from Vico

"Wars are generally fought by nations who speak distinct languages and are therefore 'mute' in relation to each other." [para 487]
Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. David Marsh.

He meant this more or less literally, but it should perhaps be taken, not metaphorically, but at least with the words 'language' and 'mute' in their broad meanings; same with 'nation,' i suppose.

Behrent on Foucault

I have just finished reading a very interesting, and unpublished, article by Michael Behrent on Foucault and economic liberalism entitled, “Liberalism without Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Free-Market Creed, 1976-1979”. The article and its references will be very useful for me in thinking about Sorel’s context of reception in post-1968 France; in particular, the question of the meaning(s) of liberalism. Behrent does a wonderful job of situating Foucault and, it seems to me, of explaining what economic liberalism ‘did’ and meant for him. The highest praise: it made me want to run out and buy (perhaps I will tomorrow), the 1978 and 1979 Collège de France lectures on which the argument is based.

As much as I liked the piece, though, I find myself disagreeing with it on a fundamental level. I get the impression that Behrent more or less agrees with what he convincingly argues Foucault thought about economic liberalism. One reason I want to read these lectures is to see if Foucault does indeed seem to be endorsing the idea that the absence of explicit disciplinary practices in an ideal neoliberal regime necessarily means the absence of implicit, or hidden, disciplinary practices. Probably he is agnostic on the question, and is interested in possibility only.

But then again, to translate things into contemporary US politics, Foucault is not neoliberal in the sense in which I understand this word. It seems that the Foucault was in favor of various forms of social protection (the negative tax, for instance) that are, in the US context, liberal rather than neoliberal (if, and I think we can, we take the last two of Roosevelt’s four freedoms as much of what neoliberals have wanted, in the last decade, to roll back).

So, finally, what I want more of is Behrent’s own evaluation of how much of the ‘neoliberalism’ that interested Foucault was reflected less in the governing practices of various parties than it was present only in his own mind. Ordoliberals may have provided an example in Germany, and certainly Behrent is clear about the negative examples in France—perhaps the Second Left may also be cited as an example, but although certain French liberals may have seen allies there, it is a stretch, I think, to compare autogestation with the Chicago School.

At any rate, a very interesting piece. I am sorry to have missed the seminar at which it was presented, and I hope it is published soon so that I can cite from it.

Spinoza's Ethics

I read Spinoza’s Ethics largely because I had heard so much about how a certain kind of Theory was deeply indebted to him, or claimed to be. My suspicion was (and is) that it is really Deleuze’s version of Spinoza that interests people, in the same way that people have now heard of Bergson largely because of Deleuze. There isn’t anything wrong with this, and I should admit strait off that I haven’t read very much of the relevant material on the French Spinozan revival of the 1970s. This, anyway, is how I came to Spinoza. Several months ago, I read the Theological-Political Treatise. Parts of it were very interesting, but since my interest in biblical hermeneutics and the debunking of miracles is, at best, abstract, I was not greatly moved. Since then, I have been traveling and focusing n other things, which is a shame. But I finally managed to sit down and work through the Ethics.

This was a first reading, and no doubt a superficial one. There are a few things I would like to highlight and remember. Most generally, and perhaps most superficially, I remember from long ago that much pop (or near pop) neuroscience takes its philosophical inspiration from Descartes. The way in which Spinoza thinks about the relationship between mind and body seems to me obviously far better tuned to contemporary understanding. I am generally fascinated by this aspect of the work, and would, on a second reading, pay close attention to it.

Perhaps most elusive and unexpected, for me, was Spinoza’s treatment of time (and much of this in the last pages of the book). This is bound up with the relation between mind and body. There is eternity and there is duration. The mind is able to conceive of nothing except through the body, which has duration, and is in time. However, the mind may conceive of the body under the species of eternity, but this is, I think, essentially to conceive of God. This is the preserve of reason, which always is concerned with the eternal. There is a great deal more here, and no doubt the duration/eternity dichotomy is crucial not just for Spinoza, but for the whole tradition of philosophy—perhaps it is even universal. The question is, and I might tend in this direction, is Spinoza attempting to get around this dichotomy, to present us with a way of thinking that downgrades the distinction to relative unimportance?

Now, given that I came to this text with Theory in my head, I was especially interested in desire as a concept. Desire is defined at one point as, “appetite together with consciousness of the appetite” (76 – I am using the Penguin Classics edition of the Curley translation). I should say in passing that, in Lukacs, consciousness appeared as the highest good, and there seemed to be no need to explain why it was good. Spinoza does a somewhat better job explaining why it is good. Later, as the first point in the definitions of the affects we find, “desire is man’s very essence, insofar as it is conceived to be determined, from any given affection of it, to do something” (104). The middle clauses, Spinoza explains, are important. Desire is man’s essence only insofar as man, and everything else, strives for self-preservation. Desire is then the conscious (as opposed to appetite) striving for something that, given an existing condition (Spinoza’s affection), tends toward the preservation of the individual. Of course, Spinoza quickly points out, desires “are not infrequently so opposed to one another than the man is pulled in different directions and knows not where to turn” (104).

Spinoza believes that if all individuals acted according to their own best interests, or what, with a clear mind, they perceived these interests to be, we would have peace, freedom, and prosperity. This is because there is nothing more useful to one individual than another individual in full possession of his own capacities. The state, however, and its power to coerce and/or legislate on matters of morality and action, is necessary because people are generally ruled by their affects rather than their reason.

I wonder how similar this is to a Smithian hand-of-God argument? Indeed, since I have been trained to pay attention to the way people talk about affect, it seems to me that a single problematic does indeed somehow unite Spinoza and, who is perhaps most interesting in this regard, the Marquis de Sade. Indeed, as an aside, I am very sorry that I could not bring myself to write about La philosophie dans le boudoir immediately after finishing it. The thing is horrible and fascinating; especially in the light of certain arguments about emotion-talk and radical forms of republicanism at the time of the French Revolution. Sade really does represent this logic pushed in a radical way to a certain limit.

A final confusion of which I want to remind myself: Spinoza several times uses the phrase “more reality,” at one point in what must be one of his famous sives, it is “more reality, or perfection” (33). What does this mean, exactly? I think this must be a significant philosophical point, in the same way that “Deus sive natura” is not just any conjunction, but a basic Spinozan contention. More perfection, I understand. The more of God’s nature one is able to understand, the more perfection one contains, or, is. But I am confused by the equation of this to reality. As opposed to confused ideas of reality? Spinoza, I would have thought, allows the reality of confusion, just not its correctness, or perfection. We can only ever have an imperfect, or mutilated (such language!) idea of evil, since it is itself a negation. It is impossible to hate God, since to know God excludes the negation necessary for hate. But does Spinoza consider such gaps, failures, and negations to be absences of reality? I am a bit confused about this.

At any rate, I rashly moved on from Spinoza some days ago, and have started reading another old and difficult book—though one I have a better excuse for tackling: the New Science of Giamattista Vico. I will need to spend some time with this text, which is more exciting than I had thought it would be, and will write more about it soon. But for now I want only to point out that there are some interesting echoes with Spinoza. For instance, here is Vico’s axiom 35, “Wonder is the daughter of ignorance. The greater the cause inspiring it, the greater the wonder.” Then here is axiom 36, “The weaker its powers of reasoning, the more vigorous the human imagination grows.” One of the more elegant moments in the Ethics is the definition of wonder as what one experiences before a singular thing. This seems to me remarkably powerful. A thing appears singular when one is ignorant of how it is connected to other things, when one has no conceptual grasp of it. (I would argue that psychologically, when a thing is really singular, it inspires not wonder so much as uncomprehending boredom—something is interesting when it speaks in a powerful and unexpected way to what one already knows. Too familiar, or too foreign, and it is impossible to think about). Perhaps having just read Spinoza, I am going too far and assimilating to him what are really pieces of Enlightenment common sense by Vico’s time. Still, the categories of wonder and imagination are clearly important—if I were more energetic, I would keep careful track of how Spinoza defines them, and then how Vico defines and uses them.

It also occurs to me, though only here, that Badiou, who certainly ought to know his Spinoza, may be doing interesting things in his Ethics, discussed a bit below, around the idea of evil as essentially a negation, a failure.

pears and flies

Today I went to the Städel Museum here in Frankfurt. I spent the most time at one particular special exhibit, “Die Magie der Dinge. Stilllebenmalerei 1500-1800.” These paintings are mostly from the low countries and Germany-though the show ends with Chardin. I seriously considered buying the catalogue, which is a pleasingly designed and large book, but I am not, just at the moment, buying this kind of book. So all I have is the brochure, which reproduces only a few pictures. Happily, the brochure leaves out the kind of silly still lives that the curator (or the curator’s boss?) thought it would be in good taste to include. In the entryway to the exhibit there is a large and beautiful vase of flowers-but then inside there is a pile of gourds and melons that looks more like a cheap thanksgiving centerpiece than anything else. I don’t get it.

This show has a definite narrative. It begins with ‘precursors’ to still-life painting found in various kinds of religious art. The first paintings are of the ‘Madonna and Child,’ but also with flowers in a vase. In one case, these are lilies and irises, symbolizing both her purity and the extent of her compassion for Jesus’ suffering (the lilies are familiar, but the iris is less so-certainly these flowers have a fleshy and perhaps bloody appearance). Similarly, we get a large-scale painting depicting a biblical scene, but with the foreground taken up by a market, and so by animals and vegetables. The curatorial materials called this a religious ‘peg,’ soon discarded, but at the time necessary for the real subject matter. I suppose this might be so, and I shouldn’t ask for too much from a blurb on an info-card; but the painting seems more interesting to me than that. The narrative of the exhibition demands that the juxtaposition of biblical/mundane subject mater be understood as transitional and provisional, but it seems to me that it would be interesting to read such a juxtaposition in terms of Erich Auerbach’s large narrative of mimetic levels, style and genre in literature. Indeed, this particular painting (Pieter Aertsen, Market Scene with Christ and the Adulteress, 1559), seems to me to have a triadic structure-the trades-people sit among their wares, and then above, in the background, Jesus writing Hebrew in the dust. Also in the background, with the biblical scene, there is another vegetable stand and selling, looking on. In contrast, those sellers in the front seem oblivious to what is going on behind them. It seems to me that the forward scene is at least as much about the people as it is about the objects they are selling. So I wonder if the biblical scene, rather than a peg on which to hang a market scene, is perhaps commenting on, or mediating between, the people and their things. Indeed, there are some pleasing formal connections between the two groups of figures.

What we have here in the first room, then, are the elements which will go into still life paintings, and the first movements toward disentangling it from other genres. In later rooms we get various forms and subgenres. I found the ‘sottobosco’ (sp?) theme boring, but was surprisingly intrigued by the niche paintings. These are paintings of another painting, or a window onto a scene, surrounded by flowers and other standard still life figures. Seeing a number of these paintings in one place made me think of them less as elaborate tromp-l’oeil exercises, and more as, in fact, efforts to create a space from which to look. This is to say that the outer band of the painting creates a space for a viewer to be, as they view the inner image.

Most of the memento mori type paintings I found relatively crude and blunt; for me without emotional resonance. There was one, however, made on a larger scale than the others, displaying many objects of vanity (cards, coins, drink...) and then off to the side, a candle just gone out, with smoke trailing up off of it in just the way it does only in the two seconds after the flame has gone. This motif (the just-extinguished candle) was in several paintings, but this particular one (I wish I had written down its information-perhaps I will go back next week) managed to capture a moment perfectly; duration-a time object-as well as the physical objects.

The narrative arc of the show is that the still life begins as extremely heavily symbolic, sometimes allegorical, and as the genre developed, the objects themselves became more important than their symbolic meanings. The artistic excellence and luxury of the painted flower became more and more important than the fact that the flower is an iris, for instance. As formal perfection becomes more important, driven then as now by the art market, it becomes difficult for succeeding generations to outdo their teachers. By the later part of the 18th century, as we see in the icon of the show, the object itself is literally put on a pedestal. This is the point, I think, of the curatorial emphasis on Justus Juncker’s 1765 ‘Stillleben mit Birn and Insekten’ (which the brochure has incorrectly in English as ‘Partridge and Pear’-there were in the museum many instances of bad English; however, it must have been intentional on someone’s part that in the English-language chronology of Max Beckman’s life, we learn that in 1947 he moved to Amerika). Then the reason that the show ends with Chardin, a French painter, is that with Chardin we can say that the painting itself, rather than the object depicted, has become the real point. This is to say, the beauty of depiction is no longer than which is valued, but the act of depiction itself.

Such was not the only point of the show-for instance it did want to locate this genre in terms of social structure, as pointedly bourgeois, and in the hunting pictures, for instance, apparently a way of claiming something of the aristocratic life-style. This argument was made in particular in reference to one large-scale hunting picture, which is dominated by a brilliantly painted hare, hung upside-down in the center and well lit. In the background, we see a sort of mansion. This is supposed to mean a claim to aristocracy. I am not so sure, since the picture was for me interesting because of the tactile tension between the bright, torsioned, beautifully textured hare in the center, and the snarling terracotta lion’s head just behind it.

But I also do not think that I am wrong about this basic narrative. I am of course in no position to argue that the narrative is wrong. I know very little about these paintings, or indeed art history in general. However, it does seem an awfully familiar story to me-in fact it is one story of modernism. The logic of the content purifies itself and eventually develops into reflexive formalism. The connection to the Dutch bourgeoisie (whatever that means) is necessary to as a driving force, but basically has nothing to do with the shape of the changes within the genre-it is an engine, but not a steering wheel.

So, finally, because I have been reading History and Class Consciousness, and Lukács’ words are ringing in my ears, I wonder if it makes any sense to offer a more Marxist reading of this sequence. Lukács often argues that one hallmark of capitalist ideology is the tendency to view objects in isolation from one another-atomization rather than totalization. Do we see in this narrative of still life painting the stripping-away of old cultural prejudices (symbolic meaning), and the isolation of objects qua objects in an increasingly rationalist fashion? Kind of. Certainly there is a stripping-away, but I am less certain of the rationalism. We can probably say atomization. Indeed, perhaps it could be argued that what we see is the painters slowly ceasing to paint the objects that society has made, and starting to paint things themselves. The pear is sitting on the altar to things in themselves as they are.

But it is also the case that many of the things pictured are commodities. In this light, what we have is the Dutch bourgeoisie tearing objects out of the old social structure (Mary’s irises), and turning them into commodities which then take on a life of their own, outside the control of their ‘masters.’ No doubt there is a great deal of Marxist art history already on the Dutch still life-it does seem obvious that it should be understood as an art form that helps this class to manage or process its world. Maybe some enterprising art historian has synchronized changing trends in still life painting with Giovanni Arrighi’s periodization of Dutch capital. Seems to me like a good idea.

On the other hand, I am a little suspicious that the show has made one genre out of what are in fact several genres. Flowers, for instance, seem to be a genre all on their own, with meanings and a dynamic that is not the same as for pictures of meals, or dead game, or especially living animals. Where do we find the genre boundaries between still life and domestic painting? The memento mori paintings, for instance, are very clearly and obviously allegorical. This is true of some, but not all of the other sub-genres of still life. The flourishing industry devoted to painting fish, for instance, does not seem to have put a great deal of symbolic ballast into their pictures.

In all events, the show was very interesting. I may well go back to the museum before it ends (August 14th-soon), and look at it again, this time writing down what I want to remember.

from Flaubert

Il ne distinguait pas, cet homme si plein de pratique, la dissemblance des sentiments sous la parité des expressions. Parce que des lèvres libertines ou vénales lui avaient murmuré des phrases pareilles, il ne croyait que faiblement à la candeur de celles-là ; on en devait rabattre, pensait-il, les discours exagérés cachant les affections médiocres ; comme si la plénitude de l’âme ne débordait pas quelquefois par les métaphores les plus vides, puisque personne, jamais, ne peut donner l’exact mesure de ses besoins, ni de ses conceptions, ni de ses douleurs, et que la parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles.

Madame Bovary, Part 2, Chapter XII.

Although it sounds foolish to say, Flaubert really is amazing. I admit to stopping part way through L’education sentimental, though I was enjoying it. But just now I’ve read Un cœur simple straight through in one sitting, and am now a little over half through Bovary.

I can only imagine that this chunk of text—at least from “la parole humaine...”—is often quoted. I especially like that Flaubert is telling us this apropos of Emma. It is not clear to me that Flaubert himself would endorse such a view of language, and I wonder if he is often taken to do so.

Also, from Bouvard et Pécuchet, “Les ouvrage dont les titres étaient pour eux inintelligibles leur semblaient contenir un mystère.” No wonder so many books are written about Flaubert.

Homo Sacer

I looked at my (temporarily much reduced) bookshelf while I was finishing Ellen Wood’s book, and decided that the best thing to read next was Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer. I have resisted reading Agamben. In a question and answer period after a lecture early last year, a grad student asked the professor, who was in the English department, something about what he was reading and thinking with these days. He said something like, “I’m reading, really seriously, Agamben.” A room full of heads bobbed up and down reverentially. At that moment I decided not to read Agamben. But I keep running across him, and have now accumulated enough context that he has come to seem interesting.

The category of the political is certainly mentioned often enough in Homo Sacer, as, in connection with the idea of sovereignty, it can hardly fail to be. Agamben’s basically ontological point of view, however, means that I have very little to grasp onto when thinking about what he means by it. Certainly he is miles from Wood, who is happy to regard politics as a space of civic equality. Similarly, echoes of Rancière’s distinction between politics and police appear at certain moments, though it seems to me likely that Agamben would, in Rancière’s terms, find only police and no politics in the modern world.

Agamben presents himself as bringing together, so to speak, Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism, and Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics (it seems to me that what is happening here is really adding the latter to the former, rather than combining). Although I am not now in a position to say firmly what politics is for Agamben, it is unsurprising, given this description of his project, that analyses of power and sovereignty would occlude or explode the political as a category.

I will not say very much about this book now. I read it quickly, though with pleasure. It does seem to me that Agamben consistently ignores the meaning of half of his central formulation. Homo sacer is one who can be killed, but not sacrificed. In the ancient context, it seems that the most important part of this formula is sacrificial—homo sacer is not buried with funeral rites. In the modern period, more important is that homo sacer may be killed, but not murdered. Are we to understand that the juridical order has simply replaced the religious one in an unproblematic way? Agamben objects to the Victorian doctrine of the ambiguity of the sacred, which he says arose at just the moment when sacredness no longer made sense to Europeans (that is, when the decisively became secular—but can this claim really be accepted?), and that it consequently infected much thinking on the subject, especially Bataille. I confess that on first reading I do not quite understand how it is that this objection—which seems to me valid—hooks into the rest of the argument, and in particular what kind of sacredness is supposed to have replaced it? Is Agamben arguing that the State (and, therefore, everyone within it, inasmuch as they are understood to partake in bare life) has indeed, in the figure of the sovereign, claimed the title of sacred? This seems to me to be dismissing anthropological investigation into the idea of the sacred very quickly. Moreover, the biopolitical imperative, and its articulation into juridical orders, does not, it seems to me, ‘cover’ the sacred in the contemporary world.

These comments are inadequate. To finish, I will make again the objection that I usually make to this kind of Heideggerianism. Agamben does not seem to need very much evidence about “today” in order to construct an ontology for it different from some supposed and unitary past (under which, none the less, today’s ontology flowed “like a river” (121)). Although I can read and enjoy this kind of talk, it seems to me that in order to render it useful, not to say meaningful, it must be handled carefully.

Citizens to Lords

Ellen Meiksins Wood’s Citizens to Lords [Verso 2007], is intended in part as a demonstration of “the social history of political theory.” Although Wood does not, for the most part, concern herself explicitly with the historiographical context of her wide subject, we do find a methodological orientation in the introduction. She ranges her manner of proceeding against Straussian textualism and Skinnerean historicism. It is not unreasonable to put Straussians on the right, Skinnerians in the middle, and Wood on the left. Citizens to Lords sets itself the task of understanding the classic texts of political theory through, or along side, the dynamics and meanings of social conflicts underway when these texts were written. Wood agrees, this is to say, up to a point with Skinner’s attention to locutionary force. For her, however, Skinner and those who share his method tend to build their contexts entirely out of other texts. Wood focuses rather on social structure and conflict.

After the methodological introduction, the book is divided into three long chapters: ancient Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages. Her argument embraces many of the classic works of political theory, and is sensitive enough to contingency and multiplicity summary does not do it justice. We may, however, set out the basic social conditions that, for her, underlie the political theory of each period. Political Theory, she says, was born in the special conditions of the Greek polis, in which the disciplinary apparatus of the state was dislodged from the exclusive control of the wealthy. In most pre-modern situations, Woods argues, the wealthy classes control the means of coercion and protection, and use them to expropriate wealth from the laboring and productive classes. In Greece, for contingent reasons, the productive classes were sufficiently strong that at a certain point it was not possible for the wealthy to remain wealthy without, so to speak, a modicum of consent. The polis is thus a state in which the numerous and poor have access to a political space of equality with the wealthy. Political theory (Plato and Aristotle in particular) is an intellectual response and as attempt to control the situation on the part of the elites. The writings of Plato and Aristotle are then read very much in terms of the political problems each one faced, and the side that they were on. Neither of these thinkers is pro-democracy, but they can also not ignore its existence and power. They are conditioned by it. For Wood, then, the rhetoric of equality began, almost immediately, to be used to justify inequality. This is to saw that where the classical political philosophers (as opposed to classical political praxis) allow a realm of equality, it is strictly circumscribed.

Wood does not go into very much detail about the transition of political philosophy from Greece to Rome. Indeed, this may be the moment to point out that if her materialist method sounds radical, it at no point and in no sense questions the existence or utility of the canon of political theory. It does not even seem to be the case, at least in this book, that this different method ranks the thinkers in a new way, or forces a re-evaluation of who is in and who is out of the canon. The book-list is fixed, only some of the questions and many of the answers change.

So we make the fairly radical leap from Greece to Rome, from Aristotle to Cicero (this isn’t entirely fair—there are other Greeks). The important thing about Rome, for Wood, is the relationship of property and government—dominium and imperium. Imperial power existed in large measure to allow the growth of personal and family wealth. It enabled massive profiteering and created great disparities. Wood, however, insists on the distinction between Rome, in which the state was one way to make money, but also depended to a great deal on the support of those with money, and China, in which the state was, she says, the only secure path to wealth. The point here is that if in Greece political theory had to deal with the space of politics as a contest between the wealthy and the poor on a field of equality, in Rome the difficulty is rather to adjudicate between different forms of possession.

The title of the book suggests what the next step will be. Feudalism in Europe did not grow from the still-warm embers of Rome, it did not ride in on the backs of the Teutons. Rather, as the central imperial authority of Rome itself waned, more and more responsibility was taken up by the local wealthy people on whom the Empire had always, anyway, depended for administration. These local rulers became feudal lords, and the tangled webs of property and obligation that bound them together as individuals and corporations are indeed the very definition of feudalism. Of course, things happened differently in different places. Parcellized sovereignty (the phrase is Perry Anderson’s, but heartily endorsed by Wood), was the rule in what would be France and Italy, but in the later the Roman municipal system had remained strong, and the city-state was a primary (but everywhere internally riven) unit. In England, on the other hand, the Roman system collapsed quickly and totally—central authority, if on a feudal model, was rapidly established there and never seriously questioned. This, for Wood, is what made England special. Before anywhere else, individuals were understood to be in direct relation with a distant central authority. This opened the way for a commercial and entrepreneurial property regime not yet possible in the same way in France or even Italy (here, I think it is clear that trade and banking work according to different principles than industrial or agro-industrial activity, and are consonant with feudal property obligations in ways that the later are not).

Since I am very unfamiliar with this material, I have few substantive objections to make. Methodologically I am sympathetic with Wood, but it does seem to me that the value-judgments that she assumes may validly be made about the canon of political theory are not so easily reconciled with the mode in which she analyzes the texts. “Productive” is a word she uses often in order to say “valuable”—but this is only a displacement. Why valuable? Her level of analysis is too sophisticated, in my opinion, to accept ‘productive’ in its usual and banal academic sense. On another level, and this is no doubt something that she has dealt with elsewhere, it does make me wince a bit to hear such confident assertions about the unique value of Europe and the Greek philosophical heritage without any kind of comparative perspective. I think, ultimately, that this is related to her unwillingness to challenge the content of the canon of political theory.