What in the hell …

I’m told that the term ‘performative’ has a certain suspicious charge in some circles, perhaps due to (mis?)uses of the work of Judith Butler. I don’t know about that. Back when I was more analyitically minded, I got excited about certain aspects of Anglo-American philosophy of language, emphasizing pragmatics, performative utterances. At the time, a professor and friend of mine remarked that reading Wittgenstein was the way he began reading Marx. I’ve moved away from much of this in the past five years, but just recently have had a recurrence of some of those themes. Nick Thoburn writes, “[i]f the world is at base a primary flux of matter without form or constant, then things are always a temporary product of a channeling of this flux in what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘assemblages’ or ‘arrangements’.” (Thoburn: Deluze, Marx, and Politics, p4). There is a moment here that is problematic: the ‘at base’ implies a certain foundationalism, as if one can only attend to the temporary, contingent (to social relations we wish revised via the abolition of capitalism), if one has a certain ontology. Politics and communism are not dependent on any philosophical world view (that is, questions such as - or analogous to - that of ‘does god exist?’ are non sequitur to matters of communism). But I digress. Thoburn’s comment can be interpreted as parallel to a pragmatics/performative turn in the analytic philosophy of language: language is action, language exists in its enacting.

The question I mean to get at here, then, is what in the hell would it mean to think about writing (ie, interpreting) history as a performative act?

First, it means that all historical narratives are actions, they are produced and are in the middle of being produced, rather than given. That is, historical narratives are historical narration. And, as actions of people (though Angela might accuse me of complicity in / paralleling the form of abstract labor here), historical narrations are contiguous with other actions of people, such that they are always (at least potentially) acting upon and being acted upon by other actions.

The Revoltes Logiques collective writes:

“An episode from the past interests us only inasmuch as it becomes an episode of the present wherein our thoughts, actions, and strategies are decided.” This is quoted in Kristin Ross’s introduction to Ranciere, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (page xxi).

Ross quotes Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History in regard to Ranciere and the Revolte Logiques’ work on history: “the concept of historical progress of mankind (sic) cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time. And a critique of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself.” Similarly, Angela references the Theses in a remark on Federici, saying: ““To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognise it ‘the way it really was’. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.””

(There is one mode of interpreting Benjamin’s “now-time” which is analogous to Thoburn’s “at base” above - as discovery of a historical essence, the truth about what time really is. That and the attendant metaphysical baggage does not interest me very much. I’m more interested in saying what practices ‘really are’ , or perhaps - if I’m to be consistently relativist about it -’also are’. )

Revolte Logique continues “What interests us is that ideas be events, that history be at all times a break, a rupture, to be interrogated only from the perspective of the here and now, and only politically.” The quote appeals quite a bit, and yet, there seems to be an implication that some modes of history are not political. The quote is better interpreted as foregrounding the political aspects of histoy, and pointing out the usefulness of being suspicious of any histories which do not admit of this.

The historical narratives like those I see in Negri and elsewhere are precisely a mode of treating moments in the past as ” an episode of the present wherein our thoughts, actions, and strategies are decided.” The difference is not that Benjamin, Ranciere, et al pose a politicized reading of history vs another reading. Rather, these narrations are political acts, though some acts deploy, as part of their strategy, a political tactic of denying that they are political. The problem with periodization is not that it is not political, but that it is bad politics.

There is still the question remaining: what in the hell is at stake in this matter? I don’t have an answer for this, only reservations and intuitions. One starting point would be to interrogate the relationship between historical moments posed in different types of historical narration, how different acts of historical narration posit different relations between historical moments as part of a different actions/ways of being within the present. (Two additional question - which, if I’m not careful, may erode the ground upon which these reflections can take place - are 1.what, or who, in the hell constitutes ‘a moment’ or event? and 2. how does one distinguish between different modalities of history - there is no ‘history itself/as such’, a simple ‘what happens’, as events are always already narrated. That said, there are differences within history, different modes of history, which must not be leveled in the gestures “everything is history” and “history is always narrated”. There are individual personal histories, [for lack of a better term] informal or unofficial histories of groups, collectivities, towns, etc, official histories, etc etc, and each type is contentious, probably contested, and certainly contestible in ever new ways. The point, of course, is not a philosophy of history, but attempts at [communist] ways of being-in, acting upon [in and against], and doing history, without making harmful mistakes.)