Attitude

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

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

La langue

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solipsism

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

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

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

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

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

History of the public sphere

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

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

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

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

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

Affect/Effect

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

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

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.