Inorganic democracy (10 July 2007)

One more post about Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Retreat From Class. Wood spends a chapter casting doubt on the idea that socialism might evolve naturally out of bourgeois democracy without the need for a revolution. She sees this as arguing that there can be socialism without having to redefine the economic organization of society, which wouldn't amount to socialism at all. Instead, she argues that the claim that politics and economics are independent of each other is one of capitalism's main lines of defense -- this separation allows the exploitative prerogatives of private property to coexist with a discourse of rights in the political sphere. The point at which political rights are used to question exploitation, the political system becomes a battlefield, and the privileged classes will use their concealed leverage, and the barriers inherent to limited representation, to protect their interests.

Wood then raises the point that it's dangerous to become enamored of democracy as an abstract end unto itself. It is a good, as far as socialists are concerned, to the extent that it allows for collective social action, but is there an inherent, organic human desire for democracy, that human nature demands democracy as an expression of its essence? Doesn't seem like it when you look at history. Here's what Wood writes about such advocates of democracy for its own sake:

We are given little guidance as to who in particular might want or need democracy, whether some people might want or need more -- or different aspects -- than others, how a social force capable of bringing it about might come into being -- or indeed why there should be any difficulty or conflict about it at all. If, on the other hand, the democratic drive is not universal, or not immediately so, and yet at the same time is not constituted by material conditions and class relations but is constructed by ideology and politics more or less "autonomously," then are we not again thrown back upon the old utopian elitism which Marx himself denounced? Must we not look to some privileged producers of "discourse" to implant the democratic impulse from without, giving a collective identity to an otherwise shapeless mass, creating the "people" and then imparting to them a socialist or democratic spirit which they cannot bring forth out of their own resources?

This not only sheds light on the hubris of the American project of exporting democracy to the Middle East as if the shapeless masses there were just waiting to be shaped into pseudo-Americans, but it's a reminder of the problem of classes requiring "organic intellectuals" to harness a group's potential power and direct it toward a goal that will continue to motivate and unify them. Because of this, the temptation is always there for those shut out from participating in the revolution to revise that requirement, and come up with ways in which the working class can be told what is in their best interests by those who don't necessary share them, or to argue (a la Laclau and Mouffe) that the working class is not necessarily pertinent to socialism. But there's no way of knowing where the class struggle is headed once the fellow travelers take the wheel.

Stumbling on Bibles (14 June 2007)

On a recent flight I traveled beside a 13-year old boy who spent most of the flight not munching complementary pretzels and sucking down Cokes or watching the Ryan Phillipe movie most of the other passengers "enjoyed" but reading passages from the Bible he carried with him. Why I found this reassuring, I can't immediately say; perhaps it was as Zizek theorizes in The Sublime Object of Ideology, and I was comforted by the material presence of an object that resonates belief -- it believes so that I don't have to. Its very existence, and the boy reading it, establishes beyond doubt the reality of a whole substratum of faith without my having to make any spiritual effort. Zizek cites a Stalinist expression: "Whatever I may be thinking, objectively I am believing" thanks to the presence of an object that connotes the material reality of belief. I don't have to believe myself to be in an objective state of belief -- this is why cultures have often developed designated mourners that can do the formally required grieving, freeing up the bereaved to take care of more pressing matters. So in this case it may be that I have convinced myself that the passenger beside me has freed me to write blog entries and play computer chess (about which more later) by carrying the visible signs of his belief with him, participating in that great religious stratum in American society in which I grumblingly subsist but in theory I'd be lost without. I need the forms of spirituality enacted around me to not be troubled excessively by spiritual questions myself. I need there to be religious folk so I don't have to be religious myself. I have faith by proxy.

I'm not entirely convinced by this reasoning, though Zizek's use of it to explicate laugh tracks is pretty interesting -- the shows laugh so we don't have to, and we can experience enjoyment without making the effort necessary to understand, make the movements in our thought to produce genuine amusement, laughter. We can rest assured that we participated without effort, which is its own reassuring satisfaction, the pleasures of passivity. As Zizek puts it, "Even if, tired from a hard day's stupid work, all evening we did nothing but gaze drowsily into the television screen, we can say afterward that objectively, through the medium of the other, we had a really good time." In other words, a really good time can be had merely by mimicking the form, perhaps more so by mimicking the form rather than genuinely experiencing pleasure. Purer pleasure is always already secondhand, mediated, predigested, since this preempts the difficult questions of purpose, why am I bothering with pleasure? What is this pleasure supposed to accomplish?

Which brings me back to Bibles. One of the comforting things I find about the Bible is that it is a book whose meaning is almost entirely exogenous; it makes little effort to justify itself by present a thesis, by mounting a coherent and unifying argument, by rationalizing its heterogeneity. This means that despite the laborious efforts of concordance, the work to organize the text and being it all to account, it still promises the leisure of unstructured reading; it invites being picked up and flipped through at random -- hence the divination procedure of opening it at random and trying to deduce the horoscopic relevance of the passage chosen. Approaching the text with that spirit feels as though it frees us from the hassles of belief as well; we can demystify the words by reading them without preconception, without needing to understand them, and this becomes a practice of faith as well -- we can take care to not make any interpretations to assure our faith's perfection. We validate the religious without partaking of it; haphazard Bible reading thus becomes a kind of homeopathic remedy for becoming overwhelmed with theological complexities and conundrums and puzzles, which after all may lead one to question faith, to question the spiritual altogether. Thus the path to spiritual sublimity may be a principled ignorance, taking for granted what you are searching for without necessarily suspending your quest or conceiving its ultimate end.

Happiness as nodal point (12 May 2007)

The following thoughts were occasioned by reading two wildly dissimilar works in conjunction: Will Wilkinson's recent Cato Institute policy paper about happiness research and Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. First of all, they couldn't be further apart on the readability scale. Wilkinson writes clean, compelling prose sprinkled with wit and pointed, impassioned polemic, while Laclau and Mouffe evince the distinct aversion to active verbs and discernible grammatical subjects that you often find in works of nebulous social theory. And they initially seem to be coming from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. Wilkinson, a libertarian, argues for as little governmental intervention as possible into the lives of sovereign individuals; Laclau and Mouffe are socialists trying to conceive of a method to bring about "radical democratic politics" to forward Leftist interests, arguing essentially that the individual has no identity outside of political struggle. Laclau and Mouffe are trying to find ways to build political blocs, to develop ad hoc unity among a disparate group so it can then effect social change. Wilkinson seems to be arguing against the social usefulness of collective will.

Nevertheless, maybe because I am misinterpreting them both, but I found a surprising potential for synthesis between the two works, mainly because Wilkinson's eagerness to discount happiness research leads him to take some rather nuanced, relativistic stances at various points about they way people comprehend their own interests, just as Laclau and Mouffe, eager to dispatch essentialist, given notions of what it means to be working class, systematically undermine all appeals to universal notions. There's no one determinant of class identity, any more than there is one definition of what happiness is, as experienced. (Whether an objective notion of well-being that we are not actively conscious of can be considered happiness is another question.)

Wilkinson cites approvingly a passage by philosopher Nicolas White, who argue that "As we develop a picture of what life is to be like, we don't start from a 'framework' concept of happiness (an idea of what the picture on the puzzle will be), to which to tailor our particular aims so that they'll fit into it.... For the most part we build up a conception of what happiness would be out of the aims that we have." Compare that with this passage from Laclau and Mouffe: "The fixity of every social element in the first theorizations of hegemony proceeded, as we saw, from the indissoluable link between the hegemonized task and the class that was supposed to be its natural agent.... But, insofar as the task has ceased to have any necessary link with a class, its identity is given to it solely by its articulation within a hegemonic formulation. Its identity, then, has become purely relational. And as this system of relations has itself ceased to be fixed and stable -- thereby making hegemonic practices possible -- the sens of every social identity appears constantly deferred." In other words happiness is contingent on aims, and aims are contingent on given social formations, and what values can become dominant (hegemonic) through the way they are articulated and their appeal broadened or made constitutive of identity for those swayed by them. The inefficacy of happiness research to pin down a consistent definition opens up the space in which hegemony can be constructed. Political work consists of defining happiness in such a way that suits a particular bloc while conveying a sense of individual empowerment (a sense of concrete identity and fulfillment of that identity's potential) to those throwing support behind the bloc.

Happiness research, then, is discourse attempting to perform this work, constructing happiness in a politically useful way and presenting that definition as natural and inevitable. Individual happiness and the collective good administered politically thereby merge into a single conception, albeit one that is always contested and is ever-shifting, no matter how much it insists it is objective and transcendent and eternally true. To gloss White, not only is the picture on the puzzle indeterminable until you start to work at putting it together, but the pieces themselves are always shifting, as is the logic of the rules for solving the puzzle.

In short, happiness may be what L&M (not the cigarette) call "nodal points," semi-fixed notions in the field of relations that seem universal and transcendent but are actually up for grabs. Despite their tendency to shift, we still rely on them to orient ourselves in construing our own goals and in conceiving how to relate to peers and how to structure who the enemies are.