the year of reading tea leaves VI: Republicans

The Republicans' main recommendation for reducing deficits is to ban earmarks. However, they did talk a good game about cutting government spending, making government smaller, etc., when they had control of the White House and Congress. This has earned them the reputation as being the party of small government. Or was that just Ron Paul? Anyway, the Department of Homeland Security wasn't created on their watch.

Tea Partysans use this apparent hypocrisy of the establishment Republicans as a rallying cry and allegedly this is a sign that they are not simply the shock troops of the Republican Party (although they welcome establishment Republicans to their rallies and national conventions and pay at least one of them – the prodigal, former Rogue-Governor – handsomely). They would happily rid the nation of the FDA, FBI, CIA, Social Security Administration, Medicare (although it seems most of the Tea Partysans are receiving it), Homeland Security, FCC (because they don't care whether porn films are shown at 7pm on all networks), etc. Back to 1790, when a muzzleloader and the Bible were all the government one needed.

*

I think coherence (such as it is) will come in the form of votes for Republican Party candidates. Now these Republican candidates, running as "rogues", will appeal to already existing incoherent Tea Partysan "ideals". Once in office, these rogue Republicans will make symbolic gestures towards this new base fraction, such as speeches about succession, the introduction of Constitutional amendments that have no chance of passage (for example, one that would abolish the IRS or abolish the 17th amendment) and the like; the same sort of thing Reagan did to appease his social conservative base (i.e., support a pro-life amendment in words, but not in deeds). But they'll vote with the establishment Republican bloc, will attach earmarks for their districts and states. Business as usual, American democracy in action.

*

The following passage in Steinfels's old book on The Neoconservatives seems apt as a description of the present state of contemporary American conservatism (as it is manifested by the Republican Party and its Tea Partysan allies).

In our time the classic statement of the benefits to be secured in taking one's political adversaries seriously -- and in having political adversaries worthy of being taken seriously in the first place -- is found in Lionel Trilling's preface to The Liberal Imagination. Trilling begins with the observation that has since become the commonplace we already noted: 'In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.' Such a situation poses two dangers. First, the absence of conservative or reactionary ideas 'does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction.' It simply means that such impulses do not 'express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.' They may do worse, for 'it is just when a movement despairs of having ideas that it turns to force.'

Trilling’s vision of the character of opposition to the dominant liberal tradition captures almost exactly the current reaction to the liberal political order of the moment: "irritable mental gestures” which only vaguely resemble ideas sums up the Tea Party movement. However, one should notice an additional element in the current reaction against the liberal tradition (or, rather, the reaction within the liberal tradition). The motive force behind these gestures is religious, not in the sense of organized religion or any particular body of faith, but rather in the structural sense of actions motivated by the force of a collective idea that is not susceptible to the test of (its) reality. Today's conservative and/or Republican political vision is fundamentally chiliastic. And even if the predicted doomsday never arrives, the fundamental faith in fear is not shaken. The Tea Party charivari blithely staggers on.

the year of reading tea leaves V: political style

What I think distinguishes my analysis from that of Hofstadter and Lipset (but primarily Hofstadter) is that I think there is a reasonable element in economic and social status anxiety. One is not a kook, a paranoiac, or an extremist for worrying about one's present and future in economic and social terms. Where the Hofstadterian analysis is useful, I think, is in characterizing the modality through which these otherwise rational concerns are articulated. And, hence, the lack of interest in genuine debate is a telling sign of something like a paranoid style. The demonization of political opponents is also a sign of this style.

*

So whereas randomly sampled Republicans may identify with some of the opinions expressed by the Tea Party, they are not necessarily likely to turn up at a rally with a poster that refers to the President by a racial slur. However, the activists in the Tea Party (and some segment of its rank and file), who may not be identical demographically with the individuals sampled by the NY Times poll, appear to be more extreme, open to expressing their concerns in extremist images and words. And more disturbing to me is the presence of Republican politicians who also seem willing to engage in (if not incite) the same mode of symbolic violence that pops up during Tea Partysan events.

*

Why does the anxious, white, middle-class college-educated male not argue in favor of an expansion of Medicare, a peace dividend dedicated to funding library construction, and amnesty for the immigrant underclass that services his comfortable lifestyle? I think the key factor here is that not all individuals of this sort react in this manner or hold these views. However, those who do also have a party identification that is Republican. They have an ideological framework (a justice frame) within which to make sense of their predicament: government is to blame. This has been the conservative mantra since Reagan. Government is given faces: Pelosi, Reid, Obama. These three individuals by themselves have created all sorts of problems, some of which will arrive on a Day of Reckoning, the national domesday that will occur at some unspecific point in the distant future. Why is this happening? Because Pelosi, Reid, and Obama are socialists.

Continue a bit further down this rabbit hole and one winds up at a Tea Party event, cheering Palin, Bachmann and Beck, wearing a silly hat, and holding a poster with a misspelled, uncivil message.

*

The Tea Party is clearly more than a tax rebellion, given the Partysans' obsession with birth certificates and other symbolic phenomena that reach far beyond the vagaries of deficit spending and the income tax. It is part poujadisme, and part classic American paranoid style, the latter of which is manifested in the Chicken Little Syndrome that infuses Tea Partysan and Teapublican rhetoric. If one were to turn over some of the Partysans, old-fashioned Dixiecrats would crawl out.

the year of reading tea leaves IV: tea-mography

I wonder if it's true that wealthy, well-educated Republicans are the ones seen at Tea Partysan events bearing signs equating Obama with Hitler, etc. On the one hand, if it is true, then we should be very afraid, because it would show that such extremist forms of political expression are now part of the mainstream Republican thinking of mainstream (i.e., wealthier, better educated) Republican voters. On the other hand, one might be encouraged by the profile of the average person who is an adherent of Tea Partysan activism: it means people who are not male, not identified as a Republican, and who are under age 45 (which would be the majority of all Americans) are not now and are unlikely to be persuaded to drink the Tea.

*

"Better educated" usually translates into a measurement of years of schooling (i.e., educational attainment), which does correlate with (but which does not mean causes) different levels of wealth attainment. The Statistical Abstracts of the United States shows this pattern descriptively. The less interesting statistical analysis involves the relationship between educational attainment and wealth (which typically means income, not assets). The more interesting statistical analysis would involve the relationship between educational attainment, wealth, and ideological disposition. In this particular case, the research questions would be: (1) are individuals with higher levels of educational attainment and income more likely to identify with the ideology (inasmuch as one exists) of the Tea Party than individuals with lower levels of educational attainment and income? And: (2) are identification with the Republican party, being a male, being "white," and being over 40 years old, the most significant variables in a statistical model that includes educational attainment, income, and Tea Party ideology? A reasonable guess is that Republican Party identification, being male, being "white", and being over 40 carry more weight than educational attainment and income as a predictor of identification with Tea Party ideology.

*

Despite all of the claims that the Tea Party is comprised of political independents, the Tea Partysans have always pursued their prey on the happy hunting grounds of the Republican tribe. It is no accident that the Tea Partysans target Democratic politicians for defeat and support candidates whose platform is indistinguishable from Republicans or candidates who are Republicans. The Tea Party demographic is basically Republican voters of a certain age, gender, race, educational attainment level, and income level who are facing a decline in their economic status (due to macro-economic trends and the financial crisis of 2008), which has implications for their social status. This reasonable economic and social status anxiety is exaggerated (i.e., raised to a fever pitch) by the presence of a liberal President with a strange name and a democratically-elected Democratic majority in both Houses of Congress. Hence, despite Ross Douthat’s fantasies, the Tea Party activists are nothing more than the shock troops of the Republican party, a new set of shock troops who will replace deployments of aging, economically less successful and less educated social conservative shock troops who have manned the barricades against secular liberalism (read godless socialism) since the mid-1970s. In other words: the Tea Party phenomenon is the Newest New Right, following in the footsteps of McCarthyite Anti-Communism, Goldwater Conservatism, and Moral Majoritarianism.

zwischenbetrachtung: the seduction of Ross Douthat

In an Op-Ed “The Seduction of the Tea Partiers,” Ross Douthat complains that “House Republicans have adopted the atmospherics of the Tea Party movement, but they’ve evaded its most admirable substance.” He describes the Tea Partysans as follows:

The Tea Party is a grass-roots movement — wild, woolly and chaotic — which sometimes makes it hard to figure out exactly what it stands for. But to the extent that the movement boasts a single animating idea, it’s the conviction that the Republicans as much as the Democrats have been an accessory to the growth of spending and deficits, and that the Republican establishment needs to be punished for straying from fiscal rectitude.

The Tea Partiers have a point. Officially, the Republican Party stands for low taxes and limited government. But save during the gridlocked 1990s, Republican majorities and Republican presidents have tended to pass tax cuts while putting off spending cuts till a tomorrow that never comes.

Douthat asserts that “Conservatives have justified this failure with two incompatible theories. One is the “starve the beast” conceit, which holds that cutting taxes will force government spending downward. The other is the happy idea that tax cuts actually increase government revenue, making deficit anxieties irrelevant.” He expends a fair amount of newsprint attacking the case Republicans make for tax cuts. In his view, they are simply coopting the Tea Partysan message for political gain that will not bring about reduced government spending.

But having maligned Republican arguments for tax cuts, what does he offer in support of the Tea Partysans?

Their eccentric elements notwithstanding, the Tea Parties have something vital to offer the country: a vocal, activist constituency for spending cuts at a time when politicians desperately need to have their spines stiffened on the issue. But it’s all too easy to imagine the movement (which, after all, includes a lot of Social Security and Medicare recipients!) being seduced with rhetorical nods to the Constitution, and general promises of spending discipline that never get specific.

So far so good. But Douthat never gets around to explaining the Tea Partysan’s case for spending cuts. For good reason: they have none. It seems that the absence of a rationale for spending cuts is preferable to having a rationale, even if a failed one, for tax cuts. The Tea Partysans have no political theory to back their position. Douthat has been seduced by the mere gestures of a movement that lacks substance. The eccentric wheel gets Douthat’s journalistic grease.

the year of reading tea leaves III: love and hate

The German language is unfairly maligned when the worst phrases are said to sound better in it. Certainly "We need to purge the weaklings" (said Tea Party Express 3 Chairman Mark Williams of the RINOs: Republicans In Name Only) would have sounded better in the original Blubo (Blut und Boden) German of the NS-Zeit. But if we are not bound to the pessimism of Adorno concerning the fascist debasement of language, and the barbarism of writing poetry after Auschwitz, one could just as easily say the obsession with weaklings or others said to undermine the community or nation is as American as apple pie and Father Joseph Coughlin. Nonetheless, the integrity of language can be restored (albeit with difficulty) no matter how debased it becomes in the hands of the political entrepreneurs du jour.

*

Perhaps one should not hold the neue Tee-Patrioten up to standards they can never meet, such as honesty, ethical consistency, and echt constitutional patriotism. Of course, they can be charged with being self-serving, with representing a false claim of universality, or wilfully neglecting the fact that the political process remains legitimate even when one's side "loses" and loses badly (perhaps they were cutting class during the lesson on "majority rule" in 10th grade civics). This self-serving rationalization of failure elevates personal loss to the level of national crisis: one needs look no further than the Hatepalooza tours of Governor Palin for an object lesson in projection. There is no impending Chicken Little Moment as much as people like Cheney wish for one (i.e., wish for an attack on the USA to prove that enhanced interrogation techniques were necessary). Republicans warn of a divided nation, which only proves they can help bring about their own self-fulfilling prophecy through the use of Us-versus-Them rhetoric pitched in the delusional terms we have grown accustomed to hearing: death panels, government takeovers, and, Armageddon (thanks to Republican National Committee Chairperson Michael Steele for that one). What goes hand in hand with the disaster movie plot structure of the political imagination of the conservative base is a pathological view of the most ordinary, mundane political action: the idea of compromise in the course of the legislative process sends our Tea Partysans into convulsive spasms that are becalmed only by amassing a stockpile of ammunition. All of this makes me long for simpler days, when the lunacy that found its way into common political discourse centered around the benign figure of Joe the Plumber, a wondrous P. T. Barnum exhibit for the 21st century. Where have you gone Joe the Plumber, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you...

Well of course he lent his voice to various gatherings of conservatives around the country, including the Tea Partysans. He's also adopted the discourse of victimhood that is so familiar among conservatives (from Palin upward) to account for his relationship to John McCain.

"I don’t owe him s—. He really screwed my life up, is how I look at it," Joe -- aka Samuel Wurzelbacher -- said of John McCain in an interview with Pennsylvania public radio correspondent Scott Detrow.

"McCain was trying to use me. I happened to be the face of middle Americans. It was a ploy."

the year of reading tea leaves II: political theory?

Some random thoughts: what does "government" mean? From the standpoint of "liberty," I could be quite happy to be unburdened of certain tasks so that I have more free time to do what I want. That would be a justification for such "government" as a standing army, or police and fire department, or FDA/USDA. I don't feel I'm giving up any "right" to make decisions for myself when I trust others to do things (like inspect/monitor the quality of the produce I eat). So here "government" are institutions that unburden ordinary citizens of a lot of tasks that would impinge on their liberty.

*

That's not the only meaning government could have. "Government" can mean a set of procedures that (ideally) bring about an orderly, rational, and fair decision making process. Government here means "governing." Roberts Rules of Order is a procedure for "governing" meetings or a parliamentary body. Insofar as individuals must enter in cooperative relations with others to achieve collective and individual ends, this notion of "government" is unavoidable.

*

Compared to these simple propositions, the Tea Partysans have an anemic political philosophy. They seem to react to random problems associated with "government" without offering any vision of what "government" should be. To assert that government should be "small" or "limited" doesn't cut it.

*

Another matter: if government is to shrink, what are the criteria for deciding what should stay and what should go. You are ok with the military but not ok with HUD or the Dept of Education. What are the criteria for this distinction? Do Tea Partysans make any distinctions on what should stay or go? One person's idea of "excessive government intrusion" is another person's idea of a "necessary function."

*

Corporations and government: yes, there is a "problem" (for some people) with the influence of corporations on legislative outcomes. But what is the solution here: get rid of government or contain corporate influence? If one argues that the growth of government (and its intrusiveness) goes hand in hand with the increase of corporate lobbyists, then one would have a more robust analysis of the situation and a better platform with which to support criticism of government.

*

Finally, there is an interesting situation for some (maybe not all) Tea Partysans that they respond to the electoral results of last fall as if it were illegitimate; they are then rejecting the democratic rights of the majority and holding their own view up as not only superior but also non-negotiable. Here I find a fundamental disrespect for democratic processes, a disrespect that could be labeled "un-American" or "unpatriotic" (but I won't do that). If they don't like majority rule (with respect going to minority rights), then they should do some homework on constitutional design and come up with an alternative deliberative and electoral procedure as opposed to ranting about socialism or depicting the President as Hitler or engaging in some other ridiculous and regressive street agitprop. I believe there is a streak of Leninism in the Tea Partysans, they seem to believe they are a vanguard party that knows better what America is and what America needs and are unwilling to subject their ideas and principles to a democratic process in which their ideas may "lose."

progress?

I think it makes sense to think of "progress" as a relative term and to define it, in the first instance, within the boundaries (however conceptualized) of a "society"; in the second instance, one might talk about "progress" across societies. I'm comfortable with a "Weberian" (Max Weber) conception: each historical case is unique; it makes no sense to look for universal laws (such as a universal law of progress) that would apply to all cases; however, comparison is possible using "ideal types." The idea of "progress" might be an ideal type that has significance within a particular case, which, under particular circumstances, could come to have significance across many cases. But this ideal type should not be defined by the standards of any particular case.

I think Weber articulates this perspective well in the “introduction” to his essays on the sociology of religion (two of which are the essays that comprise The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. (NB. The translation of this introduction was appended to the Routledge translation by Parsons, but actually post-dates the original publication of the essays on protestantism).

"A product of modern European civilization, studying any problem of universal history, is bound to ask himself to what combination of circumstances the fact should be attributed that in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of development having universal significance and value." (2001: xxviii)

(Universalgeschichtliche Probleme wird der Sohn der modernen europäischen Kulturwelt unvermeidlicher- und berechtigerweise unter der Fragestellung behandeln: welche Verkettung von Umstanden hat dazu gefürht, daß gerade auf dem Boden des Okzidents, und nur hier, Kulturerscheinungen auftraten, welche doch – wie wenigstens wir uns gern vorstellen – in einer Entwicklungsrichtung von univeseller Bedeutung und Gültigkeit lagen? Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, p. 1)

Weber's interest is in the "universal significance" of "Occidental rationalism", represented in his time by the stage of development of science, rational techniques employed in the production of art and music, and, especially, capitalism ("the pursuit of profit, and forever renewed profit, by means of continuous rational, capitalistic enterprise.” (2001: xxxi) (”…mit dem Streben nach Gewinn, im kontinuierlichen, rationalen kapitalistischen Betrieb: nach immer erneuntem Gewinn: nach ‘Rentabilität.’” p. 4)

*

The idea of progress is complicated in two ways: (a) by the fact that whatever is defined as progress is highly susceptible to partiality derived from one’s particular standpoint in time and space; (b) by the fact that progress bears a distinct, and not necessarily universal, sense of historical time. The first point (the partiality of any definition of what progress is or means) is obvious; the second point, perhaps less so. Koselleck’s discussion of time consciousness is relevant regarding point (b). He argues that between 1500 and 1800 “there occurs a temporalization (Verzeitlichung) of history, at the end of which there is the peculiar form of acceleration which characterizes modernity.” Taking Altdorfer’s splendid Alexanderschlacht (1529) as a point of departure, Koselleck comments on the peculiar representation of temporality in the painting.

“Let us try to regard the picture with the eye of one of his contemporaries. For a Christian, the victory of Alexander over the Persians signifies the transition from the second to the third world empire, whereby the Holy Roman Empire constitutes the fourth and last… The battle, in which the Persian army was destined for defeat, was no ordinary one; rather, it was one of the few events between the beginning of the world and its end that also prefigured the fall of the Holy Roman Empire. Analogous events were expected to occur with the coming of the End of the World. Altdorfer’s image had, in other words, an eschatological status. The Alexanderschlacht was as timeless the prelude, figure, or archetype of the final struggle between Christ and Antichrist; those participating in it were contemporaries of those who lived in expectation of the Last Judgment.

Until well into the sixteenth century, the history of Christianity is a history of expectations, or more exactly, the constant anticipation of the End of the world on the one hand and the continual deferment of the End on the other.” (“Modernity and the planes of historicity,” Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, pp. 5-6).

In light of this sense of time, of timeless time, what would be called “progress”?

**

Finally, I’ll mention briefly a discussion by Koselleck of the historicity of the concept of revolution (a concept that might intersect in ways with the idea of progress). Regarding the concept of revolution, which he argues is “a linguistic product of our modernity,” Koselleck makes the following point: “In 1842, a French scholar made a historically enlightening observation. Haréau recalled what had been forgotten at the time: that our expression actually signified a turning over, a return of the movement to the point of departure, as in the original Latin usage. A revolution initially signified, in keeping with its lexical sense, circulation. Haréau added that in the political sphere, this was understood as the circulation of constitutions taught by Aristotle, Polybius, and their successors but which since 1789 and through Condorcet’s influence was hardly comprehensible. According to ancient doctrine, there was only a limited number of constitutional forms, which dissolved and replaced each other but could not naturally be transgressed. These are the constitutional forms, together with their corruptions, which are still current today, succeeding each other with a certain inevitability. Haréau cited a forgotten principal witness of this past world, Louis LeRoy, who had argued that the first of all natural forms of rule was that of monarchy, which was replaced by aristocracy as soon as the former degenerated into tyranny. Then followed the well-known schema in which aristocracy was transformed into oligarchy, which was in turn displaced by democracy, which degenerated ultimately into ochlocracy, or mass rule. Here, in fact, no one ruled any longer, and the way to individual rule was open once more.” (“Historical criteria of the modern concept of revolution,” Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, p. 41).

What idea of progress, which is commonly ingrained in our affirmative understanding of “revolution,” is imaginable with this cyclical understanding of political events? Or consider the first two sentences of Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which indicate a “repetitive” (and pessimistic) idea of the “progress” of historical events: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

My point here is this: “progress” is a temporal sensibility that is, arguably, a product of historical consciousness as much as it is something “tangible”, that is, something measurable by things such as “quality of life” or level of technological development, etc.

the year of reading tea leaves I: milieu

Die grosse Frage die niemals beantwortet ist und die Ich trotz dreissig Jahre langer Erforschung der Menschenseele auch night beantwortet konnte, lautet: Was wuenscht sich die Tea-Partierei?

When I hear the argument for “less government” from the Liptoners, I wonder what these people are willing to give up. The military is a big government bureaucracy, shouldn't we start chopping it down or just let it go? Wouldn't a private army, with corporate logos on uniforms, be less costly to tax payers? What about the FDA or USDA? Who needs meat and produce inspected or new drug applications tested? If I can save $4 of my income tax that (hypothetically) goes to staffing the USDA, should I be willing take my chances with tainted meat? Perhaps so, but is this what Tea Partysans believe? Would less government include removing all government restrictions on abortion? Hey why not! The FCC? Why can't kids watch porn at 8pm on my local Fox channel if they want to and if Murdoch wants to broadcast it?

*

In the end, the Tea Partysans are weak in political philosophy and strong on a type of nativist populism that can be described as conservative in a relational sense (not in a principled ideological sense). If it were just a matter of opposing the Wall Street bailout, I could see that as “non-partisan” (even though I think there is no such thing as a truly non-partisan position in politics: non-partisan implies opposition to a partisan position, which is partisan). Everyone hates finance bankers! (except the family members of bankers). However, when the complaints about big government are represented through terms like “socialist”, then I think it is a movement that is cathected to a conservative (i.e., traditionalist) milieu. If it turns into an organized political force, I am pretty sure it will do so within the Republican Party. It is no accident that the Republican Party is welcoming the energy of the Tea Parties: it could replace the flagging energy of aging social conservatives.

the year of reading tea leaves: prologue

Leave It to Teavers

June Teaver: Wally, where are you going?

Wally Teaver: I'm going over to the rally to slur Hussein Obama.

June Teaver: That's no way to talk, this is Sunday.

Wally Teaver: You're right, I'll wait 'til tomorrow and slur him in the cafeteria.

*

Wally Teaver: Gee Dad, how come you know so much about Socialists?

Ward Teaver: Well, Wally, as unbelievable as it may seem they did have Socialists in my younger days.

Wally Teaver: Nixon?

*

Ward Teaver: It's that friend of Beaver's. You know, the one who always talks like he was just frightened by something.

June Teaver: Glenn Beck?

Ward Teaver: That's it.

*

Theodore “Beaver” Teaver: How come Obama's such a creepy guy?

Wally Teaver: He’s a Communist.

*

Wally Teaver: Did Obama hit ya?

Glenn Beck: No.

Wally Teaver: Did he arrest ya?

Glenn Beck: No.

Wally Teaver: Then why ya cryin'?

Glenn Beck: Sometimes things get so messed up, crying is the only thing you can do.

*

Wally Teaver: Boy, Beaver, wait'll the guys find out you voted for a Democrat. They'll really give you the business.

Theodore “Beaver” Teaver: But gee, Wally, you voted for Democrats and the guys don't give you the business.

Wally Teaver: Well, that's because I'm in high school. You can do a lot of stuff in high school without getting the business.

*

Wally Teaver: Obama is a pure socialist and on the verge of communism.

Theodore “Beaver” Teaver: Gee Wally, that's swell.

*

Theodore “Beaver” Teaver: Hey Wally, I carried a sign that reads “You're a president, not a dictator. Go back to Kenya” to the Tea Party rally.

Wally Teaver: What a dumb thing to do. I bet you wouldn't have done anything like this if Mom and Dad were here.

autonomy in heteronomy

I’m skeptical of the idea that any or all forms of externality with respect to the individual can be overcome, surmounted, done away with, or resolved. Also, I’m skeptical of the general claim that when the State grows, the individual loses, that an increase in the scope of the State means a decrease in the range of individual autonomy. What is ignored in the anarcho-libertarian philosophy of the subject is the fact that individuals choose to limit their own claims to absolute autonomy by binding themselves to a legal order or a set of familial relationships. The completely autonomous individual is a fiction, as fictional as the “state of nature” in which such individuals are said to possess unlimited “rights”. But one need not rest the case against the anarcho-libertarian vision of the individual with the Is. Even from the perspective of Ought, the ethical ideal of absolute autonomy for the individual leaves much to be desired. It is an ethico-political theory of the individual that is simultaneously apolitical and unethical; apolitical, because it elides the conditions under which such autonomous individuals might actually thrive (i.e., in concert and in cooperation with other individuals); and unethical, because it recognizes no legitimate external moral constraint on the pursuit of individual wishes and desires.

*

Concerning the zero-sum relationship assumed to exist between the State or any other externality and the individual (i.e., more State functions, less individual freedom) something should be noted: institutions, from informal networks to legally codified bureaucracies, do something that enhances the range of individual autonomy. They unburden the individual of the necessity of single-handedly reproducing her entire way of life by herself. Family relationships share the burden of care of children; schools relieve parents of the burden of educating children; the legal system takes on the burden of securing social order, etc. These institutions relieve individuals of the social, psychological, and political burdens they would otherwise have to carry out themselves, individually and in isolation. Perhaps the DIY (do-it-yourself) ethos of the 1970s post-counterculture communes and cooperatives may be an alternative form of social and political organization that would satisfy the autonomy requirements of the anarcho-libertarian philosophy of the subject. However, even here, it is worth noting that such communal forms of living generated a strong sense of interpersonal norms and expectations and, nevertheless, were not sustainable over the long term.

**

Short of viewing individuals as political dupes or sheeple (which is part of the anarcho-libertarian explanatory lexicon), one needs to account for the reason why individuals are not currently in a mad rush to assert the absolute autonomy claims prescribed by anarcho-libertarianism, If one is to avoid the unseemly “false consciousness” account, the process by which individuals currently seek to expand the range of autonomy, the pursuit of an expansion of “rights”, which contributes to the further articulation of the State, needs to be explained. Additionally, a case needs to be made for the priority of individualism in relation to various institutional constraints that limit individualism. In other words, what is the fostering of individualism supposed to achieve and why is it incompatible with externalities, which always already inhibit the absolute free play of individual choice?

Wittgenstein on music

Some people think music a primitive art because it has only a few notes and rhythms. But it is only simple on the surface; its substance on the other hand, which makes it possible to interpret this manifest content, has all the infinite complexity that’s suggested in the external forms of other arts and that music conceals. This is the sense in which it is the most sophisticated art of all. (8-9e)

Structure and feeling in music. Feelings accompany our apprehension of a piece of music in the way they accompany the events of our life. (10e)

-----------------------------

Culture and Value. University of Chicago Press, 1980

Anti-theses on Feuerbach

I

Oprah is the last Young Hegelian.

II

Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity is philosophical Zoloft for the religiously depressed.

III

Sarah Palin refutes the idea that Man’s consciousness is infinite.

IV

Cats take our species as the object of their consciousness.

V

Negative dialectics: Americans project all of their worst predicates onto their politicians. The politicians project them back onto Americans with great accuracy.

VI

The collection plate turns Men into Brutes.

VII

Obligatory monotheism.

VIII

Continental philosophers have only interpreted the world. Analytic philosophers chop up the interpretations into sentences.

Freud on creativity

In my reading of “The creative writer and daydreaming” (in The Uncanny, Penguin, 2003), I don’t sense that Freud seeks to draw a distinction between “normal” creative writers and the “pathological” productions of a Schreber. Unlike his usual tendency to use a perceived alliance between neuroses and infantile sexuality as a means to show that something ‘normal’ (like memory) is bound up with the unconscious, he compares childhood play/fantasy with adult fantasy, and attempts to show both a break and continuity between child’s play and adult fantasizing; then he attempts to draw an analogy between what he’s learned from this comparison and creative writers of a certain sort: writers who “create their own” material and not those who “like the epic and tragic poets of classical times, take over ready-made material” (“Creative writer”, 30) (I’ll return to a problem in this distinction below*). His “evidence” for this sort of writer/writing centers on “more modest authors of novels, romances and short stories, who nevertheless have the most numerous and enthusiastic readership” (“Creative writer”, 30) (Freud, unfortunately, neither explains nor justifies this choice). What interests Freud (and all he is really concerned about) are those works in which a “hero” or psychological individual is the “centre of interest.”

*

As he typically does, he returns to childhood, but not for the purpose of restating the tale of infantile fantasy and desire: his interest rests upon the giving up of child-like play (in the course which reality replaces wishes [and this foreshadows Freud’s discussion of “the omnipotence of thought” in Totem and Taboo]) and the repulsion an adult feels towards his/her own fantasies (which, according to Freud involve either ambition or sex). Whereas a child “does not hide his games [from an audience of adults],” the “adult, on the contrary, is ashamed of his fantasies, hiding them from others and guarding them as his most personal intimacies; as a rule he would rather admit to his wrongdoings than disclose his fantasies” (“Creative writer”, 27). One would expect Freud to move from this insight to explain how creative writers overcome such an inhibition in themselves which remains in effect for ordinary adults. However, in my view, Freud doesn’t have much to say about such creative writers as such that is of psychoanalytic import. What he asserts about these writers -- as opposed to their writings -- is the following: “It has struck me that in many so-called psychological novels there is still only one person, again, the hero, who is described from within; the author sits, as it were, inside the hero’s mind and looks at the other characters from the outside. On the whole the psychological novel no doubt owes its special character chiefly to the tendency of the modern writer to split up his ego, by self-observation, into partial egos and consequently to personify the conflicting currents in his mental life in several heroes.”

This is very interesting: implicit here is the concept of projection (which goes with fantasy and Freud’s analysis of dreams, taboos, and animistic thought). But Freud’s claim that an author’s writing can be accounted for by this process, in the absence of an observation of the author under analysis, seems to violate the methodological prerequisites of the psychoanalytic technique (not that this stops Freud in many cases, such as his essay on Leonardo Da Vinci). But the other problem* is this: he assumes that the literary texts that are of interest to him (romance-hero novels, psychological novels) are an unconscious manifestation of the author’s own psychological life. This sort of view could be challenged from two standpoints: (1) it ignores “genre”: it may be the case that the novels Freud feels are created ex nihilo in fact are produced from ready-made materials (i.e., conventional narrative forms, plot structures, types of characters and character development) that have no connection to the writer’s internal psychical life; (2) it is open to the convincing challenge (made much later, of course) that “The writer belongs to a language which no one speaks, which is addressed to no one, which has no center, and which reveals nothing. He may believe that he affirms himself in this language, but what he affirms is altogether deprived of self” (Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 16).

**

Freud admits that he hasn’t really said enough about the “creative writer.” In the last paragraph, he gets to what I feel is more important in this essay: an account of the psychological effects produced by aesthetic forms (as he does in his essay “The uncanny”). What the creative writer does, according to Freud, is to overcome the reader’s repulsion towards fantasy.

“However, when the creative writer plays his games for us or tells us what we are inclined to explain as his personal daydreams, we feel a great deal of pleasure, deriving no doubt form many confluent sources. How the writer achieves this is his most intimate secret: the true ars poetica lies in the technique by which he overcomes our repulsion, which certainly has to do with the barriers that arise between each single ego and the others. We can make a guess at two of the means used by this technique: the writer tones down the character of the egoistic daydream by modifying and disguising it, and bribes us with the purely formal – that is aesthetic – bonus of pleasure, which is offered to us so that greater pleasure may be released from more profound psychical sources, is called an incentive bonus or fore-pleasure. In my opinion, all the aesthetic pleasure that a creative writer gives us is in the nature of a fore-pleasure, and the real enjoyment of the literary work derives from the relaxation of tensions in our minds. Maybe this effect is due in no small measure to the fact that the writer enables us, from now on, to enjoy our fantasies without shame or self-reproach” (“Creative writer”, 33).

Behind this argument are claims Freud makes about how unconscious wishes are expressed in distorted form in parapraxes, dreams, and memory. Of particular importance is the idea that wishes can’t be expressed directly and that (in dreams) the “dream-work” works over the wish, presenting the wish to us in a “safe” form, much as a dissident writer, who -- in a repressive political regime that employs an official censor -- writes a fairytale of chickens defeating foxes, permits her readers to experience a type of (fantasized) fore-pleasure that substitutes for the real, but forbidden pleasure of overthrowing the regime in reality.

***

In sum, I think he has more interesting things to say (in this essay) about psychological effects that are produced by literature than the psychological sources of the creative process itself (and what the author brings into this process from her unconscious). What I find interesting in his version of psychoanalysis is the fact that – in theory, if not in practice – the line between normal and abnormal is not rigidly drawn: after all, he includes modern science – e.g., psychoanalysis – under the category of “omnipotent thought” (as he does animism and religion).

wonder and doubt

Near the beginning of Negative Dialectics, Adorno claims that philosophy had been surpassed (because its moment of realization was missed). Yet, I witnessed a packed auditorium at 9am on a Saturday morning held in rapt attention by Habermas's lecture "From Kant to Hegel and Back Again: The Move toward Detranscendentalization" (in Truth and Justification). There's no schande in the fact that there is professional philosophy (and the claim against academic philosophy that it is academic doesn't constitute a non-trivial finding) and that philosophy exists outside the academy. As an outsider, I'm amused by the apparent war between analytic and continental philosophy (which echoes the apparent war between quantitative and qualitative methods in the social sciences). Professional philosophy is an embattled field, at once the most exulted of the cultural sciences and, often, the smallest department within the humanities. The social sciences have encroached, in their clumsy way, on the philosophical field, appropriating, borrowing, and stealing, frequently without understanding.

*

Socrates: "I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher, for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder. He was not a bad genealogist who said that Iris (the messenger of heaven) is the child of Thaumas (wonder)." Plato, Theaetetus (Penguin Books: p. 25).

Hegel: “Only one word more concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be. For such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late. Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.” Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (Preface).

Wittgenstein: “In every serious philosophical question uncertainty extends to the very roots of the problem. We must always be prepared to learn something totally new.” Remarks on Colour (University of California Press: 1-15, 4e).

**

Wonder and doubt should not be placed in opposition. Here I would say that “wonder” stands in a polemical relation to the view of philosophy articulated by Hegel in the Preface to The Philosophy of Right; the notion that philosophy comes on the scene only after events are cut and dried (which allows an identity between the real and ideal, the real and the rational) and the List der Vernunft (in The Philosophy of History) leave no room for contingency, of anything of which one might be “in wonder.” There are no historical surprises for Hegel, no possibility that things could be otherwise; they simply are.

But if I might bring in Wittgenstein here: uncertainty -- a form of doubt -- also opens a way to wonder (the preparation, or capacity, to learn something totally new); or perhaps we can understand wonder and doubt as different orientations that bring about openness towards what exists, what is thought to exist, and categories of knowledge.

***

Whether doubt and wonder should be considered oppositional ways of knowing (of philosophy) or as complementary orientations, one can also acknowledge that a hierarchical relationship exists between wonder and doubt. A homology exists in the relationship between the following terms, with primacy accruing to the first term in the paired sets:

Doubt and wonder

Science and art

The hierarchical relations of doubt/wonder, science/art have other associations (or relations) of superior and inferior mapped on to them:

Doubt:Wonder

Masculine:feminine

Adult:Child

Developed:Un(der)developed

****

We can also consider the relation of wonder and doubt in another way, with another provisional “opposition” between philosophy (whatever that might be) as a way of knowing versus an understanding of philosophy as a mode of being. Ricoeur’s summary of the trend in philosophical hermeneutics (represented by Heidegger and Gadamer): “I see the recent history of hermeneutics as dominated by two preoccupations. The first tends progressively to enlarge the aim of hermeneutics, in such a way that all regional hermeneutics [here he means hermeneutics developed for the purpose of the study of the bible and ancient texts (philology)] are incorporated into one general hermeneutics. But this movement of deregionalization cannot be pressed to the end unless at the same time the properly epistemological concerns of hermeneutics – its efforts to achieve a scientific status – are subordinated to ontological preoccupations, whereby understanding ceases to appear as a simple mode of knowing in order to become a way of being and a way of relating to beings and to being” (“The task of hermeneutics.” p. 54, in From Text To Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II). The opposition of epistemology (which is associated with doubt, science, and method in Truth and Method) to ontology (with the shift in favor of the latter) has this implication for philosophy in the work of Gadamer. First, we must ask what types of beings we are: we are historical beings; second, interpretation/hermeneutics involves us in acquiring the historical tradition which always already shapes our way of being; prejudices, the bête noire of Enlightenment thought (and the philosophy of doubt running from Descartes to Durkheim), are not to be rejected, but rather are the starting point for an interpretive process in which a fusion of horizons (our own with those of the past) takes place.

Hence, we wind up (following Heidegger and Gadamer) with a rejection of skepticism, epistemology, and, most significantly, explanation, and an exclusive embrace of interpretation and understanding. Ricoeur attempted to overcome this opposition by turning to linguistics as a “scientific method” that is appropriate to language and our being in language (as per Heidegger’s claim that language is “the house of Being.” (“The way to language.” p. 135, in On the Way to Language).

“We can, as readers, remain in the suspense of the text, treating it as a worldless and authorless object; in this case, we explain the text in terms of its internal relations, its structure. On the other hand, we can lift the suspense and fulfill the text in speech, restoring it to living communication; in this case, we interpret the text. These two possibilities both belong to reading, and reading is the dialectic of these two attitudes” (“What is a text? explanation and understanding.” Pp. 113, in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II)

I reference Ricoeur for the purpose of showing an effort work through apparent oppositions that pertain to defining what “philosophy” is. It is possible to both raise epistemological questions (in this case, the conditions of meaningfulness) and ontological questions (the meaning of a text in relation to the world of texts and to ourselves). Ricoeur explains this as follows, with the notion of a hermeneutic arc.

“I shall therefore say: to explain is to being out the structure, that is, the internal relations of dependence that constitute the statics of the text; to interpret is to follow the path of thought opened up by the text, to place oneself en route toward the orient of the text. We are invited by this remark to correct our initial concept of interpretation and to search – beyond a subjective process of interpretation as an act on the text – for an objective process of interpretation that would be the act of the text.”

“The idea of interpretation as appropriation is not, for all that eliminated; it is simply postponed until the termination of the process. It lies at the extremity of what we called about the hermeneutical arc: it is the final brace of the bridge, the anchorage of the arch in the ground of lived experience. but the entire theory of hermeneutics consists in mediating this interpretation-appropriation by the series of interpretants that belong to the work of the text upon itself. Appropriation loses its arbitrariness insofar as it is the recovery of that which is at work, in labor, within the text. What the interpreter says is a resaying that reactivates what is said in the text” (“What is a text? explanation and understanding.” Pp. 121-122, 124, in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II)

In this case, an openness to the text (towards discovery and appropriation of its meaning), is compatible with the philosophical tradition of doubt (epistemology), which raises questions of the conditions for knowing a text. The tradition of doubt does not have to be excised.