AK THOMPSON
Take note of this one thing (for it is late):
Your fine philosophy, good sirs, you may proclaim
But till you feed us, right and wrong can wait!
—Ginny Jenny, in Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera, act 2, scene 3
For many comrades who came of age (as I did) at the end of history, George Katsiaficas made Herbert Marcuse’s intellectual and political legacy real. For, while we struggled as undergraduates to grasp the significance of “repressive desublimation,” “surplus repression,” and other similar formulations, Katsiaficas’ “eros effect” seemed to speak to us directly. We could feel it on the street, at the riot, in those moments when elation meant our hearts might burst. First elaborated in The Imagination of the New Left1 at a time when, wherever one looked, third-rate poststructuralists could be found feasting on the desiccated corpse of the humanist tradition, the eros effect stands out today as one of the most vital recent intellectual contributions to the Marcusian legacy—and not solely because, whereas many of Marcuse’s insights concerned the critique of existing reality, Katsiaficas coined the terms that might help us to describe the moment of ecstatic transformation itself.
Following Marcuse’s insight that there was a “biological foundation for socialism” that could be traced back to human “inclinations … and aspirations” that “become vital needs” (and that might even “cause dysfunction” if left unsatisfied),2 Katsiaficas zeroed in on those mass insurgencies that, at given moments, seemed spontaneously to erupt around the world. In this view, although capitalism normally repressed our best instincts, global uprisings—like those that took place in 1848, 1968, and even in our most recent history of protest camps and occupied squares—had the power to restore fundamental aspects of our humanity. Indeed, by Katsiaficas’ account, social movements themselves were notable for being important means by which people have historically “sublimated their basic need to become better human beings.”3 At its threshold, “sublimating Eros” so that it might (once again) find concrete and humanizing expression becomes the very substance of revolutionary activity.4
I first read The Imagination of the New Left in the mid-to-late ’90s while struggling to complete my undergraduate degree between organizing meetings and court dates. The timing could not have been more perfect. Katsiaficas’ Romanticism emboldened my own. Little wonder, then, that I stashed his book in my backpack as I made the trek to various turn-of-the-century trade summits where I witnessed comrades throw down like there was no tomorrow. Never had I felt more alive, and the eros effect provided a language for that feeling. When my own belated, post-festum analysis of those protests was published a decade later, it seemed obvious that I would ask Katsiaficas to blurb my book; I was exceptionally grateful when he obliged.5
But while the conceptual value and emotional force of the eros effect seemed self-evident to me at the time, further consideration has led me to catalog a variety of reservations concerning its analytic clarity. In a footnote to The Subversion of Politics, Katsiaficas characterized the eros effect as referring to “the sudden, intuitive awakening of solidarity”6 that arises from the fact that “the politics of eros infuse everyday life with a content that subverts its would-be colonizers and preserves it as a reservoir of the life-force.” Consequently, “the ‘eros effect’ indicates how social movements are an expression of people’s loving connectedness with each other.” And more: “movement participation … preserves and expands the domain of the heart—of all that is uniquely human, all that stands opposed to machine culture.”7 Tinged though they may be with a sentimentality that seems at odds with our own era’s waning affect, these appear to be straightforward definitions. Nevertheless, by Katsiaficas’ own admission, “much research remains to be done” before the dynamics of “spontaneous solidarity” or the “actions generated by popular upsurges” might truly be understood.8
Since the publication of The Subversion of Politics, Katsiaficas has committed himself to this research in a steadfast manner. Indeed, the release of Asia’s Unknown Uprisings—a massive tome weighing in at a thousand pages over two volumes—is testament to this.9 However, even a cursory review of these contributions makes clear that Katsiaficas’ orientation has primarily been historical rather than analytic in character. Moreover, since (as concept) the eros effect has been both defined by and described through reference to the events that are said to give it expression, the elaboration of its attributes has followed an overwhelmingly tautological course. Given the conceptual primacy it has been afforded in Katsiaficas’ oeuvre, it is in fact remarkable that the eros effect has remained as analytically indeterminate as it has.
Although I continue to be drawn to the eros effect and the horizon toward which it points, it benefits no one to hold analytic reservations in abeyance. Among these reservations, perhaps the most significant is the fact that, while Katsiaficas seems to have accurately described one means by which revolutionary activity becomes contagious,10 it is not clear that his concept—despite claims to the contrary—properly describes the compulsion that leads people toward revolutionary action in the first place. Locating this compulsion and specifying its dimensions is of tremendous analytic importance, not least because it would help to delimit the scope of (and clarify the relationship between) various moments in the process of social change. In keeping with the principle that analysis without consequence is meaningless, however, we must acknowledge that such a clarification would be of significant strategic importance as well.
Indeed, even a cursory review of the revolutionary tradition affirms that different analytic assessments to what might provisionally be called “the motivation question” have lent themselves to vastly different strategic emphases. Unconvinced that people were spurred into action by triumphant moral visions, Marx refuted the prescriptions of the utopian socialists in order to place emphasis on the practical elaboration of concrete historical contradictions instead.11 A useful corrective to what had come before, this perspective was nevertheless amended half a century later by Georg Lukács, who foregrounded how the problem of consciousness suggested that relying upon the scientific presentation of revolutionary possibility was insufficient when it came to achieving revolutionary aims.12 Further developed by Gramsci, this line of reasoning ascended to the level of strategy.13 Here, it gained prominence on the shifting terrain of a war of position we continue to fight today.
As currently elaborated, the eros effect suggests an analytic orientation to the problem of revolutionary motivation with implicit strategic implications (I say “implicit” because Katsiaficas himself has been reluctant to propose means of operationalizing his theory—or even of acknowledging that such an aim is feasible or desirable).14 However, since there can be no revolution without strategy, and since the merit of any given strategy is contingent upon the clarity of the analysis upon which it is founded (and, further, since any analysis that does not lend itself to strategic application is doomed from the outset to become an object of scholastic contemplation), revolution itself demands that the eros effect be subjected—as concept, and not just as event—to the most exacting scrutiny.
Katsiaficas has indicated his willingness to engage in such a critical assessment. Indeed, when recounting the revolutionary limitations of the global insurgency of 1968, he acknowledges that the movement’s emphasis on erotic spontaneity did not allow people to meet their revolutionary objectives. Consequently, “to rely on the awakening of a global eros effect alone to transform the world system would be shortsighted.”15 Such an admission is important; however, if relying solely upon the eros effect is not enough, it remains to be determined what else might be required.
Though it may at first seem paradoxical, perhaps what is lacking from this analysis is an engagement with lack itself.
In The Subversion of Politics and elsewhere, Katsiaficas has made his commitment to dialectical reasoning explicit. This orientation is in keeping with his professed intellectual allegiance to Herbert Marcuse and to the Marxist tradition more broadly. Nevertheless, and despite these stated commitments, Katsiaficas’ work seems to ascribe a positive and even ennobling a priori content to human nature (a nature that, though debased by capitalism, might nevertheless be salvaged). Despite the fact that dialectical reasoning should generate an account of human ontology that reveals it to be at odds with normative prescriptions, one is hard-pressed when reading Katsiaficas to avoid detecting his strong investment in what might be considered a kind of a foundational will toward freedom. Although currently debased by capitalism, spontaneous global uprisings themselves suggest that this will (this freedom) might be recovered should conditions prove right. Such a recovery is both the historical task assigned to the eros effect and the evidence enlisted to buttress its conceptual validity. Wherever the emphasis is placed, however, it becomes clear that the eros effect is unimaginable when deprived of the normative groundwork through which it is said to find expression.
It is therefore not surprising that, for Katsiaficas, the eros effect manifests itself as a kind of mass awakening (of return as completion) that simultaneously provokes, is stimulated by, and helps to further global insurrection. Indeed, such insurrectionary moments are said to reactivate fundamental aspects of our being through “intuition, identification, and other processes.” In turn, these affective-mimetic processes allow for genuine and affirming human bonds once again to be forged.16 In the preface to Subversion of Politics, Katsiaficas describes the eros effect as “the capacity of human beings to grasp instinctually the gestalt of a movement.” Consequently, upon being activated, it “connects our species at essential levels of life.”17 This may well be the case. However, before deciding that it is so, it remains necessary to ask: What, for Katsiaficas, constitute the “essential levels” of life?
Although the answer is not immediately evident, there is little point in denying that, as a Romantic postulate contesting the reason/emotion dichotomy that has plagued bourgeois thought since the seventeenth century (and that continues to find expression in various strands of social movement theory, where “political opportunity” stares down “collective behavior” in a never-ending fratricidal feud), an analysis that trades in “essential levels” and in things that are “instinctually” grasped can’t help but carry an erotic charge. The proposition is not just affectively evocative, however. Indeed, for Katsiaficas, it is also an important corrective to the limitations currently plaguing social movement research. This is because “the inability of empirical research” of the kind carried out by social movement scholars “to comprehend rapidly changing situations and outbreaks” ultimately “makes its usefulness in the study of social movements highly dubious.”18
To put it another way, reading Katsiaficas alongside other—more turgid—submissions to the social movement literature cannot help but yield a feeling similar to the one achieved by contrasting the vision of man championed by the Lake Poets to the one favored by rude mechanical thinkers like René Descartes.19 Indeed, when considered from the standpoint of its affective weight, the eros effect seems perfectly to echo William Wordsworth’s disparagement of formal intellectual pursuits (“enough of science and of art,” he wrote) as he called on people to “come forth and bring with [them] a heart that watches and receives.”20 “The multitude has its own intelligence,” says Katsiaficas. “It’s the intelligence of the life force and the intelligence of the heart. It’s not an intelligence of Cartesian duality. It’s completely different.”21 But despite this Romantic allure, and quite apart from the limits that Katsiaficas has identified with his own preferred line,22 the difficult questions that arise whenever we speak of “essential levels” force us to consider the nature of human nature itself.
Elaborating his perspective through a polemical engagement with social movement theory, Katsiaficas has critiqued the latter for studying “how we fight without considering why we fight.”23 Why, then, do we fight? According to Katsiaficas, the answer must be found in people’s “inner desire for freedom, which is the greatest force for liberation on the planet.”24 Standing in opposition to positions such as those advanced by Hobbes, for whom human nature featured primarily as a foil to justify Leviathan, Katsiaficas seems closer to Rousseau (for whom “man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains”).25 Followed to its logical conclusion, this positive, a priori conception of freedom—this freedom held to be intrinsic to humanity but thwarted by historical accident—becomes an iteration of universal spirit. Transfiguring Hegel’s otherwise historical “cunning of reason” into an inspired intrinsic drive, freedom becomes an “inner desire” propelling the world toward something it had been, in secret, all along.26
It should be admitted that, while positive ontology and dialectical reasoning are normally considered to be antithetical propositions, Katsiaficas has not been alone in following this course. Indeed, one can detect a similar inclination in the work of Walter Benjamin, for whom “our lives … are a muscle strong enough to contract historical time.”27 Similarly, Frantz Fanon described how, through the course of anticolonial struggle, it was “precisely at the moment” when the colonized subject “realizes his humanity that he begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure … victory.”28
But while Katsiaficas seems to share common ground with Benjamin and Fanon by associating recovered humanity with the dialectical process from which it is said to arise and through which it finds expression, he distinguishes himself from them by asserting (despite formally repudiating any telos)29 that the process will yield something he knows—or can anticipate the broad configurations of—in advance. Indeed, Katsiaficas has gone so far as to invoke the mythopoetic foundations of Jungian archetypes to buttress his arguments despite the fact that—as Benjamin noted—such archetypes were the bread and butter of fascism.30 In another related instance, the search for a positive, foundational ontology led him to conclude that the model for human collectivity might best be surmised by contemplating the serene interactions of “caribou, birds, bees and ants.”31
This stands in sharp contrast to the positions advanced by Benjamin and Fanon. Indeed, although Fanon’s “new man” may imply a positive ontology (depending on whether one favors a compound-noun iteration or an adjective-modifier one), Fanon is explicit that “the natives’ challenge to the colonial world is not … a treatise on the universal, but the untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute.”32 From this perspective, it becomes clear that the “new man” is a historical creation whose only a priori is history itself—he is “original” in the sense of distinct rather than foundational, and he comes into being by the same process recounted by Marx in his “Theses on Feuerbach,” where “man must prove the truth—i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice.”33
Although what can be thought at any given moment is finite and restricted, the finitude that marks imagination is not the same as the finitude of body or world. For this reason, imagination introduces a tension into being. It throws the lack deriving from and inherent in our finitude into sharp relief. At the same time, it gives a concrete dimension to our revolutionary objectives as it arrays them across the field of the possible. As Benjamin argued, “our image of happiness is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.”34 From this perspective, revolutionary action doesn’t recover humanity; it abolishes it through an act of sublation. As Marcuse proposed, “liberation” at its threshold comes to “incorporate the universal in the particular protest.”35 In contrast, and at its logical conclusion, Katsiaficas’ positive ontology reveals itself to be the eros effect’s very substance. Like an eternal return—to pure animality, to archetypical form—ecstatic transformation delivers us up to what we always were said to have been.
What are the strategic implications of this position? If the eros effect arises from (returns to) a positive a priori ontology in order that it might find a more complete realization in the present, it follows that we should emphasize forms of self-valorizing activity that can allow people to cultivate those tarnished or disparaged aspects of their being that point toward redemption. Here, politics becomes a process of recognizing and affirming a positive ontology’s positive value. Indeed (and despite what I will demonstrate to be an overarching disposition toward the refusal of positive ontology), Marcuse seems to have had this in mind when he celebrated the way Black music brought its listeners back to themselves by collapsing the interval between the phylogenetic and the ontogenetic.36
If, however, analysis reveals that revolutionary aspirations are stimulated not so much by a normative a priori content but rather by something like a universal experience of lack, then our strategy must be reconsidered. For starters, such an analysis might compel us to contemplate what might be gained by intensifying the experience of lack itself so that the present’s unbearable dimensions might be foregrounded. Strategically enabling,37 this approach is also analytically useful since it helps to make plain the degree to which it is actually lack (and not a positive ontology, whether of human, bee, or caribou provenance) that constitutes the basis upon which the universal might be brought into—and ultimately realized through—the particular as Marcuse proposed. In other words, and in contrast to Katsiaficas’ preferred and arguably antidialectical approach, starting from lack provides a means of connecting the universal to the particular (to the historically finite) without having to specify or speculate about a positive, valorizable content.
What is lack? Although the concept is now commonly associated with Lacan (for whom it was bound to the desire through which it found finite, concrete expression), it’s important to recall that, conceptually, “lack” already played a clear role in Freud’s account of the confrontation between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Here, desire endures the deferral of its gratification while the subject of desire strives (always imperfectly) to transform the world so that its aims might someday be attained. Neuroses then arise from the inevitable imperfections that mar our attempts at reconciliation. Human activity is thus set in motion by the irritation that arises from the irreconcilability of drive and reality. Still, asks the a priori, where do these drives come from? Tempting though it may be to resolve the matter by invoking a positive ontology, another resolution is possible. And here we need to look no further than Marx’s account of human history in The German Ideology, where “the satisfaction of the first need, the action of satisfying and the instrument of satisfaction which has been acquired, leads to new needs.” In this formulation, the “creation of new needs is the first historical act.”38 Indeed, it is what makes us human.
In Capital, Marx recounts how the natural limits of the working day are determined by the need to “rest, sleep, and feed, wash, and clothe” oneself. Meanwhile, the social limits are determined by the need to satisfy “intellectual and social wants, the extent and number of which are conditioned by the general state of social advancement.”39 By highlighting the tendency for the particular character of “wants” to change according to “the general state of social advancement,” Marx reveals why an a priori positive ontology cannot be the basis for revolutionary action. This is so not least because even “natural” limits (e.g., what it might mean, concretely, to “feed, wash, and clothe” oneself at any given moment) prove to be historically specific and subject to change—hence Raoul Vaneigem’s famous rhetorical provocation, circa May ’68: “Who wants a world where the guarantee of freedom from starvation means the risk of death from boredom?”40 However one chooses to answer this query, it’s clear that the content of the experience of lack changes along with the development of human society.
In addition to his analysis of the historical dynamics that give rise to human needs (and, indeed, to humanity itself), Marx further addresses the question of lack through his consideration of the unique role played by imagination in the human labor process. Describing the uniquely human dimension of this process, and contrasting humanity’s efforts to those of bees (though the latter are favored by Katsiaficas), Marx underscores the fact that “the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.”41 Here, imagination signals that which is not yet. It is the force that presages the not yet’s passage into being. The discrepancy between imagination and reality as given is nothing other than lack. By siding with bees, Katsiaficas seems to be at odds with this perspective. Nevertheless, he finds himself nearly echoing Marx when he recounts how the eros effect gives rise to “a chain reaction of insurrections and revolts” in which “new forms of power” emerge and “new visions of the meaning of freedom [are] formulated in the actions of millions of people.”42 In moments such as these, people develop an awareness of “previously non-existent aspects of reality which unexpectedly appear.”43
But while “new visions” are placed in an immediate relationship to “the actions of millions,” their formal conceptual distinction suggests that they might be theoretically parsed. If this is the case (and even if it is not explicit in his work), it becomes possible to imagine how Katsiaficas’ theoretical posture might be reconciled with the approach in which lack is foregrounded to address the problem of a priori positive ontology. Given the apparent similarity between Katsiaficas’ description of the eros effect in this passage and Marx’s description of the role played by imagination in the human labor process, however, it is confounding that Katsiaficas goes on to repudiate the insights of this historical ontology to reprise and substantiate his more aesthetically affirming positive conception. To get a sense of this vacillation, it is useful to recall how, in The Subversion of Politics, Katsiaficas expresses hostility toward Antonio Negri’s apparent reduction of all human activity to coordinated labor processes.44
The problem seems to owe to a confusion concerning Marx’s use of the category “labor.” On the one hand (and corresponding to imagination’s connection to the experience of lack), labor for Marx stands out as being the defining attribute of human ontology, the historical means by which it comes to be associated with a positive content (whatever that content may be). It is the means by which human needs arise and are resolved—and thus the means by which human ontology escapes the domain of the a priori to become historical (and thus potentially revolutionary). Significantly, Marx distinguishes this conception of “labor” from the commodity “labor power,” which arises with the advent of capitalism. Negri is charged with making a fetish of the latter conception, and consequently undermining revolutionary possibilities by reiterating the logic of the oppressive regime. Through the course of his repudiation, however, Katsiaficas goes one step further and seems to distance himself not only from labor power but labor itself.
In opposition to these reservations, diligent engagement with the intellectual tradition from which Katsiaficas’ work is derived reveals that imagination, labor, and production together comprise the distinguishing features of human ontology. They are the reason that human ontology is historical, not natural, and that the motive force in human development is lack and not the recovery of some a priori ontological goodness. Pushed to its logical conclusion, it also becomes clear that this historical ontology is the very substance of politics (a particular field of human activity in which, among other things, political subjects capable of envisioning and realizing their desires through coordinated activity are produced). At its threshold, politics yields revolution, a transformation not solely of the object or the means, but of the very mode or production. And while it is hypothetically possible that the decisive violence required to initiate such a productive transformation can be mustered through appeals to a preconceived, normative “ought,” it is more likely—as Benjamin famously pointed out—that it will be “nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors than that of liberated grandchildren.”45 In other words, the compulsion to pursue the “ought” arises less from its particular conceptual content than it does from the experience of lack emanating from the present’s inadequacies. Additionally, this experience can be cultivated, intensified.
Like others, Katsiaficas seems to have found a conception of revolution in Marcuse that is closer to the humanizing “ought” and its positive content than it is to lack’s content-unspecified concrete universality.46 Nevertheless, and despite the ecstatic enthusiasm of his New Left devotees, an attentive reading of Marcuse’s texts reveals that he was careful to foreground how the experience of lack reveals “a definite internal limit” to the possibility of worldly absolution. Even in the imagined horizon of revolution, human ontology is left to stand at odds with nature. And, since the pleasure principle and reality principle can never be made to coincide, “the end of this war … belongs to the Orphic myth, not to any conceivable historical reality.”47
If there is to be a concrete ground for the universal, then, it is to be found not through the normative projection of erotic unity but rather through the intensification of our common, inevitable feeling of lack. This is so not least because the enduring desire to reconcile subject and object, part and whole, must ultimately run up against “the insurmountable limit to the mutability of human nature: a biological, not theological, limit.”48 Needless to say, this lack is a source of tremendous frustration. Moreover, this frustration (regardless of its particular content) is universal. Finally, it can be cultivated, intensified through the imagination’s role in the human labor process, and directed toward the revolutionary transformation of society. That its aim will never be realized makes no difference. Possibility always owes its promise to the nonresolution from which it arises.
Although matters remain somewhat ambiguous in Marcuse’s deliberations on eros (in which human instincts seem both to be given and historically contingent),49 his awareness of lack’s generative dimension becomes explicit through the “Great Refusal,” a formulation advanced to underscore how revolution starts not with affirmation of the possible but rather with condemnation of the present’s inadequacy. Indeed, the Great Refusal is a “protest against that which is.” Through acts of negation aimed at confronting the lack inherent in existing reality (regardless of what that reality might be), people are said to discover “modes of refuting, breaking, and recreating their factual existence.”50 To the extent that revolution involves a process of historical awakening, Marcuse makes clear that it begins not with “recreating” but “refuting.” Indeed, only with “gut hatred” (a force Marcuse held to be indispensable to the process of revolutionary change)51 does the partisanship, the this-sidedness, inherent in any universality become clear.
Far from being antithetical to eros, hatred thus reveals itself to be its precondition. Corroborating the analysis of lack advanced by Marx and Freud, this Marcusian insight has also received considerable elaboration by other thinkers working in the critical tradition. For Paulo Freire, the violence of oppressed against oppressor constituted an act of love, since the latter could not free themselves from the finite bounds of their own parasitic being without the input of their adversary’s deconstitutive force. Simultaneously, this violence (this Great Refusal) also transforms the oppressed by forcing them to confront their own “limit situation,” the lack inherent in their ontological finitude—a lack that compels movement toward the realization of an ever more concrete universality.52 Similarly, for Gramsci, revolutionary consciousness begins to take shape through hatred and negation, the adoption of what he called “the basic negative, polemical attitude.”53 For his part (and as we have already seen), Benjamin imagined that revenge alone could ensure that the positive content developed through the course of revolutionary activity would escape the tarnish of utopian inclinations and volatile ambivalence.
Tracing the revolutionary analysis of the role played by lack in this way makes clear that, while the experience always finds expression through particular forms, the experience itself is universal. Taken together, these two observations suggest that, rather than the eros effect (which presupposes a positive, a priori ontology), lack provides the basis for a universal project unburdened by normative conceptualizations.54 This has dramatic implications for human solidarity—and for coalition politics, too. It suggests that revolution is prompted less by the thrill of spontaneity than by the burden of a shared, unendurable present. As Benjamin suggested, the challenge is highlighting the degree to which “every second of time” might therefore be “the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.”55 Marcuse’s Great Refusal underscores this same premise.
Even more telling than Marcuse’s account of the Great Refusal, however, was his casual observation that liberation presupposed “biological hatred.” Reviewing the legacy of anticolonial resistance movements in the 1966 “Political Preface” to Eros and Civilization, Marcuse recounts how occupying armies were shocked to confront “not only a social revolt in the traditional sense, but also an instinctual revolt—a biological hatred.” As a result of this hatred, “the energy of the human body rebels against intolerable repression and throws itself against the engines of repression.”56
Since it seems to suggest an active negation of unspecified content as well as a positive ontology (some line that cannot be crossed without bare life pushing back), this formulation may on first blush seem more ambiguous than the unequivocal Great Refusal. However, to the extent that this bare-life ontology suggests a positive content, it does so as a possibility occasioned by the process of historical development itself. Following Marx’s observations concerning the historical origins of human needs, we might even say that the precise character of “biological hatred” is historically determined. “There is some shit I will not eat,” claimed e.e. cummings’ Olaf. Like all others, this Great Refusal (this biological hatred aimed at reality’s abjection) owed to the particular stench of the shit he confronted—the shit of trench warfare, and of sovereignty wrapped in a bloody flag. And as the necessity of eating shit decreases, the more repulsive the idea becomes. Paradoxically, the intensification of the feeling that things are intolerable gives symptomatic expression to our growing proximity (profane though it may be) to the Orphic myth.
I will be the first to concede that Katsiaficas’ claims regarding human freedom are exceptionally appealing. Moreover, they seem to corroborate Marcuse’s claims regarding the affinity between nature and socialism. In this vision, recovery and transformation become inseparable. “Without a reworking of the psyche and reinvigoration of the spirit,” asks Katsiaficas, “can there even be talk of revolution? On the one side, the system colonizes eros, turning love into sex, and sex into pornography. Labor becomes production, production a job; free time has been turned into leisure, leisure into vacation; desire has been morphed into consumerism, fantasy into mediated spectacle.”57 In this passage, “reworking” rubs shoulders with “reinvigoration,” suggesting that both processes (despite operating in ontologically distinct ways) are not only equally required but are in fact wholly compatible with one another. Nevertheless, the political action implicitly demanded by the colonization of eros by the system is that we return to prior forms (e.g., by retracing the steps from pornography to sex to love so that we might finally recover eros). Even here, however, it’s important to note that one of these prior forms—labor—is precisely the force that stimulates our awareness of lack’s inevitability. At its threshold, it leads us to abandon normative, content-based conceptions of revolution as well.
It might seem that “biological hatred” is a feeling suited uniquely to one’s adversary. However, analytic consistency requires that we acknowledge how, at its logical conclusion, it is a concept that must be applied inwardly as well. Although Marcuse is not normally considered a nihilistic thinker, it’s important to acknowledge the degree to which the Marxist tradition is inconceivable without the will to self-abolition. For Marx, the proletariat could not free itself without destroying the conditions of its own existence. Lukács found this formulation to be so significant that he underscored it in his considerations on “orthodox Marxism.” Here, he cites Marx’s observation that “the proletariat cannot liberate itself without destroying the conditions of its own life.”58 Following suit, Marcuse landed upon this same fact in Counterrevolution and Revolt. Not only did he note (provocatively, one might say) that love of the working class actually constituted a form of commodity fetishism,59 he also foregrounded how the proletariat could not “free itself without abolishing itself as a class, and all classes. This is not an ‘ideal,’ but the very dynamic of the socialist revolution. It follows that the goals of the proletariat as revolutionary class are self-transcendent: while remaining historical, concrete goals, they extend, in their class content, beyond the specific class content.”60
Pushed to their logical conclusion, such formulations make clear that, to transcend present limitations and ascend to the universal through profane, this-sided activity, one must first disavow the normative constraints of positive ontology—which also means to disavow oneself. “It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained,” said Hegel. “Only thus is it tried and proved that the essential nature of self-consciousness is not bare existence, is not the merely immediate form in which it at first makes its appearance, is not its mere absorption in the expanse of life.”61 Despite the dangerous uses to which it has been put historically, the universal continues to be a compelling framework from which to envision mass struggle. But rather than envisioning this “universal” in terms of an a priori positive content, it is worth considering how it might be more productively pursued by foregrounding the human confrontation with lack itself. From this perspective, revolution begins not with the eros effect but with biological hatred.
But while the eros effect ceases to be the source of revolutionary aspirations (since these arise more immediately from the content-unspecified but truly universal experience of lack), it does remain one means for their possible diffusion. Given the claims that have been advanced in its name, this may seem like a conceptual demotion. Nevertheless, the procedure should be considered felicitous by those seeking to save the concept from the contradictions marking its current elaboration.
Along with this analytic clarification, it is also important to consider the specifically strategic benefits of foregrounding lack. Here, rather than forging connection through invocation (through efforts to draw the masses to an amorphous but positive vision of the people, of humanity, or whatever else), intensifying the encounter with lack and stimulating biological hatred through a principled, self-effacing nihilism can productively heighten people’s antagonism with the status quo while emphasizing the nonresolution they hold in common with everyone else. The most dangerous strategy in times of war, thought Machiavelli, was to trap one’s enemy so that there was no escape. “Great care is … taken not to reduce an enemy to total despair,” he wrote.
Julius Caesar was always very attentive to this point in his wars with the Germans, and used to open a way for them to escape after he began to perceive that, when they were hard pressed and could not run away, they would fight most desperately; he thought it better to pursue them when they fled, than to run the risk of not beating them while they defended themselves with such obstinacy.62
In opposition to Caesar’s strategy (and in keeping with Gramsci’s war of position), the foregrounding of lack’s universality demands that we cut off each and every compelling but mythical pathway to resolution. Though they are seductive (and though they may seem to keep us from harm in the short run), such postures are ultimately self-defeating. For this reason, and in response to Caesar’s cruel lesson, Machiavelli proposed that, if he were to build a fortress, he “would make its walls very strong” but ensure that there were “no retreating places” within. Through such a design, “the garrison might be convinced that when the walls and ditch were lost, they had no other refuge left.”63 It is toward this state that we too must gravitate.
Making formal conceptual distinctions in this way always runs the risk of reducing real-world complexities. Moreover, such distinctions are especially difficult to sustain when the material under consideration has been conceived dialectically. Indeed, because dialectics presupposes the formal interpenetration of opposites, the establishment of antithetical propositions can seem like a violation of the first premise. More simply, proceeding as I have may seem to be little more than a fruitless act of substituting a defiant (but ultimately resigned) “no” for the enthusiastic “yes” that seems to punctuate all of Katsiaficas’ declarations with a defiant exclamation mark.
As Cindy Milstein has made clear, such unhelpful polarizations are not unusual in radical scenes. Describing “an anarcho-queer study group made up of … ‘insurrectionists’ and ‘prefigurativists’ ” in an article about the decline of the Occupy movement, Milstein recounted a “friendly debate” that arose “after reading some of Crack Capitalism by John Holloway.” She asked: “Does ‘not making capitalism’ begin with Holloway’s ‘No!’ or instead a ‘Yes!’?” Although Milstein’s convictions led her to split the difference and settle on “maybe,” it seems almost inevitable that “this playful argument … lasted for weeks, spilling into things like, ‘Does dinner begin with a ‘no’ or a ‘yes’?”64
Although such extreme outcomes are not inevitable, and though drawing a formal conceptual polarity between eros effect and biological hatred may seem to be little more than a contrarian indulgence, the move remains both analytically and strategically important. Analytically important, because the concrete investigation of lack grounds eros and gives it a practical historical dimension. As a concept without content, lack is both the concrete encapsulation of and the mediation between the universal and the particular. For this reason, and as Marx, Freud, and Marcuse have each made clear, lack is a fundamentally historical concept. Strategically important, because—while the substance of need and the character of lack may change over time—the psychic (and, indeed, the ontological) tensions it yields consistently obtain.
Expressed though it may be through a dizzying array of particularities, the experience of lack is a universal phenomenon. It arises from the developmental process inaugurated by the first human need and won’t subside until the schism between human history and natural history is finally, decisively resolved (a resolution that, by virtue of our biological finitude, will never obtain). Given that this is the case, our primary strategic objective must not be the cultivation of eros (since, as positive content, erotic desire emanates from the confrontation with lack) but to intensify the confrontation with the intolerable nature of the present—regardless of what that present might be. As Lenin put it, “Working-class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected …”
The consciousness of the working masses cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn … to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life; unless they learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population.65
By leading with negation, critical theory demands that its advocates “abolish the opposition between an individual’s purposefulness, spontaneity, and rationality, and those work-process relationships on which society is built.”66 For Horkheimer, by underscoring the lack of fulfillment available through existing means, it becomes possible to heighten the level of psychic and social conflict “until this opposition is removed.”67 At its logical conclusion, this procedure demands that we conceive eros not as a universal metaphysical life force but rather as a concrete and historically particular means by which people have aimed to resolve experiences of lack. Considered from the standpoint of motivations for revolutionary transformation, the eros effect can thus be seen to emerge from—and therefore to be of secondary importance to—the experience of biological hatred.
1. George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Cambridge: South End Press, 1987).
2. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 10.
3. George Katsiaficas, interviewed by AK Thompson, “Remembering May ’68: An Interview with George Katsiaficas,” Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action 6 (April 2008): n.p., http://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/06-remembering-may-68/.
4. Ibid., n.p.
5. AK Thompson, Black Bloc, White Riot: Anti-Globalization and the Genealogy of Dissent (Oakland: AK Press, 2010).
6. George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (Oakland: AK Press, 2006), 270 n14.
7. Ibid., 221.
8. Ibid., 270 n14.
9. George Katsiaficas, Asia’s Unknown Uprisings, Volume 1: South Korean Social Movements in the 20th Century (Oakland: PM Press, 2012); George Katsiaficas, Asia’s Unknown Uprisings, Volume 2: People Power in the Philippines, Burma, Tibet, China, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Thailand, and Indonesia, 1947–2009 (Oakland: PM Press, 2013).
10. Here, the eros effect appears to be a Romantic iteration of social movement theory’s analysis of the dynamics of diffusion—a comparison that Katsiaficas flatly rejects. Nevertheless, Katsiaficas himself has referred to the eros effect as being marked by “the spontaneous emergence of an escalating spiral of strikes, sit-ins and insurrectionary councils.” Similarly, in a more specific report, he recounts how “the tactic of blocking traffic” used during US antiwar mobilizations “first appeared spontaneously in May, but the eros effect carried it to other sectors of the population, and it has been widely used since 1970.” Although Katsiaficas’ concept cannot be reduced to it, such characterizations make plain that the conceptual distinction between the eros effect and the account of diffusion advanced by social movement scholars may well be untenable. Katsiaficas, Imagination of the New Left, 217, 123.
11. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1967).
12. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988).
13. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International, 1971).
14. The eros effect for Katsiaficas is primarily an explicative or descriptive category. Indeed, “these forms of struggle” can’t “be predicted in advance of their appearance, resting as they do upon the accumulation of political experience and the needs of millions of people as shaped by the changing constellation of historical conditions.” Nevertheless (and hedging his bets), a “global eros effect … could be a vehicle for the coming liberation of the species.” Katsiaficas, Imagination of the New Left, 217.
15. Ibid., vi.
16. Katsiaficas, “Remembering May ’68,” n.p.
17. Katsiaficas, Subversion of Politics, 15.
18. Katsiaficas, Imagination of the New Left, 240.
19. Contrast, for instance, Descartes’ Treatise of Man to David Hartley’s consideration of “vibrations” and “associations” in Observations on Man, a work that had a great influence on Samuel Taylor Coleridge. René Descartes, Treatise of Man (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2003); David Hartley, Observations on Man (London: Thomas Tegg and Son, 1834).
20. William Wordsworth, “The Table Turned,” in William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (London: J. & A. Arch, Gracechurch Street, 1789), 188.
21. Katsiaficas, “Remembering May ’68,” n.p.
22. E.g., “activating this desire is one thing and coordinating it is another matter entirely.” Ibid., n.p.
23. Ibid., n.p.
24. Ibid., n.p.
25. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (New York: Cosimo, 2008), 14
26. “If we look at the unfolding of life on this planet,” Katsiaficas writes, “we can uncover a logic of human action analogous to the logic of the historical-philosophical laws uncovered by Hegel in the 19th century.” Katsiaficas, “Remembering May ’68,” n.p.
27. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: Belknap Harvard, 2002), 479.
28. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 43.
29. Katsiaficas, “Remembering May ’68,” n.p.
30. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 400, 472; George Katsiaficas, “Eros and Revolution,” Radical Philosophy Review 16, no. 2 (2013): 491–505 (499), doi: 10.5840/radphilrev201316238.
31. Katsiaficas, “Eros and Revolution,” 501.
32. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 41.
33. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Marx/Engels Selected Works, Volume 1 (Moscow: Progress, 1969), 13.
34. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 253–254.
35. Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 49.
36. Ibid., 114.
37. According to Benjamin, “Nothing has corrupted the German working class so much as the notion that it was moving with the current.” As a result of this misconception, workers lost sight of themselves as “the avenger that completes the task of liberation.” These outcomes are consistent with a conception of struggle founded on a positive ontology (in Benjamin’s case, one defined by “progress”). In contrast, Benjamin noted the importance of recultivating the movement’s “hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than of liberated grandchildren.” Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 258, 260.
38. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1998), 48.
39. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Moscow: Progress, 1954), 223.
40. Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 4.
41. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 174.
42. Katsiaficas, Imagination of the New Left, 6.
43. Ibid., 220.
44. See, for example, Katsiaficas, Subversion of Politics, 217–228.
45. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 260.
46. For more on this question, see AK Thompson, “The Work of Violence in the Age of Repressive Desublimation,” in The Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements, ed. Andrew T. Lamas, Todd Wolfson, and Peter N. Funke (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017).
47. Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, 68.
48. Ibid., 108.
49. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 130–131.
50. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 63.
51. Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, 130.
52. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1996), 83.
53. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International, 1971), 273.
54. As Benjamin put it in his essay on the concept of history, “Not man nor men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge.” Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 260.
55. Ibid., 264.
56. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, xix.
57. Katsiaficas, Subversion of Politics, 221.
58. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 20.
59. Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, 38.
60. Ibid., 124.
61. G.W.F. Hegel, “The Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage,” in The Phenomenology of Mind, The Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phba.htm.
62. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Art of War (Cambridge: Da Capo Press), 178.
63. Ibid., 187.
64. Cindy Milstein, “May Day Matters,” The AK Press Blog, May 15, 2012, http://www.revolutionbythebook.akpress.org/may-day-matters-by-cindy-milstein.
65. V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? (Moscow: Progress, 1983), 69.
66. Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1995), 210.
67. Ibid.