Thanatos

In his lectures on Kant's Critique of pure reason Adorno urged his students not to brush contradictions in theoretical constructions aside too easily. Understanding them, understanding why they are necessary and not always caused by superficiality of the author, leads us to understanding the object the author is struggling with.

I believe those fractures and contradictions are far more magnificent than uniformity. The life of truth itself is expressed in those fractures and contradictions. It is quite easy to brush aside contradictions and engage in superficial synthesising.

Every serious theory is contradictory, and the contradictions reveal a grinding of mind against matter. Only the banal can be free from contradiction. Contradictions are especially noteworthy because all theoretical work strives to be free of them. When the fabric of theory is thin, when the strands can not be woven together, we are moving towards the limits of that theory, and the life of the object shines through the gaps. Grasping the inability of a theory to capture its object is the first step to dialectically transcending it.

Let us look into a concept I have already mentioned, Freud's death drive, what he poetically called Thanatos (being poetical is a frequent method by theorists to divert attention from contradictions, as I should know full well) or sometimes nirvana drive. He believed the human psyche has a tendency towards eliminating all stimuli, which is manifested in its most extreme form as a desire for death. It is easy to show that his reasoning is flawed: as experiments have shown the body finds the absence of all stimuli unbearable, within a short while of such deprivation experimental subjects would start hallucinating, that is producing the craved for stimuli themselves, few could bear this state for even an hour. Furthermore the theory Freud developed prior to his conceptualization of a death drive is able to explain self-destructive tendencies: when libido is turned towards an object (what we call love), the desire for self-preservation is significantly reduced. He already applied this line of reasoning to socially desirable behaviour - it happens when the ideal self becomes the object of previously narcissistic libido - and mass psychology - the leader of the mass takes the place of the ideal self. What is most likely to have caused this shift in Freud's thinking is the monstrosity of world war 1 (one might wonder how he might have reacted had he seen the horrors of world war 1 pale in comparison to the horrors of its sequel), which he thought can not be explained sufficiently by his previous theory.

His instinct was right on: the whole of his previous theoretical work, while it might have been able to explain the particular psychical deformations involved in mass slaughter, was unable to account for the extent of destructive energies let loose upon the world. At once he was dead wrong: the explanatory incapacity of his theoretical construction had nothing to do with shortcomings in understanding purely psychical phenomena. What he failed to take into account was that social reality can not be reduced to individuals and that social processes are qualitatively distinct from and not to be explained via psychical processes. Rising nationalism, which found fertile soil among the petite-bourgeoisie fearing to tumble to the position of proletarians - that is to say was a consequence of the social distribution of frustration - the failure of socialist leaders to substitute class for nation as a mode of collective identification, imperialism of the grand bourgeoisie, which is a systematic trait of capitalism (human desire is but a component in the whole machinery of capitalism, pertaining to the use value of commodities), the industrialisation of warfare (quite a fine example of the consequences of competition) are but a few instances that show how a purely psychological explanation can provide us with merely a few pieces of the puzzle that is global imperialist war. The metaphysical patch - Thanatos - does but point us in the direction of this initial shortcoming of Freud's theoretical work

Theses against systems theory

1.
Systems theory is based on an analogy, it is essentially speculative, not empirical. The image of a system is not a concept of social processes, but a metaphor for them. The traits that are ascribed to society via the use of this concept fail to describe living societies.

2.
Systems theory implicitly treats social processes as if they were static arrangements of elements. It aims to explain why social systems do not change. In fact social systems change constantly. To overcome this irreducible difference, systems theory abstracts. The abstraction we are left with it in the end is at once robust - formulating general functions that can not be argued against - and fragile - being applicable to all societies, it is hardly applicable to any of them.

3.
Systems theory does not have a concept to describe communication. It is the theory of computer circuits, not of living society. Communication in society is inherently polysemic, the meaning of every utterance is dependant upon the social context it is used in. When Luhmann talks about "communication" he belabours the word with a meaning that is completely foreign to it. What he actually talks about is merely signal.

4.
What systems theory tells us is that there are certain societies that have managed to survive, because they were able to fulfil certain basic functions. In doing this it sets base survival as the highest goal of human striving. Its basic tendency becomes obvious: "No, you must not believe everything to be true, merely necessary."

5.
It is not particular functions that ought to be questioned, it is the totality of systems theory. As a good dialectic once put it: "The whole is untrue."

Disciplining the consumer

The pertinent question of what is an artwork has become impossible to answer. If the institution of art could incorporate Duchamp's fountain and other ready-mades, we are left wondering where the artwork can be found if it obviously is not identical to the object displayed. I would loosely follow Kant's line of reasoning and claim that art is a mode of perception, a use of the senses that is not immediately instrumental. If we look at an object for immediately practical reasons (if we would see the Fountain in its original context and our only interest would be to piss in it), we are not contemplating it aesthetically, yet when we use our senses for their own sake (contemplating the form of the Fountain and applying criteria of beauty), we have moved to the realm of aesthetic contemplation. The importance of the Fountain is that it is not aesthetic, it rather reflects on the disciplining function of the institution, which would have us find beauty in a completely banal object.

At this point you will probably object that my conceptualizations is almost all-encompassing. Every existing object can become the object of aesthetic contemplation, therefore it would seem that I have made no place for artistic creation. Art is something that spontaneously springs up everywhere. This is where the institution art comes into play. I understand the institution to encompass didactic forms (the most obvious example would be academies, but it encompasses all forms of transmission of artistic skill), critical forms (modes of valuation, most obviously art criticism) and forms of presentation and reception (like galleries, concerts, theatre performances etc.). Following my initial conceptualization of aesthetics, one of the main functions of the institution art is to discipline the audience, that is train them to contemplate certain objects, created by artists and presented in special institutions, aesthetically. This has enabled artistic creation to achieve a much higher degree of sophistication than it could in the raw form. Surely more aesthetic delight can be derived from viewing Rubens' painting Daniel in the lion's den than from naively - that is with a view that has not been trained for aesthetic contemplation - viewing any natural object.

From this follows the hypocritical nature of the apology of the culture industry: that it is giving consumers what they apparently want, since they are buying the stuff. The culture industry as a specific form of institutionalisation of art also disciplines its consumers. It does not cater to pre-existing tastes, but can not exist if it is not proactive in forming them. Resistance to the culture industry is not to be found in individualised forms of "reading" that can - so cultural studies teach us - be "oppositional". Resistance can only be organised as a social infrastructure of resistance, as an aesthetic public sphere that enables individuals to collectively critically assess the products of the culture industry.

Language and nationalism

A poem by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Amira El-zein:

A Rhyme for the Odes (Mu'allaquat)

No one guided me to myself. I am the guide.
Between desert and sea, I am my own guide to myself.
Born of language on the road to India between two small tribes,
adorned by the moonlight of ancient faiths and an impossible peace,
compelled to guard the periphery of a Persia neighbourhood
and the great obsession of the Byzantines,
so that the heaviness of time lightens over Arab's tent.
Who am I? This is a question that others ask, but has no answer.
I am my language, I am an ode, two odes, ten. This is my language.
I am my language. I am word's writ: Be! Be my body!
And I become an embodiment of their timbre.
I am what I have spoken to the words: Be the place where
my body joins the eternity of the desert.
Be, so that I may become my words.
No land on earth bears me. Only my words bear me,
a bird born from me who builds a nest in my ruins
before me, and in the rubble of the enchanting world around me.
I stood on a wind, and my long night was without end.
This is my language, a necklace of stars around the necks
of my loved ones. They emigrated.
They carried the place and emigrated, they carried time and emigrated.
They lifted their fragrances from their bowls.
They took their bleak pastures and emigrated.
They took the words. The ravaged heart left with them.
Will the echo, this echo, this white, sonorous mirage
hold a name whose hoarseness fills the unknown
and whom departure fills with divinity?
The sky opened a window for me. I looked and found nothing
save myself outside itself, as it has always been,
and my desert-haunted visions.
My steps are wind and sand, my world is my body
and what I can hold onto.
I am the traveller and also the road.
Gods appear to me and disappear.
We don't linger upon what is to come.
There is no tomorrow in this desert, save what we saw yesterday,
so let me brandish my ode to break the cycle of time,
and let there be beautiful days!
How much past tomorrow holds!
I left myself to itself, a self filled with with the present.
Departure emptied me of temples.
Heaven has its own nations and wars.
I have a gazelle for a wife,
and palm trees for odes in a book of sand.
What I see is the past.
For mankind, a kingdom of dust and a crown.
Let my language overcome my hostile fate, my line of descendants.
Let it overcome me, my father, and a vanishing that won't vanish.
This is my language, my miracle, my magic wand.
This is my obelisk and the gardens of my Babylon,
my first infidelity, my polished metal, the desert idol of an Arab
who worships what flows from rhymes like stars in his aba,
and who worships his own words.

So let there be prose.
There must be a divine prose for the Prophet to triumph.


If there ever was a poet who embodied Heidegger's desire of Being manifesting in language, it is surely Darwish. Similarly there are few poets that are so closely bound to the fate of their people as Darwish is. He condenses (coincidentally the German word for poetry is Dichtung, meaning condensation) the history of Palestine in his words. The readers of my blog will be familiar with my critique of the way Heidegger reifies the concept and will anticipate the materialist twist I will give to the interpretation of Darwish's poetry. Its first premise is that the desire for direct materiality of language is a historical factor (not like with Heidegger a timeless given), understandable with recourse to, if not reducible to, historical circumstances of its genesis. This does not mean poetry, and especially great poetry like Darwish's, can be reduced to its socio-historical circumstances, it does mean that validity can not be established independent from genesis. After all the desire for materiality of language can just as well take the form of Heidegger's abominable poetical dabbling. The task in which art is far from exhausted is to connect it to structures of feeling (to use Raymond William's term) or lived ideology (to refer Voloshinov's analogous concept) and trace these to material circumstances of the community it springs from and in which it is received, to the process of production and reproduction of life of real historical individuals.

Some nations were faced with the challenge of constructing a national language which had practical (enabling intercourse among individuals, bound together by their nationality) and ideological (creating a bond between these individuals) functions. There are other examples (like Germany) where the creation of a common culture preceded the political nation state and was the basis (Eric Hobsbawm referred to this function as proto-nationalism) on which the nation state was built - hence the stress Schiller put on the didactic function of theatre. In these instances culture enabled the material existence of a community, in a sense language itself was material. It is understandable then that Palestinians, especially after having their political (in the offensive of '82) and civic (in the most recent extensive offensive) infrastructure reduced to rubble by Israel, would feel the desire for materiality of culture.

History of the public sphere - elucidation I

In 1848 Marx and Engels stressed in the Communist manifesto that universal suffrage was an important step in the proletariat's political struggle. Engels goes so far to equate it with democracy in his 1895 foreword to Marx' Class struggles in France 1848 to 1850: "Already the Communist manifesto had proclaimed universal suffrage, democracy, as one of the first and most important tasks of the struggling proletariat." Universal suffrage, Engels claims, formerly a demagogic tool in the hands of the likes of Napoleon III and Bismarck, had been turned into a tool of emancipation by the working class: "With this successful use of universal suffrage the proletariat discovered a whole new way of fighting." He goes on to claim that: "The old style of rebellion, fighting in the streets with barricades, which was decisive until 1848, is outdated." The October and November revolutions proved Engels' claim wrong, but we should remember that theory is not a weather forecast and is not to be judged with the same criteria. What Engels noticed is that a qualitative change in class struggle had taken place: it was no longer just strategic, it became political. This qualitative leap with universal suffrage and the consolidation of worker's parties marks the beginning of communicative exchange between two spheres of opinion and will formation that were previously pretty much isolated: a move towards the class struggle model of the public sphere.

Attitude

Research in the social science tradition relies heavily on the concept of attitude. We are taught that it is an internal disposition composed of a cognitive (knowledge about an object), emotive (subjective valuation of the object) and dynamic (willingness to act in relation to the object) component - or to put it dialectically: moment. It is most frequently (that is almost exclusively) measured by relying on introspection. Technically this means administering a questionnaire.

Let us look at an earlier psychological tradition that puts this method in question: behaviourism. This questioning is pertinent since attitudes, meant to explain behaviour, are notoriously useless in doing just that: predicting behaviour. George Herbert Mead had a different understanding of attitudes (if it had not degenerated to the sorry state of psychophysics, behaviourism might have been the missing link freeing psychology from solipsism). He understood them as an inclination towards a specific response towards a specific stimulus in specific circumstances. The third element of his definition - circumstances - explains the failure of explaining behaviour via attitudes. An item in a likert scale is a stimulus that elicits a certain verbal response in the situation of anonymously filling out a questionnaire. Generalising this response to other verbal responses in anonymous situations is valid (that is why opinion polling is so effective in predicting outcomes of elections), generalising it to incommensurable situations that involve different responses is the proton pseudos of attitude research.

La langue

There is another solipsism I forgot to mention in the last post. This is the structuralist notion of language as a system of autoidentical forms. A brilliant critique is to be found in Voloshinov's Marxism and the philosophy of language. It is turned against what he calls abstract objectivism, a view that is formulated most systematically in Saussure's Course in general linguistics. Voloshinov ask from which perspective language can be seen as a rigid system. Viewed from the outside it is a constant flow, language is not static, but dynamic in its nature. Therefore Saussure errs when he believes we can extrapolate objective fixed laws from a cross-section of actually spoken language. Viewed from the inside, from the perspective of one using language, the situation, the social circumstances of a specific speech act are determining. Of course this does not mean that we can not abstract from living language certain universal - and universal does not mean static! - autoidentical forms. It means that these forms are exactly that: abstractions from the process of living language.

In an earlier post I formulated an analogous critique of a Laclau's application of structuralism. I wrote:

To top it of Saussure's "la langue" is an abstraction, a system of language that the linguist constructs, not an empirically existing system. It is already a concept, abstracted from the origins of language in mimesis.

After reading Voloshinov I realised that my critique generally went in the right direction - intuition should not be underestimated in scientific work - but was short-sighted. It is not the historical origin in mimesis (a view I am inclined to reject at this point, it was a simplification based on tendentiously selected evidence, following from the lack of an adequate conceptual apparatus), but - worse - the whole process of living language that "la langue" abstracts from. I would nonetheless still agree with the conclusion I drew from a flawed premise:

If there is an inherent impossibility of signifying to fully constitute itself, it is an impossibility the linguist, not the speaker faces.

Let me formulate my critique of Laclau in clearer terms. Since living language is constantly in flux, it does not need "closure" - remember that Laclau believes that for a system to constitute itself, it must be able to signify its borders i.e. achieve closure - nor is any sort of "closure" possible. Meaning is almost endlessly flexible since it manifests itself in myriad social interactions, is exchanged among varied social groups and (sometimes adverse) social classes. Voloshinov presents the illuminating example of rudimentary languages that knew only a single word, the meaning of which was determined exclusively by the context it was used in. "Polysemy," Voloshinov argues "is a constitutive trait of a word." It is impossible to achieve closure of the system of language (la langue) because the structuralist concept of language is a flawed concept, neglecting the constitutive trait of living language: change. Laclau projects this logical fallacy, the proton pseudos of structuralism, into living language itself. He comes up with the ridiculous claim of "empty" and "floating" signifiers. There is no such thing as an empty signifier in living language, precisely because it is not a system of autoidentical forms that would need "closure". The concept of "floating" signifiers is as useless as it is correct: there is not a single sign that is not constantly in flow, not just from a diachronic perspective, but also from a synchronic one (meaning changes according to different coincidental uses in different social contexts). A signifier that is not floating is none at all: it is not part of language, it is merely a signal.

Solipsism

That thinking can not be separated from praxis is demonstrated by a logical fallacy thinkers often fall prey to. It is a form of solipsism in which the act of thinking is confused for the object of thought. Kant warned us a bout this logical fallacy in his Critique of pure reason, where he writes that we necessarily commit it when thinking about absolutes (god, soul, immortality) - the mind is running on empty, coming to know nothing but itself, but then the result of this process is presented as something objectively existing.

I will arbitrarily select four instances of this fallacy and look into them. The first is Hegel's absolute spirit. The movement of his dialectics starts with the absolute - that is with the abstraction which denies its own genesis as abstraction from the particular, thereby becoming absolute nothingness - and returns via the particular back to absolute nothingness: "You are dust and you return to dust." That is why Marx had to turn Hegel on his head so that things might once again catch a foothold: the movement of Kapital starts with the particular (use value and value of the commodity, the façade capital presents vis a vis individuals) to move from there to the essence of capitalistic production (the extraction of surplus value) and then return to the commodity in the third volume of Kapital. While Hegel's dialectics is solipsistic, Marx' is hermeneutic - the movement between particular and universal does not return to its origin, it moves concentrically towards the truth.

The second is Heidegger's concept of being. Heidegger quite explicitly stated that he wanted to commit the aforementioned fallacy: he believed being is unveiled in language. What is being? As with Hegel's spirit it is the highest degree of abstraction from anything particular, or to put it another way: it is at once the purest concept, and at the same time it is none at all. It is the ultimate concept since it is an ultimate abstraction. It is not a concept, because it does not signify anything: it does not signify any object (it is abstracted from all particular objects), nor does it signify any subjective phenomenon (it is hypostatized as something objective)

The third is Freud's infamous libido. Freud's fallacy is somewhat different since it does not take the process of abstraction to the absolute limit of nothingness but stops half way. Nonetheless one can immediately see the fault in his theory: the concept of libido is an abstraction from all positive desires, but is given metaphysical life of its own. Freud treats libido as an actually existing object. Since he is lacking sociological concepts (and most of the classic works in sociology had already been written when he was developing his theory), he has to conjure speculative metaphysical concepts - libido, eros, thanatos - to patch up the holes in his theory. They become spectres, unable to recall their carnal history, that is their social origin.

The fourth example is rather special, since it does not involve the singular subject but the body politic. Theories of natural law succumb to an analogous type of circular reasoning. The social contract, by which men entered the political state, they tell us, was agreed upon by atomized individuals acting in their own interest. Atomized individuals are an abstraction, or rather an institutionalised fiction of the political state, which is then projected into an antecedent state of affairs, meant to justify themselves by and through themselves. Abstract individuals are what the state and market create, they are products, not the soil from which state and capitalism grow. Bentham was sceptical of the speculative natural state and avoided circular reasoning by introducing the idea of utility, yet he forgot to ask himself: whose benefit?

History of the public sphere

In his earliest book on the subject, the Structural transformations, Habermas claimed that in the late 18. and early 19. century an infrastructure existed that enabled reasonable exchange of opinions between citizens, leading to the formation of public opinion that held political authorities accountable. Infrastructure needs to be understood in both the literal (coffee houses and salons, in which debates took place, and the press, which enabled the circulation of information) and metaphorical sense (norms regulating the exchange of ideas, demanding truthfulness, reasonableness, respectfulness etc. and skills needed to engage in deliberation). What happened during the course of the 19. century according to H., was that a "bureaucracy of society", that is political parties and interest groups, formed between the publics of civil society and the state and gradually excluded the publics from decision making. Therefore his position at the time was that creating internal publicity inside the "bureaucracy of society" was crucial for the resurrection of the public sphere. This formulation of the problem is illuminating, yet H. only sketched it at this point and did not pursue it further, his later works dealing with the role of deliberation for democracy, most notably Theory of communicative action and Between facts and norms, go in a different direction.

The initial formulation of the problem is even more interesting if we combine it with critiques of the historical accuracy of Structural transformations. The most pertinent of these is that H. ignores the exclusion of the working class and women, which would according to the immanent criteria of the public sphere (being "public" in the sense of universal access is one of its indispensable demands) mean that a public sphere did not exist at the time H. claims it did. The historical evidence against H.'s claim is overwhelming, but we must ask ourselves what this means for the idea of the public sphere. More precisely the question is whether, since H. extrapolated the idea from flawed historical circumstances, the idea itself is marred with the same flaw. I would argue that it is not. Part of the argument for such a position can be found in one of my earlier posts and I will not repeat it here. Furthermore, as I have also argued in another post, attempts at reconceptualization that sprang from the critique of historical accuracy ended up giving concessions to history, instead of holding history accountable to its own ideals. What I therefore propose is to look at how the idea(l) of the public sphere has manifested itself in different historical circumstances. We can distinguish three phases that correspond to changes in the "bureaucracy of society":

1) The classical liberal model. This is the model H. described. In this situation a very limited number of people - the male bourgeoisie - engage in deliberation to secure their interest against both the political state of the aristocracy and the proletarian masses, as well as against their own wives. Since large masses are permanently excluded from the acquisition of property and property is needed to enter into citizenship, exclusion is constitutive of this phase, hence a public sphere, measured by its own immanent criteria, does not exist. Political parties are mostly quite loose organisations without much hierarchical structure, originating either from civil society or from coalitions of representatives in parliament. On the side of the excluded processes of opinion and will formation are also taking place - for example in what Negt and Cluge call a proletarian public sphere - but are either ignored by the state or even persecuted. The Union of communists, for which Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, for example disbanded after a substantial number of its members were incarcerated.

2) The class struggle model. These two diverging worlds met when the masses acquired political rights and class struggle has moved from the factories and streets to parliament. Now the structure of parliament changes to incorporate the basic antagonism of capitalist society. Organisations of civil society are connected to political parties and parties can rely on a stable voting base, identifiable by social class. Only in this phase can we talk about a public sphere, since there are no identifiable groups that are eo ipso excluded from deliberative processes. The public sphere has two levels: on one side processes of opinion and will formation take place in civil society and opinions are channelled upwards until they reach the parliament via political parties. Deliberation in parliaments enables the different hierarchies that are otherwise not linked via deliberation (unions and employers usually engage in negotiations, not deliberation) to enter into a communicative exchange.

3) The mass society model. This phase is characterised by the political system becoming autopoietic - if we borrow a term from Niklas Luhmann. Political parties have severed their ties to civil society and their function and mode of operation has changed dramatically. They are no longer mouthpieces of identifiable social groups, but are similar to brands, in that they simplify voter choice. In the same process political programs have been unified, it is impossible to notice any substantial differences between them. It is therefore logical that parliament is no longer so much a deliberative body as it is the stage for a public relations spectacle. To prove the fact that parliament as a deliberative body is redundant, formulation of policies - the quintessential activity of classical parliaments - is being outsourced to think tanks. The political caste relates to the masses in two ways: it launches topics and personalities via the mass media, to which it has privileged access, and then uses public opinion polling to probe the distribution of private opinions on these topics and the ratings of personalities. The bourgeoisie and the political system have once again forged an alliance, which can be seen in the fact that functions of the political system are being outsourced to private bodies and global decision making is delegated to bodies like the WTO, IMF and World bank, which can most accurately be described in the words of Marx and Engels as "committee[s] regulating the common affairs of the global bourgeoisie." We are witnessing a thorough rebourgeoisation of the public sphere.