who live and act in contemporary capitalism. Could he not at least have referred to the kind of studies which have attempted to make the sociological, rather than the genealogical, claim about neoliberal subjects, such as Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Character? Moreover, does the plausibility of Bröckling’s claims not rest on the fact that the force field of entrepreneurialism resonates with our actual experience? What makes Bröckling’s account intuitive is not just the presence of his theses in ‘high’ theory and ‘lowly’ management programmes, but also in the actual effects of this complex of prescriptions on the behaviour and experience of neoliberal subjects.

Having said that, let us look at what, according to Bröckling, constitutes an entrepreneurial subject more specifically. To this end, Bröckling distinguishes four functions of the entrepreneur as a macroeconomic category. These functions are respectively: the entrepreneur as speculator, innovator, risk-bearer and coordinator.

First, the notion of the entrepreneur as speculator is put forward in reference to economists Von Mises and Kirzner, who both stress that human beings are not just utility calculators, but also possess alertness to opportunities such as arbitrage, a price difference in the same commodities in different markets. The defining feature of the entrepreneur here, then, is her spontaneous alertness to such opportunities of speculation. Secondly, with the entrepreneur as innovator, Bröckling points to the works of Schumpeter, and his conception of the creative destroyer. Here the entrepreneur is a figure who exhibits leadership and establishes new combinations in production and distribution. As opposed to the rationalising and imitative manager, she is the instigator of novelty and difference in opposition to routine and staleness. Thirdly, the entrepreneur can be seen, as in the account of Frank H. Knight, as a risk-bearer. Knight here points to a fundamental uncertainty with respect to human action and knowledge. Rational action cannot be calculated with a straightforward utility function, but is stricken by a fundamental contingency. The entrepreneur, in opposition to the wage labourer and manager, bears this contingency in order to enjoy profit, and in this way she also assumes responsibility. Fourthly and finally, the entrepreneur fulfils the function of the coordinator. Her judgements and decisions regarding resource allocation and coordination attempt to be more efficient than, and therefore different from, business as usual, in which inefficiency is always the rule. In this way, the entrepreneur as coordinator is an agent of change.

Now, according to Bröckling, what unifies these separate, but not entirely unrelated, accounts of what the entrepreneurial function is, is that it is centred around such values as the new and the unknown rather than around the old and the known: “The theories we have analysed above all distinguish the entrepreneurial function from that of the calculating, instrumentalist, rationalist manager” (Bröckling 2016, 75). This proclaimed shift from the rationalist clerk to the innovative entrepreneur fits neatly with a commonplace description of present-day capitalist modernity as having moved from a conception of the capitalist subject as a Weberian-Marxian cog in the machine to an artistic, creative and autonomous post-’69 subject. It fits in with the proclaimed shift, in other words, from the old to the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ (Boltanski and Chiapello), or from solid to liquid modernity (Zygmunt Bauman), organised to disorganised modernity (Lash and Urry), or industrial to reflexive modernity (Ulrich Beck). For Bröckling, the terms of neoliberal governmentality are marked by this shift from rationalist clerk to the entrepreneurial self.

Uncomfortable Ethnographies: The Politics of Race and the Untimeliness of Critique

Review of: Gloria Wekker (2016) White Innocence. Durham: Duke University Press, 240 pp.

In a recent article titled “The coercive character of our ‘normal’”, Sander van Walsum (2017) briefly refers to the controversy surrounding the Dutch politician and ex-VJ and media presenter, Sylvana Simons. Van Walsum tries to understand the sharp turnaround in the public profile of Simons, from popular media presenter to hated public voice against racism. To the extent that Simons remained simply a “coloured” face in media culture, she was popular. But hidden behind that popularity lay the problematic politics of tolerance which Wendy Brown’s (2006) book-length analysis has exposed. For Simons could be popular only to the extent that her race was a commodity and/or an irrelevant aspect of her identity, and not “an issue”. The moment she scathingly brought up the racist and colonial mentality in the Netherlands, the often revolting public attacks against her began. Van Walsum suggests Simons’ exposed the racist assumption that she existed precisely thanks to the public and so should conform to its expectations – that is, shut up about race, and racism, since the Netherlands was not racist. After all, how could she have been so popular if it had been so?

The Simons controversy exposes something particular, and peculiar, within Dutch society. On the one hand, the claim that Dutch society is extraordinarily liberal, open-minded, and yes, that word again, tolerant. On the other, the dramatic rise in racist and xenophobic political populism since the late 1990s. Gloria Wekker confronts this paradox, and its attendant historical precedents, in her politico-economic and cultural genealogy of contemporary Dutch society. As an activist and public intellectual, Wekker’s longstanding involvement in issues around gender, race and sexuality are crystallized in a clearly constructed and lucidly developed series of arguments which in book form confront this paradox head on. This paradox is addressed by Wekker by framing herself as an anthropologist with the goal of “making the familiar world strange” (ix). Wekker’s goal of making the commonplace consensus strange seems appropriate given the claims of incomprehension and denial by which accusations of racism are met.

In the Introduction, Wekker identifies the central object of her analysis, “the white Dutch sense of self”, an ethnographic analysis of which would reveal that “whiteness is not acknowledged as a racialized/ethnicized positioning at all” (2). In making this argument, Wekker connects to a longer intellectual study of whiteness, such as Richard Dyer’s White (1997), whose relative invisibility in studies of race and ethnicity kept whiteness as the norm rather than as a subject (and ethnicity) itself worthy of analysis. Specifically for the Dutch case, Wekker argues, whiteness is the effect of “an unacknowledged reservoir of knowledge and affects based on four hundred years of Dutch imperial rule” which structures “dominant meaning-making processes” including, one may presume, the vociferous denials of racism. She deploys Edward Said’s concept of the “cultural archive” (1993) as an analytical tool for understanding how the present Dutch climate around race relations is structured. The terms “imperial rule”, “cultural archive” and an ethnography of white Dutch selfhood are linked thus by Wekker: “a racial grammar, a deep structure of inequality in thought and affect based on race, was installed in nineteenth-century European imperial populations and … it is from this deep reservoir, the cultural archive that … a sense of self has been formed and fabricated” (2). And it is this self which she argues is marked by “white innocence”.

The recurrent appearance of the word “deep” should already suggest to the reader that Wekker’s analysis is based on a depth-hermeneutic that begins with and dives below the surface articulations of racial and ethnic discourse in the Netherlands. In revealing the present legacies of the hidden colonial archive, Wekker takes recourse to a primarily psychoanalytical language of “splitting” and “displacement” (4) to explain the processes by which the denial of European history manifests itself in the crises around racism today in Dutch society. This plumbing the depths of Dutch history and the cultural archive however, does not seek to find one singular cause for the prevalence of denial in the construction of white Dutch selfhood. Wekker immediately states that she attempts an “intersectional reading of the Dutch colonial archive, with special attention for the ways in which an imperial racial economy” is marked by “gendered, sexualized, and classed intersections” (2).

Her intersectional analyses, spread out across the subsequent five chapters, focuses primarily on the western part of the Dutch empire, that is, Suriname and the Antilles. Each of these chapters fleshes out what Wekker identifies as three paradoxes which structure the white Dutch sense of self:

  • a refusal to identify with migrants;
  • the innocent victim of German Occupation;
  • Dutch imperialism.

At first, a reader might find the stating of these elements confusing since they do not seem to name a paradox but perhaps historical “features” of Dutch selfhood. It is here, however, that the sometimes uncertain place of psychoanalysis is important to emphasize, since what Wekker is arguing is that in each of these elements, a process of denial is crucial. That is, (1) the historical reality of migration which structures all and not just non-white Dutch populations is denied; (2) the Dutch self-image as victim represses the memory of violence and collaboration in the Netherlands which marked the extermination of Jews under the Occupation; and (3) a denial of the crucial importance of Dutch imperialism in structuring forms of white superiority in the Dutch context.

These three denials, Wekker convincingly argues, enable a self-presentation of the white Dutch Self as “innocent”, the central concept through which Wekker develops her analyses in the chapters that follow. In other words, a process of denial helps the positing of a self-image of innocence – and innocence is of course a powerful mode of refusing accusations of racism. The paradoxes she identifies are fleshed out in three “innovations” in her methodology. Firstly, as already stated above, Wekker thinks of race, sexuality and gender together in an intersectional frame. Secondly, she links metropolitan and colonial history in her analyses; and lastly, she links the Eastern and Western spheres of Dutch imperialism. Each of these innovative perspectives are differentially evidenced in the five chapters which follow. The reader thus encounters different features of a complex theoretical and conceptual framework (three paradoxes and three perspectives) being deployed at different levels of intensity in each of the five controversies she constructs.

The first chapter analyzes “case studies of everyday racism” ranging from controversial statements on a Dutch TV talk show to literary analysis of Ellen Ombre’s Negerjood. Unlike the other chapters, which primarily though not exclusively fasten on a single object of analysis, this chapter captures in miniature, as it were, both the wide range of Wekker’s field of analyses as well as the conceptual resources she will deploy throughout the book. The importance of psychoanalysis is felt most strongly in this chapter with invocations of Fanon on the European unconscious, and processes of “internalization and splitting” (41). Further, the crucial link between racism, gender and sexuality are brought out through a reading of the submerged effects of the experience of slavery in the work of Toni Morrison (Beloved), the work of historian and sociologist Rudolf van Lier (Samenleving in een Grensgebied) and historians including Avtar Brah and Laura Ann Stoler.

The second chapter turns to important sites of knowledge-production blessed with the official sanction of being sciences, namely the University and governmental policy-making. The chapter swiftly shifts the focus from the sphere of popular culture (such as TV) to explore the enormous power that the nexus of racism and sexism exerts within government policy-making, the academy generally, and women/gender studies in particular. One of the most important insights Wekker offers in her analysis of policy-making is the shift from “commensurate participation in society” and “integration, while holding on to one’s own identity” (55, emphasis added) to an increasing focus on “shared values” (55) and the necessity of integrating migrants into “Dutch society”. In other words, a broader focus on “employment, education, housing and political participation” (55) toward a more egalitarian society has been increasingly replaced by firstly the identification of “problem” groups (Turks, Moroccans, Antilleans) and their integration into Dutch society. Wekker’s own involvement in different government policy-making organs provides for compelling evidence that “long-standing ideas about and practices with regard to race” (58) structure the aims of policy, the allocation of funds, and the involvement (or not) of relevant, non-white partners in the process of policy-making. Her analyses reveal that the category “woman” is considered white, that “allochtonous women” do not fall within the ambit of “women” while the specific differences between allochtonous women are ignored. This colour-blindness regarding gender is then convincingly shown precisely in the area of women/gender studies, where once again the category “woman” does not include women of colour. In this chapter, Wekker’s intersectional focus on class, sexuality, race and gender clearly exposes the compartmentalized functioning of intellectual labour within the University, and policy-making generally.

The third chapter “The Coded language of the Hottentot Nymphae and the Discursive Presence of Race, 1917” fastens on an interesting if little-known case in the history of psychoanalysis in which three Dutch women were treated by the psychoanalyst Dr. J.H.W. van Ophuijsen. Here, the complex processes of identification and displacement become evident in the paradox Wekker identifies in which, while the white, upper-class women, believing they possessed overly developed labia minora, identified with “the supposed morphology of black women’s genitalia”, their doctor, on the other hand, dismissed their claims and persisted in diagnosing them as suffering from “a masculinity complex”. What propelled the doctor’s denial of these women’s racial imaginings, and why was it necessary, Wekker asks, for colonial ideologies of black women’s bodies and sexualities to be read through the lens of masculinity? In exploring this paradox fed by denial (the doctor’s) and displacement (the three women), Wekker deploys the notion of the colonial archive, and the relation between the metropolis and the colony, to show how crucial sites of cultural dissemination, including advertisements, magazines and the World exhibitions, had provided a script through which these white women were exposed “to knowledge about black women and their bodies” (93). Further, Wekker shows how medical-scientific discourse furnished fantasies of the civilized male and the evolutionary higher-placed white race, thus relegating both women and people of colour to inferior positions in both scientific and popular discourse. Wekker convincingly shows how the black female body becomes the over-determined site through which an “explicit discourse on gender and sexuality…was informed by implicit assumptions about racial difference”(106).

It is in the chapter titled “Of Homo Nostalgia and (Post)Coloniality” that the strength of Wekker’s intersectional analysis comes most to the fore, as she moves between a genealogy of the women’s and gay rights movement, the contemporary defence of gay rights, and the disparaged figure of the un-integrated allochthon. The Dutch situation is particularly important here, since the alignment of Left and Right with specific political views gets undone in the wake of xenophobic gay rights and women’s rights discourses. While elsewhere, particularly the U.S., conservative social views issue from a combined homophobic and racist milieu, Wekker rightly argues that in the Dutch case seemingly feminist and gay rights’ discourses are closely aligned with malignant notions of cultural alterity and racial/ethnic/cultural inferiority. Hence the subtitle of the chapter ‘Or, Where did all the Critical White Gay Men go?’. Wekker rightly argues that women’s emancipation was understood in far more expansive terms including issues of education, employment, child care and sexual violence. The gay liberation movement, on the other hand, argues Wekker quoting existing research, was marked by “the depoliticized character of Dutch gay identity” (116) which was “anchored in domesticity and consumption” (Mepschen et al 2010, 971) and closely linked to normative notions of citizenship and exclusionary notions of nationalism.

Wekker fleshes out this normativity by exposing how a white European understanding of gay identity underwrote both the identification of sexuality of people from other cultures as well as the demand for integration through the rhetoric of exposure in “coming out” discourse and speaking in public. Noting the virtual absence of “white and black, migrant and refugee lesbians” from the current political landscape, as well as the class-blindness of sexual rights discourse, she argues that “the assumption that speaking about one’s sexuality is only natural and thus good for everyone” (121) remains unquestioned. This equation between sexual acts and sexual identity which undergirds sexual rights discourse is singularly white, middle-class, European. Yet, precisely by claiming the status of former victims of homophobia, a nostalgic discourse of defensiveness against minorities is deployed by Dutch gay men.

In addition to an unexamined normativity, Wekker deploys Said’s concept of the cultural archive to situate the ambivalent relationship of desire and disgust which structures much public discourse of white Dutch gay men. The ethnic other (in this case, young men of Moroccan and Turkish backgrounds) is both desired and vilified. Wekker refers to a controversial interview with the late Pim Fortuyn, an openly gay man whose political campaigns targeted primarily those in the Netherlands having an Islamic background. Fortuyn’s stated desire for young Moroccans was matched by a dismissive stance toward their seemingly backward attitude – that is, denial of their homosexuality. Wekker insists that the raced and classed discourse of the white right to avail itself of the bodies of women and men in colonial history emerges precisely in this dialectic of desire and disgust. Thinking through gender, race and sexuality allows Wekker to situate the nostalgic gay rights discourse against minorities within a comparative perspective (with the women’s rights movements) and through an identification of the persistence of colonial modes of thought on coloured bodies and their sexualities. Her analysis punctures a developmental discourse of sexual and gender rights from an intersectional perspective, fleshing out in greater detail an earlier critique by Judith Butler (2008) of the link between history, time and sexuality.

The last full chapter of the book explores the increasingly virulent reactions in Dutch society to the critique of the figure of Black Pete (Zwarte Piet), often identified as a Moorish servant to a white bishop, Sinterklaas. This cultural tradition accompanied by much festivity is celebrated annually on December 5. Zwarte Piet’s integral place within tradition, particularly one enjoyed primarily by children, Wekker convincingly argues, helps explain the impassioned responses any anti-racist critique of this figure precipitates. Here the claim of “innocence” is most clearly seen since the figure of the innocent child enjoying a well-established Dutch tradition functions as a mechanism whereby the claim of racism can be denied. Wekker situates a series of controversies, including the cancellation of an artistic intervention around Zwarte Piet by two artists invited by the Van Abbe Museum in 2008, to then analyze the defensive (and aggressive) responses elicited primarily on the internet to critiques of the figure of Zwarte Piet. Deploying Paul Gilroy’s notion of “postcolonial melancholia”, Wekker frames the discourse that claims Zwarte Piet is part of “our” (Dutch) tradition as a melancholic response of sadness where something valuable from colonial history is threatened by the presence of the unwanted outsiders within. Coupled with the continual references to children, and thus a discourse of innocence, the structure of denial and then displacement (foreigners do not understand “our” tradition) generates an aggressively defensive discourse of an innocent white Dutch identity.

Wekker’s argument that whiteness exempts itself from charges of racism through claims of innocence is innovatively built up by moving her analytical gaze across a very disparate range of objects – from TV talk shows, psychoanalytical case study, popular controversies around tradition, literary analysis, and institutional critique. As a method, taking this very varied set of objects as scenes for analysis, often punctuated by tellingly painful and pungent personal anecdotes, makes for refreshing reading since no one disciplinary paradigm with its own privileged object domain prevails. Structuring this wide-ranging series of analyses through the triple-paradox framework helps the reader to situate her attention even as analytical objects shift rapidly. The use of psychoanalytic language (denial, repression, splitting, internalization, displacement) is iconoclastic, since Wekker’s engagement with psychoanalysis is primarily through its generative power evidenced in the work of writers such as Fanon and Césaire, rather than through explicit invocation of Freud and/or Lacan as “masters” of the discourse.

Wekker’s book-length study of White Innocence is untimely. If timeliness means being appropriate, and exhibiting the norms of propriety, then White Innocence speaks to an interlocutor – the white Dutch self – who would find the book inappropriate, and confronting. And that is precisely the book’s aim. One could argue that being untimely, in this sense, is precisely what critique means. Wekker’s scholarly intervention in an increasingly fraught public debate around race exhibits precisely the right sort of untimeliness, that is, puncturing the complacent, consensual and self-deluding image of a small, liberal and innocent nation whose culture is far from racist.

White Innocence is untimely in another sense too. There might be a sense for some readers going through the book that “of course” would be the obvious response to an argument which claims that colonial history and deep structures of racism, misogyny and homophobia structure the white self – that is, a sense of “haven’t we heard this all before?” But this is precisely where the book is untimely in a productive and critical way. For in the Dutch context, as Wekker clearly shows, it is precisely a denial of colonial history, with its attendant intellectual, affective and discursive consequences, that marks the contemporary multicultural scene of politics. The book then is not repeating an argument in an all-too familiar context. Rather, it is inserting a critical analysis into a national context which has strenuously denied any implication in the dark history of colonialism and racism. These two forms of untimeliness make Wekker’s intervention particularly useful in a Dutch political climate unwilling to look critically at its own self-image, as well as for theorists of race beyond the Netherlands who seek to understand how racism manifests itself quite differently in different geo-political contexts.