an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 2, August 2005, ISSN
1552-5112
Review of:
Sanbonmatsu, John.
The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making
of a New Political Subject. Monthly
Review Press, 2004, 272 pp., $22.95 paper.
The question, after the last unmentionably depressing
election, is how the left can formulate a compelling unified vision that will
allow us to win the next big election.
Many of us thought the globalization movement would unite the left after
decades of fragmentation. In Seattle,
circa 1999, it sure felt like it would.
It didn’t. Maybe that was because
of 9/11, as some suppose, and maybe not.
A few people thought that the anti-war movement would unite the
left. Not only did it fail to do this,
it ended up alienating many people who progressives should consider
friends.
For the simple reason that the left is not unified
and thus cannot unify the rest of the country around its “values,” all
progressives must ask the question at the heart of John Sanbonmatsu’s The
Postmodern Prince: “Can the now-dispersed forces of emancipation, having
been forced by history to abandon the ‘skin’ of socialism and the
International, and the Party, discover or invent a new form?” Can the left come together so that we
might eventually run the world or are we forever doomed to small wins in
diverse movements that never add up?
The first half of the book charts the failures and
collusions of the left. Sanbonmatsu
demonstrates how the New Left’s (the leftists who came of age in the 1960’s and
were radicalized by social injustices, the civil rights movement, and the war
in Vietnam) valuation of expression over strategy (this is sometime called
‘expressivism’), critical theory, and collusions with capitalism dismantled the
Marxist’s dream of historical construction and brought us ever closer to Babel,
where we no longer have the ability to talk to each other. It is in this Babel that progressives now
live and must break free.
First, Sanbonmatsu shows how the New Left valued
expression over strategy. That is, it
was more important to express that you were on the right side of the argument
than to show how you were going to win that argument. Second, he shows how the critical theory
popularized in the 1960’s (think Derrida) led away from strategy by
marginalizing the subject and leaving her stranded as a “site of
discourse.” Third, the market
exacerbated these two trends.
Expressivism “left capitalism unbound by smashing bourgeois cultural
norms that had previously placed subjective limits on consumerism.” If a person expresses what he is and there is
no connection between what he is and his political actions then there is no
reason why the market can’t tell him what his political actions should be. When this is coupled with the rationalization
of the university, the effects on leftist strategy are truly devastating:
knowledge is aestheticized. Critical
theory books proliferate, each with an original style (aesthetic) but without
anything original to say. The use value
of knowledge is denigrated in favor of its exchange value. The market comes to rule all and rules only
through fragmentation of leftist political unity.
Sanbonmatsu’s critical project makes the reader
salivate for his positive project and in the second half of The Postmodern
Prince he delivers it. His basic
division is between Michel Foucault, “the archaeologist” and Antonio Gramsci,
“the Prince.” Gramsci is the leftist
Prince of strategy and hegemony, whereas Foucault is an archeologist searching
in discourses for differences. As a
result of Sanbonmatsu’s progressive agenda, he picks Gramsci as a model of how
we should move forward. The author is
careful to note the extent to which Gramsci’s theoretical structure could lead
to totalitarianism such as was seen in the former Soviet Union. To hedge these tendencies, Sanbonmatsu uses
the positive aspects of postmodernism and shows how Gramsci was aware of some
of these more negative possibilities.
But at the end of the book it is unclear if coming together in the name
of a cause really would just end up in a morass of totalitarian politics.
Gramsci formulated the ‘Modern Prince’ who was
supposed to formulate people’s political will and was in obvious response to
Machiavelli’s Prince. Oddly however,
instead of being one person, the Modern Prince was actually a collective, such
as a political party or a social movement.
Sanbonmatsu refreshes the notion of the Prince once more in his
formulation of the ‘Postmodern Prince,’ which he defines as “a unified movement
in which many diverse movements come together to form the nucleus of a new
civilizational order.” Basically, he has
added a diversity criterion to the Prince.
The author argues that the diverse movements of the
left must be meaningfully brought together because our opponents thrive on our
diversity. “In its coming-to-form as a
unified subject, the postmodern prince would illuminate the many-sided nature
of power and domination-capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and other distorting
institutions-and also prefigure the society just to come.” We must come together in the name of a “new
normality” with a new perspective and a new unity. This new unity would be dynamic, dialectic,
in constant motion, and would not be merely humanist.
Sanbonmatsu’s model for the Postmodern Prince is
Octavio Ocampo’s portrait of Cesar Chavez, which portrays Chavez as composed of
all the individuals in his labor movement.
For Sanbonmatsu, this portrait gathers the strands of his Postmodern
Prince. First, the unity of the
Postmodern Prince is based upon the experience of the individuals involved like
the workers’ experiences in the struggle culture of the United Farm
Workers. Second, the portrait represents
“unity in diversity only within a single
movement” that we might extend metonymically “to stand in as a figure for the
unity of multiple movements in a
common utopian project.” That is to say,
there can be no Postmodern Prince absent (1) the experiences of the people
gathered by it and (2) a common and perhaps utopian vision of the future. The differences within the unified movement
cause the Postmodern Prince to move with empathy toward an ethic where no
oppression is privileged. When (and if)
this occurred all subjugations would be seen as interlocking power struggles,
which must be battled not with the mere spectacle of a protest, but with a
full-on perceptual change both of participants and the world at large. The difference between the Postmodern Prince
and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s conception of the “multitude” is that for
Hardt and Negri our differences come before our ability to act in common. The multitude is thus an inversion of the
Postmodern Prince, an inversion that Sanbonmatsu believes has the effect of
undermining the formation of our political will as it focuses its energy not on
political goals but on differences of identity and culture. In the end, it's not really clear how the
Postmodern Prince is supposed to arise, but perhaps that is where there is new
work to be done.
an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 2, August 2005, ISSN
1552-5112