In the crystal palace of modernity, the signs of Progress were put on display.. Here is exhibit a, the railway; here is exhibit b, the workhouse, exhibit c, the new labour laws..
Return now to the typical address of political leaders in the times we're living. Whenever they face contestation, they have to hide what is happening by swiftly erecting a wall of opaque words. The conclusion of Jacques Chirac's address was a perfect example: instead of challenging the false concept of modernisation, its brutal dismantling is referred to as if it were some chapter in natural science. "The world of work", as the president announced, "in perpetual evolution....."The economy (rather than this economic system) has its own mechanisms and laws. To be intelligent is to recognise - the objectivity of the economy’s workings and, therefore, your comparative impotence; to recognise that our fate is to be the managers, clerks, administrators; to salute, or assist with guile, what is in any case inevitable - . Progress, Modernisation, the New…..
The particular world organised by capitalism is the Universal; it is synonymous with the natural development of humanity as such. The ideas which function in this particular situation for this particular class or group are universal ideas. 'Modernization' on behalf of humanity etc
An Enlightenment concept: Ideology. Withholding the human world from humanity by dressing it up as nature, as the unfolding of reason, as a process without a subject. An Enlightenment task: to reveal instances where what is taken for nature, or passed off as nature, is in fact merely custom or human contrivance, or even merely the alibi of the powerful; to show that what is proclaimed as a universal - Progress, Modernisation, is only the attempt to place a particular organisation of the world beyond scrutiny and discussion. Demonstrating that something is custom or convention, or mere deception, rather than a fact of nature, is to deliver it into the hands of humanity.
“But, once their nature is understood, they can, in the hands of the producers working together, be transformed from master demons into willing servants”
2 comments:
The vague and ambiguous language with which Chirac and other politicians assert their impotence in the face of the natural laws of the economy, reminded me of this Badiou quote (copy-edited machine translation):
'Everybody says to us these days "there are laws of the economy and it is not possible to escape those laws". Therefore, the economic universe is a universe that forces. And they know that this is an essential argument of all the present governmental policies: "We are forced to do what we do because the economy is what is". So it can clearly be seen that the economy is a power, in the sense in that it forces us to do this or to do that. But, what exactly is this power? If I say it like this: what is the power of this power? We must obey, but why? In a certain sense nobody knows the answer. Then we can see that it is a variable and indeterminate power and we are forced to obey in a much stronger way when we do not know the nature of that power. I think that this is a fundamental characteristic of the State. The State is a power, but nobody can determine this power. And for that reason we are submitted, because we do not know the power which we are under. It continues being indeterminate, vague, absolute. What a movement does, is to determine a point, which is the power of the State. It is important to explain this in some detail, because in my view this is central in what it says about the question of politics. When there is a true political event it is an end to the indeterminate character of the power of the State. People rise and say "this is the power of the State right in front of us". It is as we say that it is. In other words, a movement is what fixes a measurement of the power of the State. It is something that forces the State to show what it power really is. And for that same reason a part of the submission stops.'
listening to the bbc this morning and they were interviewing a member of chirac's party about the cpe law being scrapped, and he is bemoaning how the french do not believe enough in the market, and he adds 'in brazil they believe the law of the market is just like the law of gravity'...
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