Chapter Two -
Part One

The Value of Autonomy in Relation to Personal Power - The Origins of Citizen X

Identity and autonomy in the capitalist state
Sandra Lee Bartky presents a powerful and problematic, account of the production of a “properly embodied femininity.”[1] Building on the works of Foucault and Fanon, Bartky describes the way women are “psychologically oppressed” in contemporary liberal society.

One of her primary concerns is the manner in which various power discourses sexually objectify women, inducing them to “systematically discipline their bodies through diet, exercise, restricted movement, smiling, make-up, and skin care.”[2] These disciplines, which I understand as the discourse of “The Feminine,” become internalized, incorporated into the structure of female identity and carry with them fundamental implications of lack, failure, and object-hood.

Bartky claims that the construction of the feminine identity upon and within women’s bodies is “well-nigh total,” and operates through disciplinary techniques that “aim at a regulation (of the feminine body) which is perpetual and exhaustive.”[3]

By reducing women’s identities to mere effects of a series of power relations, Bartky seems to deny individual women any true or authentic “self.”

This chapter will answer two questions. First, given such a deeply embedded psychological and phenomenological construction of the female body and mind, is any true “self” possible? Second, if it is possible, does this “self” retain a vigorous or meaningful capacity for autonomous resistance against oppressive political systems?

The term ‘autonomy’ describes our capacity to maintain authority over the directions, actions, and choices concerning our lives.[4] Autonomy is a central tenet of liberal theory, yet a clear understanding of what and who counts as autonomous remains elusive to contemporary political philosophers.

Marina Oshana has offered an interesting new theory of autonomy, however critics contend that it stands at odds with basic liberal theory.

The idea that individuals hold authority over their lives, choosing from options, changing their minds, and acting on behalf of their own interests and intentions is fundamental to the notion of agency, but her theory claims relatively few people actually qualify as autonomous agents.

Further, critics contend her model of autonomy may justify legitimate state intervention into private life beyond mere “protection of others,” a generally agreeable limit to paternalistic interference[5]. 

However, I will defend her theory on descriptive grounds, motivated by the relevancy of these critiques to contemporary issues including private property, personal and informational privacy, and forms of oppression[6].

By examining the issues central to state and personal authority, I can discuss the structural elements necessary to enable and maintain legitimate political power and argue that, regardless of any ideals of the state, the mechanisms that constitute and maintain our political system can function only under the problematic conditions presented by Oshana.

Further, I claim that, yes, an authentic “self” does exist for political agents and the capacity to resist the oppressive categories such as “The Feminine” is necessarily implied in the fact of this “self’s” existence.

And if this is the case, the criticisms leveled against Oshana could be better applied towards a critique of the contemporary liberal system that her model describes. Before concluding this chapter, I will defend my claims against a possible objection.

Part Two will be released the first week of December.

Footnotes
[1] Meyers,  pg 107
[2] ibid., pg. 93
[3] ibid. pg. 107
[4] The term itself is through the Greek ‘autonomos’, from ‘auto’ meaning ‘self’ and ‘nomos’ being ‘law’ or ‘rule’, both ideas with fundamental roots in a quality of authority.
[5] “… since paternalism usurps autonomy, then Oshana’s account of autonomy is held to be one that allows too much paternalism.” DeCew (2009), pg. 5
[6] I am particularly interested in Iris Marion Young’s “Five Faces of Oppression” (from Rethinking Power, 1992)

References
Bartky, Sandra Lee
Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression, Routledge, 1990, New York

Baumann, Holger
 ‘Reconsidering Relational Autonomy. Personal Autonomy for Socially Embedded and Temporally Extended Selves’, Analyse and Kritik, Lucius and Lucius, Germany, 2008

DeCew, Judith Wagner
‘Marina Oshana, Personal Autonomy in Society’, Social Theory and Practice, 2009
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6395/is_1_35/ai_n32102786/?tag=content;col1

Foucault, Michel
‘Discipline and Punish’, Vintage Press, USA, 1995
‘The History of Sexuality’, Vintage Press, USA, 1990
‘The Foucault Reader’, Pantheon Press, USA, 1984
‘Power’, Essential works of Foucault, Vol. 3, Editited by James Faubion, The New Press, New York, 2001
‘Power/Knowledge’, Pantheon Press, 1980

Meyers, Diana Tietjens, 
Feminist Social Thought: A Reader, Routledge, 1997, New York

Oshana, Marina
‘Autonomy and Free Agency’, Personal Autonomy: New essays on personal autonomy and its role in contemporary moral philosophy, Edited by James Stacey Taylor, Cambridge University Press, 2008
‘How Much Should We Value Autonomy?’, Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation, USA, 2003
‘Personal Autonomy in Society’, Ashgate Publishing, USA, 2006

Searle, John
‘Making the Social World’, Oxford University Press, New York, 2010

Walzer, Michael
‘Spheres of Justice: A defense of pluralism and equality’, Basic Books, 1983

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP): “Foucault and Feminism” http://iep.utm.edu/foucfem/

Chapter One
Part Three

Evolution, devolution, and other political possibilities

Truth, Fact, and Possibility

Badiou claims ‘May ’68,’ the Paris Commune, and Mao’s Cultural Revolution were Events, singular moments of spontaneous political change. To this list I would add Machiavelli’s examples of the eventful careers of Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, [and] Theseus,”[1] as well as my own example of the “Arab Spring.”

What becomes of the recent Occupation movement, as I have witnessed in both the United States and Turkey, remains to be seen, however I do feel that this style of protest and disregard of authority has the potential to become an Event. This is why I am writing this particular blog series, to explore the actuality behind its potential, to explain what dangers and limitations it faces and why.

Badiou reminds us that we do not have the language to tell different stories from the ones we tell now. These are stories of the “party-state,” of the material manifestation of the ideologies of dominators and exploitators who weave wealth and influence into the control of value and distribution.

The language to transcend the party-state does not exist, not yet, and this explains why the communist experiments and Eastern revolutions failed in actual practice.

As in the Tunisia and Egypt, once the yoke lifted in Mao’s China and in the Commune’s France, the way forward proved to be succumbing to factionalism and re-installing the form of what they had just dissolved. Machiavelli explains this process thusly, “What happens is that men willingly change their ruler, expecting to fare better. This expectation induces them to take up arms against him...”[2]

This means that when an Event occurs, it occurs because subjects expect to be better off as autonomous collective agents than as exploitable objects. Yet, unrest grows among the people because “you cannot satisfy them in the way they had taken for granted.”[3]

Further, as Machiavelli claims, “The innovator makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old order.”[4] Displaced agents of the de-legitimized state struggle to re-gain control and add to the confusion.

Rejection of the standing authority is disruptive, chaotic, and violent, in a word, injurious. The new prince, i.e. the Event, is compelled to inflict injury upon the established order and its material agents in virtue of the Event’s recognized existence. The general masses, in virtue of their subjective authority, are compelled to stand against the injuries of the transition with active intention. They fight both with and against the Event, consciously and unconsciously.

In the chaos of the moment, anything, everything, is possible. But as the moment lingers, the moment becomes an hour, a day, a week, a month. For the impossible event to remain possible, new truths must actively and consistently continue to trump traditional normative and assumed facts as they arise.

How long can the impossible continue to be recognized as possible, as the complete break from social domination, when the impossible is unrecognizable, dynamic chaos with no legible constitutional form?

Badiou’s distinction between “fact” and “truth” is crucial.

Tensions and needs

When the slate wipes clean in such manner, what remains in the instant of the event are two things: truths and facts. New truths creating new ideas creating new subjects, and this stands against recognized facts establishing recognized patterns establishing recognizable citizens.

The tension in the moment of the Event and in its immediate consequences comes down to the essence of Badiou’s distinction between fact and truth.

The tension pulls between two needs.

One, the need to embody an active fidelity to the event, staying true to the re-politicization of the subject and pushing forward new truths in place of old assumptions.

Two, the basic social reality of the need to create new facts to support the continuity and vitality of the re-born world of limitless political possibility.

For example, Badiou says of the Paris Commune, “On the one hand, then, we have an insurrection that establishes nothing of duration; on the other, a day that changes the state.”

The momentum and recognition of the actively evolving reality of the Event succumbed to the ‘corruption’ of traditional epistemological and ontological assumptions and was “confiscated by bourgeois politicians primarily concerned to re-establish the order of property…”[5]

Mao, in his effort to re-stabilize what he had de-stabilized, formed his Party-State in hopes of materially containing the dynamic force and momentum of the Cultural Revolution. However, the spontaneity that fueled Mao’s event could only be bogged down and corrupted by the degradation of their message into controlling and oppressive language; “[t]he Cultural Revolution… bears witness to the impossibility truly and globally to free politics from the framework of the party-state that imprisons it.”[6]

Truths liberate the state, but facts keep it going.  This tension in and following an Event leads to either the evolution or the devolution of the socio-political climate.

Evolution or Devolution

Fidelity to the event requires fidelity to an unsystematized, ahistorical, transcendent form of princely power: authority as natural order shared absolutely.

But this is challenged by the practicality of Machiavelli’s axiom to new sovereigns, “If the ruler wants to keep hold of his new possessions, he must bear two things in mind: first, that the family of the old prince must be destroyed; next, that he must change neither their laws nor their taxes. In this way, in a very short space of time, the new principality will be rolled into one with the old.”[7]

If “the family of the old prince” is read as the hereditary line, the assumed royalty of princely blood and its social value, then this intuitively extends to the general existent socio-political hierarchies and structures that support the established distribution of power and its justifications.

The Event, the new ruler, destroys these justifications in taking hold of its new possessions. The continual creation of new truth to replenish the factual void is how they stay destroyed.

The truth, then, is the subject, creating new political realities in the dynamic rejection of the state and its constraints. In the tumultuous times between de-stabilization and re-stabilization, social, political, and psychological issues must be dealt with in a manner true to the rejection of traditional explanations and descriptions.

Evolution then is a sustained and progressively stabilizing rejection of the full breadth of existing normative social ontologies that effectively carves out space for new political possibilities.

Still, Machiavelli’s second point, to keep familiar and politically strategic mechanisms in place (i.e. established political spheres of authority, general laws and taxes) points out the contradiction in revolutionary truths and facts.

A subject is the embodiment of truth, and as truth is a process, its material consequences exist in the conditions of socio-political life.

Sovereign power obtains authoritative stature because it is recognized as authoritative. This recognition implies recognition of the structural apparatus of sovereignty, i.e. the hierarchy of the state, the magistrates and ministers serving as bureaucrats for the princely power.

Recognition of the “prince,” the “sovereign,” is to recognize its security and military, its laws and punishments, and its systems of hierarchy and value. A true political Event destroys this in a moment of spontaneous social rupture.

However, in order to sustain the evolution of the event, the old facts must be constantly challenged on a mass scale, old patterns broke with, and the constant social un-ease and uncertainty must be dealt with.

The new truth must be constantly recognized by acting subjects. If not, devolution occurs.

Devolution, in this context, refers to the failure of the revolution of the event, the falling backwards into familiar patterns for familiar reasons. Security, health, personal possessions or identity. It is as Machiavelli claims, “men… are ungrateful, fickle, liars, and deceivers,”[8] But I understand that it is more than just that.

Humans are indeed ungrateful fickle, deceivers, but we are also simply human, wanting quiet and peace, stability and comfort. As any revolution moves forward, it must deal with humanity’s basest instincts, as well as our most pure and our most banal.

Like all great new princes, the Event, the subjective reclamation of political power by the people, hinges on circumstance and timing. As Machiavelli says, “Fortune, as it were, provided the matter but they gave it its form; without opportunity their prowess would have been extinguished, as without such prowess the opportunity would have come in vain.”[9]

The momentum of history is great, and isolated events of impossible change create disconnected stirrings in the flow of time. Badiou suggests these individual events are not evocative of historical failures, but are instead important lessons to be learned on the path of the evolution of the Communist Idea and true socio-political emancipation.

Badiou’s insight is that an Idea “presents the truth as if it were a fact.” As I will explore further in my next blog concerning autonomy and the modern woman, the Idea of Capitalism, its truth, embedded in its discourse and norms, is the repressive system upon which it functions.

Conclusion

So, what are the choices, the functions, and the stakes inherent in a moment of “true” political change? Does the Occupy Movement represent such a change? The Occupiers presence has certainly fueled an atmosphere of global unrest, but it remains pointless to speculate on the course the movement will traverse.

Echoing the ideals of the Occupy Movement, Badiou says, “[T]he Cultural Revolution showed that it was no longer possible to submit either the revolutionary mass actions or the organizational phenomena to the strict logic of class representation.”[10]

What does a real, tangible, practical, and feasible alternative to the political systems we have developed as a species over the course of our history actually look like, and how would we be able to implement it in a healthy and truthful manner? It is fascinating to think about and daunting to conceive.

However, it is worth saying that the movement towards such possibility will only be what the people recognize it as being, and will only exist as long as it continues to actively evolve.

The voices calling out for justice, for release from the bondage of a social system that does not work for their advantage, are everywhere, and with advances in communication and information technology, “humankind” seems, for the first time, something more tangible than just a platitude or poet’s dream.

footnotes

[1] Machiavelli, pp. 20
[2] ibid. pp. 8
[3] ibid. pp. 8
[4] ibid. pp. 21
[5] Badiou, pp. 218
[6] Badiou, pp. 154
[7] Machiavelli, pp. 9
[8] Machiavelli, pp. 21
[9] Machiavelli, pp. 20
[10] Badiou, pp. 116

References

Badiou, Alain

The Communist Hypothesis, Verso, 2010, New York

-http://www.lacan.com/badtruth.htm,  Highly Speculative Reasoning on the Concept of Democracy from Metapolitcs, New York: Verso, 2005

Machiavelli, Niccolo

The Prince, Penguin, 1999, England               

Chapter One
Part Two

Evolution, devolution, and other political possibilities

The politicized agent

In the realization and recognition of an event, it is the agent and the collectivity of agents who become creative vehicles for direct political action. They become fully realized political subjects.

However, different events have different degrees of effective material consequences, based on the force of the event and its recognition as an event by the agents involved. Some moments of eventful circumstances pass unnoticed or unheeded without a ripple in the air. Some, like the OWS movement, spread slowly throughout society, creating a buzz in the air and a sense of re-claimed personal authority.

OWS's slogan is “We are the 99%,” and it proclaims a self-recognition of the majority who live in socio-political conditions that support the gross accumulation of wealth by a small majority at the expense of the well-being and development of all others.

In terms of their slogan, one percent of individual agents living in capitalistic states support and maintain their subjectivity by actively sustaining a system that trains and disciplines the other ninety-nine percent into recognizing themselves as factual objects, thus appropriate for managing.[1]

Badiou writes, “More than ever, political power, as the current economic crisis with its one single slogan of ‘rescue the banks’ clearly proves, is merely an agent of capitalism. Revolutionaries are divided and only weakly organized, broad sectors of working-class youth have fallen prey to nihilistic despair, the vast majority of intellectuals are servile.”[2]

Against this, in Badiou’s realization of the Communist Idea, sovereign power, in a real way, transfers away from oppressive institutional state apparatus and its assumptions. Power becomes subjectified, re-claimed by individuals to now be found solely in the immediate actions and decisions of the moment.

Such an event effectively places sovereign authority in the hands of the people, stripped of form, a shared and spontaneous collection of self-authorities acting in unified effort to create a new state of being and of affairs. This process of creating a new state is of particular interest to Machievelli in The Prince.

The Prince and the Population

A prince, for Machievelli, wields princely power, which I understand as sovereign power, the politically legitimate means of decision-making and authority. This is the same sovereign power spoken of by Badiou, the power that is de-stabilized in the event, freed from the capitalist apparatus and hovering in breathless anticipation of what is to come next.

Throughout this blog, I will speak of “the prince,” “princely power,” and “sovereignty” interchangeably as I understand them as equal terms. The structure of the hierarchy built in relation to this governing power represents the chains of command, the bureaucratic network, and the matrices of information diffusion; the nerves and veins of the body politic embodied by individuals of varying rank, power, and prestige.

The prince is the representation of the sovereign power in the same manner more contemporary discourse claims a “ruling class” represents the interests of authoritative hierarchies. Machievelli writes, “It should be borne in mind that there is nothing more difficult to handle, more doubtful of success, and more dangerous to carry through that initiating changes in a state’s constitution.”[3]

Events are disruptive, chaotic, and overwhelming. For Badiou, this new truth is experienced by subjects as “raw, or militant,”[4] Add to this general atmosphere of explosive destabilization the banality inherent in Machievelli’s wry political observation, “The wish to acquire more is admittedly a very natural and common thing,”[5] and it is understandable the fires of an event’s incindiary winds are built and sustained in the tension between the theoretical ideal of true political liberation and the material circumstances of factual reality.

The material circumstances of factual reality

The sudden recognition by the people of the legitimacy of their own personal, individual, subjective power necessarily de-legitimizes the role of the political state as the sole arbiter of socio-political authority. According to Badiou, “An event is something that can occur only to the extent that it is subtracted from the power of the State.”[6] Events de-legitimize state authority to the extent that they empower the populace to critique practices and cultural assumptions that serve to harm or hinder, and to gather together and make collective decisions on their own terms in personally meaningful ways.

Tunisia had such an event, a re-politicizing of the people, subjects chanting in streets they had taken by force of arms and rhetoric. However, what happened next? What is happening now as I type these words? The event has unfolded and history, with its facts, writes its story.

Badiou’s story is that the communist hypothesis of emancipation failed to obtain in the world due to its inability to transcend, in language, thought, and action, the ontological structures and epistemological assumptions of the party-state; limited by what and how they knew.

As Machievelli writes, human history only knows two types of large-scale political government, republics and principalities. From these, all specific political systems have formed (i.e. capitalism, communism, totalitarianism, anarchism). If such a state of affairs is all that is conceivable and recognizable as possibile, anything else remains recognizably, conceptually, impossible. However, that is what an “event” is: the impossible becoming not only possible, but actual.

My question now can be asked: what happens, theoretically and practically, when a new state is born. I argue that one of two things happen in the event of political re-birth, in that moment when the collective mass has grown with recognition and action into a political reality that trumps, by sheer force of power and immediacy, the existing authoritative structure.

This is the subject of the next part of this blog.

PART 3 of 3 will be published the week of November 18th.

Footnotes
[1] Author’s note: This is a claim I will explore in a future blog entitled “The Possibility of Resistance to the Feminine”
[2] Machievelli, pp. 259
[3] ibid. pp. 21
[4] Badiou, pp. 253
[5] Machievelli, pp. 14
[6] ibid. pp. 244

References
Badiou, Alain
The Communist Hypothesis, Verso, 2010, New York

-http://www.lacan.com/badtruth.htm,  Highly Speculative Reasoning on the Concept of Democracy from Metapolitcs, New York: Verso, 2005

Machievelli, Niccolo
The Prince, Penguin, 1999, England

Chapter One
Part One

Evolution, devolution, and other political possibilities

Introduction
Between the recent protests in Turkey, the failed revolutions of Syria and Egypt, the promise of the “Arab Spring” of 2010-12 and the ongoing effects of the Occupy Movement in the United States, questions concerning the possibility of political change are relevant and far reaching. In my next several blogs, I will discuss the theoretical aspects of political events that disrupt, destabilize, and rupture the normative assumptions of a particular state.

Through these processes of destruction, an event of sufficient magnitude can permanently de-legitimize a traditional authoritative structure since such authority is itself ontologically based on the normative force of accepted political hierarchies. In this void of authority, the impossible becomes possible.

The world as it was before recognizing such a singularity (the revolutionary event) becomes lost, and with it go its benefits and burdens, its laws and limitations, its ideas and discourses. With nothing left, the question becomes: what now?

In this three-part blog, I will examine this question by referring to two views in tension, Alain Badiou and Niccolo Machievelli. Badiou’s concept of an “event” and Machievelli’s insights on how new states become legitimate, provide an interesting frame for discussing the tensions that occur when an event, a singularity of spontaneous political change, forces a recognition of a new truth, incompatible with the old facts, upon the subjective experience of political agents.

 
Badiou and the ontology of political events
This blog concerns the moment of reality at the end of an idea. The realization of a political event so meaningful, so total, that the social contract becomes void, the “sovereign” shrugged off as individuals, in a wave of spontaneity and declaration, reclaim the reigns of their lives and become personally responsible for the fortunes and misfortunes that await.

The emancipatory event is, for Alain Badiou, the final form of the idea of communism: the release from the exploitative, domineering “party-state” and a chance to create new possibilities for political agents. Badiou claims that the “political” are those endeavors of humankind where decision-making, distributions, and social values are created and sustained in collective processes and agreements. He writes, “An event is political if the subject of this event is collective.”[1] These collective endeavors become methodically subverted by a political state, with the state defined as “the system of constraints that limit the possibility of possibilities.”[2] Badiou is particularly concerned with “the modern, so-called ‘democratic’ form of the bourgeois State, of which globalized capitalism is the cornerstone.”[3]

Following general Marxist theory, he claims that in the capitalist state socio-political structures are organized around a principle of accumulating excess capital; hoarding wealth and decision-making power in the hands of the few at the expense and exclusion of all others. According to Badiou, the capitalist state maintains, “often by force, the distinction between what is possible and what isn’t,” [4] and he defines the capitalist state by one goal: the prevention of the Communist Idea from designating a possibility.

In any given situation, it is the state that creates the range of potential actions and choices an agent can make. Badiou writes, “[T]oday we are faced with an utterly cynical capitalism, which is certain that it is the only possible option for a rational organization of society. Everywhere it is implied that the poor are to blame for their own plight.”[5] The capitalistic liberal state, behind its free-market, unencumbered ‘veil of ignorance,’ neglects, ignores, or is simply blind to the fact that the disadvantages the majority of its citizens begin with are products of the discourses that describe an individual’s circumstances.

Normative assumptions and values underlying social arrangements create the conditions for political paradigms to be created, justified, recognized, and internalized. If the Idea of Communism is to free the people from the capitalistic party-state so that they may discover new political possibilities, then, in Badiou’s dichotomy, the Idea of Capitalism would be to support the party-state structure by legitimizing and naturalizing existing political arrangements.

The capitalist state exploits individuals and limits their possibilities by creating facts to justify this arrangement and by suppressing truths that would destabilize and radically re-orient structures of political power and favor. For Badiou, facts create the State’s version of truth; they set the range of the discursive apparatus and possible conversations that count as knowledge or possible world-view.

Facts are objects, ‘things’ conceived in the dominant group’s language, pieces controlled by the structures of the State in order to maintain, legitimize, and empower its own unquestionable hierarchal authority. Facts are “the consequences of the existence of the State.”[6]

Facts are not truths. Facts are concrete, preconceived, and catagorizable while truths reveal themselves in the process of their discovery, in the moment of creative, dynamic and evolving self-definition.

He writes, “I call a ‘truth procedure’ or a ‘truth’ an ongoing organization, in a given situation (or world), of the consequences of an event.”[7] Badiou emphasizes the relational qualities of events, truths, and political subjects, equating truth to the subject in a process of self-creation.

Badiou claims that the truth procedure of the event authorizes the individual “to go beyond the Statist constraints of mere survival by becoming a part of the body-of-truth, or the subjectivizable body.”[8]

In short, the event creates subjects, freed from the discursive objectivity of their abandoned sovereign. The agent, for Badiou, is subjectified temporal and spatial consciousness, either creating itself or being created, either in control of itself or being controlled. The subject is a product of relationships, between herself and other subjects (social), between herself and the State (political), and between herself and her own “self” (psychological). Truth is found in the subject’s recognition of herself as a political vehicle, and as this is a communal event, it is relational, thus incorporates the cumulative subjectification of all those involved in producing new ways to perceive and understand. In sum: facts control, truths emancipate.

Footnotes
[1] Lacan.com, “Highly Speculative Reasoning…”
[2] ibid. pp. 243
[3] ibid. pp. 258
[4] ibid. pp. 244
[5] ibid. pp. 259
[6] ibid. pp. 244
[7] ibid. pp. 244
[8] ibid. pp. 252

References

Badiou, Alain
The Communist Hypothesis, Verso, 2010, New York

-http://www.lacan.com/badtruth.htm,  Highly Speculative Reasoning on the Concept of Democracy from Metapolitcs, New York: Verso, 2005

Machievelli, Niccolo
The Prince, Penguin, 1999, England


PART TWO: coming the week of November 11th