Anderson's Considerations on Western Marxism

I read a library copy of Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism. Previous readers have left it heavily underlined and have also left some notes in the margins. I was most surprised, and I suppose a bit gratified, when after reading Anderson describe Rosa Luxemburg’s distinctive path as marked by, “successive theorizations of the general strike as the archetypal aggressive weapon of the self-emancipation of the working class” (13), I looked over and say in the left margin, almost tucked into the binding ‘Sorel?’ My thought exactly.

Of course, this book is from the Duke University library. So when Anderson writes, “Astonishingly, within the entire corpus of Western Marxism, there is not one single serious appraisal or sustained critique of the work of one major theorist by another” (69), we should not be surprised that a previous marxinaut has underlined this, and written next to it, “Jameson an exception?” It is none the less gratifying, if only because this is such a wonderfully medieval form of scholarly debate, to read below that, “he’s not a major theorist, litboy.” And finally, in pen, “girl?” I am not the first one to comment on this comment. So I’m putting it on the internet.

Anderson’s brief history of an object he calls Western Marxism is clear and packed full of useful information. It is one of those texts that makes a broad range of complex material appear comprehensible and within one’s reach. The book is clearly useful, but I mistrust it. Here, I reproduce nearly two pages, a long paragraph, from the book—I wouldn’t normally do this, but I think Anderson manages to summarize and condense his basic narrative and argument here in a remarkably lucid manner:

“The circle of traits defining Western Marxism as a distinct tradition can now be summarized. Born from the failure of proletarian revolutions in the advanced zones of European capitalism after the First World War, it developed within an ever increasing scission between socialist theory and working-class practice. The gulf between the two, originally opened up by the imperialist isolation of the Soviet State, was institutionally widened and fixed by the bureaucratization of the USSR and of the Comintern under Stalin. To the exponents of the new Marxism that emerged in the West, the official Communist movement represented the sole real embodiment of the international working class with meaning for them – whether they joined it, allied with it or rejected it. The structural divorce of theory and practice inherent in the nature of the Communist Parties of this epoch precluded unitary politico-intellectual work of the type that defined classical Marxism. The result was a seclusion of theorists i universities, far from the life of the proletariat in their own countries, and a contraction of theory from economics and politics into philosophy. This specialization was accompanied by an increasing difficulty of language, whose technical barriers were a function of its distance from the masses. It was also conversely attended by a decreasing level of international knowledge or communication between theorists themselves from different countries. The loss of any dynamic contact with working-class practice in turn displaced Marxist theory towards contemporary non-Marxist and idealist systems of thought, with which it now typically developed in close if contradictory symbiosis. At the same time, the concentration of theorists into professional philosophy, together with the discovery of Marx’s own early writings, left to a general retrospective search for intellectual ancestries to Marxism in anterior European philosophical thought, and a reinterpretation of historical materialism in light of them. The results of this pattern were three-fold. Firstly, there was a marked predominance of epistemological work, focused essentially on problems of method. Secondly, the major substantive field in which method was actually applied became aesthetics – or cultural superstructures in a broader sense. Finally the main theoretical departures outside this field, which developed new themes absent from classical Marxism – mostly in a speculative manner – revealed a consistent pessimism. Method as impotence, art as consolation, pessimism as quiescence: it is not difficult to perceive elements of all these in the complexion of Western Marxism. For the root determinant of this tradition was its formation by defeat – the long decades of set-back and stagnation, many of them terrible ones in any historical perspective, undergone by the Western working class after 1920” (92-93).

One of my suspicions here has to do with the manner in which Anderson has constructed this historical object, ‘Western Marxism.’ It is not a self-referential intellectual field, nor is it really a retrospectively created one (like François Cusset’s ‘French Theory’), rather, it is a group of thinkers and texts—the two are run together—that share a common position, defined by their mode of engagement, vis-à­-vis Marx and his immediate successors, in particular Lenin. Western Marxism does not encompass all those thinking about Marx, even declaring themselves to be Marxists, even philosophizing within Marxism. Anderson gives us at the end a sketch of a tradition of Marxism inspired by Trotsky, including Ernst Mandel, which is separate from Western Marxism.

Anderson’s basic argument about the theoreticization of Marxism is well-taken. Theorists who speak of action through discourse often, it seems to me, walk a fine line between cultural criticism, or working the language, and out-and-out sophistic self-justification (that is: I make my revolution here in language, in the classroom, where it counts for my career, rather than putting my body in the way of the police, or giving my intellectual energy to organizing and protest for which one receives no academic points). I am not sure I would know a genuine praxis if I saw one. Perhaps this means only that I should read more Gramsci and Lenin. My inclination, and I am concerned it can never be more than that, is to think that whole problem of mixing theory and practice is the result of false categories and distinctions. This is not at all to say that the one can be the other, but rather that new terms and new forms of sociability will render the problem senseless.

Most interesting from a historical point of view is Anderson’s assertion that after the First World War, Marxist intellectuals lost an internationalist cosmopolitanism that had in the past served them well. Certainly, this is linked to much larger trends, and Anderson is of course correct that the Stalinization of the various parties had a part in cutting out the institutional framework which might have supported Marxist internationalism despite increasing nationalist tension. And yet the problem seems larger to me, and perhaps not quite rightly framed. Stalin is not enough of a reason for the French to stop reading Italian theorists. Answering this question would require understanding first the many modes in which nationalism functions (discursive, institutional, political...), and then also the ways in which intellectuals are unable to escape, or sometimes even see, these constraints. Both are hard questions to answer, and require empirical detail well beyond what Anderson is interested in doing here. The book is, at any rate, an excellent introduction to the contours of the field, which is what it set out to be. I would recommend it to interested students, but I’m not sure that I could make use of it in a class. Otherwise, it is a historiographical artifact of the 1970s displaying a fascination with Gramsci and Trotsky, an almost endearing will to progress, and the workmanlike simplification that I have come, for some reason, to associate with British writers of this period.

Story of the New

Jameson, Frederic. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. Verso, 2002.

I have just finished a rather quick reading of Frederic Jameson’s A Singular Modernity (2002). Modernity and modernism aren’t terms that I’m especially committed to or that even excite me much, so it perhaps isn’t surprising that the book didn’t move me deeply. Still, it’s almost always worth reading Jameson. There are excellent commentaries here on Foucault, de Man and Althusser, as well as the relationship between Weber and Lukacs. Lots of Heidegger. Forced to summarize, I’d say that the main point of the book is that ‘modernity’ and also ‘modernism’ should be understood as narratives rather than concepts. They are also, to be sure, empirically existing historical realities. However, so many different things fall under these names that one cannot, according to Jameson, come to an empirical finding about their common traits. Rather, they are ways of narrativizing, and as such are always available. Indeed, the larger ‘political’ point seems to me that we (meaning, one supposes, progressive people of the world) should continue to fight to establish our own definitions of modernity, and consequently modernism, over and against the current hegemonic definition which revolves largely around the market.

What I appreciate about this is the effort made to conceptualize the various temporalities as mutually interdependent. The commonsense view might have it that the past determines the present to a certain degree, which itself determines the future within certain limits. Not so. Since the meaning of the past always depends on the narrative within which it is framed, and this narrative, made though it is in the present, always betrays a certain attitude towards the future, we can see that none of the temporal divisions (this can’t be the right way to say it) makes sense without the others. I find this view congenial—also, to a certain degree, commonsensical. It meshes well with the over-theorized temporalities of Gary Wilder’s talk, but seems somehow less self-concerned.

Probably this will go on my syllabus of ‘historical approaches to the literary’ because indeed it is extremely sensitive to these issues. Perhaps I’ll read some of Jameson’s more recent stuff.

The Political Unconscious

Here is a somewhat extended quote to explain what I like about Fred Jameson:

“Our presupposition, in the analyses that follow, will be that only a genuine philosophy of history is capable of respecting the specificity and radical difference of the social and cultural past while disclosing the solidarity of its polemics and passions, its forms, structures, experiences, and struggles, with those of the present day...My position here is that only Marxism offers a philosophically coherent and ideologically compelling resolution to the dilemma of historicism...Only Marxism can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past, which, like Tiresias drinking the blood, is momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long-forgotten message in surroundings utterly alien to it. This mystery can be reenacted only if the human adventure is one; only thus—and not through the hobbies of antiquarianism or the projections of the modernists—can we glimpse the vital claims upon us of such long-dead issues as the seasonal alteration of the economy of a primitive tribe, the passionate disputes about the nature of the Trinity, the conflicting models of the polis or the universal Empire, or, apparently closer to us in time, the dusty parliamentary and journalistic polemics of the nineteenth-century nation states. These matters can recover their original urgency for us only if they are retold within the unity of a single great collective story; only if, in however disguised and symbolic a form, they are seen as sharing a single fundamental theme—for Marxism, the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity; only if they are grasped as vital episodes in a single vast unfinished plot...” (18-20)

And cut to a quote from the Communist Manifesto. “The history of all hitherto existing societies...” In Jameson’s class on Sartre, at least in its most recent incarnation, the first reading assignment is selections from Pascal’s Pensées. At several points in The Political Unconscious Jameson mentions the frequent comparisons between various religions and Marxism, saying that the comparison may be just, but should certainly not be to the denigration of the latter. Indeed, he courts such comparisons by, entirely unnecessarily, positioning his Marxist (Freudian) hermeneutic as the successor, the next, indeed, the only real change since, medieval theological hermeneutics. He begins with the four levels of medieval Biblical hermeneutics not just in relation to Northrop Frye, but essentially because his critical practice, if not a religion proper, is certainly a faith. So perhaps assigning Pascal is a nod in the direction of his own faith.

Sartrean philosophy does not, in my opinion, leave much room for the past (even the ‘cultural past’), except as individuals ‘know’ it. Any kind of collective history is impressionistic at best. The Critique (in 1960) did indeed try to rectify this, and to treat totality rigorously from both an existentialist and a Marxist perspective. Although it is perhaps unfair, it is exactly at this juncture that I am inclined to locate the Jamesonian leap of faith. Sartre’s attempt to bring his phenomenology in line with a Marxist philosophy of the collectivity failed. I am inclined to say the Critique is a failure not so much because the book is unreadable as because as far as I can tell, Jameson, who is very persuasive, has failed to get anyone to pretend to have read it.

So from my perspective, Jameson’s insistence that not just the text, but History (emphatically, for this reason, capitalized)—which is not itself text, but can only ever be approached textually—makes a meaningful whole represents his primal leap of faith, without which the rest of his critical practice would not be possible. Conceiving of history as the Lacanian Real (or, what I know even less about, the Althusserian/Leibnizian ‘absent cause’) does not solve the problem. Lacan does not take one into a realm of genuine collectivity, never mind totality, any more than Sartre. It is possible that Jameson would describe this ‘leap of faith’ as one of the Utopian goals of his project, or a Utopia inscribed into its process. This is acceptable to me, I suppose, though I don’t share it.

Moreover, I don’t see the reason for it. Neuroscientists claim that the brain is greater than the sum of its parts. There is, I understand, a whole field of research built around ideas of irreducible complexity, critical mass of connectivity, or whatever. I should know more about them, probably. This sort of claim is far from what Jameson is doing. Really, his claims to totality—as he makes clear—are a necessary gesture of critical foreclosure. One must somehow delimit the field of study, the lines are arbitrary, and will line up only with some sort of radical original choice. Jameson’s is Marxism. After this, with great critical dexterity he divides the task of totalizing criticism into three overlapping phases, or levels. All the different critical idioms are contained, on one of the three levels, within the Marxist one (this is the point of the smaller, more soberly formulated 1976 essay, “Criticism in History”).

There are a few further issues that I would like to signal, but about which I haven’t made up my mind. The first is Jameson’s explicitly interpretive, that is, hermeneutic, stance. He mentions Gadamer once, in a footnote, to say that the contextual horizons for interpretation he, Jameson, is setting out here are not like Gadamer’s horizons of interpretation. I suppose that this is Jameson’s way of being anti-Barthesian. There is a hard kernel of the Real in every text, and the critic ought not try to ignore it in the name of jouissance. Politics, all the moral imperatives of Marxism, get in the way.

This interpretation must happen within, as suggested above, certain contexts. Different contexts for different sorts of interpretation; though I think a more detailed comparison of Jameson’s three levels of interpretive context with LaCapra’s (also from the early 1980s) long list of contexts for each text. No doubt the difference may be explained disciplinarily—that is, LaCapra is, in the end, an historian, Jameson a literary critic. So LaCapra goes very willingly outside the text, while Jameson goes so far as to say, “the symbolic act [that is, the text] therefore begins by generating and producing its own context in the same moment of emergence in which it steps back from it” (81). I’m not sure what the distinction between generation and producing is supposed to be, but the model is an interesting one. Too flat, though. Any given text certainly might be a symbolic act, and most can be read in that way, but this depends on the context of production. The author-function, I should think, still allows this. Perhaps the issue is that for Jameson one always goes into the past through the text one is investigating, and in this sense, it does indeed create its own context. In the end, though, I can’t agree. To say that the text produces its own context is to allow the critic to find whatever she is looking for in it. Jameson solves this dilemma by turning to totalizing interpretation—that is, the text means only in relation to other structures, other texts—but the totality is, as I said above, really just an act of faith, its content prescribed in some sense from before the book is opened.

Finally, there is the question of allegory. Jameson’s use of historical allegory is sensitive and multi-layered, but my fur is up about this. Michael Sprinker’s 1994 book on Proust purported to be historical materialist in orientation but didn’t seem ever, or hardly ever, to rise above the level of class allegory. As though Sprinker had read a few books about the class structure of the time, and then found homologous structures within the Recherche; he declares an allegory and goes home. For instance, he seems to have decided that the proletariat was a negligible political force in the fin-de-siècle and up until the popular front, even. The real struggle continues to be, according to him, between aristocrats and the bourgeoisie. This is foolishness. It comes from taking the Action Française at its word, and hunting for French fascists in every literary corner. The Recherche certainly is incisive social critique, among other things. But it is not a model of French society as a whole, it is a very peculiar view of a peculiar part of this society. Even this view might be said to be underpinned by the lower-classes, excluded, certainly, but not ignored. This is the content of the scene in À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs at Balbec, where the wealthy eat in the gas-lit glass box of the restaurant, while the poor stand in the dark outside, invisible from within, their faces pressed against the glass. Sprinker’s ham-handedness and vulgar allegory has made me suspicious of Jameson in this regard. I’ll have to read more.

Perhaps next I’ll try Vico out. All this talk of philosophy of history has me itching for it. Also, it will be useful when I go back to Sorel.

Izenberg and Jameson

I have just read two more texts which, from very different disciplinary perspectives, explore the possibilities of psychoanalytic approaches to various ‘non-clinical’ problems. I read Frederic Jameson’s essay, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan” (1978), first, and then a methodological piece by the noted (at least where I come from) historian Gerald Izenberg, “Psychohistory and Intellectual History” (1975). I’ll talk about them in temporal order, though from the vantage point of 2007 they are nearly contemporary.

Izenberg is basically concerned to defend the use of psychoanalytic techniques in history, especially intellectual history, by setting some limits to their place and explanatory power. This involves making a distinction between rational and irrational acts, such as the signing of a treaty by a monarch and extending this to beliefs, for instance the development of Freud’s own theories. Izenberg no doubt correctly prefers rational/irrational to right/wrong, or true/false, though he treats all these as possible axes along which one might evaluate historical fact. Rational/irrational depends on what we would now call contextual factors. Ptolemaic astronomy is wrong, but it is rational. For the historian to decide if an action was rational, she needs to gather all the information that the actor had, and make an intelligent judgment. If a monarch (this is the easiest example), made a decisions against all advice, and apparently for no reason that could be explained by anyone, this may be said to be an irrational act. Then, and only then, may psychohistory enter the picture, and try thus to arrive at depth-psychological explanatory factor.

This essay is from the 1970s, and the examples before Izenberg, or, anyway, the ones he cites, are Leopold III, Luther, Hitler...we’re clearly in the realm of history-as-biography. He mentions Erich Fromm and even the Frankfurt school’s sociological psychoanalysis, but this is not his main interest. More on this from Jameson, who mentions Adorno, but of course not Erich Fromm. (See this essay about the eclipse of Fromm, which is for me in a box with other sociological treatments of intellectuals, for instance, Michele Lamont's "How to Become a Famous French Philosopher," about Derrida and Neil Gross, "Becoming a Pragmatist Philosopher").

Izenberg argues that the irrational/rational distinction can be made with belief systems as well, even of sophisticated, self-reflective intellectuals. Interestingly, his main example here is the development of psychoanalysis itself. Was Freud’s theory developed suddenly, a leap of genius? Or did it make sense as an unfolding of previous ideas and clinical results? Izenberg argues strongly that it was the latter, that Freud’s theory was rationally developed, and therefore does not, itself, call for a psychoanalytic explanation.

There are some very clear flaws here. It is perhaps safe to say that among my contemporaries irrationality is an article of faith. All systems of thought contain contradiction, rupture, whatever you like to call it. Indeed, curiously enough, Izenberg seems to feel that irrationality remains irrational in filling a social function, where I suspect that many people would proceed under the assumption that a successfully filled social function is inherently rational, even part of a definition of rationality. Similarly, Izenberg is enough of a social-scientist that, rather than seeing history as stuffed, bursting at the seams with meaning, he seeks only ‘sufficient’ cause. There is surely a tendency today to over-reading the historical record, rather than under-reading. (Ours is a hermeneutic of suspicion?)

The area in which Izenberg is most assertive about the explanatory power of psychoanalysis for intellectual history is not so much in blind-spots, repressed possibilities, and the like, as it is in originary choices. This is discussed on the final pages of the essay, taking Max Weber, but first William James as test cases. The point here is that psychoanalysis does have something to say about why some people are interested in some things and not in other things. He says, “It will always be legitimate to ask why some area was a problem or research interest for someone, and at a basic level there will almost always be an answer in terms of identity needs or basic psychic conflict” (155). This I find quite curious. Just a page earlier, Izenberg quotes Sartre from Search for a Method. Sartre’s own psychoanalytic analyses pick up the question ‘why this, and not this other?’ in a totally different fashion. For Sartre, there is always a radically contingent original choice that lies at the center of a biography—for Baudelaire or Genet, for everyone. This choice is not that which is explained by psychoanalytic investigation, but the irrationality (in the sense of senselessness) which necessarily lies at the center of all human experience. Clearly we’re talking about two different things here, but I still find Izenberg’s attitude that from the ‘seething cauldron’ of the unconscious, something may come of social-science explanatory power, frankly amazing. I’m also surprised by the similarity of his ambition to the claims Randall Collins makes for his sociology of philosophies. Collins takes almost the opposite approach—seeking explanation for intellectual choices in external, network causes, rather than individualist, even infra-individual ones.

Now, Jameson’s essay is quite different. It meanders; it does not follow an argument so much as talk around a subject. Jameson discusses Lacan, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. I will start with one fundamental difference between Jameson and Izenberg, which I suppose is what makes the latter an historian and the former not: Jameson isn’t interested in causality. Writ large, he is a Marxist, and in this sense, his causality is taken care of. Writ small, he is a literary critic, and in this sense it is taken care of also. Also interesting, at least in the texts here, Jameson is more concerned than Izenberg with tying the individual/text into the larger social world. Jameson starts with some of the same examples of psychobiography (Erikson’s treatment of Luther, mainly) as does Izenberg. He is, of course, more committed to Sartre. The psychoanalytic approach to biography (Jameson isn’t concerned, here at least, with historical understand as such) replaces the biographer’s ‘intuition’ and ‘sympathy’ with context and situation—which is of course the technical existentialist term. Useful for all the difficulties it pastes over.

After a series of apparent digressions, which, I think, have the function of getting all the pieces of the Lacanian puzzle in place, Jameson makes his central suggestion for the literary use of the Lacanian system. It is best understood as a continuation of Freud’s own practice in reading literary texts, for instance his analysis of The Sandman. The narrative, somehow, illustrates a certain ‘pre-set’ psychic drama, trauma to neurosis, crisis, and resolution (no doubt this is an unacceptable formulation of said movement). Lacan offers a more sophisticated and diversified set of such given psychic narrative structures, each with different meanings. These are represented by the four permutations of the Lacanian formula Jameson reprints for us.

Finally, though, and this was published in 1978, what Jameson really wants is to use Lacan’s framework in order to articulate a cultural and political criticism, rather than a literary one. Of the various subject positions Lacan articulates, Jameson thinks that of the analyst is most useful. I quote the bulk of the last paragraph in the essay:

The ‘discourse of the analyst,’ finally, is the subject position that our current political languages seem least qualified to articulate. Like the ‘discourse of the hysteric,’ this position also involves an absolute commitment to desire as such at the same time that it opens a certain listening distance from it and suspends the latter’s existential urgencies—the illusion of conscious experience—in a fashion dialectical rather than ironic. The ‘discourse of the analyst,’ then, which seeks to distinguish the nature of the object of desire itself from the passions and immediacies of the experience of desire’s subject, suggests a demanding and self-effacing political equivalent in which the structure of Utopian desire itself is attended to through the chaotic rhythms of collective discourse and fantasy of all kinds (including those that pass through our own heads). This is not, unlike the discourse of the master, a position of authority...rather, it is a position of articulated receptivity, of deep listening (L’écoute), of some attention beyond the self or the ego, but one that may need to use those bracketed personal functions as instruments for hearing the Other’s desire.

From where I stand, at any rate, this is certainly a recipe, in all its profundity (that is, real and imagined) for the surprisingly narrow array of individuals who have arrived at the position of academic cultural critics. Then there is the last sentence, which I know is supposed to be a rhetorical flourish, and I think may be only that:

The active and theoretical passivity, the rigorous and committed self-denial, of this final subject position, which acknowledges collective desire at the same moment that it tracks its spoors and traces, may well have lessons for cultural intellectuals as well as politicians and psychoanalysts.