The Voice Imitator

Peter Weiss: The Aesthetics of Resistance

2011-05-05T14:36:00.001-07:00

Despite an absurd lack of recognition and a dearth of translations, Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance is one of the greatest novels of the postwar era and the 20th century. Drawing on extensive historical research, personal interviews, and some of Weiss’s own experiences, the novel narrates the struggle of anti-fascist networks from 1937 to the end of the second World War. Except for the unnamed narrator and his family, all of the characters in the novel are based on real historical figures, many of whom were eventually killed by the end of the war. A thoroughly communist work, Weiss’s novel attempts to fully reimagine and thereby reclaim the (doomed) revolutionary aspirations of its characters. As W. G. Sebald in his essay on Weiss writes, The Aesthetics of Resistance “is a magnum opus which sees itself, almost programmatically, not only as the expression of an ephemeral wish for redemption, but as an expression of the will to be on the side of the victims at the end of time.” The first volume, the only one translated into English so far, begins with clandestine workers’ movements in Berlin and ends with the International Brigades fighting in the Spanish Civil War. The novel’s title might seem better suited to an academic treatise on politics and aesthetics, but the experimental form of the novel justifies its use. Weiss minimizes the emphasis on plot, offering instead massive blocks of text in which his proletarian protagonists debate the value of art and the problems of political organization. Through a kind of collective voice, the novel projects its readers into a turbulent time when artistic revolution seemed as necessary as and inseparable from political revolution. The novel begins in Berlin with the narrator and two of his comrades viewing the Pergamon Altar, a monumental artwork that pays tribute to conquering power by figuring it as divine. Here and elsewhere in the novel, Weiss, who was a talented painter, passionately scrutinizes works of art for contradictory details that might indicate the possible redemption of culture, the freeing of culture from merely being, as Benjamin put it, a document of barbarity. His protagonists note that Hercules is absent from the fragments of the altar. Hercules had betrayed the gods and taken the side of the weak and oppressed, but history effaced his presence, so that he is indicated on the altar merely by “the paw of lion’s skin that had cloaked him.” As they return to the safety of one of their homes, whose windows are blacked out, allowing free discussion, the narrator and his friends use this detail to try to reappropriate the artwork for the oppressed by dwelling on the ambiguities that it contains but that are not easily made visible. As one character states, “If we want to take on art, literature, we have to treat them against the grain, that is, we have to eliminate all the concomitant privileges and project our own demands into them.” Throughout the novel, Weiss’s protagonists, who though young “were familiar with the world of labor and also with unemployment,” are fervently engaged in a process of self education, attempting, despite working during the day, to provide for themselves the knowledge and expertise denied them by the ruling class. They assert their right to culture and the equality of intelligences: “we assumed that dealing with literature, philosophy, art was possible anywhere. Everyone had the faculty for thinking.” An important discovery was “that the upper classes essentially opposed our thirst for knowledge. Ever since, our most important goal was to conquer an education, a skill in every field of research, by using any means, cunning and strength of mind. From the very outset, our studying was rebellion.” Excluded from educational institutions as well as from representation within culture, Weiss’s protagonists can advance only by connecting what they learn to their working class lives. “As have-nots we initially approached the accumulations with anxiety, with awe, until it dawned on us that we had to fill all these things with our own evaluations, that the overall concept might be useful only when expressing something about the conditions of our lives as well as about the difficulties and peculiarities of our thought processes.” Yet this autonomous education is fraught with political risks. “We too . . . should benefit from what was known as culture, we recognized the greatness and power of many works, we began understanding how the social stratifications, contradictions, and conflicts were mirrored in the artistic products of eras, but we did not yet achieve an image that included us ourselves, everything that was supposed to jib with us was a conglomerate of forms and styles borrowed from various sources. Whatever we read into completed things could only confront us with our own exclusion, and when we were in the midst of discovering timeless and powerful things, we ran the risk of estrangement from our own class.” Cultural liberation therefore directly called for political liberation: “Our road out of intellectual suppression was a political one. Anything referring to poems, novels, paintings, sculptures, musical pieces, films or plays had to be thought out politically.” But their debates about politics show that it is as complicated and ambiguous as the artworks they discuss. The repression of the communist movements in Germany destroyed collective solidarity, fragmenting and isolating the members of the underground, who were left trying to connect their lives to the news received from elsewhere. “We clung to the belief that something existed abroad, gaining strength and preparing to strike back, and the harder it was to take up contact among the leftovers of illegal groups, to provide mutual help and inform one another about plans, the more meaningful even the slightest detail became for drawing inferences about the status, the course of action outside our borders.” Many of the characters accept, if with reservations, the centralized structure of the Communist Party, relying on the party to give meaning and shape to their own struggle. “We tried to fit our tiny hidden precinct into the grand pattern and to accord our isolated experiences with guidelines, with slogans, whose diverse issues had been compiled, compared, assessed, revised, and hardened by the delegates and purified in disputes.” But the limitations of the organizational form of the Party become more and more apparent when the narrator travels to fight in the Spanish Civil War. At first, the enthusiasm of those joining up with the International Brigades overcomes the reality of political disagreement. “The whole of Europe was a field of antagonisms, different kinds of independent energies had to flow together in Spain and look for a synthesis. Each of us had the task of fusing divergences into a unity.” Political lines appear to become more open and inclusive: “A person belonged to the working class if he acted on its behalf no matter where he came from.” But this is only a temporary state affairs. Weiss’s characters are forced to debate the suppression of the anarchists by the rest of the left and the need for a strict, hierarchical military organization in a time of war. As the first volume draws to a close, news reports of the Moscow trials make all-too-clear the terror of Stalinism while the Spanish fascists move to win the civil war. Yet grasping on to hope in the face of retreat and defeat, one of the characters claims, “Our victory, what we called our victory, lay in our demonstrating, albeit briefly, the will to liberation, the idea of justice, lay in our managing to hold back the overwhelming material superiority, indeed, causing it to panic. That is today’s balance of strength . . . between progress and reactionism.”

Beverly Silver: Forces of Labor

2011-04-26T19:23:00.001-07:00

Beverly Silver’s Forces of Labor uses world-systems theory to examine the history of workers’ movements in the 20th century and to evaluate the prospects for the revival of substantial labor unrest in the 21st century. Silver begins by addressing the widespread belief that the labor movement has been “in a general and severe crisis,” if not total decline, since the 1970s. Rather than offering one more obituary for the working class, Silver proposes to examine the issue from “a longer historical and wider geographical frame of analysis.” Like her husband Giovanni Arrighi, Silver uses the deep and broad perspective of world-systems theory to assess the novelty of the apparent decline of labor militancy in recent decades. One of the most common assumptions about globalization is that it creates an economic “race to the bottom.” In a globally unified labor market, capital can always relocate to cheaper and more manageable regions. As a result, labor’s bargaining power is severely weakened and wages and working conditions worldwide converge upon the lowest levels found in the world-system. This mobility of capital also undermines state sovereignty by threatening states that agree to costly social-welfare compacts with capital flight to other countries. New post-Fordist forms of organization also undermine traditional forms of workplace solidarity by spreading workers across heterogeneous, geographically dispersed networks. Silver argues that these well-known criticisms of globalization need to be approached with some skepticism. She points out that data shows that the majority of international capital movement continues to be between high-income countries, not from high- to low-income ones. In the new regions to which capital has moved, strong new labor movements have typically appeared in response. And there is evidence that post-Fordist “just-in-time (JIL) production increases the vulnerability of capital to disruptions in the flow of production, and thus can enhance workers’ bargaining power based on direct action at the point of production.” Finally, state sovereignty may have much more power and flexibility than is admitted by those who assert “there is no alternative” (TINA). Another common assumption about globalization is that it is in the middle of generating a “single homogeneous world working class with similar (and unpalatable) conditions of work and life.” At the end of this process, a global proletariat (or the multitude) will confront a transnational capitalist class. A more restrained version of this argument maintains that a new labor internationalism is necessary because multinational corporations must be confronted by labor militancy in every country in which they operate. Silver once again argues that these commonplaces need to be more carefully evaluated. She points out that “recent empirical research on world income inequality is not easy to square with the image of an emergent homogeneous global working class-in-itself.” Also, if the weakness of the state in the face of capital mobility is revealed to be a myth, support for national policies, especially in the key states in the world-system, might be more effective than labor internationalism. At this point, Silver turns to Karl Marx and Karl Polanyi to theorize the historical transformation of labor movements. For Polanyi, labor, like land and money, is a “fictitious commodity” because it is not produced for sale on the market. Each time capital attempts to treat labor as a commodity (as is the case when liberalism and neoliberalism predominate), its destructiveness provokes a protective response, a struggle for the “decommodification” of labor, a push for greater recognition of the human needs and desires of the worker. This decommodification of labor increases the capitalist’s costs and eventually strains profitability, leading to a new round of commodification of labor, producing a new protective response, and so on. For Marx, the capitalist purchases labor-power as a commodity, but soon finds out that this commodity is not like others because it is embodied in human beings who struggle within and against the capitalist’s organization of the production process. The history of the development of production is therefore a “shifting terrain of labor-capital” conflict, in which “new agencies and sites of conflict emerge along with new demands and forms of struggle.” Silver concludes, “while our reading of Polanyi suggest a pendular movement (or repetition), our reading of Marx suggests a succession of stages in which the organization of production (and hence the working class and the terrain on which it struggles) is continually and fundamentally transformed).” Silver makes use of both models of historical development, arguing, “The insight that labor and labor movements are continually made and remade provides an important antidote against the common tendency to be overly rigid in specifying who the working class is. . . . Thus, rather than seeing an ‘historically superseded’ movement . . . or a ‘residual endangered species’ . . . our eyes are open to the early signs of new working class formation as well as ‘backlash’ resistance from those working classes that are being ‘unmade.’” But Silver adds that this “temporal dynamic is deeply intertwined with a spatial dynamic. . . . the periodic oscillation over time between phases tending toward the commodification and de-commodification of labor is intertwined with an ongoing process of spatial differentiation among geographical areas with regard to the level/intensity of labor commodification.” Blanket statements about globalization need to be replaced with a careful examination of the expansion and transformation of the structure of the world-system. Specific cases must be thought in relation to both time and space: “this book attempts to create a narrative of working-class formation in which events unfold in dynamic time-space.” Silver’s first chapter examines the effects of capital mobility by looking at the history of the automobile industry. With very few exceptions, the automobile industry has produced a strong labor movement wherever it has opened up production facilities. The automobile industry has repeatedly responded to labor unrest by relocating to other regions across the globe. But rather than creating a “race to the bottom,” these spatial shifts have reproduced the same “social contradictions,” the same kind of strong labor movements. As David Harvey would put it, capital “’reschedules crises’; it does not permanently resolve them.” Silver concludes, “it appears that corporations in the automobile industry have been chasing the mirage of cheap and disciplined labor around the world, only to find themselves continuously recreating militant labor movements in the new locations. Rather than providing a permanent spatial fix to the problems of profitability and labor control, relocation has only succeeded in geographically relocating the contradictions from one site of production to another.” This historical pattern leads Silver to expect future labor unrest in the automobile industry: “If past dynamics are a guide to future trends, then we have good reasons to expect the emergence of strong, independent autoworkers’ movement in Mexico and China during the coming decade.” Silver does admit that by the 1980s automobile industries had turned to a “technological fix,” the introduction of post-Fordist organizational forms adapted from Japan. But whereas the “Toyotist” model offered employment security, at least to a certain core labor force, the “lean and mean” post-Fordism that spread across the globe did not offer such security, and therefore was not very capable of obtaining “active cooperation of the workforce.” She adds that just-in-time production, which reduces inventories to a minimum, has been demonstrated to make post-Fordist organizations vulnerable to direct action by labor. Silver’s next chapter investigates the effects of what she terms the “product fix.” “Capitalists respond to a squeeze on profits in a given industry, with geographical relocation (a spatial fix) or process innovations (a technological/organizational fix), but they also attempt to shift capital into new innovative and more profitable product lines and industries. This product fix involves relocating capital from industries and product lines subject to intense competition to new and/or less-crowded industries and product lines. Successive new labor movements have risen (and established labor movements declined) with these shifts.” But the success of a product fix and the labor movement it generates heavily depends on their position within the world-system. Wealthier countries tend to move into new products early in the “product cycle,” when “competitive pressures are low and thus costs are relatively unimportant.” In these wealthier countries, labor unrest, at least temporarily, can be contained by offering more concessions to labor. But when a spatial fix occurs and the industry is relocated, the new location is typically less able to offer such concessions because competition increasingly cuts into profit as the product cycle matures and the new locations tend to be poorer nations. As Silver shows elsewhere in the book, the inequality of the global North and South is therefore reproduced, not eliminated, by globalization. The automobile industry replaced the textile industry as the leading industry for most of the twentieth century. What product fix will dominate the 21st century is less clear, though Silver investigates the semiconductor, producer services, personal services, and education industries as potential successors to the automobile industry. Silver’s third chapter turns to world politics and repeats the fundamental claims of Giovanni Arrighi’s work. She offers a particularly nice account of the relative capital-labor accord in the two decades following WW II. The diminishment of labor unrest was brought about partially by “deep institutional reforms at the firm, national, and especially global levels that partially de-commodified labor.” However, these efforts “proceeded along the knife’s edge between a major crisis of profitability, due to the costs of the reforms, and a major crisis of legitimacy, due to the failure to deliver on the promised reforms fully. This contradiction eventually exploded in the crisis of the 1970s.” Three disastrous decades of neoliberalism and financialization followed. Nonetheless, “The world-scale dislocations of established ways of life and livelihood caused by this late-twentieth-century swing toward unregulated markets is once again producing a deep crisis of social legitimacy for world capitalism. Whether the crisis of social legitimacy is (will become) sufficiently troublesome to the world’s elites so as to provoke a new swing of the pendulum back toward an emphasis on livelihood and security remains to be seen.” But this cannot simply be a return to the institutions of the early postwar era, whose contradictions were never resolved and whose environmental limits and social inequalities have become all the more evident. Silver instead concludes with a veiled call for communism: “Thus the ultimate challenge faced by the workers of the world in the early twenty-first century is the struggle, not just against one’s own exploitation and exclusion, but for an international regime that truly subordinates profits to the livelihood of all.”

Alfred Sohn-Rethel: Intellectual and Manual Labour

2011-04-24T15:14:00.000-07:00

Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labour argues that the “real abstraction” of commodity exchange makes possible “ideal abstraction” in cognition. In a radical version of the Marxist base-superstructure argument, Sohn-Rethel claims that abstraction must first exist in reality before it can appear in a pure form in the intellect. Mirroring Marx’s “critique of political economy,” Sohn-Rethel’s “critique of epistemology” attempts to prove that Kant’s a priori categories should not be grounded in the timeless transcendental subject but rather in the historical development of human society. In brief, Sohn-Rethel maintains: “(a) that commodity exchange is an original source of abstraction; (b) that this abstraction contains the formal elements essential for the cognitive faculty of conceptual thinking; (c) that the real abstraction operating in exchange engenders the ideal abstraction basic to Greek philosophy and to modern science.” At the center of Sohn-Rethel’s argument is the idea of “real abstraction.” Abstraction is typically treated as unique to human consciousness; the concreteness of reality is set in opposition to the abstractions of human cognition. Sohn-Rethel’s radical proposal is that there can be abstraction outside of and before the mind’s abstraction. In fact, this “real abstraction” is a condition for the development of intellectual abstraction in a pure form. Situated squarely within Marxism, Sohn-Rethel asserts that commodity exchange is precisely such a real abstraction. In societies oriented toward commodity production, the “the social synthesis”—“the network of relations by which society forms a coherent whole”—is accomplished through the abstraction of commodity exchange. As the universal equivalent that makes possible this social synthesis, money must exhibit a high level of abstraction so as to function in the exchange of any commodity with any other commodity that may appear on the market. But the “money abstraction” merely makes conspicuous the real abstraction hidden in all commodity exchange. Sohn-Rethel argues, “The form of commodity is abstract and abstractness governs its whole orbit.” First, the commodity functions as a bearer of value that is abstract. “The economic concept of value . . . is characterized by a complete absence of quality, a differentiation purely by quantity and by applicability to every kind of commodity and service which can occur on the market.” Next, exchange and use “must take place separately at different times. This is because exchange serves only a change of ownership, a change that is, in terms of a purely social status of the commodities as owned property.” “There, in the market-place and in shop windows, things stand still. They are under the spell of one activity only; to change owners. They stand there waiting to be sold. While they are there for exchange they are there not for use.” So “[w]herever commodity exchange takes place, it does so in effective ‘abstraction’ from use. This is an abstraction not in mind, but in fact.” Of course the individuals involved in exchange usually have specific use values in mind, but the action of exchange itself remains abstract. “The consciousness and the action of the people part company in exchange and go different ways.” Exchange abstraction enters consciousness only later in the form of money: “In money the exchange abstraction achieves concentrated representation, but a mere functional one – embodied in a coin. It is not recognizable in its true identity as abstract form, but disguised as a thing one carries about in one’s pocket, hands out to others, or receives from them.” Sohn-Rethel continues to investigate the exchange abstraction in order to specifically locate the origins of Kant’s a priori categories in commodity exchange rather than in the human mind. He shows that “the act of exchange has to be described as abstract movement through abstract (homogeneous, continuous and empty) space and time of abstract substances (materially real but bare of sense-qualities) which thereby suffer no material change and which allow for none but quantitative differentiation (differentiation in abstract, non-dimensional quantity).” He concludes, “The unvarying formal features of exchange . . . constitute a mechanism of real abstraction indispensable for the social synthesis throughout and supplying a matrix for the abstract conceptual reasoning characteristic of all societies based on commodity production.” The “conversion of the real abstraction of exchange into the ideal abstraction of conceptual thought” is first evident in ancient Greece, where the development of exchange and coinage created the conditions for Parmenides’ pure logic. Much later, real abstraction made possible Galileo’s work on “inertial motion” and modern science. With modern science, “intellectual labor” is separated from “manual labor.” Rejecting Kant’s argument about timeless a priori categories one more time, Sohn-Rethel claims, “The basic categories of intellectual labour . . . are replicas of the elements of the real abstraction,” that is, commodity exchange. The “mechanistic thinking” of science normatively prescribes how nature should act and allows intellectual labor to “yield a knowledge of nature from sources totally alien to manual labor.” At this point, Sohn-Rethel goes back and offers a more detailed history from ancient Egypt to the present of the social synthesis, showing how the development of real abstraction led to changes in ideal abstraction. In capitalism, the capitalist is responsible for production. The capitalist purchases everything needed in the production process, but does not partake in that process. As a result, long before automatic machinery is introduced in history the production process must function in an “automatic” manner. “From the perspective of the capitalist entrepreneur the essential characteristic of the production process for which he is responsible is that it must operate itself. The controlling power of the capitalist hinges on this postulate of the self-acting or ‘automatic’ character of the labour process of production. This all-important postulate of automatism does not spring from any source in the technology of production but is inherent in the production relations of capitalism.” The capitalist therefore depends on the abstract power of science to acquire control over the production process. In other words, the real abstraction of commodity exchange makes possible the ideal abstraction of science, which is now increasingly applied to the production of commodities themselves. This trend is most evident in Taylorism, which, instituting a strict division between mental and manual labor, abstractly analyzes the labor process and then forces the worker to attempt to conform to that abstraction in reality. However, machines are more suited to carrying out actions determined by abstraction, so there is the gradual move toward full automation. But as both Marx and Paolo Virno have noted, the growth of science-based automation socializes labor and threatens to burst the limits of the capitalist mode of production. Sohn-Rethal writes, “Technological devices, in substituting for the workers’ personal attributes, emancipate the subjectivity of labour from the organic limitations of the individual and transform it into a social power of machinery. Thus the electronics of an automated labor process act, not for the subjectivity of one worker only, but for all the workers employed in its previous manual stage. Automation amounts to the socialization of the human labour-power.” “We thus have the result that now man would, in principle, have at his disposal production forces which in themselves embrace in their physical reality the socialization which in the ages of commodity production had grown up in the intellectual work of the human mind – that is, in science.”

Dan Schiller: Digital Capitalism

2011-04-22T11:49:00.001-07:00

Digital Capitalism examines how the interaction of business interests, neoliberal policies, and information technologies has shaped the development of the Internet and the capitalist world-system. Calling into question utopian conceptions of the Internet, Schiller argues, “Far from delivering us into a high-tech Eden, in fact, cyberspace itself is being rapidly colonized by the familiar workings of the market system. Across their breadth and depth, computer networks link with existing capitalism to massively broaden the effective reach of the marketplace. Indeed, the Internet comprises nothing less than the central production and control apparatus of an increasingly supranational market system.” Schiller’s books show how this “digital capitalism” was made possible through the installation of neoliberal policies in the telecommunications system in the U.S. and then across the globe. During the era of mainframe computing, businesses in the U.S. began to computerize more and more of their activities. The development of business computer networks that would “make data-processing available more broadly throughout business organizations,” however, was limited by the U.S. government’s strict regulation of the telecommunications system. So “[b]etween the mid-1950s and 1970, business users elaborated a policy agenda around a general objective: freedom to develop corporate network systems and services as they preferred.” They “demanded nothing less than an autonomous sphere of corporate network applications that was essentially free of regulatory oversight and was parasitic on the existing telecommunications network.” This neoliberal project succeeded by instituting a (fictional) division between “telecommunications” and “computing” domains. “On the telecommunications side of the line, the existing rules of public service would continue to apply. However, on the computing side, established exit, entry, and price controls would be relaxed and progressively abandoned. So long as network applications were categorized by regulators as data-processing services, they could be pursued freely.” As computer networks grew at a staggering rate in the following decades, more and more services ended up “on the liberalized computing side of the line,” and eventually even regulated telecommunications companies were allowed to set up subsidiaries in the less regulated domain. “What had originated as a specialized networking industry endowed with exceptional market freedom was now set to expand comprehensively into the greater telecommunications system.” Computer networks were adopted early on in the banking and finance sectors, but soon spread across the economy as businesses sought out a competitive edge. Businesses began to spend enormous sums of money on information technologies needed for information sharing within corporations, between corporations, and between corporations and individuals. “Between 1970 and 1996 . . . the percentage of all U.S. corporate capital investment allocated to information technology climbed steeply, from 7 percent to around 45 percent.” The Internet may have been developed in a Cold War context, but its subsequent history was largely determined by its maturation in a deregulated zone open to market forces aiming to profit from this corporate frenzy for information sharing. Many businesses approached the Internet, a network of networks, as an instrument for extending the information sharing capabilities of their existing local-area networks (LANs) and intranets to greater distances and more users, such as business partners and, eventually, consumers themselves. By the late 1990s, “corporate networks and the open Internet were becoming ‘inextricably intertwined.’” “Only a thoroughgoing modernization of underlying telecommunications systems could sustain such a comprehensive, economywide move into electronic commerce,” so telecommunications companies, which had been slowly adapting to demands for carrying data, were jolted into upgrading system capacities and offering their own Internet services. One reason businesses so strongly demanded powerful and robust networks was the growing importance of “transnational production chains” (TNCs). “Sophisticated network systems . . . comprised the increasingly essential infrastructure for engorged transnational corporations, pursuing export-oriented or even globally integrated production strategies.” However, in order for global telecommunications networks to satisfy the demands of digital capitalism, the neoliberal reforms pioneered in the U.S. had to be exported; the old era of national sovereignty and regulation of telecommunications had to go. “Corresponding to the ongoing buildup of transnational production chains, therefore, was a powerful pan-corporate attempt to subject worldwide telecommunications policy to United States—originated, neoliberal regulatory norms.” Neoliberal telecommunications policies swept across the globe in the 1980s and 90s. National telecommunications systems were privatized in large numbers, and telecommunications became a lucrative sector subject to the speculative excesses of finance capital. The traditional “social-welfare features” of telecommunications systems were dismantled and neoliberalism’s negative effects soon appeared: quality declined as corruption spread, inequality increased as businesses—freed from the goal of universal access—privileged wealthier customers and neighborhoods, and employees in the telecommunications industry were subjected to downsizing. Policy changes allowing consolidation of the telecommunications industry led to a wave of mergers and partnerships and a glut of system building on both national and international scales. Neoliberalism is of course not unique to telecommunications. But Schiller argues that the Internet has functioned as a key “policy wedge” for driving forward the global spread of digital capitalism’s neoliberal policies. Since the computer’s 0s and 1s don’t distinguish between speech and commerce, the defense of the freedom of the former has tended to assist in the extension of the freedom of the latter. Upholding free speech on the Internet has gone hand in hand with the framing of the Internet as an international free-trade zone. “Capital’s stewardship of the Net, taking the form of multilateral support for cyberspace as a stateless jurisdiction, works to ensure that the market development process will only deepen and broaden its incursions on national sovereignty.” Schiller’s next chapter examines the (re)construction of the Internet as “a new consumer medium.” Schiller pessimistically argues, “The practices that saturate our culture and that are being transferred wholesale to the Net are market-driven in intent and in effect. That doesn’t mean they cannot sometimes eventuate in true artistry but rather that art itself is generally placed in harness to a narrow and exclusionary social purpose: selling.” “If the present trend is not comprehensively interrupted, the extent to which cyberspace becomes a commercial consumer medium will be largely determined by profit-seeking companies themselves. Non-profit prospects or alternative visions of cyberspace will either be marginalized or else incorporated—and exploited—by sponsors seeking access to their services and perhaps a patina of legitimacy.” Schiller’s final chapter is a specific study of the role of information technologies in the evolution of the “higher-learning industry.” He claims, “Cyberspace lent itself both to an unparalleled market takeover of the learning process and to a relentless vocationalism.”

Paolo Virno: A Grammar of the Multitude

2011-04-12T18:58:00.001-07:00

Virno begins by reviving from 17th-century political philosophy the distinction between the concept of the “people” and the concept of the “multitude.” The people is a unified One formed through the establishment of the State. In contrast, the multitude, which Hobbes vilified, is a “plurality which persists as such in the public scene.” The multitude “is the form of social and political existence for the many, seen as being many.” Whereas substantial communities attempted to secure a stable “inside” as a refuge from an uncertain “outside,” the contemporary multitude finds itself exposed to a more uncanny situation, “united by the risk which derives from ‘not feeling at home,’ from being exposed omnilaterally to the world.” Unable to rely on customary, differentiated discourses tied to specific sites and contexts within society, the contemporary multitude must orient and protect itself out in the contingent world through “generic logical-linguistic forms,” what Virno, borrowing from Aristotle, terms “common places.” For the contemporary multitude, confronting a world in which all that is solid has long since melted into air, the human animal’s general linguistic-cognitive capabilities have moved to the “forefront.” The “life of the mind” has become “public,” and the “intellect, even in its most rarefied functions is presented as something common and conspicuous.” This rise of a public intellect needs to be understood in relation to political economy, and specifically in relation to the emergence of the post-Fordist mode of production. Virno proposes to use the category of “virtuosity” to analyze the characteristic labor process of post-Fordism. Virtuosity is “an activity which finds its own fulfillment (that is, its own purpose) in itself, without objectifying itself into an end product.” Virtuosity is also “an activity which requires the presence of others, which exists only in the presence of an audience.” A piano performance by Glenn Gould clearly illustrates these features of virtuosity, but Virno is quick to extend the label of virtuosity to any form of action that is socially oriented and does not result in an “end product.” In fact, the “fundamental model of virtuosity . . . is the activity of the speaker. . . . Every utterance is a virtuosic performance.” Mankind’s “general faculty of language” therefore makes everyone a potential virtuoso. Contemporary production first became virtuosic in the culture industries, which specialized in communicative activity as an end in itself. But the “model of action of the culture industry” has since become “exemplary and pervasive.” Today, “virtuosity . . . not only characterizes the culture industry but the totality of contemporary social production. One could say that in the organization of labor in the post-Ford era, activity without an end product, previously a special and problematic case . . . , becomes the prototype of all wage labor.” Of course material commodities are still produced in mass quantities, but such material production is now differently articulated with immaterial production. “The crucial point is . . . that while the material production of objects is delegated to an automated system of machines, the services rendered by living labor, instead, resemble linguistic-virtuosic services more and more.” In the famous “Fragment on Machines” in the Grundrisse, Marx anticipated these developments. Marx demonstrated how the introduction of automated machinery led labor to step “to the side of the immediate productive process.” For Marx, at least in this fragment, the “general intellect,” the scientific knowledge embodied in machines, historically became the principal productive force. Virno modifies Marx’s argument in order to make it more applicable to the post-Fordist mode of production, which obviously has not used automation to free mankind from the burden of wage labor. Virno argues, “We should consider the dimension where the general intellect instead of being incarnated (or rather, cast in iron) into the system of machines, exists as attribute of living labor. The general intellect manifests itself today, above all, as the communication, abstraction, self-reflection of living subjects. It seems legitimate to maintain that, according to the very logic of economic development, it is necessary that a part of the general intellect not congeal as fixed capital but unfold in communicative interaction, under the guise of epistemic paradigms, dialogical performances, linguistic games.” In extending the general intellect from dead to living labor, Virno also transforms it from a historical notion (about the “progress” of human knowledge and social productivity) into a biological faculty whose potential becomes unleashed and central only at a specific historical stage. He argues, “General intellect should not necessarily mean the aggregate of the knowledge acquired by the species, but the faculty of thinking; potential as such, not its countless particular realizations. The ‘general intellect’ is nothing but the intellect in general.” The general intellect, the “most generic communicative and cognitive faculties of the human animal,” is “pure and simple potential.” It is “the foundation of a social cooperation broader than that cooperation which is specifically related to labor.” But capitalism, which ties the general intellect to wage labor, distorts this potential for cooperation into a “thick net of hierarchical relations” characterized by “personal dependence.” In addition to a radical form of “civil disobedience,” Virno proposes that the general intellect be made politically autonomous through “exit.” “Nothing is less passive than the act of fleeing, of exiting. Defection modifies the conditions within which the struggle takes place, rather than presupposing those conditions to be an unalterable horizon. . . . In short, exit consists of unrestrained invention which alters the rules of the game and throws the adversary completely off balance.” “What is at stake, obviously, is not a spatial ‘frontier,’ but the surplus of knowledge, communication, virtuosic acting in concert, all presupposed by the publicness of the general intellect. Defection allows for a dramatic, autonomous, and affirmative expression of this surplus; and in this way it impedes the ‘transfer’ of this surplus into the power of state administration, impedes its configuration as productive resource of the capitalistic enterprise.” Virno continues to add heterogeneous “philosophical ‘predicates’” to his “grammatical subject” through a fairly routine application of Simondon’s theory of individuation to the production of “the many” of the multitude. He then shows how Foucault’s theory of biopolitics allows one to understand how capitalism takes an increasing interest in the living body of the worker, which only has value as “the substratum” of the immaterial potential of labor-power. Virno concludes with “Ten Theses on the Multitude and Post-Fordist Capitalism”: 1) “Post-Fordism (and with it the multitude) appeared, in Italy, with the social unrest which is generally remembered as the ‘movement of 1977.’” 2) “Post-Fordism is the empirical realization of the “Fragment on Machines” by Marx.” 3) “The crisis of the society of labor is reflected in the multitude itself.” 4) “For the post-Fordist multitude every qualitative difference between labor time and non-labor time falls short.” 5) “In Post-Fordism there exists a permanent disproportion between ‘labor time’ and the more ample ‘production time.’” 6) “In one way, post-Fordism is characterized by the co-existence of the most diverse productive models and, in another way, by essentially homogeneous socialization which takes place outside of the workplace.” 7) “In Post-Fordism, the general intellect does not coincide with fixed capital, but manifests itself principally as a linguistic reiteration of living labor.” 8) “The whole of post-Fordist labor-power, even the most unskilled, is an intellectual labor-power, the ‘intellectuality of the masses.’” 9) “The multitude throws the ‘theory of proletarianization’ out of the mix.” 10) “Post-Fordism is the ‘communism of capital.’”

Karl Marx: Grundrisse

2011-03-29T13:53:00.000-07:00

Grundrisse contains seven notebooks written by Marx between 1857-8. In these notebooks, Marx makes a relatively condensed first attempt at laying out the ideas that would later be more fully developed in the three volumes of Capital. His concepts and distinctions often seem to develop as he writes them down, allowing the reader a valuable glimpse into Marx’s intellect in action. Grundrisse hits all the main points of Capital—money, value, capital, the labor process, surplus-value, circulation, fixed capital, machinery, the rate of profit, etc. Having covered most of those ideas in my three previous posts, I will stick here to the more original aspects of Grundrisse. Hegel looms large over these notebooks, which resonate in many ways with Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts. As the footnotes reveal, Marx clearly had Hegel’s Logic on his mind, and the argument tends to slip into a dialectical mode that Marx has to make a self-conscious effort to combat. For the contemporary reader, however, these traces of Hegel result in some of the most original and thought provoking passages in the text. The introduction, the most finished part of Grundrisse, exhibits Marx’s debt and resistance to Hegel. Taking up the question of production, or, more specifically, social production, Marx brilliantly and seemingly effortlessly shows how production and consumption, which seem to be opposite poles, are identical, how production is consumption and consumption is production (production requires productive consumption, production is not finished until the moment of consumption, production determines the nature of consumption, etc.). Marx is perfectly aware that his mode of reasoning here resembles his idealist opponents', writing, “Thereupon, nothing simpler for a Hegelian than to posit production and consumption are identical.” Nonetheless, as he adds exchange and distribution into the equation, he only slightly lessens the argument’s Hegelian tendencies. “The conclusion we reach is not that production, distribution, exchange, and consumption are identical, but that they all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity. Production predominates not only over itself . . . but over the other moments as well. . . . A definite production thus determines a definite consumption, distribution and exchange as well as definite relations between these different moments.” In the middle of the “Chapter on Money,” the first of the text’s two long sections, Marx again slips into dialectical mode: “[I]t is an inherent property of money to fulfill its purposes by simultaneously negating them; to achieve independence from commodities; to be a means which becomes an end; to realize the exchange value of commodities by separating them from it; to facilitate exchange by splitting it; to overcome the difficulties of the direct exchange of commodities by generalizing them; to make exchange independent of the producers in the same measure as the producers become dependent on exchange.” But Marx then catches himself and leaves a note: “It will be necessary later . . . to correct the idealist manner of the presentation, which makes it seem as if it were merely a matter of conceptual determinations of the dialectic of these concepts.” In the much longer “Chapter on Capital,” the Hegelian tendencies lead to some strikingly unique formulations on the antithesis of labor and capital that Negri and others have made much of. Marx claims that commodities, as exchange values, one form of capital, “are objectified labor. The only thing distinct from objectified labor is non-objectified labor, labor which is still objectifying itself, labor as subjectivity. . . . If it is to be present in time, alive, then it can be present only as the living subject, in which it exists as capacity, as possibility, hence as worker.” He goes on, “Not-objectified labor, not-value, conceived positively, or as a negativity in relation to itself, is the not-objectified, hence non-objective, i.e. subjective existence of labor itself. Labor not as an object, but as activity; not as itself value, but as the living source of value.” Capitalist production brings together the objective and subjective, the objectified and the non-objectified. In fact, capital’s incorporation of subjective living labor brings to life capital’s lifeless objectivity. To use a theological metaphor: “living labor makes instrument and material in the production process into the body of its soul and thereby resurrects them from the dead.” “Through the exchange with the worker, capital has appropriated labor itself; labor has become one of its moments, which now acts as a fructifying vitality upon its merely existent and hence dead objectivity.” Capital only momentarily touches on this idea, developed here with rhetorical flourishes, instead tending to analyze the relation of the living and the (un)dead in capitalism in the more economistic terms of variable and constant capital. Much later, in the famous section on machinery, Marx claims that there has apparently been a historical reversal in the relation of (living) labor to (dead) capital with the creation of automatic systems of machinery. In the case of such machines, “The production process has ceased to be a labor process in the sense of a process dominated by labor as its governing unity. Labor appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism. In machinery, objectified labor confronts living labor within the labor process itself as the power which rules it.” Such machines not only seem to have a life of their own, which now dominates the life of the worker, but also exhibit a productive power that makes the individual worker’s labor power seem insignificant. Although this productive power appears as an attribute of the machines, or fixed capital, it actually has been appropriated from the “general productive power” created by the growth of the “general productive forces of the social brain.” “The development of fixed capital [i.e., machines] indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it.” As Paolo Virno has noted, this leads Marx to a rather un-Marxist conclusion. Embodying the productive power of the general intellect, automatic systems of machinery make the appropriation of surplus-value from the worker no longer important for the generation of “general wealth.” They undermine the law of value and therefore contradict the capitalist mode of production. “As soon as labor in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labor time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value must cease to be the measure of use value. The surplus labor of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labor of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis.”

Karl Marx: Capital Volume III

2011-03-24T16:19:00.001-07:00

Volume I dealt with the “process of capitalist production,” and Volume II the “process of circulation.” Volume III aims “to discover and present the concrete forms which grow out of the process of capital’s movement considered as a whole. . . . The configurations of capital, as developed in this volume, thus approach step by the step the form in which they appear on the surface of society, in the action of different capitals on one another, i.e., in competition and in the everyday consciousness of the agents of production themselves.” Marx begins by discussing profit, which presents surplus-value in a “mystified form.” The value of any commodity C is equal to the sum of the constant and variable capital laid out in its production and its surplus-value. So C = c + v + s. To the capitalist, however, what the commodity costs, its “cost price,” is equal to the “price of the means of production consumed and the labor-power employed.” That is, cost price k is equal to c + v. Cost price k erases the difference between constant and variable capital, so that, to the capitalist, surplus-value appears to derive from the entire capital invested rather than from variable capital, labor-power, in particular. The capitalist therefore measures the return on his investment not as a ratio of surplus-value to variable-capital, but rather as the profit p obtained from the entire capital laid out. So C = c + v + s appears to the capitalist as “C = k + p, or commodity value = cost price + profit.” The capitalist mistakenly ends up taking the cost price for the value of the commodity, and imagines that excess value, or profit, is created through the act of selling the commodity. To the capitalist, the breeding of surplus-value in the production process described in Volume I becomes hidden, and value seems to be created through circulation, something that Volume II demonstrated to be impossible. If a commodity is sold at its value, then the profit equals the surplus-value. In the earlier volumes Marx assumed that this was always the case. But in this volume, Marx acknowledges that prices may in fact diverge from values. For example, a commodity may be sold for less than its value. So long as the sale price does not drop below the cost price, the capitalist still makes a profit, although only a part of the commodity’s surplus-value is realized. The rate of surplus-value is the ratio of surplus-value to variable capital, or s/v. The rate of profit is the ratio of surplus-value or profit to the entire capital laid out, or s/(c + v). “These are two different standards for measuring the same quantity,” but the capitalist is only concerned with the rate of profit, which is the more “visible surface phenomena.” The capitalist’s focus on cost price and profit obscures the “extortion of surplus labor,” and, as a result, “the capital relation is mystified.” Profit is “a transformed form of surplus-value, a form in which its origin and the secret of its existence are veiled and obliterated. . . . In surplus-value, the relationship between capital and labor is laid bare. In the relationship between capital and profit . . . capital appears as a relationship to itself, a relationship in which it is distinguished, as an original sum of value, from another new value that it posits.” The rate of profit is determined primarily by two factors: the rate of surplus-value and the organic composition of capital. The rate of profit is also especially influenced by the speed of the turnover of capital and by economy in the use of constant capital. Because of differences in the composition of capital, turnover time, etc., “different spheres of production” should have different rates of profit. However, “These different rates of profit are balanced out by competition to give a general rate of profit which is the average of all these rates.” As was the case with socially necessary labor time in Volume I, Marx argues that, at a certain level of development, capitalism deals with social averages and social totals. The capitalists in different spheres of production “do not secure the surplus-value and hence profit that is produced in their own sphere in connection with the production of these commodities. What they secure is only the surplus-value and hence profit that falls to the share of each aliquot part of the total social capital, when evenly distributed, from the total social surplus-value or profit produced in a given time by the social capital in all spheres of production.” At this point, Marx sets forth his controversial law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit. As Volume I demonstrated, capitalists are always revolutionizing the production process and thereby increasing “the social productivity of labor.” As a result, labor-power is able to set a greater quantity of means of production into motion. The ratio of constant to variable capital, what Marx terms the organic composition of capital, tends to rise, so that variable capital becomes an increasingly smaller part of the total capital investment. Only variable capital is the source of surplus-value, so the total surplus-value to be potentially realized from a given investment of capital, assuming a constant rate of surplus-value, depends on what proportion of that capital is spent on variable capital. As the organic composition of the total social capital rises, variable capital declines in relation to constant capital, the potential quantity of surplus-value to be realized per unit of capital declines as well, and the general rate of profit ultimately drops. The law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit can be only partially counteracted through factors such as more intense exploitation of labor, which increases the rate of surplus-value. But the long-term tendency is towards stagnation of the economy and overaccumulation of capital (which always just means the production of more capital than can be employed as capital). As a result, capital lies idle and is devalued, or, in the case of a crisis, capital is destroyed. Marx identifies the problem here as being internal to capital: “Capitalist production constantly strives to overcome these immanent barriers, but it overcomes them only by means that set up the barriers afresh and on a more powerful scale. The true barrier to capitalist production is capital itself. It is that capital and its self-valorization appear as the starting and finishing point, as the motive and purpose of production; production is production only for capital, and not the reverse, i.e. the means of production are not simply means for a steadily expanding pattern of life for the society of the producers. The barriers within which the maintenance and valorization of the capital-value has necessarily to move . . . therefore come constantly into contradiction with the methods of production that capital must apply to its purpose and which set its course towards an unlimited expansion of production, to production as an end in itself, to an unrestricted development of the social productive powers of labor. The means—the unrestricted development of the forces of social production—comes into persistent conflict with the restricted end, the valorization of the existing capital.” After showing how commercial capital affects the general rate of profit by appropriating for itself a certain proportion of the surplus-value created in production, Marx turns to interest-bearing capital. Rather than directly investing his money in production, the owner of money can lend this money out to someone else, who then takes on the function of employing the money as capital that, through the production process, generates more value. At the end of the circuit of production, this borrower must pay back the money borrowed plus, in the form of interest, a certain portion of the surplus-value he obtained. The surplus-value and profit generated by production are split between the owner of money and the employer of capital. The capital relation is thoroughly mystified in this process of lending and borrowing money. In contrast to the owner of money, who does not work, the industrial capitalist comes to see himself as earning a wage for his work, which, as always, remains the exploitation and appropriation of the labor others. The formation of joint-stock companies reinforces this appearance by replacing the industrial capitalist with the salaried manager. But even more mystified is the perspective of the owner of money. The formula for interest-bearing capital should be: M-M-C…P…C’-M’-M’. Marx repeatedly points out that without the mediation of production, no surplus-value can be generated, and therefore no interest is possible. But to the owner of money, the circuit appears simply as M-M’: money lent out returns as money plus interest. “While interest is simply one part of the profit, i.e. the surplus-value, extorted from the worker by the functioning capitalist, it now appears conversely as if interest is the specific fruit of capital, the original thing, while profit, now transformed into the form of profit of enterprise, appears as a mere accessory and trimming added in the reproduction process. The fetish character of capital and the representation of this capital fetish is now complete. In M-M’ we have the irrational form of capital, the misrepresentation and objectification of the relations of production, in its highest power.” “Like the growth of trees, so the generation of money seems a property of capital in this form of money capital.” “The product of past labor, and past labor itself, is seen as pregnant in and of itself with a portion of present or future living surplus labor. We know however that in actual fact the preservation and thus also the reproduction of the value of products of past labor is only the result of their contact with living labor; and secondly, that the command that the products of past labor exercise over living surplus labor lasts only as long as the capital relation, the specific social relation in which past labor confronts living labor as independent and superior.” Interest-bearing capital predates the existence of the capitalist mode of production, but the latter causes the former to develop into a specific kind of credit system containing institutions and instruments that facilitate production and circulation. Banks are one the key elements of this credit system, which, it must be admitted, plays a valuable—perhaps even essential—role in the acceleration of the accumulation of capital. One of the most important functions of the banks is the concentration of money that otherwise would remain unused or spent merely on private consumption. “With the development of the banking system, and particularly once they pay interest on deposits, the money savings and the temporarily unoccupied money of all social classes are also deposited with them. Small sums which are incapable of functioning as money capital by themselves are combined into great masses and thus form a monetary power.” The money that creditors such as banks lend out is not available for their further use until it is repaid. However, in exchange for the money that is advanced, the lender receives a bill of exchange, a promissory note that the debt will be repaid at a certain date. Or in the case of securities such as corporate shares and stocks, the money is exchanged for a title of ownership to a certain portion of future revenues. Marx considers these bills of exchange and securities “fictitious capital” because they are merely “paper duplicates” of the original capital, which is now in someone else’s hands. Fictitious forms of capital can themselves be traded, such as on the stock market, and in the process their value can diverge from the value of the original capital they are meant to represent. An entire superstructure of fictitious capital can then be built on top of interest-bearing capital. “With the development of interest-bearing capital and the credit system, all capital seems to be duplicated, and at some points triplicated, by the various ways in which the same capital, or even the same claim, appears in various hands in different guises. The greater part of this ‘money capital’ is purely fictitious.” During a crisis, however, fictitious capital’s ability to represent capital is thrown into question, and extreme measures have to be taken to preserve the illusion of fictitious capital’s value. “In a system of production where the entire interconnection of the reproduction process rests on credit, a crisis must evidently break out if credit is suddenly withdrawn and only cash payment is accepted, in the form of a violent scramble for means of payment. At first glance, therefore, the entire crisis presents itself as simply a credit and monetary crisis. And in fact all it does involve is simply the convertibility of bills of exchange into money. The majority of these bills represent actual purchases and sales, the ultimate basis of the entire crisis being the expansion of these far beyond the social need. On top of this, however, a tremendous number of these bills represent purely fraudulent deals, which now come to light and explode; as well as unsuccessful speculations conducted with borrowed capital, and finally commodity capitals that are either devalued or unsaleable, or returns that are never going to come in.”

Karl Marx: Capital Volume II

2011-03-22T13:49:00.001-07:00

The “circuit of money capital” follows the formula: M-C…P…C’-M’. Money is transformed into commodities, which, during the production process, are productively consumed to create new commodities that are exchanged for money. The creation of surplus-value during production makes the final M’ greater than the original M advanced. In volume I, Marx studied the middle stage of production, P, so in this volume he turns to the first and third stages, M-C and C’-M’. In M-C, the original money capital is transformed into two kinds of commodities: labor-power, L, and means of production, mp. When money capital has been transformed in this way into L + mp, it can now function as “productive capital,” P, which is capable of breeding surplus-value. In this seemingly abstract formula, the fact that L and mp are separate commodities reflects the historical separation of workers from the means of production. At this point there is “an interruption” in the circulation of capital indicated by the dots in M-C…P. “By the transformation of money capital into productive capital, the capital value has received a natural form in which it cannot circulate any further, but has to go into consumption, that is into productive consumption. The use of labor-power, labor, can be realized only in the labor process. The capitalist cannot sell the worker again as a commodity, for he is not his slave, and the capitalist has bought nothing more than the utilization of his labor-power for a certain time.” Rather than exchanging them, productive capital “consumes its own components,” exploiting labor so as to produce commodities that are “impregnated with surplus-value.” Productive capital has now become commodity capital, C’, a “bearer of the valorized capital.” But before the circuit of money capital is complete, C’ must first “fully undergo the metamorphosis C’-M’,” so that capital returns to its money form and is ready to once again function as the starting point for a fresh round of valorization. M-M’ thus “expresses the capital-relation,” the breeding of value from value. “The two forms that the capital value assumes within its circulation stages are those of money capital and commodity capital; the form pertaining to the production stage is that of productive capital. The capital that assumes these forms in the course of the total circuit, discards them again and fulfils in each of them its appropriate function, is industrial capital—industrial here in the sense that it encompasses every branch of production that is pursued on a capitalist basis.” “The circuit of capital proceeds normally only as long as its various phases pass into each other without delay. If capital comes to a standstill in the first phase, M-C, money capital forms into a hoard; if this happens in the production phase, the means of production cease to function, and labor-power remains unoccupied; if in the last phase, C’-M’, unsaleable stocks of commodities obstruct the flow of circulation.” In the circuit of money capital, M-M’, “it is the exchange-value, not the use-value, that is the decisive inherent purpose of the movement. . . . The production process appears simply as an unavoidable middle term, a necessary evil for the purpose of money-making. (This explains why all nations characterized by the capitalist mode of production are periodically seized by fits of giddiness in which they try to accomplish the money-making without the mediation of the production process.).” Money capital, M, is not the only starting point, so Marx then turns to the circuit of productive capital and the circuit of commodity capital. The circuit of productive capital follows the formula P…C’-M’-C…P. In P-P, productive capital is “reproduced,” allowing production to continue. Although the formulas for money capital and productive capital are similar, the different starting and ending points create important contrasts between the two circuits. “[W]hile in the first form, M…M’, the production process, the function of P, interrupts the circulation of money capital and appears only as a mediator between its two phases M-C and C’-M’, here the entire circulation process of industrial capital, its whole movement within the circulation phase, merely forms an interruption, and hence a mediation, between the productive capital that opens the circuit as the first extreme and closes it in the same form as the last extreme.” P-P is simply the reproduction of production at the same scale. But as the first volume demonstrated, the individual capitalist, in order to survive, must enlarge the scale of production, so the circuit actually must take the form P-P’, so that in each repetition of the circuit the value of productive capital is “augmented.” The circuit of commodity capital follows the formula C’-M’-C…P…C’. In the previous two circuits, an increase of value is the end point (M’, P’), but the circuit of commodity capital begins with C’, commodities that are already the bearers of surplus-value. “In this circuit, C’ exists as the point of departure, the point of transit, and the conclusion of the movement.” The circuit C’-C’ implies the existence of other commodity capital that is drawn into the circuit, and therefore should be considered a “social form.” Having examined the three forms of the circulation of capital independently, Marx draws some comparisons. He claims, “not only does every particular circuit (implicitly) presuppose the others, but also that the repetition of the circuit in one form includes the motions which have to take place in the other forms of the circuit. Thus, the entire distinction presents itself as merely one of form, a merely subjective distinction that exists only for the observer.” Capital continuously reproduces itself and undergoes a “metamorphosis” in its form. “The circuit of capital is a constant process of interruption; one stage is left behind, the next stage embarked upon; one form is cast aside, and the capital exists in another; each of these stages not only conditions the other, but at the same time excludes it. But continuity is the characteristic feature of capitalist production, and is required by its technical basis, even if it is not always completely attainable.” “Capital, as self-valorizing value, does not just comprise class relations, a definite social character that depends on the existence of labor as wage-labor. It is a movement, a circulatory process through different stages, which itself in turn includes three different forms of the circulatory process. Hence, it can only be grasped as a movement, and not as a static thing.” The time it takes for capital to complete its circuit can be divided into two parts: production time and circulation time, which are “mutually exclusive. During its circulation time, capital does not function as productive capital, and therefore produces neither commodities nor surplus-value.” Therefore, the less time capital spends in circulation, the more time it is available in the sphere of production and capable of generating surplus-value. As a result, there is great pressure to reduce circulation time to an absolute minimum. This pressure is increased by the fact that many commodities lose their value if they are not quickly exchanged and used. Nonetheless, “Circulation is just as necessary for commodity production as is production itself, and thus agents of circulation are just as necessary as agents of production.” A great deal of circulation time is spent on buying and selling. Although necessary for the conversion or realization of value, “the time taken up with buying and selling creates no value.” The labor required for buying or selling is “unproductive,” a necessary cost in the valorization process. The labor-power and constant capital needed for storing commodities are also necessary but unproductive “expenses.” Transportation, however, is necessary for most commodities to be used, and therefore can be considered a part of the production process that contributes to the value of the commodities. The sum of production time and circulation time is the length of capital’s “turnover,” of one interval of capital’s cycle. The turnover of capital is complicated by the division of constant capital into two forms: circulating capital and fixed capital. Circulating capital includes those means of production that are immediately consumed in the production process and therefore transfer their value to the commodities produced during each cycle. Fixed capital includes those means of production, such as factories or machinery, that are purchased up front but not productively consumed all at once. Instead, they slowly transfer their value to the commodities over a number of capital cycles. The confinement of large sums of capital as fixed capital for extended periods of time contributes to the formation of business cycles, a specific kind of periodicity characterized by “successive periods of stagnation, moderate activity, over-excitement, and crisis.” So far, Marx has examined the circuits of capital from the standpoint of the individual capital. “But each individual capital forms only a fraction of the total social capital. . . . The movement of the social capital is made up of the totality of movements of these autonomous fractions, the turnovers of the individual capitals. Just as the metamorphosis of the individual commodity is but one term in the series of metamorphoses of the commodity world as a whole, of commodity circulation, so the metamorphosis of the individual capital, its turnover, is a single term in the circuit of the social capital.” It is necessary to now go beyond examining the reproduction of individual capitals and consider the reproduction of the social capital considered in its entirety. “[S]ociety’s total product” can be divided into two “departments.” Department I consists of “Means of production: commodities that possess a form in which they either have to enter productive consumption, or at least can enter this.” Department II consists of “Means of consumption: commodities that possess a form in which they enter the individual consumption of the capitalist and working classes.” “In each of these departments, all the various branches of production belonging to it form a single great branch of production, one of these being that of means of production, the other that of means of consumption.” An individual capital is free to produce any commodity that has a use-value, and it matters little to the individual capital whether this commodity serves as a means of production or a means of consumption. But in order for the social capital as a whole to reproduce itself or to expand and accumulate, there must be certain proportionalities and growth rates in the two departments. These “reproduction schema” have been the source of no end of disagreement, but, as Mandel points out in his introduction, they not only prove that the reproduction and expansion of the capitalist system is at least theoretically possible, but also underscore the extremely tenuous stability of that system, which continuously risks slight disproportions growing into full blown crises.

Karl Marx: Capital Volume I

2011-03-20T18:22:00.001-07:00

Marx begins with an analysis of the commodity, which he treats as the key to unlocking the mysteries of capitalism. “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” Commodities have a “dual character.” As material things that can be used in different ways in consumption, commodities have use-values. But commodities “are also the material bearers of . . . exchange-value,” which “appears first of all as the quantitative relation, the proportion, in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values of another kind.” “As use-values, commodities differ above all in quality, while as exchange-values they can only differ in quantity, and therefore do not contain an atom of use-value.” Human labor is “objectified” or “materialized” in commodities. The value of commodities, then, is determined by the quantity of labor, or more accurately, the quantity of labor-time, required to produce them. But this value is not based on the specific labor-time involved in each case, but rather on an average, the “socially necessary labor-time” needed to produce the commodity. Socially necessary labor-time is “the labor-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labor prevalent in that society.” But the value of a commodity cannot be found anywhere in its physical being (“We may twist and turn a single commodity as we wish; it remains impossible to grasp it as a thing possessing value”); it can only be expressed through exchange with another commodity. That is, value “can only appear in the social relation between commodity and commodity.” This manner in which value “transcends sensuousness” leads to the “fetishism” of the commodity. “The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists . . . simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labor as objective characteristics of the products of labor themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. . . . It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. . . . I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.” For their initial owners, commodities have no use-values, but have to be exchanged for commodities that do have desired use-values. They are not directly consumed by their producers but exchanged, and the development of the capitalist mode of production leads to a tendency of all commodities being produced for exchange. As exchange historically develops, one commodity becomes a “universal equivalent,” through which any other commodity can express its value. Any commodity can become the universal equivalent, but money (for Marx, gold) ultimately specializes in the function. The process or “circuit” of exchange then takes the form of Commodity-Money-Commodity, or C-M-C: a commodity is brought to the market and exchanged for money, and that money is then used to purchase another commodity. In this circuit, money functions merely as a “medium of exchange.” Money becomes capital, however, when it enters into a process of exchange that takes the form Money-Commodity-Money, or M-C-M, in which money is exchanged with the goal of acquiring more money. Exchanging money for the same amount of money would be pointless, so the second quantity of money must be greater than the original quantity exchanged. That is, the circuit takes the form M-C-M’, in which M’ contains “surplus value” that makes it greater than M. In M-C-M’, the original money offered has been “valorized”: the magnitude of its value has increased through the process. C-M-C and M-C-M’ appear very similar, but there are important differences. Commodity exchange, C-M-C, serves the purpose of acquiring specific use-values. Capitalist valorization, M-C-M’, however, serves the purpose of increasing exchange-value. “[T]he circulation of money as capital is an end in itself, for the valorization of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The movement of capital is therefore limitless.” The circulation of commodities does not add to their value (that is, it does not alter the socially necessary labor-time of their production), so where does surplus value, the difference between M and M’, come from? “In order to extract value out of the consumption of a commodity, our friend the money-owner must be lucky enough to find within the sphere of circulation, on the market, a commodity whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value. . . . The possessor of money does find such a special commodity on the market: the capacity for labor, in other words labor-power.” “We mean by labor-power, or labor-capacity, the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being, capabilities which he sets in motion whenever he produces a use-value of any kind.” Historical conditions are necessary for the money-owning capitalist to discover labor-power on the market. Individuals must be free to offer their labor-power temporarily as a commodity, and they must be compelled to do so because they have nothing else to offer on the market. There is nothing natural about this division of society into those who own money and commodities and those who have nothing to offer but their own labor-power. Capitalism is not an eternal form of society but rather a specific, temporary “epoch in the process of social production.” “The value of labor-power is determined, as in the case of every other commodity, by the labor-time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction, of this specific article. . . . Labor-power exists only as a capacity of the living individual. Its production consequently presupposes his existence. Given the existence of the individual, the production of labor-power consists in his reproduction of himself or his maintenance.” The capitalist purchases the commodities needed for production, including labor-power, but it is impossible to discover how surplus value is produced unless one leaves the sphere of circulation and dives “into the hidden abode of production.” Regardless of the mode of production, the labor process involves individuals using their labor-power (and, at a certain point of development, instruments) to form “the materials of nature” according to some purpose. But in the capitalist mode of production, the capitalist strictly controls the process of production, the final “product is the property of the capitalist and not that of the worker, its immediate producer,” and the purpose of the entire operation is the production of surplus-value. Surplus-values can be produced because of a potential discrepancy between the value of labor-power and the value that labor-power valorizes. The capitalist purchases labor-power, paying for its value, i.e., the cost of maintaining it. For the time that his labor-power has been purchased, the laborer “alienates” from himself the use-value of his labor-power. The capitalist appropriates for himself that use-value, which produces more value than the original cost of the labor-power. The difference between the original value of labor-power and the value it produces is the surplus-value. To carry out the process of production, the capitalist must turn some of his capital into “means of production,” such as materials and instruments. Marx calls this part of the capital spent “constant capital” because its value does not change as it is transferred into the commodities produced. The capitalist must also spend the other part of his capital on labor-power. Marx calls this part of the capital spent “variable capital” because labor-power produces more value, that is, it causes the quantity of value to vary. The rate of surplus-value is measured by the ratio of surplus-value (s) to variable capital (v), or s/v (the rate of surplus-value is different from the rate of profit, which Marx more fully treats in volume 3). The higher the rate of surplus value, the more the worker is forced to labor beyond the time necessary for his own maintenance and reproduction. “The rate of surplus-value is therefore an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labor-power by capital, or of the worker by the capitalist.” One of the primary means through which the capitalist can obtain “absolute surplus-value” is the extension of the working day, which results in more total value being produced without increasing the cost of the labor-power purchased. Left unchecked, capitalism even has a tendency to extend the working day to the point that the quality of labor-power deteriorates and the reproduction of labor-power is undermined. “The establishment of a normal working day is therefore the product of a protracted and more or less concealed civil war between the capitalist class and the working class.” Because there are natural and historical limits to increasing absolute surplus value (the former is the maximum of 24 work hours in a day), capitalists attempt to produce “relative surplus value” by revolutionizing the labor process. The transformation of the conditions of production increases the productivity of labor, so less labor-time is socially necessary to produce a commodity. When productivity is increased in those industries that produce the commodities required for labor’s reproduction and maintenance, the value of labor-power decreases because it costs less to produce the laborer himself. Individual capitalists can also acquire relative surplus value by increasing productivity ahead of their competitors. Adopting new production techniques and technologies allows individual capitalists to produce commodities more cheaply while selling them at the average social value. But competition eventually forces everyone to become more productive, driving down the average social value of the commodities until this ephemeral form of relative surplus value disappears. Capitalism truly comes into its own when production reaches a certain scale and a large number of workers are brought together to labor cooperatively. The exceptional power of the collective workers, unfortunately, is placed under the command of the capitalist, or at least the managers and professionals who eventually come to specialize in this function. The cooperation of workers under capitalism therefore does not lead to the freeing of man’s species being. The workers “enter into relations with the capitalist, but not with each other. Their co-operation only begins with the labor process, but by then they have ceased to belong to themselves. On entering the labor process they are incorporated into capital. . . . Hence the productive power developed by the worker socially is the productive power of capital. . . . Because this power costs capital nothing, while on the other hand it is not developed by the worker until his labor itself belongs to capital, it appears as a power which capital possesses by its nature—a productive power inherent in capital.” The deepening of the division of labor inhumanly forces each worker to carry out only one “simple operation for the whole of his life.” It also creates a hierarchy of skills and a growing mass of “so-called unskilled laborers.” The adoption of machines furthers this deskilling of the worker and ultimately subjects the worker to a labor process determined according to technical rather than human criteria. As constant capital, machines do not produce new value, but slowly transfer their value to the commodities they produce. However, machines do increase the productivity of labor, and therefore decrease the amount of labor-time needed to produce commodities. In addition to potentially decreasing the value of labor-power, machines allow capitalists who first adopt them to obtain relative surplus value until competition forces the general use of the machines. The integration of machines reaches its culmination with the factory. “In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated into it as its living appendages.” Like every mode of production, capitalism must not only produce things but also continually reproduce itself. The “simple reproduction” of capitalism requires the production of a class of workers. “The capitalist process of production, therefore, seen as a total, connected process, i.e. a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself; on the one hand the capitalist, on the other the wage-laborer.” In reproduction on an expanded scale, i.e., the accumulation of capital, some of the surplus product is transformed into capital. As a result, the social basis of production expands and the size of the proletariat grows. The wages of this proletariat even might grow, but they are “confined within limits that not only leave intact the foundations of the capitalist system, but also secure its reproduction on an increasing scale.” As the accumulation of capital progresses, there is a concentration as well as a centralization of capital. The “organic composition” of capital also changes as less variable capital (labor-power) tends to set into action a greater quantity of constant capital (such as machinery and materials). In other words, expanded reproduction ultimately tends to cast off workers who are no longer needed due to changes in the organization of production. “The working population therefore produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous.” In fact, this “surplus population . . . becomes a condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, which belongs to capital just as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own costs. Independently of the limits of the actual increase of population, it creates a mass of human material always ready for exploitation by capital in the interests of capital’s own changing valorization requirements.” But eventually, the “monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labor reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”

Karl Marx: The German Ideology

2011-03-10T20:18:00.001-08:00

One of what Althusser terms the “Works of the Break,” Marx’s The Germany Ideology attacks the ideological illusions of philosophy while embracing an undeveloped form of empiricist historicism. The liquidation of philosophy clears a space for the installation of science, but, Althusser argues, the results of this break didn’t appear until much later. So, for the most part, Marx confronts the ideology of Man with the empirical reality of individuals, but primarily by placing “real,” “actual,” “concrete,” “material,” “empirical” in front of all his terms. The book opens with an attack on the Young Hegelians, who, staking different positions within the field opened up by the decomposition of Hegel’s philosophy, remain within the confines of Hegel’s idealism, and therefore confuse concepts and consciousness with reality. For the Young Hegelians, “The speculative idea, the abstract conception, is made the driving force of history, and history is thereby turned into the mere history of philosophy. . . . Thus, history becomes a mere history of illusory ideas, a history of spirits and ghosts, while the real, empirical history that forms the basis of this ghostly history is only utilized to provide bodies for these ghosts.” Detached from the real movement of history, these petty bourgeois Germans can only imagine a revolution of consciousness. Echoing his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx writes, “This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret the existing world in a different way.” Marx jokes that this is to imagine that freeing oneself from the concept of gravity would also free oneself from gravity’s effects. Or in another witty jibe (and it should be noted, this is a very funny and sarcastic book), Marx writes, “Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as onanism and sexual love.” Rather than the illusory abstractions of philosophy, Marx proposes to start from empirical reality. “The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstractions can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.” He adds, “Empirical observation must on each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production. The social structure and the state are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, however, of these individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people’s imagination, but as they actually are.” For Marx, consciousness is produced alongside the production of men’s material, sensuous environment and their different social forms. “Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., that is, real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious being, and the being of men is their actual life-process.” Historical, material conditions therefore determine the production of ideology, but ideology distorts, or rather inverts, the relation of ideas to reality. In a famous passage, Marx writes, “If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.” It is a matter, then, “not of setting out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh; but setting out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process, demonstrating the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the brains of men are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process.” Marx offers a short history of this “life-process,” of the development of the mode of production and forms of cooperation. A particularly important threshold is crossed when the evolution of the division of labor creates a separation of “material and mental labour” (what Balibar nicely terms “intellectual difference.”). From this point on, the production of ideology can continue in isolation from, and even in opposition to, empirical reality, and the petty bourgeois philosophers of Germany, sitting in their rooms, can convince themselves that their ideas dominate history. Marx writes, “Division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears. From this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real; from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of ‘pure’ theory, theology, philosophy, morality, etc.” Unfortunately, this division of material and mental labor allows one class—the ruling class—to impose its ideas on the others. “The idea of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, the dominant material relations grasped as ideas.” But, anticipating Gramsci, Marx seems to qualify this claim, arguing that the ruling class succeeds in imposing its ideas only by presenting its narrow, specific interest as the interest of all. Marx writes, “For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to present its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and present them as the only rational, universally valid ones.” Each revolution in history has widened the base of those pulled into believing that the interest of the ruling class is their own, but only a revolution of the proletariat, the universal class, would install a true universality. Such a communist revolution of course must be carried out in reality, not just in consciousness. “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” In fact, during its course, the revolution, when carried out at a sufficient scale, would serve to sweep away the remnants of the ruling ideology and all estrangement of ideas from actual life. “Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; the revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.”

Karl Marx: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

2011-02-22T09:27:00.001-08:00

Marx’s posthumously published Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 remains one of his most singular and puzzling works. In “The Humanist Controversy,” Louis Althusser argues that this text, which he lumps together with Marx’s early, pre-scientific works, is Marx’s “only Hegelian text.” But, Althusser adds, “it is a Hegelian text in Feuerbach.” Marx uses Feuerbachian Humanism to criticize the work of the political economists, but adds to Feuerbach’s system historical, dialectical movement. This Hegelian intervention, however, remains “within the theoretical field defined by Feuerbach’s basic concepts”—Man and alienation. The result is that “the Hegelian concept of history as a process of alienation (or dialectical process) is theoretically subjected to the non-Hegelian category of the Subject (Man).” Marx begins the book with a close reading of the political economists (particularly Adam Smith), whom he heavily quotes. “On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words,” Marx aims to show “that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; that finally the distinction between capitalist and land-rentier, disappears and the whole of society must fall into the two classes—the property-owners and the propertyless workers.” Marx demonstrates that the political economists themselves clearly recognize these consequences of the accumulation of capital, but the political economists cannot fully understand the movements they describe because they start from unexamined assumptions about private property and avarice. Armed with Feuerbach’s theory of alienation, Marx then proceeds to reinterpret the facts presented by the political economists. He starts with a seeming paradox: “The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men.” Marx’s strategy of course is to understand this movement dialectically, as a process of alienation that the political economists ignored, misunderstood, or obscured. “This fact expresses merely the object which labor produces—labor’s product—confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been congealed in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. In the conditions dealt with by political economy this realization of labor appears as loss of reality for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and object-bondage; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.” He adds, “[T]he worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful the alien objective world becomes which he creates over-against himself, the poorer he himself—his inner world—becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. . . . Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not.” And in a passage that Sartre surely knew well: “The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him; it means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.” Moreover, the worker is estranged not only from the product of his labor, but also “in the act of production—within the producing activity itself.” Marx argues, “If then the product of labor is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation.” The worker’s labor is not his own, does not belong to him; it is “forced labor” that denies the worker himself. Alienation of the product of labor and alienation in the productive activity results in man’s alienation from his “species being.” Marx claims, “estranged labor estranges the species from man. It turns for him the life of the species into a means of individual life.” For Marx, the essence of the human species (but not of animals) is “free, conscious,” productive activity. Even when freed from need, man works up the objective world, objectifies himself in reality. But when labor is alienated, man is alienated from this species being, and “Life itself appears only as a means to life.” The direct effect “is the estrangement of man from man.” “[T]hrough estranged labor man not only engenders his relationship to the object and to the act of production as to powers that are alien and hostile to him; he also engenders the relationship in which other men stand to his production and to his product, and the relationship in which he stands to these other men.” That is, “he begets the dominion of the one who does not produce over production and over the product. . . . The relationship of the worker to labor engenders the relation to it of the capitalist.” Marx concludes, “Private property thus results by analysis from the concept of alienated labor.” Marx therefore rejects utopian and/or reformist projects that seek to simply raise or equalize wages without abolishing the estrangement of labor and all of its consequences. In contrast, “Communism as the positive transcendence of private property, as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being—a return become conscious, and accomplished with the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully-developed naturalism, equals humanism.”

Sylvia Harvey: May '68 and Film Culture

2011-02-09T18:15:00.001-08:00

Sylvia Harvey’s May’ 68 and Film Culture examines the effects of a tremendous political event on film aesthetics and practice. French cineastes were perhaps exceptionally prepared for May ’68 because of the “Langlois Affair.” In February 1968, the government suddenly removed Henri Langlois from his position as head of the Cinematheque. A crowd of 1,500 people soon began demonstrating outside the Cinematheque, and intellectuals and celebrities en masse took up the cause of supporting Langlois. Protests continued throughout March, and Cahiers du Cinema included a special insert on the controversy. In April, Langlois was given back his position, though the Cinematheque lost its funding for film conservation. According to Harvey, the Langlois Affair did much more than give many cineastes their first taste of protest. “The defense of Langlois was a liberal cause, not a radical one, but it provided a certain organizational infrastructure, a network of communication within French film culture which was to prove useful to those who, in the month of May . . . were seeking not to defend individual freedom but to place the cinema apparatus in the service of the working-class.” During the events of May, many of the same cineastes again came together to form the Estates General of the Cinema (EGC). Shortly after the mass demonstration of May 13, action committees at the Sorbonne had set up a commission that screened films in the university and factories, and it was not long before elements of the film industry also began to organize so as to commit their skills to the movement. “On Friday May 17 the Union of Film Production Technicians of the CGT . . . called together a number of technicians, directors, and members of the French actors’ union as well as students from the two main film and photography schools: the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographique (IDHEC) and the Ecole Nationale de Photographie et de Cinematographie (ENPC). Out of this meeting, and a subsequent meeting between members of the film technicians’ union and the editors of Cahiers du Cinema came the suggestion for a new institution to be called the Estates General of the French Cinema (Estats Generaux du Cinema Francais). An action committee and the film technicians’ union itself issued invitations to all those active in or interested in French film culture to attend the first meeting of the EGC that evening (May 17), at the ENPC building in the rue de Vaugirard, which had been occupied by the film and photography students for a couple of days. More than a thousand people met together for the inaugural session.” The EGC regularly met over the next three weeks, the most intense period of resistance, and then slowly fizzled out in the following months. Harvey argues that the EGC was as full of contradictions and disagreements as the rest of the left, which included anarchists, Maoists, Stalinists, and popular front socialists, students and workers, reformists and revolutionaries. Different groups in the EGC produced “a number of plans for the transformation and re-structuring of the whole of the French film industry,” plans which, ranging from reform to total revolution, investigated self-management, exhibition practices, universal film education, and non-commercial forms of financing. These plans were often visionary and theoretically enlightening, yet divisions within the EGC prevented them from being effectively implemented in any manner. Within the EGC there was widespread hostility towards the Centre National de la Cinematographie (CNC), a bureaucratic organ that regulated and funded film production in France. The CNC was perhaps just the most visible symbol of the reactionary nature of the existing film system, to which many during the month began to oppose the idea of a “cinema of today.” The Film Technicians’ Union went on strike on May 19, but the “EGC made arrangements for filming to carry on, despite the strike (though not in opposition to it), so that films could be made about the workers’ and students’ movement.” EGC sponsored a number of short, collectively-made documentaries on political subjects, including Sorbonne Repression, Le pouvoir est dans la rue, Comites d’action, and Ce n’est qu-un debut. What was referred to as a “parallel cinema” emerged as film groups experimented with new forms of distribution and exhibition, such as showing films inside factories. For many connected to the EGC, “The existing system of film production and distribution was criticized on the ground that it operated only to market film-commodities to alienated spectators and that, further, the consumption of these spectacles contributed to the maintenance of that alienation. The parallel cinema was to contribute to the destruction of that endless circuit which began with alienated production and ended with alienated consumption.” Another defining feature of the parallel cinema was a commitment to discovering more egalitarian ways of making films. “In addition to the attempt at developing new methods of distribution and exhibition, the radical film groups attempted a re-organisation of the practices of production: in particular the development of a collective mode of working which refused the hierarchisation of tasks typical of the mainstream of the industry. Thus decisions about script and treatment were taken collectively and the clear distinction between those filmed and those doing the filming (and taking the decisions about the organization of meaning in the finished film) began to be broken down as the film-makers entered into extensive consultation with those about whom they were making the film. In this way the method of organizing around the point of production developed as a genuinely co-operative endeavour, and the mental-manual distinction characteristic of the division of labour within the existing industry began to be replaced by a less alienated and less alienating mode of production.” The most famous of these film collectives of course was the Dziga Vertov group, which, as its most notable member, Jean-Luc Godard, stated, was formed in order “to make politically a political cinema.” An equally important collective was SLON (Society for the promotion of new works), which formed during the production of Loin du Vietnam. With the help of militant workers, SLON member Chris Marker made A bientot j’espere about strikes in Rhodiaceta. This collaboration led to the formation of the Medvedkin Group, which “changed its composition and internal modes of organization in order to represent more adequately the workers’ own views and priorities, and the decision-making role of the film-makers themselves was reduced or disappeared entirely.” Another collective, Dynadia, aligned itself with the French Communist Party, and made propaganda films supporting the organization’s political line. Finally, the Maoist position was put forth by Cineastes revolutionaires proletariens (Revolutionary Proletarian Film-Makers), which shot films of confrontations at strikes and exhibited its films in an underground manner in working-class communities. Like Dynadia, Cineastes revolutionaires proletariens saw film as an instrument and therefore did not question its form, only its content. The French film journals also were immediately impacted by May ’68, though these effects didn’t appear in print for a few months. Harvey focuses on Cahiers du cinema and Cinethique, the two journals that seem to have been the most affected by the political events. Cahiers first responded in its August issue, which discussed the EGC and the proposals to change the film industry. It began printing and discussing translations of Eisenstein, and made space for new theories drawing from psychoanalysis, most notably Jean-Pierre Oudart’s theory of the “suture.” “Cahiers’ most explicit statement of its post-’68 position, its clearest presentation of a programme of work, and one which precipitated a crisis in the ownership of the magazine,” was Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni’s “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” an explicitly Marxist, Althusserian theorization of the cinema as a form of ideology. They offered a useful classification of films into seven categories: films that reproduced without question the dominant ideology; films that confronted the dominant ideology through choosing a political subject and attacking traditional methods of depicting reality; films that were not explicitly political but whose form had political consequences; films that had political content but that were undermined by their reliance on traditional ideology and aesthetic forms; films that appeared to reproduce the dominant ideology but upon closer inspection revealed cracks and inconsistencies; documentary films that dealt with political subjects but did not question their own form; documentary films that dealt with political subjects and did question their own form. Less well-known in the English speaking world, Cinethique set forth a different leftist line than Cahiers, with whom it debated politics and aesthetics. Cinethique largely shunned mainstream film (unlike Cahiers) and focused on experimental and alternative forms of film. The journal sought out a materialist cinema, “a theoretical cinema capable of producing scientific knowledge.” Although Cahiers disagreed with Cinethique about whether film can be scientific, the two journals, along with Tel Quel, were united in their opposition to the anti-theoretical line of Positif and in their interest in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The rest of Harvey’s book is a solid and helpful, though not especially original, examination of the problems of political modernism. She shows how the post-May ’68 debate about film aesthetics and practice, particularly as it appeared in Cahiers and Cinethique, led “to a re-examination of some of the debates around the questions of culture and class, attitudes to the art of the past and the development of new forms of art which had been conducted in Russia in the decade or so following the Revolution of 1917, and in Europe in the thirties by writers like Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin.” In both these earlier examples and in France, there was often a split between those who pursued a culture that was formally radical, but potentially both elitist and politically ineffective, and those who accepted the use of bourgeois ideology and traditional aesthetic forms in the creation of a popular proletarian culture. Harvey concludes the book with a discussion of how the ambiguities of the theory of ideology, and particularly Althusser’s version, were ferociously worked through in the debates within and between French film journals in the first few years following May ’68.

Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason

2011-02-09T18:05:00.001-08:00

Kant begins with the problem of metaphysics, which tends to overstep the boundaries of possible experience, producing dogmatic claims to knowledge and an unfortunate backlash in the form of skepticism and indifferentism. Kant proposes to police the proper limits of the employment of speculative reason through a “critique of pure reason,” a critique “of the faculty of reason in general, in respect of all knowledge after which it may strive independently of all experience.” Kant’s starting point is a fundamental distinction between the object as an appearance for us and the object as a thing in itself. All human knowledge has to do solely with the object as an appearance. We can have a priori knowledge about an object because, as an appearance for us, each object must conform to certain conditions in order to enter into our experience. This a priori knowledge is “independent of experience and even of all impressions of the senses,” and is to be distinguished from “empirical,” a posteriori knowledge. Kant’s transcendental philosophy aims to investigate and “determine the possibility, the principles, and the extent of all a priori knowledge.” The first section, the “Transcendental Aesthetic,” shows how time and space are “pure forms of sensible intuition” to which all possible objects of experience must conform. Kant isolates a “pure intuition” stripped of everything coming from the senses. The investigation of this pure intuition leads him to claim, “Space is a necessary a priori representation, which underlies all outer intuitions. We can never represent to ourselves the absence of space, though we can quite well think it as empty of objects.” He concludes, “space is nothing but the form of all appearances of outer sense. It is the subjective condition of sensibility under which alone outer intuition is possible for us.” But, he underscores, space is a predicate of things only as appearances for us, not in themselves. He then turns to investigate the other pure form of sensible intuition, time, and claims, “Time is a necessary representation that underlies all intuitions. We cannot, in respect of appearances in general, remove time itself, though we can quite well think time as void of appearances.” He concludes, “Time is the formal a priori condition of all appearances whatsoever.” Whereas the “Transcendental Aesthetic” is about the rules of sensibility, the next section, the “Transcendental Logic,” is about the rules of understanding, the faculty of thinking an object of sensible intuition. Kant writes, “Our knowledge springs from two fundamental sources of the mind; the first is the capacity for receiving representations (receptivity for impressions), the second is the power of knowing an object through these representations (spontaneity in the production of concepts). Through the first an object is given to us, through the second the object is thought in relation to that given representation. . . . Intuition and concepts constitute, therefore, the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.” More bluntly stated, “The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise.” The Transcendental Logic begins with the “transcendental analytic,” which examines the pure a priori concepts of understanding. Pure intuition provides a manifold, which is synthesized by the imagination. This synthesis then yields knowledge when brought to unity under the concepts of the understanding. From four initial categories, Kant derives 12 “pure concepts of understanding, which apply a priori to objects of intuition in general.” They are: (of quantity) unity, plurality, totality; (of quality) reality, negation, limitation; (of relation) inherence and subsistence, causality and dependence, community; (of modality) possibility-impossibility, existence-nonexistence, necessity-contingency. “The objective validity of the categories as a priori concepts rests . . . on the fact that, so far as the form of thought is concerned, through them alone does experience become possible. They relate of necessity and a priori to objects of experience, for the reason that only by means of them can any object whatsoever of experience be thought.” But Kant adds that a transcendental subject is still necessary: “There can be in us no modes of knowledge, no connection of unity of one mode of knowledge with another, without that unity of consciousness which precedes all data of intuitions and by relation to which representation of objects is alone possible. This pure original unchangeable consciousness I shall name transcendental apperception.” “The abiding and unchanging ‘I’ (pure apperception) forms the correlate of all our representations in so far as it is to be at all possible that we should become conscious of them.” In the next section, the “Transcendental Dialectic,” Kant aims to point out and correct errors stemming from the “deceptive extension of pure understanding.” But first, he examines the function of reason. According to Kant, reason works to bring “the understanding into thoroughgoing accordance with itself, just as the understanding brings the manifold of intuition under concepts and thereby connects the manifold.” The concepts of pure reason are “transcendental ideas,” which must be distinguished from the pure concepts of understanding. Kant emphasizes, “no object adequate to the transcendental idea can ever be found within experience.” Transcendental ideas act as guides for understanding, setting it the task of extending its unity toward the unconditioned. “Reason . . . occupies itself solely with the employment of understanding, not indeed in so far as the latter contains the ground of possible experience (for the concept of the absolute totality of conditions is not applicable to any experience, since no experience is unconditioned), but solely in order to prescribe to the understanding its direction towards a certain unity of which it has itself no concept, and in such manner as to unite all the acts of the understanding in respect of every object, into an absolute whole.” When examined by pure reason that remains within its appropriate limits, the three transcendental ideas—psychological, cosmological, and theological—form a system and lead one to assume “the purposive unity of things,” “to regard all order in the world as if it had originated in the purpose of a supreme reason.” To conclude: “Thus all human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts, and ends with ideas. Although in respect of all three elements it possesses a priori sources of knowledge, which on first consideration seem to scorn the limits of all experience, a thoroughgoing critique convinces us that reason, in its speculative employment, can never with these elements transcend the field of possible experience, and that the proper vocation of this supreme faculty of knowledge is to use all methods, and the principles of these methods, solely for the purpose of penetrating to the innermost secrets of nature, in accordance with every possible principle of unity—that of ends being the most important—but never to soar beyond its limits, outside which there is for us nothing but empty space.”

Immanuel Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals

2011-02-07T10:34:00.001-08:00

Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals aims to isolate and examine a “pure moral philosophy completed cleansed of everything that can only be empirical and appropriate to anthropology.” Through a “critique of pure practical reason,” Kant attempts “to seek out and establish the supreme principle of morality.” He begins by asking what is unconditionally good? He rejects a number of obvious answers (such as achieving good results, conforming to moral principles) as being too qualified or restricted. Instead, he argues that a “good will” is “good in itself,” that is, good even if it has no or even negative consequences. To support this claim that a good will is unconditionally good, Kant turns to the function of reason. Starting from the assumption that everything in nature has a purpose, he asks what is the purpose of reason? The instincts are adequate for obtaining self-preservation (and often happiness), so what function does the organ of reason serve? His answer is that the purpose of reason “is to have influence on the will; its true function must be to produce a will which is good, not as a means to some further end, but in itself.” Reason produces a will that allows the individual to act morally good for “the sake of duty.” Rather than acting according to inclinations or to achieve a specific purpose, a rational being is able to act out of a “reverence” for the law. This good will is unconditioned by any specific or individual interests, and therefore its principle can be restated in more universal terms: “I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law.” At this point, Kant attacks popular philosophy, which relies too much on examples. He argues that moral concepts are not derived from contingent, empirical experience but from a priori reason. “Only a rational being has the power to act in accordance with his idea of laws—that is, in accordance with principles—and only so has he a will.” For a perfect being, such as god, reason and will would be in complete agreement, and there would be no need for the former to correct the latter. For mankind, however, reason is not always in perfect accord with the will: there can be a divergence of objective and subjective principles. Reason therefore acts upon the will through a command, an “imperative.” “All imperatives are expressed by an ‘ought.’ By this they mark the relation of an objective law of reason to a will which is not necessarily determined by this law in virtue of its subjective constitution.” There are two general categories of imperatives: “hypothetical” and “categorical” imperatives. Hypothetical imperatives state what actions are required to achieve a specific end (These take the form: If I want to achieve A, I must do B). In contrast, “A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself apart from its relation to a further end.” Hypothetical imperatives may be disregarded according to one’s subjective inclinations (one can always choose not to do what is best, to act imprudently or unskillfully), but a categorical imperative, being unconditioned necessity, commands obedience, even against one’s inclinations. There is one categorical imperative, “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should be a universal law.” Or in a slightly modified form, “Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature.” Kant proceeds to add some matter to this imperative by considering the “value” of rational beings. Whereas non-rational beings can be treated as “things,” as means to an end, “man, and in general every rational being, exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means for arbitrary use by this or that will.” This leads to a more practical restatement of the categorical imperative: “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.” Extending the concept of each individual who, making and subjecting himself to universal law, is an end in himself to the totality of rational beings leads to the Idea of a “kingdom of ends,” which would consist of “a systematic union of rational beings under common objective laws.” Kant argues that the concept of duty is not as oppressive as it might appear because the rational being creates the very law to which he subjects himself, and thereby gains “dignity.” Kant writes, “although in the concept of duty we think of subjection to the law, yet we also at the same time attribute to the person who fulfils all his duties a certain sublimity and dignity. For it is not in so far as he is subject to the law that he has sublimity, but rather in so far as, in regard to this very same law, he is at the same its author and is subordinated to it only on this ground.” Kant ends with a discussion of the antinomy of freedom. The will’s “autonomy” “is the property the will has of being a law to itself.” But how can this free, rational causality be reconciled with the necessity of natural laws? Kant of course defends the Idea of freedom by making the correlationist distinction between things as they appear to us and things in-themselves, a distinction between the sensible and intelligible worlds. Considered as belonging to the intelligible world, a rational being has autonomy, though, like all Ideas, this Idea of freedom can never be directly experienced in intuition. Because this freedom can never be explained, it is also impossible to explain the existence of “moral feeling,” the “interest” man takes in moral laws.

Tom McCarthy: Remainder

2011-02-06T11:33:00.001-08:00

Tom McCarthy’s Remainder is an ambitious, philosophically-informed novel about trauma, repetition, and inauthenticity. At the novel’s beginning, McCarthy’s unnamed narrator has just recovered from an enigmatic accident. He doesn’t remember the incident, which to him is “a blank: a white slate, a black hole,” though he admits it “involved something falling from the sky. Technology. Parts, bits.” The narrator is unable to speak about the event, which left him severely injured and traumatized, because he didn’t actually experience it. In a clever move, McCarthy completely bans the event from being named within the narrative by adding legal motives for the narrator’s silence on the subject. In exchange for 8.5 million pounds, the narrator has signed a legal agreement not to speak publicly about “the nature and/or details of the accident.” In the period immediately following the accident, he had to relearn how to move by teaching his brain how to “reroute” the circuits that controlled his actions. He accomplished this task through a kind of Taylorization of movement: “Everything, each movement: I had to learn them all. I had to understand how they work first, break them down into each constituent part, then execute them.” As a result, he lost all immediacy in his actions. “No Doing without Understanding: the accident bequeathed me that for ever, an eternal detour.” His movements are all copies of movements, copies that are perfected through repetition. However, he soon realizes that his movements have always been artificial, “secondhand,” that his being-in-the-world has never really been authentic. Watching the film Taxi Driver, he envies how De Niro “seemed to execute the action perfectly, to live it, to merge with it until he was it and it was him and there was nothing in between. . . . He doesn’t have to think about them because he and they are one. Perfect. Real. My movements are all fake. Second-hand.” He adds, “It’s about just being. De Niro was just being; I can never do that now.” But a friend helps convince him that, largely because of the mass media, such inauthenticity is universal today, that everyone’s actions are secondhand, often self-aware, repetitions. He states, “I’d always been inauthentic. . . . I wasn’t unusual: I was more usual than most.” But when he has an epiphany at a friend’s party, he is led to embrace repetition as a way of becoming real. In the bathroom at his friend’s home he sees a crack in the wall that elicits from him elusive memories of a building that he can’t recall ever having been in. What he does know, however, is that “in these spaces, all my movements had been fluent and unforced. Not awkward, acquired, second-hand, but natural. . . . They’d been real; I’d been real.” He immediately decides how he will use his legal settlement: “I wanted to reconstruct that space and enter it so that I could feel real again.” He buys a building (named “Madlyn Mansions,” no subtle reference to Proust’s madeleine) and hires individuals (“re-enactors”) to live there and always be on call for “re-enactments” of his memories. This re-enactment leads to others, including the re-enactment of a murder on the street where it occurred. This series of re-enactments reaches its bloody peak when he attempts to make a re-enactment of a bank heist become real. The narrator, who is selfish and demanding, bursting out in rage when those he hires don’t perfectly follow his orders, is obsessed with small objective details (McCarthy’s appreciation of Robbe-Grillet is apparent at these moments, though McCarthy pushes the latter’s style towards a kind of bland realism). The novel’s title is reference to the “surplus matter” that persistently troubles the narrator. These “remainders” include the tiny splinter left in his leg after the accident, the smelly liver fat that accumulates in the building’s vents, the black grease from a subway ticket machine that gets on his fingers, and the flesh protruding from the wounds of a corpse. The narrator would like to carry out his re-enactments so perfectly that they leave no such traces, and he even starts to invest his fortune on the stock market in “logistics,” an industry aimed precisely at realizing the dream of seamlessly carried out operations. But he eventually realizes, “Everything must leave some kind of mark.” That is, “matter’s what makes us alive—the bitty flow, the scar tissue, signature of the world’s very first disaster and promissory note guaranteeing its last. Try to iron it out at your peril.”

Thomas Bernhard: Old Masters

2011-02-03T19:03:00.001-08:00

Stubbornly bitter, excessively critical, and yet deeply amusing, Thomas Bernhard’s Old Masters is an uninterrupted tirade against, well, everything. The book focuses on an elderly musicologist, Reger, who, contra John Barth, has lived his life according to the principle that anathematization of the world is an adequate response to the world, indeed, the only adequate response to the world. For over thirty years, Reger has gone “every other day except Monday” to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where he has made an arrangement with the museum guard Irrsigler so that he can occupy the Bordone room by himself and do his thinking while sitting in front of Tintoretto’s White-Bearded Man. On the day the novel recounts, Reger’s friend Atzbacher, a philosopher who refuses to publish anything, meets with and listens to Reger, who self-assuredly attacks everything that comes to his mind, including art historians, museums, the Viennese, Austrians, teachers, the state, Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler, Heidegger, childhood, birthdays, human beings, and the sun. The book has no paragraphs or chapters, and the entire narrative action consists of no more than one character entering into a room, so Reger’s expression of disapproval continues unabated from the novel’s beginning to end. Bernhard’s sentences are long and convoluted, often twisting and turning back on themselves. They typically repeat variations on the same point, attempting to land the same blow more than once rather than develop an argument. There is perhaps a certain nihilism lurking underneath this indifference to explication. Bernhard at one point writes, “everything that is said is nonsense, but we do utter that nonsense convincingly, Reger said. Anything that is said sooner or later turns out to be nonsense, but if we utter it convincingly, with the most incredible vehemence we can muster, then it is no crime, he said.” Sentimentality and kitsch are Reger’s favored derisive labels. “Sentimentality altogether, that is the terrible thing, is now greatly in vogue, just as everything else that is kitsch is now greatly in vogue.” “The whole world today is ridiculous and at the same time profoundly embarrassing and kitschy, that is the truth.” “Anything human is kitschy, he said, there can be no doubt about that.” Spread throughout the book are snippets of the philosophy underlying Reger’s condemnation of the world. For Reger, critical negativity, as a way of life, is the only thing that allows the finite individual to survive, particularly when confronted by inhumanly perfect and complete works of art. Attacking art, finding its flaws, fragments, and failures, liberates the individual from its illusions and chains, and helps make his existence, his damaged life, bearable. “We have to listen to Bach and hear how he fails, listen to Beethoven and hear how he fails, even listen to Mozart and hear how he fails. . . . We only love philosophy and the humanities generally because they are absolutely helpless. We truly love only those books which are not a whole, which are chaotic, which are helpless.” “There is no perfect picture and there is no perfect book and there is no perfect piece of music, Reger said, that is the truth, and this truth makes it possible for a mind like mine, which all its life was nothing but a desperate mind, to go on existing. One’s mind has to be a searching mind, a mind searching for mistakes, for the mistakes of humanity, a mind searching for failure. The human mind is a human mind only when it searches for the mistakes of humanity.” When extended beyond art, this critical position makes the world universally “abhorrent” to Reger. Nonetheless, Reger obtains a kind of autonomy through this negativity, which severs any relation that binds the individual to the world. “You have the strength to turn the world into a caricature, he said, the supreme strength of the spirit which is necessary for it, this one strength of survival, he said. We only control what we ultimately find ridiculous, only if we find the world and life upon it ridiculous can we get any further, there is no other, no better, method, he said.” In true dialectical fashion, however, the critical subject still needs the objects that it negates, its existence being unthinkable without them. For example, Reger is especially hostile towards the titular “old masters” that hang on the walls of the museum, but for decades he as still chosen to visit the museum. “Everything they have painted and which is hanging here is repulsive to me, I often think, he said yesterday, and yet for decades I have been unable to avoid studying it. That is the most terrible thing, he said yesterday, that I find these old masters most profoundly repulsive and again and again I continue to study them.” Throughout the book, Reger’s voice flows through and dominates the voices of Atzbacher and Irrsigler, who, respectively, do little but report and repeat what Reger says. The effect is that the narrative feels like a monologue by Reger, but the novel’s conclusion, which leaves Reger’s negativity intact, reveals a more positive truth about his garrulousness and his need for companionship.

Laszlo Krasznahorkai: The Melancholy of Resistance

2011-01-28T12:48:00.000-08:00

Like the novels of W.G. Sebald, Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s masterpiece The Melancholy of Resistance is vitally untimely; Krasznahorkai’s total commitment to a compellingly dysphoric vision and a demanding, relentless style reveals the narrowness of the contemporary field of literature, which, even at its best, rarely offers more than a refined, topical take on realism or nuanced (that is, hipsterized), metafictional endgames. The story of The Melancholy of Resistance will be familiar to fans of Bela Tarr’s The Werckmeister Harmonies, which loosely adapts the central section of Krasznahorkai’s novel. The novel opens by describing a nightmarish train ride home to a midsized town in Hungary that is caught up in an inexplicable, entropic movement toward decay, anarchy, and chaos. During a brutally cold but snow-free winter, garbage accumulates on the streets, stray cats multiply and become bold, and mysterious events keep occurring. The opening page of the novel describes a general “sense of ever-spreading all-consuming chaos which rendered the future unpredictable, the past unrecallable and ordinary life so haphazard that people simply assumed that whatever could be imagined might come to pass.” The people of the town continuously gossip about “the collapse into anarchy,” “the unstoppable stampede into chaos,” “the approaching catastrophe.” Page after page, Krasznahorkai piles on dense descriptions of this state of universal decay, of a rotting ontology and corrupted nature, creating a suffocating, paranoid atmosphere, which is only occasionally punctured by striking and darkly humorous vignettes. To make matters worse, one night a circus advertising “The Biggest Whale in the World, and other sensational secrets of nature” arrives in the heart of the town. The circus attracts a mysterious and unruly mob of strangers, who seem to be followers of “The Prince,” a monstrous being who speaks about destruction in a chirping language that has to be translated by a factotum. One of Krasznahorkai’s themes here is the Hobbesian opposition of the state and anarchy. The crowd that gathers around the whale, the fallen Leviathan, is described as a “multitude,” and this mob eventually riots over one long, destructive night, only to be subdued by a repressive and hypocritical sovereignty. This political conflict, however, cannot be separated from the novel’s metaphysical inquiry into the struggle between order and chaos. Not just the body politic, but all bodies, organic and inorganic, are swept up in an eternal fight between what resists and what attempts to overcome that resistance. Krasznahorkai assigns his characters contrasting positions on these issues. Mrs. Eszter, “president of the women’s committee” and fond friend of the police, cynically accepts reality as the war of all against all; she sees the general disorder as a sign for the need of a new beginning, and uses the circus to gain power and force her program for “A TIDY YARD, AN ORDERLY HOUSE” onto the community. Valuska, an innocent idiot savant, makes his regular rounds of the town while lost in cosmological visions of “the lowly place of man in the great order of the universe.” Valuska is therefore particularly devastated by The Prince’s proclamation that “there is no whole. . . . the whole does not exist.” Taking a more “rational” approach, Mrs. Eszter’s estranged husband, Gyorgy, has removed himself from society in order to seek out a higher form of order. He once faithfully believed that “music, which consisted of the omnipotent magic of harmony and echo, provided humanity’s only sure stay against the filth and squalor of the surrounding world, music being as close an approximation to perfection as could be imagined.” But he discovered that Werckmeister ignored pure tonalities in the construction of his “well-tempered” tuning system. Shocked by the illusory image of order that is the foundation of Western classical music, Eszter tries to adjust his piano to a more “natural” tuning, but when he performs Bach on the instrument the result is “an unbearably grating din,” which he forces himself to tolerate out of ideological zeal. Even the multitude is allowed to explain the motives for its destructive rampage when Valuska discovers a discarded notebook that describes the night’s events. He reads, “there was nothing left to lose, everything having become intolerable, unbearable, beyond the pale; each house, each fence, each advertising pillar, telegraph post, shop or the post office, even the lightly drifting odours of the bakery, had become intolerable; intolerable too every precept of law and order, every petty demanding obligation, the continuous and hopeless expenditure of energy in the attempt to suggest that there might be some point to all this rather than be faced by the unyielding, indifferent, universal incomprehensibility of things.” Krasznahorkai never harmonizes the clamor created by these different voices, yet, aesthetically, his dense style and labyrinth-like sentences seem to already be on the side of chaos, which, in the final pages, explicitly devours everything, including the book itself.

Gilles Deleuze & Michel Foucault: Photogenic Painting

2011-01-24T13:57:00.000-08:00

Photogenic Painting packages together a lengthy introduction and two essays by Deleuze and Foucault on Gerard Fromanger, a French hyperrealist painter whom one of the editors calls “the political artist of 1968 and its aftermath.” The volume also offers a generous collection of images of Fromanger’s paintings, which are relatively unknown outside France. Fromanger was friends with the two philosophers and painted magnificent portraits of them, as well as of other French intellectuals, including Guattari and Sartre. Deleuze and Foucault return the favor in their critical “portraits” of Fromanger, sharpening their respective theoretical frameworks into supportive introductions to his work. Deleuze’s essay, “Cold and Heat,” is perhaps a bit too abstract. Deleuze argues that “Fromanger’s model is the commodity.” In the world Fromanger paints, everything has been “rendered in the terms of the single model, the Commodity, which circulates with the painter.”
Rather than reject the model of the commodity, or attempt to criticize it from supposed point of externality, Fromanger works wholly within the “system of indifferences in which exchange-value circulates.” In his paintings, he manipulates the relational potential of the hotness and coldness of different colors, creating “connections,” ”disjunctions,” and “conjunctions” between different elements of the paintings. Deleuze praises this “mobilisation of indifferents” for its “radical absence of bitterness, of the tragic, of anxiety, of all this drivel you get in the fake great painters who are called witnesses to their age.” He concludes, “From what is ugly, repugnant, hateful and hateable he knows how to bring out the colds and hots which produce a life for tomorrow. We can imagine the cold revolution as having to heat the over-heated world of today.”
Foucault’s essay, “Photogenic Painting,” is the better contribution, a remarkably clear and insightful text that makes one wish that Foucault would have written more in the way of art criticism. Foucault’s argument is especially relevant today, as images are increasingly remediated as they circulate throughout digital networks. Foucault takes issue with the modernist attempt to purify painting of everything but its own essence. Instead, he finds inspiration in the early decades of photography, a period when photographers playfully indulged in a wide variety of “operations” on their images, many of which, such as painting directly on the photographs, undermined the border between photography and painting. Confronted today with political and commercial control over images, we need to learn once again how to “put images into circulation, to convey them, disguise them, deform them, heat them red hot, freeze them, multiply them.” According to Foucault, “Pop Art and hyperrealism have re-taught us the love of images. Not by a return to figuration, not by a rediscovery of the object and its real density, but by plugging us in to the endless circulation of images.” “Pop artists and hyperrealists paint images,” but not images that are meant to accurately represent reality. These images are “relays” that transmit photographic images, further circulating them in a form that retains the traces of this act of translation and circulation between media. Foucault considers Fromanger an exemplary hyperrealist who is ahead of the game. Fromanger creates a painting by taking a photo, projecting this photo on the canvas, and then directly painting over the projected image. His photos are not deliberately composed, but rather record a “photo-event.” According to Foucault, Fromanger attempts “To create a painting-event on the photo-event. To generate an event that transmits and magnifies the other, which combines with it and gives rise, for all those who come to look at it, and for every particular gaze that comes to rest on it, to an infinite series of new passages.” When the photographic projection is turned off, the painting must “sustain” the image; its function is not to fix the image once and for all, but to help it to continue to circulate, beyond the original photograph. “The function of the photo-slide projection-painting sequence present in every painting is to ensure the transit of an image. Each painting is a thoroughfare; a ‘snap’ which rather than fixing the movement of things in a photograph, animates, concentrates and magnifies the movement of the image through its successive supporting media.” Fromanger can therefore take a single photograph, a single photographic event, and relay its image in different ways through a series of paintings. Foucault concludes, “We are now coming out of the long period during which painting always minimized itself as painting in order to ‘purify’ itself, to sharpen and intensify itself as art. Perhaps with the new ‘photogenic’ painting it is at last coming to laugh at that part of itself which sought the intransitive gesture, the pure sign, the ‘trace’. Here it agrees to become a thoroughfare, an infinite transition, a busy and crowded painting. And in opening itself up to so many events that it relaunches, it incorporates all the techniques of the image: it re-establishes its relationship with them, to connect to them, to amplify them, to multiply them, to disturb them or deflect them.”

William Gibson: Zero History (2010)

2011-01-24T12:04:00.001-08:00

William Gibson continues his archaeology of the present in Zero History, which forms something of a trilogy with Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. Gone are the jacked-in adventures through cyberspace and virtual reality. Gibson’s new realism (mostly) limits itself to a contemporary world already over-populated with iPhones and GPS systems, a “mixed reality” that doesn’t require the conceits of science fiction to appear as unreal and sometimes dystopian. The very fabric of everyday life has changed as a result of information technologies, as one character ambivalently notes, “Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that once belonged to cigarettes, now belonged to phones. Human figures, a block down the street, in postures utterly familiar, were no longer smoking.” However, the information revolution is primarily approached here not through speculation about new technologies but rather through an imaginative foray into the fashion system and its relentless, repetitive quest for the ever-changing new. The plot focuses on Hollis Henry, former member of the band The Curfew, who is again dragged into a business adventure by Hubertus Bigend, head of the elusive advertising agency Blue Ant. The recession is behind Hollis’ reluctant return to “freelance” work for Bigend: she has lost “nearly fifty percent of her net worth” because of “devalued money market shares.” Bigend hires her to seek out the maker of a clothing line known as Gabriel Hounds, a “secret brand” whose “branding would be that it was a secret. No advertising. None. No Press. No shows.” Sold only for brief moments at shifting, hidden locations, the brand is about the “reinvention of exclusivity. Far ahead, say of the Burberry label you can only buy in one special outlet in Tokyo, but not here, and not on the web. That’s old-school geographical exclusivity. Gabriel Hounds is something else. There’s something spectral about it.” Bigend is interested in Gabriel Hounds because he fears someone has discovered a “new way to transmit brand vision.” His firm Blue Ant has always been more than an “advertising agency,” specializing in “brand transmission, trend forecasting, vendor management, youth market recon, strategic planning in general.” But Gabriel Hounds seems to exist beyond even his firm’s horizon: “It’s about atemporality. About opting out of the industrialization of novelty. It’s about deeper code.” Bigend’s interest in Gabriel Hounds is also motivated by his risky new venture into making “designer combat pants” for the military. As one character notes, “Military contracting [is] essentially recession-proof,” a massive but rather insular market. It is difficult to move into military clothing, however, not just because of the existing contractors but also because of the history of fashion. As one of Bigend’s employees explains, “The military, if you think about it, largely invented branding. The whole idea of being ‘in uniform.’” “The bulk of the underlying design code of the twenty-first-century male street was the code of the previous mid-century’s military wear.” However, this unintentional success has become an obstacle: “Having invented so much of contemporary masculine cool in the midcenutry, [the military and its designers] found themselves competing with their own historical product, reiterated as streetwear.” Since this is a Gibson novel, Hollis’ search for the maker of Gabriel Hounds eventually settles into some well-trodden generic conventions, resulting in a final confrontation with some angry military contractors, who are thwarted through an operation reliant on remote control drones and a Festo air penguin. The title of the book refers to the blank credit history of someone who hasn’t “had a credit card for ten years” and whose past credit data has been erased. One of the book’s major themes is the desire to acquire freedom by removing oneself from the databanks that are now accessible almost anywhere and anytime. Gibson’s characters regularly search online for information (“Google” is a prominent verb in the novel), sometimes about each other. Cell phones make such searches possible, but are also used to continuously track the movements of individuals. And London’s omnipresent surveillance cameras guarantee that any appearance in public will be recorded and stored away. Gabriel Hounds is an innovative brand precisely because its strategy is to subtract itself from these ubiquitous webs of information. The novel’s conclusion also hinges on an unattractive T-shirt that causes surveillance cameras to delete the wearer from images that are retrieved later. Rather than zero history, Bigend fantasizes about the power that might be obtained from a total view of all available information. One character explains Bigend’s interest in the “order flow,” which is “the aggregate of all the orders in the market. Everything anyone is about to buy or sell, all of it. Stocks, bonds, gold, anything. If I understood him, that information exists, at any given moment, but there’s no aggregator. It exists, constantly, but is unknowable. If someone were able to aggregate that, the market would cease to be real.” Picking up this idea in its last moments, the novel’s narrative itself “cease[s] to be real,” swerving back towards Gibson’s science fiction roots.

John Arquilla & David Ronfeldt: Networks and Netwars

2011-01-24T10:18:00.000-08:00

RAND researchers may have prepared this collection of articles on netwar for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, but its claims are important for anyone invested in the potential of networked action, and particularly for those interested in media studies. Arquilla and Ronfeldt define netwar as “an emerging mode of conflict . . . in which protagonists use network forms of organization and related doctrines, strategies, and technologies attuned to the information age.” The primary tool of netwar is “swarming,” “a seemingly amorphous, but deliberately structured, coordinated, strategic way to strike from all directions at a particular point or points, by means of a sustainable pulsing of force and/or fire, close-in as well as from stand-off positions.” “Swarming occurs when the dispersed units of a network of small (and perhaps some large) forces converge on a target from multiple directions. The overall aim is sustainable pulsing—swarm networks must be able to coalesce rapidly and stealthily on a target, then dissever and redisperse, immediately ready to recombine for a new pulse.” Because it allows small and/or dispersed groups to create substantial results, netwar has made nonstate actors into major players in the contemporary world (“power is migrating to nonstate actors”). Netwar may be waged not only by terrorists and criminal organizations, but also by leftist radicals. Anarchist and autonomous Marxist organizations (such as the Black Blocks that appeared at the Battle of Seattle or the Zapatistas in Mexico) have used netwar against state forces. States have traditionally relied on hierarchical forms of organization, but these tend not to be successful in combating the networks involved in netwar, which tend to be “robust” because of their fluid, decentralized, and ambiguous organization. As a result, “It will become crucial for governments and their military and law enforcement establishments to begin networking themselves. Perhaps this will become the greatest challenge posted by the rise of netwar.” On a more positive note, the authors admit that netwar allows organizations such as NGOs to more successfully exert a kind of “soft power” that may be of great use for democracies as well as lessen the need for more troublesome forms of violent state “hard power.” New information technologies such as the Internet have been vital for the spread of netwar, but the authors don’t want to limit netwar to online actions such as hacktivism of cyberterrorism. They claim, “netwar may be waged in high-, low-, or no-tech fashion.” What is important is the use of network forms of organization, which can be created in many different ways. These networks may depend on technologies, but “social, narrative, organizational, and doctrinal” factors are also important for their effective functioning. Arquilla and Ronfeldt offer some theses on the challenges of netwar: “Hierarchies have a difficult time fighting networks.” “It takes networks to fight networks.” “Whoever masters the network form first and best will gain major advantages.”

Catherine Lupton: Chris Marker

2011-01-21T14:36:00.000-08:00

Catherine Lupton’s Chris Marker: Memories of the Future is billed as “the first comprehensive study in English of Chris Marker’s work.” Marker the person is notoriously elusive, rarely giving interviews, making public appearances, or even letting himself be photographed (and in the last case, he prefers to be hidden behind his camera in the photo). But focusing on Marker’s published writings and film and video texts, Lupton has created an informative introduction to a director whose work remains indispensable yet largely unviewed (La Jetée and Sunless being the two notable exceptions). Marker does not fit into any readymade conception of a director, not the least because he has worked in so many different media. To identify what it is that Marker does, Lupton cites André Bazin, who argued “that the primary matter of Marker’s work was intelligence, and that his operative mode was the personal essay, which combines stylistic flair with a process of reflective enquiry into its subject. Intelligence is a quality of mind that may choose to express itself through whatever medium is at hand, whether it be a typewriter, a Rolleiflex, a 16mm-film camera, a Sony Handycam or an Apple Mac loaded with image processing software.” Lupton adds that, in contrast to a typical director barking commands on a set, “Marker is more an image-scavenger, one adept at editing, reprocessing and commenting on representations that already exist. He typically seems to stand at one remove from his own projects, like someone who is faced with an enthralling tangle of pre-existing texts and images . . . and whose role is to sort through it all, pondering aloud all the while about what this process of sorting out entails.” Marker first appeared on the Parisian cultural scene in the late 1940s as a writer, publishing a novel as well as “poetry, a short story, political and cultural essays, book and film reviews.” Throughout the book, Lupton underscores Marker’s lifelong interest in “transposing conventions and techniques across media.” She argues, “Surveyed as a whole, Marker’s early writings are striking not only for their diversity, but for their permeability to the influence of other media; their desire to reach beyond writing and embrace other potential forms of reflection and enquiry.” Marker wrote about film for Cahiers du Cinema and other periodicals. According to Lupton, this criticism reveals Marker’s fascination with cinema for “its capacity for revelation: the power to unveil deeper realities that expand and enrich the significance of the everyday world, but remain firmly grounded in its objects and appearances.” She argues that this early film criticism outlines the approach Marker would later take when he started to make his own films. “This developed sense of the physical world in film as the bearer of an inner imaginative reality sheds light on the way that Marker’s own films have used documentary footage of the actual world to map a subjective consciousness, via incisive dialogues between the spoken commentary and the assembled images. Even Marker’s engagements with political and historical subject matter would uphold this principle of revelation, by scrutinizing archival images for evidence of hidden historical realities.” Marker’s first film was Olympia 52, a rather straightforward documentary on the Olympic games. Around the same period, he co-directed with Alain Resnais Les Statues meurent aussi, a short film about African art that had strong anti-colonial undercurrents. The first period of Marker’s film career is defined by the subjective travelogue films he made, such as Sunday in Peking, Letter from Siberia, and Description of a Struggle. “[The] desire to see and show the world from unexpected angles would become the defining impulse of Chris Marker’s activities through the 1950s and the first years of the 1960s, as he began to establish a reputation as an inveterate globetrotter with a sequence of works based on journeys to countries and regions in transition.” Lupton summarizes the approach of the films from this period: “Marker’s early travelogues typically fuse an engagingly personal response to the places visited with astute insights into the political forces and attitudes that have shaped their identity, and might also determine their destiny in the world. Disdaining the fanfare of clichés and national stereotypes, Marker seeks out the fugitive signs, embedded in the texture and habits of everyday life, that reveal how nations and cultures organize and express themselves, how they engage with the memory of their past and imagine their contributions to the future.” During this period, Marker was also, fittingly, a series editor for the Petite Planete country guides, and Lupton compares these guidebooks to Marker’s films. In addition to forming deep ties with Resnais and Varda (who, with Marker, were deemed by one contemporary critic the “Left Bank Group”), Marker also wrote commentaries for the films of many other directors, including William Klein and Joris Ivens. La Jetée and Le Joli mai, which were produced at the same time, mark a turning point in Marker’s film career, and Marker himself has since refused to condone screenings of the films he made before these two. The cinéma vérité movement, particularly Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (1960), anticipated a great deal of Marker’s Le Joli mai, which interviewed individuals about their lives as the Algerian War came to an end. Lupton emphasizes that Marker was more critical and partisan than Rouch and Morin, and definitely less concerned with sociological objectivity. “Faced with Rouch’s label cinema vérité, with its troublesome connotation of some general truth discovered through cinema, Marker is credited with promptly rephrasing it as ‘ciné, ma vérité’ (‘cinema, my truth’).” Marker worked on La Jetée on the days the film crew was off from Le Joli mai (Lupton clarifies that the former film’s images were made from photographs taken on a Pentax camera, not single frames of film). Although the films might appear to be completely different, Lupton argues they are quite complementary. “[Le Jetée] imagines the Paris of 1962 as fragments of distant memory collected . . . from the perspective of a post-apocalyptic future-present, in a narrative that explicitly figures traumatic and repressed aspects of contemporary history by taking them to a terrifying but plausible fictional conclusion. In this sense La Jetée forms the political unconscious of Le Joli mai, using the archetypal structure of narrative fiction to bring to the surface disturbing knowledge and pervasive anxieties that could not be fully aired and resolved in public discourse.” Marker was involved in explicitly political filmmaking from 1967 to 1977 (that is to say, starting with Far From Vietnam and ending with Fond de l’air est rouge). Marker’s signature, subjective-essayist, style may have been muted during this period, but Lupton asserts that there was no radical break in his films during this period (which, in my opinion, are perhaps his greatest works). The militant turn in Marker’s work was influenced not only by the political events of 1967 (which Marker holds to be more important than those of 1968) but also by the formation in 1967 of the “collective Societe pour la Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (‘Society for Launching New Works’), usually known by the acronym SLON, to produce Far from Vietnam,” a collective film involving over 150 individuals, including Godard, Resnais, Ivens, and Lelouch. In what is perhaps the most valuable section of the book, Lupton offers a detailed and helpful survey of the work produced by SLON. “SLON regarded itself as a tool, to help in the production of films made from a Left political perspective that would not otherwise exist. The collective offered technical assistance and training to militant groups who wished to make their own films (the Medvedkin Groups being a case in point), and helped out with post-production facilities and financing. It then took charge of distributing the finished films, largely through the burgeoning ‘parallel’ circuit of trade unions, cultural centres, Left political organizations, schools and film societies, but also willingly organizing commercial cinema releases and sales to television.” In his SLON-related work, Marker committed himself to experimenting with more democratic forms of film production. “From 1967 this principle would take Marker beyond the privileged status of the auteur-director into the humbler and less visible functions of producer, fund raiser, editor, facilitator and general fixer, ensuring the exposure through SLON of other people’s work while continuing to make his own (unsigned) films.” Marker visited the striking Rhodiaceta workers in 1967, and these contacts eventually lead to his film A Bientot, j’espere (1968) as well as the formation of the Medvedkin Group, whose name was suggested by Marker. During May ’68, Marker came up with the idea for the Cinétracts, the silent film pamphlets about the ongoing revolutionary events. In the early 1970s, Marker was involved in a number of other SLON projects, such as the On vous parle series, and also made L’Ambassade and La Solitude du chanteur de fond. This militant period culminated in his 1977 masterpiece, Le Fond de l’air est rouge. Lupton claims the film originated in a suggestion from a friend to make a film from SLON and another organization’s unused film materials. “The idea of Le Fond as a film composed of rejected, unused materials, offcuts and outtakes would become central to Marker’s conception of its historical purpose. Introducing the published script, Marker wrote that he had become curious about all the material that had been left out of militant films in order to obtain an ideologically ‘correct’ image, and now wondered if these abandoned fragments might not yield up the essential matter of history better than the completed films.” In addition to offering this critical-historical supplement, Marker subjected the images he reused from other films “to a continual process of re-contextualization and reinterpretation through montage and commentary, so that their meaning for one historical moment is shifted and interrogated in another.” Lupton highly praises the end product, writing, “As a groundbreaking work of visual historiography, Le Fond attempts nothing less than to give cinematic form to the chaotic and contradictory movement of world history during the tumultuous decade that it covers.” The film “attempts to trace the decline of the Left back to its sources, by juxtaposing an array of competing perspectives and events in a mosaic structure of film and television images, location sound, music and multi-vocal commentary, which benefits from the kind of hindsight that is able to see the complex interplay of different forces more clearly, but not the sort that assumes from the outset that defeat was inevitable or desirable.” Moving into the 1980s, Marker became increasingly involved with computers and new media platforms, including video. As usual, Lupton claims that this openness to new media was characteristic of Marker. “He embraced new media enthusiastically and wholeheartedly from the outset, without any of the hand wringing or pronouncements of doom with which others attached to filmmaking frequently greeted the burgeoning electronic media and communications revolution. As early as 1984 Marker was conducting his rare interviews via computer, and pronouncing: ‘Film and video are equally obsolete when you consider the incoming reign of digital images.’ Although he continued to release his work on film throughout the 1980s, every one of these project contains images of and allusions to Marker’s affirmative vision of new technology.” She offers a thorough and helpful interpretation of the film Sunless, Marker’s most respected work from this period. Analyzing the film’s competing models of memory, Lupton highlights the intersecting of memory and media that would come to characterize Marker’s recent new media project. She writes, “The ways in which memory perpetually reshapes past events and experiences are figured in Sunless through the periodic visual and aural distortion of both film images and sound sources, by processing them through synthesizers. The reflections that the film offers on these synthetic images . . . crystallize the pioneering enthusiasm for new media technologies that Marker had first exhibited with Quand le siecle a pris formes, and establish a precedent for exploring questions of deep cultural memory through new media that would extend across much of his subsequent work.” More recently, Marker has made television works, gallery installations, and even a CD-ROM, Immemory. For better or worse, Marker claims that Level Five, which is about the fate of historical memory in an era of computer databanks, is “his last theatrical feature film . . . and that in the future he intends to work only with the computer.”

Guy Debord: A Sick Planet

2011-01-21T10:37:00.000-08:00

A Sick Planet collects three pamphlets by Debord (two of which are also included in the Situationist International Anthology), repackaging the separate texts as one well-designed commodity. The first pamphlet, “The Decline and Fall of the ‘Spectacular’ Commodity-Economy,” takes as its subject the Watts riots of 1965, offering what has since become the standard romantic-anarchist account of ghetto revolt. Debord attempts to defend what was characterized on almost all sides as senseless, aimless theft and destruction by offering Situationist theory as “the truth sought implicitly by [the rioters’] practical action.” “Our theory of survival and of the spectacle is illuminated by these actions, as unintelligible as they may be to America’s false consciousness. One day these actions will in turn be illuminated by this theory.” Debord explains, “The Los Angeles revolt was a revolt against the commodity, against a world of commodities and of worker-consumers hierarchically subordinated to the measuring-rod of the commodity.” Deprived of any hope for future integration into society and conscious of the degraded nature of the minority spectacle aimed at them, blacks in Los Angeles rejected the idea of entering into the capitalist exchange relation and simply seized upon the world of abundance promised by modern marketing. “The blacks of Los Angeles . . . take modern capitalist propaganda, with its touting of affluence, at its word. They want all the objects displayed, and available in the abstract, right now—because they want to use them.” Circumventing “the rat-race of alienated labour and increasing, ever-deferred social needs,” they also freed themselves from subordination to and fetishization of the commodity, and were therefore free to play with and even destroy commodities. The role the police played in fighting looting, which Debord considers “the natural response to the affluent society,” reveals that the policeman “is the active servant of commodities . . . whose job is to ensure that a given product of human labour remains a commodity with the magical property of having to be paid for instead of becoming a mere fridge or rifle—a mute, passive, insensible thing, captive to the first comer to make use of it.” Debord concludes by defending the “excesses” of the Watts rioters, claiming, “Any rebellion against the spectacle occurs at the level of the totality, because—even if it is confined to a single neighborhood, such as Watts—it is a human protest against an inhuman life; because it begins at the level of the real single individual, and because community, from which the individual in revolt is separated, is the true social nature of man, true human nature: the positive transcendence of the spectacle.” The second pamphlet collected here, “The Explosion Point of Ideology in China,” examines the causes and development of the Cultural Revolution in China. Exhibiting a strong debt to Cornelius Castoriadis (see the three volumes of his Political and Social Writings: I, II, III), Debord attacks Maoism and shows how “accelerating disintegration of bureaucratic ideology” across the globe has eliminated any remaining illusions about the supposed revolutionary nature of the communist parties. Rather than a genuine attack on the party bureaucracy, the conflicts in China are the consequence of a ruling class divided in two, a dispute at the top of the political hierarchy. Despite being masters of ideology, the Maoists pulled back and entered into a truce when the Cultural Revolution threatened the Party itself, revealing their separation from the peasants-workers. Debord concludes, “Wherever China may be headed, the image of the last revolutionary-bureaucratic regime is now shattered.” The third pamphlet in the collection, ”A Sick Planet,” is a new translation of a text from 1971. The pamphlet is of interest primarily because Debord integrates ecological issues into revolutionary theory. According to Debord, the discussion of pollution in the spectacle registers but distorts a serious materialist problem, the fact that we have reached “the moment when it becomes impossible for capitalism to carry on working.” Modern capitalist production has advanced to the point where its science and technology can even predict “the rapid degradation of the very conditions of survival.” Debord explains, “A society that is ever more sick, but ever more powerful, has recreated the world—everywhere and in concrete form—as the environment and backdrop of its sickness: it has created a sick planet. A society that has not yet achieved homogeneity, and that is not yet self-determined, but instead ever more determined by a part of itself positioned above itself, external to itself, has set in train a process of domination of Nature that has not yet established domination over itself. Capitalism has at last demonstrated, by virtue of its own dynamics, that it can no longer develop the forces of production.” The serious threat posed by pollution, which even the “masters of society” must acknowledge, might act as a revolutionary catalyst. “[T]he plain fact that such harmful and dangerous trends exist constitutes an immense motive for revolt, a material requirement of the exploited just as vital as the struggle of nineteenth-century proletarians for the right to eat.” But the spectacle focuses only on a new kind of reformism. Modern industries hope to profit from fighting pollution (think of today’s “green” technologies). Constrained by the imperative to create new jobs (“that is to say for the sake of using human labour as alienated labour, as wage-labour”), governments choose conservative responses that do not question the system. However, the problem of pollution (as well as of hierarchy, spectacle, and capitalism) can be solved “only by submitting everything—except ourselves—to the sole power of workers’ councils, possessing and continually reconstructing the totality of the world—by submitting everything, in other words, to an authentic rationality, a new legitimacy.” Debord beautifully concludes, “Alienated industrial production makes the rain. Revolution makes the sunshine.”

Bernard Stiegler: For a New Critique of Political Economy

2010-11-19T20:01:00.000-08:00

In For a New Critique of Political Economy, Bernard Stiegler repositions the techno-deconstructive philosophy he developed in Technics & Time squarely within the realm of politics and economics. For Stiegler, any critique of political economy, as well any response to the current global economic crisis, must take into consideration the default of humanity, the prehistoric “structural coupling” of humanity and technics that has made it possible to organize an economy around the externalization and exploitation of different forms of human memory. According to Stiegler, public debate about how to solve the economic crisis is misguided on all sides. Both those who advocate stimulating consumption and those who hope to revive “entrepreneurial dynamism” through investment hope to save an economic system that has undermined its conditions for successful reproduction. They refuse to acknowledge that the “consumerist industrial model” of the 20th century is now “obsolete.” It “has reached its limits because it has become systemically short-termist, because it has given rise to a systemic stupidity that structurally prevents the reconstitution of a long-term horizon.” Instead of dreaming of a restoration of this consumerist model to its former heights, we need “to produce a vision and a political will capable of progressively moving away from the economico-political complex of consumption so as to enter into the complex of a new type of investment, which must be a social and political investment or, in other words, an investment in a common desire.” This political project requires the construction of a new critique of political economy, a critique that Stiegler maintains must be founded on an analysis of the processes of grammatization, the techniques through which memory is externalized, made discrete, and opened up to social and economic investment and control. Stiegler attacks his philosophical peers for having totally failed to engage with the changes in the economy. He asserts that recent French philosophers have “nothing whatsoever so say about the contemporary economy”—they have “abandoned the project of a critique of political economy, and this constitutes a disastrous turn.” Ambivalence about critique—which is suspected of harboring metaphysics—has been a major cause of this “philosophical abdication in relation to economics.” Deconstruction played no small part in undermining the status of critique, though, as becomes clear later, Stiegler believes that “deconstruction remains a critique,” and he places deconstruction at the heart of his critique of political economy. In the last decade or two, the definition of work has been heavily debated, with figures such as Jeremy Rifkin predicting the “end of work” as a result of automation, and others (such as post-Autonomia thinkers who promote a basic income) examining the growth of “work time outside of employment.” Stiegler does not fully endorse any of these positions, but he does use their disagreements as a pretext for his own redefinition of the proletariat. He argues that the “proletariat is not the working class,” and proletarianization should not be equated with pauperization. Instead, proletarianization should be associated with grammatization, and the development of the latter dramatically changes the form of the former. Marx’s discussion of proletarianization focused on the “loss of savoir-faire” among industrial workers, whose skills were appropriated by industrial capitalism’s socio-technical systems. Proletarianization in this context involves the “grammatization of gesture,” the expropriation of workers’ bodily know-how. But grammatization is not limited to gesture: “Grammatization is the history of the exteriorization of memory in all its forms: nervous and cerebral memory, corporeal and muscular memory, biogenetic memory.” The proletarianization of the worker in the 19th century was therefore followed by the proletarianization of the consumer in the 20th century. The rise of consumption over the last century was driven by the development of mnemotechnical systems and psychotechnologies that channeled consumers’ libidinal energy toward commodities. At least until the 1970s, this consumerist economy managed to counteract what Marx described as the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Marx’s analysis of consumption failed to recognize the potential of destroying “savoir-vivre with the aim of creating available purchasing power, thereby refining and reinforcing that system which rested on the destruction of savoir-faire with the aim of creating available labor force.” (It was, of course, Guy Debord who first fully addressed this capitalist destruction of the practices of everyday life in favor of controlled consumption, though Stiegler perfunctorily refers to Debord and then dismisses him for his failure to think the question of technics) Today, we are witnessing a “vast process of cognitive and affective proletarianization.” We face the possibility of “the development of electronic and digital devices to the point that all forms of knowledge become grammatized via cognitive and cultural mnemotechnologies. This will include the way in which linguistic knowledge becomes the technologies and industries of automated language processing, but it will also include savoir-vivre, that is behavior in general, from user profiling to the grammatization of affects—all of which will lead toward the ‘cognitive’ and ‘cultural’ capitalism of the hyperindustrial service economies.” In the middle of this argument about proletarianization and grammatization, Stiegler pulls back to a more philosophical framework, making the claim, which may seem odd at first, that Plato is “the first thinker of the proletariat.” Plato’s discussion of anamnesis (“remembrance of the truth of being”) and hypomnesis (“mnemotechnics,” exteriorized memory) in Phaedrus first addressed the problem of the exteriorization of memory, and set up, as Derrida famously argued, the “pharmacological question, according to which the hypomnesis is a pharmakon: at once poison and remedy.” Socrates’ fear that the “exteriorization of memory is a loss of memory and knowledge” returns in a pressing form today, when we are confronted by a “generalized proletarianization induced by the spread of hypomnesic technologies” that cause “our memories to pass into machines.” Because “the Platonic question of hypomnesis constitutes the first version of a thinking of proletarianization,” “The truth of Plato would . . . be found in Marx.” But, Stiegler argues, since Marx and Plato failed to adequately address the question of technics, both need to be supplemented by Derrida (and, of course, Stiegler’s rereading of Derrida). Although the proletarianization of the consumer managed for much of the 20th century to weaken the class struggle and delay the rate of profit from falling, it has eliminated its own conditions of success by leading “to the destruction of [consumers’] libidinal energy and to its decomposition into drives.” Instead of “long circuits of individuation” (in the infinite sense of individuation proposed by Simondon), the proletarianization of the consumer creates “short-circuits” that produce only “disindividuation.” It reduces desires to drives, and destroys the forms of anticipatory protention needed for investment of all types (libidinal and financial, in particular). As pharmaka, hypomneta don’t need to have this poisonous effect. Hypomneta can either “individuate [the] psyche” or “proletarianize the psyche.” Hypomnesic techniques and grammatization can generate “long circuits, that is accumulate libidinal energy by intensifying individuation, and give objects of desire to the individual that infinitize his or her individuation . . . because these objects can only be given as infinite and incommensurable.” Or they can “provoke short-circuits, that is, disindividuation, and consequently desublimation, that is the commensurable finitization of all things, leading to the destruction of libidinal energy.” Stiegler calls for the creation of a “system of care” that would coordinate three levels of individuation—technical, psychic, and collective—so that “individuation at the pharmacological level (technical individuation) transductively intensifies the individuation of the other two levels (psychic individuation and collective individuation).” Stiegler is optimistic that “a genuine mutation of grammatization has occurred: digital reticulation, whereby cognitive activities are themselves proletarianized, constitutes a rupture through which associated milieus are formed, that is, milieus of individuation running counter to the processes of dissociation and disindividuation in which proletarianization consists.” In Pharmacology of Capital and Economy of Contribution, a separate text that has been appended to this English translation, Stiegler reworks the argument of For a New Critique of Political Economy by drawing more directly on André Leroi-Gourhan (all of Stiegler’s work is almost embarrassingly indebted to Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture & Speech) and examining the co-individuation of psychic, social, and technical systems. Most importantly, he supplements his discussion of consumerism with a greater emphasis on the tendencies of fictitious capital. He argues that the state has historically served to mediate between the social and technical systems, making sure that the latter does not come to directly dominate the former. But when the rate of profit collapsed in the 1970s, neoliberal deregulation removed those state controls, placing the development of the technical system directly under the control of the economic system. That economic system has become dominated by its “financial sub-system,” which, as seen in its disastrous predilection for short-term speculation, has a “tendency to carelessness.” The destruction of long circuits of individuation and desires started by the proletarianization of the consumer is then catastrophically exacerbated by the development of technology under the control of a financialized economic system focused on the short-term. In opposition to the present “conjunction of the drive-based tendency of the psychic system and the speculative tendency of the economic system,” we need to imagine “that tendencies to investment could be combined with sublimatory tendencies.” We need to “open fields of protentional possibilities,” so that “to the TINA ideology, ‘there is no alternative,’ one must oppose the TALOA argument, ‘there are lots of alternatives.’”

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi: Linked (2002)

2010-11-18T20:31:00.000-08:00

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s Linked is a popular introduction to “the new science of networks.” According to Barabasi, one of the field’s major scientific contributors, much of 20th-century science was aimed at decomposing objects of study into their simplest components. Despite its many accomplishments, this reductionist approach prevented science from realizing how “everything is linked to everything else.” In the last decade or so, however, “We have come to grasp the importance of networks.” We now recognize that “[n]etworks are present everywhere” and “that amazingly simple and far-reaching natural laws govern the structure and evolution of all the complex networks that surround us.” The theory of networks began with Leonhard Euler’s creation of graph theory. Around 1736, Euler innovatively answered a trivial question about whether it was possible to walk once across all of the bridges connecting an island in Konigsberg to the rest of city without re-crossing any of the bridges. Euler approached this mathematical problem by “viewing Konigsberg’s bridges as a graph, a collection of nodes connected by links.” By treating the bridges as a network, Euler was able to clearly and definitively solve the problem. A more recent and influential contribution to the theory of networks came from the mathematician Paul Erdos, who around 1959 “laid the foundation of the theory of random networks.” Ignoring the diversity of natural examples, Erdos created a general model of complex networks by constructing a graph through randomly connecting nodes. Because links are formed randomly in this model, most nodes have the same number of links. “We obtain a network with a very uniform fabric in which the mean is the norm.” The simplicity of this random network theory made the model extremely appealing, and helped it dominate thinking about networks for decades. “[The model] equated complexity with randomness. If a network was too complex to be captured in simple terms, it urged us to describe it as random.” In 1967, the sociologist Stanley Milgram made another contribution to the theory of networks that later would be popularized in a play as the “six degrees of separation.” Milgram performed a study asking, “how many acquaintances would it take to connect two randomly selected individuals?” The answer was shockingly low: 5.5. “Stanley Milgram awakened us to the fact that not only are we connected, but we live in a world in which no one is more than a few handshakes from anyone else. That is, we live in a small world. Our world is small because society is a very dense web.” More recent research has demonstrated that the smallness Milgram discovered is the norm, not the exception, in networks. “’Small worlds’ are a generic property of networks in general. Short separations is not a mystery of our society or something peculiar about the Web: Most networks around us obey it.” In the 1960s and 70s, another sociologist, Mark Granovetter, discovered that “[w]hen it comes to finding a job, getting news, launching a restaurant, or spreading the latest fad, our weak social ties are more important than our cherished strong friendships.” Granovetter demonstrated that, in the terms of graph theory, nodes tend to be clumped in clusters, in which each node is linked to all the others in the cluster (for example, a group of friends), and that only a few long links (such as relationships with passing acquaintances) connect the nodes of different clusters. Further research on clustering by Watts and Strogatz proved that only a few of these distant links are needed to turn a network with clusters into a small world in which the number of links between any two nodes is relatively small. The existence of clusters initially seemed to contradict the even network texture described by random network theory, though Watts and Strogatz were ingeniously able to reconcile the two. But random network theory faced a more fatal challenge when Barabasi and his colleagues, attempting to map the Web, discovered the existence of hubs. To their surprise, the robot they sent out across the Web came back with “evidence of a high degree of unevenness in the Web’s topology.” Their research showed that the “architecture of the World Wide Web is dominated by a few very highly connected nodes, or hubs.” Although first recognized on the Internet, hubs are not limited to the Web. “Hubs appear in most large complex networks that scientists have been able to study so far. They are ubiquitous, a generic building block of our complex, interconnected world.” In fact, “large hubs . . . fundamentally define [a] network’s topology.” The discovery of hubs indicated that the distribution of links in networks does not follow a bell curve, where large deviations from some norm/average number of links would be rare if not unthinkable. Instead, the distribution of links adheres to a power law. “Power laws mathematically formulate the fact that in most real networks the majority of nodes have only a few links and that these numerous tiny nodes coexist with a few big hubs, nodes with an anomalously high number of links. The few links connecting the smaller nodes to each other are not sufficient to ensure that the network is fully connected. This function is secured by the relatively rare hubs that keep real networks from falling apart.” Because of this power law distribution, there is no average scale to such networks, but rather a “continuous hierarchy of nodes.” Erdos’s random network model therefore was replaced by a scale-free network model, which Barabasi and his colleagues have devoted their efforts to developing. Work on the scale-free model soon addressed the issue of growth, a feature of networks neglected by the random network model. Hubs form as networks grow because of “preferential attachment.” “Network evolution is governed by the subtle yet unforgiving law of preferential attachment. Guided by it, we unconsciously add links at a higher rate to those nodes that are already heavily linked.” Growth combined with preferential attachment gives the first nodes in the network a competitive advantage, since they have more time to accumulate links that make them attractive to nodes appearing later. But this model was obviously reductive, ignoring the creation of internal links or the deleting of older links, and it also could not explain how latecomers—such as Google—could become hubs. One problem was the model treated all nodes as if they were the same. So a concept of “fitness,” the attractiveness of a node, was added to the model. Although growth and preferential attachment were still the dominant laws, the addition of a category for fitness modified the model so that “[b]etween two nodes with the same number of links, the fitter one acquires links more quickly.” However, fitness was not enough to explain how some hubs, such as Microsoft, come to completely dominate a network. A supplementary network model based on the concept of “condensation” was needed to explain this elimination of competition in a network. So in some cases, behavior on the network “destroys the hierarchy of hubs characterizing the scale-free topology, turning it into a starlike network, with a single node grabbing all the links. . . . A winner-takes-all network is not scale-free. Instead there is a single hub and many tiny nodes.” Further research on networks has addressed issues relating to network strength and failure. Scale-free networks show “topological robustness”: “a significant fraction of nodes can be randomly removed from any scale-free network without its breaking apart.” This “[t]oplogical robustness is . . . rooted in the structural unevenness of scale-free networks: Failures disproportionately affect small nodes.” But this same topology makes networks vulnerable to attack, since hubs play such a major role in maintaining the network. “Disable a few of the hubs and a scale-free network will fall to pieces in no time.” In other words, “scale-free networks are not vulnerable to failures. The price of this unprecedented resilience comes in their fragility under attack. The removal of the most connected nodes rapidly disintegrates these networks, breaking them into tiny noncommunicating islands. Therefore, hidden within their structure, scale-free networks harbor an unsuspected Achilles’ heel, coupling a robustness against failures with vulnerability to attack.” Hubs also make networks susceptible to “cascading failure,” in which the failure of a major node shifts that node’s responsibilities onto other nodes, overwhelming them and causing them to also fail, creating a pattern of failure that spreads across the network. Recent mapping of the Web has underscored that it is a “directed network”: links often only take you in one direction. “[T]he most important consequence of directedness is that the Web does not form a single homogeneous network. Rather, it is broken into four major continents, each forcing us to obey different traffic rules when we want to navigate them.” There is an “easily navigable” central core containing the major websites. There are then “in” and “out” continents, the former easily taking you into the core (but not back out), the latter easily taking you out of the core (but not back in). Largely disconnected from the core and these continents are islands and tendrils. The directedness of the Web makes it difficult, if not impossible, to accurately map it (robots are unable to find nodes on the “in” continent or islands). This fragmented shape of the Web might seem rather unique or contingent, but its pattern is typical of all directed networks. In his final chapters, Barabasi considers how a wide range of social, biological, and economic topics can profitably be treated as networks. His reduction of complex phenomena to network models becomes quite problematic in the chapter on business. Unsurprisingly, he repeats post-Fordist clichés about firms becoming lean, flat, and flexible, in other words, becoming networks. On a more macroeconomic scale, he also asserts, “the market is nothing but a directed network. Companies, firms, corporations, financial institutions, governments, and all potential economic players are the nodes. Links quantify various interactions between these institutions, involving purchases and sales, joint research and marketing projects, and so forth. . . . The structure and evolution of this weighted and directed network determine the outcome of all macroeconomic processes.” According to this network logic, economic crises are due to cascading failures. He even claims, “Understanding macroeconomic interdependencies in terms of networks can help us to foresee and limit future crises.” Although there is some truth to this equation of markets and networks (see the work of economics-oriented actor-network theorists like Michel Callon or Donald MacKenzie for better examples), Barabasi here risks naturalizing post-Fordist, neoliberal capitalism. By importing scientific “laws” into economics, Barabasi makes a contingent economic formation seem like an objective necessity, and he limits resistance to that economic system to the range of behavior described by a network model.

Rudolf Hilferding: Finance Capital (1910)

2010-11-15T17:55:00.000-08:00

Primarily known today for its influence on Lenin’s theory of imperialism, Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance Capital is an important, but flawed, work of Marxist economics that has much to offer contemporary readers, especially as the global recession continues. Taking for granted the analysis of capitalist production in the first volume of Marx’s Capital, Hilferding develops Marx’s claims from the second and third volumes of Capital about commodity exchange and credit. Hilferding begins by analyzing the functions of money and credit, moves on to examine the creation of corporations and cartels, and then critically reflects on the causes of imperialism and the revolutionary opportunities created by the concentrated power of finance capital. The book starts with a long, and rather dry, discussion of money. “A society based upon private property and the division of labour [i.e., a capitalist society] is only possible by virtue of . . . exchange relationship among its members; it becomes a society through exchange, which is the only social process it recognizes from an economic standpoint.” Since commodities do not directly express each other’s value, a general equivalent – money – is needed to facilitate exchange. Money, “as a form of value, is always a temporary transition stage to the value of a commodity.” In other words, in the exchange sequence C-M-C, money is a passing stage, not the final destination. Paper money, when legitimated by the power of the state, can fulfill as well as gold this function of a “medium of circulation.” However, gold is not just money but also a commodity itself, and embodies value even outside of the exchange process. Gold is therefore important for international trade and for stabilizing the valuation of paper currencies (Hilferding here anticipates the issues that would appear when nations went off the gold standard). “[M]oney with an intrinsic value – such as gold – is always needed as a means of storing wealth in a form in which it is always available for use.” In commodity exchange, payment is often not immediately settled between buyer and seller. When the debt that arises in such situations is finally paid, money takes on a new function: “it becomes a means of payment.” “The contraction of a debt and its repayment are separated by a period of time. This means that the money which is turned over in payment can no longer be regarded as a mere link in the chain of commodity exchange or as a transitory economic form for which something else may be substituted. On the contrary, when money is used as a means of payment it is an essential part of the process.” Promissory notes that have not been redeemed can be circulated themselves, and function as “credit money” that eventually must be converted back into real money. Banks assist in the canceling and settling of such debts, and grow alongside the use of commercial credit. However, “Once money is used as a means of payment a complete mutual cancellation of payments at any given time must be seen as a sheer accident, which will never occur in reality. Money concludes independently the process of moving commodities from place to place. . . . The link in the sequence C-M-C is broken.” Yet credit can also take a quite different form and function. In contrast to such commercial credit (which primarily facilitates exchange on the market), capital or investment credit is invested in production and used to produce surplus value. When offered as capital credit, money becomes capital. As Marx shows in the first volume of Capital, “Value becomes capital when it is used to produce surplus value,” and surplus value is produced only in capitalist production. The capitalist uses money to purchase labor power and commodities. However, the commodities purchased by the capitalist are used to produce more commodities, which, because of the addition of labor power, have a higher value and can be exchanged for a greater value of money than was originally invested in production. In this situation, the original money is capital not because of any inherent qualities (as usual, money is just exchanged for commodities), but because it is used to eventually produce surplus value. Importantly, the capitalist need not own the money capital originally invested, but rather can have it lent to him. Capital credit is available because industrial capitalist production produces idle money for a number of reasons. Because fixed capital (like factories or machines) has to periodically be replaced, money has to be hoarded in preparation for that moment, and remains idle in the meantime. Also, beginning or expanding capitalist production typically requires a large minimum sum of money capital, which, before it is completely accumulated, also may lie idle. For these and other reasons, “there arises from the very mechanism of capital circulation the necessity for a larger or smaller amount of money capital to remain idle for longer or shorter periods.” But idle money produces no profit, and therefore is an affront to capitalism itself. Offered as credit, however, this idle money is able to produce profit. “Investment credit . . . transfers money and converts it from idle into active money capital.” “Once [money capital] is released from the cycle of any one individual capital, it can function as money in the cycle of another capital if it is made available to other capitalists in the form of credit. . . . All the factors, therefore, which have led to the idleness of capital now become so many causes for the emergence of credit relations, and all the factors which affect the quantity of idle capital also determine the expansion and contraction of credit.” Although the productive capitalist may directly loan idle money to other capitalists, this position of loan capitalist has been almost completely taken over by the banks. The banks serve the “economic function which consists of collecting idle money capital and then distributing it.” As the banks grow in size and scope as lenders of capital credit, banks and the industries they invest in become more closely tied together. Enterprises become more dependent on credit to be competitive, and banks, attempting to guarantee the return on their investments, become more concerned with “the long-range prospects of the enterprises and the future state of the market.” This close coupling of banks and industries creates strong pressures to form joint-stock companies or corporations. Banks obtain “promoter’s profit” by assisting in the creation of new corporations or the transformation of individually-owned enterprises into corporations. Through access to credit, corporations are less financially constrained and therefore able to be more competitive in general than individually-owned enterprises. They can grow to an enormous size and approximate some economic-technological ideal, rather than be limited by contingent factors such as their accumulated capital. Corporations also undermine the traditional form of private property. Corporate shares are fictitious capital because the original capital, which has been invested in machinery or paying workers, cannot be immediately reclaimed. “Once the shareholder has parted with this capital, he cannot recover it. He has no claim upon it, but only a claim to a pro-rata share of its yield.” Unlike with individually-owned enterprises, control of a corporation does not require complete ownership, only a controlling share. Less capital therefore gives more control. Corporations exploit this feature by purchasing shares in each other that allow them to place individuals on the boards of directors and influence each other’s decisions. Banks also attempt to acquire a permanent role in the corporations they invest in by placing individuals on the directorships of corporate boards. Shares double the capital invested in production, and therefore can circulate on the stock market independently of that capital. “Once a share has been issued it has nothing more to do with the real cycle of the industrial capital which it represents. None of the developments or misfortunes which it may encounter in its circulation have any direct effect on the cycle of the productive capital.” Reflecting this autonomy of fictitious capital from industrial capital, speculation on the stock market affects the distribution of profit, not its creation. Money made speculating on the market is only a “marginal gain” - what one person gains another person loses – because surplus value is only created through production. Therefore, “Speculation cannot flourish without the participation of the public,” which must take a loss for the elite to profit. Speculation, which is basically a form of gambling, is not essential to capitalist production, but it does facilitate the “mobilization of capital,” especially in an industrial era when capital invested in production often is tied up for long periods of time as fixed capital. However, speculation, whether on the stock exchange or futures markets, depends on uncertainty and risks that disappear with the concentration of control through cartelization. The interlocking directorships of corporations allow for the elimination of competition and the coordination of businesses. Cartels and trusts emerge as a result: “A consortium comprising as many enterprises as possible, which is intended to raise prices, and hence profits, by excluding competition as completely as possible, is a cartel.” The concentration of capital in banks and the expansion of cartels creates a spiraling effect: “From the outset the effect of advanced cartelization is that the banks also amalgamate and expand in order not to become dependent upon the cartel or trust. In this way cartelization itself requires the amalgamation of the banks, and, conversely, amalgamation of the banks requires cartelization. . . . As a result of cartelization . . . the relations between the banks and industry become still closer, and at the same time the banks acquire an increasing control over the capital invested in industry.” The capital held by the banks at this point becomes finance capital. “The dependence of industry on the banks is therefore a consequence of property relationships. An ever-increasing part of the capital of industry does not belong to the industrialists who use it. They are able to dispose over capital only through the banks, which represent the owners. On the other side, the banks have to invest an ever-increasing part of their capital in industry, and in this way they become to a greater and greater extent industrial capitalists. I call bank capital, that is capital in money form which is actually transformed in this way into industrial capital, finance capital.” “Finance capital develops with the development of the joint-stock company and reaches its peak with the monopolization of industry. . . . As capital itself at the highest stage of its development becomes finance capital, so the magnate of capital, the finance capitalist, increasingly concentrates his control over the whole national capital by means of his dominance of bank capital.” Usurers’ and merchants’ capital was historically important for the initial establishment and success of industrial production. As industrial production developed, it became more independent of usurers’ capital and placed more of its idle capital in banks as bank capital. In the final stage, however, that bank capital, as finance capital, is used to dominate industry. “The Hegelians spoke of the negation of the negation: bank capital was the negation of usurer’s capital and is itself negated by finance capital.” Describing the impressive power of finance capital, Hilferding echoes Foucault’s description of biopower: “[T]he specific character of capital is obliterated in finance capital. Capital now appears as a unitary power which exercises sovereign sway over the life process of society.” However, the apparent success of finance capital in solving the “problem of the organization of the social economy” does not prevent crises from continuing to occur. Hilferding bases his theory of crises on Marx’s schema of reproduction, arguing that a lack of proportion between the capital goods and consumer goods industries disrupts simple and expanded reproduction and leads to crises (Ernest Mandel rejects this argument, claiming that Marx’s schema are meant merely to show that capitalist accumulation is hypothetically possible, not to demonstrate how such accumulation breaks down). A “distortion of the price structure” prevents production from being properly regulated. Credit can play a role in this “disruption of the specific regulatory mechanisms of production,” particularly by pumping money capital into industries even though their rate of profit is declining. Despite their power, cartels are still subject to the law of value, and their control of prices and profit rates, while initially benefiting them, may make the underlying economic problems worse: “Cartels do not diminish, but exacerbate, the disturbances in the regulation of prices which lead ultimately to disproportionalities, and so to the contradiction between the conditions of utilization and the conditions of valorization.” That is, “Cartels . . . do not eliminate the effects of crises. They modify them only to the extent that they can divert the main burden of a crisis to the non-cartelized industries.” Because cartelization alone cannot prevent or solve crises, finance capital turns to foreign markets as a solution. “We know . . . that the opening of new markets is an important factor in bringing an industrial depression to an end, in prolonging a period of prosperity, and in moderating the effects of crises.” Cartels use their power to make the state create protective tariffs or export subsidies that give them an advantage over foreign companies. Such tariffs secure their home market, but make penetration of foreign markets more difficult. Exporting capital is one solution to this obstacle. “By ‘export of capital’ I mean the export of value which is intended to breed surplus value abroad. It is essential from this point of view that the surplus value should remain at the disposal of the domestic capital.” By exporting capital, finance capitalists are able to exploit differences between countries’ rates of profit, levels of organic composition of capital, availability of cheap labor, and ground rent. As a result of the export of capital, foreign markets also become capable of consuming more, helping the balance of trade (greater overseas production generates more income for consumption of the capital-exporting country’s goods). But in order for the exported capital to be secure and fulfill its function, a specific political system is imposed on foreign countries, typically through direct imperial control. “Export capital feels most comfortable . . . when its own state is in complete control of the new territory, for capital exports from other countries are then excluded, it enjoys a privileged position, and its profits are more or less guaranteed by the state. Thus the export of capital also encourages an imperialist policy.” Annexing foreign markets, however, leads to hostility between developed countries and an increased risk of war. Resistance to the policies of finance capital and imperialism is complicated by the class composition created by large corporations. The large new salaried middle class, though not owning the means of production, continues to identify with the capitalist class as long as export-led growth continues. “The rapid development of the large banks, the expansion of production brought about by the export of capital, the conquest of new markets, all serve to open up new fields of employment for salaried employees of all kinds. Still divorced from the struggle of the proletariat, they see their best prospects in the expansion of capital’s sphere of activity.” The working class is in a different situation. Labor unions are reformist because they don’t struggle against the capitalist relation itself. But as they become more universal under monopoly capital, they might provide the foundation for a labor party that could work toward more political and radical goals. “Once an independent political party of the workers exists its policy is not confined for long to those issues which led to its creation, but becomes a policy which seeks to represent the class interests of workers as whole, thus moving beyond the struggle within bourgeois society into a struggle against bourgeois society.” Although finance capital’s policies will lead to war between imperialist nations as they fight over spheres of influence, the proletariat shouldn’t just enthusiastically wait for that catastrophe. The collapse of capitalism will “be political and social, not economic; for the idea of a purely economic collapse makes no sense.” It is therefore important to maintain “a steadfast, relentless struggle against the policy of imperialism.” But resistance to finance capital should not take the form a nostalgic desire to return to an older form of capitalism, such as the free trade of the 19th century, but rather must consist of the fight for socialism. Fortunately, because finance capital has already “brought the most important branches of production under its control, it is enough for society, through its conscious executive organ – the state conquered by the working class – to seize finance capital in order to gain immediate control of these branches of production.” Hilferding concludes with a rather Leninist image of the revolution: “The capitalist class seizes possession of the state apparatus in a direct, undisguised and palpable way, and makes it the instrument of its exploitative interests in a manner which is apparent to every worker, who must now recognize that the conquest of political power by the proletariat is his own most immediate personal interest. The blatant seizure of the state by the capitalist class directly compels every proletarian to strive for the conquest of political power as the only means of putting an end to his own exploitation. . . . In the violent clash of these hostile interest the dictatorship of the magnates of capital will finally be transformed into the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Jerzy Kosinski: Steps (1968)

2010-11-08T22:26:00.001-08:00

Despite having won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1969, Jerzy Kosinski’s Steps has silently slipped into obscurity over the last few decades, just like its author. Not even props from David Foster Wallace have been capable of counteracting the rapid devaluation of Kosinski’s literary reputation, which has been by marred by disputes over the authorship of his first novel, The Painted Bird (editorial assistants, including Paul Auster, are rumored to have written much of it), questions about the truthfulness of his autobiographical claims (especially concerning where he spent WWII), and even bizarre rumors that the CIA helped publish his works. The power of such gossip is a shame, since this a devastatingly harsh and bleak book that demonstrates a rare, cold purity. The narrative is a series of short, disconnected vignettes told by a narrator who is mostly an emotional and psychological void, an impassive witness of cruelty and atrocities, except for when his aggressive sexual desires are aroused. The book avoids using proper names for people and places, offering a generalized, Hobbesian view of the “life of man as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Roughly beginning in communist Poland, the book unsentimentally recounts the narrator’s late childhood and early adulthood. He is traumatized as a child by his bullying peers, shown the murderous absurdities of the Party organization while doing his military service, and publicly shamed by the student union at the university for his lack of involvement. As time passes, he blankly observes an extreme variety of brutalities, including rape, bestiality, incest, and suicide. Routinely, humans are reduced to bare life that can be humiliated, harmed, and eliminated without concern. The holocaust, of course, is one major source for this perspective. For example, the narrator knows a functionalist architect who helped design concentration camps during WWII. “[I]n the concentration camps my friend designed, the victims never remained individuals; they became as identical as rats. They existed only to be killed.” But rather than resist the forces that reduce humans to instruments or objects, the narrator often internalizes them and forcefully wields them against others. For example, in one most of the most disturbing sections of the novel, the narrator’s girlfriend is gang raped while he is held down by her tormenters. But shortly after this horrific event, the narrator begins to sadistically treat his girlfriend as an object, adopting, with little ado, the dominating position of her attackers. Midway through the novel, everything appears ready to change as the narrator gets on a plane to head for a new life in the U.S. After the flight takes off, the narrator comments, “I would have remained there, timeless, unmeasured, unjudged, bothering no one, suspended forever between my past and my future.” Of course this ideal state cannot be maintained, and he soon faces the same kinds of systems of cruelty and absurdity in his new capitalist home. He immediately runs into problems with money and work, so he gets involved with the criminal underworld, adopting its exploitative practices as easily as he adopted those of his former country. At one point, he expresses a love of driving and skiing, the latter seeming to encapsulate his tendency to actively throw himself into rather than resist the (typically monstrous) movements that his environment pushes him toward: “[When skiing,] I had to project myself beyond my body into a motion that had and not yet begun but was imminent and irreversible.” Yet he finds a possibility of something better in the lives of the poor and racially marginalized, whom he manages to safely observe in their bars and neighborhoods by acting like a deaf-mute. He wishes he could become one of them, believing it “would banish the dream of possession, of things to be owned, used, and consumed, and the symbols of ownership – credentials, diplomas, deeds. This change would give me no other choice but to remain alive.”

Donald Barthelme: Snow White (1967)

2010-11-01T18:49:00.001-07:00

In Snow White, Donald Barthelme subjects the traditional fairy tale to postmodern aesthetics by moving the story to the present, giving the characters modern psychologies, and deliberately frustrating any expectations about the resolution of the plot. In the novel, the seven dwarves are men who earn a living by washing buildings and making Chinese baby food. They live with Snow White in a kind of 1960s communal situation, which includes being sexually serviced by her in the shower. Though they often refer to themselves as a collective “we,” most of the dwarves are alienated from each other because of individual weaknesses and obsessions. For example, their moody leader, Bill, has decided he no longer wants to be touched by anyone, not even Snow White, and has generally failed to lead the group. Loving Snow White is the dwarves’ “great enterprise,” but they quietly harbor fears about their ability to continue carrying out this task. Part of the problem is that Snow White is a modern woman who has been highly educated in psychology, literature, and literary criticism, and therefore accepts the dwarves with a fair amount of critical distance. Snow White’s dissatisfaction is evident early on when she quotes Mao (“Let a hundred flowers bloom”), wears the clothes of a Chinese socialist, and starts writing “tiny Chairman Mao poems.” Having adopted “waiting as a mode of existence,” Snow White reassures herself that “’Someday my prince will come.’ By this Snow White means that she lives her own being as incomplete, pending the arrival of one who will ‘complete’ her. That is, she lives her own being as ‘not-with’ (even though she is in some sense ‘with’ the seven men, Bill, Kevin, Clem, Hubert, Henry, Edward and Dan). But the ‘not-with’ is experienced as stronger, more real, at this particular instant in time, than the ‘being-with.’” Barthelme of course never lets Snow White’s imaginary complement, her masculine other, properly materialize. Snow White eventually reaches the conclusion, “I am in the wrong time,” when she realizes that something must be wrong with the world, “For not being able to at least be civilized enough to supply the correct ending to the story.” Although the dwarves continue to attend to her while she waits, they start to perceive how their different desires no longer form a productive geometry: “She still loves us, in a way, but it isn’t enough.” The book ends when “THE HEROES DEPART IN SEARCH OF A NEW PRINCIPLE HEIGH-HO.” As usual, Barthelme packs the novel full of fragments, digressions, and metafictional conceits, such as a questionnaire that asks readers about their enjoyment of the text and tests their ability to catch the allusions to the original fairy tale. He also scatters witty axioms in capitals throughout the text, the most famous of which is probably, “ANETHEMATIZATION OF THE WORLD IS NOT AN ADEQUATE RESPONSE TO THE WORLD.” Barthelme explains his literary style in an important section that discusses the pointless junk found in ordinary language. He admits, “We like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant.” Barthelme explains, “That part, the ‘filling‘ you might say, of which the expression ‘you might say’ is a good example, is to me the most interesting part, and of course it might also be called the ‘stuffing.’” Just as the modern economy produces trash in increasing quantities, modern culture produces linguistic trash - meaningless details, empty phrases, and so on - in growing amounts. Barthelme argues that a change of strategy is required when trash becomes total: “Now at such a point, you will agree, the question turns from a question of disposing of this ‘trash’ to a question of appreciating its qualities. . . . And there can no longer be any question of ‘disposing’ of it, because it’s all there is, and we will simple have to learn how to ‘dig’ it – that’s slang, but peculiarly appropriate here.” He goes on, “It’s that we want to be on the leading edge of this trash phenomenon, the everted sphere of the future, and that’s why we pay particular attention, too, to those aspects of language that may be seen as a model of the trash phenomenon.”

Robert Coover: Pricksongs & Descants (1969)

2010-10-22T15:56:00.001-07:00

In Pricksongs & Descants, Robert Coover shows off his mastery of postmodern fabulation. Coover’s primary component of construction is the paragraph, which he tends to treat as unit and isolate through extra spacing, numbers, or other typographic insertions. William Gass compares Coover’s paragraphs to playing cards, which can be dealt and redealt. Gass writes, “Sharply drawn and brightly painted paragraphs are arranged like pasteboards in ascending or descending scales of alternating colors to compose the story, and the impression that we might scoop them all up and reshuffle, altering not the elements but the order or the rules of the play, is deliberate.” Rather than weave a single narrative across these paragraphs, Coover often presents variations of one story, or recombinations of different story elements, so that one foundational scenario may end up with multiple, incompatible endings. Gass again is a useful commentator: “Just like the figures in old fairy tales and fables, we are constantly coming to forks in the road (always fateful), except here we take all of them, and our simultaneous journeys are simultaneous stories, yet in different genres, sometimes different styles, as if fantasy, romance and reality, nightmare and daydream, were fingers on the same hand.” For example, “The Elevator” describes a character’s daily elevator trip up to his office on the fourteenth floor of an office building. The seriality of the work week, the dull repetition of daily routines, as well as the seriality of the floors in the skyscraper, leads to a serial story in which the paragraphs don’t really advance but rather repeat the same journey with variations that range from the banal to the embarrassing to the fatal. This blatant disregard for the law of noncontradiction is even more dramatically displayed in “The Babysitter,” perhaps the most successful story in the collection. In the story, a babysitter’s night of work develops toward a series of parallel and incompatible climaxes (which include a threesome with her boyfriend and his best friend, sex with the child’s father, the accidental death of the infant, and, of course, a calm and unexceptional evening). The story works so well because it does not refuse the dramatic power of any possible plot development or conclusion; in Coover’s world, the author and his characters truly can have their cake and eat it too. Like the work of his metafictional contemporaries such as Barth and Barthelme, a number of Coover’s stories retell fairy tales, legends, or myths from a twisted perspective. “The Brother” narrates the story of Noah’s Ark from the viewpoint of Noah’s brother, who, skeptically criticizing his apparently insane sibling, ends up drowned by the flood. “The Gingerbread House” retells the story of Hansel and Gretel, but shifts the story’s subtext, the lurking menace and sexuality, into the foreground. Coover also shows a fondness for narrating stories from the perspective of power, law, or the State. In “The Wayfarer,” a lawman coolly describes his encounter with a mute wayfarer who seems unable or unwilling to acknowledge and respond to the lawman’s questions; in what he views as a righteous act, the lawman viciously murders the wayfarer for this failure to respond to commands. “Morris in Chains” also takes the viewpoint of oppressive power that remains outright antagonistic to anything that resists its totalizing systems of control. The story describes the capture of Morris, a nomadic goat herder, and is narrated by one of Morris’s captors, a member of the team of technicians that tracks Morris down by gathering data and using computers. The head of this team, Dr. Peloris, proudly asserts the power of systems analysis to deal with apparent chaos, claiming: “Even nonpattern eventually betrays a secret system.” When laying the preparations for the final trap, Peloris describes the predictive power of the team’s systems: “[I]t is now certain that Morris will camp here in this valley, beside this canal and that grove, within five days. The order of his disorder, as exposed by [our] charts and the processed data, forces him to do so no matter what operations his mind might undertake in order to arrive at what he would tend to think of as a decision. Unless, of course, it included the foreknowledge that we await him here. And who knows? perhaps even this knowledge would not suffice to break the power of pattern over mere mind-activity.” The group of tales collected in the section titled “Seven Exemplary Fictions” is preceded by a critical commentary that explains Coover’s aesthetic aims. Coover begins by praising the work of Cervantes as “exemplars of a revolution in narrative fiction,” and he presents his own stories as related “challenges to the assumptions of a dying age, exemplary adventures of the Poetic Imagination.” He writes, “The novelist uses familiar mythic or historical forms to combat the content of those forms and to conduct the reader . . . to the real, away from mystification to revelation. And it is above all the need for new modes of perception and fictional forms able to encompass them that I . . . address the stories.” The collection’s final piece, “The Hat Act,” functions as an allegory of Coover’s literary practice. In front of a demanding and punishing audience, a magician performs a show that involves the transmutation of objects and bodies. His technical virtuosity initially receives the audience’s applause, but as he proceeds the results become disturbing, grotesque, and absurd. Like Coover’s fiction, the performance is a spectacle that is hard to look away from, though the bloodless formality of the proceedings (despite the story's bloody ending) leaves a tinge of disappointment to the experience. Fittingly, the story prematurely ends with: “THIS ACT IS CONCLUDED THE MANAGEMENT REGRETS THERE WILL BE NO REFUND”

Ronald Sukenick: The Death of the Novel (1969)

2010-10-21T19:23:00.001-07:00

In the short stories collected in The Death of the Novel, Ronald Sukenick situates his particular brand of metafiction within the political conflicts of the late 1960s. Many of these stories feature a narrator named Sukenick, an author-character whose life as a part-time academic, leftist sympathizer, and (unfortunately) sexist womanizer resembles the real Sukenick’s life. Metafictional navel-gazing is therefore an inevitable aspect of the collection, but Sukenick’s preoccupation with improvisation undoes any sense of a fixed autobiographical self. Sukenick writes, “We improvise our novels as we improvise our lives.” Through the sheer speed of composition, Sukenick aims to escape the confines of traditional literary form and of subjectivity. His most important predecessor would be Jack Kerouac, who famously taped sheets of paper together to create a roll that could continuously flow through his typewriter as he composed On the Road. Like Kerouac’s novel, Sukenick’s stories have an undeniable forward momentum, as well as an often glaring dearth of craft and refinement. In two of the stories, Sukenick takes advantage of tape recording to capture “live” composition. “Roast Beef: A Slice of Life” is merely a transcription of a recording of a chaotic, banal conversation Sukenick has with his wife during dinner time. The story “Momentum” also is presented as a transcription of a recording, and starts as if hitting the record button on the machine: “okay here we go.” Near the beginning, Sukenick states his goal for the literary experiment: “i want to say this as it comes without premeditation because i want to say it before i lose it or not so much say it as tell it tell it to myself so i’ll have it down so that i can come back to it again and recapture it so the speed of the tape is my form.” The story attempts to capture the “chaos of [Sukenick’s] mind,” the sequence of present moments that are always slipping away, and the end product is a barrage of fragments from Sukenick’s life. The story “The Death of the Novel” offers a more thorough explanation of Sukenick’s goals. In typical metafictional fashion, the piece begins with a discourse on the “contemporary post-realistic novel.” Sukenick writes, “The contemporary writer – the writer who is acutely in touch with the life of which he is part – is forced to start from scratch: Reality doesn’t exist, time doesn’t exist, personality doesn’t exist.” He adds, “Time is reduced to presence, the content of a series of discontinuous moments. Time is no longer purposive, and so there is no destiny, only chance. Reality is, simply, our experience and objectivity is, of course, an illusion. Personality, after passing through a phase of awkward self-consciousness, has become, quite minimally, a mere locus for our experience. In view of these annihilations, it should be no surprise that literature, also, does not exist--how could it?” Such reflections on literature within the text are more dramatically motivated than in most metafictional works because the narrator has been hired as a part-time teacher to give “an advanced honors seminar on The Death of the Novel.” The lectures he gives his bored, stoned students therefore often return in his story. The social and political turmoil of the late 1960s clearly influenced Sukenick’s formulation of this literary project. In addition to making reference to hippies, diggers, and yippies, the story discusses the State’s persecution of the leftist underground and includes news reports about the student movement, antiwar protests, and anti-antiwar protests. A very specific historical context lurks behind statements such as: “Reality has become a literal chaos. It has escaped our definitions. . . . If reality exists, it doesn’t do so a priori, but only to be put together. Thus one might say reality is an activity, of which literature is part, an important part, but one among many.” Sukenick adds, “Freedom in this context can mean only one thing, the freedom to create, and to create continuously, out of the fragmented, contradictory, anomalous, and progressively dissociating elements of our experience, a life that is coherent as a work of art is coherent, that continually comes together as it continuously comes apart.” The end of the story involves a return to the chaos of reality. The text stages its own (necessary) failure when Sukenick gives himself one hour to finish the piece, and then pushes himself to meet his self-imposed deadline, writing things such as, “Go on” and “Faster.” But the phones ring and his life intrudes anyway: ”Everything’s blowing up, falling to pieces. Art dissolves back into life. Chaos. It’s not the way I planned it.” The story ends in a favorite metafictional manner: “So long. End of story.” The final story, “The Birds,” is the collection’s most experimental and opaque piece. Most of the text consists of linguistic play on its titular subject, with sections on the names of birds, bird jokes, and bird symbolism. Sukenick compares this improvisational chaos (of dubious quality) directly to the Watts Towers, repeating a description of that work: “Built entirely without design precedent or orderly planning, created bit by bit on sheer impulse, a natural artist’s instinct, and the fantasy of the moment.” Sukenick also links his aesthetic project to the politics of May ’68 by including long news reports about the unfolding of the events of that month, from the occupation of the Sorbonne to the erecting of the barricades to the spread of mass striking. For Sukenick, May ’68 demonstrates the ability of spontaneous action to escape the power of existing forms, and underscores that “we must remain open to the unknown.” As the reports state: “THE PRINICIPAL THREAT LIES IN THE SPONTANEOUS, POPULAR AND UTTERLY UNCONTROLLED NATURE OF THE MOVEMENT.” “SOMETHING HAS BEEN CREATED THAT IS IRREVERSIBLE. THERE WILL BE NO GOING BACK TO THE STATUS QUO.”

William Gass: In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968)

2010-10-14T17:16:00.001-07:00

William Gass’s In the Heart of the Heart of the Country is a collection of painfully beautiful and innovative short stories by a conspicuously talented writer. Gass may be responsible for coining the term “metafiction,” but these pieces demonstrate few of the reflexive excesses of his contemporaries like John Barth or Robert Coover. Having indulged in wild, often nonsensical, and quasi-pornographical textual play in Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, and saving his philosophically-informed comments on literature for his essays (found in Fiction and the Figures of Life), Gass in this collection instead undermines traditional literary realism by emphasizing the sensuous qualities of the words he uses. By offering his readers an intense aesthetic experience of language itself, Gass makes his readers comprehend, as he writes in his essay “The Medium of Fiction”: “[that fiction] should be made of words, and merely words, is shocking, really.” Words, as the “flesh” of his “concepts,” are the only physical traits available to his readers, so Gass exploits every opportunity to direct attention to the arbitrary qualities and independent being of those words, but without ever totally severing them from their function and meaning in the story. For Gass, narrative doesn’t occur at the level of plot but at the level of words, “the coming on and passing off of words,” so that a microdrama occurs as each word gives way to the next (Gass speaks of “the exasperatingly slow search among the words I had already written for the words which were to come.”). The novella “The Pedersen Kid” is the most conventional piece here, but it bears obvious traces of an aesthetic overhaul. Gass admits in his preface that he undermined a thrilling tale involving murder in the isolated countryside by “covering the moral layer with a frost of epistemological doubt” and “erasing the plot to make a fiction of it.” The final product whites out its origins in genre fiction by obsessively repeating the word “snow,” creating a cold, barren, and ambiguous atmosphere in which murder appears liberatory for the young son of an alcoholic and abusive father. “Order of Insects” discretely functions as an allegory of the uncanny power of literature. In the story, a suburban housewife, despite being constrained by her gender role and domestic duties, develops an obsession with the bodies of the black bugs that she discovers every morning on her downstairs carpet. The insects, which are never seen alive, only lying on their backs dead with their legs up in the air, offer the woman a mystical vision of order that seems incompatible with her mundane existence. She reflects on the insects’ bodies: “The dark plates glisten. They are wonderfully shaped; even the buttons of the compound eyes show a geometrical precision which prevents my earlier horror. It isn’t possible to feel disgust toward such a order.” After the insects have taken over her imagination, the woman adds, “When I examine my collection now it isn’t any longer roaches I observe but gracious order, wholeness, and divinity.” At a couple points in the story, Gass underscores how the shriveled corpses of the insects resemble the apparently lifeless words printed in black on the page. He writes, “if the drapes were pulled, [the insects appeared] so like ink stains or deep burns they terrified me,” and later on, “Corruption, in these bugs, is splendid. I’ve a collection now I keep in typewriter ribbon tins, and though, in time, their bodies dry and the interior flesh decays, their features hold.” [emphasis added to both] The order of insects at such moments dissolves into the order of Gass’s words, and the reader converges with the woman, confronted by material traces on the page that always exceed any demands for meaning. The collection’s titular piece, “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” abandons any interest in plot; Gass divides his imaginary construction of a Midwest town into sections with quasi-objective labels such as “PLACE,” “WEATHER,” “PEOPLE,” “BUSINESS,” and “VITAL DATA.” The narrator, perhaps recoiling from a failed love affair (“For I am now in B, Indiana: out of job and out of patience, out of love and time and money, out of bread and out of body.”), presents some fundamentally ambivalent, but gorgeously written, reflections on the town. At times, he exhibits a nostalgic and idealistic fondness for the setting: “The shade is ample, the grass is good, the sky a glorious fall violet; the apple trees are heavy and red, the roads are calm and empty; corn has sifted from the chains of tractored wagons to speckle the streets with gold and with the russet fragments of the cob, and a man would be a fool who wanted, blessed with this, to live anywhere else in the world.” But such statements are usually quickly contradicted by more critical comments (“It’s a lie of old poetry. The modern husbandman uses chemical from cylinders and sacks, spike-ball-and-claw machines, metal sheds, and cost accounting. Nature in the old sense does not matter. It does not exist.”) or by troubling details, such as the fact that most of the town’s industry has been lost to bigger cities or to the monopolies of corporations (“Everywhere . . . the past speaks, and it mostly speaks of failure. The empty stores, the old signs and dusty fixtures, the debris in alleys, the flaking paint and rusty gutters, the heavy locks and sagging boards: they say the same disagreeable things.”). Discussing the difficulties of defining the Midwest, Gass writes, “This Midwest. A dissonance of parts and people, we are a consonance of Towns. Like a man grown fat in everything but heart, we overlabor; outlook never really urban, never rural either, we enlarge and linger at the same time.” The Midwest - a non-place, a nondescript setting - is a fitting subject (or even a character) for Gass’s particularly writing project. In his preface, Gass discusses his own undistinguished Midwest origins, which left him no recourse but to use language to construct an identity from nothing but potential noise: “I was forced to form myself from sounds and syllables.” Returning to the geographically and culturally empty terrain of the Midwest, which offers little for simple representation, he has to construct an order through language, producing himself at the same time as he produces his subject: “I was born in a place as empty of distinction as my writing desk. When I wrote most of these stories, it was a dining table, featureless as Fargo.” But in the story itself, the success of this project is ultimately far more ambiguous, the constructed order more tenuous: “I must pull myself together, get a grip, just as they say, but I feel spilled, bewildered, quite mislaid. I did not restore my house to its youth, but to its age.”

John Barth: Lost in the Funhouse (1968)

2010-10-06T11:18:00.001-07:00

John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse is metafiction’s degree zero. Barth’s “pieces” take literary self-reflexivity to a solipsistic extreme that few other authors have attempted to match. The pattern is quickly established with the first piece, “Frame-Tale,” which instructs the reader to construct a Mobius Strip by tearing out the page and twisting and then taping its sides together, creating an endless story that reads: “Once Upon a Time There was a Story That Began Once Upon a Time. . . .” Most of the pieces that follow continue this attack on linear literary realism (as well as on the conventions of modernism) by either persistently commenting on the techniques used by traditional literature, even while subversively using them, or offering up disembodied, self-composing discourses that reflect on their textual being. The title piece, “Lost in the Funhouse,” insistently adds meta-comments on everything from the naming of cities in 19th-century fiction to the proper use of physical descriptions. These comments not only puncture any tendencies toward realism, but also directly obstruct the linear development of the plot. For example, the piece comments near its beginning on the purpose of beginnings: “The function of the beginning of a story is to introduce the principal characters, establish their initial relationships, set the scene for the main action, expose the background of the situation if necessary, plant motifs and foreshadowings where appropriate, and initiate the first complication or whatever of the ‘rising action.’” But as these meta-comments multiply, the plot gets sidetracked, producing the fear that the story will never really get started, not to mention completed: “So far there’s been no real dialogue, very little sensory detail, and nothing in the way of a theme. . . . We haven’t even reached Ocean City yet: we will never get out of the funhouse.” Later on, as the protagonist, Ambrose, wanders, lost in the funhouse, the text contemplates different possible endings, dividing itself into a kind of garden of forking paths. By including diagrams of the arcs of conventional narratives, Barth only pushes the text further from any conventional conclusion. The result is an echo of Beckett: “This can’t go on much longer; it can go on forever.” “[T]he plot doesn’t rise by meaningful steps but winds upon itself, digresses, retreats, hesitates, sighs, collapses, expires. The climax of the story must be its protagonist’s discovery of a way to get through the funhouse. But he has found none, may have ceased to search.” The pleasures of traditional literary forms are lost from sight, but the protagonist manages to resign himself to the conditions of life in the metafictional funhouse: “He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he’s not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator – though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.” The piece “Title” most explicitly defends Barth’s dismantling of literary tradition. The text regularly underscores the excessive reflexivity of the contemporary writer through interventions such as randomly substituting grammatical terms for syntactical elements: “The novel is predicate adjective, as is the innocent anecdote of bygone days when life made a degree of sense and subject joined to complement by copula.” “Title” offers three possibilities (besides silence and extinction) for literature in this late, reflexive era: “The first is rejuvenation: having become an exhausted parody of itself, perhaps a form . . . may rise neoprimitively from its own ashes. A tired prospect. The second, more appealing I’m sure but scarcely likely at this advanced date, is that moribund what-have-yous will be supplanted by vigorous new: the demise of the novel and short story . . . needn’t be the end of the narrative art.” The third possibility, “a temporary expedient,” “is to turn ultimacy, exhaustion, paralyzing self-consciousness and the adjective weight of accumulated history. . . . Go on. Go on. To turn ultimacy against itself to make something new and valid, the essence whereof would be the impossibility of making something new.” In his manifesto for metafiction, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” Barth explains his argument more fully. Expressing an admiration for Beckett and, especially, Borges, Barth praises the latter’s “Pierre Menard” as “a remarkable and original work of literature, the implicit theme of which is the difficulty, perhaps the unnecessity, of writing original works of literature. His artistic victory, if you like, is that he confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to accomplish new human work.” For Barth, the most interesting literature takes its limiting conditions – in this case, the impossibility of creating something new – and makes them the foundation for new works. The piece “Life-Story” pre-emptively responds to potential accusations that Barth’s metafiction is hollow and pleasureless. The speaker is a writer who has come to “suspect that the world is a novel, himself a fictional personage.” Despite this metafictional theme, the speaker hopes to “to tell his tale from start to finish in a conservative, ‘realistic,’ unself-conscious way.” Like his wife and child, he hates the avant-garde, preferring the traditional comforts of a writer like Updike. So when it slowly dawns on him that he is a character in a Barth story, he states, “It’s particularly disquieting to suspect not only that one is a fictional character but that the fiction that one’s in – the fiction one is – is quite the sort one least prefers.” He more strongly states his distaste for this kind of fiction in an outburst: “Another story about a writer writing a story! Another regressus in infinitum! Who doesn’t prefer art that at least overtly imitates something other than its own processes? That doesn’t continually proclaim ‘Don’t forget I’m an artifice!’?” Ultimately, the reader’s attention is held responsible for his intolerable existence: “You dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it’s you I’m addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You’ve read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don’t go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where’s your shame?”

Raymond Federman: Double or Nothing (1971)

2010-10-05T22:00:00.001-07:00

Raymond Federman’s experimental novel Double or Nothing is subtitled a “real fictitious discourse.” An example of what Federman calls “surfiction” (a fiction on the fictions of life), Double or Nothing uses typographical experimentation and metafictional play to work through autobiographical trauma. The novel’s non-beginning outlines a complexly stratified literary discourse. By locking himself up in a room for a year, an “inventor” plans on writing a novel about the arrival of a Jewish immigrant “protagonist” in America. A “recorder” takes note of everything the inventor does and thinks while making preparations on the day before moving into the room, while a “supervisor” stands over and beyond the entire text. As the novel progresses, these four discursive levels/characters - protagonist, inventor, recorder, supervisor - begin to “converge or merge,” to collapse into one another, often within a single sentence as it shifts point of view from “I” to “he” to “we.” The inventor spends most of his time obsessively calculating the cost of a year’s worth of different basic goods – noodles, toothpaste, cigarettes, toilet paper – while the recorder faithfully keeps track of “everything [the inventor] was doing, saying, thinking, planning, calculating, organizing, inventing, composing, anticipating, projecting, writing, etc., even though much of it appeared totally incoherent, illogical, gratuitous, fragmented, all loused up, messed up, zero, irrational, unreadable, irresponsible, unpublishable, full of errors, bad, etc.” This noise is presented to the reader through the unique typographical format that Federman creates for each page, so that the work is ultimately what Brian McHale terms “concrete prose.” With a nod to jazz, Federman blasts open the walls of his prose, creating an improvised performance that underscores the materiality and technicity of the text.
Later sections of the novel offer a more explicit critique of traditional fiction, and especially plot, and serve as a justification for this experimentation. Rejecting any simple mimetic function for literature, Federman writes, “the essence of a literary discourse . . . is to find its own point of reference, its own rules of organization in itself, and not in the real or imaginary experience, on which it rests. Through all the detours that one wishes, the subject who writes will never seize himself in the novel: he will only seize the novel which, by definition, excludes him.” But less literary-critical, more autobiographical motives for the novel’s typographical and formal experimentation can be found in the fragments of the protagonist’s life that the inventor does manage to relate. The protagonist, whose name keeps changing, “has really no voice” and goes through a “mute period” while trying to learn English. Although the inventor deliberately refuses to discuss the protagonist’s life before America, it is revealed that the protagonist (just like Federman) lost his parents and siblings in the Holocaust. The novel’s seemingly superficial typographical play – that is, its experimentation with placing words on the surface of the page – therefore works through this traumatic rupture in the protagonist’s existence, his exile from his origins and even his language. Double or Nothing should be read alongside Federman’s later The Voice in the Closet (1979), a brutal yet important text that addresses Federman’s memories of being locked in a closet while the rest of his family was taken from his home and shipped off to a concentration camp. Lacking page numbers and punctuation, The Voice in the Closet offers a “verbal delirium,” intense “wordshit,” so as to “invent you federman,” “to invent an origin for myself.” Faced with unrepresentable horror and aware of the accidental nature of his existence, Federman states, “yes the whole story crossed out my whole family parenthetically xxxx into typographic symbols while I endure my survival from its implausible beginning to its unthinkable end.” However, Federman does seem to reflect in this haunting text on the different tone of Double or Nothing when he writes, “my survival a mistake he cannot accept forces him to begin conditionally by another form of sequestration pretends to lock himself in a room with the if of my existence the story told in laughter but it resists and recites first the displacement of its displacement.”

Donald Barthelme: The Dead Father (1975)

2010-10-01T14:34:00.001-07:00

Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father is a picaresque satire of paternity, a postmodern allegory of a faltering patriarchal law. A group of young people, with the help of hired labor, drags across the countryside the Dead Father, an enormous being with a mechanical leg who is “Dead, but still with us, still with us, but dead.” The Dead Father believes he is on a voyage to recover his lost youth, but his younger companions may simply be humoring him on his way to the grave. The pilgrimage seemingly takes place during medieval times, but anachronistic details often appear, including references to car washes, Stockhausen, and Lenin. Although dead, the Dead Father could be, as one character suggests, “a little more dead,” and he regularly stands up and interacts with his travel partners. Vaguely his offspring, these characters are ambivalent about the Dead Father, wavering between fondness and hatred. When they upset the Dead Father, he tends to run off and go “slaying,” leaving behind a trail of human and animal corpses. Essentially a short story writer, Barthelme constructs the narrative through short episodes while indulging in various forms of linguistic experimentation. In addition to making up words, Barthelme plays with syntax, cropping sentences short or deliberately leaving prepositions dangling. For example, he writes, “Thomas walks to the edge. Regards the edge. Aspect of one about to hurtle over the. Thomas retreats from the edge.” He also presents long, absurd, collage-like conversations composed of clichés and cultural detritus. This linguistic play seems aimed at subverting the institutions of the patriarchal law the Dead Father smugly claims to set down, such as when he says, “A son can never, in the fullest sense, become a father. Some amount of amateur effort is possible. A son may after honest endeavor produce what some people might call, technically, children. But he remains a son. In the fullest sense.” In one episode, the Dead Father and his companions face troubles passing through the land of the Wends, who father themselves by impregnating their own mothers. The Dead Father of course criticizes the Wends, claiming, “Those that are the fathers of themselves miss something, said the Dead Father. Fathers, to be precise.” The episodic structure does start to feel wearying as the novel becomes stuck in the formula, stated by one character: “Attending, departing, arriving, ignoring.” But two-thirds of the way into the novel, Barthelme presents a book within the book in the form of a guidebook titled “A Manual For Sons” that is given to the group of travelers. This text, supposedly ”translated from English . . . into English,” is one of the most inventive and amusing accomplishments of Barthelme’s career, and one can see strong traces of its influence on more recent writers such as Ben Marcus. The manual claims that there are twenty-two kinds of fathers, including the “mad father,” “the leaping father,” “the tunneling father,” the “text-father” (usually bound between blue covers), and the murderous “king-father.” In addition to sample transcriptions of some their voices, “A Manual For Sons” offers descriptions of the more important kinds of fathers and instructions for dealing with them. It also offers general advice and reflections on fathers, satirical bits of wisdom, such as, “Fathers are teachers of the true and not-true, and no father ever knowingly teaches what is not true. In a cloud of unknowing, then, the father proceeds with his instruction.” That is, “Fathers teach much that is of value. Much that is not.” Or in a section on rescuing fathers: “When you have rescued a father from whatever terrible threat menaces him, then you feel, for a moment, that you are the father and he is not. For a moment. This is the only moment in your life you will feel this way.” Despite being wary of fathers, the manual treats them as a structural problem that cannot be directly overcome. “Fathers are like blocks of marble, giant cubes, highly polished, with veins and seams, placed squarely in your path. They block your path. They cannot be climbed over, neither can they be slithered past. . . . If you attempt to go around one, you will find that another (winking at the first) has mysteriously appeared athwart the trail. Or maybe it is the same one, moving with the speed of paternity.” Perhaps a manifesto for Barthelme’s own postmodern, parodic disruption of literary traditions from within, the manual argues, “Patricide is a bad idea, first because it is contrary to law and custom and second because it proves, beyond a doubt, that the father’s every fluted accusation against you was correct: you are a thoroughly bad individual, a patricide!” “It is not necessary to slay your father, time will slay him, that is a virtual certainty. . . . Your true task, as a son, is to reproduce every one of the enormities touched upon in this manual, but in attenuated form. You must become your father, but a paler, weaker version of him. The enormities go with the job, but close study will allow you to perform the job less well than it has previously been done, thus moving toward a golden age of decency, quiet, and calmed fevers.”

Kurt Vonnegut: Breakfast of Champions (1973)

2010-09-30T22:38:00.001-07:00

Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions is a bleakly comic postmodern reflection on literature and language. Vonnegut deliberately pays little attention to the plot, which involves science fiction writer Kilgore Trout (a Vonnegut avatar who appears in some of Vonnegut’s earlier novels) traveling to an art festival in Midland City, where he accidentally sends automobile dealer Dwayne Hoover into a maniacal, violent rampage when Dwayne is exposed to the idea, found in one of Trout’s novels, “that human beings are robots, are machines.” The novel is perhaps most well-known for its metafictional elements, its self-awareness of its status as a work of fiction. The author (named Philboyd Studge, but impossible to distinguish from Vonnegut himself) regularly intrudes into the narrative, undercutting any mimetic realism by pointing out that he created the characters and can freely change this fictional universe. The common metafictional portrayal of the author as God appears when the characters refer to the author as the “Creator of the Universe.” Late in the novel, the author, hiding behind his sunglasses, physically places himself in the same bar as his two main characters, remarking, “I was there to watch a confrontation between two human beings I had created: Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout.” Having crossed the already tenuous line dividing storyteller from story, the author suffers a broken toe when Dwayne physically assaults almost every major character in the book. All of this rather slight plot structure leads up to a final encounter between the author and Trout, creator and created. At the novel’s conclusion, the author reveals to Trout his status as a character, saying, “Mr. Trout . . . I am a novelist, and I created you for use in my books.” But the author seems to renounce his traditional authorial rights and responsibilities by announcing, “I am going to set at liberty all the literary characters who have served me so loyally during my writing career,” and tells Trout directly to his face, “Mr. Trout, you are free, you are free.” This freedom, however, is marred by sadness, as the metafictional play is subjected to Vonnegut’s crushing depressiveness and his pessimistic view of society. Whatever Vonnegut’s strengths as a (black) humorist or inventor of imaginative scenarios, I think it would be hard to make a case for his skills as a craftsman of language. Extending its self-reflexivity to the question of language, Breakfast of Champions, however, perhaps offers a defense of Vonnegut’s rejection of traditional literary language, as well as traditional literary form. First, the novel makes clear the marginal status of literature and the dubious appeal of linear narrative. Trout, whose science fiction novels are transparent allegories “about a tragic failure to communicate,” decides to visit the Midland art festival in order to squash the midwesterners’ dreams of obtaining Culture. Trout’s stories primarily appear in pornographic magazines, so he has to visit an adult book store in Manhattan in order to obtain copies of his works. Completely disillusioned about the world of letters, Trout, who misanthropically believes “that humanity deserved to die horribly,” hopes “to show provincials, who were bent on exalting creativity, a would-be creator who had failed and failed.” Later on, the author (or author-character) heavily criticizes another, far more successful, novelist invited to the fair, Beatrice Keedsler, stating, “I thought [she] had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.” According to the author, this belief in the power of narrative is not innocuous. Americans “were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often. It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books. . . . Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All fact would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.” But the language needed to accomplish this project of “bring[ing] chaos to order,” of writing about life as it really is, is nearly indistinguishable from the corrupted language of commerce and conformity. For example, the novel’s title, a registered corporate trademark repeated by a bartender in the novel whenever a character orders a martini, indicates at the outset the degradation of language in contemporary American society. Brand names, such as those of Dwayne’s franchises, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Best Western, speckle the text, and words advertised on billboards and trucks appear as enigmatic symbols. Local culture, at least outside of racial minorities, offers no linguistic counterforce; the author reflects on the terse, inexpressive language of Midland City: “Most white people in Midland City were insecure when they spoke, so they kept their sentences short and their words simple, in order to keep embarrassing mistakes to a minimum. . . . This was because their English teachers would wince and cover their ears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed to speak like English aristocrats before the First World War. Also: they were told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language if they couldn’t love or understand incomprehensible novels and poems and plays about people long ago and far away.” The author adds, “It didn’t matter much what most people in Midland City said out loud, except when they were talking about money or structures or travel or machinery – or other measurable things.” The conspicuous failure of language motivates the novel’s inclusion of rudimentary explanations and illustrations of common words. As if talking to an extraterrestrial, the author defines words such as “dinosaur” or “apple,” and uses amateurish line drawings to supplement those definitions with visual icons (underscoring the juvenile nature of this discourse, Vonnegut even includes a drawing of a human asshole). At its darkest moments, the novel recasts its metafictional play as mechanized determination, reducing author, characters, and language itself to the inflexible routines of the machine: “I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair.”

Alexander Fullerton: Chief Executive (1969)

2010-09-22T16:57:00.001-07:00

Like Cameron Hawley’s corporate fictions, on which it is clearly modeled, Alexander Fullerton’s Chief Executive transforms the contradictions of corporate capitalism into narrative conflict. Fullerton’s novel is set within a world of executive conferences and board of directors meetings, and dramatizes the struggle for corporate control. Chief Executive describes Nicholas Morrell’s rise to the top of the managerial hierarchy of a shipbuilding corporation in the decades following WW II. Divided into three sections – “Forties,” “Fifties,” “Sixties” – the novel maps out the growth of American corporate capitalism during the postwar upturn, and pays particular attention to the increasingly international scope of the American economy. The narrative begins in the last years of the war, illustrating Morrell’s experiences as a lieutenant commander in the British Royal Navy, which foreshadow his later success in commanding the employees of a corporation. While having his ship repaired around New York City, Morrell meets Gil McLennan, a wealthy shipyard owner who, foreseeing America’s imminent rise to hegemony of the world economy, attempts to secure his economic position by making business contacts with important German prisoners-of-war. McLennan lectures Morrell: “This is the shape of industry in the future, Nick. International cooperation, big markets open to us all, bigger production, lower costs, bigger sales, bigger profits.” McLennan chose his last wife because her inheritance gave him the capital needed to take over the shipyard, and his next wife has a trust that is important for his later investment in overseas production (he refuses to distinguish fiancée from finance). Motivated by his impoverished childhood to seek money, Morrell, a British citizen, returns to America after the war with the hope of obtaining a management position in McLennan’s corporation. Morrell’s dream of moving straight into the gray-flannel-suit business class is quickly crushed by employment rejections, but he tenaciously gets his foot in the door by being assigned a job sweeping in the machine shop of the shipyards. Morrell notices that all of the machines have been Taylorized and automated, and therefore demand little of their operators: “Watching the movement of the operators, he was surprised to see that their jobs were really quite simple. The machines did the work they were set to do, and needed little more than to be fed and watched.” Morrell’s fatiguing job in waste disposal, however, has not been automated. He aims to change that, and in the process he redesigns the entire shop so that both production and disposal are taken care of by one cost-saving conveyor belt system. The novel makes it clear that Morrell’s plans exemplify not technical expertise (best left, as Morrell says, to the “engineers”) but entrepreneurial innovation, which is recognized by his immediate boss and becomes his “passport into management.” Leaping to the fifties and over Morrell’s quick movement up through middle management, the novel finds itself more comfortably set in the office towers and executive suites of the McLennan Corporation. Morrell, now a vice-president and member of “the hundred thousand a year class,” smartly sees the importance of moving “from single or small orders to mass production” for taking advantage of the enormous potential of new markets in the postwar era, and single-handedly guides a new pleasure boat division to success. At a certain point, Morrell can’t go any higher in the corporate hierarchy without taking the job of the president, McLennan, but he is eventually able to move up by moving overseas. When McLennan buys a large interest in a badly-run, largely government-owned, British shipyard, Morrell is shipped back to England as the executive vice-president, or “chief executive officer,” of the corporation that is formed from the merger, McLennan Ridgeway Limited. Cut to the sixties, and the narrative finds Morrell facing a conflict between individual vision and collective mediocrity straight from an Ayn Rand novel. When the decision was first made to take control of the shipyard, Morrell made it clear that complete control would be necessary: “We’d have to have a free hand to do whatever we damn well needed to get this concern looking something like a commercial enterprise instead of a benevolent trust.” But the final agreement leaves the ownership of the corporation’s stocks, and therefore control of the firm, split between the British government, McLennan, and a few other parties. As a result, the company’s board of directors consists mostly of incompetent members of the British aristocracy, who don’t appreciate the attention and recognition Morrell acquires as he transforms the business into a success. At one meeting, the president of the board of directors, Sir Charles Briscoe, admonishes Morrell: “We are a company, gentlemen, not an individual. We are McLennan Ridgeway Limited; we are not Nicholas Morrell Limited.” Morrell defends his contributions, responding: “I’ve taken this company off the scrap-heap and made it work. McLennan Ridgeway is a highly organized, expertly managed group with the finest equipment in the industry, a high return on capital investment and the longest order book in the business.” But the board of directors remains hostile, and its president, Briscoe, tries deceitfully to force Morrell to give up control of the corporation through blackmail. Although the novel proudly but rather clumsily shows off its tolerance towards Jews (unlike other executives, Morrell does not exclude Jewish managers from social outings), it unfortunately takes a homophobic turn when it figures the collective sameness of the board of directors and the socialist-leaning British government by turning the president of the board into a homosexual who has a personal relationship with an important government bureaucrat, and using the fact of that relationship as the basis of Morrell’s revenge. As the narrative progresses, Morrell’s personal identity becomes inseparable from the corporation. When asked why he continues to fight for the company, despite his wealth and options, he states: “McLennan Ridgeway hasn’t only been mine, its been me.” But as a British citizen working for an American firm operating in England, this complicated corporate identity reflects the increasing ability of capital to detach itself from its geographic roots and flow across national boundaries. When facing British criticism of American interference in England, Morrell praises America for the opportunities it has given him and expresses his contempt for what he considers the general mediocrity of English society, revealing perhaps a libertarian hatred of socialism. But he also faces criticisms from America when he steals military contracts from McLennan’s American-based shipyard. Even though they are “closely associated companies,” he refuses to restrain his company when in competition against the American firm. By the novel’s conclusion, Morrell has become a nationless subject, an embodiment of capital in an era of globalization, committed to pursuing profit wherever and however he can.

James Wood: How Fiction Works (2008)

2010-09-16T18:06:00.001-07:00

James Wood’s How Fiction Works asks “questions about the art of fiction” with the aim of revealing to general readers the techniques that make fiction work. He justifies the existence of his book by arguing that academic literary criticism has not adequately served this task (though he does admit a fondness for formalist critics such as Barthes and Shklovsky). This is a rather dubious claim, especially since Wayne Booth’s classic The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) deals with most of the same aesthetic and narratological issues and discusses many of the same literary examples. Besides a brief mention of Milan Kundera’s books on writing fiction, Wood also omits any reference to the numerous manuals that offer would-be writers clichéd advice on how to construct a good novel. Wood refuses to ground his analysis of the art of fiction in either a political program or a systematic aesthetic theory, so he winds up offering a rather idiosyncratic and incomplete appreciation of good fiction’s dedication to “truth” and “lifeness.” How Fiction Works starts out well with a chapter on narrating that demonstrates Wood’s sensitivity and sophistication as a reader. He claims that, with some exceptions, almost all stories are told in the third person or in the first person. But he questions the “common idea . . . that there is a contrast between reliable narration (third-person omniscience) and unreliable narration (the unreliable first-person narrator, who knows less about himself than the reader eventually does).” He finds this contrast to be a “caricature,” and claims, “first-person narration is generally more reliable than unreliable; and third-person ‘omniscient’ narration is generally more partial than omniscient.” Because authors flag the unreliability of their first-person narrators, readers learn how to read that unreliability. “Unreliable unreliable narration is very rare, actually – about as rare as a genuinely mysterious, truly bottomless character.” Turning to third-person omniscience, Wood argues, “authorial style generally has a way of making third-person omniscience seem partial and inflected.” He explains, “So-called omniscience is almost impossible. As soon as someone tells a story about a character, narrative seems to want to bend itself around that character, wants to merge with that character, to take on his or her way of thinking and speaking. A novelist’s omniscience soon enough becomes a kind of secret sharing; this is called ‘free indirect style.’” Wood proceeds to offer one of the best explanations of free indirect discourse you’re likely to find anywhere. He rewrites the same third-person sentence multiple times, slowly transforming it into an example of free indirect discourse. In free indirect discourse, language seems to hover between being the property of the novelist and of a character. “Thanks to free indirect style, we see things through the character’s eyes and language but also through the author’s eyes and language. We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once. A gap opens between author and character, and the bridge – which is free indirect style itself - between them simultaneously closes that gap and draws attention to its distance.” Wood is at his best in the book in the following discussion of literary examples that exploit this tension in free indirect discourse. When he identifies a single word in a Henry James sentence that pushes the text into free indirect discourse, Wood comes close to justifying his dismissal of the theoretical sledgehammers academic critics usually apply to literary works. Unfortunately, the rest of Wood’s book does not maintain this level of insight, and Wood is unable to keep many of his later claims from resembling aesthetic commonplaces. In the next chapter, he turns to Flaubert, who of course is the foundation of modern narrative and literary realism. Flaubert’s mastery of details that seem at once trivial and important leads into a discussion of the function of detail in fiction. Wood admits he is ambivalent about the “post-Flaubertian” fetishizing of the detail, which often leads to “surplus detail” in the text. Roland Barthes’ essay “The Reality Effect” argues that irrelevant, excess detail is a code for the real: it makes the text say, “I am real.” Wood adds that no detail in a novel is really insignificant, though some may be “significantly insignificant,” that is, they function precisely through their lack of clear significance. But lacking Barthes’ interest in semiotic systems, Wood explains this claim by making a problematic comparison of literature and life, arguing that irrelevant detail in literature demonstrates “the irrelevance of reality itself,” the presence of surplus detail and a “margin of the gratuitous” in everyday experience. Turning from detail to character, Wood objects to E. M. Forster’s famous distinction between flat and round characters. Wood notes that many of the great characters of literature are surprisingly flat, mere outlines that are never fully fleshed in. At this point, Wood enters into a rather unnecessary polemic against postmodern, metafictional writers who deny the existence of characters (William Gass is the direct target). Here as elsewhere, Wood comes across as being rather traditional and conservative in his literary values, values that he ultimately can only prescribe without justification. He writes, “My own taste tends toward the sketchier fictional personage, whose lacunae and omissions tease us, provoke us to wade in their deep shallows.” But more generally, “novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or deep enough, but when the novel in question has failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions, has failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality level.” “It is subtlety that matters – subtlety of analysis, of inquiry, of concern, of felt pressure – and for subtlety a very small point of entry will do.” Some rather brief and fragmentary chapters on sympathy, language, and dialogue follow, so that the book increasingly seems like a collection of random thoughts rather than a systematic account of how fiction works. When he finally reaches the question of the value of literature itself, Wood offers an answer that could have come straight from Lionel Trilling: “the novel does not provide philosophical answers . . . it gives the best account of the complexity of our moral fabric.” This response leads him to more directly confront the issue of literature’s relation to reality. He acknowledges that literary realism has largely become what he terms “commercial realism,” a degraded genre that relies on a set of conventions to depict reality. But rather than agree with the postmodernists who, denying language’s referentiality, claim that commercial realism illustrates the artificiality and arbitrariness of all realism’s codes, Wood wants to preserve a stronger link between literature and the real. He proposes to “replace the always problematic word ‘realism’ with the much more problematic word ‘truth.’” “Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or life-sameness, but what I must call lifeness: life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry.”

Zygmunt Bauman: Liquid Times (2007)

2010-09-15T21:05:00.001-07:00

In Liquid Times, Bauman adopts a popular, nonacademic style that, I assume, saps his argument of some of its originality and complexity. Especially in the later chapters, he veers into what are now familiar claims about inequality in the neoliberal city, the inadequacy of local and even national powers to solve global problems, and the decline of utopian thought. Bauman is famous for his distinction between “solid” and “liquid” modernity, a distinction that would seem to contradict Marshall Berman’s Marx-derived claim that in modernity “all that is solid melts into air.” For Bauman, the first wave of modernity did dissolve “community or corporation knots,” the “natural” bonds that held society together and provided individuals protection. However, solid modernity wove a new “network of protection from scratch,” replacing “belonging” with “solidarity.” During solid modernity, the “social state” provided “collective insurance against individual misfortune” through welfare institutions and other provisions. The Fordist compact also stabilized labor conditions and reduced individual uncertainty, offering workers the “shelter” of a career. However, during liquid modernity, which dates from the 1970s to the present, the social state and the Fordist compact, as well as the protection they offered, have been increasingly dismantled (Bauman makes only a passing reference to the literature on neoliberalism and post-Fordism, perhaps a symptom of his refusal to ultimately ground his sociological description in political economy). In liquid modernity, social forms change too continually and quickly for individuals to adapt effectively. “Forms, whether already present or only adumbrated, are unlikely to be given enough time to solidify, and cannot serve as frames of reference for human actions and long-term life strategies because of their short life expectations.” The result, as Richard Sennett has also pointed out, is an inability to make long-term plans and interpret change as more than lateral drift or a series of brief episodes. And the new virtue is “flexibility: a readiness to change tactics and style at short notice, to abandon commitments and loyalties without regret – and to pursue opportunities according to their current availability, rather than following one’s own established preferences.” In addition to this “mood of precariousness,” liquid modernity produces a general feeling of existential insecurity and fear. “Fear is there, saturating daily human existence as deregulation reaches deep into its foundations and the defensive bastions of civil society fall apart.” Unable to eliminate the actual causes of such existential fear, largely because “global forces [seem] beyond the reach of political control”, individuals seek out “substitute targets.” So in the place of existential security “rest[ing] on collective foundations,” the state promises “to protect its citizens against dangers to personal safety,” and singles out for demonization beggars, terrorists, and illegal immigrants. Whereas the unemployed once formed a “reserve army of labour,” a temporarily unproductive body, today there is a growing number of what Bauman terms “redundant humans,” permanently excluded individuals who will never be reintegrated into society and the economy and who therefore pose a pressing “human waste disposal” problem. “Rather than being a condition of being ‘un-employed’ (the term implying a departure from the norm which is ‘to be employed’, a temporary affliction that can and shall be cured), being out of a job feels increasingly like a state of ‘redundancy’ – being rejected, branded as superfluous, useless, unemployable and doomed to remain ‘economically inactive’. Being out of a job implies being disposable, perhaps even disposed of already and once and for all, assigned to the waste of ‘economic progress.’”

Raymond Carver: Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976)

2010-09-10T10:03:00.000-07:00

Raymond Carver’s first collection of short stories doesn’t fully exhibit the stern, reductive, stylistic purity of his second collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? also steers clear of the sentimentality occasionally found in his third collection, Cathedral. It is tempting to see that sentimental turn as a reaction to the excessive editorial purges of his second collection. A better approach might consider how the stylistic, even syntactical, neutralization of affect, Carver’s mastery of terse, expressive inexpressivity, which was accomplished in his second collection, cleared a field for the later reintroduction of relatively direct expressions of feeling. Economic distress and broken marriages are persistent issues in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, and many of the stories open with blunt statements about unemployment and empty households. As usual, Carver painfully illustrates his characters’ efforts to reverse their slow decline. For example, in “Jerry and Molly and Sam,” the protagonist, Al, “was drifting, and he knew he was drifting, and where it was all going to end he could not guess at. But he was beginning to feel he was losing control over everything. Everything.” So he makes a decision to take action: “He had to start someplace – setting things in order, sorting all this out. It was time to do something, time for some straight thinking for a change.” He later walks around muttering to himself, “Order, order,” but his plans cruelly involve getting rid of the family dog by dropping it off in a strange neighborhood, hardly a solution to his problems. In “Collectors,” the effort to establish personal order is figured as a fight against subjective entropy. A man who is separated from his wife finds his home invaded one day by a vacuum cleaner salesman, who tells the man, “Every day, every night of our lives, we’re leaving little bits of ourselves, flakes of this and that, behind. Where do they go, these bits and pieces of ourselves? Right through the sheets and into the mattress, that’s where!” The salesman proceeds to clean the man’s home, introducing a burst of ordering energy into the man’s decaying domestic system. “What Is It?” is unique in focusing on a case of over-consumption, and illustrates how Carver’s characters (and perhaps Carver himself) are able to think about economics only on a personal, moral, level. The story focuses on a couple that has over-indulged in luxuries, leading to impending bankruptcy: “They buy what they want. If they can’t pay, they charge. They sign up.” When asked to sell their car before it is reclaimed in foreclosure, the wife cheats on the husband with a car salesman who tells her, “personally he’d rather be classified a robber or a rapist than a bankrupt.” She apparently internalizes this moral argument about money, and responds to her husband’s fury over her affair by repeatedly yelling at him what she considers a label of individual worthlessness: “Bankrupt!” A number of these stories involve characters who are or desire to be writers, leading to a high degree of reflexivity about the writing process that edges the works toward metafiction (On Carver and the writing program, see Mark McGurl’s The Program Era). The protagonist of “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” is a teacher who talks with his wife while using his red pen on a stack of student papers. The repetition of “Please” in the story’s title emphasizes the man’s feelings of emotional desperation, but also resembles the linguistic circularity and play one might find in a Barth or Barthelme story. Although it doesn’t focus on the act of writing, “What Do You Do in San Francisco?” foregrounds what Bernhard Siegert calls literature’s “postal a priori” by taking as its narrator a postman who observes a young Beatnik couple that has moved into his rural, working class town and whose relationship hinges on letters the postman drops off in their mailbox. More than any of the other stories, “Put Yourself in My Shoes” takes writing as its explicit focus and indulges in a dizzying foray into self-reflexivity. During the Christmas season, a writer and his wife visit an older couple from whom they once rented a house. Each of their hosts tells a (melo)dramatic story, assuming it will be of use as “raw material” for the budding author. When the writer laughs at them, the older man says, “The real story is here, Mr. Myers,” and proceeds to recount how the younger couple were bad tenants who broke the rules of their lease. “That’s the real story that is waiting to be written. . . . It doesn’t need Tolstoy.” Yet the shifter “here” is more complicated than the man realizes. While he uses it to shift his story’s frame to include their present scene, in which the two couples face off, he doesn’t go far enough, he doesn’t realize there is still another frame above this story. He fails to realize that he is a character in a story himself, that the story “that is waiting to be written” has already been written, and that the word “here” is printed in a material book present in front of the reader’s eyes. But as “Put Yourself in My Shoes” ends with the younger couple making a quick exit from the house, Carver offers up a prototypically metafictional last line: “He was at the very end of a story.”

Raymond Carver: Cathedral (1983)

2010-09-08T10:30:00.000-07:00

In his third collection of short stories, Raymond Carver occasionally lessens the severity of his minimalist aesthetic, letting a few of the stories continue on to ambiguously warm conclusions, which are the closest thing to a “happy ending” in Carver country. But just as often, the stories present security and stability as ephemeral illusions and end with Carver’s typical images of lives out of control. For example, in “Feathers,” a husband and wife gain self-confidence when they visit friends in the countryside and observe the minute class and social distinctions that set the two couples apart. Their friends vulgarly allow a pet peacock to live in the house and have what the narrator simply names the “ugly baby.” But the husband and wife’s sense of superiority and distinction is quickly erased when the story’s conclusion indicates, without explanation, a transformation: “The change came later – and when it came, it was like something that happened to other people, not something that could have happened to us.” In “Chef’s House,” the narrator’s husband, a recovering alcoholic, literally has a short lease on happiness, as the titular house where he sets his life back in order is reclaimed by its owner at an unexpectedly early point. Describing a teacher whose life briefly comes together when he finds a nanny/maid to take care of his children, “Fever” mirrors “Chef’s House,” though with a slightly more optimistic ending. In “The Bridle,” an unemployed farmer and his family move to an apartment complex in Arizona. Despite the poolside community they join, they fail at their service jobs and move on, leaving behind a horse’s “bridle,” a symbol of their failure to gain control over their lives (pulling on the bridle, “You’d know you were going somewhere.”). “Where I’m Calling From” reveals a great deal about the fragile subjectivity and communication-at-a-distance of Carver’s characters throughout the volume. The titular location is an alcohol recovery center, from which the damaged narrator contemplates connecting to his absent wife through a telephone call. Taking place on a train crossing Europe, “The Compartment” is a rare shift of scene for Carver that demonstrates how easily his minimalist fiction can slip into the Mobius Strip models of metafiction. The desire of the narrator not to interact with the outside world, and particularly with the estranged son he is on his way to visit, his attempt to solipsistically seal off his psyche, is figured by the titular train car. Although the man desires to stay locked in comfortable isolation, an intruder enters the car and steals from him, and the man’s response ironically leads him to get trapped outside in a crowded second-class car. Two stories most clearly distinguish this collection from Carver’s earlier ones. “The Bath,” previously included in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, reappears in a revised and extended form in Cathedral as “A Small, Good Thing.” The earlier version, fitting with the dark tone of the rest of that collection, ends with a brutal moment of misunderstanding, a baker calling and coldly demanding payment for a birthday cake that was never picked up because the family’s son was killed in a hit-and-run. The newer version, however, allows the misunderstanding to be cleared up, and the final reconciliation of the baker and the parents edges too far towards a form of sentimentality that, while perhaps responsible for the popularity of the story, seems at odds with Carver’s emotionally-constricted writing program. The concluding story, “Cathedral,” also takes a dip into sentimental waters. As with many of Carver’s stories, “Cathedral” reflects on the limits of and the desire for communication by including different mediated interactions. The narrator insecurely and anxiously awaits the arrival at his house of a blind man, a ham radio enthusiast who has exchanged audio tapes through the mail with the narrator’s wife over the years. The awkward encounter between the narrator and the blind man seems to take a turn for the worse when the narrator’s wife falls asleep watching television, leaving the two men alone to converse. But when the blind man asks the narrator to show him what the cathedral seen on television looks like by drawing it with him, Carver reveals the goal of all his fiction: to elevate the mundane to the level of the sacred.

Raymond Carver: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)

2010-09-03T15:43:00.000-07:00

Raymond Carver’s second major collection of stories pushes his minimalism to the threshold - without every crossing it - where economical realism might disintegrate into fragmented, experimental play. The guiding (de)compositional principle here - largely attributable to Gordon Lish’s editorial hand - is to cut as much and as early as possible without undermining the coherence of the fundamental scene. This reductive aesthetic produces an exceptionally bleak tone for Carver, as his characters - sometimes described as simply “the man” or “the girl” - are often frozen at the story’s end in a pose of emotional tension or despair. The decision to abruptly, even prematurely, end each story formally redoubles the inability of Carver’s characters to weave the events of their lives into some kind of overarching narrative. In fact, many of his characters are self-conscious about their lack of “plans”; dealing with alcoholism, crumbling marriages, and/or bouts of unemployment, they are all too aware that their lives lack any form of long-term consistency. For example, in “Gazebo,” one character nostalgically notes, “Everything was fine for the first year. I was holding down another job nights, and we were getting ahead. We had plans. Then one morning, I don’t know.” As Mark McGurl has recently argued in The Program Era, Carver’s stories aestheticize lower-middle class suffering, “beautifying shame” without explaining it. This exposure of private shame to the public’s eyes is thematized within many of the stories. For example, in “Why Don’t You Dance?” a man separated from his wife places all of his household furniture out on his front lawn, exposing his domestic problems to strangers passing by. In “Viewfinder,” the narrator is fascinated by the idea of having a photographer take photos of him inside and on top of his house. Communicational dysfunction is an omnipresent problem for the stories’ couples and friends, who are cognizant of their inability to express themselves. In “Gazebo,” one character admits, “I don’t have anything to say. I feel all out of words inside.” But moments of non-verbal communion provide much needed relief. In “The Bath,” a husband tries to comfort his wife after their child is injured in a hit-and-run: “The husband sat in the chair beside her. He wanted to say something else. But there was no saying what it should be. He took her hand and put it in his lap. This made him feel better. It made him feel he was saying something.” More mystically, the titular conversation of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” ends in a powerful moment of silence (with unintentional echoes of John Cage): “I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.” Yet Carver’s stories just as often stage scenes of storytelling, confessing to the problematic pleasures of narrative making that his minimalism would seem to repress. So whereas in “The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off” a son is subjected to his father’s account of cheating on his mother, in “The Calm” the narrator overhears a hunting story while sitting in a barbershop. As McGurl notes, Carver’s characters appear apolitical (when not explicitly conservative) and cut off from any involvement in the currents of History. Outside of household appliances and color televisions, his characters even seem left behind by the latest wave of modernization. No doubt the long downturn of the U.S. economy since the beginning of the 1970s played a constitutive role in the stories’ sense of economic (and therefore individual) stagnation. Carver’s association with the house style of creative writing programs might lead some readers to be suspicious of the level of calculated craft involved in these stories, but, at times, Carver’s infamously simple syntax achieves a singularly powerful affective impact.

Saul Bellow: The Victim (1947)

2010-08-03T21:41:00.001-07:00

Saul Bellow’s second novel, The Victim, is an exploration of the aporia of ethical responsibility, of the indeterminable limits of the Self’s responsibility for the Other. Although Bellow did not achieve a significant stylistic breakthrough until his next novel, The Adventures of Augie March, The Victim, with its strong echoes of Dostoyevsky and Kafka, works well enough as a refined take on the modern narrative of urban alienation and psychological disquiet. While his wife is away visiting family, Asa Leventhal, “an editor of a small trade magazine in lower Manhattan,” suffers on his own through an intensively hot New York City summer. Emotionally reserved in public and deeply paranoid, Leventhal persistently experiences anxiety in his interactions with others. For example, at the novel’s beginning, Leventhal tries to help the sick child of his brother’s wife, whom his brother has left alone in the city while working elsewhere. Although Leventhal believes he is fulfilling his ethical “duty” in getting the child sent to a hospital, he also guiltily fears that the child’s mother blames him for taking the boy out of her home and care. As a Jew, Leventhal is exposed to anti-Semitism in the workplace, from the Italian mother of his brother’s wife, and even at parties with friends. Leventhal’s paranoia is therefore compounded by his sensitivity to the widespread hostility toward the Jewish race. The novel makes only a few allusions to the Holocaust, but Leventhal’s persecution complex is clearly influenced by his comprehension of the dangerously unsure position of Jews in society. Earlier in his life, Leventhal made a series of bad decisions that led him into poverty and nearly ruined him. At one point he worked as a clerk at a flophouse, where he witnessed the deepest levels of destitution and human misery. When he later reflects on his luck in regaining a respectable position, what he observed at that job haunts him: “He had almost fallen in with that part of humanity of which he was frequently mindful . . . the part that did not get away with it – the lost, the outcast, the overcome, the effaced, the ruined.” This abject humanity, however, one day unexpectedly and uncomfortably imposes itself on Leventhal and punctures his complacency. While walking by himself in the summer heat, Leventhal encounters an uncannily familiar stranger who confronts and begins to speak to him. Leventhal recognizes the stranger as Kirby Allbee, a man he had known many years before. Allbee’s unanticipated verbal attack startles Leventhal: “Leventhal suddenly felt that he had been singled out to be the object of some freakish, insane process, and for an instant he was filled with dread.” It quickly becomes clear that Allbee, who appears to be a homeless alcoholic, holds Leventhal completely responsible for his impoverished state, claiming, “I say you’re entirely to blame, Leventhal.” He argues that Leventhal cost him his job, his wife, and just about everything else when Leventhal fought with a powerful boss that Allbee had arranged Leventhal to meet for a job interview. Allbee is casually and habitually racist, regularly dropping anti-Semitic remarks to Leventhal about the characteristics of “you people,” though he doesn’t come across as being especially harmful or as having particularly bad intentions. Allbee once made fun of a Jewish friend of Leventhal’s who badly sang traditional Jewish songs at a party, and it is this incident that led Allbee to believe Leventhal sought out revenge and deliberately ruined him. Leventhal of course is startled by these accusations and tries to avoid any admission of responsibility, despite his doubts about his unconscious motives in the past, so this first encounter ends quickly. Alcoholism provides Leventhal a convenient explanation for Allbee’s downfall, but when seeking advice from a friend Leventhal discovers that this friend also believes he is responsible. As time passes, Leventhal finds it increasingly difficult to avoid feeling a sense of obligation toward Allbee, and his psyche is persecuted by Allbee’s charge: “You try to put all the blame on me, but you know it’s true that you’re to blame. You and you only. For everything.” Initially appearing as opposites, the lucky and the unlucky, the victimizer and victimized, Leventhal and Allbee begin to mirror and double each other, with the former even adopting the latter’s drunken excesses. So when Allbee tracks Leventhal down to his home, Leventhal eventually offers him a place to stay for a few days. Allbee, however, pushes beyond the limits of Leventhal’s “hospitality,” leading to a violent final confrontation followed by an ambiguous reversal of fortunes in the final chapter. Throughout the novel, Bellow doesn’t offer any easy solution to this singular burden of ethical responsibility that Allbee places on Leventhal: “In a general way, anyone could see that there was great unfairness in one man’s having all the comforts of life while another had nothing. But between man and man, how was this to be dealt with? Any derelict panhandler or bum might buttonhole you on the street and say, ‘The world wasn’t made for you any more than it was for me, was it?’ The error in this was to forget that neither man had made the arrangements, and so it was perfectly right to say, ‘Why pick on me? I didn’t set this up any more than you did.’ Admittedly there was a wrong, a general wrong. Allbee, on the other hand, came along and say ‘You!’ and that was what was so meaningless.”

Donald MacKenzie: An Engine, Not a Camera (2006)

2010-08-03T13:42:00.001-07:00

Donald MacKenzie’s An Engine, Not a Camera is a dense, informative study of how the development of finance theory has contributed to the construction, success, and even the crises of modern financial markets. The book follows two particular historical threads: “the emergence of modern economic theories of financial markets” in the 1950s and 60s, and the creation since 1970 of organized derivatives exchanges. Drawing from actor-network theory and social studies of finance, MacKenzie tracks how finance theory helped make possible new financial markets and became embedded in their infrastructures and daily practices. He also shows how the new markets became the subject and testing ground of finance theory, leading to changes in the latter. Finance theory is heavily dependent on models that often simplify reality into precise mathematical forms. Neoclassical (and neoliberal) economics in the postwar era has had a complex relationship with finance theory, but the two approaches have a certain “affinity,” not the least because of their shared belief in the power of models based on simple and single formulas. The simple and sometimes bizarre assumptions of finance theory’s models are easily contradicted by empirical evidence, but the proponents of finance theory have created a defense of their models’ lack of realism by drawing from Milton Friedman’s essay “The Methodology of Positive Economics.” Friedman argued a model was to be judged by its explanatory and predictive capabilities, not by whether it assumed conditions that were empirically accurate. For Friedman, “economic theory was ‘an “engine” to analyze [the world], not a photographic reproduction of it.’” McKenzie, however, revises Friedman’s argument. MacKenzie writes: “Financial economics . . . did more than analyze markets; it altered them. It was an ‘engine’ in a sense not intended by Friedman: an active force transforming its environment, not a camera passively recording it.” Borrowing from Michel Callon the idea that “economics itself is a part of the infrastructure of modern markets,” MacKenzie proposes to investigate “the performativity of economics.” He distinguishes “three levels of the performativity of economics”: “generic performativity,” “effective performativity,” and “Barnesian performativity.” The first, “generic performativity,” is when some part of economics is also used “in the ‘real world’ by market participants, policy makers, regulators, and so on. Instead of being external to economic processes, the aspect of economics in question is ‘performed’ in the generic sense of being used in those processes.” The next level, “effective performativity,” is when economics somehow alters the market once it is used. That is, it ”must make a difference. Perhaps it makes possible an economic process that would otherwise be impossible, or perhaps a process involving use of the aspect of economics in question differs in some significant ways . . . from what would take place if economics was not used.” A final level, “Barnesian performativity,” involves “self-validating feedback loops” and is when the application of economics leads the market to better conform to economic theories and models. It is a kind of performativity “in which the use of a model (or some other aspect of economics) makes it ‘more true.’” McKenzie also proposes a negative, counterperformative variation, in which the application of an economic model makes the model less true. That is, the use of the model changes the market so that the model is no longer accurate. McKenzie avoids calling Barnesian peformativity a “self-fulfilling prophecy” because such a label overemphasizes the “beliefs and world views” of economic actors. The ideas of economic actors are important, but MacKenzie underscores that economics can also be performative through “incorporation into algorithms, procedures, routines, and material devices. An economic model that is incorporated into these can have effects even if those who use them are skeptical of the model’s virtues, unaware of its details, or even ignorant of its very existence.” The first chapter after this discussion of performativity examines “the shift in the United States in the 1950s and the 1960s from descriptive scholarship in finance to the new analytical, mathematical, economics-based approach.” The chapter discusses the early development of finance theory in the work of Franco Modigliani, Merton Miller, Harry Markowitz, and William Sharpe. During this period, these writers and others contributed to the development of two particularly important and influential theories: random-walk and efficient-market theory. Random-walk theory argues “that the movements in the prices of financial securities are in some sense random – and therefore that the mathematical theory of probability can be applied to them.” Efficient-market theory argues that in “efficient” capital markets (which finance theory’s models usually assumed were the case) “prices . . . incorporate – effectively instantaneously – all available price-relevant information.” The two theories supported each other and formed a “largely coherent view of financial markets.” For example, if a market was efficient so that prices fully reflected all available information about the past, present and future, then only “events that could not have been anticipated . . . can move prices. By definition, however, that information was unpredictable and thus ‘random.’” Having outlined the formation of the foundations of finance theory, MacKenzie in his next chapter surveys “how the new finance scholarship developed into the distinct academic subfield of financial economics.” The theory was fairly quickly institutionalized through the creation of a “distinct academic field” with its own journal, incorporation into teaching and textbooks, and the training of new PhDs, particularly at the University of Chicago and MIT. Formerly associated with the “practical” fields of business schools, finance theory had to “academicize” itself, and was aided by its infatuation with sophisticated mathematics. The growth of finance theory during the 1960s and 70s was carried forward by changes in the overall economy, particularly the increasing number and power of mutual funds and the movement of many non-financial corporations into financial speculation. But there was often a strong tension between the finance theorists and the growing number of financial practitioners. For example, many practitioners adhered to “chartism,” the belief that discerning investors can spot good investments or investment trends by charting and graphing stocks and markets. “Chartism never achieved institutionalization in academia, but it became a lasting component of how many financial practitioners think about markets. It offered a vernacular theory of markets (one rooted not in economics but in speculations about investor psychology and perhaps even in the sociology of ‘herd behavior’) and a way of making sense of markets that was, and is, attractive. . . . Much mass-media presentation of markets – with its citation of ‘trends,’ ‘reversals,’ ‘corrections,’ ‘resistance levels,’ and so on, and with its fascination with salient round-number index levels such as a Dow Jones level of 10,000 – is in a sense a diluted form of chartism.” Chartism was often opposed to fundamentalism, which emphasized the study of the fundamental health and prospects of the corporations underlying stocks. Random-walk and efficient-market theory, however, rejected the foundations of both chartism and fundamentalism. According to finance theory, charts were of little use because prices already reflected all available information and price movements were essentially random, and the fundamentals of the corporations were already known in an efficient market or simply irrelevant to the movement of prices. “To practitioners, finance theory – especially random-walk theory and efficient-market theory – appeared to be claiming that ‘the value of investment advice is zero.’” Despite such tensions, there was still a movement, largely lead by the pension funds, toward “passive” investment management based on the fundamentals of finance theory and involving the selection of large “index funds” similar to the S&P 500 that offered limited but safe performances. The heart of MacKenzie’s book studies the development of the Black-Scholes-Merton model for pricing options, which was essential for the creation of derivatives markets, and examines the creation of futures markets in the 1970s. Other chapters discuss how portfolio insurance exacerbated the 1987 stock market crash and investigate the factors that led the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) to the edge of bankruptcy in 1998. These sections give numerous examples of how economics is performative, of how the use of finance theory led markets to more closely resemble models or sometimes to unexpectedly and dangerously swerve away from all predictions. Near the end of the book, MacKenzie makes an interesting argument about markets as prostheses that seriously muddles traditional political stances for or against the market by situating economics within a posthuman framework. He argues that the limited cognitive abilities of humans are aided by “the ways in which sophisticated economic calculations are nevertheless made possible by material devices . . . by organizational routines, by concepts (such as ‘implied volatility') that simplify complex realities, and so on. An economic actor equipped with all of these is quite different from an unaided human individual.” He goes on, “Indeed, markets themselves can be seen as prostheses in the sense that they enable human beings to achieve outcomes that go beyond their individual cognitive grasp. . . . Markets can indeed be seen as machines or as devices for collective calculation, and with the increasing implementation of market mechanisms in software those are not simply metaphors.”

Todd Gitlin: The Whole World is Watching (1980)

2010-07-30T09:52:00.001-07:00

Todd Gitlin’s The Whole World is Watching studies the impact of the mass media on the development of the American New Left. More specifically, Gitlin examines how CBS news and The New York Times covered the actions of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1965 and how media coverage confronted that leftist organization with a series of unexpected and untested opportunities and obstacles. Gitlin’s theoretical framework is a combination of Erving Goffman’s frame analysis and Raymond Wiliams’ reworking of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. These two theories work well enough for Gitlin, though readers shouldn’t expect anything particularly innovative or sophisticated from the book. Gitlin argues that the concentrated power of the mass media has changed the conditions in which political movements are created, popularized, criticized, and defeated. While the New Left did successfully publish its own underground newspapers and journals and achieved many victories at both local and national levels, the mass media continually tempted the movement with promises of a truly mass audience and membership, and lured movement leaders with images of political power and celebrity. And once the mass media began paying attention to SDS around 1965, it became hard for the organization to ignore its treatment in the press and to resist taking efforts to actively shape that media treatment. So for better or worse, SDS entered into an ongoing hegemonic struggle to modify the media frames guiding how political events and movements were selected, interpreted, and presented to audiences. Gitlin ignores SDS’s own underground publications and focuses on a rather narrow archive of news articles and films from CBS and The New York Times, but he supplements this material with his own experience in SDS (Gitlin was SDS president right before the period studied). He explains that one of his motives in writing the book was the “experience of disjuncture” he felt when, after returning home from a demonstration or political action, he read or saw news coverage that presented an entirely different reality. Gitlin is extremely critical of SDS’s turn toward the violence of Weatherman, a shift he argues the mass media contributed to, so readers should critically approach Gitlin’s own frame of analysis. Although SDS had already been active for five years, it was not until 1965 that “SDS was discovered by the national media.” Suddenly, “SDS changed irreversibly from an organization that recruited its elites and communicated its ideas face to face, to an organization that lived in the glare of publicity and recruited both elites and members on the basis of reputations refracted in large part through the channels of mass media.” From then on, its “actions were shaped in part by the codes of mass media operations. It conducted its activities in a social world that recognized it, liked it, and disliked it through media images, media versions of its events and rhetoric. To some extent the movement even recognized itself through mass-mediated images.” Over the next five years, SDS and the media would develop a “grammar of interaction” through which they “would recognize and work on the other.” This grammar was continuously changing: “At times, movement and media were symbiotic, at times antagonistic.” The first section of the book focuses on media coverage of SDS around 1965. Gitlin divides this period into five phases: media ignorance of or indifference to SDS; discovery of the organization after the Berkeley Free Speech movement, prompting some sparse but often sympathetic coverage; major media interest after the anti-war March on Washington, which gave SDS new media power but also tended to trivialize, polarize, and marginalize the organization; the development of “an adversary symbiosis” which divided SDS members on whether to be on the defensive or the offensive against the media spotlight; finally, “media treatment entered into the movement’s internal life,” particularly through its influence on recruiting the new generation of SDS members, Prairie Power. As he surveys this first year of negotiations between SDS and the media, Gitlin shows the deleterious effects of the application of existing media frames to genuinely new political movements and documents cases of sympathetic news reporting being censored by editors influenced by the power elite. He also emphasizes the tendency of the media to rely primarily on the statements of government and university officials in coverage of political student actions. This led to an odd division of labor: “The composite effect was that students produce actions while authorities have thoughts.” SDS began engaging in civil disobedience when protestors carrying out a sit-in in front of the Chase Building in Manhattan were arrested in 1965. Drawing perhaps from existing frames for crime reporting, the media throughout the late 1960s used such arrests as the lead into the event, not the event as cause of the arrests. The power of arrests to attract media attention was/is problematic: “Arrests . . . help democratize access to news for powerless and dissident groups. But not even activists bent on arrest for publicity’s sake can get arrested unless the police authorities decide to make the arrest. (Even the grammar of the passive choice shows that the activists remain passive in the situation: they must get arrested.) When the power to define news is, in effect, turned over to the police, the media are serving to confirm the existing control mechanisms in society.” The next section of Gitlin’s book details the media’s impact on SDS over the next five years. The primary consequences of the media’s focus on SDS included: “generating a membership surge and, consequently, generational and geographical strain among both rank-and-file members and leaders”; “certifying leaders and converting leadership to celebrity”; “inflating rhetoric and militancy”; “elevating a moderate alternative”; “contracting the movement’s experience of time, and helping encapsulate it”; finally, “amplifying and containing the movement’s message at the same time.” Gitlin is particularly critical of the inability of SDS and the New Left’s leaders to handle the spotlight shown on them without becoming celebrities. Part of the problem was the “movement’s internal structure,” “the discrepancy between its values (‘no leaders’) and its organization,” a bureaucratic hand-me-down from the old left. Another factor was the lack of any adult equivalent of SDS, so that movement leaders who “graduated” from the organization often had little place to go but into the media’s eyes. The antiwar movement also contributed by equating effectiveness with numbers, which led leaders to actively seek out media attention. Gitlin argues, “it was the war that counterbalanced [SDS’s] halting search for decentral authority structures and processes, and that rationalized the destructive performances of the movement stars.” Leaders, when transformed by the media into celebrities, often lost all contact with and accountability to the movement base. “They floated in a kind of artificial space, surrounded by halos of processed personality; the media became their constituency.” In general, finding the middle ground between bathing in celebrity status and abdicating all media attention was difficult for many movement leaders. Gitlin summarizes the problem: “Faced with the lures and pressures of a world of instant fame, the movement lost control of its ability to certify and control its own leaders. Celebrity as a political resource for the movement, as a means toward political ends, lapsed into a personal resource to be invested, hoarded, and fought over – or abandoned. The movement’s leaders, ambivalent from the first about leading, had trouble keeping track of the sources of their authority and the obligations it entailed. The rank and file wanted their leaders to lead, but were uneasy with them at the same time; the mixed message they sent made the leaders’ situation as untenable as it was tempting. The cultural apparatus’s structured need for celebrity harmonized with, and selected for, the ambitions of movement leaders.” Gitlin also spends a great deal of time analyzing the media’s role in amplifying and exacerbating the militant and violent tendencies of the movement (towards which, it must be remembered, Gitlin is personally hostile). He argues that media coverage led to inflated rhetoric and militancy, to the need to always up the spectacle of mobilized bodies and violence in order to receive media coverage. The media contributed to this escalation by focusing primarily on the events themselves, not the political reasons behind them. SDS faced the fact that the media often would only lightly cover an event if it did not expect violence. “Where a picket line might have been news in 1965, it took tear gas and bloodied heads to make headlines in 1968. If the last demonstration was counted at 100,000, the next would have to number 200,000; otherwise it would be downplayed or framed as a sign of the movement’s waning.” “The result was that newsmaking power was passing into the hands of the more theatrical leaders and militant activists, agents provocateurs, and the police.” The media contributed to growing militancy and violence, which prompted further state repression, which was responded to by even more militancy and violence. For Gitlin, this cycle led to the dead end of Weatherman, which in its first phase privileged street fighting and the “trashing” of the city, all in front of the cameras. But as sympathy for the antiwar movement grew, the news also began to reverse its frame and give more attention to moderate positions. This media shift contributed to the growing divide in the New Left between the moderates and the militants, and also helped fuel the latter’s emphasis on revolution. “As opposition to the war became more widespread and legitimate, as moderates came to speak of unilateral American withdrawal from Vietnam, much of the radical movement that had tried to articulate and focus that opposition found itself curiously stranded and desperate, frantically summoning up extravagant political world views about a coming revolution to explain and justify that feeling to themselves. Lacking a sufficient political base, the flamboyant sects resorted to the engine of revolutionary will – which gave them no political base, no political resonance, but a disproportionate access to the media.” The final result was a media-induced cybernetic nightmare: “Acting, producing mediating images, reacting hastily to the unanticipated consequences of those images, the movement entered a feedback loop without correcting errors.”

Ken Kesey: Sometimes a Great Notion (1964)

2010-07-29T20:39:00.001-07:00

Ken Kesey’s second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, remains a baffling work that seems deliberately constructed to frustrate efforts to pin down the author. The novel’s bulk, experimentation with perspective, and Faulknerian historical details demonstrate that Kesey wanted to follow up One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with a work that would seal his reputation as a major author, but his life in many ways had already moved well beyond the limits of literature. After incubating the counter culture at his house in La Honda, Kesey wheeled it out for all of the nation to see in 1964 when he and the Merry Pranksters took a bus trip to New York (with no less than Neal Cassady as the driver) in order to visit the World’s Fair and to be present for the publication of Sometimes a Great Notion. The novel received quite mixed reviews, but the drugged-out, moving multimedia spectacle of the Merry Pranksters’ bus, famously described in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, had perhaps already supplanted literature for Kesey, who wouldn’t publish another novel for over twenty years. The reception of the novel should not have surprised Kesey, who seems to have constructed its plot as a calculated affront. The narrative takes the side of a family of loggers, the Stampers, who fight against a union strike by gathering together their non-union kin to carry out the labor themselves. By turning the union into the enemy, Sometimes a Great Notion reverses the stance of the radical literature of the 1930s. Kesey acknowledges this historical contrast through the local union representative, Floyd Evenwrite, who remembers his father’s leadership role in the Wobblies. Kesey also reveals his cards when he has one Stamper son imagine saying, “My father is a filthy capitalist and my brother is a motherfucker.” There may be some hints here of the New Left’s dismissal of the iconography of the Old Left (SDS chose its name partially to distance itself from stereotypes about unions and the working class), but a more probable influence is the strong libertarianism underlying much of the counter culture. For much of the 1960s, libertarian hostility toward government intervention and emphasis on individual rights (which could mean everything from the right to control one’s private property to the right to take LSD) were able to find an uneasy place within the left, though the libertarians would move increasingly right in later decades. Kesey’s novel renders each of the Stampers as a super-human personality, for whom it would be unnatural and perhaps impossible to conform to the demands of a union or the local community. For example, when the old Stamper patriarch loses his arm in a logging accident, one of his sons attaches the severed limb to the top of their house with its middle finger out so that it can continuously flip off the community across the river. But the conflict in the novel stems less from the Stampers’ indifference to the economic hardships they cause others than from the friction between personalities within the family. Bookish college student Leland Stamper returns to help the family in its anti-union scabbing so that he can take his revenge on his older half-brother, Hank Stamper, whose godlike strength and force of presence robbed Leland of his manhood when he was just a boy. Kesey’s long descriptions of Oregon’s wet forest river environment, which threatens to wash away all traces of humanity at any moment, helps elevate this family drama to the level of myth, though, as Tom Wolfe points out, that mythology seems to draw less from ancient Greece than from comic books. Through the novel’s wandering first person narration, which jumps from character to character without announcement, each member of the Stamper family comments on the personalities of the others. An intellectual who has been living with his mother on the East Coast, Leland easily perceives and criticizes his half-brother’s obstinate and brutish masculinity as he plots to sleep with his wife and ruin his business. But despite such passages and others that satirize the Stamper men, the novel ultimately revolves around masculine bonding. Kesey’s first novel originally was to be about collegiate sports, and in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest McMurphy breaks his fellow inmates out of the asylum so they can go on a fishing trip. In Sometimes a Great Notion, the two brothers ignore family tragedy, community interests, and, in the end, the love of women as they carry out their eternal – and perhaps loving - struggle with each other, riding off on a pile of logs detached from the rest of the modern world.

Kirkpatrick Sale: SDS (1973)

2010-07-24T11:53:00.001-07:00

Kirkpatrick Sale’s SDS is an indispensable and exhaustive history of not just Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) but also the American New Left (Verso needs to acquire the rights and re-release this book). Appearing only a few years after SDS’s demise (members of Weatherman were still underground), Sale’s book is insightful and critical while avoiding the condescension of so much other historiography of the 1960s, which presumes to be able to judge between the good sixties and the bad sixties. Sale divides the history of SDS into four periods: “[T]he first, the period of Reorganization from 1960 to 1962 when SDS takes a new name and lays the basis for the shape it was to become; the second, the period of Reform from 1962 to 1965 when SDS tries to make American institutions live up to American ideals; the third, the period of Resistance from 1965 to 1968 when SDS spreads out from coast to coast with open confrontations against these institutions; and the last, the period of Revolution from 1968 to 1970 when SDS sets itself consciously for a thorough – and, for some, violent – overthrow of the American system.” SDS began as the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID). Around 1960, members of SLID decided to change the organization’s name because “industrial democracy” seemed too labor oriented, made recruiting difficult, and held too strong of an association with the dusty politics of the League for Industrial Democracy, SLID’s parent organization. So in January 1960, the name was changed to Students for a Democratic Society. Sale argues this change, noticed by few, “was symbolic of a new attitude within the organization, a new awareness that the American studentry was getting ready to shed its apathy for a resurgent life of activism and that a student organization like SDS could help on its way.” A number of factors influenced this changing position of students: transformations in the social fabric (loosening sexual morals, straining of the nuclear family, etc.); cracks in the economic structure (the “discovery” of poverty, high unemployment for certain parts of the population, inflation, etc.); political apathy turning into hostility toward political corruption and bureaucracy; America’s increasing tendency to take a visibly active and aggressive role on the international scene; a new hostility toward institutions based on the “’delegitimization’ of authority and the ‘deauthorization’ of the entire system”; the growing recognition of the power held by youth, resulting in the creation of a distinct and large “youth market”; and the spectacular rise in the number of college students, so that “In the sixties, for the first time in the history of any nation, there were more students than there were farmers.” SDS initially committed itself to the cause of the civil right movement. A grant from Detroit’s United Automobile Workers Union allowed SDS to hire a “full-time national officer,” Robert Haber, who devoted himself to making SDS an organization that could coordinate local civil rights protests at a national level. Haber’s plans for SDS immediately collided with the reformist, liberal anti-communism of the League for Industrial Democracy, but Haber pushed forward anyway and the conflict between the two organizations was put off, though it regularly resurfaced until there was a final split in 1965. During the 1961-62 school year, SDS largely consisted of Haber working in the National Office producing newsletters, copying pamphlets, and making speeches and Tom Hayden operating out in the field of the civil rights movement. But by “mid-fall SDS claimed a membership of 575 and twenty campus chapters.” At the national conference held in Ann Arbor, it was decided that what the organization needed was not “a single national program” but rather “a shared view of the world,” a manifesto that eventually took the form of The Port Huron Statement. The document was named for the camp “belonging to the United Automobile Workers at Port Huron, Michigan” where a meeting of delegates helped draft the text, though the final statement was not actually completed until a month later. Sale critically points out that much of The Port Huron Statement was unoriginal, drawing heavily from C. Wright Mills or repeating the ideas of liberal reformism, “but what gave it a particular strength was its radical sense that all of these problems were interconnected, that there was a total system of America within which its multiple parts functioned, and that social ills in one area were intimately linked to those in another, so that solutions, too, had to be connected.” The document articulated an “ideology,” a “vision of the future” based on the values of “humanism,” “individualism,” “community,” and “participatory democracy,” and offered a strategy centered on using “the universities as the ‘potential base and agency in a movement of social change.’” Over the next few years, tens of thousands of copies of the document were sent out, so “The Port Huron Statement may have been the most widely distributed document of the American left in the sixties.” Although The Port Huron Statement treated the university as an exceptional space for basing struggle, by 1962 the emphasis on university reform was already being contested. SDS faced two different conceptions of higher education: “Are the universities bases from which assaults can effectively be made on the social system, or are they bastions of that system producing instead its minions? The former impulse leads to the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, to student power, to the explosive rebellions of the campuses; the latter leads to SDS’s ghetto-organizing projects, to the ‘free universities,’ to the ‘dropout’ culture of the youth ghettos, and more.” The question, of course, has never been definitively answered, and would dramatically flare up in different ways throughout SDS’s history, pushing the organization either towards or away from the university. By the 1962-63 school year, SDS also began to face another contradiction that would trouble the organization over the rest of the decade. The paradox: “A student group that wants the growth of decentralized communities where participatory democracy can operate has at its center a single, centralized office.” “SDS almost without even thinking of it became an organization of officers at the top and bureaucratic administrators below, constitutions and bylaws, parliamentary meetings and points of order, conventions and committees, mimeograph machines and official documents, letters in triplicate and bills paid monthly, lists of members and calculations of dues, accounts receivable and payable, mailing lists, files, phones, a central office.” When, as happened many times during the decade, the national office had problems managing time and resources, handling the media (not an issue until 1965), and formulating policies and strategies, the local and regional chapters became increasingly isolated from and even antagonistic to the national organization and leadership. One inadequate solution enacted was to require the national leadership to regularly rotate, so Haber was replaced by Todd Gitlin as president. By 1963, “SDS had succeeded in establishing for itself a solid reputation as the most intellectual student group around, the place where the leaders and ideologues of other organizations went from time to time to forge their separate swords in the fires of debate and intellectuality.” “But it was not known for doing anything on its own, either as a national group or (with few exceptions) in its chapters. That, combined with the organizational limitations of the National Office, chafed increasingly on a number of the SDS in-group, and they began searching for new drives and programs that would energize the membership and circumvent the NO.” The call for a “new insurgency” led to the creation of The Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP), a program for SDS members to move into the ghetto and live amongst and organize poor, unemployed youth. Though it persisted for a few years, ERAP was a notorious failure, with ghetto youths taking little interest in being “organized” by intellectual outsiders. It also caused significant conflict within SDS, as many ERAPers argued that members should forget about school and dedicate themselves “entirely to community organizing.” The “tension between those who wanted to go into the real world and build a Movement and those who wanted to stay and organize in the universities would continue to be felt in the organization in the years to come.” But ERAP radicalized many SDS members, gave SDS a reputation for actually doing things, and taught members valuable practical lessons as they attempted to put their ideas into action. In 1964, Paul Potter was elected president and SDS began to seek out new projects and to experiment with the form of the organization. But that same year also saw the emergence of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the Battle of Berkeley, which opened many students’ eyes to the truth of American society. “During the course of the fight it was discovered that the university did not live up to its claims, but, more than that, neither did the police, the press, and the public, the very personifications of the society: the university proved not to be the home of fair and dispassionate reasoning, the regents showed themselves not to be wise statesmen above pettiness and vindictiveness, the press turned out not to be an unbiased and objective seeker after truth, the police proved not to be efficient agents of justice and servants of the people, and the public at large turned out not to be open to reason, to be willing to listen to another side of a story, to harbor sympathy.” Though still relatively limited in size and capabilities, SDS became viewed as the organization for student groups across the nation to turn to as they extended the fight of Berkeley. But it was the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965 that truly fueled the radicalization of the student movement and quickly prompted demonstrations on numerous campuses as well as a spike in SDS’s membership. SDS’s national office went into full gear in preparation for the large anti-war march planned in Washington D.C., but the organization’s frontism, its willingness to work with a variety of different groups, led to trouble with the League for Industrial Democracy, which ineffectively demanded that SDS sever all contact with communist organizations. By the fall of 1965, the two organizations would divorce over the increasing number of communist members in SDS and other reformist/radical disagreements. Shortly before the Washington march, SDS engaged in its “first official act of civil disobedience”: a “sit-in” in front of a Chase bank in Manhattan, during which protestors were arrested for refusing to disperse. A week later, the first “teach-in” was held at the University of Michigan, and the tactic soon spread across the nation. But “SDS as an organization never promoted [teach-ins] as a part of its over-all strategy. This was not only because the teach-ins were in the main faculty-led and faculty-directed, but because SDSers felt that these were essentially apolitical exercises whose best effect could be only to educate but not to radicalize.” “Without ever even enunciating it or having to make an official decision, SDS indicated by its passive response that it had gone beyond the moderation of the teach-in phase of antiwar politics. It had by now learned bitter lessons about reformism, and it was coming to feel that only with the kind of confrontation and militancy a march represented could America be changed.” At the Washington march, Paul Potter gave his famous “name the system” speech, adding to the strong passions aroused at the event. But mass civil disobedience was contained at the end of the march (SDS itself played a strong role in keeping marchers “in line”), leading to a feeling of disappointment for many. Despite SDS’s bursting into the public’s eyes with the Washington march, the national office decided not to commit SDS to being simply an anti-war organization. Money and organizational problems impaired the effectiveness of the national office, which struggled to develop anti-war policies and strategies and began to alienate many of SDS’s newer members and local chapters. Some members pushed for a new Port Huron to reestablish the organization, but conferences and meetings devoted to that purpose failed to accomplish much. When the government decided to start drafting students using a ranking system, local SDS members organized a sit-in at the University of Chicago that occupied the administration building for five days. The campus administration avoided conflict and waited for the sit-in to slowly die out, but in a faculty meeting shortly after, “the faculty voted to threaten harsh disciplinary action against future sit-ins or campus disruptions, and to put itself unshirkingly behind the administration policy with regard to ranking. The blow was severe, the students hardly believing that two months of work and negotiations and demonstrations and petitions and letters and arguments had produced not one single concession. But since the end of the school year was at hand, and regroupment was now impossible, there was little recourse.” But the sit-in at Chicago revealed that university administrations were “complicit” with the interests of business and government and demonstrated a new willingness by students to directly resist. “The realization of complicity on the part of the university, combined with a realization of how readily it could be confronted, was a crucial element in helping to turn attention back to the campus during the rest of the year.” But as was often the case, the turn towards the university was accompanied by a turn away from it. Around the same time, SDS assisted in the creation of a number of “free universities,” where alternative education could take place outside of traditional institutions. But doubts about free universities soon appeared in the following few years because they may have actually helped traditional universities by moving troublemakers outside and by creating innovative programs that could be co-opted by universities. But, Sale notes, the free universities were important as a significant attempt by the New Left to create a truly autonomous form of education and organization. As SDS continued to grow, the local ranks became increasingly powerful and independent of the national office, though the latter attempted to maintain some control through New Left Notes, a weekly newspaper which started appearing in 1966. Around this time, SDS’s constituency visible changed. The older members, and especially the national leadership, were confronted with “Prairie Power,” a younger generation, often from the Midwest rather than the East coast, that dressed less formally (more facial hair and hippie fashion) and was less versed in the history of the left, more anarchistic and hostile to the national leadership, and impatient for change. Partially in response to the demands of Prairie Power, SDS began organizing at the university level for “student power,” but with an ultimate aim of creating a general radical student movement. So though demands might be immediate at times, it was believed that “Student power in short, was not educational but political.” SDS played a key role in organizing campus protests against military recruiters and visits by government officials. The draft was a key issue that led to what Greg Calvert in 1966 called the move “From protest to resistance” (a phrase Ulrike Meinhof would import into the German New Left). Draft resistance actions spread, and there was a mass draft-card burning in New York City in 1967 as well as more protests about university complicity with the war. But there was still a growing feeling that mobilization in marches and other activities were accomplishing nothing in regards to stopping the war, and that something like “revolution” was on the table at that point. “The problem, as those of the SDS leadership saw it, was how to move more people from personal action to political commitment, how to raise the level of those who were so obviously potential recruits – the draft resister, the campus demonstrator, the antiwar marcher – to that of ‘revolutionary consciousness.’ [Carl] Davidson put it simply: ‘We need to move from protest to resistance; to dig in for the long haul; to become full-time, radical, sustained, relevant. In short, we need to make a revolution. But again, how do we go about it?” SDS came up with two solutions. First, “T-O institutes . . . a queer mixture of the familiar graduate-school seminar, the ERAP communal-living projects, and the political ‘cadre schools’ that Old Left groups like the Communist Party used to run during the summers.” Second, proposals for a new ideology to replace The Port Huron Statement. Theoretical analyses were already being produced in abundance and the journal Radical America was a valuable source for theoretical inquiry. “But the most successful ideological contestant was a concept called ‘the new working class,’” which consisted of people with “technical, clerical, and professional jobs that require educational backgrounds.” The new working class was essential for the functioning and reproduction of modern American capitalism, and, if made aware of its function, could come to play the role of a political vanguard. The theory returned emphasis to the campus as the site of resistance by arguing that students need to start with their own situation. As Sale states its impact: “Liberals operate out of other people’s oppression; the radical operates out of his own.” The summer of 1967 of course saw the beginning of the wave of dramatic political activity that would extend until at least 1970. Sale stops to evaluate the state of SDS at this point. Carl Davidson assessed the group at the time, stating, “We have within our ranks Communists of both varieties, socialists of all sorts, 3 or 4 different kinds of anarchists, anarchosyndicalists, syndicalists, social democrats, humanist liberals, a growing number of ex-YAF libertarian laissez-faire capitalists, and, of course, the articulate vanguard of the psychedelic liberation front.” Davidson also surveyed the composition of a typical SDS campus chapter. He argued 85-90% of the membership were “shock troops,” usually younger undergraduates with anti-intellectual tendencies but strong moral outrage at the American system. 5-10% were the “superintellectuals,” mostly graduate students in Social Sciences or Humanities: “They spell out grand strategies for the chapter’s activities, but will rarely sit behind the literature tables. . . . They join most of the demonstrations, but rarely help make the picket signs . . . Without a doubt some of the most brilliant young people in America today.” Finally, 5% were the “organizers,” those who “do the bureaucratic shitwork (reserving rooms, setting up tables, ordering literature, etc.) or see that it gets done.” In 1967, women began to visibly protest the elitist, male chauvinist leadership of the group, and SDS’s indifference to women’s issues would lead to many women leaving the organization over the next few years. During 1967, repression of the left became even more violent and leftists exhibited an increased tendency to directly resist and even fight back in order to make sure that disruption was successful. As Davidson puts it, “No one goes limp anymore, or meekly to jail. Police violence does not go unanswered. Sit-ins are no longer symbolic, but strategic: to protect people or hold positions, rather than to allow oneself to be passively stepped over or carted off.” This boldness was most clear in the 1967 Pentagon protest, which saw protestors (including SDSers) rushing through barriers and up the steps of the building as well as sneaky mass arrests in the middle of the night (for a firsthand account, see Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night). Despite the formulation of the new working class theory, SDSers, especially the more intellectual ones, were increasingly led to Marxism, which the early generation of SDSers had scorned for its association with the Old Left. Sale admits this shift toward Marx may have had good reasons, but he is skeptical of the tendency to accept Marxism as a readymade ideology. “[T]he SDS leadership began to see itself more and more (in the Marxist phraseology) as a ‘vanguard’ in the impending revolution, or at least as the core of that potential vanguard. The people around the [national office] itself became an increasingly close-knit group: a number of the staff lived and slept together in nearby apartments in a quasi-communal style; they shared drug experiences (marijuana mostly, but also LSD), out of which came, initially at least, a sense of closeness and unity; and they developed their political ideas together both through formal and informal meetings which they held to ‘advance their political education.’” But many SDS members resented and resisted the leadership’s turn toward revolution and Marx, and a split grew between the national organization focusing on revolution and the local chapters dedicated to base-building. Needless to say, 1968 saw protest and resistance appear in almost every possible location and form. Particularly new and newsworthy were the outbursts of political violence aimed at property, including bombings of campus buildings linked to the war. SDS did not immediately embrace such violence, labeling those responsible “adventurists.” “And yet it fascinated, the idea of violence, and as frustration grew, repression grew, the monumentality of the task grew, and its necessity, so did the possibilities of violence.” And then “Columbia” happened. The local Columbia SDS chapter played a large role in articulating an argument about the school’s links to the war and the racism of the university’s plans to expand into neighboring Harlem. SDSer Mark Rudd became a leader of the “action faction” heading the occupations movement. The first occupation received an ambivalent response, and when it seemed like it might fail SDS voted down Rudd’s proposal to take more buildings. But when other organizations successfully took over other buildings, SDS turned around and joined in supporting the wave of occupations. After the occupations were violently ended by the police, the liberal wing of the student body took back power from the more radical side, aided by the fact that groups like SDS lacked a coherent counter-proposal. “But three momentous experiences which underlay the Columbia rebellion did linger and did much to shape the revolutionary politics that SDS was edging toward. The first was the experience of those who encountered the communal life – thrown together with like-minded men and women, sharing, meeting, loving, eating, defecating, sleeping, talking, and deciding together, with no authority, no rules, no force to limit them, and making the decisions that affected their own lives.” “The second experience grew out of the alliance with black students . . . and the strength this gave to the white students’ cause. The blacks were slow in joining the issues at Columbia (it was SDS, for example, which instigated the gym and Martin Luther King protests) and insisted on going their own way once they had . . . but their mere presence gave the rebellion legitimacy, confidence, and power.” The third experience “had to do with the students’ taking a political view of themselves, and their university, and the society beyond, confronting the true implications of the old SDS slogan, ‘A free university in a free society.’” As the complicity of the administration and the faculty, as well as the liberal student body, was made clear, it became obvious that something more than reform was needed. As one SDSer stated, “’a free university’ will only exist after we have won a ‘free society.’” In order to undermine the SDS call for “two, three, many Columbias,” college administrations across the nation tried to offer friendly “restructuring” plans that would win over the support of faculty and students by offering more shared governance. But such efforts did little to stop the wave of campus demonstrations that immediately followed Columbia and the further radicalization of the student movement. By the 1968 SDS convention, “revolutionary” was a preferred adjective and statement of identity. “By the middle of 1968 there were many thousands of people who could, with no sense of hyperbole, agree with the SDS convention paper which argued ‘our movement is an element of the revolutionary vanguard painfully forming from the innards of America.” But at this time, Progressive Labor, a Maoist group with strict political lines emphasizing the organization of the working class, made its first strong bid for control of SDS. Despite its small numbers, Progressive Labor was able to acquire a great deal of power through its ability to order its members to vote in a bloc. An attempt was made to kick Progressive Labor out of SDS at the East Lansing convention, but it failed, and the final conflict between the two was put off for another year. Many groups on the left were planning protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and a number of first-generation SDSers were leading such efforts, but SDS’s national leadership at first did not support protesting the convention because it considered electoral politics a lost cause. However, as momentum for the protests grew, SDS reluctantly sent out some lines of communication and support. It was important that SDS didn’t neglect the event because police brutality at the convention, as seen on the streets and in the news, did much to further radicalize the left. “For SDS, the lessons of Chicago were profound, and each of them seemed to confirm the rightness of the move into revolution. Chicago proved once and for all, for those still needing proof, that the country could not be educated or reformed out of its pernicious system, even by establishmentarian reformers like McCarthy. It showed that even resistance, open and defiant resistance, was not enough to wrest changes, for the institutions of American society, grounded in violence, would use violence in their own defense when the threat was regarded as serious enough.” But Sale underscores that SDS in many ways failed to effectively to take advantage of the growing strength of the radical movement. The organization was partially crippled by bitter internal divisions at every level over issues such as dope or no dope, action or education, revolution or base-building. Sale is particularly critical of how the focus on revolution may have alienated SDS from its constituency. Although Sale admits the intelligence and reasons for the SDS’s leadership turn to revolution, he is critical of its failure to connect with potential supporters: “At a time when many young people wanted some explanations for the failure of electoral politics, SDS was led by people who had long since given up caring about elections and were trying to organize for revolution. To students just beginning to be aware of their own radicalization and their potential role as the intelligentsia of an American left, SDS offered the wisdom that the only really important agents for social change were the industrial workers, or the ghetto blacks, or the Third World revolutionaries. For college students who swarmed into chapter meetings ready to take on their administrations for any number of grievances, SDS provided an analysis which emphasized ‘de-studentizing,’ dropping out, and destroying universities. And for youth in search of an integrative ideology to supplant the tattered theories of corporate liberalism, SDS had only the imperfectly fashioned tenets of a borrowed Marxism and an untransmittable attachment to the theories of other revolutionaries.” By the fall of the 1968, repression had also began to take its toll on SDS and the New Left, with government spying and infiltration, police arrests, college administration sanctions, and a variety of forms of liberal cooptation sapping some of the strength of the left. For better or worse, “After years of demanding to be taken seriously, activists found that they were.” Political protest, resistance, and violence continued in 1969, the extent of the last showing just how thoroughly “violence had become a real part of the lexicon of American left-wing politics.” SDS officially remained ambivalent about the wave of political bombings and property destruction, but the organization’s revolutionary fervor made the group sympathetic most of the time. Around this time, SDS committed itself to building a “revolutionary youth movement” and also began to make contacts with other groups, particularly the Black Panthers. But the leadership was leading the organization into a corner. “How ironic it all was: at precisely the time of the greatest explosion of the American left in all of the decade, SDS, its leading organization by every index – size, fame, geographical scope, energy – was gradually but unmistakably isolating and diminishing itself, losing its student constituency, its women, its alumni, failing to connect with the high schools, the soldiers, the workers. The SDS revolutionaries were on the barricades, but they had forgotten to look behind: their troops were no longer following.” Everything fell apart at the 1969 summer convention. During the convention, issues of New Left Notes passed out included an article with the title, taken from a Bob Dylan song, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” The Weatherman statement was directly aimed at the growing power of Progressive Labor, and called for a centralized revolutionary party while it positioned white American radicals as comrades of the struggles of Third World guerillas and supporters of “black liberation struggles.” Sexist statements made by Black Panthers about “pussy power” at the convention gave Progressive Labor an opportunity to take the moral high ground and criticize the Panthers as well SDS’s growing support for black nationalism. A written statement by the Panthers later read at the convention attacked Progressive Labor, and a group of SDS leaders spontaneously split the convention by leading non-Progressive Labor members out of the hall, resulting in two SDSs, and in reality the death of SDS. The concluding chapter of SDS’s history focuses on Weatherman, which would soon attempt to lead a violent direct attack on the system during the October “Days of Rage” and after. Of course protest and resistance continued without the SDS, and perhaps in even greater number in the next few months. Yet Sale argues, “It was impossible, of course, to stop the activism of college campuses . . . but now there was no easy way for that activism to be infused with politics, with the kinds of understanding that from the beginning SDS had worked so hard to project and transmit. A campus might explode with anger over a tuition increase, but there would be no common appreciation of how that connected with the role of the university in a corporate society; a lengthy campaign against ROTC or university investments might excite a college, but there would be little understanding of the links with imperialism; students across the land could get outraged at the perilous conditions of the ecology without ever seeing the nature of the capitalist system and how it works to produce and prolong that peril. Without something like an SDS, there would be no ready political mooring; without a political mooring, activism goes adrift.”

Jean-Francois Lyotard: The Postmodern Explained

2010-07-22T19:32:00.001-07:00

The Postmodern Explained collects a series of letters that do indeed offer a relatively straightforward explanation of various aspects of Lyotard’s theory of the postmodern. Though drawing from the ideas of his later work such as The Differend, Lyotard returns to and clearly discusses many of the points of The Postmodern Condition, including the modern/postmodern distinction, the collapse of the West’s grand narratives, and the problem the multiplicity of language games causes for the act of legitimation. One of the first letters notes the widespread contemporary interest in “liquidating the legacy of the avant-gardes.” But in a society where authority takes the name of capital, avant-gardes no longer have to be replaced by mediocre realism. What Lyotard calls “transavantgardism” dominates not by rejecting the avant-garde but by neutralizing it through eclecticism: “Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: you listen to reggae; you watch a western; you east McDonald’s at mid-day and local cuisine at night; you wear Paris perfume in Tokyo and dress retro in Hong Kong; knowledge is the stuff of TV game shows.” But, Lyotard argues, “this realism of Anything Goes is the realism of money: in the absence of aesthetic criteria it is still possible and useful to measure the value of works of art by the profits they realize. This realism accommodates every tendency just as capitalism accommodates every ‘need’ – so long as these tendencies and needs have buying power.” In contrast to this “realism of money,” Lyotard offers his well known theory of art and the sublime. Drawing quite heavily on Kant, specifically The Critique of Judgment, Lyotard argues that the mind is capable of having an Idea of something that can never be concretely experienced. That is, it is possible to have an Idea of the “unpresentable.” The sublime occurs “when the imagination in fact fails to present any object that could accord with a concept.” Modern art, according to Lyotard, devoted itself “to presenting the existence of something unpresentable,” and accomplished this task largely through the use of “formlessness, the absence of form, [as] a possible index to the unpresentable,” and through “empty abstraction” that is “itself like a presentation of the infinite, its negative presentation.” What distinguished modern from postmodern art is the modality of the approach to “the sublime relationship of the presentable with the conceivable.” Modern art exhibits a “nostalgia for presence“ whereas postmodern art places emphasis “on the power of the faculty to conceive.” “So this is the differend [the irresolvable difference of opinion]: the modern aesthetic is an aesthetic of the sublime. But it is nostalgic; it allows the unpresentable to be invoked only as absent content, while form, thanks to its recognizable consistency, continues to offer the reader or spectator materials for consolation and pleasure.” But the sublime involves pleasure and pain. So “The postmodern would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into new presentations – not to take pleasure in them, but to better produce the feeling that there is something unpresentable.” The postmodern therefore must be understood in the future anterior, since the artist will “work without rules and in order to establish the rules for what will have been made.” Many of the letters in the middle of the volume take up the collapse of the West’s “grand narratives.” Lyotard almost salvages this over-used and over-extended argument by using Kant to identify a specific set of important grand narratives of modernity, which include, “The progressive emancipation of reason and freedom, the progressive or catastrophic emancipation of labor (source of alienated value in capitalism), the enrichment of all humanity through the progress of capitalist technoscience.” These grand narratives stand above others because “they look for legitimacy . . . in a future to be accomplished, that is, in an Idea [in the Kantian sense] to be realized. This Idea (of freedom, ‘enlightenment,’ socialism, etc.) has legitimating value because it is universal. It guides every human reality. It gives modernity its characteristic mode: the project.” Needless to say, although technoscience still keeps rushing forward and further destabilizing humanity, for Lyotard “the project of modernity” has been “liquidated.” The French title of Lyotard’s book translates as “postmodernism explained to children,” and the letters are addressed to the children of his friends and colleagues. But it is hard to imagine many children fully comprehending Lyotard’s references to Adorno’s negative dialectics, Habermas’ appraisal of the project of modernity, and Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Some of the later letters in the volume reveal how the title might be disingenuous. Lyotard explicitly turns to the topic of childhood when he brings up Adorno’s idea of “micrologies,” such as the tales of childhood in Benjamin’s One Way Street, which register an event that is an initiation, that “cut[s] open a wound in the sensibility,” a wound that “has since reopened and will reopen again, marking out the rhythm of a secret and perhaps unnoticed temporality.” And later, when speaking of the difficulty of teaching philosophy, which requires a kind of autodidacticism, to a young generation already indoctrinated into a world of exchange, narcissism, and competition, Lyotard singles out for praise Vincennes (University of Paris-VIII) and its non-traditional students: “Maybe there is more childhood available to thought at thirty-five than at eighteen, and more outside a degree course than in one. A new task for didactic thought: to search out its childhood anywhere and everywhere, even outside childhood.”