objectivity

The claim that objectivity is defined by the absence of subjectivity remains firmly in the framework of idealist subjectivism. The subject remains the measure against which the object is judged, the latter being thought of merely negatively (as the absence of the subject).

How come everything reminds me of you

Yesterday I watched The Grönholm method (the play, not the movie). In a nutshell the play is about a job interview where the interviewee is the subject of an experiment which tries to assess whether he possesses the appropriate psychological traits. He reacts completely ruthlessly in every situation, which impresses two of the interviewers, but the third is not convinced and in the end she proves her point. The interviewee is rejected with the words: "we are not looking for a good person who appears to be a complete bastard, but a complete bastard who appears to be a good person."

To this a quote from Adorno, again from Minima Moralia, 36 - Die Gesundheit zum Tode:

For the individual to appear physically and psychically fit, it must perform libidinous tasks that can be executed only by deepest mutilation, an internalisation of castration in the extroverts in comparison to which the old task of identification with the father appears as the child's play in which it was practised. The regular guy and popular girl must suppress not only their desire and knowledge but also all symptoms that arose from this suppression in bourgeois times. /.../ No research can reach to the depths of the hell in which the deformations that will later see the light of day as cheerfulness, openness, sociability, as successful adaptation to the inevitable and as an unthinkingly practical sense, are formed. /.../ The absence of nervousness and calmness, already a condition for the acquisition of highly paid positions, are the image of the suffocated silence, which the superiors of human resource chiefs commit politically only later on. /.../ At the core of the dominant healthiness lies death.

Finally somebody who understands

On Paul Krugman's blog I came across this very nice quote from John Maynard Keynes:

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.

Marxism my ass!

Another post on post. "Postmarxism" this time. To be more precise, Laclau and Mouffe's insolent claim that Postmarxism needs to offer no apologies, when in fact it is a trojan horse packed with metaphysics, sent to burn the Marxist heritage to the ground. The affirmative character of "Postmarxism" can be clearly seen in four ideas:
1. fragmentation of discourse as an emancipatory movement;
2. conceptualization of the historical character of ideas;
3. discursive character of all social reality;
4. conceptualization of interest;

1. Universality or fragmentation of discourses - truth or dare

The idea that fragmentation of discourses (or "metanaratives" as postmodernists would have it) is emancipatory is naive. It is a move forward from Aristotelian metaphysics that were so dear to medieval scholastics, but it is a movement which stops at the point of Hegelian metaphysics. What is the difference between the two? While scholastic metaphysics hypostizes a certain state, Hegelian metaphysics hypostizes a process (the movement of spirit), what they have in common is their ultimately affirmative character. The intellectual move merely corresponds to the shift from a traditional society to a capitalist one, the latter making perpetual change its driving principle. If Aristotelian metaphysics is the ideological apology of a traditional society, Hegelian metaphysics affirms the capitalist one. Fragmentation of discourses is something that Lukacs predicted quite correctly in History and class consciousness, the chapter titled Antinomies of bourgeois thought:

On the one hand, it [bourgeoisie] acquires increasing control over the details of its social existence, subjecting them to its needs. On the other hand, it loses – likewise progressively – the possibility of gaining intellectual control of society as a whole and with that it loses its own qualifications for leadership.

2. Nailing ideas to history

The historization of ideas is one of the most important epistemological achievements of Marxism (the first chapter of Bürgers Theory of the avant garde gives a splendid account), but "Postmarxism" does not grasp historization in the Marxist sense: instead of the inextricable embeddedness of ideas in social praxis it proclaims the arbitrary character of ideas. For Marx putting ideas into historical context meant quite the opposite: showing how certain ideas are necessarily linked to praxis (those who believe Marx conceptualized a naive determinism of base and superstructure should attempt a careful scrutiny of the first chapter of German ideology and the foreword to A contribution to the critique of Hegel's philosophy of right - Marx referred to the latter with his base/superstructure metaphor). In his critique of Hegel Marx found truth in the religious lie that a better world is waiting above the clouds: "religion is a perverted image of the world, because it is a perverted world." Religion is a lie, but the truth of it is in the functional connection with social praxis.

3. Talk is cheap

While the following quote might as well be taken from one of the most naive parts of Aristotle's Metaphysics, it is actually presented to us in the context of "postmarxism":

Thus, form is, at the same time, both the organizing principle of the mind and the ultimate reality of an object.

No need to stress the reactionary character of this statement. Marxism rebelled against the speculative philosophy of German idealism that proclaimed that the ultimate reality of objects is form, Marx demanded that an analytical distinction is to be made between meaningful social formations (which he called the superstructure) and those that were not form (which he called the base). Adorno put it most bluntly in Minima Moralia, 36 - Die Gesundheit zum Tode:

Were a psychoanalysis of contemporary culture possible; would not the absolute hegemony of economy ridicule every attempt to explain circumstances with a recourse to the minds of their victims and had psychoanalysts not sworn loyalty to them long ago -

Perhaps some basic biology might help us to clarify matters a bit. In Tree of knowledge Maturana and Varela proposed a cognitive theory based on the idea of autopoiesis. According to them no system has direct access to its environment, so all distinction between system and environment is made by the system itself (the "paradox" of re-entry as it was later named by hermeneutics). But this does not mean that the environment as such does not influence the system without the system being aware of it. Laclau and Mouffe fail to distinguish three things: nondiscursive reality (for example the laws of historical development as conceptualized by Marx, or all natural laws), nondiscursive reality being the object of discourse (Marx thinking about the laws of history or natural scientists doing research) and discourse itself becoming the object of discourse (this post for example).

By reductio ad absurdum it can be shown that Laclau and Mouffe de facto negate the existence of social structure (meaning can manifest nowhere else but in the minds of individuals), but at the same time they lose agency, when they say that this non-existent structure is the only thing determining the subject:

For that same reason it is the discourse which constitutes the subject position of the social agent, and not, therefore, the social agent which is the origin of discourse.

It is self-evident that for any social theory that operates with both a notion of agency and of structure, both most be true: that at the same time the structure influences agency and vice versa. Everything else is the most naive reductionism. C. W. Mills made us aware of this problem when he was writing on the sociological imagination.

4. Now, this is interesting

Let us again start with a quote:

"Interests" then are a social product and do not exist independently of the consciousness of the agents that are their bearers.

While this is surely a statement of fact it does not render it any less problematic. When Adorno responded to Popper in the debate that sparked of the so called positivism debate (a little insolently named so by Adorno, Popper namely rejected the term positivist and thought of himself as a criticist) he noted that:

Only to those that can imagine society as different from the existing does it pose, to use Popper's term, a problem; only through what it is not will it unveil itself as what it is, and that should be the object of a sociology that is not content - as the majority of its projects is - with fulfilling goals of public and private administration.

Merely affirming existing interests is limiting oneself to administration of the existing. The point Marx was trying to make is that there is such a thing as an objective interest, namely the interest the proletariat would form if it would - ceteris paribus - know the laws of historical development. Since that is not the case the goal of philosophy must be to unveil these laws and enable the proletariat to achieve this objective interest. The thing that is dialectical in Marxism is taking the contradicitons of social reality to construct a notion of a better society.

Laclau and Mouffe ignore the very simple fact that - as Bourdieu showed quite convincingly - the ones that are most disadvantaged are also the least able to understand the factors that put them in such a position due to a lack of cultural capital, therefore unable to come to an informed interest. At the end of the day "interest" is a thoroughly bourgeois concept.

At the end of the day?

Already in 1944 Horkheimer and Adorno predicted this farcical parade in the colours of Marxism: "the weak work has always clung to similarity with others, the surrogate of identity."

Genealogy of a crisis

The crisis had numerous causes, amongst others irrationally high consumer debt and regulation that relied on liberal ideology instead of sane policies, which permitted malfeasance by banks and investors. When the bubble burst a collapse of the banking system caused a severe economic depression lasting for a decade, after which the economy limped on until a world war finally helped it to its feet. No, this is not a science fiction future, just history. But - as the metaphysical Hegel noted - history has a tendency to repeat itself, and - as the materialist Marx added - first as tragedy, then as farce. I can not help myself to find all economical deliberations somewhat farcical, especially their compulsive immersion in means, ends not being seen anywhere on the horizon. When you have a crashed car that was going way too fast into a tight corner on a wet road with a drunk driver behind the wheel, you can certainly find a group of economists arguing whether he should have braked or accelerated, pulled the wheel to this or that side, but the obvious "don't drink and drive" is nothing short of unimaginable. Milton Friedman's analysis of the great depression is just such a virtuoso account of the minutiae of a financial crash - the question why a gang of lunatic investors was let loose to wreak havoc is not asked, and can not be lest the economy should be seen as a political problem in need of regulation (god forbid!). Knowing nothing of economics it is surely pure naivete that makes me believe the Marxist idea that a basic mismatch of consumption and production, the need to artificially create consumption (even by giving consumers loans they will never be able to repay) to match the needs of production is what causes the periodic crises of capitalism. That actually the functioning of Say's law is the problem. Even more naive probably is the idea that regulation of markets (risky loans to consumers and trickstery in financial markets) might be a way to prevent such breakdowns.

Where the hell did this damned subject person go

If the subject is made of language the fish must surely be made of water.

Žižek calls for Gelassenheit

In the latest issue of Mladina Slavoj Žižek comments on the economic crisis. He concludes with a paraphrase from Kant's Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?: "Obey, BUT THINK!" He believes that while we are necessarily being exploited in the current society, we should reflect on what sort of society it is that makes this exploitation possible, and not rush heads over heels to arms. There are two significant changes from Kant's original. First of all Kant did not write "think" but "reason", which is not quite as passive as mere thinking, it is at least collective and as such has a certain potential for political mobilization, since it establishes social networks that can be mobilized for protest. Secondly, Kant's hierarchy was reversed, he did not write "Obey, but think", he wrote: "reason as much as you like and on any subject matter; but obey!" Kant did not want to sacrifice obedience to reasoning, Žižek does not want to sacrifice reasoning to obedience. For Kant reasoning is absolute but needs to be put into bounds so as to not interfere with obedience. For Žižek obedience is absolute and needs to be curtailed only as not to interfere with thinking.

Even though Kant seems progressive in comparison to Žižek, let us not be fooled; it is in Nürnberg of November 1945 that Kant's maxim found fertile soil and proved that his moral theory protects us from minor transgressions only at the price of enabling the most hideous atrocities. It was already Hegel who noted in § 318 of his Rechtsphilosophie that the person who was allowed to voice his opinion can be made to endure much worse than the one who was forced to be silent. This is what media theoreticians meant when they wrote about the narcotic dysfunction of mass media and what Hegel mocked as the stance of the beautiful spirit. Sometimes silence is not enough, sometimes obedience is a sin; this is the sometimes when the stuff of nightmares condenses into a point in history - be it Bosnia, Germany, Rwanda, Sudan, Russia or any other of the by now countless places of horror - which is exactly the blind spot of Kant's (and Žižek's) moral theory. It was Kafka who understood the problem of this blind spot better than anybody (save Brecht perhaps). Žižek could just as well be quoting the priest in Kafka's Process:

"No", said the priest, "we must not believe everything is true, merely that it is necessary. "Gloomy opinion", said K. "lie becomes the world order."

His passive affirmation of the status quo is the same that disgusted me in Luhmann. It is the burst of impotent cynical laughter which follows the realization that we are all doomed, the bad laughter that makes surrender bearable. It reminds me of the joke about the Montenegrin on a sinking ship who replies to the Japanese screaming "what shall we do?" with: "can't you Japanese stop thinking about work for one fucking second!" It is similar to the stance Adorno described in Minima Moralia, 106 - Die Blümlein alle:

The sentence, presumably by Jean Paul, that memories are the only property [sic.] which nobody can take away from us, is a piece in the repertoire of impotent sentimental consolation, which presents the resigned retreat of the subject to inwardness as the gratification it is renouncing. By organizing an archive of itself the subject seizes its own experience as property and thereby externalizes it.

Thinking, quite contrary to what Žižek believes, is doomed the moment it is objectified, sundered from action. We can not obey an unfree world and yet maintain free thinking. If we try, thinking is perverted into its opposite, a mere alibi for the violence of the world: the beautiful spirit hovering above the filth of the damned and the blood of the innocent. Thinking can not, if I paraphrase Adorno, endure as a peaceful enclave, it can exist only by actively resisting the world. Žižek regresses to the position of Feuerbach that Marx criticised in the Theses:

Hence, in The Essence of Christianity, he [Feuerbach] regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical manifestation. Hence he does not grasp the significance of “revolutionary”, of “practical-critical”, activity.

The distinction between reasoning and obedience is ideological. Thinking is the first and but the first insubordination against a wrong society. The call to obedience does not spare thinking.

What in the name of Marx is a blog?

when we are thinking about new media we must avoid the pitfall of what in marketing has become known as technological myopia. New media phenomena do not only change the existing media landscape, but are also expanding it, collonizing spheres of life that previousl were not mediated. Blogs must be understood in both aspects: at once they are transforming existing conventions of journalism, but at once they are drawing activities that previously were not mediated into the internet: processes like discussion, opinion leadership and so on (the fact that most blogs rely on reporting second hand information and opinions invites the application of the theory of two-step flow of communication). Perhaps we should look at media in an abstract sense, as that which is in between and thereby connects. What blogs are bringing in contact are conventions of traditional journalism on one hand and processes of interpersonal communication on the other. It is this interaction that would be most interesting for research. Claiming that blogs democratize communication misses the point, because blogs only mediated a sphere of communication that used to not be mediated.