Wriggling in an unsurpassable theoretical frame

Three years ago I wrote this "conservative" reflection in response to what I thought an overstated claim made by a leftist FB commentator (whose posts I have regularly appreciated):

"Every document of civilization that seems to offer anything useful to ordinary people in their struggles against injustice is also a blood-stained record of barbarism perfected and ignored by that civilization.

The Enlightenment was as bound up in colonialism as Christianity in the Inquisition, Marxism in the Gulag, or Nietzsche in the rise of fascism. And the reverse holds as well."

The point, precisely, is that intellectual history tends to exceed its institutional applications, perhaps immeasurably. Works of art and ideas have always served rulers and states. But they also have something like 'meaning', which is by nature 'open' rather than 'closed', which is why in the examination of them that one engaged in contemplation may enjoy, practical people may use then to correct their mistakes. The documents of a civilization that is always more barbaric than its normally credulous functionaries prefer to acknowledge endure for this reason. They are found 'interesting'.

This 'open' character, the ability of a text or artifact that can be contemplated and not merely used to obtain some practical end, is why those of us who are not partisans of some Spartan false utopia (in at least some cases, Stalinism and various fascisms) do not say that artworks and texts may be inculpated, tried, and judged as innocent or guilty. If they were, who can doubt that, justly, 'all are punished," as the Prince says in Romeo and Juliet?

This is an important truth.

Yet the closed or open character of a text or artwork in the history of culture is a consequential matter practically because we also judge ideas for their practical consequences, and some then fare better than others. This is one cause of improvement, a relevant concept if we believe that there is something like a linear progress operative in the historical time of societies or civilizations that warrant being identified as such in the first place. (If not, would there be only a diversity intelligible as chaos where not values can be affirmed except as someone's preference manifesting their private property right?). The kind of judgment under discussion here presupposes such a concept of historical time, and it presupposes also that 'readers' are engaged in judgment of its contents viewed as spectacle from a standpoint of legally (morally) useful practice, which is to say counsel to the sovereign authority of a figure of state or empire effectively considered absolute in the operative linguistic community of speakers. My original interlocutor here would not like this inference at all, I am sure, opposing such imperialism of theoretical discourse (perhaps on an 'English' model). The names of authors and oeuvres cited can, however, float free from such lines and planes and be employed elsewhere, and are, a feature of their openness. This is also a feature of individual minds: they are never fully determined by operative states of affairs, however dominant as worldly powers. The 'things' that feature in the work we do when 'thinking', understood as contemplation, a kind of observation, or as work, a kind of labor or making, exceed such frames or bounds, and the uses to which they are employed. A master commands, yet the work exceeds the master's purposes and uses.

This is what is wrong with all Gnostic thinking. It opposes the authority of masters, states or bosses, because it supposes that the subject to a commanding authority has no potentialities beyond obedience to the will of a ruler who is for this reason a tyrant. The tyrant says, as Sartre claimed in his autobiography fathers normally do, which is in some cases if not always in some ways, true enough in the culture legated to us by Roman antiquity, "My will is your law." Americans tend to want to rebel at the very idea of this, though they followed the English in more or less moderating the rule of law by a sovereign state as well as legitimating that rule by claiming it as their own, with the consequence that American society is characteristically both militant in style and utterly intolerant in its demands for conformity. Because the Americans are suspicious of authority except when exercised in their own name and voice, their culture, in the ethnographic sense, is rhetorical, or if you prefer Harold Bloom's idea of it, Gnostic. This means that perceived violations of social normativity, which is always identified with the behavioral expectations of whoever is or believes themselves to be in command in the instance (such as an annoyed neighbor) are normally enforced with some remark irrelevant enough (that is, (we) Americans when behaving normally are perfect liars) that it cannot be called into question by the person criticized. (Try it and the accusation of misbehavior may instantly be doubled by one of assault). Bloom likes our Gnostic culture because he thinks this means that in our apparently infinitely open spaces of liberty (of the imagination alone), the rhetorical things people say to you that become loud when they are annoyed at you become salutary suggestions you can learn from when the situation is calm and the nearest waves not alarming but soothing. Then I suppose social life itself could be as marvelous to attend to the sights of sounds of as an abstract modernist symphonic or one of the better films available to watch. What an enchanted thought fit for an island nation, and no wonder he loved Shakespeare, who is our poet of the very large and interesting possibilities of social life within a monarchical framework and hopefully in peacetime. My caveat about this is not only that I often prefer to English teahouses the clamor of Irish bars but that in republics we do quarrel with real stakes, and while that is a problem the mere fact of that matter is not always where it stays. This is indeed dangerous, and artists like political radicals may live dangerously; the object of my pointlessly unpublished polemics like this one is among other things that I believe our society is really not a republic at all. (And, of course, our current national government is insistent that it be even less of one). Republics, and this is why they are best realized as democracies, have citizens, who quarrel openly with each about what they want (which is why most companies are not very democratic), while monarchies do not have citizens in this sense but only subjects. Subjects have exceptional rights to the sovereign’s demand for obedience, but are not citizens, lacking both constituent and distituent powers, which go together. I have lived for six decades in a society of which I always could palpably recognize that I am not a citizen except in theory. The United States is such a society. It is animated by a culture driven by a democratic desire, the corresponding institutional forms of which are extremely weak, and not strengthened much by the volume of noise attending the exercise. The city I live in has recently elected a ‘democratic socialist’ head of government, a fact I meet with guarded hope. Most troubling to me is that our mayor-elect and his associates apparently are committed not only to forms of social control that are gentler and more effective as well as concerned with rather than indifferent to the popular weal, and would replace wherever possible the use police with their possibility of using violence force with social workers using psychology, and medicine. The model here is ‘mental health’, and the tools and methods mentioned are those of psychiatric medicine. I believe this is the wrong model. I do not have ‘equal liberty’ when faced with a social worker or doctor who is concerned about my behavior and state of mind, because they can compel me against my will to do what they command. The medical industry is organized such that doctors have authority over patients. This authority cannot even be challenged within the medical model governing their interactions with them, for it is its basis. Try and say anything at all, about anything at all, to someone claiming authority over you, and one way or another your claim will either be denied or affirmed on terms and in ways that confirm the authority they have over you, which is the most important fact of the matter. Medicine and psychology are the middle class’s form of social control that correspond to the use of the police and criminal justice systems for the poor. Neither can be challenged from within, and both are totalizing. The capitalist market as a system is also totalizing, though in a different way, as bureaucratic authority differs from the rules of commodity exchange. The broad ideological problem in America today is the almost totalizing dominance of medical and psychological, military, and market, ways of thinking. Medical thinking in particular also fits the framework of a militarized society, and this is obvious on reflection since medicine uses biological and social technologies to manage persons and indeed their life and death, which may be placed in its power. Medical psychiatry is also an older social technology than the psychoanalysis whose invention was a departure from it, because the mind is modeled by the latter in a way that is more complex and intrinsically is resistant to the kind of authority a doctor observing and acting upon bodies, and minds considered as functions of bodies albeit in social and natural environments, which fails to recognize not that those environments influence the manageable bodies but that considering persons as such, and thus as bodies that function in some political economy that is more or less well managed with the aim of its success and happiness according to individual preferences and (when least tyrannical not only) of avoiding dangerous risk and liability to persons, systems, or capital that the managing director of the person (doctor, etc.) is responsible to. Medicine is an inadequate psychology and not because it needs supplementation by the spirituality of a care of the soul that attends to matters of thought and not only bodily comportments. Medicine is an inadequate psychology because the model is monarchical and pre-Copernican, and this makes it a practice of social control. Certainly however, the very idea of improving the government of persons by adopting some better model of doing so is corrupted by the failure to recognize that it is precisely because persons are rightly considered subjects to a sovereign power, whether or not they are only that, that such questions make sense in the first place. If we had a society of artists rather than laborers, artists working well only when autonomous, interventions would not only be voluntary but would ask the person, what do you want? And then it would offer them not tools and methods for improving the health of their bodies and minds as laborers who are expected to do things that are useful “for society” (and capital), and not dangerous to it, but tools and methods for doing the work they, we, choose to do for the purposes we choose. Then instead of being sent to dreary hospital wards where there is nothing to do, those persons who in the worst case are judged as requiring incarceration because “society’s” representatives believe them “likely” (capable?) of committing (or becoming victim to?) some violent crime, they would be offered ample opportunities to study and work on projects of their choosing, and would be in some large measure in charge. There would be a locally operative form of participatory “democratic socialism,” and a right or refusal of all and any treatments would have to be honored because the power to command obedience to some ordered treatment would be much diminished. But those places would remain jails, the denial that they are being the hypocrisy typical of rulers who need to be loved because the power they have makes them fear that their tyranny may make them hated, so that they share in the generalized paranoia that the prospective prisoners they aim to keep in control may commit some ‘violence’, with or without quotes, since they hate the domination, and possibly the person exercising it, as is natural. The practices involved derive from colonialism, which as Aimé Césaire said, is always brought back to the ‘metropole’ where it is used on capital’s more proximate subjects, including those who are not very likely to achieve positions of relative authority themselves and those who are. The practices involved are brutal. Psychiatric medicine is colonialist. In Italy psychiatric hospitals were abolished by law in 1978; in today’s America even the progressives are eager to use them against all and any persons they fear may be dangerous. It is a form of imprisonment and it is no coincidence that we have so much of that. The cause of this is capitalism. A society that were in the process of transitioning to a post-capitalist one, under the leadership of a government that aims to direct that transition, would begin to replace all discourses and practices of ‘mental health’ with other things entirely. My candidate for this is the arts. A democratic socialist government, if we ever are able to create one, will be one in which there is a lot of discussion going on about where ‘we’ are going - and there would be such a ‘we’, and instead of worrying who might be dangerous to us and what we can do about it, we would be curious about what people are saying. It would be a world in which the ‘true’ and ‘right’ tend to give way to the ‘interesting’. This idea not being new, I do not know exactly what its future might be. What is clear to me is that a business society oriented to war is one that must enforce its dullness. It is also one in which people do not have equal liberty because everywhere our lives are subject to the authority of a ruling class of professionals. I sensed this as a child the first time I went to a school. The professional class is, moreover, mostly not one of scientists and artists, like both my parents, but one of managers and people who believe in management. Their lives are devoted personally to monetarily rewardable professional success and organizationally to the production of stuff and management of the conditions for this production. This is the social conflict that I see at work in the society I live in. It is less true in societies, like France where I also lived and studied, that are organized less exclusively in these political-economic terms. I do not believe culture and the life of the mind depend on a centralized state, necessarily, though that is an interesting question. I told my conservative father when he was dying that while I agree that government can be oppressive, it seems to me that the libraries and museums owned by the city of New York impact my life with an effect I consider not oppression but something nearly contrary. I also believe in the activities of us working artists. Many business enterprises differ from what we do in this respect: we have (not none no doubt but) less need for policing, including the medical, psychological kinds and those that ‘spiritual’ institutions offer people in their personal oikonomia. We also believe in something that the business- and everyday life-oriented mainstream considers only preparation for the business activities of labor and family life, which is learning, which can be life-long. Life in a city can provide that. Psychoanalysis has been found useful as an aid to many artists, though it is still marketed as social control for bodies who are liable to ‘dysfunction’ in ways that may be judged dangerous. If persons are objects to be socially controlled, then their possibilities are negative: they might do something that is an error, perhaps morally, thus a crime. (Or they might be a victim of one). Is that we all are? Persons who play our roles more or less well, and must answer for how we do so? (According to the two principal meanings of ‘persona’ in Latin: a role played by an actor, and a legal subject who is ‘responsible’ because may be called before a tribunal). This is one reason religion (alone) does not satisfy me, as it does not most modern persons but does very many Americans, whose society is so peculiar in this regard: it provides an ethical code, as well as a set of literary texts. The social world I live in that is perhaps now most apt, in Europe, America, and elsewhere, to destroy itself while aiming at its preservation (which is among the things fascism did in Germany), is one whose greatest achievements were its artistic ones, while of course its downside was its enormous repression and violence, at home and abroad. The only sense in which I am a conservative liberal and not a radical (who claims to want nothing more than to overthrow an entire social world) is that I want to see those achievements both remembered and drawn upon. It actually accords with this culture that I believe the better future depends far more upon men and women of culture than those of action who tend to believe, basically, that European high culture is of no interest to the non-European world that is in the steady process of replacing it, if current directions hold, under the banner of a capitalism that will encourage the militancies that are most apt to abolish those aspects of their own cultural legacy that provide us with the best resources for building something much better than what we have now. For I have little doubt that a corporate capitalism that either respects only the values associated, superficially no doubt, with the local culture in its putative and somewhat false autonomy, or, as accords with its actual logic, none at all, is very much a possibility today, and most of our progressives are inadvertently its active harbingers. This is why I consider myself a leftist ‘conservative.’

American society approaches this sort of tyranny for several reasons, one of which is that it, since WW2 in particular, it has been largely governed as a set of corporate enterprise coordinated by military applications, as the world's dominant (now dangerously in inevitably relative decline in this role) economic power it sought to police the rest of the world to contain any local opposition to its economy. Militarism maximizes the efficiency of a corporate (organized collective labor) operation and minimizes the liberty of the persons involved by relegating its exercise to states (places, times) of exception where command and compliance are not directly operative as the enforced will, or sanctioning power, of the sovereign authority. The United States in its social life is obsessed with liberty as it is with God and "the spiritual" (a notion of almost always mystifyingly vague application though quite often also apt to be filled with gratifying meaningful contents of evidential detail, as might happen for example in the discussion of a canonical text recognized by the local institution of "faith."). It is not so liberty-involved as Americans always insist (perhaps that is why they do).

Gnostic thinking leads to antinomian thinking. It is implicit in some forms of romanticism. I believe it has its origin in the recognition as distasteful of a more or less absolute state authority. In antiquity, this was empires. It was not democracies.

If we were fated to live under imperial states, some of us would be consoled with the happy thought that there are at least universities, museums, and libraries, with books and artworks. The modern liberal is contented with such consolations. Many are full of wonders and delights, and opportunities to create others.

As citizens of the world with access to its culture, we judge its artifacts. Progressive idiots are quick to damn some authors in their rush to virtue signaling and vice attribution. I can learn from Christianity, Marxism, Nietzsche and other things, and want to pose the right questions. That is where polemicizing falls short.

I find myself becoming a conservative of sorts when confronted with the sillier statements of liberal-left 'progressives'. Might it be that their function in the media sphere is just to waste my time? They have answers instead of questions, and their answers are ready to hand. We probably already know what they are saying. Do these prophetic voices want us to recognize these truths? Why is America a culture of preachers? Why is its public intellectual life a wasteland of babblers?

Having realized that he has said nothing of much interest, really, he returned to reading in the French language, whose university discourse seems to involve more fascinating (one might hope useful somehow) readings of artworks and texts.

For it is perhaps a merely banal truth that in today’s society “there is no free speech” in the public sphere because nothing meaningfully is, or perhaps can be, said at all. In that case, meaningful public speech, being by definition dissent, is expressed as civil disobedience, and otherwise as art. Which is maybe why the latter retains such importance in our world. I might only add that there is this one difference: in what is effectively a monarchical state or dictatorship, art succeeds as disobedience, while in a democracy the fact that it would be opposed to, and by, a monarchical authority if one were in place is taken for granted.

In my youth I discovered that the inquisitorial Christian state had taken on a novel form that was everywhere: the medical and psychological state, which most citizens believe in. Our religious discourses are all continuous with it (they are one of its earlier forms) and the attendant psychological “spiritualities” are its preeminent ideology. I note that no artist was ever tutored by his doctor. And this is the difference: the corporate state, effectively organized on a more less military model into workgroups based on voluntary associations entered into with liberty, which is how I see American society more or less, “wants” something different from, and at odds with, what I think those of us working in the art world want. How might this be defined in terms of governmental politics, if and when it is? There Gnostic and statist models prevail, as that is the discourse of the field, and so most people if pressed will say either that they would prefer to be left alone, perhaps in order to pursue their own tastes, interests, and projects in “liberty,” or that they prefer a different kind of society altogether. Everyone I have ever had much respect for agrees with both propositions, and is tolerated when we are because we speak little of the latter. Yet it is overwhelmingly true. This has been the case during more or less the entire period since the beginning of the American republic, though in its institutional forms, practices, and discourses (quite unlike in France and later much of Europe), the latter was not a common object. I call “the left” the political project, first named as such, born a few years later in France. We are still there. The theoretical form this takes is the critique of the political economy of modern society (not to be confused with political economy as a theory of how that society is best governed), which is why Marx, who articulated that idea and began the project, still matters. This is, as Sartre called it, “the unsurpassed horizon of our time.” In times of crisis, rulers, more easily the more monarchical is their power, will attack those who want something different. In the extreme case, you became imagined as outside the society represented by the state, and state of affairs, they rule, and this can seem like madness, a judgment that is easily enough enforced. The assumption of the totalizing character of what is that is operative here is the premodern one of a metaphysics corresponding to imperial monarchy, such as survived in Europe at least theoretically after the end of the now Christian Roman empire. This state apparatus, often violently barbaric, has been retained under the theoretical hegemony of neoliberal governmentality, which always will have recourse to it for those vulnerable because without sufficient property to confer effective liberty. I was last falsely imprisoned under the authority of a doctor who claimed, identifying a fault he considered not sin but illness, which I consider a curious way of thinking about the moral responsibility of citizen subjects, since the designation as ill deprives one of the freedom to act (a morally sick person cannot act rightly, which is also the definition of insanity, which is their implicit claim, a lie, since they and not their victims are the ones denying that they distinction can be made, except by them acting in authority over their prisoners, between evil and good), the claim that I did not recognize that “this is a good society.” What an accusation to be charged with.

Yet I long ago gave up believing it can make any sense to point out to other people in the American social and political space any injustices. For if I describe them well enough, people will approve my outrage and remark that this is a matter of course (which they themselves are not bothered enough by to want to do anything about), usually supposing that the individual I have mentioned acted improperly somehow. But it is the norms of propriety by which these individuals are judged that I call into question.

I am sometimes indeed consoled by the thought that colonialism’s practices are being replaced by looser forms of social regulation attending our more sophisticated information systems and neoliberal capitalism. Should I be?