Andrew Johnson

David Graeber's essay On the phenomenology of giant puppets: Broken windows, imaginary jars of urine, and the cosmological role of police in American culture (2007) is a groundbreaking yet unappreciated essay that re-evaluates theories of police. The central question animating Graeber's "interpretative" essay is: why do cops hate activist puppeteers? Graeber's "tenuous" answer is that police are a form of structural violence and that their power is derived from their cosmological or imagined status. The police are one of the central themes animating Graeber's work from the beginning of his career to the end. As an anthropologist, he repeatedly turns his attention to places that lack formal police institutions or maintain police forces utterly alien to modern sensibilities. These unusual places are the animus for his recasting of the traditional concepts of political theory: sovereignty, hierarchy, and the state. Graeber's later work, attacking bureaucracy and meaningless labour, continues his critical interpretation of police. It is impossible to understand the significance and importance of Graeber's scholarship, in toto, without understanding what he has to say about the police. Most importantly, what Graeber has to say about the police is an altogether original interpretation that should be of importance to those studying the police and to social movements seeking to diminish their political power. Some of Graeber's observations represent considerable challenges to the cause of police abolition, whereas others provide supporting theses that could aid our struggle against police authoritarianism. I conclude, contra Graeber, that the unreasonableness of the police is not sufficient for them to melt away.

Open-access version here: https://scholarworks.arcadia.edu/agsjournal/vol5/iss1/2/

Fascism was once a momentous and imperative subject of study, but as the memory of atrocity faded there has been a lessening of stakes and a forgetting of its previous import. The election of Donald J. Trump, along with the Brexit referendum, growing support for economic nationalism, and a global rise of authoritarian populists, has revitalized the “fascism question,” both by scholars and the general public. The reemergence (and electoral successes) of far-right ideological partisans threatens the neoliberal consensus, challenging received wisdom within political science. The dominant approach within international political economy failed to predict escalating political opposition to global capitalism. A prescient exception is the heterodox scholar William Robinson, who had warned his readers of emergent 21st century fascism. This essay is inspired by Robinson’s theories but challenges some of his precepts and conclusions. The study of fascism is intertwined with studies of capitalism, financial crisis, inter-imperialist rivalry, democracy, and history; however, politics is never reducible to the structural settings in which it occurs. There are insoluble contradictions between historic fascism and its present-day recurrence. 21st century fascism is haunted by an overladen history and overdetermined by the present conjuncture. A renewed study of fascism ought to focus criticism upon the hypocrisy of liberal politics. The struggle against fascism is also a struggle against liberalism, global capitalism, and American empire.

Open-access version here: http://agonist.nietzschecircle.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Agonist-Spring-2019-Andrew-Johnson.pdf

The horizon of contemporary political thought is decisively apocalyptic. Human civilization has charted a one-way, irreversible, course towards the extinction of the human species through ecological suicide. Nietzsche, being the crown-priest of apocalyptic politics, establishes the horizons of our present-day politics. His distinctive philosophy of the future fashions a newfangled apocalyptical eschatology, which reveal several thematic tensions in his life’s work: self-creation versus fatalism, life-affirmation versus nihilism, the will to power and the eternal return. Nietzsche presents several possible responses to our apocalyptic future: passivity, reactive nihilism, or joyous affirmation. Each is as unsatisfactory as the rest, and we are left alone to choose, comforted only by an ontological pluralism and strategic inefficacy.

Abstract: In Discipline and Punish the police is a state institution isomorphic with the prison. In his Collège de France lectures, Foucault unearths a ‘secret history of the police’ where greater attention is paid to public health, social welfare and regulating the marketplace than investigating and arresting criminals. This broad overview of Foucault’s writings on the police exhibits a ‘splintering-effect’ in his modalities of power. To resolve this apparent contradiction, a nominalist reading that conflates Foucault’s divergent paradigms of power results in a more multifaceted history and a ubiquitous mode of power with diverse and precise techniques. There are strengths and weaknesses in Foucault’s theory when applied to modern neoliberal police. Foucault should not be employed for one-dimensional criticisms of modern police or as an analytical cure-all.

Keywords: biopower, discipline, Foucault, governmentality, neoliberalism, police

Foucault famously questioned the humor, and possibly deceit, at the heart of Deleuze’s philosophy by asserting its sincerity and seriousness. In this paper I address how humor and sincerity, and thereby truth and falsity, are philosophical concepts at the core of Deleuze’s thought. Using Deleuze’s work Difference and Repetition as the focal object of my interrogation, I seek to show how truth and falsity are structured by difference and repetitions. Deleuze’s philosophy of pure difference does not merely try to critique traditional notions of truth, but attempts to define a new model of truth and falsity that bears both difference and repetitions from the previous models in the history of philosophy.

G.W.F. Hegel delineates two functions of the police (Polizei). The modern, narrow conception is a security institution, characterized as a law enforcement body dedicated to the prevention, detection, and punishment of crime. The historical, generalized conception was a welfare institution, whose functions were limitless. Hegel is wary of the increased stress given to security. Hegel’s distrust is best represented by his dismissive criticism of J.G. Fichte. Despite his own suspiciousness, Hegel refuses to limit the security purview of the police. On the other hand, Hegel is an enthusiastic spokesman of welfare provisions. Hegel’s devotion to a robust, activist state is a veiled critique of Adam Smith’s free-market liberalism. The greatest danger to the security of the state is the inescapable inequality produced by the market, the threat of disorderly impoverished masses and the possibility of a breakdown in the general welfare of civil society. Despite his zeal and apprehension, Hegel admits the alleviation of poverty can never be fully guaranteed. Hegel wants to limit the security-state and expand the welfare-state, but between these two poles, he can do neither. Hegel is caught in a trap of his own making: reluctantly permissive regarding the increasing security-state and enthusiastically powerless to provide for the general welfare of the population.

This essay analyzes Marx’s world of monsters, machines, and magic; a motley and fascinating cast of characters which populates his 19th Century Gothic landscape. Each of these conceptual personae are entwined in a common drama but are called upon to represent distinct themes and singular movements that Marx brings into a whole in Capital, Volume One. This tripartite structure signal crucial moments and transitions that delineate the entire scope of Marx’s masterwork. Magic denotes the production and circulation of commodities, the creation of money and value-form, and the sleight-of-hand that produces the first instances of surplus-value. Machines characterize the revolution in the technical process of labor, the historical transition from manufacture to the factory, and reveal the exploitation of workers and their labor-power by capital. Monsters exemplify capital itself, the structure of accumulation that feeds and perpetuates it as a suicidal process, and the capitalists in the background whose guilt is never beyond doubt. One unique feature of this reading is that all of Marx’s monsters are brought together, at last, to commune and spell out a unified narrative than cannot be read in isolated chapters.

Deconstruction is not immune. Rather, deconstruction deconstructs it-self, by an auto-deconstruction formalized through the logic of auto-immunity. Where auto-immunity vacillates between protection and destruction, it can’t differentiate between the two. Auto-immunity threatens it-self. Auto-immunity is not immune. It chaotically and dangerously oscillates without resolution. Derrida wishes to immunize his own discourse by an antiseptic undecideability. Auto-immunity is, thus, like a poison pill, which in attempting to mask Derrida’s the escape hatch which encases his discourse has revealed its necessarily authoritative symptom and propensity. And yet, and yet… Derrida must decide.

Since Jacques Derrida’s 1989 essay “Force of Law: the Mystical Foundations of Authority,”  Carl Schmitt has been a perennial subject of Derrida’s political critique. I will argue that Derrida’s concept of auto-immunity is uniquely applicable to Derrida’s interpretation of Schmitt’s political philosophy. Therefore, my argument will consist of two interrelated but equally divergent parts; the digressive structure will attempt to mimic Derrida’s complex style of weaving opposed concepts into a coherent whole. First, I will demonstrate the many forms of Derrida’s concept of auto-immunity. Second, I will exhibit how this schema uniquely applies to Derrida’s criticisms of Schmitt and the contemporary state of politics.

The scholarship surrounding the relationship, whether personal or intellectual, of Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin is murky. Giorgio Agamben explicitly says that Schmitt’s political theology, more precisely his definition of sovereignty as the power to decide the exemption, is a direct response to Benjamin’s concept of pure or revolutionary violence espoused in the 1921 essay Critique of Violence.  Jacques Derrida claims that Schmitt sent Benjamin a letter congratulating him on the publication of this essay.  Horst Bredekamp details a different history, claiming the opposite, that it was Benjamin who first wrote Schmitt (scandalously) in 1930 acknowledging an intellectual debt. Such a history is rich with irony. The lives of Benjamin and Schmitt would depart on separate paths, both immersed in the same historical spectacle: one dying too young, alone, attempting to escape Nazi Europe and the other, dying an old man, with a legacy shrouded by his involvement with the rise of National Socialism. But two decades earlier, in the early 1920’s their fates were aligned in a shared battle against the Weimar Republic and the ideology of liberal democracy. It will be this equal footing, and two-headed assault on democracy, that will be the basis of this paper.

The New York Times reported that the 2020 George Floyd Uprising was the largest set of protests in U.S. history. Data indicates that nearly 25 million people took part in protests across the country. No issue within political science is as important as the ongoing crisis surrounding policing. This course will provide a historical examination of police institutions and the part they have played in political life. We will situate the historical development of police nationally and globally, but there will be a heightened focus on police in California and Los Angeles. Our study of the politics of the police will be theoretical and historical, but also attuned to the ways that theory and history allow us to better understand current events. This course will put current debates into context by exploring critical approaches to police reform and the role of social movements in building pressure for change. After completing this course students will better understand the causes that contributed to the current policing crisis and will be able to defend their own perspectives on contemporary debates.

Political theory requires students analyze and critique what William Connolly calls "essentially contested concepts" in politics (including, but not limited to: justice, violence, legitimacy, disobedience, inequality, truth, recognition, human rights, the foundations of political societies, etc.). In this course, we are going to closely analyze the long development of two such concepts: Freedom and Domination. Political theory is haunted by a long legacy of theorists who have justified domination while simultaneously promoting freedom. "Freedom" and "domination" are among the most widely used terms in the academic study of politics. They are objects of fierce disagreement-not just about how domination works, or how freedom can be achieved, but about what the very words mean. In this class, we'll consider some of the ways in which political theorists have defined and conceptualized freedom and domination, both in the abstract and in relation to a range of specific political issues and contexts: antislavery politics, anticolonial revolutions, post-Cold War anxieties, class conflict, feminist theory, indigenous self-determination, etc. We will examine the long development of political theory as part of a broad effort to understand its continued relevance for contemporary politics. Our approach will be historical, textual, and conceptual, with the goal of providing students with an understanding of the methods and vocabulary of political theory. This is a reading, writing, and discussion intensive course that will introduce students to the study of political theory, the history of political thought, and the meaning of "politics" itself.

Modern political theory largely consists of the history of Europe as a political and ideational project. For this reason, the study of political theory has been challenged for its Eurocentrism, its white-male perspective, and the fuzzy divisions separating the ancient, modern, and contemporary periods. In this course, we will pursue a relatively non-traditional reading of modern political theory, with a particular focus upon the uses of history for understanding politics. A contention made prominently by thinkers associated with the Cambridge School is that the history of political thought must be interpreted in its historical context. So too, many of the most famous and canonical works in political theory are also histories. As Joshua Foa Dienstag (2017) recently articulated, one way of reading modern political theory is as a collection of historical examples. In pursuing this reading of the tradition, we will pay close attention to four political theorists: Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Beyond the exception of Marx, this course will require an in-depth reading of three Great Books of modern political theory. Our study will investigate four historical case studies: the Roman Empire, the French Revolution, the 1851 French coup d'état, and the U.S. American Civil War and Reconstruction. Each of the thinkers we are studying are notable for centering the role of social forces in the making of history. Each of the historical case studies we are analyzing are noted as ending in failure. This course will examine the development of these themes within modern political theory as part of a broad effort to understand the development of the modern political world.

Within the past couple of years, there has been a dramatic rise of research and interest in the global politics of policing. In this course we will closely examine this literature so as to analyze the global breadth of police institutions and they part they play in political life. This will include a close study of comparative-historical methods, international police cooperation, police exchanges and training programs, border enforcement, private security companies, North-South dynamics, regional approaches, and, finally, some brief alternatives. Our study of the global politics of police will be theoretical and historical, but also attuned to the ways that theory and history allow us to better understand current events. This course will put current debates into context by exploring critical approaches to global policing. After completing this course students will better understand the challenges of global security, the importance of transnational advocacy networks, and will be able to defend their own perspectives on contemporary debates.

Last summer, the New York Times reported that the George Floyd Uprising was the largest set of protests in U.S. history. Data indicates that nearly 25 million people took part in protests across the country. For incoming students, perhaps no topic is as important as the ongoing crisis surrounding policing. In this course we will examine the history of police institutions and the part they have played in political life. Our study of the politics of the police will be theoretical and historical, but also attuned to the ways that theory and history allow us to better understand current events. We will read classic texts, primary sources, academic articles, and position papers. This course will put current debates into context by exploring critical approaches to police reform and the role of social movements in building pressure for change. After completing this course students will better understand the causes that contributed to the current policing crisis and will be able to defend their own perspectives on contemporary debates.

This course is premised on an underlying question: what is the role of political theory for the study of political science? Contemporary political theory, as it is often taught, largely consists of the history of 20 th century political thought with scant attention given to its relevance for current events or how political theory is practiced today. In this course we will review a select history of 20 th century political thought with the explicit intention of comparing and applying it to some of the most pressing problems of present-day politics. We will then transition to a study of 21 st century thinkers with the goal of understanding political theory as a living conversation. We will focus upon specific themes including the rise of fascism and farright populism, political violence broadly, mass incarceration and policing in particular, colonialism and decolonization, identity politics, capitalism, political organization, and the limits of democratic theory. This course will explore these themes within contemporary political theory as part of a broad effort to understand the present political world.

The British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said: "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." In this course we will take up Whitehead's suggestion and closely examine one of the earliest political theorists, Plato and his protagonist Socrates. Our close reading of Plato and ancient political theory will be complimented by a series of shorter readings from the modern and contemporary periods. We will examine the early development of political theory as part of a broad effort to understand its continued relevance for contemporary politics. Political theory requires students analyze and critique what William Connolly calls “essentially contested concepts” in politics (including, but not limited to: justice, violence, disobedience, inequality, truth, freedom, the foundations of political societies, and many others). Our approach will be historical, textual, and conceptual, with the goal of providing students with an understanding of the methods and vocabulary of political theory. This is a reading, writing, and discussion intensive course that will introduce students to the study of political theory, the history of political thought, and the meaning of “politics” itself.

Last summer, the New York Times reported that the George Floyd Uprising was the largest set of protests in U.S. history. Data indicates that nearly 25 million people took part in protests across the country. For incoming students, perhaps no topic is as important as the national policing crisis. In this course we will examine the deep history of police institutions and the part they have played in political life. Our study of the politics of the police will be theoretical and historical, but also attuned to the ways that theory and history allow us to better understand current events. We will read classic texts, primary sources, academic articles, position papers, and government reports. This course will put current debates into context by exploring critical approaches to police reform and the role of social movements in building pressure for change and developing alternatives. After completing this course students will better understand the causes that contributed to the current policing crisis and will be able to defend their own perspectives on contemporary debates.

Course Description Modern political philosophy, as it is often taught, largely consists of the history of Europe as a political and ideational project. In this course we will challenge the primacy of European history and ideals by critically analyzing how European thinkers justified the conquest of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, the slave trade, the subjugation of women, the exploitation of the poor, etc., while simultaneously promoting freedom and democracy. Our reading of European political philosophy will be global in scope and reinterpret the tradition from counter-perspectives. We will read literary works, canonical texts, underappreciated gems, and political pamphlets. We will focus upon specific themes including utopia, war, colonialism, rebellion, punishment, inequality, freedom, and obedience. This course will examine the development of these themes within modern political philosophy as part of a broad effort to understand the development of the modern political world.