Positive/Negative

I've had another flurry of comments and e-mails castigating the recent "negativity" of Amor Mundi. I find myself perplexed and exasperated as I always do when this happens.

I do critical theory. I criticize. What do people honestly expect of me?

Look, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We all know this. What must look like "negativity" from the perspective of such hellbound good intentions may well do the only measure of "positivity" available to us at an historical juncture, causing us to pause in our hellward tumble, causing us to interrogate after our real motives, causing us to question the extent of our knowledge, the soundness of our assumptions, the breadth of our survey of our options.

I like "positive" programmatic proposals as much as the next person and have offered up my share of them here on Amor Mundi, heaven knows, but I also know well the value of criticism and know that criticism is critical (in more ways than one).

I think it has to be mostly pampered and privileged people who would bridle at a confrontation with "negativity" in the world today, such as it. But, quite apart from that, it seems to me that those who would always only relentlessly "accentuate the positive" -- as the old song goes -- risk being forced by that commitment into an uncritical acceptance of the definitive terms of the status quo.

Radical futurists may boggle at the suggestion that they are accommodating rather than overturning convention when they go off on their marvelous arias about digital immortality, utility fog paradises, traversible wormholes, prostheticized superbodies, and so on. But just as ancient orders would legitimate their rule through their presumed connection to some more glorious past, modern orders would legitimate their rule through their presumed connection to some more glorious future our commitment and obedience will award us. Both gestures are ultimately as conservative as can be.

No progress that is more providential than collective in its organizing assumptions is a truly progressive progress: If one's vision of the future is imagined to express as well as to arrive through the machineries of the same corporate-militarist competitiveness and prioritization of parochial profit-taking as animates current incumbent interests, then this vision is retro-futural however many chromed curved surfaces it promises us. If incumbent interests are content to imagine their disproportionate powers intact after the arrival of some radical vision of the future, you can be sure that vision is not so radical as all that. Worse, if such incumbents are among those most eager to invest in and handwave into the airwaves about this vision, it is a safe bet that this vision is positively retro-futural, even if it is swarming with nanobots and ubiquitous computation.

The only way to be sure that one is always positive and never negative is to acquiesce to the terms of the status quo -- in its animating essentials rather than its distracting superficial details -- and acquiesce so absolutely that one neither threatens it nor even looks outside of it for insight, solace, or pleasure.

Now, here's the thing. All of this I have been saying is true enough as far as it goes, but it is also true that the roads to better futures will be no less paved with good intentions than are the roads to hells. Those who would influence the future to democratic and emancipatory ends will surely be the ones who will have inspired the imagination of the next generation -- and inspiration is much more the work of the hopeful than it is the scarred or the scared.

What seems important to me is to grasp that both of these platitudes are powerfully true, and that they are not easily reconciled (indeed, you haven't really grasped the paradox involved until you grasp its abiding difficulty). The too reflexive and too unreflective ascription of "negativity" to criticism seems to me too complacent and too anti-intellectual by far to conduce to the benefit of genuinely progressive ends.

One cannot know whether it will be the critical or the programmatic intervention that will be the more positive one, the one that will enlist the imagination and the work that enables or builds the next bit of road to a better place. What will count as the positive or the negative from the perspective of the better place we might get to will likely differ from what registers as "positive" or "negative" where we stand now.