Samnotra On Arendt (Excerpt)

 “Sensitive to Shame”: Hannah Arendt on Becoming Worldly*

            Manu Samnotra

 “and only our dreams have not been humiliated” 

         Zbigniew Herbert: Report from the Besieged City

Introduction 

This essay explores the role of shame in Hannah Arendt’s political thought. Drawing chiefly on Arendt’s writings on the Jewish experience in Europe, I argue that shame appears in Arendt’s texts in three guises. First, the shame of her social origins pushes the parvenu1 into seeking acceptance from gentile society and, being perceived as a deeply personal obstacle, precludes the emergence of a political consciousness. This much is fairly obvious to any student of Arendt’s writings on ‘the Jewish Question’ and, specifically, on Rahel Varnhagen, the eighteenth century figure on whom Arendt wrote her Habilitationsschrift under the guidance of the philosopher Karl Jaspers. However, to the degree that Arendt identifies pathways out of the constrained position of the parvenu, she does so by using shame as a temporal device that helps the parvenu narrativize and, thereby, gain an understanding of political realities.2 In other words, in its second guise, shame becomes the very medium through which the parvenu recognizes her subservient position, feels the absence of political community, and is moved to address this lack. In its third form, Arendt invokes shame as a boundary condition,3 that is, as an antidote to “social atomization”4 and, especially in the aftermath of the Holocaust, as the remaining thread that tethers human beings to each other. In The Human Condition, Arendt identifies hubris as the “political temptation par excellence.”5 The central concern shaping Arendt’s arguments is man’s alienation from the world. Although she provides powerful distinctions between the various modes of vita activa as antidotes to the decay of the public world, to the degree that the recovery of the public/political space can help us ward off the anti-political temptations of modernity – that is, overcome the hubris of modern society – a relationship to shame as a guarantee against hubris would certainly have to be part of any solution, as it was for the ancient Greeks.6 In other words, just as there is an important role for shame in the Greek experience of politics, Arendt’s theoretical vision is also hospitable7 to a role for shame in political action. More specifically, Arendt wanted safeguards against the tendency to quit the world as it arises between human beings, and she employs shame as a boundary that encloses the various modes of vita activa. Take Arendt’s description of political action: Although the most fascinating feature of political action is its non sovereign nature, actions only lose their sovereign character over time. Politics – that is, the fact of plurality – deprives the actions of an actor of their sovereign intentions by refracting them from a multiplicity of interpretive perspectives. Arendt highlights this transformation of sovereign design into non sovereign action by referring to action as both doing and suffering.8 To experience political freedom in doing and suffering requires that the political actor not quit the world – either in suicide, in the hubris of a tyrant, or in the search for scientific omnipotence – when his sovereign intentions are not realized, and this requires sensitivity to shame. As I argue presently, absent the bonds of tradition that once provided political continuity, for Arendt this continuity is accessible in the shame of the Holocaust. That is, we discover the last remaining thread connecting humanity in the shame that overcomes us when we realize what transpired in the concentration camps. Note, however, that this shame cannot dictate the content of politics. Rather, as an existential condition, shame motivates and encloses post Holocaust political experiences. There is also another dimension of shame in Arendt’s writings, and this concerns the process through which oppressed persons/peoples acquire a political consciousness. Following Arendt, we are used to thinking of political revolutions in oppressive societies as spontaneous eruptions of political power. This is indeed correct. But the question that still remains to be answered is how this spontaneity arises in societies committed to suppressing it in every instance? At this point, we might advance natality – namely, the innate human capacity for new beginnings – as a theoretical concept, but even the appearance of natality requires hospitable conditions. For example, Arendt thought that anti-Semitism shared attributes with totalitarianism, insofar as both depended on the atomization of society, and each rewarded political quietude. If this interpretation is correct, then how would the cognitive dissonance between ideology (of assimilation, of Stalinism, Nazism, et cetera) and concrete experience transform itself into a political movement, especially if the very participants in this movement had become incapable of recognizing the dissonance?

Browning

“I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce “ordinary men” to become their “willing executioners.”

Christopher R. Browning

“Bauman argues that most people “slip” into the roles society provides them, and he is very critical of any implication that “faulty personalities” are the cause of human cruelty. For him the exception—the real “sleeper”—is the rare individual who has the capacity to resist authority and assert moral autonomy but who is seldom aware of this hidden strength until put to the test.”

Christopher R. Browning

“Perpetrators did not become fellow victims (as many of them later claimed to be) in the way some victims became accomplices of the perpetrators. The relationship between perpetrator and victim was not symmetrical. The range of choice each faced was totally different.”

Christopher R. Browning

...ye can tell. That which slavery is, too well
For its very name has grown. To an echo of your own.
Tis to work, and have such pay. As just keeps life from day to day.
In your limbs, as in a cell. For the tyrants' use to dwell.
Tis to be a slave in soul. And to hold no strong control.
Over your own wills, but be. All that others make of ye.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

DH Lawrence

 

White slavery in London

From: Issue no. 21 (Saturday, 23 June, 1888)

At a meeting of the Fabian Society held on June 15th, the following resolution was moved by H. H. Champion, seconded by Herbert Burrows, and carried on after a brief discussion:

"That this meeting, being aware that the shareholders of Bryant and May are receiving a dividend of over 20 per cent., and at the same time are paying their workers only 2¼d. per gross for making match-boxes, pledges itself not to use or purchase any matches made by this firm."

In consequence of some statements made in course of the discussion, I resolved to personally investigate their accuracy, and accordingly betook myself to Bromley to interview some of Bryant and May's employees, and thus obtain information at first hand. The following is the outcome of my enquiries:

Bryant and May, now a limited liability company, paid last year a dividend of 23 per cent. to its shareholders; two years ago it paid a dividend of 25 per cent., and the original £5 shares were then quoted for sale at £18 7s. 6d. The highest dividend paid has been 38 per cent.

Let us see how the money is made with which these monstrous dividends are paid. [The figures quoted were all taken down by myself, in the presence of three witnesses, from persons who had themselves been in the prison-house whose secrets they disclosed.]

The hour for commencing work is 6.30 in summer and 8 in winter; work concludes at 6 p.m. Half-an-hour is allowed for breakfast and an hour for dinner. This long day of work is performed by young girls, who have to stand the whole of the time. A typical case is that of a girl of 16, a piece-worker; she earns 4s. a week, and lives with a sister, employed by the same firm, who "earns good money, as much as 8s. or 9s. per week". Out of the earnings 2s. is paid for the rent of one room; the child lives on only bread-and-butter and tea, alike for breakfast and dinner, but related with dancing eyes that once a month she went to a meal where "you get coffee, and bread and butter, and jam, and marmalade, and lots of it"; now and then she goes to the Paragon, someone "stands treat, you know", and that appeared to be the solitary bit of color in her life. The splendid salary of 4s. is subject to deductions in the shape of fines; if the feet are dirty, or the ground under the bench is left untidy, a fine of 3d. is inflicted; for putting "burnts" - matches that have caught fire during the work - on the bench 1s. has been forfeited, and one unhappy girl was once fined 2s. 6d for some unknown crime. If a girl leaves four or five matches on her bench when she goes for a fresh "frame" she is fined 3d., and in some departments a fine of 3d. is inflicted for talking. If a girl is late she is shut out for "half the day", that is for the morning six hours, and 5d. is deducted out of her day's 8d. One girl was fined 1s. for letting the web twist round a machine in the endeavor to save her fingers from being cut, and was sharply told to take care of the machine, "never mind your fingers". Another, who carried out the instructions and lost a finger thereby, was left unsupported while she was helpless. The wage covers the duty of submitting to an occasional blow from a foreman; one, who appears to be a gentleman of variable temper, "clouts" them "when he is mad".

One department of the work consists in taking matches out of a frame and putting them into boxes; about three frames can be done in an hour, and ½d. is paid for each frame emptied; only one frame is given out at a time, and the girls have to run downstairs and upstairs each time to fetch the frame, thus much increasing their fatigue. One of the delights of the frame work is the accidental firing of the matches: when this happens the worker loses the work, and if the frame is injured she is fined or "sacked". 5s. a week had been earned at this by one girl I talked to.

The "fillers" get ¾d. a gross for filling boxes; at "boxing," i.e. wrapping papers round the boxes, they can earn from 4s. 6d. to 5s. a week. A very rapid "filler" has been known to earn once "as much as 9s." in a week, and 6s. a week "sometimes". The making of boxes is not done in the factory; for these 2¼d. a gross is paid to people who work in their own homes, and "find your own paste". Daywork is a little better paid than piecework, and is done chiefly by married women, who earn as much sometimes as 10s. a week, the piecework falling to the girls. Four women day workers, spoken of with reverent awe, earn - 13s. a week.

A very bitter memory survives in the factory. Mr. Theodore Bryant, to show his admiration of Mr. Gladstone and the greatness of his own public spirit, bethought him to erect a statue to that eminent statesman. In order that his workgirls might have the privilege of contributing, he stopped 1s. each out of their wages, and further deprived them of half-a-day's work by closing the factory, "giving them a holiday". ("We don't want no holidays", said one of the girls pathetically, for - needless to say - the poorer employees of such a firm lose their wages when a holiday is "given".) So furious were the girls at this cruel plundering, that many went to the unveiling of the statue with stones and bricks in their pockets, and I was conscious of a wish that some of those bricks had made an impression on Mr. Bryant's - conscience. Later they surrounded the statue - "we paid for it" they cried savagely - shouting and yelling, and a gruesome story is told that some cut their arms and let their blood trickle on the marble paid for, in very truth, by their blood. There seems to be a curious feeling that the nominal wages are 1s. higher than the money paid, but that 1s. a week is still kept back to pay for the statue and for a fountain erected by the same Mr. Bryant. This, however, appears to me to be only of the nature of a pious opinion.

Such is a bald account of one form of white slavery as it exists in London. With chattel slaves Mr. Bryant could not have made his huge fortune, for he could not have fed, clothed, and housed them for 4s. a week each, and they would have had a definite money value which would have served as a protection. But who cares for the fate of these white wage slaves? Born in slums, driven to work while still children, undersized because underfed, oppressed because helpless, flung aside as soon as worked out, who cares if they die or go on the streets, provided only that the Bryant and May shareholders get their 23 per cent., and Mr. Theodore Bryant can erect statues and buy parks? Oh if we had but a people's Dante, to make a special circle in the Inferno for those who live on this misery, and suck wealth out of the starvation of helpless girls.

Failing a poet to hold up their conduct to the execration of posterity, enshrined in deathless verse, let us strive to touch their consciences, i.e. their pockets, and let us at least avoid being "partakers of their sins", by abstaining from using their commodities.

ANNIE BESANT.

Besant

Such is a bald account of one form of white slavery as it exists in London. With chattel slaves Mr. Bryant could not have made his huge fortune, for he could not have fed, clothed, and housed them for 4s. a week each, and they would have had a definite money value which would have served as a protection. But who cares for the fate of these white wage slaves? Born in slums, driven to work while still children, undersized because underfed, oppressed because helpless, flung aside as soon as worked out, who cares if they die or go on the streets, provided only that the Bryant and May shareholders get their 23 per cent., and Mr. Theodore Bryant can erect statues and buy parks? Oh if we had but a people's Dante, to make a special circle in the Inferno for those who live on this misery, and suck wealth out of the starvation of helpless girls. Failing a poet to hold up their conduct to the execration of posterity, enshrined in deathless verse, let us strive to touch their consciences, i.e. their pockets, and let us at least avoid being "partakers of their sins", by abstaining from using their commodities.

Annie Besant

DFW

"I had previously sort of always thought that depression was just sort of really intense sadness, like what you feel when your very good dog dies, or when Bambi's mother gets killed in Bambi...The Bad Thing - which I guess is what is really depression - is very different, and indescribably worse. I guess I should say rather, sort of indescribably, because I've heard different people try to describe "real" depression over the last couple years. A very glib guy on the television said some people liken it to being underwater, under a body of water that has no surface, at least for you, so that no matter what direction you go, there will only be more water, no fresh air and freedom of movement, just restriction and suffocation, and no light. (I don't know how apt it is to say it's like being underwater, but maybe imagine the moment in which you realize, at which it hits you that there is no surface for you. That you're just going to drown in there no matter which way you swim; imagine how you'd feel at that exact moment...then imagine that feeling in all its really delightful choking intensity spread out over hours, days, months...that would maybe be more apt). A really lovely poet named Sylvia Plath, who unfortunately isn't living anymore, said that it's like having a jar covering you and having all the air pumped out of the jar, so you can't breathe any good air (and imagine the moment when your movement is invisibly stopped by the glass and you realize you're under glass). Some people say it's like having, always before you, and under you a huge black hole without a bottom, a black, black hole, maybe with vague teeth in it. And then your being part of the hole, so that you fall even when you stay where you are (maybe when you realize you're the hole, nothing else). I'm not incredibly glib, but I'll tell what I think the Bad Thing is like. To me it's like being completely, totally, utterly sick. I will try to explain what I mean. Imagine feeling really sick to your stomach. Almost everyone has felt really sick to his or her stomach, so everyone knows what it's like: it's less than fun. OK. OK. But that feeling is localized: it's more or less just your stomach. Imagine your whole body being sick like that: your feet, the big muscles in your legs, your collar bone, your head, your hair, everything, all just as sick as a fluey stomach. Then, if you can imagine that, please imagine it even more spread out and total. Imagine that every cell in your body, every single cell in your body is as sick as that nauseated stomach. Not just your own cells, even, but the e.coli and lactobacilli in you too. The mitochondria, basal bodies, all sick and boiling and hot like maggots in your neck, your brain, all over, everywhere. In everything. All just sick as hell. Now imagine that every single atom in every single cell in your body is sick like that. Sick, intolerably sick. And every proton and neutron in every atom...swollen and throbbing, off color, sick, with just no chance of throwing up to relieve the feeling. Every electron is sick. Here. Twirling off balance and all erratic in these funhouse orbitals that are just thick and swirling with mottled yellow and purple poison gases. Everything off balance and woozy. Quarks and neutrinos out of their minds and bouncing sick all over the place. Bouncing like crazy. Just imagine that, a sickness spread utterly through every bit of you, even the bits of the bits. So that your very...very essence is characterized by nothing other than the feature of sickness; you and the sickness are, as they say, "one." That's kind of what the Bad Thing is like at its roots. Everything in you is sick and grotesque. And since your only acquaintance with the whole world is through parts of you - like your sense organs and your mind, etc. - and since these parts are sick as hell the whole world as you perceive it, and know it, and are in it, comes at you through this filter of bad sickness and becomes bad. As everything becomes bad in you, all the good goes out of the world like air out of a big broken balloon. There's nothing in this world you know but horrible rotten smells, sad and grotesque and lurid pastel sights, raucous or deadly sad sounds. Intolerable open ended situations lined on a continuum with just no end at all...Incredibly stupid, hopeless ideas. And just the way when you're sick to your stomach you're kind of scared way down deep that it might maybe never go away, the Bad Thing scares you the same way, only worse, because the fear is itself filtered through the bad disease and becomes bigger and worse and hungrier than it started out. It tears you open and gets in there and squirms around. Because the Bad Thing not only attacks you and makes you feel bad and puts you out of commission, it especially attacks and makes you feel bad and puts out of commission precisely those things that are necessary in order for you to fight the Bad Thing, to maybe get better, to stay alive. This is hard to understand. But it's really true. Imagine a really painful disease that, say, attacked your legs and your throat and resulted in a really bad pain and paralysis and all around agony in these areas. The disease would be bad enough, obviously, but the disease would also be open ended; you wouldn't be able to do anything about it. Your legs would be all paralyzed and would hurt like hell...but you wouldn't be able to run for help for those poor legs, just exactly because your legs would be too sick for you to run anywhere at all. Your throat would burn like crazy and you'd think it was just going to explode...but you wouldn't be able to call out to any doctors or anyone for help, precisely because your throat would be too sick for you to do so. This is the way the Bad Thing works: it's especially good at attacking your defense mechanisms. The way to fight against or get away from the Bad Thing is clearly just to think differently, to reason and argue with yourself just to change the way you're perceiving and sensing and processing stuff. But you need your mind to do this, your brain cells with their atoms and your mental powers and all that, yourself, and that's exactly what the Bad Thing has made too sick to work right. That's exactly what it has made sick. It's made you sick in just such a way that you can't get better. And you start thinking about this pretty vicious situation, and you say to yourself, "Boy oh boy, how the heck is the Bad Thing able to do this. You think about it - really hard, since it's in your best interests to do so - and then all of a sudden it sort of dawns on you...that the Bad Thing is able to do this to you because you're the Bad Thing yourself. The Bad Thing is you. Nothing else: no bacteriological infection or having gotten conked on the head with a board or a mallet when you were a little kid, or any other excuse; you are the sickness yourself. It is what "defines" you. Especially after a little while has gone by. You realize all this. Here. And that, I guess, is when, if you're all glib, you realize that there is no surface to the water. Or when you bonk your nose on the jar's glass and realize you're trapped. Or when you look at the black hole and it's wearing your face. That's when the Bad Thing just absolutely eats you up, or rather when you just eat yourself up".

DFW

Baldwin

You don't know what's happening on the other side of the wall, because you don't want to know.

James Baldwin

“I’m terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country, these people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t think I’m human. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means that they have become...moral monsters.”

James Baldwin

Chesterton

There is one strong, startling, outstanding thing about Eugenics, and that is its meanness. Wealth, and the social science supported by wealth, had tried an inhuman experiment. The experiment had entirely failed. They sought to make wealth accumulate—and they made men decay. Then, instead of confessing the error, and trying to restore the wealth, or attempting to repair the decay, they are trying to cover their first cruel experiment with a more cruel experiment. They put a poisonous plaster on a poisoned wound. Vilest of all, they actually quote the bewilderment produced among the poor by their first blunder as a reason for allowing them to blunder again...Suppose a captain had collected volunteers in a hot, waste country by the assurance that he could lead them to water, and knew where to meet the rest of his regiment. Suppose he led them wrong, to a place where...there was no water. And suppose sunstroke struck them down on the sand man after man, and they kicked and danced and raved. And, when at last the regiment came, suppose the captain successfully concealed his mistake, because all his men had suffered too much from it to testify to its ever having occurred.

G. K. Chesterton

Chesterton

In Goldsmith or Dickens or Hood there is a basic idea that the particular poor person ought not to be so poor: it is some accident or some wrong. Oliver Twist or Tiny Tim are fairy [143]princes waiting for their fairy godmother. They are held as slaves, but rather as the hero and heroine of a Spanish or Italian romance were held as slaves by the Moors. The modern poor are getting to be regarded as slaves in the separate and sweeping sense of the negroes in the plantations. The bondage of the white hero to the black master was regarded as abnormal; the bondage of the black to the white master as normal. The Eugenist, for all I know, would regard the mere existence of Tiny Tim as a sufficient reason for massacring the whole family of Cratchit; but, as a matter of fact, we have here a very good instance of how much more practically true to life is sentiment than cynicism. The poor are not a race or even a type. It is senseless to talk about breeding them; for they are not a breed. They are, in cold fact, what Dickens describes: "a dustbin of individual accidents," of damaged dignity, and often of damaged gentility. The class very largely consists of perfectly promising children, lost like Oliver Twist, or crippled like Tiny Tim. It contains very valuable things, like most dustbins. But the Eugenist delusion of the barbaric breed in the abyss affects even those more gracious philanthropists who almost certainly do want to assist the destitute and not merely to exploit them. It seems to affect not only their minds, but their very eyesight. Thus, for instance, Mrs. Alec Tweedie almost scornfully asks, "When we go through the slums, do we see beautiful children?" The answer is, "Yes, very often indeed." I have seen children in the slums quite pretty enough to be Little Nell or the outcast whom [144]Hood called "young and so fair." Nor has the beauty anything necessarily to do with health; there are beautiful healthy children, beautiful dying children, ugly dying children, ugly uproarious children in Petticoat Lane or Park Lane. There are people of every physical and mental type, of every sort of health and breeding, in a single back street. They have nothing in common but the wrong we do them.

G. K. Chesterton

       There is one strong, startling, outstanding thing about Eugenics, and that is its meanness. Wealth, and the social science supported by wealth, had tried an inhuman experiment. The experiment had entirely failed. They sought to make wealth accumulate—and they made men decay. Then, instead of confessing the error, and trying to restore the wealth, or attempting to repair the decay, they are trying to cover their first cruel experiment with a more cruel experiment. They put a poisonous plaster on a poisoned wound. Vilest of all, they actually quote the bewilderment produced among the poor by their first blunder as a reason for allowing them to blunder again. They are apparently ready to arrest all the opponents of their system as mad, merely because the system was maddening. Suppose a captain had collected volunteers in a hot, waste country by the assurance that he could lead them to water, and knew where to meet the rest of his regiment. Suppose he led them wrong, to a place where the regiment could not be for days, and there was no water. And suppose sunstroke struck them down on the sand man after man, and they kicked and danced and raved. And, when at last the regiment came, suppose the captain successfully concealed his mistake, because all his men had suffered too much from it to testify to its ever having occurred. What would you think of the gallant captain? It is pretty much what I think of this particular captain of industry.

Of course, nobody supposes that all Capitalists, or [147]most Capitalists, are conscious of any such intellectual trick. Most of them are as much bewildered as the battered proletariat; but there are some who are less well-meaning and more mean. And these are leading their more generous colleagues towards the fulfilment of this ungenerous evasion, if not towards the comprehension of it. Now a ruler of the Capitalist civilisation, who has come to consider the idea of ultimately herding and breeding the workers like cattle, has certain contemporary problems to review. He has to consider what forces still exist in the modern world for the frustration of his design. The first question is how much remains of the old ideal of individual liberty. The second question is how far the modern mind is committed to such egalitarian ideas as may be implied in Socialism. The third is whether there is any power of resistance in the tradition of the populace itself. These three questions for the future I shall consider in their order in the final chapters that follow. It is enough to say here that I think the progress of these ideals has broken down at the precise point where they will fail to prevent the experiment. Briefly, the progress will have deprived the Capitalist of his old Individualist scruples, without committing him to his new Collectivist obligations. He is in a very perilous position; for he has ceased to be a Liberal without becoming a Socialist, and the bridge by which he was crossing has broken above an abyss of Anarchy.

G. K. Chesterton

Now to me, the devastating weakness of our time, the sin of the 19th century, was primarily this: That we chose to interpret the Revolution as a mere emancipation. Instead of taking the Revolution as meaning that democracy is the true doctrine, we have taken it as meaning that any doctrine is the true doctrine. Instead of the right-mindedness of the Republican stoics, we have the “broad-mindedness” of Liberal Imperialists. We have taken Liberty, because it is fun; we have left Equality and Fraternity, because they are duties and a nuisance. We have Liberty to be unequal. We have Liberty to be unfraternal. At the last we have Liberty to admire slavery. For this was the just and natural end of our mere “free-thinking”—the Tory Revival. Liberalism was supposed to mean liberty to believe in anything; it soon meant liberty to believe in Toryism. Democracy in losing the austerity of youth and its dogmas has lost all; it tends to be a mere debauch of mental self-indulgence, since by a corrupt and loathsome change, Liberalism has become liberality.—Yours, etc.

G. K. Chesterton

"It is important to remember that although fast killing epidemic disease was rife among the Victorian poor, a significant number of the diseases which took the most lives were disabling prior to death, sometimes for years. This was true of most occupational diseases, including the first recognized occupational disease, phossey jaw, but was also true of tuberculosis, the biggest killer in Engels lifetime, syphilis, rickets, infantile paralysis, measles, mumps, and rubella, scarlet fever, and many more. TB often takes years to kill, especially if it is outside the lungs, and can inhabit the lungs, bones, spine, or skin. TB in bone causes significant orthopedic disability, requiring the use of braces, crutches, or other mobility aids. Rickets causes disability from early childhood and often resulted in death due to social murder as well as death in childbirth due to the fearfully common ricketic pelvis. Syphilis could cause deformity and children born with congenital syphilis experience orthopedic disability or intellectual disability. The list goes on, so often the killing of the poor happens by first disabling them then using the excuse of eugenics to justify letting disabled people die or actively contributing to their deaths''.

[The culture industry] proclaims: you shall conform, without instruction as to what; conform to that which exists anyway as a reflex of its power and omnipresence. The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness.

The neon signs which hang over our cities and outshine the natural light of the night with their own are comets presaging the natural disaster of society, its frozen death.

Theodor W. Adorno

 'The concept of political superiority always resolves itself into the concept of spiritual superiority'.

 

'Duration “in vain,” without end or aim, is the most paralyzing idea, particularly when one understands that one is being fooled and yet lacks the power not to be fooled.'

 

 'Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier, simpler.' 

 

Nietzsche

 

"And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most of mankind is not all of mankind.) But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime."

       James Baldwin

 

James Clerk Maxwell

 

The Chomsky hierarchy

1. Type 0 unrestricted grammar.
2. Type 1 context-sensitive grammar.
3. Type 2 context-free grammar.
4. Type 3 Regular Grammar.

Arendt

And, finally, and perhaps most disturbingly, if the modern political lies are so big that they require a complete rearrangement of the whole factual texture – the making of another reality, as it were, into which they will fit without seam, crack, or fissure, exactly as the facts fitted into their own original context – what prevents these new stories, images, and non-facts from becoming an adequate substitute for reality and factuality?

    Hanna Arendt

"Does a shrub dwindle in poor soil, or become sickly when deprived of light, or die outright if removed to a cold climate? It is because the harmony between its organization and its circumstances has been destroyed''.

"Attila conceived himself to have a divine claim to the dominion of the earth: — the Spaniards subdued the Indians under plea of converting them to Christianity; hanging thirteen refractory ones in honour of Jesus Christ and his apostles: and we English justify our colonial aggressions by saying that the Creator intends the Anglo-Saxon race to people the world! An insatiate lust of conquest transmutes manslaying into a virtue; and, amongst more races than one, implacable revenge has made assassination a duty. A clever theft was praiseworthy amongst the Spartans; and it is equally so amongst Christians, provided it be on a sufficiently large scale. Piracy was heroism with Jason and his followers; was so also with the Norsemen; is so still with the Malays; and there is never wanting some golden fleece for a pretext. Amongst money-hunting people a man is commended in proportion to the number of hours he spends in business; in our day the rage for accumulation has apotheosized work; and even the miser is not without a code of morals by which to defend his parsimony. The ruling classes argue themselves into the belief that property should be represented rather than person — that the landed interest should preponderate. The pauper is thoroughly persuaded that he has a right to relief. The monks held printing to be an invention of the devil; and some of our modern sectaries regard their refractory brethren as under demoniacal possession. To the clergy nothing is more obvious than that a state-church is just, and essential to the maintenance of religion. The sinecurist thinks himself rightly indignant at any disregard of his vested interests. And so on throughout society''.

Herbert Spencer

"It seems to me that there are varying modes of state violence, inflicted on specific categories of populations – Blacks, minorities, women, the most vulnerable – by the police, prisons, military, border guards everywhere. Let’s call it a machinic violence. It is direct, immediate, visible and is often murderous – as we saw with George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The list is endless and it happens to masses of people who are killed, dislocated or expelled.

But we also have another ‘slow’ violence that is more distant, gradual and less perceptible. Here I’m drawing on Rob Nixon’s work who describes a delayed destruction dispersed across time. That’s how I perceive racism.

So we have these two forms of violence – the immediate visible form and the slow and delayed one, that together form an attritional apparatus which attacks not only the body but also the nerves. This apparatus is also more and more technologized, more and more algorithmic.


We are witnessing a worldwide and universal rearrangement of power and discriminatory violence. This leads some to being put to death prematurely and others not. You could also call it security or insecurity as Olufemi has discussed. It also reminds us once again that it was born in colonialism, which was the laboratory in which this modern order was experimented with and developed.

In terms of where it is going, I think the agents of brutalisation have become more decentralized than they have ever been before and more abstract. They still proceed through the traditional apparatuses of the state, such as the police, judicial system, the incarceration system. But beneath this lies the increasing role played by programming, as coercion is technologized.

In the way it redistributes brutality, programming is abstract as it codes people. This isn’t just turning people into numbers, but rather turning them into a code, into data, that can be stored, circulated and also speculated on, including by finance capital. So there is a dematerialization of the state itself, as it cedes some of its functions to these technologies, which may seem neutral but are not. So although, we still have a policeman grabbing a black man in Minnesota and killing him by putting his knee on his neck, destruction of those deemed to be superfluous is also being outsourced to new machines.

So while a kind of decolonization has happened, it doesn’t mean that colonialism has ended. Some parts of the world are still under colonial occupation, places like Kashmir, Palestine and others. But more importantly, coloniality has remained. This is a mode of ruling in which certain people are deemed disposable and yet indispensable. This is how racial rule worked. We need your muscles, your work, but we are also entitled to dispose of you in the way we want. It’s this dialectic of dispensability and indispensability that is accelerating today, leading to a politics of abandonment, a politics of neglect.


Today we can see neoliberalism is in crisis and thus has to rely more and more on an illiberal state to buttress its goals. This means that more and more people will be ruled under the Black Code. More people will be governed as if they were Black people, with all that entails: wanton violence, disenfranchisement, exposure to all kinds of risks, premature death.

This universalisation of the Black code will be going on as the world is burning, the planet is burning, having reached its limits. So because of ecological breakdown, our world is becoming more and more inhospitable to life itself".

Achille Mbembe

 

Why is the oppressor so strong? Because he has so many accomplices among the oppressed

How did the axe convince the forest trees it was one of them? By pointing out that its handle is made of wood

Hedva

Before any of my other identities or occupations, and no matter what I said, did, produced, or defined myself as, I saw that I was now defined by society in terms of the care I needed—and that this was true for anyone defined by care, whether they “gave” it or “took” it—and this was a raw fucking deal. By medical doctors baffled by my symptoms and dismissive of their validity; by social workers and bosses and other cogs in the wheels of capitalism who demanded the continuity of my labor while simultaneously denigrating me to the category of worthless because my body disrupted my labor’s continuity; by institutions who swept in to finesse my condition into something that could be rendered into an art-historical and cultural product; by friends, family, lovers, and enemies who didn’t believe it could be as bad as I said it was: I was now seen as malingering, a burden, a drain on resources, possibly faking it, certainly hysterical, a thing resplendent with pathology—simply because I had a body that needed more than it was supposed to need. Who decided this—who exactly was the arbiter of what a body was supposed and not supposed to do, need, and be—decided a status that was not in fact produced by my internal condition. No, this was the accumulation of a thousand tiny and not-so-tiny external events, tones of speaking, methods institutional and otherwise of disregard and dismissal, mechanisms built to dole out pathology to a thing like me. As a sick person, I watched as the perceptions of others amassed and clustered onto me, like a little pile of arrows that got aimed, shot, and stuck. If one arrow was tweaked, they all started to move, and it hurt, the pain went deep. After a while, I couldn’t tell where the pain came from, if it originated from somewhere inside me, or was caused by something outside of me that had gone in too far. I knew that this was how ideologies of oppression work: they seep into you, get into your cells, hunker down and dig in and make a home out of you. I also knew that, no matter where it came from, the hurt was real, it sounded like my own voice, it lived in me now. But it was pain that had very little to do with my actual illness, and what fucked with my head the most was realizing that the internal condition of my illness—which felt vastly multiplicitous in what it made within me, all the worlds of experience it took me to—had been erased in favor of the external value placed upon it, which was carcerally narrow and confined to mean a set of things that I did not particularly agree with, nor consent to being. This erasure did not happen by accident. It was the intended outcome of a larger system of institutions—medical, cultural, capitalist, statist—and the ideologies that feed them—classist, racist, white-supremacist, imperialist, colonial, patriarchal, cis- and heteronormative, sexist, ableist. For the benefit of these systems, I realized that the most common and universalizing condition of life—that our bodies are fragile, get sick, need rest, need support, that they need at all—had been twisted into the measure of one’s own individual failure, something to be ashamed of and sorry for and kept out of sight until the symptoms passed and things could return to “normal.” By design, this is how the world is built—for whom? Why?

Johanna Hedva


I tried to explain to this woman that my rider is a way of taking seriously the fact that, even if we are told we have to, we cannot do this alone. Care is always a deficit, access is always insolvent—and that’s the point. This is because the body, by definition, is a thing that needs support—it needs food, rest, sleep, shelter, care. I like to truncate this definition, to make the body simply a thing that needs, period, because what else would support be—but needed? The body’s dependency is its ontology: it cannot survive alone unto itself, even if it wanted to. Yet we’ve been taught that such dependencies, such needs, are abnormal, disgraceful, an index of one’s inadequacy. Capitalism and its attendant ideologies have used powerful magic to make us believe the opposite of what is true: They have persuaded us that the most important force on earth is one’s individual will and the ability to manifest it, regardless of what that would require in terms of material resources; they have convinced us that any one person’s success is the simple result of a decision they made to thrive, and not because of the support any individual requires to do anything, on any scale, always. They have induced us to think that the failure to lead a life of wealth, ease, comfort, and privilege is because that person just couldn’t get it together, couldn’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps, wasn’t willing to put in the work. This is a mighty myth, one that is vaunted as universal, and it is the vehicle for that most romantic and nonexistent of subjects: the man who makes new worlds simply because he wants to, who shapes his destiny of his own accord. His body cuts through the void without history or politics or needs of any kind, no tether to anyone or anything else. He is not us, because he is impossible—but we all wish he was us, we all throw ourselves at his feet, try to make ourselves in his image. What is required to sustain this myth? Who hoists him up? Who is that behind him, in the background, helping him get there, defining him as what she is not?

Johanna Hedva


My Access Rider is not about sharing the load so that we can suddenly be in the black: it’s about redefining what being in the red means, what being insolvent to each other does, and it’s about acknowledging that we will always be there, covered, totally, in red.

And yet we’ve built our world as if this fact deviates us from where we should be. We’ve framed care within the context of debt—where my “giving” care to you means I’m depleting my own stash, and your “taking” from me means that now you owe me—and although we’ve made debt into an index of our deficiency, we’ve also made it the only possible condition of life under capitalism. To be alive in capitalism is by definition to live in debt, and yet we’ve defined debt not as a kind of radical interdependency, as the ontological mutuality of being alive together on this planet—which it is—but as all that reveals our worst, what happens when we fail, a moral flaw that ought to be temporary and expunged. By doing this, the omnipresence of our need is framed as a kind of weird bankruptcy that happens only to the weak—which is a fucking canard. The logic of capitalism states that the person who needs support from society is a burden on that society, but this logic can only work when the premise holds that our natural state is one of surplus—and it is not. Yes, it might be nice to labor without limits, survive without support, live without loss, decline, and fatigue, but that’s not how it is.

Johanna Hedva

“We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality''.

      Bakunin

 

Jensen

Unless it is stopped, the dominant culture will kill everything on the planet, or at least everything it can.

Each holocaust is unique. The destruction of the European Jewry did not look like the destruction of the American Indians. It could not, because the technologies involved were not the same, the targets were not the same, and the perpetrators were not the same. They shared motivations and certain aspects of their socialization, to be sure, but they were not the same. Similarly, the slaughter of Armenians (and Kurds) by Turks did not (and does not) look like the slaughter of Vietnamese by Americans. And just as similarly, the holocausts of the twenty-first century will not and do not already look like the great holocausts of the twentieth. They cannot, because this society has progressed.

And every holocaust looks different depending on the class to which the observer belongs. The Holocaust looked far different to high ranking Nazi officials and to executives of large corporations—both of whose primary social concerns would have been how to maximize production and control, that is, how to most effectively exploit human and nonhuman resources—than it did to good Germans, whose primary concerns were as varied as the people themselves but probably included doing their own jobs—immoral as those jobs may have been from an outside perspective—as well as possible; may have included feelings of relief that those in power were finally doing something about the “Jewish Problem”; and certainly included doing whatever they could to not notice the greasy smoke from the crematoria (constructed with the best materials and faultless workmanship). The Holocaust then also looked different to good Germans than it did to those who resisted, whose main concerns may have been how to bring down the system. And it looked different to those who resisted than it did to those who were considered untermenschen, whose main concerns may have been staying alive, or failing that, dying with humanity.

Manifest Destiny looked different to Indians than it did to JP Morgan. American slavery looked different to slaves than it did to those whose comforts and elegancies were based on slavery, and than it did to those for whom free black labor drove down their wages.

What will the great holocausts of the twenty-first century will look like? It depends on where you stand. Look around.

If you’re in group one, one of those in power, your post-modern holocausts will be at most barely visible, and at least a price you’re willing to pay, as Madame Albright said about killing Iraqi children. The holocausts will probably share similarities with other holocausts, as you attempt to maximize production—to “grow the economy,” as you might say—and as when necessary you attempt to eradicate dissent. This means the holocaust will look like a booming economy beset by shifting problems that somehow always keep you from ever reaching the Promised Land, whatever that might be. The holocaust will look like numbers on ledgers. It will look like technical problems to be solved, whether those problems are increasing your access to necessary resources, dealing with global warming, calming unrest on the streets, or figuring out what to do about too many unproductive people on land you know you could put to better use. The holocaust will look like houses with gates, limousines with bullet-proof glass, and a military budget that can never stop increasing.

The holocaust will feel like economics. It will feel like progress. It will feel like technological innovation. It will feel like civilization. It will feel like the way things are.

If you’re in the second group, the good Germans, you will continue to be co-opted into supporting the system that does not serve you well. Perhaps the holocaust will look like a new car. Perhaps it will look like lending your talents to a major corporation—or more broadly toward economic production—so you can make a better life for your children. Perhaps it will look like working as an engineer for Shell or on an assembly line for General Motors. Maybe it will look like basing a person’s value on her or his employability or productivity. Perhaps it will look like anger at Mexicans or Pakistanis or Algerians or Hmong who compete with you for jobs. Perhaps it will look like outrage at environmentalists who want to save some damn suckerfish, even (or especially) if it impinges on your property rights, or if it takes water you need to irrigate, to make the desert bloom, to make the desert productive. Maybe it will feel like continuing to do a job that you hate—and that requires so little of your humanity—because no matter how you try, you never can seem to catch up. Maybe it will feel like being tired at the end of the day, and just wanting to sit and watch some television.

Derrick Jensen

Fuchs

"The linkage between body, self, and other also characterizes the phenomenology of moods; it is a common understanding in phenomenology that moods are not inner states, but permeate and tinge the whole field of experience. Thus, moods are atmospheric in nature, radiating through the environment like warmth or cold, and conferring corresponding expressive qualities on the whole situation. It is no coincidence that we often use words taken from weather such as ‘bright’, ‘sunny’, ‘gloomy’, ‘clouded’, or ‘dark’ to denote mood states as well as the atmosphere of situations. On the other hand, moods also include background feelings of the body, such as feelings of lightness and freshness in elation, or of heaviness and weariness in depression. The phenomenology of moods is well expressed in the German notion of Stimmung which implies metaphors of attunement, concordance, and orchestration. Moods may be said to ‘tune’ body, self, and environment to a common chord, similar to a tonality linking a series of notes and chords to the major or minor key. Thus they tend to establish a consonance of bodily feeling, emotion, and environmental atmosphere.3 Moreover, moods link the background feeling of the body to the potentialities of a given life situation. ‘The mood has already disclosed, in every case, Being-in-the-world as a whole, and makes it possible first of all to direct oneself towards something’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 176). Moods are thus both feelings of the body and ways of finding oneself in the world. They indicate ‘how things stand’ in our life and how we are disposed to react to the present situation. Such feelings do not only include typical moods such as elation, serenity, sadness, or melancholy, but also what Ratcliffe (2008) has termed existential feelings: feelings of wideness or restriction, freedom or imprisonment, vulnerability or protection, familiarity or estrangement, reality or unreality, feeling alive or feeling dead. However, it seems important to note that all these background feelings are not just related to an anonymous world, but to the world that we share with others, or to the interpersonal world. They are existential feelings of being-with. It is primarily in our coexistence with others that we feel close or distant, familiar or alienated, open or restricted, and even real. 224 T. FUCHS [3] Of course it may occur that one’s mood is in contrast to the atmosphere one encounters in the environment, as when a sad person enters a cheerful party, but usually there is at least a tendency of mood and surrounding atmosphere to converge. Thus, interaffectivity is not merely a particular section or application of our emotional endowment. Rather, it is the encompassing sphere in which our emotional life is embedded from birth on. This sphere has its centre in the lived body: through its affectability and resonance it mediates our participation in a shared space of affective attunement. To summarize: in contrast to the common cognitivist picture in which our mental states and emotions are located within our head, phenomenology regards feelings as residing in between individuals. Human beings do not have moods or emotions independent of their embodied relations and interactions with their fellow human beings. Emotions are ways of being in the world, emerging on the basis of a pre-reflective attunement with others, indicating the current state of our relations, interests, and conflicts, and manifesting themselves as attitudes and expressions of the body. This view appears to be quite common among cultural anthropologists as well: numerous ethnographic studies, particularly in the Pacific and Africa, have noted that emotions are a primary idiom for defining and negotiating relations of self-with-others in a moral order (see Lutz and White, 1986, and Lindholm, 2007, for an overview). In these studies, emotions emerge as socially shaped and regulated; they are less construed as inner states, as conceived by western psychology, but result from people’s engagements with others. Similarly, in these cultures, the source of emotional disturbance, imbalance, or illness is assumed to lie primarily in the social world".

Thomas Fuchs

''The depressive patient experiences a local or general oppression, anxiety, and constriction (e.g. a feeling of an armour or tyre around the chest, of a pressure in the head, etc.). The materiality, density, and weight of the body, otherwise suspended and unnoticed in everyday performance, now come to the fore and are felt painfully. In this respect, depression closely resembles somatic illnesses such as infections which affect one’s overall bodily state. Corresponding reports from patients may well be elicited provided that the interviewer takes their bodily experience seriously; they will complain about feelings of fatigue, exhaustion, paralysis, aches, sickness, nausea, numbness, etc. of body and environment is blocked, drive and impulse are exhausted. Sense perception and movement are weakened and finally walled in by the general rigidity which is also visible in the patient’s gaze, face, or gestures. In order to act, the patients have to overcome their psychomotor inhibition and to push themselves to even minor tasks. With growing inhibition, sensorimotor space is restricted to the nearest environment, culminating in depressive stupor. In sum, depression may be described as a reification or corporealization of the lived body (Fuchs, 2005).4 The constriction and encapsulation of the body corresponds to the psychosocial experiences that typically lead to depression. These are experiences of a disruption of relations and bonds, including the loss of relevant others or of important social roles, furthermore situations of a backlog in one’s duties, falling short of one’s aspirations, or social defeat (Tellenbach, 1980; Bjorkqvist, 2001). In terms of temporality, one may speak of a social desynchronization (Fuchs, 2001): the movement of life is blocked and the person is unable to keep pace with others. These situations of social separation or defeat are perceived as particularly threatening since the patients feel they do not have the necessary resources for coping (‘learned helplessness’, Seligman, 1975). Depression is the consequent psychophysiological reaction: at the biological level, it involves a pattern of neurobiological, metabolic, immunological, biorhythmic, and other organismic dysfunctions which are equivalent to a partial decoupling or separation between organism and environment.5 These dysfunctions are experienced as a loss of drive and interest (anhedonia), psychomotor inhibition, bodily constriction, and depressive mood''.

Thomas Fuchs

"Since the affective contact to the environment is also essential for our basic sense of reality and belonging to the world, a loss of body resonance always results in a certain degree of derealization and depersonalization. Therefore affective depersonalization is a core feature of severe depressive episodes (Kraus, 2002; Stanghellini, 2004). However, there is a special kind of melancholic depression in which depersonalization is the prominent symptom; in German psychopathology it is called ‘Entfremdungsdepression’ (depersonalized depression; Petrilowitsch, 1956). Here the emotional quality of perception is lost completely, objects look blunt or dead, and space seems hollowed out, as it were''.

Thomas Fuchs

Simon Susen (On Habermas)

Simon Susen’s Critical Notes on Habermas’s Theory of Public Sphere

In his book the Social Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas does a socio-historical analysis of how the public sphere changed from the 18th century and beyond. Put into the perspective of Habermas’ life work, he is intrigued by this change because he sees great potential in the public sphere, particularly for the sake of deliberative process in a democracy. Though it should be noted, he wasn’t quite at this point yet in his thought. This work is significant not so much for the accuracy of its historical analysis, but for the tools Habermas uses, his overall approach to understanding the public sphere and why it should demand our attention. Both Habermas and Susen are greatly concerned with the normative function of the private and public distinction.

As is often the starting point with the public/private dichotomy, we are meant to go back to the two spheres of society in ancient Greece; the polis and oikos. Polis referred to the public sphere, a space where free citizens engaged in open interactions. Oikos, in contrast, meant the private sphere, which was a hidden sphere of interactions in the domestic realm (p. 38/39). Key to understanding the distinction between the two is not to understand their relationship as a polarity, but as a reciprocity. These two realms were mutually dependent on one another, particularly the power structures of both. Why we might bother looking at this dichotomy at all is that, for the sake of socio-historical analysis, it allows us to explore the unique ideological and material contingencies that arise given the reciprocity between the two in any given society at any particular time.

In his text, Habermas is interested in the factors that led to the transformation of the relations between the public and private in the modern era. His answer, which we will not focus on, was that given the rise of mercantile capitalism in the 16th century along with evident changes in institutional forms of political power within and between European countries at the time, a whole new form of public sphere emerged in early modern Europe (p.40).

Susen wanting to look at Habermas’ theory critically asks what does the conceptual separation between the two spheres actually represent? For this he denotes three different meanings often attached to the concept: society versus individual, visibility versus concealment and openness versus closure. The first of these is a central concept to sociological thought. The social sciences of course emphasize, “the society” and tend to study the individual in terms of the social and not the reverse (p.41). The second of the three, visibility and concealment asks what parts of social life are visible and which parts are hidden. The more intriguing political question asks, which parts of society ought to be visible and which parts ought to be concealed. Here numerous ideological institutional frameworks come forth. Susen uses the example of liberalism, which has maintained a deep suspicion toward an interventionist state and is critical of any form of authoritarian attempt to control people’s lives, a topic which we have discussed a great deal about in previous meetings. The third meaning, which often accompanies the private/public dichotomy, is that of openness and closure. Questions we might ask are: is the state simply a part of the public sphere and thus open and accessible; is the family an integral part of the private sphere and therefore closed and sealed to the public? Undoubtedly all possibilities are needed as the state requires some closure and the household, openness. All of this said, Susen concludes that the public/private distinction is a useful one, but a rather controversial one particularly for social and political analysis.

Habermas is interested in the public sphere in this dichotomy. His public sphere is a specific kind, he writes, “[t]he bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as a sphere of private people who come together as a public” (p.43). Such a definition implies an immediate connection, for Habermas, between the two parts of the dichotomy we have described above. Individuals are autonomous with one another, not in isolation, but in relation with one another. Susen calls this the “socialized expression of individuals” (ibid). Sociologically, the interest in the public sphere is how it works as mode of societal integration. Habermas takes this a step further and tries to capture how these modes, themselves, might change. Lost in the English translation of the title, Habermas’ is not invested in the structural transformation of the public sphere, but in the transformation of structures in the public spheres and how this happens. Here Susen clarifies Habermas normative sensitivities—within the (bourgeois) public sphere there is emancipatory potential. The existence of the public sphere depends on the promotion for civic engagement and communicative processes (p.45). If subjects are capable of speech and action, they too can reflect and criticize. Habermas here denotes three specific forms of critique that appear in a bourgeois public sphere: a critique of the absolutist state, a critique of democratic states and a self-reflective critique of the public sphere itself. It is this capacity for critique, which we will discuss again shortly, that Habermas finds most attractive about the public sphere. The public sphere, in short, is a collective realm where individuals, through their cognitive capacities and abilities, take on the role of critical and responsible actors; this is indicative of society’s coordinative capacity to transform itself into an emancipatory project shaped by the normative force of communicative rationality (p.47). One wonders if Habermas can conceive of any other form of liberation, be that it may, individual or one which works differently from the version of the public sphere he envisions.

The current structural transformation of the public sphere is tainted with an element of social disintegration. Four reasons are given to why Habermas see it as such, though his final point about the development of the culture industry and the tendency toward constant commodification is arguably the most significant. Here he sees that the potential for the communicative element that arises from the public sphere is being colonized by the functionalist rationality of the state and the economy (p.51).

Susen points to a number of issues in Habermas’ work. First of all, Habermas completely relies on a notion of the “bourgeois” public sphere, entirely ignoring any other forms of public sphere that could contribute to the critical engagement with the world he so demands. Secondly, by focusing on both these bourgeois and critical elements, Habermas is clearly overestimating the potential for the emancipatory in public life and therefore he underestimates the influences of its repressive elements. The third, more recent critique of Habermas’ theory is that it is gender blind, but in so being gender blind, inevitably gives into the dominant patriarchal view of society (p.53). This introduces a broader series of attacks from all marginalized groups. Fourthly it is entirely stuck in the western philosophical tradition, which conceives of a rationalistic conception of the public. This privileges rational approaches to non-rational forms of engagement with the world (p.54). Fifthly, Habermas promotes a universalistic conception of public interest, though he obviously focuses on the bourgeois public sphere. We might ask, what might other public spheres look like? Counterpublics?

Habermas’ analysis, more that the fruits of this analysis, are worthy of our attention. More for the trajectory of his own work, the concept of the public sphere is useful as it provides a forum for deliberative processes aimed at the democratic construction of society (p. 56). As Susen notes, without a doubt, “the development of social life in the modern era is shaped by both the normative opportunities and the normative limitations of public discourses” (ibid). Understanding the dichotomy and reciprocity between the public and private spheres is fundamental for understanding the construction of modern liberal societies and the construction of new societies.

Habermas’ Knowledge and Human Interests

To a great extent this text of Habermas’ is firmly seated in the tradition of the Frankfurt school, a tradition which, as we have most recently seen with Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, circulates around the question of criticality. The particular direction of this critical level of reflection in this text is made clear in his preface:

“I am undertaking a historically oriented attempt to reconstruct the prehistory of modern positivism with the systematic intention of analyzing the connections between knowledge and human interests. In following the process of the dissolution of epistemology, which has left the philosophy of science in its place, one makes one’s way over abandoned stages of reflection. Retreading this path from a perspective that looks back toward the point of departure may help to recover the forgotten experience of reflection. That we disavow reflection is positivism” (vii, emphasis added).

Though we will not discuss his socio-historical analysis of this positivism he speaks of, as is the case with Habermas, what he offers in this analysis is a powerful means of thinking about the relationship between knowledge and the human condition. In this text, Habermas is convinced that we are becoming increasingly reliant on the importance of the natural and behavioral sciences (and their means to knowledge i.e. positivism). Before we continue further, we must come to an understanding of the meanings and justifications of these sciences. We must come to know how they generate knowledge. How, in fact, does human interest generate knowledge? Habermas denotes 3 schemes or domains of knowledge and their corresponding human interests. Briefly the forms of knowledge are: instrumental/analytical, practical/hermeneutical and critical/emancipatory. Instrumental knowledge comes from technical interests of people and its correlating methods are positivistic. Its equivalent epistemological direction would be, “Knowing that”. This form of knowledge refers to the way individuals control and manipulate their environment. Practical knowledge comes from practical human interests, and attempt to “Know how”. The methods are hermeneutic and interpretive. Here it identifies human social interaction and the notion of communicative action (which we will look at next week). Critical knowledge leads to emancipatory interests. The direction of emancipatory interests are “knowing why”. The method of this last form of knowledge is where Habermas often seats himself, that is, the critical social sciences and critical theory in particular. This domain identifies self-knowledge and/or self-reflection. Here the point is to gain knowledge through reflection which in turn leads to a transformation of consciousness. Feminist theory, critiques of ideology and psychoanalysis are examples of this, as is Habermas’ own work.

In the final chapter of his text, Habermas is interested in seeing how some of these critical theories hold out. Here he is particularly interested in Freud’s psychoanalysis and Freud’s own adaptation of psychoanalysis as applied to the broader society, or “civilization” in Freud’s words.

We return again then to the tension between the state and the individual, that is, to a society and the individuals who comprise it. Why is there society, or “civilization” and why is it necessary? What would a psychoanalytic theory of society look like? The history of civilization, for Freud, is a history that shows the various paths people have chosen to “bind their unsatisfied wishes under the varying conditions of fulfillment and denial by reality” (p.276). Like Marx, Freud contends that “civilization” is the means in which human beings elevate themselves above the conditions of an animal existence and it serves two primary purposes. First, it serves as a retainer for all the knowledge and capacities of people in their self-assertion and control of nature. Secondly, it serves as a way to regulate and adjust the relations of people to one another and distribute wealth (p.277). The institutional framework that derives from the creation of civilization/society is conceived very differently in Marx and Freud however. For Marx institutions derive their force by creating a system of rewards and obligations which, rooted in force, is distorted according to the given class structure. Freud’s conception of the institutional framework however is in connection with the repression of instinctual impulses. For Freud, every individual is therefore essentially an enemy of civilization (ibid). If civilization rests on the compulsion to work, yet individuals who participate in it necessarily renounce or are coaxed to renounce their instinctual impulses, what binds individuals together in a civilization? How does it work? It does so through compulsory norms, which redirects, transforms and suppresses linguistically interpreted needs (p.279). As Habermas writes, collective fantasies are what compensate for the renunciations that have been imposed upon individual by civilization. All of these fantasies are in the public sphere at the level of communication itself. Freud sees all religious views and traditions, all ideals and political systems, all styles and art forms as examples of the “mental assets of civilization”, our “illusions” (Ibid). These illusions change through technical progress.

Is society, then...a pathological phenomenon? It would seem not necessarily so. An illusion is not a delusion. In fact they represent human wishes and are therefore not necessarily unrealizable or in contradiction to reality (p.280). Here Freud makes another sharp distinction between society and the individual offering a space for a kind of emancipation. If we recall that such illusions can change with the development of technology, the individual sees the institutional framework of his or her society as an immovable reality (p.280). But for humans as a whole, the boundaries of reality are in fact movable. There is then a direct correlation between the level of socially necessary repression and the extent of the power of technical control over nature. It would appear then, that technology is the means for which the power structure, which maintains repression, can be loosened. In Habermas’ words then, the illusions of society harbor a utopia. It’s there within reach. In this conception of society, “technical progress opens up the objective possibility of reducing socially necessary repression below the level of institutionally demanded repression” (p.280). At this point the utopian content is freed from the illusions, the ideological components of culture that repress us and legitimize the authority of a given institutional framework. Freed, they can be converted into distinct critiques of the power structures, which have now through technical progress, become historically obsolete. What we have here is a space and a place for class struggle, but one that is only feasible at a particular junction of time. Notably, this juncture is crucially linked to technical development.

Obvious similarities can be seen between this conception of society and Marxs’.

Marx implied in his work that the human species could constitute itself through a process of productive activity and the performance of social labor. Critically he wrote of another process, a self-formative one, which was pushed forward by a critical-revolutionary activity by the classes. This latter process started from a reflection of one’s experiences. But, Marx did not provide an account of the status of science. As he remained lodged into a materialist concept of man with nature he was restricted to the domain of the instrumental described above. In short this instrumental knowledge, knowledge at the level of the productive was not suited for any reconstruction of power or, for Marx, ideology. Key to this would be critical knowledge. For Habermas, Freud’s metapsychology allowed for the conceptualization of how institutional frameworks work and the functioning of illusions to a degree, which Marx could not have reached. For Marx humans raised themselves above animal intelligence when they transformed their behaviors into instrumental action, so his focus is a system of social labor. Instrumental action is purely goal-oriented behavior. Freud on the other hand saw that humans elevated themselves beyond animal existence when they transcended animal society and transformed their instinct-governed behaviors into communicative action, a topic which we will continue with in our next meeting. Of course for Freud his focal point was not social labor, but the family. Habermas’ attraction to Freud, though in may not have been explicit in his work, is his sensitivity to dialogue. For Freud, pathologies of individual consciousness or social institutions resided in the medium of human language and the capacity for communicative action, the ability to mutually deliberate and argue. The interest of this form of reason, this form of action and its epistemological framework is inclined “toward a progressive, critical-revolutionary, but tentative realization of the major illusions of humanity, in which repressed motives, have been elaborated into fantasies of hope” (p.288).