A few years ago, for a class, I read Michael Burleigh’s Earthly Powers (2005), which is a history of the conflict between and commingling of religion and politics in 19th century Europe. The fundamental argument of the book is that 20th century totalitarianisms are really ‘secular religions,’ or ‘political religions,’ or simply fundamentalisms. Whatever one’s terminological preference, the argument is that revolutionary politics of the left and right—1793, 1917, but also 1933—must be understood in terms also used for religious fundamentalism. Burleigh’s book is a popularizing history, and I don’t judge it harshly. Still, I found and continue to find this interpretive framework rather shallow. Burleigh invokes in his introduction a number of the early interpreters of the totalitarianisms of the 1930s—many with direct experience of these forms of politics. The most philosophical among the writers he cites is Eric Voegelin. Recently, hoping to break a sort of intellectual circle I’d fallen into expressing certain things in my dissertation writing, I read Voegelin’s short essay Science, Politics & Gnosticism (1959, 1968). I have just finished an earlier, slightly longer essay, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (1952).
I read the second text because I found the first one enormously frustrating. In Science, Politics & Gnosticism, Voegelin spends a great deal of time castigating various thinkers, but most especially Marx, for conducting an enormous, elaborate, “intellectual swindle.” Marx’s whole body of work, Voegelin, argues (or perhaps simply asserts) is one long denial of reality. Many of Voegelin’s specific analyses are elegant, and great erudition is evident in places. Yet at no point in this text is it explained how Voegelin himself has such clear access to truth that he can say with confidence, outside of dubious textual evidence that Marx isn’t interested in ‘reality,’ that Marx is entirely wrong? The whole text is negative—an attack on gnosticism.
The New Science of Politics (and we should certainly note the definitive article) is not nearly so negative. Indeed, I wish I had started there. Voegelin’s argument is much more subtle and thought-out than it would seem to be, based on the anti-Marx screeds of the later text. Essentially, Voegelin believes that science and truth originate in personal, individual, experience. He is, we might say, a methodological individualist—although I get the sense that he would reject these terms. History cannot be the bearer of truth in a Hegelian or Comtean sense because it is outside of experience. On the other hand, crucially, individual experience is certainly in history, and has a history. This is important because while it is typically gnostic to build one’s politics upon a philosophy of history (the Christian apocalypse, the Communist paradise, the advent of the Superman), all political philosophy implies a vision of history. The relevant truth of personal experience here is the experience of transcendence. Certain historical events—most importantly Greek philosophy and Christian theology—opened the soul to transcendence. Another way of saying this is that until Greek philosophy, truth and the socio-political structure and tradition were inextricable. Philosophy ‘arrived’ after the real unity of the Athenian polis was broken because with the dissolution of the social structure, it seemed necessary to find a new source of truth. Philosophy, then, and especially political philosophy, is a truth that stands in opposition to the established order of society. Of course, Greek philosophy was relatively limited in its psychic impact. Christianity, on the other hand, eventually penetrated quite deeply into the population of the areas under its political control. This penetration is, for Voegelin, the transition from antiquity to the middle ages. It is also, crucially, the rise of a new kind of truth. Experience becomes more complex because the dimension of the transcendent has been opened. Voegelin is willing to say that this constitutes a kind of individuality that had not, previously, existed. This new form of experience brings with it new sorts of problems. In particular gnosticism, which he understands as a psychological response to the uncertainty generated by the opening to the transcendent. Gnosticism in the Middle Ages took the form of Christian chiliasm, arrived at something like a high point with the total dominance of vulgar positivism around 1900, and exists in the middle 20th century as, on the one hand, liberal progressivism, and on the other, Communism.
I do not expect to be durably interested in Voegelin. However, I think it would be interesting to approach his work as I understand it by trying to specify and contextualize three of his basic concepts: experience, the individual, and truth. Obviously, these three concepts are closely related. We can even express their relation in a restrictive sentence: truth is established only in individual experience. I would suggest, in an offhand way, that Foucault’s perspective on the generation of subjects and truths would be useful. Martin Jay’s Songs of Experience would, I think, be at least the beginning of a useful contextualization of Voegelin in terms of 20th century European ideas of truth. Similarly, Jerrold Seigel’s Idea of the Self might do the same for Voegelin’s fairly aggressive individualism. There is, I know, a certain amount of historiography on interwar writing on gnosticism. It would also be interesting to know more about Voegelin compared to Leo Strauss—for instance, to put Strauss’ book on natural right next to The New Science of Politics. If Strauss provides a contextually similar comparison, it seems to me that the most interesting recent comparison might be with Jacques Rancière’s work on politics as the partition of visibility. The New Science is, at least nominally, about the idea of political representation. Certainly, Rancière’s distinctions between the archi, meta, and para-political could all interfere in interesting ways with Voegelin’s analysis of pre- and post-philosophical political thought.
For the moment, I will file Voegelin away with my notes on him as a figure with whom I disagree deeply, but who does manage to have a perspective much at odds with my usual way of thinking. This is no doubt because I am myself totally compromised by gnosticism.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
copy-book maxims
Here is what seems to me like the least sensible moment in what is otherwise a remarkably lucid text, Lenin's The State and Revolution [1917]. I've been reading out of the silly Dover Essential Works (this citation is from page 338), but the complete text can be read for free here.
Only in communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists has been completely broken, when the capitalists have disappeared, when there are no classes (i.e., when there is no difference between the members of society as regards their relation to the social means of production), only then does “the state...cease to exist,” and it “becomes possible to speak of freedom.” Only then will really complete democracy, democracy without any exceptions, be possible and be realized. Only then will democracy itself begin to wither away owing to the simple fact that, freed from capitalist slavery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social life that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copy-book maxims; they will become accustomed to observing them without force, without compulsion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for compulsion which is called a state.
Only in communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists has been completely broken, when the capitalists have disappeared, when there are no classes (i.e., when there is no difference between the members of society as regards their relation to the social means of production), only then does “the state...cease to exist,” and it “becomes possible to speak of freedom.” Only then will really complete democracy, democracy without any exceptions, be possible and be realized. Only then will democracy itself begin to wither away owing to the simple fact that, freed from capitalist slavery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social life that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copy-book maxims; they will become accustomed to observing them without force, without compulsion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for compulsion which is called a state.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Finishing Empire
My reading of Empire is in fact something like timely. In the fall, perhaps in October, Commonwealth, the third volume in what I suppose to be a trilogy, will be published. Good to start at the beginning.
The project of the book is to delineate and argue for a particular reading of the contemporary world. Hardt and Negri argue that we have entered a phase of history they call Empire (conceptually related to previous Empires, such as the Roman Empire, but rigorously distinguished from 19th century European imperialism). The goal is to understand the particular logic of this phase in the development of capital in order to understand how it may be resisted, and where alternatives should and should not be sought. The book is organized into four parts. The first part is an introductory clearing of the ground, and presentation of the problematic, the concepts. The middle sections present, from two different angles, an interpretation of modernity and its transformation into Empire. The second section is something like an intellectual history of the idea of sovereignty from the early modern period through to the present day; the third section tells the same story from the perspective of the means and relations of production. The backstory told, the interpretive framework set up, the final section is an analysis of Empire itself. I found the last section to be written in quite a different voice from the rest of the book. Oddly more abstract, unsurprisingly more messianic. Significantly more difficult to read.
The book is enormously rich, and intervenes in any number of debates and bodies of scholarship. I plan to look over some of the reactions to and reviews of the book in the next week. At that stage, I may present some more specific arguments. At the moment, I want only to record the questions, or miniature research projects, that I want to pose and propose to and of this text.
From the perspective of late 19th century Marxism, I find the voluntarism of the text extraordinary. For Hardt and Negri, the driving force for structural innovation in capital is not competition between capitalists, as I have understood it to be for Marx, but rather resistance to capital mounted by the proletariat. This perspective—in which worker resistance is what changes the system—is of course more congenial in the 21st century. It is also, in certain respects, closer to the facts. Hardt and Negri mention the slow end of the Caribbean slave system, pointing to arguments that slavery was not abolished when it ceased to be profitable, but rather long after it had ceased to be profitable, when the tempo and tenacity of slave rebellion made it impossible to sustain. It might be pointed out that by the middle of the 19th century the slave system was no longer central to the global economy in the way that it arguably was in the 18th century. This argument about the structural changes in the capital (and, importantly, in the constitution of sovereignty) is made largely in terms of basic metaphysics and broad periodization, rather than with specific examples. Can finance capital in the 1980s really be explained by the broad rejectionism of the 1960s? From Vietnam to Berkeley? Perhaps. If I knew the Marxist tradition better, I would understand, I think, the stakes of what I call Hardt and Negri’s voluntarism. My sense is that it is a position fundamental to certain strains of Italian Marxism with which I am not familiar. It meshes well also, it seems, with the Deleuzian anti-structuralism and anti-formalism of the authors.
Biopower is a crucial concept in Empire. Having recently read Foucault’s later lectures, I am curious about the compatibility between Hardt and Negri’s account of the contemporary world and Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism. It is possible that they are simply tangential to one another. It might be argued that Empire is simply an exaggerated and developed form of the market ideology that so interested Foucault. It would, at any rate, be interesting to take careful note of how Hardt and Negri use Foucault. My sense is that they are using his work as something of a bridge between Marx and Deleuze. Indeed, in the preface, they say that Empire was inspired by two large, interdisciplinary books: Capital and Thousand Plateaus. It seems to me that the historical transformations they chronicle from modernity to postmodernity might also be that from Marx to Deleuze.
It is crucially important for Hardt and Negri’s analysis of the contemporary world that the relationship between Multitude and Empire is not mediated. The center may be reached from any point, because the center is not geographically located. There is no mediation because there are no levels between which mediation would be necessary. Everything is mixed into a smooth geometrical soup. Or at least tends to be. For me, this raises the question of the unity of the Multitude. It seems that for Hardt and Negri, every division within the Multitude (into nations or peoples or even, perhaps, classes), is a pernicious tactic of the corruption of Empire. So, indeed, is any attempt to assert a unity of all people beyond the singularity of Multitude. Yet the task for the Multitude is to assert itself as political subject. No doubt political subjecthood does not exactly require unity in any pre-poststructuralist sense, but I’m not sure that I understand how all this is supposed to work.
Finally, I was struck by the use, in the concluding section of the book in which something like concrete possible demands of the Multitude are suggested, by the use of the language of rights. Hardt and Negri clearly have a somewhat tortured relation to the so-called republican tradition. They are not definitive in their use of such words—several times they talk about postmodern republicanism, but eventually claim that the latin verb posse is to be preferred to res-publica as a description of the victory of Multitude. (If their most recent book is to be titled Commonwealth, perhaps they’ve reconsidered this). Yet it seems to me that Arendt’s observation that human rights are nothing without citizenship is applicable here. Isn’t Empire’s conception of global citizenship caught in just the same exclusionary bind as any other form of citizenship—that is, doesn’t it also implicitly exclude from humanity all those not included within Multitude? And this in a more radical way than simple nations? Is the creative being of Multitude supposed to solve this problem?
Very likely, this and other questions will be addressed in the next volume. It will also be interesting to see how well my impression of this book tallies with that of the professional reviews.
The project of the book is to delineate and argue for a particular reading of the contemporary world. Hardt and Negri argue that we have entered a phase of history they call Empire (conceptually related to previous Empires, such as the Roman Empire, but rigorously distinguished from 19th century European imperialism). The goal is to understand the particular logic of this phase in the development of capital in order to understand how it may be resisted, and where alternatives should and should not be sought. The book is organized into four parts. The first part is an introductory clearing of the ground, and presentation of the problematic, the concepts. The middle sections present, from two different angles, an interpretation of modernity and its transformation into Empire. The second section is something like an intellectual history of the idea of sovereignty from the early modern period through to the present day; the third section tells the same story from the perspective of the means and relations of production. The backstory told, the interpretive framework set up, the final section is an analysis of Empire itself. I found the last section to be written in quite a different voice from the rest of the book. Oddly more abstract, unsurprisingly more messianic. Significantly more difficult to read.
The book is enormously rich, and intervenes in any number of debates and bodies of scholarship. I plan to look over some of the reactions to and reviews of the book in the next week. At that stage, I may present some more specific arguments. At the moment, I want only to record the questions, or miniature research projects, that I want to pose and propose to and of this text.
From the perspective of late 19th century Marxism, I find the voluntarism of the text extraordinary. For Hardt and Negri, the driving force for structural innovation in capital is not competition between capitalists, as I have understood it to be for Marx, but rather resistance to capital mounted by the proletariat. This perspective—in which worker resistance is what changes the system—is of course more congenial in the 21st century. It is also, in certain respects, closer to the facts. Hardt and Negri mention the slow end of the Caribbean slave system, pointing to arguments that slavery was not abolished when it ceased to be profitable, but rather long after it had ceased to be profitable, when the tempo and tenacity of slave rebellion made it impossible to sustain. It might be pointed out that by the middle of the 19th century the slave system was no longer central to the global economy in the way that it arguably was in the 18th century. This argument about the structural changes in the capital (and, importantly, in the constitution of sovereignty) is made largely in terms of basic metaphysics and broad periodization, rather than with specific examples. Can finance capital in the 1980s really be explained by the broad rejectionism of the 1960s? From Vietnam to Berkeley? Perhaps. If I knew the Marxist tradition better, I would understand, I think, the stakes of what I call Hardt and Negri’s voluntarism. My sense is that it is a position fundamental to certain strains of Italian Marxism with which I am not familiar. It meshes well also, it seems, with the Deleuzian anti-structuralism and anti-formalism of the authors.
Biopower is a crucial concept in Empire. Having recently read Foucault’s later lectures, I am curious about the compatibility between Hardt and Negri’s account of the contemporary world and Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism. It is possible that they are simply tangential to one another. It might be argued that Empire is simply an exaggerated and developed form of the market ideology that so interested Foucault. It would, at any rate, be interesting to take careful note of how Hardt and Negri use Foucault. My sense is that they are using his work as something of a bridge between Marx and Deleuze. Indeed, in the preface, they say that Empire was inspired by two large, interdisciplinary books: Capital and Thousand Plateaus. It seems to me that the historical transformations they chronicle from modernity to postmodernity might also be that from Marx to Deleuze.
It is crucially important for Hardt and Negri’s analysis of the contemporary world that the relationship between Multitude and Empire is not mediated. The center may be reached from any point, because the center is not geographically located. There is no mediation because there are no levels between which mediation would be necessary. Everything is mixed into a smooth geometrical soup. Or at least tends to be. For me, this raises the question of the unity of the Multitude. It seems that for Hardt and Negri, every division within the Multitude (into nations or peoples or even, perhaps, classes), is a pernicious tactic of the corruption of Empire. So, indeed, is any attempt to assert a unity of all people beyond the singularity of Multitude. Yet the task for the Multitude is to assert itself as political subject. No doubt political subjecthood does not exactly require unity in any pre-poststructuralist sense, but I’m not sure that I understand how all this is supposed to work.
Finally, I was struck by the use, in the concluding section of the book in which something like concrete possible demands of the Multitude are suggested, by the use of the language of rights. Hardt and Negri clearly have a somewhat tortured relation to the so-called republican tradition. They are not definitive in their use of such words—several times they talk about postmodern republicanism, but eventually claim that the latin verb posse is to be preferred to res-publica as a description of the victory of Multitude. (If their most recent book is to be titled Commonwealth, perhaps they’ve reconsidered this). Yet it seems to me that Arendt’s observation that human rights are nothing without citizenship is applicable here. Isn’t Empire’s conception of global citizenship caught in just the same exclusionary bind as any other form of citizenship—that is, doesn’t it also implicitly exclude from humanity all those not included within Multitude? And this in a more radical way than simple nations? Is the creative being of Multitude supposed to solve this problem?
Very likely, this and other questions will be addressed in the next volume. It will also be interesting to see how well my impression of this book tallies with that of the professional reviews.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Starting Empire
Reading Hardt and Negri’s Empire now, a decade after it was written, is an oddly comforting experience. The vocabulary and movement of the text are reassuring. It is as though I have found the common ancestor who explains an otherwise troubling similarity between several of my casual acquaintances. I now understand better, for instance, the motive for extravagant attention paid to Carl Schmitt and the late Foucault’s analysis of liberalism.
Having only just started the book, I want to withhold comment. I want to note only one striking thing. At a certain point (60ff), wrapping up what I understand to be a long introduction to the rest of the book, the authors evoke the Austro-Hungarian double-headed eagle in order to suggest that the symbol of contemporary Empire should be a similar eagle, but with the heads facing one another in combat, rather than away from one another in peace as in the model. Multitude and Empire, locked in combat, really part of the same body. This may be regarded either as an expressive metaphor or, correctly it seems to me, as a violation of the principle of immanence loudly espoused earlier in the text. How, I want to ask, can Empire be both “parasitical” and “immanent”? This makes me think of my basic objection to a no doubt poorly-understood Marxist labor theory of value. Why doesn’t everything count as labor? Marx had his reasons. Do Hardt and Negri introduce this binary for political reasons? It does not seem to me that it can have, from their perspective, ontological status—or rather, it seems that elsewhere in their text it does not have ontological status.
Might they respond that on one level, Empire is coextensive with multitude, but that on another level or in another sense, precisely the ontological one, multitude is prior and Empire is parasitical? Perhaps, however, I am not reading them right. They say, “philosophy is not the owl of Minerva that takes flight after history has been realized in order to celebrate its happy ending; rather, philosophy is subjective proposition, desire, and praxis that are applied to the event” (48-49). One might say that the text itself desires to render Empire known and therefore parasitical.
I intend to post further comments on this book later, and possibly also its companion volume.
Having only just started the book, I want to withhold comment. I want to note only one striking thing. At a certain point (60ff), wrapping up what I understand to be a long introduction to the rest of the book, the authors evoke the Austro-Hungarian double-headed eagle in order to suggest that the symbol of contemporary Empire should be a similar eagle, but with the heads facing one another in combat, rather than away from one another in peace as in the model. Multitude and Empire, locked in combat, really part of the same body. This may be regarded either as an expressive metaphor or, correctly it seems to me, as a violation of the principle of immanence loudly espoused earlier in the text. How, I want to ask, can Empire be both “parasitical” and “immanent”? This makes me think of my basic objection to a no doubt poorly-understood Marxist labor theory of value. Why doesn’t everything count as labor? Marx had his reasons. Do Hardt and Negri introduce this binary for political reasons? It does not seem to me that it can have, from their perspective, ontological status—or rather, it seems that elsewhere in their text it does not have ontological status.
Might they respond that on one level, Empire is coextensive with multitude, but that on another level or in another sense, precisely the ontological one, multitude is prior and Empire is parasitical? Perhaps, however, I am not reading them right. They say, “philosophy is not the owl of Minerva that takes flight after history has been realized in order to celebrate its happy ending; rather, philosophy is subjective proposition, desire, and praxis that are applied to the event” (48-49). One might say that the text itself desires to render Empire known and therefore parasitical.
I intend to post further comments on this book later, and possibly also its companion volume.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Cold War Modern
Some months ago I saw the exhibit “Cold War Modern” at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. I see now that the relatively new journal Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History has published a review of this exhibit. The basic argument of the brief text is that the exhibit, despite its critical and popular success, makes a basic historical and ideological error. It emphasizes the parallelisms between East and West during the period from the end of the Second World War up through some time in the middle 1970s. This period, called the Cold War, is presented as having been something like a close race toward an open-but-common modernity. East and West both, the exhibit shows us, deployed beautiful design in order to claim modernity for themselves. This is wrong on one level because the design that we see on the Western side (the first model of the Vespa scooter, for instance) actually entered into daily life, while the design we see on the Eastern side (the sketch for a never-built apartment building in Moscow) existed only in show-rooms. Both did serve propaganda purposes, but it is a gross historical error to say that they had the same content. Further, the very concept of the Cold War is a western one. The words and the idea were important and in common use in the West all through the period—nothing like this existed in the East. The reviewer concludes that the positive reception the exhibit has received in what used to be the East is evidence that the western metanarrative (or, as the author of the review prefers, communicative memory) of the Cold War is winning out even in the old East.
As is perhaps evident from the uncomfortable capitalization in the above paragraph of ‘East’ and ‘West’ and ‘western’ and ‘eastern,’ the narrativization of the Cold War is a very delicate thing. It is very easy to forget where ideas come from, and just which imagined realities they express. I don’t think that the reviewer—Dr. Muriel Blaive—is wrong, as far as her argument goes. But, I must say that I did not experience the ideological content of the show in quite the same way. I’ve got to go on my memory here, which is much less reliable than her treatment of the catalogue. Still, it seems to me that the point of the show was perhaps less real parallelism than a race for it, and the, in a certain light, very remarkable degree to which it in fact existed. At many points, it was possible to see just how far apart the two ‘modern’s were. For instance, I recall a treatment of two peace memorials, one on the west side and one on the east. The communist memorial was socialist-realist: strong-jawed and rugged (but clean) soldiers of the Red Army, standing in a heroic pose—I’m certain that one of them had a broadsword. The capitalist (I’ve no choice if I called the other one communist) memorial was never built, but the plans were for a Giacometti-type sculpture of wires that look as though they were once human and retain of their humanity only pain. Interestingly, neither memorial fit especially into the aesthetic of the ‘modern’ so nicely paralleled in the front room of the show.
Blaive’s point about the struggle over the memory of the postwar period is not at issue. Inasmuch as I am entitled to an opinion (which I am not), she seems to me correct. But I will say that she rushes rather too quickly past the ruptures and failures of parallelism in “Cold War Modern” in her desire to find an ideologically compromised history. Just as a work of art, it has no doubt been said, rewards close attention to its flaws as well as its perfections, it seems to me that the show in question should not be judged too quickly. Or even, if it comes to that, on the basis of what the curators say about it.
As is perhaps evident from the uncomfortable capitalization in the above paragraph of ‘East’ and ‘West’ and ‘western’ and ‘eastern,’ the narrativization of the Cold War is a very delicate thing. It is very easy to forget where ideas come from, and just which imagined realities they express. I don’t think that the reviewer—Dr. Muriel Blaive—is wrong, as far as her argument goes. But, I must say that I did not experience the ideological content of the show in quite the same way. I’ve got to go on my memory here, which is much less reliable than her treatment of the catalogue. Still, it seems to me that the point of the show was perhaps less real parallelism than a race for it, and the, in a certain light, very remarkable degree to which it in fact existed. At many points, it was possible to see just how far apart the two ‘modern’s were. For instance, I recall a treatment of two peace memorials, one on the west side and one on the east. The communist memorial was socialist-realist: strong-jawed and rugged (but clean) soldiers of the Red Army, standing in a heroic pose—I’m certain that one of them had a broadsword. The capitalist (I’ve no choice if I called the other one communist) memorial was never built, but the plans were for a Giacometti-type sculpture of wires that look as though they were once human and retain of their humanity only pain. Interestingly, neither memorial fit especially into the aesthetic of the ‘modern’ so nicely paralleled in the front room of the show.
Blaive’s point about the struggle over the memory of the postwar period is not at issue. Inasmuch as I am entitled to an opinion (which I am not), she seems to me correct. But I will say that she rushes rather too quickly past the ruptures and failures of parallelism in “Cold War Modern” in her desire to find an ideologically compromised history. Just as a work of art, it has no doubt been said, rewards close attention to its flaws as well as its perfections, it seems to me that the show in question should not be judged too quickly. Or even, if it comes to that, on the basis of what the curators say about it.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Barthes on the photograph
Roland Barthes said of himself somewhere that he took up in turn the great intellectual enthusiasms of his time without ever committing himself firmly to any of them. We are to think of his work as reflecting, or refracting, the light of those around him. So in his first years he is something like a phenomenologist and a Marxist (Sartre: Michelet, Degrée Zero, the writings on Camus). By the end of the 1950s, he has taken up structuralism and will follow it through a series of ‘scientific’ moments into its frantic self-dissolution in what we now call ‘post-structuralism’ (Mythologies is an important step from Marxism to structuralism, S/Z, which I haven’t read, is usually cited as the text in which structuralism swallows its own tail and becomes something else). In the 1970s Lacan and Lacanians become important; Barthes’ work becomes less ‘scientific’ and more ‘literary,’ more personal (Barthes par Barthes). Throughout all this, Barthes’ work seems governed by the idea of the text. Already in Degrée zero, the literary text is a kind of utopia. Probably Barthes’ most read work, Mythologies, is an origin-moment for cultural studies because in a sense it treats world as text, revealing layers of meaning and ideology attached to such self-evident staples as steak frites.
I go through this because La chambre claire [1979], which I have just finished reading, is quite a different sort of book than one might expect from his other late work. To begin with, it is about photographs, not text. It quite explicitly returns to a Sartrean and phenomenological viewpoint in order to treat this material. For Barthes, the photograph is the opposite of text: it is pure reality—its essence is to have been, rather than to ‘play.’ Barthes’ later work is insistently personal, but La chambre claire is ‘personal’ in a radically different way than is Barthes par Barthes [1977, i think]. I immensely enjoyed this last book—I have also enjoyed La chambre claire. The two books, taken together, might be an argument for Barthes’ status as a great French writer.
La chambre claire is divided into two parts. In the first part, Barthes gives us a sort of phenomenology of the photograph. He makes his distinction between studium and punctum. The studium of a photograph is something like one’s intellectual, or cultural, interest in it. In historical photographs, we might be very interested in the clothes worn by those in the photograph, in the building we can see in the background, and so on. A photograph of an author whose work I have read may interest me in this way. This is our usual way of interacting with photographs. Then there is the second way,
Sometimes, but not always, and entirely contingently, according to no expressible rule, the surface of studium presented by a photograph will be broken by a punctum. Often, Barthes says, the punctum is a detail (71-3 ff), it might be a necklace, a shoe, or the precise form of an open hand. The punctum may also have to do with the temporality of a photograph. Barthes reproduces the well-known picture of Lewis Payne, who was condemned to death in 1865 for plotting to assassinate the US secretary of state. Barthes says, of this photo, “le punctum, c’est: il va mourir. Je lis en même temps: cela sera et cela a été; j’observe avec horreur un future antérieur dont la mort est l’enjeu...Que le sujet en soit déjà mort ou non, toute photographie est cette catastrophe” (150).
I suspect that it is this distinction, these conceptual tools, that students are generally expected to take from the book. The second part of the book becomes increasingly personal and lyrical, less careful and more powerful. The concluding passages are perhaps something like a theoretical statement, but it feels more to me as though Barthes was simply obliged, somehow, to conclude with a transgressive and transportable conclusion.
What I find most remarkable, however, is the cascade of associations provoked by the photograph: the disjunction of temporalities, absence, but then also reality unmediated by method, death. Barthes contrasts photography with cinema, with writing, with painting. Barthes dislikes cinema. It will never be subversive in the way that photography can be. But photography clearly means death (and not only because of the circumstances in which the book was written), whereas text means life. Photographs fix and assert meaning. They are absolutely what they are—and here it makes no difference if the photograph has been altered, or that Barthes lives before digital photographs, the reference is to Sartre’s imaginaire, which is a realm of the simply and immediately true, which cannot not be true--a realm in which perception is reality. Painting emerges as not at all the source of photography, but rather as a radically different mode of artistic production. Indeed, in the end, photography looses its special ontological characteristics when it is reduced to art.
This book deserves more than I can give it just now. I should look into what I am sure is the enormous quantity of secondary material on it. I am intrigued, for instance, by the presence of race in the book (that is, several of the pictures are of African-Americans), which I think must be linked for Barthes in interesting and subtle ways to the immediate reality of the photograph, and also to the idea of his own family photographs and identity. I would want to look carefully at what Barthes says about his method, and the obvious violations of this method (he says explicitly that the one thing he does not want to do is erect his own experience as abstract socius, and then he does precisely this—what’s his game?).
The book is, at any rate, wonderful. It almost convinces me to buy the recently published Journal de deuil, made after his mother’s death. At the very least, I’ll look at his late seminars.
I go through this because La chambre claire [1979], which I have just finished reading, is quite a different sort of book than one might expect from his other late work. To begin with, it is about photographs, not text. It quite explicitly returns to a Sartrean and phenomenological viewpoint in order to treat this material. For Barthes, the photograph is the opposite of text: it is pure reality—its essence is to have been, rather than to ‘play.’ Barthes’ later work is insistently personal, but La chambre claire is ‘personal’ in a radically different way than is Barthes par Barthes [1977, i think]. I immensely enjoyed this last book—I have also enjoyed La chambre claire. The two books, taken together, might be an argument for Barthes’ status as a great French writer.
La chambre claire is divided into two parts. In the first part, Barthes gives us a sort of phenomenology of the photograph. He makes his distinction between studium and punctum. The studium of a photograph is something like one’s intellectual, or cultural, interest in it. In historical photographs, we might be very interested in the clothes worn by those in the photograph, in the building we can see in the background, and so on. A photograph of an author whose work I have read may interest me in this way. This is our usual way of interacting with photographs. Then there is the second way,
Le second élément vient casser (ou scander) le studium. Cette fois, ce n’est pas moi qui vais le chercher (comme j’investis de ma conscience souveraine le champ du studium), c’est lui qui part de la scène, comme un flèche, et vient me percer...Ce second élément qui vient déranger le studium, je l’appellerai donc punctum...Le punctum d’une photo, c’est ce hasard qui, en elle, me point (mais aussi me meurtrit, me poigne). [pgs 48-49]
Sometimes, but not always, and entirely contingently, according to no expressible rule, the surface of studium presented by a photograph will be broken by a punctum. Often, Barthes says, the punctum is a detail (71-3 ff), it might be a necklace, a shoe, or the precise form of an open hand. The punctum may also have to do with the temporality of a photograph. Barthes reproduces the well-known picture of Lewis Payne, who was condemned to death in 1865 for plotting to assassinate the US secretary of state. Barthes says, of this photo, “le punctum, c’est: il va mourir. Je lis en même temps: cela sera et cela a été; j’observe avec horreur un future antérieur dont la mort est l’enjeu...Que le sujet en soit déjà mort ou non, toute photographie est cette catastrophe” (150).
I suspect that it is this distinction, these conceptual tools, that students are generally expected to take from the book. The second part of the book becomes increasingly personal and lyrical, less careful and more powerful. The concluding passages are perhaps something like a theoretical statement, but it feels more to me as though Barthes was simply obliged, somehow, to conclude with a transgressive and transportable conclusion.
What I find most remarkable, however, is the cascade of associations provoked by the photograph: the disjunction of temporalities, absence, but then also reality unmediated by method, death. Barthes contrasts photography with cinema, with writing, with painting. Barthes dislikes cinema. It will never be subversive in the way that photography can be. But photography clearly means death (and not only because of the circumstances in which the book was written), whereas text means life. Photographs fix and assert meaning. They are absolutely what they are—and here it makes no difference if the photograph has been altered, or that Barthes lives before digital photographs, the reference is to Sartre’s imaginaire, which is a realm of the simply and immediately true, which cannot not be true--a realm in which perception is reality. Painting emerges as not at all the source of photography, but rather as a radically different mode of artistic production. Indeed, in the end, photography looses its special ontological characteristics when it is reduced to art.
This book deserves more than I can give it just now. I should look into what I am sure is the enormous quantity of secondary material on it. I am intrigued, for instance, by the presence of race in the book (that is, several of the pictures are of African-Americans), which I think must be linked for Barthes in interesting and subtle ways to the immediate reality of the photograph, and also to the idea of his own family photographs and identity. I would want to look carefully at what Barthes says about his method, and the obvious violations of this method (he says explicitly that the one thing he does not want to do is erect his own experience as abstract socius, and then he does precisely this—what’s his game?).
The book is, at any rate, wonderful. It almost convinces me to buy the recently published Journal de deuil, made after his mother’s death. At the very least, I’ll look at his late seminars.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Contingency, Habit, Being
There follow some quick thoughts on reading Emile Boutroux’s 1874 philosophy thèse, De la contingence des lois de la nature.
The essential movement of Boutroux’s De la contingence is a double gesture of logical affirmation and then empirical wiggling. He establishes in the first chapter, ‘de la nécessité,’ that the only true necessity, the only true determination, is that which applies to a priori causal syntheses. He says, “c’est seulement aux synthèses causal à priori qu’appartient la nécessité tant objective que subjective: elle seules peuvent engendrer des conséquences analytiques entièrement nécessaires” (13). There is another form of necessity, of fact rather than logic, submitted to rigorous empirical testing. Boutroux says, “Celle-ci existe lorsque la synthèse que développe l’analyse est posée à priori par l’esprit et unit un effet à une cause. Lorsque cette synthèse sans être connu à priori, est impliquée dans un enseble de faits connus, et qu’elle est constamment confirmée par l’expérience, elle manifeste, sinon la nécessité du tout, du moins la nécessité de chaque partie, à supposer que les autres soient réalisées” (14). Having established these conditions for necessity, Boutroux then proceeds up the chain of being, showing at each stage that those laws we believe to be posed a priori are, first, in fact derived from experience and, second, do not meet the conditions of the second kind of necessity in an entirely rigorous way. Boutroux constantly reminds us that “il s’agit ici, non de l’être en soi, mais de l’être tel que le considèrent les sciences positives, c’est-à-dire des faits donnés dans l’expérience” (16). In this sense, the ideas of causality and of possibility, are not given a priori, but rather are drawn from experience. Boutroux, this is to say, presents us with a rigorous definition of necessity, and then demonstrates at successively ‘higher’ levels of reality, that this necessity is an idea we derive from experiment and experience (the words are slightly ambiguous in French, but Boutroux does not, here, draw a sharp distinction between the two), and that even at this level, given the incomplete nature of our knowledge, there cannot be said to be strict causality.
Ravaisson, in his ‘rapport’ on the state of French philosophy published a few years before Boutroux’s thèse, marked out the divergence between those who began with the higher, and derived the lower, and those who began with the lower, and built their way up into the higher. Boutroux’s intervention, in a sense, is to reject this dichotomy. The physical world is imagines in a strictly hierarchical fashion, along an ascending, stepped scale not so much of complexity, as of contingency. Although no step can be derived from those below it, or conversely made to yield up the ‘truth’ of the one above it, it is important that we do not have simply overlapping sets of rules, but a genuine hierarchy. The laws of one step on the ladder cannot explain (though they apply within) a different step on the ladder.
The bulk of the book is taken up with the elaboration of this way of thinking and the erecting and demolition of various objections to it. Consciousness, he says, is simply not reducible to its component physical parts. Boutroux continually inquires after the relation of what we assume and our experience. Metaphysics, together with claims to absolute necessity, is cordoned off into its proper field, excluded from the given world. It is this negative and defensive part of Boutroux’s book that functioned as a touchstone and foundational text for the epistemological tradition. But this was only part of Boutroux’s project. It is not enough to reject determinism, a positive ideal must also be erected. This aspect of the book, which links it strikingly to Ravaisson’s De l’habitude, seems to have been less important for the founders of the RMM. This second, constructive, part of Boutroux’s work is crucial, however, if we want to contextualize him more broadly, and understand how his work could have been read.
The question of probability is important. If, later on, it would be possible to regard the physical world as, at a certain level, essentially probabilistic, Boutroux does not yet arrive at this point of view. It seems to me that his contingency is not based on chance, but on irreducibility. At the very least, I am comfortable saying that Boutroux is enormously cagey on the question of the epistemological status of statistics, skeptical at best.
Particularly interesting are Boutroux’s discussions of the relation of law to fact. He says, “les lois sont le lit où passe le torrent des faits: ils l’ont creusé, bien qu’ils le suivent” (39). At the end of the chapter ‘de l’homme,’ Boutroux has mounted a sort of sneak-attack on the supposed law of the conservation of psychic energy. He is willing, perhaps, to accept the idea, but fragments it so that it applies not to all people equally, but to each in a particular way. He says, “plus que tous les autres êtres, le personne humaine a une existence propre, est à elle-même son monde. Plus que les autres êtres, elle peut agir, sans être forcée de faire entrer ses actes dans un système qui la dépasse.” Individuals, by making their own facts, make their own laws, “la loi tend à se rapprocher du fait...L’individu, devenu, à lui seul, tout le genre auquel s’applique la loi, en est maître. Il la tourne en instrument; et il rêve un état où, en chaque instant de son existence, il serait aisni l’égal de la loi et posséderait, en lui-même, tous les éléments de son action” (130). This dream in which actions are coterminous with laws is evidently a re-import of the Kantian imperative back into the realm of the physical, a smearing together of the moral and the physical realms, of the ideal and the real. This is perhaps why, at the end of Boutroux’s text, he speaks a great deal about the good and the beautiful, but not at all about the true.
If stability is the truth of the physical world, so also is change. Both are present everywhere, but the great chain of being is constructed by increasing change, indeed, this is expressed in terms of being and its law. Boutroux says, “dans les mondes inférieurs, la loi tient uns si large place qu’elle se substitue presque à l’être; dans les mondes supérieurs, au contraire, l’être fait presque oublier la loi. Ainsi tout fait relève non seulement du principle de conservation, mais aussi et tout d’abord, d’un principe de création” (139-40). Necessity is understood here in something like a Kantian way—it is an imperative and an ideal, rather than a fact. Each level of reality takes as its ideal the one above it. Compare this idea of a hierarchy of necessity and freedom to Ravaisson, in De l’habitude: “La limite inférieure est la nécessité, le Destin si l’on veut, mais dans la spontanéité de la Nature; la limite supérieure, la Liberté de l’entendement. L’habitude descend de ‘une à l’autre ; elle rapproche ces contraires, et en les rapprochant elle en dévoile l’essence intime et la nécessaire connexion” (97). Boutroux retains hierarchy, and the basic idea of a chain of being, but some things have changed, though perhaps somewhat subtly. We can perhaps say that Habit, for Ravaisson, is the sliding of willed actions into unconscious performance, their regularization and becoming routine. How different is this from Boutroux’s metaphor of law as like a riverbed carved out by the flow of fact?
In this light, Boutroux’s ‘system,’ built around contingency, presenting an ideal of pure understanding towards which one strives, appears as remarkably mystical. Metaphysics does not provide a mode of intellectual access to the world, but rather an unrealizable but motivating ideal. Ravaisson seems almost the more content to understand. I suppose Ravaisson’s stance is the serenity of rationalism, and that Boutroux’s mystical frenzy is the defensive result of overcompensation for the encroachment of vulgar materialism.
A great deal more could and should be said in particular about Ravaisson's and Boutroux's handling of the concept of being. I think Boutroux has taken an important step toward a conception of being as radically discontinuous, and would therefore represent an interestingly non-Bergsonian development of Ravaisson's thought. The next step for me to take here is, in any case, looking over the relevant work by Jean Beaufret and especially Dominique Janicaud’s Ravaisson-Bergson book. More laterally, it seems that Boutroux’s book fits into a sort of cohort of work appearing just after the fall of the Second Empire—I think that Janicaud puts it in a box with other thèses by Alfred Fouillée and Jules Lachelier. I know already a bit about Fouillée, Lachelier might be worth looking at.
The essential movement of Boutroux’s De la contingence is a double gesture of logical affirmation and then empirical wiggling. He establishes in the first chapter, ‘de la nécessité,’ that the only true necessity, the only true determination, is that which applies to a priori causal syntheses. He says, “c’est seulement aux synthèses causal à priori qu’appartient la nécessité tant objective que subjective: elle seules peuvent engendrer des conséquences analytiques entièrement nécessaires” (13). There is another form of necessity, of fact rather than logic, submitted to rigorous empirical testing. Boutroux says, “Celle-ci existe lorsque la synthèse que développe l’analyse est posée à priori par l’esprit et unit un effet à une cause. Lorsque cette synthèse sans être connu à priori, est impliquée dans un enseble de faits connus, et qu’elle est constamment confirmée par l’expérience, elle manifeste, sinon la nécessité du tout, du moins la nécessité de chaque partie, à supposer que les autres soient réalisées” (14). Having established these conditions for necessity, Boutroux then proceeds up the chain of being, showing at each stage that those laws we believe to be posed a priori are, first, in fact derived from experience and, second, do not meet the conditions of the second kind of necessity in an entirely rigorous way. Boutroux constantly reminds us that “il s’agit ici, non de l’être en soi, mais de l’être tel que le considèrent les sciences positives, c’est-à-dire des faits donnés dans l’expérience” (16). In this sense, the ideas of causality and of possibility, are not given a priori, but rather are drawn from experience. Boutroux, this is to say, presents us with a rigorous definition of necessity, and then demonstrates at successively ‘higher’ levels of reality, that this necessity is an idea we derive from experiment and experience (the words are slightly ambiguous in French, but Boutroux does not, here, draw a sharp distinction between the two), and that even at this level, given the incomplete nature of our knowledge, there cannot be said to be strict causality.
Ravaisson, in his ‘rapport’ on the state of French philosophy published a few years before Boutroux’s thèse, marked out the divergence between those who began with the higher, and derived the lower, and those who began with the lower, and built their way up into the higher. Boutroux’s intervention, in a sense, is to reject this dichotomy. The physical world is imagines in a strictly hierarchical fashion, along an ascending, stepped scale not so much of complexity, as of contingency. Although no step can be derived from those below it, or conversely made to yield up the ‘truth’ of the one above it, it is important that we do not have simply overlapping sets of rules, but a genuine hierarchy. The laws of one step on the ladder cannot explain (though they apply within) a different step on the ladder.
The bulk of the book is taken up with the elaboration of this way of thinking and the erecting and demolition of various objections to it. Consciousness, he says, is simply not reducible to its component physical parts. Boutroux continually inquires after the relation of what we assume and our experience. Metaphysics, together with claims to absolute necessity, is cordoned off into its proper field, excluded from the given world. It is this negative and defensive part of Boutroux’s book that functioned as a touchstone and foundational text for the epistemological tradition. But this was only part of Boutroux’s project. It is not enough to reject determinism, a positive ideal must also be erected. This aspect of the book, which links it strikingly to Ravaisson’s De l’habitude, seems to have been less important for the founders of the RMM. This second, constructive, part of Boutroux’s work is crucial, however, if we want to contextualize him more broadly, and understand how his work could have been read.
The question of probability is important. If, later on, it would be possible to regard the physical world as, at a certain level, essentially probabilistic, Boutroux does not yet arrive at this point of view. It seems to me that his contingency is not based on chance, but on irreducibility. At the very least, I am comfortable saying that Boutroux is enormously cagey on the question of the epistemological status of statistics, skeptical at best.
Particularly interesting are Boutroux’s discussions of the relation of law to fact. He says, “les lois sont le lit où passe le torrent des faits: ils l’ont creusé, bien qu’ils le suivent” (39). At the end of the chapter ‘de l’homme,’ Boutroux has mounted a sort of sneak-attack on the supposed law of the conservation of psychic energy. He is willing, perhaps, to accept the idea, but fragments it so that it applies not to all people equally, but to each in a particular way. He says, “plus que tous les autres êtres, le personne humaine a une existence propre, est à elle-même son monde. Plus que les autres êtres, elle peut agir, sans être forcée de faire entrer ses actes dans un système qui la dépasse.” Individuals, by making their own facts, make their own laws, “la loi tend à se rapprocher du fait...L’individu, devenu, à lui seul, tout le genre auquel s’applique la loi, en est maître. Il la tourne en instrument; et il rêve un état où, en chaque instant de son existence, il serait aisni l’égal de la loi et posséderait, en lui-même, tous les éléments de son action” (130). This dream in which actions are coterminous with laws is evidently a re-import of the Kantian imperative back into the realm of the physical, a smearing together of the moral and the physical realms, of the ideal and the real. This is perhaps why, at the end of Boutroux’s text, he speaks a great deal about the good and the beautiful, but not at all about the true.
If stability is the truth of the physical world, so also is change. Both are present everywhere, but the great chain of being is constructed by increasing change, indeed, this is expressed in terms of being and its law. Boutroux says, “dans les mondes inférieurs, la loi tient uns si large place qu’elle se substitue presque à l’être; dans les mondes supérieurs, au contraire, l’être fait presque oublier la loi. Ainsi tout fait relève non seulement du principle de conservation, mais aussi et tout d’abord, d’un principe de création” (139-40). Necessity is understood here in something like a Kantian way—it is an imperative and an ideal, rather than a fact. Each level of reality takes as its ideal the one above it. Compare this idea of a hierarchy of necessity and freedom to Ravaisson, in De l’habitude: “La limite inférieure est la nécessité, le Destin si l’on veut, mais dans la spontanéité de la Nature; la limite supérieure, la Liberté de l’entendement. L’habitude descend de ‘une à l’autre ; elle rapproche ces contraires, et en les rapprochant elle en dévoile l’essence intime et la nécessaire connexion” (97). Boutroux retains hierarchy, and the basic idea of a chain of being, but some things have changed, though perhaps somewhat subtly. We can perhaps say that Habit, for Ravaisson, is the sliding of willed actions into unconscious performance, their regularization and becoming routine. How different is this from Boutroux’s metaphor of law as like a riverbed carved out by the flow of fact?
In this light, Boutroux’s ‘system,’ built around contingency, presenting an ideal of pure understanding towards which one strives, appears as remarkably mystical. Metaphysics does not provide a mode of intellectual access to the world, but rather an unrealizable but motivating ideal. Ravaisson seems almost the more content to understand. I suppose Ravaisson’s stance is the serenity of rationalism, and that Boutroux’s mystical frenzy is the defensive result of overcompensation for the encroachment of vulgar materialism.
A great deal more could and should be said in particular about Ravaisson's and Boutroux's handling of the concept of being. I think Boutroux has taken an important step toward a conception of being as radically discontinuous, and would therefore represent an interestingly non-Bergsonian development of Ravaisson's thought. The next step for me to take here is, in any case, looking over the relevant work by Jean Beaufret and especially Dominique Janicaud’s Ravaisson-Bergson book. More laterally, it seems that Boutroux’s book fits into a sort of cohort of work appearing just after the fall of the Second Empire—I think that Janicaud puts it in a box with other thèses by Alfred Fouillée and Jules Lachelier. I know already a bit about Fouillée, Lachelier might be worth looking at.
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