Apophatic Marxism by China Mieville

Once there had been the subterranean language with the underground forces. If speech at all then it was the spaces between words, and the echoes the words left, or what might be really meant under the surface.

     Ann Quin, ‘The Unmapped Country’

    The problem with Marxism is Marxists. Having

    discovered this world system, they are persuaded

    they have acquired a hammer-lock on infallibility.

      Jim Higgins, ‘More Years for the Locust’

A week has rarely been so long a time in politics: these are not just terrible but terribly strange times. Events deemed impossible by erudite observers, including on the left, refuse to cease to occur. Any model presuming the possibility of political certainty is a liability. The breakdown of old algorithms occasions epistemological crisis: hence liberalism’s panicked lachrymosity, the outrage of denied entitlement, conspiracism and self-righteousness. For the radical Left, the best response to the times is to replace protest-too-much business-as-usual with the perspicacity of failure. Where we can fill gaps in our understanding, we must; but perhaps we should start with the suspicion that we can’t. Political humility demands not new certainties for old, but a new, less certain way.

With such humility should come grief appropriate to the epoch. ‘Don’t mourn,’ goes the Left injunction, ‘organise.’ A bullying disavowal. How can we organise except through mourning? And in these loud days, shaking as they do with the blare of capitalism’s death drive, how could anyone consider the subtle buried tongue Quin describes and not count it among that for which we mourn?

But it is not in fact dead. It was, rather, always-already quiet and interred. Here at least our elegy is for what abides. On our submerged, resistant, tunnelling way, with those underground forces, we might encounter the subterranean language, hear it deeper than our ears, open our mouths to find it within. We might speak it to mourn it.

Marx, famously, did not describe in any detail the free, classless future for which he strove. In a preface to Capital, he announced himself disinclined to detain himself ‘writing recipes … for the cook-shops of the future’, mocking those who criticized him on this point (‘imagine!’).

When in The German Ideology, Marx insists that communism is not ‘an ideal to which reality will have to conform itself’ but ‘the real movement which abolishes the present condition’, it is precisely the immanence of a radical alterity that precludes its being spoken. Whatever Marx may at times have thought, or thought he thought, was possible, whatever passing glimmers of vision one might glean from him, it is no surprise that he never, despite Engels’ pleas, wrote ‘the famous Positive, what you “really” want’. Because ‘[w]hat we have here’, as Colin O’Connell astutely puts it in ‘Marxism and the Logic of Futural  Discourse  ‘is an image of the future primarily based on the via negativa.’

July 1917, Petrograd. The mood tense and militant. There was popular hunger for action, even insurgency. The Bolshevik leadership were more cautious. They prepared an appeal for the front page of their paper Pravda, pleading for readers not to come onto the streets. But with scant hours to go, late at night, they realized that Petrograd’s masses would not heed their injunction: the next day would bring great demonstrations. Ignored, disobeyed, the words would be an embarrassment. But there was neither time nor focus to replace it, nor any certainty of what the party line should be. The offending piece was simply cut.

Thus on 4 July 1917, when Pravda hit the streets, its front page was a masterpiece of unintended activist apophasis, rich in what Catherine Robson has said of poetry is the ‘aura of unmarked space’. In the center of the page was a white, textless hole.

From our vantage point in history, and whatever one’s view of the ‘necessity’ or otherwise of ‘the party’ for a socialist project, that silence evokes more loudly than any words humility appropriate to the twists of politics. That it was unplanned, a surrender of tactic-less comrades, does not undermine its status as apophatic Marxist declaration nonpareil . What more appropriate text could there be to inaugurate our docta ignoranta than the wordless declaration of the July Days?

It is from scraps and practices, then, from hints and intuitions, that we might construct an apophatic Marxism, certain of the indispensability of silence, and of the limits of certainty, and negate the current neon spectrum of  modern factualism .

‘I will not legitimate their issues by responding’ says the enfant terrible of French letters Édouard Louis, of the fascist Front National. ‘Silence has to be a part of our progress. We have to put silence at the center of politics today. Stop responding to the questions, stop letting them control the language, the debate, the agenda.’ An apophatic rebuke to any social-democratic utopianism of ‘dialogism’, of communicative rationality, of jaw-jaw, of the word.


A strictly cataphatic (affirmative) Marxism is, at best, in denial. A Marxism afraid of silence is a Marxism afraid of the declaratory. It is afraid of politics. It is afraid of the human, and of that fear that it perceives in itself. And it is afraid, too, of the vatic and exhortatory. Apophatic Marxism might be not only more curious and rigorous, but more subtle and effective in its interventions than any silence-less Marxism. Apophasis may not be sufficient, but it is necessary.

There are those for whom such apophatic Marxist eschatology is dereliction. On the left, some insist that blueprints for a realistic alternative, the more precise the better, will be the most effective mobilizer. And on the right, the absence thereof is grounds for scorn. ‘Get rid of capitalism’, the naughty’s  banner read, ‘and replace it with something nicer’, and critics assailed that apophatic slogan. The economist John Kay derided its ‘incoherence’, and Timothy Ash wagged a finger at activists ‘much better at pointing out the failings of global capitalism than they are at suggesting systemic alternatives’.

But such sneers redound on the sneerers. It is their imaginations that are impoverished, blind not only (in the case of anti-socialists) to the necessity of a better future, but to its sheer otherness. The request that capitalism be replaced with ‘something nicer’ should be criticized – for its tweeness, its mannered, unthreatening cuteness in place of the fire and salt the moment demands. Its apophasis, however, is by far its best element.

It is in such unsaying, rather than in anxious left assurance that the world can be said, that true radical Prometheanism inheres. What holds for the beyond, a post-capitalism of emancipation, holds too for the wrench by which it might be reached. Apophasis of communism means apophasis of revolution. The break with the social lie must contain surplus beyond expression, to be utter enough a rupture. The revolution, like its blessings, is inexpressible, and yet, tantalizingly, it is on the tip of the tongue. Such proximity, that the void out of which the rupture could emerge is the everyday world, superpositions hope and anguish. An expression of which is the lament, a recognition of catastrophe.

Catastrophe can render us speechless, can hide beyond words. Trauma, says the psychoanalyst Annie Rogers, ‘can become mixed up with something that is unthinkable, and therefore un-sayable’. According to Terry Eagleton: Money for Marx is a kind of monstrous sublimity, an infinitely spawning signifier which has severed all relation with the real, a fantastical idealism which blots out specific value as surely as those more conventional figures of sublimity – the raging ocean, the mountain crags – engulf all particular identities in their unbounded excess. The sublime, for Marx as for Kant, is Das Unform, the formless or monstrous.

To predict or hope that the numinous would disappear beyond capitalism, in a plenitudinous communism, is a faith position. That it would at the very least be utterly transformed, psychically and socially, is hardly in doubt. But even in conditions whereby the last scrap of theistic belief has ended – which eventuality, notwithstanding any bullish left faith in the Withering Away of religion, is also perfectly moot – it does not follow that the psychic surplus, the beyond, the unsayable, will become sayable. No such prediction is rigorously argued, and nor is it prima facie desirable.


https://www.patreon.com/posts/silence-in-24723065?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=postshare

The Catastrophic State of Public services in France by Wladimir Garcin-Berson

Le Figaro ,Updated on 12/03/2019 at 18:25 Published on 12/03/2019 at 09:35

In its annual report, the institution headed by Jacques Toubon is worried about the alarming state of public services in France, and recalls that their gradual disappearance can only increase the anger that rises territories, especially rural.

This is an irrevocable fact: in France, public services are in disrepair, especially in rural areas, putting users on the wall. In its annual report published Tuesday, the Defender of Rights warns of the "decline of public services" increasingly perceptible throughout the territory, even as a "policy of strengthening security and repression against the threat of terrorism "Unfolds in parallel. This abandonment of citizens can fuel anger that subsequently explode in the street, such as "yellow vests," said the representative of the institution, Jacques Toubon, in this document rich in lessons.

Justice, hospitals, medicine ... For the Defender of Rights, public services are victims of a "growing evanescence", at the national and local levels. "Remote", "withdrawn", "unable to manage complex situations" and poorly established in the territory, they no longer meet the needs of users, too often melt in silence and close gradually, victims of a logic of budgetary economy. "In many cases, the difficulties that users have to overcome" are similar to "less failures than obstacles" set up "more or less deliberately by the public authorities", the report is astonished. These successive genes widen the distance between users and public authorities and considerably complicate the lives of citizens. "The user must now demonstrate an ability to" fend for themselves "in his administrative career," notes the document.

This situation, already pointed out in the past, does not settle with the years, quite the opposite: the institution headed by the former minister estimates that it is accelerating, now affecting all territories and all populations. A particularly worrying setback, as public services may be the last - if not the only - recourse of the most fragile individuals: their disappearance therefore creates a risk of "inequalities" and geographical and economic "segregation". Moreover, this evolution leaves the door open to a "worrying regression of fundamental rights" of which the citizens would be the first victims.

A distance more and more perceptible

This distance provokes the anger of the users, who are more and more numerous to appeal to the Defender of Rights to bring their demands. Its services received 95,836 claim files, a number that increased by 6.1% over the year and 13% over two years only. Utility complaints represent an overwhelming majority of the claims received by Defender teams, representing 93% of the total. They can affect various areas, such as the delay in the payment of certain pensions or the extension of "medical deserts".

Completely outdated, public services can no longer manage the demands expressed by citizens, says the text, which cites the example of retirement pensions: "insured persons have been waiting for the effective liquidation of their benefit several months after their cessation of activity, which, for those with modest incomes, may have posed insurmountable difficulties ".

The halftone balance sheet of dematerialization

The report also highlights the inequalities in the Internet coverage of the territory: while the government wants to accelerate the dematerialization of the public service, especially for a financial purpose, the institution considers that this transformation may leave a non-negligible number of citizens on the Internet. tile. Today, 7.5 million people are threatened with "digital exclusion": without a quality internet network, they will not be able to benefit fully from these online services. We must therefore accompany people to digital, especially in small towns, and keep "physical reception areas of users," advises the document.

Quoted in the report, the general delegate for mediation with the public services, Bernard Dreyfus, relies on the example of the digitization of the issue of gray cards, which produced "calamitous effects". The man holds very harsh words against this evolution, victim of a "huge failure" depriving "hundreds of thousands" of French titles for "several months". If the internet can be a way to reconnect citizens with their public services, the thing can not be done in a cost reduction logic, on pain of being a "palliative" insufficient or even counterproductive, notes the text.

The rising anger of the French

And the consequences of the gradual abandonment of territories by public services do not stop there: questioned by AFP, Jacques Toubon explains that the demands of users reflect "the feeling of injustice and inequality" felt by a increasing part of the population, forced to travel many kilometers to access basic services. The former minister reminds that this is one of the main drivers of the movement of "yellow vests", and that this situation is not new: it is the fruit of long years of evolution.

The pursuit of this logic can, therefore, only fuel the fire. "By gradually fading away, the public services that, in France, constitute an essential element of the consent to the tax, hypothesize the redistribution of wealth and the feeling of solidarity", worries Jacques Toubon, resuming a preoccupation already formulated by several elected officials. The high official warns even on a dynamic that undermines "progressively social cohesion" between citizens.

Singles at the heart of the big debate by Romain Huret

Des gilets jaunes près de l'Arc de Triomphe à Paris, le 16 mars 2019. Zakaria Abdelkafi - AFP

Since the beginning of the movement of yellow vests, the figure of the single person haunts the many interpretations, often hasty, but always evoking the specific part of the men and the unmarried women. Humorously, some have even created dating sites for yellow vests in search of great love; with lucidity, others recalled the importance of militant conviviality for people who are often isolated. But their presence on the roundabouts owes less to the bagatelle than to the continuous deterioration of their social and professional situation. Isolated women, single mothers, men living alone, people with disabilities often share not only significant participation in the movement, but also similar marital status. Demographic data, collected by some social scientists in surveys in the process of publication, set an average age of around 47, and many of the yellow vests are not married. Subject to further studies, we are therefore in the presence of almost "definitive" singles to use the categorization of demographers.

The social, professional and political difficulties of this age group are not only French. In an important analysis of what they call the "deaths of despair" in the United States, Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have shown a similar deterioration in social indicators for men and women whose age is between 40 and 55 years, and among them, once again, a high number of singles. As they observe, their mortality rate has been rising continuously for thirty years. . . .

In French cases, earlier work on poverty and inequality also emphasized the great precariousness of singles, with or without children. As early as December 2018, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe was moved by the importance of single-parent families and the great difficulties of women living alone. But, beyond the legitimate emotion, and if the great debate must lead to something other than the expression of wishful thinking, it seems important to us to rethink the place of singles in countries whose social order has been built on the primacy given to traditional families.

For forty years, the number of single people has increased steadily in our societies, and if we take into account the divorced and widowed, the increase is only stronger. This growth is inseparable from that of inequality. Singles are the main victims of contemporary vulnerabilities because of an invisible world of discrimination. US researchers have coined the term "singlism" to refer to this multitude of devices that weaken already precarious work and family situations. From access to housing through insurance contracts or transportation costs, there is an invisible premium for traditional families, thus legitimizing the marital order. Anyone who has sought to rent an apartment alone, to obtain a bank loan alone or to buy insurance alone knows the difficulties, sometimes insurmountable, to obtain the desired product. And these social devices owe nothing to chance; they are rooted in ancient practices, deeply rooted in the marital order built throughout the twentieth century.

This celibacy contrasts with the tax penalty paid by single people in the majority of tax codes in the Western world. If they are taxable, they pay proportionally more taxes than married couples. It goes without saying that indirect taxes also weigh heavily on individuals who have only their salary (or social assistance) for any income. For a long time, for the sake of reciprocity, specific programs for these more fragile populations had compensated for this difference. For thirty years, budget cuts in many social programs have reduced these compensations and this specific support. Unsurprisingly, singles are proportionally very well represented in the poorest strata of our societies.

These inequalities are reinforced by important gender schemes. In a beautiful book on rental evictions in the United States, Evicted (2016), sociologist Matthew Desmond portrays the plight of African-American women living alone, who make up a large proportion of the expelled. Accumulating odd jobs, raising their children alone in the illusory waiting for the arrival of alimony, they can not make ends meet and find themselves quickly on the street. In France, the data goes in the same direction: single people, with or without children, join the ranks of people who are expelled every year from their homes. The United States example also invites us not to neglect men, even if the difficulties are different. In their study on the deaths of desperation, mentioned above, Case and Deaton recall their specific pathologies (suicide, massive consumption of opiates, junk food, job insecurity).

Finally, the situation of single people often deteriorates over the different ages of life, due to the dislocation of family solidarity. With time, and the disappearance of family members, often older, loneliness and precariousness become more pronounced. This important point could be an explanatory factor for the data collected on the specific age of yellow vests; he already explains the specific difficulties of singles in the United States.

If the big debate is to open a reflection on our society and its most recent transformations, not taking into account the specific and all-encompassing category of single people would be a mistake. It is not a question of returning to the conservative marriage injunction, but rather of reflecting on the strength of the marital order and its inadequacy with the new social configurations. Rethinking the social, professional, tax and symbolic systems that have traditionally relegated singles to a lower status for married people would be a good start in laying the foundations for a more egalitarian society.

Romain Huret completes a work temporarily entitled Les Oubliés de la Valentine. Singles, social order and inequalities in the United States (20th-21st centuries) to appear in France and the United States.

Romain Huret director of studies at EHESS, historian of the United States

Liberation 27.03.19
Translated by Google