This
issue of new formations explores two
philosophical interventions into the politics of culture. One provoked by Étienne Balibar,
the other by Richard Dyer. Étienne Balibar is still remembered
as one of the key collaborators in the philosopher Louis Althusser’s
attempt in the mid-1960s to re-establish Marxism’s scientific
credentials by reading ‘Capital to the letter.’ Since that period, Balibar
has continued to work within a broadly Marxist problematic that
combines ‘action in the present ’ with ‘a theoretical knowledge of the material conditions which constitute the “present ”.’1 In conversation
with Sandro Mezzadra,Balibar surveys his recent studies of the relationship
between borders and citizenship,and especially the prospects
of an emergent European citizenship, placing
them within the context of
the new militarised order of conflict, post 9/11. What
is at stake here is a simultaneous weakening of territorial boundaries
under globalisation which goes hand in hand with the idealisation
of these same contested boundaries in order to provide a secure
ideological homeland for the protection of national identities. Balibar’s
tentative way out of this impasse is a radical democracy that needs to
engage with a now transient workers’ movement, which is just barely class-based.
In this sense, the spectre of Marxism returns once again in the call for
‘consciousness, organization and institutions ’ on the model
of a reinvented International.
As a response to Balibar and Mezzadra’s far-reaching
dialogue and in an attempt to further the conversation,we publish
three specially commissioned commentaries on different aspects
of Balibar’s work. Claudia Aradau turns (via a former fellow-Althusserian
Jacques Rancière) to the conceptual nderpinnings of Balibar’s
approach to politics by focusing upon his emphasis on civility
as a form of identification and detachment that avoids the violent extremes
of idealisation – an emphasis that she sees as crucial to the process
of ‘institutional creation’ that Balibar commends. William
Outhwaite looks at the pitfalls and promises that animate the
current moment of European integration and takes Balibar’s
remarks on ‘transnational social practices’ as an anticipation
of a new phase of democracy that sublates the earlier liberal and
social versions of democracy into a truly cosmopolitan democratic Europe.
Finally, Iain Chambers reflects upon the wider cultural parameters
against which Balibar’s interrogation of Europe’s political
possibilities must be set – a longer durée
of difference in which the elaboration of rights and
privileges have been secured by the hypostatisation of a series
of religious and racialised Others – and in so doing re-opens
a chapter on the legacies of empire that has never quite been
closed, though it has sometimes been left for dead. Our concluding
section returns to Richard Dyer’s 1979 essay ‘In Defense of Disco’ As Jeremy Gilbert argues in his introduction to
the section, Dyer’s essay, reprinted here, needs no defending
today. Tim Lawrence’s accompanying essay provides the historical
context and an update on the politics of disco.
Three more essays complete this edition, each of which
engages critically with contemporary culture. Fabio Vighi and
Heiko Feldner’s essay ‘Beyond
Liberal Democracy: Slavoj Zizek’s Politics of Ideology Critique’
argues for the efficacy of Zizek’s critique in confronting
the limits of liberal democracy at a time when the Left seems
paralysed by the dynamism of global capitalism. Timothy Bewes
reads two recent works by Paul Auster in the light of Lukács’ early
work on the novel to argue against the ‘ontological relation to the present’
exhibited by so much postmodern theory, and for a historical view
of the contemporary. Finally, following Cora Kaplan’s analysis of class in contemporary
British cinema in new formations 52, James Procter examines British Asian cinema’s representation of the everyday
and the familiar as a deflation of the ‘canonical exoticism’
of certain trends in postcolonial theory. He argues that films
such as Bend it like Beckham or East is East : ‘present a mundane and imaginative alternative
to the extreme, extraordinary versions of South Asian culture in the UK since 9/11’.
1. Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy f Marx , Chris Turner
(ttrans), Verso, ondon, 1995, 122.
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