Time and Critical Theory

When the shadow of the sash appeared in the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said, Quentin, I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reductio absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury.

I've just run through Hartmut Rosa's little summary: Alienation and Acceleration. On the one hand, I respond on a deep, intuitive level to the argument that perhaps the central experience of alienation in contemporary society--late modernity, says Rosa--stems from lack of control over time. Yet I'm unconvinced along several dimensions. First, it seems that too much of the 'acceleration' effect in which Rosa is interested can be rolled into competition. This is more of an adjustment of a Critical Theory of capitalism than a new beginning--perhaps Rosa would not disagree. And the arguments Rosa makes about the necessity that Habermasian and Honnethian (!) critical theory take account of social (political) acceleration--this makes sense. Certain examples make me hesitant: there is nothing about the traffic jam, for instance, which depends on contemporary technology. It's even a kind of pure sociological phenomenon. The final pages of the book become quite casual and essayistic in their presentation of evidence--it is no longer a reconstruction/critique of the tradition of Critical Theory, but evidence of alienation drawn from, god help us, introspection and popular social psychological publications (the introspection i'll stand behind, the social psychology may be slander). Of course, there is also the problem that Critical Theory generally has, it's all identification of a problem, at its best in brutal lucidity. And then no hope at all for the future. Certainly I am not convinced that a Critical Theory built on what I think may be called a virtue ethics has any better chance of doing this than a more conventionally Marxist one--the Marxists can at least tell us to go make revolution.

Leftist Socialism

Kolakowski, Leszek. “The Concept of the Left.” [from The New Left Reader]

How to give the Left a conceptual definition? Leszek Kolakowski begins with a quasi ontological point: “every work of man is a compromise between the material and tool” (144). This principle is as true of dentistry as it is of revolution, “social revolutions are a compromise between utopia and historical reality. The tool of the revolution is utopia, and the material is the social reality on which one wants to impose a new form. And the tool must to some degree fit the substance if the results are not to be ludicrous” (145). Utopia is the negation of a currently existing reality, but it is a constructive negation. Negation is not the same as simply destruction, “the opposite of blowing up a house is not to build a new house but to retain the existing one” (146), and thus we have the space of politics. The Left wants to build a new house, which must be done through critical negation of the existing house. The Right wants to maintain the house just as it is. The two are at loggerheads, except for the moments, tactical and never determined by ideology, when they are united in the desire not to see the house blown up.

Utopia is negation, but not only negation. It is worth giving Kolakowski’s extended definition of the term,

By utopia I mean a state of social consciousness, a mental counterpart to the social movement striving for radical change in the world—a counterpart itself inadequate to these changes and merely reflecting them in an idealized and obscure form. It endows the real movement with the sense of realizing an ideal born in the realm of pure spirit and not in current historical experiences. Utopia is, therefore, a mysterious consciousness of an actual historical tendency. As long as this tendency lives only a clandestine existence, without finding expression in mass social movements, it gives birth to utopias in the narrower sense, that is, to individually constructed models of the world, as it should be. But in time utopia becomes actual social consciousness; it invades the consciousness of a mass movement and becomes one of is essential driving forces. Utopia, then, crosses over from the domain of theoretical and moral thought into the field of practical thinking, and itself begins to govern human action. (146-7)

And this movement, this utopian moment, is an absolutely essential part of the Left. Utopias generate internal contradictions within Left movements, but “the Left cannot do without a utopia. The Left gives forth utopias just as the pancreas discharges insulin – by virtue of an innate law” (147). Just as not all of the Left is utopian, so not all of the Left is revolutionary. But the revolutionary utopia of total change is a necessary part of the Left, because it is a necessary part of significant social change, “utopia is a prerequisite of social upheavals, just as unrealistic efforts are the precondition of realistic ones” (148). You must ask for the stars to receive even a warm bed for the night. This does not mean that in all cases the most radical possible position must be taken, but it does mean that obviously unobtainable demands are an inherent part of the moral existence of the Left.

Left and Right are unavoidably relative terms. One can speak without real difficulty of the Left wing of a Rightist movement. And, indeed, the success of the Left forces it always to change, “as time passes, the Left just define itself ever more precisely. For the more it influences social consciousness, the more its slogans take on a positive aura, the more they are appropriated by the Right and lose their defined meaning. Nobody today opposes such concepts as “freedom” and “equality”; that is why they can become implements of fraud” (150). In the same vein, although we can give a very nice abstract definition of Leftness, for instance as “the degree of participation in the process of social development that strives to eliminate all conditions in which the possibility of satisfying human needs is obstructed by social relations” (150), we cannot remove the manifold contradictions and ambiguities wrapped up in such a general definition.

Rather, we must define the concept of the Left within concrete historical reality. Reality today is marked by two kinds of conflicts, “first of all, class conflicts and, secondarily, political ones” (151). The social world contains many kinds of divisions other than those of class that could give rise to conflict, and further, “classes themselves are becoming more, rather than less, complicated” (151). So, it follows that “political life cannot reflect class conflicts purely and directly but, on the contrary, ever more indirectly and confusedly” (151). And from this it follows that the Left cannot be pegged to the wishes, even the benefit, of the working class, “the Left cannot be defined by saying it will always, in every case, support every demand of the working class, or that it is always on the side of the majority” (151). The intellectual realm is autonomous from the material one, “even though in today’s world there is no leftist attitude independent of the struggle for the rights of the working class, though no leftist position can be realized outside the class structure, and though only the struggle of the oppressed can make the Left a material force, nevertheless the Left must be defined in intellectual, and not class, terms” (151).

Although Kolakowski distinguishes between capitalist and non-capitalist countries, and the utility or force of the distinction might well be worth probing, his laundry-list of positions is much the same for both. Social privilege must go, whatever its source. Colonial oppression and other forms of unequal and exploitative relations between countries must be resisted. Limitations on the freedom of speech are everywhere to be thrown off, and here “the Left fights all the contradictions of freedom that arise in both kinds of social conditions: how far can one push the demand for tolerance without turning against the idea of tolerance itself? How can one guarantee that tolerance will not lead to the victory of forces that will strangle the principle of tolerance? This is the great problem of all leftist movements” (152). In addition to fighting racism and obscurantism in the name of “rational thought,” “the Left strives to secularize social life” (152). The left is willing to use violence, willing to compromise in the concrete when it seems best, “everywhere the Left is ready to compromise with historical facts, but it rejects ideological compromise” (152). Toward reality, “it takes a position of permanent revisionism” (152), while “the Right is the embodiment of the inertia of historical reality” (153). The Left is always willing to grasp reality as it is in the hope of making it how it should be with the aid of a lodestar utopia, its “political ideology,” the Right is incapable of this and “has nothing but tactics” (153). The Left, then, is practically defined as political engagement that does not abandon ideology, so that unlike the Right, it “rejects any means of political warfare that lead to moral consequences which contradict its premises” (153). It follows from this expansive definition that it is impossible to unite into a single political movement all of the Left. There will always, practically by definition although also for practical political reasons, be splinters.

Kolakowski is of course thinking from the specific position of Poland. The Communist Party, then, is the main issue: “For a long time the division into a Party Left and Right did not exist, although some members were more or less to the left…because the Party was deprived of any real political life, because its ideology did not grow out of its own historical experience but was to a large degree imposed upon it” (154). The situation in Poland now is somewhat peculiar, “the forces of the Left stand between two rightist tendencies: the reaction within the Party, and traditional reaction. This is a new historical development, awareness of which has arisen only in the past few years” (155). About this it is pointed out that, “the New Left appeared within the movement when it became apparent that a New Right existed,” without going in to how the old Left moved Right, Kolakowski emphasizes that “it does not seem that this process was caused by the mere fact of the Left’s coming to power…it does not seem that the Left can exist only in a position of opposition, or that the possession of power is incompatible with the nature of the Left and leads inevitably to its downfall” (155). In more poetic language, “the Left protests against the existing world, but it does not long for a void. It is an explosive charge that disrupts the stability of social life, but it is not a movement toward nothingness” (156).

There are many concrete political reasons for the relative weakness of the Left, but the central conceptual reason is that it is always in danger of dissolving into mere moralism. This has to do again with the Left’s ideological commitments. The difference with the Right is definitive, “let us speak openly: contempt for ideology is the strength of the Right because it allows for greater flexibility in practice and for the arbitrary use of any verbal façade that will facilitate the seizure of power” (156). The malleability of the Right means that “it is important for the Left to have available at all times criteria of recognition in the form of attitudes toward those actual political matters which, for one reason or another, force the Right to reveal itself for what it is” (156-7). The ideological danger that faces the Left, its most difficult task, is to resolutely oppose the two kinds of Right, “the Left is in grave danger if it directs its criticism toward only one pressure, for it thus blurs its political demarcations…it must take the same clear rational attitude toward both the sclerotic religiosity of the Stalinist version of Marxism and the obscurantism of the clergy. It must simultaneously reject socialist phraseology as a façade for police states and democratic phraseology as a disguise for bourgeois rule” (157). This returns us to what emerges as Kolakowski’s central point, “the Left’s greatist claim is ideological…it is to differentiate exactly between ideology and current political tactics. The Left does not refuse to compromise with reality as long as compromises are so labeled…While the Left realizes that on occasion it is powerless in the face of crime, it refuses to call crime a ‘blessing’” (157). Put differently, “the intellectual and moral values of communism are not luxurious ornaments of its activity, but the conditions of its existence” (158). Kolakowski calls this position “leftist socialism.”

The Left, then, is a position taken in relation to actually existing society, oriented at every particular turn by utopian dreams that arise out of this reality although they may seem far from it. The Left is therefore permanent. This gives a melancholic and Sisyphean note to Kolakowski’s ending. The Left’s demands are permanently necessary, and so will often enough be defeated, “but such defeats are more fruitful than capitulation. For this reason the Left is not afraid of being a minority…It knows that history itself calls forth in every situation a leftist side which is as necessary a component of social life as its aspect of conservatism and inertia” (158). “The Left the fermenting factor in even the most hardened mass of the historical present…It is…the dynamite of hope that blasts the dead load of ossified systems, institutions, customs, intellectual habits, and closed doctrines. The Left unites those dispersed and often hidden atoms whose movement is, in the last analysis, what we call progress” (158).

Most fundamental right

This opinion piece, from the World Affairs Journal in which Pascale Bruckner defends the recent French ban on the burqua, is from a few months ago, and has doubtless been discussed elsewhere. This debate has been written about brilliantly (in very different modes, for instance, by Joan Scott and Cecile Laborde), and I haven't got anything in particular to add, except to stand back and gape at the following double-whammy:

An individual’s most fundamental right is to free himself or herself from his or her origins: Muslims should be able to leave Islam, become atheist, not observe Ramadan, or convert to Buddhism or to Christianity in the same way that Christians can fall away from their faith and shop for other forms of belief. (In fact, the French press have noted many cases of Muslim aggression against other Muslims who chose not to have children; and as for apostates, they routinely face death threats.) The burqa (or the North African niqab or the Middle Eastern hijab) is a direct challenge to the ideal of laicization since it dramatically violates the principle of equality between men and women.

An individual's most fundamental right is to be set free from their origins? This seems like a pretty clear example of the internal tensions of contemporary French republicanism coming to the fore in statements that are either obvious falsehoods or can only be taken in a radically revolutionary sense. And then there is the breathtaking association of "the ideal of laicization" with "the principle of equality between men and women." Even leaving aside the question of whether, in fact, passing a law banning a kind of clothing worn only by women is indeed forwarding this principle, the idea that French laicite means gender equality cannot possibly be more than, say, 30 years old. Certainly there was very little sense that the 1905 separation or other 3rd Republic policies to remove the Catholic Church from public life, were pursued with any acceptance of gender equality--indeed precisely the opposite is arguably the case.

Chapter One, The Philosophy of Money

As part of my continuing attempt to be more educated in classical sociology, I’m beginning to read Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money. I have so far read the first chapter of this rather large book. This chapter is an enormous amount of philosophical ground-preparation, about subjectivity, objectivity, relativism, and value--and then about ten pages discussing money in the vocabulary so constituted. Simmel is a frustrating writer. Yet he’s rewarding, if only for the occasional passage like this one,

All general and particular systems of knowledge meet in this form of the mutual interdependence of thought processes. If one attempts to understand the political, social, religious or any other cultural aspects of the present time, this can be achieved only through history, i.e. by knowing and understanding the past. But this past, which comes down to us only in fragments, through silent witnesses and more or less unreliable reports and traditions, can come to life and be interpreted only through the experiences of the immediate present. No matter how many transformations and quantitative changes are required, the present, which is the indispensable key to the past, can itself be understood only through the past; and the past, which alone can help us to understand the present, is accessible only through the perceptions and sensibilities of the present. All historical images are the result of this mutuality of interpretative elements, none of which allows the others to come to rest. Ultimate comprehension is transferred to infinity, since every point in one series refers to the other series for its understanding. (pg 110)

I have not yet looked at the substantial (monograph-sized) introduction to this translation, but Simmel is working within an explicitly Kantian horizon. I don’t know enough to be able to judge what he is doing more finely than that.

His treatment of relativism is satisfyingly thoroughgoing. The Comtean-Durkheimian sociological relativism that I am more used to seems always to pull up before crashing into the more serious consequences of this line of thought. Simmel is adamant, and iterates a similar point often: it is true to say that the apple is falling towards the Earth, but it is also true to say that the Earth is falling toward the apple. In a familiar (common at this moment) formulation, he says that Science “has abandoned the search for the essence of things and is reconciled to stating the relationships that exist between objects and the human mind from the viewpoint of the human mind” (101). Hi handling of norms and laws, of objectivity through relativity—all this smacks of a slightly different tradition of philosophy of science than the French that I’m more familiar with—when he discusses measurement, it seems to owe something to Fechner, but perhaps I think this because Fechner’s is one of the few theories of measurement I’ve read anything about.

He gets, at the end of the chapter, finally to a set of definitions of money,

In this sense, money has been defined as ‘abstract value’. As a visible object, money is the substance that embodies abstract economic value, in a similar fashion to the sound of words which is an acoustic-physiological occurrence but has significance for us only through the representation that it bears or symbolizes. If the economic value of objects is constituted by their mutual relationship of exchangeability, then money is the autonomous expression of this relationship. Money is the representative of abstract value. From the economic relationship, i.e. the exchangeability of objects, the fact of this relationship is extracted and acquires, in contrast to those objects, a conceptual existence bound to a visible symbol. Money is a specific realization of what is common to economic objects—in the language of the scholastics one might call it universale ante rem, or in re or post rem—and the general misery of human life is most fully reflected by this symbol, namely by the constant shortage of money under which most people suffer. (118)

The last cryptic bit is made more clear, perhaps, by this,

For money represents pure interaction in its purest form; it makes comprehensible the most abstract concept; it is an individual thing whose essential significance is to reach beyond individualities. Thus, money is the adequate expression of the relationship of man to the world, which can only be grasped in single and concrete instances, yet only really conceived when the singular becomes the embodiment of the living mental process which interweaves all singularities and, in this fashion, creates reality. (128)

No wonder it is also the symbol of our misery.

Sources of Reaction

Il existe aujourd’hui un genre de fanatisme scientifique qui menace d’être funeste à la science: il ferait tout sauter pour éprouver un explosif, il perdrait un État pour tirer des archives et mettre en lumière un document ‘intéressant’. Ce système anarchique et révolutionnaire est de source métaphysique. Il n’a rien de rationnel. Proprement il consiste à remplacer le dieu des Juifs par la Curiosité, dite improprement la Science, mis sur un autel, faite centre du monde et revêtue des mêmes honneurs que Jéhovah. Cette superstition ne mérite pas plus de respect que les autres. Bien qu’elle soit fort à la mode parmi les savants, Sainte-Beuve ou l’empirisme organisateur lui donne son nom véritable: tantôt passion féconde, tantôt pure monomanie.

Maurras, Charles. Trois idées politiques: Chateaubriand, Michelet, Sainte-Beuve. [1898]

Anti-Constitutionalism

S'ils invoquent l'exécution littérale des adages constitutionnels, ce n'est que pour les violer impunément. Ce sont les lâches assassins qui, pour égorger sans péril la République au berceau, s'efforcent de la garrotter avec des maximes vagues dont ils savent bien se dégager eux-mêmes.

Robespierre, 5 Nivôse II (25 December, 1793)

His body lies a-mouldering

The deed was done. The next day the world knew and the world sat in puzzled amazement. It was ever so and ever will be. When a prophet like John brown appears, how must we of the world receive him? Must we follow out the drear, dread logic of surrounding facts, as did the South, even if they crucify a clean and pure soul, simply because consistent allegiance to our cherished, chosen ideal demands it? If we do, the shame will brand our latest history. Shall we hesitate and waver before his clear white logic, now helping, now fearing to help, now believing, now doubting? Yes, this we must do so long as the doubt and hesitation are genuine; but we must not lie. If we are human, we must thus hesitate until we know the right. How shall we know it? That is the Riddle of the Sphinx. We are but darkened groping souls, that know not light often because of its very blinding radiance. Only in time is truth revealed. To-day at last we know: John Brown was right. (172)

This is the first paragraph of the 12th chapter of W.E.B. Du Bois’ biography of John Brown. The previous chapters narrative briefly Brown’s life and character, at more length his actions in Kansas, and finally, in some evaluative detail, the planning for and execution of the raid on Harper’s Ferry. Du Bois goes quite lightly and quickly over how it is that John Brown decided to devote his and his family’s life to breaking slavery, the main fact is that he did so. Du Bois says, “he was the sword on which struggling Kansas and its leaders could depend, the untarnished doer of its darker deeds, when they that knew them necessary cowered and held their hands” (174). That phrase, “untarnished doer of…dark deeds” is I think the crucial one.

The book is constructed entirely from secondary sources—in this it is something like, although on a very different scale, Black Reconstruction. Also like that work, it is a fine example of committed interpretive historiography. We hear about John Brown’s life, we get a theory of the Alleghenies as the ‘central fact’ of his geographic imagination, we learn that he read up on the Haitian Revolution to learn about guerilla warfare and also, somewhat surprisingly, that his troop read Tom Paine’s The Age of Reason to pass the time (151). Du Bois rejects with some heat the idea that Brown’s plan was from the beginning silly or amateur and destined to pitiful failure. Brown had experience fighting, he knew the terrain, and it was indeed plausible that a well financed guerilla could operate in the Alleghenies striking into the “great black way” of the Shenandoah. That the raid on Harper’s Ferry failed is not itself evidence that it was stupidly or naively conceived.

Although it is not exactly ever said, we understand clearly that the author agrees with Frederick Douglass that Brown’s plan was not likely to succeed. Douglass, Du Bois clearly thinks, was correct that in the end, “only national force could dislodge national slavery” (175). Still, Du Bois emphasizes the final meeting between Douglass and Brown, in which Shields Green, a recent runaway, chooses Brown over Douglass. He cites at length from Douglass’ later recounting of the moment,

“Captain Brown urged us both to go with him, but I could not do so, and could but feel that he was about to rivet the fetters more firmly than ever on the limbs of the enslaved…my discretion or my cowardice made me proof against the dear old man’s eloquence—perhaps it was something of both which determined my course. When about to leave, I asked Green what he had decided to do, and was surprised by his coolly saying, in his broken way, ‘I b’lieve I’ll go wid de old man.’ Here we separated” (149).

Du Bois returns to this later on, in his evaluative chapter. He says, “As it was with Douglass, so it was practically with the Negro race. They believed in John Brown but not in his plan” (175). For all that this book might be called hagiography, Du Bois is perfectly willing to go further than this. The black people who had made it to Canada, with whom Brown was in communication, who he tried to enlist in his band—they knew what slavery was, and what the plantation was, in a way that John Brown, for all his moral firmness, simply could not. And, then, as Du Bois says, “was not their whole life already a sacrifice?” (176). These are hard questions, and it seems to me that Du Bois says what he can, and leaves a great deal up to historical contingency. What if the plan had gone off earlier, as it would have without the interference of Hugh Forbes? It would have had a wider support base among anti-slavery circles, there would have been more on-the-ground support. What if Brown had avoided being trapped in Harper’s Ferry, had made it up into the mountains to start his guerilla war? As it was—and this was important for Du Bois to emphasize in 1909—a number of free blacks did join, and a number of enslaved people did help in the heat of the moment. It mattered, after all, to Du Bois that black men and women (principally, in this narrative, Harriet Tubman) could be the agents of their own emancipation—this is one of the big interventions of Black Reconstruction.

Certainly I am not a historian of the US in the 19th century, so there is much that I’m unable to judge in this book. But I have at least some interest in revolutionary radicals, and it seems to me that Brown and his cohort should be included in any survey of international 19th century revolutionists. He studied Toussaint, he sought advice (although apparently he shouldn’t have) from a man who marched with Mazzini. He was part of the 19th century Revolutionary tradition. One might cite as evidence of this the somewhat bizarre, at least to me, convention called in order to draft a constitutional framework for “the government of a band of isolated people fighting for liberty” (131). Interesting, also, from a more contemporary point of view, is Du Bois’ reproduction of debate over the flag to be flown by this group. Despite some objections, especially from former slaves, Brown insisted that the guerilla should fly the Stars and Stripes (127-133). More difficult to square, I think, with the European Revolutionary tradition with which I’m more familiar is Brown’s religious fundamentalism. He was an anti-slavery egalitarian, indeed—but from his own point of view, he was absolutely engaged in a religious war.

And here is what, in the end, I find so compelling, what I so much want to worry over, about Brown today. It would be difficult today to deny the values, from a certain point of view, for which he fought. Human equality and freedom are so much the definitive words of our political idiom that they are in real danger of being totally voided of meaning. So we can only applaud a struggle in their name. Yet, I think, we cannot avoid the fact that Brown was essentially a militant fundamentalist terrorist. The violence in Kansas seemed to be settling the question in favor of the slave-holders. Indeed, it seemed that peace and at least formal, although absolutely not real, democracy was about to be established. It was at this juncture, if I understand correctly, that in order to push the situation in the better direction, Brown took a group of men out to a settlement that was a hotbed of pro-slavery activity, and began knocking on doors. He had the man of the house dragged outside, taken a little ways away into the woods, and cut down with broadswords. This was repeated at several houses. There is a ritualistic aspect to this violence. It was, in a real sense, blood expiation for the crime of slavery.

Du Bois repeats in several places the somewhat ungainly catchphrase, “the cost of liberty is less than the price of repression” (195), and calls this Brown’s great lesson for ‘our time.’ Really, though, it is only on the very last page of the book that Du Bois gets to the moral and historical claim at the heart of John Brown’s life, at least as he’d written it. Finally he says, “John Brown taught us that the cheapest price to pay for liberty is its cost to-day” (201). This is the temporal fix, this is the anti-liberal claim of the revolutionary at its purest: not tomorrow, today. Without action it will be worse tomorrow, not better.

Edward Said, I think, wrote one of his very last books on the ‘late work,’ that is, works of art made not long before the artist died. Here are John Brown’s last written words, set down the day the state of Virginia hung him: “I, John brown, am quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done” (186).

---------------
I am reading from the 1997 edition under the care of John David Smith in the ‘American History Though Literature’ series. I wish very much that I had the newer edition made for the ongoing Du Bois complete works project. For one thing, the Smith edition—and I blame the publisher not Smith—has a terribly large number of typos. ‘John brown’ is an especially common and egregious one. If I had time, I would look at the Sanborn letters, the more recent Oates biography and/or the much more recent Reynolds one. But I haven’t looked into this much at all yet.