...you really ought to be read this. I will probably be wrestling with this for a while.
As a side note, Maturana and Varela, cited for concepts from their Tree of Knowledge, are significant influences on Kravchenko in his work Sign, Meaning, Knowledge, which I have made comments on earlier in this blog.
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Essays on the New Working Class, Serge Mallet
Given the importance I put on the transformation of the labor process, I am ashamed to say that I have never read this book before. It has been on my shelves for the better part of two years and only now am I getting to it. Well, it has certainly been worth the wait. This is an amazing bit of work and confirms and develops what I had already begun to draw out thank to Hans-Dieter Bahr's crucial work.
However, as in all things, timing is everything. I spent several years trying to decipher Bahr's essay but it was only after finally coming to grips with Moishe Postone's time, Labor, and Social Domination that it clicked in my head. So too I find myself reading Mallet's book just as I have picked up this brilliant kernel of thought in Jehu's recent essays, noted in the prior post. Mallet's discussion of the transformation of the labor process, of the production process, makes much more sense if one considers it as the progressive separation of the activity of the individual from the fulfillment of the needs of the individual. It also goes along with Postone's analysis, where for him the contradiction of capital today expresses itself as the contradiction between the value-form and the imposition of wage-labor as the means to satisfy one's needs, and the amazing capacity to produce material wealth far beyond what capital can valorize. The way Mallet poses the problem has implicit in it a notion of a change in the actuality of the class relation, or the class antagonism. This is then reinforced by Jehu's expression of the class antagonism: "The antagonism between the needs of the worker and her activity cannot be overcome" within capital. The contradiction finds it expression in the fact that worker exists in the class relation as "variable capital", but is also a person in need of reproducing herself. Mallet gives detailed expression to the progressive disconnection of the worker's activity from his own existence in the labor process.
He does point to how for a certain layer, there is a re-skilling due to the production of the means of production by the direct application of science and the technical requirements of those who maintain this means, but there is also the gap between this layer and those who use the means to perform the task. He discusses this progressive reduction of the production worker to an 'operator' or 'supervisor' (in English the more common idea would be of a machine 'tender' since 'supervisor' has other connotations.)
The current tendency of the subjectivization of labor, which involves the identification of the worker with the determination of what kind of work they ought to be doing expresses part of the contradiction this creates. The manager no longer provides the plan or exactly tells the worker what to do. The technical worker is expected to themselves define what they ought to be doing. While there is an element of horror in this process, where the worker is expected to self-identify as self-managed or even self-employed, it would also seem to indicate the increasing irrelevance of management outside of dealing with the hierarchy of power (at that point, a wholly incestuous task), determining the budget for different areas to maximize profits, and to hire and fire, that is, to enforce labor discipline. In response the worker feels to no small degree that they have to work at cross-purposes to the incompetence and cupidity of management. The exemplary cultural artifact of this conflict is the comic strip Dilbert.
Overall, I feel that the critique of value has got to be brought into contact with the conceptualization of the labor process if it is to escape the scholastic dead-end of miserable battles over price and crisis, that is, it has to escape from the confines of "economics". Bahr, Mallet, Gorz, Linhart, and a host of other works are necessary material for the revival of critical theory, just as these by themselves become mere sociology without the critique of the value-form and labor.
However, as in all things, timing is everything. I spent several years trying to decipher Bahr's essay but it was only after finally coming to grips with Moishe Postone's time, Labor, and Social Domination that it clicked in my head. So too I find myself reading Mallet's book just as I have picked up this brilliant kernel of thought in Jehu's recent essays, noted in the prior post. Mallet's discussion of the transformation of the labor process, of the production process, makes much more sense if one considers it as the progressive separation of the activity of the individual from the fulfillment of the needs of the individual. It also goes along with Postone's analysis, where for him the contradiction of capital today expresses itself as the contradiction between the value-form and the imposition of wage-labor as the means to satisfy one's needs, and the amazing capacity to produce material wealth far beyond what capital can valorize. The way Mallet poses the problem has implicit in it a notion of a change in the actuality of the class relation, or the class antagonism. This is then reinforced by Jehu's expression of the class antagonism: "The antagonism between the needs of the worker and her activity cannot be overcome" within capital. The contradiction finds it expression in the fact that worker exists in the class relation as "variable capital", but is also a person in need of reproducing herself. Mallet gives detailed expression to the progressive disconnection of the worker's activity from his own existence in the labor process.
He does point to how for a certain layer, there is a re-skilling due to the production of the means of production by the direct application of science and the technical requirements of those who maintain this means, but there is also the gap between this layer and those who use the means to perform the task. He discusses this progressive reduction of the production worker to an 'operator' or 'supervisor' (in English the more common idea would be of a machine 'tender' since 'supervisor' has other connotations.)
The current tendency of the subjectivization of labor, which involves the identification of the worker with the determination of what kind of work they ought to be doing expresses part of the contradiction this creates. The manager no longer provides the plan or exactly tells the worker what to do. The technical worker is expected to themselves define what they ought to be doing. While there is an element of horror in this process, where the worker is expected to self-identify as self-managed or even self-employed, it would also seem to indicate the increasing irrelevance of management outside of dealing with the hierarchy of power (at that point, a wholly incestuous task), determining the budget for different areas to maximize profits, and to hire and fire, that is, to enforce labor discipline. In response the worker feels to no small degree that they have to work at cross-purposes to the incompetence and cupidity of management. The exemplary cultural artifact of this conflict is the comic strip Dilbert.
Overall, I feel that the critique of value has got to be brought into contact with the conceptualization of the labor process if it is to escape the scholastic dead-end of miserable battles over price and crisis, that is, it has to escape from the confines of "economics". Bahr, Mallet, Gorz, Linhart, and a host of other works are necessary material for the revival of critical theory, just as these by themselves become mere sociology without the critique of the value-form and labor.
Monday, April 8, 2013
Communism is the real movement
Jehu has posted a a very interesting piece on his RE: The People blog and I want to bring attention to a very specific point in it:
"The needs of the worker versus the activity of the worker
"The needs of the worker versus the activity of the worker
In the negotiations, the worker now sits across the table from her activity (capital) and proposes this labor must take her needs into account. By definition capital (which is only her activity) cannot exist unless her needs as an individual form no part of this activity. On the other hand, the association of the workers proceeds solely from their needs, not from their activity (capital). Since their needs form no part of their activity (capital), these needs must confront their activity as an external subject (association). At the same time the activity of the workers appears subjectless, an autonomous process antagonistic to the actors themselves.
On one side of the table is the “subject”, the worker, who thinks she can negotiate with the “subjectless” process sitting across from her, capital. She thinks, in other words, she can negotiate with her own labor (capital). But this is only one side of the equation — the association of wage labor — this is the external manifestation or expression. Everybody focuses on this side because this is the visible, obvious, side of the relation. On the other side, sits the capital. The needs of the workers plays no role in its activity; it is solely concerned with the subjectless activity of self-expansion. When the needs of the workers confront the capital, through their association, these needs appear external to it — because they really are. The needs of the workers can only appear as external — as wages, as a cost of production — while the activity of the workers appears as the activity of the capital.
Some writers will admit there is no “necessary” relation between the needs of the workers and their activity — but this is ambiguous and misleading. It makes it appear as if there can be a relation between the association of the workers and capital or that this relation is established through the struggle between the two classes. There is, in fact, no relation at all between the needs of the workers (association) and their activity (capital) — none whatsoever. It is important to emphasize the point that in capitalism the needs of the workers play no role whatsoever in the activity of the capital.
This is true not because the capitalist is greedy — which he may very well be — but because capital is, from its very inception, a communist movement of society. Most communists do not realize the higher stage of communism is exactly the point where there is no longer any connection at all between the activity of the worker and her needs. This bizarre outcome can be restated in a more familiar fashion. Communism is that point where society operates according to the principle:
“From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”.
In other words, society operates according to the principle that the needs of the individual have no connection to their contribution to the social labor of the community. This communist form of society would be impossible unless capitalism already contained the germ of this mode of existence. For this reason, labor theory assumes that with the emergence of capitalism, the material premise of communism already exists. It exists in the form of the wage labor relation itself, which severs the needs of the worker (association) from her activity (capital)."
The part I noted in italics is crucial, not only for the theoretical understanding of communism, but for understanding the current development of capitalist society and why the forms of struggle that most of the self-described communists/socialists/anarchists are constantly looking for have not appeared, and will not appear, in response to the last 40 years of capitalist development.
I tend to express this development as one where the working class no longer appears as an estate within capitalist society.
Some of the (anti-)political conclusions Jehu and I draw may indeed be quite different, as we have different understandings of the state and politics, but I believe he has grasped and expressed a fundamental point. Today's struggle is not going to satisfactorily express itself in new unions or a revivified capitalism that is 'revolution friendly' with a fundamentally 'revived' working class nor a return to a pre-neoliberal Keynesianism. The dissociation of the needs of the worker from her activity is progressive and irreversible, that is, it not only deepens, but it cannot be undone, nor should we want it to be undone as it is essential to communism.
My concern, and this is where we draw different conclusions vis-a-vis politics, is that capitalism, which cannot help but further this separation, does so at the increasing expense of the majority of the world and communism is by no means an automatic outcome of this process. A political struggle remains against the attempt to impose this separation through the widening global gap between those for whom capital has a place in wage-labor and the increasing mass of those who are utterly redundant, and yet forced to reside within a world constituted by money. That is, there is no movement "back to the land" or "back to small-scale production" or even to "workers' councils", just as there is no "back to the nation state" (Jehu's points here and here are pertinent.) However, what is a political struggle that rejects the state, whether the bourgeois nation state or any kind of so-called "workers' state"?
I have tried to begin to tackle this in earlier posts on the political, so I am not going to rehearse that now as I also have not progressed far from there.
I would also like to note that, in spite of his hostility to John Holloway's conception of class struggle as constitutive, Jehu has put forward one of the most succinct expressions of just such a notion of class struggle.
“Even in times where labor conflict has been at unprecedented historical lows — as in 2007 — capitalism suffers crisis. This crisis is nothing more than the needs of the workers imposing themselves on capital, despite the workers actual submission to capital. It does not matter whether the workers fight or submit, their material needs must impose themselves on capital through a crisis because the material needs of the workers appears as a constituent of the needs of capital itself. The level of labor conflict has nothing to do with this crisis and will assert itself no matter the level of conflict. The needs of the workers are a material precondition for accumulation and cannot be settled at the negotiating table.
What Marxists call the “law of value” is nothing more than the needs of the workers making themselves manifest in capital’s operation as the requirements of capital itself. But here is the twist: The needs in this case are not the needs of the individual workers as individuals, but the needs of the workers as a single social laborer. We can, therefore, assume there are no unions, no rights, no freedoms, no democracy — and this law will still make itself felt. By the same token, unions, right, freedoms, and democracy are one after another abolished in a vain attempt to suppress this law. The law of value cannot be suppressed because the starting point accumulation is that the worker’s activity has nothing to do with her needs — it has nothing to do with forms and level of class conflict…
The antagonism between the needs of the worker and her activity cannot be overcome
The whole capitalist epoch, therefore, is the development of the antagonism between the activity of the worker and satisfaction of her needs. The unexpected conclusion is that once the antagonism emerges it can never be resolved in any other way than communism.”
He also has a very succinct and sharp critique of Holloway's mis-placed criticism of capitalism through the device of "doing vs. done":
“Part of the problem here is that communists describe the capitalist mode of production in completely negative terms, but this is not entirely accurate. Holloway, for instance, describes capital as a relation that breaks the “sociality of doing”. He has it entirely backward, capital does not ‘break the sociality of doing’, it actually creates the material basis for a truly social doing — and communism completes this creation. Capital is actually a revolutionary mode of production, but the revolution takes place at the expense of the worker. Against all previous modes of production it is revolutionary; against the social worker produced by this activity, however, it is an insufficient, historically limited mode of production. In any case, however, capitalism lays the material basis for its own supercession.”
I think this is a valid criticism of Holloway, but that is because he has an ontology of labor, labor as a good thing. There is a reason that, even if Marx said that “labor should become life’s prime want”, he refers in Vol. 3 of Capital to the the realm of necessity as the realm of labor, against the realm of freedom. The dominance of the realm of freedom only happens through the abolition of labor, that is, only when as you say our contribution to social labor and the fulfillment of our needs no longer have a connection.
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Notes on The Culture Industry by T.W. Adorno
I am constantly struck by the overlap between Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse's various critiques of the culture industry and one-dimensional man and Guy Debord's notion of spectacle. I found this affinity once again in reading The Culture Industry, a collection of Adorno's articles by J.M. Bernstein under the heading of the concept first proposed in Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment. The culture industry referred to a specific transformation of capitalist society as a certain threshold was reached in how much capital had fully subsumed all social formation, all social relations, all of the means of thinking against and beyond capital.
If in 1967-8, the Society of the Spectacle still imagined a two-dimensional quality of capitalist society, this would be gone by the time of Comments on the society of the Spectacle with the notion of the "integrated spectacle", which saw the transformation to a one-dimensional world of the sort that Adorno and Marcuse saw as already actual by the end of World War II.
A large part of The Culture Industry, like One-Dimensional Man, is concerned with the harm done to the capacity for experience and the capacity for critique by the development of what Adorno will end up referring to as "late capitalism".
For the moment, I want to focus on the ending two essays, however, which focus on two important themes in Society of the Spectacle: time and the relationship of theory and practice.
"Free Time" focuses on the way in which the time not spent working has been transformed into an adjunct of labor time, time spent preparing to be working. One of the first things Adorno notes is the difference between 'free time' and 'leisure'. Leisure was a lifestyle; one lived "a life of leisure" which indicated a cultured life. 'Free time', however, is just literally the time left over after work (and it does not matter if that work is waged or in the home), time spent recuperating and preparing to do it all over again.
Adorno expands into the activity which comes to absorb free time and it is most definitely not the cultured time of a life of leisure. I think we can leave aside Adorno's examples of listening to radio and watching TV as well worn paths, and we can move directly to MMORPGs or Massively Multi-player Role Playing Games, like World of Warcraft (WoW.) A huge amount of time in the game is spent doing three things: leveling, trading, and repeating quests. All MMORPGs involve leveling, the way a character becomes more powerful, gets new skills and abilities, and in general improves to be able to take on challenges. If this sounds familiar, then you went through the modern school system just like I did. Think of making the top level (there is always a maximum level) as getting your doctorate.
However, your development does not stop by getting to the maximum level. Once there, your goal is to finish quests that require groups of people to complete. These might grant special pieces of equipment or new ranks or special powers, which of course are available to everyone if they are willing to do the same task over and over against, dozens and dozens of times. Considering that these end-of-game-content quests can take anywhere from 3-10 hours apiece and require going in again and again, you literally can spend hundreds of hours in a handful of these quests.
Since money is important in all of these games in one fashion or another, there is the need to sell and trade all of the things you acquire that you do not want. Technically, this also includes learning "crafting skills" that allow you to make not only things you need, but also a large number of items other people need, in return for money.
Finally, and this is a very important component, the game world never really changes. You might get stronger and more powerful and richer, but every quest and every opponent and every opportunity resets. The only things that don't reset are the battles between players. In other words, you might benefit from competing with other people, but the world itself is always the same.
In other words, WoW and other MMORPGs are capitalism's daily life in fantasy form. Not only do they reproduce its conformity, lack of change, tedious repetition, but it trains the mind to enjoy these. Even more so than the average computer game with a finish (although almost all of them today can be replayed), the MMORPG is truly the Nietzschean 'eternal return of the same', and like Nietzsche's uber-mensch, every hero gladly welcomes that return each time, rather than seeking an end to it.
I particularly like his contempt for the do-it-yourself (DIY) culture. Not only does he hit on its amateurishness, but it idolizes this amateurishness. It is an extension of the hobby, something else Adorno finds appalling, and with good reason.
"Resignation" not only picks up a few of these themes, but connects them to the anti-intellectualism of activism. Resignation is the charge hurled by activism as the "disengaged" intellectual. Adorno turns this charge around and shows how the real disengagement comes from the need to be active even when activity amounts to nothing so much as "feeling good about oneself", "feeling part of what is happening", etc. It is the activity of the activist, but also of the group-builder.
Adorno seems to put a special emphasis on the anarchist, but everything he says just as clearly applies to the Marxisante sect. If the DIY culture Adorno excoriates applies to the anarchists (and to many autonomists too), a recruitment culture applies to the socialist sect. The organization in which thought is prohibited or circumscribed by the party program, and there really is no difference in this case between prohibition and limitation, also expects that most of its members fill their time building the organization through recruiting, selling the paper/magazine/whatever, giving talks expressing the party line, etc. The demand for a really effective praxis and that theory conform to and serve first and foremost as a guide to praxis is a demand to kill critical thought.
This does not really do justice to the article. It did make me think of something, however. I find a profound difference between the one-dimensionality thesis and this critique of militantism. One-dimensionality is a kind of Cassandra call (see John Holloway, Open Marxism, Vol. 1 or 3, I don't remember which), a fatalism, but this is radically different. This is a demand for the autonomy or thought, of reason, relative to any immediate practice. It is a challenge to the voluntarism of individuals who would prefer to do than to think and in so doing, do more to reproduce capital than the theorist ever could.
If in 1967-8, the Society of the Spectacle still imagined a two-dimensional quality of capitalist society, this would be gone by the time of Comments on the society of the Spectacle with the notion of the "integrated spectacle", which saw the transformation to a one-dimensional world of the sort that Adorno and Marcuse saw as already actual by the end of World War II.
A large part of The Culture Industry, like One-Dimensional Man, is concerned with the harm done to the capacity for experience and the capacity for critique by the development of what Adorno will end up referring to as "late capitalism".
For the moment, I want to focus on the ending two essays, however, which focus on two important themes in Society of the Spectacle: time and the relationship of theory and practice.
"Free Time" focuses on the way in which the time not spent working has been transformed into an adjunct of labor time, time spent preparing to be working. One of the first things Adorno notes is the difference between 'free time' and 'leisure'. Leisure was a lifestyle; one lived "a life of leisure" which indicated a cultured life. 'Free time', however, is just literally the time left over after work (and it does not matter if that work is waged or in the home), time spent recuperating and preparing to do it all over again.
Adorno expands into the activity which comes to absorb free time and it is most definitely not the cultured time of a life of leisure. I think we can leave aside Adorno's examples of listening to radio and watching TV as well worn paths, and we can move directly to MMORPGs or Massively Multi-player Role Playing Games, like World of Warcraft (WoW.) A huge amount of time in the game is spent doing three things: leveling, trading, and repeating quests. All MMORPGs involve leveling, the way a character becomes more powerful, gets new skills and abilities, and in general improves to be able to take on challenges. If this sounds familiar, then you went through the modern school system just like I did. Think of making the top level (there is always a maximum level) as getting your doctorate.
However, your development does not stop by getting to the maximum level. Once there, your goal is to finish quests that require groups of people to complete. These might grant special pieces of equipment or new ranks or special powers, which of course are available to everyone if they are willing to do the same task over and over against, dozens and dozens of times. Considering that these end-of-game-content quests can take anywhere from 3-10 hours apiece and require going in again and again, you literally can spend hundreds of hours in a handful of these quests.
Since money is important in all of these games in one fashion or another, there is the need to sell and trade all of the things you acquire that you do not want. Technically, this also includes learning "crafting skills" that allow you to make not only things you need, but also a large number of items other people need, in return for money.
Finally, and this is a very important component, the game world never really changes. You might get stronger and more powerful and richer, but every quest and every opponent and every opportunity resets. The only things that don't reset are the battles between players. In other words, you might benefit from competing with other people, but the world itself is always the same.
In other words, WoW and other MMORPGs are capitalism's daily life in fantasy form. Not only do they reproduce its conformity, lack of change, tedious repetition, but it trains the mind to enjoy these. Even more so than the average computer game with a finish (although almost all of them today can be replayed), the MMORPG is truly the Nietzschean 'eternal return of the same', and like Nietzsche's uber-mensch, every hero gladly welcomes that return each time, rather than seeking an end to it.
I particularly like his contempt for the do-it-yourself (DIY) culture. Not only does he hit on its amateurishness, but it idolizes this amateurishness. It is an extension of the hobby, something else Adorno finds appalling, and with good reason.
"Resignation" not only picks up a few of these themes, but connects them to the anti-intellectualism of activism. Resignation is the charge hurled by activism as the "disengaged" intellectual. Adorno turns this charge around and shows how the real disengagement comes from the need to be active even when activity amounts to nothing so much as "feeling good about oneself", "feeling part of what is happening", etc. It is the activity of the activist, but also of the group-builder.
Adorno seems to put a special emphasis on the anarchist, but everything he says just as clearly applies to the Marxisante sect. If the DIY culture Adorno excoriates applies to the anarchists (and to many autonomists too), a recruitment culture applies to the socialist sect. The organization in which thought is prohibited or circumscribed by the party program, and there really is no difference in this case between prohibition and limitation, also expects that most of its members fill their time building the organization through recruiting, selling the paper/magazine/whatever, giving talks expressing the party line, etc. The demand for a really effective praxis and that theory conform to and serve first and foremost as a guide to praxis is a demand to kill critical thought.
This does not really do justice to the article. It did make me think of something, however. I find a profound difference between the one-dimensionality thesis and this critique of militantism. One-dimensionality is a kind of Cassandra call (see John Holloway, Open Marxism, Vol. 1 or 3, I don't remember which), a fatalism, but this is radically different. This is a demand for the autonomy or thought, of reason, relative to any immediate practice. It is a challenge to the voluntarism of individuals who would prefer to do than to think and in so doing, do more to reproduce capital than the theorist ever could.
Experience
Experience presents a peculiar problem for both philosophy as such and any critical theory in particular. The scope of the problem is covered in as complete a manner as one can do in a single book by Martin Jay's Songs of Experience and I read it with the idea of working through the problem in a more systematic manner. Sadly, I think that the book is not quite adequate for such a task. It is not per se unhelpful or lacking in scope so much as it is too committed to not being committed. I believe J.M. Bernstein has a sufficiently insightful review of the book and its limitations here. I would only add a few small comments.
The first is a nit-picking issue, which is that in his discussion of mourning and melancholia, related to Freud, Jay manages to have the discussion in almost the exact same terms as those of Gillian Rose, whom he knew and eulogized after her death, but he does not give any credit to her nor take the problem as far as he could have if only he had recognized her. The second matter is that his treatment of Hegel is too perfunctory and shallow. The Phenomenology of Spirit is literally a phenomenology, a book dedicated to the experience of spirit. Merely mentioning the introduction and then giving a brief gloss seems a little weak in comparison to the extensive coverage of Schleiermacher or Dilthey, never mind the eve less interesting secondary writers. However, I believe this lack of attention goes hand in hand with Jay's own problems which lead him to the morose end of the book, as Bernstein notes in his review.
Not only is experience a significant concept for Hegel, however, but it plays the central role in classical pragmatism and in the eyes of Marxists who read Hegel and Marx via pragmatism, most recently and of interest to me, Nicole Pepperell. Experience is also not a small matter for Critical Theory. Jay notes it, talks about it, but never invests it with any real excitement and it is hard to find in his discussion the importance it takes on there. Maybe part of it is that Jay seems largely fixated on Walter Benjamin and I am not particularly enthralled by Benjamin, while the entirety of the problem of one-dimensionality enunciated by Adorno and Marcuse is about the loss of the capacity to experience in a way that would lead to a mass challenge to capital, but also maybe the opening up of something else. Moishe Postone's discussion of one-dimensionality in Frankfurt School critical theory, following on their theory of state capitalism is important here because Postone lays a ground for salvaging its insights without giving in to what John Holloway and Werner Bonefeld have referred to as the Frankfurt School's "Cassandra call".
This recourse to Postone's critique of labor dovetails with Pepperell, and it is of course over philosophical issues that Pepperell is most at odds with Postone. Further, I believe there is a discussion flowing from Gillian Rose's critique of an adequate conceptualization of the subject and subjectivity in Marx. This is most evidently worked out in her Hegel Contra Sociology, but I believe other sources for this working through can be found in her collections of essays as well.
If I am correct, then an adequate thoerization of experience remains a project.
A few notes on how I conceive of experience will have to suffice for the moment.
Firstly, I agree with the general problem presented by Adorno and Marcuse that something frustrates the capacity to experience capital's domination systemically. However, I think that they have recourse to something that is both too transhistorical in the notion of the "dialectic of enlightenment" which finds its roots in antiquity, and also which falls victim to a traditional Marxist notion of labor and the critique of political economy. On the latter, I believe that Moishe Postone's critique of Friedrich Pollock's theory of state capitalism as the underlying source of the notion of "one-dimensional man" is both correct and largely adequate. Postone does not link the question to experience, which is fine. I think there is a point where one realizes that only so much can be done in one book and by one person. Nonetheless, Adorno and Marcuse provide a wealth of material to begin thinking through the problem.
Secondly, if there is a wealth of material in Marcuse and Adorno for taking up this problem, Hegel and Marx both have an immense amount to contribute that is not merely reproduced by or even taken up by the Frankfurt School. Hegel's Phenomenology has to be rediscovered in its experiential dimension by critical theory. Marx's Capital also has to be revisited, both in how we read the development of the categories, and on this Postone and Pepperell are both important to reclaiming a notion of experience in the work. Most critical to a rethinking of experience is Marx's critique of commodity fetishism.
Thirdly, I do find some value in the separation of Erlebnis and Erfahrung because the kind of experience we are interested in is not simply that of what happens to us, but what we do with what happens to us. Experience and thought go hand-in-hand. If I read Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit seriously, then I should reflect on what has happened to me, how what I am reading applies to my life and to the world I inhabit, and my comprehension of those thing should be transformed. If that happens, then I have had a new experience, a new erfahrung.
Such a thing happens in the process of social struggle. I knew a guy from the Staley workers' lockout in the 1990's in Decatur, Illinois who was one of the top union activists in the strike. He had been special forces in the Vietnam War, very patriotic, the kind of guy today who might have been a Tea Party type, except in the course of the strike his whole outlook was transformed. Most of this was the strike, some of it was who he met from the people doing strike support work, but he did not merely consider his immediate situation, but how he understood his past and what he was going to do going forward. His experience was not merely the strike, but the transformation of his comprehension of his past, present and future. Old experiences, erlebnis and erfahrung, came under a new erfahrung and thus under a new comprehension in which many of his old concepts of his experience, his very conceptual categories, changed. He became open to, was, one might even say, compelled towards, a critique of capitalism as a whole.
This is what I understand by experience, and yet, like Adorno and Marcuse, I feel that there are things about capital and its phenomenological expression which impede the capacity to experience in a way that opens up a 'we' who require for our practice and can comprehend because of our practice a systemic critique, a critique of capital as such and not merely this or that moment. These things are bound up with Marx's comprehension of the fetish character of the commodity and the abstract nature of domination qua capital, the indirect domination by pseudo-objective relations rather than the direct domination by persons. However, as capital develops, the phenomenological forms of this domination change and, in my opinion, these new phenomenological forms, such as the concrete labor process and formation of lived space, do not merely develop the material possibility for the overcoming of capital, for the abolition of labor, but also impede the experience of the phenomenological forms as just that, as forms of capital as a mad totality.
Such a thing happens in the process of social struggle. I knew a guy from the Staley workers' lockout in the 1990's in Decatur, Illinois who was one of the top union activists in the strike. He had been special forces in the Vietnam War, very patriotic, the kind of guy today who might have been a Tea Party type, except in the course of the strike his whole outlook was transformed. Most of this was the strike, some of it was who he met from the people doing strike support work, but he did not merely consider his immediate situation, but how he understood his past and what he was going to do going forward. His experience was not merely the strike, but the transformation of his comprehension of his past, present and future. Old experiences, erlebnis and erfahrung, came under a new erfahrung and thus under a new comprehension in which many of his old concepts of his experience, his very conceptual categories, changed. He became open to, was, one might even say, compelled towards, a critique of capitalism as a whole.
This is what I understand by experience, and yet, like Adorno and Marcuse, I feel that there are things about capital and its phenomenological expression which impede the capacity to experience in a way that opens up a 'we' who require for our practice and can comprehend because of our practice a systemic critique, a critique of capital as such and not merely this or that moment. These things are bound up with Marx's comprehension of the fetish character of the commodity and the abstract nature of domination qua capital, the indirect domination by pseudo-objective relations rather than the direct domination by persons. However, as capital develops, the phenomenological forms of this domination change and, in my opinion, these new phenomenological forms, such as the concrete labor process and formation of lived space, do not merely develop the material possibility for the overcoming of capital, for the abolition of labor, but also impede the experience of the phenomenological forms as just that, as forms of capital as a mad totality.
Monday, December 24, 2012
More notes on "One-Dimensional Man"
The discussion of language is really exceptional and should be studied most carefully by anyone with even the slightest interest in philosophy and critical thought. The section is obviously a product of its moment since the centerpieces of his critique are analytic philosophy and "ordinary language" linguistics, specially touching on Wittgenstein, G.E. Moore, Anthony Flew and J.L. Austin.
I find his emphasis on the openness of meaning especially important. This is emphatically not the relativity of meaning from various viewpoints none of which has priority, but rather that meaning is contradictory and contested, that if it is situated, its situation is not given in advance from the perspective of speaker because that is also contested and contradictory. It is a historical actuality insofar as it has a background and baggage and a lineage; it comes from some place and time, some usage and meaning that was and which might no longer be or which is struggling to continue to be or which the present wishes to suppress it having been, as much as the present might want what it might become to also be suppressed and denied.
There is no doubt of the reactionary quality of this specific hatred of metaphysics because it wants to put an end to meanings that might mean more or less than they seem to. In this section is in fact one of the most damning critiques of the pragmatist notion of truth central to Nicole Pepperell's work.
deflationary theory of truth According to the deflationary theory of truth, to assert that a statement is true is just to assert the statement itself. For example, to say that ‘snow is white’ is true, or that it is true that snow is white, is equivalent to saying simply that snow is white, and this, according to the deflationary theory, is all that can be said significantly about the truth of ‘snow is white’.http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-deflationary/
Exactly this notion that truth resides only within the context of the statement is utterly reconciled with what is. The entirety of Marcuse's critique of analytic philosophy and its consequent linguistics applies to this notion of truth, that is utterly barren of contradiction, of the unintended, of surplus, of anything that might not be utterly banal and trivial.
I'll need to site examples from the text later.
EDIT:
It is now 'later'. All references to the Beacon Press 2nd edition, 1991.
171-82 refer specifically to the kind of linguistic analysis common to J.L. Austen and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
p. 171
Like any philosophy worthy of the name, linguistic analysis speaks for itself and defines its own attitude to reality. It identifies as its chief concern the debunking of transcendent concepts; it proclaims as its frame of
reference the common usage of words, the variety of prevailing behavior. With these characteristics, it circumscribes its position in the philosophic tradition-namely, at the opposite pole from those modes of thought which elaborated their concepts in tension with, and even in contradiction to, the prevailing universe of discourse and behavior.
In terms of the established universe, such contradicting modes of thought are negative thinking. "The power of the negative" is the principle which governs the development of concepts, and contradiction becomes the distinguishing quality of Reason (Hegel). This quality of thought was not confined to a certain type of rationalism; it was also a decisive element in the empiricist tradition. Empiricism is not necessarily positive; its attitude to the established reality depends on the particular dimension of experience which functions as the source of knowledge and as the basic frame of reference. For example, it seems that sensualism and materialism are per se negative toward a society in which vital instinctual and material needs are unfulfilled. In contrast, the empiricism of linguistic analysis moves within a frame- work which does not allow such contradiction-the self- imposed restriction to the prevalent behavioral universe takes for an intrinsically positive attitude. In spite of the rigidly neutral approach of the philosopher, the pre-bound analysis succumbs to the power of positive thinking.
p. 173
Austin's contemptuous treatment of the alternatives to the common usage of words, and his defamation of what we "think up in our armchairs of an afternoon"; Wittgenstein's assurance that philosophy “leaves everything as it is" - such statements exhibit, to my mind, academic sado-masochism, self-humiliation, and self-denunciation of the intellectual whose labor does not issue in scientific, technical or like achievements. These affirmations of modesty and dependence seem to recapture Hume's mood of righteous contentment with the limitations of reason which, once recognized and accepted, protect man from useless mental adventures but leave him perfect1y capable of orienting himself in the given environment. However, when Hume debunked substances, he fought a powerful ideology, while his successors today provide an intellectual justification for that which society has long since accomplished-namely, the defamation of alternative modes of thought which contradict the established universe of discourse.
p. 175-8
Paying respect to the prevailing variety of meanings and usages, to the power and common sense of ordinary speech, while blocking (as extraneous material) analysis of what this speech says
about the society that speaks it, linguistic philosophy suppresses once more what is continually suppressed in this universe of discourse and behavior. The authority of philosophy gives its blessing to the forces which make this universe. Linguistic analysis abstracts from what ordinary language reveals in speaking as it does-the mutilation of man and nature.
Moreover, all too often it is not even the ordinary language which guides the analysis, but rather blown-up atoms of language, silly scraps of speech that sound like baby talk such as "This looks to me now like a man eating poppies," "He saw a robin", "I gad a hat." Wittgenstein devotes much acumen and spare to the analysis of "My broom is in the corner." I quote, as a representative example, an analysis from J. L. Austin's "Other Minds":
“Two rather different ways of being hesitant may be distinguished. (a) Let us take the case where we are tasting a certain taste. We may say I simply don't know what it is: I've never tasted anything remotely like it before ... No, it's no use: the more I think about it the more confused I get: it's perfectly distinct and perfectly distinctive, quite unique in my experience! This illustrates the case where I can find nothing in my past experience with which to compare the current case: I'm certain it's not appreciably like anything I ever tasted before, not sufficiently like anything I know to merit the same description. This case, though distinguish- able enough, shades off into the more common type of case where I'm not quite certain, or only fairly certain, or practically certain, that it's the taste of, say, laurel. In all such cases, I am endeavouring to recognize the current item by searching in my vast experience for something like it, some likeness in virtue of which it deserves, more or less positively, to be described by the same descriptive word, and I am meeting with varying degrees of success. (b) The other case is different, though it very
naturally combines itself with the first. Here, what I try to do is to savour the current experience, to peer at it, to sense it vividly. I'm not sure it is the taste of pineapple: isn't there perhaps just something about it, a tang, a bite, a lack of bite, a cloying sensation, which isn't quite light for pineapple? Isn't there perhaps just a peculiar hint of green, which would rule out mauve and would hardly do for heliotrope? Or perhaps it is faintly odd: I must look more intently, scan it over and over: maybe just possibly there is a suggestion of an unnatural shimmer, so that it doesn't look quite like ordinary water. There is a lack of sharpness in what we actually sense, which is to be cured not, or not merely, by thinking, but by acuter discernment, by sensory discrimination (though it is of course true that thinking of other, and more pronounced, cases in our Fast experience can and does assist our powers of discrimination).”
What can be objectionable in this analysis? In its exactness and clarity, it is probably unsurpassable - it is correct. But that is all it is, and I argue that not only is it not enough, but it is destructive of philosophic
thought, and of critical thought as such. From the philosophic point of view, two questions arise: (1) can the explication of concepts (or words) ever orient itself to, and terminate, in the actual universe of ordinary discourse? (2) are exactness and clarity ends in themselves, or are they committed to other ends?
I answer the first question in the affirmative as far as its first part is concerned. The most banal examples of speech may, precisely because of their banal character, elucidate the empirical world in its reality, and serve to explain our thinking and talking about it - as do Sartre's analyses of a group of people waiting for a bus, or Karl Kraus' analysis of daily newspapers, Such analyses elucidate because they transcend the immediate concreteness of the situation and its expression, They transcend it toward the factors which make the situation and the behavior of the people who speak (or are silent) in that situation. (In the examples just cited, these transcendent factors are traced to the social division of labor.) Thus the analysis does not terminate in the universe of ordinary discourse, it goes beyond it and opens a qualitatively different universe, the terms of which may even contradict the ordinary one.
To take another illustration: sentences such as "my broom is in the corner" might also occur in Hegel's Logic, but there they would be revealed as inappropriate or even false examples, They would only be rejects, to be surpassed by a discourse which, in its concepts, style, and syntax, is of a different order - a discourse for which it is by no means "clear that every sentence in our language 'is in order as it is,'" Rather the exact opposite is the case-namely, that every sentence is as little in order as the world is which this language communicates.
The almost masochistic reduction of speech to the humble and common is made into a program: "if the words language, experience, world, have a use, it must be as humble a one as that of the words table, lamp, door.”
We must "stick to the subjects of our every-day thinking, and not go astray and imagine that we have to describe extreme subtleties ...” - as if this were the only alternative, and as if the extreme subleties" were not the suitable term for Wittgenstein's language games rather than for Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Thinking (or at least its expression) is not only pressed into the straitjacket of common usage, but also enjoined not to ask and seek solutions beyond those that are already there. "The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known."
The self-styled poverty of philosophy, committed with all its concepts to the given state of affairs, distrusts the possibilities of a new experience. Subjection to the rule of the established facts is total-only linguistic facts, to be sure, but the society speaks in its language, and we are told to obey, The prohibitions are severe and authoritarian: "Philosophy may in no war interfere with the actual use of language." “And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place."
One might ask what remains of philosophy? What remains of thinking, intelligence, without anything hypothetical, without any explanation? However, what is at stake is not the definition or the dignity of philosophy. It is rather the chance of preserving and protecting the fight, the need to think and speak in terms other than those of common usage-terms which are meaningful, rational, and valid precisely because they are other terms. What is involved is the spread of a new ideology which undertakes to describe what is
happening (and meant) by eliminating the concepts capable of understanding what is happening (and meant).
p. 181-2
Ordinary language in its "humble use" may indeed be of vital concern to critical philosophic thought, but in the medium of this thought words lose their plain humility and reveal that "hidden" something which is of no interest to Wittgenstein. Consider the analysis of the "here" and "now" in Hegel's Phenomenology, or (sit venia verbo!) Lenin's suggestion on how to analyze adequately "this glass of water" on the table. Such an analysis uncovers the history in every-day speech as a hidden dimension of meaning - the rule of society over its language. And this discovery shatters the natural and reified form in which the given universe of discourse first appeals. The words reveal themselves as genuine terms not only in a grammatical and formal-logical but also material sense; namely, as the limits which define the meaning and its development-the terms which society imposes on discourse, and on behavior. This historical dimension of meaning can no longer be elucidated by examples such as my broom is in the corner" or "there is cheese on the table." To be sure, such statements can reveal many ambiguities, puzzles, oddities, but they are an in the same re language games and academic boredom.
Orienting itself on the reified universe of everyday discourse, and exposing and clarifying this discourse in terms of this reified universe, the analysis abstracts from the negative, from that which is alien and antagonistic and cannot be understood in terms of the established usage. By classifying and distinguishing meanings, and keeping them apart, it purges thought and speech of contradictions, illusions, and transgressions. But the transgressions are not those of "pure reason." They are not metaphysical transgressions beyond the limits of possible knowledge, they rather open a realm of knowledge beyond common sense and formal logic.
In barring access to this realm, positivist philosophy sets up a self-sufficient world of its own, closed and well protected against the ingression of disturbing external factors. In this respect, it makes little difference whether the validating context is that of mathematics, of logical propositions, or of custom and usage. In one way or another, an possibly meaningful predicates are prejudged. The prejudging judgment might be as broad as the spoken English language, or the dictionary, or same other code or convention. Once accepted, it constitutes an empirical a priori which cannot be transcended.
But this radical acceptance of the empirical violates the, "empirical, for in it speaks the mutilated, "abstract" individual who experiences (and expresses) only that which is given to him (given in a literal sense), who has only the facts and not the factors, whose behavior is one-dimensional and manipulated. By virtue of the factual repression, the experienced world is the result of a restricted experience, and the positivist cleaning of the mind brings the mind in line with the restricted experience.
In this expurgated form, the empirical world becomes the object of positive thinking. With an its exploring, exposing, and clarifying of ambiguities and obscurities, neo-positivism is not concerned with the great and general ambiguity and obscurity which is the established universe of experience. And it must remain unconcerned because the method adopted by this philosophy discredits or "translates" the concepts which could guide the understanding of the established reality in its repressive and irrational structure-the concepts of negative thinking. The transformation of critical into positive thinking takes place mainly in the therapeutic treatment of universal concepts; their translation into operational and behavioral terms parallels closely the sociological translation discussed above.
I find his emphasis on the openness of meaning especially important. This is emphatically not the relativity of meaning from various viewpoints none of which has priority, but rather that meaning is contradictory and contested, that if it is situated, its situation is not given in advance from the perspective of speaker because that is also contested and contradictory. It is a historical actuality insofar as it has a background and baggage and a lineage; it comes from some place and time, some usage and meaning that was and which might no longer be or which is struggling to continue to be or which the present wishes to suppress it having been, as much as the present might want what it might become to also be suppressed and denied.
There is no doubt of the reactionary quality of this specific hatred of metaphysics because it wants to put an end to meanings that might mean more or less than they seem to. In this section is in fact one of the most damning critiques of the pragmatist notion of truth central to Nicole Pepperell's work.
deflationary theory of truth According to the deflationary theory of truth, to assert that a statement is true is just to assert the statement itself. For example, to say that ‘snow is white’ is true, or that it is true that snow is white, is equivalent to saying simply that snow is white, and this, according to the deflationary theory, is all that can be said significantly about the truth of ‘snow is white’.http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-deflationary/
Exactly this notion that truth resides only within the context of the statement is utterly reconciled with what is. The entirety of Marcuse's critique of analytic philosophy and its consequent linguistics applies to this notion of truth, that is utterly barren of contradiction, of the unintended, of surplus, of anything that might not be utterly banal and trivial.
I'll need to site examples from the text later.
EDIT:
It is now 'later'. All references to the Beacon Press 2nd edition, 1991.
171-82 refer specifically to the kind of linguistic analysis common to J.L. Austen and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
p. 171
Like any philosophy worthy of the name, linguistic analysis speaks for itself and defines its own attitude to reality. It identifies as its chief concern the debunking of transcendent concepts; it proclaims as its frame of
reference the common usage of words, the variety of prevailing behavior. With these characteristics, it circumscribes its position in the philosophic tradition-namely, at the opposite pole from those modes of thought which elaborated their concepts in tension with, and even in contradiction to, the prevailing universe of discourse and behavior.
In terms of the established universe, such contradicting modes of thought are negative thinking. "The power of the negative" is the principle which governs the development of concepts, and contradiction becomes the distinguishing quality of Reason (Hegel). This quality of thought was not confined to a certain type of rationalism; it was also a decisive element in the empiricist tradition. Empiricism is not necessarily positive; its attitude to the established reality depends on the particular dimension of experience which functions as the source of knowledge and as the basic frame of reference. For example, it seems that sensualism and materialism are per se negative toward a society in which vital instinctual and material needs are unfulfilled. In contrast, the empiricism of linguistic analysis moves within a frame- work which does not allow such contradiction-the self- imposed restriction to the prevalent behavioral universe takes for an intrinsically positive attitude. In spite of the rigidly neutral approach of the philosopher, the pre-bound analysis succumbs to the power of positive thinking.
p. 173
Austin's contemptuous treatment of the alternatives to the common usage of words, and his defamation of what we "think up in our armchairs of an afternoon"; Wittgenstein's assurance that philosophy “leaves everything as it is" - such statements exhibit, to my mind, academic sado-masochism, self-humiliation, and self-denunciation of the intellectual whose labor does not issue in scientific, technical or like achievements. These affirmations of modesty and dependence seem to recapture Hume's mood of righteous contentment with the limitations of reason which, once recognized and accepted, protect man from useless mental adventures but leave him perfect1y capable of orienting himself in the given environment. However, when Hume debunked substances, he fought a powerful ideology, while his successors today provide an intellectual justification for that which society has long since accomplished-namely, the defamation of alternative modes of thought which contradict the established universe of discourse.
p. 175-8
Paying respect to the prevailing variety of meanings and usages, to the power and common sense of ordinary speech, while blocking (as extraneous material) analysis of what this speech says
about the society that speaks it, linguistic philosophy suppresses once more what is continually suppressed in this universe of discourse and behavior. The authority of philosophy gives its blessing to the forces which make this universe. Linguistic analysis abstracts from what ordinary language reveals in speaking as it does-the mutilation of man and nature.
Moreover, all too often it is not even the ordinary language which guides the analysis, but rather blown-up atoms of language, silly scraps of speech that sound like baby talk such as "This looks to me now like a man eating poppies," "He saw a robin", "I gad a hat." Wittgenstein devotes much acumen and spare to the analysis of "My broom is in the corner." I quote, as a representative example, an analysis from J. L. Austin's "Other Minds":
“Two rather different ways of being hesitant may be distinguished. (a) Let us take the case where we are tasting a certain taste. We may say I simply don't know what it is: I've never tasted anything remotely like it before ... No, it's no use: the more I think about it the more confused I get: it's perfectly distinct and perfectly distinctive, quite unique in my experience! This illustrates the case where I can find nothing in my past experience with which to compare the current case: I'm certain it's not appreciably like anything I ever tasted before, not sufficiently like anything I know to merit the same description. This case, though distinguish- able enough, shades off into the more common type of case where I'm not quite certain, or only fairly certain, or practically certain, that it's the taste of, say, laurel. In all such cases, I am endeavouring to recognize the current item by searching in my vast experience for something like it, some likeness in virtue of which it deserves, more or less positively, to be described by the same descriptive word, and I am meeting with varying degrees of success. (b) The other case is different, though it very
naturally combines itself with the first. Here, what I try to do is to savour the current experience, to peer at it, to sense it vividly. I'm not sure it is the taste of pineapple: isn't there perhaps just something about it, a tang, a bite, a lack of bite, a cloying sensation, which isn't quite light for pineapple? Isn't there perhaps just a peculiar hint of green, which would rule out mauve and would hardly do for heliotrope? Or perhaps it is faintly odd: I must look more intently, scan it over and over: maybe just possibly there is a suggestion of an unnatural shimmer, so that it doesn't look quite like ordinary water. There is a lack of sharpness in what we actually sense, which is to be cured not, or not merely, by thinking, but by acuter discernment, by sensory discrimination (though it is of course true that thinking of other, and more pronounced, cases in our Fast experience can and does assist our powers of discrimination).”
What can be objectionable in this analysis? In its exactness and clarity, it is probably unsurpassable - it is correct. But that is all it is, and I argue that not only is it not enough, but it is destructive of philosophic
thought, and of critical thought as such. From the philosophic point of view, two questions arise: (1) can the explication of concepts (or words) ever orient itself to, and terminate, in the actual universe of ordinary discourse? (2) are exactness and clarity ends in themselves, or are they committed to other ends?
I answer the first question in the affirmative as far as its first part is concerned. The most banal examples of speech may, precisely because of their banal character, elucidate the empirical world in its reality, and serve to explain our thinking and talking about it - as do Sartre's analyses of a group of people waiting for a bus, or Karl Kraus' analysis of daily newspapers, Such analyses elucidate because they transcend the immediate concreteness of the situation and its expression, They transcend it toward the factors which make the situation and the behavior of the people who speak (or are silent) in that situation. (In the examples just cited, these transcendent factors are traced to the social division of labor.) Thus the analysis does not terminate in the universe of ordinary discourse, it goes beyond it and opens a qualitatively different universe, the terms of which may even contradict the ordinary one.
To take another illustration: sentences such as "my broom is in the corner" might also occur in Hegel's Logic, but there they would be revealed as inappropriate or even false examples, They would only be rejects, to be surpassed by a discourse which, in its concepts, style, and syntax, is of a different order - a discourse for which it is by no means "clear that every sentence in our language 'is in order as it is,'" Rather the exact opposite is the case-namely, that every sentence is as little in order as the world is which this language communicates.
The almost masochistic reduction of speech to the humble and common is made into a program: "if the words language, experience, world, have a use, it must be as humble a one as that of the words table, lamp, door.”
We must "stick to the subjects of our every-day thinking, and not go astray and imagine that we have to describe extreme subtleties ...” - as if this were the only alternative, and as if the extreme subleties" were not the suitable term for Wittgenstein's language games rather than for Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Thinking (or at least its expression) is not only pressed into the straitjacket of common usage, but also enjoined not to ask and seek solutions beyond those that are already there. "The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known."
The self-styled poverty of philosophy, committed with all its concepts to the given state of affairs, distrusts the possibilities of a new experience. Subjection to the rule of the established facts is total-only linguistic facts, to be sure, but the society speaks in its language, and we are told to obey, The prohibitions are severe and authoritarian: "Philosophy may in no war interfere with the actual use of language." “And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place."
One might ask what remains of philosophy? What remains of thinking, intelligence, without anything hypothetical, without any explanation? However, what is at stake is not the definition or the dignity of philosophy. It is rather the chance of preserving and protecting the fight, the need to think and speak in terms other than those of common usage-terms which are meaningful, rational, and valid precisely because they are other terms. What is involved is the spread of a new ideology which undertakes to describe what is
happening (and meant) by eliminating the concepts capable of understanding what is happening (and meant).
p. 181-2
Ordinary language in its "humble use" may indeed be of vital concern to critical philosophic thought, but in the medium of this thought words lose their plain humility and reveal that "hidden" something which is of no interest to Wittgenstein. Consider the analysis of the "here" and "now" in Hegel's Phenomenology, or (sit venia verbo!) Lenin's suggestion on how to analyze adequately "this glass of water" on the table. Such an analysis uncovers the history in every-day speech as a hidden dimension of meaning - the rule of society over its language. And this discovery shatters the natural and reified form in which the given universe of discourse first appeals. The words reveal themselves as genuine terms not only in a grammatical and formal-logical but also material sense; namely, as the limits which define the meaning and its development-the terms which society imposes on discourse, and on behavior. This historical dimension of meaning can no longer be elucidated by examples such as my broom is in the corner" or "there is cheese on the table." To be sure, such statements can reveal many ambiguities, puzzles, oddities, but they are an in the same re language games and academic boredom.
Orienting itself on the reified universe of everyday discourse, and exposing and clarifying this discourse in terms of this reified universe, the analysis abstracts from the negative, from that which is alien and antagonistic and cannot be understood in terms of the established usage. By classifying and distinguishing meanings, and keeping them apart, it purges thought and speech of contradictions, illusions, and transgressions. But the transgressions are not those of "pure reason." They are not metaphysical transgressions beyond the limits of possible knowledge, they rather open a realm of knowledge beyond common sense and formal logic.
In barring access to this realm, positivist philosophy sets up a self-sufficient world of its own, closed and well protected against the ingression of disturbing external factors. In this respect, it makes little difference whether the validating context is that of mathematics, of logical propositions, or of custom and usage. In one way or another, an possibly meaningful predicates are prejudged. The prejudging judgment might be as broad as the spoken English language, or the dictionary, or same other code or convention. Once accepted, it constitutes an empirical a priori which cannot be transcended.
But this radical acceptance of the empirical violates the, "empirical, for in it speaks the mutilated, "abstract" individual who experiences (and expresses) only that which is given to him (given in a literal sense), who has only the facts and not the factors, whose behavior is one-dimensional and manipulated. By virtue of the factual repression, the experienced world is the result of a restricted experience, and the positivist cleaning of the mind brings the mind in line with the restricted experience.
In this expurgated form, the empirical world becomes the object of positive thinking. With an its exploring, exposing, and clarifying of ambiguities and obscurities, neo-positivism is not concerned with the great and general ambiguity and obscurity which is the established universe of experience. And it must remain unconcerned because the method adopted by this philosophy discredits or "translates" the concepts which could guide the understanding of the established reality in its repressive and irrational structure-the concepts of negative thinking. The transformation of critical into positive thinking takes place mainly in the therapeutic treatment of universal concepts; their translation into operational and behavioral terms parallels closely the sociological translation discussed above.
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
On Never Completing Essays, another fragment
The initial fragment was a self-reminder of what I find an impediment to thinking through the problem of action, not merely for myself, but for anyone. I have, over many years of navigating this divide to no one's satisfaction, most especially not my own, come to the point where I believe that both positions taken in extremis or as the kids like to say these days, hypostatized, cannot but do injury to reason. One might in another context call this the split between Marxism and anarchism, if not for the fact that both are themselves split internally over the same divide.
The nature of a fragment is that it is not connected to that which makes it comprehensible to anyone but the person who produced the fragment in the first place, and it may only be partially comprehensible to them as well. So I feel the need to at least connect a few more fragments to the initial one and maybe then we can tell if it was a jar or a plate or a phallic totem or something else entirely.
The reason for mentioning Marcel Stoetzler's article and quoting the footnote was not to discern if Bataille was a fascist or gave in to Left fascism, but to raise the problem that an anti-politics which in its ethical purity, in its rejection of all law as that which it most wants to denounce, as politics, loses the capacity to recognize any meaningful distinction between fascism and democracy, between irrationalism and a limited rationalism, it cedes too much ground and disarms reason against unreason. In the same manner, one might say that in the case of those who are so eager to get their hands dirty, who are so ready to do whatever must be done without consideration for what ought to be, and not be, done, that is, those who embrace politics and discount the ethical as a purely illusory or personal affair, they will produce what they most consciously do not wish to, a new domination, a new Master, a new subordination. The matter is posed most poignantly in the penultimate sentence: "What is at stake here is the old question of whether ‘the left’ can afford even the slightest ambiguity in its stance towards ‘the right’ while struggling against liberalism."
[Note: This is completely in line with what is at stake in Marcuse's essays in Negations and in One-Dimensional Man. If there are problems in Marcuse's answers, it is maybe less in how he poses the questions than in the limits of his critical theory, which I have pointed to earlier. Nonetheless, whatever their other failings I believe Marcuse, Adorno, and Fromm were acutely aware of what is entailed by ambiguity in the stance towards fascism while struggling against liberlism. Fascism is indeed ambiguous here. There is a tension between a period and a tendency internal to capital, always at least latent in the way in which rationalization poisons rationality. For Marcuse it is clear that liberal rationalism, faced with the threat of the annihilation of a freely held and disposed of property which for it is inseparable from liberty and equality, views fascism as historically justified and would willingly submit to it again if the need presented itself. Gaspar Tamas, aware of the tension, refers to the present "right" therefore as post-fascism because of the particularities that inhere in it despite other similarities. Tamas in particular makes a powerful argument for why the difference between the Enlightenment and post-fascism matters. He could have, in the vein I am working through here, noted that Left anti-politics can therefore dovetail with right-wing anti-politics, one because it has no faith in the public sphere, the political and law and therefore makes a virtue of its refusal, ad the latter because it sees the destruction of the aforementioned as the safest way to assure its corporatist privilege and self-certainty.]
The hypostatization of the pole of ethics, formulated as 'anti-politics', entertains exactly this ambiguity insofar as it throws out the problem of law and legal status, of democracy, tout court. It is the view which says of the struggle against racial oppression that the right to vote or other merely political rights do not matter. It is the view which says to gay men and women that the right to marry is irrelevant. It draws similar conclusions in practice to those of the racist and anti-gay troglodytes in the name of a purer liberation. I could trace a dozen different examples, but the problem remains the same and will not become clearer for all the piling on.
This is not to overlook the problem of those who hypostatize the political, it is simply that in a way because they try to engage the world as it is their own failure is, for myself at least having already been down that road, already self-evident. Their obedience to the law as overriding any ethical prerogative, any ethical injunction to disobey or to refuse is present in every act of self-deception and self-mutilation in the name of a higher law, whether it is "the revolution", "the party", "the class", etc.
I am not interested in the problem of politics/anti-politics on the plane of Leftist organizations because I cannot claim to any longer have any interest in enacting this self-mutilation in the name of a New God. Their Marxism or Anarchism does in fact reproduce the forms of organization and thought of this society in a law-like manner because to succeed in this society is to obey its laws, and to succeed on a larger scale is to take a certain shape in conformity with what is possible as capitalist organisms, should we wish to follow the line of thought of one of our most generous readers. That is not my concern and it is a line I have only the slightest interest in because at the moment it does not effect me.
However it may also be that the retreat from action leaves us in the position of the sheer refusal. It is hard not to become a beautiful soul, refusing to partake in anything that does not conform to one's impossible purity, to a withdrawal into a radical hermitude in which one simply awaits the coming revolution, in which all that exists is our speech and the world really only exists as the echo of that selfsame speech. It is a kind of revolutionary anorexia, a refusal to eat because one is convinced that to eat is the same things as to be fat and ugly and distasteful. Of course, all one can talk about is eating and the correctness of not eating and then one cannot distinguish between someone who eats without any self-consciousness and a gluttonous pig.
The nature of a fragment is that it is not connected to that which makes it comprehensible to anyone but the person who produced the fragment in the first place, and it may only be partially comprehensible to them as well. So I feel the need to at least connect a few more fragments to the initial one and maybe then we can tell if it was a jar or a plate or a phallic totem or something else entirely.
The reason for mentioning Marcel Stoetzler's article and quoting the footnote was not to discern if Bataille was a fascist or gave in to Left fascism, but to raise the problem that an anti-politics which in its ethical purity, in its rejection of all law as that which it most wants to denounce, as politics, loses the capacity to recognize any meaningful distinction between fascism and democracy, between irrationalism and a limited rationalism, it cedes too much ground and disarms reason against unreason. In the same manner, one might say that in the case of those who are so eager to get their hands dirty, who are so ready to do whatever must be done without consideration for what ought to be, and not be, done, that is, those who embrace politics and discount the ethical as a purely illusory or personal affair, they will produce what they most consciously do not wish to, a new domination, a new Master, a new subordination. The matter is posed most poignantly in the penultimate sentence: "What is at stake here is the old question of whether ‘the left’ can afford even the slightest ambiguity in its stance towards ‘the right’ while struggling against liberalism."
[Note: This is completely in line with what is at stake in Marcuse's essays in Negations and in One-Dimensional Man. If there are problems in Marcuse's answers, it is maybe less in how he poses the questions than in the limits of his critical theory, which I have pointed to earlier. Nonetheless, whatever their other failings I believe Marcuse, Adorno, and Fromm were acutely aware of what is entailed by ambiguity in the stance towards fascism while struggling against liberlism. Fascism is indeed ambiguous here. There is a tension between a period and a tendency internal to capital, always at least latent in the way in which rationalization poisons rationality. For Marcuse it is clear that liberal rationalism, faced with the threat of the annihilation of a freely held and disposed of property which for it is inseparable from liberty and equality, views fascism as historically justified and would willingly submit to it again if the need presented itself. Gaspar Tamas, aware of the tension, refers to the present "right" therefore as post-fascism because of the particularities that inhere in it despite other similarities. Tamas in particular makes a powerful argument for why the difference between the Enlightenment and post-fascism matters. He could have, in the vein I am working through here, noted that Left anti-politics can therefore dovetail with right-wing anti-politics, one because it has no faith in the public sphere, the political and law and therefore makes a virtue of its refusal, ad the latter because it sees the destruction of the aforementioned as the safest way to assure its corporatist privilege and self-certainty.]
The hypostatization of the pole of ethics, formulated as 'anti-politics', entertains exactly this ambiguity insofar as it throws out the problem of law and legal status, of democracy, tout court. It is the view which says of the struggle against racial oppression that the right to vote or other merely political rights do not matter. It is the view which says to gay men and women that the right to marry is irrelevant. It draws similar conclusions in practice to those of the racist and anti-gay troglodytes in the name of a purer liberation. I could trace a dozen different examples, but the problem remains the same and will not become clearer for all the piling on.
This is not to overlook the problem of those who hypostatize the political, it is simply that in a way because they try to engage the world as it is their own failure is, for myself at least having already been down that road, already self-evident. Their obedience to the law as overriding any ethical prerogative, any ethical injunction to disobey or to refuse is present in every act of self-deception and self-mutilation in the name of a higher law, whether it is "the revolution", "the party", "the class", etc.
I am not interested in the problem of politics/anti-politics on the plane of Leftist organizations because I cannot claim to any longer have any interest in enacting this self-mutilation in the name of a New God. Their Marxism or Anarchism does in fact reproduce the forms of organization and thought of this society in a law-like manner because to succeed in this society is to obey its laws, and to succeed on a larger scale is to take a certain shape in conformity with what is possible as capitalist organisms, should we wish to follow the line of thought of one of our most generous readers. That is not my concern and it is a line I have only the slightest interest in because at the moment it does not effect me.
However it may also be that the retreat from action leaves us in the position of the sheer refusal. It is hard not to become a beautiful soul, refusing to partake in anything that does not conform to one's impossible purity, to a withdrawal into a radical hermitude in which one simply awaits the coming revolution, in which all that exists is our speech and the world really only exists as the echo of that selfsame speech. It is a kind of revolutionary anorexia, a refusal to eat because one is convinced that to eat is the same things as to be fat and ugly and distasteful. Of course, all one can talk about is eating and the correctness of not eating and then one cannot distinguish between someone who eats without any self-consciousness and a gluttonous pig.
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