modernity

МСВТ, о.п. Площадь Революции

Children of Iofan: Post-Soviet futuristic nostalgia

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Перспективный вид с юго-запада
Children of Iofan
Проект Московской Системы Воздухоплавательного транспорта описан в сообщении МСВТ, о.п. Завод Зотова
Перспективный вид с востока
МСВТ, о.п. Ясногорская (арх. Липгарт С.В.)
МСВТ, о.п. Площадь Революции
Fragment

Stunning designs by architect S.V. Lipgart.

Enjoy! Continue reading →

seth ackerman market socialism

“On Communism and Markets: A Reply to Seth Ackerman,” by Matthijs Krul

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Apparently rejected by Jacobin, this was originally posted over at Krul’s Notes and Commentaries blog.

In his recent essay on Jacobin, Seth Ackerman makes a number of common arguments in favor of some form of market socialism over and against central planning as well as other designs for non-market, non-capitalist economies. The essay contains much that most socialists could agree with. He rightly cites the failure of the neoclassical argument for general equilibrium to apply in real-world situations under the devastating theoretical impact of the Cambridge capital critique and the so-called ‘theory of the second-best’, and the lack of statistical evidence proving the superior efficiency of market capitalist societies over those of the former Soviet bloc. The historical record of capitalism to achieve general efficiency, equity, and democracy is, in short, atrocious, and neoclassical economics always serves first and foremost as apologetics for this system – we probably need not go into this further.

Also understandable is Ackerman’s negative response to models of a post-capitalist economy along the lines of some form of direct democracy, such as Albert and Hahnel’s “Parecon” approach. For Albert and Hahnel, democratic councils would gather data from individuals regarding their preferences, debate these according to socialist and ecological norms, and process them into a planning system, which would regularly update its information according to the same political processes; all this in order to regulate production for human need. Ackerman is justifiably skeptical of the workability of this proposal, as it would require millions of political debates about millions of input-output processes from wildly divergent sources and for wildly divergent ends. If every aspect of the planning system would have to be truly democratic – in the sense of being up for immediate political input ‘from below’ – any system with more than a rudimentary division of labor would quickly come to a shuddering halt.

For Ackerman, this is proof of the validity of the so-called calculation problem, an old argument from liberal critics of Marxism (in particular the Austrian school of economics), alleging that it is a priori impossible for centrally planned economies of any kind to operate: only prices, the argument runs, are accurately able to convey the necessary decentralized and distributed information that makes up the relative exchange value of goods. Therefore, in any system seeking to replace prices (and by implication, profits) with some form of central management, there necessarily follows a shortage of information in the decision-making process in production and exchange, with the familiar results of shortages, gluts, famines, and failures of supply. Continue reading →

Ivan Kudriashev, Construction of a Rectilinear Motion (1925)

Anti-Dühring and Anti-Christ, II: Freedom to become

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IMAGE: Ivan Kudriashev, Construction
of a Rectilinear Motion (1925)

Continuing this metaphor, common to both Nietzsche and Marx, we might still ask: What is it, exactly, to which “old collapsing bourgeois society” is giving birth? Nietzsche saw two possibilities, depending on whether the self-overcoming of the present had been borne “[of] a desire for fixing, for immortalizing, for being, or rather [of] a desire for destruction, for change, for novelty, for future, for becoming.”  If the former, Nietzsche warned, the impulse is romantic and regressive, an attempt to return to the static existence of tradition.  “The desire for destruction, for change and for becoming,” by contrast, “can be the expression of an overflowing energy pregnant with the future.”[72]  Once more, the present’s pregnancy with the future is intimately bound up with the problem of conscience and self-becoming.  As Nietzsche indicated in The Gay Science: “What does your conscience say? — ‘You should become who you are.’”[73]  How is this accomplished? Through boundless negativity, through a fearless commitment to self-transformation, by embracing “the eternal joy in becoming, — the joy that includes even the eternal joy in negating…”[74]

In a similar fashion, Marx understood the bourgeois epoch to be characterized by perpetual flux, the annihilation of existing conditions to make way for those arising out of them: a ceaseless motion of becoming.  Materialist dialectic, by standing the doctrine of its Hegelian predecessor on its head, was no less negative or pitilessly destructive than its Nietzschean counterpart: “In accordance with the Hegelian method of thought, the proposition of the rationality of everything that is real dissolves to become the opposite proposition: All that exists deserves to perish.  But precisely therein lay the true significance and the revolutionary character of Hegelian philosophy, that it once and for all dealt the deathblow to the finality of all products of human thought and action.”[75]  Moreover, the concept of freedom was always understood by Marx as the freedom to become what one will be, rather than the ontological notion of freedom promulgated by romanticism and postmodernism as the freedom to be (e.g., a Jew or a Muslim, a sculptor or a painter, heterosexual or homosexual) what one already “is.”  Marx saw this possibility for self-becoming as grounded in the historical emergence of the capitalist mode of production, which, after establishing itself, reproduces the conditions of its own existence, as well as those conditions by which it might be superseded:

[Capitalism’s] presuppositions, which originally appeared as conditions of its becoming — and hence could not spring from its action as capital — now appear as results of its own realization, reality, as posited by it — not as conditions of its arising, but as results of its presence.  It no longer proceeds from presuppositions in order to become, but rather it is itself presupposed, proceeding from itself to create the conditions of its maintenance and growth…This correct view [of its development] leads at the same time to the points at which the suspension of the present form of production relations gives signs of its becoming — foreshadowings of the future.  Just as, on one side, the pre-bourgeois phases appear as merely historical, suspended presuppositions, so do the contemporary conditions of production likewise appear as engaged in suspending themselves and hence also as positing the historic presuppositions for a new state of society.[76] Continue reading →

Anti-Duhring and Anti-Christ: Marx, Engels, Nietzsche

Anti-Dühring and Anti-Christ, I

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Marx, Engels, and Nietzsche
on equality and morality

Untitled.
Image: Anti-Dühring
and Anti-Christ
untitled2

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Return to the introduction to “Twilight of the idoloclast? On the Left’s recent anti-Nietzschean turn”
Return to “Malcolm Christ, or the Anti-Nietzsche”

In his defense, Bull is hardly the first to have made this mistake. Many of Nietzsche’s latter-day critics, self-styled “progressives,” actually share his vulgar misconception of socialism. The major difference is that where Nietzsche vituperated against the leveling discourse of equality, believing it to be socialist, his opponents just as gullibly affirm it — again as socialism. Noting that Nietzsche’s antipathy toward the major currents of socialism he encountered in his day was an extension of his scorn for Christianity and its “slave morality,” which he saw apotheosized in the modern demand for equality, some critics go so far as to uphold not only the equation of socialism with equality, but also to defend its putative precursors in traditional religious practices and moral codes. This is of a piece with broader attempts by some Marxists to accommodate reactionary anti-capitalist movements that draw inspiration from religion, whether this takes the form of apologia for “fanaticism” (as in Alberto Toscano’s Fanaticism),[48] “fundamentalism” (as in Domenico Losurdo’s “What is Fundamentalism?”),[49] or “theology” (as in Roland Boer’s trilogy On Marxism and Theology).[50] These efforts to twist Marxism into a worldview that is somehow compatible with religious politics ought to be read as a symptom of the death of historical Marxism and the apparent absence of any alternative.

According to the testimony of Peter D. Thomas, “[Losurdo] argues that Nietzsche’s…critiques of Christianity…were a response to the role [it] played in the formation of the early socialist movement. The famous call for an amoralism, ‘beyond good and evil,’ is analyzed as emerging in opposition to socialist appeals to notions of justice and moral conduct.”[51] Corey Robin touches on a similar point in his otherwise uninspired psychology of “the” reactionary mind, a transhistorical mentalité across the centuries (from Burke to Sarah Palin, as the book’s subtitle would have it): “The modern residue of that slave revolt, Nietzsche makes clear, is found not in Christianity, or even in religion, but in the nineteenth-century movements for democracy and socialism.”[52] Finally, Ishay Landa differentiates between Marxist and Nietzschean strains of atheism in his 2005 piece “Aroma and Shadow: Marx vs. Nietzsche on Religion,” in which he all but confirms the latter’s suspicion that socialism is nothing more than a sense of moral outrage against empirical conditions of inequality.[53]

To make better sense of this confusion, it is useful to glance at the various texts and authors that Nietzsche took to be representative of socialism. Once this has been accomplished, the validity of his claim that nineteenth-century socialism was simply the latest ideological incarnation of crypto-Christian morality, repackaged in secular form, can be ascertained. Notwithstanding the incredulity of Losurdo,[54] even the German Social-Democrat and later biographer of Marx, Franz Mehring, who had little patience for Nietzsche (despite his indisputable poetic abilities), confessed: “Absent from Nietzsche’s thinking was an explicit philosophical confrontation with socialism.”[55] (Mehring added, incidentally, much to Lukács’ chagrin, that “[t]he Nietzsche cult is…useful to socialism…No doubt, Nietzsche’s writings have their pitfalls for young people…growing up within the bourgeois classes…, laboring under bourgeois class-prejudices. But for such people, Nietzsche is only a transitional stage on the way to socialism.”[56] Other than the writings of such early socialists as Weitling and Lamennais, however, Nietzsche’s primary contact with socialism came by way of Wagner, who had been a follower of Proudhon in 1848 with a streak of Bakuninism thrown in here and there. Besides these sources, there is some evidence that he was acquainted with August Bebel’s seminal work on Woman and Socialism. More than any other, however, the writer who Nietzsche most associated with socialist thought was Eugen Dühring, a prominent anti-Marxist and anti-Semite. Dühring was undoubtedly the subject of Nietzche’s most scathing criticisms of the maudlin morality and reactive sentiment in mainstream socialist literature. Continue reading →

Notes to “Twilight of the Idoloclast? On the Left’s recent anti-Nietzschean turn”

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Notes to Twilight of the idoloclast? On the Left’s recent anti-Nietzschean turn, Malcolm Christ, or the Anti-Nietzsche, Anti-Dühring and Anti-Christ: Marx, Engels, Nietzsche

[1] “Reading for victory is the way Nietzsche himself thought people ought to read.”  Bull, Malcolm.  Anti-Nietzsche.  (Verso Books.  New York, NY: 2011).
[2] As Domenico Losurdo blurbs on the back of his book, “Altman…adopts Nietzsche’s own aphoristic genre in order to use it against him.”  Altman himself explains: “[T]he whole point of writing in Nietzsche’s own style was to demonstrate how much power over his readers he gains by plunging him into the midst of what may be a pathless ocean, confusing them as to their destination.”  Altman, William.  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: The Philosopher of the Second Reich.  (Lexington Books.  New York, NY: 2012).  Pg. xi.  Later Altman admits, however, that “[t]his kind of writing presumes, of course, good readers.”  Ibid., pg. 181.
[3] Dombrowsky, Don.  Nietzsche’s Machiavellian Politics.  (Palgrave MacMillan.  New York, NY: 2004).  Pg. 134.
[4] Conway, Daniel.  Nietzsche and the Political.  (Routledge.  New York, NY: 1997).  Pg. 119.
[5] Appel, Fredrick.  Nietzsche Contra Democracy.  (Cornell University Press.  Ithaca, NY: 1999).  Pg. 120.
[6] “[I]n uncovering Nietzsche’s rhetorical strategy [they] reuse it.”  Bull, Anti-Nietzsche.  Pg. 32.
[7] Ibid., pg. 33.
[8] Ibid., passim, pgs. 35-38, 42, 47-48, 51, 74-76, 98, 100, 135, 139, 143.
……Indeed, Bull’s call to “read like a loser” grants to the essays in Anti-Nietzsche their hermeneutic integrity.  This formulation has since gone on to become one of the book’s most celebrated phrases, as well, charming reviewers from New Inquiry’s David Winters to Costica Bardigan of the Times Higher Education. Winters, David.  “Reading Like a Loser.”  New Inquiry.  (February 14, 2012).  Bardigan, Costica.  “Review of Malcolm Bull’s Anti-Nietzsche.”  Times Higher Education.  (January 29, 2012).  Even longtime admirers of Nietzsche like T.J. Clark admit its interpretive power: “[N]o other critique of Nietzsche, and there have been many, conjures up the actual reader of Daybreak and The Case of Wagner so unnervingly.”  Clark, T.J.  “My Unknown Friends: A Response to Malcolm Bull.”  Nietzsche’s Negative Ecologies.  (University of California Press.  Berkeley, CA: 2009).  Pg. 79. Continue reading →

Sigfried Giedion’s 1963 introduction to Space, Time, and Architecture

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Confusion and Boredom

In the sixties a certain confusion exists in contemporary architecture, as in painting; a kind of pause, even a kind of exhaustion.  Everyone is aware of it.  Fatigue is normally accompanied by uncertainty, what to do and where to go.  Fatigue is the mother of indecision, opening the door to escapism, to superficialities of all kinds.

A symposium at the Metropolitan Museum of New York in the spring of 1961 discussed the question, “Modern Architecture, Death or Metamorphosis?”  As this topic indicates, contemporary architecture is regarded by some as a fashion and — as an American architect expressed it — many designers who had adopted the fashionable aspects of the “International Style,” now found the fashion had worn thin and were engaged in a romantic orgy.  This fashion, with its historical fragments picked at random, unfortunately infected many gifted architects. By the sixties its results could be seen everywhere: in small-breasted, gothic-styled colleges, in a lacework of glittering details inside and outside, in the toothpick stilts and assembly of isolated buildings of the largest cultural center.

A kind of playboy-architecture became en vogue: an architecture treated as playboys treat life, jumping from one sensation to another and quickly bored with everything. I have no doubt that this fashion born out of an inner uncertainty will soon be obsolete; but its effects can be rather dangerous, because of the worldwide influence of the United States.

Красная Москва (1990)

Красная Москва (1990)

We are still in the formation period of a new tradition, still at its beginning. In Architecture, You and Me I pointed out the difference between the nineteenth- and twentieth-century approach to architecture. There is a word we should refrain from using to describe contemporary architecture — “style.”  The moment we fence architecture within a notion of “style,” we open the door to a formalistic approach.  The contemporary movement is not a “style” in the nineteenth-century meaning of form characterization.  It is an approach to the life that slumbers unconsciously within all of us.

In architecture the word “style” has often been combined with the epithet “international,” though this epithet has never been accepted in Europe.  The term “international style” quickly became harmful, implying something hovering in mid-air, with no roots anywhere: cardboard architecture.  Contemporary architecture worthy of the name sees its main task as the interpretation of a way of life valid for our period.  There can be no question of “Death or Metamorphosis,” there can only be the question of evolving a new tradition, and many signs show that this is in the doing.

Panel event, 2.7.2013 at NYU — Ruins of Modernity: The failure of revolutionary architecture in the twentieth century

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RUINS OF MODERNITY:

THE FAILURE OF REVOLUTIONARY ARCHITECTURE
IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Peter Eisenman ︱ Reinhold Martin  .,
Joan Ockman ︱ Bernard Tschumi

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Thursday
2.7.2013
7-10PM

NYU Kimmel Center
Room 802 Shorin Studio
60 Washington Square S.
New York, NY 10012

Visit the official event page.
Join the Facebook event page.
Download a stylized version of the event description.
A write-up of the event at ArchDaily.
A write-up of the event at the Center for Architecture in New York.
A write-up of the event at New York Architects in New York.
A write-up of the event in the English-language magazine Uncube in Germany.

“Let us not deceive ourselves,” Victor Hugo once advised, in his iconic Hunchback of Notre Dame. “Architecture is dead, and will never come to life again; it is destroyed by the power of the printed book.” Both as a discipline and a profession, architecture lagged behind the other applied arts. Even when measures toward modernization were finally instituted, many of the most innovative, technically reproducible designs were hived off from the realm of architecture proper as mere works of “engineering.” Toward the beginning of the twentieth century, however, fresh currents of thought arose within the field to lend architecture a new lease on life. Avant-garde architects emulated developments that had been taking place in both the visual arts (Cubism, Futurism) and scientific management of labor (Taylorism, psychotechnics), advocating geometric simplicity and ergonomic efficiency in order to tear down the rigid barrier dividing art from life. Most of the militant members of the architectural avant-garde sought to match in aesthetics the historical dynamism the Industrial Revolution had introduced into society. Machine-art was born the moment that art pour l’art died. “Art is dead! Long live the machine-art of Tatlin!” announced the Dadaists George Grosz and John Heartfield in 1920.

The modernists’ project consisted in giving shape to an inseparable duality, wherein the role of architecture was deduced as simultaneously a reflection of modern society as well as an attempt to transform it. Amidst the tumult and chaos that shook European society from the Great War up through the Great Depression, revolutionary architects of all countries united in opposition to the crumbling order of bourgeois civilization, attaching themselves to radical political movements. Forced out of Europe by fascism and subsequently out of the USSR by Stalinism, the architectural avant-garde fled to North America. Following a second global conflagration — transposed into the postwar boom context of America with the GI Bill, Europe under the Marshall Plan, and Japan under McArthur — the modernists now reneged on their prior commitment to spur on social change. Abandoning what Colin Rowe had called “that mishmash of millennialistic illusions, chiliastic excitements, and quasi-Marxist fantasies,” they instead accommodated themselves to the planning agencies and bureaucratic superstructures of Fordism. “European modern architecture came to infiltrate the United States, largely purged of its ideological or societal content; where it became available, not as an evident manifestation or cause of socialism,” he wrote, “but rather as décor de la vie for Greenwich, Connecticut or as a suitable veneer for the corporate activities of enlightened capitalism.” Indeed, the International Style that premiered in 1932 at MoMA under Johnson and Hitchcock’s highly selective curatorial oversight had already been stripped down to its barest formal elements. Looking to revitalize revolutionary modernism, Reyner Banham thus declared in 1962: “Even when modern architecture seemed plunged in its worst confusions it could still summon up a burst of creative energy that gave the lie to the premature reports of its demise. Modern architecture is dead; long live modern architecture!”

Only a decade later, however, Charles Jencks calculated in his book on Post-Modern Architecture that it was possible “to date the death of Modern Architecture to a precise moment in time” (July 15, 1972 at 3:32 pm, with the detonation of Yamasaki’s much-maligned Pruitt-Igoe complex in St. Louis). Today it is postmodernism that appears to be aging badly. But if postmodernism, which stood for “the end of the end” (Eisenman), is itself at an end, does this mean the end of “the end of the end”? Just another stop along the way in an endless cycle of endings? — Or might it portend the beginning of a modernist renaissance? This prospect could prove bleaker yet. “In architecture,” writes Owen Hatherley, addressing the issue of “post-postmodernism,” “typically postmodernist devices seem to have entered a terminal decline, as historical eclecticism and glib ironies have been replaced by rediscoveries of modernist forms — albeit emptied of political or theoretical content. But does this trend represent a break with postmodernism — or does it merely mark the arrival of the pseudomodernism of contemporary architecture?”

In light of these considerations, Platypus thus asks:

  1. Where does architecture stand at present, in terms of its history? Are we still — were we ever — postmodern?
  2. What social and political tasks yet remain unfulfilled, carried over from the twentieth century, in a world scattered with the ruins of modernity? Does “utopia’s ghost” (Martin), the specter of modernism, still haunt contemporary building?
  3. How can architecture be responsibly practiced today? Is revolutionary architecture even possible?

This event is free and open to the public.

“Ruins of modernity: The failure of revolutionary architecture in the 20th century” is part of a larger series of panels and events centered around the theme of the death of art that will take place during the month of February 2013 in NYC.  The headlining event, focusing on visual arts and the Left, “Aging in the Afterlife: The Many Deaths of Art,” will take place February 23rd at the New School.  For info on other events in this series, please consult the website for further updates.

Featuring

Peter EisenmanPETER EISENMAN

Peter Eisenman is design principal of Eisenman Architects in New York. His current projects include the City of Culture of Galicia in Spain; a master plan for Pozzuoli, Italy, and a residential condominium in Milan.  His award-winning projects include the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin and the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts in Ohio. In 2010, he received the international Wolf Prize in Architecture, and in 2004 the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Architecture Biennale. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his many books are Written Into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990-2004 and Ten Canonical Buildings, 1950-2000, on the work of ten architects. He is also the Charles Gwathmey Professor in Practice at the Yale School of Architecture.

Reinhold MartinREINHOLD MARTIN

Reinhold Martin is Associate Professor of Architecture in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, where he directs the PhD program in architecture and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. He is also a member of Columbia’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and the Committee on Global Thought. Martin is a founding co-editor of the journal Grey Room and has published widely on the history and theory of modern and contemporary architecture. He is the author of The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (MIT Press, 2003), and Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minnesota, 2010), as well as the co-author, with Kadambari Baxi, of Multi-National City: Architectural Itineraries (Actar, 2007). Currently, he is working on two books: a history of the nineteenth century American university as a media complex, and a study of the contemporary city at the intersection of aesthetics and politics.

JOAN OCKMAN

Joan Ockman is Distinguished Senior Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design.  Before this, she served as Director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University from 1994 to 2008 and was a member of the faculty of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation for over two decades. In addition to Columbia and Penn, she has also taught at Yale, Cornell, Graduate Center of City University of New York, and the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. She began her career at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, where she was an editor of the legendary Oppositions journal and was responsible for the Oppositions Books series.  Her most recent book is Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America. A twentieth-anniversary edition of her book Architecture Culture 1943-1968: A Documentary Anthology will appear in 2013.

BERNARD TSCHUMI

Bernard Tschumi is widely recognized as one of today’s foremost architects. In 1983, he won the prestigious competition for the Parc de La Villette. Since then, he has designed buildings such as the new Acropolis Museum; Le Fresnoy National Studio for the Contemporary Arts; the Vacheron-Constantin Headquarters; The Richard E. Lindner Athletics Center at the University of Cincinnati; and architecture schools in Marne-la-Vallée, France and Miami, Florida. Tschumi’s many books include the three-part Event-Cities series; The Manhattan Transcripts; and Architecture and Disjunction.  Tschumi was awarded France’s Grand Prix National d’Architecture in 1996 as well as numerous awards from the American Institute of Architects and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is an international fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects in England and a member of the Collège International de Philosophie and the Académie d’Architecture in France.

Ruins of modernity: The failure of revolutionary architecture in the 20th century, w/ Eisenman, Ockman, Martin, and Tschumi

Poster designed by Ross Wolfe

Ruins of modernity: The failure of revolutionary architecture in the 20th century, w/ Eisenman, Ockman, Martin, and Tschumi

Poster designed by Ross Wolfe.

square1

Poster designed by Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan.

Wilhelm Dilthey

Three models of “resistance”

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Untitled.
Image: Photograph of Wilhelm Dilthey

1. The “resistance” of the world to humanity’s conscious attempts to transform it

Go to Three models of “resistance” — Introduction

In 1890, the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey authored a remarkable essay on “The Origin of Our Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its Justification.”  Against some of the prevailing interpretations of his day, Dilthey argued that the reality of the external world was neither an immediately given fact of consciousness nor the product of unconscious inferences linking cause to effect.  On the contrary, he asserted that the reality of the world outside of the self comes to be known to individual subjects only by encountering resistance [Widerstand] to the will.  Recognition of the external world’s reality thus arises from “[the] consciousness of voluntary motion [entering] into a relation with the experience of resistance [Widerstandserfahrung]; in this way a…distinction develops between the life of the self and something other that is independent of it.”[10]

Resistance in this model stands as the original ground on which all subsequent differentiation takes place.  Here the “I” is first separated off from a “not-I” that opposes it.  But unlike the Fichtean philosophy from which these terms are derived,[11] “I” and “not-I” for Dilthey are not distinguished (at least initially) by an act of cognition.  This cleavage is first realized, rather, through an act of volition.  In other words, the intuition of a world that exists apart from the ego does not come about through the self-positing activity of the subject in making itself an object of contemplation or thought,[12] as in Fichte.  It manifests itself through an act of the will, in the subject’s efforts to subjugate the whole of reality unto itself — thereby satisfying its every appetite.  The “pushback” it experiences in trying to enforce its will then prompts an awareness that something exists outside the self.  Thus does consciousness enter into existence, circumscribed within a world that is not of its making.  It learns the limits to its own subjective agency by encountering resistance to its sovereign will.

For Dilthey, then, this experience not only formed the basis for understanding the world as an independent and objective entity — i.e., as something separate from the self.  It was also to an equal extent the source of the ego’s self-understanding as an autonomous and subjective entity.  Dilthey went on to explain that “the difference between a ‘self’ and an ‘other’ is first experienced in impulse and resistance…,the first germ of the ego and the world and of the distinction between them.”[13]  This initial moment of separation is then necessary to lend legitimacy and significance to the network of distinctions educed from it.  “The entire meaning of the words ‘self’ and ‘other,’ ‘ego’ and ‘world,’” explained Dilthey, “and the differentiation of the self from the external world is contained in the experiences of our will and of the feelings connected with it…The core of this distinction is…the relationship of impulse and restraint of intention, of will and resistance.”[14] Continue reading →

Three models of “resistance” — Notes

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Notes

[1] “[The] political beginnings [of ‘resistance’] in the West are conservative; this helps to explain some of the politics of resistance.  It’s Edmund Burke, the British conservative, who actually counsels resistance against the radical change of the French Revolution in 1790.  About 75 years later, the same call was taken up by Mathew Arnold, who essentially argues for culture as a means of resistance against the tides of anarchic progress…Marx and Engels, when they [were] writing the Communist Manifesto, actually single out resistance in the form of reactionary socialism as a major stumbling block to any sort of revolution…Resistance has this sort of conservative cast in the 18th and 19th centuries.”  Albert, Michael; Cutrone, Chris; Duncombe, Stephen; and Holmes, Brian. “The 3 Rs: Reform, Revolution, and ‘Resistance’: The Problematic Forms of ‘Anti-capitalism’ Today.”  Platypus Review.  (No. 4.  April, 2008).

[2]Upping the Anti Editorial Board.  “With Eyes Wide Open: Notes on Crisis and Resistance Today.”  Upping the Anti.  (No. 10.  May, 2010).

[3] Postone, Moishe.  Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory.  (Cambridge University Press.  New York, NY: 1993).  Pgs.

[4] Burke, Edmund.  Selected Works, Volume 2: Reflections on the Revolution in France.  (Liberty Fund.  Indianapolis, IN: 1999).  Pg 180.

[5] Paul, Alexander.  The History of Reform: A Record of the Struggle for the Representation of the People in Parliament.  (George Routledge & Sons.  New York, NY: 1884).  Pg. 138.

[6] Wolfe, Ross.  “Reflections of Resistance, Reform, and Revolution.”  Upping the Anti,  (No. 14.  November, 2012).

[7] Derrida, Jacques.  “Resistances.”  Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas.  Resistances of Psychoanalysis.  (Stanford University Press.  Stanford, CA: 1998).  Pg. 2.

[8] Ibid., pg. 16.

[9] Ibid., pg. 17.

[10] Dilthey, Wilhelm.  “The Origin of Our Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its Justification.”  Translated by Maximilian Aue.  Selected Works, Vol. 2: Understanding the Human World.  (Princeton University Press.  Princeton, NJ: 2010).  Pg. 19.

[11] “Fichte’s system is the culmination of subjective idealism.  This means simply that it completes the attempt to explain the world through the I, and to derive the nexus of all sensations and intuitions, of all that is given and exists, from the spontaneous, productive subject.  The essence of this system consists in raising all givenness, all beings, into something active, or more precisely, into the active I.  This givenness or reality is not sought for ‘out there’ in the world.  For Fichte there is no ‘out there.’  Rather the ‘out there’ exists only for consciousness itself.”  Dilthey, Wilhelm.  Hermeneutics and Its History.  Translated by Theodore Nordenhaug.  Hermeneutics and the Study of History.  (Princeton University Press.  Princeton, NJ: 1996).  Pg. 100.

[12] “The not-self is posited in the self…but all such counterpositing presupposes the identity of the self, in which something is posited and then something set in opposition thereto.”  Fichte, J.G.  The Science of Knowledge.  Translated by Peter Heath and John Lachs.  (Cambridge University Press.  New York, NY: 1982).  Pg. 106.

[13] Dilthey, “The Origin of Our Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its Justification.”  Pg. 23.

[14] Ibid., pgs. 49-50.

[15] “As is the case with many other opinions of this great author [i.e., Schopenhauer], this opinion constitutes a development of propositions set forth by his teacher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, although he does not refer to him on this occasion, and rarely mentions his name at all without piling abuse on it.”  Ibid., pg. 12.

[16] “We know that multiplicity in general is necessarily conditioned by time and space and is thinkable only through them; in this respect, we call them the principium individuationis.”  Schopenhauer, Arthur.  The World as Will and Representation, Volume 1.  Translated by Christopher Janaway, Judith Norman, and Alistair Welchman.  (Cambridge University Press.  New York, NY: 2010).  Pg. 152.

[17] Dilthey, Wilhelm.  Selected Works, Volume 3: The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences.  Translated by Rudolf A. Makkreel and John Scanlon.  (Princeton University Press.  Princeton, NJ: 2002).  Pg. 55.

[18] Dilthey, “The Origin of Our Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its Justification.”  Pg. 42.

[19] “This activity then becomes the ego’s highest function; decisions as to when it is more expedient to control one’s passions and bow before reality, and when it is more expedient to side with them and to take arms against the external world — such decisions make up the whole essence of worldly wisdom.”  Sigmund Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis: Conversations with an Impartial Person.  Translated by James Strachey.  (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.  New York, NY: 1978).  Pgs. 23-24.

Compare with Dilthey: “A volition first produces an impulse to move, which, in the course of the imagined motion, is accompanied by barely noticeable feelings of pleasure: then the experience of resistance arises.  Does the impulse simply disappear in it? Does it vanish by turning into a mere sensory state? No, it persists, supplemented by the consciousness that the will is being restrained.”  Dilthey, “The Origin of Our Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its Justification.”  Pg. 20.

[20] Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences.  Pg. 185.  My italics.

[21] Dilthey, “The Origin of Our Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its Justification.”  Pg. 14.

[22] Schmidt, Konrad.  “Final Goal and Movement.”  Pgs. 210-211.

[23] Bernstein, Eduard.  Selected Writings, 1900-1921.  Translated by Manfred B. Steger.  (Cambridge University Press.  New York, NY: 1996).  Pg. 64.

[24] Luxemburg, Rosa.  Reform or Revolution? Translated by Integer.  (Haymarket Books.  Chicago, IL: 2008).  Pg. 46.

[25] Lenin, Vladimir.  “A Protest by Russian Social Democrats.”  Translated by.  Collected Works, Volume 4: 1898-1899.  (Progress Publishers.  Moscow, USSR: 1977).  Pg. 178.

[26] Lenin, Vladimir.  “Fear of the Collapse of the Old and the Fight for the New.”  Translated by Yuri Sdobnikov.  Collected Works, Volume 26: September 1917-February 1918.  (Progress Publishers.  Moscow, USSR: 1972).  Pg. 401.

[27] “The crude confrontation of subject and object in naïve realism is of course historically necessitated and cannot be dismissed by an act of will.  But at the same time it is a product of false abstraction, already a piece of reification.  Once this is seen through, then a consciousness objectified to itself, and precisely as such directed outward, virtually striking outward, could no longer be dragged along without self-reflection.”  Adorno, Theodor.  “On Subject and Object.”  Critical Models.  Pg. 249.

[28] Clearly, the differences between these two conflicting orders of reality — the natural and the historical — must not to be ontologized by erecting some kind of permanent boundary between them, thereby succumbing to a form of metaphysical dualism.  An underlying material foundation unites both nature and history.  Depending on the way that one approaches this unity, however, diverging pictures can result.  The paradigmatic example of this was given by Theodor Adorno’s student Alfred Schmidt in contrasting Marx’s concept of nature against that of his influential predecessor, Ludwig Feuerbach.  “What Feuerbach described as the unity of man and nature,” Schmidt explained in his 1954 study on The Concept of Nature in Marx, “related only to the romantically transfigured fact that man arose out of nature, and not to man’s socio-historically mediated unity with nature in industry.”  In this sense, at least, Feuerbach remained a materialist in the eighteenth century mold:  “Nature as a whole was for Feuerbach an unhistorical, homogeneous substratum, while the essence of the Marxist critique was a dissolution of this homogeneity into a dialectic of Subject and Object.  Nature was for Marx both an element of human practice and the totality of everything that exists.”  Schmidt, Alfred.  The Concept of Nature in Karl Marx.  Translated by Ben Fowkes.  (New Left Books.  London, England: 1971).  Pg. 27.

To be sure, Dilthey distinguishes the historical world from the natural world at several points in presenting his philosophical system: “[N]ature is a constituent of history only insofar as it has an effect and in how it can be affected.  The proper domain of history is, to be sure, also external; yet the tones that form a musical composition, the canvas on which we paint, the courtroom in which a verdict is pronounced, merely have their material in nature.  Every operation of the human sciences dealing with such external states of affairs has to do merely with the sense and meaning they receive through the activity of spirit and how it serves the understanding that grasps this meaning and sense in them…The difference between the human and natural sciences is not just about the stance of the subject toward the object; it is not merely about a kind of attitude, a method.  Rather, the procedure of understanding is grounded in the realization that the external reality that constitutes its objects is totally different from the objects of the natural sciences.  Spirit has objectified itself in the former, purposes have been embodied in them, values have been actualized in them, and understanding grasps this spiritual content that has been formed between them.”  Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences.  Pgs. 140-141.  Still, the distinction between these two objective forms of external reality is posterior to their common experience as resistant to an individual’s will.

Despite their anthropological predispositions, Feuerbach and Dilthey each fell into the same fundamental error by conceiving nature as merely the baseline condition of human activity.  They failed to take into account the extent to which nature was itself conditioned by human activity.  “Labor is, first of all, a process between man and nature,” Marx wrote in Capital, “a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.”  In labor, especially industrial labor, man “sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head, and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs.  Through this movement he…develops the potentialities slumbering within nature, and subjects the play of its forces to his own sovereign power.” Marx, Karl.  Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1.  Translated by Ben Fowkes.  (Penguin Books.  New York, NY: 1882).  Pg. 283.

[29] Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich.  Manifesto of the Communist Party.  Pg. .

[30] Lukács, Georg.  “Class Consciousness.”  Translated by Rodney Livingstone.  History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics.  (MIT Press.  Cambridge, MA: 1971).  Pg. 70.

[31] Marx, Capital, Volume 1.  Pg.  165.

[32] Marx, Karl.  Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.  Translated by.  (Progress Publishers.  Moscow, USSR: 19).  Pg. 274.

[33] Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich.  The German Ideology.  ‘Pg. 47.

[34] “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.”  Translated by Rodney Livingstone.  History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics.  (MIT Press.  Cambridge, MA: 1971).  Pg. 185.

[35] Engels, Friedrich.  Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.  Translated by Edward Aveling.  Collected Works, Volume 24: 1874-1883.  (International Publishers.  New York, NY: 1989).  Pgs. 323-324.

[36] Freud, Sigmund.  Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis.  Translated by James Strachey.  (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.  New York, NY: 1989).  Pg. 364.

[37] “From what part of the mind does an unconscious resistance…arise? The beginner in psychoanalysis will… answer: it is, of course the resistance of the unconscious.  An ambiguous and unserviceable answer!… Resistance can only be a manifestation of the ego, which originally put the repression into force and now wishes to maintain it.”  Freud, Sigmund.  New Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis.  Translated by James Strachey.  (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.  New York, NY: 1989).  Pg. 86.

“We must above all get rid of the mistaken notion that what we are dealing with in our struggle against resistances is resistance on the part of the unconscious.  The unconscious — that is to say, the ‘repressed’ — offers no resistance whatever to the efforts of the treatment.”  Freud, Sigmund.  Beyond the Pleasure Principle.  Translated by James Strachey.  (W.W. Norton & Co.  New York, NY: 1961).  Pg. 13.

[38] Very little has been written concerning the historical conjuncture of reification, repetition, and resistance that takes place under the conditions of capitalist social life, much less in the moment of profound crisis within international Marxism (1914-1923).  Of the few authors who have touched on the issue, Postone has perhaps gone the furthest toward understanding their interconnection, albeit within a far more general purview.  He calls attention to the homology that exists between individual and social manifestations of this tendency to compulsively repeat.  “One could draw a parallel between [the Marxian] understanding of the capitalist social formation’s history and Freud’s notion of individual history, where the past does not appear as such, but rather in a veiled, internalized form that dominates the present,” Postone astutely notes.  “The task of psychoanalysis is to unveil the past in such a way that its appropriation becomes possible.  The necessary moment of a compulsively repetitive present can thereby be overcome, which allows the individual to move into the future.”  Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination.  Pg. 377.

[39] Lukács, Georg.  “Class Consciousness.”  Pgs. 76-77.

[40] Reich, Wilhelm.  “Ideology as a Material Force.”  Translated by Vincent R. Carfagno.  The Mass Psychology of Fascism.  (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux.  New York, NY: 1980).  Pg. 31.

[41] Adorno, Theodor.  “Sociology and Psychology.”  Translated by Irving N. Wohlfarth.  New Left Review.  Pg. 78.

[42] Any attempt to apply diagnostic categories acquired from the analysis of single subjects to larger groups — in moving from individual to mass psychology — obviously runs the risk of careless interpolation.  There is a danger of lapsing into mysticism, thus repeating Jung’s misguided inquiries into the so-called “collective unconscious” (and various speculations concerning its contents).  Yet as Adorno correctly pointed out, the applicability of theories pertaining to particular, individual subjects to a more universal, social subject is vouchsafed by the specific historical milieu out of which they both commonly emerged.  Inasmuch as psychoanalysis takes the individual patient as its point of departure, it already presumes a context in which persons come to be individuated — lifted out of self-enclosed, organic communities rooted in tradition.  In a word, the entire discipline takes for granted the existence of society.  More specifically, it takes for granted the society of exchange, wherein structures such as the family still play a powerful role in psychological development but consciousness is principally organized around the individual: “The social moment is…the origin [of] the individual with whom psychoanalysis concerns.  [This] itself is an abstraction vis-à-vis the social context in which individuals find themselves…through the dominant form of exchange between individual contracting parties.”  Adorno, Theodor.  Introduction to Sociology.  Translated by Edmund Jephcott.  (Stanford University Press.  Stanford, CA: 2002).  Pg. 112.

Of course, this recognition cannot by itself suffice to justify this procedure.  At the very least, it does not eliminate the need to exercise a certain delicacy when handling psychoanalytic concepts in a sociological key.  Nevertheless, it explains the partial legitimacy and the overwhelming suggestive power of notions like Jung’s “collective unconscious” or Durkheim’s “collective consciousness.” Ibid., pg. 113.  The real problem with such forula was not so much their illegitimacy, according to Freud, as it was their superfluity.  Repressed material belongs not only to the individual; its content belongs more broadly to humanity as a species.  Freud indicated as much in his final published work: “The term ‘repressed’ is here used not in its technical sense.  Here I mean something past, vanished and overcome in the life of a people, which I venture to treat as equivalent to repressed material in the mental life of the individual.  It is not easy to translate the concepts of individual psychology into mass psychology, [but]…not…much is to be gained by introducing the concept of a ‘collective’ unconscious the content of the unconscious is collective anyhow, a general possession of mankind.”  Freud, Sigmund.  Moses and Monotheism.  Translated by Katherine Jones.  (Hogarth Press.  New York, NY: 1939).  Pg. 208.  Thanks are due to Bruno Bosteels, who alerted me to this passage from Freud’s writings in his excellent Marx and Freud in Latin America.  (Verso Books.  New York, NY: 2011).  Pg. 88.

[43] Marx, Karl.  The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.  Translated by Terrell Carver.  Later Political Writings.  (Cambridge University Press.  New York, NY: 1996).  Pg. 32.

[44] “[World history] presents the development of spirit’s consciousness of its freedom and of the actualization produced by such consciousness.”  Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich.  Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Volume 1: Manuscripts of the Introduction and The Lectures of 1822-1823.  Translated by Robert F. Brown and Peter C. Hodgson.  (Oxford University Press.  Pg. 118. 

[45] Nietzsche, Friedrich.  Untimely Meditations.  Translated by R.J. Hollingdale.  (Cambridge University Press.  New York, NY: 1997).  Pg. 61.

[46] Freud, Sigmund.  The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.  Translated by James Strachey.  (W.W. Norton & Company.  New York, NY: 1966).  Pgs. 62-63.

[47] Freud, Sigmund.  “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through.”  Translated by Joan Riviere.  Pg. 150.

[48] Freud, Sigmund.  Beyond the Pleasure Principle.  Translated by James Strachey.  (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.  New York, NY: 1978).  Pg. 12.

[49] Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through.”  Pg. 151.

[50] Cutrone, Chris.  “Adorno and Freud: The Relation of Freudian Psychoanalysis to Marxist Critical Social Theory.”  Platypus Review.  (No. 24: June 2010).  Pg. 4.

[51] Marx, Karl.  Collected Works, Volume 34: Economic Manuscripts, 1861-1864.  (International Publishers.  New York, NY: 1994).  Pg. 397.

[52] Marx, Karl.  Capital, Volume 1.  Pg. 711.

[53] “The circuit of capital, when this is taken not as an isolated act but as a periodic process, is called its turnover.  The duration of this turnover is given by the sum of its production time and its circulation time.  This period of time forms the capital’s turnover time.  It thus measures the interval between one cyclical period of the total capital value and the next; the periodicity in the capital’s life-process, or, if you like, the time required for the renewal and repetition of the valorization and production process of the same capital value.”  Marx, Karl.  Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 2.  Translated by David Fernbach.  (Penguin Books.  New York, NY: 1992).  Pgs. 235-236.

[54] Maksakovskii, Pavel.  The Capitalist Cycle: An Essay on the Marxist Theory of Cycle.   Translated by Richard B. Day.  (Haymarket Books.  Chicago, IL: 2009).  Pg. 103.

[55] “Variable capital…loses its character of a value advanced out of the capitalist’s funds only when we view the process of capitalist production in the flow of its constant renewal.  But that process must have had a beginning of some kind.  From our present standpoint it therefore seems likely that the capitalist, once upon a time, became possessed of money by some form of primitive accumulation [ursprüngliche Akkumulation] that took place independently of the unpaid labor of other people, and that this was therefore how he was able to frequent the market as a buyer of labor-power.  However this may be, the mere continuity of the process of capitalist production, or simple reproduction, brings about other remarkable transformations which seize hold of not only the variable, but the total capital.”  Marx, Capital, Volume 1.  Pg. 714.

[56] Postone, Moishe.  Time, Labor, and Social Domination.  Pgs. 298-306.

[57] Marx, Capital, Volume 1.  Pg. 727.

[58] Jameson, Fredric.  Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One.  Pg. 106.

[59] Lukács, Georg.  “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.”  Translated by Rodney Livingstone.  History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics.  (MIT Press.  Cambridge, MA: 1971).  Pg. 83.

[60] Marx, Karl.  Grundrisse.  Pg. 701.

[61] Rubin, Isaak.  “The Reification of Production Relations among People and the Personification of Things.”  Translated by Milos Samardzija and Fredy Perlman.  Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value.  (Black Rose Books.  New York, NY: 1990).  Pg. 24.

[62] Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination.  Pg. 377.

[63] Korsch, Karl.  “Marxism and Philosophy.”  Translated by Fred Halliday.  (Monthly Review Press.  2009).  Pgs. 53-54.

[64] Cutrone, Chris.  “Book Review: Karl Korsch.  Marxism and Philosophy.”  Platypus Review.  No. 15: .  Pg. 3.

[65] Korsch, “Marxism and Philosophy.”  Pg. 88.

[66] Lukács, Georg.  “What is Orthodox Marxism?” Translated by Rodney Livingstone.  History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics.  (MIT Press.  Cambridge, MA: 1971).  Pg. 19.

[67] Lukács, “Class Consciousness.”  Pg. 52.

[68] Ibid., pg. 59.

[69] Lukács, Georg.  “Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization.” Translated by Rodney Livingstone.  History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics.  (MIT Press.  Cambridge, MA: 1971).  Pg. 304.

[70] Jacoby, Russell.  Social Amnesia: A Critique of Contemporary Psychology from Adler to Laing.  (Transaction Publishers.  New Brunswick, NJ: 1996).  Pg. 4.

[71] Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max.  Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments.  Translated by Edmund Jephcott.  (Stanford University Press.  Stanford, CA: 2002).  Pg. 191.

[72] Lukács, Georg.  “Legality and Illegality.” Translated by Rodney Livingstone.  History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics.  (MIT Press.  Cambridge, MA: 1971).  Pg. 168.

[73] Marx, Karl.  “Theses on Feuerbach.”  Translated by.  Collected Works, Volume 5: 1845-1847.  Pg. 4.  My italics.

[74] Lukács, Georg.  Tailism and the Dialectic.  Translated by Esther Leslie.  (Verso Books.  New York, NY: 2003).  Pg. 81.

[75] Lukács, Georg.  “Intellectual Workers and the Problem of Intellectual Leadership.”  Translated by Rodney Livingstone.  Tactics and Ethics: Political Essays, 1919-1929.  (Harper & Rowe Publishers.  New York, NY: 1972).  Pg. 17.

[76] Reich, “Ideology as a Material Force.”  Pg. 6.

[77] “The social situation is only the external condition that has an influence on the ideological process in the individual.  The instinctual drives through which the various social influences gain exclusive control over the emotions of an individual are now to be investigated.”  Reich, Wilhelm.  “The Authoritarian Ideology.” Translated by Vincent R. Carfagno.  The Mass Psychology of Fascism.  (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux.  New York, NY: 1980).  Pgs. 64-65.

[78] Reich, Wilhelm.  “A Practical Course in Marxist Sociology.”  Translated by Mary Boyd Higgins.  People in Trouble.  Pg. 36.

[79] Freud, Sigmund.  The Question of Lay Analysis: Conversations with an Impartial Person.  Translated by James Strachey.  (W.W. Norton & Co.  New York, NY: 1969).  Pg. 53.

[80] Reich, Wilhelm.  “The Emotional Plague.”  Translated by Mary Boyd Higgins.  Character Analysis.  (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.  New York, NY: 1990).  Pg. 511.

[81] Reich, Wilhelm.  “An Abortive Biological Revolution.”  Translated by Mary Boyd Higgins.  The Function of the Orgasm: Discovery of the Orgone, Volume 1.  (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.  New York, NY: 1973).  Pg. 238.