Kenneth Surin

Dossier on Empire

Leo Panitch, in a recent article in New Left Review (2000), praised the late Nicos Poulantzas for his new and productive conceptualization of the role and character of the state as it was beginning to evolve in response to the pressures of a burgeoning economic internationalization in the capitalist nations from the 1960s onward. In the first phases of this new situation, marked by the postwar economic resurgence of Germany and Japan and the seeming decline of the United States (this was before the 1990s, of course), it was tempting, says Panitch, to believe that the United States was not able to exercise the kind of hegemony that had been available to previous imperial powers. Poulantzas, however, discerned that what was taking place was not so much an American political-economic “decline,” with a concomitant shifting of power and influence to the corporatist model of capitalism ostensibly responsible for the economic success of Germany and Japan, as a qualitative transformation in the kind of imperium that was now being exercised by the United States. This emerging imperium was part of the beginning of a new and significant response to the crisis of the previous system of capitalist accumulation (a dispensation that has been variously titled Fordism, social democratic capitalism, Keynesianism, the Bretton Woods institutional framework, etc.). From this change would emerge a new structure of accumulation associated with the onset of globalization. Writing nearly three decades ago, Poulantzas said that

Marxism(s) and "The Withering Away of the State"

It is not some unavoidable real world, with its laws of economy and laws of war, that is now blocking us. It is a set of identifiable processes of realpolitik and force majeure, of nameable agencies of power and capital, distraction and disinformation, and all these interlocking with the embedded short-term pressures and the interwoven subordinations of an adaptive commonsense. It is not in staring at these blocks that there is any chance of movement past them. They have been named so often that they are not even, for most people, news. The dynamic moment is elsewhere, in the difficult business of gaining confidence in our own energies and capacities. ... It is only in a shared belief and insistence that there are practical alternatives that the balance of forces and chances begins to alter. Once the inevitabilities are challenged, we begin gathering our resources for a journey of hope. If there are no easy answers there are still available and discoverable hard answers, and it is these that we can now learn to make and share. This has been, from the beginning, the sense and the impulse of the long revolution. Raymond Williams3

“Reinventing a Physiology of Collective Liberation”: Going “Beyond Marx” in the Marxism(s) of Negri, Guattari, and Deleuze

(1994). “Reinventing a Physiology of Collective Liberation”: Going “Beyond Marx” in the Marxism(s) of Negri, Guattari, and Deleuze. Rethinking Marxism: Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 9-27.

Can the Experiential and the Phenomenological Approaches be Reconciled

This paper suggests a way in which the apparently conflicting experiential and phenomenological approaches to religious education can be reconciled. After a brief characterization of the two approaches, it examines the roles of experience and of the phenomenological method in religious education. Using some ideas of Paul Tillich it suggests how the two approaches can be reconciled. Finally, some objections to such a reconciliation are considered.

On Producing (the Concept of) Solidarity

In the West/North, there have been two dominant models for understanding community and its associated bonds of solidarity. One is preindustrial and invokes the notion of the village with its ‘organic’ ties of neighborliness and so on. The other is industrial and views community in terms of the shared situation of exploitation that is the basis of the constitution of the industrial working class. Neither model applies any longer in the West/North: in most places the village has become a dormitory suburb, and industrial production has increasingly been deproletarianized. This paper will pose the question of an alternative conception of social solidarity. Indispensable for the formation of community is its ability to function as a center of meaning for its members, and the question of how our new forms of production (informatically driven and globalized) allow these new centers of meaning to be developed. This paper will consider two models for this alternative conception. One is derived from Raymond Williams and takes ‘experience’ as its organizing category; the other is taken from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and uses ‘desire’ as its key category.

Conceptualizing Trauma, but What about Asia?

It is surely a truism that the various nomenclatures surrounding the subject of trauma have thoroughly permeated American popular culture. Part of the problem of dealing with this concept (and attendant concepts like that of survivorship) is getting past the idioms that grip popular culture, now that this culture guarantees a seemingly effortless visibility to those projecting themselves as some kind of traumatized subjects.1 How does one escape the banalization of what is after all ostensibly an important concept, psychoanalytically and philosophically? Is “trauma” going to be more than just a part

The Undecidable and the Fugitive: Mille Plateaux and the State-Form

When intuitionism opposed axiomatics, it was not only in the name of intuition, of construction and creation, but also in the name of a calculus of problems, a problematic conception of science that was not less abstract but implied an entirely different abstract machine, one working in the undecidable and the fugitive. It is the real characteristics of axiomatics that lead us to say that capitalism and present-day politics are an axiomatic in the literal sense. But it is precisely for this reason that nothing is played out in advance.Mille Plateaux (MP 576-7/ATP 461)1

The Night Can Sweat with Terror As Before: Afterthoughts

Before we went in [to Jenin] I asked some guys to teach me [how to operate a Caterpillar D- bulldozer]. They taught me how to drive forward and make a flat surface. . . . For three days I just erased and erased. . . . I kept drinking whisky to fight off fatigue. I made them a stadium in the middle of the camp! I didn’t see dead bodies under the blade of the D-. . . . But if there were any I don’t care. —Moshe Nissim, IDF Bulldozer Operator in Jenin, quoted in Stephen Graham, ‘‘Lessons in Urbicide’’

Getting the Picture: Donald Davidson on Robert Morris's Blind Time Drawings IV (Drawing with Davidson)

Donald Davidson is of course supremely well known for his contributions to several areas of philosophy, particularly the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of action. Perhaps less renowned are a cluster of articles that deal with topics that do not seem to fall directly within the purview of the analytic philosopher. Here the very unusual (and for the analytic philosopher somewhat unexpected) collaboration with Robert Morris published in Critical Inquiry comes readily to mind.1 Davidson’s essay on Morris presents the outline of a philosophical account of the act of artistic production that deserves closer scrutiny than it has received to date. I shall look at Davidson’s account and then present my own version of what is possibly going on in Morris’s blind paintings, bearing in mind the context supplied by Davidson’s writings, including those that deal with subjects that do not bear directly on these paintings. My primary concern will be with perception and visual fields and, perhaps more centrally for my argument, touch and its connection with bodily awareness and spatiality. Davidson tends in his commentary on

Western Marxism in the Post-Financial Crisis Era: An Interview with Kenneth Surin

In this interview, Professor Surin speaks about the latest changes in Western Marxism and the urgent need to solve some immediate and practical problems. He provides the theoretical basis and suggests the way forward for the further development of Western Marxism in the context of the post-financial crisis.