Tag: Ideas

Categories
Uncategorised

Theory Daddy

It was a celebration of all the aspects of New York art and culture that Sylvère Lotringer had touched. November 2014: ‘The Return of Schizo-Culture’, staged under the dome at MoMA PS1. It marked the fortieth anniversary of the press Lotringer co-founded: Semiotext(e). Performers ranged from the musician John Zorn to the poet John Giorno.

Lotringer resisted thinking of Semiotext(e) as an avant-garde, but it certainly bears comparison to some of the historic ones. Maybe he reinvented their form or found a way to replace them. Semiotext(e) was certainly more than a publishing house. It was international, inter-generational. It combined workers in many media, who attempted to articulate their time in forms appropriate to it – and whose desires were to change life, or at least endure it.

Like many of the animating figures of the historic avant-gardes, Lotringer’s life was blown off course by war. Born to Jewish immigrants from Poland in Paris in 1938, he was kept hidden in the countryside during the occupation. After, he lived with his family in Israel, before returning to Paris in 1958 where he was active in the Zionist socialist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair. To avoid conscription in France’s war against Algerian liberation he enrolled in the École pratique des hautes études. He wrote a doctoral dissertation on Virginia Woolf under the direction of Lucien Goldmann and Roland Barthes.

Lotringer’s intellectual formation owes something not only to his teachers but also to movement work as a left-wing militant in postwar France. The everyday life of meetings, groups, manifestos, of publications aimed beyond the seminar room. For ten years he wrote interviews and articles ­– mostly on English modernist writers – for Les Lettres Françaises, edited by Louis Aragon, the former surrealist turned communist cultural commissar. Lotringer was never in the party but breathed the air of its extensive cultural milieu. One way of thinking about his life’s work is that he took the praxis of a militant cultural worker and turned it into an art form.

After bouncing around in Turkey, Australia, and Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, Lotringer landed at Columbia University in 1972, where he would teach for more than 30 years. With a handful of others, he started Semiotext(e) as a journal in 1974. The filmmaker Jack Smith thought Hatred of Capitalism would have been a better title. That is what the 2001 anthology was called.

The journal had several landmark issues, notably: Schizo-Culture (1978), Autonomia (1980), Polysexuality (1981) and The German Issue (1982). These featured a mix of theory and literature juxtaposed against arresting visual imagery and art. In 1983, Semiotext(e) launched its famous Foreign Agents book series, with Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations. These small black books, with no preface or blurbs, were central to creating the 1980s passion in the Anglophone world for theory.

Once, when he lamented to me how little he had written, I remarked that he had not written much writing but he had authored several authors. Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio and Félix Guattari came to exist as figures in American letters in large part through his efforts. Their reception via Semiotext(e) took a different path to the passage of French philosophy into the High Theory practiced in elite humanities institutions. In Lotringer’s hands, it became low theory, the lingua franca of creative workers, avant-garde artists, and downtown bohemians.

Columbia professor by day, Lotringer was also a figure of nightlife, which is where many of us first encountered his warmth and generosity, his curious yet detached, inscrutable engagement. He was not exactly of the East Village scene. He was usually slightly displaced from it. That too was something of a method, a psychogeographic technique of understanding an ambience of the city from its edges. He was, among other things, a nightlife ethnographer, comfortable among those doing their best to refuse work and daylight but not of them. What was contemporary and original in Semiotext(e) came in part from this double practice of learning from the seminar and the soirée, the enlightened and benighted.

Through day and night, work and play, Lotringer came to see a connection between the way New York artists and Parisian philosophers responded to the failure of the festival of liberation in the late sixties, the global crises of the seventies and the rightward turn of the early eighties. In both milieux he found turns toward the materiality of language, experimental practices in social forms, engagement with media as a deepening presence in everyday life, and a refusal of the politics of representatives and representations.

The 1978 Schizo-Culture issue of the journal came out of a conference of the same name that Lotringer organized with John Rajchman in 1975. It brought together William Burroughs, Kathy Acker and John Cage with Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Jean-François Lyotard. The poster for the event was emblazoned with quotes from Deleuze about desire and Foucault on power, which signalled the will to go beyond the Freudo-Marxist dispensations then a commonplace among the New Left.

The Polysexuality issue pushed further into ways of thinking the possibilities of sexual practices as neither utopian nor pathological. Famously, it was typeset in all capitals to slow the reader down, as he, she or they perused the material gathered between the front cover image of a man in erotic congress with his motorcycle and the back cover crime scene photo.

At a time when the Italian Communist Party exercised a certain fascination among left wing intellectuals elsewhere, Autonomia looked beyond it to the Italian far left. It introduced many Anglophone readers to the political and intellectual energies of Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno and Franco Berardi. The German Issue likewise looked beyond the increasingly bourgeois-liberal world of postwar critical theory to the margins where the liberal-social democratic pact had little to offer. It put Alexander Kluge next to Ulrike Meinhof. Lotringer extracted both issues at least in part through the kind of street and salon ethnography that yielded his insights into the connections between theory and the avant-gardes in New York.

Meanwhile, the Foreign Agents book series continued to offer intellectual provocations in bite-size chunks. Lotringer was a superb interviewer and made several interview-based books, including Pure War with Paul Virilio, Hannibal Lecter, My Father with Kathy Acker and Germania with Heiner Müller. All remain excellent introductions not just to the signature concepts of these writers but also to their singular intellectual practices.

While it came out in the book series, Still Black, Still Strong (1993) functioned a bit like one of the issues of the journal, although here Lotringer and his collaborators worked as editors in the service of documenting the theory and practice of the Black Panthers. The book includes contributions by Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu-Jamal.

In 1990, Lotringer’s partner and collaborator Chris Kraus proposed a second book series as a counterpoint and corrective to the Foreign Agents. Christened Native Agents, these books challenged the apparent universality of the speaking position in what had become by now the genre of theory. The books both anticipated and contributed to the turn towards situated knowledges, in which the author is no longer the universal enunciator of universal difference. The series includes authors such as Eileen Myles, Bob Flanagan, David Wojnarowicz and Situationist International co-founder Michèle Bernstein.

In 2001, Semiotext(e) moved its base of operations from New York to Los Angeles – tracking with the rise of alternate cultural energy there – and switched distributors from Autonomedia to MIT Press. Hedi El Kholti joined as managing editor. Without detracting from the energy and direction that Kraus and El Kholti have brought to Semiotext(e), it is a tribute to Lotringer that Semiotext(e) has been able to grow and adapt and incorporate them. It is now among other things a major publisher of New Narrative authors, including Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian and Robert Glück. They came out of a San Francisco scene where mostly gay and lesbian writers grappled with the limits of the novel as form for non-heterosexual, non-bourgeois lives, and with the impact of theory’s decenterings of subjectivity.

Lotringer’s own writing is sometimes overlooked. Despite the singularity of his project, it always involved collaborators, and some of his best writing is his dialogs with other writers. The big book never quite materialized, but fragments of that project exist, such as Mad Like Artaud (2015). That book extends Lotringer’s dialogic practice to the past, presenting Antonin Artaud’s madness as a kind of shared affect with all of those around him and after him, including Lotringer himself.

What I remember from nighttime conversations with Lotringer is that the larger project on which he was trying to work was a reading of Artaud, Simone Weil, Georges Bataille as anticipators of that fascism and commodification that would sweep across all of their lives. He saw them as attempting to divert fascism’s primal energies into rituals of expiation, and failing at the task. Postwar history then appears as the wake of that failure.

One could think of Semiotext(e) as distracting him from writing more than an essay on this project (published as The Miserables). Or, as I prefer to see it, one can think of Semiotext(e) as that book. The press is a kind of meta-writing. It’s a book written through many others, updated and revised as it went along. How prescient it was that Lotringer worked his whole life against the embers of fascism of which commodification is not the liberal extinguisher but the accelerant. It’s a project that seems now even more timely than in the decades of Semiotext(e)’s formation when the figure to rail and rally against was neoliberalism rather than neofascism.

In Kraus’s novel Torpor, a Lotringer-like character’s refrain is: ‘it could be worse.’ It’s the mantra of a survivor. Lotringer was incapable of the optimism that animated much of the postwar left. Rather, he gathered and connected the energies that might avoid the worst. He certainly published and encouraged writers of a more utopian bent, but more out of a sense of their value as components in the struggle to avoid the worst.

Lotringer appears as a character in several other books: I Love Dick and Aliens and Anorexia by Kraus; Great Expectations and My Mother: Demonology by Kathy Acker; Inferno by Eileen Myles. There’s traces of him in more fictionalized form elsewhere as well. He was made to be a character in literature because he was one of those rare people who, for a good many people, drew together a storied era and made it both intelligible and deeply felt. He could have that effect on students, artists, but also people whose lives did not end up centering intellectual or creative labour but needed nevertheless to understand the play of power and desire that shaped the limits and possibilities of their lives.

As I remember it, Lotringer would express a sort of wry ambivalence about the success of the kind of theory he fashioned in the commercial art world. ‘It’s a living’, he might say, and flash that grin. When concepts or modes of writing lost their counter-intuitive force he was inclined to move on. There’s a certain ongoing variation and revision one can find playing out all through the Semiotext(e) list. It wasn’t meant to become, as Deleuze and Guattari might put it, sedentary. It wasn’t meant to have too consistent an identity. Or as Foucault once put it: leave it to the police to see that our papers are in order.

Lotringer taught us certain tactics. To conduct one’s life as a discreet yet visible site of experimentation. To look for the play of concepts between one’s pleasures and one’s struggles. To not settle into too dense a representation of oneself, one’s desires, one’s politics. To find languages adequate to the moment and to find the historical resonances of that moment, perhaps outside narrative arcs one merely inherited, from family, school or party. For those who work and play in certain discrete – and discreet – ways, he remains a model. A kind of genial, encouraging, present yet reserved theory-daddy, I name I call and recall him with love and more than a little irony, camp and otherwise.

Read on: John Willett, ‘Art and Revolution’, NLR 112.

Categories
Uncategorised

Red to Black

Until his death in September, Charles Mills was the most persistent defender of the irreducibility of race in the American academy. Across a nearly thirty-five-year career, he opposed both its reduction to an epiphenomenon of economic exploitation and to a category subsumable under supposedly universal conceptions of the rational human being. By his account both Marxism and liberalism had failed to get race adequately into view; the two chapters of his intellectual life took the form of a critical dialogue with each in turn. It was the immanent critique of the latter, set in motion by what remains his most renowned work, The Racial Contract (1997), that earnt Mills his reputation as one of the Anglophone world’s pre-eminent social philosophers. In his 2016 John Dewey lectures to the American Philosophical Association, he summarised his worldview with an inversion of Rawls’s famous assertion about the foundations of society: ‘a slave society, a white settler state, a white-supremacist polity, is not a cooperative venture for mutual advantage, but a coercive venture by whites for white advantage’.

Born in England in 1951, Mills spent his early years in Jamaica, where his father was a renowned public servant and academic, awarded the Order of Distinction and the Order of Jamaica for chairing the country’s Electoral Advisory Committee during the political and civil disorder of the 1970s. After completing a degree in physics at the University of the West Indies in 1971, a Commonwealth Fellowship took the young Mills to the University of Toronto where under the supervision of Frank Cunningham and Dan Goldstick – Marxists working within the analytic tradition – he completed a doctoral thesis on ‘The Concept of Ideology in the Thought of Marx and Engels’ in 1985. From there, he moved to the University of Oklahoma for three years before spending seventeen years at the University of Illinois, nine at Northwestern and then finally working at the City University of New York until his death. Throughout, Mills maintained an outsider’s scepticism towards the methodology and assumptions of Anglophone philosophy, exacerbated of course by his status as a black academic in a predominantly white field.

The formative period of his intellectual life coincided with the protracted decline of the left both in Jamaica and the United States. In Jamaica, a wave of social tumult had pushed Michael Manley – previously an adherent of the Fabianism of Harold Laski from time spent at the London School of Economics – to attempt to build democratic socialism through coalitions with non-aligned countries and their neighbours in Cuba. He was defeated in 1980 following a series of violent attacks on his party’s base, threats of a coup from the right, economic pressure from the International Monetary Fund, and a visit from the then National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger to personally inform Manley that the US would not tolerate his country’s insubordination. Meanwhile, in what would become Mills’s adopted homeland, racist myths about the culture of poverty had taken root amongst the right, while the few vestiges of social democracy were under attack. His Dewey lectures set out in clear-eyed fashion the state in which the American left found itself:

The old, turn-of-the-century question as to why there is no socialism in the US has now become, with the rightward shift in the political centre of gravity and the corresponding restriction of possibilities, why there is no (left) liberalism, no social democracy, in the US.

Mills felt that in key respects the bourgeois task of abolishing non-economic hierarchies had not yet been accomplished in either country. Both were riven by deep inequalities that were inseparable from the racial form in which they were manifested. In 1970s Jamaica not one top firm was controlled by black people, despite their making up ninety percent of the country’s population. For the young Mills however, this entanglement of race and class did not justify a move away from socialism, but merely proved that the cultural domain was also a material one. In ‘Race and Class: Conflicting or Reconcilable Paradigms?’, a magisterial essay published in 1987, he sought to explicate the oft-quoted dictum of Stuart Hall that race is the modality through which class is lived, arguing that Hall did not mean to suggest that there was a perfect correlation between the two categories. Rather, racial classifications were the result of conflicts between social groups and represented different relations to economic and political power. On this basis, Mills concluded that ‘the ideologies and cultures of resistance that develop in the Caribbean will be most strikingly characterized by the reciprocal valorisation of blackness, whether in the form of Garveyism, Rastafari or Black Power.’

The dominant forms of Anglo-American Marxism however largely did not exhibit the subtlety of thinking about culture that Mills believed was necessary to navigate the relationship between class and race. Much of his early career was spent wrestling with conceptual matters – questions of history, ideology and morality – which he felt that this work had misconstrued. Analytical Marxism, which took as its starting point G.A Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978), aimed to apply a scientific rigour felt to be lacking in the interpretations emerging out of France and Germany by borrowing the tools of analysis developed by economics and logic to address issues of agency, class interests, and the relationship between base and superstructure. The concept of ideology however – the subject of Mills’s thesis – presented serious problems for this paradigm, since it seemed to suggest that an essential component of Marx’s theory was a rejection, on epistemological grounds, of the autonomy of social practices and morality.

Mills took aim in a 1989 essay at what he saw as Cohen’s technologically determinist understandings of history. In his view, the Canadian Marxist’s thesis that asocial forces of production determine the structure of society was incoherent. Contra Cohen, he asserted that forces of production could not be so easily distinguished from relations of production. In his telling, the binary between the material and the social on which Cohen’s ontology rested fell apart once one recognised that society is constituted by both material and ideal elements. Where Cohen saw the impetus for the development of the forces of production in a supposedly natural human rational interest, Mills argued that it was the struggles internal to a specific society that influenced the use to which productive technologies would be put. This echoed the position developed by the political Marxists Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins-Wood, who had previously argued that economic relations were the results of political conflict between social groups. Mills however believed that the conflicts which determined the development of the forces of production were not only within the economic domain. Instead, they could also include those over racism and sexism.

His primary interventions on this terrain can be found in From Class to Race (2003), which brings together essays from the late 1980s until 2001, showcasing his intellectual development away from Marxism to what he called black radical liberalism. Its argumentative core is that debates around ideology have rested on a fundamental misunderstanding. For Marx and Engels, ideology was no mere pejorative term, denoting a false belief propagated in the interest of reactionary social forces. Mills sought to defend the view that social struggles could determine the course of history and that the ideas of equality and justice which motivated them could not be written of as ‘ideology’ in the limited sense employed by Cohen and others. For racial politics, the potential rewards of this endeavour were considerable. It motivated his attempt to resolve a central problem of Marxist social theory: if morality only served ruling class interests, then how could one defend the moral criticisms launched by the working class (or racialized minorities) against capitalism? Mills correctly observed in a 1994 essay that Marx and Engels were not in favour of a rejection of morality tout court but were instead opposed to the ideological treatment of moral claims as exercising causal power in the world. (It is one of the misfortunes of Marxist theory, which takes itself to be founded on a break with Hegel, that the origins of this critique of idealism in Hegel’s critique of Kant is often ignored.) Moralism cannot, Mills insisted, overcome technological underdevelopment or the absence of class power, but this does not mean that moral claims about the injustice of a particular social order cannot be well-founded, or that they are not worth making.

During this period, Mills also turned his attention to questions of socialist theory and practice. In the Global North he saw the failure of socialism in the dogmatism of its Stalinist adherents, who marshalled the conceptual tools of vulgar Marxism to label any criticism of communism as bourgeois ideology. Particularly moved by Vivian Gornick’s observation of the millenarian cultishness of the mid-century American Communist Party, Mills argued that Stalinism was unwilling to reckon with facts which challenged its own worldview. Broadly correct as this diagnosis was, wasn’t the pathology that Mills diagnosed the result of a division of theory and practice and the transformation of communist party members into the super-structural workers they opposed? Wasn’t the correct response a renewal of the socialist project of embedding theoretical reflection within the lives of the working class, rather than a turn towards liberalism in search of an ideology less hostile to moralism? Mills’s often illuminating analysis of the left’s failures were though never sufficiently localised to allow for a conceptualisation of political strategy. Questions of building a political movement capable of redistributing wealth and power largely eluded him.

In view of the failure of actually-existing-socialism, what was to be done about the transformations brought about by post-Fordist capitalism? A handout for a paper Mills delivered in 1996 at the Radical Philosophy Association sketched a map of the left’s road to power:

Socialism in Our Time: A 500-Year Plan to Be Passed on to Their Grandchildren: As pedants know, if nobody else, the new millennium doesn’t actually start until the year 2001, so this gives RPA members several years to prepare a 500-year plan:

2001-2100: Struggle against white supremacy/majoritarian domination

2101-2200: Struggle against white supremacy/minoritarian domination

2201-2300: Struggle for social democracy

2301-2500: Struggle for socialism

Get your black diapers now!

Mills’s point is clear: despite assumptions that America is a pure bourgeois society, it still retained pre-capitalist remnants of non-economic hierarchies. There could be no socialist revolution without a bourgeois revolution and therefore the struggle against racism was the front on which this battle needed to be fought. Ultimately, the theoretical framework that Mills adopted to illuminate the prevalence of white supremacy was one forged in dialogue with Rawls rather than Marx. The Racial Contract (1997) presented a radical reinterpretation of social contract theory: rather than equality Mills argued that it was in fact the domination of women and non-white people that served as the foundation for modern Western societies. The groundwork for this reorientation had been prepared by his decade of writing in and ultimately against Marxism, but Mills’s immanent racial critique of liberalism does not discard Marxism entirely. Radical feminism also proved to be a key influence, in particular Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract (1988); he later co-authored a revision of his book in the form of a dialogue with Pateman, Contract and Domination (2007).

Detached from a theory of history, society or political practice, in this later period Marxism for Mills remained a tool for recognising forms of domination within the social contract of modern societies. This led him to turn more directly to the ideological field, where he produced sweeping and often brilliant analyses of culture and the history of ideas. Blackness Visible (1998) brings together a series of essays on the racism implicit in the supposed universalism of philosophy, which argue that throughout history philosophers presupposed a subject which anachronistic interpretations have presented as universal. When properly historicised, he argued, it became clear that what Kant and others meant when they wrote about freedom and rationality were properties that they saw as unique to Europeans.

His most incisive critical treatment of liberal thought was perhaps his 2005 article ‘Ideal theory as Ideology’. There he argued that the assumption of a non-coercive foundation of society served as a way of treating racism and oppression as anomalies. The dispute between ideal and non-ideal theory should, Mills insisted, ‘be seen as part of a larger and older historic philosophical dispute between idealism and materialism’. The materialists, in contrast to their opponents, were on the side of a clear-eyed reckoning with the reality of exploitation. A 2007 essay, ‘White Ignorance’, elucidated his view that the Marxist conception of economic exploitation as the foundation of the social order could be employed to explain the persistence of racism, and the creation of social groups with an interest in not recognising the oppression in which they partake. But conceptions of racial exploitation need not rest on the labour theory of value which, Mills argued, ‘has proven to be fatally vulnerable’. It is hard not to read such disavowals as concessions to the liberal philosophical idea of reasonableness. In 1999’s ‘European Spectres’ Mills defended the need to move away from Marxism on this basis. The battle that Marxists face, Mills conceded, was that they:

believe a set of highly controversial propositions, all of which would be disputed by mainstream political philosophy (liberalism), political science (pluralism), economics (neo-classical marginal utility theory), and sociology (Parsonian structural functionalism and its heirs). But the irony is that all of these claims about group domination can be made with far greater ease with respect to race, relying not on controversial Marxist notions, but undeniable (if embarrassing) and well-documented (if usually ignored) facts from mainstream descriptive social theory, and on conventional liberal individualist values from mainstream normative social theory.

Of course, within an academy dominated by liberals working in a Rawlsian tradition what constitutes a reasonable opinion is heavily circumscribed. Wasn’t this a strange and somewhat defeatist concession to make? If Marxist theories of ideology were true – a view to which Mills claimed to be committed – then could they not help explain the blind spots of liberal social theory? Could they not clarify why it was that liberals conceived of society in a way that closed off the possibility of a conception of the collective good; that ignored the existence of class as a determinant of the structure of society; that denied the reality of exploitation as the source of profit; that through mystifying functionalist explanations obscured the historical emergence of social institutions? The pages of this journal, for example, have provided a socialist attack on key tenants of the liberal Weltanschaung: the political Marxism of Brenner and Meiksins-Wood, Peter Mair’s trenchant diagnosis of the hollowing out of liberal democracies, the analytic Marxism of Erik Olin-Wright. But with the political defeat of socialism in the 1990s, Mills seems to have turned away from engaging with those thinkers who offered the most perceptive interpretation of the causes of social oppression.

In his final book, Black Rights/White Wrongs (2017), which collected recent essays about the unspoken racist character of liberal thought, Mills would call for a critical rapprochement with liberalism, proposing that Rawlsian conceptions of justice could be adapted to fight for racial equality. This would only be successful, he insisted, if the social theorist employed the concept of ideology to critique the forms of rationalization that privileged groups use to justify the existing order. Such work was no doubt beneficial in sharpening the eyes of liberalism to the racism of the right as well as within its own ranks. But it is hard to shake the impression that the project of advancing a critique of liberal racism was simply moving with, rather than against, a tide which had washed away any serious challenge to capitalist domination. The afterglow of materialism in his work nevertheless offered a profound challenge to the methodological assumptions of contemporary philosophy, while his emphasis on history, political and culture – not as examples to elucidate arguments but as the sources of philosophical problems – helped to combat the provincialism that still plagues much of the discipline. This attempt to draw attention to the world of conflict and struggle was ultimately his greatest contribution. In spite of the distance he travelled, it should be understood as emerging from, not against, his Marxism.

Read on: Robin Blackburn, ‘Stuart Hall, 1932-2014’, NLR 86.

Categories
Uncategorised

Rule by Target

Can a frugal state be totalitarian? Or, in other words, is an anti-statist totalitarianism possible? These questions have been asked countless times during the era of triumphant neoliberalism: beginning in 1973 when Pinochet implemented the economic dictates of the Chicago School, passing through the various military regimes responsible for carpet privatizations (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, etc.), up to the discussions – no matter how wrongheaded – of the ‘sanitary dictatorship’ of neoliberal governance during the pandemic.

Totalitarianism requires a strong, ‘totalizing’ state, at least according to the doctrine promoted by Hayek in his 1944 Road to Serfdom, which in its redacted form, published by Reader’s Digest, sold one million copies. According to Hayek, a society sinks into totalitarianism as soon as the state begins to worry about the economic security of its citizens. The trajectory is irreversible; we start with social security and end up in concentration camps (or gulags). The omnipresence of the state is thus integral to ‘totalitarianism’ in the Arendtian sense.

A recent book, however, has planted in me a seed of doubt. Johann Chapoutot’s Libres d’obéir. Le management du nazisme à aujourd’hui (Free to Obey: Management, from Nazism to the Present Day [2020]), translated this year into Italian and German but, as is often the case, not English. Its central figure is Reinhart Höhn (1904-2000): a jurist, academic and SS general, sentenced to death for war crimes but subsequently pardoned. Höhn was part of a group of intellectuals that provided the theoretical framework not so much for Nazism itself as for the Gestapo, the SS and the occupation of almost all of Europe. His partners in this project included Werner Best (1903-89): a jurist too, but first and foremost a senior police officer in Hessen, then head of the political police, and finally plenipotentiary of occupied Denmark; Wilhelm Stuckart (1902-53), lawyer, jurisconsult to the Nazi party, member of the SS and formulator and compiler of the Nuremberg Race Laws; Franz Alfred Six (1909-75), a doctor of political science and member of the SS; Otto Ohlendorf (1907-51), an economic consultant and SS colonel who studied economics, held a doctorate in jurisprudence and commanded a unit responsible for around 90,000 deaths in Ukraine, before being sentenced to death at Nuremberg and hanged.

The presence of this educated élite at the head of one of the fiercest apparatuses of repression ever conceived, is a marked contrast with the hysterical image of SS officers in many American Second World War films: an image whose coarseness borders on the comical, and banishes the idea that a phenomenon like Nazism could ever repeat itself. We are typically reassured that such ghouls could never again implement such dangerous ideas. Not so in Chapoutot’s portrait. The author explains how these SS intellectuals were called upon to provide a conceptual framework capable of overcoming the enormous logistical difficulties by the conquest of practically the entire continent. In a 1941 text entitled Fundamental Problems for a German Administration of the Great Space, Werner Best wrote that ‘the rapid and powerful expansion of the territories on which the German people directly or indirectly exercise their sovereignty obliges us to review all concepts, principles and procedures through which this sovereignty has hitherto been thought and constructed.’ However much the territory under German dominion might increase, ‘the German people will never be able to afford doubling the number of public servants.’ More would have to be done with fewer personnel, not least because a large part of the male population was conscripted. The procedures of the state needed to be honed, made more flexible. In fact, Best had (unsuccessfully) proposed to Himmler that the public sector adopt a model of relativ lockeren Besetzung (‘relatively “loose” occupation’). The SS intellectuals thus became advocates of flexible management and streamlined protocols, at odds with the caricatured image of the Nazi dictatorship.  

Chapoutot charts the social trajectory of these characters following the defeat of Nazism. After his commuted twenty-year sentence, Franz Six became an advertising consultant for Porsche; Best worked as a consultant for the company Stinnes AG, then became an adviser to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the German Federal Republic. The most interesting story was that of Reinhart Höhn, who, having escaped the death sentence and spent years practicing homeopathy under a pseudonym, went on to found the Akademie für Führungskräfte der Wirtschaft (the Academy for Business Executives) at Bad Harzburg in Lower Saxony. By the time Höhn retired in 1972, around 200,000 German managers had passed through his institution; when he died, the number stood at 600,000. Professors at the school included other ex-SS officers, such as Six and Justus Beyer.

Bad Harzberg taught a style of management by target derived from Höhn’s reforms to the military chain of command. Under this system, the superior officer demands that his subordinates achieve their prescribed objectives, but leaves them free to decide exactly how, intervening only in exceptional cases (management by exception). Regrettably, Chapoutot does not investigate the relationship of the Bad Harzberg technique to the management styles now practiced in the United States. But his narrative shows how these hands-off methods were initially a product of German military expansion, which sought to reconcile a massive administrative operation with a reduced workforce.

The Nazi theorists were famously hostile to law and rights, viewed as creations of inferior Judaic and Latin cultures (Commandments of the Bible and Roman law codes respectively), and foreign to the proud German spirit which claims freedom from legal obligations. As such, they had a deep-rooted distrust of the state as a guarantor, responsible for the enforcement of law. The state was rather seen as a codified, ossified body which obstructs the flexibility and agility necessary for the expansion of Lebensraum. Nazis always talked of Reich (empire), never of Staat (state). Whereas Carl Schmitt saw states as bulwarks of political order, Best developed the idea of a Völkische Großraumordnung (popular order of the Great Space), in which the superior races would create zones of domination around themselves without fear of any normative restriction. Power was the only all-embracing source of political order. Aside from peoples (not, as per Schmitt, states), there existed no other normative points of reference that could be counterposed to the regime established by National Socialism.

For Höhn and his contemporaries, the state is unable to cope on its own when faced with the huge multiplication of tasks and responsibilities entailed by imperial expansion. It was precisely for this reason – to deal with re-armament, war preparations and the administrative challenges posed by the occupation of Europe – that para-state Nazi organizations began to surface, starting with the SS: a ‘private’ police force of 915,000 belonging to the party (even if Nazis always preferred to speak of a Bewegung – a movement – rather than a party). Likewise, Organisation Todt was born as a para-state company and ultimately employed 1.4 million foreign workers to meet civil and military engineering demands during the war. The state thus became one tool among many for achieving the Nazis’ domestic and overseas objectives.

Höhn believed that ‘legal theory has created an illusion, attributing to the state an “invisible personality”, transforming it in a perennial quest for sovereignty’, whereas in reality the state is nothing but an ‘“apparatus” at the service of power’, a tool which ‘the Nazi movement has captured, and to which it has ascribed other duties.’ In a chapter for the edited volume Grundfragen der Rechtsauffassung (Basic Questions for the Conception of Right), he elaborated on this argument: ‘The state is no longer the supreme political entity… It is rather an entity which limits itself to the execution of tasks assigned to it by the leadership (Führung), which operates in the service of the people. In this sense, the state is no more than a simple instrument . . . [to fulfill] the objectives it is assigned’.

It is this subordination of the state to externally-imposed targets and assignments that links Höhn’s theory to contemporary neoliberalism. Contrary to popular belief, neoliberals don’t seek to destroy the state; they know full well that without state there is no market. Rather, they want to invert the relationship of power between the market and the state. Not a market in the service of the state, but a state in the service of the market. Just as for Höhn the state is merely a mechanism equipped to achieve certain ends, so too for neoliberalism the state is a company that serves other companies – an entity that provides a service to be assessed in terms of the parameters of private enterprise (profitability, flexibility, best practices, benchmarking). None of this prevents a microscopic, pervasive control of citizenry, nor does it necessarily threaten the ability to stifle dissent. Just because war is outsourced to contractors (private mercenaries, that is to say) doesn’t mean it is less bloody, or lethal – or ‘total’.

The idea these Nazis passed down to us, then, is that of a heteronomous state, subordinated to external functions, designed to obey a logic which lies outside of it (and comes from a party or a company). This reverses the conventional wisdom. Totalitarianism doesn’t consist in enslavement by an omnipotent state; it rather wishes to impose a regime in which the state itself is enslaved as an instrument of an extrinsic omnipotence. A theory of management born to facilitate the advance of the Panzerdivisionen came to resemble the neoliberal project. We are thus able to resolve the Pinochet paradox, in which a brutal dictatorship violently imposes the free market. But if we were to think beyond 1973, it would be interesting to dwell for a moment on Paul Bremer’s 100 Orders, formulated in 2004 with the objective of instituting a neoliberal regime in Iraq, at the time occupied by the US Armed Forces. As Wendy Brown explains in Undoing the Demos (2015),

These mandated selling off several hundred state-run enterprises, permitting full ownership rights of Iraqi businesses by foreign firms and full repatriation of profits to foreign firms, opening Iraq’s banks to foreign ownership and control, and eliminating tariffs […] At the same time, the Bremer Orders restricted labor and throttled back public good and services. They outlawed strikes and eliminated the right to unionize in most sectors, mandated a regressive flat tax on income, lowered the corporate rate to a flat 15 percent, and eliminated taxes on profits repatriated to foreign-owned businesses.

Translated by Francesco Anselmetti.

Read on: William Davies, ‘The New Neoliberalism?’, NLR 101.

Categories
Uncategorised

Notes on the Curriculum

1.

Canonizing. Sociology is apparently in the process of de-colonizing itself. A strong point of the project is the recognition that sociology emerged during the age of imperialism and that this gave the field a cosmopolitan and comparative ambition lost after the Parsonian synthesis which was both grand, and a bit boring. The weakness of the decolonizers lies in their deadening approach to ideas. For the enthusiasts of this project, such as the Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell for example, the elevation of Durkheim and Weber (then joined at a later period by Marx) to the status of classics is the result of translations, edited volumes and curricula. In the past, per Connell, there were different figures such as Spencer, Comte and Martineau. In the future there might be new ones. Undoubtedly there is considerable truth in all this, but what the decolonizers never get around to is the analysis of ideas. Why is this? It is connected to a cluster of epistemological and ontological assumptions shared across sociology from the most ardent exponents of post-colonialism to hardcore positivists. It could be called the dogma of the shapeless flux. Its picture of intellectual history is something like this. There exists a massive body of texts of more or less equal quality (Connell equates Sumner’s Folkways to Weber’s sociology of religion and Comte’s theory of progress to Hegel’s philosophy of history for example). Some of these texts are arbitrarily elevated to the status of must-reads because their study serves some latent function for sociology such as reinforcing professional pride and presumably also the interests of the white middle-class men who embody it. Occasionally the time comes to shake up the texts; this is an especially urgent task in the current period because of the need to diversify in demographic terms the voices in the curriculum. Without falling into a lazy traditionalism, it should be obvious that this set of protocols for understanding the history of sociology is guaranteed to produce nothing but cynicism, both concerning the previous canon, and concerning whatever new candidates are forthcoming. What it forgets is that the first step in an analysis is the critique and reconstruction of the ideas. Whatever one might say about Parson’s Structure of Social Action at least he got this starting point right. The decolonizers, in contrast, are producing nothing more than more or less extensive annotated bibliographies.

2.

Sunk costs. It is hard to avoid the impression that ‘canonical’ struggles are really a misrecognized clash of quite specific material interests. The importance of ‘sunk costs’ in academic life should never be underestimated. Every professor has a large stock of written materials, images, graphs, reading notes and ready-to-hand interpretations which she has accumulated over years of study and thought. Although one really must avoid the slipshod analogies encouraged by the term ‘cultural capital’, these artifacts have a certain resemblance to ‘fixed capital’ in the Marxian lexicon. They provide a basic framework through which new information can be easily digested or ‘valorized’. In a material sense a challenge to the ‘canon’ poses the threat of the rapid devaluation of fixed assets. The rational response of these asset holders is ‘stand and fight’, to preserve the value of their assets even if their intellectual equipment is somewhat dated. They can at least make good use of it to valorize their ‘circulating capital’. The challengers in a material sense have quite opposite interests. They would like to leapfrog the incumbents and set up shop on the basis of an entirely new set of fixed endowments. This is the material meaning of the various projects of syllabus revision underway across the sprawling complex of US higher education, although ideologically this campaign is carried out under the sign of ‘decolonizing the syllabus’ or similar slogans. A couple of observations are in order about this struggle. First, it is important to point out the limits of the analogy. For in academic life there is no field of natural selection operating to weed out less efficient producers (as much as the managers of the neoliberal university would like this to be the case). Nor is there any analogue to exploitation. Second, the highly paradoxical character of the conflict should be emphasized. The most conservative actors in any struggle over the canon are likely to be in the least prestigious positions with the fewest opportunities to retool. To make matters worse, these are also the actors most likely to be the most vulnerable to negative student evaluations and the bureaucratic apparatus. Thus, we can fully expect that the costs of ‘de-colonizing the syllabus’ will be borne by those least able to bear them. Conversely those likely to win the most from the struggle will be those actors most well-placed with the lowest teaching loads and the most time to retool. The openness of this stratum to student demands for transformation is largely an index of its academic privilege. The outcome, in any case, will hardly be an overthrow of the canon, but a heightening of ‘barriers to entry’ for all players. A final note to the reader. The message of these lines is contained both in what they say and in how it is said.

Read on: Dylan Riley, ‘Lockdown Limbo’, NLR 127.

Categories
Uncategorised

The Intruded

Writing some years after he received a heart transplant in the early 1990s Jean-Luc Nancy remarked on the historical contingency of living beyond his early fifties. Had he been born twenty years or so earlier he would not have survived; twenty years later he would no doubt have survived differently. He also noted the sense of strangeness that accompanied the experience of receiving, and of living with, the heart of another: transplantation, he wrote, imposed an image of nothingness. Into that space most associated with intimacy and interiority, a different emptied-out space had intruded, provoking a sense of no longer being properly oneself. If Nancy was able to turn the experience into something like a philosophical parable, it is because he had long been engaged with questions of the material contingency of thought. Before it is something that we can think of as the site of our most proper self, our body is already inhabited by and exposed to the outside – a condition of co-belonging in the world as well as source of vulnerability. For over a half a century, Nancy elaborated a corpus of philosophical thought that ceaselessly traced its own limits. His thinking addressed fundamental questions of ontology, freedom and consciousness, reason and the foundations of judgement, while constantly exposing itself to philosophy’s various outsides, domains with which it has been historically and perhaps irreducibly intertwined: the political and the social, ethics, art and aesthetics, the theological and the religious.

The bare facts of Nancy’s career are quite straightforward and well-documented. Born in 1940 in Caudéran near Bordeaux, he graduated with a degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne in 1962, took the agrégation in 1964 then worked at a lycée in Colmar before taking a position at the Strasbourg Institut de Philosophie in 1968. He completed his doctorate in 1973 and that year became a lecturer at Strasbourg’s Université des Sciences Humaines, where he remained until his retirement in 2002. Until his illness in the late 1980s he was active on academic committees and was a visiting professor at numerous universities around the world. Yet this outline belies the richness and complexity of his intellectual trajectory, one that is exemplary of a wider sweep of late twentieth-century French philosophical culture. During his adolescence, as a member of Jeunesse Étudiante Chrétienne he was steeped in a culture of Christian socialist militancy as well as the wider atmosphere of the French left of the period, defined by the struggle in Algeria as well as the failed Hungarian revolution of 1956 and the difficulty of other attempts to recast socialism in Europe and elsewhere. Yet his beginnings in academic philosophy were made in the absence of any decisive heritage or orientation.

This all changed in the following decade when Nancy encountered the influences that would shape the rest of his career. In 1961 he was introduced to Hegel by the philosopher and theologian Georges Morel, and the following year wrote his master’s dissertation on religion in Hegel under the supervision of Paul Ricœur. Although, by his own account, Nancy was no longer personally religious, he nevertheless continued in these years to participate in activist Christian circles as well socialist and trade union groups. During this time he also discovered Heidegger, and was influenced by the philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem who taught him at the Sorbonne. In 1967 he met Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, another deeply engaged reader of Heidegger with whom he would participate in the events of May ’68, and who as a colleague at Strasbourg became a long-standing friend and philosophical collaborator. The sixties bear witness to the eclecticism of Nancy’s intellectual formation, one in which the influences of his religious upbringing and milieu, his political activism and philosophical engagements were so deeply entangled as to be inseparable. In this environment Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics could align with a profound disaffection with the political perspectives of the period and fuel non-conformist or non-communist Marxist activism and even insurrection.

Nancy’s discovery of Heidegger was mediated by Gérard Granel, who first translated the key Heideggerian term Abbau as ‘déconstruction’ and who greatly influenced both Jacques Derrida and, much later, Bernard Stiegler. It was through an early article of Granel’s dedicated to the then far less renowned Derrida that Nancy first encountered what would become widely known as deconstruction. With the rise of structuralism in the early 1960s – to a great extent influenced by Canguilhem – Nancy was amongst those who felt that the specificity and even existence of philosophy was under threat. By his own account, his first contact with Derrida was a letter sent in 1968 or ‘69, addressing the relation of philosophy to the human sciences and in particular the supposedly ‘scientific’ status of Althusserian Marxist theory. It is at this point of initial contact with Derrida, which inaugurated a second crucial philosophical association and friendship, and with his appointment at the Université des Sciences Humaines that Nancy’s career as a philosopher can be said to really begin.

His 1973 doctoral thesis, also completed under the supervision of Ricœur, was on Kant, confirming that although Heidegger is often thought to be Nancy’s paramount influence, his early readings of Hegel and then of Kant were nevertheless decisive. Nietzsche likewise became an important reference, shaping Nancy’s interest in the formal properties of philosophical discourse and informing the argument of his first book, The Title of the Letter, published in 1972 and co-authored with Lacoue-Labarthe. A highly critical reading of the writing of Jacques Lacan that reflected Nancy’s scepticism about the status of the structuralist human sciences, it led Lacan to refer to its authors as Derrida’s ‘underlings’. The judgment was hardly fair, but the books that followed over the next several years on Hegel, Kant, Descartes, and German Romanticism could be broadly characterised as deconstructive commentaries, which offer anti-foundationalist readings of canonical texts of philosophical modernity and explore the permeable relationship between literature and philosophy. Yet however much they betrayed a proximity to Derrida these commentaries, with their distinctive synthesis of Nietzschean and Heideggerian approaches to overcoming metaphysics, were highly original, and ultimately paved the way for the differences that would open up between the two.

The turning point was perhaps the establishment of the Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique at the École Normale Supérieure in 1980. Founded by Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe at Derrida’s suggestion, the centre intended to explore the political dimension and implications of deconstruction. There was a constitutive ambivalence to this project, one that soon produced fault lines: while there was an acknowledgment that philosophy is unavoidably a political practice and therefore always implicated in political activity or struggles, at the same time deconstruction refused any direct assimilation of philosophy to politics or attempts by philosophy to offer a foundational programme for politics, as well as overhasty attempts to seek conjunctions with Marxism. The thinking that emerged at the Centre, and in deconstruction more generally, should be understood against the wider intellectual background of post-war France, in which Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophical foundationalism were perceived to have been retroactively tainted by the experience of twentieth-century totalitarianism, the Holocaust and the violence of European colonialism and imperialism. Hegel, viewed as the paradigmatic thinker of system and totality was taken to be exemplary of a philosophy which, in its aspiration to absolute fulfilment in history, provided a model and expression of the very real ideological conditions of historical violence, totalitarian state-forms, and genocidal projects. Heidegger’s political itinerary also loomed large in this sense of philosophy having been compromised by its relation to politics.

In truth Nancy was a subtle and attentive reader of Hegel, fully aware of the complexities of a philosophical discourse whose drive towards systematicity and the absolute might have been mitigated or undermined by its dynamic of negativity. Nevertheless, the question of philosophical and political subjectivity dominated the concerns of the Centre and informed Nancy’s response to deconstruction’s ambivalence about the relation of the philosophical and the political. Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe were convinced that philosophy’s tendency to produce idealised conceptions of subjectivity – the people, national or racial identity, the proletariat, homo economicus – and proffer them as a basis for political community and forms of social and economic organisation was essentially metaphysical. In this context the ills of both totalitarianism and capitalism could be seen to have a common shared condition. It was therefore the passage from the philosophical production of foundational identities to the enactment of political projects that required deconstruction. By 1984 however, it had become clear that this orientation was not shared by all of the Centre’s participants: Claude Lefort’s work emphasised a much clearer dividing line between democracy and totalitarianism, rejecting Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s Heideggerian understanding of subjectivity, while Denis Kambouchner similarly dismissed their distinction – again inspired by Heidegger – between politics understood as an everyday practice and ‘the political’ understood as a more fundamental order of relation organising collective life. Without consensus on these assumptions, it was hard for the work of the Centre to progress.

For Nancy, the impasse coincided with his divergence from Derrida. He now returned to an engagement with Heideggerian ontology and to the question of shared being-in-the-world, fusing this with Bataille’s conception of finite embodiment and corporeal excess. This allowed him to transpose the concerns of deconstruction from the paradigm of textualism onto that of existential phenomenology and its focus on shared, material and worldly existence: it was not just the decentred subject of intertextuality or the differential rupturing of intentional consciousness that would be at play in deconstruction. He understood thought to be fundamentally embedded in the contingency of bodily life, according to which sense and meaning were disseminated as shared worldly existence. Nancy would insist from the 1980s onwards that, prior to the political ‘there is the “common,” the “together,” and the “numerous,” and that we perhaps do not at all know how to think this order of the real’. The attempt to think this ‘order of the real’ would inform his unapologetic return to an – albeit fully deconstructed – ontology that Derrida would always refuse.

From this emerged his conception of ‘inoperative community’ in the early to mid-1980s. Positing community as irreducibly incomplete and open-ended, this was an attempt to recast the experience of historical, social and political community, outside of any logic of shared subjectivity or common identity but as a form of fundamental ontological co-belonging. This was less an instance of philosophy laying the ground for politics than it was an attempt to conceive of an originary space in which relationality of one kind or another could be understood to unfold. There were resources here for rethinking concepts such as equality, solidarity, freedom, democracy and globalisation outside any logic of identitarian political destiny or state form. Yet Nancy continued to refuse the assimilation of philosophy into politics or the collapse of ontology and politics in the service of any given project or programme.

The turn away from Derrida saw Nancy exposed to criticism on at least two fronts. On the one hand there were early critics of the work of the Centre who demanded that it more directly engage with existing political struggles and projects. A trenchant critique by Nancy Fraser urged Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe to ‘venture forth from their transcendental safe-house’. On the other there were those more aligned with Derrida, who were sceptical of Nancy’s return to ontology and its Heideggerian inflection. Later, philosophers such as Simon Critchley, conjugating Derridean deconstruction with Levinassian ethics, saw in Nancy’s return to ontology an elision or repression of the ethical as such. Both criticisms – that Nancy’s thought failed to give sufficient philosophical impetus to political struggle and that it constituted a regressive re-embrace of ontology – would recur throughout his career, informing his long-standing dispute with Maurice Blanchot on the question of community, as well as Badiou’s critique of his primary focus on finitude. In response, it could be argued that the return to ontology that has been evident over the past twenty years might suggest that Nancy was ahead of his time. At the same time, his caution towards the relationship of philosophical foundationalism to the grounding of political projects can be said to respond to the lessons of twentieth-century history, no less relevant today.

It was from this inflection point in the early 1980s that Nancy’s subsequent philosophical oeuvre flowed. His doctorat d’état, supervised by Granel, was published as The Experience of Freedom in 1988. Its demonstration of the failure of Kantian reason to secure a totalising ground for being yielded a conception of existence freed from any unity of foundation and understood as an irreducible multiplicity of contingent beings. This was the hinge which turned Nancy’s philosophy towards the major themes of his mature works of the nineties and of the first two decades of the twenty-first century. A Finite Thinking (1990) established the model for Nancy’s philosophy as an experimental, non-systematic practice which sought to bring itself to the limits of its own conceptual powers and possibilities in order to proceed, in the absence of any grounding or foundational gesture, as an encounter with the contingency and multiplicity of a material existence whose totality exceeds conceptual determination. This would be characterised in different ways in the works that followed, as the fragmentary experience of embodiment in Corpus (1992), as shared ‘sense’ in excess of all phenomenological disclosure in The Sense of the World (1993), as the singular plurality of being that resists ontological determination in Being Singular Plural (1996). These were followed by Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative (1998), which, along with Catherine Malabou’s The Future of Hegel (1996), signalled a definitive end to the post-war image of a ‘totalitarian’ Hegel. From the mid-1990s onwards Nancy continued to engage with questions of politics, most notably concerning ethics and democracy, but also and extensively with art and aesthetics. His meditations on art reconnected aesthetic experience to a renewed realism of touch or contact with the sensible-intelligible world. His major late project, the ‘deconstruction of Christianity’ recast the inner logic of monotheism as an originary absenting of God from the world. In this way, he argued, the seeds of atheism had always already been sown within theism, leading to the eventual secularisation of historical religious forms. Nancy never returned to an embrace of religion as such, but his thinking has proven to be a rich resource for critical understanding of a contemporary return to religion and the category of the post-secular.

Nancy died in August, leaving various projects suspended in a state of incompletion, perhaps testifying to his understanding of thought itself as ongoing, and always incomplete. Decades before the vogue for ‘new materialism’ and ‘speculative realism’, Nancy inaugurated a shift in the wake of deconstruction towards a renewed, albeit highly novel, realism. His refusal of all politics grounded in idealised conceptions of subjectivity, self, and of political community grew out of a collective experience of historical disaster in the twentieth century. What one might call his embodied worldly realism of relational coexistence speaks to the post-secular identity politics and ecological problems of the twenty-first. Without prescribing easy answers or determinate programmes it traces and marks out the relational space in which the challenges of politics will be met.

Read on: Peter Hallward, ‘Order and Event’, NLR 53.

Categories
Uncategorised

Montaldi’s Notebooks

It was in the pages of the journal Quaderni rossi (Red Notebooks) that the theoretical and political current known as Operaismo (Workerism) began to take shape in Italy during the early 1960s. Central to this body of thought was the idea that the working class exists as an autonomous, self-constituting force, and not merely as a passive victim of capital’s onslaught. Among its most original contributions was an emphasis on the relationship between capitalist expansion and the formation of working-class subjectivities. This was explored to particularly brilliant effect by one of the journal’s founders, Danilo Montaldi, a figure little known outside Italy. Through oral history and autobiography, Montaldi’s work produced a living image of worker and lumpen subjectivities in motion, one without parallel in Marxist theory.

Born in Cremona in 1929, Montaldi grew up in fascist Italy, surrounded by artists, workers, anarchists, and socialists – all friends of his father, a transport worker with ties to the Bordigist faction of the Italian Communist Party (an anti-Stalinist left current). He left school at fourteen to fight in the resistance, acting as a courier for the Italian Communist Party’s (PCI) Fronte della Gioventù. Joining the party after the war, Montaldi soon left when his father and several of his comrades were expelled. The experience was a formative one: in Montaldi’s view, the PCI’s leader Palmiro Togliatti had sacrificed the most intellectually vibrant wing of the party for a national-electoral strategy that was ultimately reformist and patriotic in character.

Cremona was also decisive in shaping his outlook. Situated in the heart of the Po river valley, the region had been subject to an intense wave of agrarian capitalist development in the second half of the nineteenth century, and was the setting for some of the first socialist organizing in the country. Montaldi faulted the PCI for misunderstanding the needs and aspirations of the region’s farm workers, who wished ‘not at all to take possession of the land in order to reach the standard of living of the landowners, but to reach the level of the industrial worker in the cities. In fact, when these peasants occupied land, they never divided it into small properties, but made it into cooperatives.’ To focus solely on agitating in the factories was thus to exclude a mature and radical element of the rural proletariat.

Moving to Paris in the early 1950s, Montaldi made contact with the Socialisme ou Barbarie group, which had recently broken away from the Trotskyist international. Their politics were oriented around a critique of bureaucratization: that millions of workers were organized into hierarchical parties and trade unions constituted, in their view, a key barrier to social revolution. In a more libertarian vein, they looked to explore different forms of proletarian revolutionary action. To this end, the first issues of the group’s journal featured a serialized translation of The American Worker, a pamphlet published in Detroit in 1947 consisting of an autobiographical account of factory life by an autoworker, Paul Romano, and a theoretical analysis of that experience by Grace Lee Boggs. When he returned to Cremona in 1953, Montaldi published a translation of Romano’s account, explaining in a preface the significance of this text. It showed that it is in the realm of production that the proletariat’s ‘revolt against exploitation takes place, where it finds its ability to construct a better kind of society’. This was an implicit critique of Togliatti’s strategy for the PCI, which operated on the premise, first argued by Gramsci, that Italian capitalism was exceptionally backward: it was thus the responsibility of the party to overcome the disparities between north and south by building a strong national base and working with bourgeois parties. Secondly, Montaldi argued, the text demonstrated that the labour expended in the factory entailed a total subsumption of the worker’s personality to capitalist production: his or her physical as well as creative capacities were exhausted in the course of their daily work. This for him was the essence of Fordism, whether it was in the factory or the countryside: the experience of subordinating one’s life to the rhythms of production.

Montaldi was ultimately searching for a politics more directly connected to workers’ struggles. In 1955, he organized a study-group whose aim was to map the productive relations in Cremona, and in doing so, establish a common basis of struggle between workers and intellectuals. In 1957, this developed into an activist organization, the Gruppo di Unità Proletaria (GUP). Montaldi had by now fine-tuned the research technique that would guide its strategy: ‘conricerca’ or ‘co-research’. Its objective was not to produce a totalizing picture of social reality, or have workers simply report their knowledge to intellectuals who would then theorize about it. Instead, the starting point was the ever-changing ways that workers experienced forms of domination. By focusing on the subjectivity of workers, the partnership between intellectuals and proletarians could reveal the lines of fracture and class tensions that structured the workplace. This could enable them – as Montaldi emphasized in their 1957 program – ‘to give support and appropriate direction to the demands of the working-class base’. Accordingly, Montaldi called for co-research initiatives at the largest industrial and agricultural concerns in the region, from Sperlari and Negroni to Consorzio Agrario.

From 1948 on, Italy experienced the greatest economic boom in its history – a ‘miracle’ as it came to be called, with annual growth rates above 5 per cent, and giant leaps in per capita income. But, as Lucio Magri has noted, ‘everyone had to pay for accumulation, and the powers-that-be decided that workers and farmers should be the first to pay and the last to profit.’ A coordinated political attack against the left hobbled its capacity for concerted action, and empowered bosses and landlords at its expense. Mass layoffs and evictions followed; wage growth remained sluggish through the 1950s even as labour productivity soared; and management dismantled the structures of worker representation while bringing new machinery and forms of hierarchical control into the workplace. In 1959-60, workers began to strike back. A first wave of actions by electrical engineers took place in Milan; a second broke out in Turin among autoworkers, leading to an industry-wide strike. Montaldi’s GUP called for a nation-wide general strike, arguing that a fragmented offensive was sure to be defeated by the bosses. It also pushed for workers to form councils in the factories and the countryside: ‘the emancipation of the proletariat’, wrote the group, quoting Marx, ‘will be the work of the proletariat itself.’

Bound up with Italy’s miracle was a set of migratory movements. One flowed outward toward other countries in need of manpower; the others were internal, streaming from countryside to city, and from underdeveloped South to industrialized North. At first, the internal migrants landed in the metropolises of Turin and Milan, but increasingly they settled in the borderlands of the cities, living in makeshift huts known as ‘Koreas’, so called because they began to appear during the Korean War. These slums were the subject of Montaldi’s first book, Milano, Corea (1960), co-written with Franco Alasia. Like much of Montaldi’s work, the book has an autobiographical dimension: half is a collection of life stories from inhabitants of Milan’s Koreas, which endow the migrants – an otherwise ghostly presence in the northern cities – with flesh and personality, giving them authority and authorship over their own lives.

The other half is an ‘investigation’ by Montaldi. With a kind of ethnographic precision, he describes the familial relations migrants brought with them; their patterns of work; their moral codes; the humiliations they suffered in the older districts of the city. Montaldi analyzes how migrants have changed Milan, collapsing distinctions between centre and periphery, old and new. He also attempts to explain how the subjectivities of the migrants are linked to the larger social and productive relations of the city. For this he mobilizes an impressive amount of quantitative research: showing how landlords and bosses profit from the construction boom around Milan; how the city’s web of social services continually fails residents of the Koreas; how the political machinery of the city works to exclude migrants from civic life while benefitting from their low-wage labour. What emerges is a multi-tiered diagram of capitalist expansion in the city. This system, Montaldi notes, is riddled with contradictions. Its size and complexity is such that it can absorb and displace them, but not forever: Montaldi predicts that the migrant cities will resist being integrated completely into Milan’s civic life, and will one day ‘bring into crisis the key institutions of the current system of relations’.

In its experimental way, the book is a living document of proletarianization, capturing working-class subjectivities as they are moulded by the rhythms of industrial capitalism. This anticipates a key tenet of Operaismo, that capital is a system of social control that functions not merely by exploiting workers through the wage relation, but by subordinating and dominating them through institutions and government-initiated planning programs. The city as a whole becomes a kind of ‘social factory’, in which labour-power is controlled and disciplined by the political forces of capital. The theorists of Operaismo would also argue that workers nevertheless find ways to resist this regime and reassert their autonomy – through wildcat strikes, slowdowns, and absenteeism. This interplay of subordination and autonomy is at the heart of Milano, Corea’s sequence of migrant autobiographies: all share the experience of displacement and relocation; but, at the same time, each migrant struggles to reclaim the unique features of their own life.

Montaldi explored this dynamic from a different angle in Autobiografie della leggera (1961). Like its predecessor, the book features a lengthy introduction followed by a suite of worker autobiographies, but these are set deeper in the country, among the inns and taverns of provincial highways, and along the banks of the Po. Its protagonists are not migrants but drifters, or, as the book’s subtitle would have it, ‘outcasts, petty criminals, and rebels’, scraping together a living at the margins. There is a temptation, notes Montaldi, to romanticize these figures, to see them as the remnants of a lost pre-capitalist world. But capitalist development had in fact been transforming the Italian countryside since the nineteenth century and had made possible the growth of the northern cities. It was ‘the agrarian crises of the Po valley’, writes Montaldi, that produced emigration, and sent luckless peasants into the slums of Milan and Turin. The people who remained in the country and did not become farm workers tended to practice the kinds of rural trades – fisherman, woodcutter, or boatmen – that had no place in city life. This left them suspended in an interstitial space: too unskilled to work in the old artisanal trades; but not deskilled enough to join the ranks of the proletariat in the factories or in the fields of capitalist agriculture.

As Pasolini noted in an admiring review of the book, there is a literary sensibility to its autobiographical narratives: ‘each writer-speaker seems to me to be fully aware that there is something special in the telling of their life stories’. The experiences of which they tell are remarkably unbound and contingent: the narrators wander from town to town, sometimes finding work, sometimes engaging in petty crime. Money is scarce, the police and fascist spies are everywhere, and most of the narrators spend time in prison. Fiu’s story opens with an orgy that is broken up by the police. Teuta, a thief, happens to be in France at the outbreak of the First World War and is sent to fight at Verdun; Cicci, a prostitute, moves at one point to Africa, where the pay is better but the work more dangerous. Like the Koreas, the world in which they operate is lacking basic provisions: few shops, pitiable schools, and minimal health-care services. Orlando P.’s brother dies of an unknown disease; Cicci’s mother attempts suicide by throwing herself in the Po.

For Montaldi, these narratives are symptomatic of their setting. On the one hand, capital’s restructuring of the countryside has meant the destabilization of older patterns of culture and modes of subjectivity. On the other, Montaldi sees in the authors’ adherence to older folkways a ‘refusal’ to conform, a conscious ‘non-adaptation to industrial life’. He even detects ‘traces of resistance to assimilation’ in the way the narrators switch out of standard Italian into local dialect – disobedience at the level of language. A similar point could be made about the narrative forms adopted by the authors, which often have the feel of a fable. Their modern use was explored by Benjamin in his 1937 essay ‘The Storyteller’. Unlike the novelist, who, Benjamin says, ‘isolates himself’ and begins from a place of solitude, ‘the storyteller finds his material in experience’, which he then recounts to a community of listeners. As such, the art of storytelling has ‘long flourished in the world of manual labour’ and ‘is itself a form of artisanal labour’. ‘It does not aim to transmit the pure intrinsic nature of the thing like information or a report. It plunges the thing into the life of the teller and draws it out again’.

But, ultimately, Benjamin, like Montaldi, resists seeing the storyteller merely as a relic of the old world. Rather the emphasis is on the new role they have assumed in modernity, that of sage or counsellor. For both thinkers, the autobiography-as-fable functions as a record of experience, but more significantly, it offers moral instruction: Montaldi’s authors model a radical autonomy in their refusal to submit to the domination of capital. In this sense, the proletarian autobiography is not an isolated product, but a moment of class struggle, the record of a social movement in formation.

As worker and student militancy boiled over to produce the biennio rosso of 1968-1969, Montaldi continued to work feverishly. He translated Lévi-Strauss’s Totemisme aujourd’hui, opened an art gallery in Cremona, and published another volume of worker autobiographies, this one focused on grassroots party militants (Militanti politici di base). Montaldi and the GUP was active in the worker revolts of 1969, agitating with ironworkers in Venice, and publishing texts and communiqués from the working-class insurgents. He regretted that there was no true proletarian party in Italy to help the masses take power.

Montaldi’s short life ended in 1975 when he drowned in unknown circumstances in the Roya, which runs along the Franco-Italian border. At the time, he was assembling materials for an oral history of the 1969 worker revolt, which had been proposed to him by the historian Carlo Ginzburg. Given Montaldi’s unique approach, it would have been a momentous document. Even so, Montaldi’s influence was far reaching. For Sergio Bologna, one of Operaismo’s leading thinkers, it was Montaldi’s two books from the early 1960s more than anything written by Marx that shaped the movement’s thinking in its early days: ‘As I remember it,’ he wrote, ‘the group of young people who gravitated towards the Quaderni Rossi in 1961-62 were characterized first and foremost by a desire to understand the profound transformation that both productive facilities and the urban environment were undergoing; the need to master a theoretical-systematic framework by which to interpret what was happening in accordance with a Marxian logic came second.’ Montaldi directly influenced a number of these Quaderni Rossi figures, perhaps Romano Alquati most of all, a sociologist from Cremona who used Montaldi’s ‘co-research’ technique to conduct a landmark inquiry into new forms of worker consciousness at FIAT and Olivetti. After a split in 1963, Alquati went on to found Classe Operaia with Antonio Negri and Mario Tronti, which became the core journal of Operaismo.

Well before Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, Montaldi shattered the false antinomy between a supposedly idyllic, pre-capitalist countryside and a corrupted, industrialized city. The effect was to bring working-class revolt out of the factories into the migrant suburbs and depopulated countryside. It took a figure of Montaldi’s upbringing and outlook to see in the lumpen characters of the modern city and its peripheries the making of revolutionary subjectivities.

Read on: Mario Tronti, ‘Our Operaismo’, NLR 73.

Categories
Uncategorised

Sceptical Credulity

They looked at me with a benevolent smile, almost pitying my credulity, my capacity to be fooled. This person, whom I met by chance, was in their sixties, had taught at the Sorbonne and published several books. They immediately told me they would never get the Covid vaccine. They smiled when I objected that over the course of their life they had unthinkingly accepted over a dozen vaccines, from smallpox to polio, and that to enter a whole host of countries every one of us has been inoculated – against tetanus, yellow fever and so on – with relative serenity. ‘But this vaccine isn’t like the others,’ they replied, as if privy to information from which I had been shielded. At this point I understood that there was nothing I could say to shake their granitic certainty.  

What struck me most, however, was their scepticism. I knew that if I entered into the conversation, at best we would have come to the issue of government deception and Big Pharma, at worst conspiracy theories about the microchips Bill Gates is supposedly implanting in the global population. Here we’re faced with a paradox: people believe in extraordinary tales precisely because of their sceptical disposition. Ancient credulity worked in a completely different manner to its contemporary equivalent. It was shared by the highest state authorities – who typically employed court astrologists – and the most downtrodden plebeians. Inquisitors believed in the reality of witchcraft, as did commoners, as did some of the accused witches themselves. In one sense the occult still functions this way in certain parts of postcolonial Africa, where the political class relies on the same rites as ordinary citizens, using witchcraft to perform some of the operations that are the purview of public relations departments in the so-called developed West. (Peter Geschiere’s 1997 text on this topic remains instructive: The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa.) But, by and large, the modern world has given rise to a form of superstition that is accepted in the name of distrust towards the state and managerial classes.

Naturally, we have ample reason not to trust the authorities, even when it comes to vaccines. The journal Scientific American once lamented the impact of the fake Hepatitis-B vaccination campaign organised by the CIA in Pakistan with the aim of discovering Bin Laden’s whereabouts, which ultimately resulted in locals boycotting initiatives to vaccinate children against polio. We know of efforts to purposefully garble reports on the carcinogenic effects of glyphosate – the world’s most common herbicide – to tame the ire of its manufacturer Monsanto. And let’s not forget the decades in which the dangers of Teflon were hushed, whilst we cooked (and continue to cook) with coated pans. Nor can we ignore the authorities’ cynicism: between 1949 and 1969 the American armed forces conducted 239 experiments which introduced pathogenic germs amongst unknowing populations. In 1966 for instance, bacilli were released into the New York subway to study their effect.

Scepticism towards authority is the basis of modern enlightenment rationalism. The anti-vaxxers, one must concede, are enacting the very process which permitted science to develop: refusing the principle of authority, rejecting the ipse dixit (ipse here no longer referring to Aristotle, but to the titled and legitimated scientist), upholding the principle that a theory is not in itself true just because it is espoused by an expert at Harvard or Oxford.

But here we’ve already begun to slide into the unintended consequences of sceptical thinking. We cannot disavow the liberatory force of the suspicion that religion was invented as a disciplinary tool, as insinuated by Machiavelli in the 16th century. It was this distrust that came to animate the tradition of libertinism (Hobbes and Spinoza were both suspected of inspiring libertines, perhaps because they were considered crypto-atheists), as well as the theory of The Three Imposters, which held that Moses, Jesus and Muhammad were tricksters who had feigned their divine knowledge to keep the masses in check:

Neither God, nor the devil, the soul, the skies nor hell resemble how they are depicted, and all theologians – those that disseminate fables as divinely revealed truths – with the exception of a few fools, act in bad faith and abuse of the credulity of the people to inculcate in them what they please.

(Traité sur les trois imposteurs ou la vie et l’esprit de monsieur Benoit de Spinoza [1719])

The radical potential of this statement is clear, but it must be noted that this is also the first known espousal of a systemic conspiracy theory. Its scepticism has a fideistic quality. The ambiguity it illustrates can be traced back to the Renaissance, which laid the foundations of modern rationalism and simultaneously found a faith-based solution to Catholic fallacies: the Protestant Reformation. Renaissance doubt goes hand-in-hand with mystic fervour; Erasmus of Rotterdam, Pietro Pomponazzi and Machiavelli are coeval with Thomas Müntzer, Calvin and Michael Servetus. Hence, incredulity had already become a politico-religious problem in the 16th century, as the title of a seminal study by the Annales historian Lucien Febvre suggests: The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais (1968). We can therefore understand how beneath vaccine scepticism lies an oftentimes ferocious intolerance, for this group of unbelievers structures itself like a sect. (Tara Haelle has reconstructed, rather interestingly, the way in which the anti-vax movement fashioned itself as a healthcare Tea Party in a recent article for The New York Times.)

But there’s more: the ruling class that squawks in horror at the superstition of its subjects is far from innocent itself. For the majority of people, science and technology have a magical quality, in that there is an obvious imbalance between the effort one puts into an action and its result. Uttering a spell, ‘open sesame’, for instance, needs little exertion, yet this is sufficient to move a large boulder blocking the entrance to Ali Baba’s cave. There is no cost input in reciting incantations that allow you to extract gold from stone. In the world of magic, the limits imposed by nature are no longer valid; you can fly on a broom or see what goes on in distant places. And what exactly do aeroplanes, cars, radars do? The Ring of Gyges and Aladdin’s lamp have become patented products, churned out by assembly lines and sold in supermarkets. If magic is a shortcut which covers great distances by way of an easy path (press a button and darkness disappears, press another one and you speak with people far away, yet another and you see what’s happening on the other side of the world), then the entirety of scientific and technological civilisation amounts to sorcery, even more so given that the vast majority of humans are unaware of the mechanisms by which this magic operates. Like the wizard of old, the modern scientist is a keeper of arcane knowledge. Few among us have even a vague idea of how a phone works, not to mention a computer. Naturally, there’s also the division between white (benevolent) magic and black magic, the latter causing ecological catastrophes and wars.

This enchanted dimension of modern life does not just derive from the fact that the bulk of humanity is kept in the dark about the functioning of the world of objects that surrounds it. The truth is that since the 1930s (and all the more so with the advent of the Second World War) the search for natural truth has changed gears. If research once possessed an artisanal quality (Enrico Fermi researched quantum physics in a Roman basement), now it has transformed into a veritable industry (almost 2,000 researchers work at CERN), and a costly one at that. The natural-truths industry is financed by people, from politicians to CEOs, who know little about the projects they fund. An inverted relationship between researchers and donors has evolved in which the former, much like marketers or advertisers, must make constant promises that they will struggle to keep.

After the atomic bomb physicists had an easy ride; they could dangle extravagant weapons – whose unachievable prototypes remain firmly in the realm of Star Wars – before state officials, who would readily cut their own citizens’ pensions to finance the field. With the end of the Cold War, the rivers of military funding began to dry up, and the marketing of research needed rethinking. For decades, NASA has tried to ‘sell the cosmos’, instigating the belief that a colony on Mars was possible (an absurdity given the current state of technology).  It has also promised that with fresh funds it would be able to shield the earth from an inbound asteroid.

No longer able to promise the moon, the only miracle that remains for science to unlock is immortality: who would say no to this? Mark O’Connell’s extraordinary To Be A Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death (2017) contains plenty of promethean, multi-billionaire entrepreneurs pursuing infantile dreams of cryogenic freezing pending resurrection. In 1992, the great physicist Leo Kadanoff wrote in Physics Today: ‘We are fast approaching a situation in which nobody will believe anything we [physicists] say in any matter that touches upon our self-interest. Nothing we do is likely to arrest our decline in numbers, support or social value.’

The result is that it’s more and more difficult for non-specialists to distinguish between science and pseudoscience – or between scientists and salesmen. This is because the latter very often mimic the former, but also because of the proliferation of ‘heterodox’ scientists – figures who possess all the trappings of scientific legitimacy (a PhD, publications in authoritative journals, membership of illustrious faculties) but who end up on the community’s margins, or even excommunicated. Andrew Wakefield’s Vaxed (2016) claims that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has covered up the link between the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps and rubella) and the development of autism. The thesis was originally presented by Wakefield, a respected liver surgeon, alongside others in the eminent medical journal The Lancet. But the article was subsequently disproved, and the surgeon shunned from the profession (though it seems a co-author of his was absolved of the accusation of scientific fraud). From then on, Wakefield has been an anti-vax activist. Another disgraced scientist, Judy Mikovits – PhD in biochemistry, author of articles in Science, also accused of fraudulent practices – is the protagonist of two conspiracist documentaries from 2020: Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19 and Plandemic: Indoctornation.

These pariahs of the scientific community present themselves as new Copernicans facing an old Ptolemaic orthodoxy. They’re masters of all the formalisms of scientific research: bibliographies, diagrams, tables, footnotes. It’s understandable how they might sound convincing to those observing the commercialisation of the scientific-media complex from the outside.

I can confirm this disorientation with an anecdote. Shortly before he died, I went to interview René Thom (1923-2002), the founder of catastrophe theory, at a conference of physicists in Perugia. When I arrived, I discovered a meeting of physicists opposed to Einstein’s theory of relativity (nearly a century after it had been formulated in 1905), replete with papers presenting the flaws in the Michelson-Morley experiment (a key test for the theory), or in any case maintaining that its results could be explained by a host of other theories. I felt like I was participating in a clandestine meeting of some sect. I met European physicists who had been highly regarded in their field before they fell for a discovery which was proven to be false, and whose falsity they now struggled to acknowledge.

The close resemblance between science and pseudoscience – particularly in their relationship to funding, and therefore marketing – clarifies our recent difficulties in reasoning with anti-vaxxers, and why it seems almost impossible to break down the communication barrier without profound reforms to public education. For the latter, in its current form, is responsible for our present state of scientific, technological and mathematical illiteracy in an increasingly scientific, technological and digital world. Recently, in a large Roman market I saw an elderly man and woman converse across their respective vegetable stands. The man was an anti-vaxxer, and offered the argument that Covid-19 vaccines are dangerous and experimental. ‘Look who’s talking’, the lady replied, ‘all of you readily took Viagra without having the faintest idea of what it contained’.

A peculiar but highly significant case is that of Russia. Though it was the first country to patent a vaccine (Sputnik), by 2 September 2021 only 25.7 per cent of the population had been vaccinated, and only 30.3 per cent had received at least one dose (compared to a respective 58.4 per cent and 64.7 per cent in the EU). As a result, daily deaths in Russia have continued to reach 800 (out of a population of 146 million). To be sure, Russians’ wariness of the government has played a role (from the Tsars to Yeltsin, Stalin to Putin, there has never been much to trust). Even in Moscow we see versions of the fantasies about Covid and the vaccine we’ve discussed, including the online theory (signalled to me by friends who read Russian) that that ‘the virus was brought to earth by reptilian aliens who gained control of the earth in Sumerian times, and are responsible for creating the “Torahic religion”, and have now decided to curb the world’s population’, controlling humanity ‘via chips contained in the vaccine, in order to establish a new world order’. Amongst the reptilian humans are Obama, Putin and Biden (but not Trump).

But perhaps there is a more prosaic reason for Russian reticence towards the vaccine: Sputnik has not been recognized by Western (American and European) health organizations, invalidating it as a means to travel abroad. Many Russians maintain that if Sputnik permitted them to travel, there would be long queues to get vaccinated. Therein lies the power of bureaucracy, and of pharmaceutical companies’ commercial wars.

Translated by Francesco Anselmetti.

Read on: Marco D’Eramo, The Philosopher’s Epidemic, NLR 122.

Categories
Uncategorised

Crypto-Politics

Philosophy in the so-called ‘analytic’ tradition has a strange relationship with politics. Normally seen as originating with Frege, Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein in the early 20th century, analytic philosophy was originally concerned with using formal logic to clarify and resolve fundamental metaphysical questions. Politics was largely ignored, according to the Oxford analyst Anthony Quinton, before the late 1960s. Political philosophy, in fact, was routinely pronounced ‘dead’ at the hands of the analysts – so dead that the tepid output of John Rawls (whose A Theory of Justice was published in 1971) could appear as a revival.

At the same time, analytic philosophers were not uninterested in politics. Bertrand Russell is an especially well-known case, but other figures such as A. J. Ayer and Stuart Hampshire – both supporters of the Labour Party (and in Ayer’s case, later the Social Democratic Party) and critics of the Vietnam War – were also politically involved. The reluctance to engage with politics in their professional capacities might seem thus to reflect not lack of political interest, but a view of philosophy as a largely separate sphere. Russell, for example, wrote that his ‘technical activities must be forgotten’ in order for his popular political writings to be properly understood, while Hampshire argued that although analytic philosophers ‘might happen to have political interests, […] their philosophical arguments were largely neutral politically.’

While at times insistent on the detachment of their philosophy from politics – stretching to a pride in the ‘conspicuous triviality’ of their own activity that the critic of ‘ordinary language philosophy’ Ernest Gellner saw as requiring the explanation of social historians – the analysts at other times floated some quite strong claims as to the political value and potential of their own ways of doing things. As Thomas Akehurst has shown, ‘many of the leading British analytic philosophers of the post-war period made it clear that they took analytic philosophy to be in alliance with liberalism’ and ventured that certain analytic ‘habits of mind’ – in particular those associated with the ‘empiricist’ school dominant at that time – might offer a crucial protective against various forms of ‘fanaticism’.

It was less clear how this was supposed to work. The analysts’ own pronouncements on the relationship between their philosophy and politics seem to amount to little more than a declaration of a monopoly on openness, a boast of humility, a set of dogmatic and opaque assertions about the inhospitability of the analytic method to dogma and opacity (‘no-bullshit bullshit’, to borrow the moniker later bestowed on the so-called ‘no bullshit’ school of ‘analytical Marxism’ by its critics). ‘Empiricism is hostile to humbug and obscurity, to the dogmatic authoritative mood, to every sort of ipse dixit’, the Oxford philosopher H. H. Price had written already in 1940: ‘The same live-and-let-live principles […] are characteristic of liberalism too.’ In a similar vein, in his 1950 essay ‘Philosophy and Politics’, Russell describes empiricism (‘the scientific outlook’) as ‘the intellectual counterpart of what is, in the practical sphere, the outlook of liberalism’, and hailed Locke as the exemplification of the ‘order without authority’ allegedly central to both philosophies.

Between them, Russell and Price seem to be suggesting a series of links between 1. clarity, 2. the rejection of epistemic authority (amounting to a value of ‘thinking for yourself’); and 3. the rejection of political authoritarianism, a rejection which is assimilated to 4. liberalism, seemingly interchangeable with 5. democracy. Besides the looseness of the conceptual links in this chain, there are questions to be asked about its attachment to reality: about the relationship of these assertions by the analysts to actual analytic philosophy and philosophers, and to actual liberalism and liberals respectively. When Price lauds an intellectual culture ‘of free, co-operative inquiry, in which anyone may put forward any hypothesis he likes, […] provided it makes sense’ (which presumably means: makes sense to analytic philosophers), he evokes an image of a non-hierarchical, egalitarian discipline that is likely to strike those with experience of the culture of analytic philosophy as something of an idealization, to say the least. As for liberalism, Locke, and ‘order without authority’: what can you say, apart from maybe, ‘Don’t mention the slavery’?

Here we touch on another aspect of the analysts’ inchoate claim to offer a protective against political vice or misadventure. This is the wariness of ‘ideology’ and ‘theory’ (especially of the ‘grand’ variety). As Akehurst parses it, the idea is that a ‘focus on the concrete saves the empiricist from following grand theories, metaphysical chimeras and other strictly meaningless exhortations to devalue reality in favour of dangerous ideological fantasy.’ The thought here is intuitive enough, and liberals are not the only ones to feel its force – something like it is a theme of much anarchist writing, for instance. Yet whatever is to be said about it, it cannot be so simple as ‘Theory bad, Reality good.’ Rigid adherence to ideals, theories or principles can play its part in the commission of atrocities. But, first, what entitles liberals to the assumption that it is only other people who have ‘theories’? And second, can’t there be a converse and equal danger in the lack of fixed principles? Is ‘never torture’ a dangerous piece of dogma? Is it better to cast off such ideological baggage and keep all options on the table, doing as the facts of the situation (as we see them) demand? Liberalism’s history, in any case, boasts its fair share of terrible deeds committed both in the service of ‘grand ideals’ (for what else can we call ‘Liberty’?) as well as in response to the more ‘concrete’ considerations of expedience and profit.

If on the one hand analytic philosophy has presented itself as politically neutral, it has also regarded this very neutrality – this supposed freedom from dogma and ‘ideology’ – as the guarantor of liberal political conclusions. Analytic political philosophy, which has flourished and proliferated since the later part of the twentieth century, has preserved this basic posture. I wrote about this in my first book, The Political Is Political. What struck me about analytic political philosophy as a student (and what my tautological title was meant to capture) was that the subject was both paradoxically depoliticized and also political in covert ways. Under the influence of Rawls in particular, political philosophers have had remarkably little to say about actual politics or history. Armed with a sharp distinction between ‘descriptive’ and ‘normative’ (or ‘is’ versus ‘ought’), characteristic of the analytic approach, they have judged that such matters are the appropriate domain of social scientists. By contrast, the distinctive business of philosophers is to concentrate on the articulation of abstract ‘principles of justice’, often in the form of ‘ideal theory’. The contemporary political philosopher Charles Mills, while a self-identified adherent of the liberal-analytic approach, has criticized ideal theory as a form of ‘ideology’ in a loosely Marxist sense: a distortion of thought that reinforces an oppressive status quo by sanitizing and distracting from its ‘non-ideal’ features (Mills emphasises, in particular, the history and legacy of slavery in the United States).

Not only do philosophers in this tradition neglect real politics, I argued, but they also operate with a series of ostensibly neutral or ‘common sense’ methodological values  – ‘constructiveness’, ‘reasonableness’, ‘charity’ in argument – which invariably turn out, on closer inspection, to be interpreted in such a way as to favour liberal conclusions in advance, ‘begging the question’ against dissenting perspectives that might call for a more radical deviation from the political status quo. The injunction to ‘Be realistic!’, for example, commands virtually universal assent (who wants to be ‘unrealistic’?) but tells us nothing useful until filled out with some judgements as to what ‘reality’ is like and how it might be changed.

These, of course, are exactly the sorts of questions that are in dispute between people of different political outlooks. But what tends to happen in political philosophy, as in the wider world, is that taking account of reality is conflated with proposing less in the way of change, so that ‘realism’ and radicalism are assumed to be in inherent tension. Thus, while the ‘realist’ current in contemporary political philosophy is in one sense a challenge to the dominant approach (of ignoring real history and politics), it often ends up further entrenching a status quo bias, by equating ‘realism’ with small-c ‘conservatism’ and positioning ‘ideal theory’ as the peak of radical ambition.

Illusions of political neutrality, whether within the confines of academia or outside of it, are always deeply political, and usually conservative. (Think of the role that a faux-neutral, supposedly common-sense notion of ‘electability’ has played in British political discourse in recent years.) The answer, as I argued in the case of analytic political philosophy, is not to try to replace false neutrality with a ‘true’ one. The idea that this is possible, let alone desirable, is itself illusory. Judgements and assumptions about what is important, what kind of place the world is and what it could or should become – which is to say, political judgements and assumptions – are always and already embedded in the concepts and values we use to make and evaluate statements and arguments in philosophy and elsewhere. If there is an affinity between analytic philosophy and liberalism, it is perhaps in their mutual tendency to project this sort of illusion – to proceed as if their politics is no politics at all, just ‘realism’, or ‘common sense’. From this vantage point, the opponents of analytic philosophy and of liberalism can only appear respectively as obscurantists and fanatics. It’s no surprise, therefore, that some prominent analysts (Russell among them) became such ardent Cold Warriors.

The observation of G. J. Warnock, in 1958, that analytic philosophy was compatible with ‘a quite striking ideological range’ is clearly true, though Warnock also conceded that ‘there may be some deep-seated similarity of attitude and outlook’ not easily detectable to those who share in it. The political flavour of the school has been predominantly liberal, but it has not been exclusively so (think of analytic Marxists such as G. A. Cohen, or the radicals among the earlier ‘Vienna Circle’ of logical positivists). ‘Liberalism’, in any case, has meant (and continues to mean) different things to different people. Also like liberalism, ‘analytic philosophy’ is a slippery enough category to be resistant to any definitive characterization. It is not that analytic philosophy has any particular, fixed political content or valence. But its tendency toward ahistoricism and abstraction creates a vacuum at its heart, into which comes rushing, too often, too easily and too quietly, the dominant politics of the day. 

Read on: Lorna Finlayson, ‘Rules of the Game?’, NLR 123.

Categories
Uncategorised

Avalanche of Numbers

In the last few weeks, a report has been circulating in the online fora of the ultranationalist Indian diaspora. Its author, Shantanu Gupta, an ideologue closely associated with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatya Janata Party, ‘tracked the coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in India of 6 global publications – BBC, the Economist, the Guardian, Washington Post, New York Times and CNN – via web search results over a 14-month period’. His argument is that these outlets have distorted and exaggerated the effects of coronavirus in India. On what does Gupta base this thesis? On the fact that all these sources have used absolute numbers rather than cases per million. By the latter metric, we are told, ‘India is one of the better performing countries on the global map’. Here he is undoubtedly correct.

Countless times this spring we’ve seen the dramatic, record-shattering daily death counts from India, as it reportedly became the country with the third highest Covid deaths in the world. A quick look at these records: deaths in India reached their highest level on May 18th, with 4,525 per day. The USA topped this morbid leaderboard on January 12th with slightly lower numbers: 4,466. The UK reached its peak on January 20th, with 1,823 daily deaths; Italy on December 3rd with 993.

The problem is, India’s population stands at 1.392 billion. The USA’s is just 332 million, while the UK and Italy have 68 and 60 million respectively. If, then, we were to count the number of deaths per million inhabitants, ranking the highest daily death count yields quite different results: the UK holds a strong lead, with 28 deaths a day per million inhabitant; Italy is in second place with 17; the USA follows with 14; and India comes last, with just 3 per million inhabitants. Regarding the total number of deaths per million since the beginning of the pandemic, each country is almost identical, the only change coming at the very top: Italy clinches gold with 2,091 deaths per million, the UK 1,873, the USA 1,836, and India just 243.

One might argue that Indian statistics are unreliable (a fair objection, no doubt), due to the impossibility of accurately recording deaths in slums and other deprived areas. We now know that the true Covid death count in Peru was around triple the official figure. But multiply the Indian death count by four and it would still be inferior to that of more developed countries with far higher per capita incomes such as the USA, UK and Italy.

So has the pandemic in India been a bed of roses, as Modi has repeated for around a year, and as Gupta still maintains? Not at all. Try selling this to the families brought to ruin buying oxygen tanks on the black market or rooms in facilities with ventilators, or to the millions of precarious workers sent back home on foot, without a penny or subsidy to speak of. Even if, epidemiologically, Covid has not hit India more violently than other countries, it nonetheless spelled catastrophe for the health service and the wider economy. The numbers presented to underscore India’s Covid ‘tragedy’ in reality told an entirely different story. They were a testament to the brutal inequality of Indian society and the awful state of its health service: underfunded, staffed with underpaid workers, and lacking all kinds of vital equipment.

India’s pandemic casualties are but a macroscopic example of how numbers can be made to say anything, often conveying the opposite of what they really mean. In this past year and a half we’ve been submerged, buried, asphyxiated by an ‘avalanche of numbers’, as the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking terms it. In his exceptional The Taming of Chance (1990), Hacking examines the fervour for statistics that took hold of Europe in the 1800s, following the Napoleonic Wars and the Industrial Revolution. Statistics, he argues, were endowed with a double dimension: by the 19th century they emerged as pillars of a new mode of governance, and underpinned a colossal epistemological revolution in science (just think of statistical mechanics, the kinetic theory of gases, and the attendant appearance of unsettling concepts: entropy first, the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics after). It was this ‘avalanche’ that gave rise to the human sciences. Modern sociology was made possible by the availability of statistical data; Durkheim couldn’t have written his foundational text on Suicide (1897) without the mass of information provided by censuses. Our contemporary image of human beings derives in large part from the means developed to count them – an image that omits all that cannot be counted or indexed.

Statistics – numbers, that is – were obviously the primary tool for enacting what Foucault termed ‘biopolitics’, a form of governance in which it is essential for the sovereign to know the average life expectancy, the mean age of marriage relative to level of education, the number of possible conscripts at any given time, how long the state would have to pay a life salary, and so on. But a discipline cannot be an instrument of government without becoming a weapon of politics. The manipulation of statistics was born alongside statistics itself, hence the unforgettable, lapidary maxim from Mark Twain in his Chapters from My Autobiography (1906): ‘there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics’.

This whole process gave rise to a new artform, as the rhetorical use of numbers ripened into a veritable ‘rhetoric of the number’. The media spectacle we’ve witnessed in the last 17 months has deployed this numerical rhetoric to the full extent of its powers; instructive, threatening, persuasive, dissuasive, distortive. It’s opportune, then, to examine this rhetoric a little more closely. We could begin by asking, as Jacques Durand did in his first, pioneering treatment of the subject: ‘What is a number? Is it a word amongst others, an integral part of language? Or is it a purely scientific object, extralinguistic in nature?’

We may not realize it, but we’re perennially bombarded by numbers used in what might be termed an ‘extra-arithmetic’ register: The One Thousand and One Nights, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Fahrenheit 451, The Seventh Seal, Ocean’s 11, Agent 007, 7-Up, 7-Eleven, the ‘number of the beast’ 666. In politics, the rhetorical use of numbers derives ‘from the fact that numbers and statistics – even from official sources – do not hold a mirror to reality but instead reflect, and deflect, it’. Precisely because of this function, numbers produce an effect of irrational persuasion. If I’m told that thousands of people have died in some disaster, I can accept this or I can remain sceptical, but if I’m told that the death count is 12,324, I must take it or leave it in toto. Numbers thus retain a persuasive force comparable to that of an image (‘worth a thousand words’). At the same time, numbers serve to decontextualize and absolutize.

We’re so inundated with numbers that we tend not to perceive just how much of the information we are presented with is superfluous and arbitrary. When we were told, for example, that Malaysia registered a record number of 5,298 cases on the 30th of January, nobody interrogated the reason why this figure was chosen. Why have we never been given daily updates on tuberculosis cases, even if every year it causes the death of around 1.7 million people? Think of the 1.4 million people who die every year in car accidents. Why are we not informed of roadside fatalities in Chile or the Philippines every evening? It’s curious that during Covid’s second wave all mention of deaths in nursing homes vanished; they have literally disappeared from mass media, yet the elderly continue to die in great numbers. The hypocritical sobs for the ‘tragedy of the elderly’ and the crocodile tears for ‘our grandparents’ have now been muted.

So, the first mechanism the rhetoric of numbers employs is the choice of which figures to include and which to omit. To declare the accumulation of total deaths, rather than the rate of mortality relative to the size of a given population, is a shining example of this numerical rhetoric. Rarely does the news – broadcast or print – use relative figures; it generally deals in absolute tallies. Less lethal but just as serious is the doctoring of statistics relating to work, with many curious stratagems at play in assessing the rate of unemployment (in the US, for example, people are not counted as unemployed if they worked just one hour the previous week). Then there are the various figures of speech which we do not have sufficient space and time to analyse at present. With numbers you can use antithesis: ‘A €700,000 fine for missed payment of €1.20’, ‘Murder for €20’; tautology: ‘2021 is not 2001’; repetition: ‘in 12 days, with 12 bottles, your face is 12 years younger’; enumeration: ‘buy two, pay for one’ (a shoe advert) , ‘one exceptional offer, two lifestyles, three advantages’; accumulation: ‘920 tonnes at 920 km/h’. This doesn’t even cover rhetorical devices that mix words and numbers. The list is long.

It’s evident from this brief excursus that numbers are not words like any other, nor are they completely extralinguistic signifiers. Strangely enough, their logic recalls (to come full circle) the use of Hindi words in English-language Indian dailies, which are replete with local terms that communicate what in English would be inexpressible. They represent an exotic solecism embedded in standard English and hark back to a shared local heritage. In everyday consciousness numbers surely enjoy a similar exotic fascination, owing partly to the general public’s imperfect grasp of arithmetic.

What remains to be evaluated is the intention behind this particular wielding of numbers. There’s little doubt here: general panic amongst the population was a poorly-concealed – if not declared – objective of the pandemic response. I don’t wish to say that the pandemic wasn’t to be feared. I do, however, think that authorities around the world considered instilling a long-lasting panic amongst the general public necessary in order for much-needed lockdown measures and curbs on civil liberties to be accepted with such acquiescence. A well-dosed and administered media panic was, and still is, far less costly and intrusive than police measures. And for this aim the rhetoric of numbers has no match.

Translated by Francesco Anselmetti.

Read on: Marco D’Eramo, ‘Geographies of Ignorance’, NLR 108.

Categories
Uncategorised

Canny Reader

The death of J. Hillis Miller, in February, marked the end of an astonishing period in American academic literary criticism – North American really, since the dominant figure, Northrop Frye, was born in Québec and taught in Toronto. The period might be said to start in 1947, with the publication of Frye’s first book, the Blake study Fearful Symmetry, and yielded a body of work drawing on the kind of Continental resources – Marxism and psychoanalysis but also theology, linguistics, hermeneutics, and mythopoetics – that had been accorded little place by earlier formalist approaches. Miller, the author of twenty-five books, was rare among the central figures in devoting his attention to study of the novel, from Emily Brontë to Ian McEwan. The arc of Miller’s career has been described by Fredric Jameson as ‘unclassifiable’, but in bald terms, it was the story of a pair of Francophone mentors, Georges Poulet and Jacques Derrida, who washed up in Baltimore – more specifically, the campus of Johns Hopkins, where Miller taught from 1952 until 1972. Miller welcomed their interventions and ran with them, transforming himself into a leading exponent of two critical schools, one – phenomenology – that remains more or less pegged to its post-war moment, the other – deconstruction – with wider fame and implications, and a more contested legacy.

He was born in Virginia, in 1928, and raised in upstate New York – ‘definitely the boondocks’, he recalled. His mother was descended from Pennsylvania Dutch; one of her ancestors, a Rhode Islander, had been a signatory on the Declaration of Independence. Miller’s father, himself the son of a farmer, was a Baptist minister as well as a professor and an academic administrator who emphasised women’s higher education. But Miller’s upbringing wasn’t especially urbane. When he arrived at Oberlin, to study physics, he had never heard of T. S. Eliot. And when he moved to Harvard for graduate studies, he felt uncomfortable – out of step with what he called the ‘white-shoe tradition’. (Miller later wrote that he and his wife, Dorothy, thought of the shift from physics to English during his sophomore year ‘as a vow of poverty for us both’, adding, ‘That has not exactly happened’.)

The subject of Miller’s PhD was Dickens, not an established area of academic study. ‘The idea was that a gentleman had already read these novels’, he told me, during an encounter in 2012. ‘You don’t have to teach them’. When Miller was hired at Hopkins, he was the department’s first Victorianist: ‘Until I came, everything stopped at 1830’. One effect of the appointment was Miller’s meeting with the Swiss critic Georges Poulet, a member of the Geneva School of phenomenology (though, in fact, he never taught there), who argued that literature embodies the ‘consciousness’ of the author. Miller’s dissertation, notionally supervised by the Renaissance scholar Douglas Bush – whose only comment was that he uses ‘that’ when he means ‘which’ – had been written under the influence of Kenneth Burke, especially his idea of symbolic action. But in the published version, which appeared in 1958, he announced the Poulet-like desire to identify in Dickens’s fiction a unique and consistent ‘view of the world’ and called the novel the means by which a writer apprehends and creates himself.

Miller never formally rejected Poulet, but looking back, he saw his period as a phenomenologist as something like a diversion, even a cop-out. He had always been drawn to ‘local linguistic anomalies in literature’, he said, and consciousness criticism provided a ‘momentarily successful strategy for containing rhetorical disruptions of narrative logic’ through reference to the authorial perspective as a unifying – and grounding – presence. But at a certain point in the late 1960s, he abandoned what he called ‘an orientation toward language as the mere register of the complexities of consciousness’ in favour of ‘an orientation toward the figurative and rhetorical complexities of language itself as the generative source of consciousness’. In The Form of Victorian Fiction (1968), he continued to emphasise ‘intersubjectivity’ – how the ‘mind of an author’ is made ‘available to others’. But by the time of Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (1970), he had begun to embrace what he called ‘a science of tropes’.

It was a shift cemented in 1972, when Miller was hired by Yale, where his colleagues included Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and Jacques Derrida. Talk of a ‘Yale School’ now goes back almost fifty years, but did it really exist? Derrida, for his part, said that he didn’t identify with ‘any group or clique whatsoever, with any philosophical or literary school’. Yet Miller argued that in spite of such ‘complexities’ – i.e. the best-known putative member claiming otherwise – ‘a Yale School did exist’, and characterised its activities as ‘a group of friends teaching and writing in the same place at the same time, with closely related orientations’.

Miller once argued that the Yale critics were united by an interest in the eighteenth century. It’s a bizarre contention, the meta-critical equivalent of counting the people at a dinner table but forgetting to include yourself. Bloom, Hartman, and de Man were certainly engaged in an effort, spearheaded by Frye, to overturn a prejudice against Romanticism enshrined by Eliot and disseminated by the New Critical textbook Understanding Poetry. The notable products included Hartman’s 1964 study of Wordsworth, the essays in de Man’s Blindness and Insight (1971), and Bloom’s books on Shelley and Blake as well as The Visionary Company (1961), his foolhardy reading of the entire English Romantic canon. Miller, by contrast, specialised in fiction of the Victorian and modernist periods; as late as 2012, he had never read anything by Samuel Richardson.

So the orientations to which Miller alluded are not altogether clear. Even Deconstruction and Criticism (1979), the ‘manifesto’ of the Yale School, exposed the degree of ambiguity, the conjunction in the title separating Bloom from the ‘gang of four’ who practised something called ‘deconstruction’. Hartman complicated things further in his preface by calling Miller, Derrida, and de Man the true ‘boa-deconstructors’ – a gang of three. Even the book’s intended unifying element, an emphasis on Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life’, was lost along the way. Looser points of convergence seem more persuasive. Miller pointed out that what he, de Man, Bloom, and Hartman – a different gang of four – were up to differed substantially from the activities of both the New Critics and Northrop Frye. The late Irish academic Denis Donoghue said that what linked the members of the so-called Yale School was simply that they ‘teach at Yale’.

What remains beyond doubt is that Miller was closely aligned to de Man and Derrida, and that their influence explains the discrepancy between the best books of his early period, The Disappearance of God (1963) and Poets of Reality (1965), and the books he published while at Yale, Fiction and Repetition (1982), and The Linguistic Moment (1985), his book on poetry. Miller first encountered de Man’s work at a Yale colloquium in 1964 where he delivered a version of the paper that became the Lukács essay in Blindness and Insight. Another turning point was Derrida’s appearance, two years later, at the star-studded Johns Hopkins conference, ‘The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man’ – theory’s equivalent of the Sex Pistols concert at the Manchester Free Trade Hall. Miller was teaching a class when Derrida, a thirty-six-year-old lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure, and a last-minute addition ­– delivered his exhilarating lecture, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’. But he witnessed Derrida in other sessions – for example, he heard him tell the phenomenologist and autofiction pioneer, Serge Doubrovsky, that he didn’t believe in perception.

It was one of many things he didn’t believe in. Derrida’s project, owing debts of varying sizes to Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Freud, was to show that the majority of modern thought remained implicitly metaphysical, and posited a foundation – a Transcendental Signified, the logos or Word – from which many unchecked assumptions derived. The conference had been organised to remedy East Coast indifference to structuralism. In the event – a word that became a crucial part of theoretical vocabulary – the opposite was achieved. Derrida dethroned Claude Lévi-Strauss, and deconstruction was born.

You might say that the effect of deconstruction, in its literary-critical mode, was to augment a presiding canon of largely B-writers (Baudelaire, Benjamin, Borges, Blanchot, etc) with a group of H-figures (Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger, Hopkins, to some degree Hawthorne and Hardy), and to replace a set of keywords beginning ‘s’ – structure, sign, signifier, signified, semiotics, the Symbolic, syntagm, Saussure – with a vocabulary based around the letter ‘d’: decentring, displacement, dislocation, discontinuity, dedoublement, dissemination, difference and deferral (Derrida’s coinage ‘différance’ being intended to encompass both). And there was also a growing role for ‘r’: Rousseau, rhetoric, Romanticism (one of de Man’s books was The Rhetoric of Romanticism), Rilke, and above all reading, a word that appeared, as noun and participle, in titles of books by de Man, Hartman, and most prominently Miller: The Ethics of Reading, Reading Narrative, Reading for Our Time, Reading Conrad.

The New York Times, one of various media outlets that offered a beginner’s guide to this new creed, defined deconstruction as the theory that words and texts have meaning only in relation to other words and texts. That better describes the structuralist concept of intertextuality. A typical deconstructionist reading reveals the ways in which a text deconstructs itself, essentially by keeping irreconcilable ideas in suspension. (Caution: paraphrase ahead!) De Man argued, for example, that Hegel’s Aesthetics was dedicated to the same act – preserving classical art – that it reveals as impossible; autobiography at once veils and defaces the autobiographer; a literary text is something that asserts and denies its own rhetorical authority. Harold Bloom, in the recent posthumous book Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles, called de Man’s Shelley an ironist who believed that disfiguration annihilates meaning, and then pointed out that this also describes de Man’s Rousseau, his Wordsworth, his Proust…

If Derrida was the founder of deconstruction, and de Man its most concise and feline practitioner, Miller was responsible for extending its range beyond philosophy and poetry. He defined the novel as ‘a chain of displacements’ – author into narrator, narrator into characters, donnée into fiction. He pointed out that attempts to characterise the literature of a given period as closed or open are undermined by the impossibility of demonstrating whether any one narrative is closed or open in the first place. It’s possible to reply that Miller’s criticism gravitated to novels openly concerned with the challenge of reading signs, with language as something that both uncovers and evades: The Wings of the Dove, Lord Jim, Between the Acts. But in his essay ‘Narrative and History’, he argued that Middlemarch, traditionally considered a realist text, can be seen as displacing ‘the metaphysical notions of history, storytelling, and the individual, and the concepts of origin, end and continuity’ with ‘repetition, difference, discontinuity, openness and the free and contradictory struggle of individual human energies’. The ‘canny reader’s motto’, from his formidable – and longest-gestating – book, Ariadne’s Thread (1992), begins: ‘Watch out when you think you’ve “got it”’.

Miller also emerged as the critic best-placed, or anyway keenest, to stand up for deconstruction – against the right, who saw it as iconoclastic and jargon-riddled, and the left, who saw it as elitist. He was frequently forced to deny that deconstruction was simply nihilist. ‘It’s not that nothing is referential’, he said, ‘but that it’s problematically referential’. His best-known essay, and the most virtuoso display of his thinking in action, ‘The Critic as Host’, which appeared in Deconstruction and Criticism, was a response to M.H. Abrams’s essay, ‘The Deconstructive Angel’, which argued that a deconstructionist reading was parasitic on the ‘univocal’ reading of a text. Then there was the charge, recently repeated by Louis Menand in his book The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, that deconstruction was just as cloistered as the New Criticism – that it ignored, in Menand’s phrase, the ‘real-life aspects of literature’. There’s an argument that deconstruction only looked at history when history more or less forced itself onto the agenda when it emerged, in 1987, that de Man had published articles for Belgian newspapers under Nazi control. But Miller had already been engaged in rejecting the view of deconstruction as formalism by another – fancier – name.

In 1986, the year he left Yale for the University of California, Irvine – Derrida went along too – Miller used his first Presidential Address to the MLA Conference to attack the narrowness of newly resurgent historical approaches, and his own later work offered a serial deconstructionist’s riposte. His first formal intervention was Hawthorne & History: Defacing It (1991), an attempt to show that literature never merely ‘reflects’ history, and this was followed by a short book on the relationship between text and images, Illustration (1992), which Jameson called his contribution to ‘“cultural studies” as such’. In the last decade of his life, he produced a study of George Eliot that doubled as an exercise in ‘anachronistic reading’, an account of writing – including the work of Kafka and Toni Morrison – in relation to Auschwitz, and a study of ‘communities’ (always more conflicted than they just appear) in the work of writers as varied as Thomas Pynchon and Raymond Williams. 

But Miller was not content to offer deconstruction as an alternative to what he considered ‘logical’ historicism. He saw it as a truly materialist aesthetics. As long ago as 1972, Jameson argued that opposition to an ‘Absolute Signified’ encoded a critique of the authoritarian and theocentric, and compared the Derridean analysis of the word and its dominance to Marx on money and the commodity. The first overt statement of this position came a decade later in de Man’s essay ‘The Resistance to Theory’, in which he argued that those who dismissed theory as oblivious to social and historical reality exhibited an unconscious fear that it would expose their own ideological mystifications. Then he added, ‘They are, in short, very poor readers of Marx’s German Ideology.’

It wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that this one sentence determined the course of Miller’s work ever after. He became increasingly insistent on the similarity, even interchangeability, of the two traditions. Rhetorical reading was political reading, with an essential role in teaching citizens how to decode what he called the ‘imaginary formulations of their real relations to the material, social, gender, and class conditions of their existence’. In the 1986 MLA address, Miller called for a deconstructionist understanding of the material base. Later, though, he appeared to suggest that such an understanding had always existed. In ‘Promises, Promises’, a 2001 essay principally concerned with similarities between Marx and de Man, though inevitably emboldened by Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993), Miller called The German Ideology ‘a deconstructive literary theory avant la lettre’, adding ‘If Marx is a deconstructionist, deconstruction is a form of Marxism’. Both were based, in his account, on a refusal to take things for granted, and a need to investigate how a certain sign system – language, the commodity – was established, how it works, and how it might therefore be changed.        

There seems little consensus about the influence or afterlife of the movement to which Miller belonged. For many, it appears to have been something transient. Menand, in The Free World, argues that Derrida’s ‘anti-foundationalism’ never had much effect outside literature departments and ‘some kinds of art practice’. But Camille Paglia, writing in 1993, lamented that post-structuralism had ‘spread throughout academe and the arts’ and was ‘blighting the most promising minds of the next generation’, adding with only a dash of melodrama: ‘This is a major crisis if there ever was one, and every sensible person must help bring it to an end’. And Jameson, writing in NLR in 1995, noted that the ‘maddening gadfly stings’ of Derrida’s attack on metaphysics had hardened into orthodoxy – though he didn’t specify where.

Miller, for his part, liked to emphasise the deconstructive strain in the work of feminist critics such as Shoshana Felman, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Barbara Johnson (who pointed out that the Yale School was always a Male School), and Judith Butler. He never stopped writing and lecturing about Derrida or de Man or the self-immolating tendencies of language or the self-critical faculties of novels or the radicalism inherent in good reading. But he noted with regret that what he called ‘the triumph of theory’ had been undone, and he stopped using the term deconstruction, arguing that ‘a false understanding’ had won the day with the media, and ‘many academics too’.

Leo Robson is lead fiction reviewer for the New Statesman.

Read on: Fredric Jameson, ‘Marx’s Purloined Letter’, NLR I/209.