Consumerist ideology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theses against systems theory

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

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

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

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

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

Disciplining the consumer

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

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

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

Language and nationalism

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

A Rhyme for the Odes (Mu'allaquat)

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

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


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

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

History of the public sphere - elucidation I

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

Attitude

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

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

La langue

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solipsism

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

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

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

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

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

History of the public sphere

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

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

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

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

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

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.

culture industry on steroids

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

What were Zionists doing during the holocaust? Taking notes.

Goethe and reification

When Faust bargains with the devil for his soul he closes the deal with the words:

Werde ich zum Augenblicke sagen:
Verweile doch, du bist so schön!
Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen,
Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehn.

A translation of the meaning of these lines would go something like:
If I say to any given moment:
linger on, you are so beautiful!
Then you may put me in chains,
then I will gladly go to ruin.

The infernal character of these lines does not originate merely from the fact that the devil himself is the addressee, but that they are symptomatic of reification. "Happiness" Adorno teaches us "is like truth, you do not posses it, you are engulfed in it." That is why "no happy person can ever know he is happy. /.../ The only relationship that consciousness can have to happiness is gratitute." What Goethe expresses in these lines is a reified awareness of happiness, a need to objectify and manipulate time itself, when hapiness can exist only by being fleeting and fragile, despite the efforts of propaganda agents of the culture industry, psychoanalysts and advertisers. The dictate: "be happy!" does not need to be juxtaposed to the empirical reality of the adressee to be revealed as cynical, it is a lie in itself.

Paradigm: everything goes

While doing some reading on interactivity I stumbled upon an article that sought to shed some light on the concept by doing expert interviews. The authors live in the fantasy that definitions are contingent upon empirical findings (as if empirical findings can ever come to be without prior definitions) and take an inductive approach to defining interactivity. The results are of course completely arbitrary and I will not go into them, let the brief critique of the process itself suffice. What really got me going was an invocation used at the beginning of the article. The chant went something like "reality is socially constructed" and was preceded by the magical word "paradigm". Kuhn probably never realized the damage his theory would do, since it tends to be taken out of context and used as a talk-nonsense-free-card. The idea that reality is socially constructed is one of such brilliant examples, especially since we are supposed to accept it simply because the authors "chose" a specific paradigm. No halfway decent philosopher today clings to such a naive Humeian interpretation of the relationship between subject and object, yet somehow it is acceptable for social scientist if only they present it as a result of their arbitrary will. Marx and Engels already had a nice response to people who believed reality was socially constructed in their day. They answered with the anecdote of a person who believed people drowned merely because they clung to this damned idea of gravity and dedicated his whole life to banishing this idea from minds everywhere he found it.

The value of speculation

In the Feuerbach chapter of the German Ideology Marx and Engels take a strong stand against the speculative character of idealism, until at one point revolutionary zeal gets the best of them and they write:

Where speculation ends – in real life – there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place.

Being so strongly influenced by the thought of Adorno, you might imagine I find this formulation hard to stomach. Adorno was without a doubt right when he saw exactly this phenomenon: a clear-cut demarcation between speculation and praxis as the essence of idealism and of capitalist ideology: "Reason," Kant instructs us, "about anything you like and as much as you like, just obey!" But we have to ask the question how close this demarcation between speculation and positive science, or between philosophy and science, as Althusser had put it, is to Marx' own intellectual work. Can the demarcation between speculation and science really be drawn so clearly as Althusser proposes with his hypothesis of the epistemic cut? I would argue that it can not, not only with Marx, but with critical science as a whole.

Let us leave Marx aside for a moment and turn to Marcuse and his notion of utopia. He rejects the notion that socialism is an utopia in the sense of something that can not be manifested:

The other group of projects, where the impossibility is due to the absence of subjective and objective factors, can at best be designated only as "provisionally" unfeasible. Karl Mannheim's criteria for the unfeasibility of such projects, for instance, are inadequate for the very simple reason, to begin with, that unfeasibility shows itself only after the fact. And it is not surprising that a project for social transformation is designated unfeasible because it has shown itself unrealized in history.

Since, as Marcuse points out, the feasibility of projects for social transformation can only be shown "after the fact", hence it is impossible to fully exorcise speculation from critical science, that is science that aims at a substantial transformation of social reality.

Now let us turn to Marx and two central concepts of his theory, that is value and class. The fact that these two concepts are speculative might quite easily elude us . In chapter one of Capital Marx builds his theory of value and he states that the value of a commodity is defined by the amount of abstract human labour involved in its production plus the value that has been transmitted from the means of production. Is this value an empirically verifiable phenomenon? No, it is not. Value is not the same as price, since price can vary according to supply and demand, while value is indifferent to them. Value is rather the long-term tendency that price revolves around, but in itself it is not an empirical concept. The same holds for his concept of social class. The distinction between class for itself and class in itself is exactly the difference between a latent, only potentially existing class, and a manifest, empirically existing class. When writing about class Marx went even further, not only must people realize this latent class, but they must also take into account developmental tendencies of capitalism. The - obviously far fetched - political demand was for the petite bourgeoisie, peasants, lumpenproletariat, etc. to identify with the proletarian struggle for a classless society since all these classes will inevitably become proletarians themselves if capitalism is allowed to continue.