Russia and the Problem of Republican Discourse

So--having acquired as much knowledge from the peoples that came before it as possible, the Roman Republic for century after century overcame shocks and crises, preserving its structure and liberties. And only during critical periods did power intensify and concentrate in one man's hands--like the wheel of the steersman in a storm and the reins of a coachman at a steep turn.
This is why power in Rome was never seized by a tyrant. There were no coups. And never did dictatorship become anarchy--for its time was restricted and its power was bounded, and a dictator who broke the Law was simply outlawed, with all the consequences that entailed.
(And only when some zealous and not very intelligent republicans killed Caesar, who had saved the country from corruption and internecine feuds and who wanted dictatorial powers for life, did the strict but proper dictatorship become replaced with an empire; and after the death of the wise and moderate Augustus, the emperors really had a ball...)
- Mikhail Veller, Великий последний шанс (The Great Last Chance), 2005 (translation mine)

Every time a news story about Russia comes out in the West, its contents and the reaction thereto are predictable. Putin is a totalitarian, he stifles dissent, he wants to restore the evil communist dictatorship. But, for some reason, the sentiments of Russians themselves do not match with this view: Putin is, and remains, a popular president, regardless of his authoritarian leanings. This fact is very difficult for Westerners to swallow, and they are inclined to attribute Putin's popularity to brainwashing, propaganda, and repression.

But Russians have more experience with propaganda than, probably, any other country on earth. And for decades, they have taken a jaundiced view of the media; a popular Soviet proverb ran, "The trouble with newspapers is that Izvestiya [News] contains no truth, and Pravda [Truth] contains no news." People who have survived Stalinism and Brezhnevism, cracking jokes and not believing in tears, are the last people to blindly follow a charismatic strongman.

And yet it's true: there's little dissent in Russia, and what there is is easily suppressed. The West interprets this fact as prima facie evidence of totalitarian repression--yet Russians do not. Why?

I think it is because Russia, unlike every other Western democracy, never assimilated the rhetoric of republicanism on any kind of a large scale. Indeed, Russians' attitude to power has much more in common with medieval European peasants than with contemporary Europeans: it doesn't matter who rules over you, they're lords with their own interests and their politics have nothing to do with you.

The discourse and vocabulary of modern republicanism emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth century in Northern Europe and America (Southern Europe received a modified version of it in the form of nineteenth-century nationalism). Republicanism reconfigured the relationship between the individual and the state: in any polity, even a monarchical one, it is the individual's responsibility to prevent corruption. Corruption entails both physical and moral ruin--so political participation in its various forms is actually a civic duty and not merely a privilege. Even though republicanism incorporates the idea of a natural aristocracy, the relationship between individual and polity is essentially non-hierarchical--even where no "general will" is recognized.

Reading Boswell's Life of Johnson, the modern reader can't help being struck by passages such as this:

He talked in his usual style with a rough contempt of popular liberty. 'They make a rout about UNIVERSAL liberty, without considering that all that is to be valued, or indeed can be enjoyed by individuals, is PRIVATE liberty. Political liberty is good only so far as it produces private liberty. Now, Sir, there is the liberty of the press, which you know is a constant topick. Suppose you and I and two hundred more were restrained from printing our thoughts: what then? What proportion would that restraint upon us bear to the private happiness of the nation?'

Johnson is the very embodiment of the Englishman, and yet his contempt for English Liberties is evident. In fact, it belongs to an earlier world, and such remarks are part and parcel to his nostalgic recollections of feudalism. Republicanism presupposes the freedom of the public sphere as the arena where the surveillance of virtue is performed. The public persona, though an epiphenomenon of the private self, becomes linked to it with invincible bonds of virtue. Before republicanism, neither public self nor public sphere exist--and hence it is possible to conceive of private liberty and happiness distinctly from public liberty.

Politics in the West depends on a buried stratum of republicanism which presupposes the necessity and inevitability of publicness--and interprets the blockage or disappearance of publicness as corruption and tyranny, whose interests lie in preventing the surveillance of virtue. Politics in Russia, on the other hand, is "medieval"--it is the realm of personified, embodied power, which cannot fully subsume the private. The freedom of the press is received with prodigious apathy in Russia, because the surveillance of virtue is not regarded as either an obligation or an effective check on an already assumed corruption.

The singular figure of republican virtue is Brutus, who sacrifices his life to prevent the corruption of the Republic. Mikhail Veller, an intelligent and educated man (but a racist and a weird form of nationalist), has recently suggested the institution of a Roman-style dictatorship to reform Russian politics. But in the process, he suggests that Brutus was misguided and not even intelligent--and in a political world where republicanism exists, such a configuration of statements would be impossible. The rhetoric of the republic depends on the rhetoric of virtue.

Why did republicanism never really emerge in Russia? The enlightened absolutism of the eighteenth century is a tempting, but not a sufficient explanation, since the Germans eventually assimilated republicanism just fine. One reason might be that Peter the Great's reform project was embedded in a very traditional king-aristocracy conflict and hence operated in traditional terms. But then surely republicanism could have emerged in a more liberal/nationalistic form in the nineteenth century? Leaving aside the near-total social isolation of the nineteenth century intelligentsia, there were good reasons why republicanism couldn't emerge--for instance, the complete lack of enduring connection between political ideas and actual reform. Leninism and Bolshevism, of course, were not enough to create this transformation either.

So Russians see the political in a totally different way; and I think that, in many ways, we're right. Republicanism serves as an effective ideological smokescreen to mystify the real power relations behind the scenes. "Freedom of speech," and the politics that come with it, has its costs.

Three Problems With Feyerabend

People all over the world have developed ways of surviving in partly dangerous, partly agreeable surroundings. The stories they told and the activities they engages in enriched their lives, protected them, and gave them meaning. The 'progress of knowledge and civilization'—as the process of pushing Western ways and values into all corners of the globe is being called—destroyed these wonderful products of human ingenuity and compassion without a single glance in their direction ... I am against ideologies that use the name of science for cultural murder.
- Paul Feyerabend, Against Method

I think Feyerabend's philosophy of science is the only interpretation of scientific activity that has any humane potential. The early modern scientists never tired of inveighing against scholastic system-building -- rationalism for its own sake. Feyerabend's theory realizes the liberating possibilities of that critique. If, as Feyerabend shows, we need neither rigid methodological principles nor the provincialism and narrow-mindedness of certain scientasters, then we can move away from viewing science as Baconian state domination or as the inseparable handmaiden of ecological destruction.

But I think his argument is not without its flaws; perhaps they are not crippling, but they pose a threat to the antifoundationalist project in science. In many ways, these flaws are the result of Feyerabend not going far enough in his critique.

1. If anarchism is "not the most attractive political philosophy" (as opposed to methodological principle), how can Feyerabendian open debate occur in a "free society"? Feyerabend argues that no organon, no prescribed set of assumptions, can underlie an open debate. Rationalism, like mysticism, must contend with other conceptual schemes, without arbitrarily specifying its premises as given. But a free society that is not anarchist cannot therefore sustain an open debate, for an underlying set of assumptions always exists: the requirements, ideologies, and mystifications of those in power. Indeed, stripping the veneer of rationalism from debate must inevitably instantiate these requirements as basic assumptions (since, in the environment of open debate, such an explicit intervention is the only means the state possesses for securing its ends). This is a strange criticism to have to make, given Feyerabend's Leninist influences; yet it points out the explicitly political potential of his project.

2. If science is to be evaluated with respect to its impact upon social and ethical practices, does this not lead to its permanent establishment as an adjunct of the state? Feyerabend is a humanist, and hence concerned with "quality of existence"; but it is difficult to fully justify his claim here. The institution doing the evaluation is grounded in a social and political reality, whatever its nominal independence may be, and its dependence on that reality means science that supports the status quo will be preferred over science with liberating or social-integrity-threatening potential. In the long run, what Feyerabend justifies as a humane moral concern will end up as a prettier version of Baconian enlightened domination. This concern is valuable when one's opponents are grim rationalist technocrats, but becomes distinctly reactionary when confronted with a less hidebound vision.

3. If an open debate assumes nothing, does it not fall prey to the classic contradiction of liberalism, namely, its inability to reconcile tolerance with the intolerable? If an entry in such a debate implies the need for a rejection of the debate itself--methodologically, institutionally, perhaps even ethically--then the debate must collapse, which destroys the productive field of interplay between conceptual schemes and hence the possibility for further reevaluation. If any such entry is to be rejected, then a foundational assumption has been created. This is no idle objection to be defused with an appeal to pragmatism: the question of the legitimacy of debate is a serious one, and the field of interplay would be substantially narrowed if particular responses to it were excluded a priori. Equally unsatisfactory is allowing nihilistic conceptual schemes to participate on the condition that they defer or abandon their destructive tendencies; that approach, which has been characteristic of liberalism in practice, in fact makes a mockery of Feyerabend's whole project.

These are serious problems. But for all that, I think Feyerabend's vision is superior to anything Habermas has been able to produce. Though Reason might be a complicated concept, its realization in practice is far more fraught with conflict and confusion than even most post-structuralists would admit; of course, that goes double for our latter-day rationalists. For my part, I think the three problems I outlined have a solution: an anarchistic, total debate that determines its own ethics and accepts self-destruction--as well as rebirth. To make power contingent upon this debate is the only way of neutralizing its dominating potential.

Cervantes and the Dialectic of Enlightenment

And yet, with all these good things, which are commonly all that men need to enable them to live happily, I am the most discontented and dissatisfied man in the whole world; for, I know not how long since, I have been harassed and oppressed by a desire so strange and so unusual, that I wonder at myself and blame and chide myself when I am alone, and strive to stifle it and hide it from my own thoughts, and with no better success than if I were endeavouring deliberately to publish it to all the world; and as, in short, it must come out, I would confide it to thy safe keeping, feeling sure that by this means, and by thy readiness as a true friend to afford me relief, I shall soon find myself freed from the distress it causes me, and that thy care will give me happiness in the same degree as my own folly has caused me misery ...
- Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote, Ch. XXXIII-XXXV

As the title of this blog might suggest, I love interpolated stories. There's just something so inspiring about a writer who sees his work broadly enough that it can accommodate diverse--or even conflicting--genres within it. The prime example of this, and the cognitive dissonance it can induce, is Jan Potocki's Manuscript Found in Saragossa. The way Potocki's text negotiates the boundaries between interpolated text and principal storyline eventually deprives the reader of any sense that there is a main text at all.

But sometimes an interpolated fragment can have an even stronger relationship--not with the frame-tale around it, but with its whole philosophical context. The tale of the Prying Man in Don Quijote is just such a story. If Foucault's analysis of Don Quijote as a chronicle of epistemic shift or crisis is even partly accurate, the Prying Man must bear primary significance in that kind of exegesis.

For, indeed, the story of the Prying Man is a diagnosis of the Baconian, enlightened episteme--and, most startlingly, a prognosis of its ultimate failure. Anselmo lives a harmonious life, but his curiosity and his desire to unveil the truth about his wife's "real" fidelity lead him to stage more and more elaborate tests, until his life is finally destroyed. Put thus, the story is not much different from its Pandora's Box-style basic structure: the protagonist is warned not to pry, but does anyway, being forced to suffer the consequences.

Here's where it gets tricky. Anselmo never learns the truth. Instead, each of his tests ends up creating a more and more elaborate and intricately woven illusion against him--an illusion not thwarted by being set against other illusions. Even when the whole structure comes tumbling down, when the final veil of Isis is set to be savagely torn off--he can only conjecture what happened. After all, he never sees either Lothario or Camilla again. Anselmo's demand for total epistemological certainty forces him, in the end, to be satisfied with considerably less certainty than he started with: hearsay versus personal experience.

Nietzsche asks us to suppose that truth is a woman. Here, the object of the Prying Man's lust for knowledge actually is a woman; and he pursues her clumsily indeed. (The setup is so perfect that we might suppose the inserted tale to have been written by Pierre Menard). But the final consequence of the search is not the violent and unpleasant exposure of the truth, as it was in the case of Silenus' Wisdom. Instead, it is the final disappearance (cloistering) of the object of knowledge--a cloistering, by the rules of the story, unavoidable, itself caused directly by the prying.

Cervantes' Nietzschean warning is, if anything, more theoretically advanced than Adorno and Horkheimer's dialectic of Enlightenment. For Adorno and Horkheimer suppose that Enlightenment manages successfully to disenchant the world; that Pandora can actually get her box open. But with Cervantes, the small consolation of disenchantment, of satisfied curiosity, is no longer a counterweight to the horror unleashed by the enlightened project. Pierre Menard would be a johnny-come-lately had he written this text in our day; Cervantes was a doomed Cassandra.

Nietzsche's Folly

But who are they that for no other reason but that they were weary of life have hastened their own fate? Were they not the next neighbors to wisdom? among whom, to say nothing of Diogenes, Xenocrates, Cato, Cassius, Brutus, that wise man Chiron, being offered immortality, chose rather to die than be troubled with the same thing always. And now I think you see what would become of the world if all men should be wise; to wit it were necessary we got another kind of clay and another Prometheus. But I, partly through ignorance, partly unadvisedness, and sometimes through forgetfulness of evil, do now and then so sprinkle pleasure with the hopes of good and sweeten men up in their greatest misfortunes that they are not willing to leave this life,. even then when according to the account of the destinies this life has left them; and by how much the less reason they have to live, by so much the more they desire it; so far are they from being sensible of the least wearisomeness of life.
- Desiderius Erasmus, In Praise of Folly

Nietzsche, like any good German schoolboy, would probably have been intimately familiar with Erasmus in general and the Praise of Folly in particular. Yet no mention of Erasmus graces his work. That suggests a question: is there some affinity between them, whether causal or synchronistic? The Praise of Folly made Erasmus one of the most trenchant, but learned, social critics of his day (aside from Rabelais, of course). And Nietzsche, with his philological paraphernalia, was (is!) the most perceptive and intransigent critic of his.

In fact, I think, the similarity goes deeper; for Nietzsche's method owes much to Folly. Folly's enemies, the wise men, are also Nietzsche's enemies: they are the Stoics who deny life, the scholars who banter periphrastically about periphrasis, deluded statesmen and priests. And in its most crushing diagnosis Folly gives direction to a future Zarathustra:

For what is there at all done among men that is not full of folly, and that too from fools and to fools? Against which universal practice if any single one shall dare to set up his throat, my advice to him is, that following the example of Timon, he retire into some desert and there enjoy his wisdom to himself.

Nietzsche's technique, in many ways, is an attempt to take Folly seriously from the very beginning--and reject it when it literally dons its Christian garb. The wisdom that Folly mocks is the wisdom of Schopenhauer, which affirms the world to be excrement (calm yourself). And while Nietzsche does not deny wisdom, it is precisely this form of it that he considers most pernicious. Folly loves pride, that which makes life livable; and Nietzsche, bearing the banner of life, certainly doesn't prefer a stultifying and soul-destroying truth to a glorious and noble myth.

It is convenient, then, to describe Nietzsche's appropriation of folly as a sort of synthetic union between wisdom and delusion. But Nietzsche and Folly often don't agree, even when the subject isn't Christianity. Folly, for instance, prefers the squirrel to the lion; and on a less ironic level, Erasmus wants a fair and equitable royal authority rather than a corrupt one. So Nietzsche's work is never just a calque or imitation, since the implication of a better possible world in Erasmus's narrative is not at all his.

That consideration must complicate any attempt at linking Nietzsche to humanism directly. Still, even as he preaches the Overman, Nietzsche reveals his affinity with the lively and Bakhtinian sixteenth-century world (Montaigne, he says, was almost as influential for him as Schopenhauer was). Perhaps the note they both respond to is a more ancient one still: of rising through self-overcoming above the darkness of a declining world, and maybe bringing some chunk of it along. This legacy neither Erasmus nor Nietzsche could ever disavow.

Addison's Peregrinating Shilling

I WAS last night visited by a friend of mine, who has an inexhaustible fund of discourse, and never fails to entertain his company with a variety of thoughts and hints that are altogether new and uncommon. Whether it were in complaisance to my way of living, or his real opinion, he advanced the following paradox, "That it required much greater talents to fill up and become a retired life, than a life of business." Upon this occasion he rallied very agreeably the busy men of the age, who only valued themselves for being in motion, and passing through a series of trifling and insignificant actions. In the heat of his discourse, seeing a piece of money lying on my table, "I defy (says he) any of these active persons to produce half the adventures that this twelvepenny piece has been engaged in, were it possible for him to give us an account of his life."
My friend's talk made so odd an impression upon my mind, that soon after I was a-bed I fell insensibly into a most unaccountable reverie, that had neither moral nor design in it, and cannot be so properly called a dream as a delirium.
Methoughts the shilling that lay upon the table reared itself upon its edge, and turning the face towards me, opened its mouth, and in a soft silver sound, gave me the following account of his life and adventures...

- Joseph Addison, The Tatler, No. 249 (Nov. 11, 1710)

Almost every essay in the Tatler or the Spectator is overflowing with critical, theoretical, and historical significance. These periodicals did not merely reflect the mores of the Augustan Age; they shaped eighteenth-century culture itself. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, for instance, describes the elaborate process he went through to arrive at an approximation of Spectatorial style. The metaphors and frameworks employed by Addison and Steele, then, are a uniquely powerful starting point for cultural history.

Addison's shilling tells a story. It is a peculiarly Whiggish story, to be sure (though I doubt that an acre of land would tell one better). But it also illustrates the intersection between capital, politics, and culture. The path of this particular atom of capital is wholly dependent on political events, and its own experience of them is mediated through its commercial function. The shilling is likewise the subject and object of cultural development, largely autonomous from politics. In that sense, the shilling's space-time biography undermines simplistic ideas of base and superstructure.

But the shilling is also embodied. It rejoices in not being stamped with the escutcheons of the Commonwealth, and it explicitly suffers from silver-trimming and hole-punching. Its body bears the traces of the political--politics restamps its face from Elizabeth to James (evidently) to Charles II (evidently)--and this restamping is explicitly gendered, since the shilling refers to it as a "change of sex."

Though embodied, the shilling's subjectivity is a curious one: it cannot stand still. It languishes in the miser's chest and at the gambler's table. That is, it isn't unhappy with being disused, but rather out of circulation. And that suggests that its encounters with politics and culture (and, through the medium of the Spectator, with publicity) are merely encounters with other forms of circulation, with political events and cultural appropriations.

All of which adds up to a very Deleuzian Addison; for "flow" is merely another way to speak of "circulation." The way the Whigs see trade--as a life-giving recirculating stream interrupted at times by artificial blockages like miserliness and political upheaval--itself suggests a turn to Deleuze and his abstract machines. It is really only with Smith and the political economists that commerce begins to be conceived in terms of rigidly defined categories of production, distribution, consumption, and their attendant fixing of subjectivity. The watermill (flow-mill) gives you Addisonian Whiggism; the steam-mill gives you the flow-blocking machinery of developed capitalism.

Oscar Wilde and the Trap of Irony

Jack: Oh, that's nonsense, Algy. You never talk
anything but nonsense.

Algernon: Nobody ever does.

- Oscar Wilde, “The Importance of Being Earnest”

“The Importance of Being Earnest” is, by all accounts, an innocent little comedy by a man who never suffered his wit to carry him into wisdom. Certainly it is easy to laugh at. But the easy laughter it offers is never quite satisfactory from a traditional point of view: the great eighteenth-century comedies were full of irony and biting satire, but generally served it with a helping of well-meaning moral edification. The absence of any such didacticism in Wilde's play raises an interesting question: is it impossible?

I think it is, and that the play is therefore a tragedy. In “Schopenhauer as Educator,” Nietzsche distinguished between two types of cheerfulness: a good kind, which refreshes us with “courage and strength,” and a cheerfulness which is false and deceiving, since it laughs at that which it has not made its own. The distinction found an afterlife in Heidegger's critique of idle talk. But Nietzsche's emphasis on laughter, his assertion of the vital need to laugh at oneself, is a more penetrating attack.

In the ironic world of Oscar Wilde, it is no longer possible to make anything one's own—that is, to understand it fully in relation to one's own subjectivity. There is apparently a made-up philosopher named Jerboa Kolinowski, whose single known utterance is “seriousness is an honesty of forms.” For Wilde, the forms are incapable of sustaining honesty: Algernon himself has as much subjectivity as his invented invalid Bunbury. Nietzschean laughter depends on making something one's own and then, recognizing its arbitrariness, to dissolve it in mockery. Laughing at oneself is thereby the fundamental act of laughter.

The ironic attitude begins as a way of performing a similar function, as a kind of skepticism based on direct, dialogical, Bakhtinian experience rather than abstract logic. But if the Pyrrhonian skeptic can execute his dismantling of philosophical claims, suspend his judgment, then carry on his life as normal—the ironist is forced into an infinite loop, since he does not have the privilege of compartmentalizing his metaphysics.

What does all this stuff have to do with the play? Well, traditionally a comedy in the vein of Goldsmith and Farquhar is supposed to have a happy ending, where the cross-dressing and deception is unmasked, the traditional two or three couples are formed, and everyone's love is consummated. Indeed, “The Importance of Being Earnest” attempts to do just that. But the destabilization of Kolinowskian forms carried out in the first act implies that no resolution is possible—the romantic ending is a convention with no underlying reality, and is thus, in the last analysis, unsatisfying (compare the list of romantic rules given to the protagonist in Stendhal's The Red and the Black). The play is a tragedy because irony corrupts all such satisfaction: Jack and Algernon, like Midas with his golden touch, make the final resolving encounter with subjectivity impossible.

Being Earnest is important, but Ernest is a pose. If the title is taken literally, then the viewer must experience her catharsis from the realization that, however important, earnestness is unattainable. For precisely this reason, philosophy is destroyed in ages ruled by the decadence of the ironic mode. Even a Rortyan ironist is unequipped to defend himself philosophically, and he is forced to fall back on a lazy last-man complacency, the assumption that liberalism is right because no one cares enough to disagree.