Author: john mcgowan

Meaninglessness and Modernity

My goal for the month is to get through Charles Taylor’s The Secular Age, which was the “it” book about ten years ago. I read 250 pages of it at the time, then put it down and only picked it up again about a month ago. Now I have managed to get through another 80 pages or so—which only leaves about 350 pages to go.

Anyway, Taylor has always been a liberal critic of liberalism—going all the way back to his first “big book,” the one on Hegel, published in 1975. He was thought of as a “communitarian” in those days because his theme was the emptiness of “negative liberty” as contrasted to the notion of “situated freedom” that he derived from Hegel. (In A Secular Age, Taylor calls the liberal, autonomous self “the buffered self,” barricaded against “communion” with others or with the world, taking a detached, “objectivist” view of things, better to maintain its disengaged, “cold” autonomy.) The basic idea was that the autonomous, disconnected self, that sits at the center of any idea of negative freedom, is so contentless that its freedom to act is basically meaningless. I was greatly influenced by Taylor in my Postmodernism and its Critics, where I took his “situated freedom” in a more materialist direction, thinking about the ways in which social structures and access to/distribution of material resources were central to any ability to act. From there, I later moved to using the term “effective freedom,” which I got from John Dewey. The notion is fairly simple: freedom is just another word for nothing unless you have the wherewithal to actually enact the things you dream of accomplishing. In other words, a certain social organization that attends to material needs is required for freedom to be enjoyed. A version, in other words, of the Marxist critique of the “formal freedoms” of a bourgeois society.

But I want now to think about Taylor’s assertion that modernity is afflicted with a certain kind of spiritual “malaise” (his word), a pervasive uneasiness (not felt by all, but by many) that their lives lack purpose or meaning. This is the nihilism that Nietzsche saw all around him, or Durkheim’s anomie, or Baudelaire’s ennui. Taylor insists this is new. “What you won’t hear at other times and places is one of the commonplaces of our day (right or wrong is beside my point), that our age suffers from a threatened loss of meaning. This malaise is specific to a buffered identity, whose very invulnerability opens it to the danger that not just evil spirits, cosmic forces or gods won’t ‘get to’ it, but that nothing significant will stand out for it” (303).

Note the hedge: Taylor doesn’t commit himself fully to asserting that modernity is truly a realm of meaninglessness. He only insists that the feeling that one lacks meaning is prevalent. And, elsewhere, he also admits that this feeling is mostly articulated by elites.

My basic reaction is to say that I don’t see it. Sufficient unto the day is the meaning thereof. What strikes me as much more evident is that the daily round, the struggle to keep life going and halfway bearable, provides more than enough purpose for most people. I am fully persuaded that meaning is generated through the daily entanglement within social practices and our relations with/to others. One possibility, I guess, is that modernity pushes more people into loneliness, into disconnected lives that exclude them from being embedded in larger social relations. And I don’t doubt that something like “modern individualism” means that some selves (again, we need to think about privilege and elites here) develop strategies that provide them greater autonomy vis a vis the social orders in which they are embedded. Buffered selves are not, however, necessarily (or even, I would argue, primarily) disconnected selves. Rather, they are selves who enjoy (I choose this word deliberately) some power within the social relations in which they are entangled. Everything we know about human social orders tells us that power will be abused where it is possessed. Which is why idealizing traditional communities, with their strict hierarchies, is either foolishly naïve or tantamount to an inegalitarian defense of privilege. As with wealth, the only good way forward is for a fuller, more equitable distribution of power. Unbuffered selves are exploited selves.

But back to nihilism. I just don’t see it (as I have said.) I am tempted to go so far as to say it takes leisure—and lots of it—to suffer from ennui. Just getting by takes all the time and attention of lots of people—and they don’t seem inclined to wonder if somehow there is more, that somehow their lives are missing something. Rather, I think it much more likely that what we have is a case of elites who disparage what keeps “ordinary people” engaged. I am thinking here of Thoreau’s claim that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation,” or even of Wordsworth’s complaint that “getting and spending takes all our power.” What is troublesome about the masses is that they don’t experience anomie, that they find “getting and spending” good enough for them, thank you very much. They aren’t searching for meaning, they are searching for a way to get ahead. Life is hard enough to keep one going; it provides plenty of purpose in its daily rounds.

Let me be clear: I don’t think it actually functions all that differently for elites. I think that they, too, are mostly sustained by the demands that each day brings, along with their own ambitions (for acclaim, recognition etc within their own social spheres). I just think elites are endlessly snobby about the form that they see non-elite desires taking. (I am somewhat channeling Bourdieu’s Distinction here, with its wonderful discussions of how elite taste scorns everything bodily and material in the name of “higher” pleasures. We arrive here at J. S. Mill’s worries about and scorn of the pleasures of the pig.) Elites may have a different content for their purposes, but I think the form is much the same, i.e. generated out of the social relations in which they are embedded.

What to conclude? 1. I am with Taylor in seeing “meaning” as a function of social entanglements. Thus, if modernity truly extracts people from such entanglements, then modernity would be afflicted by a loss of meaning. But that is a very, very different claim than saying that a secular age that only offers entanglement in the here and now—and not some kind of additional relationship to the transcendent—leaves us short of meaning or purpose. I am willing to grant to Taylor that for some people a relationship to the divine stands as an important motivator in their lives. But that is, for me, just like saying that for some people reading books, with their relationship to absent, often dead, authors is important to their lives. Many don’t read books—and never feel any absence of purpose because they don’t read. Similarly, many will do just fine without any relation to a divine.

I am suspicious, as is obvious, as anyone imputing to others a state of desperation, anomie, loss of purpose etc. I don’t quite know what would stand as evidence to back up such a claim. I suspect that, much more often, the basis for the claim is a distaste for, even incredulity about, the things in which people find purpose. Surely, the critic says, that can’t be enough to sustain a meaningful life? There must be more, there must be a longing for more. Why? Just because it wouldn’t satisfy you, that’s no evidence that it is unsatisfactory to that other guy.
I hardly want to deny the existence of despair. (Let me for the moment make a false distinction between despair and depression, where depression is [as we say these days] a “clinical” condition while despair is something produced by the external circumstances in which the self finds itself.) I suspect that despair is rarely a function of the general conditions of modernity; in other words, I don’t believe in some general malaise inflicting our (or some other) culture. Rather, despair (at least within the structures of feeling that I see as fairly general in our culture) comes from one of three sources. (Pardon the wild generalizations here.) 1. Suffering, either one’s own and [even worse] that of one’s loved ones that cannot be alleviated. 2. Being caught into dismal situations that one cannot alter or escape. Such situations can be a job which one hates because constantly humiliated or exploited or made to do things that are shameful, or caught in certain social relations that, for whatever reason, one thinks must be endured even though terrible. 3. Being excluded from entanglement in the kinds of social relations that generate meaning. The obvious case here is unemployment. Work is a central producer of meaning in modern societies. The weight (in terms of senses of self-worth and of engagement with others in a collective enterprise) placed on work in our society is truly frightening—and is what makes unemployment an existential as well as a financial disaster. I do think Taylor is good in pushing us to think about the possibility of societies which would have many more sources of meaning aside from one’s work.

Three further thoughts for today. The first is that (again, generalizing wildly) I don’t actually think religion (at least in contemporary American society) functions primarily as a source of meaning. Or if it does, it does so by way of conferring an identity and offering a set of social relations apart from work and family. I don’t think it has much to do at all with a relation to the transcendent, to god. I do think it offers some consolation for suffering, some modes of coping with sickness, death, and other ills. But it does not seem to be offering some kind of alternative path through the modern world, some other way of constructing a life. Again, for a few it does do that. But the Simone Weils among us are few and far between. For the vast majority, their religion sits comfortably with their leading completely conventional modern lives. I just don’t see where the religious in America today acknowledge or act upon some kind of “malaise,” some kind of awareness of modernity’s constitutive shortcomings. The religious, in other words, are as casually modern as the rest of us, unmoved (by all appearances) by a sense that there must be “more.” Religion is a source of meaning, yes, in that it affords participation in another, different, set of communal relations, but it hardly seems at odds with modernity. Evangelicals may deplore modern permissiveness and keep their children out of public schools, but they still associate virtue with toeing the line in a capitalist economy and find purpose in constructing a life in the here and now.

The second thought concerns “bullshit jobs.” Reading David Graeber’s book of that title is on my to-do list. The issue it raises is the extent to which people find their jobs meaningless. Again, I suspect this is an elitist projection. I could never find that job meaningful, so how could someone else. There must be millions and millions of people unhappy at work, pushing paper and doing it only out of raw economic necessity, the elite observer opines.

I spent eight years running an institute, with eight to ten employees underneath me. At least four of them did jobs I could never stand doing for more than three weeks. But they were conscientious and engaged workers. Some were less competent than others, but the less competent ones were, in some ways, even more engaged because it took all of their effort and attention not to screw up. There was some grousing, of course, about various kinds of bureaucratic requirements that created work for our staff, but, generally speaking, loyalty to our little platoon trumped issues about the meaningfulness of (or need for) the work that had to get done. In short, like soldiers (as every study of them has shown), the meaning is generated out of the relation to one’s comrades, one’s fellow workers, without much attention paid (no less worrying about) larger meanings or purposes or the larger organization’s stated goals (or “mission” in today’s jargon.) Thus, cynicism about the larger organization (again, a mainstay of soldier’s lives) can easily be combined with a deep, and satisfying, engagement with the daily round of tasks performed in the company of a group of comrades.

As I say, I will read Graeber, since he has done some field work among those who have bull shit jobs—and maybe he will convince me that a pervasive sense of meaninglessness exists among such workers. For now, I don’t see an epidemic of meaninglessness all around me.

Third, and finally, I do however see an epidemic of depression (coupled with its evil twin, anxiety). But I see it as produced by the crisis of work. Even in 1951, Arendt (in Origins of Totalitarianism) could point to the problem of “superfluouness,” her euphemism for unemployment. The idea was that the Depression created the opening for fascism. People want to be needed, to be put to work, to be asked to join something, to be given something to join. The Nazis offered the nation, while the work was war. Our current epidemic of depression is caused by the lack of work—and the deep insecurity of those who do have jobs. [Neat that the same word, depression, stands for the economic condition that causes unemployment and the psychological condition that follows upon unemployment.] For our young people, finding a job that in some ways matches up with what they were educated to do has become a terrifying—and often unsuccessful—quest as the ranks of the solidly middle class are depleted. For our blue collar workers, either the jobs have disappeared forever or are on the verge of disappearing. Here is where the devil of the modern location of primary meaning in employment makes its horrors most felt. We need to proliferate the sites of meaning production, of social entanglement in cooperative endeavors that strike people as meaningful. We have to learn how not to work—and to not feel bad when we are not working. And if there are bullshit jobs, ones that people find utterly meaningless, then the problem is compounded.

Perhaps (it is at least a plausible argument) the loss of a sense of transcendence, of a relation to the divine, partly causes the way meaning gets so centered in work in the modern age. And if meaning and work are so entangled, an end to work (on the personal level as involuntary unemployment, and on a societal level with the advent of robots) is a disaster that we need to figure out how to address. But I still want to say that engagement in the things of this world, with the people with whom we share it, provides plenty of meaning for the vast majority. If there is a “malaise,” it is a product of the specific ill of unemployment (taking that term in its largest possible sense of exclusion from doing things with others) that is to blame, not some sickness unto death lodged in the modern soul. And if the remedy is to learn how to find meaning in things apart from work, that doesn’t necessarily entail turning our eyes away from the things of this world.

Impasse

George Shulman (NYU prof who is part of the reading group that meets in New York every year) is interested in impasse—basically the feeling that we are stuck in a world we hate but can’t figure out how to change.

Framing it as a question of impasse helps me to state baldly some major themes of this blog’s agonizing over the past six to eight months. First comes the sense that current evils somehow operate under a thin veneer (but an effective veneer) of legality and normalcy. There seems no way within current legal and political institutions to intervene to stop daily operations that are unjust and render millions of people miserable and millions more vulnerable, a step away from misery. The machine grinds on relentlessly.

Second comes the primary debate on the left. At what level should the effort for change takes place. Is electoral politics any use at all? Could we actually vote into office a political party that would effect the changes needed, alter both the ends and the means (i.e. significantly redistribute resources in ways that actively alter balances of political and economic power)? It seems to take larger and larger leaps of faith to believe that the system can be reformed (to use the hoariest of clichés). The gridlock (another cliché) that is another name for impasse seems utterly baked in at this point. Too many veto points, too many established immunities (campaign finance, gerrymandering, voter suppression, lobbying, tax breaks, conservative judges etc. etc.) for those fighting against change. Obstruction is the order of the day.

So the electoral route is only going to work if there is astounding pressure for change from the populace—and the US populace rarely swings left and seems, instead, to cling desperately to what little it has (deeply averse to risk) instead of working to force the system to yield it more.

The alternative, then, is some sort of forced, dramatic change. Two things intrude here. The first is the worry (a big and legitimate one) about forcing a change that the majority does not desire. Anti-democratic (in the core sense of the term’s reference to the will of the people) change is problematic for any number of reasons. So the left’s first work, it would seem, must take place on the battlefield of rhetoric. We must win the hearts and minds, so that the clamor for substantive change can not be ignored.

The second problem is violence. With the possible exception of Terry Eagleton (and even he masks his talk of violence in the “soft” language of Christ-like sacrifice and of Greek tragedy), all the radical leftists I read shy away from talking about violence. In Judith Butler’s book on the performative theory of assembly, she briefly says that activism must be non-violent. Interestingly, the force of that “must” is more pragmatic than ethical. Violence is counter-productive; it calls down repression at the same time that it alienates potential supporters. Non-violence is the winning strategy.

But a description of effective non-violent tactics is missing. Non-violent disruptions of business as usual, of daily life, will be treated almost as harshly as violence. Which isn’t to say that martyrdom can’t prove effective politically. But we seem at this moment pretty far from a place where martyrs will be viewed sympathetically. (Contrast to King’s children campaign.) I fight shy of asking people for fruitless sacrifices; of course, the response is that one never knows ahead of time if the sacrifice will be fruitless. We can’t know what might, against all logic and predictions, galvanize people. The shortness of the current news cycle, the way in which things (even the horrible mass shootings at schools), fade from public attention is just another barrier in the way of imagining galvanizing sacrifices. (This returns me to my obsession with figuring out how to create a movement that has legs, that is sustainable over the long haul.) When today’s anti-liberal, radical leftists write of galvanizing moments, they reference Seattle’s anti-globalization demonstrations and Occupy, neither of which really offers grounds for hope. There is a vast sympathy for the Palestinians, but nobody is calling for the formation of liberation fronts or armies in the West.

Eschewing violence has much going for it. Calling for large-scale, systematic transformation, however, and refusing to think hard about the means (including violence) toward that change seems more wish-fulfillment than productive thinking. King’s non-violence was paired with the urban riots of the 60s; the anti-war demonstrators were beaten by police and they didn’t end the war, although they did makes its prosecution more costly for our benighted political leaders. The system (I keep using that word for lack of a better shorthand at the moment) is violent through and through—under the cloak of legality. The left keeps coming to a gunfight with a knife—and keeps refusing to even consider the fact that it might be in a gunfight.

Within this set of dillemmas/delusions, the left’s most characteristic move is to argue that the majority really is on its side, that if we just offered the populace full unadulterated leftism (some kind of democratic socialism presumably, although the left gets fuzzy on those details as well), we would win elections handily. Bernie Sanders would have swept to victory. It’s pretty to think so, isn’t it? And it gives our dissident leftist so much to do—fulminating about those liberals who queer the pitch, instead of thinking about the really hard work that would be required (especially in addressing that populace he is convinced secretly agrees with him) to break the ongoing impasse.

Do I have anything constructive to offer? Not all that much since it wouldn’t be an impasse if we weren’t stuck. But I will say that I much prefer loud denunciations, usually on moral grounds but sometimes on pragmatic ones, of the right’s constant enactment of petty and major cruelties. The internecine fights on the left (of which I guess this post counts as one) are tiresome and not very useful. True, the temptation to go that way is reinforced by the fact that such arguments may even gain a hearing and a response, while one’s jeremiads against the right seem cast out into the void, aiming to reach a general public that is nothing if not absent more than present, and certainly not going to move a right that has proved itself, again and again, without conscience and beyond shame. Still, better to be a witness to infamy, than a nit-picking polemicist within one’s own tribe.

And better to be a clear thinker about ends and means than to throw blame about indiscriminately (those nefarious liberals!) and talk as if political victory was a matter of just snapping one’s fingers.

Moten and Harney, The Undercommons

The political/literary theory reading group to which I belong (and which meets once a year) read Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons this year and we were privileged to have Fred Moten join us for our discussion.

When I read the book in early June, my reaction was that it was anarchist gobblygook. I was somewhat mollified by the interview with M&H that comprises the last 1/3 of the book and which presented a much more palatable (at least to me) vision of what they were up to. The conversation with Moten himself was even more to my taste; the style of the book is deliberately associative, more a riff, or an improvisation, than a formal argument—in large part because M&H hate “formality” as tyrannical and are very much against any notion of the avant-garde or critique or any other pretension to having a truth or a knowledge to deliver. They want to inspire, to provoke, to set things in motion, to put things into flight (shades of Deleuze), and to celebrate (create? perform?) incompleteness.

M&H have any number of things they want to reject/refuse. But the two big ones are politics and individuation. Politics is pernicious precisely because it insists on the formation of subjects, of individuals, who then step forward to ask for recognition, to make claims on the basis of rights, to articulate interests that must be taken into account, and to grab/claim a share of goods. The very act of subject formation, of individuation, sets in motion a credit/debt accounting, a parceling out of responsibility, and of owing that M&H want to get out from under. So they are with the various leftists I have been discussing these past few months in seeing the making of political demands only as a trap that legitimizes the powers and institutions to which the demands are addressed. Moten told us that he rejected everything that Arendt designated as politics.

Yet . . . M&H also accept that the current order of things is rotten to the core. Modernity is constituted by anti-blackness, by the exclusion of the black subject even as that black body’s labor is extracted from it. Blacks are “conscripts of modernity”—and it would be a terrible mistake for them to see their goal (political or otherwise) as admission to the condition of the rights-bearing modern subject. “You have denied us a place in modernity even as we are the condition of its emergence and persistence. Don’t delude yourselves that what we want is what you have. We want something utterly different.”

What is that utterly different thing? Here is where is gets both inspiring and weird. Moten fully admitted to a romanticism of “black sociality.” There is nothing wrong with us (blacks). We are already doing what we want to do, being who we want to be, in the fullness of black sociality (which also goes by the name of the “undercommons.”) M&H aspire to a fundamental affirmation; black life is not about lack or deprivation; black life, instead, is a rich set of practices and entanglements that were created “in the hold” of modernity, out of a need to live otherwise. The basic message: “We are here. You can’t get rid of us (as much as you might want to). And we won’t be placated by the crumbs you think to push our way. But we have our own world, the one we have created in your despite, and we just want to live in that world, as untroubled by you as possible.”

An odd kind of quietism. Just leave us alone. We don’t want to partake of your madness. We ask nothing of you; just stop bothering us. Yet—Moten also said “anti-blackness” is what is going to kill me, just as it killed my father and my grandfather, and it will kill my children. Because whites can’t just leave blacks alone since modernity is dependent on the exploitation of blacks. Moten also said that anti-blackness will kill everyone—even (maybe especially Donald Trump) because modernity is poison. But that description of a murderous modernity makes the affirmation of a quietist sociality harder to stomach. Living in the interstices (Ellison’s invisible man) is a completely understandable strategy. But it is surely a second best. Is there no hope, no politics, that can address modernity’s crimes and mis-steps?

Of course, the whole thing is also premised on the notion that modernity is an unmitigated disaster. Moten, as Nick Bromell pointed out, is a radically undialectical thinker. There is no interplay between individuation (form) and the play of differences (the Deleuzian flux), just as there is no interplay between politics (public work toward justice) and sociality (informal, unstructured being together), or between modernity and its other(s). Just condemnation of politics, individuation and modernity—and an attempt to build a world elsewhere, apart. Modernity and individuation and politics are madness pure and simple; they thrust us into ways of living that are actually prolonged flirtations with death—ending in a full embrace of death.

That Moten is now reading the medieval mystics comes as no surprise. The longing for an elsewhere is deeply attractive when articulated so poetically by someone like Moten. Especially when the claim is that the elsewhere is always already here—hidden in plain sight, embodied in moments of being together, of conversation and collaboration that are taken as ends (joys) in themselves, not aimed to the production of anything (be it status or a commodity or knowledge). On some level, it just seems right to say that life is best lived in the company of others and unproductively. And it is great to have M&H break ties with “leftist anti-humanism” and straight-forwardly take “life” as their lodestar, that which they aim to serve and foster. But if the powers that thwart life, that worship and impose death, are so big, then to escape seems highly unlikely—and a privilege few will be able to access.

It increasingly comes to seem to me that the Nietzschean problematic of “affirmation” is everywhere. How can we affirm “life,” instead of constantly looking for ways to escape it, or transform it, or control it, or to put it into the service of something else. Why if life so hard to love?

Rom Coles

I have been traveling, so not posting. But I have also been talking some with Rom Coles via email–as he responded to my post some time back on his book, Visionary Pragmatism. Rom is a human of unbelievable energy, having written a number of interesting books of political theory (in fact, “visionary” is the best word to describe his books), while also carrying on a more than full life as a community organizer/political activist. In particular, he is deeply committed to and engaged in democracy on the ground. So here is his description of what he is currently up to in Sydney, Australia, as he works to catalyze community responses to climate change and to the economic devastations of neoliberalism. Everything in quotes is by Rom.

“Thanks for those sharp reflections in your blogpost. I think I agree with basically everything there – including, for sure, the need to work with/in the Democratic Party in order to pull it left in the context of winner takes all election system. Especially when the only alternative is the Green ‘party’ which is a party in name only – or worse, a parody of a party. I also really liked some of your other posts, including the Merlefest one. For all its limitations, I have found Merlefest to be a pretty heterogeneous space of conviviality (yes, all white, but also these festivals tend to be the only places where conservative southerners, hippies, professionals, etc., gather and share at least some overlapping enjoyments…). But then, I’m biased as I just love bluegrass and especially new grass and bluegrass-jazz-classical-blues fusions! We go to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival most summers and love it – though it is much less diverse.

The one thing I’m interested in opening further than you may want, perhaps?, is a lot more institutional change in higher ed that is supportive of engaged modes of research and pedagogy. I ‘get’ the critique of that – perhaps most famously from Wendy Brown, and also many others – and I love reading, teaching and writing about great books as much as anyone. But I also think that we are in the last decade (if that) for generating major change to avert complete planetary collapse, widespread neofascism emerging in quite a few spots, etc, and that there is still comparatively a lot of freedom in these spaces we inhabit – though the boxes are shrinking rapidly for sure.

In Sydney, I’m working more on an inter-institutional level right now, helping to catalyse an engaged research and pedagogy movement that so far has drawn scholars from 8 institutions of higher ed in the city. We are working with Sydney Alliance, which is an umbrella organisation of 45+ organisations – ranging from a variety of faith traditions, unions, nonprofits and so forth. We’re cooking up a pretty ambitious ‘pilot’ collaboration around climate justice in migrant communities in western Sydney. The aim is to pull all sorts of capacities together to cultivate green energy, participatory democratic cultures that collaborate across lines not crossed so far (in this case Pacific Islanders, Vietnamese, Indians, Middle Easterners, white progressives, and more), perhaps (still in discussion stage) generating new community-based economic models/platforms, etc. We’re also strategising to ‘flip’ those parliamentary seats, which are pivotal to Aussie politics – sort of like how if you flipped several states in the Southeastern US you would flip the country – pulling the plug on the ’Southern Strategy’ that has held sway for half a century now!

At the same time, something that is very exciting about it is that we are organizing this through the National Tertiary Education Union, so at one and the same time building an inter institutional identity as scholars and a locus of power to intervene on educational issues at the state and national level, and also really trying to shift what the union is, so that it not merely a wage-contracts negotiating unit (important as that is) but also a union that is a locus of voice and organizing power around the craft of research and teaching and how universities are structured. This is super important in AU right now because the form neoliberalization is taking is to abolish departments – leaving faculty as mass anti-associational ‘lumpen’ and creating yet another administrative layer on top that dictates downward. Anyhow, all this is to say we’re up to some interesting stuff, I think.”