Monday, 17 October 2011
REQUIESCAT IN PACE
Bob was a force of nature, a brilliant, multi--talented man whose scholarly work spanned Ancient Philosophy, Logic, the Philosophy of Science, Nietzsche, and much else. There was a period of many years in my life when I spoke to Bob every single day, even when he was away for a semester in Scandinavia. I learned from him constantly, and shamelessly plagiarized his ideas when I wrote a Philosophy textbook. In the doctoral program that we created and ran for a while at UMass as an alternative to the standard program, Bob was the central figure. Students gravitated to him, worked with him, learned from him, and wrote their doctoral dissertations under his direction.
Bob was also a professional jazz pianist who performed frequently in such venues as could be found in Western Massachusetts. I think it must have been a surprise for patrons of a lounge or bar to discover that the big man hunched over the keys playing standards and little known tunes was also a distinguished philosopher.
Bob was a cheerful, ebullient man with a mordant, ironic sense of humor. It is not an exaggeration to say that his presence in the Philosophy Department kept me sane during some very dark times. He will be sorely missed by a great many people, and was loved by many, including myself.
Requiescat in pace, Bob.
Sunday, 16 October 2011
ONE-DIMENSIONAL MAN A MINI-TUTORIAL PART TWO
Marcuse was powerfully struck by the fact that in a mature capitalist society, workers seem to internalize psychologically the demands of their bosses, treating the repression of their natural instincts in the factory or shop or office as signs of virtue rather than as painful constraints necessitated by the fact that they have been deprived of access to and ownership of the means of production. To be sure, some deferral of gratification and control of libidinal instincts is unavoidable. That Marcuse had learned not only from Freud but also from Marx. But the quantum of repression that workers inflict on themselves far exceeds what is required by what Freud called "the reality principle." This surplus repression serves no useful function for the workers. It does, however, serve a very useful function for capitalists, for it vastly increases their profits. Here is the way I put the same point more than twenty years ago in my little book, Moneybags Must be so Lucky:
"[T]he worker, as purveyor of abstract, averagely efficient labor is torn between her natural human needs and the needs of capital. Her mind and body require a graceful, rational, integrated development if she is to achieve a healthy fulfillment of her nature. But the exigencies of profitability demand the services of a neutral, adaptable labor power unencumbered by such obstructive predispositions as natural body rhythms, craft traditions, or a preference for participation in the planning, direction, and evaluation of the activity of production.
The concept of abstract labor is socially valid because the more fully the worker construes his actual work situation in its terms, the more successful he is, as measured by the criteria implicit in the concept itself -- criteria endlessly reconfirmed by employers, fellow-workers, ministers, teachers, and even by the members of his own family. The more completely he remakes himself in the image of abstract labor, the more likely he is to get and hold a job, win the praise of those around him, and weather the periodic economic storms. This repeated social confirmation confers objective validity on the concept, so that finally it comes to seem that resistance to the regime of the machine is mulish stubbornness, rejection of the authority of the bosses is sinful rebelliousness, and dissatisfaction with a subsistence wage is self-indulgence." [Third Lecture: Mrs. Feinschmeck's Blintzes.]
Marcuse noted that although the output of goods and services in modern capitalist economies has grown vastly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, workers are actually putting in longer hours now than they had half a century earlier. This is clearly humanly irrational, he argued, but of course immensely profitable for capital. The function of the surplus repression manifested in longer work hours and speeded up production lines, even in dress codes and modes of deference and demeanor in the work place, is simply to serve capital's insatiable need for accumulation. The very structure of desire itself is manipulated and distorted to ensure adequate demand for capital's products, with "needs" being created for products that no sane person could truly be said to need.
Marcuse's analysis, of course, rests on a rejection of the dominant tradition of Western Civilization, as expressed in Freud's pessimism concerning the unavoidability of elevating the Reality Principle over the Pleasure Principle, embracing instead Marx's Romantic interpretation of artistic creativity as the key to understanding humanly fulfilling labor. [I must now apologize to the readers of this blog for repeating things I have said in other tutorials. In a perfect world, I could count on every reader to have read everything I have previously posted, either here or on box.net. But since my readers, alas, actually have lives of their own, which must necessarily intrude on their attention to my every word, I shall what I wrote in my tutorial on The Thought of Karl Marx. This inevitable interpenetration of my various lines of exposition is, I suppose, some evidence that there is a measure of coherence to my thought processes.] Here is what I said there.
"Let me begin by talking about the Romantic conception of artistic creativity. The painters, sculptors, poets, and composers of the medieval and classical period were thought of as artisans, skilled craftsmen who worked for patrons or for entire communities, decorating castles or churches and memorializing military victories and the marriages of princes. But a different conception of artistic creativity emerged in the early nineteenth century period that we now call the Romantic era. Artists began to be thought of -- and to think of themselves -- as lonely creators, inspired by their muses to tear works of great art bleeding from their breasts [think Beethoven rather than Bach.] Thus understood, the act of artistic creation has the following structure: First, the artist is inspired to form an idea in his or her mind, an idea of a sculpture, a painting, a poem, a sonata, an idea of beauty. Then, by exercising great skill with chisel and mallet, with canvas and brush, or with pen, the artist makes the idea real, externalizes it, embodies it in some medium, thereby producing the work of art.
"This self-externalization [or selbstentausserung -- it always sounds better in German] may be achieved with great effort, leaving the artist exhausted, spent, drenched in sweat. Or it may be accomplished with blinding speed and seemingly little or no effort at all. But in either case, the completion of the act is, for the artist, a moment of triumph and fulfillment. The Idea has truly been made Flesh. The labor is a fulfilling labor, the fatigue a good fatigue. There it stands, on the page, or on the canvas, or on the podium -- what had begun as an idea in the artist's mind is realized, made real, before him or her. And the work of art is now available to all of us to see, to hear, to read, to experience and enjoy. Even those of us incapable of the act of creation can derive great enjoyment from the work, and even inspiration.
"But this act of creation has a dark side, a negative dimension, for what originally completely and indisputably belonged to the artist alone, as an idea in mind, now takes on a life of its own. The artist ages, but the work of art does not. At the moment of creation, the object, the embodied idea, belongs to the artist, but it may -- indeed, it most probably will -- be sold, to someone whose intentions and appreciation may be antithetical to those of the artist. There is no way that the artist can control how the public experiences the work of art, what the experts choose to say about it, what uses it may be put to, whether for the greater glory of a God whom the artist does not worship, a State to which the artist owes no allegiance, or a collector for whose vulgar tastes the artist has only contempt. Eventually, the artist may have to ask permission or pay an entry fee to view the work that he or she has created. Is it any wonder that Emily Dickenson resisted publishing her immortal poems?
"What began as an act of fulfilling and satisfying self-externalization runs the risk of becoming an act of self-alienation [selbstentfremdung]. The term "alienation" has a double meaning on which Marx plays endlessly. To make alien, to alienate, means to make an other, an enemy, something that stands over against oneself [gegen-stand]. But to alienate also means to sell, to transfer title from one owner to another. In this sense, the word is routinely used in the law. By alienating the work of art, by selling it, the artist becomes alienated from it. The work of art becomes not simply other than him or herself, but perhaps even inimical, hurtful, an enemy.
"Marx, with what I consider a stroke of sheer genius, takes the Romantic conception of artistic creativity and generalizes it to all of us, arguing that all human beings are capable of, indeed must engage in, an act with the same fundamental structure -- the act of production. Human beings, unlike animals, live by purposefully transforming nature in accordance with ideas in their minds, so as to make it into goods that can satisfy their needs. [Marx did not know about tool use in animals, but that really does not matter here.] They too first form an idea in mind -- of a stone shaped to be a tool, of a field of grain, of a stick bent to form a bow -- and then externalize it, embodying the idea in an object that can serve our needs, helping us to gain food, clothing, shelter, and other humanly satisfying goods. But unlike the act of artistic creation, the act of production is collective, social. We struggle with nature together, not alone. This act of collective self-externalization, of production, is labor."
Marcuse embraces Marx's conception of natural, fulfilling, autonomous labor as a human good, not as a curse laid upon us for our disobedience, and adds to it the concept of surplus repression. This gives him a very powerful analytical tool with which to criticize human existence in an advanced capitalist economy. Capitalism as we experience it today is exploitative and it rests upon a degree of repression that is far greater than required simply for the satisfaction of human needs. But what is, in Marcuse's view, even worse, modern capitalist society [and especially American society, I think Marcuse believed] has devised ways of depriving the exploited and repressed of the psychological means of resistance.
The key to this critique is Marcuse's surprising and seemingly contradictory notion of repressive desublimation.
Saturday, 15 October 2011
ONE-DIMENSIONAL MAN -- A MINI-TUTORIAL PART ONE
One-Dimensional Man -- A Mini-Tutorial
I now begin what I hope will be a series of mini-tutorials, each perhaps only a few parts long, on books that I think are important or interesting, and which may not be familiar to the readers of this blog. As I proceed, I will find it necessary, for clarity and coherence, to repeat some things I have said in other tutorials. I apologize for this, but it has been borne in upon me that not every visitor to this blog has read the 300,000 or so words I have posted on serious subjects over the last year and a half. I find this incredible [ :) ], but I must bow to the exigencies of the cultural norms of the medium.
Herbert Marcuse was born in Germany in1898, and died at the age of eighty-one, in 1979. He was a student of Heidegger and Husserl and was deeply influence by the philosophy of Hegel. [Faithful readers will know that I have an allergic reaction to Hegel, so I consider it an evidence of my admirable broadmindedness that I am willing to take Herbert's works seriously, as I do.] In 1932, Marcuse published his first major work, Hegel's Ontology and Theory of Historicity. The next year, he joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, which had gathered to itself the most brilliant left-wing thinkers in Germany -- Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Fromm, and many others. In 1934, fleeing the Nazis like many other intellectuals, Marcuse came to the United States. During the Second World War he worked in Washington for the organization that eventually became the CIA, heading up the German Desk. It was there that he met and befriended Barrington Moore, Jr., who was working on the Soviet desk. They remained close friends for the rest of Marcuse's life, and it was at Moore's house that I first met Marcuse in 1960 or 61.
Although Marcuse was a formidably raffine German intellectual, he became, almost through a serious of accidents, the inspiration and idol for young, rebellious German, French, and American students in the 1960's, gaining such wide name recognition that at one point he even was mentioned in a New Yorker cartoon. Herbert was somewhat bemused by this fame, and publicly disavowed any interest in it, but I have always thought he was secretly amused and pleased by it. Marcuse taught for some years at Brandeis, and then, when he reached retirement age and Brandeis would not extend his contract, he went for a time to UC San Diego, where he taught Angela Davis, among others. The two books by which he is best known in the United States are Eros and Civilization, published in 1955, and One-Dimensional Man, published in 1964.
In order to understand One-Dimensional Man, it is essential to have some grasp of the set of issues that Marcuse and the other members of the Frankfort Institute were grappling with in the 1930's and afterward. I believe this is what French intellectuals and their American epigones would call his "problematic," although I dislike that term. For these thinkers, the two great influences on their understanding of the world around them were Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx [and on mine as well, I might add.] But it was very difficult to see how the insights of these two great thinkers were to be combined, or even held in the same consciousness. Freud took the larger social and economic world of himself and his patients as a given fact, to which, as a medical doctor, he gave very little thought. His realm of investigation was the individual unconscious, with heavy emphasis on the development of the unconscious in early childhood. Perhaps his central analytical concept is the notion of repression, the forcing into the unconscious of "unacceptable" thoughts and wishes, which, despite the repression, retained their power to disrupt conscious adult functioning. Freud was deeply pessimistic about the human condition, as he made clear in such speculative works as Civilization and its Discontents. The survival of the human race, he argued, requires the stifling of powerful libidinal instincts, or at the very least, the sublimation of erotic energies in productive and socially acceptable activities, such as art, literature, industry, and even war. No amount of psychoanalysis, Freud thought, however successful in relieving neuroses, could alter the fact that the infantile fantasy of instantaneous gratification of libidinal desires is incompatible with the reality orientation required for survival and for civilization itself. Notice that although these views seem to be about the social and economic world, their universality and pessimism is such that they leave that world untouched, unaltered, and hence unchallenged. In this sense, Freud's views, while scandalous to his world, were in fact in their effect conservative rather than revolutionary.
The focus of Marx's mature work was the socio-economic structure of capitalist economies -- what he called, echoing Newton, "the laws of motion of capitalist economy." Although in his twenties he wrote some very suggestive and important essays about the psychodynamics of labor in a capitalist economy -- essays that, as we shall see, had a considerable effect on Marcuse and other mid-twentieth century left intellectuals -- it was the economic theory set forth in the five thousand pages of the six volumes of Capital and several other works that were his great legacy. Particularly after the success of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, carried out in his name if not in his spirit, it was Marx's theories of capitalist exploitation, of crises, and of the possible transition from capitalism to socialism, not the early speculations on unalienated labor, that were most widely associated with his name.
The key concept of Marx's analysis of capitalism is surplus labor -- the labor that workers expend over and above what is necessary to reproduce their conditions of existence. In any society, under any circumstances, a certain amount of labor just be expended to grow food, produce clothing and shelter, provide medical and other services, and care for the children who are new generation of workers. Marx calls this ”necessary labor," and he makes it clear that this labor must be performed no matter what the "social relations of production" may be. But because capitalists own or control the means of production, they can force workers to labor longer hours than is necessary for their existence. The capitalists appropriate this "surplus labor," in the form of the products which they sell in the market. Marx's central analytical claim is that profit is nothing but the money form of the surplus labor extracted from the workers. Marx calls this appropriation of surplus labor "exploitation." Thus, the central conclusion of Marx's analysis, which, despite certain technical and mathematical problems I consider fundamentally correct, is that capitalism rests on the exploitation of the working class.
The central project of the Frankfort School, to put it in a phrase, was to bring Freud and Marx into fruitful conjunction, and, by somehow fusing their insights and teachings, produce an integrated theory of human existence in a mature capitalist economy and society. In their different ways, Horkheimer, Adorno, Fromm, Marcuse and others were all embarked upon this same quest. After the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the advent of Nazism, their principal effort was to understand how such horrors could come to be in a society that seemed to be at the height of refinement, intellectual development, and artistic and cultural realization. Many of the great works of the mid-century period deal, in one way or another, with this question. [See, for example, Horkheimer and Adorno's study of The Authoritarian Personality -- note the fusion of psychoanalytic and socio-political themes in the title itself.]
In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse, in a truly brilliant coup de theatre, combines the concepts of repression and surplus labor, and gives us, as a key to understanding life in a capitalist society, the concept of surplus repression. Tomorrow, we will see what he means by this suggestive phrase.
Friday, 14 October 2011
QUESTION
THE RATIONALE OF THE MINI-TUTORIALS
It might seem that I am engaged in an adult intellectual version of this childish game when I propose to write mini-tutorials on works of economics, sociology, and social psychology, after having done full scale tutorials on Kant, Hume, Freud, Afro-American Studies, Game Theory, and Ideological Critique -- intended to impress with my versatility perhaps, but really having no inner unity or coherent rationale.
Not so. My deeper purpose is pedagogical in the best sense. I am trying, by example, to teach that the bureaucratic separation of these various subjects in the Academy is actually counterproductive and artificial. The great thinkers whose works I have been discussing themselves drew no such lines, and moved seamlessly across disciplinary boundaries wherever the logic of their investigations took them. It is thoroughly unnatural for an economist to know no philosophy, for a sociologist to know no psychology, for a literary critic to be daunted by Game Theory.
My academic career was, by today's standards, rather atypical. After earning a doctorate in philosophy, I taught European history for three years, then a survey of the social sciences for two, later mathematics, political science, and economics, and eventually, for sixteen years, Afro-American Studies. I have always viewed this ceaseless movement from discipline to discipline as natural and productive. I would like to think that through the tutorials I post on this blog, I am encouraging younger scholars to be equally ecumenical in their intellectual endeavors.
Tomorrow, I shall start my first mini-tutorial with a series of remarks about the work of Herbert Marcuse, with special reference to the book I have recently several times mentioned, One-Dimensional Man.
Thursday, 13 October 2011
PUSHOVER