On the theory that ideological purity is a sign of intellectual degeneration, I turned to Raymond Aron’s textbook (or something like it) Les étapes de la pensée sociologique for a treatment of Marx before looking at Althusser.
This particular text is interesting for several reasons. The book was published in 1967, which I think we can treat as the autumn of Marxism as a fad in French intellectual life. Aron is thus accustomed, at this point, to being set aside. This is perhaps the source of the clarity of his prose. I have for the moment only looked at the chapter on Marx (I think next will be Durkheim), so although I can’t say what the book as a whole attempts to do, I can say that for Marx, Aron attempts simply to say what points he thinks Marx plainly tried to make and to elaborate the sources of the ambiguity that typifies interpretations of this foundational thinker. I can also say that, as someone who has read a great deal about Marx, and has now read a few of the major texts, Aron seems enormously even-handed, though not without his faults.
Whence the ambiguities? First of all, because any philosophy that becomes ‘official,’ sanctioned by governments, and taught to hundreds of millions of people, can only be contested and confused. Apart from this there is the widely discussed philosophical/scientific division in Marx’s corpus. Aron presents this ‘Althusserian’ theory of Marx in contrast to the tripartite set of influences claimed by Marx for himself: English economics, German philosophy, French socialism (that is, sociology). Aron views skeptically the claim that we know, now, that the early philosophical manuscripts contain the secret of Marx’s work, even though Marx himself left them to rot. Many objections could be made (and no doubt have been made) to this somewhat ‘naïve’ approach. I think it is enormously valuable. Aron certainly does not hide the philosophical issues at play for Marx, nor does he attempt to paper over the (perhaps productive) leaps in Marx’s thinking. His naïve reading, then, is in fact an attempt at a less engaged (though no less ideological) appreciation of the author of Capital.
For Aron, Marx is first of all, above all, the author of Capital. Marx was and ‘wanted to be’ a scientific economist. Yet he was, plainly, at first and durably, a philosopher. His economics itself, Aron says, passes necessarily through sociology. So, in very compressed form, we can say that for Aron, the sources of Marx’s various ambiguities are to be found, first, in the confusions, slippages, or décalages between these three areas and, second, in the attempt to derive historical movement, then necessity, from the economic/sociological/philosophical conceptual toolkit he has constructed.
Aron seems to rely on Schumpeter for his criticism of Marx as an economist. For instance, in his discussion of the labor theory of value, after arguing that Marx adopts this theory as the only one that can account for the quantitative nature of the exchange of qualitatively different goods, Aron seems to endorse Schumpeter’s argument that since the value of labor itself is itself qualitatively determined, the whole thing is a word-game. Yet, if I understand correctly, it seems to me that this objection falls into the hole Aron describes between economy and sociology. The value of labor (that is, the cost of reproducing the worker physically, which includes his dependents) is determined socially. It is true that there is a physiological lower limit to the resources necessary for the reproduction of labor (or even for the act of labor), but Marx is quite clear that the cost of labor is determined, we might now say, culturally. This makes it no less real, but it does mean that the primary question is not biological, and perhaps therefore qualitative, but rather remains quantitative. Social norms declare that a certain set of material, of a given value, is necessary for the maintenance of the given worker. There is no bottom to the labor theory of value, and it seems to me that this means it does not run aground on physiology. This, however, is a quibble.
I won’t summarize Aron’s points about Marx more than I have already. But I do want to mention the final section of the chapter, in which Aron sets out the three great crises so far encountered by Marxism. The first, naturally, is the revisionist crisis between Kautsy and Bernstein. Then there is the crisis precipitated by the Bolshevik revolution. This time the antagonists are Kautsky and Lenin. The third crisis—and this struck me as odd—Aron says is contemporary (1967), and is between the Bolshevik and the Scandinavian models of socialism. The antagonism here is between, on the Bolshevik side, an economy planned entirely by a ‘total’ state, and on the ‘occidental’ side, an economy partially planned by a democratic state. Some Marxists, says Aron, are looking for a third way: a genuinely democratic state with a fully planned economy. If I, today, were asked to enumerate the crises of Marxism, I would quite naturally chose the first two in the same way as Aron has done. I might then say that Maoism, or tiers-mondisme was a third. I would want to think about whether the fall of the Soviet Union in fact constitutes a crisis in socialism, but it would be perverse to argue that it does not. I don’t think such an enumeration of crises would be controversial.
One might say that Aron didn’t have the perspective we have now. I think, however, that Aron wanted his crises to line up with the three poles of Marxian thought. The first, the revisionist crisis, is clearly economic. The second, the Russian Revolution, is sociological in that what is at issue, according to Aron, is the relation of state and class. Lenin claimed that the Bolsheviks, since they represented the proletariat, were, when in power, the dictatorship of the proletariat. Or, as many other Marxists thought, did the Bolsheviks really only represent a dictatorship over (‘sur,’ as opposed to ‘de’) the proletariat? Aron thinks that the dictatorship of the proletariat is a ‘myth,’ on obvious impossibility. How can the majority rule? The state itself, the actual human beings making decisions, will always be a minority.
This means that the last crisis, the one that Aron says is contemporary, is a philosophical crisis. It is philosophical in the sense that it represents an attempt to collapse the economic (a planned economy) and the political (democracy). Does Aron mean to suggest that this operation leaves us with the more general science of society, sociology? Writ large, it seems to me that Aron endorses Marx’s sociological categories, but does not draw the same conclusions from them, or find them in history in the same way, as did Marx. So perhaps the lesson is that Bourdieu will rise over the grave of Althusser? Aron, himself, defends the specificity, the irreducibility, of the political. Indeed, I could only smile, thinking about Badiou and Laclau talking about how Marxism tends to collapse the political into the economic—while Aron wrote, 30 years earlier, that one of Marx’s major problems was, “la réduction de la politique en tant que telle à l’économie...l’ordre de la politique est essentiellement irreductible à l’ordre de l’économie” (199). Perhaps it was a commonly made point? I don’t know.
I can’t finish without noting the odd presence, on tel gallimard’s cover for the book, of a detail from Volpedo’s The Fourth Estate, which is also the opening shot of 1900, and on the cover of Laclau’s On Populist Reason. Everyone wants to love that painting.
At any rate, I look forward to reading Aron on Durkheim. I expect he will need to be less careful, but I hope that won’t make him less lucid.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Monday, February 16, 2009
Flipping through the introduction to De la division du travail social, trying to get a sense of the text, I found a reference to an introductory course from 1888, in which Durkheim sets out the ambitions of his sociology. The course is republished in La science sociale et l’action, which I happen to have on my shelf. So, as my introduction to Durkheim, I read this introductory leçon. I’m glad I did.
Durkheim sets out to show what sociologie, or la science sociale, in fact is. He hopes to set down a series of inter-related questions that will constitute the specificity of this young science. The spirit will not be that of a professor simply explaining to his students a received truth, but rather of teaching mixed with research, where the students collaborate in a collective attempt to understand. The point here must be to contrast French with German universities. There are in fact many places in the text at which one can detect a certain national tension; to which we will return.
Most previous attempts to think scientifically about society have foundered at their very outset by assuming that society is a made thing. Durkheim says that Hobbes and Rousseau both, although the first makes it an individual and the second a collective enterprise, none the less see society as the conscious creation of man. I think one might perhaps argue with this characterization. I think the point here was really to attack a certain kind of utopianism that perhaps still hung, like a faintly bad smell, around French sociology. There is the broadly 19th century view of the Enlightenment (Rousseau) as an agent of Revolution, and Durkheim wants to distance himself from this. Then there are later socialists, like Fourier and Saint-Simon, with whom the science of society might be associated. Comte, after all, himself sprung from Saint-Simonianism.
Durkheim credits the economists with being the first to attempt to treat society scientifically: as a naturally occurring phenomenon that must, therefore, be subject to certain laws. This was a great step forward, but for the political economists, society is an abstraction that is not, itself, an object for scientific study. For economists, there are only individuals—and even then, these individuals, Durkheim says, are themselves in fact abstractions, without any concrete existence.
Durkheim makes his point through an analogy. In the past, ‘society’ was thought to be a machine, like a watch. The various parts and materials had been brought together specially for a purpose (for instance, to secure peace), and were not inherently related to one another except by dint of this bringing-together (the social contract). One might, Durkheim suggests, on the other hand, think of society as an organism. Just like any other naturally occurring phenomenon, then, society has its special laws. One might object that this contrasting analogy is highly politicized. Watches and machines obey natural laws just as much as dogs and other animals; it’s just that in Durkheim’s time no one could take apart a dog and make it again in a different way. The economists at least admit that society is not a made thing, but having taken the watch apart, they are not themselves able to arrive at the idea of society as an organism, having a reality greater than the sum of its parts.
Durkheim brushes aside, here, a perennial philosophical debate: is there such a thing as free-will? He allows that this is an interesting metaphysical question, but insists that it is only an interesting metaphysical question. He speaks of causality rather than determinism. That causality is a basic principle of the world is presented as the single best-established result of scientific investigation. It would perhaps be more honest to say that a firm belief in causality is not so much the result as the premise, and condition of possibility for modern science. Durkheim’s way of thinking about causality and the special laws of the organism remind me strongly of Claude Bernard. Bernard (or perhaps an intervening factor) might well be the source for Durkheim’s brushing-away of the free-will question—just as Bernard rejected the vitalist thesis that would have made it illegitimate to study living things, Durkheim rejects the idealist (spiritualist?) thesis that would say human free-will renders impossible the scientific study of society.
August Comte is the father of sociology. His great contribution was to make just the leap that the political economists failed to make. For him, sociology contained all the other positive sciences, because society itself contained these facts and was therefore more complex than any of them. But Comte, says Durkheim, was unable to distinguish between societies. For him, there was only l’Humanité, radically set apart from the natural world with an internal development all of its own, which, moreover, was always the same. There are three stages of civilization, and all societies go through them in the same way. Thus, in the end, Comte’s sociology reduces, for Durkheim, to a philosophy of history.
Herbert Spencer, who marked the next great step in sociological thinking, in the end succumbs to the same error. He admits that each society is its own individual organism, but then he applies a single rule of evolution to every single society he investigates. His empirical reach is impressive, but in the end he sees the same thing everywhere he looks. He, too, is really only applying a philosophy to society.
Durkheim then turns to something of a panoramic view of contemporary sociology. Alfred Espinas (who plays something of a role in Pierre Rosanvallon’s The demands of liberty) is credited with founding genuinely scientific sociology. That is, he is the first, in fact, to derive rules from empirical observation, rather than apply a philosophical system to selected data. Strong words. It’s good that Espinas gets this position, because without it, the French would look very thin on the sociological ground. Nearly all of the scholars Durkheim singles out in the following pages are German.
An interesting mise en abyme then occurs. Durkheim, discussing the various subdivisions of sociology, and the merit of division in general, says, “une science est, elle aussi, une sorte d’organisme” (101). That is, a science is like a society in that it develops both as a whole and in its constitutive parts by becoming more complex and subdivided.
Durkheim sets out the following non-exhaustive list of the broad fields of application that are, he says, already plainly to be found in sociology. First is social psychology, which on his telling is quite broad, including customs and traditions—we might today say culture. Second is sociology as a science of morals. This is recognized as related to the first, but its specificity is insisted upon. Third is law, which is itself in a sense only an ‘imperious’ application of collective moral sentiments. Lastly, there is economic science. Durkheim says that this is in a sense already close to genuine scientificity, but must first give up its supposed autonomy. I think the same point would be made by saying that Durkheim wants economics to give up its false naturalism and admit that economic behavior is embedded within a complex socio-cultural environment. Durkheim mentions two possible subfields, defined by subject, for sociology that aren’t yet even close to constituting themselves: the army, and diplomacy. I found this striking because the first seems to me a very natural subject for the kind of investigation of collectivity that Durkheim is proposing, while the second seems completely different. What did Durkheim mean by diplomacy?
Each of these subfields, Durkheim says, could be approached in two basic ways. He illustrates this by analogy to a basic division in medical science (also mentioned in Bernard): that of form and function, or morphology and physiology. Durkheim comes down solidly on the side of function. In the organism that is modern society, he says, the actual institutions are generally able to perform various functions, and the function performed by any given institution might change rapidly. It is therefore the functions, rather than the institutions which perform them, that are primary. I have always been made uneasy by what I have understood to be Durkheim’s functionalism, and here it is explained. I am still uneasy. It is possible to speak of the functions of an actual organism, because we are authorized to assume that, qua organism, it has a limited set of non-complex goals: eating, breathing, and so on—which we might themselves reduce, as Claude Bernard does, to sustaining the artificial milieu that the organism itself constitutes. It is to this end that we explain the regulation of various levels of chemicals, or of heat. Is it legitimate to make an analogy to society in this way? (ignoring, for the moment, the problem of delimiting each society, which I suppose needn’t be in principle different from the problem of delimiting different organisms). I do not think that we can, as Spencer does, assume that societies are organisms in the sense that they are born, grow, live, and die. Despite Marx’s attraction, as well, to the image of social metabolism, I do not think that we can say that societies eat and excrete. Perhaps Durkheim elsewhere explains himself differently, and more.
The remainder of the essay is taken up by an overview of the various sorts of students Durkheim feels would benefit from studying his sociology. In the first place, his wants to speak to students of philosophy. Philosophy as a discipline, he says, is already far on the way to dividing itself into two distinct disciplines: psychology and morals. Psychology is turning increasingly toward experimental science—it is Durkheim’s ambition that sociology should constitute a science of morals. A genuinely scientific study of morality is also, he says, the only way to overcome the oft-remarked upon dichotomy between science and morality. We might point out that, in the form of the free-will/determinism conceptual bind, Durkheim has already simply refused to discuss the relation of morals (presumably depended on some conception of human freedom) to science. I wonder if there isn’t a little slight of hand here. At any rate, this division of philosophy into psychology and morals is described as the division of labor in studying facts about individual consciousness and “la conscience de la société,” which is a naturally sociological object of study.
Durkheim next suggests that students of history would benefit greatly from the study of sociology. I think it is fair to say that the battle for disciplinary supremacy within the French academy between historians and sociologists begins here, later t be carried on between the various iterations of the Annales school and Durkheim’s inheritors.
With less imperialist intent, Durkheim also argues that law students should come out of their hermeneutic bubbles and allow sociology to speak to them of the function of law in society, and in particular of the nature of the various major juridical institutions (the family, the state).
Last but not least, sociology has a general pedagogical mission. Here is expressed in a bald form what I take to be Durkheim’s basic worldview and project. I quote at length:
Or, much more succinctly, Durkheim wants to teach the over-inflated modern self that, “il n’est pas un empire au sein d’un autre empire, mais l’organe d’un organisme, et lui montrera tout ce qu’il y a de beau à s’acquitter consciencieusement de son rôle d’organe” (110).
As by temperament a liberal-reformist, I can only approve of Durkheim’s general project. Yet his language makes my collar feel a little tight. The ‘professor’ in Conrad’s Secret Agent would often feel, quite concretely, the massive weight of the people around him, their numbers and the power the numbers gave them over him. This isn’t so structured an appreciation of the social bond as Durkheim wants, but it seems, somehow, a more plausible response to modern society than actively appreciating and taking joy in one's role as a functioning organ within a larger social organism.
Durkheim sets out to show what sociologie, or la science sociale, in fact is. He hopes to set down a series of inter-related questions that will constitute the specificity of this young science. The spirit will not be that of a professor simply explaining to his students a received truth, but rather of teaching mixed with research, where the students collaborate in a collective attempt to understand. The point here must be to contrast French with German universities. There are in fact many places in the text at which one can detect a certain national tension; to which we will return.
Most previous attempts to think scientifically about society have foundered at their very outset by assuming that society is a made thing. Durkheim says that Hobbes and Rousseau both, although the first makes it an individual and the second a collective enterprise, none the less see society as the conscious creation of man. I think one might perhaps argue with this characterization. I think the point here was really to attack a certain kind of utopianism that perhaps still hung, like a faintly bad smell, around French sociology. There is the broadly 19th century view of the Enlightenment (Rousseau) as an agent of Revolution, and Durkheim wants to distance himself from this. Then there are later socialists, like Fourier and Saint-Simon, with whom the science of society might be associated. Comte, after all, himself sprung from Saint-Simonianism.
Durkheim credits the economists with being the first to attempt to treat society scientifically: as a naturally occurring phenomenon that must, therefore, be subject to certain laws. This was a great step forward, but for the political economists, society is an abstraction that is not, itself, an object for scientific study. For economists, there are only individuals—and even then, these individuals, Durkheim says, are themselves in fact abstractions, without any concrete existence.
Durkheim makes his point through an analogy. In the past, ‘society’ was thought to be a machine, like a watch. The various parts and materials had been brought together specially for a purpose (for instance, to secure peace), and were not inherently related to one another except by dint of this bringing-together (the social contract). One might, Durkheim suggests, on the other hand, think of society as an organism. Just like any other naturally occurring phenomenon, then, society has its special laws. One might object that this contrasting analogy is highly politicized. Watches and machines obey natural laws just as much as dogs and other animals; it’s just that in Durkheim’s time no one could take apart a dog and make it again in a different way. The economists at least admit that society is not a made thing, but having taken the watch apart, they are not themselves able to arrive at the idea of society as an organism, having a reality greater than the sum of its parts.
Durkheim brushes aside, here, a perennial philosophical debate: is there such a thing as free-will? He allows that this is an interesting metaphysical question, but insists that it is only an interesting metaphysical question. He speaks of causality rather than determinism. That causality is a basic principle of the world is presented as the single best-established result of scientific investigation. It would perhaps be more honest to say that a firm belief in causality is not so much the result as the premise, and condition of possibility for modern science. Durkheim’s way of thinking about causality and the special laws of the organism remind me strongly of Claude Bernard. Bernard (or perhaps an intervening factor) might well be the source for Durkheim’s brushing-away of the free-will question—just as Bernard rejected the vitalist thesis that would have made it illegitimate to study living things, Durkheim rejects the idealist (spiritualist?) thesis that would say human free-will renders impossible the scientific study of society.
August Comte is the father of sociology. His great contribution was to make just the leap that the political economists failed to make. For him, sociology contained all the other positive sciences, because society itself contained these facts and was therefore more complex than any of them. But Comte, says Durkheim, was unable to distinguish between societies. For him, there was only l’Humanité, radically set apart from the natural world with an internal development all of its own, which, moreover, was always the same. There are three stages of civilization, and all societies go through them in the same way. Thus, in the end, Comte’s sociology reduces, for Durkheim, to a philosophy of history.
Herbert Spencer, who marked the next great step in sociological thinking, in the end succumbs to the same error. He admits that each society is its own individual organism, but then he applies a single rule of evolution to every single society he investigates. His empirical reach is impressive, but in the end he sees the same thing everywhere he looks. He, too, is really only applying a philosophy to society.
Durkheim then turns to something of a panoramic view of contemporary sociology. Alfred Espinas (who plays something of a role in Pierre Rosanvallon’s The demands of liberty) is credited with founding genuinely scientific sociology. That is, he is the first, in fact, to derive rules from empirical observation, rather than apply a philosophical system to selected data. Strong words. It’s good that Espinas gets this position, because without it, the French would look very thin on the sociological ground. Nearly all of the scholars Durkheim singles out in the following pages are German.
An interesting mise en abyme then occurs. Durkheim, discussing the various subdivisions of sociology, and the merit of division in general, says, “une science est, elle aussi, une sorte d’organisme” (101). That is, a science is like a society in that it develops both as a whole and in its constitutive parts by becoming more complex and subdivided.
Durkheim sets out the following non-exhaustive list of the broad fields of application that are, he says, already plainly to be found in sociology. First is social psychology, which on his telling is quite broad, including customs and traditions—we might today say culture. Second is sociology as a science of morals. This is recognized as related to the first, but its specificity is insisted upon. Third is law, which is itself in a sense only an ‘imperious’ application of collective moral sentiments. Lastly, there is economic science. Durkheim says that this is in a sense already close to genuine scientificity, but must first give up its supposed autonomy. I think the same point would be made by saying that Durkheim wants economics to give up its false naturalism and admit that economic behavior is embedded within a complex socio-cultural environment. Durkheim mentions two possible subfields, defined by subject, for sociology that aren’t yet even close to constituting themselves: the army, and diplomacy. I found this striking because the first seems to me a very natural subject for the kind of investigation of collectivity that Durkheim is proposing, while the second seems completely different. What did Durkheim mean by diplomacy?
Each of these subfields, Durkheim says, could be approached in two basic ways. He illustrates this by analogy to a basic division in medical science (also mentioned in Bernard): that of form and function, or morphology and physiology. Durkheim comes down solidly on the side of function. In the organism that is modern society, he says, the actual institutions are generally able to perform various functions, and the function performed by any given institution might change rapidly. It is therefore the functions, rather than the institutions which perform them, that are primary. I have always been made uneasy by what I have understood to be Durkheim’s functionalism, and here it is explained. I am still uneasy. It is possible to speak of the functions of an actual organism, because we are authorized to assume that, qua organism, it has a limited set of non-complex goals: eating, breathing, and so on—which we might themselves reduce, as Claude Bernard does, to sustaining the artificial milieu that the organism itself constitutes. It is to this end that we explain the regulation of various levels of chemicals, or of heat. Is it legitimate to make an analogy to society in this way? (ignoring, for the moment, the problem of delimiting each society, which I suppose needn’t be in principle different from the problem of delimiting different organisms). I do not think that we can, as Spencer does, assume that societies are organisms in the sense that they are born, grow, live, and die. Despite Marx’s attraction, as well, to the image of social metabolism, I do not think that we can say that societies eat and excrete. Perhaps Durkheim elsewhere explains himself differently, and more.
The remainder of the essay is taken up by an overview of the various sorts of students Durkheim feels would benefit from studying his sociology. In the first place, his wants to speak to students of philosophy. Philosophy as a discipline, he says, is already far on the way to dividing itself into two distinct disciplines: psychology and morals. Psychology is turning increasingly toward experimental science—it is Durkheim’s ambition that sociology should constitute a science of morals. A genuinely scientific study of morality is also, he says, the only way to overcome the oft-remarked upon dichotomy between science and morality. We might point out that, in the form of the free-will/determinism conceptual bind, Durkheim has already simply refused to discuss the relation of morals (presumably depended on some conception of human freedom) to science. I wonder if there isn’t a little slight of hand here. At any rate, this division of philosophy into psychology and morals is described as the division of labor in studying facts about individual consciousness and “la conscience de la société,” which is a naturally sociological object of study.
Durkheim next suggests that students of history would benefit greatly from the study of sociology. I think it is fair to say that the battle for disciplinary supremacy within the French academy between historians and sociologists begins here, later t be carried on between the various iterations of the Annales school and Durkheim’s inheritors.
With less imperialist intent, Durkheim also argues that law students should come out of their hermeneutic bubbles and allow sociology to speak to them of the function of law in society, and in particular of the nature of the various major juridical institutions (the family, the state).
Last but not least, sociology has a general pedagogical mission. Here is expressed in a bald form what I take to be Durkheim’s basic worldview and project. I quote at length:
Nous vivons dans un pays qui ne reconnaît d’autre maître que l’opinion. Pour que ce maître ne devienne pas un despote inintelligent, il est nécessaire de l’éclairer, et comment, sinon par la science? Sous l’influence de causes qu’il serait trop long d’analyser ici, l’esprit de collectivité s’est affaibli chez nous. Chacun de nous a de son moi un sentiment tellement exorbitant qu’il n’aperçoit plus les limites qui l’enserrent de toutes parts. Se faisant illusion sur sa propre puissance, il aspire à se suffire à soi-même. C’est pourquoi nous mettons tout notre mérite à nous distinguer le plus possible les uns des autres, et à suivre chacun notre mouvement propre. Il faut réagir et de toutes nos forces contre cette tendance dispersive. Il faut que notre société reprenne conscience de son unité organique; que l’individu sente cette masse sociale qui l’enveloppe et le pénètre, qu’il la sente toujours présente et agissante, et que ce sentiment règle toujours sa conduite; car ce n’est pas assez qu’il ne s’en inspire que de temps en temps dans des circonstances particulièrement critiques (109).
Or, much more succinctly, Durkheim wants to teach the over-inflated modern self that, “il n’est pas un empire au sein d’un autre empire, mais l’organe d’un organisme, et lui montrera tout ce qu’il y a de beau à s’acquitter consciencieusement de son rôle d’organe” (110).
As by temperament a liberal-reformist, I can only approve of Durkheim’s general project. Yet his language makes my collar feel a little tight. The ‘professor’ in Conrad’s Secret Agent would often feel, quite concretely, the massive weight of the people around him, their numbers and the power the numbers gave them over him. This isn’t so structured an appreciation of the social bond as Durkheim wants, but it seems, somehow, a more plausible response to modern society than actively appreciating and taking joy in one's role as a functioning organ within a larger social organism.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Tantae molis erat
Alfred North Whitehead famously characterized western philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato (I paraphrase). I have the strong impression that a significant portion of contemporary historical work would fit comfortably into a few footnotes in the last 40-odd pages of Capital.
For instance, I recently read a short, popularizing essay by on globalization and politics by Kevin O’Rourke—I had already noticed his textbook, and thought idly about reading it. The article is interesting, and argues generally that geopolitical equilibrium has as much to do with patterns of global trade as to ‘technical’ capabilities. An important part of the article is an analysis of the uses to which certain European powers put their ‘comparative advantage in violence’—that is, they used this power-imbalance to seize or create monopolies where this was possible, to drive up prices, and pay for more violence. Marx, in chapter 31 (pg 917), describes these very same monopolies as moments of ‘primitive accumulation.’ Where O’Rourke suggests that we can ask whether or not the monopolies, given the costs of the military required to protect them, were really ‘worth it,’ Marx would say that they achieved their real purpose, which was capital accumulation rather than profit, per se.
More strikingly, in the final chapter on ‘The Modern Theory of Colonization,’ Marx describes in outline the very same economic process—the problem of creating in land-rich colonies a floating population of ‘free’ workers—that Thomas Holt puts at the center of his excellent The Problem of Freedom. Holt is certainly marxisant, if not explicitly Marxist; I’d check to see what he says specifically if I had his book here. In any case, I can now recognize that book as a sophisticated revision and expansion Marx’s basic framework in order to include and explain the trajectory of racism as a political force.
I also do not see, despite the prophecies at the end of chapter 32, how a historiography taking inspiration from Marx himself could be inflexible or deterministic. The very grammatical structure of Marx’s predictions set them apart from the rest of the text:
Most of the sentences in Capital do not have this kind of lucidity (though I should really look at the German). Here, for instance, we are again in the philosophical realm: “this is the negation of the negation.” The historical narrative Marx has given us about the development of property relations in England (the so-called ‘classic’ case), in fact is contingent and flexible. It is eminently empirical, and although many people are starved to death, although this narrative does contain contradictions such as the presence of at once a great demand for labor and unemployment and starvation wages, this narrative is able to unfold across hundreds of pages without even a single ‘negation of the negation.’ Its logic is, rather, historical. The development of the English economy cannot be understood outside larger, essentially global series of events. This is not to say that god touched England, and the whole world moved in such a way as to produce capitalism at a given spot. Rather, as it happened, this particular geographical location witnessed the conjuncture (not, at least here, one of Marx’s words) of a set of circumstances that were propitious for the exploitation of the surplus-value of labor and the development of industrial machinery.
I would like to write some kind of summary, some sort of more comprehensive reaction, on finishing this book. I can’t. It’s too big, too rich with detail. I can only say that I understand how it became a classic (following, shall we say, Antoine Compagnon’s definition of the classic). The disjunction between the philosophical and the empirical, between the necessary unfolding of ideality and the contingent play of violence and power—such is the unevenness that makes a book a classic.
For instance, I recently read a short, popularizing essay by on globalization and politics by Kevin O’Rourke—I had already noticed his textbook, and thought idly about reading it. The article is interesting, and argues generally that geopolitical equilibrium has as much to do with patterns of global trade as to ‘technical’ capabilities. An important part of the article is an analysis of the uses to which certain European powers put their ‘comparative advantage in violence’—that is, they used this power-imbalance to seize or create monopolies where this was possible, to drive up prices, and pay for more violence. Marx, in chapter 31 (pg 917), describes these very same monopolies as moments of ‘primitive accumulation.’ Where O’Rourke suggests that we can ask whether or not the monopolies, given the costs of the military required to protect them, were really ‘worth it,’ Marx would say that they achieved their real purpose, which was capital accumulation rather than profit, per se.
More strikingly, in the final chapter on ‘The Modern Theory of Colonization,’ Marx describes in outline the very same economic process—the problem of creating in land-rich colonies a floating population of ‘free’ workers—that Thomas Holt puts at the center of his excellent The Problem of Freedom. Holt is certainly marxisant, if not explicitly Marxist; I’d check to see what he says specifically if I had his book here. In any case, I can now recognize that book as a sophisticated revision and expansion Marx’s basic framework in order to include and explain the trajectory of racism as a political force.
I also do not see, despite the prophecies at the end of chapter 32, how a historiography taking inspiration from Marx himself could be inflexible or deterministic. The very grammatical structure of Marx’s predictions set them apart from the rest of the text:
The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. (pg 929)
Most of the sentences in Capital do not have this kind of lucidity (though I should really look at the German). Here, for instance, we are again in the philosophical realm: “this is the negation of the negation.” The historical narrative Marx has given us about the development of property relations in England (the so-called ‘classic’ case), in fact is contingent and flexible. It is eminently empirical, and although many people are starved to death, although this narrative does contain contradictions such as the presence of at once a great demand for labor and unemployment and starvation wages, this narrative is able to unfold across hundreds of pages without even a single ‘negation of the negation.’ Its logic is, rather, historical. The development of the English economy cannot be understood outside larger, essentially global series of events. This is not to say that god touched England, and the whole world moved in such a way as to produce capitalism at a given spot. Rather, as it happened, this particular geographical location witnessed the conjuncture (not, at least here, one of Marx’s words) of a set of circumstances that were propitious for the exploitation of the surplus-value of labor and the development of industrial machinery.
I would like to write some kind of summary, some sort of more comprehensive reaction, on finishing this book. I can’t. It’s too big, too rich with detail. I can only say that I understand how it became a classic (following, shall we say, Antoine Compagnon’s definition of the classic). The disjunction between the philosophical and the empirical, between the necessary unfolding of ideality and the contingent play of violence and power—such is the unevenness that makes a book a classic.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
The Secret Agent
[I think I am obliged to say: spoilers]
The characterization, the plotting, and the prose in The Secret Agent are all slightly off—unbalanced.
There is a remarkable degree of depth in the interactions between different characters. The air fairly vibrates with code between any given characters. Even the (somewhat unbelievable) chance encounter between ‘the professor’ and Inspector Heat in a side-street is painted from, as it were, all sides. The long and excruciating scene toward the end of the novel between Verloc and Winnie, during which she is entirely quiet, is masterful (made, I think, for the stage). And yet the characters are not only more interesting interacting with one another than by themselves, they are only interesting when interacting. The criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso is mentioned by one of the characters, Ossian, at the beginning and the end of the book. The reference is more, I think, than local 1890s intellectual color. Ossian’s diagnosis of Stevie as a ‘perfect-type’ is cruel; his sudden realization that Winnie is very like her brother is, to say the least, self-serving. My knowledge of Lombroso’s work is second-hand, but it seems to me that Conrad has essentially drawn his characters from Lombroso’s types. I compare the novel with, say, Thèrese Raquin. Zola certainly made explicit use of anthropological types—but his characters are, I want to say, painted alone, while Conrad’s are always painted together.
It is hard to see by what principle, exactly, is the plot narrated. Suspense, but by no means in the usual way; the suspense is not about what will in fact happen, but about the revelation of what has happened. It is not that the whole plot is given at the beginning, but rather that we know long before we are told, that Verloc will set the bomb. We know, long before we are told, that Stevie will die—then we must wait, and wait, for this truth to come out, and its consequences to unfold. Conrad goes out of his way to telegraph the presence of the knife; but as we wait for Winnie to kill Verloc, we are really waiting for her character to reach the point at which this is possible, rather than for the deed itself. Similarly, we do not wait for Ossian to abandon Winnie, but to see what Winnie will do after. Yet I do not mean to say that the plot of the book is driven by changes in character, or that ‘plot-points’ are moments in the development of the characters.
The prose itself is playful and mocking. It is aware of the double role that each word and sentence has in moving forward the story, and also as a distinct object in a field of other objects. This, I think, is the source for the peculiar and oft-repeated double-use of words. As example drawn at random, of a whole paragraph:
This paragraph is built like some kind of sonnet. Short sentence/long sentence, the two rhymed with ‘crusade.’ The punctuation of the emptied-‘it’ that he has at heard. Long sentence/short sentence, this time rhymed with ‘walked...home.’ Then three ‘room’s in a row for no reason at all but the sentiment of circulation and the sound. Then the last sentence provides movement and contains four different people.
In other places, Conrad plays with his level of discourse. This can mean veering rapidly from over-purple to colloquial. Or in a more Auerbachian sense, it can mean mixing up mode of address and content: ‘Moreover, he was dead.’
My feeling is that these discursive and narrative peculiarities of Conrad’s will begin to make sense as an ensemble if I am able to think out more clearly the historical meaning of the text. I know relatively little about Conrad’s body of work. The Secret Agent was written in 1906, and seems to be ‘set’ in the 1890s. It has the obvious themes of farcical revolutionaries and clumsily repressive states. Various approaches to life within modernity are showcased, from the police inspector to the Nietzschean bomb-maker. Empire is present with varying levels of intensity throughout the book. There is no doubt some kind of overt anglophilia at work as well, despite the general impression that London is a swamp where it is always night. These themes are all too much on the surface. Thematic analysis and formal analysis can be, I think in this case ought to be, filled out through historical contextualization.
Although I hesitate to use the word, Conrad is standing on the brink of modernism. He is obviously more nearly modern than Zola or other French ‘naturalists,’ from whom he is borrowing. All the pieces of the narrative, I want to say, are old, but he has woven these patterns in new thread. It would be easy to go through the text and point out parallels with various forms of modern art (as people have done, I think without interesting result, for Virginia Woolf and Proust). One of the things this means is formal experimentation and self-consciousness. Conrad is certainly doing these things. Hypothesis: the level of Conrad’s experimentation and self-consciousness is the naturalist generic convention.
The characterization, the plotting, and the prose in The Secret Agent are all slightly off—unbalanced.
There is a remarkable degree of depth in the interactions between different characters. The air fairly vibrates with code between any given characters. Even the (somewhat unbelievable) chance encounter between ‘the professor’ and Inspector Heat in a side-street is painted from, as it were, all sides. The long and excruciating scene toward the end of the novel between Verloc and Winnie, during which she is entirely quiet, is masterful (made, I think, for the stage). And yet the characters are not only more interesting interacting with one another than by themselves, they are only interesting when interacting. The criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso is mentioned by one of the characters, Ossian, at the beginning and the end of the book. The reference is more, I think, than local 1890s intellectual color. Ossian’s diagnosis of Stevie as a ‘perfect-type’ is cruel; his sudden realization that Winnie is very like her brother is, to say the least, self-serving. My knowledge of Lombroso’s work is second-hand, but it seems to me that Conrad has essentially drawn his characters from Lombroso’s types. I compare the novel with, say, Thèrese Raquin. Zola certainly made explicit use of anthropological types—but his characters are, I want to say, painted alone, while Conrad’s are always painted together.
It is hard to see by what principle, exactly, is the plot narrated. Suspense, but by no means in the usual way; the suspense is not about what will in fact happen, but about the revelation of what has happened. It is not that the whole plot is given at the beginning, but rather that we know long before we are told, that Verloc will set the bomb. We know, long before we are told, that Stevie will die—then we must wait, and wait, for this truth to come out, and its consequences to unfold. Conrad goes out of his way to telegraph the presence of the knife; but as we wait for Winnie to kill Verloc, we are really waiting for her character to reach the point at which this is possible, rather than for the deed itself. Similarly, we do not wait for Ossian to abandon Winnie, but to see what Winnie will do after. Yet I do not mean to say that the plot of the book is driven by changes in character, or that ‘plot-points’ are moments in the development of the characters.
The prose itself is playful and mocking. It is aware of the double role that each word and sentence has in moving forward the story, and also as a distinct object in a field of other objects. This, I think, is the source for the peculiar and oft-repeated double-use of words. As example drawn at random, of a whole paragraph:
“He had his own crusading instincts. This affair, which, in one way or another, disgusted Chief Inspector Heat, seemed to him a providentially given starting-point for a crusade. He had it much at heart to begin. He walked slowly home, meditating that enterprise on the way, and thinking over Mr Verloc’s psychology in a composite mood of repugnance and satisfaction. He walked all the way home. Finding the drawing-room dark, he went upstairs, and spent some time between the bed-room and the dressing-room, changing his clothes, going to and fro with the air of a thoughtful somnambulist. But he shook it off before going out again to join his wife at the house of the great lady patroness of Michaelis” (pg 176).
This paragraph is built like some kind of sonnet. Short sentence/long sentence, the two rhymed with ‘crusade.’ The punctuation of the emptied-‘it’ that he has at heard. Long sentence/short sentence, this time rhymed with ‘walked...home.’ Then three ‘room’s in a row for no reason at all but the sentiment of circulation and the sound. Then the last sentence provides movement and contains four different people.
In other places, Conrad plays with his level of discourse. This can mean veering rapidly from over-purple to colloquial. Or in a more Auerbachian sense, it can mean mixing up mode of address and content: ‘Moreover, he was dead.’
My feeling is that these discursive and narrative peculiarities of Conrad’s will begin to make sense as an ensemble if I am able to think out more clearly the historical meaning of the text. I know relatively little about Conrad’s body of work. The Secret Agent was written in 1906, and seems to be ‘set’ in the 1890s. It has the obvious themes of farcical revolutionaries and clumsily repressive states. Various approaches to life within modernity are showcased, from the police inspector to the Nietzschean bomb-maker. Empire is present with varying levels of intensity throughout the book. There is no doubt some kind of overt anglophilia at work as well, despite the general impression that London is a swamp where it is always night. These themes are all too much on the surface. Thematic analysis and formal analysis can be, I think in this case ought to be, filled out through historical contextualization.
Although I hesitate to use the word, Conrad is standing on the brink of modernism. He is obviously more nearly modern than Zola or other French ‘naturalists,’ from whom he is borrowing. All the pieces of the narrative, I want to say, are old, but he has woven these patterns in new thread. It would be easy to go through the text and point out parallels with various forms of modern art (as people have done, I think without interesting result, for Virginia Woolf and Proust). One of the things this means is formal experimentation and self-consciousness. Conrad is certainly doing these things. Hypothesis: the level of Conrad’s experimentation and self-consciousness is the naturalist generic convention.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
dialectical reversal?
If, at present, variation of labor imposes itself after the manner of an overpowering natural law, and with the blindly destructive action of a natural law that meets with obstacles everywhere, large-scale industry through its very catastrophes, makes the recognition of variation of labor and hence of the fitness of the worker for the maximum number of different kinds of labor into a question of life and death. This possibility of varying labor must become a general law of social production, and the existing relations must be adapted to permit its realization in practice. That monstrosity, the disposable working population held in reserve, in misery, for the changing requirements of capitalist exploitation, must be replaced by the individual man who is absolutely available for the different kinds of labor required of him; the partially developed individual, who is merely the bearer of one specialized social function, must be replaced by the totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions are different modes of activity he takes up in turn. (Capital, pg. 618)
This is Marx’s humanism. Is it also the place at which some kind of Darwinian naturalism comes to bear a significant amount of weight in his philosophy of history?
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