Response

The papers here tarry at an open site of trauma, at the moment when, in Thomas Dumm's words, "belief in legitimacy vanishes and the latent force embedded in the system of institutions is released." Wendy Brown describes the temptations of this reason as a kind of relief or escape—where even Al Gore appears as a figure of desperate longing and attachment (my god, this is one of the people who participated in reinventing government as an economic enterprise and market player)—even as she demonstrates the way neoliberalism stands in as a specific form of rationality. Bill Connolly, perhaps in an effort to traumatize Habermasians and Deleuzians alike, or at least assist them in traversing the fantasy that their chosen discourse can masterfully fill all the gaps it encounters, works to deflect in advance the temptation of rationality by enacting a convergence of opposites. To this end, he identifies useful resonances between Habermas and Deleuze. And Dumm suggests a decision for undecideability, a decision that is not simply one that says "there is no way out," as Habermas does, but that acknowledges that one does not know what the way is and that choices of direction, no matter how well reasoned, will necessarily be stained by elements of irrationality and necessarily exceed what reason can provide. All three contributions, again in Dumm's words, emphasize that power's relation to truth isn't completely or fully mediated by rationality precisely because rationality is not singular, unified, whole, and complete, but multiple, differentiated, fragmentary, and tied to differing temporalities of obsolescence and becoming.

I focus my remarks on the "open site of trauma," but I have a preliminary question: if rationality becomes tempting as a solution or fantastic way out of a traumatic situation, might it not be useful to champion an alternative left rationality as a counter to neoliberalism and fundamentalist Christian dogmatism? That is, might it be possible to imagine a solidaristic and egalitarian rationality, however stained and imperfect and permeated by enjoyment, a left rationality that doesn't escape problems of power but acknowledges them?

Elsewhere, I've argued that Habermas's turn to communicative rationality as a way out of instrumental rationality fails under current conditions of globalized information and communications networks, conditions I theorize as communicative capitalism.ⁱ The idea of communicative capitalism highlights the way participation and the freedom to express oneself are essential to the economic success of neoliberalism—telecommunications networks are inseparable from production, consumption, political expression, and state surveillance. The more people participate—blog, email, register their opinions—the stronger the telecommunications infrastructure necessary for financial flows and markets and the greater the opportunities for surveillance. Under communicative capitalism, then, communication functions fetishistically as a disavowal of a more fundamental political disempowerment or castration.

If Freud is correct in saying a fetish not only covers over a trauma but in so doing helps one through a trauma, what might serve as the analogous socio-political trauma today? A likely answer can be found in the left's role in the collapse of the welfare state: its betrayal of fundamental commitments to social solidarity. I want to flag three aspects of left failure in order to mark some of the political aspects of the open site of trauma Dumm evokes: the left's abandonment of workers and the poor, its retreat from the state and repudiation of collective action, and its acceptance of the neoliberal economy as the "only game in town."

The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed a set of profound changes in the world economy, changes associated with declines in economic growth and increases in inflation and unemployment. Powerful figures in the corporate and finance sectors took this opportunity to dismantle the welfare state (by privatizing public holdings, cutting back on public services, and rewriting laws for the benefit of corporations). For the most part, the American left seemed relatively unaware of the ways business was acting as a class to consolidate political power—a fundamental component of which was the passage of a set of campaign finance laws establishing the rights of corporations to contribute unlimited amounts of money to political parties and...