Thomas More created the word utopia with a deliberate contradiction. The word is a deliberate play between the term eutopos, the good place and outopos, no place. Tensions over the meaning of the word have only intensified over the succeeding centuries, and one can now find a multiplicity of definitions of the term that are not only mutually exclusive, but are radically disconnected from each other. It would be futile to try to cover the full extent of the proliferation of meanings that the term has taken, but many of those meanings have taken the form lazy polemics against any effort to create a more socially just word and aren't really worth the engagement. Instead, I want to look at the way the term has been taken up in very different and distinct ways in relationship to a series of radical projects, notably the anti-utopian turn of thinkers ranging from Michel Foucault to James C. Scott, the embrace of the term by Ernst Bloch, and finally the subsumption of the term into the generic framework of science fiction by radical critics such as Darko Suvin.
Before I get into that conversation, it's remarkable to the degree that these distinct camps, those who reject and embrace the term, don't engage with one another. In each case, the term not only takes on a different meaning, but is placed in reference to radically different objects and social formations. The utopian project critiqued by Michel Foucault and James C. Scott is distinctively a state formation, although Foucault is focused on the forms of knowledge that construct that state formation, directed towards creating spaces that are easily comprehended by an outside observer. For instance, both thinkers discuss the organization of the French state, and in particular, the efforts to transform Paris into a kind of garden city. The utopian state project transforms the muddle of daily life into something that is easily graspable within a single gaze. It reduces complexity to create order. Foucault's rather lengthy description in The Order of Things provides a useful description of this particular framework.
Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold; they open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical. Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy 'syntax' in advance, and not only the syntax that we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to 'hold together.' This is why utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of the fabula; heterotopia (and those to be found so often in Borges) desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences. (Foucault xviii)
For Foucault,the utopia brings together the ease of the gaze with the flow of the narrative. It is a place of order untroubled by the complexities and contradictions of ordinary life. It's a space that is simultaneously impossible but easily imaginable. It's not hard to see the connection between this vision and the structures of knowledge that Foucault discusses in the initial section of the text itself, the grids of intelligibility created by figures such as Linneus. We find our space of tables and grids, individualization constructed through forms of gradation and differentiation. It's also tempting to draw a line from this conception to Foucault's later critique of the prison found in Discipline and Punish. The panopticon, after all, operates through the internalization of the gaze of the prison guard, which can only occur through the potential universal access of that gaze. At the same time, Foucault still holds onto the tension as created by More. After all, utopias 'have no real location' and are 'fanastic.' Within this context, it's not surprising that he creates a tension between the 'fantastic' utopia and the indescribable but very concrete and real heterotopia. The latter shatters the illusion of the order of the former with its messy complexity of daily life.
It's hard not to see a strong connection between this critique and the critique presented by James C. Scott in his text, Seeing Like a State. Scott begins his text by looking at German forestry in the 18th century and moves into a discussion of state projects, ranging from the attempt to reorganize the rationalize the city of Paris in the 19th century to agricultural projects in the United States and the Soviet Union in the 20th century and the construction of the city of Brasilia. Through that process, Scott critiques a phenomenon that he labels 'high modernism.' 'High modernism is an attempt to create a sort of order and productivity through a process of simplification. To give a sense of the project, Scott opens by describing efforts on the part of German Foresters to expand lumber production. These individuals come to the conclusion that the production of lumber is being limited by the scrub and underbrush of the forest. This junk, the hypothesize, is getting in the way of the trees growing as quickly as they can. They then went about removing all of the underbrush in order to allow for the most efficient growth of the forest. The plan went well for the first few years, but then the forests collapsed. It turns out all of that underbrush was crucial for the working ecology of the forest. In this sense, Scott also replicates the tension found both in Foucault and in More. The high modernist project turns out to be a chimerical fantasy that can only be implemented by force and results in only disaster.
Utopia's sympathizers imagine a very different framework for the utopian impulse, focusing on the literary tradition of the word and on a very different reception history, the unintentional and unruly uptake of the tradition by social movements. Probably the most intense version of this perspective is taken up by the German philosopher Ernst Bloch, who offers a radically different understanding of the word than any other person discussed in this posting. Bloch against the tendency of later thinkers who borrow from his framework, shows very little interest in the literary tradition of the utopia. Bloch is not a genre theorist and finds those works a distraction from the phenomenon that he wants to discuss. For Bloch, one must understand the utopia as a sort of impulse, a trace that marks out the existence of other possibilities, for other ways of life. Bloch looked for this trace in every conceivable place, from dreams to advertisements to the formation of the Ku Klux Klan. These traces pointed to other possibilities of life and the desire for transformation in even the vilest of social formations. It was also an impulse that he linked to insurrectionary social movements, most notably the eschatological formations created by Thomas Muntzer and others during the civil wars of Germany in the 16th century. Throughout all of these examples, Bloch looks for the expression for the desire for something new, something different. Bloch frames this impulse through the concept of the Novum, "the unexpectedly new, which pushes humanity out of its present towards the not yet realized" (Moylan para 4).
Despite his aversion to the generic formation of the utopia, Bloch's insights were most quickly embraced by a school of science fiction critics who were interested in embracing the utopia as the forerunner of the genre of science fiction. This branch of thought is largely started through the work of Darko Suvin and his work on the genre, notably his text, The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, but the work has been taken up by a variety of other critics such as Philip Wegner and Fredric Jameson. Suvin emphasizes a number of things about the genre that distinguish his take from the above thinkers. Most significantly, Suvin conceives of the utopia within the shifts in the understanding of history that were going on at the time of the construction of utopian narratives. Suvin notes that there is a radical shift in the nature of More's narrative. Rather than imagining a sort of golden age, More imagines a community that has a sort of history, a beginning and just as significantly, an open and unfolding process of becoming. The nation has come across a set of rules that work for it, but it also continues to interact and transform its neighbors. (Interestingly, Benedict Anderson makes a similar observation about the construction of utopian narrative forms and the rise of the empty homogeneous time that undergirds the logic of the nation-state, which is synthesized in Wegner's Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity.)
Suvin takes up the concept of the Novum as developed by Bloch and uses it as a key term for the understanding of science fiction. The Novum still remains a novelty that points to something new, but that newness loses the eschatological framework that dominates Bloch's thinking. The Novum continues to be some sort of novelty, whether in the form of some sort of invention or some sort of sociological or political transformation, but instead offering a moment of redemption, the Novum creates the conditions for the kind of totalizing cognitive estrangement, which presents a radically different society. Contrary to many of his critics, Suvin is far less concerned about the technoscientific veracity of such a Novum, and is far more concerned about its engagement with its engagement with the class struggles that define its present. Within this context, the work of H.G. Wells is more significant than the work of Jules Verne, despite Verne's greater concern with technoscientific veracity. In effect, the Novum becomes a way of using the shifts in the concept of time that were introduced with capitalist accumulation in order to imagine radically different ways of life. Suvin looks to the Novum to provide the means to imagine new ways of life, but ways of life that still remain historical in nature, even if the future societies are different.
In the end, these particular takes on the word are irreconcilable. Constructing an antagonism between the camps would itself assume too much ground. Instead, the two perspectives constitute a kind of non-relationship, perhaps close to what Jean Francois Lyotard refers to as the Differend, "a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both arguments. One side's legitimacy does not imply the other's lack of legitimacy (Lyotard xi). My own work has tended to work on one side of this bifurcation or another. For instance, my readings of China Mieville like many other critics has framed that work in relationship to hybridity and heterotopia, while my work on writers such as Ursula Le Guin has engaged with the utopian tradition, again, not unique. Just as significantly, I've found myself continually returning to the work of Suvin, who draws on the tradition to frame the history of the development of science fiction. Utopia within that context is a continual haunting, a gesture towards other possibilities and a refusal to naturalize the present. At the same time, Foucault and Scott's critique of high modernism has an equally significant influence over how I think of social and political projects, ranging from long term prospects for transformation to the processes of daily life. I suspect that this disjunction will not be changing any time soon.
Showing posts with label Ernst Bloch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ernst Bloch. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 20, 2018
Wednesday, December 26, 2012
Notes near the end of the year
I haven't been posting much this month for a number of reasons, notably because of travel, research, and other distractions. Happily, this brief exodus has translated into a full if fairly rough draft of another chapter, books read, and two trips undertaken, one to Minneapolis and one to San Francisco. Not much of this has translated into the sort of material that I could easily translate into blog postings. (No doubt, other writers would have produced a number of excellent posts, but not me.) However, I've been driven back into writing by my brief reading of Samuel R. Delany's 7 Essays, 4 Letters, and 5 Interviews About Writing, which might be titled 7 Essays, 4 Letters, and 5 Interviews About Why You're Probably Not a Writer. While neither Delany's primary message nor the main point that I gained from the text, it was a good reminder that I had set up this blog in order to do more day to day writing, and the fact that this day to day writing has translated into much stronger writing on my part in other situations.
The result is what you are seeing now, a slightly stream of consciousness effort taken up in order to start the creative process. I suspect that I will be writing another piece about the current problems with the Progressive Labor Party, but I suspect that I will need to check in with folks to get a better sense of the current situation. (The organization has written a defensive and not terribly coherent response to the demands that they deal with the rapist in their organization, but I'm not sure what they have been doing on the ground.) Similarly, I want to return to some of the questions about science fiction that have been a thread through the publication, but the last book I read, John Scalzi's Old Man's War, while enjoyable, didn't really translate into a desire to write about it. Perhaps, I should visit Uncle Hugo's while I'm in town. Finally, I'm tempted to write about Kathi Weeks' new text, The Problem With Work, but I haven't completed reading it. It does deal with the ways that work has been increasingly marked as private, a current political interest of my own.
Moving on, the question of generic convention has been on my mind a considerable amount recently, most likely because of the sheer amount of time that I have spent reading, thinking, and writing about women's magazine. The work of Lauren Berlant has played a significant role in shaping the way that I read those publications, and the ways that they attempt to construct particular types of subjects through their pedagogical efforts. However, Delany's work also brings up the issue of convention and genre in his work, emphasizing the ways that writing must rigorously engage with a set of generic conventions and reader expectations in order to operate as successful writing, even if that work is designed to unsettle or transgress those infrastructure. The thread that runs through this is the way that each conceptualizes generic convention not as restriction or censorship, but a constitutive of a set of social relations, whether producing the housewife installed in the matrix of unpaid reproductive labor or the novel that is recognizable as successful by both reader and writer.
Perhaps at some point I'll take another point that has interested me, the pleasure in generic familiarity, whether in the form of the enjoyment of a piece of literature that fulfills these familiar expectations or the ways that we attempt to shape our social relations based on a series of conventions. This question has been an implicit one through a number of my short essays, whether in the exploration of how anarchist activists attempted to take Boots Riley's critique of particular forms of property destruction and transform it into a very familiar set of debates about the divisions between anarchists and communists, or the ways that both critics and advocates of the Occupy phenomena refuse to recognize the multiplicity and immense contradictions in the emergent form. Perhaps my position is increasingly close to the positions taken by Delany because of our common influences through marxism, formalism, and a sort of structuralism. For Delany, the question of ethics and aesthetics are distinctly related, and the construction of richer and thicker literary conventions gestures towards the ability to produce a more ethical society. (It would take a long time to work through how this remains faithful to a sort of materialist analysis, but I think you can.)
It's significant that this position doesn't argue for the end of conventions as either a desired outcome or even as a possibility. Instead, the goal is to produce an aesthetic that deals with the complexity, contradictions, and conflict that defines what might be called the real, the immense complexity of the world. To turn briefly to my examples, each response refuses to engage with the emergent properties of the social phenomena, or to use Ernst Bloch's term, it's function as novum or novelty. Conversation becomes repetitive and ultimately futile, but in such a way as to reinforce the positions of both parties through a series of mechanisms of pleasure. I don't deny the functionality of this approach at times. Offering substantial and thoughtful criticism to racist and sexist internet trolls is exhausting in a not terribly productive manner. But there's a danger in attempting to take every utterance and place it into a familiar and repetitive category, and perhaps more significantly in the desire to only engage with the modes of communication that fall into this terrain, which is stasis,stasis not understood as a sort of immobility but as a sort of unending and repetitive civil war. If those sorts of engagement are unavoidable, and I do believe that they are, we need to find other forms of engagement in order to escape being fully defined by their terms.... somehow that ties into the aesthetic novum.
The result is what you are seeing now, a slightly stream of consciousness effort taken up in order to start the creative process. I suspect that I will be writing another piece about the current problems with the Progressive Labor Party, but I suspect that I will need to check in with folks to get a better sense of the current situation. (The organization has written a defensive and not terribly coherent response to the demands that they deal with the rapist in their organization, but I'm not sure what they have been doing on the ground.) Similarly, I want to return to some of the questions about science fiction that have been a thread through the publication, but the last book I read, John Scalzi's Old Man's War, while enjoyable, didn't really translate into a desire to write about it. Perhaps, I should visit Uncle Hugo's while I'm in town. Finally, I'm tempted to write about Kathi Weeks' new text, The Problem With Work, but I haven't completed reading it. It does deal with the ways that work has been increasingly marked as private, a current political interest of my own.
Moving on, the question of generic convention has been on my mind a considerable amount recently, most likely because of the sheer amount of time that I have spent reading, thinking, and writing about women's magazine. The work of Lauren Berlant has played a significant role in shaping the way that I read those publications, and the ways that they attempt to construct particular types of subjects through their pedagogical efforts. However, Delany's work also brings up the issue of convention and genre in his work, emphasizing the ways that writing must rigorously engage with a set of generic conventions and reader expectations in order to operate as successful writing, even if that work is designed to unsettle or transgress those infrastructure. The thread that runs through this is the way that each conceptualizes generic convention not as restriction or censorship, but a constitutive of a set of social relations, whether producing the housewife installed in the matrix of unpaid reproductive labor or the novel that is recognizable as successful by both reader and writer.
Perhaps at some point I'll take another point that has interested me, the pleasure in generic familiarity, whether in the form of the enjoyment of a piece of literature that fulfills these familiar expectations or the ways that we attempt to shape our social relations based on a series of conventions. This question has been an implicit one through a number of my short essays, whether in the exploration of how anarchist activists attempted to take Boots Riley's critique of particular forms of property destruction and transform it into a very familiar set of debates about the divisions between anarchists and communists, or the ways that both critics and advocates of the Occupy phenomena refuse to recognize the multiplicity and immense contradictions in the emergent form. Perhaps my position is increasingly close to the positions taken by Delany because of our common influences through marxism, formalism, and a sort of structuralism. For Delany, the question of ethics and aesthetics are distinctly related, and the construction of richer and thicker literary conventions gestures towards the ability to produce a more ethical society. (It would take a long time to work through how this remains faithful to a sort of materialist analysis, but I think you can.)
It's significant that this position doesn't argue for the end of conventions as either a desired outcome or even as a possibility. Instead, the goal is to produce an aesthetic that deals with the complexity, contradictions, and conflict that defines what might be called the real, the immense complexity of the world. To turn briefly to my examples, each response refuses to engage with the emergent properties of the social phenomena, or to use Ernst Bloch's term, it's function as novum or novelty. Conversation becomes repetitive and ultimately futile, but in such a way as to reinforce the positions of both parties through a series of mechanisms of pleasure. I don't deny the functionality of this approach at times. Offering substantial and thoughtful criticism to racist and sexist internet trolls is exhausting in a not terribly productive manner. But there's a danger in attempting to take every utterance and place it into a familiar and repetitive category, and perhaps more significantly in the desire to only engage with the modes of communication that fall into this terrain, which is stasis,stasis not understood as a sort of immobility but as a sort of unending and repetitive civil war. If those sorts of engagement are unavoidable, and I do believe that they are, we need to find other forms of engagement in order to escape being fully defined by their terms.... somehow that ties into the aesthetic novum.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
A Short Essay on Bloch's Munzer and its relation to Schmitt
Written for a German class a few years ago during my obsession with Muntzer. There is some material that is untranslated, that I can provide translations for if there is the interest.
Ich war, ich bin, ich werde sein
--Rosa Luxemburg
“Our sabotage organizes the proletarian storming of heaven. And in the end that accursed heaven will no longer exist!
--Antonio Negri
Modern sovereignty can be defined by a dialectical process of revolutionary crisis and the deflection of that crisis into colonial expansion. In this sense, the dialectical process gives capital a unique ability to productively subsume its crisis into itself. The process rebounded back on itself in the First World War. Mass death left the laboratory of the colonies and entered Europe proper. All of the techniques that defined World War I were first tested in the colonies. The explosive violence that defined that war destroyed the easy progressive teleology that even was starting to impact the workers movement. The immediate response was a series of failed uprisings that marked the first years after the war. The specific aftermath that I am interested in is the collapse of the Wilhelmite German State after World War I and the failed revolutionary insurrection afterwards.
The impact of the war and the insurrection led to a radical philosophical shift in two significant thinkers, Ernst Bloch and Carl Schmitt. Ernst Bloch’s Jewish messianism took on an increasingly radical turn as he turned increasingly towards a radical marxist politic. At the same time, Carl Schmitt moved away from a neo-Kantian interpretation of legal theory towards a radical authoritarianism defined by decisionist, rather than a normative, definition of sovereignty. These shifts also produce the work that both figures are best known for. Although the two figures are defined by substantial political differences, their political transformations are defined by a revolutionary energy that I want to conceptualize as the ‘schwarmgeistig.’
This concept, which I draw from Bloch’s book on Munzer, is tied to a self-destructive quality that I want to argue is immanent to the process of capital itself. It represents the self-destructive element in the structure that Marx continually pointed to. We can see this expressed best in the end of the first chapter of the manifesto which itself is a translation of these theological concerns. “Mit der Entwicklung der grossen Industrie wird also unter den Fussen der Boureoisie die Grundlage selbst hinweggezogen, worauf sie produziert und die Produckte sich aneignet. Sie produziert vor allem eignen Totengraber. Ihr Untergang und der Sieg des Proletariats sind gleich unvermeidlich.” I want to first begin by looking at what that might mean a revolutionary politic, before shifting to the way that Ernst Bloch explores the concept in Thomas Munzer als Theologe der Revolution. I will end in the ways that Carl Schmitt theories attempt to return to the policies of the Absolutist State in order to nullify this radical possibility.
To understand this notion of the schwarmgeistig, the element of religious fanaticism, of utopian dreaming in the turmoil of revolutionary movements, I want to turn to a passage in Anson Rabinbach’s theorization of the Messianic. Rabinbach points out.
"The apocalyptic element involves a quantum leap from present to future, from exile to freedom. This leap necessarily brings with it the completed destruction and negation of the old order. Messianism is thus bound up with both violence and catastrophe. Scholem has emphasized the importance of this aspect of the Messianic idea to underscore the contrast between “the destructive nature of the redemption on the one hand and the utopianism of the content on the other.” This tension, which the Marxian idea of “transition” only weakly captures, is the essence of the apocalyptic vision of catastrophic upheaval as the handmaiden of redemption. In history this image constantly recurs, appearing in the creation of the revolutionary calendar of 1793, in the Munster Anabaptists destroying the records of the old church, Komsomol youth disinterring the bones of the Saints in the Russian revolution, or the specter of the Maoist Red Guards demolishing the ancient art works of Confucian China—each symbolizes a total destruction of the prior age as the precondition for the full restitution of the Messianic period."
This description brings in the two elements that I want to tie in with this concept of the schwarmgeistig, this concept is produced in the dialectical relationship between the destructive power of the apocalypse and the redemption contained in the figure of a utopian future on the other hand. The notable quality of the violence can be found in the fact that it is enacted in the open. Revolutionary transformation is supposed to occur through its very performance. It evokes the notion that, “the people are good, but the magistrate is corruptible,” which acted as a constant irritant to Carl Schmitt. At the same time, the violence can not be explained in instrumental terms. It opens up the world to a general economy of expenditure that places those in the more limited economy of instrumentality in a state of both bewilderment and horror.
This motif is a reoccurring one, but the moment that both Bloch and Schmitt focus on is the explosive conflicts of the wars of religion. This places the notion of the “schwarmgeistig” within the conflict that led to the creation of the secular. I want to understand it as a border concept, one that is defined by a whole series of translations that occur in that period. In this, I take seriously the statement made by Carl Schmitt, when he states, “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development… but also because of their systemic structure.” Schmitt is recognizing that the concepts of god that defined this period were always also concepts of society at large. In this sense, the notion of the ‘schwarmgeistig’ could be translated into a secular term such as the militant, but this translation misses out on the radicality of such a figure. At the same time, one cannot collapse it entirely into the transcendental concept of messianism, both because of its tendency to mystify the discussion, and because not all the figures in this category embrace that transcendental notion.
This concept can neither be tied to the Enlightenment, nor can it be described as a sort of archaic holdover from an earlier time. Instead, it charts another genealogy of modernity, one that is defined by defeat, and allows for the more limited transformation that occurred in the Enlightenment. Paolo Virno perhaps captures this best when he refers to Spinoza’s multitude as a sort of archive of civil liberties. The moment of the wars of religion becomes significant because it both represents the most open expression of this tradition, and points to a contingent element in the creation of Enlightenment rationality. For the most part, this trajectory remains either hidden or disguised in translated forms. Bloch codes this deformity under the term “slave talk,” which he links both to readings of the Bible and to certain literary traditions. In his book, Atheism in Christianity, Ernst Bloch points to this tradition.
The fact remains, however, and nothing can detract from it, that thinking men, as such, were refusing to be priest-ridden any more. Long before simple, devout feelings had grown rusty, long before the real Enlightenment, pamphlets against the clergy and their lies were going the rounds among the peasants, complaining about the miserable swindling and deception of the poor. The real complaint was about the way the Scriptures were twisted to serve the exploiters and drudge-merchants, but these pamphlets also show the common man’s will to speak for himself: he has finished with being struck across the mouth. The peasants, however, were defeated, and their place was taken by the rationalistic bourgeoisie: in their Enlightenment the will to come of age became an all-consuming
Bloch is making an argument for the existence of another critical network of knowledge, one that created the logic for a form of counter-governance in a negative form. It placed the structures of legitimization into question, while positing the possibility of a different structure of society. One can turn to a comment made by Foucault in a talk on critique to get the full meaning of this. “Not wanting to be governed was a certain way of refusing challenging, limiting (say it as you like) ecclesiastical rule. It meant returning to the Scriptures, seeking out what was authentic in them, what was really written in them, what was really written in the scriptures. It mean questioning what sort of truth the Scriptures told, gaining access to this truth of the scriptures in the Scriptures and maybe in spite of what was written, to the point of finally raising the very simple question: were the Scriptures true?” Foucault is reading this in the tradition of the Enlightenment, while Bloch is arguing that it can already be found in a crude form in this peasant circulation.
Bloch’s reading of Thomas Munzer in his book Thomas Munzer als Theologe der Revolution charts how this alternative network found its way into the daylight, if briefly, with the coming of the reformation and the printing press. The book acted as a sort of companion piece to his more famous text, Geist der Utopie, and Bloch always saw them as companion pieces. Geist der Utopie was Bloch’s critique of a trajectory of Enlightenment thought including music and the German philosophical tradition defined by Kant and Hegel. Although still concerned with the utopian impulse, Bloch made a significant shift in the archive he examined, moving from the dominant thought of the Enlightenment to the legacy of a defeated radical tradition in the Reformation. He looked at both how Munzer was produced in this tradition and at the way that the image of Munzer traveled
Bloch links Munzer to this specific history in his description of Munzer’s influences, both its tradition of conspiracy and its tradition of oppression. It links his thought not so much to Luther’s reformation, but to a tradition of mystical thought and conspiracy. For example, we find this description early in the book,
“Die garende Zeit zog an, jung fur sich, boll ungekannter Dinge, das Land lag wach, ruhelos, wie voraufgeschickt, wanterten Boten, Kundschafter, Prediger umher. In den Waldtalern des Harz waren ohnedies geisslierishe Lehre, Erinnerung an die Feme noch lebendig.” Munzer, a product of the poor and outcast, was also intimately aware of its networks of knowledge, of its secret histories and of the attempts to repress it. This plays an important double feature for the production of the movement that Bloch describes. It both allowed for Munzer’s critical reading of the scriptures in order to challenge the ruling authorities both religious and secular, and for him to have the critical mass support in order to do so.
However, it would be incorrect to define Bloch’s understanding of Munzer as merely being defined by his production in a certain environment. It is also related to a concept of inwardness that Bloch links to the Utopian in his previous book. “In the end, however, after this internal vertical inner movement: may a new expanse appear, the world of the soul, the external, cosmic function of utopia, maintained against misery, death, the husk realm of the mere physical nature.” The ‘authentic’ knowledge of the self allows for the question of the ‘We’ to be answered according to Bloch. Bloch reads this inwardness in Munzer, an inwardness that stands on the borderline between the mystical and the autistic. Bloch points to this in the words of Munzer himself. Munzer states, “Was Bibel, Bubel, Babel, man muss auf ein Winkel kriechen und mit Gott Reden” Munzer’s mysticism goes beyond the critical reading practices of Luther towards a reading of one’s interiority, an interiority that he felt had a privileged position in understanding the truth of what preceded him, the essence of several generations of mysticism. The inwardness contained in this statement holds both of the notions of besessen together, possession and madness
Like Bloch, I take the singularity of Munzer seriously, and I take the singularity of the community that Munzer operates in seriously, doing so produces the preconditions for the concept that I want to develop. But the relevance that Munzer has for the concept of the ‘schwarmgeistig’ that I want to develop lay less in those singularities than in the way that history has been taken up, both by revolutionaries and by counter revolutionaries. Bloch points the way to this in his chapter, “Munzer als Gestalt und Gegenwart.” The chapter opens by discussing the difficulty of getting at the essence of the significant individual. He links it to a similar blindness that Nietzsche sees, “Unerkennbar liegen wir uns selbst noch im blinden Flick.” He eventually argues that the ability to put together an honest answer to this involves a serious transformation. We can see this in the following passage.
“Andereseits freilich tont der bedeutende Mensch, aus der Erscheinung zurucktretend, zugleich als Mundstuck, Antenne, Mandatar: und so dunkel er wird, so ist doch Bessenheit darin. Auch Munzer ist besessen, und nicht das Charakterologische also, sondern das Nachwirkende, Allbetreffende, zur Legende Taugliche, der Schein uber seinem Haupt schiesst an Munzer, dem Mandatar, zum halbwegs moglichen Bild zusammen.
A reasonable picture of Munzer’s importance can only be created by stripping away his individuality, and looking at him as a representative figure. This accomplishes two significant goals. First, it strips away the ability to individualize, and therefore pathologize Munzer. Bloch argues that Munzer’s “ist besessen, und nicht das Charakterologische.” If there is a madness involved, it is both collective and political. At the same time, it points to the quality that Munzer takes on as a “Gestalt.” We can link this up to the notion of the ideal type that Weber develops, but that is too secular a concept for this phenomenon. The Gestalt is theorized as a light over his head that flashes up periodically. This light can either be read in terms of an aura or a halo, but either way it keeps us out of the disenchanted world that Weber inhabits.
This figure flashes up in the revolutionary movements of 1848, returning as the figure of primitive revenge and redistribution to the poor. It taken up major political thinkers including Engels, Seidemann, Kautsky, etc. Munzer becomes the figure of ‘schwarmgeistig’ par excellence not because of an individual uniqueness, a uniqueness that has eroded over time. All of the physical features that are typically used to describe the man can be questioned. But instead he becomes a significant figure because he is repeatedly re-imagined. This re-imagination returns repeatedly to the fact that the current organization of the world only exists because of the active destruction of its alternatives. It points to a continual lack of completion of this project, a horizon, which may not lead to its inevitable end, but does point to the fact that it is not itself inevitable.
We can track the phenomenon negatively as well through the attempts to neutralize it. I propose that we make that effort through the figure of Carl Schmitt. Translator George Schwab attempts to pay tribute to Schmitt by linking him to the figure of Thomas Hobbes, referring to him as the Thomas Hobbes of the 20th century. Although I am not nearly as generous a reader of Schmitt as Schwab, I think that we should take him seriously. Just as Hobbes theorized the absolutist Leviathan state in order to suppress the radical forces that exploded out of the wars of religion, Schmitt tried to return to this stronger decisionist notion of the sovereign in order to suppress the revolutionary upheaval that defined the end of the First World War. The state of exception became the protection of a homogeneity that is much more contingent due to this upheaval. He also attempted to do this on practical grounds in his interpretation of article 48 in the Weimar Constitution, the emergency clause.
The opening statement of Political Theology is perhaps the most defining one. Schmitt states, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” This statement defines the figure of the sovereign by two capabilities, both what constitutes the exception to the order of things, and when to suspend the rules in order to preserve them. This state of exception is precisely the opposite of “anarchy and chaos” because “order in the juristic sense still prevails even if it is not of the ordinary kind.” The law is defined by this constant need to neutralize various crises that put it in jeopardy. In this sense, Schmitt returns to the absolutist concept that Hobbes conceptualizes, a state that mirrors the sovereign god, and a state that attempts to neutralize an essentially evil man.
Carl Schmitt’s interpretation of Article 48 became the most practical way that he attempted to preserve this order. Schmitt’s interpretation depended on a reading of the article that most legal scholars could except. He repeatedly tried to expand the powers of both the presidency and the points at which the president could claim a state of exception. Schmitt attempted to use this as a basis of closing off the electoral system to those who wanted to destroy that system. This led to his support of both the creation of a state of exception by President Hindenburg and later by the NSDAP.
In this sense, perhaps we can conceptualize the ‘schwarmgeistig’ against what Schmitt is describing as the task of the sovereign. Just as the sovereign is defined by decision rather than as the sole legitimate source of violence, the schwarmgeistig can be defined by the ability to escape this decision rather than as the figure that contests the monopolization of violence, although the question of violence is implicit in both formulations. Schmitt tracks this as it shifts from the realm of the theological, to the realm of the political, to the realm of the economic. Each act of neutralization creates another space of the political decision and contestation. For Schmitt, this acts as a sort of horizon, the creation of an exteriority that makes “all law” into “situational law.” But from the other side, it points to the contingency of the current order of things, one that can be changed.
It is in this terrain of contingency that I want to end this essay. In his last writings, Louis Althusser attempts to conceptualize a new type of materialist philosophy, one that he calls “the materialism of the encounter.” Within it, he makes an attempt to rethink the dual concepts of contingency and necessity. “It is only after the world is constituted that the realm of reason, of necessity, and of sense is established…. Rather than thinking of contingency as a modality of necessity or as an exception to necessity, one ought to think of necessity as the becoming-necessary of the encounter of contingencies.” To invoke this notion of contingency is to embrace a continual potentiality that exists within the seemingly uniform space of necessity. The schwarmgeistig points back to the contingency and potentiality by its continual return.
Ich war, ich bin, ich werde sein
--Rosa Luxemburg
“Our sabotage organizes the proletarian storming of heaven. And in the end that accursed heaven will no longer exist!
--Antonio Negri
Modern sovereignty can be defined by a dialectical process of revolutionary crisis and the deflection of that crisis into colonial expansion. In this sense, the dialectical process gives capital a unique ability to productively subsume its crisis into itself. The process rebounded back on itself in the First World War. Mass death left the laboratory of the colonies and entered Europe proper. All of the techniques that defined World War I were first tested in the colonies. The explosive violence that defined that war destroyed the easy progressive teleology that even was starting to impact the workers movement. The immediate response was a series of failed uprisings that marked the first years after the war. The specific aftermath that I am interested in is the collapse of the Wilhelmite German State after World War I and the failed revolutionary insurrection afterwards.
The impact of the war and the insurrection led to a radical philosophical shift in two significant thinkers, Ernst Bloch and Carl Schmitt. Ernst Bloch’s Jewish messianism took on an increasingly radical turn as he turned increasingly towards a radical marxist politic. At the same time, Carl Schmitt moved away from a neo-Kantian interpretation of legal theory towards a radical authoritarianism defined by decisionist, rather than a normative, definition of sovereignty. These shifts also produce the work that both figures are best known for. Although the two figures are defined by substantial political differences, their political transformations are defined by a revolutionary energy that I want to conceptualize as the ‘schwarmgeistig.’
This concept, which I draw from Bloch’s book on Munzer, is tied to a self-destructive quality that I want to argue is immanent to the process of capital itself. It represents the self-destructive element in the structure that Marx continually pointed to. We can see this expressed best in the end of the first chapter of the manifesto which itself is a translation of these theological concerns. “Mit der Entwicklung der grossen Industrie wird also unter den Fussen der Boureoisie die Grundlage selbst hinweggezogen, worauf sie produziert und die Produckte sich aneignet. Sie produziert vor allem eignen Totengraber. Ihr Untergang und der Sieg des Proletariats sind gleich unvermeidlich.” I want to first begin by looking at what that might mean a revolutionary politic, before shifting to the way that Ernst Bloch explores the concept in Thomas Munzer als Theologe der Revolution. I will end in the ways that Carl Schmitt theories attempt to return to the policies of the Absolutist State in order to nullify this radical possibility.
To understand this notion of the schwarmgeistig, the element of religious fanaticism, of utopian dreaming in the turmoil of revolutionary movements, I want to turn to a passage in Anson Rabinbach’s theorization of the Messianic. Rabinbach points out.
"The apocalyptic element involves a quantum leap from present to future, from exile to freedom. This leap necessarily brings with it the completed destruction and negation of the old order. Messianism is thus bound up with both violence and catastrophe. Scholem has emphasized the importance of this aspect of the Messianic idea to underscore the contrast between “the destructive nature of the redemption on the one hand and the utopianism of the content on the other.” This tension, which the Marxian idea of “transition” only weakly captures, is the essence of the apocalyptic vision of catastrophic upheaval as the handmaiden of redemption. In history this image constantly recurs, appearing in the creation of the revolutionary calendar of 1793, in the Munster Anabaptists destroying the records of the old church, Komsomol youth disinterring the bones of the Saints in the Russian revolution, or the specter of the Maoist Red Guards demolishing the ancient art works of Confucian China—each symbolizes a total destruction of the prior age as the precondition for the full restitution of the Messianic period."
This description brings in the two elements that I want to tie in with this concept of the schwarmgeistig, this concept is produced in the dialectical relationship between the destructive power of the apocalypse and the redemption contained in the figure of a utopian future on the other hand. The notable quality of the violence can be found in the fact that it is enacted in the open. Revolutionary transformation is supposed to occur through its very performance. It evokes the notion that, “the people are good, but the magistrate is corruptible,” which acted as a constant irritant to Carl Schmitt. At the same time, the violence can not be explained in instrumental terms. It opens up the world to a general economy of expenditure that places those in the more limited economy of instrumentality in a state of both bewilderment and horror.
This motif is a reoccurring one, but the moment that both Bloch and Schmitt focus on is the explosive conflicts of the wars of religion. This places the notion of the “schwarmgeistig” within the conflict that led to the creation of the secular. I want to understand it as a border concept, one that is defined by a whole series of translations that occur in that period. In this, I take seriously the statement made by Carl Schmitt, when he states, “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development… but also because of their systemic structure.” Schmitt is recognizing that the concepts of god that defined this period were always also concepts of society at large. In this sense, the notion of the ‘schwarmgeistig’ could be translated into a secular term such as the militant, but this translation misses out on the radicality of such a figure. At the same time, one cannot collapse it entirely into the transcendental concept of messianism, both because of its tendency to mystify the discussion, and because not all the figures in this category embrace that transcendental notion.
This concept can neither be tied to the Enlightenment, nor can it be described as a sort of archaic holdover from an earlier time. Instead, it charts another genealogy of modernity, one that is defined by defeat, and allows for the more limited transformation that occurred in the Enlightenment. Paolo Virno perhaps captures this best when he refers to Spinoza’s multitude as a sort of archive of civil liberties. The moment of the wars of religion becomes significant because it both represents the most open expression of this tradition, and points to a contingent element in the creation of Enlightenment rationality. For the most part, this trajectory remains either hidden or disguised in translated forms. Bloch codes this deformity under the term “slave talk,” which he links both to readings of the Bible and to certain literary traditions. In his book, Atheism in Christianity, Ernst Bloch points to this tradition.
The fact remains, however, and nothing can detract from it, that thinking men, as such, were refusing to be priest-ridden any more. Long before simple, devout feelings had grown rusty, long before the real Enlightenment, pamphlets against the clergy and their lies were going the rounds among the peasants, complaining about the miserable swindling and deception of the poor. The real complaint was about the way the Scriptures were twisted to serve the exploiters and drudge-merchants, but these pamphlets also show the common man’s will to speak for himself: he has finished with being struck across the mouth. The peasants, however, were defeated, and their place was taken by the rationalistic bourgeoisie: in their Enlightenment the will to come of age became an all-consuming
Bloch is making an argument for the existence of another critical network of knowledge, one that created the logic for a form of counter-governance in a negative form. It placed the structures of legitimization into question, while positing the possibility of a different structure of society. One can turn to a comment made by Foucault in a talk on critique to get the full meaning of this. “Not wanting to be governed was a certain way of refusing challenging, limiting (say it as you like) ecclesiastical rule. It meant returning to the Scriptures, seeking out what was authentic in them, what was really written in them, what was really written in the scriptures. It mean questioning what sort of truth the Scriptures told, gaining access to this truth of the scriptures in the Scriptures and maybe in spite of what was written, to the point of finally raising the very simple question: were the Scriptures true?” Foucault is reading this in the tradition of the Enlightenment, while Bloch is arguing that it can already be found in a crude form in this peasant circulation.
Bloch’s reading of Thomas Munzer in his book Thomas Munzer als Theologe der Revolution charts how this alternative network found its way into the daylight, if briefly, with the coming of the reformation and the printing press. The book acted as a sort of companion piece to his more famous text, Geist der Utopie, and Bloch always saw them as companion pieces. Geist der Utopie was Bloch’s critique of a trajectory of Enlightenment thought including music and the German philosophical tradition defined by Kant and Hegel. Although still concerned with the utopian impulse, Bloch made a significant shift in the archive he examined, moving from the dominant thought of the Enlightenment to the legacy of a defeated radical tradition in the Reformation. He looked at both how Munzer was produced in this tradition and at the way that the image of Munzer traveled
Bloch links Munzer to this specific history in his description of Munzer’s influences, both its tradition of conspiracy and its tradition of oppression. It links his thought not so much to Luther’s reformation, but to a tradition of mystical thought and conspiracy. For example, we find this description early in the book,
“Die garende Zeit zog an, jung fur sich, boll ungekannter Dinge, das Land lag wach, ruhelos, wie voraufgeschickt, wanterten Boten, Kundschafter, Prediger umher. In den Waldtalern des Harz waren ohnedies geisslierishe Lehre, Erinnerung an die Feme noch lebendig.” Munzer, a product of the poor and outcast, was also intimately aware of its networks of knowledge, of its secret histories and of the attempts to repress it. This plays an important double feature for the production of the movement that Bloch describes. It both allowed for Munzer’s critical reading of the scriptures in order to challenge the ruling authorities both religious and secular, and for him to have the critical mass support in order to do so.
However, it would be incorrect to define Bloch’s understanding of Munzer as merely being defined by his production in a certain environment. It is also related to a concept of inwardness that Bloch links to the Utopian in his previous book. “In the end, however, after this internal vertical inner movement: may a new expanse appear, the world of the soul, the external, cosmic function of utopia, maintained against misery, death, the husk realm of the mere physical nature.” The ‘authentic’ knowledge of the self allows for the question of the ‘We’ to be answered according to Bloch. Bloch reads this inwardness in Munzer, an inwardness that stands on the borderline between the mystical and the autistic. Bloch points to this in the words of Munzer himself. Munzer states, “Was Bibel, Bubel, Babel, man muss auf ein Winkel kriechen und mit Gott Reden” Munzer’s mysticism goes beyond the critical reading practices of Luther towards a reading of one’s interiority, an interiority that he felt had a privileged position in understanding the truth of what preceded him, the essence of several generations of mysticism. The inwardness contained in this statement holds both of the notions of besessen together, possession and madness
Like Bloch, I take the singularity of Munzer seriously, and I take the singularity of the community that Munzer operates in seriously, doing so produces the preconditions for the concept that I want to develop. But the relevance that Munzer has for the concept of the ‘schwarmgeistig’ that I want to develop lay less in those singularities than in the way that history has been taken up, both by revolutionaries and by counter revolutionaries. Bloch points the way to this in his chapter, “Munzer als Gestalt und Gegenwart.” The chapter opens by discussing the difficulty of getting at the essence of the significant individual. He links it to a similar blindness that Nietzsche sees, “Unerkennbar liegen wir uns selbst noch im blinden Flick.” He eventually argues that the ability to put together an honest answer to this involves a serious transformation. We can see this in the following passage.
“Andereseits freilich tont der bedeutende Mensch, aus der Erscheinung zurucktretend, zugleich als Mundstuck, Antenne, Mandatar: und so dunkel er wird, so ist doch Bessenheit darin. Auch Munzer ist besessen, und nicht das Charakterologische also, sondern das Nachwirkende, Allbetreffende, zur Legende Taugliche, der Schein uber seinem Haupt schiesst an Munzer, dem Mandatar, zum halbwegs moglichen Bild zusammen.
A reasonable picture of Munzer’s importance can only be created by stripping away his individuality, and looking at him as a representative figure. This accomplishes two significant goals. First, it strips away the ability to individualize, and therefore pathologize Munzer. Bloch argues that Munzer’s “ist besessen, und nicht das Charakterologische.” If there is a madness involved, it is both collective and political. At the same time, it points to the quality that Munzer takes on as a “Gestalt.” We can link this up to the notion of the ideal type that Weber develops, but that is too secular a concept for this phenomenon. The Gestalt is theorized as a light over his head that flashes up periodically. This light can either be read in terms of an aura or a halo, but either way it keeps us out of the disenchanted world that Weber inhabits.
This figure flashes up in the revolutionary movements of 1848, returning as the figure of primitive revenge and redistribution to the poor. It taken up major political thinkers including Engels, Seidemann, Kautsky, etc. Munzer becomes the figure of ‘schwarmgeistig’ par excellence not because of an individual uniqueness, a uniqueness that has eroded over time. All of the physical features that are typically used to describe the man can be questioned. But instead he becomes a significant figure because he is repeatedly re-imagined. This re-imagination returns repeatedly to the fact that the current organization of the world only exists because of the active destruction of its alternatives. It points to a continual lack of completion of this project, a horizon, which may not lead to its inevitable end, but does point to the fact that it is not itself inevitable.
We can track the phenomenon negatively as well through the attempts to neutralize it. I propose that we make that effort through the figure of Carl Schmitt. Translator George Schwab attempts to pay tribute to Schmitt by linking him to the figure of Thomas Hobbes, referring to him as the Thomas Hobbes of the 20th century. Although I am not nearly as generous a reader of Schmitt as Schwab, I think that we should take him seriously. Just as Hobbes theorized the absolutist Leviathan state in order to suppress the radical forces that exploded out of the wars of religion, Schmitt tried to return to this stronger decisionist notion of the sovereign in order to suppress the revolutionary upheaval that defined the end of the First World War. The state of exception became the protection of a homogeneity that is much more contingent due to this upheaval. He also attempted to do this on practical grounds in his interpretation of article 48 in the Weimar Constitution, the emergency clause.
The opening statement of Political Theology is perhaps the most defining one. Schmitt states, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” This statement defines the figure of the sovereign by two capabilities, both what constitutes the exception to the order of things, and when to suspend the rules in order to preserve them. This state of exception is precisely the opposite of “anarchy and chaos” because “order in the juristic sense still prevails even if it is not of the ordinary kind.” The law is defined by this constant need to neutralize various crises that put it in jeopardy. In this sense, Schmitt returns to the absolutist concept that Hobbes conceptualizes, a state that mirrors the sovereign god, and a state that attempts to neutralize an essentially evil man.
Carl Schmitt’s interpretation of Article 48 became the most practical way that he attempted to preserve this order. Schmitt’s interpretation depended on a reading of the article that most legal scholars could except. He repeatedly tried to expand the powers of both the presidency and the points at which the president could claim a state of exception. Schmitt attempted to use this as a basis of closing off the electoral system to those who wanted to destroy that system. This led to his support of both the creation of a state of exception by President Hindenburg and later by the NSDAP.
In this sense, perhaps we can conceptualize the ‘schwarmgeistig’ against what Schmitt is describing as the task of the sovereign. Just as the sovereign is defined by decision rather than as the sole legitimate source of violence, the schwarmgeistig can be defined by the ability to escape this decision rather than as the figure that contests the monopolization of violence, although the question of violence is implicit in both formulations. Schmitt tracks this as it shifts from the realm of the theological, to the realm of the political, to the realm of the economic. Each act of neutralization creates another space of the political decision and contestation. For Schmitt, this acts as a sort of horizon, the creation of an exteriority that makes “all law” into “situational law.” But from the other side, it points to the contingency of the current order of things, one that can be changed.
It is in this terrain of contingency that I want to end this essay. In his last writings, Louis Althusser attempts to conceptualize a new type of materialist philosophy, one that he calls “the materialism of the encounter.” Within it, he makes an attempt to rethink the dual concepts of contingency and necessity. “It is only after the world is constituted that the realm of reason, of necessity, and of sense is established…. Rather than thinking of contingency as a modality of necessity or as an exception to necessity, one ought to think of necessity as the becoming-necessary of the encounter of contingencies.” To invoke this notion of contingency is to embrace a continual potentiality that exists within the seemingly uniform space of necessity. The schwarmgeistig points back to the contingency and potentiality by its continual return.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
A Note on the Title
I took the title for this blog from the first lp by the English group, News From Babel. News From Babel was one of many projects that came out of the break up of the avant-rock group Henry Cow. Both groups were committed to combining popular music with radical politics and the aesthetics of the avant-garde. The most obvious precedent to this approach is the theatrical work of Bertolt Brecht. Brecht's theatrical work even before his conversion to Marxism brought popular and even folk forms with the aesthetic avant-garde to critically engage with his society. As Brecht began to more explicitly engage with historical materialism, he also began to work towards a participatory and democratic theater that would break down the space between audience and actor. This project coalesced into a set of plays named Die Lehrstücke, or the teaching plays. The plays emphasized popular audience participation through questionnaires, conversations, and by moving the theatrical experience to non-traditional locations through the use of amateur worker theater groups. The plays combined current events with didactic folk theatrical traditions. However, the didacticism of these plays was directed towards transforming the experience into a sort of collective experiment. The plays were designed to produce a terrain of conflict, rather than produce the consensus that earlier didactic theater was intended to produce. The audience/ actors were meant to use the experience as a sort of social laboratory to work through social problems. None of the experiments were really fully successful. In fact, the most notable of the plays, Measures Taken, was only performed one or two times because of the criticism directed at it by the communist press. However, the theoretical writings that Brecht produced during this time and afterwards allowed for the concepts behind these failed experiments to live on. (See the collection edited by Fredric Jameson, Aesthetics And Politics, which includes a number of Brecht's engagements)
In addition, Brecht's aesthetic approach has been taken up by a number of other radical artists. Michael Denning notes Brecht's influence on the radical cultural politics of the United States in his text, The Cultural Front. The theatrical influence is obvious in the works of Müller, Weiss, Boal, and others. Brecht also has had a great deal of influence on cinema. Most notably, Hollywood director Douglas Sirk was a former Brecht collaborator, but the most radical films of Jean Luc-Godard also draw from Brechtian theory and practice. (I would argue that Tout Va Bien is the most successful translation of Brecht's theatrical techniques to the screen.) Within this context, the work of Henry Cow and News From Babel gesture to a Brechtian influence on popular music. This linkage is made most explicitly by the solo albums made by singer Dagmar Krause, performing the songs of Brecht and Eisler. However, the political and economic practice of Henry Cow also points to the Brechtian legacy, primarily through the formation of Rock In Opposition (R.I.O). R.I.O. was put together by a group of primarily leftist avant-rock groups who were looking for ways to present their music to audiences outside the traditional circuits of the music industry. The organization collapsed because of internal conflicts, but it has a distinct linkage to the attempt on the part of Brecht to escape traditional theatrical venues.
We can see this simultaneous attempt on the part of artists to produce new forms, escape an establish set of circuits of capital, and use those new aesthetic forms towards a radical and democratic critique as a sort of revolutionary thread running through modern art. It's a thread that doesn't easily fit into the traditional binary of the popular and the avant-garde, as that most of the artists operating within the tradition (for lack of a better term) oscillate uneasily between the two poles. The later compositions of Cornelius Cardew and Archie Shepp's attempts at R&B point to the ambiguity and slipperiness of this position through their separate failures. The most interesting long running project in this mold is the Chicago based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), which has been in existence for close to a half century at this point. (For more on this, take a look at George Lewis' excellent history of the organization. A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, which is one of the best pieces of writing that I have read dealing with the history of jazz.) It's continuity is linked to its commitment to a participatory culture, as well as a social and cultural epistemological function.
In addition to the reference to this long radical tradition, the title's reference to the Tower of Babel contains a crucial trace of heresy within it. The relationship between radical politics and heretical traditions has been a side interest for me for the past few years, coming out of my engagement with the work of Antonio Negri, Ernst Bloch, as well as the historical work of Sylvia Federici. Each of these authors point to the role that heretical social formations acted as a network of counter-systemic movements, opposing both feudalism and the nascent capitalist world system. Bloch notes in his Atheism in Christianity, that "long before the real Enlightenment, pamphlets against the clergy and their lies were going the rounds among the peasants, complaining about the miserable swindling and deception of the poor. The real complaint was about the way the Scriptures were twisted to serve the exploiters and drudge-merchants, but these pamphlets also show the common man's will to speak for himself; he has finished with being struck across the mouth." (Bloch 19) Bloch points to a tradition of heretical Christianity that opposes the European world system through a full embrace of one of its strongest ideological bulwarks. It points to the long history of communism, an opposition to both state and exploitation that both incorporates Marxism and is much older than it. Perhaps communism needs to be understood as a potential within this heretical trace, a trace "that can happen only within the time horizon of capital, and yet it has to be thought of something that disrupts the unity of that time." (Chakrabarty 95)
In addition, Brecht's aesthetic approach has been taken up by a number of other radical artists. Michael Denning notes Brecht's influence on the radical cultural politics of the United States in his text, The Cultural Front. The theatrical influence is obvious in the works of Müller, Weiss, Boal, and others. Brecht also has had a great deal of influence on cinema. Most notably, Hollywood director Douglas Sirk was a former Brecht collaborator, but the most radical films of Jean Luc-Godard also draw from Brechtian theory and practice. (I would argue that Tout Va Bien is the most successful translation of Brecht's theatrical techniques to the screen.) Within this context, the work of Henry Cow and News From Babel gesture to a Brechtian influence on popular music. This linkage is made most explicitly by the solo albums made by singer Dagmar Krause, performing the songs of Brecht and Eisler. However, the political and economic practice of Henry Cow also points to the Brechtian legacy, primarily through the formation of Rock In Opposition (R.I.O). R.I.O. was put together by a group of primarily leftist avant-rock groups who were looking for ways to present their music to audiences outside the traditional circuits of the music industry. The organization collapsed because of internal conflicts, but it has a distinct linkage to the attempt on the part of Brecht to escape traditional theatrical venues.
We can see this simultaneous attempt on the part of artists to produce new forms, escape an establish set of circuits of capital, and use those new aesthetic forms towards a radical and democratic critique as a sort of revolutionary thread running through modern art. It's a thread that doesn't easily fit into the traditional binary of the popular and the avant-garde, as that most of the artists operating within the tradition (for lack of a better term) oscillate uneasily between the two poles. The later compositions of Cornelius Cardew and Archie Shepp's attempts at R&B point to the ambiguity and slipperiness of this position through their separate failures. The most interesting long running project in this mold is the Chicago based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), which has been in existence for close to a half century at this point. (For more on this, take a look at George Lewis' excellent history of the organization. A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, which is one of the best pieces of writing that I have read dealing with the history of jazz.) It's continuity is linked to its commitment to a participatory culture, as well as a social and cultural epistemological function.
In addition to the reference to this long radical tradition, the title's reference to the Tower of Babel contains a crucial trace of heresy within it. The relationship between radical politics and heretical traditions has been a side interest for me for the past few years, coming out of my engagement with the work of Antonio Negri, Ernst Bloch, as well as the historical work of Sylvia Federici. Each of these authors point to the role that heretical social formations acted as a network of counter-systemic movements, opposing both feudalism and the nascent capitalist world system. Bloch notes in his Atheism in Christianity, that "long before the real Enlightenment, pamphlets against the clergy and their lies were going the rounds among the peasants, complaining about the miserable swindling and deception of the poor. The real complaint was about the way the Scriptures were twisted to serve the exploiters and drudge-merchants, but these pamphlets also show the common man's will to speak for himself; he has finished with being struck across the mouth." (Bloch 19) Bloch points to a tradition of heretical Christianity that opposes the European world system through a full embrace of one of its strongest ideological bulwarks. It points to the long history of communism, an opposition to both state and exploitation that both incorporates Marxism and is much older than it. Perhaps communism needs to be understood as a potential within this heretical trace, a trace "that can happen only within the time horizon of capital, and yet it has to be thought of something that disrupts the unity of that time." (Chakrabarty 95)
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