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printemps1996 · 8 years ago

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Risk and Resistance: Baudrillard, Badiou, and Being an Activist

(On May 25, 2016, one month before graduation march, I turned in the last paper I wrote as a college student. A product of several nights of beer and staying out at a nearby bar, this paper was the final requirement for Philo 170 or Philosophy of Man. Please don’t ask me why I, a Journalism major, took this course as an elective in my do-or-die final semester. The important thing is: I passed the goddamn course!)

Western astrology says that I am a Taurus. I was born on April 24, a date which falls under the sign of the Bull. Based upon the Cretan Bull, the mythical animal that fathered the Minotaur, people with such a sign are said to be the most headstrong, determined, strong-willed, and therefore, stubborn. Such traits, as astrology claims, are embodied by the said creature’s horns.

The validity of Western astrology, and any other horoscopic astrology for that matter, is subject of another discussion. It is with no doubt that astrology is largely pseudoscientific, and the newspaper columns and booklets that, using its framework, are devoted to offering a foresight of the days, months, or years to come in one’s life only work because they easily affirm one’s confirmation bias. However, it is this exact reason that makes reading one’s horoscope interesting, to say the least. While it may be a stretch to say so, astrology is just one of the innumerable ways we have created to make sense of our surroundings and our lives.

There is one tidbit of information about Taureans that struck a chord in me. It says, “Taureans are not fond of change. In fact, if change is imminent, they get very nervous and worried. They do not like anything new because anything new is unknown, and Taureans fear the unknown.” Apparently, the consensus among such horoscopes is that we Taureans actively resist change, and prefer comfort and familiarity over risk and adventure.

Not to say that I subscribe to astrology to the point of contending these words, I am alarmed and appalled that there is such a notion. After all, I for one am currently a part of a youth organization with national-democratic ideals and a socialist perspective, and the national-democratic movement in the Philippines has pushed for genuine social change and persisted for more than five decades, yet to waver in the face of every imperialist attack on the Filipino people. Coming from this, there spring questions in my mind as to how I approach change and how I see myself in the said movement. Am I really resistant to change? Do I really fear taking risks?

However, it is more apt to ask is if there is, indeed, such a thing as “resistance to change”. The field of philosophy, one that concerns appropriate aspects to address this problem, is at a point in time in which there is a re-invigorated interest in the human individual as a subject. After German continental philosopher Georg Hegel’s propositions on objective truth, or more particularly the lack thereof, we move towards an assessment of the subject’s knowledge of the Real, one of the three registers of the mind permeating every mental act and influencing us in unique ways (the other two being the Imaginary and the Symbolic). Philosophy now asks how – or whether at all – the subject approaches objective reality. As Slovenian psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Žižek quipped, “Why is there nothing rather than something?”

These questions can then be answered parallel to the simplistic and overarching adage, “Change is the only constant in this world.” Given its nature as both a lack and an impossibility, that which “resists symbolization and cannot be known by language, mathematics, or social rules”, how do we approach the Real as subjects? To contextualize the question, how do we see reality in relation to the movements for radical change all over the world? How do we see reality in light of the long-running national-democratic movement in the Philippines, or for the members of its allied organizations who are subjects themselves? What is reality for someone devoted to and engaged in the longest and most comprehensive resistance in the country? Having established the Real as a hole that is both fixed and impossible to reach, we shall ask then: why are we activists?

Philosophy and radical change

“Philosophy no longer knows whether it has a suitable place,” wrote Alain Badiou of the field in the twenty-first century. This is a bold declaration on the field’s apparent softness in relation to the other sciences. Badiou supports his view with a division of philosophy into sutures (political-scientific, artistic, amorous) to re-assess its relevance and its significance at present.

Dermot Moran in 2008 wrote that given the political cataclysms of the 20th century, “it seems rather strange that political philosophy did not really develop as a subject until the latter part of the century.” Moran here pertains to the great events of the past hundred years, from the two World Wars, the Cold War, and the powerful yet sporadic revolts and uprisings in the midst of these. On the other hand, Peter Laslett famously said in 1956 (as quoted in Moran 2008) that political philosophy is dead “for the moment, anyway”. Both aiming to address the relevance of political philosophy at present, the two scaffold the argument excellently worded by Matt Matravers (as quoted in Moran 2008), that political philosophy must now look at things using the lens of justice. Matravers believes that political philosophy will “turn away from theorizing about the precise nature of justice” as it underlines global issues, and that it will foster “the application of philosophical ideas to political practice [as] a matter of the particular, local, and historically informed”. With the apparent failure of the movements for radical change – that is, to put an end to capitalism as a social order – the questions of political philosophy are at the limelight again.

Given these insights, it is imperative of philosophy to engage in the movement of the sciences not only to interpret the world, but more importantly, in the spirit of Karl Marx’s works, “to change it”. Philosophy must now commit itself to not only understanding why injustices exist – a task rooting back to the Greek times – but more importantly, to address such injustices, to put an end to inequality, and to introduce a new order where inequality ceases to exist. The field of philosophy during Marx’s time generally adhered to his presentation of such an order, long-term and on a global scale, in the form of communism, one that is founded upon the liberation of the workforce. However, the philosophers of present time have contested the power and even the possibility of communism and a proletarian revolution – a goal that is shared in principle by the Philippine national-democratic movement – in light of the failure of the communist experiments around the world which were fascist and totalitarian in nature. These regimes imposed a new order with little consideration of the objective condition. Moreover, these revisionist regimes entrusted radical change to the institutions; this defeated the objective of communism to abolish the state, which it deems on the whole as an apparatus of oppression in itself. To make use of psychoanalytic concepts, they simply forced the subjective conditions to fill in the void.

One of the said philosophers, who has written about the intrinsic incapacity of a revolution to be birthed from the womb of the present order, is French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard. Born in 1929, Baudrillard is best known to the public as the sociologist behind hyperreality, a term that encompasses his views on the commodity as the organizing principle of society. According to the University of Paris alumnus, we have lost contact with the “real”, and what remains is a fascination with its abolishment by models “more real than the real”. Hereafter, Baudrillard has adapted a neo-Marxist position, contending the German’s views on production in the context of postmodernity.

In spite of his materialist and Marxist roots, Baudrillard is unpopular among the likes of the national-democrats in the Philippines, because of his views that, for instance, the Left anywhere is only “keeping capitalism alive with its moral critiques and its quests for meaning” (Robinson 2012) which merely push capitalism to “panic” in the face of its own arbitrariness and to rectify its “temporary correctable glitches” – which, on the other hand, expose its unjustifiability.

Baudrillard’s postmodernity

While his fellow Situationists retained hopes for liberation, Baudrillard radicalized their analyses and argued that even the fundamental assumptions of Marx – needs, labor, production – are mere signs, or “ideological concepts created by the system itself to insinuate its survival”. He noted that “any attempt to talk about emancipation or alienation will be futile, because the system itself is no longer grounded upon a ‘great signified’, a presence, or the real – emancipated from what?” (Baudrillard as quoted in Mendoza 2010), closing in on his radicalness as an analyst.

With society having transformed our relations into one based on what can be shown and with signs and images having reduced reality into appearance, everything is reduced to sign and everything is reproduced by the system as a sign. This is the point in which Baudrillard’s writing veers away the furthest from classical Marxism, with him declaring the “end of production” and that “there is nothing more coming to be”. Returning to hyperreality, even the Real is a sign for Baudrillard, and we are left with models that are more real than what we have come to know as real. To put it simply, we cannot contain the Real in a regime of signs. It is impossible to represent.

In a sprawling series of essays for British left-wing weekly Ceasefire, Andrew Robinson posits a tripartite view of the works of Baudrillard. The French’s writings can be divided into the domains of symbolic exchange, of simulation, and of resistance. Robinson discusses Baudrillard’s views on symbolic exchange, how our alienated life today is suffering from its abolishment, and how capitalism’s reproducibility has invoked a new type of alienation – simulation.

Symbolic exchange “allows things to ‘mean’” as it establishes a relationship between signs and reality. In the midst of the regime of manufactured scarcity, we yearn for “our lost continuity and interconnectedness” as we simulate our reality through signs in a way that is “intense, ignorant of fashion, and disregarding of others’ demands for particular meanings” (Robinson 2012). Therefore, a regime based on equivalence brought about by reproduction instead of on symbolic exchange wards off ambivalence through the simulation of need, which in turn drives us to live a life of consumption and to derive our meaning from it. Capitalism functions on social exchange, “reducing everything to a regime based on value and the production of value”.

As he posited, in a postmodern society, “the need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost its meaning” (Baudrillard 2012). Words like these challenge the ranks of the national-democratic movement in the Philippines which have been an agent of resistance in the country for more than 50 years and whose socialist ideals have mobilized the larger, disenfranchised fraction of the population to advance their rights and interests as citizens of a democracy. It is in this light that Baudrillard contends the impossibility of a revolution. As a society, we have foregone symbolic exchange. It can be argued that even resistance is a sign, since the institutions in place in our present condition, in exchange for the struggle for liberation, only give us images to consume, in the form of slight, sporadic, short-term reforms. As Johnson writes:

Liberation is thus nullified, and re-encoded as a role and as narcissism. Concrete gains for liberation movements are side-effects of this immense strategic operation to disempower oppressed groups through their reduction to function or role. We are drip-fed little bits of democracy and progress to ensure the system’s survival.

Nevertheless, Baudrillard wrote of resistance by positing strategies of subversion through which he sees alienation being overcome or collapsing. However, what must be understood here is how these add up to the subject’s knowledge of the Real, especially in this condition that seemingly escapes approaching it through representation and replacing it with hyperreality.

The possibility of a revolution

Speaking of Baudrillard’s writings on resistance vis-à-vis his view of reality, Robinson (2008) says that the loss of reality “might explain why hope for liberation seems so hard to come by, and why revolutionary movements now seem to lack a clear vision of transformation”. For one, his view that consumption is a socially imposed duty is an attempt to address “why workers and other oppressed groups fall for capitalist ruses and remain attached to the system”. Seeing the postmodern condition as unable to provide “anything referential or emotionally meaningful”, Baudrillard believes that radical change cannot be possible at all if we make use of the same ideas and institutions, if we decide to return to production or fixed meanings, and if we keep working under the same framework or system. It is therefore a risk we take if we embark upon the struggle.

In spite of the challenges of a postmodern condition, movements of resistance like the national-democratic movement in the Philippines continue to persist. Although the movement fields and actively campaigns for senatorial candidates and party-lists during general elections, for instance, its socialist perspective altogether rejects and counters the continuity of the current social order. In his work “Towards a Marxist Theory of Oppression” (2005), David McNally insists:

Capitalism could not continue to exist unless the majority of working class people believed in the system; unless they thought that in some sense the present system was the best possible and that all talk of a new and free society was “unrealistic”. In order to keep its hold, capitalism is not only based on a system of economic and political domination; it also requires a system of ideological domination, a system through which workers can be made to believe bourgeois ideas.

Baudrillard’s words on resistance might be the French cultural theorist at his most benevolent towards activism. As a Marxist, what he shares is an acknowledgment of the necessity for liberation and therefore radical change; his point of departure lies in the means of the struggle for such. Alluding to the end of production, Baudrillard also believes that “every option available to resisters has already been encoded, given a meaning and a response. This makes the system seem impossible to fight” (Robinson 2008). Albeit a little pessimistic, he welcomes some sort of a revolution, still. Probably for Baudrillard, we are not that powerful to enforce a change in the objective order. What his pessimism might suggest is the need for a change in our subjectivity.

Sharing similar points, Badiou in The Rebirth of History (2012) says that the movements of resistance across the world must consider the impossible which is the Real, and how the subject ought to approach it. He writes, “The rebirth of History must also be a rebirth of the Idea.” Badiou, born in 1937 in French Morocco, actively posits the resurrection of the idea of communism in his works on truth, the being, the event, and the subject. As he says in lecture “On Optimism” (2012), “Freedom has nothing to do with the capacities of an ordinary body under the law of some language. Freedom is: active participation to the consequences of a new body, which is always beyond our own body.” For Badiou, a radical change can only be achieved “by forcing the Real and by displacing the empty place, so as to make the impossible possible”. It can be said, then, that communism is the Real of politics, given its nature as a complete overturn of the subjective orders that have persisted in the past millennia and as an order that seeks to fill the gaps present in these.

According to Slovenian poststructuralist scholar Alenka Zupančič, the Real signifies the incompleteness of reality. It is horrifying because it is impossible, in that it taunts the subject and asks the subject to overturn the convention of the symbolic order. Also, it “cannot be effaced and escaped by the subject”; there will always be figments of our world that we cannot understand. In this light, Badiou says that there must be “a forceful transformation of the Real into a consistent truth”. The incompleteness of reality must be acknowledged, though not to the point that we as subjects become passive or even surrender to the objective order confronting us. We must work towards changing our current subjectivity in such a way that the fear of the unknown only challenges us to push further and to understand and eventually resolve what is unjust in society. Here, the role of the subject in relation to the Real is thus underlined. For Zupančič’s fellow Slovenian Žižek, the subject is “what endeavors to fill in the gap within the order of being”.

Go not gently and rage with me

It is in this light that Badiou truly promotes the idea of communism. As he writes in The Rebirth of History (2007):

The rebirth of History must also be a rebirth of the Idea. The sole Idea capable of challenging the corrupt, lifeless version of ‘democracy’, which has become the banner of the legionaries of Capital, as well as the racial and national prophecies of a petty fascism given its opportunity locally by the crisis, is the idea of Communism, revisited and nourished by what the spirited diversity of these riots, however fragile, teaches us.

With the popular election of Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte as the head of state and government of the Philippines, the national-democratic movement is given a limelight. With the president-elect’s declaration of the social and economic reforms his administration is to offer, the progressive character of the movement is featured. Duterte, whose campaign strategy employed the creation of the Filipino people’s need for a brash, no-holds-barred figure to be at the helm of social transformation, has promised large-scale reforms.

In line with this, he has offered four seats in his Cabinet to “the Left”. Apart from this, he is known to have close ties with the leaders and prominent figures of the national-democratic movement. In his youth, Duterte was a member of the banned, underground, national-democratic mass organization Kabataang Makabayan (KM). The Davao region, too, is a known bailiwick of the movement. Jose Maria Sison, founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and a chief consultant of the national-democrats, was even promised a safe trip home and a warm welcome after having been exiled to the Netherlands for decades.

The euphoria surrounding Duterte’s rise in power is double-edged at best. While Duterte’s relatively anti-imperialist and progressive stance may truly work in favor of the Filipino people, there remains the fact that radical change must come from below instead of the institutions that benefit in its repression. We cannot deem the image of a Philippines under Duterte as an unknown, since it was a given from the start, with his positioning as the most “different” and “progressive” candidate, and even with his outing as a “socialist” and his promise of federalism for the country, he shall remain a figurehead of the current socio-political order. To quote Daniel Bensaïd in his essay “Thirty Years After: A Critical Introduction to the Marxism of Ernest Mandel” (2007):

Far from being a mechanical consequence of capitalist development, the rallying of the forces of resistance and subversion of the order established by capital is an incessant task recommenced in daily struggles, and whose results are never definitive.

In its struggle for genuine social change, the national-democratic movement must remain firm in its position of mounting a new, stable, and just social order instead of merely reforming and therefore reinstating the one currently in place. Moreover, it must be able to do this with the conscious knowledge that the objective order can never be perfect.

Having said all these, I begin to reaffirm my position in the national-democratic movement. Firstly, there is no such thing as “resistance to change”, more so when one is engaged in a movement of resistance against the current social order. There is only that social order in place which, given its scope in every aspect of life, makes it impossible to overcome. It is this position that promulgates our surrender to the current condition. There is only a fear of change, so to speak, since the Real remains an unknown and it is too horrifying to even approach.

However, as Badiou says, “Do not give up on that part of yourself that you do not know.” When I am faced with having to make a big decision, I either decide on what is more comfortable or familiar, or resolve to go with the flow and let the waves carry me. This is not simply being a Taurus, as I would defend before, but a manifestation of a code that is imposed upon each one of us as we are born to a system which promotes reproducibility over creativity and signs and images over reality. The system teaches us to fear radicalness and to lose hope that there can be a better world different from or outside the one we are living in.

Activism in its sole legitimate form – militant and uncompromising – is a resounding call waged upon us to acknowledge our subjectivity and to assert our significance in relation to our objective reality. As Friedrich Engels’ dialectical materialism puts it, “The alteration of nature by men, not solely by nature as such, is the most essential basis of human thought.” Philosophy must now veer towards the subject as an agent of radical change and the Real as an impossibility that a subject must nevertheless acknowledge. To be Icarus creating his own pair of wings and flying close to the sun – that is the great risk of our time.

References Badiou, Alain, The Rebirth of History (New York: Verso, 2012). Baudrillard, Jean, The Ecstasy of Communication (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012). Bensaïd, Daniel, “Thirty Years After: A Critical Introduction to the Marxism of Ernest Mandel,” in International Viewpoint (2007). Diken, Bulent, Revolt, Revolution, Critique: The Paradox of Society (New York: Routledge, 2012). Johnston, Adrian, “The Quick and the Dead: Alain Badiou and the Split Speeds of Transformation,” in International Journal of Žižek Studies 1:2 (2007). McNally, David. “Towards a Marxist Theory of Oppression,” in Another World is Possible: Globalization and Anti-Capitalism (Winnipeg: ArbeiterRing Publishing, 2005) Moran, Dermot. The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2008). Mendoza, Daryl Y., “Commodity, Sign, and Spectacle: Retracing Baudrillard’s Hyperreality,” in Kritike, 4:2 (December 2010). Robinson, Andrew, “Jean Baudrillard and Activism: A Critique,” in Ceasefire (February 7, 2013), <https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-14>. Robinson, Andrew, “Jean Baudrillard: From Production to Reproduction,” in Ceasefire (May 4, 2012), <https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-6>. Robinson, Andrew, “Jean Baudrillard: Marx and Alienation – Draft 2,” in Ceasefire (February 17, 2012), <https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-4>. Robinson, Andrew, “Jean Baudrillard: Symbolic Exchange,” in Ceasefire (February 17, 2012), <https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-1>. Robinson, Andrew, “Jean Baudrillard: The Rise of Capitalism & the Exclusion of Death,” in Ceasefire (March 30, 2012), <https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-2>.

#jean baudrillard #slavoj žižek #alain badiou #words #personal

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