In April and May, the global movement protesting the continued destruction of Gaza by Israel evolved into a series of encampments within universities, protesting the attack in general, and university investment in Israel in particular. Some had been planned early in the attack. But others developed quickly in response both to the destruction itself and to the declining impact of the weekly street protests on the matter. The protesting students and staff put at the centre of their protest the contradiction that most university authorities had been quick to try and obscure: that the places from which critical, ethical thinking is supposed to come had become those most devoted to the smooth instrumental arming and reproduction of tyranny and mass death, through their research into high-tech weaponry, and their involvement with corporations, often with Israeli connections, who would be both applying it to Gaza, and using it across the world. No wonder the global political right went crazy, and tried to deflect explanation for this movement from anything to do with reflection, blaming it on indoctrination and social media.
This was the first such outbreak of moral political action that specifically called on the implicit questions raised by the humanities—which remain, however battered, the core of the university — and it has raised two different types of hopes about the prospect for imminent future critical protest action and organisation. One — that such protests are the start of a ‘new internationalism’ to use the phrase of Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra in Sidecar, drawing in disparate groups in an attitude common to the Gaza and university protests — is in grievous error. The second, correct perception, is that such a movement represents the renewal of collective self-recognition by intellectuals, students and sections of the ‘intellectually trained’. The two are in contradiction, and making such visible is essential to developing a strategy of the immediate future.
To go to the second first. In this issue of Arena we have put the question of this social-political process at the centre, with a series of articles drawing out the major and multiple event of our time: the rapid transformation of social life by a new ‘jump’ — by ‘jump’ I mean a period of a decade or more — in technological development, and its application to changed everyday life, and the global structures of process and power they are lived within. Gaza has been a prominent example, and has been recognised as such in the discourse of the protests. This is not an attack that is merely asymmetrical, with tanks riding over shacks, and napalm dropping on villages. As noted by Alison Broinowksi and Robert Rollason, a war of AI-steered drones, tracking individuals and groups amid a level of destruction openly bragged of as a prelude to the abolition of ‘Gaza’ and its reconstruction as a version of Neom, the ultra-tech (and now much truncated) ‘special economic area’ proposed by the Saudis.
But Gaza is only the most ghastly and visible manifestation of a deeper process which has been underway for decades, and which has been a focus of the Arena research project, whose development we return to a greater visibility here. As John Hinkson notes, the central movement we have pointed to is the changed content of value, power and action that occurs at the heart of Western, and then global, state power and capitalism as scientific intellect is brought to the centre of the social reproductive process. This simultaneously leads to the creation of intellectuals and those working in the domain of intellect as a significant, and not marginal social group in their own right, and to transform the world into a techno-scientific order which draws in the whole of society, although different groups have a different relationship to its core processes. This new world, of the new media and communications technologies, of nuclear power and super-(and soon quantum-) computing, of the techno-biological reconstruction of the physical species, transforms both the social ontology — what there is — and the structure of the social bonds, and internal subjectivity of the persons created within them.
In this new world, Marxist and Marxian formulas of capitalist development no longer work, no matter how modified the basic theory is. Intellectual process can no longer be subsumed to ‘labour’, and specifically not to the form of routinised metabolic transfer that is at the heart of high capitalist accumulation.
This dual character of this new world — opening society to new forms of inquiry and liberation, while closing off possibilities of life through the imposition of a new order of power — can be seen in the intellectuals of today. It is only through the critical and reflexive practices of reason established by modern university intellectuality, and the remnant of it that remains today, expressed in the idea of communism — a free and borderless exchange of ideas which establishes collective value without subsuming particular character — that we can stand back from the technoscientific era and make visible its deeper tendencies to a total autonomy of process oriented towards destruction of the species. This is destruction, not merely in the most spectacular processes of nuclear annihilation, or engineered disease, or the biological reconstruction of the species en masse — that is, in a way capable of making existential hells difficult to reverse — but also through the steady undermining of the basic structures of social life through which we have reproduced as humans capable of life, love, reciprocal respect and meaning for aeons.
This last process is usually taken by the Left to be unambiguously good — a lifting out from parochial and limited ways of life, in which unversal human self-realisation is not possible. This is true, but if such as process is taken for granted as it occurs, it undermines the more general capacity for a social framework of meaning to stabilise, be collective and be internalised as stable subjectivity.
This was a marginal process for a long time, typically seen in modernity in the character of, for example, bohemian artistic communities, and both adults and children raised within them. But it is surely now obvious that it is being generalised, as a social process, in the rapid decay of stable social institutions, from schools to hospitals to work to universities, as they become attenuated by the possibilities of high-tech remoteness, international circulation and the like. In the subjective sphere it is obvious that the sheer number of children developing psychological developmental disorders — overwhelmingly those of attachment, bonding and shared meaning — and adults developing anxiety and depression is a product of the undermining of a prior ground of social meaning.
Yet these developments have not occurred the same way for everyone. Those excluded from them — which includes a working class once industrial, once at the centre of social reproduction — will produce in numbers people who believe that intellect itself has become the master’s discourse, and, increasingly, the enemy. Anti-science and conspiracy theory has moved from the fringes to the centre of life as a form of counter-reasoning, an intellectual resistance. This process — a counter-revolution to knowledge and abstraction itself — has driven the rise of a new nationalist Right, passionate about borders, stabilisation and the desire to feel ‘at home’ in one’s own time and space. This has had success the world over, in different forms, as pieces here on Portugal and Fiji document, and is reconstructing any remnants of left-right politics, as Simon Cooper documents in his review of the new ‘class conservatives’ in the US.
Notions of a ‘new internationalism’ — that false conclusion drawn from the Gaza protests — seem unwilling to recognise the reality of this new division. However such an ‘internationalism’ is false if it believes that intellectuals, in our time, are merely an add on, a supplement, to either a class process, or to the expanded notion of class as ‘the multitudes’ that Negri and Hardt advanced at the turn of the 2000s.
No, what the radical, critical and committed intellectual must do in our era is apply a reflective and reflexive reasoning to the making and remaking of intellectual practices as they are applied to the world. That begins with an understanding of their own centrality, of the degree to which radical aims — both the universal flourishing of communism, and the nihilist dissolution of post-structuralism, and cultural forms arising from it — arise as utopian/dystopian versions of the ethical demand that arises from the very practice of inquiry.
It also means recognising the nemesis that shadows intellectual life: the human orientation to power, domination and even sadism that intellectual practices can be used to enact. This is what has been seen in Gaza: that it is not only from the state in Jerusalem, but from Tel Aviv — Israel’s high-tech centre, a famously intellectual, alternative, LGBTQ city—that unending, ever inventive horrors are arising. In standing with the Gazans, we are not cosplaying being an Arab sequestered people whose daily values we may or may not share; we are challenging those who annihilate them, in the chain of intellect and power that stretches from our universities and parliaments to theirs, to live up to the ethical universality arising from the reflective practices that make the bombs possible.
Do we abandon the mainstream? No, the pro-Palestine street protests have been magnificent. But movement building must, as Richard King argues, no longer be done on the de facto belief that, and judgement of, other groups steadily ‘coming round’ to the full set of intellectual values. Equally, we cannot abandon the social-economic question that sat at the centre of modernity, but nor can it be expressed, analytically or strategically in terms of a contradiction that no longer has transformative power. We agree with Alain Badiou, as relayed in Justin Clemens’s heroic summary of his ideas, that certain types of radical politics and critique are concluded; we would disagree with the turn — now common among the western intellectual left — away from a materialist social theory to philosophy as a master discourse, which, arguably makes the materiality of intellectual practices invisible at the very time that intellectuals move towards the centre of the process of social reproduction. Indeed, the social-economic thinking and proposals, must be more radical and critical as to social reconstruction, to restore hollowed-out levels of life through new forms of association. Such a politics cannot simply propose the take-over of a world overwhelmingly composed of abstracted high-tech processes, with the ‘capitalism’ bit removed. Only by a reconstruction of life’s form, lived at many levels of abstraction, in a reflexive —that is, non-dominant — relation to each other, can the content of radical hopes for equality, liberation and universal flourishing be achieved. Retreat to a univocally less abstract mode of life does not ‘set free’ an inherently self-governing collective human spirit. But notions that a transcendentally transformed good life could be won by a relentless pursuit of the most abstract levels of transformation and production — the dream of communisms, avant-gardeisms and accelerationists for two centuries — would simply deliver a (literally) next-level oppression, slaves to the algorithm. In this grand transitional practice we are advocating for, the world of depth, ground, sensuality and presence, re-emerges as an ongoing life-praxis among collectives, communities and networks as prior levels are restored. The one-dimensional, most instrumentalised version of the most abstract level of life loses its dominance, and power to undermine the full interfusion of nature and culture, in birth, embodiment, connection, that makes meaning possible.
It is the global that now commands our attention, with a relentless pressure towards war, resulting from the insistent emergence of a multipolar world based on the numerous ‘nation’-states — civilisation-states would be a better term for China and India — into a world whose structures and intent are the continuation of a world dominated by the wholly-extended power of the United States, unipolar, reaching back into the last decades of the Soviet Union.
The way of life our populations depend upon, and expect, prompts our continued co-operation in this overextension. This way of life has worn away the values, good or bad, of stoicism, pride and sacrifice, that we would need to draw on for a steady transition to a genuinely multipolar world — one necessarily involving a genuine revival of local production, and a reconforming of politics, economy and society. Gaza, and the particular lickspittle character of our government’s support for Israel’s destructiveness was a necessary consequence of a commitment to such a pathway. What we were asked to give up with what remained of our operational independence was our capacity to take a collective moral stand — and our government was willing to give it, because it had already put us on the path that made it inevitable. The Gaza encampments across the world, and the right-wing hysteria concerning them, are a sign that we may have recommenced not merely the first order process of questioning states, interests and powers, but also making visible the deeper processes that cause such horrors to be both inevitable and routinised, their origin in the world we have made, and the radical reconstitution of how we live now that is required.