Pleasures of the Polemic
Afflicted Powers is a rich and engaging work that is difficult to comment on for a series of reasons. As one might expect from a multiauthored work, the text is a true heteroglossia, a creative clash of languages, styles, and modes of analysis that are in a constant state of tension and competition. Sparked by the antiwar protests in 2003, it “smells,” as Mikhail Bakhtin might say, of its Berkeley milieu and the political culture of San Francisco. The writing is passionate and apocalyptic, giving free rein to the pleasures of polemics and hyperbole (e.g., “We have rarely been closer to hell on earth” [AP, 175]). It is also angst-ridden as it grapples with the current condition and therapeutically works through the defeat of the antiwar movement and the future of “the Left.” Given the distinguished intellectual achievements of its various authors, the work is packed with erudition and literary flourishes. Amid this rich heteroglossia, a master voice (the “we” and “our”) occasionally declares italicized transcendent truths that are meant to be beyond the antiwar slogans of the street, the cautious poststructuralism of the academy, and instrumental Marxism of many of the Left’s faithful.
The book presents itself as “an account of world politics since September 11, 2001” (dust jacket). But instead of an engagement with the facticity of world politics, analysis proceeds through creative use of broad couplets, philosophical categories, anachronistic discourse, literary citations, and the analytic narratives of the Marxist tradition. Our current geopolitical condition, RETORT declares, is a mix of “atavism” and “new-fangledness” (AP, 15). Atavism is “a plunging backward into forms of ideological and geopolitical struggle that call to mind now the Scramble for Africa, now the Wars of Religion” (AP, 14). Newfangledness is “the apparatus of a modern, not to say hyper-modern, production of appearances” (AP, 14). The former represents the past, the material, interests, and “a baldfaced imperialism,” the latter the futuristic, the immaterial, imagery, spectacle, the “struggle for control of ‘information’ ” (AP, 14). This is sweeping declarative stuff, the heaving complexity of the present packaged into a lively dialectic. Running with its all-too-full concepts, the master voice pronounces the subject of analysis: “the contradictions of military neo-liberalism under conditions of spectacle” (AP, 15).
How persuasive is the analysis that follows? From the perspective of the critical geopolitics project, Afflicted Powers is a powerfully provocative work but deficient on many levels.1 The polemical mode of argumentation makes the book difficult to evaluate, but style and argumentative substance are not separable. The first deficiency is that the arguments in Afflicted Powers are insufficient explanations of the current geopolitical moment. This moment has been conditioned by the Bush administration’s articulation and use of certain long-standing imperial tendencies and practices in American geopolitical culture, chief among them the (con)fusion of “America” with the “universal.” But the historical background and domestic context in which this takes place need analysis, which the book surprisingly does not provide. Instead, it provides an account of a society in the thrall of “the spectacle” and an inadequate conceptualization of the domestic political basis for American geopolitical actions.
This first deficiency is directly related to the second, the use of a crude and deterministic conception of an “American empire” (introduced without qualification as a manifest, fully formed structure [AP, 5]) to explain the geopolitical actions of the U.S. state. Like others, I want to suggest that “empire” is a problematic category to describe American power in world affairs or the current geopolitical condition.2 Notions of an “American empire/imperium,” an “imperial culture,” a “colonial present,” and a “will to empire” are, of course, part of contemporary geopolitical culture and extremely relevant to understanding it.3 But the notion of an American empire that RETORT deploys all too easily closes down rather than opens up an appreciation of the contingent qualities of the present. What the book recognizes — in the concept of “afflicted powers” and when noting the “real strategic failure” in Iraq (AP, 5) — but does not foreground sufficiently is the profound weakness of the policies and position of the U.S. state as a result of the Bush administration’s response to September 11. Afflicted Powers develops an overly structural-determinist analysis of the current geopolitical moment while missing a key emergent structural point: the American state under George W. Bush’s leadership has dramatically weakened its global power and standing in world affairs.
The third deficiency is the functionalism of many passages in the work. Despite the apparent renunciation of “capitalist” structural determinism, the text’s master voice posits “capital” as a coherent and recognizable actor, logic, or structure working in the current geopolitical condition, which, according to the dust jacket, “is attempting, nakedly, a new round of primitive accumulation.” One has a circuit of increasingly abstracted reasoning that leaps unproblematically from Bush’s Iraq war (as iteration of American empire) to war conceptualized as recurrent primitive accumulation tied to the “imperatives” and the “needs and appetites” of “capital” (AP, 42). Consider the following sentence toward the conclusion of the work: “Atavism, the reader will now realize, is tied in our view to a central new set of capitalist imperatives — a pattern of needs and failures and necessities, which we have tried to outline, as a result of which a fresh round of primitive accumulation is being attempted” (AP, 186). Geopolitical actions, in RETORT’s account, are ultimately overdetermined by “capitalist imperatives.” Let me briefly substantiate these points.
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