Anarchoblogs

i have to say that the continuing infestation of the academy with marxist theory is a sad thing in a number of respects. one respect is this: there just seem to be no emerging or creative or even responsive modes of leftism; y'all need something new. zizek shows this on the upper intellectual end, for example.

so, communicating with some colleagues about let's say arts education, i quoted friedrich schiller to the effect that art is a form of play. one thing i got back: well, that sort of romantic individualism was just capitalist ideology. i think the idea that you're going to dismiss someone like friedrich schiller as a bourgeois ideologist is just sad. really, however, everyone y'all disagree with is a bourgeois individualist, just like this was 18fucking70.

first of all, the history of individualism of various sorts (and actually i would not necessarily call schiller an individualist) is, as i have been arguing for many years, pretty damn complex. the brand that ends you up at thoreau or kierkegaard, for example, starts in religious, not economic life; the basic idea is that the individual conscience is important, which i think you can only deny at the cost of nightmares. but the marxist interpretation would make the spiritual and political dimensions illusory: all of this, protestantism, republicanism, and capitalism, are just capitalism. i'm just going to baldly assert that you need to ditch the idea that only economy is real. the religious, cultural, aesthetic, and economic developments are all intertwined, and none is the only real thing. if you're looking at vermeer, the quakers, schiller, milton etc and all you can say is 'bourgeois', then you are being very primitive and missing a lot of great stuff.

anyway, the 'bourgeois' crap has got to go. first of all, every damn person making the accusation is herself bourgeois by her own acccount, and i guess trance-channeling the proletariat. however, if you were trance-channeling the proletariat in the states - and if these categories made sense anymore at all - you'd be flying 'don't tread on me' and stockpiling ammunition. you can trance-channel them because, unlike them, you know what they think and what their interests are. stop right there, tear down your intellectual structure, and start again from scratch.

second, to say of a doctrine or a figure or a painting that it is bourgeois: is that supposed to be some kind of refutation, or bear on its truth or its quality? one right answer would be: so what? wake me up when you have an argument. well, the bourgeoisie will be left on the slag heap of history (not; marxism has been left on the slag heap of history, however). but even if it was, that just does not bear on its truth. i mean, on your own account, we're in 'late capitalism' (just keep wishing, y'all). does the persistence of capitalism (well, that's how y'all see it yourselves) show that bourgeois ideas are true after all or something?

anyway, dismissing someone's politics - much less northern european and north american intellectual, aesthetic, religious, and political history from 1517 to 1848 - as bourgeois, is sad and really not attentive to the material in any way and irrelevant to its truth or value. and of course the idea that, for example, the concept of individual rights is bourgeois is really just an extraordinarlly empty and irrelevant justification for silencing people, taking their stuff, interning them, or executing them: i suppose on behalf of the proletariat. if your first move is: well, really, you have no rights; that's just bourgeois ideology: ask yourself: what do they want to do with the claim that you have no rights: why is that an important claim to them? the answer, i believe, is that they want to violate individuals in every possible way on the journey to collective identity.

anyway, the whole structure of thought is a meat cleaver: it's irrational; it's irrelevant; it's crude; it's false; and if history has demonstrated anything, it's that it's extremely dangerous. and it's so bourgeois. 

bringing the last couple of posts into proximity, the only alternative to individualism (which i mean in the sense daniel gives, as respect for each person's autonomy and value and dissent from majority opinion) is, precisely, forced collectivization. the only opposite i can think of to individualism is collectivism. both are both ontological theories of personhood and political programs. as an ontological theory, collectivism says that we (whomever that is at a given time and place: a class/race/nation/gender/everybody) are really not distinct; we are one thing, one will, one consciousness, one taste, etc. then they demonstrate extremely concretely that they know that's bullshit: they will force each person to nod along with a gun to her head. it's the most ridiculous position ever: even its most extreme proponents don't believe it at all.

now on the other hand, we really are connected in infinitely many ways, and we really do share languages, for example, and people can share the same values and so on. but dissent emerging from a single human body is always possible and is continuously necessary. anyway, if you don't believe in individualism i would try this test: take the person you are closest to in the world, or select at random someone in your race, nation, gender, social class, or whatever you think is the locus of collective consciousness. tell that person to sit at home. now, sometime in the next twenty-four hours, you tell him, you at your place will drop a bowling ball on your own foot. no doubt he will feel your pain, for the locus of cosciousness is collective. so get him to tell you exactly when it happened. then tell him to get his foot treated and see whether you feel better.

phil mcreynolds, john lysaker, and i rock on.

 

 

i've been working on a piece on american cynicism (twain, bierce, and mencken: my peirce, james, and dewey), for what may end up being a volume of essays for suny.

one angle: so there's a basic narrative of american thought: you have the transcendentalists, incredibly optimistic representatives of an america with an open frontier. emerson and even thoreau kept expecting a transformed and redeemed humanity, more or less made possible by america. well, the second half of the 19th century would make any quasi-rational person think twice about that. so the supposedly characteristic american optimism is tempered in the pragmatists from a secular milennialism to meliorism; things might not be just about to be entirely ecstatically transformed, but things will get better and better if we work for it. this is the narrative you'll read in many histories of american thought; it's even more or less the one i've taught in classes on american philosophy. but one thing you have to realize: every narrative, especially one that neat and synoptic, is simplistic, distorting, and largely false. 

what if mencken was sitting in intellectual history where his contemporary dewey is right now? then the whole thing looks entirely different i believe. maybe that sounds ridiculous. but first off, mencken was an extraordinary intellectual. check out the american language, an amazing scholarly achievement. he wrote 'treatises' on philosophy of religion (his treatise on the gods makes all the hitchens and dawkins stuff redundant, and it is so much better) and on ethics (taking a naturalistic darwinian view). he was the first american translator of nietzsche. he was certainly much more widely known and read than dewey in his own lifetime. mencken dropped out of poly high school in baltimore to work on newspapers, but he was, believe it or not, far more erudite than dewey: you can't believe at any given moment what the man knows, from the whole history of philosophy, religion, and literature to what music they're playing in the speakeasy down the street. also (obviously) he writes infinitely better than dewey, and unlike dewey he's hilarious. well there are some problems too, of course.

i want to say that american cynicism - like the ancient variety - is a profoundly affirmative philosophy. it looks squarely at all the human realities that emerson and dewey apparently didn't see at all: all the corruption, self-seeking, dishonesty, mediocrity, especially among our eminent legislators. and it laughs and laughs. no one was ever more delighted by america than mencken. he loved our clowns and con men, our "Knights of Pythias, Presbyterians, standard model Ph.D.'s, readers of the Saturday Evening Post, admirers of Richard Harding Davis and O. Henry, members of the Y.M.C.A. or the Drama League, weepers at chautauquas, wearers of badges, 100 per cent patriots, children of God" - if nothing else because they made for great insults and jokes. none of these folks, apparently, were known to john dewey. america gave him a truly hearty laugh. but he didn't write fictional redemptions; he lived in something resembling the real world, namely baltimore.

that too is central to 'america': keeping your feet on the ground, looking squarely at the dark side, rolling your eyes at the glossy propaganda that they're feeding you. seriously, stop talking to professors - who are incapable of independent or rational thought - and start talking to mechanics. well that can take you into a place of darkness. but it took mencken to a place of joy. vicious joy, but joy.

now narrating it all through the prags is useful for a 'progressive' orientation, and it does make history culminate in democratic socialism. and surely mencken's reputation has faded primarily for political reasons. but there are many ways this history could be narrated, and hence many places we might be headed. also mencken was just not that politically problematic except for his germanophilia.

 

it's true. i'm stoned today. i actually don't think that experts can reliably detect the hand of pollock; that got a bit screwed up in the editing. sometimes it's funny but people can't quite seem to believe that i am actually asserting what i seem to be asserting. not that they disapprove, necessarily, or even disagree. it's just that it doesn't quite register. i seem to be somewhat hostile to both modernism and post-modernism, which would make me a reactionary of the early 19th century, i guess, or at any rate, ready for something else. but i am more hostile to modernism. picasso: creator and destroyer (you doink): or, maybe just a person who put paint on canvas. anyway, at least postmodernism has many playful moments, many anti-pretentious moments, and is open: there are many things you could do or be as an artist. no one can be what modernism held all great artists were.

been working on a paper on my teacher, richard rorty, for a conference next month in opole, poland. so scroll down to my name and you can dig it up on that page, if thus inclined.

one way to construe the left-right spectrum is as state vs capital. but this distinction is a single ideology shared by ayn rand and vald lenin. look and see: they are not distinct and you will not be pulling them apart. 

Both left and right accepted an ideological framework in which state and capital were opposed; indeed to a large extent the left-right spectrum just is this idea. And yet as soon as this opposition is questioned empirically with regard to any particular fundamental development in practical political economy, it disintegrates. Panitch and Gindin adduce also the world financial crisis of 2007-2008, which was created in part by the American government's support for home ownership and the development of financial instruments based on them. Of course the American government and those of other nations, as well as international coalitions of bankers and officials massively infused the specific private financial concerns with cash in repsonse to the crisis. The United States government purchased and then re-sold domestic car manufacturers.

   The interlocked histories of the corporation and state war machines, for example Krup to Germany or Halliburton to the USA must on any account be regarded as fundamental to the nature and growth of both the modern state and the modern corporation.

   State repression of striking workers, for example the severe outbreak in the US in the 1890s, or the less violent outbreaks in Thatcher's Great Britain or Reagan's United States, is a tried and true tradition. State regulation of business concerns increases barriers to entry into the market and hence helps consolidate markets in established hands. This effect increases exponentially when the regulators are themselves essentially representatives of those very firms, who after all are the only ones who understand their segment of the market, and the health of which depends on their activity.

    The way the FCC has actually imposed corporate oligarchy on communications is entirely typical; in the public interest and so on they auctioned off and licensed first radio and then televion frequencies, and now cellular bandwidth made the networks possible, and for some time most Americans had perhaps four sources of information, all basically purveying the same interpretation of the world. The state enforced copyright laws in such a way as to limit publishing or the dissemination of music to a few large corporations. But it did the same with the railroads and mineral rights in the 19th century, for example, leading directly to the great American personal fortunes of that period. By the 1890s the American economy was being bailed out by J.P. Morgan, a gesture which it has repaid to the financial sector many times, and in response to which the idea of a central or national bank was expanded to include unidorm regulation of currency under the Federal Reserve. These mechanisms for mutual stabilization of state and capital were refined and internationalized throughout the twentieth century and still have their little drawbacks at times. One effect of a state that conceives itself and which is conceived by the population primarily as a distributor of benefits is that it stabilizes the supply and demand or manufacturing, sales, and consumption, by, for example, giving many people a certain amount to spend evry week or month. Consumption can be increased by increasing such benefts, for example in a slump with regard to unemployment benefits; this assures retailers, for example, of a certain minimal level of sales. To look at state and corporate interests as opposed in these dimensions is distorting.