tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-71576407482604429882024-03-13T22:32:13.237+01:00The world (and books)Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.comBlogger224125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-20748332097970393052024-02-07T12:48:00.007+01:002024-02-08T23:59:37.404+01:00Is the Communist Manifesto a Promethean text?<p>The <i>Communist
Manifesto</i> is often seen as a locus classicus of Marxist Prometheanism. Its opening sections on the bourgeoisie and its capacity to revolutionize the world
– accomplishing “wonders far surpassing the Egyptian pyramids” – are usually
understood as a enthusiastic paean to the release of humanity’s productive capacities. It
goes without saying that this reading of the text fits well with the customary celebration
of the development of the productive forces in later, orthodox Marxism – a
celebration resting on trust, central to so-called historical materialism, in the progress of technology as a motor of
history. It is, however,
possible to detect a certain ambiguity in the manifesto, and a case could be
made for exercising some caution before equating the undeniable productivist
enthusiasm that colours the section on the bourgeoisie with the trust in
productive forces characteristic of orthodox Marxism. Consider, for instance,
the following lines from the manifesto:</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></p><blockquote>The bourgeoisie, during its rule of
scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive
forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s
forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture,
steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents
for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the
ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces
slumbered in the lap of social labour? </blockquote><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-GB">Commentators like
to remark that Marx and Engels here unwittingly seem to express admiration for
the bourgeoisie. Yet for all their magnificence one wonders if these lines really
amount to a celebration of either the bourgeoisie or the productive forces. Isn’t
the bourgeoisie rather portrayed as a demoniacal, hellish force, impressive in
the same way that Satan is impressive? Marshall Berman (in <i>All That Is Solid Melts into Air</i>) catches this demoniacal
side of the manifesto’s portrayal of the bourgeoisie when he compares it to
Faust, the prototypical modernist who can only remake the world with the help
of Mephisto. The relentless whirl of destruction and creation that capitalism
sets in motion would then not so much be a feat to be repeated and emulated by
socialism, as a bewitching spectacle of an unfolding catastrophe – something
akin to what happens in Goethes’ poem about the sorcerer’s apprentice who is
unable to control the powers that he has unleashed (“Die ich rief, die Geister,
/ Werd’ ich nun nicht los”). J</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">ust a few lines below the quoted passage, Marx and Engels in fact explicitly
refer to this poem when they write that bourgeois society, which “has conjured
up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who
is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called
up by his spells”. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">To be sure, there are other passages
in the manifesto that counterbalance the </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">impression
that the forces of production are demonical and not to be trusted. It seems
quite clear that while Marx and Engels deem the bourgeoisie unable to control
these forces rationally, they are quite optimistic about the prospects of
mastering these forces rationally in a socialist society. It is significant,
however, that only two very brief sentences can be found in the entire manifesto
that clearly celebrate the productive forces as something that the proletariat too, after its victory, should promote (they
thus write that once</span><span lang="EN-US" style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">
the proletariat has become the ruling class, it will “increase the total
productive forces as rapidly as possible”, specifying on the next page that this
involves extending factories, cultivating waste-lands, and improving soil).</span><span lang="EN-US" style="text-indent: 14.2pt;"> </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">Furthermore, one should note that even as
they make these pronouncements, they never portray the proletariat as <i>compulsively</i>
obliged to follow such a course. While “[t]he bourgeoisie cannot exist without
constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production”, the proletariat may
choose to do so freely but unlike the bourgeoisie it is never forced to do so by any heteronomous
logic or lawlikeness in society. It is thus only in a very qualified
sense that the manifesto can be read as “prometheusian”. In view of its
ambiguities, a more reasonable interpretation might instead be that Marx and
Engels caution against an uncontrolled release of these forces and call for a
society capable of their rational mastery.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">With these remarks, my aim is not to deny the </span><span style="text-indent: 18.9333px;">enthusiasm or even fascination </span><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">that colours the manifesto’s portrayal of the bourgeoisie’s transformative powers. But I do question whether this enthusiasm is
really based on an embrace of the productive forces per se. Marx and Engels are
in fact quite open about the existence of another, quite different source of their
glee, namely the fact that the “everlasting uncertainty” and “constant
disruption of all social relations” would be so destructive of religious and
other traditional beliefs that people would finally be forced to “face with
sober senses the real conditions of their lives”. In other words, what appears
to be praise of the productive forces may very well be better understood as
praise of their disruptive power, of the shock they deal to traditional
culture, which awakens the mind and dispels religious and ideological haze.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">It was for this reason that Walter Benjamin too would later celebrate modern
technology – namely because of the shock effect of modern techniques of reproduction,
of photography, and glass architecture, and its power to bring about an “awakening
from the nineteenth century”. As the example of Benjamin shows, celebrating
technology for its shock effect is not at all the same thing as endorsing its
continuous growth or any idea of continuous “progress” resting on the development
of the productive forces. On the contrary, that idea of such growth or
progress was always anathema to Benjamin. Appreciating
the shock effect of technology is thus quite compatible with rejecting productivism
or Prometheanism.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">The manifesto, then, points in two
directions. Apart from the passages that anticipate the glorification of
productive capacity typical of later orthodox Marxism, there are also passages
that, in my reading, make more sense as a paean to the shock-effect and that emphasize the demonic rather than the beneficial side of technology.
Whereas the former passages affirm the domination over nature by means of
technology, the latter seem rather to stress the need for a rational mastery,
or taming, of technology itself - a mastery that the bourgeoisie is incapable of but which the proletariat might accomplish. In Benjamin’s words, such rational mastery
would not be over nature per se, but rather over the </span><i style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">relation</i><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;"> to nature.
Crucially, such mastery is not necessarily productivist or Promethean, but can
equally well take the form of <i>abstaining</i> from exploiting nature: rather than
increasing our reliance on technological progress, it might try to decrease it.
Rather than promoting growth, it might aim for degrowth, or, in other words,
for an economy that would be free from the compulsive acceleration and accumulation
typical of capitalism.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></p><br /><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;"><br /></span><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI1NmhNpC4SD_YEx09na2AgtT390-Sd5tDsX9Xu6HwoMBVC_gv0UQ5vnURbqNZKqB3EBDL0twfWseD6C-356IgcywUZldmAz6zXBpnzd5pBwzNj6GenLqlYDcFlCB_QdN_uzgi45J1lf31a0qEdIGmV5f9Fshabh5U9uZ_L60yNlodaFFFPecQuYh3mTPY/s828/1.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="828" data-original-width="536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI1NmhNpC4SD_YEx09na2AgtT390-Sd5tDsX9Xu6HwoMBVC_gv0UQ5vnURbqNZKqB3EBDL0twfWseD6C-356IgcywUZldmAz6zXBpnzd5pBwzNj6GenLqlYDcFlCB_QdN_uzgi45J1lf31a0qEdIGmV5f9Fshabh5U9uZ_L60yNlodaFFFPecQuYh3mTPY/s320/1.jpg" width="207" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Goethe'z Zauberlehrling, by Erich Schütz</td></tr></tbody></table><br />Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-40135294072121007242024-02-07T12:21:00.002+01:002024-02-08T08:51:10.880+01:00Roadside picnic and not being able to think<p>The Strugatsky brothers' <i>Roadside Picnic</i> (Orion House, 2012) is very good. This is an early example of a sci-fi novel in the postapocalyptic mood. The scientists helplessly try to understand an alien technology, but it remains a riddle. A mood of resignation sets in. The zone around the mysterious object is shunned and quaranteened. Left as a landscape of poisonous ruins, dangers, death. Stalkers gather the stuff illegally. </p><p>Reading the final scene I had the sensation of reading something quite new, something rarely expressed in literature. What was it? It's not about the religious language, which is commonplace. It has to do with the protagonist, Red, and the sudden inability to think which he experiences. To start with, I think its clear that he embodies an experience and a longing that is easy to recognize for anyone who's been to elementary school, in particular in a class where many have a working class background. I am reminded of the "lads" in Paul Willis' <i>Learning to Labour</i>, whose very rebelliousness gets them stuck in low-wage jobs or unemployment. Red is similar: stuck in unfavorable structural conditions and constantly chased by moralizers and the police. He is tough, violent and courageous but at the same time a humiliated underdog – just listen to this passage</p><blockquote>But how do I stop being a stalker when I have a family to feed? Get a ob? And I don’t want to work for you, your work makes me want to puke, you understand? If a man has a job, then he’s always working for someone else, he’s a slave, nothing more… (p. 192).</blockquote>One of his primary experiences is that of constant humiliation. He is forced to pretend, bend and bow, try to say pleasing things to people in authority, humiliated by life, by bad luck, by being "born as riffraff." His forays into the zone has thrown his family life into disarray: his daughter Monkey is a mutant and his undead father has risen from the grave to live in his apartment. He spends time in prison, drinks heavily and often uses violence (but only against other men). But he is not broken: he has his toughness, his hatred and his will to get even, and above all he has moments of generosity, compassion and courage - even though he berates himself for those moments. Despite knowing how dangerous it is to be kind in a hard, unfair and ungrateful world, he instinctively helps people around him, like Kirill and even the undeserving Gutalin. He's "good," as his friend Noonan says. <div><br />Near the end, when he and Arthur, after hellish hardships, aching and death-weary, arrive at their goal — the golden sphere in the zone that is said to to fulfill one's innermost desires — he is confronted for the first time with the need to think, and discovers that he cannot. He cannot think in the sense of really finding the right words for what needs to be done and that need to be said. I recognized myself in it. That was well described. Before his eyes, the young Arthur has just died, after foolishly running towards the sphere while jubilantly shouting: "Happiness for everyone! Free!"<br /><blockquote>Well, that’s done, he thought unwillingly. The road is open. He could even go right now, but it’d be better, of course, to wait a little longer…. In any case, I need to think. I’m not used to thinking – that’s the thing. What does it mean – “to think”? “To think” means to outwit, dupe, pull a con, but non of these are any use here… <br /><br />All right. The Monkey, Father… Let them pay for everything, may those bastards suffer, let them eat shit like I did… No, that’s all wrong, Red. That is, it’s right, of course, but what does it actually mean? What do I need? These are curses, not thoughts. He was chilled by some terrible premonition and, instantly skipping the many arguments still lying ahead, ordered himself ferociously: Look here, you redheaded asshole, you aren’t going to leave this place until you figure it out, you’ll keel over next to this ball, you’ll burn, you’ll rot, bastard, but you aren’t going anywhere. <br /><br />My Lord, where are my words, where are my thoughts? He hit himself hard in the face with a half-open fist. My whole life I haven’t had a single thought! (p191) </blockquote>Yet, ever the tough guy, he drags himself towards the sphere, dizzy and sweaty, as his thoughts go into overdrive.<br /><blockquote>And he was no longer trying to think. He just kept repeating to himself in despair, like a prayer, “I’m an animal, you can see that I’m an animal. I have no words, they haven’t taught me the words; I don’t know how to think, those bastards didn’t let me learn how to think. But if you really are – all powerful, all knowing, all understanding – figure it out! Look into my soul, I know – everything you need is in there. It has to be. Because I’ve never sold my soul to anyone! It’s mine, it’s human! Figure out yourself what I want – because I know it can’t be bad! The hell with it all, I just can’t think of a thing other thant those words of his – HAPPINESS, FREE, FOR EVERYONE, AND LET NO ONE BE FORGOTTEN!” (p. 193) </blockquote>And what exactly is thinking if not this? <br /><br /><div>So what - whose - predicament is being addressed here? The working classes? Not only them. The book is science fiction, but not of the "hard" kind. There is no trust in progress here, no naive belief in humanity's mission to conquer the stars. Humanity as such is humiliated. Hence the title, the "roadside picnic". Whatever arrived didn't even bother to try to make contact, didn't perhaps even notice human civlization. It left its refuse behind, just like picnicers leave their dirty garbage behind on the roadside, for insects and other lifeforms to explore. So in a sense, a more general audience is intended here. The mass of humlliated people? And today, in view of the dead end of our industrial civilization, maybe that is us. </div></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8RIaKnv_NSJPxrQC26R3KAoco4LuVrXzMPJkd6VnjDidPxZ8c5BrT63FKpyncMZ98lwutQyyh8aIr2pcJkti679VGghFMYPm7Fb0rwcsMLQPeFeq1Fz7g8a7PQdjeAv2jVZE4jXoC5s3-fNTIKCrUknpol6XYZ9gin4bauDxwO882VECpTwoTJ9x4mw8Z/s499/1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="325" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8RIaKnv_NSJPxrQC26R3KAoco4LuVrXzMPJkd6VnjDidPxZ8c5BrT63FKpyncMZ98lwutQyyh8aIr2pcJkti679VGghFMYPm7Fb0rwcsMLQPeFeq1Fz7g8a7PQdjeAv2jVZE4jXoC5s3-fNTIKCrUknpol6XYZ9gin4bauDxwO882VECpTwoTJ9x4mw8Z/s320/1.jpg" width="208" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div>Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-5873661793900798002023-10-22T11:23:00.009+02:002023-10-22T22:54:34.171+02:00Moshe Dayan and Girard<a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/when-moshe-dayan-delivered-the-defining-speech-of-zionism/">This </a>is an extraordinary document. I am reminded of René Girard’s argument that culture is founded on a denial of mimetic, fratricidal violence that perpetuates the violence. The opening words are important. Moshe Dayan says: “Let us not hurl blame at the murderers. Why should we complain of their hatred for us? Eight years have they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and seen, with their own eyes, how we have made a homeland of the soil and the villages where they and their forebears once dwelt”. That was written in 1956. Since then, not eight, but 76 years have passed. Dayan’s acknowledgment that the Palestinians are right to hate seems as true today as it was then. <div><br /></div><div>But then, the speech goes on to argue that precisely for that reason – precisely for the reason that the Palestinians are so justified to hate – Israel must never ever be lulled into thinking that peace is possible with them. The surging sea of hatred behind the walls, he writes, means that “without the steel helmet and the maw of the cannon we shall not plant a tree, nor build a house.” The speech turns into a grim paean for “the barbed wire fence and the machine gun”, and the ones to blame, he suggests, are not the Palestinians so much as “the ambassadors of conspiring hypocrisy, who call for us to lay down our arms”. </div><div><br /></div><div>Why is this document so extraordinary? Not just because it is a “defining speech of Zionism”, as the commentator points out, but because it is so totally bereft of any moral justification of the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. The reference to “millions of Jews, murdered without a land” certainly justifies Jewish hatred of Germans and Europeans, but hardly of Arabs. And the reference to “children” who “shall not have lives to live if we do not dig shelters” of course immediately invites the objection: how about Palestinian children? </div><div><br /></div><div>So what the speech amounts to is an asounding self-acknowledged barbarism: a grim affirmation of unceasing, ruthless struggle, despite the knowledge that the victims are in the right. It does away with denial, but not with violence. What Israel must do, it suggests, is to face the violence on which the state is founded and affirm it, despite its horror and its immorality. I can’t help thinking, while reading it, that Dayan must have realized how repulsive his own stance was, as well as the stance of Israel.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-62014234874974866282023-08-27T11:27:00.006+02:002023-08-27T12:02:53.117+02:00The antinomy of hopeJust some thoughts here about Rebecca <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/26/we-cant-afford-to-be-climate-doomers" target="_blank">Solnit's article</a>. It made me think of Kant, in whose writings the disconnect between freedom and the empirical world is mirrored in a similar disconnect between hope and the empirical world. To both him and Solnit, hope is obligatory in whatever circumstances: it is never too late.<div><br /><div>The paradox is that, to inspire hope, we must always think that it is not too late to act. But empirically, it is self-evident that things can be lost that one had hoped to keep and preserve. And not only material things, but also living beings, relations, and ways of life. So situations where it is “too late” can certainly exist.</div><div><br />Against Benjamin’s idea that redemption must include the dead, Horkheimer replied that the dead are dead.</div><div><br />The disconnect is stubborn: it is true that it is never too late – in whatever circumstances, there will always be meaningful things to do, small actions that can make a difference, if not saving the world then at least make things a little less bad. But it is equally true that we often experience that it is too late. The disconnect has emotional consequences: shock, grief, traumatization, depression.</div><div><br />Even when the earth turns into a wasteland – Beckett’s rubbish heap – it will not be too late. This is the vindication of the Panglossian hope ridiculed by Voltaire. Even if we do not claim that the world is the best of all possible ones despite all catastrophes, we are obliged to think that things can always improve, regardless of how bad they are. We end up in Solnit’s: “I respect despair as an emotion, but not as an analysis”.</div><div><br />But at the same time, such an attitude is both cruel and cynical, especially in view of those who mourn what has been lost. Those insisting on hope – like Kant or Solnit – can easily appear unfeeling.</div><div><br />Can the paradox be overcome? No side is right: we are confronted with an incompatibility, or antinomy. <br /><br /></div><div>To hope is fine, but this must be a hope that proceeds through despair and through a loss of hope, a “hope beyond hope”. A hope that can bud even in the rubbish heap.</div><div><br />The problem with Kant and Solnit is that they never allow for giving up hope. For hope to be meaningful, it must be disappointable, as Bloch writes. Only a hope that can be lost is respectful of what people hold dear. </div></div>Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-57688610330088537662022-08-16T22:28:00.002+02:002022-08-16T22:31:19.555+02:00A sensitive creature: On thinking<p><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">My thinking, when its fruitful and rich, seems
to run on two tracks. Apart from the conscious thoughts, which are like a kind
of flotsam, there is an underground current. The latter is not thought in the sense
of being conscious, but it is </span><i style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">mind working</i><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">. I feel it as something dark
and moving, something that is active although it is opaque. It’s like when you’re
on a boat: you can only feel the sea indirectly, but you know that it’s
powerful. Now here comes the important thing: you must acknowledge and respect
the movements of this sea and enhance your sensitivity to it! Conscious
thoughts on their own are seldom interesting. They’re like a melody without
accompaniment; a melody that is banal and sterile on its own. The unconscious
current that carries them, by contrast, is always productive, </span><i style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">pregnant</i><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">
with things that you feel, in time, will appear in the form of splendid conscious
ideas. It is this feeling of something </span><i style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">taking shape</i><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;"> that makes thinking enjoyable.
For you to think well, the interplay between the conscious and unconscious
elements is indispensible.</span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">Try to encourage this interplay! This goes for
all thinking; also for the thinking you engage in while reading a book, talking
to others, playing chess, watching a film or listening to music. Don’t focus
too much on what is explicit or foregrounded. To focus only on the words, tones
or conscious thoughts is a mistake that will prevent you from doing them
justice. They are important but insufficient on their own. For them to be
fruitful, they must be like raindrops falling into the vast sea of your unconscious.
There must be a dialogue between them and this sea. This dialogue may seem
bizarre, like a dialogue in a movie where you can only hear the words of one of
the persons speaing while the words of the other person have been silenced, but
don’t fear these silences. They’re </span><i style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">active</i><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;"> silences, and they need to be
there for thinking to be </span><span style="text-indent: 18.9333px;">worthwhile</span><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">.</span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">The dark undercurrent of the unconscious is a
sensitive creature. It easily gets scared. Try to be kind to it, invite it and
encourage it. Find places that it likes, such as the cemetery where I sit and
read books in the summer or the road by the canal in Kyoto where I used to walk
so many eveings when I lived in Japan. </span><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;"> </span></p>Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-1108899811791187622022-07-03T17:31:00.014+02:002022-08-26T19:37:02.093+02:00A problematic novel: Stamboul Train<p>Yesterday I finished reading Graham Greene's <i style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 14.2pt;">Stamboul Train</i><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 14.2pt;">, published in 1932. Yes, it’s been criticized for its antisemitic stereotypes. But
no, it didn’t prevent me from appreciating the book. Greene calls it “entertainment”,
but it’s a far cry from the infantile formula of fast-paced adventure,
wholesome heroes, and villains who get what they deserve. Clearly, the book is
not anti-semitic in a conventional sense, despite what some commentators seem to claim. The Jewish character, Carleton Myatt, is sympathetically
portrayed; he is certainly not a caricature, but a complex character that one gets
to know as one keeps on reading. Possessing conscience and acting as decently
as anyone can expect, he is a better man than most. Furthermore, Greene
consistently portrays anti-semititism as a trait of unlikable characters, while
the good and sympathetic ones are free from it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 14.2pt;">Yet the book </span><i style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 14.2pt;">is</i><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 14.2pt;"> problematic. Metaphorically
it fuses anti-capitalism, a </span><i style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 14.2pt;">sort</i><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 14.2pt;"> of anti-semitism and Orientalism on the
one hand, and Christianity and socialism on the other. Let me start with Orientalism,
which may not be very foregrounded but which is metaphorically present in the journey
itself, which takes the passengers from Ostende to Constantinople. This journey, I suggest, is a descent into Hell. Each trainstop
marks a new and deeper hellish circle. Occasional moments of happiness – mostly
connected to the squalid love story of Myatt and the sickly dancing girl Coral Musker
– only serve to thicken the sense of impending calamity. Clear premonitions
tell the reader that the girl’s dreams of happiness will be dashed. Meanwhile increasingly
repulsive people board the train. The vicious and hateful journalist Mabel
Warren boards the train in Cologne, only to be replaced by the cold-blooded murderer
Josef Grünlich in Vienna.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 14.2pt;">The book is pervaded by the squalor, insecurity
and restlessness of the interwar years. But above all, it’s pervaded by a
Catholic sense of </span><i style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 14.2pt;">sinfulness</i><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 14.2pt;">. This sinfulness, I suggest, is key to understanding
the book as well as one of its central characters, Dr Czinner (pronounced “sinner”).
Czinner is an emigree revolutionary, a former medical doctor brought up by poor
parents who devoted himself to helping the poor in the slums of Belgrade before
turning to communism. Five years ago he barely escaped the police and has been
living in exile in Great Britain ever since. Now he is tormented by guilt and
is returning incognito to his homeland. Along the way he learns that the revolt
in Belgrade he had hoped for has failed but he nevertheless decides to continue
his journey and stand trail (a good sentence here: “I am afraid, he told
himself with triumph. I am afraid”).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 14.2pt;">Please stop reading here if you don't want spoilers. Mabel Warren recognizes Czinner in Cologne and
by telegraphing the news brings about his arrest at the bordercrossing of
Subotica. Czinner’s trial and death are clearly modelled on those of Christ. His self-doubt
and vacillation bring Getsemane to mind. He bears his verdict with serenity and
relief ("There was no need to decide anything. He was at peace... He was powerless now and happy" ). Two “Roman” soldiers accompany him as witnesses. Grünlich, who is imprisoned
together with him, is a Barabbas-like figure who gets away unscathed. There are
even faint suggestions that the doctor’s political message might spread despite
his death in almost total obscurity, since one of the soldiers seems receptive to
it and since Coral, who was with him before he died, will be interviewed by
miss Warren who wants “exclusive” rights to the story.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 14.2pt;">After the horror of Subotica, the book ends
with a seemingly incongruous idyllic chapter on Constantinople. Here Myatt, who
during the entire journey had been the victim of anti-semitic slurs, is at home. Excelling at money and negotiations, the despised Jew turns princely.
Fortune smiles at him. He resolves his businesses successfully and finds a beautiful
prospective wife, Janet Pardoe, who unlike Coral is a lady of “genuine worth”. This
last chapter is the most lighthearted in the book and at first sight offers a happy ending. Yet in terms of the book’s structure, it is the culmination
of Hell, its innermost pit. The happy ending is made possible by forgetting.
Myatt forgets Coral, just as Janet forgets her previous attachments to miss
Warren and the writer Savory (whom she had met on the train). If the train ride was suffused by squalor and
insecurity, here the narrative emerges into a sunlit zone of capitalist triumph.
The happy ones are the rich gathering at the luxury terraces of Pera Palace,
joined by the murderer Josef who is seen waving his hand from one of the tables.
If there is anti-semitism in the book it consists in the metaphorical
designation of this blissful and faithless paradise, clearly a fallen world, as
a Jewish world. Here Greene taps into an ancient anti-semitism, which is not
racist in a modern sense but has religious roots: the Jew is the one who closes his ears to God and enjoys life as usual – despite
the crucifixion and despite the suffering of the poor going on around him. Myatt forgets his entire journey and by doing so merges
metaphorically with the Orient as well as with Hell and capitalism. Yet in condemning this forgetfulness, the novel commits its own. Despite its
seeming anti-capitalism, it displaces the object of its criticism,
capitalism, from its home in the west to its geographical and cultural Other. </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 14.2pt;"> </span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg438adn4Yj-1jtOhj5f3pUwqq_jnc3GgHlqPekrahJ-4qAWbLmvFN5jtGLuA25EZzOFsVsnDSpXFuDwpvVn7J8kNlcf3wVHZoFBVmwSKLKBmcmKH7KKlijWSvjfzmvyRoC58INURU0nKqpgyTA_qlYS3S2RdcaH17oIhXvcEexLf4aObeVHINgdxcTKw/s950/1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="950" data-original-width="950" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg438adn4Yj-1jtOhj5f3pUwqq_jnc3GgHlqPekrahJ-4qAWbLmvFN5jtGLuA25EZzOFsVsnDSpXFuDwpvVn7J8kNlcf3wVHZoFBVmwSKLKBmcmKH7KKlijWSvjfzmvyRoC58INURU0nKqpgyTA_qlYS3S2RdcaH17oIhXvcEexLf4aObeVHINgdxcTKw/s320/1.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><br /></span><p></p>Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-34496782094925913352022-02-02T17:57:00.016+01:002022-02-03T23:43:45.290+01:00Kant, the sublime, and catastrophe<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhqx2-ztt0PCrRwEY2-7-qR_usxfw_JloCU4meZ1xjN5MFcDUZEdJ8jmRcUJbggBbjM8YBsYRHOi9m6ok9ewcMAKX_EW7xm5FrHoBrPxrA0zQfgCUR4oesDBw1vZvXFUn2s9F1685Sce62VKIxFfTMWpHdF088hapjQByjBMkY6u2h7LjXNMU4cQvERdQ=s499" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="334" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhqx2-ztt0PCrRwEY2-7-qR_usxfw_JloCU4meZ1xjN5MFcDUZEdJ8jmRcUJbggBbjM8YBsYRHOi9m6ok9ewcMAKX_EW7xm5FrHoBrPxrA0zQfgCUR4oesDBw1vZvXFUn2s9F1685Sce62VKIxFfTMWpHdF088hapjQByjBMkY6u2h7LjXNMU4cQvERdQ=s320" width="214" /></a></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I want to write down some thoughts about the relation between the sublime and catastrophe that struck me when reading Kant’s <i>Critique of Judgement </i>last year. While reading, I kept looking for ways to make his argument fruitful for thinking about ecological catastrophe. That quest seemed justified firstly by </span>the fact that Kant himself uses natural phenomena as his primary examples of sublime things, and secondly by the fact that the
sublime refers to experiences that surpass our ability to grasp them through our
senses or our understanding – and that, surely, is an important quality
of many catastrophes.</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I will first present what I see as the (provocative) core of Kant's argument, namely that natural forces that appear to overwhelm us can give us pleasure since they confirm the superiority of reason. I will then argue that his analysis can be made fruitful for thinking about ecological catastrophes, but only if we drop his assumption that sublimity can only be appreciated from a contemplative standpoint where we don't need to fear for our safety. I will also underpin my argument by briefly discussing how the concept of the sublime relates to history, morality and feelings such as grief and humliation. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Reason and the pleasure of the sublime</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">First, here is how Kant describes the experience of the sublime. It's a vivid description that brings out how <i>pleasurable </i>this experience can be.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk91373411;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"></span></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">[C]onsider bold, overhanging and, as it were, threatening rocks,
thunderclouds piling up in the sky and moving about accompanied by lightning
and thunderclaps, volcanoes with all their destructive power, hurricanes with
all the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean heaved up, the high
waterfall of a mighty river, and so on. Compared to the might of any of these,
our ability to resist becomes an insignificant trifle. Yet the sight of them
becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a
safe place. And we like to call these objects sublime because they raise the soul's
fortitude above its usual middle range and allow us to discover in ourselves an
ability to resist which is of a quite different kind, and which gives us the
courage [to believe] that we could be a match for nature's seeming
omnipotence. (Kant 1987[1790]: 120)</span></blockquote>Kant contrasts the sublime with the beautiful. The sublime, like the beautiful, is pleasing. But while beauty relates to the object's form, the sublime is connected to formlessness and unboundedness. Unlike the beautiful, the sublime is not playful and not compatible with charms. It not only attracts but also repels the mind, meaning that the pleasure of the sublime is a "negative pleasure" (ibid. 98f). Rather than with lawful movement, it is "in its chaos that nature most arouses our ideas of the sublime, or in its wildest and most ruleless disarray and devastation" (ibid. 99f). More specifically, "nature is sublime in those of its appearances whose intuition carries with it the idea of their infinity" (ibid. 112). <div><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;"><br /></span></div><div><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;">But how can something that humiliates the mind's powers of understanding give rise to a feeling of pleasure? Kant's answer is stimulatng but provocative: while the sublime (unlike beauty) exceeds our sensibility and understanding, our very ability to feel it <i>confirms reason's superiority over nature</i>. This is because the </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;">capacity of thinking it requires a
faculty in the human mind that is itself supersensible. </span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;">If </span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;">the human mind </span><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;">is </span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;">nonetheless to <i>be able even to
think </i>the given infinite without contradiction, it must have within itself
a power that </span><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;">is </span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;">supersensible [...]. For only by means of this power and its idea do we, in
a pure intellectual estimation of magnitude, comprehend the infinite in the
world of sense <i>entirely under </i>a concept (ibid. 111f)</span></span></blockquote><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;"></span><p></p>Our appreciation of the sublime in nature is similar to how, in mathematics, the mind masters phenomena that exceed our capability of sensation, such as the infinite, by forming concepts about them. The pleasure in regard to the sublime thus arises from the superiority of reason over the faculty of sensibility. While for the imagination, the sublime appears "like an abyss" in which it fears to lose itself, for "reason's idea of the supersensible" it is "not excessive but conforms to reason's law to give rise to such striving by the imagination" (ibid. 115).</div><div><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;">Kant's solution to the riddle of why the sublime can be pleasurable rests on his division of the mind in two faculties, <i>understanding </i>and <i>reason</i>, where the former refers to judgements about the empirical world (as we experience it through our senses) while the latter refers to the power of inference (which is not limited by our senses). </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;">Whereas the beautiful refers us to understanding, the sublime refers us to reason. This explains why </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;">the sublime both attracts and repels. While humiliating our senses and our understanding, it "is at the same time also a pleasure, aroused </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;">by </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;">the fact that this very judgment, namely, that even the greatest power of sensibility is inadequate, is [itself) in harmony with rational ideas" (ibid. 115).</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> Or more concisely: </span><i style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">“Sublime is what even to be able to think proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;">” (ibid. 106). </span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;"></span></span></p><blockquote><span lang="EN-US"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;">Indeed, who would want to call sublime such things as shapeless mountain masses piled on one another in wild disarray, with their pyramids of ice, or the gloomy raging sea? But the mind feels elevated in its own judgment of itself when it contemplates these without concern for their form and abandons itself to the imagination and to a reason that has come to be connected with it - though quite without a determinate purpose, and merely expanding it - and finds all the might of the imagination still inadequate to reason's ideas. (ibid. 113)</span></span></blockquote><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"></span></p><blockquote><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Thus
any spectator who beholds massive mountains climbing skyward, deep gorges with
raging streams in them, wastelands lying in deep shadow and inviting melancholy
meditation, and so on is indeed seized by <i>amazement </i>bordering on terror,
by horror and a sacred thrill; but, since he knows he is safe, this is not actual
fear: it is merely our attempt to incur it with our imagination, in order that
we may feel that very power's might and connect the mental agitation this
arouses with the mind's state of rest. In this way we [feel] our superiority to
nature within ourselves, and hence also to nature outside us insofar as it can
influence our feeling of well-being (ibid. 129)</span></blockquote><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>Imagination figures in two roles here. In its first, it makes us see our dependence on physical things. But the sublime gives it a new role, namely "to assert our independence of natural influences, to degrade as small what is large according to the imagination in its first [role]" (ibid. 129). </div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">The extent of Kant's provocativeness should be clear by now. Today, the environmental movement has taught us to be wary of Enlightenment reason and its belittlement of nature, but his argument unabashedly aims at driving home how triflingly </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">little </i><span style="font-family: inherit;">nature means in producing the sensation of the sublime. To Kant, the awe that sublime natural phenomena evoke is actually a disguised awe for the ability of our own reason to elevate us above the violent natural forces. Indeed, he goes out of his way to argue that it is actually the mind that is sublime, rather than the natural objects themselves (ibid. 105). </span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24px;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hence the feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for our own vocation. But by a certain subreption (in which respect for the object is substituted for respect for the idea of humanity within our[selves, as] subject[s)) this respect is accorded an object of nature that, as it were, makes intuitable for us the superiority of the rational vocation of our cognitive powers over the greatest power of sensibility (ibid. 114)</span></blockquote><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hence sublimity is contained not in any thing of nature, but only in our mind, insofar as we can become conscious of our superiority to nature within us, and thereby also to nature outside us (as far as it influences us). Whatever arouses this feeling in us, and this includes the <i>might </i>of nature that challenges our forces, is then (althougb improperly) called sublime. (ibid. 123)</span></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">So: the sublime humiliates part of us (understanding and sensibility, the part of us that is tied to our status as empirical beings) but at the same time elevates another part (reason, our capacity to think independently of the senses). A surprising <i>volte-face </i>has occurred: the tremendous might of nature only serves to fuel the pleasurable sensation of reason's superiority to the senses. In worshipping storms and mountains we worship reason. Instead of elevating the object, the sublime elevates the subject. </span></p><p><i style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></i></p><p><i style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Isn't this hubris? </span></i></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">But what is this, we may ask, if not blatant, unabashed idealism? Isn't it precisely the kind of hubris that the environmental movement has warned us against - the hubris of a reason conceited enought to congratulate itself for its superiority to nature? As usual, Kant defends himself well. He himself takes up the objection that it is presumptuous to claim superiority for reason. Isn't the proper attitude to the sublime, he asks, one that should be borrowed from the religious attitude to God, an attitude of prostration, submission, and humility? </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;"></span></p><blockquote><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;">[I]n tempests, storms, earthquakes,
and so on [...] we usually present God as showing himself in his wrath but also in
his sublimity, while yet it would be both foolish and sacrilegious to imagine
that our mind is superior to the effects produced by such a might [...]. It seems that here the mental attunement
that befits the manifestation of such an object is not a feeling of the
sublimity of our own nature, but rather submission, prostration, and a feeling
of our utter impotence [...]. It seems that in religion in general the
only fitting behavior in the presence of the deity is prostration, worship with
bowed head and accompanied by contrite and timorous gestures and voice; and
that is why most peoples have in fact adopted this behavior and still engage in
it. (ibid. 122)</span></blockquote><p></p>Here it is easy to associate with today's ideas of the wrath or revenge of nature and the environmentalist call for humility and contrition. Kant's counterargument, however, is that contrition and fear of punishment is not intrinsically connected with sublimity. <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;">A person who is actually afraid and finds
cause for this in himself because he is conscious that with his reprehensible
attitude he offends against a might whose will is at once irresistible and just
is not at all in the frame of mind </span><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;">[</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;">needed] to admire divine greatness, which
requires that we be attuned to quiet contemplation and that our judgment be
completely free. (ibid. 122)</span></span></blockquote><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;"></span><p></p>In the same way, we cannot appreciate the sublime in nature if we are afraid. "For we flee from the sight of an object that scares us, and it is impossible to like terror that we take seriously" (ibid. 120). Kant, then, defends himself by claiming that our appreciation of the sublime never rests on real fear. It always presupposes a "safe place" from which we, as spectators, can contemplate the forces of nature. Just as we only appreciate beauty when we approach it in a contemplative frame of mind - without "interest", as he puts it - so we only appreciate the sublime when we are safe from danger.</div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">This argument may sound plausible, but it raises questions. Is it true that we don't appreciate the sublime in moments of thrilling risk and danger? Aren't those the moments when we, in fact, have the strongest and most intense experiences of the sublime? To the extent that "being safe from danger" is part of Kant's definition of the sublime, it is of course impossible to refute him. One can argue, however, about whether it is an appropriae and fruitful definition. What reasons did Kant have for making it and are those reasons sound?</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">I can't see that Kant had any good reasons for limiting the sublime to what we can experience in a contemplative state of mind from a "safe place". I even believe that it goes against the overall thrust of his more important argument about how the sublime proves the superiority of reason. To put it in a nutshell, if reason can only prove its superiority when we are in a "safe place", then it doesn't really prove its superiority at all. A reason that needs physical security to operate is hardly superior to natural forces. In other words, whereas Kant usually talks about "us" as beings capable of reason, here he suddenly - and unwarrantedly, I believe - slips into an identification with mere understanding. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Instead of arguing that sublimity requires an absence of physical danger, wouldn't Kant have been more consistent if he had argued that reason is </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">always </i><span style="font-family: inherit;">in a "safe place" simply by virtue of being reason? That, I believe, would have been in keeping with his overall theoretical edifice, in which the distinction between nature and freedom is fundamental. Nature is defined by causal relations grasped theoretically by understanding, while freedom is grasped practically by reason. Reason operates by principles belonging to a supersensible realm that cannot be reduced to nature. The mere presence of physical danger should not be able to threaten the integrity of reason, since reason is defined by its capacity to operate in a supersensible realm, regardless of whether our physical bodies are safe from danger or not. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">My view is therefore that the assumption that the sublime requires a contemplative attitude can be dropped without hurting the overall thrust of Kant's argument. Dropping it would allow for the possibility of experiencing the sublime even in the midst of catastrophes and moments of great danger. Above, I raised the question whether risks can enhance the feeling of sublimity. Isn't it indeed precisely in the ability to enjoy danger and overcome fear that reason's superiority is shown most clearly? Isn't there even an art of creating or inviting sublimity by playing with risks, as suggested by examples such as mountain climbing, drugs and gambling? If we allow for the idea of sublime </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">courage</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, which I think we should (and here Kant seems to agree, as seen in his discussion about the veneration for soldiers, ibid. 122), then the idea that sublimity requires physical safety must surely be dropped. Rather than interpreting Kant as claiming that sublimity requires a safe standpoint where we don't need to feel fear, I prefer to interpret him as saying that it requires an ability to </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">overcome </i><span style="font-family: inherit;">fear. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">The latter interpretation would be in keeping with Kant's suggestion that "war" can inspire feelings of sublimity (ibid. 122). This statement is one of the rare instances where Kant finds examples of the sublime in history rather than nature</span><span style="font-family: inherit; mso-spacerun: yes; text-indent: -18pt;">. It helps us relativize the distinction between history and nature which is otherwise a recurring feature of his thinking. Formlessness, excess and violence exist not only in nature but of course also in history, where they are manifested in an endless series of catastrophes, shocks and traumas. Just as nature can give rise both to beauty and sublimity, one may find beauty in history (for instance by its aesthetization in the form of narratives) as well as sublimity, as for instance in the fortitude and spiritual strength that allow people to rise after a crushing defeat or catastrophe. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24px;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24px;">Let us return to the objection about humility. My point is not that feelings of utter impotence, fear, contrition and humliation should be made part of the concept of the sublime. I believe that Kant is right that that would be to stretch the concept too far - but right for the wrong reasons. It is not because the sublime requires a contemplative stance or a safe distance that he is right, but simply because such feelings are not a necessary part of the concept of the sublime. The sublime, I suggest, does not require a "safe place" and, contrary to what Kant suggests, it is eminently </span><i style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24px;">compatible </i><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24px;">with feelings of fear, humiliation and so on. It is thus not the </span><i style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24px;">absence </i><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24px;">of such feelings - or the absence of physical dangers that might produce them - that defines the sublime, but the ability to </span><i style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24px;">overcome </i><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24px;">them and rise above them. This overcoming is made possible not by physical safety, but by a shift from the standpoint of understanding to the standpoint of reason. From the standpoint of understanding, we view ourselves as natural beings subjected to the causality nexus of the empirical world. From the standpoint of reason, we view ourselves as free beings capable of thinking and acting independently of that causal nexus. </span></div><div><i style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></i></div><div><i style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></i></div><div><i style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Kant as environmentalist </span></i></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;">Following my critical remarks above, I will now defend Kant. The interpretation I suggested above should, I believe, make his position more palatable to environmentalists. In particular it should make it easier to rebut the objection that it represents Enlightenment hubris and insensitivity to nature. Despite his provocative idea that the pleasure of the sublime derives from a realization of reason's superiority over nature, there is little of hubris in this idea. As physical beings and as creatures of understanding we are subjected to nature and other causal forces around us. It is only as rational beings that we have a chance of rising above those forces. The sense of superiority obtained in sublime moments cannot be taken for granted, but is an uncertain and perhaps fleeting achievement that requires us to overcome feelings such as fear and humiliation. Furthermore, this superiority does not connote any actual physical mastery over nature or any other parts of the empirical world, but is at best a mental mastery, an inellectual relief or satisfaction that at least our capacity as free and rational beings is still unharmed by the violent and formless forces around us. </span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;">This is well expressed in the following passage:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;"></span></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: -18pt;">[T]</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;">hough the irresistibility of nature's might makes us, considered as natural beings, recognize our physical impotence, it reveals in us at the same time an ability to judge ourselves independent of nature, and reveals in us a superiority over nature that is the basis of a self-preservation quite different in kind from the one that can be assailed and endangered by nature outside us. This keeps the humanity in our person from being degraded, even though a human being would have to succumb to that dominance [of nature]</span><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;">. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;">Hence if in judging nature aesthetically we call it sublime, we do so not because nature arouses fear, but because it calls forth our strength [...] to regard as small the [objects] of our [natural] concerns: property, health, and life (ibid. 120f)</span></span></blockquote><span style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-indent: -18pt;"></span></span><p></p>I would have preferred to write that nature, in sublime moments, <i>both </i>arouses fear <i>and </i>calls forth the strength to overcome fear. But apart from that, I think that this passage dovetails nicely with what many environmentalists are saying. Kant is clear about the fact that nature can be a source of catastrophes, of immense devastation concerning human life, goods and health. The affinity to environemtalism is even more evident regarding how we should respond to the present ecological crisis. The predominant call of environmentalism today is that we should wake up to our responsibility to act as free and rational beings. We need to rise to the occasion and exercise our freedom by breaking out of the passivity of our ordinary routines. In other words, we need to prove the superiority of our reason by breaking free from the seemingly inexorable causal forces driving us towards doom.*</div><div><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;">Kant presents the sublime as an eye-opener that can help us achieve this intellectual awakening, a reminder of our capability to act as free and rational beings even when we are confronted with catastrophes so immense that they appear to surpass understanding. That a link exists between sublimity and action is shown by the fact that sublime moments always include such a reminder, unlike moments of beauty which we can enjoy as contemplative spectators. What we enjoy in sublime moments is not so much the self-congratualitory sense of the superiority of reason per se, as its link to the freedom that we can discover within ourselves even in the most difficult circumstances. </span></div><div><i style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></i></div><div><i style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></i></div><div><i style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Should we really aestheticize catastrophes?</span></i></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;">We can now turn to a common objection to applying the concept of sublimity to catastrophes. The argument is that it is inappropriate and frivolous to apply such a concept </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;">to catastrophes since it turns them into aestheticized objects of pleasure. Here, for instance, is the philosopher Günther Anders, writing on the topic of nuclear apocalypse:</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">I am explicitly avoiding the term ‘the sublime’ here, which Kant uses in <i>The Critique of Judgment </i>to name that which exceeds all proportiones humanas, all ‘human proportions’. […] The instant of the nuclear flash, the view of the annihilated city of Hiroshima, and the prospect of its inevitable repeat are anything but ‘grandiose’ or ‘sublime’. (Anders 2019: 140 n1)</span></blockquote><p></p>But this objection seems more pertinent to the attempt to find <i>beauty </i>in catastrophes. Regarding the sublime, however, I think that two points can be made that show that it doesn't necessarily involve any frivolity or making light of suffering.</div><div><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;">Firstly, unlike beauty, the </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;">sublime reminds us of our responsiblity to act as moral, free beings. The pleasure that accompanies it does not disregard suffering. On the contrary, it is a pleasure we feel when we are able to </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24px;">rise to the occasion and act as free and rational beings despite the adverse circumstances. This is not so </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;">different from when the eco-philosopher <a href="https://www.exopermaculture.com/2014/04/02/joanna-macy-on-how-to-prepare-internally-for-whatever-comes-next/" target="_blank">Joanna Macy</a> asserts that even if the future looks bleak, we can still </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">think: “How lucky we are to be alive now—that we can measure up in this way”.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Secondly, although it may seem self-evident it deserves to be pointed out that </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24px;">the sublime doesn't exhaust our possible reactions to catastrophe. Far more common is simply pain, grief and despair. </span><i style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-style: normal;">There's nothing sublime or pleasurable about such experiences, which </span></i><i style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-style: normal;">capture the devastating and traumatic impact of catastrophes. </span></i><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;">It is not catastrophe per se that is pleasurable but our (rarely exercised ) ability to respond to it as free and morally responsible beings, using our faculty of reason. </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;">This is also why </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;">feelings such as grief or fear should be conceptually distinguished from the sublime. They differ from the sublime, not because we are not in a "safe place" when we feel them, but because the sublime is defined by the ability to rise above such feelings. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;">This second point also points to the </span><i style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;">limits </i><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;">of using the concept of the sublime for understanding our reactions to catastrophes. While it is useful for theorizing a certain response to catastrophes, to many people such a response will not be possible. It presupposes a subject that remains intact, despite the catastrophe. But traumatized people cannot be expected to elevate themselves over the catastrophe. </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24px;">Nor is there any moral obligation that they should do so. No one can tell a person to stop grieving. Grief can, however, be a step towards recovery. </span><i style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The idea of rising after a defeat hints at the fact that sublimity may be the result of a process that requires time and in which feelings of grief, impotence and humliation may be central ingredients. Such feelings are not sublime in themselves, but they are not incompatible with sublimity. As Kant points out, humility can coexist with sublimity to the extent that it is guided by reason: </span></i><i style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-style: normal;">“Even humility… is a sublime mental attunement, namely voluntary subjection of ourselves to the pain of self-reprimand so as gradually to eradicate the cause of these defects” (ibid. 123). This is echoed in the environmentalist call for contrition, which can be seen as a call to human beings to reflect on and atone for the wrongs they have committed against nature. That sublimity can coexist with feelings of this kind is not surprising, considering that </span></i><i style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-style: normal;">we are creatues both of understanding and reason. Kant's argument </span><span>in nuce</span><span style="font-style: normal;"> is that what humiliates the former provides an opportunity for elevating the latter. </span></i></div><div><i style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></i></div><div><i style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></i></div><div><i style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Is the concept of the sublime useful for thinking catastrophes? </span></i></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24px;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24px;">As physical beings, we are vulnerable to </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24px;">the might and violence of forces that can </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24px;">destroy our lives, our health, our property, and all the things that we cherish. </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24px;">But sublime moments make us see these things as "small", thereby reminding us that we are also </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24px;">rational beings, partaking in the supersensible realm of freedom. This is the core of Kant's argument. It</span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24px;"> is not an idea of reason's ability to subjugate nature materially. Instead, it accepts the tremendous force of nature in the realm of materiality, but asserts that all is not lost when this material realm is shattered in catastrophe. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;">So can Kant's concept of the sublime be made fruitful for thinking about enviornmental catastrophe? The answer is yes, but only if parts of his argument are modified. Firstly, more than Kant we probably need to pay attention to history as an arena of the sublime next to nature. After all, history has a far greater role in producing the natural phenomena that could be seen as sublime than in Kant's days, and the same can be said of the repercussions of environmental destruction on history in the form of a catastrophes. Secondly, we must drop his assumption that the sublime can only be appreciated from a "safe place", as contemplative spectators. In today's ecological catastrophe, no such safe place exists. Thirdly, we probably need to emphasize more than he did that sublimity is an uncertain achievement. Most catastrophes wil simply produce pain, grief, fear and traumatization rather than sublimity. But despite this, the idea of the sublime may well be indispensible for thinking about catastrophes since it indicates the possibility of eye-opening experiences that awakens us to freedom and moral responsibility. </span></div><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24px;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -24px;"><i>References</i></span></p>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />Anders, Günther (2019) “Language and End Time (Sections I, IV and V of ’Sprache und Entzeit’)” (tr. Christopher John Müller), <i>Thesis Eleven</i> 153(1): 134-140.<br /><br />Hamilton, Clive (2017) <i>Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene</i>, Cambridge Polity Press.<br /><br />Kant, Immanuel (1987[1790]) <i>The Critique of Judgement</i> (tr. Werner S. Pluhar), Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co. <br /><br />Macy, Joanna (2014) “It Looks Bleak. Big Deal, It Looks Bleak”, Exopermaculture.com, posted on April 2 2014 by Ann Kreilkamp; <a href="https://www.exopermaculture.com/2014/04/02/joanna-macy-on-how-to-prepare-internally-for-whatever-comes-next/">https://www.exopermaculture.com/2014/04/02/joanna-macy-on-how-to-prepare-internally-for-whatever-comes-next/</a> (accessed 2021-02-06). <br /><br />Sloterdijk, Peter (1987) <i>Critique of Cynical Reason</i>, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. <br /><br /><br />* This is of course an extremely common exhortation among environmentalists. An eloquent example is Hamilton (2017). Outside of environmentalism, Sloterdijk (1987: 130ff) expresses a similar idea in his idea of the bomb as the Buddha of the West. </span><div><br /><div><span style="text-indent: -18pt;"><br /></span></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><div>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><br /><br /></div></div></div></div>Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-57167951912253928952022-01-16T03:30:00.011+01:002022-01-16T11:44:00.712+01:00Woland's courage <p>I recently reread Mikhail Bulgakov's <i>The Master and Margarita </i>(Penguin 2016), which I read for the first time in high school. What impressed me most that time was the brooding, unhappy figure of Pilate. He who longs for nothing more than to meet Yeshua Ha-Notsri again, the mad philosopher who had made the outrageous claim that all people were good and whom he had sentenced to death. I've never forgotten Pilate's dream, in which the two of them are reunited and happily walk along a moonlit path, discussing endlessly with each other. </p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">They were arguing about something very complex and important, and neither of them could refute the other. They did not agree with each other in anything, and that made their argument especially interesting and endless. (p. 319)</p></blockquote><p>To me this <i>is </i>a glorious picture of happiness.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiX-3nCEmtzUY62R8enUP3dXH3PzNwMBEUqQ14QWSElxnHWxcp19qKFGXT7dBaMC9g7oBJN8pHHmiUdRz1Hrf7zcXMvYJC6xJZ2tLuerEtrwCBS8_ktK05abWtqBVFIdDZFdlRkzgRvo4byz5k5EL4CpjoGvXfQx_P1IcXBTKjTNzuCOoSAjkm4fXl9dA=s564" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="564" data-original-width="564" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiX-3nCEmtzUY62R8enUP3dXH3PzNwMBEUqQ14QWSElxnHWxcp19qKFGXT7dBaMC9g7oBJN8pHHmiUdRz1Hrf7zcXMvYJC6xJZ2tLuerEtrwCBS8_ktK05abWtqBVFIdDZFdlRkzgRvo4byz5k5EL4CpjoGvXfQx_P1IcXBTKjTNzuCOoSAjkm4fXl9dA=s320" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Vyacheslav Zhelvakov, illustration for <i>The Master and Margarita </i>(Pilate)</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">I still love the Pilate chapters for their dark, psychological portrait of a tormented man, but this time I found myself much more drawn to the parts of the book in which Woland (Satan) and his clownish-sinister entourage take centre stage. The chapters on the meeting by the Patriarch Pond and the late-night talk in Satan's room after the great ball are especially delightful - partly because they're funny and partly because they're so rich in interpretative possibilties. </span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">While reading I couldn't help thinking of Stalin and the oppressive circumstances under which Bulgakov was working in the 1930s. Especially in the early part of the novel, I felt that Stalin was everywhere - in the ’mysterious
disappearances’ from Apartment No. 50 in chapter 7 (which made me recall the many sudden "disappearances" in the 1930s which Robert Conquest describes in <i>The Great Terror</i>); in Ivan’s "splitting in two" in chapter 11 (which made me recall the absurd conversions displayed at show trials), and so on. By explaining these phenomena not by Stalinist terror but by black magic, Bulgakov satirically turns Stalin into a devil and life in the Soviet Union into a realm of the supernatural.
Laughter becomes serious, a refusal to accept the forgetfulness of God in a totalitarian
system (I write "God" here, but "conscience" might work just as well). As the translator writes in his introduction, the subversive nature of laughter in Bulgakov's novel hints a a kinship with Bakhtin. I imagine that the freedom, laughter and happiness in the atmosphere surrounding Woland must have been a mental breath of fresh air - a force for sanity even - to Bulgakov in the maddening circumstances in which he was writing. The novel's two famous catchphrases - "manuscripts don't burn" and "cowardice is the most terrible of vices" - acquire their subversive radiance precisely against the background of repression. So does the statement, often repeated in the novel, that Moscow has been invaded by "unclean powers". Didn't Bulgakov sneak in those words at least in part for the sheer pleasure of being able to utter them in the midst of a totalitarian society, even while </span><span style="text-indent: 18.9333px;">pretending to speak of Woland?</span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">Let me try to develop my interpretation a bit. To see clearer how the novel makes sense of this totalitarian background, I think Greimas and his semiotic square can be helpful. </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgX3z82X5qZ4oR-qMmSi6amEmuI8od9QsRNK-f6trPf6CbpSu7Fx7slLvcd4_PJzQt8wulg4FXzoqUZTFQXSE1Ofi0DCO_R28qHyvRm1MKiW-JxYX4VXhmh14H-GdDzPE63jzbFFaCTRi4wiARY89kof-u4JHDzRzJWkxq9X4zVofnm0-38zAuWiByxmw=s1015" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="704" data-original-width="1015" height="278" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgX3z82X5qZ4oR-qMmSi6amEmuI8od9QsRNK-f6trPf6CbpSu7Fx7slLvcd4_PJzQt8wulg4FXzoqUZTFQXSE1Ofi0DCO_R28qHyvRm1MKiW-JxYX4VXhmh14H-GdDzPE63jzbFFaCTRi4wiARY89kof-u4JHDzRzJWkxq9X4zVofnm0-38zAuWiByxmw=w400-h278" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">The idea I want to try out here is that </span><span style="text-indent: 18.9333px;">the relation between courage and power is the novel's central theme, or at least that they are fundamental to its "meaning universe". </span><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">That cowardice is the worst of vices is repeated several times in the novel, most memorably by Yeshua on the cross (p. 305). According to a footnote by the translator, Bulgakov also told a friend that cowardice was the worst of vices "because all the rest come from it" (quoted on p. 410 n7). As for power, it is a pervasive presence in the relations depicted in the novel. For instance, an enormous asymmetry of power is the most striking feature of Satan's and Pilate's relations to others around them. </span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">Lets see where the novel's characters can be mapped onto the square. Margarita is courage at its purest. Throughout the second half of the novel, she is a truly glorious and delightful heroine. Although a bit nervous at first - and who wouldn't be when faced with the devil? - she soon learns to face all dangers in high spirits, including Woland himself who even pays homage to her for her courage - "That's the way!", he joyfully exclaims (p. 282). </span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">Margarita's courage is married to love, but <i>not </i>to power. In this, she is like the innocent and naive Yeshua, whose fate lies in Pilate's hands, but who despite this refuses to bow to his power and who remains full of concern for others even while suffering on the cross. While lacking power, both Margarita and Yeshus possess the courage not to give up their love. There's not a trace of cowardice in either. To be sure, their fates are different. Margarita's final triumph contrasts with Yeshua's crucifixion. But their fates are not as different as it might look. Being crucified is the price paid for courage in the face of power. Metaphorically, crucifixion is what writers such as the master and Bulgakov himself had to face for producing works that were unpalatable to the authorities. Having chosen life with the master, Margarita would have faced crucifixion herself if it hadn't been for Woland's helping hand. Although she achieves "peace" for herself and the master at the end, it is significant that it is not in <i>this </i>world that this final triumph becomes possible, but</span><span style="text-indent: 18.9333px;"> - just as in Yeshua's case - in a </span><i style="text-indent: 18.9333px;">beyond</i><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">. </span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 18.9333px;">Incidentally, the parallel between Margarita and Yeshua is underscored by the similar lines they use to comfort the ones they have saved. Thus Yeshua tells Pilate, in the latter's dream, that "[n]ow we shall always be together" (p. 320), and Margarita says to the Master, as Satan finally grants them peace: "And you will no longer be able to drive me away. I will watch over your sleep" (p. 384).</span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 18.9333px;">The prime representative of cowardice is my old favourite character Pilate. He</span><span style="text-indent: 18.9333px;"> shows why courage is so important to Bulgakov. Courage is needed in a totalitarian system to escape perdition. Or perhaps one should say: to avoid becoming part of the general badness of any society (including those societies in which we, the readers, happen to live). Pilate's fault was precisely that the lacked the courage to follow his conscience. </span><span style="text-indent: 18.9333px;">As he explains, how could he, the procurator of Judea, "ruin his career" for the sake of a mad philosopher (p. 320)? The opportunists of the literary establishment who attacked the master and drove him to insanity are like tinier versions of Pilate, unable to ruin their careers by behaving decently. </span><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">Just as Margarita och Yeshua combine courage and powerlessness, Pilate and the literary vultures combine cowardice and power. The result is corruption, a corrupt, evil power that kills the best in its possessors and that turns into a trap since they lack the courage to give it up. </span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">The opposite of power - powerlessness - is best represented by the master, who lets himself be defeated and broken by the literatuy establishment. Losing belief in his novel and in himself, he escapes into self-chosen confinement in a mental ward. </span><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">Unlike Margarita and Yeashua, he lacks not only power but also courage (by combining the two negatives, he represents what Greimas called the "neutral term"). It is clear, I think, that he also represents a predicament experienced by the masses, the common people in a repressive society, who need to act cowardly to survive. In the novel, people like Annushka, the secret informer Aloisy Mogarych and the tenant association chairman Bosoy seem like good examples of this. The nameless master may of course also represent some part of Bulgakov himself.</span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">Somewhat surprisingly, the utopian possibilities generated by the novel's semiotic universe find their outlet in the dark prince, "messire" Woland, who incarnates the "complex term" that combines the two positives, courage and power. Not only is he nearly all-powerful ("Nothing is hard for me to do", p. 361), he is also clearly not a coward. We know that from Milton, of course ("And courage never to submit or yield / And what is else not to be overcome?", as the spiteful Lucifer exclaims on Mount Niphrates). Yes, there is much of Milton's Satan in Woland (Bulgakov refers to Goethe's Mephisto in his epigraph but Woland is not just a simple reiteration of Mephisto, who lacks Woland's grandeur and munificence). Woland is a prince and a rebel, a despiser of cowardliness (recall how contemptuously he refers to Matthew as a "slave", ibid.). Importantly, he is a force of subversion of the powers that be and thereforce also a source of hope. </span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">If I'm right then Woland is </span><span style="text-indent: 18.9333px;">an "imaginary solution to a real contradiction", as Fredric Jameson put it</span><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;"> - a utopian projection of the longing for a synthesis of good things that are hard to reconcile in reality. </span><span style="text-indent: 18.9333px;">That he is a projection is shown by his ambiguity: he is both the evil of this world and the one who redeems us from it, Stalinist terror and the one who saves us from Stalin. It is in order to resolve the theological nicities of this paradox that Bulgakov refers to Mephisto, the spirit that "wills evil and eternally works good", but that reference seems to me to be very much like a smoke screen: clearly much of the havoc that Woland wreaks on Moscow is good in itself, a sort of liberating destruction. </span><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">The true evil, by contrast, is the deadening hand of the status quo, the falsity and general badness of the system as it is. This evil has little or nothing to do with Woland and is instead represented by the neutral term, a society in which people can only survive by becoming "cowards". Not even those who possess power within this fallen society are free, but, like Pilate, trapped by it. Courage is also of little use, unless supernatural forces lend a helping hand. </span><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">So the people awaits a </span><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">powerful, courageous, and non-existent savior. </span><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;"> </span></p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjgipLzPLg8m7BTZ2SXEqtxoPd_5rO52IVoSCmrnr0azzH5dj0Z7fASBm7bXiGJq9w-8lBKvH5bdKTISZZPk40_xm8fQIP_nnoUMWTtulJHzp3_ybVq-S8jK-357DInFCWUnf8ZWe-gBn4dyQlxSQYsQkgsb1idGNYLAk3rx0fZVSNRee6BgqnWnkpIuw=s748" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="748" data-original-width="564" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjgipLzPLg8m7BTZ2SXEqtxoPd_5rO52IVoSCmrnr0azzH5dj0Z7fASBm7bXiGJq9w-8lBKvH5bdKTISZZPk40_xm8fQIP_nnoUMWTtulJHzp3_ybVq-S8jK-357DInFCWUnf8ZWe-gBn4dyQlxSQYsQkgsb1idGNYLAk3rx0fZVSNRee6BgqnWnkpIuw=s320" width="241" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Marcin Minor, illustration for <i>The Master and Margarita</i> (Behemot)</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><span style="text-indent: 14.2pt;"><br /></span></p>Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-55951553755672385852020-09-08T13:08:00.019+02:002021-01-06T21:36:22.680+01:00Ecological war-communism?<div class="separator">I haven't yet read Andreas Malm's recent and exciting-looking book (<i>Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency</i>), but I will soon. Meanwhile, here are my thoughts on <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">an interview he gave for <i>Jacobin</i> </a>earlier this summer. He presents a great diagnosis of the COVID-19 crisis so far, and I agree with much in it – for instance when he points out that social democracy has no concept of catastrophe. But ecological war-communism? My take is that, yes, a massive state intervention to stave off climate catastrophe is needed, but it is just as unrealistic to expect it to succeed as it is to put hope in market mechanisms. Why? Because such intervention goes against the interests of the elites that run not only the economy but also the state. We are therefore more likely to end up in post-apocalyptic breakdown rather than in a state-led rescue of the climate. That doesn’t mean that we should abandon the idea of revolution. The struggle for a socialist future must go on even when everything falls apart. Today we might feel that we have a choice between socialism and barbarism, but this choice isn’t made once and for all. Even if we end up in barbarism we mustn’t give up hope in socialism.</div><div><br /></div>I'll add some of my thoughts on the future, pasted from a text I wrote last year. Depending on how responses to the climate crisis unfold, I imagine that three different scenarios are possible when looking at the so-called developed world: <br /><ol><li>Transformative response: Politicians and society at large respond in an adequate way, giving us a chance of breaking with the pathway towards catastrophe. This response involves a massive transformation of the economy in order to stop destructive practices and channel investment into alternatives, massive investments into adaptation, and massive transfers of wealth to further socio-eonomic justice and prevent social disruption. The transfers are needed to “democratize survivability” (Clive Hamilton) and uphold at least a semblance of egalitarianism and social solidarity. This scenario implies a revolutionary break with the socio-economic system as it has functioned for centuries. Resistance from elites will be fierce. In addition, mass protests can be expected if the transition is carried out without consideration for the material interests of ordinary people. Unfortunately, this scenario is unlikely in the absence of strong social movements and a unified public opinion committed to ecological concerns and socio-economic justice.</li><li>Business-as-usual: this response involves stepped-up efforts to manage climate change but within a framework set by existing institutions and prevailing practices. Drastically raising prices (e.g. of fuel) or imposing other burdens on ordinary people is avoided out of fear of mass protests. Transfers of wealth from elites is also avoided since the elites are too powerful to be challenged. This scenario is highly plausible. However, since it fails to address the causes of the crisis it risks leading over to the third scenario.</li><li>Collapse: important social functions break down. This can happen both through direct environmental factors (global temperature change affecting agriculture, water supply, contagion, extreme weather, rising sea levels etc.) and indirectly, through escalating political and social crises (breakdown of global international order, political turmoil, social unrest, rising criminality, civil war, interstate war, increasing poverty and polarization, mass migration). This too will involve radical transformations of the socio-economic order but in a largely uncontrolled and chaotic way. Preparing for this scenario will be difficult, but must include organizing at grassroots level, community-building and local experiments in small-scale “resilient” living. </li></ol><div>The first scenario implies a radical transfer of power to the state. The logic of this scenario points in the direction of what Joel Wainwright & Geoff Mann call the “climate Leviathan” and what Malm calls ecological war-communism. But as should be clear from my notes, I believe the third scenario is more plausible. Nothing can be predicted with certainly, of course, but it would be foolish not to prepare for all scenarios. When I write prepare, I mean both on a personal level - in regard to how to conduct our lives - and politically, in regard to how to wage the struggle for a socialist, non-barbaric future. Here's my suggestion: we should do what we can to pressure the state to follow the first scenario, but let's not despair if we fail - for it is, unfortunately, likely that we will fail. We shouldn't despair, for there's another struggle we should be engaged in <i>at the same time</i>, namely the struggle against the injustices and the suffering that are likely to follow from the third scenario.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div> <img alt="MR Online | A review of Andreas Malm's Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century" height="306" src="https://mronline.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/9781839762154-otc4zgsp24c48j0n2wuz08bnzxbdxm00ehx1nn8rqu.jpg" width="200" /></div><div><br /></div><div>Addendum (2021-01-06): I've now read the book. It's great - but my assessment above still stands!</div>Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-7969008342548309322019-04-13T15:32:00.002+02:002022-05-23T15:00:45.906+02:00Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yRXa4Yo17IM/XLHYTM6iGYI/AAAAAAAABNQ/VGIJ76TS7ekZK8CTJ_tcqBxlQ9w6FLWCQCLcBGAs/s1600/9780241269152.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="982" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yRXa4Yo17IM/XLHYTM6iGYI/AAAAAAAABNQ/VGIJ76TS7ekZK8CTJ_tcqBxlQ9w6FLWCQCLcBGAs/s200/9780241269152.jpg" width="122" /></a> I finished reading Graham Harman's <i>Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything </i>(Penguin Books, 2018). It's very accessible and at least in parts quite entertaining. I must confess that I'm a newcomer to object-oriented ontology (OOO), but I'd nevertheless like to put down my impressions of the book.<br />
<br />
As I see it, OOO contains two core ideas <br />
<br />
First, there is an idea that I like. This is OOO's realism concerning "objects". According to Harman, idealism must be rejected since reality is different from our conceptions of it. Objects are real, but withdraw from us since they are not directly accessible to our senses. Hence we must approach them indirectly. This doesn't mean that we can only approach them negatively. We can do it through art and philosophy. Metaphor in particular is crucial in mediating our access to objects. Metaphor doesn't produce knowledge about things, but nevertheless has great cognitive value. If I understand Harman correctly, he claims that metaphors produce objects. Not by defining them or laying claim to knowledge about them, but by creating a semblance of withdrawn things-in-themselves which we must apprehend as real. Here it is obvious that OOO, despite its rejection of idealism, isn't a materialism. According to Harman, materialism is based on an untenable claim to know what matter is. OOO, by contrast, is a realism, but not a materialism. Objects can be real without having to consist of matter. It is a false assumption, he claims, that everything that exists must be physical (p. 25ff).<br />
<br />
What are objects then? Harman's very concise definition is that objects are what can neither be "undermined" nor "overmined" (pp. 41-53). That objects can’t be "undermined" means that they can't be reduced to their parts. That everything that exists must be basic and simple is another false assumption, which cannot account for the reality of emergent entities. That objects can’t be "overmined" means that they can't be reduced to their effects. An object, then, is always more than its pieces and less than its effects. Examples of objects mentioned by Harman include the Dutch East India Company (p. 27), the American Civil War (p. 114ff), and a hospital (p. 186f).<br />
<br />
Based on his definition of objects, Harman defends the Kantian notion of things-in-themselves. He also defends the idea of “essences”. Postmodernists dismiss this idea as politically repressive: “But this critique only works against those who claim to have knowledge of the essence of a thing” (p. 159).<br />
<br />
I'm less fond of OOO' second core idea, which is the affirmation of flat ontologies. According to OOO, all objects deserve equal attention, whether human or nonhuman. It's ontology is thus “flat” in the sense that it at least initially treats all objects in the same way rather than assuming different ontologies for different objects. The fact that human beings possess consciousness doesn't suffice to grant them any privileged ontological status (as assumed in what Quentin Meillassoux calls correlationism). Instead OOO claims that all objects, not just humans, interact through their sensuous qualities. This means that objects are opaque or "withdrawn" not just to humans, but to each other as well. There's a mutual darkness between objects, a mutual withdrawal that prevents the objects from making direct contact (p. 11f).<br />
<br />
That these two core ideas don't necessarily go together is shown in Harman's criticism of other thinkers who also adhere to flat ontologies but who fail to properly appreciate the reality of objects. A typical sin is that they "overmine" objects by reducing them to their effects or relations. This can be seen in the case of Bruno Labour. The book is full of praise for him and his actor-network theory (ANT). But it also insists on how OOO and ANT differ. While OOO resuces the non-relational core of every object, ANT dissolves the thing-in-itself, reducing actors to their mutual effects on each other (pp. 106f, 256). Furthermore, ANT's flat ontology is too rigid since it can’t distinguish transformational and trivial events (p. 110f). By contrast, OOO allows for discerning asymmetrical relations and for stating that things endure over time since all relations don’t necessarily change it (p. 134f). Differences also exist in regard to Jane Bennett's "vibrant" materialism. She too adheres to a flat ontology, but differs from OOO in emphasizing matter and by relying on an ontology of flux and becoming which doesn't sit well with OOO's idea of unified objects (pp. 240ff). <br />
<br />
So what do I think? I agree with the fundamental idea about anti-mining. Like Harman I don't believe that objects can be reduced to either parts or effects. Like him I think it's legitimate and necessary to have concepts for macro-objects - such as the American Civil War or the Dutch East India Company - and that we should be able to talk about such objects as real. Insisting on that seems like an important advance on myopic, empiricist approaches such as ANT. Against them, Harman is right in stressing that the reality of objects doesn't depend on empirical knowledge. A question that arises here, however, is how OOO would view classical macro-concepts of the sort usually rejected in "flat" ontological approaches - concepts like "nature", "capitalism" and the like. Can capitalism and nature be objects in Harman's sense? In view of his definition of objects I would say yes. But doesn't OOO then risk reverting into a rather conventional or traditional sort of theory? Wouldn't it even be possible to use the idea of the "reality" of this kind of objects to resurrect the much maligned "Cartesian" dichotomy of nature and society? Here Harman's reply would probably be that OOO's flat ontology would prevent that. <br />
<br />
That brings me over to what I don't agree with in the book.<br />
<br />
Firstly, I’m not convinced of the usefulness of flat ontologies. Harman's examples (the American Civil War, the Dutch East India Company, the hospital etc) are all examples that centrally involve humans and that primarily seem to highlight the relation between objects and a human consciousness. In the absence of examples that show what we gain from presupposing analogous relations between non-human objects, the idea of mutual withdrawal between objects doesn't come forward as convincing. Let me take Harman's discussion about causation as a case in point. Since real objects can’t interact, Harman claims that interaction is only possible indirectly or "vicariously" through the senses (pp. 163-166). This means that only the sensuous side of objects can interact with other objects. But sensuous to whom? Here most people would probably reply: to living beings possessing senses. To Harman, however, this answer would be unacceptable since it goes against his flat ontology. His reply has to be: sensuous also to stones, chemical elements, and so on. But is this really convincing? <br />
<br />
Let me formulate this more succinctly. By emphasizing the distinction between the "real" object and its "sensuous" apects, doesn't Harman come close to reinstating a subject-object dualism? Doesn't this in turn require him to grant different ontological status to the "sensing" subject and the perceived "object"? To be sure, his reply would almost certainly be that his ontology is still flat in the sense that he extends the ability to "sense" to all objects. Something like correlationism would thus be retained, despite his seeming rejection of it, with the modification that it is generalized or democratized to a trait characterizing all interactions between objects. But is this a convincing position? What do I gain by supposing that stones have the ability to sense? In other words, what do I understand better by thinking that they do, than by not thinking so? Nothing, it seems to me. But if there are no advantages to extending the ability to sense to all objects, are there any drawbacks? Yes, there is at least one obvious drawback - it dilutes the meaning of the term "sense" to the point that it no longer really seems to carry much meaning at all.<br />
<br />
Secondly, I don’t agree with Harman's rejection of materialism. There are different kinds of materialism. We can take Adorno as an example. At first sight, there seems to be a basic similarity between how Harman and Adorno criticize idealism and in how both regard aesthetics as a way to apprehend the object, the "something" that is non-identical to our concepts. But
there’s also an important difference: Harman talks about art and metaphor.
Adorno would add that pain, shock and dizziness too are ways of
apprehending non-identity. More than Harman's objects, Adorno’s seem to have the power to intrude on
and disrupt our concepts. In this sense Adorno is more
materialist than Harman. He also shows us a materialism that I believe escapes Harman's objections against materialism. <br />
<br />
Thirdly, Harman's argument about politics is unconvincing. Harman uses an entire chapter to discuss OOO's relation to politics, but the arguments presented here are weak. He states that OOO tends to agree with Labour in terms of politics and that OOO
“avoids the left/right polarization” (p. 15, see also the similar statement on p. 137). The reason is said to be that there is no
knowledge about politics
(p. 136). From this it follows that “OOO cannot be sympathetic to most forms of
radical politics, since these are invariably based on the claim to a
radical knowledge” (p. 146). But does this really follow? My suspicion that Harman is here simply using the argument to camouflage
his own dislike of radical politics is strengthened by the fact that
other OOO-adherents - like Tim Morton - seem to be much more comfortable
with embracing more radical positions. The idea that radical politics must presuppose a claim to real
“knowledge” about politics seems to me to be entirely baseless. Why can’t it be based on, for instance, an aesthetic
apprehension of reality through metaphors that Harman otherwise sees as fully
legitimate? <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-44277242226021037022019-03-11T00:24:00.002+01:002019-03-12T14:44:56.219+01:00Measure, or Hegel’s theory of destruction<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xZQa-vPKEDM/XIWftZG_NVI/AAAAAAAABM0/84ldC_51Q4wdQ1ZDxbI6jSvYDdPtcecfgCLcBGAs/s1600/200px-Wissenshaft_der_logik.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="352" data-original-width="201" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xZQa-vPKEDM/XIWftZG_NVI/AAAAAAAABM0/84ldC_51Q4wdQ1ZDxbI6jSvYDdPtcecfgCLcBGAs/s320/200px-Wissenshaft_der_logik.jpg" width="181" /></a><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">There is a justly famous subsection in Hegel’s <i>Logic </i>where he describes
“the sudden conversion into a change of quality of a change which was
apparently merely quantitative” (p. 335). This subsection, as far as I
know, contains the clearest expression in his writings of the famous
dialectical leap (or <i>Umschlag</i>) from quantity into quality. Below I'd like to offer a few reflections on the relevance of this idea for some present-day discussions, e.g. climate change and the idea of emergence.</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
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</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">The relevant passages
occur in the context of Hegel's discussion of what he calls “measure”. According to Hegel, everything
that exists is determined by the magnitudes, or quantities, of the things that
constitute it. When a particular magnitude becomes defining for the entity in
question, it is called measure. For example: a dwarf that grows above a
certain size is no longer a dwarf. A piece of sandy land needs to exceed a certain size before we call it a desert. Hot days need to continue with a certain regularity before we can speak of climate change, and so on. The size or magnitude (a quantity) is thus
part of what defines the thing (a quality). As Hegel writes, the specific quantity (or
quantum) “is now the determination of the thing, which is destroyed if it is
increased or diminished beyond this quantum” (p. 333f). </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">According
to Hegel, measure is a paradoxical. This is because we usually can’t find anything in
the concept of a thing that pinpoints the exact quantitative limit where a qualitative
change must occur. This makes us think that we can vary the quantity without
affecting the quality. A forest needs to have a certain size in order to be a forest, but it will surely remain a forest even if we cut down one tree. A
heap remains a heap even if we remove a grain of sand from it, and a hair pulled from a person’s
head doesn’t make the person bald. Yet, obviously, if we keep
cutting, removing and pulling we will eventually arrive at a point where the
forest and heap will disappear and the person will be bald. What Hegel
describes here is the so-called <i>sorites</i>
paradox (from the Greek word for heap). </span></span></div>
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</div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">Hegel
concludes that:</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">... the
destruction of anything which has a measure takes place through the alteration
of its quantum. On the one hand, this destruction appears as <i>unexpected</i>, in so far as the quantum can
be changed without altering the measure and the quality of the thing; but on
the other hand, it is made into something quite easy to understand through the
idea of <i>gradualness</i>. (p. 334f) </span></span></div>
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">This passage
is remarkable for two reasons. The first is the range of Hegel’s claim. He claims
that <i>anything</i> can be destroyed
through quantitative alterations (this is the only possible interpretation
since “everything that exists has a measure”, p. 333). Hegel is clearly aware of the gravity this lends his statement. He goes out of his way to argue
that the examples he has given about heaps and baldness “are not a pointless or
pedantic joke” (p. 336). Instead, they point to a paradoxical quality that
adheres to everything that exists. There’s a brittleness to things which we
cannot grasp if we focus only on their quality, on the way we understand them
through concepts. The destruction of the State or of
great fortunes are two further examples:</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">Quantum...
is the aspect of an existence which leaves it open to unsuspected attack and
destruction. It is the cunning of the Notion to seize on this aspect of a
reality where its quality does not seem to come into play and such is its
cunning that the aggrandizement of a State or of a fortune, etc., which leads
finally to disaster for the State or for the owner, even appear at first to be
their good fortune. (p.336)</span></span></div>
</blockquote>
<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">This is a magnificent
passage. That it comes like a bolt out of the blue in the midst of
Hegel’s long, notoriously abstruse and seemingly apolitical discussions about
quantity and quality only makes it more impressive. No wonder his idea
of the transformation from quantity to quality later came to inspire hosts of
revolutionaries!</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">Secondly, Hegel
points to an interesting curiosity. The destruction is always <i>unexpected</i>, he claims, and this <i>despite</i> the fact that it is quite easy to understand what causes it. Strangely, it’s not because of ignorance that we are surprised by
the destruction of a State or a fortune. On the contrary, we are surprised because the concepts we use tell us that small
quantitative changes in things won’t affect their quality. We know that
removing one grain of sand from a heap won’t make the heap disappear, because that’s
part of the concept of a heap. That’s why politicians and capitalists, and
others too, are justified in thinking that a little more aggrandizement won’t
hurt. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">Who can
avoid thinking here of global warming? We all know that releasing greenhouse
gases into the atmosphere is bound to cause global catastrophe, yet we go on thinking
that “a little more won’t hurt”. And we are quite correct in thinking so. Surely,
it can’t possibly make any difference to the global climate whether I choose to
walk to my job today or to take the car. Similarly, it doesn't make any sense to claim that any particular molecule of CO2 is decisive in causing global warming. It’s
precisely because we are so irrefutably correct that we’re in for a <i>surprise</i>
when we realize that the catastrophe is here. To put it differently, we can’t
stand with a measurement instrument in hand and say: <i>now</i> the catastrophe begins. What happens is rather that, when the
dialectical <i>Umschlag</i> finally occurs,
we realize that the catastrophe has been going on all the time, and that we were living in its midst even when we still thought that things were fine. The <i>Umschlag</i> brings with it a shift of perspective from which it becomes possible to project the origins of the catastrophic process far back into the distant past. To awaken to the catastrophe of
global warming is thus to realize not only that the catastrophe is here, but that it has been unfolding ever since the industrial revolution first
brought steam engines into the world. It's not just that quantitative changes give rise to qualitative ones; there is also an opposite process, through which the qualitative shift produces a certain version of the past which tells us which quantitative processes should be deemed relevant and important. That's why the awareness of catastrophe often seems to include the realization that the
catastrophe isn’t new. The catastrophe started already when we cut the
first tree, removed the first grain of sand, and plucked the first hair.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">The economy
is perhaps an even better example of how changes both surprise us and don’t
surprise us. I’m not thinking here of the constantly recurring speculation bubbles,
which certainly surprise us so often that they no longer surprise us, so much as of the ideology of endless exponential growth. Mainstream economics
has so far failed to make sense of such growth, which clearly leads to absurd
consequences if extrapolated far enough into the future. What seems to be missing
in the models used in economic theory is that they fail to acknowledge that their
concepts are defined by a “measure” which sets limits to the magnitudes that
they can comprehend. If we think that two per cent annual growth every year is
good, but that endless exponential growth is an absurdity, then we clearly have a problem in how to relate quantity to quality. To be more precise: our entire economy is built around the <i>sorites</i> paradox. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
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</div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">At this
point, I think it’s not far-fetched to link Hegel’s ideas to present-day
discussions about emergence. </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">Emergence is what occurs when it is possible to discover a quality in the whole
that doesn’t exist in the parts. </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">In many well-known examples used to
illustrate emergence in the field of complexity theory, the emergent quality
hinges on quantitative change. Crowd behaviour, for instance, arises from a quantitative increase in the number of
people. Mobilization processes in social movements, the diffusion and
establishment of new technologies, or the way size impacts organizations are
other examples. </span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">Yet when we look closer at the idea of emergence we discover an
ambiguity related to how it brings together qualitative
and quantitative change. On the one hand, emergence is a causal process, in
which a macro-level phenomenon results from complex, interlocking processes
originating on the micro-level. On the other hand, emergence is also the
result of a conceptual <i>Gestalt</i> shift,
or shift in perspective, which in itself says nothing about causality. As an example, we can return to the heap of
sand. The heap isn’t “caused” by the grains of sand in any ordinary sense of
the word. For instance, there is no temporal sequence such that we first have
grains and then a heap. If we dump a load of sand from a bucket, the heap
exists from the start. In many discussions about emergence, it seems to me that
a clearer distinction between the causal and the conceptual is needed.
Exclusively focusing on the causal aspect of emergence easily leads to debates
about directions of causality – whether it can only be from micro to macro, or
the other way round or between macro-entities as well. While these discussions
are important enough, they shouldn’t obscure the fact that causality alone can
never explain emergence. Emergence also depends on our ability to capture
changes in quality. Without that ability, a dwarf that grows in size would
simply be a big dwarf, not something qualitatively different. Nothing would be
surprising to such thinking, since nothing qualitatively new would ever happen.
On the other hand, exclusively focusing on the conceptual aspect would be equally
bad, since it would make us blind to the forces that undermine our concepts, to
the way they are “open to unsuspected attack and destruction”, to quote Hegel. Without
understanding those forces, we’d deprive ourselves of means for understanding
change. All we would have would be one surprising change after the other.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">To capture
both the causal and the conceptual side, I think it is worthwhile to return to
Hegel and to how he describes the transformation of quantity into quality as a
process that paradoxically leaves us both surprised and not surprised at
the same time. What Hegel seems to be saying is that quantitative processes –
that may well involves causal mechanisms, such as the greenhouse effect – compel
us to conceptual shifts that allow things to appear in a qualitatively new way.
The compulsion here, however, is not of a causal nature in the sense of a
law-like regularity or automatic reflection. The compulsion arises as a
response to surprise, just as when we suddenly realize that the heap of sand
has disappeared. This is significant, because it shows that Hegel is not an
idealist in the sense that we can disregard experience. As I’ve argued
elsewhere, his idealism consists in his belief in the ability of thought to
retrospectively endow experience with meaning by shaping it into a
conceptual totality. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">The
question with which I would like to end my reflections today is this:
doesn’t Hegel’s remarks on the subversive nature of quantitative change also
provide an opening for idealist self-criticism? Even if Hegel opens up thought to experience, his understanding remains conceptual and organized around qualitites. But an important lesson from his discussion about measure is that
quantitative changes are radically subversive. No matter how correct and justified we are in
clinging to the quality of the world as we comprehend it, quantitative changes continually undermine and destabilize it - </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">precisely because they takes place “below the
radar” of conceptual thinking.</span></span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">Reference:</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">Hegel, G. W. F. (1969) <i>Science of Logic</i> (tr. A. V. Miller), Oxon: Routledge. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-53755213777140631652019-03-07T14:42:00.002+01:002020-12-03T11:51:39.165+01:00Climate change is here, and that means new struggles<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
It’s important to think ahead. For everyone, not just for social scientists. And the future is bleak. Regardless of whether we look at resource depletion or climate change, it’s almost certain that catastrophic disruptions of the way we organize our societies await us. To many people, the catastrophes are already here. I stress that not to induce hopelessness, but to encourage all of us to think about what it means and to discuss it together. Above all, we need to sharpen our eyes to what new conflicts will emerge or become more central in a future of ecological devastation and diminishing material prosperity. To accept the inevitability of catastrophe doesn’t mean passivity at all. It means discovering a host of new struggles.<br />
<br />
Clive Hamilton makes two important points in his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the
Truth about Climate Change</i> (Earthscan, 2010). First, he stresses the need
to mourn. Rather than clinging to hopefulness – which he describes as a “means
of forestalling the truth” – we should allow ourselves “a phase of
desolation... in short, to grieve” (p. 211). But, secondly, he
also stresses the need for mass movements in order to resist elites. One of the great dangers of
climate change is that it may lead to:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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…a retreat to self-preservation in which the ruthless and
the wealthy use their power to control dwindling resources and exclude others
form sharing in them. It is to prevent this from happening that... I urge the
mobilisation of a mass movement to build a countervailing power to the elites
and corporations that have captured government. In short, a revived democracy
is the only means of fighting the effects of climate change in a humane way. (p.
218)</div>
</blockquote>
<br />
In short, we must build democracies that “do not abandon the poor and vulnerable to their fate while those who are able to buy their way out of the crisis do so”. The goal must be to “democratize survivability” (p. 223). <br />
<br />
So here’s another reason for the importance of “climate justice”. Justice is necessary not just to distribute burdens for mitigation fairly or to compensate for historical emissions. It’s necessary from the point of view of adaptation too, in order to avoid having climate change result in a Hobbesian war. Facing the reality of climate change means facing the threat of a brutal, exterminist future in which ruthless oligarchs protect themselves while large swaths of humanity perish. To prevent that, we need to make efforts already now to reduce social inequality and strengthen the political rights of those whose position in society is weakest. That’s surely a struggle that’s still worth fighting, even if disruptive climate change per se can no longer be averted.<br />
<br />
Framing the climate crisis in these terms helps us gain a better view of the stakes of some other recent political debates. The so-called refugee crisis, for example, is clearly linked to climate change in many ways. The way societies in Europe and other parts of Global North reacted to the crisis gave a foretaste of how these societies may react to diminishing material prosperity in the future. With the crisis, we saw a right-wing shift across the political landscape of the Global North, a new love of walls that was not least fuelled by the argument that we can’t afford accepting refugees because of the burden they place on our economies. Isn’t this readiness to sacrifice others with reference to a sacrosanct economy a glimpse of the barbaric future Hamilton warns us about?<br />
<br />
We can’t have a society that can only act morally when it’s rich. Such a society would condemn us to hell the moment the economy runs into decline. Unless we find at least relatively decent ways of living together that don’t presuppose economic growth, it’s not just the refugee crisis that we won’t be able to deal with. We won’t be able to deal with the ecological crisis either.<br />
<br />
Another issue concerns neoliberalism. Neoliberalism isn’t just about economics. It’s also a political project involving the destruction of rights. Its history since the late 1970s shows how quickly rights and welfare systems can be dismantled when economic elites see their interests threatened. Even as I write, the government of Sweden (where I live) is looking for ways to restrict workers’ right to strike, justifying this with the need to limit disruptions of the economy. It’s easy to imagine a host of other rights being abolished or curtailed as climate change and resource depletion threaten the profitability of the economy – the right to public access to information, the right to free schooling, the freedom of the press, and so on. If Hamilton is right, and I believe he is right, weakening these rights is surely the stupidest and most counterproductive thing we can do. Weakening them means strengthening the very elites that we ought to mobilize against. Accepting the economy as a valid excuse to outlaw strikes or to build walls is to make ourselves hostage to these elites who claim the power to define our economic interests, but whose own interests are in fact opposite to ours. <br />
<br />
To summarize this post, I believe that we really need to have a public debate about how to manage processes of material decline, and how that can be done in a way that minimizes suffering. Not just for the sake of refugees, but for the sake of everyone. If the word ecology indicates a focal point for many conflicts today, it’s not only because we must struggle <i>against </i>climate change and resource depletion, but also because of the many new conflicts that are emerging <i>because of </i>ongoing climate change and resource depletion.<br />
<br />
I once used the word “post-apocalyptic environmentalism” for environmental activism that takes its departure in catastrophes that are already occurring or that are seen as inevitable. Perhaps the association to post-apocalyptic fiction is not altogether misplaced. Such fiction practically always shows heroes and heroines who continue fighting and struggling, even “after the end”, in the desolate landscapes that remain after the cataclysm. I think it’s possible to find traces of a similar heroism in today’s climate activism – but I’ll write more about that in a later post!<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-h_h0ADN0FKI/XIEjgMZftvI/AAAAAAAABMo/LCNhBheD22QcxcRkR95djcOdR1Ti9iNfQCLcBGAs/s1600/Nausicaa.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="850" data-original-width="1166" height="233" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-h_h0ADN0FKI/XIEjgMZftvI/AAAAAAAABMo/LCNhBheD22QcxcRkR95djcOdR1Ti9iNfQCLcBGAs/s320/Nausicaa.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nausicaa - a post-apocalyptic hero </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-31595011455007294802019-02-27T17:08:00.001+01:002019-10-31T23:13:16.944+01:00To explain dialectics, I tell people about a friend<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7jLYuqhh8IQ/XH-ts2ajqAI/AAAAAAAABMc/busl4HQ16CIvHwc3I_eVp2OJYVzEZOOkQCLcBGAs/s1600/hegel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="630" height="199" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7jLYuqhh8IQ/XH-ts2ajqAI/AAAAAAAABMc/busl4HQ16CIvHwc3I_eVp2OJYVzEZOOkQCLcBGAs/s200/hegel.jpg" width="200" /></a><span style="font-size: small;">To Hegel, dialectics is a
retrospective presentation of the various moments that constitute the meaning
of a concept. The meaning of the concept – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">der
Begriff</i>, which is also translated as the “Notion” – only emerges from the
totality of the constitutive moments. In isolation, each moment is abstract,
i.e. one-sided. When they come together, they allow for a concrete grasp of the
concept. To Hegel, dialectics always involves a movement from the abstract
towards the concrete. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">This procedure is hardly
difficult to understand. In fact, we use it all the time when we try to explain
something to somebody. Say that I want to tell you about a friend of mine. His
name is George. I know him well and believe myself to have a clear grasp, or concept,
of who he is. But how am I to transmit my concept of George to you? Well, I
could start by saying that he is a writer, that he lives in Copenhagen and that
he has a dog. But these determinations are necessarily abstract. They’re also
all insufficient, since they don’t really capture what I think is
essential in George. No matter what starting point I use, I’m bound to
feel, sooner or later, that lots of important things are left out. And so I’m
forced to add more determinations – telling stories about his life, describing
his relations to other people, and so on – until I feel that the picture I’ve
given is concrete and captures George’s essence. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">But why would this kind of
explanation be dialectical? Thought is dialectical if it involves
negation. I can try to understand George’s life solely
from the vantage-point of him being a writer, but I already know how silly that would be since there's so much of his life that can't be explained from that
vantage-point. These things “negate” the vantage-point, which is revealed to be
limited and partial. I face a contradiction between the abstract
vantage-point and its negation. The only way to escape it is to find another vantage-point,
from which the contradiction can be redefined into part of what constitutes George
(this shift of vantage-point is what Hegel refers to as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Aufhebung</i>, or “sublation”). Yes, he is a writer but he is also a
violinist and dreams of being an astronaut. Yes, he hates travelling but next
month he is moving to Australia to marry. That’s how people are! People are
full of contradictions, and yet, importantly, we can still know them and feel that
there is a unity in their lives which to no small extent is defined precisely
by these contradictions. Instead of preventing me from understanding my friend,
the contradictions help me know him better and become part of what defines him
for me. They become a necessary part of the higher unity or totality that
defines his essence. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">Perhaps you’re thinking that
George is a misleading example since Hegel was interested in wholes on a much
grander scale – such as the spirit or the logic of thought. I admit that this
objection has truth in it: Hegel’s wholes are defined by the fact that they are
so all-encompassing that we ourselves are part of them and that it is usually hard
to discern any form of outside to them. Nevertheless, I still find it useful to refer
to George – or some other fictitiously named friend – whenever I'm asked what Hegel meant by dialectics. Like all people, George is a
contradictory person, and in that sense he is similar to entities such as spirit
or (the Hegelian) logic. And just like Hegel finds it necessary to explain the
concept by reconstructing the totality of moments that constitute its meaning,
the only way I can explain the essence of George is by a complex exposition of
all the various moments that together, as a whole, define him for me. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">A good thing about an
everyday example, such as George, is that it makes it plain how much in a
dialectical procedure that hinges on retrospectivity. Dialectics is not about deducing
the concept from a handful of premises, as if it were a logical conclusion. In fact,
there is nothing in the abstract beginnings per se that compels thought to
develop further. That George is a writer doesn’t allow me to conclude that he
dreams of travelling in space or that he likes ketchup on his fries. Instead,
dialectics is all about making sense of, or explicating, a concept constituted
by a totality that we already know. It is when I already assume the standpoint
of this totality that I can see that being a writer and wanting to be an
astronomer are both conceptually necessary parts of what defines George to me. When
Hegel stresses the importance of “internal” rather than “external” relations, “internal”
means internal to the concept of the whole, not internal to the abstract
starting points. One might object, of course, that if the meaning of the
abstract starting points is mediated by the relation to totality, then relations
internal to the totality must in some sense also be internal to the abstract
starting points. This is completely correct, but my point is that we cannot see
this, unless we <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">first</i> adopt the
standpoint of totality. It’s only then that I can claim that George’s being a
writer is defined in relation to his unfulfilled childhood wish to fly to the
stars or that his visceral dislike of travelling can only be properly
understood if viewed in the light of the fact that he nevertheless decided to
travel to the other side of the world for the sake of love, and so on. Similarly,
the only way in which Being, used as Hegel’s starting point in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Logic</i>, can be seen to imply Nothingness
is from the vantage-point of a higher unity or totality that must already be
assumed and in which both moments are already part. In both cases, to quote
Hegel, the starting-point is the goal. We do not deduce the goal from the
premise, but explain how the starting-points can only be understood when viewed
in relation to the goal. To use a Hegelian term, the goal "posits" the starting-point.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">Retrospectivity, then, is central.
Retrospectivity also helps us understand the “necessity” that defines the
relations between the moments and that drives thought onwards from the simple
and abstract towards the complex and concrete. I’ve already pointed out that this
isn’t the necessity of logical deduction. It’s also not causal necessity (not
even in works, such as the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Phenomenology</i>,
in which Hegel employs a historical dialectic that unfolds over time rather
than a systematic one looking at interrelations in a given whole, as in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Logic</i> or the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Philosophy of Right</i>). Rather, it is a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">conceptual</i> necessity. Some moments have to be part of the whole in
order for the concept to have the meaning that it has. Such necessity can only
be retrospectively reconstructed, when I already know what the concept means.
There is thus nothing in this necessity that can be used to predict the future
or to deduce a more rational order than the one defined by the concepts that we hold to be valid today. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">But if dialectics can only
operate retrospectively, does that mean that it cannot generate new knowledge?
If so, what is the point of it? My answer would be that even a dialectic that
only operates retrospectively <i>can</i> generate new knowledge, in two ways: one that
employs the dialectic more or less like Hegel does it, and another that takes
the dialectic beyond Hegel, in the direction of Adorno’s negative dialectics (thus generating a knowledge that is critical and undermines idealist systems like Hegel's). </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">To start with the first of these options, the retrospective procedure involves
a <i>clarification </i>of the concept. That I already at the start possess the
concept of a thing doesn’t mean that I possess it clearly. For instance, I
can know George very well without having clarified to myself exactly what constitutes
this knowledge. The same, obviously, applies to self-knowledge. Who hasn't had moments of shock or revelation when encountering memories of past events that we then retrospectively recognize as defining
moments in our lives, as constitutive of what we are today? Hegel himself
recognizes that we can have the concept of a thing without possessing it
clearly. That is why, for instance, he can set it up as a task for philosophy
to comprehend its age in thought, a task of self-clarification that is not so
different from the self-clarification carried out on an individual scale in psychoanalysis. But not even successful self-clarification results in a
concept that can be directly put in words. The concept can ultimately only be
expressed through the totality of its moments and that in turn means that it’s impossible
to express it in a unitary, simple way that is free from contradiction. The
riddle-like reference to the rose in the cross in the preface to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Philosophy of Right</i> is an example of
this. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">To illustrate the second way, that of taking the dialectic beyond Hegel, let me
return to George. What Hegel ultimately misses in his insistence on dialectics
as a retrospective reconstruction of meaning is the problem of how to account
for the things that have to be suppressed or forgotten for this meaning to
arise. Let us imagine that George totally unexpectedly walks into the room, after I’ve finished telling
you my stories and anecdotes about him. Frankly, I feel a bit disturbed by this
appearance of the real object of my stories. Anxiously I look at your faces,
searching for reactions. I know that you are all busy judging for yourselves whether
I have been right or wrong. Suddenly I’m made aware of what Adorno calls the
non-identify of concept and object, and this awareness triggers another kind of logic than
the Hegelian one, a logic of disintegration that threatens the integrity of the
concept. I’m no longer sure who George is. </span></div>
Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-2296808160638375092019-02-02T18:34:00.001+01:002019-02-02T18:39:42.619+01:00To Ursula LeGuin<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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</xml><![endif]-->I'm reading Ursula LeGuin's <i>The Lathe of Heaven</i>. What a find. The protagonist is so darn likable, despite being passive and helpless!<br />
<br />
LeGuin died last year. I'd like to pay her homage with her own words. Here's a quote from the book. <br />
<blockquote>
Are there really people without resentment, without hate, she wondered. People who never go cross-granted to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it? <br />
Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the sharecropper’s wife in Alabama and the lama in Tibet and the entomologist in Peru and the millworker in Odessa and the greengrocer in London and the goatherd in Nigeria and the old, old man sharpening a stick by a dry streambed somewhere in Australia, and all the others. There is not one of us who has not known them. There are enough of them, enough to keep us going. Perhaps.</blockquote>
The quote makes me recall a favorite passage of mine, from Italo Calvino's <i>The Invisible Cities</i>:<br />
<blockquote>
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.</blockquote>
I tip my hat to both LeGuin and Calvino. <i>En serio, mucho respeto!</i><br />
<br />Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-59678015754710253132019-02-01T23:56:00.001+01:002021-10-06T09:33:15.872+02:00Great things and little things<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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</xml><![endif]-->Just a small reflexion in the middle of the night.<br />
<br />
Pascal concludes the<i> Mystère de Jésus</i> by saying that “we must perform little things as if they were great ones because of the majesty of Christ Jesus who does them in us and who lives our life; and we must do great things as if they were simple and easy, because of His omnipotence” (quoted by Lucien Goldmann, in <i>The Hidden God</i>, Routledge, 1964, p.38f). <br />
<br />These are great words, and you have to be a Christian to believe in them.<br />
<br />
I once read the following in an old samurai manual from the early 18th century, <i>Hagakure</i>, written by Yamamoto Tsunetomo:<span class="commtext c00">"Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige's wall
there was this one: 'Matters of great concern should be treated
lightly.' Master lttei commented, 'Matters of small concern should be
treated seriously.'"</span><br />
<br /><span class="commtext c00">In the same spirit, Yamamoto states that important decisions should be made within the space of seven breaths (<i>nanakai kokyû suru aida ni ketsudan subeshi</i>). I always understood that to be an example of treating matters of great concern lightly. </span><br />
<br />
<span class="commtext c00">Don't let your mind get entangled. Keep a clear mind, attend to the moment and do what you think is best. </span><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
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Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-36713635168014550672018-10-20T11:15:00.005+02:002022-05-30T23:01:48.747+02:00Is nature a machine? Reflections on a passage in the Grundrisse<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“In agriculture, the soil itself with chemical etc. action is already a machine which makes direct labour more productive...” (Karl Marx, <i>Grundrisse</i>, Penguin, 1973: 588)</blockquote>
Is nature a machine? Perhaps. But according to Marx, machinery can transfer value to the product while nature cannot. What, then, is meant by the statement that nature is a machine?<br />
<br />
First, does machinery really transfer value to the product? It is a widely held assumption that in Marx’s “labour theory of value” machinery cannot produce any value, only transfer the value that has already gone into producing the machinery itself. But how exactly is this transference achieved? It is <i>not </i>achieved in the process of utilizing the machinery. During this process, machinery is simply a resource that is freely available to its owner, just like nature. Hence, a machine cannot transfer any value once it is acquired by an owner. It’s only a semblance that it does so, arising from the fact that a capitalist who employs machinery enjoys a competitive advantage over other capitalists who don’t. The use of machinery affects the distribution among competing capitalists of the surplus produced in the economy, but it doesn’t add to the overall amount of this surplus itself. If machinery had been simultaneously introduced and employed in the same measure by all capitalists in a certain branch of production, the result would be a general rise of productivity, shortening the “socially necessary labour” needed to produce the commodity and leading to a cheaper, less valuable product.<br />
<br />
Machinery, then, cannot add to value once it is acquired; although it can add to the surplus value obtained by the individual capitalist (through the competitive advantage it gives the capitalist on the market, through monopolies or monopoly-like situations where competition is prevented from exerting downward pressure on the price, or by opening up new markets when commodities are developed that were impossible to produce before the introduction of machinery). <br />
<br />
If this is so, then how can machinery “transfer” any value at all? The answer is that the transfer happens through two crucial moments. The first is the <i>purchase and maintenance</i> of the machinery. Just as wages (variable capital) add to value by adding to the production costs, so the purchase and maintenance of machinery (constant capital) adds to value by increasing these costs. Machinery, then, adds to value not by virtue of increasing productivity (which cheapens the product) but by virtue of its costs (which makes the product more valuable and expensive). If machinery had been free, i.e. without any costs, it would have been just as value-less as nature. Here it’s important to remember that when I write that the cost of machinery “adds” to the value of a commodity, this “adding” is actually a “transfer” of value that originates in labour, since – according to the labour theory of value – the cost of a machine reflects its value which corresponds to the “socially necessary labour” that has gone into producing it.<br />
<br />
The second moment is, of course, when the commodity is <i>realized </i>on the market, since without this realization the commodity wouldn’t have any value of all. <br />
<br />
These reflections clarify why nature takes on the appearance of a “free lunch” in capitalism. Nature is like a machine in the sense that utilizing it as a resource in the production of commodities doesn’t add to their value. As stated above, it's not the process of utilizing a machine that adds to value. Value is only transferred from machinery when the cost of purchasing and maintaining machinery reflects labour that has been socially necessary to produce it. To the extent that nature preexists such labour, it functions like a valueless machine. While it has use-value, like all machinery, it lacks value in a strict sense to the extent that labour isn't needed to produce it.<br />
<br />
Just as nature can be seen as a value-less machine, machinery can be seen as value-endowed nature. Once acquired by the capitalist, however, machinery functions as nature <i>tout simple</i>. <br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-54616682724621777582018-05-31T18:33:00.000+02:002018-06-01T13:00:30.734+02:00Is Marx' value law anthropocentric?One question that bothers many people who start to study Marxism is why labour power alone is regarded as the source of value in capitalism. Why not technology, energy flows or other forms of constant capital? What makes labour power special? <br />
<br />
Human labour is said to be a unique commodity that produces more value than is required for its reproduction. To be sure, tools and natural resources can transfer value to the commodity, but that value stems from the labour that is socially necessary to produce them. Human workers, by contrast, contribute more value than they get back in the form of wages. This is the source of surplus-value. <br />
<br />
But this argument is unsatisfactory since it doesn't explain why human labour alone produces value. At first glance, it seems obvious that robots and other machines are just as capable as humans of producing "more" than is needed for their reproduction. To rebuff this objection it isn't enough to point out that what robots produce "more" of isn't value, since that would make the argument circular. To avoid the charge of anthropocentrism, shouldn't one rather accept that the crucial input that creates value is simply <i>energy</i>, whether this passes through human bodies or not? <br />
<br />
While this might be tempting, doing so would be a mistake. To explain why, let's try an (admittedly simplistic) thought experiment.* Say that we want to produce a fixed amount of a commodity. Superficially, it might seem that labour power and machinery are equivalent in the sense that both simply provide energy to the production process. Try, however, to increase either of them and see what happens. Introducing more or better machinery can be expected to increase productivity and prices will therefore tend to fall. In terms of the value law, the increasing energy flows will lower the amount of "socially necessary" labour for producing the commodity and hence its value. The opposite effect follows if we instead increase labour power. Assuming that the commodity will be sold and that wages remain constant, the increase in working-hours will drive up the costs for labour and hence also prices. In terms of the value law, the result is a more valuable commodity.<br />
<br />
Why does the increase in the flow of energy results in a less valuable commodity in one case and a more valuable commodity in the other? If we want to avoid anthropocentrism, the only possible answer is that the <i>form</i> of wage labour is crucial, regardless of whether this labour power is provided by humans or non-humans. By the form of wage labour I mean that labour is treated as a commodity that is the private property of individual workers and sold for wages on a labour market. Using Marx's terms, we might say that wage labour alone is "abstract labour" capable of producing value, while other types of energy input are "concrete labour" - labour that is useful but fails to show up as value.<br />
<br />
What matters, then, isn't whether labour power is <i>human</i> or not, but whether it is <i>waged</i> or not. The thought experiment above helps us see why. Due to the form of wage labour, increasing the input of labour power for a fixed amount of a commodity must result in increasing production costs, unless workers are found who are willing to work for cheaper wages. Due to the competition between capitals, increasing the production costs associated with labour will usually not be a viable strategy unless for some reason there is a general rise of the "socially necessary labour" for manufacturing it. Increasing other forms of energy input, by contrast, is usually done to <i>lower</i> production costs. The fact that energy has a unit cost - e.g. kilowatt hours of electricity - doesn't make it similar to labour power, since the overall effect will still be to cheapen production. Due to the competition between capitals, this will also result in a general decrease in the "socially necessary labour" needed for manufacturing the commodity. There is thus a crucial difference in regard to production costs, which means that labour power sets the baseline for value while other forms of energy subtract from value in proportion to their cheapness in relation to labour power.**<br />
<br />
An interesting consequence - which might sound fanciful but which might well be spelled out more boldly than has been done so far - is that it is quite possible to imagine robots or animals producing value provided that these robots or animals are at the same time employed as wage-workers. <br />
<br />
The crucial role of wage labour is shown by the fact that, just as waged robots or animals can produce value, human workers can lose their value-creating ability if their labour isn't provided as individual wage labour. Imagine, for example, a capitalist who pays a lump sum to a sub-contractor who agrees to provide the capitalist with all the necessary labour power. In such a case the number of workers can obviously be increased without adding to the value of the commodity. The same holds true for a labour force consisting of serfs producing for a capitalist market. The effect in both cases is similar to the effect of increasing productivity by un-waged machinery.***<br />
<br />
In a nutshell, from the point of view of the value law, un-waged labour tends to behave like constant capital while waged machinery, if it were to exist, would tend to behave like variable capital. <br />
<br />
That the form of wage-labour is crucial for the value law of course doesn't mean that individual capitalists must rely on wage-labour. While capitalism as a whole certainly depends on the production of surplus-value, individual capitalists compete for a share of the aggregate amount of surplus-value in various ways, above all by trying to increase productivity and cutting wage costs. This is why wage-labour can be central to capitalism while individual capitalists at the same time try to minimize their reliance on wage-labour. It is also why capitalism co-exists with a wide variety of un-waged forms of labour. Although the latter don't create value, they give individual capitalists a competitive edge against other capitalists and help them increase their share of the aggregate surplus-value produced in society.****<br />
<br />
A final thought: does my suggestion that the labour law should be understood as non-anthropocentric mean that we might imagine a capitalism in which all human labour can be abolished and replaced by robots? Theoretically speaking, yes, although its hard to imagine such a society ever being realized. Furthermore, abolishing human labour would not mean the end of social conflicts. Indeed, such a society is likely be at least as conflict-ridden as today. To begin with, who says that robots must necessarily be docile (especially if they have evolved so far as to be able to replace human labour and to function as full-fledged free individuals owning their own labour power)? Secondly, the great mass of un-employed humanity would still need to be fed. Not all humans will be able to enter the capitalist class or remain there, and those who can't will hardly be docile either. <br />
<br />
<br />
Footnotes:<br />
<br />
* As mentioned, the thought experiment rests on many simplifying assumptions. I have regarded demand for the commodity as inflexible and simply assumed that it will be sold. I have also assumed that wages are inflexible (so that wage-labour isn't increased, for instance, by moving production to countries with cheaper wages). I have also disregarded the possibility that increasing the quantity of workers can have the effect of increasing productivity (e.g. though a division of labour). Finally, I have disregarded that technology too has costs that in some instances (e.g. in start-up phases) may off-set the tendency for technology to cheapen production.<br />
<br />
** This relation is obscured by the fact of monopolistic price-setting, e.g. due to scarcity (see the chapters on ground rent in <i>Capital</i>, vol. III). Since almost all natural resources are to some extent defined by scarcity, "nature" is a realm where prices are almost never determined in accordance with the value law. See <a href="https://carlcassegard.blogspot.com/2016/10/labour-and-scarcity-ricardos-caveat.html" target="_blank">this old blog post</a> for a discussion of how Marx treats scarcity. <br />
<br />
*** Interestingly, it doesn't hold for most forms of slavery, since the slave-owner usually has to provide the costs for the reproduction of the labour force. This means that slavery approximates modern wage-labour better than serfdom (where the workers are to a greater extent responsible for their own subsistence).<br />
<br />
**** This is why it is crucial to distinguish between what Marx calls the rate of profit (s/(c+v)) and the rate of surplus value (s/v). Natural resources (c) don't contribute to surplus value, but they do contribute to the rate of profit. Why? Because the rate of profit diminishes the costlier these resources are, just as it diminishes the costlier labour power (v) is. As Marx points out, the notion of the rate of profit is important since it is what most immediately motivates capitalists, namely the return on capital. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-85297354959115613512018-02-13T00:00:00.002+01:002018-02-14T14:42:04.126+01:00Dark Mountain and hope: some quotes and reflexionsNo emotion lends itself so well to paradoxical formulations as hope. Writing this I recall Walter Benjamin's words at the end of his essay on Goethe - “Only for the sake of the hopeless are we given hope”. Yes, this may well be true. There is a logic connecting hope and hopelessness, two emotions that constantly seem to invite each other. Indeed, the very presence of hope testifies to the existence
of something bad, something that we want to escape. In that sense, every incidence of hope is cause
for pessimism. Perhaps there is no pure hope, no hope without an element of hopelessness? But conversely, isn't it true that one sometimes experiences how giving up hope can be a cure against hopelessness?<br />
<br />
When asked by an interviewer if he had hope in view of the ecological
disaster, Paul Shepard replied: "Of course I have hope. Why not, it’s cheap and
available. It is also the last resort” (quoted in Jensen 2004: 256). A seemingly opposite viewpoint is offered by the <a href="http://salvage.zone/about/" target="_blank">Salvage </a>magazine: "Hope is precious; it must be rationed". <br />
<br />
The curious thing is that both statements ring true, and that's the paradox.<br />
<br />
Here's what Naomi Klein <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/trumps-crony-cabinet-is-full-of-scared-losers/" target="_blank">wrote </a>after Trump's election: ”To quote a popular saying on the French left, 'The hour calls for
optimism; we’ll save pessimism for better times.' ('L’heure est à
l’optimisme, laissons le pessimisme pour des temps meilleurs.')”<br />
<br />
I realize of course that hope isn't the same as optimism. Hope is a
feeling not wholly under our conscious control, while optimism is a
cognitive assessment. Rebecca Solnit puts it well when she writes that both optimism and pessimism are set views of the future and both provide
excuses for inactivity. Hope, by contrast, is to see the future as open
and thus calling for action (Solnit 2006; also Ehrenreich 2009:3, Weber-Nicholsen 2002:183). Yet despite this difference, the paradoxical quality of hope often seems to
reflect on statements about optimism (and pessimism) as well, at least
to the extent that such statements are meant to induce a feeling of hope.<br />
<br />
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I'd like to use these remarks about hope as a way of approaching and making sense of two books I've read recently, Paul Kingsnorth's <i>Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist</i> <i>and Other Essays </i>(2017) and <i>Walking on Lava: Selected Works for Uncivilised Times </i>(2017), an anthology of texts produced by the Dark Mountain collective (of which Kingsnorth is a co-founder). Dark Mountain is a hugely interesting group of writers, artists and activists who came together in 2009 to put words on the experiences of loss accompanying the decay and collapse of civilization. The fundamental gesture of Dark Mountain consists, I believe, in giving up hope that "the world can be saved". Instead, the group insists that accepting loss and honestly confronting the fact that the catastrophe can no longer be avoided is a liberating act. In a debate with fellow enviornmentalist Wen Stephenson, Kingsnorth expresses it as follows: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This may sound a strange thing to say, but one of the great achievements for me of the Dark Mountain Project has been to give people permission to give up hope. … I don’t think we need hope. I think we need imagination. We need to imagine a future which can’t be planned for and can’t be controlled. I find that people who talk about hope are often really talking about control. They hope desperately that they can keep control of the way things are panning out. … Giving up hope, to me, means giving up the illusion of control and accepting that the future is going to be improvised, messy, difficult. (quoted in Stephenson 2012) </blockquote>
<br />
Whereas much environmentalism until now has employed an apocalyptic
rhetoric, pointing to the threat of a future, global catastrophe only in
order to enable us to avoid it, Dark Mountain instead exemplifies what I've called a new <a href="https://carlcassegard.blogspot.se/2015/02/towards-post-apocalyptic.html" target="_blank">post-apocalyptic form of environmentalism</a> which sees catastrophe as something that's already here: as already having happened, as ongoing or as unvaoidable. <br />
<br />
In post-apocalyptic environmentalism we encounter a new paradox. Don't people need hope in order to become activists? It's a well-known saying that people don't join movements because of pessimism. As Klein points out in the quote above, pessimism should probably be "saved for better times" if you want to stop bad things from taking over entirely. In regard to climate activism in particular, researchers have pointed to the centrality of the emotion of hope in mobilizing and sustaining activism (e.g. Ojala 2012). Even if emotions such as fear, anxiety, despair or depression may exist among activists, hope is still indispensible, mediating the other emotions so as to motivate action (Gardner 2017, Kleres & Wettergren 2017). At the climate summit in Paris 2015 (COP21), well-known environmental organizations such as Greenpeace made a point of delivering a bright and hopeful message, praising the deal as an important breakthrough. The aim was to avoid generating feelings of disappointment among activists and in the general public, and thereby maintain trust in the efficacy of activism (see e.g. Thörn et al 2017: 240f). <br />
<br />
To understand post-apocalyptic forms of activism, as in Dark Mountain, we need to drop the premise that all mobilization needs hope in the sense of upbeat, optimistic messages - the "positive thinking" lambasted by Barbara Ehrenreich in her 2009 book <i>Bright-Sided</i>. Dark Mountain is the antithesis of such thinking. <br />
<br />
The answer to the riddle is, I believe, that Dark Mountain relies on the paradoxical quality of hope - the fact that giving up hope may be a way to gain hope. Sean Parson (2017) advocates making use of this paradox in activism, citing Adorno as the great theoretician of “revolutionary pessimism” in which politics is generated by “embracing doom”. An even blunter example is Roy Scranton’s <i>Learning to Die in the Anthropocene </i>(2015) which advocates a radical-Buddhist rejection of hope. By realizing that we are “already dead” and that our civilization, including capitalism, are also dead, we can let go of our fear. That is the only way of seeing what possibilities we have to adapt to the new reality. Somewhat similar is the suggestion by Flores & Rousse (2016) to
embrace ecological finitude, learning to die as a species, while at the
same time finding space for “fulgor” – the faint glimmer or glow of a
dawning reconfiguration – and radical hope as a commitment to
possibility. Here again we see how important it is not to confuse hope
with optimism. In all these writers and thinkers, hope
co-exists with a lack of optimism, and perhaps it even arises
because of this lack. Like Kingsnorth, they also all emphasize the need for imagination - for new ideas and new stories - and that giving up hope may be the key to freeing up this imagination. <br />
<br />
The best theoretician of this kind of paradoxical mechanism is perhaps the philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy, who has put forward the idea of “enlightened doom-saying” and post-apocalyptic retroactivity as a way of handling climate change and other environmental threats (Dupuy 2007/2008; 2013: 27f, 46f). The problem, he states, is that the world is headed for doom, but people don’t prevent it since the future is not conceived as real. It appears unreal precisely because we believe in our free will, in our capacity to "act otherwise" which makes it impossible for us to believe that the worst will occur. Only retrospectively will it appear possible. The catastrophe “possiblizes itself” – and that is our problem, because to prevent it one needs to believe in it before it occurs. What is the solution? To project oneself into the future and look back at our present from there. One must allow “the mind to project itself into the aftermath of the catatstrophe, and treat the event in the future perfect tense” (Dupuy 2013: 204). <br />
<br />
This strategy is described very well by Zizek in <i>In Defense of Lost Causes</i>. There he points to the notorious “pessimism” of Adorno and Horkheimer as an example of this paradoxical strategy: “While traditional Marxism enjoined us to engage and act in order to bring about the necessity (of communism), Adorno and Horkheimer projected themselves into the final catastrophic outcome perceived as fixed (the advent of the 'administered society' of total manipulation and the end of subjectivity) in order to stimulate us to act against this outcome in our present” (Zizek 2008: 460). Here the very rejection of ostensible “hope” becomes the precondition for hope. Only by renouncing the seemingly hopeful prognosis that the catastrophe can be averted can we free ourselves from paralysis and act. <br />
<br />
Here it's possible to object that Dupuy isn't really accepting loss. Isn’t he still hoping to avert or at least postpone the future catastrophe by using retroactivity as an intellectual ruse? What he calls enlightened doom-saying at first sight does not appear to be based on a genuine post-apocalyptic acceptance of catastrophe; instead it is supposed to spur us to undo the catastrophe that fate has ordained for us: “to believe in fate is to prevent it from happening” (Dupuy 2013: 32). This may seem like a form of rationalism, a mere strategy for averting the worst, which is still tied to the linear perspective on time which Dupuy claims to be criticizing. But to understand Dupuy's strategy as a rationalism is to do it a disservice. It appears to me that the strategy becomes genuinely persuasive only when seen as practiced by subjects groping their way towards recovery from a traumatized or melancholic state. Rather than as a calculated trick implemented by a wholly self-controlled subject, I prefer to see it as a strategy that doesn’t have to be wholly conscious. This is why his idea is relevant in the context of Dark Mountain’s literary production where a strategy similar to Dupuy's post-apocalyptic retroactivity appears to be involved, albeit in a form that is perhaps unconscious or only half-conscious.<br />
<br />
Dupuy himself seems to admit that full consciousness of the strategy is not required when he writes that the post-apocalyptic future should be believed in as a “fate” that is somehow similar to the way we believe in the world we encounter in literature: “We must… believe in fate exactly as one believes in a work of fiction” (ibid. 193). This stance is seemingly rational but also a way of working-through and liberating the mind in a way that could be described as only half-conscious or even dreamlike. <br />
<br />
Michael Ortiz Hill provides an illustration of what this form of belief might mean in his discussion of apocalyptic dreams. To begin with, it is crucial not to confuse the literal and the psychic apocalypse. “In the psyche… images often have different implications than in our waking life, and the apocalyptic initiation may well require destruction” (Hill 1994: 53). Entering the “apocalypse of the psyche” may be a way of avoiding “enacting apocalypse in the world” literally. What is suggested here is that the confrontation with apocalyptic destruction in dreams can function as a catharsis, freeing us to act with greater sensibility and freedom in our waking lives. I would like to suggest that this form of confrontation is aimed at in the literary production of Dark Mountain as well as in Dupuy's “enlightened doom-saying”. Rather than a purely rational operation, this doom-saying can be enacted in dreams and played out in the unconscious as well as in literary production. The point is to psychically visit the apocalypse to free ourselves from the fixations that, in our ordinary lives, prevent us from taking action against the catastrophic course of events that unfold around us in reality. There is thus a therapeutic function to anticipating loss – to liberate the mind, and find something positive in the loss, and thus, perhaps, regain the ability to avert the worst.<br />
<br />
It's time to wind down, but before finishing I'd like to offer a final quote. Here's Max Brod recallling a conversation with Kafka (quoted by Benjamin). <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
‘I remember,’ Brod writes, ‘ a conversation with Kafka which began
with present-day Europe and the decline of the human race. “We are
nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that come into God’s head,” Kafka
said. This reminded me at first of the Gnostic view of life: God as the
evil demiurge, the world as his Fall. “Oh no,” said Kafka, “our world
is only a bad mood of God, a bad day of his.” “Then there is hope
outside this manifestation of the world that we know.” He smiled. “Oh,
plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope – but not for us.”</blockquote>
Infinite hope indeed, but this invocation of hope only serves to strengthen the impression of infinite hopelessness. And isn't that the perfect way to end this essay?<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>References: </i><br />
<br />
Dark Mountain (2017) <i>Walking on Lava: Selected Works for Uncivilised Times</i>, ed. by Charlotte Du Cann & Dougald Hine & Nick Hunt & Paul Kingsnorth, White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing. <br />
<br />
Dupuy, Jean-Pierre (2007/2008) “Rational Choice before the Apocalypse”, <i>Anthropoetics - The Journal of Generative Anthropology </i>13(3) (Fall / Winter); http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1303/1303dupuy.htm (accessed 2016-02-03) <br />
<br />
Dupuy, Jean-Pierre (2013) <i>The Mark of the Sacred</i>, Stanford: Stanford University Press. <br />
<br />
Ehrenreich, Barbara (2009) <i>Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America</i>, New York: Metropolitan Books. <br />
<br />
Flores, Fernando & Rousse, B. Scot (2016) “Ecological Finitude as Ontological Finitude: Radical Hope in the Anthropocene”, <i>Telos </i>(177): 127–143. <br />
<br />
Gardner, Claire (2017) “Oscillating Futures: Visions of Apocalypse Amongst Climate Activists”, interview by Odette Shenfield, <i>Demos</i>, June 2; <a href="http://www.demosproject.net/oscillating-futures-visions-of-apocalypse-amongst-350-org-climate-activists/">http://www.demosproject.net/oscillating-futures-visions-of-apocalypse-amongst-350-org-climate-activists/</a> (accessed 2017-10-25). <br />
<br />
Hill, Michael Ortiz (1994) <i>Dreaming the End of the World</i>, Dallas: Spring Publications. <br />
<br />
Jensen, Derrick (2004) “Paul Shepard”, pp. 248-259, in <i>Listening to the Land: Conversations about Nature, Culture, and Eros</i>, White River Junction: Chelsea Green.<br />
<br />
Kingsnorth, Paul (2017) <i>Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays</i>, London: Faber & Faber. <br />
<br />
Kleres, Jochen& Åsa Wettergren (2017) “Fear, hope, anger, and guilt in climate activism”, <i>Social Movement Studies</i> 16(5): 507-519<br />
<br />
Ojala, Maria (2012) “Hope and climate change: the importance of hope for environmental engagement among young people”, <i>Environmental Education Research</i> 18(5): 625-642.<br />
<br />
Parson, Sean (2017) “Cthulhuscene: Ecological Catastrophe, Cosmic Horror, and the Politics of Doom”, Reading Super Heroes Politically (blog), February 24; <a href="https://readingsuperheroespolitically.wordpress.com/2017/02/24/cthulhuscene-ecological-catastrophe-cosmic-horror-and-the-politics-of-doom/">https://readingsuperheroespolitically.wordpress.com/2017/02/24/cthulhuscene-ecological-catastrophe-cosmic-horror-and-the-politics-of-doom/</a> (accessed 2017-11-25). <br />
<br />
Scranton, Roy (2015) <i>Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization</i>, San Francisco: City Lights Books. <br />
<br />
Solnit, Rebecca (2006) <i>Hope in the Dark</i>, New York: Nation Books. <br />
<br />
Stephenson, Wen (2012) “‘I withdraw’: A talk with climate defeatist Paul Kingsnorth”, The Grist, April 11; <a href="http://grist.org/climate-energy/i-withdraw-a-talk-with-climate-defeatist-paul-kingsnorth/">http://grist.org/climate-energy/i-withdraw-a-talk-with-climate-defeatist-paul-kingsnorth/</a> (accessed 2018-01-09). <br />
<br />
Thörn, Håkan & Cassegård, Carl & Linda Soneryd & Åsa Wettergren (2017) “Hegemony and Environmentalist Strategy: Global Govenance, Movement Mobilization and Climate Justice”, pp 219-244, in Håkan Thörn & Carl Cassegård & Linda Soneryd & Åsa Wettergren (eds.) <i>Climate Action in a Globalizing World: Comparative Perspectives on Environmental Movements in the Global North</i>, New York: Routledge. <br />
<br />
Weber Nicholsen, Shierry (2002) <i>The Love of Nature and the End of the World: the Unspoken Dimension of Environmental Concern</i>, Cambridge: MIT Press. <br />
<br />
Zizek, Slavoj (2008) <i>In Defense of Lost Causes</i>, London: Verso.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-59689296712948743412018-01-30T19:53:00.004+01:002018-02-01T11:56:55.815+01:00Salvage as utopia, or: why are anti-capitalist utopias so... capitalist? <div style="border-image: none;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8MXcS25nOhY/WnCjHe1EHAI/AAAAAAAABJc/MnRvvG-hGuMC3HGZSm_UZYf-X_CfJzFsACLcBGAs/s1600/railsea.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="475" data-original-width="307" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8MXcS25nOhY/WnCjHe1EHAI/AAAAAAAABJc/MnRvvG-hGuMC3HGZSm_UZYf-X_CfJzFsACLcBGAs/s320/railsea.jpg" width="206" /></a>One perhaps unfortunate side-effect of the focus on the super-rich, or "1%", in so much anti-capitalist criticism in recent years is that it conveniently forgets the capitalism pervading the rest of society. This forgetting is understandable, of course, considering the mindboggling levels of income, wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite today. The gap between the super-rich and the mass of small-scale producers, traders and entrepreneurs has taken on the semblance of a class division. Where do the profits end up? It's certainly only a trickle that ends up with small shop-owners or family-run businesses, not to speak of e-waste scavengers, private taxi drivers or freelancers. Indeed, the very idea of a class divide between "capital" and "labour" begins to lose meaning when much of what was once counted as labour is redefined as hired or subcontracted services provided by private enterprises consisting of one or just a few people. Regardless of the fact that the latter are capitalists <em>on paper</em>, big capital is capable of skimming surplus value off their work just as comfortably as from wage labour. Just as the reality of exploitation is hidden by the employment contract in the case of wage labour, so it can be hidden when it takes place <em>among capitalists</em> by a contract between seemingly equal business partners.<br />
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What I'd like to do here is to analyse what the perception of a class divide within the capitalist class does to the utopian imagination. It's no news that the utopian imagination today hardly seems capable any longer of mobilizing any radically non-capitalist, or communist, visions. In literature as well as scholarly accounts, there's instead a tendency to relish in rose-coloured visions of a thriving, buzzling market economy in which commodities mostly derive from salvage or simple do-it-yourself production. These writings, although suffused by abhorrence for the excesses symbolized by the parasitical "1%", idealize a particular kind of capitalism, a capitalism with a "human face", so to speak, from which the excesses have been purged. It's not my intention to reject visions of this kind, but I would like to point out that they're ambiguous in a very interesting way. They have a utopian lustre, as if salvage and small-scale production per se signified a post-capitalist economy, but they are also, strikingly, portrayed as part and parcel of a rather rapacious, brutal and Hobbesian form of capitalism. Visions of this kind thus present a riddle. What exactly is the utopian content of these visions? Why are we attracted to them? Are they just a trap to make us affirm capitalism even as we criticize it?<br />
<br />
Let me turn to China Miéville's 2012 novel <i>Railsea </i>(written in a genre which the author himself calls "salvagepunk") to illustrate this ambiguity. The world of the novel is post-apocalyptic, but still recognizably capitalist. Humankind subsists largely on salvage, using trains to "sail" a flat, poisoned earth covered with a carpet of railways known as the "railsea" - the remains of an old, forgotten civilization whose technological achievements are far beyond the grasp of the surviving remnants of humanity. The first thing to note is that the depiction of this future world is not particularly bleak. In large parts, it's an adventurous and carnivalesque world. The gaze it turns on salvage is filled with fascination and fondness. Take for instance the following description of Streggeye, a lively "port" town where Sham - the book's protagonist - admiringly watches the salvage trains come in.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
They were like no other rolling stock on the railsea. Patchwork
vehicles. Powerful engines, wicked shunters at the front, train sides
riveted with cladding, bristling with the peculiar tools of the salvor’s
trade. Drills, hooks, cranes, sensors of various unorthodox kinds, to
find & sort through the millennia of discarded rubbish that littered
the railsea. Bits of salvage used & incorporated. On the topside
decks salvors themselves in their distinctive clothes, tool-belts &bandoliers & stained leather chaps, snips of treated cloths &
plastic feathers & showy bits & pieces pulled from the earth
& miraculously unruined. Helmets of various complicated designs.<br />
First the city authorities would come aboard & bargain for what
salvage they wanted. Then high-rolling clients, the Streggeye rich.
& finally, if the salvor crews were feeling generous & had a few
days, they would run a market.<br />
Their antique & reclaimed wares were set on stalls on the
dockside, according to various taxonomies. Pitted & oxidized
mechanisms from the Heavy Metal Age; shards from the Plastozoic; printouts on thin rubber & ancient ordinator screens from the Computational Era: all choice arche-salvage, from astoundingly long ago. & the less interesting stuff, too, that discarded or lost anything from a few hundred years ago to yesterday (Miéville 2013: 97f)</blockquote>
There's something here that reminds me of preindustrial European capitalism. The involvement in salvage activities of city authorities (and, as we learn later in the book, privateers and navy "war-trains") suggests a collusion between political power and capital that a variety of writers from Braudel and Wallerstein to <a href="https://carlcassegard.blogspot.se/2017/06/kockas-capitalism.html" target="_blank">Kocka</a> have argued is typical of the capitalist world-system. The world of the railsea is thus hardly post-capitalist. And indeed, why should it be? As Evan Calder Williams points out, salvage is firmly enmeshed within the circulation of capital:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
By now, the meaning of salvage has stabilized to the point where it can be paraphrased: the discovery of hidden value or use in what appears beyond repair or sale – or, at the least, a wager that the already ruined might still have some element worth saving, provided one knows where and how to look. In this form, it designates a fundamental mechanism within the circulation of capital. It is a relentless search for every last scrap of value. (Williams 2015: 845) </blockquote>
As a "search for every last scrap of value", salvage might not seem a likely abode of utopian possibilities. Yet distinct glimpses of such possibilities are offered in the book. We see this in a key scene when Sham arrives at the house of the siblings Caldera and Dero and asks to join them as salvors. It must be exciting, he says, to uncover the past. But Caldera admonishes him: "you don’t uncover the past if you’re a salvor: you pick up rubbish. The last thing I think you should
think about’s the past. That’s what they do wrong here" (ibid. 145). Let me quote Zak Bronson, who nicely summarizes the utopian significance of this scene:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Caldera’s knowledge about the
railsea suggests that she has abandoned any desire to uncover objects’
original use; instead she creatively repurposes it for its contemporary
possibilities. This is something that Sham notices when he arrives at
Caldera’s home, which serves also as a scrapyard for rusted-out,
discarded metal. He marvels at her salvaged waste, including a stack of
washing machines that arc over the entrance to their property. Sham
wonders, “Why would you use arche-salvage for something it clearly
wasn’t for? When there were much bloody easier things to build an arch
out of?” (156). Caldera’s transformed arch signifies the utopian
possibilities of salvagepunk: it turns objects upside down. In the
post-apocalyptic world, their value is no longer based on the process of
exchange, but on their social function within the new landscape. (Bronson 2014: 94) </blockquote>
I readily agree with Bronson that Caldera's salvage activities - and not least the arch - are the locus of <em>Railsea</em>'s utopia. But isn't it significant that these utopian possibilities are not portrayed as in any sense <em>negating</em> the salvage-based capitalism of the railsea world? Just like the washing machines making up Caldera's arch, the salvaged junk brought in by the salvage trains in Streggeye will also be repurposed, disconnected from any past, original use. In regard to what, then, does Caldera's version of breaking with the past represent a utopian possibility? If it consists in creatively repurposing junk for present purposes, then we need to figure out what this "past" is in order to know exactly what the arc is supposed to be a counter-image <em>to</em>.<br />
<br />
The answer to this (perhaps not so difficult) riddle comes near the novel's end. Sham and his comrades make their way to the edge of the railsea and, against all odds, manage to find a way out of it. As the first people in millennia, they cross an ancient bridge stretching over an almost endless chasm and arrive at what appears to be a ghost town. There feral figures appear, headed by a sinister tall man. <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
What were they, these dwellers beyond the world? Rag-clad, hulking
& shaggy, creeping, sniffing, they loped out of the dust that
announced them. Ten, twelve, fifteen figures. Big women & men, all
muscle & sinew, baring their teeth, coming on two limbs & four,
apelike, wolflike, fatly feline. Staring as they came.<br />
«We have to go,» Dero said, but they could not get past. The
newcomers had reached the base of the jetty. & there they stopped.
Their dark clothes were so shredded they looked like feathers. They
licked their lips; they stared a long time. ... Something was approaching from the ruins. Seven feet tall, sloped,
immense. An ancient, powerful man, of great girth. He wore a repatched
dark coat, a tall black hat....<br />
What looked like a degenerate avatar of the god stepped slowly past
his fellows, towards Sham & the others. The jetty shook with his
great steps. He licked his face in delight.</blockquote>
Amazingly, it turns out that the man, known as the "Controller", represents the ancient corporation responsible for constructing the railsea. The railsea was in fact once a real ocean that was drained by the corporation to increase marketable real estate. Believing that Sham and his comrades have come to settle their debts at last, the Controller triumphantly presents them with a bill.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Caldera stared at the paper. «This is … more money than there’s ever been in history,» she whispered. «It’s gibberish.» ...<br />
Abruptly, Sham hated them. He didn’t care that they were lost, too, in thrall to a remorseless drive, the hunger of a company presiding over ruin. That refused to allow the fall & rise of civilisations, the visitations & transformations & leave-takings & rubbish-pickings of aliens, the fall of waters, the poisonings of skies & the mutation of the things in the earth, because of the very actions for which they charged, to intrude on their patient accounting. Endlessly extending terms to a humanity unaware they were in debt, that they had for millennia been buying travel-passes on the never-never. All in the hopes that at the end of time, economies would be back in place to pay.<br />
«Ghost money in Heaven,» Sham said. «Not ’cause it died — ghosts because it weren’t born yet.» He stared the big man in the face. «We,» he said, «owe you nothing.»<br />
The controller stared at him. His look of hungry expectation slowly changed. To one of uncertainty. Then slowly to one of misery. & abruptly to one of rage.<br />
He roared. All the Heaven-dwellers roared. They lurched forward. The jetty rocked as they came. (Miéville 2013: 360-363)</blockquote>
So here, in the person of the Controller, Shame and his comrades finally confront the beast, the last and pitiably remnant of today's global finance capitalism. Written as it was in 2012, it's safe to assume that readers wouldn't have had any difficulties in recognizing in the Controller's snickering face the masters of the debt economy that just a few years earlier had wreaked havoc with global finance, plunging whole populations into debt servitude, and yet, despite the enormity of their fiasco, managed to live on basically unscathed by the crisis. In the ensuing fight on the jetty, Sham manages to push the Controller into the sea and that's the end of capitalism - not with a bang but with a whimper.<br />
<br />
Now the picture seems clear. Caldera's liberating ability to start anew is the necessary antithesis to this ridiculous zombie-like capitalism, which refuses to let go of the past and over millennia keeps track of accumulated debts that have become irrelevant to the living. Bronson (2014) is clearly right when he points out that Miéville’s novel "taps into the utopian possibilities of repurposing and
recreating the world anew out of the wreckage that remains”.<br />
<br />
Yet, the simple opposition between the utopian possibilities of Caldera-style salvage/repurposing and the absurd persistence of Controller-style zombie capitalism is complicated and to some extent undermined by the existence of the far less moribund economy of the railsea, which, as we have seen, is also very capitalist. The facile end of the Controller seems to suggest that finance capitalism is nothing but a parasitical remnant that can easily be removed without any damage to the real, functioning economy. This real economy has, after all, grown up and prospered in blissful ignorance of the Controller and his monstrous corporation for ages. And now it is ready to cast off the shell of the old (the "iron cage", to paraphrase Max Weber, has thus reverted into the "light cloak" it was meant to be). The only problem is that Controller-style capitalism is killed off only to make way for another kind of capitalism, namely the salvage-centred railsea economy. How radically new are the utopian possibilities of salvage if salvage is part and parcel of the latter economy?<br />
<br />
This, I believe, is how far Miéville's novel takes us. No doubt it would be possible to continue exploring the ambiguities of salvage by looking closer at other examples. Why not discuss Williams' explorations of salvagepunk in <em>Combined and Uneven Apocalypse</em>, Anna Tsing's ruminations on salvage in <em>The Mushroom at the End of the World</em>, or perhaps Steven Jackson's discussions of "repair"? Wouldn't it have been helpful also to consult Marxist discussions of how capitalism relies on resources not generated by wage-labour (such as Jason Moore's <em>Capitalism in the Web of Life</em>)? True, true - but discussing these works will have to wait until some other day. <br />
<br />
Before I end, I'd like to propose three theses, which I hope will go some way towards clarifying the ambiguity of salvage. <br />
<br />
Firstly, although salvage is today a moment in the circulation of capital, it is also grounded in the need of human beings for survival and subsistence. Through its orientation to use value, salvage may offer glimpses in to a possible post-capitalist life. In that sense, it contains the seed of negating, not just the "1%", but also the railsea economy. The fascination with salvage that is evident in post-apocalyptic fiction stems, I suggest, from this seed. <br />
<br />
Secondly, a capitalism relying to a large extent on salvage is different from one based on industrial production. This in turn means that anti-capitalist struggles will also look different. Nicholas Beuret and Gareth Brown (2015) have argued that instead of the wage-labourer, the survivor takes central place as the subject of politics in such struggles. Instead of furthering historical progress and economic development, the survivor "dwells within a collapsing world". At the same time, differences between salvage and labour shouldn't be exaggerated. Labour, as Marx reminds us, is what people do when they're deprived of other means of subsistence. In labour we thus see the same ambiguity as in salvage. A person who is forced to work for a wage - a proletarian - is oriented to subsistence and hence to use values, yet works in a system where what counts is exchange value. Like the worker, the salvor takes part in the movement of capital yet retains an orientation to use value from the point of view of which the logic of capital will appear alien. Depite the fact that the salvor is sometimes formally a capitalist or at least not a member of the class of wage-labourers, it is thus possible to see salvage as a site of potential resistance to the logic of capital - and in this sense there is also a potential continuity between struggles waged in the name of labour and salvage.<br />
<br />
Finally, whatever utopian possibilities may grow from salvage are only present as a seed. As long as they remain unrealized, salvage per se is perfectly compatible with capitalism of any type. Moishe Postone once criticized a common mistake made by what he called "traditional Marxists", namely that they treated labour as a <em>transhistorical</em> category, extrapolating it into the future post-capitalist society. Against them, he argued that the point of overthrowing capitalism wasn't the liberation of labour, but the liberation <em>from</em> labour, since the category of labour only had meaning within the relations established by capitalism. In similar fashion, we shouldn't idealize salvage, treating it as a transhistorical category that can unproblematically be extrapolated into the future. Salvage as it exists today is no less enmeshed in capitalism than labour, and shouldn't be transposed into the future as a blueprint for a post-capitalist society. But that doesn't mean that it is mere ideology. Utopias, as Miéville (2015) points out in another text, are not meant to be blueprints but dreams that shock us into action by liberating our imagination.<br />
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<em><br /></em>
<em>References</em><br />
<br />
Beuret, Nicholas & Gareth Brown (2015) “Dancing on the Grave: Salvage, The Walking Dead, and the End of Days”, <i>Salvage</i>, 19th of October; <a href="http://salvage.zone/in-print/dancing-on-the-grave-salvage-the-walking-dead-and-the-end-of-days/">http://salvage.zone/in-print/dancing-on-the-grave-salvage-the-walking-dead-and-the-end-of-days/</a> (accessed 2017-10-23) <br />
<br />
Bronson, Zak (2014) “Reproduce, Reuse, Recycle: the End of the Future,
Salvage, and China Miéville’s <em>Railsea</em>”, Researchgate, January 2014; <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317175893">https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317175893</a> (accessed 2017/12/08).<br />
<br />
Miéville, China (2013) <em>Railsea</em>, Pan.<br />
<br />
Miéville, China (2015) “The Limits of Utopia”, Salvage Vol. 1, 1st of August; <a href="http://salvage.zone/in-print/the-limits-of-utopia/">http://salvage.zone/in-print/the-limits-of-utopia/</a> (accessed 2017-10-23).<br />
<br />
Williams, Evan Calder (2015) “Salvage”, <em>Journal of American Studies</em> 49(4): 845-859. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-71558878641008493402017-06-22T17:16:00.000+02:002017-06-23T08:14:05.674+02:00Kocka's capitalism<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pNe5y-7smEI/WUve77-PO7I/AAAAAAAABIk/VPzGZ_kV68w1_8Oqqd7jYcEiDYlF_KkhwCLcBGAs/s1600/k10563.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="467" data-original-width="300" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pNe5y-7smEI/WUve77-PO7I/AAAAAAAABIk/VPzGZ_kV68w1_8Oqqd7jYcEiDYlF_KkhwCLcBGAs/s200/k10563.gif" width="128" /></a>Just a very brief note on Jürgen Kocka's <em>Capitalism: A Short History</em> (Princeton University Press, 2016). This is a thin volume grasping an enormous subject, and as can be expected Kocka sometimes becomes too sweepingly superficial. It is rather annoying when entire scholarly traditions are dismissed in a single sentence without even the trace of an argument to back it up. <br />
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Still, there are two things in the book that I like. One is the definition of capitalism The second is his treatment of the "great divergence" in Chapter 2. I believe, however, that there is a slight tension between the two.<br />
<br />
The definition stresses decentralization, commodification and accumulation as three core elements in capitalism. To put it more precisely: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
(1) Property rights enable economic decisions to be made in a decentralized way<br />
(2) Markets are main mechanisms of allocation and coordination<br />
(3) Investment are systematically made in expectation of future gain. </blockquote>
To these elements he adds that in its fully developed form capitalism is also characterized by, firstly, the enterprise form and, second, the reliance on wage workers and the absorption from them of surplus value (Kocka 2016: 21f). A benefit of this definition is that it allows him to speak of early forms of capitalism when it merely represents a minority formation in noncapitalist environments. <br />
<br />
The "great divergence" is the one between East Asia and Western Europe made famous by Kenneth Pomeranz in his 2000 book <em>The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the World Economy</em>. Why did industrial capitalism take off in Western Europe rather than East Asia, despite similar levels of economic development as late as the 1750s? Pomeranz's answer (which has been much debated) was England's easy access to coal and to the New World. </div>
<br />
Kocka, however, thinks that a better explanation can be found by looking at the relation between economy and state. Contra free-market ideologues, his argument is <em>not</em> that the market was somehow freer of state interference in Europe than in China. In fact, in neither Europe nor China was there a clear differentiation between economy and state. The decisive difference was that "in Europe the political system was intrinsically diverse and positively fragmented, while in China there was a centralized empire" (ibid.51). Hence political rulers in Europe had to compete to promote their economies. This meant that they intervened much <em>more</em> than in China to further the interests of capitalists. Furthermore: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[The] merchants who supported capitalism in Europe... exercised direct influence on politics – in part via a symbiosis with rulers in the city-states and free cities... By contrast, merchants in China, as well as in Arabia and India, were confined to the antechamber of power... This explains how, in the final analysis and in spite of many countervailing trends, politics in Europe was decisive for promoting mercantile dynamism and a capitalistic kind of accumulation. (ibid. 51)</blockquote>
The conclusion, then - which I find persuasive - is that it wasn't differentiation between economy and society that helped capitalism in Europe, but on the contrary the much tighter <em>fusion</em> of economic and political power in European states compared to, for instance, China. <br />
<br />
Regarding this point, it's interesting to see that Kocka here draws rather near to Fernand Braudel, despite some critical remarks on the French historian's distinction between market and capitalism earlier in the book. Repeating a common criticism, Kocka thinks Braudel's distinction is much too sharp. When discussing the "divergence", however, he seems to implicitly rely on something very much like this distinction. Braudel stresses precesely the un-marketlike behaviour of great capitalists, who use their connections with political power to secure monopoly-like dominance of the most lucrative trades to make much bigger profits than in the ordinary market economy. Using Braudel's distinction, we might say that while markets were just as developed in China as in Europe, capitalism - in the sense of a system of capital accumulation supported by political and military power - was Europe's forte, and this is what explains the "divergence". Braudel himself writes: "China... is a perfect illustration of the fact that a capitalist superstructure did not automatically emerge out of a thriving market economy” (Braudel 1992: 600). Following Braudel, David Graeber similarly argues that premodern China and Islam were thriving market societies, but since the states were indifferent or hostile to the markets they never developed the Western brand of armed capitalism (Graeber 2011, Chapter 8). <br />
<br />
Kocka's argument concerning the "divergence" is very similar to Braudel's and Graeber's (although he doesn't mention them). The problem is that his definition of capitalism is not really congruent with Braudel's. If one goes with Kocka's own definition stressing the market as the central mechanism for allocation and coordination, then the system will be less capitalist the more allocation and coordination instead happens politically or through military force. Considering the entwinement in Europe between commercial interests and political power, this would seem to make Europe less capitalist than China. I am not so sure that this is a conclusion that Kocka would want to draw. However, the only way to avoid drawing it would be change the definition of capitalism - probably one would need to deemphasize the role of the market and instead allow for forms of capitalism that achieve capital accumulation not solely by relying on market mechanisms. <span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 9pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<br />
<em>References</em><br />
<br />
Braudel (1992) <em>The Wheels of Commerce, Vol. 2 of Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century</em>, Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. <br />
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<span lang="EN-US">Graeber, David (2011) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Debt: The First 5000 Years</i>, Brooklyn, New York: Melville House.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Kocka, Jürgen (2016) <em>Capitalism: A Short History</em>, Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br />
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<span lang="EN-US">Pomeranz, Kenneth (2000) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World
Economy</i>, Princeton: Princeton University Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-73272147307763033092017-03-12T23:08:00.000+01:002017-04-28T08:39:43.017+02:00Lovejoy and the hell-ocentric worldviewArthur O. Lovejoy's <i>The Great Chain of Being</i> (based on lectures held in 1933) tells the story of an influential idea in western thought, that of the 'Chain of Being', from Plato to Schelling. I read it to familiarize myself a bit more with pre-modern ideas of nature, prior to the establishment of the nature-culture distinction and the associated belief in the superiority of humankind as separate from and standing above nature (beliefs that, as Philippe Descola and others have pointed out, are both parochially Western and historically recent).<br />
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According to the idea of the chain of being, humankind was not separated from nature, but part of it, just one rung among others on the infinite ladder (the <i>scala naturae</i>) reaching up to God’s perfection. As Lovejoy points out, a logical corollary of this idea was that humankind was only infinitesimally separated from other rungs. Hence there was a “consanguinity of man and the animals” (pp. 195-198, references here and below to the 2001 Harvard University Press edition).<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Scala naturae, Didacus Valades (1579)</td></tr>
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The idea, which made its first organized appearance in Neoplatonism, is defined by three principles: those of plenitude, continuity and gradation. These principles say that the world must contain all possible kinds of being (even imperfect ones) and that these must be linked in a chain of continuity and graded according to their degree of perfection. When these principles came together in Neoplatonism, the result was "the conception of the universe as a ‘Great Chain of Being’, composed of an immense... number of links ranging in hierarchical order from the meagerest kind of existents... through ‘every possible’ grade up to the <i>ens perfectissimum</i>” (p. 59)<br />
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One of the things I found interesting in the book was how Lovejoy conceptualized the transition from medieval to modern worldviews. He points out that the idea of the chain of being, although forming an important undercurrent in medieval thought, was prevented from becoming dominant during the middle ages since it faced competition from the anti-rationalism of scholastics like Duns Scotus or William of Ockham who saw the inscrutable will of God as the sole ground of all value distinctions. What defines the arrival of modernity isn't the triumphant rise of what most of us think of as 'modern science' so much as the liberation of the idea of the chain of being from its old scholastic competitor. Freed from this competitor, the idea of the chain of being blossoms to its full splendour in early modernity, above all in the 18th century when, for example, it becomes a dominant motif in Alexander Pope's poetry and forms the philosophical core of Leibnitz' "optimism".<br />
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In telling this story, Lovejoy makes an interesting digression on medieval cosmology prior to the heliocentric worldview. The aim of the digression is to show that the 'Copernican revolution' wasn't very important in establishing the modern worldview. It certainly didn't mean a shift from a worldview in which humankind was central to creation to one in which it wasn't. “It is an error", he points out, "to suppose that the medieval world was a small affair, in which the earth bulked relatively large” (p. 99). The Ptolemaic system thus saw the earth as a mere dot compared with the heavens, and so did Maimonides.<br />
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It has been shown that the distance between the centre of the earth and the summit of the sphere of Saturn is a journey of about eight thousand seven hundred years of 365 days, assuming that one walked forty leagues a day [i.e., the distance, in round numbers, is 125 million miles]... Consider this vast and terrifying distance... Consider, hten, how immense is the size of these bodies, and how numerous they are. And if earth is thus no bigger than a point relatively to the sphere of the fixed stars, what must be the ratio of the human species to the created universe as a whole? And how then can any of us think that these things exist for his sake, and that they are meant to serve his uses? (Maimonides, quoted on p. 100)</blockquote>
In the following striking passage, Lovejoy then points out that the tendency of the geocentric system was the very opposite of giving man a high sense of his own importance.<br />
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For the centre of the world was not a position of honor; it was rather the place farthest removed from the Empyrean, the bottom of creation, to which its dregs and baser elements sank. The actual centre, indeed, was Hell; in the spatial sense the medieval world was literally diabolocentric. (p. 101f). </blockquote>
To paraphrase somewhat, the medieval worldview prior to the heliocentric order was hello-centric.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">L'image du monde by Gautier de Metz (1464), showing Hell in the centre of a universe made of concentric circles.</td></tr>
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This worldview lingered on in Montaigne, who described humanity's dwelling-place as "the filth and mire of the world, the worst, lowest, most lifeless part of the universe, the bottom story of the house" (quoted on p. 102) and John Wilkins who mentions as an argument against Copernicus that the earth because of its vileness "must be situated in the centre, which is the worst place, and at the greatest distance from those purer incorruptible bodies, the heavens" (quoted on p. 102). As Lovejoy concludes, "the geocentric cosmography served rather for man's humiliation than for his exaltation" (p. 102).<br />
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The Copernican hypothesis, then, wasn't important in challenging notions of humankind's centrality. More important was the growing sense that the universe might be acentric, associated with the assumption that the stars might be suns like our own, that these might be encircled by planets inhabited by rational beings like us, and so on - all ideas associated with the Chain of Being and the idea of boundless plenitude.<br />
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In Lovejoy's portrayal of early modern thought, then, there are few traces of any ideas of human superiority over nature or human centrality in the universe, and interestingly he argues that the tendency to assign a peripheral role to humankind <i>increases </i>in early modernity, thanks to the dominant influence of the idea of the Chain of Being.<br />
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Before ending, it is of course relevant to point out that another part of his argument is that this idea starts to wither away towards the end of the 18th century, when it collides with the idea of progress. To some extent it adapts by opening up for temporality in the realization of plenitude. The program of nature is now seen as carried out only gradually, in a slow ascent up the “ladder”. The idea of timeless fullness is replaced by that of unending progress. With this, a new era of thought begins on which the book hardly touches at all.<br />
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Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-11929494719241547002017-03-05T01:25:00.000+01:002017-03-05T22:23:23.044+01:00Elena Ferrante and MephistoFerrante's Neapolitan novels are terrific – I especially liked the first volume, but also read the others voraciously. <br />
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Just a small note: The epigraph in the first volume is from <em>Faust</em> and deals with Mephisto. During the reading I realized that it must have been chosen with Lila in mind. Throughout the novels, the narrator (Elena Greco) uses her brilliant friend Lila as an anti-ideology device. As soon as Elena gets puffed up with success, Lila says something mean, brutal or harrowing that disorients her and makes her lose self-confidence. At the same time, Elena is painfully honest about the fact that she owes all her successes to Lila. Above all, Lila is the one who makes her write, and write well. <br />
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So her friend is Mephisto: the <em>Geist der</em> <em>stets verneint</em>, but who in so doing brings forth the good. Like in Hegel, Lila is the terrible force of the Negative that always gets <em>aufgehoben</em> into a positive, synthesizing totality. Between the two friends a tension is generated that holds the reader in suspense. Who will carry off the victory? The positive or the negative? Who will have the last word? Hegel or Adorno?<br />
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Ferrante comes closest to openly disclosing this logic in the final, fourth volume (all references below are to <em>The Story of the Lost Child</em>, Europa editions, 2015). <br />
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For instance, Elena tells her friend that as a writer she has a duty to make everything seem coherent. “But if the coherence isn’t there, why pretend?”, Lila asks. “To create order”, Elena replies (p. 262).<br />
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Later Elena reflects: “I said to myself that to be adult was to recognize that I needed her impulses. If once I had hidden, even from myself, that spark she induced in me, now I was proud of it... <em>I was I</em> and for that reason I could make space for her in me and give her an enduring form. <em>She instead didn’t want to be her</em>, so she couldn’t do the same” (p. 371).<br />
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Anticipating her own disappearance (which sets off the novel in the first volume), Lila tells Elena: “To write, you have to want something to survive you. I don’t even have the desire to life, I’ve never had it strongly the way you have. If I could eliminate myself now, while we’re speaking. I’d be more than happy” (p. 454).<br />
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And finally, there’s Elena’s admission near the end: “Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity” (p. 473).<br />
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But extracts cannot substitute for what should be read in its entirety. They're like pebbles in the sea. When you pick them up and let them dry in the sun, they lose their lustre.<br />
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<span style="font-family: MS Pゴシック;"></span><br />Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-40342374779980417252017-01-14T17:14:00.000+01:002017-01-14T22:21:25.485+01:00Kant's metaphorsI'm just now reading Kant's <em>Critique of Pure Reason</em> and I'm struck by his metaphors, many of which draw on colonialism, voyages of discovery, sovereignty and constitutional monarchy. I'm starting to wonder to what extent it might be possible to read these metaphors as indicators of a certain layer of ideas - not so deep as to be unconscious and not entirely visible at the surface level of explicit discussion, but residing in the topsoil of the text, so to speak. <br />
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Let me start with the startling and almost poetical passage at the beginning of Chapter III in the second book ("The Ground of the Distinction of all Objects in General into Phenomena and Noumena") where the realm of understanding is described as an island (page references are to <a href="http://staffweb.hkbu.edu.hk/ppp/cpr/toc.html" target="_blank">Norman Kemp Smith's translation</a>):<br />
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WE have now not merely explored the territory of pure understanding, and carefully surveyed every part of it, but have also measured its extent, and assigned to everything in it its rightful place. This domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits. It is the land of truth -- enchanting name! -- surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion. Before we venture on this sea, to explore it in all directions and to obtain assurance whether there be any ground for such hopes, it will be well to begin by casting a glance upon the map of the land which we are about to leave, and to enquire, first, whether we cannot in any case be satisfied with what it contains -- are not, indeed, under compulsion to be satisfied, inasmuch as there may be no other territory upon which we can settle; and, secondly, by what title we possess even this domain, and can consider ourselves as secured against all opposing claims. (p 258)</blockquote>
This is a language not only of adventure and discovery, but also of conquest and colonialism. Kant puts himself in the role of a colonial captain who is preparing for settlement and who is much concerned about the "title" to the territories explored so far. This language recurs when later he discusses the limits of reason, which mustn't extend itself beyond the field of possible experience:<br />
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... inscribing its <em>nihil ulterius</em> on those Pillars of Hercules which nature herself has erected in order that the voyage of our reason may be extended no further than the continuous coastline of experience itself reaches -- a coast we cannot leave without venturing upon a shoreless ocean which, after alluring us with everdeceptive prospects, compels us in the end to abandon as hopeless all this vexatious and tedious endeavour. (p. 362)</blockquote>
Again, in the discussion of the paralogism of reason, Kant warns against taking even a single step beyond the realm of sense perception:<br />
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For by such procedure we should [...] have entered into the field of <em>noumena</em>; and no one could then deny our right of advancing yet further in this domain, indeed of settling in it, and, should our star prove auspicious, of establishing claims to permanent possession. (p. 371)</blockquote>
Passages like these raise the question to what extent Kant's philosophical endeavor was coloured by the historical experience of Columbus and Cook. I'm not suggesting that the former simply reflects the latter or replicates it in thought, but at least it seems certain that it was from such experiences that Kant borrowed the metaphors by which he envisoned it.<br />
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Considering this explicit modelling of philosophy on voyages of discovery and colonialism, might we not suggest that the critique of pure reason is also a critique of colonialism? I think we can, at least if we take critique to mean, not necessarily a negative appraisal, but rather a scrutiny of possibility. Rather than as an imperialist, he can more accurately be described as a cartographer, carefully mapping the bounds beyond which colonial ventures must fail. Far from advocating overseas empires beyond the realm of the sensible, Kant seeks to prove the illusory character of such advocacy.<br />
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Speaking of territory, the issue of sovereignty is of course close at hand. Kant's use of metaphors related to sovereignty and political struggles is perhaps most apparent in the Preface to the first edition of the Critique, where he describes metaphysics as "the Queen of all the sciences" (p. 8). <br />
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Her government, under the administration of the dogmatists, was at first despotic. But inasmuch as the legislation still bore traces of the ancient barbarism, her empire gradually through intestine wars gave way to complete anarchy; and the sceptics, a species of nomads, despising all settled modes of life, broke up from time to time all civil society. (p. 9)</blockquote>
In addition to nomadic skeptics, the queen's empire is also threatened by the plebs of common experience ("dem Pöbel der gemeinen Erfahrung", unhappily translated as "vulgar origins in common experience", p. 9). <br />
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In relation to this queen, Kant comes forward as an advocate of constitutional monarchy. Her realm is defended against nomads and plebs, but at the same time her power is circumscribed by the "tribunal" of critique, as befits "the matured judgment of the age, which refuses to be any longer put off with illusory knowledge" (p. 10).<br />
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It is a call to reason to undertake anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely, that of self-knowledge, and to institute a tribunal which will assure to reason its lawful claims, and dismiss all groundless pretensions, not by despotic decrees, but in accordance with its own eternal and unalterable laws. This tribunal is no other than the critique of pure reason. (p. 10)</blockquote>
The monarchy, then, mustn't be despotic. As befits an enlightened age, the precise reach of monarchial power must be prescribed by critique. Kant's metaphors even suggest that "revolution" might be a way to establish this desired form of monarchy:<br />
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This attempt to alter the procedure which has hitherto prevailed in metaphysics, by completely revolutionising it in accordance with the example set by the geometers and physicists, forms indeed the main purpose of this critique of pure speculative reason. (p. 26)</blockquote>
Looking at passages like this, it feels like it wouldn't be impossible to extract an entire political philosophy from the Critique. To read a political message into it would probably go against Kant's own intentions (or wouldn't it?). Still, I can't help marvelling at the extent to which Kant, in his use of metaphors, provides a kind of sketch or map of the issues and concerns of his own historical situation, that of the 18th century, reproducing them as philosophical concerns in the mirror world of his system.<br />
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<em>References</em><br />
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Kant, Immanuel (1929) <em>Critique of Pure Reason</em> (tr. Norman Kemp Smith), e-version prepared by Stephen Palmquist and placed in the Oxford Text Archive in 1985; <a href="http://staffweb.hkbu.edu.hk/ppp/cpr/toc.html">http://staffweb.hkbu.edu.hk/ppp/cpr/toc.html</a>(accessed 2017-01-14) <span lang="EN-GB"></span><br />
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</span>Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-45930875060299198362016-12-09T09:38:00.002+01:002016-12-09T23:12:50.105+01:00Solidarity with those listed on the "professor watchlist"The list in question is of course disgusting - an attempt at intimidation that evokes unpleasant memories of fascist witchhunts. In view of my earlier criticism of John Bellamy Foster, I'd like to take the opportunity to express my solidarity with him and others on the list. Fortunately this thing is not (yet) a state project. Here's the message from him, which is now circulating on the Internet:<br />
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Dear Colleagues,<br />
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This is no game. We are a different period. I have not yet seen the environmental sociology discussion on this, but I am a PEWS, Environmental Sociology, and Marxist Theory section member (a former head of the section) and I am on the list. I believe I am the only one on the list in this region (the Pacific Northwest). In my case I am on it because of the Horowitz Dangerous Professors List of a decade ago, where I was listed. The Professor Watchlist has taken over the statements by Horowitz there word for word, I believe, but now it is more serious. There is a University of Oregon Chapter of the Professor Watchlist established over the last week and I am the principal target. Next week an NPR affiliated local radio station will be interviewing the head of the Chapter in a call-in show, where that individual will no doubt pinpoint me as the local rotten apple and use that as a weapon for threatening other professors. One of my sins is to be editor of Monthly Review. I have been asked to do a separate, “adjacent” interview on the same station, in which I will be able to respond.<br />
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Here we have to learn from history. The key to developing a coherent response is the Einstein First Amendment Strategy from 1953 developed in the midst of the McCarthy Era (the initial attempt to use the First in the case of the Hollywood Ten failed) in which Einstein declared that there should be determined non-cooperation and that the goal should be to use the First to attack the inquisition itself. His letter appeared in the NYT in June 1953 and let writers Leo Huberman and Harvey O’Connor, and then Corliss Lamont, Lilian Hellan, and Paul Sweezy, all of whom were closely connected, and linked to Einstein and MR, put it into practice in a succession of attempts to break McCarthyism. Sweezy was the most successful because he refused to turn over his lecture notes and to name names and they hit him with contempt of court and consigned him to county jail and he fought it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Things are obviously not at that critical state yet (we are not talking about subpoenas and prosecutions with possible imprisonment at the moment), though there are calls to reestablish the House on Un-American Activities Committee. But I think that the Einstein strategy is what we need to adopt from the start. If such a stance is taken from the beginning we may be able to head off further disasters. There should no arguing of specifics of charges, rather freedom of speech and academic freedom and challenging the goon squads should be everything. You might want to familiarize yourself with the U.S. Supreme Court Decision Sweezy v. New Hampshire of 1957. You can find it online under its case number (354 U.S. 234). Welcome to Gleichschaltung.</blockquote>
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P.S. The list has already attracted protests. One way is to turn being listed into a badge of honor and expressing solidarity by demanding to be on the list, as <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/12/08/a-twist-on-controversial-professor-watchlist-notre-dame-academics-want-their-names-added/?utm_term=.00683712b21f" target="_blank">these academics</a> on Notre Dame.<br />
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<br />Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7157640748260442988.post-66704881419076994702016-12-08T23:48:00.000+01:002016-12-09T23:25:08.579+01:00Coming across LévinasI'm probably always out of step with the times. Back in the days when Lévinas was in vogue I didn't care much for his philosophy, but today I can't help thinking of it with fondness. There's undoubtedly something right about it. An important moral intuition that what is right has very little to do with legality, the state or the nation. Why are there so few who dare to say that today? Maybe I'm nostalgic for the days when what he wrote didn't seem as controversial and bold as it does today? Today, ever since the "refugee crisis", those who speak up for hospitality are immediately accused of "lacking solutions", but we shouldn't forget that the accusers lack solutions too - namely to the other's suffering. <br />
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I came across an essay on Lévinas today, "<a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/18/what-do-we-owe-each-other/?smid=fb-nytopinion&smtyp=cur&_r=0" target="_blank">What Do We Owe Each Other</a>?". It's by Aaron James Wendland, a research fellow at the University of Tartu and it ends like this.<br />
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Levinas has taught us that our responsibility for others is the foundation of all human communities, and that the very possibility of living in a meaningful human world is based on our ability to give what we can to others. And since welcoming and sharing are the foundation upon which all communities are formed, no amount of inhospitable nationalism can be consistently defended when confronted with the suffering of other human beings. “In the relationship between same and other, my welcoming of the other is,” as Levinas puts it, “the ultimate fact.” </blockquote>
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<time class="dateline " datetime="2016-01-18T08:45:39+00:00" itemprop="datePublished"></time><br />Carl Cassegardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15403509890553232521noreply@blogger.com0