Previous Residents: 2005

Jan Verwoert

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In Defense of Scepticism
By Jan Verwoert

The sphere of the political is constituted through the act of designating the difference between friends and foes. This is how Carl Schmitt put it.[i] And it might very well be that simple. The talk of the day exposes the logic of the political as binary and brute. “Who is not for us is against us” President Bush stated at the outset of his bellicose campaign. By confronting the nations with a simple choice he effectively divided the world into allies and enemies. So the potential of power manifests itself in its capacity to politicize. A true world power asserts its status through allocating the difference between friends and foes on a global scale. Bush politicized the planet. There is no outside to the sphere of the political thus demarcated. But if this is so, how can you then talk back to power without playing according to its rules? It might not be possible at all. The uncanny feeling you get from watching Michael Moore’s audiovisual pamphlet Fahrenheit 9/11, for instance, is that the film plays back the same tune Bush stroke up, only with inverted content. The logic is identical: choose your ally, name and shame the enemy. There may be no alternative to this formula. One must answer rudeness with rudeness. To demand an alternative choice would not only be hypocritical but ignorant of the principles that govern the political sphere.

Once you acknowledge however, that the act of politicizing is the gesture through which power asserts itself, you can no longer deny the violence implied in the act of forcing a choice upon people that they cannot refuse. The pressure the political imposes on the social manifests itself in the urgency of the question: friend or foe? There never is time to reflect that choice. Power demands an answer right away. Hesitation equals outright opposition. You cannot remain undecided. To reject the power play of the imposed choice as such is to assume the position of the sceptic. Giorgio Agamben points out that the essence of antique scepticist philosophy is the refusal to accept any choice unconditionally.[ii] The sceptic seeks to suspend the binary logic of exclusive options by revealing that one option is no more true than the other. The friend is no more a friend than the foe is a foe. And that the one “who is not for us” is not necessarily the one “who is against us”. This way the sceptic tries to step back from the choice, play for time and thus sabotage the mechanism by which power is enforced.

The character Deleuze and Agamben choose as the modern saint of scepticism is Melville’s Bartleby.[iii] In the story Bartleby, an inconspicuous clerk, is hired as a scrivener by a solicitor. One day, he declines the request to check copies of contracts with the words I would prefer not to. Eventually he stops work altogether but never leaves the office. Confronted with the choice to either resume work or remove himself, Bartleby replies he would prefer not to do either and stays, doing nothing. Deleuze points out that Bartelby does not simply object to his assignments, since his reply is no outright no. Instead, he refrains from choosing any of the choices he is presented with. He opts out of the given set of options. According to Deleuze this strategic withdrawal short-circuits the logic of power to impose choices. Bartleby’s refractory behaviour effectively puts his superior at his mercy. As Bartleby cannot be moved, the lawyer, completely at a loss, moves the office instead. He confesses: “There was something about Bartleby that not only strangely disarmed me, but, in a wonderful manner, touched and disconcerted me.”[iv] In a sense these words perfectly sum up what the sceptic – or art and intellectual discourse putting the tactics of scepticism to work – can do in the face of power: disarm, touch and disconcert. And to disarm the explosive charge of a power-politics hell-bent on waging global war is certainly not nothing.

But does this credo to the subversive potential of scepticism not amount to nothing more than wishful thinking? After all, Bartleby’s story ends sadly. When the new proprietors of the office find him on their premises they have him removed by force. He then starves himself to death in jail and fades away, curled up like a foetus. In this state of final regression he epitomizes the utter impotence of the individual in the face of power enforced by violence. This is precisely the point at which Agamben enters into Deleuze’s discourse on Bartleby. His aim is to explore the potential of impotence[v] by going back to Aristotle. In his Metaphysics Aristotle refutes the assumption that true potential is realized in the moment of action. He argues that the man of action, who can only act, is doomed to act. His impotence lies in his incapacity to remain inactive. Conversely, true potential manifests itself in the one who could, but at present prefers not to act. Think of a piano-player who doesn’t play. Only in the moment of suspended action does potentiality show itself in pure form. But what does it mean to take this impassive stance in the face of power? Are we talking about the Dumchampian position of the artist in exile who asserts his right to remain silent? Is this not the attitude Melville’s narrator, in relation to Bartleby’s conduct, calls a “cadaverously gentlemanly nonchalance”?[vi]

In his defense of the political potential of impotence Agamben turns towards Walter Benjamin’s theory of redemption. The question here is how justice can be brought to the victims of oppression. The disempowered are understood as those who are deprived of their future (the chance to have lived like they would have wanted to live) by the actual political reality and course of history. To do justice to them thus means to revise actuality and point towards its unfulfilled potentials: to show life not like it is and was, but like it could and should have been (for them). Following Agamben’s previous argument, this insight into pure potentiality, however, can only be gained from the position of suspended action assumed by the sceptic. Only the distanced observer sees how reality could be different. And this point of view is not the position of power. The strong claim Agamben makes is that only the powerless can redeem the disempowered. Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’ takes the place of Bartleby: In response to the painting Angelus Novus by Paul Klee, Benjamin portrayed the harbinger of redemption as an angel who is helplessly blown away by the storm of historical progress, but turns his head back towards the catastrophes of the past to mourn them.[vii] To the political pragmatist this picture may seem melodramatic. Yet, if you perceive the work of power as the enforcement of a regime of choices that precludes all alternatives, allegories of radical potentiality become a vital source for critical thinking.