Jameson as a Running Dog of Banality

(NB. My computer is broken, so my last post for this month is a polemic I never got around to posting many months ago.)

We also need to point out tirelessly the interesting development that the "market" turns out finally to be as Utopian as socialism has recently been held to be. Under these circumstances, nothing is served by substituting one inert institutional structure (bureaucratic planning) for another inert institutional structure (namely, the market itself). What is wanted is a great collective project in which an active majority of the population participates, as something belonging to it and constructed by its own energies.
- Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Jameson is a man of considerable intelligence and penetration, but he is given to a certain glibness; he is an uncomfortable postmodernist, and the ease with which he deploys intertextual references and cites divers cultural artifacts only seems to highlight that fact. The main deficiency of Postmodernism, though, is the constant reemergence of the political--always marked with a sickly testiness. Jameson is a Marxist, and he wants to make that fact as clear to the reader as possible; his text functions as a vehicle of self-presentation and identity construction, and within its borders Jameson seems to be carrying on a struggle against himself.

Witness, for instance, the reference to how “bizarre” it is to identify Soviet gulags with Nazi concentration camps. As an heir of the sixties, there's no reason for Jameson to associate himself with actually existing socialism at all, and hence no reason to describe as bizarre a contention that, while arguable, is hardly out of the ordinary. But some latent will to authenticity makes him pursue a United Front strategy, with which he can evade the anxiety inherent in his analysis by grounding himself in the solid certainties of respectable orthodox Marxism (notice, too, the connection with Sartre's similar, but far more honest and explicit, refusal to recognize the reality of the gulags because of the political inexpediency of that recognition). Hence, also, his periodic reversion to the tried-and-true tactic of non-confrontational Soviet professors: expound a theory, then spend the rest of your time finding similar approaches in Marx. The Grundrisse serves Jameson particularly well in this regard. When Marx himself (incidentally, “Marx himself” is a recurring phrase, a sort of more insipid ipse dixit) is unavailable for comment, Marxist jargon phrases and their derivatives stand in: Jameson cites Debord's characterization of the image as “the final form of commodity reification” no fewer than four times, thrice describing it as “remarkable” and once as “famous.”

This is also the root of his yearning for a “great collective project.” Elsewhere, Jameson mocks the concept of political nostalgia. But this affirmation of the ultimate end of Marxist thought in the era of postmodernism is so hazy, so lacking in any concreteness or coherence, that it suggests that Jameson's Marxism is at best a lifestyle choice valorized to the level of a personality keystone. Indeed, the project as Jameson conceptualizes it resembles nothing more than the great public works projects of the USSR: BAM, Dnepropetrovsk, and so on. Fittingly for such an incurable postmodernist, Jameson's vision of the future is little more than a Social Realist poster of a well-muscled worker toting his hammer proudly into the sunset.

In one of his cleverer moments, Jameson seizes upon Paul de Man's use of the vocabulary of “temptation,” and so on, to make a larger point about his “ascetic impulse.” We might do the same with his own unremitting flow of “interventions.” They crop up everywhere: Nietzsche intervenes, as does “alertness to the problems of photography,” as do any number of people and concepts. While, like “always already,” this term has long been a staple word (an “iron ration,” as Adorno and Horkheimer would put it) in the postmodernist vocabulary, Jameson is far too subtle a stylist to rely so fundamentally on a cliché. I think his use of “intervention” is reflective of a deeper anxiety, a desire for salvation, a will to expiate the sins of postmodernism and achieve some reconciliation. The operative image is, of course, the cavalry in the Western, intervening at the last moment (in the last instance) to save the white people from the savages.

The fact is, Jameson is manifestly unable to see past the horizons of even the most moribund Marxism. For instance, Jameson evidently believes, and is not ashamed to assert, that for his enemies the conservatives “Utopia” always means “socialism” and “the political” means Marxism—as does “ideology.” The most egregious example in Jameson's book is the placement of little pluses (for leftist) and minuses (for reactionary) next to the names of the theorists in the chart at the end of Chapter 2. (Transvaluation of all values this is not.) The failings of this brand of academic postmodernism shine through with crystal clarity: Jameson is prevented by his inborn prejudices from carrying the critical project to its logical conclusion. In the absence of a functional politics, we get what is essentially an empty space.

Self-Hating Intellectuals and the "Russian Soul"

Princess: No, there is an Institute in Petersburg
Pe-da-go-gical, I think they call it.
They train in schism and unbelief,
Professors!!--our kinsman studied with them,
And came out! Might as well go apprentice at a pharmacy.
He runs away from women, even me!
Cares not for ranks! He's a chemist, he's a botanist.
Prince Fyodor--my nephew.

[...]

Chatsky: From far away, I voiced a wish--
Humbly, yes, but still aloud--
That God would crush this evil spirit
Of imitation empty, slavish, blind;
That He would give a spark to somebody with heart
Who could, by words and by example
Keep us, as with a tight-drawn rein
From our pathetic lust for foreign lands.
Call me an Old Believer, fine,
But our North for me has worsened hundredfold
Since it has traded it all in for newer stuff--
Our customs, language, sacred history ...
Will we awake from foreign fashions' rule?
So that our smart and sprightly people
At least would think us Russian by our speech.
- Aleksandr Griboedov, Горе от ума (Trouble From Being Too Smart), 1823

This play is among the best of the classic works of Russian literature, but it is virtually unknown in the West. Difficulties begin with the title. Typically, it is translated something like "The Woes of Wit," which is not only bland and inexpressive but also radically betrays the point of the play: "ум" does not translate to "wit" or even "cleverness," but rather, quite simply, "intelligence." The plot, in brief, is this. Chatsky, an irreverent ironist in the Oscar Wilde vein, returns to Russia from abroad to woo his childhood sweetheart Sofya Pavlovna. Against him is her father (a fanatical conservative and boot-licker to autocracy), her current lover Molchalin (a taciturn and servile social climber), another suitor (a wealthy and stupid military man), and the entire Russian beau monde (a gaggle of feckless idiots with nothing to do but gossip, curtsy, and imitate French fashions). Chatsky loses; a rumor is spread that he has gone insane, and he is caught in a compromising position with Sofya. Instead of marrying her, as is supposed to happen in these plays, Chatsky quits Russia in disgust. In other words, it's not his wit that is the source of all his troubles: it's precisely the fact that he's too smart for this narrow and provincial little world.

Griboedov's play remains so famous--it is the equivalent of a Russian Hamlet, it's staged so often--because it touches a persistently aching nerve. There's some hint of what that is in the passages I've quoted above. The Princess's line is parody--Griboedov's mission is to expose that kind of brutish anti-intellectualism to ridicule, and he succeeds admirably. (Incidentally, “botanist” has since become the Russian word for “nerd.”) Yet Chatsky's monologue is delivered in all sincerity. The Russian intellectual wants to have a legitimate and acknowledged position within society, but he does not want it on Western terms. (Notice, by the way, that the referent of “our” in Chatsky's speech is not Russia in general, but only the tiny circle of the upper class to which he belongs.) This attempt leads to a fatal dilemma.

Rousseau wrote—in 1762!—that “the Russians will never be civilized, because they were civilized too soon.” The prophecy would have come true in every respect, but for the existence of the intellectual class. It emerged as a kind of partial-birth abortion, brilliant and self-assertive but never quite legitimate. As a result, the intellectual was left to balance on a razor's edge: either he believed that Russia should turn to the West for its future or that it should turn inward. Both options would lead to his own negation. A victorious Westernizer would be merely an unoriginal legate of European liberalism, producing nothing but footnotes to Mill. The end result of “narodnichestvo,” on the other hand, is the intellectual's dissolution in the deep and dark pit of “the people”—a people which has not substantially changed since it was converted by fire and sword to Christianity a thousand years ago. For all the virtues of this archaic and myth-ridden world, it is incapable of supporting a distinct intellectual class.

In the West, it is often easy to forget that Russian literary texts are not the unproblematic output of a popular consciousness. One might say, for instance, that if Leaves of Grass is worth anything at all, it is because it reflects a certain underlying substratum of “Americanness” particularly well. A book like Dead Souls has much more trouble claiming its birthright. When Westerners read about the unfathomable depths of the melancholy Russian soul, or some other such mystical claptrap, what they are actually reading is the Russian intellectual's own profoundly painful attempt to understand his country and his people.

We might read Trouble From Being Too Smart as an allegory for this process, suggestively hinted at by Chatsky's musings on the inadequacies of his contemporaries. Sofya Pavlovna, of course, represents Russia herself, and Chatsky stands in for the intellectuals—after all, his main project is to figure out how Sofya could possibly love the obvious dullard Molchalin and rebuff his own advances. What is at stake here is nothing less than Russia's destiny: will it take the side of the Frenchified ninnies or the archaic reactionaries? Will it ever accept the intellectuals as they are? To the extent that it offers a resolution, it is a deeply unsatisfying one; Chatsky's abrupt departure does not really constitute a way out of the dilemma.

In practice, many Russian intellectuals—Tolstoy, for one—simply “repented” and devoted their lives to making themselves a part of “the people,” with its mysterious soul. Their self-hatred shows through more and more over the course of nineteenth-century literary history. In fact, it produced the Revolution. The self-sacrificing terrorism of Narodnaya Volya was not just about radical reform; it was in equal measure an attempt to atone for the sin of having been an intellectual in a country where organic intellectualism was impossible. The Bolsheviks, including Lenin himself, were made of the same stuff—except they offered the possibility of salvation without self-destruction. Only later did the intellectuals realize that they had sold their souls to a much nastier devil.

(for Cammisa, who asked for it)

In Defense of Passive Obedience

Yet ev'n in France, in shackl'd France,
Midst Want, and Slav'ry, Song, and Dance:
E'en there, the Friends to Truth, and You,
Helvetius, Diderot, Montescue;
D'Alembert, Rousseau, Marmontel,
In spite of Slav'ry, lov'd to dwell.
Yet there, the Wise, the gay Voltaire,
Freedom's and Candors lineal Heir;
There form'd, his sweet instructive Page,
To curb the Priest's, the Tyrant's Rage,
To scourge, divert, and mend the Age.
Nor chang'd, for Brunswick's mild Command,
The Pleasures of his native Land:
Midst Power despotic, Monkish Cells,
Thy Beccaria peaceful dwells.
These chosen few, the Wise, and Great,
Lament, their hapless Country's Fate;
View all, with Philosophick Eyes,
See thro' the Gaudy, thin Disguise.

...Yet ev'n in wretched Lands, like these,
True Wisdom, finds Content, and Ease;
Knows that these Ills, are gentler far,
Than horrid Discords, civil War.
- The Patriots of North-America: A Sketch, with Explanatory Notes

This anonymous poem, published in New York in 1775, is a massive, fifty-page-long screed against the American Revolutionaries. The author fulminates with all the rage of a fire and brimstone preacher. For him, evidently, the Revolution was the greatest catastrophe he had yet known. This particular section makes the point that it is better to live under French slavery than with the riots and disorders occasioned by the revolutionary outbreak--and the war had only just begun. Clearly, the poetic merits of the work are questionable. But the broader point which the author attempts, inelegantly and circuitously, to argue, deserves a more serious consideration.

To begin with, consider the sheer audacity needed for an eighteenth-century American to make the claim that living under slavery was better than anything at all. ("Give me liberty or give me death" was a sentiment hardly unique to Patrick Henry). If there was anything everyone in the colonies could agree on, it was that slavery was the worst conceivable condition; this is why Loyalist pamphleteers (including this one) always made a point of arguing that the revolutionary mobs and the Continental Congress were tyrannical and illegitimate. For eighteenth-century Britons, slavery did not simply equate to tyranny. It was also a moral failure on the part of each and every citizen; to suffer slavery to persist was to be unmanly, and even a suicidal lashing-out in the manner of Brutus killing Caesar was preferable to continued inaction.

I was planning originally to write a calm and measured post, pointing out that this author seems to have been on to something--that his resurrection of passive obedience as an ideology could guarantee a kind of freedom that the revolutionaries would not even understand. But then I stumbled upon a veritable fountain of logorrhea, foolishness that makes the revolutionaries look like reasonable men: the banter of the pseudo-new-left politickasters about the implications of the financial crisis. One guy, holding high the banner of Georgy Plekhanov Thought, thinks this is a wonderful opportunity for Roosevelt-style reformism. In other words, his Marxist blathering is just a cover story for the old Fabian technocratic panacea. Why this thoroughly unoriginal recipe should require the volume of pseudo-intellectual justification he produces is absolutely beyond me. I don't imagine that the dead weight of the nostalgic British establishment needs much convincing.

On the other side, old "Autonomist" snake-oil peddler Mario Tronti thinks there is something called "the workers" that "we need" to found our agency. A characteristic move of the zombie Left, this: assert in the beginning of your article that the workers are politically nonexistent, then close off by saying that "we need" to somehow resurrect them. Class consciousness by theoretical fiat! Where does he propose to get this "Left"? Presumably out of the same orifice where Hardt and Negri found their Multitude.

The most promising, and yet somehow the most disappointing, is this little Deleuzian rhapsody. It is promising, because it advocates a certain abandonment of stale illusions, based on more venturesome notions of subjectivity; it is disappointing, not merely because the author conceals his stylistic infelicities with a veneer of 1980s postmodernist clichés, but because he chases his flight of theoretical fancy far beyond the realm of possible concrete action. What are the stakes of "xenoeconomics"? Who, in God's holy name, is going to be "using capitalism" for anything? Does he mean to suggest that George Soros and Warren Buffett are going to go to town on the NYSE with their copies of A Thousand Plateaus? Intellectuals, obviously, are in no position to control the flow of any events whatsoever--they can't even make the academy a refuge from the stultifying colonization of technocracy. (Quite the opposite.) Fancy Deleuzian language, while all very well in its way, is here just a over-elaborated attempt to conceal the total collapse of agency.

Where, at the end of it all, does this leave our poor Loyalist? I think that with its negation of positive and absolute political duties (i.e., resistance to tyranny), Loyalism negates the conceptual framework of eighteenth-century politics. Jefferson hoped that the continued existence of the independent yeoman would be secured by his political action; he was wrong. But in fact the independent yeoman, in his archetypal form--J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur--was no revolutionary. He was a Loyalist. Not because of his thoroughgoing loyalty to King George, but because he believed disengagement from politics was the only way to be left alone.

Passive obedience (or non-resistance) does not require anything more than ritual to be realized. Carry out the rites of political obeisance that we need from you, and your soul will not be inquired into. (This is why Voltaire and Rousseau are here presented in a positive light: their critique has legitimacy despite its lack of a praxis.) In contrast, eighteenth-century revolutionary politics--and the various chimerae of the contemporary left--require a much more thorough commitment. The most ludicrous manifestation of this today is Alain Badiou, who fetishizes the militant and grounds subjectivity in a thoroughly impoverished "Truth."

I have been peddling this line for a while, but I haven't gotten sick of it yet, so I'll repeat. In the face of a collapsing agency, who needs praxis or revolutionary dedication? By all means, pursue xenoeconomics, inspect capital as a naturalist studies a weird bug. Do your thing--publish, draw pay, consume--but do not cede the battleground of your subjectivity to any ideology. I must admit I see some beauty in the poet's vision, however inadequately expressed:

See the poor Gaul, whose merry Soul,
Nor Priests, nor Tyrants, can controul;
Give him, his Onion, Soupe, and Bread,
No idle Cares, perplex his Head.
Intendants, Farmers, Soldiers, Spies,
Unnumbered, pass before his eyes,
He sees them all, and never sighs.
Judges corrupt, and Racks, and Wheels,
Hang o'er his Head, he nothing feels;
Contented, in his humble Sphere,
To mind his Work, the Laws revere ...

Woes of next Cen'try, ne'er revolves,
Nor breaks his Rest, with Town Resolves;
Of Slav'ry, nor of Want, complains,
But sings, and Dances, in his Chains.

The Epicurean Dilemma

Again, I think, in writing to Idomeneus [Epicurus] urges him not to live as a slave to laws and opinions, as long as they do not occasion troubles caused by a blow from one's neighbor. So if those who abolish laws and political institutions abolish human life, then this is what Epicurus and Metrodorus do; for they urge their adherents to avoid public life and express disgust for those who participate in it, abusing the earliest and wisest lawgivers and urging contempt for the laws, providing there is no fear of beatings or punishment.
- Plutarch, Against Colotes

Read ... the letter of Epicurus which is entitled "To Idomeneus"; he requests Idomeneus that he flee and hurry as much as he can, before some greater force has a chance to intervene and take away his freedom to 'retreat.'
- Seneca, Letters on Ethics (both of these from Hellenistic Philosophy, Inwood and Gerson, eds.)

The most problematic sticking point of Epicurean philosophy, for both the ancients and the moderns, has probably been the concept of the "swerve." Epicurean atoms move deterministically, bouncing off one another in theoretically predictable ways, except for the fact that once in a while (it's not clear when, where, or how often) an atom "swerves" in a random direction. On the one hand, this helps the Epicureans account for the fact that the universe exists (because without an initial swerve, all atoms could only move downwards). On the other hand--and more significantly--the swerve seems to bear some relationship to free will. The nucleus of randomness at the heart of their physics permits an exception to the laws, which presumably (it is not clear how) allows an uncaused cause to exist.

It is common for critics of Epicureanism to seize upon the obvious absurdity of this point and condemn the Epicureans because of it. Indeed, it seems to make the entire enterprise of grounding ethics on physics totally senseless: a system of physical laws that admits of exceptions is a contradiction in terms. But in fact there seems to be a deeper commitment behind this move, deeper even than their commitment to freedom of the will. (At the very least, Epicurus could not reject free will, because the evidence of the senses says that we have free will and for him all sense data is true.)

The swerve must be understood equally in political terms. In his ethics (which shade into a kind of anti-politics), Epicurus emphasizes the need to maintain the freedom to retreat: all involvement in public life is pragmatic, and it is imperative that the possibility of disengagement be preserved. His ethical counsels to avoid public life, then, are a kind of warning against entangling alliances. The possibility of retreat guarantees the freedom from subjection. Thus the system of political laws, like the system of physical laws, is undermined by the indomitable swerve.

This suggests that we have, in a certain sense, misunderstood him. If it is clear that Epicurus opposes politics, his stance with respect to the natural order of the universe (physics' object of inquiry) seems considerably more positive. He plays off natural laws and concrete sense-experience against hazy lekta and superstition. But the swerve implies a more conflicted attitude; somehow he conceives of himself (and potentially all human beings) as an exception to the laws. Epicureanism is much more about freedom, ontologically and politically, than we had assumed--and so it is appropriate that Thomas Jefferson (the self-proclaimed Epicurean) would have made "eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man" his battle-standard.

In a world where even the swerve, in the form of quantum indeterminacy, cannot guarantee free will, and where the universal state makes a mockery of political retreat, the Epicurean doctrine seems obsolete and fatally unrigorous. Yet this cannot negate his ethical mission. To find a way of grounding the exception in the face of increasingly constraining systems has been, and continues to be, the task of critical theory--yet there has been little effort to recover the resolute materialism and principled self-distancing of the Epicureans. What better allies do we have if it turns out that the exception, like so much else, is just--a pleasant fiction?

Ars Fugae

- Glenn Gould performing Contrapunctus IV, from Bach's Art of Fugue.

It says here that Ezra Pound wrote his Cantos in the form of a fugue. The basic principle is this: to introduce the major themes in the beginning, then develop them in any number of contexts, each time allowing the natural process at the heart of the work to reemerge in the succession of elements as it did in the introduction. (This happens to virtue, corruption and rebirth, for instance, as the work develops). So I started thinking: could the fugue serve as a style for scholarly--specifically, historical--argument? What opportunities would such a technique afford us?

At present most academic history books are written in one of two ways. Either a single context or frame of reference is set up and the narrative moves through it in a neatly chronological order, or a set of social phenomena is identified and each is traced more or less independently of the others. Some books combine elements of both, and some rely, explicitly or implicitly, on some kind of dialectical structure. But the fact is, neither of the two main techniques is wholly satisfactory. The first creates the need to identify some kind of progression or radical change that would set the end of the narrative apart from its beginning--a sort of chronological payoff that, if it does not actually exist, needs to be invented. The result is often a perversion of the historical texture. The second technique creates the illusion that the historical field--the entire life of a society at a given moment in its existence--can be neatly parceled out into almost monadic subject areas. The dialectic is the most interesting style, but applied artificially it collapses into a caricature of itself.

The fugue, as I imagine it, would be a sequence, rather than a progression, of dialectical processes. That is, the subject of the fugue is a dialectic--an organic movement rather than the frozen and abstract thesis-antithesis-synthesis sequence that is often taught in the manuals. (Why a dialectic? Because, after all, the fugue is a genre based on counterpoint.) The fugue then assembles thematic/chronological units, fluidly defined, and follows the emergence of the subject as it recapitulates itself within them. The key is that the subject undergoes changes, but not a development: it adapts itself to each new setting, but retains a certain core that is resistant to fundamental transformations. An ideal subject would, like a pattern in a fractal, be visible at the most intimate as well as the grandest levels of historical inquiry.

The purpose of relying on the fugue rather than on traditional argumentative styles is to return (as Pound does so well) to the question of the recurrent in history. Historical writing at least since Hegel has deliberately occluded the processes that reappear in every historical moment, because the profession is invested in studying the superficial--the dynamic rather than the static. This is not to create a base/superstructure distinction: the dynamic includes economics as well as ideas, material substances as well as cultural forms. But it is this very thoroughness of historical change that creates the impression that everything is subject to it.

By taking the fugue as their grounding, historians can move closer to discovering how much their argumentative form impacts the narratives they create. Hence the fugue is nothing more than another perspective, another partial and limited form. And yet the intricacy of the episodes, the subtle construction of the subject, may allow for a particularly rich and aesthetically compelling work--to say nothing of the possibility of double and triple, and quadruple, fugues. A universal history written today would take the form of a fugue with an unlimited number of subjects.

The Reinvention of Tradition

... The basic discreditation of all prejudices, which unites the experimental fervor of the new natural sciences during the Enlightenment, is universalized and radicalized during the historical Enlightenment.

This is the point at which the attempt to critique historical hermeneutics has to start. The overcoming of all prejudices, this global demand of the Enlightenment, will itself prove to be a prejudice, and removing it opens the way to an appropriate understanding of the finitude which dominates not only our humanity but also our historical consciousness.

Does being situated within traditions really mean being subject to prejudices and limited in one's freedom? Is not, rather, all human existence, even the freest, limited in various ways? If this is true, the idea of an absolute reason is not a possibility for historical humanity. Reason exists for us only in concrete, historical terms--i.e., it is not its own master but remains constantly dependent on the given circumstances in which it operates. This is true not only in the sense in which Kant, under the influence of the skeptical critique of Hume, limited the claims of rationalism to the a priori element in the knowledge of nature; it is still truer of historical consciousness and the possibility of historical knowledge. For that man is concerned here with himself and his own creations (Vico) is only an apparent solution of the problem posed by historical knowledge. Man is alien to himself and his historical fate in a way quite different from the way nature, which knows nothing of him, is alien to him.
- Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method

Gadamer seems, in a way, to take his point of departure from Proust. I have heard the recommendation that one should read the Recherche at least twice: only the second time is one really equipped to be the kind of reader Proust wants us to be. (I am, hélas, still inadequate.) Proustian memory, like reading the Recherche, is a twice-born consciousness--it has to be lived through directly the first time and survive in a partial and unreconciled form to create the preconditions for its recapture. It is the same with tradition; what forms its living substance is the fact that it is the totality of an already-lived historical experience, through which we can then recapture it.

Or is it? Gadamer is maddeningly vague about what tradition really is, and what our proper attitude to it should be. On the one hand, it seems as if it should be individual experience which gives us our prejudices and our presuppositions. On the other, it appears to be something much broader: a collective historical unconscious. (This problem may in fact be a residue of Heidegger. The way the idle talk of the They covers up the reality of death for the individual Dasein is a sort of echo or microcosm of the covering up of the problem of Being by metaphysics, and to repair the latter seems to imply the redemption of the former as well.) Gadamer strongly implies that the legacy of tradition is a universal heritage, but in the process, he forgets to address the central problem: transmission.

Is the wild child in the state of nature subject to tradition? Only in the first, weaker sense. Is the nineteenth-century German historian subject to tradition? At least as much in the second sense as in the first. Something intervenes between them, and that is what forges the link between individual memory and collective experience. It is tempting to outline a solution along the following lines: the German historian has had a two-step process of the reclamation of tradition. First he recaptured the prejudices of a common tradition by using his individual prejudices as a kind of springboard, then he looked at the historical past through a lens (prism?) of presuppositions that now partook of the totality of common historical experience.

But there is still something awfully reductive here. Where is the common tradition? How does one get access to it? Is it simply a matter of a classical education? But that is clearly inadequate, because the classics are only a kind of tabula rasa on which we impose the cultural prejudices we have developed later. Is it a kind of popular culture, a Zeitgeist that wafts about and that one can't help picking up involuntarily? Gadamer seems to imply something more fundamental than that, and even the Zeitgeist can never be appropriated identically by two different people.

In fact, to reify the split between individual memory and common tradition would be a significant mistake. Individual memory is in many ways a history of what is vulgarly called "socialization." It is the entrance of the human being into her rights as an heir. But what is inherited here is a much more unstable, rough-edged, partial, fluctuating thing than Gadamer wants to believe. Some elements of the legacy are entailed, and cannot be critically overturned or sold off, while others are unencumbered; and for everyone the will says something different. And there is no point at which we have completed the acquisition--tradition is always being revealed to us. Hence even the second step of the two-step process is illegitimate. We do not look at the past through the ready-made film of tradition, but rather we acquire historical understanding just as we acquire tradition itself. I think that that is what Gadamer wanted to say--but he was obviously uncomfortable with declaring an individual tradition for everyone. The bogeyman of relativism leers angrily from that direction, but I am not afraid of it, and neither should you be: together, our partial traditions make up something like a totality.