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After a modern era of technological progress that has led humans to believe in their increasing ability to control nature, we are reaching a point at which this power on a small scale has given way to increasing uncertainty and uncontrollability on the large scale. Not only are the specific effects of climate change difficult to predict and control, the only mechanisms available for such control—agreement and cooperation across national and cultural divides—are not the stuff of engineering but of politics. So with every technological advance that promises to bring us more control over our lives, we as a species are facing ever greater risks and uncertainties. The question concerning technology has become the unpredictability and uncontrollability of its development itself. The key difficulty is a problem of a tension between community or national interests and species-wide interests. While there might be an ethical imperative on a species-wide level to exercise self-restraint in pursuing dangerous technologies such as nuclear weapons, gene manipulation, or coal-fired power plants, such self-restraint could very well lead to the decline or even annihilation of the group that exercises it. The path forward will not be revealed by new technological advances, which can easily create more problems than they solve, but through the development of new ethical, political, and affective frameworks by which people understand themselves and their connections to the rest of the world. This issue of Telos, devoted to Carl Schmitt and the critique of technical rationality, investigates the ways in which Schmitt’s critique moved him toward ways of considering law, politics, and human history as fundamentally uncertain movements, requiring strategies that accept such unpredictability even as we try to intervene in our historical development as a species.
A first task in this effort is to imagine ways of relating to the world that move away from the insistence on total control. Hugo E. Herrera discusses the opposition in Schmitt’s thinking between a technical rationality, which reduces individual cases to examples of a rule, and a juristic rationality, which focuses on each individual case as an anomaly. Because technical rationality seeks to dominate and manipulate nature in a way that creates total predictability, it cannot accept the exception as something that might upset the functioning of the rule. Against Jacques Derrida’s argument that Schmitt also seeks to limit the radicality of the exception, Herrera contends that Schmitt carefully constructs the juristic decision as an event that is not dictatorial but rather treats the exception as a unique and singular case that can have a substantive effect on the form of law itself.
Since Schmitt thereby rejects a scientific understanding of law, his political theory similarly proceeds from the premise that there are no unquestionable foundations. Jüri Lipping’s essay describes the ways in which both Ernesto Laclau and Schmitt engage in a kind of post-foundational political theory in which the key antagonisms are open to continual transformation. For both Laclau and Schmitt, every political order contains an aspect of difference within itself that threatens its unity. Consequently, Schmitt defines the relationship to the enemy as a self-bifurcation in which the enemy is intimately connected to the self, and Laclau recognizes that every society will contain antagonisms that threaten its unity. For Schmitt, the inherent instability of any order is a particular problem for a democracy, in which the people are nominally sovereign but the people themselves do not constitute a stable entity. Because they must be represented in order to take form and this process of representation is only a particular interpretation of what the people are, there is the constant possibility that the actual people might rise up against the representation. Political order is constantly open to redefinition through this process in which existing categories and institutions are placed into question by new representations of the people.
This primacy of representations in the construction of the identity of the people leads to Schmitt’s idea, elucidated by Harmon Siegel, that myth would be the essential “counter-concept” to technical rationality. Against the treatment of myth as mere illusion, Schmitt imagines that myth, embodied in works of art such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Melville’s Benito Cereno, establishes the broader structure of understanding within which truth can be distinguished from falsehood and the friend from the enemy. This process is hardly a predictable one, and Schmitt describes the way in which fiction becomes myth only when it includes an intrusion of reality that would turn illusoriness into something consequential. If this moment of reality in Hamlet includes the confessional religious conflicts surrounding James I’s ascension to the throne, Siegel argues that in Benito Cereno this reality is the conflict over slavery that provides the background for Melville’s text. In both cases, myth develops through the aesthetic mechanisms by which political and ethical conflicts are integrated into the structure of the fictional reality.
Qi Zheng brings these reflections on the representational character of the political to the issue of a universal human ethic when she considers Schmitt’s approach to international tribunes of law. On the one hand, Schmitt argues that because the sovereign state defines the enemy as someone who threatens the way of life that the state must protect, the individual must be willing to fight and die for the state. On the other hand, in order to deny that individuals could be prosecuted by international law for collaborating with an unjust state in war, Schmitt insists in 1945 that the individual must obey the state so long as the state protects the individual but that individuals would have the right to refuse to fight for the state if the state cannot protect them. Consequently, an international law that offers no protection to individual resisters against a state cannot have a claim against individuals who fail to resist. Zheng argues that this latter argument is in fact anomalous for Schmitt because he generally subordinates individual rights to the collective. His insistence on the protection of the individual in 1945 could be either a tactical shift that he makes in order to oppose the idea that international law might be used to prosecute former Nazis or part of a more strategic opposition to the idea of a world state. In either case, the way toward an international ethic and corresponding law would consist for Schmitt of the development of a species-wide sense in which individuals would feel themselves to be part of a collective, requiring new mythic forms of representation.
King-Ho Leung analyzes the subjective parameters of this process by describing the way in which both Charles Taylor and Giorgio Agamben criticize the modern scientific objectification of the individual subject. Taylor begins with the Aristotelian idea that the human is a language animal that can only exist in the world by speaking a language. Because of this embeddedness in language, the human is not a self-sufficient individual but always a participant in a received network of meaning given by language. The paradox of the modern, scientific subject is that it assumes that we can know the world by taking an objective stance that is devoid of a cultural background, even as this assumption forms the very cultural background that grounds its form of knowledge. While Taylor seeks to recover an understanding of humans as language animals that must interpret their own existence, Agamben’s critique of the objectification of humans seeks to overcome the distinction between humanity and animality by focusing on animality and treating language as an unnatural metaphysical imposition on this animality. As opposed to these two approaches to avoiding the treatment of humans as manipulated objects, Leung suggests that we might affirm the paradoxical nature of humans as both embodied and linguistic beings.
This paradoxical nature of the human leads to an understanding of the sovereign state as similarly split. Melayna Lamb and German E. Primera argue that Thomas Hobbes understands the state as existing within a profane and worldly realm of mechanical motion, but in which this worldly realm will one day be superseded by the second coming of Jesus Christ. By setting the Hobbesian state within the context of such a messianic redemption, they oppose Schmitt’s reading of this state as the katechon, that is, as the upholder of a worldly order that prevents a lawless chaos. Hobbes provides for them a view of the state that is an administrative order that only seeks to manage and control its citizens but in which there is an eschatological alternative to the state’s bureaucratic control. By retaining both a worldly and a messianic perspective, Hobbes retains a hope for a utopian transformation of the administrative state that Lamb and Primera claim is similar to Walter Benjamin’s idea of revolutionary transformation. But if they retain Hobbes’s view of the Leviathan state as a mechanical and bureaucratic apparatus, whose only theological aspect lies in a messianic future, does this conception already ignore the way that every state already has a mythic-theological underpinning?
The next essay by J. E. Elliott considers the university as an example of a corporate administrative bureaucracy in which dissent without a cultural basis ends up feeding back into the administrative structure. He investigates why humanities disciplines, in particular English studies, are dominated by an oppositional culture even though they exist within a university that has been totally integrated into a corporate-bureaucratic system. The humanities shifted from the mid-twentieth-century focus on high culture classics toward cultural studies, media studies, and minority and diaspora cultures in order to attract student-clients disaffected by the preprofessional orientation of STEM and business disciplines. Rather than overturning institutional structures, though, academic protest functions as a “Brand English” that competes with “Brand Science” and “Brand Business” in “channeling student interests, filling course rosters, and managing faculty labor.” If one of the main practical changes has been to promote remedial courses in order to integrate previously unserved populations into higher education, such a goal serves the corporate bureaucracy by creating a new set of student-clients. Rather than creating substantive change or establishing the basis for a common culture, the protest culture of the humanities has simply established its own niche in the corporate-bureaucratic ecosystem.
Andreas Pantazopoulos also poses the question of culture as opposed to administration in describing the way in which, after the end of dictatorship in 1974, the establishment of a statist political system in Greece organized around clientelism led to the rise of national populism by the 2000s. Once the Greek state had centralized the power to distribute services and provide monopolies, this state-centered clientelism undermined other sources of authority such as the family and the church. As a consequence, the national populist protests during the economic crisis became nihilistic, unable to establish an alternative vision of authority and directing popular resentment against the entire political class as well as foreign powers such as Germany, the United States, and globalization in general. The Greek national populist protests linked both left-wing and right-wing elements into a politics of victimization, humiliation, and resentment that promoted conspiracy theories about the collusion of ruling elites with international powers. As Pantazopoulos suggests, the underlying issue may not be the economic difficulties so much as a long-term crisis of national identity.
Affirming the human ability to intervene in history, Lachlan Ross defends Marx’s focus on the power of human labor against those Marxists who emphasize historical determinism. Ross sees Marx’s main insight as the idea that because humans and the world are the result of human labor, we can take control of history. By contrast, the dialectical materialist understanding of Marx turns humans into the “passive bearer of external and superior forces,” creating a determinism in which human action must follow the world spirit. A renewed approach to Marx would reject determinism to affirm the transformative power of human action.
Finally, André Fischer’s review of Vincent Blok describes how Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger conceptualized the changing relationship of humanity to nature. Jünger’s Gestalt and Heidegger’s Gestell are linked in their common approach to technology as no longer a simple tool but as a fateful structure that humans must face, offering important concepts for understanding our present predicament in relation to technology.
