¶ 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

  Second letter to a friend

If you read this text of Zizek on Democracy Now, at the end you'll find something that seems to confirm the impression you tell me that "your generation" gets from Zizek, and that you object to: license to be politically unengaged. He would reverse the 11th thesis on Feuerbach and say it's time to interpret the world and not change it; the left is too engaged in changing. But if you check the context of this you can see that he is giving an impetus to dis-engagement, standing back from the usual leftist stance, rather than not becoming active in the first place. Zizek is addressing people who have already become enmeshed in the left but have not thought through their categories of understanding, not those who want an excuse not to even think about their choices, and instead cover their fear of risks by following a star. I take it his latest book In Defense of Lost Causes is also along these lines.

A first-hand illustration of what I think Zizek is getting at: in 1974 I created a one-man project, growing out of a protest letter to the first Gulf War that I circulated to everyone I knew, a couple hundred people, many of whom responded positively. My project following that was Letters, an invitation to a public space of writing in which to understand, criticize what we are doing politically. I asked people to respond to each other, like letters to the editor, only there would be no editor, only each other, and it would be a private network. I got several letters of people expressing their political feelings, but not at the level of awareness that goes beyond mutual support. The assumption was that our agreement on fighting government policy was the political foundation. I also wrote to the Progressive Magazine, suggesting it could be a forum of the sort I was looking for, and got a polite rejection from the editor. I should have continued the project but felt isolated, became discouraged and quit.

If I had known Lacanian categories then I would have concluded, the core of the Left is a Big Other, obscured by an ideology of radicalism (going to the root of things). This Big Other is in some way always a step ahead of any rooting out, of getting under itself, so It is actually preventing us from being radicals in any thoroughgoing, disturbing sense. We progress or fall back but in ways that are always defined for us. (Always my analogy to music: it is like the way improvisers have now become a role and are seen from outside themselves, such that they don't really have to face the ugly fact of not knowing what to play. In a way they consider that they have already improvised before they begin to play; they have achieved improvisation). Every attempt by someone to find out why we must honor and obey this Big Other is automatically feared and avoided as harmful, self-destructive, an outsider with malicious intent. If you question It you are actually (and here is the continuing Stalinist core of the left, which would say "objectively") on the Right. Now, the left that young people find themselves in the midst of has inherited this whole notion of correctness, of moralism, which means you are obliged to step on the toes of the bad guys, the fundamentalists, the racists, etc.--transgression against someone else's Big Other gets its kicks right here--but don't step on the toes of your own Father.
Since the fall of "really existing socialism" almost twenty years ago, the embarrassing link of the left to Stalinism has disappeared from view, and with it the attack from the right that the left was really dogmatic, which means theory-driven, ideological rather than pragmatic, that is, unamerican. This was a defeat only to that part of the left that felt it needed some link with a revolutionary past, and through that with Marxism. However, it strengthened that part of the left that was more interested in practical politics--think globally, work locally. This part traced the failures of the left to the turn of the 70's when some had confused the "genuine" left with Maoism, the Weathermen, Panthers, etc. There has always been a huge majority of the left that had at least a hierarchy of beliefs that could be safely asserted, such that they could not give the kind of support to eastern Europe resistance to Communism that the anti-communists could. As late as 1982, Susan Sontag was considered a traitor, at least an embarrassment, for her accusation that the left had protected Communism from valid criticism (her Town Hall speech).

After 1989-1991, the left can be activist, and play a purely constructive role, demonstrating and writing, and be perceived as united (the "overzealous" who embarrassed it were now political correctors on the campuses). Leftist organizers and activists can ignore a Marxism that had been linked to it simply by the existence of socialist countries claiming to base themselves on Marx. Philosophy, however, as understood in the West is generally seen as something other than a social order, it is the questioning of all forms of order, including that of its own practitioners. So Marxism as a philosophy, as a stumbling block of self-criticism, could be left behind, guilty by association with the failed socialist "experiment". It's not just that the left wants to think of itself as questioning its enemy and not itself. It has to do with the left imagining itself as a movement, which can only go in one direction. This is politics, the practical question of how to be effective, getting the job done, reflecting back like all politicians on what it looks like, how the press sees it. And criticism from within, as in Obama's camp, looks bad.

The left has then no way to criticize itself from within; all criticism is from the alien other side, the dark side of evil. Americans especially need to be as light and bright, clean and incorruptible as possible (which rules out "true" radicals actually holding political office, of course). The American Left-Liberal coming from Dewey was always embarrassed that it was joined at the hip to a dominant philosophy like Marxism, since it interpreted that in a Stalinist way, as the Book, a scripture that had to be taken literally. Even dialectical thinking, which requires us to see beyond an us/them antagonism, could not be wrenched away from top-down Stalinist/Maoist authoritarianism. The left does not want a unified correct theory to stand in judgment, yet it also ridicules the normal working of philosophy which yields conflicting philosophers, who are so cranky and individualist that they always differ from each other, and so are unable to come to the same Party. There were all these splinter groups, that couldn't decide on how to symbolize the failure of the 1917 Revolution, how to characterize the USSR--as a deformed workers state, or whatever other term would distinguish one splinter from another and prevent a unified front. Marxism made the Left look foolish, whereas the right (after Goldwater, at least) could come together on all its basic ideological terms in the interest of gaining political power.

So now, when Zizek says, lets learn what look critically at what beliefs we must be holding given the evidence of our actions, some will of course use this as a way to stand on the sidelines. Every time you jump into such a situation you might be found to defend something that later you will have to criticize. And thus the left re-creates itself and its defensive self-image.  ¶ 1:38 PM

  Letter to a friend

You were talking about whether you should take Zizek seriously when he has become something of a philosophical rock star to your age peers. You feel a split, in general alienated from them, and want to be critical of their choices, or of how they see Zizek. From them you have gathered that he supports their interest to stand above politics and not to engage, and this turns you away from him. There are many interesting questions here: one of them is, what are we really trying to do when we read someone who brings with him or her a certain aura, a frisson of fame/notoriety? What are we looking for? All of our reading of serious non-fiction is motivated by some kind of desire, which can't be symbolized by and reduced to specific questions we want answered. We may be attracted by two seemingly contrary motives that succeed each other as moments. Seeing the crowd forming around Zizek, for instance, we are partly attracted in the same way they are, asking ourselves, "what is the charisma here that draws them, what message does he have that I might also want?" We must then accept that we are in this moment part of that "crowd mentality" that wants to consume him for the same reason others do. We see everyone screaming for the beautiful package and we can't help asking, as they also do, what's the mystery inside? Here we must confess to having no identity apart from others. Yet in the very next moment, seeing ourselves do this repels us as a betrayal of our independence, our desire not to consume like the others but to be genuinely interested for myself as an individual who can pick and choose for my more intimate, personal needs. These I do not necessarily share with others--the mind I say I value as "my own". So we feel a contrary impulse, to recuperate ourselves with an almost violent reaction, which means to explore him against the crowd.

This then splits into two possibilities: either to discover that the crowd is foolish to find anything of value in him, OR to find that the crowd is attracted only for the wrong or superficial reasons. Wrong reasons would be that he does not in fact profess what he does--and we are then obligated not only to point out the mistake but to say why others would choose to misread him. The superficial reason would be because they are attracted to the package only, wanting to be seen as a hip follower, etc. rather than to his hidden, in a sense more mundane message, which to pursue they would have to lose their hipness and not pretend to be so knowing about him. In other words, if Zizek is the fool we denounce him as a charlatan or if the crowd is foolish we defend him against his false followers, who are using and distorting him unconsciously for their own purposes. In either case we are drawn to engage him in a genuine way, that is non-academic, where we get to define and assert our own motives for and uses of this labor of understanding, rather than as part of the institutional project. This brings in the element of passion, which is blind and destablizing, and for these reasons anathema to the disengagement academia prefers.

What is interesting in what you say about the crowd's take on Zizek is that their passion for him would partly conform to the quietism the traditional academy would prescribe. That academy would advocate only the freedom not to make "absolute" judgments, that is, commitment to judgments based on reasons outside the current standards of accepted science. In fact, what I get from Zizek himself is quite the opposite, that there is no avoidance of choosing; one cannot choose not to choose, and all choices are political in that they relate to our well-being on the planet. If the "buzz" around him is that he exudes an aloof cynicism and withdrawal, then people have isolated some texts I haven't come across, or it would be worth knowing how such a distortion could take place. I suspect that people are drawn, right now at least, to the image, the personification of engagement, but don't know how to take the further step to being such a person. If Zizek is the Father, the Moses, then we surely must know that he can't enter the promised land himself; everyone must, as the gospel says, go through that lonesome valley by themselves. His young followers must leave the academic Mother (or the rebellious Child of more politicized faculty) and walk out into the lonely world where no one will bless them and shelter them, where they will have to take the consequences for every mistake they make. The same was true with the coffee-house existentialist engagés of the fifties; they had to first feel their way into the role of being actually politically committed before they--or at least their sixties successors--could actually find themselves doing it.

Above I say "we" I can see my own patterns of following/rebelling, not with regards to Zizek--when I stumbled on him I had no knowledge of how hip he is today--but with regards to other heroes. Usually I wait until they are safely obsolete, and then abandon them if they come in vogue again! We cannot escape being consumers, satisfying our need for goods material and spiritual by means of choices that seem to come from our personal knowledge. But to do this we can't ignore what the world around us is doing, that is, the open-air marketplace, which arouses doubts about our choices: why is everyone rushing over to that table? Are their asparagus better than these I just picked up? On the one hand we are confident in our knowledge, on the other, we prudently allow for our ignorance. These two seem to come in percentages and we can observe how people, including ourselves, work with the imbalances that are bound to appear in our various personalities.

Loosely related to these two moments I would pose two opposing ideal types: the specialist expert, the savant, the one who needs to trust to the highest degree all that he or she pronounces, and so must restrict authoritative statements to a narrow range of competence. In relation to others one feels a great need to be trusted, to reduce challenge and conflict to a minimum, observing clear rules of how to deal with opposition and associating with others who share that commitment. Here is the traditional academy that I refer to above, it is the rule of a self-defining community. There is a hierarchy of one's own knowledge with the "area of competence" at the peak, and a community is founded on this ideology. Ostensible security then is a cover for a vast sea of insecurity; in saying one thing I tacitly acknowledge my huge uncertainty about everything else, to the point of fearing to tread on another's bailiwick, recoiling in horror that I might offend the other and provoke a hostile attack on my own small tract. To paraphrase Sartre, the hell of insecurity is other people, who don't respect property lines and like wandering cows come trampling on my grapes just to find something more to eat, something that is not appropriate to them. At the other extreme is the generalist, the wandering cow, who takes in a huge amount of information about all kinds of things, and does not hesitate to opine on practically anything. This one might make bold assertions but doesn't have the command of details to back them up with an authority that would be respected by the specialist. This figure can be often be refuted as inaccurate, ill-informed, and confuted as the egoist who weaves theory out of thin air for the sake of dazzling the gullible (I think the so-called intellectual "babe magnet" fits in here). So the specialist appears confident in his/her mental powers but in fact must limit the field of judgment in order to appear so; the generalist appears confident but is vulnerable to charges of building castles of theory on the sands of ignorance, so it is a confidence that seems to come from personal boldness, extraversion, rather than being rooted in anything solid. This figure is scorned as one who has the answer to everything, and therefore the truth about nothing.

What confuses the picture is that while the specialist is authority, and has respectability enough to turn all opponents into rebels, it has this for an inescapable price: all authority is suspect--even the most buttressed academic knows that. Specialized authority (think of the academic philosophers who don't think Zizek--or Deleuze--is even worthy of being called a philosopher) is based on a fear-driven ego, and may at best be accurate and precise in statements but in the end cannot say what purpose that knowledge (the kind of knowledge the university still enshrines as sacred) is for. Simply to have it? To even speak of a desire to know means to drive towards a place beyond safe boundaries, it is to ignore the safety of boundaries.

I tried to conceive this as a balanced two-pole image, with the specialist on one side and the generalist on the other, with the mean as the position of choice, the should. But I fooled myself, I couldn't help but find the generalist more attractive, as if this were the role of the intellectual, as opposed to the scholar. The generalist takes the greater risk of being ignored and condemned as wasting his or her own time as well as that of others who pay attention to them; this would bother some but instead attracts me. So ultimately this is an argument that has reached my life--my life as an academic, renunciation of that for a committed politics, renunciation of that for the specialization of playing one kind of music on one instrument, then back into generalized study, etc. I go to the marketplace thinking I know just what I want to buy, see the crowd moving--history itself envelops me, then I feel deceived, "I want my life back", etc. Now I am moving again, after a long period of specialization, and what I do is no longer of any importance, instead it is what the world does that is beautiful.

For a brief coda, Zizek is attractive partly because he is a generalist, and this is a good reason for people to be attracted to him before they know anything of his ideas. He stirs people up, and we need to be stirred up in order to get moving under our own steam.  ¶ 12:06 PM