Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics

Chapter 1
UNTIMELINESS AND PUNCTUALITY: CRITICAL THEORY IN DARK TIMES
Criticism is not an "homage" to the truth of the past or to the truth of "others"--it is a construction of the intelligibility of our own time.
--ROLAND BARTHES, "What Is Criticism?"
THIS ESSAY reflects on timeliness and untimeliness in critical political theory. It works outside the intellectual circuits through Twhich both problems are conventionally routed--those offered by Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School--in order to feature aspects of the relationship between political time and critique overshadowed by these traditions of thought. Foucault once defined critique as "the art of not being governed quite so much,"1 and these reflections might be taken in the spirit of a refusal to be governed quite so much by critical theory's traditional intellectual signposts. They accord, too, with Benjamin's counsel to "wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it," a wresting Benjamin thought could be enabled through igniting images of the past different from those the present routinely paints for or as itself.2
We begin with three tales from contemporary political life, each of which poses a conundrum for the time of critique.
1. The "Geneva Accords," an unofficial framework for a peace settlement between Palestinians and Israeli Jews, were signed amid much fanfare by selected Palestinian and Israeli representatives in December 2003. Designed to model what "the people" wanted and could agree on (as opposed to what intransigent official leadership would do) and to represent a replacement of earlier negotiation processes, including the Oslo Accords, the Geneva Accords mapped in considerable detail a contemporary two-state solution to the enduring, bloody conflict in the Middle East.
Both committed Zionists and Palestinian militants rejected the Geneva Accords as selling out their interests. Ariel Sharon condemned the document out of hand, and even Labor Party Prime Minister Ehud Barak heaped scorn on it. Most Palestinian organizations also rejected it. In addition, many progressives committed to a just peace in the Middle East viewed the accords as representing compromises of Palestinian aspirations and entitlements too great to swallow: they largely gave up the Palestinian right of return (leaving the matter for Israel alone to determine), left intact a number of Jewish settlements (including those around East Jerusalem), and more generally represented significant Israeli incursions into Palestinian territory. In addition, for many committed democrats, the time of the two-state solution, if it had ever existed, had passed, for practical as well as principled reasons. Such critics argued that the aspiration for democracy and peace in the Middle East required a reckoning with the antidemocratic heart of a Zionist state that is also a colonial one, and insisted on the importance of formulating a binational state that would harbor Palestinians and Jews on a one-person, one-vote basis.
Critics in this last group were themselves harshly condemned by supporters of the Geneva Accords. In essence the condemnation ran: "You are holding out for utopia while we are modeling real-world solutions. If you truly care about peace in the Middle East, then you must support the accords. If you do not support them, you care more about your abstract ideals than about politics."
2. Once John Kerry emerged as the clear nominee of the Democratic Party for the 2004 presidential elections, Ralph Nader threw his hat into the ring. While delighting Republicans, Nader's move infuriated most liberals and leftists, including many who had voted for Nader in 2000. "Anybody but Bush" was the cry of the day, which meant that every voter had to line up behind the emerging Democratic Party nominee, whatever one's misgivings about him. Nader was a selfish spoiler, fit for nothing more than denunciation.
A few small voices, however, suggested that Nader was doing what he has always done: namely, working publicly to remind America that obscenely gerrymandered political districts and two corporately financed political parties do not a democracy make.3 What was the harm of this reminder when Nader knows full well that we all--perhaps even Nader himself--would vote for Kerry in November? And if not during election season, when else could this point be made as powerfully and vividly? What if Nader's candidacy were to make Kerry even slightly more accountable to the citizenry and less beholden to corporate interests? Above all, what if Nader's candidacy, based largely on a critique of the corrupt and antidemocratic aspects of the existing electoral and party system, became a way to infiltrate the media lockout of such critique?