Tony on Gil I: Anticipating Conspiracies, Research Time, 02/03/2018

Here's a nerdy thing I’m enjoying about all the research of Utopias – a bunch of the key authors knew each other personally and wrote about each other’s work. So when I come across an essay that Antonio Negri wrote about the ideas of Gilles Deleuze, it’s going to have a little more significance than any other category.

Just like the Isabelle Stengers essay I was writing about yesterday, only I’ve read more of Negri’s work so far than Stengers’.

If Deleuze and Guattari had become as
prominent in American humanities
curriculums as the Frankfurt School had,
would Andrew Breitbart even have done
any of the radical anti-progressive activism
that defined his life? A butterfly flaps its
wings and a reactionary movement forms.

So Antonio Negri wrote an essay about Gilles Deleuze. It ranges across their political philosophy in two ways. It discusses Deleuze and Guattari’s own concepts, but it also describes some of the historical factors of how they were received.

In the case Negri discusses, America, it’s how they weren’t received. Because Deleuze and Guattari’s contribution to progressive political philosophy was, for a long time, squeezed out of public prominence by the Frankfurt School.

Historically, it was a matter of contingent historical connection. The Frankfurt School thinkers who survived the Second World War settled in the United States – Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse. Their writing was already prominent enough that they could land professors’ positions at the major elite schools.

Not everybody could do it, but the ones who didn’t seemed to be more effective in inspiring revolution against injustice.

Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse ended up locking down intellectual influence on the university-educated progressive left in America. Their books were the basis of critical political studies in the United States for the rest of the 20th century.

This fact is at the centre of why “cultural marxism” has taken hold as a conspiratorial concept in reactionary circles these days. It began from Andrew Breitbart’s misreading of Adorno – he saw the philosopher’s message as saying that social and political change begins from changing the culture, not from the top-down with state control institutions.

As a result, Breitbart shaped his extremist libertarian media outlet with an ambitious mission – change the culture through media activism. His goal was to counter the influence of Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Brietbart and his followers saw these writers as the communist Jews* who spent decades spreading ideologies of state socialism – cultural marxism – into the young generations through their books and the humanities professors who taught them.

* Because this is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, just so we have that clear. The Elders of Zion are now a bunch of elderly university professors.

Another irony is that Negri, Guattari, Deleuze, and
many others who built the philosophy of radical
democracy like Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe,
and Bifo Berardi were all actual political activists.

Breitbart has, by all accounts, been incredibly successful. His brand of frothing anti-communism consumes conservative circles today. They make monsters out of people who support ordinary welfare state policies like government-provided health insurance.

Negri wrote this essay before Breitbart Media’s brand of extremism – rabidly anti-socialist white nationalism – took hold of American culture. But he provides an ironic point through his spin on the Frankfurt School. Even as Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse identified the only route to change society in cultural change, they also considered liberatory cultural change impossible.

Theo, Max, and Herb analyzed all the vectors of cultural repression – economic, political, psychological, sociological – and found it omnipresent. It’s actually impossible to find any breathing room in cultural repression to start a positive movement that will actually overthrow the repressive relationships themselves.

The most a real revolution in state or economic power can achieve is changing the character of repression. As Marcuse put it, capitalist vectors of repression reduce people to a single dimension of activity and self-conception. It becomes impossible to conceive of any positive alternative.

So all you can do in the face of a capitalist framework of life is critique and question. Negri identifies the quietism and hopelessness at the heart of Frankfurt School philosophy. Writing more than a decade ago, Negri finds an irony for me – Breitbart didn’t realize that, for all the critique and questions, the writers who became his Elders of Zion already considered him the winner.

More next week.

Contradictory Heritage, A History Boy, 08/09/2017

I have a pretty stand-offish relationship with Theodor Adorno. I think it’s a result of my first exposure to him. That came through an older university librarian I knew by the philosophy department circles back in my undergrad years at Memorial.

He was the philosophy specialist in the library’s procurement, and his own PhD research focussed on Adorno. CD was a smart guy, and although I found him a little pretentious, he was a good person to hang out with. I have to say, though, he wasn’t very good at selling Adorno to me.

I reconsidered his work as I got older, but never really made the jump to studying his philosophy in full. Mostly, it was because I was working on a totally different tradition and approach in Western philosophy during my doctorate – informing environmentalist ethics through philosophy of biology and ecology, with a leg up from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on the conceptual framework.

Remember, freshmen, there is no art without suffering.
No education without folly.
No philosophy class without a surly smart-ass.

But I think it was also because of his reputation. I’m not usually one to cower in front of a reputation, but with Adorno, I did. His work wasn’t just philosophy to me – it was an edifice. I came to that image through the Adorno specialists and students I knew – they treated him like a figure of awe.

Nein broke that image for me. He injected some levity into Adorno for me, and made him and his work more approachable. I don’t want to read some unapproachable edifice. I want to read a thinker.

So I’ll probably hit up some Adorno soon. I’ll soon be transitioning away from looking at left-wing philosophy as it’s more traditionally defined. But after a walk along the path that I’m heading for, I think I’ll go back to some Adorno, no matter how strange his work might be.

How strange might that work be? Well, here’s Perry Anderson’s take on it. This is probably what I admire most about Anderson’s writing and thought. He’s a historian of ideas who can genuinely grapple with the real strangeness of some ideas and still find witty and concise ways of explaining it.

Maybe it helped that I was already familiar with the context. I mean, I haven’t read much Adorno myself, but I’ve read almost everything else that influenced him. So it’s not like I have no idea what kind of concepts are flying around there.

Here are the concepts that Anderson throws down to explain the underlying ontology of Adorno’s philosophical writing. Same goes for the rest of the Frankfurt School more generally.

He describes Frankfurt School thinking as on the same plane as these following two philosophical frameworks. One is the philosophy of Friedrich Schelling. Anderson describes this as adapting the metaphysics of Christian salvation to the human relationship with the material Earth. So the path to humanity’s redemption from our fundamental corruption is a kind of devotion to harmonious material nature.

Schelling is another German philosopher who I
could just never get into. Everything I heard about
his ideas, even from people who loved his work,
made me think I would hate it all. I haven't heard
anything much different yet.

The City of God becomes the City of Man when it’s no longer a city, but a forest. And we must treat it as such.

Two is Heidegger’s critique of technology, his account of the technological attitude as the rupture of man from nature. This rupture is the ongoing social, cultural, and philosophical goal of dominating the Earth – we dominate Earth to make commodities from it, and we define our lives through our commodities, our stuff.

In the words of the Frankfurt School’s marxist heritage, capitalism is the rupture of humanity from Earth, from nature. So a liberated society, in Adorno’s thinking* is a reconciliation of humanity and Earth.

* According to Perry Anderson.

It’s a beautiful vision. As someone who holds environmentalist political and ethics values, I definitely like it. Despite the way Anderson’s account tends to reify nature. Actually, that’s a serious problem for me. By pulling Schelling’s Christian salvation narrative into an immanent material relationship – humanity and Earth – you turn the planet into God.

Earth isn’t God. It’s Earth. If you believe it’s God, you’re making a serious mistake. God as a Christian concept was designed as the ultimate Other – the Fall means that humanity’s nature is utterly and totally anathema to the Divine. That we’re virtually like poison to divinity.

If this is really the underlying metaphysics of the Frankfurt School, I can’t even say they’re radical left anymore. To make a Christian God of Nature is making an idol out of a word that shouldn’t even be capitalized.

There’s an even deeper conservatism underneath the ideas of what the radical right today call the communist conspiracy of the modern era.

Hey! Cultural Marxism! III: Like Rain At Your KKK Rally, Research Time, 28/08/2017

Yeah, it’s a pretty deep irony. Better men than me have described the utterly weird way the Frankfurt School thinkers have become the bogeymen of the radical white supremacist and libertarian set these days.

The Frankfurt School became the ideological prototypes of the cultural marxism that folks all over the far right see spreading everywhere.

Here’s something that tends to happen in the far-right of America since the Tea Party first blew up – they tend to mistake having been in the class of a professor for being the loyal soldier of their ideas.

The John Birch Society believed crazy shit like how a bunch of old
men who found most American culture totally distasteful and had no
experience or history of radical politics beyond the trade union and
international workers' associations could secretly direct a
revolution along completely different lines. Breitbart (the
network) took that conspiracist paranoid blindness to the
mainstream of American culture.

Barack Obama once took a course from Bill Ayers, who’d been in the radical anarchist Weather Underground decades before. Therefore, Obama was a disciple of Ayers, bringing the older radical’s politics to the Presidency.* Well, the same thing happened when Angela Davis was in a couple of classes by Herbert Marcuse.

* I think this is one reason why many Trump supporters throughout middle class Republican Party members aren’t concerned by the current President’s tacit support of extremist racist militias. They’re so accustomed to the notion that Obama was an extreme left-wing radical that they consider the President’s office long-radicalized.

Obama and Marcuse are – to a very special audience – a great triumph and a founder of ‘cultural marxism.’ The way it’s often used today, the term follows how from Andrew Breitbart understood it in most significant book, Righteous Indignation. Breitbart studied the works of the Frankfurt School himself – Marcuse, Theodor Adorno** – and came to a very unorthodox reading.

** Andrew Breitbart strikes me as a man who couldn’t appreciate Walter Benjamin. I don’t mean whether or not he’d agree with him – I’m talking about the value of his essays as a work of art and craftsmanship in philosophical writing.

Granted, it’s now a popular reading, thanks to him. It starts with his picture of the intellectual storehouse of communism.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau develops a concept of humanity that requires deep harmony with your community to complete yourself as a person. Georg Hegel transforms community into State, Karl Marx elaborates the theory into economic theories and real political movements.

The last of these was the Frankfurt School, the marxist theorists that fled Nazi Europe for the United States – all Jews, of course. They develop the idea that successfully changing society along a socialist line requires more than economic control, but changing the culture and moral values of the society.

The liberation movements of the 1960s were doing exactly that. Breitbart understood these movements as an explosion of marxism, but along cultural lines with activists instead of economic vectors with state planners.

He saw – as these philosophers had just developed their central theories of culture and social change – these threatening liberation movements emerge. He saw America walking the path to communism while singing songs of freedom.

The irony is that these movements had little to do with the cabal of refugee philosophers. Adorno and Horkheimer both found black culture distasteful, and Adorno developed a complex aesthetic theory which happened to justify his extreme hatred of jazz.

They were no directors of the revolutionary network. Women, black people, gay people, Indigenous people – they had nothing to do with a proper marxist revolution. That was for workers.

A very sarcastic ending. I want to talk more about this tomorrow.

Hey! Cultural Marxism! II: Missed Connections, Research Time, 25/08/2017

The philosophers went to the universities. The group of thinkers at the centre of Perry Anderson’s short book Considerations on Western Marxism are, more commonly, called the Frankfurt School.

They're at the centre of the great right-wing conspiracy theory of our time – cultural marxism. Part of what I want to do with the next few posts is clarify my ideas about this conspiracy image – the product of Andrew Breitbart’s weird interpretation of this existentialist marxism.

The cultural impact of this angry, angry man fascinates me.

I’ll be getting back to Breitbart’s interpretation later on, riffing from his book Righteous Indignation. I want to stick with Anderson for now, because Anderson describes accurately the history of the Frankfurt School and the other theorists of Western marxism.

So when I left off yesterday, Stalin had just purged the entire Soviet Union of any communist philosopher with any originality of thought beyond dutifully transcribing and explaining ideological directives from the Central Committee. Those people were all dead by the end of the 1930s.

It’s not as though the study or continuation of marxist theory was doing much better in Europe. The central clique of these thinkers in the university sector were at Max Horkheimer’s Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Hence the name.

They ran into some trouble when Hitler came to power. So Horkheimer and the rest of his crew picked up whatever they could and moved to New York.

Here was the break in the Cold War’s West* between philosophical creation and community organizing among working class people. The main institution the theorists used to become community activists was the Communist Party of each country where they lived.

* And the Cold War wouldn’t even start for another 15 years.

Anderson wrote his book in the 1970s, so there was no sign on the
horizon of the ironic movement in universities happening today:
Squeezed by large-scale underemployment, many humanities
researchers are pursuing careers outside the university campus,
and many on the left are becoming journalists and activists.

Already, the link between philosophers and activists was getting strained. The philosophers no longer worked for the political parties or the radical newspapers. They taught in universities. But there was still the party itself, where the theorists could work with the folks who pounded the streets and the factory floors.

Uprooting the entire intellectual rank and file of the western European workers’ movement** across the Atlantic Ocean had two effects.

** Or killing them. Many of them were also killed. Taken out of their homes and shot. Bundled into a car in the middle of the night, tortured, and never seen again.

Here was the first effect. I don’t even know why I included that note about so many socialist philosophers and theorists being killed. Because I can just say it here. The rise of Stalin in Russia and Hitler in Europe resulted in many original thinkers getting bullets in their brains. That’s one obvious loss to the community of writers and activists.

The other loss was a bit more subtle. While Horkheimer and the other political refugees from Hitler’s Europe were working in New York, they had no Communist Party to draw on.

Now, there were plenty of communist parties and groups in the United States. But none of them had the unity of the European communist parties. It was a literal unity, another function of the social organizing work Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels did in the 19th century. They built an international conference for all the communist parties of Europe. It strengthened the unity of the European workers’ movement’s social network.

The flaw of the marxist tradition – and all traditions named after a
person – is excessive fealty to Marx himself. It hobbles a thinker
or an activist from adapting to changing times.

None of that existed in the United States. Its movements for workers’ rights developed in very different directions in an extremely different set of cultures from those in Europe. Left-wing politics in the United States was much more fragmentary, with different parties across the states all holding different principles and doing their own things.

That lack of centralization had one big advantage – it made the workers’ movement more flexible. The core ideas could survive many different attempts to repress them, their devotees could adapt to the most hostile and unstable political contexts. Plus, the movement on a national scale was more immune to pressure and co-optation by Stalin.

Not to say that plenty of communist parties throughout the United States didn’t become puppets of Stalinism. Many did. Which is why the ideas and goals of a social democratic liberation movement mutated away from communist parties themselves. But that’s for later.

The problem was that there was no unified political party on a continental scale for Frankfurt School leaders and other left-wing intellectuals to latch onto. So by the end of the Second World War, the university-based philosophers of the workers’ movement lost all their material connections to politics.

This is where the irony sets in . . . . To be continued

Far More Than a Mere Instrument, Research Time, 04/02/2014

One chapter of Living in the End Times demonstrates the problem that the Utopias project faces: the gravity of Marxism. The chapter is a comprehensive critique of traditional Marxist perspectives and the engagement with traditional Marxist perspectives of Alain Badiou and the Frankfurt School. 

The extremely intense Max Horkheimer

Zizek’s basic idea is that the concept of instrumental reason is an incomplete critique of how our society works. The legacy of Martin Heidegger is the problem here. For all of Heidegger’s reputation for difficulty and complexity, when you look past all the possibilities for purely technical/historical criticism regarding his appropriations and interpretations of various philosophers,* his philosophy amounts to a critique of the vision of the world as existing as a potential resource. When we look at the world today, says Heidegger, we understand it only in terms of things that we can use. The Frankfurt School writers like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, understood this in terms of humanity’s one-dimensionality. We were no longer even able to critique ourselves, because instrumentality, use-value, was our only framework left for understanding the world.**

* The academic paper of the form “X’s understanding of Y” is very easy to write and publish in a contemporary specialist journal. All you have to do is compare and contrast X’s interpretation of Y with that of several prominent contemporary specialized scholars of Y. I’ve read these papers, and they tend to amount to quibbling, with very little philosophical creativity. The prevalence of this attitude among so many journal reviewers I’ve encountered over the last few years is why I want to concentrate on writing books for my philosophical work instead.

** If our supposed one-dimensionality makes critique impossible, then why were Horkheimer and friends able to write their critical books? A cheap shot, but a fun shot to make.

My own perspective on the Frankfurt School authors is complicated. I’ve explored a little Marcuse and the basics of Adorno, but I’ve largely kept my distance in the past. I think this is because I’ve met too many people who worship Adorno, and slavishly parrot his views, ideas, and terminology without fully understanding them. As well, the amount of secondary material that has been produced about them is so massive that it’s become intimidating. I feel as though the only way I’d be able to speak with legitimacy about them is to study them and the works about them to the exclusion of everything else. If the Utopias project will require any one skill, it’ll be learning how to take in a wide scope of philosophical ideas and texts while maintaining the credibility for my discussion to be taken seriously.

Zizek’s critique is that conceiving of humanity as one-dimensional is too one-dimensional, putting the blame for the inevitable collapse of the Enlightenment dream and social revolution on a fundamental and inescapable feature of human nature. Even Heidegger himself didn’t think instrumental reason was necessary to humanity, just an enormously dominant feature of thought in our civilization. The real phenomena of totalitarianism, the exploitive features of mass-scale capitalism, and the injustices of colonial military-economic expansion are too complicated to reduce to a single cause or underlying framework of thought. And because the phenomena of oppression are so complicated in their generation, structure, and development, they can also be sabotaged, critiqued, and fought in equally complicated ways. 

For someone who describes himself as a pessimist, Zizek is very good at arguing against pessimism.