Author: john mcgowan

Despair

“This book is principally the story of a man who lived out the greater part of his life in Western Europe, in the latter half of the twentieth century. Though alone for much of his life, he was nonetheless occasionally in touch with other men. He lived through an age that was miserable and troubled. The country into which he was born was sliding slowly, ineluctably, into the ranks of the less developed countries; often haunted by misery, the men of his generation lived out their lonely, bitter lives. Feelings such as love, tenderness and human fellowship had, for the most part, disappeared. The relationships between his contemporaries were at best indifferent and more often cruel.”

This is the opening paragraph of Michel Houellebecq’s novel, The Elementary Particles (1998). Let me pair it with a passage from John Berger’s Portraits, from a short piece he wrote about the Fayum portraits in 2000.

“The situation at the end of our century is different. The future has been, for the moment, downsized, and the past is being made redundant. Meanwhile the media surround people with an unprecedented number of images, many of which are faces. The faces harangue ceaselessly by provoking envy, new appetites, ambition, or, occasionally, pity combined with a sense of impotence. Further, the images of all these faces are processed and selected in order to harangue as noisily as possible, so that one appeal out-pleads and eliminates the next appeal. And people come to depend upon this impersonal noise as a proof of being alive.”

I just don’t see it. Do I live in a bubble? I read about the ravages Facebook is causing for adolescents, or the booming market in plastic surgery, or the frantic search for status and wealth among various social sub-groups. And I don’t see it in the world I inhabit. Kiernan and Siobhan’s friends and contemporaries certainly suffer the ills—and anxieties—of economic precariousness and over indebtedness. But they aren’t unstable consumers, with lives dictated by social (or any other) media.

Yes, the future has been downsized and a sense of impotence about society’s general dysfunction and sheer nastiness reigns. But the people I know feel very much alive; the scariness of a world out of control is more than enough to keep the nerve ends jangling.

And in their personal lives—their relations to family and friends and colleagues—they are not indifferent and cruel. Even out in the public spaces of the city, the vibe is infinitely better than it was in the 1970s. Conviviality is palpable—and can pretty much be counted on in most interactions with strangers. It is the disjunct between this face-to-face decency and the nastiness of our politics and the on-line shit that is most striking to me. For the most part, it seems to me people are remarkably resistant to the poison seeping through the system.

But maybe it’s the bubble I occupy, the world of the professional upper middle class. A word with very few divorces, very little domestic abuse, very little drug and alcohol abuse. Maybe under the polite veneer, chaos, anger, and horrors lurk. It would speak of an unbelievable cover-up if such were the case. I am hardly denying that the opioid epidemic or domestic violence or homophobia or racism exist.

I think what I am trying to say comes down to four claims, all of which I only advance tentatively because I am not by any means convinced I understand what is going on. Here are the claims

Our economics and our politics have become more nasty, but there are strong counter-vailing forces. Those forces widen the gap between public life (the structure of the imagined, non-face-to-face worlds of commerce and politics and the media) and the concrete face-to-face interactions of everyday life (including in the workplace to a large extent). That the strain of this gap has not, thus far, led to serious disruptions is surprising to me. By which, I guess I mean, that the disruptions have only been manifested on the personal level—in domestic violence or drug/alcohol abuse—not in much serious push-back against the inhumanity of corporations treating employees as replaceable parts and subjecting them to increasingly demeaning surveillance.
The impact of the increased nastiness has been felt very unequally. No surprise there since the increased nastiness has been accompanied by huge upsurges in economic inequality. Where people are doing quite well—as they are in Chapel Hill—the social ills of our time are not very manifest. But those class differences do not explain the convivial vibe in America’s cities or the declining crime rates. The “losers” in the next economic regime are, for the most part, still “nice” to others. It is sort of like Charlie Kruzman’s work on the “missing’ Muslim terrorists; given the hordes of losers, it is striking how few of them adopt the kind of indifference or cruelty toward others that Houellebecq claims is general.
So, one the one hand, I incline to an almost economic determinist viewpoint when it comes to domestic violence and drug/alcohol abuse, thus explaining why certain classes are more afflicted with these ills than others. (Of course, I am only talking general trends here. The economically fortunate can still be alcoholics, and domestic abusers.) But when it comes to homophobia and racism, I am inclined to say that values other than the economic remain incredibly strong—and perhaps even stronger than—economically driven beliefs and behaviors. This works both ways. Residual decency, the considerate ways we interact with others, prove resistant to the prevailing economic modes of relationship. The economic—for better and for worse—does not carry all before it.
Similarly, let’s no overestimate the effectiveness of media. People have developed all kinds of ways to shut media messages off. The overload of which Berger speaks is itself a disabling factor. Everyone has to create a filter against such bombardment. Confirmation bias suggests that we only hear the messages we are predisposed to hear—which is one way of saying that most messages don’t get through and that the power of messages to change our basic beliefs is severely limited. Conversion is an astoundingly rare experience.

In sum, I just don’t see that generalizations about the despair of our times—and how they have changed basic behaviors tout court—are credible. There is more variety out there than such pronouncements credit. And, frankly, just much more good behavior than they are willing to admit.

American Decline

I have never had much patience for the kind of universal history that trades in ideas like “decline and fall.” I look at Italy or Spain in 2018 and don’t really buy that life for the ordinary Italian in 1470 or ordinary Spaniard in 1570 was better than life for a comparable person today. Power and empire have their obvious pathologies—and their perhaps a little less obvious costs.

Is the US today worse off than it was in 1955? Not for blacks and gays, it would seem obvious to say. Or even for leftists, one might add, given the rather terrifying impact of Joe McCarthy’s ravings. For the grand American middle class, things generally are worse. We can tell ourselves a story about how, coming out of the collective effort and collective sacrifice of the War, we entered the most egalitarian moment in US history, the moment when a grateful nation rewarded all its citizens for what they had done for the war effort. It is certainly true that Harry Truman’s embrace of civil rights (as far as it went) was driven partly by electoral calculations, but also partly by his outrage that black veterans could be treated so shabbily at home. Truman’s ah-ha moment came with the killing (not quite a lynching, but damn close) of a black Army veteran in Georgia in 1947.

American confidence—and rude health—in the post-War years can also be seen in its investments. The interstate highway system, the airports, the public universities and health care facilities were all products of a positive outlook on society and its future. American decline can be measured, it seems to me, in the growing refusal to invest in the future—either in infrastructure or in our children’s health or education—since the 1970s recession. The contrast to China (as illustrated in the most recent issue of The New Yorker) could not be more stark. While they are building universities, roads, high speed trains, we are letting our infrastructure decay all around us. Our subways and highways are falling apart—and our universities are being left to rot.

Of course, this is a story about privatization, about the evils of neoliberalism, about the loss of any sense that the public coffers should finance such things as education, health, or transportation. But we can also tell a story in which it stems from the on-going (and seamlessly endless) backlash from the 1960s, the interminable culture wars. The right has insisted on an “us” vs. “them” narrative since 1968 (at least), where “them” are the uppity blacks of the civil rights movement and the hippies of the anti-war movement, later joined by feminists and gay activists. The right will be damned before spending public money (“our taxes”) on these god-forsaken folks. Cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face it all too often is, but to hell with the consequences.

It’s the loss of any sense of fellow-feeling with whole cross-sections of one’s fellow Americans that makes abandonment of infrastructure investment so easy to countenance. We know it is not for lack of funds. So we all get to live in a crumbling physical environment in which higher education and decent health care become increasingly unaffordable. Each day present day America resembles

Corporate Enterprises

A short addendum to my last post. It is striking that war and revolution unite people in destruction, in tearing things down, in fierce opposition to some foe. Is the bliss of cooperation possible in more constructive, creative endeavors? Sports and business don’t fully count here since are so wrapped up in competition, in having an opponent that must be beat. How about art? The making of a film or a play, or of a Gothic cathedral, requires many hands working in concert. Certainly, that’s where Ruskin located his utopia, in the corporate effort to create Notre-Dame.

In his famous and influential “Nature of the Gothic,” Ruskin imagines a perfect Hegelian society, where unified purpose also enables individual distinction. It is precisely not about everyone moving in lock-step, but about each contributing according to his talents—with that contribution being recognized, appreciated, and honored. A sense of individual satisfaction in work well done and, crucially, work self-directed is joined to an over-arching project. I get to work on my small piece in freedom, but am also driven by the knowledge of how it contributes to the whole.

The vast body of scholarship is constructed along similar lines. Yet for those of us immersed in it, it hardly seems ideal. How did the stone-mason in 13^th century Paris feel about his work from day to day? Surely Ruskin idealizes.

Still, one’s scholarship depends on and is in conversation with the work of others. And one’s own work is certainly pointless if not contributing to something that we represent, vaguely enough it is true, as “knowledge.” Without that, where would we be—just seekers of prestige in our designated circle of Bourdieuian hell.

All of which is to say the Hegelian/Ruskinian dream is a beautiful, even a worthy, one. We do well to keep trying to make it real. And while alive to all the imperfections that inflict its semblances in our daily lives, we should also suspect the cynicism that would undermine those efforts entirely. Hence my desire to avoid simply scorning the Hardt/Negri book or the efforts of our “prefiguative” democrats.

Utopian Passion

The heartfelt disgust at neoliberalism’s cruelty that animates Hardt and Negri’s work is, quite simply, admirable. And the equally passionate desire for the “commons” and for “cooperation”—along with the desire to imagine a politics, along with forms of political action, that body forth such cooperation in a shared space—is also praiseworthy. Just because their sharp analysis of neoliberalism is not matched with a correspondingly acute description of what to do next is no reason to disparage the work.

Here’s the fullest statement of the longed-for utopia in the book.

“The history of general strikes is animated by an insurrectional and constituent passion: not passion in the sense of a charismatic or thaumaturgic event, but passion that lives in the highest moments of political ethics, in the intersection of resistance and solidarity, when spontaneity and organization, insurrection and constituent power are most closely tied together. It is an act, to use the language of ethical philosophy, when rationality and love triumph together. In the ‘strike’ passion, reason creates a dynamic of common freedom and love generates an expansive action of equality. Calls for coalition, tous ensemble, speak the language of reason and freedom; expressions of camaraderie, companer@s, sisters and brothers, are the language of love and equality. The general strike thus gives flesh to the bare bones of the language of human rights” (Assembly, 241).

“O, then was it bliss to be alive. The resemblance to Arendt’s celebration of “the lost treasure of revolution” impresses me. The importance of ends, of purposes, of outcomes shrinks; it is the political action itself that looms large, the ecstatic moment of union with others in the fierce present of “resistance,” of love. Success is almost beside the point. The strike is not a moment of building or of becoming. It is a moment of pure being, of being-with, of the ecstatic loss of self in something larger than the self.

(To be fair, Hardt and Negri’s term “constituent power” is meant to signal that the power immanent to the general strike is constructive, it constitutes things. They certainly don’t want to say that the strike, like Auden’s poetry, “makes nothing happen.” But “constituent power” is another instance of their sloganeering. How this power constitutes anything and what it constitutes are never addressed.)

The longing for a worthy collective, a larger cause to which I can willingly, happily, in a full unshadowed endorsement, immerse myself must beckon to us all at some point or another. Even the staunchest individual imagines a soul mate, an absorbing and fulfilling love. A perfect union.

Love, admittedly, is difficult. I am often astonished at both how mundane love is—and how improbable at exactly the same time. We are all such prickly beasts, full of selfish desires and self-regarding hurts and shames and needs. The slightest things rub us the wrong way, make us wrinkle our noses in disgust. “I don’t want to be associated with that.” Such sensitivities afflict our personal loves and consistently poison less personal associations. So when it actually works, when our incorporation (a potent word when its bodily root is taken seriously) is complete—and satisfying–it seems nothing short of a miracle.

And here’s the rub. Few experiences appear to scratch the itch for belonging so intensely as war. Nostalgia for war is rampant among those who have participated in one. And Hardt and Negri’s romance of the general strike sounds remarkably similar to soldier’s memories of being in the army. The logic of William James’s famous essay, “A Moral Equivalent of War,” weighs upon me. James was eloquent, in Varieties of Religious Experience, about the desire to merge the self into some cause, some entity, larger than self. In many respects, that longing is religion for James. War can look like religion’s equivalent—the stakes are appropriately high, the denial of the self’s petty needs fully imperative.

“War is the health of the state,” wrote Randolph Bourne. Presumably, war thus should be the exact opposite of everything that Hardt and Negri desire from politics. They want ecstasy without destruction, with everything on the line even though violence is absent. I sympathize. I, too, want that. At least some of the time. I am, I suspect, more attached to individuality than they are. I want to reserve my right to have reservations, to maintain an ironic distance from collective enterprises, to be allowed to judge them as well as participate in them. No unreflective belonging.

One final thought. Bourne’s famous statement can be taken in another way. Reading the book about the American war in the Pacific, it is impossible not to be impressed by the feats of organization and coordination the state managed during World War II. The moving parts were almost infinite; the details that needed to be anticipated and then taken care of simply mind-boggling. As an intellectual challenge, a challenge then joined to the material and psychological challenges, the war—and how America responded to it—is awe-inspiring. If anything ever proved that communism could work, it was what America did in the five years from 1940 to 1945, when a centrally planned economy that appropriated every single member of society and assigned them their place in the war-making machine performed its task extremely well.

Hornfischer (the author of the book on the Pacific War) is a fairly typical right-leaning military historian. He is fully taken with the romance of American power and deeply proud of American know-how and courage. He never cottons on the extent that the America of the war years was a communist society if ever there was one. But he also pays just about no attention to the sand in the machine. For him, the war operations were just about frictionless, with only a few minor, if unfortunate, mishaps (he really can’t even bring himself to call them screw-ups). Most telling, perhaps, is the fact that he deems artillery and air bombardment (long-distance killing) as almost always effective, whereas most analysts have concluded that the military has always over-estimated their efficacy.

It wasn’t just for humor’s sake, with no connection to reality, that the common sailor resorted to the ever-present euphemism, SNAFU. Situation Normal All Fucked Up. The best laid plans and all that. The romance of war, like all romances, tends to eliminate the warts. Many a soldier was not a happy camper, and even the happy ones usually had scant respect for the abilities of the higher-ups, with their fancy uniforms and even fancier plans.

Assembly is driven by a desire for a moment (at least a moment, even though it seems to suggest we could have an era) when all are in lockstep. Be careful what you wish for. War, based on nationalist solidarity, is the closest we’ve come to such ecstatic unity. Maybe the revolutionary moment, the longed for assembly of the multitude out in the public square protesting the evils of neoliberalism, compares. But I’ll put in my two cheers for liberal pluralism all the same. Lockstep just doesn’t appeal to me all that much.