Thinking About the Fall of Public Man

I'm just finishing Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man, and I have mixed impressions of it. On the one hand, he draws some intensely fascinating connections between theatrical performance and public self-presentation; the eighteenth-century world he paints is very much a phantasmagoric, alien landscape, full of men and women with outlandishly made-up faces and elaborately designed costumes, interacting with one another in a way that is now lost to us. Perhaps this kind of illustration is worthwhile to show us just how different the world of the eighteenth century was from ours.

Yet the reviews I've found are fairly negative. Sennett, they say, betrays both history and sociology; his work is not grounded in demographics. (These, I think, are the prejudices of an age more enamored with social history than we are now.) Some of their complaints are just: his book is too clever by half, its use of primary sources sporadic and inconsistent, he too easily elides the distinction between Paris and New York. But these reviews are not wholly justified, either: they criticize the book for not drawing upon theories that are quite specifically discussed in the text. I also unsure if Sennett can really be criticized for an inadequate grasp of a historical method which is quite explicitly subordinate to a broader rhetorical point.

That point is, admittedly, poorly articulated. I don't know why Sennett, of all the problems in contemporary society, decided to pick on charismatic leaders. And there are other problems, too: he neglects the role of gin shops in early-eighteenth-century England (which provoked riots in the 1730s, as George Rude has described), for one. He tries to draw distinctions between things which are substantially similar. And it is difficult to believe that the theater and music hall really had the causal power Sennett attributes to them; thus, American cities did not acquire theaters until well into their development.

Overall, I think Sennett's vision of the eighteenth century, in which the public sphere is constituted as a commonly accepted medium of communication, without any necessary dichotomy between private/public--natural/artificial, and so on, is a good one. But the problem with Sennett's assertion that there was no substantial questioning of the constructed and artificial nature of the public self is that this nature was constantly being questioned. Perhaps the strongest evidence of this is the obsession with irony, a staple of both the beginning and end of the century. This sense of irony is a continuous questioning of the nature of stable, coherent forms of public discourse. Thus the presence of irony suggests that there was, after all, a deep anxiety about the artificiality of the public self--and did not the "natural" family environment Sennett discusses emerge as a kind of resolution of that anxiety? So perhaps his argument is not so dialectically coherent. Somehow, though, its constituent parts remain interesting enough to stand on their own.

Against Tronti

The intellectual heritage of Hardt and Negri--and a large proportion of other contemporary Marxist writers--includes not only Lukacs and Althusser, but also the Italian Operaismo movement. A sober evaluation of the theoretical and practical deficiencies of contemporary Marxism, therefore, requires a confrontation with the theoretical underpinnings of Operaismo (and post-Operaismo). Its founding text--as convenient a place to start as any--is evidently Mario Tronti's 1964 article "Lenin in England."

(I have, for the purposes of this post, adopted the stilted and nauseating Newspeak of Marxist rhetoric.)

Tronti's primary argument is that a critique of capitalism requires putting workers, not capitalist development, first. At first glance, this seems to be a laudable perspective; a crudely mechanistic orthodox Marxist historicism does much to erase the subjectivity of the very proletariat it attempts to empower. But the question must be: does Operaismo recover that subjectivity? If so, what does that mean for Marxism? (it is not a question of the validity of its empirical facts, though Tronti's grasp on reality is exceedingly tenuous).

In June 1848 (that fateful month, a thousand times cursed by the bourgeoisie), and possibly even earlier, the working class took over the stage, and they have never left it since. In different periods they have voluntarily taken on different roles – as actors, as prompters, as technicians or stage-hands – whilst all the time waiting to wade into the theatre and attack the audience ... the political situation of the working class has never been so clear: wherever in history we find concentrated the social mass of an industrial labour force, we can see at a glance the same collective attitudes, the same basic practices, and the same unified political growth. Planned non-cooperation, organised passivity, polemical expectations, a political refusal, and a permanent continuity of struggles – these are the specific historical forms in which working class struggle today is generalising and developing itself.

The metaphor of the theater is appealing, and fraught with implications. But it also raises the question: if the bourgeoisie is the audience, and the workers are the company, who is directing the show? Tronti seems to regard it as unproblematic that the revolutions of 1848 had no real liberating effect: no destruction of capitalism ensued, no egalitarian society, perhaps a token expansion of the franchise. Thus the proletariat's political activity, if it today displays a continuity with 1848, is just that: a show. The audience is left unslaughtered, and in the end they pick up their coats and go home, secure that the political is isolated from the economic.

Tronti sees the activity of the working class as an international unity of theory and practice. But this is an assumption deriving from Marxism itself, not from observation of workers' activity: the Marxist must see class-consciousness, because that is his unit of analysis. Even if Tronti were adequately assessing the world of 1964, his position today implies a colonialist standpoint; the workers of the Western countries are not practically unified with the workers of the South/East, because their labor occupies a difference site on the field of core and periphery interactions, and a denial of this difference involves a concurrent repression of the colonialist and racist aspects of the globalized capitalist production system. In that sense, much of the current rhetoric around "immaterial labor" must be read as an abortive attempt to remake the no-longer-proletarian Western worker into a historically viable subject.

In other words, the totalization of worker activity disenfranchises the greatest supposed beneficiaries of Marxist politics, non-Western proletarians. But let us allow Tronti to argue his case further.

It is clear that if the working class had a revolutionary political organisation, it would aim, everywhere, at making use of the highest developed point of capitalist reformism. The process of building a unification of capital at the international level can only become the material base for a political recomposition of the working class (and in this sense a positive strategic moment for the revolution) if it is accompanied by a revolutionary growth not only of the class, but also of class organisation. If this element is absent, the whole process works to the advantage of capital, as a tactical moment of a one-sided stabilisation of the system, seemingly integrating the working class within the system.

It is, of course, far from clear. This premise introduces an inherent contradiction in Tronti's argument. Suppose the international unification of capital were accompanied by a revolutionary political organization. If the latter aims at making use of the highest point of reformism, it cannot operate fully without introducing that reformism throughout the global production system. Thus the supposedly revolutionary proletariat becomes dependent on reformism and chained to its advancement. Either way, then, the international unification of capital leads to "a one-sided stabilisation of the system," since reformism in itself serves to further the advancement of capitalism!

Ah, but we already have an answer.

Today the strategic viewpoint of the working class is so clear that we wonder whether it is only now coming to the full richness of its maturity. It has discovered (or rediscovered) the true secret, which will be the death sentence on its class enemy: the political ability to force capital into reformism, and then to blatantly make use of that reformism for the working class revolution. But the present tactical position of the working class – as a class without class organisation – is, and must necessarily be, less clear and more subtly ambiguous. The working class is still forced to make use of contradictions which create crisis within capitalist reformism; it has to play up the elements which hinder and retard capitalist development, since it knows and senses that to allow a free hand for capital's reformist operations in the absence of a political organisation of the working class, would amount to freezing for a long period the entire revolutionary process (and, by the same token, if such an organisation did exist, it would open this process immediately). Thus the two reformisms – that of capital and that of the labour movement – should certainly meet, but only through a direct initiative by the working class.

The crucial point here is that reformism is to be "made use of" for the purposes of the revolution (how is it to be made use of? Beats me). But that suggests a reverse vanguardism which is in fact a direct vanguardism: the "labor movement" blindly pushes reform, unaware that without the guiding hand of the Working Class Movement it will only support capitalism. If the broad working class is in fact more radical than the labor movement, then there is neither the need nor the possibility of reform--and, since Tronti concedes that there is not yet any revolutionary political organization of the working class, a body which is unorganized and unfocused must somehow "direct" the already organized labor movement. We thus return to the fundamental question of political organization, which is supposed, somehow, to appear; and it is this question, with all of its authoritarian implications, that Tronti chooses to ignore (not to mention that this theory tends toward the creation of an antagonism between labor and "revolutionary organization," a perfect tactical move on the part of a capitalism which wishes to "divide and conquer" the proletariat).

So we have to a large extent established that Tronti's Operaismo is in fact counter-revolutionary, in that it marries the tactical imperatives of the proletariat to the demands of capitalism. But one question remains: does Tronti's recovery of a uniquely proletarian commonality, and, soon, subjectivity in the face of the rhetoric of capitalist development in fact imply an liberating reconstruction of class agency?

It does not. Tronti elevates the distinction between the tactical and the strategic, and holds that the tactical aims of the movement correspond with reformism, but the strategic aims do not. First, if tactics is an art of the possible, this move involves sacrificing all of the revolutionary proletariat's immediate power to act. But even if strategy allows non-tactical agency, that agency rests in the hands of an agent, a historical subject, which is still coming-into-being. The proletariat is left with no choice but to commit to the tactical imperative of reformism in the hope that a revolutionary agent will, against all odds, appear in its midst.

Well. The Gotha Programme could have told us that.

William Smith Gets Goosed

One of my favorite things about the eighteenth century is the culture of the press. Pamphlets with snarky pseudonyms, pointed satire, massive press battles--it's almost like LiveJournal drama, except (sometimes) more intelligent.

In 1752, the young Rev. William Smith (who was later to be the first Provost of UPenn) was living on Long Island. Anxious to make a name for himself in New York, and grooming himself to be the president of the new provincial college (eventually to become Columbia) then in planning, he wrote a pamphlet called "Some Thoughts on Education," where he argued that the college ought to be located in the city. Since this was probably his first widely-read publication, he wanted to make a good impression (even prefacing the text with some flowery doggerel).

On November 20th, the New-York Gazette, or Weekly Post-Boy published a letter, signed Goose Adrianse, addressed to "the Author of the late Pamphlet, intitled 'Some Thoughts on Education,' &c." It was one of the finest contemporary specimens of a popular satirical technique, namely, burying mockery in panegyric:

Your Sense is so penetrating, your Learning so large, and Taste so refin'd, that the Attempts of others, must needs be dispicable in your Eyes. He that addresses you with Propriety, must do it with Judgment and Elegance, in the Strain of Rhetoric, and Pomp of Language; He must write, in the Spirit and Perfection of the Dedication, perfixed to your Pamphlet, which is justly admired as a Pattern to all future Dedicators; and universally esteemed, to be a convincing Proof of prodigious Arts and of your Acquaintance with the polite Methods of recommending One-self to the Great.

Between the lines, the review accused Smith of plagiarizing from James Thomson, indulging in "Scoticisms," being a bad poet, and, finally, using a sockpuppet to publish a self-congratulatory letter in the newspaper (verily, nothing new under the sun). It worked. Smith was both confused and incensed:

Yours in the Gazette, No. 514, I have seen; but as it was so unhappily pointed, I could not for some determine, whether it was meant as Panegyric or Satyr; or whether it had any Meaning at all ... a small share of the Modesty, you so largely ascribe to me; suffic'd, to make me apprehend, I had no Pretensions to the high Compliments of such a gigantic Writer; and, that possibly you meant it shou'd be read (by me at least) like a Witch's Prayer, backwards.

He resolved to answer this "Rant of labour'd Nonsense" anyway, by quoting a friend of his--"a very good Taylor, a very well-bred Man, and a very good Critic and Scholar." Not having found anything concrete enough to respond to, Smith's letter ended up being a mass of bluster and accusation (evidently "Adrianse"'s "national and personal reflections" offended his sensibilities). He was duly mocked again, supposedly by "Adrianse"'s son:

When my Father wrote his Letter, I am sure he bore you no Ill-will, and intended nothing more than to restrain your Vanity; which, as it very little became you, might in its Consequences prove vastly prejudicial to a young Author, who possibly by a proper Attention to his Studies, and with some further Knowledge of the World, might be useful in his little Sphere, to this Infant Country. Had you been silent under the Rod of his Correction, you would have approved yourself, to the prudent Part of the World...

Smith, of course, could not take this lying down, but lacking the verbal facility to answer this kind of satire, he inserted pointed references to his detractors in his next pamphlet, A General Idea of the College of Mirania (which, incidentally, ran in quite a different direction of argument than the first, and much more voluminously). Benjamin Franklin, to whom Smith sent a copy, was not amused:

Yet, as Censure from your Friends may be of more Use as well as more agreable to you than Praise, I ought to mention, that I wish you had omitted, not only the Quotation from the Review, which you are now justly dissatisfy’d with, but all those Expressions of Resentment against your Adversaries, in Pages 65 and 79. In such Cases, the noblest Victory is obtained, by Neglect, and by Shining on.

Indeed.

Baudrillard: the Violence of the Global

Jean Baudrillard's post-'80s work was mostly disappointing and derivative; what was cutting edge theory in the heyday of cultural studies now seems redundant and cliched. When I saw him lecture at the New School a couple of years ago, he was barely coherent--Sylvère Lotranger came off as almost heroic in comparison. Yet I am belatedly coming to realize that the questions that preoccupied Baudrillard in the last years of his life are questions that I myself cannot ignore. His 2003 article "The Violence of the Global," a surprisingly lucid (if somewhat crude and unoriginal) piece of analysis, attempts to set out some important problems: what is the role of globalization for contemporary thought? What part does terrorism play in the globalized world? What is the difference between the global and the universal?

I think Baudrillard's instincts are largely correct, but there are two unexamined assumptions that prevent his critique from being truly incisive. The first is the distinction he draws between the global and the universal. He asserts that the globalization of markets and the universalization of values are mutually antagonistic, that the former destroys the latter. This distinction, however, cannot be sustained. If the West's universalizing ambitions meant the end of various non-universal cultures, the achievement of that destruction was predicated on the practical requirements of expanding European states and economies. We know, then, that at least at some point the universal and the global were identical. Is there an identifiable historical point of divergence between them? I don't think so. McDonald's and the rhetoric of human rights--the Lexus and the olive tree, "Malraux's aesthetics and ads for Coca-Cola"--have gone hand-in-hand, the values of liberalism preparing society for the irruption of the market.

Baudrillard thinks that today's situation is different: while markets continue to expand, the concept of universal values has withered into nothingness, to be replaced by "all sorts of singularities." Terrorism is thus the acting-out of singularity against the tyranny of an undifferentiated market and its "promiscuity" of signs. But he does not address the most obvious objection, anticipated even by Sextus Empiricus and made orthodox by Adorno and Horkheimer--that the substance of the universalization of values is basically self-undermining. It is misguided to argue that as an "Idea," the universal "committed suicide"; it merely achieved transcendence. Baudrillard's nostalgia for Kantian morality seems strangely out of place.

Baudrillard's second mistake, the perennial error of the Left, is exemplified in these lines:

But the game is not over yet. Globalization has not completely won. Against such a dissolving and homogenizing power, heterogeneous forces -- not just different but clearly antagonistic ones -- are rising everywhere ... Positive alternatives cannot defeat the dominant system, but singularities that are neither positive nor negative can. Singularities are not alternatives.

With this move, Baudrillard makes Islamic terrorism the vanguard of a kind of revolutionary proletariat of singularities. (Never mind, of course, that al-Qaeda is a global network whose ultimate goal is the establishment of a pan-Islamic Caliphate. ) Because his thinking is so clearly heir to the Marxist tradition, he cannot see revolutionary class-consciousness without also seeing it victorious in the future. For him, it is merely enough to establish a dialectic; the achievement of the synthesis will take care of itself. Yet there is not enough argument here to accept this conclusion. Terrorism, for Baudrillard, is global society's "judgment and penalty"; if so, it seems we have received a slap on the wrist.

The basic problem here was well-treated by Umberto Eco back in the early '80s. His essay "Striking at the Heart of the State" skewers the traditional ideology of terrorism: no single act of terror can topple a system which has become self-correcting. But the other essays in Travels in Hyperreality suggest that the alternative, resistance on the margins, is equally ineffectual. The Hakim Beys, the Banksys, the al-Qaedas are only changes in the weather to a system which requires neither approval nor stability, which is comfortable being off-balance. The reluctant but increasingly desperate valorization of ever less-palatable resistance movements is a sign of the anxiety of the times: we are not comfortable with the end of history, we can't believe in the endurance of this distasteful globalism. Perhaps the real "specter of Marx" is not the downfall of capitalism, but our inability to abide by that troublesome 11th thesis.

Open Source through an eighteenth-century lens

In my discussions with anti-authoritarian folks, I've frequently encountered references to the open source/free software movement as an example of grassroots, decentralized, from-each-according-to-his-abilities kind of activity with real liberating potential--a first step toward Multitude. Generally, people that argue this have no practical experience with free software. I used to be fairly immersed in the politics and controversies surrounding the free software community (even posted to the Linux Kernel Mailing List a few times!), and since I'm interested in the study of these kinds of phenomena both on a political and an intellectual level, I thought I'd make a few observations.

F/OSS (free/open source software) encompasses two different ways of thinking about the nature of the development process: "free software" and "open source," represented by the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative, respectively. The two support different kinds of software licenses: "free software" supports the GPL, while "open source" stands behind the BSD license (and its brethren). In practice, the distinctions tend to fade away, since most software produced by both groups tends to be licensed under the GPL anyway. But an ideological division remains.

The crucial difference between the licenses is this: the GPL requires all modifications of the source code to bear the same license, while the BSD license has no such restriction. There are hundreds of pages of debates in the archives of F/OSS sites about which one is more "free." In reality, the argument is unresolvable, because they rely on different definitions of "liberty," coming from distinct intellectual traditions: liberalism and classical republicanism (see Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order, 15-22). This hasn't been acknowledged, and, indeed, participants in these debates do not even seem to recognize the fundamental nature of the gap between them.

The Free Software movement is a contemporary version of classical republicanism, which turns software development into a sort of public sphere. The important property of the GPL is that all changes made to source code immediately, with a few exceptions, become common property. In other words, it is impossible to sell your software as such, though you can sell support and packaging. Software developers who cannot derive immediate financial benefit from their work thus become ideal disinterested political agents (who are distinct from the populace, which only consumes what they produce under the GPL). Like the classical republicans, Free Software advocates have a borderline-paranoid fear of corporate participation and control over their public sphere; when Linus Torvalds, the founder of Linux, accepted a paid position at Transmeta, his act was viewed as a "a classic story of betrayal of the movement roots ... commercialization of GPL-based software created by volunteers and used to enrich several "open source pigs" including Linus Torvalds himself." A standard Free Software critique of the Linux development process is that the main developers are on the payroll of major companies like IBM. Any critic of Free Software is accused of conspiring with Microsoft, in terms which are often reminiscent of revolutionary-era American ideology.

The Open Source movement, on the other hand, is liberal in a very eighteenth-century way. The BSD license allows code modifications to be made closed-source and sold. Open Source advocates do not defend the open-source development process because it is virtuous or communitarian; they defend it because it is more efficient. Open Source embraces self-interest. Eric S. Raymond, founder of the OSI and committed libertarian, was the first to articulate the principle that "every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch." In other words, self-interest stimulates open-source development because each participant benefits from the process. The confluence of individuals each pursuing her interest leads to the continual improvement of software, because "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." This is why Raymond's landmark book The Cathedral and the Bazaar characterizes the open-source development model both as a "bazaar" (i.e., an inherently commercial and self-interested assembly) and as a "community of interest." This is not a position many advocates of Free Software would readily accede to, if they thought about it long enough.

Today, the world of open source development is not what it was six or four years ago: the two positions have adopted a stance of de facto reconciliation. Anti-commercialism is still prevalent, but the presence and increasing role of profit-driven corporate involvement has been accepted as inevitable. That's not because corporations have become any nicer, but because the ideal of disinterested software development originating with independent programmers has proven unrealizable--except for smaller projects, who are the Swiss cantons of F/OSS development. Thus the fate of the F/OSS movement has mirrored the post-revolutionary history of the United States--the classical republican ideal subverted by new social realities.

Ultimately, this interpretation suggests that there is little new about the F/OSS model. It is dependent on ideological precedents which go back millennia, with all their accompanying deficiencies. The anti-authoritarians who point to the movement as a blueprint for a new social order ought seriously to consider the last time this happened.

Philip Freneau on teaching

This ought to resonate with at least a couple of my readers. In 1772, the American poet Philip Freneau--an underappreciated and quite talented versifier--published a pamphlet of his poems. One of them is particularly well-said, I think.

The Miserable Life of a Pedagogue

To form the manners of our youth,
To guide them in the way of truth,
To lead them through the jarring schools,
Arts, sciences, and grammar rules;
Is certainly an arduous work,
Enough to tire Jew or Turk;

And make a christian bite his nails,
For do his best, he surely fails;
And spite of all that some may say
His praise is trifling as his pay.

For my part I, tho' vers'd in booking,
Still sav'd my carcase from such cooking;
And always slyly shunn'd a trade,
Too trifling as I thought and said;
But at a certain crazy season,
When men have neither sense or reason;
By some confounded misadventure,
I found myself just in its centre.

Odd's fish and blood, and noun and neuter,
And tenses present, past and future;
I utter'd with a wicked sigh,
Where are my brains, or where am I?
The dullest creature of the wood,
Knows how to shun the distant flood;
Whales, dolphins, and a hundred more,
Are not the fools to run ashore.

Well, now contented I must be,
Forc'd by the dame Necessity,
Who like the tribunal of Spain,
Lets you speak once, but not again;
And swift to execute the blow,
Ne're tells you why or whence it's for.

Now I am ask'd a thousand questions,
Of Alexander and Ephestions;
With sly design to know if I
Am vers'd in Grecian history;
And then again my time destroy,
With awkward grace to tell of Troy;
From that huge giant Polyphemus,
Quite down to Romulus and Remus.
Then I'm obliged to give them lectures,
On quadrants, circles, squares, and sectors;
Or in my wretched mem'ry bear,
What weighs a cubic inch of air.

"Sir, here's my son, I beg you'd mind.
The graces have been very kind,
And on him all their blessings shed,
[Except a genius and a head].
Teach him the doctrine of the sphere,
The sliding circle and the square,
And starry worlds, I know not where;
And let him quickly learn to say,
Those learned words Penna, Pennae;
Which late I heard our parson call,
As learning, knowledge all in all."

And there a city dame approaches,
Known for her horsemen, chairs and coaches;
"Sir, here's my son, teach him to speak
The Hebrew, Latin, and the Greek;
And this I half forgot, pray teach
My tender boy--the parts of speech--
But never let this son of me,
Learn that vile thing Astronomy:
Upon my word it's all a sham,"--
O I'm your humble servant ma'am.
There certainly is something in it---
"Boy, drive the coach off in a minute."
And thus I'm left in street or road,
A laughing stock to half the crowd,
To argue with myself the case,
And prove its being to my face.

A plague I say on such employment,
Where's neither pleasure nor enjoyment:
Whoe'er to such a life is ty'd,
Was born the day he should have dy'd;
Born in an hour when angry spheres
Were tearing caps, or pulling ears:
And Saturn slow 'gainst swift Mercurius,
Was meditating battles furious;
Or comets with their blazing train,
Decreed their life, a life of pain.

(From the 1772 Inslee and Car edition)

Irony and Resistance

There is an odd explosion in the arts, with an immense number of amateurs, of a kind of urban folk art in all genres. It is entirely inauthentic in style, combining misunderstood fragments of international culture with commercialized mountain music and stereotyped urban naturalism; yet it is authentic to the actual urban confusion.
- Paul Goodman, Like a Conquered Province (1965)

It is remarkably easy to notice and to criticize the pervasive role of irony in contemporary culture. If, in the grungy, earnest nineties, being called a "poser" was still something to be afraid of, today's insipid and glutted decadent hipster culture makes inauthenticity into an art form. I feel a sense of relief when the typical member of the pretend counterculture reveals unconcealable vacant yuppie eyes beneath her shiny pop-culture-bricolage exterior (hence the mirrored shades). There is nothing more horrifying than finding a real punk, aesthete, or heroin addict under the layers of punk-chic, boho-chic, heroin-chic. It is almost a solecism.

The above is already a stereotyped complaint, one which emerges inevitably with cultural and literary decadence. This means that it functions as a self-parody. Hipster culture, in fact, is entirely based around affectation of styles previously conceived as "authentic" ripostes to false mainstream culture. That's why the first rule of hipsterism is to condemn hipsters: its ideological heritage requires it to act as a critique, but, since it presupposes inauthenticity, it can only turn on itself--like Ouruboros eating his own tail. In fact, the only difference between a hipster and a non-hipster disdain for hipster culture is that the latter is not self-aware.

There is a David Foster Wallace story which illustrates this point pretty well. The main character, who is tortured by the inauthenticity of his own yuppie life, watches a late-night episode of Cheers in which one of the show's characters complains about her yuppie analysands who think their lives are inauthentic. The main character realizes that he cannot escape the cycle of irony--that his critique is as much a sham as his life, that he cannot help replicating a stereotyped reaction already being mocked by so crude and inauthentic a show as Cheers (which, of course, relies for its success on the fantasy of a personal and genuine camaraderie, already subverted by its rigid adherence to form). The character commits suicide, but it is clear that that is not a solution, that he's never going to be a Werther, only one of innumerable copycats.

Of course, the fact that this is being articulated by a cheap, snobbish, and derivative writer --whose own dependence on po-mo fiction cliches is nothing short of awe-inspiring--only adds to the poignancy of the situation.

So is there any solution? One is, I suppose, Rortyan ironism. But that provides a good foundation only for engagement in political life, not a thoroughgoing critique. The question which must be answered is: must a radical social critique operate from a standpoint which privileges authenticity? It is tempting to immediately answer "no," to point to detournement and avant-garde art as possible sites for resistance. But I think Jameson has a point--such an aestheticization of social critique plays right into the hands of the late-capitalist culture industry, which loves nothing better than a pretty and marketable rebellion (of course, it makes no difference that the commodity is draped in anti-commercial slogans).

I think the best approach is not to embrace the derivative, but to deny it. Irony can only work in a social context with a critical mass of texts and intertextual relationships. Thus a critique which desists from any and all engagement from a corrupted and suicidal textual milieu is immune from ironic self-subversion. Buddhist wisdom, received as part of a serious and lengthy engagement with meditation and asceticism, does not seem trite, but the Dalai Lama--preeminently a public figure--inevitably becomes associated with Starbucks and yoga.
What makes the former different from the latter is the former's complete removal from a public sphere of discourse, which makes it impossible to receive otherwise than on its own terms.

Céline as Moralist?

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the well-known French misanthrope who wrote Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan, was a collaborator (in spirit, though not in action) with the Nazis during World War II. I find that telling people this is an easy way to turn them off to Céline--even people who have read him before and appreciate what he stands for. The Nazis are the ultimate, unthinkable evil of our age, and an association with them taints anyone, including intellectuals (though, for some reason, Heidegger often gets a free pass).

The decision to collaborate is a form of original sin; it is not merely for a clever joke that David Lehman titled his account of Paul de Man's Nazi activities Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. But the story of every such moral failing is the story of a decision, and that decision is open to analysis--thus, the Jewish and Christian interpretation of the Fall condemns the act unequivocally, while the Islamic view treats it as a preordained and divinely intended outcome. Céline's collaboration is equally open to such dissection, but not all readings of his choice have equal value.

It is simplest to view Céline's complicity with the Nazis merely as an extension of his pre-existing anti-Semitism. This accounts for a large part of the answer, but not all; after all, Céline thought Hitler as much an agent of the international Jewish conspiracy as the Communists. Furthermore, the subtlety in Céline's anti-Semitism is that he perceived it to be the fundamental cause of war and exploitation, and thus an association with a regime which perpetrated it--a regime with whose other ideas Céline disagreed--would be illogical. An analysis based on this formulation is fundamentally flawed, because it does not take into account the moral aspect of the choice.

A more sensitive explanation would posit Céline as an amoral agent for whom considerations of ideological responsibility are meaningless--what is good is what ensures one's own survival. There is ample support for this in Journey to the End of the Night, where the narrator is drafted into the army but promptly deserts, fearing equally the brutality of both sides. This accounts for another piece of the puzzle--his avoidance of any concrete collaborationist action, and likewise his understandable lack of participation in partisan or resistance movements. Nonetheless, this approach still sells Céline short, because it assumes that a lack of ideological engagement is tantamount to amorality.

That assumption cannot be sustained. I believe the most adequate explanation of Céline's mindset and behavior is that he believed firmly in the individual's autonomy from ideology, in a way which was itself a principled moral stand. Journey to the End of the Night is, first and foremost, a study of the failure of ideology: patriotism, religion, altruism, love, imperialism, capitalism. Throughout the book, characters who surrender to supra-individual ideological considerations are revealed to be gross beasts. The only man who resists these desubjectifying drives is Bardamu himself, whose hate powers his individuality. The modern reader readily objects that this overt existentialism is in itself an ideology, but Céline is already ahead of him--after all, Bardamu hates himself as well.

This accounts for the highly schematic structure of the narrative--first, a critique of nationalism, then a critique of religion, and so on--since, if Céline were merely a misanthrope, it would have been easy to do without any such framework. It also holds the key to an explanation of Céline's anti-Semitism, which, in standard fashion, identified the Jews with Communism, Positivism, Capitalism, Freemasonry, and so on--for Céline, the Jews are ideologues who deny the authenticity of individual experience. And thus Céline's moral affirmation of individuality in his collaborative activity functions on every level.

The Colden-Franklin Letters

As part of my summer research, I've been looking at the remarkable exchange of letters between Benjamin Franklin and Cadwallader Colden (1688-1776) between 1743 and 1754. Franklin, as everyone knows, was colonial America's premier polymath, but Colden was probably a close second--and an equally colorful figure. Colden, who came to America from Scotland in 1708 and died in New York three months after independence, experienced the entire colonial eighteenth century firsthand. He was no detached observer, either: drawn into politics under Robert Hunter in the 1720s, he was politically active until his death. He also, however, found time for other pursuits--botany (he was a friend of Carolus Linnaeus, who named the plant Coldenia after him), physics, invention (he first outlined the idea for stereotype printing), medicine (trying to foist George Berkeley's famous tar-water cure on unsuspecting colonials), history (he was the first English-speaking historian of the Native Americans), mathematics (crudely attempting to elaborate Newtonian calculus), and philosophy.

It is with scientific matters that the Franklin-Colden correspondence is concerned. It contains some remarkably resonant reflections on the research process:

You’l perceive by what you receive on these Sheets that I have open’d to my self a large Prospect either into Nature or into Fairyland and I have in my Imaginations made some steps into the Country but as the whole of this way of thinking is entirely new I am desirous to lay it step by step before my Friends for their remarks that thereby I may be either incouraged to go on in an amusement of this kind or be prevented in throwing away time uselessly which may be better imploy’d (in my time of life especially). (Colden to Franklin, Sept. 17, 1744)

You may assure your self that I think and I hope Mr. Logan will believe me in good earnest when I say that there cannot be a stronger and surer mark of Friendship than showing to me the mistakes I may have fallen into as it may prevent my exposing my weakness and Ignerance to others. Men often impose sophisms upon themselves which they can not detect without the assistance of others. (Colden to Franklin, December 1744)

Despite the role that politics played in his life, Colden's scientific activities were crucial for his self-identity--every spare moment was devoted to study of one form or another, to the exclusion of more traditional social entertainments. Unfortunately, most of his projects were false starts, especially his massive magnum opus, An Explication of the First Causes of Action in Matter and of the Cause of Gravitation (an unsuccessful and widely ridiculed attempt to extend the principles of Newtonian physics). This makes reading his letters to Franklin especially poignant; he was insecure, constantly worried about what people would think of his ideas, sent his work to Academic Superstars in Europe, was always writing to ask his acquaintances if they'd heard anything--and he was always defensive if he felt himself to be criticized.

I am so strongly possessed with the Principles of Action in Matter which you have seen that I amuse my self at leisure hours in applying them to the explication of the most general phoenomena of nature and can not easily direct my thoughts to other speculatives. These favourite prepossessions probably may be of advantage to our gaining of knowledge more perhaps than if you and I were both solely attached to one kind of pursuit because one may receive hints from the other which do not naturally arise in the pursuit which only one singly follows ... I cannot expect that my sentiments so contrary to the commonly received notions should suddenly prevail. A French Gent. writes "il a bien donné la torture a nos Metaphysiciens" but I am confident they will at last. (Colden to Franklin, March 16, 1752)

I shall be in a longing expectation of seeing Mr. Bowdoin’s observations on my book. Mr. Collinson sent me some remarks made on it by Professor Euler of Berlin. He writes much like a Pedant highly conceited of himself ... The most unexpected remarks on my book I receiv’d lately with a letter from Saml. Pike a person entirely unknown to me with a book he has lately published entituled Philosophia Sacra wherein he attempts to deduce the Principles of Physiology from the Hebrew Bible ... his book has not increased my vanity much. (Colden to Franklin, Nov. 29, 1753)

The image of Colden that emerges from studying his writings is a sad one: an undeniably intelligent man, he was too closed-minded to revise his ideas, too self-confident to tolerate criticism, and too deluded to recognize his irrelevance. Perhaps, as scholars, it is difficult not to see something of ourselves in him--and not to feel a twinge of concern that our own work is just another Explication.