From Marxism 2009 last year. Though I'd heard of him and his excellent work before, I only really started to read some of Harvey when I was writing on Raymond Williams (Harvey has the single best piece on Williams--in Spaces of Capital--thinking through Williams' problematic "militant particularism"). I'm liking him a lot. Again, if you haven't seen the Reading Capital course, check that out. It's a good way to get through that book, which is one of those no one ever reads all the way through unless it's assigned (not unlike anything by Hegel). That's not always a bad thing, of course (certainly in Hegel, though only reading the master-slave passage in the Phenomenology or the beginnings of the greater Logic and thinking the dialectic is "therefore" necessary to "overcome" is pushing this way too far). I'm planning on going all the way through Capital 2 and 3 shortly (I've only really gotten through the beginning of 2 and the end of 3), so it's a great refresher and a good way to pick up those parts of the first book (especially part 7) I never made it through. I never touched anything really after the chapter on the working day (except some pieces of the machinery chapter and the amazing part on primitive accumulation), even when I reread it for exams last summer: in literary studies, due to Derrida and his specters, the focus is still on the first three chapters on use and exchange value (though not confusing the labor theory of value with the value theory of labor has enough attendant complications), often to the detriment of the theory of surplus value as a whole.
One more thing. Harvey above (and in a recent paper) talks about a transition from capitalism to socialism--revolution--taking just about as long (or at least involving as much complexity and work) as the transformation from feudalism to capitalism. This is a welcome comment (obviously drawn from Marx's sense of things itself) when revolution has always had the connotation of radical, instantaneous breaks on the one hand, and on the other has been conceptually discredited by the theoretical left itself in the US for about forty years in favor of micropolitical models of change (or a a dour sort of pragmatism, which turns quickly into a fatalism, rightly thrust to the fore for critical inspection at Planomenology--though one should also point out Zizek too often trades in this pessimism). To this, I would also just add a pragmatic remark about the relation of revolution to violence by by Fredric Jameson:
What is always at the bottom of the quarrel about the term [revolution--MJ] is the conception of revolution as violent, as a matter of armed struggle, forceful overthrow, the clash of weapons wielded by people willing to shed blood. This conception explains in turn of what may be called demotic Trotskyism, that is, the insistence on adding the requirement of "armed struggle" to whatever socialist proviso is at issue: something that would seem both to substitute effect for cause and unnecessarily to rase the ante on salvation. Rather, this proposition needs to be argued the other way around: namely that the other side will resort to force when the system is threatened in genuinely basic or fundamental ways...
-"Actually Existing Marxism," in Valences of the Dialectic, 388
Then I would follow that up with how he shows, pointing rightly at Allande's Chile, just how plausible the beginnings of such a long revolution (Raymond Williams' term) actually are:
Left electoral victories are neither hollow social-democratic exercises nor occasions in which power passes hands definitively: rather, they are signals for the gradual unfolding of democratic demands, that is to say, increasingly radical claims on a sympathetic government which must now, in obedience to that development, be radicalized in its turn, unless it sells out to the appeal for order. The revolutionary process in this sense is a new legal dispensation in which repressed popular groups slowly emerge from the silence of their subalternity and dare to speak out--an act which can range, as in Allende's revolutionary Chile, from the proposal of new kinds of laws to the seizure of farm lands [which right now we find in Venezuela--MJ]; democracy necessarily means that kind of speaking out, which can also be identified as the truest form of the production of new needs (as opposed to consumerism).
-"Actually Existing Marxism," in Valences of the Dialectic, 391
So new laws, new freedoms, new regulations, alongside the building of new economic infrastructures under the emerging new state:
The legislature was passing the laws of eco-economics [...] They directed co-ops [...] to help the newly independent metanat local subsidiaries to transform themselves into similar cooperative organizations. This process, called horizontalization, had very wide support, especially from the young natives , and so it was proceeding fairly smoothly. Every martian business now had to be owned by its employees only. No co-op could exceed one thousand people; larger enterprises had to be made of co-op associations, working together. For their internal structures most of the firms chose variants of the Bogdanovist models, which themselves were based on the cooperative Basque community of Mondragon, Spain. In these firms all employees were co-owners, and they bought into their positions by paying the equivalent of about a year's wages into the firm's equity fund, wages earned in the apprentice programs of various kinds at the end of schooling This buy-in fee became the starter of their share in the firm, which grew every year they stayed, until it was given back to them as pension or departure payment. Councils elected from the workforce hired management, usually from outside, and this management then had the power to make executive decisions, but was subject to yearly review by the councils.
-Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars, 296-7
And one more thing: this sort of conception of revolution concretely situates any cultural or discursive struggle--struggle on that level is only of finite use, and takes place at that level. Cultural politics is only politics (often just politicization, often just micropolitics) unless it also hits at or ties into economic levels--as Jameson (who some might call a mere cultural Marxist) never gets tired of saying.
But then again it is also necessary to register (with Harvey--see this lecture of his for an elaboration of his point about Ch. 15, footnote 4 in the short piece above--and Jameson) that there are many levels of struggle, and that no one who seriously is engaged in cultural Marxism believes they can turn the world around just at that level. No, it's often a micropolitical model that believes that--along with people who dismiss cultural Marxism as a safe or partial form of commitment. The dismissive sense of that last word shows that its positive sense--that indeed, as applied, it is a piece in a larger situation--isn't available from this perspective, one that also believes with the micropolitics of Foucault especially (and tendencies in critical theory in general) that institutions (the "academy") are what is big and bad, and moreover are what determine and compromise the situation of cultural anti-capitalist critique (rather than capitalism, which is precisely much larger--and smaller--than any institution).
My point is that "the production of new needs" is what cultural criticism is about (finite, because representational, demands and Utopian possibilities), but is about this alongside other--indeed partial--sorts of activities and commitments that are by no means incapable of this sort of production (Jameson's phrasing here is precisely calculated to emphasize the fact that these needs can be and are produced at these other levels--even especially at economic ones). Significantly, it is precisely the cultural level (or the level of everyday life) that is most engaged by the recent statements of Zizek, Jameson, Harvey, Badiou and others to think hard about what communism might be, to imagine Utopias, to speak up out of subalternity and present alternative experiences of the world, and, indeed, to think about revolution: "carving out autonomous spaces," as Paul Ennis recently calls it, in various ways (he talks about what Badiou thinks is necessary, against Zizek, but I think Zizek too thinks this Utopian--and I use this word in an approving, Harveyian, Jamesonian sense that too few share--enclave-production occurs or is at least pragmatically necessary). And it is this cultural level that is most misunderstood by people unfamiliar with that level and what it involves (including the sacrifices that I don't think we can just say are nonexistent--unless we keep thinking all cultural Marxists are just "humanists" in a disturbing new sense). That, however, means education is necessary (both of yourself and the misinformed, as Harvey insists upon above: part of the problem is that this stuff isn't taught, or only gotten through someone like Zizek), and repeated reconnection of this level to others (an act that cultural criticism and recent ideology critique has learned to do in perhaps the most adept and tactical way).
And indeed, cultural Marxism is great at this too: what is culture but a way to reconnect while recognizing that separation of levels, rather than try and construct a one-off sort of immanent metaphysical level at which every microelement just is or is not political? I don't even think you can say cultural Marxism has gone too far--which is what the reactionary consensus in the US (indeed increasingly in literary studies) seems to be. We need more cultural studies, not less. As these studies make their way into departments dealing with urbanism, architecture, media theory and design--where some of the most radical Marxist work is now being done--I think they become more concrete and produce more connections and reconnections, perhaps, than they did when this study was done primarily in literature and film (or philosophy). But that's a development and transformation, which is also probably a shift made in accordance with changes in the system studied and the new forms reconnection to other levels is imagined to take.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Best of... Critiquing de Man
I've always been suspicious of de Man. That said, I've also always tried to give him a fair shake. You never should dismiss any thinker outright. Part of the problem, though, is that de Man takes a lot of your good will and puts it into his service. It's the common practice of a cynic, of course--not too hard to get around (though it takes John Guillory some time). But you have to be vigilant.
Part of the appeal of de Man is not so much his aphoristic language, but the modernism of his postmodernism--as Jameson has rightly put it. Everything is tightly worked out to fold back onto itself, in a perfect self-perpetuating form in which you are... now not in control. On another level, it's also the appeal of a system: with de Man, you can put away all the considerations that have to come from context, and just ram a text through the system. Oh yes, you have to pay very close attention, work through all sorts of problems--but that's made a part of the system too, insofar as it is what the system accounts for as an act of "reading" irreducible to the system.
Regardless, it's a significant and influential appropriation of Derrida--so influential that American philosophers confronting Derrida might still not have encountered the more (I hesitate to say original) French-Algerian article (one can often tell by their reference to Derrida's overintense focus on language... the latter being a primarily de Manian preoccupation).
I'm only realizing now that I'm a little outside that circuit--having never quite been in on the de Man sort of deconstruction, whenever I encounter it I just feel odd. But I think the important thing to stress is that it wasn't a "misappropriation" (something de Manians love to get all moralistic about) so much as a powerful coordination of all sorts of concerns, a lot of them political (and even the desire to be apolitical is quite political) and having to do with the state of the university and the English department (particularly Yale's department, which never was consolidated into an actual department like in other schools) at the time. It is also something we can sort of ignore or put by, while we try and cultivate some completely new sense of how to relate Derrida to the reading of literature. We can't let the dour de Manian, or for that matter the Derridian, stop that project, especially with his system.
That said, we have to learn to extract what we can from de Man, I think. And there is a lot that is useful here. Some of the following posts try and bring these elements out, while combatting what is the desperate sort of attempt of de Man to make literature both relevant and irrelevant at the same time:
Prior to a Hermeneutics and a History: I try to focus on what is good and anti-hermeneutic about this de Manian proposition--written for a class with Peter Brooks.
Theory, Pedagogy, de Man: A look at de Man's remark, "the resistance to theory is itself theoretical," and why this sort of aphoristic tendency of his produces a sketchy "pedagogical" situation--that is a situation sketchy insofar as we insist on its supposedly pedagogical nature.
Demystifying the Singular: Consolidating the critique, by looking at more dangerous lines in "Criticism and Crisis." There's a long exchange in the comments where I try to defend my views and distinguish de Man from Derrida (a task well-accomplished by Gasché, but I try and do it in a more holistic sort of way). One thing I didn't emphasize enough in this exchange is that de Man truly thinks the origin of the language of the sciences are "literary," and that this is insane. Now, it's not insane insofar as it engages an issue involved in literary studies all the way back to Richards and his rejoiners to C.P. Snow. It's insane insofar as it encroaches on articulating a sort of metaphysics of the letter--which many people still attribute to Derrida himself.
Giving Up Deconstruction: Not where I give up deconstruction, but where I reflect on many people being dissatisfied with just this sort of de Manian metaphysics of the letter (this is a sort of sequel to "Demystifying"). I use Frances Ferguson's excellent situation of this problem in terms of 18th century aesthetics and the role of Kant.
Blindness: I read "The Rhetoric of Blindness" and try and sum up the differences between Derrida and de Man that I've been articulating in "Demystifying" and "Giving Up." What's sort of amazing is how hard this is to do in literary terms, when philosophically it is extremely clear what these differences are... something that shows why new and more sophisticated interpretations of Derrida in America usually come from philosophy departments. This, however, isn't a sign that Derrida was really a philosopher all along--or that the new Derrida is actually more correct than the previous Derrida (the fact that many of these philosophers worked in Comp Lit. shows their knowledge of Derrida is impossible without the literary emphasis). Indeed I claim elsewhere that philosophy will never quite grasp Derrida without going back to the literary-critical concern. What this means though is that the de Manian approach pulls Derrida too quickly towards reading an individual literary object. Other literary approaches to Derrida--like that of Geoffrey Hartman--can often be deeper.
Blindness, part 2: One last word on the issue.
Predicaments: Looking a little closer at how people get de Man out of certain binds.
Reading and Society: Here I consider the de Manian drive to separate literature from any significant social context by way of a simplistic reduction of these contexts to the Barthesian "codes." The apolitical tendency of de Manian deconstruction is quite apparent here: society and politics has to somehow come only out of the literariness of the literary--nowhere else. All one has to do to oppose this is say that a social context is not the same thing as a Barthesian code. Insofar as the code is inadequate, however, de Man's critique is actually quite welcome.
Derrida, de Man, Materialism: In the last post I'll collect here I critique de Manian materialism and Derrida's weird insistence that he is asserting something similar to de Man on this issue. Indeed, I critique Derrida's buddying-up with de Man in general--I simply think they're on completely different pages, except in their shared high-modernist temperament. More specifically, I make the case for considering Derrida as more of an idealist than a materialist--with one important caveat: this is only really valid insofar as it is just a sort of heuristic. Nevertheless, I think it is helpful to combat the increasingly meaningless postmodern insistence on the "materiality" of the letter (and which Derrida himself critiqued extensively in his writings on Lacan). The trace, it is true, isn't ideal. But conceiving it as the effect of idealization--well, that's what Derrida's very first books lay out. It's important to retain that connection, and understand that it therefore forces a rethinking of materiality--one that makes the latter something completely different from anything de Man is insisting upon.
Part of the appeal of de Man is not so much his aphoristic language, but the modernism of his postmodernism--as Jameson has rightly put it. Everything is tightly worked out to fold back onto itself, in a perfect self-perpetuating form in which you are... now not in control. On another level, it's also the appeal of a system: with de Man, you can put away all the considerations that have to come from context, and just ram a text through the system. Oh yes, you have to pay very close attention, work through all sorts of problems--but that's made a part of the system too, insofar as it is what the system accounts for as an act of "reading" irreducible to the system.
Regardless, it's a significant and influential appropriation of Derrida--so influential that American philosophers confronting Derrida might still not have encountered the more (I hesitate to say original) French-Algerian article (one can often tell by their reference to Derrida's overintense focus on language... the latter being a primarily de Manian preoccupation).
I'm only realizing now that I'm a little outside that circuit--having never quite been in on the de Man sort of deconstruction, whenever I encounter it I just feel odd. But I think the important thing to stress is that it wasn't a "misappropriation" (something de Manians love to get all moralistic about) so much as a powerful coordination of all sorts of concerns, a lot of them political (and even the desire to be apolitical is quite political) and having to do with the state of the university and the English department (particularly Yale's department, which never was consolidated into an actual department like in other schools) at the time. It is also something we can sort of ignore or put by, while we try and cultivate some completely new sense of how to relate Derrida to the reading of literature. We can't let the dour de Manian, or for that matter the Derridian, stop that project, especially with his system.
That said, we have to learn to extract what we can from de Man, I think. And there is a lot that is useful here. Some of the following posts try and bring these elements out, while combatting what is the desperate sort of attempt of de Man to make literature both relevant and irrelevant at the same time:
Prior to a Hermeneutics and a History: I try to focus on what is good and anti-hermeneutic about this de Manian proposition--written for a class with Peter Brooks.
Theory, Pedagogy, de Man: A look at de Man's remark, "the resistance to theory is itself theoretical," and why this sort of aphoristic tendency of his produces a sketchy "pedagogical" situation--that is a situation sketchy insofar as we insist on its supposedly pedagogical nature.
Demystifying the Singular: Consolidating the critique, by looking at more dangerous lines in "Criticism and Crisis." There's a long exchange in the comments where I try to defend my views and distinguish de Man from Derrida (a task well-accomplished by Gasché, but I try and do it in a more holistic sort of way). One thing I didn't emphasize enough in this exchange is that de Man truly thinks the origin of the language of the sciences are "literary," and that this is insane. Now, it's not insane insofar as it engages an issue involved in literary studies all the way back to Richards and his rejoiners to C.P. Snow. It's insane insofar as it encroaches on articulating a sort of metaphysics of the letter--which many people still attribute to Derrida himself.
Giving Up Deconstruction: Not where I give up deconstruction, but where I reflect on many people being dissatisfied with just this sort of de Manian metaphysics of the letter (this is a sort of sequel to "Demystifying"). I use Frances Ferguson's excellent situation of this problem in terms of 18th century aesthetics and the role of Kant.
Blindness: I read "The Rhetoric of Blindness" and try and sum up the differences between Derrida and de Man that I've been articulating in "Demystifying" and "Giving Up." What's sort of amazing is how hard this is to do in literary terms, when philosophically it is extremely clear what these differences are... something that shows why new and more sophisticated interpretations of Derrida in America usually come from philosophy departments. This, however, isn't a sign that Derrida was really a philosopher all along--or that the new Derrida is actually more correct than the previous Derrida (the fact that many of these philosophers worked in Comp Lit. shows their knowledge of Derrida is impossible without the literary emphasis). Indeed I claim elsewhere that philosophy will never quite grasp Derrida without going back to the literary-critical concern. What this means though is that the de Manian approach pulls Derrida too quickly towards reading an individual literary object. Other literary approaches to Derrida--like that of Geoffrey Hartman--can often be deeper.
Blindness, part 2: One last word on the issue.
Predicaments: Looking a little closer at how people get de Man out of certain binds.
Reading and Society: Here I consider the de Manian drive to separate literature from any significant social context by way of a simplistic reduction of these contexts to the Barthesian "codes." The apolitical tendency of de Manian deconstruction is quite apparent here: society and politics has to somehow come only out of the literariness of the literary--nowhere else. All one has to do to oppose this is say that a social context is not the same thing as a Barthesian code. Insofar as the code is inadequate, however, de Man's critique is actually quite welcome.
Derrida, de Man, Materialism: In the last post I'll collect here I critique de Manian materialism and Derrida's weird insistence that he is asserting something similar to de Man on this issue. Indeed, I critique Derrida's buddying-up with de Man in general--I simply think they're on completely different pages, except in their shared high-modernist temperament. More specifically, I make the case for considering Derrida as more of an idealist than a materialist--with one important caveat: this is only really valid insofar as it is just a sort of heuristic. Nevertheless, I think it is helpful to combat the increasingly meaningless postmodern insistence on the "materiality" of the letter (and which Derrida himself critiqued extensively in his writings on Lacan). The trace, it is true, isn't ideal. But conceiving it as the effect of idealization--well, that's what Derrida's very first books lay out. It's important to retain that connection, and understand that it therefore forces a rethinking of materiality--one that makes the latter something completely different from anything de Man is insisting upon.
Mimic the strata
You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of signifiance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You don't reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying. That is why we encountered the paradox of those emptied and dreary bodies at the very beginning: they had emptied themselves of their organs instead of looking for the point at which they could patiently and momentarily dismantle the organization of the organs we call the organism. There are, in fact, several ways of botching the BwO: either one fails to produce it, or one produces it more or less, but nothing is produced on it, intensities do not pass or are blocked. This is because the BwO is always swinging between the surfaces that stratify it and the plane that sets it free. If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe. Staying stratified--organized, signified, subjected--is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole "diagram," as opposed to still signifying and subjective programs. We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified for us and in us and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within which we are held; gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the side of the plane of consistency. It is only there that the BwO reveals itself for what it is: connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities. You have constructed your own little machine, ready when needed to be plugged into other collective machines.
-A Thousand Plateaus, 160-161.
The great thing about Deleuze and Guattari is that they let you think that you're doing something in forming a concept... but without being an idealist (or a Badiouian--which is here, however, something even better to be, I think). Thus, the injunction to mimic the strata here, rather than wildly destratifying, is excellent, and commensurable with a provisional Derridian approach as well (though they're ultimately on different pages). In the end, it's wonderful that you can think that you botch things.
-A Thousand Plateaus, 160-161.
The great thing about Deleuze and Guattari is that they let you think that you're doing something in forming a concept... but without being an idealist (or a Badiouian--which is here, however, something even better to be, I think). Thus, the injunction to mimic the strata here, rather than wildly destratifying, is excellent, and commensurable with a provisional Derridian approach as well (though they're ultimately on different pages). In the end, it's wonderful that you can think that you botch things.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)