The Faustian Contract

[This should really be properly researched, instead of thrown together from wikipedia browsing and googling. Maybe when I have time. In any case, I think it's at least suggestive.]

In a letter of 1507, Johannes Trithemius warns his correspondent of “Georgius Sabellicus, Faustus junior, fons necromanticorum, astrologus, magus secundus etc”. In 1532 Johann Georg Faust attempts to enter the city of Nurnberg – the junior mayor demands that the city “deny free passage to the great nigromancer and sodomite Doctor Faustus”. In 1540 or 1541 Faust’s body is discovered in a “grievously mutilated” state – perhaps the result of an explosion during alchemical experiments. In 1587 the chapbook Historia von D. Johann Fausten is published in Frankfurt am Main

HISTORIA & TALE OF
DOCTOR JOHANNES FAUSTUS
The sorcerer, wherein is described specifically and veraciously:
His entire life and death,
How he did oblige himself for a certain time unto the Devil,
And what happened to him,
And how he at last got his well-deserved reward

This chapbook is widely read and translated. Its 1592 English translation forms the basis for Marlowe’s 1594 Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Multiple other versions of the Faust story are published over the following years and decades – Das Wagnerbuch, 1593; Das Widmann’sche Faustbuch, 1599; Dr. Fausts großer und gewaltiger Höllenzwang, 1609; Dr. Johannes Faust, Magia naturalis et innaturalis, 1612. The Teufelsbücher – devil book – is a new popular literary genre. At the same time, and apparently independently, the story of Pan Twardowski is emerging in Polish folklore. Like Faust, Twardowski sells his soul to the devil in exchange for wealth and knowledge – he writes an encyclopedia, dictated by the devil. Like Faust, his contract can only condem him – though he ends up not in hell, but on the moon, through the intervention of the Virgin Mary. (Twardowski is accompanied by a spider, who can, on occasion, descend to earth on a thread, to bring back news from below.)

Stories of a bargain with the devil have a far longer history. According to a 4th century legend, the servant of Senator Proterius of Caesarea made a pact with the devil, to marry his master’s daughter, which was broken by the prayers of St. Basil. In the 13th century, Jacobus de Voragine wrote of Theophilus of Adana – whose pact with the devil was only broken when a bishop burned the contract. In the 14th and 15th centuries, Mystery Plays about pacts with the devil were widespread.

But in the late 16th century, the myth of a pact with the devil takes on a new popular potency, and changes. As Ingrid H. Shafer writes:

The above mentioned medieval legends involving Faustian types reveal surprising continuity. Most of those depicted as having entered a pact with the devil are saved rather than damned.

…

Theoretically, invoking the Lord in the process of calling up Satan was considered a sin. On the other hand, it was common knowledge that demons could be called forth in the name of God. If the ritual was performed properly, they would have to do the conjurer’s bidding. After all, Light was more powerful than Darkness, and to bind the devil or his servants in Jesus’ name could even be interpreted as an act of faith. Hence, there seemed no reason not to make use of Satan’s special powers for a few months or even years, as long as one made sure not to die without having repented first. It was a gamble, but one with reasonably good odds.

Before the late 16th century, a contract with the devil can be broken.

After the late 16th century, the contract cannot be broken.

This change is channelling a widespread and dramatic shift in the social, legal, political and economic institutions in the European societies the Faust myth suddenly appeals to. Capitalism is beginning. Suddenly, the social form of the contract is beginning to assume a far greater pervasiveness and power. Suddenly, a contract becomes something far more fundamentally – apparently metaphysically – binding.

This is connected to a change in the nature of the devil’s contract, also. The nature of the devil is changing – the contract is not one negotiated between worldy actors (even if supernatural), but between a human actor and an actor far more thoroughly withdrawn from the human realm (like the God of Calvin), whose power apparently cannot be broken by any human action. A contract now spans and swallows lives.

Capitalism is beginning. And the contracts that inaugurate it are signed in blood.

What are the virtues of democracy?

Democracy has many virtues, it seems to me. But maybe the most important virtue, which hasn’t gotten nearly enough airtime in at least the discussions of democracy I’ve encountered recently, is the following:

Democracy, as an institutional form, makes it much much more difficult for the rulers of a political entity (exemplarily, a nation-state) to murder a substantial percentage of that political entity’s population.

This, it seems to me, is sort of the bottom line, w/r/t democracy.

Marx Reading Group: Chapter 25, Section I

So I’ve been a disgraceful slacker on this Marx reading group – apologies. You’d think that, after not posting for so long, I’d have something considered to say. But the notes below are pretty much notes. I suggest people also check out (if you haven’t already done so) Nate’s posts on chapters 23 & 24, and NP’s posts on various aspects of chapter 25. (Plus all the other stuff in the sidebar reading group aggregator, for that matter.)

This post is focussed just on section I of Chapter 25. It is very sketchy.

In this chapter we shall consider the influence of the growth of capital on the fate of the working class.

This basically means – it’s business time. Marx has, by this extremely late point in Capital Vol. I, developed almost all the resources he feels he needs in order to speak (comparatively) plainly about matters close to the centre of his theoretical analysis.

The most important factor in this investigation is the composition of capital.

Marx distinguishes two ways of analysing the composition of capital – the value-composition and the technical composition of capital. NP has already written eloquently on the meaning of the distinction between ‘value’ and ‘material’ here. The fundamental economic issue, w/r/t the composition of capital, is obviously the difference and the relation between labour and other factors of production. This is what the chapter will centre on.

There are a number of different things in play here. On the one hand, there’s the distinction between technological advance in the means of production, and human labour. Technological advance increases human productivity – increases the productivity of labour – but this increase in productivity is a threat to labour, it produces unemployment, throws people out of work because fewer people are necessary to produce the same amount of stuff.

On the other hand, there’s an exchange-value dimension to this – the ratio of the money paid by capitalist firms for factors of production other than labour, and money paid in wages. It’s a matter of indifference to capitalist firms how their money is spent, so long as it generates profit, and ideally as much profit as possible.

The relation between these two modes of analysis – analysis of actual labour and actual technology, and analysis of the cost to capitalist firms of wages versus other investment, is a complicated one – Marx discusses it in the chapter, but I’m not going to discuss it in my summary. (It leads us into surprisingly deep waters quite quickly, imo, and while I want to return to it at some point, I’d rather get the bare bones of the analysis out here first).

Marx’s basic point is clear. If you have the same ‘ratio’ (however that’s understood) between constant and variable capital – between labour and other factors of production – and you’re dealing with capital accumulation, then the demand for labour is going to increase.

And this expansion in demand for labour may exceed the increase in the number of workers.

So wages rise.

[I’m going to note as an aside, here, that Chapter 25 is absolutely dominated by supply and demand analysis - it's a large mistake to see Marxian analysis as not deploying supply and demand analysis.]

the requirements of accumulating capital may exceed the growth in labour-power or in the number of workers; the demand for workers may outstrip the supply, and thus wages may rise.

This is assuming the same organic composition of capital (however that’s understood), plus capital accumulation.

Marx now writes:

As simple reproduction constantly reproduces the capital-relation itself, i.e. the presence of capitalist on the one side, and wage-labourers on the other side, so reproduction on an expanded scale, i.e. accumulation, reproduces the capital-relation on an expanded scale, with more capitalists, or bigger capitalists, at one pole, and more wage-labourers at the other pole.

This is telegraphic, and relies on stuff that Marx discusses elsewhere in Capital. It’s probably right, but, with apologies, I’m basically going to fiat it, or pass it by, for now.

In a footnote here Marx makes the important point: “’Proletarian’ must be understood to mean, economically speaking, nothing more than ‘wage-labourer’” [p. 764]

p. 768. [And skipping over the footnote that NP’s already discussed.]

“Under the conditions of accumulation we have assumed so far” things are good for workers. Capital accumulates; as capital accumulates, more workers are needed; as more workers are needed (assuming population doesn’t rise to a comparable degree) wages rise. Land of milk and honey for the proletariat.

A large part of the worker’s own surplus product, which is always increasing and is continually being transformed into additional capital, comes back to them in the shape of a means of payment, so that they can extend the circle of their enjoyments

This is basically the analysis of capitalism that, say, The Economist would endorse (in Marx’s time and also in ours, conveniently). Capital accumulates and accumulates, real wages rise and rise. Sure, there’s a level of exploitation, here, but real living standards are constantly increasing

Marx aims to critique various aspects of this analysis.

First Marx notes that even given this analysis’s conclusions, the fundamental coercive relationship between capital and labour remains in place.

these things no more abolish the exploitation of the wage-labourer, and his situation of dependence, than do better clothing, food and treatment, and a larger peculium, in the case of the slave.

Here Marx makes a very characteristic and important point:

In the controversies on this question, the essential fact has generally been overlooked, namely the differentia specifica of capitalist production

.

It is essential to Marx’s analysis that it is not just a class analysis. Capital, which is devoted to analysing the differentia specifica of capitalist society, is dedicated to analysing the structural pressures that are distinctive to capitalist society, the structural pressures that enable and produce capitalist society’s distinctive class structure. This is fundamental to Marx’s project – and these structural pressures are extremely elaborate in their forms of self-reproduction, which is why a whole vast (unfinished) work like Capital is required to analyse them. Capital is focussed on the differencia specifica. The purchase and sale of labour power is at the heart of this – but what is distinctive in capitalism cannot be limited to the purchase and sale of labour power. (If only because there are other structural pressures in place which reproduce the social form of the sale and purchase of labour power – such a limited and contingent social form cannot, on its own, reproduce itself.)

Now Marx moves on to the next step of his analysis.

Various possibilities are on the cards here.

- The price of labour keeps rising, because accumulation is also rising to such an extent that this rising price of labour does not interfere with accumulation.

- The price of labour rises to such an extent that it interferes with profitability. This reduces or annuls the incentive to invest, which in turn reduces the demand for labour, which reduces the power of labour again.

In this latter scenario we have, as it were, a series of fluctuations around an ‘equilibrium’ of capitalist profitability. (Or, if you prefer, a constantly refreshed series of disequilibriums – but disequilibriums that are driven by the structurally reproduced social requirement of profitability.)

The mechanism of the capitalist production process removes the very obstacles it temporarily creates.

i.e. (as already said): if increased accumulation raises the wage-rate to such an extent that profitability is reduced, this will remove the incentives to capitalist investment, thereby reducing accumulation, thereby reducing the demand for labour, thereby reducing wages, until such a point at which the wage-rate is low enough to enable renewed accumulation, with profit as the incentive.

It is these absolute movements of the accumulation of capital which are reflected in relative movements of the mass of exploitable labour power, and therefore seem to be produced by the latter’s own independent movement.

In the next post I’ll try to address more central stuff. Hopefully to god there won’t be such a long gap between posts this time..

[NB: I apologise in advance if I don't respond in a timely or adequate manner to comments - quite busy.]

Superfreakonomics

So I wrote a long and extremely angry post about the final chapter of the new Freakonomics book. (I read a PDF version of the final chapter, which now appears to have been removed at the publisher’s request. I’ll put up a link if I find one.) Ranting obscures the issues, though, so first off I’ll just do a link compilation.

Krugman has takedowns here, here and here. Brad DeLong has takedowns here, here and here. [Those last two links are especially good.] William Connolley and Tim Lambert both have excellent critiques. Yoram Bauman reproduces an all-too-revealing email exchange with Levitt here. Levitt’s initial smokescreen response is here. Dubner’s follow-up ‘rebuttal’ is here. The Romm post which Dubner chooses as the object of his counter-attack is here. Real Climate discusses the actual issues here. Lots more googleable stuff – but that’ll do for now.

I don’t really have anything substantive to add. But:

1) Even having read some of the online critiques, I was shocked by how ignorant and deceitful this chapter is. Do not take Dubner’s online summary as a fair representation of the chapter’s egregious contents.

2) This is a genuinely pernicious political intervention by figures with huge popular readership and (in Levitt’s case) considerable academic authority/credentials. I’m not sure I can think of another issue where spreading such falsehoods could have more serious negative consequences. Levitt and Dubner are no longer amusingly sloppy, more or less frivolous, pop-economists – writing and publishing this chapter is despicable. [Krugman: "This is a serious issue. We’re not talking about the ethics of sumo wrestling here; we’re talking, quite possibly, about the fate of civilization."]

3) Some of the clearer evidence of deliberate, calculated deceit is getting a bit lost in the noise. So I’ll reproduce this contrast (via Lambert):

From the chapter:

In 2006 [Paul Crutzen] wrote an essay in the journal Climatic Change lamenting the “grossly unsuccessful” efforts to emit fewer greenhouse gases and acknowledging that an injection of sulphur in the stratosphere “is the only option available to rapidly reduce temperature rises and counteract other climatic effects”

From Crutzen’s paper:

By far the preferred way to resolve the policy makers’ dilemma is to lower the emissions of the greenhouse gases. However, so far, attempts in that direction have been grossly unsuccessful… Therefore, although by far not the best solution, the usefulness of artificially enhancing earth’s albedo and thereby cooling climate by adding sunlight reflecting aerosol in the stratosphere might again be explored and debated …

If sizeable reductions in greenhouse gas emissions will not happen and temperatures rise rapidly, then climatic engineering, such as presented here, is the only option available to rapidly reduce temperature rises and counteract other climatic effects.

Finally, I repeat: the very best would be if emissions of the greenhouse gases could be reduced so much that the stratospheric sulfur release experiment would not need to take place. [My emphases]

Such calculated misrepresentation should not be treated with anything but contempt, or responded to with anything but condemnation. This book needs to be buried.

—

[UPDATE: Reading this back, I think highlighting the Crutzen example may give the misleading impression that Levitt and Dubner's argument is built up out of citations of the academic literature. On the contrary - the chapter cites painfully few real climate scientists, relying for the most part on the speculations of Intellectual Ventures entrepreneurs. Those climate scientists that Levitt and Dubner do cite - notably Ken Caldeira - are demonstrably misrepresented. This is Caldeira, quoted in Dubner's own 'rebuttal' post:

I do think there are a bunch of things in the chapter that give misimpressions.

On the line "carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight":

That is just wrong and I never would have said it.

Go to Dubner's post for some of the context of these. Caldeira also writes, politely: "I think everyone operated in good faith". I disagree.

Hopefully a PDF of the chapter will resurface online at some point - it's really hard to convey how terrible it is via quotation and paraphrase alone.]

[UPDATE II: This line of Levitt's, from the email exchange linked above, is amusingly indicative of just how distant he and Dubner are from any kind of reputable scientific practice:

for the record, I am getting roughly an equal number of criticisms like yours from people who are on the other side saying we are too accepting of the current global warming thinking!

The obvious analogy here is a good one: if Levitt and Dubner had published a book critical of evolutionary biology, and had written a Sunday Times article entitled 'Everything You Know About Evolutionary Biology Is Wrong', and had followed this up by writing, in an email exchange, "I do think also that there is something to be said for raising some skepticism about evolutionary biology … its claims are stated and restated as if they are fact, when in practice I suspect, and good scientists agree, that there is enormous uncertainty" - it would not make things better to then add "for the record, I am getting roughly an equal number of criticisms like yours from creationists!" Because the creationists are wrong.

Those screeching sounds you hear in the distance are, I trust, the death throes of Levitt's academic reputation.]

[UPDATE III: In case this post implies that Levitt and Dubner weren't always disgraceful lying hacks, probably worth clarifying that they were. This 2005 paper by John DiNardo (pdf), does a pretty damn thorough job of shooting down the original book. Various people (e.g. The Economist's Free Exchange blog), are suggesting, in a stable-door-closing attempt to differentiate Levitt's earlier work from this debacle, that this is what happens when Levitt moves outside his area of expertise. Well, presumably he wouldn't be so dramatically ignorant if he were writing on a subject he knew something about. But I think this is more what happens when Levitt moves outside an intellectual area in which lies are the coin of the realm. Earlier retractions of 'misleading' statements about academics' work haven't done much to dent his prestige, after all. If you're Levitt, you've probably been pretty thoroughly, and understandably, socialised into the idea that you can get away with pretty much anything you like. Perhaps this says something, not just about Levitt, but about the discipline of economics.]

What is the role of the left intellectual?

Or that should be – what is (or should be) the role of the left intellectual as (left) intellectual?

This isn’t exhaustive – for instance, I’m not talking about literary or generally artistic production, which can be thoroughly political, or politically informed. And I’m not talking about, say, government figures whose intellectual work informs the policy decisions they make, or activists whose intellectual work informs their activism – I’m only really talking about intellectual product as intellectual product. I’m also not talking about polemicising or propaganda work, even though that’s clearly one of the more significant ways in which intellectuals (aim to) ‘intervene’ politically, as intellectuals – and even though there’s not a very clean break between propagandistic and non-propagandistic intellectual production, often. I also don’t have much interest or investment in the category or class ‘intellectuals’, if such a class exists. I’m meaning to talk about intellectual work – basically written theoretical or analytical work – and to the extent that people are producing such work, they are intellectuals in the relevant sense, irrespective of whether they belong to a particular milieu of textual producers, say. I’ll add some further caveats at the end. I should also say that this probably applies to any intellectual work that’s oriented in some way towards the transformation of society, but I’ll stick with ‘left’ because that’s what I’m interested in. (My sense of ‘left’ probably maps fairly closely onto ‘communist’, but it needn’t for what I’m saying.) I’m writing this mainly to clarify what I want to be doing and aim to do in my own intellectual output.

It seems to me that there are various roles that intellectual or theoretical work can play, if it’s oriented in some sense towards political, social and economic transformation.

1) The analysis of society as it currently exists and functions.

2) The proposal of alternative social, political or institutional forms.

3) Proposals regarding how best to get from A (society as it currently exists) to B (proposed alternative(s)).

For the sake of brevity I’ll call (3) analysis related to organisational (and/or policy) questions, even though that’s a bit loose and narrow (and the two things aren’t at all the same).

W/r/t (3) again, there’s clearly a (varying) degree of overlap with (2), because the forms that we decide or argue can best effect social transformation are themselves part of society, and in different kinds of political organising (for instance) we are already effecting some degree of social change. And there’s often a large sense in which the organisational or institutional structures we decide on in order to try to effect change are chosen to a large extent based on the degree to which they resemble, or already are, a desired political goal. There’s a big overlap between (2) and (3), often, even if they’re rarely identical.

Also (3) can often in practice carry over into or become (2). Choices that were made initially for organisational reasons tend to impact (2), even if that impact wasn’t necessarily an originally desired one.

And (3) will influence (2) to an extent, also, because our sense of what changes are ultimately achievable, politically, will often influence what political proposals we focus on developing and articulating.

There’s much less overlap between (1) and (2), but (1) can influence (2) (and (3)) in a big way. Our understanding of what needs to change, in society – what a better society would be – is going to be massively influenced by our understanding of how our present society functions.

So although I don’t think there’s any real hierachy here, I also think that (3) – questions of political organisation (or policy-making) are always obviously going to be influenced by (2), and that (2) is always going to be influenced to a large extent by (1).

Now I might as well mention some other roles intellectuals play.

4) The critique of other intellectual product. (This is almost always going to involve some proposed or implicit alternative, but it can also be fairly free-floating – the proposed alternative [whether it relates to (1) or (2) or (3) or (other)] somewhat implicit or ill-defined.)

5) Persuasion. (For instance, articulating already-existing ideas clearly or resonantly.) (Or indeed persuading in other ways, through deception say – but I’m not so interested in that for now.)

6) Finding out and disseminating information. (This is probably subsumed within roles already mentioned.)

Then I guess maybe finally:

7) ‘Rallying the troops’ (let’s call it). I.e. strengthening or validating a community that’s taken to have political worth.

I’m saying this mainly because I want to get a bit clearer on what my goals in my own intellectual output are. I believe them to be basically (1) and (2). (That doesn’t mean that (1) and (2) are what I’ve focussed on up till now, or that they’re all I’m interested in – I’m saying I want my intellectual output to be principally oriented towards these things.) That also means that I want to articulate (in this post) what I believe to be true: that it’s largely tenable to focus principally on (1) and (2) (albeit always with some overlap with other things I’ve mentioned), as an intellectual project; and I also want to briefly articulate what I take (1) and (2) to involve.

(1), the analysis of society as it currently exists and functions, is, in my opinion, in the first place a scientific endeavour – a social-scientific endeavour. I think it’s both tenable and accurate to draw a strong distinction between positive and normative economics (and social theory/analysis).

I think this issue gets confused sometimes, partly because a lot of the people who aim to draw a strong distinction between positive and normative economics (/social theory) [in economics Milton Friedman is perhaps the most celebrated example] simply draw the distinction badly, often for ideological reasons, sometimes simply through confusion, and this makes it look like economics or social theory are intrinsically ideological endeavours, in one sense or another. I think that’s true of a lot of the empirically-existing disciplinary spaces, but I don’t think it’s true of economics/social theory as scientific projects, in principle. Basically, one’s analysis can simply be right or wrong, no matter one’s political commitments.

I also think it’s possible to a large extent to separate out analytic and normative judgements based on social/economic analysis. Perhaps I should have included an additional category in the original list:

1) The descriptive analysis of society as it currently exists and functions. (How does society actually work?)

1B) The normative analysis of society as it currently exists and functions. (What’s good and bad, what do we like and dislike about present society?)

Which implies:

1C) What do we think should be gotten rid of or changed in current society?

Which in turn can lead to:

2) The proposal of alternative social, political or institutional forms. (What should we change current society into?)

(1) would be the scientific bit of the analysis, (1B) and (1C) are thoroughly political (as analysis); but neither on their own lead to (2), which is I think really important. As in – (2) is really important, and it’s also important to note that none of the (1) intellectual activities themselves lead to (2). I don’t think a diagnosis of the problems with actually-existing society is in principle or in general enough to orient politics towards anything other than angry & inchoate dissent. (And I think it can often though not always help politics to be not simply reactive – not simply driven by condemnation of something, or anger or fear at it, but also oriented towards a reasonably coherently articulated alternative or set of alternatives – even if there’s lots of dispute about what alternatives are preferable.)

W/r/t (2), then – the proposal of alternative social, political or institutional forms – this strikes me as an extremely important thing that left intellectuals can do, as intellectuals.

I’m unclear just how closely related (2) and (3) are – this probably has more to do with the generality/vagueness of my category (3) than anything. A lot of actual political proposals are going to sort of implictly or explicitly carry with them certain organisational imperatives, if they’re going to be achieved. Even so, I’m pretty convinced that it makes sense to attend to (2) without necessarily attending to (3), a fair bit of the time.

Another reason that I’m prepared to downplay (3), with regard to the work of intellectuals as intellectuals, is that I’m not convinced that (3) (unlike, in my opinion (1) and (2)) is always best addressed by intellectuals as intellectuals. Clearly there’s a whole lot of important intellectual work to be done in relation to (3) – and I may be muddying my original insistence that I’m not talking about intellectuals a a class dedicated to intellectual production here (I don’t think I am that much, but I see the problem). But my thought is that discussion of organisational questions is far more closely tied to political practice than are simple analysis of current society or proposal of alternatives. I’m conscious of the extent to which adequate analysis and ideas of alternatives are in fact often prompted by concrete political engagement – but I think there’s probably something here.

I suppose I feel that two of the main functions that intellectuals as intellectuals can play in terms of aiding political organisation, are 1) producing useful analysis, that resonates with and makes sense of people’s experience, in a way that can potentially be politically helpful; and 2) providing well-thought out alternatives or political goals than can help with political mobilisation. Actual intellectual discussion of organisational questions, if it isn’t prompted by actual organisational problems, often seems sort of redundant, to me. Though clearly it’s still often important.

—

The context of all this, in terms of why I’m writing it, is a few things I’ve been reading and thinking about recently.

First of all, a few pieces by and about a prominent leftist intellectual, who I won’t bother naming just because I just don’t want to get into a fight about the worth of that intellectual’s work, and it’s anyway sort of irrelevant to my point whether I’m right in my assessment of this work. It struck me, anyway, that this intellectual product does neither (1) nor (2) nor (3). It does a fair bit of (4) and – in my opinion- a whole lot of (7). But it’s my opinion that, although these things can be valuable, they’re really secondary or less important in terms of the role of the left intellectual than (1) or (2) (or indeed (3)).

Another thing, in terms of me writing the post, was thinking about the political outcomes so far of the economic crisis. It seems to me that the crisis has been an absolute disaster for the left – and that quite a lot of people on the left haven’t really adequately recognised what a disaster it’s been. I think I’ll quote from a recent post by Doug Henwood here:

I’m no fan of economic crises as offering opportunities for political transformation—they could as easily, maybe more easily, break to the right as to the left, and they cause lots of suffering—but I had hoped that the near-meltdown of the financial system might lead to new ways of seeing, thinking, talking. Not yet.

When I started blogging (and even though one of my earliest posts quoted that Keynes line about practical men being under the influence of intellectual scribblers of a few years back) I think I was a lot more sceptical about the potential political influence of intellectual work than I am now. It seemed to me then, I think, that intellectual movements were to a large extent expressive of social movements – that, although it may appear that intellectual work influenced political outcomes, the influence was really, generally the other way around.

I now think that that was sort of a category error. Intellectual work is no less part of a society’s social relations than anything else. We’re swept along by the currents of history – but we’re no more or less swept as intellectuals than we are as social actors in other roles. The social actors who engage in ‘real’, as opposed to ‘merely intellectual’, activities are no more free of social determinants than those social actors playing the role of intellectual producers. Social change is a product of the sum of our social actions – and I don’t see any reason why intellectuals, as intellectuals, should be less able to participate in that change than anbody else, in other roles.

But what that participation consists in depends what the function of the role is.

This concluision is a bit peremptory. But what’s struck me, in responses to the economic crisis, is the extent to which things have carried on as normal. I’m sure this will change eventually – but I think the left has already blown its chance to be the decisive influence on that change. When we think of early structural transformations of capitalism, there were ready-made intellectual frameworks ready to assume the role of guiding economic activity – however disastrously. In the late seventies and early eighties neoliberalism was primed and ready to go. The left (which was largely statist and technocratic) had no ready political response to the micro turn. After the second world war Keynesianism was already set up and ticking along nicely. The Russian revolution simply wouldn’t have happened as it did were there not a whole lot of intellectual work somewhere in the background. Etc.

I’m not trying to say anything terribly dramatic with this. I’m, I guess, trying to say two things.

Firstly: if intellectuals want to be politically useful in some way, as intellectuals, some of the more useful things they can do are 1) provide an adequate analysis of current social, economic and political conditions; 2) start generating concrete proposals for social, political and economic alternatives. And I think there’s a paucity of these – especially (2) – in a lot of contemporary left intellectual work.

Secondly: whether or not I’m right about the above, (1) and (2) are what I want and aim to do.

UPDATE: More thoughts, and a modification, in the comment thread below.

[Edited slightly for clarity - thanks for the feedback.]

Marx Reading Group: Marx’s Sarcasm

Okay – so Chapter 25 of Capital is a monster, and I think it’ll take me quite a while to re-read it, taking notes, in a way that’ll allow me to say something helpful about the whole. So I thought I’d throw out a short ‘this is great’ kind of post before trying to say something more substantive.

There are a few qualities of Marx as a writer that are quite unusual, to my mind. First off, I’m not sure I know another writer/thinker of Marx’s stature who uses sarcasm so pervasively and centrally. It’s not just that he’s a sarcastic son of a bitch – although obviously he is. It’s that the sarcasm is woven deep into his articulation of many of his most central claims. Capital is (of course) a critique of political economy. But a lot of the time that critique is manifest mainly in Marx’s bitter, sardonic, bathetic turn of phrase. Hegelian (of a sort) that he is, Marx likes to articulate many of his points in a manner immanent to the positions being criticised – he wants to unfold the horrors of capitalism from out of the discourses aimed towards capitalist apologetics. Part of Marx’s reasoning, I think, is that if even those political economists most committed to making the case for capitalism, can be made to yield insights condemnatory of capitalism, Marx will have given his own condemnation extra power – made it more compelling. (He also, of course, wants to show that his own position contains the best of what he criticises.) (Plus he wants to show where the positions he criticises come from, what makes them – why and how.) [N Pepperell's written a lot on issues related to this stuff - Marx's presentational strategy, standpoint of critique, and lots of other things. I won't put links to NP's work in every post, because I think that'd be annoying - so take this as a general indication that a great deal of the stuff in my posts on Capital is going to be derived from NP's work.] There’s an interesting double aspect to this procedure. On the one hand, Marx is overflowing with bile and rage at the apologism for violence and coercion that he encounters everywhere in the political economic literature. He never tires of denouncing bullshit – and it seems clear that this act of denunciation – holding up for all the world to see some particularly egregious piece of apologism, no matter how minor the text he finds it in – was one of the ways he motivated himself in his incredible labours of reading, assimilation, and synthesis. Marx the student of political economy will trudge through any piece of text – government reports, minor but interminable academic controversies, countless historical tracts. The reward at the end of it, for us, is Capital. But Marx needs more immediate satisfactions – and this is part of where the endless vicious pleasure of displaying the results of political-economic self-deception and self-interest comes from, I think. One can almost feel Marx’s glee as he happens upon a particularly revealing phrase on page 800 of some committee transcript.

On the other hand, although Marx is tireless in these condemnations, he is also doing work with his sarcastic deployment of other thinkers. The second thing that’s unusual about Marx as a writer, to my mind, is the extent to which (and the way in which) he deploys quotations. Marx will quote any fucking thing. Sometimes one wonders if there’s anything he read that he didn’t quote. (Obviously this impression is exacerbated by the fact that so much of his draftwork is extant..) So much of Marx’s own argument is made through the use of quotations. If Marx wants to say something, in Capital, he’ll find someone who’s already said it (if he can), quote them, and then show how this insight is far more powerfully and adequately articulated as part of Marx’s account of capitalism, than it is as part of whatever shonky system Marx has pulled the quote from.

Marx’s quotations, then, and the sarcastic way in which he deploys them, are central to his work.

This is by way of leading in to my favourite bit of Chapter 25 so far, re-reading. Which is Marx’s use, almost right at the start of the chapter, of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees. (Not a minor text, in terms of capitalist apologetics.) On pages 764-765 of the Fowkes Penguin edition, Marx quotes Mandeville [ellipses and square brackets are in the text]:

“It would be easier, where property is well secured, to live without money than without the poor; for who would do the work? … As they [the poor] ought to be kept from starving, so they should receive nothing worth saving. If here and there one of the lowest class, by uncommon industry, and pinching his belly, lifts himself above the condition he was brought up in, nobody ought to hinder him; nay, it is undeniably the wisest course for every person in the society, and for every private family to be frugal; but it is in the interest of all rich nations, that the greatest part of the poor should almost never be idle, and yet continually spend what they get… Those that get their living by their daily labour… have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their wants which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure. The only thing then that can render the labouring man industrious, is a moderate quantity of money, for as too little will, according as his temper is, either dispirit or make him desperate, so too much will make him lazy… From what has been said, it is manifest, that, in a free nation, where slaves are not allowed of, the surest wealth consists in a multitude of laborious poor; for besides that they are the never failing nursery of fleets and armies, without them there could be no enjoyment, and no product of any country could be valuable. To make the society” (which of course consists in non-workers) “happy and people easier under the meanest circumstances, it is requisite that great numbers of them should be ignorant as well as poor; knowledge both enlarges and multiplies our desires, and the fewer things a man wishes for, the more easily his necessities may be supplied.”

What’s so great here (if ‘great’ is the word) – apart from the sheer hideousness of the quote – is the way that Marx deploys it. Marx doesn’t disagree with Mandeville’s analysis of capitalism – he thinks it’s more or less spot on. He just thinks Mandeville is an evil motherfucker. Marx’s small sarcastic textual intervention (“(which of course consists in non-workers)”) completely transforms (if it needed transforming, which apparently it does) the emphases and values of the passage quoted. Marx here hones in on the intellectual dishonesty that permits the ‘respectable’ propagation of this political and ethical monstrosity – the identification of ’society’ with the tiny portion of society “which of course consists in non-workers”. Capitalist synecdoche. This – right up until our own time, and into the future of capitalism as well – is the most pervasive form of apologism. ‘Society’ benefits from the capitalist system. And of course ’society’ is all of us. But in fact ’society’ consists, really and truly, only in those who benefit. And since those who benefit benefit, everything is fine in the world. [Of course this is only part of Mandeville's point. The other part is that if people are oppressed enough not to realistically desire decent living standards, they won't mind the absence of decent living standards.]

Marx will consistently do this, throughout Capital. He will quote political economy, and at times he will disagree with it, and at times he will agree with it. But he will, throughout, show us what political economy means – and how this meaning – in however fig leaf a fashion – is obscured by political economy’s own forms of articulation. There’s a huge amount going on in Capital, and in Chapter 25, besides this, of course. But that can wait for other (and others’) posts.

Marx Reading Group – Links

Okay – Nate came up with the excellent idea of having an online reading group focussed on something by Marx. Participants so far [UPDATED]: Nate; N Pepperell; Reid Kane; Carl Dyke; Mikhail Emelianov; JCD; Mike Beggs; Michael Burns; possibly Nick Srnicek; Lumpenprofessoriat; yours truly. JCD has set up a Yahoo! Pipes aggregator to provide a feed of Reading Group-related posts, which should be sitting in the sidebar at this very moment – it gathers up posts containing the keyword ‘Marx’ in their titles. I’ll also do my best to cull links from the aggregator and the blogs, and put them up in this post as we go. If you want to join in and the pipe doesn’t register your post, leave a comment here (or somewhere else noticeable) and I’ll add you to the links list.

We may not get started properly for a little while yet, but the first reading matter will be Chapter 25 of Capital Volume I.

Reading Group Posts:

14/8/09: Nate. What in the hell… could make me more dense?
24/8/09: JCD. Internet Reading Group on Marx
29/8/09: Mikhail. Start Your School Year Right. Read Some Marx.

28/8/09: Nate. What in the hell… Marx will we be reading?
30/8/09: Duncan. Marx’s sarcasm
13/9/09: NP. Revisiting the Product of the Hand
14/9/09: Nate. What in the Hell… is Marx doing in chapter 24?
15/9/09: NP. Valued Matter
16/9/09: NP. Malthusian Asides
29/9/09: Reid. Eliminative Marxism 1: Notes on Eliminativism
2/10/09: Lumpenprofessoriat. The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation

The Unnamable and Horrifying In-Itself

A number of Speculative Realist writers have expressed admiration for the work of H.P.Lovecraft, whose Weird Fiction evocations of an unnamable, primordial, horrifyingly alien reality resonates with many aspects of the SR turn. But if Speculative Realism is driven, in part, by impatience with “the continental reverence for dusty textual monuments“, what is to be done with the obviously textual nature of Lovecraft’s works? Is there not a dissonance here?

I believe I have the answer. Rather than focussing on Lovecraft’s work, object-oriented philosophers should focus their attention on indisputably Lovecraftian objects. Specifically: this Plush Cthulhu range of toys.

“This absolutely adorable Cthulhu Plush is one of the first speciality plush items from Toy Vault. The mini version is 8 inches tall, is made of beautiful green fabric, and is filled with plush and beanies.”

If you are concerned that these objects, made for loving human owners, are too entwined in humanist, anthropocentric, correlationist narcissism to be proper objects of Speculative Realist study, I direct your attention to this charming site, which provides indisputable proof that Plush Cthulhu can interact with other objects (e.g. Brown Snuggly Bear), without any correlationist compromise.

(Finally, for those alarmed by Speculative Realism’s apparent evacuation of the political, perhaps ‘Cthulhu for President: Why vote for the lesser evil?’ will set your mind at rest.)

Plush Cthulhu Conference Now!

[Hat tip NP]

Militant Atheism

From an interview with Richard Dawkins by Laurie Taylor:

“We have to consider the advancing technology that made it so much more possible for a Hitler or a Stalin to do the horrible things they did. If you planted Hitler or Stalin back in the middle ages, would they have stood out as they do to us now, or would they have seemed par for the course in terms of their nastiness? I would still suggest that they were temporary setbacks. There is general progress. We don’t now have slavery. We have equal respect for women. A universal revulsion against Hitler. Nobody can now say what Hitler once said without being instantly shouted down.”

Was he really happy to describe a planned policy to exterminate an entire race of people as “a temporary setback”?

“But that belief in the extermination of an entire race, you can say that it was a last gasp.”

Richard Dawkins on Sam Harris:

Every word zings like an elegantly fletched arrow from a taut bowstring and flies in a gracefully swift arc to the target, where it thuds into the bullseye.

Various extracts from Harris’s The End of Faith:

We are at war with Islam. It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran.

No amount of casuistry can disguise the fact that the outer of “lesser” jihad – war against infidels and apostates – is a central feature of the faith. Armed conflict “in the defence of Islam” is a religious obligation for every Muslim man.

Islam, more than any religion humans have ever devised, has the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death

Is Islam compatible with a civil society? Is it possible to believe what you must believe to be a good Muslim, to have military and economic power, and not to pose an unconscionable threat to the civil societies of others? I believe that the answer to this question is no.

What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe.

Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.

I love the smell of progress in the morning. Smells like fascism.

Thoughts on the Human Limit

There’s been some discussion, on some of the blogs I read, recently, and on this blog too, about science, philosophy, mysticism, totality. There is a philosophical longing for, in Derrida’s terminology, presence – for completeness, the non-division of the self, the non-invasion of the self by a desire that tears the self in pieces; a desire that works to suppress the non-completeness of the self in the form of mortality, our knowledge of the ultimate collapse of the temporarily self-maintaining biological systems that have no self or sense of self outside that maintenance. Dissolution. This longing for completeness and security leads to philosophical fantasies – the desire for something that cannot be lost, even if that something is nothingness, as in the Fort! of Freud’s grandson’s Fort-Da game. (What is really lost in that text and life, of course, is not the mother, but the grandson – dead, buried and grieved.) But the self-division at the heart of that desire for non-self-division is present in and as desire. And this in turn is analysable in physical, biological, and contingently empirical terms. The terms of our painful, real, and exorbitant lives.

Knowledge is, for philosophy, shadowed by the dream of absolute knowledge. And this dream is only a dream – a dream more potent than the dream the dream dreams – the dream of apparent knowledge, as dreaming. I mean to say: Descartes imagines that all the world might be a fantasy. But this is the real fantasy, and the only fantasy Descartes refuses to doubt. For that would make him vulnerable to more exigent doubts still.

I’ve been advancing, on this blog, a claim that should be much less controversial than it is: the claim that scientific knowledge’s authority comes from its status as hypothesis. Which is also to say, in a sense, its status as fiction – or as possible fiction. It is the fact that we cannot ultimately know whether a scientific claim is a story we are telling ourselves that gives science its status as source of truth – as non fiction. Which is also to say, with Derrida, that the categories of truth and fiction are far less cleanly dissociable than they are often taken to be.

In the current theoretical reaction against not just post-structuralism, not just the linguistic turn, but against the post-Kantian problematic of human finitude itself, many fought-for insights are being suppressed and attacked. Not least of these is this emphasis on human finitude as incorrigible limit – not a locatable limit, which pens us in, but simply a limit described by wherever we happen to be and whatever we happen currently to think and do. We can move elsewhere – we can think more – we can expand or transform the limit. But a limit remains while finitude remains – and finitude is our fate and only habitat, as biological, fleshy, mortal and substantial organisms. The occlusion of the human limit gathers its forces as its pragmatic justifications fall away – as the culture of happiness reveals yet again its pale and bleeding underbelly.

I’m riffing off of and distorting Roger’s work. (Here; here, for example.) And I want to talk about Roger’s work. But for now I want briefly to pursue this idea of limit as finitude innate in knowledge and in fiction. I’ve thought for a long time that one of the more ghastly effects of the ‘analytic / continental’ divide that did so much damage to twentieth century philosophy, was the way it suppressed the resonances between the literary-theological-political emphases of ‘continental’ theorising and the logical-scientific emphases of ‘analytic’ thought. There are profound resonances and homologies here. One such homology is this idea of finitude as fiction as hypothesis, in its connection to truth.

Here’s a famous Nabokov quote: “One must have the passion of a scientist and the precision of an artist.” And there’s another quote I can’t find right now, in which Nabokov outlines the career of a researcher. The more one studies, the more there is to uncover, Nabokov writes. One encounters an endless opening up of knowledge and experience. Everything unfolds forever. This is the agony and the intense joy of curiosity and consciousness. One pushes back the limits of knowledge or experience endlessly, endlessly, endlessly – without limit, as it were.

This resonates, for me, with the scientific method. One learns more and more, builds more and more elaborate or expansively simple theories or descriptions – but one doesn’t reach the point, ever, at which the theory becomes identical with its object, rendering each pointless with respect to the other. No – the limit remains but changes.

Something similar takes place in literary endeavour, I believe. Nabokov was of the school of artists who believe in an incorrigible mystery, which can be limned in aesthetic production. This is a flaw of Nabokov’s art. The limit cannot be understood in these terms – it is more empirical than that, more basic and arbitrary. The limit is not a hole in being, through which another world can be glimpsed (as Nabokov and many many others believed). It is simply the stuff we haven’t yet gotten round to understanding or experiencing. It is the empirically undeniable fact that there are many things we will never understand, will never experience. Individually or collectively.

Nabokov’s aesthetics ontologises this limit – makes it a feature of Being itself, rather than a limit to our individual or collective understanding and experience. And this ontologisation in turn produces a suppression of the attempt to move beyond the limit – the attempt to push aesthetic, ethical, political or scientific understanding beyond the limit that is our current understanding. This aesthetic – or ethic – can present as humility; but ontologisation is never a humility; it is the narcissism of believing that reality shares our qualities – and is therefore a fundamental suppression of the nature of the limit, and, ultimately, of the limit itself. (Here Nabokov shares something with the current turn to ’speculative’ realism – which means, of course, no realism at all.)

In his writings on aesthetics Nabokov articulates his project in a double way. On the one hand there is the task of description – of vivid and intense and ardent evocation of the details of experience. On the other hand there is the effect produced by the collation and juxtaposition of these descriptions. In these juxtapositions something is summoned or evoked which is not present in any of the individual items – something inexpressible through mere description – something, for Nabokov, transcendent – something which can touch on the divine.

This aesthetics is fractal – it describes every level of the poetic endeavour. Thus, above all, it is a description of metaphor. Two words placed side by side, or bound by a copula, summon a meaning-unit unachievable except through this contact, which transforms, in so doing, the words themselves. But this is also an account of the macrostructure of Nabokov’s novels, in which the incidents and non-incidents of their protagonists’ lives summon a larger scale meaning-unit which conveys something about those lives, or about life itself, which cannot be achieved via any descriptive account.

But what is this inexpressible? Is it inexpressible because it touches the secret of existence qua existence? This, I think, is what Nabokov would have us believe. But I prefer a more down-to-earth analysis: the inexpressible is simply what we’re not able to express – not here, not now; maybe never, but maybe just for today.

And so an honest aesthetics, I believe, engages in exactly this endeavour – the evocation of the inexpressible – but without hypostatising the inexpressible as inexpressible. Rather pushing forward, basely, in the base analysis of the production of the sensation of the unconveyable – which in turn yields new limits, and new exorbitant beauty.

I meant to go on from here to write about other things – to discuss some of Roger’s recent ravishing posts. But I think I have reached my limit, for today.