Cultural studies decided - quite arbitrarily - to sever the descriptive idea of culture as "a whole way of life" from its normative dimension and focus exclusively on the former. It was already Adorno who during a lecture on Kant urged his students to take a more reflexive stand towards ideas:
I believe these fractures and contradictions to be far greater than uniformity, because in these fractures and contradictions truth manifests itself, while smoothing of contradictions, superficial synthesising, is easily achieved
As Lukacs before him, Adorno knew full well that the crests and crevices of theory are really a topography of the world. It is not carelessness of authors that causes contradictions to find their way into their thinking, contradictions are rather the necessary effect of mind grinding against the object. Every valid theory is contradictory, since the world itself is contradictory. In the double moments manifested in the idea of culture, at once descriptive and normative, the dialectics of the world shine through: the contradiction between particular class rule and the universalistic ideas it must necessarily develop to achieve hegemony.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Immanent critique
I just came across a brilliant article:
Jones, Paul. 2007. Beyond the Semantic ‘Big Bang’: Cultural Sociology and an Aesthetic Public Sphere. Cultural sociology Vol 1(1): 73–95.
The author attributes to Habermas' Structural transformation the method of immanent critique:
He wishes to immanently acknowledge the utopian prospect of an ideology (broadly, liberalism) while remaining fully aware of both its dramatic failure as an empirical account of ‘realpolitik’, and its possible success as a means of legitimation of ongoing domination. But he also wishes to acknowledge that such unfulfilled promise retains a normative potential as a court of appeal. The space so provided, the gap between ideal and reality, is the crucial point of recovery for normative discussion.
I would disagree that this description holds for Habermas at any point of his career, even when he was working at the Institute, but most certainly it does not hold for Structural transformations. The confusing nature of the work stems exactly from a deviance from immanent critique: Habermas is starting on his path of uncritical and undialectical acceptance of liberalism by stating that a public sphere actually existed in the 19. century. This claim goes against all historical evidence and contrary to popular belief Habermas was fully aware of it when writing the book. The problem was that he did not at the time have at his disposal nebulous concepts like "regulative idea" to obscure the inconsistencies of such an approach.
Enough about Habermas though, what I want to do is return to a classical text to shed some light on the logic underlying immanent critique. In the German Ideology Marx and Engels take a stand against a history, which analyses ideas abstracted from their material base:
This conception of history, which is common to all historians, particularly since the eighteenth century, will necessarily come up against the phenomenon that increasingly abstract ideas hold sway, i.e. ideas which increasingly take on the form of universality. For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class.
This is a passage that Althusser obviously missed when writing about ideology, but one that the Frankfurt school understood perfectly. Ruling ideology is, according to Marx and Engels, paradoxical: at one point it is the ideal expression of the rule of a certain social class, but at the same time it is a critique of this same rule: because the ruling class came to dominance in class struggle it was forced to make concession to other classes, represent itself as the manifestation of universal values, and thereby its ideology by its universalist tendency necessarily opposes its particularist rule.
Jones, Paul. 2007. Beyond the Semantic ‘Big Bang’: Cultural Sociology and an Aesthetic Public Sphere. Cultural sociology Vol 1(1): 73–95.
The author attributes to Habermas' Structural transformation the method of immanent critique:
He wishes to immanently acknowledge the utopian prospect of an ideology (broadly, liberalism) while remaining fully aware of both its dramatic failure as an empirical account of ‘realpolitik’, and its possible success as a means of legitimation of ongoing domination. But he also wishes to acknowledge that such unfulfilled promise retains a normative potential as a court of appeal. The space so provided, the gap between ideal and reality, is the crucial point of recovery for normative discussion.
I would disagree that this description holds for Habermas at any point of his career, even when he was working at the Institute, but most certainly it does not hold for Structural transformations. The confusing nature of the work stems exactly from a deviance from immanent critique: Habermas is starting on his path of uncritical and undialectical acceptance of liberalism by stating that a public sphere actually existed in the 19. century. This claim goes against all historical evidence and contrary to popular belief Habermas was fully aware of it when writing the book. The problem was that he did not at the time have at his disposal nebulous concepts like "regulative idea" to obscure the inconsistencies of such an approach.
Enough about Habermas though, what I want to do is return to a classical text to shed some light on the logic underlying immanent critique. In the German Ideology Marx and Engels take a stand against a history, which analyses ideas abstracted from their material base:
This conception of history, which is common to all historians, particularly since the eighteenth century, will necessarily come up against the phenomenon that increasingly abstract ideas hold sway, i.e. ideas which increasingly take on the form of universality. For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class.
This is a passage that Althusser obviously missed when writing about ideology, but one that the Frankfurt school understood perfectly. Ruling ideology is, according to Marx and Engels, paradoxical: at one point it is the ideal expression of the rule of a certain social class, but at the same time it is a critique of this same rule: because the ruling class came to dominance in class struggle it was forced to make concession to other classes, represent itself as the manifestation of universal values, and thereby its ideology by its universalist tendency necessarily opposes its particularist rule.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Goethe and reification
When Faust bargains with the devil for his soul he closes the deal with the words:
Werde ich zum Augenblicke sagen:
Verweile doch, du bist so schön!
Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen,
Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehn.
A translation of the meaning of these lines would go something like:
If I say to any given moment:
linger on, you are so beautiful!
Then you may put me in chains,
then I will gladly go to ruin.
The infernal character of these lines does not originate merely from the fact that the devil himself is the addressee, but that they are symptomatic of reification. "Happiness" Adorno teaches us "is like truth, you do not posses it, you are engulfed in it." That is why "no happy person can ever know he is happy. /.../ The only relationship that consciousness can have to happiness is gratitute." What Goethe expresses in these lines is a reified awareness of happiness, a need to objectify and manipulate time itself, when hapiness can exist only by being fleeting and fragile, despite the efforts of propaganda agents of the culture industry, psychoanalysts and advertisers. The dictate: "be happy!" does not need to be juxtaposed to the empirical reality of the adressee to be revealed as cynical, it is a lie in itself.
Werde ich zum Augenblicke sagen:
Verweile doch, du bist so schön!
Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen,
Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehn.
A translation of the meaning of these lines would go something like:
If I say to any given moment:
linger on, you are so beautiful!
Then you may put me in chains,
then I will gladly go to ruin.
The infernal character of these lines does not originate merely from the fact that the devil himself is the addressee, but that they are symptomatic of reification. "Happiness" Adorno teaches us "is like truth, you do not posses it, you are engulfed in it." That is why "no happy person can ever know he is happy. /.../ The only relationship that consciousness can have to happiness is gratitute." What Goethe expresses in these lines is a reified awareness of happiness, a need to objectify and manipulate time itself, when hapiness can exist only by being fleeting and fragile, despite the efforts of propaganda agents of the culture industry, psychoanalysts and advertisers. The dictate: "be happy!" does not need to be juxtaposed to the empirical reality of the adressee to be revealed as cynical, it is a lie in itself.
Paradigm: everything goes
While doing some reading on interactivity I stumbled upon an article that sought to shed some light on the concept by doing expert interviews. The authors live in the fantasy that definitions are contingent upon empirical findings (as if empirical findings can ever come to be without prior definitions) and take an inductive approach to defining interactivity. The results are of course completely arbitrary and I will not go into them, let the brief critique of the process itself suffice. What really got me going was an invocation used at the beginning of the article. The chant went something like "reality is socially constructed" and was preceded by the magical word "paradigm". Kuhn probably never realized the damage his theory would do, since it tends to be taken out of context and used as a talk-nonsense-free-card. The idea that reality is socially constructed is one of such brilliant examples, especially since we are supposed to accept it simply because the authors "chose" a specific paradigm. No halfway decent philosopher today clings to such a naive Humeian interpretation of the relationship between subject and object, yet somehow it is acceptable for social scientist if only they present it as a result of their arbitrary will. Marx and Engels already had a nice response to people who believed reality was socially constructed in their day. They answered with the anecdote of a person who believed people drowned merely because they clung to this damned idea of gravity and dedicated his whole life to banishing this idea from minds everywhere he found it.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
The value of speculation
In the Feuerbach chapter of the German Ideology Marx and Engels take a strong stand against the speculative character of idealism, until at one point revolutionary zeal gets the best of them and they write:
Where speculation ends – in real life – there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place.
Being so strongly influenced by the thought of Adorno, you might imagine I find this formulation hard to stomach. Adorno was without a doubt right when he saw exactly this phenomenon: a clear-cut demarcation between speculation and praxis as the essence of idealism and of capitalist ideology: "Reason," Kant instructs us, "about anything you like and as much as you like, just obey!" But we have to ask the question how close this demarcation between speculation and positive science, or between philosophy and science, as Althusser had put it, is to Marx' own intellectual work. Can the demarcation between speculation and science really be drawn so clearly as Althusser proposes with his hypothesis of the epistemic cut? I would argue that it can not, not only with Marx, but with critical science as a whole.
Let us leave Marx aside for a moment and turn to Marcuse and his notion of utopia. He rejects the notion that socialism is an utopia in the sense of something that can not be manifested:
The other group of projects, where the impossibility is due to the absence of subjective and objective factors, can at best be designated only as "provisionally" unfeasible. Karl Mannheim's criteria for the unfeasibility of such projects, for instance, are inadequate for the very simple reason, to begin with, that unfeasibility shows itself only after the fact. And it is not surprising that a project for social transformation is designated unfeasible because it has shown itself unrealized in history.
Since, as Marcuse points out, the feasibility of projects for social transformation can only be shown "after the fact", hence it is impossible to fully exorcise speculation from critical science, that is science that aims at a substantial transformation of social reality.
Now let us turn to Marx and two central concepts of his theory, that is value and class. The fact that these two concepts are speculative might quite easily elude us . In chapter one of Capital Marx builds his theory of value and he states that the value of a commodity is defined by the amount of abstract human labour involved in its production plus the value that has been transmitted from the means of production. Is this value an empirically verifiable phenomenon? No, it is not. Value is not the same as price, since price can vary according to supply and demand, while value is indifferent to them. Value is rather the long-term tendency that price revolves around, but in itself it is not an empirical concept. The same holds for his concept of social class. The distinction between class for itself and class in itself is exactly the difference between a latent, only potentially existing class, and a manifest, empirically existing class. When writing about class Marx went even further, not only must people realize this latent class, but they must also take into account developmental tendencies of capitalism. The - obviously far fetched - political demand was for the petite bourgeoisie, peasants, lumpenproletariat, etc. to identify with the proletarian struggle for a classless society since all these classes will inevitably become proletarians themselves if capitalism is allowed to continue.
Where speculation ends – in real life – there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place.
Being so strongly influenced by the thought of Adorno, you might imagine I find this formulation hard to stomach. Adorno was without a doubt right when he saw exactly this phenomenon: a clear-cut demarcation between speculation and praxis as the essence of idealism and of capitalist ideology: "Reason," Kant instructs us, "about anything you like and as much as you like, just obey!" But we have to ask the question how close this demarcation between speculation and positive science, or between philosophy and science, as Althusser had put it, is to Marx' own intellectual work. Can the demarcation between speculation and science really be drawn so clearly as Althusser proposes with his hypothesis of the epistemic cut? I would argue that it can not, not only with Marx, but with critical science as a whole.
Let us leave Marx aside for a moment and turn to Marcuse and his notion of utopia. He rejects the notion that socialism is an utopia in the sense of something that can not be manifested:
The other group of projects, where the impossibility is due to the absence of subjective and objective factors, can at best be designated only as "provisionally" unfeasible. Karl Mannheim's criteria for the unfeasibility of such projects, for instance, are inadequate for the very simple reason, to begin with, that unfeasibility shows itself only after the fact. And it is not surprising that a project for social transformation is designated unfeasible because it has shown itself unrealized in history.
Since, as Marcuse points out, the feasibility of projects for social transformation can only be shown "after the fact", hence it is impossible to fully exorcise speculation from critical science, that is science that aims at a substantial transformation of social reality.
Now let us turn to Marx and two central concepts of his theory, that is value and class. The fact that these two concepts are speculative might quite easily elude us . In chapter one of Capital Marx builds his theory of value and he states that the value of a commodity is defined by the amount of abstract human labour involved in its production plus the value that has been transmitted from the means of production. Is this value an empirically verifiable phenomenon? No, it is not. Value is not the same as price, since price can vary according to supply and demand, while value is indifferent to them. Value is rather the long-term tendency that price revolves around, but in itself it is not an empirical concept. The same holds for his concept of social class. The distinction between class for itself and class in itself is exactly the difference between a latent, only potentially existing class, and a manifest, empirically existing class. When writing about class Marx went even further, not only must people realize this latent class, but they must also take into account developmental tendencies of capitalism. The - obviously far fetched - political demand was for the petite bourgeoisie, peasants, lumpenproletariat, etc. to identify with the proletarian struggle for a classless society since all these classes will inevitably become proletarians themselves if capitalism is allowed to continue.
Sunday, January 4, 2009
The mataphysics of Adorno?
I have already written about the similarity of two philosophical directions that are usually portrayed as not only distinct but opposite: the critical theory of the Frankfurt school and Heidegger's resurrection of metaphysics. My intent is not to show that these two systems actually are one and the same, but to highlight the differences by showing how the systems follow diverging trajectories from the same starting points. In a previous post I have already quoted from Adorno's reply to Popper that sparked of the so-called positivism debate, but there is another part in Adorno's speech that is quite interesting, the part where he argues that theory can not be reduced to a set of testable hypotheses:
Facts are not the ultimate point in society, at which cognizance can find a foothold, because cognizance itself is mediated by society. Not all theorems are hypotheses; theory is the telos, not a tool of sociology.
What is interesting is the use of the word "telos", borrowed from metaphysics, and the context it was used in suggests that Adorno used it intentionally. If we first turn to the notion of telos, it is - broadly speaking - the goal that a given phenomenon is moving towards because of its own inner logic. The "self-realization of Spirit" in Hegel might be one such example, or in Aristotle the movement of matter towards form, or in Marxist eschatology the second coming of communism, the end of history as the necessary result of that very history. If we translate Adorno into Heideggerian, his argument goes something like this: by virtue of his being-in-the-world, man is called upon by being to uncover truth (truth as unconcealment is a formulation that both Heidegger and Adorno used) and put himself in the service of being. For Adorno then though must be critical not by choice, but because of its ontological position. Ironically it would seem the base of critical thought is built on the uncritical, the matter-of-fact of metaphysics. But is it really that simple?
The main difference, and it is a fundamental one, is in the way Adorno and Heidegger think about being. The very formulation Sein indicates that Heidegger - somewhat in Platonist manner - still envisioned an abstract Being beyond all concrete being. This can be seen in his idea of historicity (Geschichtlichkeit): for him things can become part of history only because they have an inherent characteristic, that is historicity. It is not the fact that they are part of history that makes them historical, quite the opposite: that they are part of history only proves that they posess the inherent characteristic of historicity that allowed them to manifest themselves in history in the first place. The obvious logical problem with a notion of being abstracted from all being, of historicity abstracted of all history, is that - as structuralism has taught us - every being of something implies a not being of something else and vice versa. Only concretely can the two - being and not being - be distinguished. A purely abstract being must therefore also be a purely abstract not being. We see that an idea of a purely abstract being is utterly useless. Heidegger grounds society and history in something beyond themselves, abstract being and an equally abstract historicity, supplies them with a base that curtails change. Adorno on the other hand sees change as the very essence of history - that is to say history as a process of change has no base outside itself. It is the dialectics of history that are its driving force. His position is as much a critique of Heideggerian metaphysics as it is a critique of Kantian epistemology, as can be seen from the following quote:
The matter, the object of social cognizance is not free of normative content [Sollensfreies], it is not merely being there [Daseiendes] - this it becomes only by the workings of abstraction. Values do not exist beyond it on a horizon of ideas.
Facts are not the ultimate point in society, at which cognizance can find a foothold, because cognizance itself is mediated by society. Not all theorems are hypotheses; theory is the telos, not a tool of sociology.
What is interesting is the use of the word "telos", borrowed from metaphysics, and the context it was used in suggests that Adorno used it intentionally. If we first turn to the notion of telos, it is - broadly speaking - the goal that a given phenomenon is moving towards because of its own inner logic. The "self-realization of Spirit" in Hegel might be one such example, or in Aristotle the movement of matter towards form, or in Marxist eschatology the second coming of communism, the end of history as the necessary result of that very history. If we translate Adorno into Heideggerian, his argument goes something like this: by virtue of his being-in-the-world, man is called upon by being to uncover truth (truth as unconcealment is a formulation that both Heidegger and Adorno used) and put himself in the service of being. For Adorno then though must be critical not by choice, but because of its ontological position. Ironically it would seem the base of critical thought is built on the uncritical, the matter-of-fact of metaphysics. But is it really that simple?
The main difference, and it is a fundamental one, is in the way Adorno and Heidegger think about being. The very formulation Sein indicates that Heidegger - somewhat in Platonist manner - still envisioned an abstract Being beyond all concrete being. This can be seen in his idea of historicity (Geschichtlichkeit): for him things can become part of history only because they have an inherent characteristic, that is historicity. It is not the fact that they are part of history that makes them historical, quite the opposite: that they are part of history only proves that they posess the inherent characteristic of historicity that allowed them to manifest themselves in history in the first place. The obvious logical problem with a notion of being abstracted from all being, of historicity abstracted of all history, is that - as structuralism has taught us - every being of something implies a not being of something else and vice versa. Only concretely can the two - being and not being - be distinguished. A purely abstract being must therefore also be a purely abstract not being. We see that an idea of a purely abstract being is utterly useless. Heidegger grounds society and history in something beyond themselves, abstract being and an equally abstract historicity, supplies them with a base that curtails change. Adorno on the other hand sees change as the very essence of history - that is to say history as a process of change has no base outside itself. It is the dialectics of history that are its driving force. His position is as much a critique of Heideggerian metaphysics as it is a critique of Kantian epistemology, as can be seen from the following quote:
The matter, the object of social cognizance is not free of normative content [Sollensfreies], it is not merely being there [Daseiendes] - this it becomes only by the workings of abstraction. Values do not exist beyond it on a horizon of ideas.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Let's think a chair, shall we?
A bizarre turn of phrase has become widespread among second-rate philosophers these days, so widespread that it is quite annoying. Where we would usually expect the formulation "think about object x", we are hit over the head with the abomination "think object x". The people writing in this manner obviously missed the introductory course to philosophy, where they would have learned about two philosophical positions on the relationship between subject and object that were held by some unenlightened spirits in the dark ages. At one end we have naive nominalism, which states that subjective concepts have no equivalents on the level of the object; Hume, while living after the end of the dark ages - but who was still pretty much untouched by the light of reason - was a proponent of this view: he held that things like causality are purely subjective phenomena and do not exist objectively. At the other end we have naive realism, which states that there can and does exist an unmediated relationship between object and subject, that the object is transparent to the subject. This is the problem that Adorno adressed when he was talking about the non-identical: about that, which can not be subsumed under the concept. Some proponents of positivism - who are, to be fair, like Hume a product of the post-dark-ages, but whom we have to thank for the contemporary "eclipse of reason", as Horkheimer put it - can be counted as members of this camp. What both camps would agree upon is that the formulation "think object x" is quite felicitous. It can be understood in two ways: when we say for example "think democracy", this might imply that democracy is a pure phantom of the mind, without any correlate in the real world. This belief lies at the heart of bourgeois morals: ideals are to be thought about, not acted upon. Another way we can understand the formulation "think democracy" is that, to put it bluntly, I take the object as it is, stick it into my brain and let it swirl around a bit in there. This is the belief at the core of the bourgeois work ethic, it is what Marx meant with the term commodity fetishism and what Lukacs meant with the term reification: the misapprehension that sees subjective phenomena - social relationships - as objective, as somehting pertaining to the commodity itself. To "think democracy" is therefore the purest manifestation of the deformations democracy has undergone in capitalist societies, it is the point at which we can see even language itself bent and twisted by the untrue society, proving the value of the marxist idea of base and superstructure.
Stance of undefeated despair
In his essay on Kafka Walter Benjamin reports about a discussion Kafka had with Max Brod. They started off talking about the end of civilization and at one moment Kafka remarked that we are just nihilistic, suicidal thoughts in the mind of god. This reminded Brod of the gnostic idea of god as an evil demiurge and the world as his sin. "No," Kafka responded, "nothing like that, we are merely the result of a bad day, a gloomy mood." From this Brod gathered: "Then there is still hope?" At which moment a broad smile illuminated Kafka's face: "As much hope as you like, endless hope ... just not for us."
In the story At the building of the Chinese wall there is a myth about a royal message sent out to a lowly subject. The story also exists independently under the title A royal message, following a pattern that was not unfamiliar to Kafka: structuring his stories like fractals. The same structure can be found in The Process, where the entire novel is condensed into the story from the introductory scriptures of the Law. A royal message starts like this:
Der Kaiser - so heißt es - hat Dir, dem Einzelnen, dem jämmerlichen Untertanen, dem winzig vor der kaiserlichen Sonne in die fernste Ferne geflüchteten Schatten, gerade Dir hat der Kaiser von seinem Sterbebett aus eine Botschaft gesendet.
The king - so it is said - had sent to you, the individual, pitiful subject, the shadow that is chased to the remotest corner by the light of the royal sun, to you of all people the king had sent a message from his dying bed.
The message must be very important because the king had it repeated to his ear, before finally nodding his approval to the messanger and sending him on his way. But there is a problem: the messenger - the fittest man in the whole of the land - can not move forward for the mass of the people. He will never be able to leave the inner palace, and even if he could by some miracuolous fate achieve this, it would be in vain, because there are steps beyond that, and then the yard, after that the outer palace, and again steps and yards. It is quite impossible that you, the lowly subject, will ever receive the royal message,
- Du aber sitzt and Deinem Fenster und erträumst sie Dir, wenn der Abend kommt.
- But yet you sit at your window and dream it into existence as the evening comes.
In both stories we can see a sense of hope in spite of hopelessness. This feeling resonates in Adorno's and Horkheimer's metaphor of the message in a bottle (that their theory is intended for some imagined future recipient, for a time when things will not be as bleak). More recently though it is what John Berger described as the Stance of undefeated despair in his report from Ramallah. The New York Times write - almost cynically - about the "densely populated Gaza Strip", completely ignoring the question whence this overpopulation comes from: it is the progressing stranglehold of the Israeli occupation that is robbing Palestinians of living space. Ironically, the same world-view is found among Jews, persecuted in Europe, and Palestinians, persecuted by Israel. Ironically, a wall is featured in both stories. Berger notes that "oddly, it doesn’t look final, only insurmountable," and continues:
When it’s finished, it will be the 640-km-long expressionless face of an inequality. At the moment it’s 210 km long. The inequality is between those who have the full arsenal of the latest military technology to defend what they believe to be their interest (Apache helicopters, Merkava tanks, F16’s) and those who have nothing, save their names and a shared belief that justice is axiomatic. The stance of undefeated despair works like this.
In the story At the building of the Chinese wall there is a myth about a royal message sent out to a lowly subject. The story also exists independently under the title A royal message, following a pattern that was not unfamiliar to Kafka: structuring his stories like fractals. The same structure can be found in The Process, where the entire novel is condensed into the story from the introductory scriptures of the Law. A royal message starts like this:
Der Kaiser - so heißt es - hat Dir, dem Einzelnen, dem jämmerlichen Untertanen, dem winzig vor der kaiserlichen Sonne in die fernste Ferne geflüchteten Schatten, gerade Dir hat der Kaiser von seinem Sterbebett aus eine Botschaft gesendet.
The king - so it is said - had sent to you, the individual, pitiful subject, the shadow that is chased to the remotest corner by the light of the royal sun, to you of all people the king had sent a message from his dying bed.
The message must be very important because the king had it repeated to his ear, before finally nodding his approval to the messanger and sending him on his way. But there is a problem: the messenger - the fittest man in the whole of the land - can not move forward for the mass of the people. He will never be able to leave the inner palace, and even if he could by some miracuolous fate achieve this, it would be in vain, because there are steps beyond that, and then the yard, after that the outer palace, and again steps and yards. It is quite impossible that you, the lowly subject, will ever receive the royal message,
- Du aber sitzt and Deinem Fenster und erträumst sie Dir, wenn der Abend kommt.
- But yet you sit at your window and dream it into existence as the evening comes.
In both stories we can see a sense of hope in spite of hopelessness. This feeling resonates in Adorno's and Horkheimer's metaphor of the message in a bottle (that their theory is intended for some imagined future recipient, for a time when things will not be as bleak). More recently though it is what John Berger described as the Stance of undefeated despair in his report from Ramallah. The New York Times write - almost cynically - about the "densely populated Gaza Strip", completely ignoring the question whence this overpopulation comes from: it is the progressing stranglehold of the Israeli occupation that is robbing Palestinians of living space. Ironically, the same world-view is found among Jews, persecuted in Europe, and Palestinians, persecuted by Israel. Ironically, a wall is featured in both stories. Berger notes that "oddly, it doesn’t look final, only insurmountable," and continues:
When it’s finished, it will be the 640-km-long expressionless face of an inequality. At the moment it’s 210 km long. The inequality is between those who have the full arsenal of the latest military technology to defend what they believe to be their interest (Apache helicopters, Merkava tanks, F16’s) and those who have nothing, save their names and a shared belief that justice is axiomatic. The stance of undefeated despair works like this.
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