Absolutizing the Particular

individual, “endowed with an ever growing list of human and civil rights,” to be modern culture’s nadir. He now considered modernity to be “a particular pathology of western culture” (emphasis in the original) (Delfini and Piccone 1998: 35, passim; Piccone 1998a:12-13, passim). Paul Gottfried’s (1994:172) succinct “After Liberalism,” summed up pointedly Telos’ trajectory at 100 issues; its “towering contribution” has been its attempt to expose “‘liberal democracy’ as flagrantly undemocratic.”[27] Concluding this appropriately titled special issue (“Is There a Telos Left in Telos?), Piccone (1994: 206-08) scolded less stalwart editors for being “reluctant to stray beyond a reality limited exclusively to a present which, so impoverished, seems doomed to irreversible decline, betrays conceptual fatigue and helps explain some of their unintended conformism.” In closing, however, his own faith in the arrival of his populist subject (“citizens qua autonomous individuals”) wavered, and he conceded that the only public audience likely to find Telos’ arguments at all interesting are the New Class! He seemed to be at the edge, gazing into the abyss. Was there any place to go but back into the open arms of the Church? He now saw its Latin liturgy as a strategic site to resist modernity’s pervasive “cultural alienation” and “decadence.”[28] Berman’s (2008:4) point that particularity “is tradition, which in turn is inextricably tied to religion” signified the terminus of Piccone’s long trek. Berman’s comment appeared in Telos’ 40th Anniversary Issue, in which retrospection and reflection about Telos’s path was limited to a few paragraphs in his introduction. After Piccone’s Telos this was.[29] From Telos’ early days, Piccone and his circle, treated extreme one-dimensionality and cultural homogenization as givens. Rather than a topic of inquiry, their vision of the liberal-left wasteland has been a presupposition or departure point. Their ideas about profound cultural and political exhaustion became more expansive and forceful as liberal-left editors and contributors exited and more emphatically antiliberal thinkers joined the fold. Their attack on the liberal-left became a fundamental critique of Enlightenment and modernity. Piccone’s related idea of the New Class as an all-powerful, decadent bureaucratic and cultural leadership also operated as a “first principle.” Contributors and associates, who challenged these beliefs, were attacked as New Class operatives or mindless exponents of its retrograde ideology. Liberal-left challenges were not excluded, especially when Paul thought that criticism of their perspectives was needed to advance his and Telos’ views. However, Telos’ Schmittean right-turn discouraged left-leaning contributors from writing for the journal.[30] Gouldner’s point, in his1978 frontal attack on the early version of the artificial negativity thesis, was that extremely impoverished visions of liberal democracy open the way for ideas and politics that might lead to much worse states of affairs. Piccone’s view of welfare state bureaucracy as quasi-totalitarian, dismissal of the threat and even the concept of authoritarianism, and treatment of doubts about these views as prima facie evidence of New Class sympathies evaporated the discursive space to entertain and debate Gouldner’s type of critique. However, could the hesitators in Piccone’s circle, berated by him in the Telos at 100 issue, have had lingering doubts about dumping a liberal democratic regime that served most of them well in their academic careers and everyday lives? Could any of them have shared Rick Johnston’s bemusement with Piccone’s and Gottfried’s equation of liberal rights with absolutism and totalitarianism and dismissal of the historicity of rights claims? I am still bewildered by Piccone’s assertion, in his original artificial negativity essay, that the civil rights movement was the US “counterpart” to the Holocaust. Right on Rick: “What planet is this?”[31] Absolutizing the PARticulAR Page 13 Volume 5 • Issue 1 • 2009 fast capitalism Absolutizing Particularity: Piccone’s Schmittean Populism vs Deweyan Democracy Egalitarian rights claims can be abused.[32] However, Piccone’s reduction of human rights discourses, initiatives, and protections to New Class drivers of domination and homogenization ignores the fact that the they also manifest aspirations for justice from below, anchor forms of legality that give vulnerable people some protection, and provide an ethical vocabulary to protest domination, terror, and war. His equation of egalitarian movements and critiques with political correctness manifests the same myopic one-sidedness.[33] Piccone attributed universal normative claims an animistic homogenizing force, and absolutized his imagined organic communities’ particularity and autonomy. He rejected universalism, but implied that populist local autonomy should be the rule everywhere. When pushed, he held that his view was based on his fallible decision, informed by concrete history.[34] His Schmittean move ignored, or tacitly accepted as necessary, the historical ways individuals, in the absence of the countervailing power of voluntary association and liberal rights and legality, have been harnessed to familial elites, clientelist hierarchs, churches, and other compulsory associations.[35] Granting total privilege to local culture, he argued that Lincoln “had no business” attempting to force the South to stay in the Union. In Piccone’s view, the North still could have declared war to free the slaves, but he doubted that the American public would have supported such an action. Moreover, he reduced lynching of black people in the Jim Crow South to a “resentful over-reaction within defeated Southern communities, whose laws were imposed from the outside and were considered illegitimate.”[36] Was slavery’s unspeakable violence and cruelty a better state of affairs? Piccone seemed untroubled about the fate of subordinate status groups in organic communities. He held that populist community has “nothing to do with race and ethnicity” and that it can accommodate substantial difference within its shared culture (e.g., Normans speaking Arabic dialects as well as French and attending Mosques) (Piccone 1999b: 156). Regardless of sweeping New Class homogenization, he held, organic communities survive in “the American heartland”(e.g., in Kansas), where belief in tradition and personal freedom are still the rule. Yet he warned that these islands of cultural particularity will soon be leveled “unless the modernist logic is reversed.”[37] Eliminating this threat, however, requires dismantling the liberal-democratic cultural, institutional, and legal regime, in which these communities are now embedded. Piccone left vague the alternative form of local rule and possible consequences for minorities, and did not entertain and, in fact, dismissed the idea that populism, in the absence of liberal legality and countervailing power, might harden the racial, ethnic, and religious divisions and animosities that suffuse many actually-existing communities and populist movements (e.g. Zeskind 2009). Piccone’s (1982) memoriam to his father’s passing provides context for his absolutizing of the particular. Paul explained that his parents moved from their native, small-town of Celano, Italy to the provincial seat of L’Aquila to make a living. Although just “on the other side of the mountain,” the Aquilani spoke a different dialect and their city drew other regional migrants, who were also pushed there by economic necessity and shared other dialects and local cultures. Paul was born in L’Aquila, but he implied that his Celanese cultural traits made success at school and development of close friendships difficult and turned him inward to his family. He held that his nuclear family never acclimated fully to L’Aquila and that, from his: “earliest recollections, we never really felt at home anywhere, which meant we had to be at home everywhere—but only as outsiders” (Piccone 1982: 2,10).[38] The family’s immigration to the US posed fresh challenges. However, Paul vented about his brother adjusting too well to American ways and lacking proper Celanese respect for their father (i.e., failing to offer Papà a drink and eating dinner before he arrived for a visit). Piccone (1982:15-16) said that his brother forgot all that he was taught at home and that he personified upwardly-mobile, middle-America’s “worst features”; “fashionable nihilism,” “genteel superficiality,”and “easy-going plastic mellowness of the Pepsi generation.” He attributed his brother’s pathologies to the: “cretinizing effects of exchange relations to which consumer culture reduces everything, including the primacy of blood relations.”Years later, Paul held that populist community, governed by shared values and norms, was the cure for this toxic deracination and nihilism. He believed that “postmodern populism’s” traditionalist normative consensus would immunize people against today’s rootless ennui and the xenophobic prejudices of earlier populist currents. Paul claimed that his populism was in tune with John Dewey’s view of community and radical democracy. However, Dewey rejected Piccone’s conventionalist type of social psychology, seeing it as a manifestation of Western philosophy’s dualism and “quest for certainty,” which precludes reflective selves and opens the way for prejudicial judgments.[39] Following Jefferson, Dewey and Mead held that the “moral sense” is forged initially and is sustained in face-toface relationships. Piccone shared this view. However, Dewey and Mead did not argue that community is constituted by conformity to internalized norms or that value judgment and normatively-guided action can be equated with application of a norm per se.[40] They held that people reach understandings and cooperate by imagining themselves Page 14 RobeRt J. Antonio fast capitalism Volume 5 • Issue 1 • 2009