itself | What is required, as opposed to artificial negativity, is ‘organic
negativity’. Here, small communities or regions with practices
sufficiently outside state-capital and its codes, resplendent with
robust traditions, are capable of truly opposing the state and capital –
a thesis that should be certainly familar to readers of this blog in
its ‘the church as anti-capitalist’ modulations. In part, for a
community to have organic negativity it must partially reject modernity
as such. Hence Telos interest in all manner of communities and
movements that it believes to be examples of organic negativity.
Piccone’s personal favourite was the formulation of postmodern
popularism and federalism. One example of this, he believes, was in the
original project of the United States where local federated direct
democracy combined with minimal centralised government designed to
foster collaboration between individual and culturally specific and
geographically delimited political communities. Everything, for Piccone,
goes sour in the aftermath of the American Civil War. The punishment of
the South for its practices of slavery leads to the centre, previously
with strictly delimited functions, claiming control over the federation
hegemonically. These “unbearable new relations of domination imposed
after the Civil war” by the industrial North and Washington lead to
resistance from the Midwest and the South against the destruction of
their particularity. For Piccone the Klu Klux Klan (I kid you not) are
self-defence organisations against the Northern occupation as Birth of A Nation allegedly shows.
Hence “America is no alternative to Europe, but its future” –
organically negative communities federated beyond the nation state,
examples of which Piccone finds apparently across the Midwest and,
presumably if he were still around, The Tea Party Movement. Pursuing
further instances of artificial negativity lead to a collection of
various instances: radical orthodoxy (where liturgy provides a critique
of the flat empty time of modernity and connects the local
particularities with the transcendent while not erasing their
particularity), the French New Right (which broadly agrees with the
analysis of modernity and liberalism proffered and recommends
ethno-cultural regionalism against the nation-state and liberal European
treaties) and one of its practical substantiations in the Italian Lega
Nord. If artificial negativity is what is created, it is the ‘new class’
that is the creator. Piccone theorises that mostly The New Class is
adapted from Marxist analyses of Stalinism, which claimed that the
brutality of Stalin was the result of a formation of a new bureaucratic
class of elites which replaced the bourgeois as the oppressors of the
massed proletariat. In Telos’ analysis, the New Class similarly
replaces the bourgeois in a Marxist analysis, but they are political
and cultural as opposed to economic oppressors. Telos had always been
indifferent to quantitive social science and the jettisoning of
economics and political economy was the hallmark of Telos’
analyses even before its interest in organicity, yet after this turn any
concern with the economic as significant category becomes itself
complicit with artificial negativity – hence organic negativity is not
concerned with economics but culture and politics, and indeed,
capitalism is far from the enemy provided it is localised. The New Class
is the embodiment of everything that Telos believes to be wrong and
which is opposed by the forces of organic negativity: modernity,
universality, human rights, large-scale capitalism and the welfare
state, abstract individualism, rights discourse, the modern state,
formal contractualism, multi-culturalism, affirmative action, repression
of organic tradition etc. The New Class have had a fairly long history,
and have flowed through a number of forms, including the New Deal and
contemporary political correctness – Piccone sometimes traces the
movement back to the 19th century, but some contributors, as we know,
radical orthodoxy, trace it far further.
The case of multi-culturalism provides a vital illustration for Telos
of the New Class at work and the distinction between artificial and
organic negativity. The New Class divides society up into often
arbitrary racial groups whose needs can be reflected in and satisfied by
the state, allowing the state to interfere with their affairs –
artificial negativity. Yet those apparently ethnically delimitated
communities who have, in common parlance, kept themselves to themselves
and not joined the mainstream of American culture and the New Class
politics have been those who have flourished most – an example of
organic negativity. To give a flavour – Piccone thinks African
Americians have fallen prey to the New Class, but Asian Americans and
Italian Americans have not, the kind of posit derived from the French
New Right.
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