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# Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics

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Absolute Relativism

While evil has long flourished in the fecund discursive habitats of Americanized religiosity, it has inhabited political speech as well, evolving as it adapts to changes in political climate. Evil is at home in George W. Bush's presidential rhetoric not because of his own personal faith but because of a larger coincidence of relativism and absolutist conviction, of the instability of signifcation and the resolve to signify in the face of this instabilty. Rather than two warring ethical or epistemological attitudes, relativism and absolutist conviction are two sides of the same coin, part of the same ideological matrix. On the one hand, this coincidence of opposites involves the way that each position limits and conditions the other-relativists understand their position against absolutists and vice versa. To this extent, neither position is fully identical with itselfj each is internally split, possible only through the other. But more important is the way that the speculative identity between relativism and absolutism can be expressed as internal to :relativism: relativism denotes an attitude toward absolutes. \_Far from negating or even taking issue with these absolutes, reiativism requires the acceptance of particularized convictions, the acknowledgment that each is entitled to her O'Yfl beliefs and opinions. Difering positions or beliefs are not to be engaged, compared analyzed, or brought into critical dialogue with one another. They -are to be accepted as wholes, as essences, unique to the self-identity of another . .Abso.; lute conviction appears in and through relativism. Relativism encourages certainty in one's own convictions because it accepts that others have their own convictions: My convictions make me who I am.

Giveri: the rich variabilty in evil's discursive habitats, the multiple registers in which it thrives, determing the fields of reference informing a specific invocation of "evil" is dificult, potentially unending. Much easier is the registration of afect: an invocation of evil expresses an intensity of judgment and belief. The eficacy or weight of the term evil thus shifts from the signified to the signifying subject. The subject is convinced, certain. He knows the truth. He feels it deep in his soul. Moreover, as hearers join the speaker in filng in evil with content, they become invested in the struggle against evil. Insofar as they have suppressed uncertainties and installed their own unacknowledged fantasy of evil into the empty place the term occupies, they identify al the more deepl)lj libidinall)lj with the battle against it. Evil might thus be usefully analogized to obscenity in First Amendment jurisprudence: giving a clear, principled, definition of obscenity is too dificult; nevertheless, "we know it when we see it:' The emphasis shifts from the object to those who know, to those brave and forthright enough to look evil in the face. Were the terms obscenity and evil dear and unambiguous, using them, applying them to their proper objects, would be no great feat. In the United States of George W Bush, as in the United States ofRonald Reagan, this shift of the eficacy of the term evil from its object to the signifying subject suggests wil, courage, and faith; indeed, it points to the resolve and conviction of a subject who knows.

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This chapter's retrospective on "evil." in presidential speeches indicates how Reagan's invocation of evil difers markedly from that of his predecessors as evil becomes an ontological fact. Ontological evil permeates the world, establishing the conditions of existence even as its specificity as an attribute or judgment remains elusive. This elusiveness, in turn, reflects on the moral character of the one willing to confront the truth of evil. Likewise, Bush's invocation of an "axis of evil" is not an empirical claim regarding a political or military alliance among Iran, North Korea, and Iraq. It is also not a statement about September u. Rather, it marks Bush's attempt to tell the United States and the world just what kind of man he is. He is a man of conviction, he is certain, and he knows. Armed with c�rtaint)lj Bush is resolved to fight evil in al its myriad, shifting, evolving manifestations. He wil fight it as possibilit)lj as potential, before its pernicious efects can even be felt. In the face of Bush's knowledge of ontological evil, reasons are at best signs of weakness, lapses in certainty. At ·worst, they are hosts for pernicious evil, a mutant form of liberalism or leftism in which evil hides.

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s conservatives have resolve"d to fight any and al o <sub>p</sub>onents to the death and neoliberals have been ever more emboldened in their grotesque grabs for greater and greater shares of the world's wealth, many on the academic and typing left have urged peace, love, and understanding. These influential voices advocate a turn to ethics, a generosity to diference and awareness of mutual vulnerability. They respond to the religious, nationalist, and market fundamentalisms dominating contemporary social and political life by rejecting dogmatism and conviction, advocating instead micropolitical and ethical practices that work on the self in its imediate reactions and relations. They are likely right that engaging others with afation and generosity is a nice thing to do. But it's politically suicidal. The more the left refrains from divisive political engagement, the more the right advances.

Some on the left " share my concern about the futility of a politics based on making sure that nobody is ofended. An editorial in The Nation on June 26, 2oo6, for example, urged progressives in the United States to recognize that now is the time for conviction, not caution. This editorial might be thought of as a direct counter to Judith Butler, who argues against conviction and for responsiveness in Giving an Account of Oneself (2oos). There she portrays conviction in terms of an ethics that "takes the self to be the ground and measure of moral judgment:'1 Butler admits that there might be times for condemnation and denunciation. But she warns against these modes of judgment insofar as they carry with them a certainty and opacity that disalow connections to others. Left politics, Butler suggests, is ultimately incompatible with conviction, condemnation, and denunciation.

5

Ethics

LEF T RES P O N S IVENE S S AND RET REAT

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Butler's recent work is emblematic of the ethical turn in left political theory, one that seems to embrace ethics out of a kind of political despair. For her, ostensible barriers to justice can become opportunities for responsibility, recognition, and resignification.2 Opacity, vulnerability; exposure, and grief provide potential openings to others and to ourselves, resources that might enable us to understand how our human being is necessarily and unavoidably a being together. The cost of this ethical sensitivity, however, is politics. Butler presents ethical resources as available only under conditions of the denial of politics. Should we make political choices or act politicaly we wil cut ourselves of from the insights and capacities arising out of vulnerability and grief. Thus, Butler ofers a set of responses to contemporary fundamentalisms that eschew condemnation and conviction and present openness and critique not only as ethically preferable to decisions for or against but as necessarily incomp�tible with the division necessary for politics.

To be sure, Butler's ethical turn need not displace politics. Rathet; as this chapter explains, such displacement results from her constrained conception of sovereignty, wherein sovereignty functions less as a political arangement than as a kind of master capable not only of holding together difuse meanings and efects by the force of its word, a word with power to initiate and end, but also of fully determing the words that it utters and the efects of these words. I show how Butler's critique of sovereignty misfires as it shoots at fantastic returns of a master rather than attending to the more complex reformatting of sovereignty in globalized communicative capitalism. Because she aims at the wrong target, left political conviction . ends up a casualty of friendly fire: a result that contributes to neoliberalism' s advance.

Governmentality and Fantasy

Butler's Excitable Speech, published in 1997, explores power and agency against the background of Michel Foucault's notion of governmentality. Foucault argues that state power from the eighteenth century on has formed an ensemble of "institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections . . . calculations and tactics . . . which has as its target population, as its principal form ofknowledge, political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security:'3 Butler takes this notion of governmentality to mean that contemporary power is not " constrained by the parameters of sovereignty" but "difused throughout disparate and competing domains of the state apparatus, and through civil society in difuse forms:'4 In contrast to Foucault, who asserts the continued centrality of the problem of sovereignty even as he recognizes that the governmentalized state is lacking in unity, individuality, and functionality, Butler reads governmentality as replacing sovereignty. She writes that "contemporary power is no longer sovereign in character" and power is "no longer constrained within the sovereign form. of the state" --as if there were some time when it had been (ES, 74, 78) .

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The claim that governmentality has replaced sovereignty is crucial to Butler's critique of critical legal studies arguments in favor of regulating hate speech. She argues that a "particular historical anxiety" accompanies the dispersion of power characteristic of governmentality, and she links this anxiety to problems in locating injury and finding the origin of specific acts. The historical loss of the sovereign organization of power gives rise to the fantasy of its return ( ES, 78) . Butler finds evidence of such fantastic returns in idealizations of speech acts as sovereign actions coupled with idealizations of sovereign state power. These idealizations, she claims, underpin arguments for hate-speech codes. Fantasies of sovereign power emerge to compensate for a prior loss of sovereign power. The fantasies that in speaking one wields sovereign power and that state speech takes a sovereign form compensate for the absence of such a sovereign.

Although one might do well to note the Nietzschean resonances in Butler's reading of legai theorists' eforts to produce a subject capable of being responsible, such an approach misses the way sovereignty in Butler's account functions as a master signifer linking together an unstable chain of significations. Butler's criticism presumes that holding a person legally accountable for her words requires viewing that person as a sovereign speaker, as an originator of words, a controller of words, a user of words who remains unbound and unconditioned by them. For Butler, hatespeech codes overdetermine "the scene of utterance" as they reduce racism. to a single linguistic site. This reduction, she explains, presupposes the eficacy of the speaker in injuring and subordinating another through the force of her speech. It presupposes, in other words, the fantasy of a sovereign speaker, of a speaker capable of consolidating at a single site the structures, practices, and harms of racism.

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Butler rightly rejects this fantastic figure of sovereignty. But why should we accept that such a figure inhabits the writings of critical legal theorists or hate-speech codes at all? Two aspects of Butler's own account make her figure of a fantastic sovereign returning to haunt the law unconvincing.

First, given her focus in Excitable Speech on American law and the place of free speech in American jurisprudence, it is difcult to make sense of the phrase no longer when Butler claims that "contemporary power is no longer sovereign in character:' If the notion of sovereignty she has in mind is one invested in a single sovereign body or locus of authority, then the American framework of separation of powers eludes from the start a simple notion of sovereignty. The innovation of the American Constitution was its investment of sovereignty in the people and its provisions for enabling the people to exercise sovereignty not only through laws but through necessarily separated powers. 5 The federal system relies on separating and distributing the means of governance, again, so as to ensure that the people remain sovereign. If sovereignty in the United States has been thought as a sovereignty of the people, then what could it meah to say that the figure of a unified, poyv-erful, sovereign master returns in legal discourse?

Second, given Butler's reliance on Foucault's notion of governmen� tality, why should we not consider hate codes e1:nd the discourse around hate codes likewise in terms of the decentered structure of the state? Interventions into the constitution and management of a population; regulations on hate speech are typically pursued at campus, local, and state levels rather than as federal laws. We might say, then, that such codes are tools or instruments that the people use in governing themselves, hi arrangin<sub>�</sub> their interactions with one another. And we might wel recognize that these instruments wil be contested, open to interpretation, and implicated in other practices through which the people attempt to change their collective modes of being. Yet Butler treats these legal codes as somehow resistant to interpretation and resignifcation, insisting instead that they are attempts to isolate accountability in the words of a single sovereign speaker.

Perhaps my reading of governmentality misses what is actually at stake in Butler's emphasis on a "particular historical anxiety:' She is attending to the setting of what Lacanian psychoanalysis theorizes as a change in the discourse of the master. As chapter 2 explains, in his later work, Lacan moves away from his earlier notion of a symbolic order held in place by a master signifer to emphasize the instability of signification and the absence of guaranteed meaning. Understood in terms of this setting, Butler's account of the change in sovereignty appears not simply as an analysis oflegal arrangements of power but also as a discussion of changes in subjectivity and the character of the social link. The speaking subject is not sovereign. Speech is out of its control. This subject is called into being in and through speech and n�cessarily remains vulnerable to and dependent upon these linguistic arrangements. Just as sovereignty is not concentrated in a single extrasocial location but penetrates society as a whole, relying on various state and nonstate apparatuses, so does the subject persist in and through language, wielding the very terms that produce and sustain it. For Butler, the "contemporary scene of cultural translation emerges with the presup;. position that the utterance does not have the same meaning everywhere, indeed, that the utterance has become a scene of conflict" (ES, 91). Chapter 2 introduces Zizek's notion of the decline of symbolic eficiency as a tag for this setting of instability and conflict. Vhile Butler views this setting as opening up opportunities for resignification and new experiences of freedom, Zizek emphasizes the closure and domination that accompany our inability to know what to trust or on whom we might rely. 6

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In Excitable Speech, Butler argues that conflict over an utterance enables subversive resignification. Law, though, neither provides an opportunity for such resignification nor can itself be subversively resignified. N\_onetheless, Butler looks optimistically to new meanings that ofer '�an unanticipated political future for deconstructive thinking" (ES, 161). She juxtaposes the willingness to remain open to the futures opened up by the "insurrectionary efects" of the reappropriation of terms like freedom and justice to a dogmatism that opposes the destabilization of reality (ES, 162) .

In contrast, Zizek notes the sufocating closure efected by the decline of symbolic norms. The undecideability of basic questions, the ready availability of multiple, conflicting interpretations, turns decisions into risky gambles. The decline of symbolic eficiency thus results in a combination of impotent interpretations and raw violence. For example, Zizek points to the rise of "ethical committees" that issue instructions and recommendations, noting that these suggestions are unable to orient the subject in a world. Instead, the subject clings to imaginary spectacles and simulacra, while both striving for and being impacted by experiences in the Real.7 Unprotected by symbolic norms, the subject feels threatened by al sorts of imaginary figures, at the mercy of the superego injunction to enjoy even as these figures threaten its enjoyment-Why does everyone else seem to be having more fun, wilder sex, cooler vacations, fitter bodies, and better jobs than I? In sum, the decline of symbolic eficiency introduces new opportunities for guilt and anxiety as well as new attachments to domination as subjects seek relief from the endless injunctions to enjoyand do so properly.

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I return to these injunctions below. At this point, I simply want to emphasize Butler's account of the conditions of resignifcation as openings to a political future, openings that the return of the fantastic figure of a sovereign risks closing of.

Sovereignty and Resignifcation

In Precarious Life ( 2003), Butler confronts the resignifcations that followed the atacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September u, 2001. The unanticipated future instaled by the insurrectionary efects of t�s resignifcation has unfolded as one of preemptive war, indefinite detention, and ever increasing threats to civil liberties. In the name of freedom and democracy, the United States attac;ked a country that not only had not attacked it but presented no imnent danger. Given that resigrtifcation worked to advance militarism, what role does Butler assign it in this later work?

Assign is likely the wrong term here. Butler does not speak of resignification. She enacts it, though, as she reworks vulnerability and mourning into oppor�ties for connecting With others rather than occasions for securing violated borders. Yet the very sensitivity Butler brings to these moments of vulnerabilty and mournig exceeds a notion of resignification. After al, she is not saying mournig means that one has not undergone a loss. Rather she takes awareness of this loss to be an opportunity to appreciate the way we are given over to others. Feeling loss we are reminded of our deep interconnections. Vulnerabilty and loss, as she puts it, might thus provide new bases for "reimagining the possibility of community:'8 So it is rather inapt to read Butler's method in terms of resignification.

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This is particularly true with respect to Butler's argument against former Harvard president Lawrence Summers's charge that criticism of Israel is efectively anti-Semitic. For rather than resignifying that charge and identity, rather than noting the ways that Summers's speech might misfire, might open up opportunities for insurrection, rather than attending to the repetitions and citations enabling Summers's speech, as one might expect from her arguments in Excitable Speech, Butler criticizes Summers for identifying Israel with the Jewish people and for attempting to stifle critical debate $\left( P L , \mathfrak { m } , \mathfrak { n } 2 6 \right)$ . I agree with Butler's criticisms. Yet I am surprised she attributes to Summers's words "a chilg efect on political discourse" that stokes "the fear that to criticize Israel during this time is to expose oneself to the charge of anti-Semitism" $\left( P L , \ 1 0 2 \right)$ . Butler imbues Summers's speech with the very sovereignty she criticizes critical legal studies scholars for attributing to hate speech (is this a fantasy of sovereign return occasioned by the loss of U.S. sovereignty on $9 / 1 1 ? )$ . Her arguments in Excitable Speech tell us we should recognize how Summers's words do not have the power to determine the limits of what can and cannot be said.

Butler's move away from resignification unfolds against a refinig ofher account of the relationship of governmentality and sovereignty. Whereas her concern in Excitable Speech is with the encroachment of law via the fantasy of a sovereign power attributed to speech, in Precarious Life she attends to the way law's suspension itself produces sovereignty. In this later book, sovereignty appears where law is not. Sovereignty is unbounded by law, "outside the law;' in excess of law $( P L , { \mathfrak { s } } 1 )$ . Butler continues to- assert that governmentality operates through law as a "set of tactics" $( P L , _ { 5 ^ { 2 } } )$ . Yet she focuses on sovereignty's "resurgence within the field of governmentality" $\left( P L , \ _ { 5 3 } \right)$ . She argues that in this new formation, sovereignty is exercised through acts that ''suspend and limt the jurisdiction of law itself" $( P L , \ 5 3 )$ . So while Excitable Speech analyzes the way a fantasy of sovereign power accompanies extensions of the law, Precarious $L i f e$ confronts situations wherein an anachronistic sovereignty is "reintroduced in the very acts by which the state suspends law, or contorts law to its own uses" $( P L , { \mathfrak { s } } 4 )$ . In each case, the resurgence of sovereignty is compensatotyj compensating for sovereignty's loss $( P L , { \mathfrak { s } } 6 )$

The cases difer insofar as resignification is a contestory practice opposed to sovereignty in Excitable Speech and an aspect of the very operation of sovereignty in Precarious Life. In the earlier book, Butler treats resignification as a practice external to law} a practice she links to the subversion of authority. In the later one, resignification is figured as a means of consolidating authority as sovereign power. Thus, discussing U.S. assertions that it treats the prisoners held in the camp at Guantanamo "humanely" and in a way consistent with the Geneva Conventions, Butler writes: "When the U.S. says, then, that it is treating these prisoners humanely, it uses the word in its own way and for its own purpose, but it does not accept that the Geneva Accords stipulate how the term might legitimately be applied. In efect, it takes the word back from the accords at the very moment that it claims to be acting consistently with the accords. In the moment that it claims to be acting consistently with the accords, the U.S. efectively maintains that the accords have no power over it" (PL, 82). As it takes the word back and applies it in its own fashion, the United States resignifes "humanely," denying the Geneva Accords the power to determine the condition of the term's use. In so doing, the United States asserts its singular sovereignty over and against international norms.

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