Lincoln and the Mud-sill

But another class of reasoners hold the opinion that there is no such relation between capital and labor, as assumed; and that there is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life, in the condition of a hired laborer, that both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them groundless. They hold that labor is prior to, and independent of, capital; that, in fact, capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed---that labor can exist without capital, but that capital could never have existed without labor. Hence they hold that labor is the superior---greatly the superior---of capital.

They do not deny that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital. The error, as they hold, is in assuming that the whole labor of the world exists within that relation. A few men own capital; and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital, hire, or buy, another few to labor for them ... Again, as has already been said, the opponents of the "mud-sill" theory insist that there is not, of necessity, any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life. There is demonstration for saying this. Many independent men, in this assembly, doubtless a few years ago were hired laborers. And their case is almost if not quite the general rule.

The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This, say its advocates, is free labor---the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all---gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all. If any continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune.
- Abraham Lincoln, address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society (1859)

Lots of talk these days about accelerationism. What this appears to mean is analogous to the Situationist approach to art: take capitalism and simultaneously realize and destroy it. Capitalism deterritorializes, it melts all that is solid into air and profanes all that's holy. But it does not go far enough, it congeals and paralyzes, transforms into structures of oppression--so use its own essence against it! In fact, accelerationism is one of Marxism's most legitimate heirs. After all, what distinguished Marx from his precessors was not his "scientific" approach or his materialism but above all his lack of nostalgia for the bygone utopias capitalism had swept away. The way for him was always forward, towards a realization of capitalism's revolutionary impulse.

What does Lincoln have to say to us about accelerationism? His speech, of course, embodies the very liberating claims that grounded revolutionary capitalism to begin with. And while we may laugh at the naive liberalism of the assertion that "it is not the fault of the system," it is undeniable that his vision is much more appealing than the neo-feudalism of the "mud-sill theory." What animates the thought of Lincoln, like that of Thoreau, is the inherent potentiality of any structural arrangement: to be a hired laborer is not simply that, it is to be a hired laborer with the potential to become an employer. This means that no particular position has any specific value or worthlessness except insofar as it is a token in the generalized economy of social advancement.

Here, however, Lincoln runs aground without noticing it. For the operative metaphor is not at all the stream of history, pushing mankind forward to greater and greater heights; rather, it is the wheel of samsara or Fortuna. The economy of free labor is fundamentally circular. The system exists only to reproduce itself, to enable another generation to enter an identical cycle. Because the lowliness of the hired laborer is redeemable only by his potential for progress, any structural change or breakdown in the system would mean that it becomes monstrous. It is fitting that Lincoln's audience is the Agricultural Society of Wisconsin, because his rhetoric is firmly situated in (Bakhtin's) chronotope of the countryside. The irreversible time of capitalism is thus revealed as pseudo-cyclical (as Debord would put it).

Perhaps this little quandary is of no relevance whatsoever to accelerationism. Yet I think that if the latter is really to produce a coherent praxis, rather than a species of Chardin-esque metaphysical bloviation, it must account for a generalized form of the problem. When we think we are deterritorializing, maybe we are only reproducing a cycle? Is the escape from the cycle part of another cycle? Like Ptolemaic astronomy, accelerationism is in danger of suffering from epicyclical degeneration. We cannot, indeed, make a step in any new theory of politics without plunging into the realm of the recurrent. The denial of this is the characteristic lie of our perishing modernity.

The Possibility of Assent

Still, our case at least is straightforward; all we want to do is to discover the truth without strife and this we pursue with the greatest care and enthusiasm. For although all knowledge is beset by many hardships and although there is so much unclarity in the things themselves and so much weakness in our faculty of judgment that the most ancient and wise thinkers were justified in doubting that they could discover what they wished to, still, they did not give up and neither shall we weary and abandon our enthusiasm for uncovering [what we seek]. The sole aim of our discussions is to tease out--or, as it were, squeeze out--something which is either true or comes as close to it as possible, by speaking on both sides of the issue and listening [to our opponents]. The only difference between us and those who think that they know something is that they do not doubt that the positions which they defend are true, while we say that many things are plausible, those which we can easily follow [in practice] but can hardly affirm.

But we are freer and more flexible just in so far as our ability to decide lies wholly in our own hands; we are not compelled by any necessity to defend a whole set of positions which are laid down like orders. For the others are tied down and committed before they can decide what is best; furthermore, it when they are at the most vulnerable time of life that they either follow some friend or become captivated by one speech given by the first person they happen to hear and so make decisions about things which are unknown to them. Having been carried off to whatever school it might be as though by a storm, they then cling to it as though to a rock.
- Cicero, Academica [from Inwood and Gerson, Hellenistic Philosophy]

Cicero isn't a particularly consistent or orthodox Skeptic--he likes Stoicism too much for that. But here he seems to put his finger on something integral to the Skeptics' critical project, something that they themselves lose sight of all too easily: that Skepticism can only be a provisional waypoint on the road to something imagined as justified assent or knowledge. The general outline of the Skeptical point of view is this: there is either knowledge or opinion; knowledge does not exist; but the wise man would not assent (in the Stoic sense) to an opinion; therefore the wise man would not assent to anything. So what could be the real meaning of the wise man in the context of Skepticism?

One interpretation, which seems plausible and even interesting, is suggested by several of the Skeptics' texts: the Skeptic wise man, unlike the Stoic one, does not actually exist--rather, he functions as a kind of purely instrumental legal fiction that allows the Skeptics to meet the Stoics on their own ground. A consistent wise man would not have any opinions or knowledge about anything at all and would not possess any substantial ethical advantages over the common man, with his base opinions. (Not until Sextus Empiricus would the Skeptics defend a firm distinction between metaphysical truths and pragmatic everyday truths, which is one way of simultaneously clouding and solving the issue.) Hence the work that the Skeptics make the wise man do in their account is only of the kind that helps them poke holes in Stoicism--he's defined in a purely negative sense. It is not even clear how the Skeptics could defend the wise man as a condition to aspire to, since that pretty clearly requires adherence to a particular concept of wisdom or goodness.

Cicero, I think, does this notion one better. There is a kind of wise man--the Skeptical searcher. His distinguishing features are twofold: on the one hand, he does not adhere to things he doesn't know for sure, while on the other, he holds open the possibility of eventually finding something he does. This model seems at first like a contradiction in terms. But in fact it is the contrary that contradicts itself, as earlier Skeptics loved to point out. If you assert dogmatically that you will never know anything for sure and will have to suspend judgment forever, you are violating your own commitment to conceptual "balancing" (the idea that for any proposition there will be an equal counterproposition and that the resulting dilemma is irresolvable). After all, other philosophers do argue that knowledge is possible under certain conditions. Cicero merely says: I don't know, I suspend my judgment, in case x and case y and case z--as for all the other possibilities, I can't tell yet. (Patterns don't exist either.)

In some ways, this stance echoes Gadamer's version of the dialectic. A dialectic is a conversation that proceeds tactically, from question to answer and back; it holds no final end in sight. What sustains it is a moment of communicative openness that always preserves the possibility of another question. By refusing to make hasty judgments, Cicero is also refusing to compromise communication and thought. Such an argument might be the relativist's strongest answer to the dogmatist (although Cicero is not a relativist): I am refusing to have things neatly settled, whereas you would subject everything to your intellectual terror; if you won, we would have to stop talking. And there might also be an ethical good hiding here. For by suspending judgment, rather than saying "no," the skeptic preserves in amber every idea, every claim and proposition. They become eternally accessible to us, as glorious in their infinite potential as any good idea is.

Vysotsky and the Collapse of Socialism

And a hazy, strange conversation began,
Someone moaned out a song and tore on his guitar,
And an epileptic kid--an idiot and a thief--
Showed me a knife from under the table.

"Who will answer me--
What house is this,
Why is it so dark
Like a plague-ridden barracks?
The oil-lamps extinguished,
The air has leaked out...
Or is it that you all
Have forgotten how to live?

Your doors are wide-open, but your souls are locked up.
Who's the master here? Wish he'd give me some wine."
And in response to me: "Looks like you've been traveling
Too long, you've forgotten men--we've always lived like this.

We eat grass,
On sorrel for an age,
Our souls have soured,
Become pimply,
And then wine
We fooled around with too,-
Ruined the house,
Fought, hanged ourselves."
- Vladimir Vysotsky

After the Second World War, it was common in the West to speak of a putative “end of ideology” and its replacement by a technocratic, valueless rationality derived directly from Weber. Yet this thesis was always pursued with reference to capitalist society: the socialist East was not a counterpart but rather an ideological enemy that had ceased to matter. In fact, however, postwar Russia was on a popular level just as anti-ideological as the West; as the CPSU’s propaganda apparatus pumped out ever more schematized slogans, the unbelieving populace turned to increasingly desperate ways of finding meaning. The Cold War was obsolete before it started.

The music of Vladimir Vysotsky, among the best-known Russian singer/songwriters of those decades, probably represents the clearest expression of this trend. Marxist theory spoke of capitalism having “grown out” within feudalism, in the form of free trading cities; Lenin spoke of his socialist society growing out within a capitalist one; Vysotsky is an individualist growing out within the hollowed-out hulk of state socialism. (Hence it is a fitting irony that a release of his hitherto banned songs was ceremoniously authorized by Gorbachev himself in the late ‘80s).

In fact, his songs celebrate individualism to a degree long taboo in the West. Society (the collective) is either a Heideggerian Das Man or simply an opportunity to demonstrate one’s prowess. Any means is fitting to this end: sport, long-distance trucking, war, death. “Gorizont” (“Horizon”) takes this theme to its fullest extent: the protagonist makes a bet that he will be the first to reach the horizon. Obviously, he is unsuccessful—but the attempt is validated by the overcoming of societal boundaries and, ultimately, the expansion of the limits of the horizon itself.

When Vysotsky celebrates individualism—without even bringing liberal capitalist ideological weapons to bear—he exposes Marxism-Leninism as a system of beliefs that does not even need to be refuted. For the Bolsheviks, who relied on the constant forward thrust of history to legitimize their Leninist project, this blow was even more severe than 1989. Socialism is simply less equipped to deal with a crisis of meaning than capitalism is; in some ways, capitalism depends on presenting itself as a lack of meaning.

Vysotsky’s song “Troya” (“Troy”) is an extended and furious disquisition, linking the figure of Cassandra to the treatment of dissenters in the Soviet Union. But it is also a reference, I think (even an unconscious one), to Mandelstam’s “To Cassandra.” The latter, written in December 1917, was a pre-emptive epitaph for the Revolution—evoking the failure of the Decembrist revolt, Mandelstam appeals to Cassandra as an impossibly authoritative source of justification for his classicizing intellectual posture. The Horatian resignation of Mandelstam’s verse thus links up to the Stirnerian individualism of Vysotsky’s, the eternal cycle of the always defeated Russian intellectual.

A Stoic Free Will

How long, then, will you delay to demand of yourself the noblest improvements, and in no instance to transgress the judgments of reason? You have received the philosophic principles with which you ought to be conversant; and you have been conversant with them. For what other master, then, do you wait as an excuse for this delay in self-reformation? You are no longer a boy, but a grown man. If, therefore, you will be negligent and slothful, and always add procrastination to procrastination, purpose to purpose, and fix day after day in which you will attend to yourself, you will insensibly continue to accomplish nothing, and, living and dying, remain of vulgar mind. This instant, then, think yourself worthy of living as a noun grown up and a proficient. Let whatever appears to be the best, be to you an inviolable law. And if any instance of pain or pleasure, glory or disgrace, be set before you, remember that now is the combat, now the Olympiad comes on, nor can it be put off; and that by one failure and defeat honor may be lost – or won. Thus Socrates became perfect, improving himself by everything, following reason alone. And though you are not yet a Socrates, you ought, however, to live as one seeking to be a Socrates.
- Epictetus, Enchiridion

Last month, I described the Epicurean concept of the swerve as a gesture that is, at bottom, anarchistic: an attempt to escape the constraining influence of laws, even physical ones. A logical continuation of this theme would be a study of the Stoics, who are interesting for several reasons. The first is that they are thoroughgoing determinists--in fact, they might have been the first Western philosophers to articulate a coherent account of the Eternal Return. The second is that their ethical system is much more dependent on voluntarism than Epicureanism ever was. Where the Epicureans only want you to follow your natural urges (redefined, of course, through a rationalist Greek lens), the Stoics want you to do things according to nature, the difference being that the latter requires "natural" habits of mind to be constantly questioned. Of course, Stoic determinism and Stoic ethics are in contradiction with each other; whether this contradiction is real or apparent remains to be, er, determined.

For the Stoics, the crucial link between physics and ethics lies in the concept of "assent." An impression is made on your soul; you assent to it; impulse and action follow. Supposedly it is the assent that is voluntaristic and allows for the possibility of free will. To illustrate this, the Stoics use a metaphor, maybe one of the finest philosophical metaphors ever invented: a dog is tied to a horse-cart. If the dog chooses of its own free will to trot along down the road, it will move autonomously in the same direction as the cart. If the dog refuses, it will be dragged along whether it wants to or not. Such dogs are we all--so will we assent?

In fact this is one of those metaphors that conceals more than it explains. Superficially, it seems like a satisfying solution: assent, and you will have the placidity of mind required to accept the principle of necessity. But is this placidity of mind causal? The Stoics believe in a divided soul, like Plato. If the rational portion of the soul achieves placidity, that necessarily entails a causal effect on the other portions of the soul, which are then restrained or redirected in their desires (there'd be little point to Stoicism otherwise). You see the problem here: if assent is truly an uncaused cause, it can never result in a lived benefit, since all causes are determined. Apparently some commentators have made the case that assent is fundamentally Kantian--i.e., you have the freedom to act rationally, but if you do not do so, you are no longer free. But this does not solve the problem either: after all, the dog acts rationally even when it doesn't assent.

The only solution to the Stoic quandary that makes any sense, I think, is a principle of assent that is completely removed from any causal relationship whatsoever. It is actually possible to give a clear account of how this might work. Stoic semiotics is structured in the following way: the signifier is a corporeal utterance; the signified is a noncorporeal lekton; the object is a corporeal referent. Lekta ("things said") resemble Platonic Forms in that they are noncorporeal true or false propositions or parts of propositions that subsist in some kind of an external world and cannot directly interact with the material. Compare this structure (corporeal -> incorporeal -> corporeal) with the structure I've outlined above (determined -> voluntary -> determined). I do not think this similarity is accidental. Assent is a kind of lekton; lekta are bound up with assent. In other words, there is a lekton out there in lekta-land that says "He has assented." If I have, in fact, assented, this lekton becomes true, which does not in any way change the course of history but nonetheless represents a change of some kind. My free will simply makes this proposition true, no more and no less.

It is much more difficult, of course, to derive ethical conclusions from this. But here again we may argue from analogy, this time with Epicurean religion. For the Epicureans, the gods serve as ideals that we must emulate and keep in our heads, but they do not interfere with the world in any way (since they are already perfect and have no need to do so). In the same way, an assent can make a kind of anchor for the rational part of the soul. If it has achieved assent--that is, if it has reliable access to the truth of the lekton which says so--it can gaze out of its portholes with a kind of acceptance, keeping its assent in mind, and regard the work of the body under its command as a product of its own will. It is no such thing, of course--but the ethical end is thereby (partially) achieved. And we have rescued free will without sacrificing the Eternal Return.

Walden II: Epistemology

You find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat (labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; globus, lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and many other words); externally a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b (single lobed, or B, double lobed), with the liquid l behind it pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the guttural gadds to the meaning the capacity of the throat. The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit ...

Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf. What Champollion will decipher this hieroglyphic for us, that we may turn over a new leaf at last? This phenomenon is more exhilarating to me than the luxuriance and fertility of vineyards. True, it is somewhat excrementitious in its character, and there is no end to the heaps of liver, lights, and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side outward; but this suggests at least that Nature has some bowels, and there again is mother of humanity. This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry.
- Walden

Is it true that Walden relies on an abstract destination called Nature? Maybe so. It is easy to read Thoreau's pontifications as the promotion of just such a ideological image. Certainly “the woods” are a magical place where the laws of custom are suspended and the writer's roving eye can identify any number of features to compare advantageously to civilized life. It is just as simple to think of the book as a chronicle completed, as it were, before it even begins: Thoreau seems to have come to his conclusions already and only informs the reader of what she should think.

But in fact Walden displays the traces of an evolution. It may be that at first, there is only an undefined and hazy concept of nature—yet by the end, it is filled out with a concrete and instructive content. The crucial moment is when Thoreau decides to plumb the depths of Walden Pond and discovers that they are not really bottomless. He finds that what we typically, lazily, think of as an infinity is actually both more or less than this; that is, he no longer finds satisfaction in this kind of abstract reasoning. From a capital-N Nature he moves to something rather more compelling.

Thoreau begins to realize that each part of nature is a synecdoche for the whole, that in the finest detail one perceives the lineaments of the entire interconnected web of ecological relationships. Ultimately this nature is to be accessed through a kind of hermeneutics. We are unable to conceptualize or even take in the whole of nature, so we must conceive of it as a text undergoing a constant process of interpretation or translation. Because the symbolic or signifying relationship between each part of nature and the others is inexhaustible, we must move with a constant sense of their infinite regress. To understand nature, for Thoreau, is to take hold of the surplus of the sign.

This general movement, from abstract concept to signifying structure, operates also on the level of temporality. Objects here are not metaphysical units but rather (like in Whitehead’ s process philosophy) indicators of a potentiality. To grasp one object or another is to discern within it the seeds of its future death and rebirth. It is not just the subject that constitutes a movement; it is just as much the objects themselves. Thoreau is always anticipating Heidegger, but it is in the second half of Walden that this becomes clearly apparent: the subject is not a self-contained Cartesian naturalist examining nature from without but a fully equiprimordial Dasein, almost an accident of the natural signifying structure.

These two epistemological themes are united in the book’s triumphant closing image, the bug emerging from its petrified cocoon in the family’s dining table. On one level, this says that we can never be successful in interpreting even societally-constructed objects. Although we normally ignore the signifying regress, treating the social world as a comfortably partitioned and dead collection of hard commodities, nature manifests itself even here. On another level, the social world is revealed as the home of a never quite extirpated potentiality. If the subject, like the bug, can acquire new life, it is because there is always more business to be transacted in everything.

Walden I: The Subject

Who ever saw his old clothes — his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.

We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are our epidermis, or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; but our shirts are our liber, or true bark, which cannot be removed without girdling and so destroying the man.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Only just having (re)discovered Thoreau for myself, I've been caught in his cunning web. So I would like to dedicate two posts to rescuing him from the standard calumnies: he's devoted to a ridiculously inflated abstraction called Nature, he's trite, he's insufficiently radical and overly elitist. Thoreau, I think, is among the five or six greatest prose stylists in the language (although by no means poets)--but he is also a much more subtle and interesting thinker than he is generally given credit for being. In a sense, Walden, "Slavery in Massachusetts," and the "Plea for Captain John Brown" contain the early ontogenetic stages of most every interesting idea in twentieth-century philosophy.

It is, however, difficult to renounce the idea that Thoreau is just a benighted purveyor of pastoral clichés that have been stale since Virgil finished the first Eclogue. To think this way is to fall into a trap deliberately set for the reader. What is the key characteristic of traditional pastorals of old age? Why must Tityrus be a "fortunate senex"? It is the association with retirement, i.e. the passage from eventful and active youth to the empty and homogeneous time of old age. Pastoral always means a more or less permanent retreat from business and from worldly concerns. The trick is that this is precisely what Thoreau is not doing: in fact, he has gone to Walden specifically to "transact some private business." Our task, then, is to figure out what this business actually was.

Compare the above passage, on fashion, with the (perhaps more recognizable) paragraph about digging through the encrusted layers of artifice and fakeness down to the solid bedrock of Reality. What unites the two? Certainly the layers of one echo the layers of the other. But what is really suggestive is that each involves a metaphor of movement, of directionality. The "molting" is an attempt to move through the clothes down to the really necessary thing--a shirt (via "internal expansion"). Likewise, of course, to dig through the ground is to move from the outside to the inside.

This operative movement is a determining theme throughout the book. Again and again, Thoreau contrasts the valueless, externally-driven movement of the mass of men (the They who live without a call of conscience) with the internally-motivated and purposeful movement of those that reject this premise, and his own project is an attempt to live and move "deliberately." This suggests a paradox: while we are still on the outside, artificial level, we are incapable of moving past societally-imposed false needs, yet we must commence moving precisely at that point. To make this movement is Thoreau's business; what it does, in fact, is create a subjectivity premised on its constant reenactment. At no point does Thoreau achieve stasis, only a restaging of this movement on its various levels (in Deleuzian terms, Walden is a literary depiction of a line of flight, a deterritorialization). This is why he is impelled to return to the village just after having left it.

The biggest problem, of course, is the notion of an underlying and accessible Real where the "Realometer" can be firmly planted. But this is not really fundamental for Thoreau in any sense. What Nature or Truth promises is not a revelation or final resting place but rather an ideal, a directional compass for a movement-based subjectivity. The passage on fashion carries the implication that to reach the naked, fashionless body is not possible or desirable: we must stop at the shirt, which is already subject to fashion. The ideal exists but it is not a real destination. Hence the noble savage that appears in Chapter Six is not presented as someone Thoreau is intending to emulate: he calls him from the finish line of his movement, but is essentially a static figure. Thoreau wants only to maintain the mobile tension between himself and society, not rupture it entirely.

What Walden allows, then, is not so much a return to the Golden Age as the ability to reconstitute a deliberate subjectivity even when no a priori subject seems possible. Thoreau is fundamentally an anti-Cartesian, even more so than Heidegger: his subject does not sit in judgment upon the world but rather emerges from a certain kind of encounter with it. What Thoreau discovers in the process of confronting his natural surroundings will be the subject of the next installment.