Marcuse?

I'm about halfway through The Dialectical Imagination, Martin Jay's classic study of the Frankfurt school (an exam-list book if there ever was one). It's a classic for a reason, so no evaluation here. The thing is 35 years old, though, and the distance tells. Particularly in the seriousness with which he takes Herbert Marcuse. I've once been asked to read Marcuse--of course I know who he is, know something about his work, but although his name is still thrown around, he doesn't seem (as it were) read anymore. He's someone I need to know a great deal more about.

Recently, I came across some sociology of knowledge work on why Erich Fromm (another figure who plays a major role in Jay's story) fell out of academic favor. From Jay's account, it seems clear why 'we' don't find Fromm useful at all these days. Marcuse, on the other hand, seems to be speaking (especially up through the 1940s--but perhaps no longer in Eros and Civilization) very much to issues current in postmarxism, especially Zizekian attempts to bring Hegel back to the table (even in his engagements with Schmitt--this is the contemporary postmarxist academic left, at least as i've so far been exposed to it). It seems to me that a more interesting and subtle problem than "why not Fromm?" is thus "why not Marcuse?" Is it just that he's embarrassingly associated with the gauche-y new left, with the painfully naive adolescence of the current generation of academics? hmmmm...

This early Martin Jay is also interesting to read in light of the two books by students of his--Moyn and Kleinberg--that i've just finished. I've got to write something about them as well. possibly i'll post it here, but i'll admit to feeling considerably more comfortable making public my thoughts about those born before 1930 than after 1960.

writing about Zizek

I am now obliged to write a paper about The Parallax View. Reading and thinking with Zizek is, I'm fairly certain, bad both for your prose and your head. So far I've written several fat paragraphs about the dust-jacket, not because I've nothing to say about the inside, but because it seems like a reasonable place to start. These paragraphs are a bit ridiculous, so I'll probably cut them from the final paper, or reduce them substantially (they'd be almost 2 1/2 pages of what can't be more than 8 or 9 total--too much). In the interests of not letting myself forget that I sometimes write this sort of stuff, I'm going to post it here, now.
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Since so much of The Parallax View is about the play of appearances, it seems to me that a prejudiced over-reading of the most superficial and transitory part of the book-as-commodity (the jacket) is in order. The front of is a painting of an empty arm-chair, wrapped in a white cloth; to the viewer’s left is a table covered with papers, which can be seen to wrap around the spine. Before following the table around the book, what is this chair? I can only see it as a reference to Magritte.[1] The folding of the white cloth is strongly reminiscent of Magritte’s series of cloth-covered heads. Further echoes immediately suggest themselves. The title of the book—in bold, empty white type, contrasting sharply with the textured, painted background—labels the empty chair. Ceci n’est pas un pipe is only the most famous of Magritte’s ‘labeled’ paintings, there is a whole series of them; always, the label is not the same as the picture. So far we have an empty chair, labeled by the title of the book, and even signed by the name of the author at the bottom. Should we then read the label as misdirection or questioning?

Following the table around to the spine of the volume, we arrive at the back cover. We see that behind the table there is a couch, only the very end of which we could see on the front, it also is empty. There is little text, only the technical information, and the barcode (I am pleased to learn that MIT Press is able so easily to categorize The Parallax View as ‘philosophy/cultural studies.’) Mostly, there is the second half of the picture: a man (bald) sitting and writing, the paper supported by his knee, which appendage almost, but not quite, touches the table. At this point: the images on the two sides of the book are connected by the table (covered in written-on paper), and behind the table, the couch. Should we see here “two sides of the same coin,” connected by, on the one hand, writing, the very image of intellection, and on the other, the couch, the emblem of psychoanalysis?

The man sitting taking analytic notes on the spectral occupant of the couch is not anonymous. It is Lenin.[2] Of course, things become more complicated when we open the back flap, and see the picture of Zizek there, in the normal spot for such images. It is a picture of a piece of installation art. An empty chair and a plant before a large mirror, in which we see Zizek, sitting, absent from ‘reality.’ (Magritte, again, has several paintings which play with the idea of the mirror.) The formal parallel between the portrait of Zizek and the painting of Lenin is unavoidable—indeed, the original painting was reversed when it was put onto the cover, perhaps just so as to make the parallelism work.[3] Zizek is thus in Lenin’s ‘place’—are we supposed to be able to apply a Lacanian grid of some sort to the cover? Would we read the empty spots of the couch and chair for subject-positions, one and two, Lenin for the analyst and then the fourth position would be we, ourselves, the viewers of the painting, possessors of the book? For Lacan, if we may hazard a generalization, what was most interesting about the Sausseurian formula of the sign was neither the signifier at the top, nor the signified on the bottom, but rather the bar separating the two. The cover of Zizek’s book, then, might also be not so much about the two sides, as about the gap of representation as such—in this case, the spine of the book. At the bottom is the publisher’s logo, out of which rises the leg of the table (a phallus?), supporting the written-on pages (phallogocentric discourse?). Hovering above this field of text is the title of the book, framed by the one of the back-cushions of the couch (psychoanalysis itself)—above this, textured nothingness. Have we yet achieved non-sense?

This is a good point to pull up out of this hermeneutic spiraling nosedive. The superficial and disposable outside of the book puts, I think, a very fine point on the game of representation, in which art, politics and psycho-analysis are all deeply involved. The relationship between Zizek and Lenin is highlighted, and by extension, the relation of psychoanalysis to politics. Similarly at play in the jacket design are the covered and the uncovered; the real and the phantasmic; the human and the inhuman.

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[1] Clearly, there are no formal similarities between Magritte’s photo-realist-surrealism and the socialist-realist painting used for the cover-art of The Parallax View. This painting is itself a copy made by Grigori Shpolyanski from an original by Isaac Brodsky. The game of political (mis)-representation is very much afoot (see note on front-flap). Although one finds things to disagree with on nearly every page of The Parallax View, there are relatively few outright errors. Interesting, then, that Zizek as a passing comparison to the self-constitution of consciousness, incorrectly attributes to Magritte the M.C. Escher picture of a hand drawing another hand, itself drawing the first hand (219). Should this be read symptomatically?

[2] I tread on thin ice here: The picture’s title is “Lenin at the Smolny Institute,” which I think means a specific time and place, December 1917, when Lenin and his cabinet agreed that Finland should be separate from Russia. I wouldn’t speculate further on this without more information.

[3] Of course, this reversal often happens—perhaps it is a technical convenience? The cover of Laclau’s On Populist Reason also reverses its painting, a detail from “The Fourth Estate” by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo. What conclusion, if any, is to be drawn from the fact that this painting is also featured as the background to the opening credits of Bernardo Bertollucci’s epic film Novocento? Did either Laclau or Zizek even have a hand in the design of their books? Does the answer matter?

Conservative

Apropos of the last posting: perhaps I have revealed my (always suspected) essentially conservative nature, since, as Zizek quotes Heidegger as saying:

“What is conservative remains bogged down in the historiographical; only what is revolutionary attains the depth of history. Revolution does not mean here mere subversion and destruction but an upheaval and re-creating of the customary so that the beginning might be restructured...” (qtd on page 278, Parallax View)

But then again, perhaps it is ‘properly’ progressive to be called conservative by Heidegger?

two commonplaces?

There are no historical problems, only historiographical ones.

Or so I have come to believe.

Also, I’d like to record the passing thought that, given the sections of Lacan’s Seminaire XX on feminine sexuality that i’ve just listened to read out loud on a car trip, my vision of Lacan is significantly altered. Perhaps very tritely, I would now compare the text of his seminars (such tiny amount of it as i’ve heard) rather to the Recherche than to the great philosophical systematizers, or even to post-structuralist ‘philosophy’ like Derrida. It isn’t that he’s not philosophical, it’s only that when you add the deepest possible subjectivism (the only possible way to move past it, of course, is all the way into and through it) an equally abiding concern for language, and an extremely, to say the least, idiosyncratic personality, what you get is closer to pseudo-philosophical literature than anything else. It’s about character, texture, and reader-experience. This isn't to deny Lacan philosophical content, but rather to try to give content to the vague idea that he is genuinely post-philosophical.

history is...

Since I’m supposed to be professionally interested in this sort of thing, here is Modris Eksteins, in a recent TLS review (“Spirited,” Aug 24/31, pg 32, of Jon Savage’s, Teenage: The creation of youth 1875-1945). I’ll give most of the paragraph, as set-up:

But perhaps the avoidance of theory and connectivity is all to the good. Causality as historical enterprise seems dead anyway. History as explanation is passé. History today is all about feeling the past...

Thibaudet, Bell, Proust -- Anti-Semitism

So: I’ve been working towards a paper on Clive Bell’s Proust book. Clive Bell, especially later in his life, was objectionable elitist. Proust has, especially at the beginning, a light tone of genteel anti-Semitism. Marcel Proust is, for instance, an “exquisitely civilized Jew,” no doubt praise, but still we wince to read it today. These qualities, and the likelihood that Bell read Thibaudet, make the two treatments of Proust interesting to compare.

I’ve been reading the Nouvelle Revue Française memorial issue on Proust (Tome XX, 1923, no 1.). It is, taken as a whole text, fascinating, and deserves some study in its own right. Possibly I’ll write something about it here when I’m done. I have just now finished Albert Thibaudet’s contribution, which is called “Marcel Proust et la tradition française.” Bell must have read this little essay. First of all, Thibaudet claims that there are corners—“ces jardins secrets”—of every national literature into which foreigners simply cannot penetrate. Of course there are also very cosmopolitan gardens as well, into which greenhouse he puts Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe. Bell mentions this book as well, echoing Thibaudet’s vocabulary, in the opening pages of Proust. He mentions it as part of a list of other books, possibly as great as the Recherche, “even Jean Christophe—which the French have put in the corner quite as much because it was written by a Protestant and a pacifist [note, in passing, that Clive Bell is himself both those things] as because it is written in a woefully undistinguished manner” (7-8). (As I copy out that quote, I notice the was/is written tense shift—because authorship is past, but the writing itself is always in the present).

For Thibaudet, though, the Recherche is clearly especially French, somehow unavailable to foreigners. Bell’s name (along with a clutch of other Bloomsberries) appears later in the volume appended to an awkwardly written “Hommage d’un groupe d’écrivains anglais” (248-9), which itself strongly suggests some of the themes Bell will later work on his own. Probably in reference to this, or at least this sort of activity, Thibaudet says, “de consiencieux Anglais ont fondé pour l’étudier une société Marcel Proust. Que le ‘monde’ français ait pu se faire aimer et admirer d’un Marcel Proust, cela doit bien étonner un romancier anglais. Cela ‘étonnera moins s’il cherche le fil qui relie Proust à une tradition authentique” (133).

This authentic ‘tradition française’ in terms of which Thibaudet wants to situate Proust is, first, Saint-Simon, the diarist of the court of Louis XIV, and then, Montaigne. Again, Bell will follow Thibaudet. The comparison with Saint-Simon is instructive, “Proust comme Saint-Simon est de ces écrivains qui, ne voyant et ne sentant pas simple [qui n’a rien à voir avec la simplicité], ser refuseraient comme à une trahison à écrire simple. Il faut que chaque phrase conserve la complesité, l’épaisseur, l’intensité émotionnelle ou la joie descriptive, qui étaient au principe des pensées et des images” (135). Compare that to Bell’s “Proust wanted to speak his mind, and his was a mind not easily spoken” (21). Bell’s idea, that style is, or should be, radically determined by process of thought even to the point of rupturing the surface of ‘good writing’ (characteristic, I think, of Bloomsbury), is also Thibaudet’s, who says, describing Proust’s writing: “Un tel style est vraiment consubstantiel à la chose pensante et vivante. Trop consubstantiel pour être clair et correct, dira-t-on. Et le fait est qu’il tient plutôt à la main et au corps de l’écrivain, qu’à la pointe délié de la plume” (136).

The conclusion, the ‘punt,’ of Thibaudet’s little contribution is fascinating. It is, I think, probably an example of some of the best that liberalism had to offer in the 1920s. Thibaudet has been describing Proust’s affinities to Montaigne, an interesting comparison because Proust writes very much about and from his own memory, while Montaigne is famously bad at remembering, and confined entirely to the present of his own writing. Thibaudet, having just called established the dynamism, the process-orientation, of this writing, pauses, and says, “On aura reconnu dans ces dernières ligns des expressions bergsoniennes, et elles nous amènent à des vues suggestives que j’introduis avec quelque réserve” (138). Before quoting, at length, the next paragraph, I wanted to pause and note the hesitance, almost trepidation, which marks Thibaudet’s plunge out of pure stylistic analysis, and into blood.

“Ces analogies entre Proust et Montaigne, leur singulier mobilisme à tous deux, ne seraient-elles pas en liaison avec un autre genre de parenté? Il est certain que la mère de Montaigne, une Lopez, était juive. Montaigne, voilà le seul de nos grands écrivains chez qui soit présent le sang juif. On connaît l’hérédité analogue de Marcel Proust. Et telle est également l’hérédité mixte de grand philosophe que je viens de nommer...[mentions other examples]...Je songe à cette mobilité, à cette inquiétude d’Israël, à ces tentes dont Bossuet, dans le Serment sur l’Unité de l’Eglise, fait le symbole du peuple de Dieu...l’Odyssée, a cristallisé, lui-même, comme l’a montré Bérard, autour de doublets gréco-sémitiques. Un Montaigne, un Proust, un Bergson, installent dans notre complexe et riche univers littéraire ce qu’on pourrait appeler le doublet frano-sémitique, comme il y a des doublets littéraires franco-anglais, franco-allemand, franco-italian, comme la France elle-même est un doublet du Nord et du Midi. Mais ne prenons cela que de biais, et, nous aussi, en une mobilité qui n’appuie pas. La tradition française à laquelle nous devons rattacher un Marcel Proust, c’est une tradition vivante, imprévisible, singulière, une tradition en mouvement irréguliere, en ligne serpentine, en tours et en retours, qui, comme une phrase même, comme une page de Proust, dépasse toujours sa matière précise par son élasticité intérieure et par la profusion de son débordement” (138-139).

So this little chunk of text, which I’ve edited down a bit, first postulates a link between heredity and style—but as is typical of humanist racial discourse, there is a great deal of ambiguity about the exact mechanism of transmission of these stylistic traits. Clearly, style is here an expression of the functioning of the writer’s mind, we might now say personality, or perhaps character. Style of writing is closely linked to style of thought. (But also, in the quote from pg 136, it is close to the writer’s body). This style of thought is linked to blood, which is a way of saying what, exactly? Historical experience is tied up in this (the tents of Israel—simple metaphor, or is this the content of the claim? To what register, we might ask, does this image belong?)

Thibaudet then mentions the Odyssey, which everyone agrees is a foundation of ‘our’ civilization, and which, according to the French hellenist (Victor?) Bérard, is a greco-semitic ‘doublet.’ From this point on, we have a theory of hybridization circa 1920. (We might notice that, as generous as he is with his doublets, they all start ‘franco-...’). This hybridization takes place strictly between national-linguistic groups, which makes it sound, I think, more obsolete than it is. This vision of mixing blood (understood to mean national, in the mystic sense, tradition) is profoundly progressive. The French tradition is living and vibrant, elastic and always overflowing its boundaries—this is a result of all the mixing, especially the Jewish blood.

This sort of talk is reprehensible for what seem to me obvious reasons. The Nazis (or even, Thibaudet’s contemporary and the object of one of his studies, Charles Maurras) have only to say exactly the same thing as Thibaudet—and they are able to use it to justify doctrines of racial purity. The logic is, I think, exactly the same as in the argument about the Jews as a modernizing force in the economy of Europe. ‘Progressive’ historians, a number of them Jewish, re-wrote the history of European capitalism with Jewish bankers in the staring role, from the middle ages on. Everyone loves capitalism, right? But as politics radicalize, especially, I think it must be said, with the rise of radical socialist ‘scientific’ re-valuation of bourgeois society and its capitalist/industrialist underpinnings, the very narrative which had been understood to praise ‘the Jews’ (I introduce quotes now, because the category becomes problematic) is widely available to damn them. All this is what was discussed at Julie Mell’s IHS session, but grows out of many sources. I don’t think Arendt puts it quite this way, but it is in her spirit.

So Thibaudet is, in literature, doing the same kind of thing that liberal, philosemitic historians did. His discourse is inside the same frame as Maurras’s, even as they disagree. Where does Bell stand in relation to this? Probably not far off.

VIII

Reading the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. I feel as though I belong to a long tradition of left-leaning students constantly reliving a moment assumed to have been radical. If there isn’t yet a journal/magazine/blog/political organization named “Thesis Eight,” there should be. It reads, from the Penguin Early Writings, as follows:

All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.