The Political
John Phillips
10/02/2006
Rhetoric
There is a connection between the various
domains of knowledge that reveals a common basis in
rhetoric. This rhetorical bridge proves
to be decisive and wide-ranging, linking anthropology, psychology, politics and
aesthetics, as well as the variety of natural and social sciences. Notice that in the distinction between the
types of science a rhetorical and, even from a scientific point of view,
entirely unsatisfactory boundary has already been drawn between the natural and the human. It is as if the two
realms are utterly different, and require different types of logical
procedure--two incommensurable types of logic (with no logical connection
between the two). Aristotle divided
knowledge into its natural and political dimensions, so that in his texts we
read about the universe, about physical and biological nature, on the one hand,
and aesthetics, politics and ethics, on the other. There is even a text in Aristotle’s work that
sets out a philosophical ground more fundamental than this distinction. This text came to be known as The Metaphysics (meaning after, on or about the physics) and it deals with the most
general questions of philosophy, notably thought
and being. However a number of Aristotle’s works deal
with what we would now recognise as the field of discourse. The extant
remains of his Poetics (most of which
has never been recovered) deals with the nature and function of tragedy in art
and manifests an extremely sophisticated aesthetics. His Rhetoric
charts the ways in which discourse functions to persuade and construct
arguments. His Interpretation examines the relation of thought to language. His Logic
begins what was to unfold over centuries as a systematic exploration of the
processes of human reasoning. A careful
reading of Aristotle would reveal that the rhetorical
investigations (interpretation, rhetoric, aesthetics and logic) could be
reduced neither to nature nor to politics (in Aristotle phusis and politeia). But rather, the works on knowledge itself,
including the Metaphysics, show that
a rhetorical dimension affects and compromises each attempt on Aristotle’s part
to arrive at a clear and unchanging ground for understanding in any of the relatively distinct
areas. The explicit or at least implicit
assumption of any metaphysics (which can take numerous diverse forms) is that
something, some logic, some order, whether hidden or essentially discoverable,
determines things and thus can itself become the object of knowledge. An inescapable meta-knowledge is thus
implied, a knowledge on or about or after knowledge. Aristotle was not the first to attempt to
chart knowledge, systematically bending knowledge back onto knowledge itself
(asking what can we know about the
process and the ground of knowing?) but his metaphysics is amongst the most
influential and systematic. At its heart
are the problems of rhetoric.
What is implied at the very basis of
metaphysical questioning is the question of Being. Here things get broken down into empirical
and transcendental dimensions. In
natural knowledge the empirical is made up of what appears to us, e.g., rocks,
trees, skyscrapers, sun, moon and stars.
The empirical thus reaches out to the infinite heavens beyond which we
may only imagine. The empirical is the
dimension of beings, that is, things that are (as in the phrase there is a moon). The question of being thus concerns the
dimension of the phrase there is. What is involved in asserting there is (there is a moon, there are stars)?
We seem to assert of particular beings an essence or some kind of
essential predicate, that is, their being.
In traditional western thought, which is a sophisticated grafting of
diverse theological and philosophical traditions, being as an essential predicate takes the form of a transcendental
determination, a determination from beyond and outside empirical
experience. The eternal, the infinite, the being whose existence is essence, God,
the order of things, each of these phrases indicates some sense of how the
transcendental realm is systematically opposed to the empirical. The eternal can only be assumed to exist
outside and beyond mutable worldly existence.
Plants, animals and people die, as do suns and planets eventually. The infinite as such is outside experience,
though the mathematical versions of it are suggestive and can inspire startling
intuitions of infinity, as can certain kinds of poetry. God
or, in one Catholic version, the being
whose existence is essence is just everywhere, wherever there is existence
God is its essence. According to this
account, if something exists the source of its existence just is God. Everything else is a creature whose existence
is owed to something not itself. The order of things may refer us to the
obscure but perhaps real system of ordering of the universe and all the things
in it. Discoveries in cosmology always
strongly hinted at an order to the universe even though there are innumerable
chaotic counter-examples. The
development of modern empirical science always hinted strongly that there was
an order that eventually scientists would discover, in the meantime adding up
all the accumulated facts until a total picture emerged. This supplemental faith links science to the
great world religions in its own way.
Sadly for many scientists this kind of faith is no longer possible. The point, finally, is this. The transcendental indicates a kind of
ordering or structuring of the empirical, an ordering that cannot be discovered
or embedded within our experience. We
assume, without witnessing, the existence of some universal or grand principle
of ordering, which in its absence needs to be intuited or hypothesised on the
basis of what we do have. We have access
only to our traditions, histories and customs, the appearance of things in the
world, our mode of reasoning and the events and actions in which we
participate. In the absence of that
universal principle of ordering we do have a range of rhetorical strategies for
producing critical yet faulty versions of “the universal” that may stand in, as
it were, temporarily.
One of the most important, yet controversial,
philosophers of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger, concentrates his
attention on the relation between finite beings and their Being by focusing on
the phenomena of finitude itself. Thus
predicates like time, anxiety, guilt and death, come to organise his earliest writings
(specifically 1927’s Being and Time). Dasein
(“being here”) is the name he gives to that being for which Being is first of
all a question (i.e., philosophers like you and me) and an issue. Very briefly put, one can say that Being (in
the English translations with a capital B) stands for the modes of
interpretation that constitute what traditionally would have been the
transcendental determination of empirical experience. The separation of the transcendental from the
empirical is seriously compromised by Heidegger, increasingly so after his
major work (Being and Time) ground to
a halt uncompleted. (It was published
anyway after pressure from his University authorities; nothing changes in this
sense, I am thinking, as I type this section at a rate of knots you wouldn’t
believe). The importance of Heidegger’s
work is reflected in terms of its influence on our reading of the
tradition. His understanding of western
modernity is based upon a series of quite extraordinary readings of traditional
philosophical and poetic texts, from the pre-Socratics to his own
contemporaries. It seems odd to think
that a deep understanding of the ancients should provide him with prophetic
insights into the most modern trends of modernity, specifically the direction
of technology and the uprooting of cultures that many have observed is the key
to postmodernism. But this would follow
as a matter of course if his most consistently stated thesis turned out to be
the case. That is, that Dasein is grounded in its historicity--humanity
is a historical being--and in the modern era this has been forgotten as technics takes over and dominates every
other mode of being. Technics, in this sense, is not just
technology and machines; it is, rather, a specifically technological interpretation
of the world. The greatest danger,
thought Heidegger, was that the alarming successes of technology, which reaches
deep into the earth and stores up its energy as standing reserve, would enslave
and ultimately destroy humanity on the basis of a promise to cure the
inevitable condition of finitude (Dasein’s temporal and finite condition). Being is in fact essentially ungrounded but
watched over by poets, artists and philosophers, who remember the modes of interpretation by which experience is produced. The key distinction is between the ontological (Being) and the ontic (beings). The former is the dimension of ungrounded
historical being. But no access can be
achieved to the realm of Being without passing first through the dimension of
the ontic, which we know through our particular modes of being (Caucasian
professor of literature in a
Aristotle’s famous phrase, “Anthropos is a political animal,” was
intended to resonate beyond what is often regarded as the political field
today. But he did intend a clear
distinction, in so far as there are other beings that are not in his sense
political. It is his version of what
marks out the human from all other things, and what makes the human
special. What is the definition of
human? Aristotle would say, the political. Just as there have been numerous diverse
attempts to discover the underlying order of beings in nature (phusis) there have been numerous diverse
attempts to discover the hidden order of the political. In the wider sense the political concerns the
organisation of social relations. In a
more focused and personal sense it implies the problem of ethical action. So the distinction between the empirical and
the transcendental is operative here too, in almost the same way as with the
order of things. The empirical stands
for actions and passions of people in their historical, geographical
specificity. It implies relations of
economics and force. The transcendental
thus implies a realm where these relations are determined. Aristotle’s Politics charts the different modes of government that are possible
and explores the conditions upon which one might arrive at the best form of
government.
In order to arrive at
a general sense of any being Aristotle’s analysis sets out to find a model for
the best example of the thing under analysis.
The function of the thing is first established. What is an eye for? It is to see.
What is the best kind of eye? It
is an eye that sees well. What is a
government for? It is to govern with an
eye for everyone’s interest. What is the
best kind of government? It is the
government that most approximates the ideal of government where all interests
are taken into consideration in matters of legislation. The circularity of the argument is a genuine
problem. But implied is a strong
teleological factor. To ask about the
final purpose of something, is to ask what
is its telos? When Aristotle asks the question of man (what is the function of anthropos?) his
answer is a little obscure. The function
of anthropos is praxis or ethical action.
But praxis has no example that
can be generalised (like the seeing of the eye). A brave action may not be brave if I just
copy someone’s bravery in a different context.
Praxis demands the
simultaneous skills that make up deciding and acting in the midst of
unpredictable contingencies. Thus,
according to an inescapable logic, humanity is perpetually indefinable. The essence of the political is in perpetual
retreat. It is as if the telos of humanity, its final purpose,
is somehow just itself, which means that individuals must write their own
telos, their own final purpose. What is
the function of man? The function of man
can be discovered with reference to the best of men. Who is the best of men? That is the kind of question that will cause
fights. Again, the circularity of the
argument is likely only to get us in to trouble philosophically.
What lies at the heart of the problem of
government is the evident fact that people are different and they have different
interests. Some desire more freedom,
others wish for greater wealth. Some
require better transport or healthcare.
Some require more security, more policing. Others require less. There are some interests that often go
unnoticed or that represent the needs of those with little influence or power
(the homeless and hungry). Yet in some
cases a minority may have influence over decisions that affect everybody, thus
putting them in a position of privilege (members of parliament with business
interests). Furthermore it is impossible
to predict in advance what particular antagonisms might arise. We never go for long without reading about
some dispute between neighbours. Someone
has loud music playing. Someone else
grows his or her trees too high. Neighbours
have been known to fight, often with fatal consequences. The courts are flooded with such
disputes. Analogous situations occur on
every level and, in severe cases (though never rare), neighbours wage war. Therefore any conception of justice, on
whatever level, must include laws according to which one can act but with
enough leeway to account for situations that cannot be predicted according to
those laws. The keeper of these laws
must also be their interpreter in such cases that arise. The judge is also always an arbitrator--a
perpetual third party who must decide according to principles divorced from the
immediate empirical interests of the two parties. Even when one of the parties is right that
right does not belong to his selfish interest but to the law as neutral
arbitrator. In this way it is possible
to promise (if not to deliver) a universal or “human” right.
The transcendental thus stands for all those
modes of theory that attempt to approximate the obscure order of things that
would solve the ills of social relations (whether within a state or
internationally). And, in a more focused
way, it stands for the hidden imperative of a moral law that seems always to be
off the edge of experience. In so far as
laws are unavoidable they are based upon some existing rationale. That rationale, in its rhetorical dimension,
will always have been a gesture towards a transcendental determination.
The argument for sovereignty might run as
follows: why must I give my money to the King?
It is the King’s law. Where does
the King get the right to make such a law?
As the King it is his divine right.
Against this type of argument it would always be possible to oppose a
kind of empiricism. According to the
above logic one would only owe fealty to a ruler in a social environment where
belief in the divine was dominant. Once
that is shaken then the divinity argument is going to look a little
fragile. But it takes seismic cultural
shifts of immense historical structures to shake such arguments. And the appeal to the bluntly empirical must
itself assume the rhetorical power that makes such ungrounded belief possible
in the first place. So the empirical
cannot simply be opposed to the transcendental.
But rather, empiricist rhetoric
can be opposed to transcendental arguments.
Rhetoric would then be in the service not of right or truth but of an
alternative power base. Once again it is the absence of a universal principle that comes to organise the
political, for a universal principle seems always to be what is desired. We are stuck with a subtle play of
often-antagonistic forces each gesturing outside to some unimaginable exterior
that would ground them all.
In the modern period the subtle yet powerful
forms of fealty, which I’ve just simplified with my example of the King’s
divinity, come to be known as types of false
consciousness. False consciousness
is a notion that allows the philosopher or critic to assert and demonstrate
that our most deeply held beliefs about ourselves and others, about right and
wrong, about the universe in general, are based upon assumptions about these
things that are complacently accepted and culturally produced. Our culture is made up of stories or
narratives that support a dominant version of things that is generally accepted
as true. The stories are not simply
false, of course, but rather they are related to the true situation by
distorting it, disguising it, distracting from it and lulling its subjects into
the false way of thinking. Analysis of
false consciousness tends to aim for a kind of enlightenment that provides an
understanding of 1) how the false
situation came about and 2) what the
true one is. The problem for
contemporary critical theory is that the narratives of false consciousness are
in no clearly discernible or final way less fragile than the narratives they
would expose. The narrative of false
consciousness opposes a rhetorical procedure against another rhetorical
procedure.
There is a story by Jorge Luis Borges called
“The Circular Ruins” in which a wizard goes to the jungle and arrives at the
ruined
Figurative language is
the language of tropes. A trope is a
form of substitution whereby a metaphor, simile, allegory or even parable
stands in for another way of speaking.
The ideal form of discourse is often regarded as the literal. However the phrase literal language is an oxymoron.
An oxymoron (itself a kind of trope) puts two contradictory words
together and is often used in poetry.
William Wordsworth’s description of his experience of a trickling
mountain stream as “peopled solitude” is a good example. The notion of literal language is a logocentric dream because language,
just in terms of what it is at the most basic level, already stands in for
something other than what it is (for what we assume it means). So by the same account the phrase figurative language is a tautology. A tautology (which is also a kind of trope)
is a phrase which more or less says the same thing twice (e.g., an “evil
devil”). A literal use of language takes advantage of the essential ability of
language to stand-in-for things other than itself. Thus literal language is just a particular
form of language generally. The condition
of being always somewhat literal and somewhat figurative (somewhere between
contradiction and tautology) marks language.
In order to step outside the cave--to see it,
as it were, from outside experience, that is, from a transcendental
viewpoint--the cave has to be constructed and represented. In other words we are still inside the cave
but now looking at a representation of it in order to imagine what it might be
like to get outside if only it were possible.
Imagine that you enter the town hall and find yourself looking down at a
model of the town with the town hall in beautiful scaled down
reproduction. You are stuck in there,
says Plato, and you cannot get out, except by means of representational models
like these. This is the basic pattern of
the false-consciousness narrative. It
involves a kind of rhetoric that builds a representation of the world as somehow
being contained within a larger one, which we can imagine only by virtue of the
representational model. Of course you
can leave the town hall but can you ever get beyond your own experience? What is important to understand about this is
that without getting us to an outside
the rhetorical dimension is still able to take us beyond experience. The beyond is not necessarily what we’d
happily call real (remember fire in
the story of Borges’s dreamed man), as Plato demanded. But if representations like the cave and the
miniature town hall could not have been made then what kind of experience would
ours be? Doubtless it would be entirely
different. Experience would not be what
it is without the possibility of these representations. Thus something of the empirical does always
seem to involve a passage through what we are for the moment calling the
transcendental. This is the dimension
that traditionally is called theory.
The narratives of false consciousness move
through several variants throughout western history and they each deserve
careful analysis. Here I can only
provide a few directions and pointers. I
have already introduced the Medieval Dominican scholar Thomas Aquinas, whose
writing is among the most majestic and impressive. He managed systematically to integrate
Christian teaching and Greek philosophy, through a series of close commentaries
on Aristotle’s texts that run parallel with readings of the Christian
pedagogy. For our purposes we should
focus on two related issues. The first
is iconic representation and the second is language more generally. Iconic representation occurs when a figure or
an image of some kind stands in as a sign for something, often an elusive
entity like a God. Every culture, it
seems, has some image of their god, representing the object of their
belief. Pictures of saints, the
Christian cross, carved Buddhas and the Ancient Greek statues of Zeus are all
totemic images or icons. In the strict
sense an icon is symbolic or representative of something. Christians worship in front of an image of
Christ on the cross as a symbol of Christ himself and his suffering
sacrifice. Thus the word icon comes to mean any kind of symbolic
image, including the icons on your computer screen, which are images of
pathways into some densely written store of digital information. This icon stands for “My Computer” on the
Microsoft desktop:
:
Nowadays you can replace the stock icons by
downloading uncountable alternatives, characters from Star Wars to animated figures of all kinds, which will give you a
personalized shortcut to wherever you tend to go in the digital universe. What makes this possible is no different from
the conditions that make all substitutions of tropes possible, the tautology figurative language. So an icon might look like the thing it
symbolizes (a tiny computer screen for my computer) or it might not (a Star Wars Gungan can be used
instead). In the case of religious icons
we are dealing with representations that are often images of something no one
has ever seen. They are sensuous personifications
of abstract or otherwise impossible concepts.
Notice in that last sentence that the difference between the empirical
(sensuous, visible) and the transcendental (spiritual, invisible) is strongly
implicated. Aquinas, working with a
Christian theological philosophy that owes as much to Greek as to Hebraic
influences, can make use of a pattern of thinking, a teaching in fact, that is
common to both. This has to do with the
supposed tendency of fallible and mortal creatures (men and women) to fall into
the worship of false images. A
representation of the spiritual realm can become fetishized and be taken for the thing itself.
The word fetish is very interesting here. Its etymology, from the Latin facticius meaning factitious, via the
French and Portuguese, fétiche and feitiço, associates the word with senses
of artificial or false. It
comes first of all to describe an object (perhaps a small stone or wood carving
of an animal) that is believed to have magical power that can protect or aid
its owner. A lucky rabbit’s foot or
other mascots are often brought to competitive sports or during exams. The use of the term fetish implies the
recognition that these are objects of occult superstition. So, more broadly, fetish comes to describe a material object regarded with
superstitious or extravagant trust or reverence. People also come to fetishize ordinary belongings or things, which become objects of
irrational reverence or obsessive devotion.
In the domain of sexuality, of course, a fetish is an object (for
instance, a whip, leather gloves, suspenders, or stilettos) or a bodily part
(for instance, breasts, feet, fingers or toes) whose real or fantasised
presence is psychologically necessary for sexual gratification. The fetishized object thus stands in for the
supposed real one. It is an object of
fixation to the extent that it may interfere with complete sexual expression; a
fetish sometimes becomes a barrier to the thing itself. In each of the above examples, the fetish has
come to stand in for the supposed real object of devotion or trust. When Karl Marx coined the phrase commodity fetishism what he had in mind
was the fetishizing of things in terms of their commodity value, divorced from
their actual use value. The trouble with
using the notion of fetish is that it too easily refers us to some as yet
unanalysed “real,” some thing-in-itself beyond the circulation of
substitutions. In other words the word fetish is itself a fetish, implying an
extravagant trust in the real on behalf of its user.
In the case of both Hebrew law and Platonic
philosophy icons too easily become objects of devotion themselves, no longer
simply symbols but actual manifestations of the divine. So in Yahweh’s commandments from Exodus we read the following:
Thou shalt have no other gods
before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee
any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that
is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water that is under the earth. (Exodus 20: 3-4).
The commandment is decisive. There is only one God. And nothing in experience, nothing in the
universe, can represent it. Hebrew
monotheism and Hellenic philosophy thus have in common this insistence on a
single spirit, a single truth, a single good, that nonetheless cannot be
represented or embedded in the world, which is otherwise full of shadows and
graven sensuous images. Aquinas explains
the situation in terms of language and, specifically, analogy.
We have observed that he insists on only one
God and that everybody worships the same one.
Even pagans worship the same single God, though they may have many gods,
with many different names and diverse icons to represent them all. They just do not realize it. The Christian, on the other hand, knows what God is so when he worships he
worships the true God. Why, then, does
Aquinas think that heathens fall into error?
He suggests that the error is connected with a failure of language. He shares with his tradition an assumption
about language that holds until well into the 20th Century. That is, in an ideal situation, words should
be used univocally, they should have
a single meaning in whatever the context of use. But they don’t. Words are equivocal in so far as they tend to mean different things in
different contexts. Now the assumption,
which we can recall here as logocentrism,
isn’t about the words themselves but their meanings.
According to the dream
of the univocal word, or the logocentric
dream, a word should always have the same meaning. Because the dream cannot possibly be
fulfilled, words have to be held in check by strategies of containment,
hierarchies and oppositions, etc., which authorize and, strictly speaking, institute
meanings. In other words the dream (or
naive assumption) is maintained by an attempt to relate marks to each other in a more (rather than less)
fixed way. Actually though, the dream is
rather more involved and has its source in higher and brighter concerns, i.e.,
truth and God. It has always been known
that words fail in their assumed task (to represent meanings univocally). The knowledge is the source of a metaphysical
hatred of writing, the language form which best exemplifies the failure of the
univocal word in so far as written expressions most clearly exemplify a
tendency of addressees to misunderstand. The dream and its failure support each other
in so far as the unchanging identity of that which is more or less well
represented by the word (or concept), the transcendental truth or God, must
remain untouched by the miserable failure of human language, especially in its
most alienated form--writing. In other
words the finite and fallible languages of man have always been a handy
demonstration (through negation) of the perfection of the truth that they can
in no way approximate. So logocentrism involves the belief that meanings are
anchored by a principle of identity-of-meaning.
The logocentric assumption accepts, even affirms, that languages are
shifting and context bound while meanings are invariant (i.e., what I mean is
what I mean but what I say may not convey it well and may certainly be
misunderstood).
So Aquinas can assert the unchanging necessity
of the single and absent God with reference to the shifting languages of
fallible man. He says that only divine
language can be univocal and thus there are many names for God because human
language is equivocal. It is Aristotle’s
notion of analogy that serves to
square things in this instance. Analogy
lies somewhere between equivocality (difference) and univocity (identity) in so
far as it gestures towards the same yet it involves finding a relation between
differences, squared only in the relation.
When pagans worship their multifarious gods and goddesses they all in
fact worship the single Catholic God by
analogy.
Nomos is the Greek word for Law. Significantly, Aristotle
introduces his notion of analogical predication during the central discussion
of the Nichomachean Ethics, where he
discusses the nature of the social bond, that is, the essence of the political itself. The usual distinctions are made, as follows:
humans obey a law (nomos) that is not a law by nature (phusis).
It is a law by convention and is designed to bond people in a
community. The law works through
analogy, which can be seen in the example of economic exchange. Tailors and bakers need to exchange their
goods but a robe is worth a good deal more than a loaf of bread so a single
measure must be assumed that would square the baker’s labour with the
tailor’s. So the labour is broken up
into units of exchange, according to which its price can be calculated. Because needs and quantities are always
changing, the “single measure” that would determine the relative prices of
everything in the market place cannot be fixed.
However, the idea of the
single measure remains in place as the principle of analogical predication by
which tailors and bakers are put into relations of economic justice. A is the Baker and B is his labour
(bread). C is the tailor and D is his
work (clothes). A is to C as B is to D
according to price (which determines how many loaves are equal to a robe). This example is supposed by Aristotle to
account for the totality of social relations.
What is important is that this single measure (analogically it is the
same as Plato’s transcendental truth and Aquinas’s God) cannot actually be
fixed and embedded in the world. It is a
principle only. But it seems that we
cannot as political animals do without it, ever.
Some of the terms we have explored in this
section can briefly be repeated here because a relatively consistent pattern is
emerging. Analogy lies somewhere between
univocity and equivocality. The naïve and
simplistic univocal dream, that a word always means just what it means, is
often mistaken for what we can nearly always recognize as a literal use of language. So equivocality might be mistaken for figurative uses of language. However, all language is figurative to the
extent that substitution is always implied.
The key terms upon which these oppositions rest are, in fact, identity and difference. In the logocentric dream it is assumed that
identity-of-meaning (what a word refers to) is represented by something
different (language generally or a figure, i.e., metaphor, metonymy, simile,
analogy). But it is figurative language
that grounds all discourse and all expression.
By no coincidence we also find that in the earliest accounts, from the
Ancient Greeks onwards, some pattern that is precisely equivalent to figurative
language accounts for the political bond that holds people together in social
relations (association). Social relations, too, are grounded in the
difference between identity and difference. For this reason these terms will come to play
an increasingly greater role in working through the problems of the political.
Ideology
The best known versions of the
false-consciousness argument are contained in various versions of the term ideology. The joint influence of Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels cannot be disputed. For
many years the political was simply equated with Marxist--or more
broadly--left-wing political positions.
The Enlightenment notion of “Emancipation” is important here, but what
we have with Marx and Engels is a specific mode of critical engagement with the
intent to foster revolutionary change.
The most famous quotation from Marx is the Ninth of his “Theses on
Fuerbach,” which reads: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in
various ways; the point is to change it.”
A careful review of the first two theses would reveal in what ways that
change is expected to come about. Marx
Writes:
The chief defect of all
hitherto existing materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that the thing,
reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of
contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively.
Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed
abstractly by idealism -- which, of course, does not know real, sensuous
activity as such. Feuerbach wants
sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not
conceive human activity itself as objective activity.
The point he is making here constitutes a
dialectic between what traditionally is conceived as the empirical (real) and
transcendental (ideal) realms. The
contradiction is found where the object is regarded as sensuous thing and the
subject is regarded as abstract thinker, with no actual relation between them
but the object’s passivity in the gaze of the subject’s understanding.. Marx, on the contrary, considers the subjective realm of ideas to be worthy
in itself of objective understanding.
Ideas are concrete images, constituent components in the world of
actions. So understanding must turn back
critically upon it own ideas, systematically (dialectically) locating them
within the historical process. In other
words, the very notions of philosophical subject
and passive object are also objects,
ideal objects (subject/objects), susceptible to dialectical upheaval. For Marx the consequence was a contradiction
not only in philosophy, but also a corresponding one in the world of social
relations, most famously, in class contradiction.
The materialist doctrine
concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that
circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the
educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts,
one of which is superior to society. The
coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or
self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary
practice.
Revolutionary practice would thus involve a
position that goes beyond the ideology that disguises, or distorts, the
economic reality of social relations. It
would involve manipulation of changing circumstances in terms of the
contradictions that underlie ordinary experience. So the proletariat (the labouring classes)
who are supposed to be alienated from their economic interests by an ideology
that distracts them from the facts of their exploitation, should be enlightened
and then emancipated through the revolutionary activity of intellectuals. Marx’s version of false-consciousness does
not, unlike many of the others, gesture
to some actually existing truth, but to a reality of struggle and contradiction
that is discovered only in the contingency of social relations. An understanding of ideology is thus a means
of engaging socially within the intellectual sphere. This has not prevented certain dogmatic
assertions from arising in the name of Marxism, of course, and a continual
critical vigilance appears to be always necessary.
The
study of ideology, begun in the eighteenth century, sets out to understand the
effects of ideas on consciousness and raises the question of what an idea, as a
historical and thus concrete entity, actually is. You remember that, for Plato, an idea is only
ever represented by its repeatable and imperfect real forms (e.g., writing). Plato’s philosophy also serves as a prototype
of theories of ideology in so far as his analogy of the cave provides an image
that describes the world of our experience as fundamentally false and posits a
real truth somewhere outside the cave in a wonderful yonder that we
unfortunately cannot experience.
Marx and Engels are responsible for
the (often contradictory) statements that form the basis of contemporary
notions of ideology. The following
quotations, from The German Ideology,
will give an idea of the various things ideology can mean:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every
epoch the ruling ideas . . . The class that has the means of material
production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of
mental production. (47)
This
might suggest that the ruling classes have their specific ideology, in that a
certain dominant class within society imposes a set of beliefs, values and
ideas upon the whole of society. The
notion of the dominant or ruling class can be generalised beyond the class
arguments of Marx and one sees similar approaches in studies of ethnicity and
sexuality, in which various racist, homophobic and misogynistic ideologies can
be seen to be at work in cultural texts.
There are more complex variations, however, as a second quotation
illustrates:
If in all ideology men and their circumstances
appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as
much from their historical life process as the inversion of objects on the
retina does from their physical life-process. (25).
This
notion (another philosophical analogy) suggests that ideology is a false
consciousness that alienates subjects from political and economic reality (and
their own interests), both veiling the reality of social relations and
naturalising the alienated condition. Marxist criticism (and Marx too in
places) can thus be criticised for having a spurious claim to the actual truth (not dissimilar from
Plato’s sense of truth). In his own
critique of Fuerbach, which we examined above, he finds an unanalysed aspect of
material ideology in Fuerbach’s text (the ideal). However Marx himself retains an unanalysed
element in his own discussions. That truth, in classical Marxist terms, is the political economy, which lies outside
and beyond the rhetoric of substitutable (thus supposedly false) tropes. A yet more sophisticated version is suggested
by the following quotation:
We do not set out from what men say, imagine,
conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order
to arrive at men in the flesh. We set
out from real active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we
demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this
life-process. (25)
What
this last statement gives rise to is the dialectical consideration of the mediation between what Marx and Engels
call “real life-process” and “ideology.”
The dialectic mediates “real life-processes” and types of discourse,
“what men say,” the words, images and ideas of (actual) men, the discursive
habits of human subjects as well as images and ideas about men, the mythical human subject as dreamed up in
discourse. Underlying these types of
discourse--what men say and the men that are “spoken”--is a kind of substratum,
a “reality” of actions and passions manifested by economic relations. The
ideological forms might include all media (books, newspapers, journals,
broadcasting, cinema, advertising, etc., all manifestations of distinction and
class, traditions, artistic movements and tendencies, while the mediation between these and “real
life-processes” can be considered in terms of the role of institutions: i.e.,
church, family, school, university, media organisations, etc. The mediation involves the participation and
the lived experience of subjects who thus have some agency in opposing and
contesting ideologies. In cultural and
critical theory reading protocols become one of the main focuses of
attention.
Fake Snuff
A number of recent
Hollywood blockbusters, including 8mm
and Matrix appear to be peddling
false-consciousness narratives. Matrix is basically Plato’s cave without
the sun. The premise is as follows: late
in the twentieth century humanity has destroyed the clear sky leaving only a
bustling civilization and a ruined world complete with scorched earth. The machines, dominated by intelligent
computer technology take over. Mankind
is now bred in captivity and used for body energy, stored in little cave-like
structures embedded in huge cavernous walls.
There the little humans spend their lives plugged into what is called
the matrix, a computer simulated
version, complete with taste, sound, colour, light and feelings, of late
twentieth century civilization. Things
have been like this for some time. A few
are able to resist the Matrix and live as outlaws eating tasteless food and
entering into the Matrix only sporadically.
These last are Hollywood’s latest incarnation of Plato’s enlightened
philosopher. Clearly the matrix stands
for the fake transcendental while the empirical is the dull outside. In 8 mm
Nicholas Cage plays a detective hired to discover whether the apparently real
on-film killing of a young teenager was actually real or faked, thus tapping
into the mythology of the snuff movie.
The film thematises the real through a number of carefully constructed
oppositions, centrally contrasting the uniqueness of the single copy snuff film
(on 8 mm) to the repeatability of the pornographic video. The fake snuffs, oddly, are made in the
Philippines. The only way he can
recognize that they are fake is because in two of the films the same woman
dies. The emphasis seems to be on the
repetition of pornographic (fake) death and it affirms, by its negation, an
off-screen reality that not even 8 mm,
with its armoury of gothic devices (heavy rain--wetness everywhere--huge gothic
arches, graveyards and dark contrasts) can attain. The rhetoric of the film, as with Matrix, is designed to illustrate,
describe or evoke an actual reality beyond rhetoric, which it cannot do. In this case the pornographic is the
denigrated paradigm for a fake reality nonetheless too close for comfort to a
dull and horrific real that only love (well this is Hollywood) can redeem. Many other contemporary films could be
considered in this light. There seems to
be an obsession on the part of the mass media with its ability to produce fake
realities and its corresponding inability to produce reality as such (given
that cinema promises precisely this).
The implicit argument of the canon of the
false consciousness is not only that you are deceived, but that you are the
deception itself, a doubt in the face of which even Descartes’ subject might
tremble. What the canon sometimes tries
to say in its subtlest moments is that the narrative of the origin of narrative
is another narrative of origin; consciousness of false consciousness is more
false consciousness; the account of the origin of myth is just a myth of the
origin of myth (etc.).
For these writers the empirical (and objective
world) always has to be fitted in to the “matrix” of principles, axioms, rules,
laws, cultural representations, patterns of memory, etc., before the subject
has access to it. But that too is a
construction based upon the opposition between the empirical (object) and the
transcendental (subject), and fails to account for the iterability that remains
its principle.
Iterability contains
the two senses of repetition and difference, or same and alteration. It is the name that Jacques Derrida gives for
the law of repetition: what repeats must be the same but can never be
identical. We will explore this law in
detail in the chapter on deconstruction.
It is out of repetition that all identities emerge. Yet in the repetition identity is always
corroded by its difference.
As for false consciousness: on one level an
argument would presuppose the possibility, existence (or something) of a true
or correct consciousness (e.g., authentic as opposed to illusory being). This kind of argument can take all kinds of
different forms. On the one hand, the
empirical world is a false representation of a true one, either A) to which we
cannot get access, or B) to which we can only get access in certain ways. Or, on the other hand, the empirical world
just is the real one and all assertions of a transcendental reality or truth
are themselves false pictures of the world.
In each case the opposition of truth and falsity is based upon the
opposition between the transcendental and the empirical. On another level (that of appearance perhaps)
an argument about false consciousness might refuse to accept the opposition
true/false and reinscribe falsity as the condition per se, i.e., deception with
no reference to the truth. At this stage
the dialectic is radically incomplete, the telos is absent and particularity is
given free rein in every direction to satisfy its needs, accidental caprices,
and subjective desires. So it destroys
itself.
Dialectic first of all is the Platonic way; interlocutors are
brought to the way of truth via the permanently negating activities of Socratic
dialogue. Analysis would be the Cartesian way of presenting a demonstration
through the phenomenology of the “I.” Aporia
would be the way of the sophist, revealing your assertions and beliefs to be
based upon contradictions you cannot go beyond.
Empirical research would
describe the recourse of the Enlightenment scientist, convinced that the truth
lies in the direction of simple provable facts with the power of safe
prediction. The modern logician might
rest on the repeatable and immutable consequence of mathematics. But the list is
endless.
Even the enigmatic twentieth century philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein should be included in the growing canon of
false-consciousness arguments. He talks
the metaphor of waking from the dream (as so often, echoing Kant), but also of
being “held captive” or being “taken in” by pictures, propositions, similes and
repetitions. He say that “Philosophy
goes to work when language goes on holiday.”
For him it is to the peculiar ability of language to create false
pictures of the world that the philosopher must attend. “What we do is bring words back from their
metaphysical to their every day use.” He
claims that this is necessary because language, like pictures, can produce
false appearances. His sentences are
“correctives” to be transcended, “then you'll see the world aright.” The following argument is typical: “A simile
that has been absorbed into the forms of our language produces a false
appearance, and this disquiets us [. . .] if only I could fix my gaze
absolutely sharply on this fact, get it in focus, I must grasp the essence of
the matter [. . .] One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing's
nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through
which one looks at it.”
The metaphorics of light and dark shade
Wittgenstein's pictures. In the
introduction to Philosophical
Investigations, he says, “It is not impossible that it should fall to the
lot of this work, in its poverty and the darkness of this time, to bring light
into one brain or another” (that is the--“unlikely”--power to stimulate thinking). And, pointing out what is wrong with this
picture, he manages to dissolve one false-consciousness myth by opposing
another false-consciousness argument to it:
The evolution of the higher
animals and man, and the awakening of consciousness at a particular level. The picture is something like this: Though
the ether is filled with vibrations the world is dark. But one day man opens his seeing eye, and
there is light. What this language
primarily describes is a picture. What
is to be done with the picture, how is it to be used, is still obscure. Quite clearly, however, it must be explored
if we want to understand the sense of what we are saying. But the picture seems to spare us this work:
it already points to a particular use.
This is how it takes us in.
The quotation finds Wittgenstein exploring the
so-called picture theory of meaning. The
result of this was the famous statement, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one
must remain silent.” I would argue that
where Wittgenstein leaves off, critical theory begins. The ethical and political obligation of
contemporary critical thought is to affirm what cannot be spoken of, not as a
reality or a ground upon which we must someday hope to land, but as the
impossible space that makes politics and the social relation possible. There is no universal ground. Instead we affirm its singular absence.
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