Time and world politics: Thinking the present 9781847792181

Table of contents :
Front matter
Contents
Acknowledgements
Dedication
Part I Theories of World-Political Time
Introduction to the question of world-political time
From fortune to history
Against historicism
Part II Diagnosing the Times
Prophecies and predictions
Time for democracy
Apocalyptic times
Thinking the present
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Time and world politics

Page i

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page ii

REAPPRAISING THE POLITICAL

Simon Tormey and Jon Simons . series editors The times we live in are troubling, and as always theory struggles to keep pace with events in its efforts to analyse and assess society, culture and politics. Many of the ‘contemporary’ political theories emerged and developed in the twentieth century or earlier, but how well do they work at the start of the twenty-first century? Reappraising the Political realigns political theory with its contemporary context. The series is interdisciplinary in approach, seeking new inspiration from both traditional sister disciplines, and from more recent neighbours such as literary theory and cultural studies. It encompasses an international range, recognising both the diffusion and adaptation of Western political thought in the rest of the world, and the impact of global processes and non-Western ideas on Western politics. already published Rehinking equality: the challenge of equal citizenship Chris Armstrong Radical democracy: politics between abundance and lack Lars Tønder and Lasse Thomassen (eds) The biopolitics of the war on terror: life struggles, liberal modernity and the defence of logistical societies Julian Reid Unstable universalities: post structuralism and radical politics Saul Newman 

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page iii

Kimberly Hutchings

T I M E A N D WO R L D P O L I T I C S Thinking the present

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave Macmillan

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page iv

Copyright © Kimberly Hutchings 2008 The right of Kimberly Hutchings to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed exclusively in Canada by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 7302 1 hardback

First published 2008 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Typeset by Action Publishing Technology Ltd, Gloucester Printed in Great Britain by Cromwell Press Ltd, Trowbridge

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page v

Contents Acknowledgements

page vii

Part I: Theories of world-political time 1 Introduction to the question of world-political time 2 From fortune to history 3 Against historicism

3 28 54

Part II: Diagnosing the times 4 5 6 7

Prophecies and predictions Time for democracy Apocalyptic times Thinking the present

81 106 130 154

Bibliography Index

178 193

[v]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page vi

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page vii

Acknowledgements This book has been the product of several years of work, and I have received a great deal of feedback and helpful suggestions on different aspects of it over the course of those years. I am particularly grateful to Sam Chambers, Chris McIntosh, Roy Smith, Maria Stern and Rob Walker, who all read and commented on particular chapters. I am also grateful for the input of my colleagues at LSE over the course of several staff research seminars, and particularly to Chris Brown for pointing me towards Newton on chronology. Elizabeth Frazer has been of invaluable help in joining with me in the task of reading and interpreting Derrida and Benjamin, as well as acting as a bracing philosophical interlocutor. I have received further help from presenting versions of chapters at conferences and seminars, including at Edinburgh, Oxford Brookes, Sheffield and Southampton universities. In addition I have benefited greatly from the anonymous comments of Manchester University Press’s reviewers, and from the feedback of reviewers and editors who have commented on earlier versions of the book’s arguments that have appeared elsewhere. The provision of sabbatical time from the London School of Economics in 2005–6 was crucial for the completion of the manuscript, and I am grateful to the School for this and for the welcoming and supportive research environment I have found there over the past five years. As ever, my deepest gratitude is to all my friends and family who have put up with me always being too busy to do other things because ‘I am working on the book’! Needless to say, whatever credit all of the people mentioned here can certainly take for the merits of the argument that follows, the credit for the mistakes is all my own.

[ vii ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page viii

This book is dedicated to Susan Pryse-Davies and the virtues of friendship.

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 1

PA RT I T H E O R I E S O F WO R L D - P O L I T I C A L TIME

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 2

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 3

1

Introduction to the question of world-political time

Introduction N The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argued that our grasp of the world is inescapably structured through space and time. In other words, whether we like it or not, our experience of any object is always located in a spatial field and temporal duration, conceived in Newtonian terms. The novelty of Kant’s argument was that he effectively bracketed the question of the ontological status of space and time, thus evading long-standing philosophical problems, such as those inherent in Zeno’s paradox of the arrow.1 Instead Kant focused on demonstrating that they (space and time) are transcendental conditions of sensible experience and, in combination with the categories of the understanding, of knowledge of the external world (1983: 67–68). For Kant, space and time are neither knowable in themselves nor subsumable under categories of the understanding. They are sensible intuitions, the inescapability of which is established not through a transcendental deduction, but through a transcendental aesthetic (1983: 65–91). Whereas space (our outer sense) is a condition of our sensible experience of external objects, time (our inner sense) conditions all our experience, including our experience of ourselves as thinking, feeling subjects (1983: 77). Kant traces this temporal condition of experience back to the transcendental unity of apperception and to the irreducibly mysterious human capacity for imagination and judgement (1983: 152–155). This suggests not only that questions about the nature of time may be incapable of being settled ontologically, but also that different accounts of time reflect different sensibilities or orientations underpinning experience and reason rather than either experience or reason themselves. My concerns in this book are not the same as Kant’s in the Critique of Pure Reason, but they are post-Kantian, in the sense that they are concerned with the

I

[3]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 4

Theories of world-political time role of time in experience and understanding, that is to say with the connection between time and judgement rather than with the physics or metaphysics of time. Unlike the Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason, however, I am concerned with the inter-subjective time of politics, rather than with time as a condition of individual sensible experience of empirical objects; and I take the conception of political time to be essentially contested, rather than being tied to a singular (in Kant’s case, Newtonian) definition.2 The purpose of my argument is twofold. Firstly, my aim is to examine the role played by assumptions about time in different theories of contemporary world politics. In all cases, I will argue, such assumptions play a significant part in the analysis and normative judgement of what is happening (and what will happen) in world politics in the twenty-first century. Secondly, my aim is to examine the link between the operation of time in theories of the world-political present within the western academy and certain philosophical accounts of political time. I will argue that major differences between alternatives to thinking the world-political present conceal a common dependence on the idea that political time is unitary, and, in contrast to natural or sacred time, is constructed through the control and direction of other forms of temporality.3 Like Kant in relation to time as a condition of sensible experience, I do not think that the meaning of political time is subject to empirical verification. Nevertheless, it is possible to make a case that the analysis and judgement of world politics is unduly restricted by this dominant view about the nature of political time, which cuts across ideological and theoretical lines. In contrast to this predominant conception, following the arguments of postcolonial and poststructuralist theorists, I will argue that an alternative view, which conceives world-political time in terms of immanent, non-linear, plural ‘becoming’ opens up the analysis and judgement of the present(s) of world politics in interesting ways. The aim of this chapter is to introduce the subject matter of the book and offer some preliminary arguments for why conceptions of time matter in theories of world politics. The first section examines the concept of time, and differentiates two aspects of temporal categorisation: chronos and kairos. It then goes on to offer a brief account of how both of these aspects have played a part in three familiar ways of conceptualising political time, in terms of narratives of repetition, progress and decline. The second section addresses the category of ‘world politics’, and traces the ways in which these familiar narratives of political time have figured in theories of international relations, globalisation and postmodernity. The third section outlines the argument of the rest of the book. Time: chronos and kairos My concern in this book is with inter-subjective, public constructions of time as they operate in theories of world politics. By ‘inter-subjective, public construc-

[4]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 5

The question of world-political time tions of time’, I mean the ways in which the temporality of social life is categorised and theorised, whether explicitly or implicitly, both in the realm of social life itself and in the ways in which that life is explained and judged. There is now a well-established body of work on the anthropology and sociology of time that focuses on such assumptions.4 This body of work reminds us that different accounts of social temporality, which mediate both the experience of individuals and prevailing understandings of the social world, may co-exist within societies. For example, within many societies one finds the co-existence of constructions of everyday time, perhaps governed by, and understood through, sunrise and sunset, tide or season with various accounts of mythical or divine time, within which everyday time is both encompassed and surpassed. In the secularised and multicultural contexts of many societies, it is possible for several different, potentially conflicting, constructions of both mundane and divine time to co-exist in the public realm, along with a variety of metaphysical, scientific and subjective accounts of temporality. At the level of personal experience, most of us have experienced a lack of fit between our own experience of a particular time span and its publicly accepted measure. Time, as a (intersubjective, public) category through which our experience of, and action in, the world is organised, has complex and multiple meanings. I suggest, however, that we can gain some analytic purchase on the category by distinguishing two aspects to the ways that social life is temporalised, a distinction captured by the terms chronos and kairos.5 The chronos/kairos distinction is often traced back to ancient Greek thought. In this context, a contrast was drawn between time as quantitatively measurable duration, associated with the inevitable birth–death life cycle of individuals (chronos), and time as a transformational time of action, in which the certainty of death and decay is challenged (kairos) (Smith, 1969, 1986; Lindroos, 1998: 11–12). The contrast between chronos and kairos in Greek thought captures a range of meanings. It distinguishes both analytically and evaluatively between normal and exceptional time. Analytically, it presents exceptional time as challenging or interrupting normal time, and it links ‘normal’ to the idea of time as a quantitatively infinite, divisible medium within which finite lives are lived out, and ‘exceptional’ to a qualitative event that creates, arrests or changes time, rather than endures it. Normatively, it links the kariotic challenge to chronos with an idea of ‘timeliness’, in which the overcoming of human subordination to natural chronotic6 temporality is celebrated (Smith, 1969).7 Most mundane ways of breaking down social time depend on thinking of time as a medium which can be represented and subdivided in a range of ways.8 The prevailing version of chronos in modern societies rests on Newtonian assumptions about time, in which time as linear, infinite succession conditions the possibility of counting time by means of the technologies of calendars, clocks and timetables (Nowotny, 1994: 13–14). Chronotic time renders life

[5]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 6

Theories of world-political time manageable, by providing a background frame in relation to which we can measure phenomena such as the length of the working day, the span of human life, or the duration of empires. But chronotic time is not reducible to the ways it is accessed via calendars or clocks; these are only able to accomplish their measuring work because they are rooted in the natural phenomenon of time.9 Precisely because chronos is not changeable, even though it may be known or represented in a range of different ways, it operates as a basis for prediction. The generalisation of clock time began with the advent of modern market relations and wage labour in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, which required the replacement of the imprecise, unevenly experienced temporality of sunrise and sunset, tide or season, by a universally shared, precisely regulated experience of time. Clock time transformed and has continued to transform, the ways in which people across the world experience and live their lives. The socially accepted temporality of clock time carries with it a whole set of related assumptions. On this account, time is universally the same, it proceeds at a constant pace, and it is infinitely divisible and linear. It is also a neutral medium and measure, events and experiences happen within it, novel and familiar, but time itself does not change qualitatively. It is also, of course, an instrument of discipline, through which the coordination of highly complex systems of production, exchange and distribution can be organised across vast ranges of space.10 The notion of time as a neutral, constant, measurable and measuring medium opens up a variety of possibilities for thinking about the relation of present to past and present to future in the natural and social sciences. For instance, it becomes possible to divide the past into specific periods, to make direct comparison between events at the same time or at different times, to make judgments about the sameness or novelty of now as opposed to then, and to speculate about the near or distant future. Newton’s theory of time does not presume an ‘arrow of time’, but eighteenth- and nineteenth-century developments in physics (thermodynamics) and biology (evolution) suggested that time was not only infinite and linear but also uni-directional and irreversible.11 On this view, chronos becomes bound up with a particular account of causation, in which, because time is irreversible, cause must precede effect, and in which the sequence of events potentially becomes the key to their explanation, whether in the natural or the social world.12 It therefore becomes possible, with hindsight, to identify patterns of cause and effect, which in turn may enable prediction of what is to come. The historical and social sciences only emerged as systematic disciplinary fields because of the conceptions of chronos bound up with developments of Newtonian and post-Newtonian science. Clock and causal chronologies open up a variety of possibilities for how to think about the relation between past and present in the social world. However, in modern European thought, alongside chronotic conceptions of time, we also find a variety of ways of thinking about time that simultaneously rely on and are in

[6]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 7

The question of world-political time kairotic tension with those conceptions. These ways of thinking about time establish patterns for political time that work across and through chronotic time, in a way reminiscent of the Greek interruption of chronos by kairos. They draw on qualitatively specific temporal categories, such as beginnings, ends, novelty, repetition, stasis and change. And they superimpose alternative linear and cyclical temporalities on the infinite, indifferent time of the clock. The most obvious example of an account of political time that both feeds off and challenges clock and causal accounts of chronos is in the various theories of world history that played such an important role in accounts of world politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.13 Theories of world history depend on a capacity to divide historical time into periods and to tell a story about development through time, which rests on comparison between past, present and future. The interpretation of the meaning of historical development relies on the transparency of time, through which one can see the difference between stasis, progress and regress, and may identify the principles governing change. An infinite, linear and irreversible understanding of time enables the idea that the ‘end of history’ is not equivalent to the idea of an ‘end of time’, but may instead be thought of as an open, indefinite future in which things will not change (see Chapter 2 below). At the same time, however, theories of history complicate the idea of chronotic time. The whole point of these theories is that the principle according to which the past, present and future is divided does not reflect the idea of time as a neutral measure or undifferentiable flow. Rather than world history being divided up into lumps of equal length, it is divided according to principles of comparative value, in which some times become seen as more significant, better or worse, than others. Moreover, the division into stages raises the problem of the boundary and of how one is to understand the points of transition between stages. Such theories invariably present time in terms of a succession of different values and intensities, and not simply as indifferent sameness. They enable distinctions between normal and revolutionary time, treating long periods of time as stasis and comparatively short ones as quantum leaps. They also enable the disassociation between space and time in the world, by raising the possibility that different places in effect inhabit different times, suggesting an a-chronotic world in which the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous holds true.14 In addition, in many cases theories of history challenge the supremacy of efficient causation (in which cause precedes effect) in human affairs, by raising the spectre of a teleological direction to world history. In a variety of ways, therefore, theories of world history characterise world-political time as an intersection between chronotic and kairotic temporalities. Theories of history, as developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, present narratives of both progress and decline. As we shall see in later chapters, they continue to play a sometimes explicit, sometimes hidden

[7]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 8

Theories of world-political time role in a variety of accounts of contemporary world politics, even where temporal categorisations (for example between ‘pre-modern’, ‘modern’, ‘postmodern’) are assumed to be matters of classificatory convenience in the face of time’s indifference.15 However, an investment in notions of world history as a finite, linear process with an origin and end is not necessarily involved in every attempt to place either analysand or analyser in temporal context. Such theories of history are countered by alternative macro-level accounts, in which history is understood in terms of cycles rather than stages, repetition rather than change, or some kind of combination of the two (see Chapter 2). These accounts in turn both utilise and undermine the assumptions of chronotic time. In doing so, however, as with stadial theories of history, they embed alternative temporal orientations into their analyses, invoking kairos in the midst of chronos. But if kairos and chronos both play a part in theories of world-political time, then a series of questions is opened up, about different ways in which kairos and chronos may be thought and about the relation between them. In a meditation on the relation between ‘politics’ as a practice in the present and ‘history’ as the inheritance of the past, Pocock refers to two of the ways in which the chronos/kairos distinction has been theorised in western political thought: To the Florentines she was the maenad Fortune, an irrational and irresistible stream of happenings. To the Romantics she was (and is) the Goddess History, of their relationship with whom they expect a final consummation, only too likely to prove a Liebestod. (Pocock, 1973: 271)

The figures of Fortune and the Goddess History are drawn from a Machiavellian understanding of political time on the one hand, and, on the other, from teleological eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of history referred to above. In the case of Machiavelli, the temporality of politics is understood as an ongoing struggle between fortune and virtù for control.16 Both fortune and virtù have the capacity to direct natural chronotic time, though in rather different ways. Whilst fortune is kairotic, an external, arbitrary power behind what ‘happens’, virtù is the (always temporary) capacity to tap into that kairotic power, and re-shape what ‘happens’. Politics, as opposed to nature, is the sphere of a re-shaped nature, emerging out of the potential of kairos, whether as fortune or virtù, to interrupt chronos. In order to understand and judge politics one needs to take both fortune and virtù into account and see how they conflict with and may also be made to work together. Fortune is a woman, but she is also a river: I compare fortune to one of those dangerous rivers that, when they become enraged, flood the plains, destroy trees and buildings, move earth from one

[8]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 9

The question of world-political time place and deposit it in another. Everyone flees before it, everyone gives way to its thrust, without being able to halt it in any way. But this does not mean that, when the river is not in flood, men are unable to take precautions, by means of dykes and dams, so that when it rises next time, it will not overflow its banks or, if it does, its force will not be so uncontrolled and damaging. (Machiavelli, 1988: 85)

For Machiavelli, the struggle between fortune and virtù is not capable of being won by one side or the other. The most virtuous leader is liable to come unstuck through bad luck, the most profound bad luck may still be countered and even exploited by the ‘virtuous’ leader. For this reason, the combination of chronos and kairos in Machiavelli’s thinking about the temporality of politics results in a cyclical understanding of politics as the rise and fall of power. In contrast, the figure of the Goddess History puts exceptional kairotic time in permanent control of chronos. According to the Romantic theories of history to which Pocock is referring, political time is structured in relation to a specific end of history, which can be understood in positive or negative terms. Instead of the Machiavellian struggle and its cyclical implications for the understanding of politics, here we find a linear, teleological model, in which the meaning of politics transcends the purposes of particular political actors (individual or collective), whether in terms of hope or despair. Accounts that understand the interplay of chronos and kairos in politics in terms of cyclical repetition, progress, or decline are not the only ways of grasping the meaning of political time. However, as we shall see, they have been and remain particularly influential in interpretations of world politics. In the following section, I will explore how these narratives of political time remain prevalent in contemporary accounts of world politics, but also how alternative accounts of both chronos and kairos are beginning to disrupt and challenge that prevalence. We will return to examine the accounts of temporality embodied in the figures of Fortune and History in more detail in Chapter 2. World politics and time ‘World’ and ‘Politics’ I have chosen to use the term ‘world’ as a placeholder for a variety of concepts located in different literatures. These terms include: ‘international’; transnational; ‘supra-national’; inter-state’; ‘trans-state’ and ‘global’.17 All these terms are used to refer to fields of human activity, relations and institutions which are not reducible to state or sub-state political communities, either in terms of what they are or how they may be explained and judged. Theories of the ‘international’ as much as of the ‘global’ are assumed to apply across both states and regions, identifying patterns peculiar to an object of analysis that is world-wide in principle, even if the world is not understood in holistic terms.

[9]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 10

Theories of world-political time Some of the accounts of ‘world politics’ with which I am concerned use the vocabulary of international or inter-state because they see it as reflecting the predominant dynamics of politics beyond the state, in which, they argue, state sovereignty, the balance of power between sovereign states or international society (understood as the institutions, norms and rules governing social interaction between states) continues to play the most crucial role. Other accounts use the language of ‘trans-national’ or ‘global’, because they claim that we are already in a situation in which the state is not necessarily the most crucial worldpolitical actor. Whereas the former demarcates the space of world politics from the spaces of politics within state or sub-state spheres, the latter tends to generalise the space of world politics to include the most local (inter-personal) as well as the most global (trans-national corporations or meetings of the United Nations). To some extent the differences between these accounts is reflected in disciplinary terms by the distinction of ‘International Relations’ from the cross-disciplinary study of globalisation.18 In addition, however, it also reflects differences in how the term ‘politics’ as well as the term ‘world’ is to be understood. In the case of theories which focus on the ‘international’ or ‘inter-state’, the realm of politics tends to be identified with ‘high politics’, that is to say with the political relations of elite actors, paradigmatically concerned with issues of state security and the pursuit of the ‘national interest’. When politics is conceived in this way, there is a tendency to mark out the realm of politics as clearly distinct from the realms of the social and economic. In literatures using the language of globalisation, however, politics tends to be understood in much more all-pervasive terms, as working through all aspects of social life and interaction, from technology through to diplomacy. In my own use of the term ‘world politics’, the term politics encompasses relations, distributions and dynamics of power which include both those at work in the interaction of elite state and trans-national actors and those inherent in relations, structures and distributions of power affected by and affecting populations across the world, which may not be traceable to any particular set of actors, elite or otherwise (e.g. class, race, gender). All of the literatures referred to above are interested in making claims about world politics in the sense that they are all concerned with diagnosing and prescribing for political developments that are not confined to any particular state or region in their origins and effects. What they have in common is an ambition to make some kind of sense of what is happening now, and what will happen, to the world as a whole, and it is the temporal aspect of this ‘making sense’ with which this book is concerned. I will therefore be interrogating the ways in which different accounts of the present in world politics are shaped by how the temporality of world politics is conceived. As a preliminary step in the analysis, we will go on to examine some examples of the ways in which certain

[ 10 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 11

The question of world-political time diagnoses of the present are imbricated in temporal structures that carry very specific implications for both analysis and judgement. For the moment I am concerned simply to illustrate some of the ways in which time matters in contemporary theories of world politics. I will begin by focusing on certain debates in the discipline of International Relations, before moving on to examples from the study of globalisation and the cross-cutting issue of periodisation in terms of modernity and postmodernity. Time and international politics The study of international politics as a distinctive branch of the social scientific study of politics took shape in the wake of the Second World War.19 As any history of the discipline or field of study that became labelled ‘International Relations’ (IR) will relate, the predominant theoretical and analytical trends within it owe a great deal to the intellectual, social and political context of the western academy at that time.20 Predominant academic modes of analysis and judgement of international politics in the period between 1945 and 1989 were overtly preoccupied with spatial rather than temporal relations. There are several reasons why this was the case. First and foremost, the model of interstate relations which underpinned most Cold War scholarship was a static one, in which a spatial distribution of different power capabilities was seen as trumping the possibility of major changes in the power dynamics of the international system. In other words, the space of international politics was thought of as frozen in time, in contrast to the spaces of domestic politics in which change could and did happen. For many IR theorists, this spatialisation of international politics could be traced back to the distinction between external and internal sovereignty confirmed by the Peace of Westphalia in seventeenth-century Europe, and generalised across the world in the wake of the Second World War and post-1945 decolonisation. On this view of the world, the plurality of sovereign powers, in conjunction with the absence of any hierarchical organising principle, such as that inherent in either imperial systems or the idea of Christendom, led to a situation in which the position of individual states might be stronger or weaker over time, but the essential characteristics of inter-state relations were likely to remain the same. In terms of large-scale theorising about international politics, this made time irrelevant to the analysis, since it wasn’t thought to make any difference to the analytical tools and normative assumptions employed by international theorists. In addition, however, the dominance of space over time in the discipline of International Relations can be argued to have been derived from the rejection of the idea that the ‘Goddess History’ could play a respectable part in social scientific analysis. In the wake of the Second World War, mainstream western scholarship associated theories of history with totalitarian politics and pseudoscience. In their place, social scientists turned to empiricist, behavioural and

[ 11 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 12

Theories of world-political time experimental methods of analysis. These approaches were based on the idea that social science is analogous to natural science, that natural science operates on Newtonian principles, and that its purpose is to establish laws that apply in space and across time. Time was treated as a medium across which comparisons could be drawn, so that two events at two different times could share a common meaning. This kind of work is perhaps best represented in International Relations by large-scale statistical studies, such as the project to establish the ‘Correlates of War’, in which the salience of correlations between phenomena (such as authoritarian regimes and propensity to go to war) is regarded as neutral in relation to time, and therefore as generalisable across time. It is only because time is both neutral and transparent that one can pick out the salient pattern from the complex of variables at work in any given context.21 An alternative, and highly influential, attempt to render the study of international politics scientific, can be found in the structuralist neo-realist theory of Kenneth Waltz (1979). As with structuralist theories in general, Waltz treated his object of analysis, the international system, in synchronous terms. His focus was on the spatial distribution of capabilities at any given moment in time, rather than the international system being treated as a diachronically evolving entity. Waltz’s parsimonious theory, which was inspired by the kind of theorising found in the discipline of economics, provided a basis for the formal analysis of international politics. Such analyses rely on a high level of abstraction, in which inferences are drawn on the basis of idealised, fixed assumptions and temporality is extremely difficult to factor in other than in terms of repetition of the same. On reflection, however, the claim that the post-1945 study of international politics was dominated by the privileging of spatial over temporal categorisation is misleading. Although the significance of time may have been grasped through spatial metaphors, and certain (by no means all)22 approaches to international politics adopted a synchronic rather than a diachronic approach, nevertheless assumptions about the temporality of international politics were of crucial importance. This was true both in terms of the historical narrative in which the study of international politics was embedded, and which it also reproduced, and in terms of the ways in which the temporal dynamics of that politics were conceived. As mentioned above, for most scholars, the study of contemporary international politics was historically contextualised in a longue durée narrative in which the 1648 Peace of Westphalia and the European state system played a crucial role, both in terms of the object of analysis and the legitimation of IR as a distinctive mode or field of inquiry. In effect the possibility of bracketing time out of the analysis of international politics depended on accepting a particular account of historical time, with a specific origin and direction. But, above and beyond the ways in which the work of scholars of international politics was placed in time, there were also significant debates between different schools of

[ 12 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 13

The question of world-political time thought in International Relations about how to conceive the temporality of the practice of international politics itself. A standard text book view of the major theoretical approaches to understanding international relations in the Cold War period draws a contrast between ‘liberal’, ‘realist’ and ‘Marxist’ perspectives, and for each of these a particular configuration of chronos and kairos is at stake.23 Liberal theories of international politics built on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophies of history, in which world political progress was accounted for in terms of a series of claims about human nature and interaction. The most well-known liberal contribution to the analysis of international politics to emerge from the Cold War period was the theory of liberal democratic peace. According to proponents of this theory, the statistical evidence supported something like Kant’s argument in his essay ‘On Perpetual Peace’, in which structural and cultural aspects of the human condition propel history in the direction of progress (Doyle, 1983). From a realist or neo-realist perspective, politics between states was not so much frozen in time as structured by a different temporality than that of politics within the state. The contrast here was between a temporality of linear progress, or possibly regress (within states) and one of sameness and repetition (between states). This contrast depended on the distinction between domestic and inter-state politics legitimised by the narrative of Westphalia referred to above. In the former sphere, it was possible for a more just and stable order to emerge over time. In the latter, all that was possible was the recalibration of, always precarious, balances of power, in which the actions of states were predictable because they were doomed to repeat the behaviour appropriate to rational actors with differing capabilities in an anarchic context. Waltz’s neorealism, and the kind of formal analysis to which it lent itself, reflected the broader realist sensibility of time as repetition of the same. There were, literally, no novel solutions to the security dilemma in which any state perpetually found itself. If liberal democratic peace theory can be read as smuggling the Goddess History back into the frame of chronotic time, then the realist conception of the temporality of international politics as repetition of the same reintroduces us to the maenad Fortune. At the formal level, the claim to repetition in world politics is embedded in a paradox, in which events and processes are posited as the same but also as different. In the obverse of the logic of theories of history, in which the contemporary can be understood as non-contemporaneous, on the repetitive account, the non-contemporaneous become contemporary, so that it is possible to treat Pericles, Cesare Borgia, Frederick the Great, Stalin or G. W. Bush as all occupying the same time. At a more substantive level, realist theories of world politics identify patterns of recurrence in world politics, which suggest that time is not a neutral medium, but rather a series of peaks and troughs or

[ 13 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 14

Theories of world-political time cycles, inflected with differing levels of energy or force. In contrast to the advocates of liberal progress and realist repetition, Marxist and neo-Marxist theories offered a rather different view of the temporality of world politics in the Cold War period. Although (as discussed in the following chapter), classical Marxist philosophy of history is a progressive theory, in many respects analogous to liberal theories, it is noticeable that analyses of world politics inflected by Marxist assumptions, such as world systems theory, have tended towards a pessimistic rather than an optimistic tone (Galtung, 1971; Wallerstein, 1983). World history is presented as the story of the increasingly totalising, globalising, exploitative forces of liberal capitalism. As with other stadial theories of history, such neo-Marxist analyses rely on a combination of chronotic and kairotic understandings of time, most obviously in their simultaneous reliance on efficient and teleological causation. The above discussion suggests that rather than being unimportant to the analysis of international politics in the Cold War period, assumptions about time played a significant part in empirical research and theoretical generalisation. However, whatever one’s view of the comparative significance of theorisations of space and time in the study of world politics 1945–1989, there is no question that themes of temporality and history have come centre stage in debates about world politics in International Relations since the end of the Cold War. The unexpected and disorienting re-articulation of inter-state and transstate political relations in the wake of the breakup of one of the world’s two superpowers has provoked a range of diagnoses of these ‘new’ times that we are in at the level of popular journalistic, foreign policy and academic debate. What is interesting about these attempts to think the present of contemporary world politics is that once the question of the distinctiveness of the current time has become the object of analysis, the question of the role of different understandings of the temporality of world politics in enabling one to pinpoint this distinctiveness and its implications also comes to the fore. Time emerges in the role of both analysand and analyser, and those seeking to understand and make judgements about the present find themselves, whether self-consciously or not, dusting off and putting to work theoretical accounts of the workings of time in politics, even those speculative philosophies of history that had previously been consigned to the dustbin of history. Many of these debates suggest that the temporal modes of repetition, progress and decline have, if anything, strengthened their grip on the social scientific imagination in the wake of the Cold War. We can see this in the contrast between readings of the 1990s in terms of a choice between ‘end of history’ and ‘clash of civilisations’, and in current debates about the United States and how its power in world politics should be understood and practised.24 It is not simply that analysts of the present necessarily interpret the past, but that in doing so they make claims about the mechanisms that underlie historical change, and thereby provide the key to the

[ 14 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 15

The question of world-political time meaning of the present and the future and a set of prescriptions for what should or should not be done. Counter narratives to the temporal orientation of ‘end of history’ or ‘clash of civilisations’ can be found in the work of realist and neo-realist scholars of international politics since 1989, both in response to the end of the Cold War and more recently in response to the 2003 US/British invasion of Iraq. The key message of realist and neo-realist scholars during this time has been their insistence that the world has not fundamentally changed because of the demise of the Soviet Union or the rise of international terrorism. It remains the case that world politics is structured by an anarchic international system, characterised by a particular distribution of capabilities amongst self-interested actors. Because we know how the dynamics of such a system work, then we can be sure that the moment of US ‘unipolarity’ will be temporary and new powers will rise to balance US power. From this perspective, the ‘hard Wilsonianism’ characteristic of certain neo-conservative thinkers assumes a possibility of progress in history which is grounded in a misunderstanding of the dynamics of power inherent in the international system, which has led to the further misunderstanding of the nature of threats to US security in a post-Cold War world. The important social scientific and policy question is actually the question of which powers are the most likely ‘risers’.25 In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, the revival of progressive understandings of political temporality was particularly obvious. Since the mid1990s these have been increasingly countered not only by realist repetitive or ‘tragic’ understandings of political time, but also by readings of the present in terms of decline and apocalypse. These narratives (considered in Chapter 6 below) link contemporary US foreign policy to broader trends within world politics driven by market capitalism and technology. Here themes of repressive global governmentality, neo-liberalism, the totalisation and dehumanisation of war, nuclear proliferation and ecological catastrophe become woven together as the triumph of the dark side of the dialectic of enlightenment (Agamben, 1998; Virilio, 2005). Such narratives are influenced both by the change from the familiar bi-polar framework of Cold War world politics and by more long-standing claims about changes in the fundamental social, economic and political relations characteristic of western modernity. The latter claims draw on theories of globalisation and broader debates in social theory about the fate of modernity, which are briefly mapped out in the following section. Time and globalisation, modernity and postmodernity The study of the phenomenon of globalisation has grown exponentially over the past two decades. It has developed within different social scientific literatures and covers a vast range of topics: economic, technological, cultural, social and political. Within this section, I will be focusing on two aspects of contemporary

[ 15 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 16

Theories of world-political time theories of globalisation as they touch on the concerns of this book. First, I will be examining how narratives of repetition, progress and decline recur in these theories in a way that echoes the temporal structure of theories of international relations considered above. Second, I will be examining the way in which time itself becomes an object of investigation within certain theories of globalisation, and how this complicates the idea of world-political time as constructed through the intersection of chronos and kairos by undermining the distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘exceptional’ temporality. The identification of time as a problem for the analysis and judgement of politics is at the heart of the temporal distinction between modernity and postmodernity, and I will end by examining this distinction and how it works through the temporalisation of both international and global politics. The concept and the phenomenon of globalisation are both contested. The concept is contested in that there is no agreed definition, and theorists vary as to the relative importance of different factors in what it would mean for the world to be ‘globalised’. The phenomenon is contested in that commentators disagree as to whether and how far processes of globalisation have actually taken root in the world, with positions ranging from what Held and McGrew categorise as ‘sceptics’ to ‘hyperglobalists’ (Held et al., 1999: 10). One of the areas of disagreement about globalisation as a phenomenon is how long it has been going on. Although most scholars agree that globalisation characterises the present, for some scholars it is a process that can be dated back in millennia; for others it is a product of the last thirty to forty years. There is, however, sufficient overlap and interconnection between various definitions and accounts of globalisation to establish some common ground. Conceptually, ‘globalisation’ refers to processes through which economic, technological, cultural, political and social processes, structures, institutions and actors transcend territorial boundaries in the scope of their origins and/or effects. Globalisation as a phenomenon is the extent to which such a transcendence has actually taken place. In general, there is a fair degree of consensus in literatures on globalisation, that this transcendence is most developed in economic and technological spheres, but increasingly it is argued that cultural, social and political globalisation have developed in the wake of economic and technological developments. Students of globalisation point to the growing significance of trans-national, non-state actors in world politics, to mechanisms of global governance and to global political issues (such as ecological crisis or universal human rights) as signifying the need to think about world politics in global rather than international terms.26 It is not my purpose to adjudicate between different theories of globalisation here; my interest is in the ways in which such theories are temporally framed. A key commonality of such theories is that they are, like the theories of the international that followed the end of the Cold War, oriented in relation to the idea of the present as novel. As with those theories, however, this does not mean that

[ 16 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 17

The question of world-political time globalisation is actually new, either in itself or in the conceptual tools required to understand it. Nevertheless, all theories of globalisation begin with the question of its novelty and how that novelty is to be understood and judged. The moves played out in different attempts to offer answers to the question of the novelty of globalisation revive familiar narratives of repetition, progress and decline. On the one hand, some theorists undermine the idea of the novelty of globalisation through claims to repetition reminiscent of the realist response to the end of the Cold War. Hirst and Thompson (1996), for instance, dismissed economic globalisation arguments by pointing to analogous phenomena in the global political economy at the beginning and end of the twentieth century. Their response echoes that of many realist and neo-realist thinkers, for whom the rhythm of inter-state time remains far stronger than the pulse of either capitalism or global civil society in contemporary world politics.27 Where the novelty of globalisation is accepted, interpretations vary between progressive hope and apocalyptic despair, from cosmopolitan arguments that see globalisation as the condition of possibility for a positive end of history, to the pessimistic rendering of the present as the culmination of the dark side of enlightenment. Here we are again on familiar ground. Progressive readings of globalisation tend to rely on adaptations of theories of world history in the manner of liberal democratic peace theory or Fukuyama’s argument, in which chronos and kairos both play a part (Linklater, 1998). Pessimistic interpretations of globalisation, such as those of Gray (1998) or Barber (1995), often combine a neo-Marxist denunciation of the totalisation of capitalist consumerism and elements of Huntington’s hierarchically ordered clash of civilisations. Once again, chronotic time enters into partnership with the maenad Fortune and the Goddess History to explain political time and its potential trajectories. Although it is not universally the case, perhaps because of the obvious connections between studying globalisation and the tradition of thinking about world history in the west, scholars of global politics tend to be more selfreflexive about time than scholars of international relations. In contrast to most work in International Relations,28 theories of globalisation are more likely to identify time as an object of analysis in itself, both as inherent within the globalising world, and as it operates within theories of that world. Of particular interest are those attempts to analyse time in a globalising world that disrupt the combination of chronotic and kairotic assumptions about political time on which the narratives of repetition, progress and decline depend. These strands of globalisation theory focus on the changing nature of chronos in a world of instantaneous communication. According to theorists such as Beck, Virilio, Lasch and Urry (who would be classified under the ‘hyper-globalist’ label in Held’s and McGrew’s terms), global time has become accelerating time (Virilio, 1997a, 1997b; Lash et al., 1998; Beck, 2000). A considerable amount of work in global history and globalisation studies

[ 17 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 18

Theories of world-political time sees the international conferences that established globally unified time in the late nineteenth century as one of the key founding moments of globalisation (Mazlish, 1993). This was the point at which Newtonian clock time became globally institutionalised, and a genuinely global system of communication was established, accompanied by the invention of technologies such as the telegraph and, later, the telephone. According to the hyper-globalists, this globalisation of clock time has been (or is being) displaced by a new form of chronos. Whereas in the past, time was mediated and measured by space (the time it took to deliver the post on horseback or by railway), now the spatialisation of time has shrunk to nothing (the instantaneous transmission of an image from the other side of the world; the automation of reactions which might once have had to be humanly mediated). For these theorists, this means that at all levels of social life, from everyday communication with others to elite (military, political and economic) decision making, the sense of a trajectory from the past through the present to the future, which could be measured by the clock, has been replaced by an experience of immediacy, of speed, of the moment. This argument about chronotic time disrupts the way in which chronos/kairos distinctions, and with them a distinction between natural and political time, have been drawn. In the case of both optimistic and pessimistic invocations of the Goddess History, it is possible for history to end but not time. But in these hyperglobalist arguments the possibility of distinguishing time and history is undermined. All time has become, or is in the process of becoming, exceptional time, a point at which time stops. And the interpretation of what this means becomes crucial to the understanding and judgement of global politics.29 The ways in which hyperglobalists re-think the meaning of chronos intersects with an argument about time, history and politics which has developed in parallel with globalisation studies. This is the debate over modernity and postmodernity that was central to much social and cultural theory in the 1980s and 1990s. Within this literature, the meaning of both chronos and kairos is at the heart of another argument about whether and how the world may have changed (or be changing) in the latter decades of the twentieth century. As with the literatures on both globalisation and post-Cold War international politics, debate about postmodernity hinges on the question of novelty. This question is thematised in Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984), which has acquired the status of a kind of manifesto for postmodernity. Within this text, Lyotard asserts the distinctiveness of postmodernity, in terms of a shift from the assumptions about chronos and kairos characteristic of liberal capitalist modernity, in both science and social life. According to Lyotard, liberal capitalist modernity is characterised by ‘metanarratives’ of science and history that assert the progressive nature of this particular economic, social and political form, both technological and moral. For Lyotard, the shift from modernity to postmodernity is not a straightforward

[ 18 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 19

The question of world-political time historical movement from one age to another; rather elements of postmodernity have always been embedded within modernity (1984: 79–82). These elements, within some parts of the world, have come increasingly to disrupt the assumptions that dominated accounts of the nature of knowledge in modernity from the Enlightenment to the middle of the twentieth century (1984: 23–27). He argues that clock and causal assumptions about chronos have been undermined both in science and technology, and in everyday life. According to Lyotard, the meta-narrative of natural science – based on the assumptions of efficient causation, the production of law-like generalisations and the capacity to predict – can no longer act as the model for knowledge in the later twentieth century. It (the meta-narrative of science) Lyotard argues, has been replaced by a plurality of competing models of knowledge, specific to the particular object or problem under investigation (1984: 54–60). At the level of everyday life, Lyotard argues that the singular clock time of modernity no longer applies to the world of casualised labour and temporary contracts (1984: xxiv). The stable context required for clock time to coordinate and unify social life and the division of labour has disappeared, and we are now in a world of plural and shifting temporalities. Lyotard’s argument that we need to re-think our categorisation of chronotic time is accompanied by a critique of kairos as he sees it shaping both liberal and Marxist grand narratives of modernity. He famously identifies postmodernism as ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives’ of all kinds (1984: xxiv), but particularly with the banishment of the Goddess History from the social and political stage (1984: 35–37). For Lyotard, kairos has to be re-thought along the same lines as chronos in terms of multiple little narratives or language games, rather than as a source of unifying meaning. Lyotard’s argument, although it made suggestions about the way that communication and economic relations were becoming increasingly globalised, was essentially addressed to western industrial/post-industrial states, societies and economies.30 And a significant amount of the debate about modernity/postmodernity has been confined to the experience and development of western states. Nevertheless, the emphasis on plurality in Lyotard’s account has been picked up in a variety of literatures concerned with the broader context of world politics. Both international and globalisation theorists have adopted and used the idea of postmodernity. In the case of international theory, it is sometimes linked to the idea of ‘post-Westphalian’, in which the claim is made that the society of states has developed beyond the norms of Westphalia (Linklater, 1998). In this context, the label of postmodern has been applied to particular states, or to the EU as an example of a post-Westphalian arrangement. Within globalisation theory, the idea of postmodernity has been used to capture the plurality of communities and identities within global politics, in particular the co-existence of what are seen as modern and pre-modern or anti-modern

[ 19 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 20

Theories of world-political time cultures and values. More broadly, postmodernism as the critique of grand narratives of history has been used to challenge such grand narratives in both international and globalisation studies. It is in this context that feminist and postcolonial scholars have found ideas about postmodernity and postmodernism useful as a way to question accounts of world politics that rely on versions of chronos and kairos that exclude or occlude non-western and nonmasculine temporalities (see Chapter 7).31 What links all these literatures together is the idea that it is misleading to think about world politics in terms of a singular temporality, at either the level of chronos or kairos. For this reason, as with the hyper-globalists’ account of accelerating time, Lyotard’s argument appears to put the chronos/kairos relation that underpins repetitive, progressive and decline interpretations of world politics into question. The above discussion has sought to demonstrate, in rather cursory fashion, that assumptions about time enter into the analysis and judgement of contemporary world politics. What it has not done is to examine in any depth how and why those assumptions matter in any particular case. The interconnection between time and judgement may have been shown, but the nature of that interconnection, in particular the weight borne by accounts of time in given diagnoses of the present of world politics remains obscure. In what follows, my aim is to pursue the idea that time matters in the understanding and judgement of world politics by looking beyond the ways in which particular accounts of world politics depend on and deploy theories of time, to analysing and evaluating these theories themselves. Chapter outline In the rest of Part I of the book, I examine the philosophical positions underpinning rival accounts of political time. I begin in Chapter 2 by taking a closer look at the accounts of political temporality that have surfaced in the above discussion as narratives of repetition, progress and decline. All three narratives have a long history as responses to different kinds of experiences of the political present.32 However, in the primarily secular form in which they continue to haunt contemporary academic debate on the nature of world politics, all of them took shape in response to the specific intellectual and political circumstances of late medieval and early modern Europe.33 Of all of them, I will argue, it is the progressive narrative that has had the most significant influence on the development of understandings of world politics since the seventeenth century, with repetitive and decline/apocalyptic temporalities being deployed in reaction to ameliorative accounts. For this reason, I will go on to explore and assess the grounds and implications of progressive accounts of political time in more detail in the philosophies of history of Kant, Hegel and Marx. What emerges from this interpretation is a more complicated account of the role of the

[ 20 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 21

The question of world-political time Goddess History than is suggested by Pocock’s characterisation. I will argue that although all three philosophies of history offer a systemic account of world political time, all three are ambivalent about whether this system is open or closed. In the final section of the chapter, I will suggest that the kind of historicism that came to dominate the study of world history and politics in the nineteenth century followed from a ‘closed’ reading of the philosophy of history that reflected the influence of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. This historicism adopted ‘mechanical’, ‘organic’ and ‘pedagogic’ metaphors from Kant, Hegel and Marx, and used these as the basis on which to argue for the superiority, and universal salience, of the historical trajectory of western Europe. In Chapter 3, I will examine accounts of political temporality that explicitly take issue with progressive historicism and its claims to knowledge and control of both natural and social worlds. These accounts offer an understanding of the intersection of chronos and kairos within political time that challenges the ways in which they are configured in closed systemic readings of Kant, Hegel and Marx. After a brief discussion of Nietzsche’s and Bergson’s critiques of historicism and linear, scientific time, I will focus in the first section on the arguments of Arendt and Benjamin. Both of these thinkers argue that historicism ends up reducing political time to natural time, and thereby misrepresents the intersection of chronos and kairos through which politics is possible. In Arendt’s case this leads her back to the Greek origins of the distinction and the significance of natality or new beginning for politics. In Benjamin’s case, his critique of historicism leads him to the concept of messianic time, the revolutionary, genuinely political, moments in which past and present are fused together to create a different, though unspecifiable future. In the second section, I turn to the more recent anti-historicist accounts of political time of Derrida and Deleuze. As with Arendt and Benjamin, these theorists argue against linear, deterministic and predictive theories of politics. Derrida makes a case for the inherently ‘untimely’ character of any political present, and our incapacity to grasp its meaning or future direction. Deleuze argues for an understanding of political time in terms of multiple, co-existing ‘presents’, all subject to the contingency of a temporal order of becoming. Although there are clearly commonalities in the critique of historicism across both pairs of thinkers, I will suggest that Arendt and Benjamin remain closer to the theories of which they are critical, than do Derrida and Deleuze. The conclusion of the first part of the book, is that natality and messianic time (in common with the kairos of the Goddess History) represent an ideal of political time as a unified and unifying (fully present) present, and as characterised by the interruption and direction or re-direction of natural chronotic time. In all cases, political time feeds off, but is not reducible to chronotic and kairotic temporalities. It is a distinctive kind of time and one that, through a variety of mechanisms, enables the theorist’s own contribution to be timely, to rise above time in order to be ‘in time’ or capable of making a

[ 21 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 22

Theories of world-political time difference. Derrida’s and Deleuze’s conceptions of political time, in contrast to Machiavelli and Arendt as much as to Hegel and Marx, put the idea of timely theories of politics, as well as timely politics itself into question. Part II of the book returns to the terrain of theories of contemporary world politics. In Chapter 4, I focus on the contrast between theories of post-Cold War world politics that rested on a revival of historicist theorising, and those that claimed scientific status. The chapter begins with Popper’s critique of historicism and how this set up an apparently clear, but actually unsustainable, distinction between scientific (including social scientific) and historicist conceptions of political time. We then go on to look at the way that the end of the Cold War prompted a revival of historicism in efforts to grasp the novelty of the new times of the 1990s, most notably in the theories of Fukuyama and Huntington, which echo some of the accounts of political time discussed in Chapter 2. In contrast to Fukuyama’s and Huntington’s accounts of the worldpolitical present, social scientific theories of post-1989 world politics take Popper’s rejection of historicism as their starting point. I argue, however, that the abandonment of historicist assumptions is in the end precluded by the assumptions on which such social scientific theories, and their supporting methodologies, rest. Liberal and realist responses to the new times of world politics post-1989 continue to be haunted by the relation between chronos and kairos previously traced in linear philosophies of history and in cyclical, repetitive accounts of political time. In conclusion, however, I point to the way in which some of the social scientific responses to thinking the post-1989 present of world politics begin to put the unity and predictability of world-political time into question. Chapter 5 focuses on two alternative diagnoses of the time of contemporary world politics: firstly, arguments that suggest the end of the Cold War marks a stage on the way to the transformation of international political community towards a cosmopolitan world order;34 secondly, Hardt’s and Negri’s postMarxist thesis of empire and counter-empire (Hardt and Negri, 2000, 2005). We will begin by examining Habermas’s reinterpretation of Kant’s idea of perpetual peace, and move on to look at a range of arguments about post-Westphalian world politics as a time in which some (stronger or weaker) version of cosmopolitanism may become possible globally at elite or grassroots levels. We will then move on to the argument for ‘empire’ and Hardt’s and Negri’s account of the de-centring of political authority away from its locus in the state in the globalisation of bio-power, and the resistance (on the part of the ‘multitude’) that this creates in the process. In the third section of the chapter, we will evaluate the resources offered by these theories for analysing and judging the present, and the ways in which those resources depend on temporal assumptions. These theories all claim to offer a diagnosis of the present of world politics that captures its distinctiveness and direction without falling into the traps of

[ 22 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 23

The question of world-political time progressive philosophy of history. In fact, it will be argued, both of these theories hover somewhat uncertainly between operating ‘as if’ certain temporal assumptions hold and ‘knowing’ that they do, and between closed and open versions of the philosophies of history offered by Kant and Marx respectively. In both cases analyses shift between an openness to the future, and reliance on a progressive meta-narrative of political time as the guarantor of the salience of a particular reading of world politics. Chapter 6 examines Virilio’s and Agamben’s accounts of world politics. Virilio and Agamben, like Arendt and Benjamin, reject historicism and social science, taking them to be two, equally regrettable, sides of the coin of modern hubris. In Virilio’s case, the re-thinking of chronos as globalised, infinitely accelerating time provides the key to the interpretation of contemporary world politics, which is a story of decline and potential apocalypse (Virilio, 2005). For Agamben, the present is also identified with a potentially terrible end of history, as the ‘state of exception’ becomes the normal condition for the conduct of global politics (Agamben, 1998, 2005a). For both thinkers, redressing this parlous situation requires the re-assertion of political time, which Virilio understands in Arendtian terms as the spatial control of chronos, and Agamben in terms of Benjamin’s messianic time. It will be argued that although these theorists offer a very different analysis and judgement of the meaning of contemporary world politics than the post-Kantian and post-Marxist theorists discussed in Chapter 5, their arguments continue to be locked into meta-narratives of political time that have much in common with the theories of which they are critical. It remains the case that world-political time is understood in unitary terms, as the unique, singular narrative, spearheaded by Europe, of the loss of politics through the encroachment of naturalising scientific and historicist temporalities. The only answer to this is to slow down or to break through chronotic time in a moment of new beginning, which is not subsumable under chronological or eschatological representations. The role of the theorist is to be timely, just as Habermas and Hardt and Negri seek to be timely in producing their accounts of the potential of the present. Chapter 7 offers a critical comparison of the accounts of political time discussed in Chapters 4 to 6. It argues that all of them rest on assumptions about the time of world politics being constructed through the interplay of two distinct temporal orders, in which chronotic time is controlled and managed through the other-worldly power of kairos. And that, however different these accounts may be, firstly they all render world politics a unitary object for analysis and judgement by privileging a eurocentric interpretation of the western trajectory of world-political time. Secondly, all of these accounts require that politics be understood as a heroic project, in which political actors (and political theorists) tap into extra-chronotic powers in order to control and shape the future. I go on to argue that postcolonial and feminist theories have provided

[ 23 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 24

Theories of world-political time good reasons to doubt both the unitary nature of world-political time and the degree to which the time of world politics can be shaped, controlled and predicted from a perspective which is somehow able to operate on the boundaries of both chronotic and kairotic temporal orders. In the arguments of thinkers such as Chakrabarty (2000) and Spivak (1999), the questioning of these assumptions is linked both to the lack of fit between dominant temporal assumptions and the plural and complex ways in which politics is temporalised from the periphery of the global political and economic order and to Derrida’s poststructuralist insights into the ‘untimeliness’ of the present. In the latter part of the chapter, I return to assess Derrida’s arguments, first discussed in Chapter 3, as a possible answer to the problems raised by postcolonial and feminist critics. I suggest that they do indeed help to dispel the ‘heroic’ conception of politics that haunts both world politics and the ways in which it is theorised, but I am less sure that they resolve the question of how to think world-political time in plural rather than unitary terms. In this respect, I argue that Deleuze’s theory of time as it has been taken up in Connolly’s pluralist political theory offers a more productive way forward. In conclusion I defend a Deleuzean account of world-political time against those critics who would argue that it undermines the possibility of thinking the present, analytically and normatively. Rather, I argue, it frees up possibilities for explanation, understanding and judgment, whilst acknowledging the impossibility of holding and directing the arrow of time. Notes 1 Which, given the infinite divisibility of space, should never actually arrive at its destination. 2 In other contexts, Kant is also concerned with political time: see the discussion of his philosophy of history in Chapter 2 below. 3 It will already be apparent to the reader that I am using the categories of ‘time’ and ‘temporality’ interchangeably, rather than treating the former as the, as it were, basic ingredient or constant that is then organised in different ways by the latter. This is because it does not seem to me to be possible to separate the concept of political time from the concept of temporalisation, and I am doubtful whether this is possible with any scientific, experiential, social or religious concept of time either – see discussion below. 4 This includes work that examines constructions of time within social practices and within social scientific theory and research. See: Kern, 1983; Fabian, 1983; Adam, 1990; Bender & Wellberg, 1991; Nowotny, 1994; Abbott, 2001; Galison, 2003. 5 There are many different ways of categorising time in order to get a purchase on how it operates as a way of structuring experience. For instance Castoriadis uses the distinction between ‘identitary’ (natural or cosmic time) and ‘imaginary’ (social time) (1991); Ricoeur refers to distinctions between ‘lived time’, ‘cosmic time’ and ‘historical time’ (2004); sociologists and anthropologists have distinguished between sacred and profane and between public and private time (Nowotny, 1994). The distinction

[ 24 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 25

The question of world-political time

6

7

8 9

10

11 12

between chronos and kairos is a key analytical distinction in relation to different temporal categorisations because it captures a qualitative difference, rather than reflecting particular spheres of application (e.g. public, private, society, cosmos, nature). The qualitative distinction is, essentially, one between time being understood as the medium (a common, reliable and regular, context in which and through which objects exist and events take place, but which is distinct from those objects and events) and time being understood as the message (a creative force in its own right, intervening in relation to objects and events, rather than operating as a neutral medium). Although it may be the case that the distinction does map onto particular spheres of activity, this is not necessarily the case. Within theories of world politics, as I hope to show, both chronotic and kairotic temporalisations are at work. I use the term chronotic here rather than ‘chronological’, because I am using it to encompass the ways time is thought to work naturally as well as the ways in which natural time is represented as working chronologically through human social life, as in Newton’s chronology discussed in Chapter 2 below. The link between kairos and the capacity for timeliness runs through western traditions of thinking both about politics and about political theory. The point about being timely, is that it involves either a prospective of retrospective grasp of what it means to be in time (punctual), which in turn means having some kind of external perspective on what the time is. Timeliness is important for politics because it is inherent in models of political agency, and accounts of the difference between natural and political events and phenomena. Timeliness is important for political theory, in particular since the speculative philosophies of history of Kant, Hegel and Marx, because the point and purpose of such theories is supposed to be their capacity to diagnose and prescribe for the times, whether with the virtues of hindsight or foresight. See Isaac, 1995, and responses to his argument by W. Brown, 1997; Patton, 1997; Wolin, 1997, also discussed in Chambers, 2003: 73–90. See also Chambers, 2003 and Chapters 3 and 7 below for a discussion of ‘untimely’ political theory and the ‘untimely’ in Derrida’s work. Chronotic time is always spatialised, in the sense that it is represented in spatial, quantitative terms (see Smith, 1986; Agamben, 2005b: 63–65). As Adam points out, chronotic time has the peculiar quality of being treated simultaneously as both what measures and what is being measured; this duality becomes more entrenched as the measurement of time becomes more and more central to the ways in which social life is conducted after the invention of the clock (Adam, 1990: 53). The question of whether clock time has been overtaken by other ways of organising mundane time in the ‘accelerating’ world of globalisation will be considered below and in Chapter 6. Theorists, such as Virilio, argue that the displacements of Newtonian conceptions of space/time in twentieth-century physics have also been accompanied by their displacement in social and political life. See Adam, 1990: 53–75. The question of an ‘arrow of time’ is a point of significant differentiation between modern physicists on the one hand and biological and social scientists and historians on the other. The prevailing view amongst physicists is that time is ‘tenseless’, and there is no qualitative difference between what was, is and will be, with some arguing that time travel is possible in principle (Lockwood, 2005). Biologists, social scientists and historians, in contrast, treat time as essentially ‘tensed’ and irreversible (Adam, 1990: 81–82). The question of the relation between time and causation remains a subject of contention between philosophers (Tooley, 1999).

[ 25 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 26

Theories of world-political time 13 Theories such as those offered by Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, discussed in Chapter 2 below. 14 As we will see, for Rousseau, the ‘noble savage’ in the Caribbean occupied a different (earlier but better) historical stage than his European contemporaries. For Hegel, Africans in general occupied a different (earlier but worse) historical stage than their European contemporaries (see Chapter 2 below). 15 Most historical and social scientific research within the western academy continues to be structured in terms of a periodisation (ancient, medieval, modern) that is very obviously derived from stadial theories of history. For social scientists of world politics, the category of modernity is all-pervasive in our attempts to analyse the present, including within this book. One of the paradoxes of exploring the issue of time, is that, in order to make any sense to potential readers, one finds oneself utilising categories which it is one’s aim to problematise. An analogous problem is the use of the equally all-pervasive category ‘western’, which I utilise in this book to characterise mainstream social science and social and political theory. Although, like ‘modern’ this is a highly problematic category and presumes (unsustainably) a kind of boundedness to the history and philosophy of Europe and its colonial offspring, most notably, the United States, I continue to use it because it emphasises the ‘provincialism’ of the experiences and ideas on which many supposedly universal truths about world politics are based. These difficulties are thematised (though by no means resolved) in the postcolonial critiques considered in Chapter 7 below. 16 The translation of ‘virtue’ for Machiavelli’s virtù would be misleading, since it does not refer to virtue in terms of traditional ideas about goodness. For Machiavelli, virtù is better understood as ‘virtuosity’ or ‘ability’. It refers to the capacity of political leaders to foresee and control events, in contrast and opposition to the blind workings of fortune (see Machiavelli, 1988: 103–106 and further discussion of Machiavelli in Chapter 2 below). 17 A parallel set of arguments goes on in the field of historical studies, where scholars differentiate and argue over the merits of ‘universal’, ‘ecumenical’, ‘international’, ‘world’ and ‘global’ history (Mazlish & Buultjens, 1993; Pomper, Elphick & Vann, 1998; Finney, 2005). 18 This isn’t a neat fit: literatures arising out of English School and interdependence theories in International Relations cut across straightforward international/global divisions (Keohane & Nye, 1977; Buzan, 2004), though they are marked by keeping the inter-state as a crucial aspect of the framework of analysis. More radically, the work of many critical IR scholars challenges the Westphalian premises of mainstream IR (Der Derian & Shapiro, 1989; Walker, 1993). In addition, much work contributing to globalisation studies still sees the inter-state framework as central (see Lechner & Boli, 2004: Part V). 19 This is not to suggest that IR was invented in 1945: we now have a great deal of disciplinary historiography that shows how the post-Second World War debates in IR were prefigured in earlier work (Schmidt, 1998). 20 Though they will differ over the importance of intellectual trends internal to the academy and external social and political developments such as the Cold War (Hoffmann, 1987; Holsti, 1998). 21 I don’t mean by this that such work did not assume time’s ‘arrow’. One of the difficulties inherent in the correlates of war project has been in working out which ‘correlate’ has causal efficacy in relation to which, but the aim was always to generate hypotheses about this and to test and establish patterns of causation (Singer et al., 1979, and see Chapter 4, third section below).

[ 26 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 27

The question of world-political time 22 Obvious exceptions to the ‘synchronic’ tendency in International Relations theory during the Cold War are English School theory (see Buzan, 2004; Bellamy, 2005) and neo-Marxist world systems theory (Wallerstein, 2004). 23 See Baylis & Smith, 2005; Brown with Ainley, 2005; Burchill et al., 2005. 24 See discussion of Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ and Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ arguments and of liberal and realist responses to the end of the Cold War in Chapter 4 below. 25 Waltz, 1993; Paul & Hall, 1999; Mearsheimer, 2001; Waltz & Gray in Booth & Dunne, 2002. 26 Held & McGrew, 2003 and Lechner & Boli, 2004 provide useful overviews of arguments surrounding globalisation and of the scope of globalisation studies. 27 See for example, most of the essays in Paul & Hall, 1999; and Mearsheimer, 2001. 28 The main exception is in the work of Der Derian (2002), but see also Wendt (2006), McIntosh (2006), Bernstein et al. (2000), discussed in Chapter 4 below. 29 As will become clear in my discussion of Virilio’s work in Chapter 6, I do not agree that his version of this kind of argument actually gets rid of the chronos/kairos distinction; instead it re-invents it as a distinction between profane and sacred time. 30 It was written for the Quebec ministry of higher education. Lyotard himself refers to a ‘temporal disjunction’ between the situation of post-industrial states compared to others, but sees this as a difference in temporality in the form of speed rather than in traditional modern/pre-modern terms. However, as with most of the theorists considered in this volume, there is no question but that the temporality associated with post-industrial, liberal capitalist states is what matters for theorising politics. 31 As will be evident in Chapters 6 and 7, I believe that repetitive, progressive and decline accounts of world political time are challenged more powerfully by theorisations of time that insist on its plurality than by arguments for the globalised acceleration of time. 32 As far as can be known, cyclical theories of political time have the longest history and the broadest cross-cultural reach. Linear accounts in which political time is ultimately to be subsumed under sacred time also have a long history, in particular in apocalyptic versions. However, linear accounts of political time in which the culmination of history is within chronotic time, in particular progressive versions of such accounts, are a more recent phenomenon. See, e.g., Aveni, 2002. 33 Aspects of these secularised, western accounts of world-political time resonate with accounts of political time produced in other times and by other cultures. Nevertheless, their emergence is specific to a particular context and their generalisability is one of the questions that is moot to the concerns of this book. I am focusing on these accounts because they are the resources on which contemporary theories of world politics, predominantly produced in the western academy, draw. In Chapter 7, I will be examining some of the ways in which the hegemony of western modes of thought is challenged in postcolonial scholarship on world politics. 34 I have selected Habermas, Linklater and Benhabib as theorists representative of this tendency (Habermas, 2006; Linklater, 1998; Benhabib, 2002, 2004).

[ 27 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 28

2

From fortune to history

Introduction H A P T E R 1 pointed to the ways in which accounts of world politics embody temporal narratives of repetition, progress and decline. The aim of this chapter is to deepen our understanding of the conditions of possibility of these temporal framings and the role that they play as resources for thought in the western social scientific imagination. In order to do this, I will highlight some of the contrasts and connections between neo-classical, Christian and secular historicist configurations of world, politics and time in European thought between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. What follows is not an attempt to account for the emergence of different arguments about time at different historical periods. Instead, it is a highly selective examination of certain ideas about time, as both chronos and kairos, and how those conceptions render world politics meaningful in different ways. The first section begins by revisiting Machiavelli’s work and taking a closer look at the tensions inherent in the Machiavellian temporalisation of politics, and the possibilities it yields for understanding and judging political life. I then move on to draw a contrast between Bacon’s ‘The Masculine Birth of Time’ and Newton’s Unitarian chronology of world history. Both of these accounts remove political temporality from the cyclical rhythms of Machiavelli but in very different ways. Bacon sees science as the key to a new time of unfettered progress, in which the chronos of nature is trumped by the kairos of human invention. In contrast, Newton’s science is put to use in order to reconcile secular chronos with the kairotic time of creation and apocalypse described and prophesied in the Bible. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, neo-classical and Christian temporal framings of human history interact and intersect with a Baconian faith in the possibilities of progress. They do so within a context in which the temporal and spatial distinctiveness of Europe is becoming a self-

C

[ 28 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 29

From fortune to history conscious assumption of European thinkers, a context also of the development of the European state system, and of increased interaction with other parts of the world through trade, colonialism and imperialism. The idea of ‘new time’ (Neuzeit) or a time of enlightenment or modernity is difficult to fit with either cyclical or apocalyptic readings of world-political time, and new narratives emerge that offer a different kind of meaning to distinctions between now and then, here and there. These narratives are self-consciously worldly, not only in the sense that they secularise understandings of political time, but also in the sense that they posit a future for the world as an interconnected whole. The second section of the chapter examines the distinctive mode of thinking about time in world politics in speculative philosophies of world history. Although clearly prefigured in assumptions about scientific progress and Christian eschatology, the temporalisation of world politics in the philosophy of history represents a new direction in the theorisation of world political time. We look first at Rousseau and Herder and the ways in which their accounts raise questions about the idea of progress and unity in human historical development. We then move on to the work of Kant, Hegel and Marx as key exemplars of philosophies of history in which issues of both progress and unity in human history are resolved. Although the philosophies of history of each of these thinkers are by no means equivalent, there is considerable common ground between them, much of which has continued to underpin more recent readings of the temporality of world politics. The discussion of these theorists will concentrate on tracing out this common ground, focusing on the conditions of possibility of these readings of world history and their implications for understanding and judging the present and future of world politics. The final section of the chapter will focus on mechanical, organic and pedagogic versions of historicism that became dominant in the disciplines of history and social science in the western academy by the end of the nineteenth century. It will be suggested that such historicisms combine elements of a selective reading of the theories of Kant, Hegel and Marx, which ignores their tensions and ambiguities, along with arguments drawn from nineteenth-century developments in biological and geological science. Within historicism the time of politics and the time of science are increasingly conflated, undermining the chronos/kairos distinction that underpinned accounts of political time from Machiavelli through to Marx. Before the Goddess History Fortune is a woman Machiavelli is famous for basing his arguments on experience of political and military life, rather than on principles known a priori. Nevertheless, as many commentators have shown, Machiavelli’s ‘realism’ is not simply a reflection of the observed or chronicled machinations of politicians or generals through the

[ 29 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 30

Theories of world-political time ages.1 Rather, he interprets those machinations in the light of specific assumptions about the nature of politics, the best forms of political rule and conditions for the conduct of politics and war that are ubiquitous. In the latter category are Machiavelli’s assumptions about the temporality of politics, its overall patterning, the ebb and flow of fortune, and the consequent significance of times and timing for political success and failure. Time operates in the Machiavellian account of politics in complex and layered ways as both chronos (orderly and predictable) and kairos (disruptive of order and unpredictable). Chronotic time is anchored in the heavens. In contrast to the Christian, Augustinian view in which the universe has a single and irreversible trajectory from creation to apocalypse, Machiavelli endorses classical cosmology (Parel, 1992: 28). All aspects of the world, including the human world, are temporally organised in a cyclical pattern of birth and death, rise and fall, growth and decay that is structured by the movement and interrelation of the planets. From this point of view, one can understand the history of the world and of political life as structured in such a way that it is possible to learn lessons from the past and foretell the future. This in itself can then become the key to taking control of the body politic and protecting it from the ravages of corruption and decay, creating a different form of time, the political time of the city or of the military camp (Machiavelli, 1988, 2003). In this context the cyclical development of chronotic time is halted; instead time is a constructed, ordering rhythm, within which the cultivation of power, wealth, military prowess and civic virtue may take place. However, as noted in the previous chapter, for Machiavelli there is no permanent solution to the problem of controlling the ravages of time through the exercise of virtù. Neither the universal temporality of the heavens nor the heroic achievements of great men can render the time of politics wholly regular and predictable (Parel, 1992: 43). This is because, in addition to the motions of the heavens, the world is also affected by the contingencies of fortune, the kairotic temporality that contests the chronos of the universe and also the artificial rhythm of the body politic. Fortune may act so as to accelerate or delay the cyclical pattern of growth and decay inscribed in the universe; it may also help or hinder the construction of polities and their capacity to keep corruption at bay (Machiavelli, 1988: 87; 1996: 198). But fortune is not simply a force that intervenes in natural and political life – it is always a matter of combinations of events and actions, with particular people at particular times. Fortune is all about timing, and capitalising on fortune (virtù) is also all about having a capacity for timing, in the sense of being able to suit qualities and actions to contingent circumstance (1996: 239). The very unpredictability of fortune keeps political hopes alive, even in the absence of any assurance of the permanency of political achievement.

[ 30 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 31

From fortune to history I indeed affirm it anew to be very true, according to what is seen through all the histories, that men can second fortune but not oppose it, that they can weave its warp but not break it. They should indeed never give up for, since they do not know its end and it proceeds by oblique and unknown ways, they have always to hope and, since they hope, not to give up in whatever fortune and in whatever travail they may find themselves. (1996: 199)

In examining how Machiavelli thinks about time and timing in politics, the ambiguities that run through his political thought become particularly marked. Politics is both subject to the temporal patterns inscribed in the universe as a whole and has the potential to create its own time, in which time serves politics rather than being subject to its (time’s) determination (1996: 9). Political action is both at the mercy of fortune and able to turn fortune to its own ends. Time as chronos enables one to learn from the past and predict the future, but time as kairos renders the lessons of history unreliable because the ways of fortune are ‘unknown’. For Machiavelli, however, these ambiguities are not inconsistencies but a reflection of co-existing, cross-cutting temporalities that mutually constitute the time of politics. Understanding this temporal complexity yields the insight that politics is predictable in general and unpredictable in particular. At the most general level, politics always repeats itself and one can trace the patterns imposed by the laws of the universe both backwards and forwards in time. Still at a general level, one can identify the forces at play in politics, the mix of heavenly determination, fortune and virtù (or lack of it) that explains all political outcomes (1996: 5–6). But in any particular actual time and place it will never be certain how the mix of forces will play out. Even in the case of the most ‘virtuous’ and well-informed actor, who understands the heavenly as well as the earthly powers, and is possessed of the strength and skill to make things happen, there is no predicting the turns that fortune may take (1996: 125). Two implications of Machiavelli’s interpretation of political time are of particular interest. The first is that even though at any given moment peoples, cities or individuals may occupy different positions in relation to the dynamics of nature, fortune or virtù in politics, these are dynamics common to all politics, within and between collective and individual actors. Strong powers are the outcome of the same processes through which weak powers are produced; they are not ‘advanced’ or progressive. Equally ‘virtuous’ political actors may come to triumph or disaster depending on times and timing. There are winners and losers in politics, but not those who are ‘ahead’ or ‘behind’. For Machiavelli, there are no permanent victories of virtù over nature or fortune and, in the long term, nothing ever changes. The second implication of Machiavelli’s view of political time is powerfully normative. In his republican political ideal, politics is protected from nature (chronos) and contingency (kairos), it evades the time of the heavens and of fortune and institutes a new time in which corruption and decay are banished. In this ideal the body politic becomes immortal, and any

[ 31 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 32

Theories of world-political time glory in politics is linked to the glimpses of that immortality afforded by our knowledge of ‘virtuous’ political action. The view that politics is the same in all contexts across time and space and that the ideal political temporality is one in which time stands still is in stark contrast to the accounts of political time that came to dominate understandings of world politics in later centuries. The cyclical and arbitrary dynamics of Machiavelli’s neo-classical vision both enables and limits our political imagination in a variety of ways. On the one hand it enables us to interpret events through comparison and analogy with events at different times and places. On the other hand it renders meaningless the kinds of narratives of linear historical progress discussed later in this chapter. On the one hand, it provides us with tools to explain the patterns of political events. On the other hand, it reifies the factor (fortune) that undermines the practice of generalisation and prediction on the part of both political actors and commentators. For Machiavelli, the idea that one could associate the ideal of political action not with the halting of time but with its acceleration is an absurdity, since to accelerate time can only be to accelerate the process of decay. In this political imaginary it is the military camp that comes closest to the political ideal of a community in which nature (chronos) and fortune (kairos) are disciplined and controlled (Machiavelli, 2003: 117–129). Masculine science and the end of time As we have seen, in Machiavelli’s work, as in much neo-classical and humanist work in the European thought of his time, the predominant understanding of chronos is in terms of the repetitive cyclical patterns of birth and death, growth and decay that are identified as embedded in nature and determined by the movements of the planets. This time shapes all developments in the universe, including in political life. Although Machiavelli provides us with examples of virtù triumphing in the face of nature and contingency, he also makes it clear that this is only possible if political actors work with and capitalise on both chronos and kairos, and moreover that any victory over chronos is only ever a postponement of the inevitability of death for the individual and decay for the polity. It is chronos in this sense that is challenged and overcome in Bacon’s account by ‘The Masculine Birth of Time or the Great Instauration of the Dominion of Man over the Universe’ (Farrington, 1964: 61–72). In this unfinished essay, Bacon proclaims the subjugation of the time of nature through the radical new beginning offered by science.2 My intention is to impart to you, not the figments of my own brain, nor the shadows thrown by words, nor a mixture of religion and science, nor a few commonplace observations or notorious experiments tricked out to make a composition as fanciful as a stage play. No; I am come in very truth leading to

[ 32 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 33

From fortune to history you Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave. (Farrington, 1964: 62)

Bacon’s vision of the new relation between ‘man’ and nature is expressed not only through the metaphor of slavery, but also through that of a marriage, in which men are united with the reality of nature (knowing and understanding ‘things themselves’ rather than the fantastical imaginings of scholastics and alchemists), and have as their offspring ‘a blessed race of Heroes or Supermen who will overcome the immeasurable helplessness and poverty of the human race’ (Farrington, 1964: 72). For Bacon, science simultaneously conquers and creates time, overcoming the powers of both nature and chance. It conquers time in that it provides the key to nature’s workings and thereby takes over nature’s power. It creates time, in that it puts nature’s power to productive use for the improvement of the human condition, enabling in turn longer and more productive lives. Bacon’s account of the masculine birth of time differs profoundly in the orientation of its imaginary from Machiavelli’s superficially analogous account of the relation between masculine virtù and either nature (chronos) or fortune (kairos). Machiavelli’s masculine political actor rides and dives the waves of circumstance, but the most he is likely to achieve is a paradoxically fleeting immortality. In contrast, Bacon’s scientist masters fate and thereby fundamentally changes the temporal register of human existence in all its aspects. Man is neither at the mercy of time nor interested in holding time back. Instead he creates a different, ever-expanding future, progressively dynamic, linear and purposeful. Bacon’s notion of the masculine birth of time reverses the classical understanding of the relation between natural chronos and the human capacity for action. In classical terms the latter is shaped and determined by the former, except for highly exceptional examples of heroic, god-like, actions. In contrast, Bacon puts human capacities in control of natural chronos, envisaging god-like action as the norm rather than the exception. Within this context not only does human chronos become detached from natural chronos, but kairos becomes identified with human invention rather than with the contingencies of fortune (as in Machiavelli) or the sacred time of Christianity, bounded by creation and apocalypse. One of the most obvious consequences of this is the way in which the future of humanity, instead of being thought of as either similar to the past or as heading for a determinate end, becomes thought of as an open and unbounded product of human creativity. A second consequence is that human temporality is established as clearly distinct from natural or sacred temporalities. This distinctiveness of human temporality, which, following Bacon, becomes one of the watchwords of Enlightenment thinking, has specific implications for the understanding and judgement of distinctively human domains of action. It isn’t possible to know humanity definitively, because humanity is self-

[ 33 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 34

Theories of world-political time changing. While nature becomes ever more transparent and predictable in its patterns of development, humanity is the source of change and therefore its future cannot be predicted on the basis of its past or present. Nevertheless, the capacities for reason and invention that render the future of humanity unknowable specifically, at the same time signal the trajectory of human development in terms of an ethic of infinite progress. As far as judgement is concerned, the Baconian view reverses the traditional valorisation of stasis as a human ideal, and instead identifies that ideal with progressive, accelerating change. Bacon’s masculine birth of time looks forward to scientific progress and clearly prefigures elements of secular Enlightenment thought. However, at the time at which he was writing, world politics was not primarily conceived, from a European point of view, through the temporal lenses of either science or the Machiavellian neo-classical cosmos. In thinking about the world as a whole Christianity remained the key reference point both temporally and spatially (Manuel, 1963; Avis, 1986). From this point of view, the past and future of world politics had to be understood in terms of the relation between profane (chronos) and sacred (kairos) time. The important questions that this raised about universal history were, when did the world begin, and when will it end? The answers to those questions were to be found through the study of the Christian Bible, which served as a reference point against which other sources of information could be verified. The standard Christian account of universal history in Bacon’s time was based on Daniel’s prophetic dream of the four monarchies, which became identified by scholars with Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome (Manuel, 1963: 37, 146). This history was universal not because it paid attention to all of history, but because it followed the path set out by the Bible, which led to the birth of Christ and the foundation of the Church and, ultimately, to apocalypse. The Protestant reformation and wars of religion fuelled a revival of apocalyptic thinking in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, which in turn fuelled the ongoing interest in working out when the apocalypse would happen. In order to work out the possible date of the apocalypse, one needed also to identify the date of creation. The result of this was a whole field of scholarship dedicated to the chronology of the world. For the chronologists there is a sharp distinction between the time of chronology, which is understood in Newtonian terms as linear, divisible, measuring and measurable and God’s time. Chronological time is bounded by creation and apocalypse, but its different moments are qualitatively indistinguishable. One of the most famous exponents of Christian chronology was Newton, who dedicated a massive amount of time to the task of reconciling what could be known about secular history with biblical prophecy. In order to do this, Newton not only drew on existing written sources but also used his theories about the physical universe to correlate material events, such as eclipses or comets, with the events predicted in biblical prophecies. Newton’s acceptance of

[ 34 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 35

From fortune to history the idea that chronological time exists between ‘two absolute poles of creation and destruction’ (Manuel, 1963: 164–165), enabled him to identify historical with natural time (chronos), as a linear continuum, which could be subdivided. However, whereas mathematics provided the key to studying the time of nature, bibilical prophecy was the key to historical chronology (1963: 164). Newton’s interest in world history was not driven by any concern with explanatory principles, but by his interest in demonstrating the validity of his Unitarian religious commitments (1963: 193). Monarchies might rise and fall, but, from the viewpoint of Christian chronology, all human history tells the same story of fallen humanity: the Baconian vision of progress is therefore an illusion. Nevertheless, it is possible for God to communicate across the distinction between sacred and profane time, as happens through the figure of Christ and the foundation of the Church. Ultimately, all events in chronological time gain their meaning from their relation to sacred time, which is outside of chronological and natural (Newtonian) time. Within a Machiavellian understanding of the temporality of politics, the experience of the present as different is an illusion, and the task of the political commentator is to point to the importance of history as a kind of toolbox of examples and strategies in similar cases. Within a chronological understanding, the present is only truly distinctive insofar as it is a transition to a different kind of time. As long as one still inhabits chronological time, then the present is qualitatively the same as both past and future. In eighteenth-century Europe, these ways of thinking about time and politics remained significant, but were increasingly superseded by accounts of political time as actually or potentially progressive. A crucial factor in this development was the notion, which became prevalent amongst European educated elites, of the distinctiveness of their own present times as a time of enlightenment. This distinctiveness was linked to an awareness of the present as modern (Neuzeit) in contrast to the past of tradition, and with the present as oriented towards future possibilities immanent within it (Koselleck, 1988, 2004: 9–25; Cavournas, 2002: 1–17). In order to make sense of the claim that the political present is somehow qualitatively demarcated from the past a different way of thinking about political time was needed, one which, as with Bacon’s masculine birth of time, detached human from natural temporality (whether cyclical or linear) and ceased to make qualitative change dependent either on chance or divine intervention. In the absence of the certainties of either natural repetition or other-worldly end, philosophers of the Enlightenment began to tell a different set of stories about how the past, present and future of humanity could be understood in universal terms. These new accounts of political temporality engaged with and raised a different set of questions to those that preoccupied Machiavelli and Newton. These were questions about the nature of the differences between now and then, what is and what will be, and the mechanisms that

[ 35 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 36

Theories of world-political time explained those differences. These were also questions about the relation between now and then, is and will be and here and there, given the spatial delimitation of enlightened self-consciousness in an era of expanding European trade, colonialism and imperialism. World politics and world history Speculation on the origins and ends of humanity Speculation about earlier phases of human existence, or thought experiments about what such a phase might look like, provided Enlightenment thinkers with one way in which to make sense of the distinctiveness of the present both spatially and temporally. The idea of a shift from a state of nature to one of civilisation, even when not presented as an empirical claim, was a useful technique for isolating the mechanisms through which human beings could improve (or worsen) their lot. Theories proliferated in eighteenth-century Europe as to the driving forces of human historical development, with different accounts highlighting self-interest, reason, culture, morality or economic production and dividing history up into different stages or periods of development. Within such accounts, time was used to map and measure the past, drawing on different sorts of evidence that included natural history and science as well as written sources, myths and legends. In this sense, time was understood as Newtonian chronos, continuous and neutral between natural and human events. Meanwhile, time as kairos was detached from any immediate link to an other-worldly source (God or Fortune). Origins and ends were no longer understood as signalling the qualitative difference between profane and sacred time. The key to time, to changing time and to the times was, in Baconian fashion, put firmly in human hands. Unlike earlier ‘universal’ accounts of the human condition, these speculative histories encompassed developments beyond Europe, drawing on available evidence about other existing cultures, or previously existing cultures, to demonstrate the temporality of human development in the context of the world as a whole (Koselleck, 1988, 2004; O’Brien, 1997; Cavournas, 2002). This preoccupation with possible pasts and potential futures produced two debates that continue to resonate in contemporary attempts to grasp the meaning of world politics. The first debate was about the direction or telos of human temporality in the present and the mechanisms that explained that direction. The second debate was about whether human development should be understood in terms of a unified and universal kairos, or whether there were plural temporal trajectories inhabited by different peoples in different parts of the world. The first debate centred on the question of progress, the sources of progress in human history and how to ensure that history developed in a progressive direction. The second debate focused on how to think about the world in relation to historical time and the possibility of progress.

[ 36 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 37

From fortune to history The work of Rousseau and Herder is typical of Enlightenment thinking insofar as it puts forward speculations about human origins and development from the point of view of the distinctiveness of the spatio-temporal coordinates of Enlightenment Europe. At the same time, however, both thinkers are notable for presenting theories of human history that run counter to what became orthodoxies in the philosophy of history: Rousseau, because he read the development of humanity in terms of decline rather than progress; Herder, because he denied the idea that one can understand human development in unified terms. We will look briefly at these two accounts before examining the ways in which the problems they raised were addressed in the philosophies of history of Kant, Hegel and Marx In his ‘Discourse on the Origins of Inequality’ (Rousseau, 1973: 27–113), Rousseau famously turns the tables on Hobbes by arguing that the behaviour of individuals in Hobbes’s state of nature actually reflects the behaviour of civilised rather than natural man. On this account, the masculine birth of time is cause for mourning rather than for celebration, since the detachment of human temporality from the rhythms of nature initiates a process of corruption rather than progress (1973: 45–46). Nevertheless, even though the evaluation is reversed, Rousseau still follows Bacon’s identification of human time with kairos, a different temporal plane that disrupts and transforms chronos (the time of nature). For Rousseau, the human capacity to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to instincts within the contingent play of circumstances leads to discoveries and inventions that move humanity away from a simple, subsistence economy to a complex division of labour (1973: 54, 85–89). This then requires more complex social and political institutions, most notably that of private property, that operate so as to entrench inequalities between different groups of people. These inequalities corrupt rich and poor alike, making the rich arrogant and effete and the poor resentful and brutish, leading to a world of states that are corrupt within and warlike without (1973: 100–103). Rousseau points to both natural and cultural factors in his account and suggests that humanity has become trapped in a cage of its own making. His speculations about earlier and better times are informed by arguments and evidence taken from natural and human history and from accounts of the existence of less unequal societies outside of Europe. Like many other thinkers of the European Enlightenment, he draws analogies between the state of ‘savages’, the state of nature, and earlier stages of European history (1973: 49–55, 104). In the ‘Discourse on the Origins of Inequality’, the overall message is highly pessimistic and the pattern of corruption is presented as the likely fate of all human development. The condition of ‘savages’ may be better in certain respects, but that is because it is undeveloped – their human potential has yet to, and may never, be realised. However, the decline of humanity owing to its departure from its natural

[ 37 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 38

Theories of world-political time condition is not the whole story for Rousseau. Countering this pessimistic narrative is an alternative, in which the possibility of human progress is bound up with the creation of a second nature, in the sense of a community and culture that will enable the cultivation of a genuinely moral will. This potential future is explored at the level of the collective in The Social Contract and at the level of the individual in Émile (1973: 165–278; 1974). In a way reminiscent of Machiavelli, Rousseau identifies the creation of the good state and the good citizen as key to halting the corrupting ravages of time. Unlike Machiavelli, however, corruption derives from nurture rather than nature and may be permanently rather than only temporarily halted. Rousseau’s work raises specific questions in relation to debates about the direction and unity of human historical development. In terms of direction, in Rousseau’s account, there is a lack of fit between the story of human decline and the potential for a new beginning. He does not explain how it is possible to change the direction of human development through human will, given the entrenchment of corruption in those contexts in which that will is furthest detached from nature. In terms of unity, Rousseau presents his story of decline in both universal and particular terms. It is both the decline of humanity as such and the story specific to civilised humanity. This means that it is left unclear as to whether all human communities and civilisations eventually evolve in the same direction or whether some develop (decline) further or differently than others. Herder’s work follows Rousseau in reading human history as emerging out of the interaction of natural and cultural factors, and in seeing human perfectibility (the capacity to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to instincts) as the key to historical change. He also follows Rousseau in seeing culture as crucial to the possibilities of community. Herder departs from Rousseau, however, in his denial of a sharp qualitative distinction between natural and cultural determination in human affairs. In his Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (Barnard, 1969), Herder embeds human history in planetary history, treating human beings as a ‘multiplicity and a unity’, simultaneously formed through acting and being acted upon by a variety of natural and social influences (Barnard, 1969: 282). Herder gives an even stronger emphasis than Rousseau to distinct cultures and traditions as the key source of meaning for human beings in any particular spatial and temporal present. His argument for the complexity of determination in human history and for the importance of distinctive cultural contexts leads to an insistence on plurality as the key principle at work in human affairs (Barnard, 1969: 284). For Herder, this is not a plurality that can be unified in any straightforward way through a temporal ordering, in which difference is understood as being ‘ahead’ or ‘behind’ in relation to a common kairotic destination (Barnard, 1969: 299). Instead he envisages human individuals and communities as distinctive systems that are like links in a chain of being

[ 38 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 39

From fortune to history that connect to a range of other organic and inorganic systems and ultimately encompass the universe as a whole. He applies this idea to the temporality of non-human organic and inorganic systems as well as to humanity. In reality, every mutable thing has within itself the measure of its time; this persists even in the absence of any other; no two worldly things have the same measure of time . . . There are therefore (to be precise and audacious) at any one time in the Universe infinitely many times. (Herder, Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft, quoted in Koselleck, 2004: 2)3

Herder’s speculative account of human history raised a new set of questions about progress and universality. Herder challenged not only the enlightenment narrative of progress, which had already been contested by Rousseau, but also the idea that there was a universally applicable yardstick through which progress (or decline) could be measured. This raised problems for comparability and translatability across space and time that undermined the idea of Enlightenment Europe as a model for other more benighted parts of the world. In terms of universality, although Herder identified humanity as a single species about which certain universal truths held true, his account stressed the particularity of different peoples and the absence of a common language through which their interrelation with each other could make overarching sense. For Herder, the idea that it might be possible to turn other parts of the world into ‘a second Europe’ was an absurdity (Barnard, 1969: 295). Philosophical history Rousseau and Herder challenged speculative enlightenment accounts of world history that presented it in terms of progress and unity. The philosophies of history of Kant, Hegel and Marx offer a response to Rousseau and Herder that takes the problems they raise (in relation to progress and unity) into account, whilst still holding on to a vision of the ‘new time’ of enlightened modernity as both distinctive and progressive. In spite of the obvious differences between them, there are significant commonalities in the philosophical histories developed by these thinkers. For all three the philosophy of world history is explicitly bound up with the development of world politics, in the sense of both international and global political relations. All three thinkers also bring the theorisation of the relation between the philosopher and the times that he is theorising to the forefront of consideration, so that this becomes a crucial aspect of the philosophy of history itself. Finally, in all three cases the ‘new time’ of the present is essentially revolutionary time and the French Revolution is a crucial reference point for understanding the specificity of the political time of the present in relation to the past and its orientation to the future.

[ 39 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 40

Theories of world-political time Kant In his writings on history and politics Kant offers us a story of how nature, free will and reason work complementarily to produce culture that, over time, ensures both juridical and moral progress for mankind.4 Kant is critical of Herder’s philosophy of history on several grounds, but principally because, he argues, Herder conflates natural with wilful and rational determination in his account of how human beings develop (Kant, 1991a: 201–220). For Kant, nature certainly supplies crucial ingredients of human history, from climate to instinctual drives, but these must not be confused with either ‘perfectibility’ (the attribute of being able to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to instincts) or with the human capacity to identify the requirements of autonomous reason and develop a genuinely rational (moral) will. Following on from the conclusions of his critical philosophy, the key to historical change is the interplay between choices driven by desire and self-interest on the one hand, and by the requirements of the categorical imperative on the other. Free will is at the heart of kairos (revolutionary time and times) (Kant, 1991b: 42). According to Kant’s argument, the catalysts of desire and reason work along parallel, mutually reinforcing tracks. This is because, in relation to the first catalyst, the pursuit of one’s own desires, as with Hobbes’s reasoning, pushes people into law-governed communities. Even a ‘nation of devils’ will ultimately accept a contract that provides mutual protection and mutual recognition (Kant, 1991a: 112). In relation to the second catalyst, a legal order provides a way of approximating the achievement of the ends of pure reason, in which people are compelled to behave according to the moral law, even if they do not do so on rational grounds. Such a legal order is, in turn, the best kind of context for the cultivation of a purely moral will. On the one hand, man’s ‘unsociable sociability’ drives cooperation within and between states via competitive mechanisms. On the other hand, reason has the power to transform a ‘pathologically enforced’ union into a ‘moral whole’. These two kinds of stories, driven by distinctive principles, run through Kant’s philosophy of right and his philosophical histories, including his account in the essay ‘On Perpetual Peace: a philosophical sketch’ (1991a: 108–114). In this essay, as well as in various speculative accounts of the origins and ends of human history, Kant links the possibility of progress specifically to the development of a certain kind of republican state, as well as to the implications of the practices of both commerce and war. A republican state, grounded in principles of right, is less prone to war both because it involves all citizens in decisions about wars and their human and financial costs, and because such states enable the cultivation of moral citizens (1991a: 99–102). Commerce and war as such provide good incentives for even the most self-interested actor eventually to desire the internationalisation of a law-governed condition. Commerce requires stable property relations and freedom to trade and travel, both of which are

[ 40 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 41

From fortune to history undermined by conditions of insecurity between states. And the impetus to continually improve the technologies of war will eventually produce such destructive machines that states will be deterred from engaging in war and seek to settle their differences peacefully (1991a: 113–114). For Kant, therefore, choices based on both desire and reason drive history towards a condition of republican states, linked together in an ordered international society which recognises levels of state, international and cosmopolitan right. As against Herder, truths common to all humanity, about the role of desire, free will and reason, yield a narrative in which both progress and universality are confirmed. Nevertheless, it is also clear that Kant’s projected telos of perpetual peace can only be realised through the exercise of human will, which is reducible to neither natural nor rational determination. Like Rousseau, Kant therefore has a difficulty accounting for his assurance that the exercise of human will will follow the prescribed direction, whether willy-nilly (through the clash of interests and the pursuit of desire) or self-consciously (through the embrace of the moral law). Kant addresses this difficulty by introducing a further layer to his analysis. In his essay ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, Kant seems at first to be offering a framework for understanding world history as progress, along the lines discussed above (1991a: 41–53). In other words it appears that he is identifying the progressive logic of historical development underlying surface events. However, it turns out that this is a misleading reading. Kant’s ninth proposition in ‘Idea for a Universal History’ turns his philosophy of history from a type of philosophical investigation into the principles governing historical development, on the basis of which the origins and ends of human history may be discerned, into a mode of philosophical and political judgment, or even action. A philosophical attempt to work out a universal history of the world in accordance with a plan of nature aimed at a perfect civil union of mankind, must be regarded as possible and even as capable of furthering the purpose of nature itself. It is admittedly a strange and at first sight absurd proposition to write a history according to an idea of how world events must develop if they are to conform to certain rational ends; it would seem that only a novel could result from such premises. Yet if it may be assumed that nature does not work without a plan and purposeful end, even amidst the arbitrary play of human freedom, this idea might nevertheless prove useful. (1991a: 51–52, original emphasis)

The way in which Kant distinguishes empirical from philosophical history complicates the relation between kairos and chronos by anchoring the kairos supposedly embedded in the mechanisms and purposes that underlie the Newtonian chronos of successive empirical events in the figure of the philosopher himself. The philosopher cannot be sure of what, if anything, propels the ‘arbitrary play of human freedom’, therefore he cannot be sure that empirical history is actually developing teleologically towards the ‘perfect civil union of

[ 41 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 42

Theories of world-political time mankind’. Because of this, it is necessary for the philosopher to interpret history as if it had a purpose in keeping with a rational, moral will. On the one hand, this keeps the hope of progress alive, but even more importantly, the judgement of history as if it were progress may itself further the ends of reason. Thus the historical intervention of the philosopher’s judgement can be cited to confirm the truth of his diagnosis of his own times and of the forces shaping history, even as he denies his ability to demonstrate a pattern of progress in the inchoate mess of empirical political events. The work of empirical and philosophical history as intellectual enterprises is different for Kant: the former is an essentially descriptive, the latter an essentially prescriptive, activity. The political task of philosophical history is to intervene in the empirical, to influence the judgement of leaders and populations, to encourage enlightenment and the self-conscious implementation of the political project of republican government and perpetual peace. The relation between past, present and future prescribed in Kant’s philosophical history is effectively guaranteed only by the degree to which the philosopher’s judgement finds an audience in political actors. For this reason, historical progress is a matter of faith and hope rather than something of which there can be certainty. The orientation of the philosopher’s judgement of history both substitutes for and exemplifies the specificity of the present as the revolutionary time of kairos. In the terms of Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1987: 33–35), the philosopher’s judgement of politics can be understood as either teleological or aesthetic. If the judgement of history is teleological then it works on analogy with the judgment of organic nature, in which, for instance, we understand the workings of a plant by reference to the end point of its development, by which it is governed. On this account, a definite end to historical development is postulated as governing the overall pattern of historical events. If the judgement of history is aesthetic, then rather than having a definitive end, history is judged in terms of the extent to which it conforms to the ‘purposiveness without purpose’ characteristic of the aesthetic judgment of taste. According to Kant, this kind of judgment appeals universally but has no authorising ground, and gains meaning only to the extent that it resonates with the judgement of others.5 The way in which the orientation of the philosopher’s judgement can outweigh the progressive significance of actual political events, is illustrated in Kant’s discussion of the French Revolution. For Kant, the Revolution was the crucial exemplar of the new time in which he lived; a time of enlightenment in which progress was understood to be the product of autonomous human action, and human beings were emerging from their ‘self-imposed immaturity’. In spite of this, however, Kant felt obliged to condemn the revolutionaries because, in overthrowing legitimate political authority, their actions contravened the fundamental principle of obedience to law and thereby threatened the foundations of right (Kant, 1991b: 131; 1992: 153–157). In contrast, the judgement of

[ 42 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 43

From fortune to history spectators of the Revolution, who interpreted it in terms of the ongoing progress of humanity, could be taken as uncontaminated evidence for the moral development of humanity (Kant, 1979: 153). Ultimately, Kant’s theorising of the new time of the present pulls the rug from under the feet of the teleology he has himself ascribed to human history. Being in new time means having to make it happen, whether as an actual or a philosophical revolutionary. Kant’s work addresses problems raised by Rousseau about progress in human affairs by identifying free will with rational will at the level of the philosopher’s judgement but also with the spirit of his own times – the two bearing witness to each other. The potential future represented by the new start of the social contract, which is inexplicable in the context of corrupted humanity, becomes intelligible when the right kind of will turns out to be immanent in the present, even if only through the free will of the enlightened philosopher. Nevertheless, this solution to the question of progress depends on a sleight of hand in which the distinction and relation of empirical (chronos) and philosophical (kairos) history is ambiguous. On the one hand, Kant makes a very clear distinction between the two; on the other hand, when he identifies his judgement with the revolutionary principle of his times, he puts the distinction into question. Kant’s philosophy of history is ambivalent between two claims. The first is that kairos in some sense inhabits chronos in the form of both effective (underlying mechanisms) and teleological (overarching ends) causation. The second is that the direction of history is uncertain and the end cannot be guaranteed. What is certain, however, on Kant’s account, is that the principle of plurality identified in human history by Herder is governed by a higher principle of unity. The division of the world into different peoples serves the ends of reason by providing an incentive, in the long term, for republican peace. Hegel The ambiguity in Kant’s philosophy of history, in which the sources of meaning of empirical events are somehow distinguishable from, yet also inherent in, empirical events, is carried through into Hegel’s work. Nevertheless, Hegel’s philosophy of history differs from Kant in significant respects in its account of the mechanisms and ends of world history, in its historicisation of the philosopher’s judgement and in the way in which the significance of the French Revolution for the ‘new time’ of modernity is interpreted.6 As with Kant, Hegel’s philosophy of history presents a narrative of human progress. As with Kant also, the concept of freedom or self-determination is central to the possibility of qualitative change in human history and operates as both mechanism and telos in the philosophical account of world history. Contrary to Kant, however, Hegel rejects a dualistic account of human life, at both individual and collective levels, and therefore also rejects the idea of free will as an a-historical phenomenon, perpetually and arbitrarily poised between

[ 43 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 44

Theories of world-political time desire and reason (Hegel, 1991: 67–70). For Hegel, self-determination is not grounded in the will of individuals – freedom is meaningful within institutionalised relations of mutual recognition that are human constructions (spirit), through which and in relation to which any particular will takes shape (Hegel, 1977: 265). History is propelled by freedom in the sense that it is propelled by the ways in which different cultural forms recognise or fail to recognise themselves in terms of their own complex logic of self-determination (Hegel, 1975: 55–60). Like Herder, Hegel treats human history as the story of a plurality of distinctive cultures. Unlike Herder, however, Hegel understands this plurality in terms of a common underlying logic that is temporally, even if not unilinearly, worked through. Hegel treats different cultural forms as representative of different stages in world history, the logic of which is inherent in different levels of self-conscious recognition of the meaning of social life as self-determination (1975: 54); a logic that can be traced geographically as well as historically in a path that leads from Africa to Europe and potentially to America. World history is always characterised by the non-contemporaneity of the contemporaneous, but at any given time there will be a culture or civilisation that is most advanced and will exert a significant influence on the rest of the world (1975: 60). The most advanced culture at any given time is the one that self-consciously identifies a previously unrecognised aspect of the meaning of the self-determination of spirit. In Hegel’s present, this most advanced culture is the new time of European modernity and the French Revolution, a time that is novel because of the way that it self-consciously identifies itself with the principle of self-determination as such (Hegel, 1977: 355–363). Hegel sees European modernity as the source of principles and institutions that are coming to dominate the world of the present. In his philosophy of right, he puts particular emphasis on the significance of the European state and state system and on institutions of private property, economic production and exchange being pioneered within European civil societies for the world as a whole. However, in contrast to other philosophical historians, he does not engage in speculating about what this might mean for the ideal shape of the world’s future. Instead, Hegel refuses to theorise beyond his own time and categorically dissociates himself from a prescriptive understanding of the philosophy of history such as is to be found in Kant’s argument for perpetual peace (Hegel, 1991: 20–23). In the interpretation of Hegel’s work, the refusal to speculate beyond his own time has been understood in two ways (McCarney, 2000: 177–191). According to the first interpretation, Hegel does not speculate beyond the present because he identifies that present with the end of history, not as chronos but as kairos. In other words, his claim is that although there may still be events, there can be no further qualitative progression in human existence. The second interpretation explains Hegel’s opposition to prescription differently, arguing that it follows not from his identification of the actual present

[ 44 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 45

From fortune to history with the ideal, but from his view that his own judgement cannot transcend his time. Both interpretations bring us back to questions raised by Kant about the relation between empirical and philosophical history, and between the philosopher’s judgement and the present. As we have seen, Kant resolves the problem posed by the lack of fit between empirical and philosophical history by treating them as clearly demarcated realms, in which the aim of the latter is not so much to illuminate as to guide the direction of the former. For Hegel, this understanding of the relation of chronos and kairos and the role of the philosopher is a typical manifestation of the new time of modernity, and it is also typical of the kind of mistake to which this new time is prone. As mentioned above, European new time is advanced in relation to previous periods of history and other contemporaneous cultures, because of the ways in which it recognises the principle of self-determination as the key to human development and community. However, this does not mean that the principle of self-determination has been adequately understood or institutionalised. One example of such an inadequate understanding is the conception of self-determination as being somehow outside of history, an undetermined (arbitrary) source of change, such as a pure rational will. For Hegel, Kant’s account of the role of the philosopher’s judgement in the philosophy of history depends on a power to detach that judgement from the historical context that makes it possible. In contrast to this, Hegel locates the authority of the philosopher’s judgement in its immanence within history. Thus, although he understands philosophical history and the study of empirical history as distinct intellectual pursuits, he sees both as part of the same movement of spirit, which accounts for both contingent events and qualitative, progressive change. The latter is characterised as a kind of collective learning in which spirit’s recognition of itself as self-determination immanently unfolds. Meaning emerges from history rather than being endowed by judgement, since the philosopher’s judgement itself is within and not beyond history. Hegel and Kant share the assurance that they inhabit new time, with the French Revolution in both cases exemplifying this novelty. Hegel, however, also sees Kant’s philosophy as exemplifying at the level of theory the kairos enacted in practice in the French Revolution. Hegel’s response to his time in the experience of revolution and in Kant’s critical philosophy is to argue that they demonstrate both the truth and the hubris of new time. For Hegel, the truth of spirit is self-determination, but this doesn’t mean that any given will can create the world anew without freedom turning to terror. Hegel’s thinking of the present is therefore rather different from Kant’s. Although he follows Kant in diagnosing history in terms of self-determination, rather than this being a new development following on from man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity, it is argued to be the ongoing truth of the evolving forms of spirit. What differentiates old from new time is not spirit’s self-determination but the emer-

[ 45 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 46

Theories of world-political time gence of spirit’s self-consciousness of itself as self-determination. On the one hand this confirms Kant’s (and modernity’s) disciplining of history as the ‘(auto)biography of the West’ (Spivak, 1999: 208). On the other hand, contrary to Kant, rather than new time being understood as the time in which history becomes a human creation, new time is the time in which history is recognised as what it has always been. The lessons of this recognition are not yet clear in general, but one specific lesson has been learned, according to Hegel, which is that for any particular human self-consciousness to take on the position of the creator, the being responsible for time, is to engage not in freedom but in terror. If Robespierre commits this folly politically, then for Hegel, Kant commits it philosophically. Hegel’s philosophy of history removes the ambiguity involved in Kant’s account of the relation between kairos and chronos in the sense that it confirms the former as wholly immanent to the latter. In Kant’s philosophy of history, even though historical progress is not necessarily guaranteed, the grounds on which progress is judged are guaranteed, and transcend any particular time and place. For Hegel, the immanent logic of self-determination guarantees progress in history, but only at the price of sacrificing the transcendent ground of judgement. If all judgement is immanent to cultural context, then it becomes unclear how it is possible to distinguish between kairos and chronos, and to make meaningful judgements about world progress at all. Hegel identifies diverse cultures with a unifying temporal order. On his account the non-contemporaneity of contemporaneous cultures is understood in normative terms, with the present of European modernity confirmed as the contemporary world ‘court of judgement’ (Hegel, 1991: 372). Once more, human plurality is subsumed under a principle of unity, this time with a clear hierarchy delineated in which particular places become identified with particular stages of historical development (1991: 377–379). At the same time, however, there is no way of seeing beyond the present and determining the verdict of the world’s ‘court of judgement’ for the future. Marx There are echoes of both Kant and Hegel in the claims Marx makes about history and in the questions raised by those claims.7 As with both Kant and Hegel, Marx understands history and his own times in terms of a narrative of progress played out on a world stage. Like them also he sees the relation of his judgement to his historical context as immanent to his theory of history, and interprets the French Revolution as significant of the revolutionary nature of the present. Nevertheless, Marx claims that his philosophy of history is grounded in the rejection of both Kant and Hegel. Marx’s claim to differ from Kant lies in his self-proclaimed abandonment of utopian prescription. Marx denies the idea that there can be a pure will, operating outside of history, which can somehow

[ 46 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 47

From fortune to history bring about an ideal end of history, and emphatically rejects the role of the philosopher as some kind of deus ex machina or midwife of progressive historical development. Marx’s claim to differ from Hegel rests in his overturning of the Hegelian emphasis on self-consciousness as the key to historical development in favour of an emphasis on material conditions and revolutionary action (Marx, 1970: 478, 58–60; 1976: 102). As with Kant, Marx gives a dual account of the mechanisms underlying historical development. In Marx’s case the role of desire and self-interest on the one hand, and rational will on the other, in Kant’s account of the drivers of historical change, is taken over by the role of forces (technologies, natural and human resources) and relations of production (class) (Marx, 1975: 425; 1998: 14). However, in contrast to Kant, these two aspects of the conditions of all human life are not necessarily wholly consonant with one another or mutually reinforcing in their effects. Forces of production may sustain different sets of class relations that may be more or less effective in maximising the productive potential of particular technologies, and more or less likely to develop class struggle. Class struggle is in turn enabled or constrained by broader social and political institutions and cultures and by contingent events from war to natural disaster (Marx and Engels, 1968: 96; Marx, 1975: 248–249). Nevertheless, there are immanent links between levels of technological development, the organisation of production and social and political institutions and cultures (Marx, 1975: 424–428). This is powerfully demonstrated in the present, where a bourgeois class has succeeded in revolutionising social and political relations in line with the dominance it has gained in the capitalist mode of production (Marx and Engels, 1970: 64; Marx and Engels, 1998: 14–20). In his reading of this revolutionary present, Marx follows Hegel in identifying progress in Europe with a world-historical ‘advance’ and linking geographical differences with a temporal logic of development. As with Hegel also, this ‘advance’ is interpreted as radically incomplete, but in contrast to Hegel, Marx postulates the idea of a next stage of history, one in which the productive power liberated through capitalism is put at the service of all rather than that of the bourgeois class. The ghosts of Hegel and Kant also haunt Marx’s account of the relation between empirical and philosophical history. In rejecting utopianism and idealism, Marx places his own philosophical history squarely within empirical history and its immanent logic. However, there are two ways in which Marx’s incorporation of his own thought into his philosophy of history may be understood: firstly, as science; secondly, as revolutionary praxis.8 Both Kant and Hegel saw empirical history as a set of processes that could be analysed in causal terms according to Newtonian spatio-temporal assumptions. In challenging the distinction between philosophical and empirical history, Marx at times suggests that his own theory of history is equivalent to science. That is to say, it identifies

[ 47 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 48

Theories of world-political time the actual causal mechanisms that direct empirical history. This scientific view treats the time and space of human history as equivalent to that of nature, subsuming kairos under chronos and suggesting a determinist account of historical development (Marx, 1975: 424–428). However, the scientific account of Marx’s theory of history is also contested by the priority he gives to practice over theory. On this account, the point is not to understand but to change the present through active intervention (Marx and Engels, 1970: 123). If Marx the scientist is in some ways reminiscent of Hegel’s observing consciousness, discerning the underlying meaning of apparently chaotic events, then Marx the revolutionary is reminiscent of Kant’s philosopher, intervening in history by reading it in terms of progress. This duality in Marx’s account of his own philosophy of history is reflected in his interpretation of the significance of the French Revolution for his time. Like Kant, Marx understands the French Revolution as the construction of new time. However, as with Hegel, Marx claims that his deeper insights into the logic of history enable him to see that the French Revolution is mistaken in its identification of itself with the end of history. For Marx this is because the novel circumstances of capitalism and bourgeois hegemony have a new revolutionary potential inherent within them. It is the responsibility of the progressive theorist to take this potential forward, just as Kant saw it as the responsibility of the spectators of the French Revolution to celebrate the principles of freedom that it enshrined. The claim that the present is revolutionary is common to all three thinkers, but where Kant intervenes and hopes and Hegel offers only retrospective judgement, in Marx the thinking of the present becomes indistinguishable from making or producing it and the responsibility to make it and produce it differently (Koselleck, 2004: 201–202). Overall, it can be said that in the work of Kant, Hegel and Marx, Bacon’s masculine birth of time is made meaningful for the social and political as well as the natural sciences. And yet, the hubris of their respective philosophical histories, and the possibilities they suggest for grasping the truth of the past, present and future, are also undermined by ambiguities and tensions foreign to the thinking of Machiavelli or Newton. Kant’s theory of history shifts between teleological and aesthetic modes. Hegel’s theory of history proposes an ‘end’ of history but renders the future unknowable. Marx’s theory of history combines a narrative of material determination with a philosophy of praxis. On the one hand, the philosophy of history of Kant, Hegel and Marx appears to dispel the problems, raised by Rousseau and Herder, with reading off the progressive and unitary nature of world history from the perspective of the ‘new time’ of European modernity.9 On the other hand, even while Kant, Hegel and Marx confirm that history progresses in a specific direction, they also confirm the difficulty, if not impossibility, of controlling and knowing the future.

[ 48 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 49

From fortune to history The dynamic of the modern is established as an element sui generis. This involves a process of production whose subject or subjects are only to be investigated through reflection on this process, without this reflection leading, however, to a final determination of this process. A previously divine teleology thus encounters the ambiguity of human design, as can be shown in the ambivalence of the concept of progress, which must continually prove itself both finite and infinite if it is to escape. (Koselleck, 2004: 103–104)

Historicism The philosophy of history, in its different forms, depends on certain assumptions about both chronos and kairos. Chronos is understood as the time of nature, a linear, irreversible continuum that moves at a constant pace. Chronotic time can be quantified, but is indifferent to the ways in which it may be divided up. As with Newtonian space, chronos is, fundamentally, always the same, a container or medium that is unaffected by the succession of events that take place within it. All human history takes place within chronotic time, and it provides the basis for the quantitative measurement of distinctions between different times in human history as well as for relations between cause and effect. Kairos, as with Machiavellian and Christian accounts, is understood as the principle underlying qualitative shifts in time. However, in contrast to Machiavellian and Christian ideas, kairos operates immanently within, rather than beyond, chronos. The task of the philosophical historian is to identify how, and with what effect, kairos patterns the infinite plurality of events in successive chronotic time, and therefore how it produces, or will produce, distinctions between qualitatively different times in human history. A difficulty for the philosophy of history is that at the same time as setting up and depending on a chronos/kairos distinction it also threatens that distinction by placing kairos as, in some sense, within chronos. Kant, Hegel and Marx attempt to postulate underlying causes or ends to explain the movement of history, but those underlying causes or ends are always tied up with temporalities that transcend chronos, whether in the form of reason, self-determination or revolutionary action. In the nineteenth century, meta-narratives of progress in world history, such as those of Kant, Hegel and Marx, increasingly became intertwined with the claims of natural science, and assumptions about natural time (chronos). During this time, natural science was famously historicised in Darwin’s theory of evolution and ongoing discoveries in natural history bearing on the age and origins of the earth. Simultaneously, the study of human history began to aspire to the status of science in the historicism of Von-Ranke as well as in the determinist historical materialism of certain Marxists. The identification of kairos with chronos is exemplified in the use of three sets of metaphors to capture the progressive movement of history: mechanical, organic and pedagogic. Understanding the chronos/kairos relation in mechanical terms means

[ 49 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 50

Theories of world-political time seeing kairos as a causal mechanism. On this account, kairos operates in the form of deeper level causes that somehow underpin that which appears to precipitate events in chronotic historical time. Organic language reflects an understanding of kairos as telos, in which the end result of a process determines its development, in effect overriding the irreversibility of chronotic time. A pedagogic account of the chronos/kairos link rests on an analogy of historical with individual development. Here kairos is understood as a capacity to learn and self-consciously reflect on the lessons of chronos. All of these metaphors can be found in the work of Kant, Hegel and Marx. The mechanical version of the historicism has two significant implications. First, it sees history as being shaped by causal forces in the same way as the Newtonian physical universe. In other words, in the mechanical version, the claim to the distinctiveness of human history, which is foundational for the philosophy of history, turns out to rest on an identification of natural and historical processes. The most obvious example of this is the idea of ‘laws’ of historical development that are seen as parallel to the ‘laws’ of nature discovered by science. The second implication of mechanical versions of the philosophy of history is their unifying logic. If there are deep causes dictating the direction of human development, then all human history can be understood in terms of the same dynamic, and human pluralism is apparent (illusory) rather than real. Kant’s arguments as to the role of desire, and Marx’s as to the role of material conditions, in the determination of the direction of history, are both open to this mechanical interpretation. Organic accounts of the philosophy of history undercut the distinction between natural and human processes in a similar way to mechanistic accounts and have an even more powerfully unifying logic. Nevertheless, they are deterministic in a somewhat different way. The ends inherent in organisms are not always fulfilled; every acorn does not become a tree. Moreover, if it is to become a tree, the acorn requires not only internal health but also an appropriate environment in which to flourish. Organic metaphors therefore provide a useful way of understanding empirical plurality in terms of a deeper underlying unity. Sickness, corruption and starvation may all provide grounds as to why instances of the same plant are in fact so different. Hegel’s principle of the self-determination of spirit and Marx’s vision of socialism can both be interpreted in these organic, teleological terms. Unlike mechanical and organic accounts, the construction of philosophy of history in terms of pedagogy apparently refuses the identification of historical with natural processes. In the case of both of the former, kairos works, as it were, by stealth, over the heads of the actors contributing to the forward direction of history. But where history is a learning process, actors become self-conscious participants in realising its lessons. However, on reflection this isn’t quite right. The metaphor of learning certainly puts self-consciousness at the heart of

[ 50 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 51

From fortune to history progressive change, but it also assumes that this self-consciousness is only achieved at a certain stage, condemning previous or less enlightened generations to a perpetual childhood. Moreover, the lesson to be taught by history is the same one for all people – it may be unavailable to those not yet at the right stage and it may be learned well or badly, but it is essentially the same. For Kant, Hegel and Marx the overriding lesson of history is freedom. The pedagogic analogy can be found at work in Kant’s notion of our emergence from selfimposed immaturity, Hegel’s idea of the progressive education of collective self-consciousness and Marx’s account of the shift from a ‘class-in-itself’ to a ‘class-for-itself’. Kant, Hegel and Marx are not alone in their use of mechanical, organic and pedagogic language in trying to convey the meaning of their philosophies of history: these were all common vocabularies for reflecting on social and political change at the times at which they were writing. Neither do I want to suggest that the philosophies of history of Kant, Hegel and Marx are reducible to either one or a combination of the narratives outlined above. Nevertheless, their philosophies of history acquire considerable analytic and political purchase when interpreted in mechanistic, organic or pedagogic terms. Nineteenthcentury political and social theorists used these metaphors as easily intelligible sources of legitimacy for political policies and for ideological and theoretical commitments, ranging from the promotion of free trade to the inauguration of a distinction between the social sciences of sociology and anthropology. The mechanistic version of the philosophy of history can be found in both liberal and socialist accounts of the conditions for progressive historical change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mechanisms, such as trade or technology, operating as a kind of ‘hidden hand’ of history are still being regularly rediscovered as the solution to problems of war and poverty. Teleological reasoning, with its focus on the end as both explaining and justifying the course of historical development has also played a crucial part in nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideologies, of both left and right. If one knows the telos of human history, then one can be confident of the legitimacy of actions in pursuit of that telos, and one can make judgements about the relative levels of development of both oneself and others in relation to it. The pedagogic version of the philosophy of history has perhaps been most obvious in paternalistic imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism, where certain parts of the world are treated as literally ‘younger’ than others. Teleological reasoning tends towards labelling those ‘behind’ as corrupt or diseased, whereas pedagogic reasoning infantilises such ‘others’. In all cases, however, a specific set of spatio-temporal coordinates, normally those of Europe or the ‘western’ world are confirmed as occupying a privileged present, one that provides a key to the meaning of past and future in relation to now, and there in relation to here.

[ 51 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 52

Theories of world-political time Conclusion The purpose of this chapter has been to map out resources for thinking about the temporality of world politics as they develop within the history of European thought. The account has been necessarily selective, but it serves to illustrate modes of thinking that remain significant in attempts to grasp the meaning of the present of world politics today. Of the ideas considered here, it is the theorisation of world history as progressive and, ultimately, unitary, that has had the strongest and most persistent influence on how world politics is understood, analytically and normatively. And this is the case in spite of the fact that such historicist versions of the philosophy of history radically underplay the ambiguities and tensions in the work of the thinkers often cited as authors of historicism: Kant, Hegel and Marx. At stake, from Machiavelli to Marx, is always the question of the meaning and interrelation of chronos and kairos in political time. This interrelation underpins the tension between the twin presuppositions of ‘timely’ political theory: determinism (through which the direction of history can be known and plotted); and agency (through which the arrow of time can be kept on, or diverted to, the ‘right’ track). Within historicism, the conflation of chronos and kairos puts the distinctiveness of political time into question, closing the gap between empirical and philosophical history, and suggesting that the arrow of time is always already directed towards the appropriate end of history. In the following chapter we will examine theories that seek to rescue the distinctiveness of political time from the conflations of historicism. Notes 1 The following account of Machiavelli’s thought is based on his Discourses on Livy (1996), The Prince (1988) and Art of War (2003). My interpretation is influenced by the work of Berlin (1989), Pitkin (1984), Skinner (1981) and Parel (1992). 2 This essay, written in the early 1600s, was unfinished and unpublished in Bacon’s lifetime, though its arguments were incorporated into his later work, The Great Instauration (1620): see Farrington (1964: 11–12). 3 Herder’s argument, which both renders time plural and appears to undermine the distinction between chronos and kairos, has some things in common with the Deleuzean account of temporality, which claims to draw on arguments from stoicism, discussed in Chapter 3 below. 4 Key sources for the following interpretation of Kant’s philosophy of history are found in the essays collected in Kant’s Political Writings (1991a), in particular ‘Idea for Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, ‘Perpetual Peace: a philosophical sketch’, ‘Reviews of Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of History of Mankind’, and ‘What is Called Orientation in Thinking’. See also Critique of Judgment (1987), The Conflict of the Faculties (1992) and Metaphysics of Morals Part 1 (1991b). See also Hutchings (1996). 5 The relation between political judgement and aesthetic judgement is never entirely

[ 52 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 53

From fortune to history

6

7

8

9

clear in Kant’s account. In the Critique of Judgement (1987), two types of aesthetic judgement are investigated: the judgement of beauty and the judgement of the sublime. Arendt argues that it is the former type of judgement that is closest to Kant’s understanding of political judgement (Arendt, 1982 and see discussion of Arendt in Chapter 3 below). Whereas the judgement of beauty is purely aesthetic, in the sense that it refers only to a subjective claim to universality (Kant, 1987: 43–96), the judgement of the sublime is linked by Kant to our faculty for moral judgement and the objective moral law (Kant, 1987: 97–126). As well as drawing on Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1975), the following discussion also draws on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1977) and Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1991). Key texts for Marx’s philosophy of history include early writings, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State’, ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction’, ‘Preface to “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”’, ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ (all included in Marx Early Writings, 1975); ‘The German Ideology’ and ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ (Marx and Engels, 1970); The Communist Manifesto (Marx & Engels, 1998); ‘Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ and ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’ (in Marx & Engels, 1968); Capital: Volume 1 (1976). This has been a key point of contention in the interpretation of Marx from the earliest reception of his writings. Most of the theorists discussed below in Chapter 3 are reacting against the ‘scientific’ Marx (see below). For two contemporary readings that contest the scientific version see Cavournas (2002) and Bensaïd (2002). Not only do these philosophies of history construct space (the different part of the world) in terms of time (for instance, Kant’s scattering of peoples, Hegel’s geographically located forms of spirit and Marx’s Asiatic mode of production all involve the disciplining of space in terms of the time), but it also construes the past (contemporary and previous) in terms of the present (‘new time’) and projected future.

[ 53 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 54

3

Against historicism

Introduction H I S chapter examines accounts of political time that are premised on the critique of philosophy of history and historicism. We will begin by looking briefly at two thinkers at the end of the nineteenth century who offered alternatives to the conflation of kairos and chronos in historicist and scientific accounts of time, Nietzsche and Bergson. This then sets the scene for exploring ways in which the assumptions and implications of historicism, in particular Marxist versions of historicism, have been challenged by the following thinkers: Arendt, Benjamin, Derrida and Deleuze. The arguments of these thinkers differ, but they all involve rejecting an account of political time as driven by mechanical causation or teleological end. From these points of view, the idea of thinking about history either as the authoritative ground for action and judgement or as something that can be scientifically grasped and controlled is fundamentally mistaken. For all of these thinkers, the time of politics is associated with indeterminism. Underlying these critiques, however, are distinctive accounts of time and politics that take the critique of the philosophy of history, and potential ways of grasping the present of political time, in different directions. Arendt’s interpretation of politics, revolution and natality take us back to some of the insights and ideas of Machiavelli and to the Kantian aesthetic judgement of taste. Benjamin’s work, in contrast, re-fashions Marx’s historical materialism into a non-linear and anti-teleological but nevertheless messianic revolutionary theory. Derrida draws on his philosophical understanding of the aporia of time to suggest a present haunted by, yet unable to fully accommodate, both past and future. Deleuze develops an ontology of time as becoming, in which the metric time of chronos is conditioned and disrupted by the qualitative, indivisible time of ‘event’.

T

[ 54 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 55

Against historicism The concluding section of the chapter reflects on the issues at stake between these counter-narratives of political time and the theories discussed in the previous chapter, in particular the theories of Kant, Hegel and Marx. These issues concern both the question of how one is to account for world political change and how one is to judge (analytically and normatively) its meaning. It is clear that there are significant differences from the philosophy of history, in the ways in which the alternative understandings of political temporality of Arendt, Benjamin, Derrida and Deleuze set up the possibilities for thinking the present of world politics. Nevertheless, it will also be argued that in certain respects the critics of the philosophy of history remain caught in the same ambiguities and tensions that characterise the work of Kant, Hegel and Marx, in which the chronos/kairos distinction is undermined and perpetually reinvented. However, they negotiate these ambiguities and tensions in different ways. On the one hand, Arendt’s and Benjamin’s theories of political time, in their resistance to the historicist subsumption of kairos under chronos, address the ambiguities and tensions through an inversion of historicist logic. This is a move that returns us to classical and Judeo-Christian temporalities discussed in the first section of Chapter 2. On the other hand, in contrast, it will be argued that Derrida’s and Deleuze’s accounts of political time, which remain haunted by the spirits of Kant and Marx respectively, offer a way of keeping the ambiguities and tensions of an open reading of the philosophy of history in play. Against the times of history and science At the end of the nineteenth century, various forms of historicism dominated the human and biological sciences. Even then, however, certain thinkers sought to counter the conceptions of time and temporality bound up in historicism. Of these thinkers, Nietzsche and Bergson are two particularly influential figures, whose work has continued to resonate with subsequent anti-historicist accounts of political time.1 In his essay ‘History in the Service and Disservice of Life’, Nietzsche targets historicism in general and Hegel in particular. [Hegel] has instilled in the generations nurtured in his philosophy that admiration for the ‘power of history’ which in point of fact is constantly transformed into naked admiration of success and leads to idolatry of the fact . . . (Nietzsche, 1990: 127)

Nietzsche charges Hegelian inspired historicism with being antithetical to ‘life’, by which he means the capacity to act in the present to create the future (1990: 103). Historicism is against life for two main reasons: firstly, because it is obsessed with providing an exhaustive account of the past in order to understand and judge the present and future; secondly, because it breeds a kind of resignation, in which the present always comes ‘too late’ to change the way

[ 55 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 56

Theories of world-political time things are and will be. The problem with the aspiration to grasp the past in historicism is that it becomes a wholly undiscriminating quest for knowledge, in which every aspect of historical process is as important as every other, and the only hope of redemption lies in the historical process as such. In contrast to this, Nietzsche argues for doing history only insofar, and in such a way, that it serves life. That is to say, in such a way that it enables an affirmation of the present and future in contradistinction to the past. On this account it is not the historical process as a whole that gives meaning to the present but the capacity of a singular moment in a particular present to ‘shatter and disintegrate a past’ (1990: 102). Such a capacity relies not only on memory, but also, more importantly, on forgetting.2 Nietzsche’s argument against historicism echoes other arguments he makes about the genealogy of modern morality and subjectivity. Across all of his works, we find an understanding of temporality in which linear causal time (history) is contrasted with another kind of time, a time of becoming (life). The unhealthy slave morality dissected in The Genealogy of Morals is one in which history exceeds life: it is reactive and backward looking, unable to break out of the painful ‘blunders’ of history in which it is rooted, and mistakenly searching for meaning elsewhere, in a heavenly or earthly kingdom (Nietzsche, 1969a: 90–91). In contrast, the time of the overman (the ‘supra-historical’ man) is a time of becoming, oriented to the future in a way that is neither controllable nor predictable (Nietzsche, 1969b: 136–139). The most famous way in which Nietzsche captures the temporality of the overman is through the notion of ‘eternal return’. The idea is a radicalisation of Machiavelli’s cyclical temporality, in that it is not about the repetition of particular historical patterns, but about willing, now and forever, the throw of the dice that is all that the affirmation of the future can be. In Nietzsche’s work, therefore, we find that both the philosophy of history and the Newtonian time of science are problematised. He not only denies that history is progressing, but makes the idea that history is progressing culpable for the degeneration of his own times. In addition, however, he insists on an alternative temporality to the linear succession of Newtonian time, a time of becoming that is capable of countering (shattering and disintegrating) the causal mechanisms that operate through Newtonian time. Bergson’s concerns were much more with the critique of Newtonian time and scientific determinism than with the philosophy of history, although his work has clear implications for the latter. In his earlier work, Bergson focused purely on the question of time internal to introspection (Bergson, 2001), but he later extended his analysis of time to the external world (Bergson, 2005). Bergson argued that his critique of Newtonian time applied to almost all existing accounts of time in the philosophical tradition. The fundamental mistake shared by these accounts was that they understood time in terms of space (2001:

[ 56 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 57

Against historicism 75–139). Because of this, Newton and others were able to treat time quantitatively, as a succession of units, which could be added up and divided, as well as as a kind of container, on analogy with two and three dimensional space. On this view, the temporal unfolding of cause and effect formed a kind of neutral background, but did not play any positive role in the transition from one (cause) to the other (effect). For philosophical determinism, it remained unclear as to why – given that effects were always immanent in causes – those effects were not contemporaneous with their causes. And, indeed, as Bergson points out, much western philosophy has been devoted to reducing the temporal to the timeless, by reference to Platonic forms or a God’s eye view (2005: 343–357). For Bergson, the de-spatialisation of our thinking of time became the key to undermining the claims of determinism across the natural and social sciences. The spatial view of time is that it is like a straight line (or an arrow’s flight) that can be divided and subdivided indefinitely into successive moments (2005: 366–367). How time is cut up into successive moments is a matter of convention, since there is nothing inherent in the timeline itself that makes any difference. Bergson challenges this quantitative view of time’s indifference through his analysis of psychological ‘duration’ (2001: 105). Whereas quantitative accounts of temporal succession see each moment of time as discrete from, and uncontaminated by, its predecessor, Bergson’s understanding of succession as duration draws attention to how anterior moments endure in present ones, making them qualitatively and not simply quantitatively distinguishable from what has gone before. For Bergson, duration (time) is the continuous, always incomplete, emergence of novelty. Rather than time being understood as distinct from the events that unfold within it, it is the ongoing emergence of events that is equivalent to time. To say that time ‘is’ is misleading; rather one should say that time ‘becomes’, and is always becoming. On this qualitative understanding, time is not homogeneous but constantly differentiating, with multiple possibilities inhering within it. Bergson criticises the determinist view that what happens must correlate to the only outcome that was possible; rather he insists that the future is genuinely indeterminable in advance. The future is always ambiguous and so, in another sense, is the past. The future is ambiguous because there are many different futures that are virtual within duration, and no way of establishing a key to which future ends up being actualised. The past is ambiguous in the sense that its meaning is bound up with an onward continuous movement in which the significance of past events shifts according to an unpredictable pattern of actualisation – in this sense the past is being re-written constantly in the present and future. Beginnings and interruptions At the time at which they wrote, Nietzsche and Bergson were dissident voices in a world in which the study of history and science took the clock and causal time

[ 57 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 58

Theories of world-political time of chronos for granted. However, during the twentieth century, historicist, deterministic accounts of political time came increasingly under question from both the right and left of the ideological spectrum. The experience of the First World War and economic collapse, the rise of fascism and the failure of the League of Nations in the inter-war period undermined faith in liberal progressive readings of history. But, even more significantly, a variety of experiences not only cast doubt on the accuracy of historicist versions of Marxism, but also suggested that they were politically lethal. Arendt and Benjamin quarrelled specifically with Marxist accounts of political time and blamed them for disastrous political developments in the twentieth century, from the rise of totalitarianism to the failure to prevent the rise of fascism.3 Both also sought to go beyond critique and to invent an alternative way of thinking about time and politics in which the relation between politics and history that they saw as set up by the philosophy of history was reversed. We will now move on to look at their arguments more closely. The abiding concern of Arendt’s political thought was to understand the conditions of possibility of totalitarian rule.4 Part of these conditions, she argued, were philosophical ideas about politics and history which had developed in response to the American and French revolutions and found their ultimate expression in Marxist philosophy of history (Arendt, 1973: 51–58). The key problem with Marx’s philosophy of history (and derivative ideas) was that it expressed a reversal of its own starting point in the idea and experience of revolution. For Arendt, the beginnings of both the American and French revolutions were genuinely new beginnings, political acts that disclosed new meanings on the political stage (1973: 41). In this sense, thinkers such as Kant and Hegel were right to identify the French Revolution with ‘new time’ and with the idea of freedom. The mistake, however, was to subsume the meaning of this act of freedom in a broader account of historical development, in which what was initially understood as free action became understood as the necessary implication of the workings of history (1973: 56–57). The result of this, Arendt argues, was the reduction of political life to processes of natural determination, along mechanistic and/or organic lines. This reduction of politics to history and of history to mechanism or organism was theoretically and practically disastrous. Theoretically it was based on a mistaken understanding of politics and human action that underpinned poor history and social science as well as misleading political and social theories (Arendt, 1961: 63). Practically, it legitimated the reduction of the field of politics to pure process or instrumentalism, the ultimate expression of which was the concentration camp (1961: 87–88). In order to make her argument against the philosophy of history, Arendt contrasts it with her interpretation of ancient Greek understandings of time and politics (1961: 41–48). She argues that the latter saw human time in comparison to the eternal, cyclical time of nature, as fleeting and limited. The one way in

[ 58 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 59

Against historicism which mortality could be challenged was through the enacting of glorious deeds, which then became perpetuated by storytellers and historians. Politics could approach immortality as a field of action in which certain actions could acquire meaning that transcended time and place. This ideal of what political action might be is contrasted with the philosophy of history in which immortality is not inherent in particular deeds and meaning but in an overall process, within which individual actors are entirely subsumed. Initially, Arendt suggests, the mistake is to confuse ‘action’ with ‘fabrication’, so that politics is understood on analogy with the manufacture of objects (1961: 77–78).5 On this account history is ‘made’ in the sense that, for instance, revolutionaries aim to construct a world of freedom. But neither freedom nor any other meaning can ever be the product of a human activity in the sense in which the table is clearly the end product of the carpenter’s activity. (1961: 78)

Arendt’s point is not that political action does not have outcomes, but rather that the outcomes of action are not predictable or individually controllable, in the way that producing an artefact can be. Moreover, freedom (or any other meaning) is not a determinate entity, on analogy with the table, but is inherent in the plural, indeterminate interplay of political actors and spectators in a specific time and place. However, for Arendt, the errors of philosophy of history, and the ways in which they are taken up within the context of the French Revolution and its later theorisation, do not stop with the confusion of action with fabrication. In Marx’s work they take on a more profoundly mistaken form because of the way in which Marx makes material conditions of production central to his account of the mechanisms of history. Within this account, the meaning of political action is reduced not to the fabrication of enduring objects, but to the reproduction of life through labour (Arendt, 1958; 1961: 83–84). In Arendt’s view it is this move in the philosophy of history that ensures the identification of politics with nature and ultimately the conflation of social and historical with natural sciences. She argues that the adoption of a uniform BC/AD dating system, in which time can be counted off indefinitely both backwards and forwards, means that immortality is now only to be found in processes that have no definite end or beginning (1961: 75). Both nature and history become understood as processes in which the singularity of particular phenomena will always be reducible to a larger, potentially never-ending, story.6 These meta-narratives of process that Arendt sees as characteristic of both natural and social science have two sorts of implication. In the first place, they are generalisations that provide the basis of explanation of particular events and therefore insights into how events may be technically manipulated, whether in the natural or social domain. As Arendt says of the social sciences:

[ 59 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 60

Theories of world-political time If their vocabulary is repulsive and their hope to close the alleged gap between our scientific mastery of nature and our deplored impotence to ‘manage’ human affairs through an engineering science of human relations sounds frightening, it is only because they have decided to treat man as an entirely natural being whose life process can be handled the same way as all other processes. (1961: 59)

However, in addition to the ways in which knowledge becomes subservient to technique, the second implication of ‘process- thinking’, according to Arendt, is to confirm a move towards subjectivism and relativism in both the natural and the social sciences. This development began, Arendt argues, with the epistemological view, shared by the natural and historical sciences, that access to true knowledge about the world was not straightforwardly available through contemplation but needed to be indirectly derived through method and experiment (1961: 60). With the advent of process thinking, Arendt argues, the assumption of a gap between real events and the ways in which they are understood or explained enables historians to impose any kind of pattern on successive events. The ultimate fate of process thinking in both the philosophy of history and the science of nature is to present all reality (natural and social) as infinitely manipulable and at the same time open to any interpretation. This means that neither action (in the sense of intervention in process) nor claims to knowledge are subject to any objective constraint (1961: 81). In such a world, Arendt implies, the concentration camp and nuclear weapons are the sorts of outcome one might expect. For Arendt, the mistaken historicist understanding of the relation between politics and history is crucially bound up with the American and French revolutions. It is in relation to these events, she argues, that the whole notion of ‘world history’ and ‘world-historical’ events as qualitatively new time is both inaugurated and subverted. One might mark the point where the modern age abandoned its earlier attempts to establish a new political philosophy for its rediscovery of the secular by recalling the moment at which the French Revolutionary calendar was given up, after one decade, and the Revolution was reintegrated, as it were, into the historical process with its twofold extension toward infinity. It was as though it was conceded that not even the Revolution . . . contained sufficient independent meaning in itself to begin a new historical process. (1961: 81)

For Arendt, the problem in a world given over to process thinking and the reduction of action to fabrication and labour is how to revive the lost understanding of the American and French revolutions as the inauguration of new time. This means detaching the meaning of politics from history and re-establishing a clear distinction between genuine timely political time (kairos) and natural, chronological time (chronos). In doing this, Arendt draws on a combination of ideas, including that of

[ 60 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 61

Against historicism the immortality inherent in ‘glory’ in both ancient and early modern accounts of action in the public realm (Arendt, 1958), the Augustinian concept of will as the key to a human capacity for new beginnings (‘natality’) (Arendt, 1978), and Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment (Arendt, 1982). Arendt’s use of Ancient Greek and Roman accounts of ‘great deeds and words’ in politics – which she also sees echoed in Machiavelli’s republicanism and in the work of the ideologues of the American and French revolutions – locates the distinctiveness of political action in its singularity and its capacity to generate meaning. Political action is singular in that it is not a particular instance of a universal. In other words, its meaning is not already given by a meta-narrative about the causes or ends of political events. In this sense, political action exemplifies a fundamental human capacity for new beginning or ‘natality’, which Arendt argues is best captured in Augustine’s theory of the will. The point here is that this capacity for innovation is not susceptible to any deeper level of explanation. This means, in turn, that political action provides the basis for its own judgement, which can be traced in its capacity to generate new meanings for fellow political actors and for spectators of political action. A crucial point for Arendt, however, is that politics in this sense has to be specifically located; it has to take place in a determinate political arena. There can be no political action without a republic (res publica), literally a delimited public space within which actors act and spectators narrate. In this sense, Arendt sees it as crucial to reverse the tendency of the philosophy of history to see space as dominated by time (chronos), with world history working to erase the distinctiveness of particular political spaces. If political action depends on political space, then this raises the question, also asked by Machiavelli, of how political space is created and maintained. In modern terms this becomes the problem, posed for Arendt by the American and French examples and their twentieth-century heirs, of revolution. At the crux of Arendt’s thinking about this question is the three-way relation between political time as qualitatively new beginning (kairos), natural time as the succession of moments (chronos) and space. The problem faced by the American and French revolutions is how to preserve the spirit of new beginning over and against chronos. The answer, Arendt suggests, is to set up political space in such a way that renewal is built into its constitution. As with Machiavelli, for Arendt, if one can establish the right kind of republic then politics can overcome chronos, setting up its own calendar in contradistinction to the infinite march of natural time, a calendar that, through its marking of particular achievements, sustains the meaning of those achievements across generations. As with Machiavelli, also, however, Arendt emphasises the inherent fragility of any such foundation. For Arendt, however, the threats to the polis are not primarily those of external or internal enemies but the subsumption of political life under material and technological concerns.

[ 61 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 62

Theories of world-political time In Arendt’s thinking about the nature of politics the ‘storyteller’ or ‘spectator’ plays an important part in preserving the distinctiveness of political time. This figure is associated with the Greek poets and historians, who, as with Thucydides, turn political events into stories with a message for ‘all time’. And it is also associated with the Kantian figure of the spectator of the French Revolution, whose judgement provides confirmation of the possibility of progress in history. In her later work, Arendt turned increasingly to the idea of ‘judgement’ as a necessary complement to ‘action’ in distinguishing the meaning of political events (Arendt, 1982: 63). Her idea of political judgement echoed Kant’s account of the aesthetic judgement of taste in two key respects. Firstly, judgement in this sense (unlike moral judgement) is not grounded in a prior universal rule or law. Secondly, judgement in this sense is bound up with plurality, an appeal to the common sense shared with others, and its validity depends on the possibility of agreement with others. The key contribution of political judgement is to keep the space of politics open by eliciting agreement on the meaning of political action as a distinctive mode of action that cannot be understood in any other terms. Without political judgement, the transience of political action cannot be captured, or, more disturbingly, ends up being captured in the wrong kind of terms as simply another instance of a universal law. For Arendt, thinking the present is a profoundly political matter. This is evident in her condemnation of her own times, in her critique of philosophy, science and social science, and in her endorsement of the idea of politics as the creation of new time. The overall implications of Arendt’s thinking of the present are ambiguous. On the one hand, she can be read as reading the present in terms of ongoing decline, or even apocalypse, since for her the death camps and nuclear weapons were the most telling signs of her times. On the other hand, with her celebration of new beginning and her emphasis on both acting and judging politically, Arendt also suggests that the future is capable of being re-written in unpredictable ways. If kairos is located in a fundamental human capacity for renewal, then it is difficult to see how it could be completely subsumed under chronos. In any event, it is clear that, for Arendt, the greatest mistake possible is to conflate these two temporalities. Benjamin’s critique of the philosophy of history shares with Arendt a quarrel with the way that chronos and kairos become conflated in certain versions of Marxism.7 In Benjamin’s case, it is the form that historical materialism takes in German social democracy in the early twentieth century that exemplifies a damaging but pervasive misunderstanding of the relation between politics and time (Benjamin, 1999: 250, 252). This variant of Marxist ideology understood the philosophy of history in mechanistic terms as the necessary progressive development of history through particular stages, driven by underlying forces. With this view, when revolution either did not happen or failed to happen (as

[ 62 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 63

Against historicism in Germany in 1919), this had to be because the time was not yet right; but it did not make the socialist revolution any less inevitable at the end of the day. For Benjamin this meant that what purported to be historical materialism had collapsed into a form of historicism, in which the ongoing continuum of chronotic time was the condition of possibility for progressive change. This historicism implied two things: firstly, it implied that all history is victor’s history; secondly, it reduced historical to natural time (1999: 248). The historicism of social democracy is victor’s history in the sense that it deprives the past and present of all meaning except in relation to the future. This means that all the violences experienced and challenged by historical actors in the past cannot be remembered except as necessary costs or as mistakes in relation to the forces that are carrying history forward: forces of war, capitalist exploitation and alienation.8 The effect of this, Benjamin argues, is to silence the voices of the oppressed and encourage complicity with oppression, all in the service of pushing history forward. Historicism reduces political or historical time to natural time in the same way as Arendt’s ‘process thinking’, where both nature and history are understood as an infinite, uni-directional temporal succession of moments. For Benjamin this means that change becomes understood as a process of potentially infinite quantification. History is simply the accumulation of moments that will, eventually in some un-specifiable future, add up to progress. In contrast, he argues for an appreciation of history as qualitatively temporal, not to be understood as events happening in time but rather as ‘time filled by the presence of the now’ (1999: 252–253). Benjamin’s account of politics and time in what he sees as genuine historical materialism is notoriously difficult to interpret. It is summed up allusively in a series of aphorisms on the concept of history, in which the distinction between historicism and historical materialism is spelled out. A key point Benjamin makes is that the historical materialist has to think beyond temporal categorisations in which historical presents are understood either as one in a succession of moments, or as a continuous transition between past and future. Instead, historical materialists should think about both the past and present as opportunities for the arrest or interruption of temporal succession and continuity. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for an oppressed past. He takes cognisance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history – blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. (1999: 254)

As is evident in the above quotation, the arrest or interruption of chronotic time brings past, present and future together in a way that is disruptive of temporal continuity in two senses. Firstly, it disrupts continuity by identifying the three

[ 63 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 64

Theories of world-political time temporal categories as simultaneously present. Instead of being connected in a string, like ‘beads of a rosary’, the three temporalities are sedimented together like the layers of an archeological site and can be cut through simultaneously (1999: 255). In relation to this first sense, Benjamin’s argument is that revolutionary change depends not on the sacrifice of the past to the present but on the capacity to break open victor’s history. This capacity is dependent on tapping into the revolutionary energy that is crystallised in the congruence between the experience of singular pasts and singular presents. For Benjamin, as for Arendt, this energy and its capacity to change time is exemplified in the setting up of the calendar over the clock in revolutionary situations (1999: 253). In these contexts the calendar provides a recurring possibility of the identification of a revolutionary past with a revolutionary present through days of remembrance. The ongoing task of the historical materialist is to put memory to work: memory ‘as it flashes up at a moment of danger’ as a weapon in the fight against the ruling classes. The second sense in which temporal continuity is disrupted is in the idea of being beyond time, ‘a Messianic cessation of happening’ (Benjamin, 1999: 254). This Messianic dimension to the disruption of ‘homogeneous empty time’ in Benjamin’s account plays off both the Judaic theological Messianic tradition, in which human history will eventually be redeemed, as a whole and from the ‘outside’, by the Messiah,9 and the ways in which the philosophy of history of the social democrats attempts to secularise Messianism, by bringing redemption within the scope of chronos. In contrast to either of these possibilities, Benjamin keeps kairos out of chronos, but in a way that confirms the secularity of revolutionary action. Rather than being the ‘end’ of history, whether immanent or transcendental, kairos is the entirely human capacity to abridge time, by recognising and transforming the past in the present and thereby breaking open the historical continuum. If the past is redeemed at all, then it is not redeemed as a whole but always in a singular present, the meaning of which depends on future presents. The overriding message of both Arendt’s and Benjamin’s work is that the conflation of chronos and kairos in ‘scientific’ versions of historicism is both misleading and dangerous. It is misleading because it claims but fails to capture the temporality of politics, and it is dangerous because to the extent that historicist accounts of politics are accepted, the options for politics are radically impoverished. For Arendt, the effects of historicism can be traced in the concentration camps and policies of mutually assured destruction. For Benjamin they can be traced in the passivity of German social democracy in the face of the rise of Nazism. Although the analyses of both Arendt and Benjamin relate to their very specific socio-historical context, they both have implications for a reading of world politics. In both cases, and for overlapping reasons, the present of world politics is understood in terms of decline and crisis. However, their

[ 64 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 65

Against historicism prescriptions for how this problem should be addressed differ markedly. Where Arendt seeks to revive older models of political temporality, which she identifies with republican politics, Benjamin celebrates the possibility of radical disruption. For Arendt, the possibility of revolution (new beginning) hinges on the spatial delimitation of politics from both without and within the polis. Externally, politics in the modern world for her depends on the survival of the nation-state and state system. Internally, it depends on preserving a demarcation between the political realm and the realms of production and reproduction (work and labour). For Benjamin, however, the possibility of revolution depends on the realisation of ‘new time’, a different temporal order, which cannot be grasped in spatialised terms and in which radically new possibilities for social and political organisation emerge. Haunting and becoming Arendt and Benjamin lived in and experienced times of crisis in world politics which are reflected in their accounts of political time and of the meaning of their own times. As we have seen, in both cases their analyses were articulated in relation to a particular interlocutor, the historicist philosopher of history who conflated kairos and chronos and effectively naturalised a narrative of progress as the truth of political time. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the political events and experiences that led Arendt and Benjamin to the critique of historicism, in particular of Marxist historicism, were supplemented by developments that reinforced that critique.10 Of these, the failure of uprisings in 1968 carried particular weight in discrediting Hegelian and Marxist theories of history for a generation of French intellectuals of the left that included Derrida and Deleuze. In response to this, both thinkers sought to articulate an alternative account of time and politics that avoided the traps of philosophy of history.11 In his essay ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, Derrida engages directly with an early essay of Benjamin’s, ‘Critique of Violence’ (1978: 277–300). The aim of Derrida’s essay and his interpretation of Benjamin is to interrogate (deconstruct) the relation between law and justice. However, it becomes clear during the course of the essay that the issue of time is central to Derrida’s argument in general, and to his critical reading of Benjamin in particular. For Derrida, law can never do justice. All law requires a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence that cannot be legally grounded but can only be enforced prior to law. Its very moment of foundation or institution (which in any case is never a moment inscribed in the homogeneous tissue of a history, since it is ripped apart with one decision), the operation that amounts to founding, inaugurating, justifying law (droit), making law, would consist of a coup de force, of a

[ 65 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 66

Theories of world-political time performative and therefore interpretative violence that in itself is neither just nor unjust and that no justice and no previous law with its founding anterior moment could guarantee or contradict or invalidate. (Derrida, 1992a: 13)

Derrida deconstructs law by pointing to its dependence on a series of impossibilities or aporia (impassable pathways for thought) (Derrida, 1992a: 16; Beardsworth, 1996: 32). The aporia of law are temporal in the sense that law requires legitimacy, a past that grounds and guarantees the future of legality. The problem is that the origin of law can never be adequate to the claims to legality that are treated as following from it. The inauguration of law is a kind of violence because it is the forceful interruption of what could only otherwise be an infinite regress. The inauguration of law requires that it be recognised as law, but how does one recognise law unless it in some sense repeats ‘law-like’ characteristics, in which case the law has always already been inaugurated? This necessity and impossibility of simultaneous novelty and repetition, which Derrida traces in the inauguration of law, leads us to justice because it acts as a reminder of the necessary inadequation between any singular statement or act and the rules, categories and principles through which its meaning is enforced.12 It also, however, acts as a reminder that it is only through the failure to do justice to the singularity of statements and events that any kind of justice is possible. Paradoxically, it is because of this overflowing of the performative, because of this always excessive haste of interpretation getting ahead of itself, because of this structural urgency and precipitation of justice that the latter has no horizon of expectation (regulative or Messianic). But for this reason, it may have an avenir, a ‘to-come’, which I rigorously distinguish from the future that can always reproduce the present. (1992a: 27)

The ‘regulative or Messianic’ horizons of expectation to which Derrida refers are those embedded in Kant’s and Benjamin’s readings of political time. For Derrida, both the Kantian invocation of an ‘as if’ direction through which to interpret historical development, and Benjamin’s invocation of ‘divine’ violence as the Messianic possibility of breaking with the violence of law,13 mistakenly invoke a transcendental ‘beyond’ to language, politics and history (1992a: 25). Nevertheless, Derrida acknowledges that in some sense the idea of justice does have a ‘quasi-transcendental’ temporal structure (Fritsch, 2005: 64), in which a future justice is indirectly invoked through the failure that doing justice always involves. Indeed, he argues that it is the experience of the inadequacy of law to justice that motivates revolutionary action in the ‘juridico-political’ sphere (Derrida, 1992a: 20). Although the structure of inadequation between law and justice does not imply any particular future or any particular pattern to the relation between past, present and future, it keeps the promise of the future open. This cannot, however, be a future ‘beyond’, since the temporal aporia inherent

[ 66 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 67

Against historicism in law means that the present is characterised by ‘spectrality’, the untimely in the form of past as well as future. Derrida elaborates on the spectrality of time and history in his meditations on Marx, in which he counterposes an ‘ontological’ to a ‘hauntological’ Marx (Derrida, 2006: 213–214). The ontological Marx is the philosopher of history, who is committed both to the idea of a future materially immanent in the present, and to the idea of the proletarian revolution as a genuine new beginning, the decisive break with an exploitative past. The hauntological Marx is the Marx who, in analysing the ‘18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, or the commodity form under capitalism, recognises and elucidates the ‘untimely’ contamination of any given present by an assortment of pasts and futures. The first Marx is interested in exorcising ghosts and using his secular and materially grounded knowledge to control the production of the future. The spectre of this particular Marx, for Derrida, is the one that haunts the gulags and the terrible waste and destruction of state socialist regimes (2006: 130–131). The second Marx, in contrast, understands the plurality and contingency of political events, and our incapacity to fully grasp or control them. The spectre of this second Marx, for Derrida, is one that haunts revolutionary action and aspirations towards justice. At stake is the issue of the presentness of the present. To see the present as fully and completely disclosed in the present, which is the ontological movement of exorcism (2006: 202), is to do violence to the underlying temporal structure of any way of conceptualising the world. Deconstruction reveals that the thinking of past, present and future as a succession of actual presents depends on the ‘untimely’ possibility of a future that precedes (and therefore a past that succeeds) any such present: the present is never synchronic, but always anachronic. Hauntology, which is in effect another word for deconstruction, is focused on demonstrating how this impossible ‘spectral moment’ subverts and destabilises the temporal certainties of theories of history. To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. This is what we would be calling here a hauntology. (2006: 201–202)

In Spectres of Marx, Derrida picks up on Nietzschean themes of remembrance and forgetting in relation to the question of inheritance, specifically in the context of Marx’s treatment of the inheritance (and repetition) of the revolutionary tradition in 1848 and the inheritance of Marx after 1989 (2006: 118–155). Marx argued that what was needed in 1848 and in future revolutions was to remember the spirit of revolution, but forget the ghosts (spectres) of previous revolutions (which include the victims of terror and war), and let the ‘dead bury their dead’. But, as Derrida demonstrates, in Marx’s rhetorical analysis of 1848 it is impossible to separate out the spirit of revolution from the

[ 67 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 68

Theories of world-political time spectres of past revolutions. Derrida argues that the attempt to ignore the spectres, to refuse to bury the dead of past revolutions and to actively forget, exemplifies an ontological mistake. This is the mistake of assuming that the present is fully present, transparent and under control, rather than always haunted by futures past. According to Derrida, ‘Inheritance is never a given, it is always a task’ (2006: 67). But one can take on the task in different ways: one may mourn the dead or one may refuse them burial. In the first case the relation of the living to the dead is acknowledged, however inadequately, in the form of a politics of memory. In the second case, an inescapable responsibility to the past is disavowed. The spectrality of the present necessitates a responsibility towards the past in the present, which is also equivalent to responsibility towards the future. There are several times of the spectre. It is a proper characteristic of the spectre, if there is any, that no one can be sure if by returning it testifies to a living past or to a living future, for the revenant may already mark the promised return of the spectre of living being. Once again, untimeliness and disadjustment of the contemporary. (2006: 123)

One aspect of Derrida’s taking up of the task of inheriting Marx is his insistence on the ‘politics of memory’, but the other side is focused on the ‘promise’ of the future. The two key reference points for this idea of ‘promise’ are, as in the essay on the ‘Force of Law’, the notion of the ‘Messianic’ and the Kantian conception of a regulative idea.14 Although, as we have seen, Derrida rejects both the strong Messianism of Benjamin’s revolutionary violence and the Kantian regulative idea of a ‘kingdom of ends’, he nevertheless holds on to an element that is common to both. The common element here is the reference to something that is both external to, and a condition for, all speech and action. On Derrida’s account the very structure of experience is ‘Messianic’, in that it relies on something that is outside of its own scope, the future (‘indeterminate, abstract, desert-like’) as its condition of possibility (2006: 210–211). The promise of the future is affirmed in every claim and every action, even in those that betray that promise through rushing ‘headlong toward an ontological content’ (2006: 114). For Derrida, taking on the task of the inheritance of Marx means keeping the promise of the future open by thinking in terms of ‘perhaps’ rather than of material causes or teleological direction (Derrida, 2005: 68–69). Derrida uses his account of the ‘untimely’ in time, in order to deconstruct the ontological Marx and delineate different ways in which the legacy of Marx could be inherited. His analysis, although he extrapolates its implications for thinking about and doing politics, is nevertheless highly formal. Deconstruction traces the impossible (aporetic) conditions of possibility of language and experience, and elaborates an ethics and a reading of law, politics and history on this basis, drawing self-conscious parallels with the project of Kantian critique and ‘quasi-

[ 68 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 69

Against historicism transcendentalism’. Deconstruction, though it always operates in relation to specific, historically situated contexts, is not itself fully accountable within historical time. The work of Deleuze, and of Deleuze and Guattari, takes a different materialist and ontological route in the critique of the philosophy of history. Nevertheless, their analysis of desire and becoming in many ways mirrors the deconstruction of the present accomplished by Derrida’s ‘untimely’ (Buchanan, 2000: 15). Deleuze’s account of time is presented in the context of his interpretation of Stoic thought in The Logic of Sense (1990).15 The central argument concerning time in this text is that it is necessary to think in terms of two temporal orders: chronos and aion (Deleuze, 1990: 5).16 Chronos is time that is internal to particular kinds of entity, and provides the measure for processes of cause and effect within them. On Deleuze’s account, entities (which might be, for instance, planets, plant life, animal life or humanity) are understood as partial systems that impinge on one another, but are nevertheless distinct.17 Within the chronos of these partial systems, past and future are defined solely in relation to the present, and each present is peculiar to the system in question, related to particular origins and ends. Nevertheless, the present of some systems may be encompassed by others, as God’s present encompasses that of man (1990: 162). According to Deleuze, within the Stoic world-view, there is both ‘confidence and mistrust’ in chronos (1990: 162). On the one hand, it is the ground of measure and conservation, on the other hand there are deep-lying forces within the cosmos whose chronos clashes with, and has the potential to destroy, the times internal to the harmonious interplay of different systems of being (1990: 165). However, the time of both harmonious (Zeus) and destructive (Saturn) chronos, which is in both cases immanently ordered, is sharply distinguished from an alternative form of time: Aion stretches out in a straight line, limitless in either direction. Always already passed and eternally yet to come, Aion is the eternal truth of time: pure empty form of time, which has freed itself of its present corporeal content and has thereby unwound its own circle, stretching itself out in a straight line. (1990: 165)

Time in the sense of aion is the pure movement of ‘becoming’ or ‘event’ in which time perpetually divides itself into past and future, always eluding the present (1990: 5). Time as becoming is opposed to time as chronos, since it cuts across the measures internal to specific, organised systems (1990: 77). Where there is no beginning or end then there is also no orientation relative to the present, no measure, no organisation – only the ongoing differential production of past and future. Time as aion is beyond the ways in which particular systems are temporally constituted, but it operates as a ‘quasi-cause’ in the sense that it disrupts all subsistence and perpetually re-orients the relation and conjunction

[ 69 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 70

Theories of world-political time of different systems with each other. Deleuze uses the metaphors of ‘depth’/‘point’ and ‘surface’/‘line’ to capture the distinction between these two modes of time (1990: 165). Worlds in which causes produce effects or which are functionally organised (chronos) can be plotted and related like points on a graph. In contrast, aion operates at a purely ‘surface’ level, counteracting the vertical pressures inherent in systems with its horizontal sweep, and bifurcating their (systems’) determinate lines with its own never-ending, indeterminate line. In Deleuze’s and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis and capitalism, AntiOedipus (1977), the Stoic distinction between chronos and aion is echoed in the distinctive temporalities of ‘machine’ on the one hand and ‘desire’ on the other. Machines are partial systems that regulate the productive flow of desire, through mechanisms of ‘coding’ and ‘territorialisation’, which can range from the control of populations through territorially based nationalism to the control of individuals through psychic manipulation.18 Any aspect of organic or social reality, from orchids to brains, and from institutions to invasions, can be analysed in terms of a ‘machine’, insofar as it can be understood as an organised, partial system, and all such systems either actually or potentially may impinge on one another (Deleuze and Guattari, 1977: 340). Desire is the ‘flow’ of becoming, not a causal driver of effects as such but the condition of possibility for the production of novelty in the relations between different machines. Desire as becoming will always flow towards an outlet or escape, creating lines of flight that move across and disrupt different systems. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari trace the interconnections and commonalities between social and desiring machines at different historical points from the perspective of a present in which both capitalism and psychoanalysis have triumphed. In doing so, they substitute their account of ‘universal history’ for the standard Marxist version. On this account we can read the shift from primitive to Asiatic and feudal and eventually capitalist modes of production in terms of a series of different machines with their different modes of coding and territorialising desire and production. However, Deleuze and Guattari argue that capitalism is a distinctive social form, which in some sense is inherent in all previous forms. This is because the capitalist machine is distinguished from other (previous) systems by its decoding and deterritorialisation of desire and production.19 Whereas previous social machines have sought to control desire, capitalism depends on liberating the flow of desire and productive power, freeing up economic and social relations to an unprecedented degree (Deleuze and Guattari, 1977: 139). This means that capitalism depends, paradoxically, on the exacerbation of energies that also threaten to destroy it, since desire undermines any kind of systemic subsistence. For this reason capitalism finds itself reterritorialising and recoding desire, most notably through the control of libidinal energy in the nuclear family via the Oedipus complex (1977:

[ 70 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 71

Against historicism 267–271). For Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism and psychoanalysis are implicated in one another and the latter supports and sustains the former (1977: 340). By the same token, the conditions pathologised by psychoanalysis, such as schizophrenia, offer clues to how capitalism may be undone (1977: 176). The actualisation of a revolutionary potentiality is explained less by the preconscious state of causality in which it is nonetheless included, than by the efficacy of a libidinal break at a precise moment, a schiz whose sole cause is desire – which is to say the rupture with causality that forces a rewriting of history on a level with the real, and produces this strange polyvocal moment when everything is possible. (1977: 378)

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari reject any kind of revolutionary programme as antithetical to the liberation of the productive flow of desire (1977: 350), and insist that there is nothing necessary or inevitable about the ways in which modes of production have developed historically (1977: 140). In their later work, the antithesis between history and becoming is emphasised further. In A Thousand Plateaux, the authors concur with Nietzsche’s rejection of history as antithetical to life and creativity, proclaiming the view that ‘History is made only by those who oppose history’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 295–296). As with Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the mistake of the philosophy of history is to assume the present-ness of the present. In their case, however, rather than the present being perpetually haunted by its own impossible conditions of possibility, multiple punctual presents (inherent in different partial systems) are perpetually ruptured by the line of becoming, so that their (those presents’) impingement on each other constantly shifts in unpredictable ways. For Deleuze and Guattari, there is no ‘beyond’ of time, but there is a temporal order of becoming that is always at cross-purposes with the temporality inherent in organised systems. In place of the philosophy of history, Derrida and Deleuze offer an interpretation of political time as ‘untimely’. The category of the ‘untimely’ claims to capture the meaning of political time as well as to hold implications for the possibilities of political change. From a classical Marxist perspective, the globalisation of capitalism means the globalisation of class struggle, which is a necessary prerequisite for revolutionary change. From the perspective of the ‘untimely’, however, the classical Marxist view massively overestimates the degree of agentic control that can ever be exercised in relation to any experienced present. But if faith in the realisation of freedom at the end of history disappears, this does not, in Derrida’s and Deleuze’s cases, result in the degree of pessimism characteristic of Arendt’s and Benjamin’s reading of their times. In Derrida’s case, the possibility of embracing a ‘lesser violence’ through recognising the necessity of the failure to do justice (and thereby hearing the call of justice) is the ongoing possibility of resistant and revolutionary politics. For

[ 71 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 72

Theories of world-political time Deleuze, the ineluctable movement of becoming operates in a similar way, enabling micropolitical movements that work to open up the flows of desire rather than to block and channel them. In place of the Marxist emphasis on a class as a revolutionary subject with world-political scope, ‘untimely’ readings of world history point to multiple, localised and fragmentary sources of resistance. This means that not only the narrative of progress associated with the philosophy of history, but also its account of ‘world’ is put into question by untimely accounts of political time. Where historicism constructs the world in ‘world politics’ as a whole, subsuming plurality under the logic of an overarching unity, theories of political time as untimely emphasise a logic of plurality and difference. Conclusion The analyses of Arendt, Benjamin, Derrida and Deleuze are rooted in a common critique of the philosophy of history, associated particularly with Marxist historicism. At the heart of this critique is an objection to the subsumption of kairos under chronos in deterministic accounts of political time. However, the ways in which this determinism is resisted is rather different between the two pairs of thinkers. Arendt’s and Benjamin’s arguments rely on the invocation of a different temporal order to counter and disrupt the chronotic time of linear succession and causal relations. For Arendt, political time is premised on banishing the mechanical and teleological temporalities of labour and work. In common with Machiavelli, this means that the political has a peculiar and fragile temporality that can only be sustained by a distinctive kairotic power of origin. The radical new beginning, which Machiavelli celebrates in the Prince’s founding of polities, is identified by Arendt with the power of revolution. And, as with Machiavelli, Arendt sees the spatial organisation of politics that follows from the creation of a political order as key to that order’s maintenance, providing a stable context within which politics can flourish. Arendt’s view of political time explicitly borrows from the Greek conception of kairos as ‘timeliness’, that is to say the capacity to act so as to change the times, and the mastery of chronotic time is central to this possibility. Benjamin’s notion of Messianic time borrows from Judeo-Christian rather than classical sources, but it shares with Arendt the idea of political time as being archetypically the capacity to stop the clocks and begin time again, although in Benjamin’s case, this new beginning also encompasses the redemption of the past. However, as with Arendt, we are left with questions about how these redemptive endings and beginnings of time are possible. In both cases, the possibility of politics seems to depend on conditions that may once have been in place (looking back to the classical polis), or may become possible in an unspecificable future present (a Messianic moment), but which have been effectively undermined by the rise of historicism.

[ 72 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 73

Against historicism Paradoxically, both Arendt and Benjamin appear to concede to historicism the power to control (put an end to) political time. In contrast, Derrida and Deleuze complicate matters by arguing that chronotic, historical time is always, as it were, contaminated by temporal otherness. On their accounts, it is not a matter of political time standing outside of chronos, but of chronotic time being re-imagined to encompass kairotic elements. Thus, spectrality does not operate in Derrida’s argument as an alternative temporal order for politics, but as a quality of the temporal order that we always already inhabit. Similarly, the cross-cutting temporalities of chronos and aion should not be thought of as alternatives but as interrelated aspects of the temporal organisation of life. In this respect, Derrida and Deleuze are much closer to the sensibilities of Kant, Hegel and Marx than are Arendt and Benjamin. In spite of their rejection of philosophies of history, both Derrida and Deleuze conceive political time as the immanent implication of chronotic and kairotic time, although they draw different lessons as to what this means. In particular, Derrida resists the push to seek to control the future by assigning an ontological content to justice, and Deleuze resists the idea that time operates as a mode of unifying apparently plural temporalities, instead seeing time as both pluralised and pluralising. The issues at stake between the philosophy of history and its critics recall the issues of progress and unity raised by Rousseau and Herder in their critique of Enlightenment readings of the ‘new time’ of modernity. This is an argument about what the world is and might be, but, in the wake of the work of Kant, Hegel and Marx, it is always also a political argument about judgement and action. For the critics of the philosophy of history, the politics of judgement and action that follow from the theories of Kant, Hegel and Marx are dangerously prescriptive. In this sense Arendt, Benjamin, Derrida and Deleuze share ground with Machiavellian views of political time, in which the risk and contingency of action is recognised and the notion of perpetual progress is incomprehensible. At the same time, however, all of these thinkers want to keep the idea of positive political change alive, at least as a possibility. In the work of Arendt and Benjamin, because of the way in which they understand the condition of possibility of such change – in terms of a radical break with the chronotic time of historicism – there are strong echoes of Rousseau’s pessimistic (or even apocalyptic) reading of the present. This is less the case with Derrida and Deleuze, who follow Kant, Hegel and Marx in seeing the possibility of change as immanent within the present(s), but are much less confident about assigning any determinate content to the idea of what counts as progress. For this reason, when it comes to the role of the theorist’s judgement in diagnosing the times, Arendt’s and Benjamin’s roles reflect that of the historicist prophet, who in having the key to the meaning of political time, is able to offer a reading of the trajectory of the present and, in timely fashion to intervene to raise the possibil-

[ 73 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 74

Theories of world-political time ity of re-directing the arrow of time. This is not a possibility open to Derrida and Deleuze, for whom there is no definitive reading of the meaning of the present. When it comes to the question of unity, it is clear that all four of the theorists discussed in this chapter oppose the idea that a world-historical temporality operates to unify disparate non-contemporaneous political presents. Nevertheless, as with Kant, Hegel and Marx, all of the theorists also continue to treat the present of western modernity as the reference point for drawing general conclusions about the meaning of the present. In the case of Arendt and Benjamin, the experience of western modernity in the twentieth century is read as the confirmation of the corruption of political time. For Derrida and Deleuze the same experience also confirms the damage done by historicist assumptions, as well as testifying to the lack of teleological direction to world-political development. In the case of the latter two theorists, however, their conceptualisation of political time explicitly incorporates a dimension of pluralism that undermines the claim to privilege of any particular experience or reading of the present. This is particularly the case for Deleuze, for whom there is no ‘present’, but only presents caught up in an unpredictable flow of becoming. In Chapter 1, I introduced the temporal meta-narratives of repetition, progress and decline that continue to influence contemporary readings of world politics. In Chapter 2 I traced some of the sources of these narratives and the emergence of the idea of world-historical progress as the key meta-narrative of political time, developed in response to the ‘new time’ of Enlightenment. The theories considered in this chapter challenge mechanistic and teleological historicisms in two different ways. They do so, on the one hand, through a return to conceptions of kairotic time, derived from classical and JudeoChristian traditions. On the other hand, they do so through a development of the notion of kairos as immanent to chronos (already present in the philosophical histories of Kant, Hegel and Marx), in a way that refuses to define political time as either natural or transcendental. The aim of the first part of this book has been to explore ideas about political time that underpin, but may also undermine, accounts of world politics as temporally structured in terms of repetition, progress or decline. In the second part of the book, we return to the direct examination of the operation of conceptions of political time in contemporary diagnoses of world politics. Notes 1 Key sources for the following, abbreviated comments on Nietzsche are ‘History in the Service and Disservice of Life’ in Unmodern Observations (1990), On the Genealogy of Morals (1969a) and Thus Spake Zarathustra (1969b). Useful interpretations of Nietzsche include: Ansell Pearson (1994 and 1997a); Owen (1995); and Kaufman (1974). The comments on Bergson rely primarily on Time and Free Will (2001) and ˇ (1971). See Creative Evolution (2005) and on the interpretation offered by Capek

[ 74 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 75

Against historicism

2

3

4

5

6 7

8 9

10

Ansell Pearson (2002) and Grosz (2004) for contemporary readings of Bergson that also bring out the links between his thought and that of Deleuze. Nietzsche suggests that there are three kinds of historical work, all of which have the capacity to serve life, if they are undertaken ‘for the purpose of life’ (Nietzsche, 1990: 91): exemplary or monumental; antiquarian; and critical. In exemplary history, the historian focuses on examples of unique events and individuals. In antiquarian history, the past is preserved and venerated. In critical history, the historian examines how history may make freedom possible. In all these cases, Nietzsche argues that a kind of history that employed in moderation may serve life tends to end up as an ‘excess’ of history in which life degenerates into history. In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche explains how memory is literally bred into human beings through techniques of punishment (‘breeding an animal with the right to make promises’) (1969a: 84–85). Memory and forgetting are in an unhealthy relationship when memory fixes people into an attitude of ‘ressentiment’ in which they become wholly defined by the ways in which they have been damaged (the danger of critical history). In both cases, this critique had to do with historicist versions of Marxism, and did not necessarily extend to Marx’s own arguments. As we shall see, however, Arendt did hold Marx responsible for a key element of historicist thinking in the role he gives to ‘labour’ in his theory of history (see below). Benjamin, in contrast, is very much targeting particular social democratic Marxists, and sees his own theory as recouping the revolutionary force of historical materialism proper (see below). Key sources for the discussion of Arendt below are: ‘The Concept of History: ancient and modern’ in Between Past and Future: six exercises of political thought (1961); On Revolution (1973); The Human Condition (1958); Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (1982); and The Origins of Totalitarianism (1986). For useful commentaries see: Kaplan & Kessler (1989); Benhabib (1996); Villa (1999 and 2000); and Hansen (1993). See also Hutchings (1996). In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt sets up a typology for dimensions of the human ‘vita activa’. There are three types of human activity: labour (the ongoing and incessant reproduction of material life, including productive and reproductive processes); work (the production of lasting artefacts, including tables but also city walls and laws); and action (the production of meaning within the public sphere). In this respect, Arendt echoes Nietzsche’s critique of historicism: see above. The main source for Benjamin’s views on time and politics is his aphorisms, translated under the title ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in Illuminations (1999), and also his early essay ‘Critique of Violence’ (1978). For commentaries on Benjamin’s work, see Osborne (1995); Lindroos (1998); Benjamin & Osborne (2000); and Benjamin (2005). This echoes Nietzsche’s critique of historicism as leading to the worship of success. This is also, of course, part of the Christian tradition, which shares with Judaic Messianism the identification of the Messiah with sacred or divine as opposed to profane time, and the notion of the coming of the Messiah as a radical disruption of profane time (see discussion of Christian chronology in Chapter 2, Derrida’s notion of the Messianic structure of action discussed below, and Agamben’s revival of the idea of Messianic time discussed in Chapter 6). In Specters of Marx, Derrida refers to the sense of déjà vu he experienced in relation to the debates over Fukuyama’s argument for the ‘end of history’ in the early 1990s, which, he says, replayed arguments as to the ‘poverty of historicism’ and the ‘end of ideology’ from the 1950s and 60s (see discussion of Popper in Chapter 4 below). However, although Hegelian and Marxist theories of history were the subject of strin-

[ 75 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 76

Theories of world-political time

11

12

13

14

15 16

17 18

gent critique at different points in the period after the Second World War, notably post-1956, post-1968 and post-1989, liberal progressive narratives of a Kantian kind retained more credibility, especially in the aftermath of the Cold War – see discussions of liberal democratic peace theory and cosmopolitan democracy in Chapters 4 and 5 below. Key works for the interpretation of Derrida are: Specters of Marx (2006); The Politics of Friendship (2005); Writing and Difference (2001); and ‘Force of Law: the “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’ in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (Derrida, 1992a). See also Given Time 1: counterfeit money (1992b). For an overview of Derrida’s political thought see Beardsworth (1996), and for an interesting interpretation of Derrida in relation to Marx and Benjamin, see Fritsch (2005) and also ‘Futures: Specters and Angels: Benjamin and Derrida’ in W. Brown (2001). Key works for the interpretation of Deleuze are: The Logic of Sense (1990); Deleuze & Guattari Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia (1977); and A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia (1988). For secondary sources on Deleuze, see Ansell Pearson (1997b); Buchanan (2000); Thoburn (2003); and Stivale (2005). Law is one instance of the general problem of the perpetual failure of thought to encompass singularity, because of time. There is no eternal (timeless) in Derrida to recoup the failure through a god’s eye view. Benjamin’s essay, ‘Critique of Violence’, argues for the idea of ‘divine’ violence as the possibility of breaking through the cycle of law-making and law-preserving violence in which the modern state is caught (1978: 297–300). Although written much earlier than his aphorisms on the philosophy of history, the logic of Benjamin’s argument is similar in both places, requiring a radical blowing apart of existing political and temporal orders. Derrida’s appropriation of the idea of Messianism re-works Benjamin’s notion in the light of a reading of Levinas. As noted above, Derrida rejects a strong (ontological) version of Messianism, in which the actual transcendence of time is posited (something of which he accuses Benjamin); instead he interprets it in ‘hauntological’ terms, in the sense that the radical future-orientation inherent in Messianism is read by Derrida as a structure that haunts all experience, but is incapable of realisation. For Derrida, this is linked to the Levinasian idea of ethics as infinite responsibility towards the ungraspable ‘other’. For Derrida’s reading of Levinas, see ‘Violence and Metaphysics: an essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas’ in Derrida (2001), in which he says of Levinas’s work: ‘. . . messianic eschatology is never mentioned literally: it is but a question of designating a space or a hollow within naked experience where this eschatology can be understood and where it must resonate. This hollow space is not an opening among others. It is opening itself, the opening of opening, that which can be closed within no category or totality, that is, everything within experience which can no longer be described by traditional concepts, and which resists every philosopheme.’ (Derrida, 2001: 103). Sellars points out that in fact Deleuze’s account of stoicism’s philosophy of time has very little to do with stoicism itself (Sellars, 2007: 30). Deleuze’s chronos/aion distinction appears to map onto the chronos/kairos. In many ways it is reminiscent of Machiavelli’s work, in that chronos refers to naturally ordered time, and aion to the sheer contingency of happening. This echoes Herder’s account of nature quoted in Chapter 2 above. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s understanding of ‘coding’ and ‘territorialization’ is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s analysis of mnemonics in the Genealogy of Morals. The terms refer to ways in which meanings and identities are stabilised through processes of repeti-

[ 76 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 77

Against historicism tion and limitation both at the level of the individual psyche and at the level of state and economy. 19 Deleuze and Guattari change their minds on this: what are presented as historical stages in Anti-Oedipus are presented as simultaneous moments in A Thousand Plateaus (1988: 233).

[ 77 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 78

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

PA RT I I D I AG N O S I N G T H E T I M E S

Page 79

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 80

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 81

4

Prophecies and predictions

Introduction N the previous two chapters we have been exploring philosophical accounts of political time. In this and subsequent chapters we examine readings of contemporary world politics and the different ways in which they rely on and reproduce configurations of the relation between chronos and kairos in their accounts of the world-political present. In this chapter our focus is on interpretations of the nature and direction of world politics after the Cold War, including the popular ‘end of history’ and ‘clash of civilisations’ narratives offered by Fukuyama and Huntington, and responses from the social science of International Relations during the 1990s. These interpretations were all diagnostic in intent, seeking to identify what was or was not peculiar to the post-Cold War times of world politics and the implications of this diagnosis for the future. The chapter begins with an examination of the critique of historicism embedded in the idea of social science championed by Karl Popper in The Poverty of Historicism (1957). Popper’s critique shares some ground with the critique of historicism in Arendt’s and Benjamin’s work. However, in contrast to their account, Popper includes cyclical as well as linear theories in his definition of historicism and sets up a sharp distinction between historicism and science (both natural and social). The key claim of Popper’s argument is that there is no place for kairotic temporality in what purport to be scientific approaches to explaining the world. It will be argued, however that Popper’s attempt to distinguish clearly between chronos and kairos, and to banish the latter from the stage of social science is less successful than he claims. Popper’s work set the scene for dominant approaches to the science of international politics in the Cold War period. In the immediate aftermath of the end of the Cold War, this Popperian consensus was apparently challenged by the revival of meta-narratives of world political time in the work of Fukuyama and

I

[ 81 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 82

Diagnosing the times Huntington, that take us back explicitly to ideas explored in Chapter 2 above. At the same time, however, mainstream social scientific work on post-Cold War international politics in the 1990s continued to be preoccupied with the scientific status of its claims, and with differentiating the social science of international politics (predictive) from speculative philosophies of history (prophetic). For these latter arguments it remained crucial that the ghost of kairos be laid to rest. However, on investigation, within these accounts linear, uni-directional chronotic temporality, within which sequences of effective causation unfold, co-exists with kairotic temporalities inherent in ‘experimental’ method and in structural, evolutionary and teleological frameworks of explanation. In each case assumptions about chronos are inflected by assumptions about kairos, so that scientific work becomes enmeshed in linear and cyclical historicisms, unsettling the distinction between prediction and prophecy so crucial to the claim to scientific status. On the whole assumptions about experimental and historical temporalities in post-Cold War scholarship have changed little post-1989. Instead we find theorists divided along familiar lines of opposition, both in terms of alternative ways of conceptualising the overall temporal trajectory of world politics and in terms of diagnosis and prescription. Nevertheless, there have been some attempts to put the model of science underpinning such work into question and thereby open up questions about whether we might think world political temporality differently. In the final section of the chapter, we will examine attempts to disrupt the temporal assumptions embedded in standard International Relations methodologies and theories. The poverty of historicism I mean by ‘historicism’ an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the ‘rhythms’ or the ‘patterns’, the ‘laws’ or the ‘trends’, that underlie the evolution of history. (Popper, 1957: 3, original emphasis)

Popper’s critique of historicism is in many ways an echo of the arguments of Arendt and Benjamin discussed in the previous chapter.1 For all three thinkers, the philosophy of history pioneered by thinkers such as Kant, Hegel and Marx results in highly dangerous forms of both fatalism and activism in politics. It results in fatalism because it encourages the idea that history simply will develop according to a particular formula regardless of human action. And it encourages activism (in the form of vanguardism) by allowing for the possibility that certain individuals or groups may have privileged insights into the direction of history and see it as their mission to accelerate the forces they know are already in play. However, although Popper may agree with Arendt’s and Benjamin’s

[ 82 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 83

Prophecies and predictions assessment of the political dangers of historicism, he provides a rather different analysis of why it is also a mistaken account of human society and action. For Arendt and Benjamin, the key problem with historicism is that it naturalises social and political phenomena, absorbing them into the language of either physics or biology by subsuming kairos under chronos. For Popper, in contrast, historicism is based on a mixture of naturalism and anti-naturalism, but is most crucially characterised by its lack of understanding of what genuinely scientific claims involve – historicists confuse scientific prediction with unscientific prophecy. So what precisely is the distinction between prediction and prophecy? The key difference between them is that the former specifies initial conditions and is, in principle, capable of generating testable (that is to say, falsifiable) hypotheses along the lines of ‘in circumstances X, then outcomes Y’, whereas the latter is unconditional, and cannot be specified in terms of a hypothesis capable of being tested. The major reason that historicism is unscientific in this sense, according to Popper, is its methodological holism. It is a mistake to believe that there can be a history in the holistic sense, a history of ‘States of Society’ which represent ‘the whole of the social organism’ or ‘all the social and historical events of an epoch’. This idea derives from an intuitive view of a history of mankind as a vast and comprehensive stream of development. But such a history cannot be written. (Popper, 1957: 81, original emphasis)

The methodological holism of historicism provides no grounds on which to distinguish and put to the test claims about the key drivers of the human condition: it can therefore provide no reliable basis for explanation or prescription. In contrast, genuine science is methodologically individualist: it allows for the isolation and testing of explanatory variables, and thus a basis, within the social sciences, for ‘piecemeal social engineering’. Whilst acknowledging that social scientists may face more problems than physicists in practice in designing and engaging in experiment, in principle their task is the same (1957: 93–97). In making this argument, Popper establishes the historicist’s overestimation of the distinction between natural and social phenomena by drawing attention to the historicist’s misunderstanding of both. According to Popper, the historicist over-complicates the idea of the social by introducing speculative and untestable claims about historical relativism and evolution, and over-simplifies the idea of nature by underestimating the degree to which laws of nature are specific to particular conditions and contexts (1957: 97–104). His standard response to historicist argument is first to demonstrate how its claims are untenable as such, and then to suggest that we can, in any case, find parallels to the peculiarities of social and political life identified by the historicists in the natural world, and the attempts of physicists to make sense of it. The basic

[ 83 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 84

Diagnosing the times message of Popper’s argument is that social and political life, in whatever time and place, shares the temporality of nature. To the extent that we can know anything about it, this is the temporality of chronos in the form of clock and causal time, in which patterns of cause and effect can be identified in particular sequences of events under specified and, broadly speaking, repeatable conditions (1957: 124). What we cannot know is whether or not there is any meta-level temporality organising the multiple, interacting lines of causation that operate according to their specific laws. For this reason, we cannot call the theory of evolution in nature a genuine theory, let alone speculative theories about holistic trends in the direction of human development or world politics (1957: 108).2 Popper’s argument for the unity of a hypothetico-deductive scientific method across natural and social sciences acknowledges certain differences between them. One of those differences turns out to be key to the possibility of progress in social science, and in social life in comparison to the natural sciences and the natural world: there are good reasons, not only for the belief that social science is less complicated than physics, but also for the belief that concrete social situations are in general less complicated than concrete physical situations. For in most social situations, if not in all, there is an element of rationality. (1957: 140, original emphasis)

Rationality appears in two different roles in Popper’s hopes for the social sciences and for social life. In the first place, in the form of instrumental rationality, it enables the control of temporal and spatial conditions for social scientific research, by providing a constant in relation to which the method of logical and rational reconstruction, pioneered by economics, can be used to model human behaviour. This method consists of constructing models on the basis of pure means/ends reasoning as a ‘kind of zero coordinate’ against which to interrogate actual behaviour in concrete situations. Popper’s enthusiasm for this method within the social sciences is bound up with his argument that the historicist obsession with change, by rendering everything relative to historical context (the holist error), ignores how it may actually be constant features of human beings that explain stasis, regress and progress in relation to particular kinds of human endeavour – political, scientific, economic, artistic and so on. At the same time, he is clear that attempts to explain historical change in general by reference back to accounts of human nature are untestable and therefore unscientific. Popper is careful to explain that he is not putting forward instrumental rationality as the guarantor of historical progress at the macro-level in the way that it is within various Enlightenment philosophies of history. Sometimes progress is made through mistakes or irrational assumptions, and anyway rationality is never pure, but is always mixed with or may be under-

[ 84 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 85

Prophecies and predictions mined by the irrational (‘There may, for example, be an epidemic of mysticism’ (1957: 156)). The second way in which rationality enters Popper’s argument is as an end as well as a means for scientific and also, it turns out, social and political progress. In spite of his wariness about falling into historicist traps, Popper is concerned to address the question of progress in science and whether it is possible to specify its conditions. First, we have to attempt to find conditions of progress, and to this end we must apply the principle set out in section 28: we must try to imagine conditions under which progress would be arrested. This immediately leads to the realization that a psychological propensity alone cannot be sufficient to explain progress, since conditions may be found on which it may depend. Thus we must, next, replace the theory of psychological propensities by something better; I suggest, by an institutional (and technological) analysis of the conditions of progress. (1957: 154, original emphasis)

It turns out that these institutional conditions are those that protect and encourage the flourishing of rationality not simply instrumentally (since instrumental reason is as likely to be devoted to the ends of alchemy as chemistry), but in a non-instrumental sense, as the exercise of critical intelligence in the (in principle unsatisfiable) pursuit of knowledge. This kind of rationality for individuals, Popper claims, is most likely to thrive in the context of democratic and liberal political institutions in which freedom of thought is guaranteed, and highly unlikely to thrive in conditions of despotism. If the growth of reason is to continue, and human rationality to survive, then the diversity of individuals and their opinions, aims, and purposes must never be interfered with (except in extreme cases where political freedom is endangered). (1957: 159)

Popper claims to be avoiding historicist errors in his consideration of progress, because he is focusing not on progress in general, but specifically on the nature of the conditions of scientific progress. However, given his argument for the unity of method and purpose of natural and social science and the strong (though neither necessary not sufficient) link he draws between reason and social and political freedoms, the account of both what progress is and how it is possible, in spite of his denials, looks uncannily like that of many standard Enlightenment philosophies of history. Popper’s holistic picture reflects a pedagogic version of philosophy of history, in which progress depends on processes of learning through critical reflection on experimental processes of trial and error. Nevertheless, we know what progress is and therefore what the end of history ought to be. Popper differentiates his argument from that of historicists by presenting the holistic aspects of his account as a ‘historical interpretation’, one that reflects a selective ‘point of view’. But this argumentative move in fact

[ 85 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 86

Diagnosing the times mirrors Kant’s account of philosophical history and the role of the philosophical historian. This role is both to draw attention to what matters in the ‘vast and comprehensive steam of development’ in the history of mankind, and to assume responsibility for pushing the world in the right direction. Popper is acutely aware of all the factors that might derail scientific and social and political progress, but he nevertheless assumes that it is possible for the former to facilitate the latter and vice versa, and, with more certainty, that the lack of social and political progress will block the progress of science. His argument in practice plays on the ambiguity he deplores in historicists, an ambiguity between causal explanations of historical development and normative prescription as to the proper direction of that development, an ambiguity compounded by his identification of rationality as both explanatory factor and normative ideal. Popper identifies rationality as a key factor in explaining human conduct (and therefore a key reference point for methodological individualism in the social sciences) and also identifies the flourishing of rationality as a desirable end of human conduct. In making these claims, Popper threatens to undermine the aim of his philosophy of social science, which is to free accounts of social life from the errors of historicism. The invocation of rationality, as both cause and end, allows the exceptional time of kairos to re-enter the picture in two ways. Firstly, kairos reappears as the causal and teleological key to chronos. Secondly kairos reappears as a framework for sociological and political judgement. In the first sense, kairos operates at both micro- and macro-levels. At the micro-level it takes the form of ‘experimental time’, in which the social scientist is able to manipulate spatio-temporal conditions by abstracting from the ‘vast and comprehensive stream’ and constructing artificial worlds or models as analytic tools that enable the testing (through repetition) of competing explanations and predictions about events in the social world. At a macro-level, kairos is the ‘historical interpretation’ that guides the selection of appropriate research pathways and prescribes the application of findings that emerge from micro-level experimental work – the ‘piecemeal social engineering’ that Popper recommends.3 As a framework for judgement, kairos, on Popper’s account operates in much the same way as many of the historicist theories he rejects, to forge a link between actual historical developments and normative ideals and to read space in terms of time, by associating particular historical developments with universal significance. In these respects, Popper typifies much of the work in the social science of International Relations during the Cold War period, which was selfconsciously committed to being ‘scientific’. This commitment involved both the attempt to bracket out the messy time of chronos (‘history is just one damned thing after another’) at a micro-level through sophisticated statistical and modelling techniques, and the justification of this research as a contribution to shaping the world in appropriate ways. Popper includes in his category of historicism not only liberal and socialist progressive theories of historical devel-

[ 86 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 87

Prophecies and predictions opment, but also cyclical and ‘decline’ accounts. One of the distinguishing features of the social science of International Relations has been that the meaning of ‘shaping the world in appropriate ways’ has been rendered intelligible by all of these macro-level versions of kairos. The return of prophecy Popper was one amongst many supposedly hammering nails into the coffin of historicism in the aftermath of the Second World War and during the Cold War. Within International Relations, orthodox opinion denied any relation between the space and time of international politics and untestable kairotic assumptions, even though standard debates between ‘realist’ and ‘liberal’ perspectives clearly reflected their influence. In the late 1980s, the orthodox scholarly community of International Relations received something of an exogenous shock when the familiar patterns of international politics at the very least appeared to be disrupted by the end of the Cold War (Gaddis, 1992/3; Lebow and RisseKappen, 1995; Wohlforth, 1998). The effect of this was twofold. In the first place, scholars of international politics were required to explain this event, its likely consequences and implications for policy. In the second place, it raised the question of the plausibility of the claims of the social science of International Relations to be ‘scientific’, given its failure to predict the end of the Cold War. In this section, we will focus on how responses to the first problem included an explicit re-engagement with ‘prophecy’ as the key to ‘prediction’ in the influential re-workings of philosophical history by Fukuyama and Huntington. In the following section we will return to the question of prediction, and the less obvious accounts of world-political time embedded in different attempts made by International Relations scholars to respond scientifically to the apparent failure of their science. . . . few of those comfortable residents of developed democracies who scoff at the idea of historical progress in the abstract would be willing to make their lives in a backward, Third World country that represents, in effect, an earlier age of mankind. (Fukuyama, 1992: 130) The central theme of this book is that culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest level are civilization identities, are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration and conflict in the post-Cold War world. (Huntington, 1996: 20)

Fukuyama and Huntington self-consciously present their theories as philosophies of history or what Popper would call ‘historical interpretations’ rather than as social scientific argument. Nevertheless, both draw on aspects of social scientific, as well as historical, argument as a means of substantiating the accuracy of the lens through which they are seeing contemporary world politics. In

[ 87 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 88

Diagnosing the times Fukuyama’s case, his philosophy of history is drawn out of a particular interpretation of Kant, Hegel and Marx (strongly filtered via Kojève). It combines mechanical, organic and pedagogic elements and is essentially linear and singular in form (that is to say, there is one, uni-directional temporal pattern to human development, which ultimately overrides the kind of differences with which thinkers such as Herder were concerned). In Huntington’s case, the story is more complex, since he combines linear and cyclical elements in his metanarrative of historical development, and also suggests that it is both singular and plural in form. Whereas Fukuyama sees world history, up to a point, as progress, Huntington’s theory stresses the apocalyptic potential of recent historical developments. Fukuyama tells the story of world history as driven simultaneously by material, technological imperatives and by individuals’ desire for recognition. Huntington tells the story of world history in terms of the parallel development of distinctive civilisations, in which two mechanisms are at work, the values inherent in particular civilisational visions of how the world should be, and the trans-civilisational imperative of technological mastery and control (modernisation). In both cases, Fukuyama and Huntington assert the value of their reading of world politics over and against the social scientific claims of International Relations, and thereby exacerbate the challenge posed by the end of the Cold War to its explanatory paradigms. Fukuyama’s notorious claim that the end of the Cold War marked the ‘end of history’ in the form of the capitalist market and the liberal state is an archetypal example of historicism of the kind targeted by Arendt, Benjamin and Popper. It is a methodologically holist theory of history which incorporates mechanical, organic and pedagogic processes. The mechanical processes are economic, the organic and pedagogic processes pertain to the human psyche. At the mechanical level, Fukuyama draws on classic liberal arguments (such as Kant’s) as to the pacific effects of trade on relations between states and on the Marxist claim that modes of political organisation are dictated by modes of production. Modern technology and the globalisation of markets are identified as material drivers of world history towards the acceptance by all states of capitalist economics and liberal politics. Underlying these causal processes is, ultimately, an innate human self-interest in maximising chances of survival. At the organic and pedagogic levels, Fukuyama puts a highly Kojèvian spin on the Hegelian story of the ‘struggle for recognition’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit. According to Fukuyama, all individuals, as well as being driven by self-interest are also driven by the ‘desire for recognition’ (thymos).4 That is to say, we are all motivated by a need to be acknowledged by others as worthy of respect. The satisfaction of desire for recognition operates teleologically as a final cause towards which human relations develop, as well as as a reference point for individual and collective learning and striving. The collapse of the Soviet bloc signifies the importance not only of economic drivers of human development

[ 88 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 89

Prophecies and predictions but of how populations have learned by their mistakes, in this case the mistake of institutionalising political arrangements which cannot satisfy individuals’ need for recognition. Paradoxically, however, the achievement of the liberal ‘end of history’ may turn out not to be as ideal as might have been supposed. Within liberal market capitalism, Fukuyama argues, the struggle for recognition, which had been a progressive driving force in human history, becomes channelled and institutionalised as rational arrangements for the satisfaction of material desire, rendering the post-historical world potentially boring and without meaning (1992: 333–336). In the course of his argument, Fukuyama reflects on the explanatory and normative paradigms that have shaped thinking about international politics in the twentieth century, in particular during the Cold War period, focusing on ‘realism’ and ‘liberal internationalism’. In the case of the former, Fukuyama argues that realism is based on shaky foundations. Firstly, because it assumes that the pursuit of power in the service of self-interest is the only motivation of states; secondly, because of its failure to ‘address the question of History’ (1992: 254). In unpacking these complaints, Fukuyama argues that although the pursuit of power is important for understanding the behaviour of states, the meaning of both power and self-interest varies with the nature and situation of states themselves (‘States therefore do not simply pursue power; they pursue a variety of ends that are dictated by concepts of legitimacy’ (1992: 257)). Moreover, he argues that underlying states’ pursuit of power is thymos or the desire for recognition. This desire can manifest itself as a desire for mastery (and is therefore at the root of war between states). However, given that thymos cannot actually be satisfied by mastery (following the logic of Hegel’s ‘struggle for recognition’), it always has the potential to develop instead into a drive towards mutually recognitive relations between states. It is this possibility that takes us to the ‘question of History’. According to Fukuyama, although based on mistaken assumptions, realism was nevertheless able to provide a very useful map and set of prescriptions for foreign policy in the Cold War period, when the world was ideologically split and divided between liberal and totalitarian regimes. However, once the Berlin Wall came down, the context in which realism appeared to make sense disappeared, and it became necessary to rethink the fundamental principles on which international politics operated. Fukuyama suggests that realist analyses of foreign policy post-Cold War are reminiscent of a doctor: who, after treating a cancer patient through a long and agonizing process of chemotherapy that finally forces the cancer into remission, tries desperately to persuade the patient to continue the chemotherapy on the grounds that it has been so successful in the past. (1992: 252–253)

In contrast to realism, on Fukuyama’s account, the time of liberal internation-

[ 89 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 90

Diagnosing the times alism (which is equivalent to the end of History with a capital ‘H’) has now come. He refers back to the reasons why it could not have succeeded in the earlier part of the twentieth century and draws on Doyle’s argument for the liberal democratic peace to underpin his claim that as states become liberal democratic and capitalist they will be pacific in relation to one another. In making this argument he invokes the authority of Kant’s account of Perpetual Peace (1992: 281–283). Fukuyama’s message is very clear: in contradiction to Popper, without an understanding of ‘“the rhythms” or the “patterns”, the “laws” or the “trends”, that underlie the evolution of history’ (Popper, 1957: 3), there can be no adequate, diagnostic and predictive, social science of international politics. Huntington provides us with an analysis of the ‘rhythms’, ‘patterns’ etc. that diverges from, but also overlaps with, Fukuyama’s in certain respects. Huntington’s reading of history is more complex than Fukuyama’s because it identifies a series of cross-cutting drivers of historical change. The focus of the book is on the way in which ‘civilisational identities’, which comprise the broadest level of cultural identities, have become crucial to the way in which international politics is developing. At the same time, Huntington also identifies two other dynamics that work through and across civilisational identitites: ‘modernisation’ and ‘Civilisation’. Modernisation ‘involves industrialization, urbanization, increasing levels of literacy, education, wealth and social mobilization, and more complex and diversified occupational structures’ (Huntingdon, 1996: 68). ‘Civilisation’ in the singular sense (capital ‘C’), gains its meaning from the contrast with ‘primitive’ or ‘barbarian’ and involves ‘higher levels of morality, religion, learning, art, philosophy, technology, material well-being, and probably other things’ (1996: 320). The various civilisations (Huntington identifies seven or eight) can be more or less modernised or Civilised at any given time, though it is clear that Huntington sees the driver of modernisation (akin to Fukuyama’s view that technological mastery is a material driver of history) as a good deal more powerful than any impulse towards Civilisation in general. Nevertheless, some degree of Civilisation is a threshold condition for counting as a civilisation at all. The philosophy of history underpinning Huntington’s account of post-Cold War international politics is complicated. The focus of much of his argument is on the importance of reading history in a cyclical and plural way. History moves in cycles because the power and influence of different civilisations follows a common pattern of rise and fall. History should be thought of in terms of ‘histories’ because there is no universal ‘history of mankind’; civilisations produce their own specific histories, and have their own beginning and ‘ends’. The typical mistake made by civilisations is to identify their specific history with the history of the world or humanity as such, a mistake to which ‘western’ civilisation is particularly prone (1996: 54–55). However, the story does not end there.

[ 90 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 91

Prophecies and predictions As noted above, Huntington also invokes two ‘revolutionary’ shifts that cut across world history: the shift from ‘primitive’ to ‘Civilised’ and the shift from ‘pre-modern’ to ‘modern’. Huntington suggests that the latter, in particular, is a distinctive process, which, at least once it is under way, is contingently but not necessarily linked to ‘westernisation’. Much of his argument is devoted to debunking the notion that modernisation necessarily leads to westernisation, and to the threats posed to western civilisation by other civilisations that have modernised (or are modernising) but remained civilisationally distinct. Thus, the pattern of world history is understood in terms of a plurality of temporal cycles, which interact with singular, linear processes. In addition, however, Huntington also implicitly relies on another singular linear model of historical development in his account of contemporary world politics. The horizontal plurality of civilisations ‘clash’, so that history as a whole is presented in terms of a version of social Darwinism in which all civilisations pursue the goal of survival and growth, and survival is linked to the elimination or subsumption of competitors. In his account of contemporary world politics, Huntington’s social Darwinism is apocalyptic in two senses. It raises the prospect of apocalypse specific to western civilisation by stressing the dangers that it currently faces and, more broadly, stresses the apocalyptic potential of clashes of civilisation in a world of high technology weaponry, including nuclear missiles. In arguing for the plausibility and utility of his reading of history, Huntington explicitly challenges a range of other theoretical approaches to understanding post-Cold War international politics. He rejects Fukuyama’s liberal internationalist argument, because it conflates westernisation and modernisation. He rejects Marxist ‘two world’ readings of international politics, because they underestimate the civilisational cleavages between the ‘rest’. He rejects realism, because, he argues, states are now increasingly defining their interests in ‘civilisational’ terms. And he rejects the idea that the post-Cold War world is simply an anarchic mess, slipping increasingly into chaos without the stabilising bipolar structure of a world divided between two superpowers, as analytically unhelpful: Viewing the world in terms of seven or eight civilizations avoids many of these difficulties. It does not sacrifice reality to parsimony as do the one-and-twoworld paradigms; yet it also does not sacrifice parsimony to reality as the statist and chaos paradigms do. It provides an easily grasped and intelligible framework for understanding the world, distinguishing what is important from what is unimportant among the multiplying conflicts, predicting future developments, and providing guidelines. (1996: 36)

As with Fukuyama, Huntington asserts the necessity of kairos as a framework for understanding chronos in world politics. Like Fukuyama also, and in traditional historicist fashion, Huntington also stresses the distinctiveness of the present

[ 91 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 92

Diagnosing the times and the consequent inapplicability of existing frames of reference for rendering it intelligible. Fukuyama’s and Huntington’s arguments attracted a great deal of attention in the fin-de-siècle thinking of the 1990s, in which the meaning of the end of the Cold War became bound up with broader deliberations about the meaning and promise of the closing years of the century. Within the social science of International Relations, however, these historicist positions were regarded with considerable suspicion, even though there is clearly shared ground between Fukuyama and liberal International Relations theories and Huntington and realist International Relations theories respectively. A noticeable trend in International Relations analyses of post-Cold War politics was the assertion that that the underlying dynamics of world politics remained the same as prior to 1989. Proponents of liberal democratic peace theory, whilst agreeing with Fukuyama on the fact of pacific tendencies (and even on some of the underlying reasons) in the interaction of liberal states, were much less optimistic about the necessity of the trend towards the expansion of ‘pacific union’, and the jury remained out on what factors really explained the well-established set of correlations between liberal states and inter-liberal peace. Structural realists, both defensive and offensive, emphasised how the crucial factors in world politics remained the distribution of capabilities amongst states in a context of anarchy, and spent a great deal of time working out the implications of US hegemony and potential ‘balancers’ for the future shape of the international system. Debates within International Relations continued to be cast in very familiar terms, with realists castigating the failures of liberal internationalist and institutionalist literatures, and liberals and neo-liberals criticising the blind spots of realism.5 In both cases, however, scholars looked to interrogation of the ‘real’ world to settle the question of the nature of international politics post-Cold War. The key to working out the nature and trajectory of the present was not philosophy of history, but scientific method. Prediction, not prophecy, continued to be the aim.6 Given the apparent failure of prediction in relation to the events of 1989, this meant a refocusing of attention on the possibilities of prediction in the social science of International Relations. Back to the future One might as well have relied upon stargazers, readers of entrails, and other “pre-scientific” methods for all the good our “scientific” methods did . . . (Gaddis, 1992/3: 18)

In his article ‘International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War’, Gaddis attempts to identify the reasons why International Relations theories were (in his opinion) no more effective than astrology in predicting the end of the Cold War. He identifies three forms of scientific approach to international

[ 92 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 93

Prophecies and predictions politics: behavioural, structural and evolutionary. Behavioural approaches are those that rely on inductive methods, gathering data exhaustively in order to build explanatory models and hypotheses. Structural approaches follow a deductive path, in which certain assumptions about the nature of the international system act as the major premises.7 Evolutionary approaches are like Popper’s ‘historical interpretations’: broad-based theories of historical development that are used as the basis on which to interpret empirical evidence and extrapolate future trends. Gaddis cites Singer’s ‘correlates of war’ project as the major example of behaviouralism, and Kaplan and Waltz as key representatives of the structural approach. The evolutionary approach covers a much broader range of theories and theorists, all of which read the temporality of world politics, on the basis of historical and statistical analysis, along linear or cyclical lines.8 In each case Gaddis catalogues the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and the reasons why they lack predictive power. According to Gaddis, the major problem for behaviouralist and structuralist theories is that they neglect the significance of time in world politics, whereas evolutionary theorists acknowledge the role of time, but oversimplify the complex interrelation of structure and agency in historical developments (1992/3: 17). In Gaddis’s mapping of the social science of IR there is a persistent blurring of the distinction between methodology and theory. There are in fact two kinds of categorisation at work in his account. Firstly, there is a methodological comparison between empiricist, hypothetico-deductive and historical approaches to social science. Secondly, there is a critical assessment of substantive theories of international politics and their predictive power. Because of this blurring, it becomes possible for Gaddis to classify behaviouralist and structuralist arguments as a-temporal in contrast to the work of evolutionary theories.9 On closer examination, however, this categorisation is in many ways misleading. At a methodological level it is not the case that behavioural and hypothetico-deductive approaches are a-temporal; rather they make very specific assumptions about the temporality of international politics. And again, at the theoretical level, the substantive descriptive and explanatory analyses emerging out of behaviouralist and structuralist work makes such temporal claims explicit. Gaddis moves too quickly to the conclusion that the ‘experimental time’ of the social scientist is a-temporal because it is abstracted from the temporal flow of events as a whole. He therefore neglects the temporal patterning assumed and reproduced in even the most static and repetitive accounts of how world politics works. In fact claims about temporality, at micro- and macro-levels, are crucial to behavioural and structuralist responses to the question of how world politics operates post-1989. Bueno de Mesquita meets Gaddis’s critique head on in his claim that even though the end of the Cold War may not have been predicted, it was certainly predictable. The keys to this predictability are the tools provided by game

[ 93 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 94

Diagnosing the times theory, which allows for the tracing of the endogenous logic of multiple historical pathways which could have, or could still, be taken by rational decisionmakers.10 Bueno de Mesquita is here following in the footsteps of Popper’s recommendations for the future of social science. He does this by picking out the rationality of social actors as crucial to the kinds of abstraction and simplification that are necessary to enable the claim that ‘the events of history are a laboratory against which to test their [social scientists’] claims about how variables are associated with each other, to test their theoretical propositions about causation’ (Bueno de Mesquita, 2002: 12–13). Bueno de Mesquita responded to Gaddis’s complaint about the lack of predictive power of International Relations theory, by using the ‘expected utility model’ to simulate the behaviour of major powers from the starting point (arguably just prior to the Cold War) of the alliance patterns in 1948 through a variety of pathways, by randomly varying the salience of security concerns. His results, based on a hundred simulations, confirmed the high probability of an American victory over time and that key variables in the likelihood and speed of that victory were to do with non-security issues, discrediting realism’s marginalisation of such explanatory factors (Bueno de Mesquita, 2006: 154–167). On this account, the actual history of the Cold War is understood as “noise”, ‘or a small perturbation around the preponderant central tendency of the predictions’ (2006: 155). I show that, by simulating a wide array of plausible counterfactual histories, we can see that the initial starting point of the Cold War has embedded in it an emergent property. Specifically, the probability of an American Cold War victory was much higher than the probability of a Soviet victory, given the initial Cold War conditions and rationally complex adaptive behaviour. (2002: 79)

The laboratory of history comprises both past and future events because it is possible to work backwards and engage in simulations of historical pathways from some postulated origin that preceded them. This is demonstrated not only in relation to the Cold War, but also in relation to the implications of the ‘Concordat of Worms’ for the evolution of the European system of states (2002: 49). But Bueno de Mesquita also makes claims about events in the future, which may or may not confirm his propositions about causation. As with Popper, Bueno de Mesquita’s argument relies on the role of rationality in both experimental and historical time. At the experimental level, rationality works doubly, underpinning both the ability of the social scientist to interrogate the world through processes of simulation, and as the constant that provides continuity in the persons of decision-makers in radically different, given contexts and in response to unpredictable exogenous shocks. This rationality has causal force, but it also has a sui generis quality that distinguishes it from the run of events as such (one damned thing after another). Its reliability enables the scientist to

[ 94 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 95

Prophecies and predictions extrapolate likely futures, because rationality has a distinctive power to shape the future. Unlike everything else, rationality does not change, and its internal logic operates like the string in the labyrinth, enabling us to make sense of many twists, turns and complexities in an essentially linear fashion. This kairotic power of rationality not only shapes experimental time, but also historical time. Indeed, the long-term aim of Bueno de Mesquita’s work (as of all predictive social science) is to enable the lessons of experimental time to shape the policies of historical actors. The purpose of social scientific experimentation is not simply prediction in and of itself but a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, in which actual history can be made less like ‘noise’ and more like the logic of experimental time. In his view, by better appreciating what the outcomes of rationally adaptive behaviour will be, foreign policy actors will become more able to put their rationality to work and use rationally adaptive behaviour to push history in a rationally desirable direction – either to change or confirm the patterns already set in motion by a mixture of prior endogenously and exogenously generated decisions and events (2002: 151). For example, Bueno de Mesquita refers to the way in which his simulated histories of the Cold War include ‘superior’ histories, pointing to ways in which better decisions could have been made for a more optimal (faster) outcome, and how this might influence US foreign policy in relation to China or the Islamic world in the future (2006: 145, 167). In this sense, Bueno de Mesquita’s account of world-political time recalls the tensions between fatality and control that Arendt, Benjamin and Popper all saw as characteristic of historicism’s dangers. On the one hand, the future is predictable; on the other hand the future is to be made through our access to knowledge about patterns and motors of historical development. As in so much historicist work, the identification of that which shapes history catches us between determinism and god-like powers, forcing us to become perpetual time-travellers, undoing the future(s) to which the past is likely to have consigned us. Far from being a-temporal, Bueno de Mesquita’s work, which draws on both behavioural and hypothetico-deductive methodologies, in fact relies on fundamental assumptions about the intersection of chronos and kairos through the mechanism of ‘rationally adaptive behaviour’. It is the latter that reveals the secrets of historical development in experimentation at the micro-level and underpins the possibility of progress at the macro. The role of the scientist is, like that of Kant’s philosophical historian, to recognise what matters in empirical history and use this recognition to influence the direction of historical development. Bueno de Mesquita was not the only International Relations theorist to offer a robust rebuttal of Gaddis’s argument. Ray and Russett (1996) also claim that the fact that the end of the Cold War went unpredicted, does not mean that the predictive ambitions of the social science of International Relations have been undermined. Using Popper’s distinction, they argue that critics of prediction

[ 95 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 96

Diagnosing the times tend to conflate prediction with prophecy. And they counter that conditional, probabilistic prediction is, and should continue to be, the business of social science (1996: 446). This is both on scientific grounds, because it provides a means of testing theories, and on political grounds, because it enables the amelioration of the human condition (1996: 447). Once more, the task of social science is to identify causal mechanisms directing political time in order to confirm or re-direct its trajectory. In this respect, they claim, the liberal democratic peace hypothesis emerges unscathed from the experience of the end of the Cold War and should continue to help the shaping of the future. Even if it did not actually do so in most cases, liberal democratic peace theory ‘could generate probabilistic forecasts about the Cold War, contingent upon regime transitions’ (1996: 463). Prospectively, they argue, the end of the Cold War could have been predicted on the basis of the causal power of the ‘three legs’ of Kantian liberal democratic peace theory: democracy; economic interdependence; and international law and institutions (1996: 461). This is in contrast, they argue, to the case of realism, where Gaddis’s critique has more salience (1996: 455–457). Realism, they argue, fails both methodologically and substantively. It fails methodologically, because it is inherently difficult to falsify. It fails substantively because it gives priority to the wrong causal mechanisms (systemic over domestic factors). However, the judgement of Ray and Russett on realism’s failure has been challenged by other responses to Gaddis’s assessment. Mearsheimer, although he is working with a less sophisticated set of methodological techniques for the interrogation of events than Bueno de Mesquita, also responds to Gaddis’s challenge, in his case by reasserting the scientific status and predictive power of structural theories of international politics. As with liberal democratic peace theory, Mearsheimer uses his theory to explain the past and predict the future of international politics. However, in contrast to Bueno de Mesquita, in Mearsheimer’s analysis experimental and historical time are identified, since Mearsheimer relies on historical methods to gain the information about events that will counter or confirm his theory: the world can be used as a laboratory to decide which theories best explain international politics. In that spirit, I employ offensive realism to peer into the future, mindful of both the benefits and the hazards of trying to predict events. (Mearsheimer, 2001: 8)

Mearsheimer’s particular structural theory is that of ‘offensive realism’, which rests on a small number of basic assumptions that are closely analogous to those built into Hobbes’s account of the state of nature, but relate to states rather than to individuals. For Mearsheimer, states are rational actors primarily interested in their own survival. States exist in a context of anarchy, and are perennially uncertain about the intentions of other states. The only significant difference between states relates to their material strength, some states being much

[ 96 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 97

Prophecies and predictions stronger than others. The strongest states, great powers, manifest their strength in military capability. Although he does not use game theory, Mearsheimer does make considerable use of the ‘game’ analogy: Because one state’s gain in power is another state’s loss, great powers tend to have a zero-sum mentality when dealing with each other. The trick, of course, is to be the winner in this competition and to dominate the other states in the system. (2001: 34)

Mearsheimer applies his model of great power politics to various historical cases as a way of demonstrating its explanatory power in contrast to other explanatory frameworks (such as those of Fukyama and Huntington, liberal institutionalism etc.). The overall message is twofold: firstly, that the unchanging truths about international politics, identified by offensive realism, mostly explain the actions of states (in particular, great powers) across the historical time of the modern states system, and therefore provide a good basis to predict the future of post-Cold War international politics. Secondly, that when states do not act according to the rationalist and systemic imperatives built into the theory, then they are likely to become losers in the historical game. Mearsheimer’s great concern about international politics in the twenty-first century, is that the US will act irrationally by ignoring threats to its supremacy posed by likely balancers, in particular China (2001: 402). From Gaddis’s point of view, theories such as Mearsheimer’s exemplify the structuralist mistake of taking time out of the understanding of international politics by focusing on the constant, unchanging factors by which it is shaped. However, on closer examination, it is clear that there is a temporal patterning of the game of international politics on Mearsheimer’s account. This temporal patterning is strongly reminiscent of Machiavelli’s understanding of political time in general as cyclical and repetitive. For Bueno de Mesquita, ‘rationally adaptive behaviour’ gives linear, potentially progressive, impetus to historical time, and for Ray and Russett the ‘three legs’ of democratic peace theory are the key to historical progress, whereas for Mearsheimer the underlying conditions of international politics (which include systemic and rational actor assumptions) dictate a logic of balancing behaviour which will produce different winners and losers of the same game over time. In place of kairos embedded in the motions of the planets and the Goddess Fortuna, we have anarchy and rational action governing the rise and fall of powers, or, on a more poetic note, the motif of ‘tragedy’. Like Machiavelli also, Mearsheimer offers the possibility of learning from kairos. Once states understand the conditions that govern the temporality of international politics, they can know whether they are acting with the times or against them and change their behaviour accordingly. As with Bueno de Mesquita’s ‘expected utility model’ or liberal democratic peace theory, Mearsheimer’s theory becomes the key to how the future of international poli-

[ 97 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 98

Diagnosing the times tics may be changed as well as known. For Bueno de Mesquita and the liberal peace theorists, the possibility of time travelling (changing the chronotic lines of development in which we are caught), lies in our capacity to make the future unlike the past, whereas for Mearsheimer, the possibility of time travelling lies in our ability to internalise and consciously act on the principles on which the past has operated. In Mearsheimer’s case, as in the case of the other theorists, the ways in which rational actors behave and the ways in which they ought to behave are run together along classically historicist lines of alternation between the workings of providence (fate) and the intervention of the philosopher (judgement and action). For all of these theorists, the value of their argument is claimed to rest on its scientific character, which is in turn bound up with the distinction between prediction and prophecy. Unlike Fukuyama and Huntington, scientific theorists of international politics are clear that they should not rest their case on untestable claims about the ‘rhythms’, ‘patterns’, ‘laws’ or ‘trends’ that govern historical development as such. Instead their claims should relate to the real world, and be subject to empirical confirmation or falsification – except that, as Popper acknowledged in his own account of social science, the generation of testable claims about the world turns out to require principles of selection that precisely repeat ‘from a selective point of view’, the kinds of moves traditionally made by philosophers of history. The parsimony so central to the articulation of social scientific theory is grounded in the simplification of spatial and temporal conditions, both methodologically and theoretically. The point is not simply that prediction may become entangled with prophecy, but that prediction, in the context of the social sciences, relies on prophecy. It is not possible to predict unless the object of analysis is predictable. The only reason why prediction can count as a test of theory is because the homology between experimental and historical time has already been assumed, so that we already know what counts as ‘noise’ and what matters. This requires building in the kinds of assumption that Popper called ‘historical interpretations’: interpretations that, in the case of International Relations theory post-1989, take us straight back to the contrast between Kantian and Machiavellian kairos, and to the Cold War stand-off between liberal and realist approaches to the social science of International Relations. This requirement to read history is also closely linked to the identification of the role of the scientist as being to enable the keys to historical development embedded in experimental time to become truths rather than hypotheses. Unless world-political time is thought in simplified and unified terms, it is difficult to imagine that one could intervene in the world in the ‘right’ way, and confirm or deflect its temporal trajectory. If social science is about changing the world as well as explaining it, then the ghosts of historicism represented by Fukuyama and Huntington in the 1990s are not easy to exorcise. According to Gaddis, evolutionary approaches improve on behavioural and

[ 98 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 99

Prophecies and predictions structural arguments because they distinguish between time in the sense of natural time (understood in Newtonian terms as the ongoing container and condition of actual events and processes) and historical time, which is essentially to do with experience and the ongoing changes to events and processes that follow from learning from experience. However, on investigation, the sharp distinction drawn by Gaddis does not hold up since, as we have seen, approaches such as those of Bueno de Mesquita, Ray and Russett, and Mearsheimer also rely on and reproduce the distinction between natural and historical time, by establishing keys to the distinctive patterns of the latter. Indeed, I would suggest that the main difference between behavioural and structuralist theories and those Gaddis identifies as evolutionary, lies more in the greater clarity with which the former, in comparison to the latter, identify the presuppositions of world political temporality. As Gaddis points out, explicitly historical theories have identified patterns (development, long cycles of war and peace, technological progress etc.) without being clear as to the distinctive motors driving that patterning of world political time. However, above and beyond the critique of a-temporality, Gaddis makes a more fundamental critique of social scientific research into international politics, which reaches across behavioural, structural and evolutionary categories. In all cases, he argues, these methodologies and theories rely on a model of scientific theory and method that is outdated in its view of natural science and inappropriate to the spatio-temporal complexity of the object of inquiry, international politics itself. He argues that we need to re-think both ‘science’ and ‘time’ as a prerequisite for improving our social scientific grasp of the past, present and future of world politics. Re-thinking science and time The failure of international relations theory arose primarily, I believe, because of a methodological passing of ships in the night. The social sciences, seeking objectivity, legitimacy, and predictability, set out to embrace the traditional methods of the physical and natural sciences. But they did so at a time when physicists, biologists, and mathematicians, concerned with disparities between their theories and the reality they were supposed to characterize were abandoning old methods in favor of new ones that accommodated indeterminacy, irregularity and unpredictability – precisely the qualities the social sciences were trying to leave behind. (Gaddis, 1992/3: 54)

For Gaddis, all three types of theorising about International Relations are premised on interpreting the world, on analogy with the framework of Newtonian physics, as determined by causal laws. Such a world is characterised by regularity and predictability and can be properly approached through techniques of controlled experimentation. And it relies on fixed assumptions about

[ 99 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 100

Diagnosing the times how time works, whether at the micro-level of experimentation or at the macrolevel of historical interpretation. Gaddis suggests that this framework of thinking must fail to do justice to the complexity of the ‘real world’, just as it turns out Newtonian physics is a very partial account of the physical universe. Moreover, he argues, the complexity of international politics is compounded by the agentic, subjective properties of both the object of analysis (human beings) and of the political scientists who carry it out. Gaddis’s argument, therefore, plays off two factors: firstly, it invokes the authority of natural science in rethinking International Relations theory. Secondly, it brings in familiar arguments about the distinction between the physical and the social world, suggesting that the model of natural science is, in any case, inappropriate for the social sciences. This set of argumentative moves can be traced in the work of other International Relations theorists who take up Gaddis’s challenge to rethink the social science of international politics in the wake of its predictive failure after the Cold War. Here we find systems theory, quantum physics and evolutionary biology being identified as a more satisfactory inspiration for a contemporary science of the times of world politics than classical physics. Below I will examine two examples of such arguments in the work of Wendt (2003, 2006) on both teleological and quantum theorising and in the work of Bernstein et al. on evolutionary theory (2000). I will argue that in Wendt’s case, his account of world-political temporality effectively differs little from the kinds of account of which Gaddis is critical. Bernstein et al., however, suggest a much more radically different way of thinking about world-political time, one that involves breaking the link between prediction and science in the social science of international politics. Wendt’s International Relations theory is characterised by its simultaneous commitment to a ‘scientific’ approach to understanding world politics and its dissatisfaction with what he sees as partial or reductive arguments that rely solely either on models of mechanical causation (bottom up) or structural determination (top down). In recent work this has led him to engagements with both systems theory and quantum mechanics as ways of making sense of the spatio-temporal characteristics of international politics. In his argument ‘Why a World State is Inevitable’ (2003), Wendt develops a teleological theory of the development of international politics towards the end-state of a single world state, which is premised on a systems theory interpretation of the implications of the co-constitutive interaction of micro-level efficient causation and macrolevel formal causation: the logic of anarchy transforms structures of recognition and identity from a territorial to a global basis, giving us a Weberian world state by creating a Hegelian one. (2003: 517)

Wendt is enabled to come to this conclusion by assuming a version of the ‘struggle

[ 100 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 101

Prophecies and predictions for recognition’ as the micro-level motor (efficient cause) of individual and state behaviour, and the ‘logic of anarchy’ as the formal cause of state behaviour. The systemic logic of the mutual constitution of these two forms of causation pushes towards the eventual stabilisation of the system through the creation of a world state to satisfy the demands of recognition in a fully mutual fashion. Wendt argues that this is a purely explanatory teleology rather than a normative one, but, as critics have pointed out, it reproduces traditional features of historicism. These include the tension between fate and action, and the possibility of doing or undoing time, which traditionally accompany macro-level accounts of historical time. like states today, a completed world state would be an intentional actor. Such an actor could not intend its own creation (that would be backward causation), but it seems counter-intuitive to think that prior to its emergence there would be no intentionality at all at the system level . . . (2003: 530)

In a more recent argument, abandoning theories of self-organising systems, Wendt turns instead to the inspiration of quantum mechanics, with rather similar results. Here the wave/particle duality is used in order to grasp the nature of social systems, and the interplay of micro-level and macro-level causation. The argument hinges on the unpredictability of wave function collapse, but although it moves away from the determinism inherent in the teleology argument,11 it retains the commitment to methodological holism, in which boundary conditions constrain and modify the plurality of possibilities inherent in the system’s constituent elements. In addition, it retains the idea that within the intra-action comprising the ‘super-organism’ of international politics, the place of scholars may precisely be to point the world in the right direction. If IR scholars are irreducibly participants in the super-organism that is world politics, ‘performing’ . . . or instantiating it holographically in our work, then we have ethical responsibilities to the other subjects of those politics in measuring them, responsibilities which we do not necessarily have if facts and values can be clearly separated in the classical worldview. But with those responsibilities comes a capacity for collective self-consciousness that is otherwise largely missing in day-to-day international life, and as such is a basis for reflexivity and progressive change. (2006: 217)

In spite of his taking up of post-Newtonian physics, Wendt’s account of world political temporality concedes little to ways in which the understandings of space and time have been transformed within that physics. In all of the instantiations of his theoretical position, his methodological holism delivers a classical historicist temporality, in which we both know the structure and drivers of world-political time and have a responsibility to make history happen according to the appointed pattern. The chronos of ‘day-to-day’ international life is determined by the kairos embedded in ‘collective self-consciousness’, to which scholars of international politics have the key.

[ 101 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 102

Diagnosing the times Wendt responds to Gaddis’s challenge by trying to formulate a science of international politics that could retain some limited potential for prediction and testing, whilst nevertheless accounting for the complexity and self-reflexivity of international politics itself. An alternative response to Gaddis can be found in Bernstein et al., ‘God Gave Physics the Easy Problems: adapting social science to an unpredictable world’ (Bernstein et al., 2000). According to the argument of this article, the social science of international politics needs to abandon the idea of scientific reasoning on analogy with Newtonian physics. Instead, International Relations theorists should think of international politics as analogous with evolutionary biology, as an open system which can be understood scientifically in retrospect, but is not predictable in its future patterns (2000: 49).12 In nineteenth-century historicisms based on the analogy between biological and social evolution, the mechanisms underlying social change were interpreted mechanistically or teleologically. In contemporary evolutionary theory, however, complexity and chance are considered to be crucial to the actual path that evolution takes (Krasner, 1988: 80). This means that the present, in contrast to Bueno de Mesquita’s ‘noise’ has to be interpreted as path dependent and is not prospectively traceable, though it can be made sense of in retrospect. For Bernstein et al., however, the analogy between theorising biological evolution and international politics is not exact. Whereas it is plausible for evolutionary biology, retrospectively, to theorise about world historical development holistically, they argue that the reflexive capacities of social actors make this level of theoretical generality highly dubious in the context of the social world. They therefore depart from structural and behavioural theories not only in questioning the possibility of scientific prediction and control, but also the temporal unity of international political processes, suggesting the need to pluralise our understanding of world-political time. Unlike theories of evolution, they will not apply to all of history, but only to discrete portions. It seems self-evident but needs to be emphasized – scholars need to specify carefully the temporal and geographic domains to which their theories are applicable. We suspect that those domains are often narrower and more constrained than is generally accepted. (Bernstein et al., 2000: 52)

Nevertheless, Bernstein et al. argue that the study of international politics cannot confine itself to a retrospective mode or modes. This is because, they claim, the purpose of the study of the world is to inform the ongoing decisions that shape that world. If this is the case, then a better approach than that offered by the traditional model of law-like principles underpinning world-political development is needed. They find this in the idea of forward reasoning or process tracing, in which potential plot lines of world political developments in relation to specific issues and problems are sketched out and constantly refined in response to actual events (2000: 53–59). Such an approach, they claim, can

[ 102 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 103

Prophecies and predictions deal with issues of contingency and discontinuity that are blocked out by standard hypothetico-deductive theorising, but also can enable a rigorous and comprehensive grasp of the range of factors shaping futures in international politics (2000: 70–71). Whatever one’s assessment of Bernstein et al.’s suggestion that their approach retains credibility in ‘scientific’ terms, their argument is interesting because of its departure from the latent historicism in the work of theorists such as Bueno de Mesquita, Ray and Russett, Mearsheimer, and Wendt. In many ways it is reminiscent of Gaddis’s conclusions about the way to approach thinking the future in international politics: good scientists, like good novelists and good historians, make use of all the tools at their disposal in trying to anticipate the future. That includes not just theory, observation, and rigorous calculation, but also narrative, analogy, paradox, irony, intuition, imagination, and – not least in importance – style. (1992/3: 58)

Yet Bernstein et al.’s understanding of the social reality of international politics in fact goes beyond Gaddis’s introduction of complexity and self-reflexivity into the equation. Like all of the theories he criticises, Gaddis does not challenge the idea that, however complex and open it might be, the time of international politics is, like the time of evolution, unitary. In contrast, Bernstein et al., in acknowledging the temporal and geographical specificity of the application of accounts of processes within the international arena, render the ‘open’ character of international politics double. On the one hand, as with the biological realm, it harbours many possible futures within it; on the other hand, unlike the biological realm, it cannot be assumed that its ‘present’ or ‘past’ is any more unitary than its futures. This double pluralisation of world-political time displaces the links between prediction and prophecy and between chronos and kairos at work in much mainstream social scientific research into international politics.13 What it retains, however, is the aspiration to timeliness. Like Bueno de Mesquita, Mearsheimer and Gaddis himself, the purpose of social scientific investigation is still oriented to anticipating, and therefore being able to respond punctually to, future developments. Conclusion Social science is supposed to be opposed to historicism, and yet it appears unable to do without it. The reaction of social scientists of international politics both to the unpredicted end of the Cold War, and to challenges to their theorising presented by thinkers such as Fukuyama and Huntington demonstrates this very clearly. We can see it in the reiteration of frameworks of analysis that reflect Kantian and Machiavellian assumptions about the workings of worldpolitical time, and we can see it in the strong continuity between pre- and post1989 readings of world politics within the discipline of International Relations.

[ 103 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 104

Diagnosing the times These continue to invoke cyclical, and linear, narratives about the trajectory of world history, in which particular systemic or domestic factors are given worldhistorical significance.14 They also continue to place the social scientist in the role of the philosophical historian – pointing in the direction in which the world ought to go. In such accounts, kairos works through chronos, in the form of the ‘cunning of reason’ and consciously as the making of history in accordance with its inherent potential. But if the predominant tendency within the social science of International Relations has been to think the post-1989 world-political present as essentially the same as what has gone before, this has not been true of other attempts to take the pulse of contemporary world politics. In the following chapters we move on to consider arguments in which world politics is claimed to have changed or be changing. Notes 1 It should be noted that Popper’s critique is inspired by very much the same historical and political experiences as Arendt’s in relation to fascist and socialist totalitarianisms. 2 There is definitely a kind of hierarchy of sciences at work in Popper’s account, in that physics provides the standard for true science against which other natural and all social sciences are judged. He is particularly critical of the use of organic metaphors in historicist theory. As we will see in the discussion of International Relations theories below, some methodological debates centre around whether physics (normally classical, Newtonian physics) or biology (evolutionary biology) is the most relevant comparator for the social science of International Relations. 3 The distinction between ‘experimental time’ and ‘historical interpretation’ made here is indebted to Sewell’s work, and the distinction he makes between ‘experimental’ and ‘teleological’ in historical sociological accounts of world historical development. On my account ‘experimental time’ is generalised to encompass the different processes of spatio-temporal abstraction involved in the specification and testing of generalised hypotheses. ‘Historical interpretation’, which is Popper’s phrase, covers the same ground as his concept of ‘historicism’, and therefore includes cyclical as well as linear, mechanical as well as teleological theories of history (Sewell, 2005: 82–102). 4 Fukuyama traces the idea of thymos back to Plato, who is, of course, on Popper’s account part of the tradition of historicism (1992: 163). 5 See for example: Mearsheimer 1990, 1994/5; Keohane & Martin, 1995; Russett, Layne, Spiro & Doyle, 1995; Ray & Russett, 1996; Mastanduno, 1999; Doyle, 1999. 6 This was not the position of all social scientists in the aftermath of the Cold War: for some the unpredictability of the event simply confirmed that social science should be concerned with explanation rather than prediction. See Ray and Russett’s discussion of Singer’s position (Ray & Russett, 1996: 443). For others, however, the lesson of the end of the Cold War was to do with the kinds of prediction with which social science should be concerned. Many made the point that general theories, such as neo-realism, do not pretend to predict specific events but only general tendencies; others argued for a probabilistic approach to prediction (see Lebow & Risse-Kappen, 1995; Ray & Russett, 1996; Bueno de Mesquita, 2002; 2006; Wohlforth, 2003). 7 All states behave in such a way in anarchic conditions, X is a state in anarchic condi-

[ 104 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 105

Prophecies and predictions tions, therefore X will behave in such a way. 8 Gaddis includes linear progressive narratives such as modernisation theory, liberal democratic peace theory and Fukuyama’s theory of history, a variety of cyclical theories about revolution, political regimes and war and peace, narratives of decline in relation to US power, and some arguments that combine linear and cyclical elements (1992/3: 38–52). 9 McIntosh develops Gaddis’s point in his critique of predominant models of temporality in the social science of International Relations (McIntosh, 2006). 10 Bueno de Mesquita employs the ‘expected utility model’, which combines game theoretic assumptions about rational action, with the capacity to factor in substantive knowledge (based on area specialist expertise) about how ‘rationally adaptive behaviour’ should be construed in relation to specific decision-making processes (2006: 147–150). 11 This is not completely abandoned, in that Wendt argues that the quantum approach entails that there is a kind of final causation at work in action, at the phenomenal level, since the reasons that determine our actions (unlike the causes that determine our physical actions) only emerge through action, rather than being prior conditions of it. However, this is very different from a claim about systemic logic: . . . ‘“final causation” makes sense if the emergence of a distinction between physical and phenomenal states involves temporal symmetry breaking, with the former moving forward in time and the latter backward . . . On this view, human action is fundamentally “anticipatory”, not in the conventional sense that we act on expectations about the future, but in the radical sense that in intentional action we literally “feel” the future though a kind of “temporal non-locality”.’ (Wendt, 2006: 199). 12 The idea of taking evolution as the model for theorising in International Relations is, of course, not new. Gaddis discusses a variety of evolutionary approaches (1992/3), Krasner argues for an analogy between institutionalist arguments and evolutionary theory (1988: 77–80) and a Special Issue of International Studies Quarterly (40 (3) 1996) made the argument that evolutionary theory offered a useful alternative to dominant behavioural and structural approaches (Modelski & Poznanski, 1996: 315–319). 13 The argument of Bernstein et al. has much in common with arguments developed in social theory that also try to get away from the dominance of clock and causal conceptions of chronos in social science. Sewell draws a distinction between three forms of temporality: experimental, teleological and eventful. Whereas experimental (Bueno de Mesquita) and teleological (Wendt) temporalities are linear and homogeneous: ‘The eventful conception of temporality – assumes that social relations are characterized by path dependency, temporally heterogeneous causalities, and global contingency’ (2005: 102). See also McIntosh (2006); Abbott (2001). 14 In their article ‘Why IR has Failed as an Intellectual Project and What to Do About it’, Buzan and Little point to this tendency to ‘singularise’ the meaning of world politics: ‘The closed circle of Eurocentric a-historicism inadvertently but effectively isolates International Relations, and can partly explain why the concept of the “international system” has failed to travel beyond disciplinary boundaries and address popular debates’ (Buzan & Little, 2001: 26).

[ 105 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 106

5

Time for democracy

Introduction N the previous chapter I argued that ‘scientific’ attempts to diagnose the post1989 times of world politics, in spite of their explicit rejection of historicism, nevertheless depended on kairotic meta-narratives of political temporality. The familiar ghost of philosophical history, in which the scholar’s task is both to identify the ‘real’ mechanisms underlying historical development and to intervene, or enable intervention, positively in relation to time – to work with or against time – continued to be present. One of the reasons why post-Popperian social science ostensibly rejected historicism was because it was argued that historicism was normatively driven and incapable of objectivity. On these grounds, scientific International Relations scholars in the 1990s rejected the ‘ideological’ narratives of Fukuyama and Huntington and looked to a combination of methodological technique and empirical evidence to substantiate their claims to the truth of the post-Cold War world. In this chapter, we examine a rather different range of responses to developments in world politics in the late twentieth century. These accounts acknowledge an explicitly normative, progressive ethical and political agenda and their indebtedness to modernist philosophies of history. They are allied either to the promotion of cosmopolitan liberal or social democracy or to the promotion of radical global democracy. And although they reject the idea that they embrace the kind of historicism condemned by Arendt, Benjamin or Popper, they nevertheless situate their historical analysis as a theoretically and empirically defensible development of the arguments of Kant and Marx respectively. For these scholars, the end of the Cold War, although significant, is less important for the present and future of world politics than the range of developments referred to in Chapter 1 as ‘globalisation’. In what follows, we will examine the temporal assumptions and claims at work in the arguments of theorists who contend that the world may have arrived at a time when government has ceased to be bounded by the nation-state and democracy may become genuinely, globally inclusive.

I

[ 106 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 107

Time for democracy In the first part of the chapter, we will focus on examples of post-Kantian theorists of cosmopolitan law, democracy, citizenship and civil society. We begin by examining the work of one of the inspirational figures for post-Kantian arguments, that of Habermas, and the ways in which assumptions about worldpolitical time operate in his work. We will then go on to look at two examples of theorists who have taken Habermas’s Kantian cosmopolitanism forward in work on contemporary international politics: Linklater and Benhabib. In the second part of the chapter, we will turn to examine the arguments of Hardt and Negri, who identify themselves as rejecting Kantian cosmopolitanism and instead put forward a post-Marxist theory of the future of world politics. It will be argued that the claims of all of these theorists to be post Kant or Marx, when it comes to their account of the temporality of world politics, are questionable. Although the theories under consideration disavow aspects of the modernist philosophy of history, in particular in relation to determinism, their interpretations of chronos remain fundamentally shaped by a kairos of world politics that is revolutionary ‘new time’ wedded to a narrative of both progress and unity. In the final part of the chapter, we will examine the impact of these post-Kantian and post-Marxist conceptions of world-political time on their diagnoses of what matters in the present. Cosmopolitan time Habermas and the ‘Kantian project’ Habermas’s critical theory has been formulated over the past half century and encompasses a wide variety of arguments in philosophy and social theory, as well as shifts in ideological orientation, from its beginnings in the neo-Marxist tradition of the Frankfurt School. However, one of the threads that has persisted in his work throughout this time, from The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989) to the legal and political theory presented in works such as Between Facts and Norms (1996) and the essays recently gathered together in translation, The Divided West (2006), is the historical significance of modernity. Even in his earlier work, in which Habermas focused on the legitimacy crisis in modern social democratic states, he nevertheless found the solution to modernity’s problems within modernity itself (Habermas, 1979). In his mature work, this solution is located in the presuppositions of communicative action, which underpin both Habermas’s ‘discourse ethics’ (1990, 1992)1 and the evolution of societies from traditional to modern forms (1979). They are also at the heart of the self-reflexive capacity of ‘lifeworld’ in modern societies to act as critical constraint on ‘system’ (1984, 1987).2 And they ground the necessity of the link between popular sovereignty and human rights foundational to the constitution of the modern democratic state, and to the extension of constitutionalism beyond the bounds of the state (1996, 1997, 1998, 2006). Habermas’s social,

[ 107 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 108

Diagnosing the times political and ethical theories build on the work of Kant, Hegel and Marx, but also on that of theorists as diverse as Austin and Luhmann, and he denies that his diagnosis of modernity and of the possibility of progress within it relies on a philosophy of history. Nevertheless Kant has become the most significant reference point in Habermas’s defence of the progressive potential of modernity in the post-Cold War world, and the latter’s argumentative strategies are increasingly reminiscent of Kant’s arguments in his political writings on peace and universal history. This is evident in Habermas’s argument for the continuing robustness of what he terms the ‘Kantian project’ of ‘constitutionalising’ international law, in the face of a variety of other interpretations of the direction of world politics after the Cold War and 9/11.3 In his essay ‘The Kantian Project and the Divided West’ (2006: 115–193), Habermas defends the ongoing ‘juridification’ of international politics through a combination of philosophical and socio-historical argument, in which the questions of what international politics is and what it ought to be are inextricably entangled with one another. The essay begins with a historical claim: Following two world wars, the constitutionalization of international law has evolved along the lines prefigured by Kant toward cosmopolitan law and has assumed institutional form in international constitutions, organizations and procedures. (2006: 115)

Habermas explains this historical trend as the product of collective learning processes (2006: 147), of a double kind. These learning processes reflect the lesson of the horrors of war but also the lesson learned within the modern constitutional state that law, properly understood, rationalises power in a normatively positive way (2006: 138–139, 148–150). It is the latter lesson that is most crucial, since it demonstrates the connection in principle between law and peace. This conceptual connection, which Habermas elucidates at length in Between Facts and Norms (1996), derives from the formal properties of law itself, first properly unpacked in the social contract theories of Rousseau and Kant: The point of the reconstructive program of social contract theory was to demonstrate that the conceptual germ of the constitutionalization of the ‘irrational’, unregulated decisionistic power of the state is, in virtue of its formal legal character, already implicit in political power itself. (2006: 131)

On the account Habermas derives from the work of Rousseau and Kant, law puts an end to the wars of the state of nature not because it equates to the sword in the hands of leviathan, as for Hobbes, but because the universal form of law presupposes conditions of equality and impartiality that can only be fully satisfied if positive law is grounded in a constitution in which democratic will-formation and fundamental rights are embedded. Civil peace within the state, therefore, is only ultimately to be found within the constitutional state and, for similar reasons, peace between states could only be ensured for Kant if

[ 108 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 109

Time for democracy they (states) entered a law-governed condition under a cosmopolitan constitution (2006: 121–122). According to Habermas, this explains Kant’s arguments for reading history from a cosmopolitan point of view (2006: 122). Habermas reads back the idea that there is a conceptual connection between peace and law into the logical and historical implications of international law, which, he argues, have become increasingly, though still inadequately, constitutionalised during the twentieth century. He departs from Kant, however, in refusing the two options he (Kant) presents for the telos of inter-state relations, that of constitution as a world republic on the one hand (2006: 123), and that of the ‘league or confederation of nations’ on the other (2006: 124). Habermas argues that the first of these options follows from Kant’s analysis only because Kant was operating with the model derived from the French revolutionary constitution, with its emphasis on the indivisibility of sovereign power (2006: 128). Because of this, Kant was concerned that a world republic would all too easily lapse into despotism, in which the plurality of nations and peoples would be subsumed under a centralising power, and therefore decided against the idea of a world republic. Instead, Kant argued for a league of nations, whose voluntary cooperation with each other was partly grounded in the principle of right and partly in the philosophy of history and the combined incentives provided negatively by war and positively by trade (2006: 126). For Habermas, however, Kant’s first option is not the only way of thinking about the constitutionalisation of international law, and the latter option, insofar as it legalises relations between states, has a constitutionalising logic implicit within it. He goes on to build on Kant’s analysis in a different way, arguing that the constitutionalisation of international law is complementary rather than analogous to the constitutionalisation of law within the state (2006: 134). Habermas suggests that the constitutionalisation of international law is not necessarily tied to the idea of a world republic, since the key actors involved are collectives (states) rather than individuals (citizens) and the purpose is not to constitutionalise (rationalise, constrain) an already existing political power but to enable the fulfilment of diverse functions, many of which do not require a supranational level of authority (2006: 134). According to Habermas, the kind of constitution already implicit in supranational and transnational organisations implies a multi-level system of authority. He sees the constitutions (founding treaties and charters) of existing organisations such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization and, above all, the European Union, as foreshadowing the shape that such a multi-level constitutionalised global order is likely to take (2006: 134, 140). At the supra-national level, Habermas suggests that legal authority would (and should) be largely confined to the preservation of peace and the protection of human rights. Supranational constitutions rest at any rate on basic rights, legal principles, and criminal codes which are the product of prior learning processes and have

[ 109 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 110

Diagnosing the times been tried and tested within democratic nation-states. Thus, their normative substance evolved from constitutions of the republican type. This holds not only for the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but even for the treaties underlying GATT and the WTO . . . To this extent, the constitutionalization of international law retains a derivative status because it depends on ‘advances’ of legitimation from democratic constitutional states. (2006: 140–141)

The conceptual connection between law and peace is carried historically by ‘democratic constitutional states’, and the ‘prior learning processes’ embodied in them, and transferred by those states to the realm of international law. However, Habermas is not only suggesting that the limited requirements to ‘not . . . engage in wars of aggression and not . . . commit crimes against humanity’ (2006: 143) are presupposed empirically in existing, partial constitutionalisations of international law. In addition, he argues that these requirements are universally valid beyond the ‘thick’ claims of differing identities and cultural traditions. Here Habermas is using his distinction between ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’. According to Habermas, ‘ethics’ refers to those normative values that reflect specific conceptions of the good and are embedded in cultures and ways of life. Ethical principles are not inherently universal, but make sense in relation to particular contexts, languages and histories. ‘Morality’, in contrast, refers to those principles of justice that transcend cultural difference and are genuinely universal in their appeal. This universality echoes Kant’s account of practical reason and the moral law, but is grounded instead in a theory of language and the necessary presuppositions of communication (Habermas, 1990, 1992). On Habermas’s account, we can test out the universality of claims of justice through an actual or virtual discursive procedure, in which all affected by the claim in question are involved. The conceptual connection between law and peace at the global level is secured ultimately by their common foundation in principles of justice that are genuinely universal, because they are grounded in the presuppositions of communicative reason, and all those affected by them would endorse those principles if given the opportunity to deliberate upon them in a fair discursive procedure (2006: 143). Habermas’s adaptation of the ‘Kantian project’ attempts to draw out the logic implicit in the idea of law, but, as with Kant, goes beyond the realm of the ‘idea’ by tracing that logic within empirical history (chronos), specifically the empirical history of western modernity. As with Kant also, however, Habermas is insistent that the necessary links between law and peace may not be empirically realised within the workings of chronos (2006: 144) and that this therefore necessitates philosophical history: the idea of a cosmopolitan condition, however normatively well founded, remains an empty, even deceptive, promise without a realistic assessment of the totality of accommodating trends in which it is embedded. (2006: 144)

[ 110 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 111

Time for democracy Kant, Habermas argues, used his philosophy of history to help render the cosmopolitan condition empirically probable and plausible (2006: 145). According to Habermas, Kant’s identification of cosmopolitan historical trends in his philosophy of history suffered from blind-spots inherent in his time and place, but nevertheless remains significant in principle insofar as it rests on ‘the cognitive procedure of universalization and mutual perspective-taking which Kant associates with practical reason and which underlies the cosmopolitan transformation of international law’ (2006: 146). Habermas therefore undertakes to read the history of international law and international politics in a way that does better justice to Kant’s insights into the real meaning of progress in history. He does this by identifying those historical developments that ‘meet the Kantian project halfway’ (2006: 143) and by setting his reading of history against alternative possibilities, which put international politics beyond law or reduce international law to an instrument of power politics or cultural identity (2006: 148–149). In doing this, Habermas acknowledges the depth of conflict over different interpretations of international law and of the history of international law, but argues that this conflict itself militates against a reduction of international law to power, since the relation asserted between law and power is ‘affected by the normative self-understanding of state actors’, a self-understanding shaped by the constitutional history of the state actor in question. The Kantian conception of international law, by contrast, allows for the possibility that a superpower, assuming it has a democratic constitution and acts with foresight and prudence, will not always instrumentalize international law for its own ends but can promote a project that ends up by tying its own hands. (2006: 150)

Habermas goes on to offer a reading of the history of international politics and successive institutionalisations of international law that point to ways in which it accords with, and ways in which it runs counter to, any cosmopolitan promise. In his account, the UN Charter plays a particularly significant role in relation to three of its features: firstly, in the connections it makes between securing peace and human rights; secondly, in the link made between prohibitions on the use of violence and the threat of prosecution and sanctions; and thirdly, in the inclusivity of the UN’s membership and the universal validity claimed for the law it enacts (2006: 160–166). For Habermas all three of these features make explicit the link in principle between law, democracy and rights and thereby represent moves towards a cosmopolitan constitution. However, evidence in both Cold War and post-Cold War periods for the consolidation of this cosmopolitanism is, as Habermas acknowledges, ambiguous (2006: 161; 168–169). As well as cosmopolitan innovations in international law, such as the spread of international human rights law in the Cold War period or the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s, there are also many examples of the

[ 111 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 112

Diagnosing the times redundancy and manipulation of the UN and its founding principles. In addition, these developments in the ‘high politics’ of international relations are situated in a wider context, ‘the emergence of a world society, chiefly as a result of the globalization of markets and communication networks’ (2006: 175). Globalisation, Habermas argues, is a set of systemic processes that has led to the multiplication of international organisations and the intensification of global governance, taking the world into a new ‘postnational constellation’ that, it turns out, ‘meets the constititutionalization of international law halfway’ (2006: 177). Although he does not claim that globalisation is straightforwardly progressive (in his terms) in its effects, nevertheless Habermas does claim that the pressures of globalisation tend to strengthen the common interest of states in the rule of law and also socialise state actors to act in ways that acknowledge mutual dependence and increasingly undermine the distinction between domestic and foreign policy (2006: 177). The latter reinforces the principled link between all law and its (rationally required) legitimate grounding in democratic will-formation and fundamental human rights. This is exemplified, for Habermas, by the case of the EU in which ‘if the chains of democratic legitimation are not to break, civic solidarity must extend across former national borders within the enlarged communities’ (2006: 177). In this respect, globalisation reinforces the previously relatively weak link between international law and ‘world citizens’ (2006: 135) and greatly enhances the chances of the cosmopolitan logic of international law unfolding historically. In the concluding sections of the essay, Habermas examines three alternatives to an interpretation of the times of world politics in terms of the ‘Kantian project’ (2006: 179–193). The first is ‘hegemonic liberalism’, the second, ‘neo-liberal and post-Marxist arguments’, and the third ‘Schmittian’ arguments. In each case, Habermas’s defence of his Kantian alternative in contrast to these others rests on its claim to offer a more plausible understanding of the nature of law, and the analytical and normative implications of that understanding. By US hegemonic liberalism, Habermas is referring to neo-conservative and liberal ‘empire’ arguments that support US interventionism as the way forward for a more stable post- Cold War international order. Habermas’s critique of this kind of thinking is that because it effectively reduces law to power it compromises its own liberal credentials. This not only leads the US to make serious mistakes about how to fight ‘international terrorism’, but also prevents it from putting in place the kind of processes of validation that would enable discrimination between particular and universal interests. This, Habermas argues, sets up a ‘cognitive dissonance’ between the universalistic language of US claims to represent justice, and the particularistic nature of its actions, which will sooner or later become apparent to its own citizens (2006: 184–185). By ‘neo-liberal and post-Marxist arguments’,4 Habermas means arguments from

[ 112 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 113

Time for democracy both right and left which see the times of contemporary world politics in terms of the globalisation of capital, and understand international law as entirely subordinate to this process. Habermas is summarily dismissive: The distinctive dialectic of the history of international law cannot be interpreted with a completely deformalized conception of law as a mere reflection of underlying power constellations. The egalitarian and individualistic universalism of human rights and democracy has a ‘logic’ that interferes with the dynamics of power. (2006: 187)

Habermas devotes rather more space to the refutation of arguments derived from the international legal theory of Schmitt, which argue against the further juridification of international politics and for the post-Westphalian emergence of two mutually antithetical imperial hemispheres (2006: 188).5 However, Habermas’s reasons for refuting this interpretation of contemporary world politics are very much the same as for his rejections of the other two. Habermas traces Schmitt’s claims about international law to their grounding in moral non-cognitivism (and the incommensurability of different conceptions of justice) and rejection of the possibility of ‘rationalising’ the primal existential antagonism inherent in the political (2006: 190). Although superficially plausible in certain respects as a description of certain developments in international politics post-9/11, Habermas argues that there is no philosophical ground for the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis that follows from a Schmittian understanding of identity and power. In Schmitt’s case, it was already nourished by ressentiment against Western modernity and its updated versions remain completely blind to the productive ideas of self-consciousness, self-determination, and self-realization that continue to shape the self-understanding of modernity. (2006: 193)

The quotation above underlines the significance of Habermas’s understanding of western modernity for his diagnosis of the current times of world politics. It also demonstrates, yet again, the pattern of his argument, which shifts from the philosophical to the empirical and back again. In Chapter 2, in our examination of various exemplars of modernist philosophy of history, we noted that the arguments of Kant, Hegel and Marx shared certain features. In each case, the time of western modernity was given world-historical significance (became the yardstick for the political time in general), the relation between the philosopher and his times became immanent to the account of history being given, and there was an identification of the current time with ‘revolutionary’ new time, represented by the world historical ‘event’ of the French Revolution. In Habermas, we can trace analogous elements of his argument, but his account is closest, perhaps unsurprisingly, to that given by Kant. In Habermas’s case, the world-historical significance of western modernity lies in its institutionalisation of practices of communicative, as well as instrumental, rationalisation at the phylogenetic

[ 113 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 114

Diagnosing the times (socio-political) level. As with Kant, the emphasis is on reason as the key to freedom and to the construction of a new and better world. Just as for Kant, only societies that embed the principle of right in a republican constitution can bring politics into accord with the demands of practical reason, so for Habermas, only those societies that embed the possibility of discursive validation of claims to truth and justice can take forward the telos immanent in communicative action. Like Kant, Habermas, having identified the ideal telos of history, recognises that development towards that telos is not inevitable, and that one must distinguish between empirical and philosophical history. Like Kant also, however, he sees the task of the philosopher as being to forge a link between philosophical and empirical accounts by reading history ‘from a cosmopolitan point of view’. In doing this, however, the nature of the link between empirical and philosophical remains ambiguous. On the one hand, the philosopher’s reading of history represents a transcendental moral judgment of what ‘ought to be’ a categorical imperative for those dedicated to progress; on the other hand, the reading of history is presented as immanent to historical development, a truth that can be read off by an impartial observer of the ‘logic’ of modernity. On the one hand, progress is carried self-consciously by principles of self-reflexivity built into complex societies; on the other hand it is carried willy-nilly by processes such as globalisation that intensify that complexity and carry it beyond state borders. Whereas for Kant, Hegel and Marx, the French Revolution exemplified the ‘new time’ in which they lived, for Habermas this new time is the time of globalisation or the ‘postnational constellation’ – historical developments that meet the rationalising capacity of law halfway. Habermas’s argument replicates the argument of his predecessors in its reliance on a particular relation between chronos and kairos, in which the latter is carried through, but also shapes the former, and in which there is a constant dialectic between determinism (fate) and self-determination (autonomy). The role of the philosopher is both to interpret the meaning and direction of political time and to intervene to push historical development in the ‘right’ direction. His insights are a product of his time and place (western modernity) but they are also universally valid and applicable. Cosmopolitan futures Over the past ten years, a rapidly expanding literature in international political theory, ethics and globalisation studies has argued for the development of cosmopolitan democracy and citizenship, modelled on liberal or social democratic lines, as both a normative ideal and an immanent potential of world-historical development. Accounts of what this cosmopolitan ideal might look like vary. But in all cases, such arguments put forward an analysis of international, transnational and global politics in terms of the progressive transformation of the political temporality of inter-state relations into the

[ 114 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 115

Time for democracy global political temporality of humanity as a whole.6 Much of this work finds at least part of its inspiration in the ‘Kantian project’ as it is conceptualised in Habermas’s philosophical and social theory. Two examples of this can be found in the work of Linklater (1998) and Benhabib (2002, 2004). In Linklater’s argument modernity is defined by a principle of universalisability that successively challenges limits to the moral and political progress of humanity. The present is interpreted as revolutionary ‘new time’ because the Westphalian international order is in the process of transformation into a new form of political community in which citizenship is no longer confined by the boundaries of states. The telos towards which the transformations analysed by Linklater are leading is that of self-determination, understood along the lines of Kantian autonomy in which individuals become self-legislating. For Linklater, this means that the end of history takes the form of a cosmopolitan, egalitarian, dialogic democracy. The mechanisms through which progress happens are immanent to history but not certain in their outcome. Linklater essentially relies on two such mechanisms, both of which reflect the importance of Europe as the carrier of world-political time. Firstly, there are the material mechanisms of globalisation which lead to an increase of economic interdependency, which are abetted by advanced communicative technologies with global reach, and which necessitate the development of increasing inter- and trans-state cooperation in global governance and regulation. However, these material processes are by no means straightforwardly progressive. On the one hand, they facilitate the recognition of the commonality of the situation of humans across the globe; on the other hand, they exert fragmenting as well as unifying pressures, alienating those at the sharp end of global inequalities and deepening rifts between rich and poor, dominant and subaltern cultures (Linklater, 1998: 30–32). It is therefore the second mechanism which is much more important for Linklater’s theory of history: the non-material process of moral learning, in which both individuals and collectivities absorb and proselytise the universalising lessons of Enlightenment reason (1998: 118–119).7 Linklater’s most powerful example of moral learning draws on Marshall’s theory of the development of citizenship rights, in which the logic of universality implicit in liberal citizenship pushes forward an increasingly inclusive understanding of both who is included as a citizen and the kind of rights that he or she bears (1998: 184–189). Although progress cannot be guaranteed, the theorist’s analysis confirms that it is moral learning which is the sine qua non of progress. In so far, therefore, as the theorist points out and reinforces the moral lessons of modernity, he is acting as a good global citizen. The demand to read history as if it were progress becomes a categorical imperative. Promoting the Kantian vision of a universal kingdom of ends, and the parallel enterprise of realising the neo-Marxist ideal of overcoming asymmetries of power and wealth, form the essence of cosmopolitan citizenship. (1998: 212)

[ 115 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 116

Diagnosing the times In Linklater’s analysis, civil society is the arena in which political actors challenge the unjustifiable exclusions inherent within states and in inter-state relations. Feminist and multiculturalist movements are taken to exemplify the way that Habermasian performative contradictions within liberal states, in which states act in contradiction with their own grounding principles, provide revolutionary opportunities for social and political transformation.8 The same logic that pushes the extension of rights within states, challenges the validity of the distinctions drawn between those within and those without state borders. The development of global civil society is therefore a logical development of Enlightenment reason, as is the European Union (1998: 189–211). On Linklater’s interpretation the analysis of global civil society is necessarily linked to his broader progressivist narrative, in which liberal Enlightenment reason plays the crucial role. This does not mean that Linklater is claiming that all activity in global civil society is necessarily progressive. But he is providing a way of distinguishing between the progressive and reactionary within civil society movements, and putting the emphasis on the positive logical weight carried by progressive developments. It is therefore also the case that an idealised version of global civil society itself, as a public sphere of open and inclusive dialogue, becomes an integral part of the telos of modernity. Benhabib’s cosmopolitanism is based on a modified version of Habermas’s discourse ethics and theory of history. As with many other cosmopolitan theorists, she developed her ethical and political theory (1992) initially in relation to the state as the necessary form of political community. In this context Benhabib accepted Habermas’s distinction between morality and ethics and between different forms of rationality and their associated modes of action. She also broadly accepted his theory of modernity (system/lifeworld). She argued, however, that certain adjustments to Habermas’s theory were necessary. For Benhabib, Habermas draws the boundaries of the content of moral discourse too narrowly to accommodate feminist concerns with the distribution of power within the private sphere. He also underplays the importance of recognising differences in power and culture between individuals involved in dialogic exchange premised on the norms inherent in communicative reason. Benhabib, in contrast, insists on the need for participants in communication to be recognised not simply in ‘generalised’ terms of universal respect and egalitarian reciprocity, but also in their ‘concrete’ identity. With these adjustments, Benhabib formulated her version of Habermasian discourse ethics as ‘interactive universalism’, and argued that this should form the basis for political practice in the form of deliberative democracy (1992: 107–113, 169–202). In her more recent work, Benhabib has gone on to extend this interactive universalism from the sphere of the state to the international, and to extrapolate a cosmopolitan politics that builds on her cosmopolitan ethics (2002, 2004). Her reasons for extending her argument beyond the sphere of the state follow from her diagnosis of the present.

[ 116 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 117

Time for democracy We have become moral contemporaries, even if not moral partners, caught in a net of interdependence, and our contemporaneous actions will also have uncontemporaneous consequences. This global situation creates a new ‘community of interdependence’. (2002: 36)

It is this interdependence that creates a connection in practice between discourse ethics and global scope, which was always present in principle.9 Once it is accepted that some norms may now have an impact across the boundaries of political culture and community, discourse ethics must go global and extend the range of participation in dialogue to everyone. This has two kinds of political implication. Firstly, it implies that political community can no longer necessarily be confined to the state, and that institutional mechanisms for deliberation across boundaries of state and culture must be put in place. Secondly, it implies that the norms presupposed by communicative reason oriented towards agreement, norms Benhabib sums up as ‘universal respect’ and ‘egalitarian reciprocity’, must become counterfactual guides to our ‘judgments and deliberations’ about moral and political issues at a global level (2002: 38). However, Benhabib is well aware that accepting the guidance of the norms inherent in communicative reason is not something that comes about through an examination of the logic of argumentation alone, or through the simple fact that the circumstances of justice are now marked by interdependence across state and cultural borders. And here she calls upon a Habermasian theory of modernity to supplement the ‘weak transcendentalism’ of discourse ethics (2002: 38). Like Habermas, Benhabib sees the ‘generalized moral attitude of equality towards human beings’ qua human beings as the historical achievement of European modernity, one which has been carried by both coercive and communicative encounters between cultures and political communities over time. This collective moral learning is most advanced in ‘cultural life-worlds and worldviews under conditions of modernity’ (2002: 40). This might be seen to pose problems for moral and political questions that involve ‘non-modern’ cultures and communities in debates over moral principles. However, Benhabib does not see this as an insuperable problem because of the way in which, according to her account, interdependence is opening up all cultures to the moral lessons of modernity. Speaking of the different extent to which cultures may have internalised distinctions such as the Habermasian distinction between ‘moral’ and ‘ethical’, Benhabib states: Increasingly, though, the globalized world we are inhabiting compels cultural traditions that may not have generated these differentiations in the course of their own development to internalise them or to learn to coexist in a political and legal world with other cultures that operate with some form of these differentiations. Many traditional cultures, for example, still consider women’s and children’s rights as an aspect of their ethical life-world, of the ways things are done in that particular culture. However, the international

[ 117 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 118

Diagnosing the times discourse on women’s rights, the activism of international development and aid organizations, migration, and television programmes are transforming these assumptions. (2002: 40)10

Benhabib is somewhat ambivalent as to how inter-cultural moral learning takes place. She suggests that it is both through the exercise of communicative rationality itself, and through material, coercive mechanisms that drive cultures into modernity whether they like it or not. In practice, it becomes clear that the conditions underpinning the discourses needed to agree on global moral norms are stringently liberal. They therefore require a high degree of coincidence of moral starting points, which is where the account of world-political time, which Benhabib borrows from Habermas, substitutes for the work that communication itself is supposed to do. Modernist liberal societies are ahead of the game in the ‘end of history’ stakes, but the rest of the world will catch up as the globalisation that meets the Kantian project half way accelerates. As with Kant, Habermas and Linklater, for Benhabib, the cosmopolitan future is both morally required and historically immanent, even if not inevitable. Its shape reflects the ethical and political lessons inherent in modernity, which require the reconciliation of respect for human rights with the principle of democratic self-determination. Benhabib’s vision of a cosmopolitan future is therefore one in which humanitarian intervention is rendered compatible with democratic self-determination through keeping the principle of membership of political community open to challenge. She follows both Kant and Habermas in envisaging a world in which universalist cosmopolitanism and particularist republicanism are mutually reinforcing. In the spirit of Kant, therefore, I have pleaded for moral universalism and cosmopolitan federalism. I have not advocated open but rather porous borders . . . (2004: 220–221)

The details of the political arrangements that form the telos of Linklater’s and Benhabib’s arguments are not the same. In Linklater’s case the vision of a postWestphalian world order is profoundly different from current international society and shares considerable ground with Held’s model of cosmopolitan democracy and Habermas’s multi-level, global federation (Held 1995, 2004; Habermas, 2006). For Benhabib, in contrast, the vision of a cosmopolitan future is closer to Kant’s league of nations, in which republican constitutions co-exist under a framework of international law, but with the proviso that there are mechanisms in place to discursively validate decisions about who has the right to cross borders. Nevertheless, in terms of their analysis and judgement of the relation between the past, present and future of world politics Linklater and Benhabib have much in common. In both cases it is the institutionalisation of procedures for the discursive validation of norms (reflecting insights emergent within western modernity) that provides the progressive potential for history. In

[ 118 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 119

Time for democracy both cases also, this potential is taken forward by the material driver of globalisation, in combination with the changing potential of international law, after the Cold War. Whether we like it or not, it is argued, all inhabitants of the world are becoming contemporaries and therefore open to progress. Although this progress is not guaranteed, its meaning is known and its applicability is universal. Imperial time Progressive Kantian readings of the times of world politics, from liberal democratic peace theory to Habermas’s interpretation of international law, have become commonplace in the post-Cold War era. Sometimes these theories use insights from Hegel or Marx to modify or elaborate on essentially Kantian arguments.11 But it has been rare for theorists of world politics or globalisation who identify themselves as Marxist or post-Marxist to put forward a progressive analysis of the current times of world politics. The major exception to this trend is the work of Hardt and Negri, who in books such as Empire (2000) and Multitude (2005) elaborate an explicitly post-Marxist argument that combines a reading of the present with a vision of a radically democratic global future. As with Habermas’s (and the other post-Kantian theorists discussed above) use of Kant’s work, Hardt and Negri argue that although they draw on Marx’s work, they are not committed to his philosophy of history. In its place, they put forward an alternative theorisation of world-political time, one which combines Marx’s historical materialism with arguments drawn from the analysis of ‘biopower’ in Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari (Hardt and Negri 2000: 22–29).12 Hardt and Negri diagnose the present as the unprecedented time of ‘empire’, the decentred biopolitical production of economic and political power beyond sovereignty, which nourishes and harbours the revolutionary forces of counterempire. The theorisation of world-political time put forward in Empire and Multitude makes use of a particular interpretation of the distinction between chronos and kairos, a distinction initially explored in Negri’s essay, ‘The Constitution of Time’ (2003b; first published 1981). In this essay, chronos is the measurable, measuring time of capitalism, in which the value produced by the labourer is constituted as dead labour, the ultimate spatialisation of time in the commodity (2003b: 51). Contrasted with this kind of time, is the productive time (kairos) of communism, the time of living labour, which is also revolutionary time, and which capitalist time presupposes. Already in this essay, Negri prefigures the arguments he and Hardt articulate in Empire (2000) and Multitude (2005), which are also echoed in Negri’s ‘Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo’ (2003c). These works all invoke the idea of creative, multiple times (‘instants’, ‘event’) of resistance to the homogenising, deadly time of imperial power, but also ground

[ 119 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 120

Diagnosing the times the possibility of the former in its being in some sense always already foundational to the latter. . . . in the history of thought, the hypothesis of a collective constitution of time as an operation antagonistic to the spatial and mediatory conception of time, becomes an increasingly observable element – one that is always characteristic of revolutionary thought. (2003b: 59)

Empire, although it is to be transcended, is presented as a progressive force because of the ways in which it has dismantled the mediations (such as those of nation-states and the civil societies of nation-states) of earlier capitalist eras and brings the population of the globe (in Hardt and Negri’s terms, the ‘multitude’) face to face with imperial power as such. The telos of Hardt and Negri’s account of history harks back to the communist ideal of a world in which freedom is grasped by humanity in and for itself.13 In Empire, the meaning of this telos in practice is not spelled out, though by implication this will be a holistic, undifferentiated social condition in which the breaking down of boundaries initiated by empire will be carried further in the multitude. This is gestured towards by the two immediate aims suggested by Hardt and Negri for the multitude in the conclusion to Empire, that of the right to free mobility for labour and a global minimum wage. In Empire, Hardt and Negri suggest two mechanisms though which imperial power may be transcended. First, they suggest that internal tensions or contradictions within the mechanisms of empire will push forward revolutionary change, for instance through the forced globalisation of labour. This is clearly a re-working of the Marxist notion of capital harbouring the seeds of its own destruction. Secondly, change will come about through the political demands and resistance of the ‘multitude’, as its consciousness shifts from an ‘in-itself’ to a ‘for-itself’ moment. In contrast to the Habermasian emphasis on communicative reason, here the emphasis is on resistant action, in which the generative power of desire which empire has both relied on and exploited is turned in novel directions (2000: 406). On this model the ideal end of history envisaged as a humanitarian and deliberative cosmopolitan politics, is replaced by an ideal of global revolutionary praxis. The argument for the telos of imperial power is fleshed out further in Multitude, the sequel to Empire. In this text, Hardt and Negri locate the transition from traditional models of class struggle to the multitude’s multiple, singular resistances to imperial power in the changing modes of economic and social production. The form of the latter has been transformed into a postFordist network model, and its content is now exemplified not by the material production of things, but by the immaterial production of life itself, the biopolitical production of the common (2005: 114–115). In spelling out their theory of the multitude, Hardt and Negri build on Marx’s ‘method’, and admit that ‘we continually have the haunting suspicion that he was already there before us’

[ 120 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 121

Time for democracy (2005: 141). At the same time, however, they are anxious to avoid giving the impression that ‘forms of resistance evolve through some natural evolution or in some preordained linear march toward absolute democracy’ (2005: 93). As with the post-Kantian theorists discussed above, Hardt and Negri distance themselves from any claims about the necessity of the historical development that they describe and to which they are committed. For Hardt and Negri it is clear that the ‘logic that determines the genealogy of forms of insurgency and revolt’ (2005: 63) is not to be found in the kinds of cosmopolitan argument discussed in the previous section. They are critical of the role of moral universalism in contemporary world politics, arguing for instance, that global civil society activism in the form of humanitarianism sustains rather than subverts imperial bio-power (2000: 36–37). At the same time, however, this moral universalism, as manifested in the development of non-governmental humanitarian organisations, is nevertheless linked to progress, in the sense that it represents the breakdown of the mediating role played by the civil societies of nation-states, which in the past protected certain populations against the full consequences of global imperial power. This breakdown is a stage on the way to a different kind of change, in which ‘the multitude’ directly confronts empire. Exemplary cases of the latter kind of revolutionary practice on Hardt and Negri’s account include anti-globalisation politics and indigenous revolutionary movements (2000: 53–54, 393–413; 2005: 264–267, 299–303). We need to look now from the other side and recognize the logic that determines the genealogy of forms of insurgency and revolt. This logic and this trajectory will help us recognize what are today and will be in the future the most powerful and desirable organizational forms of rebellion and revolution. (2005: 63) . . . we know that capitalist production and the life (and production) of the multitude are tied together increasingly intimately and are mutually determining. (2005: 90)

The difference between the ‘empire’ and ‘counter-empire’ aspects of politics beyond the state for Hardt and Negri, is reminiscent of the traditional Marxist distinction between a class ‘in-itself’ and a class ‘for-itself’, in which a transformation in political consciousness makes an objectively existing socio-economic group into a revolutionary subject. Although humanitarian non-governmental organisations confirm ‘the multitude’ as a global entity, in acting on behalf of humanity as such they also confirm the passivity of the multitude. In contrast, anti-globalisation protests and indigenous revolutionary politics are the multitude acting in- and for-itself, albeit in a fragmentary and uncoordinated way. In the final section of Empire, in which Hardt and Negri address the question of what the politicisation of the multitude would mean, revolutionary change is

[ 121 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 122

Diagnosing the times associated with the demand for global citizenship as the right to free immigration and a social wage mentioned above, as well as expropriation of property (2000: 396–403). But Hardt and Negri’s vision of a cosmopolitan future transcends these specific claims and is presented as a utopian world of freedom and love, a democracy unlike any that has previously existed (2000: 413; 2005: 330). In Multitude, Hardt and Negri contrast their argument with alternative accounts of the relation between democracy and globalisation (empire) (2005: 233–237). Their key critique of the arguments of theorists such as Habermas, Linklater and Benhabib is that the latter misunderstand the radical nature of the shift from international capitalism to empire, and from thence to the time of multitude. This misunderstanding is twofold, encompassing mistakes about the radical nature of the effects of globalisation, and about the meaning of democracy. Cosmopolitanism misrepresents globalisation, Hardt and Negri argue, because it does not grasp how the globalisation of bio-power undermines all boundaries; instead it assumes that it will be possible to spatialise and constrain empire, on analogy with how the democratic, welfare state ameliorated the effects of capitalism in the twentieth century. Relatedly, cosmopolitanism misrepresents democracy, because it persists in visualising it in liberal and constitutional terms, as a set of structured, mediated relations between ruler and ruled. In contrast, Hardt and Negri argue that the democracy ‘to come’ is without ‘qualifiers’, in other words it is literally identifiable with the direct selfrule of the multitude (2005: 236–237). We can already recognize that today time is split between a present that is already dead and a future that is already living – and the yawing abyss between them is becoming enormous. In time, an event will thrust us like an arrow into the living future. (2005: 358)

In spite of their claims to be ‘post’ Marx, the moves in Hardt and Negri’s argument about the time of world politics replicate the ways in which Marx thinks of his present as world-political time, theorises his own relationship to his present and identifies his times with revolutionary ‘new time’. In spite of their emphasis on multiplicity and singularities, Hardt and Negri read world-political time in a unified way as a story with universal significance, one which builds on rather than challenges Marx’s account of earlier stages of history. As with Marx, Hardt and Negri understand their role to be both scientific and revolutionary, on the one hand identifying the ‘logic’ underlying both ‘empire’ and ‘multitude’, and on the other making the future happen in an appropriate way. Like Marx, they claim to have identified the key ‘tendency’ in contemporary economic and social relations, even if it has yet to become the reality for the majority of the world’s population. Like Marx also, they see this ‘tendency’ both as inherent in material relations (now understood as biopolitical immaterial production of subjects) and as a matter of praxis or sheer creativity. And again,

[ 122 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 123

Time for democracy like Marx, they grasp their own time as ‘new time’ in a special sense, an unprecedented socio-economic order that creates unprecedented opportunities for progressive change. On examination it is clear that Hardt and Negri have no more transcended Marx’s analysis than Habermas, or his followers, transcended Kant’s. In all of these cases, the claim to transcendence rests on two main arguments. Firstly, that the contemporary thinkers offer a better understanding of the key mechanisms involved in historical development; and secondly, that they have moved away from any notion of historical determinism or a ‘telos’ in the form of a given end of history. In relation to the first claim, there are in fact very strong similarities in the supposedly ‘post’ Kantian and Marxist stories that are told and the theories of their predecessors. Habermas, Linklater and Benhabib substitute a quasi-transcendental theory of the presuppositions of communication for Kant’s conception of practical reason, but their claims for the form and substance of moral rationality remain very much the same as Kant’s. In their theories of history they are even closer, acknowledging much the same kind of mix of material and rational, selfconscious factors as Kant recounts in his readings of history from a cosmopolitan point of view. Hardt and Negri do not essentially differ from Marx in their account of the ground and orientation of revolutionary subjectivity, even if ‘multitude’ is not presented as a unified identity in the same way as the proletariat. Moreover, as with Marx, it is material changes in the form and substance of relations of production that drives the possibility of progressive change for the two thinkers. Given the amount of common ground, it would therefore seem to be the case that the claim to be ‘post’ Kant or Marx ultimately comes down to the rejection of a determinist theory of history or of teleology. But, as Browning has pointed out in relation to Hardt and Negri, it can plausibly be argued that, if anything, the latter are more closed and deterministic in their reading of history than Marx himself (Browning, 2005). As was evident in our examination of modernist philosophies of history in Chapter 2, Kant and Marx never straightforwardly presented the trajectory of history as necessary or inevitable. The whole purpose of interpreting historical political time was to be able to capitalise on those tendencies within it that were oriented towards the ideals of reason and freedom. In this respect, Habermas, Linklater, Benhabib and Hardt and Negri, with their focus on ‘trends’ (Habermas) or ‘tendencies’ (Hardt and Negri) are carrying forward the project of philosophical history rather than departing from it. In the following section, we will examine the implications of this philosophical history for the analysis and judgement of contemporary world politics. Towards a democratic future The post-Kantian and post-Marxist theories of the present discussed above rely on the normative standards of reason and freedom (kairos) being immanent in

[ 123 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 124

Diagnosing the times the actual historical and political development of world politics (chronos). The mechanisms through which world politics progresses are identified with communicative reason or revolutionary action respectively, but this is illustrated rather than demonstrated through a selective account of historical chronos and the meaning of particular developments (Habermas on international law, Hardt and Negri on the ‘concrete abstraction’ of immaterial labour). In this sense, the explanation for progress is always already known, and although neither approach claims to know what will happen in advance, both are clear as to why progress happens. This grasp of the kairos shaping worldpolitical events has strong implications for the description of, and prescription for, the world-political present. This is apparent in the contrasting accounts of the nature and role of global civil society offered by post-Kantian and postMarxist theorists. Post-Kantian accounts of global civil society borrow from Habermas, in seeing it primarily in terms of dialogic public spheres (Linklater, 1998; Young, 2000; Benhabib, 2002; Kaldor, 2003). This exerts obvious constraints on what can count, by definition, as global civil society activity, so that, for instance, violent activity of any kind tends to be excluded, as are movements out of tune with the implicit universalism of communicative reason (Kaldor, 2003: 97–101). This means that post-Kantian analyses of global civil society focus on the work of humanitarian non-governmental organisations and issue-based social movements that seek to influence global governance in a direction more in accordance with the presupposition of communicative reason. Following Habermas also, post-Kantian accounts of global civil society tend to support a framework of cosmopolitan law, governance and policing, based on principles of universal human rights, to sustain the operations of global civil society. Even theorists such as Kaldor, who are sceptical about the possibility of cosmopolitan democracy, offer an account of global civil society underpinned by international law, in which key moral principles are enshrined and may be enforced (Kaldor, 1999: 210; 2003: 128–141). Post-Marxist approaches to global civil society are sceptical of cosmopolitan enlightenment, and of the universalising claims of humanitarian non-governmental organisations or the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 36–37).14 Instead they look to more particular modes of resistance in the non-state sphere to exemplify the genuinely radical potential of global civil society (Baker, 2002: 129). The emphasis of such accounts is on the ideal of revolutionary praxis as the distinctive mark of genuine civil society activism. All global civil society actors may be challenging the status quo, but only those that embody the goal of freedom within their own praxis as political actors, as in Hardt and Negri’s example of the ‘White Overalls’ anti-globalisation protests, provide the appropriate vision for what global civil society should mean (2005: 264–267). In place of a post-Kantian rule-governed world order, which frames

[ 124 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 125

Time for democracy the ongoing dialogue of diverse civil society actors and which is substantively modelled on liberal or social democracy within states, we are presented with a future which is in principle indescribable because of its radical novelty. In the case of both post-Kantian and post-Marxist arguments there is an ongoing trade-off between the empirical (chronos) and the normative (kairos) that fixes the parameters of analysis. Because of this, the ideals of rational dialogue and of revolutionary practice respectively exert specific kinds of closure on the concept of global civil society and therefore on the ways in which it can be analysed or understood. The effect of this closure is to occlude both interconnections between what is counted as inside global civil society and what is excluded, and to occlude the possibility of recognising ambivalences internal to that which is counted as inside. Thus, following the post-Kantian path, we are diverted from theorising the connection between civility and violence, even when it is acknowledged that coercion plays a necessary role in sustaining civil society. We are also encouraged to see the distinction between violence and civility as clear cut, so that identifying ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ within global civil society is relatively unproblematic. In the case of post-Marxism, Hardt and Negri similarly divert us from considering the link between the moral humanitarianism of the non-governmental organisations, which they see as implicated in empire, and the resistant practices of anti-globalisation protestors or indigenous social movements. We are only permitted to see the former as an aspect of the material conditions for the latter, but not the actual and ongoing interplay between grassroots movements and trans-national organisations. At the same time, the ‘multitude’ is presented as necessarily pure in its generative power in sharp distinction to the corruption and crisis of empire, and we are encouraged to think that the distinction between empire and counter-empire is somehow straightforward. The exclusions in both post-Kantian and post-Marxist accounts of global civil society are particularly powerful because they are not simply reducible to wishful thinking. Instead they reflect a way of thinking about the world in which the theorist is doubly invested in reading history as progress. The theorists of cosmopolitanism and empire have normative standards which the world fails to live up to, but they also understand history in such a way that they are obliged to read the world as if it were developing in accordance with their normative telos. This is because, even if they don’t see progress in world history as inevitable, they know that one of the ways in which progress will happen is through the intervention of the theorist, insistent that this progress is visible and that he or she knows how it works. Thus, Habermas sees himself as part of the rational dialogue which pushes moral learning, and thereby the constitutionalisation of international law, forward, and Hardt and Negri are part of the transformation of the multitude from a class in-itself to a class for-itself. PostKantian and post-Marxist analyses of contemporary world politics take for

[ 125 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 126

Diagnosing the times granted that one can speak of world politics in terms of a unified temporality, with a specific past and future. Invariably, this temporality is captured in retrospect, from a (globalised, capitalist, modern) present interpreted as increasingly shared, towards which world politics has been evolving. In this context, plurality tends always to be accounted for in terms of either anachronism or reaction. In addition to blocking recognition of plurality through an overly universalising account of the history of world politics, post-Kantian and post-Marxist arguments also ground their accounts of progressive, post-state politics in values that transcend contingent conditions of political action. In the postKantian case, these values are embedded in communicative reason; in post-Marxism, they are embedded in revolutionary praxis. However, the claim to the universal appeal of these normative arguments is grounded in time as well as reason, since both sets of theorists presume a particular stage of historical development, and link this to the intelligibility and persuasiveness of their ethical position. This circularity in which reason provides the key to interpreting political time, but political time in turn grounds the claims of reason, leads to the assumption that their views can command widespread agreement by right-thinking people and that the operationalisation of the ethical standards in question will produce progressive politics. Although the post-Kantian and post-Marxist accounts of global civil society are different in their empirical and normative claims, I have suggested that they shape and limit our political imaginary in relation to the times of world politics in very similar ways. Ethically and politically both accounts endorse the universality of particular moral ideals (reason and freedom) and concomitant political practices. Analytically, both accounts rely on a holistic, universalising (kairotic) ordering of the history of world politics. This shapes the analysis of the comparative significance of different kinds of (chronotic) global political developments, and also leads to a homogenised account of how people are historically situated in the present. In ways strongly reminiscent of historicist and social scientific theories discussed in previous chapters, post-Kantian and post-Marxist modes of thinking the world-political present repeat the situation in which politics is caught between fate and control, and the purpose of the theorist’s intervention is to be timely, to make a difference to the world. Conclusion Neither post-Kantian nor post-Marxist theories suggest that the future is determined, although they do suggest that there is a direction to world-historical development. In line with the philosophies of history on which they draw, they identify progressive potential in history, and argue that it is the duty of the progressive theorist to contribute to that potential. Nevertheless, they do offer privileged access to the future in terms of establishing both what it ought to be

[ 126 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 127

Time for democracy and the mixture of rational and material mechanisms through which it may be brought about. In this way, they assess the value of political action in the present in terms of a projected future, which is known but not yet achieved. We therefore know the answer to ‘what is to be done’ (and therefore also, what should not be done) in order to ensure the transformation of the world-political present. For Habermas, therefore, it is clear that the promotion of certain human rights norms across territorial state boundaries, the increasing legalisation of inter-state relations, and the establishment of modes of democratic deliberation at supra-national, trans-national and national levels is the prerequisite of the fulfilment of the promise of republican states and international law. In contrast, the promotion of some kind of centralised world government or cosmopolitan democracy is not the right way to go, and we must reject the rival analyses offered by neo-conservatives, neo-liberals, post-Marxists and Schmittians. For Hardt and Negri, in contrast, we know that the legalisation of inter-state relations in developments such as international human rights regimes and humanitarian intervention is evidence of the all-pervasiveness of imperial power, that the work of humanitarian non-governmental organisations is an inappropriate form for emancipatory politics to take, and that anti-globalisation protests presage the unprecedented democratic future beyond empire. We also know that various post-Kantian, as well as neo-conservative and communitarian, interpretations of contemporary world politics, are mistaken. In order to have this kind of grasp of the world-political present, postKantian and post-Marxist theorists have to assume both the capacity of kairos to transcend the contingencies of chronos in order to create world-political time, and that world-political time has a unified meaning. To have already decided against a world republic or for anti-globalisation protests, is to deny the specificity of different presents and the unpredictability of different futures. To read history in terms of a particular vision of progress is to deny the significance of the plurality of understandings and experiences of political temporality within the world. Confidence in these assumptions, which is also shared by the less optimistic theorists of international politics discussed in the previous chapter, is what enables the constant slippage, in both post-Kantian and post-Marxist theories, from the temporal trajectory of global politics to that of western capitalism and the liberal democratic state (Dunn, 2004: 152). Notes 1 The key principle of discourse ethics is that in order for a moral principle to be legitimate, all those affected by a norm would have agreed to it in an inclusive dialogue conducted under conditions of fair argumentation (See Habermas, 1990, 1992; Benhabib & Dallmayr, 1992). 2 In his Theory of Communicative Action (1984, 1987), Habermas distinguishes two

[ 127 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 128

Diagnosing the times

3

4 5

6

7 8

9 10 11

12

13 14

modes of action in modern societies: strategic action is driven by instrumental rationality, and involves functional responses to the requirements of complex economic and political problems, for instance the design of monetary or bureaucratic systems; communicative action, by contrast, is grounded in communicative rationality, in which certain normative pre-requisites are embedded, and is at work in the development of public spheres, human rights and democratic politics. The latter ‘lifeworld’ aspects of modern society, in Habermas’s view need to regulate and constrain the former ‘systemic’ aspects. These alternative interpretations include realist, liberal (neo-conservative), neoliberal, post-Marxist and Schmittian (based on the work of Carl Schmitt) ‘hemispheric’ arguments; see discussion below (Habermas, 2006: 179–193). For a more in-depth discussion of Habermas’s relation to Kant, see Hutchings, 1996: 58–80. Habermas includes Hardt and Negri as an example of post-Marxism – see discussion below. See Schmitt (1996, 2003). Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisation’ thesis also comes under the Schmittian heading for Habermas. See also discussion of Agamben in Chapter 6 below for a different reading of Schmitt’s significance. These ideas vary from the relatively detailed architecture suggested by Held, to the ‘grassroots’ civil society arguments of Falk and Kaldor. See Held (1995), Falk (1995), Archibugi et al. (1998); Kaldor (2003); Archibugi (2003); Held (2004); Germain & Kenny (2005a); Baker & Chandler (2005a); Hutchings (2005b). This argument is based on the self-conscious appropriation of Habermas’s interpretation of history in terms of the values embedded in communicative reason. Again, Linklater is borrowing from Habermas here and the idea of ‘performative contradiction’. This notion is developed as part of Habermas’s discourse ethics and does work similar to that of Kantian universalisability in Kant’s moral theory. A speaker is in performative contradiction when he/she communicates something that undermines the conditions of possibility of communicating it: see Habermas, 1992: 86–91. This is an inference drawn in much contemporary ethical and political cosmopolitan theorising: see Held (2004), Fraser (2005) and discussion of Linklater above. See a discussion of the implications of Benhabib’s views for transnational feminism in contrast with Spivak’s in Chapter 7 below. There are clearly Hegelian elements in Habermas’s notion of historical collective learning, and the role of economic globalisation in most such theories often draws on aspects of Marx’s analysis of capitalism, its unequal distributive implications and internal contradictions. Linklater treats the Kantian and Marxist philosophies of history as virtually equivalent (1998: 4; 212). As will become evident, I am not convinced that Hardt and Negri move as far from a historicist version of Marxist teleology and dialectic as they claim to do. This is an opinion echoed by many interpreters: see Walker, 2002; Maurer, 2004; Quinby, 2004; and Connolly, 2005: 148–154. Nevertheless, their biopolitical view of globalisation, to which the production of subjects rather than of commodities is central, also connects their arguments to the anti-historicist positions of Virilio and Agamben, to be discussed in Chapter 6 below. Hardt and Negri would insist that this ‘telos’ is not teleological, in that it is not some kind of pre-existing final cause governing the development of history. The category of ‘post-Marxism’ here does not just apply to the progressive theory of Hardt and Negri, but to other leftist critiques of cosmopolitanism that share Hardt

[ 128 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 129

Time for democracy and Negri’s distrust of humanitarianism and highlight instead the radical, disruptive potential of grassroots movements in global politics (see Walker, 1994, 1999; Baker, 2002; Mignolo, 2002; Calhoun, 2003).

[ 129 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 130

6

Apocalyptic times

Introduction H A P T E R S 4 and 5 explored assumptions about the temporality of world politics at work in different bodies of literature, seeking to explain, understand and prescribe for the present times of world politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In all cases, it was clear that predominant voices in the social science of international politics, in post-Kantian theories of cosmopolitan democracy and in post-Marxist accounts of ‘empire’ and ‘multitude’ relied upon accounts of the relation between chronos and kairos that echoed arguments previously encountered in Chapter 2. Rejecting Fukuyama and Huntington, and following Popper, International Relations scholars, both liberal and realist, sought to keep chronos and kairos apart. However, on examination, their readings of the present chronos turned out to depend on Kantian or Machiavellian meta-narratives of political time. The accounts of the present of world politics in cosmopolitans such as Habermas and in the radical postMarxist arguments of Hardt and Negri were much more explicit in their dependence on the philosophies of history of Kant and Marx respectively. In all these cases, kairos provided the key to the distinctiveness of the present, even where, as in the case of Mearsheimer, the distinctiveness of the present turned out to lie in the repetition and future return of the same. In these theories, kairos operates doubly, both shaping the meaning of chronos and confirming the role of the theorist as philosophical historian, helping history along the pathway in which it already does (and ought to) proceed. Even those theorists providing bleak diagnoses of the intransigence of power politics (Mearsheimer) or the diffused biopolitical power relations of empire (Hardt and Negri), are nevertheless committed to the positive role that the theorist can play in keeping time’s arrow on its genuine track. As we have seen, the operation of kairos as it is played out within these theories of contemporary world politics is necessarily exclusionary. It provides the key to what will and will not be counted as significant

C

[ 130 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 131

Apocalyptic times within the present, it is always bound up with specific normative stances, and it always relies on treating the time of world politics in unifying and universalising terms. The accounts of the times of world politics to be considered in this chapter are premised on the rejection of modernist, progressive philosophies of history and are highly suspicious of social science, interpreting the latter in Foucauldian terms as bound up with the biopolitical control and production of modern subjects. For Virilio and Agamben, as for Arendt and Benjamin, the present cannot be grasped in terms of the time of prediction or prophecy, and it is certainly not the case that the world has arrived at the time for democracy; rather the reverse. Virilio offers a reading of contemporary global politics in which rather than kairos giving progressive shape to chronos, the latter is rapidly moving to an (apocalyptic) end. Agamben famously interprets the present in terms of the generalisation of the ‘state of exception’ inherent in the institution of sovereignty, exemplified by the refugee and the concentration camp. He argues that this is at least partly due to the confusion of kairos with eschatology in modern western thought. The only way to challenge the depressing fate of the world is through invoking an alternative Messianic kairos (see below). For both thinkers, the present of the world is not only bleak, but also exhausted as a site of politics, linking their vision in some ways to Fukuyama’s depressing account of the post-historical condition. Virilio and Agamben share an opposition to the kinds of arguments discussed in Chapters 4 and 5,1 certain philosophical influences, in particular the work of Arendt and (to a lesser extent) of Derrida and Deleuze, and a bleakness of vision in their reading of the present. Nevertheless, their philosophical positions, concerns and arguments are not the same. Virilio’s focus is on the technologically driven, globalised transformation of chronotic time, its roots in the war system, and its negative implications for politics, both within and between states. Agamben, by contrast, is preoccupied with the fate of the modern state, and the ways in which sovereignty and historicism (in Benjamin’s sense) are mutually implicated in the paralysis of politics. In what follows, I will argue that, in spite of the pessimistic tone of their analysis, and their reliance on a variety of critics of the philosophy of history,2 Virilio and Agamben, as with Arendt and Benjamin, remain caught up in the logic of historicism that they apparently oppose. In the case of Virilio and Agamben, in addition, their reading of the dialectic of enlightenment (as with Benjamin’s) also returns us to the connection between secular theories of progress and Judeo-Christian Messianic narratives of apocalypse and redemption. For both Virilio and Agamben, though for rather different reasons, time as both chronos and kairos permits very little room for worldly hope.

[ 131 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 132

Diagnosing the times The world on speed Space/time/end Fukuyama is entirely wrong: it’s not the end of history, but the end of a regime of historical temporality. (Virilio, 1997a: 185)

Virilio’s diagnosis of the present as the time of ‘globalitarianism’ overlaps with a range of other readings of the ‘postmodern condition’ that have emerged in French philosophy and social theory in the latter half of the twentieth century. However, Virilio himself, whilst acknowledging some common ground with Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, is careful to reject the label of postmodernism. Firstly, because his diagnosis of the present understands it as a continuation (albeit a massively accelerated one) rather than an overcoming of modernity. Secondly, because he is opposed to the relativism and anti-humanism he identifies in the position of thinkers such as Lyotard. He classifies his own position as a combination of anarchism, Christianity and humanism.3 In spite of this, Virilio shares with many postmodernist and poststructuralist thinkers the argument that the meta-narratives of scientific and political progress that dominated nineteenth- and twentieth-century analyses of history are both misleading and dangerous. They are misleading, because scientific and political ‘progress’, in which humanity gains greater control of both material and social environments, has turned out to be a myth – instead we are losing control in both senses. They are dangerous because they prevent us from recognising and averting our own fate. At the heart of these myths is a misunderstanding of the spatio-temporal conditions of political life, and the ways in which they have been, and are being, revolutionised by changes in technology, changes in turn conditioned by the requirements of war. Modernist narratives of the development of world politics subordinate chronos to kairos, but also depend on a standard account of chronos as linear, quantifiable, irreversible succession. In his alternative to such accounts, Virilio focuses on the logic inherent in chronos itself. For Virilio, the lessons of Einstein’s theory of relativity apply to the understanding of chronos in social and political life. Chronos is only meaningful in relation to topos, that is to say, in relation to spatial categorisations of location, proximity and distance. On Virilio’s account, there are three successive kinds of proximity within geopolitical history: metabolic, in which chronos is constituted by rates at which human and animal bodies traverse space; mechanical, in which chronos is constituted by the rates at which mechanised means of transport (trains, planes, automobiles) traverse space; and electromagnetic in which chronos is constituted by the rate at which electronic transmissions traverse space (i.e. at the speed of light) (1997b: 73). This means that chronos is not the same regardless of historical era, but changes in accordance with technological developments. These developments, according to Virilio, are conditioned above all by the strategic requirements of

[ 132 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 133

Apocalyptic times war making, which are also what push one era of chronos into another. The fortifications thrown up as a strategic response to nomadic warfare, eventually yield the time and space of the city. The mobilisation needs of the mass warfare of the nineteenth century power the industrial revolution and yield the time and space of the nation-state. The undermining of ‘spatial’ (and human) warfare by the invention of nuclear weapons, drives the development of communications technologies that eventually yield the virtual time and space of ‘globalitarianism’, first demonstrated in the conduct of the 1991 Gulf War (2002). The shift with which Virilio is particularly concerned is that from mechanical to electromagnetic proximity, both in relation to war and, more broadly, in relation to the contemporary political situation of the world, in which war and politics are no longer capable of distinction. Even though the shift from mechanical to electromagnetic proximity can be accounted for in very similar ways to the earlier shift from metabolic to mechanical proximity, its implications for chronos are far more radical. In previous developments, chronos had speeded up in a way that changed the conditions of social political life dramatically, but did not eliminate the significance of space. This meant that politics remained bounded not only by location, but also by duration. Both space and time, as conceived in Newtonian terms, were still a crucial aspect of political decision-making and implementation. In its most recent development, however, the acceleration of chronos is qualitatively different, in that it abolishes the relevance of space altogether, reducing chronos to instantaneity, unlimited by duration (1997b: 14). In such a world weapons systems can be set up so as to respond to each other immediately without the possibility of human intervention. Time as chronos has eaten itself up, and with it traditional understandings of the present in relation to past and future. We are, quite literally, according to Virilio, at the end of the kind of time in which history is possible. What then are the features of this era of the disappearance of the present? Virilio points to the breakdown of geo-political boundaries and the subsumption of many local times under one ‘world time’, in which personal, martial and market transactions take place in ‘real time’, the virtual equivalent of the chronos of face-to-face proximity. And he reads these phenomena in a consistently negative way. They indicate not only the disappearance of the present, but also the disappearance of politics. They provide the conditions for new, globalised totalitarianisms and for the ‘general accident’. The field of freedom shrinks with speed. And freedom needs a field. When there is no more field, our lives will be like a terminal, a machine with doors that open and close. A labyrinth for laboratory animals. (1997a: 73) . . . the intensive duration of the ‘real moment’ now dominates duration, the extensive and relatively controllable time of history – in other words of the long term that used to encompass past, present and future. (1997b: 14)

[ 133 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 134

Diagnosing the times Apocalypse now? As Der Derian puts it ‘there is certainly more than a hint of millenarian doom to Virilio’s work’ (Der Derian, 1998: 11). But in order to tease out the arguments underlying his ‘endist’ claims about the ‘globalitarian’ present, we need to look more closely at what he thinks is happening both to the state and to inter-state and global geo-political relations, and how this is bound up with the fate of time. In this respect, there are two kinds of temporal meta-narratives in Virilio’s work. One narrative is a story of decline, in which we are taken through the mirror image of eighteenth-century stadial theories of history in the manner of Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. The other narrative is the ‘millenarian’ one, in which the end of time is nigh in the general accident. As with Rousseau, starting from the nomadic and the pastoral, Virilio describes a trajectory of human development, the stages of which can be explained by a singular logic. As with Rousseau again, this logic is tied up with projects of technical control that underpins the division of labour and the grounding of property in Rousseau’s account. Unlike Rousseau, however, for Virilio, war is not an outcome of the corruption inherent in the distinction between ‘mine’ and ‘thine’, but the driving force of that corruption (perhaps equivalent to original sin). It is war as a form of social relation that drives the need for technical control and ultimately shapes the history of technology that is also the history of humanity. More properly, it is war that opens up the possibility of history, and that will, ultimately, close it down (1997a: 97–98). At the heart of Virilio’s account is an argument about the relation between war and politics (1997a: 107). For Virilio, war literally creates the space for politics in the fortified places that protect populations from attack and become cities (2002: 1–16). Like Machiavelli and Arendt before him, Virilio takes the connection between ‘polis’ and ‘politics’ very seriously. The space of the city, its clear distinction between private and public spheres, and the separation and connection of populations within it enable the development of distinctive perspectives: that is, the ability to see and represent the same thing from different points of view. This combination of commonality and distinction is the ground of specifically political exchange, exemplified in Athenian democracy and the republicanism of the renaissance Italian city-state, which is also where it becomes aesthetically represented in quattrocento art (1997b: 125; 1995; 2000: 10-11). The chronos of the Athenian or Machiavellian city-state is mediated by metabolic proximity and distance. In this context a clear inside/outside distinction is confirmed between the possibility of politics within and war without, the former feeding off the latter. For Virilio, as for Arendt, this is the most promising context for politics to flourish, and his account of politics is strongly reminiscent of Arendt’s in The Human Condition. Like her, he sees politics as a space of appearance, in which a plurality of perspectives can be represented in speech

[ 134 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 135

Apocalyptic times and action (2000: 73–74). Like her also he sees this possibility as conditioned by different kinds of boundary. On the one hand, the boundary between public and private, which enables a clear distinction between the realms of labour and action, a differentiation of biological from political life. On the other hand, the boundary between the inside and the outside of the polity, represented by the city wall. It is this locatedness of political life that, for both Arendt and Virilio, provides the common condition in relation to which multiple perspectives and representations are possible. For Virilio, however, the quality of the locatedness of the city as polis is also bound up with a chronos of temporal duration, in which it is possible to argue over decisions, to act, but also to undo the effects of action. Paradoxically, he argues that this is a situation in which popular control is possible in a way increasingly undermined by the growth of technical control. Unlike Arendt, however, in addition to endorsing the human, political, democratic time of the city-state, Virilio situates its origin and fate in the effects of warfare. The city is enabled by war and the technologies bred by war, but it also depends on war to preserve the space for politics. This means that politics is invested in its preservation through war, and therefore in controlling and directing war in Clausewitzian fashion (2002: 40). Within this situation, defence turns to offence, and what Virilio calls ‘exo-colonialism’ is common, in which the power of particular polities is projected out in the conquest of others, and the drive to conquest fuels the development of machines capable of covering distances at greater speeds. The way in which war supports the possibility of politics is to some extent carried through into the chronos of the era of mechanical proximity, which has been driven by the logistical demands of colonial and revolutionary war. In this historical shift, the city-state gives way to the nation-state. Within this context, perspective and representation remain possible for political actors, but are rendered much more difficult than in the context of the city-state. Increasingly, the technologies that war has created corrupt politics by their implications for the space-time of polities and for the possibilities of control of large populations, whether through direct coercion, manipulation or materialism. Trains, steamships, cars and aeroplanes reconfigure the relation between space and time. In this new chronos, there is a lack of fit between the human time of speech and action and the time of realpolitik. This applies at both a popular and an elite level. At the popular level, there are simply too many citizens for the kind of political interplay possible in Athens, so short cuts have to be taken in which public opinion is always already mobilised and represented in the ideological positions of political parties, disseminated through mass media. At the elite level, statesmen are preoccupied internally with the (disciplinary and biopolitical) control of their peoples, and externally are in reactive mode, second-guessing the responses of other states in the mechanical logic of the balance of power. The capacity to respond quickly and with overwhelming

[ 135 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 136

Diagnosing the times power to internal threats, as well as external ones, enables state repression, so that the exo-colonial projection of power beyond the state is accompanied by growing capacities for endo-colonialism, within the state. In common with Foucault, Virilio sees politics within the state in the mechanical age as becoming less about juridical than about disciplinary power. Within the modern capitalist state, characterised by market relations, commodification and liberal governmentality, subjects are produced as ‘docile bodies’, instrumentally rational actors and consumers. For Virilio, as for Arendt, this rise of the ‘social’ marks the breaking down of the distinction between biological and political life, the erosion of plurality, and the victory of materialism and process thinking. Although Virilio sees mechanical proximity as a threat to politics, he does not think that it undoes the possibility of politics entirely. Chronos is speeded up in modernity, but it is still spatially mediated in significant respects. Nation-states remain geographically distinct; political opinions, actions and decisions are still spatially mediated – they take time to formulate and implement, and this means that there is still opportunity for democratic engagement. However, the requirements of modern war lead to technological developments that are antithetical to the, already limited and distorted, time for politics inherent in a system of nation-states (1997b: 56; 2000: 122). Instead of being complementary or supplementary to politics, war eventually comes to undermine it. In order to gain strategic advantage in the mechanical age, successful war-making depends on the conquest of space. The more quickly and permanently military power can be projected over massive distances, the greater one’s strategic edge. This edge is initially carried by the transport revolution and the capacity to carry personnel and weapons, but this is displaced by a concentration on the weapons themselves and how both they and their destructive potential can be made to travel. Virilio calls this ‘spatial’ war, but the paradox of spatial war is that it culminates in the possibility of the annihilation of space altogether, for instance in the setting up of automatic triggering systems for nuclear weapons (Der Derian, 1998: 31). Improperly named ‘deterrence’ by the apologists of nuclear conflagration, pure war is therefore only the emergence of a cult, the institution of militaryscientific messianism founded on the logistical capacities of vectors of extermination escaping the control of a political intelligence corrupted by materialism, a materialism which progressively turned it away from the contemplation of death (individual and collective), contemplation that all the same maintained tight relations with the origin of politics. (Virilio, ‘The Strategy of the Beyond’, in Der Derian, 1998: 90)

The dynamic of war tips the world from mechanical into electro-magnetic proximity. For Virilio, it is not so much the global destruction inherent in Cold War ‘mutually assured destruction’ that signifies a qualitative shift in chronos, but the removal of human intervention from the process. This is only possible follow-

[ 136 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 137

Apocalyptic times ing a revolution in communications technology, in which space is not so much traversed as removed from the equation altogether. As we see in the above quotation, the capitulation to the logic of war is, for Virilio, bound up with developments that accompanied the age of mechanical proximity, in particular the corrupting force of materialism. In so far as populations and decisionmakers have assumed the perspective of the rational consumer, they have assimilated the logic of civilian life to that of war, in which there is only instrumental interest in strategic advantage. The distinction between war and politics that war created in throwing up the space of the city has become eroded, not only because the city walls have become irrelevant and the distinction between inside and outside no longer holds, but also because individuals and collectivities have ceased to understand the difference between politics and war and given up on the possibility that the former might control or direct the latter. Virilio is perhaps best known for his account of the 1991 Gulf War as the first example of fully-fledged electronic, ‘virtual’ warfare (2002). Within this conflict, he argues, the temporality of mechanical and metabolic proximities, through which we can trace particular histories of geo-political relations, gives way to the temporality of immediacy and ubiquity inherent in the speed of light. This is a context in which both fighters and observers interact directly with images that are simultaneously projected and seen to create a shared ‘present’ in the moment. However, the technologies that make this possible are not confined to war – they shape the political possibilities of late twentieth-century existence. Previously, according to Virilio, chronos was always localised in character, mediated by particularities of city or state. Now this has given way to a form of chronos that is singular ‘world-time’, in which people in all parts of the world interact, except for the underclass of those excluded from the empire of real time, such as the unemployed, the destitute and refugees (1997b: 71). The result of this is a dizzying loss of perspective, in which the distinctions between here and there, and now and then, through which people were previously able to orient themselves, give way to distinctions between ‘activity and interactivity, presence and telepresence, existence and tele-existence’ (1997b: 44). For Virilio, it is the latter (real time) that has come to dominate the former (real space) (1997b: 73).4 In his descriptions of what this implies for world politics, Virilio draws attention not only to electronic warfare but also to the globalisation of market and financial relations, the dependence of political communication and participation on electronic media, the ways in which personal relations and leisure activities are carried out in and through virtual environments, the hyperbolic patterns of consumption driven by constant technological advances and the growth of surveillance and of bio-technologies. What used to be the outward projection of political power in the form of war or trade has swallowed up the political community by simultaneously abolishing the distinction between

[ 137 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 138

Diagnosing the times inside and outside and radicalising the individuation already at work in the production of docile subjects (workers and consumers) in the age of mechanical proximity. After two world wars in space that ended in the gradual loss of the space-world, with the conquest of the air and of circumterrestrial space, the world war in time will lead, for its part, to the loss of our freedom of movement: an irremediable but discreet loss, in which everything will remain as it was, except for being qualitatively discredited in this time-world that will respond in future to our every desire. (1997b: 128–129)

The city wall or state border no longer provides the protected space within which thinking can be done and perspective cultivated. Paradoxically, the undermining of territorial borders by the high-speed chronos of communications technologies results in political inertia (2002: 12–13). We are in a situation in which movement is so rapid that we are always already wherever it is we want to go. At the same time as territorial borders disappear so do the boundaries between private and public spheres in everyday life. Electronic media, consumerism, surveillance and bio-technology create a world in which there is no distinction between real and simulated sex, sheep and clone, ultimately no way of differentiating between the natural and the artificial, and therefore no action, only reaction or interaction (2000: 20, 31–42, 66–73). This is the effect of what Virilio calls ‘endo-colonisation’, in which the repressive power once directed by the state against outsiders becomes directed towards its own population in a project of total control. Only this time, the nihilistic logic of technical control that works through war and market is not in the service of any particular polity but operates in pure form, released from the spatio-temporal constraints of politics (2000: 138–139). Virilio develops an extensive vocabulary to capture his vision of chronopolitics (2000: 109). But the most telling of the terms he uses is ‘globalitarian’, in which the concepts of ‘globalisation’ and ‘totalitarianism’ are fused (2000: 10-11). Here his arguments are strongly reminiscent of Arendt’s account of totalitarianism (Arendt, 1986). Globalisation is totalitarian because it both homogenises and fragments the human condition. It homogenises it by destroying the spaces between individuals that condition the possibility of political judgement and action. There is no plurality of perspective in globalitarian time, and therefore no democratic engagement. Instead we have a politics (or non-politics) of collectivist emotion, of immediate gut reaction to simultaneously experienced events, in which there is no possibility of mediation (Virilio, 2005: 33). Globalisation fragments the human condition because it destroys the common location in which political community can be sustained, leaving individuals with nothing but the commitment to their own material, instant gratification, which feeds into a logic of instrumentality and technical control, and extends

[ 138 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 139

Apocalyptic times into all bodily as well as spiritual domains of existence (2000: 66). Like Arendt, Virilio is also clear that people are at least partly responsible for their own globalitarian plight. He argues that we are complicit with the projects of control and surveillance that have spilled over from war into all spheres of human existence. We should, he suggests, be thinking about how to control this new temporality, rather than letting it control us. But his arguments make it difficult to see how this could be possible. A crucial question arises at this precise instant in history: can one democratise ubiquity, instantaneity, omniscience and omnipresence, which are precisely the privileges of the divine, or in other words, of autocracy? (2002: 134)

One strand of Virilio’s thought can be traced back to Rousseau or, more generally, the romantic and conservative critiques of modernity that have deplored the effects on society and politics of mass society and materialism, from Burke to Arendt. However, there is another strand of his argument that is strongly technologically determinist. The first strand of argument permits the possibility of the invention or reinvention of alternative spatio-temporal conditions for politics that might allow politics (and thereby humanity) to take priority over war or technological innovation. It is this first strand that leads Virilio to deny that he is a purveyer of doom, and identify himself instead as a political actor (2005: 100). But the second strand of argument sees the fate of humanity as technologically determined, from the point at which politics becomes possible to the point at which it ceases to exist. If one defines politics in terms of particular kinds of spatio-temporal conditions that can no longer apply, then the answer to Virilio’s ‘crucial question’ has to be in the negative. It is in this mode that Virilio writes of the earth as ‘the colony, the camp of the great ordeal’ (2000: 131) or our lives as a ‘labyrinth for laboratory animals’ (1997a: 73). However, there is another twist to Virilio’s narrative. His grim vision of the earth as a global concentration camp is not the only possible ending, the end of chronos as such is also possible: if interactivity is to information what radioactivity is to energy, then we are confronted with the fearsome emergence of the ‘Accident to end all accidents’, an accident which is no longer local and precisely situated, but global and generalized. (2000: 134)

Inherent in every form of chronos are different possibilities of accidental catastrophe, from the train wreck to nuclear holocaust. The accident undoes the power of control inherent in different technologies, but is also only possible because of them. For the first time, however, in the era of electro-magnetic proximity, this ‘undoing’ threatens to undo the human species altogether, if not immediately then certainly in the longer term (Armitage, 2000a: 44). In the contemporary era, the project of technical control is confronted for the first

[ 139 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 140

Diagnosing the times time in pure form with the potentially wholly catastrophic consequences of its own power on a number of fronts economically and biopolitically as well as militarily. The idea of ‘accident’ encompasses not just the possibility of another Chernobyl, but more broadly any of the unintended consequences of new technologies. For Virilio this includes the possibility of world economic collapse, which follows from the technologies that enable a single world market and the gradual replacement of humanity itself by its virtual counterparts. In this respect, the road to hell is most certainly paved with good intentions, since the technologies enabling the world market or cloning or cyber-sex were set up to serve rather than to destroy human interests. And so, we have seen the emergence of a third anthropological type over the twentieth century: the exterminator. Not so much the butcher of a terrorism that has turned suicidal, the looming shadow of the lost soldier of the wars of days gone by; more the kind of butcher who ingeniously offers the means of putting an end to the world and to its embedded humanity – every possible means, including economic, technical and scientific – all the while being intimately persuaded of bringing Progress, as superior civilization. (2005: 79)

Virilio extends his argument about the accident to encompass more generally the implications of a world in which fear of the consequences of loss of control matches the scale of devastation that technologies of control have made possible. In this kind of world, he argues, there is a tendency for the declaration of a ‘state of emergency’ to become widespread, and for pre-emptive action to be seen as the appropriate response to unexpected events. He interprets the US response to the events of 9/11 in these terms (2005: 74). Virilio’s notion of ‘accident’ brings home the relation of his account of chronos in all of its different eras to a kairotic meta-narrative of time. What remains constant in Virilio’s account of different chronotic temporalities is that the project of technical control, which is infinite in principle, is contrary to the limitations involved in what it means to be human. For this reason, the possibility of technology serving the ends of humanity is always in tension with technology’s opposition to the space and time of human action and judgement. This tension can be lived with in eras where time is subordinate to space, but once the relation between time and space is reversed, then the world as a place of distinctively human habitation is doomed to end. This end is determined not by technology, but by the persistence of the ‘will-to-power’ that underlies the drive for technological innovation, the sin of hubris in which humanity aspires to god-like powers. This ‘millenarian’ dimension of Virilio’s analysis cuts across his Machiavellian ideal of political time, and his account of human history as decline, and links it instead to a pre-modern Christian meta-narrative of kairotic time. According to this version of kairos, the important fact is not the deteriorating difference between the chronos of the city, the nation-state or the globe,

[ 140 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 141

Apocalyptic times but the ways in which all chronos is equally shaped by original sin. In this respect, Virilio is as close to Newton as he is to Rousseau or Arendt in his reading of the present, but perhaps closer still to early Christians or to those in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Christian sects who lived in the certain knowledge of the imminent end of the world. What is lacking in Virilio is a Messianic expectation of what the end of the world is likely to bring; his apocalyptic vision does not encompass redemption in this world, and leaves the distinction between sacred and profane time intact. We have a grasp of the end of chronos but kairos is also only presented as the end inherent in the logic driving the development of chronos through its different technological stages. In this respect, Agamben’s equally dark portrait of the present in world politics is very different from Virilio’s. Messianic Time Time, law and violence I must say I have a boundless admiration for Agamben. I was asked by several papers to give my choice of the best books of the year and I mentioned Homo Sacer. It is a remarkable book, and one with which I could not agree more. (Virilio in an interview with Armitage: Armitage, 2000a: 52)

Agamben comments in Homo Sacer (1998) (and again in Means without End: Notes on Politics, 2000) that in order to grapple fully with the meaning of the present in world politics, one needs the capacity to think the end of history and the end of the state simultaneously and to mobilise the one against the other (1998: 60; 2000: 111). For Agamben, the world-political present, characterised (in terms reminiscent of Virilio) by the globalisation of biopolitical control and Schmittian exceptionalism, demonstrates the dangerous potential of modernist foundational narratives about historical progress and legal and political authority. Following in the footsteps of Benjamin, and to a lesser extent, Arendt, Derrida and Foucault, Agamben’s work deconstructs the claims of modernist philosophy of history and the sovereign authority of the modern state, and looks for an alternative conception of politics, beyond historicism and law. Conceptions of time and temporality are crucial to Agamben’s deconstructive and constructive arguments. In contrast to Virilio, however, Agamben’s arguments about the significance of time for politics are philosophical rather than sociological and are rooted in a particular conception of language and human agency. This can be seen in one of his earlier works, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience (2007). In this text, Agamben engages critically with two prevalent ways of approaching the understanding of human culture: historicist (diachronic) and structuralist (synchronic) (2007: 85). Agamben argues that diachronic and synchronic temporalities can be found in all

[ 141 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 142

Diagnosing the times cultures. However, neither of them in isolation captures the meaning of human temporality (historicity) – instead this is to be found in the interplay between them: in historically cumulative societies the linearity of time is always arrested by the calendrical alternation and repetition of holiday time; in historically stationary societies circularity is always interrupted by profane time. (2007: 86)

In effect, Agamben is arguing that human temporality is located in the ways in which chronos (clock time, profane time) and kairos (calendar time, sacred time) interrupt each other. And he argues that the condition of possibility of this interruption lies in the relation between human beings and language. The origin of human relation to language is marked by difference and discontinuity. Each ‘speaker’ is only able to enter language (and therefore enter culture and history) by differentiating him/herself in infancy from language within language as the ‘I’ that speaks (2007: 59). This originary splitting is what makes history, as opposed to biological evolution, possible. And it also underwrites foundational distinctions between nature and culture, private and public, time (chronos) and history (kairos) (2007: 93).5 This means that history is, in principle, not about linear continuity (2007: 60). Nevertheless, Agamben goes on to argue, because different experiences and conceptions of time condition different conceptions of history, modern political thought has tended to fall into the trap of equating human, historical time with the linear time of chronos (2007: 99). Agamben’s critique of modern political thought follows Benjamin’s argument in Theses on the Philosophy of History very closely. He (Agamben) argues that the modern grasp of history is muddled and diluted by the influence of a tradition of conceptualising chronological time that goes back to the Greeks, and works through western philosophy from Aristotle onwards. This is the view that time is a pure linear, quantifiable succession of instants. He sees this as exemplified in Hegel’s philosophy, where he claims that the connection between time (pure succession of instants) and spirit (human culture and action) is not interrogated, and the latter is simply subsumed under the former via the dialectic. On such a view, human temporality becomes buried under the notion of a historical totality – a process that humanity serves rather than enacts (2007: 108). This way of conceiving time is further reinforced by the experience of chronological time in manufacturing work, which since the nineteenth century means that the predominant experience of lived time matches the Aristotelian conception (2007: 102). In contrast, Agamben argues, Marx’s philosophy of history reflects a much more genuinely historical understanding of human temporality, in which humanity constitutes history rather than being constituted by it (2007: 109). However, as with Benjamin, Agamben regards the real meaning of Marx’s historical materialism as having been lost in the historicisms

[ 142 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 143

Apocalyptic times of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, leaving modern subjects caught between the chronological time of succession, and the kairotic time of revolution (2007: 109). Following Benjamin, Agamben suggests that the way in which to approach an alternative experience of being-in-time, which would be adequate to the ‘original dimension of man’, is to concentrate on moments in which the line of time is experienced as broken or halted. One dimension of experience in which this happens is in pleasure, and Agamben makes a direct analogy between the experience of pleasure and the nature of revolutionary action, in which time is qualitatively altered. For history is not, as the dominant ideology would have it, man’s servitude to continuous linear time, but man’s liberation from it: the time of history and the cairós in which man, by his initiative, grasps favourable opportunity and chooses his own freedom in the moment. (2007: 115)

Agamben’s account of human temporality in Infancy and History depends on a differentiation between human and animal. Animals do not enter language, but humans do, and thereby condition the distinctions between animal/human, nature/culture, private/public, time/history that make politics possible (2007: 59; 1998: 8). The crucial difference between politics today and classical politics is that these distinctions have been undermined by the modern state. In the classical polis zoe– (simple, natural life, shared by animals and humans) is excluded from the realm of politics proper, and is confined to the private realm of the household. This kind of life is clearly distinguished from bios, ‘the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group’ (1998: 1), which takes place in the public sphere. The classical polis depends on marking the distinctions between these two different realms of existence. In contrast, in the modern state, the realm of zoe– becomes increasingly politicised and its distinction from bios disappears from view. Instead, politics becomes biopolitics, devoted to the production and preservation of natural life. The result of this is twofold: on the one hand, as Foucault has shown, there is a proliferation of disciplinary technologies through which individuals are produced as ‘docile bodies’; on the other hand, there is a massive increase in the power of the state to control all aspects of human existence. According to Agamben, the connection between biopolitics and juridical-sovereign power is something that the work of both Arendt and Foucault points towards, but does not adequately address. Arendt does not link her analysis in The Human Condition of the rise of the social and the decline of politics to her earlier analysis of totalitarianism. Foucault never examines the exemplary sites of biopolitical power, the totalitarian state and the concentration camp (Agamben, 1998: 4). As a result we lack a proper understanding of the enabling conditions of modern state power and the implications of those conditions in a contemporary era in which state sovereignty is under threat from the

[ 143 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 144

Diagnosing the times forces of globalisation. In Homo Sacer and various later volumes, Agamben aims to elucidate these conditions and their implications and to examine the possibilities for an alternative politics (1998: 10–11). In accounting for the nature of sovereign power, Agamben utilises two figures: the sovereign authority whose right to decide on the exception underpins law (1998: 26), and homo sacer (1998: 81–83). Homo sacer is the figure who, in Roman law, marks the boundary between political life and natural life as a being that may not be sacrificed but may be killed. What is important about both of these figures is the way in which both represent zones of indistinction between what lies inside and outside of the polis. The sovereign power of exception is both law and not law; homo sacer is both included and excluded from both nature and politics: his life is ‘bare life’, not even the simple, natural life of zoe–. At the two extreme limits of the order, the sovereign and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns. (1998: 84)

This symmetrical relation between sovereignty and the bare life of homo sacer is, Agamben argues, fundamental to all sovereign power, whatever the specific form taken by polis or state. In this he follows Benjamin’s argument in Critique of Violence (Benjamin, 1978), in which all law is taken to depend on constitutive violence. In the modern state, however, the moment of inclusive exclusion, that in the classical polis confirmed and protected the distinction between political life and natural life through the production of bare life, has become more than a moment of exception. This is because the dependence of the exercise of sovereign power on its inclusive exclusion of life has shifted from the margin to the centre of politics. This follows the growing importance of the needs and interests of whole populations to the perpetuation of state power since the seventeenth century, accompanied by the discourse of ‘rights of man’ that sought to challenge but actually reinforced new biopolitical forms of sovereign power (Agamben, 1998: 121).6 Within the modern state, all citizens can be said ‘in a specific but extremely real sense, to appear virtually as homines sacri’ (1998: 111). In other words, the moment of exception, in which politics is constituted through sovereign exclusion of life, has become the predominant mode in which politics is conducted. It is for this reason that Agamben sees the camp as the ‘biopolitical paradigm of the modern’. The concentration camp and the refugee camp are both absolutely biopolitical spaces: that is to say that they are both wholly spaces of exception which operate in a zone of indistinction between politics and life, and mark the boundaries between inside and outside of political community (1998: 123, 134). The fact that the former is the product

[ 144 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 145

Apocalyptic times of totalitarian politics and ideology and that the latter is the outcome of ‘humanitarianism’ does not matter for Agamben. Although he acknowledges differences between democratic and authoritarian states, and between fascist and liberal ideologies, insofar as both make life central to politics, both reproduce the original constitutive violence of sovereignty (1998: 10–11). Agamben’s analysis in Homo Sacer and the later volumes Means Without End: Notes on Politics (2000) and State of Exception (2005a) present a highly pessimistic vision of the present of world politics. Although Agamben’s focus is very much on the western philosophical tradition and the western ‘Westphalian’ state, he extends this analysis to the situation of all states and humanity in the context of globalisation. As with Hardt and Negri and Virilio, he identifies the rise of humanitarian intervention in the 1990s as an example of totalising power, rather than as a challenge to the norms of sovereignty. In Agamben’s case, however, again he grounds this analysis in Benjamin’s Critique of Violence. In this text, Benjamin argues that police violence (law-preserving) is increasingly merging with sovereign power (law-making) within the modern state. This means that the constitutive violence that grounds law and the state is being included within the state, creating a permanent ‘state of emergency’ in which law collapses into a violence without limits (1978: 286–287). For Agamben, humanitarian intervention signals the spread of this confusion of sovereign and police power beyond the borders of the state, and means that violence has become the explicit means by which law and politics are conducted world-wide (2000: 112). At the opposite end of the spectrum, biopolitics becomes the micro-management of individual lives and deaths in developments like the legalisation of euthanasia. At all levels, biopolitics degenerates into ‘thanatopolitics’ (1998: 122). In the modern state and state system, there is no stability of distinction between life and politics. Agamben follows Arendt in his claim that it was this distinction that created the space for politics in the classical realm, as the realm of natality and opinion, distinct from the strategic rationality or biological drives determining the realms of work and labour. Combining aspects of Arendt’s argument and Benjamin’s notion of ‘pure violence’, Agamben identifies politics proper with ‘the sphere of a pure mediality without end intended as the field of human action and human thought’ (2000: 117). For this reason there can be no future for politics in the form of the state; instead we need an opening into ‘a nonstatal and nonjuridical politics and human life’ (2000: 112). The problem is how to find the way to this other kind of politics. For Agamben, the answer has to come from starting with the zones of indistinction characteristic of contemporary world politics. Engaging with the relation between sovereign power and sacred life with a view to transcending it, involves bringing together the thought of the end of the state with the thought of the end of history, and making a connection between human temporality and the space of exception.

[ 145 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 146

Diagnosing the times New time/now time Agamben’s answer to the problem of a new politics is developed in the text in which he returns to the idea of a conception of human temporality (historicity) different from that embedded in chronology and philosophies of history, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (2005b). This text consists of an analysis of the opening passages of Paul’s ‘Letter to the Romans’ in the Christian New Testament. This is a text written in order to convey the meaning of ‘Messianic time’, the time of an exigent present, a kind of dislocation between chronological time and its apocalyptic end (2005b: 62). For Agamben, it is a text with extraordinary relevance for our time (‘timeliness’) because it articulates a time that is neither eschatological nor chronological, and which is also simultaneously within and without the spaces of state and law. Paul is writing about a time in which the end of both history and state power are immanent. It is this same kind of time, Agamben argues, that is at issue in Benjamin’s notion of ‘Messianic time’ in the Theses on the Philosophy of History. Indeed, Agamben identifies Paul as the theological dwarf under the table in Benjamin’s opening aphorism, and suggests that Benjamin had Paul’s argument in mind when he wrote the text (2005b: 138; Benjamin, 1999: 245). For Agamben, it is through re-connecting with the experience of Messianic time in both Paul and Benjamin that the opening into ‘nonstatal and nonjuridical’ politics may become possible: the messianic vocation is a movement of immanence or, if one prefers, a zone of absolute indiscernability between immanence and transcendence, between this world and the future world. This will be important in understanding the structure of messianic time. (2005b: 25)

Agamben unpacks the meaning of this temporal structure by relating it to the temporalities of revolt and revolution in Stirner and Marx (2005b: 31–32) and to post-Kantian ‘as if’ arguments that simultaneously deny the possibility of redemption and operate ‘as if’ it were possible (2005b: 33–41). All of these ways of thinking about politics and ethics share ground with Messianic time in so far as they challenge chronological and eschatological conceptions of the relation between past, present and future. But in so far as they maintain the idea of a revolting, revolutionary or observing subject, they do not capture the radical disruption of Messianic time to which Paul testifies. Within this time, all things and all subjects are called into question (2005b: 42).7 The redemption of what has been involves the undoing of the present in relation to the past, which means the undoing of the conditions that made the past possible. Agamben tries to capture the meaning of the experience of this kind of time in terms of the modality of ‘exigency’. In unpacking this concept, he echoes Benjamin’s critique of victors’ history in Theses on the Philosophy of History and calls for a similar mode of relating present to past. For Benjamin, the task of the historical

[ 146 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 147

Apocalyptic times materialist is to identify those moments in the past that call the present into question and fuse with the present in a making of history in which time comes to a standstill (Benjamin, 1999: 245–246). For Agamben, this means an acknowledgement in the present of responsibility to the exigency of the ‘forgotten’, all of the moments that will never be remembered because they are not part of victors’ history. This responsibility is not about writing alternative subaltern histories, but about recognising the dependence of the present on the forgotten past, and therefore the existence of an ongoing claim of the past upon the present (2005b: 40–41). As Benjamin puts it: The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. (Benjamin, 1999: 245–246)

The weak Messianic power inherent in the present, to which the apostle testifies, must be firmly distinguished from the figures of both prophecy and apocalypse as well as from standard secular readings of chronological time. Prophecy relies on the idea that the future is knowable. Apocalypse is the end of secular time in the time of eternity. But Messianic time neither knows its future nor escapes from secular time (chronos); rather it is a time in which the whole of secular time contracts (is redeemed) in a present in which eternity is immanent: ‘the time that remains between time and its end’ (Agamben 2005b: 62–63). It is a time that disrupts but also relates chronological (chronos) and eschatological time (kairos), and therefore an experience of temporal non-coincidence (2005b: 62–64). In explaining this, Agamben points to the difficulties inherent in the representation of time and the distinction between what is representable and what is thinkable. He argues that the notion of an end of time is representable, because it can be conveyed in spatial terms as the end point of a line, but that this notion is not thinkable: we do not have any sense of what the end of time could mean. Conversely, he suggests, Messianic time is unrepresentable in diagrammatic terms as that which inhabits, splits and exceeds the distinction between chronos and kairos, but it is thinkable (2005b: 64). In order to show how Messianic time can be thought, Agamben draws on the linguistics of Guillaume, and his distinction between ‘operational time’ and ‘chronological representation’. The former is the time which it takes for thought to arrive at the latter ‘time image’ (2005b: 66). Operational time, therefore, does not coincide with, but it does enable, the representation of time. Agamben takes this idea and uses it as the basis for a distinction between the time that we ‘are’ (operational) and the time we ‘are in’ (chronological representation). He defines Messianic time as the time we ‘are’ as opposed to the time we ‘are in’. It is operational time, the time it takes for us to ‘end’ time, in the sense of arriving at a representation of

[ 147 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 148

Diagnosing the times it. This is a time that presses ‘within chronological time, working and transforming it from within’ (2005b: 68). And it is solely because of the non-coincidence between our temporality (time interior to time) and chronology (spatially represented time) that we are able to be actors rather than spectators. What follows from this is that Messianic time as kairos should not be understood as a time that transcends chronos, but rather as the ‘pearl embedded in the ring of chance’ – a moment in which chronos is contracted and abridged in the redemption of the past in the present (2005b: 69, 70-71). Whereas our representation of chronological time, as the time in which we are, separates us from ourselves and transforms us into impotent spectators of ourselves – spectators who look at the time that flies without any time left, continually missing themselves – messianic time, an operational time in which we take hold of and achieve our representations of time, is the time that we ourselves are, and for this reason, is the only real time, the only time we have. (2005b: 68)

Paul’s exposition of Messianic time as a ‘now’ time, in which the past is comprehensively undone, also involves accounting for the relation between this ‘now’ time and the law. In his discussion of how ‘promise’ and ‘faith’ are set against the law of the commandments in Paul’s argument, Agamben claims that what is at stake is not the setting of ‘non-law’ against ‘law’ but rather of ‘setting a nonnormative figure of the law against the normative figure of the law’ (2005b: 95). Tracing the etymology of the terms Paul uses to explain the relation between a law of faith and traditional law, Agamben argues that Paul means not that traditional law is simply abolished but that it is deactivated or suspended, yet is simultaneously fulfilled in the law of faith. Agamben then argues that this is the origin of the Hegelian concept of Aufhebung, supporting the widely held view that Hegel’s logic and philosophy of history are a secularisation of Christianity, but also pointing to the Messianic genealogy of Hegel’s thought. In Hegel’s work, according to Agamben, the Messianic becomes flattened out into the eschatological, because Aufhebung is understood in terms of a constant process of deferment towards a future end, rather than as a seizing of time in which it is brought to an end in the present (2005b: 100).8 The Messianic relation between faith and law is one in which the former both deactivates and fulfils the latter. This conclusion leads Agamben back to his earlier analysis of sovereign power and the situation in which law is simultaneously suspended and fulfilled – the state of exception (2005b: 104). He traces an exact parallel between Schmitt’s account of the nature, scope and enforceability of law in the state of exception and the situation of law in Paul’s account of the Messianic condition. In his rendering of the messianic condition of the believer, Paul radicalises the condition of the state of exception, whereby law is applied in disapplying itself, no longer having an inside or an outside. (2005b: 106–7)

[ 148 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 149

Apocalyptic times Paul’s radicalisation of the state of exception, by absolutising the deactivation of the law of the commandments, according to Agamben, essentially exposes the illegitimacy of all legal powers in Messianic time. In contrast to Schmitt, who interprets Paul as justifying the earthly power of the state because it is capable of staving off the coming of the Antichrist at the end of time (2005b: 109–110), Agamben reads Paul instead as exposing the unjustifiablity of sovereign power as such (2005b: 111). Nevertheless, this does not mean that Messianic time transcends law. Faith (religion) and commandment (politics) are not two ‘heterogeneous’ elements but are both elements of law. Faith is the element of ‘pact and constituent power’, commandment is the element of ‘norm in the strict sense’ (2005b: 118–119). In modern terms, according to Agamben, this is the distinction between constitution (Benjamin’s law-making violence) and positive law (Benjamin’s law-preserving violence) (Benjamin, 1978). Messianism does not abandon law but operates in the tension and disconnection between these two elements: the ways in which the promise of the covenants through which the law was founded exceeds what could be fulfilled by obedience to commandment. It is in this context that ‘Grace’ enters as a ‘sovereign capacity’ of giving that cannot be repaid in a relation of exchange and obligation and therefore does not found a new set of commandments (Agamben, 2005b: 123–124). Grace operates in the mode of Benjamin’s ‘pure violence’ (he also terms it ‘divine’); it is an effect in the world that is not the ground of new order and gains its authority solely in virtue of its own power. Agamben goes on to elaborate the nature of this power by dwelling on the connection between ‘faith’ and ‘word’ in Paul’s text. He argues that the confession of faith, for Paul, is not about denoting a particular content but about the performative efficacy of the word itself: faith exists only in so far as it is enacted in the declaration of faith. In exploring this performative quality of faith, Agamben draws on the linguistic analysis of performative speech, specifically those speech acts which are effectively self-authorising. What is essential here is not a relation of truth between words and things, but rather the pure form of the relation between language and world, now generating linkages and real effects. Just as, in the state of exception, law suspends its own application in order to ground its enforcement in a normal case, so too in the performative does language suspend its own denotation only in order to establish links with things. (2005b: 133)

The comparison here between the suspension of the denotative function of language in speech acts and the suspension of law in the state of exception implies their structural equivalence. Agamben treats both phenomena as expressive of the ‘time that we are’, and as exposing the potential relation between Messianic time and the chronological ‘time we are in’. Neither could be possible without a disruption of the standard application of legal and religious norms and the representations of time inherent in them. At the same time,

[ 149 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 150

Diagnosing the times however, as moments of excess that interrupt the relation between the origins and ends of political or religious covenants, the suspension of law as norm and the confession of faith have two different kinds of potential. The first, according to Agamben, is that they may become the ground of normative law, in which contract and obligation are again reinforced. The second is that they may be taken as instances of a pure experience of world (without representation), in which the world is opened up as ‘space for gratuitousness and use’ (2005b: 135). Agamben suggests that we can interpret the history of both church and human society in terms of a ‘dialectic’ between these two tendencies. He also argues that it is always the case (‘and seems to be happening again today’), historically, that the second tendency falls to the wayside, leaving only an atrophied normative law in the sovereign power of the state and the dogma of the church (2005b: 135). To set against this, we have only the weak Messianic power of our capacity to set word against law, the nonjuridical against the juridical. This is a power that is weak not because it is ineffective but because it is entirely non-cumulative, a ‘remnant of potentiality’, the performative power of language that exceeds both what is said and any specific act of saying and is the ongoing capacity to undo the worlds of fact and law ‘making them freely available for use’ (2005b: 137). This remnant of potentiality echoes Agamben’s characterisation of the temporality of pleasure, and its relation to revolutionary action, in Infancy and History, and also his account of the potential of the ‘planetary petty bourgeoisie’ to transcend global biopolitics in The Coming Community (1993).9 But the sense in which in both the earlier and the later texts Messianic time is counterposed to normativity, is also simultaneously put into question by the way in which normativity itself depends on Messianic power and the sheer openness of its potential for good or ill. In State of Exception, Agamben returns to the idea of the ‘dialectic; between normative and non-normative tendencies within the history of the Western legal order’. However within this text, it is the blurring of the boundaries between constitutive and the normative rather than the disappearance of constitutive power that shapes the current fate of human history: As long as the two elements remain correlated yet conceptually, temporally, and subjectively distinct . . . their dialectic – though founded on a fiction – can nevertheless function in some way. But when they tend to coincide in a single person, when the state of exception in which they are bound and blurred together, becomes the rule, then the juridical-political system transforms itself into a killing machine. (2005a: 86)

Agamben interprets current world politics as the generalisation of a state of exception, the loss of the differentiation of life from politics, constitutive from normative power. As with Virilio, Agamben sees the problems of the present as stemming from the failure to sustain, or if necessary inaugurate the distinctions

[ 150 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 151

Apocalyptic times that make politics possible. The developments that he takes as exemplifying the parlous state of the current world order, again as with Virilio, include the workings of the global political economy, the development of bio-technology and humanitarianism (2004: 77). In both intra- and inter-state relations, Agamben sees a potential for tyranny, which essentially stems from the global reach of the ‘spectacular’ democracies of the west, within which the boundaries between constitutive and normative power have already been thoroughly undermined, including in relation to the state itself as a viable political-juridical category (1993; 2000: 86–87, 16). Within this context, the distinction between law and violence is lost and the former collapses into the latter. In contrast to Virilio, however, Agamben suggests the possibility of challenges to this pessimistic scenario. In Means Without End: Notes on Politics, he refers to the ways in which spectacular democracies also produce ‘singularities’, those subversive movements and events that are unrepresentable by the state and articulate a Messianic interruption of state representation (2000: 114–116). However, in general Agamben’s discussion of such challenges relies on a highly formalised set of structural possibilities that are derived from the same problem of the originary distinction and confusion of the categories of human and animal, politics and life, history and time. At the root of Agamben’s critique of the contemporary world is an argument about the ways in which politics is destroyed by a thinking that reduces human temporality to chronology and eschatology. Within this kind of thinking, in which the social sciences and philosophy of history work hand in hand, humanity is understood as an ‘anthropological machine’ with a historical destiny, and we are led into the world of biopolitics and the global confusion of sovereign and police power. In order to break away from this conception of humanity, Agamben calls for a thinking that reveals the distinction between man and animal in the ‘hiatus’ within man, the emptiness internal to the dislocation between language and its subject and between the experiences of operational and representational time (2004: 92). But the argument for the normative power of the non-normative is always caught up in the same paradox: either it inaugurates a new regime of normativity or it remains a ‘weak’ Messianic capacity, which it is impossible to predict or direct, and which can accomplish nothing. Agamben’s argument appears to be caught between the political theologies of Schmitt and Benjamin: While Schmitt attempts every time to reinscribe violence within a juridical context, Benjamin responds to this gesture by seeking every time to assure it – as pure violence – an existence outside of the law. (2005a: 59)

Conclusion The arguments of Virilio and Agamben both challenge the accounts of political temporality governing social scientific and normative arguments as to the current

[ 151 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 152

Diagnosing the times state of world politics. In developing their alternative account of the present, they both draw on earlier critics of the philosophy of history, within whom there is also a strong tendency to see social science and historicism as part of the same, dangerous, modernist narrative. In addition, however, both also draw on aspects of Messianic Judeo-Christian theology. The resulting readings of world-political time and the times of world politics, in apocalyptic or Messianic terms, present a powerful contrast to the optimistic interpretations of post-Kantian and postMarxist thinkers discussed in the previous chapter, and they are also a long way from the more cautious social engineering prescribed by scholars of contemporary International Relations, discussed in Chapter 4. Nevertheless, although qualitatively different from these other thinkers in their sociological and philosophical accounts of political time, and in the normative force of their readings of the present, Virilio and Agamben remain qualitatively the same in certain crucial respects. Like the historicists of whom they are critical, and like Arendt and Benjamin before them, both thinkers analyse the times in terms of a tension between determinism (fate) and freedom (control/creation) and situate their analysis as ‘timely’. In other words, they both share the predominant logic of western conceptions of political time, as the task of directing or re-directing chronotic time in the light of the revelation of kairos. Indeed, partly because of the theological vocabulary in which their arguments are expressed, the dualism between chronos and kairos and the association of politics with the control and banishment of chronos is arguably more marked in their work than it is in the arguments of Kant, Hegel and Marx. In addition to the persistence of the idea of the theorist as prophet and time-traveller, Virilio and Agamben also share with social scientific, cosmopolitan and imperial accounts of the times, a unified conception of world-political time and a tendency to conflate the time of western modernity with the time of world politics as such. As with the work discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, the present of world politics is unquestioningly understood as the globalised fate of the liberal, capitalist, western state. Notes 1 This is not entirely accurate, in that there are, as we will see, certain points of contact between Virilio and Agamben and Hardt and Negri in their treatment of the potential consequences of the globalization of bio-power. This is particularly clear in the case of Agamben, who uses the same vocabulary as Hardt and Negri to describe biopolitical globalisation as potentially the production of the ‘common’ (see Agamben, 1993, which was translated by Hardt). Like Hardt and Negri, Agamben sees biopolitical relations as systematically reducing the traditional boundaries between state and non-state, public and private, biological and political. Like them also, he suggests that the apparently destructive effects of global biopolitics may nevertheless be the condition for progressive transformation. However, as I hope to show, Agamben’s analysis is much more formal than Hardt and Negri’s and gives much less sense of how it is that ‘empire’ sows the seeds of its own destruction.

[ 152 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 153

Apocalyptic times 2 As we will see below, Virilio is an eclectic and aphoristic thinker, who does not place his work within a particular genealogy. Nevertheless, one can certainly trace a legacy from Arendt in his work, and he also draws on ideas from his contemporaries, in particular Foucault and Deleuze. Agamben is very strongly influenced by Benjamin, and also draws on Arendt, Derrida and Foucault. 3 For an explanation of the political, aesthetic and religious, as well as philosophical, sources on which Virilio draws in his work, see Armitage (2000b). 4 Virilio acknowledges that, at the time of writing, this dominance of ‘real time’ is not necessarily the case for all parts of the world, but his analysis insists on the ongoing triumph of world time over ‘slower’ local times throughout the globe (1995: 3; 1997b: 134). 5 In this section of the text, Agamben, discussing the distinction between time and history as it originates in Greek thought uses the term aion to refer to the temporal principle of qualitative change, as opposed to chronos – the spatially representable infinite succession of instants (2007: 93) – although elsewhere he introduces the term kairos to capture the same meaning (2007: 115). The distinction maps on to that between chronos and kairos as used in this book, since it is a distinction between natural time and the time that shapes and interrupts natural time. 6 Agamben is following Foucault here, but also echoing arguments (already discussed) made by Hardt and Negri and Virilio about the biopolitical trajectory of the sovereign power of the modern state (Foucault, 1976, 1977, 1980). He shares with Hardt and Negri and Virilio the view that contemporary humanitarianism is part of ‘empire’ rather than a challenge to it. 7 But if Messianic time undoes all things and all subjects, it nevertheless has a quasisubject, which Agamben translates in Paul’s work as the ‘remnant’. In his interpretation of Paul’s account of the body of the elect, Agamben argues that its defining characteristic is non-identity. He concludes this on the basis of Paul’s characterisation of the Christian as the non-coincidence of both Jews and non-Jews with themselves as Jews or non-Jews in terms of flesh and spirit (2005b: 51). This impossibility of identity is then taken as key to the meaning of ‘the people’ as a political actor. This should not be understood in terms of traditional democratic theory as universality, majority or minority, but as the figure assumed in decisive moments (2005b: 57). The point about such a figure is that it can’t be identified with any particular identity or attributes and therefore the distinction between ‘doer’ and ‘deed’ disappears. Something like this unboundedness, undifferentiation and indefinability is the characteristic of Hardt and Negri’s ‘multitude’ (see also Agamben, 1993: 63–65). 8 Agamben follows the discussion of Hegel and Hegelianism here with an examination of deconstruction, which he defines as a ‘thwarted messianism’, one in which the Messianic is recognised but ‘suspended’, because of the impossibility, in Derrida’s view, of coming to terms with foundation. ‘What is essentially messianic and historic is the idea that fulfilment is possible by retrieving and revoking foundation, by coming to terms with it.’ (Agamben, 2005b: 103; see also discussion of Derrida in Chapter 3 above). 9 In Infancy and History Agamben associates the time of pleasure and of revolution with Benjamin and with a Gnostic tradition of thought, in which, Agamben claims, there is: ‘incoherent and unhomogenous time, whose truth is in the moment of abrupt interruption, when man, in a sudden act of consciousness, takes possession of his own condition of being resurrected’ (2007: 101). In The Coming Community the nihilism of ‘spectacular’ democracy and the globalisation of the petty bourgeoisie is ‘probably the form in which humanity is moving toward its own destruction. But this also means that the petty bourgeoisie represents an opportunity unheard of in the history of humanity’ (1993: 65).

[ 153 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:57

Page 154

7

Thinking the present

Introduction H E previous three chapters have explored different approaches to thinking the ‘present’ of world politics. In every case, the diagnoses of, and prescriptions for, the current ‘times’ of world politics depended on assumptions about world-political temporality in which different conceptions of chronos and kairos, and the relation between them, were embedded. All of the theories of contemporary world politics with which we have been concerned developed from two sets of assumptions: one about time as the ground for knowledge claims about world politics, and another concerning claims about the sources of agency and change within the world-political present. The aims of this chapter are firstly to reflect back on and assess accounts of the present examined above; and secondly, in the light of this reflection, to explore some alternative pathways for conceptualising world-political time and their implications for knowledge, agency and change. The first section of the chapter interrogates the temporal framings of the diagnoses and prescriptions involved in the theories considered in Chapters 4 to 6, paying attention to what is occluded as well as what is illuminated by particular assumptions about world-political temporality. It also highlights how these temporal framings relate back to the philosophical accounts of political time discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. It will be argued, firstly, that all of the theories are haunted by the idea that politics is fundamentally associated with the project of controlling time as chronos and creating a different kind of time through the power of kairos. Secondly, and consequently, in spite of their many differences, all of the theories therefore reproduce a pattern in which a particular configuration of temporal experience, inherent in western modernity, is universalised (negatively or positively) as the homogenising time of the present. This blocks the possibility of recognising (or investing in the possibility of) temporal plurality in world politics, and encourages the categorisation of phenomena that do

T

[ 154 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 155

Thinking the present not ‘fit’ as being outside of world-political time (negatively or positively). Thirdly, it will be argued that all of the theories share an aspiration to timeliness. The assumptions about political time inherent in the different theories always put the theorist in the position of prophet and time-traveller, although the implications of that role are not always the same. On the basis of these arguments, I conclude that the resources offered by the particular temporalisations of world politics involved in the theories under consideration are limited, because they perpetuate the exclusion of large parts of the world from what matters in the world-political present, and because they claim a theoretical status that is unsustainable. In the second section of the chapter, I focus attention on two areas of theoretical work that are premised on challenging the exclusionary implications of dominant theories of contemporary world politics: postcolonialism and feminism. I argue that these bodies of scholarship undermine the assumptions about world-political temporality examined above, and require a different way of thinking about time. In particular they undermine the idea that one can theorise world-political time in homogeneous or unified terms or that theorising world-political time can aspire to be timely. From these theoretical perspectives, politics cannot be about making or controlling time and theory is not about prophecy or time travelling. But what kind of conception of world-political time does this presume? And what sort of knowledge, and what kind of account of political agency does it imply? In working out answers to these questions, I suggest that we can follow the link between postcolonial and feminist arguments and certain threads in the theorisation of political time discussed in Chapter 3, specifically the arguments of Derrida and Deleuze, to delineate a different approach to theorising the temporality of world politics. Diagnosis and prescription Each of the theoretical arguments addressed in Chapters 4 to 6 offered a diagnosis of the times with prescriptive implications. This is as true of the International Relations theorists as it is of Fukuyama, and as true of Virilio and Agamben as it is of Habermas and Hardt and Negri, even though in each case the former would disassociate themselves strongly from the taint of philosophy of history. In this respect, all of the theories considered are thoroughly modernist in their orientation towards thinking the present in relation to some broader temporal narrative, an orientation that is only possible if it is assumed that the present can be demarcated from past and future, and that some sense can be made of the concept of the present and what it implies for the future. As we have seen, however, the ‘broader temporal narrative’, built on assumptions about chronos and kairos, is not the same for each of the theories, giving us very different substantive visions of the present and future of world politics.

[ 155 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 156

Diagnosing the times For example, Bueno de Mesquita’s and the liberal democratic peace theorists’ accounts of what world politics is and will be relies on the chronotic linear, Newtonian time of efficient causation, but it also relies on the kairotic power of strategic rationality to ground and direct the relation between present and future. In this respect, International Relations theorists reproduce an assumption that, as noted in Chapters 2 and 3, we find in western thought from Machiavelli to Benjamin, that is, that chronos is a threat to politics. This means that in order for there to be politics, including world politics, chronos has to be related to a kairotic temporality in which natural time (most often understood in terms of an infinite linear succession of moments) becomes shaped through an orientation to beginnings (moments of foundation and promise), ends (teleological culminations) or interruptions (Messianic breaks).1 In neo-liberal accounts of contemporary world politics, rationality operates, in Baconian fashion, as the masculine birth of time. It is the key to making and controlling time. And it is also bound up with a particular understanding of what it means to be an international actor, and therefore to be inside or outside of worldpolitical time. Thus, theorists such as Bueno de Mesquita offer us a vision of world politics in which it continues to be largely dominated by key state actors and inter-state regimes and in which the continued (and expanding) hegemony of liberal democracy and capitalism is identified as the outcome of rational foreign policy-making. The rationality of decisions that contribute to this outcome is reinforced by the prescriptive implications of the (rationally driven) temporality of experimental reconstructions of the dynamics of world politics. On this account, there are two possibilities for the future: a descent into irrationality (the rejection of liberal democracy and capitalism) or the gradual reproduction of all parts of the world in the image of the west. It is precisely because these are the choices that the theorist is able to act as deus ex machina, using insights gained in the controlled time of the laboratory. The social scientist travels in experimental time, which reproduces the essence of actual time, in order to predict and potentially to change what will happen. The point and purpose of social scientific theory is to be ‘timely’, in the sense of making a timeous contribution to ongoing processes, not being ‘too late’ to make a difference (Chambers, 2003: 1). Habermas’s reading of the times of world politics shares some ground with Bueno de Mesquita and with liberal democratic peace theorists such as Ray and Russett, but is both more and less confident about the future direction of those times. Like the liberal social scientists, Habermas identifies political time with the capacity to control and counteract chronos. In Habermas’s case, this kairotic capacity is rooted both in strategic rationality and in the human universal of communicative reason. Strategic rationality underpins the technical and scientific advances that enable complex societies to develop, but it is communicative rationality that enables the kind of moral learning through which political

[ 156 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 157

Thinking the present progress may be guaranteed. For Habermas it is Kant rather than Bacon who provides the inspiration for how to understand and judge the present. And this helps to explain why Habermas is both more and less confident than the social scientists in his reading of the times. He (Habermas) is more confident because he has a fully-fledged theoretical account of the meaning and directionality of historical developments from simple to complex societies. Moreover, his account allows for material and moral determinations to mutually reinforce each other in the course of world history. He is less confident because in the present the mutual reinforcement of material and moral determinations is less significant than the ongoing tension between the two. This makes it harder to predict what will happen but reinforces the responsibility of the theorist to respond to the present in the most appropriate way. What is not in doubt, however, is that world politics can be understood not only as the outcome of western history (which is a simple reflection of the pattern of human development in general) but as the instantiation of the key characteristics of that history (both good and bad): the nation-state; international law; the capitalist economy; civil society; and the public sphere. The ongoing challenge is to ensure the globalisation of what is positive in this legacy at the expense of the negative. For this reason the theorist, in a direct echo of Kant’s understanding of the philosopher’s role, argues ‘as if’ world history is moving in the appropriate direction, taking Kant’s essay on perpetual peace as his manifesto. For Hardt and Negri, the political project of controlling chronos and producing new time takes its inspiration primarily from Marx’s materialist philosophy of history.2 On this account kairos is immanent to, but also distinct from, chronos. It (kairos) is a latent power of interruption and creativity embodied in the multitude’s challenge to empire. Empire is parasitic, it has no centre and does not act, and it has emptied out the traditional sites of revolutionary agency through the biopolitical power relations by which it is characterised. But empire simultaneously is producing the conditions for its own destruction in the multitude, which will create revolutionary political time again. In this vision of the present of world politics, there is only the holistic, biopolitical time of global capital. The state is no longer the key actor in world-political time, and all collective and individual agency is in the same temporal boat. In this context, the task of the theorist is to delineate the dangers and possibilities of the present in order to point the multitude in the right direction. There could be no purpose in Hardt and Negri’s theory of empire if it wasn’t produced ‘in time’ to inform and encourage the multitude’s capacity to overcome empire. In this sense, the theorists both know what will happen and are part of making it happen, as timetravellers and prophets. For liberal democratic peace theorists, liberal democracy and capitalism represent the meaningful end of history in much the same way as they do for Fukuyama. For Habermas and Hardt and Negri the present instantiates ongoing

[ 157 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 158

Diagnosing the times kairotic truths about historical time, but is also envisaged as a stage on the way to a different, more positive, kind of future for world politics. For Virilio, all of the above thinkers are trapped in the hubris that endorses the acceleration of chronos in modernity and thereby helps to destroy the conditions for politics. Bacon, Kant and Marx identify the control of chronos with a temporality of progress, in which orientation towards progress is the way to prevent collapse into an a-political time of pure succession. For these thinkers politics is about using (tapping into) the powers of kairos to regulate, control and transform seasonal or clock time into something different. For Virilio, the paradoxical consequence of this kind of thinking is that politics falls increasingly victim to the dynamics of chronos, which were always ultimately reducible to the speed of light, but which could only be fully understood and experienced as such in the wake of ‘progress’. For Virilio, politics is about the capacity to generate a time that is extended, not through orientation to an ideal end of history, but through the bounded space of the city-state. In this respect, his argument echoes those of Machiavelli and Arendt, and, as with Arendt, locates politics in the past rather than in the present or the future. However, in spite of his fundamental disagreement with social scientific, post-Kantian and post-Marxist accounts of the meaning of the present, Virilio’s analysis of world politics is substantively very similar. Contemporary world politics is envisaged as the victory of global capital and liberal democracy, and this victory is traced as the necessary outcome of material processes. This is not, however, either a comfortable end of history or a stage on the way to a more positive future, it is a doom-laden condition in which global catastrophe is imminent. In this context, the role of the theorist is not to help history on its way, but rather to encourage the world to become conscious of its parlous condition ‘in time’ to do something about it. Even more than with International Relations theorists, Habermas or Hardt and Negri this ‘doing something’ is an urgently necessary, heroic intervention. Virilio’s apocalyptic prophecies simultaneously situate the theorist as powerless and as a potential saviour. Agamben, like Virilio, sees the chronotic time of science and the kairotic time of eschatology as two sides of the same coin of the hubris of modernity. For him the possibility of politics is tied up with the capacity to interrupt and make new time before or in between the ways in which time is represented in the western tradition, successive chronos and teleological kairos. He takes inspiration for this possibility from Benjamin’s notion of Messianic time, a time of redemption, which, he argues, is particularly ‘timely’ for the present of world politics. This is a present dominated by the biopolitical control of life within and beyond the modern western state, which is increasingly becoming the global generalisation of the ‘state of exception’. Agamben’s account of the present of world politics is bleak, represented by the figures of the refugee and the concentration camp. As with Virilio, Agamben attributes responsibility for this bleak condition to the

[ 158 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 159

Thinking the present dual effects of scientific reason and historicism on the development of the western state. It is for this reason that Paul’s letter to the Romans and Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history are timely. They speak to the possibility of making new time even within the old, redeeming law in faith and past sacrifice in present action. But, as we have seen, this possibility is always also the possibility of law-making and law-preserving violence. It is the task of the philosopher to witness to temporal paradox and the possibility, but also improbability, of a different kind of politics. The above theories are focused on identifying what matters in contemporary world politics. They draw our attention to the structures, institutions and tendencies that are important for the meaning of what we see in the world-political present, and for what we can deduce about the world-political future. None of these theoretical accounts are simple. They all acknowledge the complexity of world politics and are wary of making definitive statements about the future. Nevertheless, they all confirm that the range of possibilities, and of possible remedies, inherent in world politics derive from a temporal trajectory inherent (for good or ill) in western modernity. This is not simply because of the contingent fact that western powers acquired unprecedented global power over the course of the last few centuries, but because western political time is presumed to be world-political time, the time that drives or leads historical development. For all of our theorists, the time of world politics is the time of liberal capitalist states and the globalisation of capitalism. This temporality enables an overarching sense to be made of foreign policy-making, international law, global civil society activity, humanitarian intervention, global governance, intra- and inter-state politics in general, and of specific events like the end of the Cold War, the 1991 Gulf War, 9/11 or the war in Iraq. These temporal assumptions do not prevent theorists from acknowledging that there are a variety of phenomena and events, of other histories and experiences, that play a role in world politics (phenomena which might include authoritarian capitalist states, religion, non-western culture, clientalist politics, imperialism, colonisation, the organisation of reproduction, gendered relations of power). But they reduce the significance of such phenomena for the purposes of diagnosis and prediction by subsuming them under a master narrative of time, so that the idea of an alternative temporal perspective on world politics becomes literally unintelligible. Any other temporal perspective is automatically transmuted into an aspect of a narrative in which the present of the liberal capitalist state and the globalisation of capitalism is a permanent, or ‘stage on the way’, culmination. Temporal assumptions enable our theorists to make claims about world-political time as a whole, where it has been and where it is going. But, above and beyond this, such assumptions also mean that it is possible for theorists to claim a grasp of the ways in which political time is shaped and directed and therefore for their claims to figure as timely interventions, prophecies or predictions that make (or

[ 159 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 160

Diagnosing the times may make) a difference. The ways of thinking the time of world politics exemplified in the theories examined above can be considered as inadequate for two reasons. In the first place, they are inadequate because, whether critical or not of western modernity, they are profoundly blinkered by their attachment to the idea that we can use western modernity as the key to making sense of the past, present and future of the world as such. In the second place, they are unsatisfactory because they put the theorist in the position of time-traveller and prophet, thus succumbing to an old temptation about the nature of political time within western political thought. This is the temptation of thinking that politics is conditioned by the possibility of making or controlling time. The first argument is at the heart of postcolonial and feminist objections to mainstream theorisations of world politics; the second argument echoes one we have already encountered in the work of Bergson, Derrida and Deleuze. Critiques of world-political time Other times Unsurprisingly, the questioning of temporal assumptions in theories of world politics has come primarily on behalf of those left out of or marginalised in accounts of the world’s past, present and future. Such persistently excluded or marginalised figures include aboriginals, peasants, non-western peoples, women and children. From the point of view of postcolonial critics, the only way in which non-western peoples are brought into the story of contemporary world politics is, at best, as latecomers, forced (now or in the future) to join the party, and, at worst, as those outside of politics altogether (subject to anthropological investigation). In particular it has been argued that historicist theories, whether liberal or Marxist-Hegelian, deny any significance to non-western indigenous temporalities and their different accounts of the past in relation to present and future. Blaney and Inayatullah point to the way in which the social sciences of International Relations and International Political Economy occlude cultural difference by temporalising it, a move traceable back to early modernity and the simultaneous emergence of the Westphalian state system and European colonialism, and forward to modernisation and liberal democratic peace theories: With the conversion of space into time, the constructed temporal backwardness of the savages is equated with the imagined temporal origins of the European self in antiquity and the spatially distinct other is thereby converted into a temporally prior self. (Inayatullah and Blaney, 2004: 56)

The key result of this temporalising move is that it removes any need to address the terms in which these peoples temporalise their own historicity; instead it renders the whole process of colonisation and decolonisation an insignificant

[ 160 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 161

Thinking the present detour in the ‘true’ story of international politics. In order to understand and explain contemporary international politics, scholars of international relations turn to the narrative of Westphalia, because that is what international politics is, by definition. Actors that are not states, and non-state actors that are not western can only be bit-part players in this drama of origin, even though they may grow up to play a starring role. Chakrabarty makes a similar critique of the assumptions underlying social scientific work on the nature of capitalist modernity, work which persistently conflates modernity as such with the temporality of western political and economic development, and therefore counts nonwestern modernities as ‘backward’ (2000: 238). At stake are always two related moves on the part of western social science: firstly the neglect of alternative temporal framings as being relevant to understanding and explanation (they may be objects of investigation but not frameworks for thought); secondly, the subsumption of the non-western under an encompassing western narrative of political time, so that the non-western is either irrelevant to, or explicable in terms of, what really matters. As Chakrabarty points out, this is not a criticism of the idea that western capitalist modernity is shaping the political economy of non-western parts of the world; it is a criticism of the idea that what this means experientially, analytically or normatively can necessarily be made sense of in a western temporal frame. Blaney’s, Inayatullah’s and Chakrabarty’s targets are the kinds of historicism inherent in Kantian and Marxist-Hegelian-inspired progressive interpretations of world history. It would therefore seem that their critiques are more applicable to the work of Bueno de Mesquita, Ray and Russett, Habermas or Hardt and Negri than to that of the critics of philosophical history, Virilio and Agamben. However, on examination, this turns out not to be the case. In Virilio’s case, there is no question that the chronotic time of western modernity will triumph over the local, slower times that may still be in operation in the global South. Again, what matters for world politics is the technological revolutions and hubris of western states and, in particular, of the remaining hegemonic power, which will drive the whole world in a particular direction. Once more nonwestern peoples figure as passive victims of forces that they neither create nor control, and their local temporality offers no useful insight into the meaning of the present. Agamben’s argument is somewhat different: here we have the figure of the refugee raised to an exemplary status, which must surely indicate recognition of the significance of non-western actors to the meaning of the present. But if one looks at the way in which the refugee figures in Agamben’s theory it is as the constitutive outside of politics, a position of absolute vulnerability to sovereign power in which the capacity for political action is gone. This is a figure out of political time in much the same way as Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’, whose usefulness resides in the extent to which he prompts western critical self-reflection. Moreover the meaning of the refugee’s situation is constructed wholly in

[ 161 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 162

Diagnosing the times terms of western temporality and history, the product of a state of exception always exemplified by the Nazi regime and the dark side of the dialectic of western enlightenment. The exclusion of the colonial or non-western subject from the temporal meta-narratives of social scientists and political theorists of cosmopolitanism and globalisation points to one range of omissions in theories of the worldpolitical present. Another source of questioning of these narratives has come from dissident voices within western social and political theory, in particular from feminism. Seventeenth-century western social and political theory places the ‘savage’ outside of political time, and constitutes him as an appropriate subject for anthropological investigation and as, poised between nature (chronos) and a future political time, some kind of prior stage in the evolution of politics proper. Simultaneously, it places ‘woman’ in an analogous position, outside of political time, poised between nature and civil society in the private sphere, conditioning but not participating in the political. Unlike the ‘savage’ however, woman is obliged to maintain this position; she is not a ‘stage on the way’ in a linear historical story, but a constant outsider, confirming and unsettling the political order. Perhaps it is for this reason, as noted in Chapter 1, that the way in which both natural chronos and exceptional kairos are depicted in western philosophical thought is often gendered feminine. Machiavelli’s Fortune, Bacon’s Nature, Kant’s Nature/Providence, Benjamin’s whore called ‘Once Upon a Time’ all speak to the uneasy relationship of the feminine to political time. This uneasy relationship is confirmed in the role of masculinised rational and revolutionary actors in liberal and Marxist accounts of political temporality, and in the nostalgia for clear boundaries between public and private spheres to be found in Arendt, Virilio and Agamben. As with postcolonial critics, feminists have objected to their exclusion from political time and to modes of inclusion that effectively subsume women’s time and women’s history under a masculinist master narrative. The point is not simply to demand recognition as part of the story, but to insist that there is no ‘story’: rather there are ‘stories’, alternative temporalities that may not fit with the dominant ways in which political temporality is conceived (Kristeva, 2002). Feminist sensitivity to the problems of dominant ways of thinking political time has been reinforced by the encounter between feminism and postcolonialism in the international politics of feminism. Attempts to export the lessons of western feminism have all too often failed to live up to feminists’ own insights into the plurality of political time. Instead western feminists from the nineteenth century onwards have identified themselves as carrying forward a progressive mission that subsumes all women under the same temporal condition. In recent years, the most important discourse for feminist transnational activism has been that of women’s human rights. And this language has underpinned, and provided normative force for, campaigns around civil, political and

[ 162 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 163

Thinking the present economic issues, from female genital mutilation, to women’s reproductive rights, to development. As we saw in Chapter 5, for feminist theorists such as Benhabib, this kind of development signals a process of moral learning, in which through a mixture of communicative and coercive encounters, the world as a whole may be improved (Chapter 5, 00; Benhabib, 2002: 40). Postcolonial feminists have taken issue with the way that this kind of thinking repeats the pattern of subsuming non-western under western norms through an implicit philosophy of history. In practice, it has been pointed out that this kind of discourse has justified ‘maternalist’ intervention by western women in the lives of non-western women in a way that echoes the history of western imperialism (Spivak, 1998a: 333). In response to dissatisfaction with the homogenisation of world-political time underpinning much western feminist transnational activism, postcolonial feminists have sought to engage with the insights of both postcolonial and feminist scholars in theorising world politics (Mohanty et al., 1991; Mohanty, 2003). One example of this is the work of Spivak, who unsettles not only the hegemonic narratives of development and modernisation, but also the ways in which postcolonial and feminist alternatives demonstrate their own hegemonic tendencies (Spivak, 1998a; 1998b; 1999). The vocabulary of development is necessarily tied to a view that the ‘un- or underdeveloped’, the ‘less developed’ or ‘developing’ are somehow ‘behind’ their ‘developed’ counterparts. Whether one explains this through essentialist arguments about national inferiorities, modernisation arguments about the lack of capitalist market relations or liberal democratic law, or Marxist arguments about colonial exploitation is irrelevant to the fact that in all these cases it is the history of the liberal capitalist state which sets the agenda and vocabulary in which problems of poverty, infant mortality, poor housing and environmental sustainability are to be addressed. According to Spivak, the development programmes of (western/metropolitan dominated) international intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations perpetuate normative vocabularies with particular disciplinary effects. Interests and ideas of global civil society actors and publics are obliged to be articulated in terms of the values that dominate those organisations, and so are the debates that go on within and between those actors and publics. For Benhabib the dominance of a liberal rights vocabulary is a sign of progress in international politics (2002: 40). For Spivak, however, the dominance of the liberal vocabulary underlines the degree to which there is no equality of exchange between those she identifies as the global ‘subalterns’ and those that dictate the language of that exchange (1998b: 332). to establish international women’s rights upon the human rights paradigm, the myriad specificities of women’s histories must be flattened out to assume a history whose synchrony is something like the UN’s six-point platform of action. (1998a: 816)

[ 163 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 164

Diagnosing the times At the same time as being highly critical of the temporal framings of transnational feminism, Spivak problematises the idea that the postcolonial historiography of ‘subaltern studies’ should be seen as producing an alternative truth to imperial history, in which the subaltern subject takes the place of the imperial subject as the key to political time.3 Instead she argues that that the focus on the subaltern should be about disturbing the idea of a settled truth of political time: ‘the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic’ (1987: 207). In order to underline this, she deploys feminist insights to point to how the subaltern account of political time depends on the exclusion of women’s time (1987: 215–221), and uses the figure of the subaltern woman to de-centre any claim to the subaltern as subject of universal history in the sense of Hegelian self-consciousness or Marxist class. In Benhabib’s case, the figure of ‘woman’ confirms the moral demand that humanity trumps the specificities of identity and that participants in moral dialogue (the end of history implicit in communicative reason) must be ‘human’ before they can be ‘woman’. For Spivak, on the other hand, it is the unrepresentable specificity of the multiply silenced subaltern woman that works to disturb assumptions about the historical significance of identification with any particular subject position, whether it be that of ‘human’, ‘woman’, ‘subaltern’ or ‘third world’. Postcolonial and feminist critics call into question temporal meta-narratives, such as those of the theorists considered in Chapters 4 to 6. In particular, they draw attention to the plurality of temporalities relevant to theorising world politics, suggesting that the project of diagnosing, let alone prescribing for, the times of world politics may be a good deal more complicated than most theories allow for. This can be illustrated in relation to aspects of ‘our’ world-political times, which have been major focuses of attention in post- Cold War scholarship, such as the globalisation of capitalism or international humanitarianism, including military humanitarian intervention. As we have seen, the ways in which these phenomena have been characterised, explained and judged within the different theoretical traditions discussed above, have relied on a meta-narrative of worldpolitical temporality. For the liberal theorist of international politics, the globalisation of capitalism is the extension of capitalist market relations as developed within existing liberal capitalist states. It can be explained as the outcome of the strategic rationality that governs historical development, and that was bound, eventually, to drag all humanity in the wake of western powers. And it can be judged as part of a generally progressive historical dialectic in which capitalism and liberalism are mutually reinforcing. Theorists such as Virilio also characterise the globalisation of capitalism as the generalisation of trends originally manifested in the liberal capitalist west. In their case, however, this is explained by reference to material forces immanent within earlier forms of capitalism that have driven a shift from sovereign to biopolitical power. Rather than instantiating progress, this represents the intensification of

[ 164 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 165

Thinking the present exploitation and control, and the apocalyptic possibility of the end of time. From the point of view of postcolonial and feminist critics, such examples of the characterisation, explanation and judgement of trends and events in world politics, put forward a vision of ‘our times’ that constructs ‘the’ world-political present in a way that disregards the extent to which it does or does not fit with the various presents of those people, institutions, communities and states not narrated as in the vanguard of historical development. The idea that the globalisation of capitalism is ultimately the same process in China as in Germany or in Russia as in the United States is rendered plausible by a temporal metanarrative in which a singular telos guarantees the eventual subsumption of plurality under unity. But, as postcolonial and feminist critics point out, the time of capitalism, the relation of its present to past and future in these different contexts is not the same. Nor is it the case that we can think about it in terms of a plurality of neat, self-contained temporal cylinders, in which distinct capitalisms each follow their own trajectory and share an internally common present. The present of the Chinese factory worker cuts across the present of the multinational corporation and the western consumer, but is also cut across by the distinctive temporalities of, for example, gender and nationality. In order to take this into account, analysts of the globalisation of capitalism need to make a conscious effort to follow Chakrabarty’s injunction to ‘provincialise’ Europe, in order not to pre-judge ‘the’ global present in terms of a parochial temporality, which is assumed to orient time’s arrow and therefore to provide the key to causal explanation and prediction. If the ‘our’ is to have any meaning in the diagnosis of ‘our times’ in the world-political present, then explanation and normative judgement of ‘our times’ has to become sensitive to a multiplicity of times and temporalities. This means a willingness to bracket what theorists already think they know, based on their interpretation of their own present, about what drives capitalist time, and the extent to which it is good or bad for humanity in general. For Habermas and other cosmopolitans, international humanitarianism, including military humanitarian intervention, is understood as part of the constitutionalising tendency of international law. Whatever its shortcomings in practice, in principle humanitarian intervention reflects the progressive logic immanent to western modernity. For Hardt and Negri also international humanitarianism is driven by a logic originating in western modernity. In their case, it exemplifies the decline in sovereign, juridical power and the concomitant rise of biopolitical governmentality heralded by welfarism and post-Fordism in the advanced capitalist states. For Hardt and Negri humanitarian intervention represents an extension of the hegemonic power of empire rather than of human rights, and is the opposite of a genuinely resistant emancipatory politics. From the point of view of postcolonial and feminist critics, both of these interpretations rest on the illegitimate generalisation of particu-

[ 165 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 166

Diagnosing the times larity. The temporality of the sovereign power of most states, the patterning of their past, present and future, is radically different to that of those imperial and colonial states that Habermas, Hardt and Negri all take as the blueprint for world-historical development. Events such as the intervention in Kosovo or the creation of the International Criminal Court set up a series of intersections between western meta-narratives of political time, in particular the past of the ‘dark side of enlightenment’ exemplified by the Second World War and the Holocaust, and a range of other meta-narratives in which the constitutive experience of definitive wrong is different. From the point of view of presents defined primarily in relation to colonised and subjugated pasts, it is hardly surprising that humanitarian intervention, whether military or otherwise, tends to be explained and evaluated not as an example of world historical progress nor as ‘empire’ but as imperialism or realpolitik, and not as the overcoming of sovereign power (for good or ill), but as the confirmation of the radical asymmetries of the sovereign power of states in the contemporary international system. This does not mean that there is some singular ‘counter-history’ which instantiates a ‘better’ truth of the meaning of humanitarianism in the worldpolitical present. Rather, it means that there is more than one truth about international humanitarianism as a sign of ‘our’ times, because there is more than one way in which the world-political present lives. As with the debate over women’s human rights discussed above, the same action or event may have radically different meanings and material consequences, and present radically different political opportunities across different political temporalities. The interventions of feminist and postcolonial critics into mainstream accounts of world politics call for ways of theorising world-political time as inherently plural and cross-cutting. This requires the abandonment of an overarching orientation for explanatory and normative judgement provided by generalising particular interpretations of the trajectory of the arrow of world-political time, whether these interpretations are grounded in imperial or subaltern experience. However, it also requires a rejection of the kind of multicultural or ‘clash of civilisation’ argument that treats world politics as the co-existence of distinct, internally homogeneous and mutually exclusive histories. The challenge of thinking the present of world politics is the challenge of thinking heterotemporality, ultimately neither one present nor many presents, but a mutual contamination of ‘nows’ that participate in a variety of temporal trajectories, and which do not derive their significance from one meta-narrative about how they all fit together. Re-thinking the present Postcolonial and feminist critics point to what is missing in predominant temporal framings of world politics, but they also suggest alternative ways for thinking about world-political time that might offer a different way forward for

[ 166 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 167

Thinking the present understanding ‘our’ times. Chakrabarty suggests that the way to address the question of how to understand political modernity in South Asia is by conceptualising political time as double: ‘History 1’ and ‘History 2’. The former refers to the universalising narrative of capitalist imperialism, whereas the latter refers to the temporalities inherent in the ways of being in the world with which capitalist imperialism interacts. In Chakrabarty’s view, these two modes of temporality cut across and interrupt one another and imply both that there is an inherent undecideability in the nature of historical development, and that ‘heterotemporality’ is an irreducible feature of history (Chakrabarty, 2000: 71, 94–95). At the level of thinking about what it means to be a subaltern historian, Chakrabarty insists on the relation between historicisation, ‘constructed within the master code of secular history’ (2000: 93) and other forms of temporalisation, embedded in lived experience, that cannot be encompassed within the ‘master code’, even as they in some sense make it possible (2000: 112–113). For Chakrabarty, the co-existence of different temporalities in lived experience (‘time-knots’) is what provokes the project of historicisation in the first place, but that project is always going to fail to encompass (explain away) all of that non-contemporaneity. Subaltern pasts thus act as a supplement to the historian’s pasts. They are supplementary in a Derridean sense – they enable history, the discipline, to be what it is and yet at the same time help to show what its limits are. In calling attention to the limits of historicizing, they help us distance ourselves from the imperious instincts of the discipline – the idea that everything can be historicized or that one should always historicize. (2000: 112)

Spivak, like Chakrabarty, makes use of Derrida’s deconstructive approach to thinking time and historicity in her attempts to formulate a ‘history of the vanishing present’ (1987: 197–221; 1999: 238). For both thinkers, the significance of Derrida’s work lies in its insistence on the present as never being fully present and therefore capable of being known and controlled, whether from the point of view of the political subject (subaltern, woman, subaltern woman) or of the theorist or historian. Instead the present is haunted by multiple pasts, no representation of it can be adequate and it is inherently unpredictable. This suggests that Derrida’s ‘hauntological’ approach to thinking about political time may be a good place to start in order to elucidate an alternative to the theories that have been the object of postcolonial and feminist criticism. Derrida’s account of political time, like Agamben’s, ties together an argument about the time of law (the state) with an argument about the time of revolution (history). However, whereas Agamben accepts Benjamin’s view of the Messianic potential inherent in the interstices of chronological and eschatological representations of time, Derrida is suspicious of Benjamin’s Messianism. For Derrida there can be no exemplary (timely) moment of ‘new’ and ‘now’ time, forged in the redemptive fusion between origin and end.4 From the point

[ 167 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 168

Diagnosing the times of view of Chakrabarty and Spivak it is this suspension of the Messianic that constitutes the attraction of Derrida’s position, which simultaneously demonstrates the ineradicable ‘out of joint-ness’ of the present and the impossibility of making and controlling time in the ‘blueprint’ mode suggested by the ‘ontological’ Marx. However, although Derrida’s critique of both linear chronological and eschatological accounts of political temporality is persuasive, I would argue that it is more convincing in its undermining of the idea of ‘timeliness’ in politics and political theory than in its capacity to theorise the heterotemporality of world-political time. The problem with Derrida’s argument is the quasiMessianism that remains in his account of the temporal structure of politics in spite of the explicit critique of Benjamin. This residue of Messianic time enables Derrida to theorise spectrality but not plurality in the present. Within his hauntological account, ‘other times’ essentially become the source of an ethical imperative towards a politics of memory and the ‘promise of the future’, but they are identified with an unrepresentable supplement to mainstream representations of the meaning of the times, and therefore with what cannot be known and can only be hoped for. On Derrida’s account the structure of all experience is ‘Messianic’, in the sense that any statement or action in the present is oriented towards the promise of the future as the condition for the redemption of its meaning. The indeterminacy of the future is inherent in the spectrality of the present and the impossibility of exorcising the contamination of any particular present by an assortment of ghostly pasts and futures. Derrida’s reading of the implications of this for theorising the present focuses on the impossibility of doing justice to spectrality. The only way the critical theorist keeps the promise to the future open is by always acknowledging that even actions inspired by aspirations towards justice will inevitably fail to do justice to the indeterminacy of the future (Chambers, 2003: 82–94). Paradoxically, the acknowledgement of heterotemporality in Derrida’s account of the spectral quality of political time is temporally redeemed, not in a teleological philosophy of history, but as a temporal orientation that operates as the ‘quasi-transcendental’ condition of the critical interrogation of both law and history. In Philosophy in a Time of Terror, Derrida explicitly identifies this temporal orientation (towards the promise of the future) with an (unachievable) idea of Europe, giving the ethical and political tradition of Enlightenment thinking a universal pertinence, even if it is not identified with a projected universal end of history (Borradori, 2003: 116). For this reason, Derrida provides only a partial alternative to the ways of thinking world-political time considered above. He successfully displaces the idea that politics depends on the control or making of time, and he undermines the idea that political theories can be timely, in the sense of being able to grasp the essence and direction of the present. But he does not provide any way of thinking heterotemporality other than as spectral. Spectres unsettle claims to

[ 168 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 169

Thinking the present diagnose and prescribe in the present: as with Agamben’s refugee or Spivak’s woman subaltern they mark the limits of representation, operating on the boundaries of political time but never wholly inside it. This is because, in Derrida’s view, to bring them inside political time is necessarily to subsume them under a false master-narrative. For him, there is no way of thinking heterotemporality, other than in spectral terms, that would not entail an unsustainable claim to presence and the concomitant ordering of times according to a normative hierarchy of comparison. The danger here, I would argue, is that in an effort to avoid this kind of philosophical hubris, the theorist falls back into a default position in which ‘other times’ are, quite literally, unthinkable except in so far as they serve the ethical purpose of ensuring theoretical humility. In Chapter 3, we noted the overlap between the arguments of Derrida and Deleuze and Guattari in relation to political time. We also noted, however, that although, in many ways, Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of desire and becoming mirrors the deconstruction of the present involved in Derrida’s ‘untimely’, the basis of the two sets of arguments are quite different. Even though any exercise of deconstruction will take place within a temporal context (one in which a present is haunted by multiple pasts and futures), deconstruction itself, like justice, is not open to deconstruction. The possibility of deconstruction is inherent in the impossibility of presence, which is not ‘in time’, but is the given, untimely condition of the production of any kind of meaning. For this reason, Derrida’s acknowledgement of untimeliness takes the form of an ethical imperative and constitutes a rejection of claims to know the times that are not oriented by an explicit ethical commitment to the idea of justice – an orientation which, I have suggested above, in practice tends to re-temporalise the untimely along relatively familiar lines in mainstream readings of world politics, in which the ethos of the western Enlightenment provides the orientation of judgement. At best, the deconstructionist is able only to appreciate the limitations of accounts of his own times; at worst, he resembles a negative version of the philosophical historian’s deus ex machina, perpetually undermining the claims of any mode of temporalisation anywhere it may occur. In contrast, as we saw, the ontological and materialist arguments of Deleuze and Guattari, which take up themes from Nietzsche and Bergson, do not allow for the possibility of reference points for judgement that are outside of time. For Deleuze and Guattari, the mistake of philosophy of history is not that it assumes a possibility of presence in the present as such, but more specifically that it assumes the present as fully present in relation to both being (chronos/ machine) and becoming (aion/desire). This is a mistake because it misrepresents both the diverse presents inherent in the chronological temporalities of machines in the plural, and because it misrepresents the unpredictability of desire. The implications of this for theorising world-political time are as follows: firstly, that in relation to the time of being in world politics, no present is fully

[ 169 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 170

Diagnosing the times present because world politics is constituted by a plurality of diverse partial systems, with their own immanent temporality. These may range from the times of the lived body (notoriously not the same in different parts of the world), to the temporal framings of divine time in religious belief systems, to the virtually instantaneous time of electronic communications systems. Secondly, there is no synthetic unifying principle that works either immanently within, or transcendentally without, to create a larger pattern through which to make sense of these multiple presents. Thirdly, however, there is the temporality of becoming, which works not as an external force governing the time of being, but as the contingencies through which different temporal orders come to cut across, impinge on and transform each other. Chakrabarty draws on Derrida’s arguments, in addition to those of Heidegger and Marx, in order to articulate an understanding of political time that ‘provincialises Europe’, by displacing the narratives dominant in social science and history that deploy the present of liberal, capitalist states as the ground for judgement of all pasts, presents and futures. It could also be argued that his distinction between History 1 and History 2 reflects a Deleuzian approach, in which the plural and systemic times of chronos are brought together in the contingency of becoming and re-work each other to produce a different modernity. Chakrabarty is not alone in calling for a theorising of political time as double. Connolly also calls for a ‘double entry orientation to time’ in normative political theory. However, rather than History 1 and History 2, he uses the contrast between time of being and time of becoming, adapted from the theories of time of James, Bergson and Nietzsche as well as Deleuze. In Neuropolitics: thinking, culture, speed (2002) Connolly explores the temporality of thinking and how it may be connected to theorising political temporality. The key point about the temporality of thinking is that it is not chronologically linear but an ‘out of joint’ emergence and coming together of a range of virtual (rather than potential) pasts in relation to an ongoing, given present which yield a previously unpredictable future (2002: 96–97). The asymmetries within the time of thinking, which perpetually destabilise and transform the temporal organisation of pasts, presents and futures, have their parallel in the experience of ‘out of jointness’ between different public temporalities. Connolly discusses Wolin’s argument that in the contemporary world, political time is not synchronous with the temporalities governing communication and culture. For Wolin, in common with Arendt and Virilio, political time needs to be slow in order to allow for the possibility of democratic political action and engagement. It is therefore necessary to resist the acceleration of time embedded in non-political orders, and revive a ‘politics of place’ (Wolin, 1997; Connolly, 2002: 141). Connolly accepts the idea that there are asymmetries of temporal ordering within the contemporary world, but resists Wolin’s conclusion:

[ 170 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 171

Thinking the present Wolin and I both reject the cyclical image of slow time adopted by many ancients. But I also find myself at odds with progressive, teleological, and linear conceptions of time set against it. Against these four images I embrace the idea of rifts or forks in time that help to constitute it as time. A rift as constitutive of time itself, in which time flows into a future neither fully determined by a discernable past nor fixed by its place in a cycle of eternal return, nor directed by an intrinsic purpose pulling it along. Free time. Or, better, time as becoming, replete with the dangers and possibilities attached to such a world. (Connolly, 2002: 144)

In extrapolating on his idea of this time as becoming, Connolly explains that ‘rifts in time’ are to do with contingent encounters ‘between complex systems with some capacity for self-organization and unexpected events not smoothly assimilable by them’ (2002: 145). This clearly recalls the Deleuzean view of the cross cutting times of chronos and aion. In Pluralism (2005), Connolly further unpacks the meaning of time as becoming as the interaction between immanent chronologies (2005: 103). This leads him to distinguish between politics of being and politics of becoming. A political temporality of being refers to relatively stable contexts for political judgement and action, on the basis of which one can extrapolate the meaning of progress in accordance with given, sedimented criteria. This temporality of being is analogous to Deleuze’s chronotic, systemic time, in which a temporal trajectory is immanent. In contrast, the political temporality of becoming (analogous to aion) refers to shifting and unfamiliar contexts for political judgement and action, where criteria for the meaning of progress must be negotiated without the certainties embedded in a politics of being.5 From Connolly’s point of view, normative theories of cosmopolitan or global politics, whether of the liberal-Kantian progressive kind, as in Nussbaum’s work, or of the pessimistic Arendtian kind, as in Virilio’s work, have tended to remain within the temporal register of the politics of being, and have therefore been unable to do justice to either plurality or unpredictability in their diagnoses of the times. He argues that both Nussbaum and Virilio, in their opposing evaluations of the promise of the world-political present, are caught up in a ‘concentric’ understanding of culture, in which a particular, parochial temporality generates the force that will bind increasingly distant circles of humanity together. In Nussbaum’s case, this is possible because of the moral truths embedded in the evolution of western modernity. In Virilio’s case, this is possible because of the driving force of war and technology in shaping world-political time. Both thinkers, according to Connolly, fail to appreciate the eccentric temporal flows that cut across and disrupt the circles of a concentric vision of the world, and that do so as much within the ‘inner circle’ of liberalism or capitalism as in the outer circles of ‘others’ (2002: 176–193; see also Connolly, 2000). Connolly makes a similar criticism of Agamben’s account of sovereignty and the

[ 171 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 172

Diagnosing the times mutual implication of the time (and end) of state and history. He argues that Agamben traps the interpretation of world-political time in an impasse in which there can be no room for a time of becoming. In making this argument, Connolly rehearses the critiques of postcolonial and feminist thinkers by accusing social science and historicism, as well as Agamben (a critic of both of the above) of ‘hubris of intellectualism’. Agamben displays the hubris of intellectualism when he encloses political culture within a tight logic. Some theorists express that hubris by applying a tight model of causal explanation to social processes, others by applying a closed model of historical realization, and yet others by resolving the first two images into paradoxes so tightly defined that only a radical reconstitution of the world could rise above them. (Connolly, 2005: 140)

Chakrabarty’s History 1 and History 2 and Connolly’s double reading of political time offer two possible ways forward for theorising world-political time without the ‘hubris of intellectualism’. As with the Deleuzean account of political time, firstly they show that ‘presentness’ is always constituted by a plurality of ‘presents’ inscribed in diverse, immanent temporalities. Secondly, they reject the idea that any unifying temporal orientation provides the master key to the meaning of ‘presentness’. Instead, thirdly, they argue that the contingent and ongoing cross-contamination of different temporal orderings should be the starting point for understanding and judgement. So what might this mean for theorising world politics? Without the ‘hubris of intellectualism’ will it be possible for ‘us’ to say anything about ‘our’ world, about where it is and where it might, or should, be going? One obvious implication of this way of theorising political time is that theorists need to start by taking their own ‘presentness’ much more seriously. Chakrabarty argues that it is his own being and becoming in the plural, emergent present of western and non-western modernity that enables him to produce its histories. In his case, his ‘presentness’ highlighted temporal non-coincidence, and thereby helped in the de-centring of academic assumptions about the forces driving historical development. Supposing Bueno de Mesquita, Habermas, Hardt and Negri or Agamben started from the standpoint of the temporal non-coincidence of their own presentness? Wouldn’t this necessarily put the perspective of their present into question, making it no longer their ‘own’, and thereby demonstrating their reliance on an entangled plurality of pasts and futures? Rather than time being something that the theorist should be able to control through the timely recognition of the forces shaping the present, time would instead become something that the theorist, like the political actor, undergoes in all its complexity and opportunity. To recognise one’s implication in heterotemporality, and heterotemporality’s centrality to the knowledge and judgement of one’s ‘own’ times, is to make a start in developing one’s capacity to unpick the meaning of different

[ 172 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 173

Thinking the present ‘presents’, and explore the possibilities as well as limitations of one’s own political imagination in relation to specific problems and questions. From this starting point, understanding alternative temporalisations of the world-political present, without prior reference to a meta-narrative of world-political time, becomes much less difficult to envisage. The point to bear in mind here is that political temporalities are complicated, but they are neither secret nor untranslatable. Within predominant contemporary diagnoses of world politics the problem is not that temporal plurality goes unrecognised, so much as that its meaning is always already homogenised as part of the familiar linear or cyclical, repetitive, progressive or apocalyptic stories. A Deleuzean approach to worldpolitical time takes us out of these stories. In doing so, it raises different kinds of questions and suggests different kinds of analyses and judgements of phenomena such as globalisation and international humanitarianism discussed above. In relation to globalisation, thinking in heterotemporal terms not only allows for the recognition that globalisation is not a singular phenomenon: it also opens up questions of explanation (why and how it happens where and when it happens) and refuses to prejudge the supposed irreversibility of globalisation processes, or universalise their normative value (good or bad). In relation to humanitarianism, and in particular humanitarian intervention, a heterotemporal perspective raises the question as to why it should be taken as a sign of the distinctiveness of the world-political present in the first place. Does it mark a normative difference in the conduct of world politics or simply confirm the paternalistic patterns of a colonial or quasi-colonial past? For whom, and from whose perspective is this a novel development? Simply raising the question of novelty challenges those narratives that explain humanitarian intervention in terms of a shift in the institution of sovereignty. By drawing attention to the different presents of different sovereign states, heterotemporality pushes theories of humanitarian intervention towards contextual analysis and the possibility that there may be no unified pattern here, in terms of either how humanitarian intervention is to be explained, or of its normative implications. An untimely approach to global justice is opposed to the kind of normative arguments that assert their own timeliness without regard for the co-existence of a multiplicity of ‘clocks’ by which world-political punctuality may be measured. Without kairos to shape and control the temporal ordering of multiple, intersecting chronotic systems, heterotemporal normative judgement has to recognise its own historicity and that it partakes of the partiality and revisability of the presents to which it is immanent. But this does not preclude normative critique and prescription. If humanitarian intervention is identified with the potential globalisation of justice, then heterotemporality would suggest that what is needed is to begin by acknowledging and examining political temporalities of violation, in order to understand the meanings of injustice in the

[ 173 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 174

Diagnosing the times present. This would enable judgement of the likely effects of the institutionalisation of particular normative priorities in the principles and practices of international humanitarianism. But it would also open up the question of what kinds of violation matter and why, and offer a different route to the establishment of international hierarchies of outrage than that reflected in the moral priorities of existing international human rights regimes. The world’s ‘clocks’ may or may not already chime in harmony on these issues, but from the viewpoint of heterotemporality this is something to be discovered rather than assumed. To insist on the value of untimely political critique is not, then, to refuse the problem of time or timing in politics but rather to contest settled accounts of what time it is, what the times are, and what political tempo and temporality we should hew to in political life. (W. Brown, 2005: 4)

In summary, a heterotemporal account of world-political time does not identify it with a unifying logic or with the idea that politics emerges out of the controlling and re-shaping of chronos. It displaces the theorist from the position of prophet, not because it is impossible to theorise the multiple, parallel and interacting presents that make up world politics, but because of the sheer volatility and unpredictability of temporal becoming. In these respects, it avoids not only the unsustainable position of those theorists who are able to render engagement between different presents only by a temporal subsumption in which one present is more genuinely ‘the present’ than others. But it also avoids the temptation of engagement with other times having to be articulated only in terms of a formal commitment to a difference that conditions time but cannot be grasped in ‘this worldly’ terms. In spite of the very clear disagreements between Deleuze and Hegelian and Marxist philosophies of history, in its affirmation of time as immanence (both as chronos and aion), as opposed to transcendental condition, Deleuzean accounts of political time are closer to those of Hegel and Marx than to those of Kant or Derrida. Conclusion The idea that there is a close connection between social science and historicism is not new, and neither is the argument that the social or political theorist cannot occupy an Archimedean point, outside of time, from which the key to political time can be observed or put to work. One common response to this line of critique, as Agamben points out, is to follow the ‘as if’ Kantian route, and claim that we have to make these kinds of temporal assumptions if either social science or normative theory is to be possible at all. On this account, something like a Deleuzean approach to political temporality makes theorising world politics impossible. Social scientists claim that it makes a mockery of the substantial

[ 174 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 175

Thinking the present bodies of knowledge we have accumulated on the basis of generalisations about rationality as the key to political time, and provides no guidance about how to accumulate knowledge (conduct research programmes) differently. In a similar vein, many normative international political theorists argue (as Connolly points out with regard to Nussbaum) that without the universally resonant values that have emerged from a particular history, there can be no capacity to make distinctions between right and wrong in world politics, and we simply fall back into the impasse of cultural parochialism. However, it may be that rather than simply undermining social science and normative theory, thinking about worldpolitical time as heterotemporality offers an alternative to both. A Deleuzean understanding of world-political time acknowledges multiple temporal orderings and the ways in which they contingently impinge on one another. It rejects accounts of political time that see it in unified or unifying terms, or as transcendentally conditioned by some external kairotic power. On the one hand, this makes it more difficult to approach understanding the ‘presents’ of world politics. On the other hand, it opens up the possibility of understanding by insisting that insights into world politics are inherent within the dynamic conjunction of living, open systems, and do not require the social scientist to assume a perspective outside of chronotic time. It is clear that social scientific research premised on Deleuzean conceptions of time would be unable to assume the kind of cut-off between experimental and historical time put forward by Bueno de Mesquita. If political time, to which the social scientist is immanent, is plural and untimely then the social scientist is no longer able to operate, as it were, outside of the chronotic time of the phenomena under investigation; and is therefore also unable to select what deserves to be explained, how it should be explained, and what may be predicted on the basis of already knowing the key to political action. But if we have to give up on Popperian ideals of prediction and parsimony, this does not necessarily imply the impossibility of the systematic study of the dynamics of world politics, though it does suggest that knowledge generated will always be both partial and revisable. This was evident in Chapter 4, when we looked briefly at the ways in which social scientists of International Relations have been adapting research in the light of more complex, unpredictable and immanent conceptions of international political time. When it comes to normative theories of international or global politics, abandoning unifying kairotic accounts of world-political time is doubly disorienting for the theorist. It is disorienting because it undermines the theorist’s capacity to represent and speak for the future in terms of the present, whether that future takes the form of cosmopolitan democracy or of the ‘general accident’. It is also disorienting because it challenges the theorist’s role of timetraveller and prophet, the spectator that knows where world-political time is headed but also has the responsibility to direct or re-direct the arrow of time.

[ 175 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 176

Diagnosing the times But for theorists such as Connolly or Brown (quoted above), this double disorientation does not need to be disabling for either understanding or judgement. Rather, through limiting the ‘hubris of intellectualism’, normative theory is able to cultivate self-criticism, appreciate the possibilities for change inherent in contingency, and multiply the possibilities for critical engagement, negative and positive. Thinking about world politics, in order to explain, understand or prescribe for it, is difficult. As we have seen, one of the main ways in which this difficulty has been addressed has been through temporalising moves that have rendered a highly complex, multi-faceted set of structures, institutions and practices more manageable by identifying their essential meaning (empirically and normatively) with a unified present, through which both past and future can be made intelligible. These temporalising moves are deeply rooted in the resources of the western political imaginary, and the modes of explanation, understanding and prescription for political life inscribed within it. I have argued that the cyclical and linear (progress/decline/apocalyptic) conceptions of political time that emerge out of a combination of classical, Christian and natural scientific ideas in early modern Europe, construct political time as the outcome of interaction between chronotic and kairotic time. Neither chronos nor kairos has a settled specific meaning, but the former is always associated with natural, material and everyday time, and the latter with exceptional time, a time that stands outside of and is able to interrupt and re-constitute chronos. The theories that we examined in Chapters 4 to 6 can be divided into those that assume the capacity of kairotic time to trump chronos, and those that mourn the incapacity of kairos to change the times. They can also be divided into those that treat kairos as transcendent and those that treat it as immanent to chronos. The problem, I have suggested, with all of those theories is, firstly, that they treat world-political time as temporally unified; and secondly, that they overestimate the capacity of the theorist to grasp and intervene in the times. Instead, I have argued, we need to look for ways of thinking world-political time as heterotemporality, which includes the way in which the theorist’s own complex temporal structure is implicated in and with that which he or she seeks to describe, explain and judge. World politics is a shifting and unpredictable conjunction of times, and so is the theorist seeking to render the times of world politics intelligible. Thinking the present without the authority of kairos to ground and orient judgement is profoundly destabilising for those of us used to taking for granted the kind of temporal meta-narratives discussed in this book. But this destabilising is equally the freeing up of our sociological and political imaginations. Without kairos, chronos has to be taken seriously, and the possibilities of explaining and judging world politics are not undermined but multiplied, and not mutually exclusive but able to engage with one another in the ongoing production of new truths and new times.

[ 176 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 177

Thinking the present Notes 1 For Machiavelli, Rousseau and Arendt, the control of chronos is a matter of creating and sustaining the artificial time of the military camp or the polis; for Bacon it is about the creation of new time in the scientific subjection of nature; for Kant, Hegel and Marx it is about the immanent direction of chronos towards a particular end; for Benjamin it is about the possibility of the Messianic interruption of the chronotic line. Political time is neither natural/technical/everyday chronos nor exceptional kairos, it is their hybrid offspring. 2 As explained in Chapter 5 above, Hardt and Negri would deny the charge of Marxist historicism. I, in common with many other commentators, disagree with their claim to have moved beyond key elements of historical materialism. 3 Subaltern studies is a leftist movement within Indian historiography, which has challenged predominant Marxist interpretations of Indian history, in particular the history of independence struggles. Instead it has focused on historical actors (‘subalterns’) that do not fit Marxist class categorisations or assumptions about revolutionary praxis (see Spivak, 1987: 197–221; Chakrabarty, 2000). 4 It is for this reason that Agamben argues that: ‘Deconstruction is a thwarted messianism, a suspension of the messianic’ (2005b: 103). See Chapter 6, n. 8 above. 5 Connolly suggests that we can talk about ‘politics of being’ in situations in which there is a high level of political homogeneity, and presumably a high level of consensus in political memory and the collective reading of time’s arrow. Whether or not such political communities exist, in the case of world politics it is clear that ‘politics of being’ could not possibly describe its temporality, although, as Connolly argues, political theorists persistently attempt to read it in this register.

[ 177 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 178

Bibliography

Abbott, A. (2001) Time Matters: on theory and method, Chicago & London: Chicago University Press. Adam, B. (1990) Time and Social Theory, Cambridge: Polity. Agamben, G. (1993) The Coming Community, trans. M. Hardt, Minneapolis & London: Minnesota University Press. Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: sovereign power and bare life, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G. (2000) Means Without End: notes on politics, trans. V. Binetti & C. Casarino, Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press. Agamben, G. (2004) The Open: man and animal, trans. K. Attell, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G. (2005a) State of Exception, trans. K. Attell, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Agamben, G. (2005b) The Time That Remains: a commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. P. Dailey, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G. (2007) Infancy and History: essay on the destruction of experience, trans. L. Heron, London: Verso. Amoore, L. & Langley, P. (2005) ‘Global Civil Society and Global Governmentality’, in Germain & Kenny (eds) The Idea of Global Civil Society. Anderson, J. (ed.) (2002) Transnational Democracy: political spaces and border crossings, London & New York: Routledge. Anheier, H., Glasius, M. & Kaldor, M. (eds) (2001) Global Civil Society 2001, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ansell Pearson, K. (1994) An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ansell Pearson (1997a) Viroid Life: perspectives on Nietzsche and the transhuman condition, London & New York: Routledge. Ansell Pearson, K. (ed.) (1997b) Deleuze and Philosophy, London: Routledge. Ansell Pearson, K. (2002) Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the time of life, London: Routledge. Archibugi, D. (ed.) (2003) Debating Cosmopolitics, London: Verso. Archibugi, D., Held, D. & Koehler, M. (eds) (1998) Reimagining Political Community: studies in cosmpolitan democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, H. (1961) ‘The Concept of History: ancient and modern’, in Between Past and Future: six exercises in political thought, London: Faber & Faber.

[ 178 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 179

Bibliography Arendt, H. (1973) On Revolution, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Arendt, H. (1978) The Life of the Mind Volume 2, ed. M. McCarthy, London: Secker & Warburg. Arendt, H. (1982) Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. R. Beiner, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Arendt, H. (1986) The Origins of Totalitarianism, London: André Deutsch. Arendt, H. (2005) The Promise of Politics, ed. and intro. J. Kohn, New York: Schocken Books. Armitage, J. (ed.) (2000a) Paul Virilio: from modernism to hypermodernism and beyond, London: Sage. Armitage, J. (2000b) ‘Paul Virilio: an introduction’, in Armitage (ed.) Paul Virilio: from modernism to hypermodernism and beyond. Armitage, J. (2000c) ‘From Modernism to Hypermodernism: an interview with Paul Virilio’, in Armitage (ed.) Paul Virilio: form modernism to hypermodernism and beyond. Aveni, A. (2002) Empires of Time: calendars, clocks and cultures, Boulder CO: University Press of Colorado. Avis, P. (1986) Foundations of Modern Historical Thought: from Machiavelli to Vico, London: Croom Helm. Baker, G. (2002) Civil Society and Democratic Theory, London: Routledge. Baker, G. & Chandler, D. (eds) (2005a) Global Civil Society: contested futures, London: Routledge. Baker, G. & Chandler, D. (eds) (2005b) ‘Introduction: global civil society and the future of world politics’, in Baker & Chandler (eds) Global Civil Society: contested futures. Barber, B. (1995) Jihad vs McWorld, New York: Times Books. Barkawi, T. & Laffey, M. (2002) ‘Retrieving the Imperial: empire and International Relations’, Millennium: journal of international studies 31 (1): 109–127. Barnard, F. M. (1965) Herder’s Social and Political Thought: from enlightenment to nationalism, Oxford: Clarendon. Barnard, F. M. (ed.) (1969) Herder on Social and Political Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Basu, A. (ed.) (1995) The Challenge of Local Feminisms: women’s movements in global perspective, Boulder CO: Westview Press. Baylis, J. & Smith, S. (eds) (2005) The Globalization of World Politics: an introduction to international relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beardsworth, R. (1996) Derrida and the Political, London: Routledge. Beck, U. (2000) What is Globalization?, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bellamy, A. J. (ed.) (2005) International Society and Its Critics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bender, J. & Wellberg, D. E. (eds) (1991) Chronotypes: the construction of time,

[ 179 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 180

Bibliogaphy Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Benhabib, S. (1992) Situating the Self: gender, community and postmodernism in contemporary ethics, Cambridge: Polity. Benhabib, S. (1996) The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publications. Benhabib, S. (2002) The Claims of Culture: equality and diversity in the Global Era, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Benhabib, S. (2004) The Rights of Others: aliens, residents and citizens, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benhabib, S. & Dallmayr, F. (eds) (1992) The Communicative Ethics Controversy, Cambridge: Polity. Benjamin, A. (ed.) (2005) Walter Benjamin and History, London: Continuum. Benjamin, A. & Osborne, P. (eds) (2000) Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: destruction and experience, London: Clinamen Press. Benjamin, W. (1978) ‘Critique of Violence’, in P. Demetz (ed.) Reflections: Walter Benjamin, essays, aphorisms, autobiographical writings, New York: Schocken Books. Benjamin, W. (1999) ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in H. Arendt (ed.) Illuminations, London: Pimlico. Bensaïd, D. (2002) Marx for Our Times: adventures and misadventures of critique, London: Verso. Bergson, H. (2001) Time and Free Will, trans. F. L. Pogson, Mineola NY: Dover Publications. Bergson, H. (2005) Creative Evolution, New York: Cosimo Inc. Berlin, I. (1989) ‘The Originality of Machiavelli’, in Against the Current ed. H. Hardy, Oxford: Clarendon. Bernstein, S., Lebow, R. N., Stein, J. G. & Weber, S. (2000) ‘God Gave Physics the Easy Problems: adapting social science to an unpredictable world’, European Journal of International Relations, 6 (1): 43–76. Bohman, J. & Lutz-Bachmann, M. (eds) (1997) Perpetual Peace: essays on Kant’s cosmopolitan ideal, Cambridge MA & London: MIT Press. Booth, K. & Dunne, T. (eds) (2002) Worlds in Collision, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Borradori, G. (2003) Philosophy in a Time of Terror: dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Breckenridge, C. A., Pollock, S., Bhabha, H. & Chakrabarty, D. (eds) (2002) Cosmopolitanism, Durham & London: Duke University Press. Brown, C. (1992) International Relations Theory: new normative approaches, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Brown, C. (2002) Sovereignty, Rights and Justice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, C. with Ainley, K. (2005) Understanding International Relations (3rd edition), Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

[ 180 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 181

Bibliography Brown, M. E., Lynn-Jones, S. M. & Miller, S. E. (eds) (1995) The Perils of Anarchy: contemporary realism and international security, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Brown, M. E., Lynn-Jones, S. M. & Miller, S. E. (eds) (1996) Debating the Democratic Peace, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Brown, W. (1997) ‘The Time of the Political’, Theory and Event, 1 (1): http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v001/1.1brown.html. Brown, W. (2001) Politics Out of History, Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press. Brown, W. (2005) Edgework: critical essays on knowledge and politics, Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press. Browning, G. (2005) ‘A Globalist Ideology of Post-Marxism? Hardt and Negri’s Empire’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 8 (2): 193–208. Buchanan, I. (2000) Deleuze: a metacommentary, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bueno de Mesquita, B. (2002) Predicting Politics, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Bueno de Mesquita, B. (2006) ‘The End of the Cold War: predicting an emergent property’ in M. Cox (ed.) Twentieth Century International Relations Volume II, London: Sage. Bunch, C., Antrobus, P., Frost, S. & Reilly, N. (2001) ‘International Networking for Women’s Human Rights’, in Edwards & Gaventa (eds) Global Citizen Action. Burchill, S., Linklater, A., Devetak, R., Donnelly, J., Paterson, M., Reus-Smit, C. & True, J. (2005) Theories of International Relations (3rd edition), Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Buzan, B. (2004) From International to World Society? English School theory and the social structure of globalization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buzan, B. & Little, R. (2001) ‘Why International Relations has Failed as an Intellectual Project and What to do About It’, Millennium: journal of international studies, 30 (1): 19–39. Calhoun, C. (2003) ‘The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travellers: towards a critique of actually existing cosmopolitanism’, in Archibugi (ed.) Debating Cosmopolitics. ˇ Capek, M. (1971) Bergson and Modern Physics: a reinterpretation and evaluation, Dordrecht: Reidel. Castoriadis, C. (1987) The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. K. Blamey, Cambridge: Polity. Castoriadis, C. (1991) ‘Time and Creation’, in Bender & Wellberg (eds) Chronotypes: the construction of time. Cavournas, D. (2002) Diverging Time: the politics of modernity in Kant, Hegel

[ 181 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 182

Bibliogaphy and Marx, Lanham: Lexington Books. Chakrabarty, D. (2000) Provincializing Europe, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chambers, S. A. (2003) Untimely Politics, New York: New York University Press. Chandhoke, N. (2002) ‘The Limits of Global Civil Society’, in M. Glasius, M. Kaldor & H. Anheier (eds) Global Civil Society 2002, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chandler, D. (2005) ‘Constructing Global Civil Society’ in Baker & Chandler (eds) Global Civil Society: contested futures. Colás, A. (2005) ‘Global Civil Society: analytical category or normative concept?’ in Baker & Chandler (eds) Global Civil Society: contested futures. Connolly, W. E. (2000) ‘Speed, Concentric Cultures and Cosmopolitanism’, Political Theory, 28 (5): 596–618. Connolly, W. E. (2002) Neuropolitics: thinking, culture, speed, Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press. Connolly, W. E. (2005) Pluralism, Durham & London: Duke University Press. Dauphinee, E. & Masters, C. (eds) (2007) The Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror: living, dying, surviving, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Deleuze, G. (1990) The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester & C. Stivale, ed. C. V. Boundas, London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1977) Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem & H. R. Lane, New York: Viking Press. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, London: Athlone. Der Derian, J. (1990) ‘The (S)pace of International Relations: simulation, surveillance and speed’, International Studies Quarterly, 34 (3): 295–310. Der Derian, J. (1992) Antidiplomacy: spies, terror, speed and war, Cambridge MA: Blackwell. Der Derian, J. (ed.) (1998) The Virilio Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. Der Derian, J. (2002) Virtuous War: mapping the military-industrial-mediaentertainment network, Boulder CO: Westview Press. Der Derian, J. & Shapiro, M. (eds) (1989) International/Intertextual Relations: postmodern readings of world politics, Lexington MA: Lexington Books. Derrida, J. (1992a) ‘Force of Law: the “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, in D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld & D. G. Carlson (eds) Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, London & New York: Routledge. Derrida, J. (1992b) Given Time 1: counterfeit money, trans. P. Kamuf, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1993) ‘On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy’, in P. Fenves (ed.) Raising the Tone of Philosophy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Derrida, J. (2001) Writing and Difference, trans. and intro. A. Bass, London & New York: Routledge.

[ 182 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 183

Bibliography Derrida, J. (2005) The Politics of Friendship, trans. G. Collins, London & New York: Verso. Derrida, J. (2006) Specters of Marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning and the New International, trans. P. Kamuf, intro. B. Magnus & S. Cullenberg, Abingdon & New York: Routledge. Dower, N. (1998) World Ethics: the new agenda, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Doyle, M. (1983) ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Policy, Parts I and II’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 12 (3): 205–235; (4): 323–353. Doyle, M. (1999) ‘A Liberal View: preserving and expanding the liberal pacific union’ in Paul & Hall (eds) International Order and the Future of World Politics. Dunn, K. C. (2004) ‘Africa’s Ambiguous Relation to Empire and Empire’, in Passavant & Dean (eds) Empire’s New Clothes: reading Hardt and Negri. Eade, J. & O’Byrne, D. (eds) (2005) Global Ethics and Civil Society, Aldershot: Ashgate. Edwards, M. and Gaventa, J. (eds) (2001) Global Citizen Action, London: Earthscan. Fabian, J. (1983) Time and the Other: how anthropology makes its object, New York: Columbia University Press. Falco, M. J. (ed.) (2004) Feminist Interpretations of Niccolò Machiavelli, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Falk, R. (1995) On Humane Governance: towards a new global politics, Cambridge: Polity Press. Fanon, F. (1986) Black Skin, White Masks, trans. C. L. Markmann, London: Pluto Press. Farrington, B. (1964) The Philosophy of Francis Bacon: an essay on its development from 1603 to 1609 with new translations of fundamental texts, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Fasolt, C. (2004) The Limits of History, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Finney, P. (ed.) (2005) International History, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Foucault, M. (1976) The History of Sexuality Volume I, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge, ed. C. Gordon, Brighton: Harvester Press. Fraser, N. (2005) ‘Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World’, New Left Review, 36: 69–88. Fritsch, M. (2005) The Promise of Memory: history and politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida, Albany NY: State University of New York Press. Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man, London: Penguin Books.

[ 183 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 184

Bibliogaphy Gaddis, J. L. (1992/3) ‘IR Theory and the End of the Cold War’, International Security, 17 (3): 5–58. Galison, P. (2003) Einstein’s Clocks and Poincaré’s Maps: empires of time, New York: Norton. Galtung, J. (1971) ‘A Structural Theory of Imperialism’, Journal of Peace Research, 8 (2): 81–117. Germain, R. D. & Kenny, M. (eds) (2005a) The Idea of Global Civil Society: politics and ethics in a globalizing era, London: Routledge. Germain, R. D. & Kenny, M. (2005b) ‘The Idea(l) of Global Civil Society’, in Germain and Kenny (eds) The Idea of Global Civil Society. Gray, J. (1998) False Dawn: the delusions of global capitalism, London: Granta Books. Grosz, E. (2004) The Nick of Time: politics, evolution and the untimely, Durham & London: Duke University Press. Grosz, E. (2005) Time Travels: feminism, nature, power, Durham & London: Duke University Press. Habermas, J. (1979) Communication and the Evolution of Society, Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action Volume 1, Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1987) The Theory of Communicative Action Volume 2, Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1990) Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, J. (1992) ‘Discourse Ethics: notes on a program of philosophical justification’, in Benhabib & Dallmayr (eds) The Communicative Ethics Controversy. Habermas, J. (1996) Between Facts and Norms, Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, J. (1997) ‘Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace with the Benefit of 200 Years Hindsight’, in Bohman & Lutz-Bachmann (eds) Perpetual Peace: essays on Kant’s cosmopolitan ideal. Habermas, J. (1998) ‘Remarks on Legitimation Through Human Rights’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 24 (2,3): 157–171. Habermas, J. (2006) The Divided West, trans. and ed. C. Cronin, Cambridge: Polity Press. Hansen, P. (1993) Hannah Arendt: politics, history and citizenship, Cambridge: Polity Press. Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2000) Empire, Cambridge MA & London: Harvard University Press. Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2005) Multitude, London: Penguin Books.

[ 184 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 185

Bibliography Hegel, G. W. F. (1975) Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: introduction, trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1991) Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. A. V. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Held, D. (1993) ‘Democracy: past, present and possible futures’, Alternatives, 18 (3): 259–271. Held, D. (1995) Democracy and the Global Order, Cambridge: Polity Press. Held, D. (2003) ‘Cosmopolitanism: globalisation tamed?’, Review of International Studies, 29 (4): 465–480. Held, D. (2004) Global Covenant: the social democratic alternative to the Washington Consensus, Cambridge: Polity Press. Held, D., McGrew, A., Goldblatt, D. & Perraton, J. (1999) Global Transformations, Cambridge: Polity Press. Held, D. & McGrew, A. (eds) (2003) The Global Transformations Reader (2nd edition) Cambridge: Polity Press. Herder, J. G. (1800) Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans. T. Churchill, New York: Bergman Publishers. Hirst, P. & Thompson, G. (1996) Globalization in Question, Cambridge: Polity. Hobbes, T. (1991) Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoffmann, S. (1987) ‘An American Social Science: International Relations’, in Janus and Minerva: essays in the theory and practice of international politics, Boulder CO: Westview Press. Holsti, K. J. (1998) ‘Scholarship in an Era of Anxiety: the study of international politics during the Cold War’, Review of International Studies, 24 (Special Issue): 17–46. Huntington, S. P. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon & Schuster. Hutchings, K. (1996) Kant, Critique and Politics, London: Routledge. Hutchings, K. (1997) ‘Moral Deliberation and Political Judgement: Reflections on Benhabib’s Interactive Universalism’, Theory, Culture and Society, 14: 132–142. Hutchings, K. (1999a) International Political Theory: re-thinking ethics in a global era, London: Sage. Hutchings, K. (1999b) ‘Feminism, Universalism and the Ethics of International Politics’, in V. Jabri & E. O’Gorman (eds) Women, Culture and International Relations, Boulder CO: Westview Press. Hutchings, K. (2003) Hegel and Feminist Philosophy, Cambridge: Polity. Hutchings, K. (2004) ‘From Morality to Politics and Back Again: feminist international ethics and the civil society argument’, Alternatives 29: 239–264.

[ 185 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 186

Bibliogaphy Hutchings, K. (2005a) ‘Speaking and Hearing: Habermasian Discourse Ethics, Feminism and IR’, Review of International Studies 31 (1): 155–165. Hutchings, K. (2005b) ‘Global Civil Society: thinking politics and progress’, in Baker & Chandler (eds) Global Civil Society: contested futures. Hutchings, K. (2006) ‘Hegel, Ethics and the Logic of Universality’, in K. Deligiorgi (ed.) Hegel: new directions, Chesham: Acumen. Hutchings, K. & Dannreuther, R. (eds) (1999) Cosmopolitan Citizenship, London: Macmillan. Inayatullah, N. & Blaney, D. (2004) International Relations and the Problem of Difference, London: Routledge. Isaac, J. (1995) ‘The Strange Silence of Political Theory’, Political Theory 23 (4): 636–652; 681–688. Isenberg, N. (1999) Between Redemption and Doom: the strains of German-Jewish modernism, Lincoln NA & London: University of Nebraska Press. Jackson, R. (2005) Writing the War on Terrorism: language, politics and counterterrorism, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kaldor, M. (1999) ‘Transnational Civil Society’, in T. Dunne & N. Wheeler (eds) Human Rights in Global Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaldor, M. (2003) Global Civil Society: an answer to war, Cambridge: Polity Press. Kant, I. (1983) Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp-Smith, London: Macmillan. Kant, I. (1987) Critique of Judgment, trans. W. S. Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett. Kant, I. (1991a) Political Writings, trans. N. B. Nisbet, ed. H. Reiss, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (1991b) Metaphysics of Morals, trans. M. J. Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (1992) The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. M. J. Gregor, Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press. Kaplan, G. T. & Kessler, C. (eds) (1989) Hannah Arendt: thinking, judging, freedom, Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Kaufman, W. (1974) Nietzsche: philosopher, psychologist, and Antichrist, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Keane, J. (2003) Global Civil Society?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keene, E. (2002) Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, colonialism and order in world politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keohane, R. & Martin, L. (1995) ‘The Promise of Institutionalist Theory’, International Security, 20 (1): 39–51. Keohane, R. & Nye, J. (1977) Power and Interdependence: world politics in transition, Boston: Little, Brown. Kern, S. (1983) The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918, London: Weidenfeld. Kiely, R. (2005) ‘Global Civil Society and Spaces of Resistance’, in Eade & O’Byrne (eds) Global Ethics and Civil Society.

[ 186 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 187

Bibliography Koselleck, R. (1988) Critique and Crisis: enlightenment and the parthogenesis of modern society, Oxford & New York: Berg Publishers. Koselleck, R. (2004) Futures Past: on the semantics of historical time, trans. Keith Tribe, New York: Columbia University Press. Krasner, S. (1988) ‘Sovereignty: an institutionalist perspective’, Comparative Political Studies, 21 (1): 66–94. Kristeva, J. (2002) ‘Women’s Time’, in K. Oliver (ed.) The Portable Kristeva, New York: Columbia University Press. Lash, S., Quick, A. & Roberts, R. (eds) (1998) Time and Value, Oxford: Blackwell. Lebow, R. N. & Risse-Kappen, T. (eds) (1995) International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War, New York: Columbia University Press. Lechner, F. J. & Boli, J. (eds) (2004) The Globalization Reader, (2nd edition), Oxford: Blackwell. Lindroos, K. (1998) New Time/Image Space: temporalization of politics in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy of History and Art, Jyväskylä: SoPhi, University of Jyväskylä. Linklater, A. (1998) The Transformation of Political Community: ethical foundations of the Post-Westphalian era, Cambridge: Polity Press. Lipschutz, R. D. (2005) ‘Global Civil Society and Global Governmentality: resistance, reform or resignation?’, in Baker & Chandler Global Civil Society: contested futures. Lockwood, M. (2005) The Labyrinth of Time: introducing the universe, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge, trans. G. Bennington & B. Massumi, Manchester: Manchester University Press. McCarney, J. (2000) Hegel on History, London: Routledge. McGrew, A. (ed.) (1997) The Transformation of Democracy?, Milton Keynes: Open University & Polity Press. Machiavelli, N. (1988) The Prince, ed. Q. Skinner & R. Price, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Machiavelli, N. (1996) Discourses on Livy, trans. H. C. Mansfield & N. Tarcov, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Machiavelli, N. (2003) The Art of War, ed. C. Lloyd, Chicago: Chicago University Press. McIntosh, C. (2006) ‘Theory Across Time: IR’s Privileging of Time-less Theory’, paper delivered at the International Studies Association Conference, San Diego, March 22nd. Manuel, F. E. (1963) Isaac Newton: historian, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1968) Selected Works in One Volume, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

[ 187 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 188

Bibliogaphy Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1970) The German Ideology, trans. C. Arthur, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. (1975) Early Writings, ed. L. Colletti, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, K. (1976) Capital: Volume 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1998) The Communist Manifesto in M. Cowling (ed.) The Communist Manifesto: new interpretations, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mastanduno, M. (1999) ‘A Realist view: three images of the coming international order’, in Paul & Hall (eds) International Order and the Future of World Politics. Maurer, B. (2004) ‘On Divine Markets and the Problem of Justice: Empire as theodicy’, in Passavant & Dean (eds) Empire’s New Clothes: reading Hardt and Negri. May, J. & Thrift, N. (eds) (2001) Timespace: geographies of temporality, London & New York: Routledge. Mazlish, B. (1993) ‘An Introduction to Global History’, in Mazlish & Buultjens (eds) Conceptualizing Global History. Mazlish, B. & Buultjens, R. (eds) (1993) Conceptualizing Global History, Boulder CO: Westview Press. Mearsheimer, J. (1990) ‘Back to the Future: instability in Europe after the Cold War’, International Security, 15 (1): 5–56. Mearsheimer, J. (1994/5) ‘The False Promise of International Institutions’, International Security, 19 (3): 5–49. Mearsheimer, J. (2001) The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Inc. Mignolo, W. D. (2002) ‘The Many Faces of Cosmo-Polis: Border thinking and critical cosmopolitanism’, in Breckenridge et al. (eds) Cosmopolitanism. Modelski, G. (1996) ‘Evolutionary Paradigms for Global Politics’, International Studies Quarterly, 40 (3): 321–342. Modelski, G. & Poznanski, K. (1996) ‘Evolutionary Paradigms in the Social Sciences’, International Studies Quarterly, 40 (3): 315–319. Mohanty, C. T. (2003) Feminism without Borders: decolonising theory, practicing solidarity, Durham & London: Duke University Press. Mohanty, C. T., Russo, A. & Torres, L. (eds) (1991) Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Morgan, A. (2007) ‘Petrified Life: Adorno and Agamben’, Radical Philosophy (Jan/Feb): 23–32. Chowdhry, G. & Nair, S. (eds) (2004) Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations: reading race, gender and class, London & New York: Routledge. Nardin, T. & Mapel, D. R. (eds) Traditions of International Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[ 188 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 189

Bibliography Negri, A. (2003a) Time For Revolution, trans. M. Mandarini, New York & London: Continuum. Negri, A. (2003b) ‘The Constitution of Time’, in Negri Time For Revolution. Negri, A. (2003c) ‘Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo: nine lessons to myself’, in Negri Time For Revolution. Negri, A. & Zolo, D. (2003) ‘Empire and the Multitude: a dialogue on the new order of globalization’, Radical Philosophy, 120 (July/August): 23–37. Neocleous, M. (2004) ‘Let the Dead Bury their Dead: Marxism and the politics of redemption’, Radical Philosophy, 128 (Nov/Dec): 23–32. Nietzsche, F. (1969a) On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufman & R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Vintage Books. Nietzsche, F. (1969b) Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Vintage Books. Nietzsche, F. (1990) ‘History in the Service and Disservice of Life’, in W. Arrowsmith (ed.) Unmodern Observations, New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Norris, A. (2003) ‘The Exemplary Exception: philosophical and political decisions in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer’, Radical Philosophy, 119 (May/June): 6–16. Nowotny, H. (1994) Time: the modern and postmodern experience, trans. N. Plaice, Cambridge: Polity. Nussbaum, M. (2000) Women and Human Development: the capabilities approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Brien, K. (1997) Narratives of Enlightenment: cosmopolitan history from Voltaire to Gibbon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Byrne, D. (2005) ‘Globalization, Cosmopolitanism and the Problem of Civil Society’, in Eade & O’Byrne (eds) Global Ethics and Civil Society. Oneal, J. R., Russett, B. & Berbaum, M. L. (2003) ‘Causes of Peace: democracy, interdependence and international organizations, 1985–1992’, International Studies Quarterly, 47 (3): 371–393. Osborne, P. (1995) The Politics of Time: modernity and avant-garde, London: Verso. Owen, D. (1995) Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity: a critique of liberal reason, London: Sage. Parel, A. J. (1992) The Machiavellian Cosmos, New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Passavant, P. A. & Dean, J. (eds) (2004) Empire’s New Clothes: reading Hardt and Negri, London: Routledge. Patton, P. (1997) ‘The World Seen from Within: Deleuze and the philosophy of events’, Theory and Event, 1 (1): http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and _event/v001/1.1patton.html. Patton, P. & Protevi, J. (eds) (2003) Between Deleuze and Derrida, London: Continuum.

[ 189 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 190

Bibliogaphy Paul, T. V. & Hall, J. A. (eds) (1999) International Order and the Future of World Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perkins, M. (2001) The Reform of Time: magic and modernity, London: Pluto Press. Pieterse, J. N. & Parekh, B. (eds) (1995) The Decolonization of Imagination, London: Zed Books. Pitkin, H. F. (1984) Fortune is a Woman: gender and politics in the thought of Niccolò Machiavelli, Berkeley: University of California Press. Pocock, J. G. A. (1973) Politics, Language and Time: essay on political thought and history, New York: Atheneum. Pomper, P., Elphick, R. H. & Vann, R. T. (eds) (1998) World History: ideologies, structures and identities, Oxford: Blackwells. Popper, K. (1957) The Poverty of Historicism, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Protevi, J. (2001) Political Physics, London: Athlone. Quinby, L. (1994) Anti-Apocalypse: exercises in genealogical criticism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Quinby, L. (2004) ‘Taking the Millennialist Pulse of Empire’s Multitude’, in Passavant & Dean (eds) Empire’s New Clothes: reading Hardt and Negri. Ray, J. L. & Russett, B. (1996) ‘The Future as Arbiter of Theoretical Controversies: predictions, explanations and the end of the Cold War’, British Journal of Political Science, 26 (4): 441–470. Ricoeur, P. (2004) Memory, History, Forgetting, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Rousseau, J.-J. (1973) The Social Contract and Discourses, London: J. M. Dent & Sons. Rousseau, J.-J. (1974) Emile, London: J. M. Dent & Sons. Russett, B (1993) Grasping the Democratic Peace: principles for a post-Cold War world, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Russett, B., Layne, C., Spiro, D. E. & Doyle, M. W. (1995) ‘Correspondence: the Democratic Peace’, International Studies Quarterly, 19 (4): 164–184. Russett, B., Ray, J. L. & Cohen, R. (1995) ‘Raymond Cohen on Pacific Unions: a response and a reply’, Review of International Studies, 21 (3): 319–325. Sahlins, M. (2004) Apologies to Thucydides: understanding history as culture and vice versa, Chicago & London: Chicago University Press. Schmidt, B. C. (1998) The Political Discourse of Anarchy: a disciplinary history of International Relations, Albany NY: State University of New York Press. Schmitt, C. (1996) The Concept of the Political, trans. G. Schwab, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Schmitt, C. (2003) The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the ‘Jus Publican Europaeum’, trans. G. L. Ulmen, New York: Telos Press. Sellars, J. (2007) ‘Deleuze and Cosmopolitanism’, Radical Philosophy, 142, March/April: 30–37.

[ 190 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 191

Bibliography Sewell, W. H. (2005) Logics of History: social theory and social transformation, Chicago & London: Chicago University Press. Singer, J. D. et al. (1979) Explaining War: selected papers from the Correlates of War project, Beverley Hills: SAGE. Singh, K. (2001) ‘Handing over the stick: the global spread of participatory approaches to development’, in Edwards & Gaventa (eds) Global Citizen Action. Skinner, Q. (1981) Machiavelli, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, J. E. (1969) ‘Time, Times and the “Right Time”: chronos and kairos’, The Monist 53 (1): 1–13. Smith, J. E. (1986) ‘Time and Qualitative Time’, Review of Metaphysics, 40 (1): 3–16. Sorabji, R. (1983) Time, Creation and the Continuum: theories in antiquity and the early middle ages, London: Duckworth. Soulsby, M. P. & Fraser, J. T. (eds) (2001) Time: perspectives at the millennium, Westport & London: Bergin & Garvey. Spengler, O. (1961) The Decline of the West, London: George Allen & Unwin. Spivak, G. C. (1987) In Other Worlds: essays in cultural politics, New York & London: Methuen. Spivak, G. C. (1995) ‘Teaching for the Times’, in Pieterse & Parekh (eds) The Decolonization of Imagination. Spivak, G. C. (1998a) ‘Cultural Talks in the Hot Peace: revisiting the “global village”’, in P. Cheah & B. Robbins (eds) Cosmopolitics: thinking and feeling beyond nations, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Spivak, G. C. (1998b) ‘Gender and International Studies’, Millennium: journal of international studies, 27 (4): 809–831. Spivak, G. C. (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: toward a history of the vanishing present, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Stivale, C. J. (2005) Gilles Deleuze: key concepts, Chesham: Acumen. Thoburn, N. (2003) Deleuze, Marx and Politics, London: Routledge. Tooley, M. (ed.) (1999) Time and Causation, New York & London: Garland Publishing Inc. Villa, D. (1999) Arendt: politics, philosophy, terror, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Villa, D. (ed.) (2000) The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Virilio, P. (1995) ‘Red Alert in Cyberspace’, Radical Philosophy 74 (Nov/Dec): 2–16. Virilio, P. (1997a) Pure War (revised edition), trans. M. Polizzitti & B. O’Keeffe, New York: Semiotexte. Virilio, P. (1997b) Open Sky, trans. J. Rose, London: Verso. Virilio, P. (2000) The Information Bomb, trans. C. Turner, London & New York: Verso.

[ 191 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 192

Bibliogaphy Virilio, P. (2002) Desert Screen: war at the speed of light, trans. M. Degener, London: Continuum. Virilio, P. (2005) City of Panic, trans. J. Rose, Oxford & New York: Berg. Walker, R. B. J. (1993) Inside/Outside: international relations as political theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walker, R. B. J. (1994) ‘Social Movements/World Politics’, Millennium: journal of international studies 23 (3): 659–70. Walker, R. B. J. (1999) ‘Citizenship After the Modern Subject’, in Hutchings & Dannreuther (eds) Cosmopolitan Citizenship. Walker, R. B. J. (2002) ‘On the Immanence/Imminence of Empire’, Millennium: journal of international studies, 31 (2): 337–345. Wallerstein, I. (1983) Historical Capitalism, London: Verso. Wallerstein, I. (2004) Alternatives: the United States confronts the world, Boulder CO: Paradigm Publishers. Waltz, K. (1979) Theory of International Politics, Reading MA: Addison Wesley. Waltz, K. (1993) ‘The Emerging Structure of International Politics’, International Security, 18 (2): 44–79. Walzer, M. (1992) ‘The Civil Society Argument’, in C. Mouffe (ed.) Gramsci and Marxist Theory, London: Routledge. Wendt, A. (2003) ‘Why a World State is Inevitable’, European Journal of International Relations, 9 (4): 491–542. Wendt, A. (2006) ‘Social Theory as Cartesian Science: an auto-critique from a quantum perspective’, in S. Guzzini & A. Leander (eds) Constructivism and International Relations, London: Routledge. Wohlforth, W. C. (1998) ‘Reality Check: revising theories of international politics in response to the end of the Cold War’, World Politics 50 (4): 650–680. Wohlforth, W. C. (2003) Cold War Endgame: oral history, analysis, debates, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press. Wolin, S. (1961) Politics and Vision, London: George Allen & Unwin. Wolin, S. (1997) ‘What Time is It?’, Theory and Event, 1 (1): http://muse.jhu.edu /journals/theory_and_event/v001/1.1wolin.html. Young, I. M. (2000) Inclusion and Democracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Young, R. J. C. (2001) Postcolonialism: a historical introduction, Oxford: Blackwell. Young, R. J. C. (2004) White Mythologies: writing history and the west (2nd edition), London & New York: Routledge. Yovel, Y. (1980) Kant and the Philosophy of History, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

[ 192 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 193

Index Note: ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page.

9/11 108, 140, 159 action communicative 107, 114, 128n.2 human 42, 58, 82, 105n.11, 140, 145 political 31–2, 59, 61–2, 126–7, 161, 170, 175 revolutionary 47, 49, 66–7, 124, 143, 150 activism 82, 118, 121, 124 transnational 162–3 Agamben, G. 23, 75n.9, 128n.12, 131, 141–52, 152n.1, 153n.2, 153n.5–9, 155–74 passim, 177n.4 bare life 144 Coming Community, The 150, 153n.9 Homo Sacer 141, 144–5 Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience 141, 143, 150, 153n.9 Means without End: Notes on Politics 141, 145, 151 State of Exception 145, 150 Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, The 146 agency 25n.7, 52, 93, 141, 154–5, 157 aion 69–70, 73, 76n.16, 153n.5, 169, 171, 174 American revolution 58, 60–1 anarchy 92, 96–7, 100–1 anthropology 5, 51 apocalypse 15, 23, 28, 30, 33–4, 62, 91, 131, 134, 147 aporia 54, 66 Arendt, Hannah 21–3, 53n.5, 54–5, 58–74 passim, 75n.3, 81–3, 88, 95, 104n.1, 106, 131–52 passim, 153n.2, 158, 162, 170–1, 177n.1 Human Condition, The 75n.5, 134, 143 natality 21, 54, 61, 145 authority 22, 42, 45, 90, 100, 109, 141, 144, 149, 176

Bacon, F. 28, 32–37, 48, 52n.2, 157–8, 162, 177n.1 masculine birth of time 28, 33–5, 37, 48, 156 ‘Masculine Birth of Time or the Great Instauration of the Dominion of Man over the Universe, The’ 32 balance of power 10, 13, 135 becoming 4, 18, 21, 54, 56–7, 65, 69–72, 74, 169–72, 174 beginning 7, 21, 23, 32, 38, 57–9, 61–2, 65, 69, 72, 90, 156 Benhabib, S. 27n.34, 107, 115–18, 122–4, 128n.10, 163–4 Benjamin, Walter 21, 23, 54–74 passim, 75n.3, 75n.7, 76n.11, 76n.13–14, 81–95 passim, 106, 131, 141–52 passim, 153n.2, 153n.9, 156–68 passim, 177n.1 ‘Critique of Violence’ 65, 76n.13, 145 ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ 75n.7, 142, 146 Victor’s history 63–4, 146–7 Bergson, H. 21, 54–7, 74n.1, 160, 169–70 Bernstein S. 100, 102–3, 105 biology 6, 83, 102, 104n.2 evolutionary 100, 104n.2 Biopolitics 143, 145, 150–1, 152n.1 Bio-power 22, 121–2, 152n.1 Blaney, D. 160–1 borders 118, 145 cultural 117 national 112 state 114, 116–17, 138 territorial 138 bourgeois 47–8 Bueno de Mesquita, B. 93–9, 102–3, 105n.10 ‘expected utility model’ 94, 97, 105n.10 capital 113, 120 global 157–8

[ 193 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 194

Index capitalism 14–5, 17, 47–8, 67, 70–1, 89, 119, 122, 128n.11, 156–65 passim categorical imperative 40, 114–15 causal mechanism 48, 50, 56, 96 causation 6, 25n.12, 26n.21, 84, 94, 100–1, 105n.11 efficient 7, 14, 19, 100, 156 mechanical 54, 100 teleological 14, 43 Chakrabarty, D. 24, 161, 165, 167–8, 170, 172 chance 33, 35, 63, 102, 148 change 7–8, 11, 34–5, 38, 43, 45, 64, 102, 153n.5, 154, 176 historical 14, 40, 47, 51, 84, 90 political 55, 71, 73 progressive 51, 63, 101, 123 revolutionary 71, 120–1 Christianity 33–4, 132, 148 chronological time 34–5, 60, 142, 146–8 chronology 25n.6, 34–5, 146, 151 Christian 34–5 historical 35 Unitarian 28 chronopolitics 138 chronos causal 7, 19, 56–8, 72, 84, 86, 105n.13 clock time 6–7, 18–19, 25n.10, 57, 84, 142, 158 control 9, 23, 33, 154–8, 173–4, 177n.1 distinction chronos/kairos 5, 8, 18, 20, 27n.29, 29, 49, 55, 76n.16 duration 5, 57, 133, 135 kairos and 4–5, 9, 13, 18, 20–1, 25n.5, 32, 49, 52, 52n.3, 62, 64, 81, 130, 153n.5, 154 linear 5–8, 22, 35, 49, 72, 82, 132, 142, 156 measurable time 5–7, 18, 25n.9, 34, 49, 69, 119 natural 4, 8, 21, 24, 25n.6, 35, 49, 60–1, 63, 99, 153n.5, 156 Newtonian 5, 34–6, 41, 49 citizenship 107, 114, 115 global 115, 122 city-state 134–5, 158 civil society 43, 107, 116, 125, 128n.6, 157, 162 global 17, 116, 121, 124–6, 159, 163 civilisation 38, 44, 88, 90–1 class 10, 47, 51, 64, 72, 121, 125, 164, 177n.3

struggle 47, 71, 120 Cold War 11–22 passim, 26n.20, 27n.22, 27n.24, 76n.10, 81–103 passim, 104n.6, 106–19 passim, 136, 159 colonialism 29, 36, 51, 160 Endo-colonialism 136 Exo-colonialism 135 colonisation 159–60 communication 17–19, 110, 112, 116, 123, 133, 137, 170 community 38, 45, 87, 115–17 political 22, 32, 117–18, 137–8, 144 concentration camp 58, 60, 131, 136, 144, 158 global 139 Connolly, William 24, 170–2, 175–6, 177n.5 Pluralism 171 constitutionalism 107 contingency 21, 31–2, 67, 73, 76n.16, 103, 105n.13, 170, 176 control biopolitical 131, 141, 158 popular 135 technical 134–5, 138–40 cosmopolitan 17, 109–11, 114–18, 121–4, 128n.9, 130, 152, 165 democracy see democracy; cosmopolitan ethics see ethics; cosmopolitan politics 116, 120, 171 cosmopolitanism 22, 107, 111, 116–18, 122, 125, 128n.14, 162 cosmos 25n.5, 34, 69 creation 28, 30, 33–5, 38, 62, 72, 101, 152, 166, 177n.1 cultural identity 87, 90, 111 culture 20, 27n.33, 36, 38, 40, 44–7, 87, 110, 115–18, 141–3, 159, 170–1 political 117, 172 decline 4–23 passim, 27n.31, 28, 37–9, 62, 64, 74, 87, 105n.8, 134, 140, 143, 165, 176 decolonisation 11, 160 deconstruction 67–9, 76n.11, 153n.8, 169, 177n.4 Deleuze, Gilles 21–2, 24, 54–5, 65–74 passim, 75n.1, 76n.11, 76n.15–16, 76n.18, 77n.19, 119, 131–2, 153n.2, 155–74 passim Anti-Oedipus 70–1, 77n.19

[ 194 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 195

Index coding 70 Logic of Sense, The 69 territorialisation 70 Thousand Plateaux, A 71 democracy 62–4, 96, 106–7, 111, 113, 115, 121–2, 125, 131, 153n.9 cosmopolitan 76n.10, 106, 114, 124, 127, 130, 175 deliberative 116 liberal 156–8 global 106 Der Derian, J. 27n.28, 134 Derrida, Jaques 21–2, 24, 25n.7, 54–5, 65–74 passim, 75n.9–10, 76n.11–12, 76n.14, 131–2, 141, 153n.2, 153n.8, 155–74 passim ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’ 65, 68, 76n.11 haunted 22, 54–5, 68, 71, 154, 167, 169 hauntological 67, 76n.14, 167–8 Philosophy in a Time of Terror 168 Specters of Marx 67 desire 40–1, 44, 47, 50, 69–72, 88–9, 120, 138, 169 determination 31, 38, 40–1, 48–9, 50, 58, 157 structural 100 determinism 52, 56–7, 72, 95, 101, 107, 114, 123, 152 diagnosis 22, 42, 81–2, 108, 113, 116, 132, 155, 159, 165 dialogue 116–7, 125, 127n.1, 164 discontinuity 103, 142 discourse ethics 107, 116–17, 127n.1, 128n.8 division of labour see labour; division of duration 3, 5–6, 57, 133, 135 economics 12, 84, 88 empire 6, 22, 112, 119–22, 125, 127, 130, 137, 152n.1, 153n.6, 157, 165–6 end of history 7–23 passim, 27n.24, 44–52 passim, 71, 75n.10, 81, 89–90, 115, 120, 132, 141, 145, 157–8, 168 enlightenment 15, 17, 19, 29, 33–7, 39, 42, 73–4, 84–5, 115–16, 124, 131, 162, 166, 168–9 eschatology 76n.14, 131, 151, 158 Christian 29 ethics 68, 76n.14, 110, 114, 116, 146 cosmopolitan 116

discourse see discourse ethics European state system 12, 29, 44 European Union 19, 109, 112, 116 evolution 6, 82–3, 90, 94, 102–3, 105n.12, 107, 121, 142, 162, 171 theory of 49, 84 evolutionary theory 21, 100, 105n.12 experimental time 86, 95, 98, 104n.3, 156 explanation 6, 24, 59, 61, 82–3, 86, 104n.6, 124, 161, 165, 172–3, 176 faith 28, 42, 58, 71, 148–150, 159 fate 15, 33, 37, 60, 98, 101, 114, 126, 131–2, 134–5, 139, 150, 152 feminism 162 transnational 128n.10, 164 feminist 20, 23–4, 116, 155, 160, 162–7, 172 postcolonial 163 western 162 First World War 58 foreign policy 14, 89, 95, 112, 156, 159 US see United States; foreign policy fortune 8, 9, 26n.16, 29–33, 36, 162 maenad 8, 13, 17 free will 40–1, 43, 74 freedom 40–1, 43–6, 48, 51, 58–9, 71, 75n.2, 85, 114, 120, 122–4, 126, 133, 138, 143, 152 French Revolution 39, 42, 44–6, 48, 59–61, 109, 113 Fukuyama, Francis 17, 22, 27n.24, 75, 81, 87–92, 98, 103–6, 130–2, 155, 157 Gaddis, J.L. 92–100, 102–3, 105n.8–9, 105n.12 generalisation 6, 19, 32, 59, 131, 150, 158, 164–5, 175 global governance 16, 124, 159 global political economy see political economy; global global politics see politics; global globalisation 4–22 passim, 25n.10, 16n.18, 27n.26, 71, 88, 112–22 passim, 128n.12, 137–8, 141, 144–5, 152n.1, 153n.9, 159–73 passim cultural, social and political 16 economic and technological 16–17, 128n.11 theory 15–17, 19 Goddess History 8–9, 11, 13, 17–19, 21, 29, 97 governmentality 15, 136, 165

[ 195 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 196

Index Guattari, F. 69–71, 76n.18, 77n.19, 119, 169 Anti-Oedipus 70–1, 77n.19 Thousand Plateaux, A 71 Habermas, J. 22–3, 27n.34, 107–27 passim, 127n.2, 128n.2–5, 128n.7–8, 128n.11, 130, 155–72 passim Between Facts and Norms 107–8 Divided West, The 107–8 Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The 107 Hardt, M. 22–3, 107, 119–25, 127, 128n.4, 128n.12–14, 130, 145, 152n.1, 153n.6–7, 155–72 passim, 177n.2 Empire 119–21 Multitude 119–20, 122 Hegel, G.W.F. 20–2, 25n.7, 29–58 passim, 73–4, 82, 88, 108–19 passim, 152, 153n.8, 174, 177n.1 Phenomenology of Spirit 88 hegemony 27n.33, 48, 156 Held, David 16–17, 27n.26, 118, 128n.6 Herder, J.G. 29, 37–41, 43–3, 48, 52n.3–4, 73, 76n.17, 88 ‘Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind’ 38 heterotemporality 166–9, 172–6 high politics 10, 112 historical development 7, 36–51 passim, 58, 66, 86–98 passim, 104n.3, 106, 111, 114, 121, 123, 157–72 passim historical materialism 49, 54, 62–3, 75n.3, 119, 142, 177n.2 historical process 50, 56, 60 historicism 21–23, 49–74 passim, 75n.7–8, 75n.10, 81–103 passim, 104n.3–4, 105n.14, 106, 131, 141–2, 152, 159, 161, 172, 174, 177n.2 mechanical 21, 29, 49–51, 88 organic 21, 29, 39, 42, 49–51, 58, 70, 88, 104n.2 pedagogic 21, 29, 49, 51, 88 history empirical 41, 45, 47–8, 52, 95, 110, 114, end see end of history human 28, 35–41, 43–4, 48–50, 64, 89, 140 natural 36, 49 philosophy of 14, 21, 23–4, 40–52 passim, 52n.4, 53n.7, 54–73 passim, 75n.7, 76n.13, 82, 85, 88, 90, 107–19 passim, 131, 141–69 passim

secular 34, 167 theories of 7–9, 11, 13–14, 26n.15, 67, 75n.10, 104n.3, 123, 134 universal 34, 41, 52n.4, 108, 164 Hobbes, T. 37, 40, 96, 108 hope 9, 17, 31, 42, 48, 60, 131, 168 hubris of intellectualism 172, 176 human temporality 33, 36, 142–3, 145–6, 151 human time 37, 58, 135 human will 38, 41 humanitarian intervention 118, 124, 127, 145, 159, 164–6, 173 humanitarianism 121, 129n.14, 145, 151, 153n.6, 164–6, 173–4 humanity 33–43 passim, 90, 110, 115, 120–1, 132, 134–51 passim, 153n.9, 164–5, 171 Huntington, Samuel 17, 22, 27n.24, 81–98 passim, 103, 106, 128n.5, 130 clash of civilisations 14, 17, 27n.24, 81, 121 hyper-globalists 16–18, 20 imperialism 29, 36, 51, 159, 163, 166–7 Inayatullah, N. 160–1 institutions 9–10, 16, 37, 44, 47, 70, 85, 96, 159, 165, 176 instrumental rationality see rationality; instrumental inter-state 9–10, 13–14, 17, 26n.18, 159 relations 109, 114, 116, 127, 134, 151, 156 Interests 41, 91, 112, 140, 163 International Criminal Court 166 international law see law; international international order 112, 115 international politics see politics; international International Relations 4–17 passim, 26n.18, 87–103 passim, 104n.2, 105n.12, 105n.14, 106, 112, 130, 152–61 passim, 175 social science of 87, 92, 95, 104n.2, 105n.9 theories 4, 26n.18, 27n.22, 92, 98–100, 104n.2 international society 10, 41 international system 11–12, 15, 92–3, 105n.14, 166 international terrorism 15, 112

[ 196 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 197

Index Iraq 1991 Gulf War 133, 137, 159 US/British invasion of (2003) 15 judgement aesthetic 42, 52n.5, 53n.5, 54, 61, 62 moral 53n.5, 62, 114 normative 4, 165–6, 173 philosopher’s 42–3, 45 political 41, 52n.5, 53n.5, 62, 86, 138, 171 justice 65–7, 73, 100, 110–14, 117, 168–9, 171, 173 kairos 28–64 passim, 72, 81–2, 86, 95, 124, 130, 141, 153n.5, 157–8, 176 chronos and see chronos; kairos and distinction chronos/kairos see chronos; distinction chronos/kairos exceptional 5, 9, 16, 18, 86, 162, 176 revolutionary 7, 39, 42, 119 timeliness 5, 25n.7, 72, 103, 146, 155, 168, 173 Kant 3–4, 23, 24n.2, 40–3, 45–8, 53n.5, 55, 58, 106–11, 114, 118, 123, 130, 157–8, 174 Critique of Judgement 42, 53n.5 Critique of Pure Reason 3–4 ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ 41 ‘On Perpetual Peace: a philosophical sketch’ 13, 40 labour 6, 19, 59–72 passim, 75n.3, 75n.5, 119–20, 124, 135, 145 division of 19, 37, 134 language 10, 19, 39, 50–1, 66, 68, 83, 110, 112, 141–51 passim, 162–3 law of historical development 50, 98 international 96, 108–13, 118–19, 127, 157, 159, 165 constitutionalisation of 108–10, 112, 125 moral 40, 53n.5, 110 positive 108, 149 universal 62, 108 League of Nations 58 legitimacy 51, 66, 89, 99, 107, 149 liberal democratic peace 13, 17, 76n.10, 90, 92, 96–7, 105n.8, 160

state 88, 92, 116 theories of international politics 13–14, 164 liberalism 112, 171 lifeworld 107, 116, 128n.2 Linklater, R. 107, 115–16, 118, 122–4, 128n.8–9, 128n.11 universalisability 115, 128n.8 Lyotard, J. –F. 18–20, 27n.30, 132 Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge 18 McGrew, A. 16–17, 27n.6 Machiavelli 8–9, 22, 26n.16, 28–33, 35, 38, 48, 52, 54, 56, 61, 72, 76n.16, 97, 134, 156, 158, 162, 177n.1 machines 41, 70, 135, 151, 169 capitalist 70 social 70 temporality of 70 Marx, Karl 20–3, 25n.7, 29–52 passim, 53n.7–9, 54–74 passim, 75n.3, 75n.10, 76n.11, 82, 88, 106–23 passim, 128n.11, 130, 142–58, 168, 170, 174, 177n.1 ‘18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ 67 Marxism 58, 62, 75n.3 Marxist 13–14, 19, 22–3, 49, 54, 62, 65, 70–2, 75n.3, 75n.10, 88, 91, 119, 120–1, 123, 160–4, 177n.2–3 philosophy of history 14, 58, 128n.11, 174 material conditions 47, 50, 59, 125 materialism 135–7, 139 historical see historical materialism Mearsheimer, J. 96–9, 103, 130 memory 56, 64, 68, 75n.2, 168, 177n.5 Messianic 54, 63–72 passim, 75n.9, 76n.14, 131, 141–52 passim, 153n.7–8, 156, 158, 167–8, 177n.1, 177n.4 Messianism 64, 68, 75n.9, 76n.14, 136, 149, 153n.8, 167–8 time 21, 23, 72, 75n.9, 141, 146–50, 153n.7, 158, 168 methodological holism 83, 101 methodological individualism 83, 86 modernisation 90–1, 105n.8, 160, 163 modernity 11–19 passim, 26n.15, 29, 39, 43–6, 48, 74, 107–18 passim, 132, 136, 139, 152–72 passim moral learning 115, 117–18, 125, 156, 163

[ 197 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 198

Index moral will 38, 40, 42 morality 36, 56, 90, 110, 116 multicultural 5, 116, 166 multiplicity 38, 122, 165, 173 multitude 22, 120–3, 125, 130, 153n.7, 157 nation-state 65, 106, 110, 120–1, 133, 135–6, 140, 157 natural science 6, 12, 19, 48–9, 57, 59–60, 84–5, 99–100, 104n.2 nature 8, 28, 31–5, 37–8, 40–2, 48–50, 58–60, 63, 83–5, 142–4, 162, 177n.1 neo-conservative 15, 112, 127, 128n.3 neo-liberal 15, 92, 112, 127, 156 neo-realism 12–13, 15, 17 Negri, A. 22–3, 107, 119–27, 128n.4, 128n.12–14, 129n.14, 130, 145, 152n.1, 153n.6–7, 155–66 passim, 177n.2 ‘Constitution of Time, The’ 119 ‘Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo’ 119 new time 22, 28–48 passim, 53n.9, 58–74 passim, 107, 113–15, 122–3, 146, 157, 159, 176, 177n.1 Newton, (Sir) I. 6, 25n.6, 28, 34–5, 48, 57, 141 Unitarian chronology of world history 28 Nietzsche, Friedrich 21, 54–7, 71, 74n.1, 75n.2, 75n.6, 75n.8, 76n.18, 169–70 Genealogy of Morals, The 56 ‘History in the Service and Disservice of Life’ 55 non-governmental organisation (NGO) 121, 163 humanitarian 122, 124–5, 127 non-state actors 16, 124, 152n.1, 161 normal time 5, 7, 16 novelty 3, 6–7, 17–18, 22, 45, 57, 66, 70, 125, 173 nuclear weapons 60, 62, 133, 136 Nussbaum, M. 171, 175 parsimony 91, 98, 175 Paul see St. Paul peace 43, 92, 98–9, 105n.8, 108–11 perpetual 22, 41–2, 44, 157 philosophical history 39–42, 45, 47–8, 52, 86–7, 106, 110, 114, 123, 161 philosophy 26n.15, 40, 44–5, 48, 53n.7, 55–6, 60, 62, 76n.15, 86, 90, 107,

132, 142 physics 6, 25n.10, 83–4, 99–102, 104n.2 of time 4 quantum 100 pluralism 50, 74 plurality 11, 19, 27n.31, 38–50 passim, 62, 67, 72, 91, 101, 109, 126–38 passim, 162–73 passim Pocock, J.G.A. 8–9, 21 polis 61, 65, 72, 134–5, 143–4, 177n.1 political actors 9–10, 23, 31–3, 42, 59, 61, 116, 124, 135, 139, 153n.7, 172 political economy 160–1 global 17, 151 political imagination 32, 176 political theory 24, 25n.7, 26n.15, 107, 116, 162, 168, 170 politics domestic 11, 13 global 16–19, 23, 114, 127, 129n.14, 131, 175 international 11–14, 18, 82, 87, 89–93, 96–103, 107–8, 111, 113, 127, 130, 161–4 social science of 90, 100, 102, 130 inter-state 13, 159 Popper, Karl 22, 81–8, 90, 93–5, 98, 104n.1–3, 106, 130, 175 historical interpretations 85–7, 93, 98, 100, 104n.3 post-Cold War 15, 18, 22, 82, 87, 89–92, 97, 106, 108, 111, 119 postcolonial 4, 23–4, 26n.15, 27n.33, 155, 160, 162–7, 172 post-Kantians 3, 23, 107, 119, 121, 123–7, 130, 146, 152, 158 post-Marxists 23, 107, 112, 119, 123, 125–7, 128n.3, 130, 158 postmodernism 19–20, 132 postmodernity 4, 11, 15–16, 18–20 postnational constellation 112, 114 poststructuralist 4, 24, 132 power balance of see balance of power biopolitical 130, 143, 157, 164 politics 97, 111, 130 sovereign 109, 143–5, 148–50, 161, 166 state 143–4, 146 praxis 47–8,120, 122, 124, 126, 177n.3 prediction 6, 32, 82–3, 86–7, 92, 94–6, 98, 100, 102–3, 104n.6, 131, 159, 165, 175

[ 198 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 199

Index prescription 15, 44, 46, 65, 73, 82–3, 86, 89, 124, 154–6, 173 presentness 67, 172 private property 37, 44 private sphere 116, 134, 138, 162 private time 24n.5, 142–3 production economic 36, 44 relations 47, 123 of subjects 128n.12, 131, 138 profane time 35, 75n.9, 141–2 progress historical 34, 42. 46, 74, 84, 87, 141, 166 political 13, 115, 132 proletariat 67, 123 prophecy 82–3, 87, 92, 95–6, 98, 103, 131, 147, 155, 158–9 biblical 34–5 proximity electromagnetic 132–3 mechanical 132–3, 135–6 metabolic 132–3, 137 psychoanalysis 70–1 public sphere 75n.5, 116, 124, 128n.2, 134, 138, 143, 157 rational actor 13, 96–8, 136 rational will 40, 42–3, 45, 47 rationality 84–6, 94–5, 116, 123, 156, 164 communicative 128n.2, 156 instrumental 84, 128n.2 strategic 145, 156, 164 Ray, J.L. 95–7, 99, 103, 104n.6, 156, 161 realism 29, 89, 91–2, 94, 96 structural 92 defensive 92 offensive 92, 96–7 real time 133, 137, 148, 153n.4 reason 3, 34, 36, 40–4, 49, 85, 104, 114, 126, 159 communicative 110, 116–17, 120, 124, 126, 128n.7, 156, 164 practical 110–11, 114–16, 123 recognition 40, 44–6, 88–9, 95, 100–1, 115, 126, 172–3 redemption 56, 64, 72, 131, 141, 146–8, 158, 168 refugee 131, 137, 144, 158, 161, 169 relativism 60, 132 historical 83 religion 32, 34, 90, 149, 159

repetition 4, 7–9, 12–14, 16–17, 20, 28, 35, 56, 66–7, 74, 86, 130, 142 responsibility 48, 68, 76n.14, 86, 101, 147, 157–8, 175 revolution 42, 45, 54, 60, 62–3, 65, 67, 133, 136–7, 143, 146, 153n.9, 167 revolutionary action 47, 49, 66–7, 124, 143, 150, 162 rights 108–9, 111, 115–18, 144, 163 citizenship 115 human 16, 107, 109–13, 118, 124, 127, 128n.2, 163, 165, 174 women’s 162–3, 166 Rousseau, J.J. 26n.13–4, 29, 37–9, 41, 43, 48, 73, 108, 134, 139, 141, 161, 177n.1 ‘Discourse on the Origins of Inequality’ 37, 134 Émile 38 ‘Social Contract, The’ 38 Russett, B. 95–7, 99, 103–4, 104n.6, 156, 161 sacred time 4, 24, 27n.29, 27n.32, 33–6, 75n.9, 141–2 St. Paul 146, 148–9, 153n.7, 159 Letter to the Romans 146, 159 savage 37, 160, 162 noble 26n.14, 161 Schmitt, C. 113, 128n.5, 148–9, 151 science 6, 18–9, 28–9, 32–4, 36, 47, 49–50, 55–7, 60, 62, 81–3, 85–7, 99–100, 102, 104n.2, 158 natural see natural science social see social science Second World War 11, 76n.10, 87, 166 security 10, 13, 15, 94 self-determination 43–6, 49–50, 113–15 democratic 118 self-interest 36, 40, 47, 88–9 singularity 59, 61, 66, 76n.12, 122, 151 slow time 161, 171 social actors 94, 102 social science 6, 12, 26n.15, 29, 51–62 passim, 81–104 passim, 104n.2, 104n.6, 105n.13, 106, 130–1, 151–2, 161, 172, 174–5 social scientific imagination 14, 28 social theory 15, 58, 105n.13, 107, 115, 132 social time 5, 24n.5 sociology 5, 51

[ 199 ]

3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics

18/7/08

07:58

Page 200

Index sovereignty 10–11, 107, 119, 131, 143–5, 171, 173 space and time 3, 7, 14, 39, 87, 101, 133, 140 spectrality 67–8, 73, 168 spirit 43–6, 50, 53n.9, 55, 61, 67, 142, 153n.7 Spivak, G.C. 24, 128n.10, 163–4, 167–9 state of exception 23, 131, 145, 148–50, 158, 162 state of nature 36–7, 96, 108 Stoic 69–70 subaltern 115, 147, 163–4, 166–7 woman 164, 167, 169 subject 3, 49, 63, 72, 101, 121–2, 128n.12, 136–51 passim, 153n.7, 162, 164, 167, 177n.1 modern 131, 143 subjectivity 56, 123 supra-national 9, 109, 127 surveillance 137–9 technology 10, 15, 19, 88, 90–1, 134, 137–8, 140, 151, 171 teleology 43, 101, 123, 128n.12 telos 36, 41, 43, 50–1, 109, 114–16, 118, 120, 123, 125, 128n.13, 165 thanatopolitics 145 theory of time 6, 20, 170 thymos 88–9, 104n.4 time-traveller 95, 152, 155, 160 totalitarianism 58, 133, 138, 143 trade 29, 40, 51, 88, 109, 137 United Nations 10, 109, 112 Charter 110–11 United States 14–15, 26n.15, 105n.8, 112, 140, 165 foreign policy 15, 95, 97 unity 3, 22, 38–9, 43, 46, 50, 72–4, 84–5,

107, 165 in historical development 29, 38 temporal 102 universalism 116, 118, 124 moral 121 universality 39, 41, 53n.5, 110, 115 untimeliness 24, 68, 169 untimely 21, 25n.7, 67–9, 71–2, 169, 173–5 value 7, 20, 88, 98, 101, 110, 119, 126–7, 128n.7, 163, 173–5 violence 63, 65–8, 71, 76n.13, 111, 125, 141, 144–5, 149, 151 police 145 law-making 149, 159 law-preserving 149, 159 Virilio, P. 17, 23, 25n.10, 27n.29, 128n.12, 131–52 passim, 152n.1, 153n.2–4, 153n.6, 155–71 passim globalitarianism 132–4, 138 virtù 8, 9, 26n.16, 30–3 Waltz, Kenneth 12–13, 93 Wendt, A. 100–3, 105n.11 Westphalia 13, 19, 26n.18, 161 peace of 11–12 Westphalian 26n.18, 115, 145, 160 world history 7–8, 14, 17, 21, 28–52 passim, 60–1, 72, 88, 91, 104, 125, 157, 161 philosophy of 29, 39 theory of 7, 17 world political development 74, 102 world republic 109, 127 world state 100–1 world systems theory 14, 27n.22 World Trade Organization (WTO) 109, 110

[ 200 ]