NEW IN ENGLISH & SPALabor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity: The L

Monday, January 28, 2013

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Jameson on Sartre on Flaubert











 SARTRE IN SEARCH OF FLAUBERT
By FREDERICK JAMESON; Frederick Jameson is the editor of Social Text; his most recent book is ''The Political Unconscious'

THE FAMILY IDIOT Gustave Flaubert 1821-1857. Volume I. By Jean-Paul Sartre. Translated by Carol Cosman. 627 pp. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. $25. SARTRE & FLAUBERT By Hazel E. Barnes. 449 pp. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. $25.

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, whose first novel, ''Nausea,'' had a biographer as its hero, spent the last 10 years of his working life on a massive psychobiography of a writer he had always detested for his estheticism and his reactionary opinions - Gustave Flaubert. He customarily explained this curious project as an attempt to synthesize what can be understood today about an individual life, given what we have learned from a century of work in psychoanalysis, social psychology, linguistics, anthropology and the symbolic analysis of culture and individual behavior. But for Sartre, understanding always involved the discovery of that point at which all constraints - external accidents, the miseries of psychic determinism and social conditioning - are suddenly transformed into the active gestures and free choices of an individual - what he called ''praxis.'' It is never easy to reach that magical point. ''The Family Idiot'' takes some 3,000 pages to get there.

This vast work is now beginning to appear in a splendid translation by Carol Cosman. There are four more volumes scheduled to appear in the next eight years. Simultaneously with this first volume the University of Chicago Press is publishing a study by Hazel Barnes in which ''The Family Idiot'' is recapitulated in its entirety. Her summary is very useful, for this last work of Sartre's is marked by an exasperating prolixity. Blindness forced him to abandon the final volume, which was to have been an analysis of ''Madame Bovary.'' Miss Barnes's study not only provides a quick preview of the whole work, but it gives for the first time anywhere an account of Sartre's notes for the final, unwritten volume.

Sartre called ''The Family Idiot'' a ''true novel,'' and it does tell a story and eventually reach a shattering climax. The work can be described most simply as a dialectic, which shifts between two seemingly alternative interpretations of Flaubert's destiny: a psychoanalytic one, centered on his family and on his childhood, and a Marxist one, whose guiding themes are the status of the artist in Flaubert's period and the historical and ideological contradictions faced by his social class, the bourgeoisie. But there is no determinism in his approach, for Sartre insisted on seeing contradictions - whether psychic-familial or socio-economic - as so many situations for which we cannot but invent responses: ''Neurosis,'' as he says in an earlier work, ''is an original solution the child invents on the point of stifling to death.''

In his Marxist interpretation of Flaubert's situation as a young bourgeois artist in the middle of the 19th century, Sartre articulates two levels of dilemma: the crisis of the serious middleclass artist in a marketsystem, faced with a disappearing audience; and the ideological crisis of the French bourgeoisie, which during the French Revolution had invented the notion of a universal human nature as a weapon against the aristocracy, only to find itself confronted in the days of the 1848 revolution with a new proletarian underclass it was reluctant to recognize as part of that universal humanity. The bourgeoisie will ''solve'' this new problem by becoming Victorian, by repressing the animal and physical ''nature'' it seemed to share with the proletarians and by transforming its earlier humanism into a misanthropic positivism.

The bourgeois artist faced additional problems. As commoners, Flaubert's generation could no longer enjoy the metaphysical confidence of the earlier aristocratic Romantics like Chateaubriand, whose ''genius'' and ''suffering'' expressed a whole class's repudiation of the new middle-class business world. And the revolutionary vocation of the the great bourgeois writers of the Enlightenment was also denied them, precisely because those writers succeeded in overthrowing the ancien regime. Yet Flaubert's generation was formed by the works of both these preceding literary generations.

Sartre here develops a theory of generational ''misprision'' (or misreading), drawing on the concept of the ''practico-inert,'' which he had developed in his ''Critique of Dialectical Reason.'' Sartre had always seen literary works as responses to concrete situations, responses that become intelligible only when grasped within those situations. He now draws the unexpected consequences: Like tools, literary works outlive the situations for which they were intended, and they are passed down with a new material inertia. ''The tradition of all the dead generations,'' Marx said, ''weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.'' The artists of Flaubert's generation had no way of understanding the practical purposes for which the older generation had invented their now inert themes: critical negativity, misanthropy, the ideal of classlessness, the defense of the autonomy of the intellectual (which will now be ''mistranslated'' as art for art's sake), and a quasi-religious conviction of the nothingness of the world and the emptiness of life. Crippled by the themes of their predecessors, the following generation became artists without inspiration. This was not a subjective matter, a lack of talent or vocation. Rather, Sartre's idea of the practico-inert -the weight of so many dead artistic ideologies from an incomprehensible past - suggests a situation in which it was objectively impossible for them to have something to say.

Flaubert's solution opened a door that had not existed before; ''Madame Bovary'' was not just another novel, but an original and creative act, which in one stroke resolved all the objective contradictions that paralyzed Flaubert's contemporaries. This solution was the discovery of what Sartre calls ''the imaginary'' and its ''derealizing'' operation on the world: ''I would like to write a book about nothing, a book without external links, which would be held together by the internal force of its style ... just as the earth without being suspended moves in the air, a book which would have almost no subject matter or at least whose subject would be almost invisible if that is possible,'' Flaubert declared.

Now the riddle that Sartre set out to solve in ''The Family Idiot'' becomes clear. In Flaubert, the moment met the man, as the old historians liked to put it. But who was Flaubert? What gave this Norman doctor's son his chance with history? To reach the answerto this question Sartre had to return to the subjective moment of his dialectic and patiently work through the formation of Gustave's psyche in childhood. Unavoidably, this emphasis on the subjective moment makes its relationship to the objective social situation of the writer in Flaubert's time problematical. Sartre's solution seems to posit what the philosophers used to call some ''pre-established harmony'' between Gustave's private neurosis and the public dilemmas of 19th-century intellectuals and bourgeoisie (which Sartre, parodying Hegel, terms the ''objective neurosis'' of the age). Today, however, ''pre-established harmony'' has another name: overdetermination. The Flaubert family, within which Gustave elaborated his private solution, his personal neurosis, was itself the result of objective social and historical forces.

As for the plot of ''The Family Idiot,'' however, nothing was apparently less dramatic than the private life of Gustave Flaubert. Second son of a well-known Rouen physician, Gustave finds his elder brother, Achille, is heir in advance to the profession of his father. Meanwhile the correct but unloving attention of his mother (who scrupulously bathes the infant Gustave ''as though it were a corpse'') blocks the development of any healthy narcissism and encourages a self-loathing that will later be reinforced by Gustave's repugnance for the bourgeoisie, which, inasmuch as he is bourgeois, turns back on Gustave himself.

One thinks of the parable in Sartre's autobiography, ''Words'': Life is a train, but all the compartments are already filled up, and there is no seat left for the newcomer. When the conductor asks for your ticket -your justification for existing -your pockets are empty (just like everybody else's, but of course you're not aware of that). Meanwhile Gustave is growing up; ticket or no, he has to do something in the world; the family sends him to Paris to study law and become a real bourgeois.

Now, after 2,000 pages, the climax of ''The Family Idiot'': Gustave is 21; on vacation at home, he has a mysterious seizure and collapses (the ''crisis'' of Pont-l'Eveque). There are no particular crippling aftereffects, but Dr. Flaubert concludes that his second son will never be able to live an active life and should remain in the care of his family. The father's own death shortly afterward leaves Gustave materially secure; the ''hermit of Croisset'' is born, and the novels of ''Flaubert'' can now be written.

Gustave's convulsion has been variously diagnosed (on the flimsiest evidence), most often as an epileptic fit; biographers have considered it a minor episode, at most an obstacle to Gustave's later career. For Sartre, however, it was the central event in Flaubert's life and of a piece with his literary vocation. The philosopher of freedom reinterprets this seemingly physical trauma as an intentional act whose intelligibility greatly transcends the ''psychosomatic.'' Faced with the intolerable prospect of ''real life'' in a business society, Gustave used his body to invent the ultimate solution to an unresolvable dilemma, committing suicide without dying. After that he was able to live a posthumous life - to die to the world, to bourgeois ambition, to money and profession, as well as to the hated self.

Only one problem remained: what to do with himself for the rest of his suspended earthly existence. Art, ''the imaginary'' and ''Madame Bovary'' provided the final turn of the screw; and it begins to become clear how, in the last, unwritten volume of ''The Family Idiot,'' the two great circuits of the subject-object dialectic would at last have coincided in the ''symbolic act'' of the work of art - both private expression and public ideology. The predestined catastrophe that hangs over ''Madame Bovary'' -from one perspective the elaboration of Flaubert's private trauma - will then slowly, in what Sartre calls ''prophetic anteriority,'' begin to resonate across a whole public world, at length coming to seem a virtual prophecy of the collapse of the Second Empire itself in 1870.

For Sartre, the meaning and dynamic of the ''imaginary'' is most clear in Flaubert's style, which he sees as the correlative of Gustave's lifelong suicide: It is a way of killing off the outside world without changing a thing, of transforming human instruments and activities into the suspended objects of esthetic contemplation. The point of the ''imaginary'' - for Sartre a veritable passion, demonic and inhuman - is not to turn away from the world in religious or other worldly fashion, but to keep your eyes filled with the richness of things and relationships while secretly emptying them of their density in an ''internal hemorrhage of being.'' Flaubert's style ''derealizes'' things, transforms them into images, in order to draw the whole immense being of the world into nothingness without changing a leaf or a blade of grass in the process. Yet that style is an operation born of resentment; it is meant to demoralize bourgeois readers without their becoming aware that their world has been pulled out from under them. ''Words'' was Sartre's guilty confession of this passion for the imaginary in himself as a young man, and his attempt to exorcise it. ''The Family Idiot'' is its epic.

When one thinks of the 10 years during which Sartre shackled himself to this immense project - a period of unparalleled political militancy in his life, punctuated by the uprising of May 1968 and culminating in a rich series of experiments in all kinds of new political action - ''The Family Idiot'' sometimes looks like a form of self-imposed penance, a private duty jealously guarded against the reproaches of his Maoist friends (they wanted him to write a proletarian novel). If, however, one sees the theme of the imaginary in inseparable dialectical tension with that other lifelong theme of Sartre's work, which is praxis, then Sartre's stubborn devotion to his Flaubert project becomes more comprehensible; the study of the ''imaginary'' can then be taken as a self-diagnosis of bourgeois ''objective neurosis,'' while praxis - deliberate action in the real world - stands as the projection of a radically different mode of activity, identified with the proletariat.

For it should not be thought that the nihilism of the imaginary, as it is elaborately anatomized in ''The Family Idiot,'' is a mere 19th-century curiosity or a local feature of some specifically French middle-class culture; nor is it a private obsession of Jean-Paul Sartre himself. Turning things into images, abolishing the real world, grasping the world as little more than a text or sign-system - this is notoriously the very logic of our own consumer society, the society of the image or the media event (the Vietnam War as a television series). Flaubert's private solution, his invention of a new ''derealizing'' esthetic strategy, may seem strange and distant, not because it is archaic, but because it has gradually become the logic of our media society, thereby becoming invisible to us. This is the sense in which ''The Family Idiot'' - at first glance so cumbersome and forbidding a project - may well speak with terrifying immediacy to Americans in the 1980's.

http://www.nytimes.com/1981/12/27/books/sartre-in-search-of-flaubert.html

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Where is Washington going?


Obama picks reflect plans for military pullback

(Commentary)

BY JOHN STUDER
President Barack Obama sent Congress a block of nominations to fill openings in his cabinet—for Defense, the State Department and the head of the CIA—as his second term begins this month. The proposals lay the groundwork for a pullback in military involvement abroad—boots on the ground—and deeper cuts in war spending.

This shift is based on Obama’s view that “U.S. interests”—the interests of the propertied rulers’ in the United States to which he is beholden—can be better advanced by a combination of persuasive speeches, and whenever “necessary” killer drones and special forces assassins.

Obama nominated John Kerry, Democratic senator from Massachusetts, as secretary of state, Chuck Hagel, former Republican senator from Nebraska, as secretary of defense, and his White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan to head the Central Intelligence Agency. Kerry and Hagel are both veterans and critics of U.S. conduct in the Vietnam War.

Brennan has helped lead the White House campaign of drone bombings and assassinations aimed at alleged terrorists, including U.S. citizens. He served in a similar capacity under the George W. Bush administration.

The three nominees fit the White House’s course well. Like Obama, they are uncomfortable with Washington as the preeminent world imperialist power and use of U.S. military might, apologetic for U.S. “excesses” from Vietnam to Iraq to the Middle East and inclined toward “leading from behind.”

Obama is pulling together “a new national security team deeply suspicious of the wisdom of American military interventions around the world,” the New York Times commented Jan. 9. Washington’s moves in the world will be characterized by “caution, covert action and a modest American military footprint around the world,” specializing in “drones, cyberattacks and Special Operations forces.”

“We’ve got to understand great-power limitations,” Hagel told Foreign Policy magazine in May 2012, commenting on U.S. policy in Syria. “You work through the multilateral institutions that are available, the U.N., the Arab League. The last thing you want is an American-led or Western-led invasion into Syria.”

Hagel has called the war budget “bloated.”

“Fewer boots on the ground,” Ross Douthat, conservative Op-ed writer for the Times, summed it up, “but lots of drones in the air.”

The nominations came as the White House is planning to slash the number of troops in Afghanistan in preparation for the removal of all combat forces no later than 2014. The administration has said it is considering “an option to leave behind no American troops,” the New York Times reported Jan. 11.

The administration’s outlook reflects the meritocratic social layer of bourgeois-minded professionals that Obama comes from and looks to around the world. They believe they can hash out the world’s problems if they can just get in a room to work on them with like-minded diplomats, professors, nongovernmental organization staffers and other “brights” around the globe.

While the propertied rulers don’t share this naïve outlook on the world, a section of the ruling class agrees with cutting back on military intervention and spending at this time.

Leading the charge against Hagel’s nomination are a bevy of so-called “neocons,” writers at the Weekly Standard, editorial board members at the Washington Post, staffers at the American Enterprise Institute and their comrades-in-arms.

Dozens of their articles have filled the bourgeois press in recent days criticizing Hagel’s skittishness about military action against Iran, comments he made marking some distance between his views and those of Israeli government figures and his unwillingness to promote U.S. military action in Syria.

This opposition reflects a wing of the capitalist rulers who think U.S. imperialist interests would be better served by a larger, stronger military force and greater willingness to deploy it.

Among the critics of Hagel are the “three amigos”—Republican senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, joined by “independent” Joseph Lieberman, who have been traveling the world together urging a bigger, more robust U.S. military.

Other political figures in the Republican Party have called for confirming Hagel. “I think he’s ultimately superbly qualified,” Colin Powell, former secretary of state under George W. Bush, said on NBC News “Meet the Press.”

On the other hand, ultrarightists like writers for the American Conservative and former presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, have their own reasons to favor restraining for now U.S. military action abroad. They oppose the anti-Hagel outcry, forming part of the pink-brown anti-war alliance of left liberalism and ultranationalist rightist politics.

Hagel’s past statements expressing distance from the actions of the Israeli government is one area where questions about his nomination have come from both neocons and Democrats alike.

After his nomination, Charles Schumer and Barbara Boxer, influential Democratic senators from New York and California who are Jewish, both indicated they were not sure they could vote for Hagel. After talking with Hagel, both announced they would back his nomination.

http://www.themilitant.com/2013/7703/770358.html

What is "aleatory materialism"?




My copy here.







The Dice Man
Ross Speer

Mikko Lahtinen (Gareth Griffiths & Kristina Köhli, trans.), Politics and Philosophy: Niccolò Machiavelli and Louis Althusser’s Aleatory Materialism (Haymarket, 2011)

There are two mainstream interpretations of the work of Niccolò Machiavelli: he is seen either as the “the father of immoral ‘Realpolitik’” or as the “Renaissance era representative of the republican tradition” that sought to revive the political traditions of ancient Greece and Rome. In popular discourse it is the language of repression that passes for “Machiavellianism”; within the academy it is the republican Machiavelli, associated with the Cambridge scholar Quentin Skinner, that is dominant. In Politics and Philosophy Mikko Lahtinen seeks to uncover an alternative reading of Machiavelli’s work—the “aleatory materialist” approach first set out by the French Marxist philosopher
Louis Althusser.

Lahtinen describes how, for Althusser, Machiavelli was a part of a tradition running through the “underground” of materialist philosophy which he termed aleatory (dice-like) materialism, or “the materialism of the encounter”. Starting with the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus and moving through Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx and Heidegger aleatory materialism represented a “dangerous” current that questioned the “philosophical-religious, judicial and moral doctrines in which…the existing social order is legitimised” through its presentation as “the natural or rational order”. Throughout history this current was “underground”, subversive and hidden, as it ran against the common sense idealism in which divine or natural laws were held to determine the rationality of what is. Aleatory materialism stresses the contingency of the social order: what exists did not, and does not, have to. To craft a new society the range of alternatives that may result from human action, the possibilities for self-determination, must be understood. There is an “ultimate lack of guarantees” as to the path history may take. History has no pre-ordained end. The trajectory of the historical process is, then, influenced by active individuals or groups, actors or agents, which must pay particular attention to the strategy and timing of interventions if they are to be effective in achieving their aims.

For Althusser, Machiavelli was first and foremost a theorist of the “conjuncture”, a concrete moment of a complex whole determined by its specific characteristics. In each historical-political case the general and the specific are linked together to produce a unique combination. Lahtinen explains how, in Althusser’s Marxism, the nature of this unique combination is determined by the process of over- and under-determination. While the fundamental contradiction of capitalist society, between labour and capital, may be determining “in the last instance”, it manifests itself in different, more readily understood, ways. The contradictions in society are inter-dependent, and become displaced and congealed onto the overdetermined contradiction. The accumulation of these contradictions undermines the cohesiveness of the social formation, thereby presenting revolutionary opportunities, with the implication being that struggles erupt over issues that may not appear “fundamental” but nonetheless represent challenges to the system as it is. In deploying these concepts to analyse the conjuncture and understand the specific articulation of these antagonisms, a “concrete analysis of a concrete situation” could be produced and the revolutionary actor could derive the most appropriate course of action.

Lahtinen’s purpose in Politics and Philosophy is not solely to contribute to scholarship of Machiavelli, nor to intervene in the controversy that continues to surround Althusser’s Marxism, but to show what Machiavelli’s perspectives may offer us today. Seen through the lens of Althusser’s aleatory materialism Machiavelli becomes an “intellectual pointer, a revolutionary weapon, on the battlefield of global capitalism in our own ‘conjuncture’”.

In Machiavelli, Althusser found a Lenin of the Renaissance. If Lenin can be considered the paramount organic intellectual of the early 20th century proletariat, so Machiavelli was the organic intellectual of the “rising city-state bourgeoisie”. Much of Althusser’s earlier work (most famously Reading Capital and For Marx of the 1960s) was directed towards uncovering what he claimed was the “real” Marxist tradition. His study of Machiavelli (Machiavelli and Us) is part of his later, aleatory, work. But its purpose is the same: to uncover the subversive elements of a well-known writer, the true revolutionary nature of which had been obscured in the prevailing interpretations. Like Lenin, Machiavelli was a “theoretician of praxis”, a “man of action” who teaches us how to answer the question, “What is to be done?”

Lahtinen describes how Althusser treads between the two dominant interpretations of Machiavelli. His most famous work, The Prince, was neither “a guidebook for tyrants” nor a “guidebook to democracy” for the people, as supposed in the republican reading. Instead Althusser argues that, while The Prince is indeed written from “the viewpoint of the people”, the people did not constitute the primary agent in his political project—Machiavelli’s call is for a “new prince”. With this in mind it becomes a thoroughly bourgeois text, conditioned unapologetically by the conditions in which it was written. Althusser’s aleatory interpretation stresses the “struggles and conflicts”, the outcomes of which are not predetermined, that come before any “moment of passivity”.

Machiavelli’s The Prince was directed towards unification of the Italian Peninsula, a response to the declining power of the city-state form in view of the rise of the absolutist monarchies of France and Spain. The “organisation of a durable state” is his primary intention. For this, the aleatory must be tamed. Lahtinen only begins to unpack what the application of this concept to understanding modernity and state formation might mean: “Population censuses and statistics, timetables and calendars, the standardisation of measurements and monetary units, as well as nationalistic ideologies” are directed towards reducing unpredictability “by controlling the population with different methods.” Aleatoriness is simultaneously “a threat that should be averted” and the “possibility for political interventions and mass movements”.

Machiavelli articulated this within his own conjuncture. In order to construct a new type of polity, thus reducing the external threats that had plagued the city-states of the region, the class struggle between nobles and people must be displaced; the new prince must ally with the latter in order to form a mass movement that could take advantage of the concrete moment. Founding a new unified state is Machiavelli’s solution to the problem of a high degree of unpredictability, but the possibility of doing so relies upon that same unpredictability. His radically new form of state was to be a “national-popular” one, complete with an army based on a popular constituency as an early form of ideological state apparatus. The masses must enter the stage of history in order for Machiavelli’s project to become realised. But, in order to secure the new state, they must also be persuaded to exit it.

Despite successfully weaving together Althusserian Marxism with the political theory of Machiavalli, Lahtinen is sometimes at pains to explain the relevant elements of Althusser’s Marxism to the reader, and here there are far better introductions. Althusser’s particular, often elitist, conception of Marxism receives little critical analysis. Politics and Philosophy could have benefited from engaging with the debate that continues to surround Althusser—in particular, the potential problems of his aleatory materialism and a comparison with Antonio Gramsci’s reading of Machiavelli. Furthermore, the text is often hampered by lengthy footnotes that, while interesting to the specialist, do not aid the development of the overall argument.

However, in attempting to reintroduce Machiavelli to Marxists, Lahtinen performs a valuable service. Ignored in mainstream interpretations is the common concern between Machiavelli and Marx for the problem of power for the respective social groups they sought to represent. It should come as no surprise that Machiavelli was of great interest first to Gramsci, and second to Althusser. Third, he should be of interest to us. Published in English over a decade after its initial appearance in Finnish, Politics and Philosophy makes a timely arrival at the conjuncture the English-speaking Marxist tradition faces today.

http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=878&issue=137