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