This page will act as a database of sorts for all of the work I have done over the summer. All of these entries are priliminary rough drafts that show my engagement with the texts. All of the texts referenced in these sections can be found sourced in the "Annotative Bibliography" section of the portfolio, however not all of the texts cited in the Bibliography have been included here. The uploaded pieces are a representation of the work I have done this summer, rather than a full report.
The notes are formatted so that quoted material appears in regular print, while my engagements with the text appear in italics. Reflections and Critiques are more free form. The decision as to whether I would engage in just notes, reflection, or critique would depend on the text. The more difficult text (Marx's The German Ideology, for instance), required more detailed engagement and as a result my notes become a place not just for understanding the text but also for raising the begining of what could eventually become critique or reflection.
By the end of the summer, I realized that to write a full research paper by August would not give me enough time to fully work through these materials. Instead, the summer functioned more as time and space to do the brunt of the work. This has been the result.
Page 1: “Only where the ideas which present themselves as scientific are made to repudiate their own foundations and necessary presuppositions is the further development of the theory possible”
Doing internal critique, or figuring out the ways in which the theory contradict itself can help strengthen the theory?
Page 2: Assuming fixed conditions: “Methodologically, determination is identified by classical political economy with reduction to an independently fixed condition”
I’m thinking that there are two ways to work with this in unproductive ways. The first would be to accept the fixed condition and use it as a basis to refuse to criticism altogether. Assuming fixed conditions means that there is no need to zoom out and critique or even question these conditions at all.
The second misuse would be to reject the idea of fixed conditions and use the rejection to support a push to change the conditions.
Page 3: “What for Ricardo always remains the attempt to root the economic forms in the natural condition of fatality, becomes for Marx the attempt to establish direct reductions of social production as the determinants of the economic forms of exchange and distribution. Marx establishes relation of production as social relations and thereby makes the determination of exchange and distribution in production their social determination.
Ricardo: Condition of fertility (nature) ----(determines) à economic form
Marx: Social relations ---(determines) à economic form ---(and therefore) à nature
This doesn’t completely negate the relevancy of nature, it just shifts the relation between nature and social and economic relations
Page 7: Levine points to Marx using classical political economy to change natural determination: labor is now what is naturally determined. This feels like internal critique: use of the author’s logic to show how the theory undermines itself, but I’m confused because I’m having trouble figuring out if Levine is condemning Marx’s use of natural determination.
Page 9: “For the theoretical treatments of the system of economic relations, it is necessary to leave behind that logic which proceeds via the reduction of social relations to primordial conditions, however these conditions may be conceived. This requires a break with certain of the most strongly held claims of the Marxian method. It is not, however, implicit by this that an equally sharp break is necessary from the logical structure of Marx’s argument”
I read this and I think that this is “good reading” explained. Relying on a primordial condition is just a fancier way of infusing your ethics into a theory. I think by this I mean that a primordial state assumes that such a thing exists – that a universal set of ethics and behaviors exist, but this can only be based on the ethics of the theorist or writer. Levine is suggesting that this is not cause to throw out Marx completely (if this was the basis for not reading or working through writing then perhaps we couldn’t read anything), but instead to identify how Marx uses the primordial condition and then, through the logic of Marx’s own argument, break the “primordial condition” away from the theory itself?
Page 11: “So long as the determining conditions are taken to be fixed independently, the social and economic relations, which provide for those conditions a form of existence, must be arbitrary. They can be nothing more than the external and inessential forms. As such they cannot be accounted for by any inner necessity and can provide, at best, a limited subject”
Relying on something like fixed independent conditions helps erase the need to critique the political/social/economic structures at all because it doesn’t connect the [human] conditions to the ideologies supporting the political/social/economic structures. I’m reminded of Understanding Capitalism: business majors or econ majors “fix” things within the system. I’m also wondering how this might be connected to an emphasis on change. Within the belief in fixed conditions, we can believe that fixing the economy is separate from ourselves. They fix things as if they are their car rather than their body (this analogy is so hard to erase from my brain, I love it). The reality is, however, that capitalism is not external or fixed. Because of this, while we think we are fixing or changing something separate from us, we are “fixing” nothing because we refuse to acknowledge the internal pieces.
Connecting this with reading: The reader wants to believe that their critique is separate from them. Their critique or reading is academic, but unless they are able to recognize their ethics and logic and bracket them, they are offering nothing useful to the piece. Readers are hesitant to acknowledge a living interaction with a text and therefore their ability to do good reading is inhibited.
Page 11: “In order to [destabilize the apparently fixed premises], it is necessary to find the determination of the premises of economic life within the system of economic relations itself”
THIS is internal critique. (I think).
Barrier of History/Evidence
Pages 11-12: “To recognize that the relation of economic life have a history is necessarily to deny those relations any purely natural determination, and to establish, at least implicitly their social determination.”
On the one hand, history can show us how useless “natural determinations” are.
But…
“Nonethesless, the attempt to ground the analysis historically runs up against serious obstacles when it is required to take the form of a truly theoretical argument”
We have to be careful using history (or any external “evidence” like science?) because the use of history to counter a theoretical argument is still an external critique. The critique is strengthened if the reader can use the theory itself to find the contradictions.
Also…
“It is only possible to write the history of capital from the vantage point of the systematic analysis of capital”
Is he saying here that history is already imbedded in the ideology? It can’t be separated: it’s not “objective”. Can history point us to theoretical?
Pages 14-17: Reproduction, self-generation, and regeneration
I need some help with this. I understand how wealth self-generates and reproduces, but is this a fixed condition or does it happen because we need to believe it is a fixed condition?
Page 16: “Nature becomes the object of scientific investigation only when nature ceases to be determined externally, and is instead considered upon the basis of its intrinsic laws”
I need to wrestle with this more, but is he saying that the study/investigation of nature implies that we recognize its self-generation and therefore wish to use its rules to undermine or change it?
Page 19: “The objective of theoretical work is neither to ignore nor to present evidence, but to transcend it, in order that the concrete history, represented abstractly by the “data” can be grasped as a living reality”
Okay so I reworked this a little. Let me know if this is fair/makes sense:
“The objective of reading is neither to ignore nor to present your ethics and experience, but to transcend them, in order that the concrete history of the narrator represented abstractly by the “story” can be grasped as a living reality.
Page 25: “In the present state of the science this abstract standpoint has been lost. The theoretical investigation of economic life invites criticism on the grounds of being too great an abstraction not because of any demonstrably greater presence of the state driving the current political period, but because of the preoccupation of modern social science with the economic activities of the state. This preoccupation derives from specific historical conditions within which the social sciences find themselves, and form the congenital propensity of social science to allow nothing which is not immediate to enter its line of vision, thereby repudiating all abstraction from the immediately given situation”
I took this to mean that we are scared of a world in which evidence doesn’t matter or in which theory is as legitimate as evidence because it would require is to think of our political and economic lives as imbedded or intermingled with our personal, familial, and sexual lives and this is potentially threatening. This would mean that in order to critique capitalism, the critique would also seep into personal, familial, and sexual relations.
For the reader, it feels very much the same. The reader can’t bracket their ethics because they don’t even want to acknowledge what their ethics are never mind an opposing one. I’m thinking of Emily in our Writing and Criticism class specifically. Even getting to exposing her judgements toward my narrator took a lot of time and energy out of her.
What is Immanent Critique?
Titus Stahl
Page 1: Critique is limited if it is nothing more than a moral condemnation: “they accept that it is ot sufficient to approach social issues with a preconceived, normative standard that is justified independently of any examination of social practices in question”
Morality assumes a fixed condition. Critique based on conceptions of morality are weak as they are contingent on the time, space, and the reader upholding the same conceptions of morality.
Page 2: “Establishes that our society fails also on its own terms”
Like reading: use the logic of the society to show the failures of the society – use the logic of the narrator to reveal the contradictions of fissures of the narrator.
“An immanent critique of society is a critique which derives the standards It employs from the object criticized, that is, the society in question, rather than approaching that society with independently justified standards”
Yes! And the object criticized has its own norms and conceptions of morality
Rawls: “Because Rawls seems to assume that we should formulate basic principles of justice in a way that enables them to be used for evaluating all possible kinds of basic social structures without presupposing any such structure to be normatively privileged, his theory seems to entail that we must justify these normative principles (and thus, any critical claims building on them) without referring to the self-understanding of the norms of any particular social practice”
This practice would be useless because it is exactly the contradictions between the self-understanding and the normative principles that inform good internal critique. I’m also frustrated with the notion of “basic principles of justice”, as if this is a fixed condition.
Page 4: I’m confused by Stahl’s distinction between individual and societal, as the offerings in writing and criticism have shown me the unavoidable link between these two. It feels unnecessary to make this distinction because all individual actions are part of societal practices. This distinction feels linked somehow to the author’s insistence on ‘change’ throughout the piece. Dislocating the individual from society might mean that we could fix society without fixing ourselves.
“However, social critique very often does have this aim [change]”
This is also what Stahl wants as he states on page 6 that he doesn’t think internal critique goes far enough. Stahl seems as if he wants justice despite the fact that he’s already explained the problems with the word.
Page 4-5: “While people can engage in social critique for its own sake or to reach agreement with other observers of a social practice as to whether this practice should be condemned or not, social critics will most often not only refer to but also address those who either are engaged in the relevant practice or who have the capacity to change it. If this is the case, it does not suffice to describe the practice and to evaluate it according to the standard employed, the critique must also be directed in changing the practice in question so as to better conform to the standard”
I think I’m okay with this but am still uneasy. This feels like what economists might do: examine the ways in which the practice of capitalism is failing its ideological premises and then internally “fix” the problem to better align with the ideology. I think my discomfort comes from wanting to say “change might be possible, but complete conformity isn’t”. I think I need to wrestle with this more.
Page 5: “While such changes can be brought about by many different means, including manipulating the persons in question and changing their practices, social critique aims at effecting such changes by way of convincing its addresses to agree on the reliance of its guiding standard and, therefore, to take the failure of their practices to live up to this standard as a reason to change it”
Okay here is my actual discomfort in word choice. The use of manipulation versus convincing worries me. I want to say, “In what ways is convincing ever lacking manipulation” and also: “I find it difficult to swallow the idea that when confronted with critique, the object/subject/society would 1) accept the critique as real and valid and then 2) do anything to change themselves. Stahl is putting too much hope in social critique and I think this is partially because he began by distinguishing between the individual and the society.
“at some point the question becomes inevitable as to how we can distinguish between standards that are not only justified but in regard to which we can have a legitimate expectation that others should accept them and standards for which this is not the case”
Do I even bother reading Mein Kampf? Yes.
“This is especially true if the addressees of the critique have beliefs about norms and justificatory reasons which do not coincide with those of the critic”
Right, but can’t this problem be avoided if criticism is always done with the logic of the author/narrator? If everyone did good internal critique of something they hated then it wouldn’t matter if the justificatory reasons were the same or different.
Page 5-6: Stahl explicitely points to conceptions of ‘justice’ being problematic because they imply a fixed condition:
“For example, one could assume that the relevant standard for the social is that of justice and that the meaning of justice can be known as a result of a philosophical analysis – independently of its envisaged application – that always yields the same result when done correctly. The resulting form of criticism could be called an external critique, for the standard that is used is established independently of all particular social practices”
Here is my frustration. Despite the fact that Stahl acknowledges this as a weakness of external critique, he still finds himself frustrated that internal critique doesn’t do enough. It feels as if he’s misinterpreting the purpose or result of internal critique or critique in general. This guy has some serious uncrushed hope.
If an internal critique is looking for “justice”, is it really an internal critique? No!
Page 6: “One obvious way to do so is to take up the self-understanding of the members of the practice in question and to evaluate whether their actual behavior within the practice is compatible with that self-understanding”
Find out what the author is trying to say and then find out how they are saying the exact opposite. This is always happening, right? There is never a time in which an individual or society’s self-understanding is completely harmonious with their actual behavior. There are ALWAYS contradictions.
“Internal critique seems to claim too little”
Stahl wants the good feelings (like thinking about justice or ‘good’) that external critique gives him but knows they aren’t useful and so he wants to impose these good feelings on internal critique. He seems to be stuck in an anxiety about being unable to change things.
Stahl’s problem is that he is searching for success.
Page 7(paraphrased): 1) Figure out the author’s normative standard (but first figure out your own)
2) Uncover the multiple standards or the author (or society)
3) Show why we should care. Change behavior
Stahl doesn’t want to digest that changing behavior is impossible. This is his biggest fault throughout the piece. You can’t change, you can try and continue to engage in the critique process to fail better each time (offer – revise – offer – revise…)
Page 8-9: He is distinguishing between Marx and Hegel and I’m having trouble seeing the distinction.
Page 9: “Therefore, on Marx’s account, social practices should not be judged according to their self-conception, but rather according to the criterion of whether or not they are characterized by unresolved internal contradictions”
Aren’t self-conception and internal contradictions the same thing or at least self-conception is part of internal contradiction. Marx and Hegel seem to be in agreement rather than at odds with each other.
Page 10: “Social critique cannot rest content with just describing contradictions, but must always also aim at explaining them”
Isn’t this kind of what psychoanalysis does? The author doesn’t usually know what their contradictions are or why they are there, but if they put everything their conscious can give them down on paper, the person analyzing can use internal critique to tell them their contradictions while also locating the why – or trying to at least.
Page 10-11: Adorno -> the promise of autonomous subjectivity versus societal constraints.
This points to an unavoidable social fissure:
“Thus, society systematically produces normative demands internally connected, on the one hand, and social structures that necessarily frustrate these demands on the other”
I’m reminded of Rickert in the last chapter when he talks about Oedipalization/Deoedipalization. We can’t resolve this contradiction. Stahl’s use of Adorno seems to suggest that he understands this, but if he understands this, why such a huge emphasis on change?
Page 11: “[Immanent critique] means to say that there are normative potentials in social practices that extend beyond the normative beliefs of their members”
This would be a singular theory of reading!
Page 20: Here’s the most overt exposure of Stahl’s contradiction:
“Its ontology is thus one of social norms as constituted by authority attributions, its epistemology one of interpretive reconstruction of empirical behavior. It’s claim to enable the justification of critical demands towards a community finally is derived from the assumption that socially instituted commitments are prima facie reasons. Even though this assumption does not answer the question of what a critic is justified in demanding all things considered, it can still serve as an argument for the claim that immanent critique can uncover new normative resources that can be employed by critics that want to change the practices and beliefs of their fellow citizens or community members for the better”
He’s making it too easy, but I’m having trouble figuring out how to articulate his failure. I feel like I need the line from Levine that says “The objective of theoretical work is neither to ignore nor to present evidence, but to transcend it, in order that the concrete history, represented abstractly by the “data” can be grasped as a living reality” (Prologue, 19). Stahl is counting on humans to do something once confronted with their internal contradictions. He is expecting a resolution and is unable to accept the inevitability of the fissures. The first quote he uses from Marx shows this: “We shall not say: Abandon your struggles, they are mere folly; let us provide you with true campaign-slogans. Instead, we shall simply show the world why it is struggling, and consciousness of this is a thing it must acquire whether it wishes to or not” (1), along with his example of Adorno.
I think I need to start this by reflecting on Stahls piece. I’m struggling with wanting to distance myself from Stahl’s faith in “justice”, despite the fact that this need is still a part of me too. I find that usually my tolerance for people’s contradiction is higher when I don’t share the same contradiction. To put this in perspective, I’m thinking of Marieme’s offering and how aggressively I responded to her narrator. I felt that Sam had made her narrator into a heroine and as a result she was no longer responsible for her own isolation. My frustration with the narrator specifically was in her tone: as I read I got the impression that thought of herself as exceptional (which I liked), but also as a victim of other people’s limitations (which I hated). I felt as if Marieme’s narrator was attempting to place all of the blame for her own isolation on her family and this frustrated me because my narrator does the exact same thing. The violence or aggression in my reaction was not because I felt that I had a moral high ground but because I felt so similar: I want Marieme’s narrator to emerge from the tone so badly because I want to be able to do the same thing myself.
My tension with Stahl feels like tension in myself, and is partly due to the fact that I have yet to work out my own relationship to “justice” or “change”. I never really remember thinking: “I want to change the world”, but I do remember growing up thinking “It’s got to get better than this.” I always stayed away from formulating concrete opinions on things like capital punishment or torture and I think the older I got, the more the complexities of the world made it difficult to put my faith in notions of justice. But I’ve always believed in art. I’ve always believed in literature and music especially and I think that inevitably my faith in change has usually gravitated toward these vehicles. I’ve met people that are driven by uncrushed hope and they don’t really phase me: I’ve never been close enough to them to spark worry. Stahl has one foot in each door, and I think that’s why he pushed me so hard. I find relief in the tragic perspective because it takes some of the urgency away and allows me to do the work, but it doesn’t erase the urgency completely. Like Stahl I find myself trapped in the urgency to do something. Yelling at him while reading is both genuine and anxious: it’s me stopping myself for falling in love with Habernas. Stahl’s distinction between the individual and society is incredibly attractive because it allows for the individual to be both a victim and an agent of change at the same time. It also doesn’t require the individual to examine contradictions within themselves. Stahl, and critics like Stahl, can critique Capitalism without really wrestling with the parts of them that love capitalism. This world is both psychologically better and worse: worse because Stahl’s emphasis on justice and change counteracts his good faith in immanent critique, but good because his purpose for writing can be heroic. His use of immanent critique, and scholars/philosopher like Adorno, Hegel, and Marx lays out the inevitability of contradiction but his trust in Habernas and the division between humans and the structures they live in suggests that Stahl wants to believe that his psyche is free of ties to structure.
For my purposes, I think my frustration with education is what mirrors him most. On the one hand, I understand education’s limitations. Reading Alcorn and Rickert (Rickert especially) has given validity to my frustration, but my need to “fix” my classrooms hasn’t gone away. My freshman year I thought I would do so by working in the public-school system and eventually working on education reform at the state level. Even though I tend to adapt a tragic tone when discussing education, especially where I’m from, it is cloaking a desperate hope underneath. For a long time I didn’t include Ithaca College or higher education in general in my list of things that needed to change. Compared to my K-12 experience, Ithaca College felt like a magic place where thought and analysis was encouraged. The last two years have changed this perspective and I can’t pretend that I haven’t thought about what utopian education might look like. This project is first and foremost trying to work through/provide an explanation for why good reading is so hard to do, but it’s also hoping that when confronted with this clarity, academics will want to read better. It’s hoping that people will take my work as clarity rather than insult.
I don’t want to have one foot in and one foot out like Stahl. I feel like this is too safe. I want to jump fully into the tragic mode and be okay with sinking but my need to bring others with me proves that I’m not there yet.
What is Immanent Critique?
Titus Stahl
Page 1: Critique is limited if it is nothing more than a moral condemnation: “they accept that it is ot sufficient to approach social issues with a preconceived, normative standard that is justified independently of any examination of social practices in question”
Morality assumes a fixed condition. Critique based on conceptions of morality are weak as they are contingent on the time, space, and the reader upholding the same conceptions of morality.
Page 2: “Establishes that our society fails also on its own terms”
Like reading: use the logic of the society to show the failures of the society – use the logic of the narrator to reveal the contradictions of fissures of the narrator.
“An immanent critique of society is a critique which derives the standards It employs from the object criticized, that is, the society in question, rather than approaching that society with independently justified standards”
Yes! And the object criticized has its own norms and conceptions of morality
Rawls: “Because Rawls seems to assume that we should formulate basic principles of justice in a way that enables them to be used for evaluating all possible kinds of basic social structures without presupposing any such structure to be normatively privileged, his theory seems to entail that we must justify these normative principles (and thus, any critical claims building on them) without referring to the self-understanding of the norms of any particular social practice”
This practice would be useless because it is exactly the contradictions between the self-understanding and the normative principles that inform good internal critique. I’m also frustrated with the notion of “basic principles of justice”, as if this is a fixed condition.
Page 4: I’m confused by Stahl’s distinction between individual and societal, as the offerings in writing and criticism have shown me the unavoidable link between these two. It feels unnecessary to make this distinction because all individual actions are part of societal practices. This distinction feels linked somehow to the author’s insistence on ‘change’ throughout the piece. Dislocating the individual from society might mean that we could fix society without fixing ourselves.
“However, social critique very often does have this aim [change]”
This is also what Stahl wants as he states on page 6 that he doesn’t think internal critique goes far enough. Stahl seems as if he wants justice despite the fact that he’s already explained the problems with the word.
Page 4-5: “While people can engage in social critique for its own sake or to reach agreement with other observers of a social practice as to whether this practice should be condemned or not, social critics will most often not only refer to but also address those who either are engaged in the relevant practice or who have the capacity to change it. If this is the case, it does not suffice to describe the practice and to evaluate it according to the standard employed, the critique must also be directed in changing the practice in question so as to better conform to the standard”
I think I’m okay with this but am still uneasy. This feels like what economists might do: examine the ways in which the practice of capitalism is failing its ideological premises and then internally “fix” the problem to better align with the ideology. I think my discomfort comes from wanting to say “change might be possible, but complete conformity isn’t”. I think I need to wrestle with this more.
Page 5: “While such changes can be brought about by many different means, including manipulating the persons in question and changing their practices, social critique aims at effecting such changes by way of convincing its addresses to agree on the reliance of its guiding standard and, therefore, to take the failure of their practices to live up to this standard as a reason to change it”
Okay here is my actual discomfort in word choice. The use of manipulation versus convincing worries me. I want to say, “In what ways is convincing ever lacking manipulation” and also: “I find it difficult to swallow the idea that when confronted with critique, the object/subject/society would 1) accept the critique as real and valid and then 2) do anything to change themselves. Stahl is putting too much hope in social critique and I think this is partially because he began by distinguishing between the individual and the society.
“at some point the question becomes inevitable as to how we can distinguish between standards that are not only justified but in regard to which we can have a legitimate expectation that others should accept them and standards for which this is not the case”
Do I even bother reading Mein Kampf? Yes.
“This is especially true if the addressees of the critique have beliefs about norms and justificatory reasons which do not coincide with those of the critic”
Right, but can’t this problem be avoided if criticism is always done with the logic of the author/narrator? If everyone did good internal critique of something they hated then it wouldn’t matter if the justificatory reasons were the same or different.
Page 5-6: Stahl explicitely points to conceptions of ‘justice’ being problematic because they imply a fixed condition:
“For example, one could assume that the relevant standard for the social is that of justice and that the meaning of justice can be known as a result of a philosophical analysis – independently of its envisaged application – that always yields the same result when done correctly. The resulting form of criticism could be called an external critique, for the standard that is used is established independently of all particular social practices”
Here is my frustration. Despite the fact that Stahl acknowledges this as a weakness of external critique, he still finds himself frustrated that internal critique doesn’t do enough. It feels as if he’s misinterpreting the purpose or result of internal critique or critique in general. This guy has some serious uncrushed hope.
If an internal critique is looking for “justice”, is it really an internal critique? No!
Page 6: “One obvious way to do so is to take up the self-understanding of the members of the practice in question and to evaluate whether their actual behavior within the practice is compatible with that self-understanding”
Find out what the author is trying to say and then find out how they are saying the exact opposite. This is always happening, right? There is never a time in which an individual or society’s self-understanding is completely harmonious with their actual behavior. There are ALWAYS contradictions.
“Internal critique seems to claim too little”
Stahl wants the good feelings (like thinking about justice or ‘good’) that external critique gives him but knows they aren’t useful and so he wants to impose these good feelings on internal critique. He seems to be stuck in an anxiety about being unable to change things.
Stahl’s problem is that he is searching for success.
Page 7(paraphrased): 1) Figure out the author’s normative standard (but first figure out your own)
2) Uncover the multiple standards or the author (or society)
3) Show why we should care. Change behavior
Stahl doesn’t want to digest that changing behavior is impossible. This is his biggest fault throughout the piece. You can’t change, you can try and continue to engage in the critique process to fail better each time (offer – revise – offer – revise…)
Page 8-9: He is distinguishing between Marx and Hegel and I’m having trouble seeing the distinction.
Page 9: “Therefore, on Marx’s account, social practices should not be judged according to their self-conception, but rather according to the criterion of whether or not they are characterized by unresolved internal contradictions”
Aren’t self-conception and internal contradictions the same thing or at least self-conception is part of internal contradiction. Marx and Hegel seem to be in agreement rather than at odds with each other.
Page 10: “Social critique cannot rest content with just describing contradictions, but must always also aim at explaining them”
Isn’t this kind of what psychoanalysis does? The author doesn’t usually know what their contradictions are or why they are there, but if they put everything their conscious can give them down on paper, the person analyzing can use internal critique to tell them their contradictions while also locating the why – or trying to at least.
Page 10-11: Adorno -> the promise of autonomous subjectivity versus societal constraints.
This points to an unavoidable social fissure:
“Thus, society systematically produces normative demands internally connected, on the one hand, and social structures that necessarily frustrate these demands on the other”
I’m reminded of Rickert in the last chapter when he talks about Oedipalization/Deoedipalization. We can’t resolve this contradiction. Stahl’s use of Adorno seems to suggest that he understands this, but if he understands this, why such a huge emphasis on change?
Page 11: “[Immanent critique] means to say that there are normative potentials in social practices that extend beyond the normative beliefs of their members”
This would be a singular theory of reading!
Page 20: Here’s the most overt exposure of Stahl’s contradiction:
“Its ontology is thus one of social norms as constituted by authority attributions, its epistemology one of interpretive reconstruction of empirical behavior. It’s claim to enable the justification of critical demands towards a community finally is derived from the assumption that socially instituted commitments are prima facie reasons. Even though this assumption does not answer the question of what a critic is justified in demanding all things considered, it can still serve as an argument for the claim that immanent critique can uncover new normative resources that can be employed by critics that want to change the practices and beliefs of their fellow citizens or community members for the better”
He’s making it too easy, but I’m having trouble figuring out how to articulate his failure. I feel like I need the line from Levine that says “The objective of theoretical work is neither to ignore nor to present evidence, but to transcend it, in order that the concrete history, represented abstractly by the “data” can be grasped as a living reality” (Prologue, 19). Stahl is counting on humans to do something once confronted with their internal contradictions. He is expecting a resolution and is unable to accept the inevitability of the fissures. The first quote he uses from Marx shows this: “We shall not say: Abandon your struggles, they are mere folly; let us provide you with true campaign-slogans. Instead, we shall simply show the world why it is struggling, and consciousness of this is a thing it must acquire whether it wishes to or not” (1), along with his example of Adorno.
Page 400: [1] “The chief defect of all previous materialism (including Feuerbach’s) is that the object, actuality, sensuousness is conceived only in the form of the object or perception but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectivity”
Previous materialism assumes that there’s a difference between the object as real and as it’s perceived.
“Feuerbach wants sensuous objects actually different from thought objects; but he does not comprehend human activity itself as objective”
The split between object and perception is something I’ve wrestled with because I think it leads to an tension between the sciences and the humanities. My science major friends want to believe that “good science” is without human error, and that human subjectivity is bad and needs to be erased. I’m drawn to two metaphors. The first is the one used in Pin-fat’s Dissolutions of Self about the bowl of water being extracted from the stream. Science wishes to examine objects without human error but does not want to believe that the second an object is examined or even thought about by the human it is changed. The second metaphor is from Understanding Capitalism when we discussed the relation between language and objects: specifically, language as being like a map.
If we allow ourselves to distinguish between “objective objects” and human subjectivities” we can then draw a line isolating theory from “practice” which is exactly what too many people do. What is the stake in drawing this line? And what do we lose/gain by blurring it?
(401) [2] “The question whether human thinking can reach objective truth – is not a question of theory but a practical question. In practice man must prove the truth, that is, actuality and power, this sidedness of his thinking. The dispute about actuality or non-actuality of thinking – thinking isolated from practice – is a purely scholastic question”
Again, we make the division, but theory cannot escape practice and practice cannot escape theory. I’m still thinking of the metaphor as language being a map: It doesn’t matter if the real exists independent of my ability to explain it because I can only know the object through language whether the language is verbal or body language so lets accept this limitation and move on.
[3] “The materialistic doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated”
This means that it’s kind of impossible to throw everything we know out the window and create something new. This is altering the way I think about revolution: Revolution must be necessarily imbedded in tradition
“Hence this doctrine must divide society into two points – one of which towers above”
All of this together creates a new world. I was talking to Isabella Grullon and Celisa Calacal the other day and they were joking that they were going to move to Europe and preach anti-imperialism. In my train of thought I said “Isn’t preaching anti-imperialism a just another form of imperialism?” Isabella told me that since their teachings were against the current structure, that what they wanted to do was revolution rather than imperialism. As I read this I think there is no elimination of imperialism even through revolution, there’s just better imperialism.
“The coincidence of the change of circumstances and of human activity or self-change can be comprehended and rationally understood only as a revolutionary practice”
The word coincidence is what gets me here. I think specifically of “the box” talked about constantly in Understanding Capitalism. I’m not sure what to do with “revolutionary practice” though – There seems to be tension in this sentence. On the one hand, revolutionary practice feels full of intention, on the other, it is bound by coincidence.
401: [4] “[Feuerbach’s] work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. But the fact that the secular basis becomes separate from itself and establishes an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavage and self-contradictoriness of the secular basis”
There’s something lacking/conflicting in the secular world that pushes for the creation of religion. We have to understand that the creation of something new can be both understood as contradiction and as revolution – I guess what I’m pushing against is the idea that anything is resolved by this. The secular society doesn’t go away in the presence of a new religious one.
“For instance, after the earthly family is found to be the secret of the holy family the former must then be theoretically and practically nullified”
This doesn’t feel right. Unless the translation goes like this: “When the religious society realizes that the existence of heaven or higher beings is contingent on their belief rather than the real existence of God(s), in order to preserve the existence of the higher being they make themselves invalid”
[5] “Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants perception; but he does not comprehend sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity”
Sensuousness meaning body knowledge? I’m getting Marx as saying, body knowledge is human activity, language is human activity, all of these are part of real human activity.
402: [6] “Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the essence of man is o abstraction inhering in each single individual. In its actuality it is the ensemble of social relations”
We are our relations with others. We aren’t a singular relation. If we were, then identity politics might make more sense/be more useful.
[6] “Feuerbach, who does not go into the criticism of this actual essence, is hence compelled to 1. To abstract from the historical process and to establish religious feeling as something self-contained, and to presuppose an abstract – isolated – human individual; 2. To view the essence of man merely as “species,” as the inner, dumb generality which unites the many individuals naturally.”
Translation: Feuerbach 1) sees religion as intrinsic to human consciousness rather than social practice and therefore assumes that man as an individual has a particular essence abstracted from society and 2) sees only man’s animalism as uniting. In other words, man’s actions without consciousness (Feuerbach includes religion in this) relate him to others and his consciousness is what makes him the individual. His consciousness is his rather than his relations with others.
[7] “Feuerbach does not see, consequently, that “religious feeling” is itself a social product and that the abstract individual he analyses belongs to a particular form of society”
Marx does a reversal of number 6. He locates what Feuerbach views as “natural” as societal.
[8] “All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and the comprehension of their practice”
Theory = practice. But what is the danger in assuming they’re different? (Constantly find myself returning to the bowl of water from the stream). Is it not dangerous to view practice as real and theory as imaginary or mystical? I understand that this is not what Marx is doing, but he does take a bitter tone with the German theorists who distance themselves from “reality”. I find myself doing the same thing to scientists who want to distance themselves from or even discredit theory.
[9] “The highest point attained by perceptual materialism, that is, materialism that does not comprehend sensuousness as practical activity, is the view of separate individuals and civil society”
Limitation: eliminating body knowledge allows us to distance ourselves as individuals from societal problems.
Question: How?
Answer: Sensuousness is for the individual: touching, feeling sensing. If this is not accepted as valid practical knowledge then we look for knowledge outside of ourselves
Ex: Look to Chemistry to give us cures for diseases that are chemical/physical rather than…spiritual? Mental? (not sure what would go here).
Or, test things in nature as if our interactions with it haven’t changed it at all.
Question: Why discredit sensuousness?
Answer: I’m not sure, but it might have something to do with worrying that changing external objects rely on internal changes. We don’t want to change – we can’t change. So let’s treat our body, our society, our world as if our individual essences are separate from them.
This feels similar to the bias against autobiography that you (Naeem) talk about in Flow. Once we separate ourselves from our work, our work becomes potentially inconsequential (or at least that’s the worry), and this worry keeps us separated and keeps us invalidating body knowledge/individual experience (which is what good autobiography tries to capture I think).
[10] “The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society or socialized humanity”
What? Is Feuerbach old and Marx new? This confuses me…
[11] “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is, to change it”
I feel uneasy with this. On the one hand I want to be with the philosophers, on the other, I want to be with Marx.
Preface
405: “A clever fellow once go this idea that people drown because they are possessed by the idea of gravity. If they would get this notion out of their heads by seeing it as a religious superstition, they would be completely safe from the dangers of the water. For his entire life, he fought against the illusion of gravity while all statistics gave him new and abundant evidence of its harmful effects. This kind of fellow is typical for the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany”
The first time I read this preface I thought Marx was criticizing Hegelians who read Hegel for change, but I’m now realizing that he is criticizing Hegelians who divorce theory from reality. In the same way that it’s unproductive to separate science from theory, it is equally unproductive to not believe in practical reality at all. There are physical limitations and causes.
Ideology in general, particularly German ideology
406: “All of [German philosophy’s] inquiries were based on one philosophical system, that of Hegel’s…The dependence on Hegel is the reason why none of these modern critics ever attempted a comprehensive criticism of the Hegelian system”
Dependency – being too close or zoomed in. I’m thinking about bad reading in this way: If someone is dependent on another, they are not able to grasp the totality or the essence of the other because they are feeding off every line, every thought for their own life.
406-407: “In the beginning they took up pure and unfalsified Hegelian categories such as “Substance” or “Self-consciousness.” Later they desecrated such categories by giving them more mundane names such as “Species,” “the Universe,” “Man,” etc.”
Marx is accusing the German philosophers of not reading holistically. Immanent critique requires this. I’m thinking of Buchwalter’s differentiation between the internal critiques that choose small inconsequential points rather than the larger essence of a society: This also reminds me of Asma’s chapter on hermeneutics in the “Believing Women” book. *(go back to this later)
407: “Gradually every dominant relationship was held to be religious and made into a cult, such as the cult of law, the cult of state, etc. Eventually there was nothing but dogmas and belief in dogmas”
Use of the text as a security blanket. These philosophers are infusing their biases into the text. If the philosopher [reader] goes directly to analysis, their biases and judgements and needs will overthrow the text and the text will become only a vessel for the reader’s purposes.
“The Old Hegelians comprehended everything once they reduced it to a logical category. The Young Hegelians criticized everything by imputing religious conceptions to it or declaring everything to be theological”
Yes!
“Since the Young Hegelians regard concepts, theories, ideas, and all products of consciousness, to which they give independent existence, as the real fetters of man – while the Old Hegelians pronounced them the true bonds of human society – it is obvious that the young Hegelians have to fight only with illusions of the consciousness”
The Young Hegelians have minimized Hegel to only the relationship within the individual’s self-consciousness which means that their problems/solutions don’t give any attention to society.
“In the Young Hegelians’ fantasies the relationships of men and their actions, their chains, and their limitations are all products of their consciousness”
Complete erasure of society and affirmation of the individual only. This is reading/working for a particular and narrow purpose rather than reading/working for the work itself. They are blocking themselves from internal critique by ignoring what Marx sees as real human existence.
408: “Not one of the philosophers thought to look into the connection between German philosophy and German reality, between their criticism and their own material environment”
I’m thinking that the connection between theory and “real material environment” also helps bridge the gap between what is seen as the individual and society. The German philosophers are separating the layers and then claiming one layer to be the absolute truth. They do not want to engage in “flow”.
Ideology in general, especially German philosophy
408: Moving from history of nature (man – nature) to history of man (man – man)
“But we will have to discuss the history of man, since almost all ideology amounts to either a distorted interpretation of this history or a complete abstraction from it. Ideology itself is only one of the sides of history”
This is where history gets its limit from. It’s not that history itself is biased, it’s that history as we know it is, as it is only retold through particular ideologies (and we are all necessarily fastened to ideology, right?)
409: “The first historical act of those individuals, the act by which they distinguish themselves from animals is not the fact that they think but that they begin to produce their means of subsistence”
This is the key and Marx’s connection to the “real” or what he means by “real human activity” I think. He’s saying here that consciousness as the philosophers understand it isn’t what makes us human but instead the nature of our labor is what makes us human.
“These relationships affect not only the original and natural organization of men, especially as to race, but also his entire further development or non-development up to the present”
This threw me off because it sent me back to Freshman year reading Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations”. Also, language of development is still how we speak in the world today “developed versus underdeveloped countries”. I think I need to remind myself here that Marx isn’t saying that racism hierarchy or racism is intrinsic or natural, but instead is locating it in material conditions. I think.
“Man can be distinguished from the animal by consciousness, religion, or anything you please. He begins to distinguish himself from the animal the moment he begins to produce his means of subsistence, a step that is required by his physical organization”
Production IS intrinsically tied to social, political and economic structures. This I think I like.
“This mode of production must not be viewed simply as reproduction of the physical existence of individuals. Rather it is a definite form of their activity, a definite way of expressing their life, a definite mode of life. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with what they produce and how they produce.”
This feels like the clarification I needed. It also seems like a universal rule: we can always understand the essence of human life based on the mode of production and its relation to labor.
410: Inter/Intra-national relations;
“The relations of various nations with one another depend upon the extent to which each of them has developed its productive forces, the division of labor, and domestic commerce…But not only the relation of one nation to others, but also the entire stage of development achieved by its production and its domestic and international commerce”
This is so cool to me. I’m thinking about the day in Understanding Capitalism when relations between the “first world and the “third world” were compared to domestic relations between “rich states” and “poor states”. I think seeing the way the same things/relations are happening at every level makes it more difficult to understand the world linearly. Domestic politics aren’t just domestic politics anymore, international relations aren’t just international relations.
410-411 (Paraphrased) Stages of Development
1st: The tribal stage: undeveloped, hunting/gathering societies à primitive agricultural societies
Division of labor: “…natural division of labor in the family…” “The social structure thus is limited to an extension of the family: patriarchal family chieftains, below them the members of the tribe, finally the slaves”
On the one hand, reading this is painful because the use of the world “natural” makes me want to scream because in my head it feels as if he is equating this order with a natural order and on the other hand I’m telling myself to calm down because he’s also explaining how this dynamic is linked to the mode of production.
2nd: Ancient Communal and State Ownership
411: “Union of several tribes into a city by agreement or by conquest”
“Alongside communal ownership there already develops movable, and later even immovable, private property, but as an abnormal form subordinate to communal ownership”
So Masters are still accountable for communal interest. Marx also writes that antagonisms in this world are between the town and the country, or within cities between industry and mariners.
3rd: Feudal/Estate Ownership
412: The middle ages in Europe are sprung from the country due to scarce population (I’m assuming because disease is killing everyone)
“As soon as feudalism is fully developed, there also emerges antagonism to the towns. The hierarchical system of land ownership and the armed bodies of retainers gave the nobility power over the surfs”
This is sort of the same tension that exists in modern capitalists as well, right? The worker doesn’t have ownership over the goods he produces, it goes directly to the capitalists.
413: Rise of Guilds
The hierarchy of the lord to the serf is again seen in the relationship between the master and the apprentice. The system works on all levels.
“The strip-system hindered such a division in agriculture; and in industry there was no division of labor at all within particular trades, and very little among them.”
This would be because craftsmen would be responsible for the entire creation of the product. A potter makes the entire pot, the tasks hadn’t been broken down yet and so everything was artisanal labor.
“The fact is, then, that definite individuals who are productively active in a specific way enter into these definite social and political relations”
Little mobility. Changing your position or class or occupation is relatively impossible. Your skill is everything you have
414: “The ideas which these individuals form are ideas either about their relation to nature, their mutual relations, or their own nature”
This brings me back to your comments on my final for writing and criticism about Reading. All objects are about relations and all of our ideas are about objects and relations.
Marx goes from the bottom up:
“In direct contrast to the German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here one ascends from earth to heaven.”
Man doesn’t begin at consciousness, he begins at his labor.
414-415: “In other words, to arrive at man in the flesh, one does not set out from what men say, or conceive, nor from man as he is described, thought about imagined or conceived. Rather one sets out from the real, active man and their actual life-process and demonstrates the development of ideological reflexes and echoes of that process”
This is why we say so often in Writing and Criticism “Show me don’t tell me”. We don’t trust the narrator to always come to their own conclusions, yet at the same time we want the narrator to tell us, we want to listen to how they describe themselves or what they say or is said about them. It’s one of the reasons people react so aggressively towards the Dunn piece. They want something from the narrator so they can either dismiss him as looking for a pat on the back, or reward him for overcoming his racism. Instead he only shows us and leaves us to wrestle with his contradiction.
415: “Consciousness does not determine life, but life determines consciousness”
I love this mostly because it’s such a neat and clean sentence.
Feuerbach
416: “practical materialist, that is, the communist”
I extracted this clause because I needed to understand it better. Communism sees the relation or contradictions between “real” man (his action and labor) and theory (man’s conscious or essence) and seeks to resolve them.
416-417: “Feuerbach’s mistake is not that he subordinates the flatly obvious, the sensuous appearance, to the sensuous reality established by close examination of the sensuous facts, but that he cannot, after all, cope with sensuousness except by looking at it with the eyes, that is, through the “eyeglasses” of the philosopher. To remove this disturbance, he must take refuge in a dual perception: a profane one which apprehends only the “flatly obvious and a higher philosophical one which gets at the “true essence” of things”
Here’s the need for separation -> Why don’t we want to think that an object/person’s “true essence” can be found in its real or earthly action? If sensuousness is located in the real, what happens” What are the stakes? Vulnerability? Intimacy? Self-critique?
417: “Even the objects of the simplest “sensuous certainty” are given to him through social development, industry, and communal relationships”
While the German philosophers need to keep an arm’s length between reality and theory so their ideas can stay safe in the realm of theory only, Marx needs to engage with both. Exploring the relations and activity of the object grounds the objects’ activity in their material relations rather than individual consciousness. This feels like what we do with autobiography. The narrator writes the story based on actions, conversations, thoughts, and the reader locates the contradictions in the authors writing and then locates the contradictions in the narrator’s interactions with objects and people (the parents, the friends, the significant other, the teddy bear) in order to examine the narrator not as a unique individual but as the result of time, space, politics, economics, etc.
417: “For example, the important question of the relation of man to nature from which all of the “unfathomably lofty works” on “Substance” and “Self-consciousness” were born, collapses when we understand that the celebrated “unity of man with nature” has always existed in in industry in varying forms in every epoch according to the lesser or greater development of industry, just like the “struggle” or man with nature, right up to the development of his productive forces on a corresponding basis”
Industry IS man’s relation to nature. Man cannot/does not know nature as “pure”. Thoreau and Emmerson thought they were experiencing their place in nature going into the woods outside of their house and that this interaction was doing something that industry wasn’t but they misinterpreted what their relation to nature is.
418: “But where would natural science be without industry and commerce?”
This question is in the middle of a longer paragraph about natural science and I loved reading it. It was satisfying: an internal critique of environmentalist righteousness. On the one hand, I want to through this in the faces of the people in environmental studies that swear that Capitalism is evil and needs to be taken down. “Capitalism is the only reason you’re here studying environmental science!” (Jasmine’s take down of Mike in Theories of Exploitation…I wasn’t there but I heard all about it). On the other hand, I wonder what the need for the self-deception is. Why do these fields so often need to believe that they are separate from industry or from capitalism?
“And after all, the kind of nature that preceded human history is by no means the nature in which Feuerbach lives”
It CAN’T be. This is where the Transcendentalists got it wrong. They thought they were sitting in the wilderness but they were actually just sitting in their back yards.
“Feuerbach admittedly has a great advantage over the “pure” materialists because he realizes that man too is a “sensuous object”, but he sees man only as “sensuous object,” not as “sensuous activity,” because he remains in the realm of theory ad does not view men in their given social connection, not under their existing conditions of life which have made them what they are”
What do the scales look like though? To what extend to we shape the social conditions and to what extent do the social conditions shape us?
419: “When [Feuerbach] sees, for example, a crowd of scrofulous, over worked, and consumptive wretches instead of healthy men, he Is compelled to take refuge in the “higher perception” and “ideal compensation of the species”. Thus he relapses into idealism of the very point where the communist materialist sees the necessity and at the same time the condition of transforming industry as well as the social structure.”
I understand this distinction: Living only in the world of theory has no urgency as it works to find justification or explanation for everything. Marx wants movement or motivation or something more tangible. I think I’m stuck on 1) what does this transformation look like to him and 2) who is he holding accountable to change it? The philosophers? The Capitalists? The Laborers? Everybody?
History
(419) “…men must be able to live in order “to make history.” But life involves above all eating and drinking, shelter, clothing, and many more other things”
This stuff feels like history: the way we eat and drink and find/build shelter and wear or make clothing. The basic stuff (economic rights?) are our history.
“The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of the life itself”
This is also why we organize ourselves in groups: I’m thinking back to the Sahlin’s hunting and gathering piece: If we were each responsible for these things on our own, or if the division of labor was that minimal, we would spend the entirety of our days working to provide ourselves with just the basic needs.
(420) Paraphrased: The Germans refuse history completely for theory. Marx notes that the French and the English do include history but that it is one sided:
“[The French and English} nevertheless made the first attempts to give historiography a materialistic basis by writing histories of civil society, commerce, and industry”
“The second point is that once a need is satisfied and the acquisition of the instrument for this purpose, new needs arrive. The production of new needs is the first historical act”
Okay this is what he meant when he talked about humans being different from animals. If humans were only satisfying basic needs and not producing for themselves new needs, they would be like every other animal just living off of the earth for their sustenance. The fact that in their production of basic needs create new needs is what makes them different.
“The third circumstance entering into historical development from the very beginning is the fact that men who daily remake their own lives begin to make other men”
This one was tricky to me: from how I understand it we remake ourselves through our labor. Is this because we keep ourselves alive and evolving through our labor?
“The family, initially the only social relationship, becomes later a subordinate social relationship when increased needs produced new social relations and an increased population creates new needs”
The word “subordinate” is definitely hard for me to process. The new social relationships would be those attached to the work place or the community. Is there potential danger when families don’t allow this to happen? I’m thinking of “The First Bond” chapter in Benjamins book where she talks about the importance of the mother not existing only in and through her child. This feels close to home. Children born into families that insist that families are everything are traumatized when they eventually encounter the rest of the world because the rest of the world doesn’t work this way.
421: “The production of life, of one’s own life in labor, and of another in procreation, now appears as a double relationship: one the one hand as a natural relationship, on the other as a social one.
Both labor and sex are natural and social relationships at the same time.
The other thing I’m thinking about is that Marx is showing the ways in which all forms of interaction change based on history (mode of production). In the same way that political/economic/social systems change, does our relation to sex also change? Answer: of course. Question: How?
“Having considered four moments, four aspects of the primary historical relationships, we now find that man possesses a “consciousness””
Marx is showing the ways in which material reality creates consciousness rather than the other way around. This is a reversal of the German philosophers
421-422: “[Language] is practical consciousness which exists also for other men and hence exists for me personally as well. Language, like consciousness, only arises from my need and necessity of relationships with other men. ((My relationship to my surroundings is my consciousness))”
Language is the way we express ourselves as conscious beings to other men, consciousness is internal in our thoughts, and external in our inter(actions) with our surroundings.
(Surroundings = objects = labor = relations)
(Surroundings = people = relations)
423: “The only result we obtain from all such muck is that these three moments – the force of production, the state of society, and consciousness, - can come into conflict with one another because the division of labor implies the possibility, indeed the necessity, that intellectual and material activity and material thought – enjoyment of labor, production and consumption – are given to different individuals and the only possibility of their not coming into conflict lies in again transcending the division of labor”
All of our contradictions – internal, familial, societal, national, global – are inevitable as long as the division of labor exists. This is where the push for communism comes. I guess I’m skeptical because I wonder: if what Marx is saying is true, how possible is it to actually “transcend the division of labor” if these essential contradictions are also essential parts of our being. I’m skeptical of a world in which humans might be at peace with themselves: this is what he seems to be asking: at the same time that he connects the levels (the individual, the familial, the societal), he also asks for the change to take place on every level.
424: “With the division of labor in which all these conflicts are implicit and which is based on the natural division of labor in the family and the partition of society into individual families opposing one another, there is at the same time distribution, indeed unequal distribution, both quantitative and qualitative, of labor and its products, hence property which has its first form, its nucleus, in the family where wife and children our slaves to the man”
The division of labor creates exploitation as an inevitability or at the very least “power of controlling the labor of others”. This is why we feel conflicted about capitalism: On the one hand we don’t want to exploit people, on the other we really want to exploit people so that we don’t have to make our own clothes or food or technology.
“The communal interest doesn’t exist only in the imagination, as something “general,” but first of all in reality, as a mutual interdependence of those individuals among whom the work is divided”
The word mutual is what gets me here. Mutual need and therefore consent in the division of labor. As he continues in this paragraph, he notes that the mutuality doesn’t mean that the labor and communal obligation doesn’t feel alien or oppressive. Contradiction: On the one hand we need and participate in Capitalism (at every level), on the other, the nature of Capitalism makes it a necessary participation (forced choice).
“For as soon as labor is distributed, each person has a particular, exclusive area of activity which is imposed on him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and he must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood”
Two things. The first is the emphasis on individuation: Capitalism asks the laborer to individuate themselves, but the only way they can do so is by becoming their labor (at the lower end of the economic latter it looks like this “trade = identity”, at the middle or upper end it can look more like “art = identity). The second thing is the based on what we see now: industrial jobs have been leaving or are currently leaving the US, leaving less opportunity for factory workers here to find work. There’s been a push to for retraining, but I wonder if the upset over exporting labor to other countries isn’t just about income, if it isn’t also about identity.
424-425: “In communist society, however, where nobody has an exclusive area of activity and each can train himself in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production, making it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, breed cattle in the evening, critique after dinner, just as I like, without ever becoming a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critic”
Freedom from identity or pressure to individuate the self creates a freedom TO create. Part of me loves this, part of me is scared of this.
425: Paraphrased: The state is division of labor on a large scale:
“…all struggles within the state, the struggle between democracy, aristocracy, monarchy, the struggle for franchise, etc. etc. are nothing but illusory forms in which the real struggles of different classes are carried out among one another”
State is just a larger version of tensions of division of labor like the ones seen in the family. I love this: This is why autobiography should be important/why we shouldn’t analyze the state as if it is separate from us.
426: “Communism is for us not a state of affairs still to be established, not an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of affairs. The conditions of this movement result from premises now in existence”
How does this work? In a way, communist revolution can’t be kick started from anything other than capitalism running its course or exceeding its own capacity. Capitalism has to bring us to the point in which humans are no longer responsible for basic needs (robot utopia?)
427: Capitalism has to become intolerable (an intolerable power), without patience for this:
“1) communism could only exist locally; 2) the forces of interaction themselves could not have developed as universal and thus intolerable powers, but would have remained homebred, superstitious “conditions”; 3) any extension of interaction would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of dominant peoples, “all at once””
This is the part that many people who read Marx ignores. As I read this I thought “he tells you exactly what the limitations are, how do people miss this?” It’s imbedded in everything else as well, but here it’s written so plainly. My thoughts are people who want Marx to be even faster wouldn’t read this, and even if they came across it they would convince themselves that the conditions for communist revolution could be spurred by a superficial one.
Communism
427-428: “…labor power on a mass scale cut off from capital or even limited satisfaction, and hence no longer just deprived of work as a secure sense of life – presupposes a world market through competition”
Labor power is universal in time and space: it is the end all/be all. But the world market I a historical thing, and therefore labor’s relation to world history is not fixed.
428: “The form of interaction determined by and in determining the existing productive forces at all previous historical stages is civil society”
We, humans, are the variable, but as much as we act on our history, our history also acts on us (and vice versa). This entire chapter keeps bringing me back to Rickert: we always have a decision to make but never enough information to actually make a decision and because of that everything is a forced choice. Recognizing this doesn’t mean you stop making decisions because you can’t. I guess my question would be: what’s the ratio? How much are we shaping history versus how much is history shaping us? Or does it matter?
“History is nothing but the succession of separate generations, each of which exploits the material, capital, and productive forces handed down to it by generations. On the one hand, it thus continues the traditional activity in completely changed circumstances and, on the other, modifies the old circumstances of a completely changed activity”
Change but also sameness. This is how change happens, but knowing this how is it that Marx puts so much confidence in communist revolution?
428-429: “The further the separate spheres that interact on one another extend in the course of this development, the more the original isolation of separate nationalities is destroyed by the developed mode of production, commerce, and division of labor between various nations naturally brought forth by these and the more does history become world history”
This is a project of capitalism (or how today in our politics classes we say “globalization instead”), but also a project of empire or imperialism. Anti-imperialist always say that they wish to return to what a region was like before it was colonized or effected by imperialism, but what they really mean to say is “We don’t want anything to change, we want you to be part of the global capitalist order, we just want your people to be in charge so that it looks better”. Return is not possible. In reading group, we are reading “The Intimate Enemy” by Ashis Nandi and I get the sense that this is what is being talked about. After reading the first 30 pages or so we talked about the desire to “go back”, even though music and food and clothing and everything becomes a hybrid.
429: “Hence the transformation of history into world history is not a more abstract act of the “Self-consciousness,” the world spirit, or of any other metaphysical specter but a completely natural, empirically verifiable act, an act for which every individual furnishes proof as he goes, eats drinks, and clothes himself”
The music we listen to, the clothes we wear, the food we eat….
On the Production of Consciousness
“In history up to the present it is constantly an empirical fact that separate individuals, at the broadening of their activity into world-historical activity, have become more and more enslaved by a power alien to them, a power which has become increasingly great and finally turns out to be in the world market”
Of course, this makes sense. As the market expands, as does the division of labor. The laborer finds himself farther and farther away from the product he is producing and/or the boss he is serving
Marx claims that the elimination of private property after communist revolution will solve this alienation.
Question: How?
Answer: Production and labor will not be for the market it will be for the self? I’m not sure about this…
430: “In the development of productive forces there comes a stage when productive forces and means of interaction are achieved which under existing relationships cause nothing but mischief and are no longer productive forces but rather destructive ones (machinery and money). Connected with this is a class which has to bear all the burdens of society without engaging its advantages”
Again, I’m having trouble with this. NONE of its advantages? I feel like my hesitancy is that disadvantages are certainly there and in abundance especially for the lower classes, and for me it’s easy to laugh at the irony that a lot of the same people who believe in the American dream or meritocracy are the ones disadvantaged – but still frustrated. Whether or not Marx is right almost doesn’t matter, because people fully believe in the system that disadvantages them. People don’t want communism, they want to be rich, and as a result they throw their trust behind Capitalism because it tells them that through (hard work?) (chance?) they can make their dreams come true.
“The conditions under which definite productive forces can be applied are the conditions of the rule of a definite class of society whose social power, deriving from its property, has its practical-idealistic expression in the form of the state as it happens to exist then”
The ruling class is always going to be those who control property. Nobles under feudalism, the capitalists under capitalism.
430-431: “A revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way but also because the class overthrowing it can succeed only by revolution in getting rid of all the traditional muck and be capable of establishing society anew”
But to what extent is the proletariat part of the “muck”? To what extent do poor people consent to being poor BECAUSE they believe that the system might allow them to be rich some day? I feel like while what Marx is saying here makes sense to me, while at one point he acknowledges the malleability of who can be in the ruling class, still relies on a fixed proletariat. Wouldn’t this revolution need come from the people who have the power? Wouldn’t the capitalist have to be caught in their own contradiction in order for the system to change?
432: “It shows that history does not end by being resolved into “Self-consciousness” as “spirit of the Spirit” but that there is a material result at each historical stage, a sum of productive forces, a historically created relation of individuals to nature and to one another which is handed down to each generation from its predecessor – a mass of productive forces, capital funds and conditions which on the one hand also prescribes its conditions of life, giving it a definite development and special character”
I am reminded of the day in Understanding Capitalism when we did the lightening round “Would you rather the state be your master or the market” and Catherine added that she, as a consumer, is a master of the market. Both can be true, and neither – the problem seems to be that the actual ability to choose increases in relation to how much money you have. Ex: I can choose to buy stuff from Patagonia because I view them as being a “good” corporation but only so long as I have $100+ to shell out on a jacket. In other words, the less you have, the more your conditions of life feel more like a forced choice. I can’t remember exactly why this thought was sparked by paragraph….
432: “If these material elements of total revolution are not present (namely, the existing productive forces on the one hand and the formation of a revolutionary mass on the other, a mass which revolts not just against the particular of the prevailing society but against the prevailing “production of life” itself, the “total activity” on which it was based) then it is absolutely immaterial, so far as practical development is concerned whether the idea of this revolution has already been expressed a hundred times, as the history of communism proves”
Marx is in essence asking for the majority of society to do an immanent critique of it/themselves. If capitalism was ONLY our political/economic mode this might be possible, but he has shown us how it is also our personal, familial, sexual, and social mode. It’s internal. It is a body rather than a car – he’s asking for the majority (of the world?) to resolve their contradictions: to annihilate themselves.
432-433: “In the whole conception of history up to the present this actual basis of history has been either totally neglected or considered as a minor matter irrelevant to the course of history. Thus history must always be written according to an extraneous standard. The actual production of life appears as something unhistorical, while the historical appears as something separated from ordinary life, something extra-superterrestrial”
Perhaps not viewing the ordinary as history is a way to distance ourselves: in excluding the ordinary we remove ourselves as actors. This might be part of the reason we aren’t comfortable reading Merze Tate (or perhaps even Ashis Nandy and autobiography more generally). We say that it’s boring or that we can’t find ourselves in it, but maybe it’s actually the opposite: They show us the mundane, the every-day, and as a result we find ourselves in every character (In the colonizer as well as the colonized).
434-435: “[The Germans] forget all other nations, all real events, and the theatrum mundi is confined to the Leipzig Book Fair and the mutual quarrels of “criticism,” “Man,” and the “Unique.” When the theorists attempt to treat really historical subjects, as for example the eighteenth century, they merely give a history of the ideas of the times, torn away from the facts and practical developments fundamental to them”
I find myself doing what the Germans do. Story: I was at reading group, and Sam Boyles mentioned Lacan in his office talking to patients. I stopped him and said “Woah, it’s so weird for me to think of Lacan as a practicing psychiatrist or as a real person. I realized that I only wat to think of the theorists we talk about as theorists: sitting at a desk writing. I don’t want to think about Marx engaging in politics or economics.
Question: Why?
Answer: Self-preservation?
Question: What’s at stake?
Answer: I want their ideas to be pure – I want the writing without the external influence or contradiction. I think it’s the same for Professors. It’s easier for me to compartmentalize if I only think of my professors as in their offices or in the classroom. The minute they also become a mother, a father, a practitioner, an activist, I worry that that somehow those obligations are complicating their work. I think this worry is partly because I worry so much about distinguishing my work from myself.
437: “Nor will we explain to them [the German philosophers] that real liberation can be achieved only in the real world and with real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam engine and the spinning jenny, that serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that people on the whole cannot be liberated so long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, shelter and clothing in adequate quality and quantity”
This is why we need capitalism, right? Because capitalism makes the goods and the machines that make the goods so that eventually we won’t need to exploit people for the basic necessities (again, robot utopia?)
440: “When the French bourgeoisie overthrow the power of the aristocracy, it permitted many proletarians to raise themselves above the proletariat, but only insofar as they became bourgeois. Every new class, therefore, achieves dominance only on a broader basis than that of the previous class ruling, whereas the opposition of the non-ruling class later develops all the more sharply and deeply”
Protest, or even revolution changes the people in charge and addresses the particular grievances held under the former ruling class, therefore strengthening the structure rather than changing it. I’m thinking specifically about people at IC protesting Tom Rochon. A lot of them thought that the success of the protest was getting him to resign because it changed the structure, but really it just made the structure stronger: Shirley Collado checks all the boxes, she addresses the particular grievances (race, diversity), but doesn’t address the problems with the structures of the college.
440: “When ruling ideas are separated from ruling individuals and above all from relationships resulting from a given level of the mode of production and the conclusion has been reached that ideas are always ruling history…”
I stopped in the middle of this quote because I find that we often confuse the people with the ideas that put the people in power. If this distinction could be made AND we could also find where these ideas are located in our minds and bodies, then maybe we could prepare ourselves for the communist revolution. The problem seems to be that we want to pretend like the “evil ideas or ideologies” of the capitalists are not in us and so we hate them so that we don’t have to hate ourselves.
Division of Labor
442: Bear with me this paragraph is long:
“In the first case, with the natural instrument of production, individuals are subservient to nature; in the second, to a product of labor. In the first case, property (landed property) appears as direct natural domination; in the second, as domination of labor, particularly of accumulated labor, capital. The first case presupposes that the individuals are united by some bond: family, tribe, the land itself, etc. The second case presupposes that they are independent of one another and are only held together by exchange. In the first case, the exchange is mainly an exchange between men and nature in which the labor of men is exchanged for the products of nature; in the second, it is predominantly an exchange of men among themselves. In the first case, average human common sense suffices; physical activity is not as yet separated from mental actual labor already must be practically completed. In the first case, the domination of the proprietor over non-proprietors may be based on a personal relationship or kind of community; in the second, it must have taken on physical shape in a third party: money…”
I think I see this and I think “These all of these things happen at the same time (the first and the second cases are simultaneous a lot of the time)” We live in these tensions between the two. Are we trying to move toward only the first or only the second? What does this resolution look like?
443: “Separation of town and country can also be understood as the separation of capital and landed property, as the beginning of capitalist existence and development independent of landed property, the beginning of property based on labor and exchange”
Capitalism revolutionizes conceptions of property because it turns human labor into property.
445: Middle ages; “In each craft journeymen and apprentices were organized as best suited their master’s interest. Their patriarchal relationship with their masters gave the masters a double power, first because of their direct influence in all aspects of life of the journeymen and secondly because there was a real bond uniting the journeymen who worked for the same master, a bond separating them from journeymen working for other masters. And finally the journeymen were bound to the existing order by their interest in becoming masters themselves”
Master is like a conflation of the teacher and the employer (and maybe the parent?). Double dependency.
446: “The next extension of the division of labor was the separation of production and commerce and the formation of a special class of merchants, a separation which had been handed down in established towns and soon appeared in new areas”
Trade is the production of new needs: the merchant is the result of that.
Manufacturing
I don’t have specific quote for the beginning of this section because it’s very descriptive, but I was thinking about an example that Ryan Kresge was talking about with sugar. He mentioned that because sugar used to be hard to get, it was reserved only for the upper classes. Once trade and manufacturing increased the supply increased a ton, but people didn’t really eat it because it wasn’t a part of their diet, and so it was marketed in a way that made the demand increase. Marx discusses a moment in the second part of the 17th century that reminiscent of this:
“Commerce and navigation had expanded more rapidly than manufacturing which played a secondary role. Colonies were becoming important consumers”
Excess of product can use the market to create new needs. Ryan’s story then made me think of the Michael Moss story and our addiction to sugar: what started as a marketing strategy ends up being what feels like a necessary part of our diets and lives.
454: “It is clear that big industry does not develop equally in all districts of a country. However, this does not hinder the class movement of the proletariat, because the proletarians created by big industry assume leadership in this movement and carry the crowd with them, and because the workers excluded from big industry are put in a worse situation than the workers in big industry itself”
This is a weird place (forced choice). I’m tryng to figure out what this continuum looks like:
Consent ------- participation ---- force
Community
455: “This separate domestic economy [the building of houses] is made even more necessary by the further development of private property”
Question: Why? I get the material correlation, but there seems to be a psychological reason too. Development of private property creates a new need or opportunity to individuate oneself.
“In all previous periods, however, the abolition of individual economy, which cannot be separated from the abolition of private property, was impossible for the simple reason that the material conditions were not present.
Material life matters: we will live in the world of private property because our mode of production requires this. It seems like he is saying that there is a correlation between how technologically advanced and efficient we are and the emphasis on communal property.
“To establish a communal domestic economy presupposes the development of machinery, of the use of material forces and of the many other productive forces – for example, of water supplies, of gaslighting, steam heating, etc., the removal [of the antagonism] of town and country”
Communal economy is made possible by these advancements. The less people have to worry about their own basic needs, the more they can invest in community. The development of machinery helps this along, because it makes obtaining or maintaining basic needs more efficient. This goes back to what he’s saying when he talks about humans creating new needs: as the needs of the individual are met faster and better, communal needs are born.
“Without these conditions a communal economy could not form a new productive force”
Marx cites in this paragraph the establishment of prisons and barracks as some of the first forms of public property. It draws my attention to the words “productive force” in this sentence. I’m trying to sort out these two institutions, prisons and barracks, as productive forces and I’m stuck because I fail to see what prisons or barracks produce other than cheap labor (slave labor).
456: “It is self-evident that the transcendence of individual economy cannot be separated from the transcendence of the family”
And yet we try to distinguish between these things. We often don’t examine the family because we want to believe that industry, that capitalism, exists outside of the home. Marx is showing the levels, and merging them at the same time.
“Saint Max’s frequent statement that everyone is all that he is through the state is basically the same as the statement that the bourgeois is only a specimen of the bourgeois species, a statement that presupposes that the class of the bourgeois existed before the individual constituting it”
I think Marx is suggesting that class distinction is not innate, but instead historical. Saint Max is trying to conclude that humans are pure: that their essence and position in relation to the state are harmonious. Marx is rejecting this and saying that class instead is made of something else.
“The burghers had created these conditions insofar as they were determined by this opposition to the existing system”
This is how identity or class identity is created. It is always in opposition. People define themselves based on what they are not (I am not poor I am not rich). Or at the very minimum, they are pushed to realize themselves as individuals in opposition with the other.
“Various individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a joint battle against another class. Otherwise, they are hostile, competing with each other”
I laughed when reading this because it reminded me of freshman year IR, studying realism. People can/will only unify against a common enemy. I was really attracted to realism freshman year and still am I think.
457: “The transformation of personal into material powers (relationships) through the division of labor cannot be transcended by dismissing the general idea of it from one’s mind but only by individuals again controlling the material powers and transcending the division of labor”
Isn’t he saying here that the revelation or drive has to come from the bourgeois themselves? From the owners? From the capitalists? It’s not that we can just say “fuck capitalism let’s do something else”, it’s that it has to be felt in our bodies as a need.
“Only in the community is personal freedom possible. In previous substitutes for the community in the state, etc., personal freedom has existed only for the individuals who developed within the ruling class”
I understand this and agree to a point, but I’m not sure I have a feeling for freedom coming with wealth. There’s material freedom, freedom to individuate oneself with stuff. As a consumer, choices feel less forced, but after reading Frank’s Richistan book it seems that material freedom comes with its own limitations.
458: “Individuals have always started with themselves though within their given historical conditions and relationships, not with the “pure” individual sense of the ideologists”
Direct take down of German philosophy as he explains it earlier in the chapter.
“…thus occurs a division in the life of each individual, insofar as it is personal and determined by some branch of labor and by the conditions pertaining to it. (This does not mean that the…capitalist ceases to be persons; but their personality is conditioned and determined by definite class relations and their differentiation appears only in their opposition to another class and, for themselves, only when they go bankrupt”
I read this and thought of my friendship with Isabella Grullon. For the most part, most of my friends are of the same economic class or at least close enough to it that class doesn’t function as something divisive. Any disagreements I have with these friends can in the end be seen as superficial because we can still relate and understand each other’s lives because we have similar financial limitations or advantages. My friendship with Isabella has always been excessively strained, and I attribute all of this strain to class differences. We can have similar hobbies or interests, but at the end of the day, she cannot understand my life and I cannot understand hers. My long live resentment of rich people makes me suspicious of every “problem” she has and doubly suspicious and envious of her successes. I do not want to see rich people as people and I certainly don’t want to consider the possibility that they have problems, or that Isabella might not want to be rich. Recently we talked about all of this, and she mentioned the frustration she felt going to school with people in her economic class. She also hates rich people and yet she is one. She is not the capitalist, her father is, but she is the product of the capitalist and occasionally will mention how much she loves aspects of her wealth (the yacht, the clothes, the clubs). Our friendship remains because we now find it fun to explore the boundaries of our friendship through class. What starts as resentment and hatred on my part turns into jokes about our childhood. My problem is that this feels unique to my relationship with her. I still don’t think of Martha Stewart or the Rockefellers as people when they come to vacation twenty minutes away from my house. This is sort of a tangent but I think it’s a tangent I needed to have.
“In imagination, individuals seem freer under the rule of the bourgeoisie then before because their conditions of life seem accidental to them”
Leads to belief in the lottery, to chance, to luck: “I’m not poor because I’m piece of shit, I could be rich. Anyone can be rich in America.” And yet still, even for those who believe in the idea that capitalism gives them a chance, poverty becomes part of identity.
Communism: Production of the Form of Interaction Itself
461: “Communism differs from all previous movements because it overturns the basis of all previous relations of production and interaction, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as creations of men, strips them of their national character, and subjects them to the power of united individuals”
Ownership looks different in this world, and as a result, nationalism is erased. It almost seems like there has to be a necessary separation between what is produced and the land the product is produced from under communism (or erasure of the land entirely?). This also makes environmentalism a product of capitalism, or at least environmentalism would not exist in the same way under communism. Environmentalism feels like an attempt to minimize human credit or impact on the land and products. Environmentalism works to separate man and nature. How might environmentalism, nationalism and capitalism be related?
“Communists in practice treat the conditions created until now by production and interaction as inorganic conditions, without imagining, however, that it was the plan or the destiny of previous generations to provide them material and without believing that these conditions were inorganic for the individuals creating them”
Does this mean that communism itself can’t acknowledge the necessity of capitalism before it or that communists as individuals have trouble doing so.
462: “The conditions under which individuals interact so long as contradiction is still absent are nothing external to them but are conditions pertaining to their individuality, conditions under which these particular individuals living in particular circumstances can produce their material life and what is connected with it. They are the conditions of their self-activity and are produced by this self-activity.”
So under communism, we our production correlates with our “essence”, but what does this look like? I’m thinking back to the paragraph where Marx talks about hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, criticizing at dinner without being a hunter, fisher or critic, but am wondering what this might look like. Actually, I find myself worried about what this might look like. I always remember hearing that without incentive to work or to produce, that people won’t. While I can recognize that the opposite may be true, I still worry that real human individuality does not want activity or production. I worry that we actually do need the force and the contradiction.
“In the absence of contradiction, the particular condition under which they produce thus corresponds to the actuality of their conditioned nature, their one-sided existence, the one-sidedness of which shows only when contradiction enters and thus only exists for later individuals”
Does this mean there’s a whole other half of me that I can never know and explore because I’m limited by my contradictions?
463: “In countries like North America which begin in an already advanced historical epoch, development proceeds very rapidly. Such countries have no other natural premises than the individuals who settled there and were induced to do so because the forms of interaction in the old countries did not correspond to their wants. Thus they begin with the most advanced individuals of the old countries and with the correspondingly most advanced form of interaction, even before this form of interaction has been established in the old counties”
In essence, The US is kick-started into fast paced industrial growth because of the circumstances of its birth and the people who established it. This feels like it gives justification for the genocide of indigenous peoples…I hate this because I understand it.
“This whole interpretation of history appears to be contradicted by the fact of conquest. Violence, war, pillage, murder, etc., has been seen as the motive force of history.”
The North America explanation above changes things for me. On the one hand, it feels like these forms of violence are means rather than motive, but at the same time the excess of violence doesn’t seem explained only by capitalism. How do we account for excessive violence? How do we account for the violence that seems to be only for violence’s sake?
464: “As indicated…, with the conquering barbarian people, war is still a regular form of interaction which is more eagerly exploited as the population increases and requires new means of production to take the place of the traditional and the only possible crude mode of production”
Marx is painting a picture of war as a tactic of barbarian people because it’s force is their only tool of influence and this both makes sense but also baffles me. Either we have to accept western aggression and peoples as barbaric (which I think I might be willing to do), or there has to be a more complex explanation for war and violence. In the first part of “The Intimate Enemy” there’s a point where Nandi lays out the approach of colonialism. “Colonialism dutifully picked up these [Calvinistic] ideas of grown and development and drew a new parallel between primitivism and childhood Thus, the theory of social progress was telescoped not merely into the individual’s life cycle in Europe but also into the area of cultural differences in the colonies. What was childlikeness of the child and childishness of immature adults now also became the lovable and unlovable savagery of primitives and the primitivism of subject societies” (Nandi, 15-16)
(photo taken from Nandy, "The Intimate Enemy")
This feels like the logic that is still used, although the US tends to put all most of its enemies in the “childish” category. The logic above is dependent on total commitment to belief in the superiority of Westernization, modernization, Christianization, but what might happen if these three things were interrogated? Can Capitalism only be successful through the forced lens of the Western world? I’m tempted to say no. Can I then use Marx’s logic to argue that Westernization is barbaric and primitive?
464-465: Marx discusses that for the barbarians, their only means of subsistence is taking (through force):
“Finally, taking very soon comes to an end, and when there is nothing more to take, one must begin to produce. From this necessity of producing, which comes about very soon, it follows that the form of community adopted by the settling conquerors must correspond to the stage of development of the productive forces they find in existence; or, if this is not the case from the start, it must change to accord with the productive forces. This explains what people say they have noticed everywhere in the period after the Great Migration, namely, that the servant was master and that the conquerors very soon adopted the language, culture and manners of the conquered”
I want to add “to an extent”. Again, I am thinking of Nandi here: “But while the British rule had already been established, British culture in India was still not politically dominant, and race-based evolutionism was still inconspicuous in the ruling culture. Most Britons in India lived like Indians at home and in the office, wore Indian dress, and observe Indian customs and religious practices” (Nandi, 5). While reading in the beginning I was floored. Why don’t we learn about this when we talk about colonization? This complicates things, and in the complications the motives for the actions of the colonizers change. This change feels like it matters.
465-466: “Private property, insofar as it is opposed to labor within labor itself, evolves out of the necessity of accumulation and has at first the form of community. But in its further development it approaches more and more the modern form of private property. From the outset, the division of labor implies division of the conditions of labor, of tools and materials, and the splitting up of accumulated capital into the hands of various owners, and thus the division between capital and labor and different forms of capital itself. The further division of labor proceeds and the more accumulation grows, the more pronounced does the fragmentation become. Labor itself can exist only under the premise of this fragmentation”
I’m thinking about this correlation this way (it might not be the right way). The more the division of labor increases, the more people become part of production and there is less of a direct connection between production and labor (I’m picturing the difference between an artisan making a chair versus a factory making a chair (one person cuts the wood, another refines it, another nails it together, another sands, another varnishes, another markets, another sells, another owns the labor of all of the previous). The second division of labor creates a need for property or ownership because ownership cannot be found in the mode of production. The more estranged I am from the products I’m creating the more I lust after a house of my own, tools of my own, products of my own.
466: “Thus two facts become clear. First, the productive forces appear as a world by themselves independent of, removed from, and alongside individuals because individuals whose forces they are, exist as split up and opposed to one another. On the other hand, these forces are only real forces in the interaction and association of individuals”
My labor is estranged and done in isolation and yet the only validity of my labor is my relationship to my boss, to the owner, to the capitalist.
“Thus we have, on the one hand, a totality of productive forces which, so to speak, have assumed material form and are for the individual no longer the forces of individuals but of private property – of individuals only insofar as they are owners of private property”
This is what would happen in artisanal labor I think.
“Never before have the productive forces taken on a form so indifferent to the interaction of individuals as individuals, because their interaction was still restricted. On the other hand, opposing the productive forces, there is a majority of the individual from whom these forces have been wrested away and who have become abstract individuals deprived of all real life content. Only through this fact, however, are they enabled to enter into relation with one another as individuals”
We find community or connection through our alienation? This is why relationships between different classes are so damn hard.
467: “While in earlier periods self-activity and production of material life were separated by the fact that they devolve on different persons and because the production of material life was considered a subordinate mode of self-activity due to the narrowness of the individuals themselves, they now diverge to labor, the producer of this material life (now only possible but negative form of self-activity, as we see), appears as means.
I labor to live and live to labor (and this makes me want to die).
468-469: “Civil society compromises the entire material interaction among individuals at a particular evolutionary stage of the productive forces. It compromises the entire commercial and industrial life of a stage and hence transcends the state and the nation even though that life, on the other hand, is manifested in foreign affairs as nationality and organized within a state”
All of these levels are working at once with and against each other.
The short preface notes that when Arendt references “today”, she is writing in the 1950s.
276: “But the challenge with which Marx confronts us today is much more serious than these academic quarrels over influences and priorities. The fact that one form of totalitarian domination uses, and apparently developed directly from, Marxism, is of course the most formidable charge ever raised against Marx”
I understand where Arendt is coming from, but I think this makes me uncomfortable because it relates directly to my thoughts on bad reading. I’m remembering when we read the prologue to the Raybon piece, “My First White Friend” in Writing and Criticism (you were out of town), and Anissa brought up that while she loved the piece, she worried that some racist white guy might read it and use it to validate his dismissal of black oppression. My response was something along the lines of “while that is a valid fear, does it really take away from the piece? Should she not have written it because it could be used as a tool against her?”. The piece itself is an address to Anissa’s fear. It’s totally valid to fear bad readings of good work because we can trace the violence and destruction “caused by” such interpretations in our history, but if the fear causes us to not read, or even worse not write dialectically…I’m not sure where this leaves us. I feel stuck here. My thought is that, while Marx may have given totalitarianism it’s foundation, I’m not sure that an absence of Marx would have resulted in an absence of totalitarianism. In other words, the racist white guy that Anissa fears reading the Raybon prologue didn’t read the piece to develop his racism, he read it to validate what he already felt or needed to believe. My question is, could totalitarianism find its foundation in liberalism? Arendt sort of leaves room for this:
“It has become fashionable during the last few years to assume an unbroken line between Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, thereby accusing Marx of being the father of totalitarian domination. Very few of those who yield to this line of argument seem to be aware that to accuse Marx of totalitarianism amounts to accusing the Western tradition itself of necessarily ending in the monstrosity of this novel form of government.”
For the rest of the article, Arendt relates Marx to ancient philosophy and political thought, specifically the similarities between Marx and Greek and Roman society. Initially when I read this I wasn’t sure what “Western tradition” referred to (it’s still not completely clear because she rarely explicitly defines it despite the fact that it seems to be central to the entire paper), I think I need help figuring this out. The argument seems to be that on the one hand, Marx can’t escape “the tradition”, but on the other hand, Marx breaks from “the tradition”.
277: “The serious aspect of this situation, therefore, does not lie in the ease with which Marx can be slandered and his teachings, as well as his problems, misrepresented. The latter is of course bad enough, as we shall see, Marx was the first to discern certain problems arising from the Industrial Revolution, the distortion of which means at once the loss of an important source, and possibly help, in dealing with real predicaments that ever more urgently continue to confront us. But more serious than any of this is the fact that Marx, as distinguished from the true and not imagined sources of the Nazi ideology of racism, clearly does belong to the tradition of Western political thought. As an ideology Marxism is doubtless the only link that binds the totalitarian form of government directly to that tradition; apart from it any attempt to deduce totalitarianism directly from a strand of occidental thought would lack even the semblance of plausibility”
This actually makes me cringe. Marxism is the only ideological link between totalitarianism and Western political thought? Are we sure about this? I feel as if I don’t have the resources to yell at Arendt but I want to. I can see the ways in which Marx can be read to fully endorse or support totalitarianism, but it feels wrong to say that it is the only link between “Western tradition” and totalitarianism. I need help! Why does this feel so wrong??
278: “The examination of Marx, in other words, cannot but be an examination of the traditional thought insofar as it is applicable to the modern world, a world whose presence can be traced back to the Industrial revolution on the one hand, and to the political revolutions of the eighteenth century on the other. The modern age presented modern man with two main problems: independent of all political events in the narrow sense of the word: the problems of labor and history. The significance of Marx’s thought lies neither in his economic theories nor in its revolutionary content, but in the stubbornness with which he clung to these two chief perplexities”
Labor and history is the base for Marx’s economic theories I thought. Is Arendt worried that the fixation on labor and history acts as blinders for Marx? I’m confused or rather having trouble deciphering her tone so far.
278-279: “What Marx understood was that labor itself had undergone a decisive change in the modern world: that it had not only become the source of all wealth, and consequently the origin of all social values, but that all men, independent of class origin were sooner or later destined to become laborers, and that those who could not be adjusted into this process of labor would be seen and judged by society as mere parasites. To put it another way while Marx already foresaw the time when, not this class, but the consciousness that corresponded to it, and to its importance for society as a whole, would decree that no one would have any rights, not even the right to stay alive, who was not a laborer”
Is this an accurate interpretation? I’m thinking that this is what we see with Capitalism: quid pro quo. Those who do not labor don’t deserve to live. It’s why being on welfare or food stamps is taboo. We call them moochers or leeches.
279: “From the viewpoint of the history of ideas, one might argue with almost equal right that the thread of tradition was also broken the moment that History not only entered human thought but became its absolute. Indeed, this had happened not with Marx but with Hegel, whose entire philosophy is a philosophy of history, or rather, one that dissolved all previous philosophic as well as all other thought into history. After Hegel had historicized even logic, and after Darwin, through the idea of evolution, had historicized even nature, there seemed nothing left that could withstand the mighty onslaught of historical categories”
This seems like an erasure or discrediting of “human nature” as the center of philosophy. Human nature doesn’t matter as a universal fixed condition but is instead movable in accordance with history. Even nature itself changes according to Darwin. Could we then call Hegel a historical reductionist? The word “dissolved” makes it seem as if Arendt is uncomfortable with reducing everything to history.
280: “One could say that the problem with labor indicates the political side, and the problem of history the spiritual side, of the perplexities that arose at the end of the eighteenth century and emerged fully in the middle of the nineteenth.”
The division between history and labor is made my Arendt, but from my understanding Marx would not separate the two. I’m unclear as to Arendt’s purpose for this because she kind of leaves this sentence and doesn’t return to it.
For the next few pages, she emphasizes the “break in tradition” often. It seems to be guiding the piece. Arendt seems to view totalitarian regimes in the modern world to be a drastic change in the history of mankind. I’m thinking about how I’ve learned about the modern state: in Chip’s class, we read “Nations and Nationalism since 1780” by Eric Hobsbawm, and he discusses the tie between the emergence of the modern state and nationalism, and walking away from that book I was pretty comfortable with totalitarianism and nationalism evolving from traditional Western ideology. Totalitarianism didn’t feel like a break in “tradition” but rather the continuation of it. My understanding of the modern state is making me not trust her:
280-281: “The thread of our tradition, in the sense of a continuous history, broke only with the emergence of totalitarian institutions and policies that no longer could be comprehended through the categories of traditional thought. These unprecedented institutions and policies issued in crimes that cannot be judged by traditional moral standards, or punished with the existing framework of civilization whose juridical cornerstone had been the command Thou shall not kill.”
My response to this is, are you kidding me?? When has traditional Western political thought ever actually grounded itself in “Thou shall not kill?” Western Political thought seems more grounded in “Thou shall not kill yourself”. Arendt’s need to categorize the Nazi regime and the Holocaust as a break in tradition seems less grounded in history and more grounded in a fear that the Holocaust might be completely in line with Western tradition.
281: “I propose to accept the rise of totalitarianism as a demonstrably new form of government, as an event that, at least politically, palpably concerns the lives of all of us, not only the thoughts of a relatively few individuals or the destinies of certain specific national or social groups.”
Arendt is saying that totalitarianism is new and we are all at a loss because of it. I think I might be able to get behind totalitarianism as new politically – maybe she is right in that the political structure looks different than the tradition, but I’m not sure the results of totalitarianism are new. I’m not sure that anything new is created or destroyed. I guess I’m having trouble locating where my anxiety meets Arendt and where it separates. Totalitarianism is scary, but I think it may be limiting to examine the kind of totalitarianism rising internally in Europe as “new”. I’m not sure how to articulate this so I’m going to move on.
281-282 “[Marx] is the one great man of the past who not only was already concerned with predicaments that are still with us, but whose thought could also be use and misused by one of the forms of totalitarianism. Thus Marx seems to provide a reliable link for us back into the tradition, because he himself was more firmly rooted in it (even when he thought he was rebelling against it, turning it upside down, or escaping from the priority of theoretical-interpretative analysis into historical-political action) than we can ever be again. For us totalitarianism necessarily has become the central event of our times and, consequently, the break in tradition a fait accompli”
Again, here is the limitation I have in reading this piece. I’m not sure what she means by “the tradition and because of this I don’t know how to properly verify or resist what she considers to be “the break” in tradition. At one point, she describes ‘the tradition” to mean the tradition in [Western] philosophy, at another she references it as Judeo-Christian belief, and for most of the paper references the tradition as stemming from Greek and Roman society both in its philosophy and its government. My trouble is that she seems to collapse all of these things into a sustained and smooth flow of tradition and then explains totalitarianism as a sudden break that we can’t possibly fit into the flow of the [Western] “tradition”.
“The first great challenge to tradition came when Hegel interpreted the world as a subject to change in the sense of historical movement. Marx’s own challenge to tradition – “The philosophers have only interpreted the world…the point is, however to change it” – was among many possible conclusions that might be derived from Hegel’s system. To us it sounds as though Marx were saying: The world the philosophers of the past have interpreted, and that the last of them understood in terms of continuous, self-developing history, is in fact changing beyond recognition. Let us try to take control of this process and change the world in accordance with our tradition”
Arendt’s translation was not my interpretation of this line. I think this is a misreading, and it is the misreading that Arendt is scared of. This line appears to give legitimacy to totalitarianism. I’m thinking about Asma’s chapter on hermeneutics in her book Believing Women and her emphasis throughout the book about reading holistically. While I understand how easy it is to read urgency into a line like this, if the line itself isn’t abstracted from the rest of the work or his other works the intense urgency is harder to justify. I read this and think “Did she keep reading?? Or did she stop when she found exactly the line that validated her concern?”
283: “In order to grasp the political importance of the emancipation of labor, and Marx’s corresponding dignification of labor as the most fundamental of all human activities, it may be well just to mention, at the beginning of these reflections, the distinction between labor and work that, although largely unarticulated, has been decisive for the whole tradition, and that, only recently, and partly because of Marx’s teachings, has been blurred.”
This is the only mention in this piece about the distinction between labor and work. I’m still not sure I understand her distinction, but I’m going to look at her chapters on “labor” and “work” in her book “The Human Condition” and hope it helps clarify this.
“Marx’s great influence today is still due to this one fact, which also, to a large extent, explains how his thought could become so useful to the purposes of totalitarian domination. The Soviet Union, which from the moment of its foundation, called itself a republic of workers and peasants, may have deprived its workers of all the rights they enjoy in the free world.”
Yes, I think I get this. There’s a promise of consistency or stability that’s both in Marx’s descriptions of what communism might look like and in totalitarianism. If given the choice between a life of “freedom” and stability, I like to believe that I favor stability: what good is freedom of speech if I can’t afford to eat or live? What good is freedom if I’m dead or dying for the pursuit of it?
284: “But whether Marx, whose influence on politics was tremendous, was genuinely interested in politics such may justly be doubted. The fact is that his interpretation, or rather, glorification of labor, while only following the course of events, in itself could not fail to introduce a complete reversal of all traditional political values. It was not the political emancipation of the working class the equality for all that for the first time in history included menial workers, that was decisive, but rather the consequence that from now on labor as a human activity no longer belonged to the strictly private realm of life: it became a public political fact of the first order.”
I have written in my notes “Yes?”. Labor is the center of public and private – there actually is no distinction between public and private. There is just labor.
284- 285: “Labor is necessarily prior to any economy, which is to say that the organized attempt of men living together, handling and securing both the needs and the luxuries of life, starts with and requires labor even when its economy has been developed to the highest degree”
I like this writing. It feels relaxed, straightforward…
285: “In every civilization labor is the activity that enables the public realm to put at our disposal what we consume. Labor as the metabolism with nature is not primarily productive but consumptive, and its necessity would remain so even if no productivity, no addition to the common world were ever associated with it. It is because of the connection of all laboring activity to the strictly biological needs of our bodies that it traditionally was deemed to belong to the lower, almost animal-like functions of human life, and as such considered a strictly private matter.”
Consumptive labor is animalistic: it is not a reproduction of self, it is not a production of new needs. Productive labor creates surplus, creates new needs, and necessarily fuses the public and private world (?)
“Public political life began where this realm of the private ended, or in other words whenever those needs could be transcended into a common world, a world in -between men transcending the metabolism with nature of each of its individuals. Politics in the original Greek sense of the word began with the liberation from labor, and in spite of many variations remained the same in this respect for nearly 3,000 years; and this, as we know, was first made possible through the institution of slavery”
Upper classes get to create, get to make art, because their basic needs are taken care of by slaves. This comes up in the rest of the article because Arendt ties Marx’s vision of communism to Greek and Roman society and suggests that Marx’s ideas are almost nostalgic for this kind of society.
286-287: “When [Marx] added that nobody could be free who rules over others he was saying, again in terms of the tradition, what Hegel, in the famous master-servant dialectic, had only less forcefully said before him: that no one can be free, neither those enslaved by necessity nor these enslaved by the necessity of rule In this Marx not only appeared to contradict himself, insofar as he promised freedom for all at the same moment he denied it to all, but to reverse the very meaning of freedom based as it had been on the freedom from the compulsion we naturally and originally suffer under the human condition”
I’m not totally convinced that this is the main contradiction. Marx accounts for this, right? I shy away from two things here: 1) the use of the word “naturally” because I’m not sure how to read or place it and 2) Arendt’s insistence that there is a contradiction in Marx’s use of the master-servant dialectic. The division of labor sustains the necessity of master-servant (I think). Marx’s freedom can’t be found in this world. It’s because of this that he writes about transcending the division of labor, transcending labor.
287: “At the end of this position and, as it must appear at first glance, in the most extreme opposition to it, stand three positions that are the pillars on which Marx’s whole theory and philosophy rest: first, Labor is the Creator of Man; second, Violence is the midwife of History (and, since history for Marx is past political action, this means that violence makes action efficient); and third, seemingly in contradiction with the other two, Nobody can be free who enslaves others.”
Okay so I’m trapped. I have trouble with the second “pillar”: Violence is the midwife of History because I’m not sure what the spectrum of violence looks like. I’ve been wrestling with this since getting through some of the Nandy: are violence and force the same thing? I’m really uncomfortable with both…In some ways, I feel that I can say violence that is violence of resistance is “the midwife of history”, while the violence of domination like we see in colonization is counterproductive and limiting, but I know this distinction isn’t very useful: they seem codependent. There’s no need for resistance without domination and vice versa. I need some violence to be good and some to be evil which puts me in a similar place as Arendt, but I also really don’t like being in that place. I want to be able to engage in an understanding of violence and history that doesn’t just rely on my fear of violence (on my fear of violence toward myself and my loved ones specifically) and by extension by need to cling to categories of “good” and “evil”.
289: “The basic self-contradiction in which Marx’ whole work, from the early writings to the third volume of Capital, is caught (and which can be expressed in various ways, such as that he needed violence to abolish violence, that the goal of history is to end history, that labor is the only productive activity of man but that the development of man’s productive forces will eventually lead to the abolition of labor, etc.) arises from this insistence on freedom. For when Marx stated that labor is the most important activity of man, he was saying in terms of the tradition that not freedom but necessity is what makes man human.”
We are always working toward a resolve: does it really matter if we ever get there? Freedom, violence and history are not abstract philosophical categories for Marx, they are all necessarily attached to the real development of human production. Arendt seems to grasp this but then diverge:
“And he followed this line of thought throughout his philosophy of history, according to which the development of mankind is ruled by, and the meaning of history contained in, the law of historical movement, the political motor of which is class struggle and whose natural irresistible driving force is the development of man’s laboring capacity. When under the influence of the French Revolution he added to this that violence is the midwife of History, he denied in terms of the tradition the very substantial content of freedom contained in the human capacity of speech”
I feel like Arendt shows her cards here. Is she worried that Marx’s description of history doesn’t account for other conceptions and manifestations of “freedom”? If this is the worry, I’m not sure I’m with her. He does find a place for this (somewhere in the Marx I read he talks about language. This is me making a note for myself to go back and find it and see if this helps me or not.
“And he followed this line of thought to its ultimate consequences in his theory of ideologies, according to which all activities of man that express themselves in the spoken word, from legal to political institutions to poetry and philosophy, were mere and perhaps unconscious pretexts for, or justifications of, violent deeds.”
Arendt wants spoken word to be more than that, or for the potential for word (freedom of speech) to exist separately from action? I’m confused here. What is she faulting Marx for?
“From this it follows – and this was already clear in Marx’s own historical writings and has become even more manifest in all strictly Marxist historiography – that history, which is the record of all past political action, shows its true, undistorted face only in wars and revolutions; and that political activity, if not direct, violent action, must be understood as either the preparation of future violence or the consequence of past violence.”
Where is this in Marx? I didn’t really come across this in the German ideology stuff. Arendt doesn’t cite any specific writing here so I’m wondering if you might have some citations for this.
292: “Marx’ self-contradiction is most striking in the few paragraphs that outline the ideal future society and that are frequently dismissed as utopia. They cannot be dismissed because they constitute the center of Marx’s work and express most clearly its original impulses. Moreover, if utopia means that this society has no topos, no geographical and historical place on earth, it is certainly not utopian: its geographical topos is Athens and its place in history is the fifth century before Christ. In Marx’s future society the state has withered away; there is no longer any distinction between rulers and ruled and rulership no longer exists. This corresponds to life in the ancient Greek city-state, which, although it was based on rulership over slaves as its pre-political condition, had excluded rulership from the intercourse of free citizens”
I feel that Arendt is mistaking Marx’s “utopia” for a nostalgic reconstruction of Greek society, but I feel like he’s smarter than that. I have never gotten the feeling that he is writing nostalgically: this comes across in his admiration for capitalism. I’m not sure what to do with this. As far as the idea of communism as the end of history or a utopia, I do understand this discomfort or skepticism. I was talking with Ryan Kresge and Sam Boyles about this and they talked about how this world is scary to them: they want their fissures, their conceptions of identity. I think I might too.
293: “Most striking of all is of course Marx’s insistence that he does not want to “liberate labor’” which is already free in all civilized countries, but to “abolish labor altogether.” And by labor Marx here does not mean only the necessary “metabolism with nature,” which is the natural condition of man, but the whole realm of work, of craftsmanship and art, that requires specialized training.”
If this is an accurate reading, then I feel defeated. Holman suggests that Marx is talking about abolishing alienated labor which feels too weak but Arendt’s interpretation feels to strong. Isn’t the point of transcending or abolishing labor so that we can all make art? So that we work or labor but for ourselves and freely and without necessity? Again, I’m returning to Marx’s line about hunting without being a hunter…
“This realm never fell under the general contempt for the drudgery of labor that is characteristic of our whole tradition and whose degradation specifically characterizes Athenian life in the fifth century. Only there do we find an almost complete leisure society in which the time and energy required for making a living were, so to speak, squeezed in between the much more important activities of agorein, walking and talking in the marketplace, of going to the gymnasium, of attending meetings or the theater, or of judging conflicts between citizens”
I understand why Arendt makes this comparison, but even her description of “leisure society” is not the abolition or absence of craftsmanship and art.
Also, why does Arendt feel that Marx needs Greece? Why does she locate him here? Is this in his work or is this a comparison she draws on her own? If it is the latter, then why?
294: “Marx was not and, as we shall see, could not have been aware that his glorification of violence and labor challenged the traditional connection between freedom and speech. He was aware, however, of the incompatibility of freedom with the necessity that is expressed by labor, and also with the compulsion that is expressed by violence. As he put it, “The realm of freedom in fact begins only where labor, conditioned by need and exterior usefulness, ends.””
I think he was aware that his emphasis on labor challenged “the tradition”. The entirety of the first part of “The German Ideology” is him actively and consciously challenging the philosophy that focuses on abstract understandings of humanity and consciousness.
For the next few pages, Arendt outlines and discusses Aristotle and Plato and their ties between speech and freedom (or speech and humanity”. Aristotle in particular reminded me of Descartes: “Je pense, donc je suis,“ and so I’ve kind of oriented myself around this:
295-297:
Aristotle: I speak (my thoughts) therefore I am
Plato: I act (my thoughts?) therefore I am
Marx: I produce my needs and myself therefore I am
302: “Marx’s demand that nobody should be called free who rules over others is in complete agreement with the fact of universal equality, a condition in which by definition no one has a right to rule. Yet the elimination of rule, of the age-old distinction between those who rule and those who are ruled, is so far from being the only and sufficient condition of freedom that our tradition even deemed freedom impossible without rulership”
She mentions Hobbes earlier, and this is exactly what Hobbes does. He justifies monarchy in this way in Leviathan (if I am remembering correctly). Arendt spends pages discussing the impossibility of freedom in Marx but doesn’t use his own understanding of freedom. She is not doing an internal critique because she is using freedom as it is understood and explained in “traditional philosophy” to try to find Marx’s contradiction. She is somehow attached to what she explains as “traditional” understandings of freedom (especially speech) and is unwilling to relinquish her attachment in her analysis of Marx. If I’m right about this, this is a good example of bad reading I think.
Arendt continues to riff on this for a while and so I’m not including all of my notes because they would get even more repetitive than they already are. None of these writers do brevity well (me included).
309: “The tremendous practical advantage of Marx’s “scientific” over utopian socialism was, and still is, that it liberated the socialist movement from its worn-out moralizing attitudes, and recognized that the class questions in modern society could no longer be solved by a “passion for justice” or the basis of a slightly modified Christian charity. If labor is the central activity of modern society, it is absurd to think of members of the working class as underprivileged, no matter how oppressed or exploited they may happen to be at any particular moment”
It’s not absurd to think of the working class as underprivileged, but it isn’t useful in attempting to construct a solid critique. Reading this passage felt good: Arendt is willing to accept the dialectic mode in some spaces, she is willing to abandon morality in some spaces. She can do good reading here because it doesn’t threaten her or her family.
“The dialectical movement of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis – which becomes infinite as each synthesis at once establishes itself as a new thesis from which a new antithesis and new synthesis flow – holds man and matter in its grips and mixes them with each other, then separates them from each other, antithetically, so that they appear distinct as matter and spirit, only to reunite them synthetically”
This is what “flow” is. You showed in the “Flow” piece how we can see this not only in Hegel and Marx but also in the Sufi stories and autobiography.
Arendt’s tension with flow:
309-210: “The logic of dialectical movement enables Marx to combine nature with history, or matter with man; man becomes the author of a meaningful, comprehensive history because his metabolism with nature, unlike an animal’s, is not merely consumptive but requires an activity, namely, labor. For Marx labor is the uniting link between matter and man, between nature and history. He is a “materialist” insofar as the specifically human form of consuming matter is to him the beginning of everything; and he is an “idealist” insofar as nothing ever comes from matter by itself without the consuming activity that lies in nature of man, which is labor. In other words “materialism” and “idealism” have lost their meaning, although Marx himself seems not to have been aware of this” (Emphasis added).
On the one hand, she seems to be aware of exactly how this process works, but on the other it feels as if she doesn’t like it (unless I’m reading “lost their meaning”) wrong. Anytime Arendt suggests Marx isn’t aware of something I feel weird because either 1) I relate Arendt’s statement to a place where he does seem aware and explicitly addresses her statement or 2) remember every time you have warned against underestimating Marx. In this case, I have no particular place to validate the first possibility and so my skepticism comes from blind faith in Marx or fear of underestimating him.
After finishing this piece, Arendt has left me with a few tensions:
Work On Blaney and Inayatullah’s “On Marx” and Carver’s “Mark’s political theory of exploitation”
I’m not sure what to do with Marx’s shift in perspective on colonization. To wrestle with this I went back to the idea of “The Box”. We spent most of Understanding Capitalism last semester trying to grasp the idea that intentions don’t matter: intentions or plans go into The Box and come out as results with no regard for what the initial intentions were. I’m now trying to grasp something new: even with The Box the intention or motivation does shape the way the actions are approached or enacted. If my end goal is to move into a single apartment, differing motivations for doing so might change how and where I look. Blaney and Inayatullah lay out Marx’s initial hope for colonization as the mode to bring Indian into new modern society, and this makes sense to me, but I find it hard to believe that progress or internal development of India was the direct intention of the British colonizers. Part of me is not sure it matters whether or not the colonizers cared about the progress of India, but part of me thinks that if progress was really the goal of the colonists, colonization might not have been the approach. I’m left with wondering about the motivating drive of the colonizers and why force is understood as a necessary evil. I get the initial rebuttal to my resistance of the box: the material advancements show that progress was a result either way:
“As if taking a script directly from the apologists for Britain’s empire, Marx argues in his second report, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” that British conquest began the job of “regenerating” India. It unified and modernized India by training a native army and creating political unity through the sword; by building the telegraph and establishing a free press; by imposing “private property in land – that great desideratum of Asiatic society;” by building educational and scientific institutions; and by bringing steamships and railways that shorten the distance between England and India as producers and consumers” (151).
What I’m grappling with is Marx’s condemnation of England for in essence, messing up colonization. It seems that colonization has sent India into violent limbo: “loss of the old world, with no gain of a new one” (152). I’m wondering whether colonization has the tools that Marx initially hoped for, and if not why he couldn’t see this from the beginning.
Violence feels like the tool used by the salesperson when they know their product is shit or when they know the person they’re selling to doesn’t need it. The passages from Marx and Engels frustrate me because I’m not sure where they see the line between violence as a necessary means and violence as excessive and stagnating. The quotes used on 152 seem to say. “the violence needs to produce progress and/or an opportunity for the colonized people to be in a position to reap the benefits of Capitalism: to individuate themselves and to recreate nature, to break away from patriarchal dependency and move toward free exchange.” While I think I’m okay with this and understand why Marx’s tone toward colonization shifted, I am bothered because I’m getting the feeling that the violence/force of colonization was never equipped to motivate progress. The best I can do to counter this feeling is to think of this scenario:
The colonizers impose their violence on the colonized and bring with them the mechanical advancements and tools of industry. They exploit the colonized as extensions of the equipment. The colonizers act as the owners, the colonized the laborers creating a similar dynamic to the relation between owners and laborers in Europe, but the force and violence of the transaction makes it so the laborer is aware that he is not consenting. The colonized is under no (or at least less) delusion that his labor is a free and fair exchange with the owner. This dynamic encourages and requires eventual resistance or revolt. It requires an inevitable reclamation of the means of production by the colonized. I think that maybe this is violence of progress. I’m thinking specifically of Carver’s piece:
“Marx’s refers to the capitalist as a despot and a private legislator, and physical threats to workers are mentioned, but not as a defining feature of the relationship, however much the relationship allows or even encourages this behavior… He suggests that the differential in economic power between capitalist and workers makes ‘bourgeois’ claims about freedom, voluntary contracts and legal equality ring false... Indeed these fictions disguise the true situation, which is one where differential economic power gives the capitalist an immense advantage over the worker…While this differential is not itself coercion of the worker by the capitalist the worker is nevertheless constrained by lack of resources into doing what the capitalist wants” (Carver, 71).
This reminds me more of Understanding Capitalism, specifically the discussion of Smith’s The Deception and the myth of meritocracy. I remember explicitly that while as a class we were most concerned with understanding why the laborer must believe in this myth, we also briefly got to the question as to whether or not the capitalist also necessarily believed it too. I think I had brought up at the time that this myth is almost more important for the Capitalist: if they had to come to terms with the fact that their wealth or position was a weird combination of luck, time, and circumstance, it might rob them of the legitimacy they feel to act as a capitalist. I think I need to go there because it may give me something as far as why it is so important for colonists to believe in progress. There’s a similar theme in Exterminate all the Brutes and Heart of Darkness. While the pursuit of wealth and ivory is heavily emphasized, as is the faith in the civilizing mission. The motivation can’t be simply one or the other. The colonizer needs the tangible products of their exploitations, transactions, violence, but they just as often need their ideology and justification. Often in politics classes, students express frustration when the US won’t intervene in human rights crises unless the region also promises economic or security risks/benefits. While I understand the frustration, it doesn’t feel surprising at all. On the flip side, the US is reluctant to act violently for resources only, unless it can also validate or justify the action within their internal ideology (Ex: fucking up Iraq for the sake of “stability in the middle east” or bombing Syria over outrage of the use of chemical weapons). If anyone needs the ideology the most, it’s the capitalists, it’s the colonizers.
I’m wondering if the biggest weakness of the colonizers is the violence. They did not allow the delusion to be sold to the colonized in the same way that it was sold at home. The thought seemed to be that it was the only way, that the colonized lacked the capacity to voluntarily engage in these contractual relationships. This feels like the biggest, most destructive, and counterproductive underestimations of all time (maybe slightly ahead of trying to conquer Russia in the dead of winter), and feels like maybe this is where we can separate capitalism from white supremacy…I need more time to flesh this part out
Reading Achebe’s “An Image of Africa” of the second time was surprising, mostly because I had forgotten how drastically the essay shifts from strong, slow critique, to impatient, fast frustration. He starts the essay with autobiography, beautifully exposing his own stake in his argument. He discusses run ins with students and other people who are “ignorant” of African history and literature. In the first two pages, I follow him completely. He writes: “If there is something in these utterances more than youthful inexperience, more than a lack of factual knowledge, what is it? Quite simply it is the desire – one might indeed say the need – in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest” (Achebe, 337). I read this, and I think “Yes! Yes! Yes! I need this as a starting point – is Achebe willing to interrogate the desire? Is he willing to play with what explanations or descriptions Conrad has to offer that might help us understand it?”
From these first few pages, the tone shifts and speeds up: “Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as “the other world”, the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization,” a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality” (338). I’m stuck here because I’m not sure what to do with his frustration: on the one hand, I have no real problem with his description: the novel does wrestle with the tension between Europe and Africa in these ways. On the other, I’m wondering why he’s so outraged. Aren’t Europe and the Congo at this time extremely different? What is so harmful about describing them as opposing? His first citation is the description of the Thames versus the River Congo: “The book opens on the River Thames, tranquil, resting peacefully “at the decline of day after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks.” But the actual story will take place on the River Congo, the very antithesis of the Thames” (338). Achebe then extends this to project Conrad’s intentions: “Is Conrad saying then that these two rivers are very different, one good, the other bad? Yes, but that is not the real point” (338). This conclusion is a stretch to me: at no point does Marlow (Achebe conflates all three narrations in the first half of the essay, but I think I need to draw the distinction) value the stillness of the Thames over the “frenzy” of the River Congo : quite the opposite : Marlow seems rather bored in the estuary of the Thames, so bored that he decides to tell the exciting story of his travels on the River Congo! Achebe continues:
“It is not the differentness that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry. For the Thames too “has been one of the dark places of the earth.” It conquered its darkness, of course, and is now in daylight and at peace. But if it were to visit its primordial relative, the Congo, it would run the terrible risk of hearing grotesque echoes of its own forgotten darkness, and falling victim to avenging recrudescence of the mindless frenzy of the first beginnings” (338).
I agree with this interpretation: this does seem to be the tension throughout the piece, but I think that it is important to view the ways in which the favorability changes. By the end of the novel, it seems clear that Marlow is trying to distance him from silence and stillness. When returning to London, he bitterly complains about “civilized life”:
“I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating presence because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of follow in the face of danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces so full of stupid importance” (Conrad, 71).
I have trouble grasping Achebe’s distain for the descriptions of “peace” versus “frenzy”, because although I am okay with how he understands this as a central tension of the piece, I question his projections of morality onto it. As I read the novel, I feel as if Marlow is complicating Achebe’s analysis of “good versus bad” correlating to “peace versus frenzy”, as he finds in himself a desire to escape the silence. Nearly every description of Europe has some reference to death or a lack of life (robotic, unemotional movement), beginning with Marlow’s visit to the French Company in the beginning of the novel:
“A narrow and deserted street in deep shadow, high houses, innumerable windows with venetian blinds, a dead silence, grass sprouting between the stones, imposing carriage archways right through one of these cracks, went up a swept and ungarnished staircase, as arid as a desert, and opened the first door I came to. Two women, one fat and the other slim, sat on straw=bottomed chairs knitting black wool. The slim one got up and walked straight at me – still knitting with downcast eyes – and only just as I began to think of getting out of her way, as you would for a somnambulist, stood still, and looked up” (10).
When I read this, I think “if this is civilization, get me the fuck out”. Marlow’s descriptions of European civilization have me in no hurry to move to London : them make me feel as if the sacrifice for civilization is life itself. I wonder how with descriptions like these, Achebe could jump so quickly to his moral interjection.
Achebe then continues to block quote a large section of the text in which Marlow is first confronted with native people in the Congo, narrowing in on “Conrad’s” use of the word “ugly” in describing the humanity of the native people. The passage in Conrad’s piece goes:
“The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there – there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly and the men were…No they were not inhuman. Well, you know that was the worst of it – this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity – like yours – the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough, but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response of the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you – you so remote from the night of first ages – could comprehend” (Conrad, 36).
After quoting this passage, Achebe reduces the paragraph to his condescended version: “Herein lies the meaning of Heart of Darkness and the fascination it holds over the Western mind: “What thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity – like yours…Ugly”” (Achebe, 339). Achebe, after using an entire page to block quote Conrad, refuses to let himself play in the world of the text. He does not allow himself to give the speaker any merit, and finds in the work exactly what he was looking for. As he opens the essay admitting to the reader that he is frustrated with African history and literature being dismissed or generalized by Western philosophy, he then uses his frustration to not actually read the work. He is seeking out only the places in the novel that best support his worry that Western work is only interested in itself (which he’s totally right in his conviction that Western thought is self-centered and as a result blind to dynamic histories that aren’t its own, but in his conviction, misses the mark about why and how this blindness can be useful to us).
Achebe continues to cite examples of what he views as Conrad generalizing and belittling Africans and elevating Europeans using what is possibly my favorite example, the description of the women. He notes that the description of the African woman is favorable only because “she is in her place and so can win Conrad’s special brand of approval and second, she fulfills a structural requirement of the story: a savage counterpart to the refined, European woman who will step forth to end the story” (Achebe, 341). Again, I wonder why Achebe is so quick to see the ways in which Conrad wants African woman “in her place”, but fails to see the limitation of the Kurtz’s European woman. While reading I am able to find real and genuine desire and admiration for the African woman as well as Marlow’s fireman, while the European characters in the novel (Kurtz as the exception), all seem rather foolish. Achebe acknowledges this critique:
“Students of Heart of Darkness will often tell you that Conrad is concerned not so much with Africa as with the deterioration of one European mind caused by solitude and sickness. They will point out to you that Conrad is, if anything, less charitable to the Europeans in the story than he is to the natives, that the point of the story is to ridicule Europe’s civilizing mission in Africa. Conrad student informed me in Scotland that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz. Which is partly the point. Africa is setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril” (343).
I’m at odds with both Achebe and the Conrad students here: Africa isn’t interchangeable, because it’s historically real. Africa and Africans aren’t unimportant here, and yet at the same time Achebe isn’t going to find what he is looking for because the text is uninterested with history outside of colonization. Here is where my risk comes in. I’m going to lay something out that I feel is dangerous but still I think I need to do. I’m returning to my wrestling with Marx and exploitation. There is nothing pretty or humane or even good in murdering or abusing people for resources, for “progress”. This is why we have such a hard time endorsing colonization because it uses these methods – it is sustained by violence. Capitalism does ask, however, for material progress – for industrialization. Is there anything wrong in admitting that the Congo was not industrialized? Is there anything wrong in saying that it held a wealth of resources in rubber and ivory that would enable material advancements? Can we go so far as to say that from this view, pre-colonial and colonial Africa was less “civilized” than Western Europe? I think this is where things get tricky. At what point is the word “civilized” understood strictly as correlating to the realization of labor and material relationships, and at what point is “civilized” understood as correlating to “innate racial differences”? Achebe seems to be worried that if he concedes to capitalism’s understandings of “civilized” versus “uncivilized”, he will also have to concede or even endorse white supremacy’s definition of the terms. His response is to then dismiss the novel in its entirety: “The real question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization [of Africa and African bodies], which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot” (344). Achebe is at his horizon. He later fully admits to his refusal to bracket himself as a reader: “Secondly, I may be challenged on the grounds of actuality. Conrad, after all, did sail down the Congo in 1890 when my own father was still a babe in arms How could I stand up more than fifty years after his death and purport to contradict him? My answer is that as a sensible man I will not accept just any traveller’s tales solely on the grounds that I have not made the journey myself. I will not trust the evidence even of a man’s very eyes when I suspect them to be as jaundiced as Conrad’s” (346), adding later “Indeed travellers can be blind” (347). While I agree that Achebe is right in not trusting the narrator, his critique falls short because his lack of trust forbids him to even think about participating in internal critique.
I read Edward Said’s essay “Two visions in Heart of Darkness”, waking up slowly in the fabricated utopia of the Grassroots Festival. I had planned on doing work over the weekend, but began to regret my decision to only bring the Norton edition of Heart of Darkness, and worried that it would be too academic or direct for me to happily engage with, camping at a music festival. I almost didn’t even try, worrying that my brain was not in a setting equipped to jump into full-fledged academia, but looking at Liz in the chair across from me, busily studying GRE vocab words, I felt my body relax a little. I didn’t expect myself to engage fully in the text, and was fully prepared to need to read it again inside in a quiet space where I had committed to an 8-hour work day, and was surprised when I found everything I needed in this essay.
I read it again anyway today, to remind my brain of why and how I lost myself in it the first time, and once again found Said’s writing to be direct and honestly engaged with the novel. The piece opens:
“Domination and inequities of power and wealth are perennial facts of human society. But in today’s global setting they are also interpretable as having something to do with imperialism, its history, its new forms. The nations of contemporary Asia, Latin America, and Africa are politically independent but in many ways are as dominated and dependent as they were when ruled directly by European powers. On the one hand, this is the consequence of self-inflicted wounds, critics like V.S. Naipaul are wont to say: they (everyone knows that “they” means coloreds, wogs, niggers) are to blame for what “they” are, and it’s no use droning on about the legacy of imperialism. On the other hand, blaming Europeans sweepingly for the misfortunes of the present is not much of an alternative. What we need to do is to look at these matters as a network of interdependent histories that it would be inaccurate and senseless to repress, useful and interesting to understand.” (422)
I read this and I am instantly thrilled. I think to myself: Said is ready to jump into the gray area, he is neither taking western imperialism nor black suffering for granted. He is willing to struggle on both ends of the spectrum. He is ready to actually engage with the text.
Said addresses directly the gap that Achebe seems afraid of: (bear with me, long block quote)
“Yet neither Conrad nor Marlow gives us a full view of what is outside the world-conquering attitudes embodied by Kurtz, Marlow, the circle of listeners on the deck of the Nellie, and Conrad. By that I mean that Heart of Darkness works so effectively because its politics and aesthetics are, so to speak, imperialist, which in the closing years of the nineteenth century seemed to be at the same time an aesthetic, politics, and even epistemology inevitable and unavoidable. For if we cannot truly understand someone else’s experience, and if we must therefore depend upon the assertive authority of the sort of power that Kurtz wields as narrator, there is no use looking for other, non-imperialist alternatives; the system has simply eliminated them and made them unthinkable…Conrad is so self-conscious about situating Marlow’s tale in a narrative moment that he allows us simultaneously to realize after all that imperialism, far from swallowing up its own history, was taking place in and was circumscribed by a larger history, one just outside the tightly inclusive circle of Europeans on the deck of the Nellie. As yet, however, no one seemed to inhabit that region, and so Conrad left it empty” (425)
It feels like Said is exposing something in Heart of Darkness that is tragic not just for the black bodies that are not given a voice or basic humanity by the narrator but also tragic for the Western imperialists engaging in the imperial project. “Swallowing up its own history” feels like its own muffling of voices. Marlow’s need to tell his story is, in a way, his resistance to his own silence, his own participation, his own inability to exist as an outsider:
“Conrad’s realization is that if, like narrative, imperialism has monopolized the entire system of representation – which in the case of Heart of Darkness allowed it to speak for Africans as well as for Kurtz and the other adventurers, including Marlow and his audience – your self-consciousness as an outsider can allow you actively to comprehend how the machine works, given that you and it are fundamentally not in perfect synchrony or correspondence.” (425-426)
I read this and I remember how much emphasis Marlow places on “choice of nightmare”. Marlow, while heavily critiquing the violence and methods of imperialism, cannot conclude that it is not his duty or destiny to explore or discover pieces of Africa. He cannot be the outsider, he is necessarily part of imperialism, and yet even still he is other-ed by imperialism. Heart of Darkness does not and cannot give Achebe the history of imperialism that he needs and wants, because it’s use is in showing the fissures and inconsistencies of Western colonial/imperial thought. It exposes not only the direct or external violence toward the natives but the internal damage for the imperialist.
Said lays out the two ways in which Heart of Darkness can be envisioned: “One argument allows the old imperial enterprise full scope to play itself out conventionally, to render the world as official European or Western imperialism saw it, and to consolidate itself after World War II” (426). This interpretation is worrysome, feared by myself and I think Achebe too. We don’t want Heart of Darkness to somehow validate Africa or Africans as unimportant or nonexistent unless they fit within Western ideology and practice. But this is not the only way to read the text:
“The second argument is considerably less objectionable. It sees itself as Conrad saw his own narratives, local to a time and place, neither unconditionally true nor unqualifiedly certain. As I have said, Conrad does not give us the sense that he could imagine a fully realized alternative to imperialism: the natives he wrote about in Africa, Asia, or America were incapable of independence, and because he seemed to imagine that European tutelage was a given, he could not foresee what would take place when it came to an end. But come to an end it would, if only because – like all human effort, like speech itself – it would have its moment, then it would have to pass. Since Conrad dates imperialism, shows its contingency, records its illusions and tremendous violence and waste (as in Nostromo), he permits his later readers to imagine something other than an Africa carved up into dozens of European colonies, even if, for his own part, he had little notion of what that Africa might be” (427)
I see two obvious places where Conrad dates imperialism. The first is his mention of “pre-civilization Europe” and the savagery of the Thames. The second is the structure of story-telling. Marlow is placing his voyage to the Congo and to Kurtz’s inner station in the past. These places emphasize the historicism of the novel: Achebe is worried that Conrad’s narrative paints Africans as innately inhuman, as less than, etc., but Said is making the case that Conrad is actually allowing for the opposite to be true. The book does not make imperialism the end all be all, despite the fact that imperialism is inescapable for the author, the narrators, and the characters in the text. Said points to the consciousness of the narrators as an indication that imperialism isn’t taken for granted: “Despite their European names and mannerisms, Conrad’s narrators are not average unreflecting witnesses of European imperialism. They do not simply accept what goes on in the name of the imperial idea: they think about it a lot, they worry about it, they are actually quite anxious about whether they can make it seem like a routine thing. But it never is” (427). Conrad’s characters might not be able to offer the reader a solid critique of imperialism, but they do provide grounds for the reader to come up with one. I keep thinking about Marlow’s emphasis on a “choice of nightmare” toward the end of the book, a phrase he uses at least 3 times in the last 10 pages. He seems wildly uncomfortable everywhere: in the company, in London, near the native people. Marlow’s response to the discomfort is to bend the rules just enough so he can feel as if he is not fully consumed by the Company, by London, or by the Congo. Said cites the narration as evidence for the anxiety or worry: (again long block quote)
“Marlow, for example, is never straightforward. He alternates between garrulity and stunning eloquence, and rarely resists making peculiar things seem more peculiar by surprisingly misstating them, or rendering them vague and contradictory. Thus he says, a French warship fires “into a continent”; Kurtz’s eloquence is enlightening as well as fraudulent; and so on – his speech so full of these odd discrepancies that the net effect is to leave his immediate audience as well as the reader with the acute sense that what he is presenting is not quite as it should be or appears to be
Yet the whole point of what Kurtz and Marlow talk about is in fact imperial mastery, white European over black Africans and their ivory, civilization over the primitive dark continent. By accentuating the discrepancy between the official “idea” of empire and the remarkably disorienting actuality of Africa, Marlow unsettles the reader’s sense not only of the very idea of empire, but of something more basic, reality itself” (427-428)
I read this and I think Said has given me the key to both understanding Achebe’s frustration and critiquing it. It’s not that Achebe is wrong in his conviction that the book is imperialist (and in his words racist), Achebe’s critique falls short in that he cannot concede that it is exactly because of this fact that the novel should be read. If the book is not just about upholding white supremacy or capitalism, if it is also about shaking up reality, narrative, ideology than a good reading and internal critique of Heart of Darkness can also help us get to a good internal critique of imperialism itself (I think). This is the usefulness that I couldn’t quite figure out before. This is why we should be teaching this text. I read Said’s essay and I think “Show me how to read like this guy”.
It’s important to also note that the usefulness of the text doesn’t let Conrad or his characters off the hook. Said writes:
“[The narrators] (and of course Conrad) are ahead of their time in understanding that what they call “the darkness” has an autonomy of its own, and can reinvade and reclaim what imperialism had taken on its own. But Marlow and Kurtz are also creatures of their time and cannot take the next step, which would be to recognize that what they saw, disablingly and disparagingly, s non-European “darkness” was in fact a non-European world resisting imperialism so as one day to regain sovereignty and independence, and not, as Conrad reductively says, to reestablish the darkness. Conrad’s tragic limitation is that even though he could see clearly that on one level imperialism was essentially pure dominance and land-grabbing, he could not then conclude that imperialism had to end so that “natives” could lead lives free from European domination. As a creature of his time, Conrad could not grant the natives their freedom, despite his severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them” (428)
Achebe is desperately looking for that final step, and because he does not find it he dismisses the book’s usefulness. Said’s critique feels like exactly the right one: it feels like the stronger version of the critique that Achebe was trying to make. Much like myself when I read, Achebe wouldn’t allow himself to submit to the text enough to come up with a strong critique and so instead he use only his resistance as his tool for combat. This is a major mistake of bad reading, and it is a mistake that we all inevitably do. I finish this essay and I think “How does Said avoid the compulsion to either fight or submit entirely? How does he find the balance between the two? How does he allow himself to let the tensions of the author/narrator drive his critique rather than the tensions within himself?” This is the kind of work that I feel like I am trying to get to. This feels like astoundingly good reading.
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