Marx and paradise

In  volume 41 of the old Marx Engels Werke, which gathers together Marx’s scraps and trivia (the stuff he carved on his school desk, the limerick he made about a fellow gymnasium student, the boxtops he sent off for a secret decoder ring, etc.)  there is a passage in a gloss on Schelling which concerns the existence of God. This is one of the rare times Marx explicitly talks about old Noboddaddy.  He does so in the most bored manner possible, showing briefly why no proof for the existence of God has ever or will ever work, with all the passion of a page out of Atheism for Dummies.
So: God is not very important in Marx’s critique of religion. Nor, surprisingly, is the church, or priestcraft. If it as if this, too, which had an urgency in the French revolution, is all settled now. Or at least it isn’t primary.
What is primary is paradise.
Marx is fascinated by the anthropological fact that societies have dreamed up an image of utopia which is the exact negative of society as it is lived. I think it is interesting to contrast Marx, here,  with Nietzsche, who tread on the same territory forty some years later. Nietzsche as far as I know never read Marx, but he shares a vocabulary with the Critique. He also shares an interest in eschatology – but he emphasizes the exactly opposite anthropological fact, which is the popular dream of hell. For Nietzsche, hell reveals the true secret of slave morality, its cosmic resentment. For Marx, paradise reveals the secret of what the vast majority of society, the laboring obscure, thought of the society they supported with their labor: that it would be good only if it was utterly changed.
It is this aspect of Marx’s critique that is obscured by the opium wisecrack, which casts too great a shadow over this essay, which begins on the anthropological note:
For Germany, the critique of religion is essentially over, and the critic of religion is the presupposition of all critique.
After is heavenly oratio pro aris et focis is contradicted, the profane existence of the error is compromised. Man, who, seeking the Overman in the fantasmal reality of heaven has found only the reflection (widerschein) of himself, will no longer be inclined to to find only the semblence (Schein) of himself, the Un-person, where he is seeking, and must be seeking, his real circumstances.”

rhetoric and revolution

I have a tremendous future thesis about Marx’s style curled up in my mind, sleeping and issuing yelps like an old  hunting dog dreaming of its glory days. One day, I will eventually write it down in a severely truncated form, where it will flow over three pages max. I’m not a long distance runner, scholarship-wise.

Here are the previews of this exciting and never to be completed future project: Marx’s style, as I would like to prove, is where we see the actual form of dialectical materialism in practice. Or, to put it another way, Marx discovered at an early point in his career that reversal is a tremendous power. Turning things inside out and upside down, wrenching the lines of ownership inscribed in the genetive and the lines of power inscribed in the accusative and dative,  one could truly say that in Marx’s work, rhetoric precedes revolution. He sinks into the regimes of ownership and of power that are his target – as he puts it somewhere in the Grundrisse – allows him to come out of those regimes through a pass that fundamentally alters our view of them.

Perhaps – and this is the kind of semi-psychoanalytical speculation that hovers near fiction, but what the fuck – perhaps Marx’s feeling for reversal is his replay of a crucial moment in his childhood: the moment when he was baptised. Or rather, the moment when his father converted his household from Judaism to Christianity. Apparently his mother resisted this decision for a while, but finally agreed to it. To reverse that baptism did not mean, for Marx, becoming Jewish again. Instead, he became something other than the Jew and the Christian, or at least that was the project.  It is here, trying to reverse an essential surrender, that Marx stumbles upon the principle of negativity. The way forward and the way backwards are contained in one self-identical way, according to common sense, which seeks, thus, to squelch the power of inversion. This is not the case with Marx.  He embraces negativity fiercely in  order not to become the dupe of either positivism or a naïve belief in progress – while still trying to found a “universal history.”

To Anglo-American thinkers, steeped in the culture of common sense, Marx’s reversals can simply seem crabby or crooked, a matter of rhetorical excess that is vaguely alluded to by the term “prophetic” . The first task for these thinkers is to straighten Marx out, get a clear position of the case so we can properly “go forward”.

Perhaps I am making too much of the effect of conversion – although I can’t resist pointing out that there is a line of great German polemicists – Heine, Marx, and Karl Kraus – who all used thundering reversals as their grand trope, and who all were converted Jews. Converted to fit with a society that was always hostile to Jews. Make of this what you will. 

Germany: a third world tale

Michael Loewy calls the Critique “pre-Marxist” because it was written before Marx had absorbed the lesson of the French socialists that class struggle was the fulcrum of society. I can see Loewy’s point, but the essay not only carries the essential voice of Marx – his way of mixing the prophetic and the sarcastic in his most characteristic rhetorical ploy, inverting relations – but it also expresses  Marx’s concern about the place of modernity in universal history – a history that he tried to write in the Grundrisse.  For us, one of the great interests in the piece is that Marx treats Germany as a ‘pre-modern’ country – essentially as a piece of the third world. Marx is the spirit that haunts all post-colonial discourse for good reason – he founded it. Or at least, he was one of the people who gave it shape.

There’s a historical school that claims that Germany’s history did not travel the path of modernity like other European countries. The Sonderweg school is associated with the right, but there is some truth in it for the left as well. At least for Marx, Germany was a lesson in underdevelopment.  Unlike the Sonderweg historians, Marx doesn’t take Germany to be more “authentic” in its struggle with modernity – rather, he takes it to be politically and culturally half-made in an interesting way: one can see, in the forces that fail to synthesis into civil society and industrial capitalism in Germany, the forces that are in operation in the so-called “modern” societies. For Marx, these societies have not come to rest in modernity; they, too, are fractured. The ancien regime might have been overturned, Marx says, but it exists in the unconscious as a trauma with multiple effects on everyday life.

It is in this situation that Marx wants us to think about religion. 

Marx's IED: religion, modernity, the west, all that shit...

Out of all the phrases in Marx’s  1844 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the one that has stuck is: “religion is the opium of the people.” Careless readers – and aren’t we all? – have a Jack Horner like tendency to stick our thumb in the pie and pull out a plumb, destroying the pie’s structure, the cooking that went into it, its mix of tastes.  In this case, to collapse Marx’s essay into this one plumb is an act of barbarity. 

Marx was in his young twenties at the time he wrote the essay – later, as a middle aged man with persistent sores that kept him bedridden in agony, he learned to appreciate the power of opium, which is not a little thing. But the opium crack is only one of the comparisons to which religion gives rise. These comparisons are expressed in the exuberant style favored by a certain Berlin crowd that liked to be  scratchin Hegel and Heine. There’s a study by Bercovitch of the American Jeremiad as an essential American style – the essential style of modernity in Germany, from Lichtenberg to Brecht, echoes with this Berlin  tone. It is repulsive to a certain Anglo-American sensibility – I think the general sense is still in agreement with one of Marx’s glossers, Donald Kelley, who wrote that Marx’s essay contained “no poetry” and a “large amount of convoluted and ill humored philosophizing.” I think, on the contrary, that this may be the most Heine-like of Marx’s essays. Its style is not separate from its argument – which may well be the object of revulsion by Anglo-Americans who have traded style for specialization and thus distrust rhetoric as the mark of the amateur.  The poetry, here, has to be seen as a sort of futuristic act – to be anachronistic. Marinetti, though, would have appreciated Marx’s phrase that critique should not be an anatomical scalpel, but a weapon.  In fact, the weapon Marx devised in this oddly gay romp is rather like our old friend, the improvised explosive devise. It is a combination of deadly technologies tied together on the spot, in the midst of everyday life, and meant to explode both the façade of ‘modern’ society and the, in Marx’s view, ‘pre-modern’ level of society in Germany.

I think it is a good piece to read in the light of the Charlie Hebdo murders and the response to them, especially (and perhaps provincially ) by the high hats of the American left and the lowdowns of the street.

So I think this is what I will do for a while.

Reflection after solidarity with Charlie Hebdo

After solidarity, reflection. I’ve noticed two tendencies in the responses to the mass murder of the Charlie hebdo artists. The first is pretty much the total theme of Andrew Hussey’s rather astringent column in the NYT. According to this theme, the journal went too far. Hussey enlivens the usual complaint by pursuing two different and contradictory complaints. One is that they were past their shelf life, old 68s – as he points out, Wolinski was guilty of being 80. Hussey implies that 80 was about the median age of the editorial board to make the point that this irresponsible May spirit has now been totally discredited. The other complaint, though, makes them totally relevant, creating threats to the French abroad and being hated by the whole of the immigant banlieux.

Hussey sees, with justice, that the immigrant banlieux have a lot to justly complain about.  The other tendency, which one expected – such being the moronic inferno of this world – is that Charlie Hebdo was defending our civilization. With the implication that there is another thing outside our civilization, which is a buncha murderous Islamofascists who need to be taught a good lesson.

We don’t really have to dwell too long on the assimilation of Charlie Hebdo to the rightwing imperialist shitheads. It was a magazine of satire that devoted itself to a violent anticlericalism that was anything but friendly to “our civilization”. I think they would have agreed with a bon mot attributed to Brecht that civilization is such a good idea we should try it some time.

The first criticism is more interesting. In a sense, I think  my problem with Charlie Hebdo’s bare bummed Mohammeds and such is that they did not go far enough. Being anti-clerical, I think, blinded them to the deeper level of humor to be derived from the utterly hypocritical coordination of the “west” and the “Islamic fanatics.” In truth, what we have seen for the last eighty years is the cultivation, for quite cynical reasons, of a form of Islam dominant in the Arabian peninsula. That form of Islam is a product of the nineteenth century, not of the seventh century. Its aim is to dominate and purge the Islamic world of the thousands of intersecting Islamic sects. In this, it was, until the 1960s, successful only in the restricted area of the Arabian peninsula, and not even thoroughly there. But what happened then is that the west decided that these powers would be very useful in the two-fold task of fighting Arabic Nationalism and Middle Eastern communism.

And thus began the hilariously sick comedy of the Western double standard: human rights for, say, totalitarian Russia, and cat licks and giggles for totalitarian Saudi Arabia. In the late seventies, with Iran becoming undone, the West had a new enemy, and agreed, as though this were the best thing in the world, to turn a blind eye as the Gulf states, flush with cash, planted and surplanted Mosques throughout the world. The first target of those mosques was… other mosques. Centuries old traditions and cults were brutally attacked. In the nineties, one saw this in, for instance, Chechnya, a country were the predominant Sufi Moslems became the victims of their so called allies, Moslem paramilitaries financed by Saudi Arabia, who tried to institute the thing called “radical Islamic rule” – except of course when that is the rule of our oil producing allies.

By never going beyond Mohammed’s bare bum, Charlie Hebdo failed to exploit the riches of the sinister and farcical alliance. Take, for instance, last year. The French foreign ministry was in a lather about civil rights in Putin’s Russia. It is a place where a tax avoiding but democracy talking billionaire doesn’t have a chance! Meanwhile, of course, in Saudi Arabia, France’s ally, there was a beheading  and anti-witchcraft campaign going on, with at least forty guest workers, mostly from Indonesia, mostly maids, sitting on death row for casting spells. Remember when Qaddaffi kidnapped the Belgian nurses? That was a crime against humanity. But Saudi Arabia, oh, well, can’t fuck up the oil supply, can we?  The French Foreign minister, Fabius, has spoken out about Pussy Riot and extended best wishes to Khodorkovski, but when it comes to Ati Abeh Inan, the Indonesian maid who spent ten years on death row in Saudi Arabia for witchcraft, silence at the Matignon.  I would think here is the tender spot for placing a little comic dynamite. But I think this was beyond the vision of Charlie Hebdo – it was where they didn’t go. It would be going too far, after all, to basically mock the West for complicity in the murders of Indonesian guest workers by our allies, or for trampling into Bahrain, or for supplying all the money in the world to the Islamic  “radicals”.  Drive a car, and support an ISIS paramilitary for another day – this is of course what it comes down to. 

Still,  you targets what you can hit, as they say. They were a nervy band and their absense is a huge hole, into which, as we know, imbeciles and cretins from the right will be crawling for a long time. 

academics, charlatans, and the mystery of what we learn

In the 2000s, while I wasn’t looking, a lot of work was done on Bakhtin’s life. And that work crashed down one sancrosanct image after another, since it turned out that Bakhtin was quiet a creative liar about his own life. For instance, he gave a couple of stories to interviewers about his education, tracing his path from the University of Odessa to the University at St. Petersburg. Alas, it turns out this path was taken by another Bakhtin, his brother. Nikolai. Mikhail Bakhtin also alluded to stints at German univesities, borrowing the C.V., this time, of his friend Kagan Matvei Kagan.

More substantially, Bakhtin sometimes seemed to indicate that he had written certain works by certain of his friends, notably Voloshinov’s Marxism and and the Philosophy of Language and Medvedev’s The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship. Such was the hype about Bakhtin in the late seventies and eighties that Bakhtin’s name was actually put on some editions of these books. Brian Poole, who made the most thorough study of the matter, unequivocally denies Bakhtin authorship. Poole also discovered that Bakthin sometimes incorporated pages of other texts, notably Cassirer’s, into some of his writing without acknowledging the source – or, in other words, plagiarizing him.  Brian Poole, for instance, finds a whole page of Cassirer’s book about Renaissance philosophy incorporated into Bakhtin’s Rabelais book, where Cassirer is not even cited. Wierdly enough, nobody seemed to notice this until the later nineties. These issues are confused partly by the fact that Bakhtin inspired a cult – a cult so powerful that one Russian critic closed to him mocked the very idea that we could or could not prove Bakhtin’s authorship of Voloshinov and Medvedev’s works by comparing it to trying to scientifically prove that God exists. The cult definitely extended to the U.S. – the first wave of Bakhtin’s reception in the U.S. was urged on by scholars like Michael Holquist, who practically made Bakhtin out to be a saint.  By the end of the nineties, as Bakhtin’s papers and those of his circle became available, you have people like the man in charge of the Bakhtin center, David Shepherd, saying, well, we have to allow for the fact that Bakhtin may have been a charlatan.

I’m not sure what I think about the new Bakhtin. He is certainly different from the answer to all critical problems enthusiastically wheeled out for me by some UT professors in the 1980s. On the one hand, I feel for the descendents of  Voloshinov and Medvedev, who have not appreciated at all the idea that some of the most creative works of their ancestor are included in an edition of “masked”  works by Bakhtin. On the other hand, scoundrel scholars, brilliant ones, are always more interesting once the myths come down. If Paul de Man had been a brilliant little Belgian nerd who’d gone up the same scholarly ladder as everyone else, he would certainly never have received the biography treatment – it was that he wrote opportunistically anti-semitic things for a Nazi leaning paper in occupied Belgian, defrauded a publishing house and fled to Argentina, apparently committed bigamy by marrying in the U.S. and did not pass any examinations at all on his way to tenure – he apparently had a neuroses that made him fail all exams – that attracts our attention. Bakhtin has often been used to construct a rosy utopia that we can all believe in without thinkin’ about the nasty class struggle, and I’m not too down with that – but he was undoubtedly brilliant. That he borrowed a lot of his scholarship from German sources that he never acknowledged would be a pretty damning thing if he hadn’t done more with those borrowings.

Still, it is worth considering that the texts that are both taught to students in colleges and asked about on their exams are often by fakers, moochers, plagiarists, and people who, themselves, froze up at the thought of exams. It is a sign of something. A mystery. 

kaelism and grand budapest hotel

I went to the see the Grand Budapest Hotel last year. I liked it, but I can’t say that the pleasure of the experience induced any kind of critical afterlife in me – I forgot it almost immediately. Except for the Royal Tennenbaums, all of Wes Anderson’s films have this effect on me.

So I was surprised by the virulent criticism of The Grand Budapest Hotel and Wes Anderson in general that was published in the Jacobin a couple weeks ago. Although the film left me without any compulsion to think about it after I walked out of the the rancid butter smell of the lobby, turned to A., and asked her where she wanted to go to dinner, the screed against Anderson did make me think an old thought, which I could entitle the problem with Kaelism.

Kaelism, as Pauline Kael, the movie critic, practiced it, is a critical form that concentrates firstly on the audience that one imagines is being enticed to a movie, or enjoys it; secondly, on what other critics have said about the movie; and only thirdly on the thing itself. It is envious of those pleasures it cannot participate in. It is exclusive about those pleasures it does experience. It is an amalgam of uninformed sociology and prejudice, and at its best creating negative images of what it dislikes. 

Of course, seeing a film or reading a book or any entertainment experience will have a moment of distinction – a moment in which the experience becomes more important for what it says about the audience for the entertainment. What it says, here, is very much refracted by the person making the judgment. To give an example: one of my worst movie experiences ever was seeing Horrible Bosses 1, or I think it was !. The film was so bad, to me, that it really embarrassed me. I could hardly bear to see what was happening on the screen. Because I’d come to see it with a group of people, I couldn’t just walk out. So I concentrated on hating the audience, because clearly, the audience, in the great majority, was loving it. They were howling with laughter.

Now, I had no intention or desire to review that movie. But if I did, according to my reviewer’s creed, I’d have to give up my notion that the audience was a buncha idiots. In fact, they were having fun and I wasn’t – but I can’t really hold that against them. Kaelism, however, allows me to wreak my revenge on them by triangulating from the film to the audience, and review the audience into the film.

The problem is, of course, that I don’t know that audience, except through some drive by sociological generalisations.  I can’t go all formalist and pretend that there isn’t an audience, but if I am going to talk about the audience, if it is the medium to the medium I am supposedly reviewing, I should make an effort to see them without falling prey to cliché.

So onto the review, by Eileen Jones, in the Jacobin.

Jones begins her review by saying that death is central to Anderson’s work. What central means, however, is pretty unclear. She says there a lot of death, or death becomes the motivation for certain action sequences, or wraps up the film – but I am not sure that this makes death central, as, for instance you could say it was central in many Bergman films.

On this death trip, she plunges into her cry against the whole Wes Anderson thing:

“Consider that Anderson kills a beloved animal for laughs in almost every film. Usually it’s a dog, but in The Grand Budapest Hotel he switches it up and kills a cat. The corpse is carried away by his loving owner inside an impromptu bag made out of fine-looking cloth marred by a single, artful blotch of blood. Then the owner, played by Jeff Goldblum with his usual self-amused irony, passes a garbage can on the street and abruptly tosses the bag into it with a slapstick comedy thump.

It was at that moment that I became officially sick of Wes Anderson, and of the gleeful laughter in the theater that accompanies every Wes Anderson-ish move he makes. The audience even anticipates the move he’s going to make and begins guffawing ahead of time, just to be sure to appear maximally Wes-savvy.”

It is that last sentence that rubbed me the wrong way. It seems to me that every comedy exists by creating the anticipation of mirth. It is the rhythm of comedy – a comedy that made you laugh thoughtfully, and only when the joke or gag was finished, would not be a funny film at all. That the audience was gleeful, and began guffawing ahead of time, means, simply, that the audience took the film to be a comedy. I could say the same thing of Horrible Bosses, or Duck Soup, or Medicin malgre lui, or Midsummer Night’s Dream.

What  is really happening here is revealed by the term Wes-savvy. The audience is being reviewed through the film. And the audience is unbearably hip. They are hipsters. They think they are cool. They are the type of people who think disposing of a beloved animal in a trash can is funny, except perhaps not in real life, perhaps, because there it probably isn’t cool. 

I’ve mentioned the sociological problem with reviewing the audience – the aesthetic problem is that audiences are pretty, well, reactive. They laugh, or they don’t, they are silent, or they aren’t, but my bet is that anybody watching a film of an audience watching a film (in this thought experiment, the sound track of the film being watched would have to be muffled) would have a hard time knowing what film the audience was watching. Audiences, in other words, aren’t mirrors of films.

Jones ostensibly larger point is that the poisoned political motive of Anderson’s films comes out in the way that fascism is defanged, de-historicized and miniaturized in the film. Which is all true. But this is almost always true, in one way or another, of American films featuring fascist bad guys.  Jones scores one fair hit, which is a genuine piece of non-Kaelism:

“Anderson’s film evokes several classic ones by talented writer/directors trained in the pre-Fascist German film industry who managed to get out in time, such as Ernst Lubitsch (Trouble in Paradise,To Be Or Not to Be), Max Ophuls (Letter From an Unknown Woman,Earrings of Madame D. . .) and Emeric Pressburger (working with British partner Michael Powell on The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp).

All created characters featuring a remarkable zest for life in the form of fine food, broad-minded sex, and witty conversation combined with excellent manners and admirable toughness. Lubitsch and Pressburger engaged directly in anti-fascist film propaganda by presenting fond portraits of such endangered Good Europeans. M. Gustave is clearly meant to join this pantheon, announcing himself as the last vestige of civilization in “this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.

Only here’s the problem: Wes Anderson’s Old Europe is just like a modern Andersonian world we know so well, mannered, decorative and nostalgic, with slight additional flourishes in the form of fancier pastries and adorable funiculars for traveling up and down cartoon-cute mountains. Newly fascist Europe on the rise looks to be wonderfully Wes-like, only with slightly severer uniforms.”

Undoubtedly it is true that  fascist Europe is wonderfully Wes-like – that is, that it is buffoonishly stylized. But is it a criticism of the  films she mentions that they look wonderfully Lubitsch-ish, or Pressburgerish, or Ophuls-ish? Sure, they have an extra authenticity, but this is  because, after all, they were dealing with fascism as a contemporary and dangerous event. Anderson isn’t; in fact, the villains exist to topple the doll house, or at least threaten to. In as much as fascism is a much bigger and nastier thing than this, Anderson’s film is totally inadequate to portray it. In fact, the aesthetic of fascim has a way of tripping up directors who try to confront it, from Visconti’s the Damned to Cavani’s The Night Porter to, even, Fosse’s Caberet (although Caberet does have its great moments). Anderson simply decided to avoid the whole issue by making fascism a Ruritanian farce. I’m not sure whether using this bat upside Anderson’s head is the damning criticism that Jones takes it to be – from another point of view, the creation of these toy boxes is a way of disclaiming, rightly,  any attempt to understand fascism on a deeper level. American directors, with their fetish for WWII, don’t often display this humility.

Still, I don’t think Jones’s hatred for Wes’s work, which the review officially proclaims, is due to his insufficient or ever reactionary politics so much as for the Wes-savvy audience she associates with him, and that seems, by association, to be the type of people who giggle at easy ironies. The Indie film audience, in other words.

I don’t have a lot of sympathy for that audience, I’ll admit. For one thing, I, too, am not into easy ironies. I want massive, upfront tedium in a film, ironclad boredom, minutes dripping by as the camera slowly pans, say, a white wall, or a rain puddle. I want things to be hard, goddamn it! But I’m not a monk. I don’t mind things that are easy. I do mind not wrestling a bit with how one’s feeling about an audience effects or should effect one’s feeling for the film. I am not a fan of Kaelism.