Hermogen

Debtocracy

2011-06-01T03:12:00.000+02:00

A brilliant documentary about the dictatorship of financial markets:

Debtocracy International Version by BitsnBytes

Ad 5. or Against the enclosure of the commons

2011-05-25T19:51:00.002+02:00

Enclosure of the commons is a term that refers to the historical process through which common property was appropriated by a few individuals and transformed into the modern form of private property. Marx has referred to the process as primitive accumulation of capital and his historical overview is remarkably precise given the limited sources at his disposal. The process was carried out with varying degrees of violence but always ruthlessly since it gradually robbed the rural population of its means of subsistence. It was also a process that enabled the capitalist mode of production to take root in the first place since it created a sufficient degree of concentration of property in the hands of few and forced many into subservience to capital either as labourers in manufactures and later factories (what Marx has called real subsumption under capital) or as individual producers indirectly subordinated to capitalists (what Marx has called formal subsumption under capital). Even as early capitalism flourished in Britain the living standard of a large part of the working class declined: the wages, even when and where they were relatively high, could not make up for the theft of common land that used to provide people with means of subsistence. Modern apologists of capitalism often forget that capitalism did not take root simply because of its supreme efficiency - although, to be fair, the efficiency of organising labour in manufactures and factories was an important factor in the decline of earlier modes of production - but needed violence and coercion to force people into factories and prevent workers from organising politically.

Once a legal framework for securing private property was firmly established capitalism no longer needed such brutal measures to ensure that products of social labour were privately appropriated, yet that did not motivate the ruling classes to become too faithful followers of the laissez-faire principle. They don't shy away from government intervention whenever it helps them to appropriate surplus profit and that is why the enclosure of the commons has been repeated many times over. Today it is an ongoing process institutionalised in the form of intellectual property rights. Knowledge, which is produced and can be produced only collectively, is being turned into private property, an unlimited resources is being made scarce to enable appropriation of surplus profits. Unlike industrial production, where the appropriation of surplus value by the capitalist needs but a legal guarantee of private property, appropriation of surplus value of cognitive production demands constant state intervention: it must grant patents and trademarks and it must constantly increase the scope of intellectual property (whether broadening it to include for example biological organisms, increasing its duration or forcing it on "developing" countries through the WTO).

The amount of state intervention needed to create and uphold the private character of cognitive production suggests that a central paradox of capitalism (collectively produced value being privately appropriated) is being manifested in its purest form. Asserting that creation of intellectual property rights has gone too far and is therefore hampering development, as for example Henry and Stieglitz or Lawrence Lessig do, misses this fundamental point. We are not dealing with the question of finding the right degree of property "protection" but with a paradox that can not be resolved under capitalism. Far from being the solution to the problems of capitalism, cognitive production is the point where capitalism is most frail. Political struggles for the right to infringe upon copyright (the best know example is perhaps the Swedish pirate party) are about far more than downloading music and movies, they are at the core of anticapitalist struggles today.

Crash course on Maxism

2011-04-26T19:41:00.000+02:00

Peter Thompson is currently writing a nice set of articles for the Guardian, offering insight into some central tenants of Marxism and controversies surrounding it. Check them out:
1. Religion, the right answer to the wrong question;
2. How Marxism came to dominate socialist thinking;
3. Men make their own history;
4. "Workers of the world, unite!";

Ad 2. Universal basic income

2011-04-17T13:09:00.000+02:00

Universal basic income is an income unconditionally granted to all individuals (for info on the universal basic income you can check out the Basic Income Earth Network). The concept has been gaining prominence among scholars and politicians and has already been introduced in a limited form in some countries. The best thing about it is that it reduces the power of coercion of the labour market by taking away its threat of death by hunger. As Rev. Townshend remarked, the legal imposition of work “gives too much trouble, requires too much violence and makes too much noise. Hunger, on the contrary, is not only a pressure which is peaceful, silent and incessant, but as it is the most natural motive for work and industry, it also provokes to the most powerful efforts.” (quoted in Paul Lafargue's The Right to be Lazy) An income not conditional upon work takes into consideration the fact that the valorization on a market is an imperfect mechanism of judging the social merit of labour at best, an utterly flawed one at worst. Together with a reduction of working hours it can lead to a significant increase in the independence of individuals from markets and can enable them to immediately begin building alternative modes of production, modes that are not based on ruthless exploitation, where supply responds to demand an not vice versa, where individuals are not alienated from the products of labour and from each other.

Ad 1. Drastic reduction of working hours in the private sector.

2011-04-17T03:42:00.000+02:00

There are a number of reasons. First of all, labour productivity per hour worked in the developed world has been steadily increasing throughout the twentieth century. The rise in productivity only between the years 1990 and 2008 has been roughly 26% in Denmark, 25% in France, 16% in Italy, 58% in Finland, 45% in Sweden, and 41% in Norway (source: Eurostat, percentage points were calculated for all countries where data for both years is available). Throughout this time there has been no reduction in working hours and wages have failed to keep pace with GDP growth. Secondly, a reduction of working hours does not necessarily translate into an equivalent reduction of productivity. We can assume that employees are able to maintain a level of productivity for say four hours that they could not maintain for eight. Thirdly, we can expect a reduction of living costs and a reduced dependency on markets for the procurement of everyday goods and services like childcare, home repairs and food. All in all this means that we would be facing not only a significant increase in the quality of life, but also a partial emancipation from the labour market, which would open up space for further political actions.

Contribution to a new communist manifesto

2011-04-17T02:14:00.014+02:00

The new planetary vulgate has reached an unprecedented level of vulgarity. A long time has passed since Hegel has developed a philosophical system that remains to this day the most magnificent apology of a status quo - any status quo - ever devised. Since then we have witnessed a tremendous development of productive forces accompanied by an even greater degradation of consciousness. Contemporary neoliberal defenders of capitalism are incapable of even the most basic cognitive achievements. The likes of Parsons, Friedman and Hayek were still able to formulate a theoretical defense of capitalism, flawed and contradictory as their attempts were. In their footsteps followed Alan Greenspan, a pathetic figure in every respect. The place of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, truly formidable foes in their time, is today occupied by imbeciles and village idiots: George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, Silvio Berlusconi and Nicolas Sarkozy. It seems that among the ruling classes there is not a single individual whose cognitive abilities have developed past the stage of a seven year old child.

Contemporary ideology is a reflection of this development. It has regressed to an incoherent mass of slogans, force fed to us through the propaganda machine that monopoly media have become. Their lies are so thinly veiled, their deceptions so obvious that one wonders whether they even care about being believed. Citizens are being threatened with the wrath of international financial markets lest they agree to the dismantling of the welfare state, "flexibilisation" of the labour market and an utterly vicious privatisation of public infrastructure and services. Politicians and their technocrats want to make us believe that the same international financial markets who have triggered the contemporary crisis and who are currently creating a new bubble by speculating on food are capable of solving our problems. They are willing to leave us at the mercy of private credit rating agencies who were giving top marks to even the most irresponsible financial speculators on the eve of the financial meltdown. To save the sheep from getting lost in the woods politicians want to entrust them to wolves. The remedies they propose are no better than the people chosen to administer them. The current crisis is a typical crisis of overproduction: it was not caused by bad credit, bad credit proliferated because demand could not keep up with supply. It is blatantly obvious that measures which decrease the buying power of households can do nothing but lead to an even more devastating crisis. Far from being able to formulate a critique of political economy, the academic lackeys of the global bourgeoisie are unable even to achieve a limited technocratic understanding of capitalism and its laws. As they recite their litanies the public debt of Greece is rising, completely untroubled by the brutal austerity measures imposed on its people.

Two things follow from this. First of all it has become obvious that the ruling classes have lost their ability to rule. Today the power of the global bourgeoisie is greater than ever. They have brought states to their knees through threats of capital flight and vengeance of international financial markets. The concentration of global wealth is unprecedented in human history. The productive forces they control have developed to an awe inspiring level. Yet for all its power the bourgeoisie is incapable to keep at least half of the world population safe from poverty. For all its liberalism it is unable to stem the tide of new racism and authoritarianism in the "developed" world. For all its ingenuity it must muster all its strength just to keep capitalism afloat. Their impotence is increasing proportionally to their power. Man has walked on the moon. From the distance he should have been able to see one thing clearly: something is fundamentally wrong with a system that is able to send a man to the moon yet unable to allow the poor to feed themselves.

Secondly, critique is not the weapon we must use in our fight against the bourgeoisie. Their myths do not need demystification, they are so improbable that living experience of the masses refutes them every day. They are immune to demystification because they are not based on reasoning but on the ceaseless howling of the all-pervasive propaganda machinery. We do not need new theory. Partly because the world has failed to progress in any substantive way since Marx wrote his Capital, partly because our collective capability to formulate theory is in ruin (universities have long since fallen prey to the neoliberal offensive). In fact, the university has never been a place where a blueprint of a better world could have been sketched out. The university is hermetically sealed of from any emancipatory social praxis, the very praxis that is constitutive for critical theory. The Communist manifesto was written in 1848, at a time when the working classes of Britain were largely subdued. Preceding it were six decades of struggles and defeats, of smashing machinery, joining the middle classes in their fight for suffrage, of strikes and mass rallies, each fight contributing to the collective learning process. The Communist manifesto was written by the working classes of Britain, written in blood on the streets among charging cavalry and cannon fire, written in sweat to the rhythm of pounding machinery.

What we need first of all is a political gesture, what is today perhaps THE political gesture. It has been performed by citizens all over the world, from Paris to London, from Rome to Zagreb, from Egypt to Wisconsin. There and elsewhere the words: "We will not pay for your crisis!" have become flesh. What we need is a radical break with the past - for, as we know, the crisis to be paid for is not a crisis of capitalism, it is the crisis that is capitalism - a resolute decision that whatever the world looks like tomorrow, it will look nothing like it does today or as it did yesterday. This decision is not utopian. What is utopian is the belief that a total social disaster can be avoided within the parameters of the current system. We know that their ways do not work and we know that an attempt to reinstate the crumbling welfare state with its oppressing eight hour work day and rotten social compromises is as senseless as it is futile. We do not have a plan for what comes after capitalism, but we do not have it precisely because under capitalism we are being denied the freedom needed to formulate it. Only a gesture of total refusal will open up this space of freedom.We must refuse the criterion of fiscal stability, for unless we do we are accepting the fact that democracy has effectively been undermined by international financial capital. We must refuse the imperative of creating new jobs. We do not need new jobs, we need a fair distribution of socially produced goods. We do not need higher wages, we must demand that coercion in the form of wage labour is abolished. Only then will the window of possibility be opened for a free society to rise from the rubble of capitalism as once the commune did from the rubble of Paris.

To the radicalism of mainstream politics we must oppose a most moderate position: that nobody should go hungry, that the products of social labour should be fairly distributed, that welfare and sustainability should be the benchmarks of development, that labour should allow for personal growth of individuals and their need to contribute meaningfully to society, that forms of political organization are legitimate only insofar as they allow for every individual to be fully empowered but most of all that there is no valid criterion for political decisions save that of lasting happiness for all. The only reforms we can accept are those that contribute to these goals. Total refusal of capitalism does not mean calling for violent revolution or demanding the immediate destruction of capitalism. It means that we resolutely refuse to take a single step in the direction of strengthening or preserving the capitalist mode of production. It means that we carve out the space needed for an emancipatory praxis to emerge in embryo before it can become universal. We must first create the space of freedom that allowed the revolts of 68 to flourish before we can complete what they have begun.

Here is a provisional list of some realistic immediate measures that could loosen the stranglehold of capitalism:
1. Drastic reduction of working hours in the private sector.
2. Universal basic income.
3. A tax on financial transactions that would discourage short-term speculation (Tobin tax or a variation thereof).
4. Creation of public credit rating agencies, instituting measures that would enable them to fully substitute private agencies
5. Radical reduction in the scope and duration of intellectual property rights and a complete amnesty for infringements by countries below a specified GDP level.
6. Legalisation of the theft of food for personal consumption.
7. Legalisation of squatting in all buildings that have not been used for a specified time period.
8. A complete ban on private contributions to political parties and candidates.
9. Strengthening the power of the European Parliament in relation to the European Commission.
10. Abolishment of tuition fees and full inclusion of students and the academic proletariat in the decision making bodies of universities.

The list is not completely thought out, some of the suggested measures might turn out to be unreasonable, some crucial measures were probably omitted, but that is beside the point. The scope of public debate has been narrowed to the point where we are almost unable to seriously discuss anything but the specifics of the ways in which capitalism might be saved at all costs. We will refuse to play that game. Until the terms of debate change radically we will continue to protest, we will continue to occupy stores, banks and universities, we will go on strike, we will march together and we will not cease until the ruling classes concede to us the freedom needed to abolish classes altogether.

Report from London

2010-12-08T01:39:00.001+01:00

Something was different this time around. London itself has not changed much, it still feels like a giant machine. Not a particularly well oiled one, not one that is functioning smoothly (perhaps the snow that had prevented some trains from running contributed a bit to the impression), not one of those seamless and noiseless gadgets seen in sci-fi movies. Rather it is reminiscent of a monstrous steam engine. It is entirely too big, terribly inefficient, not particularly user friendly, yet it still somehow manages to persist against the grain of history. Its main purpose? Extraction of surplus value. The city hardly conveys the impression of being constructed for people to live in. Every inch of it feels like it was built by capital for capital. Every footstep sounds a bit like the stroke of a piston. Yet something was different this time around. If you put your ear to the ground you could hear the facade of cold concrete beginning to crack. If you looked attentively you could see fresh buds making their way through the cracks. They are fragile yet persistent, unwavering in their battle against the weight of dead material piled upon them. They are the people claiming what ought to be theirs.

Walking down Kingsway from Holborn station one passes LSE's new academic building. The contrast between the name and the architecture defies belief. The facade towering menacingly above the pavement appears like a bastard child of a high security prison and a bank. Tall gray monoliths that vaguely resemble doors speak no invitations, they guard. I walk on. I turn the corner, then another and there it is: an invitation. A makeshift banner is hanging from a window of the old academic building, informing passers by that LSE is under occupation. „Join us!“ it says. How can I refuse? Inside it hardly resembles an occupation; it is a place of learning, of coming together, of critical thinking and action, and most certainly of fun. It is what a place of higher learning ought to be. It is not occupied, the remainder of LSE is. Howard Davies, LSE's director, has refused the students' invitation, which is hardly surprising. He is a former banker and bankers have a hard time understanding the importance of learning, coming together, critical thinking and action, and they almost certainly do not understand why people need to have fun.

About half an hours walk to the north the students of UCL have put quite some effort in redesigning the exterior of their university. Bright red signs are anouncing a closing down sale and promising further reductions. For now the commercial discourse is ironic. The most likely result of the vote in parliament on Thursday will make it bitter reality (irony is another thing bankers fail to understand). Some very pompous stairs guarded by pompous columns are covered with witty messages written in chalk, demonstrating that irony can effectively take away the power of threats. „How can I afford my caviar?“ one of them reads. UCL's management on the other hand has responded with sarcasm (or was it a farce?) when their demand to have students evicted was rejected in court. I somehow doubt they see the funny side of it.

Neither did Topshop security when a bunch of people started blowing whistles inside the store on Oxford street. This time around irony was supplied by the police. In response to the protest they barricaded the entrance, either not realising or not caring (reductions in their salaries are also part of the government's austerity measures) that completely closing down the store was something protesters never could have achieved without their help. Again sarcasm is to be found higher up in the hierarchy: while government is cutting public spending in ways absolutely devastating for working people it is turning a blind eye toward tax evasion by the rich. The people have decided that they have taken about as much of it as they can take. Their chants were without irony this time: „If you wanna sell your clothes pay your tax!“

Personal growth

2010-11-25T01:51:00.004+01:00

I forgot to add a third thing to the list of most depressing phenomena, namely this:

This is ideology at its subtlest and at its cruelest. It presents itself as humane and authentic, yet it is the perfect perversion of both. So, what's wrong with cherishing "the little things in life", with seeking "true love", seeking "personal growth" and a rich "inner life"? Everything. This type of propaganda presents personal growth as an individualistic endeavor, as something we do alone as we run from others, as we abandon them and set our own interests as the measure of the world. It is what capitalism does to us, there is no need that we should try and bring this curse upon ourselves. It wants to present itself to us as the most tender thing. The worldview that breaks us asunder, that affirms the world as a cold, hostile place, full of pain and suffering and loneliness, is not tender, it is ruthless and inhumane. "Only the roughest would be tender," Adorno once wrote, "the demand that nobody must go hungry." Only radical thought and action can be tender. Radical in that they refuse to accept the world as it is and stubbornly affirm the right to happiness as a universal human right. The vicious propaganda of personal growth reduces individuals to mere objects. They become sources of profit or experiences and little more. Personal growth is then a result of the manipulation of oneself and others as resources. The truth is that we can grow only together by collectively working to improve the world and our relationships among ourselves. This new world is what represents our growth. The new world which we can only build together and that we can enter only together.

The Secret

2010-11-01T01:11:00.000+01:00

Two of the most depressing phenomena for me lately are neo-nazism and this:

They are depressing not just because they are signs that the world is going fundamentally in the wrong direction, but because they are proof of our failure. We have failed miserably in painting a vision of the world for which the oppressed would be willing to fight. We have failed to show them that a sense of belonging can only be won in our common struggle for a just society. We have failed to show them that a sense of self-worth can be attained by building that world. We have failed to offer a credible vision of happiness. Oh, we like to scorn racism, nationalism, new-age cults, but have we even the slightest idea of why people are turning to them? Perhaps we do not even want to know because then we would have to admit our own share of the guilt.

What I see in all these different phenomena is a compensatory function. Put together they are the dark mirror of contemporary capitalist societies. The Secret asks the audience to regress, as Freud would say, to one of the earliest phases of childhood. It is the phase Freud called infantile narcissism, when the reality principle has not yet manifested in the psyche of the child. A happy time when the constraints of reality were ignored, when they did not yet manifest as a psychic conflict (this conflict being, by the way, the constitutive element of the subconscious according to Freud). It is the last resort of the beaten and battered creature. It is total surrender, a complete removal from the world. Have their desires been frustrated to such a point that they do not even believe it is worth to fight for them? I am sorry. We have not given you hope when you most needed it.

And then there is neo-nazism, a rapidly growing trend in Europe. If the Secret chooses to surrender without a fight, neo-nazism chooses to lash out blindly. In a world in which true and lasting solidarity is made impossible, it chooses to adhere blindly to a completely arbitrary category, defined mostly by its hatred of those who are even worse off. The weak are thus bound together by their hate of the weakest, they become brothers and sisters in crime and thus, perversely, claim the solidarity that was denied to them. Why the weakest? Because the weak dare not lash out against the strong. I am so, so sorry. We have failed to acknowledge your hatred and to give you the support you needed to turn it against those who oppress you.

Against theory!

2010-10-29T23:03:00.004+02:00

While intellectuals are laboring away to bring us ever newer and better theoretical explanations of the world they have lost sight of the gulf that has sprung up between theory and practice. I am not talking about the "ivory tower" of academia, the way it has become self-sufficient and has failed to be part of the most important emancipatory struggles. I am talking about the curious fact that the state of the world has failed to progress and has recently even regressed so far that theories have ceased to be applicable. Not because there is something wrong with theories, but because the world is lagging so far behind in its development that the most advanced theories fail to describe it. The gap is roughly 150 years. The most advanced theories of that day are those that best describe our contemporary reality.

A leaflet Marx and Engels wrote in 1848 bears the title Demands of the communist party in Germany. One of the demands is quite interesting in the present-day context: "8. Mortgages on peasant lands shall be declared the property of the state. Interest on such mortgages shall be paid by the peasants to the state." What a simple and brilliant solution to the recent mortgage crisis in the US. Give banks the money they need to stay afloat, but at the same time nationalize mortgages. This would have directly guaranteed that the money given to banks benefited citizens, would have stopped or at least significantly slowed down the further erosion of housing prices and prevented misuses of the generous contribution of the US Government - once said to be of the people, by the people and for the people - to the corporate world. It would have also spared Obama from offering that embarrassing lip-service to justice in which he scolded CEOs for rewarding themselves with million dollar bonuses. You would expect that after managing to plunder the federal budget they would be quite proud of that feat and would see it fitting to reward their success.

Given the situation the government had basically three options, two of which were completely unacceptable. The first was standing by idly as the whole economic system came crashing down around their ears. The second - perhaps even worse than the first - was to give a vast amount of money to people who have proven themselves to be perfectly incapably of responsibly handling money. This would be the fiscal equivalent of trying to cure an alcoholic by giving them a crate of vodka. The third option was some form of nationalization (either of banks directly or of mortgages, as Marx and Engels had suggested). How is it possible that a democratically elected government has decided upon an obviously ludicrous course of action just because it brought profit to a corrupt, irresponsible and cruel elite. It has become obvious that such a government is not susceptible to reason. And the US merely set the pace, European governments have by now outdone it in its monstrosity and idiocy. The time for reasoning is past, it is the pressure from the streets that these committees of the global bourgeoisie will listen to once it has become so strong that it strikes fear in their hearts. It has become obvious that we are in a state of war, war of the combined forces of bourgeois and states against the people. In war we must not try to understand our opponent but try to hit them where it hurts. In this context we need only the theory that can serve us as a weapon in this struggle.

Multiculturalism is dead

2010-10-23T22:07:00.004+02:00

At least that is what German chancellor Angela Merkel has declared in a speech to the youth branch of the CDU, sparking a heated polemic around the globe. It is not long ago that Thilo Sarrazin, at the time member of the executive board of the Deutsche Bundesbank, published a book in which he openly propagates racist theories (for example that genetic deficiencies are to blame for low academic performance of Turkish immigrants). He has been relieved of his post, not surprisingly. That the book has become a bestseller on the other hand is cause for concern. That Merkel has shifted to a national-chauvinist rhetoric is cause for concern.

Yet she speaks the truth. Multiculturalism has failed utterly. What is more it was madness to ever believe it could work. While coexisting together peacefully might seem fine on paper, in reality some groups have stubbornly refused to integrate. Time and time again they have proven themselves unable to accept the most basic rules of society. Today their antisocial behavior, their moral depravity and ruthless criminality have become blatantly obvious, but were they really any different in the past? No. Although I consider myself a tolerant person, here is where I must draw the line: the bourgeoisie must go. There is no way we can coexist peacefully with them. It is not the case that they were not given a chance to integrate. We have asked them time and time again to accept our most basic social norms and time and time again they have refused. Every chance they have gotten they chose greed over charity, ruthlessness over compassion, egoism over altruism. They are the cancer that is destroying our societies. So I ask you this: should we try to coexist peacefully with the cancer whose only aim is to destroy us, or should we fight it with every ounce of strength?

On emptiness

2010-10-18T15:15:00.002+02:00

A feeling of emptiness, lack of meaning, the never ending search for ones "true" self, they are perhaps what best characterizes the modern Zeitgeist. The symptoms are many: expressive consumption (buying to satisfy emotional needs or needs of belonging), the grotesque inflation of expectations regarding erotic relationships and child rearing, new age cults, a surge in national chauvinism. Reactionaries have been preaching for some time now that we need more religion, more indoctrination, more propaganda, more ideology. They believe meaning is socially created and from that assumption they derive the demand for social institutions that create meaning. Truth be told we need more indoctrination like we need another hole in the head. We have way too much of it already and most of it of the wrong kind: the one that tries to convince us to ignore our interests in the interest of the powerful, that tells us our hurt is not real, that our frustrations are imaginary, that our anger is unjustified but most of all that we should not act on our feelings.

This is perhaps the most pervasive and most diabolic effect of propaganda: not that it changes our opinions and attitudes (almost a century of scientific investigation has demonstrated that propaganda is terribly ineffective at changing attitudes) but that it constructs a wall between perception, feelings, knowledge on the one hand and action on the other. To change someone's attitude you need to provide proof, you have to argue, you have to inform, you have to plead, and even then the results are unreliable at best and only make themselves felt in the long run. To change behavior turns out to be much easier. Change the structural conditions and people behave differently (not that hard to do for someone acting from a position of power). Associate the feelings of people with the action you want them to perform - that is why washing powders don't clean clothes anymore, at least as far as advertising is concerned, they create happy families, just as toothpaste makes you attractive, SUVs make you powerful, and Marlboro cigarettes make you independent. When you trick people into changing their behavior, you get their attitudes for free, since people try really hard to convince themselves that an action they had already performed was justified (another thing scientific investigation has shown us). To change their attitudes after they have acted is easy, since at that point they want to be convinced.

The all-pervasive feeling of emptiness is a consequence of this rift between cognition and feeling and action. Indoctrination will not cure it since it is actively contributing to the problem. The argument also rests on a flawed epistemology. Meaning is not created by ideological apparatuses, but by action. The only proof we have that the world exists is because we are able to interact with it meaningfully. All the philosophical proofs that we can not be certain of the existence of the world will mean nothing to the person who has just bumped his or her head against a wall. They can feel the pain, they can not feel philosophical arguments. All the sermons of love for ones fellows will remain futile as long as our society is structured by a logic of competition instead of cooperation. The world is meaningful insofar it is able to satisfy needs and desires: sufficient food and shelter (a minority of people on our planet is able to enjoy these), safety and belonging. A society in which the achievement of basic needs is based on a bellum omnia contra omnes can never lead to happiness. Meaningless of life today is quite objective. The problem will not be solved until a humane society has been built. Until that day our best bet is the happiness ensuing from the anticipation of that better world, the belonging we feel when we are building it together.

The un-hero

2010-10-12T18:45:00.003+02:00

During the latter half of the twentieth century Serbia had been one of the leading global centers of movie production. Not in terms the market would acknowledge - quantity or popularity, or global sales figures - but by the power of their visions, the capacity to condense the state of the world into a few hours of film. Emir Kusturica has gained some international acclaim (winning the Palme d'or twice, for When father was away on business and Underground, and then there is Do you remember Dolly Bell, arguably his best movie, and of course Time of the Gypsies), but does he measure up to the greats of earlier generations? Not really. One needs only to take a look at Dušan Makavejev's early feature length films like Čovek nije tica, Ljubavni slučaj ili tragedija službenice PTT and Misterije organizma, or Saša Petrović's masterpieces Skupljači Perja and Tri. And then in the comedy department there is Paskaljević's Varljivo leto 68 and Kovačević's Balkanski Špijun (before Underground was an award winning movie, it was a play by Kovačević, who has also co-written the script for the movie together with Kusturica) and so so many more.

If I were forced to make an impossible choice and pick one I thought was the best, I would go with Tri. But before I focus on it I will solve the mystery of the title: tri is the serbian word (or number?) for three. The title is fitting since we are presented with three stories, containing one violent death each (adding up to three deaths in all). The first story is from the beginning of World war II, the second from the middle, the last happens toward the end. The connection between them is established by the protagonist, who acts as witness in all three cases.

Luckily someone took the time to upload the whole movie on Youtube, here is the first part, I'm sure you'll find your way after that:

Now that the mystery of the movie title is solved, how about the title of this post? The un-hero acts as witness to the three deaths and little more. What is happening in the movie happens around him, never through him or even to him. In Minima Moralia Adorno claimed that all attempts to turn the horror of the war into drama are doomed to failure, since what happened was far beyond the subject, beyond the subject's ability to act and beyond the subject's ability to comprehend. The catastrophe was objective, hence impossible to translate into actions of subjects, on which drama must rely. I don't know if Petrović has read Adorno, but he certainly solved his paradox: if the war can not be understood through actions of subjects, well then my protagonist will not act. Petrović took the camera and pointed it at the paradox itself. The un-hero (I don't believe he even has a name) is faced three times with his inability to act, to change the course of events, to save a life. The movie brilliantly subverts the expectations of the audience. We can not identify with the un-hero, not because he is alien to us, but because he is us. He does not convey to us his frustration, his feeling of powerlessness, we feel them first hand with him. We are watching events unfold on screen, unable to interfere with them, and so is he, telling us that the subject has become so hollowed out that his capacity to act has been reduced to acting as a silent witness to the course of the world.

Revolution in the technological society

2010-02-01T22:40:00.003+01:00

Marx wrote about communism as a fulfilment of history. It was to be not so much a complete break with history as a final qualitative leap in its development. While we are rightfully sceptical of this teleological argument (that claims history has an inherent end), we must remember that its merits are not purely metaphysical. The political implication of Marx' eschatology is that the proletariat is to take possession of the means of production at the height of their development. The productive forces will develop to their final stage under capitalism and their socialization will unleash their full potential for human emancipation. The contradiction is between capitalist productive relations and the productive forces that capitalism has unleashed and this contradiction needs to be solved. When the proletariat takes control of the political apparatus it can abolish private ownership of the means of production and after a short period of centrally planned production it will somehow start to harmonize spontaneously. While Marx was always a bit vague about how this spontaneous harmonizing of production, consumption and circulation is to come about, another assumption of his political programme has come to be just as problematic: namely that the state can effectively take control of the means of production.

Marx bases his economic analysis on the assumption that all labour is simple unskilled labour (he is of course aware that skilled labour exists but argues that the difference is merely a quantitative one and makes no difference to his analysis). I would like to argue that this is not the case. By making this assumption Marx ignores the possibility of exploitation not just by the capitalist but by other wage-labourers. Marx claims that the wage-labourer is paid less than he produces and that the difference is appropriated by the owner of the means of production. While this claim is not problematic in the case of unskilled workers it does seem out of place when applied to say top managers. A wage-labourer can also be paid more than he produces (multi million dollar bonuses in a time of recession come to mind), which means that the surplus value some wage-labourers create is not appropriated only by the capitalist but also by other wage-labourers. In this sense the assumption is problematic from the vantage point of economics.

Another problem of the assumption is that it would have us see the means of production as material artefacts. If we analyse all labour as unskilled labour, we must assume that the whole of western rationalization is manifested in material artefacts, not in skills and knowledge. If we demand that the proletarian state takes over the means of production this seems possible if we think of means of production as bricks and mortar and cogs and wheels. If these are developed to the highest degree under capitalism, the state can take control of them without loss of their productive potential (why should machines care whether they are run by a capitalist or by the state?). But if we take into account that skilled labour is also produced and that it and its production (manifested in the form of pedagogical and research institutions) are integral components of the means of production, we encounter some difficulties.

As Ulrich Beck has argued in Risk society a central feature (and problem) of contemporary societies is the inflation of complexity. It is not that the world per se has grown more complex (the basic natural laws are the same as they always were) but that rationalization has begun to demolish its own footing. In the time of the industrial revolution the task seemed simple enough: conquest of nature. Progress meant better protection from the arbitrariness of natural forces. For western societies today nature itself has become socialized (google earth provides a good illustration: it is hard to find a piece of soil that does not bear the mark of human intervention). The risks we face today do not originate from an independent nature but are in part socially produced. This means that the simple logic of means and ends has run amok. Whatever action we take is bound to have important side-effects (what Beck calls risks): if a new factory is built to solve the problem of unemployment it might have detrimental effects on the environment, clearing a forest to grow crops might cause avalanches, higher GDP might increase pollution and crime etc. Any action taken to combat these side-effects is bound to have side-effects of its own: building wind farms can endanger birds and upset the ecosystem, recycling can be even more detrimental effects on the environment than just letting junk accumulate (the famous example of the Shell oil platform comes to mind).

Laymen often complain that scientists are unable to agree on anything, they don't know whether global warming is happening or not and if it is, whether it is caused by humanity or not etc. It seems that disagreement among experts is an indispensable way of dealing with the increase in complexity. If experts were forced to agree it is likely the whole system would collapse in a short while because the low internal complexity of science would be ill-fitted to deal with the high complexity of its object. At this point we are able to return to Marx' initial political programme: the idea that the state can take over the means of production without a significant loss of productivity is essentially flawed. Since central planning would significantly reduce the complexity of the scientific subsystem of society (which, as I have argued, is an integral part of the means of production), the subsystem would be unable to effectively deal with the complexity of its environment. The state would have in its hands not the means of production at the height of their development but in a crippled state.

Where does this leave us in terms of a communist revolution? Since a world in which more than half of the world population is living in poverty while the level of development of the productive forces in western nations would in principle allow poverty to be eliminated almost instantaneously is clearly intolerable, since the impossibility of realising an utopian vision can only be proven after everything in our power has been attempted to bring it about, and since the impossibility of realising an utopian vision - were it possible to prove it - does not diminish its necessity, just coming to terms with the existing is not an option. The struggle against capitalism must be radically rethought.

First of all it seems that taking over the state can not be the final goal of proletarian political organization. The impossibility of achieving a high enough level of democratic support for a radical communist party has become evident during the 20th century. The catastrophic consequences of a communist party taking over the state without mass support, which would also put a check on its power, has equally been demonstrated by Stalin and the like. Furthermore the state itself is withering away: partly it is outsourcing the provision of public goods (transport, healthcare, education etc.) to private bodies, partly it is delegating its decision making to bodies beyond democratic control (it is shocking how little attention the delegation of policy formation - the sine qua non of parliaments - to private think tanks is receiving).

If the state is being emptied of power class struggle must follow. What is needed is a decentralization that would at once attack the new centres of power and by its internal complexity be able to cope with the heightened complexity of social action in the risk society. Surely the diverse "new social movements" springing all around the globe satisfy that criterion. Why then do all protests seem hopelessly futile, affording some amusement to the scavenging media organisations at best? Why has capitalism been steadily entrenching itself during the last 30 years? Why have autocratic global centres of power flourished so vividly? Why does the darkness that covers us seem more impenetrable than ever?

It is because the manifold centres of opposition that are springing up around the globe lack coordination. If the classical model of class struggle via parliamentary parties that aim to finally take over the state and abolish private ownership over the means of production was overly centralized the new model is overly decentralized. What is lacking is a coordinating ideology that would channel all the disparate streams, the trickles of discontent, into a fierce river. The streams flow hot with tears, which show no sign of drying up. The task of criticism today is not to show the people a mirror, which will shock them with their misery. The misery is obvious enough. A lens is needed to channel the rays into one fierce, burning spot. What is needed most of all is a new communist international: a loose association of forces that would coordinate rather than command, that would unify ideologically rather than administratively.

The models for such an organising exist. Whether it is the communards and their very effective ad hoc organisation or the spontaneous growth of the November revolution in Germany, they all have in common a spontaneous outburst, channelled by a coherent ideology. It is because these outbursts were of a local nature that they were easily crushed by brute force. In a globalising world not only the free movement of capital, its freedom to undermine democracy and keep billions in poverty, is expanding, also the possibilities of a global struggle against this tyranny become imaginable.

Bare necessities

2010-01-08T11:40:00.003+01:00

In Minima Moralia, Sur l'eau Adorno argued against modelling the image of emancipated society on the productive process. Unbounded productivity and ceaseless activity are not expressions of freedom, but of the blind subordination under the unleashed means of production. The emancipated society would be one in which the internalised imperatives of productive forces would not be the essence of the individual but a tool to be used to satisfy human needs. In such circumstances possibilities could be left unexploited. Happiness, not boundless productivity, would be the final word. "To lie on the water and peacefully gaze into the sky," would take the place of "process, activity, achievement." The immanent demand of emancipated society is quite simple: "Only the roughest would be tender: that nobody should go hungry."

One would not expect to find such critical materialist views expressed in a Disney movie, but in the Jungle book this is exactly the case:

It is interesting to compare this to the German translation:

In the English version the first stanza goes like this:

Look for the bare necessities
The simple bare necessities
Forget about your worries and your strife
I mean the bare necessities
Old Mother Nature's recipes
That brings the bare necessities of life

In the German version it is:

Probiers mal mit Gemütlickeit
Mit Ruhe und Gemütlichkeit
jagst du den Alltag und die Sorgen weg
Und wenn du stets gemütlich bist
Und etwas appetitlich isst
Dann nimm es dir egal von welchem Fleck

The meaning of the lines could be translated as:

Why don't you try relaxation
With calm and relaxation
You can chase away the everyday worries
If you are always relaxed
And something is attractive
Take it and do not concern yourself

The materialism of the English version is lost completely. The idea that satisfying basic needs is a precondition for happiness and that human needs, not the quest for ceaseless accumulation, should be the driving force of life, gives way to a litany that preaches a subjective attitude as a way of transcending "everyday worries". In this version the dictate of being happy in not political, but becomes the responsibility of individuals. Not only does the present society inhibit the possibilities for happiness, failures of the system are grotesquely transformed into failures of individuals. Bare necessities are the demand that goes against the grain of this ideology.

Consumerist ideology

2009-12-30T14:56:00.002+01:00

The arrogance of the intellectual class is particularly aggravating when it is disguised as "critical" thought. Roland Barthes is by far not the only one who indulged in "demystification" - analysing myths of the "ruling classes" so that the myths themselves will lose their power to captivate and indoctrinate. Some intellectuals have transferred this "critical" impulse to the analysis of consumer society: they teach us that consumption is giving us illusionary satisfaction, they preach that the needs promoted by advertising and served by consumption are false needs, yet they can say hardly anything about what is to be done. Their political programme is as devoid of substance as the grandiose phrases they employ and just as revolutionary as the semi-erudite followers that duplicate their jargon of arrogance. This is because the impulse is not critical at all, it is self serving idle banter of a self righteous elite.

This banter is based on two crucial assumptions, both of them dead wrong. The first is that all people - of course excluding the intellectuals - are dumb. They are being exploited and this exploitation is being effectively covered up with a bit of sweet talk. When Marx wrote in the first part of Capital: "they are doing it, but they do not know it," it was not meant to denigrate those who do not know, it was a critique of political economy - yes, of intellectuals - for failing to come up with an adequate theory. People do not know that when trading goods they are implicitly judging the amount of labour needed to produce those goods because intellectuals have failed miserably in their task to produce an adequate theory of value and an explanation of how value is created. Marx did not want to show the proletariat the blatantly obvious, namely that they are being exploited. He wanted to analyse the not at all obvious, namely the structural logic of capitalism and its implications for the specific political form proletarian class struggle must take to be successful. For this end he was employing resources that the proletariat did not have access to: economic theory, philosophical methodology and statistical data. When intellectuals today tell us that advertisement tells lies, an experience everyone can make first hand, they must assume that everyone save them is lacking in intellect. They forget that they are distinguished from the "common man" merely by access to intellectual productive forces, not their inherent genius.

The second assumption is that the happiness consumerism provides is merely illusory. I for myself think that having a heated apartment during winter, owning a car (with air conditioning), being able to order affordable books from the internet, enjoy music on a quality stereo or rip through singletrack on a mountain bike strong enough to handle hits from rocks, roots and 4 foot drops to flat yet efficient enough for a cross-country ride lasting a few hours, are very real pleasures. When Marcuse was writing of false needs, he did not mean illusory satisfactions, imposed on the people by an omnipotent ideological apparatus. He was talking of needs that are not working towards lasting happiness. Working hard to be rich and enjoy the things consumer society has to offer has very real benefits, yet it precludes working towards a form of society in which lasting happiness of all people could be achieved and in this respect can consumer society be thought of as fostering "false" needs.

The term "fordism" applies to an age in which the proletariat was given its share - albeit a small one - of the pleasures of consumerism. The key was that capitalists discovered that the working classes are not only employees, but that they are also consumers (a paradox Marx noted already in his Grundrisse) and that paying them higher wages could be beneficial, since it would increase the buying power of consumers. The problem is not that the market offers illusory satisfactions, it is that the satisfactions of private life have taken on the task of compensating for the frustrations of working life. That expectations regarding sexual relationships are becoming ever more demanding while relationships are becoming ever more ephemeral, not being able to live up to expectations, is one symptom of this process. That advertising has abandoned presenting characteristics of products in favour of presenting the happiness ensuing from their use is another. In the realm of production we are not able to meaningfully contribute to a meaningful world, therefore we seek to compensate for that lack in private life. Talcott Parsons, a radical conservative, glimpsed a fragment of this process when he wrote that the role of the wife is an "expressive" one: creating a soothing environment in which the bread winner can relax. Advertisement is fulfilling very real needs, but these needs can be thought of as false ones, because they do not question the nature of the productive forces and the unhappiness their organisation creates. Instead of revolutionising productive relations, which could bring lasting happiness to all, we are compensating for our frustrations by consumption. The promise of happiness that advertisement makes touches upon a real need, yet it is not through consumption that this need could be fully satisfied.

The culture industry and Freud

2009-11-29T12:38:00.003+01:00

The interpretation of dreams was for Freud an important element of psychoanalysis. What Roland Barthes later claimed about art, namely that there is no "noise", was for Freud the basic premise for entering the dream world. Phenomena that were believed to be banal, arbitrary and inconsequential, like dreams or slips of the tongue, fascinated Freud; not in and of themselves but as symptoms of unconscious mental processes. What happens when we dream, according to Freud, is that some elements of our waking life (e.g. experiences, persons, events) are selected and arranged into a new whole, which is the manifest content of the dream. To the naive observer, even to the dreamers themselves, this manifest content seems chaotic and without meaning, it is all "noise". Actually it is all signal, because there is a latent structure underlying this apparent chaos: dreams fulfil repressed wishes in a symbolic manner, where elements of the manifest dream content represent objects of the wish. Because the superego censors these wishes, they can be expressed only indirectly as symbols. Freud mentions the example of a lady patient who dreamed of a friend, who had just recently married. From the context in which this person appears in the dream (the dreamer had bought some theatre tickets early and found out she could have latter bought them at a better price, like her friend did), Freud interprets the friend to represent a repressed regret of the patient: she had gotten married too early. If she had just waited, she could have snatched a better husband.

Perhaps you are expecting that I will now furnish examples of how products of the culture industry cater to these repressed desires, reducing art to a sort of phantasmal wanking off, perhaps explaining how Popeye represents repressed aggression towards sexual competitors (Bluto always behaves in a manner that legitimises aggression, circumventing the cultural taboo and enabling the male audience to live out their aggression in a way that is not sanctioned by the superego):

What I am more interested in are the changes the models of the culture industry are going through. Surely Freud's analysis of how suppressed desires are being satisfied through art is correct enough. But at the same time it fails to grasp the truth of the phenomenon. One part of that is the new guise Hollywood has given standard formats. Advertising nowadays likes to tell us that a picture is "epic" and I guess this is meant as praise. The funny part is that advertising is telling the pure and simple truth here (it rarely tells outright lies, but it tends toward using hyperboles lavishly). Motion pictures today might most adequately be described as "epic", a few recent examples:

Ninja assassin:

The road:

2012

Sherlock Holmes (a bastard child of James Bond and Night of the living dead)

The perplexing thing is that epic forms abound today, when none of the social circumstances that gave them meaning in antiquity are present. In Greece for example the epic form developed under the auspices of warlords, it was a sort of propaganda for their great deeds (mostly consisting of murder, rape and plundering). The warrior hero ethics were also a way of promoting enlistment, recruiting soldiers who would willingly give up their lives in battle ("May you live forever" was one of the most insulting things you could say to a man in Sparta). When the merchant class gained power in city states like Athens, culture was becoming more refined, focusing on feeling and creativity, largely abandoning the heroic epos of yore.

What, then, is the charm contemporary epos exhibits over contemporary audiences? Surely the events portrayed are utterly alien to their lives and their perception of themselves. In complex societies, one can hardly imagine oneself as a heroic figure, which is able to change the course of the world with its solitary actions. One is rather embedded in the many subsystems of society, which mediate our actions and make it nearly impossible to gauge their final consequences: we are told that buying a more efficient vehicle will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, that our contribution to a charity will benefit some village in Africa, that responsible consumption habits can contribute to a more humane economy, that our vote counts, but the effectiveness - even the meaningfulness - of our actions remains utterly opaque to us.

Whose story is the contemporary epos telling? If the answer can not be found on the side of the users, it must be on the side of the producers. Yet what aim could the producers be following in serving audiences contents they can not meaningfully relate to? Is there a secret plot to militarise our societies with Hollywood as the vanguard (the epos of the Third Reich comes to mind)? It would seem that art should be distinguished from dreams (a distinction Freud never made) in that its manifest content is determined by two layers of latent factors. If we only focus on the psyche of producers and recipients, we are unable to achieve insight into the workings of the culture industry. The second layer of latent factors is the economic system. The products of the culture industry are exactly that, namely products. Individual desires are an important determining factor in the production process since they determine use value, as Marx called it, without which exchange value could not exist. Yet individual desires are qualitatively transformed once they become an impetus for consumption. They become a variable in the equation of profitability and in this sphere achieve a striking independence from the minds of individuals that gave birth to them.

Karl Marx painted a picture of the world in which the living individual is passive, while dead labour (capital) is active, determining the life of society. The hero of contemporary epos is none other than capital itself, an exquisite parody of the dialectics of spirit, as told by Hegel (history does have a talent for parodying Hegel, does it not?). Producers are merely following through the logic of the market: since substantive innovation is too risky a business the culture industry exhibits a tendency to follow certain proven stereotypes (today's plots basically repeat those from the 1920s, albeit in a more sophisticated manner) - with stereotypical cultural formats the investors can anticipate future profits, and advertisers know what type of audience to expect (by the way, do you really believe MPAA ratings were instituted to protect children?). Innovation in Hollywood is rather showcasing the sheer might of productive forces: grandiose special effects are the main difference between the pictures of today and those 50 years ago. The grandiose Mannerist style of Hollywood is not a fad, the epos is not a symptom of nostalgia: it is the ideology of capital, told by capital itself.

The unease, which the first Terminator movie is still able to cause, stems from the melting away of borders between humanity and its productive forces and the - not at all imaginary - feeling that the unleashed productive forces have grown far beyond our control. The terminator is the best metaphor for the culture industry of today: a machine, masquerading as a human. The Academy awards its Oscars to outstanding individuals. Truth be told, the true recipient is never on the stage of that festive event.

Perpetum mobile

2009-09-27T21:27:00.002+02:00

First I must apologize for my long absence, I have been tangled up in real life. This time I will let some quotes speak almost by themselves. They are basically about reification:

1. Martin Heidegger, Die Technik:

Everywhere it is put to stand to availability. To stand as a standing-reserve for being available further. What is so set to be available has its own stance. We will call it the standing-reserve.

2. Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt (The working man: dominion and form):

The task of total mobilization is the transformation of life into energy, as it is unveiled in the economy, technology and traffic in the whirring of wheels or on the battlefield as fire and movement.

3. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: Futurist Manifesto

We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!... Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.

4. Karl Marx and Friederich Engels: Manifesto of the Communist Party, chapter one: Bourgeois and Proletarians

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

You will notice that the first three quotes are from fascist ideologues or sympathizers (Heidegger's text was written later, it records a lecture held in 1949). M&E's prediction that the new state of affairs will enable people to see the true nature of productive forces is refuted by the eagerness with which fascism engaged in total mobilisation of society as a standing-reserve: the capitalist model in which raw materials and people are reified in the productive process is let loose upon the whole of society: sports, education, culture, procreation, friendship, everything is bound into the demand to produce a standing-reserve for the needs of the totalitarian state (its needs were quite basic: production and warfare). The humanity, with which the bourgeois era tried to soothe its guilty conscience, was abolished, the productive process made to truly dominate the whole of social totality. Besides proving that capitalism is by far more persistent and far less progressive than M&E believed, able to mobilise seemingly outlived modes of subjectivity (Like the identification with a race or folk) to come to its defence in a time of crisis it makes a point about the affinity between capitalism and fascism that members of the Frankfurt school have stressed. Not only does fascism utilize a certain type of personality that is bred under the conditions of liberal democracy - the Authoritarian personality, as Adorno et al. called it in their seminal study, it can also be seen as totalizing in the sense that it subjects the whole of society to the reification inherent in the productive process.

Prostitution

2009-07-11T00:42:00.002+02:00

It is puzzling how much contempt societies, based upon the principle of exchanging bodily functions for an universal equivalent, have for the sale of one particular bodily function. I make my living selling my intellect, which could be regarded as more integral to my self than my genitals, yet the first is deemed acceptable, while the latter is scorned. Love is not to be sold, after all. Love, a specifically capitalist phenomenon, is the prime alibi of capitalism, its prime obfuscation. Prostitution lays bare the ideological denial of universal mediatedness at work in the bourgeois idea of love, reveals that abstract negation - reserving a sphere of complete self-will in the midst of universal servitude - is hypocrisy. In the hysteric reaction towards prostitution the subject denies the painful realisation that he or she is sold daily and that this transaction is the basis of subjectivity. Prostitution is the lens through which society can be comprehended in its totality. As such it deserves scorn just as much as Galilei's telescope.

The enemy never sleeps

2009-06-29T01:41:00.003+02:00

Some time ago I analysed the subtle ideology of RPG games. They do come less subtle than that. The goal of Kirby superstar, an old Super Nintendo game, is to venture:

P.S.: Honest to Marx, I used Photoshop only to paste, crop and save the image.

Hegel on Kafka's Metamorphosis

2009-06-27T22:43:00.003+02:00

The reader of Kafka's story is immediately struck not so much by the bizarre transformation of the protagonist into an enormous insect - surely not the most bizarre in the history of literature - as with the indifferent response the transformation is met with. Gregor Samsa at first feels no discomfort with his new shape, which leads us to reject the interpretation that his transformation is in itself a punishment. Indeed he finds pleasure in new habits that come with the new form: eating rotten food, crawling on the ceiling etc. The interpretation that the transformation is actually fulfilling a latent desire might seem far fetched at first, but let us see if it can help us make sense of the story. Gregor is working at a job he distinctly dislikes (that are his first thoughts upon waking) but to which he is bound by debts his father had incurred. The fantasy is not a positive one, a desire to become an insect, but a negative one, a desire to escape inescapable social obligations.

The insect can be read as a metonymy of nature (that Kafka declared a Bilderverbot regarding the insect in a letter to Kurt Wolff would indicate that the insect is a place holder for a more abstract idea), nature not as a positive idea, but as a purely abstract negation of human sociality, a wishing-away of the mediatedness of the subject through social institutions, a fantasy of pure immediacy in the midst of universal mediation. The tragedy of the insect testifies to the impossibility of an abstract negation. As Adorno noted in one of the most orthodoxly Hegelian parts of Minima Moralia, the bourgeois demand for purely spontaneous love functions as an alibi for the untrue society - it is not as pure spontaneity that love can offer resistance to the existing, only as specific negation, as "stubborn opposition" as Adorno put it. Note that the motive of family love (especially that of Gregor to his sister) is central to Kafka's story.

The answer to the question what the nature of mediation is, of what Gregor is running from, takes us beyond Hegel to Marx. On all the central parts of the story money is of paramount importance. The debt of the father is forcing Gregor to stick to a job he dislikes. Georg only finds displeasure in his new form when he realizes it will cause him to miss work. Gregor's family start neglecting him because of the jobs they in turn have to take to compensate for his missing pay check and they completely reject him after he has scared away the tenants inhabiting a spare room of their apartment. Gregor's sister put it most succinctly: "When one has to work so hard as we do it is impossible to put up with this incessant torture at home." Brecht's Good person of Szechwan immediately comes to mind, where Shen Te is confronted with an analogous dilemma: "How can I be good, when everything is so expensive?"

The transformation can then be read as a parable, the moral of which is that "there is no right life in the wrong."

Value neutrality

2009-06-16T15:47:00.003+02:00

Norms are not stars, glittering on a horizon beyond being. They are an integral part of social reality. The norm of neutrality - besides the obvious fact that a normative demand for the absence of normative demands is a contradictio in adjecto - is nothing but the dictate of applicability. The results of research technique should be free from value statements so that they can be used broadly and efficiently. The measure of neutrality is the extent of capitulation to the existing. The attempt to eliminate the normative moment of cognition wrongs the object (unresolved antagonisms of society are paradoxes calling to be resolved) and the subject, equipping it with blinders that prevent it from seeing beyond the sensus communis. Research does not aim to satisfy a fickle curiosity as Popper had childishly imagined, it is productive work. As all productive work it aims to achieve an effect, that is provoke some change in the world. The question is therefore not whether research should or should not be value free, but what the nature of the values should be: should they be subjective, conforming to doxa (what is today deemed objective) or objective, following from the inherent paradoxes of the object (what is today deemed subjective).

Shizophrenia

2009-05-26T23:06:00.002+02:00

In The good person of Szechuan Brecht portrays the protagonist faced with contradictory demands of reality and morality. Schizophrenia is a natural reaction then: Shen Te develops the alter ego of Shui Ta, who steps in when the dictate of being good threatens to destroy Shen Te. "How can I be good," she asks, "when everything is so expensive?" The only rational response to a pathological world is pathological.

When Freud developed his theoretical system he acknowledged that there is an inherent contradiction between desire and reality (what he termed the dynamic aspect of a metapsychological inquiry). When later on in life desire is hampered by reality libido regresses to an earlier stage (Freud gives the example of fetishism), but this regression is unacceptable to the superego, which censors the desire and neurotic symptoms are the only way libido can find an expression. What Freud has missed is that psychological contradictions originate from social ones, the contradiction between desire and reality is secondary, the primary contradiction is between the dictates of authority and the reality it creates. Ruling ideas take on a universal character which transcends particular class rule, hence the individual is faced with the task of yielding to moral imperatives which reality makes impossible to follow. The pathologies of the individual mirror the pathologies of society, the resolution of the psychical dialectic is possible only by resolving the dialectics of society. Until then we can resist totality only by being consistently pathological. As Horkheimer and Adorno noted in Dialectics of enlightenment, the task of philosophy is to be naively consistent, believing the whole of ruling ideology: "She believes that division of labour serves humanity and that progress leads to freedom."

G spot

2009-05-05T22:36:00.006+02:00

That Freud was deeply conservative is clear from his theory of the development of erogenous zones. While the child - so Freud - is polymorphously perverse, meaning that it can enjoy sexual pleasure from the stimulation of a large number of organs, the genitals monopolise this function during the course of normal sexual development. The most bizarre element in this puzzle is the claim that the vagina must take the place of the clitoris as the primary erogenous zone. Freud tells us nothing about how this miracle is to be achieved. Furthermore it is noticeable that he uses the term "perverse" for sexual arousal originating from areas of the body other than the genitals, which would imply that heterosexual intercourse with the aim of procreation is the norm. Even foreplay must be thought of as a perversion.

Modern pseudo science has rushed to the aid of Freud's phantasm. It has discovered the g spot, an area inside the vagina, which is the harbinger of unparalleled sexual pleasure. It is no coincidence that the "discoverer" of the g spot was a man. What this phantasm actually discovers is a phallocentric view on sexuality. It tells us that only the penis can be the source of ultimate pleasure. It seeks to deny the obvious fact that women can quite well do without it. It is the most outstanding manifestation of the fear of castration. The g spot consoles men that their little friend is not utterly useless by projecting the male love for their penis onto women. Freud, the old prude, tried to base human psyche on sexuality, but he saw sexuality only in its limited bourgeois guise. He confused the superstructure for the base and built his theoretical construction on a hypostatized patriarchal society.

Lust

2009-05-04T23:43:00.002+02:00

I believe a further elucidation is needed for those not fluent in German to fully grasp Freud's idea of the pleasure principle or Lustprinzip. The word Lust is - as are most German words - elusive. Its meaning is but imperfectly captured in the English pleasure. This is but one of its nuances. Another is retained in the English lust; the German original also has sexual, or rather sensual, undertones. At its core Lust means the most basic impulse which cannot meaningfully be reduced to any cause. If one is asked for one's motivation for some proposed activity and answers: "Ich hab' halt Lust dazu," any competent speaker would regard a further inquiry into the origins of Lust as absurd. Adorno took Freud by his word and demanded Lust to be the guiding light towards an emancipated society.

Philistine

2009-05-04T22:51:00.003+02:00

Reading Freud is certainly a peculiar experience. At once one cannot help but be amazed at his profound insights into the human psyche, especially if we remember that the poor devils deemed "insane" were subjected to most barbaric treatments not so long before his time. His achievement is so much greater since it transcended the narrow stereotypes of his class, which in its turn reacted hysterically to psychoanalysis. Freud was very much aware of his intellectual supremacy and arrogantly stepped on a self-erected pedestal next to Copernicus and Darwin, next to the great demystifiers who dared insult the vanity of their fellows. Reading his later writings we see Freud in the role of the magician - the metaphor Marx and Engels used in the Manifesto for the bourgeoisie - who cannot contain the spirits he himself has conjured. It is not just the way he honours contemporary stereotypes by mentioning homosexuality in one breath with other "deviances" like misogyny. A more profound change is going on in his theoretical construction, which is shaking its very foundation. Just like the great bourgeois revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century unleashed desires of the oppressed that were needed for the bourgeoisie to dethrone the aristocracy and which needed to be contained lest they turn on the bourgeoisie itself, so Freud is faced with the task of putting Lustprinzip, the pleasure principle, in its place after he let it loose upon the world. The solution is as simple as it is unconvincing: condemning desire, which, as he discovered in Beyond the pleasure principle, contains not just Eros, but also a death drive. If desire - the only final justification of reason, as Adorno noted in Minima Moralia - is not to become a disruptive force, it needs to be kept in chains. Only these chains had do be made a bit more comfortable and be adorned with flowers, so that their bearers would not feel their weight so acutely. Freud the philistine preaches in Über das Unbehagen in der Kultur (rather awkwardly translated as Civilization and its discontents) that human desire is too dangerous to be allowed to roam free, that it must be curbed if civilization is to endure. He was correct: only by putting a check on desire can bourgeois civilization endure.

Thanatos

2009-04-28T22:48:00.005+02:00

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

2009-04-24T16:52:00.002+02:00

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

2009-04-20T20:36:00.008+02:00

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

2009-04-20T19:31:00.003+02:00

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

2009-04-18T12:52:00.002+02:00

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

2009-04-15T00:07:00.002+02:00

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

2009-04-14T23:24:00.002+02:00

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

2009-04-12T14:12:00.010+02:00

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

2009-04-05T17:11:00.008+02:00

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.

Affect/Effect

2009-03-26T13:07:00.003+01:00

A nice instance of attribution of causality to art is found in Virgil, who comments on the effects of poetic creation thus:

immemor herbarum quos est mirata iuvenca
certantis, quorom stupefactae carmine lynces,
et mutata suos requierunt flumina cursus

Virgil attributes to poetry not only effect on other creatures (cows and lynxes which are enchanted by poetry), thereby proclaiming universality of art, but also causal effects (streams that stop flowing because of poetic force). Of course Virgil, being a son of the enlightened ages, no longer explicitly believed in the immediate causal effects of art, but this mythical origin is still reverberating in his lines. If we read them hyperbolically, we do not come to a satisfactory explanation, after all effecting nature is not a higher degree of aesthetic effect, it is rather qualitatively distinct from effects on a public of reasonable beings.

Art and Lustprinzip

2009-03-23T11:24:00.003+01:00

Freud reduces artistic expression to phantasmal realization of desire, akin to that of dreams and daydreams. When looking at the earliest instances of art, that is palaeolithic cave paintings, one must concede some truth value to his theory. These cave paintings often take on the form of phantasmal realisation of desire, they almost exclusively portray animals that were hunted for food or the act of hunting itself. On some walls traces of the impact of spears and arrows can be found, showing that the ritual was a mimesis of hunting, an artwork taking the place of the real object. This is as far as I can agree with Freud, but now I would rather choose to venture on the path of sociology and ask what social consequences these ancient magical practices had.

First of all we must realize that ancient art can not be reduced to the formula of phantasmal realization of desire, although it is one of its defining features. We are dealing with a society living in scarcity, where every working hour not spent rationally can threaten the survival of the community. Looking at cave paintings one realizes that an enormous amount of technical skill was required for such a naturalistic depiction (stylized depictions cropped up only later), hence a substantial amount of working hours had to be taken away from essential activities like gathering food, hunting, building shelter etc. We see that the first manifestation of the separation of material and intellectual production - a social circumstance that for Marx and Engels meant that for the first time social consciousness was more than a direct registering of social praxis - took the form of a magical activity being separated from the neccessities of survival.

What Freud can not explain is why so much effort was put into magical practices if daydreaming could have performed the function of phantasmal realisation of desire quite adequately. The answer is that at the heart of civilization lies a misconception. Cave paintings were not only a fantasy, but a fantasy to which causal effects were ascribed. The only rationale of having a craftsman-artist absent from hunting and gathering in the conditions of material scarcity is that artistic practice has a causal effect on material praxis. By enabling intellectual production to have a certain degree of autonomy from praxis this misconception enabled the birth of civilization.

Let us look at another formula that aims to describe the essence of art: Adorno's promesse du bonheur. The fantasy that found its expression in the first instances of art was not merely one of gratification of immediate practical needs, it entailed a promise and a desire for the world to be formed according to the dictates of reason. The ancient magician claimed to be able to form the world according to human needs through ritual, a desire that is homologous with the desire of enlightenment for the rationalization of the world. The ancient misconception is still at work millennia later in Kant and Hegel, in the stirring of the French revolution, in Marx and in Adorno and in the Universal declaration of human rights. This is the illusion at the core of illusion. While the incidental desires art expresses are multitudinous and can range from love to revolution, from pumpkin pie to a new pair of Adidas, at its core always lies a desire for freedom, with which art transcends the world and offers us a vision of the emancipated society.

Happiness

2009-03-09T19:06:00.002+01:00

Faust, part II, act 5, scene 3:

Das ist der Weisheit letzter Schluß:
Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben,
Der täglich sie erobern muß.
Und so verbringt, umrungen von Gefahr,
Hier Kindheit, Mann und Greis sein tüchtig Jahr.
Solch ein Gewimmel möcht' ich sehn,
Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn.
Zum Augenblicke dürft' ich sagen:
Verweile doch, du bist so schön!
Es kann die Spur von meinen Erdetagen
Nicht in Äonen untergehn. –
Im Vorgefühl von solchem hohen Glück
Genieß' ich jetzt den höchsten Augenblick.

A translation of the meaning of these lines:

This is the last judgement of wisdom:
Only he deserves freedom and life,
Who has to strive for them daily.
And so, surrounded by danger, strives
Through childhood, manhood and old age.
I want to see such swarming,
To stand amongst a free people on free soil.
I dare say to the moment:
Linger on, you are so beautiful!
The mark of my days on earth
Will not be erased in aeons. -
In anticipation of such happiness
I now enjoy the most blissful moment.

"Verweile doch, du bist so schön!" or "Linger on, you are so beautiful!" is of course the line with which Faust forefeits his soul and Mephistopheles is much amused to see this precious gift squandered on what he deems the emptiest and lowliest moment - the vain phantasies of an old blind man. God interprets this act somewhat differently and in an ending that is homologous to the one of the Threepenny opera - where the narrator anounces it with the words: "so that at least in the opera you may see how for once mercy triumphs over law." - he declares the contract by which Faust traded his soul not void, but suspended.

To this a part from dispatch number 6 from John Berger's Ten dispatches about endurance:

This can be put the other way round: on this earth there is no happiness without a longing for justice.

culture industry on steroids

2009-02-27T12:59:00.002+01:00

It would seem that contrary to popular belief that the chapter on the culture industry in Dialectics of enlightenment is too pessimistic - a symptom of a fundamental misunderstanding not only of the work, but philosophy in general - it was not pessimistic enough, as the contemporary fusion of culture and advertising demonstrates. Two cases in Slovenia are symptomatic. A few months ago a mobile phone network operating company (Mobitel) sponsored the broadcasting of a "concert" by the Gorillaz free of charge. As I am writing this post billboards are being covered with advertisements for a concert of the Killers, brought to us by the same company. The deal is this: if you subscribe to a specific price plan the company has to offer, you get the tickets free of charge. Horkheimer and Adorno had much to say about a culture industry that sells mass-produced products, aimed at eliciting prestandardised psychological responses from target audiences, thereby mimicking the productive process culture was meant to transcend. These recent developments are at once in continuity with the logic of the culture industry and an intensification of the tendencies Horkheimer and Adorno extrapolated. We are witnessing the cultural artefact becoming even more degraded, no longer does it even aim to achieve some standardised psychological response, like identification with a hero or heroine and their plight, but is merely a sideshow. The function of the cultural artefact in such a situation is not to be a product that is consumed for its own sake, but as advertising. Culture, in such instances, has truly become what Horkheimer and Adorno accused it to be: mere propaganda.

Practical mediation

2009-02-22T19:13:00.004+01:00

In his first thesis on Feuerbach Marx charted out the plan for a theory of mediation that would find its full development only in Adorno's idea of negative dialectics. The first thesis reads:

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.

According to Marx idealism develops the active side, that is the synthesising activity of the subject, but frames it abstractly. Kant's transcendental subject has to be abstracted from any empirical detetrminants if Kant's aim was to be achieved, the aim to save objectivity through the workings of the subject. If this subject was to be a historical subject its categories and contemplative forms (Anschaungsformen) could not claim objectivity, hence the possibility of synthetic judgements a priori (that is judgements that are not tautological, but still have validity independent of any and all empirical reality), that Kant aims to prove in the Critique of pure reason, would not exist. Marx has shown us the flaws of an abstract idea of mediation of the object through the subject, as is present in Kant as well as Hegel. The popular slogan of Marx merely inverting Hegel is ridiculous because it misses this fundamental point. Marx did not just turn Hegel on his head, but has discovered history proper, discovered that all knowledge is not mediated through an abstract subject, but through its empirical historical manifestation. This actually existing individual relates to the world through social labour, hence mediation must be thought of as an inherently practical activity.

Dialectics of public opinion

2009-02-22T18:51:00.002+01:00

In 1991 the translation of Habermas' Structural transformations introduced a term that became immensely popular, that of the public sphere. Critics pointed out that Habermas missed some rather obvious historical facts, namely exclusion of a large majority from political opinion forming processes and the embeddedness of communicative exchanges in relationships of power. This critique is at once correct and misses the point completely. Habermas was very much aware of exclusion, but argued - rather awkwardly - that the interests of the bourgeoisie coincided with the universal interest to such a degree that the identification of bourgeois reason with reason as such was feasible. Later this aporia was formulated more explicity with a resurrection of Kant's regulative ideal in the form of the "ideal speech situation" that is a purely communicative situation in which the speakers do not act instrumentally but communicatively, that is with the sole aim of establishing common understanding. As with Kant autonomy and freedom this regulative ideal is a curious chimeric creature. While both Kant and Habermas nominally treat it as pure counterfacticity, that is as something that is not empirically realised nor realisable, they use it as a supposition, that is as something empirically existing. Habermas tries to save the normative potential of public opinion by sundering it from its flawed manifestation in empirical reality. This path was left opened by his critics that were not radical enough in their critique, they questioned the historical accuracy of Habermas' account but did not go on to show how the negative side of public opinion - power, exclusion, dominance - is a constitutive moment of the phenomenon. What we are left with as a result is a sterile theory of public opinion - sterile, because it proceeds abstractely, not from actually existing individuals, to borrow a phrase from Marx - and an thoughtless praxis of public opinion polling that simply - as elisabeth Noelle-Neumann has done - denounces the normative ideal of public opinion because it does not correspond to empirical reality. What is needed is an immanent critique which would not abstract away the empirical foundation of opinion, but would keep the idea of public opinion it to its word, that is develop dialectically the tension between its pretense to rationality and its constitutive irrationality.

Ontology and dialectics

2009-02-16T12:57:00.003+01:00

The crucial difference between Heidegger and Adorno, or between affirmative and critical thinking, is that the former hypostizes Being while the latter sees it dialectically as mediated through empirical being, or as a note Adorno wrote in the last year of his life reads: "There is no transcendence without that which is transcended."

Empty signifier(s)

2009-02-16T12:02:00.009+01:00

Building on structuralist theories of language Laclau wants to convince us that in language there exist "empty signifiers". These are not signifiers without signifieds, which would not be signifiers at all, but signifiers which signify the constitutive impossibility of signifying. If - so Laclau argues - all identities in language are differential identities then the signifying of the borders of signifying would imply a distinction between language and non-language, would become another distinction and therefore part of language. But, as Hegel noted, to think the borders of a phenomenon is to go beyond these borders - and the signifying of the borders of language is therefore a signifying beyond the field of language - so there is an inherent impossibility of closure of language as a system, which is expressed in empty signifiers. There are a couple problems with such a formulation. First of all Saussure never claimed that all of language is based on purely differential identity, merely the signifier (the only identity the word "dog" has is that it is neither "god" nor "hog" nor "drag" nor "empiricism" ...) and even in this form the argument is problematic, as Plato had already shown in Kratylos (and as Poe demonstrated in the onomatopoeic lines: "A silken, sad uncertain rustling"). 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 (that the Greek alphabet was in its most archaic form mimetic bears testimony to that, so do the many instances of hieroglyphic writing). If there is an inherent impossibility of signifying to fully constitute itself, it is an impossibility the linguist, not the speaker faces. To add to the confusion Laclau has been unable to give a satisfactory example of an empty signifier. His examples include "emancipation" and "democracy", but these are merely contested and ambiguous concepts, they are by far not "empty".

The solution of the riddle of the empty signifier is provided by Adorno. In his lectures on Ontology and dialectics he also comes upon the inherent impossibility of signifying. But for him it is not a problem of the linguist, he sees this inherent impossibility in the fact that the concept, which is an abstraction, can never fully grasp, can never fully represent, or signify, its object. In Kant this impossibility is pushed aside in the idea of the infinitely heterogeneous "Ding an sich" - and the price he has to pay is that the object and the subject are radically sundered, objects becoming merely the infinitely malleable raw material for mind to work with - Hegel on the other hand relegates the problem to totality. But it was Heidegger who tried to solve the problem with reference to an empty signifier. As Adorno argues in his lectures, the concept of Being is at once the ultimate concept, aiming to signify everything - nuomena as well as phaenomena - thereby erasing the distance between concept and object, but at the same time it is the ultimate anti-concept, beacause as the highest form of abstraction it is the least able to signify anything particular. The concept of being is the empty signifier. Laclau erroneously talks about empty signifiers in the plural and he has an instinctive understanding of the matter, because the examples he gives are very much abstract. What he fails to see is that his examples represent only a move toward the empty signifier, the signifier signifying the limits of signification, which is to be found only at the highest level of abstraction in the concept of Being as Heidegger formulated it. But the limits of signification are not inherent to language as a sytem, they spring from the relationship between subject and object (Laclau's philosophy knows neither), the grinding of mind on matter, which it can never fully grasp. It is no wonder then that Laclau in a lecture he had on Saturday here in Ljubljana, tried to erase both nuomena and the Frankfurt school from the history of modern philosophy.

Mein Kampf

2009-02-07T22:10:00.003+01:00

One of the most destructive myths of the twentieth century is the one about Hitler's pathological personality. There is an almost unanimous consensus that the man was a monster, less human than any other historical persona, save only perhaps count Dracula, who had to relinquish his real existence to be fully incorporated into myth. Hitler remains firmly rooted in both myth and history and that is no coincidence. That the myth of his personal monstrosity is probably correct does not render it less problematic. It is the apology of society which refuses to acknowledge its own monstrosity. Hitler erroneously called the untrue society by its true name. The myth of Hitler today is merely an inversion of his personality cult, an explanation of totality via the particular, when in fact fascism was the manifestation of radical subordination of the particular under totality. It is the form that makes the true myth a lie. Adorno made a similar point in Minima Moralia 94 - Staatsaktion:

[Drama] interprets the seizing of power by the most powerful harmlessly as machination of rackets outside of society, not as the self-realization of society by itself.

Marx and natural science

2009-02-02T21:44:00.003+01:00

When Immanuel Wallerstein gave a talk titled "The heritage of sociology. The promise of social sciences," he identified six "challenges" to the traditional thinking of the social sciences. The fourth of them, so Wallerstein, stems from the natural sciences, specifically from the chemist Ilya Prigogine, who claimed that Newtonian physics had a limited applicability, it was applicable only to integrable systems, which are an exception among existing systems. In The end of certainty Prigogine claimed that most systems include "deterministic processes (between bifurcations) as well as probabilistic systems (in the choice of branches)".

What does this imply for one of the central postulates of Marxism, namely that "all of history is the history of class struggle." At first glance this would imply a completely deterministic social system, functioning according to objective laws. A second glance, especially one informed by the aforementioned "challenge", helps us to interpret Marx in a more productive way. If we were to accept that all history is the product of the dialectics between relationships and means of production, what would that imply for Marx' own intervention? Would it not mean that it was according to its own postulates futile, a mere reflection of the real base of society, which itself functions according to its inherent internal laws, unperturbed by the phantoms spooking the superstructure? Marx was of course not so naive to blindly saw off the branch he was sitting on, his intention was far more ambitious: the whole tree had to go, because it is - if we paraphrase Hölderlin - obscuring the young blossoming life underneath. The distinction between deterministic and probabilistic systems can help us to distinguish two types of history. One is the history of "business as usual", when a certain mode of production is dominant and a ruling class successfully maintains its hegemony. These stages of history can be analysed with a reference to the laws of class struggle. These are the stages between bifurcations. But there are also points when deterministic laws are not applicable, these are the moments of revolutions. The outcomes of revolutions are not arbitrary, or as Marx put it at the beginning of the Eighteenth brumaire: "People make their own history, but they do not make it as they please, not under self-selected circumstances, but under found, given and inherited circumstances." The important point though is that people do make their own history, that is, the outcome of revolutionary upheavals is not determined by the laws of history. Adorno seized upon the implications of this fact in Minima Moralia 100 - Sur l'eau: "As the inevitable question [of how an emancipated society would look like] is illegitimate, so is the answer inevitably repulsive and arrogant". The question is illegitimate precisely because the outcome of revolutionary upheavals is not determined, but springs from freedom. This freedom at once implies that the choice for a return to slavery is always a viable outcome of emancipation. A determined emancipation is no emancipation at all.

Ways of living

2009-01-24T10:35:00.002+01:00

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.

Immanent critique

2009-01-24T00:26:00.002+01:00

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.

Aphorism

2009-01-22T21:03:00.001+01:00

What were Zionists doing during the holocaust? Taking notes.

Goethe and reification

2009-01-20T11:15:00.004+01:00

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.

Paradigm: everything goes

2009-01-20T00:33:00.002+01:00

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.

The value of speculation

2009-01-06T20:24:00.002+01:00

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.

The mataphysics of Adorno?

2009-01-04T01:30:00.003+01:00

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.

Let's think a chair, shall we?

2009-01-01T18:10:00.002+01:00

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

2009-01-01T11:26:00.002+01:00

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.

Dialectical literature

2008-12-30T21:00:00.010+01:00

Bertolt Brecht considered using the term "dialectical theatre" for what has later become known - more appropriately - as "epic theatre". Such lax usage of the term dialectics is not particular to Brecht, Benjamin also made quite inappropriate references to dialectics. If we were to seek a properly dialectical piece of literature we would have to look at Hölderlin's magnificent elegy Hyperion. That the novel is dialectical is no coincidence since Hölderlin was a good friend of Hegel and they shared ideas and ideals: Lukacs describes - not without irony - how Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling had in their youth planted a tree in honour of the French revolution and danced around it. Lukacs interprets Hyperion as an elegy for the heroic phase of the bourgeois revolution, for the time the bourgeoisie glistened in the light of a grandiose self-deception, as Marx noted: "Its gladiators found in the rigorous classical legacy of the Roman republic the ideals and artistic forms, the self-deceptions it needed to conceal from itself the limited bourgeois character of its struggles and to raise its passion to the height of a great historical tragedy." If reactionary interpreters of Hölderlin (among which Lukacs forgets to mention Heidegger) tried to cleanse him of all historical content (class struggle), Lukacs commits the fault to interpret motifs and characters from Hyperion with a direct recourse to historical circumstances. The path I would prefer - and it is the path I also take with philosophical systems - is to treat the text as a coherent whole in which every element is first of all to be interpreted in context of the work and only then can the work as a whole be put into historical context. In the case of Hyperion the task therefore starts with uncovering the dialectical structure of the work.

The dialectical structure can be found on two levels: 1. the fabula, 2. explicit reflection by the characters. If we first turn to the fabula, we could read the three main characters as a dialectical whole. On one side we have the warrior Alabanda, the fiery youth who inflames Hyperion and moves him to action. On the other we have Diotima, Hyperion's great love, representing nature in its harmony, who has a rather passivizing effect on him. It is these two forces that are fighting inside the protagonist and which determine the state he finds himself in. Upon meeting Alabanda we can find Hyperion speaking these words in revolutionary fervour (first is the original, followed by my less then perfect translation):

Ich will, sagt ich, die Schaufel nehmen und den Kot in eine Grube werfen. Ein Volk, wo Geist und Größe keinen Geist und keine Größe mehr erzeugt, hat nichts mehr gemein, mit andern, die noch Menschen sind, hat keine Rechte mehr, und es ist ein leeres Possenspiel, ein Aberglauben, wenn man solche willenlose Leichname noch ehren will, als wär ein Römerherz in ihnen. Weg mit ihnen! Er darf nicht stehen, wo er steht, der dürre faule Baum, er stiehlt ja Licht und Luft dem jungen Leben, das für eine neue Welt heranreift.

I want to, I said, take a shovel and hurl the manure into a pit. A people, where spirit and greatness do not spur spirit and greatness, has nothing in common with others, who are still human. It has no rights, and it is mere farce, a superstition, to believe such corpses can be honoured like a roman heart were beating in their chest. Away with them! The rotten tree can not stand where it stands, it is obscuring the young life, the ripening new world.

But alas! upon meeting Diotima, we find the same Hyperion speaking these words:

Was kümmert mich der Schiffbruch der Welt, ich weiß von nichts, als meiner seligen Insel.

What do I care for the shipwreck of the world, I know of nothing but my blissful island.

We find the protagonist being subject to the balance of two moments, on one the warrior principle, a disharmonious activating force, on the other love, a harmonious passivizing force. The second level where we come across dialectics are reflections by characters. The way Hyperion envisions the perfect order of the world is fundamentally dialectical. He wants to bring society in harmony with nature once again, and at the core of nature he finds the principle of beauty. How does Hyperion envision this principle? As a balance of contrasting forces, or - may I be so bold to say - of dialectic moments. When describing the ideal people, the Athenians, he says:

Kein außerordentlich Schicksal erzeugt den Menschen. Groß und kollosalisch sind die Söhne einer solchen Mutter, aber schöne Wesen, oder, was dasselbe ist, Menschen werden sie nie, oder spät erst, wenn die Kontraste sich zu har bekämpfen, um nicht endlich Frieden zu
machen.

Man is not created by an extraordinary destiny. Great and colossal are the sons of such a mother, but they never or only late become beautiful beings, or, what is the same, human, if the contrasts are in too sharp an opposition to come to peace.

Continuing, he discovers dialectics as the essence of philosophy (something else Hegel agreed on with Hölderlin):

Das große Wort, das εν διαφερον εαυτω (das Eine in sich selber unterschiedne) des Heraklit, das konnte nur ein Grieche finden, denn es ist das Wesen der Schönheit, und ehe das gefunden war, gabs keine Philosophie.

Only a Greek could find the great word, the εν διαφερον εαυτω (The one that is differentiated in itself) of Heraclitus. It is the essence of beauty and before it was found there could be no philosophy.

For dialectical thinkers from Heraclitus onwards the internal forces of the contrasting moments are the driving force of change - as the dialectics of Spirit was the driving force of history for Hegel, so class struggle was the driving force of history for Marx. Heraclitus had thus avoided a problem all prima philosphia had been stuck with - the problem of the prime mover. Heraclitus answered simply that movement had no prime mover, because there is no initial static state that needed to be moved. Change is the perpetual order of the world and this change does not result from a first cause, but from the dialectics of nature, from intrinsic properties of each and every object existing in nature. Compare now Alabanda's opinion on the matter:

Ich fühl' in mir ein Leben, das kein Gott geschaffen, und kein sterblicher gezeugt. Ich glaube, daß wir durch uns selber sind, und nur aus freier Lust so innig mit dem All verbunden.

In me I feel a life that no god has spawned and no mortal created. I believe that we exist through ourselves, and that we are so deeply connected to existence merely by free will.

Other examples of dialectical thought can easily be found, but I will take that I have provided sufficient examples to convince the reader of my point that dialectics are the fundamental structuring principle of the novel. Now we can move one step further, and see at what point Hölderlin surpassed his friend Hegel. I will attempt to prove that Hölderlin's dialectics are not merely subjective as Hegel's, but that it represents a first step towards materialism (of course - historically speaking - it was a step into a blind alley since Marx found the path to a materialist dialectics through Feuerbach). The element that transcends mere idealism is destiny. If for the conservative Hegel the march of spirit towards self-realization is determined only by its own inner dialectics (Hegel had found the decadent protocapitalims of Germany quite comfortable) for Hölderlin it is destiny that opposes the self-realization of the harmonious society. Destiny - of which Hölderlin has but a vague understanding - is the force that opposes the harmony towards which humanity is striving. It is the material force which prevents the subjective dialectics, the self-realization of spirit, to take its course. As opposed to Hegel and the bourgeoisie as a whole, Hölderlin was not prepared to shed the great ideals that propelled the bourgeoisie to power like a worn-out coat. But for him destiny was an arbitrary foreign force, he did not yet understand society as Marx did: for whom the failure of great bourgeois ideals was the natural order of things since they were a tool the bourgeoisie used and that it discarded as soon as it ceased to fulfil its function. Hölderlin can be compared to Kafka and Euripides: for all of them destiny is a foreign element that crushes the individual, but none of them had a full understanding of the material basis of destiny, none of them understood, as Brecht did, that people make their own destiny, that - as Marx had put it: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please, not under circumstances of their own choosing, but under given and inherited circumstances. The tradition of all dead societies burdens the minds of the living like a nightmare." If they did, they could have said as Brecht did in the closing lines of the Threepenny opera:

Verfolgt das Unrecht nicht zu sehr, in Bälde
Erfriert es schon von selbst, denn es ist kalt.
Bedenkt das Dunkel und die große Kälte
In diesem Tale, das von Jammer Schallt.

Do not persecute injustice too harshly,
outside it will soon freeze by itself.
Think of the darkness and the great cold
in this valley that echoes with wailing.

The metaphor strikes back

2008-12-30T18:14:00.002+01:00

Metaphors are sneaky little buggers. True, they might help you get your point across more clearly and vividly and are particularly suited to become part of intellectual world history - few people are unaware that capital lives a "vampire like" existence, that religion is the "opium of the people", that capitalism encloses us in an "iron casing" etc. Of course there are those instances of metaphors gone terribly wrong, like the one about the "base" and "superstructure" which has caused terrible misunderstandings, but there is another way metaphors can, like Frankenstein's "monster", develop a life of their own and take vengeance on their creator. One such unruly metaphor is Plato's cave. Plato meant to illustrate his theory of the double realms (ideas and phenomena), but ended up showing that his theory is logically inconsistent. The main problem of his conceptualization is (as Aristotle showed in his Metaphysics) that it does not show how these two fundamentally distinct realms, the realm of ideas and the realm of phenomena, can have anything in common, how ideas can spawn phenomena as their imperfect images. Even before Aristotle answered that they can not, at least if we understand them as independent spheres, Plato's cave showed the flaws of such conceptualization. In the story Plato describes people in a cave, chained so they can move neither their bodies nor their heads. Behind these people there is a fire and in front of the fire figures are carried to and fro. The imprisoned know nothing of this, but see only shadows of objects being thrown on a wall in the cave. Since they can not see the origins of the shadows, they mistake them for the figures themselves. Ah! but you will notice that all of a sudden we are confronted not with two - as Plato would have us believe - but with three spheres: that of shadows (phenomena), that of figures (ideas) and that of light. The latter has no equivalent in Plato's philosophy, indeed even Aristotle's solution to the problem of incommensurability does not solve it with recourse to the mysterious third element. The metaphor of the cave was centuries before its time, a true prophesy of things to come: it was only Kant who discovered that the subject is the source of light that is joining phenomena and nuomena.

A priori, a posteriori or Heidegger contra Kant

2008-12-20T00:02:00.003+01:00

Recently I have become interested in the problem of epistemology and Kant's Critique of pure reason seemed like a good starting point. Kant makes quite a convincing point about a priori categories, namely time and space. He claims that these categories are preconditions for any sensory and cognitive activity. Categories should be distinguished from ideas and concepts: that the subject necessarily has an a priori category of time does not mean that it has a positive idea of time (the fact that the idea of time is culturally specific - linear and circular time being two most common examples - would obviously disprove that) but that there necessarily exists a category which allows phenomena to exist in the relationship of before and after. If this were not an a priori category no meaningful interaction would be possible, because we would not be able to conceptualize things like action/reaction, cause/effect, even a notion of self - which is at its core a notion of temporal continuity - would be quite impossible. After proving this point Kant is content to leave the matter as it stands and does not investigate into the origins of these a priori categories. He was wise enough to know that in the context of his philosophical system this endeavour would have been futile. The problem is that it is framed as an epistemological, not ontological, problem. In the context of idealism with its fixation on the primacy of the subject all ontology boils down to epistemology in the end, that is why the answer necessarily eluded Kant.

Fast forward then to Heidegger, a man who could have been a great philosopher, were his tremendous sagacity not coupled with an even greater measure of senselessness. To put it more precisely: a man, who refused to take the obvious step all the inconsistencies and paradoxes of his system called for - the step from metaphysics to materialism - only for the sake of acting as a mouthpiece of the Third Reich, even as the Reich had been long dead. I will be so bold to take this step, the step his servile cowardice prevented him to take, for him. For Heidegger in Being and time then the starting point was not epistemology, he took a broader perspective and claimed that being-in-the-world is antecedent and is a precondition for knowing the world. This allows us to solve the riddle of the origin of a priori categories: they are ontological characteristics of the subject's being-in-the-world, time and space are something that the subject shares with the object, and only by virtue of this commonality can the subject know anything about the world. For Kant a priori categories were something at home in the subject, they were something the subject imposed on the world, no wonder then that the object - the infamous Ding an sich - eluded him. The truth is that a priori categories are not merely subjective and it is this fact which makes cognition possible in the first place. The problem with Heidegger is that upon discovering this fact he ran amok and tried to subsume everything to the realm of Dasein. While there can be no doubt that time and space as physical categories are things society and individuals can have little influence on, Heidegger envisions the whole of society to this be similarly beyond reproach and adds history to boot. His philosophy becomes a giant apology for the status quo, the most ferocious one since Hegel, indeed ferocious enough that Heidegger's epitaph might have read: "No, you must not think everything is true, merely that it is necessary."

sterile sexuality

2008-12-13T16:32:00.006+01:00

When Habermas was first writing about the public sphere he used the ideal types of mass and public to define the degree of "publicness" of an opinion. I thought it might be useful to pursue the same path to define an aesthetic public sphere. That is why I am - among other things - reading Freud's mass psychology and ego analysis. In it Freud notes that the libidinous binding force of the mass is unrealizable or zielgehemmt - the pleasure derived is not from fulfillment but from deferment. It is this element that makes the bond permanent: the mass does not satisfy its victims, for if it did, it would cease to exist. It does not disappoint them, for if it did, it would cease to exist. Rather it promises and what it promises is another promise. This is an interesting vantage point to approach the culture industry from since it is this infernal characteristic that makes up for its noxious character: the products of the culture industry are not even vulgar, they do not even satisfy the most base and primitive desires, the way folk culture used to. Rather they induce a perpetual frustration. This is the point a lot of misunderstanding of Adorno originates from: people charge him with elitism since he supposedly favoured elite over popular culture. Far from this Adorno and Horkheimer claimed in Dialectics of enlightenment that the problem of the culture industry is that it is neither high culture that marks the hypocrisy of bourgeois society, nor is it popular culture of those excluded from elite culture, it is imposed on the masses by elites.

The following video by Britney Spears is a good case in point:

Britney Spears - Womanizer (Clip Video)
Uploaded by Britney_Jean_Spears

I do not want those people behind the wheel

2008-11-27T20:44:00.003+01:00

In an earlier post I scolded Slavoj Žižek for his position on the economic crisis. His idea was that the bailout is unfair, but in the current system the rich have to be helped for the poor to be saved, so he concluded with: "obey, but think". What irritated me then - and what has irritated me for as long as I have known Žižek's writing - is the reactionary character of someone who has the audacity to present himself as a progressive thinker. Now it would seem that - what a surprise - US banks are using the no-strings-attached 700 billion to buy other banks and not much of the money will trickle down to the people it was intended to help:

Base and superstructure

2008-11-27T13:08:00.003+01:00

The metaphor of base and superstructure that Karl Marx used in the preface to his Contribution to a critique of political economy is one of the most often misunderstood metaphors, which is no wonder since a vast number of people don't bother to read anything besides this preface and perhaps Engel's letter to Borgius. Engels was - like Althusser - interpreting this metaphor as a determination in the last instance, a indirect and mediated determination, but a one-way determination none the less. The obvious problem with such a conceptualization is that it negates entirelly the radical political moment of marxism - philosophers would be doomed to merely interpret the world. We should not be taking this metaphor too seriously, since with it Marx was summing up his thinking from the time he was writing his Contribution to a critique of Hegel's philosophy of right. The obvious path would be then to look at this text to make sense of the metaphor. The preface already shows that a one-way determinism is not what Marx meant with base and superstructure. He claims that only by having philosophy reveal the laws of historical development will the proletariat be able to become a revolutionary force - hence the upheaval of the base is dependant upon action from the superstructure. A further point can be made if we look at Marx' critique of religion. He claims that religion is in a functional connection to social praxis:

Religious misery is in a sense an expression of real misery and in another a protest against real misery. Religion is the sigh of the tormented creature, the conscience of a heartless world, as it is the spirit of bleak circumstances. It is the opium of the people.

A second important point is made in the Feuerbach part of the German ideology. Here Marx and Engels claim that social consciousness was originally merely directly registering praxis. As material and intellectual production split, consciousness itself gained autonomy. The important point is that the relationship of base and superstructure is not a constant but historically variable. We could therefore speak of a one-way determinism only in societies that did not yet develop speech and where intellectual production is fully integrated into material production. Since we have instances of technically accomplished cave paintings - that is to say paintings done by someone with artistic training, hence someone who specialized in intellectual work - from as early as the late paleolithic, this pure determinism is a very distant historical state.

Tiepolo and Zuccarelli

2008-11-27T11:58:00.003+01:00

As I reread my previous post I realized I had written something that might strike the reader as odd; I attributed to Tiepolo and Zuccarelli the playful rendition of everyday life. Surely this does not hold for Tiepolo who was thematically speaking very much in the baroque tradition: biblical scenes and depictions of the lives of saints are predominant with the occasional mythological motive from ancient Greece or Rome. Zuccarelli fits more closely to my description, but he liked to portray idyllic country scenes, sometimes adding mythical figures like fawns to spice up scenes of bacchantic folly. None of the two painters was interested in depicting the life of the rising bourgeoisie - since most of Tiepolos work was commissioned either by the church or by aristocracy, he was still rooted firmly in the old order of the world. Zuccarelli also had patrons among the aristocracy, but his paintings were obviously intended for a different function, not for public exhibition but for private enjoyment, for the aristocracy that was already under the sway of bourgeois values. Tiepolo's paintings were obviously meant for public use in the context of what Habermas had called representative publicity - the public showcasing of authority. This is revealed in the excessive pathso of his compositions, baroque drama taken to the extreme, but on the other hand the colour palette reveals an entirely different story. Baroque painters had discovered the dramatic effect of light and shadow and even master of colour like Rembrandt in his later years (Johannes Itten noted that Rembrandt's colours are like gems glittering in the darkness) subordinated colour to the effects of light and shadow. If baroque can be characterised as dramatic (deviating from the rationalism of the renaissance and the middle ages), the 18. century is somewhat schizophrenic: on the one hand compositions are nearly bursting with dynamism, everything that was still solid in baroque now melts away, every trace of rationalism and order that the baroque retained is abandoned in favour of drama. The colour palette on the other hand became by far less serious, the dramatic opposition of dark and light gave way to the play of bright colours, harsh contrasts are avoided, there are no uniform expressive planes of colour, everything is in motion, everything is in harmony and everything expresses a joie de vivre. It is this quality of colour that is chronicling the ongoing social transformation. It expresses the very ideal of bourgeois intimacy. Art of the 18. century is a prophesy, it is the trumpet that singalls the by now inevitable triumph of the bourgeoisie.

Bourgeois sentimentalism

2008-11-14T23:20:00.008+01:00

The other day I was listening to a radio programme, in which a Roman publisher was talking about how Boris Pahor (among other things Knight of the Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur and repeated nominee for the Nobel prize in literature) was for a long time virtually unknown in Rome. What struck me was not so much the provincialism of Rome, but the words the publisher chose to praise the writer, taken right from the stock of romanticist criticism: he praised the "depth" of his writing and the "sincerity" of his testimony. It made me wonder whether Habermas was right in Theory of communicative action to ban art to the realm of intimate testimony, to be judged according to the criterion of sincerity. Was the historical avant-garde just a fleeting flash of light that made the subsequent darkness all the harder to bear?

To properly understand sentimentalism, we must go back in time a bit. It is inextricably intertwined with the rise of the bourgeoisie, which during the 18. century discovered a whole new phenomenon, completely foreign to feudal society - intimacy and the subjective experience housed by this sphere of life. As the bourgeoisie was also beginning to take the leading role in the realm of culture, this preoccupation with subjectivity also appeared in art: whether in introspective literature, the predominance of melody in music (one need only think of the emotion-laden melodies of Mozart) or of the playful rendition of everyday life in painting (Tiepolo or Zuccarelli come to mind). Biedermeier of course represents the grotesque peak of this movement - intimacy gone awry - expressing a radically entrenched privatism, fleeing from the gradual decay of progressive bourgeois ideals and their immanent shattering in the reactionary reflexes of 1848.

I do not want to argue that under the sway of sentimentalism critical art is unable to flourish, but there is a danger of intimacy becoming an alibi for the flaws of the world, or as Adorno put it in Minima Moralia 110 - Constanze:

As longing for that which dispenses with labour the bourgeois idea of love transcends bourgeois society. But by constructing the true as unmediated in the all-present untrue it perverts the former and transforms it into the latter. Not only does pure emotion, insofar as it is possible at all in the economically determined system, become a social alibi for the hegemony of interest and acclaims a humanity that does not exist. But the unwilfulness of love itself, even when not a priori practically oriented, contributes to this totality as soon as it is established as a principle.

It is in artists such as Euripides and Kafka that a rising dischord is felt between private destiny and the order of the world. While still staying in the confines of metaphysics - the notion of fate is strong with both writers - the order of the world is no longer seen as inherently just and rational, it is no longer pure form, but takes on an arbitrary and alltogehter alien character. Here we witness the sprouting of the same intellectual seed that Marx planted in German Ideology and Contribution to the critique of political economy, namely the realization that ideas are not the governing principle of the world, or as we could put it in Adorno's terms: recognition of the non-identical. It is from this rupture between form and heteronomy of the non-identical that critical thought emerges as Athena from Zeus' head. Similarly it is at the point where it transcends psychology that bourgeois sentimentalism is critical. No one understood this better than Ivan Cankar, when he described the reaction of children to the letter announcing their father's death in world war one:

That evening something unknown from lands far away disturbed the heavenly light with a violent hand, it struck the hollidays, stories and fairytales mercilessly. A letter had anounced that father "fell" in Italy. "He fell". Something unknown, new, foreign, completely incomprehensible was standing before them, high and mighty, but it had no face, nor had it eyes, neither had it a mouth. It belonged to nowhere; not to this vibrant life in front of church and on the street, not to this warm dusk on the oven, not even to fairytales. It was not happy, but not particularly sad either; it was dead, since it had no eyes to reveal why and from where it came, and no mouth to tell it. Thought stood miserable and shy before this enormous apparition like before a mighty black wall and could go nowhere. It came close to the wall, stood there and was speechless.

Juxtaposition

2008-11-09T02:35:00.004+01:00

Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectics of enlightenment:

The subject of the new ideology is the world as such. By elevating wicked existence to the realm of facts it makes use of the cult value of fact. By virtue of such transmission mere existence becomes the surrogate of meaning and justice. Whatever the camera reproduces is beautiful.

Kafka in Der Prozess:

"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."

Lapsus lingue

2008-11-06T09:25:00.006+01:00

I am currently at the Arts, Culture and Public Sphere conference in Venice, organized by the IUAV and the ESA. Yesterday Mark Jacobs gave a very inspiring lecture, where he pointed out three different perspectives from which art can be approached: art as market (the instrumental aspects of expressive practices), market as art (the expressive aspects of instrumental practices) and art as existential (existential and moral issues negotiated and expressed through art). I was captivated enough not to be able to take notes, so I will disappoint you by not recounting his lecture in detail. Yet there is one seemingly insignificant and minute detail that caught my attention, and I will report on it: the omission of Horkheimer from the authorship of Dialectics of enlightenment. One might think of it as nothing more than an accidental slip of the tongue, after all, as Freud noted: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Let us not engage into speculation about the possible latent psychological motivation of the author though - after all I would not like to reproach somebody I hold in the highest esteem with following ulterior motives - what is of interest is the act itself. I noticed the same phenomenon a few weeks ago when a friend sent me an MMS greeting from Berlin with a picture of the statues of Marx and Engels, or to be precise, with the statue of Marx; Engels had been cropped in Stalinist manner. This tradition of strategic concealment of the base has a long history. Plato wrote about dialectics as the highest form of human endeavour, yet never once mentioned that this freedom - the freedom to think, if not necessarily of thought - had been won only at the price of unfree labour of others. In German idealism the spirit hovered above the world, and it took the combined effort of Feuerbach and Marx to ground it in praxis. Similarly it was Horkheimer's enterprising spirit as head of the Institute that enabled Adorno to produce such a vast corpus of work. The bliss of philosophy – which for Adorno lay in the elevation above praxis – can be achieved only on account of others being subject to praxis the more ruthlessly. When thought is trying to escape the "wicked society" as Horkheimer and Adorno had called it in Dialectics of enlightenment, it is actually making this hell a little less bearable for those not as fortunate to be above it. The freedom one is given caries with itself an inextricable responsibility.

objectivity

2008-10-30T09:38:00.002+01:00

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

2008-10-26T13:32:00.003+01:00

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

2008-10-25T10:20:00.001+02:00

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!

2008-10-25T01:05:00.017+02:00

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

2008-10-23T23:39:00.004+02:00

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

2008-10-12T23:32:00.002+02:00

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

Žižek calls for Gelassenheit

2008-10-12T21:03:00.013+02:00

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?

2008-10-03T13:33:00.002+02:00

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.

Non-places

2008-09-30T00:04:00.005+02:00

In the previous post I have outlined Adorno's vision of utopia. This should be distinguished from the way Marcuse used the term in The end of utopia. Marcuse claims that ideals of the emancipated society have often been reproached with being "utopian". He then goes on to prove that an emancipated society is possible - or at least that it is impossible to claim that it is not possible. But Marcuse himself adds to the confusion of terms that critics of critical theory have made use of when accusing Marxism of "utopianism". U-tupia, the non-place, should not be understood as a plan for reality to follow. As Adorno showed the question of whether redemption can ever come is besides the point - but I would go even further and claim that posing this question already distorts the function of utopia. Utopia is a regulatory mechanism, an imaginary vantage point set into emancipated society from which our world is viewed. This is the meaning of non-place: the vantage point of the utopian gaze is beyond the world. Yet because it is never possible to step outside the world this gaze remains bound by it, it remains a historical contingency. In fact it is bound by history the strongest when it feigns independence, thereby regressing to mere ideology. The point of utopia is not to gaze upon emancipated society, but to step into emancipated society and gaze upon the existing. But since every utopian view is historically contingent, each historically existing society constructs a different emancipated society, utopia is not static. Utopian society can not be fixed for all times, but fulfills its functions only if it changes together with the society it mirrors.

O Freunde, nicht diese Töne

2008-09-29T19:43:00.010+02:00

Adorno concluded his Minima Moralia with an essay contemplating the role of eschatology for critical thought:

The only philosophy that can be responsibly practised in the face of despair, would be the attempt to observe all things as they appear from the standpoint of redemption. Cognizance has no light but that which shines on the world from redemption: all else is exhausted in repetition and remains mere technique.

And even if we agree that: "Compared to the demand thereby laid upon [thinking] the question of the reality of redemption itself is nearly irrelevant," the question of what redemption looks like remains immensely important. From the standpoint of a redemption that is itself repetition of the existing the faults of the world are concealed, affirmed and reinforced, not brought into the light. But what are the predominating visions of redemption but repetitions of the existing? We are forced to ask as Schiller did in Shakespeare's shadows: "Why do you flee from yourself, when it is yourself you seek?" Even great works of art - or perhaps those especially - are not immune, the promesse du bonheur they utter tends to be as far from redemption as the world it is trying to flee. What is most noticeable about the great finale of Beethoven's ninth is that there is not one spark of tenderness to be found in the pompous fireworks of joy. Fleeing from the misery of the world one is struck over the head with it thousandfold. What Adorno wrote about Strauss in part holds for Beethoven:

The misery of the sunrise in Richards Strauss' Alpensymphonie is not caused merely by banal sequences, but by splendour itself. No sunrise namely, not even that in high mountains, is pompous, triumphant, majestic, but appears weak and hesitating like the hope that all might turn out well in the end, and in such inconspicuousness of the mightiest light lies its moving magnificence.

True redemption, whenever it appears, is hard to discern, not because it is hidden, but because it is fragile and tender, not to be perceived in the overpowering racket of trumpets and timpani, but at the border between sound and silence:

And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation. Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you. (Luke 17:20-21)

True redemption was captured by Mozart in Zauberflöte. Not in Die Strahlen der Sonne though, but in Papagena, Papagena, Papagena. There we can feel true grace, awarded to the weak not because of their merits but in spite of their flaws. Stubbornly adhering to a vision of redemption that is not and can never be earned Zauberflöte opposes the world in the name of a better, a world whose strenght lies in its frailty.

Sapere aude!

2008-09-28T18:46:00.002+02:00

Kant demanded free reasoning but forgot that reason itself is not free.

A fragment on love

2008-09-27T00:32:00.002+02:00

I do not even measure time in minutes and hours and days and weeks any more, but in hearing from you: every time is a heartbeat and between lies an eternity. It is the same every time, my torture repeated, living for moments that are as fleeting as the silence between them is deafening. Were the heartbeats to stop, what then? Would I die, would I find absolution, would I find apocalypse or apocatastasis? I am just another impotent prick, chasing flashes of light (oh, but what a warm and bright glow you are) like a moth, stumbling and fumbling around spectres of a thousand false moons. To everyone seeing through the illusion we moths do look like complete fools. But know this: their self-assuredness is itself nothing more than illusion.

Is that Marx I smell on you, herr Heidegger?

2008-09-26T09:08:00.003+02:00

The parallels that exist between Heidegger and critical theory are striking. One need only compare Wesen der Technik and Dialektik der Aufklärung. Heidegger claims that we necessarily misconstrue the essence of technology if we look at it as a means to an end or as something people do. While these viewpoints are correct, they are not true - that is they do not grasp the essence of technology. The essence of technology for him is to be sought by following the etymology of the word to its Greek origin techne. Techne meant a way of knowing and through technology for Heidegger the world is revealed in a certain way. Modern technology relates to the world as a Be-stand (quite impossible to translate, some use "standing reserve"), a reserve of energy that can be harboured - in this way the earth becomes the harbinger of coal or oil, while the traditional understanding of the field for the peasant was as something that needed to be nurtured. The danger Heidegger sees is that if this relationship to the world as Bestand is taken to its extreme, humans - who are also part of nature - will relate to each other as mere Bestände, and never be in touch with their essence.

It is quite easy to find empirical equivalents of Heidegger's somewhat perplexing writing. The operation that transforms the world into Bestand is the transformation of use value into trade value. As capital the world can be accumulated and as capital it is used to turn people into Bestände, making it possible to extract more capital from their work. An even more intimate link can be found between Wesen der Technik and Dialektik der Aufklärung. Adorno and Horkheimer similarly devote their attention to a specific relating to the world - Aufklärung or enlightenment. This stance towards the world is an instrumental one, it aims at dominating nature but the price humanity has had to pay for this control was high: in the process of enlightenment (which is not to be confused with the historical epoch of the same name, the process is broader and only culminates in this epoch) humanity has extended this instrumentalist posture to themselves, domination of other human beings has been inextricably connected to domination of nature. In Heidegger's terms: humans extend the relating as Bestand from nature to themselves.

But let us not be fooled into lumping these quite diverse philosophical traditions together on account of a few common themes. Nietzsche supposedly once wrote that he who sees too many similarities between different philosophical systems should get a better pair of glasses. Let us therefore take a closer look at the differences between these two positions. Adorno and Horkheimer claim that we have come full circle: before the process of enlightenment started, our lives were governed completely by necessity, today they are again. The only change that had happened is that natural necessity has given way to economic one: if caveman was blindly subjected to the arbitrary events in nature he could neither control nor understand, so today we are blindly subjected to the arbitrary events of the economic system we can neither control (and on this point neo-liberals will agree first of all) nor understand. Adorno and Horkheimer turn to a critique of enlightenment only to save it from itself. The ideal remains the same: emancipation, subjecting our lives to our own free will instead of external arbitrary forces. This emancipation is not the telos of history (like Hegel's idea of the self-realization of spirit) nor is it the essence of humanity - whenever it is present it is purely negative, a possibility that was never realized but that can be grasped as such. As Adorno had put it in his answer to Popper: "only to those that can imagine it as different from the one currently existing does society, to use Popper's term, pose a problem; only by what it is not will it unveil itself as what it is, and that should be the object of a sociology that does no limit itself, as the majority of its projects does, to projects of public and private administration." What the dialectics of enlightenment is endangering is not any metaphysical essence of humanity, but the never manifested - yet inalienable - right to lead a free life. For Adorno and Horkheimer that, which is, calls upon humanity, but negatively, by revealing itself as what it might become. For Heidegger on the other hand Dasein calls upon humanity affirmatively. As he had put it in Wesen der Technik: "[Gestell] is the way in which the real unveils itself as Bestand. Now we ask: does this unveiling happen somewhere beyond human activiy? No. But it does not happen merely in the human nor essentially through him." Notice the similarity in phrasing between Heidegger and Adorno: they both talk of unveiling (Adorno uses the word ent-hüllen, Heidegger ent-bergen, they both imply that truth is revealed by lifting a barrier that prevents it to be seen), but the crucial difference is that for Adorno truth is revealed through a critical relationship to the world, for Heidegger it is purely affirmative. This is the crucial difference between Adorno's critical theory and Heidegger's metaphysics. The similarities are explained by Adorno in Minima Moralia, 122 - Monnograme: "Not the last of the tasks facing thinking is to put all reactionary arguments against western culture into the service of advancing enlightenment."

Trading badges

2008-09-17T13:07:00.003+02:00

In my opinion one of the greatest movie scenes ever shot is the badge scene in Schindler's list. It is right at the end of the movie when Schindler reflects that what he has done was not enough, that he could have saved more people. He has wasted too much money, he kept the car that would have bought 10 people, and the gold NSDAP badge he wears would have bought at least one more life. At first it would seem that the audience is drowned in a tide of sentimentalism. But something happens that blocks the impending catharis; the tide recedes, yet we are still unable to draw a breath. For when the tide recedes, that which repelled it stands revealed: the grotesque. The schock comes not from identification with Schindler and his remorse that more lives could have been bought, but from the realization that life has a price. A puny badge is equivalent to that which should be beyond all worth. If Schindler's trading at first glance seemed heroic, now we are forced to realize the truth of Adorno's claim: "There is no right life in the wrong."

Aura

2008-09-13T12:03:00.004+02:00

Aura is a crucial concept of Walter Benjamin's essay The work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility. The core idea of the essay is that technical reproducibility is dissolving the aura of the artwork by loosening its ties to tradition and ritual and is thereby an emancipatory effect. I have already criticized the technological determinism of Benjamin's essay and now it is time to ask whether the critical concept of aura can be salvaged. What is aura according to Benjamin? The essay lacks a clear definition. He starts by discussing "originality". He writes that with technical reproducibly the originality of the work of art, it's "here and now /.../ it's unique existence in the place where it is present," is dissolving. In this process the Aura, the "unique impression of distance, as close it may be" is also lost. Aura was reproduced by ritual, it was part of the traditional use of art, it had cult value.

What are we to think of the enigmatic definition of aura: "unique impression of distance, as close as it may be" It reminds us of Barthes' description of myth as alibi. He presents us with the image of a train ride during which one is looking through the window: as ones own reflection on the glass and the view through the window are never in the same place, so the mythical (second-order) signifier and signified can not be grasped as a whole. The whole (the sign) therefore acquires the characteristic of an infernal distance, and this distance increases with closeness. Closeness is the modus operandi of myth for Barthes: when we are presented with the image of the saluting soldier, French imperialism is right there, presenting itself as the most obvious commonsensical fact. But at the same time it eludes us with its infernal distance, it jumps just out of reach at the moment we reach for it. What Barthes analysed was aura in the age of technological reproducibility.

Benjamin made the mistake of tackling aura from a purely technological viewpoint. Therefore he could not see that aura could flourish even in face of technological reproducibility. Creation of aura is a process that transcends the creation, reproduction and reception of works of art. In romanticism for example discourses of "genius" accompanied art and made sure it is received with awe for the singular abilities of the artist-god. The culture industry creates stars for the same purpose, although it produces for a mass market and is therefore geared towards the highest level of technical reproducibility and the availability of its products is even enhanced by illegal exchange on the internet. Benjamin exhibited a naive trust in the masses and their need to "bring things close" since - as Barthes has shown - an illusion of closeness is the modus operandi of myth.

But Barthes' brilliant analysis of signifying processes also does not bring us closer to an emancipatory theory of art. In a sense Barthes' analysis is even narrower - and perhaps this is the only reason fewer problems can be pointed out - because his analysis is limited to the structure of myth and ignores the whole context of it's creation and reception, it is completely ahistorical. His belief that by analysing myths they will lose their function was just as naive. A theory that is to have emancipatory potential must take into account social conditions of the production and effectiveness of aura. I see two particularly useful starting points for this endeavour. On the one hand are Adorno's writings on the culture industry and his idea that for art to have a critical potential it's production must have some level of autonomy from social praxis. His search was also for a form, but an emancipatory one: he believed that only that form which actively resists incorporation into praxis can have critical potential. By the very act of resistance it is a prophecy of a world in which "happiness is be above praxis". This is what promesse de bonheur means for Adorno. On the other is the idea of an aesthetic public sphere which is capable of critical reflection on works of art while individualised recipients are easy prey for manipulation.

Night of the living dead

2008-09-12T19:19:00.006+02:00

This will be a post on post. It seems we are living in a post world, words with the prefix are springing up like daisies on a spring pasture. Notwithstanding the most obvious objection that adding the prefix post does not say anything substantial: we might as well say that philosophy today is post-scholastic and have it done with, say that we are living in the post-palaeolithic and that our art is post-baroque, the real problem is that the prefix does not only reveal an intellectual confusion, but that it is ideological. It's aim is to conceal a reactionary movement in all spheres of modern life. The process is the same everywhere one looks: take a name of a progressive movement (in either art, philosophy, politics or social sciences), strip it of all progressive tendencies and attach the prefix. A good example is post-modernism in art. The historical avant-garde developed means of expression that aimed at a revolutionary impact: no more and no less than a thorough social transformation by the aesthetic realm. In post-modernism these devices have survived, but have become assimilated by the institution art that the historical avant-garde rebelled against. In this process the avant-garde has been reduced to a set of ornaments, set to adorn a resurrected affirmative culture. And as Adorno noted, culture is the mechanism by which class domination is internalized. It, that can exist only by exclusion, has produced a sphere that promised pure humanity to the select few - it should be noted that just as slave labour was constitutive of philosophy in ancient Greece, so exclusion was constitutive for bourgeois culture. That today all are excluded - the manager, who must subordinate not only his body, but his mind to the dictates of economy, most of all - might fool us into thinking that contemporary culture has become inclusive. Quite the opposite is true: exclusion has becom universalized. Where can one today find a homme de lettre, or anybody cultivating aesthetic sensibility as an entry into the realm of a pure humanity? There is no "high" or "low" art any more - constitutive of "high" art of the bourgeois era was that it transcended social praxis by its promesse de bonheur - a counterfactual vision of a better, a harmonious world. This idea (one can find it in almost all aesthetic manifestos of the time, whether it be Kant's Critique of the faculty of judgement, Wordsworth's preface to his Lyrical ballads, Schiller's Aesthetic education, or Hölderlin's Hyperion) was of course ideological when it claimed that the harmony of art was realised in society, but at the same time critical, when it showed the gulf between social praxis and happiness. Bourdieu's analysis of art in Distinction implicitly treats it as equivalent to objects of taste (furniture, clothing, cuisine), which might have caused an outrage in the 19. century, but is today statement of fact: art has been reduced to a mere object of taste, critique to a statement of like or dislike on a 5 point Likert type scale - in short, art has become a mere commodity among others. Post-modern art has retained the affirmative character of bourgeois culture, but what it affirms is no longer a realm of pure humanity set into heaven, but social praxis itself - one need only look at the works of Andy Warhol. What has remained is the ideological moment of affirmation, what has been lost is the critical vision of a better world. Avant-garde techniques are used not to beat the path to a free society, but to soothe the guilty conscience of the sublime fallen from grace.

guilt - some reflections on Kafka's Judgement

2008-09-09T19:48:00.004+02:00

Punishment is a theme frequently reoccurring in Kafka's works from Prozess to In der Strafkolonie, but nowhere is its nature revealed to us so clearly as in his short story Das Urteil. Here it is bound up in a seemingly paradoxical web of guilt and an arbitrary use of force. The first object of guilt for Georg is a friend that has emigrated to Russia. Georg ponders the situation of the friend who appears as his binary opposite: while Georg is taking over his father's business and making enormous profits, about to get married to a woman from wealthy background, his friend in Russia is living in poverty, sickness and social isolation without hope of ever finding a spouse. At this point we find Georg has kept all his success concealed from his friend and limited their correspondence to banalities. When he decides to report his engagement to the friend and goes to tell his father another object of guilt is revealed: Georg finds his fading father, already a bit senile, sitting in his dark room, his breakfast hardly touched and wearing dirty underwear (dirt is something that Kafka frequently associates with authority), so he starts to think that he has been neglecting his father and resolves to take better care of him. When he puts the father to bed, the story takes an abrupt turn. Just when the father seems completely passivized, he rises from his bed with fierce force:

»Nein!« rief der Vater, daß die Antwort an die Frage stieß, warf die Decke zurück mit einer Kraft, daß sie einen Augenblick im Fluge sich ganz entfaltete, und stand aufrecht im Bett. Nur eine Hand hielt er leicht an den Plafond. »Du wolltest mich zudecken, das weiß ich, mein Früchtchen, aber zugedeckt bin ich noch nicht. Und ist es auch die letzte Kraft, genug für dich, zuviel für dich.

The usual situation of succession has been turned on its head: the fading father that is to be succeeded by his son - one might interpret the putting to bed as a symbol of burrial, especially since the father rejects the act with the words: "you wanted to cover me /.../ but I am not yet covered" - suddenly rises while the son fades. The seemingly powerless father becomes ever more energetic as his accusations accumulate, while his son is fading at the same pace. The energies of father and son are bound in a zero-sum game. The father reveals that he has been the informant of the friend and accuses Georg of betrayal. Another point of his accusation is the most paradoxical one, at one point it seems that the very fact of succession (which the father acknowledged as a fact of nature earlier in his seemingly passivized state) is a sin against the father:

Und mein Sohn ging im Jubel durch die Welt, schloß Geschäfte ab, die ich vorbereitet hatte, überpurzelte sich vor Vergnügen und ging vor seinem Vater mit dem verschlossenen Gesicht eines Ehrenmannes davon!

The verdict the father delivers at the end of his accusations is damning - death by drowning:

Und lauter: »Jetzt weißt du also, was es noch außer dir gab, bisher wußtest du nur von dir! Ein unschuldiges Kind warst du ja eigentlich, aber noch eigentlicher warst du ein teuflischer Mensch! – Und darum wisse: Ich verurteile dich jetzt zum Tode des Ertrinkens!«

Georg rushes out of the room to fulfill his sentence - he runs to a busy bridge and throws himself into the water, his last words being: "Liebe Eltern, ich habe euch doch immer geliebt"

The first question that merits an answer is what is the nature of the fathers' authority. The father has no means to force Georg to fulfill the verdict, certainly he can not use physical force, the most likely explanation seems that there is an agreement on guilt between them - the guilt Georg felt weekly when composing the letter to his friend and one that the father attached his judgement to. Yet when we judge this by conventional moral codes there is no real cause for guilt, rather for compassion: nothing in the story suggests that the friends miserable state is Georg's fault. The other sin, the sin of succession, is likewise not one of his own, if anything it is a sin of the father. The first sin, the one of doing well, is a consequence of Georg succeeding his father in business - again it seems the sin is on the side of the father. The only moral transgression Georg is objectively guilty of is his existence, for which the father acts at once as the actual perpetrator, judge and jury. The moment the father mounts the accusation is at the point when Georg is about to enter maturity (financial independence, marriage) and at which point he has become distinguishable from his heritage - hence only now the judgement can be spoken by the father without being spoken against himself. The judgement is a representative one - in it the son takes the role of the sacrificial animal, being slaughtered in place of the father.

The notion of guilt Kafka portrays is one that is perfectly in accord with the one Walter Benjamin attributes to capitalism in Capitalism as religion: "A situation that is so inextricable creates guilt." Benjamin's formulation is at least as puzzling as Kafka's. How can something that is inextricable - hence beyond responsibility of any and all involved actors - produce guilt, which feeds on responsibility. But this paradoxical situation is one that all Kafka's characters have to deal with when they face the law, be it Georg, Joseph K. or the man from the countryside. As Benjamin elucidates: "This cult [of capitalism] is thirdly culpabilizing. Capitalism is presumably the first case of a religion that does not atone but produces guilt. In so doing, this system of religion stands in the wake of an enormous movement. An enormously guilty conscience, which does not know how to atone, seizes on the cult, in order not to atone for its guilt but to make it universal, hammering it into consciousness until finally and above all God himself is included in this guilt, so as finally to interest him in atonement." This is exactly the world Kafka's story paints: a world in which individual actions are sundered from the moral framework, from guilt and atonement, and the law does not sanction individual actions but sanctions in spite of them. Guilt is something that has become universal, one is implied in it merely by being. And Kafka makes it absolutely clear that death is not a refuge from guilt. When Joseph K. dies he feels as if shame - but why should he feel ashamed, he always felt he was guilty of no crime - was to outlive him. Similarly the executioner in Strafkolonie is refused a cathartic death because of a malfunction in the machine. His failure is double: firstly he feels that he will not be able to uphold the commandement "be just!" and secondly he is refused to even justly punish himself for failing justice.

Das Urteil is a judgement on a world in which being is a sin. In the purest form it achieves what Brecht presumptuously ascribed to his epic theatre - it poses a moral problem in such a way that it cannot be interpreted away, it can not be reconciled by pure reasoning. It calls for action: only through action can the paradoxical strands of the story be woven into a whole, only social change can achieve what literary criticism must fail to do. The judgement Kafka here speaks is on the world that has made coldness its driving force - as Hannah Arendt noted, evil is banal, and as Adorno rephrased: everything that is banal is evil. We see Georg at the point of awakening from his moral solipsism and that is what the father means by saying that in being an innocent child Georg was an infernal human:

Jetzt weißt du also, was es noch außer dir gab, bisher wußtest du nur von dir! Ein unschuldiges Kind warst du ja eigentlich, aber noch eigentlicher warst du ein teuflischer Mensch!

Georg was guilty of succession, he was guilty of perpetuating the social injustice and living in a moral vacuum - "bisher wußtest du nur von dir" - you knew of nothing but yourself! You have made the bourgeois principle of indifference your own and never questioned it! The world Kafka presents us is one where there is no innocence, or rather: where the greatest innocence is at once the greatest sin. A world in which a rupture has sprung up between success and achievement, a world that has reached its grotesque peak in the form of concentration camps where the only reason one survived was because someone else died. As Brecht had put it in To those who come after us:

What kind of times are they, when
A talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?
That man there calmly crossing the street
Is already perhaps beyond the reach of his friends
Who are in need?

It is true I still earn my keep
But, believe me, that is only an accident. Nothing
I do gives me the right to eat my fill.
By chance, I've been spared. (If my luck breaks, I am lost)

affirmative culture

2008-09-09T12:03:00.000+02:00

I have already proposed the idea that art can be approached through the framework Marx had developed for the critique of ideology. I argued that role playing games were revealing a specific subjectivity of the contemporary individual and through analysis of this subjectivity a critique of society can be practised. The problem is that this critique of ideology is a critical destruction: for Marx religion was to be destroyed by critique so that it would not be able to comfort people suffering under the given social circumstances and with the abscence of consolation the need for change will rise.

Now I would like to play with another, more affirmative idea of criticism. I will start from Adornos premise that art had a dormant emancipatory potential, a promesse de bonheur. He believed that the harmony and beauty of bourgeois art held a dark mirror to society in which its faults were revealed and a vision of a better world was made possible. In contemporary society for him this was no longer possible - in a world that continually reproduces mass murder, torture and terror the promise of harmony has lost all credibility. Therefore he believed that contemporary culture could only be negative, not affirmative: it could only show society as untrue and broken, but no more show the promise of paradise society could potentially be. Culture industry on the other hand functioned by assimilation to the status quo, to the broken individual such as he has become under the untrue society and even dared to justify this with a recourse to democracy (people are buying, ergo: we are giving them what they want). The question is whether we can find a middle path between this total rejection of the world and complete assimilation to it.

The key is an aesthetic public sphere. The idea has been neglected in favour of the political one, but in Structural transformations Habermas assigned a very important role to a literary public sphere, which was crucial to the formation of a bourgeois public in three ways: 1) it was instrumental in the formation of the fora of the political public sphere like salons; 2) in it the bourgeoisie honed their debating skills; 3) through aesthetic exchange the bourgeoisie formed a specific subjectivity that was the stepping stone for their political activity; The idea I want to defend is that only through the workings of an aesthetic public sphere can art redeem its emancipatory potential. If is to do so it must avoid two pitfalls: assimilation to the existing state of society that makes art perform an ideological function, and a complete isolation from society that while preserving the emancipatory potential, does nothing to realize it. If art is to be a critical force it must go beyond the understanding of it's audience, if it is to have some transformatory potential, it must challenge, it must perturb, it must violate. It is naive to expect that this challenge can be faced by isolated individuals, only by critical reflection on art in a public sphere will they be able to go beyond their current subjectivity.

Philosophy of despair

2008-09-09T11:34:00.000+02:00

I believe two anecdotes are illuminating the nature of critical theory particularly well. One is supposed to have happened in California still during the war. At a party Adorno presented the idea that his philosophy was a message in a bottle. The question what the content of the message was was answered by Fritz Eisler in broad Viennese accent: "Mir is' soooo mies!" (I feel sooo bad)

Another is reported by Benjamin in his Kafka essay: In a conversation Kafka had with Brod he had the idea that we are all suicidal, nihilistic thoughts in the mind of god. This reminded Brod of the gnostic idea of god as the evil demiurge and creation as his sin, which Kafka denied vehemently:"No, nothing like that, we are just the result of a mood, a bad day." "Then there is still hope." Brod concluded from this, at which moment a broad smile crept across Kafkas face:"Hope? Of course! Endless hope, just not for us!"

These two anecdotes reveal a stance towards the world that John Berger has called stance of undefeated despair. Despair shines thorough both anecdotes like a black dawn, a sense that in any conceivable way all is lost. This sense of despair is coupled with an almost boundless hope, a hope for a better world we will never see. That is why Adorno and Horkheimer thought of their philosophy as a sort of time-capsule: it would preserve the emancipatory potential of philophy for a future time, when it would be possible to redeem this emancipatory promise. Like bacteria that form a protective coating when the environment is hostile, so culture was to isolate itself from the social environment, because the world in which Ausschwitz happened for Adorno held no possibility of realizing the emancipatory potential of bourgeois culture. Curiously enough this idea reveals a trace of affirmative fatalims - a belief that things will in and of themselves turn towards the slightly better, a trace of metaphysics that Adorno despised so much.

Elective affinities

2008-09-05T16:55:00.000+02:00

Andy Warhol and Leni Riefenstahl. Seemingly the hypothesis of an elective affinity between these two artists is bizarre. Once we search deeper the very adverse is revealed. I was having a discussion with a friend on the merits of Warhol and he claimed that Warhol's achievement was taking banal or ugly, even terrifying (electric chairs for example) objects and making them seem so beautiful that people actually wanted to hang them on their walls. That is the moment Leni Riefenstahl came to my mind: what was her greatest achievent but making the horrors of Nazism seem so beautiful that - if possible - people would be nailing them on their walls. This was only part of the phenomenon Walter Benjamin called aesthetization of politics, a most radical antidemocratic force. Leni Riefenstahl took the driving principle of Nazism - the elimination of all non-identical - and made and aesthetic principle of it: her films have perfect symmetry, rigid rhythm, nothing idiosyncratic or non-identical (like the Jew) is allowed to enter, the people are all so similar that it is nearly impossible to distinguish one from the other - all except for the führer, who is allowed his idiosyncrasy only because he encompasses the whole. Warhol took the driving principle of capitalism - the elimination of all non-identical - and made an aesthetic principle of it: his paintings aestheticize the workings of a mass society in which all is reduced to economic functions, in which all is tradeable, in which all is expendable and hence worthless. Just like Nazism, capiatlism had made humans only cogs in the mechanisms of the whole and just like Leni Rifenstahl Andy Warhol has functioned as an ideologue for this process.

Barroco by Tomaž Pandur

2008-09-05T16:41:00.000+02:00

The sublime with a guilty conscience.

How Duchamp killed the artist

2008-09-05T15:03:00.001+02:00

One of the most controversial instances - "work" would hardly be applicable here - of art remains Duchamp's Fountain. It is surely idiosyncratic for a number of reasons. Adorno wrote about the tension between artefactuality and transcendentality that is present in every work of art and the Fountain is special because it implodes this tension. In history we can find works of art that attempted to hide their artefactuality, for example contemporary productions of the culture industry, or romanticist art that sought to hide the process of production with recourse to ideas of "inspiration" and "genius". The historical avant-garde flaunted artefactuality openly, the institution of art became a focus of reflection, but still the tension persisted, the transcendental character was not eliminated. Duchamp's Fountain goes beyond that, the artefact (an urinal) is not a signifier, but a gesture. The difference is that a signifier points to something in a certain aspect, while a gesture points to it in its totality and idiosyncrasy. If I referr to a "table" I point to the aspect of this object that it shares with all other objects of the same name and by virtue of which they are equivalent. A gesture points to the very specific object with all its idiosyncrasies. The Fountain points to the process of it's own creation as an instance of art, at the space in which an urinal becomes the Fountain. The actual artefact is merely pointing to the process of it's creation, artefactuality taken to it's extreme becomes transcendence. It is the avant-garde in it's purest form, ideal type become flesh. It exhibits unbreakable resistance to the institution of art, in fact the strength of resistance increases proportionally to the force of incorporation. The greatest example are the "replicas" that were made of the urinal and which are displayed as replicas of the Fountain. In one sense this is a vain attempt since the content of the Fountain is not the artefact but the process of its initiation into a work of art and that can not be replicated. In another the replicas are true children of the Fountain - they no longer point to the process of initiation but to the resistance of the institution towards such reflexivity and its vain attempts of suppressing it. Just like the father in Kafka's Judgement the Fountain rises with fierce force just when the replica thought it passivized (I could not find a translation and am not confident enough to attempt one myself, therefore I must apologize to the reader for giving the quote only in german) :

Du wolltest mich zudecken, das weiß ich, mein Früchtchen, aber zugedeckt bin ich noch nicht. Und ist es auch die letzte kraft, genug für dich, zuviel für dich!

Those familiar with the story will know that the father is in no way an emancipatory force, he is a fierce tyrant. It seems we must submit the Fountain to closer scrutiny. It rebels against the institution art and brings the artefactuality of the work of art to the fore, this is its anti-mythical impulse that should be praised, but in the end it turns out to be the mouthpiece against a bad world in the name of one even worse. It rebels against the fact that in myth the artefactual nature of the work of art is concealed (in contemporary movies by the culture industry all aspects of craftsmanship are concealed) but in so doing it sacrifices the subject. Bourgeois aesthetics thought of the artist as a singular genius and thus concealed the social circumstances of the production of art. Duchamp dispenses with this hypocrisy by dispensing with the artist; there is no place for the artists in The fountain, he creates nothing, only selects. The artist becomes nothing more than an agent of the death drive, the need for complete assimilation with the surrounding, indeed the radicalised version of the dialectic of enlightenment. The seemingly radical work is revealed to be nothing more than a radicalised version of the status quo.

Throw your motherfuckin fingers in the air and wave them motehrfuckers like you just don't care

2008-09-04T11:58:00.000+02:00

Avid Hip-hop fans will have recognized Snoop - at the time still Doggy - Dogg's take on stock phrase of old school hip-hop. They will also recall that a stock of phrases that was constantly being reused and recombined was a crucial characteristic of old school hip- hop, a phenomena that survived well into the 90s: for example Jay-z's début album Reasonable doubt (released in 1996) features a lot of quotes from older hip-hop songs. For example 22 twos refers to Can I kick it by A tribe called quest, Dead presidents refers to one of the greatest verses in the history of poetry (from Nas' The world is yours):

I'm out for presidents to represent me
Say what?
I'm out for presidents to represent me
Say what?
I'm out for dead presidents to represent me

Just by the way: I use this verse to explain Habermas to my students (the two types of political representation characteristic for critical and manipulative publicity). Then there is a quote from Snoop dogg's Murder was the case from Doggystyle in the track D'evils, then there is some quoting of LL Cool J, ODB, and very prominently also Scarface. This is the interesting bit: When Nas recorded The world is yours the chorus was an allusion to the same movie (Tony Montana is inspired by an advertisement that reads "The world is yours" and has a globe made for his house featuring the same slogan) and in the music video a few scenes are taken over from Scarface. The fact that one moment we see Nas in the bathtub scene from the movie and the next moment a child watching this same scene on television shows us that montage here is used reflexively in the tradition of the historical avant-garde.

Intertextuality in hip-hop is not limited only to text, it is also a key stylistic element of the music. The break came with a technological innovation - namely sampling - towards the end of the 80s that enabled DJ's to cut a short part of another song (called a sample), loop it and use it in their music. This can be done very lavishly (like is the case with kitchsy MTV hip-hop of today) or minimalistically, a great example of the latter approach is Heute Nacht by the german rapper Torch:

Here montage is clearly audible, samples are not even looped, but follow one another successively.

To recapitulate: stylistic characteristics of Hip-hop involve use of a stock of material (phrases, samples from music), which are edited (an author was expected to add something innovative to the stock phrase to rise above mediocrity, today music samples are often digitally edited) and through the principle of montage composed into a new whole.

All that has been said has implications for the analysis of the impact of digital editing and distribution techniques (what is sometimes referred to as new media) on art. Walter Benjamin in his essay The work of art in the age of it's technical reproducibility (the translator mistakenly wrote "in the age of technical reproduction" - compare a recent book by Weber on Benjamin's abilities for a comprehensive explanation why the suffix -ibility matters) proposes that we must analyse the impact of new media on art with a view to tendencies in artistic circles that try to achieve with old technology what only the new one makes fully possible. If Benjamin had followed this suggestion himself more closely he would have not made himself vulnerable to justified accusations of technological determinism (among others by Adorno in their correspondence) and been proven wrong by the culture industry which reproduces aura effortlessly by marketing techniques such as branding even in an era of advanced technical reproducibility. Another major problem with Benjamin's essay is that it lumps all forms of art together under the heading of "the work of art"; technical reproducibility of written text was possible since Gutenberg as every technique of mass reproduction like radio, photography and cinema has a different history - it simply can not be justified to treat all art as homogeneous when talking about technical reproducibility of artefacts.

Hip-hop needed digital technology to fully realize the potential that lay dormant. Crucial stylistic elements are echoed in the logic of digital media: since digital media break up content into bits of data, these bits can easily be separated, filters can be used on them and they can be recombined into new units (the famous copy-paste operation familiar to all computer users). It is not true that this was not possible before, just that it was much harder to say apply a filter to analogue media (film sometimes had to be hand-edited one frame at a time, with music the absence of frames made even this luxury unattainable). This has lead to a brief efflorescence of hip-hop music during what is referred to as it's renaissance (roughly '89 to '91) and continued throughout the first part of the 90s; after 96 it stared to fall to pieces because the workings of the culture industry finally gained complete control of production. The main stylistic change has been that montage is no longer used as a reflexive technique in the tradition of the historical avant-garde, but as a latent mode of construction: just as with modern movies that use digital editing, modern hip-hop presents a shiny seamless façade (Roland Barthes once noted that the seamless façade of the Citroën DS was the essence of its mythical character), the affirmative nature of bourgeois culture walks again devoid of its soul, a limp and lifeless zombie, polished to a shine by the workings of the culture industry. If, as Adorno noted, in every artwork there is a vibration between its nature as a product and as something transcendental, the culture industry forcefully destroys this vibration by hiding the nature of the product and trying for complete transcendentality. And the illusion of complete transcendentality is, as it always was, ideological; it takes the form of myth as analysed by Barthes: a perpetual alibi in the service of the status quo.

This shows that a broader view on technology is needed - Benjamin's problem was that he treated technology too narrowly. Technology are not just the tools we use, it is also social organization of labour and the production and reproduction of systematic applicable knowledge (techne in greek). Artefacts do not have a life of their own outside of this tripartite constellation, and such a broader view can shed some light on the question why "technological reproducibility" has not led to the emancipation Benjamin had hoped for.

Proletarian music

2008-09-02T11:34:00.001+02:00

To continue the cultural theme taken up in the last post (for Adorno philosophy - or theory - and art were both part of "culture", the defining characteristic of which is the freedom from immediate pressures of utility - or social praxis, to use Adorno's terminology). In On the social situation of music Adorno wrote:

The immanent-aesthetic results of bourgeois history, including that of the last fifty years, cannot simply be brushed aside by the proletarian theory and praxis of art, unless the desire is to eternalize a condition in art produced by class domination. The elimination of this condition within society is, after all, the fixed goal of the proletarian class struggle.

The attentive reader will surely hear the reverberations with my writing on the European public sphere and I will not insult her intellect by explicitly stating them. The object of my scorn in this specific post will rather be cultural studies. I am not quite sure what to even call them, it is hard to imagine them as a discipline or even field, since they have neither a specific object nor method of enquiry. John Storey in his introduction to Cultural theory and popular culture defines their object as culture understood as the way of life of a given community - but that is already the object of anthropology. The methods cultural studies employ also show an elective affinity with anthropology when methods developed by sociology are not far more advanced. In the end cultural studies have managed to produce an astounding amount of purely descriptive work, lacking both the methodological rigour of positivism and theoretical rigour of speculative approaches like critical theory.

With a look to Adorno the hidden conservative bias in cultural studies, especially when treating the output of the culture industry, comes to light. The way they treat it is in accord with the way the positivist Lazarsfeld chose to research it in the Princeton radio research project - taking the output of the culture industry as a given and researching the reception side as a variable, ignoring how reception is shaped both by the social totality of capitalism of which the culture industry is an integral part and by the output of the culture industry itself (as Weber had already noted in Economy and Society, in capitalism needs are constructed by the economic system to a substantial amount). To avoid misunderstanding: this of course does not imply the distinction between "real" and "false" needs, a patently naive idea, just the fact that earlier economic systems worked with needs that were constructed outside of the economic system, while the capitalist economic system takes an active role in influencing and constructing needs. Adorno's point was that the fact that people consume products of the culture industry and derive meaning and a sense of enjoyment from them is not an argument for the culture industry, because both it and the tastes it caters to are part of the "untrue" society.

If we now look at the quote from Adorno, we can see that cultural studies stops short even of the position Adorno criticized, namely that bourgeois art is to be counterbalanced with proletarian art. Adorno here takes up an orthodoxly Marxist (and, seemingly paradoxically, orthodoxly bourgeois) standpoint - namely that emancipation can only be universal: for Marx the grand historical role of the proletariat was not that it would itself become a ruling class but that it would make class rule history along with classes themselves. For Adorno the promise of universality in bourgeois art is to be taken seriously, not dismissed as pure ideology in the face of the actual exclusivity of bourgeois culture. The reception fetishism - and fetishism here is to be read in its Marxist sense - of cultural studies has made even a proletarian counterbalancing of bourgeois culture obsolete. And this has happened not by induction from empirical proof but from the very decision to hypostize the productive side and treat reception as the variable.

The european public sphere

2008-08-30T22:30:00.000+02:00

In recent (and not so recent) debates about the possibility of an European public sphere a very disquieting assumption has become at home in the mind of scholars - namely that national public spheres exist and the only challenge we are facing is internationalizing them on an European level. This leads some researchers to resort to analysis of media content to assess what topics are being reported on and whether we can abduce the internationalisation of national public spheres from the internationalization of content in the media. The problem with this approach is that the non-existence of a public sphere forms a blind spot: media will always report on something, ergo: there will always be a public sphere. The fact that has gone unnoticed is that today media have hardly anything to do with the public sphere at all. As a radical democratic ideal - and that is how in my oppinion the concept should be treated if it is to have any critical potential - the public sphere is not something at home in political institutions, negotiations with interest groups (in fact in his earliest work on the public sphere Jürgen Habermas conceived of this as the very negation of the public sphere, although he later modified this position), and reporting by the national media, the majority of their content consisting of information by institutional sources. The public sphere is at home in the day to day delibeartions of citizens - this is what the positioning of the public sphere in the life-world by Habermas in Theory of communicative action means. If conceived in this way it is questionable whether the media today form an integral part of the public sphere - rather they seem to be affiliated with the other of the public sphere, with political institutions. It is the non-existence of a public sphere at all and forces that hinder its development that should be the basis for reflection.

Critics of Habermas' conceptualization of the public sphere are among those that are to blame for this predicament. Those (among others Nancy Fraser and Negt and Cluge) that have sought to reconcile the lofty nature of the idea with the putrid reality of the world have done so by sacrificing the former to the latter. The fact that the manifestations of the public sphere did not live up to its ideal of universality is undisputable. But this is exactly the very core of the critical potential of the idea: it encompasses a promesse de bonheur, a hope and promise of a better world. The fact that ideological forms of the bourgeoisie, its culture, exhibited universalist tendencies was the soil on which critiques of the actual exlusiveness of bourgeois society caught a foothold. This was the promise of the bourgeoisie that justified its rise to power: that the liberation from aristocratic rule was to be a universal one. When Negt and Cluge talk about a proletarian public sphere they negate the very idea and ideal of the public sphere, namely that it, as Habermas had put it "stands and falls with the principle of universal access." As soon as we can talk about specific public spheres we are already negating the potential for a public sphere to exist at all. When faced with the chasm between the ideal and reality we must not try to fit the ideal onto reality, we must not break the mirror that reminds us of our blemishes - that is the way of the political order the idea of the public sphere was launched against. In fact the mirror that best reflects our blemishes is the one that serves us best: an idea of the public sphere where all citizens might freely engage in debate and form informed opinions on public matters that the state will be obliged to listen to when making decisions. The point of this image is not that it could ever be achieved, it is exactly in the function of a reflection of society on itself by which its faults are revealed that its emancipatory potential is realized.

Understanding the public sphere in this way does not mean that we make it inaccessible to empirical study. If the ideal can not be fully realized - and even this can not be said with certainty as Marcuse teaches us - the extent to which it is can be studied. While universal access might not be possible in its purest form (even in perfect social conditions we would find some individuals who through purely idiosyncratic reasons would not be able to participate - for an Adornian as myself control of idiosyncrasies, or the non-identical, would constitute the very neagation of an emancipated society) the degree to which it is realised can be the object of empirical research. The same applies to quality of deliberation (a recent article by Todd Graham in Javnost - The Public is a very good example) and the impact of deliberation on decision making of the political system. Identifying these emprical criteria of the public sphere is the first step that should be followed by explanation: what factors impact universality of access, quality of deliberation, impact on decision making. Only after this task is completed the question of whether a European public sphere can be formed and under what circumstances can be answered - but this question might as well turn out to be besides the point.

Kafka and the metaphysics of death

2008-08-28T18:16:00.000+02:00

I came across an interesting part in Adorno's metaphysics lectures (transcripts from lectures on metaphysics he held in the summer semester of 1965). It reads as follows (first is the original, followed by my translation):

Ich habe seinerzeit in meiner Einleitung zu den "Schriften" Walter Benjamins versucht auszudrücken, daß so etwas wie der Begriff des Lebenswerks heute problematisch ist deshalb, weil unser Dasein längst nicht mehr nach einem ihm immanenten, quasi organischen Gesetz verläuft, sondern derart bestimmt wird von allen möglichen Mächten, die eine soche immanente Entfaltung ihm versagen; daß das Vertrauen auf eine solche Ganzheit des Lebens, der dann als ein Sinnvoles der Tod soll antworten sollen, bereits den charakter der Chimäre hat.

In my introduction to Walter Benjamin's "Writings" I have tried to convey that the concept of the life-work has become problematic because our life does not follow an imminent quasi organic law any more but is subjected to diverse forces that prevent such an imminent development; that the faith in such a totality of life, which is meaningfully concluded by death, is chimeric.

Two associations came to my mind: the one aesthetic the other sociological. Let us venture down the path of art first, since it illuminates the same idea from a different viewpoint, hopefully helping the sociological application to make more sense. Nowhere is the sentiment that Adorno expresses - and it is above all a sentiment, a certain experience of the world - captured so clearly as in Kafkas Prozess. It ends with death, a completely meaningless death: "like a dog!" is the last train of thought going through K.s mind, feeling that "shame was to outlive him." What takes all meaning from death is not the fact that it is beyond our control (it always is, and in the case of suicide it is more than ever) it is the fact that it is not organically attached to the life-course. The total war Adorno witnessed is of course a perfect example: not so much for the people fighting on the front where some delusions of the meaningfulness of sacrificing ones life for the sake of the arian race could still flourish - if for no other reason than that it is hard to come to terms with the meaninglessness of ones death - but for the victims of the death camps, who were faced with completely arbitrary annihilation. In Der Prozess the life of K. takes the form of arbitrary events - as I mentioned in an earlier post, there is nothing to prevent the addition of chapters to the novel ad infinitum since there simply is no organic logic tying the whole of the narrative together.
When we arrive at the last chapter, death is as much a surprise for us as it is for K. Not that we believed the process could end victorious, it is because the narrative form suggested infinite repetition. This is the life that Adorno described in the quote: a series of episodes the "subject" (compare earlier posts on subjectivity for an explanation of the quotation marks) goes through, looking for meaning while being shuffled to and fro like a leaf in the wind, the leaf having no less understanding about the functioning of wind than the "subject" has about the forces that affect his life. A very similar sentiment can be found in Ravel's Bolero (no matter how often one hears it, the silence at the end comes as a shock) and more recently in No country for old men.

The sociological explanation takes us to theories of individuation and the life-course. To put it shortly throughout the period known as modernity we have witnessed the gradual transition of prescribed life-courses, mediated by ritual, upheld by tradition and guarded by authorities, to a self-selected life-course, where individuals have been burdened with the freedom of constructing their own life-course. This has resulted in a feeling of disorientation, some reactionary authors write about the crisis of meaning - fact is that it is harder to make sense of ones life today as it was say a hundred years ago. Since meaning is not given to the individual from above, he is forced to not only negotiate with the outside forces entering his world without the proper information to make an informed decision (market failure in the US, nuclear accident in France, pollution in China, to name but a few extreme hypotehtic examples), he must also make sense of the arbitrary character his life seems to take in these circumstances. When Anthony Giddens talks about self-identity as the narrative of the life-course, he completely feitishizes the phenomenon (the individual must cope with objective forces). If this conservative argument is not acceptable, neither is the reactionary that laments the disorineting loss of perspective, calling for the reinstitution of traditional values. Traditional guardians of the life-course were not emancipatory forces, they just softened the impact an arbitrary world made upon the individual. What individuation has done is break away those barriers and let the world break in, making the individual feel its full impact - if this has traumatizing consequences on the one it also has an emancipatory potential on the other side, since the need for an emancipated society is as strong as it never was. Each individual feels it with unprecedented force, not just intellectually, but in every aspect of his daily routine.

Heidegger as a Nazi ideologue

2008-08-26T17:26:00.001+02:00

The ones who would have us believe that Heidegger's philosophy should not be judged on account of him being an active Nazi miss the point that his philosophy is the very ideology of Nazism. When interpreting any philosophy we must avoid two pitfalls: either interpreting it directly through psychological or sociological factors on the one and interpreting it without any reference to the social conditions it was formed in on the other side. Sein und Zeit would not be so problematic had it been written a century earlier, but as it is it is a vile piece of propaganda. First of all the affirmative character of Sein comes to mind, certainly a metaphysical inheritance. For Heidegger being is meaningful in itself - as is revealed of his manipulative reading of truth as a-letheia, as un-concealment (manipulative because there is no eveidence that the ancient greeks understood the word in that way, on the contrary Plato interpreted it as ale theia, as divine frenzy). He opts for a passive stance toward the world, an acceptance of the status quo that is revealed in his idea of Gelassenheit. What might have been interpreted as just a conservative stance towards the world a century earlier now say nothing less than that you should not fight the inevitable (the domination of the world by the Arian race), because it is predestined. The most grotesque part of Sein und Zeit is the one dealing with death - Heidegger interprets is as a meaningful end of life that is organically connected to the life-course. Here is where the morally perverted character of his philosophy is revealed in all its essence: being part of the totalitarian system which created concentration camps, places where physical death was a relief from existence as a living corpse, which stole all meaning not only from death but also from life, he dared write about the meaningfullness of death. The justification of Heidegger and the justification of Nazism are so closely intertwined that it is impossible to separate one from the other. We must never forget the lesson Adorno taught us: thinking - and especially for those that are privileged enough that they may freely use their mind for the pursuit of truth - caries with itself an inextricable moral responsibility.

Foucault and death of the subject

2008-08-26T17:09:00.000+02:00

What I find most striking about the greatest apologist of our status quo - Michel Foucault - is how he manages to turn concepts that critical theory has developed to oppose capitalism into their very opposite. A case in point is Adorno's thesis of the death of the subject. For Adorno a tendency of capitalism is that it reduces individuals into quantifiable functions, into mere specimen of a genus. His point is not merely that we are replacable on the market, but that this feature of the market is pervading the whole of modern existence. He believed that when we are made universally equivalent, reduced to functions, when all that is idiosyncratic (or as Adorno would put it: non-identical with the concept) is suppressed, we cease to be individuals, we cease to be subjects. What Foucault did was turn the death of the subject into subjectivity itself, using the term subject to refer to objects of ideology. For him objectification is the measure of subjectivity. For Foucault the ideal subject is the inmate of Ausschwitz, stripped of all humanity, the sheer amount of violence he suffers at the hands of a repressive system the only measure that still manages to diferentiate him from the other victims.

Narrative structures of RPGs III - micro narrative

2008-08-26T17:05:00.000+02:00

As I have earlier proposed an analytical distinction between micro and macro narrative I would like to add some observations on micro level narrative in RPGs. In the first post on narrative in RPGs I have proposed that the macro narrative is one of growing up. Now I would like to argue that the micro narrative is supporting this on another level. To support this hypothesis we will first have to take a closer look at gameplay in RPGs.

If we go from macro to micro, most RPG universums are structured hierarchically. On the top level are worlds – they are the chapters of the game, each consisting of a set of places, missions, foes and allies that the player encounters (there is of course continuity – say an ally might follow the player through more worlds, foes might reappear). Some worlds do not have clearly defined worlds and it is hard to make an empirical distinction between them. Sometimes the very opposite is true and they are clearly delineated in the game (most often the player travels to another area that was not accessible before). As a heurestic method the following criteria might be used to distinguishing between worlds:
- an integrated set of tasks is presented to the player, which culminates in either acquiring a special object or battling an important foe or both;
- new foes appear and reappear throughout the world;
- new helpers appear that follow the player throughout the world;

On a lower level we have what I have called »villages« and »dungeons«, friendly places where the macro narrative is developed and places for battle. If we go still deeper into detail we find again two actions: exploration and battle. »Villages« are places that only exceptionally feature battle (Zelda is one example), whereas in dungeons and transportation routes (most places that are neither »village« nor »dungeon« fall into this category – here the player has to battle foes but they are not as numerous as in dungeons plus these places have no specific importance for the macro narrative as the dungeons do) both exploration and battle take place. The majority of games have different interfaces for battle and for exploration (Final fantasy series, Chrono trigger) but a substantial amount of them does not (Zelda series, Terranigma)

This finally brings us to the core of the problem – the structure of micro narrative. Both exploration and battle serve similar purposes (though with different means): 1) acquisition of special objects that enable the player to advance in the game and 2) improvement of the character's skill. Let us turn to the latter first: each character in a RPG game has a quantified amount of different skills: attack and defence strength, amount of health and magic power. These can be further differentiated, for example attack strength can be acquired for different weapons separately. When a player increases his skills the game becomes easier: higher level of attack skill increases the damage he does to enemies, defence reduces the damage he takes etc. This tendency is countervailed by the introduction of ever more powerful enemies. A player can acquire these skills in two basic ways: either through battle (every victorious battle adds some points that are converted to a higher level of skill when they reach a certain threshold) or by acquisition of specific objects (most commonly potions). It is interesting to note that the amount of points commonly varies according to the strenght of the defeated enemy, therefore the player acquires progressively more points per battle as she progresses through the game. On the other hand thresholds for each successive skill level are progressively higher, therefore the increase in skill gained from battles stays roughly the same throughout the game.

The acquisition of special objects most commonly takes place through defeating a special foe (for example the boss of the dungeon) or by exploration (the player has to venture to a special place to acquire the object). These objects enable the player to progress in the game (they might be a key or a special weapon without which a certain foe can not be defeated). Sometimes these objects also add to skill levels of a character. In some games not only the player but also his equipment has a »skill level« so that for example the amount of damage done to an enemy varies according to the level of attack skill of the character and according to the power of the weapon used.

This quick description allows us to make some generalizations from the structure of micro narrative in RPGs. I have noted that throughout the game the player improves certain quantified skills and also accumulates objects of special value. The micro narrative is one of linear progression with quantum leaps. This supports the macro narrative, which is one of growing up. The two extreme states of this process are child (at the beginning of the game) and grown-up (at the end of the game). The micro narrative shows the gradual nature of this transition as a continuous phenomenon. It also illustrates the work the subject has to go through in order to attain autonomy. But there is also an effect on the recipient. As I have noted in an earlier post, interactive media tend to increase the identification of the viewer with the content. The micro narrative draws the player into the macro narrative, he is made to experience the hardships the character has to go through in the process of growing up, so that the macro narrative becomes more captivating.

At this point we might look into the role the RPG narrative plays in contemporary society, or to be more precise: which experiences of the contemporary “subject” correspond to the RPG narrative. The crucial experience is entry into the labour market. In the 18. century the foundations of individuation were possession of capital and citizenship (both one and the same thing if we believe Marx and Engels and their metaphor of the state as a committee of the international bourgeoisie). Today the first foundation of individuation is no longer capital but possession of qualifications that are in demand on the labour market. In a capitalist economy productivity of the individual is quantified to a substantial amount (of course this amount varies: the border case is the manual labourer, whose productivity can be strictly quantified as number of standardized products per hour, while quantification becomes less pronounced with “products” that are not that highly standardized). This process is at work not only on the labour market but also (of not even more) in the educational system, where the acquired knowledge of students is quantified into grades. The experience of the contemporary “subject” is one of quantification – which Adorno interpreted as the very death of the subject since something that is strictly quantified becomes just a specimen of a genus and as such can not be a subject. Lukacs noted in History and class consciousness that reification is expressed on the subjective side in that individuals think of themselves as a set of quantifiable and objectifiable abilities, not as organic entities. This is a precondition for entry on the labour market – to sell ones productivity one must quantify it and be able to expropriate in some way. In the narrative of the RPG we find a mirror of these experiences. The character is thrown into the world and is faced with the challenge of increasing quantifiable skills. In fact there is nothing to him except these quantifiable skills, in this he is the perfect negation of the subject from an Adornian standpoint. As in real life this quantification has quantum leaps (one gets a promotion, passes an exam etc.), but this leap does not lead to anywhere but to more of the same (acquisition of quantifiable skills on a higher level)

What does this mean for a critical theory of society? A look at Marx’ critique of ideology might be in order here. In the preface to his Introduction to a contribution to the critique of Hegel's philosophy of law, he notes that religion has a functional connection with social praxis – it is because existing social circumstances are so unbearable that man projects a utopia into heaven. A common misunderstanding of Marx here states that ideology is a wrong picture of the world which must be contrasted with the true picture. The first problem with such a view is that it does not tell us exactly what truth is or where it is to be found – not to mention the fact that this can lead to an authoritarian position in which a specific subjective truth is hypostasized as the one and only truth. The other problem is that it tackles the problem undialectically and thereby misses the point altogether. A short quote from Marx might help us to understand the dialectics in his approach: “Religion is a warped consciousness of the world, because the world is warped.” It is not the case that religion is wrong and that a correct picture of the world must be substituted in its place. The case is that religion tells a lie and in so doing reveals the truth. The fact that religion has to tell us a comforting lie shows us the truth that existing social circumstances are unbearable – this is the critical potential of ideology, its truth content, if I borrow a phrase from Benjamin.

RPGs are at once a lie, but a lie that in lying reveals the truth. The lie is the affirmative character of the game. Quantification is presented as the ontological structure of the world; it is hypostasized in the tradition of the finest metaphysicians. This is not to say that it is a conspiracy of the creators or of the bourgeois class to infuse false consciousness to the masses – an idea that would be nauseatingly naïve. It is also not to say that it is something that is forced onto consumers by the culture industry. It is rather something that appeals to consumers because it mirrors their own subjective experience. It is a warped picture of the world, because it is a warped world. We must take its lie seriously and through it come to the realization of what is warped in the world. "Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower." (Marx, Introduction to a contribution to the critique of Hegel's philosophy of law)

Narrative structures of RPGs II - the dungeon and the village

2008-08-20T09:44:00.001+02:00

I have already written about the common structure of RPGs (role playing games) and interpreted it as a narrative of growing up in an earlier post. As I reflected further on the topic I realized that an analytical distinction between two levels of narrative would be needed:
- The macro level narrative is the one we would normally think of, it is the way the story unfolds during the whole of the game and is composed by notable events. It is analogous to a narrative in a written piece of work and can be analysed in the same way. It is also the narrative to which I have devoted most of my attention in the first post.
- The micro level narrative are the ways the player interacts with the game. I am not referring to the immediate interface like joysticks or keyboards and the way in which they are connected with actions in the game. It would not be appropriate to equate the interface to narrative, this would be analogous to equating the structure of a book (composed of pages that need turning) to narrative structure. What I am referring to with the term micro level narrative are the actions the player is expected to perform to advance in the game. This narrative level differs from the macro in several notable ways:
1) it does not unfold during the whole game, it's units are smaller and are repeated throughout the game. In fact every game has an essentially unfinished character since these smaller units can be added ad infinitum without influencing the macro level narrative (note here the difference with a structuralist theory of language, where smaller units are combined to form larger ones).
2) it is not composed by notable, but by routine events. We learn nothing new from each successive event after we have figured out the pattern (for example: keep shooting/hitting/stabbing the enemy until he/she/it is dead) and it is exactly this pattern that is the bearer of meaning, not each individual event.
3) it has a hierarchical structure. In RPGs on the lowest level there are fights with specific enemies, on a higher level there are dungeons, and even on a higher level there are worlds.

Interesting enough in RPGs these two types of narration are assigned special places. This naturally does not mean that one type of narrative can ever exclude the other, but one can have a stronger role at times. The place for macro level narratives is the village (it can also be some other form of friendly refuge like a house or castle). Here the characters take a break from fighting and talking becomes the dominant action - talk in which crucial elements of the macro narrative are revelaed. This of course does not mean that the micro level narrative is not present - it is just that the content of the interactions with the others becomes far more important (as opposed to the mere act of killing).

Here is an example of a "village" from the game Chrono trigger. We can see the hero and the heroine along with a pendant that will become crucial for the unfolding of the narrative. Singular events and characters have individual meaning for the narrative.

The place of the micro narrative is the dungeon. Here the macro narrative is almost frozen, the heroes continue battling ever same foes, sometimes they encounter a new and stronger opponent (which is then added to the stock of opponents) and in the end they fight the boss of the dungeon (the strongest opponent in the dungeon). Commonly acquisition of special objects is required to navigate the dungeon (most often keys).

Example of a "dungeon" from the same game. The specific foes here do not have any individual significance, they are just specimen of a genus. It is the pattern that is important. Note that the interface has also changed (we can see indicators of health and magic power of our heroes).

The binary opposition between village and dungeon is noticeable, but going further into this topic would transcend the aim of this post and I will let the structuralistically inclined reader continue this train of thought by herself.

The question that needs to be asked is whether this new level of narrative is specific to interactive media. This is not entirely the case and I would like to illustrate the point in the case of Kafkas Process. The novel might be divided into three parts. The first part is the arrest, the third is the execution, everything in between is the unfolding (or rather not unfolding) of the process. Of course the church chapter must be treated separately, I believe it must be interpreted as a lens in which the whole of the novel is condensed - only viewed through this lens does the whole makes sense - but this is also not something that I intend to probe into very deeply. Suffice it to say that the present illustration (and the fact that it is an illustration excuses this omission) will analyze the narrative structure without paying attention to this self-referrentiality. Now we can compare the structure of the core of the novel with the micro level narrative in computer games. They are similar in that they are composed of routine repetitive events that have no individual significance but are rather just manifestations of an imminent pattern and it is only this imminent pattern that is noteworthy. Bureaucrats in the process are always somewhat shabby, they never understand the functioning of the court but are confined to their function, courtrooms are always dirty, dusty and suffocating, K. is always just as much in the dark as he was before, his helpers always seemingly well-meaning but in the end just as clueless as he is. Just as enemies or dungeons and worlds in a video game, chapters in Der Process can be added ad infinitum - the pattern is given and can be weaved without end.

Therefore it seems that the type of micro narrative I have analysed in computer games is not something new and specific to them. This does not mean there is nothing new to this phenomenon. What is noteworthy and specific is the sheer quantity of the phenomenon. While we can find earlier examples of this type of narrative, they are exceptions, while in computer games the presence of the micro narrative is rule. The other specificity is the linking of micro and macro level narrative. We can not find the specific interlinking of micro and macro that is characteristic for video games in Der Process, nor am I aware of any other work of art that would fit this structure.

How do we explain this specific interlinking of micro and macro in computer games? I believe it is strongly connected to the fundamental principles of new media and to what members of the Frankfurt school referred to as the mythical character of modernity. But that is already the topic for another post.

Death of the subject

2008-08-19T12:15:00.000+02:00

While watching Marionettes, a short film by Tamás Waliczky, the introduction to Adornos Minima Moralia came to mind:

To speak immediately of what is immediate, is to behave no differently from that novelist, who adorns their marionettes with the imitations of the passions of yesteryear like cheap jewlery, and who sets persons in motion, who are nothing other than inventory-pieces of machinery, as if they could still act as subjects, and as if something really depended on their actions. The gaze at life has passed over into ideology, which conceals the fact, that it no longer exists.
Source: Marxists internet archive

We can interpret the short film as an aesthetization of this phenomenon, or better said an ironic commentary: we see Marionettes being subject to simple simulation of gravity. Even when they act collectively (i.e. they are collectively subjected to the same external force), this can never be social action, since they are isolated, each individually experiencing an objective force, the apparent consensus being only due to the immense uniformity of outside pressure. This is a view of society like the one that Adorno formulated in his darkest works (Minima Moralia surely counting among them): farces of subjects behaving collectively - but never as a collective, since the only binding material that holds them togehther is the oppresive uniformity of social totality.

Cinematic interactivity

2008-08-19T11:55:00.000+02:00

Traditionally cinema was one of the least interactive art forms. Not only if we look at interactivity behaviourally (whether a viewer can actually influence the structure of the text), but also psychologically - as Benjamin wrote in his Work of art essay, the cinema was substituting a series of shocks (a surrealist and dadaist technique) for the older contemplative stance that a visitor of a gallery was assumed to take. New media on the other hand enable interactivity even in this traditionally non-interactive art form. One of the simplest ways is by cutting the movie into pieces and allow the viewer to choose different paths, as is the case with the WaxWeb project.

The invisible shapes of things past

2008-08-19T11:44:00.000+02:00

An interesting artistic project by the ART+COM collective, called The invisible shapes of things past, aims at moving film away from mimesis by spatializing it. It is certainly refreshing to see such a project in an age in which the culture industry clings ever so tightly to mimesis. when one can hardly imagine movies like The love of zero, Man with a movie camera, or mastarpieces of expressionism like Metropolis being produced. It seems that Adorno was right when he wrote that it is quite possible that a movie that conforms to all standards of the Hayes office would have artistic value - just not in a world in which a Hayes office exists.

Politics of FaceBook

2008-03-12T09:22:00.000+01:00

When I saw that a candidate for president in the recent presidential elections in Slovenia has a Facebook profile I was very much amazed. It seems politicians have discovered the potential of social networking sites for their promotion. When browsing further I found Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Mccain all have profiles.

When Browsing still further, I could not find any profiles for Slovene politicians with the exception of the aforementioned candidate who is now president, Danilo Türk. I did find some scam pages for Lojze Peterle, Jožef Jerovšek and Alojz Sok. I also found some user generated groups commemorating the recently deceased former president Janez Drnovšek, and a group pushing for the Ljubljana airport to be named after him.

Can anything be found on YouTube? Seemingly the answer is yes.

2008-03-03T19:46:00.000+01:00

When procrastinating one of my favourite activities is YouTubing. It is unbelievable what one can find on there; there is Jimmy Page doing the violin thing on his guitar, there are Street Fighter II Turbo championships (I remember watching one the other day and commenting on the unbelievable moves with a friend on MSN messenger), the other day I was checking out compilations of Michael Jordan's best moves (I stopped watching basketball after he retired) but YouTube still has the potential to amaze me. One example is this vintage interview with Heidegger, in which he criticizes Marx' 11. thesis on Feuerbach:

Heidegger has an obstinate philosophical style that can be a source of many headaches. In his writing there is no distinction between signifier and signified, ideas are rather already present in language. To present new ideas he transforms language itself (that is where the headaches come from, he does not write in German, he writes in Heideggerian, constantly belabouring words with new meanings). It is not surprising that this style shifts into manipulation when talking about other authors, as is the case with Marx. For all those not fluent in German, the 11. thesis that Heidegger is criticizing, reads:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
Source: Marxists internet archive

Heidegger objects that to change the world one must first interpret it. We can surely not argue with that. The problem is the attribution of an anti-intellectualist sentiment to Marx. Even a cursory inspection of the syntax of thesis 11 will reveal the word "only", which means that interpretation and changing of the world are not to be seen as antagonistic. Marx sees the role of materialism in not stopping at the point of interpretation, but taking it further to the point of changing it.

Narrative structure of RPGs

2008-03-02T13:05:00.000+01:00

I am part of the generation which remembers the SNES, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, as THE status symbol of early childhood. The reality for us were for a long time cheap imitations of the NES (I will let you figure out the meaning of the acronym for yourself), the precursor of the SNES, and daydreams of the amazing graphics in 32 bit colours that the SNES made possible (as I look at some games today, they still look good). I can still remember the moment when I finally buggered my parents into buying me my first SNES and all the good times me and my friends had with it (that was also the time when computer games were rarely played alone - or if they were it was training to humiliate your friends in the next Super Street Fighter II Turbo competition)

When PCs came out the natural choice was to download a SNES emulator. When replaying the games of old I was struck by the uniformity of narrative of RPGs (role playing games). There are of course notable exceptions (like Zelda, who has a different narrative structure altogether). Broadly speaking the games share the following structure:
- we begin with a state of equilibrium. The main character (always male) is enjoying a careless childhood. He sometimes exhibits traits of playful mischievousnesses, but never to the point of seeming malign. Sometimes the main character has a male best friend, sometimes the best friend is introduced later on in the story.
- the state of equilibrium is disturbed by some catastrophic event. There are two variations here: either the event was triggered by the main character's careless mischief (for example the breaking of a taboo) or it starts completely independently. Either way the scope of happening, once set in motion, is far above the main character's ability of understanding and action. At this point the main character is forced to leave his home village (which is sometimes even destroyed, along with his family) and venture into the world in the quest of apocatastasis.
- at this point the main character usually meets the female heroine, which he will develop a romantic interest later on in the story, who joins him in his quest. Sometimes she enters the story at the point of the catastrophic event, but that is less frequent. If the male friend friend was not present yet, he will also join the quest at this point (usually earlier than the female one)
- the largest part of the story is the quest to restore equilibrium. Here the background of the catastrophic event becomes clear, revealing an evil force behind it and an incredibly powerful foe which must in the end be defeated. Also the main character discovers that he is predestined to fight the all-important battle with the foe. Sometimes the protagonists battle this foe early on in the story, where they lose horribly, but through some lucky coincidence survive (be it through the working of some helper, the cockiness of the foe who does not even think them worthy to be killed or some other play of events). Two things are thus revealed: the protagonists will have to improve their skills before taking on the foe again and often will have to get hold of some magic object (most commonly a special sword) that will be able to defeat the foe. The interesting part here is that the skills of the characters are quantified: they have a certain amount of attack (which is sometimes divided into skills for specific types of weapons), defence and magic skills. These skills can be improved by acquiring new objects and weapons, but mostly they are improved by defeating enemies. Through this process the protagonists acquire enough skills for the final battle with the foe.
- the final battle usually takes place on the home ground of the foe, a castle of some sort. Through his defeat the equilibrium is restored, although significant losses might have been sustained (for example the loss of the main character's parents and home village). The playing out of the romance between the main character and the female helper is indicated (rarely explicitly stated). The main reward for the main character remains his service to the world though: an excellent albeit unconventional illustration of this is the ending of Terranigma, where the main character, upon restoring equilibrium and saving the home village, discovers that this was the sole function of his existence - and since that is the case he will cease to exist, living out the remainder of the day being all the reward he receives. In any case the protagonist is profoundly transformed by his quest.

The narratives are clearly ones of growing up. The world enters the self-contained happiness of childhood and forces the protagonist to venture outside the circle of his family, learn responsibility, discover friendship and romance. They are also narratives of service to the greater good, the protagonist facing all the hardships and dangers to save the world from a great evil. This latter trait being more common to the Japanese narratives, the American counterparts focusing more on the egoistical motives of the protagonist: the thrill in battling foes, self-discovery, personal rewards etc.