4. LEFT MODERNITY
1.This expansionary process has been conceived of in a variety of (not incompatible) ways – for instance, through uneven and combined development, spatial fixes, and expanding cycles of hegemony. In each case, though, the expansionary nature of capitalist universalism is readily apparent. See, respectively, Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (London: Verso, 2010); David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (London: Verso, 2006); Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Time (London: Verso, 2009).
2.For a lengthy defence of this claim, see Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013), ¶ 9.4.
3.‘For it is finally the universal … which furnishes the only true denial of established universalisms.’ François Jullien, On the Universal: The Uniform, the Common and Dialogue Between Cultures (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), p. 90.
4.Mark Fisher and Jeremy Gilbert, Reclaim Modernity: Beyond Markets, Beyond Machines (London: Compass, 2014), pp. 12–14.
5.Sandro Mezzadra, ‘How Many Histories of Labor? Towards a Theory of Postcolonial Capitalism’, European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, 2012, at eipcp.net.
6.Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero, 2009).
7.Similar arguments have also been made about postmodernity. See Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991).
8.Peter Wagner, Modernity: Understanding the Present (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), p. 23.
9.For a similar argument with respect to ‘development’, see Kalyan Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and PostColonial Capitalism (New Delhi: Routledge India, 2013), p. 92.
10.To give a sense of this variety, Jameson outlines fourteen different proposals for the beginning of modernity as historical period. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), p. 32.
11.Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (London: Verso, 2010); Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
12.Chibber, Postcolonial Theory, p. 233.
13.We seek to follow Susan Buck-Morss when she writes: ‘The rejection of Western-centrism does not place a taboo on using the tools of Western thought. On the contrary, it frees the critical tools of the Enlightenment … for original and creative application.’ Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (London: Verso, 2003), p. 99.
14.Wang Hui, The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity (London: Verso, 2011), pp. 69–70.
15.Göran Therborn, European Modernity and Beyond: The Trajectory of European Societies, 1945–2000 (London: Sage, 1995), p. 4.
16.Jameson, Singular Modernity, p. 18.
17.Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
18.Simon Critchley, ‘Ideas for Modern Living: The Future’, Guardian, 21 November 2010.
19.Kamran Matin, ‘Redeeming the Universal: Postcolonialism and the Inner Life of Eurocentrism’, European Journal of International Relations 19: 2 (2013), p. 354.
20.Walt Whitman Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
21.Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. xxiv–xxv.
22.S. N. Eisenstadt, ‘Multiple Modernities’, Daedalus 129: 1 (2000), p. 1.
23.Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1997); Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity, 1991).
24.David Priestland, The Red Flag: A History of Communism (New York: Grove, 2009).
25.Stephen Eric Bronner, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 28.
26.Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, transl. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).
27.Walter Mignolo and He Weihua, ‘The Prospect of Harmony and the Decolonial View of the World’, Marxism and Reality 4 (2012).
28.Wagner, Modernity, p. 81.
29.S. N. Eisenstadt, ‘Multiple Modernities’, Daedalus 129: 1 (2000).
30.For contemporary reflections on this concept, see the debates collected in Alex Anievas, ed., Marxism and World Politics: Contesting Global Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2012).
31.For a philosophical–political–religious genealogy of the universal, see Jullien, On the Universal, Chapters 4–7.
32.It should be clear that the discussion of the universal here is within a political rather than a philosophical register.
33.Étienne Balibar, ‘Sub Specie Universitatis’, Topoi 25: 1–2 (2006), p. 11.
34.Broadly, we can divide these criticisms between Latin American decolonialism, South Asian subaltern studies and African postcolonialism, which each inflect modernity and colonialism through their regional history.
35.Mignolo, Darker Side of Western Modernity.
36.Ibid., Chapter 2; Ramón Grosfoguel, ‘Decolonizing Western UniVersalisms: Decolonial Pluri-Versalism from Aimé Césaire to the Zapatistas’, transl. George Ciccariello-Maher, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1: 3 (2012).
37.Jullien, On the Universal, p. 92.
38.Jullien argues that Islamic thought does have a degree of ethico-political universal normativity, but this is in any case significantly less apparent than that emerging from European modernity and is qualified by the priority given to community (ibid., p. 74). John Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Amartya Sen, ‘East and West: The Reach of Reason’, New York Review of Books 47: 12 (2000).
39.‘The project of provincializing Europe cannot … originate from the stance that the reason/science/universals that help define Europe as the modern are simply “culture-specific” and therefore only belong to the European cultures. [This] simple rejection of modernity would be, in many situations, politically suicidal.’ Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 43–5; Matin, ‘Redeeming the Universal, Duy Lap Nguyen, ‘The Universal Province of Modernity’, Interventions 16: 3 (2014), p. 447; Mignolo, Darker Side of Western Modernity, p. 275.
40.There have been a number of alternative approaches posed in light of the critiques of classic substantialist universalism. We will not elaborate on them here, but a few quick comments are in order. ‘Negative universalism’ grounds universalism on a common opposition, but this remains a folk-political, defensive and negative approach. It does not elaborate an alternative future. ‘Minimal universalism’ argues for a few basic principles common to all, but is simply a reduced version of classical universalism and remains subject to all its problems. Finally, ‘pluri-versalism’ is the most intriguing perspective, and the one we would most closely align with. It argues for self-determination of cultures in mutual horizontal engagement. But it requires three quick comments. First, it neglects the medium of engagement between cultures, which we argue requires a sophisticated theory of reasoning in order to avoid domination. (See Anthony Laden’s work for a non-dominating and collective conception of reasoning.) Secondly, it rightly opposes a homogeneous vision of universalism, but overlooks the ways in which universalism can already incorporate the sorts of differences it highlights. Pluri-versalism too easily suggests neglecting the common aspect required in a globalised world. Humanity exists not simply as mutually exclusive ways of being, but instead as a deeply intertwined set of differences. Thirdly, pluri-versalism recognises that capitalist universalism needs to be eliminated first in order for it to stand a chance. Until then, it is bound to resistance and defensive gestures against expansionary capitalism. Pluri-versalism thus relies upon the elimination of capitalism and is dependent upon a counter-hegemonic postcapitalist project as its presupposed condition of existence. The problem of universalism – especially actually-existing universalism – cannot be dispensed with by theoretical fiat. Grosfoguel, ‘Decolonizing Western UniVersalisms’, p. 101; Bhikhu Parekh, ‘Non-Ethnocentric Universalism’, in Tim Dunne and Nicholas J. Wheeler, eds, Human Rights in Global Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 128–59; Mignolo, Darker Side of Western Modernity, p. 275; Anthony Simon Laden, Reasoning: A Social Picture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
41.Ernesto Laclau, ‘Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Constitution of Political Logics’, in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, eds, Contingency, Hegemony and Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2011).
42.Nora Sternfeld, ‘Whose Universalism Is It?’, transl. Mary O’Neill, 2007, at eipcp.net; Jullien, On the Universal, p. 92.
43.Butler, ‘Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism’, in Butler et al., Contingency, Hegemony and Universality, pp. 33.
44.Stefan Jonsson, ‘The Ideology of Universalism’, New Left Review II/63 (May–June 2010), p. 117.
45.Matin, ‘Redeeming the Universal’.
46.For the classic reference point on negative freedom, see Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Henry Hardy, ed., Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
47.Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), Chapter 1.
48.Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (London: Routledge, 2006).
49.This has overlaps with Philippe van Parijs’s (as well as many other theorists’) distinction between formal and real freedom, but the notion of ‘synthetic’ freedom highlights that it is not a natural aspect of humanity, but something constructed. See Philippe Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All: What (If Anything) Can Justify Capitalism? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 21–4.
50.Daniel Raventós, Basic Income: The Material Conditions of Freedom, transl. Julie Wark (London: Pluto, 2007), p. 68; Mignolo, Darker Side of Western Modernity, pp. 300–1.
51.Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (London: Prometheus, 1976), p. 44.
52.Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, 2nd edn (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 65.
53.As Erik Olin Wright puts it, ‘The idea of “flourishing” includes not just the development of human intellectual, psychological and social capacities during childhood, but also the lifelong opportunity to exercise those capacities, and to develop new capacities as life circumstances change.’ Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (London: Verso, 2010), pp. 47–8.
54.There is no strict order of preference for these three elements, even though the remainder of this book will focus predominantly on the first.
55.Alex Gourevitch, ‘Labor Republicanism and the Transformation of Work’, Political Theory 41: 4 (2013), p. 597.
56.Slavoj Žižek, ‘Utopia and Its Discontents’, interview with Slawomir Sierakowski, 23 February 2015, at lareviewofbooks.org.
57.Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit (New York: International Publishers, 1976), p. 54; Grundrisse: Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, transl. Martin Nicolaus (Middlesex: Penguin, 1973), p. 706; and Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume III (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977), p. 820.
58.There is an alternative republican argument for this position, which rightly argues that wage labour involves domination (as distinct from interference), and that only the provision of the basic means of existence enables us to overcome this domination. This tradition has a long line of thinkers associated with it, from Aristotle to Robespierre to nineteenth-century labour activists. While we will not rely on it here to support the argument for a post-work society, it nevertheless has important contributions to make over and above liberal conceptions of freedom. See Raventós, Basic Income, Chapter 3; Gourevitch, ‘Labor Republicanism and the Transformation of Work’, pp. 593–8.
59.Antonella Corsani, ‘Beyond the Myth of Woman: The Becoming-Transfeminist of (Post-)Marxism’, transl. Timothy S. Murphy, SubStance 36: 1 (2007), p. 127.
60.For this argument, see Parijs, Real Freedom for All, pp. 17–20.
61.This shares similarities with the ideas of power-with and power-to. See Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory (London: Pluto Press, 2007), pp. 54–5; John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today (London/Sterling, VA: Pluto, 2002), p. 28.
62.Laden, Reasoning, pp. 14–23; Gordon, Anarchy Alive!, p. 54.
63.For the notion of language as cognitive scaffolding, see Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), Chapter 3.
64.Cited in Gregory Elliott, Althusser: The Detour of Theory (Leiden: Brill, 2006), p. 16.
65.Krafft Ehricke, ‘The Extraterrestrial Imperative’, Air University Review, February 1978.
66.Marx and Engels, German Ideology, p. 44.
67.For a defence of this Promethean spirit, see Ray Brassier, ‘Prometheanism and Its Critics’, in Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, eds, #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014).
68.For an earlier, historicized interpretation of our cyborg nature, see Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991). For a contemporary updating, see the Laboria Cuboniks manifesto in Helen Hester and Armen Avanessian, eds, Dea Ex Machina (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2015).
69.Benedict Singleton, ‘Maximum Jailbreak’, in Mackay and Avanessian, #Accelerate.
70.Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (London: Verso, 2014), pp. 144–5.
71.Sadie Plant, ‘Binary Sexes, Binary Codes’, 3 June 1996, at future-nonstop.org.
72.Reza Negarestani, ‘The Labor of the Inhuman’, in Mackay and Avanessian, #Accelerate, 452.
73.Ibid., p. 438.
74.For examples of these parochial defences, see Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (Cambridge: Polity, 2003); Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (London: Profile, 2003).
75.For two fascinating accounts of bodily experimentation, see Shannon Bell, Fast Feminism (New York: Autonomedia, 2010); and Beatriz Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (New York: Feminist Press CUNY, 2013).
76.The remainder of this book will be concerned mostly with the first two aspects of synthetic freedom: the basic conditions of existence, and the collective capacities to act. We will, however, return to the technological augmentation of humanity in the Conclusion.
77.Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), p. 106.