Bonner, Robert E. “Proslavery Extremism Goes to War: The Counterrevolutionary Confederacy and Reactionary Militarism.” Modern Intellectual History, 6, 2 (2009), 261-285.
My copy of the August issue of MIH has finally arrived. I have never before been subscribed to a professional journal. Reading articles in bound form, and marking them up in this bound form is oddly exciting. No doubt it’ll soon wear off.
Bonner’s essay is an informative summary of the kinds of arguments being made by some very extreme pro-slavery publicists in the late 1850s, in the crucial winter of 1860, during, and finally after the war. I have virtually no historiographical context for this—although if I had pursued my old counter-revolutionary studies path I no doubt would. Bonner’s point seems none the less pretty clear. He wants to document the existence and nature of this particular militaristic, authoritarian and explicitly counterrevolutionary wing of Confederate thought. What is the point of all these descriptors? The point is that given the radicalizing power of the actual outbreak of hostilities, a hearing could be had for individuals who were not claiming a ‘purer’ American republic, but rather wanted to overturn the entire revolutionary project. Their theory of politics, in great conservative tradition, held that the state should be representative of society rather than an egalitarian or any other force for changing it. But these publicists (for obvious and bad reasons I don’t want to call them intellectuals) were not the mainstream. Indeed, for me the most interesting aspect of the material that Bonner presents is the way in which it highlights a difficulty fundamental to any attempt to bring race into politics. In the North American context, I think it is fair to say that race has been constructed as binary. In this way, a firm racial hierarchy can be established while none the less insisting on a kind of egalitarianism within ‘whiteness.’ There are obvious logic problems here. A more rigorous form of racism implies a biologically determined hierarchy articulated densely through society. This seems to me to be a fundamental tension in racist discourse, one that is liable to be found (perhaps it is, I don’t know) in all attempts to actualize racial hierarchy in the political realm. Indeed, I wonder if it might be argued that any hierarchical system not tending toward the destruction of all egalitarian impulses cannot properly be called racism. No egalitarianism at all, only the racially best in charge, articulated to the level of the individual. Given the way the 19th century was, this was obviously going to point toward militarism—in which, it should be pointed out, the same problematic of hierarchy and equality only repeats itself—and political authoritarianism. Bonner’s essay shows that indeed it did, and in the Confederacy was sharply at odds with what was otherwise a rights-based rhetoric. Bonner’s closing point, made for reasons of space rather obliquely, is that within the rich field of Confederate memory, most of these radical discourses have little place. What remains, though, as it were to haunt the memory of Confederate war dead, is a certain form of authoritarian militarism.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Incipient (voyeuristic) liberalism
Zizek is generally at least stimulating. He manages to pose problems. Indeed, he has the courage at least to pose the obvious questions and face the obvious objections. As he says in a recent piece (May-June, 2009) in the New Left Review, "if liberal-democratic capitalism is, if not the best, then the least bad form of society, why should we not simply resign ourselves to it in a mature way, even accept it wholeheartedly? Why insist on the communist hypothesis, against all odds?" Indeed. In this short essay, “How to Begin from the Beginning”—which is at least half a retelling of Lenin’s ‘last struggle’ with Stalin and bureaucracy—Zizek does briefly suggest the basis on which he thinks that revolutionary politics should now be set. He says, “All truly emancipatory politics is generated by the short-circuit between the universality of the public use of reason and the universality of the ‘part of no part’. This was already the communist dream of the young Marx—to bring together the universality of philosophy with the universality of the proletariat.”
In the current configuration, there are four principle immanent antagonisms that seem like sources of potential catastrophe “the looming threat of ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of private property for so-called intellectual property; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments, especially in biogenetics; and last, but not least, new forms of social apartheid—new walls and slums.” Zizek doesn’t say this, but I imagine that these four broad categories can be arrived at by a simple content analysis of popular culture. Those things that scare us the most are understood to be somehow related to these immanent antagonisms. Fictions reveal them to us in utopias and distopias, apocalypses and period pieces.
Only the fourth of these four areas of potential catastrophe has the potential for universality, for Rancière’s ‘part of no part.’ In other words, the other forms of antagonism can all be managed in various ways by the many mechanisms developed by liberal democracy—rather than true democracy—and its culture for this very purpose. Zizek says,
“The predominant liberal notion of democracy also deals with those excluded, but in a radically different mode: it focuses on their inclusion, as minority voices. All positions should be heard, all interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone guaranteed, all ways of life, cultures and practices respected, and so on. The obsession of this democracy is the protection of all kinds of minorities: cultural, religious, sexual, etc. The formula of democracy here consists of patient negotiation and compromise. What gets lost in this is the position of universality embodied in the excluded. The new emancipatory politics will no longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of different agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, we are in danger of losing everything. The threat is that we will be reduced to an abstract, empty Cartesian subject dispossessed of all our symbolic content, with our genetic base manipulated, vegetating in an unliveable environment. This triple threat makes us all proletarians, reduced to ‘substanceless subjectivity’, as Marx put it in the Grundrisse. The figure of the ‘part of no part’ confronts us with the truth of our own position; and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure. In a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially homo sacer, and the only way to avoid actually becoming so is to act preventively.”
Such are the last lines of the essay. I know that Zizek’s intention was radical, but it seems to me that, in essence, what he has just said is that it is only the ghettoized, only those most radically excluded by modernity, who are able to hold up to us a mirror of our own possible futures if we do not successfully moderate rampant capitalism through the judicious use of liberal, humanist reformism. The favelas, in this passage, are not a call to revolution, but a reminder that we do indeed have physical, psychological, and intellectual comforts worth defending. The ‘preventative action’ he invokes at the end does not sound like a revolution, it sounds more like a justification for another bailout. “In a way, we are all excluded...” surely this sounds just like the kind of “In a way, we are all different...” mindlessness against which Zizek supposedly stands? I see no relation whatsoever between Lenin’s dilemmas in the first part of the essay, and the (albeit very brief) analysis of the present situation in the last part. Perhaps Lacano-Leninism has in fact finally run out of ideas.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Theoretical man
Lessing, the most honest of theoretical men, dared to state openly that searching for the truth meant more to him than truth itself; thereby the fundamental secret of science is revealed, much to the astonishment, indeed annoyance, of the scientifically minded. Admittedly, alongside this isolated recognition (which represents an excess of honesty, if not of arrogance), one also finds a profound delusion which first appeared in the person of Socrates, namely the imperturbable belief that thought, as it follows the thread of causality, reaches down into the deepest abysses of being, and that it is capable, not simply of understanding existence, but even of correcting it. This sublime metaphysical illusion is an instinct which belongs inseparably to science, and leads it to its limits time after time, at which point it must transform itself into art; which is actually, given this mechanism, what it has been aiming at all along.
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, chapter 15. [In the Cambridge edition edited by Geuss and Speirs, pg 73.]
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, chapter 15. [In the Cambridge edition edited by Geuss and Speirs, pg 73.]
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Gender, the Parasitical State, and Revolution
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is, it is often asserted, a classic. It is as rewarding a document for a meta-reading, or a history of reception, as any—see Donald Reid’s 2007 essay in Modern Intellectual History for just such a project. But before a scholarly survey of this kind can be properly appreciated, the text itself should be read because the reception history of a work is more interesting when one understands how complex the thing is all on its own.
The Brumaire recounts in some detail the period from February of 1848 to the days just following Louis Bonaparte’s coup of December 2nd, 1851. The tone is one of bitter invective and scorn; the mode is very often satire. The question, of course, was how what began as a proletarian revolution could end in a cheap, tawdry, strong (but really weak)-man dictatorship. Today the spectacle of a revolution descending into tawdry authoritarianism is so banal as to be declared often enough a law of history. At the time, in France, certainly dictatorship was associated with revolution, but it should be born in mind that if 1789 eventually lead to military dictatorship—Napoleon’s empire—it did so first by passing through a Jacobin period that had the highest possible ambitions, and that Napoleon himself was easy to see as a world-historical genius. Marx’s task, then, writing in the 1850s, was to understand and explain the path revolution had taken, and indicate what might be the consequences, theoretical and practical, of this revolution.
By way of introducing what Marx says about the interrelated issues of the state and the class base of Louis Napoleon’s power, and considering the relation of this to Marx’s other work, I would like to make a rhetorical, or metaphorological, point that I feel smells strongly of a certain outmoded style of criticism, and that perhaps has already been made.
The famous opening passages of the text catalogue symbolic borrowings of various revolutions from history—these borrowings go from narratives to costumes. Marx puts language in a central position here. Indeed, he makes the learning of a language the metaphorical bridge from the faintly ridiculous actual history of these borrowings to an imagined revolution: “Likewise a beginner studying a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue; but only when he can use it without referring back, and thus forsake his native language for the new, only then has he entered into the spirit of the new language, and gained the ability to speak it fluently”(32).[1] In the case of the 1848 revolution, however, farce is in the air. Marx’s satire holds what is, what is said, and what ought to be, up for inspection. Louis Bonaparte is a con man running a nation as an emperor in order to pay his own debts. Everything is tawdry and small in comparison to past revolutions. If the Brumaire has become a central text for interpretation of Marx’s understanding of ideology, it is because he pays so much attention here to language and its power, perception and reality—to the essential emptiness, or lack, that drives the logic of public political discourse.
I would like to suggest that we link this obsession with farce, the tawdry, the small, and the emptiness and corruption of discourse, with Marx’s occasional, throw-away comparisons of politics and sex. There are a few remarks in the text, not central to the argument, but which in good post-structuralist fashion, I would like to suggest might provide a key to its rhetoric. It need hardly be said that Marx’s sexual politics are not those of the politically correct 21st century. First, famously, we have, “it is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation has been taken [by Louis Bonaparte] unawares. A nation like a woman is not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the first rake that tries can take her by force”(36). In reference to the eventual arrival of Odilon Barrot at the head of a ministry, a position he had sought for many years, Marx says, “he brought the bride home at last, but only after she had been prostituted” (49). Later on, more obliquely, discussing the accumulation of small bribes by which Bonaparte purchased the loyalty of the army, we find a similar trope, “hence the shamefaced despair, the feeling of terrible humiliation, degradation, which weighs down upon France and suffocates her. France feels dishonored. Just as under Napoleon there was scarcely any pretext for freedom, so under the second Bonaparte there was no longer any pretext for servitude” (116). Finally, and again veiled, there is the gender imaginary implied in the joke Marx makes discussing the duping of the peasants about the merits of the newer Napoleon, who perhaps does not really have a right to the glorious name he bears. Louis Bonaparte arrives protected by the Napoleonic (law) Code, under which “all inquiry into paternity is forbidden” (118).
The point here isn’t the boring simple-feminist one that Marx had reprehensible, perhaps Victorian, views about virtue and chastity, corruption and promiscuity. The point is rather the (I hope more sophisticated) sort of one made by gender analysis. The same set of idealist beliefs Marx had about the virtue of women slide over into politics, and seem also to govern the relationships he perceives between political action and social foundation. Louis Bonaparte is a weak and self-interested individual who finds the social foundation of his power in the conservative elements of the least-organized class, the small-holding peasantry. If he himself is a member of the lumpenproletariat (the members of which, it should be pointed out, typically have low moral standards), and if he draws his personal army from their ranks, his support in the larger society comes from what is essentially his seduction of a simple—but morally reprehensible—class. The smallholding farmers are only half a class, although they share the physical make-up of a class, in other words are united by a similar relation to and means of production, they lack the intellectual or superstructural unity, the community, that forms a class. Marx ends his breathtaking single-paragraph analysis of this sector of society thus:
It must be admitted that this description is not unlike a certain 19th century idea of woman—who would, if admitted into the homosocial community of politics, only drag unfreedom into it by acting simply as the proxy of her husband or her priest.
Louis Bonaparte is not the only object of Marx’s scorn in the Brumaire. The fragmented and indecisive bourgeoisie also comes in for much abuse. (It should be indicated here that a good point of comparison with Marx’s analysis of the political dynamics of these years is Maurice Agulhon’s book on the Second Republic. Agulhon, like Marx, sees the Republic as caught, paralyzed, between the twin dangers of popular uprising and monarchism; unlike Marx, he has, or is able to express, more respect for the political perspicacity of Louis Bonaparte in allowing each faction to believe what they liked about him, playing them off against one another). The source of Marx’s scorn, though not of his hostility, is the failure of the bourgeoisie to insist on the alignment of its economic and its political power. Marx heaps invective on the bourgeoisie because, fragmented as it is, it effectively renounces political life—which for Marx is the power to act (108)—in the hope of thus securing its economic creature comforts. That is, the bourgeoisie falls away from its ideals and prostitutes itself out. Sexual and political virtue are confounded.
Now, I will want to wait and see how Marx’s analysis of this period appears in his later, post 1870 writings on France, but it seems possible to assert that this confusion of virtues makes it difficult for Marx to see the potential of what Louis Napoleon had done. When Marx looked at the new regime, he seems largely to have seen only the socially marginal, the classless, and therefore corruption that is coded sexually—for instance in his reproduction at the end of the piece of the quip about the specific difference of the new regime: “France has often had a government of mistresses, but never before a government of kept men” (126). I understand that the Brumaire was referred to in the 1930s as a tool for understanding the rise of Fascism, seen then as a classless gang of petty criminals grabbing power from the weak and divided bourgeoisie. Is it permissible to suggest that this kind of analysis makes sense only when one cannot fully appreciate the power of political rhetoric because one is trapped in a sexist grounding of moral virtue on physical innocence? The purity of the physical must be certain, or there can be no moral (which is to say, spiritual) force? Could this be a sort of cruel irony whereby the sexist assumptions of progressive rationalism prevented it from seeing the enormous power and danger of fascist demagoguery? Or perhaps this is going much too far. It would none the less perhaps be interesting to see if previous feminist readings of the Brumaire (which must exist, but which I know nothing about) move in this direction.
The above is a little unfair to Marx in that he does not base his entire analysis of Louis Napoleon’s power base on the staging of an act of sexual violence. Marx’s treatment of the nature and tendencies of the French state is also crucial here. What I find most productive here in terms of a Marxist vision of French history is how close Marx comes to describing the state as itself a sort of class. The material reality of this seems to have made a great impression on Marx. The president, as head of state, has the power to fire and appoint 500,000 bureaucrats, which is to say that 1.5 million individuals (the families of the appointees), owe their daily bread to him personally (44, 67-8, 115, 122). According to Marx, during the Second Republic, the president makes a strong contrast with the national assembly, “While each individual delegate of the people merely represents this or that party, this or that city...He is the elect of the nation...The elected national assembly stands in a metaphysical relation to the nation, but the elected president stands in a personal one” (45). [2]
Marx’s analysis of the French state and the role it plays in Louis Bonaparte’s ascension must have an important role his broader interpretation of 19th century French history. (Clearly expressing Marx’s position here also provides a crucial substratum for reading Lenin—indeed, it seems to me now that I must go back and re-read State and Revolution to see precisely what it was that Lenin adds to Marx, and what he merely renames). The great centralizing bureaucratic apparatus of the French state—and Tocqueville would agree with Marx here—developed first under the absolute monarchy, and in the sequence of revolutions in the earlier part of the century, always served as the tool of the rising bourgeoisie (115-116). This has been the history of the state, “this executive with its enormous bureaucratic machinery of state...this fearsome parasitic body, which traps French society like a net and chokes it at every pore...All upheavals perfected this machinery instead of destroying it...Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have achieved independence with respect to society and to have brought it into submission” (115-116). The state, if it is conceived as a monstrous parasite, must of course have a host. It must also have support, “state power is not suspended in mid-air” (116), the cohort of bureaucrats themselves are not enough support. Here we return to the above-mentioned small-holding peasants, the formless class seduced, with the aid of the Napoleonic legend, into supporting Louis Bonaparte.
The discussion above of the curiously directionless nature of the small peasants is important here. If these peasants exist in no sense as community or organization, and are a group only by virtue of the similarity of their employment (that is, their position relative to the means of production), then the state as it is described by Marx is precisely the opposite of this. It is entirely organization, and has no material substrate whatsoever. It is an unproductive parasite. The opposition isn’t highlighted by Marx, and has, we might say, a poetic content rather than anything else. It is one more sign that the end is near.
Terrell Carver, in his brief accompanying note calls the Brumaire a “consolation.” In what sense? In the sense that Marx attempts to show some progressive result to the catastrophe of having such a nonentity as Louis Napoleon rise to power. Marx says,
The whole course of revolution, Marx suggests, can be read as a ‘heightening of the contradictions’ in a political sense. In the whole period up until the coup in 1851, revolution had “developed parliamentary power so that it could be overthrown. Now that this has been attained, it is developing the executive power, reducing it to its purest expression, isolating it, confronting it as sole challenger in order to concentrate all its powers of destruction against it” (115). That is, the purification of executive power represented by Louis Bonaparte is a necessary stage in the development of the consciousness of the rural population before an urban proletarian revolution can be successful.
Here is the basic inspiration for Leninism, although my sense is that Lenin made explicit the important additional step that it would be necessary for the proletariat to seize and use the full force of the bureaucratic machinery of state built by the bourgeoisie in order to eliminate the bourgeoisie. Here, also, is a theory on the level of the political that is structured much in the same way as an ‘economist’ Marxian theory of revolution. Based on Capital alone, one might well think that Marx’s theory of revolution was largely limited to the developing contradictions between the means of production and the relations of production (property). Perhaps the overlap I see here is the famous ‘dialectic’ applied to both realms. Or perhaps my reading of Marx is clouded by my reading of Lenin. Yet it seems that Marx is here posing his characteristic theory of social change as contradiction driven evolution-then-revolution in a manner that leaves economic change almost entirely out of the picture. No doubt much effort has been made by other more accomplished exegetes of Marx than this one, to make the two versions line up.
------------------------------------
[1] I am reading from the Later Political Writings, edited by Terrell Carver, published through the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series. It seems to me that this earlier passage mentioning the learning of a language must certainly be read as the first part of another, more famous passage a few pages on: “The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot create its poetry from the past but only from the future...Past revolutions required recollections of world history in order to dull themselves to their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury the dead in order to realise its own content. There phrase transcended content, here content transcends phrase” (32). That is, we might say, the revolution is in fact taking place only when the form of what takes place is no longer drawn from the textbook of the past, but arises out of immediate necessity.
[2]France
The Brumaire recounts in some detail the period from February of 1848 to the days just following Louis Bonaparte’s coup of December 2nd, 1851. The tone is one of bitter invective and scorn; the mode is very often satire. The question, of course, was how what began as a proletarian revolution could end in a cheap, tawdry, strong (but really weak)-man dictatorship. Today the spectacle of a revolution descending into tawdry authoritarianism is so banal as to be declared often enough a law of history. At the time, in France, certainly dictatorship was associated with revolution, but it should be born in mind that if 1789 eventually lead to military dictatorship—Napoleon’s empire—it did so first by passing through a Jacobin period that had the highest possible ambitions, and that Napoleon himself was easy to see as a world-historical genius. Marx’s task, then, writing in the 1850s, was to understand and explain the path revolution had taken, and indicate what might be the consequences, theoretical and practical, of this revolution.
By way of introducing what Marx says about the interrelated issues of the state and the class base of Louis Napoleon’s power, and considering the relation of this to Marx’s other work, I would like to make a rhetorical, or metaphorological, point that I feel smells strongly of a certain outmoded style of criticism, and that perhaps has already been made.
The famous opening passages of the text catalogue symbolic borrowings of various revolutions from history—these borrowings go from narratives to costumes. Marx puts language in a central position here. Indeed, he makes the learning of a language the metaphorical bridge from the faintly ridiculous actual history of these borrowings to an imagined revolution: “Likewise a beginner studying a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue; but only when he can use it without referring back, and thus forsake his native language for the new, only then has he entered into the spirit of the new language, and gained the ability to speak it fluently”(32).[1] In the case of the 1848 revolution, however, farce is in the air. Marx’s satire holds what is, what is said, and what ought to be, up for inspection. Louis Bonaparte is a con man running a nation as an emperor in order to pay his own debts. Everything is tawdry and small in comparison to past revolutions. If the Brumaire has become a central text for interpretation of Marx’s understanding of ideology, it is because he pays so much attention here to language and its power, perception and reality—to the essential emptiness, or lack, that drives the logic of public political discourse.
I would like to suggest that we link this obsession with farce, the tawdry, the small, and the emptiness and corruption of discourse, with Marx’s occasional, throw-away comparisons of politics and sex. There are a few remarks in the text, not central to the argument, but which in good post-structuralist fashion, I would like to suggest might provide a key to its rhetoric. It need hardly be said that Marx’s sexual politics are not those of the politically correct 21st century. First, famously, we have, “it is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation has been taken [by Louis Bonaparte] unawares. A nation like a woman is not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the first rake that tries can take her by force”(36). In reference to the eventual arrival of Odilon Barrot at the head of a ministry, a position he had sought for many years, Marx says, “he brought the bride home at last, but only after she had been prostituted” (49). Later on, more obliquely, discussing the accumulation of small bribes by which Bonaparte purchased the loyalty of the army, we find a similar trope, “hence the shamefaced despair, the feeling of terrible humiliation, degradation, which weighs down upon France and suffocates her. France feels dishonored. Just as under Napoleon there was scarcely any pretext for freedom, so under the second Bonaparte there was no longer any pretext for servitude” (116). Finally, and again veiled, there is the gender imaginary implied in the joke Marx makes discussing the duping of the peasants about the merits of the newer Napoleon, who perhaps does not really have a right to the glorious name he bears. Louis Bonaparte arrives protected by the Napoleonic (law) Code, under which “all inquiry into paternity is forbidden” (118).
The point here isn’t the boring simple-feminist one that Marx had reprehensible, perhaps Victorian, views about virtue and chastity, corruption and promiscuity. The point is rather the (I hope more sophisticated) sort of one made by gender analysis. The same set of idealist beliefs Marx had about the virtue of women slide over into politics, and seem also to govern the relationships he perceives between political action and social foundation. Louis Bonaparte is a weak and self-interested individual who finds the social foundation of his power in the conservative elements of the least-organized class, the small-holding peasantry. If he himself is a member of the lumpenproletariat (the members of which, it should be pointed out, typically have low moral standards), and if he draws his personal army from their ranks, his support in the larger society comes from what is essentially his seduction of a simple—but morally reprehensible—class. The smallholding farmers are only half a class, although they share the physical make-up of a class, in other words are united by a similar relation to and means of production, they lack the intellectual or superstructural unity, the community, that forms a class. Marx ends his breathtaking single-paragraph analysis of this sector of society thus:
They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must also appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unrestricted governmental power which protects them from other classes and watches over them from on high. The political influence of peasant proprietors is ultimately expressed in the subordination of parliament to the executive, society to the state.(p. 117)
It must be admitted that this description is not unlike a certain 19th century idea of woman—who would, if admitted into the homosocial community of politics, only drag unfreedom into it by acting simply as the proxy of her husband or her priest.
Louis Bonaparte is not the only object of Marx’s scorn in the Brumaire. The fragmented and indecisive bourgeoisie also comes in for much abuse. (It should be indicated here that a good point of comparison with Marx’s analysis of the political dynamics of these years is Maurice Agulhon’s book on the Second Republic. Agulhon, like Marx, sees the Republic as caught, paralyzed, between the twin dangers of popular uprising and monarchism; unlike Marx, he has, or is able to express, more respect for the political perspicacity of Louis Bonaparte in allowing each faction to believe what they liked about him, playing them off against one another). The source of Marx’s scorn, though not of his hostility, is the failure of the bourgeoisie to insist on the alignment of its economic and its political power. Marx heaps invective on the bourgeoisie because, fragmented as it is, it effectively renounces political life—which for Marx is the power to act (108)—in the hope of thus securing its economic creature comforts. That is, the bourgeoisie falls away from its ideals and prostitutes itself out. Sexual and political virtue are confounded.
Now, I will want to wait and see how Marx’s analysis of this period appears in his later, post 1870 writings on France, but it seems possible to assert that this confusion of virtues makes it difficult for Marx to see the potential of what Louis Napoleon had done. When Marx looked at the new regime, he seems largely to have seen only the socially marginal, the classless, and therefore corruption that is coded sexually—for instance in his reproduction at the end of the piece of the quip about the specific difference of the new regime: “France has often had a government of mistresses, but never before a government of kept men” (126). I understand that the Brumaire was referred to in the 1930s as a tool for understanding the rise of Fascism, seen then as a classless gang of petty criminals grabbing power from the weak and divided bourgeoisie. Is it permissible to suggest that this kind of analysis makes sense only when one cannot fully appreciate the power of political rhetoric because one is trapped in a sexist grounding of moral virtue on physical innocence? The purity of the physical must be certain, or there can be no moral (which is to say, spiritual) force? Could this be a sort of cruel irony whereby the sexist assumptions of progressive rationalism prevented it from seeing the enormous power and danger of fascist demagoguery? Or perhaps this is going much too far. It would none the less perhaps be interesting to see if previous feminist readings of the Brumaire (which must exist, but which I know nothing about) move in this direction.
The above is a little unfair to Marx in that he does not base his entire analysis of Louis Napoleon’s power base on the staging of an act of sexual violence. Marx’s treatment of the nature and tendencies of the French state is also crucial here. What I find most productive here in terms of a Marxist vision of French history is how close Marx comes to describing the state as itself a sort of class. The material reality of this seems to have made a great impression on Marx. The president, as head of state, has the power to fire and appoint 500,000 bureaucrats, which is to say that 1.5 million individuals (the families of the appointees), owe their daily bread to him personally (44, 67-8, 115, 122). According to Marx, during the Second Republic, the president makes a strong contrast with the national assembly, “While each individual delegate of the people merely represents this or that party, this or that city...He is the elect of the nation...The elected national assembly stands in a metaphysical relation to the nation, but the elected president stands in a personal one” (45). [2]
Marx’s analysis of the French state and the role it plays in Louis Bonaparte’s ascension must have an important role his broader interpretation of 19th century French history. (Clearly expressing Marx’s position here also provides a crucial substratum for reading Lenin—indeed, it seems to me now that I must go back and re-read State and Revolution to see precisely what it was that Lenin adds to Marx, and what he merely renames). The great centralizing bureaucratic apparatus of the French state—and Tocqueville would agree with Marx here—developed first under the absolute monarchy, and in the sequence of revolutions in the earlier part of the century, always served as the tool of the rising bourgeoisie (115-116). This has been the history of the state, “this executive with its enormous bureaucratic machinery of state...this fearsome parasitic body, which traps French society like a net and chokes it at every pore...All upheavals perfected this machinery instead of destroying it...Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have achieved independence with respect to society and to have brought it into submission” (115-116). The state, if it is conceived as a monstrous parasite, must of course have a host. It must also have support, “state power is not suspended in mid-air” (116), the cohort of bureaucrats themselves are not enough support. Here we return to the above-mentioned small-holding peasants, the formless class seduced, with the aid of the Napoleonic legend, into supporting Louis Bonaparte.
The discussion above of the curiously directionless nature of the small peasants is important here. If these peasants exist in no sense as community or organization, and are a group only by virtue of the similarity of their employment (that is, their position relative to the means of production), then the state as it is described by Marx is precisely the opposite of this. It is entirely organization, and has no material substrate whatsoever. It is an unproductive parasite. The opposition isn’t highlighted by Marx, and has, we might say, a poetic content rather than anything else. It is one more sign that the end is near.
Terrell Carver, in his brief accompanying note calls the Brumaire a “consolation.” In what sense? In the sense that Marx attempts to show some progressive result to the catastrophe of having such a nonentity as Louis Napoleon rise to power. Marx says,
It’s plain as day: ‘all Napoleonic ideals’ are ideals of the undeveloped smallholding in its heyday, but for the smallholding that has outlived this, they are an absurdity. They are merely hallucinations of its death struggle, words transformed into phrases, ideas into spectres, befitting dress into preposterous costumes. But the parody f the empire was necessary to liberate the bulk of the French nation from the weight of tradition and to work out in pure form the opposition between state and society. The demolition of the state machine will not endanger centralisation. Bureaucracy is only the low and brutal form of a centralization which is still afflicted with its opposite, feudalism. When, disappointed with the Napoleonic restoration, the French peasant will cease to believe in the smallholding, the whole edifice of state erected on this smallholding will collapse, and the proletarian revolution will obtain the chorus without which its solo becomes a swan song in all peasant countries. (p. 123)
The whole course of revolution, Marx suggests, can be read as a ‘heightening of the contradictions’ in a political sense. In the whole period up until the coup in 1851, revolution had “developed parliamentary power so that it could be overthrown. Now that this has been attained, it is developing the executive power, reducing it to its purest expression, isolating it, confronting it as sole challenger in order to concentrate all its powers of destruction against it” (115). That is, the purification of executive power represented by Louis Bonaparte is a necessary stage in the development of the consciousness of the rural population before an urban proletarian revolution can be successful.
Here is the basic inspiration for Leninism, although my sense is that Lenin made explicit the important additional step that it would be necessary for the proletariat to seize and use the full force of the bureaucratic machinery of state built by the bourgeoisie in order to eliminate the bourgeoisie. Here, also, is a theory on the level of the political that is structured much in the same way as an ‘economist’ Marxian theory of revolution. Based on Capital alone, one might well think that Marx’s theory of revolution was largely limited to the developing contradictions between the means of production and the relations of production (property). Perhaps the overlap I see here is the famous ‘dialectic’ applied to both realms. Or perhaps my reading of Marx is clouded by my reading of Lenin. Yet it seems that Marx is here posing his characteristic theory of social change as contradiction driven evolution-then-revolution in a manner that leaves economic change almost entirely out of the picture. No doubt much effort has been made by other more accomplished exegetes of Marx than this one, to make the two versions line up.
------------------------------------
[1] I am reading from the Later Political Writings, edited by Terrell Carver, published through the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series. It seems to me that this earlier passage mentioning the learning of a language must certainly be read as the first part of another, more famous passage a few pages on: “The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot create its poetry from the past but only from the future...Past revolutions required recollections of world history in order to dull themselves to their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury the dead in order to realise its own content. There phrase transcended content, here content transcends phrase” (32). That is, we might say, the revolution is in fact taking place only when the form of what takes place is no longer drawn from the textbook of the past, but arises out of immediate necessity.
[2]
Sunday, August 16, 2009
The Cold War and Political Philosophy
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.
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.
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.
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