French versus British democratic orgins

The question of France and Britian's different routes into democratic modernity is a fascinating one. So it is interesting to note that Lucien Goldmann in The Hidden God and Marcel Gauchet in the first volume of his L'Avènement de la démocratie both make similar cases about the fate of French absolutism in the eighteenth century. Gauchet's argument is that the absolute sovereign had sufficient power to destroy the ranks below him and the organic ties between them, and in particular to marginalize the church. This meant that the social situation for the philosophes to begin to think from the point of view of the individual, that is to say in Lockean terms. Goldmann of course argues that the king sideline the old noblesse de robe in his efforts to raise taxes (he created hugely powerful tax farmers and a new oligarchy arose around them). Pascal and Racine articulate the "tragic vision" of the displaced elite class. But in both cases the absolutist monarch digs his own grave because he has sufficient power to break down the old "traditional" order.

unused notes for a book introduction: endgame capitalism again

The period in which I wrote the chapters of this book has been a trying one politically. The optimism of the post war period, which, for all its peaks and troughs, can be traced through fifties social democratic state-building, the radical new left of the sixties the civil rights movement, feminism, and postcolonialism, seemed finally to dissipate between 1989 (the fall of the Wall) and 2001 (9/11 and the beginning of the war against terror.) Perhaps for those of us in the Anglophone West, however, the key moment were the elections won by the officially ‘left’ or liberal’ side: Bill Clinton in the US and Tony Blair in Britain. Both sides had now abandoned social democracy: neo-liberalism or the rather what Phillip Bobbitt has called the market state reigned.
So this book is motivated by a particular political fear—that the current globally hegemonic regime of democratic capitalist nation-states is impossible to replace and yet is systemically, pathologically flawed. We are stuck with national-democratic capitalism for the foreseeable future since it and it alone is the political system that rationality (as we know it) legitimates and since it provides so many goods and is so open to reform. But for all that it is destructive of human capacities. It would still be destructive were able to create a just society within its framework , since what it destroys is autonomy and the will to think and (though less so), happiness, none of which concern justice. I realize that this is an extraordinarily contentious assertion whose various premises elide a library of debate. But for me, here, it’s a question not of truth but of fear.
And that fear has led me to break with the main currents of cultural studies which, as we shall see, are embedded not in exit from the system (revolution, mysticism, quietism for instance) but in reformism. This is not to say that reformism is to be rejected in practice. That would in effect to be return to classical communism or to varieties of anti-worldly Christianity. It is to say that reformism is a secondary and profoundly limited game, which lies at the heart of our intellectual life only as a sign of the system's pathologizing march. And yet it has not led me into the arms of those who are indeed enemies of national-democratic capitalism and who do have a vital presence in the academic humanitie

Contemporary democratic state capitalism is an endgame capitalism, because we can’t imagine a way out of it: it is endlessly future-directed but not a future which offers more than more accumulation, more control of nature, and (for the left) more social justice in its own terms. It’s a machine in which individual’s lack agency: or rather their collective agency has been mediated and mediatised. In effect the market-economy has taken control of the political institutions via the media, and indeed there are tendencies to politicize once neutral institutions of state in order to bring them too under the sway of the market. The mechanics of the process work like this: democratic elections require media campaigns to reach out or rather to influence the electorate since these media campaigns can in effect buy votes; since these media campaigns are themselves expensive (and under indirect control of the media owners), the money required to buy them must be donated to parties and politicians by interest-groups who often have lobbyists and intellectuals working for them on another tack. But those donations bring with them obligations to aid donors’ access to profit, prestige and power. At the same time, the periodic formal democratic vote has become swamped in continuous polling, by which various political agents seek to gauge the will of the electorate and tweak their media campaigns. The circuits between polls, media campaigns and policy, on the one side, and between donations, media campaigns and policy on the other contains little room for principled policy in terms that other than that thrown up from the circuits themselves. This is one example of a general process we can call the autonomisation of the social
At another level the integration of the global economy has created a Kantian perpetual peace. As early as the sixties it became clear that national governments had little ability to escape the logic of transnational capital: that was shown in 1964 when Harold Wilson proved incapable of implementing Labour Party policy because to do so would cause capital flight (Miliband). (Mitterand followed in a similar path in the early 1980s) This perpetual peace is secured by ever increasing tightening of immigration regimes, which are as it were nationalism’s final refuge. (John Locke still lived in a world where a child ‘was at liberty what government he put himself under’: that is impossible today, despite the societies government administer being less different from one another than in his time. 347)
The integration of economies is not merely a fact of economics: it has its military roots too. One of the key lessons to be learned from Phillip Bobbit’s The Shield of Achilles is that the market state develops from a long series of functional relationships between military and economic needs: at the beginning and still today, states encouraged markets in large part to fight wars.
The old tropes of consent and obligations do not apply to endgame capitalism: individuals do not consent to being governed and they do not have obligations (they are in something like the condition that Rousseau and Hegel posited of slaves.)
The right to strike and the effectiveness of striking has been curtailed.
The kinds of tactical resistances praised by de Certeau.
And the pluralist critique of state sovereignty which has a long (mainly ecclesiastical) history: non-jurors, Keble and the Oxford movement, the anti-Hegelians of the period around the first world war both of the right (Maitland, Figgis) and later of the left (Laski, Cole) and which reappears in the sixties (worker’s control, Paul Hirst, Rosanvallon, Michael Walzer’s Essays on Disobedience, p. 16 ff he wants “to take very seriously the possibility of joining secondary associations with limited claims to primacy”) and today in David Runciman
Endgame articulations:
Hegel after 1806.
Nietzsche’s Last Man
Kojeve’s ‘end of history’ 1946.
Lash, End of ideology
Fukayama’s End of History and the last man, after 1989

The figure of the philosopher in anti-historicist thought (the early Nietzsche, Strauss, Badiou). The philosopher in touch with wisdom, the true, an enemy of stupidity. And the figure of the critic: not wholly inside the society, a reflective alienation. And the figure of the alien: the one who simply does not belong.

Body politics

The head is on the left; the heart is on the right.

Aging and the novel

When was the first novel written in which a character ages? A novel, that is, that carefully focusses on a character who moves through youth to middle age and then into old age and finally death? This is not the Bildungsroman narrative which stops at maturity. An aging story dwells on the diminuation of power and imagination, the closing down of a personal future, the strange mix of reconciliation to, and hatred of, the world which typically comes in old age.
King Lear tells such a story perhaps. But no 18thc novel does I think. Very few, if any, 19thc novels either.
Does aging somehow fall out of the literary imagination in the epoch of realism?

Culture

In his essay, "Does culture matter?", E.M. Forster makes an important suggestion, more or less in passing. It is that to enjoy "culture" is to feel the will to transmit it. Culture is essentially a chain of communicability. Or to put this in slightly different terms: a serious engagement in culture involves a disposition to bequeath and to develop it. Without that disposition, culture is not being fully engaged.  

This need not mean that to engage culture requires participation in the formal institutions designed to pass it on. Not at all.  The disposition to develop and bequeath may take the form of performing work on oneself: reading, looking at art, listening to music in order to attune oneself imaginatively to the world in ways that will to make a difference on others (even if they may not.) 

Engaging culture is to help imagination grow in what is, for Forster, its essential impersonality.

Forster's essay worries about what happens to culture thought like this in a society which tends to marginalize and disrespect the creative imagination and culture. His answer seems to be: if you do care about culture, hang in there and don't worry too much about the others, not even the State which is structurally anti-culture.

In this light, it is worth remembering Forster's advise that one of the best things you can do for culture is just to spend money on it.

so exactly what's wrong with endgame capitalism?

The question of what is wrong with contemporary state democratic media capitalism is not as easy as it might seem, given that the system endless spills out regional injustices. But on what grounds do we look, not for reforms, but beyond the system as a whole, especially since it does indeed produce unprecedented comfort, health, and pleasure to the population?
I'd suggest beginning by thinking about capitalism's enduring unacceptable structural failures under three abstract rubrics, that is, its production of:
1) insecurity
This needs no explanation, everyone know how insecurity gnaws away our society, spoiling its benefits. It is the dark side (the 'experienced' side in Blakean terms) of opportunity, enterprise and freedom of choice. And it cannot be reformed away.
2) invisibility
The market-orientated media dazzle and blind. Whole zones of pain and neglect lie out of view for the general public. In the blindness the media cause, suffering and injustice fester without final remedy.
3) stupefaction.
This is the most problematic of these three categories. The basic thought is not just that endgame capitalism is selective in it what brings to view, but that it relies on bedazzled stupidity and ignorance to continue under its current form and that a good society must be one committed not just to justice but to intelligence.

the night of the Klimt conflagration

I don't usually latch onto ideas for tradebooks or novels... but a story in this week's Guardian Weekly struck me as irresistible for a book idea. (And not only me I reckon.)
It is a story about the Klimt exhibition at the Liverpool Tate by Jonathan Jones. Jones says (which I did not know), that a large Klimt collection was destroyed by the SS in Austria on the last day of the second world war in Austria. The SS were billeted in the Immendorf Castle, and were ordered to leave once the surrender was signed. Before moving on, they held an orgy in the Castle and then burnt it to the ground. 

This was more than innocent destruction, since the castle housed a large and important collection of Klimts. These had been collected by the Jewish industrialist, August Lederer. (Klimt was, apparently, mainly collected by Jews). This collection included the large Nietzschean allegorical paintings Klimt painted for the University of Vienna: Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence, which the University decided were not for them.
Some sort of book, probably fiction, around the night the Klimts burnt would seem a winner. Not least because of Klimt's own Nietzscheanism, his appeal to Jewish collectors (including the cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder).

The novel of ruined life

Is there a genre that we can call the ruined-life novel? It would be the genre that describes those whose live hope-and redemption-forsaken lives of fragmentation and pain, usually from close up.
It's a twentieth-century genre, and women write it about women (for obvious reasons) more often than men write it about men. It works especially well in the first person. Some examples: Jean Rhys's fictions; Joan Didion's Play it as it lays; Mary Robison's fictions; Anne Enright's recent The Gathering.
Examples by men? I will try to think of some (Beckett in a modernist mode? not really, the metaphysical and ethical intentions of the writing itself are too apparent). Men seem to be too addicted to hope and the possibility of retrieving a redeeming heroic gloss even from the most destroyed of existences.
Why does this genre (if we allow it to exist) emerge in the middle of the 20th century? Perhaps because that's when hegemonic urbanising capitalism prised hierarchised gender relations apart not just because the economy needed more labour or because of the liberating technologisation of domestic work, but by shifting the relation between public and private lives for the bourgeoisie. Women begin to occupy the public sphere differently, including the workplace. In the logic of democratisation, they were called upon to participate in the polity; in the logic of the market, they were called upon to consume. At least after about 1956, the paradigmatic ruined life is a woman who is alienated from and stranded in domesticity under this regime.

Richard T. Kelly's Crusaders

I have been reading Richard T. Kelly's Crusaders, a very rewarding novel about England's northern cities, anglicanism and New Labour. It's set in Newcastle's lost, violent, housing projects in 1996, the year that Tony Blair's New Labour comes to power. Stylistically, it binds a thinned-out version of the classic realism of the Arnold Bennett kind to the modern thriller: its turn, increasingly as it goes on, to genre-fiction conventions and excitements provide it with formal constraint (and perhaps a readership) in lieu of more experimental or literary devices. Like many social-realist novels it needs to deal with the problem of how to represent characters and a social sector with little or no connection to the literary and intellectual world that the novel and its readers belong to. The thriller plot helps solve that problem. But the novel also belongs to the more recent genre of political novel (e.g. Alan Hollinghurst's The line of beauty) which relate the lived-in world to recent shifts in government and policy.

So Kelly is basically interested in juxtaposing Labour party policy and discourse with the lives of both the poor and the well-intentioned. It mounts a hard critique of the false promises of New Labour's simultaneous embrace of a certain christianity (even of 'christian socialism') and neo-liberalism/MBA-style managerialism. It does so by telling the (based on fact) story of an Anglican minister who sets out to establish a new Anglican church on a very run-down and demoralized state housing estate and his relation to various locals: the Labour MP, an thuggish enforcer for a local gangster; a young woman working in a massage parlour; Church volunteers. The novel is especially insightful about black-market/crim capitalism and its deep connections into the economic life of poor communities. At the end, it becomes clear that neither New Labour nor the Church have the capacity to reach into communities such as this. For these highly centralised and bureaucratised institutions poverty offers, at best, an opportunity for their own aggrandizement.

Perhaps this is not one of the great literary novels, although its dialogue is stunning and its characterization wonderfully unsentimental and finely tuned to its major argument (it's a novel which does have an argument). But then to write a great literary novel about the lives of the poor has not so far been possible in the capitalist epoch.

This novel is not available in Australian bookshops I think. A great pity.

Hope

Is it possible to have an utterly hopeless memory of hope?

Four adjectives which best describe Australia

crude, clean, stupid, democratic

Singapore

Singapore is very different than it was even six or so years ago. It has become very confident: the leading city state in a region that it is to inherit the earth.

Howards End

I read E.M. Forster's Howards End on the plane on the way back from Singapore. It's probably the third time I've read it, though the last time would be thirty or so years ago and I had lost much of my sense of it.
I found it utterly engrossing. Ultimately because it is about democratization across a triple axis: as a political, a cultural, and as an ethical process and ideal. By which I mean it is about how egalitarianism is to be lived, socially and personally (and especially between men and women).
But it is also a social allegory in which two kinds of bourgeois styles are set against one another: that of the business world (the Wilcox's) and that of the aesthetic liberal intellectuals (so to say) (the Schlegels).
In the end the liberal intellectuals (Bloomsbury) wins, and in the end egalitarianism merely shores them up.
And it is also about London's relation to the rest of England in a period in which rural England was increasingly becoming a network of transport nodes (the motor car is important to this novel) and, in many counties, a leisure resource for London.
The wonderful final sentence brings together the novel's main concerns: Helen Schlegel, the most committed of the novel's liberal free spirits, pregnant with the bank clerk Lionel Bast's child, and who with her sister Margaret has managed to tame the millionaire businessman Wilcox, runs into the country house, Howard's End, excited about the new season's hay crop being harvested in the fields.
Not much hitherto has led us to think that Helen is interested in hay. Clearly her excitement expresses her motherhood to come. But more than that: it is a turn away from the struggle for equality and the fight for the soul of the bourgeoisie to the secular (in the oldest sense) rhythms of nature. A kind of retreat into the natural mundane.

Neoliberalism

One of the more noteworthy features of neoliberalism is the way that it has de-democraticised all other spheres than formal politics (and perhaps the family?). It is not just that it leads to re-oligarichisation: it's that business enterprises and bureaucracies (including universities) become increasingly inegalitarian and administered from above. There's no real ideological support for this even from within neoliberalism itself it seems to me.

Notes from Ritter on Hegel and the French Revolution

Ritter argues that in Philosophy of Right Hegel deals with civil society as such for the first time. Hegel is inspired by reading English political economy for which he had enormous respect: he believed that writers like Adam Smith inductively demonstrated the philosophical and generalized principles that regulate the "mass of accidents" that constitute society. In effect, for Hegel, Smith is to civil society what Kepler was to astronomy. (70) And the way in which political economy can aid philosophy becomes especially apparent in Hegel's remarks on globalisation and the sea (paras 243-246 of Philosophy of Right; in the footnote Ritter also refers admiringly to Carl Schmitt's Der Nomos der Erde (1950)).
More generally, according to Ritter, 77ff , Hegel argues that the civil society which produces the modern opposition between enlightenment (objectivity) and romanticism (subjectivity) also produces the pre-conditions for man as such to emerge out of a system designed to satisfy mere needs, ie. out of civil considerations of individual and communal welfare. Out of the history of civil society, "abstract" man appears: a being who is not merely a Jew, Catholic, German, Italian etc. And this abstract man does not belong to history: he has been emancipated from it. But this abstract man is merely abstract, he exists in a certain sense nowhere.
Which is why Hegel cannot think of the division between romanticism and enlightened rationality as surpassable. Ritter 78, “Existing reason reveals itself in the present not in the inner preservation of subjectivity in its antithetical relation to social and political revolution, but in the dichotomy making it possible.” This means that there is also a ‘continuance of the substantial order of tradition within the realm of the modern world.” (78) In my own words: it seems to be the case that the human liberation which evolves mechanically from out of civil society/political economy, requires an appeal to, as well as the continuation of, the history of philosophy and of the religious passions (i.e. longing for transcendence) to be recognised as liberation.
But, more practically, philosophy also “has the methodological task of validating the historical substance of modern society, and of grasping in their concept those determinations which cannot be won from their abstract natural and emancipatory principle, without connection to the historical substance.” (80-1). Philosophy in other words judges what is emergent and what is residual
Furthermore a revolutionary materialism comes into existence in modernity that refuses to recognise the importance of the history of tradition to liberation. It is dangerous both in its social power and in its blindness to the fact that human liberation sublates rather than overcomes the dichotomy between the tradition of the (religious) spirit and welfarism (or the dynamics of needful man in civil society.)

Wolf Solent

Just back to Brisbane from a week in Auckland, where, along the line, I finished reading John Cowper Powys's Wolf Solent. The novel was something of a success when first published in 1929 and Cowper Powys still has a smallish cult following, but no real place in literary history, especially academic literary history. I read this book first when I was about fifteen and it had a visceral impact on me then: I found its grandiloquence, its intermingling of the cosmic/spiritual with the psychological/erotic imaginatively invasive, queasy making. It doesn't work like that on me anymore, but I can see why it did. It's about a youngish man, Wolf Solent, who is almost wholly committed to his interior life, which is based on his personalised and melodramatised mysticism. He has the capacity to fantasize himself as an agent in a cosmic battle between forces of good and evil. That's where the real of Wolf's life finally is: it matters more to him than relationships and experiences. But the book is about the tension between Wolf's dime-novel mysticism and his relationships with his mother and two women whom he loves, one of whom he is married to. And it turns out that the good-evil mysticism is one one level, something of a mask for a battle between heterosexuality and homosexuality, and on another an expression of Wolf's sensitivity to landscape, nature and place. At the end, he comes to recognise his spiritual interior life as a form of resistance to settling down with a woman, where women represent, both for author and character, the conventional, the petty, the materialistic but not wholly negatively. What's strong about the novel is the way in which its provisional commitment to the mystical, even though it takes a pulpy narrativised form, allows the novel access to modes of characterization where personalities remain undefined, mysterious, suggestive, driven by forces beyond the merely social and even beyond the sexual. A lot has been learned from Lawrence here, and it would be possible to think of the novel as a cross between Women in Love and Charles Williams (another thirties mystical-melodramatic fictionalist, and one who was unbelievably successful in the market place), but it's better than that, just because it can rescue from its critique of mysticism, mysticism's power to enrich experience.

Religion

Is religion a useless concept? Would we be better off without it?
The point is: once we subtract actual faiths or religious practices (Christianity, animism, Judaism....) from it, what's left?
The problem with maintaining the notion 'religion' outside of such institutions of religious practice is that the term becomes available too widely, meaning leaks from it. Pantheism, socialism etc can become thought of as 'religions' in some sense that is stranded between the metaphoric and the literal, and which obsfucates rather than clarifies thought.

Aidan Higgins and the sixties

Balcony of Europe, published in 1972, may be an unusual novel, and not a wholly successful one, but it is revealing about the sixties, and, not less to the point, is an intriguing sign of a literary-historical moment. It's mainly set in beach-culture Spain circa 1968 (just before the onslaught upon those beaches of the Northern European mass leisure industry), and describes a relatively brief affair between an Irish painter (a version of Higgins himself one assumes) and a young American Jewish woman who is married to a slightly older American writer. It's haunted by and dependent on a slew of masculinist modernist texts: Joyce's Portrait of an Artist most obviously, but also Malcolm Lowry, Faulkner, Hemingway, Paul Bowles and so on.
It's beautifully written, and the modernist sentence here begins to move towards autonomy in the direction later taken by Iain Sinclair. That is, the style (the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter) has become detached from any clear cut character-based project: the novel's characters don't come to life as they say, there's no real sense of what kind of person the hero (Dan Ruttles) is, and not much more of Charlotte his sexy, charismatic love object.
Yet it's not as if the gist of an authorial intention isn't apparent: the novel wants to represent this affair against the backdrop of European history (especially the Holocaust and the Cold War under US hegemony) as a kind of passive resistance to the horrors of the twentieth century. And that is where it reveals a mood we can call sixties, since the characters, all somewhat rootless international bohemians, seem to live in an atmosphere of freedom and opportunity, a lack of regard for questions of money and career and respectability, which is at least superficially is bequeathed to them by the cultural modernisms that inhabits them and that they ceaselessly discuss. They have turned an aesthetic commitment to cultural modernism as a form of resistance to bourgeois orthodoxies and norms into hedonistic, self-exploratory adventures in the private sphere (mainly sex but also alcohol and drugs), that is, into lifestyle. They exist, so to say, historically between Le Bateau-Lavoir and Benidorm.
And it's lifestyle's alienation from literary aesthetics that means that the sentence in particular breaks free from meaning and intent at the level of the text itself and that wonderfully crafted sentences, paragraphs, chapters barely invoke the fictional world they purport to describe. So, from another literary-historical perspective, this is écriture produced spontaneously, outside the world of literary theory, and perhaps all the more revealing of the historical forces that tended towards the text-fetish because of that.

Rancière's Hatred of Democracy

A quick one from Brisbane (where we're still not properly settled, though over the last day or so we have acquired a fridge, a car and broadband in that order of importance).
The last chapter of Jacques Ranciere's Hatred of Democracy is interesting because it connects neo-liberalism to the old term oligarchy, and because it seeks persistantly to defend democracy.
If I understand the argument correctly (and it's hard to pay it sufficient attention among this moving chaos), for Ranciere democracy is to be thought of the persistant demand for participation and agency by those who have 'no place' in any particular socio-political structure. We don't currently have democracy, though there is enormous pressure to imagine that we do: we have 'States of oligarchic law.' (This is not to say that democracy is attainable: it is not. There will always be those who have 'no place' and their demands will always maintain the deficit which defines democracy.)
Contemporary oligarchies direct peoples' attention "towards private pleasures" and away from the public sphere. Governing becomes adminstration by experts. (Here a certain Trotskyism/Maoism becomes apparent). And that form of government, though formally divided into opposing poltical parties, is based on a consensus: that the most important function of government is to take care of the "economy" and, more specifically, the expansion of capital. Wealth has acquired 'unlimited power'. But this does not avoid 'democratic supplementation', i.e. a division of those who who manage or own capital and those who do not (the people for Rancière). The politics of the latter, which take both left and right forms, are denounced by the former as 'populism'.
Some of the old 'new left', of May 1968, blame the whole new system of neo-liberalism on the popular consumer. This is a new form of anti-democraticism: 'democratic man' takes the guise of the 'idiotic consumer', even consumers of 'alterglobalist' illusions and who may be linked to identity politics. From this point of view it is this figure (the consumer into the politics of difference) who signals the end of the Enlightenment. This 'antidemocratic discourse of today's intellectuals adds the finishing touches to the consensual forgetting of democracy that both state and economic oligarchies strive toward." But democracy can never be forgotten, not because it exists as a potential equal society to be born out of this unequal one, but because egalitarian relations can be traced through singular and precarious acts within all unequal societies, including this current form of neo-liberal oligarchy.