It’s role, I mean. Jodi has a post at the latest LS symposium wherein she describes the partisan as not having a self-interest in being the partisan (or doing partisan stuff). This is Jodi’s read on Carl Schmitt’s using intensity of political commitment as one of the marks that makes the partisan be the partisan. I’m pretty sure I disagree, but I’m not entirely whether I’m disagreeing with Jodi’s read of Carl here or with Jodi and Carl.
In any case, the question is what the relationship is between intense political commitment and self-interest. My immediate reaction, and this is how I read Schmitt, is that self-interest is, for lack of a better term, a non sequitur. Or, put better, motivation by self-interest or the absence thereof is neither a qualifying nor a disqualifying condition for being a partisan.
I’m ambivalent on self-interest here, though. On the one hand, I like it’s bracketing - politics as a matter of commitment to something outside oneself. And this entails a rejection of anything like class interests as determining forces, which I’m sympathetic to in that I want agency and organization to be thought of as deliberate, as self-positing. On the other hand, I’m attached to the idea that acting collectively can result in positive outcomes (at a minimum, harm to enemies, but also gains in terms of what we want and need). Even more so, though, I’m attached to an idea that people following what they want and need can at times have destabilizing results on structures of power (Napster being one example, or really all forms of proletarian shopping).
There’s also a question to my mind about the position from which one can identify and assess self-interest. If the partisan is a subject, a self, then presumably the partisan has an interest in achieving the goals of that partisanship. At least as a desire to so achieve. Is desire different than interest? Put differently, to what degree is interest something knowable (particularly beyond the first person position) and nonsubjective?
The example of the raid on Harper’s Ferry serves as a useful test case. Is John Brown a candidate for being a partisan? Or, at a minimum, is Brown partisan-like in terms of his political commitment? On this I think the answer must be yes. Jodi’s argument would imply then that Brown had no self-interest in his activity. I could accept that on the face of it, though Brown might himself have disagreed (along the lines of Deb’s line, “As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”) and the old, and often repeated, wobbly slogan that “an injury to one is an injury to all.”
If Brown’s an example of the partisan or is sufficiently partisan-like, what about Osborn Perry Anderson? He could be said to have no self-interest in the raid. That seems harder to sustain, though, as being black in the US at the time they did have at least some self-interest in the success or the political aims of the raid and in the abolition of slavery. Is Brown then an exemplary partisan and Anderson not? I’m okay with that, but only if the next move is to say that the partisan and the whatever-it-is-that-we-call-Anderson (something that would consist of the partisan plus a supplement of self-interest) are of equal worth or laudability. That would go against what’s implied in Jodi’s take, as I think the issue here for her is one of a theoretical reflection on radical subjectivity (that’s one of my interests in reading the Schmitt piece too), as indicated by her use of the term “subjective destitution,” which as she’s written before on her blog is one of the categories she takes as integral to this type of subjectivity.
Myself, I’m out to lunch on it. The response to Brown as saying he didn’t have a self-interest or that he did (or that if we had a diary, which we may well I don’t know, which said he thought of it in terms of his own self-interest) strikes me as wrongheaded, just not the place to take the conversation. (I wonder if Badiou and Ranciere’s stuff on universality could be of use here. Perhaps Tzuchien can say something about that, as I’m not sure I get it. That might also allow the self-interest of Anderson, as it would be a move from or conjunction of their self-interest with a universal.) Again to invoke the IWW slogan, it seems to me that the point of “an injury to one is an injury to all” is partly to produce a collectivity such that this is really the case - so that it is in the self-interest (subjectively interpreted) of all to act upon an injury to any one. That’s important I think, and worthwhile. It is different of course, though not absolutely so, from the self-interest(s) that could be ascribed to one worker in not crossing another group of workers’ picket line. I would want to say that the important interest, then, is one that is declared/produced as part of a collectivity, meaningful action does not emerge from and is not reducible to a simple calculus of instrumentally rational self-interests (or, if it does emerge from this, self-interest is transformed in that process).
I’m also very interested in (but ambivalent about) taking declared self-interest as self-interest, rather than seeking to claim a real self interest that one is subjectively out of touch with.
Another question here is the degree to which one can be subjectively in line with a universal. Jodi’s emphasis on subjective destitution suggests that for her the relation of an individual to a universal - the attainment of or being in line with a universal by a subject - can only be in the form of individual suppression to (in order to reach) a universal. I’m less convinced that’s the case, and very much want that to not be the case.
Update -
I just read John’s post at LS. He quotes Schmitt:
“The powerful third party who is interested in the partisan may think and deal in an entirely egoistic way, but with his interest he stands politically on the side of the partisan. This functions as political friendship and is a kind of political recognition, even if it is not expressed in terms of public and formal recognition as a warring party or as a government”
then writes:
“The partisan fights, then, perhaps not out of the strong ideological commitment, but out of a strong commitment to exist within (and be recognized by) the dominant situational ideology (or sovereignty). Before this recognition, the partisan is uncounted, and yet, when the partisan appears as “irregular” and challenges, on the level of the “regular”, only then is there an “accounting,” as such. “
I wouldn’t want to cash it out in terms of recognition, but I like part of this. The interested figure who is otherwise just like the partisan (if the partisan is sans self-interest in being partisan) would be someone who fights out of a commitment to existing. Not necessarily to existing within a dominant count, but committed to not existing in the position of uncounted (of included as invisible or as excluded). More simply, committed to nonsubordinated existence.