The whole society deal

An old post - but one I am putting up as a squint eyed comment concerning the controversy concerning Vivek Chibber's recent book on Marxism and post-colonial studies.

In Ma Nuit chez Maud, Jean-Louis, the Catholic engineer, bumps into an old college friend of his, Vidal, who is now a philosophy professor. Jean-Louis confesses that he is still an observing Catholic; but, he says, he has his own ideas about Catholicism. For instance, he recently read Pascal and felt that if Pascal’s rigorism was Christianity, he would rather be an atheist. Vidal, on the other hand, claims that, as a Marxist,  Pascal has a peculiar meaning to him.  His choice of Marxism, he claims, was decided by something like Pascal’s wager about the existence of God. As Vidal sees it, there are two ways of looking at history. Either it doesn’t make sense or it does. If the first view, A, has an 80 percent sense of being true, and the second a 20 percent chance, it is still rational to bet on the second view – as it fills one’s life with meaning.

I doubt that there are many Marxists today who would say, with Vidal, that Marxism is a decision to see the meaning in history. They are far more likely to explain that Marxism points to the way in which the meaning of history changes with the historical circumstances of the interpreters – which tends to undermine any objective claim to discern the meaning of history. And, to an extent, I would agree with the disabused Marxist. It is true that Vidal is reflecting a position that was most pronounced in the years after WWII, when the defeat of Nazi Germany and decolonization could easily make a person think that history was ‘on our side’ – although of course the sense of history could be an infinite crucifixion, a la de Maistre. By the sixties, however, the notion that there was some inevitable development in history – inevitability being one way to construe the ‘meaning’ of history – was on the wane. This version of history had always competed with a positivist variant – that the progress of science was, in general, the progress of liberal capitalist society. In the late 80s and 90s, the notion that history made sense was disguised in the end of history thesis.

Marx had a strong sense of history. This, it is usually said, is his inheritance from Hegel; however, even a glance at the Enlightenment and Romantic culture of Germany would show us that history as a “force” of some kind precedes Hegel. Herder, the translators of the Scots like Gentz, romantic critics like Schlegel were very invested in seeing history as a force. In one way, this expressed a clear material anguish: the peasant society of the limited good was particularly strong in the German states, and the distrust of growth was shared by peasants and Juunkers. Faith in history as a force was the face of the modernity longed for by a section of the intelligentsia.

Marx’s original views about history were, I think, entangled with his sense of Germany’s underdevelopment. The double aspect of Marx’s description of the capitalist system – on the one hand, as the expression of the revolutionary force of the bourgeoisie, and, on the other hand, as a system that had to be overthrown – lead to a certain confusion in reading Marx chronologically. That double aspect allows Marx a lot of irony elbow room – and Marx always viewed irony as a high intellectual gift.

It is in the Manifesto that Marx makes certain statements about history that, themselves, have a history leading up to the conversation of Jean-Louis and Vidal in Ma Nuit chez Maud. As with Baudelaire’s notion of the modern, history is obviously a bit of an intoxicant to Marx. And why not? Who has not known the sublime feeling of standing with the devil above it all, at say 6,000 feet above all human kind  – although it is best not to bow down to the devil at that moment, no matter what he promises you.

“One speaks of ideas, which revolutionize a whole society; one thus only expresses the fact, that within the old society have been moulded the elements of a new one, for the dissoluton of the old ideas keeps pace with the dissolution of the old relations of life.”

The uncompromising phrase, a “whole society,” seems to infer a unilateral motion, pressing on all levels of society.  Everything goes at once, for all pieces of the old relations of life are connected to each other. And we do see this. Who can’t see, for instance, that the old ways of human locomotion – mainly by walking, sometimes by horse – were so completely swept away, first by the railroad, then by the automobile, that walking in many places in the developed world – for instance, Texas – has become a minority option.  The old times – the week it would take to go from London to Edinburgh – have disappeared – or exist only in the minds and careers of bums and tramps. But bums and tramps can’t simply walk across the countryside like they could in 1900 or 1800 – they are bounded by the roads they can travel, as they cannot walk besides a highway, and would certainly draw police attention if they walk along other roads. At the present time, China, in one of the greatest engineering feats ever attempted, is automobilizing its human locomotion. All over the world, the car is uprooting and changing  the old relations of life.

And yet, is it true that the surface of life is so homogeneous that it can simply change like this?

That question gets to another aspect of Marx’s ironic praise of the bourgeoisie: that homogeneity is the result of capitalism. The homogeneous society, in which the archaic has no place to hide, is the effect of the penetrative tendency of capitalist culture, which roots out its opponents from the intimate sphere. Of course, its opponents might produce the elbow room that makes capitalism tolerable – and capitalist overreach might well be keyed to the sound of a gravedigger digging his own grave, which is what Marx heard. We at this point give capitalism much more time than Marx could give it in the nineteenth century, and we can watch the process of total change. Ethan Watters, a journalist,  has pointed out that the variegated understanding of emotions in different cultures are in the process of being changed, or at least confronted, by an American model that is convenient to Big Pharma. This is from a NYT magazine article he wrote on the subject:

“We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

This unnerving possibility springs from recent research by a loose group of anthropologists and cross-cultural psychiatrists. Swimming against the biomedical currents of the time, they have argued that mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories. These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places. In some Southeast Asian cultures, men have been known to experience what is called amok, an episode of murderous rage followed by amnesia; men in the region also suffer from koro, which is characterized by the debilitating certainty that their genitals are retracting into their bodies. Across the fertile crescent of the Middle East there is zar, a condition related to spirit-possession beliefs that brings forth dissociative episodes of laughing, shouting and singing.”

No matter – all madnesses must get in line! Or so it would seem as the Blue Pill bears down. The marketing of mood management is by now a well known ongoing scandal – one that has produced almost no opposition. Whenever marketers change the laws to allow for the mass advertising, over tv, of various anti-depressives, the amount of anti-depressives goes up far, far over anybody’s estimate of the real number of pathological depressives, which then enters into the ordinary life of the emotions and our expectations of people’s moods. And so it goes – what, in an earlier age, would be considered an illness in itself, can now be dismissed as a side affect and become the locus of a new marketing campaign and a new drug. Here, the homogenization promised by the term  ‘whole society” seems armed and should be considered dangerous.

And so, I’d contend, Marx began to think in the years after the Commune.

Bite the hand that feeds you

Plato, when doing philosophy, often used a method familiar to any 17 year old with a passion for music: he would pull out a line from one of his favorite singers – Heraclitus, Democritus, Parmenides, et al. and finger it until it gave up its meaning. Unfortunately, the history of philosophy, from Heraclitus to Elvis Costello, shows that philosophers are less and less inclined to linger over these gnomic spasms that come in – as though fully formed in a whole other universe - from the outside, while they are more and more concerned about creating logically coherent structures in this world that they can argue for and against.

However, I, like Plato, think it is worthwhile pondering the weighty obscurities summoned like spirits in a great phrase. For instance – to return to Elvis Costello for a moment – it seems to me that the proper measure of that phrase in his song, Radio Radio, which goes: I want to bite the hand that feeds me – has not yet been attempted.

Of course, the naïve listener might think that this is pure resentment. The naïve listener instinctively takes the side of the hand, and is thus lost. However, the listener who has a larger sense of the dialectical peculiarity of the human situation would not so quickly go over to the hand’s side. Instead, this listener might consider that biting the hand that feeds you is, at least in some urgent cases, the  necessary prelude to understanding just what it is that the hand is feeding you. This is not only the truth of punk – it is the truth of satire, of film noir, of all kinds of insomnias, ideological and personal.

Biting the hand that feeds you is a lot more difficult than it might seem, especially when the hand is so much larger than you, and you are so dependent on the hand that you can barely stand without it.  

Reading Marx reading me

I resist the teleological interpretation of Marx – that all of Marx is there in every text, and if a text seems to say something that contradicts all-of-Marx, then we just have to either categorize Marx’s works to shunt it to the side – it was polemical! – or decide that it was an unfortunate collateral gesture. On the other hand, I’m not sure that my idea of Marx as constructing his all-of-Marx-ness in his text really purges the teleological impulse completely. Take the issue of the notebook, or the draft. We have these things. They were preserved. But the facile notion that Marx, too, having these things, goes back over them suffers both from lack of proof and automatic assumptions about research and writing that I have found, both in my personal experience and as an editor of others, to be false. I have found, instead, that one’s vital discoveries tend to fade and change and be renewed – that old intentions get submerged by new ones. Yet characteristic themes and inclinations will assert themselves, and the repressed will return.

This is why I favor the problem-based approach to reading monumental texts. For any theme or thesis carries with it both the problems it responds to and the new problems it creates. A problem is as much a token of memory as a thesis. Stripping a writer of his problems – translating his text into something like a list of answers such as you can find in the back of the math textbook - trivializes him.

3 versions of liberty

Last night, as I lay in bed and waited for sleep, like a good little insomniac, I thought about the dialectic of freedom. It didn’t put me to sleep. So, here I am, the next day, putting words to my sleep deprived thoughts.

In the Anglosphere, the problem of liberty has been narrowly framed by a tradition reaching from Benjamin Constant to Isaiah Berlin, in which the supreme contrast is between negative liberty and positive liberty. In Two Concepts of Liberty, Berlin speaks of negative liberty in terms of compulsion:

“I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no human being interferes

with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a

man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by other persons from

doing what I could otherwise do,I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is

contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as

being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved.”

Positive liberty, for Berlin, is the liberty implied by “being one’s own master.” It is, in other words, autonomy, and not simply being buffered from various coercive acts.

However, in philosophy, as in Looney Tunes, there is more than one way to skin a cat. And, in philosophy as in Looney Tunes, in the end the skinned cat will slink back with a whole new skin. It is the nature of the beast. Novalis said that God is a problem whose solution is another problem, which is a high falutin way of saying the same thing.

So instead of beginning with freedom as being, firstly, a matter of the human, let’s begin with the ancient notion of freedom, which from the Daoists to the Stoics consists of being free from property. The sage and the fool are the paragon figures of freedom – one, by an act of generosity, liberates himself by the simple but massive act of giving away his chains – and the other has no chains to impede him anyway, but exists as a conduit for God’s occasional flashes of lightning.

This idea of freedom derives its coloring from a world view that projects a society of slave or serfholders on the cosmic order. The generous act – the act of giving away – is a form of power, and it has a certain sacred backlighting.

Among the early moderns, those stalwart visionaries of a capitalism to be, the coordinates of freedom are reversed. It is here that Berlin’s two freedoms have there focus. The propertarian notion of liberty is that, precisely, the preservation of one’s property against encroachment is the essence of freedom. The libertarian tendency in the U.S. is just the psychopathological outgrowth of this revolution in values. For the ancients, of course, this would have been absurd – it is as if the slave imagined he were free by carefully protecting his chains against all comers.

The third idea of freedom I’d call the existential one – with a strong mixture of Marxism. It echoes the ancient wisdom, while absorbing the historical lesson of modernity. For the existentialist, like the Marxist, makes property subordinate to life – and in particular, to time. Marx’s approach to the labor embodied in properties – which sees the measure and dynamic of that labor in time – is a key insight here. Freedom can’t be divorced from the time one spends laboring. For the Marxist, and the existentialist, capitalism has, in essence, abolished the old aristocratic categories of the serf, the slave and the poor. The poor no longer exist as a social residue and charity case, but as an exploitable mass from which class power is extracted. In the Marxist vision, all labor exists to be routinized, mechanized, and made more efficient for capital. On the other side of the divide, however, stand the capitalist who are also pursuing routines. For a time, those routines are valorized to a hypertrophic extent: while the cashier is replaced by the automatic checkout machine, the CEO is attributed a mystical power of governance and leadership, instead of considered in terms of the regression to the mean that governs his sector. The latter then is paid enormously, while the former is paid less and less. The former’s time is, in other words, devalued.

Eventually, Marx expected all professions to become proletarianized. This hasn’t happened yet, as we have an elaborate and not well understood guild system that keeps the doctor and the dentist from falling victim to the mechanization instinct of capitalism. One can easily imagine that eventually, the artificial economic paradise carved out by these guilds will fall, too. At some point, pure capital, pure property, will reign supreme over a propertyless mass, which has paid with its time for its surroundings, but does not, when push comes to shove, own anything – rather, every thing, underneath a veil of middle class security, is actually rented.

Freedom, from the existentialist point of view, is the project of actually releasing human time from the system of property relations in which it is held captive. The existential version of freedom, then, is both utopian and highly dependent on the movement of the social towards the final crisis of the capitalist system.

Now, given these three ways of thinking about liberty, we can understand why the libertarian is such a fascinating figure for the liberal. It is as if they form a couple, with the libertarian being the trickster and the liberal being the straight man. Together, they represent the fool position. Meanwhile, we wait, we wait patiently, for the arrival of the sage.

Jesus's politics

Every oncet in a while, it is a good thing to think about Jesus.
I read a typically odious oped by that typically odious neo-con, Pascal Bruckner, in the Sunday Le Monde, and I thought of this post I wrote a while ago in my blog. This is the reason I like Jesus more than creepy Nouvelles Philosophes:

Jesus’ politics.

As the few who have actually read the Gospels know, Jesus said relatively little about sex. For him, it was a thing that occurred in the structure of families. Jesus didn’t much like families. He was only half joking when he said that he had no patience for him who didn’t hate his mother. He thought if you entered into a marriage, that was the end of it – no divorce for you. Of course, marriage, back in Jesus' day, wasn't the love match it is today, but an exchange between parents and clans in which the individuals exchanged had little say. So this is a hard saying to understand -- was it a way of warning men not to desert their wives and children?

In any case, he looked upon the marriage and family racket as hopelessly perverting -- there'd be no giving and taking of wives and husbands in the Kingdom of Heaven.

On the other hand, Jesus had numerous opinions about wealth. He unequivocally thought that the wealthy would not be in the kingdom of heaven. He thought that they were scanty in their sacrifices, and pushy in their lives, and in general a diabolical nuisance. Just getting wealthy, Jesus thought, probably entailed doing things that would send you to Hell. He had no hesitation about saying so. When a rich man came to him who had sacrificed much of his wealth, Jesus famously said that it was harder for the rich to get to heaven than for the camel to get through the eye of a needle. This saying is one that the most literal American fundamentalist suddenly gets all liberal about. But the meaning is made clear by what Jesus did before he made that comment – he clearly thought that the rich man hadn’t given enough. He hadn’t really destroyed his wealth.

While there is, currently, a great deal of kowtowing to a bunch of pissants who call themselves Christian in contemporary American culture, one can be confident that, if Jesus is within the ballpark of being right, most of the Christian right, from George Bush to Pat Robertson, are going straight to hell. It isn’t really even a close call. All are wealthy. All retain their wealth in the face of a world in which masses starve. All have let these people starve during the whole course of their lives. Some, such as Pat Robertson, have acquired their wealth through such bloody associations that they are obviously immoral. But Jesus really didn’t make a lot of distinctions here. Gays are never condemned by Jesus. The wealthy are, time and time again. As for the clergy that coddles the wealthy and themselves become rich, they are what Jesus called Whited Sepulcres, filthy on the inside. Among the certainly and for sure damned, one can spot some easy prey: the creators of the Left Behind series (sin against the holy ghost, wealth), Dr. James Dobson (wealth, refusal to visit those in prison, definitely on the left side of the Son when he judges the quick and the dead), Newt Gingrich (are you kidding me) and many others who are going to go where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. It is, of course, Limited Inc’s burden that, as an atheist, we are probably ending up spending the afterlife with a bunch of yahoo evangelical leaders. Just our luck. Many of these men are under the misapprehension that Jesus gives his unconditional approval to heterosexuality, confusing viagra with virtue. Jesus made know his contempt for the family whenever he got a chance; his contempt for the mere industriousness that leads to wealth (behold the lilies of the field), his contempt for profiteers on the poor (you have made my father’s house into a den of thieves), etc. As for the collectivity of Congress, they have as little chance of making it to heaven as a vampire bat has of winning best in show at your local kennel club. If there is one crowd that has beast written on their foreheads, it is this one. Hopeless, from the divine point of view.

However, as George Bernard Shaw pointed out long ago, hardly anybody believes Jesus anymore, especially Christians. Shaw said that Christians are, almost to a man, followers of Barabbas: worshippers of ostentatious power, self-pitying about their cruelties, absolutely unable to sympathize with those lower than them if they aren’t allowed, at the same time, to strip those lower than them of all dignity – in other words, cannibals and freaks and the usual good booboisie you see buying steaks in the grocery store. Shaw thought certain of Jesus’ communistic ideas might work in today’s society. We don’t. That is, as a majoritarian stance, what Jesus taught leads to chaos and cruelty. The Grand Inquisitor is right about that. But as a minority stance, here and there, it is an experiment well worth doing.

The Kantian baby

The Kantian baby – imagine that there is such a thing for a moment – exemplifies corporeally the Critique of Pure Reason. Reason is, as anyone who has hung around babies knows, the mouth, which anything can enter that the baby can reach and pull. It obeys the purely formal law of its size.  If it were big enough, the baby would put a car, a street, its parents, the house, or the sky in it. But it isn’t that big, so the baby puts in, say, the tip of the tail of the cloth green cat, or – if the parent isn’t wary – the circular wooden bead, or the rounded end of the rectangular parental pinky. It is here that synthetic aprioris are born, and they will proceed to dance like fairies around the baby’s cradle, in a fusion of now and shape, lulling him to sleep. But as we have already mentioned, the supreme bliss of reason depends on reaching and pulling. On, in fact, picking – that supreme tool of understanding, analysis, which resides in the hand. Picking and grasping – this is what the hand does (English, in its genius, even makes grasping synonymous with understanding. Henry James’ characters may look like Edwardian adults, but they, like babies, are always “grasping” mentally; it is a word that he loves, as though the hand’s warmth were needed to fight through the verbal fog which his characters so often pull over themselves). Admittedly, the picking is hesitant at first, and what the eye and body seem to aim at – here’s the pacifier, here’s the squeaky toy – is often not what the hand lands on. Instead, the hand frankly stutters there as it is in the full force of its arc towards the object, and instead what do we have? We have the edge of the blanket, we have a pen, we have the ear of the green frog doll (or is it a frog? With that cat’s ear?). But gradually the hand and the incredibly delicate fingers get better at the whole hand eye coordination thing, and then we pick – we pick the little chain of links of the earring or necklace, we pick and grasp and pull the handle of the coffee cup (sending it on a fatal, romantic dive towards its one true love, the keyboard of your computer). These are picked out of the continuum, grasped, pulled. Oh insatiable fingers!

Of course, reason rules – the fingers pick in order to raise the thing picked to the mouth, which opens in all innocence, naively, hopefully. Reason is a dreamer. But as we  look back, we are amazed at all the picking we’ve done, our miner’s work on the continuum. The continuum, however, is vast, our equipment is disproportionate to the world it is set loose in, and in the end we have picked up so few things, even metaphorically, that we will probably die longing, our fingers wrapped about one more shape – a plastic tube, the fringe of a polyester/cotton coverlet. Still, I admire that instinct for picking and grasping. I honor it here, as much as I can, in these sentences.