The Anomie of the Earth: Philosophy, Politics, and Autonomy in Europe and the Americas - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 082235893X ISBN 13: 9780822358930

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2015

Synopsis

The contributors to The Anomie of the Earth explore the convergences and resonances between Autonomist Marxism and decolonial thinking. In discussing and rejecting Carl Schmitt's formulation of the nomos—a conceptualization of world order based on the Western tenets of law and property—the authors question the assumption of universal political subjects and look towards politics of the commons divorced from European notions of sovereignty. They contrast European Autonomism with North and South American decolonial and indigenous conceptions of autonomy, discuss the legacies of each, and examine social movements in the Americas and Europe. Beyond orthodox Marxism, their transatlantic exchanges point to the emerging categories disclosed by the collapse of the colonial and capitalist frameworks of Western modernity.

Contributors. Joost de Bloois, Jodi A. Byrd, Gustavo Esteva, Silvia Federici, Wilson Kaiser, Mara Kaufman, Frans-Willem Korsten, Federico Luisetti, Sandro Mezzadra, Walter D. Mignolo, Benjamin Noys, John Pickles, Alvaro Reyes, Catherine Walsh, Gareth Williams, Zac Zimmer

About this title

About the Author

Federico Luisetti is Professor of Italian Studies, Comparative Literature, and Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of Una vita: pensiero selvaggio e filosofia dell'intensità (A Life: Savage Thought and Philosophy of Intensity).

John Pickles is Earl N. Phillips Distinguished Professor of International Studies in the Department of Geography at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World.

Wilson Kaiser is Assistant Professor of English at Edward Waters College in Florida.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Anomie of the Earth Philosophy, Politics, and Autonomy in Europe and the Americas

By Federico Luisetti, John Pickles, Wilson Kaiser

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5893-0

Contents

FOREWORD. Anomie, Resurgences, and De-Noming WALTER D. MIGNOLO, 
INTRODUCTION. Autonomy: Political Theory/Political Anthropology FEDERICO LUISETTI, JOHN PICKLES, AND WILSON KAISER, 
PART I. Geographies of Autonomy, 
1 The Death of Vitruvian Man: Anomaly, Anomie, Autonomy JOOST DE BLOOIS, 
2 Sovereignty, Indigeneity, Territory: Zapatista Autonomy and the New Practices of Decolonization ALVARO REYES AND MARA KAUFMAN, 
PART II. Indigeneity and Commons, 
3 Enclosing the Enclosers: Autonomous Experiences from the Grassroots–beyond Development, Globalization and Postmodernity GUSTAVO ESTEVA, 
4 Life and Nature "Otherwise": Challenges from the Abya-Yalean Andes CATHERINE E. WALSH, 
5 Mind the Gap: Indigenous Sovereignty and the Antinomies of Empire JODI A. BYRD, 
6 The Enclosure of the Nomos: Appropriation and Conquest in the New World ZAC ZIMMER, 
PART III. Forms of Life, 
7 Decontainment: The Collapse of the Katechon and the End of Hegemony GARETH WILLIAMS, 
8 The Savage Ontology of Insurrection: Negativity, Life, and Anarchy BENJAMIN NOYS, 
9 Unreasonability, Style, and Pretiosity FRANS-WILLEM KORSTEN, 
10 Re-enchanting the World: Technology, the Body, and the Construction of the Commons SILVIA FEDERICI, 
AFTERWORD. Resonances of the Common SANDRO MEZZADRA, 
Bibliography, 
Contributors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Death of Vitruvian Man Anomaly, Anomie, Autonomy

JOOST DE BLOOIS

1492 to 1977: The Passage beyond Modernity

In his recent "Towards a Critique of Political Democracy," Mario Tronti argues that "there will be no genuine and effective critique of democracy without a profound anthropological investigation, a social anthropology but also an individual anthropology." For Tronti, "we witness the epochal encounter between homo economicus and homo democraticus. The subject of the spirits of capitalism is precisely the animal democraticum. The figure that has become dominant is the mass bourgeois, which is the real subject internal to the social relation." In autonomist discourse this democratic animal gets different names, such as the Bloom in the work of Tiqqun, the virtuoso opportunist in the work of Paolo Virno, the entrepreneur on Prozac in the work of Franco "Bifo" Berardi. These notions proceed from the conviction that it is vital that any alternative to what Tronti calls the "mass biopolitics" that goes under the name of democracy has to start from a far-reaching critique of the different incarnations of the anthropological subject. Therefore, I would like to argue that we might consider autonomist thought to constitute a savage political anthropology, in the sense that the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres speaks of a "savage ethnography": an ethnography that claims a certain primitivism that thinks with the savage against the Western political anthropology of the zoon politikon. Although such a savage political anthropology draws crucially, as I will show, on what I will call "the anthropological perspective," which is indebted to the anthropology of savage thought (pensée sauvage) that spans from Lévi-Strauss via Clastres to contemporary anthropologists such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, it does not so much refer to a specialized area of study as to an "underground current" of political philosophy, in the sense that Althusser speaks of "the underground current of the materialism of the encounter": an obscured but no less operative tradition. To reconsider autonomist thinking as a savage political anthropology thus uncovers strange bedfellows with whom it shares a vocabulary as well as an ethos.

Crucially, such a savage political anthropology constitutes a vital critique of modernity, that is to say: of political modernity and its epistemological and subjective architecture.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi describes autonomist thought and activism precisely in terms of "passage" and "premonition." For Berardi, the year 1977 heralds the "passage beyond modernity." The acme of autonomist thought in Italy witnesses the closure of "the modern horizon": autonomism breaks away from the epistemology of modernity by no longer thinking emancipation in purely historical terms. The notion of "history" constitutes the pivot of modernity's epistemology. Historical thinking provides modernity with its horizon of humanitas and intrinsically Western spatiotemporality. It was the centrality of "history," and its ensuing dialectics, that connected Marxism to the epistemology of modernity. In fact, operaismo constitutes a first instance of departure from it. The year 1977 therefore marks the "premonition of an anthropological mutation and the emergence of a new transformative subject." For Berardi, this "anthropological mutation" is highly ambiguous. What he describes as "the implosion of the future," as the horizon of political, social, sexual emancipatory thought, also sees the emergence of the animal democraticum or "mass bourgeois" referred to by Tronti. This anthropological figure constitutes the subject of a posthistorical humanitas that in fact fulfils the project of modernity by universalizing the subject of Western capitalism, the Vitruvian man of economic globalization. Berardi therefore insists on the need "to resume the thread of analysis of social composition and decomposition if we want to distinguish possible lines of processes of recomposition to come."

One such possible afterlife of autonomist thought is, I argue, its alliance with decolonial thinking, as exemplified by the work of Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, Rámon Grosfoguel, or Nelson Maldonado-Torres. Both (post)autonomism and decolonial thinking attempt to grasp the epistemological and political ramifications of the "passage beyond modernity" vis-à-vis new forms of autonomy. As Maldonado-Torres writes, the modern conception of autonomy presupposes a subject caught up in the master/slave dialectics of self-affirmation (of its humanitas) through the negating of others: "It is as if the production of the 'less than human' functioned as the anchor of a process of autonomy and self-assertion." The idea of modernity has coloniality as its "constitutive and darker side." The year 1492 thus constitutes the passage to modernity. Modernity's epistemology, and subsequent (political) anthropology, its hierarchy of potential subjects, is inextricably linked with the encounter and subsequent negation of Amerindian civilization and the ensuing Atlantic slave trade. Autonomy and emancipation are thus conditioned by an epistemology that is scaffolded by "the systematic differentiation between groups taken as the norm of the human and others seen as the exception to it." The modern conception of autonomy supposes the prior conception of an "epistemic zero point" that is the privilege of those inhabiting it and who may claim their ensuing humanitas; it is from his "zero point" that, at the same time, those "who inhabit the exteriority (the outside invented in the process of defining the inside)" are created, precisely as the objects of observation or anthropos: the barbarian or the primitive. Decolonial thinking proposes an "epistemic delinking" that, in a sense, stages a different encounter. It revaluates anthropos before humanitas, by taking indigenous practices and epistemologies, without unproblematically considering them as latter-day robinsonnades, as the anchor point of new forms of autonomous politics. Decolonial thinking therefore draws on what I coined earlier as the anthropological perspective. It is this perspective, along with the reappraisal of autonomy that it enables, that allows for a joint reading of contemporary decolonial and autonomist thinking. The potential of such an alliance is discussed, most notably, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Commonwealth. However, I would like to argue against their attempt to incorporate decolonial thinking, as well as contemporary radical anthropology, in a somewhat overstretched autonomist notion of "the commons." Such a project, as we will see, remains still determined by dialectical figures of thought that are in fact radically challenged by decolonial thinking. On the contrary, I propose to reconsider autonomist thinking from the anthropological perspective, that is to say: in particular, outside of the exclusive bias of political economy. This will allow us to highlight autonomism's intrinsic proximity with decolonial thinking and its potential for reassessing "savage thought." I therefore propose a reading of autonomist thinking as savage political anthropology that, crucially, gravitates toward the savage, unmodern element in autonomist thinking and that recurrently stages a different encounter between the (political) epistemology of modernity and its outside (as is shown, for example, in the work of Negri and Virno and of Byrd [chapter 6 here]). In particular, this alternative staging of the foundational encounter of modernity, and its impinging master/slave dialectic, allow for a radical departure from the Hobbesian imperatives that dominate modern political thought.

A New Nomos of the Earth? Altermodernity, Decoloniality, Autonomy

"Modernity is always two," write Michael Hardt and Toni Negri in Commonwealth. Modernity is not so much a result of diachronic thinking as it is at the very origin of the conception of historical linearity. Therefore, "modernity" is a profoundly speculative affair: its concept emerges as both origin and end of historical reason. Modernity constitutes the very heart of a complex historical-teleological thinking that thinks history from its point of arrival, the very point where it locates itself. This point of arrival is thus spatiogeographical as much as it is temporal. Its proper name is Europe. The constitutive "two" of modernity referred to by Hardt and Negri consists of the couple colonizer/colonized, or master/slave. "Coloniality ... is constitutive of modernity — there is no modernity without coloniality," Mignolo writes in turn. The year 1492 testifies of the advent of a new nomos of the earth that, at its core, consists of a double-bind: it is shored up by the idea of a "universal history" that, paradoxically, has as its condition of possibility its particular geographical location: Europe. Modernity simultaneously invents "history" (as an entity) and cuts through it like a knife. It divides into those with and those without history; those within the salutatory realm of history and those whose salvation will depend on their compliance in being maneuvered within it. Europe — and its twenty-first-century avatar "the West," still firmly rooted in the autonarrative of its intrinsic modernity — thus becomes the "civilization destined to lead and save the rest of the world," most notably from "barbarism and primitivism." What is thus put into place has been amply theorized over the past decades by Latin American theorists as "the colonial matrix of power." As Rámon Grosfoguel argues, this matrix cannot be reduced to its economic component. It consists of a "broad entangled 'package'" that includes, vitally, a vision of history, but also, on equal and intimately related terms, an epistemology, a cosmology, a spirituality, and visions of race and sexuality, as well as the economic rationale we call "capitalism." The new nomos of the earth is nothing less than the violent attempt to universalize this complex "package" of epistemic hierarchies. Vitruvian man has the conquistador as his shadow.

"Modernity is always two," Hardt and Negri write, adding that, more precisely, "modernity lies between the two." Cautious not to replicate modernity's autonarrative, they argue that "resistances to colonial domination, are not outside modernity but rather entirely internal to it, that is, within the power relation." Being intimately entwined with the colonial matrix of power, modernity hinges upon the inside/outside binary of a history of salvation and its subsequent epistemological, cosmological, or racial imaginaries. According to Hardt and Negri, modernity is therefore coextensive with the emergence of "the forces of antimodernity," ultimately resulting into what they call "altermodernity." Consequently, modernity is to be understood neither as the unilateral narrative of conquest nor as the interminable Adornian dialectic between modernity and its "monsters" of myth and barbarism, leaving any foreseeable resolution of this dialectic at the price of the eruption of modernity's opposite, a new kind of barbarism. The latter dialectic, by either dragging the colonized back into modernity's uniform interiority or banishing it to its antehistoric outside, in fact replicates that most pervasive diagonal of the colonial matrix of power, the inside/outside binary. For Hardt and Negri the veiled logic of modernity is that of the dynamics between encounter and foreclosure: the encounter with Amerindian and Caribbean civilizations has led to the foreclosure of "the innumerable resistances within and against modernity which constitute the primary element of danger for its dominant self-conception. Despite all the furious energy expended to cast out the 'antimodern' other, resistance remains within." Walter Mignolo similarly dismisses a dialectical reading of modernity as the tacit endorsement of Eurocentrism, arguing that the nomos of the indigenous cultures of Latin America was "negated and discarded, not incorporated." The latter defiance of dialectical inclusion is vital here, since it accounts for the fact that "today we see that the 'first nomos of the earth' was not 'destroyed.' Because they were not destroyed they are reemerging in the twenty-first century in different guises: as religious and ancestral identities rearticulated in response to and confrontation with Western global designs (globalism rather than globalization). This is not, of course, to propose a return to the past but, precisely, to open up the roads toward global futures."

For Mignolo, as well as for Hardt and Negri, the vicious circle of modernity, redefined here as the colonial matrix of power, can be broken only by recognizing how "the monstrousness and savagery of the native" that is called upon to legitimate European rule in the name of salutary modernity also holds the "positive, productive monsters of antimodernity, the monsters of liberation, [that] always exceed the domination of modernity and point toward an alternative." This alternative will be conceptualized as "altermodernity" by Hardt and Negri and "de-coloniality" by Mignolo and others: "de-colonial thinking is, then, thinking that de-links and opens ... to the possibilities hidden (colonized and discredited, such as the traditional, barbarian, primitive, mystic, etc.) by the modern rationality." That is to say that, for Mignolo, the institution of the colonial matrix of power, with which modernity is coextensive, is also the moment when decolonial thinking materializes. Decoloniality is therefore engrained in coloniality, not in a dialectical logic of opposites, but rather: it is akin to the mutual becoming of molar and molecular segmentations in Deleuze and Guattari, the latter continuously undermining the alignment of the former. In decoloniality and altermodernity, the stakes are simultaneously epistemological and practical, cultural and political. Both ground epistemology on the terrain of struggle, as Hardt and Negri write. By "delinking" indigenous, antimodern, or unmodern epistemologies from the modern nomos, both altermodernity and decoloniality make way for a rationality different from, and even diametrically opposed to, the modern power matrix. Perhaps the founding act of this alternative rationality is to overcome the binary thinking/doing. As Mignolo states, decolonial thinking means engaging in "decolonial options."

The alternative to modernity consists, precisely, of a "truth constructed from below," grounded in practice, or rather: a multiplicity of practices. Such practices, vitally, include those "colonised and discredited, such as the traditional, barbarian, primitive and mystic," referred to by Mignolo, or what Hardt and Negri call "the savage power of monsters." It is crucial here to note that such notions as "savage" of "primitive" are not necessarily essentializing notions. They neither obtain their meaning exclusively, and negatively, as exteriority in relation to the modern matrix, nor do they result solely, and positively, from phantasmagorias of the nonconstructed world of the pure given or the "narcissistic paradise" of an "immanent humanity," as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls it. Discarding the savage and mythic either as modernity's projected antipode or as Rousseauist reverie might in fact entail, once more, equating liberation or autonomy and modernity. For Hardt and Negri, "when we reduce all figures of antimodernity to a tame dialectical play of opposite identities, we miss the liberatory possibilities of their monstrous imaginings." At least in part, the passage from anti- to altermodernity operates through the revaluation of those epistemologies, cosmologies, and practices that, having been branded "savage," were the prime objects of modernity's foreclosure.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Anomie of the Earth Philosophy, Politics, and Autonomy in Europe and the Americas by Federico Luisetti, John Pickles, Wilson Kaiser. Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 082235893X
• ISBN 13: 9780822358930
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 276
• Editor: Luisetti