What in the hell …

In particular I mean the theological motifs in Benjamin. As in, what does one do with all of that stuff if one is an atheist? I’ve been thinking about this largely in response to the Long Sunday Benjamin symposium, and various reading I’ve been doing.

In his short piece, “The Right To Use Force” (a commentary on another essay of the same name from a journal of religious socialism), Benjamin writes that “one of the tasks of my moral philosophy” is an exposition of the position that only individuals possess the right to use force. In this regard, “‘anarchism’ may very well be used to describe a theory that denies a moral right not to force as such but to every human institution, community, or individuality that either claims a monopoly over [force]”. (232)

It is in this light that one should read Benjamin’s remark that “a normative force always comes down in favor of existing reality”, which is to say, this should be read as ‘a monopoly of norm founding, norm preserving, and norm destroying force’. To say otherwise would imply a certain non-normative force, a position which is not a position (a political position analogous to the epistemological position of the god’s-eye-view or view from nowhere found metaphysical realism).

Benjamin does seem to at least gesture toward such a non-normative position through his use of the divine, a politics from god’s position. Benjamin writes that there should be no claims for a right to use force “from any point of view, even if only as a general principle”, because instead the ability to make use of force should be read always “in specific cases as a gift bestowed by a divine power, as absolute power”. (233) That is to say, the use of force is right that only the divine has, and human use of force only occurs by a gift on god’s part of temporary temporarily bestowing the right of the divine upon the human.

I do not believe in the divine in anything other than a strictly metaphorical sense. Thus, there is no god who bestows anything. At the same time, though, by absolutizing a moral right to force that is not legitimately monopolizable, as it resides in all humans (at any point/time when force is exercised this faux divine right exists), Benjamin essentially renders the language of rights inert. All rights to use force are equal rights (since there can not be greater and lesser quantities of divinity, as divinity for Benjamin is absolute), and, as we all know, between equal rights force decides.

In a sense, Benjamin’s argument is for a common ownership - in the sense of owned entirely and yet equally by each individual - of the means of force, or means of production of force. Since, at bottom, the heart of the means of production of force is the body and mind, this implies that for Benjamin there can be no legitimate delegation of the body and mind to another unless there is always an immediately exercisable recall option. This indicates a perhaps obvious extension of the argument by analogy to a claim about the means of production in a more traditional marxist sense, which is to say, there can be no monopoly over the means of production either.

Law and capital as social relations are control over the means of force and of production (at the most general level, control over the exercise of certain capacities for force and for production). It is for this reason that “law sees violence in the hands of individuals as a danger undermining the legal system” (238), and why capital can not abide the exercise of productive capacities that do not pass through the gate and pay the entry price of commodification. [See the debate on primitive accumulation at
the Commoner, also the work of G. and M. Dallacosta, and Hydrarchist “Vampires of Value, Masters of Repression”] Benjamin comments on this same threat to the monopoly of the means of force in his various remarks on the figure of the great criminal. (Which is not always positive, it must be noted. Benjamin’s scattered remarks on the criminal are just that, and can’t be taken as much more: football chants mocking police for their inability to find the Yorkshire ripper are just one case where ‘the masses’ lauding of criminals is not wholly positive. Extending Benjamin’s analysis to other figures, figures of class struggle in a more positive sense, is an interesting project for future inquiry, considering figures like Ned Ludd, Captain Swing, perhaps Robin Hood and Luther Blissett.)

Against this, if one felt a need for such justifications, one might pose the figure of the commons as social relations of not only not monopolized but nonmonopolizable means of force and of production. In a Benjaminian parallel we might say that the commons are not res communis, but res divinis juris, a loan from god that is extended equally to all in every moment when they make use of the commons. What I like about this formulation is that it allows a reading of the commons talk among certain marxists that I like, in a way that might help prevent thinking of the commons as utopian and conflict-free.

Since, again, all have equal right extended by the divine, and so conflicts between those rights, if/when when they arise, will be determined by force. The res divinis juris renders law aporetic, as the monopoly of means of force and of production is delegated to a nonexistent figure of the divine, which is to say, it is jettisoned. Put differently, we might say that the point of the talk of the divine is for as much of a lack of social pre-determination as is possible: Benjamin writes that “fate (…) in all cases underlies legal violence” (248). The divine, on the other hand, is not fated but writes fate (in a sense, we might say this is a replaying of the - I think Kantian but I’m not sure - argument that the I is/should be the source of causal chains rather than their object). A secularized/profane divine would be an act/order/process by which secular/profane fates are attacked and undermined.

One last thing, a digression (though ‘digression’ may imply a more clear line of thought in the above than actually exists). Benjamin writes that “there is a sphere of human agreement that is nonviolent to the extent that it is wholly inaccessible to violence” (245). I like the spirit of this, but I wonder if, if pressed, this doesn’t turn into a Habermasian ideal speech situation, and, how can one tell if there is really no relationship of/to force (we must remember that ‘violence’ is not bodily harm but the exercise of force on another, gewalt)? One of the best ways to hide violence is to say it is not there.

Also, it is worth noting that Benjamin writes “the right to strike constitutes in the view of labor, which is opposed to the view of the state, the right to use force in attaining certain ends”, presumably even the end of the state. (239) There is a perspectivalism here that I quite like, the same one in the better works of Negri, of Cleaver, etc: the view that there is an incommensurability of perspectives - an antagonism - between labor and state, workers and capital. If is this is, however, from what perspective can it be said that there is a sphere of nonviolent agreement? Surely from the perspective of the state and of capital the act of living under the social relations of law and capital constitute a form of agreement with the prevailing order (this is the idea in contract theory as I understand it). And at the same time, the extension of nonviolent, non-force laden, agreement far enough might come to undermine the state and capital. I’m thinking here of Agamben’s remarks about Tiananmen Square, that the sovereign can not countenance a form of community without conditions, as this threatens the sovereign’s existence. In this sense, then, nonviolence is precisely violence when viewed from another perspective. I suspect that this forgetting of perspectivalism in the last instance may be bound up with how one reads the divine, and with some of the unsatisfactory aspects Agamben’s work (for instance, sounding as if bare life is bare not only from the perspective of the sovereign but for itself, or as such, ontologically. A similar moment may also occur in Negri though I’ll have to think more about this, that constituent power must constitute, that value productive labor power must produce value, treating these as teloi rather than names for capacities that exist in conflictual instantiation and which can be subtracted from their current trajectories. In a word, perhaps there is a forgetting here that the divine erodes fate, and this forgetting re-installs a type of fatedness).

So, what to do with the theological stuff? Secularize it, render it profane, but perhaps in a way that universalizes or absolutizes the traits of the divine. In a sense, to my mind, the divine is something with regard to which claims, if pressed, resort to either infinite regress or tautology. The former is more problematic as it is hard to construct much on the basis of unstable regresses. The latter, however, are fine by me. Convictions and activities as tautological, and conflicts between them playing out not by propositional exchanges in ideal speech situations but at least as often, if not always, in relationships of force.