The Devil's Glossary

An excellent critical glossary and Ambrose Bierce tribute from Iain Boal reposted from the Contrapolis website http://www.enoughroomforspace.org/project_pages/view/199. To employ a brief summary in the words of the great contrarian himself:

Dictionary A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.Ambrose Bierce, Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Glossary (from which the entries below are a sample, many composed specifically for Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement, Eddie Yuen et al., 2004) derives its inspiration from that small band of writers drawn to the critical glossary as a form: contrary lexicographers such as Ambrose Bierce (The Devil’s Dictionary) and Charles Bufe (The Heretic’s Handbook of Quotations). Poets, too, of a committed imagination with an accurate ear for the demoralisation of language. Here I think of Benjamin Péret, Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, but most of all a pair of critics, one American and the other Welsh –Kenneth Burke and Raymond Williams – who composed what the former called “a dictionary of pivotal terms” and the latter dubbed “a vocabulary of culture and society”, both of them quite without nostalgia for some Adamic speech, for the “true meaning” of a word.

Language does not just label things in the world; it helps to constitute it. The naming of parts, the framing of questions, the refusing to explain, are at once the prerogative and the springs of power. Enemies of the present, standing on terrain not of their own choosing, too often retort in an idiom satisfactory to the sovereign. It would further be wise to recall the urban critic who observed that, although political writing is always instrumental, its time of instrumentality – its time as a weapon – sometimes lies a little in the future. As to what might be entailed in the forging of a lexicon adequate to the matters currently at hand, these entries from The Devil's Glossary are offered as a gesture.

Autonomy A term with wide currency among the opposition to capitalist globalisation—cf. Italian autonomia, German autonomen, Zapatista autonomismo, and “temporary autonomous zones” (TAZ). Not to be understood in the abstract formalist Kantian sense of autonomy as obedience to reason, but in Cornelius Castoriadis’ sense of movement away from heteronomy in general (“being in someone else’s project,” whether state, parent or boss) towards self-activity – of a collective kind, rather than the “independence” of loners, self-made entrepreneurs and authoritarians in flight from mother.

Borders Be careful what you ask for. “World without borders” has now joined those other counter-cultural bumper slogans – “Think globally, act locally” and “Flexible working hours!” – as the basic vocabulary of neo-liberalism. The hip academy’s love affair with “transgressing borders” has put them in interesting company such as the German Wehrmacht and the WTO. The dismantling of barriers is, of course, highly selective in favour of goods and capital rather than people, a fact well understood by workers trying to enter fortress Europe or to cross the Rio Grande from the South, and by travellers to G8 summits.

Civil Society “Community”, “stakeholder”, “participation”, “transparency”, “empowerment” — these are the grisly fetish words of foundation officers, non-profit apparatchiks and boardrooms everywhere, echoed in the field by the NGO cadres busy producing “locals”. These liberal shibboleths, that cluster under the heading of “civil society,” name simulacra of the social and disclose only its disappearance. Not for the first time; at the turn of the 19^th century, Romantic schoolmasters and antiquarians – the clerisy of European nationalisms – celebrated the “folk” at the very moment its extinction was assured by enclosure of the commons and the criminalisation of custom. It was the proto-Romantic Rousseau who remarked: “The first person who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.”

Commons See “Enclosure”. The law locks up the man or woman, That steals the goose from off the common, But lets the greater felon loose, That steals the common from the goose.

Community The maximum shibboleth. A mantra used affirmatively across the entire political and cultural landscape. There is an implied antithesis to “the state” (with its suggestion of power, authority and central decision), in favour of the local and the face-to-face. The results can be grotesque: the release of asylum and hospital inmates to “the community” often means, in reality, warm ventilation grates. The “communitarian” right would rather nobody noticed that the shattering of communities is a direct effect of capital moving away in obedience of the logic of the very system they endorse.

Democracy System of periodic ratification of political masters by ballot. Meanwhile, the major decisions – who, for what, how – remain in the hands of a few. Democracy is the ideological keystone of the West’s charter myth, and historically consistent, by its own account, with slavery (Athens), monarchy (England) and plutocracy (United States).

Development Perhaps the key term of modernity, drawing into a single nexus the discourses of real estate, childhood and colonialism, for the future realization of added value. By the colonization of infancy and the infantilisation of the colonies, labour and land (human and natural ‘resources’) are made ready for ‘improvement,’ the older word that development replaced, etymologically derived from <pros> ‘profit’.

Economy The alpha and omega of our epoch. The mere utterance of the words “the bottom line” is supposed to halt discussion. The disembedding of the “economy” from its social and moral matrix has been a long and savage process; its first paid professor was the Reverend Malthus in 1800. As often, it was in a work of imagination, not theory – in Daniel Defoe, rather than Adam Smith – that one encounters the first classic projection of homo economicus. What is Robinson Crusoe, that lonely, primitive accumulator and idol of economists, but a cost-benefit calculating machine? Such is the neurotic Protestant imago that the technicians of neo-liberalism dream of universalizing.

Enclosure The exclusion (sometimes physically by hedges and fences) of commoners and peasants from the means of life, in order to ‘free’ them for wage labour under capitalist modernity. Enclosure meant not only the extinction (by force and later by acts of parliament) of customary “rights of common” to soil, grazing, firewood, timber, and the cultivated and uncultivated bounty of the earth, but, at least as important, the breaking of communal consciousness and autonomy. The commodification of land and labour was capitalism’s essential founding process, written “in letters of blood and fire”. The buying and selling of commodities could then be generalized; property and price come to mediate all relations with nature and humanity. The structural adjustment programmes of the IMF, and the WTO’s intellectual property regimes, amount to new (as well as old) forms of enclosure—privatization of water and public land, auctioning of the electromagnetic spectrum, the patenting of seeds, etc.

Environment When taken to mean external surroundings, environment reinforces the old split between humanity and nature, between inside and outside, which at least has the merit of not positing a fascist metaphysics of identity – blood and soil, thinking with the body, woman equals nature. Environments are constituted by the life-activity of their inhabitants; without the active involvement of its denizens, no expert has any business claiming even to identify an environment. Environmentalists are corporate capital’s stormy petrels, warning of bad weather. That Mobil and environmentalists both like to operate under the sign of NASA’s ‘whole earth’ image reveals how green politics is a version of global managerialism. The Malthusian assumptions and the eugenic and racist roots of environmentalism (population control, native plant fanaticism, defence of wilderness that was someone else’s home) are barely below the surface.

Globalisation Business school jargon that gained general currency in the 1990s, to describe the dismantling of barriers to the movement of capital and the loss of local and national sovereignties to the interests of transnational firms, helped along by developments in telecommunications and the collapse of the two-bloc world. Globes were originally “emblems of sovereignty” (1614), that became playthings of merchant princes and navigators, familiar as props in Renaissance portraiture. It was the task of cartography to project the globe into two dimensions; without the resulting maps and charts the business of empire and planetary capitalist hegemony would be literally unthinkable.

Human rights Liberal discourse lately favoured by the managers of the new world order, not least the military humanists of NATO and the Pentagon who use it, arbitrarily of course, as a Trojan horse for intervention worldwide, by land, sea, air and, soon no doubt, space – mercy by any means necessary.

Market More accurately described by the French historian Braudel as the “anti-market.” Capitalism from its birth has been about oligopolies and monopolies. The necessary contrast to the glory of old marketplaces, fairs, bazaars, and agoras is the “container,” the tilt-up warehouse, and the supermarket.

Multitude Key term of the philosopher Spinoza, the anti-Hobbes of early modernity, now dusted off for the digital epoch by certain critics of globalisation. As the argument goes, if capitalism at its dawning produced a multitude, and the factories of the industrial revolution a proletariat, then the social factory of the cybernetic economy is producing a new (global, wired) multitude. Some in the current anti-capitalist movements are partial to this neo-Spinozist scheme, and hope that the power of the new antinomian multitude will constitute the gravedigger this time.

Neo-liberalism Post-1960s version of classical liberalism’s gospel of the market and the “hidden hand.” For forty years the strategy developed during the crisis of the 1930s to prevent anti-capitalist movements from taking power – national Keynesianism – was hegemonic in the West, in the form of welfare safety nets, income redistribution, domestic industry protection, state-financed public works, and capital controls. The assault on national Keynesianism came in the shape of globalizing neo-liberalism, propagated in reactionary thinktanks (funded by oil and armaments fortunes) in response to the revolutionary events of the sixties and the falling rate of profit. The immediate intellectual roots lay in the work of the English accountant Ronald Coase, with von Hayek the bridge to classical liberalism, the University of Chicago its academic home, and Thatcher and Reagan its door-to-door sales force. Neo-liberals wish to bury the memory of their system’s saviour – “capitalism in itself,” observed Keynes in 1924, “is in many ways objectionable” –by claiming that “there is no alternative” to unregulated global flows of money and goods, the sale of public assets, the overriding of workplace and environmental protections, and a recomposed planetary division of labour. In sum, the removal of any fetters on the rate of exploitation.

NGOs Non-governmental organisations. The mendicant orders of late capitalism, as Antonio Negri put it. By one calculation they numbered a mere nine in 1907, most famously the Red Cross. The Biafran famine in the mid 1960s, where international state action proved spectacularly inadequate, was the watershed, and by the late nineties NGO’s numbered in the thousands. They are thriving on famine, disease, and war, and in the spaces (north as well as south) created by structural adjustment – forced privatisation, market deregulation, and the hollowing out of state agencies.

Privatization Etymological kin to “deprivation,” though any memory of why that might be – namely, that “privacy” was a prideful abstention from a life in common – is long gone. The transvaluation has taken four hundred years, and can be marked by the junkbond artist Ivan Boesky’s notorious speech to Berkeley’s Haas (Levi Strauss) Business School when he announced that “Greed is good,” and was cheered to the rafters. The privatization of everything is often imagined to be the ideal of free marketeers, but their real game involves the maximum socialization of costs in the sink of nature and labour.

Risk The entry “Risk” in the Dictionary of the Social Sciences has a single cross-reference, to “Profit.” That is at least honest, since the rhetoric of risk, which now drives medicine, law, portfolio management, criminology, social welfare, education, public health, technology impact, environmental policy, banking, industrial hygiene, urban planning, military strategy and genomics, emerged during the 17^th century in the milieu of Lloyd’s coffeehouse, where the new capitalist dealers in risk (sale of annuities, stock jobbing, marine insurance) were busy undermining the moral economy with the logic of the market and the counting house. Modern apologists of risk inform us that new technologies make for an unavoidably dangerous world, and therefore the real menace comes from riskophobes and untrusting luddites facing backwards.

Terrorism The strategic use of violence against civilians – typically by states, but also by those thinking like a state, however marginal and poor in resources. Terrorism seeks to kill and maim, but also more widely to demoralize, to spread the message that no one is safe. Terrorism is an act of communication. It aims to breed rumour, grab headlines, burn an image of pain and horror into the citizenry’s collective skull. The tactic is cost-effective, and has had successes. Colonial occupiers have given up and gone home in the face of it. Whether victimization and the sowing of mass paranoia can ever provide the basis for a “revolution” – that is, the release and refocusing of repressed social energies – is another question. Whereas terror is often disavowed (though inherent to rapine, slavery, inquisitions and colonialism), terrorism lives on the oxygen of publicity. It took modern form with the Jacobins’ spectacular use of Dr Guillotin’s enlightenment machine for rational decapitation. The next fin-de-siècle burst of “propaganda by the deed” – political assassinations, bombings and incendiarism, often in fact the work of agents provocateurs in the service of the state’s need to justify the deployment of its hegemonic violence – turned out to be just a curtain-raiser for the 20^th century which witnessed the apotheosis of terrorism. Its emblematic instruments have been, in the industrialised North, the car bomb, and, in the Third World, disappearances and death-squads. But twentieth century terrorism’s hallmark was bombardment from the air, the Damoclean threat of mass death aimed at the inhabitants of cities – Guernica, London, Dresden, and the ground zero of globalised atomic terror, Hiroshima. For keepers of nuclear stockpiles to declare a “war on terrorism” places them very deep in Orwell’s debt. In political rhetoric, the epithet “terrorist” is projected only onto others—enemies so designated by authorities wherever; in the US, the term has proliferated to implicate all resistance to capitalist globalization, foreign and domestic. Thus fast-track WTO legislation, corporate bail-outs and environmental de-regulation are called “counter-terrorism” measures. Not for the first time is “terrorist” (cf. “luddite” and “communist”) being forged as a weapon in capitalism’s arsenal.

Utopia Thomas More’s 16^thcentury book forever lent its name to projections of an ideal world. They are, typically, static blueprints – More’s original Utopia, though it contained a savage critique of early capitalist enclosures, was really a nostalgic retrospect for a dying patriarchal feudal order. We are currently living in the utopia of 1930s automobile company executives, who gave us warning in the GM pavilion of the 1939 World’s Fair. Although Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, P.M.’s Bolo Bolo, and William Morris’s News from Nowhere shine out as beacons in a dismal genre, it is hard to envisage the far side of capitalism, the more everyday life has been colonised by the imagineers of the commodity world.