It is a facile observation that capitalism is like a religion, or, more precisely, that it does much the same thing as religions do. The evidence for this is the incompatibility of an established, religiously governed way of life with capitalism. Islamic banking is a non-sequitur. It's an unresolved dialectic or a preposterous joke. The absurd notion of the 'conflict of civilizations' finds its moment of truth in the manifest incompatibility of these 'civilizations' with the one force which dissolves them all: capitalism. If a 'civilization' comes into contact/conflict with capitalism, e.g. "Islam" vs. "the Western world," then the civilization is on the verge of extinction. Religion is an atavism, like all other forms of community, like all binding agreements except those supported by the institutions of capitalism such as the law and, what really supports the law, the organized violence of the state. The servile nonsense called protestantism can of course support capitalism, but those religions which forbid usury and condemn profit, while always coexisting with forms of unequal exchange, cannot coexist with the enshrining of unequal exchange as the basis of the social order. What happens to them when placed on this precipice is perhaps what we are witnessing today - what we call fundamentalism and explain in the stupidest way.
But a question: what are the dual histories of Christianity and capitalism in Russia? Christianity and feudalism? How did the church respond/what happened to the church in the early 20th century? What is the relationship between devout Christians and incompetent capitalists?
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Friday, April 30, 2010
On Kafka
I once tried to justify my love for Kafka to a pair of incredulous friends. My failure was total. Not only were they not convinced, but my own faith in Kafka's works was shaken by my inability to locate their substance. After numerous false starts, I was confronted by the nihility of that which I was trying to defend. Why is Kafka great? I was left with the most idiotic of claims: because he is really unusual.
And so, let me make another attempt, in a vacuum this time. Something of the extraordinary nature of Kafka's modest oeuvre makes itself evident when one reads interpretations of his writing. Invariably, these interpretations appear grossly inadequate to their task. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the satisfactory interpretation of Kafka is the despair of any theoretical scheme. This is the obstacle which none of them manages to overcome. In each case, the attempt brings the interpretive method to the brink of its own dissolution. Strangely enough, the reason for this seems to be that each one works so well.
Kafka as the prophet of totalitarianism, Kafka as the psychoanalyst avant la lettre, Kafka as theologian for an absent God, Kafka as writer of minor literature. All these attempts are idiotic.
Without access to any of the works I have read or the many more which I have only perused or read about, I cannot substantiate my easy dismissal of all this scholarship, no doubt written by people more learned and intelligent than I. But whenever I read an interpretation of Kafka, I am left with the impression - although I have succeeded in articulating this impression only now - that the interpretive process crushes the supremely delicate tissue of the work, smashes it into dust, and leaves nothing but its own superstructure standing.
Any interpretation of Kafka in accordance with a given theory leaves nothing except that theory. Kafka disappears. He is explained away. If one wants, one can reduce Kafka to weird father-son relationships, monstrous women, dark corners, beds, and laws written down in porno books. Gregor Samsa and the protagonist of "The Judgment" are sons who can find no light in the shadows of their fathers. So total is their domination that they turn into insects or carry out their own death sentences. There's quite a lot of guilt here, you know. Or "Investigations of a Dog" is a theological allegory: dogs are to people as people are to god. But the allegorical aspect is totally irrelevant to the narrator's pursuits. The dogs' obliviousness to humans is less an indictment of their ignorance than it is a dismissal of the irrelevant "higher" beings. What the investigator is searching for is eminently immanent to the world of dogdom.
If K.'s attempts to reach the castle are like man's attempts to reach God, then God is absolute banality.
Kafka's works are striking in that they seem to be symbolic, when they are not. If "The Metamorphosis" seems to be the most symbolic work, then maybe this accounts for its popularity. It is the easiest of the stories to understand.
If Kafka has been misread by those emphasizing the tortured interiority of his works, then what to make of "The Cares of a Family Man?" Was the audience supposed to laugh at this story too? It is wrong to interpret laughter as signaling the opposite of seriousness. Sometimes one laughs in despair. This is not the kind of tepid laughter that one encounters among people at uncomfortable parties.
A few years ago, there was a book released portraying Kafka as an active man-about-town, successful bourgeois bureaucrat, and connoisseur of high-end pornography. The attempt was to humanize him, I suppose, and that is a worthy enough endeavor. There have been enough hagiographies of Kafka. It is all too unfortunate, then, that in the 21st century, to humanize a person is to point out his hemorrhoids. Kafka purchased pornography? You don't say! [and really, you don't, insofar as the 'pornography' was a literary journal. Show Kafka a modern Russian pop video, and he would probably have cried.] The publication of Kafka's office writings does not do much to convince me that he was an exemplar for the managerial class or that one can produce the works he did while 'enjoying' the 'life' which is served to us with added vitamins and minerals.
If the attempt to humanize a writer means making him as banal and worthless as I, his reader, am, then I think I prefer the hagiographies. There is a reason I read Kafka instead of re-writing him.
If I were an artist, I would create life-like statues of attractive naked women and position them in a landfill. Honesty and freedom. I would insist that this is not an allegory, but merely a paraphrase of life as it is.
And so, let me make another attempt, in a vacuum this time. Something of the extraordinary nature of Kafka's modest oeuvre makes itself evident when one reads interpretations of his writing. Invariably, these interpretations appear grossly inadequate to their task. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the satisfactory interpretation of Kafka is the despair of any theoretical scheme. This is the obstacle which none of them manages to overcome. In each case, the attempt brings the interpretive method to the brink of its own dissolution. Strangely enough, the reason for this seems to be that each one works so well.
Kafka as the prophet of totalitarianism, Kafka as the psychoanalyst avant la lettre, Kafka as theologian for an absent God, Kafka as writer of minor literature. All these attempts are idiotic.
Without access to any of the works I have read or the many more which I have only perused or read about, I cannot substantiate my easy dismissal of all this scholarship, no doubt written by people more learned and intelligent than I. But whenever I read an interpretation of Kafka, I am left with the impression - although I have succeeded in articulating this impression only now - that the interpretive process crushes the supremely delicate tissue of the work, smashes it into dust, and leaves nothing but its own superstructure standing.
Any interpretation of Kafka in accordance with a given theory leaves nothing except that theory. Kafka disappears. He is explained away. If one wants, one can reduce Kafka to weird father-son relationships, monstrous women, dark corners, beds, and laws written down in porno books. Gregor Samsa and the protagonist of "The Judgment" are sons who can find no light in the shadows of their fathers. So total is their domination that they turn into insects or carry out their own death sentences. There's quite a lot of guilt here, you know. Or "Investigations of a Dog" is a theological allegory: dogs are to people as people are to god. But the allegorical aspect is totally irrelevant to the narrator's pursuits. The dogs' obliviousness to humans is less an indictment of their ignorance than it is a dismissal of the irrelevant "higher" beings. What the investigator is searching for is eminently immanent to the world of dogdom.
If K.'s attempts to reach the castle are like man's attempts to reach God, then God is absolute banality.
Kafka's works are striking in that they seem to be symbolic, when they are not. If "The Metamorphosis" seems to be the most symbolic work, then maybe this accounts for its popularity. It is the easiest of the stories to understand.
If Kafka has been misread by those emphasizing the tortured interiority of his works, then what to make of "The Cares of a Family Man?" Was the audience supposed to laugh at this story too? It is wrong to interpret laughter as signaling the opposite of seriousness. Sometimes one laughs in despair. This is not the kind of tepid laughter that one encounters among people at uncomfortable parties.
A few years ago, there was a book released portraying Kafka as an active man-about-town, successful bourgeois bureaucrat, and connoisseur of high-end pornography. The attempt was to humanize him, I suppose, and that is a worthy enough endeavor. There have been enough hagiographies of Kafka. It is all too unfortunate, then, that in the 21st century, to humanize a person is to point out his hemorrhoids. Kafka purchased pornography? You don't say! [and really, you don't, insofar as the 'pornography' was a literary journal. Show Kafka a modern Russian pop video, and he would probably have cried.] The publication of Kafka's office writings does not do much to convince me that he was an exemplar for the managerial class or that one can produce the works he did while 'enjoying' the 'life' which is served to us with added vitamins and minerals.
If the attempt to humanize a writer means making him as banal and worthless as I, his reader, am, then I think I prefer the hagiographies. There is a reason I read Kafka instead of re-writing him.
If I were an artist, I would create life-like statues of attractive naked women and position them in a landfill. Honesty and freedom. I would insist that this is not an allegory, but merely a paraphrase of life as it is.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Notes on Society of the Spectacle
1. Spectacle makes the concrete abstract and the abstract concrete: the world is pure surface, where anything can be possessed, but only as an image. That is to say, passive contemplation replaces activity: only pseudo-consumption is really possible, since one cannot do anything in a totally reified world.
Here, Debord reveals his debt to Lukacs.
2. "The true is a moment of the false" (sec. 9): The totality can only be grasped negatively, as the sum of that which has been occluded by the spectacle and the spectacle itself.
3. The spectacle steals work and non-work (rest): work moves away from life and toward the construction of the spectacle; leisure time is the opportunity to be subjected to the spectacle (to one's own alienated labor); leisure is a spectacular simulacrum of concrete freedom.
But what is the wholeness of which spectacle has robbed us?
4. "The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map that is identical to the territory it represents." (sec. 31)
5. The spectacle is at once a confirmation of already achieved abundance and the denial of its practical realization: the liberation of humanity from alienation and need.
6. The economy, as second nature, liberates humanity only to impose a new, equally permanent and equally impersonal (though voluntary!) compulsion.
7. The conquest of abundance necessitated the opening of a new sphere of production - that of desire. The economy's most important product is consumption (cf. sec. 40-43).
8. The use-value of a commodity in the age of pseudo-activity lies in its exchange-value (cf. sec. 46).
9. "The spectacle is money one can only look at." (sec. 49)
10. The function of civilization is now the support and reproduction of the economy.
11. The "economy loses all connection with authentic needs insofar as it emerges from the social unconscious that unknowingly depended on it" (sec. 51). Are authentic needs not social? Or is the support of the spectacle a false sociality which is slowly emerging?
Economy is the social subconscious. It must be made conscious and subjected to the reality principle.
12. Stars live exemplary lives as representations of society's unfulfilled promise - but they also turn the byproducts of social labor into the most desirable things: "power and vacations" (sec. 60).
The public figure is always-already spectacular, i.e. not real, nonliving.
13. The commodity economy breeds spectacular rivalries and antagonisms which are themselves commodities. The infantilization of society creates inter-generational conflict; homogenization produces cliques, fads, subcultures; radical otherness is effaced in the world of pure apprehensibility. Everything can be acquired - but only as image, only as object of contemplation. Radical otherness - the Real - recedes as noumenon. Kantian philosophy becomes intuitive (cf. sec. 62).
14. Youth itself is a commodity - the correlate of endless production and necessary obsolescence; ideal youth becomes eternal and endlessly the same - a demographic through which one passes.
15. Concentrated spectacle is totalitarianism, culminating in the cult of personality as surrogate for the existence of the masses.
16. Diffuse spectacle: capitalism celebrating itself as inaccessible totality.
17. Self-conscious hipsterism and the phenomenon of 'it's so bad it's good' are tacit admissions that there can be no talk of quality in a cultural sphere approximating Borges's Library of Babel. All demographics are provided for, and one must choose from the superabundance which makes its absurdity undeniable: stupidity, corniness, gimmickry - all become commodities; the undesirability of bad things made in bad taste makes them desirable.
18. The collection - the most idiosyncratic thing possible - is manufactured en masse. This is because idiosyncrasy is also manufactured.
19. Marxism is non-teleological insofar as its goal as theory is to make historical development conscious of itself. After that? Total openness as against the false choices of capitalism and the mechanical determinism of idealist misunderstandings.
20. The bourgeoisie are the only revolutionary class that has ever won (sec. 87); they are the class of the economy. The proletariat must become the class of consciousness - that is the necessary condition for a new society.
21. The wake of the October Revolution revealed the survival of the economy above all - the bourgeois economy could exist without a bourgeoisie: the bureaucracy with its goal of primitive accumulation would serve in its place.
22. Stalinist totalitarianism is a sort of surrogate for the capitalist spectacle - but rather than transforming reality like the latter, it only forces (with the direct application of violence) a transformation in the subjected population's perception.
23. The power of totalitarian bureaucracy is directed first and foremost to the denial of its own existence. (sec. 106)
24. Judeo-Christian religion marks a temporal revolution - a universal, unidirectional movement of time - a temporality affecting everyone and everything. It was not a complete revolution, however, and its telos was merely the beginning of the Real - the kingdom of God outside of time; but it was a definitive break with cyclical time nonetheless. (sec. 137).
25. The bourgeoisie introduce the concept of work as the transformation of history; work becomes a value in itself because it makes the world, and is not merely a condition of life. (sec. 140)
26. Global capitalism introduces universal history, but only as the temporality of the economic process, as universal reification: history is given to all just as it is taken away again.
27. The reified time of life under capitalism acquires a pseudo-cyclicity: nights/days, weekdays/weekends, vacations: it is itself a resource for temporal commodification - ultimately for the lifestyle-commodity itself.
28. "The spectacle, whose function is to use culture to bury all historical memory" (sec. 192) - the random juxtaposition of fragments which have become illegible, the construction of a false unity (as a spectacle) of a fragmented world in a fully integrated present which communicates the totality of fragmentation and the impossibility of communication: diagnosis of the postmodern condition.
29. sec. 196: structuralism as apology for the spectacle.
30. The charge that capitalism creates false desires does not necessitate the existence of true desires - merely the gratuitousness of what exists and the possibility of something better.
Here, Debord reveals his debt to Lukacs.
2. "The true is a moment of the false" (sec. 9): The totality can only be grasped negatively, as the sum of that which has been occluded by the spectacle and the spectacle itself.
3. The spectacle steals work and non-work (rest): work moves away from life and toward the construction of the spectacle; leisure time is the opportunity to be subjected to the spectacle (to one's own alienated labor); leisure is a spectacular simulacrum of concrete freedom.
But what is the wholeness of which spectacle has robbed us?
4. "The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map that is identical to the territory it represents." (sec. 31)
5. The spectacle is at once a confirmation of already achieved abundance and the denial of its practical realization: the liberation of humanity from alienation and need.
6. The economy, as second nature, liberates humanity only to impose a new, equally permanent and equally impersonal (though voluntary!) compulsion.
7. The conquest of abundance necessitated the opening of a new sphere of production - that of desire. The economy's most important product is consumption (cf. sec. 40-43).
8. The use-value of a commodity in the age of pseudo-activity lies in its exchange-value (cf. sec. 46).
9. "The spectacle is money one can only look at." (sec. 49)
10. The function of civilization is now the support and reproduction of the economy.
11. The "economy loses all connection with authentic needs insofar as it emerges from the social unconscious that unknowingly depended on it" (sec. 51). Are authentic needs not social? Or is the support of the spectacle a false sociality which is slowly emerging?
Economy is the social subconscious. It must be made conscious and subjected to the reality principle.
12. Stars live exemplary lives as representations of society's unfulfilled promise - but they also turn the byproducts of social labor into the most desirable things: "power and vacations" (sec. 60).
The public figure is always-already spectacular, i.e. not real, nonliving.
13. The commodity economy breeds spectacular rivalries and antagonisms which are themselves commodities. The infantilization of society creates inter-generational conflict; homogenization produces cliques, fads, subcultures; radical otherness is effaced in the world of pure apprehensibility. Everything can be acquired - but only as image, only as object of contemplation. Radical otherness - the Real - recedes as noumenon. Kantian philosophy becomes intuitive (cf. sec. 62).
14. Youth itself is a commodity - the correlate of endless production and necessary obsolescence; ideal youth becomes eternal and endlessly the same - a demographic through which one passes.
15. Concentrated spectacle is totalitarianism, culminating in the cult of personality as surrogate for the existence of the masses.
16. Diffuse spectacle: capitalism celebrating itself as inaccessible totality.
17. Self-conscious hipsterism and the phenomenon of 'it's so bad it's good' are tacit admissions that there can be no talk of quality in a cultural sphere approximating Borges's Library of Babel. All demographics are provided for, and one must choose from the superabundance which makes its absurdity undeniable: stupidity, corniness, gimmickry - all become commodities; the undesirability of bad things made in bad taste makes them desirable.
18. The collection - the most idiosyncratic thing possible - is manufactured en masse. This is because idiosyncrasy is also manufactured.
19. Marxism is non-teleological insofar as its goal as theory is to make historical development conscious of itself. After that? Total openness as against the false choices of capitalism and the mechanical determinism of idealist misunderstandings.
20. The bourgeoisie are the only revolutionary class that has ever won (sec. 87); they are the class of the economy. The proletariat must become the class of consciousness - that is the necessary condition for a new society.
21. The wake of the October Revolution revealed the survival of the economy above all - the bourgeois economy could exist without a bourgeoisie: the bureaucracy with its goal of primitive accumulation would serve in its place.
22. Stalinist totalitarianism is a sort of surrogate for the capitalist spectacle - but rather than transforming reality like the latter, it only forces (with the direct application of violence) a transformation in the subjected population's perception.
23. The power of totalitarian bureaucracy is directed first and foremost to the denial of its own existence. (sec. 106)
24. Judeo-Christian religion marks a temporal revolution - a universal, unidirectional movement of time - a temporality affecting everyone and everything. It was not a complete revolution, however, and its telos was merely the beginning of the Real - the kingdom of God outside of time; but it was a definitive break with cyclical time nonetheless. (sec. 137).
25. The bourgeoisie introduce the concept of work as the transformation of history; work becomes a value in itself because it makes the world, and is not merely a condition of life. (sec. 140)
26. Global capitalism introduces universal history, but only as the temporality of the economic process, as universal reification: history is given to all just as it is taken away again.
27. The reified time of life under capitalism acquires a pseudo-cyclicity: nights/days, weekdays/weekends, vacations: it is itself a resource for temporal commodification - ultimately for the lifestyle-commodity itself.
28. "The spectacle, whose function is to use culture to bury all historical memory" (sec. 192) - the random juxtaposition of fragments which have become illegible, the construction of a false unity (as a spectacle) of a fragmented world in a fully integrated present which communicates the totality of fragmentation and the impossibility of communication: diagnosis of the postmodern condition.
29. sec. 196: structuralism as apology for the spectacle.
30. The charge that capitalism creates false desires does not necessitate the existence of true desires - merely the gratuitousness of what exists and the possibility of something better.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Progress
Anyone aspiring to an understanding of the present must come to terms with the past. But the past is constantly expanding. Every generation entering the present of history must therefore become wiser or, if that proves impossible, more superficial than those which preceded it. There is something to be said for the perpetual lament for the degenerating present - there is, indeed, a change in the horizons of knowledge that is always taking place. Maybe the destruction of the literary canons has something to do with their own unlimited growth. Perhaps relativism is a concession to the impossibility - as the rate of acceleration increases and the permissibility of ignorance declines - of an adequate and attainable realm of common knowledge.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Compromise
I regard myself as an uncompromising person. At first, this sounds like self-praise, and, like all self-praise, it is no doubt unjustified, for a single exception is enough to puncture insecure vanity, and such an exception is always available. All the same, this label ceases to flatter as soon as one reflects upon the general approbation accorded to the concept of compromise. But I cannot agree with this judgment.
Compromise is, essentially, nihilism. It is the concession to total relativism, to the idea that one idea is as good (as bad) as another. For when two parties compromise, they arrive at a position that is equidistant from both original claims, and which is therefore incapable of doing justice to either. To admit to the possibility of compromise is to forsake one's commitment to the original idea.
Compromise, like political moderateness, is the claim that all points of view are equal and equally worthless. It is not so much a matter of respecting the other as it is a total destruction of the possibility of meaningful difference. My position is as (in)valid as yours. By compromising with you, I betray my own position and assert that yours should be betrayed as well - in the interest of expediency, or peace, etc. All claims to the right apprehension of the matter slip into an abyss remote from all positive statements. One compromises with the other because the other is there, not because there is evident truth in the other's claim - this is something else entirely; it is re-evaluation; in the most basic sense, it is a repudiation of one's earlier claim. This is not the same thing as systemic compromise, as in the American political system, where all commitments are nullified in their aggregation, where the system is to preserve itself by amalgamating the delusions of the masses into an innocuous mixture.
A claim comes with a corollary - that claim is right, or it is not right. The resolution of this question necessitates action: the defense of the claim or its repudiation. Defense can succeed, or it cannot. If it does not, one is at least left with the truth of one's convictions, or the conviction in one's truth. Insofar as the functioning of a system or organization presupposes compromises, it nullifies the individuals within it. The structure which allows me to keep my opinion for myself by preventing its expression in the social realm divorces that opinion (and my opinions as a whole) from the possibility of realization.
Something of this problem is already captured in the dual connotations of the word 'compromise.'
Compromise is, essentially, nihilism. It is the concession to total relativism, to the idea that one idea is as good (as bad) as another. For when two parties compromise, they arrive at a position that is equidistant from both original claims, and which is therefore incapable of doing justice to either. To admit to the possibility of compromise is to forsake one's commitment to the original idea.
Compromise, like political moderateness, is the claim that all points of view are equal and equally worthless. It is not so much a matter of respecting the other as it is a total destruction of the possibility of meaningful difference. My position is as (in)valid as yours. By compromising with you, I betray my own position and assert that yours should be betrayed as well - in the interest of expediency, or peace, etc. All claims to the right apprehension of the matter slip into an abyss remote from all positive statements. One compromises with the other because the other is there, not because there is evident truth in the other's claim - this is something else entirely; it is re-evaluation; in the most basic sense, it is a repudiation of one's earlier claim. This is not the same thing as systemic compromise, as in the American political system, where all commitments are nullified in their aggregation, where the system is to preserve itself by amalgamating the delusions of the masses into an innocuous mixture.
A claim comes with a corollary - that claim is right, or it is not right. The resolution of this question necessitates action: the defense of the claim or its repudiation. Defense can succeed, or it cannot. If it does not, one is at least left with the truth of one's convictions, or the conviction in one's truth. Insofar as the functioning of a system or organization presupposes compromises, it nullifies the individuals within it. The structure which allows me to keep my opinion for myself by preventing its expression in the social realm divorces that opinion (and my opinions as a whole) from the possibility of realization.
Something of this problem is already captured in the dual connotations of the word 'compromise.'
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Unceasing consumption induces indigestion, and so, I feel compelled to return to this blog and reverse the flow of information, however insignificantly, in utter disdain of the endlessly proliferating obstacles to such frivolity. Has it been a while? It could have been worse ("Behold, I come quickly ...").
And if the process of writing another post, although effectively contributing nothing to my short list of accomplished things, brings relief, it should not, I hope, be read in light of what I just wrote about the sickness that comes with the consumption of texts which I have neither the time nor the energy to absorb.
It would be entirely unoriginal to characterize the world's scholars as a herd of ruminants, busily reconstructing their fodder into the only production of which they are capable. I can only hope to be so prolific. As far as the usefulness of all this creation, perhaps it is no better than the metaphor toward which I have been tending with a feeling of delicate revulsion. Or maybe it is even worse, for nothing sprouts from it - except more bovines, perhaps.
But if academics don't do anything useful with those brains of theirs (and for all the noble defenses of the humanities I could mount, there is a difference between preserving the "treasures" of "civilization" and endless self-extirpation in the interest of projects which only pretend to have contact with political reality), then this is at least in part because academia is, whether accidentally or intentionally, a repository - an institution, no less! - for those dangerous and altogether undesirable elements of society which might, if deprived of the opportunity for unceasing busy-work, busy themselves with certain, more concrete, forms of criticism.
[Please note, this is conspiracy theory No. 2 regarding the purpose of academia: there are those who are merely processed by the system, i.e. die Studenten, and those who are contained by it and do the system's processing, i.e. die Professoren. See also conspiracy theory No. 1]
And as far as the first category - the blessed students for whose ostensible sake this whole structure exists - the perpetual complaints and polemics regarding the always-already irrelevant humanities and the constant demands for practical skills - the expansion of the university to accommodate those who were always destined for the meat-packing plant in one form or another brought with it, quite naturally, a new set of requiremetns. The humanities never mattered to the people who did; it is simply that the universities did not have to produce high-level cashiers and managers of cashiers, and the rich people who rebelled by becoming professors could continue to dispense healthy portions of the refrigerated high culture which those who would assert their superiority to the mob which they exploited needed to pass the time (and show that they needed something with which to pass the time).
[One is reminded of the contemporary notion of exercise. Those who do not need to work need to demonstrate that they have enough idle time to pretend to look like they have to work - but no one would ever confuse those who work and those who work out! The latter is a demonstration of one's superiority to compulsion].
To put the matter briefly, if reading Marx in an academic environment makes me sick at the thought of the utter pointlessness of the excercise of reading Marx in an academic environment, anemically discussing texts which were, at least once upon a time, intended to provoke action, then perhaps there is still some hope for me as a human being. On the other hand, it would be much easier just to give in and feel the comforting waves of contented cretinism wash over me as I settle into even the minimally tolerant lifestyle of a "contingent" academic. But if not cretinism, then what? What is to be done? Write stupid books, starve, wait for the inevitable (the unpredictable).
And if the process of writing another post, although effectively contributing nothing to my short list of accomplished things, brings relief, it should not, I hope, be read in light of what I just wrote about the sickness that comes with the consumption of texts which I have neither the time nor the energy to absorb.
It would be entirely unoriginal to characterize the world's scholars as a herd of ruminants, busily reconstructing their fodder into the only production of which they are capable. I can only hope to be so prolific. As far as the usefulness of all this creation, perhaps it is no better than the metaphor toward which I have been tending with a feeling of delicate revulsion. Or maybe it is even worse, for nothing sprouts from it - except more bovines, perhaps.
But if academics don't do anything useful with those brains of theirs (and for all the noble defenses of the humanities I could mount, there is a difference between preserving the "treasures" of "civilization" and endless self-extirpation in the interest of projects which only pretend to have contact with political reality), then this is at least in part because academia is, whether accidentally or intentionally, a repository - an institution, no less! - for those dangerous and altogether undesirable elements of society which might, if deprived of the opportunity for unceasing busy-work, busy themselves with certain, more concrete, forms of criticism.
[Please note, this is conspiracy theory No. 2 regarding the purpose of academia: there are those who are merely processed by the system, i.e. die Studenten, and those who are contained by it and do the system's processing, i.e. die Professoren. See also conspiracy theory No. 1]
And as far as the first category - the blessed students for whose ostensible sake this whole structure exists - the perpetual complaints and polemics regarding the always-already irrelevant humanities and the constant demands for practical skills - the expansion of the university to accommodate those who were always destined for the meat-packing plant in one form or another brought with it, quite naturally, a new set of requiremetns. The humanities never mattered to the people who did; it is simply that the universities did not have to produce high-level cashiers and managers of cashiers, and the rich people who rebelled by becoming professors could continue to dispense healthy portions of the refrigerated high culture which those who would assert their superiority to the mob which they exploited needed to pass the time (and show that they needed something with which to pass the time).
[One is reminded of the contemporary notion of exercise. Those who do not need to work need to demonstrate that they have enough idle time to pretend to look like they have to work - but no one would ever confuse those who work and those who work out! The latter is a demonstration of one's superiority to compulsion].
To put the matter briefly, if reading Marx in an academic environment makes me sick at the thought of the utter pointlessness of the excercise of reading Marx in an academic environment, anemically discussing texts which were, at least once upon a time, intended to provoke action, then perhaps there is still some hope for me as a human being. On the other hand, it would be much easier just to give in and feel the comforting waves of contented cretinism wash over me as I settle into even the minimally tolerant lifestyle of a "contingent" academic. But if not cretinism, then what? What is to be done? Write stupid books, starve, wait for the inevitable (the unpredictable).
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