Critical criticism after my dejeuner

 

1.

There is a famous passage in Marx and Engel’s Germany Ideology, which was written in 1846, set aside, and published in 1932. It reads:

“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. “

There are two schools of interpretation about this passage. One reads it as a genuine attempt to imagine a society in which the bonds of the division of labor are lifted. The other reads it as satire.

Myself, being Mr. Split the difference, I read it as a comic bit with a serious nub. In other words, I view this as a typical example of Marx’s romantic humor – a post-Hegelian humor which he shares with other disillusioned romantics of the 1840s, like Kierkegaard and his future enemy, Herzen.

This humor is, above all, gleeful. It exaggerates. Exaggeration holds within itself a truth, or a fact – and in this it is opposed to the lie. The lie, to be successful, conforms to the informal rules of plausibility – while an exaggeration, to be successful, flouts those rules. In particular, it takes a fact out of the plausible and subjects it to a field in which we have lost our grip on proportion. Proportion, which we tend to assume, is of course only as good as the other assumptions with which it is bound. Although we all know now, from pop science books, that a butterfly flapping its wings can cause untold changes in the universe – one of those “truths” of complexity theory – this knowledge can’t really be felt, even by those who are at the extreme end of the paranoid spectrum. In this sense, the credo of the new atheist/rationalist crowd – that facts don’t care about your feelings – gets things completely backwards. Without feelings, a whole spectrum of them, facts would not make any sense – they’d be unavailable to you.

Glee, which was taken up by romantics like De Quincy – or even pre-romantics, like De Sade – is thematized as “agony” in Mario Praz’s famous book, The Romantic Agony – which is still worth reading, although I’d bet my De Quincey that it is not on the curriculum for most grad students in literary studies.  Anyway, Marx was fully conversant with that form of humor – like Heine, or like the Russians, Gogol and the early Dostoevsky.

There are complex truths stuck in Marx’s squib. One of the lesser ones is that criticizing is on the same plane as hunting or harvesting. It is one of the structures of a liberal, developed economy – although it is far more important in an underdeveloped, backwards economy like Germany’s in the 1840s than it is in a fully developed one. Still, in a fully developed economy, on its way to a social democracy that allows a certain equality of the quality of life – measured exactly by its freedom from the slavery of the division of labor – there is and must be room for speculation.

Or to sum this up in a good, 1950-ish way: Man is the speculative animal.

2.

I’m a fundamentally bad lego man. I always put my weightiest bits on the top of the column, and the lightest underneath.

So, sue me.

Anyway, I take criticism and literature as important functions in a “developed economy” – which may well be simply a self-justifying gesture that helps me think, well, I am doing my bit. Perhaps my bit is meant to be spent organizing demonstrations, etc.  After all, I am living in the slops of the twentieth century, in a society that seemingly hasn’t budged since the 1980s. The social neurosis is killing us.

However, it is at just such times – times much like the 1840s – that glee becomes charged with lightning. One has to have a strong streak of gleefulness to read today’s newspapers or social media, turning hatereading into exaltation, and one’s enemies into involuntary dance partners. Repulsion, to the gleefully morbid mind, is half of attraction.

This is, I think, where Marx as a dialectician sometimes outsmarted himself. As a publicist and writer, though, he knew his strengths – which is why he ultimately shoved the German Ideology project aside and went on to other projects. The importance of the German Ideology, to me, is that it presents a sort of stylistic key to Marx. Like all the 1840s romantics, glee and dialectics remained his rock n roll, but he was careful with them. He knew that they might open up the world – de-proportion the proportions – but that they were only steps to get back into the world as a struggle.

So I like to think that, through social media, we might, if we overthrow those social conditions that are handily summed up in the term “neoliberalism” – we just might – might – criticize after dinner. Or, as I am doing now, here, after lunch.