Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)
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"What is the opposite of bullshit?" Possibilities of intellectual engagement, since Sartre: An interview with Bill Martin / Joseph G. Ramsey [Part 2]
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<38> JR: How does a "Sartrean radical intellectual" differ from say, Foucault's "specific intellectual" or other currently popular notions of "public intellectuals" in and around the U.S. academy?
<39> BM: The problem now, and you could say this is an unfortunate thing - I think it is, at any rate - is that the debate about the models of engaged intellectual activity, whether of Sartre or Foucault or Noam Chomsky or possibly even Slavoj Zizek (we can return to this last example) are surpassed by the question of what it means to be an intellectual in this society anymore. What's interesting is that you get about as much respect from the "average person on the street" for being a writer and a thinker (in other words, next to none) as you do from ostensibly left or progressive movements (again, next to none). Now, there are exceptions, but it is also the case that, in the latter milieu, whatever respect one receives has more to do with whatever position one might have in this society, in terms of some sort of standing, than with the actual intellectual contributions one might be trying to make. Against the background of a society with a very low level of what deserves the name of "culture," I don't know that it matters that much which model for being a radical intellectual one follows - and at the same time I would add that I don't know that it ever had to matter as much as some people might think it should. Why does there have to be just one model to follow in this any more than in most everything else? This kind of goes back to the days of the sort of orthodox Marxism that needs to decide on the one, true "proletarian style" in music or painting, whether that be folk music or cubism or "boy meets tractor" social realism. I'm more inclined toward letting a hundred flowers bloom, and not only because that is the way to find the "one, true" path, but because there are different things that need to be done and different things that are interesting, and maybe even just different things that different people have become good at doing. I doubt that Pete Townshend could play guitar the way John McLaughlin does, but that doesn't mean that McLaughlin could have made the sorts of musical contributions that Townshend has, either.
<40> In that light, it is interesting to examine the model of Chomsky, whose is certainly engaged and certainly an intellectual, but who, in a way, is not an engaged intellectual - even while also being the most famous and influential "engaged intellectual" at work today, and I am certainly appreciative of all that he does. But what he mainly does is expose the machinations of U.S. imperialism - which is a very important thing to do - but under an Enlightenment model where "the truth will set you free." Well, alright, that is one model, and it's not that I want people who are following that model to give it up, and certainly it would seem silly in a time when everything is so wrapped in lies to be critical of those who are trying to get some truth out there.
<41> When I refer to a society with a low level of culture, I don't mean this in a way that attempts to reinstate some "high/low" distinction. Just because perhaps as much as ninety-five to ninety-nine percent of rock music is crap (or at least not very good) doesn't mean there isn't some of it that is very good and even truly great and deserving of attention from anyone who cares about good music. What I am worried about at root is a society that is so infused with instrumental reason and is so bombarded with various elements of stupidification that there is no cultural curiosity. It's one thing if young people don't know yet about Beethoven or Coltrane or King Crimson, it's another thing if people are brought up to not want to know. The same thing goes for philosophy, and indeed it is part of the same non-culture - in other words, a non-culture that beats down or never ignites curiosity and critical thinking, critical listening, critical appreciation for the creativity of others, and the desire to be creative oneself. What Adorno said about the culture industry and what Arendt said about banality may have been something of a strategic exaggeration in their day, but are very close to being truths with deep roots today - the irony being the idea of a structured superficiality with deep roots.
<42> Not to simply engage in an ad hominem attack, but it is interesting to consider that in the United States there is now a ruling class that is willing to put stupidity and vapidity out there as its cultural emblem. The ruling classes of Western Europe may not have liked the fact that Beethoven was writing anthems to universal humanity that threatened to burst beyond the narrow horizons of bourgeois right, but it would not have occurred to them (I don't think, maybe I'm wrong - at least let's put this out as a hypothesis, we can "workshop" it a bit) to simply undermine the very idea of having a culture if that culture seems to be a threat to them. But with someone such as George W. Bush you have an excellent emblem of someone with no culture, and who is proud of having no culture, and who helps tremendously to bolster the idea that it is fine to just be some stupid jerk. Of course this gets aligned with the "working man," instead of being seen as a tremendous insult to working people, especially as Bush became president without having ever done an honest day's work in his whole privileged and wasted life.
<43> Then the problem of the model (or models) for radical intellectuals becomes part of the larger question of how there can be a counter-culture when there is no culture to counter. Against such a background, we might think that Sartre and Foucault were closer in their engagements than at least Foucault would have thought back in the day. It would be worthwhile to revisit this question in terms of the relationship between their respective works in theory and their "practical engagements." Again, I don't know that I see such a big difference, at least in 20/20 hindsight. Sartre aimed to take on the "big questions," to have big works on ontology, epistemology, and society, but then he never finished any of the big works. Being and Nothingness was to have a second volume on ethics and politics, which we have as Cahiers pour une moral, while the Critique never came completely together, either. Foucault at least finished his major works (or, in the case of History of Sexuality, he went a long way into the project), and while they might be understood as more "specific" than Sartre's, the questions they deal with are certainly big enough. Maybe the difference was more that, when they took it to the streets, so to speak, Sartre was more of a big talker. Again, maybe it's being from South Carolina that gives me more of an affinity for Sartre, who also was not from the center of French intellectual life. But Foucault, Althusser, Derrida, none of them were Parisians to begin with, either. (And we can add Irigaray, Kristeva, and Cixous to this list, for that matter.) More substantively, at least as far as intellectual matters go, the contrast might more properly be made with Chomsky. Sartre and Foucault, despite their large differences, perhaps captured well enough by saying that one was more Hegelian and the other more Nietzschean, were engaged in developing theories of society, and then in acting publicly on the basis of their understanding, which in both cases brought them up against the structures of existing society. Chomsky, on the other hand, does not really think we need social theory, but instead simply the exposure of the evils of the existing society, which then will help inspire people to go into motion against - again - the structures of the existing society. In terms of a model, the only reason I am more inclined toward Sartre is that I also like the big questions, and my sense of these questions is more influenced by German Idealism (though more Kant than Hegel) than by the Nietzschean form of the deconstruction of German Idealism (as opposed to the Marxist or Derridean forms, which I think still owe a larger debt to Kant), and then I want to connect the analysis of big questions to practice and activism. However, to conclude, on the one hand, I would be happy to have many more Sartres, Foucaults, and Chomskys in the world, I think they are all needed, and yet, on the other hand, I don't really see any model that is adequate to what we are facing in the world today, which is a world where real intellectual work, at least in philosophy, social theory, or the humanities, has little standing.
<44> This avoids, for the moment, the question of organization and the role of political leaders who are also doing intellectual work (to some extent), and perhaps we can come back to this.
<45> JR: Some of this reminds me of Zizek's comment (repeated in several places) that the dominant –and very troubling - sensibility among the U.S. public today is not so much ignorance as cynicism. As he puts it, paraphrasing and revising Marx, "They know what they are doing, and they are doing it!" What do you make of this position? As someone whose research is devoted to recovering the–suppressed, repressed - literary and political legacies of previous radical movements and moments, such as U.S. Communists during the 1930s - I often wonder about the degree to which anti-Communism and anti-radical discourse (over and above the general postmodern sapping of historical consciousness mapped by somebody like Jameson) is something like the linchpin of this cynicism. So that even those "radical liberals" who see the deep structural problems with capitalism and can sit through a Chomsky lecture nodding "yes, yes" still often hold this deep underlying suspicion of on the ground radical agitation and political organizing, a resistance to any sort of identification with the idea of a bold and positive revolutionary project as such. And of course there is the question of how people like Chomsky (and even another emerging figure like Naomi Klein) and even many other socialist groups relate to this, with frequent, and virtually uncontextualized references to the Gulag or the famine of the Great Leap Forward…
<46> You've put a good deal on the table just now, and I think I'll momentarily show you the flipside of my usual procedure of giving very long answers to short questions and instead move through the foregoing rather quickly - or I'll try to do this, at any rate.
<47> Of course I agree completely with Zizek on this point. This isn't a competition, but I might point out that I was already developing in my first book this argument about cynicism, rather than the standard jingoism, as the ideology embraced and promoted by postmodern capitalism. One important result of this is that, when there has been a certain return to outright jingoism in the wake of September 11, 2001, it is a markedly cynical jingoism. We can go one step further, too, and develop the questions of not only cynicism but also a kind of cynical, willful stupidity, in the post-9/11 context. There are new forms of this, which need to be understood, but there is also the rootedness of what I call "brain damage" especially in the Reagan period, which was really set up to be a negation of the sixties. In the book of discussions I did with Bob Avakian, he balked at the term "stupidity," with very good reason I think, and instead offered the term "ignorance." This is indeed dangerous territory, but, unfortunately, we are up against the problem that, if people have so internalized the injunction to not think about things that are going on in the world, and to especially not to try to grasp the interconnections, after awhile they just won't even have the mental ability to do this even if they at some moment might have otherwise felt motivated to go into this direction. I realize this is very harsh, but I often have the feeling that there is a good deal of early-onset Alzheimer's in this society. But one does have to wonder if the "brain damage" goes even beyond a kind of ideological training in being sure to never think, down even into the biology of the brain. I'm thinking of a study that was done a few years ago by the National Institutes of Health, and which was mentioned in all of the chess magazines (such as Chess Life and New in Chess), that showed that there has never known to have been a case of Alzheimer's among grandmasters.
<48> This also takes us back into Mao's amusing statement that the brain is a "muscle" for thinking, and that it has to be exercised. This is a pitiful state of affairs, for sure, and yet we also need to deal with it in an analytical way, and I don't think it quite cuts it anymore to simply fall back on injunctions about how, yes, in their everyday lives, people are too busy or tired or whatever to think, but then, when the everyday routine breaks down, they will very quickly bust through all of that. Of course I don't want to say that such breakthroughs are no longer possible, or that nothing can break through the culture of "affirmation" (in Marcuse's sense) and "false negativity" (an essentially Adornian thesis, forwarded by Paul Piccone), but I don't think we'll get anywhere by ignoring these problems and trying to bluff our way past them with pure hype, either.
<49> In all honesty, it has to be added that there has been no shortage of chess masters who have gone nuts or who were (or are) otherwise quite dysfunctional as human beings. On the other hand, even these aren't any more crazy or dysfunctional (lacking basic social skills) as plenty of other people who have no skill for chess or much of anything else - and, again, it is a sad and pitiful state of affairs, and I realize it is difficult because we find ourselves in something too close to "blaming the people, blaming the masses" territory.
<50> Just to get away from this territory for a moment (I don't like being in it any more than anyone else), I was thinking of a good example of the sort of "bullshit" that concerns me. I put the term in scare-quotes because the point is to develop a more technical definition, with the hope that we can deploy this term in a helpful, critical, and critically-negative way. At this moment in early 2008 when it is beginning to dawn on people that the U.S. economy, contrary to what G. W. Bush is saying about "short-term difficulties," is more than likely beset by very deep problems, one supposed bright spot is that there is job growth in the health care fields. Just in the last week I have seen various news stories about this, about the sorts of jobs that are resistant to downsizing and outsourcing, and also for programs that will train people to go into these fields. This is all presented as if it is a great thing - oh, we've found something people can do, even in these times of economic decline. This is not only bullshit in and of itself, in the sense that there is the other side of this coin that is not happy at all, that the one thing that is not declining is the number of sick people. It is also bullshit in that it is training in not ever backing up and asking about the big picture and the deeper, systemic questions. Clearly, too, we see the connection between truth and power here, in a fairly crude form even, because people only want to go so far in asking big questions for which no practical answers are forthcoming. Better to numb the mind to this kind of stuff, and, gee, it turns out the very same bullshit system that is the source of the problems is happy to dispense the drugs (the usual ones as well as the other sorts of distracting pabulum that is very close to being the totality of "culture" these days) that will help a person not only swallow the bullshit but also to structure one's mind and whole life-energy according to it.
<51> A lot could be done with your allusion to "nodding to Chomsky"! Just to move past that part of your question very quickly, let me say that I am more and more convinced that we need something like two models of truth, or a model of two "orders" of truth, where the relationship between the orders is highly uncertain. I can fully understand the hesitation and exhaustion that people might feel regarding the "bold revolutionary programs" that are still, at this moment, mostly re-castings of the past - leaving aside for the moment some of these "militant" expressions that were just wrong-headed to begin with. But part of what I am saying is that Badiou's theory of the situation and the event is something that needs to be studied to people who hope to contribute to radical change. I think we'll have the opportunity to develop these themes more as we move along.
<52> JR: We can come back to Badiou later too. But first, what concepts and categories of Sartre do you find particularly resonant and important today?
<53> BM: I don't hesitate to say that I am Sartrean in two senses. First, that it still seems to me there are plenty of projects to work on that are either in Sartre's own oeuvre or that come out of it, and I have been actively attempting to contribute to some of these projects. Second, I think the framework of Sartre's version of Marxism, with the terms developed not only in the Critique (though I want to underline again the point that it is still a big project to try to unify the that project, in all three volumes, to the extent that is possible), but more or less from "Materialism and Revolution," from right after the way, up through even Hope Now and certainly through the essays and interviews of the 1970s, all of this forms a language that I still think has much to give us in understanding the world. This is the case even if, for example, seriality has more recently become something like "hyperseriality." Perhaps there is also a third thing with Sartre that will always inspire me, namely that, on any given question, he always aimed to mark out the most radical position, and he was often critical of himself for not being sufficiently radical. It might be said that he was always asking himself what sort of philosophy would allow for this radicality. Put another way, if our philosophy does not have room for us to do the things that need to be done to create a just and sustainable society, then we had better look again at our philosophy, and I think this is the approach Sartre took. Not only Sartre, by any means, but, let's face it, he did it in a way that made people take notice, and I think it is still worth taking both the political and philosophical measure of this fact.
<54> JR: Towards the end of your book The Radical Project you pose the question - after contemplating Jameson's analysis of postmodern capitalism - as to what can help us to "break through" the current "impasse" and how Sartre can be of value in this project. What, as you see it, is the nature of the present "impasse"? You ask at one point towards the end of that chapter: ‘What "third" and what "oath" can bridge this gap and allow humanity to transcend its present state?" (102). What is your answer to this pressing question? I take it that you think Sartre helps us to envision the conditions of emergence for a politically conscious collectivity that could challenge capitalist hegemony. Along these lines, many seem to be wondering - I am tempted to say grasping - at the notion that global warming and the imminence of catastrophic global climate change may provide something like Sartre's threatening "Third."
<55> BM: Let me begin where you stopped. The threat of global ecological catastrophe is in fact the sort of thing Sartre had in mind as a "third," the thing that stands beyond you and me and that brings us together. In his day, Sartre was probably more concerned with the solidarity that is possible in Third World countries, countries dominated by colonialism and imperialism, where the imperialist power plays the role of the "third." Here, significantly, it seems easier to "unite all who can be united against a common enemy," and that is not a bad thing, but it seems harder for people to really unite at the level of an internationalism that has the fate and future of all humankind as its largest horizon.
<56> Of the revolutionary leaders of the twentieth century from the Third World, Mao gave expression to this internationalism more than any of the others, even apart from discussing fundamental dividing lines concerning who was really developing the legacy of Marx and Lenin and the idea of a proletarian revolution. It could even be said that a big part of what made the Chinese revolution a "proletarian" revolution, given that this revolution took place in an overwhelmingly peasant and agriculturally-based country, was the internationalist vision of the leadership, and first of all Chairman Mao. Even so, there were serious shortcomings in this internationalism, it tended to remain abstract, while the level of unity required for the national liberation struggle (and the land reform, and the struggle against patriarchy, and the struggle against the feudal landlord and warlord systems, and, at the deepest levels, the struggle to simply have something to eat) was much more concrete. Furthermore, the legacy of Stalin was to berate internationalism as an abstract "cosmopolitanism" (and there was no shortage of anti-Semitism behind this critique and that was quite ready to latch on to this line of thought; this reminds me that I should have said earlier that one somewhat smaller but important project that should be carried forward from Sartre's work would be to bring together the part of Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 2, on Stalin and the "detour" of Marxism, with the chapter that was placed at the end of the book on Stalin and anti-Semitism and what Sartre calls "an objective drift"). If anything, one can see in Sartre's judgment that there was a moment when Stalin was in fact right about this (not in the anti-Semitism, of course, but in holding in abeyance abstract cosmopolitanism for the concrete gains of the revolution), a narrowness to this notion of the "third" that needs to be transcended.
<57> I would propose, and now to bring the notion of "oath" (or "pledge") into the picture, that one venue for tackling this question might be the different interpretations of the oath and solidarity in Sartre's Critique on the one hand, and Derrida's Politics of Friendship, on the other. To put it very simply, there is too much in the politics of Sartre and Mao that depends on not only knowing friends from enemies, but in defining the friend as simply someone who, for a while, is a fellow traveler in a common struggle - in other words, there is no positive meaning to friendship, it is simply the temporary and conditional and situational negation of enmity. One might say that, in the comparison, the Hobbesian side of Sartre comes out in a way that I find troubling and that I fundamentally reject, and I would instead want to find a more Kantian side (which I think is exemplified more in Derrida). One might even read this back into Sartre's relations with his own former friends, especially Camus and Merleau-Ponty. On the one hand, I appreciate the circumstances in which these breaks occurred, and how charged they were. And I essentially agree with Sartre on the issues that were at stake. On the other hand, it is hard to see what good came of the level of enmity that Sartre especially displayed. Or perhaps it is just that I don't know that I have the stomach for this sort of thing anymore - though, again, I just don't see what good comes of it. Perhaps if we just made a distinction between "comrade" and "friend" it would help. I have been through a number of intense political-intellectual conflicts and a couple of them came close to killing me (I'm not exaggerating) and, who knows, a couple of the ones that are seemingly in the past may kill me yet.
<58> Still, the most difficult thing thus far is where a very large mass of humanity finds the wherewithal to "back up" enough to see the larger picture and that the larger picture has to be addressed. Sartre, along with many others, mainly understood this scenario in terms of a nuclear war, though I have to wonder if it was because of Sartre's affinity for Maoism and for Tiers Mondialism (and anti-colonial struggle in general) that he did not mainly thematize the third in terms of inter-imperialist nuclear conflict. Thinking about this, I was reminded of the song by Lynton Kwesi Johnson, "The Eagle and the Bear" - "the eagle and the bear are people living in fear of impending nuclear warfare" [sometime in the early 1980s, maybe around 1983 or so] Johnson goes on to say that the people of the Third World couldn't care less if the United States and the Soviet Union blow each other to smithereens, and in fact that would probably be a good thing for the rest of the people in the world. But it was soon after that that we learned there weren't going to be any people in the rest of the world in the wake of an all-out nuclear war. Still, I think that Sartre, like Johnson (Sartre was gone by then, of course), would have thought it first-worldist to focus on nuclear war as the "third." As someone who retains quite a bit of Third-Worldism, I find it difficult to not have sympathy for this position, even if, unfortunately, it is both ethically and strategically wrong. It shouldn't be hard to have this sympathy when, for example, in the present election cycle in the U.S., the new main concern among potential voters is once again the economy and not Iraq. I know there are disputes over how many people in Iraq may be left dead by the U.S. invasion and occupation, but it is not inconceivable that the number will be in the hundreds of thousands. But, never mind, we've got to keep the caravan of consumption rolling along.
<59> So, to return to your original suggestion, certainly the environmental issues that face humanity and indeed all of life on our planet should constitute a "third," and it should be more than obvious that only certain kinds of solidarities and collectivities can resolve this difficulty - if anything can at this stage of things. In other words, not to beat around the bush, but continuing down the path of capitalism and imperialism will spell doom for humanity, and we have to have a socialism that incorporates the ecological and bio-regional vision if there is going to any kind of human future at all, but of course there are two impediments to this happening. The first is of course the existing system and first of all within this its power and institutional embodiment and weight, which keeps going even if most people know it is ultimately unworkable and that we are coming up against this unworkability. Second, but also crucial and indispensable, is the breakthrough to consciousness and commitment. This again is where postmodern capitalism comes in, a form of capitalism that is well-programmed to undercut in advance the possibilities for solidarity. Even so, the very same dynamic also creates a heightened role for the "vision thing." I wonder, though, if, given the preponderance of distractions and even "partial utopias" (fantasy worlds that individuals can slip into for some period of time), if everything we say now has to at least be prefaced by some very directs and either harshly negative or demandingly affirmative and even prophetic words.
<60> The term that is missing from all of this is "crisis," and it seems we need some new thinking on how crisis works in the world today. Clearly the changes in the global ecology already constitute a crisis that is deepening daily (and the idea that we need to wait a lot longer and get more "studies" from scientists who work for the petroleum industry is ridiculous; even if it could turn out that we have more time than some of the more dire predictions are telling us, why would we fool around with a question of this immensity?), and yet the effects at present are for the most part gradual and not clearly or deeply perceived. In the early decades of the American Revolution, Hegel said that people wouldn't know what America really is until it is filled up, so to speak. Clearly this kind of thinking influenced Marx. In some sense, we won't know what this Earth will be until it is filled up, except that, when it is filled up, it will no longer be a place for habitation by humans. Perhaps this is an opening for the line of thought that runs from Kant through Sartre and Derrida, that we should change society not only because we have to, but also because we have an ethical obligation to the future possibilities of humankind. We - intellectuals - need to use the tools that we have, in diverse ways, to put it right in front of people that we live in a certain social system today, at root capitalism, that cannot even muster any sense of ongoingness into the future. ("Ongoingness" is a theme I develop in Ethical Marxism.) To return to the notion of "the opposite of bullshit," why is there even any question that a social form that is predicated on using the world up and throwing it away will after awhile throw away the world altogether? This is why, not incidentally, there is the vigorous promotion of the related phenomenon of fundamentalist religion and postmodern jadedness in which the future of our planet, at least as a human concern or anything that people can do anything about, is reduced to insignificance.
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