Paul Virilio and improvised music [reading Steve Redhead, Paul Virilio--Theorist for an Accelerated Culture, 2004] Virilio calls himself a dromologist, dromos means "race" in Greek. He is focused on the speed and acceleration of culture, has been called “the high priest of speed”. His starting point is WWII and military technology; for him that war was never finished, from the point of view of technological development. Speed has continued to accelerate until it has reached the speed of light (internet, cybernetics)--instantaneous, making events and time itself global and no longer local. The human as a local phenomenon, first of all the body, disappears as a cultural given. His concept of the accident is related, since speed as the essence of technological advance brings with it the accident, which is no longer "accidental", i.e. contingent. We have now the "integral accident", that is a necessary part of technological advance, and points to the coming accident which will integrate many disasters through chain reactions. Progress has then reached its finite limit. Accelerated modernity, especially after the end of the Cold War and the impossibility of checking nuclear proliferation, has become dangerous modernity (the terms are Steve Redhead's).

The question for me is in what ways free improvisation draws from current cultural trends, and which trends. Reflecting on Virilio’s categories I am reminded how it is the most contingent music, lacking the substance, the necessity of what is considered significant art. It occurs in real time, instantaneous for players and listeners, then disappears. At whatever speed it goes, no matter how slow or fast, it is still instantaneous, and cannot be criticized with the tools that have been used to analyze art as object. It cannot correct itself and is not responsible for itself any more than Cage's traffic sound outside his window; it is only replaced by the next improvisation, valued in turn for itself. Recording is a futile attempt to capture it and turn it into substance, for it always escapes to the next moment. In this way it is very much a part of our accelerated culture and would not have been conceived of at an earlier age, a post-war phenomenon. Then begins the attraction to what I'm starting to call "absolute" improvisation, which burst the bonds of free jazz in the sixties. Absolute improvisation cannot actually exist but there is the desire to approach a music without givens, as if purified of human hands, non-idiomatic right down to the idiom of each player, a kind of randomizing machine under human control. Cage deplored free improvisation because he said musicians were too steeped in habit to equal pure randomness, such as his coin toss; there would always be the human limitation. But improvisers ignore his strictures, seeking freedom from their limitations of habit.

The accelerated culture is an extension of the myth of progress, which sees the present as necessarily superior to the past. Logically, this should mean that the present is inferior to the future, which is full of promise, as was believed in the Victorian era and has continued in some force in the hopes for specific technologies, such as medical. Yet accelerated culture has broken with the progress myth significantly since, from the time of nuclear competition the future is seen not as glorious and problem-solving but as threatening. The “grand narrative” has collapsed along with the faith that Man will prevail. Celebration of the present, such as the self-congratulation of neo-liberal capitalism after the collapse of Western Communism, has a hollow ring, one with the short reverberation of this month’s advertising slogan. If we were to see the future as having recognized our present shortcomings then we would not celebrate the present as a kind of “last generation”, to be followed by the deluge. It is hard to find any faith, as opposed to hope against hope, that humans will be able to use its wits to overcome the various accelerating calamities multiplying around us. Similarly, the accelerated culture encourages us to avoid looking at what we do from a future perspective, that is critically.

In relation to music, there is a celebration of the present free of criticism, free of the thought that we might some day look back on what we do now and find it wanting, or conversely look at what we did in the past and find it superior. Western artists generally proceeded through a process of criticizing their work, finding problems with it and inventing solutions on their own terms. In my experience this approach is lacking among improvisers; the next improvisation wipes away the last. This is of course not just due to the celebration of the present moment but also to ubiquitous market culture (of which Virilio says little), in which the musical entrepreneur never admits doubts about his or her work. Also the Anglo-American celebration of the hidden artist in every man and woman fits nicely in this uncritical artform. If boosting your self-image and overcoming a sense of inadequacy is part of the picture then you are hardly going to look negatively at your work.

Virilio makes a point about speed creating an aesthetics of disappearance, as in, here this second (instantaneous), gone the next. This parallels the development of photography (I'm also reading Susan Sontag's 1977 book On Photography), which values the multitude of images easily shot by amateurs as highly as those of painstaking professionals (now digital photos and ubiquitous cellphone videos have pushed this even further). The stable object—painting, sculpture, composition—is replaced or at least competes with the unstable, such as cinema, which moves at 24 frames per second, installation art, and improvised music. The art object--the masterpiece (Artaud) and the aura (Benjamin)—disappears in the equal valuation of everything as art. This is all related to the democratizing of art, of which free improvisation is a good example. There is a fine piece in the current London Review of Books by Andrew O'Hagan ("Short Cuts") concerning U-tube, which he calls "the depot of international self-realisation". It links well with Virilio, pointing to the recent instantaneous global success of Susan Boyle's appearance on the UK's Britain's Got Talent. We think of free improvisation as on the other side of celebrity culture, but fifteen minutes (now seconds) of fame, the egalitarianism of everyone as potentially "special", parallels the valuing of every sound and moment, or at least the reluctance to devalue any moment of sound. Here the politics of anti-discrimination reinforces the cultural; every sound has a kind of soul that needs recognition in the light of day, not a dark spot left unexposed (take that, Nietzsche!) Not to mention the relative openness of improvisation to anyone, whether they’ve practiced five minutes or five years on their “sounds”, and the blurring of the amateur/professional distinction, which has something to do with the very nature of this music.

Improvisers have also been highly attracted to electronics (electro-acoustic improvisation, or eai), the core technology for the expansion of the media, providing its speed of response, the ubiquity of the internet, all of which are of significance for Virilio's categories. For traditional, acoustic music the invention of a new instrument has been rare, but with electronic instruments it takes only a year or two for a technology to be dated. This speed of turnover, and the specialized knowledge of what is the latest, is part of the attraction to electronics for many. Moreover, it takes much less time to learn to improvise passably on electronics than on an acoustic instrument. An acoustic player can spend years before being judged proficient, whereas the period for some electronics players is a few weeks before they're on stage and impressing people (I include myself here among those frequently impressed). Even extended techniques on acoustic instruments, which are favored by contemporary improvisers, are much more easily mastered than the elaborate finger and embouchure work of a John Coltrane. The greater popularity of electronics over acoustic instruments among improviser audiences demonstrates that technology speeds up a career just as it gets you from here to there a lot faster.

Virilio says that the now, global real time undivided by time zones, is replacing the local here; history, which is always located in a specific place, disappears into ubiquity. International humanitarianism, for instance, the rationale for American global intervention, recognizes no sovereign states. The instantaneousness of 24-7 engagement with the world through international television and the internet is not just the focus on the now but means that a local event occurs simultaneously everywhere. This is what the virtual means, a substitute for the real (and not, as for Baudrillard, a simulation.) The spectators of a sport event are eclipsed by the television viewers, who must collectively purchase products (implicit in commercial sponsoring) in order to see it. For art, that means not only that the masterpiece is obsolete because everything is art but because it is available around the globe without ever having to see the actual object. Originally this was seen as a great advance in bringing art to more people through books of photographed art (Andre Malraux, The Voices of Silence, 1953), but that was when art was still revered as inhabiting the realm of untouchable heroes. Artists marketing their work today seek to attract buyers by putting it online at a dot com; achieving fame the old-fashioned way is left to the increasingly popular "outsider artist".

By contrast, for the improvised music session, unrecorded or recorded only for participants, is very much here, occurring at one place and time; there is no virutality, no participation without the physical body being actually in the room. In this sense free improvisation escapes the ubiquity of mediated experience; our music is for us, players and listeners, and none other. I often joke, when there are only a couple of listeners, that each gets a larger share of the music than if there were more present. But it is no joke; small-scale and intimate is somehow as natural to this music as it once was to blues. But then I am not typical of improvisers; the stage, where musicians display their developed styles of playing to a hopefully growing audience, has trumped the session. Whether the session will be able to assert itself against the scene remains to be...seen.

I read this over, it sounds like a mish-mash, but, sorry, it's how my mind works on only a quarter cup of coffee. Imagine a half-cup!  ¶ 6:53 AM 1 comments

  Speedup and the middle class professional [reading Paul Virilio, The Original Accident] I should point out that here as often elsewhere in this blog I am not claiming to present new knowledge but trying to answer my own questions, which is a different and not a lesser pursuit. The former, the academic or scientific approach, assumes the theories and discoveries of the past and seeks to supplement, verify, revise or overturn them, whereas I am turning questions over in my often troubled mind, perhaps of no relevance to “new knowledge”. For instance, the story below of the creation of the factory worker has often been told, I am simply updating the (Marxist) theme of the white collar middle class (my class, however wayward I may have been) becoming increasingly proletarianized and pauperized, only with far more illusions than the earlier industrial working class had. Why would the educated elite in particular be so much more unable or unwilling to grasp what is happening to them (speedup, increased work load, pressures and hours, reduced real wages, etc.), compared to their social inferiors of the working class who protested vigorously and briefly threatened revolution. Questions like this intrigue me, and as neither academic nor journalist nor aiming to influence others I merely indulge myself in pursuing them.

I’m interested in the kind of shifts over the last fifty years or so in what it takes for people to be content with what they are in relation to what they do. What I mean by this would be expressed today as the kind of job they tend to have, which earlier would have been considered a vocation or profession. I am referring to the kind of contentment in an earlier age that meant accepting unconsciously, without question, one’s lifelong identity as a librarian, a mechanic, a physician, a mailman, farmer, etc. after a period of apprenticeship. There was even resistance to moving up the ladder, from being, say, a teacher to being an administrator (expressed in the phrase, “kicked upstairs”). Today of course there would still be many who would resist such promotion, but I would guess that the resistance is less. Certainly it would be interesting to explore this statistically. But my general point would probably hold, that today one is looked down upon for being content with one’s vocational identity as if limiting one’s options and showing lack of ambition. To stay at the same level is considered stagnation. In my own profession, that of musician, unless one is moving ahead in cd sales, fees for performance, recognition (visibility), one is disrespected.

To finally link this to Virilio, there has been a shift from substance to movement and acceleration. The new substance, what makes people feel they are real, purposeful, and connected with the world, or at least expect to be connected adequately to the world, is movement. Significantly, career is not confined to the upward path from, say, instructor to full professor but encompasses previously questionable spin-offs--scientists become entrepreneurs, hawking and profiting from their discoveries; sociologists and philosophers become talking heads and media stars; historians go on book tours as part of their career. It is not enough to be one thing and do it well; one must have an entire life of entrepreneurship in order to sit back by one’s private pool with a gin and tonic and feel content. Of course this is only the image of success, the expectation, since of course there is no way to feel actual content when speed has taken over one’s life. So surely there is discontent, as there was in the fifties with the business career, but without analysis, public expression (The Organization Man) or target of criticism. There is no target out there, as “the system” (for the sixties’ activists) or the exploited enraged at the exploiters in the earlier version. In this case the appropriate target is within one’s own most positive, hopeful energies. These cannot be touched without risking the collapse of one’s entire system of life accommodations—family, the trajectory of expected fulfillment, consumption patterns, indeed everything that has come to replace the moral and religious standards by which one can stand apart from and judge one’s life.

This shift is seen as an advance over the old, antiquated system, which is indeed rooted in ancient society. The librarian who got paid poorly because she loved books and desired the social good of literacy was the secular equivalent of the medieval monk, who was socially esteemed so long as he was selfless and sacrificing. He or she has been replaced by an employee who is paid according to accomplishment, perhaps initiating a literacy program and getting it funded, to the applause of all, and is competing with all enterprising others. The goal is that of the state, of the statistician, to increase the number of those who can read, not to communicate a love of reading, of thought, of reflection. To be motivated like the selfless librarian is indeed a handicap to advancement. I am not asking the question of whether this is a better system or not, because our judgment of what better would mean would then have to be asked first. I am asking only how did it come about, and to say this happened because it was an improvement, or even inevitable begs the question.

What is called progress here is actually the same process as that which eliminated the skilled mechanic in favor of the factory worker, who was created largely out of another skilled sector of the population, peasantry and small independent farmers, who were forced off the land, i.e. into poverty, by market competition. The knowledge and skill of trained mechanics as well as farmers, knowledge acquired through a lifetime, was irrelevant to the industrial labor required. Unlike the professions, industrial workers had no or little chance for advancement, but what I’m looking at is their relation to work. Industrial workers, beginning in the 18th century, identified not with their skills, whether or not they were satisfied with a piece of work they had done, but with their location within a process. This process yielded objects and a wage based on following instructions from those who were in control of the knowledge and process. The struggle between craft unions (the AFL) and industrial unions (the CIO) ended in the victory of the latter. It was a victory of mass democracy over the small-producer Jacksonian democracy that de Toqueville had witnessed, dominated by independent skilled workers and professionals.

What has happened to librarians, teachers, doctors, engineers and all the professions of yesteryear is that they have been “liberated” from their dependence on privately acquired knowledge and individualist pride of accomplishment, the ability to make things or perform services according to a certain standards in which they were trained and for which they were respected. They have been industrialized, their knowledge computerized, and they are no longer in control of their work life. This has happened in a way that makes it very difficult for them to sense that they have lost anything of value, and so there is little complaint that gets to the heart of the matter.

For each profession we would have to ask how this occurred, what combination of attraction and necessity brought it about. For doctors, it seems like an advance to become an entrepreneur rather than a professional when the latter is expected to maintain a skill level that is increasingly expanding. The entrepreneur deals with changing situations, utilizing what is available and selling what people are interested in; the professional is easily cast as an elitist and is pushed aside in favor of the one who “meets people’s needs” as the client and not medical knowledge defines them. There is at least a tug of war between the two, as the patient seeks empowerment just as every other customer does. You could say that necessity, the threatened loss of patients for some “traditional” doctors, joins with the attraction of entrepreneurship for others, those for instance who have scanned the potential income stats for the various specializations while in med school and have chosen accordingly. Since the eighties, the increased social status of entrepreneurs in all fields influences this shift. The traditional medical establishment, the journals and respected specialists, struggle to maintain the integrity of the profession in the face of this shift.

The marketplace doctor has not replaced the professional standards doctor but this seems to be the trend. The shift that can be seen as a decline, but why associate it with the creation of the industrial working class in the 19th-20th centuries? Doctors have not been pauperized; in fact they have been thriving financially. The marketplace is the new factory in another sense, that it is the place where what is valued is what others want and not what the professional’s judgment tells him or her to impose. It is where the object of useful knowledge is not, or not exclusively, the body and the tools and skills needed to repair it but the manipulation of patients’ fears and desires for medical procedures to greatest pecuniary advantage. In the name of democratic advance, the patient is the new boss, who can be fooled and stampeded but must ultimately be reckoned with if one wants to develop a practice, just as the old factory boss had a bottom line of production quota and efficient operation. And of course the insurance companies, competing with each other for subscribers’ dollars and the lowest payouts possible, overrule professional standards. The doctors used to have the authority to tell the insurance companies what to pay and what to pay for, now the companies are telling the doctors who is boss. The increasing technologizing of their business also reduces doctors to being a factor in production rather than like the bosses, in charge of the process. The emphasis, as any patient knows, is eliminating the personal relation of doctor and patient in the interest of efficiency and turnover (output). So with their large technical knowledge and training doctors may not be assembly line workers, but they certainly do not live up to their self-image of "independent professionals".

And for musicians, “liberated” from the union and the club owners increasingly since the sixties, are they their own boss now or is the anonymous marketplace? Do they determine what music they will do or, if they wish to be respected and paid a decent amount, do they bow to the market?  ¶ 9:57 AM 0 comments

  Paul Virilio [Reading Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, 1997] When I read Marshall McLuhan in 1967 I was horrified at the world he described coming into being, the eclipsing of print at the hands of electronic media. I could find no way to protest or deny what he was saying; the handwriting was on the walls for all to see. At the time it confirmed me in my sense of not truly belonging to the present, desiring instead what the world was discarding and drifting further from what I had preferred as reality. I could only see myself as an “old” leftist, but unlike them I was too young to take a stance opposing youth rebellion, which embraced the media-oriented new world.

What Virilio describes in the current world is much the same as the earlier McLuhan but I read him with a different response. Yet there is no real shift here. McLuhan apparently welcomed the transformation as a utopia coming into being, shifting from his critique of advertising in the fifties to an optimism regarding the new medium of television and its inevitability (he coined the phrase “the global village”). As an admirer of technological advance, what he saw as passé was anything resisting the dissolution of the “hot” linear media, which implied a subject standing apart from content rather than merging with it as with the cool tv-based media. As that resistant and anachronistic subject myself I could not see a means of resistance, felt disabled, speechless before the critique of speech itself. Virilio, on the other hand, (a committed Catholic like McLuhan, incidentally) did and still does speak and critique this development as of questionable value. His analysis tells us that the global village is not the boon to mankind but its destroyer, instead of expanding the universe for us it has been closing it off.

My receptiveness to this today is partly the difference of the sidedness of the two writers, my sense of being denied by McLuhan and emboldened, given my voice by Virilio. But it also rests on a real change over the last forty years. As with the shift in the appeal of Communism and the Soviet Union for the Left, an embarrassment from which it has not recovered, we have to look at how the sides themselves changed. In the sixties technological progressivism, faith in its juncture with science, was still alive and favored the electronic media as an ally, evident in “the whole world is watching” theme of marches and occupations of buildings by young radicals. It was as if television, with which the younger generation had grown up, could not help but be on the side of positive world change, at least if one were fed the right images, which was the function of those activists. The war-weary parental generation had stamped “children are the hope of the world” on their progeny; part of that hope was the medium that had entranced those children in the fifties. Short of nuclear weaponry, which did not fit the schema, only reactionaries would have denied that whatever new technology provides is for the good of mankind.

The assumption of civil rights and anti-war body-on-the-line fighters was also a childlike trust that adult culture could and should reflect “mankind”, a positive sign wherever it appears in the decade. If there is injustice and evil in the world it is only because a handful of people have hidden it from view, and so the work of freedom and anti-war fighters is to expose and publicize it, converting the innocent and ignorant (southern whites) into knowing opponents of evil. Once people are shown the truth of evil how could they not condemn it? (The unresisting population of Germany during the Nazi era was not taken into account in this illusion.) Exposure and publicity had been the traditional role of progressive muckrakers; however, print reaches only the rational mind whereas television impacts the emotional body which must be moved. The image alone—especially the moving image of television nightly news, practically immediate to the event and giving a sense of participation that was virtual—was essential to the conversion. “I was blind but now I see”—the Evangelical and Enlightenment "dare to know" embraced here. Conversion was the model of political change, by the direct means of a police nightstick for the radicals and by the tv image for the passive masses. The only recently discovered magic of the tube, its ability to create a trance-like gaze and credulousness beyond the imagining of religion, seemed to be on the same side as the mass political movements of the past. It was an apparent irony that the democratized culture-in-a-box which the liberal power elite sanctioned for the populace and could not itself resist, the box that true Americans were enshrined in their homes like a gift they were unworthy to deserve, was actually a secret weapon on the side of those who expected the overthrow of that elite. The new world of justice was one that not only included the revolutionary cool media but would rest upon it. Exposure would be the means, and if “now I can see for myself” was not convincing then post-hypnotic suggestion would do the trick. Any critic of television as a medium, it was assumed by young radicals, was not only curmudgeon but was opposed to the kind of political and social change required by and promised by history.

If there is little positive, utopian vision credible today it is not simply that the utopias of Communism and Revolution have collapsed. Any sense that there is a future for which we can organize and work towards has withered in the face of the all-present Now of instantaneous communication, which has swallowed up both past and present. This is Virilio’s argument applied to the Left, which shifted long ago from its critique of popular media to an embrace of it, that is, it critiques content, not the media itself. It waits in the wings to be called on as a talking head, competing for precious air time. If it is commonly said today that there is no longer a left and right of a political spectrum, such that the Left can only be self-styled and protesting too much, this is part of the explanation. The Left, with its Marxist/scientistic background is scared to be accused of anti-technologist Luddism, and can’t develop a critique of the present that might include themselves or end up divisive. So my question is, can we single out the technological advance of weaponry for opprobrium and yet uphold the rest of it as benevolent to humankind, and if we do find a way to critique the submergence of science under technology can we face the charge of clinging to the past?  ¶ 10:29 AM 0 comments

  Difficult to write because I am full of fear, afraid of hurting myself more by writing and then hating it than by not writing, which is almost equally painful. I have simply the job of watching the two gauges; when the level of pain of not writing exceeds that of writing then I will swing the lever over to the other side and begin doing it, as I am now doing. It follows this rule, however: only after beginning to write do I realize the balance must have shifted. I try to force the change but can't; that is part of the pain. I’m not in control of the respective pressures, there is not even any inevitability to trust in.

For most, I would guess, writing flows naturally from confidence, reinforced by the prospect of praise and support or of critical antagonism, which arouses the fighting spirit in those who need that motivation. In either case it is social context that fuels and determines it, whether an email or a treatise. And this context is assumed by every writer. Both support and opposition are proof that one is a real live person; it assumes there is no existence that is not mirrored. I will hazard that some besides myself long to speak only to oneself, to ground oneself in some soil more nourishing than the variable reflections of others. Prayer is the only silent speech, that is, if we never let others know our prayer or that we even have this speech. This can be a living relation to an unknown and unknowable (un-manipulable, un-representable) void which does not reach out to receive it; a letter that is never mailed or is returned to sender. Prayer then is purposeless, meaningless, non-communicative, words assembled in the void and for the void, and swallowed in the void. And yet, time well spent, for reasons that do not need defending.

This then is the only way I can understand such writing of mine, as prayer in the void, a kind of mist that cannot be aimed in any direction. It is not for you and it is not for me, that is, it does neither of us any measurable good. I can say the same basic ideas in different forms, repeat myself endlessly, and it doesn’t matter, since I’m not trying to reach some higher plateau, some original, deeper thought that will attract attention from readers, from Reason itself, or from a God. It has a purity that has not been sought, and cannot be disappointed to be found impure.  ¶ 6:06 AM 1 comments

    ¶ 10:06 AM 0 comments

 
I have re-written this entry so many times it seems that nothing I say will satisfy me. Undaunted, I plunge ahead once again. I am focused on something that does not seem to be a part of what is considered politics today, and yet it is vital to the kind of political effort I would like to see and can imagine.

America is poised on the threshold of another major political shift, analogous to what began with Nixon's 1968 campaign, when he recognized and developed a new anti-liberal constituancy, the silent majority. This direction was supplemented after Nixon's defeat by the organizational work of what became the New Right, which managed to completely reverse the image of Conservatism. Goldwater and his followers had been labeled elitist and dogmatic, such that Nixon could not even refer to them in 1968. In a short twelve years the Right consolidated its success in the 1980 Reagan election.

The shift we are looking at now with the Obama campaign is in the direction of the left, but lacking several major elements, among them self-organization (compared to the anti-gun control, anti-abortion, anti-busing groups, which the New Right appropriated), and real ideological change, a new way of thinking, which is my interest here. In the earlier shift, people had to feel that New Deal liberalism no longer represented them, and they had to reverse their very self-perception as political beings. Partly this meant a breakdown of altruism as luxury one could not afford; liberalism meant some form of sacrifice for others “less fortunate”, an image of society as an organic whole rather than a collection of self-interests. Moreover, at that time party membership was more like traditional belief, as if it would be an irrevocable, personal stain for one who had voted “all my life” for the Democrats to move to the other column, something like the rule that “I have never crossed a picket line”, now largely a forgotten maxim. Liberalism on a practical level was held together by family, class, neighborhood allegegiance. Breaking this was a major accomplishment of the Right, de-traditionalizing politics, an irreversible and radical change. The shift can be viewed from a radical perspective as politicization, bringing into the process, empowering, those who had taken their political choices for granted and had been on the political sidelines for years. These were liberals who became radicals, as in “I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!” They were first given a spokesperson, Nixon, and then ten years later became themselves empowered to organize for what they perceived as their interests. What the right did is what the radical left had aimed at: wake up (consciousness raising), get angry (speak your mind), and organize for change (mobilize).

Of course there's a question of which side of the bed you wake up on, what you get angry about. But the radical left and radical right seem to agree, in their activist, expansive periods (both of which are past) as to what political activity is about.

Without going further into that past story here, let us at least ask what precisely we want to see happen. I leave aside results we might agree on--the withdrawl from most world military commitments in favor of attention to domestic needs, etc. In my view, putting the results first is part of the notion of politics that is the problem. Let's assume, if we can, that we don't know what we want and instead ask: what do we want to be doing as our political activity?

The right, back in the seventies, took their cue from the radicals, who in the end could only antagonize liberal america, proclaim it as the enemy. If we choose to inherit anti-liberal radicalism, as leftist anti-Obamists do, we are making a mistake. But it is important to try to locate that mistake, which I see as deep rooted in the notion of politics as a matter of EITHER proclaiming one's considered political opinion and seeking to rally others to it OR manipulating others into holding opinions that they have failed to consider seriously. This characterization obviously favors the former, and so it collects people who stand on their opinion and believe, in effect and often verbally behind their backs, that those who don't agree are stupid or lazy, that is, their views are not truly their own because they have not come to them out of consideration or did not value “thinking for themselves”. The political task then becomes to get people to be more like us, people who presumably think for ourselves about what is the right, ethical direction to take.

How would we begin to get out of our mistake?

There are many directions to take up at this point, I will focus on one: face to face argument. Here is a possible form of political engagement which illuminates what is wrong with the radical left conception of what is to be done.

To be continued!  ¶ 10:48 AM 1 comments

 
Here is the interplay of world and person, with two perspectives: myself as an individual in the world, and the world as it appears in myself through the chosen objects of my searching. This is St. Paul’s distinction between being “in the world” and “of the world”, but without the directive to value the former and avoid the latter. This is a dialectical pair that needs some effort of separation in order to create a story of oneself that respects both the self and the world in their mutuality. How have I gone about constructing my specific world, and how has the world widely known and available constructed me? The world is a vast reservoir of often conflicting and changing possibilities of which I have chosen certain ones at certain times over others, and I can build up the story from within, with the self as responsible agent. This perspective aims at self-mastery, the Socratic goal of “Know Thyself” informed by awareness of how this mind works, its passions, and what it chooses. The other perspective locates this individual in the world as one among many. What I choose is available to and embedded in a specific social and historical context, and my choices have bound me to some and put me in conflict with others, have given me a particular identity that I would not have in another culture or time.

It was especially in an earlier writing project that I concentrated on the first perspective. I was the isolate in retreat standing at the mouth of my cave and looking deep into it, trying to retrieve and reconfigure my past, to put myself into words, with the goal of leading myself out of despair and defeat. This can be simplified to: I am the one who takes responsibility for making my world—you might also say, for getting myself into a jam. The corollary is that the world, the Other as a unified object, stands over against my world, which I must understand if not defend and hide. As the individual in extremis one struggles in private away from the world, the site of trauma. The longing to recover the world in love (which includes the acceptance of struggle) is a different moment. Such writing is ambivalent, incomplete, since it can’t help but objectify the being of the individual. Unearthing it through writing makes the self available even when it is securely hidden in the closet (my familiar image in such periods: one hand alone poking out of the earth, furiously writing). In this mode, for instance, I have worked to understand the role various events played in the formation of my sense of purpose, how that is still active today and what weakens it. My questions have included: how have I revealed myself in my past, how am I that same person today, one being traumatically twisted, broken, recovering. I’ve wanted to circle and trap any missing links to myself, engaging my shame of being a concrete, unique and destructible subject and struggling to overcome it.

This has been valuable research but I am here posing the alternate perspective, one that stretches towards sensing and finding specific points of continuity with the world. This Other is by definition not myself but here I find myself radically reflected in it. It is because I am of the world that I have something to do with it. The formula here is: the world creates me, with the corollary that I welcome this. I must sense my mind and behavior as not at all unique and chosen but pointed in a certain direction by the world into which I have been and continue to be born. There was a line I read long ago in Ernst Troeltsch’s Historicism and its Problems that reflects this perspective: “You cannot escape your historical skin.” The moment I saw it I was frozen in fear, surprised at my reaction, as if a huge weight had crushed me and all my hopes. Yet this weight became transformed, connecting me with the world in a way that my personal struggles for self-understanding could not, as if I had to prove that I was a subject against all odds. Added to other forms of determinism I studied, especially the sociological, the effect for me was paradoxically not at all quietistic, defeated by the huge list of determinations, but activist, pushing me towards political engagement, the world in its movement.

The two perspectives work together and against each other, with no a priori guidelines of how they may be balanced. Each perspective must be pursued recklessly all the way to the bottom. The struggling isolate I* has no choice but to resist the I* caged by its cultural options and vice versa. In playing music for instance, I would not be searching each sound as that which I intimately choose, as true for me alone, if it all added up to mirroring current fashion. At the same time my music has a place and meaning that I cannot claim to have determined myself, and I publicly resist the ideology of Art that does claim this. I will not choose between these two perspectives, I choose rather to be both in some kind of shifting, antagonistic harmony that never settles down.

In concert, these two perspectives yield a writing conceivably of greater interest to readers. Like my music, all my serious writing has been aimed not at others but through me for others, I risk here the word sacrifice. When I stand at the door of my cave I speak a language that I myself must strive to understand, but when I am wandering about, as now, then I am making myself universally available and speaking of us. Although others might gain something by reading themselves into my personal delving, the addition of this other perspective engages readers more directly, for it concerns a culture and choices that are common to others. It is just possible that my particular curiosity might lead to an insight


This particular thread begins with wondering why, fifty years ago, my heart suddenly raced at the first sentence I ever read of Marx: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” For me it was not just the literal meaning of those few English words that struck me, a sweeping claim that could be laid out alongside alternatives. I did not dismiss it as a reductionist theory of society and history, as a college student might today. Could I have studied Marx as just one among many theorists when he was considered by those around me as the primordial motivator of America’s enemies?

All objects of our attention, possible paths, answers, ethical choices are mediated by our culture; they are the points at which the individual most truly meets the culture, transforms and recreates it. It is others who arouse us—crash into us—and force us to become the subjects we subsequently imagine ourselves to have become through our free choice. These others are historically specific and cannot be reduced to eternal archetypes. Marx's statement above, that begins the textual body of The Communist Manifesto, would hardly raise an eyebrow today when Marxism no longer holds the positive/negative charge it did in 1958; it does not divide people along lines of life and death struggle, friend and foe. Few would read Marx’s texts as a secret that our world was trying to keep from us, as “fighting words”, as I did back then.

Further on I came to this: “a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift and joins the revolutionary class”, and I felt a place had been carved out for me in the world scheme. I saw the words of Marx as a guideline of how to understand the world and take my place in it, a world divided that included me. It was a heavily charged interpellation that challenged all others, including the call to be a Christian and the call to be a functioning member of society, such as a musician, my childhood dream. Without knowing it I was searching for an alliance with Marx and would have believed practically anything he said. I took him as my master, who would provide me with teachings that would illuminate my situation and support me. At the same time it would give me something to do, a job without social status, for the revolutionary is not acclaimed by society as a musician or professor could hope to be. My work would fulfill me only by submerging me in the most important historical task.

The context of this personal Event was middle class America in the fifties. The common view at the time was that world history is a battle ground between forces that could be reduced to good and evil, the view later presented more explicitly by the Reagan and Bush II administrations than by Eisenhower. Instead of identifying the evil as Marxism and Communism, as my classmates no doubt did, it was America that I opposed, at least the upper classes and the American Way. The reasons for this I easily find in my personal history: my disappointment with Christianity and middle-class Christians, who I felt betrayed Jesus; envy/rejection I felt in my close proximity to the wealthy and my anger at my (conservative) father for distancing himself from me. I was predisposed, waiting for Marx to be dropped in my lap.

To see the ways I was over-determined, and that with other personal factors I could have gone the other way, detracts in no way from my current validation of that experience. At the time I was attracted to the solid ground Marx promised, the freedom from personal confusion in a view I could take as objective and foundational, a justification for my nameless rage. Later when I discovered the reasons that were particular to me, that Marxism was in part a faith I had chosen, I ran into difficulties. In the mid-seventies I also read critiques that helped me see Marxism in perspective, and it was painful to realize how vulgarly and unthinkingly I had accepted so much. I cleared out much of my belief system with nothing to replace it, politically immobilized.

One aspect remained which I will mention here. Marxism is one of those complex events that gains power partly from being situated right at the border between understanding and doing, interpreting the world and acting in it. My power drive towards historical knowledge and understanding was released by Marx only because I could imagine that through that study I would participate on the side of revolutionary change. When it became apparent that academic study would not do that I had to leave. I did not want to validate even a part of Marx's teaching without some revolutionary contribution, and in the academic world that was not and is not possible. Especially at a time when Communism was the dividing line of “which side are you on”, to express any aspect of Marxism was to will it, to place yourself on the side of doing and risk taking a hit.

Marxism, grounded in the white-hot conjuncture of knowing and doing, theory and praxis in dialectical relationship, has not failed to arouse problems for those it touches. Marxists themselves, as for leftists in general, have contributed to its defeat by self-righteously externalizing the causes of these problems and refusing to examine the roots of their belief system.

Reading Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, discussing Alain Badiou’s categories of Being and Event, I come across something directly a propos:

“Let us take the Marxist thesis that all history is the history of class struggle: this thesis already presupposes engaged subjectivity—that is to say, only from this slant does the whole of history appear as such; only from this ‘interested’ standpoint can one discern traces of the class struggle in the entire social edifice, up to the products of the highest culture….the allegedly ‘objective’, ‘impartial’ gaze that is not in fact neutral but already partial [is] the gaze of the winners, of the ruling classes.” (p. 137)

Now that Marxism is no longer a forbidden temptation, is there anything today that fulfills this function?  ¶ 12:00 PM 0 comments