Chapter 3: Reconstructing Critical Theory

The chasm between traditional critical theory and its anti-foundational challenges cannot be resolved, it must be overcome. And it can be overcome, I propose, through what I would call “counter-critical theory.”

The notion of counter-critical theory is not anti-critical theory, but a form of contemporary critical thought that goes beyond traditional critical theory. It operates what I call a counter-move that rests on the importance of thinking in terms of “counter” rather than “anti”. The conceptual particle “counter” in “counter-critical theory” indexes the opposition to the foundationalism and positivism of early critical theory, and simultaneously overcomes the opposition from which it is born, in order to generate a fully autonomous critical approach. It overcomes the opposition, not in the Kantian or Hegelian sense of a synthesis that resolves the opposition between thesis and antithesis (not least because the conceptual particle “counter” functions very differently than the particle “anti”), but rather as a form of contestation that becomes so potent as to liberate itself from the oppositional relationship entirely and to transform itself into a free-standing idea, principle, or even method. Counter-critical theory becomes something greater than just a constant resistance to traditional critical foundationalism; it turns into something independent, overcoming its mere oppositional character. It becomes self-sufficient—no longer dependent on its relationship to earlier critical theory.

Counter-critical theory becomes autonomous, in this way, when it becomes a pure theory of illusions—a pure theory of relations of power in flux such that every critical unmasking forces us to reexamine the resulting redistribution of power relations. At that point, it can continue to index, but need not concern itself with or argue against the foundations. At that point, the original anti-foundationalist insight no longer needs to refer back to the object challenged. At that point, counter-critical theory develops fully into its own independent form of thinking. This is an ambitious project perhaps, but realizable, I believe.

I.

“It is necessary to institute a counter-city or a counterpower in the face of legitimate power that has become the mere property of those who exercise it or the expression of governmental or administrative routine.”⁶⁸

— Étienne Balibar, “Resistance, Insurrection, Insubordination,” in Equaliberty: Political Essays (2013)

A similar conceptual movement at times runs through Etienne Balibar’s writings, as evidenced in this epigraph, and in Foucault’s writings and method as well. A good illustration is from Foucault’s inaugural lesson to the 1981 Louvain lectures on Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice. At the close of that inaugural lesson, Foucault offers, as the overarching framework of his intervention, the notion of a counter-positivism which, he explains, “is not the opposite of positivism, but rather its counterpoint.”⁶⁹ The full passage is as follows:

We often speak of the recent domination of science or of the technical uniformity of the modern world. Let’s say that this is the question of “positivism” in the Comtian sense, or perhaps it would be better to associate the name of Saint-Simon to this theme. In order to situate my analysis, I would like to evoke here a counter-positivism that is not the opposite of positivism but rather its counterpoint. It would be characterized by astonishment before the very ancient multiplication and proliferation of truth-telling, and the dispersal of regimes of veridiction in societies such as ours.⁷⁰

This notion of a “counter-positivism” provides the key to the Louvain lectures. The notion conveys more than merely an opposition to positivism, since Foucault is admitting that he is embracing something akin to a positivistic view of a history of shifting truth-telling forms. There is, in fact, a history in the lectures—or a genealogy. Foucault traces a series of truth-telling forms. This is a history of regimes of truth—more specifically, of regimes of veridiction and of speaking truth, which fit neatly into the broader arc of his research and lectures at the Collège de France.

In effect, Foucault’s method, at Louvain and at the Collège, is not anti-positivist, but instead a “counterpoint,” deploying positivistic sensibilities against narrow positivism. And the central point is that Foucault’s counter-positivist method culminates in a philosophical intervention that is independent of both positivism and of anti-positivism, that does not depend on either, and that no longer merely responds to the opposition—but becomes its own autonomous method: a pure philosophical method, a way of seeing the world. In fact, it is perhaps the most important compass to decipher the Louvain lectures—which is why, incidentally, the passage ended up on the quatrième de couverture, where it remains in the French edition as the most significant words of those lectures. It is the point of perfection.

In a similar way, we can imagine a counter-critical theory—distinct from this counter-positivism—that is not anti-critical, but instead overcomes the foundationalism of critical theory. It indexes traditional critical theory insofar as it holds on to its core insight. At its core, critical theory has always been a theory of illusions: the world we find ourselves in, rife with inequalities, injustice, and prejudice, is made tolerable by means of a series of illusions—the myths of individual responsibility and merit, the illusions of liberalism and free markets, the fantasy of upward social mobility, and so on. These fantasies are what make our unequal world tolerable to too many of us. And they are what critical theory unmasks, unveils, reveals. But not to give way to a truth underlying those illusions. Not to reveal real interests, or genuine class interests. The illusions instead give way to another set of ambitions that eventually we will need to unmask again. In this sense, counter-critical thought becomes a pure theory of illusions.

II.

“The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality—counter moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical. He plays his little game—so do you propagandists. But I don’t play…”

— The Professor in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907).

The idea of counter-critique is precisely to get beyond the ordinary play of “countermoves in the same game,” in the Professor’s words. Of overcoming the opposition from which it is born and generate a fully autonomous conceptual form. Again, not in the Kantian or Hegelian sense (not the least of which, because the particle “contre-” functions differently than the particle “anti-”), but rather as an original counterpoint that itself becomes so powerful as to liberate itself from the oppositional relationship and transform itself into a free-standing concept, intervention, or even mode of governmentality.

Such a counter-critique would have to become greater than simply resistance to the foundationalism of critical theory. In order for it to achieve its full potential, it would need to liberate itself from its originary opposition and transform itself into an autonomous, self-referential, fully articulated form of critique. This alone could guarantee that the “contre-” move would develop into its own independent mode of critical theory.

A model for this can be found in Joseph Conrad’s novel, The Secret Agent. The character of the Professor in that novel had strapped on him, at all times, a flask of explosives and carried a small detonator in his hand—ready to blow himself and everyone around him to bits. By means of these devices, he claimed to have gotten past the conventional opposition between revolutionaries and the police. He claimed to have overcome the mere “game” of moves and countermoves, and reached a higher—and more threatening—stage. He claimed to have transformed his reactivity into a pure force. Into perfection.

You will recall that it was the figure of the Professor, more so than Conrad’s other characters, who inspired later anarchists and some terrorists, prominently among them the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. Conrad, who always labeled his characters for us, referred to the Professor as “the perfect anarchist.”⁷¹ And what exactly, you may ask, was the ambition of this “perfect anarchist”? “What is it you are after yourself?” his comrade Ossipon asked him with indignation. “’A perfect detonator,” Conrad writes, in a response he describes as “the peremptory answer.”⁷²

One can infer from Conrad’s novel that the Professor himself had begun as an anarchist caught in the counter-moves that he himself disparaged—caught in the play, in the game, in the parry. One can assume that the Professor was originally part of that dance, or that judo of countermoves. But the implication is clear: The Professor had gone beyond the mere tit-for-tat and had achieved instead a more perfect form of anarchism. What made this the most perfect or peremptory anarchist state was precisely getting beyond the contre- move to another level—a level that was autonomous of the opposition itself, and in that way, absolute. It was a pure state, independent from the back and forth between the revolutionaries and the police.

Because of the explosives he strapped on himself at all times, the Professor remarked, “They know… I shall never be arrested. The game isn’t good enough for any policeman of them all. To deal with a man like me you require sheer, naked, inglorious heroism.”⁷³ The Professor may have sounded almost delirious, and self-aggrandizing for sure, but the Professor had achieved something unique: He had gotten beyond the ordinary relation of opposition.

The Professor ultimately has the last scene of The Secret Agent. After the counter-intelligence and counter-espionage is all over—after Winnie Verloc’s story has reached, in Conrad’s words, “its anarchistic end of utter desolation, madness, and despair,”⁷⁴ after her brother’s accidental explosion at Greenwich Station, her own murder of her husband, and her suicide—it is the Professor who closes the book, “the incorruptible Professor” as Conrad adds. Conrad closes:

“He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable—and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street of full men.”⁷⁵

The Professor had become sheer force, ruin and destruction. He had overcome his opposition to the system to become something as deadly as the pest. He had achieved the full effect of the contre- move. Not a very attractive overcoming here, but we do not always have total control over the consequences of our conceptual moves.

In a parallel way, Foucault’s counter-positivism in the Louvain lectures becomes a full-fledged method, fully detached from any dispute with positivism.

The contre- move—by which I mean, to be clear, the movement of thought and practice, the action that is captured by adding the prefix contre- or counter- to another concept—is itself a conceptual factory. Its generative power is remarkable. It is not so much a concept itself, but instead the creator, the producer of concepts. The contre- move produces rich, constructed mental representations. It practically defines the distinction between concept and notion: nothing here is intuitive and immediate, as are notions; on the contrary, the contre- move is complex, constructed, and stabilized over time. It is intellectual work product. It is the infrastructure to myriad new concepts. In fact, if one looks in the Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, the entry for “counter” becomes a litany, a catalogue, an enumeration of counter-concepts: “Counter-address; counter-advise; counter-affirm; counter-ambush; counter-avouch; counter-beat; counter-bid; counter-bore,”⁷⁶ and I am still only at the beginning of the B’s. Each term with its own early etymological use and history.

Foucault made use of the contre- move extensively—in fact, one could argue that it was one of his most productive devices, a veritable conceptual-production technique. Nietzsche did too, referring for instance to “art” as the “countermovement” against nihilism; and Nietzsche coincidentally adds, in Twilight of the Idols, that “in art, man takes delight in himself as perfection.”⁷⁷

In conversation with Étienne Balibar, during his seminar on Foucault at Columbia University in the Fall of 2015, we began to identify and catalogue the occurrences of the contre- move in Foucault’s work: the concept of “contre-pouvoir” in his debate with Maoists^78; the concept of “counter-history” in “Society Must Be Defended”^79; the concept of “counter-conduct” in Security, Territory, Population, or in the same lectures, the concepts of “counter-society”: “[I]n some of these communities there was a counter-society aspect, a carnival aspect, overturning social relations and hierarchy”⁸⁰; or the concept of “counter-justice” again in his debate with Maoists,⁸¹ of the “counter-weight” to governmentality in the Birth of Biopolitics,⁸² of the idea of psychoanalysis as a “counter-science” in The Order of Things^.83 Throughout his writings, his lectures, his interviews, Foucault constantly returned to the prefix contre- to create concepts, to fashion new and autonomous ideas.

It is of central importance in reading and understanding Étienne Balibar’s writings as well. There are, in his Equaliberty essays and many other brilliant writings, multiple deployments of the contre- move: Balibar speaks of “counter-racism,”⁸⁴ and of counter-populism—as Michel Fehrer discusses in his public concepts entry; there is the “counter-city” and the “counterpower.”⁸⁵ Then, there is also this important contre- move, which may fall on the darker side of the ledger:

The crisis of the national-social state correlative to globalization and the re-proletarianization that constitutes both its result and one of its objects from the side of the dominant classes (of financial capitalism) gives rise to a whole series of national or international political initiatives that relate to what could be called a preventative counterrevolution, even more than neoimperialism.⁸⁶

There is also the contre- move that counters the counter-revolution with a “counter-counterrevolution,” setting things somewhat more straight for the resisters and the disobedients:

The whole question is whether a policy of this kind, more or less deliberate but perfectly observable in its effects, which combines financial, military, and humanitarian aspects and which I believe can be characterized as preventive counterrevolution, elicits a revolutionary response, or, if you like, a counter-counterrevolution, according to the schema of “going to extremes” that was largely shared among Marxist and Leninist representations of the socialist transition after the experience of the insurrections of the nineteenth century.⁸⁷

In his culminating seminar in the Fall of 2015, Étienne Balibar proposed that Foucault had developed a “counter-politics”—in contrast to “le politique,” the a-political, or even the un-political. Following that, at a conference at the University of Paris—Créteil on “Assujetissement et subjectivation” on June 1, 2016, Balibar developed his contre- move further, suggesting that the central element of truth-telling in Foucault’s work—of parrhesia, of veridiction and all its associated forms of diction—is a form of “contre-diction” and “contre-conduite,” effectively placing the element of the contre- move at the very center of Foucault’s thought. Balibar pointed us in particular to the quatrième de page of both Volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality, which reproduce the following quote by René Char:

« L’histoire des hommes est la longue succession des synonymes d’un même vocable. Y contredire est un devoir. »

To contre-dict is a duty: for Balibar, this notion of parrhesiastic contradiction has within it the seeds of a counter-democratic principle, not in Pierre Rosanvallon’s sense, but as was exercised by certain parrhesiasts such as Socrates or Diogenes. This reflects an element of the counter-majoritarian in Foucault’s work. And by means of the contre- move, Foucault’s intervention and turn to parrhesia becomes an autonomous, independent theory based on a “contradiction” that is indexed but that we barely see.

In an essay titled “In praise of counter-conduct,” Arnold Davidson underscores how so many of the forms of resistance that we admire in Foucault’s writings take us back to the concept of “counter-conduct”:

In a series of remarkable formulas concerning freedom, Foucault speaks of the ‘insubordination of freedom’, the ‘rebelliousness of the will and the intransitivity of freedom’, the ‘art of voluntary inservitude’ and of ‘deliberative indocility’ (Foucault, 2001b: 1056; 1990: 39). All of these phrases belong to the semantic field of counter-conduct and make evident the double ethical and political scope of this counter-conduct.⁸⁸

One can hear, in Davidson’s essay, a kind of admiration for the concept of counter-conduct. But it is important to emphasize that the contre- move is not always or necessarily progressive. As with concepts such as solidarity⁸⁹ or internal frontiers,⁹⁰ there is an equivocal nature to counter-concepts. They too can go a bit all over the place—and be deployed against the interests of a progressive agenda. This is reflected in what Robespierre referred to as the “counter-revolutionary;”⁹¹ or, depending on your political interpretation, what Pierre Rosanvallon referred to as “Counter-Democracy.” I am here again in Balibar’s Equaliberty – or rather, in his footnotes – always inescapably in Balibar’s work.

Many of us bear an almost romantic attachment to the counter- practice itself. It feels so intimately linked to notions of disobedience, resistance, and countering power. But it is important not to get carried away.

III.

Let me set forth as systematically as possible this notion of counter-critique. There is a particularity to the contre- move that distinguishes it from other political devices or mechanisms. It does not function like a dialectic. It is not an opposition that leads to a synthesis, but instead to a stage of “perfection,” in Conrad’s terms, that (1) merely indexes its former counter-partner, and (2) becomes a fully independent concept, all to itself, that does not incorporate its opposition and is no longer a reaction against anything. This is very different than the way that concepts generally work. It is markedly different, for instance, from the Nietzschean idea that concepts are the cumulative effect of dead metaphors; or that only when its history is forgotten can something become a concept.

It may be useful, then, to delineate three dimensions of the contre- move.

The first dimension distinguishes it from the more classic or simple opposition associated with the prefix “anti-”. Adding the prefix anti- serves only to defeat or eradicate its object, directly. For instance, anti-terrorism aims to eliminate terrorism by stamping it out, in contrast to counter-terrorism that uses the logic and strategies of terrorism to undermine it. The contre- move is more internal: it engages in a play, a movement, a dance with its object, using the force of the object against itself, in order to get beyond that game. It uses the energy of the object, and the internal logic of the object, to defeat it. It starts in a game with the object—as in chess, or fencing, or martial arts—but then transcends it.

There is, in this sense, some proximity between the contre- move and the term “against”—as in Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method, or in my book Against Prediction (2007). “Against” is closer to counter- than to anti- insofar as it attempts to develop a new method in the oppositional work rather than simply defeat its object.

In any event, the contre- move is different than the anti- move.⁹² Returning to the example of security, specifically of counter-insurgency: Counterinsurgency uses the internal logic of Maoist insurgency to defeat the insurrection. It adopts and accepts the logic, in fact it fully embraces the logic; but it tries to do it better, to reappropriate it, to redeploy it even more aggressively. It does not rest on the idea that there would be two opposing views that are contrary to each other in a dialectical confrontation. Instead, it burrows into the logic and deploys it against its opponent.

The contre- move differs as well from the Socratic dialectic (the testing of an opposing view), the Kantian model of dialectics (thesis-antithesis-synthesis), and the Hegelian method (abstract-negative-concrete). It differs, in its very foundation, from an Adornian negative dialectics. It differs as well from Marx’s dialectical materialism—which rests on a notion of direct opposition, as expressed in his Capital:

My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e. the process of thinking, which, under the name of 'the Idea', he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of 'the Idea'. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.⁹³

To be sure, there is of course a family resemblance between all these forms of opposition. Foucault was keenly aware of this and in fact suggested as much in an interview discussing what he called “countereffects,” where he added: “I dare not use the word dialectics—but this comes rather close to it.”⁹⁴ The contre- move “comes rather close” to a dialectic, but is not the same thing. It also comes close to the anti- move, but again differs. One can hear that as well in Foucault’s writing, with passages for instance in Security, Territory, Population that read as follows: “the first element of anti-pastoral or pastoral counter-conduct is asceticism.”⁹⁵ Here and elsewhere, Foucault is struggling to pin down the conceptual move, using the term “anti-pastoral struggles” interchangeably with “pastoral counter-conducts,” but trying to correct and replace the first with the second.⁹⁶

A second dimension concerns the internal logic of the contre- move. It is almost an imminent form of critique: The object that is being opposed is taken as such, it already exists fully, and the contre- move effectively goes into the object to oppose it. Notice how the Oxford English Dictionary defines the term: “Done, directed, or acting against, in opposition to, as a rejoinder or reply to another thing of the same kind already made or in existence.”⁹⁷

Arnold Davidson points directly to this notion of immanence in his essay “In praise of counter-conduct,” where Davidson writes that, as in the interiority of the relationship between points of resistance and relations of power:

In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault also emphasizes the nonexteriority, the immanent relation, of conduct and counter-conduct. The fundamental elements of the counter-conduct analysed by Foucault are not absolutely external to the conduct imposed by Christian pastoral power. Conduct and counter-conduct share a series of elements that can be utilized and reutilized, reimplanted, reinserted, taken up in the direction of reinforcing a certain mode of conduct or of creating and recreating a type of counter-conduct”⁹⁸

There is, Davidson explains, a “tactical immanence” of counter-conduct to conduct. Counter conduct is not “simply a passive underside, a merely negative or reactive phenomenon, a kind of disappointing after-effect.”⁹⁹ In the words of Foucault, counter-conducts are not “les phénomènes en creux.”¹⁰⁰ There is a “productivity of counter-conduct which goes beyond the purely negative act of disobedience.”¹⁰¹ It is in this sense that, for Davidson, “the notion of counter-conduct adds an explicitly ethical component to the notion of resistance.”¹⁰² As a methodological matter, the “counter-” element of “counter-conduct” works in a similar way as “resistance” to power: as something internal, that does not reach beyond, that is not a gap or absence. Foucault talks about counter-conduct that is “used against and to short-circuit, as it were, the pastorate.”¹⁰³ Notice the use of the term “against” and the idea of short-circuiting. The short-circuit is tied to the internal dimension of the contre- move. It uses the circuit, the flow of electricity against itself. Davidson comes back to this in regard to homosexuality:

Foucault describes these relations with the same expression, court-circuit, that he had used to describe religious counter-conduct: ‘these relations create a short-circuit, and introduce love where there should be law, rule, habit.’¹⁰⁴

A third dimension, and perhaps most important, is the ultimate emancipation of the contre- move, which goes beyond its oppositional object, is liberated from it, becomes autonomous. At that point, it is no longer “counter-.” It is more like the Professor in Conrad’s The Secret Agent: outside the game, outside the dance, beyond the counter-moves in the same game. But it always indexes the original opposing object. The Professor is perhaps the “perfect anarchist,” but he is still an anarchist.

When the counter- move works, it gives rise to something that is neither the opposite, nor even the dance partner, but instead is perfectly autonomous and self-sufficient—a concept that functions all on its own. Counter-conduct is no longer conduct that resists something, but conduct that has become its own form, a pure form of force, or disobedience, or of resistance.

IV.

Let me offer a more tangible or concrete illustration: the example of jujutsu, a form of judo. (I must emphasize up front that I am not an enthusiast of martial arts; but I do believe the illustration is instructive here). As I see it, jujutsu is the perfect illustration of the contre- move.

“Ju” stands for pliable or yielding to another. “Jutsu” means techne or art. Together, the term signifies the art of yielding to the other’s force. “The word jujutsu may be translated freely as ‘the art of gaining victory by yielding or pliancy.’”¹⁰⁵

The central idea of jujutsu is to use someone’s own force against them. Rather than confront the other with one’s force, the idea is to turn the force of the opponent into your own weapon and use it against them. In other words, to turn one’s opponent’s energy against them, rather than trying to oppose that energy directly. In an article from 1887, “Jujutsu and the origins of Judo,” the authors explain: “its main principle being not to match strength with strength, but to gain victory by yielding to strength.” And the first principle of the art: “Not to resist an opponent, but to gain victory by pliancy.”¹⁰⁶

I would identify this as that first moment of the contre- move: to parry, to block, to ward off by a corresponding move. But what I would suggest is that, forms of jujutsu as judo transcend that parry. The philosophy of jujutsu is that of the counter-move: to use the force of the attack and transform it into something else, something that is neither an attack nor a block.

When the counter-move can exist on its own, without responding to its counter, always perhaps indexing it, but fully unmoored, detached, independent, above its counter, doing what it does without responding to its counter, countering without reference to its counter—that, I take it, is the final productive moment of contre.

V.

The darkest illustration of the contre- move—one that, paradoxically, demonstrates well its fullest potential—lies right before our own eyes: the American Counterrevolution. As I demonstrate in my book, The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens (2018), a new form of governmentality characterized by counterinsurgency strategies has come to dominate our government. Developed as a counter-move to insurgencies that drew extensively on Maoist theories of insurrection, this new form of governmentality has liberated itself from its oppositional object and become a form of governing despite the absence of any domestic insurgency. It has become an autonomous form of government.¹⁰⁷

Since 9/11, the United States has undergone a dramatic transformation in the way it carries itself abroad and governs itself at home. Long in the making—at least since the colonial wars abroad and the domestic turmoil of the 1960s—this historic transformation has come about in three waves. First, militarily: in Vietnam and now in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. military strategy shifted importantly from a conventional model of large-scale battlefield warfare to unconventional forms of counterinsurgency warfare. Second, in foreign affairs: as the counterinsurgency paradigm took hold militarily, U.S. foreign policy began to mirror the core principles of unconventional warfare—total information awareness, targeted eradication of the radical minority, and psychological pacification of the masses. Third, at home: with the increased militarization of police forces, irrational fear of Muslims, and over-enforcement of anti-terrorism laws, the United States has begun to domesticate the counterinsurgency and to apply it to its own population.

The result has been radical: the emergence of a domestic counterinsurgency model of government, imposed on American soil, in the absence of any domestic insurgency. The counterinsurgency has liberated itself from its oppositional object to become a new and radical form of government. It is a counter-insurgency without an insurgency, an autonomous form of unconventional warfare unmoored from reality.

This illustrates perfectly the contre- move: born in an opposition, it soon exceeds it. Neither inherently good nor bad, it can take us in multiple directions. It is not thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis. It is not anti-. There is no inherent necessity to these logical steps. Not with counter also. Counter can fail. But when it succeeds, it tends to be a powerful device, born of contestation. It has worked powerfully on the other side. It is time to reappropriate it.