Radical Future Pasts: Untimely Political Theory

Radical Future Pasts?

1 Radical Future Pasts? An Anti-introduction Romand Coles, Mark Reinhardt, and George Shulman Just when they appear to be engaged in the revolutionary transformation of themselves and their material surroundings, in the creation of something that does not yet exist, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they timidly conjure up the spirits of the past to help them; they borrow their names, battle slogans, and costumes so as to stage the new world historical scene in this venerable disguise and borrowed language. —Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it “the way it really was.” It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger. . . . Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is working to overpower it. —Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” Yet how is one to be untimely when our own time seems to be so many times at once? —Peter Euben, Platonic Noise “Political theory” names not a unified object or protagonist, but a practice of thinking and writing about politics that has been given different forms and purposes as practitioners redefine “theory,” “politics,” and “the political.” In introducing this book, we place a special emphasis on theory’s relationship to radical democratic struggle, broadly conceived—a relationship at least as old as Socrates’ and Plato’s critical interventions into Athenian politics and culture, and one in which contests over the shape of the future are 2 Romand Coles, Mark Reinhardt, and George Shulman inseparable from arguments about the past. By calling this volume “radical future pasts,” we are not claiming to foresee or predict “the” future. On the assumption that neither past nor future is dead in the sense of fixed and foreclosed, we view theorizing and politics as practices that could have been and can always be otherwise. We thus say “radical future pasts” to emphasize how practitioners of political theory can draw from a still open-ended past to conjure possibilities of living on terms different from those that “the” past and “our” present seem to dictate. We also say “radical” in the sense of questioning the conditions of possibility for how theory and politics are pursued now and of exploring their transformation. We would brush history against the grain, as Walter Benjamin says, to recover past possibilities and to question what is currently counted as inevitable (and as better) in views of theory, politics, and progress.1 The most fruitful way to argue about political theory now, we believe, is by coming to terms with the ways it has been shaped historically by cold war history, by political radicalism, and by years of culture war and neoliberalism . Our conception of the landscape of theorizing is situated through these three broad moments, which take almost a generational form, and (in ways that will seem especially obvious to those living elsewhere) it is also strongly influenced by our location in the United States and our membership in various American theoretical and political communities. In this introduction, we thus position political theory within what might be called the Long Sixties and the Long Recession that followed, periods that— exemplifying the contingencies, syncopations, and polyrhythms of political time—are partly overlapping. On the one hand, we can say in hindsight that the period of reaction typically associated with the rise of Reaganism began in the United States amid the iconic global rebellions and struggles of 1968, with the election of Richard Nixon. The Southern Strategy, the invocation of the Silent Majority, and the appeals to law and order all facilitated the breakdown of the New Deal coalition that had underwritten decades of American social democratic expansion. On the other hand, throughout the 1970s and up to Reagan’s election, 1960s radicalism had a vigorous afterlife marked by continuing insurgency and innovation. In that time between Nixon and Reagan, theorists and activists still imagined changing at once and in mutually reinforcing ways “the system” (as it was still called) and forms of everyday life or cultures. In foregrounding radical democratic struggle, our account of political theory’s future pasts begins with the emergence of postwar visions of systemic change, charts their transfiguration and (partial) Radical Future Pasts? 3 chastening, and concludes with reflections on some of the key avenues for and problematics of political thinking in the contemporary conjuncture. Those avenues and problematics also run through the...