Category Archives: Critical theory and philosophy

Jargon of Authenticity, Day 4

Heidegger enters the scene on the third page. Here’s the paragraph in full:

This [Kracauer getting shown the door by the Rosenstock circle] was well before the publication of Being and Time. In that work, Heidegger introduced authenticity par excellence, in the context of an existential ontology and as a philosophical term of art; so, too, did he pour into the mold of philosophy the object of the Authentics’ less theoretical zeal; and in that way he won over all those in whom philosophy strikes a vague chord. It was through Heidegger that confessional demands became unnecessary. His book acquired its nimbus by describing as full of insight — by presenting to its readers as an obligation true and proper — the drift of the [German] intelligentsia’s dark compulsions before 1933. Of course in Heidegger, as in all those who followed his language, a diminished theological resonance can be heard to this very day. The theological obsessions of those years have seeped into the language, far beyond the circle of those who at that time set themselves up as the elite. Nevertheless, the sacred quality of the Authentics’ language belongs to the cult of authenticity rather than to the Christian cult, even when — for temporary lack of any other viable authority — the Authentics end up resembling Christians. Prior to any consideration of particular content, their language molds thought in such a way that it adapts to the goal of subordination even when it thinks it is resisting that goal. The authority of the absolute is overthrown by absolutized authority. Fascism was not simply a conspiracy, although it was that; it originated, rather, in a powerful current of social development. Language provides it with a refuge; in language, the still smoldering disaster speaks as though it were salvation. 

A reader might launch into this passage and think they have arrived at the main event, the smackdown, Adorno vs. Heidegger. This is what I came to see. That would be wrong — consequentially so. For anyone trying to make sense of The Jargon of Authenticity, nothing is more important than noticing that Adorno is taking much of the onus off of Heidegger, who was at most an important relay for a malign turn in German intellectual life that happened well before he started writing. Stripped of all detail, what this page is saying is that the problem goes well beyond Heidegger. Focusing too much on Heidegger lets too many other intellectuals off the hook.

       I’d like to go ahead and extract three theses from this paragraph — they are, I think, the book’s major claims — and pause to ask what implications they might have for anyone trying to reckon with the revival of fascism in our own generation.

        Thesis #1) Anti-fascists, when studying fascist thought, should be prepared to cast the net widely. At some level, Adorno’s approach isn’t all that unusual. On the basis of this paragraph alone, we could think of The Jargon of Authenticity as his attempt at an Intellectual Origins of National Socialism, and we might note that the book appeared at more or less the same time as the classic volumes on that topic: Stern’s Politics of Cultural Despair (1961); Mosse’s Crisis of German Ideology (1964). It’s just that Adorno proposes figures of his own, alongside the agrarian ethno-nationalists and anti-Semites and pan-German Wander-birds unearthed by Mosse and Stern. He thought that the early existentialists had something important to contribute to the making of fascism — an authoritarian cast of mind that typically posed as religious and sometimes even posed as free. But unlike Mosse and Stern, Adorno was also interested in the survival, after 1945, of this proto-fascism. The fundamental task of all historical study is to judge matters of continuity and rupture — to identify what in any historical constellation has been inherited and what has been made anew. And there is perhaps no period for which this most basic of historiographic questions has higher stakes than Germany in the 1950s. What did the Germans (and their minders) manage to remake after the war, and perhaps build from scratch? And what was carried over from the 1930s and ’40s? (Who rebuilt the bombed-out cities if not Nazi architects? Who staffed the reopened public schools if not Nazi teachers?) Adorno, at any rate, is offering his own version of what we might too innocuously call the Continuity Thesis.

      Thesis #2: Even radical philosophy has a way of remaking itself as an idiom, a set of verbal commonplaces, a lingo for the educated classes. This indicates a break with Adorno’s usual method. You can pick up Negative Dialectics if you want to see Adorno grapple with the technicalities of Heidegger’s philosophical program — if, that is, you want to watch him crawl inside of that program and flush out its impasses and contradictions from the inside. The reason, one concludes, that Adorno decided finally that The Jargon of Authenticity did not belong in that volume is that he is in this case not interested in philosophy qua philosophy, and certainly not interested in its subtle failures. If anything, he is interested in the success of modernist German philosophy, but as something other than philosophy — interested, I mean, in the making of a Heideggerian-existentialist patois that got spoken, apparently, by a lot of people who weren’t philosophers — people “far beyond the circle” of adepts. What I’d like us to notice for now is that this position is doubtless repeatable. Adorno hands us a question that we might want to ask and at intervals re-ask: How does the late-modern Bildungs-bourgeoisie deploy to its own ends the philosophical argot with which its professors have equipped them? We might, for instance, want to chart the fate of critical theory itself as it moves from the classroom to Left Twitter and Left Tumblr and various workplaces. And when we ask that question, we will want to avoid a certain temptation, which will be to blame the speakers of this or that philosophical jargon for not getting it; we will have to choke back the lecture that we have at the ready, the one that pronounces ex cathedra that That’s not what Heidegger (or Foucault or Butler) really said. If Adorno is right, then philosophy attains its (malleable) historical force only in reduced form, as a vulgate. It’s the crude version that we should be keeping an eye on.

       Thesis #3: Fascism draws some of its intellectual energies from people who do not regard themselves as fascists and who may even take themselves to be anti-fascist. I can specify the matter like so: Many of the intellectuals that Adorno sees as preparing the way for Heidegger and for what he is content to call fascism were Jewish — either active Jews (like Rosenzweig or Buber) or men from Jewish families (like Rosenstock or the Ehrenbergs). In fact, the one figure that Adorno has cited approvingly (Borchardt) was way closer to the fascists than the unnamed figures he is now attacking. This is bound to shake up our understanding of fascism. Hans Ehrenberg was a vocal member of the movement that defied the Nazi takeover of the Protestant churches. Rosenzweig and Buber made landmark contributions to the revival of modern Jewish philosophy. Adorno’s argument is outrageous if wrong and disturbing if right: Your positions, as they enter the world, will not remain *your* positions. Even your anti-fascism can be transposed into a fascism. Call it the ruse of un-reason.

One way to capture the force of Adorno’s theses would be to update them, speculatively, for the revival of fascism in our generation. You could, if you wanted, enter the ranks as an anti-fascist philosophical watchdog. You could tell us that members of Trump’s inner circle have been reading Julius Evola, that they’ve met with Aleksandr Dugin. You could warn us again about Nick Land and the lure of Dark Enlightenment. You can bone up on de Benoist and the French Nouvelle Droite. But if we follow the page in front of us, then this isn’t nearly enough and may be something of a distraction.  For a decade, Nick Land was a professor of Continental philosophy at the UK’s most famously left-wing university. Alain de Benoist was first introduced to American readers by a journal founded by Lukacsians. Fascism, if it is to succeed, will have to find a perch in ordinary discourse, including educated discourse. And some of that discourse is likely to be your own. The Benoist circle call themselves Les Identitaires.

Jargon of Authenticity, Day 2

So we are sent back to the passage already quoted, to scan it again for clues:

In the early 1920s, a number of people active in philosophy, sociology and theology were planning a gathering. Most of them had switched from one denomination to another; what they had in common was their emphasis on newly acquired religion, and not the religion itself. They were all dissatisfied with the idealism that still dominated [German] universities at the time. Philosophy moved them to choose, out of freedom and autonomy, what has been known since at least Kierkegaard as positive theology. 

What jumps out now is that the men in question were all converts (not strictly true of the Patmos Circle, but perhaps true of the particular conference that Adorno is describing — who knows)? So maybe that’s the problem. But then why would that be a problem? You could begin by asking yourself: Do you typically have a beef with people who leave their religion for another — or who get God for the first time? Adorno also remarks that they had all converted in a Kierkegaardian spirit, and this might seem significant. Adorno, we know, was sufficiently interested in Kierkegaard to have written his PhD dissertation about him. So maybe that’s the problem — not conversion as such, just the Danish kind. Maybe that’s how we can tell the difference between the religious thinkers that Adorno warmed to and the ones he had no patience for. Rosenstock and Rosenzweig were existentialists; Walter Benjamin was not. But here, too, a complication opens up. Key figures in the Patmos circle were converts in the ordinary sense: Rosenstock was born into a secular Jewish family, but converted to Christianity as a teenager. The anti-fascist Protestant minister Hans Ehrenberg likewise converted from Judaism in his 20s. His cousin Rudolf Ehrenberg wasn’t exactly a convert, but was baptized Lutheran by his assimilated Jewish father, which is close. (Let’s poke around the family tree: Both Ehrenbergs were cousins of Franz Rosenzweig’s. And Rudolf’s niece was Olivia Newton-John’s mother. And Hans’s nephew was the father of the British comedian who created Blackadder.)

        The problem is that if we’re talking about Kierkegaard, then conversion might not have its ordinary meaning. I’ll see if I can’t put across a few core Kierkegaardian positions, and I’ll emphasize the ones that mattered most to the existentialists. We can begin with the idea that you have to choose yourself. Society is the domain of conformity and routine and a muddled, huddling thoughtlessness. Chances are that on any given day, you just do what everybody else is doing. You do the expected thing. Nobody living under these circumstances, which is of course most people, is even remotely an individual. Your task, then, is to become an individual, and Kierkegaard has some strong beliefs about how you might go about this. The first thing to know is that philosophy won’t help. Philosophy, after all, is keyed to the universal; it wants to be able to make claims that will hold true for all people at all times — and that’s not a promising path for anyone seeking to individuate. Philosophy is just a more recondite way of becoming no particular person. The only way to achieve individuality is to be committed to something, to be fully dedicated to something outside yourself — though you can already tell from what I’ve just written that your commitment won’t proceed from philosophy and to that extent won’t be rationally defensible. You won’t be able to give compelling reasons for holding the particular commitment that you do — reasons that other intelligent people would have to grant are cogent.

      Now Kierkegaard’s thinking on this matter is impeccably Protestant — and not just generically evangelical, but specifically Anabaptist, though that’s one of those explanations that probably needs explaining in turn. Anabaptism is the name for the Protestant sects who oppose infant baptism — who regard it as ungodly, in other words, to baptize babies, to induct newborns into a church without their consent and with no inkling of their actual standing with God. Baptism, on this view, is meant to follow on from a conversion experience, of a kind that a young child is unlikely to have and as a seal of one’s new openness to God — and as a cleansing, obviously, and a second birth. Ana- is a Greek prefix meaning “again” and refers to the early stages of the movement, when adult believers would have had to rinse away the false and infantile sprinklings of their native churches by getting baptized anew. The German word for Anabaptist means “re-dunker” or “double dipper.”

    The thing to know about Kierkegaard, then, is that he was profoundly hostile to what we might call “cultural Christianity” — a society in which most people are Christian by default, because they were raised that way. (The last book he saw through to publication was his Attack Upon Christendom.) Conversion in the specifically Kierkegaardian sense might therefore involve leaving one church for another, but it needn’t. It might just mean committing with one’s whole being to the institution of which was already nominally a member. In this framework, conversion, commitment, and the second baptism group tightly together. Franz Rosenzweig thus belongs in Rosenstock’s company even though he didn’t convert to Christianity, precisely because he very nearly converted before deciding not to: “Also bleibe ich Jude. … It looks like I’m staying a Jew,” but for real this time — which is the sound of Judaism remaking itself on the model of Baptistry, a Judaism for born-agains.

 Adorno, in fact, points out one of the more distinctive features of conversion — that it is chosen religion, religion practiced freely and by autonomous people. But then that can hardly be the problem. Surely freedom and autonomy are the very best things about the Kierkegaardian program. Let’s stick with the Anabaptists. The Amish famously tolerate among their teenagers all manner of ungodly behavior: wearing jewelry, signing up for Instagram, playing X-Box off of farmhouse generators, binge-watching Fast and Furious movies, gathering at the end of country roads to listen to hip-hop and drink Miller Lite. There is a general understanding, in other words, that a sixteen-year-old Amish person is not yet genuinely Amish and that the ordinary rules of Amish society therefore don’t apply. What’s at stake in this is perhaps best phrased like so: Being Amish is not an ethnicity. Americans at large tend to ethnicize the Amish, because Americans ethnicize everybody. The Amish even ethnicize their non-Amish neighbors and anyone who, like, drives a car, who are known collectively as “the English.” But the Amish do not ethnicize themselves. They are not “the Pennsylvania Dutch.” Young German-speakers in Lancaster County are only in some very qualified sense Amish, and their teenaged brothers and sisters are even less Amish than that, in a visible state of suspension, with the choice in front of them whether to be Amish or not. The creed of these horse-and-buggy traditionalists, then, is in core respects anti-traditional, premised on the conviction that custom is no-one’s fate, that heritage has claimed no-one in advance; and this goes back to a few of the key tenets of all sectarian Protestantism: that no-one can make you believe anything, that no-one should be forced into a church against their will or conscience. Milton called this the promise of “Christian freedom.”

      The other point to make here is that critical theorists and their cousins have often written in favor of conversion. It is thus hardly obvious that a radical philosopher would have to look askance at the experience of re-birth. Three examples will clinch the case.

         1) The core Sartrean position begins with the idea (again) that you have to choose yourself. You have to choose yourself; *and* you have to know that you have chosen yourself, you have to keep that idea in front of you; *and* you have to be ready to keep choosing yourself ongoingly; *and* you have to grant others all possible latitude to choose themselves. Conversion actually plays two distinct roles in this scheme: First, Sartre thought of Being and Nothingness — most of it anyway — as a close description of what it was like for a person to live without having arrived at this understanding. And his word for that arrival — for breaking through the reifying and identitarian delusions of ordinary existence — was “conversion.” A person, if she’s lucky, converts out of mauvaise foi. Second, nothing guarantees that I will continue to choose my personhood in the future in just the same way that I have in the past. (That’s a silly sentence, right? — because if there were a guarantee, then it wouldn’t be a choice. Sartre framing my selfhood as a perpetual choice has already abolished the guarantee.) The possibility always stands that I will encounter an “instant,” a moment of rupture, an ending-beginning, where my earlier project — my earlier personhood — is terminated and another one opens before me. The ongoing possibility and occasional reality of conversion vouches for my freedom, for a self that cannot be made intelligible via biography or some personal past.

       2) For a while, Zizek was pushing a theory of what he called subjective suicide. Let’s start with the idea that all of us spend nearly all of our lives cocooned in ideology, social convention, and pseudo-sociological delusion — a set of more or less specious understandings of “how the world works.” Eventually, though, any one of us is going to have experiences that the social-symbolic order does not cover, and Lacanian wisdom holds that these experiences are bound to be deeply unpleasant, since anything that is compatible with that order will immediately get incorporated into it, absorbed into one of the pat narratives that we already tell about ourselves and our society, which means, in turn, that anything that lies outside that order is incompatible with it, ergo a threat to our ordinary understandings of the world and ourselves. Most of the time, these encounters with the Real don’t amount to much; they aren’t much more than eerie smudges on the screen of your experience. It is always possible, though, that an encounter with the Real will, for an interval, sunder your ties with the social-symbolic order, propelling you out of your accustomed social “reality,” and in the process obliterating all of your socially entangled perceptions of yourself: your “identity.” Lacan himself gives this experience the innocuous name of “the act,” which makes it all the more alarming to realize that the technical term for the resulting condition is “psychosis.” Zizek seems to get it right, tonally, when he calls it subjective suicide, though we might also just say: Sometimes you snap. Here’s Zizek: ‘The act differs from an active intervention (action) in that it radically transforms its bearer (agent): the act is not simply something I “accomplish”—after an act, I’m literally “not the same as before.” In this sense, we could say that the subject “undergoes” the act (“passes through” it) rather than “accomplishes” it: in it, the subject is annihilated and subsequently reborn (or not).’ This, then, is the Lacanian account of conversion: your temporary reduction to nothing; psychotic Anabaptism.

        3) Badiou’s theory of the “truth-event” is the Lacanian act’s benign double. Sometimes — not often — we have an experience that strikes us as surpassingly important, something that hits us as anomalously true and real and right, an experience that leaves us feeling transformed and that suspends the normal order of the day: “This changes everything.” For Badiou, then, ethics is simply a matter of attending to those experiences — being open to them, letting ourselves be changed by them, and then resolving to stay changed, not to let ourselves bend gradually back to the norm and expectation and set-point. Until you have been called, there is simply no way for you to live morally. All ethics is an ethics of conversion.

     All I mean to say here is that radical philosophy furnishes some rather attractive defenses of conversion, which means we’ll have to account for Adorno’s not following them.

     Adorno also remarks that the Patmos group was religiously mixed; its members didn’t have a religion in common. He doubtless has this one gathering in mind, but his point would hold just as well for the New Thinkers at large. The Rosenstock-Rosenzweig correspondence is often held up as one of the twentieth century’s great feats of Judeo-Christian dialogue. Die Kreatur was published under the direction of three editors: a Protestant, a rogue Catholic, and a Jew (that last would be Martin Buber). It is hard to see these efforts as anything but a benignly ecumenical exercise. By the time Adorno wrote these words, Germans had been attacking each other on confessional grounds for more than four hundred years, often lethally: Schmalkadic Wars and  Kulturkämpfe and Judenhetze. It will come as a surprise, then, to realize that this interdenominationalism is a big part of what is bothering Adorno.

         We’ll have to keep reading to figure out why. The men in question had all taken a religious turn. A new passage:

However, they were less interested in the specific doctrine, the truth content of revelation, than in a disposition or cast of mind. To his slight annoyance, a friend [of mine], who was at that time attracted by this circle, was not invited. He was—they intimated— not authentic enough. For he hesitated before Kierkegaard’s leap, suspecting that any religion con­jured up out of autonomous thinking would subordinate itself to the latter, and would negate itself as the absolute which, after all, in terms of its own conceptual nature, it wants to be. 

I’m going to fill in a few details, and then we can see what they add up to. We know from Adorno’s papers that the friend in question was Siegfried Kracauer. If you’re reading that name for the first time, you could, just for now, think of him as the other Walter Benjamin, a second German-Jewish intellectual, close to Adorno, a good decade his senior, transfixed by popular culture in a way that Adorno manifestly was not, determined to remake thought around the experience of modern cities, and with a great many illuminating things to say about photography and film. (But then Adorno met Kracauer in his late teens, which means that in T.W.A.’s biography, he came first. Benjamin appears as a kind of second Kracauer. Also: You have to be able to imagine a Benjamin who was able to hold down a job at a major newspaper and who managed to make it out of France.)

        Apparently one of the Patmos people told Kracauer that he was inauthentic. I’m sure you don’t need to be told that no-one was accusing him of being watered down to suit American tastes, like he was a corrupted version of Kracauer the way they cook it back home. The existentialist doctrine of “authenticity” tends to involve variations of the following claims:

        -You need to know that you choose yourself, that you choose your identity, choose your way of living, choose your fundamental commitments. However you are, you weren’t just born that way.

          -Equally, then, you need to be willing to own yourself — to be candid about your commitments and to take responsibility for your personhood, for your way of being in the world. The German word for “authenticity” — the one in Adorno’s original title — is Eigentlichkeit, which comes from the word eigen, which is the everyday adjective that designates something of one’s own: “I brought my own book.” “I brought mein eigenes Buch.” Its closest cognate in German is Eigentum, which means “property” — what you own. To be “authentic,” then, is to be your own person and to be willing to own the person that you are.

-If your fundamental commitments line up in some sense with those of your culture — and it is the hallmark of right-wing existentialism that it considers this always your best option — then the task in front of you is to be in some now fully committed way what up until now you had been unthinkingly. If you wake up at 17 and realize that you have been raised more or less as a Jew and that other people regard you as Jewish, then it is up to you to commit to your Judaism and to adopt it as a project. (And yes, equally: If you wake up at 17 and realize that you have been raised more or less as a Russian, then it is up to you to commit to your Russianness…) This is where the existentialist notion of “authenticity” rejoins vernacular concerns with race and ethnicity and bad Chinese food: You go from being an x to being a real x.

   And then there’s this bit about “the Kierkegaardian leap.” That’s what English speakers usually refer to as a “leap of faith,” though Kierkegaard scholars love to point out that he never actually used that phrase. They also tend to object that the term, having first been invented by K’s Anglo-Saxon readers, then gets extracted from the ironies and pseudonymous obliquities of his writing and turned into some kitschy, blog-ready philosopheme — which is, of course, all the more reason for us to pay attention to it. The version that has come down to us mostly gets routed through the existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers, who was one of the key figures in the Kierekegaard revival who will turn out to be one of Adorno’s prime targets in this book. It’s his version of the leap we need to know about here.

         The first point to make about Jaspers is that he was a dualist: He thought that the human mind was bifurcated into two fundamentally different domains. Unlike many of his existentialist cousins, Jaspers had no objection to science and reason as such. They aren’t really the problem; they’re just grand as far as they go. There’s no reason to call into question what the scientists have figured out about non-human nature. Science will pass all but the most stringent epistemological tests. But if I say that they are grand as far as they go, then I am implying, of course, that they also have limitations. They can’t go just anywhere. Crucially, science and reason can’t tell us how to live — can’t tell us what to care about — can’t tell us what kind of people we want to be. I can become quite learned — I can bone up on string theory and evolutionary biology and the latest research into the Haitian Revolution — and I can reflect carefully on what I’ve learned. But none of this amassed knowledge can tell me what to do with my life. That’s the dualism: There are some problems, a great many problems, that we can approach with the tools of science; and there are other problems that we have to learn to think about in some fundamentally different way. For anyone interested in the history of philosophy, one of the more unusual features of Jaspers is that he thought of himself as a Kantian; he knew himself to be devising an existentialist Kantianism or to be offering Kierkegaardian answers to Kantian prompts. Kant’s first Critique vindicates science (and other types of empirical knowledge), while insisting that the mind will nonetheless press on, riskily, to some non-empirical notion of the world, the self (or soul or psyche), and God. Existentialism, then, picks up where science leaves off. What, after all, are we supposed to do about all those issues where science and knowledge can’t help? Maybe now’s the moment to pause to ask yourself: What is your basic orientation to the world? What other orientations would be possible? What are your fundamental commitments? Jaspers’s point — and this is how the “leap of faith” has often been understood — is that you are going to have to choose those commitments — some commitments, maybe an overriding commitment — and make your peace with your knowledge that this commitment is in some sense groundless: sorely under-justified. You’ve chosen *this* commitment; you could have chosen another. Jaspers has a lot to say about the dualism of science and commitment: about the danger of treating existential matters as matters of knowledge and the even graver danger of trying to duck those fundamental existential choices.

      This last must be the accusation that was leveled against Kracauer, more or less: that he refused to grant that all convictions, including nominally secular ones, resemble religious belief; that he couldn’t bring himself to announce a commitment of a basically religious kind; that he thought maybe he could get by without commitments; that he was no leaper. Of course, Adorno also gives us — and implicitly endorses — Kracauer’s counterclaim: “He suspected that any religion that has been sworn to out of autonomous thinking would subordinate itself to the latter, and would negate itself as the absolute which by the light of its own concept it wants to be.” There are a few different issues that need to be teased out here. Adorno shares Kracauer’s exasperation with what looks like a contradiction in the existentialist position. To see this, we’ll need to bring into play the opposite of autonomy, which is heteronomy — the condition of being ruled from without — not giving-yourself-the-law, but having-the-law-imposed-upon-you. Adorno’s premise is plausible enough: He seems to think that religion is fundamentally an exercise in heteronomy, for which the Christian’s ordinary word is “revelation.” The law comes to the Christian from some external source: from the Catholic’s gradual training into Church tradition and discipline; from the scripturalist’s painstaking study of Holy Writ; from the spiritualist’s resolve to wait for God’s “leading.” Adorno’s point is that you can’t sincerely arrive at heteronomy non-dogmatically and via your own independent judgments. The existentialist gambit is to say that you can be a freethinker and still submit, and that your submission will not abrogate your status as a freethinker. And to this Adorno responds that if you retain a sense of yourself as a freethinker — if, following Jaspers, you never forget that you have chosen your commitments and could have chosen otherwise — then your commitment will always be provisional and indeed revocable and in that sense not really a commitment at all, certainly not an “absolute” one, one that you couldn’t imagine re-negotiating.

         Of course, we can run the contradiction the other way. The heteronomy that the young existentialist agrees to mimic will require that he relinquish his freedom, punctually, over and over again, even as he tells himself that he is doing so freely. Existentialism thus resembles nothing so much as the voluntary servitude first described by La Boétie in the 1540s — or the condition that made Spinoza shudder, the confusion of people “who fight for their bondage as though it were their freedom.” Equally, we could think of this existentialism as a bizarre reversal in the history of Left Hegelianism. In the 1840s, Bauer and Feuerbach and others began arguing that religion was the very model of alienation: Humans had invented God; assigned to him their own most distinctive powers (the powers of spirit, of creation, their ability to make and remake their world); and then subordinated themselves to this distorted avatar of their own disavowed eminence. Left Hegelianism was obviously an invitation to drop the God-act; to recognize that God was a projection of the power of thinking human activity and so to affirm that power directly. The existentialists then arrived on the scene and took these arguments on board, only to say: That! Do that! Kneel to the god of your own making, even as you freely concede that this is what you are doing. Existentialism thus enshrines the alienation that it was supposedly designed to combat. It is the resolve to stay alienated even once you have gained insight into the sources of your alienation.

           There’s another problem that follows on from this last and which Adorno has already insinuated at least twice: These early existentialists weren’t interested in any one religion, weren’t interested “in any specific doctrine.” So Jaspers says that we choose are commitments freely, and this will tend to imply that commitments are always plural — not that *I* will have multiple commitments, but that other plausible commitments were available and that I could have chosen differently and that I have to be prepared to let other people choose differently. Their choosing freely means they don’t have to choose as I do. This is Jaspers’s big innovation on Kierkegaard, who when all is said and done only had this one ardent version of Protestantism in mind. And though we might congratulate Jaspers for having figured out how to make Kierkegaardianism liberal, we might for that very reason fret that he has led us straight into the quagmire of multiple and contending Absolutes. We begin to sense the scope of the problem if we look again at Badiou, whose ethics is designed above all to undo liberal society’s general neutralization of commitment — its insistence that we not really believe what we claim to believe, or its grudging permission to believe anything we want provided we promise in advance never to do anything about it. Badiou, in other words, wants to teach members of a liberal society how to be fanatics again; he wants us to recover our lost capacity for militancy and Schwärmerei. The peculiar character of his argument, though, is that he is sticking up for fanaticism in general — for no particular fanaticism — and certainly not for communism specifically, which is what you might have thought he was after. And “fanaticism in general” is, of course, a broken-backed concept, a contradictory fusing of zeal and indifference: extreme and passionate dedication to a cause that doesn’t care anything about the cause. Badiou’s ethics thus incorporates the flaccidly noncommittal pluralism that it was designed to overcome, offering only a hollowed-out militancy remade on the model of its liberal enemy. Or to put the point more plainly: A genuinely religious person can’t care about religion in general, because he will be committed to the specific claims (rites, beliefs) of some particular religion. Particularity is built into the thing. Religion can only appear as “religion” to someone whose underlying premises are secular.

Jargon of Authenticity, Day 1

[The introduction is here.]

Adorno starts with an anecdote. This already marks out The Jargon of Authenticity as a bit unusual, since anecdote is not Adorno’s usual way. He doesn’t begin the Dialectic of Enlightenment by telling you about the time that he and Horkheimer hitchhiked to Amsterdam. Even Minima Moralia, which one might reasonably regard as Theodor Adorno’s Diary of America, hides its origins in lived experience behind a veneer of abstract and depersonalized utterance: Notes from the Damaged Life, not Notes from My Damaged Life. So we shouldn’t take this first page for granted. Let’s listen to Adorno tell a story.

In the early 1920s, a number of people active in philosophy, sociology and theology were planning a gathering. Most of them had switched from one denomination to another; what they had in common was their emphasis on newly acquired religion, and not the religion itself. They were all dissatisfied with the idealism that still dominated [German] universities at the time. Philosophy moved them to choose, out of freedom and autonomy, what has been known since at least Kierkegaard as positive theology. 

A reader might pause at this point to wonder who exactly Adorno has in mind here. The Jargon is Adorno’s most polemical book, and surely we would learn something if we could put names to its targets. What he says here, on the opening page, is going to frame everything that comes after. Aren’t we being asked to see these figures as representative, and wouldn’t Adorno’s points be easier to follow if we knew who they were? Or you might just be curious: Who had sufficiently raised Adorno’s ire that he was still going on about it some forty years later?

        That question has an answer. We do know who is referring to, though The Jargon will let them remain anonymous. A few years ago, a philosopher in Germany — it turns out that scholars are good for something — discovered an unpublished notebook of Adorno’s in the Walter Benjamin archive in Berlin, and in that notebook Adorno tells the story again—and this time with identifying marks. So the people he has in mind were a group of German intellectuals who came together after World War I to remake religion in a broadly Nietzschean spirit—to devise versions of Christianity and Judaism that could withstand Nietzschean attack—and to explain, further, how this modernist religion, a religion without metaphysics, could push Europe to remake itself, apocalyptically, after Passchendaele and the Somme. The key name here is Eugen Rosenstock, though the figure that a contemporary English-speaker is most likely to know is not Rosenstock, but Franz Rosenzweig—not Rose-tree, but Rose-branch, who was the former’s closest collaborator. I should point out: Even in the notebook, Adorno doesn’t write out their names; he just calls them “the Patmos people”—Patmos being the name of the publishing house that the Rosenstock circle founded in order to spread their hopes for new life in the post-Wilhelminian Pentecost.

      The question now is whether filling in these names will help us understand why Adorno doesn’t like them. Will it make the book in front of us any easier to read? And the answer to this is less clear than one might have hoped. If anything, finding out about Rosenstock and Rosenzweig can make Adorno’s animosity harder to understand.

      Let’s say we start scanning these first four sentences for clues. Adorno tells us, for one, that Rosenstock and his crew had come out against the German idealists—that they had rejected the legacy of Kant and Hegel. But it is hard to see Adorno attacking them on those grounds alone. The Jargon of Authenticity was first conceived as a series of chapters in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and was, in fact, included in that book’s first edition, as an appendix. And that’s the book where Adorno remarks that “philosophical system is the belly turned mind, just as rage is the defining mark of idealism in all its forms.” Suffice it to sat that Adorno is unlikely to call out a post-Nietzschean philosopher for being insufficiently respectful to Kant.

         But then there are, of course, many different ways of opposing idealism. The next step, then, would be to try to at least catch the drift of R&R’s particular anti-idealism—to try to put some substance to their discontent with the philosophical heritage. Here it will help to know about three positions that Rosenstock and Rosenzweig shared—positions that add up to a kind of anti-philosophy.

         1) Philosophers have typically erred by convincing us that we can think abstractly, outside of space and time. This is little better than a trick, a writerly illusion that falsifies the most basic coordinates of human experience and the human situation. One of the few things that we can say about human beings in general is that they have to be somewhere and that they exist in time. The task of a post-Nietzschean counter-philosophy—what Rosenzweig called the New Thinking—will be to clarify what is going on when I try to apprehend the world at some particular moment, from some particular place, and to do this is in a way that resists transcendence’s every lure. Hegel, in the introduction to his smaller Logic, describes what it’s like to start studying philosophy: “The mind, denied the use of its familiar ideas, feels the ground where it once stood firm and at home taken away from beneath it.” And that, of course, is a vision of displacement and dispossession. Philosophy will take away your land; will put you on the run; will leave you homeless. Every twenty-year-old who picks up Fichte undergoes their own personal Nakba. The easiest way to understand what Rosenstock and Rosenzweig were up to, then, is simply to notice that they wanted to re-do philosophy without Hegel’s cruel threat. It doesn’t matter where you are right now, as you are reading these words. You are reading them in some particular location, and there’s a good chance that you are there by choice, because you want to be. The New Thinking is content with your remaining a terrestrial being, not that you could be otherwise. You can think carefully and still stay where you are. You don’t need to levitate, and you don’t need to leave.

 #2: A thinking that has stopped trying to abstract from time and space will have no choice but to reconstruct the primal varieties of religious experience (or else shut up about religion altogether). The idea here is that religion should be kept away from philosophy, set free from doctrine and system and argued-out theology. Once we have agreed that we are terrestrial creatures—and that we must not delude ourselves into thinking otherwise—then the question becomes whether we can discover the stuff of religion within the texture of ordinary, earth-bound experience. If we attended to experience in a more or less phenomenological fashion, could we find the raw materials of religion, non-transcendentally and before its capture by philosophy? One of the more curious consequences of that question is that it asks us to face, historically, in two directions at once. In one sense, it resembles nothing so much as the Protestant Reformation, which wanted to go back behind the whole history of the Christian church, and especially behind the tradition of Christian (Catholic) philosophy, in order to revive—to let loose upon the world again—the original spirit of Christianity (or pre-rabbinical Judaism), to turn an ossified Church back into the Jesus movement (or an archaic Israel). It can seem as though Rosenstock and Rosenzweig are proposing a radicalized version of that project, whose gambit is to get us back behind the whole history of philosophy. That’s the bit they got from Nietzsche and will share with Heidegger. At the same time, though, their point is that what we call religion is a permanent feature of human experience, to be accessed at any time. We might need to scrape away layers of philosophical accretion in order to do that, but we don’t need, each of us, to make a preposterous transhistorical leap to early antiquity.

       #3: One of the best ways to retrieve the sources of religious experience—away from the latter’s codification in theology—is to pay close attention to ordinary language. The way we speak, the way we use language, has a way of pointing to those things that we ordinarily call “religion.” Examples will help: So maybe you would grant that a few people feel a religious calling, but you know equally that most people don’t. Saul, you have read, was called on the Road to Damascus, but most of us don’t expect to be transformed by a blinding light while traveling to Dallas for work. You know that priests sometimes say they felt a calling, but it seems pretty clear that cashiers and construction workers don’t. To this Rosenstock would respond that we have all, in fact, had the experience of being called — that we are called all the time and over and over again: “Hey, Remy!” “Oh, Clara, am I glad to see you!” “Yo, Julian! What’s good?” Others address us, and our orientation in the world briefly shifts. Someone speaks my name, and I am pried open. What’s more, the vocative is primary; all the other things we do with language happen after a relationship has been established via a calling. We are inclined to think otherwise only because philosophers and grammar books tend to take the indicative as the paradigmatic instance of language, but it’s not. Second case in point: We create in language—we build our cultures and out customs and our institutions and our lifeworlds; we make things happen with utterance—and every such speech act follows the example of “Let there be light.” Religion, in general, has thus tended to be more clear-eyed about the powers of language, less deceived than philosophy by the tyranny of the declarative sentence, the syllogism, the doctrine of predication. Socrates, God help us, is a man.

     The problem, I think, is the following: We know that Adorno was friendly with intellectuals who were to varying degrees religious. It is, after all, hard to imagine a close reader of Walter Benjamin rejecting these three positions out of hand. Benjamin, indeed, published in the house journal of the New Thinkers, Die Kreatur; he published alongside the very thinkers that Adorno is going after here. And for a number of years, Adorno served as informal assistant to the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, who must rank high on any list of T.W.A.’s consistently remarkable mentors. (Adorno on Tillich: Without him, “it is very questionable whether I would be able to speak to you today; it is even questionable whether I would have survived.”) Adorno was certainly capable of taking the fight to the religious Right. He wrote an entire book, in English, about a former boxer turned radio evangelist—an anti-Semite and red-baiter who first took to the airwaves to combat the malign influence upon America of Upton Sinclair. But Rosenstock and Rosenzweig are no Martin Luther Thomas. The easiest way to figure out what they expected from religion will be to let their modern students summarize their program.

             Here’s Wayne Cristaudo on Rosenstock: He held that “today so many, including so-called Christians, failed to fathom the claims about Jesus’ divinity, which had to do with the overpowering of death, not in any mystical or Pythagorean manner of the continuity of the individual soul in a netherworld, but in the triumph over death and deadly forces through forming a body across time, the Church. For Rosenstock-Huessy, Jesus was proof that Caesar and Pharaoh and ‘great men’ were not gods and Jesus’ divinization meant that after him no one else would be God, that our redemption was universal and mutual. Jesus’ taking on the role of the crucified was to show us that we crucify God when we do evil to each other, and that we fail to achieve the maximum of our powers (our own divinity) in our failure to obey the law of love, and that to obey the commandment of love means being continually prepared to leave abodes ruled by death and to die into new forms of love and fellowship.”

         Here’s Benjamin Pollock on Rosenzweig: “According to Rosenzweig, redemption designates that future point of unity towards which all beings strive through acts of interpersonal love and recognition, through the formation of religious and political communities, and … through translation; it is a future point that orients our everyday temporal existence but that we can experience proleptically through liturgical practice; a future point toward which history unfolds, without history thereby achieving it.”

             Here’s Cristaudo again: Rosenstock “never doubted that his desire to create new forms of community, to change the education system by bringing students and workers together, and to restructure the workplace, were as much part of one calling and project as his studies on Egypt, Greece, Christianity, the tribes, the nations, the law, and every other topic he addressed in his writings. Like Rosenzweig, he saw scholarship as a contribution to life. He held that ideas are nothing without incarnation and that everything he did was all part of one life lived in devotion, service, and prayer.”

   The word you might wish to circle is “redemption”—as in: “Redemption designates that future point of unity…”—since any long-time reader of Adorno will know that it’s a word that he uses a lot: (From the final pages of Minima Moralia: “The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption.”) At some point, Adorno and Horkheimer decided in tandem that Stalinism had made it impossible to keep using the old Marxist vocabulary. This is a book about jargon, right?—and Marx’s was the jargon that they were drawn to and sometimes spoke, until they dropped it, famously scrubbing the first edition of the Dialectic of Enlightenment to make it sound less like Chicago’s Voice of Labor: “exploitation” became “enslavement” (or “injustice” or “subjugation”); “capitalism” became “the economic system”; “class society” became “society”; and so on. The question is, then: What did Adorno write instead of the words “socialism” and “communism”? And my point here is that he mostly made do with variants of “redemption” and “reconciliation,” to the point where the literature on Adorno is crowded with these terms: “the redeemed future,” “the redeemed world,” “reconciled humanity,” “a reconciled society.” Adorno himself refers in Minima Moralia to those “tidings of redemption whose purest notes are heard in the Sermon on the Mount.” I could also put the matter this way: In the early 1940s, Eugen Rosenstock, by then in his New England exile, took over a recently vacated workers’ camp in Vermont. His plan was to extend the New Deal’s jobs program to college students, on the theory that the “overprivileged”—his term—needed to learn to work for the community every bit as much as the destitute and the displaced. And that project—it was called Camp William James—is sometimes cited as the most direct precursor to the Peace Corps, which was apparently proposed to the Kennedy administration by one of its alumni.

       That’s the puzzle, in other words: Adorno does not begin The Jargon of Authenticity by going after some dingbat Ariosophist or the so-called German Christians—those were the people who thought the Romans had nailed Jesus to a swastika. He begins by going after the Christian intellectual who is said to have inspired the Peace Corps. And one wishes to know why.

A Commentary on Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity

Certificate of Authenticity

Introduction

Today, I would like to begin a project whose like I have never attempted before. Over the next several months, I will provide a detailed commentary on a short book that Theodor Adorno published in 1964, in the run-up to Negative Dialectics. That book, The Jargon of Authenticity, has never attracted much interest, in German or in English. It’s not that readers make it through the book and then decide they don’t like it. They mostly don’t read it. Or they take it up and soon set it down again, thirty pages into the thing and still unsure what Adorno is up to. This is entirely understandable. The book is a roundhouse attack on a certain intellectual scene as it took shape in Germany in the 1950s and early ‘60s, the milieu of a right-leaning existentialism whose presiding gurus were Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. But Adorno barely even uses the word “existentialism,” which the Sartreans had come by that point to monopolize, and he is not especially interested in his opponents’ philosophical positions. He is interested, rather, in how existentialism had, by 1964, degenerated into set of commonplaces, and he expects the reader to be able to recognize this sub-philosophical boilerplate. But then we are emphatically not in a position to recognize that boilerplate. History (and a foreign language) have drawn a curtain over Adorno’s efforts.

Worse, the few intellectual historians who have bothered to comment on The Jargon of Authenticity have concluded that it is minor Adorno—or even unworthy of him. They miss the dialectical intricacy of his more famous engagements with Heidegger — the ones that take Heidegger seriously as a philosopher and offer to meet him on his own ground. By the standards of Negative Dialectics (or of the now published lectures on Ontology and Dialectics), The Jargon can seem merely polemical or perhaps “sociological,” for which read “Marxist.” But then this, of course, is precisely the interest of the volume. Adorno is tracking the fate of a philosophy when it gets picked up by people who aren’t exactly philosophers, and he has changed his grip accordingly. If you want to figure out the work that a philosophy does—in the world and not just at the seminar table—it won’t be enough to read the masters. You will have to take seriously the B-listers and garbled enthusiasts, the people who seize on a philosophy’s key terms and strip them of their native subtlety. This is worth our attention for at least two reasons: First, Adorno here expands his at least somewhat well-known critique of Heidegger to many other figures, including a few intellectuals (like Buber) with whom we might have expected him to have some sympathy. Heidegger, after all, makes things easy for the critical theorist, who can always just cry “Nazi!” and claim victory. But what do we say about the Existenzphilosophen who weren’t fascists, who opposed the Nazis or were almost killed by them? Second, one suspects that all successful philosophies suffer the fate that Adorno traces here; that they are all made to yield a jargon, a bundle of memes and buzzwords. One suspects, indeed, that the list of such philosophies would include critical theory itself, with or without the capital K. And we might well be grateful for Adorno’s help in thinking about this problem. Philosophy cannot realize itself unless it is taken up as a project, and by many readers at once. But if a philosophy is widely taught, the most likely effect, at least in the middle term, is that it will become the common property of the educated classes, an acquired idiom for a society’s more successful members to justify their very advantages. Existentialism, says Adorno, outs itself as the “snooty crowing of come-down gentlemen.” To which we must add: Speaking the lingo of critical theory is by now mostly just evidence that you went to a good school.

Some practicalities: Anyone wanting to read along could grab a copy of the 1973 Jargon of Authenticity, translated by Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will. We should be grateful to anyone who completed an Adorno translation fifty years ago, without the benefit of the extensive Frankfurt apparatus now available in English. But the translation is as error-prone as one would expect of such a pioneering effort, and I will often amend it without explanation.
Also: I have a companion in this project, Justin Piccininni of Williams College, who first suggested that The Jargon deserved a closer look. There is very little in the book that I would understand if it weren’t for conversations with him.

The Real Universal, No. 3 – Part 3

For a pdf of the entire book, click here.

Then there are the failures of conceptualization and the argumentative inconsistencies. Here’s one:

Derrida’s theory of writing is incompatible with an ethics of alterity. Anyone going back to re-read Lévi-Strauss should stay on the lookout for his most characteristic move. Examples of this argumentative pattern abound, but one especially telling instance arrives early in Tristes Tropiques, when Lévi-Strauss launches his celebrated attack on travelers and travel writing. The ethnographer begins his travelogue by arguing that we require an anthropology of Western exoticism itself. Or perhaps we don’t require new knowledge; maybe it would be enough to adapt what we already know back to Germany and Britain and the US. This is to suggest that anthropology in its current form can already help us understand why some white people—and especially young white men—are drawn to the jungle and the desert. The backwoods adventure, the study-abroad program, the New Zealander’s OE—these are all tribal initiation rites, in which the European male passes into adulthood via some pointless act of disorientation, self-abuse, and pseudo-heroism. The temporary journey away from one’s society is how some people achieve status in that society, by returning home from their gap-year walkabout bearing diaries full of fabricated wisdom: “Lofty and lucrative are the ‘revelations’ which these young men draw from those enemies of Society—savages, snowbound peaks, bottomless caves, and impenetrable forests—which Society conspires to ennoble at the very moment at which it has robbed them of their power to harm.”[i] One is struck by how much Lévi-Strauss’s observations anticipate postcolonial theory in its vintage, Saidian form. Travel writing is an industry for producing transformative encounters with the non-West, routinized encounters with the Third World, manufactured sublimity that, despite promising fresh experience, nonetheless only ever discovers the same few human types and hyperborean pigeonholes. That argument about well-trodden paths is itself by now a well-trodden path, but the distinctive Lévi-Straussian touch is the idea that commercial and urban societies have never really given up on rites of passage, that expeditions in search of ceremony are themselves ceremonial; that the adventure tourist and bush-league neo-conquistador is, indeed, close to the indigenous people that he seeks out, just not in the way he thinks he’s close; that Westerners are most like tribal peoples when acting out their Orientalism. A properly structuralist account of writing, then, would have to reason in this manner, arguing perhaps that indigenous people are quicker than others to comprehend the politics of literacy, because even before they have ever seen a book, they understand the capacity of marks to confer power, whereas scholarly people who live in and around written language are more likely to be duped by its content—all that information! Indigenous people are obviously well positioned to recognize the survival of non-civilizational social forms within putatively civilizational ones, and what they might therefore say about literacy is that when young Westerners document their travels in Bolivia or the Thai hill country, they are trying to absorb indigenous life by representing it—that’s an argument that Lévi-Strauss himself really does make. Western travel writing is a species of “black magic,” and this will be easier to spot if you already know a lot about magic, if you’re an anthropologist, I mean, or if you’re Azande.

This is all to say that Lévi-Strauss, no less than Derrida, posits a continuity between the practices of non-literate and literate peoples. “These customs are very much closer to our own that they appear.”[ii] In the aggregate, structuralism’s continual rediscovery of indigenous ways among Europeans amounts to a Big Argument, which is that we never really break away from pensée sauvage, that wild thinking is a permanent part of cognition. If I say again that all peoples are semiotic peoples, then I am saying that the content of any particular system of classifications is less important than the simple fact of system itself, that it is the ability to generate conceptual distinctions—to code the world in language—that makes society possible at all. Semiosis is the ability to organize human groups around basically fictional or at least contingent distinctions. But then to the extent that all societies do this, they are all sauvage—all premised on myth and taxonomy and the classifications that analogy makes possible.

Here, then, are some key points that Derrida and Lévi-Strauss agree upon: First, that indigenous people make marks, and that some of those marks resemble script.[iii] Second, that even the people we call native live at a permanent and unbridgeable remove from nature. On the terrain of this concurrence, one question remains at issue: whether we are going to assimilate so-called civilized societies to their stateless counterparts, by arguing that even Westerners &c. have indigenous minds, or whether we are going to assimilate indigenous people to the West by arguing that even uncolonized Indians have writing. The choice between Lévi-Strauss and Derrida is thus a choice between a universalism-of-the-other and a universalism of the self. You might have taken Derrida to be arguing that “Western thought” has always been locked into a certain structure; that it is “poisoned by metaphysics”; that it might nonetheless be possible to think outside of the West if we could patiently wean ourselves off those metaphysics; that until we do so, we will tend recklessly to project Western categories upon everything we see and fatefully upon the non-West.[iv] It is precisely if you are convinced that Derrida is right about this last that you would have to reject the Derridean category of “writing,” which is more egregiously Occidentalist than “presence” or “spirit” or any other philosopheme that deconstruction raises its crowbar against. There are in the end good reasons for thinking that writing engenders non-identity, and yet the indiscriminate argument-to-écriture is the most identitarian device in all of deconstruction. Alterity is nullified when the well-read ego can envision its others only with books in their hands.

[i] Ibid., p. 42

[ii] Savage Mind, p. 209.

[iii] I should note: There’s simply no way that Lévi-Strass thinks that native Americans were altogether without writing. At one point in Tristes Tropiques, p. 246, he mentions three pre-Colombian societies, the Hopewell, the Chavin, the Olmec, and then makes the following remark: “In all three cases, we are faced with an art that is cursive, free, supple, and marked by an intellectual delight in double meanings (in Hopewell, as in Chavin, certain motifs bear one meaning when read normally, and quite another when read upside-down).”

[iv] Derrida qtd in Peeters biography, p. 180.

The Real Universal, No. 3 – Part 1

Deconstruction aligns itself with the history of the European empires, with a universal and impossible colonization. That’s a claim likely to be met with more than customary suspicion, so I’d like to present the clearest evidence for this without delay. What I mean to show is that deconstruction is an extrapolation from colonial history. Anyone inclined to doubt this should read out loud the following sentences, all of them from Monolingualism of the Other.

  • Most of what we say about “situations of ‘colonial’ alienation or historical servitude … also carries well beyond these determinate conditions.”
  • “It would be the exemplarity [of colonialism] … that allows one to read in a more dazzling, intense, or even traumatic manner the truth of a universal necessity.”
  • ”I would not like to make too easy use of the world ‘colonialism.’ All culture is originally colonial.”[i]

These three sentences—non-continuous; a motif not an instance—should suffice to establish a first point: Deconstruction would have us believe that colonialism is a ubiquitous and permanent condition or even that we have to face up to an metaphysical colonialism from which no liberation is possible: “the truth of a universal necessity.” Monolingualism was first published in 1996, and goes back to a lecture that Derrida gave in Louisiana in 1992, so it might be tempting to think of this colonial register as a novelty, an unusual feature of his late thinking, maybe even as an anomaly. One is powerfully reminded, however, of an interview that Derrida gave to a feminist interlocutor in  1981. He was arguing, on party-line anti-humanist grounds, that women were wrong to seek liberation and agency, because such pseudo-goods would merely render them metaphysical. Emancipation, that is, would simply ensconce women in the bad illusions of Western personhood, from which they would still have to seek non-identity and alterity. This is the nuance of Derrida’s argument: Liberation may not be possible, but then neither is it desirable.[ii] And so in Monolingualism, Derrida just comes out and says that “emancipation” and national “revolution” are a “trick,” the suggestion being that colonization is, well, whatever isn’t a trick: a candor, an illumination—the ethical condition, in other words, having to speak a language that is not really your own, an alien language, in a manner that renders you open to the other.[iii] It is possible, of course, to say that “liberation is a trick” and mean that the various freedom movements have mostly failed—that many achieved freedoms have been insufficiently liberating, that what passed for independence in Jamaica in 1962 or Zimbabwe in 1980 was not, in fact, the unhobbling that it promised to be. That Derrida is arguing nothing of the sort should be clear if we linger for a bit over the word “alien.” We all live in conditions of “colonial alienation”—that, too, sounds like a complaint, like an outmoded snippet of existentialist melancholy, but only until you recall that “alienation,” in Derrida, is a condition to be embraced (because a name for what binds me to the not-I). Language is colonial because my relation even to my native tongue is “asymmetrical”—that’s Derrida’s word; in language, we are “always for the other, from the other, kept by the other.”[iv] And this position of being kept is, of course, what deconstruction has to offer by way of virtue; it is the stance from which one pursues justice and perhaps already a form of justice itself. Derrida: “I always surrender to language.”[v] People who are actually colonized—let’s call them “colonized in the narrow sense”—are thus closer to a certain wisdom, provided they know how to submit to that status, how not to struggle, how to follow Derrida by surrendering. Derrida is admirably upfront about the point: The “language of the other” will sometimes be “the language of the master or colonist.”[vi] This might be “unsettling,” but deconstruction can’t help with that. Anti-imperialism is immoral to the extent that it invites a subject people to seal themselves off from a disruptive and alien force to which one would more properly submit.[vii]

This is the instant when one is tempted to start blabbing the established facts of Derrida’s personal history: that he was pied noir; that he threw his lot in with the French when Algerian independence came; that he served in the French military, in Algeria, during the Algerian War; that he wrote a nineteen-page letter to Pierre Nora defending the accomplishments of French settler society.[viii] (Derrida was thirty-one when he wrote that letter, in case you’re wondering whether the letter in question counts as juvenilia.) By themselves, though, such biographical data won’t tell us much; it’s not clear what they are supposed to disclose about his published writing. We don’t have to supply Derrida’s missing biography for him, however—we don’t have to excavate the life behind the writing—since there is a lot we can say about how Derrida stages his life in that writing. Deconstruction is at its most revealing when it comes closest to autobiography. Sometimes, not often, the philosopher speaks about his own childhood and in doing so improvises for deconstruction the kind of sociological account that Marxists and others would otherwise feel compelled to cart in from the outside: This is where deconstruction came from; these are the historical and political circumstances that gave rise to my thinking.

In Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida wants to account for himself and his philosophy in openly national-ethnic terms. It might be easiest at this point just to reach for a question: What nationality is Derrida? French, one replies without needing to think about it, having spent many decades now talking about “French philosophers” and “French intellectuals” and “French theory.” But then how would Derrida himself answer that question? That’s harder to answer; not “French,” at any rate, at least not always and not without provisos. In Monolingualism, he assigns himself three different ethnicities, which then get superimposed on one another in complicated ways. This will take some explaining:

First, he calls himself “Franco-Maghrebi.”[ix] This jumps out because it’s a term that usually refers to North Africans living in France and so suggests that Derrida, in an unexpected moment of solidarity with the banlieues, is actively identifying with immigrants and their kin. It’s the sort of formulation that would make a beur of any French-born deconstructionist.[x] As such, it calls to mind those rare passages in the early Derrida where he not only inveighs against “Western metaphysics,” but also points to non-Western alternatives. There is something big right at the beginning of Grammatology that doesn’t usually feature in presentations of Derrida’s core arguments. As of 1968, one of the categories that most interested Derrida—that, indeed, consistently roused his ire—was “phonocentric writing,” writing that wanted to be close to speech, which mostly meant “alphabetic writing” or any script that mimicked phonemes.[xi] This was the particular (and non-Heideggerian) way in which the younger Derrida thought the Greeks had ruined everything: Western writing was infected with self-loathing by its very alphabet. Mere spelling submits writing to the authority of speech. His attention thus turned, though only fitfully, to non-alphabetic writing systems, to the point where he was briefly claiming to prefer Chinese characters or the mixed writing systems of the ancient world.[xii] When Derrida calls himself “Franco-Maghrebi,” then, we have to hear him as fessing up that he is not comfortably or wholly French, nor even comfortably European. Deconstruction maintains a still operative allegiance to something outside the West.

If it is nonetheless unclear whether or not to call this solidarity, then this is because Derrida, in Louisiana in 1992, called himself “the only Franco-Maghrebian here” and, indeed, teasingly pulled rank on the people who otherwise fit that description: North African Arabs with strong ties to France and French culture. To one such person he said: My friend, I am more Franco-Maghrebian than you.[xiii] His meaning becomes clear over the next few pages: Derrida is more Franco-Maghrebian because he is neither one nor the other, because his friend is really Moroccan, whereas he is not really Algerian. At that moment, something unusual about Derrida’s formulation slides into view, which is that he wants the two-term ethnicities that have become common in immigrant societies to be able to indicate neither-nor instead of both-and, which is how they are usually glossed. In fact, he seems determined to reserve the hyphenate construction for the negative case, requiring us silently to revise any number of common usages. To anyone speaking Derridean, “Mexican-American” would henceforth mean “not Mexican, but not American either.” I am Mexican-American … I am an un-Mexican-un-American. The hyphen furnishes not the fullness of a dual identity, of belonging more than one place, but the liberating severity of non-identity, of belonging nowhere, of feeling beholden to no formation.

Not really Algerian…. Second, then, Derrida makes a point of letting his audience know that his family was Jewish. He talks about being stripped of his citizenship during World War II and of being expelled from his French-colonial school as a pre-teen. He even links that near-calamity to his philosophical preoccupation with non-identity.[xiv] This matter is especially complicated, however, since it would have been easy for Derrida at this point to claim a Jewish identity. Plenty of scholars do this on his behalf.[xv] He was neither French nor Algerian because he was Jewish; one writes that sentence and Judaism takes up its accustomed place (or non-place) as the non-national and stateless term, the stranger, the third, the identity-that-is-not-one. It is all the more conspicuous, then, that Derrida refuses to make this claim. Plainly, the term “Franco-Maghrebi” is already in the way, occupying the spots in all the formulations where one might have expected to find the word “Jewish”; it, and not its Abrahamic rival, is doing the work of non-identity. “To be a Franco-Maghrebian, one ‘like myself,’ is not … a surfeit or richness of identities, attributes, or names. In the first place, it would rather betray—a disorder of identity.”[xvi] From this perspective, a man calls himself “Franco-Maghrebi” in order not to call himself “Jewish,” presumably because this latter would too readily be perceived as a preformed category.

Not really Algerian, then, but not really Jewish, either. Third, and in order to explain this last, Derrida offers that it was his absorption into French settler society that kept him from being in any emphatic way Jewish: No-one he knew spoke Hebrew or Ladino; the Algerian Jews trimmed the penises of infant boys, but called this “baptism”; he grew up in “a disintegrated ‘community’ … cut off … from Jewish memory.”[xvii] Derrida way of putting this is to remark that he was socially and culturally a pied noir. This, at least, is an identification he reaches for without fuss: “I have never ceased learning, especially when teaching, to speak softly, a difficult task for a ‘pied noir’….”[xviii] Judaism moves in to block his identification with Algerians, and French settler society moves in to block his identification with Jews, but nothing arises in turn to block that last identification. The role of pied noir is the limbic of non-identity within which the other two are suspended, since it was under the umbrella of French colonial institutions that Algerian Jews and assimilated Arabs and the mutant French all met. The term “Franco-Maghrebi” thus ends up suggesting not North African Arab in France but displaced pied noir: the homeless Acadian or expropriated Rhodesian. A term that you might have thought was functioning like “Haitian-American” or “Asian-American” turns out to sport the old imperial hyphen after all, in the manner of “Anglo-Indian” or “Anglo-Irish,” while the qualities that a radical ethics has sometimes associated with Judaism get assigned to white colonials instead.

What we’ll want to see at this point is that Derrida goes out of his way to narrow the distance between the Algerian Jews and the pied noirs—or, indeed, between the pied noirs and favored Arabs. He refuses, in other words, to distinguish between varied and unequal social positions in colonial Algeria, or is interested in those situations where these really were least distinct. Crucial here is a longish passage where Derrida describes his early education: “For all the pupils of the French school in Algeria, whether they were of Algerian origin, ‘French Nationals,’ ‘French citizens of Algeria,’ or born in that environment of the Jewish people of Algeria who were at once or successively the one and the other… –for all these groups, French was a language supposed to be maternal, but one whose source, norms, rules, and law were situated elsewhere.”[xix] Two points need to be made about this passage:

First, it is Derrida’s habit to fuse the positions of the colonizer and the colonized, and to associate both indifferently with the alterity for which Judaism has long served as shorthand. “For all the pupils … For all these groups…” This bit of improvised sociology is a historically concrete version of that argument he has already made in the abstract, via the philosophy of language: that none of us are the masters of language, not even of our native tongues, that we are all colonized by language. A person reading Monolingualism of the Other for the first time might think that the historical situation of the young Derrida was simply too peculiar to furnish any generalizable insight. Perhaps all Derrida can do, when thinking back to his childhood in the colony, is testify, to draft what at times reads like anti-fascist testimonio. But writing as a philosopher, Derrida says he has no interest in mere witnessing of this kind. Quite the contrary: He wants to consider the ways in which the seemingly anomalous settler-Jew, the not-quite-pied-noir, discloses something “structural, universal, transcendental, or ontological.” Here’s the single most Kantian sentence in the entire oeuvre: “What holds for me, irreplaceably, also applies to all. … Everyone can say the same thing for themselves and of themselves.”[xx] So everyone is a not-quite-pied-noir, and deconstruction asks us now to conclude that noone is native. No-one is native—you can’t be a good Derridean and flinch from the realization that this line of reasoning simply shuts out indigenous people, by declaring them non-existent. You might, of course, think that Derrida is right about this—that the people who call themselves indigenous are dismally self-deluding—though hopefully you’ll concede even so that this is going to come as news to the Quechua and kanaka maoli. The Algerian Jews, at any rate, “could not properly identify themselves,” but then neither could the French-speaking Arabs or the white-settler kids; they were all equally “deprived of easily accessible models of identification.”[xxi] Non-identity thrives in the colony, which is to that extent to be preferred to non-colonial formations—either to decolonized institutions or to the putatively uncolonized metropolis.

And yet—second point—the metropolis retains its position of priority even here, just when it seems to have been sidelined. The colony, as the scene of generalized liminality, is where deconstruction is best actualized, and yet it can only achieve its truth in relation to Paris. Without colonialism, no liminality; and without the metropolis, no colony. A few sentences bear the claim out. French literature, Derrida says…

…was the only thing … that I enjoyed receiving. The discovery of French literature, the access to this so unique mode of writing that is called ‘French-literature’ was the experience of a world without any tangible continuity with the one in which we lived, with almost nothing in common with our natural or social landscape.[xxii]

We’ll need to pause to absorb the force of these key Derridean claims: The French language was situated elsewhere. French literature had nothing in common with ordinary experience. It’s not hard to see that Derrida has maneuvered the high bourgeois culture of the imperial center into what deconstruction takes to be the redemptive position, the position of Autrui. Racine and Voltaire are this short book’s one specified instance of “language … coming from the other,” language as “the coming of the other.”[xxiii] The idiom of alterity has always been wholly formal anyway and to that extent self-defeating, unable to distinguish among the world’s many different candidates for the title of other, consigning them all in one go to the heap labeled “anything-that-isn’t-me” and thereby abolishing the very distinctions that the concept was commissioned to safeguard. More to the point, the concept of “the other” is reversible; I possess a boundless obligation to the other, but then so does the other, who to that extent ceases to be altogether unlike me. Radical ethics thus establishes the identity of moi and Autrui in the very act of making our dissimilarity morally relevant. As concepts, non-identity and alterity are vacant, incapable of caring about which historical content you summon to fill them out. Politically, otherness becomes a non-starter as soon as you realize that one can easily plug the imperial metropolis into the alterity slot—and not only that one can, but that Derrida does. For our purposes, the important point to carry forward is that when Derrida speaks of language in these (messianic) terms—as “the coming of the other”—he is making a universal point about the colonial status of all language while also talking in historically specified ways about the projection outside of Europe of Parisian French: “an available monolanguage—for example, French.”[xxiv] In deconstruction, the other is a Gaul. “I finally know how not to have to distinguish any longer between promise and terror.” Or almost two decades before that, in Of Grammatology: “What is going to be called enslavement can equally legitimately be called liberation.”[xxv]

[i] Monolingualism, p. 23, p. 26, p. 39.

[ii] See “Choreographies” in Points, pp. 91-2: “To credit [the ordinary left-wing conception] of progress and entrust everything to it would be to surrender to a sinister mystification: everything would collapse, flow, founder in this same homogenized, sterilized river of the history of mankind…. This history carries with it the age-old dream of reappropriation, ‘liberation,’ autonomy, in short the cortège of metaphysics and the techné.”

[iii] The claim is, for Derrida, startlingly direct: The idea of French national culture is “the first trick.” “Liberation, emancipation, and revolution will necessarily be the second trick.” Monolingualism, p. 40.

[iv] Monolingualism, p. 40.

[v] ibid., p. 47.

[vi] Ibid., p. 62.

[vii] See also Monolingualism, p. 40: “we cannot and must no lose sight of this obscure common power, this colonial impulse which will have begun by insinuating itself into … ‘the relationship to the other’ or ‘openness to the other.’”

[viii] For more on that letter, see Edward Baring’s “Liberalism and the Algerian War: The Case of Jacques Derrida,” in Critical Inquiry 36 (Winter 2010), pp. 239-261. As of February 2021, the Wikipedia entry on Derrida states that “[d]uring the Algerian War of Independence of 1954–1962, Derrida asked to teach soldiers’ children in lieu of military service, teaching French and English from 1957 to 1959.” In fact, Derrida was drafted in 1957; underwent military training outside of Algiers; and in addition to teaching schoolchildren, produced translations for the French colonial administration while it conducted war against the Algerians. See Benoit Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, pp. 91-94.

 

[ix] Monolingualism, p. 12.

[x] “Maghrebi-French” is also common in the English-language scholarship, often as a more formal synonym for beur. For a general discussion, see Paul Silverstein’s Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, Nation (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2004).

[xi] In Of Grammatology, Derrida lays into “the phoneticization of writing” as early as p. 4.

[xii] He aligns écriture with China on pp. 25-26 and again on p. 76.

[xiii] “You see, dear Abdelkebir”—the Francophone Moroccan critic and writer Abdelkebir Khatibi, eight years Derrida’s junior—“between the two of us, I consider myself to be the most Franco-Maghrebian, and perhaps even the only Franco-Maghrebian here.” Monolingualism, p. 12.

[xiv] Monolingualism, p. 15-17.

[xv] See especially Sarah Hammerschlag’s Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar France Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

[xvi] ibid., p. 14.

[xvii] ibid., p. 55.

[xviii] ibid., p. 47.

[xix] ibid. p. 41.

[xx] ibid. p. 20.

[xxi] ibid., p. 52.

[xxii] ibid. p. 45.

[xxiii] ibid., p. 68.

[xxiv] ibid., p. 67.

[xxv] Monolingualism, p. 73; Of Grammatology, p. 131.

The Deconstructive Universal 1

  • 2. The Deconstructive Universal

 

  • 2.1

Whether or not you take to deconstruction has always had a lot to do with how you feel about universals in any of that word’s related senses: how you feel, for one, about metaphysical universals, abstract characteristics shared by individual objects or persons; but also how you feel about universals in some distinctively Hegelian sense, master categories and higher abstractions, as opposed to secondary categories and lesser abstractions, the order rather than the genus; and then, too, how you feel about ethical and political universalism, which asks that our institutions give priority to characteristics that all people (in all times and all places) might be thought to have in common. Your views on such matters are germane because Derrida’s single most famous argument is, in fact, universal in scope, pullulatingly so. If you’re going to be a Derridean, the first argument that you’re going to have to take on board is that there is no philosophically defensible distinction to be drawn between writing and speech, that all language is writing, and that all people (and peoples) must be thought of as possessing écriture. That’s the universalism: Writing is everywhere; everyone has it. Derrida, of course, offers reasons for thinking this. His proposition is that we typically (and incorrectly) think of writing as more mediated than speech. I might, for instance, worry that if spoken words represent things, and writing represents spoken words, then all written documents, even original ones, are going to have the smudgy, deteriorating quality of second-generation photocopies. Speech removes me from the object; and writing removes me further still. A Derridean counters this anxiety simply by honing in on the phrases I’ve just written—that “spoken words represent things” or that “speech removes me from the object”—in order to make the point that speech is already mediation, already the arbitrary coding of the world, already constructed out of a network of differences, gaps, or non-positivities. Words emerging from a mouth aren’t any more tethered to their objects than words emerging from an ink cartridge, which means that we will have to give up the fantasy that one type of language can keep us close to things while the other will cost us the world.

Similarly, you might think of writing as uniquely decontextualizing. Once recorded, words strung together in one place and time can be encountered in any other place or (subsequent) time. But then spoken language isn’t nearly as place-bound as we unthinkingly take it to be, since people often remember speech they’ve heard and go about their lives and move around and eventually re-speak it. Writing travels, true enough, but so does quoted speech; there is no world without recording devices. Or again, you might think that spoken language keeps listeners closer to a speaker’s intentions or private understandings, if only because they can interrupt him when he’s being unclear and ask him what he was trying to say. But there aren’t any grounds for thinking that spoken language is less in need of interpretation than the written kind, and if consulted, a living, yakking, disambiguating speaker-in-the-room can only produce more speech, equidistant from his intentions and requiring interpretation in turn.

What we’ll want to notice now is that nothing in this explanation strictly requires Derrida to claim that all language is writing. In fact, the argument would probably be more perspicuous without that provocation, without, I mean, your always having mentally to substitute for the word écriture the notion that all language displays some-but-not-all of the features conventionally associated with writing. Eventually some philosopher is likely to want to reform deconstruction along these lines, by insisting on perspicacity, stripping away as gratuitous the doctrine of universal writing and then seeing what’s left or what else has to change in the absence of an ecumenicized écriture. But anyone wanting to account for the peculiarity of really existing Derrideanism doesn’t have that option. Far from seeming expendable, the needless apotheosis of écriture—that drive to say it’s-all-writing and actually mean something a little different or to say it’s-all-writing even when your argument doesn’t strictly demand it—can easily seem like one of deconstruction’s most salient features.

Writing, this is all to say, is at the center of deconstruction’s bid for universalism, and yet its status as a universal is open to question. Even within the framework generated by Derrida himself, one has to wonder whether writing hasn’t been trickishly generalized. At the very least, we’ll want to describe Derrida’s procedure here, which is to extract a particularized term from the semantic stratum where we are used to encountering it and insert it instead into the place of the universal. At the formal level, to claim that all language is writing is akin to claiming that all vehicles are pushcarts or all buildings are pyramids. That this procedure introduces problems that Derrida cannot solve should be apparent as soon as you notice that writing, even having been promoted to the status of universal, sometimes persists in his arguments as particular all the same—as writing-writing, book-and-document writing; “writing in the narrow sense,” he calls it—at which moments écriture is called upon to function as a subset of itself. In deconstruction, we have an encompassing term, writing-which-means-the-sum-of-all-language, under which we can class a second term, which is … writing. All vehicles are pushcarts, and then some of them are also pushcarts.

The consequences of this will be hard to reckon if we don’t pause first to consider the several different ways that one could deal with writing or language as a universal term—or, indeed, the different ways one could deal with universals of any kind. It will be easier, that is, to say what Derrida is up to if we know which nearby philosophical options he is refusing.

It might help, for instance, to clear up a few misconceptions about the status of universals in Hegelian philosophy. Hegel, after all, is not quite the aloof, god’s-eye philosopher of Geist and Weltgeschichte that casually hostile readers take him to be. He is in various senses a universalist, to be sure, but this point is easy to overstate, since one of the concerns that most obviously fuels dialectical thinking is a discomfort over the ways in which non-dialectical philosophers get universals wrong, mostly by approaching them too abruptly. Among the core tenets of dialectical philosophy is the notion that universals cannot manifest themselves directly in the world. You can phrase this point in illuminatingly trivial terms—that no entity can be a bird, immediately and nakedly avian, without also being, say, a goose—as long as you realize that the payoff for this claim is above all ethical and political: that no-one can be human without specification, that no-one can instantiate mind or spirit except by pursuing some particular practice, that no-one is the abstract and Vitruvian bearer of rights and freedoms, &c.[i]

From out of dialectics, therefore, even in its classical form, it is not hard to extract some moderately anti-universalist positions, the second of which would state that individuals cannot be directly linked to their universals, but are better understood as passing through an always extendable set of intermediate categories. I am standing in western Ireland in December, looking at a creature with wings and feathers, fairly big for such an alate thing, with a white face atop a long black neck, and a variously grey, elongated body. For almost no purposes will it be enough to say that this x is an “animal” or a “bird.” It probably won’t even be enough to say that it is a “goose,” once one realizes just how high a floor in the taxonomical edifice that designation actually occupies. We might loosely think of geese as forming a species, but they don’t; there are species of goose, but no species “goose.” Nor are geese properly thought of as a genus, one story up, but rather as what zoologists call a tribe or even a subfamily. An informed person, in this context, is one who can introduce additional determinations, who will know that this x is not just a bird but a goose, and not just a goose but a barnacle goose; she might even know that the latter is itself a kind of black goose. One way to appreciate what Hegel is after here is to keep alive in yourself a sense of surprise that even the word “goose” is more abstract than you probably thought and is best approached patiently and stepwise. About écriture, then, a Hegelian would have to say that there can be no writing as such, without instantiation, and further, that no collection of words can be grasped as writing without passing through a set of intermediate terms, which in this case would let the mind loose in the encyclopedia of textual genres: birthday card, saint’s life, personal ad, ransom note, presidential signing statement, silver fork novel, and so on.

Perhaps the least appreciated point about dialectics is that it is at heart an anti-reductionism, a way of combating the mind’s tendency to seek explanations at one degree of abstraction at the expense of other explanations involving other degrees of abstraction. Let’s say, to consider a Marxist offshoot of this Hegelian program, that I am sitting down to write a book about the English Revolution. And let’s say further that I want to show how Atlantic merchants—English men trading with the Caribbean and the east coast of North America—played a central and hitherto underappreciated role in the upheavals that overtook England, Scotland, and Ireland in the 1640s. I won’t be able to make that case if I can’t tell you about those merchants in individuated detail, if I don’t know their biographies, if I can’t account for the choices they made month for month, some of which choices included rising against their king and disestablishing the national church. I have to be able to tell you about Maurice Thomson and Matthew Craddock and Samuel Vassall. At the same, though, I won’t be able to understand what these men were after if I don’t understand the groups into which they formed or the institutions that housed their projects—the corporations (set off against rival enterprises), the dissenting sects (each set off against the others and all of them set off against the Church of England), the often unformalized political factions. Similarly, I’m going to need a robust account of the new colonial-capitalist economy in the Atlantic in which all of these men operated, and to which all English, Scottish, and Irish people were increasingly connected, though at meaningfully different removes—and what I will need to show about this economy is that it introduced imperatives and constraints of its own that none of the actors in the 1640s, whether grasped as individuals or as groups, could simply defy. Just as important, I will need to make clear how each of these explanatory modes requires the other two, how each, if you like, houses the others within itself. Maurice Thomson and Matthew Craddock don’t come to me as mere data or as singletons, not as “individuals,” but as individuated within various groups—within the Providence Island Company, perhaps, or English Baptistry—as also within the Atlantic economy as a whole. But those same groups, meanwhile, are plainly made up of these individuals, while also taking on individuated profiles of their own when positioned across from one another within the Atlantic economy at large. This economy at large, meanwhile, is from some perspective nothing but the networked aggregate of those individuals arranged in those groups.

The task of Hegelian (and Hegelian-Marxist) thought is thus to find the individual and the particular in the universal; but also to find the individual and the universal in the particular; and then to find the particular and the universal in the individual. The idea is precisely to avoid the reduction to the universal or impetuous argument-to-system for which Hegelianism is often mistaken. At the same time, however, Hegelianism cautions against explanations that would lock in at the level of the intermediate category; if revolutions are the day’s topic, then such part-explanations would be the usual business of social history, the history not of persons but of groups and institutions, revealed here to be a reduction to the particular. And then, of course, the methodological individualism beloved of the it’s-more-complicated school of academic history-writing, which prides itself on its own version of anti-reductionism, stands indicted here as a reduction to the deinstitutionalized and un-mediated individual.[ii]

Adorno’s philosophy of non-identity, then, is best thought of not as breaking with Hegel but rather as radicalizing the anti-universalist strain that was indigenous to dialectics all along. This isn’t to say that Adorno’s revisions don’t present subtleties of their own. The trick to coming to terms with Adorno is to grasp that he is not a nominalist, a point that requires us to concede the insufficiently considered possibility of an anti-universalism that does not go back to Ockham. Negative dialectics asks us to oppose universals, in that term’s various senses, but not because these are fake or just names. The point is complicated: There is, in fact, a nominalist moment in Adorno’s thinking, which does sometimes describe concepts as herding singular objects into undifferentiated droves, asking us to fret about the penalties we pay for this most ordinary of all cognitive procedures, the heedless aggregation involved in all naming. It’s just that Adorno is also interested in the ways in which objects (and persons) really can be deprived of their singularity, in actuality and not just in thought, by mass production or by unified institutions or by standardization across increasingly vaster regions of the planet. The administered society, by flooding the world with generic objects, makes real the abstraction that had hitherto been merely verbal or conceptual. The standardized planet is the world remade in the image of language, a world in which language has at last become adequate to things, but only because the latter have become as indefinite as the perfunctory mono-terms with which we have always identified them. Universals in Adorno thus occur on two levels—both as verbal abstractions and as real ones—and it is his outlandish hunch that the universals of one level are best resisted on the other level, that one might be able to turn back the accelerating protocols of standardization—that one could prevent Body Shops from being built in Warsaw or the entry of Pizza Hut into Guangdong—if only one could disable abstraction at its cognitive source, in words and concepts. The vocation of negative dialectics is thus to terminate universals, sometimes via aesthetics, mostly via a re-jigged dialectics capable of bringing thought up against the unthought specificity of things.[iii]

Any guide to critical theory will tell you that Adorno’s is one of the great anti-universalisms in the history of philosophy. And a careful reading of Hegel should show that even orthodox dialectics produces an argued-through critique of das Allgemeine. Saying as much now should bring into view the first of the features that makes Derrida distinctive, which is that he is not an anti-universalist to nearly the same degree.

[i] See Hegel in the Philosophy of History, translated by J. Sibree (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), p. 59 : “A person is a specific existence; not man in general (a term to which no real existence corresponds).” Or in the early essay on the “Positivity of Christianity,” in the Early Theological Writings, translated by TM Knox (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1961), p. 169: “The general concept of human nature admits of infinite modifications, and there is no need of the makeshift of calling experience to witness that modifications are necessary and that human nature has never been present in its purity. A strict proof of this is possible; all that is necessary is to settle the question: ‘What is human nature in its purity?’ This expression, ‘human nature in its purity,’ should imply no more than accordance with the general concept. But the living nature of humanity is always other than the concept of the same, and hence for the concept is a bare modification, a pure accident, a superfluity, becomes a necessity, something living, perhaps the only thing which is natural and beautiful.” Hence, too, the emphasis placed by many Hegelians on “concrete universality (i.e., the specific embodiment that the universality of modern philosophy receives in particular sociohistorical settings.” See Paul Piccone’s Italian Marxism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 18.

[ii] Hegel’s anti-reductionism is clearest in his account of the syllogism in either of his two Logics, see, e.g., The Science of Logic, translated by George di Giovanni (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010),  p. 588 – 624. The book I’m describing is not hypothetical. See Robert Brenner’s Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (1993) (London: Verso, 2003).

[iii] This is the goal of the demontieren I was describing earlier. See Negative Dialectics, pp. 3 – 28.

Literature and Political Theology in the Eighteenth Century

The following is a review of Spencer Jackson’s We Are Kings: Political Theology and the Making of a Modern Individual (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2020). It will appear in a future issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies

If you want to be able to appreciate what Spencer Jackson is up to in We Are Kings, it will help first to recall what John Milton was up to in Book 3 of Paradise Lost. A lot happens in Milton’s third book: We meet God for the first time, and also the Son, who immediately volunteers for a suicide mission, even as Satan is rocketing through outer space, landing on the sun, and asking anyone he can find whether they know the way to Earth. Book 3 also contains Milton’s compressed account of the End of Days—God’s insurrectionary Five Year Plan, which is to unfold in three stages:

Stage #1: Already here, in humanity’s earliest days, God is losing interest in ruling as a monarch, choosing instead to hand his sovereignty off to Jesus, who is in some respects a lesser being, and who uniquely in his person will end up sharing that power with humanity. So that’s two sharings now: God is going to share power with the one who shares power. In the figure of the Son, God and humanity will in some not fully manifest sense rule together and so un-sovereignly: He “shalt reign both God and man” (3:316-17). What had been God’s power alone will eventually become a condominium of two. (Or is that three? Or is it many?) Power has already started its trajectory out- and downward.

Stage #2: When the millennium comes, this figure of shared power is going to undertake a world revolution, installing himself as “universal king” (3:319) and thereby ridding the planet of its particular kings: its despots, tyrants, and bosses.

Stage #3: The universal monarchy’s last act will be to abolish itself. The Un-lord will become immanent in the world, which will henceforth be self-governing: “God shall be all in all” (3:343).

Our historicist scruples will never be pedantic enough to suppress the observation, as it flits across the mind, that Milton has in the passage of #2 to #3 anticipated the Bolshevik theory of revolution at its most controversial point: centralization as the counterintuitive path to decentralization, the amassing of power by one determined to give it all away. But we don’t have to establish that point here. For now, it will be enough to grasp that Milton’s prophecy also furnishes Spencer Jackson with the template for his argument. You might hear me as saying that Jackson has something new to report about Paradise Lost, but that’s not it. He has surprisingly little to say about Milton, in fact, and nothing at all about the epic’s third book. The point is rather that Jackson has silently and perhaps unwittingly modeled his book on Milton’s apocalypse. What if the millennium—the redeemed world, the all-in-all—had almost come to pass in 1812? Such is Jackson’s question to his readers. And what if its gospel had been eighteenth-century British literature, and not just this or that title from its canon, but all of them taken together, one long Book of Revelation to foretell Babylon’s late Hanoverian downcasting? And what if we had overshot the kingdom of ends, had missed our chance to build the reign of saints on earth, because it hadn’t occurred to us to read Augustan satire and the early novel as sacred texts? And what if we now had another crack at it? What if we could have the millennium after all if we only corrected our readings of Alexander Pope and Samuel Richardson? We Are Kings is by all appearances an academic book, with eleven pages of endnotes and a University of Virginia logo on its back cover. But it is, in fact, something else altogether—a whirlwind scroll of radical Protestant prophecy masquerading, not all that convincingly, as literary history.

Jackson’s Miltonic scheme goes like this: John Dryden spent most of his career writing poetry that transformed the late Stuart kings into godlike figures, or better, into incarnations of the Christian God, humans invested with God’s power, redemptive figures who, committed to saving their people, handed down the law but were not bound by it. And yet not even Dryden remained a monarchist of this kind, and so with the discrediting of absolutism, he and other English writers were forced to wonder whether there were other candidates, besides kings, who could play the part of God-man. Who else could save England by standing outside the law while also enforcing it? Dryden accordingly ended his career by offering the job to an exemplary country gentleman. Pope, however, would soon offer it to the poet, which is to say to himself; Richardson to the Protestant woman with no special credentials; and Maria Edgeworth to colonized peasants and the enslaved. Jackson thinks he can show us that eighteenth-century writers did not, in fact, undertake the secularization of English letters. Whatever we usually think of as literary secularism—plots that rely more on causal explanation than on Providence, fewer collections of innovative devotional poetry, no more masterworks with archangels subbing in as guest narrators—this is not one of literary histories Big Stories. After the demise of divine-right monarchy, English literature, far from eliminating divinity from its pages, simply went looking for alternative people to sanctify. What we won’t want to miss is the stepwise descent traced by Jackson’s sequence, that decurrence of God’s power from king to Englishwoman to slave, ergo his sense that this more-than-literary history—the story, that is, of “the democratization of divine authority” (128)—had both a direction and a terminus. Sovereignty rolls downhill.

Such a book cannot be judged by the usual standards of peer review and the call for papers. As a piece of scholarship, it is the kind of mess that one sometimes calls “unholy.” Jackson describes Maria Edgeworth’s Absentee “domestic” (141) even though its hero is a) noble; b) a man; and c) almost never at home—the novel shows him, in fact, traveling extensively across two countries. He calls that same novel “anticolonial” (141) even though its happy ending shows Ireland’s Anglo-Protestant aristocracy resolving to intensify its government of the island it continues to occupy. He works up a visionary flight about a half page of Edgeworth’s prose by misreporting plot details and suppressing all the counterevidence that her novel supplies just two or three pages later. Indeed, he spends the balance of most chapters tsk-ing older scholars for “failing” to do x and “too quickly saying” y, and then, as the timer is about to buzz, staples a few fervent claims to isolated passages from whichever text he is currently scripturalizing. But listing the argumentative failings of We Are Kings would, in fact, be a cheerless task. One feels a little silly fact-checking John of Patmos.

Some of the conceptual issues that the book raises are nonetheless worth sorting through, if only to flag some of the difficulties that literary scholars are likely to face when they undertake to write political theology. The first problem to note is that Jackson’s sequence—from Dryden to Richardson to Edgeworth; from king and squire to Englishwoman to colonized peasant and slave—is wholly contrived. Jackson gives the impression that English writers dispersed God’s sovereignty through the polity in stages: that they had to beta-test it on country gentlemen first before offering it to women and that it had to work for the Pamelas before it could be extended to subalterns in the colonies. And yet, more extensive reading would surely have shown that each of these positions was available throughout the period and, indeed, before Dryden had written his first couplet. This is one reason that Jackson, despite his audible channeling of Christopher Hill—as when he takes for his theme “a distinct Anglo-American brand of socialism, one grounded in liberation theology” (179-180)—has almost nothing to say about Milton. For serious attention to Milton would explode Jackson’s timeline, bringing into view a Puritan revolutionary intellectual who presents in one swoop (and outside of Jackson’s chosen period) every single type on his list: the sanctified prophet-poet of Paradise Lost; the sanctified Englishwoman of Comus, who was, of course, the original of Richardson’s captive heroines; the sanctified, country-dwelling garden keepers of Milton’s Eden, Adam and Eve, who are also sanctified Native Americans, the naked denizens of “this New World,” “in native honor clad” (2:403, 4:287). The point is not just a literary one, of course. If the sanctified demos did not, after all, stand in line waiting for its number to be called, but rather rushed to convene itself in the 1630s and 1640s, when Scottish Covenanters showed English ones how to organize, then neither, too, did divine-right monarchism simply bow out once Dryden went Jacobite: De Maistre was still writing tracts on royal sovereignty in the generation of the Jacobins, Napoleon, and Maria Edgeworth. The term that begins Jackson’s sequence will still be available, in European letters, once his sequence has ended; and the term that ends his sequence was available before that sequence had even begun. What Jackson presents as the carefully paced rollout of divine authority across the English and Anglo-colonial polity—an apocalypse, yes, but one that proceeds in the orderly phases of a well-executed business plan—is better grasped as the messy contest of rival positions, coexisting in time and vying for supremacy on the same confessional field. It stands out, therefore, that Jackson’s Catholic and evangelical and Anglican writers never fight. Not at all: Each waits his turn to play the role appointed him in a chronology blocked out in advance by a Levelling and General Baptist God. We Are Kings offers up political theology with the politics left out.

The theology doesn’t fare much better. One of the more unusual features of Jackson’s argument is that it discusses divine-right monarchism, sovereignty theory, and antinomianism within the same frame. It might help if I restated each of these as propositions. Jackson considers the ideas, respectively:

  • that kings rule because God wants them to and, indeed, that individual kings have been placed on their thrones by Providence;
  • that there needs to exist, in any political system, a moment of authority that, because beyond legal review, will be capable of terminating debate on ambiguous issues; making necessary decisions in conditions of uncertainty; and acting swiftly during emergencies;
  • that Christian morality is not a matter of laws; that Christians in any situation need to figure out what is right without reference to rules, which are a lure and a constraint upon the spirit; that Christians are called upon to live a life beyond the law and perhaps to build societies that to whatever degree possible lift the yoke of law from their members.

What stands out about We Are Kings is that it tends to treat these three ideas as at heart the same position. Historians of modern political cultures are sometimes interested in how the promises of liberalism have been extended progressively to more and more members of the socius. Liberalism, after all, says that it thinks of everyone as a rights-bearing individual, but has a notably hard time finding room for everyone in that “everyone.” So how and when did women actually attain the status of rights-bearing individuals? How and when did Black and indigenous people attain that status? How about people without property? Jackson’s argument proceeds very much on this model, but in the place of the rights-bearing individual he has placed the improbable figure of the king—how did x-and-such a group attain the status of kings?—which means that he expressly thinks of democracy as a paradoxically universalized monarchism, and of antinomianism as nothing more than sovereignty theory in a different class register, a decisionism for plebes. The claim is not wholly unconvincing. It is easy enough to spot certain affinities among the three positions that anchor Jackson’s argument. Divine-right monarchy and sovereignty theory can swirl together into a generic royalism. Antinomianism and sovereignty theory each posit figures who dwell beyond the law. So maybe the monarch is just the antinomian-in-chief and the ordinary Protestant a Mr. King. And yet the last-named are not for all that the same position, not in the way that a liberalism that includes women can seem like the plain correction of the version that omits them. Even sovereignty and divine-right monarchism are disjunct theories, since it is possible to hold that God has appointed a king to rule over you without automatically concluding that the monarch can therefore do anything he wants. More to the point, the three positions take their cues from different theological and biblical prompts. Divine-right monarchism cites the example of the Israelite kings elevated by God in the Hebrew Bible, while also translating medieval understandings of priestly and papal power in order to conceive of the king as sacerdotal, which is to say as God’s proxy or super-priest. Sovereignty theory, meanwhile, borrows its concepts from thirteenth-century voluntarism—from the idea, that is, that God is not bound by his own rules; that there is no one right way for the cosmos to be, and no best way that God, because supremely rational, has merely deduced; that the cosmos is the particular way that it is merely because God has willed that it be so; and that He could have willed it otherwise. Sovereignty theory merely repeats these claims at the level of the state—that there is no one right or even best way for a state to be &c—and in that sense makes of the sovereign a political God. But the Calvinist path to antinomianism (though there are others) insists on the Christian’s inability to emulate God, beginning rather from the wholly Christocentric idea that Jesus’s judicial murder abolished the law, as also from Geneva’s usual souped-up theory of grace: that Christians do not save themselves by being well-behaved, that they are saved only by God and for reasons known only to Him. The political imaginary that this liberation Puritanism yields is thus quite different from the one that Jackson describes. The English antinomian is not a petty kinglet, but a hypothetically condemned person living (joyously, gratefully) under reprieve.

We should thus be on our guard when, in his discussion of Clarissa, we see Jackson describe antinomian Christians as “the lawless source of all law” (132), since that phrase is the clearest evidence that the scholar has pilfered the language of Bodin and Hobbes in order to put it in the mouths of Dissenters and Nonconformists. “The lawless source of all law” works rather well as a gloss on the sovereign as theorized by the seventeenth century’s state-of-the-art political philosophy, but makes an utter hash of antinomianism, which arrives not to establish the law, but simply to eliminate it. A similar problem arises when Jackson describes as antinomian the Lutheran “idea that all believers could through faith alone (sola fide) assume the shape and sovereignty of God” (131). Luther does, of course, sometimes write as an antinomian: just not here—not when he sola-fideizes. The doctrine of antinomianism says that you can and need do nothing in order to be redeemed by God, whereupon solafiderianism steps forward to scale back mercy’s astounding proffer by insisting that there is this one thing that you have to do after all, which is believe. Sola fide thus marks the survival of the rule-making contractualism that Protestantism had briefly seemed willing to do without. The coexistence of anti-legalist and better-believe-it arguments in Luther’s writing has never demonstrated their equivalence, or even their compatibility, but has merely installed a rift in Protestant theology that has played itself out in the reformed churches’ centuries-long tendency towards schism. What’s more, Jackson’s notion that each Protestant claims his portion of God’s authority misses the actual scandal and preposterous dare of radical Christianity, which is not that we will all be empowered, but rather that our weakness will bind their very strength. Jackson is so busy misassigning to the sects the paradox of sovereignty that he never gets around to discussing antinomianism’s own and better paradox.

Jackson also argues that eighteenth-century evangelicals should be called antinomian for the simple reason that they introduced innovations into Anglican worship, going so far as to set up parallel institutions within the English church, and sometimes in defiance of their bishops. He argues further that Clarissa is British fiction’s paradigmatic evangelical, the one who reveals “the modern British subject’s antinomian heart” (107). By this point in We Are Kings, the problems are piling up, because when a Christian substitutes her private judgment for the judgment of the constituted authorities, that act is not all by itself a form of antinomianism. An orthodox believer might, after all, reject civil law in favor of canon law (or halakha or sharia)—she might knowingly and on principle violate the statutory law of governments—but she has not thereby become antinomian, since she is manifestly substituting one law for another. Even the Kantians—and it is Jackson’s tendency to treat antinomians as Christo-Kantians—even the Kantians who reject both church law and civil law remain nomian to the extent that they proclaim their adherence to the moral law within. There may, indeed, have been antinomian tendencies among the mid-eighteenth-century’s field preachers and proto-Methodists; the problem is simply that Jackson hasn’t cited any.

The same doubts will now churn around Richardson. Is Clarissa speaking as an antinomian when she says “the LAW shall be all my resource: the LAW … The LAW only shall be my refuge!—” (Letter 282)? Is Richardson, who held from the Crown the commission to print British law, writing as an antinomian when he has Clarissa compile her case against her violator, which the two of them together, character and author, will place forensically before the judging reader? Do we expect an antinomian novel to conclude the way this one does, with an authoritative legal document, Clarissa’s will, which Richardson has written out and included in toto, to the tune of fourteen pages? And how are we to respond when Lovelace, the novel’s villainous libertine and Clarissa’s attacker, says “The law was not made for such a man as me” (Letter 174)? Is the rapist the authentic antinomian? Do we know for sure who in Richardson is law-loving and who beyond-the-law?

Jackson, at any rate, persistently misdescribes antinomianism, which asks Christians to make do without the law, as a contradictory conjoining of lawlessness and law. The lawless term somehow produces law, even as the nomos eventually yields its own negation. It is true that radical Protestant writers sometimes dealt in transpositions of this kind. The only reason that Milton could write in the borrowed accents of a Stuart loyalism and so pose as a repentant ex-revolutionary—“Henceforth I learn that to obey is best” (12:561)—is that he knew that militant fidelity to God-our-king would absolve Christians from submitting to any actual kings. Obedience would transmute in one to universal disobedience—the only surprise here is that monarchist readers ever fell for the trick. Jackson’s rendering of antinomianism is thus not simply a mistake—or if it is a mistake, it is an mistake of a rather compelling kind. The most interesting passages in We Are Kings are the ones where Jackson undertakes some Miltonic transpositions of his own—where he offers, indeed, to multiply this authentically antinomian procedure: In Jackson’s pages, the “political theology” of Carl Schmitt and the Catholic Right remakes itself as the “liberation theology” of Luther, Gutierrez, and Howard Thurman; Foucauldian discipline reinvents itself as a viable left-liberalism (while still remaining visible as discipline); the British Empire accidentally produces the democratic multitude; Maria Edgeworth read asquint becomes a second William Blake; and our own neoliberal workhouse of self-management and self-care, by universalizing the arts of government, offers to bring about “a society of the equally sovereign” (182), which would also be “socialism” (1, 174, 179), which would also be apocalypse. And the unspoken claim that seems to underwrite these variously redemptive capsizings is that we should retain the word God to name whatever it is in history capable of effecting such reversals, which to be sure display the chiasmatic structure of good gospel blessings: The x shall be y. The last shall be the opposite of last.

In Areopagitica, Milton spells out what can reasonably be called an antinomian theory of reading. Books, he says, don’t amount to much. Parliament should let censorship lapse—or let it stay lapsed—not because books are so precious, but because they are irrelevant, not even important enough to keep tabs on. A book, after all, can’t make a person do or think anything, since we will each scry in a text only what we were predisposed to see there before we started reading. A good man will find his virtue reflected back at him even from the pages of a base book. A profligate will make pornography of the veriest scripture. It is to that extent unfair to conclude that Jackson is wrong about eighteenth-century literature, when it would be more accurate to say that he is reading with the spirit, running across aristocracy in Dryden and somehow noticing only “democratization” (55); meeting a disenfranchised Catholic man in Alexander Pope and discerning in his features a liberated Protestant woman (69); consulting the pages in The Absentee in which Irish peasants fall to their knees before their ethnically English overlords and perceiving in those figures only anti-colonial rebels rehearsing revolution (165 – 177). Jubilee, finally, is all a good reader can see.

Immanuel Kant’s Manifesto for Dad Rock

•1.

If there is one point that should be reasonably clear to anyone who has read “The Culture Industry,” it is that Adorno and Horkheimer do not reject popular culture. That essay, it’s true, gives us reasons to question any number of things that we typically hold dear: free time (for being unfree time, nearly as programmed as the work from which it nominally releases us), laughter (for being the consolation prize you get for not having a life worth living), style (for funneling all social and historical content into a pre-arranged matrix or inflexible scheme of aesthetic quirks and twitches; for holding out the promise of artistic individualism—the personal signature in literature or music—and then transposing this into its opposite, the iterative, unresponsive art-machine). Most of us remember “The Culture Industry” as anti-pop’s cahier de doléance, its encyclopedia of anathema, the night in which all bêtes sont noires. But alongside the essay’s admittedly austere bill of grievances, it is easy enough to compile a second list, an inventory of things that Adorno and Horkheimer say they like and suggest we might admire: Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Greta Garbo, the circus, old cartoons, Felix the Cat (maybe), Gertie the Dinosaur (perhaps), Betty Boop (for sure, because they name her). Just to be clear: “The Culture Industry,” Exhibit A in any case against critical theory’s Left elitism, is also the essay in which Adorno attacks Mozart while praising “stunt films,” which we might more idiomatically translate as “Jackie Chan.” One can thus cite authentically Adornian precedence for an attitude that distrusts classical music and celebrates kung fu movies, and this will be hard to believe only if you prefer a critical theory shorn of its dialectics, stripped of the contradictory judgments that thought renders upon contradictory material—only, that is, if you prefer the Adorno of joke Twitter feeds and scowling author photos: bald, moon-faced, a Central European frown emoji inexplicably mad at his own piano. One suspects that readers have generally refused to take seriously the essay’s central category. For the culture industry is neither an epithet nor a gratuitously Marxist synonym for popular culture, but rather a different concept, distorted every time we paraphrase it in that other, more comfortable idiom, as a calumny upon pop culture or pop. There is plenty of evidence, in the essay itself, that Adorno and Horkheimer were drawing distinctions between forms of popular culture, and not just pitting the Glenn Miller Orchestra against Alban Berg.[1]

Such, then, is one way of taking the measure of Nicholas Brown’s Autonomy.[2] This is one of those books that you might have thought no-one could write anymore: four chapters that mean to restate the old, left-wing case for art, unapologetically named as such, as the artwork—and not as text or culture or cultural production—the idea being that art represents the survival of independent human activity under conditions hostile to such a thing. No longer homogenized under those master terms, art can again take as its rival entertainment, a word whose German equivalent derives from the verb unterhalten, which even English speakers can tell means “to hold under,” as though movies and TV shows existed to keep us down, as though R&B were a ducking or a swirlie. That the English word borrows the same roots from the French only confirms the point: entre + tenir, to keep amidst or hold in position. Entertain used to mean “to hire, as a servant.”

Autonomy is also the book in which a next-generation American Marxist out-Mandarins Adorno, who, after all, begins his essay by insisting that the cultural conservatives are wrong. There has been no decline of standards, no cultural anarchy let loose by the weakening of the churches and the vanishing of the old, agrarian societies, hence no permissive culture in which anything goes. Just the contrary: Magazines and radio and Hollywood form a system with its own rigidly enforced standards, a highly regulated domain in which almost nothing goes. Adorno’s way of saying this is that there is no “cultural chaos.”[3] But Nicholas Brown prefers the chaos thesis, endorsing the position that Adorno has preemptively rejected as both reactionary and implausible: “The culture industry,” Brown writes, couching in Frankfurtese his not-at-all Adornian point, is “the confusion in which everything worth saving is lost” (135).

Similarly, readers are usually surprised to find Adorno writing in defense of “mindlessness.” His hunch is that Kantian aesthetics might find its niche among the lowest art forms and not, as we more commonly expect, among the most elevated. Sometimes I encounter an object and find it beautiful, and in that moment of wonderment, my attitude towards the object is adjusted. I stop trying to discern what the thing is for or how to use it. Where a moment ago, I was still scanning its instruction manual, I am now glad for the thing just so. Perhaps I am even moved to disenroll the beautiful thing from the inventory of useful objects, or find myself doting on it even having ascertained that it’s not good for much. But then sometimes this purposiveness without a purpose is going to strike me not as beautiful, but as stupid, and Adorno’s point is that the stupid can do the work of the beautiful, that the beaux arts are If anything outmatched by the imbecile kind. The activities that we do for their own sake, for the idiot joy of our own capacities, are the ones that our pragmatic selves are likely to dismiss as dopey: someone you know can pay two recorders at once with her nose; a guy you once met could burp louder than a riding mower; you’ve heard about people who can vomit at will and recreationally. Kantian Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck enters the vernacular every time we mutter “That was pointless.” It is in this spirit that Adorno sticks up for “entertainment free of all restraint,” “pure entertainment,” “stubbornly purposeless expertise,” and “mindless artistry.” His claim, in fact, is that the culture industry is hostile to such “meaninglessness,” that Hollywood is “making meaninglessness disappear.”[4] It might be enough here to recall the difficulties that the major studios have in making comedies that are funny all the way through, preferring as they do to recruit their clowns from improv clubs and sketch shows, to promote them to the rank of movie star, and then to impound them in the regularities of the well-made plot, complete with third-act twists and character arcs, gracelessly telegraphed in the film’s final twenty-five minutes, to make up for all the time squandered on jokes, and tending to position the buffo’s comic persona as a pathology to be cured, scripting a return to normalcy whose hallmark is a neutralized mirthlessness. Hollywood’s comic plots model the supersession of comedy and not its vindication.

But Nicholas Brown is not on the side of meaninglessness. “In commercial culture,” he writes, “there are no works to critique and no meanings to be found”—and he does not mean this as praise (10). In Autonomy, there is no liberating nonsense, but only the English professor’s compulsion to discern meaning, his impatience with any art for which one could not readily devise an essay prompt. Whatever independence the book’s title is offering us, it is not the freedom to stop making sense. It feels bracing, in fact, to read a book so willing to discard the institutionalized anti-elitism of cultural studies and 200-level seminars offering to “introduce” 20-year-olds to horror movies. When Brown rolls his eyes over Avatar because of some dumb thing its director once said in an interview, or when he calls off a wholly promising reading of True Detective by announcing that it is “nothing more than an entertainment,” we need to see him as turning his back on the aging pseudo-Gramscians of the contemporary academy, all those populists without a movement, the media-studies scholars who imagine themselves as part of a Cultural Front that no-one else can see, a two-term alliance consisting entirely of Beyoncé fans and themselves; the shopping-mall Maoists of the 1990s who couldn’t tell the difference between aller au peuple and aller au cinema (71). Adorno, of course, was concerned that the desires and tastes of ordinary audiences could be manipulated or even in some sense produced. “The Culture Industry” prompts in its readers the still Kantian project to figure out which of the many pleasures they experience are authentically their own. Which are the pleasures that will survive your reflection upon them, and which are the ones that you might reject for having made you more object-like, for having come to you as mere stimulation or conditioning? The autonomy that Adorno is trying to imagine is therefore ours, in opposition to a mass media that muscles in to tell us what we want before we have had a chance to consider what else there is to want or how a person might want differently, to work out not just different objects of desire, but different modes of desiring and of seeking satisfaction. Brown, by contrast, complains repeatedly that artists more than ever have to make things that people like. The autonomy that he is after is thus not our autonomy from an insinuating system but the artist’s autonomy from us. It is no longer surprising for a tenured literature professor to disclose, in writing, that he’s been listening to early Bruno Mars records. The unusual bit comes when Brown says he doesn’t think they’re any good (24).

[PART TWO IS HERE.]

[1] See Adorno and Horkheimer’s “Culture Industry,” in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/1947), translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 94 – 136. On free time, p. 104; on laughter, p. 112; on style, pp. 100ff; Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, p. 109; Greta Garbo, p. 106; the circus, p. 114; Betty Boop, p. 106.

[2] Nicholas Brown, Autonomy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); subsequent citations will be given by page number in parentheses.

[3] Adorno and Horkheimer, p. 94.

[4] Ibid., p. 114.

The Old Adam, After All

A review of The Other Adam Smith by Mike Hill and Warren Montag (Stanford University Press 2014)

This review first appeared in Historical Materialism 26. 3 (2018)

 

A book promises The Other Adam Smith, and the title is already something of a puzzle. Scholars writing about much read philosophers have, after all, a few established ways of declaring their revisionism. If the line you are taking is programmatically modernist and decontextualizing and perhaps even contraindicated, you can signal this by saying you have made your philosopher “new”: the new Nietzsche, the new Hume, Montag’s own New Spinoza, published in 1997. If, conversely, you are resolved to scrape away decades worth of interpretive accretions and polemical anachronisms—if you have just about had it, I mean, with the neo-Kantians and not-really-quite Marxists—you can choose from a few different options: X in Context, What X Really Said, The Authentic X, as in The Authentic Adam Smith, published by James Buchan in 2006. By these standards, a book calling itself The Other X can seem hard to parse, lackadaisical and itemizing. The adjective announces a lateral move, a secret life, maybe another person altogether. A Harley Davidson dealer in Texas? A cryptographer at Penn State?  An ecologist with the Missouri Botanical Garden? You know—the other Adam Smith.

So who exactly do Hill and Montag mean to put before us? Have they written a New Perspectives on Adam Smith? An Adam Smith Reloaded? Or have they given us Adam Smith in the Eighteenth Century? Other to what?, in other words. Part of the problem is that it is no longer clear what counts as Smith’s received image. I announce the other Adam Smith, but no-one can be sure with what settled perceptions this double is being asked to share the room. Outside the academy, Smith is still widely regarded as the preeminent theorist of an austere and deregulated capitalism, the house philosopher of the IMF, Ayn Rand’s Scottish uncle. But this is precisely the view that the last forty years of Smith scholarship have been out to defeat. A person gains entry into contemporary Smith studies by offering to identify one more way in which he disagreed with Friedrich Hayek. You can begin by pointing out that Smith propounded a moral psychology of considerable scope and complexity, discerning in social actors a wide variety of motivations, ethically charged feelings, and modes of judgment. Rational utility-maximizers barely feature. You might go on to point out that when Smith defends deregulated markets, he typically does so on the grounds that they will help the poor, generating plenty and higher wages and the equitable allotment of scarce goods. The anti-capitalists might scoff that Smith has been wrong about this, but the modest point remains that his framework of justification for that error is more or less Rawlsian—that Smith is not the Malthusian or social Darwinist we have been led to expect. Next, a person goes on to read The Wealth of Nations and is surprised to discover how hostile it is to merchants and manufacturers; far from modeling the bourgeois takeover of the state, Smith’s most famous work issues an unmistakable call to roll back the power of the commercial classes. That there were identifiable Left Smithians by the time of the philosopher’s death in 1790 is now well established—proven critics of the eighteenth-century state who greeted Smith as a brother radical, an anatomist of corruption and aristocratic privilege and colonial misrule. Nor were these last some negligible eddy in the crosscurrents of Georgian politics. There were Smithians in the French revolutionary assembly for one, deregulators who considered free markets wholly compatible with famine relief and social insurance schemes, best understood in this context as innovative proposals for protecting artisans, farmers, and workers without falling back on late-feudal modes of market manipulation. One occasionally still runs into radical Smithians of this vintage. As recently as 2007, Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing was making the case that it was wrong to think of Smith as the theorist of “capitalism,” which a Scot who died before 1800 could not have had access to (either as concept or mature social formation). Nonsense, you think, except if you’re the kind of person who insists that Marx was not a Stalinist, nor even much of a Bolshevik, you might want to grant the point. Reading Smith alongside Marx should teach us, indeed, to tell the difference between “capitalism” and “commercial society,” on the understanding that the latter is not the utopian misdescription of the former, but a historical rival in its own right, no less than the socialism whose vacated place it might now assume. Adam Smith should help us discern the underconsidered possibility of a market society without colonization or rule-by-investment-bankers or the de-skilling and devaluation of labor. Such, at least, was Arrighi’s pitch. Among intellectual historians, regular reminders that Marx had a lot to say in defense of capitalism are now matched by explanations that Smith had a lot to say against it.

It is this Adam Smith that Hill and Montag’s book is out to sideline—the Left-libertarian Smith, the social-democratic Smith, the anti-capitalist Smith. It will be hard for readers to appreciate what the authors are up to, then, unless they are willing to correct what is most misleading in the volume’s prefatory material—that word “other,” for a start, since the book’s chief aim is in fact to vindicate the textbook image of Smith as the ideologue of market society. The Other Adam Smith summons the philosopher back from Beijing and relocates him instead in the accustomed precincts of Vienna and Chicago. This Smith is the pensioned intellectual willing to let the poor starve, a philosopher at one with von Mises, himself discussed at length in Hill and Montag’s Chapter 4 (312 – 41); an ontological individualist who thinks the most pressing purpose of government is to protect the market from the intemperate demands of the starving; the originator, therefore, of a now dominant politics of abandonment. Hill and Montag’s alterna-Smith is the old Adam, after all.

But then the words “Adam Smith” are hardly less misleading than the word “other” and will need correcting in their own right, since Hill and Montag are interested in Smith only intermittently and mostly as the member of a movement or a scene. The authors boast early on that they have consulted all of Smith, and not just the two big books on which his reputation rests, and indeed, one important part of their case is that nothing you can read of Smith will adjust your accustomed sense of him as the arch-bourgeois philosopher: not the lectures on rhetoric and jurisprudence, not the early essay on Newtonianism, certainly not The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Hill and Montag might return the reader to an orthodox understanding of Smith, but their trick is to reach that point by less familiar routes. There’s no reason to believe them, then, when they promise not to impose an artificial coherence on Smith’s corpus, offering contrariwise to identify those passages where his writing is most multiple and unsettled. They pay tribute, it’s true, to the philosopher’s “complexity and contradiction” (3), and yet their Smith is fully of a piece, as witness this typical sentence: “The virtues of self-command so important in The Theory of Moral Sentiments ground Smith’s condemnation of prodigality in The Wealth of Nations” (235). And that underlying boast (to have read the complete Smith) is in its own way rather timid, since Hill and Montag have read much else besides: Henry Home, David Hume, University of Edinburgh principal William Robertson, Samuel Johnson, Henry Fielding. The book contains extensive commentary on each, its implicit claim being that the continuity that runs across Smith’s un-varied writings extends to these several figures, as well. Smith, Hume, and the others all speak in one voice or are engaged in the same project, albeit a many-sided one—the project of “moderate Enlightenment,” premised on the love of harmony, order, and consensus, backed by repression, discipline, and “liberal indifference,” content to “pacify particularity” and build safeguards against “disruption” (75, 54, 63).

Adam Smith stands accused, in other words, of loving system too much, which is the charge automatically leveled by critical theory against any eighteenth-century philosopher. Such, indeed, might be the small innovation of Hill and Montag’s book—that rather than making Smith the apologist of liberal capitalism, they cast him instead as just another enlightener and thus trade in the perhaps overfamiliar Marxist positions on The Wealth of Nations for the stances of a barely less familiar Enlightenment critique. Sometimes the shift from one theoretical vantage to the other is rhetorical, an ornamental swapping of idioms, as when Hill and Montag propose that Smith’s economic writings, like those of his twentieth-century followers, are haunted by a certain human type, a new, quasi-legal category of person they name le malheureux, and whom they define as “the one, the many, who may, with impunity and without consequences, be exposed to starvation and allowed to die, slowly or quickly, in the name of the rationality and equilibrium of the market” (307). This Unfortunate Man is plainly a cousin to Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer and is to that extent the translation of some old Marxist claims into the language of biopolitics. One can credit the elegance of the repackaging and still note that the substance of the underlying argument hasn’t much changed. The point remains that laisser faire mostly means “let ‘em die” and that Smith was the sort of philosopher who dismissed persistent malnutrition as an “inconvenience” to the hungry (302).

And yet Hill and Montag do have a case to make, as their low-key reliance on the dialectic of Enlightenment manages to flush out some under-remarked aspects of Smith’s output. Most readers, for instance, wouldn’t think to consult Smith on the topic of aesthetics, even though he had a lot to say on the subject, or at least on the subject of sublimity, whose escalations and upsurges were central to eighteenth-century conceptions of the field. As surprising as Smith’s aestheticism is, though, even more surprising is its popping up in an essay called the “History of Astronomy.” A philosophy of art intrudes itself upon the domain of science—is that what anyone associates with Adam Smith? But it’s true: When you read his reflections on Newtonianism, you will find that Smith was not interested in physics qua physics. He was interested, rather, in how the mind responds to “surprise” and “wonder”—and, indeed, in the defense mechanisms the mind possesses to cope with these latter, which Smith urges the reader to treat as threats. Smith is emphatic that we confront astonishment as a menace. Granted, this argument won’t make much of sense until one realizes that Smith’s philosophical skepticism goes much deeper than casual readers ever suspect. In the astronomy essay, he says openly that “all philosophical systems” are “mere inventions of the imagination to connect together the otherwise disjointed and discordant phenomena of nature.” It is when philosophy fails us that we briefly encounter the authentically disorganized world. Sometimes we perceive a traumatic gap in the cosmos or are made to contemplate a glitch in our experiential timelines. “Surprise” and “wonder” are the anodyne names we give to these small shocks, and philosophical explanation, some more or less contrived argument to order, is how we cope. Wonder unmitigated, by contrast, can easily kill us or drive us mad. This last is perhaps the most remarkable feature of Smith’s essay—that it is making the case against sublimity. Prolonged exposure to novelty and the unexplained will destroy us, and it is the task of thought—in this case, of astronomy—to “invent connections” where none are evident. Philosophical system is the shock-absorbing fiction of balance and pattern.

It is this argument that Hill and Smith have seized upon as the key to decoding Smith in toto. Their book’s most ingenious stroke is simply to take Smith’s word on this front and so to read The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations as producing not systems, but fantasy systems—make-believe non-structures whose unreality has been conceded to the attentive reader in advance. Three arguments follow on from here, and together these make for a nifty refinement of Enlightenment critique in its Adornian and Foucauldian modes:

  • If Smith holds that intellectual systems are inventions, then the critique of system widely regarded as the central plank of Counter-Enlightenment thought has to some degree been anticipated by Enlightenment philosophy itself. Smith is no doubt promoting system, and yet he doesn’t in any ordinary sense of the word believe in it. This is bound to be a problem for the skeptics and anti-systematizers, who will never get much leverage over Smith by insisting that system is a permanent intellectual lure, the mind’s built-in tendency towards metaphysical overreach, its preference for order, even when deceptive, over the world’s inevitable mess and shifting difficulty, for the simple reason that the philosopher has already granted the point. More important, the status of system in Smith’s most famous writings will henceforth be in doubt. Do the ethical sensibilities of my fellows and me really merge in equilibrium and consensus, as described in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, or are these, too, nothing more than fabricated connections? And what of capitalism’s “system of perfect liberty”? That’s Smith’s own lustering gloss on the free market, but by the time he wrote that sentence, he had already committed to the idea that “system” was a (salutary) “invention of the imagination.” So when Smith speaks of the system of perfect liberty, don’t we have to bracket the word “system”? Does Smith himself take deregulated markets to be make-believe?
  • Hill and Montag are also eager to catalogue the many terms that Smith’s commitment to imaginary system compels him to repress. The list is rather extensive: tumult, “corporeal labor,” sedition, writing, “the noise of numbers,” “material infinity,” and the multitude (104, 147, 87). What we won’t want to miss is the binary, zero-and-one character of this operation. The authors argue that there are only two positions in Smith, System and Anti-System, at which point that entire incommensurate list (tumult &c.) gets shunted into the second slot.
  • There is a name from the philosophy of history that gets to stand in for these many anti-systemic others: Spinoza. Hill and Montag’s final complaint against Adam Smith is that he was neither a materialist nor a monist—or worse, that his addiction to fake system could only bury the period’s Spinozist wisdom. One good way to read The Other Adam Smith, then, is as forcing Spinozism into a showdown with some of its eighteenth-century rivals. For us, meanwhile, it presents an opportunity to reckon with Left Spinozism in its early twenty-first century guise, to measure it against its current rivals, and in the process to consider how illuminating it is to project back into the late Enlightenment a neo-vitalist philosopheme like “the multitude.”

Much of Hill and Montag’s accomplishment on this front is appealingly odd. You can figure out whether you should read The Other Adam Smith by asking yourself right now whether you’re willing to entertain a fondly Deleuzian apology for eighteenth-century Jacobitism, the movement, if that’s what it was, to restore the exiled House of Stuart to the throne by overthrowing some sitting George or another. According to Hill and Montag, Jacobitism involved “a complex intra-dependency among multiple political players, … ‘mixed multitudes,’ who [were] not subject to traditional ideological borders” (212). Where a more conventional political historian might labor to work out why some regions went Jacobite and others didn’t, to separate out the multiple constituencies in the loose Jacobite coalition, to identify who had the authority to mobilize others into rebellion even when these latter were not committed anti-Hanoverians, to reconstruct what the Jacobites said they wanted and how they might have remade Britain had they prevailed, Hill and Montag content themselves with the claim that the Stuart party were a rhizome, the Young Pretender a sprouting potato eye.

The Jacobites were a multitudinous and borderless mixture. Even readers able to appreciate the larky quality of that claim are likely to be put off by the Manichean grind of the authors’ broader case. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries, they tell us over and over again, were “divided into two opposing camps” (240). In this corner, Spinoza, novels, rioters, and the body’s barely processed stimuli. In that corner, Scotland’s urban gentry, philosophy, stadial history, and doctrines of Providence. The problem is this: Hill and Montag do not hide their distaste when summarizing Adam Smith’s account of concept formation, which holds that the mind has an innate talent for producing genera—a knack, that is, for making categories. No-one particularly needs an education on this front; the mind is the Great Sorter. Hill and Montag’s eye-rolling over this argument is one of the more obvious ways that they perpetuate an older line of Enlightenment critique. Adam Smith, they want us to know, was yet another of schematism’s dupes. But the book they have written is itself one big sorting mechanism. Their writing, it’s true, is aswarm with hard-to-follow detail, and yet all this shimmering data eventually gets subjected to an A-B coding. One balks a bit at being conscripted into this antithesis, and especially at being asked to watch as Spinoza puts a beatdown on Adam Smith. Can Spinozists consistently frame their Spinozism in these terms? Hill and Montag never ask us to think of Spinozism and the Scottish Enlightenment as eighteenth-century assemblages in their own right, complexly living ensembles capable of recombining unpredictably with other such ensembles, including, one presumes, with each other. If Hill and Montag are right, “Spinoza” and “Smith” are names for mere positions, between which the reader is expected to choose. Spinoza was right, Adam Smith rather a dummy. The Spinozism that Hill and Montag endorse as a matter of doctrine is thereby abandoned as a matter of method. Around its Spinozism, The Other Adam Smith generates a series of increasingly expansive abstractions, all of which name the multitude without having to tally its number—“popular contention,” “the mixed and the multiple,” “life”—just so many brisk flattenings of profusion. “Popular contention” is a formal category that asks us to disregard the politics of any particular movement or event, indiscriminately encompassing the Porteous Riots, the Gordon Riots, the Wilkes Riots, the ’45, “the vulgar, Jacobites, Puritans, republicans, savages and barbarians, alike” (155). “Life,” meanwhile, is Spinozism’s only agent, hence the secret subject of Hill and Montag’s every sentence: “That which resists … is perhaps nothing other than life itself” (342). Artisans and factory workers don’t (sometimes, under specifiable circumstances) resist. Peasants don’t resist (sometimes, under specifiable circumstances). Women don’t resist (sometimes, &c). The colonized don’t resist. Only life resists, and these others are at most its avatars and transient objectifications. “Network” is the word favored by those who don’t have patience enough to plot the points.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Buchan, James 2008, The Authentic Adam Smith, New York: Norton.

Montag, Warren and Stolze, Ted (eds.) 1997, The New Spinoza, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Rothschild, Emma 2002, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Stedman Jones, Gareth, An End to Poverty?: A Historical Debate, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

Smith, Adam 1980 [1795], “The History of Astronomy”, in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, edited by W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce, Oxford: Clarendon Press.