Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
an invention that cannot be grasped as a passage from a mythical conception of the past to a rational conception of the past. The supposed break or rupture from mythical conceptions and turn to rational ones, which forms the basis of the positivist account, is unsustainable, for the rise of history does not supplant mythology but operates in parallel with it. Even in Herodotus (regarded as one of the first scientific historians), references to myths continue. Lazarus reads Finley as suggesting that history is a capacity, and a provisional capacity at that; a capacity that Lazarus names ‘sequential’, for it corresponds to a provisional subjective capacity which delimits a specific historical sequence. For Finley, history is not an invariant; any society or period does not necessarily have a history. There are societies which do not produce history, and not just those without states and without writing. The absence of history is not indicative of an absence of historical sources. Rather, in order for history to exist there should be a generation which has thought its own situation, its own conditions of life. The history (in this self-reflexive sense) of this generation is possible both for itself and also for future historians. There is therefore not always a capacity for history; this refers to a specific mode of thought contemporaneous with itself.
Two theses follow, according to Lazarus. Firstly, there can only be history which is contemporaneous with itself, and a specific consciousness is necessary for it to exist; secondly, the existence of a contemporaneous history is not always given. Not all generations possess this capacity or consciousness. Thus, history exists only under the condition of such a consciousness: only under such conditions can statements, formulations and generalisations be constructed with regard to the particular situation. For Finley, the condition of this capacity of an epoch to produce a history is nothing other than the existence of politics. The invention of history for Finley is contemporaneous with the invention of the ‘polis’, and particularly with the invention of politics. History is not connected to the state as such, but to the existence of politike techne, to political agency and excessive thought. It is not possible to explain the discovery of history by the Greeks as a matter of moving from an irrational mode of thinking to a rational one, but only as one of ‘invention’. For Lazarus, politics is also an invention, irreducible to the state, to classes, to the management of the social, to power. A specific subjective invention, politics is not permanent; it is, in Lazarus’s terms, ‘sequential and rare’. History and, by inference, social sciences do not always exist as independent novel thought distinguished from myth.19 They require politics for their existence, politics as a thought of something different from what exists. Excessive politics is always inventive and, through its inventiveness, impacts on thought and transforms it after the owl of Minerva has flown, to paraphrase Hegel’s famous aphorism. We need therefore to say something about politics in this transformative sense, for there is a sense in which politics precedes social thought.
In his discussion of Lazarus’s book Anthropologie du nom, Badiou (2005a: ch. 2) notes that there are in fact two distinct ways of dealing with Hegel’s idealist historicism of the actualisation of an absolute Idea. Either one follows Marx and the historian Marc Bloch in arguing that, however much people may be the makers of history, their ideas are reflections of the material world, in which case one replaces an idealist historicism by a materialist historicism; or one attempts to save the irreducibility of the Idea by considering it as a subjective singularity, not as a universal essence. The latter approach means abandoning notions of totality to which politics has to conform as well as the idea of time, and insisting rather on accounting for consciousness, ideologies, choices, practices – i.e. politics – as sequential subjective singularities. It is the latter path that is theorised at length by Lazarus (1996, 2013). This path is imposed on us as soon as we wish to maintain consistently that there is no telos, no end to history.
History is clearly a narrative construction ‘after the fact’; there is no ‘real’ of history as such – it is purely imaginary (Badiou, 2009d: 188, 190). To put it simply, history is understood scientifically ex post facto; politics, on the other hand, is simply lived.20 For Marx, of course, the view that all history is the history of class struggles could only be derived ex post facto. In other words, it is only after politics has taken place that it becomes possible to say that it is history; historians can then argue about whether and how it was determined all along by structural developments including class struggles (or demography, climate, geography, economic interests, discourses or whatever). As it is about to take place or while it is taking place, politics is simply a number of (clearly constrained) collective decisions or choices (including choices about how to overcome or circumvent constraints) emanating from within specific subjectivities, while it attempts to make a seeming impossibility possible in emancipatory conditions; in other words, it is purely thought, purely subjective and irreducible. Class for Marx was both an objective category of political economy and history, on the one hand, and a category of politics, on the other. The distinction was not theorised by Marx, as for him there was an unfolding of history which drove necessarily towards a classless future after a transition period that he refers to as ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ (Marx, 1852b). Marx sees a communist political consciousness developing among workers as a result of their common experience of oppression and collective discipline in the labour process. It is this common social experience which he sees as giving rise to a working-class politics. For Marx, it is relations of production which form the basis of a political consciousness. In other words, he sees politics as emanating from workers’ experiences at work, an emanation that is ‘spontaneous’ in Lenin’s sense. This is why he sees organisation in trade unions as a step towards class organisation, i.e. towards communist consciousness. Hence unions, he says, ought not to restrict themselves to demanding wage increases but should be ‘using their organised forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class’ (Marx, 1865b: 226). Influenced by the great working-class movements of the 19th century, Marx clearly saw the mere fact of worker combination as a political act. This was not the case for Lenin, for whom only a party could enable a proletarian political consciousness and make it possible.
Class struggle as it takes place in the present, as Lenin knew full well, could not be about social structures; consequently, politics (e.g. insurrection) was for him a complex art and not a science. Class was, for Lenin, both a socio-economic category and a political category, but it is crucially important to note that, for him, a ‘proletarian politics’ could not be deduced from the objective socio-economic location of the working class. A proletarian politics was, for Lenin, ‘under condition’, to use Lazarus’s (1996) expression. The condition for such a politics was an organisation – for Lenin, the party – which had to develop positions on all important political issues of the day, something a mere ‘trade union consciousness’ could not possibly achieve. In this manner a political class of proletarians could demarcate itself in the political sphere through the medium of a party and a specific proletarian politics could be constructed. As is well known, for Lenin this politics could not be a spontaneous occurrence, as it had been for Marx, but could only result from the conscious application of theory to the political questions of the day (e.g. in Lenin’s time, the ‘agrarian question’, the ‘national question’, the ‘women’s question’, the question of the state).21 Lenin was the first to argue in the 20th century that a consciousness or ‘interest politics’ founded on a category of the social division of labour (in his case, workers’ and trade union consciousness) was not in itself emancipatory; something else was required to transform it into a universal and make it truly political.
Lazarus argues in some detail that the idea of historical time – which, along with the idea of totality, constitutes the foundation of historicism – must be abandoned, as it co-represents the objective and the subjective, the material and the mental (e.g. in the notion of the ‘conjuncture’), and thus enables historians to assert at the same time that change is objective and also that people make history. This is the position developed at length by Marc Bloch, whose book The Historian’s Craft makes a rigorous argument in this regard. For Bloch, time is the ‘element’ of history, ‘it is the very plasma in which events are immersed, and the field within which they become intelligible’ (Bloch, 1954: 27–8). Lazarus notes that time is a ‘circulating category’ in Bloch’s work; in other words, it enables him to move without contradiction from the objective to the subjective, ‘men in time from the material perspective and from the subjective