Etienne Balibar: Politics and the Other Scene.

Etienne Balibar Politics and the Other Scene Verso, 2002, 160 pp. ISBN 1-859-84267-4 (pbk) 15 [pounds sterling] ISBN 1-859-84725-0 (hbk) 40 [pounds sterling]

This book is a collection of Balibar's recent essays. Although they range across a number of issues, they are united by a focus on the themes of universalism and difference, politics and identity. Some of the ideas are expressed through issues like European identity, nationalism and ethnicity. However, I will concentrate mainly on Balibar's preface and on the first essay 'Three concepts of politics', which set out some of the theoretical parameters.

The 'other scene' of politics could mean what post-structuralists refer to when they talk of the scene of the other. But Balibar is also keen to stress the more Marxist view that urges us to 'turn away from the "apparent scene" of politics, structured by discourses and ideas/ideals and unveil the "real scene" of economic processes, the development of capitalism and class struggle' (p. xiii). It is this concern that guides his discussion of European developments in the other essays collected here, and it is this concern that keeps the discussion of post-structuralist themes within the Marxist camp.

However, Balibar is still keen to question Marxism, inverting the pattern of real and ideal not to show that ideas drive history, but to show that '"material" processes are themselves (over-) and (under-) determined by the processes of the imaginary which have their own very effective materiality and need to be unveiled' (p. xiii). The imaginary is described as 'the infrastructure of the infrastructure'. All forces that interact at the economico-political are groupings that consequently possess an imaginary identity. The moment when politics becomes manifest is not rational, but it is not irrational either. In attempting to maintain a Marxist position, Balibar argues that 'recognition of the other scene is theoretically associated with the rejection, not of class antagonisms and the structure of capitalism, but of an absolute "last instance", and with the adoption of a broad (hence heterogeneous) concept of materiality' (p. xiii).

The other scene is where the effects of the autonomy and heteronomy of politics are engineered. Balibar is concerned with the relation between emancipation, transformation and the politics that cannot be reduced to either emancipation or transformation, which he calls the 'ethical horizon of civility'. He raises the question of a politics of equal liberty and the unfolding of the self-determination of people. Citizenship is inconceivable without the autonomy of its subject. Autonomy becomes a politics when a part of society is excluded from the universal right to politics. This part then becomes a party, the party of the universal--which is to say, for the abolition of particularities and classes. This is a more general way of understanding the argument of Marx and Engels when they write that the proletariat becomes the universal class.

One of the interesting aspects of this work is the way Balibar brings together Marx and Foucault. For Marx, history always takes place under determinate conditions. Social relations have a history explained by the process of production. However, this need not lead to a deterministic position. It is more a case of politics being explained from the inside, through the role of productive forces and social consciousness. Again, we see how Balibar is trying to weave together the material and the ideal. Ideas are expressed through social consciousness. Consequently, every concept of politics implies a subject. This goes against the latest post-structuralism, not to mention a certain theoretical collaborator of Balibar's: 'Nothing, then, is more absurd ... than to believe such a politics to be "subjectless" (it is history which is without a subject)' (p. 12). It is not entirely clear whether the bracketed section is intended to rescue Althusser or condemn him.

Politics, then, is a 'journey of subjectivation' binding together different modalities of practice and the effects of different structural conditions. If Marx gives us the big picture of production, then Foucault brings in conditions like the microphysics of power, governmentality, and the disciplinary society. The problem, for Balibar, is that in Foucault, the difference between these conditions of power and the process of trans-formation is reduced to a minimum, and they become contemporaneous in an ontological, ethical and political present. This makes the issue of autonomy problematic. When Foucault argues that practices of liberty are not so much the precondition for liberation as a necessary emerging after the event, we are led in the direction of technologies of the self. This raises further questions about how individuals' relationships to themselves develop.

In the essay 'Is there such a thing as European racism?' Balibar argues that current problems go back deep into our history--that racism in Europe today is the result of insoluble contradictions at a deeper level.

We need a long march towards a public space of European citizenship--something that can only be achieved if different communities march together. European citizenship entails a new notion of citizenship itself, more democratic than the old national-social form. Unless it includes all communities living in Europe, it will necessarily be against the universalist principles that European states claim to promote. The problem today, as is raised in the essay 'What is a border?' is that the Schengen Convention is moving Europe in the direction not of citizenship, but of anti-citizenship.

A theme in a number of essays is that all identity is fundamentally ambiguous, and that no identity is self-identical. In fact, there is no given identity, only identification--an uneven process and a precarious construction. Balibar argues that no identity can be given or acquired for once and for all. It is the product of an uneven, unfinished, hazardous construction. Identity is overdetermined, fulfilling several functions at once, in transit between several symbolic references (p. 28). Identification comes from others and operates within historical institutions that reduce the multiplicity and complexity of identifications. Because of this, identity is linked to a hierarchy of communal references and belonging.

If identity is ambiguous, then so too is universality. For Balibar, there are three instances of universality: as reality, fiction, and as symbol or ideal. Real universality can be seen as global economic expansion (the age-old process of capitalist expansion) and political expansion of transnational strategies. Fictive universality involves the construction of social hegemonies based on state institutions or fictive ethnicity. Ideal universality is the subversive element of negativity posing the infinite question of equality and liberty together.

This raises the impossibility of achieving freedom without equality, or equality without liberty. This is the radical thread running through the book. The engagement with Foucault and post-structuralism is made worthwhile because it refuses to abandon Marxist concerns. No concept of politics is ever complete. There can be no emancipation without transformation or civility, and no civility without transformation or emancipation.